Had I known it was going to move files on the hard drive, I wouldn't have done it.
I use a program called MP3 Collector, which is a database that allows you to mass-modify ID3 tags according to schemes that you specify. It calls its database a "collection", and it's very clear about when it's doing things to the database (which, of course, contains pointers to files on the HDD) and when it's doing things to your files.
iTunes was not similarly clear. I can tell, because I'm not the only one who's gotten bitten by this. You didn't...good for you. That doesn't mean it's good user interface.
Now every "various artist" album that I have, whose ID3 tags I attributed (mostly manually) to the actual artist, instead of having the Artist tag read "various artists", are scattered across 10gb of date, and 6000+ files. This is going to take a long time to fix. All the genres I'd specified (I organized my file structure by Genre, Artist, Album, and my genres are mostly of my own devising and have little to do with the way other people might describe the music) are now gone.
Although there is no reason why economies of scale should even be relevant when we're talking about bandwidth, you still aren't/entitled/ to have other people subsidize your habits.
Sometimes it works out that way, but don't count on it.
Nuclear Winter was debunked 20 years ago, though. Carl Sagan pretty well lost his reputation (in my eyes) because of his poorly-founded stance on the subject.
Remember when the Iraqi oil fires were going to blacken the skies and kill us all? That's right. Neither do I. Didn't happen.
Would nuclear war be awful? You betcha. But an overcast sky would be the least of my worries.
The "evidence" is in the story at the top of this article. That's my point: If this author is right, then we can not affect global warming by decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, we need to figure out if he's right or not, by employing the scientific method. Unfortunately, the political situation will make that a very difficult piece of science.
You are apparently unfamiliar with rhetoric and debate. I was defending a position, and I made it clear that I wasn't sure if that position was correct or not, you turd-munching fuckwit.
The point that the article was making (you did read the article, didn't you?) is that it's unclear how much impact humans are having. That is not the same as saying "I like raping Mother Earth in the asshole."
I did not argue that wise management of our resources is stupid. As a matter of fact, I made it clear that wise management of one of our resources (capital) is a particularly good idea: Use it where it will do the most good (schools) rather than throwing it into a "hole" in the atmosphere.
Don't even bother replying if you don't want to be civil. If that's the way you want to debate, go chain yourself to a redwood and leave the rest of us alone.
One of Apple's human interface guidelines is to have an Undo feature whenever the user commands a big change.
Guess what. No undo. I experimented with a feature of the program (it didn't say what "organize the MP3's" meant, and I was curious) and I couldn't undo what it did.
If it had SAID "You can't undo this!" I would have read more to figure out what it meant. However, since it was an Apple program, I assumed that they were following their own guidelines.
I was presented with a dialog box whose meaning was not clear. I thought it was going to reorganize the catalog within iTunes, not reorganize my carefully-crafted filing system. That really pissed me off.
Should I have known better? Maybe. If a very experienced computer user like myself can make that mistake, maybe the mistake should be harder to make.
Your points are all well-taken. I certainly won't argue that there aren't a lot of fun games out there.
I would like to see the publishers taking more risks. There hasn't been a new game-form since, Wolf3D and Dune (which were roughly contemporaneous). The overwhelming majority of the top-tier titles out there trace their lineage directly to those two games.
I really want something fresh. If I knew what that was, I'd produce it, but I don't.
Deus Ex was great. Looking forward to the sequel. It was still a POV shooter, albeit with a good story. Max Payne didn't do anything for me.
Halo isn't groundbreaking. I happen to like it some, now that I can play it with a mouse like God intended, but it's not groundbreaking. It's a good shooter, but it's just a shooter.
Vice City has been eating my brain. In my opinion, that's taken an established genre (driving/racing game) to a whole new place. GTA3 was, IMO, one of the most innovative games in recent memory, and Vice City polished the idea 'till it gleamed. I felt the same way about Half Life.
Re: the Flash Gordon Rocket: Whoops. And I just got corn-fuzed about which discussion I was posting to. My bad.
Terraforming Mars is going to be a lot easier than moderating the behavior of Earth's atmosphere. Mars' atmosphere has 1/100 the density of Earth's, and the planet's surface is right about a third the size of Earth (if I remember correctly). So, you've got 1/300th as much atmosphere you need to deal with.
However, I'm not sure that a lot of people really appreciate the volume of gases we're talking about. Terraforming Mars is going to take hundreds of years, and some really amazing industrial might. It's certainly a long-term goal. "Terraforming" Earth (moderating its long-cycle periodic weather changes) is, I believe, not possible with technology that will be available within the next 50 years, simply because of the mass of fluid we're talking about.
Hmm. If that's what they meant, maybe that's what they should have said.
Many environmentalists use the exact same tactic; decide upon a course of action, then gin up some plausible reason that everybody should shut up and do it their way, and anybody who says different wants to rape Mother Earth. (Freon is a perfect example)
There's plenty of bad science on both sides. That's why I'm, well, skeptical.
The smallpox infected blankets were an atrocity, and were NOT a natural disease vector.
However, prior to that event, European diseases had already done a number on the indigenous peoples of North America. Most of those diseases were transmitted by natural vectors.
Which is, of course, the Europeans' fault, right? Because, in the early 1600's, they understood disease and could have prevented it, right?
Distributing smallpox-infected blankets was an atrocity, to be sure. But the "genocide" was caused by naturally occuring diseases, transmitted naturally. Evolution at work.
But we CAN'T accelerate it. Or slow it down. At least, that's the argument (which I tend to agree with, although I don't have a well-educated opinion)
If our greenhouse gas emissions don't have a substantial effect on global warming, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions won't have a substantial effect on global warming. It will be expensive. I can think of more productive ways to spend our money than emptying the Red Sea with a teaspoon.
If I thought NASA had any serious plans to go to another planet, I'd be totally behind them.
The thing is, all the interesting planets have atmospheres. Yes, that does imply that the moon is not an interesting planet. Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt. Exploration means going to new places.
Yes, yes I did forget about sports "games" (particularly team sports games), since they're pretty much the same game with new chrome each year. That is a great example of stagnation (which is even worse on the console titles). Personal bias? You betcha. I think they're stupid.
Yes, there are great sports games out there. Sure, you might like playing them. This is just an opinion.
Look, I'm not saying that I don't enjoy PC games. I do. But there hasn't been a new genre, or a new game-form, introduced in a good long time. Hell, even really well-established game forms (like, say, high-fidelity flight simulations) are dying, since everybody wants to make strategy games and shooters.
I think the best designed game of recent memory was GTA3. I just want to see the same sort of good design coming back to PC games.
Where you sit and what kind of screen you look at are secondary concerns to me. I want good games, and right now, there aren't very many PC games that are worth my time.
If we can't heat up the atmosphere (as this article agrees), then how exactly are we going to cool it down?
You're talking about spending billions of dollars on a program that has not been demonstrated to have any measurable effect. I can think of lots of ways to spend billions of dollars that have measurable effects. Like hiring good teachers, for starters.
What makes me think that? Because that's not what the DC-X did, and that's not the design I'm arguing against. I argue that a powered descent phase of any substantial length is going to be cost-prohibitive, and does not provide important benefits to a landing on a body with an atmosphere.
You might do with some reading comprehension courses.
Considering that we haven't even proven the viability of single stage to orbit (and I personally don't think it's a particularly economical idea in the first place), talking about single stage launches to other planet(oid)s is just silly.
So, you're not the only person who can't see the point.
For every pound of fuel you want to use for landing, you need about four pounds of fuel to get that pound of landing fuel up into orbit. If I wanted to look at the orbital mechanics text that is two feet behind and one foot above my head, I could in about five minutes derive the actual fuel consumption curves based on estimated exhaust velocities of chemical rockets.
As with all aspects of aviation, material cost is not the primary factor. Weight is. This is far more true for rocketry even than for aviation.
Why else do you think that composite and/or titanium structures, which are vastly more expensive but somewhat lighter than aluminum structures, are so widely used in aerospace?
Hmm. Both of the textbooks I have on the subject refer to "fluid" mechanics when they talk about both gas and liquids. One is a basic text, split pretty evenly between liquids and gases, and the other one is almost exclusively aerodynamics.
Slashdot Mirror
Had I known it was going to move files on the hard drive, I wouldn't have done it.
I use a program called MP3 Collector, which is a database that allows you to mass-modify ID3 tags according to schemes that you specify. It calls its database a "collection", and it's very clear about when it's doing things to the database (which, of course, contains pointers to files on the HDD) and when it's doing things to your files.
iTunes was not similarly clear. I can tell, because I'm not the only one who's gotten bitten by this. You didn't...good for you. That doesn't mean it's good user interface.
Now every "various artist" album that I have, whose ID3 tags I attributed (mostly manually) to the actual artist, instead of having the Artist tag read "various artists", are scattered across 10gb of date, and 6000+ files. This is going to take a long time to fix. All the genres I'd specified (I organized my file structure by Genre, Artist, Album, and my genres are mostly of my own devising and have little to do with the way other people might describe the music) are now gone.
Wah.
/entitled/ to have other people subsidize your habits.
You don't have a right to economies of scale.
Although there is no reason why economies of scale should even be relevant when we're talking about bandwidth, you still aren't
Sometimes it works out that way, but don't count on it.
Nuclear Winter was debunked 20 years ago, though. Carl Sagan pretty well lost his reputation (in my eyes) because of his poorly-founded stance on the subject.
Remember when the Iraqi oil fires were going to blacken the skies and kill us all? That's right. Neither do I. Didn't happen.
Would nuclear war be awful? You betcha. But an overcast sky would be the least of my worries.
If I remember correctly, it asked me if I want to reorganize my "collection" which, to me, meant the catalog within iTunes.
Was it a stupid mistake for me to make? Sure. Normally, I'd just thump myself on the forehead and hit the "Undo" button...
which was not available. Yeah.
The "evidence" is in the story at the top of this article. That's my point: If this author is right, then we can not affect global warming by decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Now, we need to figure out if he's right or not, by employing the scientific method. Unfortunately, the political situation will make that a very difficult piece of science.
You are apparently unfamiliar with rhetoric and debate. I was defending a position, and I made it clear that I wasn't sure if that position was correct or not, you turd-munching fuckwit.
The point that the article was making (you did read the article, didn't you?) is that it's unclear how much impact humans are having. That is not the same as saying "I like raping Mother Earth in the asshole."
I did not argue that wise management of our resources is stupid. As a matter of fact, I made it clear that wise management of one of our resources (capital) is a particularly good idea: Use it where it will do the most good (schools) rather than throwing it into a "hole" in the atmosphere.
Don't even bother replying if you don't want to be civil. If that's the way you want to debate, go chain yourself to a redwood and leave the rest of us alone.
One of Apple's human interface guidelines is to have an Undo feature whenever the user commands a big change.
Guess what. No undo. I experimented with a feature of the program (it didn't say what "organize the MP3's" meant, and I was curious) and I couldn't undo what it did.
If it had SAID "You can't undo this!" I would have read more to figure out what it meant. However, since it was an Apple program, I assumed that they were following their own guidelines.
And I got fooked.
I was presented with a dialog box whose meaning was not clear. I thought it was going to reorganize the catalog within iTunes, not reorganize my carefully-crafted filing system. That really pissed me off.
Should I have known better? Maybe. If a very experienced computer user like myself can make that mistake, maybe the mistake should be harder to make.
Your points are all well-taken. I certainly won't argue that there aren't a lot of fun games out there.
I would like to see the publishers taking more risks. There hasn't been a new game-form since, Wolf3D and Dune (which were roughly contemporaneous). The overwhelming majority of the top-tier titles out there trace their lineage directly to those two games.
I really want something fresh. If I knew what that was, I'd produce it, but I don't.
Deus Ex was great. Looking forward to the sequel. It was still a POV shooter, albeit with a good story. Max Payne didn't do anything for me.
Halo isn't groundbreaking. I happen to like it some, now that I can play it with a mouse like God intended, but it's not groundbreaking. It's a good shooter, but it's just a shooter.
Vice City has been eating my brain. In my opinion, that's taken an established genre (driving/racing game) to a whole new place. GTA3 was, IMO, one of the most innovative games in recent memory, and Vice City polished the idea 'till it gleamed. I felt the same way about Half Life.
Re: the Flash Gordon Rocket: Whoops. And I just got corn-fuzed about which discussion I was posting to. My bad.
Terraforming Mars is going to be a lot easier than moderating the behavior of Earth's atmosphere. Mars' atmosphere has 1/100 the density of Earth's, and the planet's surface is right about a third the size of Earth (if I remember correctly). So, you've got 1/300th as much atmosphere you need to deal with.
However, I'm not sure that a lot of people really appreciate the volume of gases we're talking about. Terraforming Mars is going to take hundreds of years, and some really amazing industrial might. It's certainly a long-term goal. "Terraforming" Earth (moderating its long-cycle periodic weather changes) is, I believe, not possible with technology that will be available within the next 50 years, simply because of the mass of fluid we're talking about.
Hmm. If that's what they meant, maybe that's what they should have said.
Many environmentalists use the exact same tactic; decide upon a course of action, then gin up some plausible reason that everybody should shut up and do it their way, and anybody who says different wants to rape Mother Earth. (Freon is a perfect example)
There's plenty of bad science on both sides. That's why I'm, well, skeptical.
I think I didn't make my point clearly.
The smallpox infected blankets were an atrocity, and were NOT a natural disease vector.
However, prior to that event, European diseases had already done a number on the indigenous peoples of North America. Most of those diseases were transmitted by natural vectors.
Sorry about the confusion.
We should already be on Mars.
NASA is dipping their pinky-toe into the idea of maybe someday thinking about evaluating the possibility of considering going to Mars.
I am not sanguine about their plans.
And, more to the point, this Flash Gordon style rocket business is not going to get us there. It's a solution in search of a problem.
Which is, of course, the Europeans' fault, right? Because, in the early 1600's, they understood disease and could have prevented it, right?
Distributing smallpox-infected blankets was an atrocity, to be sure. But the "genocide" was caused by naturally occuring diseases, transmitted naturally. Evolution at work.
But we CAN'T accelerate it. Or slow it down. At least, that's the argument (which I tend to agree with, although I don't have a well-educated opinion)
If our greenhouse gas emissions don't have a substantial effect on global warming, reducing our greenhouse gas emissions won't have a substantial effect on global warming. It will be expensive. I can think of more productive ways to spend our money than emptying the Red Sea with a teaspoon.
Good scientists are skeptical. That's what makes them good scientists.
If I thought NASA had any serious plans to go to another planet, I'd be totally behind them.
The thing is, all the interesting planets have atmospheres. Yes, that does imply that the moon is not an interesting planet. Been there, done that, got the T-Shirt. Exploration means going to new places.
Sounds like somebody needs a hug.
Yes, yes I did forget about sports "games" (particularly team sports games), since they're pretty much the same game with new chrome each year. That is a great example of stagnation (which is even worse on the console titles). Personal bias? You betcha. I think they're stupid.
Yes, there are great sports games out there. Sure, you might like playing them. This is just an opinion.
Look, I'm not saying that I don't enjoy PC games. I do. But there hasn't been a new genre, or a new game-form, introduced in a good long time. Hell, even really well-established game forms (like, say, high-fidelity flight simulations) are dying, since everybody wants to make strategy games and shooters.
I think the best designed game of recent memory was GTA3. I just want to see the same sort of good design coming back to PC games.
Where you sit and what kind of screen you look at are secondary concerns to me. I want good games, and right now, there aren't very many PC games that are worth my time.
If we can't heat up the atmosphere (as this article agrees), then how exactly are we going to cool it down?
You're talking about spending billions of dollars on a program that has not been demonstrated to have any measurable effect. I can think of lots of ways to spend billions of dollars that have measurable effects. Like hiring good teachers, for starters.
What makes me think that? Because that's not what the DC-X did, and that's not the design I'm arguing against. I argue that a powered descent phase of any substantial length is going to be cost-prohibitive, and does not provide important benefits to a landing on a body with an atmosphere.
You might do with some reading comprehension courses.
Considering that we haven't even proven the viability of single stage to orbit (and I personally don't think it's a particularly economical idea in the first place), talking about single stage launches to other planet(oid)s is just silly.
So, you're not the only person who can't see the point.
Parachutes are pretty cheap. Operating rockets four to eight times as heavy as they need to be is not cheap.
*sigh*
You're wrong too.
For every pound of fuel you want to use for landing, you need about four pounds of fuel to get that pound of landing fuel up into orbit. If I wanted to look at the orbital mechanics text that is two feet behind and one foot above my head, I could in about five minutes derive the actual fuel consumption curves based on estimated exhaust velocities of chemical rockets.
As with all aspects of aviation, material cost is not the primary factor. Weight is. This is far more true for rocketry even than for aviation.
Why else do you think that composite and/or titanium structures, which are vastly more expensive but somewhat lighter than aluminum structures, are so widely used in aerospace?
Hmm. Both of the textbooks I have on the subject refer to "fluid" mechanics when they talk about both gas and liquids. One is a basic text, split pretty evenly between liquids and gases, and the other one is almost exclusively aerodynamics.
So you're wrong. Sorry.