Nanaimo is also the WEED Capital of the World. Think about it: they came up with Nanaimo bars for a reason. As they say, if you've been in Nanaimo for 20 minutes and you find someone to sell you pot, you're already baked. Wait, maybe that's Nelson. Hold on... what?
Let's put aside all window management like switching between windows...
He chose to put it aside, but we don't have to. Personally, I find it flabbergasting how few people know about "ALT-TAB". This exists, in some form or another, on every window management system I've used, from Gnome to whatever Windows 95 and onward. Yes, the taskbar is useful as a readily visible list of open programs, but I don't think I'd ever click it to switch focus.
The second thing that never fails to surprise me is how few people use tab to navigate between fields on fill-out forms, especially in an HTML context, but that's been adequately covered in other posts.
Guess what retard emo-hippies, those new releases that you "buy only on vinyl" are no better sounding than the cd...
This is totally flamebait. As another poster pointed out, you're wrong about the master-to-vinyl vs. master-to-cd process. But that's not why I'm replying...
I buy a lot of vinyl. Not because I think it sounds better, just because I like it better. Here's why:
Most of the bands I like press vinyl. The records don't usually cost more than the CDs to buy, even though they're more expensive to make. I don't listen to a lot of really super-weird bands or anything. A lot of independent labels (Merge, Matador, Killrockstars, Constellation, etc.) press vinyl for their artists. and even some major labels are getting into it.
You get a bigger, nicer version of the cover art.
It looks better on the shelf in my front room than a bunch of CDs (seriously, it does)
Frequently, the record will come with a slip of paper with a link and a download code to grab reasonable-quality MP3s from the label's website (again, see Matador). If that's not the case, I can always download the MP3s from a more dubious source. Either way, I can burn them onto a CD if I need to (roadtrips, mix CDs, etc.) and I've still got that sexy piece of wax sitting in my living room.
A lot of bands will release vinyl-only albums or include "bonus" tracks on the vinyl pressings of their LPs.
Very rarely, a band or label will commission an "audiophile" re-master of an album on heavy vinyl. The most recent example of this is the new White Stripes album, Icky Thump. The retail CD & LP are mastered terribly--they clip constantly as a result of over-zealous compression. (Remember? That's the part you got wrong in your post...) But discerning listeners can seek out the Steve Hoffman re-master. That's right: it came out last week and it's already been re-mastered. And you can only buy it on vinyl. How's that for a counter-example?
This is kind of a fluff reason, but it just feels better to buy vinyl. And since I started collecting the stuff, I've received no less than half a dozen hand-written notes from record labels I've bought from, thanking me for supporting their businesses. So apparently, it feels better to sell the stuff too:P
As far as the sound goes... my LPs sound every bit as good as your CDs. Yeah, my turntable is an ornery pig sometimes, but it's usually just a loose cable or something. So, are CDs obsolete? I think so. Especially in the retail world. Every now and then, an album comes out that I want that isn't available on vinyl--in that case, I usually cave and buy the CD. Like I said, though, it's becoming more and more common to find every new release I'm interested in on wax.
PS: Between the time I started typing this and the time I pressed preview, your post got moderated down by 2. BONUS!!
This is so awesome. I went to the Calgary premiere of Grindhouse a couple months ago and they were super-strict about recording stuff. Anyone with a camera on their mobile phone had to sign a waiver (!!) and check it in for the duration of the movie. Naturally, I set my ringer to "PIERCINGLY LOUD" and planned on making some calls from non-camera phones later on, just to get a giggle. Anyways, the mall cops at the entrance were so frazzled by having to confiscate all these phones that they didn't notice (or ignored) several bags of candy, a 26 of rye, a glass pipe, and two joints. SCORE!
One last thing: Geist seems to be blowing this ever-so-slightly out of proportion. Like I said, it's MALL cops we're talking about here, which are hired by the theatres. Although I find the sentiment of C-59 quite laughable, I strongly doubt there will be any significant change in the allocation of govt. resources from public health & safety to piracy prevention. Just more mall cops.
This is kind of exciting! I'm a long-time Firefox user, but I'm getting tired of the bloat and the gmail-related memory leaks. Although I know these are tentatively going to be fixed in Firefox 3, I'm interested in seeing what Safari has to offer. I've installed it and it looks really pretty and all, but I'm kind of agitated by the fact that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to customize its keyboard shortcuts: I'm all about ctrl+tab to switch between tabs... this ctrl+shift+] crap doesn't really float my boat.
Anyways, if anyone has additional info about Safari on Windows, I think that would make for some interesting discussion. And if anyone can tell me how to get it to mimic Firefox keyboard shortcuts, I think I will switch over entirely. For the time being...
This is kind of exciting! I'm a long-time Firefox user, but I'm getting tired of the bloat and the gmail-related memory leaks. Although I know these are tentatively going to be fixed in Firefox 3, I'm interested in seeing what Safari has to offer. I've installed it and it looks really pretty and all, but I'm kind of agitated by the fact that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to customize its keyboard shortcuts: I'm all about ctrl+tab to switch between tabs... this ctrl+shift+] crap doesn't really float my boat.
Anyways, if anyone has additional info about Safari on Windows, I think that would make for some interesting discussion. And if anyone can tell me how to get it to mimic Firefox keyboard shortcuts, I think I will switch over entirely. For the time being...
As a hockey fan, it pains me to say this, but the people suggesting this is a desperation move by a league struggling to stay relevant in the USA are absolutely right. Low ratings for game 3 on NBC are one thing, but the real icing on the cake was when NBC pre-empted overtime during the Sabres-Senators series to show a pre-game show for Preakness.
In Canada, this caused a minor outrage, but it didn't really matter since CBC showed the whole glorious game. In fact, I doubt many people up here know what "Preakness" means. Sounds like a soft drink or something.
Any NHL fan can tell you the sport is floundering stateside: During the first-round series between Calgary and Detroit, it was damn near impossible to get tickets to watch the (utterly horrific) Flames on home ice. Meanwhile, some friends of mine traveled to Detroit and snapped up tickets on game day! And they were cheap! And they were great seats! And the Wings were playing about 100x better than the Flames.
Finally, and slightly more on-topic, at the beginning of the playoffs, CBC announced that they would be doing on-demand streaming for all broadcasts of Hockey Night in Canada.
At the end of the day, the league is pulling out all the stops trying to convince US audiences they should care about hockey. The Placeshifting issue is just one example of that. It won't work. Maybe they should convince NBC to fire Brett Hull, then people would be able to stomach the NBC telecasts? No, probably not. Sigh.
Did anyone else find it just a little bit weird that Jennings lost on the same night as Jeopardy aired the episode in which every category was somehow related to Seinfeld, not to mention the final category that was actually questions (answers?) about Seinfeld, read by actors fromSeinfeld...
The tie-in was a plug for the recently-released DVDs (one week before the airing of the episode, to be exact). Most Jeopardy episodes don't contain this kind of plug... in fact not a single one comes to mind in recent history. Doesn't anyone else find this the least bit weird?
In general I don't think much of the "Bush-bashing" is warranted or useful. I don't think Bush is a particularly bad President, but from a philosophical standpoint I would rather see a Democrat than a Republican in the position of President.
So, it seems that I'm in agreement with the rest of the non-US world. There's a catch, though: Although I prefer Kerry as a candidate, I realize that he's going to lose. Badly. The best synthesis I've ever heard of all the information in the campaign was from Jon Stewart on the Daily show. It was (paraphrased):
"It never ceases to amaze me that Bush comes off as a nice guy while he's lying his face off while Kerry comes off as a dick while he's telling the truth."
Certainly food for thought.
PS: Yes, all of us in Canada are watching this election very closely, just like we did last time. And the time before that. In fact, there's a significant portion of the population that cares more about the US elections than our own.
That's right. The basic Japanese phonetic alphabet is called hiragana. They actually have another one called katakana, which is used for describing "foreign" things like the menu at McDonalds. A lot of the time when you see Japanese writing on CD covers or t-shirts (I think a recent Madonna, for example) it's in this alphabet.
Anyways, more on-topic, you said that it's "quite easy, if a bit slow, to enter them on the phone". Having owned a cell phone in Japan for the past year, I have to disagree about the supposed "slowness". Even a ham-handed gaijin like me found it quite easy to send messages in hiragana, or even in kanji ("chinese" characters) with use of the insanely handy "kanji convert" function: basically, you enter a few characters in hiragana then press a button and it brings up an enumerated list of all the possible kanji. Crazy.
Moreover, the experienced Japanese users are insanely fast. In fact, I would say the Japanese language is even better-suited to the "text message" input system than English.
There's no one alive so desperate for entertainment that they need an in-dash DVD player. The US Department of Justice (or whoever's in charge of this - I'm not sure) needs to underscore the fact that your own personal gratification needs to get put on hold when you're in control of a vehicle that can quite easily take lives.
There's no way in hell. Playing an FPS with a console-type controller instead of a keyboard is roughly equivalent to gouging out your own eyeballs, in terms of pain and frustration.
I remember the first time I tried Doom64 - UGH. Please. I'll stick to Mario, thanks.
Sure, there's bound to be a keyboard/mouse add-on for the XBox, but certainly not a cheap one. Factor in the karma burn for owning (nay, touching) an XBox and your effective cost has climbed far beyond that of a new CPU and some RAM.
I think the key word in that post is Recommended. I have been shopping around on-line all morning and I found these specs at one Canadian retailer:
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:
* CD ROM: 8X * CPU Speed: 700MHz * CPU Type: Intel Pentium III * Disk Space: 600MB * Display: 32MB DirectX 9.0 Compatible Video Card * Memory (RAM): 128MB * Operating System Compatibility: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Not Mac Compatible
I didn't miss the point. Gibson's rendering farm is for a series of high-quality video clips from "footage" that appears on the internet. It's the prisoners' job to hand-render each frame. Sorry if I failed to make that clear, but I was trying to avoid divulging too much information about the plot.
I'm happy to admit that I haven't the first clue what goes into the rendering process, but Gibson gave the impression that it is a highly labour-intensive process.
Does anyone else find this statement just a wee bit contradictory? Isn't the "Big Bang" metaphor traditionally reserved for describing phenomena of divergence? Maybe it would be more appropriate to call it a "Big Crunch of convergence".
This is a bit off-topic, but William Gibson put forth an interesting idea about rednering farms in his most recent novel, Pattern Recognition. [This is something of a spoiler, so if you are planning on reading the book, stop reading.]
At one point in the book, the main character discovers a huge rendering farm in Russia that is staffed entirely by white-collar criminals who are "doing time". Since Russian prisons are a well-known hotebed of communicable diseases, this "Dream Factory" (as it is called) is referred to as the only prison in Russia that prisonners are trying to get inside. They are forced to work all day, but in exchange they can live comfortably without fear of the infection (or some other grisly fate) that would befall them in an ordinary prison.
Personally, I don't find this idea so far-fetched, especially in places like Russia or even the USA where the prison systems are under tremendous strain and there is a huge amount of untapped labour that would likely be happy to work in exchange for a guarantee of safety and sanitary conditions.
How do you exchange a file with a colleague or a photograph with a family member? Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it.
No. That's what the "attach" button is for. I've always found cut & paste into an email to be quite dodgy.
It's good to see that GMail will store sent mail, I assume using a label. One of Hotmail's biggest problems, IMHO, is the lack of that functionality.
I'm kind of concerned about the lack of an address book feature. Does anyone care to elaborate on the article's mention of the "primitive" contact management system in the beta?
Did you notice the one mistake? The angled brackets beside "more" are pointing the wrong way on the mirror site (">>" on real site is not flipped on mirror).
One of the biggest boons of Windows is the ease with which multimedia playback (read: video) is integrated with the OS. IMHO, Windows Media Player is an undesirable program for many reasons, but it gets the job done.
On Linux, the only app that comes close is MPlayer. I've used Linux for several years in an academic setting and in the last year I've had a chance to become my own sysadmin for the first time. I had no problem installing Redhat 9 from CDs and things were going well, then I tried to install MPlayer and the associated Mozilla plugin. Hell on Earth, my friends. Eventually, I made things work, but not without a few days of constant headaches.
[Hang in there, the point is coming...]
When I saw Multimedia programs in the preamble to the THG article, I was delighted. Unfortunately, the author drops the ball by saying "you can choose from Xine or MPlayer, here are some links".
Sigh.
Realistically, I shouldn't be griping about this. I don't have the know-how to write a FAQ about getting MPlayer to integrate well and I'm not sure if such a person exists. What I do know is that if I'm ever going to convince myself to make the switchover from Win-to-Lin at home (and hopefully persuade my parents and my brother to do the same), I'm going to need some sort of comprehensive HOWTO for setting up MPlayer, including the Mozilla plugin.
Slashdot Mirror
Nanaimo is also the WEED Capital of the World. Think about it: they came up with Nanaimo bars for a reason. As they say, if you've been in Nanaimo for 20 minutes and you find someone to sell you pot, you're already baked. Wait, maybe that's Nelson. Hold on... what?
From part I of the article:
Let's put aside all window management like switching between windows...He chose to put it aside, but we don't have to. Personally, I find it flabbergasting how few people know about "ALT-TAB". This exists, in some form or another, on every window management system I've used, from Gnome to whatever Windows 95 and onward. Yes, the taskbar is useful as a readily visible list of open programs, but I don't think I'd ever click it to switch focus.
The second thing that never fails to surprise me is how few people use tab to navigate between fields on fill-out forms, especially in an HTML context, but that's been adequately covered in other posts.
This is totally flamebait. As another poster pointed out, you're wrong about the master-to-vinyl vs. master-to-cd process. But that's not why I'm replying...
I buy a lot of vinyl. Not because I think it sounds better, just because I like it better. Here's why:
As far as the sound goes... my LPs sound every bit as good as your CDs. Yeah, my turntable is an ornery pig sometimes, but it's usually just a loose cable or something. So, are CDs obsolete? I think so. Especially in the retail world. Every now and then, an album comes out that I want that isn't available on vinyl--in that case, I usually cave and buy the CD. Like I said, though, it's becoming more and more common to find every new release I'm interested in on wax.
PS: Between the time I started typing this and the time I pressed preview, your post got moderated down by 2. BONUS!!
This is so awesome. I went to the Calgary premiere of Grindhouse a couple months ago and they were super-strict about recording stuff. Anyone with a camera on their mobile phone had to sign a waiver (!!) and check it in for the duration of the movie. Naturally, I set my ringer to "PIERCINGLY LOUD" and planned on making some calls from non-camera phones later on, just to get a giggle. Anyways, the mall cops at the entrance were so frazzled by having to confiscate all these phones that they didn't notice (or ignored) several bags of candy, a 26 of rye, a glass pipe, and two joints. SCORE!
One last thing: Geist seems to be blowing this ever-so-slightly out of proportion. Like I said, it's MALL cops we're talking about here, which are hired by the theatres. Although I find the sentiment of C-59 quite laughable, I strongly doubt there will be any significant change in the allocation of govt. resources from public health & safety to piracy prevention. Just more mall cops.
This is kind of exciting! I'm a long-time Firefox user, but I'm getting tired of the bloat and the gmail-related memory leaks. Although I know these are tentatively going to be fixed in Firefox 3, I'm interested in seeing what Safari has to offer. I've installed it and it looks really pretty and all, but I'm kind of agitated by the fact that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to customize its keyboard shortcuts: I'm all about ctrl+tab to switch between tabs... this ctrl+shift+] crap doesn't really float my boat.
Anyways, if anyone has additional info about Safari on Windows, I think that would make for some interesting discussion. And if anyone can tell me how to get it to mimic Firefox keyboard shortcuts, I think I will switch over entirely. For the time being...
Crappp. Yes, that's right. Sorry everybody...
This is kind of exciting! I'm a long-time Firefox user, but I'm getting tired of the bloat and the gmail-related memory leaks. Although I know these are tentatively going to be fixed in Firefox 3, I'm interested in seeing what Safari has to offer. I've installed it and it looks really pretty and all, but I'm kind of agitated by the fact that there doesn't seem to be an easy way to customize its keyboard shortcuts: I'm all about ctrl+tab to switch between tabs... this ctrl+shift+] crap doesn't really float my boat.
Anyways, if anyone has additional info about Safari on Windows, I think that would make for some interesting discussion. And if anyone can tell me how to get it to mimic Firefox keyboard shortcuts, I think I will switch over entirely. For the time being...
As a hockey fan, it pains me to say this, but the people suggesting this is a desperation move by a league struggling to stay relevant in the USA are absolutely right. Low ratings for game 3 on NBC are one thing, but the real icing on the cake was when NBC pre-empted overtime during the Sabres-Senators series to show a pre-game show for Preakness. In Canada, this caused a minor outrage, but it didn't really matter since CBC showed the whole glorious game. In fact, I doubt many people up here know what "Preakness" means. Sounds like a soft drink or something. Any NHL fan can tell you the sport is floundering stateside: During the first-round series between Calgary and Detroit, it was damn near impossible to get tickets to watch the (utterly horrific) Flames on home ice. Meanwhile, some friends of mine traveled to Detroit and snapped up tickets on game day! And they were cheap! And they were great seats! And the Wings were playing about 100x better than the Flames. Finally, and slightly more on-topic, at the beginning of the playoffs, CBC announced that they would be doing on-demand streaming for all broadcasts of Hockey Night in Canada. At the end of the day, the league is pulling out all the stops trying to convince US audiences they should care about hockey. The Placeshifting issue is just one example of that. It won't work. Maybe they should convince NBC to fire Brett Hull, then people would be able to stomach the NBC telecasts? No, probably not. Sigh.
Did anyone else find it just a little bit weird that Jennings lost on the same night as Jeopardy aired the episode in which every category was somehow related to Seinfeld, not to mention the final category that was actually questions (answers?) about Seinfeld, read by actors fromSeinfeld...
The tie-in was a plug for the recently-released DVDs (one week before the airing of the episode, to be exact). Most Jeopardy episodes don't contain this kind of plug... in fact not a single one comes to mind in recent history. Doesn't anyone else find this the least bit weird?
My two cents as a Canadian:
In general I don't think much of the "Bush-bashing" is warranted or useful. I don't think Bush is a particularly bad President, but from a philosophical standpoint I would rather see a Democrat than a Republican in the position of President.
So, it seems that I'm in agreement with the rest of the non-US world. There's a catch, though: Although I prefer Kerry as a candidate, I realize that he's going to lose. Badly. The best synthesis I've ever heard of all the information in the campaign was from Jon Stewart on the Daily show. It was (paraphrased):
"It never ceases to amaze me that Bush comes off as a nice guy while he's lying his face off while Kerry comes off as a dick while he's telling the truth."
Certainly food for thought.
PS: Yes, all of us in Canada are watching this election very closely, just like we did last time. And the time before that. In fact, there's a significant portion of the population that cares more about the US elections than our own.
That's right. The basic Japanese phonetic alphabet is called hiragana. They actually have another one called katakana, which is used for describing "foreign" things like the menu at McDonalds. A lot of the time when you see Japanese writing on CD covers or t-shirts (I think a recent Madonna, for example) it's in this alphabet.
Anyways, more on-topic, you said that it's "quite easy, if a bit slow, to enter them on the phone". Having owned a cell phone in Japan for the past year, I have to disagree about the supposed "slowness". Even a ham-handed gaijin like me found it quite easy to send messages in hiragana, or even in kanji ("chinese" characters) with use of the insanely handy "kanji convert" function: basically, you enter a few characters in hiragana then press a button and it brings up an enumerated list of all the possible kanji. Crazy.
Moreover, the experienced Japanese users are insanely fast. In fact, I would say the Japanese language is even better-suited to the "text message" input system than English.
Just some food for thought.
For those of you not inclined to read it:
I began to feel sick. I knew one of the first symptoms of radiation illness was vomiting, but I was thinking, have I eaten something?
Is it safe to say that Linux is finally a conteder in the desktop market?
Absolutely not. It may, however, be a contender.
[Cue rotten tomatoes]
There's no one alive so desperate for entertainment that they need an in-dash DVD player. The US Department of Justice (or whoever's in charge of this - I'm not sure) needs to underscore the fact that your own personal gratification needs to get put on hold when you're in control of a vehicle that can quite easily take lives.
It looks to be an inside job as six Acxiom employees have agreed to cooperate with the investigation.
It might just be the early morning talking, but could someone explain how employee cooperation implies an inside job? Maybe I need more coffee.
There's no way in hell. Playing an FPS with a console-type controller instead of a keyboard is roughly equivalent to gouging out your own eyeballs, in terms of pain and frustration.
I remember the first time I tried Doom64 - UGH. Please. I'll stick to Mario, thanks.
Sure, there's bound to be a keyboard/mouse add-on for the XBox, but certainly not a cheap one. Factor in the karma burn for owning (nay, touching) an XBox and your effective cost has climbed far beyond that of a new CPU and some RAM.
I think the key word in that post is Recommended. I have been shopping around on-line all morning and I found these specs at one Canadian retailer:
(Reference: Futureshop)
I didn't miss the point. Gibson's rendering farm is for a series of high-quality video clips from "footage" that appears on the internet. It's the prisoners' job to hand-render each frame. Sorry if I failed to make that clear, but I was trying to avoid divulging too much information about the plot.
I'm happy to admit that I haven't the first clue what goes into the rendering process, but Gibson gave the impression that it is a highly labour-intensive process.
The result is a Big Bang of convergence...
Does anyone else find this statement just a wee bit contradictory? Isn't the "Big Bang" metaphor traditionally reserved for describing phenomena of divergence? Maybe it would be more appropriate to call it a "Big Crunch of convergence".
Just a thought...
This is a bit off-topic, but William Gibson put forth an interesting idea about rednering farms in his most recent novel, Pattern Recognition. [This is something of a spoiler, so if you are planning on reading the book, stop reading.]
At one point in the book, the main character discovers a huge rendering farm in Russia that is staffed entirely by white-collar criminals who are "doing time". Since Russian prisons are a well-known hotebed of communicable diseases, this "Dream Factory" (as it is called) is referred to as the only prison in Russia that prisonners are trying to get inside. They are forced to work all day, but in exchange they can live comfortably without fear of the infection (or some other grisly fate) that would befall them in an ordinary prison.
Personally, I don't find this idea so far-fetched, especially in places like Russia or even the USA where the prison systems are under tremendous strain and there is a huge amount of untapped labour that would likely be happy to work in exchange for a guarantee of safety and sanitary conditions.
How do you exchange a file with a colleague or a photograph with a family member? Chances are that you cut the desired element and paste it into your e-mail program to send it.
No. That's what the "attach" button is for. I've always found cut & paste into an email to be quite dodgy.
It's good to see that GMail will store sent mail, I assume using a label. One of Hotmail's biggest problems, IMHO, is the lack of that functionality.
I'm kind of concerned about the lack of an address book feature. Does anyone care to elaborate on the article's mention of the "primitive" contact management system in the beta?
Did you notice the one mistake? The angled brackets beside "more" are pointing the wrong way on the mirror site (">>" on real site is not flipped on mirror).
Cool link, though. Is that done dynamically?
But it won't do the trick.
One of the biggest boons of Windows is the ease with which multimedia playback (read: video) is integrated with the OS. IMHO, Windows Media Player is an undesirable program for many reasons, but it gets the job done.
On Linux, the only app that comes close is MPlayer. I've used Linux for several years in an academic setting and in the last year I've had a chance to become my own sysadmin for the first time. I had no problem installing Redhat 9 from CDs and things were going well, then I tried to install MPlayer and the associated Mozilla plugin. Hell on Earth, my friends. Eventually, I made things work, but not without a few days of constant headaches.
[Hang in there, the point is coming...]
When I saw Multimedia programs in the preamble to the THG article, I was delighted. Unfortunately, the author drops the ball by saying "you can choose from Xine or MPlayer, here are some links".
Sigh.
Realistically, I shouldn't be griping about this. I don't have the know-how to write a FAQ about getting MPlayer to integrate well and I'm not sure if such a person exists. What I do know is that if I'm ever going to convince myself to make the switchover from Win-to-Lin at home (and hopefully persuade my parents and my brother to do the same), I'm going to need some sort of comprehensive HOWTO for setting up MPlayer, including the Mozilla plugin.