On the opposite side of the coin, may I present Mel Gibson, who will also be entitled to his choice of projects for the next couple of years, and who was sure his career would be doomed for making the Passion of the Christ.
There's one big issue about movie downloads: bandwidth. Simple fact is that a full-frame, full-motion movie, even in DivX form, is going to take a massive amount of space up in the downloading process. Without fiber broadband, it just isn't going to be worth the trouble for the forseeable future.
You know, I see a lot of people complaining about this, and frankly I wind up thinking of most of them as some sort of neophilic quasi-Luddites. Film has a look to it that some people appreciate. Fact is, you look at most of what's on TV these days, it's the film look as far as the eye can see. Video tends to look a bit harsh sometimes, perhaps a bit too lively. Film looks more sedate, more "professional" somehow. (Notice most sitcoms during the 80s and 90s were on tape; most are film look now.) Film also has much broader theoretical resolution compared to video -- the best available video in terms of resolution is 1080i HDTV, but film resolution is limited only by particle size in the emulsion.
My point isn't that film is better; my point is that it's a very subjective thing, and it seems people tend to be more comfortable looking at film. I haven't seen it myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if some people thought that the fact that 28 Days Later was shot on DV made it substantially edgier in visual appearance. It's as much about associations as it is technology. If it was my production, I'd probably shoot on HDV 720p, but that's for budget reasons. Film just looks more like what people like to look at.
The Zahn novels (and to a lesser extent the Correllian trilogy of Roger McBride Allen) were very well-written books and worthy additions to the world of Star Wars. If you think Zahn sucked, you haven't read the work of uberhack Kevin Anderson.
Baking and commercial production are each special cases, with concerns of their own. Baking has to be very scientific or it will fail, and commercial production has issues of product consistency that are simply unimportant to a home cook. Engineered recipes are a waste of time in many circumstances.
In any case, look at Escoffier. If you pick up a copy of the Guide Culinaire you get page after page of recipe descriptions, but few actual worked-out recipes. Why? Because the engineering is in the techniques used, not the recipes themselves. It is of no use to the well-educated cook to have a full-on recipe for sole meuniere; better to know how to apply a la meuniere technique to any sort of fish than focus on one specific recipe.
It's my belief that in the age of the internet two things are worth considering:
a) there's no excuse for someone who doesn't have the ability to cook metric in the US -- the measuring tools are available; and b) there's no reason for non-USians to get their panties in a bunch over the issue, since conversion tables are readily available as well.
A smart recipe writer, though, writing for an international audience, should put metric conversions on their recipes for internet distribution. (Granted I haven't been consistent about it on my own recipe pages, but I do try.)
I think the real issue is not men vs. women, but fuzzy vs. discrete or instinctual vs. analytical. Except for baking, cooking tends not to be very scientific, just a pinch of this, a pinch of that. (If you want some real seat-of-the-pants technique, consider that cooks in Taillevent's time had almost no temperature control at all, and still managed to put out some pretty amazing results.)
For me, it's the labels on the knob that I use to judge "medium", "medium-high", whatever. Now if I had that brick oven in the backyard that I wanted, I'd have to relearn all that, and that's where experience becomes the teacher. Sometimes there's no substitute for someone coming up to you and saying "That, my friend, is a gentle heat".
The Brits are the best about it -- both Imperial and metric units, because they've used both for a few decades. Their cookbooks usually have both units, and if you're an American trying to use British gallons (for example) you can use the metric quantities for disambiguation.
I mentioned in another post Cooks Illustrated -- they've got the scientific approach down. And we can't forget Julia -- after all, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was as much about technique as it was recipes.
Truthfully, I think Alton Brown would point to Harold McGee, as would Shirley Corriher and Howard Hillman.
All uranium is radioactive. Depleted uranium is mostly U-238, which isn't as radioactive as U-235 (which is required for fission reactions), but it's still radioactive.
If you want to know more about uranium, check out Theodore Gray's Uranium page -- U-238 gives off mostly alpha radiation and is pretty harmless unless you eat it or inhale it. (I'd take a Geiger counter to that red Fiestaware, though -- that's definitely something to keep on the shelf rather than use for dinner.) Gray has quite a number of uranium samples, including two pieces of more or less pure depleted uranium. Interesting stuff.
Fuel reprocessing would be nice -- there'd be a hell of a lot less waste to deal with if they did that. But the Powers That Be are concerned about security of the reprocessed fuel -- I think the environmental issue of thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste outweighs security concerns, but what do I know? I work at a furniture store.
Fusion wouldn't be sustainable in case of an accident anyway... you'd probably get a light show and a ruined reactor in the case of a containment failure, but fusion bombs and fusion reactors are entirely different beasts. (IIRC a "fusion" bomb is triggered by a fission reaction, which in turn triggers an even larger fission reaction. A standard fission reactor, on the other hand, is nothing more than a tightly controlled bomb, running at a very low rate so it doesn't blow up.)
Re:Additional Myths Debunked by DJ Bitterbarn
on
IT Myths
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· Score: 1
Myth: Chicks dig assholes.
Harsh Reality: Chicks dig exciting guys. Assholes tend to be exciting. Geeks tend to be too arcane to be interesting; "nice guys" are just boring.
As for geek chicks... they're also either stunningly beautiful or unattractive and overly aggressive. I don't think there's an in between there.
"beta" in Japanese, so I've heard, is a calligraphy term for a brushstroke that covers the entire surface of the stroke. Or something like that. At any rate, the term was chosen because of the way that the information was recorded on the tape -- Beta was a fairly high-density format compared to VHS, thus its greater image quality.
The technology worked for some people, and Sony eventually created the Betacam format based on Betamax. I have never dealt with Betacam myself, so I can't say what resemblance there is between the media for each format, but I think I can safely say that Betacam probably bears (very roughly) the same relation to Betamax in quality that SVHS does to VHS, probably quite a bit more so. Good enough for broadcast work, anyway, and having compared my own SVHS masters to real broadcast TV it's quite a difference.
These days everything's digital though... you can get better-than-broadcast with miniDV (assuming your equipment is studly enough) and, at least in theory, DVD. And the bar is just that much higher for broadcasters too, though the practical benefits probably really only shine through with DVD conversions and digital cable.
Betamax was the standard, in the beginning. Sony screwed up in not making it capable of doing everything that a home video format was supposed to do, and that's why it died.
Sony loves lockin though. I want a MiniDisc recorder, but I can't afford one with a mike jack. And Memory Stick, when most everyone else is using SD. Hell, even their new DV camcorders use a nonstandard a/v plug -- where most of the other digital camcorder makers use a modified mini-RCA jack for a/v out, Sony uses this odd little plug that looks like a micro-sized version of an Xbox USB plug. And then you have the misbegotten MicroMV tape format -- an overpriced, underperforming, mediocre-quality digital video "standard" created for keychain-sized camcorders which nobody really wanted or needed.
Sony has lost track of its audiences in recent years, I think. Their most recent high-end consumer camcorder is such a poor upgrade to the TRV-950 that it's an embarrassment, and of course they're hobbling their own formats with DRM restrictions. I mean, MD failed as a medium for prerecorded music, but if Sony hadn't crippled the design of their consumer MD equipment it could have replaced the audiotape by now. They're excellent at creating what consumers want, but lately they seem to keep repeating the Betamax mistake -- they don't follow through with the full product experience.
I don't think that's quite the case, though there are two separate versions of the iPod driver software so that might be the case for one of them.
It's actually a little more complicated than that -- you can use an iPod as a hard drive sure enough, but I believe that iTunes is required to bless the files you upload somehow to play them -- updating the database among other things. I don't know all the details, but I do know that it was more complicated than a simple upload. The people who wrote iPod support for Linux found that out -- had to reverse-engineer the database format as I recall.
I always wanted an ISO English ADB keyboard, just to be different... to this day I still wouldn't know where to get one though.
Apple's keyboards have never really impressed me. The only ADB keyboard I still use (though I have a spare or two kicking around) is a MacAlly, and they still use a form factor more or less similar to the old Apple Pro Keyboards even for some of their USB keyboards (the iKey, I believe). Their laptop keyboards are traditionally too delicate as well.
That said, I never really liked the clicky keyboards people seem to love. They just feel like you're putting too much effort into them. I also have one of those PS/2 mini-keyboards, which I actually used for a while in a very cramped computer space, but got tired of. The laptop-shallow key travel didn't do it for me, I guess.
That doesn't mean there's no reason to make it available.
What's really needed is a sort of open source TabletBIOS -- a basic nanokernel (Mach-based? FreeDOS-based? A hack of GRUB or LILO?) that provides very basic OS services and drivers for the tablet screen, even if it's nothing more than a proof-of-concept.
Truth be told I'm surprised there's no demand for a lightweight Open Source nanokernel. I'd do it myself if I knew what I was doing.
Sounds like a fair way of looking at it -- I believe Wacom also makes a display tablet for similar uses. But you're right, it's definitely a vertical-market sort of toy, excellent for artists and certain related disciplines, but not very interesting to the bulk of normal users. (If that's the case, though, Apple should be working on a tablet Powerbook. They've already got the hooks in the OS for a tablet design, but since there are no Mac clones nobody's using them.)
I've actually heard a theory that the push for Tablet PCs -- or at least the handwriting recognition associated with them -- is being driven by corporate executives who feel that keyboards and typing are beneath them, undignified secretary work. If that's the case, it's no wonder there's so little real-world interest -- most people don't mind keyboards.
They're two completely different things. OpenTransport handled transport protocols (AppleTalk, TCP/IP, theoretically IPX or NetBEUI though I don't think anyone ever implemented them), thus the name. ZeroConf operates on a higher network layer -- think of TCP/IP as the truck and ZeroConf as the CB on the truck.
Actually I believe you've got it backwards. Apple created FireWire, and the IEEE committee standardized it as IEEE 1394. I don't know when Sony decided to call it i.LINK though.
I wouldn't necessarily agree that the name is dead, though the transport protocol has been for some time. What OpenTransport did was unify the APIs for the protocols, not the protocols themselves -- there were still separate control panels and such.
Of course it's Berkeley Sockets as far as the eye can see now, but that's because STREAMS never caught on with the cool kids, not because of any inherent issues with the design. And AppleTalk refuses to die completely anyway -- the transport protocol may be gone, but there is still nothing like AFP/AppleShare IP for quick cross-network file transfers. (It's less of a headache to set up than Samba, at any rate.)
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On the opposite side of the coin, may I present Mel Gibson, who will also be entitled to his choice of projects for the next couple of years, and who was sure his career would be doomed for making the Passion of the Christ.
There's one big issue about movie downloads: bandwidth. Simple fact is that a full-frame, full-motion movie, even in DivX form, is going to take a massive amount of space up in the downloading process. Without fiber broadband, it just isn't going to be worth the trouble for the forseeable future.
You know, I see a lot of people complaining about this, and frankly I wind up thinking of most of them as some sort of neophilic quasi-Luddites. Film has a look to it that some people appreciate. Fact is, you look at most of what's on TV these days, it's the film look as far as the eye can see. Video tends to look a bit harsh sometimes, perhaps a bit too lively. Film looks more sedate, more "professional" somehow. (Notice most sitcoms during the 80s and 90s were on tape; most are film look now.) Film also has much broader theoretical resolution compared to video -- the best available video in terms of resolution is 1080i HDTV, but film resolution is limited only by particle size in the emulsion.
My point isn't that film is better; my point is that it's a very subjective thing, and it seems people tend to be more comfortable looking at film. I haven't seen it myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if some people thought that the fact that 28 Days Later was shot on DV made it substantially edgier in visual appearance. It's as much about associations as it is technology. If it was my production, I'd probably shoot on HDV 720p, but that's for budget reasons. Film just looks more like what people like to look at.
Detonating a nuke -- especially above ground -- would come under the category of "too stupid".
I guess we'll know more in the morning.
Well, yeah. That's true too, especially when baking, maybe not so important for a simple entree, but something to keep in mind.
The Zahn novels (and to a lesser extent the Correllian trilogy of Roger McBride Allen) were very well-written books and worthy additions to the world of Star Wars. If you think Zahn sucked, you haven't read the work of uberhack Kevin Anderson.
Baking and commercial production are each special cases, with concerns of their own. Baking has to be very scientific or it will fail, and commercial production has issues of product consistency that are simply unimportant to a home cook. Engineered recipes are a waste of time in many circumstances.
In any case, look at Escoffier. If you pick up a copy of the Guide Culinaire you get page after page of recipe descriptions, but few actual worked-out recipes. Why? Because the engineering is in the techniques used, not the recipes themselves. It is of no use to the well-educated cook to have a full-on recipe for sole meuniere; better to know how to apply a la meuniere technique to any sort of fish than focus on one specific recipe.
It's my belief that in the age of the internet two things are worth considering:
a) there's no excuse for someone who doesn't have the ability to cook metric in the US -- the measuring tools are available; and
b) there's no reason for non-USians to get their panties in a bunch over the issue, since conversion tables are readily available as well.
A smart recipe writer, though, writing for an international audience, should put metric conversions on their recipes for internet distribution. (Granted I haven't been consistent about it on my own recipe pages, but I do try.)
Fuzzy logic, dude.
I think the real issue is not men vs. women, but fuzzy vs. discrete or instinctual vs. analytical. Except for baking, cooking tends not to be very scientific, just a pinch of this, a pinch of that. (If you want some real seat-of-the-pants technique, consider that cooks in Taillevent's time had almost no temperature control at all, and still managed to put out some pretty amazing results.)
For me, it's the labels on the knob that I use to judge "medium", "medium-high", whatever. Now if I had that brick oven in the backyard that I wanted, I'd have to relearn all that, and that's where experience becomes the teacher. Sometimes there's no substitute for someone coming up to you and saying "That, my friend, is a gentle heat".
The Brits are the best about it -- both Imperial and metric units, because they've used both for a few decades. Their cookbooks usually have both units, and if you're an American trying to use British gallons (for example) you can use the metric quantities for disambiguation.
I mentioned in another post Cooks Illustrated -- they've got the scientific approach down. And we can't forget Julia -- after all, Mastering the Art of French Cooking was as much about technique as it was recipes.
Truthfully, I think Alton Brown would point to Harold McGee, as would Shirley Corriher and Howard Hillman.
I like the notation he uses. Very concise, perhaps a bit odd-looking if it was typeset instead of rendered as HTML tables, but it works beautifully.
That said, shouts out to Alton Brown (the patron saint of geek cooks) and the crew at Cooks Illustrated, and a toast to Julia the Great.
If you want to know more about uranium, check out Theodore Gray's Uranium page -- U-238 gives off mostly alpha radiation and is pretty harmless unless you eat it or inhale it. (I'd take a Geiger counter to that red Fiestaware, though -- that's definitely something to keep on the shelf rather than use for dinner.) Gray has quite a number of uranium samples, including two pieces of more or less pure depleted uranium. Interesting stuff.
Fuel reprocessing would be nice -- there'd be a hell of a lot less waste to deal with if they did that. But the Powers That Be are concerned about security of the reprocessed fuel -- I think the environmental issue of thousands of tons of high-level radioactive waste outweighs security concerns, but what do I know? I work at a furniture store.
Fusion wouldn't be sustainable in case of an accident anyway... you'd probably get a light show and a ruined reactor in the case of a containment failure, but fusion bombs and fusion reactors are entirely different beasts. (IIRC a "fusion" bomb is triggered by a fission reaction, which in turn triggers an even larger fission reaction. A standard fission reactor, on the other hand, is nothing more than a tightly controlled bomb, running at a very low rate so it doesn't blow up.)
Myth: Chicks dig assholes.
Harsh Reality: Chicks dig exciting guys. Assholes tend to be exciting. Geeks tend to be too arcane to be interesting; "nice guys" are just boring.
As for geek chicks... they're also either stunningly beautiful or unattractive and overly aggressive. I don't think there's an in between there.
"beta" in Japanese, so I've heard, is a calligraphy term for a brushstroke that covers the entire surface of the stroke. Or something like that. At any rate, the term was chosen because of the way that the information was recorded on the tape -- Beta was a fairly high-density format compared to VHS, thus its greater image quality.
The technology worked for some people, and Sony eventually created the Betacam format based on Betamax. I have never dealt with Betacam myself, so I can't say what resemblance there is between the media for each format, but I think I can safely say that Betacam probably bears (very roughly) the same relation to Betamax in quality that SVHS does to VHS, probably quite a bit more so. Good enough for broadcast work, anyway, and having compared my own SVHS masters to real broadcast TV it's quite a difference.
These days everything's digital though... you can get better-than-broadcast with miniDV (assuming your equipment is studly enough) and, at least in theory, DVD. And the bar is just that much higher for broadcasters too, though the practical benefits probably really only shine through with DVD conversions and digital cable.
Betamax was the standard, in the beginning. Sony screwed up in not making it capable of doing everything that a home video format was supposed to do, and that's why it died.
Sony loves lockin though. I want a MiniDisc recorder, but I can't afford one with a mike jack. And Memory Stick, when most everyone else is using SD. Hell, even their new DV camcorders use a nonstandard a/v plug -- where most of the other digital camcorder makers use a modified mini-RCA jack for a/v out, Sony uses this odd little plug that looks like a micro-sized version of an Xbox USB plug. And then you have the misbegotten MicroMV tape format -- an overpriced, underperforming, mediocre-quality digital video "standard" created for keychain-sized camcorders which nobody really wanted or needed.
Sony has lost track of its audiences in recent years, I think. Their most recent high-end consumer camcorder is such a poor upgrade to the TRV-950 that it's an embarrassment, and of course they're hobbling their own formats with DRM restrictions. I mean, MD failed as a medium for prerecorded music, but if Sony hadn't crippled the design of their consumer MD equipment it could have replaced the audiotape by now. They're excellent at creating what consumers want, but lately they seem to keep repeating the Betamax mistake -- they don't follow through with the full product experience.
I don't think that's quite the case, though there are two separate versions of the iPod driver software so that might be the case for one of them.
It's actually a little more complicated than that -- you can use an iPod as a hard drive sure enough, but I believe that iTunes is required to bless the files you upload somehow to play them -- updating the database among other things. I don't know all the details, but I do know that it was more complicated than a simple upload. The people who wrote iPod support for Linux found that out -- had to reverse-engineer the database format as I recall.
I always wanted an ISO English ADB keyboard, just to be different... to this day I still wouldn't know where to get one though.
Apple's keyboards have never really impressed me. The only ADB keyboard I still use (though I have a spare or two kicking around) is a MacAlly, and they still use a form factor more or less similar to the old Apple Pro Keyboards even for some of their USB keyboards (the iKey, I believe). Their laptop keyboards are traditionally too delicate as well.
That said, I never really liked the clicky keyboards people seem to love. They just feel like you're putting too much effort into them. I also have one of those PS/2 mini-keyboards, which I actually used for a while in a very cramped computer space, but got tired of. The laptop-shallow key travel didn't do it for me, I guess.
That doesn't mean there's no reason to make it available.
What's really needed is a sort of open source TabletBIOS -- a basic nanokernel (Mach-based? FreeDOS-based? A hack of GRUB or LILO?) that provides very basic OS services and drivers for the tablet screen, even if it's nothing more than a proof-of-concept.
Truth be told I'm surprised there's no demand for a lightweight Open Source nanokernel. I'd do it myself if I knew what I was doing.
Sounds like a fair way of looking at it -- I believe Wacom also makes a display tablet for similar uses. But you're right, it's definitely a vertical-market sort of toy, excellent for artists and certain related disciplines, but not very interesting to the bulk of normal users. (If that's the case, though, Apple should be working on a tablet Powerbook. They've already got the hooks in the OS for a tablet design, but since there are no Mac clones nobody's using them.)
I've actually heard a theory that the push for Tablet PCs -- or at least the handwriting recognition associated with them -- is being driven by corporate executives who feel that keyboards and typing are beneath them, undignified secretary work. If that's the case, it's no wonder there's so little real-world interest -- most people don't mind keyboards.
They're two completely different things. OpenTransport handled transport protocols (AppleTalk, TCP/IP, theoretically IPX or NetBEUI though I don't think anyone ever implemented them), thus the name. ZeroConf operates on a higher network layer -- think of TCP/IP as the truck and ZeroConf as the CB on the truck.
Actually I believe you've got it backwards. Apple created FireWire, and the IEEE committee standardized it as IEEE 1394. I don't know when Sony decided to call it i.LINK though.
I wouldn't necessarily agree that the name is dead, though the transport protocol has been for some time. What OpenTransport did was unify the APIs for the protocols, not the protocols themselves -- there were still separate control panels and such.
Of course it's Berkeley Sockets as far as the eye can see now, but that's because STREAMS never caught on with the cool kids, not because of any inherent issues with the design. And AppleTalk refuses to die completely anyway -- the transport protocol may be gone, but there is still nothing like AFP/AppleShare IP for quick cross-network file transfers. (It's less of a headache to set up than Samba, at any rate.)