Mainly because my old local pub is smack in the middle of the circle. Ah, the days of sipping Wadworths 6X in the summer garden!
There are several circles similar to Stonehenge in the area around Wiltshire, one not so well known circle is Woodhenge, which is a few miles north east of Stonehenge just past Amesbury. The whole area is full of barrows and free-standing stones. A lot of them are in the middle of farm land which makes it difficult to get to, and there are a lot of ancient forts around too.
One funny thing I remember, walking past the entry gates to the stones one saturday morning walking the dog and there was a bus of American tourists doing the rounds, and I actually overheard one say "It's nice, but why did they have to build it so close to the road"...
Something that a lot of people don't realise about the circle is that a lot of the stones were moved around a lot during the early part of the 20th century. Six stones were set up-right in 1918 from their horizontal positions by the office of works and the stones were closed off to the public. They've also been moved backwards and forwards to London for inspection and maintenance a couple of times in the past, they certainly haven't been standing untouched for the last 3000 years!
The problem I find with combination of things is that if one of the components breaks and you have to send the device back, you're down the other components too. Like having a fax/copier/answering machine/combines hat and shoe rack, if the fax breaks and you have to return it you're all of a sudden stuck with nowhere to hang your hat and shoes.
I have a motorola e398 which has 'stereo' speakers on either side of the unit, a camera, a largish colour LCD and 64Mb of RAM for storing MP3's too. If the CCD breaks for some reason, I have to send the phone back to get it fixed, and then I'll be without a phone.
Instead of making the actual recognition of something the object of the exercise, how about elevating it to a more abstractive method. My daughter was watching Sesame Street the other day and it came up with the "One of these things is not like the other", she got it right instantly, shouting at the TV, and I got thinking about how it could be implemented to weed out the humans from the computers. You could have a collection of easily recognisable monochrome shapes, maybe a couple of hundred, group them by image attributes, say a group of pictures of birds, some flying, some not, large birds, small birds. And then present the user with 4 pictures of birds, three flying, one not or whatever and get them to click on the odd-one-out. then you could re-use the same birds with different attributes on the pictures, like three large eagles and a small sparrow. This would require the automated CAPTCHA cracker to not only recognise the shape but also figure out which picture is the odd one out.
There are two issues which I've come across with convincing people to stick with a desktop linux.
1. Too much choice for an un-informed audience. When you install a distro, you get choices of what you want to use for a task. Which is great, for an experienced user. But when a new user is presented with 4 programs to perform the same job, they tend to get frustrated. There's nothing worse than using something wondering if it's actually the best tools to use for the task. Personally I'd like to see a desktop linux with a select version of each app installed, a single window manager, single browser, single word processor. Once the user gets the hang of it, build their confidence, then they'll look for alternative applications and improve their linux knowledge a little bit futher.
2. Integration. Make everything talk to each other properly. Fix the clipboard issues between applications. Windows users are used to being able to select stuff in one application, copying, and pasting it into whatever they want. All of a sudden they're faced with the problem of not being able to do this anymore.
I've had direct contact with this memory 'erasing' drug, and it removes about 2 hours worth of memory (or that's what I calculated from the last thing I remember to the time I woke up). It's like one second sitting on a bed in a smock, and the next 'becoming aware' of yourself sitting in the car on the way home. Still doesn't make you feel comfortable afterwards. Having a tube stuck up your arse could never be comfortable, trust me.
On track one of the windowlicker EP, there's a spiral at the end. There's also an audioplot on his new Drukq's album.
He's also put data into his songs which can be extracted. On his "Richard D James" album, there's two tracks with ZX Spectrum tape headers at the beginning and ends of the tracks which can be read into some spectrum emulators.
Recently, he released a single called "Two remixes by AFX" featuring a remix of 808 states flowcoma. The last track titles "Bonus High Frequency Sounds" is basically a data track from some computer (not a spectrum), hopefully someone out there would recognise its sound and extract the information out of it, because I've tried and all I've got is junk data...
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Hmm, sounds like things have changed. I haven't been back there since I moved to Oz about 15 years ago.
Mainly because my old local pub is smack in the middle of the circle. Ah, the days of sipping Wadworths 6X in the summer garden!
There are several circles similar to Stonehenge in the area around Wiltshire, one not so well known circle is Woodhenge, which is a few miles north east of Stonehenge just past Amesbury. The whole area is full of barrows and free-standing stones. A lot of them are in the middle of farm land which makes it difficult to get to, and there are a lot of ancient forts around too.
One funny thing I remember, walking past the entry gates to the stones one saturday morning walking the dog and there was a bus of American tourists doing the rounds, and I actually overheard one say "It's nice, but why did they have to build it so close to the road"...
Something that a lot of people don't realise about the circle is that a lot of the stones were moved around a lot during the early part of the 20th century. Six stones were set up-right in 1918 from their horizontal positions by the office of works and the stones were closed off to the public. They've also been moved backwards and forwards to London for inspection and maintenance a couple of times in the past, they certainly haven't been standing untouched for the last 3000 years!
The problem I find with combination of things is that if one of the components breaks and you have to send the device back, you're down the other components too. Like having a fax/copier/answering machine/combines hat and shoe rack, if the fax breaks and you have to return it you're all of a sudden stuck with nowhere to hang your hat and shoes.
I have a motorola e398 which has 'stereo' speakers on either side of the unit, a camera, a largish colour LCD and 64Mb of RAM for storing MP3's too. If the CCD breaks for some reason, I have to send the phone back to get it fixed, and then I'll be without a phone.
Instead of making the actual recognition of something the object of the exercise, how about elevating it to a more abstractive method. My daughter was watching Sesame Street the other day and it came up with the "One of these things is not like the other", she got it right instantly, shouting at the TV, and I got thinking about how it could be implemented to weed out the humans from the computers. You could have a collection of easily recognisable monochrome shapes, maybe a couple of hundred, group them by image attributes, say a group of pictures of birds, some flying, some not, large birds, small birds. And then present the user with 4 pictures of birds, three flying, one not or whatever and get them to click on the odd-one-out. then you could re-use the same birds with different attributes on the pictures, like three large eagles and a small sparrow. This would require the automated CAPTCHA cracker to not only recognise the shape but also figure out which picture is the odd one out.
Keep it real, innit
You're a meteorologist marrying a wedding planner. Now there's irony...
There are two issues which I've come across with convincing people to stick with a desktop linux.
1. Too much choice for an un-informed audience. When you install a distro, you get choices of what you want to use for a task. Which is great, for an experienced user. But when a new user is presented with 4 programs to perform the same job, they tend to get frustrated. There's nothing worse than using something wondering if it's actually the best tools to use for the task. Personally I'd like to see a desktop linux with a select version of each app installed, a single window manager, single browser, single word processor. Once the user gets the hang of it, build their confidence, then they'll look for alternative applications and improve their linux knowledge a little bit futher.
2. Integration. Make everything talk to each other properly. Fix the clipboard issues between applications. Windows users are used to being able to select stuff in one application, copying, and pasting it into whatever they want. All of a sudden they're faced with the problem of not being able to do this anymore.
I've had direct contact with this memory 'erasing' drug, and it removes about 2 hours worth of memory (or that's what I calculated from the last thing I remember to the time I woke up). It's like one second sitting on a bed in a smock, and the next 'becoming aware' of yourself sitting in the car on the way home. Still doesn't make you feel comfortable afterwards. Having a tube stuck up your arse could never be comfortable, trust me.
On track one of the windowlicker EP, there's a spiral at the end. There's also an audioplot on his new Drukq's album.
He's also put data into his songs which can be extracted. On his "Richard D James" album, there's two tracks with ZX Spectrum tape headers at the beginning and ends of the tracks which can be read into some spectrum emulators.
Recently, he released a single called "Two remixes by AFX" featuring a remix of 808 states flowcoma. The last track titles "Bonus High Frequency Sounds" is basically a data track from some computer (not a spectrum), hopefully someone out there would recognise its sound and extract the information out of it, because I've tried and all I've got is junk data...
We have a zombie domain controller that keeps re-appearing in our network neighbourhood... Should get around to fixing that...