I love my job. I love my boss. I wake up looking forward to work.
(And no, I'm actually NOT being facetious!)
My manager used to be a tech geek. After the company was bought out, he left due to personality conflicts. When the subject of said conflicts was fired for being utterly incompetent, he came back as manager of a tech group, and has steadily worked his way to manager of the entire Unix team (about 40 of us or so).
His job, officially, is to make sure that we provide the best possible service (Unix hardware and software both) to our customers. His idea of how to accomplish that is to fight like hell to ensure:
1) We don't have to deal with corporate bullshit. 2) We have the equipment and tools we need to do our jobs. 3) We get the training we need, initially and ongoing. 4) We don't have to deal with client-side politics. If the customers have problems with us, they take it to our manager. (who in turn deals with us fairly)
And on top of that, he's been away from the command line for a few years now but he still at least understands the work we do.
Am I just bragging here? Maybe.:-) But let it be known that it IS possible for managers with good technical knowledge and managerial/people skills to exist. They're rare, though. If you find one, you'll probably be happy to deal with the odd bits of shit that get through to you.
I'm rather annoyed that you've been modded down. It's easy for me to scoff having been through these arguements and (eventually) come out on the other side, but here's the thing.
Every new chair is a new design. (The same holds for everything else, of course.)
If I'm going to build a chair, naturally there's tons of history behind it. We know how a chair 'works.'
BUT, to make a chair and especially sell it commercially, we have to make sure that it's wide enough for fat people to sit in, that the armrests are at a reasonable height, that the chair seat can actually support a given weight and that the legs can withstand the pressure. Let's not forget angles of how everything goes together, and the height of the back, or seatpan off the ground.
In fact, look at all of the adjustments available on a good task chair, and realise that every one of those is a fixed value in (say) a dining room chair. If you don't get them right (not always the same values, but they have to work--and work together), then you've got a chair that doesn't work. And it happens. We were at a festival this summer, and they had started selling a new festival chair. The first bad sign was that it warned against use by anyone over 215lbs. As it turns out, they were folding up after five hours of use by pretty much anyone over 180lbs! That is a BAD design, and we just shook our heads about how all of the weight was being focused on a bend in the tubular aluminium frame.
So even with something as simple and beaten-to-death as chairs, while there may not be much to discover, you still have to design it properly. Also, it would be silly to say that we know everything there is about chairs--there are still really innovative designs out there, like the Airon and the Taz.
The first thing I thought of when I read the subject was closer to 'how everyday things are created,' a cause near and dear to my heart.
Manufacturing is fascinating stuff, but my wife is an industrial designer, and as a result I get to see the REALLY neat parts--the research/design/prototype/test process that feeds into manufacturing.
Not too many people thing about the work that goes into making a chair (for example) fit properly, but it's a complex process and one that requires a lot more engineering than people realise.
Nothing really important to say here--just thought that people (especially those younger/.ers who haven't yet decided on a career) who find the manufacturing process interesting might also give a thought towards the industrial design aspect.
There's nothing inherent about the internet or any other part of the world that makes it essential to franchise, to commercialise, or to produce an ROI. It's the companies themselves--the multinationals that can't survive without consuming or destroying everything in their path--that are forcing this on us, and this is what I intend to stand against.
More likely, I'll end up in a shack in the mountains, with no electricity, a wood-burning stove, and a guitar--cursing the fact that I couldn't save the world.
Thanks for the bulldozer opinion. Guess what--there's nowhere to go!
Karl is quite right, and perhaps even a bit conservative. The internet has become a big unpleasant dung-heap. It's rapidly going the way of TV, radio, and yes--farms. It was perhaps the last (and at least, certainly the latest) frontier of the western world, and it's becoming another useless, money-centric McDonald's culture.
Something that I don't feel you understand: Just because it's inevitable doesn't make it right, or not worth standing against.
Bah! That's about as explicit and mature as Porky's, but without the plot. Not to trash the game (never played it), but it's not what I'm talking about here.
There were a few sex simulators early on that were awful, but at least someone was playing with the idea of adults-only X-rated games. Now that world is gone, and more's the pity.
What we really need is something like Henry & June, the game.
Man, what ever happened to the computer game porn revolution?
Serious question here! When you consider the amount of porn sold annually (billions of dollars, even if it almost universally sucks), there MUST be a market for a game that addresses sex in a deeper way than Duke Nukem.
As for maturity, I'd love to see an adult game with a hint of maturity, but that's never gonna happen. Sadly.
OK, this is way off topic, I'll admit. However, in some strange way, it's related to this magic little box.
Can anyone tell me if it is currently possible to isolate a single musical instrument from a mono recording? I've come up with some neat thought experiments around the idea, but I'd like to plug a song into some software and/or equipment, and pull each of the instruments into a separate track.
Is this possible? Can I get software to do this stuff? Will it take two years per song?
Ah yes. I was more or less restricting my comments to the case of using them realtime in live shows.
Fixing slight studio tweaks is pretty clear in my mind. It's not much different than Mike Oldfield slowing down the tape flanges during overdubs on Tubular Bells. Fixing recordings of live performances is perhaps a bit greyer. Fixing bad live singing is very questionable. (although performers with colds come to mind)
I propose that there are two types of performers who use these: The ones with utterly no talent (most of the ones listed in the article), and the ones who may have talent, but are too busy dancing and performing acrobatics onstage to nail their notes. (not that an athletic performance is a sign of talent, but Cher played in town the other night, and I can't write her off as utterly talentless.)
So we have talentless shills, and visual performers who don't focus 100% on their music onstage. Are we REALLY causing any damage with them, or for that matter, are we very interested in listening to the singing from these people?
Somehow I don't see Happy Rhodes using one of these.
Well, I can agree to disagree, but there are two points I take issue with:
"...Raymond's done a fine job of replying to McBride's paranoid rant about IBM orchestrating the anti-SCO campaign."
You say he has. I say he hasn't. It's a matter of opinion, not fact.
Secondly, "If you find sarcasm sophomoric..." Here you're deliberately misinterpreting my comment. I said that ESR's use of sarcasm was sophmoric. There's a difference.
As for the rest, well I'm sure I won't change your mind so I won't bother getting into a fight over it.
ESR has a long history of writing tirades like a 14 year old fanboy, albeit one with an excellent grasp of English.
It is possible to write a STRONG article--one full of very clear and ferocious intent, that doesn't contain sophmoric sarcasm and literary raspberries.
Interestingly, ESR quoted Jeff Gerhardt, who managed to do exactly what ESR fails at: tear a strip off of SCO and Darl, offer them a way out, make it PERFECTLY clear where he (and his supporters) stands, and remain mature.
Don't be a prat! Of course ripping DVDs and sharing them on Kazaa is copying. So is sharing a completely unaltered iamge of the DVD. The fact that one is decrypted by the sharer, and the other is decrypted by the downloader (who may well burn it to a DVD and toss it into his Sony player with legal decrypting code) is entirely irrelevant. DeCSS didn't make it possible to copy the file.
But the point has been made, and made, and made again. Yes it's ridiculous--you're preaching to the converted here. What I'm saying is that it *IS* illegal, according to recent US rulings. Your point is valid, but irrelevant. No matter how preposterous it is, there's no point in pointing it out yet again. Better to do something productive like, for example, spreading the code as far and wide as possible.
Just post the damned code, and quit playing with cute ways of extracting it. The point was made--two years ago. The courts WILL recognise this as identical to the actual code, and will act on both, or neither.
You forgot the one actual valid response, which gets posted fairly heavily (shockingly!). DeCSS has no relevance to copy protection in the first place. Just decrypting for use.
To be fair, I said "this is what we need." Not, "this is what's going to happen."
Unfortunately, power sells. Hz sell computers, and HP sells cars, and people are too stupid and/or blind to look any farther than that. Nobody even looks at HP/kg, or Hz vs. the rest of a system, let along gas/power consumption.
But regardless--Intel couldn't get away with water cooling a few years ago. Now that the heavy overclockers have brought it to the forefront, the chip manufacturers can start to play with it. Next will be freon cooling, and then refrigerated coolers (i.e. peltier coolers on a water reservoir). It just won't end.
Really, we don't need better cooling. Every heat problem we look at revolves around better ways of pumping heat away from the CPU. As soon as we come up with something cool (pardon the pun), the chip manufacturers have implicit carte blanche to produce hotter chips.
We Need Cooler Chips. We need CPUs and GPUs that consume maybe 10W instead of 80+W, and then we can go back to heatsinks perhaps with small fans. Looking back on my first x86 machine (a 486), I discover that it was the last processor Intel certified for use without a heat sink (or maybe without a fan--something like that). Now we have BIG copper heatsinks, monster CPU fans as well as extra case fans and dual-fan power supplies, and the companies are starting to look at liquid cooling as a mainstream "solution."
When will it end? At this rate, we'll actually be maxing out 500W power supplies in a few years. Half a kilowatt is too much power to be drawing for a computer! (and consider that it doesn't even include the monitor or peripherals.)
Let's start leaning on Intel and AMD, and get them to reduce the power consumption rather than giving us meaningless MHz increments.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times? ALL of them!
They'll never get brighter consumers. Ever ever ever. People like following the trend, and people like shiny new things.
I love my job. I love my boss. I wake up looking forward to work.
:-) But let it be known that it IS possible for managers with good technical knowledge and managerial/people skills to exist. They're rare, though. If you find one, you'll probably be happy to deal with the odd bits of shit that get through to you.
(And no, I'm actually NOT being facetious!)
My manager used to be a tech geek. After the company was bought out, he left due to personality conflicts. When the subject of said conflicts was fired for being utterly incompetent, he came back as manager of a tech group, and has steadily worked his way to manager of the entire Unix team (about 40 of us or so).
His job, officially, is to make sure that we provide the best possible service (Unix hardware and software both) to our customers. His idea of how to accomplish that is to fight like hell to ensure:
1) We don't have to deal with corporate bullshit.
2) We have the equipment and tools we need to do our jobs.
3) We get the training we need, initially and ongoing.
4) We don't have to deal with client-side politics. If the customers have problems with us, they take it to our manager. (who in turn deals with us fairly)
And on top of that, he's been away from the command line for a few years now but he still at least understands the work we do.
Am I just bragging here? Maybe.
There's not really much point, because it's so strongly implied. The very term PHB is a Dilbertism, so it's pretty much taken as read by the poster.
Get a headset, asshole!
Don't like the wires? Boo fucking hoo. Go get a job at McDonald's.
I'm rather annoyed that you've been modded down. It's easy for me to scoff having been through these arguements and (eventually) come out on the other side, but here's the thing.
Every new chair is a new design. (The same holds for everything else, of course.)
If I'm going to build a chair, naturally there's tons of history behind it. We know how a chair 'works.'
BUT, to make a chair and especially sell it commercially, we have to make sure that it's wide enough for fat people to sit in, that the armrests are at a reasonable height, that the chair seat can actually support a given weight and that the legs can withstand the pressure. Let's not forget angles of how everything goes together, and the height of the back, or seatpan off the ground.
In fact, look at all of the adjustments available on a good task chair, and realise that every one of those is a fixed value in (say) a dining room chair. If you don't get them right (not always the same values, but they have to work--and work together), then you've got a chair that doesn't work. And it happens. We were at a festival this summer, and they had started selling a new festival chair. The first bad sign was that it warned against use by anyone over 215lbs. As it turns out, they were folding up after five hours of use by pretty much anyone over 180lbs! That is a BAD design, and we just shook our heads about how all of the weight was being focused on a bend in the tubular aluminium frame.
So even with something as simple and beaten-to-death as chairs, while there may not be much to discover, you still have to design it properly. Also, it would be silly to say that we know everything there is about chairs--there are still really innovative designs out there, like the Airon and the Taz.
Now let's talk about computer keyboards...
The first thing I thought of when I read the subject was closer to 'how everyday things are created,' a cause near and dear to my heart.
/.ers who haven't yet decided on a career) who find the manufacturing process interesting might also give a thought towards the industrial design aspect.
Manufacturing is fascinating stuff, but my wife is an industrial designer, and as a result I get to see the REALLY neat parts--the research/design/prototype/test process that feeds into manufacturing.
Not too many people thing about the work that goes into making a chair (for example) fit properly, but it's a complex process and one that requires a lot more engineering than people realise.
Nothing really important to say here--just thought that people (especially those younger
I guess my problem is this:
"...a world that must franchise to survive..."
There's nothing inherent about the internet or any other part of the world that makes it essential to franchise, to commercialise, or to produce an ROI. It's the companies themselves--the multinationals that can't survive without consuming or destroying everything in their path--that are forcing this on us, and this is what I intend to stand against.
More likely, I'll end up in a shack in the mountains, with no electricity, a wood-burning stove, and a guitar--cursing the fact that I couldn't save the world.
Thanks for the bulldozer opinion. Guess what--there's nowhere to go!
Karl is quite right, and perhaps even a bit conservative. The internet has become a big unpleasant dung-heap. It's rapidly going the way of TV, radio, and yes--farms. It was perhaps the last (and at least, certainly the latest) frontier of the western world, and it's becoming another useless, money-centric McDonald's culture.
Something that I don't feel you understand: Just because it's inevitable doesn't make it right, or not worth standing against.
Pretty simple. Osirus has been run by a juvenile, power freak for ages. You use it, you deal with his temper tantrums.
As others have said, this is an RBL that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
Damn. I was afraid of that.
I had envisioned a waveform follower of some sort. Tell it what, say, a clarinet sounds like, and then have it track the clarinet waveform.
Neat idea, but I guess it was mostly just wishing.
Bah! That's about as explicit and mature as Porky's, but without the plot. Not to trash the game (never played it), but it's not what I'm talking about here.
There were a few sex simulators early on that were awful, but at least someone was playing with the idea of adults-only X-rated games. Now that world is gone, and more's the pity.
What we really need is something like Henry & June, the game.
Man, what ever happened to the computer game porn revolution?
Serious question here! When you consider the amount of porn sold annually (billions of dollars, even if it almost universally sucks), there MUST be a market for a game that addresses sex in a deeper way than Duke Nukem.
As for maturity, I'd love to see an adult game with a hint of maturity, but that's never gonna happen. Sadly.
OK, this is way off topic, I'll admit. However, in some strange way, it's related to this magic little box.
/.ers!
Can anyone tell me if it is currently possible to isolate a single musical instrument from a mono recording? I've come up with some neat thought experiments around the idea, but I'd like to plug a song into some software and/or equipment, and pull each of the instruments into a separate track.
Is this possible? Can I get software to do this stuff? Will it take two years per song?
Thanks
Ah yes. I was more or less restricting my comments to the case of using them realtime in live shows.
Fixing slight studio tweaks is pretty clear in my mind. It's not much different than Mike Oldfield slowing down the tape flanges during overdubs on Tubular Bells. Fixing recordings of live performances is perhaps a bit greyer. Fixing bad live singing is very questionable. (although performers with colds come to mind)
Well thank you for judging the depth of the book based on one sample chapter.
Seriously, the chapter given (11), was more of a prelude and background to chapter 12, which is securing TCP and UDP services. Don't be too misled.
"If you're a bad singer and sing out of tune, it'll turn you into a bad singer who's now singing in tune," Antares's Mr. Alpert said.
Ah hah! Now I understand Whitney Houston!
I propose that there are two types of performers who use these: The ones with utterly no talent (most of the ones listed in the article), and the ones who may have talent, but are too busy dancing and performing acrobatics onstage to nail their notes. (not that an athletic performance is a sign of talent, but Cher played in town the other night, and I can't write her off as utterly talentless.)
So we have talentless shills, and visual performers who don't focus 100% on their music onstage. Are we REALLY causing any damage with them, or for that matter, are we very interested in listening to the singing from these people?
Somehow I don't see Happy Rhodes using one of these.
Well, I can agree to disagree, but there are two points I take issue with:
"...Raymond's done a fine job of replying to McBride's paranoid rant about IBM orchestrating the anti-SCO campaign."
You say he has. I say he hasn't. It's a matter of opinion, not fact.
Secondly, "If you find sarcasm sophomoric..." Here you're deliberately misinterpreting my comment. I said that ESR's use of sarcasm was sophmoric. There's a difference.
As for the rest, well I'm sure I won't change your mind so I won't bother getting into a fight over it.
Sorry, but I just don't agree.
ESR has a long history of writing tirades like a 14 year old fanboy, albeit one with an excellent grasp of English.
It is possible to write a STRONG article--one full of very clear and ferocious intent, that doesn't contain sophmoric sarcasm and literary raspberries.
Interestingly, ESR quoted Jeff Gerhardt, who managed to do exactly what ESR fails at: tear a strip off of SCO and Darl, offer them a way out, make it PERFECTLY clear where he (and his supporters) stands, and remain mature.
Don't be a prat! Of course ripping DVDs and sharing them on Kazaa is copying. So is sharing a completely unaltered iamge of the DVD. The fact that one is decrypted by the sharer, and the other is decrypted by the downloader (who may well burn it to a DVD and toss it into his Sony player with legal decrypting code) is entirely irrelevant. DeCSS didn't make it possible to copy the file.
But the point has been made, and made, and made again. Yes it's ridiculous--you're preaching to the converted here. What I'm saying is that it *IS* illegal, according to recent US rulings. Your point is valid, but irrelevant. No matter how preposterous it is, there's no point in pointing it out yet again. Better to do something productive like, for example, spreading the code as far and wide as possible.
Bah!!!
Just post the damned code, and quit playing with cute ways of extracting it. The point was made--two years ago. The courts WILL recognise this as identical to the actual code, and will act on both, or neither.
You forgot the one actual valid response, which gets posted fairly heavily (shockingly!). DeCSS has no relevance to copy protection in the first place. Just decrypting for use.
But aside from that, I think you got them all.
To be fair, I said "this is what we need." Not, "this is what's going to happen."
Unfortunately, power sells. Hz sell computers, and HP sells cars, and people are too stupid and/or blind to look any farther than that. Nobody even looks at HP/kg, or Hz vs. the rest of a system, let along gas/power consumption.
But regardless--Intel couldn't get away with water cooling a few years ago. Now that the heavy overclockers have brought it to the forefront, the chip manufacturers can start to play with it. Next will be freon cooling, and then refrigerated coolers (i.e. peltier coolers on a water reservoir). It just won't end.
Sigh.
Really, we don't need better cooling. Every heat problem we look at revolves around better ways of pumping heat away from the CPU. As soon as we come up with something cool (pardon the pun), the chip manufacturers have implicit carte blanche to produce hotter chips.
We Need Cooler Chips. We need CPUs and GPUs that consume maybe 10W instead of 80+W, and then we can go back to heatsinks perhaps with small fans. Looking back on my first x86 machine (a 486), I discover that it was the last processor Intel certified for use without a heat sink (or maybe without a fan--something like that). Now we have BIG copper heatsinks, monster CPU fans as well as extra case fans and dual-fan power supplies, and the companies are starting to look at liquid cooling as a mainstream "solution."
When will it end? At this rate, we'll actually be maxing out 500W power supplies in a few years. Half a kilowatt is too much power to be drawing for a computer! (and consider that it doesn't even include the monitor or peripherals.)
Let's start leaning on Intel and AMD, and get them to reduce the power consumption rather than giving us meaningless MHz increments.