Hmmm, I have an AGP camera and it stores the date and time with the picture on the film. Of course I had to set the time on my camera once but that shouldn't be a problem.
Normally, it's not. My comments were more directed at digital cameras, where modification is the Name of the Game.
However, even film-based cameras aren't as good as one-step cameras. There is room for modification of the picture in the darkroom. Polaroids remove that possibility and increase the weight of the evidence, which is always a good thing.
BTW, I seriously doubt one-step cameras will go away anytime soon. This is one of the reasons why. Probably, Polaroid's intellectual property covering them will be sold to somebody (Kodak would be appropriately ironic), and they will continue to manufacture them, albeit at a lower rate.
FWIW, I do most of my photo-type stuff in the digital domain, and I prefer analog, film-based cameras overall, at least for still imaging. I'd rather use a scanner to bring the image in than have the original in the digital cam; two reasons - I like the look of film, plus the resolution tends to be better than what you can get with CCD in comparable price ranges. Also, you can do things with a scanner that are interesting in themselves.
That's still a bit more than what I pay. I'm a Canadian, so that's about $150/month in my dollars.
I have DSL from my telco. It costs $40/month on top of local phone service, which costs me about $40/month, after taxes (which we Canadians have a good deal of on our phone lines). I don't have digital cable, just basic cable: but that would be about another $40-$50/month I believe for digital from the local cable co.
That's a 1MBit downstream, though. But I'm paying slightly under $100/month in my dollars, not including long distance (which I get at a capped flat rate of $20/month (i.e. 10 cents/minute for the first 200 minutes, 0 cents/minute thereafter) for all Canadian calls), although I only get regular cable.
Cassidy and Greene was discontinuing Soundjam, which was really quite an incredible (closed source, alas) audio player for Mac. They're now working on iTunes, or something similiar.
Yes, it's true, SoundJam was discontinued because of iTunes. However, I believe the developers left C&G to go work for Apple, with the blessing of C&G being given due to a cheque from Apple. It is still possible to find SoundJam in odd places (I have a limited version of it on my machine that came with my Rio; I bought my Rio just before iTunes was released & consequently never upgraded; "RioPort SoundJam MP" still comes in handy sometimes, although it's somewhat crippled).
Although I love iTunes and use it frequently, ironically, my favourite MP3 player is MacAST, due to its superior AppleScript support. while it doesn't do everything I want it to, it does allow me to press the play button in a script. iTunes, weirdly enough, has no AppleScript support at all. also, the one feature that SoundJam had that iTunes doesn't is a large base of available visualization plugins. the default Apple visualization is kinda cool, but I've yet to see anything as neat as G-Force, or in fact any non-Apple visualization plugins at all. this is weird. there is an SDK for iTunes plugins, does anybody use it?
Anyway, back to the topic.:) SoundJam was - as far as I know - based entirely on original code. MacAST (formerly known as MacAmp) was originally a port of WinAmp. (Amp changes to AST for broadcasting, i.e. shoutcast playback support.) It was done by a company called @soft though, but they did have Access To The Source.
the post-iTunes postscript: @soft's site is still up. However, they haven't released much; they just put out an encoder a few weeks ago, but most of the site is still living in March 2000. most of the other Apple MP3 players have basically stopped. the only reason people use them now is because they have Old Macs and can't run iTunes, or because they're cranky like me.:)
Personally, I feel they should release this as a completely static binary, this way it can be run on any Linux system.
Deep breath.
This is not a release. It's an alpha version, fergawdsakes. You don't release precompiled binaries of alpha versions.
And yes, it's bleeding-edge: of course. The fact that it was compiled with bleeding-edge libraries is probably a reflection of the libraries Nullsoft have on their Linux boxen.
Kodak makes more money selling 35mm motion picture film than they ever do from the consumer market.
True.
Some applications will always require film, no matter what technological advancements occur. You can shoot 35mm film in conditions where electronic systems would never function.
Possibly true. I feel some trepidation when using the word "never." However. Assuming it is true, is it therefore true that the market for 35mm film is fixed and large?
No. Most 35mm film is shot in movie studios, in highly controlled conditions. This is an enormous market, and it's being invaded right now by DV.
The next battle, IMO, is Sony vs. Kodak, and I'm betting on Sony. DV (not the consumer version, i.e. FireWire, known as mini-DV) has made significant inroads already in the independent film market, and has begun to show up in mainstream Hollywood releases. There are things you can do with it that are impossible with film, mainly native digital editing. Also, there's the CGI industry to consider: I would suspect that, given a choice, ILM would prefer an all-digital environment today (where they would not have in the early '80s, when model effects were king).
Using a Polaroid usually indicates that the photo hasn't been tampered with and serves as good proof in some areas.
Yeah, like the law.
Private investigators use Polaroids all the time. If somebody breaks something of yours, take a Polaroid of it and write the date and time on it immediately: it's much better evidence than traditional film, because it's harder to modify.
The problem with digital cameras is that their images are easy to modify. While this is great for artists and people who Want to Look Beautiful, it sucks for use in court.
It's a nice idea, but printing presses are too old. Patents for invention don't go back to Gutenberg. While you can patent specific improvements on the press - and people do - those improvements just don't give you enough market share to try and pull an Edison-like stunt.
The thing about the Edison case was that the Edison company had all the patents on film projectors wrapped up. (Edison was really, really good at tying up patents. Marvellous businessman.) This allowed them to try and do this market grab.
I doubt you're going to find many comparable situations, unfortunately. Even what the RIAA proposes isn't as bad as what Edison was trying to pull. Even monopolies like Diamond Comics aren't as bad.
Theoretically, it can go so far as to strip the RIAA of all of their music copyrights. I'm not aware of any cases that go quite this far. There's an old case involving one of Edison's companies that might shed some light. It's the classic case of illegal bundling; but it wasn't dealt with under antitrust but rather under patent misuse. Copyright misuse is incredibly rare, BTW; patent misuse is much more common as a legal doctrine.
Basically, Edison's company invented the movie projector, and held the patent on the projector. Edison's company also made films.
In order to use the projectors, a theatre owner needed to get a patent license. (Remember, in order to use a patented article, you need a patent license? This is an example.) Edison, of course, happily licensed the projectors. However, a standard clause in the patent license was that the theatre owners sign an exclusive contract with Edison's film company.
The theatre owners protested. Edison's films were not that good. And they won: although I can't remember what the remedy was, I think it may have been just the striking out of that clause in the contract. The rationale was that Edison was trying to use the patent in a way that the legislation did not want him to. Also, the film contracts did not expire with the patents, which was seen (correctly) as an attempt to unlawfully extend the term of the patent.
The company is cagey about details, but a patent describes one way in which an inflatable speaker might work.
The disclosure's in the patent. Normally, companies with patents don't talk much in public: they're already giving stuff away in the patent, they don't want to give any more.
This is actually a common fault of all Star Trek shows. Every series has had somebody beam up and conquer the computer, except maybe DS9 (and there was an implication that that was because it was a Cardassian computer).
The only things they seem to use authentication for is secret Starfleet documents and auto-destruct sequences. Everything else is an anything goes affair.:)
I say to my iMac "What's on TV?" and it logs in to the canadian version of clicktv and shows me my TV listings. (It's a short AppleScript I wrote that knows my username and password.) I say "Webcam on" and it starts up my webcam and logs me into CitizenX using a combination AppleScript/JavaScript program. I say "Angst" and it checks to see if the right CDR is in the drive, and if it is, plays Angst by KMFDM in my MP3 player, and if it isn't, lets me know so that I can switch CDs. I say "Slashdot" and it logs me in here. I say "Tag's Trance" and it plays one of my favourite techno shoutcast streams. I say "Salon"...
I hope my point is clear.
The only problem with it is that when I'm playing MP3s, it tends to not hear me too well, because the mic is really close to the speakers. So I want a solution: a cordless headset mic.
Ah, yes, the cordless headset mic. That's what people use in call centres. And that's what they would use in offices in general if talking to your computer was an accepted practice. Pretty simple technology really, and no more expensive than a high-end mouse.
I had a VAX 11/780 back in the day. I only knew how to get it to output to the Gigi (there was Only One) through a few miscellaneous systems calls in VMS. (I forget now. SMG libraries probably.)
anyway, I am now going to complain. Mods, mod this parent up. He/she/it is better than you. The parent poster has a quite low number, and over 2000 posts. And was a PDP 11/34 programmer.
This should translate to a Score +1 Bonus. Hell, I have one, and I haven't even made 400 posts.
Yes.. for a few characters in a row, you MAY exceed 300bps.....but that's still not 'typing faster than the modem'. You may experience a delay while waiting for the remote echo from whatever software you are using.. so you might think you are going 'faster' than the modem.. but you aren't.. you're just waiting for processing & return on the other end.
What is typing faster than the modem then?
Lag happens when the network is not moving fast enough to keep up with input.
What you are describing is lag.
I don't understand why, when typing causes intermittent lag, it cannot be said that you are typing too fast for your network, whether that network consists of a hundred computers or only two.
(And yes, I've seen modern, ethernet-based networks lag because of normal typing. I've only ever seen it when NT was involved somehow though.:)
The question about RS232C programming was directed, I guess, at a rather simple point: most people on/. don't have that much experience. Programming was a lot different in the '80s; there were issues when you're dealing with a 1MHz environment and low-speed peripherals that just don't appear anymore.
The point about the 4 characters was that it's just incredibly stupid to claim that the average word is only 3 letters long. Anyway.
Execute-Macro-Code is written by Committee A (well probably Committee J through M, but you know:)
Detect-Nasty-Macro-Code is written by Committee B.
Closed source doesn't just apply to not letting outsiders see the source. With large projects like this, the philosophy is competitive: Manager A wants to look Better than Manager B. Thus, Manager A's techies are not allowed to talk to Manager B's techies. Result? Nobody gets to share code.
One of the great benefits of open source is that it wipes out this kind of stupid, anti-productive competitiveness.
360 WPM for anything other than well remembered, often-used phrases is pretty unlikely for most people.
I have three words for you: Manually entered sigfiles.:)
That aside, you're making a similar mistake to the 450 WPM poster; you're forgetting spaces and punctuation. Words average 5 letters, not characters.
In other news, I can read straight text at 2400 baud if I'm actually paying attention (rare at times:). I went straight from 2400 to 28.8 and lost that ability though...
people type faster when they're in the middle of words. basically, humans don't stream text at a fixed rate. that beating the 30 cps rate happens when, for example, you do things like hitting a few characters in a row which are close to each other.
there is, of course, one exception: holding down the space bar. centered sigs were incredibly difficult in 300 baud. without common support for the HT character. but I digress.
also, as I said, I don't hunt and peck. I know where all the letters are on the keyboard. it's just that I don't always use all my fingers, especially for stuff near the middle of the keyboard. I touchtype badly would be the most accurate way to describe it.
finally, there is indeed something wrong with your math. the average word is not four characters. much higher. let's see... one of my recent essays has 1,086 words, and counting spaces and punctuation (remember, modems have to transfer those too), totals to 6,546 characters. A little division gives 6.0276243094 characters per word. You're right in a sense though; that still gives 300 WPM, and I don't type that fast - not sustained. But the reason why you don't is because you... take breaks.
4 characters per word would make "the" an average length word though. Huh.
As for HW flow control: Ever actually do any RS-232C programming in the '80s? Like, for example, writing a terminal program? I did. (OK, it was primitive; it didn't have any support for XModem or Punter, just text; but it did have a really badass dialer which I hand-coded to match my modem's exact timing to get more redials than everybody else. one sysop told me once that he could tell it was me on the line, 'cause the OH light just flickered for a brief moment before my call came in. I had to re-code it when I upgraded modems though.:)
wow, the beginning of the Great Decline, at least in my area at the time.
WWIV? never even seen one. however, it can't have been the worst. the other poster is prolly not old enough to remember 6485. heh.
(6485's great selling points were that (a) it ran on a C64, and (b) it had a Multiple File Download feature - you could ask it for more than one file at a time! believe it or not, this is after the invention of mget.:)
I run one, actually. Nobody uses it though (except me), as this is the first time I've mentioned it since it went up again a month or so ago. OK, I'm lazy.:)
The fastest touch-typist in the world can't type faster than a 300 bps modem can transmit; 110 bps maybe.
Hell, I can type faster than a 300 baud modem can transmit, and I type funny (I tried to learn how to touch-type, got bored; now I touch with about seven fingers:)...
300 baud, at 8-N-1 or 7-E-1, is 37.5 cps, theoretically. Practically, 300 bps modems only reach that speed when they're getting a steady stream of characters. You wind up spending a lot of time just dealing with RTS/CTS and other junk when you've got an irregular stream, as you do when you're typing.
Of course, most hackers, are hunt-and-peck and can't even reach that.
One of the guys I knew when I was in CS was a trained professional typist. It helped him a lot when he was a starving student (tm); he got these really nice jobs typing stuff (and maybe doing other secretary work; he didn't talk about it much, I think he was embarrassed; it was OK for a geek to be a male secretary but he was also a metalhead:) all summer.
However, it instilled in him a tendency to produce really gross code. He was like a human cut-and-paste machine. If he could think of an inelegant solution to a problem, that only meant typing up 5000 lines or so, he just went ahead and did it. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But he did produce reams and reams of code.) He could code optimally, but he rarely did; he typed so fast that he spent actually less time coding by simply overcoding.
So anyway, the point is maybe it's a Good Thing that most hackers are hunt & peckers.
Anyway, back in my day, I had a Gigi terminal (I think) to do my gfx on. I still remember sneakernetting jpegs back from school (where I had Usenet) to my home (where my Amiga could view them, in truecolour; the machines at school hadn't yet even discovered 256 colours).
Well, it's true, I do like dark fantasy, but I don't think that's what I was talking about in the bit you quoted.:)
Wolf Lake is a horror show. All Souls was also a horror show. Brimstone, maybe: but I would put it probably on the horror side of the line. Fantasy Island was dark fantasy, yes. Empire was a satire soap opera.:) Earth 2 was semi-dark SF. Max Headroom was cyberpunk (and treated badly by the British).
I've seen extremely little in the way of genuine dark fantasy on TV, or in the movies. Usually it's either heroic fantasy or horror. Beastmaster comes close sometimes: but the main character is pure heroic fantasy. It's a quirky show. Xena wandered towards dark fantasy sometimes, but that's a show that was all over the map in so many ways (sometimes it felt like a quasi-feminist version of Xanth:). I think the old Conan show thought it was dark fantasy, but they didn't know either what dark fantasy was or how to write.
Now, I read tons of dark fantasy. The first name that comes to mind is Brust, but my shelves are awash in it. But I can't think of any live-action TV show ever made that was even remotely reminiscent of something like the Taltos books (which would make an excellent TV series, I think; Vlad's character has a lot of potential). Perhaps the Gargoyles cartoon, at least on the surface; stylistically the Batman cartoon had a lot in common too I think.
Hmm. Some of Burton's stuff, perhaps. Especially Beetlejuice and Scissorhands.
Nevertheless, I ramble too much. It will be interesting to see how the three Lord of the Rings movies do, especially relative to each other. I see Fellowship of the Ring as being the archetype of high fantasy, The Two Towers providing the basis of dark fantasy, and Return of the King as the archetype of heroic fantasy. Of course, these are overgeneralizations, but I feel there's some truth to them (even though heroic fantasy predates Tolkien; he just wrote it better:)...
ASCAP, BMI and SOCAN (a Canadian copyright collective, does the same thing as ASCAP and BMI) collect copyright licensing fees.
A musician's performance does incur copyright. However, this can lead to overlapping layers of copyright - under the Berne convention, which the United States did not implement until the late '80s. For an example, let's analyze Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower.
Dylan wrote All Along the Watchtower. He gets songwriter's copyright as a result, which has a term of life plus fifty (or longer, under the Mickey Mouse rules:). However, Hendrix played it. Under Berne, this means that he gets a more limited copyright in the perfomance itself - IIRC the term is only fifty years, not life plus fifty. Also, the other members of the Experience contributed something. What this means, in effect, is that in order for a radio station in a Berne country (as the U.S. is now) to play this particular tune, then they have to get written permission from both Hendrix (well, his estate) and Dylan. Well, and the other members of the Experience. Or possibly whoever these people sold their copyrights to. It's not simple.
This would be rather complicated if they had to do it for each song. "Please excuse me, we will now take call-ins for three hours while we arrange copyright permission for the next song.":) Therefore, we get ASCAP, BMI and the others. An american radio station signs a contract with ASCAP or BMI, sends it a playlist, and the copyright collective bills it back and redistributes the money between the copyright holders (who are artists, in many cases).
Therefore, ASCAP and BMI are not just "the people who wrote the song or, more often, the people who bought (or swindled) the publishing rights from the people who wrote the song" --- they're also performers. And finally, it's not just the publishing rights. Actually, publishing rights aren't that important to the collectives. What's important to them are broadcasting rights, which are separate under Berne.
This is Berne, though. Before Berne, I think you were right - in the United States, which IIRC was 1988. The rest of the world has been on Berne pretty much since the late 19th century.
Slashdot Mirror
Normally, it's not. My comments were more directed at digital cameras, where modification is the Name of the Game.
However, even film-based cameras aren't as good as one-step cameras. There is room for modification of the picture in the darkroom. Polaroids remove that possibility and increase the weight of the evidence, which is always a good thing.
BTW, I seriously doubt one-step cameras will go away anytime soon. This is one of the reasons why. Probably, Polaroid's intellectual property covering them will be sold to somebody (Kodak would be appropriately ironic), and they will continue to manufacture them, albeit at a lower rate.
FWIW, I do most of my photo-type stuff in the digital domain, and I prefer analog, film-based cameras overall, at least for still imaging. I'd rather use a scanner to bring the image in than have the original in the digital cam; two reasons - I like the look of film, plus the resolution tends to be better than what you can get with CCD in comparable price ranges. Also, you can do things with a scanner that are interesting in themselves.
Interesting.
That's still a bit more than what I pay. I'm a Canadian, so that's about $150/month in my dollars.
I have DSL from my telco. It costs $40/month on top of local phone service, which costs me about $40/month, after taxes (which we Canadians have a good deal of on our phone lines). I don't have digital cable, just basic cable: but that would be about another $40-$50/month I believe for digital from the local cable co.
That's a 1MBit downstream, though. But I'm paying slightly under $100/month in my dollars, not including long distance (which I get at a capped flat rate of $20/month (i.e. 10 cents/minute for the first 200 minutes, 0 cents/minute thereafter) for all Canadian calls), although I only get regular cable.
Yes, it's true, SoundJam was discontinued because of iTunes. However, I believe the developers left C&G to go work for Apple, with the blessing of C&G being given due to a cheque from Apple. It is still possible to find SoundJam in odd places (I have a limited version of it on my machine that came with my Rio; I bought my Rio just before iTunes was released & consequently never upgraded; "RioPort SoundJam MP" still comes in handy sometimes, although it's somewhat crippled).
Although I love iTunes and use it frequently, ironically, my favourite MP3 player is MacAST, due to its superior AppleScript support. while it doesn't do everything I want it to, it does allow me to press the play button in a script. iTunes, weirdly enough, has no AppleScript support at all. also, the one feature that SoundJam had that iTunes doesn't is a large base of available visualization plugins. the default Apple visualization is kinda cool, but I've yet to see anything as neat as G-Force, or in fact any non-Apple visualization plugins at all. this is weird. there is an SDK for iTunes plugins, does anybody use it?
Anyway, back to the topic. :) SoundJam was - as far as I know - based entirely on original code. MacAST (formerly known as MacAmp) was originally a port of WinAmp. (Amp changes to AST for broadcasting, i.e. shoutcast playback support.) It was done by a company called @soft though, but they did have Access To The Source.
the post-iTunes postscript: @soft's site is still up. However, they haven't released much; they just put out an encoder a few weeks ago, but most of the site is still living in March 2000. most of the other Apple MP3 players have basically stopped. the only reason people use them now is because they have Old Macs and can't run iTunes, or because they're cranky like me. :)
Deep breath.
This is not a release. It's an alpha version, fergawdsakes. You don't release precompiled binaries of alpha versions.
And yes, it's bleeding-edge: of course. The fact that it was compiled with bleeding-edge libraries is probably a reflection of the libraries Nullsoft have on their Linux boxen.
True.
Possibly true. I feel some trepidation when using the word "never." However. Assuming it is true, is it therefore true that the market for 35mm film is fixed and large?
No. Most 35mm film is shot in movie studios, in highly controlled conditions. This is an enormous market, and it's being invaded right now by DV.
The next battle, IMO, is Sony vs. Kodak, and I'm betting on Sony. DV (not the consumer version, i.e. FireWire, known as mini-DV) has made significant inroads already in the independent film market, and has begun to show up in mainstream Hollywood releases. There are things you can do with it that are impossible with film, mainly native digital editing. Also, there's the CGI industry to consider: I would suspect that, given a choice, ILM would prefer an all-digital environment today (where they would not have in the early '80s, when model effects were king).
Yeah, like the law.
Private investigators use Polaroids all the time. If somebody breaks something of yours, take a Polaroid of it and write the date and time on it immediately: it's much better evidence than traditional film, because it's harder to modify.
The problem with digital cameras is that their images are easy to modify. While this is great for artists and people who Want to Look Beautiful, it sucks for use in court.
It's a nice idea, but printing presses are too old. Patents for invention don't go back to Gutenberg. While you can patent specific improvements on the press - and people do - those improvements just don't give you enough market share to try and pull an Edison-like stunt.
The thing about the Edison case was that the Edison company had all the patents on film projectors wrapped up. (Edison was really, really good at tying up patents. Marvellous businessman.) This allowed them to try and do this market grab.
I doubt you're going to find many comparable situations, unfortunately. Even what the RIAA proposes isn't as bad as what Edison was trying to pull. Even monopolies like Diamond Comics aren't as bad.
Theoretically, it can go so far as to strip the RIAA of all of their music copyrights. I'm not aware of any cases that go quite this far. There's an old case involving one of Edison's companies that might shed some light. It's the classic case of illegal bundling; but it wasn't dealt with under antitrust but rather under patent misuse. Copyright misuse is incredibly rare, BTW; patent misuse is much more common as a legal doctrine.
Basically, Edison's company invented the movie projector, and held the patent on the projector. Edison's company also made films.
In order to use the projectors, a theatre owner needed to get a patent license. (Remember, in order to use a patented article, you need a patent license? This is an example.) Edison, of course, happily licensed the projectors. However, a standard clause in the patent license was that the theatre owners sign an exclusive contract with Edison's film company.
The theatre owners protested. Edison's films were not that good. And they won: although I can't remember what the remedy was, I think it may have been just the striking out of that clause in the contract. The rationale was that Edison was trying to use the patent in a way that the legislation did not want him to. Also, the film contracts did not expire with the patents, which was seen (correctly) as an attempt to unlawfully extend the term of the patent.
RTFA.
The disclosure's in the patent. Normally, companies with patents don't talk much in public: they're already giving stuff away in the patent, they don't want to give any more.
It'll affect a ton of people if sendmail and qmail are banned. Even if further development on sendmail and qmail is made illegal.
Tsk. Don't pick on Voyager.
This is actually a common fault of all Star Trek shows. Every series has had somebody beam up and conquer the computer, except maybe DS9 (and there was an implication that that was because it was a Cardassian computer).
The only things they seem to use authentication for is secret Starfleet documents and auto-destruct sequences. Everything else is an anything goes affair. :)
I already do this, kinda.
I say to my iMac "What's on TV?" and it logs in to the canadian version of clicktv and shows me my TV listings. (It's a short AppleScript I wrote that knows my username and password.) I say "Webcam on" and it starts up my webcam and logs me into CitizenX using a combination AppleScript/JavaScript program. I say "Angst" and it checks to see if the right CDR is in the drive, and if it is, plays Angst by KMFDM in my MP3 player, and if it isn't, lets me know so that I can switch CDs. I say "Slashdot" and it logs me in here. I say "Tag's Trance" and it plays one of my favourite techno shoutcast streams. I say "Salon"...
I hope my point is clear.
The only problem with it is that when I'm playing MP3s, it tends to not hear me too well, because the mic is really close to the speakers. So I want a solution: a cordless headset mic.
Ah, yes, the cordless headset mic. That's what people use in call centres. And that's what they would use in offices in general if talking to your computer was an accepted practice. Pretty simple technology really, and no more expensive than a high-end mouse.
bad karma.
my board went down in '96.
someday, I'm going to get a dialin line and plug my Citadel/UX in to a modem.
just to fight the power.
I am thoroughly outgeeked.
I had a VAX 11/780 back in the day. I only knew how to get it to output to the Gigi (there was Only One) through a few miscellaneous systems calls in VMS. (I forget now. SMG libraries probably.)
anyway, I am now going to complain. Mods, mod this parent up. He/she/it is better than you. The parent poster has a quite low number, and over 2000 posts. And was a PDP 11/34 programmer.
This should translate to a Score +1 Bonus. Hell, I have one, and I haven't even made 400 posts.
Moderators are dumb.
What is typing faster than the modem then?
Lag happens when the network is not moving fast enough to keep up with input.
What you are describing is lag.
I don't understand why, when typing causes intermittent lag, it cannot be said that you are typing too fast for your network, whether that network consists of a hundred computers or only two.
(And yes, I've seen modern, ethernet-based networks lag because of normal typing. I've only ever seen it when NT was involved somehow though. :)
The question about RS232C programming was directed, I guess, at a rather simple point: most people on /. don't have that much experience. Programming was a lot different in the '80s; there were issues when you're dealing with a 1MHz environment and low-speed peripherals that just don't appear anymore.
The point about the 4 characters was that it's just incredibly stupid to claim that the average word is only 3 letters long. Anyway.
many /. readers are in tech support, maintaining M$ machines at work. these articles are useful: they serve a practical purpose.
however, maybe a new category for tech-support issues would be good.
you are quite right. how could this happen?
Execute-Macro-Code is written by Committee A (well probably Committee J through M, but you know :)
Detect-Nasty-Macro-Code is written by Committee B.
Closed source doesn't just apply to not letting outsiders see the source. With large projects like this, the philosophy is competitive: Manager A wants to look Better than Manager B. Thus, Manager A's techies are not allowed to talk to Manager B's techies. Result? Nobody gets to share code.
One of the great benefits of open source is that it wipes out this kind of stupid, anti-productive competitiveness.
I have three words for you: Manually entered sigfiles. :)
That aside, you're making a similar mistake to the 450 WPM poster; you're forgetting spaces and punctuation. Words average 5 letters, not characters.
In other news, I can read straight text at 2400 baud if I'm actually paying attention (rare at times :). I went straight from 2400 to 28.8 and lost that ability though...
not consistently. you're forgetting physics.
people type faster when they're in the middle of words. basically, humans don't stream text at a fixed rate. that beating the 30 cps rate happens when, for example, you do things like hitting a few characters in a row which are close to each other.
there is, of course, one exception: holding down the space bar. centered sigs were incredibly difficult in 300 baud. without common support for the HT character. but I digress.
also, as I said, I don't hunt and peck. I know where all the letters are on the keyboard. it's just that I don't always use all my fingers, especially for stuff near the middle of the keyboard. I touchtype badly would be the most accurate way to describe it.
finally, there is indeed something wrong with your math. the average word is not four characters. much higher. let's see... one of my recent essays has 1,086 words, and counting spaces and punctuation (remember, modems have to transfer those too), totals to 6,546 characters. A little division gives 6.0276243094 characters per word. You're right in a sense though; that still gives 300 WPM, and I don't type that fast - not sustained. But the reason why you don't is because you... take breaks.
4 characters per word would make "the" an average length word though. Huh.
As for HW flow control: Ever actually do any RS-232C programming in the '80s? Like, for example, writing a terminal program? I did. (OK, it was primitive; it didn't have any support for XModem or Punter, just text; but it did have a really badass dialer which I hand-coded to match my modem's exact timing to get more redials than everybody else. one sysop told me once that he could tell it was me on the line, 'cause the OH light just flickered for a brief moment before my call came in. I had to re-code it when I upgraded modems though. :)
1992?
wow, the beginning of the Great Decline, at least in my area at the time.
WWIV? never even seen one. however, it can't have been the worst. the other poster is prolly not old enough to remember 6485. heh.
(6485's great selling points were that (a) it ran on a C64, and (b) it had a Multiple File Download feature - you could ask it for more than one file at a time! believe it or not, this is after the invention of mget. :)
heh. I was using vnews, which I installed myself as it was Officially Banned by computer services. so there. :)
I run one, actually. Nobody uses it though (except me), as this is the first time I've mentioned it since it went up again a month or so ago. OK, I'm lazy. :)
Hell, I can type faster than a 300 baud modem can transmit, and I type funny (I tried to learn how to touch-type, got bored; now I touch with about seven fingers :)...
300 baud, at 8-N-1 or 7-E-1, is 37.5 cps, theoretically. Practically, 300 bps modems only reach that speed when they're getting a steady stream of characters. You wind up spending a lot of time just dealing with RTS/CTS and other junk when you've got an irregular stream, as you do when you're typing.
One of the guys I knew when I was in CS was a trained professional typist. It helped him a lot when he was a starving student (tm); he got these really nice jobs typing stuff (and maybe doing other secretary work; he didn't talk about it much, I think he was embarrassed; it was OK for a geek to be a male secretary but he was also a metalhead :) all summer.
However, it instilled in him a tendency to produce really gross code. He was like a human cut-and-paste machine. If he could think of an inelegant solution to a problem, that only meant typing up 5000 lines or so, he just went ahead and did it. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little. But he did produce reams and reams of code.) He could code optimally, but he rarely did; he typed so fast that he spent actually less time coding by simply overcoding.
So anyway, the point is maybe it's a Good Thing that most hackers are hunt & peckers.
Anyway, back in my day, I had a Gigi terminal (I think) to do my gfx on. I still remember sneakernetting jpegs back from school (where I had Usenet) to my home (where my Amiga could view them, in truecolour; the machines at school hadn't yet even discovered 256 colours).
Well, it's true, I do like dark fantasy, but I don't think that's what I was talking about in the bit you quoted. :)
Wolf Lake is a horror show. All Souls was also a horror show. Brimstone, maybe: but I would put it probably on the horror side of the line. Fantasy Island was dark fantasy, yes. Empire was a satire soap opera. :) Earth 2 was semi-dark SF. Max Headroom was cyberpunk (and treated badly by the British).
I've seen extremely little in the way of genuine dark fantasy on TV, or in the movies. Usually it's either heroic fantasy or horror. Beastmaster comes close sometimes: but the main character is pure heroic fantasy. It's a quirky show. Xena wandered towards dark fantasy sometimes, but that's a show that was all over the map in so many ways (sometimes it felt like a quasi-feminist version of Xanth :). I think the old Conan show thought it was dark fantasy, but they didn't know either what dark fantasy was or how to write.
Now, I read tons of dark fantasy. The first name that comes to mind is Brust, but my shelves are awash in it. But I can't think of any live-action TV show ever made that was even remotely reminiscent of something like the Taltos books (which would make an excellent TV series, I think; Vlad's character has a lot of potential). Perhaps the Gargoyles cartoon, at least on the surface; stylistically the Batman cartoon had a lot in common too I think.
Hmm. Some of Burton's stuff, perhaps. Especially Beetlejuice and Scissorhands.
Nevertheless, I ramble too much. It will be interesting to see how the three Lord of the Rings movies do, especially relative to each other. I see Fellowship of the Ring as being the archetype of high fantasy, The Two Towers providing the basis of dark fantasy, and Return of the King as the archetype of heroic fantasy. Of course, these are overgeneralizations, but I feel there's some truth to them (even though heroic fantasy predates Tolkien; he just wrote it better :)...
Have you actually worked in radio?
ASCAP, BMI and SOCAN (a Canadian copyright collective, does the same thing as ASCAP and BMI) collect copyright licensing fees.
A musician's performance does incur copyright. However, this can lead to overlapping layers of copyright - under the Berne convention, which the United States did not implement until the late '80s. For an example, let's analyze Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower.
Dylan wrote All Along the Watchtower. He gets songwriter's copyright as a result, which has a term of life plus fifty (or longer, under the Mickey Mouse rules :). However, Hendrix played it. Under Berne, this means that he gets a more limited copyright in the perfomance itself - IIRC the term is only fifty years, not life plus fifty. Also, the other members of the Experience contributed something. What this means, in effect, is that in order for a radio station in a Berne country (as the U.S. is now) to play this particular tune, then they have to get written permission from both Hendrix (well, his estate) and Dylan. Well, and the other members of the Experience. Or possibly whoever these people sold their copyrights to. It's not simple.
This would be rather complicated if they had to do it for each song. "Please excuse me, we will now take call-ins for three hours while we arrange copyright permission for the next song." :) Therefore, we get ASCAP, BMI and the others. An american radio station signs a contract with ASCAP or BMI, sends it a playlist, and the copyright collective bills it back and redistributes the money between the copyright holders (who are artists, in many cases).
Therefore, ASCAP and BMI are not just "the people who wrote the song or, more often, the people who bought (or swindled) the publishing rights from the people who wrote the song" --- they're also performers. And finally, it's not just the publishing rights. Actually, publishing rights aren't that important to the collectives. What's important to them are broadcasting rights, which are separate under Berne.
This is Berne, though. Before Berne, I think you were right - in the United States, which IIRC was 1988. The rest of the world has been on Berne pretty much since the late 19th century.