I grew up with astronomy, and have been watching the skies with binoculars for a few years now, which is leading to my first scope. Something you have to understand from the start is that
First of all, get a good Planisphere. That'll set you back about fifteen bucks, and you'll learn a TON about the night sky. Also get a red flashlight. I really like the Rigel Systems ones which have a variable-brightness red LED for viewing, and a variable brightness white one for set-up and tear down.
Get a copy of Nightwatch, by Terry Dickenson. It'll serve you from day one until the paper disintegrates (which will be a long time--it's well made).
Now guess what? Armed with nothing more than a pair of eyes and a chart, you're an amateur astronomer! Wasn't that easy?
The next step is usually binoculars. A good pair of 10x50 (Nikon and Pentax are good in the low end, ~$150) and a tripod mount will let you see more than you realised was out there. 10x50 is a nice size, because you can use them handheld, whereas getting much bigger (11x70 and up) will be too heavy to hold steady enough without a tripod. The first time you see the Pleiades through mounted binoculars in a dark sky will be breathtaking.
Now comes the scope. You can easily spend two years happily researching scopes while you use the binoculars and charts (and your naked eyes--don't ever forget just looking up!), by which point you'll know what suits you best. A few pointers, though:
1) Aperture rules. More aperture means more light coming in, which means fainter objects. Deep sky stuff (galaxies and nebulae) NEED aperture. Unfortunately, more aperture means more money, more size, and more weight. 2) Bigger is harder to move. A gorgeous 24" light-bucket is useless if you can't actually get it outside without three willing friends (unless they're eager and living with you). An 8" scope may only be adequate for deep sky objects, but if you get it out every clear night then it's a far better scope for you. 3) The mount is key. Most mid-range telescopes available are built by one of two companies, and have surprisingly good optics--better by far than you could get at (almost) any price 25 years ago. Unfortunately, good optics are ruined if the scope won't stay steady. 4) No telescope can do everything.
As I said above, most telescopes are made by one of two Chinese companies. Synta makes Sky-Watcher and Celestron, Guan Sheng makes several Meades, Antares and some others. Orion scopes are sourced from both companies, depending on the year and the type. There's not a lot of difference between them--both have good optics and good design. There are some cheapies, but once you hit the $300 point, the scopes and mounts are all pretty reliable. (and again--MUCH better than you could get a while back.)
If your heart is set on astrophotography, be prepared to spend a LOT of time and quite a chunk of money in the hobby. You'll need an equatorially mounted scope with a motor drive, and stability will become much more important than for simple viewing. You'll need some sort of camera capable of long (30 minute!) exposures, you'll need books, you'll need planning, and you'll need patience. Lots of patience. Don't get me wrong--astrophotography can be great fun--I used to take pictures on my dad's 8" SCTs and do the developing and printing in our darkroom--but it's a whole range of 'more work' and pretty serious stuff, even with digital.
Which mount you want is a major deciding factor. For the same amount of portability and similar prices (about $400 CDN), you can get an 8" Dobsonian or a 6" Newtonian on an adequate mount. For another hundred bucks, you can get the same 6" on a really beefy mou
Ah well. I tend to avoid working for idiots like that, and don't get upset when that sort fires me. Most of the time, I'm hired for my knowledge and skill; not using them properly would be more upsetting for good managers.
Heh. I didn't mean to wax nostalgic too heavily over Office 97, but from my bleary memory, it was the first version that had auto-kerning and 'live' font display. I was doing a lot of publishing-quality work at the time, and those were the features I was missing up to that point. Since then, there hasn't been a feature I've seen the need for which wasn't in that version, bloated and slow as it was at the time. (Manual kerning was painful, but made a significant difference in making a product look professional.)
Users don't expect DRM, and they don't expect the most obscure features. Since auto-kerning and real-time font display came about, all word processors have had more features than anyone but professional typesetters would use.
Let me be more blunt: There is no justification whatsoever under the Sun, moon, and God's green earth, that an OPERATING SYSTEM requires five hundred million operations per second. None. Period. Any supposed justification is simply apologist behaviour.
You're right, but also naive and I'd guess relatively young in the industry. (Assuming, of course, that you're in "the industry.")
The single most important thing we can do in our IT jobs is to ask why? "We need to buy some web 2.0. How much will that cost?" "Why do we need it?"
Note that the answer is NOT "no", it is NOT "that's new and insecure." It is, to be precise, "what do you want to do and how will this technology help with it?"
The answer to so-called web 2.0 is almost invariably no because it consists of: 47% rehashed ideas. 51% marketing and management consultant bullshit. 1.6% new ideas that solely benefit vapid, angst-ridden, insecure teens. 0.4% worthwhile advances.
That means that one time in 250 that someone comes to you with a 'web 2.0' idea, it's going to be worthwhile. Actually, that number seems high. Oh well, we'll leave it.
Most of this crap is either old shit in a new wrapper, or complete self-serving hyperbole. Our jobs as professionals is to make that decision (or at least help in making it), and NOT waste valuable company resources (time, money, people, equipment) on stupid pointless ideas.
When people are using gmail or facebook for inter-office communications, we shouldn't first assume that we're doing our jobs poorly. The first thing we must ask is why. Are they doing this because the existing communication paths are inadequate? Maybe so--then we need to act. On the other hand, maybe it's because if they can justify using gmail for "work-related purposes," they can then keep flirting with that S&M submissive in Minnesota who just happens to have gmail open as well.
In fact, you nailed it perfectly in this sentence:
"We're tired of chasing Word docs everywhere - we're getting a wiki to manage our information", we should be looking at their problems and figuring out if a wiki is the best solution, or if they really just need a document management system.
That's precisely it: we should be bringing our expertise to the table and finding the right solution for them--proactively if possible. The real problem is that we are so often presented with a fait accompli, "we have decided on this totally inappropriate technology to solve a problem we don't have", that after a while the automatic answer is, "No. Now prove me wrong or go back to your desk."
Your point and mine aren't actually in opposition. I agree that computers getting faster and more capable is a great thing! However, what I'm saying is that bloatware is WASTING that advantage. Windows 2000 with Office 2000 run well on a 6-year-old computer, say 500MHz. Should you be using a 500MHz P3 as a result? Of course not--but if you run them on a modern computer, they will (a) run phenomenally fast, and (b) let you do tons of other stuff on that computer. Unfortunately, the newer and more bloated versions of the OS and office suite will unnecessarily consume as much of your modern computer as the older packages did of that 500MHz machine. Why do I call this unnecessary? It's because you're not gaining any benefit from the newer OS or the newer Office package--they're just consuming more resources on stuff you don't need, which means that you need to buy more gear to support the applications that should be consuming resources.
Look at it another way. If I'm doing graphics editing, I can easily hold entire images in RAM now, because I can easily buy a machine with 2GB of the good stuff. This is wonderful--this is a HUGE benefit over paging chunks out, and is exactly how advances in computing should benefit me. Unfortunately, if I run it under Vista, I end up losing a big chunk of that lovely RAM to the OS, and the Office suite running in the background, neither of which are doing anything appreciably better than the ancient versions of them did.
Bloatware isn't big software that needs to be big--it's poorly written, feature-excessive, pointless wastes of resources, which take them away from programs which actually justify them.
As for OS 9 vs. OS X, that was a profound rewrite, and entirely justified as far as I'm concerned. There's probably some bloat in there, but it was long past time for Apple to move to a new core.
"OS X has never been nor ever will require activation of any kind." All I can say is that 'ever' is a long time.
It's not just you--in fact, it's far too many of "you," and you're wrong.
There are two reasons for bloat: Accidental (i.e. shitty programming) and deliberate (adding pointless features.) By buying into the "let's just throw money at it until the problem goes away" mentality, you're encouraging bad programming and endless marketing-driven upgrades. It's a hundred bucks on RAM now, another hundred on a new hard drive, and then next year it'll be a new CPU. You're going to end up spending about $500-1000 per year on maintaining the same level of productivity as you've always had. This is key!
Windows 2000 required a 133MHz processor and 64MB RAM. Windows XP required a 233MHz processor and 128MB RAM. The ONLY FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCE between them was the thumbnail view mode. Everything else was eyecandy and toys, but it wasn't a huge upgrade cost. Windows Vista requires a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, a DirectX 9-compliant video card, and an internet connection. Oh yeah, and TEN TIMES as much disk space. Now what extra value does Vista provide to you, the end customer? What advantage does Vista give you over XP?
Consider Office suites. Office 97 ran on a 486, with 12MB RAM for all features. Office 2007 now requires a 500MHz processor and 256MB RAM, and contains very few features that weren't already in Office 97. Moreso, only a tiny fraction of those features are actually used by any appreciable chunk of the population.
The ONLY REASON to keep writing bloated software is to make you constantly spend more money staying exactly where you are, and your answer is to reward them by spending that money. Bloatware is capitalism gone wrong. It's forced consumption (and the forced aspect is getting worse with OSes now requiring online license activation and continued polling), and so much of the population is EAGER beyond words to consume while getting no value.
Quintessential Player is a GREAT little music player. It's got skins, it's got fanciness, but at the end of the day it's small (2.2MB download) and fast--on my ancient laptop (P2-233) I started using it because it was the only thing that would play audio without skipping and with less than 100% CPU. (In fact, it normally consumed about 20% CPU.)
There's also a media player with a comprehensive library and all of the bells and whistles in development. Bigger, but still fast and light to run.
"Sun is not historically a friend of Open Source."
Bollocks! Sun has been pushing open source and (far more important) open standards since before the religion was formed and the term was capitalised.
Ever hear of...
NFS NIS NIS+
Looking at a relatively short-term, recent, and (eventually) harmless contract with The Enemy and calling them 'not historically a friend of Open Source' is just more whining.
Hmm. Solaris on AMD is really REALLY fast, stable, and solid. Random 3rd party hardware support isn't where Linux is, but most of the stuff I want on a server (i.e. NOT Bob's home-made gigabit NIC overclocked to 1.3GB) is now supported and solid.
Sun had a bit of problems with bad hardware somewhere around 2003-2004, but I've never seen it get remotely as bad as commodity hardware. The one thing it did was complain louder, which led to replacing hardware before the server crashed. I've seen people mistake self-diagnosing hardware with unreliable hardware, but the average lifespan of Sun gear has always been great in my experience.
Sun comes with bash built in (yuck!!! Maybe I'm weird, but I like a sh-like shell that doesn't actually break bourne shell scripts.), and vim is installed by default in a complete build. They're available on a fresh box, if you really insist on using them.
But ease of administration? I'm...stunned. Admittedly familiarity plays a huge factor, but the device naming in Linux has caused more cursing, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and misconfigured hardware than all of the SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and DEC systems I've administered over the decades. Disk partition naming in Linux is nightmarish--Is this a primary partition, a logical one, or an extended on? Is it active? What type is it? Hey, is that type 82 actually Linux swap, or are we going to blow away our Solaris x86 installation? ARGH!
I first actually installed Linux about the same time as the 2.0 kernel came out, and was surprised that a cute little hobbyist OS was so full-featured (until I crashed the entire system by running a math routine). "A few more years of real work, and they'll polish the rough spots and make a serious OS out of this," I thought. Unfortunately, most of the work in the past decade has been focused on polishing the already-shiny bits, and not putting as much effort into the guts of the OS.
"...much of Linux and GNU was born out of people's long-running frustrations with Solaris' shortcomings."
Well now, that's just historical rewriting, unless the only shortcoming you're talking about was the fact that Solaris wasn't free in any sense of the word. (No source code without a license, no copy of the OS without a license, etc.) Linux was a free alternative to Unix. If Solaris or HPUX or Irix (oh yeah, I forgot Irix in my previous list) were available for a free download with source code available under some free license, Linux almost certainly wouldn't have happened. The fact that it did is a different fact entirely from the fact that it went in a modestly different direction from 'traditional' Unix.
First of all, I didn't mention Blizzard at all--I'm not paying for ANY online games anymore.
Secondly, if a company can provide a good enough gaming environment for me to willingly pay, then so be it. Encouraging cheating and forced upgrades ain't the way, though.
(I'm biting my tongue to avoid a bunch of knee-jerk reactions here.)
We're using Sun. I've worked for a dozen BIG companies over the past bunch of years who are using Sun gear. We keep running into Linux, and it keeps letting us down, despite the fact that many of us use it at home. Thus, I have to ask: What did Linux provide that Sun failed on? End user (i.e. desktop) issues I can certainly believe (unfortunately), but Linux seems to be unable to catch up on any of the other fronts.
Honestly, I'm curious. I keep hearing about people leaving Sun for Linux, and outside of the desktop, I've yet to hear a good reason for it.
The group has been illegally stalking its opponents. To quote Wikipedia (not the definitive resource I realise, but accurate and verifiable in this case):
In 1978, a number of Scientologists including L. Ron Hubbard's wife Mary Sue Hubbard (who was second in command in the organization at the time) were convicted of perpetrating the largest incident of domestic espionage in the history of the United States. Called "Operation Snow White" within the Church, this involved infiltrating, wiretapping, and stealing documents from the offices of Federal attorneys and the Internal Revenue Service.
...and...
The FBI raid on the Church's headquarters revealed documentation that detailed Scientology actions against various critics of the organization. Among these documents was a plan to frame Gabe Cazares, the mayor of the city of Clearwater, Florida, with a staged hit-and-run accident; plans to discredit the skeptical organization CSICOP by spreading rumors that it was a front for the CIA; and a project called "Operation Freakout", aimed at ruining the life of author Paulette Cooper, author of an early book critical of the movement, The Scandal of Scientology.[25]
You're making a large number of errors in a well-intentioned post here.
First of all, the list you posted is a list of groups that a commission recommended be considered cults. The government of Belgium did not accept that recommendation, and did not make any judgements on the groups listed. Secondly, the site you referred to is very biased in their own way: If it's religious, it's good. If it's religious and small, then it's even better. It is pathologically opposed to any recognition of cults (even when real cults exist). Thirdly, this article is ENTIRELY unrelated to that article. This is a ten-year investigation into the CoS. Not the Quakers, not the two Buddhist sects, not the Amish mission--JUST the Scientologists.
The Cult of Scientology has been hunting down people on the internet since before/. was founded. They have been involved in lawsuits and forged cancels on usenet for decades (!) now. In short, they brought the fight to the internet, and so it _is_ actually technical (and nerd) related. And it certainly matters.
Interesting history. I had played DAoC from fairly early on, and had brought two characters up to level 50 by the time ToA was released. I had also become a Legendary Grandmaster armourcrafter, which took twice as much time as leveling two characters. At first the rule and game changes looked like they were designed for better balance, but then they started to get silly and frustrating. Then there was the cheating: I worked with a guy who got up to the same crafting level as me in a week, by using an auto-crafting program, which were explicitly forbidden. I complained to the powers that be, and got no response. I appealed to the in-game support folks, and got ignored, even when he was USING THE PROGRAM AT THAT MOMENT--they simply refused to check into it.
Then ToA came out. Despite their promises, they quickly started to hold official events in the expanded area, and if you hadn't bought it, then you were left out. So much of the game's upgrades which _could_ have been implemented realm-wide required owning ToA, that it became pointless to play if you didn't shell out the extra $45.
It became abundantly clear that the Powers That Be weren't interested in running a fair, honest, or fun game--they were out to soak their customers for as much money as possible. Expensive game, expensive (and effectively mandatory) upgrades, AND a monthly fee, and as long as you paid your bill, you could cheat as much as you liked. No thanks Mythic, I'll keep my money.
I see that the cheater mentioned above still exists. Apparently in-game crime _does_ pay.
I guess I could have added some emphasis. Read that first sentence as; "Ah yes, of COURSE! Because they NEVER used compression on flawless and holy vinyl!!!"
Or in other words, the first sentence was intended to be facetious.
As far as LOUD music, I saw Daniel Lanois perform a few years ago at a local folk festival. This was an open-air stage in the middle of a park of trees and grass, and the volume was cranked LOUD. You could feel the bass rumbling in your gut, and you could feel the drums smash against your chest. However, you could also hear Daniel whispering into the mic, and pick out every note on his classical guitar. That was just about a religious experience for sound quality.
As an aside, here's a great article about how Rush has devolved into the louder=better camp. Sigh.
(On the other hand, Kate Bush's new album is both artistically and acoustically fantastic, which is a nice change after her previous albums which were painful to listen to.)
I just have to jump into the audiophile fray here.
Gold makes perfect sense on connectors, but more often than not it's a very thin layer of gold electroplated onto the plugs, which gets scratched off easily and ends up making a worse connection than cheap nickel-plate. Expensive plugs may have thick gold plate, but the gold on the cheap ones is almost totally pointless. As for cables, beyond a very easily attainable point (cheap coax for interconnects, 14-gauge copper for short speaker runs), any real difference that affects the signal audibly is a result of deeply flawed equipment. Yes, cables CAN make a difference, but it's trivially easy to avoid those problems, unless your gear is insanely badly designed.
I figured someone would jump on my rap comment, and I considered putting in a pre-emptive explanation of what I meant by that. Then I decided to leave it, because I didn't want to weigh down my original post with other material. Let me do some 'splaining here on my point.
First of all, I'm not unaware of the sub-genres of rap and hip-hop. I saw Arrested Development just last year, and I've seen Michael Franti a few times, one of which was a fairly hardcore rap set. (other times he's been downright reggae, which is pretty cool too.) Then there are the bands/artists who incorporate some rap and hip-hop into their regular music: Ani DiFranco and REM have both done this recently. (And in fact, Ani's Hat-Shaped Hat is a fairly brilliant 7-odd minutes of straight rap).
However, be that as it may, rap has never been a _musical_ genre. Its roots come from protest and street rhythms and percussion, not music and harmony. Some of those things have been added after the fact, but at its core, rap is fundamentally amusical--almost antimusical. That's just what rap is, without passing judgement.
HOWEVER, here's the key: Without musical talent or ability as a measure of quality, the industry can push anyone with a bad attitude and bad clothes as a rap artist, and don't have to spend money or effort on discovering and training talent. Add to this the fact that some (not all, some!) of the 'founding fathers' of rap never had the vaguest inkling of musical ability, and it's easy to encourage lack of talent as a selling feature.
"The old arguments for why we should squash the dynamic range no longer hold."
The primary argument for DR compression still holds: Radio stations can only broadcast at a certain level, and compressed music sounds louder on the radio. Same thing with CDs, where there a specific range and 0db level. Louder turns more heads. Louder sells more music, which sells more ads. Uncompressed music is bad for sales.
Out of curiosity, do the DR expanders just apply a log (or other) multiplier to the level of the signal? That should be easy enough to do in software without even plugins, but I wonder if that really would do the trick.
Slashdot Mirror
I grew up with astronomy, and have been watching the skies with binoculars for a few years now, which is leading to my first scope. Something you have to understand from the start is that
First of all, get a good Planisphere. That'll set you back about fifteen bucks, and you'll learn a TON about the night sky. Also get a red flashlight. I really like the Rigel Systems ones which have a variable-brightness red LED for viewing, and a variable brightness white one for set-up and tear down.
Get a copy of Nightwatch, by Terry Dickenson. It'll serve you from day one until the paper disintegrates (which will be a long time--it's well made).
Now guess what? Armed with nothing more than a pair of eyes and a chart, you're an amateur astronomer! Wasn't that easy?
The next step is usually binoculars. A good pair of 10x50 (Nikon and Pentax are good in the low end, ~$150) and a tripod mount will let you see more than you realised was out there. 10x50 is a nice size, because you can use them handheld, whereas getting much bigger (11x70 and up) will be too heavy to hold steady enough without a tripod. The first time you see the Pleiades through mounted binoculars in a dark sky will be breathtaking.
Now comes the scope. You can easily spend two years happily researching scopes while you use the binoculars and charts (and your naked eyes--don't ever forget just looking up!), by which point you'll know what suits you best. A few pointers, though:
1) Aperture rules. More aperture means more light coming in, which means fainter objects. Deep sky stuff (galaxies and nebulae) NEED aperture. Unfortunately, more aperture means more money, more size, and more weight.
2) Bigger is harder to move. A gorgeous 24" light-bucket is useless if you can't actually get it outside without three willing friends (unless they're eager and living with you). An 8" scope may only be adequate for deep sky objects, but if you get it out every clear night then it's a far better scope for you.
3) The mount is key. Most mid-range telescopes available are built by one of two companies, and have surprisingly good optics--better by far than you could get at (almost) any price 25 years ago. Unfortunately, good optics are ruined if the scope won't stay steady.
4) No telescope can do everything.
As I said above, most telescopes are made by one of two Chinese companies. Synta makes Sky-Watcher and Celestron, Guan Sheng makes several Meades, Antares and some others. Orion scopes are sourced from both companies, depending on the year and the type. There's not a lot of difference between them--both have good optics and good design. There are some cheapies, but once you hit the $300 point, the scopes and mounts are all pretty reliable. (and again--MUCH better than you could get a while back.)
If your heart is set on astrophotography, be prepared to spend a LOT of time and quite a chunk of money in the hobby. You'll need an equatorially mounted scope with a motor drive, and stability will become much more important than for simple viewing. You'll need some sort of camera capable of long (30 minute!) exposures, you'll need books, you'll need planning, and you'll need patience. Lots of patience. Don't get me wrong--astrophotography can be great fun--I used to take pictures on my dad's 8" SCTs and do the developing and printing in our darkroom--but it's a whole range of 'more work' and pretty serious stuff, even with digital.
Which mount you want is a major deciding factor. For the same amount of portability and similar prices (about $400 CDN), you can get an 8" Dobsonian or a 6" Newtonian on an adequate mount. For another hundred bucks, you can get the same 6" on a really beefy mou
Ah well. I tend to avoid working for idiots like that, and don't get upset when that sort fires me. Most of the time, I'm hired for my knowledge and skill; not using them properly would be more upsetting for good managers.
Heh. I didn't mean to wax nostalgic too heavily over Office 97, but from my bleary memory, it was the first version that had auto-kerning and 'live' font display. I was doing a lot of publishing-quality work at the time, and those were the features I was missing up to that point. Since then, there hasn't been a feature I've seen the need for which wasn't in that version, bloated and slow as it was at the time. (Manual kerning was painful, but made a significant difference in making a product look professional.)
You could be right...but you're not.
Users don't expect DRM, and they don't expect the most obscure features. Since auto-kerning and real-time font display came about, all word processors have had more features than anyone but professional typesetters would use.
Let me be more blunt: There is no justification whatsoever under the Sun, moon, and God's green earth, that an OPERATING SYSTEM requires five hundred million operations per second. None. Period.
Any supposed justification is simply apologist behaviour.
Well now...
:-)
you're right. 100%. I agree. The biggest _detriment_ to my field is people who are so jaded that they fail to see potential good in new technology.
I have nothing to say that would contradict you. Damn!!!
The single most important thing we can do in our IT jobs is to ask why?
"We need to buy some web 2.0. How much will that cost?"
"Why do we need it?"
Note that the answer is NOT "no", it is NOT "that's new and insecure." It is, to be precise, "what do you want to do and how will this technology help with it?"
The answer to so-called web 2.0 is almost invariably no because it consists of:
47% rehashed ideas.
51% marketing and management consultant bullshit.
1.6% new ideas that solely benefit vapid, angst-ridden, insecure teens.
0.4% worthwhile advances.
That means that one time in 250 that someone comes to you with a 'web 2.0' idea, it's going to be worthwhile. Actually, that number seems high. Oh well, we'll leave it.
Most of this crap is either old shit in a new wrapper, or complete self-serving hyperbole. Our jobs as professionals is to make that decision (or at least help in making it), and NOT waste valuable company resources (time, money, people, equipment) on stupid pointless ideas.
When people are using gmail or facebook for inter-office communications, we shouldn't first assume that we're doing our jobs poorly. The first thing we must ask is why. Are they doing this because the existing communication paths are inadequate? Maybe so--then we need to act. On the other hand, maybe it's because if they can justify using gmail for "work-related purposes," they can then keep flirting with that S&M submissive in Minnesota who just happens to have gmail open as well.
In fact, you nailed it perfectly in this sentence:
That's precisely it: we should be bringing our expertise to the table and finding the right solution for them--proactively if possible. The real problem is that we are so often presented with a fait accompli, "we have decided on this totally inappropriate technology to solve a problem we don't have", that after a while the automatic answer is, "No. Now prove me wrong or go back to your desk."
Oooh oooh oooh!!! I want some free viagra lesbians!!!
Seriously, wikis are exceedingly useful--in the right context, when administered appropriately. Then there's the other 99.6%.
Your point and mine aren't actually in opposition. I agree that computers getting faster and more capable is a great thing! However, what I'm saying is that bloatware is WASTING that advantage. Windows 2000 with Office 2000 run well on a 6-year-old computer, say 500MHz. Should you be using a 500MHz P3 as a result? Of course not--but if you run them on a modern computer, they will (a) run phenomenally fast, and (b) let you do tons of other stuff on that computer. Unfortunately, the newer and more bloated versions of the OS and office suite will unnecessarily consume as much of your modern computer as the older packages did of that 500MHz machine. Why do I call this unnecessary? It's because you're not gaining any benefit from the newer OS or the newer Office package--they're just consuming more resources on stuff you don't need, which means that you need to buy more gear to support the applications that should be consuming resources.
Look at it another way. If I'm doing graphics editing, I can easily hold entire images in RAM now, because I can easily buy a machine with 2GB of the good stuff. This is wonderful--this is a HUGE benefit over paging chunks out, and is exactly how advances in computing should benefit me. Unfortunately, if I run it under Vista, I end up losing a big chunk of that lovely RAM to the OS, and the Office suite running in the background, neither of which are doing anything appreciably better than the ancient versions of them did.
Bloatware isn't big software that needs to be big--it's poorly written, feature-excessive, pointless wastes of resources, which take them away from programs which actually justify them.
As for OS 9 vs. OS X, that was a profound rewrite, and entirely justified as far as I'm concerned. There's probably some bloat in there, but it was long past time for Apple to move to a new core.
"OS X has never been nor ever will require activation of any kind."
All I can say is that 'ever' is a long time.
Someone asked me the other day about the difference between psychotic and psychopathic. Here it is laid out nicely.
The psychotic Jack Thompson is sending a subpoena to the psychopathic George Bush.
It's not just you--in fact, it's far too many of "you," and you're wrong.
There are two reasons for bloat: Accidental (i.e. shitty programming) and deliberate (adding pointless features.) By buying into the "let's just throw money at it until the problem goes away" mentality, you're encouraging bad programming and endless marketing-driven upgrades. It's a hundred bucks on RAM now, another hundred on a new hard drive, and then next year it'll be a new CPU. You're going to end up spending about $500-1000 per year on maintaining the same level of productivity as you've always had. This is key!
Windows 2000 required a 133MHz processor and 64MB RAM.
Windows XP required a 233MHz processor and 128MB RAM. The ONLY FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCE between them was the thumbnail view mode. Everything else was eyecandy and toys, but it wasn't a huge upgrade cost.
Windows Vista requires a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, a DirectX 9-compliant video card, and an internet connection. Oh yeah, and TEN TIMES as much disk space. Now what extra value does Vista provide to you, the end customer? What advantage does Vista give you over XP?
Consider Office suites. Office 97 ran on a 486, with 12MB RAM for all features. Office 2007 now requires a 500MHz processor and 256MB RAM, and contains very few features that weren't already in Office 97. Moreso, only a tiny fraction of those features are actually used by any appreciable chunk of the population.
The ONLY REASON to keep writing bloated software is to make you constantly spend more money staying exactly where you are, and your answer is to reward them by spending that money. Bloatware is capitalism gone wrong. It's forced consumption (and the forced aspect is getting worse with OSes now requiring online license activation and continued polling), and so much of the population is EAGER beyond words to consume while getting no value.
Quintessential Player is a GREAT little music player. It's got skins, it's got fanciness, but at the end of the day it's small (2.2MB download) and fast--on my ancient laptop (P2-233) I started using it because it was the only thing that would play audio without skipping and with less than 100% CPU. (In fact, it normally consumed about 20% CPU.)
There's also a media player with a comprehensive library and all of the bells and whistles in development. Bigger, but still fast and light to run.
"Sun is not historically a friend of Open Source."
Bollocks! Sun has been pushing open source and (far more important) open standards since before the religion was formed and the term was capitalised.
Ever hear of...
NFS
NIS
NIS+
Looking at a relatively short-term, recent, and (eventually) harmless contract with The Enemy and calling them 'not historically a friend of Open Source' is just more whining.
Hmm. Solaris on AMD is really REALLY fast, stable, and solid. Random 3rd party hardware support isn't where Linux is, but most of the stuff I want on a server (i.e. NOT Bob's home-made gigabit NIC overclocked to 1.3GB) is now supported and solid.
Sun had a bit of problems with bad hardware somewhere around 2003-2004, but I've never seen it get remotely as bad as commodity hardware. The one thing it did was complain louder, which led to replacing hardware before the server crashed. I've seen people mistake self-diagnosing hardware with unreliable hardware, but the average lifespan of Sun gear has always been great in my experience.
Sun comes with bash built in (yuck!!! Maybe I'm weird, but I like a sh-like shell that doesn't actually break bourne shell scripts.), and vim is installed by default in a complete build. They're available on a fresh box, if you really insist on using them.
But ease of administration? I'm...stunned. Admittedly familiarity plays a huge factor, but the device naming in Linux has caused more cursing, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and misconfigured hardware than all of the SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and DEC systems I've administered over the decades. Disk partition naming in Linux is nightmarish--Is this a primary partition, a logical one, or an extended on? Is it active? What type is it? Hey, is that type 82 actually Linux swap, or are we going to blow away our Solaris x86 installation? ARGH!
I first actually installed Linux about the same time as the 2.0 kernel came out, and was surprised that a cute little hobbyist OS was so full-featured (until I crashed the entire system by running a math routine). "A few more years of real work, and they'll polish the rough spots and make a serious OS out of this," I thought. Unfortunately, most of the work in the past decade has been focused on polishing the already-shiny bits, and not putting as much effort into the guts of the OS.
"...much of Linux and GNU was born out of people's long-running frustrations with Solaris' shortcomings."
Well now, that's just historical rewriting, unless the only shortcoming you're talking about was the fact that Solaris wasn't free in any sense of the word. (No source code without a license, no copy of the OS without a license, etc.) Linux was a free alternative to Unix. If Solaris or HPUX or Irix (oh yeah, I forgot Irix in my previous list) were available for a free download with source code available under some free license, Linux almost certainly wouldn't have happened. The fact that it did is a different fact entirely from the fact that it went in a modestly different direction from 'traditional' Unix.
First of all, I didn't mention Blizzard at all--I'm not paying for ANY online games anymore.
Secondly, if a company can provide a good enough gaming environment for me to willingly pay, then so be it. Encouraging cheating and forced upgrades ain't the way, though.
(I'm biting my tongue to avoid a bunch of knee-jerk reactions here.)
We're using Sun. I've worked for a dozen BIG companies over the past bunch of years who are using Sun gear. We keep running into Linux, and it keeps letting us down, despite the fact that many of us use it at home. Thus, I have to ask: What did Linux provide that Sun failed on? End user (i.e. desktop) issues I can certainly believe (unfortunately), but Linux seems to be unable to catch up on any of the other fronts.
Honestly, I'm curious. I keep hearing about people leaving Sun for Linux, and outside of the desktop, I've yet to hear a good reason for it.
Lisa McPherson was murdered by the Cult.
The group has been illegally stalking its opponents. To quote Wikipedia (not the definitive resource I realise, but accurate and verifiable in this case):
Not bad for their first half-century.
You're making a large number of errors in a well-intentioned post here.
First of all, the list you posted is a list of groups that a commission recommended be considered cults. The government of Belgium did not accept that recommendation, and did not make any judgements on the groups listed.
Secondly, the site you referred to is very biased in their own way: If it's religious, it's good. If it's religious and small, then it's even better. It is pathologically opposed to any recognition of cults (even when real cults exist).
Thirdly, this article is ENTIRELY unrelated to that article. This is a ten-year investigation into the CoS. Not the Quakers, not the two Buddhist sects, not the Amish mission--JUST the Scientologists.
"...since 2001 it's actually been part of Pepsico."
In fact, that is a FAR better reason to boycott it than being associated with a religion.
After all, Pepsi was a prime instigator in the invasion of Chile.
(There's tons of other stuff out there of course, but I wanted to stick to reliable and relatively neutral sources.)
The Cult of Scientology has been hunting down people on the internet since before /. was founded. They have been involved in lawsuits and forged cancels on usenet for decades (!) now. In short, they brought the fight to the internet, and so it _is_ actually technical (and nerd) related. And it certainly matters.
Interesting history. I had played DAoC from fairly early on, and had brought two characters up to level 50 by the time ToA was released. I had also become a Legendary Grandmaster armourcrafter, which took twice as much time as leveling two characters. At first the rule and game changes looked like they were designed for better balance, but then they started to get silly and frustrating. Then there was the cheating: I worked with a guy who got up to the same crafting level as me in a week, by using an auto-crafting program, which were explicitly forbidden. I complained to the powers that be, and got no response. I appealed to the in-game support folks, and got ignored, even when he was USING THE PROGRAM AT THAT MOMENT--they simply refused to check into it.
Then ToA came out. Despite their promises, they quickly started to hold official events in the expanded area, and if you hadn't bought it, then you were left out. So much of the game's upgrades which _could_ have been implemented realm-wide required owning ToA, that it became pointless to play if you didn't shell out the extra $45.
It became abundantly clear that the Powers That Be weren't interested in running a fair, honest, or fun game--they were out to soak their customers for as much money as possible. Expensive game, expensive (and effectively mandatory) upgrades, AND a monthly fee, and as long as you paid your bill, you could cheat as much as you liked. No thanks Mythic, I'll keep my money.
I see that the cheater mentioned above still exists. Apparently in-game crime _does_ pay.
"How would you best make use of this opportunity if you found yourself in my shoes?"
Bullets.
Well probably not, but it's nice to daydream.
I guess I could have added some emphasis. Read that first sentence as;
"Ah yes, of COURSE! Because they NEVER used compression on flawless and holy vinyl!!!"
Or in other words, the first sentence was intended to be facetious.
As far as LOUD music, I saw Daniel Lanois perform a few years ago at a local folk festival. This was an open-air stage in the middle of a park of trees and grass, and the volume was cranked LOUD. You could feel the bass rumbling in your gut, and you could feel the drums smash against your chest. However, you could also hear Daniel whispering into the mic, and pick out every note on his classical guitar. That was just about a religious experience for sound quality.
As an aside, here's a great article about how Rush has devolved into the louder=better camp. Sigh.
(On the other hand, Kate Bush's new album is both artistically and acoustically fantastic, which is a nice change after her previous albums which were painful to listen to.)
I just have to jump into the audiophile fray here.
Gold makes perfect sense on connectors, but more often than not it's a very thin layer of gold electroplated onto the plugs, which gets scratched off easily and ends up making a worse connection than cheap nickel-plate. Expensive plugs may have thick gold plate, but the gold on the cheap ones is almost totally pointless.
As for cables, beyond a very easily attainable point (cheap coax for interconnects, 14-gauge copper for short speaker runs), any real difference that affects the signal audibly is a result of deeply flawed equipment. Yes, cables CAN make a difference, but it's trivially easy to avoid those problems, unless your gear is insanely badly designed.
I figured someone would jump on my rap comment, and I considered putting in a pre-emptive explanation of what I meant by that. Then I decided to leave it, because I didn't want to weigh down my original post with other material. Let me do some 'splaining here on my point.
First of all, I'm not unaware of the sub-genres of rap and hip-hop. I saw Arrested Development just last year, and I've seen Michael Franti a few times, one of which was a fairly hardcore rap set. (other times he's been downright reggae, which is pretty cool too.) Then there are the bands/artists who incorporate some rap and hip-hop into their regular music: Ani DiFranco and REM have both done this recently. (And in fact, Ani's Hat-Shaped Hat is a fairly brilliant 7-odd minutes of straight rap).
However, be that as it may, rap has never been a _musical_ genre. Its roots come from protest and street rhythms and percussion, not music and harmony. Some of those things have been added after the fact, but at its core, rap is fundamentally amusical--almost antimusical. That's just what rap is, without passing judgement.
HOWEVER, here's the key: Without musical talent or ability as a measure of quality, the industry can push anyone with a bad attitude and bad clothes as a rap artist, and don't have to spend money or effort on discovering and training talent. Add to this the fact that some (not all, some!) of the 'founding fathers' of rap never had the vaguest inkling of musical ability, and it's easy to encourage lack of talent as a selling feature.
"The old arguments for why we should squash the dynamic range no longer hold."
The primary argument for DR compression still holds: Radio stations can only broadcast at a certain level, and compressed music sounds louder on the radio. Same thing with CDs, where there a specific range and 0db level. Louder turns more heads. Louder sells more music, which sells more ads. Uncompressed music is bad for sales.
Out of curiosity, do the DR expanders just apply a log (or other) multiplier to the level of the signal? That should be easy enough to do in software without even plugins, but I wonder if that really would do the trick.