... "See! Science is wrong! It can't answer all your questions! It can't tell you why you're here! Give up your Science nonsense, accept Jesus Christ as your saviour and be Born Again!"
Some of what they do takes weeks or months to do, you just don't see it on the show because it's edited to fit in 1 hour. They sometimes do many more tests than you see.
More importantly, they don't mind going back and doing something again if there's a suspicion they got it wrong. The "frozen chicken through windshield" was tried three times using three different methods. The second one (measuring the impulse) had me cringing, since it excluded the hardness of the materials, or the way glass cracks under pressure from sharp points. So they went back and did a more rigorous test - not perfect, not statistically complete, not the ideal glass - but enough to be reasonably confident in the result.
Um... you may be confusing the Spectrum with the ZX-81, which was sold as the Timex-Sinclair 1000 in the USA. That one really needed the expansion RAM to be useful, since 1K went very quickly.
But the Spectrum 48K was a different beast... we lived in South Africa at the time, and my family couldn't afford one at import prices, but I got to use one belonging to a computer club. My "finest hour" was a program for editing the onscreen typeface. The characters were copied from ROM to RAM at bootup, and you could modify them by POKEing the right addresses in RAM. So I wrote a program that let you edit them onscreen, save sets of characters to tape, load them from tape, and POKE one or all to RAM.
Even when you loaded another program from tape, the changes persisted unless the program explicitly overwrote the typeface, which confused a few people (tee hee). I didn't just learn about programming, I also learned a lot about a user interface, and how to set up a useful workflow (load - edit - save - commit) etc. Good times.
Here you go. The PDF FAQ they put there confirms the terms: $3.1 billion.
Apart from that, I second/third/fourth the previous comments: zero impact here, DoubleClick has been on my blacklist for years now, by any means available.
Or the next Dalian? Bangalore is booming despite its restrictions on immigration & emigration, hardware imports, and its flaky infrastructure. My company has a support center there, and some fairly epic problems sending hardware to India for internal use only (never mind resale).
Manpower is also a problem; you'd think Bangalore would be awash with engineering graduates, and IIT is churning them out, but what happens when you need someone with actual experience? In my company's case we've been lucky with expatriates returning to India from the Middle East (mostly) and the USA (a few). We just don't find quality local candidates worth interviewing.
Will Russia be any better, with its lack of internationally-recognised qualifications and standards? I fail to see how any Silicon Valley comparisons are worth considering, even as a joke.
I've always wondered about using the potential energy of water (that is, raising it to a higher height), to store that energy to smooth out production versus demand issues for electricity.
I've been trying out 64Studio v1.0 over the last couple of months. Debian-based, with a core set of audio apps that fit on a single CD, and JACK to glue them all together. Ardour and Rosegarden work well, and it wasn't hard to get my USB audio & MIDI gear working with standard modules. Includes some decent graphics / video programs too, Blender3D, CinePaint & more. If I have one wish, though, it's for more synthesisers in the base package, and even a general-purpose sampler. (QSampler only supports GigaSampler files so far, not building your own sample sets, as supplied.)
Heck, as literary works go, there are many PD texts far superior to Harry Potter: just about anything by Mark Twain, for starters, and Dickens for the older kids. Heck, I even enjoyed "Anne of Green Gables" and sequels, and I'm not even a girl...
Well, I've installed Vista Enterprise RTM on two systems so far:
1) Compaq Presario 2815 (a.k.a EVO 800) notebook: 4-1/2 years old. Pentium Mobile 1.5GHz, 512MB RAM, 12 GB HDD. Slow, but generally works. No WDDM graphics, of course, but all the hardware was recognised. Even an old Symbol wireless card I tried.
2) HP TC4200 Tablet PC, just over a year old. Pentium-M 1.8GHz, Centrino, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD. Speed is good, except for graphics: Intel says they are not going to develop a 915GM driver for Vista WDDM because of hardware limitations. Strictly "business graphics", which are OK. No Bluetooth hardware driver supplied or can be found. Audio is not all there: the "soft jacks" are not recognised, so plugging in headphones does not cut out the speaker!
These inflated specs are for new PCs, as has been pointed out: Microsoft work with the PC makers to set the specs, with a view to boosting sales. Tell us something we don't know..!
If you're talking about Dom Joly, did you even read TFA? He wrote about his mishap in a column in a UK national newspaper (The Independent on Sunday), after which OnTrack contacted him. So, what are you referring to?
Of the points raised in the article, I found the viewfinder the most convincing reason to get a DSLR. Live preview on a screen is not a replacement, especially in the dark, when a screen can kill your night vision. It's also very quick once you get used to it, and I've found the difference is particularly apparent with long lenses. Be aware, though, that not all DSLRs are equal in this respect: so far, of the established makers, Canon have been poor, Nikon average, and Pentax have really emphasised a good, bright viewfinder in their mainstream DSLRs. That may change, of course - the new Nikons are catching up.
Another key point is that you're not just buying a camera, you're buying in to a system, so the lens range needs to be taken in to account, in the long term. You're not going to be happy with the "kit lens" for very long.
I'm all for it if it inspires even a small fraction of players to take up a real instrument. Just as long as they start at the beginning!
GH2 is good publicity for one of my fave bands, Rush, whose YYZ is at the "advanced" level. I can see a lot of adults going "so that's what that is", having heard it but not knowing where it's from. It's not exactly plain sailing on real instruments either. A kid who starts off fresh, trying to play that on guitar or bass, is risking sore fingers and severe disillusionment. Still, you gotta love a song with a minor-fifth riff on the Morse Code broadcast by the radio beacon at the band's home airport...
My thoughts exactly, and the war will be against the other country in a similar situation: India. Hundreds of millions of young men with no prospects but joining the army...
Totally power down the PC every day, then 3 months down the line, your BIOS settings are lost, because the button cell has discharged. That happened to me, so I stopped unplugging it. There was a time when they used large lithium batteries, or rechargeable batteries, but since people kept their PCs plugged on, what was the point? 8) These days, I'd hope to see BIOS settings stored in Flash. (It's been 2 years since I bought a desktop PC, so it may be happening and I just missed it?)
First, let me Second the previous comments about NoScript. I've also been using it for about a year, and find whitelisting to be only a minor inconvenience. I'm saddened by some of the JS Crud that otherwise legitimate sites try to foist on you, such as "Google Analytics", or the Tacoda ad-targeting that Slashdot uses here (which I blacklist).
However, none of this is answering the basic question: why do I want this? What's in it for me? I don't want a single unique digital ID, visible to anyone on the internet who wants to see it. I know it is Possible to link peoples' various identities together, but I feel no obligation to make it Trivial by willingly participating in such a scheme. Companies get no more information out of me than I'm willing to give them, on a case-by-case basis. If I buy a book from Amazon, what business is it of theirs are any details other than those needed for a) payment, b) delivery?
I don't care who's behind it: it's still unnecessary and a threat to privacy in general.
A lot of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "use Ubuntu for as a Windows replacement, use Debian for servers". Not necessarily. Ubuntu installs Gnome by default, which is not as much of a Windows replacement as KDE (as used in Kubuntu). For working servers, though, I've done server-only installs of Ubuntu, which leaves off X-Windows entirely, giving me a lightweight install I can customize from the command line. Then, as a test, I've added the Xubuntu components to one server, which adds Xfce4 and some X apps like the Synaptic package manager. I don't need Gnome or KDE on a server, even Xfce is a luxury I could easily do without, and Ubuntu lets me decide which way I want to go.
My point is that the monolithic Ubuntu Gnome install that gets the most publicity is not the be-all and end-all of the Ubuntu project. In particular, this "Windows replacement" talk is misplaced, if you stick with the Gnome defaults, instead of KDE.
In case any one is wondering about the nature of the sounds in question, there are samples of Robert Fripp's work online. One of my favourites is a recording from a building that still exists, but saw so much tragedy: the World Financial Center.
Much as I like RF's work, I still expect people will be able to turn the startup sound off, without having to hack anything. The way computers are used in quiet environments such as libraries and classrooms, that would be very inconsiderate of M$. No sound is that good.
"Art, music included, is not a pure expression of its creator, meant to be interpreted only as he/she sees fit, but instead how the viewer/listener/whatever sees that creation."
Who's saying that you must listen to a whole album at once, songs in the order the artist laid out? I didn't, and I didn't see anyone else doing that either. You're turning this into an either-or proposition, when it is nothing of the sort, there is room for interpretation.
I'm not saying I fully agree with what this minority of artists are saying in TFA, trying to force the issue, my point was that completeness and song order are part of the experience you get out of some albums. The "value proposition", in VC-speak. But if the artist who created the work feels it IS important, can you simply dismiss that? Sounds like you're saying their opinion on this does not matter, which calls into question why you would pay any attention to them or their work at all. You would deny them any say over the form in which their music is released, which is like telling a painter he or she has no say how their art is hung in the gallery. Try that (with a living artist) and see what happens! So if an artist wants to sell an album only, what are you going to do? Boycott them? Go ahead, you're obviously not the kind of fan they want anyway. It's only money, some things are more important than 3c per track.
The type of "Album artist" I'm referring to would not deliberately produce "filler", so that's why I say you can not pre-judge what the "filler" is - IMHO that is not a valid reason to insist they release individual tracks. I know it's different today, on the charts, and I can hardly argue against cherry-picking the best tracks and avoiding the filler there - all I'm saying is that there really are "Album artists" who take the making of an Album very seriously. Example: when Rush were asked to produce a 4-minute "filler" to balance the sides of their Signals album in 1981, in 2 days, they took the job seriously. The result of imposing these "pop song" limitations on their methods, New World Man, was anything but filler, and became a live favourite.
When the artist is putting that kind of care in to an album, what's wrong with trying to get it out in the listening? It really is rewarding to the listener. Or is it all about money, and all artists care about is getting the maximum amount of money out of you, even though they will see very little of it themselves? Too much "Top 40" music may make you cynical, you may feel that the music business is all about money. Well, you're right about the Business, so if you care about music, look beyond the crud the Business is foisting on you today, to the modern independent artists, and the veterans who got pushed out because they failed to move the units. You can tell I feel passionately about this, because I know what music can do, and the importance of the difference between a set of songs and an Album. Go ahead and laugh if you want, see if I care. 8-P
It's happening. It just doesn't have the big marketing dollar behind it. See Bleep (Warp Records) or DGM Live (King Crimson & Friends) for examples. DGM even do lossless, you can buy FLAC files with no hint of DRM - a sure sign that they "get it".
Blammo! You just blew the bottom out of your own argument. The Charts have very little to do with music, they are the marketing equivalent of a Quake III Deathmatch. One week you score a kill, next week you die, the next week you score another kill. Complete musical movements have appeared and flourished without even touching the bottom of the Charts. Some good bands do get some attention e.g. Tool, NiN, Muse et al - but getting a chart place requires musical compromises that not all artists are prepared to make.
Fine, but some artists do view an album as more than just a series of tracks. Can you be sure, in advance, which tracks are "filler" and which aren't? Why, when I was a lad, it was my pleasure to unearth an "unsung" album track with special meaning to me.
Radiohead is mentioned in the article: any thoughts about the overarching story told in the order of the songs on OK Computer? It's there, almost a hidden message that rewards careful listening, and it would be destroyed if the songs were Shuffled. My "unsung" song on that album is Let Down, one that got no attention and would be left out if I had bought the "singles" on iTunes.
You should try this with a book - after all, who the heck is the author to decide that Chapter 7 comes immediately before Chapter 8?
They have a strategic agreement with Samsung, and at least one new semi-pro digital SLR camera due later this year (K10D ?). My only question would be: will there be enough space left on the back for the controls?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still wondering about "a car crash that happened on the turnpike and was, therefore, property of the turnpike".
Who'd want to own a car crash? (I shoulda bin a Engrish teecher, me...)
... "See! Science is wrong! It can't answer all your questions! It can't tell you why you're here! Give up your Science nonsense, accept Jesus Christ as your saviour and be Born Again!"
Some of what they do takes weeks or months to do, you just don't see it on the show because it's edited to fit in 1 hour. They sometimes do many more tests than you see.
More importantly, they don't mind going back and doing something again if there's a suspicion they got it wrong. The "frozen chicken through windshield" was tried three times using three different methods. The second one (measuring the impulse) had me cringing, since it excluded the hardness of the materials, or the way glass cracks under pressure from sharp points. So they went back and did a more rigorous test - not perfect, not statistically complete, not the ideal glass - but enough to be reasonably confident in the result.
Um... you may be confusing the Spectrum with the ZX-81, which was sold as the Timex-Sinclair 1000 in the USA. That one really needed the expansion RAM to be useful, since 1K went very quickly.
But the Spectrum 48K was a different beast... we lived in South Africa at the time, and my family couldn't afford one at import prices, but I got to use one belonging to a computer club. My "finest hour" was a program for editing the onscreen typeface. The characters were copied from ROM to RAM at bootup, and you could modify them by POKEing the right addresses in RAM. So I wrote a program that let you edit them onscreen, save sets of characters to tape, load them from tape, and POKE one or all to RAM.
Even when you loaded another program from tape, the changes persisted unless the program explicitly overwrote the typeface, which confused a few people (tee hee). I didn't just learn about programming, I also learned a lot about a user interface, and how to set up a useful workflow (load - edit - save - commit) etc. Good times.
Here you go. The PDF FAQ they put there confirms the terms: $3.1 billion. Apart from that, I second/third/fourth the previous comments: zero impact here, DoubleClick has been on my blacklist for years now, by any means available.
Or the next Dalian? Bangalore is booming despite its restrictions on immigration & emigration, hardware imports, and its flaky infrastructure. My company has a support center there, and some fairly epic problems sending hardware to India for internal use only (never mind resale).
Manpower is also a problem; you'd think Bangalore would be awash with engineering graduates, and IIT is churning them out, but what happens when you need someone with actual experience? In my company's case we've been lucky with expatriates returning to India from the Middle East (mostly) and the USA (a few). We just don't find quality local candidates worth interviewing.
Will Russia be any better, with its lack of internationally-recognised qualifications and standards? I fail to see how any Silicon Valley comparisons are worth considering, even as a joke.
Yes - it's being done in South Africa, the Drakensberg Pumped Storage Scheme.
I've been trying out 64Studio v1.0 over the last couple of months. Debian-based, with a core set of audio apps that fit on a single CD, and JACK to glue them all together. Ardour and Rosegarden work well, and it wasn't hard to get my USB audio & MIDI gear working with standard modules. Includes some decent graphics / video programs too, Blender3D, CinePaint & more. If I have one wish, though, it's for more synthesisers in the base package, and even a general-purpose sampler. (QSampler only supports GigaSampler files so far, not building your own sample sets, as supplied.)
Heck, as literary works go, there are many PD texts far superior to Harry Potter: just about anything by Mark Twain, for starters, and Dickens for the older kids. Heck, I even enjoyed "Anne of Green Gables" and sequels, and I'm not even a girl...
Well, I've installed Vista Enterprise RTM on two systems so far:
1) Compaq Presario 2815 (a.k.a EVO 800) notebook: 4-1/2 years old. Pentium Mobile 1.5GHz, 512MB RAM, 12 GB HDD. Slow, but generally works. No WDDM graphics, of course, but all the hardware was recognised. Even an old Symbol wireless card I tried.
2) HP TC4200 Tablet PC, just over a year old. Pentium-M 1.8GHz, Centrino, 1GB RAM, 80GB HDD. Speed is good, except for graphics: Intel says they are not going to develop a 915GM driver for Vista WDDM because of hardware limitations. Strictly "business graphics", which are OK. No Bluetooth hardware driver supplied or can be found. Audio is not all there: the "soft jacks" are not recognised, so plugging in headphones does not cut out the speaker!
These inflated specs are for new PCs, as has been pointed out: Microsoft work with the PC makers to set the specs, with a view to boosting sales. Tell us something we don't know..!
If you're talking about Dom Joly, did you even read TFA? He wrote about his mishap in a column in a UK national newspaper (The Independent on Sunday), after which OnTrack contacted him. So, what are you referring to?
Of the points raised in the article, I found the viewfinder the most convincing reason to get a DSLR. Live preview on a screen is not a replacement, especially in the dark, when a screen can kill your night vision. It's also very quick once you get used to it, and I've found the difference is particularly apparent with long lenses. Be aware, though, that not all DSLRs are equal in this respect: so far, of the established makers, Canon have been poor, Nikon average, and Pentax have really emphasised a good, bright viewfinder in their mainstream DSLRs. That may change, of course - the new Nikons are catching up.
Another key point is that you're not just buying a camera, you're buying in to a system, so the lens range needs to be taken in to account, in the long term. You're not going to be happy with the "kit lens" for very long.
I'm all for it if it inspires even a small fraction of players to take up a real instrument. Just as long as they start at the beginning!
GH2 is good publicity for one of my fave bands, Rush, whose YYZ is at the "advanced" level. I can see a lot of adults going "so that's what that is", having heard it but not knowing where it's from. It's not exactly plain sailing on real instruments either. A kid who starts off fresh, trying to play that on guitar or bass, is risking sore fingers and severe disillusionment. Still, you gotta love a song with a minor-fifth riff on the Morse Code broadcast by the radio beacon at the band's home airport...
My thoughts exactly, and the war will be against the other country in a similar situation: India. Hundreds of millions of young men with no prospects but joining the army...
Totally power down the PC every day, then 3 months down the line, your BIOS settings are lost, because the button cell has discharged. That happened to me, so I stopped unplugging it. There was a time when they used large lithium batteries, or rechargeable batteries, but since people kept their PCs plugged on, what was the point? 8) These days, I'd hope to see BIOS settings stored in Flash. (It's been 2 years since I bought a desktop PC, so it may be happening and I just missed it?)
First, let me Second the previous comments about NoScript. I've also been using it for about a year, and find whitelisting to be only a minor inconvenience. I'm saddened by some of the JS Crud that otherwise legitimate sites try to foist on you, such as "Google Analytics", or the Tacoda ad-targeting that Slashdot uses here (which I blacklist).
However, none of this is answering the basic question: why do I want this? What's in it for me? I don't want a single unique digital ID, visible to anyone on the internet who wants to see it. I know it is Possible to link peoples' various identities together, but I feel no obligation to make it Trivial by willingly participating in such a scheme. Companies get no more information out of me than I'm willing to give them, on a case-by-case basis. If I buy a book from Amazon, what business is it of theirs are any details other than those needed for a) payment, b) delivery?
I don't care who's behind it: it's still unnecessary and a threat to privacy in general.
A lot of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "use Ubuntu for as a Windows replacement, use Debian for servers". Not necessarily. Ubuntu installs Gnome by default, which is not as much of a Windows replacement as KDE (as used in Kubuntu). For working servers, though, I've done server-only installs of Ubuntu, which leaves off X-Windows entirely, giving me a lightweight install I can customize from the command line. Then, as a test, I've added the Xubuntu components to one server, which adds Xfce4 and some X apps like the Synaptic package manager. I don't need Gnome or KDE on a server, even Xfce is a luxury I could easily do without, and Ubuntu lets me decide which way I want to go.
My point is that the monolithic Ubuntu Gnome install that gets the most publicity is not the be-all and end-all of the Ubuntu project. In particular, this "Windows replacement" talk is misplaced, if you stick with the Gnome defaults, instead of KDE.
In case any one is wondering about the nature of the sounds in question, there are samples of Robert Fripp's work online. One of my favourites is a recording from a building that still exists, but saw so much tragedy: the World Financial Center.
Much as I like RF's work, I still expect people will be able to turn the startup sound off, without having to hack anything. The way computers are used in quiet environments such as libraries and classrooms, that would be very inconsiderate of M$. No sound is that good.
Agreed. Makes no more sense than saying a piece of music is more complex just because it has more notes in it...
Who's saying that you must listen to a whole album at once, songs in the order the artist laid out? I didn't, and I didn't see anyone else doing that either. You're turning this into an either-or proposition, when it is nothing of the sort, there is room for interpretation.
I'm not saying I fully agree with what this minority of artists are saying in TFA, trying to force the issue, my point was that completeness and song order are part of the experience you get out of some albums. The "value proposition", in VC-speak. But if the artist who created the work feels it IS important, can you simply dismiss that? Sounds like you're saying their opinion on this does not matter, which calls into question why you would pay any attention to them or their work at all. You would deny them any say over the form in which their music is released, which is like telling a painter he or she has no say how their art is hung in the gallery. Try that (with a living artist) and see what happens! So if an artist wants to sell an album only, what are you going to do? Boycott them? Go ahead, you're obviously not the kind of fan they want anyway. It's only money, some things are more important than 3c per track.
The type of "Album artist" I'm referring to would not deliberately produce "filler", so that's why I say you can not pre-judge what the "filler" is - IMHO that is not a valid reason to insist they release individual tracks. I know it's different today, on the charts, and I can hardly argue against cherry-picking the best tracks and avoiding the filler there - all I'm saying is that there really are "Album artists" who take the making of an Album very seriously. Example: when Rush were asked to produce a 4-minute "filler" to balance the sides of their Signals album in 1981, in 2 days, they took the job seriously. The result of imposing these "pop song" limitations on their methods, New World Man, was anything but filler, and became a live favourite.
When the artist is putting that kind of care in to an album, what's wrong with trying to get it out in the listening? It really is rewarding to the listener. Or is it all about money, and all artists care about is getting the maximum amount of money out of you, even though they will see very little of it themselves? Too much "Top 40" music may make you cynical, you may feel that the music business is all about money. Well, you're right about the Business, so if you care about music, look beyond the crud the Business is foisting on you today, to the modern independent artists, and the veterans who got pushed out because they failed to move the units. You can tell I feel passionately about this, because I know what music can do, and the importance of the difference between a set of songs and an Album. Go ahead and laugh if you want, see if I care. 8-P
It's happening. It just doesn't have the big marketing dollar behind it. See Bleep (Warp Records) or DGM Live (King Crimson & Friends) for examples. DGM even do lossless, you can buy FLAC files with no hint of DRM - a sure sign that they "get it".
Blammo! You just blew the bottom out of your own argument. The Charts have very little to do with music, they are the marketing equivalent of a Quake III Deathmatch. One week you score a kill, next week you die, the next week you score another kill. Complete musical movements have appeared and flourished without even touching the bottom of the Charts. Some good bands do get some attention e.g. Tool, NiN, Muse et al - but getting a chart place requires musical compromises that not all artists are prepared to make.
Fine, but some artists do view an album as more than just a series of tracks. Can you be sure, in advance, which tracks are "filler" and which aren't? Why, when I was a lad, it was my pleasure to unearth an "unsung" album track with special meaning to me.
Radiohead is mentioned in the article: any thoughts about the overarching story told in the order of the songs on OK Computer? It's there, almost a hidden message that rewards careful listening, and it would be destroyed if the songs were Shuffled. My "unsung" song on that album is Let Down, one that got no attention and would be left out if I had bought the "singles" on iTunes.
You should try this with a book - after all, who the heck is the author to decide that Chapter 7 comes immediately before Chapter 8?
They have a strategic agreement with Samsung, and at least one new semi-pro digital SLR camera due later this year (K10D ?). My only question would be: will there be enough space left on the back for the controls?