Folders. Simple as that! Artist, album, song name. Folders descending in that order.
Movie soundtracks and video game soundtracks have their own exclusive folders outside of
the normal contemporary music hierarchy as does classical music.
Bingo! Same here - We even have almost the exact same exceptions to the default. I
also have an exception for audiobooks as well, though... I could put them under
the author, but they really just don't fit in conceptually as "music". And if I want
to make a playlist of everything I have to put on shuffle for a party, it confuses the
hell out of people to have the music abruptly break off into hour #27 of one of Feinman's
lectures
That's all you need. Don't fool yourself.
I would add one small tool to that for helping friends find music, however... No fancy
library management software or anythgin like that - I wrote a cheesy CGI script that takes
a string input from a web page (with exactly one input box and the question "what do you
want to listen to"), does a caseless edit-distance comparison against each line of the
output of "find/multimedia/audio", then produces a page of links of the top 100 results
that the user can then drag-and-drop onto WinAmp. I learned very quickly that most people,
even people who appear basically competent at using a computer, don't really grasp
the idea of a directory tree as a set of nested containers.
Does it mean the likes of Amazon? If so they too may continue to cry. I don't
need to know about This week's hot deals on Electronics & Photo at Amazon.co.uk.
Although I agree with you in general (I get far too many advertisements from
companies with whom I may once-upon-a-time have chosen to do business)... Believe it
or not, I get no spam from Amazon. None. Not a bit.
They send me order confirmations and shipping notifications (which may include a
few brief text blurbs that would count as an ad), but nothing else. I place an order,
I get four or five assorted confirmations of the progress of the order, then I don't
hear from them until next time I place an order.
Perhaps that explains why I've ordered from them more than once.;-)
Are you implying that because someone chooses not to learn how to assemble a computer,
they are retarded sheep? That's horribly elitest and wrong.
Although you twisted my words horribly, you didn't need to - "Implying"? I
didn't imply it, I outright said it.
As for elitist and wrong... Geeks have something that very few others do. Not intelligence,
not formal education, not problem-solving skills (though geeks do tend to come in
well above average in all those categories). No... Geeks have curiosity.
Just because you know something that someone else doesn't, doesn't make you
smarter or better than them as a whole.
I agree completely. Not "because" I know, but rather, why I know.
I know because I want to know. Sheep know what modern living
forces them to know (and often not even quite enough of that,
and as little extra as possible.
Sheep look at an outlet and get out a hacksaw if the plug has
too many pointy bits for the available number of holes. Geeks
look at an outlet and wonder why it takes three prongs
rather than two (or even just one - yes, you only need one
conductor, under most real-world operating conditions).
Sheep learn that 1+1=2 and take it on no less faith than that
Jesus loves them. Geeks consult Whitehead and Russell because
we want to know why 1+1=2.
Sheep buy the Deluxe Limited Edition Tie Fighter Lego set and
build the Deluxe Limited Edition Tie Figher Lego model. Geeks
buy the cheapest set that has the 40-tooth gear they need to
finish their trebuchet, and yes, they can tell you the difference
between a trebuchet and a catapult.
Get the trend here? Not the mere posession of knowledge,
but the motivation to acquire it, and apply it,
and more. No, "motivation" doesn't quite suffice... "Money"
can motivate. Geeks have a deep, burning need to understand
their environment, for no reason beyond the knowing itself.
How about a little tolerance in this world, eh?
Tolerance give us inner-city cultural ghettos. Tolerance gives us genetically
defective humans not only allowed to live, but allowed to reproduce. Tolerance
gives us schools that teach cooperation then unleash totally unprepared students
into a world based on competition, literally to-the-death.
However, you'd find, if you got to know me, that I count as probably one of the most
"tolerant" people you'll ever meet. Not out of some misguided dedication to the
idea of tolerance itself, however - No, I simply don't give a shit. Screw whomever
(or whatever) you want, smoke whatever you want, worship whatever imaginary friend
you want, pretty much do anything you want... As long as it doesn't affect me
(and, by empathetical extension, anyone other than you, without the consent
of those others).
But when "saving the weak" makes me pay more in taxes, I care. When "cultural identity"
makes it more dangerous for me to walk down the street (and FSM forbid I wander into
the "wrong" neighborhood!), I care. When my (hypothetical) offspring leave school
unprepared to fight tooth-and-nail against the million-and-seven other inadequately
educated shmoes who all have PhDs to get past the first round of eliminations for an
entry-level burgerflipper job, I care.
But feel free to preach tolerance. It will make it easier to take your food
and your women after the oil crash.
As a card-carrying member of Amnesty International
(AI), I was shocked when AI accused Washington of running
a Soviet-style gulag.
It surprises me that a "card-carrying member" of AI wouldn't
already have heard the extensive proof of our network
of secret prisons when the story finally hit the mainstream
news... Indy media such as Democracy Now have covered the topic
every few months since 2004!
Sadly, superheroes could tell the government to go pound sand -
What could Bush do against Superman? But we mere normals have
little choice in the matter. Please leave your DNA sample at the
door and you'll receive your RealID card in two to six weeks as
long as your name doesn't sound Middle-Eastern.
Now, if you want secret prison conspiracy theories - Google
for "Rex 84".
Now WHY would someone do that? Out of spite for
the new law? No, I think not.
Much of the confusion about attitudes here comes from
Americans posting about a European law.
In Europe, they apparently deal with recycling and
hazardous waste disposal by building all that right
into the cost of the product up-front. Even second-hand
users don't get screwed, because no one has to pay at
the time of disposal, only at the time of purchase.
In the US, our politicians pass laws like this with
absolutely no consideration of who pays for it
or even who will accept such items for proper
disposal. They say "you must recycle these or else",
then, the task goes to the end-of-life user (even if
that user already "recycled" the product by
saving it from the curb after the original owner threw
it out). Then, if the local (usually city, not
even state) government decided to set up a suitable
disposal facility, they charge the person considerate
enough to bring it in for the privilege of disposing
of it properly.
So when Americans say "laws like this will end up with
cell-phones tossed in the nearest river" - Now you know
why.
Your access point has limits for a reason. Please
respect them. If you start pissing all over someone
else's hobby with your computer junk, they're licensed
and you're not, you're the one in the wrong.
My "computer junk" actually has some use in the modern
world. Ham radio has gone the way of the dodo, and for
good reason. Oh, wait, let the protests of "during Katrina,
hams did foo, bar, and bat!" begin. Boo hoo. And
I can transmit an SOS using sparkgap, but I don't see anyone
trying to protect that obsolete technology. Suck it
up and give me my BPL so I have a third choice in the
current regional broadband duopoly.
As the number of people using WAPs increases, the difficulty
of getting a good signal increases as well. Currently, at
least in the US, geeks can cheat and use channel 13 or 14
to get a good solid clean signal, and that without
needing to push the transmitter power to always stay at
max (and if you think the FCC cares about a <100mw
omnidirectional transmitter operating inside my house
a mere 0.9% out of range, I have a bridge to sell to you).
But even that only represents a band-aid for the real
problem - Namely, that while we have literally GHz allocated
to the highest bidding commercial users, we mere plebes can
go pound sand trying to fight over the use of a few meager
MHz. And not even a "good" few MHz - The FCC only gave
that range to us because the whole goddamned planet
acts like a giant 2.4GHz sponge, making it useless for
anything more important than your phone talking to its
base station.
The FCC does a good thing, in general (when it sticks to
controlling spectrum allocation rather than censorship).
But they need a harsh reminder that the interests of the
people come before the interests of the highest
bidder.
It is weird that we don't have more computer parts stores
Not at all... The sort of people who have the skills neeeded to build
their own computers (when I say "skills", while we might consider
throwing together a PC from known-compatible parts as nearly trivial,
keep in mind that most people conflate memory with HDDs and while their
video cards might come with 512MB, they don't understand that they can't
upgrade their monitor to 1GB) also have the skills to get the best
price for the best parts online.
Why don't you see more parts stores? Because they can't compete. Sure,
you have the occasional semi-literate person who will buy a cable or two,
but actually building a system? No.
As for Walmart's "great" prices... True story. A few months back I
desperately needed a new HDD ASAP for a project at work. Even
overnighting it wouldn't suffice, so I went to WallyWorld, figuring
they'd have something that would work.
Well, at the risk of a mixed-metaphorical-double-entendre, size didn't
matter, but I didn't expect to raped so hard regardless.
I ended up paying $90 for a 60GB Seagate (ATA133, mind you, not some
high-end SCSI deal). Seriously. At the time, I could have bought the
same thing online for half the price, or gotten a 200GB for the
same price.
So... Geeks will keep shopping for parts online (for the majority of us
not lucky enough to have a Fry's in-state), and sheep will keep buying
preconfigured Dells. This new "trend" merely gives a new option to the
sheep who have learned not to fear the sun rising every morning. But as
they say... "Even if you win the Special Olympics, you're still a retard".
Perhaps, then, you should edit the Wikipedia entry of common
carrier, since you have it right and they have it wrong.
I do not see my use as substantially different from the Wiki
article, as long as you keep in mind that AT&T doesn't just
act as a broadband ISP. The "Brand X" ruling didn't change
AT&T's status as a common carrier - In fact, it didn't change
anything. It just clarified that cable broadband providers
such as Time Warner don't automatically count as common
carriers.
What contracts are you specifically referring to?
Contracts to provide a given level of service at a given
price? Although we poor home users get what TW will toss
us, the terms of which they can unilaterally change on a
whim - "Real" internet connections come with terms including
price, a guaranteed level of bandwidth, maximum downtime, conditions under which either party can terminate the agreement, etc. Google doesn't just "trust" that their ISP will give
them a good deal and won't suddenly disconnect them with
no warning. They have contracts in place that define
every aspect of service, down to details most of us wouldn't
even think about.
Just curious. How many high-speed low-latency connectivity
providers can you choose from where you live? More than two?
Cheap home broadband, only three choices (possibly four, if
the ISP about a mile away offers point-to-point wireless
links, but I've never looked into that).
And no, I don't live in big city... Not the middle of nowhere,
either, but the suburbs of a fairly small city (~30k people).
But I see your point. Keep in mind, however, that cellular
carriers already have the ability to offer decent
internet connections (not quite broadband quality, and
certainly not cheap, but a hell of a lot faster than dialup).
Within a few years I fully expect them to make a move to
try to eradicate the dialup ISP market (would I drop down to
a 768k connection for $20/mo on top of my normal cell bill,
if it didn't count against my minutes? Hell yeah!)
Add in the likelyhood of wide-area broadband wireless
technologies such as 802.16/802.20 maturing in the next few
years, and we could realistically see "broadband" enter
the same realm of consumer-benefitting ISP competition
as the glory-days of the dialip ISP back in the
late-80's/early-90's. $9.99/mo unlimited at up to 10Mbit?
It'll happen, eventually.
So if AT&T (or any other provider) plans to abuse its
current position as having near-monopoly control within
given regions (usually half of the phone/cable duopoly),
they'd better do it soon, because unhappy customers jump
ship the first chance they get.
I'm talking about corporate sponsored refusal to
carry types of traffic.
Then they would lose their "common carrier" status, a fate
VERY few of the big boys would willingly risk.
What would happen if a carrier started using
Class-Based Queueing techniques just across their
sections?
Then they would either breach their contracts with those
on either side of their chunk of network, or they would
voluntarily transmit less data over time, thereby making
less money for that traffic.
If you sell cinnamon buns for $1 and someone comes along and
offers you $10 per cinnamon bun, unless they buy all
your cinnamon buns, only a fool would stop selling the
remainder at $1 each. And if you have more demand than
capacity, again, only a fool would turn down potential $1
sales by refusing to expand his production capacity.
Should content providers like Google, or subscribers
like us, pay for the bandwidth consumed?
Both of us already pay for our connection. I
pay $45+tax+fees+basic_cable per month for a decently fat
pipe coming into my house. Google pays something I don't
even want to imagine for the bandwidth it consumes - and
that includes the bandwidth for which I also
paid to connect to Google.
But now the telecoms have said they want even more???
Greedy bastards we should do away with, for certain. But do
we need to worry about non-net-neutrality?
Everyone talks about "imagine carrier-X favoring MSN
over Google"... But Google already pays for a
guaranteed bandwidth. My connection at work pays for
a guaranteed bandwidth. Although I currently pay for
peak bandwidth rather than guaranteed on my home
connection, watch how fast consumers drop ISPs that
throttle them for reasons unrelated to congestion. "But
I can stream HD video from MSN? Great, fuck you too, I
don't use MSN, cancel my account!"
So this leaves AT&T with three options - breach of contract
with their "supply-side" customers, or loss of constomers
on the "consumer-side". Wait, I said "three", didn't I?
Yep - They have one other choice. They already need to
provide a certain level of service to Google and to Joe
Sixpack. But they have the option of making MSN
faster than the competition. Whether they do that
as anticompetitive price-cuts for higher bandwidth or as
network infrastructure upgrades, both would tend to drive
prices down and quality up. End result, they lose their
own bone barking at the dog in the stream.
Use a simple application to record the sound output
of your PC sound card. Click "record" just before playback
starts and click "stop" when the song ends.
WOW does that take waaaay too much effort! And after all
that, you still need to fix the ends of the file and then
properly tag them. And even then, you still have a 128Kbps
stream serially transcoded, resulting in artifacts even my
half-deaf grandmother could pick out.
Streamripping takes far less effort. Tune WinAmp
to a streamed station playing the genre you want, start
Streamripper,
and go to work/school/bed. Eight hours later, you'll
have practically the entirety of that station's high-rotation
playlist, properly tagged and at a quality of up to VBR384Kbps.
(I have yet to find a stream doing better quality than that,
and even as something of a sound-quality-elitist, I have to
admit that comes as close to CD quality as I can tell in
any listening environment I can afford).
Or better yet - Just borrow the CD from a friend and rip it
yourself.
Or best of all, BUY THE CD (preferably directly from the
artist)! I have no qualms about downloading to check out a
band, but if I like them, why wouldn't I want to give something
back?
Why do so many people have this fetish for giving all
the money from music recording sales to the musicians?
In most cases, the performer did the least work of anybody
involved in the making of the record.
"Work", yes. Most bands even enjoy what they do.
But the artist has something that the rest of the food
chain does not. The artist - not the engineers, not
the studio, not the marketing guys, not the lawyers - actually
create what we want. The rest of them might help get
that to me, but you could substitute any of a million drop-in
replacements for any step of the process except the
artist.
Now, no doubt someone will respond about how many of Britney's
songs Britney had any input beyond singing, or how much modern
music sucks and calling the band "talent" stretches credibility.
But underlying idea remains the same. The people who hear
music in their heads and need to get it out for the rest
of us to enjoy, THEY very much "deserve" the lion's
share of the sales.
I'm sorry, I didn't realise you lived in such a technologically backward country.
I meant that as hyperbole (thus the "dare I say"). Though an amazing number of companies
do still run NT4.
Everyone here has XP on the desktop, and I think any Win servers are 2003.
Okay, I admin a similar network (though probably smaller than yours, from the sounds
of it). But tell me - What has that gained us since... Well, NT4/98 had its problems
(with AD in particular), but how about 2000/2000server? Don't get me wrong, I consider
2003 Server proabably the single most stable OS Microsoft has made since DOS 3.3, but
does it really add so much from 2000 Server that any company not on SA would even
consider the cost of upgrading? And XP... Well, I personally consider XP a
step back from Win2k, but if you shut off literally 2/3rds of the services it
runs almost as well.
And so far, from the pre-release MSDN versions, Vista looks like more of the same.
Yeah, a few marginal improvements, a LOT of new resource-sucking crap that we'll want
to turn off for business machines (Thank you, nLite!!!). But does it have anything
that makes me say "Hey, cool, I'll upgrade just for that"? Nope. The one feature it
originally had, Avalon (aka vector graphics allowing far better high-DPI scaling),
they cut. Good one, Billy G!
if they can't actually ship a product (even at the already delayed date)
they deserve the mass defections that hopefully will be coming.
"Mass defections"?
People (not talking about Geeks, here) upgrade their OS when they upgrade
their PC. Not before, and not after.
They don't buy a Mac because Vista takes too long to come out. They don't
install Linux because Vista takes too long to come out. They don't
install "make XP look like Vista" themes because Vista takes too long to
come out.
They run what they buy. When it crashes, or spyware makes it unuseable...
Do they reinstall XP? Hell No! They buy a new PC.
If their new PC comes with XP, they will run XP. If their new PC comes
with Vista, they will run Vista. Their new PC won't run anything else,
because Walmart doesn't sell PCs loaded with anything else in-store
(Linspire boxes via their web store matter about as much as Macs do).
It doesn't take much more analysis than that, sadly. You want to know why
Microsoft won't sweat this delay? Because it won't affect either their
sales or their market penetration by even 1%.
And as for the much-discussed "business" buyers - Working in a job where I
would play a very significant role in the decision to "Switch", I
can say that Microsoft has nothing to worry about (except that almost no
one wants to upgrade to Vista, much less to an entirely different
OS). If Vista doesn't ship until 2094, very little would make me
happier. Vista will break working programs in exchange for
virtually no new features. Why on Earth would anyone
want it? We'll eventually upgrade only because Microsoft will leave
us no choice - Keep in mind that a lot of fortune-500s (dare I
say "the majority of them"?) still run NT4 servers and Win98 desktops,
and you'll get the general idea.
That would be awesome, but unfortunately it
doesn't work.
The brick idea, no. But the SD article made a nice
suggestion - A rectangular chunk of nice thick sheet
metal would fit well inside the return envelope, yet
weigh far more than one ounce.
Also, one point on the SD article:
of
the 161,000 people who wrote to the DMA last year,
116,000 wanted more junk mail. They were sent a booklet
entitled "How To Get More Interesting Mail" (as God is
my witness, I am not making this up), which tells you
various key catalogs that you can send for to guarantee
you'll be deluged with stuff.
I can tell
you exactly why people ask for more junk mail...
I mean, like 75% of slashdot readers have written
patches for the kernel, right?
I see your point and agree with it, but you chose a bad
example.
As big and scary as it looks, the kernel has some of the
best-written code in the entire GNU/Linux codebase. Granted,
it has some unbelievably nasty and unintelligible sections,
but on the whole, any decent C coder can realistically
make their own kernel patches.
And yes, I have done so myself - Back in the 2.2 days, on
a Compaq server, the kernel couldn't see a second PCI bus
(on which resided the RAID controller). Granted, my fix only
hardcoded the enumeration I wanted; but with literally
no familiarity with that part of the kernel, I
managed to identify the problem, locate the offending code,
and fix it in under half-an-hour (not counting recompile
times).
Rule of thumb: Anything that allows you to "level up" is out to fuck you
Although I agree with you in principle...
In practice, the Mauve Dragons of the Middle Management Plateau still yield
before my mighty +3 sword of Spam Slaying (and other "useless" security expertise);
My dual-classed L2AA/L4BS Geek-of-Many-Colors Resume still slays the trolls of HR;
My numerous cross-platform Certs of Knowledge tame the most pernicious NixClone
Daemons; And my White Male +30 racial modifier grants me (fair to the
other players or not) a bonus to all rolls for find-treasure/performance-evaluation
(nullified by any zone of EEOC or an attractive Half-Succubus apprentice competing
for limited treasure apportionment).
Now if only I could apply that to WoW, I'd study my ass off for a PhD in
Auriculture with a minor in Ebaynics. But let's not get too silly, here!
We Americans have a somewhat different view of
what it means to find traces of a civilization
than do Europeans.
In the US, if you go out and dig in your backyard and
find something man-made and more than a few hundred years
old, you've most likely really found something
of archaeological interest.
In Europe, you can set up a dig just about anywhere
and find crumbled bricks, broken pottery, or some other
traces of very very old human civilization.
Hell, for another recent news item to make my point, the
UK Times Online reports that archaeologists just found
an almost perfectly preserved Roman city in Spain - Which
the Spanish felt so impressed by, they promptly turned it
into a parking lot.
And it's perfectly reasonable to assume that his wild-assed
guess of 12,000 B.C.E. is totally wrong, while he's 100%
correct about the pyramid's existance.
I agree that ad hominem doesn't disprove the existance
of a pyramid in Bosnia. But when the town loony raves about
aliens landing in his back yard, you don't call NASA to
disprove him.
First: The Bosnian "pyramid" (a roughly four-sided
hill where they've found nothing but a mound
of dirt so far) hit the news last year, in Early
November IIRC.
Second, the fellow cho claims it a pyramid ranks
right up there with Uri Gellar as far as credibility
goes, according to
Archaology last week.
So +5 for topical, but minus a million for reporting
on entirely the wrong end of the issue. They
didn't just discover it, they just debunked the
discovery.
Just point it to an RBF such as Spamhaus. We use their
SBL/XBL combo list, and spam dropped by easily 95%.
You don't need any additional software, it just
plain works. And it stays up-to-date
automagically (well, thanks to the hard work of the
guys at Spamhaus that maintain it). You'll never need
to touch it again unless your RBL's maintainer shuts
down.
Sadly, as the biggest problem you'll have - Many manegerial
types receive spam and consider it some sort of insider
secret prize they've won (you know, like the stock-tip
s[cp]ams?). No joke - You will get complaints if you
manage to completely block all spam.
Ooh! <A random quasi-interesting topic my highschool
teacher mentioned offhand, which has nothing to do with the
topic at hand>
Wow, the slash-trolls have come out in force today!
Perhaps you would have done better to listen to that
"quasi-interesting" topic, then apply the knowledge gained to
reading the FP link. Because, strangely enough, it has
everything to do with the topic at hand. From
the linked article:
the original intention was
to devise an arresting demonstration of how random energy
can be rectified into directed motion
It may have confused you that in this case, the "demon"
has a higher temperature than the surrounding area - But
Maxwell only propsed that the source and destination of
the molecules have the same temperature, not the demon
itself. Somehow I suspect that subtletly lost on you,
however, and you had no such semi-legitimate objection
in mind, preferring to just act like a complete git in
general.
The Alexa toolbar's gotten Alexa a bad rap from privacy
advocates, though in function it's effect on search results is
similar to click stream data that Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask may
or may not be using in their determinations of relevance.
While that may (or may not) hold true, the key difference there
involves how much we trust the company getting the data.
Google has proven itself, time and again, to act in the best
interests of its users, even going up against the DoJ to
fight for our privacy rights. Yahoo and MSN don't quite
have the same good track record, but they at least don't
have a reputation as outright spyware.
But Alexa? C'mon, Amazon, give us a frickin' break
here!
Wow, what an ignorant statement. The Voodoo line of cards didn't use OpenGL nor Direct3D [...]
Now, there are very few problems unique to only one card manufacturer, and everybody is working
through Direct3D. The olden days of video card compatability problems are all but gone.
Wow, what an ignorant statement.
Do you have any idea what a driver does? As someone who has made a living writing
them, allow me enlighten you a tad...
OpenGL and Direct3D provide an Application Programming Interface for
games and other graphically-intense programs to use to more easily access the features
available on the hardware.
You still rest at the mercy of NVidia or ATI to write their driver to export the
hardware features as that API. For the basics, they do so fairly well, and as a result,
we do indeed enjoy a welcome relief from the hassle of hardware-specific configuration.
For the basics.
Now tell me - Why do you suppose the top of the troubleshooting list for high-end games
includes "disable custom pixel and/or vertex shaders" (and with DX10, you can add Geometry
Shading to that as well)?
Answer - Because those features still depend on the game knowing how to deal with
each particular card to get it right. For example, The ATI X1000 skipped Vertex Texturing
yet can call itself 'Vertex Shader 3.0 compliant" by the loophole of disallowing the use
of any filtering on any texture format. Now, technically the correct DX9c sanity checks
would notice that little quirk and the program would respond accordingly... But from the
POV of a programmer trying to implement that API, it strikes me as similar to needing to
ask the CPU if it has power, and somehow magically the answer comes back "no".
So I guess you missed the part of the article where they played it with
about a dozen of today's current most popular games off the shelf. You know,
that whole benchmarking part?
So I guess you didn't make it up to page 10. You know, the page titled
"Bang Bang: Here Come Problems"? Where they show horrible mangled screenshots and
make such comments as (Bolding mine):
Before we proceed with the benchmark
scores, we would like to stress that Nvidia GeForce 7900 quad SLI technology does
not seem to be mature enough so far. We have experienced a lot of significant
and insignificant issues with nearly all the games we have tested with it,
including 3DMark benchmarks
and:
During the testing
we also experienced numerous crashes and freezes
But hey, kudos, your comment (and two others) did well enough to convince
the mods to spank me.
Slashdot Mirror
Folders. Simple as that! Artist, album, song name. Folders descending in that order. Movie soundtracks and video game soundtracks have their own exclusive folders outside of the normal contemporary music hierarchy as does classical music.
/multimedia/audio", then produces a page of links of the top 100 results
that the user can then drag-and-drop onto WinAmp. I learned very quickly that most people,
even people who appear basically competent at using a computer, don't really grasp
the idea of a directory tree as a set of nested containers.
Bingo! Same here - We even have almost the exact same exceptions to the default. I also have an exception for audiobooks as well, though... I could put them under the author, but they really just don't fit in conceptually as "music". And if I want to make a playlist of everything I have to put on shuffle for a party, it confuses the hell out of people to have the music abruptly break off into hour #27 of one of Feinman's lectures
That's all you need. Don't fool yourself.
I would add one small tool to that for helping friends find music, however... No fancy library management software or anythgin like that - I wrote a cheesy CGI script that takes a string input from a web page (with exactly one input box and the question "what do you want to listen to"), does a caseless edit-distance comparison against each line of the output of "find
Does it mean the likes of Amazon? If so they too may continue to cry. I don't need to know about This week's hot deals on Electronics & Photo at Amazon.co.uk.
;-)
Although I agree with you in general (I get far too many advertisements from companies with whom I may once-upon-a-time have chosen to do business)... Believe it or not, I get no spam from Amazon. None. Not a bit.
They send me order confirmations and shipping notifications (which may include a few brief text blurbs that would count as an ad), but nothing else. I place an order, I get four or five assorted confirmations of the progress of the order, then I don't hear from them until next time I place an order.
Perhaps that explains why I've ordered from them more than once.
Are you implying that because someone chooses not to learn how to assemble a computer, they are retarded sheep? That's horribly elitest and wrong.
Although you twisted my words horribly, you didn't need to - "Implying"? I didn't imply it, I outright said it.
As for elitist and wrong... Geeks have something that very few others do. Not intelligence, not formal education, not problem-solving skills (though geeks do tend to come in well above average in all those categories). No... Geeks have curiosity.
Just because you know something that someone else doesn't, doesn't make you smarter or better than them as a whole.
I agree completely. Not "because" I know, but rather, why I know. I know because I want to know. Sheep know what modern living forces them to know (and often not even quite enough of that, and as little extra as possible.
Sheep look at an outlet and get out a hacksaw if the plug has too many pointy bits for the available number of holes. Geeks look at an outlet and wonder why it takes three prongs rather than two (or even just one - yes, you only need one conductor, under most real-world operating conditions).
Sheep learn that 1+1=2 and take it on no less faith than that Jesus loves them. Geeks consult Whitehead and Russell because we want to know why 1+1=2.
Sheep buy the Deluxe Limited Edition Tie Fighter Lego set and build the Deluxe Limited Edition Tie Figher Lego model. Geeks buy the cheapest set that has the 40-tooth gear they need to finish their trebuchet, and yes, they can tell you the difference between a trebuchet and a catapult.
Get the trend here? Not the mere posession of knowledge, but the motivation to acquire it, and apply it, and more. No, "motivation" doesn't quite suffice... "Money" can motivate. Geeks have a deep, burning need to understand their environment, for no reason beyond the knowing itself.
How about a little tolerance in this world, eh?
Tolerance give us inner-city cultural ghettos. Tolerance gives us genetically defective humans not only allowed to live, but allowed to reproduce. Tolerance gives us schools that teach cooperation then unleash totally unprepared students into a world based on competition, literally to-the-death.
However, you'd find, if you got to know me, that I count as probably one of the most "tolerant" people you'll ever meet. Not out of some misguided dedication to the idea of tolerance itself, however - No, I simply don't give a shit. Screw whomever (or whatever) you want, smoke whatever you want, worship whatever imaginary friend you want, pretty much do anything you want... As long as it doesn't affect me (and, by empathetical extension, anyone other than you, without the consent of those others).
But when "saving the weak" makes me pay more in taxes, I care. When "cultural identity" makes it more dangerous for me to walk down the street (and FSM forbid I wander into the "wrong" neighborhood!), I care. When my (hypothetical) offspring leave school unprepared to fight tooth-and-nail against the million-and-seven other inadequately educated shmoes who all have PhDs to get past the first round of eliminations for an entry-level burgerflipper job, I care.
But feel free to preach tolerance. It will make it easier to take your food and your women after the oil crash.
As a card-carrying member of Amnesty International (AI), I was shocked when AI accused Washington of running a Soviet-style gulag.
It surprises me that a "card-carrying member" of AI wouldn't already have heard the extensive proof of our network of secret prisons when the story finally hit the mainstream news... Indy media such as Democracy Now have covered the topic every few months since 2004!
One from November 2004, an interview with Stephen Gray...
July 2004 with Michael Posner...
June 2004 (just a brief unsubstantiated blurb on the topic).
Sadly, superheroes could tell the government to go pound sand - What could Bush do against Superman? But we mere normals have little choice in the matter. Please leave your DNA sample at the door and you'll receive your RealID card in two to six weeks as long as your name doesn't sound Middle-Eastern.
Now, if you want secret prison conspiracy theories - Google for "Rex 84".
Now WHY would someone do that? Out of spite for the new law? No, I think not.
Much of the confusion about attitudes here comes from Americans posting about a European law.
In Europe, they apparently deal with recycling and hazardous waste disposal by building all that right into the cost of the product up-front. Even second-hand users don't get screwed, because no one has to pay at the time of disposal, only at the time of purchase.
In the US, our politicians pass laws like this with absolutely no consideration of who pays for it or even who will accept such items for proper disposal. They say "you must recycle these or else", then, the task goes to the end-of-life user (even if that user already "recycled" the product by saving it from the curb after the original owner threw it out). Then, if the local (usually city, not even state) government decided to set up a suitable disposal facility, they charge the person considerate enough to bring it in for the privilege of disposing of it properly.
So when Americans say "laws like this will end up with cell-phones tossed in the nearest river" - Now you know why.
Your access point has limits for a reason. Please respect them. If you start pissing all over someone else's hobby with your computer junk, they're licensed and you're not, you're the one in the wrong.
My "computer junk" actually has some use in the modern world. Ham radio has gone the way of the dodo, and for good reason. Oh, wait, let the protests of "during Katrina, hams did foo, bar, and bat!" begin. Boo hoo. And I can transmit an SOS using sparkgap, but I don't see anyone trying to protect that obsolete technology. Suck it up and give me my BPL so I have a third choice in the current regional broadband duopoly.
As the number of people using WAPs increases, the difficulty of getting a good signal increases as well. Currently, at least in the US, geeks can cheat and use channel 13 or 14 to get a good solid clean signal, and that without needing to push the transmitter power to always stay at max (and if you think the FCC cares about a <100mw omnidirectional transmitter operating inside my house a mere 0.9% out of range, I have a bridge to sell to you).
But even that only represents a band-aid for the real problem - Namely, that while we have literally GHz allocated to the highest bidding commercial users, we mere plebes can go pound sand trying to fight over the use of a few meager MHz. And not even a "good" few MHz - The FCC only gave that range to us because the whole goddamned planet acts like a giant 2.4GHz sponge, making it useless for anything more important than your phone talking to its base station.
The FCC does a good thing, in general (when it sticks to controlling spectrum allocation rather than censorship). But they need a harsh reminder that the interests of the people come before the interests of the highest bidder.
It is weird that we don't have more computer parts stores
Not at all... The sort of people who have the skills neeeded to build their own computers (when I say "skills", while we might consider throwing together a PC from known-compatible parts as nearly trivial, keep in mind that most people conflate memory with HDDs and while their video cards might come with 512MB, they don't understand that they can't upgrade their monitor to 1GB) also have the skills to get the best price for the best parts online.
Why don't you see more parts stores? Because they can't compete. Sure, you have the occasional semi-literate person who will buy a cable or two, but actually building a system? No.
As for Walmart's "great" prices... True story. A few months back I desperately needed a new HDD ASAP for a project at work. Even overnighting it wouldn't suffice, so I went to WallyWorld, figuring they'd have something that would work.
Well, at the risk of a mixed-metaphorical-double-entendre, size didn't matter, but I didn't expect to raped so hard regardless.
I ended up paying $90 for a 60GB Seagate (ATA133, mind you, not some high-end SCSI deal). Seriously. At the time, I could have bought the same thing online for half the price, or gotten a 200GB for the same price.
So... Geeks will keep shopping for parts online (for the majority of us not lucky enough to have a Fry's in-state), and sheep will keep buying preconfigured Dells. This new "trend" merely gives a new option to the sheep who have learned not to fear the sun rising every morning. But as they say... "Even if you win the Special Olympics, you're still a retard".
Perhaps, then, you should edit the Wikipedia entry of common carrier, since you have it right and they have it wrong.
I do not see my use as substantially different from the Wiki article, as long as you keep in mind that AT&T doesn't just act as a broadband ISP. The "Brand X" ruling didn't change AT&T's status as a common carrier - In fact, it didn't change anything. It just clarified that cable broadband providers such as Time Warner don't automatically count as common carriers.
What contracts are you specifically referring to?
Contracts to provide a given level of service at a given price? Although we poor home users get what TW will toss us, the terms of which they can unilaterally change on a whim - "Real" internet connections come with terms including price, a guaranteed level of bandwidth, maximum downtime, conditions under which either party can terminate the agreement, etc. Google doesn't just "trust" that their ISP will give them a good deal and won't suddenly disconnect them with no warning. They have contracts in place that define every aspect of service, down to details most of us wouldn't even think about.
Just curious. How many high-speed low-latency connectivity providers can you choose from where you live? More than two?
Cheap home broadband, only three choices (possibly four, if the ISP about a mile away offers point-to-point wireless links, but I've never looked into that).
And no, I don't live in big city... Not the middle of nowhere, either, but the suburbs of a fairly small city (~30k people).
But I see your point. Keep in mind, however, that cellular carriers already have the ability to offer decent internet connections (not quite broadband quality, and certainly not cheap, but a hell of a lot faster than dialup). Within a few years I fully expect them to make a move to try to eradicate the dialup ISP market (would I drop down to a 768k connection for $20/mo on top of my normal cell bill, if it didn't count against my minutes? Hell yeah!)
Add in the likelyhood of wide-area broadband wireless technologies such as 802.16/802.20 maturing in the next few years, and we could realistically see "broadband" enter the same realm of consumer-benefitting ISP competition as the glory-days of the dialip ISP back in the late-80's/early-90's. $9.99/mo unlimited at up to 10Mbit? It'll happen, eventually.
So if AT&T (or any other provider) plans to abuse its current position as having near-monopoly control within given regions (usually half of the phone/cable duopoly), they'd better do it soon, because unhappy customers jump ship the first chance they get.
I'm talking about corporate sponsored refusal to carry types of traffic.
Then they would lose their "common carrier" status, a fate VERY few of the big boys would willingly risk.
What would happen if a carrier started using Class-Based Queueing techniques just across their sections?
Then they would either breach their contracts with those on either side of their chunk of network, or they would voluntarily transmit less data over time, thereby making less money for that traffic.
If you sell cinnamon buns for $1 and someone comes along and offers you $10 per cinnamon bun, unless they buy all your cinnamon buns, only a fool would stop selling the remainder at $1 each. And if you have more demand than capacity, again, only a fool would turn down potential $1 sales by refusing to expand his production capacity.
Should content providers like Google, or subscribers like us, pay for the bandwidth consumed?
Both of us already pay for our connection. I pay $45+tax+fees+basic_cable per month for a decently fat pipe coming into my house. Google pays something I don't even want to imagine for the bandwidth it consumes - and that includes the bandwidth for which I also paid to connect to Google.
But now the telecoms have said they want even more??? Greedy bastards we should do away with, for certain. But do we need to worry about non-net-neutrality?
Everyone talks about "imagine carrier-X favoring MSN over Google"... But Google already pays for a guaranteed bandwidth. My connection at work pays for a guaranteed bandwidth. Although I currently pay for peak bandwidth rather than guaranteed on my home connection, watch how fast consumers drop ISPs that throttle them for reasons unrelated to congestion. "But I can stream HD video from MSN? Great, fuck you too, I don't use MSN, cancel my account!"
So this leaves AT&T with three options - breach of contract with their "supply-side" customers, or loss of constomers on the "consumer-side". Wait, I said "three", didn't I? Yep - They have one other choice. They already need to provide a certain level of service to Google and to Joe Sixpack. But they have the option of making MSN faster than the competition. Whether they do that as anticompetitive price-cuts for higher bandwidth or as network infrastructure upgrades, both would tend to drive prices down and quality up. End result, they lose their own bone barking at the dog in the stream.
Use a simple application to record the sound output of your PC sound card. Click "record" just before playback starts and click "stop" when the song ends.
WOW does that take waaaay too much effort! And after all that, you still need to fix the ends of the file and then properly tag them. And even then, you still have a 128Kbps stream serially transcoded, resulting in artifacts even my half-deaf grandmother could pick out.
Streamripping takes far less effort. Tune WinAmp to a streamed station playing the genre you want, start Streamripper, and go to work/school/bed. Eight hours later, you'll have practically the entirety of that station's high-rotation playlist, properly tagged and at a quality of up to VBR384Kbps. (I have yet to find a stream doing better quality than that, and even as something of a sound-quality-elitist, I have to admit that comes as close to CD quality as I can tell in any listening environment I can afford).
Or better yet - Just borrow the CD from a friend and rip it yourself.
Or best of all, BUY THE CD (preferably directly from the artist)! I have no qualms about downloading to check out a band, but if I like them, why wouldn't I want to give something back?
Why do so many people have this fetish for giving all the money from music recording sales to the musicians? In most cases, the performer did the least work of anybody involved in the making of the record.
"Work", yes. Most bands even enjoy what they do.
But the artist has something that the rest of the food chain does not. The artist - not the engineers, not the studio, not the marketing guys, not the lawyers - actually create what we want. The rest of them might help get that to me, but you could substitute any of a million drop-in replacements for any step of the process except the artist.
Now, no doubt someone will respond about how many of Britney's songs Britney had any input beyond singing, or how much modern music sucks and calling the band "talent" stretches credibility. But underlying idea remains the same. The people who hear music in their heads and need to get it out for the rest of us to enjoy, THEY very much "deserve" the lion's share of the sales.
I'm sorry, I didn't realise you lived in such a technologically backward country.
I meant that as hyperbole (thus the "dare I say"). Though an amazing number of companies do still run NT4.
Everyone here has XP on the desktop, and I think any Win servers are 2003.
Okay, I admin a similar network (though probably smaller than yours, from the sounds of it). But tell me - What has that gained us since... Well, NT4/98 had its problems (with AD in particular), but how about 2000/2000server? Don't get me wrong, I consider 2003 Server proabably the single most stable OS Microsoft has made since DOS 3.3, but does it really add so much from 2000 Server that any company not on SA would even consider the cost of upgrading? And XP... Well, I personally consider XP a step back from Win2k, but if you shut off literally 2/3rds of the services it runs almost as well.
And so far, from the pre-release MSDN versions, Vista looks like more of the same. Yeah, a few marginal improvements, a LOT of new resource-sucking crap that we'll want to turn off for business machines (Thank you, nLite!!!). But does it have anything that makes me say "Hey, cool, I'll upgrade just for that"? Nope. The one feature it originally had, Avalon (aka vector graphics allowing far better high-DPI scaling), they cut. Good one, Billy G!
if they can't actually ship a product (even at the already delayed date) they deserve the mass defections that hopefully will be coming.
"Mass defections"?
People (not talking about Geeks, here) upgrade their OS when they upgrade their PC. Not before, and not after.
They don't buy a Mac because Vista takes too long to come out. They don't install Linux because Vista takes too long to come out. They don't install "make XP look like Vista" themes because Vista takes too long to come out.
They run what they buy. When it crashes, or spyware makes it unuseable... Do they reinstall XP? Hell No! They buy a new PC.
If their new PC comes with XP, they will run XP. If their new PC comes with Vista, they will run Vista. Their new PC won't run anything else, because Walmart doesn't sell PCs loaded with anything else in-store (Linspire boxes via their web store matter about as much as Macs do).
It doesn't take much more analysis than that, sadly. You want to know why Microsoft won't sweat this delay? Because it won't affect either their sales or their market penetration by even 1%.
And as for the much-discussed "business" buyers - Working in a job where I would play a very significant role in the decision to "Switch", I can say that Microsoft has nothing to worry about (except that almost no one wants to upgrade to Vista, much less to an entirely different OS). If Vista doesn't ship until 2094, very little would make me happier. Vista will break working programs in exchange for virtually no new features. Why on Earth would anyone want it? We'll eventually upgrade only because Microsoft will leave us no choice - Keep in mind that a lot of fortune-500s (dare I say "the majority of them"?) still run NT4 servers and Win98 desktops, and you'll get the general idea.
The brick idea, no. But the SD article made a nice suggestion - A rectangular chunk of nice thick sheet metal would fit well inside the return envelope, yet weigh far more than one ounce.
Also, one point on the SD article:I can tell you exactly why people ask for more junk mail...
They own wood stoves.
I mean, like 75% of slashdot readers have written patches for the kernel, right?
I see your point and agree with it, but you chose a bad example.
As big and scary as it looks, the kernel has some of the best-written code in the entire GNU/Linux codebase. Granted, it has some unbelievably nasty and unintelligible sections, but on the whole, any decent C coder can realistically make their own kernel patches.
And yes, I have done so myself - Back in the 2.2 days, on a Compaq server, the kernel couldn't see a second PCI bus (on which resided the RAID controller). Granted, my fix only hardcoded the enumeration I wanted; but with literally no familiarity with that part of the kernel, I managed to identify the problem, locate the offending code, and fix it in under half-an-hour (not counting recompile times).
Rule of thumb: Anything that allows you to "level up" is out to fuck you
Although I agree with you in principle...
In practice, the Mauve Dragons of the Middle Management Plateau still yield before my mighty +3 sword of Spam Slaying (and other "useless" security expertise); My dual-classed L2AA/L4BS Geek-of-Many-Colors Resume still slays the trolls of HR; My numerous cross-platform Certs of Knowledge tame the most pernicious NixClone Daemons; And my White Male +30 racial modifier grants me (fair to the other players or not) a bonus to all rolls for find-treasure/performance-evaluation (nullified by any zone of EEOC or an attractive Half-Succubus apprentice competing for limited treasure apportionment).
Now if only I could apply that to WoW, I'd study my ass off for a PhD in Auriculture with a minor in Ebaynics. But let's not get too silly, here!
They found cut and polished stone blocks.
You live in the US, correct?
We Americans have a somewhat different view of what it means to find traces of a civilization than do Europeans.
In the US, if you go out and dig in your backyard and find something man-made and more than a few hundred years old, you've most likely really found something of archaeological interest.
In Europe, you can set up a dig just about anywhere and find crumbled bricks, broken pottery, or some other traces of very very old human civilization.
Hell, for another recent news item to make my point, the UK Times Online reports that archaeologists just found an almost perfectly preserved Roman city in Spain - Which the Spanish felt so impressed by, they promptly turned it into a parking lot.
And it's perfectly reasonable to assume that his wild-assed guess of 12,000 B.C.E. is totally wrong, while he's 100% correct about the pyramid's existance.
I agree that ad hominem doesn't disprove the existance of a pyramid in Bosnia. But when the town loony raves about aliens landing in his back yard, you don't call NASA to disprove him.
Always right on top of things, eh, editors?
First: The Bosnian "pyramid" (a roughly four-sided hill where they've found nothing but a mound of dirt so far) hit the news last year, in Early November IIRC.
Second, the fellow cho claims it a pyramid ranks right up there with Uri Gellar as far as credibility goes, according to Archaology last week.
So +5 for topical, but minus a million for reporting on entirely the wrong end of the issue. They didn't just discover it, they just debunked the discovery.
Just point it to an RBF such as Spamhaus. We use their SBL/XBL combo list, and spam dropped by easily 95%.
You don't need any additional software, it just plain works. And it stays up-to-date automagically (well, thanks to the hard work of the guys at Spamhaus that maintain it). You'll never need to touch it again unless your RBL's maintainer shuts down.
Sadly, as the biggest problem you'll have - Many manegerial types receive spam and consider it some sort of insider secret prize they've won (you know, like the stock-tip s[cp]ams?). No joke - You will get complaints if you manage to completely block all spam.
Wow, the slash-trolls have come out in force today!
Perhaps you would have done better to listen to that "quasi-interesting" topic, then apply the knowledge gained to reading the FP link. Because, strangely enough, it has everything to do with the topic at hand. From the linked article: Pretty much the frickin' definition of Maxwell's Demon!
It may have confused you that in this case, the "demon" has a higher temperature than the surrounding area - But Maxwell only propsed that the source and destination of the molecules have the same temperature, not the demon itself. Somehow I suspect that subtletly lost on you, however, and you had no such semi-legitimate objection in mind, preferring to just act like a complete git in general.
The Alexa toolbar's gotten Alexa a bad rap from privacy advocates, though in function it's effect on search results is similar to click stream data that Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask may or may not be using in their determinations of relevance.
While that may (or may not) hold true, the key difference there involves how much we trust the company getting the data.
Google has proven itself, time and again, to act in the best interests of its users, even going up against the DoJ to fight for our privacy rights. Yahoo and MSN don't quite have the same good track record, but they at least don't have a reputation as outright spyware.
But Alexa? C'mon, Amazon, give us a frickin' break here!
Wow, what an ignorant statement. The Voodoo line of cards didn't use OpenGL nor Direct3D [...] Now, there are very few problems unique to only one card manufacturer, and everybody is working through Direct3D. The olden days of video card compatability problems are all but gone.
Wow, what an ignorant statement.
Do you have any idea what a driver does? As someone who has made a living writing them, allow me enlighten you a tad...
OpenGL and Direct3D provide an Application Programming Interface for games and other graphically-intense programs to use to more easily access the features available on the hardware.
You still rest at the mercy of NVidia or ATI to write their driver to export the hardware features as that API. For the basics, they do so fairly well, and as a result, we do indeed enjoy a welcome relief from the hassle of hardware-specific configuration.
For the basics.
Now tell me - Why do you suppose the top of the troubleshooting list for high-end games includes "disable custom pixel and/or vertex shaders" (and with DX10, you can add Geometry Shading to that as well)?
Answer - Because those features still depend on the game knowing how to deal with each particular card to get it right. For example, The ATI X1000 skipped Vertex Texturing yet can call itself 'Vertex Shader 3.0 compliant" by the loophole of disallowing the use of any filtering on any texture format. Now, technically the correct DX9c sanity checks would notice that little quirk and the program would respond accordingly... But from the POV of a programmer trying to implement that API, it strikes me as similar to needing to ask the CPU if it has power, and somehow magically the answer comes back "no".
So I guess you didn't make it up to page 10. You know, the page titled "Bang Bang: Here Come Problems"? Where they show horrible mangled screenshots and make such comments as (Bolding mine): and:
But hey, kudos, your comment (and two others) did well enough to convince the mods to spank me.
Ass.