Save as much as you can, and when you can afford it, retire. Life isn't about 'being happy now' it's about playing the game right, so one day you can tell
everyone to fuck-off and then go and 'be really happy'.
I disagree completely. I'm trying to lead a really happy life right now, instead of planning to do it after 30 years of misery. In a way I've told the whole capitalist rat race to fuck off many years ago.
The idea you talk about is the whole Christian work ethic once again, with retirement as the blissful afterlife. There are other, IMHO better ways to live your life.
When you write on the silvery label you're actually writing on the back of the recording medium. The solvents from the sharpie leak right through the thin layer and corrupt the data.
This is true for CDs, but not DVDs. They have the data layer in the middle of the plastic bulk, whereas CDs have it on the label-side surface.
You can see this clearly if you microwave coasters of each:) The shiny layer of CDs begins to strip away, whereas that of DVDs stays inside the plastic.
Laziness is one thing that drives new inventions, but there's also the sheer joy of hacking. People like us enjoy solving problems.
If there's a job that would take the same time either by brute force, or by writing a program that does the actual work quickly, I'd choose the latter. I'd probably choose it even if it took slightly longer than the grunt route, because of the fun and the experience/education gained. There's also this weird sense of inherent wrongness/evil in doing grunt work, if a clever alternative is available.
It seems like from the posts the BT community has known about this for a while and it really doesn't seem to matter too much. Most downloaders who have at least a basic understanding of how torrents work will keep those downloads going caust it's just a nice thing to do.
I agree completely, I don't see what the fuss is. The good side-effect is that it's mostly private sites that will suffer from this, and torrent action will hopefully move into the public sites where nobody's counting.
In the project website, BT is introduced as as "free speech tool". Ratio counting sounds more like capitalism than free speech.
This reminds me of a New Scientist article few years back. It said that the best way to "recycle" paper was to burn it, assuming that the heat energy was utilized some way. New trees that would have to be grown, would act as carbon sinks. On the other hand, recycling paper in the usual way requires nasty chemicals and energy.
I've thought about this a lot. I spent two years teaching math/physics/chemistry in a high school, after a degree in physics and some research work experience. I'm pretty sure the experience gave me a better understanding on the subjects I taught, and the students seemed to like real-life anecdotes much more than some dry theory. The most often asked question from students was "Why are we studying this/where will we ever need this?" and I was glad I usually had a straightforward answer -- and not just something fancy like particle physics, but also things like construction work.
I'm now getting back to an academic career (starting PhD studies) but I will probably want to do some non-university teaching again at some point. I have an urge for teaching, but I feel that it's more fruitful to do it only occasionally with new experiences to share, instead of a full teaching career.
This is possible simply because the tiny, tiny elements don't have to produce much vibration to do their job, so the inertia of the speaker element becomes negligible, and because there's nothing else to get in the way of absorbing the sound besides your ear.
I think the more correct explanation is with the resonance frequency. All vibrating systems have resonances, and one main reason why a speaker can be awful is a resonance peak within its audio range. Damping is used to smooth down resonance peaks, but then you need to waste lots of energy, and high end speakers tend to be have low efficiencies.
Even resonances outside the audible range cause problems within the range. The further it gets, the less effect there is. The point about smaller headphone drivers is to get the resonance frequency very high, so it's further away from the hearing range.
Simple noise cancellation works by taking the inverse of the 'noise' signal. This can be done with simple analogue circuits, there's no need to analyze the noise in any way. This doesn't care about any details about the signal, so persistent noises are cancelled just as well as sudden ones.
I've noticed a similar effect. When I'm listening to music for extended periods (e.g. a full album), I end up turning the volume down gradually, as my ears (and more importantly brain, I think) get used to listening. The same goes for watching movies at home, and it's slightly annoying at a movie theatre when the soundtrack appears louder towards the end.
Overall, I've also noticed a general improvement in my hearing. It's a little surprising since I've played in bands since I was about 10, and I go to raves occasionally. On the other hand, I don't listen to music very much.
I agree with the article that it's a problem when people listen to music for hours and hours every day. I remember reading somewhere that people who live in deserts don't experience any hearing loss due to old age, since it's so quiet out there.
Noise cancellation should (ideally) cancel all of the sound that doesn't come from the headphones themselves. Usually though, they are limited to a certain frequency band. In any case I don't think they discriminate between 'real noise' and human voice, for example. While it's technically possible to do it (cf. image denoising), I don't see any point why it should be done in those kinds of headphones, and besides it's a lot harder to do in realtime than simple cancellation.
Powerlines where never designed with having broadband traffic travel through them. They are highly inefficient.
True. However, DSL seems to work pretty well even if the phone lines it uses were designed for something like 4 kHz of voice bandwidth.
Of all the non-data cables leading to households, TV cable is the only one that was actually designed for high bandwidth. Pity that the way it is deployed makes it usually worse than DSL.
My laptop is my music workstation. That's currently the main reason why I like space on a laptop drive. People have different uses for computers, so be wary of generalizing your usage patterns on others.
Besides, I hate the articifial distinctions between servers/desktops/laptops etc. that have nothing to do with their actual capabilities. Particularly Windows users treat computers as limited appliances. With unix, it's easier to see that a computer is a computer is a computer, and you can use almost any machine for any use. In fact laptops make great servers as they come with a built-in UPS.
I think 120 GB HDDs should stay in servers
Yeah, and 120 GB ought to be enough for everyone;) I mean this as a reminder of the point that you shouldn't impose arbitrary limitations on how technology should be used, because people will always find uses for new inventions.
I would love to simply do a bittorrent from firefox.
You can do this now, as long as you have bittorrent installed. You can instruct Firefox to open torrent files in the application, just like we do with many other file types such as postscript.
I don't really see a need for the bittorrent:// protocol specifier; with the current system, torrents are files that are usually downloaded with http. Of course BT is another protocol in itself, but this would mean rather messy URLs because the contents of the torrent file would be needed after bittorrent://. It's like sending mail by writing smtp:// in a browser. We don't do that kind of thing in a _web_ browser, even though it's technically possible.
It's a lot simpler to download the torrent via http, and then launch an application to handle it. The application itself could be a Firefox extension, if you like. I think this is how it works wit Opera.
Personally, I like to keep torrents separate from a browser, and rather run them on my server in screen. But I would also like to see much more user of bittorrent, and to enable that we should have BT functionality in browsers.
I never claimed Gates said it. It doesn't matter who said it originally, or if it was ever spoken out seriously. In any case the saying stands as a reminder that is stupid to impose such limitations on what's enough for people, because the world moves on and different people have different needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree completely. I'm trying to lead a really happy life right now, instead of planning to do it after 30 years of misery. In a way I've told the whole capitalist rat race to fuck off many years ago.
The idea you talk about is the whole Christian work ethic once again, with retirement as the blissful afterlife. There are other, IMHO better ways to live your life.
This is true for CDs, but not DVDs. They have the data layer in the middle of the plastic bulk, whereas CDs have it on the label-side surface.
You can see this clearly if you microwave coasters of each :) The shiny layer of CDs begins to strip away, whereas that of DVDs stays inside the plastic.
I thought so too. The smell is also added to industrial oxygen for the same reason, and I'd imagine oxygen itself is pretty fresh.
If there's a job that would take the same time either by brute force, or by writing a program that does the actual work quickly, I'd choose the latter. I'd probably choose it even if it took slightly longer than the grunt route, because of the fun and the experience/education gained. There's also this weird sense of inherent wrongness/evil in doing grunt work, if a clever alternative is available.
Forget about the transplant operation, just take the anti-rejection drugs.
Coral cache seems to work fine.
I agree completely, I don't see what the fuss is. The good side-effect is that it's mostly private sites that will suffer from this, and torrent action will hopefully move into the public sites where nobody's counting.
In the project website, BT is introduced as as "free speech tool". Ratio counting sounds more like capitalism than free speech.
This reminds me of a New Scientist article few years back. It said that the best way to "recycle" paper was to burn it, assuming that the heat energy was utilized some way. New trees that would have to be grown, would act as carbon sinks. On the other hand, recycling paper in the usual way requires nasty chemicals and energy.
You can still pirate music and movies for playing on Linux. Arrr!
I'm now getting back to an academic career (starting PhD studies) but I will probably want to do some non-university teaching again at some point. I have an urge for teaching, but I feel that it's more fruitful to do it only occasionally with new experiences to share, instead of a full teaching career.
How ironic :) but true.
or perhaps Twinkle.
No, but I hate it when someone writes me an email using Photoshop.
s/shot/job/
I think the more correct explanation is with the resonance frequency. All vibrating systems have resonances, and one main reason why a speaker can be awful is a resonance peak within its audio range. Damping is used to smooth down resonance peaks, but then you need to waste lots of energy, and high end speakers tend to be have low efficiencies.
Even resonances outside the audible range cause problems within the range. The further it gets, the less effect there is. The point about smaller headphone drivers is to get the resonance frequency very high, so it's further away from the hearing range.
Simple noise cancellation works by taking the inverse of the 'noise' signal. This can be done with simple analogue circuits, there's no need to analyze the noise in any way. This doesn't care about any details about the signal, so persistent noises are cancelled just as well as sudden ones.
Overall, I've also noticed a general improvement in my hearing. It's a little surprising since I've played in bands since I was about 10, and I go to raves occasionally. On the other hand, I don't listen to music very much.
I agree with the article that it's a problem when people listen to music for hours and hours every day. I remember reading somewhere that people who live in deserts don't experience any hearing loss due to old age, since it's so quiet out there.
Noise cancellation should (ideally) cancel all of the sound that doesn't come from the headphones themselves. Usually though, they are limited to a certain frequency band. In any case I don't think they discriminate between 'real noise' and human voice, for example. While it's technically possible to do it (cf. image denoising), I don't see any point why it should be done in those kinds of headphones, and besides it's a lot harder to do in realtime than simple cancellation.
True. However, DSL seems to work pretty well even if the phone lines it uses were designed for something like 4 kHz of voice bandwidth.
Of all the non-data cables leading to households, TV cable is the only one that was actually designed for high bandwidth. Pity that the way it is deployed makes it usually worse than DSL.
http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/img/etherkil ler.jpg
I'd say you can replace "XML" with "ASCII" to get a perfect analogy. Either one can be used to implement both closed and open document formats.
Besides, I hate the articifial distinctions between servers/desktops/laptops etc. that have nothing to do with their actual capabilities. Particularly Windows users treat computers as limited appliances. With unix, it's easier to see that a computer is a computer is a computer, and you can use almost any machine for any use. In fact laptops make great servers as they come with a built-in UPS.
I think 120 GB HDDs should stay in servers
Yeah, and 120 GB ought to be enough for everyone ;) I mean this as a reminder of the point that you shouldn't impose arbitrary limitations on how technology should be used, because people will always find uses for new inventions.
You can do this now, as long as you have bittorrent installed. You can instruct Firefox to open torrent files in the application, just like we do with many other file types such as postscript.
I don't really see a need for the bittorrent:// protocol specifier; with the current system, torrents are files that are usually downloaded with http. Of course BT is another protocol in itself, but this would mean rather messy URLs because the contents of the torrent file would be needed after bittorrent://. It's like sending mail by writing smtp:// in a browser. We don't do that kind of thing in a _web_ browser, even though it's technically possible.
It's a lot simpler to download the torrent via http, and then launch an application to handle it. The application itself could be a Firefox extension, if you like. I think this is how it works wit Opera.
Personally, I like to keep torrents separate from a browser, and rather run them on my server in screen. But I would also like to see much more user of bittorrent, and to enable that we should have BT functionality in browsers.
I never claimed Gates said it. It doesn't matter who said it originally, or if it was ever spoken out seriously. In any case the saying stands as a reminder that is stupid to impose such limitations on what's enough for people, because the world moves on and different people have different needs.
Besides, the article is about terabytes. The word "terrabyte" seems like it measures planet-munching ability rather than storage capacity.