The problem is I don't know what I want. I already have every CD by every band that I know that I like. As I can tell from a 56kbit mono OGG file whether I like the music or not I can then either buy the album or not, my choice.
Small files. Fast downloads. Free advertising for the bands, rather than 'digital pillaging on the cyber-high-seas'. Lets you 'try before you buy'. etc etc.
That's what I want. I'll pay for it by buying more regular CDs if it recommends some good stuff to me.
In the bottom draw of a teacher's desk[1] at sixth form college I found what I now know to be a Shaeffer Imperial Flighter. I looked at it, thought it was nice and put it back. A month later it was still there. So I pocketed it and have used it ever since. The steel barrel and cap is heavily tarnished now but it still writes with impecable smoothness and never leaks. http://www.oldschoolpens.com/pd1217465757. htm?cate goryId=4
I have since bought a Waterman Serenite. This curved pen that looks somewhat like a samuri sword is a beautiful work of art. A good writer once you get the ink flowing (ie the first sentence is a chore) but it leaks slightly and so I don't use it as much as the Shaeffer. http://www.penbox.co.uk/new.waterman.pe ns.htm
[1] Understand that the desk was simply where the teacher sat when giving the lesson and didn't 'belong' to any teacher. Also the desk draw was 90% full of old A-level papers and the pen itself was underneath these at the bottom and obviously unused and seemed unowned. Put it this way, it felt more like giving a home to the pen than stealing.
I believe the punchline to the story is that NASA realised the carbon dust would potentially short the electronics. Bad news in orbit. The Rooskies had bigger electrical components less susceptible to the effect.
but we are scared the shops will be unreasonable with the information they can now harvest.
You are photographed, you pay for the product, the tag is disabled (by whatever device) and your picture is deleted.
1. Not all RFID trials promise to the public to disable the tag at the checkout. So we all need to continue these protests to make sure that happens.
2. Under the data protection act I can request copies of images taken of me by CCTV systems. So when do you delete the image? http://www.dataprotection[DOT]gov.uk/dpr/d pdoc.nsf (CCTV checklist link, view the last point on the second page of the document) (Actually it is 'request access to images' not 'copies' but that may ammount to the same thing in practice.)
That is a simple matter of removing the tag when you leave the store.
You can't remove what you can't find. How many places could a 0.5mm RFID tag be embedded into a pair of Nike trainers? Could you remove the tag from the inside of the sole?
My Ph.D. is in Physics so I consider myself qualified to answer this. The subject line sums up my views on this exact question, which is one that I considered myself for quite some time.
In other words, if you want to do it then go for it. You know in your heart if it sounds like a fun thing to do. Just don't choose your path based on 'maximum income potential' or anything like that.
There were good times and bad times for me, I enjoyed my time there and met a load of great people, but now I'm 30 and have less than 4 years of employment experience and am finding it hard to get a new job after the telecomms bust finally closed the site where I was.
Afterstep 1.0 was the first window manager I settled on after starting with Linux. BTW I first discovered a proto-dotting Malda on the web with his Afterstep page.
Anyhow. I had a UI feature then that to my knowledge is still not available on any of the 'modern' desktop environments. While most now let you hold down the win key (or alt depending on configuration) and left click anywhere to to drag a window. I used to be able to hold down the win key and right click within a window then sweep the pointer out past the edge to resize the window (if I wanted to make the window narrower or shorter I moved it out then back into the original window area).
I found these move and resize features very very useful. Wish I had them both today.
I design and build fiber-coupled semiconductor lasers as a day job, and some of the stuff in our R&D lab has a significantly higher power than what is currently used in most systems out there. A fiber bend radius that leaks/absobs x% of the power at 10mW with no difficulty becomes dangerous when you put a 5W laser in the system.
I used to do that job. Now I don't have a job and the site where I worked is for sale.
One of our packaging designs for fibre coupled semicondutor lasers was quite old but worked OK. As we ramped up the power of the laser chips we found that the light which wasn't coupled into the core would cause physical distortion of the packaging and move the fibre tip* due to the ammount of heat absorbed by the fibre-cladding to package interface. We fixed it after a fashion for one generation and redesigned the whole package for the next one which was due to see nearly 1W of 980nm ex-facet.
* You can guess what happens to power vs drive current linearity when the coupling ratio changes with facet output power.
I have a Z with the 2.39 uk sharp rom which I sync with my linux PC using Qtopia Desktop and use IR to my mobile to get email/web when I'm out. I think I'll stick with things as they are for now.
Ogle, vlc, mplayer, xine. Tried them all. Usually ogle for normal use nowadays. vlc used to be my first choice but the newer versions skip on chapter transitions on my box. Mplayer just complains about my system being too slow[1] and xine doesn't do the css properly on my box (possibly becasue of the other players installed alongside).
[1] Yes I know I shouldn't go for a spiffy video card without upgrading the processor(s) as well. It is just that the card I ordered worked (kinda) and the dual athlon mb was d.o.a.
My problem was DVD playback. I got RTCW etc working with my 9700 and it was nice. But try a DVD and only the left side of the movie was shown. I couldn't resize or swap to full screen to show the whole picture, it would always only show part of the picture. None of the rest of the desktop showed similar problems so it (hopefully) wasn't thinking there were two monitors plugged in. I never got it fixed and the ATI site hasn't updated the drivers yet either. Back to the old matrox G400max now. No RTCW but I can watch DVDs.
I actually use the Qtopia Desktop sync program with my Z-5500 on my RedHat 7.3 box. Took some serious mojo to get this together, I pulled info from about 4 different sites each of which was incomplete and improvised certain things based on error messages to get it working. Screws up if I change the kernel, but I know how to fix that.
Oh and USB host rather than gadget status if needed so you can plug keyboards, Zip drives whatever into it. (yes I know about interpocket, make it built in!)
One lego brick. Two lego bricks. Many lego bricks.
Check the lego website where they state this very clearly.
Similarly: One beef burger. Two beef burgers. Not two beefs burger.
One red car. Two red cars. Not two reds car.
One SCO lawsuit. Two SCO lawsuits. Not two SCOs lawsuit.
Understand yet?
Re:The best part of this book...
on
The Cassini Division
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I remember she was at a party and fed the suit. Was it a wine glass she gave to the 'monkey' perched on her shoulder that was all part of the suit? That was cool.
Anyway, I only read about a quarter of it before I got bored.
Not a patch on the Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons.
>In 2002, unit sales were down about 11 percent. >In 2001, unit sales were down about 10 percent. >In 2000, unit sales were down seven percent. "
In 2000 I bought more CDs than any other year. In 2001 I bought slightly fewer CDs than 2000. In 2002 I bought approx half the number as in 2000. In 2003 it's looking to half again (at present rate).
What does the RIAA conclude from this?
BZZZZZZT! Wrong. I have never downloaded any albums from the internet. I have, however run out of CDs to buy. I own all the CDs that I can find of all the bands that I like. So for me to buy more CDs I have to wait for new releases from bands I like or discover new (to me) bands. I have not yet found a good way of discovering new (to me) bands, radio is crap, P2P is crap with a 56k modem and a networking setup that cuts your bandwidth to zero after ~25mins online (but allows manual reconnection back at full rate), MTV etc: see radio, friends don't like what I like.
Total spent on 12cm shiny dics has probably increased over that time though. I've bought a lot of DVDs. Money spent will now decrease in line with my unemployment, it really is the ECONOMY, STUPID.
My 'Grand Theory' about this is for the record companies to put every piece of recorded music up for free download. No they won't go out of business. No the artists won't starve. No, civilization as we know it won't collapse.
Why?
Low data rate recordings. I want to be able to download a full album quickly and easily over my modem. I can then listen to the AM radio equivalent quality music over my shitty computer speakers and decide whether I like the music or not. If I do, I'll buy the frikin CD. If not, I'll delete the files. Call it advertising, call it 'try before you buy', but don't call this idea theft.
I don't need 'Hi-Fi' to tell if I like the music. But I do want the CD to fully enjoy it.
Now what the record companies really should have is a cross-pigopolist database of bands and peoples preferences. So in a firefly like manner I can input what I already like and get recommendations of new-to-me bands.
PS. When Rush used to put out albums they only had 5 or 6 songs on them, CoS, 2112, AFTK, H, PW etc
Can you do similar with SRPMs?
on
Gentoo Reviewed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Has anyone written a utility that lets your take a stock RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake (etc) system that is installed on your machine and recompile the binaries from the SRPM sources? Then these optimised RPMs can be installed over the top of the stardard ones already present.
Might is be as simple as a query to give a listing of what is installed piped into a rebuild of the SRPM files piped into an upgrade (or freshen) command with the force option because the version numbers will be the same? IE, all done mostly with the RPM command itself probably inside your favourite scripting language?
Obviously this applies to any RPM based distos I didn't mention and potentially applies to other package formats that distribute in binary + source variants.
Every single piece of recorded music that exists should be available for free download.
This can either be anonymous download, registered download with access to recommendation features (if I like X and Y and you like Y and Z then I'm likely to like Z), or even what I term postal download, where I choose a CDs worth of files that gets auto-burned and posted to me for not much more than cost. Whatever suits my net connection.
This includes being able to choose individual songs, whole albums, or even the band's entire back catalogue.
The missing piece of info so far? Data rate/music quality.
I want it to be shit. I mean mono, medium wave radio kinda quality. This makes for quicker downloads but does not stop me being able to tell if I like the song or not.
Then if I hate the music I'll delete it and won't buy the CD. If I only like one or two songs and the CD costs 17UKP (not uncommon UK price) then I probably won't buy it. But if I like it all, I'll buy it. And in the end that is what it comes down to.
I _also_ have the 'right click' key * set to pop an xterm up on my linux box. Sooo handy. Any incredibly easy to configure in Sawfish, probably in other WMs too.
* the one you never use which is next to 'alt Gr' which you really never use.
Slashdot Mirror
What about:
I don't know what to buy, already owning every CD by every band that I know that I like.
The problem is I don't know what I want. I already have every CD by every band that I know that I like. As I can tell from a 56kbit mono OGG file whether I like the music or not I can then either buy the album or not, my choice.
Small files. Fast downloads. Free advertising for the bands, rather than 'digital pillaging on the cyber-high-seas'. Lets you 'try before you buy'. etc etc.
That's what I want. I'll pay for it by buying more regular CDs if it recommends some good stuff to me.
In the bottom draw of a teacher's desk[1] at sixth form college I found what I now know to be a Shaeffer Imperial Flighter. I looked at it, thought it was nice and put it back. A month later it was still there. So I pocketed it and have used it ever since. The steel barrel and cap is heavily tarnished now but it still writes with impecable smoothness and never leaks.. htm?cate goryId=4
e ns.htm
http://www.oldschoolpens.com/pd1217465757
I have since bought a Waterman Serenite. This curved pen that looks somewhat like a samuri sword is a beautiful work of art. A good writer once you get the ink flowing (ie the first sentence is a chore) but it leaks slightly and so I don't use it as much as the Shaeffer.
http://www.penbox.co.uk/new.waterman.p
[1] Understand that the desk was simply where the teacher sat when giving the lesson and didn't 'belong' to any teacher. Also the desk draw was 90% full of old A-level papers and the pen itself was underneath these at the bottom and obviously unused and seemed unowned. Put it this way, it felt more like giving a home to the pen than stealing.
I believe the punchline to the story is that NASA realised the carbon dust would potentially short the electronics. Bad news in orbit. The Rooskies had bigger electrical components less susceptible to the effect.
Just found that I'd made a note of how I did this in Afterstep1.0
.Xmodmap file now contains:
.xclients the line:
.steprc the lines:
This is directly from my 6 year old 'linux notebook', so you may need to modify it to fit. YMMV etc.
--------
The
keycode 115 = Hyper_L
add mod4 = Hyper_L
add to
xmodmap $HOME/.Xmodmap
add to
Mouse 1 W 4 Move
Mouse 3 W 4 Resize
-------
Ie, read up on xmodmap and apply as normal with '4' rather than 'M' to your feel file.
BTW. No, not using AS anymore, after initially being turned off by Bluecurve I find that now I know all the keyboard shortcuts I actually like it.
but we are scared the shops will be unreasonable with the information they can now harvest.
d pdoc.nsf
You are photographed, you pay for the product, the tag is disabled (by whatever device) and your picture is deleted.
1. Not all RFID trials promise to the public to disable the tag at the checkout. So we all need to continue these protests to make sure that happens.
2. Under the data protection act I can request copies of images taken of me by CCTV systems. So when do you delete the image?
http://www.dataprotection[DOT]gov.uk/dpr/
(CCTV checklist link, view the last point on the second page of the document)
(Actually it is 'request access to images' not 'copies' but that may ammount to the same thing in practice.)
That is a simple matter of removing the tag when you leave the store.
You can't remove what you can't find. How many places could a 0.5mm RFID tag be embedded into a pair of Nike trainers? Could you remove the tag from the inside of the sole?
My Ph.D. is in Physics so I consider myself qualified to answer this. The subject line sums up my views on this exact question, which is one that I considered myself for quite some time.
In other words, if you want to do it then go for it. You know in your heart if it sounds like a fun thing to do. Just don't choose your path based on 'maximum income potential' or anything like that.
There were good times and bad times for me, I enjoyed my time there and met a load of great people, but now I'm 30 and have less than 4 years of employment experience and am finding it hard to get a new job after the telecomms bust finally closed the site where I was.
As described in the 'A Fishfull of Dollars' episode from season one of the docu-drama 'Futurama'
True.
/.
Further proof that we need a 'just plain wrong' moderation on
Afterstep 1.0 was the first window manager I settled on after starting with Linux. BTW I first discovered a proto-dotting Malda on the web with his Afterstep page.
Anyhow. I had a UI feature then that to my knowledge is still not available on any of the 'modern' desktop environments. While most now let you hold down the win key (or alt depending on configuration) and left click anywhere to to drag a window. I used to be able to hold down the win key and right click within a window then sweep the pointer out past the edge to resize the window (if I wanted to make the window narrower or shorter I moved it out then back into the original window area).
I found these move and resize features very very useful. Wish I had them both today.
I design and build fiber-coupled semiconductor lasers as a day job, and some of the stuff in our R&D lab has a significantly higher power than what is currently used in most systems out there. A fiber bend radius that leaks/absobs x% of the power at 10mW with no difficulty becomes dangerous when you put a 5W laser in the system.
I used to do that job. Now I don't have a job and the site where I worked is for sale.
One of our packaging designs for fibre coupled semicondutor lasers was quite old but worked OK. As we ramped up the power of the laser chips we found that the light which wasn't coupled into the core would cause physical distortion of the packaging and move the fibre tip* due to the ammount of heat absorbed by the fibre-cladding to package interface. We fixed it after a fashion for one generation and redesigned the whole package for the next one which was due to see nearly 1W of 980nm ex-facet.
* You can guess what happens to power vs drive current linearity when the coupling ratio changes with facet output power.
You've just answered my questions.
I have a Z with the 2.39 uk sharp rom which I sync with my linux PC using Qtopia Desktop and use IR to my mobile to get email/web when I'm out. I think I'll stick with things as they are for now.
Ask him to spell 'irrigate'.
Aye
Arrr
Arrr
Aye....
Ogle, vlc, mplayer, xine. Tried them all. Usually ogle for normal use nowadays. vlc used to be my first choice but the newer versions skip on chapter transitions on my box. Mplayer just complains about my system being too slow[1] and xine doesn't do the css properly on my box (possibly becasue of the other players installed alongside).
[1] Yes I know I shouldn't go for a spiffy video card without upgrading the processor(s) as well. It is just that the card I ordered worked (kinda) and the dual athlon mb was d.o.a.
My problem was DVD playback. I got RTCW etc working with my 9700 and it was nice.
But try a DVD and only the left side of the movie was shown. I couldn't resize or swap to full screen to show the whole picture, it would always only show part of the picture. None of the rest of the desktop showed similar problems so it (hopefully) wasn't thinking there were two monitors plugged in. I never got it fixed and the ATI site hasn't updated the drivers yet either.
Back to the old matrox G400max now. No RTCW but I can watch DVDs.
Desktop linux syncing that works. Easily.
I actually use the Qtopia Desktop sync program with my Z-5500 on my RedHat 7.3 box. Took some serious mojo to get this together, I pulled info from about 4 different sites each of which was incomplete and improvised certain things based on error messages to get it working. Screws up if I change the kernel, but I know how to fix that.
Oh and USB host rather than gadget status if needed so you can plug keyboards, Zip drives whatever into it. (yes I know about interpocket, make it built in!)
Ahem. 3 people. Unless you counted me already.
Correct.
One lego brick.
Two lego bricks.
Many lego bricks.
Check the lego website where they state this very clearly.
Similarly:
One beef burger.
Two beef burgers.
Not two beefs burger.
One red car.
Two red cars.
Not two reds car.
One SCO lawsuit.
Two SCO lawsuits.
Not two SCOs lawsuit.
Understand yet?
I remember she was at a party and fed the suit. Was it a wine glass she gave to the 'monkey' perched on her shoulder that was all part of the suit? That was cool.
Anyway, I only read about a quarter of it before I got bored.
Not a patch on the Hyperion cantos by Dan Simmons.
>In 2002, unit sales were down about 11 percent.
>In 2001, unit sales were down about 10 percent.
>In 2000, unit sales were down seven percent. "
In 2000 I bought more CDs than any other year.
In 2001 I bought slightly fewer CDs than 2000.
In 2002 I bought approx half the number as in 2000.
In 2003 it's looking to half again (at present rate).
What does the RIAA conclude from this?
BZZZZZZT! Wrong.
I have never downloaded any albums from the internet.
I have, however run out of CDs to buy. I own all the CDs that I can find of all the bands that I like. So for me to buy more CDs I have to wait for new releases from bands I like or discover new (to me) bands. I have not yet found a good way of discovering new (to me) bands, radio is crap, P2P is crap with a 56k modem and a networking setup that cuts your bandwidth to zero after ~25mins online (but allows manual reconnection back at full rate), MTV etc: see radio, friends don't like what I like.
Total spent on 12cm shiny dics has probably increased over that time though. I've bought a lot of DVDs. Money spent will now decrease in line with my unemployment, it really is the ECONOMY, STUPID.
My 'Grand Theory' about this is for the record companies to put every piece of recorded music up for free download.
No they won't go out of business. No the artists won't starve. No, civilization as we know it won't collapse.
Why?
Low data rate recordings. I want to be able to download a full album quickly and easily over my modem. I can then listen to the AM radio equivalent quality music over my shitty computer speakers and decide whether I like the music or not. If I do, I'll buy the frikin CD. If not, I'll delete the files.
Call it advertising, call it 'try before you buy', but don't call this idea theft.
I don't need 'Hi-Fi' to tell if I like the music. But I do want the CD to fully enjoy it.
Now what the record companies really should have is a cross-pigopolist database of bands and peoples preferences. So in a firefly like manner I can input what I already like and get recommendations of new-to-me bands.
PS. When Rush used to put out albums they only had 5 or 6 songs on them, CoS, 2112, AFTK, H, PW etc
Has anyone written a utility that lets your take a stock RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake (etc) system that is installed on your machine and recompile the binaries from the SRPM sources? Then these optimised RPMs can be installed over the top of the stardard ones already present.
Might is be as simple as a query to give a listing of what is installed piped into a rebuild of the SRPM files piped into an upgrade (or freshen) command with the force option because the version numbers will be the same? IE, all done mostly with the RPM command itself probably inside your favourite scripting language?
Obviously this applies to any RPM based distos I didn't mention and potentially applies to other package formats that distribute in binary + source variants.
Every single piece of recorded music that exists should be available for free download.
This can either be anonymous download, registered download with access to recommendation features (if I like X and Y and you like Y and Z then I'm likely to like Z), or even what I term postal download, where I choose a CDs worth of files that gets auto-burned and posted to me for not much more than cost. Whatever suits my net connection.
This includes being able to choose individual songs, whole albums, or even the band's entire back catalogue.
The missing piece of info so far?
Data rate/music quality.
I want it to be shit. I mean mono, medium wave radio kinda quality. This makes for quicker downloads but does not stop me being able to tell if I like the song or not.
Then if I hate the music I'll delete it and won't buy the CD.
If I only like one or two songs and the CD costs 17UKP (not uncommon UK price) then I probably won't buy it.
But if I like it all, I'll buy it. And in the end that is what it comes down to.
My CF card in my Zaurus is /dev/hda1, just like my primary hard drive on my PC.
I _also_ have the 'right click' key * set to pop an xterm up on my linux box.
Sooo handy. Any incredibly easy to configure in Sawfish, probably in other WMs too.
* the one you never use which is next to 'alt Gr' which you really never use.