what you are doing is freeloading: "I love your content, give it me for free, no I will make YOU pay to serve me, every day, on every site I hit, because I am too much of a loser to let a damned jpg banner load."
Yes. And if you want me to view your stuff, you will pay to serve me. It's called "the cost of doing business".
Now, I can understand sites which provide nothing of value requiring advertising to survive (hey, I'll still typing in this textarea, aren't I?;-). And, if the content is attractive enough, I'll tolerate it. But ultimately, if you build it expecting them to come, and they don't because you've pissed them off with advertising, or they block your imagined revenue stream, then it's you and your business model that failed - not me.
And capitalism being the wonder that it is, you wouldn't want a poor business model to succeed, would you?
What users are failing to realize is that you have NO RIGHTS on the Internet. If companies want to block all user agents from their sites except for MSIE 6.x on Windows XP, there isn't a thing you can do about it.
No there isn't. But you're failing to take into account a very basic premise of modern capitalism : corporations are greedy. A corporation won't consciously decide to restrict its potential market like that, for 2 reasons: 1) It can't bear the thought of missing out on a potential market. 2) Someone else will jump in and become the leader in that section of the market.
There's all sorts of variables in amongst that (consider if the secondary market is tiny, razor-thin margins, etc), but basically it boils down to those 2 points.
So, the corporation is left with 2 avenues: 1) Open themselves to the market 2) Try and warp the market to suit themselves.
Now, a homework question : Which of those 2 avenues are MS, the RIAA / MPAA, etc taking?
Ultimately, it cuts both ways. If they want me, they can choose to meet my terms. If I want them, I can choose to meet their terms. It comes down to who needs who the most.
Personally, I think they need me more than I need them. Corporations find this disturbing, hence the use of advertising in an attempt to create / strengthen wants into needs...
As a paid and participating member of the "half-arsed and bloody awful" club (I work for Telstra;-), let me say this...
It's at least a consistent half-arsedness - we don't really have the extremes of exemplary service existing right alongside bloody awfulness. Everybody and everything runs along at 75%~80%, which is generally enough for everybody to be happy. If everything was perfect you'd have nothing to bitch about (and you'd be surpised how unhappy you'd be if you had nothing to bitch about;-), and you occassionally get these pleasant little surprises when someone unexpectedly give you the 100% treatment.
It's the embodyment of the old "you can please most of the people most of the time" saying. Personally, I find the falsity of the american customer-service industry disgusting - grow some balls, people, and either act human or give me real quality rather than trying to con me into thinking I'm getting it! And let's not mention the pommy idea of "service"...
However, I take issue with your last remark about importing forced voting. I am sorry, but I disagree with you quite strongly. How can a society be called free when you are forced to vote? What if you only vote for someone because it was the law and not because you agree with his or her political stance? This cannot be a viable option until voting ballots had a box labeled 'Abstain from this race'.
Even then, I would not want such a system. Forced voting in a free society (if you ignore most of what Congress does that is;) just does not make sense.
I believe it was an american who said "with rights come responsibilities".
I look at it this way - you value your right to free speech / privacy / whatever. Fine. Then the absolute minimum responsibility that goes with those rights is that you have to attend a polling booth every couple of years. If you don't want to vote then get your name checked off, pretend to vote, and leave. This software allows you to do that.
(Quickly: Once I walked in, got my name ticked off, took a ballot, walked into the booth, turned around, walked out, and put my paper in the box.
The observer said "you didn't vote!". I said "prove it...";-)
If you can't be bothered to at least pretend to vote, I think the very least you can do is give up the right to complain about any outcomes from the result...
true story: one day i was going to class had a midterm.. but no calulator.. so i just filled out the form.. got a cheapo $2 calculator.. 4-6 weeks later got yet ANOTHER card.. and just cut it up.
i still failed the test
That's because it was an English test. You really should be more careful...
Again, I'd agree to some extent - technical design and measurement needs to be augmented by actual, if non-quantative, observation.
But... For example, I ripped some Sheryl Crow CDs to 128kbps MP3. When I played them over my speakers (Klipsch 4.1, nowhere near audiophile quality) they sounded flat, as if I was listening to them through some thick fabric.
Sheesh! Although I have moderate high-frequency loss (due to childhood illness), I have reasonably well-trained ears. It's easy to distinguish 128kbps.mp3s from uncompressed audio, even through the plastic speakers of my eMac. It's more obvious on some types of music than others - Sheryl Crow is one of them - but the non-linear compression, phasing, and pumping effects are obvious at that bitrate. 160kbps VBR is about where my ears run out of puff.
And yes, I've done my own random, double blind, level matched testing...
but the reason they don't back things up with numbers is that in audio, numbers lie. A lot. To the point that they have little meaning, except as a comparison to otherwise identical equipment.
Well, to some extent - a small extent - I'd agree with you. However, the bigger part of the problem is that people generally lie a lot more, whether they be engineers, audiophiles, or marketroids (which, unsurprisingly, share a lot of traits with the other sort of 'roids...)
A 5W tube system may be louder than a 50W transistor system.
Well, it may sound louder, for all sorts of reasons - more efficient speakers, less noticeable/offensive distortion, etc. But, ultimately, for a given level of total distortion and equivalent speaker efficiency, it's not. The numbers don't lie.
A speaker with.002% signal distortion might easily introduce its own distortion due to cheap magnets or poorly engineered cones and not include that, even though the stat says "Total Harmonic Distortion."
Then it ain't the THD of that device, is it? Someone lied...
Even a stat like "Frequency response: 20 Hz - 22 kHz" is useless if the amplification device is not perfectly linear, and no device is.
Which is why only boom-boxes, consumer marketed stereos, and marketroids talk in unqualified figures like that. Real hi-fi equipment specs are qualified with additional figures like "+3db, -1.5db". Some even have graphs to show the linearity & flatness of the response, and the best has individual measurements for each piece of equipment.
Thus, the auditioning of gear on a "well trained ear" is essential to any audio review.
I agree. Just be aware that trained ears are also susceptible to their own biases, preconceptions, self-delusions, and yes, the influence of the almighty dollar.
Having said all that, I'd agree that "Stereophile" is one of the better audio magazines. But that doesn't mean that a lot of it isn't biased, opinionated, self serving, self-important, and advertiser-influenced crap. Just like most every other electronics, home decorating, computer, technology, gaming, and car magazine out there. Probably even gardening magazines too...
I've actually done similar things - even pulled off the apocryphal "put it back in the box, take it back to the shop, and tell them you're too fsckin' stupid to own a computer!" line once - but only as a last resort. It goes like this:
Explanation
Explanation with attached threat
Carry out threat
The trick is to choose your targets, and do it all with good grace and a sense of humour. If you've done it right, not only will you keep your job, but you'll probably be known as that guy who knows his stuff and can take firm and decisive action.
(However, I suspect that this time next year I'll be having the following discussion in a pub somewhere: "I survived 3 rounds of layoffs!" "But weren't there 4 rounds?" "Yes...."
Last week, our manager told us "there isn't a morale problem, there's a negativity problem, and if you're negative it's your fault!". Now, I'm no good at taking hints, but I think I see something that looks a bit like writing on that wall over there...)
The threading support in the latest version (the one for OS 10.3) is very poor... The gpg support (even with the plugin for it) is bad.
Well, in my defense, I did say it was nothing fancy;-) Agreed, threading & GPG are poor (or non-existant in 10.2.x). IMAP seems OK to me, but I have only ever used it across the local network.
Apple actually broke a lot of the CSS support that khtml had (and still has on linux).
Haven't noticed that exactly - what I have noticed is that the DOM is different enough to need special attention when writing cross-browser stuff, and I guess that leaks over into CSS to some extent too. I hadn't noticed that Konq was any better, but I haven't really played with it much - my Linux boxes don't have X, and my Sun still runs NS 4.godknowswhatbutitsscreaminglyawful
Re iTunes : You don't need to import (it does it automagically when you open the file). Checking the volume is done only the first time it plays (on mine at least; iTunes 4.01, and that may not be the default setting), and takes ~2 seconds. Admittedly, by default, it does copy everything into the library. But there's a "hidden" option for that - the obtusely-named "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library";-)
(Yes, I made the same mistake when I first set up my Linux media server. The sudden lack of local disk space was the giveaway;-)
I guess it's all just a personal preference thing - my feelings about OS X, and Macs in general, are that everything is set up pretty well by default for the average user, but there is a hell of a lot of sensible configuration available to more advanced users hidden just below the surface.
And programming under OS X is an absolute joy compared to Gnome & KDE, approaching the niceness of BeOS. (Mind you, I hate C but love ObjC, javascript, and PHP, so take that as you will;-)
I'm not a Mac zealot, or even an apologist - I'd used them v.occasionally over the years, thought they were a nice enough toy, until I bought my eMac - but now I tell every newbie who asks "what sort of computer whould I buy" to at least investigate the Mac line. Saves me from most of the inevitable "how do I..." phone calls...
I too bought a G4 eMac earlier this year; a few weeks ago it died with no video (no EHT; whatever died there took the video board with it). All repaired happily in 3 working days under warranty. The worst part was lugging the damn thing into the second-busiest part of town (the other Mac repair centre is in the busiest part of town!) - luckily, having a commercially-signed van I could park right outside the door...
But, c'mon...
The apps that don't crash just plain suck (mail, safari, iTunes, i'm looking at you.)
What?!
Mail.app - it's nothing fancy but quite nice, the automagic filtering works better than anything else I've tried under Linux or Windows, it handles multiple accounts v.well - the only real problems I have are due to its inane rich-text-alike format.
Safari - yeah, well, I'm a Mozilla fan;-). But it's quite a serviceable browser, lacking a bit in javascript & DOM stuff I guess, but still better than that Redmond-delivered p.o.s.
iTunes - All I can say is I guess you've never actually used it. I was sceptical, but it truly is the greatest thing to happen in MP3-land since Bill Gates, Jack Valenti, & Hillary Rosen committed mass-suicide (oops, that hasn't happened - yet...)
second, why should so much power dealing with the interent be given to a corporation, why not a common non-profit organization handle the.com and.net(and.org,.tv,.info even.... excluding individual contries' domains)?
As hundreds have said before, in response to questions just like yours, it's the wrong thing to do in a technical sense.
What should happen:
Machine requests DNS lookup on non-valid name.
Query travels all the way up to root servers (or something says "yup, I'm the authorative source on that domain").
Response comes back saying "no such domain" (NXDOMAIN)
What happens now that Versign have fucked with things:
Machine requests DNS lookup on non-valid name.
Query travels all the way up to root servers.
Response comes back saying "yup, here it is! Oh, BTW, the name you asked for is actually an alias for http://sitefinder.verisign.com/"
The second response might be considered useful to you, as a human being, but it's of no use to a machine which is expecting either a "yes, and here's the details" or a "no" response to determine if a name is valid. The only way to get around it (for a machine) is to do something extra to interpret the result to see whether it's a real valid result, or a faked valid result. Which, cleverly enough, is what the various hacks and patches are doing...
(Except the BIND patch. That's clever;-). But it's still nasty, and I feel it itself breaks the spirit [if not the letter] of DNS. But it's better than leaving Verisign polluting user expectations of DNS...)
Real world example : what if you, as a multi-national monopolist abuser, write a browser, and decide that if somebody mis-types a domain name you want them re-directed to your ad-riddled search engine? If you wrote it expecting that invalid names would return a NXDOMAIN response, your grand plans for world domination on the back of banner-ad revenue have just gone down the toilet - because Verisign have just hijacked it...
Lately I've spotted a UFO cult in my neighborhood, the Raelians.
I have to admit, I have a soft spot in my heart for the Raelians. Forgetting about all the cloning / genetic engineering / alien crap, I remember when Rael himself came out to Australia about 8 years ago.
Has anyone else noticed a theme with Keanu's movies? So many of them revolve around his brain - in "Chain Reaction" he discovers the secret of making the not-cold-fusion work; in "Johnny Mnemonic" there's the concept that his brain can hold a huge amount of information (though, as we all suspected, that turns out not to be so true after all...); "The Matrix" - 'nuff said; even in "Bill and Ted" you could argue his brain is what makes the whole thing believable.
"Imagine back about 150 years ago when most of our society was based on Information Technology. More than half of all labor went into producing computerised knowledge systems. Not a lot of luxuries back then. When offshore IT shops came about, a lot of IT workers lost their jobs. Was this a bad thing? Of course not. Because IT became cheaper, jobs shifted to nanomolecular biotechnology where goods were produced to make people's lives easier, etc, etc..."
He may be blunt. He may be unbending. He may be forthright.
But, I'm afraid whenever I read one of RMS's speeches (as opposed to his writings), I can't help but think it sounds like the Chewbacca defense...
"So the most important thing for you to start with is never mix Wookies and Ewoks as topics. They have nothing to do for each other. Let me tell you some of the basic differences between copyrights and patents: a copyright is a Wookie, living on Endor,and it has to do with the details of that work. Ideas are completely excluded from it. Ewoks, by contrast - well, Ewoks cover an idea. And why am I wasting your time talking about Ewoks and Wookies? Because I can. It's that simple..."
I thought the same thing - 20 years ago, when I did all my Telecommunications theory and practical training...
1) Psychological : Firstly, there's a law of diminishing returns - there's not much point (with voice) in going beyond 300Hz -> 3.4kHz (as I learnt it; I understand the US rolls off at more like 3.0 or 3.2kHz...). 90% of the intelligence in speech is contained in that band, 90% of the stuff outside is just rumble and sillibants.
Secondly, there's the learned psychology - you've become mentally adapted to the restricted bandwidth of phone calls; you're unthinkingly aware that it's not a *real* conversation. I've seen videos of demonstrations of this where a normal voice-quality link was suddenly switched to a full 20kHz quality mono link. People automatically stop scratching themselves, sit up properly, adjust their clothes, and start looking around;-)
2) When compression techniques became available (1950's), there was huge interest in this. As well as the psychological effects, there was also the knowledge that you're really only trading one sort of distortion for another, so why bother - just stick with the distortion that's easiest to implement, is well understood, and well accepted. If you think we've come too much farther with compression techniques, I challenge you to listen to a spoken-word.mp3 encoded @ 56k;-)
And be thankful they didn't - any sort of compression adapted for voice fscks up the modulation schemes used for VF modems. Knowing this, would you go back and introduce.mp3 compression to those 1950's engineers, then come back and face a life of 4800bps dialup?
There are plenty of more "dangerous" electronic components made by the same companies that produce LiIon cells (such as large value capacitors, certain transformer types, etc.) that can be purchased without goofy "designer agreements."
2 things:
L-I cells are dangerous little buggers. Basically, because of their high capacity & low internal R, they get real hot real quick. They're also prone to thermal runaway - put simply, the hotter they get, the more current they can supply, so they get hotter => little vaguely battery-shaped pod of melted plastic and acidic goop. That's why the manufacturers require proof that the purchasers of individual cells (not packs, which generally have the charge controller built-in) know what they're doing.
(BTW, you mention "solder tabs" on L-I cells. They're not solder tabs, they're for spot welding or crimping. Remember all those warnings you've seen about being careful when soldering tabs on NiCads or NiMHi cells? Well, it goes double for L-I cells. In fact, JUST DON'T!)
As for "goofy designer agreements", I'm reminded of the time my organisation tried to buy some v.v.large capacitors (100 FARAD, > 50v) to replace smoothing batteries in high current buck boost power supplies - telecomms stuff, we're talking 1000A @ 50v each here. Anyway, after we tried, we got phone calls from some very suspicious people at ONA/ASIO. Because the primary use for such large capacitors is in nuclear weapons primers, plasma / rail gun research, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes. And if you want me to view your stuff, you will pay to serve me. It's called "the cost of doing business".
Now, I can understand sites which provide nothing of value requiring advertising to survive (hey, I'll still typing in this textarea, aren't I?
And capitalism being the wonder that it is, you wouldn't want a poor business model to succeed, would you?
What users are failing to realize is that you have NO RIGHTS on the Internet. If companies want to block all user agents from their sites except for MSIE 6.x on Windows XP, there isn't a thing you can do about it.
:
:
No there isn't. But you're failing to take into account a very basic premise of modern capitalism : corporations are greedy. A corporation won't consciously decide to restrict its potential market like that, for 2 reasons
1) It can't bear the thought of missing out on a potential market.
2) Someone else will jump in and become the leader in that section of the market.
There's all sorts of variables in amongst that (consider if the secondary market is tiny, razor-thin margins, etc), but basically it boils down to those 2 points.
So, the corporation is left with 2 avenues
1) Open themselves to the market
2) Try and warp the market to suit themselves.
Now, a homework question : Which of those 2 avenues are MS, the RIAA / MPAA, etc taking?
Ultimately, it cuts both ways. If they want me, they can choose to meet my terms. If I want them, I can choose to meet their terms. It comes down to who needs who the most.
Personally, I think they need me more than I need them. Corporations find this disturbing, hence the use of advertising in an attempt to create / strengthen wants into needs...
Saying one thing then doing another is the American Way, isn't it?
As a paid and participating member of the "half-arsed and bloody awful" club (I work for Telstra ;-), let me say this...
;-), and you occassionally get these pleasant little surprises when someone unexpectedly give you the 100% treatment.
It's at least a consistent half-arsedness - we don't really have the extremes of exemplary service existing right alongside bloody awfulness. Everybody and everything runs along at 75%~80%, which is generally enough for everybody to be happy. If everything was perfect you'd have nothing to bitch about (and you'd be surpised how unhappy you'd be if you had nothing to bitch about
It's the embodyment of the old "you can please most of the people most of the time" saying. Personally, I find the falsity of the american customer-service industry disgusting - grow some balls, people, and either act human or give me real quality rather than trying to con me into thinking I'm getting it! And let's not mention the pommy idea of "service"...
I believe it was an american who said "with rights come responsibilities".
I look at it this way - you value your right to free speech / privacy / whatever. Fine. Then the absolute minimum responsibility that goes with those rights is that you have to attend a polling booth every couple of years. If you don't want to vote then get your name checked off, pretend to vote, and leave. This software allows you to do that.
(Quickly: Once I walked in, got my name ticked off, took a ballot, walked into the booth, turned around, walked out, and put my paper in the box.
The observer said "you didn't vote!". I said "prove it..."
If you can't be bothered to at least pretend to vote, I think the very least you can do is give up the right to complain about any outcomes from the result...
Wow ... I guess it wasn't too much to ask that the /. editors actually edit!
OTOH, you can please some of the people some of the time...
Again, I'd agree to some extent - technical design and measurement needs to be augmented by actual, if non-quantative, observation.
.mp3s from uncompressed audio, even through the plastic speakers of my eMac. It's more obvious on some types of music than others - Sheryl Crow is one of them - but the non-linear compression, phasing, and pumping effects are obvious at that bitrate. 160kbps VBR is about where my ears run out of puff.
But...
For example, I ripped some Sheryl Crow CDs to 128kbps MP3. When I played them over my speakers (Klipsch 4.1, nowhere near audiophile quality) they sounded flat, as if I was listening to them through some thick fabric.
Sheesh! Although I have moderate high-frequency loss (due to childhood illness), I have reasonably well-trained ears. It's easy to distinguish 128kbps
And yes, I've done my own random, double blind, level matched testing...
but the reason they don't back things up with numbers is that in audio, numbers lie. A lot. To the point that they have little meaning, except as a comparison to otherwise identical equipment.
.002% signal distortion might easily introduce its own distortion due to cheap magnets or poorly engineered cones and not include that, even though the stat says "Total Harmonic Distortion."
Well, to some extent - a small extent - I'd agree with you. However, the bigger part of the problem is that people generally lie a lot more, whether they be engineers, audiophiles, or marketroids (which, unsurprisingly, share a lot of traits with the other sort of 'roids...)
A 5W tube system may be louder than a 50W transistor system.
Well, it may sound louder, for all sorts of reasons - more efficient speakers, less noticeable/offensive distortion, etc. But, ultimately, for a given level of total distortion and equivalent speaker efficiency, it's not. The numbers don't lie.
A speaker with
Then it ain't the THD of that device, is it? Someone lied...
Even a stat like "Frequency response: 20 Hz - 22 kHz" is useless if the amplification device is not perfectly linear, and no device is.
Which is why only boom-boxes, consumer marketed stereos, and marketroids talk in unqualified figures like that. Real hi-fi equipment specs are qualified with additional figures like "+3db, -1.5db". Some even have graphs to show the linearity & flatness of the response, and the best has individual measurements for each piece of equipment.
Thus, the auditioning of gear on a "well trained ear" is essential to any audio review.
I agree. Just be aware that trained ears are also susceptible to their own biases, preconceptions, self-delusions, and yes, the influence of the almighty dollar.
Having said all that, I'd agree that "Stereophile" is one of the better audio magazines. But that doesn't mean that a lot of it isn't biased, opinionated, self serving, self-important, and advertiser-influenced crap. Just like most every other electronics, home decorating, computer, technology, gaming, and car magazine out there. Probably even gardening magazines too...
- Explanation
- Explanation with attached threat
- Carry out threat
The trick is to choose your targets, and do it all with good grace and a sense of humour. If you've done it right, not only will you keep your job, but you'll probably be known as that guy who knows his stuff and can take firm and decisive action.(However, I suspect that this time next year I'll be having the following discussion in a pub somewhere
"I survived 3 rounds of layoffs!"
"But weren't there 4 rounds?"
"Yes...."
Last week, our manager told us "there isn't a morale problem, there's a negativity problem, and if you're negative it's your fault!". Now, I'm no good at taking hints, but I think I see something that looks a bit like writing on that wall over there...)
The threading support in the latest version (the one for OS 10.3) is very poor ... The gpg support (even with the plugin for it) is bad.
;-) Agreed, threading & GPG are poor (or non-existant in 10.2.x). IMAP seems OK to me, but I have only ever used it across the local network.
;-)
;-)
;-)
..." phone calls...
Well, in my defense, I did say it was nothing fancy
Apple actually broke a lot of the CSS support that khtml had (and still has on linux).
Haven't noticed that exactly - what I have noticed is that the DOM is different enough to need special attention when writing cross-browser stuff, and I guess that leaks over into CSS to some extent too. I hadn't noticed that Konq was any better, but I haven't really played with it much - my Linux boxes don't have X, and my Sun still runs NS 4.godknowswhatbutitsscreaminglyawful
Re iTunes : You don't need to import (it does it automagically when you open the file). Checking the volume is done only the first time it plays (on mine at least; iTunes 4.01, and that may not be the default setting), and takes ~2 seconds. Admittedly, by default, it does copy everything into the library. But there's a "hidden" option for that - the obtusely-named "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library"
(Yes, I made the same mistake when I first set up my Linux media server. The sudden lack of local disk space was the giveaway
I guess it's all just a personal preference thing - my feelings about OS X, and Macs in general, are that everything is set up pretty well by default for the average user, but there is a hell of a lot of sensible configuration available to more advanced users hidden just below the surface.
And programming under OS X is an absolute joy compared to Gnome & KDE, approaching the niceness of BeOS. (Mind you, I hate C but love ObjC, javascript, and PHP, so take that as you will
I'm not a Mac zealot, or even an apologist - I'd used them v.occasionally over the years, thought they were a nice enough toy, until I bought my eMac - but now I tell every newbie who asks "what sort of computer whould I buy" to at least investigate the Mac line. Saves me from most of the inevitable "how do I
I too bought a G4 eMac earlier this year; a few weeks ago it died with no video (no EHT; whatever died there took the video board with it). All repaired happily in 3 working days under warranty. The worst part was lugging the damn thing into the second-busiest part of town (the other Mac repair centre is in the busiest part of town!) - luckily, having a commercially-signed van I could park right outside the door...
But, c'mon...What?!
Mail.app - it's nothing fancy but quite nice, the automagic filtering works better than anything else I've tried under Linux or Windows, it handles multiple accounts v.well - the only real problems I have are due to its inane rich-text-alike format.
Safari - yeah, well, I'm a Mozilla fan
iTunes - All I can say is I guess you've never actually used it. I was sceptical, but it truly is the greatest thing to happen in MP3-land since Bill Gates, Jack Valenti, & Hillary Rosen committed mass-suicide (oops, that hasn't happened - yet...)
What should happen
What happens now that Versign have fucked with things
The second response might be considered useful to you, as a human being, but it's of no use to a machine which is expecting either a "yes, and here's the details" or a "no" response to determine if a name is valid. The only way to get around it (for a machine) is to do something extra to interpret the result to see whether it's a real valid result, or a faked valid result. Which, cleverly enough, is what the various hacks and patches are doing...
(Except the BIND patch. That's clever
Real world example : what if you, as a multi-national monopolist abuser, write a browser, and decide that if somebody mis-types a domain name you want them re-directed to your ad-riddled search engine? If you wrote it expecting that invalid names would return a NXDOMAIN response, your grand plans for world domination on the back of banner-ad revenue have just gone down the toilet - because Verisign have just hijacked it...
"Q : What would you call a multi-tasking, multi-user operating system designed to run on 8-bit processors?
A : Eunuchs!"
(It's an old, old joke, predating even LSL3. Or was it LSL2?)
The itineray went somthing like this
- Melbourne : huge rally
- Sydney : huge rally
- Brisbane : Go-karting...
Now, if only we could get the Pope to do that...Has anyone else noticed a theme with Keanu's movies? So many of them revolve around his brain - in "Chain Reaction" he discovers the secret of making the not-cold-fusion work; in "Johnny Mnemonic" there's the concept that his brain can hold a huge amount of information (though, as we all suspected, that turns out not to be so true after all...); "The Matrix" - 'nuff said; even in "Bill and Ted" you could argue his brain is what makes the whole thing believable.
But not "Speed"...
Ever wonder why?
There's no 'I' in 'team', but there's a 'U' in 'fuckwit'.
"Imagine back about 150 years ago when most of our society was based on Information Technology. More than half of all labor went into producing computerised knowledge systems. Not a lot of luxuries back then. When offshore IT shops came about, a lot of IT workers lost their jobs. Was this a bad thing? Of course not. Because IT became cheaper, jobs shifted to nanomolecular biotechnology where goods were produced to make people's lives easier, etc, etc..."
What goes around comes around...
But, I'm afraid whenever I read one of RMS's speeches (as opposed to his writings), I can't help but think it sounds like the Chewbacca defense...
I thought the same thing - 20 years ago, when I did all my Telecommunications theory and practical training...
;-)
.mp3 encoded @ 56k ;-)
.mp3 compression to those 1950's engineers, then come back and face a life of 4800bps dialup?
1) Psychological : Firstly, there's a law of diminishing returns - there's not much point (with voice) in going beyond 300Hz -> 3.4kHz (as I learnt it; I understand the US rolls off at more like 3.0 or 3.2kHz...). 90% of the intelligence in speech is contained in that band, 90% of the stuff outside is just rumble and sillibants.
Secondly, there's the learned psychology - you've become mentally adapted to the restricted bandwidth of phone calls; you're unthinkingly aware that it's not a *real* conversation. I've seen videos of demonstrations of this where a normal voice-quality link was suddenly switched to a full 20kHz quality mono link. People automatically stop scratching themselves, sit up properly, adjust their clothes, and start looking around
2) When compression techniques became available (1950's), there was huge interest in this. As well as the psychological effects, there was also the knowledge that you're really only trading one sort of distortion for another, so why bother - just stick with the distortion that's easiest to implement, is well understood, and well accepted. If you think we've come too much farther with compression techniques, I challenge you to listen to a spoken-word
And be thankful they didn't - any sort of compression adapted for voice fscks up the modulation schemes used for VF modems. Knowing this, would you go back and introduce
Mine plays the "Imperial March" from Star Wars. Customers look at me funny when it goes off. I find their lack of faith disturbing...
;-)
(But it beats the looks I used to get when it played the theme from "Leisure Suit Larry"
L-I cells are dangerous little buggers. Basically, because of their high capacity & low internal R, they get real hot real quick. They're also prone to thermal runaway - put simply, the hotter they get, the more current they can supply, so they get hotter => little vaguely battery-shaped pod of melted plastic and acidic goop. That's why the manufacturers require proof that the purchasers of individual cells (not packs, which generally have the charge controller built-in) know what they're doing.
(BTW, you mention "solder tabs" on L-I cells. They're not solder tabs, they're for spot welding or crimping. Remember all those warnings you've seen about being careful when soldering tabs on NiCads or NiMHi cells? Well, it goes double for L-I cells. In fact, JUST DON'T!)
As for "goofy designer agreements", I'm reminded of the time my organisation tried to buy some v.v.large capacitors (100 FARAD, > 50v) to replace smoothing batteries in high current buck boost power supplies - telecomms stuff, we're talking 1000A @ 50v each here. Anyway, after we tried, we got phone calls from some very suspicious people at ONA/ASIO. Because the primary use for such large capacitors is in nuclear weapons primers, plasma / rail gun research, etc...