While it is true that one can say Bill had no obligation to inform Seattle of the value of their own product, his behavior in crossing out all the "lease" language in the contract and substituting "buy" and then informing Seattle that they could still "have nonexclusive rights" was disingenuous to say the least - if not outright fraud.
No one forced Seattle Computer Products to sign a contract that said "buy" instead of "lease". You make it sound like Bill Gates pointed a gun at their head or changed the contract after SCP had signed it. whatever..
I remember that the airing of "The Day After" was soooo controversial that, on the night of the airing, someone killed my suburban neighborhood's cable service. Won't someone please THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!
In case you didn't know, the file format that CDDB (and FreeDB) use is complete garbage. In addition to random idiotic crap like it being impossible to unambiguously represent a song title that has a slash in it, it's rocket science to figure out how long a song is supposed to be. I need this info not only to display it in Gronk (my MP3 jukebox software), but also for some error-checking that my CD-ripping scripts do, so that I don't end up with truncated files if there was a crash or a full disk or something.
(You'd think that the fact that it's in a comment would mean something, but no: you have to parse both comments and non-comments, begging the question of what they thought "comment" means.)
Those numbers are the starting sectors of each track on the disc. There are 75 sectors per second. So you convert those to seconds by dividing, and then find the length of each track by subtracting each from the previous. Oh, but wait, they don't give you the sector address of the end of the last track: for that one, it's expressed in seconds instead of sectors, for no sensible reason. Still, the info is there, right?
Uh, almost.
It turns out that if the last track on a CD is a data track (an ISO9660 file system) then there is a gap between the last track (the data track) and the second-to-last track (the last audio track.) This gap is exactly 11400 sectors (152 seconds, 2:32.) On some discs, you can actually see this track, it's a differently-shiny ring. Why's it there? I don't know. Why's it that size? I don't know. What if the data track is not the last track on the CD? (Does that even work?) I don't know.
So what this means is, when computing the length that a track should be, you have to subtract 152 seconds from the length of the second-to-last track, only if the last track is a data track.
How do you tell whether the last track is a data track, without having the CD in question physically in your computer? By hoping that the CDDB file contains the words "data track" in the title of that track, I guess. Yeah, that's reliable.
And, just to keep things interesting, it turns out that older versions of grip and cdparanoia didn't skip over this gap when ripping: instead, they would append 152 seconds of silence onto the end of the second-to-last track. So now my script that sanity-checks the lengths of the files has to consider two different lengths to be "right", since I now have CDs that were ripped both ways.
Whee. I love love love supporting standards invented by 12-year-olds.
Of course the reason that I use CDDB files at all in Gronk is because of the mind-blowing worthlessness of ID3 tags (32 character limits on titles, etc.) Yay more standards invented by 12-year-olds. (Please don't even mention ID3v2 or Ogg. I laugh at you, you silly person. Those are universally-unsupported fantasies that simply trade one set of problems for a whole new set of problems.)
And as if CDDB wasn't bad enough, FreeDB has taken the CDDB braindeadness and layered even more braindeadness on top of it: it is truly a thing of wonder.
For example, go ahead and try to ever have the "genre" field be something approaching reality -- oops! The first person who ripped this CD said it was "folk" because that's genre number zero! So fix it and resubmit it to the database? Sorry! You can't ever change the genre of an entry in the database after creation, since the genre dictates what directory the file goes in on their server. And so on.
well, that and the minor feature that VHS tapes could hold an entire 2 hour feature film, while Beta tapes could not (rendering Beta tapes useless for commercial video distribution).
The existence of low-scoring or unknown "regular" words would NOT mask the presence of high-scoring spammy words! The Bayesian filter would not be fooled.
The phrase "Free Minds, Free Markets" also seems to me to be a contradiction in terms, although "Free Markets" leaves room for interpretation. I guess I'm reading this wrong, because to my mind, the notion of individuality resists the concept of demographic marketing, no matter how "free."
You must not know what a free market is then. If your interpretation was true, then nobody would be able to sell anything to anyone.
but it sounds like the Argentina gub'mint has price caps that prevent the producers from reaping the true value opportunity of the power market. The price caps to ensure "cheap" power are CREATING power shortage! Higher prices (or lawsuits) are sure to follow.
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No one is forcing you to email someone@gmail.com. How many people @aol.com do you send email to?
While it is true that one can say Bill had no obligation to inform Seattle of the value of their own product, his behavior in crossing out all the "lease" language in the contract and substituting "buy" and then informing Seattle that they could still "have nonexclusive rights" was disingenuous to say the least - if not outright fraud.
No one forced Seattle Computer Products to sign a contract that said "buy" instead of "lease". You make it sound like Bill Gates pointed a gun at their head or changed the contract after SCP had signed it. whatever..
The linux kernel is now a base for some of the more promising research in CS theory (the O(1) scheduler comes to mind)
Never mind that the Windows NT kernel has had O(1) scheduler since 1989..
When one looks at Sun's "FireMan" next-gen TCP/IP stack, it has elements of a microkernel personality siting on top of the Sun kernel.
do you mean Sun's "Firehose"? And how is Solaris's new TCP/IP stack a microkernel personality?
I remember that the airing of "The Day After" was soooo controversial that, on the night of the airing, someone killed my suburban neighborhood's cable service. Won't someone please THINK ABOUT THE CHILDREN?!
appologies??
Beef, it's real food.
Beef, it's what's for dinner.
Here is Netscape's JWZ hilariously sad-but-true rant about the ID3 header format:
CDDB: Feel the Pain
In case you didn't know, the file format that CDDB (and FreeDB) use is complete garbage. In addition to random idiotic crap like it being impossible to unambiguously represent a song title that has a slash in it, it's rocket science to figure out how long a song is supposed to be. I need this info not only to display it in Gronk (my MP3 jukebox software), but also for some error-checking that my CD-ripping scripts do, so that I don't end up with truncated files if there was a crash or a full disk or something.
So get this. CDDB files contain junk like this:
# Track frame offsets:
# 150
# 18265
# 32945
# 49812
# Disc length: 3603 seconds
#
DISCID=...
DTITLE=...
(You'd think that the fact that it's in a comment would mean something, but no: you have to parse both comments and non-comments, begging the question of what they thought "comment" means.)
Those numbers are the starting sectors of each track on the disc. There are 75 sectors per second. So you convert those to seconds by dividing, and then find the length of each track by subtracting each from the previous. Oh, but wait, they don't give you the sector address of the end of the last track: for that one, it's expressed in seconds instead of sectors, for no sensible reason. Still, the info is there, right?
Uh, almost.
It turns out that if the last track on a CD is a data track (an ISO9660 file system) then there is a gap between the last track (the data track) and the second-to-last track (the last audio track.) This gap is exactly 11400 sectors (152 seconds, 2:32.) On some discs, you can actually see this track, it's a differently-shiny ring. Why's it there? I don't know. Why's it that size? I don't know. What if the data track is not the last track on the CD? (Does that even work?) I don't know.
So what this means is, when computing the length that a track should be, you have to subtract 152 seconds from the length of the second-to-last track, only if the last track is a data track.
How do you tell whether the last track is a data track, without having the CD in question physically in your computer? By hoping that the CDDB file contains the words "data track" in the title of that track, I guess. Yeah, that's reliable.
And, just to keep things interesting, it turns out that older versions of grip and cdparanoia didn't skip over this gap when ripping: instead, they would append 152 seconds of silence onto the end of the second-to-last track. So now my script that sanity-checks the lengths of the files has to consider two different lengths to be "right", since I now have CDs that were ripped both ways.
Whee. I love love love supporting standards invented by 12-year-olds.
Of course the reason that I use CDDB files at all in Gronk is because of the mind-blowing worthlessness of ID3 tags (32 character limits on titles, etc.) Yay more standards invented by 12-year-olds. (Please don't even mention ID3v2 or Ogg. I laugh at you, you silly person. Those are universally-unsupported fantasies that simply trade one set of problems for a whole new set of problems.)
And as if CDDB wasn't bad enough, FreeDB has taken the CDDB braindeadness and layered even more braindeadness on top of it: it is truly a thing of wonder.
For example, go ahead and try to ever have the "genre" field be something approaching reality -- oops! The first person who ripped this CD said it was "folk" because that's genre number zero! So fix it and resubmit it to the database? Sorry! You can't ever change the genre of an entry in the database after creation, since the genre dictates what directory the file goes in on their server. And so on.
It's a wonder anything works at all.
but you are assuming that paternity must actually be established, through genetic testing or having the man's name listed as the father on the birth certificate. Reason Magazine had an article on this recently: "Injustice by Default: How the effort to catch "deadbeat dads" ruins innocent men's lives"
Java continues to have serious performance problems. I wrote some Java code and it was damn slow!
Can Microsoft really charge "monopoly rents"? Do you think Microsoft could get away with charging $1000 per Windows seat? I don't think so..
but do NOT put your plastic shower curtain in the drier!
And Steve Jobs tried to hire Linus.
And now you know WHY those airplanes crashed..
Do you think Grandma would be able to install and use TurboTax on Windows? I don't.
"Ok, would you rather i kill someone or have sex?"
I like to kill people and THEN have the sex.
If you want to see what's REALLY on the news, check out News 14 Carolina whose TV caption system was haxored:
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~smheath/news14.html
you are assuming each voter cast just one vote.
well, that and the minor feature that VHS tapes could hold an entire 2 hour feature film, while Beta tapes could not (rendering Beta tapes useless for commercial video distribution).
The existence of low-scoring or unknown "regular" words would NOT mask the presence of high-scoring spammy words! The Bayesian filter would not be fooled.
The phrase "Free Minds, Free Markets" also seems to me to be a contradiction in terms, although "Free Markets" leaves room for interpretation. I guess I'm reading this wrong, because to my mind, the notion of individuality resists the concept of demographic marketing, no matter how "free."
You must not know what a free market is then. If your interpretation was true, then nobody would be able to sell anything to anyone.
You must not be using the same internet I'm using!
is Kathy Fent the reason Taco leaves the house or the reason he DOESN'T leave the house?
Be sure to give your wife a big hug today for putting up with your male antics!
but it sounds like the Argentina gub'mint has price caps that prevent the producers from reaping the true value opportunity of the power market. The price caps to ensure "cheap" power are CREATING power shortage! Higher prices (or lawsuits) are sure to follow.