If you're looking for an area that is only lightly touched upon by computer book publishers its this: tackle a single problem in detail. Design a database backed web site, and spend the entire book detailing the site as a case study. Or write a sophisticated P2P app, and spend the whole book talking about that.
There are millions of "Learn Programming X in <timeframe>" or "Massive OS XII under the hood" books. Yours will only be the million and oneth.
But write books detailing individual projects, of real-world complexity and depth and I think you will see those fly off the shelves.
If you've written neural net programs, writing a web spider should be a walk in the park. Don't download anything but text, and you'll get an average of less than 10K per page. 1,000,000 pages will fit in less than 10GB of disk space.
Well, my subject line was changed a bit, so it looks like I need broad information on constructing a studio, but really, all I asked for was some pointers on recording analog sounds like guitar, drums, and vocals onto hard disk.
I've found cards with 24bit/96kHz specs for under $200 yet other cards with the same specs(maybe more I/O options) that sell for $800 or more. So I'm really trying to find people who have the experience to know what to buy and what not to buy from the point of getting the most bang for the buck.
So basically, my question is: how do I record analog sounds to my PC with the highest quality possible at a reasonable price?
That was quite an insightful comment. In fact I think this is the best comment I've read in this entire thread.
Its been apparent to me for some time now that our current capitalist system is woefully inadequate in dealing with the realites of products being reproduced and distributed for very little cost. Capitalism is based entirely upon the idea of unique physical objects. You have a physical item that suggests the amount of labor and materials that went into it. A fair price is set, and the overwhelming majority of the people who wish to obtain these objects will fork over their hard earned money for them.
Now we have all these things where it is next to impossible for the average customer to ascertain the value of their particular copy of an object. Its difficult to see how much work goes into a piece of software and its even more difficult to see how many other people have paid for this software. If a large number of people have gotten it for free, you might even feel cheated because you had to pay for yours! Especially when you have a large contingent of people saying software should be free(in reference to obtaining an illegally copied piece of software) or saying that copyright infringement is not theft, therefore its not a bad thing to do.
You brought up a point I had never thought about before. China and other underdeveloped countries are going to standardize on free software, and also look the other way when software is massively pirated. I hear you can go into any number of retail stores and get perfect copies of just about anything, with original-looking packaging even, for less than $3 per piece of software. We are going to be competing with entire countries that don't pay for software. In the long run that's going to cause some serious repercussions to the economy.
Unless, as you say, the government steps in and restructures the economy so that it can deal with our digital age.
Actually we have a republic, not a democracy. Otherwise Al Gore would be the president. Perhaps you should revisit your fourth grade history book.(see the part about the electoral college) Or maybe you are suggesting it would be OK to overthrow the republic and install a real democracy?
Hmm...well I am definitely not on the side of anarchist wackos, so sorry if you read what I wrote that way.
I think we have a great government, because at the heart of that government is the Constitution. Basically I'm just a person who is intent on making sure that the freedoms enumerated by the Constitution and Bill of Rights don't get withered away - by Corporate America, the WTO, special interest groups, etc.
Re:violently overthrow the Constitution?
on
Raisethefist.com Raided
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You're so right. When our Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence there's no doubt they wanted a peaceful political solution!
It's those damn British who forced us to violently overthrow them. Had they not been so insistent on keeping us as a colony, the whole matter could have been settled peacefully.
Yeah, yeah, this guy broke into websites and should be punished. However, way too many people seem to be forgetting a couple of things.
1 - The right of the people to overthrow their government when it fails to meet their needs is written in the Declaration of Independence:
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government
It is expressly Patriotic according to our countries founding document to overthrow the government should it become tyrannical.
2 - we have this little thing called freedom of speech. There is no law prohibiting the dissemination of bomb making information. If that is a crime, I guess Amazon.com is a terrorist organization:
I suggest we keep these things in mind as we continue to hunt down terrorists. Its important not to forget the freedoms that make this country worth fighting for.
guess I should have looked for the email link first. You can't actually email them your information - because when you get to the next page they identify themselves.
To bid on these shares, you must quickly e-mail us the number of shares you wish to purchase, together with your major credit card number and social security number (for identification) so we can reserve your slot.
Thanks, SEC! Now I now where to listen for plain text emails containing social security card and credit numbers. So perhaps you are teaching people a lesson, but who's gonna pay when they become real victims of identity and credit card theft?
The way they are handling this is just as irresponsible as the people who would actually email sensitive information.
Well, seeing as how I already hook my Playstation through my stereo, with this it can be an MP3 server/TIVO. I can network it with other computers that store music, video, etc. I can pause to check the rest of my network while I'm playing games or watching TV.
I was planning on using a computer for DVD/MP3 playback anyway - this would just be cheaper and cooler than what I had planned for in the first place.
If only the mouse and keyboard were wireless. Damn!
Based on Borland's past offerings, I'd say there will probably be a free C++ compiler(command line) but not C++ builder.
I'm currently learning Java using their JBuilder6 Personal Edition, (a very good Java IDE, I might add). It's available for free on both Windows and Linux. Its got everything you need to learn Java, just not the enterprise stuff. So its possible they might do the same with C++ Builder. Its just in the past(for Windows) they made the base compiler free and charged you for the IDE.
I think Slashdot got this story wrong. A couple of other posters are mentioning that RC3 was just released.
BTW, I'm still using pure-ftpd. Last time I replied to a comment of yours I was just trying it out, but now its in production. Works great! With the vulnerabilities in wu-ftp and others, hopefully you have gotten a lot more users.(pure-ftp is written with security in mind for those reading this comment.)
That's because no one has done it right so far. Battery life on an IPAQ or Jornada is to short to make a useful GPS(for me anyway.) It should be able to last a weekend without needing to be recharged.
I use a Palm Pilot, GPS, cell phone, and MP3 player separately. If someone combined all those things into a single device that was still small and had a good battery life I would definitely snap it up.
on the new Slash book. I have a feeling we will sell a lot of these(I'm telling the computer book buyers about this and placing my order today). Despite the overabundance of computer books, there really aren't a whole lot of books that detail end-to-end how to do a complete database-driven site from beginning to end.
A book on installing and running a Slash site would have to cover a lot of things - installing Linux, Apache, mod_perl(not to mention a bunch of other perl modules), and MySQL. Hopefully this book will show how to make a scalable site by using NFS and multiple web servers - since Slash is capable of running on such a beast.
I think a book like this could be useful to a lot of people, and not necessarily just people who want to run a Slash site. If you've ever gotten a Slash site going, you know there is a lot of setup and configuration to make it work, and that is applicable to a lot of other things.
Its just too hard to look at an article on censorship just yet considering recent events. As many of you know, this post recently caused quite a stir, with over 200 replies, and over 500 moderations so far?
Its not the findings of this post that disturb me so much, actually I don't really agree with his post. Its the fact that the editors decided to massively override the hundreds of moderations in favor of this post, and not only that, to moderate down many long time users who have never trolled, simply for replying to his post.
In my opinion moderation works pretty well most of the time. But it is definitely a system whereby the editors of this site implicity trust the moderators to regulate the system. Yes, negativekarmanow's post was offtopic. But it was also interesting, dammit. Interesting is another perfectly valid moderation option. The users of this site that moderated this post found it interesting, yet the editors overrode the users(on a massive scale) and decreed that this post was offtopic. Funny, I don't remember reading in the moderation FAQ that offtopic overrode interesting. Maybe there are valid moderators out there who consider interesting to be more important than offtopic?
Speaking of things that aren't in the FAQ, what about the editor moderations themselves? This isn't mentioned anywhere in the FAQ. If you dig, you can find posts by Jamie admitting that the editors moderate. But nowhere does he say they will use their unlimited power to override regular users moderation. I mean think about it, thats about as bad of a flaw as you can get. How can anyone possibly trust using the moderation system knowing that they can be overridden by the editors? How can anybody metamoderate knowing that such action may be potentially useless as the editors have amply proven that they will decide what is a valid moderation and what is not.
Also, I feel particularly offended by this comment from another editor. The moderation FAQ recommends people getting involved and posting often. But Michael says if you have posted 700 comments you need to get a life. Fort Knox has a user ID close to mine meaning he's been here for over two years. That's just under one comment a day(I have posted at a similar rate over my history). So folks, if you post just one comment a day you are a loser who needs to get a life, according to at least one editor.
I recommend at minimum these issues get addressed in the moderation FAQ, and a meta-story would be even better. Until then, I'm clicking the "Unwilling to Moderate" checkbox, and I'll certainly view every censorship story with a raised eyebrow.
Insightful. I put almost all of the blame for the current recession on the idiotic free-for-all that was the dot-com economy circa 1999.
Of course, the bargain hunters will never learn because in general people always think short-term rather than long term, and almost nobody will sacrifice small personal gain for greater societal gain.:( But the people in charge of businesses should know better.
The online bargains were another symptom of the dot-coms that are mostly gone now. They were there because these people would do just about anything to bring people to their web sites. In other words, they lost money on every sale but made up for it in volume.
The death of these businesses has been a good thing for my online bookstore, which is an addition to a business that has been around for twenty years. Now we can reasonably compete with fair prices, whereas before it was hard because of all the damn giveaways and businesses selling merchandise at a loss.
Its not a good thing for the economy in general if you have a bunch of businesses blowing through venture capital by selling their merchandise at a loss or giving it away. But that was the business plan for a great many merchants trying to establish themselves online. Good riddance, I say.
Oracle 9i is the shit. I certainly haven't been able to break it.(heh)
Now, I have to apologize for my previous post that criticized the parent. Although I still disagree with the specific points you made, now I see the light. This really is an abuse of editor moderation. Sure the editors can mod down trolls, but as far as I know, regular users have always been able to post to offtopic threads without being modded down. Bitchslapping an entire thread and moderating down valid posts is indeed excessive.
There. I was a man and admitted I was wrong. Think we'll ever get the same from the editors?
First of all I want to say that in no way am I associated with this web site and that I am posting this entirely of my own volition. I'm not trying to garner favor with the editors, and I'm certainly not trying to gain karma(I'm at the kap and I expect to lose karma for posting this).
Why is it the trolls and crapflooders are always the ones who complain about moderation? You spew your misinformation and crap all over Slashdot and then you claim to be improving it!
That said, I disagree with pretty much every point in your post:
1. Duh. Of course more moderator points are spent modding people down. Thats because there are unfortunately more trolls and crapflooders than there are insightful posts. Now if you people were to go away and get a life, this wouldn't be the case, now would it? Interesting and clever are subjective. Do you really expect the Slashdot Collective to moderate according to your opinion? You are wrong about there being more +5 posts than +3 or +4. In virtually every story there is a declining number of posts at each successive moderation level.
2. Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. You really mean to say that logged in trolls are modded down than anonymous trolls, right? Well, duh, again. I'd expect the editors to quickly put +1 or +2 trolls in their place. They disturb the discussion far more than anonymous trolls do.
3. Once you have a karma of -4 or -5, your posts have a score of -1 by default. Who cares? Once a post is -1, it can't be modded any lower, so why would someone bother modding it down even further. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here, but you make no sense.
4. Substituting Windows for BSD to make a Windows is Dying post is not clever. The only people who would think the sex with goats post is funny are the trolls themselves. But again, subjective.
5. Now this is really funny. You are going back to a poll which took place before there even was moderation. How could people even know they didn't want what is here today?(hint: it wasn't even an option).
Forgive me if I don't buy the whole "Slashdot Editors are opressing us trolls" bit. Cry me a fuckin' river.
If you are talking about imposing rigid design and coding standards to software that is released to the public, it could have a far more adverse effect on small software publishers and open source projects than it does to, oh say Microsoft.
Seems to me this will have the least impact on those who need to pay attention to security the most(large software companies) while having the potential to make it harder for the "little guy" to write and publish software.
Has anyone else had this idea. What if Slashdot/EFF/Sourceforge and whoever else was interested set up a fund to patent as many trivial ideas as they could, for the dual purpose of extracting money from large corporations and to point out to the world how idiotic some of the patents that are granted.
All you would need to do is look for obvious ideas that the big corps will need to use at some time in the near future then hold those ideas hostage until either the big corps pay through the nose or someone with a clue decides to pass legislation that raises the bar for granting patents.
Although this kind of stuff is not exactly new, it's still damn interesting.
My mom is an engineer at SNL, and I try to go once a year when they have their open house for families. The place is packed with stuff just as cool as this - supercomputers, particle colliders, nanotech, rockets and sattelites, I could go on and on. Really an amazing place - reading about it doesn't compare to seeing it in person. I highly recommend visiting if you get the chance.
Slashdot Mirror
There are millions of "Learn Programming X in <timeframe>" or "Massive OS XII under the hood" books. Yours will only be the million and oneth.
But write books detailing individual projects, of real-world complexity and depth and I think you will see those fly off the shelves.
If you've written neural net programs, writing a web spider should be a walk in the park. Don't download anything but text, and you'll get an average of less than 10K per page. 1,000,000 pages will fit in less than 10GB of disk space.
I've found cards with 24bit/96kHz specs for under $200 yet other cards with the same specs(maybe more I/O options) that sell for $800 or more. So I'm really trying to find people who have the experience to know what to buy and what not to buy from the point of getting the most bang for the buck.
So basically, my question is: how do I record analog sounds to my PC with the highest quality possible at a reasonable price?
Its been apparent to me for some time now that our current capitalist system is woefully inadequate in dealing with the realites of products being reproduced and distributed for very little cost. Capitalism is based entirely upon the idea of unique physical objects. You have a physical item that suggests the amount of labor and materials that went into it. A fair price is set, and the overwhelming majority of the people who wish to obtain these objects will fork over their hard earned money for them.
Now we have all these things where it is next to impossible for the average customer to ascertain the value of their particular copy of an object. Its difficult to see how much work goes into a piece of software and its even more difficult to see how many other people have paid for this software. If a large number of people have gotten it for free, you might even feel cheated because you had to pay for yours! Especially when you have a large contingent of people saying software should be free(in reference to obtaining an illegally copied piece of software) or saying that copyright infringement is not theft, therefore its not a bad thing to do.
You brought up a point I had never thought about before. China and other underdeveloped countries are going to standardize on free software, and also look the other way when software is massively pirated. I hear you can go into any number of retail stores and get perfect copies of just about anything, with original-looking packaging even, for less than $3 per piece of software. We are going to be competing with entire countries that don't pay for software. In the long run that's going to cause some serious repercussions to the economy.
Unless, as you say, the government steps in and restructures the economy so that it can deal with our digital age.
at least make a Cringely icon. This makes quite a few consecutive Cringely columns Slashdot has covered.
I think we have a great government, because at the heart of that government is the Constitution. Basically I'm just a person who is intent on making sure that the freedoms enumerated by the Constitution and Bill of Rights don't get withered away - by Corporate America, the WTO, special interest groups, etc.
It's those damn British who forced us to violently overthrow them. Had they not been so insistent on keeping us as a colony, the whole matter could have been settled peacefully.
1 - The right of the people to overthrow their government when it fails to meet their needs is written in the Declaration of Independence:
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government
It is expressly Patriotic according to our countries founding document to overthrow the government should it become tyrannical.
2 - we have this little thing called freedom of speech. There is no law prohibiting the dissemination of bomb making information. If that is a crime, I guess Amazon.com is a terrorist organization:
Poor Man's James Bond
Anarchist's Cookbook
Home Workshop Explosives
I suggest we keep these things in mind as we continue to hunt down terrorists. Its important not to forget the freedoms that make this country worth fighting for.
Need. More. Sleep. Ignore parent post.
To bid on these shares, you must quickly e-mail us the number of shares you wish to purchase, together with your major credit card number and social security number (for identification) so we can reserve your slot.
Thanks, SEC! Now I now where to listen for plain text emails containing social security card and credit numbers. So perhaps you are teaching people a lesson, but who's gonna pay when they become real victims of identity and credit card theft?
The way they are handling this is just as irresponsible as the people who would actually email sensitive information.
Well, seeing as how I already hook my Playstation through my stereo, with this it can be an MP3 server/TIVO. I can network it with other computers that store music, video, etc. I can pause to check the rest of my network while I'm playing games or watching TV.
I was planning on using a computer for DVD/MP3 playback anyway - this would just be cheaper and cooler than what I had planned for in the first place.
If only the mouse and keyboard were wireless. Damn!
I'm currently learning Java using their JBuilder6 Personal Edition, (a very good Java IDE, I might add). It's available for free on both Windows and Linux. Its got everything you need to learn Java, just not the enterprise stuff. So its possible they might do the same with C++ Builder. Its just in the past(for Windows) they made the base compiler free and charged you for the IDE.
BTW, I'm still using pure-ftpd. Last time I replied to a comment of yours I was just trying it out, but now its in production. Works great! With the vulnerabilities in wu-ftp and others, hopefully you have gotten a lot more users.(pure-ftp is written with security in mind for those reading this comment.)
That's because no one has done it right so far. Battery life on an IPAQ or Jornada is to short to make a useful GPS(for me anyway.) It should be able to last a weekend without needing to be recharged.
I use a Palm Pilot, GPS, cell phone, and MP3 player separately. If someone combined all those things into a single device that was still small and had a good battery life I would definitely snap it up.
A book on installing and running a Slash site would have to cover a lot of things - installing Linux, Apache, mod_perl(not to mention a bunch of other perl modules), and MySQL. Hopefully this book will show how to make a scalable site by using NFS and multiple web servers - since Slash is capable of running on such a beast.
I think a book like this could be useful to a lot of people, and not necessarily just people who want to run a Slash site. If you've ever gotten a Slash site going, you know there is a lot of setup and configuration to make it work, and that is applicable to a lot of other things.
Its not the findings of this post that disturb me so much, actually I don't really agree with his post. Its the fact that the editors decided to massively override the hundreds of moderations in favor of this post, and not only that, to moderate down many long time users who have never trolled, simply for replying to his post.
In my opinion moderation works pretty well most of the time. But it is definitely a system whereby the editors of this site implicity trust the moderators to regulate the system. Yes, negativekarmanow's post was offtopic. But it was also interesting, dammit. Interesting is another perfectly valid moderation option. The users of this site that moderated this post found it interesting, yet the editors overrode the users(on a massive scale) and decreed that this post was offtopic. Funny, I don't remember reading in the moderation FAQ that offtopic overrode interesting. Maybe there are valid moderators out there who consider interesting to be more important than offtopic?
Speaking of things that aren't in the FAQ, what about the editor moderations themselves? This isn't mentioned anywhere in the FAQ. If you dig, you can find posts by Jamie admitting that the editors moderate. But nowhere does he say they will use their unlimited power to override regular users moderation. I mean think about it, thats about as bad of a flaw as you can get. How can anyone possibly trust using the moderation system knowing that they can be overridden by the editors? How can anybody metamoderate knowing that such action may be potentially useless as the editors have amply proven that they will decide what is a valid moderation and what is not.
Also, I feel particularly offended by this comment from another editor. The moderation FAQ recommends people getting involved and posting often. But Michael says if you have posted 700 comments you need to get a life. Fort Knox has a user ID close to mine meaning he's been here for over two years. That's just under one comment a day(I have posted at a similar rate over my history). So folks, if you post just one comment a day you are a loser who needs to get a life, according to at least one editor.
I recommend at minimum these issues get addressed in the moderation FAQ, and a meta-story would be even better. Until then, I'm clicking the "Unwilling to Moderate" checkbox, and I'll certainly view every censorship story with a raised eyebrow.
Of course, the bargain hunters will never learn because in general people always think short-term rather than long term, and almost nobody will sacrifice small personal gain for greater societal gain.
The death of these businesses has been a good thing for my online bookstore, which is an addition to a business that has been around for twenty years. Now we can reasonably compete with fair prices, whereas before it was hard because of all the damn giveaways and businesses selling merchandise at a loss.
Its not a good thing for the economy in general if you have a bunch of businesses blowing through venture capital by selling their merchandise at a loss or giving it away. But that was the business plan for a great many merchants trying to establish themselves online. Good riddance, I say.
Now, I have to apologize for my previous post that criticized the parent. Although I still disagree with the specific points you made, now I see the light. This really is an abuse of editor moderation. Sure the editors can mod down trolls, but as far as I know, regular users have always been able to post to offtopic threads without being modded down. Bitchslapping an entire thread and moderating down valid posts is indeed excessive.
There. I was a man and admitted I was wrong. Think we'll ever get the same from the editors?
Why is it the trolls and crapflooders are always the ones who complain about moderation? You spew your misinformation and crap all over Slashdot and then you claim to be improving it!
That said, I disagree with pretty much every point in your post:
Forgive me if I don't buy the whole "Slashdot Editors are opressing us trolls" bit. Cry me a fuckin' river.
IHBT
I don't know malloc, but I'm pretty good with new and delete.
OK, so I'm being pretty facetious here, but most universities(mine included) don't teach in C, they use C++ or Java.
Seems to me this will have the least impact on those who need to pay attention to security the most(large software companies) while having the potential to make it harder for the "little guy" to write and publish software.
All you would need to do is look for obvious ideas that the big corps will need to use at some time in the near future then hold those ideas hostage until either the big corps pay through the nose or someone with a clue decides to pass legislation that raises the bar for granting patents.
My mom is an engineer at SNL, and I try to go once a year when they have their open house for families. The place is packed with stuff just as cool as this - supercomputers, particle colliders, nanotech, rockets and sattelites, I could go on and on. Really an amazing place - reading about it doesn't compare to seeing it in person. I highly recommend visiting if you get the chance.