Right, but, Lucas seems to want folks to feel there _is_ a message in his films
Says who? I've never heard anything from Lucas to suggest he expects us to take them seriously. When asked "why did Phantom Menace suck so much?" he said something like "I wrote it for the kids". As you say Campbellian techniques are recipies for popularity and Lucas used them freely, but that does not mean he subscribes to the "must shape and teach" aspect.
Nope. The idea is that a mono reader (like a scanner would be - I doubt you'd have much luck reading both stereo signals) would be able to get a good mono signal from a stereo record (the l+r signal which means you don't lose any content like you would if stereo was stored as L and R signals and you just read one of them). The poster I first replied to was implying that a scanner might get a reasonable signal from a mono record but wouldn't get a good signal from a stereo record. I'm saying it'd work just as well with a stereo record - but it would only be mono.
I'm sorry, exactly how many times do the users need to ask nicely before the editors implement some form of dupe prevention? Do you have any real suggestions on how to fix this situation?
Yep, here's one: have the submittors check for dupes. Clearly the editors won't do it so it's pretty much up to us. If you want to avoid this problem then take the extra time necessary to find out if your story has already been posted. Obviously this won't stop a dupe if you submit before the first story, but it should help.
Now to see if my memory still works. Mono LPs used horizontal modulation; the needle moved back and forth within the groove. Stereo can be viewed two ways. Vertical is difference (L-R), horizontal is sum of the L+R. Viewed differently, the two diagonal walls of the groove are the two channels.
The reason that horizontal is l+r (the volume levels of l and r are half the levels of the real signal L and R) and vertical is l-r, rather than just storing L and R, is for backwards compatibility. l+r is basically what the recording would sound like had it been recorded in mono. In a stereo system L and R can be simply reconstructed from l+r and l-r (L=l+r+l-r, 2R=l+r-(l-r)). In a mono system l+r is played.
A flatbed scanner can only see the horizontal, so it might work a bit with mono, but it won't work too well!
Theoretically you could get a mono signal out of even a stereo recording. I'd probably try partially filling the tracks to a constant depth with some sort of white material, then scanning it at very high resolution. But I don't know if you could make the whole process accurate enough to actually work. Certainly I seriously doubt it would be doable the way that guy claims he did it.
Well if you want to redefine the definition of pixel, then fine. A CRT driven at 32bit color can manage only 768 colors measured at the subpixel level. And Palm's M130 can only manage 48 and not the 128 they claimed. Which is the point - they lied about the color capabilities and now they're still distorting the truth so they don't look quite so bad. Offering refunds for 58K colors instead of 65K sounds like Palm are great. Refunds for 4K colors instead of 65K sounds justified, nothing more.
P4 has 4 pipelines with 20-stage pipeline, a PowerPC 7 pipelines with 4 steps afaik
Pretty much right. The G4e has a 7-stage pipeline, and is able to fetch 4 instructions per clock.
But don't get too hung-up about pipeline lengths and execution unit numbers. Pipeline lengths do allow faster clock speeds, and result in higher stall costs, but that's only a small part of the puzzle (comparable to saying the only thing that matters about car engines is the number and size of the cylinders). Scheduling, branch prediction, cache size, etc, are all also important. Ultimately the only thing that counts is user-level performance.
I agree re the proprietary nature of SACD, but I think that SACD will become a true standard if it is successful. I'm just as nervous about DVD-A. For a start the RIAA has been involved in it's conception, and it therefore has "anti-piracy" features, including audio watermarking. It will also require licensing, in the same way that CD, and DVD-Video does. To me it looks like it comes down to SACD - a format developed by Sony and Philips, licensable from them (terms undisclosed), or DVD-A - a format developed by a larger group of companies, licensable from them (terms undisclosed, but possibly less onerous). Note too that the CD redbook standard was developed by Sony and Philips and requires a license from them. And Sony and Philips developed the MMCD (multimedia CD) spec, that combined with Toshiba/Time Warner's SD (Super Disc) spec became DVD.
My point here is that I don't think we need to get too hung up on the fact that SACD is comming from Sony and Philips alone. They have a good track record for licensing their technology, and in the past their formats have gone on to become widely available standards.
I too would be hesitant to buy a Sony camera because of the proprietary nature of the Memory Stick, but people do buy them. There are some pluses too, Memory Stick is smaller and it has been easier to get higher capacity Memory Sticks. I've seen a few cool gadgets too, like USB optical mice with built in Memory Stick readers.
Anyway to drag this back to SACD v DVD-A, my point is that Sony have a track record of producing high quality technology when they are unhappy with the alternatives. They also will adopt existing technology if it's good enough - e.g. FireWire, DVD Video. IMHO, the most likely reason why Sony have gone it alone is the potential for hybrid CD/SACD discs. After thinking a bit I can now see some more advantages to hybrids - the biggest being portability. A hybrid CD/SACD will play in my home SACD player and also my car CD, my CD walkman, and my computer. DVD-A will require a complete upgrade of all my gear, especially if their promised copy-protection technology does prevent me making MP3 or CD copies.
MiniDisc is definitely alive. Maybe not in the US, but remember US != World. I can go into a store and buy a MiniDisc player. I can even get prerecorded MiniDiscs (though not many). MiniDisc has been around for 10 years and doesn't look like disappearing anytime soon. Betamax didn't last half that long.
That you don't know anyone who uses Memory Stick merely proves that you don't know anyone with a Sony digital camera. A lot of Sony stuff has Memory Stick slots, including cameras, walkmans, and laptops.
Betamax was also first, and had superior quality. It was also not a standard (I don't call someone's proprietary format a standard). It was also made by Sony. See a pattern?
Yes I do: Sony are innovative. They failed with Betamax because there was no room for multiple standards and they failed to recognise the importance of rentals. But plenty of other Sony proprietary technology has done just fine, even if they haven't become a dominant force in the market. MiniDisc and Memory Stick are obvious examples. If you think Sony will repeat the mistakes they made with Betamax you'll be suprised.
To me it looks like neither format will win any time soon. The most likely outcome is that in a year or two the majority of players will handle both DVD-A and SACD, in the same way that most DVD players handle VCD.
Around here I've seen SACD players but no DVD-A players, so for the moment Sony's ahead (here, at least). Like DVD-A SACD has no regional encoding so that's no a problem. The lack of digital out is quite annoying though. Utlimately the winner will be the format that gets the most support from the media providers, and I expect a lot of systems capable of supporting DVD-A and SACD will appear until one or the other dies.
Which bit of "total search hours per month" confused you? Audience reach and even referal numbers don't mean much. Audience reach is heavily influenced by the fact that Yahoo and MSN are portals (i.e. not everyone is going there to search), and the numbers are almost identical in any case. Using referals actually penalises better search engines because users are not hitting so many false results. Total search hours per month OTOH indicates exactly where people are doing their searching and Google leads by a factor of 3-4.
And I conjecture that, Google being low on the advertising and high on the usefulness, it is more popular among Linux users (being *slightly* more knowledgeable than the average user). Thus the proportion of Linux visitors to Google is way above the true proportion of Linux users on the Internet.
A year ago you would have been right but now Google is decidely mainstream. Check out the total search hours per month graphs in thesetwo reports. Google is by far and away the leading search engine now.
This subject is well covered at the excellent Search Engine World. In particular this article provides a detailed list of things to do to build a site that will rank well on Google. The short summary though is exactly what you say: real content is critical to top Google rankings.
One point, however: that article is 20 years old. Obviously the history is still accurate, but is the current diamond situation still the same? The article seemed to be implying that all sorts of changes where just around the corner - did any of that actually happen?
Yes it does. You have trading accounts which record the actual conversion from one currency to another. These accounts represent the purchase of foreign currency and you can then transfer that foreign ammount to a dedicated foreign currency account.
I haven't used Quicken, but I do use GnuCash. It's pretty good, certainly perfectly adequate for personal use and headed toward being a decent small business package, too. I don't know what Quicken is capable of but some of the nicer features in GnuCash are the true double-entry nature of it (which Quicken doesn't have) and the ability to handle stocks and other securities in any currency.
first, any company that GE's food products does one thing first of all. make them sterile!!
This doesn't make sense for the producer. So long as they can identify strains containing their patented work they can sue any farmer using their seed who cannot prove purchase. If you're a farmer and you find your fields "infected" with patented plants all you can do is either pay for them or risk a lawsuit. Basically you are forced to purchase whether you wanted the GE plants or not. Otherwise you are a criminal. That means it is in the producers' best interests to make the seeds as viable as possible.
The person quoting Confucius is a big Star Wars fan and imagines that Yoda really was Confucius in another lifetime.
Or rather that Confucius was Yoda in another lifetime (a long time ago...).
Re:Serious Question...
on
GUIs for Everyone
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I disagree -- they need a way to tell the computer "I want to write a letter," or at another level "I need to get this done so I can go to lunch." That's a very important and fundamental paradigm shift that we as engineers are responsible for assuming; rather than contemplating the nature of "programs" and "processes", the user is best off focusing on accomplishing his/her end goals without even knowing that the concept of a "program" even exists.
I don't think that's how people work away from computers. You don't sit down at a desk and say "I want to write a letter" and expect the paper and pen to magically appear. When you think about doing some task part of that thought is always how you're going to do it. People do think about the tools necessary to do the task and programs are just tools.
The problem is that people (especially initially) don't know what programs do what - they don't have the experience to associate the tool to the task. This is a communication problem and computer interfaces are traditionally very poor in this regard. The first time I was faced with a Linux GUI I could see tens of programs in the main menu and there was virtually nothing to indicate what any of them did.
The solution you're proposing is to have the computer choose the tool based on the task. I'm not convinced it would be better or even possible. Problems arise when different programs have different but overlapping capabilities. The system can't pick which program to use without a very detailed description of the task. E.g. I like the tabbed browsing of Mozilla so I'd prefer to use that but not every page works properly so sometimes I have to switch back to IE.
Another issue is that while the task-based approach is great for inexperienced users who don't know the capabilities of the system it could become frustrating to more experienced users. Computers are very general tools, the number of different tasks that can be performed is virtually limitless. A task-based interface could not present all those options, and you would not want to present all those options to a new user. You'd end up having to talk about programs in some sense anyway.
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Yeah, it's obvious really. The cunning part is that if you encode the signals as l+r and l-r then existing mono gear will continue to work.
Nope. The idea is that a mono reader (like a scanner would be - I doubt you'd have much luck reading both stereo signals) would be able to get a good mono signal from a stereo record (the l+r signal which means you don't lose any content like you would if stereo was stored as L and R signals and you just read one of them). The poster I first replied to was implying that a scanner might get a reasonable signal from a mono record but wouldn't get a good signal from a stereo record. I'm saying it'd work just as well with a stereo record - but it would only be mono.
Well if you want to redefine the definition of pixel, then fine. A CRT driven at 32bit color can manage only 768 colors measured at the subpixel level. And Palm's M130 can only manage 48 and not the 128 they claimed. Which is the point - they lied about the color capabilities and now they're still distorting the truth so they don't look quite so bad. Offering refunds for 58K colors instead of 65K sounds like Palm are great. Refunds for 4K colors instead of 65K sounds justified, nothing more.
My point here is that I don't think we need to get too hung up on the fact that SACD is comming from Sony and Philips alone. They have a good track record for licensing their technology, and in the past their formats have gone on to become widely available standards.
Anyway to drag this back to SACD v DVD-A, my point is that Sony have a track record of producing high quality technology when they are unhappy with the alternatives. They also will adopt existing technology if it's good enough - e.g. FireWire, DVD Video. IMHO, the most likely reason why Sony have gone it alone is the potential for hybrid CD/SACD discs. After thinking a bit I can now see some more advantages to hybrids - the biggest being portability. A hybrid CD/SACD will play in my home SACD player and also my car CD, my CD walkman, and my computer. DVD-A will require a complete upgrade of all my gear, especially if their promised copy-protection technology does prevent me making MP3 or CD copies.
That you don't know anyone who uses Memory Stick merely proves that you don't know anyone with a Sony digital camera. A lot of Sony stuff has Memory Stick slots, including cameras, walkmans, and laptops.
To me it looks like neither format will win any time soon. The most likely outcome is that in a year or two the majority of players will handle both DVD-A and SACD, in the same way that most DVD players handle VCD.
Around here I've seen SACD players but no DVD-A players, so for the moment Sony's ahead (here, at least). Like DVD-A SACD has no regional encoding so that's no a problem. The lack of digital out is quite annoying though. Utlimately the winner will be the format that gets the most support from the media providers, and I expect a lot of systems capable of supporting DVD-A and SACD will appear until one or the other dies.
The reports highlight audience reach because that's what advertisers are interested in. It's a stupid metric though.
Which bit of "total search hours per month" confused you? Audience reach and even referal numbers don't mean much. Audience reach is heavily influenced by the fact that Yahoo and MSN are portals (i.e. not everyone is going there to search), and the numbers are almost identical in any case. Using referals actually penalises better search engines because users are not hitting so many false results. Total search hours per month OTOH indicates exactly where people are doing their searching and Google leads by a factor of 3-4.
This subject is well covered at the excellent Search Engine World. In particular this article provides a detailed list of things to do to build a site that will rank well on Google. The short summary though is exactly what you say: real content is critical to top Google rankings.
One point, however: that article is 20 years old. Obviously the history is still accurate, but is the current diamond situation still the same? The article seemed to be implying that all sorts of changes where just around the corner - did any of that actually happen?
Yes it does. You have trading accounts which record the actual conversion from one currency to another. These accounts represent the purchase of foreign currency and you can then transfer that foreign ammount to a dedicated foreign currency account.
I haven't used Quicken, but I do use GnuCash. It's pretty good, certainly perfectly adequate for personal use and headed toward being a decent small business package, too. I don't know what Quicken is capable of but some of the nicer features in GnuCash are the true double-entry nature of it (which Quicken doesn't have) and the ability to handle stocks and other securities in any currency.
This parody is copyright 1996-2001 Americhrist Ltd. All rights reserved.
The problem is that people (especially initially) don't know what programs do what - they don't have the experience to associate the tool to the task. This is a communication problem and computer interfaces are traditionally very poor in this regard. The first time I was faced with a Linux GUI I could see tens of programs in the main menu and there was virtually nothing to indicate what any of them did.
The solution you're proposing is to have the computer choose the tool based on the task. I'm not convinced it would be better or even possible. Problems arise when different programs have different but overlapping capabilities. The system can't pick which program to use without a very detailed description of the task. E.g. I like the tabbed browsing of Mozilla so I'd prefer to use that but not every page works properly so sometimes I have to switch back to IE.
Another issue is that while the task-based approach is great for inexperienced users who don't know the capabilities of the system it could become frustrating to more experienced users. Computers are very general tools, the number of different tasks that can be performed is virtually limitless. A task-based interface could not present all those options, and you would not want to present all those options to a new user. You'd end up having to talk about programs in some sense anyway.