Maybe the developmentally disabled kids need a lot more help to be functional (and if they don't get that help as kids, we end up feeding them their whole adult lives), and the genuises don't need as much help?
Honestly, I wish I'd gotten help for my actual limitations (mild autism, which has been moderately crippling at times), but frankly, for the genius stuff, it would have been sufficient for the schools to mostly get out of my way.
AppleWorks was massively undermaintained, buggy, and really needed work -- but they sacrificed it for iWork, and then kept it around solely for the spreadsheet. I am SO glad to have, finally, a decent and stable spreadsheet for the Mac. (I guess NeoOffice sorta counts, but I like Numbers better.)
Just 38% were "relaxed enough" to wait a day or more to answer the phone, too. Hope you like hold music.
Seriously, is this all that bad? I check my mail whenever I have an idle cycle or three, and that often means that I get things done sooner rather than later. Similarly, probably the biggest single waste of time in my day is waiting on responses to things that I really wanted a response on soon.
Yeah, people like me, who are playing WoW, with its crap graphics and good gameplay, and who spend our time hanging out at a PS3 forum pointing out that my PS3 gathers dust because it's got no games worth playing, but who own at least ten Wii games.
Actually, I don't think I'm one of those. Yeah, I have an iPod -- but I only got it within the last month, and I didn't even touch the crap headphones that came with it.
The fact is, its sound quality is noticably better than any stereo or speaker I've used in the last ten years, and it produces much clearer sound from 160kbps MP3s than my stereo ever did from original CDs.
Also, I'd point out that I'd never use 128kbps for anything I wanted to listen to, because at that point, I can hear the difference. It's just a bit further out that I stop caring, because problems with the sound are trumped by problems with hardware.
Have you done double-blinds to see exactly what you can and can't hear? I'm assuming that, if you're doing real sound engineering, you're not an audiophile nutjob, so you at least recognize that double-blind tests are significant.
It's pretty nice. Wouldn't mind if it were brighter.
The really frustrating thing is, I'd had AA working previously on different hardware with different drivers, so I was so sure that something was wrong, but then I set it to 16xAA, and sure enough, it was dog slow, so it MUST be antialiasing. I briefly theorized that nvidia's hardware just had the least effective antialiasing hardware ever.
I've been using antialiasing for rendering programs since the late 80s, I'm used to the feel.
I spent a while once thinking I couldn't tell AA from no-AA.
Then I discovered that, with the drivers I was using at the time, the "full screen glow" effect in WoW replaced antialiasing, so you still took the performance hit, but you didn't actually get any jaggy reduction. (This was under WINE. I dunno whose fault the compatibility problem was.)
But it's really noticable to me -- and I'm playing at 1920x1200 on a MacBook nowadays, and I still can't play without AA. So, given that I'm now on a 17" screen, that suggests a fair amount of room to be able to see such details.
I'm not at all convinced. I can certainly tell AA from no-AA. I can also tell good sound from bad sound; despite the crap headphones that come with the ipod, if you get decent ones, the response is incredible -- I'm consistently picking out details on the ipod, from 160kbps MP3s, that I never noticed listening to my "good" stereo. (And no, I don't think they're compression artefacts; things like another voice in the background that I just never noticed before.)
I'm not exactly a professional musician, but I've put songs together, and I've worked with more serious types... And what I've found is that, time and again, the people who think they can tell turn out to be unable to pass a double-blind test. I can easily make out low-bandwidth MP3s; 128kbps was too annoying for me, so I had to upgrade. I think I mostly use 160 now, but it might be 192... But at that point, the flaws in the encoding are totally swamped by flaws in the physical media available to me. A little background hiss? It's not as loud as the fans on my desktop. A little buzzing? I get worse than that from having too many wireless devices near my stereo. (I can tell when my cell phone is going to ring; the noise is quite noticable.)
So I think it's not sufficient for you to just handwave and say it's all a problem with me. I can hear well enough to distinguish things that most people don't hear -- but I honestly don't care about the difference between decent bitrate MP3s and uncompressed audio. For a lot of the music I have, the noise from the original analog tapes is worse anyway.
I'm not at all convinced. I have an awful lot of music encoded at a mere 160kbps, and I can't usually tell which I'm listening to. Of course, I don't have an astoundingly great stereo... But since I can't afford one, what do I care? In the world I actually live in, no, I can't tell the difference; it's swamped by other noises.
Remember the complaints in the article about "higher prices"?
First off, the capacity being sold right now is beyond what we have the technology to create. 10 gigabit switch? A thousand users with ten megabit connections would soak that through, and there are places with twenty thousand users.
Secondly, it would cost ten or twenty times what we currently pay.
Fuck that! I'll take the current situation over these ivory tower dogmatisms, any day of the week.
Competition at work; if one company offers me 1Mbps for a given price, and another offers me 10Mbps for the same price, I'm gonna go with the company that offers 10.
Except, of course, that if we all do that, and actually use it, we have problems.
I'm okay with some amount of overselling; it makes good economic sense. If companies only sold as much bandwidth as they could guarantee everyone at once, my downloads would be throttled to MAYBE 512Kbps right now, more likely 256. As is, I get 7Mbps, and I really have downloaded files at 600K*B* per second... But I don't get that all the time.
I'm fine with that. My fear is that, if we start legislating "no overselling", I'll end up with bandwidth throttled ALL the time to ensure that, even if everyone in the entire city tried to download at once, I'd see no difference in performance. I'd rather not have that.
But without regulation, other companies could come in and compete. The best efforts to "stifle" competition are nothing compared with an absolute legal ban on it.
Actually, even that page supports the claim -- it was widely believed that there was a coming ice-age, people reported on it, sci fi writers talked about it, and so on.
It wasn't the same as what we have now, certainly; there was less consistency in beliefs, and a lot less detailed evidence. But then, that's true for lots of things that have changed one or two times in my lifetime.
As an argument that there's no global warming, it's inept. As an argument that people ought to be a little less hasty to take actions based on popular news reporting about science, it's spot on. As a simple statement of fact, it's indubitably correct.
"Solaris" has almost always been used to refer to their bloated crapware based on SVR4, rather than their relatively slim but buggy SunOS, which was based on BSD.
Of course, late releases of SunOS got relabeled "Solaris" to confuse people.
Disclaimer: Modern Solaris doesn't suck so much, but SVR4 needed a lot more polish than it got early on, and it's always been sorta huge.
I don't buy a gaming console to be all sorts of other crap; I buy it to play games.
Nintendo's success comes from their decision to sell a good toy at a reasonable (albeit sorta high) price for a toy, while their competition is trying to sell a toy at a ludicrously high price, claiming that it's a really good deal for the incredible general-purpose computer and movie machine that it really is... But since the market is the toy market, that's sorta running into issues.
The ARC's thing isn't a trademark; there's a special law recognizing it. They do NOT have to defend it, necessarily, but they tend to do so quite actively -- and mostly, they're going against what are effectively fraudulent uses, people trying to create the impression that they're allied with the red cross.
Yeah, I guess... I just don't really care. I am rich with computers, practically drowning in them. I am fine with not being able to get a shell prompt on my toys. I guess if I cared, I'd get a dev kit and write my own.:)
Billions and billions of dollars of year are not a "solved" problem.
I'm not saying we need or want legislation. I'm just saying that it's not a solved problem.
Greylisting is a workaround. It is an obnoxious workaround which reduces the functionality of legitimate mail. Any time I have to sacrifice some useful functionality to keep things working, that is exactly what a "workaround" is.
I'm not claiming there is, or should be, a silver bullet; nothing I said implied any such thing. What I am saying is that what we have right now is utter crap, costing us billions and billions of dollars, wasting the full-time employment of many many thousands of people, and that we could do orders of magnitude better if there was general buy-in for it.
People saying the problem is "solved", while the rest of us are losing a day or more of our productive output every week to this "solved" problem, are making the problem worse, not better. You might as well declare that the drug-related violence problem in America is "solved" by the War On Some Drugs.
Re:They try to send, but don't really succeed
on
The New Yorker On Spam
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You know, I actually do use greylisting. And a lot of other techniques, too.
They all add up, and they really do require a lot of extra hardware.
Do you have any clue what percentage of the bandwidth I pay for is going to the initial TCP packets from hosts I drop immediately? I'll give you a hint: It's a lot.
I guess... I've heard serious discussion from people at large sites of what goes into their spam filtering. I'd guess they're not morons; in many cases, I know that they are quite intelligent, and have a lot of experience, and put a lot of time into learning about this stuff.
They think it's expensive. Hell, the mere fact that there are people who are putting in full-time jobs at this proves that it's expensive.
It's not solved. As long as it's taking a measurable number of people working full-time to "solve" it, it's not solved. It'll be solved when we no longer have to spend huge chunks of bandwidth on it, no longer lose mail to it, no longer have mail delayed by it -- you do know that greylisting often delays legitimate mail, right? -- and otherwise no longer have to pay for it. Until then, it's not solved, we just have workarounds that are more tolerable than not having the workarounds.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the developmentally disabled kids need a lot more help to be functional (and if they don't get that help as kids, we end up feeding them their whole adult lives), and the genuises don't need as much help?
Honestly, I wish I'd gotten help for my actual limitations (mild autism, which has been moderately crippling at times), but frankly, for the genius stuff, it would have been sufficient for the schools to mostly get out of my way.
AppleWorks was massively undermaintained, buggy, and really needed work -- but they sacrificed it for iWork, and then kept it around solely for the spreadsheet. I am SO glad to have, finally, a decent and stable spreadsheet for the Mac. (I guess NeoOffice sorta counts, but I like Numbers better.)
For me, this kills Netflix. I'd been thinking about it, but I hate talking to people on the phone. I prefer email for many customer service tasks.
I would love the idea of making calling a service rep a viable option. I would not work with a company that wouldn't accept email.
Just 38% were "relaxed enough" to wait a day or more to answer the phone, too. Hope you like hold music.
Seriously, is this all that bad? I check my mail whenever I have an idle cycle or three, and that often means that I get things done sooner rather than later. Similarly, probably the biggest single waste of time in my day is waiting on responses to things that I really wanted a response on soon.
Yeah, people like me, who are playing WoW, with its crap graphics and good gameplay, and who spend our time hanging out at a PS3 forum pointing out that my PS3 gathers dust because it's got no games worth playing, but who own at least ten Wii games.
Yup. Graphics whore to the core.
Lemme go kill Morgoth again and get back to you.
Actually, I don't think I'm one of those. Yeah, I have an iPod -- but I only got it within the last month, and I didn't even touch the crap headphones that came with it.
The fact is, its sound quality is noticably better than any stereo or speaker I've used in the last ten years, and it produces much clearer sound from 160kbps MP3s than my stereo ever did from original CDs.
Also, I'd point out that I'd never use 128kbps for anything I wanted to listen to, because at that point, I can hear the difference. It's just a bit further out that I stop caring, because problems with the sound are trumped by problems with hardware.
Have you done double-blinds to see exactly what you can and can't hear? I'm assuming that, if you're doing real sound engineering, you're not an audiophile nutjob, so you at least recognize that double-blind tests are significant.
It's pretty nice. Wouldn't mind if it were brighter.
The really frustrating thing is, I'd had AA working previously on different hardware with different drivers, so I was so sure that something was wrong, but then I set it to 16xAA, and sure enough, it was dog slow, so it MUST be antialiasing. I briefly theorized that nvidia's hardware just had the least effective antialiasing hardware ever.
I've been using antialiasing for rendering programs since the late 80s, I'm used to the feel.
I spent a while once thinking I couldn't tell AA from no-AA.
Then I discovered that, with the drivers I was using at the time, the "full screen glow" effect in WoW replaced antialiasing, so you still took the performance hit, but you didn't actually get any jaggy reduction. (This was under WINE. I dunno whose fault the compatibility problem was.)
But it's really noticable to me -- and I'm playing at 1920x1200 on a MacBook nowadays, and I still can't play without AA. So, given that I'm now on a 17" screen, that suggests a fair amount of room to be able to see such details.
I'm not at all convinced. I can certainly tell AA from no-AA. I can also tell good sound from bad sound; despite the crap headphones that come with the ipod, if you get decent ones, the response is incredible -- I'm consistently picking out details on the ipod, from 160kbps MP3s, that I never noticed listening to my "good" stereo. (And no, I don't think they're compression artefacts; things like another voice in the background that I just never noticed before.)
I'm not exactly a professional musician, but I've put songs together, and I've worked with more serious types... And what I've found is that, time and again, the people who think they can tell turn out to be unable to pass a double-blind test. I can easily make out low-bandwidth MP3s; 128kbps was too annoying for me, so I had to upgrade. I think I mostly use 160 now, but it might be 192... But at that point, the flaws in the encoding are totally swamped by flaws in the physical media available to me. A little background hiss? It's not as loud as the fans on my desktop. A little buzzing? I get worse than that from having too many wireless devices near my stereo. (I can tell when my cell phone is going to ring; the noise is quite noticable.)
So I think it's not sufficient for you to just handwave and say it's all a problem with me. I can hear well enough to distinguish things that most people don't hear -- but I honestly don't care about the difference between decent bitrate MP3s and uncompressed audio. For a lot of the music I have, the noise from the original analog tapes is worse anyway.
I'm not at all convinced. I have an awful lot of music encoded at a mere 160kbps, and I can't usually tell which I'm listening to. Of course, I don't have an astoundingly great stereo... But since I can't afford one, what do I care? In the world I actually live in, no, I can't tell the difference; it's swamped by other noises.
Remember the complaints in the article about "higher prices"?
First off, the capacity being sold right now is beyond what we have the technology to create. 10 gigabit switch? A thousand users with ten megabit connections would soak that through, and there are places with twenty thousand users.
Secondly, it would cost ten or twenty times what we currently pay.
Fuck that! I'll take the current situation over these ivory tower dogmatisms, any day of the week.
Competition at work; if one company offers me 1Mbps for a given price, and another offers me 10Mbps for the same price, I'm gonna go with the company that offers 10.
Except, of course, that if we all do that, and actually use it, we have problems.
I'm okay with some amount of overselling; it makes good economic sense. If companies only sold as much bandwidth as they could guarantee everyone at once, my downloads would be throttled to MAYBE 512Kbps right now, more likely 256. As is, I get 7Mbps, and I really have downloaded files at 600K*B* per second... But I don't get that all the time.
I'm fine with that. My fear is that, if we start legislating "no overselling", I'll end up with bandwidth throttled ALL the time to ensure that, even if everyone in the entire city tried to download at once, I'd see no difference in performance. I'd rather not have that.
Yes, providers will have to raise prices or impose stringent caps.
This is what happens when people start trying to use a hugely oversold service.
But without regulation, other companies could come in and compete. The best efforts to "stifle" competition are nothing compared with an absolute legal ban on it.
Actually, even that page supports the claim -- it was widely believed that there was a coming ice-age, people reported on it, sci fi writers talked about it, and so on.
It wasn't the same as what we have now, certainly; there was less consistency in beliefs, and a lot less detailed evidence. But then, that's true for lots of things that have changed one or two times in my lifetime.
As an argument that there's no global warming, it's inept. As an argument that people ought to be a little less hasty to take actions based on popular news reporting about science, it's spot on. As a simple statement of fact, it's indubitably correct.
"Solaris" has almost always been used to refer to their bloated crapware based on SVR4, rather than their relatively slim but buggy SunOS, which was based on BSD.
Of course, late releases of SunOS got relabeled "Solaris" to confuse people.
Disclaimer: Modern Solaris doesn't suck so much, but SVR4 needed a lot more polish than it got early on, and it's always been sorta huge.
The claim may not be that all forum members are journalists... But that some might be.
Er, the red cross wouldn't be involved at all at an actual scene. They don't do that.
They would be selling the hospital blood at market rates, and pocketing the profit.
Get the story right.
I don't buy a gaming console to be all sorts of other crap; I buy it to play games.
Nintendo's success comes from their decision to sell a good toy at a reasonable (albeit sorta high) price for a toy, while their competition is trying to sell a toy at a ludicrously high price, claiming that it's a really good deal for the incredible general-purpose computer and movie machine that it really is... But since the market is the toy market, that's sorta running into issues.
Maybe they shoulda called it the MovieStation.
The ARC's thing isn't a trademark; there's a special law recognizing it. They do NOT have to defend it, necessarily, but they tend to do so quite actively -- and mostly, they're going against what are effectively fraudulent uses, people trying to create the impression that they're allied with the red cross.
Let's take a quiz. Two wrongs don't make a.... what?
A left! But three do.
Yeah, I guess... I just don't really care. I am rich with computers, practically drowning in them. I am fine with not being able to get a shell prompt on my toys. I guess if I cared, I'd get a dev kit and write my own. :)
It's the "moving towards being a media centre, and not a place for games" that has stuck them with $600 retail prices and poor sales.
I got a Wii because I wanted to play games.
Billions and billions of dollars of year are not a "solved" problem.
I'm not saying we need or want legislation. I'm just saying that it's not a solved problem.
Greylisting is a workaround. It is an obnoxious workaround which reduces the functionality of legitimate mail. Any time I have to sacrifice some useful functionality to keep things working, that is exactly what a "workaround" is.
I'm not claiming there is, or should be, a silver bullet; nothing I said implied any such thing. What I am saying is that what we have right now is utter crap, costing us billions and billions of dollars, wasting the full-time employment of many many thousands of people, and that we could do orders of magnitude better if there was general buy-in for it.
People saying the problem is "solved", while the rest of us are losing a day or more of our productive output every week to this "solved" problem, are making the problem worse, not better. You might as well declare that the drug-related violence problem in America is "solved" by the War On Some Drugs.
You know, I actually do use greylisting. And a lot of other techniques, too.
They all add up, and they really do require a lot of extra hardware.
Do you have any clue what percentage of the bandwidth I pay for is going to the initial TCP packets from hosts I drop immediately? I'll give you a hint: It's a lot.
I guess... I've heard serious discussion from people at large sites of what goes into their spam filtering. I'd guess they're not morons; in many cases, I know that they are quite intelligent, and have a lot of experience, and put a lot of time into learning about this stuff.
They think it's expensive. Hell, the mere fact that there are people who are putting in full-time jobs at this proves that it's expensive.
It's not solved. As long as it's taking a measurable number of people working full-time to "solve" it, it's not solved. It'll be solved when we no longer have to spend huge chunks of bandwidth on it, no longer lose mail to it, no longer have mail delayed by it -- you do know that greylisting often delays legitimate mail, right? -- and otherwise no longer have to pay for it. Until then, it's not solved, we just have workarounds that are more tolerable than not having the workarounds.