See, I just didn't have enough things to do with the computer when I got online. I found myself feeling isolated, unrecognized, and downright bored. I'm just relieved to know that somebody knows more about me than they should, and that they can target not just the occasional pop-up web ad to me, but hundreds - nay, thousands of e-mails inviting me to partake of their oh-so-wonderful business opportunities.
Seriously, people, this could be a good idea potentially, if a few things were true:
1. It decreased the amount of "non-certified" spam, just because almost anything that decreases spam is a good thing.
2. You had an option to block the "certified" spam in addition. I wouldn't mind a few extra seconds of effort if I could take care of the whole group of approved spammers all at once.
3. If they agree to only "approve" non-porn spammers. I have the distinct disadvantage of being an AOL member, and my god, I tire quickly of the same "incest-with-beasts-vegetables-and-more" crap. It's not even funny anymore.
But, since I don't see any of those things happening, once more we find ourselves at the mercy of the big businesses who obviously know what's best for us.
As a big fan of Penny Arcade (And who isn't?) I decided a while back to start my own webcomic. I thought that a sort of personal-diary thing to go along with it would be nice and all. I looked into blogger and some of the others but didn't find anything quite what I wanted. I think this news may make my search a little easier, since I can use slash (which I know and love) to take care of some of the gruntwork behind my site.
Wellnow, there ARE a few issues here that you neglect to touch upon. The ARGUMENT has come up before about what is the best format, granted, but it has not really been asked as this specific question, with a purpose in mind. 1. As someone notes above, there is no commercially available Ogg Vorbis player - however, if you're solely ripping for computer use, either format is fine. 2. To correct everyone above, you RIP at 128/44, which is standard CD quality, but if you ENCODE at a higher bitrate, you get cleaner ultimate quality. 3. Most importantly, it all goes back to purpose. If you're just setting up a jukebox for the home, stick with MP3, stick with 128/44, it's more than fine for good quality (with a decent encoder) and if you aren't listening for artifcating it's easy enough to ignore.
Well, you could always just set up a Lego Mindstorms robot to open your case, remove a platter from a hard drive (assuming that's where they're stored) and physically operate a bandsaw to trim the media. There's no good way to reunite it but it's effective. If the songs are on a CD, just increase the laser's power to section off the track in question. I find physical separation of data makes for much better organization, if less practical use.
Well, it's nice to know someone's looking out for our safety. We wouldn't want 31337 H4X0RZ all over us. Now, we have an anti-terrorist force of 31337 50F7W4R3 6U4RD5 out to protect us.
You mean, as Napster was intended for (or at least, what mp3.com was intended for and Napster kinda liked and borrowed), artists such as the fine gentlemen mentioned above are actually going to USE this new medium to promote songs, sort of a "special offer" deal, so long as it's not subject to abuse? How novel!
Seriously, this sounds like the best compromise to the situation. I feel kinda bad that it had to go as far as it did the way it did but, as we all know, part of this is anger caused by a lack of understanding, and part of this is because like it or not, copyright infringement (I won't say illegal) is a little on the "hinky" side.
I can't believe in this comparison they neglected one of the most unique formats of all time! I mean, this format has nearly zero compression, a limited spand, is fairly lossy in level (although it has a better frequency range), and is extremely easily corruptible and nearly impossible to repair.
I mean, the vinyl record didn't even earn its due in this battle! Although I understand that if you're willing to take a shorter piece of music, the media can be compressed to half its original diameter.
No. First of all, you don't own all the air over your head. We're spinning on a ball moving through space so aforementioned area is constantly changing hands by thant analogy.
Second of all, it's a fair-but-not-fair tax. A lot of the complication comes from the way the article was touted - it's not the satellite being taxed, it's the business IN THE CITY that uses the satellites to generate revenue. They take money from everyone that makes it. You should be used to it by now.
And, in a last-ditch attempt to get a +1 Funny, California taxes satellites because they don't see them too well. Minnesota faces a more serious problem from them as they reside approximately 12 centimeters below the orbit of nearby satellites. They're too busy ducking to legislate. Thank you, come again.
...If you can generate music with fractals, why not classify it? The only question then is how to do smaller differentials - punk vs. ska vs. reggae, ambient vs. jungle vs. rotterdam... I know some people that take this stuff *WAAAAY* too far.
Well, think of CmdrTaco, Hemos, and all the merry gang here. There real names are arbitrarily assigned at birth, and they have no say in them. But like they point out in the FAQ, their nicks / handles are very personal to them. They actually put some conscious thought into them, and try to reflect a little bit of who they are with them. I would be proud to be remembered as Espy - a person I had declared myself to be - and I'm certain that, wherever he is, Espy is proud of it as well
What about requiem? I mean, aside from TF, it's *THE* best addon for Q1. Since everything is slowly but steadily climbing up through the versions of Quake (except TF) when can we expect to see the *OTHER* cool mods?
Uh-oh, gotta run. Smell a week-long frag-fest coming up in my basement.
It's not so much that he thinks it's illogical (as much as I could garner from his commentary anyways) but that it's totally inconsequential... I mean, what changes *ARE* going to come out of this?
PayPal is offering (in collaboration with XBank) a new business PayPal account option. I haven't read too much about it, but it's such a unliateral program that it might be worth c hecking into if nothing else.
And, since I gotta, use me (JArtis1@aol.com) as a referrer if you *DO* go that way...
After they've mastered figuring out exactly what you're paying attention to, they'll come up with the next big, amazing thing...
A bio-feedback monitor! Yeah, that's right, with a little head-strappie thing and a monitor that apparently picks up your brainwaves, you can control games, graphics, and much, much more. Coming soon for your *COCO 3*!!!
So much of this user-over-friendly technology is a half-step backwards... A lot of people, while they want computers to be friendlier, don't want the me to get much more helpful.
I live in a house with several Win95 machines and several less-than-impressive computer users. My computer has the only scanner, CD burner, video capture card, etc. I find X to be absolutely invaluable to "idiot-proof" my computer. None of my family or friends want to learn a (GASP!) command-line interface. It's too complicated. They're too lazy. They still hunt-and-peck. With X, however, and (ick) fvwm2, I make it look enough LIKE win95 that they can use it. I use KDE, personally, but that can be changed for each user. The FLEXIBILITY is one of it's strongest points, and the reason that everyone uses it. If you don't *WANT* a GUI, don't USE one. I don't when I code! If you *WANT* a GUI, USE one. I play Arachnid on mine!
I never said it was okay for people to put up copyrighted material for trade. After all, those people should be (and in some cases are) banned from using Napster. All I'm saying is before everyone cheers this guy on, he is *ALSO* violating the terms of use. It's like murdering a rapist - two wrongs do *NOT* make a right!
In addition, Napster reserves the right to terminate the account of a user and to block use of the Napster service permanently upon any single infringement of the rights of others in conjunction with use of the Napster service, or if Napster believes that user conduct is harmful to the interests of Napster.
...such as people that post bogus files for that reason. Understood that yes, they too would be violating copyright laws and the terms of use, but this guy is interfering with the service that they're attempting to provide. If they're identified, they should be banned. (After all, it does infringe upon other's use of the service!)
Well, I admit it may not be a fair comparison, so I'll point out that it's never been stated that the two products are in competition with each other. The thing is, however, all that's been said about open vs. closed and how they inspire designers comes down to an argument mentioned above.
...plus it will output Pantone and other spot colors, CMYK, etc etc etc.
Exactly. Now that there's a feature in a closed product, many people will scream "Reinventing the wheel!" when you create a similar feature for an open-sourced product. But, if you think about it, it's not going to stop there. Until the new version of Photoshop comes out, we don't know what it will have that we might like. And unfortunately, with the exception of the coders at Adobe, we don't have any say in the features we want or need. With open source, the entire point is "Is a feature not there? Well then, add it!" Closed source is best thought of as a sort of "test bed" - features you want appear there. If you want them, feel free to adopt them for your own. Make them better. If this is exactly what you need, and it's an immediate thing, however, you can pay for that convenience.
Now that I'm done claiming advocacy, I'll freely admit I'm running a dual-boot system, and as a graphic designer myself, have found invaluable services in both packages. I throw graphics in a common storage place and twiddle them with both programs. The GIMP does a lot of gruntwork (map generation, maze generation) that I'm too lazy to do myself, and Photoshop has a lot of other features (color separation, catalog generation) that make it *ANOTHER* indispensible tool. Just thought I'd throw in my two pence.
Yes, but think about all the subtle improvements inspired by things like this.
GIMP. Photoshop. Which one has scriptable effects? Which one can run a script to *GENERATE* an image? Which one is expandable enough to run over a web browser?
Or the AOL IM clients. TiK, anyone? Aol *CHAT ROOMS* over the client? I think the biggest advantage is the fact that closed software inspires not only clones, but improved versions.
My apologies for the misinformation - a brief search shows you're right - but the point I meant to carry is more or less the same. I just think a little of this "apathy" might be a sort of "coerced apathy" if you will.
It's really sad to hear this indeed - where else will future stories about insane overclocking of poor, poor 386 chips to 700MHz come from? I mean, every quickie or two we find someone who feels a need to make their old 8088 into a dutch oven...
But has anyone read "The Big Book of the Unexplained"? It's a graphic novel-type book dealing with bizarre phenomena. One of the many things mentioned is the curious silence that astronauts usually have regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Also, with Apollo 13, there's the infamous "Houston, we've just been told Santa Claus exists" quote.
To make a long story short, one of the reasons postulated by the author for a lack of return flights to the moon or longer-term (out of orbit) missions is extraterrestrtial warning. Forgive me if I sound conspiracy-minded, but it's a possibiltity. Maybe a tad far-fetched, but a sound possibility nonetheless.
Assuming that the FTC didn't enter into a court battle, couldn't we (the users) enter into a class-action lawsuit against Toysmart? I mean, getting cash cost for damages, etc., above and beyond what they were paid for the database would send out a better message, IMHO. I would think that to be a better deterrent.
It could be accurate. Keep in mind it took 36 CPU-hours in order to render a frame. Perhaps they were rendered in parallel on separate machines/groups. With a bank of systems doing rendering, at 36 hours a frame, if there were a thousand machines/groups, that would drop your estimate to less than a full year.
Of course, an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of Macs with an infinite number of licences for rendering software could do the same thing, even if it took considerably more than said 961 years.
Slashdot Mirror
See, I just didn't have enough things to do with the computer when I got online. I found myself feeling isolated, unrecognized, and downright bored. I'm just relieved to know that somebody knows more about me than they should, and that they can target not just the occasional pop-up web ad to me, but hundreds - nay, thousands of e-mails inviting me to partake of their oh-so-wonderful business opportunities.
Seriously, people, this could be a good idea potentially, if a few things were true:
1. It decreased the amount of "non-certified" spam, just because almost anything that decreases spam is a good thing.
2. You had an option to block the "certified" spam in addition. I wouldn't mind a few extra seconds of effort if I could take care of the whole group of approved spammers all at once.
3. If they agree to only "approve" non-porn spammers. I have the distinct disadvantage of being an AOL member, and my god, I tire quickly of the same "incest-with-beasts-vegetables-and-more" crap. It's not even funny anymore.
But, since I don't see any of those things happening, once more we find ourselves at the mercy of the big businesses who obviously know what's best for us.
As a big fan of Penny Arcade (And who isn't?) I decided a while back to start my own webcomic. I thought that a sort of personal-diary thing to go along with it would be nice and all. I looked into blogger and some of the others but didn't find anything quite what I wanted. I think this news may make my search a little easier, since I can use slash (which I know and love) to take care of some of the gruntwork behind my site.
Wellnow, there ARE a few issues here that you neglect to touch upon. The ARGUMENT has come up before about what is the best format, granted, but it has not really been asked as this specific question, with a purpose in mind.
1. As someone notes above, there is no commercially available Ogg Vorbis player - however, if you're solely ripping for computer use, either format is fine.
2. To correct everyone above, you RIP at 128/44, which is standard CD quality, but if you ENCODE at a higher bitrate, you get cleaner ultimate quality.
3. Most importantly, it all goes back to purpose. If you're just setting up a jukebox for the home, stick with MP3, stick with 128/44, it's more than fine for good quality (with a decent encoder) and if you aren't listening for artifcating it's easy enough to ignore.
Well, you could always just set up a Lego Mindstorms robot to open your case, remove a platter from a hard drive (assuming that's where they're stored) and physically operate a bandsaw to trim the media. There's no good way to reunite it but it's effective. If the songs are on a CD, just increase the laser's power to section off the track in question. I find physical separation of data makes for much better organization, if less practical use.
Well, it's nice to know someone's looking out for our safety. We wouldn't want 31337 H4X0RZ all over us. Now, we have an anti-terrorist force of 31337 50F7W4R3 6U4RD5 out to protect us.
You mean, as Napster was intended for (or at least, what mp3.com was intended for and Napster kinda liked and borrowed), artists such as the fine gentlemen mentioned above are actually going to USE this new medium to promote songs, sort of a "special offer" deal, so long as it's not subject to abuse? How novel!
Seriously, this sounds like the best compromise to the situation. I feel kinda bad that it had to go as far as it did the way it did but, as we all know, part of this is anger caused by a lack of understanding, and part of this is because like it or not, copyright infringement (I won't say illegal) is a little on the "hinky" side.
I can't believe in this comparison they neglected one of the most unique formats of all time! I mean, this format has nearly zero compression, a limited spand, is fairly lossy in level (although it has a better frequency range), and is extremely easily corruptible and nearly impossible to repair.
I mean, the vinyl record didn't even earn its due in this battle! Although I understand that if you're willing to take a shorter piece of music, the media can be compressed to half its original diameter.
No. First of all, you don't own all the air over your head. We're spinning on a ball moving through space so aforementioned area is constantly changing hands by thant analogy.
Second of all, it's a fair-but-not-fair tax. A lot of the complication comes from the way the article was touted - it's not the satellite being taxed, it's the business IN THE CITY that uses the satellites to generate revenue. They take money from everyone that makes it. You should be used to it by now.
And, in a last-ditch attempt to get a +1 Funny, California taxes satellites because they don't see them too well. Minnesota faces a more serious problem from them as they reside approximately 12 centimeters below the orbit of nearby satellites. They're too busy ducking to legislate. Thank you, come again.
...If you can generate music with fractals, why not classify it? The only question then is how to do smaller differentials - punk vs. ska vs. reggae, ambient vs. jungle vs. rotterdam... I know some people that take this stuff *WAAAAY* too far.
Well, think of CmdrTaco, Hemos, and all the merry gang here. There real names are arbitrarily assigned at birth, and they have no say in them. But like they point out in the FAQ, their nicks / handles are very personal to them. They actually put some conscious thought into them, and try to reflect a little bit of who they are with them. I would be proud to be remembered as Espy - a person I had declared myself to be - and I'm certain that, wherever he is, Espy is proud of it as well
What about requiem? I mean, aside from TF, it's *THE* best addon for Q1. Since everything is slowly but steadily climbing up through the versions of Quake (except TF) when can we expect to see the *OTHER* cool mods?
Uh-oh, gotta run. Smell a week-long frag-fest coming up in my basement.
It's not so much that he thinks it's illogical (as much as I could garner from his commentary anyways) but that it's totally inconsequential... I mean, what changes *ARE* going to come out of this?
PayPal is offering (in collaboration with XBank) a new business PayPal account option. I haven't read too much about it, but it's such a unliateral program that it might be worth c hecking into if nothing else.
And, since I gotta, use me (JArtis1@aol.com) as a referrer if you *DO* go that way...
After they've mastered figuring out exactly what you're paying attention to, they'll come up with the next big, amazing thing...
A bio-feedback monitor! Yeah, that's right, with a little head-strappie thing and a monitor that apparently picks up your brainwaves, you can control games, graphics, and much, much more. Coming soon for your *COCO 3*!!!
So much of this user-over-friendly technology is a half-step backwards... A lot of people, while they want computers to be friendlier, don't want the me to get much more helpful.
I live in a house with several Win95 machines and several less-than-impressive computer users. My computer has the only scanner, CD burner, video capture card, etc. I find X to be absolutely invaluable to "idiot-proof" my computer. None of my family or friends want to learn a (GASP!) command-line interface. It's too complicated. They're too lazy. They still hunt-and-peck. With X, however, and (ick) fvwm2, I make it look enough LIKE win95 that they can use it. I use KDE, personally, but that can be changed for each user. The FLEXIBILITY is one of it's strongest points, and the reason that everyone uses it. If you don't *WANT* a GUI, don't USE one. I don't when I code! If you *WANT* a GUI, USE one. I play Arachnid on mine!
I never said it was okay for people to put up copyrighted material for trade. After all, those people should be (and in some cases are) banned from using Napster. All I'm saying is before everyone cheers this guy on, he is *ALSO* violating the terms of use. It's like murdering a rapist - two wrongs do *NOT* make a right!
In addition, Napster reserves the right to terminate the account of a user and to block use of the Napster service permanently upon any single infringement of the rights of others in conjunction with use of the Napster service, or if Napster believes that user conduct is harmful to the interests of Napster.
...such as people that post bogus files for that reason. Understood that yes, they too would be violating copyright laws and the terms of use, but this guy is interfering with the service that they're attempting to provide. If they're identified, they should be banned. (After all, it does infringe upon other's use of the service!)
IBM outta team up with these guys - Can you imagine a monster-res 3d monitor? Kinda leaves this whole "real world" thing in the dust!
Well, I admit it may not be a fair comparison, so I'll point out that it's never been stated that the two products are in competition with each other. The thing is, however, all that's been said about open vs. closed and how they inspire designers comes down to an argument mentioned above.
...plus it will output Pantone and other spot colors, CMYK, etc etc etc.
Exactly. Now that there's a feature in a closed product, many people will scream "Reinventing the wheel!" when you create a similar feature for an open-sourced product. But, if you think about it, it's not going to stop there. Until the new version of Photoshop comes out, we don't know what it will have that we might like. And unfortunately, with the exception of the coders at Adobe, we don't have any say in the features we want or need. With open source, the entire point is "Is a feature not there? Well then, add it!" Closed source is best thought of as a sort of "test bed" - features you want appear there. If you want them, feel free to adopt them for your own. Make them better. If this is exactly what you need, and it's an immediate thing, however, you can pay for that convenience.
Now that I'm done claiming advocacy, I'll freely admit I'm running a dual-boot system, and as a graphic designer myself, have found invaluable services in both packages. I throw graphics in a common storage place and twiddle them with both programs. The GIMP does a lot of gruntwork (map generation, maze generation) that I'm too lazy to do myself, and Photoshop has a lot of other features (color separation, catalog generation) that make it *ANOTHER* indispensible tool. Just thought I'd throw in my two pence.
Yes, but think about all the subtle improvements inspired by things like this.
GIMP. Photoshop. Which one has scriptable effects? Which one can run a script to *GENERATE* an image? Which one is expandable enough to run over a web browser?
Or the AOL IM clients. TiK, anyone? Aol *CHAT ROOMS* over the client? I think the biggest advantage is the fact that closed software inspires not only clones, but improved versions.
My apologies for the misinformation - a brief search shows you're right - but the point I meant to carry is more or less the same. I just think a little of this "apathy" might be a sort of "coerced apathy" if you will.
It's really sad to hear this indeed - where else will future stories about insane overclocking of poor, poor 386 chips to 700MHz come from? I mean, every quickie or two we find someone who feels a need to make their old 8088 into a dutch oven...
I know, I know, you're all going to shoot me...
But has anyone read "The Big Book of the Unexplained"? It's a graphic novel-type book dealing with bizarre phenomena. One of the many things mentioned is the curious silence that astronauts usually have regarding the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Also, with Apollo 13, there's the infamous "Houston, we've just been told Santa Claus exists" quote.
To make a long story short, one of the reasons postulated by the author for a lack of return flights to the moon or longer-term (out of orbit) missions is extraterrestrtial warning. Forgive me if I sound conspiracy-minded, but it's a possibiltity. Maybe a tad far-fetched, but a sound possibility nonetheless.
Assuming that the FTC didn't enter into a court battle, couldn't we (the users) enter into a class-action lawsuit against Toysmart? I mean, getting cash cost for damages, etc., above and beyond what they were paid for the database would send out a better message, IMHO. I would think that to be a better deterrent.
It could be accurate. Keep in mind it took 36 CPU-hours in order to render a frame. Perhaps they were rendered in parallel on separate machines/groups. With a bank of systems doing rendering, at 36 hours a frame, if there were a thousand machines/groups, that would drop your estimate to less than a full year.
Of course, an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of Macs with an infinite number of licences for rendering software could do the same thing, even if it took considerably more than said 961 years.