SUVs are agressively marketed for one reason: Mark-up. They can be sold for large amounts of money because of the mistaken impression that if it's bigger, it ought to cost more. The reality is, that SUVs, are (as far as government safety and enviromnemtal regulations are concerned) not considered passenger vehicles, they are considered trucks, and as such, they do not need to meet the same environmental and safety regulations that cars do. And thus, the SUV only costs a moderate amount more to manufacture, but can be sold for substantially more. Thus, selling an SUV will be more profitable than selling a similarly priced car. That's why they've busted their nuts trying to convince everyone that the size of your SUV must indicate that size of your dick.....
I can collaborate that. I once got a warning in NJ (not a ticket) for "failure to keep up with traffic", and I was doing 10-15 over the limit at the time.
Of course, in NJ, they also are very big on targeting out-of-region plates, as I discovered the first 4 out of 5 weeks after I moved there... a small pickup-truck with indiana plates just didn't go over well for some reason, maybe its because indiana didn't require front plates. I suppose having long hair didn't help much.
Never a ticket, or even a written warning... generally just a few questions "visiting someone?" and possibly "your speech seems a bit slow, have you had anything to drink?" (midwestern drawl also a no-no in Joisey) Thankfully, a few years on the east coast has fixed most of the accent... or maybe switching to a faster sports car did the trick...
One problem with putting modern equipment on electrical timers is that when the power goes out, the thing gets totally reset. TV's forget what channels are available, and require you to go through the whole "setup" before they let you watch TV again, my Satellite DVR has to go through the 5-10 minute "connecting to satellites/downloading channel information" thing, and many other devices have similar problems. This, of course, is all due to poor design of the products in the first place (they should remember their settings unless a hard reset button is pressed... not reset themselves on loss of power). And some devices (such as my DVR) has timed events (recording some show) making them impractical for totally powering down.
Other equipment, (such as a dehumidifier I have) would be perfect candidates to set on timers so that they only run on off-peak hours (cheaper electricity at night). However, the modern "electronic" design of the damn things means that when the power comes back on, the device won't power back up with it. You have to go manually hit the power button again. 1970's products didn't have those stupid problems.
Actually, one major problem in many 3rd world countries *is* low food prices (generally caused by cheap imports). The problem is that a large portion of their population are subsistance farmers, and low food prices means little/no income. Which in turn means it becomes economically infeasible for them to continue to farm, (it costs more to raise the crops then they can sell them for). This then leaves a large population without jobs (or useful skills) who now cannot afford even the cheap food, and a loss of local food production, making the countries more dependent on imports.
If you happen to have a job which requires a large amount of driving, (think truck driver), or happen to be a company with a lot of traveling employee's for whom you need to reimburse for expenses, then it can add up quickly.
We all ("all" being anyone who lives near a coastal area) are familiar with a regular "flooding" of the coast, which sometimes exposes and covers dozens of meters of shoreline, and in some cases, even whole islands sink beneath the waves, only to return some hours later. This is of course called tides. It is well known that the moon causes tides. It is also known that the sun has some tidal effect.
What would happen if a large asteroid (moon sized even) had brushed close to the earch and only just missed us? Wouldn't that have the potential to cause unbelievably high tides and tidal waves? (hey, there's probably even some real awful movies out there about this....) I could see the possibility of something like that depositing stuff 8000 feet up the side of a mountain. I think it bloody unlikely that it would deposit a whole boat full up people and animals up on a mountain, rather than turning the boat (and creatures in it) into a smashed up pile of garbage though.
I've got one of the seagate drives in one of my machines at work. It really *is* silent. Of course, it really doesn't make much difference unless the fans on the machine are also very quiet... (luckily for me, they gave me a new machine which actually has quiet fans... makes an incredible difference in the noise...) I think that if you're worrying about noise though, most of the modern crop of hard drives are pretty quiet compared to most fans. All of my maxtor and WD drives in my home computer from the last 3 years are unnoticable unless I conentrate on them.
When I went to college (way way back), the school I first went to (some hi-tech "eliteist" engineering school) decided that computers were a wonderful thing, and some professor got a grant to put minicomputers (Vax 1000 stations if I remember correctly) *in* the classroom, for use in the teaching of calculus, so that we could graph complicated differential equasions and stuff. As neat as that may sound, when actually trying to *learn* the concepts, it sucked sucked sucked.
What happened was, that instead of us working out the simpler equasions on paper, we were stuck trying to enter in these massive 3 page equasions into the computer's math program (Maple, or Mattlab or something). Nothing sucks more then having to lug yourself to the *classroom* every night just to do your math homework, and then having it take 10-20 minutes for *each* of your 20 homework problems to process on the machine. This made for some *very* long homework assignments. The biggest problem of all, was that you never learned the concepts involved. The examples were things that you couldn't possibly visualize in your head... most of us were left totally baffeled by the math involved. All we learned was how to enter equasions into the math application. That was no way to teach the basic concepts.
In one sense, you can understand why math was taught at such an extremely complicated level... I mean, the prof had to justify the need for having all these mini-computers... but that *did* mean that the poor students coulnd't learn... the math was *too complicted*, you needed a damm minicomputer to do anything... you didn't learn how to solve the problem... you learned how to type it into the computer. You *certainly* couldn't grasp what the concepts behind the math were.
I think that as soon as you require all the students to have computers in the classroom, the teachers are going to feel obligated to skip over the basic concepts (things like memorizing those basic multiplication tables, or learning how to divide 2045/13 by hand) and move on to more complicated stuff, without giving the students a chance to really *understand* what they're being taught. That's gonna cause a whole lot of students to be totally lost. Sure, they will learn how to use the computer, but thats all they'll learn. They won't understand the basic concepts behind everything.
I agree. "sound cards" just plain suck when it comes to producing decent sound... the "audio out" and "audio in" are kind of a waste.
I do most of my work on my Emu E-synth nowdays (plugging the digitial out directly into my home Stereo reciever makes for some cool surround sound effects:) It'd be nice to be able to do some neat sample-editing on the computer, but I'm not willing to fork over $600 for SoundForge, or Cubase, or what have you, plus another however many hundreds for Windows, and hundreds to upgrade my comuter equipment so that it can run a currently supported version of windows. The synths cost enough already.
Right now, the only possible use I can see out of connecting my synths to my linux box would be to try to send a drum sequence over the midi...
It would be nice to able to use my old 486 to control my e-synth and other sound modules in a performance setting (I'm not dragging my regular computer around anywhere) And, any program I used would HAVE to be consol based. It is just *not* practical to fiddle with a mouse when you're trying to play an instrument. I wanna go press "F6" and have it make my synths do all the bank changes/paramter adjustments necessary to instantly put me exactly at the sound configuration i need. (in effrect, I record a sysex midi, and it plays it on que. In fact, it would be quite usefull to be able to run any number of midi's in a similar way, so that I could , say have it playing a rythem sequence on one sound controler, and simutaniously be prepared to do a bank change and play some funky sound effect on my ESI-32 on que.
To me, THAT would be a musicians dream. A seqencer from hell that could control several sound modules at once, scripting everything I need into a few simply key presses, ready to activate at need.
In general, What this would mean is me having several cheap-ass sound cards in the thing, using nothing but the midi capabilites on them. But I'd need a console based program 'casue I'm not gonna be looking at a computer monitor while I'l playing to see where to move a mouse. (and heck, my old 486 can't deal with X anyway). A linux based progam like that could instanlty make dirt cheap *practical* and *useful* sequencing available to to any musician. with enough spare cash to fork over for a 486...
Of course, a decent sample editor would be a joy too, but for that sort of thing you really need a program which knows all the ins and outs of whatever sound module/synthesier you use, "general purpose" sample editing has very limited use when you want to make something which sounds good when using the particular effects of your synth. You gotta keep in mind all the preset info (ie, crossover points, cuttoff points, sample mapping and stuff) in order to be usefull to someone wanting to lay out a bank on his synth. And most differnt synths do these things differently. Each has differen't capabilites. Just getting the loop points to sound decent can be a major stumbling block on different keyboards.
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SUVs are agressively marketed for one reason: Mark-up. They can be sold for large amounts of money because of the mistaken impression that if it's bigger, it ought to cost more. The reality is, that SUVs, are (as far as government safety and enviromnemtal regulations are concerned) not considered passenger vehicles, they are considered trucks, and as such, they do not need to meet the same environmental and safety regulations that cars do. And thus, the SUV only costs a moderate amount more to manufacture, but can be sold for substantially more. Thus, selling an SUV will be more profitable than selling a similarly priced car. That's why they've busted their nuts trying to convince everyone that the size of your SUV must indicate that size of your dick.....
I can collaborate that. I once got a warning in NJ (not a ticket) for "failure to keep up with traffic", and I was doing 10-15 over the limit at the time.
Of course, in NJ, they also are very big on targeting out-of-region plates, as I discovered the first 4 out of 5 weeks after I moved there... a small pickup-truck with indiana plates just didn't go over well for some reason, maybe its because indiana didn't require front plates. I suppose having long hair didn't help much.
Never a ticket, or even a written warning... generally just a few questions "visiting someone?" and possibly "your speech seems a bit slow, have you had anything to drink?" (midwestern drawl also a no-no in Joisey) Thankfully, a few years on the east coast has fixed most of the accent... or maybe switching to a faster sports car did the trick...
One problem with putting modern equipment on electrical timers is that when the power goes out, the thing gets totally reset. TV's forget what channels are available, and require you to go through the whole "setup" before they let you watch TV again, my Satellite DVR has to go through the 5-10 minute "connecting to satellites/downloading channel information" thing, and many other devices have similar problems. This, of course, is all due to poor design of the products in the first place (they should remember their settings unless a hard reset button is pressed... not reset themselves on loss of power). And some devices (such as my DVR) has timed events (recording some show) making them impractical for totally powering down.
Other equipment, (such as a dehumidifier I have) would be perfect candidates to set on timers so that they only run on off-peak hours (cheaper electricity at night). However, the modern "electronic" design of the damn things means that when the power comes back on, the device won't power back up with it. You have to go manually hit the power button again. 1970's products didn't have those stupid problems.
Actually, one major problem in many 3rd world countries *is* low food prices (generally caused by cheap imports). The problem is that a large portion of their population are subsistance farmers, and low food prices means little/no income. Which in turn means it becomes economically infeasible for them to continue to farm, (it costs more to raise the crops then they can sell them for). This then leaves a large population without jobs (or useful skills) who now cannot afford even the cheap food, and a loss of local food production, making the countries more dependent on imports.
If you happen to have a job which requires a large amount of driving, (think truck driver), or happen to be a company with a lot of traveling employee's for whom you need to reimburse for expenses, then it can add up quickly.
We all ("all" being anyone who lives near a coastal area) are familiar with a regular "flooding" of the coast, which sometimes exposes and covers dozens of meters of shoreline, and in some cases, even whole islands sink beneath the waves, only to return some hours later. This is of course called tides. It is well known that the moon causes tides. It is also known that the sun has some tidal effect.
What would happen if a large asteroid (moon sized even) had brushed close to the earch and only just missed us? Wouldn't that have the potential to cause unbelievably high tides and tidal waves? (hey, there's probably even some real awful movies out there about this....) I could see the possibility of something like that depositing stuff 8000 feet up the side of a mountain. I think it bloody unlikely that it would deposit a whole boat full up people and animals up on a mountain, rather than turning the boat (and creatures in it) into a smashed up pile of garbage though.
I've got one of the seagate drives in one of my machines at work. It really *is* silent. Of course, it really doesn't make much difference unless the fans on the machine are also very quiet... (luckily for me, they gave me a new machine which actually has quiet fans... makes an incredible difference in the noise...) I think that if you're worrying about noise though, most of the modern crop of hard drives are pretty quiet compared to most fans. All of my maxtor and WD drives in my home computer from the last 3 years are unnoticable unless I conentrate on them.
When I went to college (way way back), the school I first went to (some hi-tech "eliteist" engineering school) decided that computers were a wonderful thing, and some professor got a grant to put minicomputers (Vax 1000 stations if I remember correctly) *in* the classroom, for use in the teaching of calculus, so that we could graph complicated differential equasions and stuff. As neat as that may sound, when actually trying to *learn* the concepts, it sucked sucked sucked.
What happened was, that instead of us working out the simpler equasions on paper, we were stuck trying to enter in these massive 3 page equasions into the computer's math program (Maple, or Mattlab or something). Nothing sucks more then having to lug yourself to the *classroom* every night just to do your math homework, and then having it take 10-20 minutes for *each* of your 20 homework problems to process on the machine. This made for some *very* long homework assignments. The biggest problem of all, was that you never learned the concepts involved. The examples were things that you couldn't possibly visualize in your head... most of us were left totally baffeled by the math involved. All we learned was how to enter equasions into the math application. That was no way to teach the basic concepts.
In one sense, you can understand why math was taught at such an extremely complicated level... I mean, the prof had to justify the need for having all these mini-computers... but that *did* mean that the poor students coulnd't learn... the math was *too complicted*, you needed a damm minicomputer to do anything... you didn't learn how to solve the problem... you learned how to type it into the computer. You *certainly* couldn't grasp what the concepts behind the math were.
I think that as soon as you require all the students to have computers in the classroom, the teachers are going to feel obligated to skip over the basic concepts (things like memorizing those basic multiplication tables, or learning how to divide 2045/13 by hand) and move on to more complicated stuff, without giving the students a chance to really *understand* what they're being taught. That's gonna cause a whole lot of students to be totally lost. Sure, they will learn how to use the computer, but thats all they'll learn. They won't understand the basic concepts behind everything.
Ok, from a musician's point of view:
:) It'd be nice to be able to do some neat sample-editing on the computer, but I'm not willing to fork over $600 for SoundForge, or Cubase, or what have you, plus another however many hundreds for Windows, and hundreds to upgrade my comuter equipment so that it can run a currently supported version of windows. The synths cost enough already.
I agree. "sound cards" just plain suck when it comes to producing decent sound... the "audio out" and "audio in" are kind of a waste.
I do most of my work on my Emu E-synth nowdays (plugging the digitial out directly into my home Stereo reciever makes for some cool surround sound effects
Right now, the only possible use I can see out of connecting my synths to my linux box would be to try to send a drum sequence over the midi...
It would be nice to able to use my old 486 to control my e-synth and other sound modules in a performance setting (I'm not dragging my regular computer around anywhere) And, any program I used would HAVE to be consol based. It is just *not* practical to fiddle with a mouse when you're trying to play an instrument. I wanna go press "F6" and have it make my synths do all the bank changes/paramter adjustments necessary to instantly put me exactly at the sound configuration i need. (in effrect, I record a sysex midi, and it plays it on que. In fact, it would be quite usefull to be able to run any number of midi's in a similar way, so that I could , say have it playing a rythem sequence on one sound controler, and simutaniously be prepared to do a bank change and play some funky sound effect on my ESI-32 on que.
To me, THAT would be a musicians dream. A seqencer from hell that could control several sound modules at once, scripting everything I need into a few simply key presses, ready to activate at need.
In general, What this would mean is me having several cheap-ass sound cards in the thing, using nothing but the midi capabilites on them. But I'd need a console based program 'casue I'm not gonna be looking at a computer monitor while I'l playing to see where to move a mouse. (and heck, my old 486 can't deal with X anyway). A linux based progam like that could instanlty make dirt cheap *practical* and *useful* sequencing available to to any musician. with enough spare cash to fork over for a 486...
Of course, a decent sample editor would be a joy too, but for that sort of thing you really need a program which knows all the ins and outs of whatever sound module/synthesier you use, "general purpose" sample editing has very limited use when you want to make something which sounds good when using the particular effects of your synth. You gotta keep in mind all the preset info (ie, crossover points, cuttoff points, sample mapping and stuff) in order to be usefull to someone wanting to lay out a bank on his synth. And most differnt synths do these things differently. Each has differen't capabilites. Just getting the loop points to sound decent can be a major stumbling block on different keyboards.
cav