4'33", pronounced "four minutes, thirty-three seconds", (Cage himself referred to it as "four, thirty-three") is often mistakenly referred to as Cage's "silent piece". He made it clear that he believed there is no such thing as silence, defined as a total absence of sound. In 1951, he visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in order to hear silence. "I literally expected to hear nothing," he said. Instead, he heard two sounds, one high and one low. He was told that the first was his nervous system and the other his blood circulating. This was a major revelation that was to affect his compositional philosophy from that time on. It was from this experience that he decided that silence defined as a total absence of sound did not exist. "Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot," he wrote. "One need not fear for the future of music."
One would imagine that Blatt's silence would be a digital silence - no noise, a silent file he generated and slapped on a CD. Cage's silence (not that it is silence as outlined above), since it is much older, would probably have at least white noise in it on a recording. Clearly since Cage did not believe that silence could exist neither he nor his estate could claim ownership of silence.
It was obviously well known in late 2000 when I bought my system because there were registry patch fixes for windoze avaliable from AMD's site and now are avaliable on mobo manufacturer's sites too.
Doesn't a suicide tend to imply that there was some additional influencing factors perhaps? It was clearly a rash and poorly thought-out action, considering he basically went home and did it pretty much straight away. But in my experience, stable people, even 13 year olds, don't even consider suicide when they get punished for doing something which they would have known would have been viewed by the people they did it against as wrong.
Additionally, I found the article to be quite sketchy on many details, like how he was found out, the oppinions of his friends. This may sound cynical, but as far as we know, this boy may have had no friends and have been forced into all these activities that he didn't want to do by his parents, and being punished for doing something that he wanted for a change was the straw that broke the cammel's back. Several of my friends have been affected by parents who wanted to involve them in everything, and who pressured them to do well. Aside from which, he can't have been that bright and gifted - he got caught.
Anyhoo, my point being that a happy 13 year old wouldn't have killed himself over something that meant he was getting a light rap over the knuckles for. I get the impression that we may have been fed a few scraps of reality and dickloads of sensationalism here.
I have a feeling that what Blueforce is talking about is the idea that the internet (as first concieved by the US military I think) is a decentralised communication system, not each company having a backup, as a few people have discussed, although that is relevant.
The key idea of the internet is that it is not a node-based system - in convential communication systems, if you take out a key node, then none of the people connected to that node can communicate with anybody and no other nodes that went through that node could connect to the other side of it. For example if you have a 20 storey building with your servers and such on the first floor, and from there a lan connection goes to a hub that serves the second floor and then through that hub to the third floor, and so on (which you probably wouldn't do, but you get the idea), if someone comes along and turns the hub on the tenth floor off, then the tenth floor network won't work at all and floors 11 to 20 won't get access to the servers.
In the internet, there should be no central nodes or key cables. Back to the office system, each floor should have its own servers, and connection to the internet, with a cable to each floor independantly, so that even if that idiot on floor 10 strikes again, none of the other floors will be affected, (the server on floor 10 might even have connections to the other floors independantly of the hub). Even if floor 10 was burnt out, floors 11 to 20 would be able to access the others and the internet.
Unfortunately though, this is not often put into practice any more. I can't really point the finger at anybody specific because I'm not really up-to-date with who's got what wires where, but most ISPs would only have one connection, especially small ones, so that if that line was damaged their customers would be out of service.
We have @Home cable. We have a dedicated proxy/firewall (an AMD 586 75MHz@133MHz, 20 MB RAM, 420 MB HDD, Dual NIC - you'd probably want something a bit better 'cause it seems to choke the bandwidth down to around 100KB/s, but hey, it was completely free). The proxy is just running Sygate Home Network on Win95 (yeah yeah I'd prefer Linux too, but we had to keep dad's work happy so he could use it for checking emails, etc) from there it goes to a cheap 10 Mbps 5 port hub. From the hub it goes to all corners of the house with the capability of some small patching.
OK, so it's not much. We did however wire proper CAT-5 throughout the house so that should we ever feel the urge (ie if someone gives us a better free computer) we can easily upgrade to 100MBps. To be honest though the current system is surprisingly stable. The server runs 24/7 and has only crashed twice ever (not a bad effort for M$).
I'd say other cables that could/should be run everywhere are: phone, TV RF (from your antenna), Audio and Video (make sure for the video cable that you use 75 ohm coax so that there isn't too much signal loss), and possibly speaker if you have some sort of switch. If you really wanted to be phreaky you could put all your boxen in one air conditioned room, and run monitor, keyboard and mouse cables to other rooms (this could be very effective if you were a mac user (yuck!) because then you'd only have to run USB for keyboard, mouse and floppy, except that every room you wanted a computer would have to be adjacent to the one with the boxen in it), but then the impracticality of this would be astounding.
AFAIK, our eyes are only able to ditinguish between the 16.7(ish) million colours of 24 bpp (that's 8 bpc) colour depth - although I guess that'd be conditional. Therefore the reason Photoshop has some capabilities to work in 16bpp is for working with the levels (i.e. white level, black level and gamma - if you use Photoshop or similar, then you know what I'm talking about) otherwise, the immage suffers as a result of the squishing and stretching of the colour range, and artifacts would appear.
Currently, good consumer scanners are able to scan at 48bpp, so once the immage is scanned, the levels can be adjusted, then the colour information is quantised/shaped/dithered/whatever down to 24bpp for editing in your favorite immage editing program. Photoshop has very limited capabilities in 48bpp mode, probably because it would require more RAM and processing power.
It may interest you to know that TV's capability to cope with colour is much worse than that of 24bpp immage editing. In the whole TV signal, only a tiny portion of the bandwidth is reserved for the hue (which actual colour is shown) and saturation (how much of the colour is shown) - most is used for the luminance (brightness information). Video is encoded as HLS, not RGB, so that it is still compatible with black and white sets. The worst TV format as far as colour and resolution go is NTSC (National Television Standards Comittee - the US, Japanese & other 60Hz mains countries' standard), which is affectionately known amongst the PAL (Phase Alternate Line - the most common 50Hz mains powered countrys' standard) industry as Never The Same Colour. SECAM (French acronym that translates to sequential colour and memory) has even slightly higher colour definition than PAL. If you want to know the specifics about why, I suggest reading Television Production by Gerald Millerson (Focal Press), it's pretty common in TV Production circles. This is most prominent with composite (the most common home video connection) since the colour is crammed into the same signal, but even the colour capabilities of professional broadcast standards like component suffer this sort of problem - even most digital video formats.
Well all TOSs that I've ever had for any of my ISPs say the same, but aside from the fact that no one ever abides by them, I haven't heard of n e one getting kicked. I assume its just a way of making us more responsible for using the content than they are for replying to it. (If that makes any sense?)
Sony released a DVCAM tape drive with some of the earlier DVCAM products they made. I assumed it was designed to be used for backup, although I can't find any trace of it on the sony website, so it mustn't have been profitable. But why would you use tape anyway? the cheapest and easiest way to backup is just to buy another IDE hard drive.
My Grandmother worked as one of the WRENS (Womens Royal English Naval Service), entering the encoded message into the enigma machines for decoding. I did a school project on it some years back.
The Germans' code was an encrypted tesxt message, encoded by a machine known as the Enigma Machine. The Enigma Machine consisted of a series of gears and wheels that would encode the message depending on the setting on the front of the machine.
The English had (relatively) no trouble obtaining a machine, as someone simply stole it from the germans and they copied it. What the computer was used for was to determine the setting needed on the machine to get a sensible message out. I can't actually remember how, but that's what it did.
It was using this that enabled the English forewarning if battles and to determine the positions of the germans.
This is pretty old news, though, The books that I got all this from for my project were old at the time. As far as I know, the information was released thirty years after the event as per legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, (quoted from azstarnet)
One would imagine that Blatt's silence would be a digital silence - no noise, a silent file he generated and slapped on a CD. Cage's silence (not that it is silence as outlined above), since it is much older, would probably have at least white noise in it on a recording. Clearly since Cage did not believe that silence could exist neither he nor his estate could claim ownership of silence.
It was obviously well known in late 2000 when I bought my system because there were registry patch fixes for windoze avaliable from AMD's site and now are avaliable on mobo manufacturer's sites too.
Thats because they're so slow and crappy they don't need fans.
I have 4 case fans just for the sake of it as well as a DVD(rom) and CD-RW drive and I say who cares if your box sounds like a small air-conditioner.
Additionally, I found the article to be quite sketchy on many details, like how he was found out, the oppinions of his friends. This may sound cynical, but as far as we know, this boy may have had no friends and have been forced into all these activities that he didn't want to do by his parents, and being punished for doing something that he wanted for a change was the straw that broke the cammel's back. Several of my friends have been affected by parents who wanted to involve them in everything, and who pressured them to do well. Aside from which, he can't have been that bright and gifted - he got caught.
Anyhoo, my point being that a happy 13 year old wouldn't have killed himself over something that meant he was getting a light rap over the knuckles for. I get the impression that we may have been fed a few scraps of reality and dickloads of sensationalism here.
F4+80y +1++135
The key idea of the internet is that it is not a node-based system - in convential communication systems, if you take out a key node, then none of the people connected to that node can communicate with anybody and no other nodes that went through that node could connect to the other side of it. For example if you have a 20 storey building with your servers and such on the first floor, and from there a lan connection goes to a hub that serves the second floor and then through that hub to the third floor, and so on (which you probably wouldn't do, but you get the idea), if someone comes along and turns the hub on the tenth floor off, then the tenth floor network won't work at all and floors 11 to 20 won't get access to the servers.
In the internet, there should be no central nodes or key cables. Back to the office system, each floor should have its own servers, and connection to the internet, with a cable to each floor independantly, so that even if that idiot on floor 10 strikes again, none of the other floors will be affected, (the server on floor 10 might even have connections to the other floors independantly of the hub). Even if floor 10 was burnt out, floors 11 to 20 would be able to access the others and the internet.
Unfortunately though, this is not often put into practice any more. I can't really point the finger at anybody specific because I'm not really up-to-date with who's got what wires where, but most ISPs would only have one connection, especially small ones, so that if that line was damaged their customers would be out of service.
F4+80y +1++135
OK, so it's not much. We did however wire proper CAT-5 throughout the house so that should we ever feel the urge (ie if someone gives us a better free computer) we can easily upgrade to 100MBps. To be honest though the current system is surprisingly stable. The server runs 24/7 and has only crashed twice ever (not a bad effort for M$).
I'd say other cables that could/should be run everywhere are: phone, TV RF (from your antenna), Audio and Video (make sure for the video cable that you use 75 ohm coax so that there isn't too much signal loss), and possibly speaker if you have some sort of switch. If you really wanted to be phreaky you could put all your boxen in one air conditioned room, and run monitor, keyboard and mouse cables to other rooms (this could be very effective if you were a mac user (yuck!) because then you'd only have to run USB for keyboard, mouse and floppy, except that every room you wanted a computer would have to be adjacent to the one with the boxen in it), but then the impracticality of this would be astounding.
F4+80y +1++135
Currently, good consumer scanners are able to scan at 48bpp, so once the immage is scanned, the levels can be adjusted, then the colour information is quantised/shaped/dithered/whatever down to 24bpp for editing in your favorite immage editing program. Photoshop has very limited capabilities in 48bpp mode, probably because it would require more RAM and processing power.
It may interest you to know that TV's capability to cope with colour is much worse than that of 24bpp immage editing. In the whole TV signal, only a tiny portion of the bandwidth is reserved for the hue (which actual colour is shown) and saturation (how much of the colour is shown) - most is used for the luminance (brightness information). Video is encoded as HLS, not RGB, so that it is still compatible with black and white sets. The worst TV format as far as colour and resolution go is NTSC (National Television Standards Comittee - the US, Japanese & other 60Hz mains countries' standard), which is affectionately known amongst the PAL (Phase Alternate Line - the most common 50Hz mains powered countrys' standard) industry as Never The Same Colour. SECAM (French acronym that translates to sequential colour and memory) has even slightly higher colour definition than PAL. If you want to know the specifics about why, I suggest reading Television Production by Gerald Millerson (Focal Press), it's pretty common in TV Production circles. This is most prominent with composite (the most common home video connection) since the colour is crammed into the same signal, but even the colour capabilities of professional broadcast standards like component suffer this sort of problem - even most digital video formats.
F4+80y +1++135
Well all TOSs that I've ever had for any of my ISPs say the same, but aside from the fact that no one ever abides by them, I haven't heard of n e one getting kicked. I assume its just a way of making us more responsible for using the content than they are for replying to it. (If that makes any sense?)
Sony released a DVCAM tape drive with some of the earlier DVCAM products they made. I assumed it was designed to be used for backup, although I can't find any trace of it on the sony website, so it mustn't have been profitable. But why would you use tape anyway? the cheapest and easiest way to backup is just to buy another IDE hard drive.
My Grandmother worked as one of the WRENS (Womens Royal English Naval Service), entering the encoded message into the enigma machines for decoding. I did a school project on it some years back.
The Germans' code was an encrypted tesxt message, encoded by a machine known as the Enigma Machine. The Enigma Machine consisted of a series of gears and wheels that would encode the message depending on the setting on the front of the machine.
The English had (relatively) no trouble obtaining a machine, as someone simply stole it from the germans and they copied it. What the computer was used for was to determine the setting needed on the machine to get a sensible message out. I can't actually remember how, but that's what it did.
It was using this that enabled the English forewarning if battles and to determine the positions of the germans.
This is pretty old news, though, The books that I got all this from for my project were old at the time. As far as I know, the information was released thirty years after the event as per legislation.