>>That means that 9 times out of 10 when a gun >> goes off, it's a tragedy. > > New math? 9 times out of 10, it's a homicide. Homicide, suicide, or accident. And, in the cases of homicide and accident especially, one which could well have been non-fatal had a gun not been available (most homicides are spur-of- the-moment crimes of passion or opportunity and, of course, all accients are spontaneous).
When you have a bunch of SCSI devices with no documentation and have to try to figure out which are terminated and need it turned off and how, SCSI termination can be a real pain (most of the hard drives I've used in the past few years have been salvage). It would be much simpler and nicer just to be able to plug and go. Yes, I can (usually) find the specs online, after a bit of a hunt, but that doesn't mean it's fun.
Beta is still used by almost all professional video companies. Any time you see a news videographer wandering around with a camera on his shoulder, it's a Betacam.
Why is this sinister?
on
Robotic Dogs
·
· Score: 1
>Sure the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle makes >life non-deterministic, but only to us. If you >start out the universe in exactly the same way >again, we would be having this conversation about > 14 billion years Nope. QM is probabilistic and nondeterministic in nature. Heisenberg doesn't say "you can't measure position and momentum together". It says "position and momentum only exist within a constraint, there is no such thing as complete precision in both". Throw in chaos, and strict determinism is out the window.
There is a comics page switch this year, too! This time, it's among non-syndicated artists, and includes Helen, Bruno, Keven & Kell, & many others. You can hook in at http://grove.ufl.edu/~normal/switch.html
A big part of it is, I think, the whole "mask" phenomenon. When people can't see you, you feel freer. Performers are familiar with this: they put on a mask (sometimes real, sometime simply an acted persona, whatever) on stage and they feel more comfortable talking to an audience.
To quote the cartoon, on the 'net no-one knows you're a dog. The people you are talking to can't see you, you can't see them. So all the normal social pressures which would prevent you from saying certain things are weakened. This applies to flamage as much as intimate discussions: it's one of the reasons flamewars get so vitriolic online. The rule "never say something to someone online which you wouldn't say to that person's face" would be complete unnecessary if it weren't for the fact that, *not* being face-to-face, you feel freer to say things.
When lambasting an author for his statements, nothing undermines a critic like throwing darts at a factual statement. The dejanews article suffers from this:
> [Katz writes:] >> Geeks bit the heads off of >> chickens and rats in carnivals at the >> beginning of the century in exchange for >> room and board. > > Suggesting that Alice Cooper, faded mainstream > media musician who gets television time as an > indicator of American culture, is a geek, > strikes me as rather, well, odd. Come again?
First off, the story about Alice Cooper biting the heads off chickens is a myth. At one show he had chickens as a prop, and one got snatched by his audience and torn to pieces. That got turned into the "biting the heads off" story.
Secondly, Katz is entirely correct. At the turn of the century (rather before Cooper's time), and in fact up until the 1950s, "geeks" meant side-show performers whose acts consisted of them biting the heads off (and often eating entirely) small animals. Next to the fake freaks, they were the lowest of the low in the freakshow heirarchy. The blue-skinned, puzzle-tattooed Enigma from Jim Rose's Travelling Freakshow (as seen on the X-File) is a classic geek.
I got the Palm V -- wanted the rechargable batteries and smaller size -- and am quite liking it. I put FlashPRO on it, so I can move all my common apps to ROM. Instant extra 800kb memory. The only way I'm going to run out in the foreseeable future is if I start deciding to put all my eText's on at once, which I don't really need to do. It's working quite nicely.
More memory would be *nice*, but I can make do quite well with what it comes with.
A URL linking to an image of the cover would certainly be more efficient to store. My only concern would be with the volatile nature of such things, and keeping the URL current and linked somewhere meaningful.
CD covers are indeed copyrighted and it is a serious concern. The main problem is that if you have copyright on your work and don't enforce it, it can lapse. If enough people start throwing your artwork around, people can (legally) challenge your right to it and take it away from you, putting your work in the public domain. This can *really* hurt artists.
On the other hand, a small (say, 64x64 - 100x100 pixels) icon of the cover art *might* fall under "fair use". You'd have to talk to a copyright lawyer, though.
The same applies to lyrics and liner notes -- they are copyright the original authors, and cannot be used without permission. And there, you don't have the option of doing low-res versions.
Some artists don't have a problem with their stuff showing up online (like The Residents, who's site I created, http://www.residents.com/), others are very uptight about it.
The thing is -- I shouldn't *have* to be disabling features to get reasonable performance. I'm on a 266 MHz Pentium, I should be able to get reasonable menu performance out of it. If KDE can keep up and GNOME can't, then that suggests that KDE is doing it better than GNOME. KDE's graphic design leave a lot to be desired compared to the GNOME stuff, but that's no fun if I have to turn the GNOME artwork off.
What it boils down to is that a desktop should be usable out of the box, and (for now, for me) GNOME isn't -- even though I like what I see. The look is great, the feel is wrong (so far).
I know *how* to switch between workspaces in WM. I just don't *like* the ways. I don't want to have to aim for a box in a pager or an even smaller arrow in the clip. I just want to spin my trackball to the side and be there. Works great with KDE, I'd like to be able to do the same under GNOME.
I'd like to use GNOME -- I like the way it looks. I've tried moving over to GNOME three times now, but so far I've always fallen back to KDE. Why? There are a few reasons:
No properly integrated window manager. Enlightenment is too slow, WM keeps on shutting itself down and running Blackbox on me (I don't know why) and doesn't have mousing between workspaces (except when you're carrying a window), and the others do not seem to have the necessary GNOME support.
It seems slow. The menu icons are very nice, but the menus seem to take quite a bit longer to appear than the KDE menus.
The libraries. *Every* time I try to install the latest GNOME or GTK libraries from RPM, I get reams of conflict messages -- even when upgrading from one library to the next version. Inevitably I have to force the issue. Even when I installed Red Hat 5.2 (which I did in part to get GNOME in an easy-to-handle package), the RH install coughed and died because there were too many "X requires files from the old library" messages.
I would *LOVE* to run GNOME. I think it's much cleaner and fresher-looking than KDE. But right now, KDE is easier to work with. It gives me no headaches. So I'm sticking with KDE.
I just wish KDE hadn't gotten itself entangled with this Qt licensing mess. Life'd be a lot simpler without the religious issues.
Just to be a little more accurate, the recent Candian levy on blank CDs and tapes is a levy, not a tax -- the money does not go to the government. It was lobbied for by SOCAN, the Canadian musicians union, though the SOCAN memeber I've talked to about it (Nash the Slash) hates the whole idea. I expect it will be challenged in court soon. In the mean time, you can't find blank CDs *anywhere* up here...
If nothing else, university gave me several years of access to medium-to-high-end UNIX systems which I could play on and learn stuff. While few of my classes actually gave me the expertise I use at work, the stuff I did between my classes helped a lot!
My SO had to drop out without getting her Master's degree, and has done fine (14 years in the industry), but then she went right into doing IT work *for* a university, which helped a lot.
The article in the Post says that they will be showing strips from the past year, then "graudually" bringing in the current ones. It implies that this means that it will continue online concurrently. There are some details about the Post deal in the news section on the User Friendly site.
Agreed -- I won't read the Post, User Friendly or not. When I call Black "The Rupert Murdoch of Canada", it's not to compliment his astute businesss sense!:)
Nonetheless, getting into even the Post is a great opportunity for Illiad, and I think we should all wish him well with this!
Slashdot Mirror
>>That means that 9 times out of 10 when a gun >> goes off, it's a tragedy. > > New math? 9 times out of 10, it's a homicide. Homicide, suicide, or accident. And, in the cases of homicide and accident especially, one which could well have been non-fatal had a gun not been available (most homicides are spur-of- the-moment crimes of passion or opportunity and, of course, all accients are spontaneous).
When you have a bunch of SCSI devices with no documentation and have to try to figure out which are terminated and need it turned off and how, SCSI termination can be a real pain (most of the hard drives I've used in the past few years have been salvage). It would be much simpler and nicer just to be able to plug and go. Yes, I can (usually) find the specs online, after a bit of a hunt, but that doesn't mean it's fun.
Beta is still used by almost all professional video companies. Any time you see a news videographer wandering around with a camera on his shoulder, it's a Betacam.
>Sure the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle makes >life non-deterministic, but only to us. If you >start out the universe in exactly the same way >again, we would be having this conversation about > 14 billion years Nope. QM is probabilistic and nondeterministic in nature. Heisenberg doesn't say "you can't measure position and momentum together". It says "position and momentum only exist within a constraint, there is no such thing as complete precision in both". Throw in chaos, and strict determinism is out the window.
There is a comics page switch this year, too! This time, it's among non-syndicated artists, and includes Helen, Bruno, Keven & Kell, & many others. You can hook in at http://grove.ufl.edu/~normal/switch.html
A big part of it is, I think, the whole "mask" phenomenon. When people can't see you, you feel freer. Performers are familiar with this: they put on a mask (sometimes real, sometime simply an acted persona, whatever) on stage and they feel more comfortable talking to an audience.
To quote the cartoon, on the 'net no-one knows you're a dog. The people you are talking to can't see you, you can't see them. So all the normal social pressures which would prevent you from saying certain things are weakened. This applies to flamage as much as intimate discussions: it's one of the reasons flamewars get so vitriolic online. The rule "never say something to someone online which you wouldn't say to that person's face" would be complete unnecessary if it weren't for the fact that, *not* being face-to-face, you feel freer to say things.
When lambasting an author for his statements, nothing undermines a critic like throwing darts at a factual statement. The dejanews article suffers from this:
> [Katz writes:]
>> Geeks bit the heads off of
>> chickens and rats in carnivals at the
>> beginning of the century in exchange for
>> room and board.
>
> Suggesting that Alice Cooper, faded mainstream
> media musician who gets television time as an
> indicator of American culture, is a geek,
> strikes me as rather, well, odd. Come again?
First off, the story about Alice Cooper biting the heads off chickens is a myth. At one show he had chickens as a prop, and one got snatched by his audience and torn to pieces. That got turned into the "biting the heads off" story.
Secondly, Katz is entirely correct. At the turn of the century (rather before Cooper's time), and in fact up until the 1950s, "geeks" meant side-show performers whose acts consisted of them biting the heads off (and often eating entirely) small animals. Next to the fake freaks, they were the lowest of the low in the freakshow heirarchy. The blue-skinned, puzzle-tattooed Enigma from Jim Rose's Travelling Freakshow (as seen on the X-File) is a classic geek.
I got the Palm V -- wanted the rechargable batteries and smaller size -- and am quite liking it. I put FlashPRO on it, so I can move all my common apps to ROM. Instant extra 800kb memory. The only way I'm going to run out in the foreseeable future is if I start deciding to put all my eText's on at once, which I don't really need to do. It's working quite nicely.
More memory would be *nice*, but I can make do quite well with what it comes with.
A URL linking to an image of the cover would certainly be more efficient to store. My only concern would be with the volatile nature of such things, and keeping the URL current and linked somewhere meaningful.
CD covers are indeed copyrighted and it is a serious concern. The main problem is that if you have copyright on your work and don't enforce it, it can lapse. If enough people start throwing your artwork around, people can (legally) challenge your right to it and take it away from you, putting your work in the public domain. This can *really* hurt artists.
On the other hand, a small (say, 64x64 - 100x100 pixels) icon of the cover art *might* fall under "fair use". You'd have to talk to a copyright lawyer, though.
The same applies to lyrics and liner notes -- they are copyright the original authors, and cannot be used without permission. And there, you don't have the option of doing low-res versions.
Some artists don't have a problem with their stuff showing up online (like The Residents, who's site I created, http://www.residents.com/), others are very uptight about it.
The thing is -- I shouldn't *have* to be disabling features to get reasonable performance. I'm on a 266 MHz Pentium, I should be able to get reasonable menu performance out of it. If KDE can keep up and GNOME can't, then that suggests that KDE is doing it better than GNOME. KDE's graphic design leave a lot to be desired compared to the GNOME stuff, but that's no fun if I have to turn the GNOME artwork off.
What it boils down to is that a desktop should be usable out of the box, and (for now, for me) GNOME isn't -- even though I like what I see. The look is great, the feel is wrong (so far).
I know *how* to switch between workspaces in WM. I just don't *like* the ways. I don't want to have to aim for a box in a pager or an even smaller arrow in the clip. I just want to spin my trackball to the side and be there. Works great with KDE, I'd like to be able to do the same under GNOME.
I'd like to use GNOME -- I like the way it looks. I've tried moving over to GNOME three times now, but so far I've always fallen back to KDE. Why? There are a few reasons:
No properly integrated window manager. Enlightenment is too slow, WM keeps on shutting itself down and running Blackbox on me (I don't know why) and doesn't have mousing between workspaces (except when you're carrying a window), and the others do not seem to have the necessary GNOME support.
It seems slow. The menu icons are very nice, but the menus seem to take quite a bit longer to appear than the KDE menus.
The libraries. *Every* time I try to install the latest GNOME or GTK libraries from RPM, I get reams of conflict messages -- even when upgrading from one library to the next version. Inevitably I have to force the issue. Even when I installed Red Hat 5.2 (which I did in part to get GNOME in an easy-to-handle package), the RH install coughed and died because there were too many "X requires files from the old library" messages.
I would *LOVE* to run GNOME. I think it's much cleaner and fresher-looking than KDE. But right now, KDE is easier to work with. It gives me no headaches. So I'm sticking with KDE.
I just wish KDE hadn't gotten itself entangled with this Qt licensing mess. Life'd be a lot simpler without the religious issues.
I can never remember mnemonics...
It's not a tax, it's a levy, imposed on behalf
of SOCAN, the Canadian musician's union -- many
members of which hate the levy.
Just to be a little more accurate, the recent Candian levy on blank CDs and tapes is a levy, not a tax -- the money does not go to the government. It was lobbied for by SOCAN, the Canadian musicians union, though the SOCAN memeber I've talked to about it (Nash the Slash) hates the whole idea. I expect it will be challenged in court soon. In the mean time, you can't find blank CDs *anywhere* up here...
If nothing else, university gave me several years of access to medium-to-high-end UNIX systems which I could play on and learn stuff. While few of my classes actually gave me the expertise I use at work, the stuff I did between my classes helped a lot!
My SO had to drop out without getting her Master's degree, and has done fine (14 years in the industry), but then she went right into doing IT work *for* a university, which helped a lot.
The article in the Post says that they will be showing strips from the past year, then "graudually" bringing in the current ones. It implies that this means that it will continue online concurrently. There are some details about the Post deal in the news section on the User Friendly site.
Agreed -- I won't read the Post, User Friendly or not. When I call Black "The Rupert Murdoch of Canada", it's not to compliment his astute businesss sense! :)
Nonetheless, getting into even the Post is a great opportunity for Illiad, and I think we should all wish him well with this!