I may be just an angry old man, but I have an idea that could revolutionize the digital music industry (patent-pending).
The label could take the highest quality digital version of the music and create analog presses that have near the same quality as the file. In each press, hot vinyl would be pressed to form a high quality analog reproduction of the music (patent-pending). Now, these vinyl *discs* could be packaged in a carboard envelope with printing, lyrics, and etc. Then they are sold. Certain *disc* players would read the music off of these *discs* by dragging a needle across the surface (patent pending) and reading the resulting vibrations.
High fidelity buffs would be impressed with the quality, yet it's still analog which would prevent some piracy since people would prefer the *best* analog reproduction to some digital copy of that analog reproduction. Packaging would turn on people who want something a little extra with their music. Finally, and this is the ingenious part, since this *disc* is read by dragging a needle across the surface, the quality would degrade over time, preventing resale value from gnawing at new *disc* profits (patent-pending).
The ultimate effect of my new music distribution model, is that piracy would come to an end, since the best copy is analog. At most, piracy would be used to sample the music of a particular *disc* prior to purchase. I could revolutionize a piracy filled industry. Recording Labels would grow since they longer have to worry about piracy and digital CDs being reproduced. They could tightly control the distribution of these vinyl *discs* thus controlling their profit.
Music might become thought of as a tangible piece of property with a physical existance rather than some digital idea that is freely copied and shared. (patent-pending)
My post was intended to make fun of the stereotype more than make fun of you. I will admit to never having worn a wool jersey, although I hear they can be quite comfortable. The pictures on the website that you linked are great (the old cycling pictures)
Wool wearing, steel frame riding stubborn old people like you refuse to be flexible enough to test equipment and objectively determine if it's better or not. My Descente plain white (read: Not flashy or lycra) sleevless jersey is my most comfortable shirt I own, and I wish I could wear it at work.
For Slashdot readers who aren't familiar with bicycling, lnoble is equivalent to a bearded Debian user who has nothing better to do than tell people to RTFM and "It's called GNU/Linux, not Linux". He's to afraid to try MS Outlook to see that it actually *IS* a decent program, or that Windows has been stable and useable since Win2k.
But for those of us who are familiary with biking, we'll probably pass this guy as we're climbing a hill. As we breeze past him, we'll know that Polyester *is* cooler than wool (and less stinky), that 32 teeth in the rear is a nice gear to have, that a lighter, more resilient bike is both faster and feels nicer than a lead/steel tank, and finally, that every advance in cycling in the last 10 years (there have been huge advances in the last 10 years) have been made to the advantage of the cyclist.
Not to mention that if somebody want's to spend $2000 and not use clipless pedals, then more power to them. If they want to use pedals with not clips or cages then so what. If they have the means and walk into a bike shop and buy the most expensive bike, then who is the bike shop salesperson to get offended?
I'll be the 2nd material scientist to reply to your post. Durability and "liveliness" of a material is more of a design issue than a material issue. I know that various materials are used to solve design issues, but believe me, a Carbon Fiber, Aluminum, or titanium frame can be made to feel every bit as lively as a steel frame.
It's okay to say that *current* aluminum frames don't feel as lively as a steel frame, but if Aluminum frames were designed to "feel like steel" rather than designed to "be as light as possible", then I'm sure they would feel just like steel.
Finally, to correct your remark: "Steel's got some great new alloys". No, it doesn't. Even the fancy high-strength alloy steels aren't new (in the last 20 years). They just haven't been applied in bicycle manufacturing or tubing yet.
Everything is as "real" as steel. It's just that steel is mature. Steel alloying technology goes back to middle ages. Carbon fiber technology dates back to the cold war. That's why there seems to be a steel that works for every manufacturing/design problem. Although we've had bulge-formed steel tubes, double and triple butted steel tubes, various welding & bonding techniques with steel for many years, there hasn't been the same demand for those types of Al or Ti tubes until recently. It seems as though the Cold War defense/Aerospace industry was happy with straight-gauge formed AL and Ti tubes. Only in the last 10 years has high-performance sporting industries created enough demand for exotic formed Al & Ti tubes that manufacturers actually started creating them. I remember reading an advertisement by Lightspeed Titanium saying that they were bending sheets of 6/4 Ti into tubes for their bike frames since you couldn't *draw* 6/4 into a tube shape. IMO, a bike company shouldn't be forming their own tubing. It's far to expensive for them to be doing it, rather they should focus on connecting the tubes to create bikes. Hopefully in the years since, they have found a tubing maker capable of making 6/4 tubing. Now that the cold war is over, manufacturers have to rely on aerospace and sports to peddle their tubes & billet. The automobile industry isn't very interested in composites or high-tech ceramics (e.g. carbon) since these materials are not as recycleable as steel or AL.
BTW, I'm on a steel road bike, and I love the feel of it. Irregardless of material, I won't buy another road bike until I find one that matches the liveliness of my current one.
Finally, I know I made a bunch of general remarks in this post without backing it up with facts. Please disagree and reply with what you think. I'd love to read if your opinions differ from mine.
Re:Technology can go too far... Or not far enough.
on
Sports Technology?
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· Score: 4, Funny
Um, this hasn't been true for some time now. F1 cars are now made of exactly 63% Unobtainium and 47% Bolonium.
You forgot to mention the -10% Slow-goin-ium that they remove from the alloy. They need this for speeding up the F1 car and for making percentages add to 100%.
I'm going to use it to counterfeit postage stamps!!!!! Thanks to Hewlett-Packards' economical cartidges & paper, then I should be able to print $0.37 postage stamps for about $0.36 each... and make BIG BUCKS!!
Back in my day we didn't need a shirt that changed colors or went from one size to another.
Our clothes would come in one respectable size and respectable color and it stayed that way. Nowadays all you kids and your fancy schmancy rayon or neon colors think that your clothes need to glow and look fancy. Now you even want your shirts to change sizes as you grow up.
When I was a kid, I wore all of my older sisters shirts once she outgrew them and I liked it. When I outgrew these shirts I kept wearing them until my younger brother grew into them. This would often take about 2 years and the shirt would develop respectable worn marks and tears. My kid brother would eventually wear these clothes after they were thread bare and see-through and he liked it.
Re:Coming soon to the Darwin awards.....
on
Pulse Jet Go-kart
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· Score: 3
Did anybody else notice that the jet was mounted *slightly* above the go-kart's vertical center of gravity?? If that thing was ever able to produce some real power, that guy and his go-kart would be sent off in somersaults.
I always thought that the Star Trek Enterprise would have a similar problem.
Title of article: Locusts watching Star Wars may spell end for car accidents
Mental note: Researchers always have to relate every neat phenomenon to some never-going-to-be-practical use (i.e. prevent car accidents) in order to recieve $$$$$ from the industry. Actually these claims are made with hopes to recieve $$$$$ from the industry, but the industry is too smart to fall for it.
What was the last thing to go through the bugs mind as it hit my windshield?
It's okay. It will give the mob something to do besides drug trafficking.
Ever since prohibition was lifted, the mob's main cash cow was organized drug trafficking. Now they can get into organized money laundering and theft using MS Passport.
Microsoft will even make it easy for them to get started for the first 3 years or so.
These are loopholes that would not crop up if things were done intelligently. I will attempt to explain why for each of your points. Of course, the usual IANAL applies:
1. Programmer will not nominate friend as bond judge. They will go through a proven bond-assistance company. Many law firms already provide these services (e.g. Miller Canfield or Hawkins Delafield & Wood).
2. Half-baked implementations will not be approved because our smart bond issuers will set very strict requirements and the software will be complete when it complies with the requirements. This is currently how good software development processes work. No reason that using bonds for funding would be any different.
Anything else that a bond judge might do would be a breach of contract.
With regard to your comments about discrediting the whole system until reputations can be built up, there are already many good reputations that have arisen from the sale of government bonds. There are many companies that deal with various aspects of government bonds. The difficulty would be for the bond issuers and purchasers to carefully go over the software requirements to ensure that they are clear and attainable.
again: IANAL and I welcome and response from anybody who agrees/disagrees.
Bagh. fwc, you don't realize what a luxury that you had!
I'd rather wait 1 hour for a 100kB program than have to walk 2 hours uphill each way to work to copy the program onto a single 10" floppy disk, only to find out that sunspots erased the floppy on the way home.
Shees. You young whipper-snappers and your need for high-bandwidth. When I was young, we had no-bandwidth and we liked it. To transport files, we used disks, cassette tapes, cards and whatever else we could find. Delivering the file to another office gave us an excuse to get out of the office and flirt with the cute receptionists. The drive accross town meant that we could take a long lunch... pay the 5 cents and get a large soda... just don't spill any on that disk!
Galeon represents what a browser should stand for! It doesn't have none of these fancy schmancy bells-and-whistles bloat that you young whipsnappers come to expect from each and every application. Shortly after Emacs came out, I knew that we were headed down the road to disaster.
If you young kids repected your elders, then you would have kept with the Unix philosophy of using small dedicated tools for specific tasks. Read email? You'd use mail. Browse web? Use Lynx. Look at images? Use xv. Use talk for an instant messager
Nowadays you need fancy schmancy browsers that do everything. Galeon is a step back in the right direction. Although I don't agree that bookmarks should be part of a browser (I used to have to remember the IP addresses in my head), galeon provides an efficient specific web browsing experience. Maybe all you programmers could take some notes from the guy who gave us Galeon!
Bagh, back in my day, people didn't need to teach senior citizens how to use the web. Senior citizens were old and frail and we just put them out to pasture.
Now-a-days all you kids and your eco-friendly fancy schmancy respect-everybody want to teach old people how to use the internet.
Well, all I have to say is this... If old people needed to learn how to use the 'net, then they would learn it. Your typical old-nearly-dead (such as myself) spends their time watching Alex Trebeck and Pat Sajek and we have no need for the fancy-schmancy commerciallized contorsion that used to be the internet.
Back in my day, we used the internet to trace milatary sectrets and send information to colleagues. Now it's a commercialized joke that's dominated by too few large corporations.
Instead of teaching us old fogies how to use the internet, we'd rather that you gave us all sponge baths.
Back in my day, we didn't need all these fancy schmancy boot loaders and tables. There was only one real operating system to boot and that was VAX. Nowadays all you kids think that you need these fancy schmancy OSes because they support 3D games or because they support free speech!
If you had real computing problems to worry about such as soviet missle trajectory prediction, then you wouldn't even think about booting into multiple operating systems.
...OR how about Less Secure: Open source means that anyone can get a copy of the source code. Developers can find security weaknesses very easily with Linux.
The same is not true with Microsoft Windows.
This is funny. MS states that, on one hand Linux is less secure, then on the other, that developers can easily find security weaknesses!
HAHA. This exact argument is why Linux is _MORE_ secure than windows, not less secure.
I agree with this young lad, that it is hard to make a dent on the OS, yet the Nautilus dent is big. I mean, look at me! I'm an 97 year old senile man and I can still use linux with the best of them. That's because my background comes from VAX systems in the late 60s (when I was still a senile old man).
All you young bucks think that you need a GUI file browser to make your system friendly and easy to use. Bagh! Major leaps in System useability didn't occur with the advent of the file browser. They occured when linefeed printers became Cathode Ray Tubes, and when Reel-to-reel tape drives became Cassettes or CD-Roms.
I'm angry, and I'm old, and the 2nd half of this post seems to contradict the first half, but that's just the viagra speaking.
Back in my day, we didn't have nice friendly community businesses closing down to the greedy cut-throat ones. I guess it's a sign of the times all you young whipper-snappers.
Bagh, Every respectable internet user connects via modem. Now-a-days all you lazy kids think that you need fancy schmancy cable-modem or some other nonsense just to browse all these large graphical websites. If internet connections need to be so fast, then why are new standards such as the passenger pigeon protocol still being developed? Once I shipped a box of cards, punched with VAX, clear accross the country overnight. That was as much bandwidth as anybody might ever need. Anything more is just for lazy disrespecting kids.
If it wasn't for all this bloat everywhere on the net, then we could all use a respectable browser such as Lynx or gopher.
Back in my day, working with computers involved lifting large tape reels, finding and replacing bad tubes, and walking all the way across the room just to read what you just typed on the LF printer.
Now-a-days you lazy kids have it easy... "Ohhhh, logging onto a remote machine takes too much effort to type my password over again" or "I actually have to lift this fancy-schmancy flat panel monitor onto my desk? Can't a temp do it??" Do you know that all of the respecable hard-working user interfaces, such as line-feed printers, way at least twice that of a monitor.
If you want computer workers to get excercise in their jobs, then start using respectable computers that have tubes and no monitors! Use respectable media like Reel-to-reel tape drives instead of the unnessecary CD Burner.
Back in my day we didn't AOL or all of this fancy schmancy network performance degraders. If we wanted to slow down network performance, we would just hold the phone handset about 2 inches away from the modem cradle and then loudly shout. Nowadays, all you lazy kids with your fast 100 Mb connections complain when quake 3 doesn't get a ping rate less than 50. If it wasn't for all that wasted bandwidth, the internet would still be only used for DoD research like it was intended, and like any hardworking network should be used for.
Slashdot Mirror
The label could take the highest quality digital version of the music and create analog presses that have near the same quality as the file. In each press, hot vinyl would be pressed to form a high quality analog reproduction of the music (patent-pending). Now, these vinyl *discs* could be packaged in a carboard envelope with printing, lyrics, and etc. Then they are sold. Certain *disc* players would read the music off of these *discs* by dragging a needle across the surface (patent pending) and reading the resulting vibrations.
High fidelity buffs would be impressed with the quality, yet it's still analog which would prevent some piracy since people would prefer the *best* analog reproduction to some digital copy of that analog reproduction. Packaging would turn on people who want something a little extra with their music. Finally, and this is the ingenious part, since this *disc* is read by dragging a needle across the surface, the quality would degrade over time, preventing resale value from gnawing at new *disc* profits (patent-pending).
The ultimate effect of my new music distribution model, is that piracy would come to an end, since the best copy is analog. At most, piracy would be used to sample the music of a particular *disc* prior to purchase. I could revolutionize a piracy filled industry. Recording Labels would grow since they longer have to worry about piracy and digital CDs being reproduced. They could tightly control the distribution of these vinyl *discs* thus controlling their profit.
Music might become thought of as a tangible piece of property with a physical existance rather than some digital idea that is freely copied and shared. (patent-pending)
My post was intended to make fun of the stereotype more than make fun of you. I will admit to never having worn a wool jersey, although I hear they can be quite comfortable. The pictures on the website that you linked are great (the old cycling pictures)
For Slashdot readers who aren't familiar with bicycling, lnoble is equivalent to a bearded Debian user who has nothing better to do than tell people to RTFM and "It's called GNU/Linux, not Linux". He's to afraid to try MS Outlook to see that it actually *IS* a decent program, or that Windows has been stable and useable since Win2k.
But for those of us who are familiary with biking, we'll probably pass this guy as we're climbing a hill. As we breeze past him, we'll know that Polyester *is* cooler than wool (and less stinky), that 32 teeth in the rear is a nice gear to have, that a lighter, more resilient bike is both faster and feels nicer than a lead/steel tank, and finally, that every advance in cycling in the last 10 years (there have been huge advances in the last 10 years) have been made to the advantage of the cyclist.
Not to mention that if somebody want's to spend $2000 and not use clipless pedals, then more power to them. If they want to use pedals with not clips or cages then so what. If they have the means and walk into a bike shop and buy the most expensive bike, then who is the bike shop salesperson to get offended?
It's okay to say that *current* aluminum frames don't feel as lively as a steel frame, but if Aluminum frames were designed to "feel like steel" rather than designed to "be as light as possible", then I'm sure they would feel just like steel.
Finally, to correct your remark: "Steel's got some great new alloys". No, it doesn't. Even the fancy high-strength alloy steels aren't new (in the last 20 years). They just haven't been applied in bicycle manufacturing or tubing yet.
Everything is as "real" as steel. It's just that steel is mature. Steel alloying technology goes back to middle ages. Carbon fiber technology dates back to the cold war. That's why there seems to be a steel that works for every manufacturing/design problem. Although we've had bulge-formed steel tubes, double and triple butted steel tubes, various welding & bonding techniques with steel for many years, there hasn't been the same demand for those types of Al or Ti tubes until recently. It seems as though the Cold War defense/Aerospace industry was happy with straight-gauge formed AL and Ti tubes. Only in the last 10 years has high-performance sporting industries created enough demand for exotic formed Al & Ti tubes that manufacturers actually started creating them. I remember reading an advertisement by Lightspeed Titanium saying that they were bending sheets of 6/4 Ti into tubes for their bike frames since you couldn't *draw* 6/4 into a tube shape. IMO, a bike company shouldn't be forming their own tubing. It's far to expensive for them to be doing it, rather they should focus on connecting the tubes to create bikes. Hopefully in the years since, they have found a tubing maker capable of making 6/4 tubing. Now that the cold war is over, manufacturers have to rely on aerospace and sports to peddle their tubes & billet. The automobile industry isn't very interested in composites or high-tech ceramics (e.g. carbon) since these materials are not as recycleable as steel or AL.
BTW, I'm on a steel road bike, and I love the feel of it. Irregardless of material, I won't buy another road bike until I find one that matches the liveliness of my current one.
Finally, I know I made a bunch of general remarks in this post without backing it up with facts. Please disagree and reply with what you think. I'd love to read if your opinions differ from mine.
You forgot to mention the -10% Slow-goin-ium that they remove from the alloy. They need this for speeding up the F1 car and for making percentages add to 100%.
I'm going to use it to counterfeit postage stamps!!!!!
Thanks to Hewlett-Packards' economical cartidges & paper, then I should be able to print $0.37 postage stamps for about $0.36 each... and make BIG BUCKS!!
Our clothes would come in one respectable size and respectable color and it stayed that way. Nowadays all you kids and your fancy schmancy rayon or neon colors think that your clothes need to glow and look fancy. Now you even want your shirts to change sizes as you grow up.
When I was a kid, I wore all of my older sisters shirts once she outgrew them and I liked it. When I outgrew these shirts I kept wearing them until my younger brother grew into them. This would often take about 2 years and the shirt would develop respectable worn marks and tears. My kid brother would eventually wear these clothes after they were thread bare and see-through and he liked it.
I always thought that the Star Trek Enterprise would have a similar problem.
Mental note: Researchers always have to relate every neat phenomenon to some never-going-to-be-practical use (i.e. prevent car accidents) in order to recieve $$$$$ from the industry. Actually these claims are made with hopes to recieve $$$$$ from the industry, but the industry is too smart to fall for it.
What was the last thing to go through the bugs mind as it hit my windshield?
Give up?? His Ass!!!
Ever since prohibition was lifted, the mob's main cash cow was organized drug trafficking. Now they can get into organized money laundering and theft using MS Passport.
Microsoft will even make it easy for them to get started for the first 3 years or so.
1. Programmer will not nominate friend as bond judge. They will go through a proven bond-assistance company. Many law firms already provide these services (e.g. Miller Canfield or Hawkins Delafield & Wood).
2. Half-baked implementations will not be approved because our smart bond issuers will set very strict requirements and the software will be complete when it complies with the requirements. This is currently how good software development processes work. No reason that using bonds for funding would be any different.
Anything else that a bond judge might do would be a breach of contract.
With regard to your comments about discrediting the whole system until reputations can be built up, there are already many good reputations that have arisen from the sale of government bonds. There are many companies that deal with various aspects of government bonds. The difficulty would be for the bond issuers and purchasers to carefully go over the software requirements to ensure that they are clear and attainable.
again: IANAL and I welcome and response from anybody who agrees/disagrees.
I'd rather wait 1 hour for a 100kB program than have to walk 2 hours uphill each way to work to copy the program onto a single 10" floppy disk, only to find out that sunspots erased the floppy on the way home.
Shees. You young whipper-snappers and your need for high-bandwidth. When I was young, we had no-bandwidth and we liked it. To transport files, we used disks, cassette tapes, cards and whatever else we could find. Delivering the file to another office gave us an excuse to get out of the office and flirt with the cute receptionists. The drive accross town meant that we could take a long lunch... pay the 5 cents and get a large soda... just don't spill any on that disk!
but I digress.
If you young kids repected your elders, then you would have kept with the Unix philosophy of using small dedicated tools for specific tasks. Read email? You'd use mail. Browse web? Use Lynx. Look at images? Use xv. Use talk for an instant messager
Nowadays you need fancy schmancy browsers that do everything. Galeon is a step back in the right direction. Although I don't agree that bookmarks should be part of a browser (I used to have to remember the IP addresses in my head), galeon provides an efficient specific web browsing experience. Maybe all you programmers could take some notes from the guy who gave us Galeon!
Now-a-days all you kids and your eco-friendly fancy schmancy respect-everybody want to teach old people how to use the internet.
Well, all I have to say is this... If old people needed to learn how to use the 'net, then they would learn it. Your typical old-nearly-dead (such as myself) spends their time watching Alex Trebeck and Pat Sajek and we have no need for the fancy-schmancy commerciallized contorsion that used to be the internet.
Back in my day, we used the internet to trace milatary sectrets and send information to colleagues. Now it's a commercialized joke that's dominated by too few large corporations.
Instead of teaching us old fogies how to use the internet, we'd rather that you gave us all sponge baths.
If you had real computing problems to worry about such as soviet missle trajectory prediction, then you wouldn't even think about booting into multiple operating systems.
This is funny. MS states that, on one hand Linux is less secure, then on the other, that developers can easily find security weaknesses!
HAHA. This exact argument is why Linux is _MORE_ secure than windows, not less secure.
All you young bucks think that you need a GUI file browser to make your system friendly and easy to use. Bagh! Major leaps in System useability didn't occur with the advent of the file browser. They occured when linefeed printers became Cathode Ray Tubes, and when Reel-to-reel tape drives became Cassettes or CD-Roms.
I'm angry, and I'm old, and the 2nd half of this post seems to contradict the first half, but that's just the viagra speaking.
Back in my day, we didn't have nice friendly community businesses closing down to the greedy cut-throat ones. I guess it's a sign of the times all you young whipper-snappers.
Somebody studied their Calculus I. Do you have a final exam this week, you young whipper-snapper?
If it wasn't for all this bloat everywhere on the net, then we could all use a respectable browser such as Lynx or gopher.
OUCH!!
Back in my day, working with computers involved lifting large tape reels, finding and replacing bad tubes, and walking all the way across the room just to read what you just typed on the LF printer.
Now-a-days you lazy kids have it easy... "Ohhhh, logging onto a remote machine takes too much effort to type my password over again" or "I actually have to lift this fancy-schmancy flat panel monitor onto my desk? Can't a temp do it??" Do you know that all of the respecable hard-working user interfaces, such as line-feed printers, way at least twice that of a monitor.
If you want computer workers to get excercise in their jobs, then start using respectable computers that have tubes and no monitors! Use respectable media like Reel-to-reel tape drives instead of the unnessecary CD Burner.
Back in my day we didn't AOL or all of this fancy schmancy network performance degraders. If we wanted to slow down network performance, we would just hold the phone handset about 2 inches away from the modem cradle and then loudly shout. Nowadays, all you lazy kids with your fast 100 Mb connections complain when quake 3 doesn't get a ping rate less than 50. If it wasn't for all that wasted bandwidth, the internet would still be only used for DoD research like it was intended, and like any hardworking network should be used for.
Bagh!