Despite playing the first tracks much more than the later tracks on most of my CDs (I'm a habitual cd swapping junkie), the latter tracks on my CDs tend to fail before the earlier ones when the things starts to get beat up. I would assume that an 80 minute disc burnt to the rim of the platter would fare worse than a rip-off weezer album.
I don't know why this is, exactly, but there is definitely a corrolation between length and failure, at least in my experience. Wow, that has some interesting sexual meaning as well!
I'm currently working on a couple of projects. One being a newsletter for a political group I work for and the other being a handbook for my cooperative house. Does anyone know of a free/cheap alternative to Quark or Pagemaker?
Also, I might add on your MS Office rant. I think that with Microsoft potentially pulling out of Mac support, you might see a more open Office format very soon. There will still be certain proprietary bits, but more and more it seems Office users are not using the new wiz-bang features incorporated into the new Office releases. I foresee Microsoft being pressured from all ends to open their Office formats once it is a Windows only product. It's a lot easier for Apple to drum up PR in this respect than it is for the open source community. Hopefully the Apple/Sun juggernaut that's forming in the Office field will work towards the common good.
Either way we're in for better.doc support if Microsoft stops developing Office X - Apple has to support it somehow, their alternative will be Star Office and changes to Star Office benefit Open Office as well.
Localization is important, but with a good stereo recording and headphones it can be recreated for most sounds. I've heard simple stereo recordings that sound like they are coming from behind me - it's creepy and very possible.
Obviously you can't recreate the feeling of having a low frequency sound shake the floor and come from a specific amplifier or speaker, but I don't think a new standard is in order.
For those who want to publically display their music in an enveloping way, there are 5.1, 6.1, and 8.1 standards to help them along already. DVD Audio is the obvious one.
Interesting list. I'd have trouble even calling Stereolab electronica... unless I'm listening to Dots and Loops I suppose. Tortoise is pretty hard to call electronica too since it's all analog with a single synthesizer. I mean, their later albums, especially Standards (haven't heard their remix albums - but I assume they're more electronic) use more electronic experimentation, but it's still normal rock at its core. Well, if marimba is normal for rock. I mean, would you call Revolution 9 electronica?
This was a great trailer until they gave away Gandalf's return. I mean, quite a few people would know this given the wide readership of the books, but for ~half the audience that hasn't read them, isn't this a ridiculously massive spoiler?
No offense, but not all couches are made in your hometown. They have to be shipped at some time, probably in a large truck that still can't fit very many couches within it. That's why there a companies making a lot of money by selling furniture online or, more commonly, through catalogs.
Yes, these things have a kinetic energy of.5*several_friggin_tons*9E10 Ton Miles^2/Hour^2, but that doesn't mean that all that energy is lost in the passage through the earth. A BB can rip through a sheet of paper and leave a small puncture rather than tear the thing apart - imagine what a BB traveling at a thousand miles per hour would leave... just a hole of its own size most likely. These things have such high mass and velocity that they're hardly going to scatter off of anything or slow down much after they vaporize anything in their path.
Now what you should really worry about is a strangelet collision:)
Star Wars also opens a day early though... I seem to remember opening on labor day weekend counting towards a movie's opening gross or something like that. Beats me how this affects things... it's not like both movies aren't going to make all hell in terms of profit anyway. This is really only a point for fanboy bickering than anything else.
Re:Is this like the Sharper Image air filters?
on
Build Your Own UFO
·
· Score: 2
If people are correct in saying that this device uses a high voltage to transform the air into plasma, then it would actually work better in a vacuum. Better in the sense that it would take less voltage to achieve plasma, anyhow.
I know I probably shouldn't post against this because it is good advice. That said, I e-mailed my rep (Moore of Kansas) following his vote for Bush's Authorization of Use of Force bill or whatever you'd term it. I received what was clearly a personalized reply - very on topic to my complaint, etc. This was a post reply too, not just an e-mail back. I suspect that Moore may be among a minority, but he does seem to page through all of his mail and ignore the lobbying spam or at least has some method of filtering it.
Got a chananel here in Urbana called SCOLA, I believe that always broadcasts foreign news (most of the time anyhow). We get Iranian, Icelandic, etc feeds all the time. Now if only they were subtitled most of the time I might get a chance to get an alternate viewpoint. Alas, the only English-accessible news that doesn't come from America is BBC World and, of recent, the English have just been America's tool reflecting our interests to gain good standing with us (which probably isn't a bad idea from their standpoint).
Yes, there were a heaping handful of incremental changes that admitedly vastly improved the UI. The fact remains though that the original UI was painstakingly designed so that it didn't need a really major revision until just now. I don't think that anything exists like that now for Unix (unless you count work heavily derived from an existing UI).
I suppose that my comments on the Windows and Mac UIs could easily be seen as saying that they are horribly outdated, but that's not what I intended. I meant that if you decide on a standard now, you'd better be willing to stick with it for five or more years. It should have the extensibility that the win95 and original macOS UIs had as well so that it could evolve over time yet still retain the same basic methods for achieving different things - the same metaphores if you want to follow Stephanson...
In my opinion, the purpose of standardization is defeated rather easily if you stop at the level of the desktop background, colors, and icons. There are a few notable advantages from this - standard icons are a big help as well as standard window layouts (I know I've seen a TON of different schemes for the menu bars on windows in various default interfaces). I don't see the point in all this fuss over a standard theme if that's all you're going to go for though. I'll admit that getting gnome and kde to cooperate at all is a slick achievment, but results would be more interesting to me than press releases and unified color schemes.
Besides, if you want to standardize icons that means either the foot or the K will have to go - you know that'll never happen:)
Actually, there's a pretty simple argument against this. Standardizing the desktop stagnates innovation. With a standard "Linux" desktop, all distributions for a good amount of time will have to follow that standard or face alienating their users. Look at how little the MacOS interface changed before OSX and how only with Windows XP has Windows had a major interface revision - and even now it is still heavily rooted in the framework of prior revisions.
Personally, I agree with you and think a standard would be a good idea. Taking a step away from rapid developement and making a single stable interface would do wonders for acceptance. Besides, you can always have easily accessible information on configuring your interface how you like it. Still though, the arguement against this is pretty obvious.
I'd probably say that the best idea would be for some group to go and dedictate a year or so to making the be-all-end-all of interfaces. Not some wierd hybrid of previous interfaces like most distros ship now, but something that is simple, elegent, etc. Other people have said it, and I'll repeat - like the OSX interface. I'm not saying it's the most efficient, but it consistently does what you intuitively expect it to do. That's what a defacto Linux "theme" would need to do. The only other option, I suppose, is just to copy Windows or OSX or another highly developed/researched interface. There simply exists nothing right now that would make sense to call the default desktop.
That isn't blur induced by the film image. When you sit two feet away from the screen (I had the displeasure of seeing LOTR from rows 2 and 3 in my two screenings... ugh) you notice the fluttering of the film a lot more. Other people have posted about this in this discussion, so I won't go in to much depth. Basically each frame goes by in a slightly different place, different distance away from the lens, etc. This, in addition to film defects can have a seemingly insignificant effect, but from a close distance, you'll definitely notice it. Movies on DVD still show the same 24 frames per second, but they upscale it to 29.97 fps for NTSC presentation by repeating frames in a certain pattern (I'm too lazy to do the math). I guess I was thrown off when you said "motion blur"... there is a true motion blur given by the exposure of the film (all movement in the exposed interval is captured on the frame... your brain does all the work and makes it look like a moving image instead of a bunch of frames).
I suppose that might be the case if you really want to get a single frame from a fast-moving scene and use it for something, but if you're watching the movie you won't notice it. 24fps in a movie does not equal 24fps in a video game BECAUSE of that motion blur, not despite it.
As for the resolution of 35mm film, I've heard kodak research that says it's equivilent to a few million pixels - easily reachable by today's standards. Digital technology easily equals film today (look at the use of digital cameras for star wars 2) and will far surpass it in the near future. There is the complaint that the loss of film grain hardens the image, but like any analog effect, it can be added in the digital process if you so desire (just as solid-state amplifiers could technically sound like tube amps with the right signal processing).
There are also way more advantages beyond the physical distribution aspect. First, as has been mentioned, no film decay. Second, far fewer mechanical errors, film catching on fire in the reel, etc. Third, the reels no longer have to be spliced together and broken down every time a film arrives or has to be shipped back to the distributor. Fourth, though this could be viewed with some controversy, it gives studios more control over the material shown before the film, since the digital tape (or whatever storage format they use) won't be easily modified. Presentation houses could stick their own material up front, but they'd probably be stuck with whatever the studio chooses between the end of that material and the beginning of the feature. Lastly (though there are benefits beyond those I've listed), it does open the possibility for online distribution, but this really isn't much of a concern and would carry quite a bit of cost. The traditional physical distribution system already exists... just replace the canisters with digital tapes for now and forget about upgrading to online distribution for awhile.
There are disadvantages - mainly the expense of converting to the process. These are, however, outweighed (from a business standpoint anyway) by the cost savings of using the digital process. You no longer have to pay employees to pull all nighters on Thursday when the new films arrive and the old ones go out. Hell, you probably don't even have to test screen the new films before showing them (with the low cost of digital media, distributors could send 'back-up' tapes in case of a shoddy copy).
So essentially, the benefit to all involved is infinite. The only problem for me as a movie watcher is that I might get an even higher influx of ads before the film, but unlike most of the wide-eyed folks in the theater today I don't pay attention to them anyway and just go on conversing with my friends. Somehow it seems that the trend of advertisements before films wouldn't have been stemmed any by sticking with the analog process either.
I would agree that digital processing is probably a bigger boon for the effects houses and editing professionals than the distributors and theaters, but it is an amazingly good choice for them. Oh, and I guess I left out the studios - don't think they'd want to miss out on this either with the dirt-simple conversion to DVD it would offer. No more storing old films and periodically restoring them, etc. Of course, most modern films are being stored in a high-definition digital format already, so this wouldn't change things much for them as it is.
The only thing I really fear from the digital revolution in cinema is the loss of the meticulous work of people like Joel and Ethan Coen who still are known to hand-edit their work. Luckily, you can convert celluloid to digital fairly easily. Not to mention that even they have been embracing digital technology (the coloring effects in 'O Brother, color filming -> black/white presentation in The Man Who Wasn't There - wait, scratch that, that was a chemical process).
Suffice to say though, there are far more benefits than eliminating the "horrible" motion blur (which really isn't even a problem at all).
Oh my, they might think you're violating the DMCA. At least then you get a trial and some meager apology if it's a mistake. Falsely accused terrorists, on the other hand, get four months of jail without trial before being released without a word from the government (or killed without apology as in Afghanistan in the last couple weeks). Not to mention that people have been already been denied flight simply because of the book they brought along to read (A college student going home brought along a book about populist farmer 'terrorist-esque' tactics in sabotaging corporate farms that had a picture of some sort of explosive device on the cover - after returning with a different book, a Harry Potter book in fact, he was denied flying once again). There is definitely a precident here in judging one's intended malice against the country based solely on the literature they read (indeed, people questioned by the secret service regarding anti-american activity are always asked whether they have pro-taliban, anti-US literature, etc). Giving the government access to our libraries will make this mental-profiling even easier.
It's actually a rather clever scheme. This way, when our humble poster picks the sole language that meets the boss's demands and it inevitably fails, it is the poster who will get the firing. It's all part of the technique they teach you in Business 101 called "Responsibility Shifting." Look at Enron for a stellar example on a far larger scale.
Yeah. I concur but I was in a bit of a hurry. If I'm just writing straight without pausing I don't like to corrupt my writing (if you'll allow me to say that) by inserting things that aren't intended in the flow of speech. It was meant as a from-the-cuff rant and I think an unbroken paragraph enhances that. It also keeps such an unresearched comment from getting undue respect. I believe in what I say, but if I really wanted to say it eloquently I'd've taken more time.
Ah, fair enough then. I suppose there could be verbalizable words hidden in that gibberish, so I'll concede. I'd have to wonder what it would be like with something like The Microphones "Window" with a bunch of the tracks having the same name.
You obviously haven't seen the back cover of the faint's album:)
I tried desperately to find an image, but no luck. They're not French either, that is unless there's a lot of new-new-wave-indie-rock-frenchmen in Omaha.
I do, however, concur that some of Aphex Twin's tracks might be a bit harder to pronounce.
Slashdot Mirror
Despite playing the first tracks much more than the later tracks on most of my CDs (I'm a habitual cd swapping junkie), the latter tracks on my CDs tend to fail before the earlier ones when the things starts to get beat up. I would assume that an 80 minute disc burnt to the rim of the platter would fare worse than a rip-off weezer album.
I don't know why this is, exactly, but there is definitely a corrolation between length and failure, at least in my experience. Wow, that has some interesting sexual meaning as well!
I'm currently working on a couple of projects. One being a newsletter for a political group I work for and the other being a handbook for my cooperative house. Does anyone know of a free/cheap alternative to Quark or Pagemaker?
.doc support if Microsoft stops developing Office X - Apple has to support it somehow, their alternative will be Star Office and changes to Star Office benefit Open Office as well.
Also, I might add on your MS Office rant. I think that with Microsoft potentially pulling out of Mac support, you might see a more open Office format very soon. There will still be certain proprietary bits, but more and more it seems Office users are not using the new wiz-bang features incorporated into the new Office releases. I foresee Microsoft being pressured from all ends to open their Office formats once it is a Windows only product. It's a lot easier for Apple to drum up PR in this respect than it is for the open source community. Hopefully the Apple/Sun juggernaut that's forming in the Office field will work towards the common good.
Either way we're in for better
Localization is important, but with a good stereo recording and headphones it can be recreated for most sounds. I've heard simple stereo recordings that sound like they are coming from behind me - it's creepy and very possible.
Obviously you can't recreate the feeling of having a low frequency sound shake the floor and come from a specific amplifier or speaker, but I don't think a new standard is in order.
For those who want to publically display their music in an enveloping way, there are 5.1, 6.1, and 8.1 standards to help them along already. DVD Audio is the obvious one.
Interesting list. I'd have trouble even calling Stereolab electronica ... unless I'm listening to Dots and Loops I suppose. Tortoise is pretty hard to call electronica too since it's all analog with a single synthesizer. I mean, their later albums, especially Standards (haven't heard their remix albums - but I assume they're more electronic) use more electronic experimentation, but it's still normal rock at its core. Well, if marimba is normal for rock. I mean, would you call Revolution 9 electronica?
This was a great trailer until they gave away Gandalf's return. I mean, quite a few people would know this given the wide readership of the books, but for ~half the audience that hasn't read them, isn't this a ridiculously massive spoiler?
Ability to use XBox to play games online $50/year (or whatever it is)
No offense, but not all couches are made in your hometown. They have to be shipped at some time, probably in a large truck that still can't fit very many couches within it. That's why there a companies making a lot of money by selling furniture online or, more commonly, through catalogs.
Yes, these things have a kinetic energy of .5*several_friggin_tons*9E10 Ton Miles^2/Hour^2, but that doesn't mean that all that energy is lost in the passage through the earth. A BB can rip through a sheet of paper and leave a small puncture rather than tear the thing apart - imagine what a BB traveling at a thousand miles per hour would leave... just a hole of its own size most likely. These things have such high mass and velocity that they're hardly going to scatter off of anything or slow down much after they vaporize anything in their path.
:)
Now what you should really worry about is a strangelet collision
Star Wars also opens a day early though... I seem to remember opening on labor day weekend counting towards a movie's opening gross or something like that. Beats me how this affects things ... it's not like both movies aren't going to make all hell in terms of profit anyway. This is really only a point for fanboy bickering than anything else.
If people are correct in saying that this device uses a high voltage to transform the air into plasma, then it would actually work better in a vacuum. Better in the sense that it would take less voltage to achieve plasma, anyhow.
I know I probably shouldn't post against this because it is good advice. That said, I e-mailed my rep (Moore of Kansas) following his vote for Bush's Authorization of Use of Force bill or whatever you'd term it. I received what was clearly a personalized reply - very on topic to my complaint, etc. This was a post reply too, not just an e-mail back. I suspect that Moore may be among a minority, but he does seem to page through all of his mail and ignore the lobbying spam or at least has some method of filtering it.
Got a chananel here in Urbana called SCOLA, I believe that always broadcasts foreign news (most of the time anyhow). We get Iranian, Icelandic, etc feeds all the time. Now if only they were subtitled most of the time I might get a chance to get an alternate viewpoint. Alas, the only English-accessible news that doesn't come from America is BBC World and, of recent, the English have just been America's tool reflecting our interests to gain good standing with us (which probably isn't a bad idea from their standpoint).
Yes, there were a heaping handful of incremental changes that admitedly vastly improved the UI. The fact remains though that the original UI was painstakingly designed so that it didn't need a really major revision until just now. I don't think that anything exists like that now for Unix (unless you count work heavily derived from an existing UI).
I suppose that my comments on the Windows and Mac UIs could easily be seen as saying that they are horribly outdated, but that's not what I intended. I meant that if you decide on a standard now, you'd better be willing to stick with it for five or more years. It should have the extensibility that the win95 and original macOS UIs had as well so that it could evolve over time yet still retain the same basic methods for achieving different things - the same metaphores if you want to follow Stephanson...
I was replying to this -
"Matthias Ettrich once went far enough to propose a default unified 'Linux' theme that both Qt and GTK+ could support."
There wasn't any link provided to back that up, so I took it as is.
And no, I didn't read the RMS post. That's why I didn't comment on it.
In my opinion, the purpose of standardization is defeated rather easily if you stop at the level of the desktop background, colors, and icons. There are a few notable advantages from this - standard icons are a big help as well as standard window layouts (I know I've seen a TON of different schemes for the menu bars on windows in various default interfaces). I don't see the point in all this fuss over a standard theme if that's all you're going to go for though. I'll admit that getting gnome and kde to cooperate at all is a slick achievment, but results would be more interesting to me than press releases and unified color schemes.
:)
Besides, if you want to standardize icons that means either the foot or the K will have to go - you know that'll never happen
hehe, post windows 95... 3.1 wasn't really superior to dos anyhow :)
Actually, there's a pretty simple argument against this. Standardizing the desktop stagnates innovation. With a standard "Linux" desktop, all distributions for a good amount of time will have to follow that standard or face alienating their users. Look at how little the MacOS interface changed before OSX and how only with Windows XP has Windows had a major interface revision - and even now it is still heavily rooted in the framework of prior revisions.
Personally, I agree with you and think a standard would be a good idea. Taking a step away from rapid developement and making a single stable interface would do wonders for acceptance. Besides, you can always have easily accessible information on configuring your interface how you like it. Still though, the arguement against this is pretty obvious.
I'd probably say that the best idea would be for some group to go and dedictate a year or so to making the be-all-end-all of interfaces. Not some wierd hybrid of previous interfaces like most distros ship now, but something that is simple, elegent, etc. Other people have said it, and I'll repeat - like the OSX interface. I'm not saying it's the most efficient, but it consistently does what you intuitively expect it to do. That's what a defacto Linux "theme" would need to do. The only other option, I suppose, is just to copy Windows or OSX or another highly developed/researched interface. There simply exists nothing right now that would make sense to call the default desktop.
That isn't blur induced by the film image. When you sit two feet away from the screen (I had the displeasure of seeing LOTR from rows 2 and 3 in my two screenings... ugh) you notice the fluttering of the film a lot more. Other people have posted about this in this discussion, so I won't go in to much depth. Basically each frame goes by in a slightly different place, different distance away from the lens, etc. This, in addition to film defects can have a seemingly insignificant effect, but from a close distance, you'll definitely notice it. Movies on DVD still show the same 24 frames per second, but they upscale it to 29.97 fps for NTSC presentation by repeating frames in a certain pattern (I'm too lazy to do the math). I guess I was thrown off when you said "motion blur" ... there is a true motion blur given by the exposure of the film (all movement in the exposed interval is captured on the frame... your brain does all the work and makes it look like a moving image instead of a bunch of frames).
"The motion blur at 24 fps is horrible."
I suppose that might be the case if you really want to get a single frame from a fast-moving scene and use it for something, but if you're watching the movie you won't notice it. 24fps in a movie does not equal 24fps in a video game BECAUSE of that motion blur, not despite it.
As for the resolution of 35mm film, I've heard kodak research that says it's equivilent to a few million pixels - easily reachable by today's standards. Digital technology easily equals film today (look at the use of digital cameras for star wars 2) and will far surpass it in the near future. There is the complaint that the loss of film grain hardens the image, but like any analog effect, it can be added in the digital process if you so desire (just as solid-state amplifiers could technically sound like tube amps with the right signal processing).
There are also way more advantages beyond the physical distribution aspect. First, as has been mentioned, no film decay. Second, far fewer mechanical errors, film catching on fire in the reel, etc. Third, the reels no longer have to be spliced together and broken down every time a film arrives or has to be shipped back to the distributor. Fourth, though this could be viewed with some controversy, it gives studios more control over the material shown before the film, since the digital tape (or whatever storage format they use) won't be easily modified. Presentation houses could stick their own material up front, but they'd probably be stuck with whatever the studio chooses between the end of that material and the beginning of the feature. Lastly (though there are benefits beyond those I've listed), it does open the possibility for online distribution, but this really isn't much of a concern and would carry quite a bit of cost. The traditional physical distribution system already exists... just replace the canisters with digital tapes for now and forget about upgrading to online distribution for awhile.
There are disadvantages - mainly the expense of converting to the process. These are, however, outweighed (from a business standpoint anyway) by the cost savings of using the digital process. You no longer have to pay employees to pull all nighters on Thursday when the new films arrive and the old ones go out. Hell, you probably don't even have to test screen the new films before showing them (with the low cost of digital media, distributors could send 'back-up' tapes in case of a shoddy copy).
So essentially, the benefit to all involved is infinite. The only problem for me as a movie watcher is that I might get an even higher influx of ads before the film, but unlike most of the wide-eyed folks in the theater today I don't pay attention to them anyway and just go on conversing with my friends. Somehow it seems that the trend of advertisements before films wouldn't have been stemmed any by sticking with the analog process either.
I would agree that digital processing is probably a bigger boon for the effects houses and editing professionals than the distributors and theaters, but it is an amazingly good choice for them. Oh, and I guess I left out the studios - don't think they'd want to miss out on this either with the dirt-simple conversion to DVD it would offer. No more storing old films and periodically restoring them, etc. Of course, most modern films are being stored in a high-definition digital format already, so this wouldn't change things much for them as it is.
The only thing I really fear from the digital revolution in cinema is the loss of the meticulous work of people like Joel and Ethan Coen who still are known to hand-edit their work. Luckily, you can convert celluloid to digital fairly easily. Not to mention that even they have been embracing digital technology (the coloring effects in 'O Brother, color filming -> black/white presentation in The Man Who Wasn't There - wait, scratch that, that was a chemical process).
Suffice to say though, there are far more benefits than eliminating the "horrible" motion blur (which really isn't even a problem at all).
Oh my, they might think you're violating the DMCA. At least then you get a trial and some meager apology if it's a mistake. Falsely accused terrorists, on the other hand, get four months of jail without trial before being released without a word from the government (or killed without apology as in Afghanistan in the last couple weeks). Not to mention that people have been already been denied flight simply because of the book they brought along to read (A college student going home brought along a book about populist farmer 'terrorist-esque' tactics in sabotaging corporate farms that had a picture of some sort of explosive device on the cover - after returning with a different book, a Harry Potter book in fact, he was denied flying once again). There is definitely a precident here in judging one's intended malice against the country based solely on the literature they read (indeed, people questioned by the secret service regarding anti-american activity are always asked whether they have pro-taliban, anti-US literature, etc). Giving the government access to our libraries will make this mental-profiling even easier.
It's actually a rather clever scheme. This way, when our humble poster picks the sole language that meets the boss's demands and it inevitably fails, it is the poster who will get the firing. It's all part of the technique they teach you in Business 101 called "Responsibility Shifting." Look at Enron for a stellar example on a far larger scale.
Yeah. I concur but I was in a bit of a hurry. If I'm just writing straight without pausing I don't like to corrupt my writing (if you'll allow me to say that) by inserting things that aren't intended in the flow of speech. It was meant as a from-the-cuff rant and I think an unbroken paragraph enhances that. It also keeps such an unresearched comment from getting undue respect. I believe in what I say, but if I really wanted to say it eloquently I'd've taken more time.
Ah, fair enough then. I suppose there could be verbalizable words hidden in that gibberish, so I'll concede. I'd have to wonder what it would be like with something like The Microphones "Window" with a bunch of the tracks having the same name.
You obviously haven't seen the back cover of the faint's album :)
I tried desperately to find an image, but no luck. They're not French either, that is unless there's a lot of new-new-wave-indie-rock-frenchmen in Omaha.
I do, however, concur that some of Aphex Twin's tracks might be a bit harder to pronounce.
What if someone tries queing up their favorite track from The Faint's Danse Macabre.