part of that long ramp-up is the simple fact that it took time for people to catch on to the idea of a portable MP3 player - from any manufacturer. Zune doesn't have that particular problem; the market is well-established.
i listen to my iPod at work, through Apple's basic ear-buds at, literally, the lowest volume setting. and for many songs, this is too loud - the White Stripes, for example, compress their songs and pump them up to a much higher volume than many other bands. i wish there were four or five lower volume settings below what is the current lowest.
yet, on a plane, there is no volume setting that works with the basic ear buds - everything distorts before i can hear anything over the plane's engines. yes, i should buy better earphones, for that situation.
>Apparently we are not allowed to know our own position on this issue.
we're not allowed to know many things our government does in our name. that's the way it should be. the Founding Fathers certainly knew this, otherwise they wouldn't have put that "... thusly we establish a government to rule the people, as only it sees fit..." bit in the Constitution.
i have pretty sensitive cat allergies (i can usually tell if someone has a cat by sitting next to them). but i'm symptom-free with my cat (unless she scratches me, then my skin reacts a little). i also take Zyrtek for allerigies in general and Sigulair + Advair for ashtma in general, so maybe i'm not a good clinical study.
it's not just dandruff (dander) and saliva, per se; it's a few specific proteins in the saliva and dander that cause the problem. if a breed is missing (or has a modified version of) those proteins, they'll be less likely to cause allergic reactions.
i don't, didn't and don't know why you think i would.
my cat is not huge, and she hasn't grown any in 6 months. i'm sure there are truly huge Siberians, as they are known for their size. but there are also many smaller individuals who are not huge, and painting the whole breed as some kind of dog-like mini-tiger is a bit unfair - they're not all like that.
>Basically you can't extrapolate your experience to _everyone_
well then it's a damned good thing i didn't try to !
gentle reminder - when you read something that doesn't include the words "you", or "every", or the phrase "as is typical", and where every sentence contains the word "i" and/or "my", you can be pretty sure it's a statement of personal experience and not an attempt to extrapolate the writer's experience to everyone.
she's only 8 pounds, not huge. her parents were a bit bigger, though.
i have some pretty sensitive (not severe, just very easily activated) cat allergies, but I haven't have any symptoms with our cat. before we got her, as a test, we went to the breeder's house and i stayed in the 'cat room', with five aduts and ten kittens, for an hour - just to make sure i was symptom-free. no problem at all.
i'm also taking Zyrtek, but that's not supposed to be all that great against pet allergies.
>How do you explain to a ten-year-old that the BASIC exercise from the math book is >essentially identical to the internal processes of a video game, a web server, or >the embedded micro-processor that drives your microwave oven?
the same way you would've done it back in 1982: "when you write a program, you tell the computer what to do. these are simple programs; games are complex programs. but they are both programs."
believe it or not, professional games back then were amazing and awe-inspiring to people like me who were just learning how to make a computer do *anything*. while i was puzzling out BASIC's GOSUB and C64 assembly, i was also playing stuff like Zork, Zaxxon and Ultima III. yes, those games seem primitive today, but they were far beyond what your typical programmer could accomplish with BASIC. i knew they were programs, and that they were probably beyond my skill to create at the time (even now, too). it didn't take long to figure out that BASIC gave me control of the computer, and that making a game like Jumpman was just like writing any other program, but bigger, better planned, and probably in a langauge like Assembly. but that didn't stop me, or confuse me, it made me want to learn more.
i think the loss of easily-accessible and very simple programming tools is a tragedy. yes, you can install Python or whatever (just like i could've installed C on my C64). but that's still too big, IMO. computers should come with *simple* scripting languages built-in (no, bash, ksh, etc. are not simple). the goal should be to teach people that programming gives you control of the computer - even if it's an illusion because it's really an interpreted language running in a sandbox in a user process on a multi-process computer. that's the big leap - don't give them Python because it's "more powerful than BASIC" - power isn't the problem - an easy way to get comfortable with basic programming concepts (sequential execution, variables, input, output, etc) is more important than power.
i let Retrospect do automated incremental backups twice a week, to a NAS RAID 5 - this is protection against accidentally deleting files, or disk failure in our PCs. the NAS is in the same room as the PCs, so it doesn't help against fire or theft, obviously.
monthly, i do a full backup to DVDs with Nero. then i take those DVDs to work with me and stick them in my desk. if i had the time, i'd do this weekly. but it takes hours and i have to be there to swap DVDs. maybe i should do the full back up to an external HD...
>The GPL exists to protect rights; DRM exists to take them away. Duh.
you're kidding, right?
DRM, whatever its form, exists to protect the rights of publishers. remember, the same laws that give people fair use rights also give publishers the right to profit from their creations. but people have proven conclusively that they won't honor copyright laws when it comes to music and movies, directly impinging on publishers' rights. and so the media companies keep racheting-up their technological schemes, trying to protect their publishing rights. yes, their schemes sometimes (often) encroach on our rights in the process. but, that doesn't mean that's the *intent* of DRM.
and if people treated source code the way they treated music, the GPL (which also, yes, protects publishers' rights) would be considered as quaint as the 'copyrighted' flag in MP3s - we'd all look at it and chuckle, as we copied the source for our own GPL-violating uses.
My wife used to have a jewelry business, and I did all the product photography for her.
At first I tried using film; but the turnaround time, even with 1-hour developing is a drag, because it's tough to get everything Just Right, when you're dealing with highly-reflective and very small objects. So, we discovered that it's much easier to just drop the stuff onto a flatbed scanner and do a hi-res scan. The old HP scanner I had at the time had a really deep depth-of-field and a nice wide, diffused light source, so even non-flat pieces came out very nice. And, you could stick colored paper or cloth on top of the product for fun backgrounds - propped-up a bit if you needed to get the background out of focus.
Then that scanner died and I couldn't find another scanner that would duplicate the DOF and diffused light source. So I bought a digital camera.
But, boring story short: if you can find a scanner with the right DOF, you can do some really great macro stuff with it. 4000dpi at 1:1 shows a surprising amout of fine detail.
tons and tons of programs use metafiles for their graphics. MFs are great for graphics that need to scale to arbitrary sizes, because they are drawing commands, not static pixels (though they can contain bitmaps, too).
but, 99% of these programs use Windows to do the rendering because writing your own MF renderer would be a gigantic PITA (essentially, you'd duplicate all of the Window GDI system), and Windows' MF renderer is trivially easy to use.
all of the Office tools (and many others) can handle MFs, and they all ship with a clip art gallery full of MFs.
My two year old Dimension 4600 came with a shiny mouse pad, too. And, it's not just shiny, it's shiny and textured. My optical mouse absolutely hates that thing - the light bouncing off at different angles makes the pointer jump around like mad.
Luckily, the mouse works just fine on my bare desk.
i used to feel the same way. and i can hear the difference if i listen very closely to the compressed copies of songs i've known forever from uncompressed recordings. but for new music, stuff that i've never heard outside of an MP3, i don't notice many artifacts.
even more importantly, 99% of the time i'm listening to music i'm either in the car or at work. if i'm in the car, there's a good chance the top is down and there's a 50mph wind competing for all those delicate cymbal sounds. and if i'm at work, i'm listening through headphones and am paying attention to work, not the music.
in other words: ITMF is definitely good enough for the places i listen to it.
now if someone could find a way to run two MP3s end-to-end so as to not chop up songs that the artist intended to fade into one another...
We just discovered (last Friday, at 4:00pm of course) that "SpySweeper" is labelling one of our components (a general-purpose image processing library) as spyware. After a little digging, it turns out that a program called TrueActive Activity Monitor installs a file with the same name as our component.
But, we can't tell if it actually *is* our component or if they just have a file with the same name (not very likely) - because our anti-virus and anti-spyware apps freak out when we open the TrueActive installer to see what their version of the file actually is. Either way, SpySweeper says our component is an "activity monitor" and this is freaking out both our customers and our customers' customers.
We're talking with the people who write SpySweeper, to get this fixed, and they've been helpful so far. So hopefully, this will be resolved soon.
(yes, this was posted on the 180-Solution article, too. i think it belongs here, more. apologies)
We just discovered (last Friday, at 4:00pm of course) that "SpySweeper" is labelling one of our components (a general-purpose image processing library) as spyware. After a little digging, it turns out that a program called TrueActive Activity Monitor installs a file with the same name as our component.
But, we can't tell if it actually *is* our component or if they just have a file with the same name (not very likely) - because our anti-virus and anti-spyware apps freak out when we open the TrueActive installer to see what their version of the file actually is. Either way, SpySweeper says our component is an "activity monitor" and this is freaking out both our customers and our customers' customers.
We're talking with the people who write SpySweeper, to get this fixed, and they've been helpful so far. So hopefully, this will be resolved soon.
there are a bunch of black plastic rectangles, a couple of fans, some ribbon cable, a hard drive and a few stray capacitors all soldered to a green circuit board.
All peoples should be exceedingly surprised to learn that Einsteins' concept of TIME, which he assigned as the 4th Dimension, and the speed of light are one and the same. It means by altering either one then the other one must remain unchanged; be declared a constant. Einstein could have made TIME the constant and the speed of light alterable. I will demonstrate this by using a high speeding spacecraft in which the speed of light within the spacecraft has halved to 150,000 k.p.sec. then the TIME, it is relative to, has to be made Stationary Time the constant and the speed of light alterable. We could use our, not so quite, stationary TIME on Earth. Now I will do it the other way by making TIME in the spacecraft as the variable and halving it, but the speed of light MUST become the constant and be related as 300,000 k.p.sec., which is the common everyday way it is stated, explained, understood and taught. What I have now done is to prove and explain more easily that I had and have proven the Speed of light is ALTERABLE. It is under my non-exclusive copyright.
A decade or more ago I stated Black Holes should be stationary. I also stated the speed of light within Black Holes has slowed and the previous paragraphs' data proves I had and have proven my statement was true and correct. With Black Holes being stationary then the speed of light within them is relative to Stationary Time making the speed of light slower due to the Black Holes massive mass and the resulting massive gravity. The speeding spacecrafts' mass increases with its' speed increasing. So an increased mass causes an increase in gravity and a slower TIME or rather a slower speed of light.
A major problem has been that the World Science Establishments, Educational and Political Systems and the colluding Media Establishments wrongly believing that the speed of light is unalterable. All this would be of great surprise to the World Science Establishments and an enormous surprise for the public to know of their surprise due to Science, Scientists and Physicists Internationally not understanding Relativity. They all have not understood Einsteins' Relativity since it's release in 1905. Maybe Spacetime's 4th Dimension being defective and deficient can take some of the blame, but only part of the blame for it is their weak minds and poor reasoning powers and arrogance that is at fault. I again have demonstrated and proven my Intellectual and Scientific superiority and again I am being denied credit, recognition, and public awareness so depriving me of financial remuneration which hinders and stops me from getting my major Fusion and Space projects underway in Australia with International involvement. The Media deceives and confuses the Public of the credibility of my achievements with its' silence.
Slashdot Mirror
storage might be less of an issue, but streaming .WAV files would suck suck suck
i've used server-side JScript on nearly every web project i've been on. it's one of the nicer capabilities of IIS, from a developer's perspective.
5) The balls this company has to push the industry .net as a "Business Solution"...
.Net ?
Have you ever written a web app with
part of that long ramp-up is the simple fact that it took time for people to catch on to the idea of a portable MP3 player - from any manufacturer. Zune doesn't have that particular problem; the market is well-established.
i listen to my iPod at work, through Apple's basic ear-buds at, literally, the lowest volume setting. and for many songs, this is too loud - the White Stripes, for example, compress their songs and pump them up to a much higher volume than many other bands. i wish there were four or five lower volume settings below what is the current lowest.
yet, on a plane, there is no volume setting that works with the basic ear buds - everything distorts before i can hear anything over the plane's engines. yes, i should buy better earphones, for that situation.
life is hard
>Apparently we are not allowed to know our own position on this issue.
we're not allowed to know many things our government does in our name. that's the way it should be. the Founding Fathers certainly knew this, otherwise they wouldn't have put that "... thusly we establish a government to rule the people, as only it sees fit..." bit in the Constitution.
i have one.
i have pretty sensitive cat allergies (i can usually tell if someone has a cat by sitting next to them). but i'm symptom-free with my cat (unless she scratches me, then my skin reacts a little). i also take Zyrtek for allerigies in general and Sigulair + Advair for ashtma in general, so maybe i'm not a good clinical study.
expensive, yes - because they're pure-bred.
it's not just dandruff (dander) and saliva, per se; it's a few specific proteins in the saliva and dander that cause the problem. if a breed is missing (or has a modified version of) those proteins, they'll be less likely to cause allergic reactions.
>But, if you want to dispute my calling them huge
i don't, didn't and don't know why you think i would.
my cat is not huge, and she hasn't grown any in 6 months. i'm sure there are truly huge Siberians, as they are known for their size. but there are also many smaller individuals who are not huge, and painting the whole breed as some kind of dog-like mini-tiger is a bit unfair - they're not all like that.
>Basically you can't extrapolate your experience to _everyone_
well then it's a damned good thing i didn't try to !
gentle reminder - when you read something that doesn't include the words "you", or "every", or the phrase "as is typical", and where every sentence contains the word "i" and/or "my", you can be pretty sure it's a statement of personal experience and not an attempt to extrapolate the writer's experience to everyone.
she's only 8 pounds, not huge. her parents were a bit bigger, though.
i have some pretty sensitive (not severe, just very easily activated) cat allergies, but I haven't have any symptoms with our cat. before we got her, as a test, we went to the breeder's house and i stayed in the 'cat room', with five aduts and ten kittens, for an hour - just to make sure i was symptom-free. no problem at all.
i'm also taking Zyrtek, but that's not supposed to be all that great against pet allergies.
>How do you explain to a ten-year-old that the BASIC exercise from the math book is
>essentially identical to the internal processes of a video game, a web server, or
>the embedded micro-processor that drives your microwave oven?
the same way you would've done it back in 1982: "when you write a program, you tell the computer what to do. these are simple programs; games are complex programs. but they are both programs."
believe it or not, professional games back then were amazing and awe-inspiring to people like me who were just learning how to make a computer do *anything*. while i was puzzling out BASIC's GOSUB and C64 assembly, i was also playing stuff like Zork, Zaxxon and Ultima III. yes, those games seem primitive today, but they were far beyond what your typical programmer could accomplish with BASIC. i knew they were programs, and that they were probably beyond my skill to create at the time (even now, too). it didn't take long to figure out that BASIC gave me control of the computer, and that making a game like Jumpman was just like writing any other program, but bigger, better planned, and probably in a langauge like Assembly. but that didn't stop me, or confuse me, it made me want to learn more.
i think the loss of easily-accessible and very simple programming tools is a tragedy. yes, you can install Python or whatever (just like i could've installed C on my C64). but that's still too big, IMO. computers should come with *simple* scripting languages built-in (no, bash, ksh, etc. are not simple). the goal should be to teach people that programming gives you control of the computer - even if it's an illusion because it's really an interpreted language running in a sandbox in a user process on a multi-process computer. that's the big leap - don't give them Python because it's "more powerful than BASIC" - power isn't the problem - an easy way to get comfortable with basic programming concepts (sequential execution, variables, input, output, etc) is more important than power.
i let Retrospect do automated incremental backups twice a week, to a NAS RAID 5 - this is protection against accidentally deleting files, or disk failure in our PCs. the NAS is in the same room as the PCs, so it doesn't help against fire or theft, obviously.
monthly, i do a full backup to DVDs with Nero. then i take those DVDs to work with me and stick them in my desk. if i had the time, i'd do this weekly. but it takes hours and i have to be there to swap DVDs. maybe i should do the full back up to an external HD...
>The GPL exists to protect rights; DRM exists to take them away. Duh.
you're kidding, right?
DRM, whatever its form, exists to protect the rights of publishers. remember, the same laws that give people fair use rights also give publishers the right to profit from their creations. but people have proven conclusively that they won't honor copyright laws when it comes to music and movies, directly impinging on publishers' rights. and so the media companies keep racheting-up their technological schemes, trying to protect their publishing rights. yes, their schemes sometimes (often) encroach on our rights in the process. but, that doesn't mean that's the *intent* of DRM.
and if people treated source code the way they treated music, the GPL (which also, yes, protects publishers' rights) would be considered as quaint as the 'copyrighted' flag in MP3s - we'd all look at it and chuckle, as we copied the source for our own GPL-violating uses.
today is my first day looking at /. after probably two years away.
it's nice to see the jokes haven't changed any.
My wife used to have a jewelry business, and I did all the product photography for her.
At first I tried using film; but the turnaround time, even with 1-hour developing is a drag, because it's tough to get everything Just Right, when you're dealing with highly-reflective and very small objects. So, we discovered that it's much easier to just drop the stuff onto a flatbed scanner and do a hi-res scan. The old HP scanner I had at the time had a really deep depth-of-field and a nice wide, diffused light source, so even non-flat pieces came out very nice. And, you could stick colored paper or cloth on top of the product for fun backgrounds - propped-up a bit if you needed to get the background out of focus.
Then that scanner died and I couldn't find another scanner that would duplicate the DOF and diffused light source. So I bought a digital camera.
But, boring story short: if you can find a scanner with the right DOF, you can do some really great macro stuff with it. 4000dpi at 1:1 shows a surprising amout of fine detail.
tons and tons of programs use metafiles for their graphics. MFs are great for graphics that need to scale to arbitrary sizes, because they are drawing commands, not static pixels (though they can contain bitmaps, too).
but, 99% of these programs use Windows to do the rendering because writing your own MF renderer would be a gigantic PITA (essentially, you'd duplicate all of the Window GDI system), and Windows' MF renderer is trivially easy to use.
all of the Office tools (and many others) can handle MFs, and they all ship with a clip art gallery full of MFs.
they left the SetAbortProc functionality in there for debugging purposes, but disabled it for developers who don't know about the sneaky backdoor.
My two year old Dimension 4600 came with a shiny mouse pad, too. And, it's not just shiny, it's shiny and textured. My optical mouse absolutely hates that thing - the light bouncing off at different angles makes the pointer jump around like mad.
Luckily, the mouse works just fine on my bare desk.
i used to feel the same way. and i can hear the difference if i listen very closely to the compressed copies of songs i've known forever from uncompressed recordings. but for new music, stuff that i've never heard outside of an MP3, i don't notice many artifacts.
even more importantly, 99% of the time i'm listening to music i'm either in the car or at work. if i'm in the car, there's a good chance the top is down and there's a 50mph wind competing for all those delicate cymbal sounds. and if i'm at work, i'm listening through headphones and am paying attention to work, not the music.
in other words: ITMF is definitely good enough for the places i listen to it.
now if someone could find a way to run two MP3s end-to-end so as to not chop up songs that the artist intended to fade into one another...
We just discovered (last Friday, at 4:00pm of course) that "SpySweeper" is labelling one of our components (a general-purpose image processing library) as spyware. After a little digging, it turns out that a program called TrueActive Activity Monitor installs a file with the same name as our component.
But, we can't tell if it actually *is* our component or if they just have a file with the same name (not very likely) - because our anti-virus and anti-spyware apps freak out when we open the TrueActive installer to see what their version of the file actually is. Either way, SpySweeper says our component is an "activity monitor" and this is freaking out both our customers and our customers' customers.
We're talking with the people who write SpySweeper, to get this fixed, and they've been helpful so far. So hopefully, this will be resolved soon.
(yes, this was posted on the 180-Solution article, too. i think it belongs here, more. apologies)
We just discovered (last Friday, at 4:00pm of course) that "SpySweeper" is labelling one of our components (a general-purpose image processing library) as spyware. After a little digging, it turns out that a program called TrueActive Activity Monitor installs a file with the same name as our component.
But, we can't tell if it actually *is* our component or if they just have a file with the same name (not very likely) - because our anti-virus and anti-spyware apps freak out when we open the TrueActive installer to see what their version of the file actually is. Either way, SpySweeper says our component is an "activity monitor" and this is freaking out both our customers and our customers' customers.
We're talking with the people who write SpySweeper, to get this fixed, and they've been helpful so far. So hopefully, this will be resolved soon.
there are a bunch of black plastic rectangles, a couple of fans, some ribbon cable, a hard drive and a few stray capacitors all soldered to a green circuit board.
laptops are fun, but you have to be alive to use one.
i'm thinking that it'd be a better use of technology to find a way to eradicate malaria, which kills 200 people an hour, worldwide.
10 Build Road
20 Destroy Road
30 Goto 10
http://home.pacific.net.au/~t_rout/Gravity%20waves .htm
All peoples should be exceedingly surprised to learn that Einsteins' concept of TIME, which he assigned as the 4th Dimension, and the speed of light are one and the same. It means by altering either one then the other one must remain unchanged; be declared a constant. Einstein could have made TIME the constant and the speed of light alterable. I will demonstrate this by using a high speeding spacecraft in which the speed of light within the spacecraft has halved to 150,000 k.p.sec. then the TIME, it is relative to, has to be made Stationary Time the constant and the speed of light alterable. We could use our, not so quite, stationary TIME on Earth. Now I will do it the other way by making TIME in the spacecraft as the variable and halving it, but the speed of light MUST become the constant and be related as 300,000 k.p.sec., which is the common everyday way it is stated, explained, understood and taught. What I have now done is to prove and explain more easily that I had and have proven the Speed of light is ALTERABLE. It is under my non-exclusive copyright.
A decade or more ago I stated Black Holes should be stationary. I also stated the speed of light within Black Holes has slowed and the previous paragraphs' data proves I had and have proven my statement was true and correct. With Black Holes being stationary then the speed of light within them is relative to Stationary Time making the speed of light slower due to the Black Holes massive mass and the resulting massive gravity. The speeding spacecrafts' mass increases with its' speed increasing. So an increased mass causes an increase in gravity and a slower TIME or rather a slower speed of light.
A major problem has been that the World Science Establishments, Educational and Political Systems and the colluding Media Establishments wrongly believing that the speed of light is unalterable. All this would be of great surprise to the World Science Establishments and an enormous surprise for the public to know of their surprise due to Science, Scientists and Physicists Internationally not understanding Relativity. They all have not understood Einsteins' Relativity since it's release in 1905. Maybe Spacetime's 4th Dimension being defective and deficient can take some of the blame, but only part of the blame for it is their weak minds and poor reasoning powers and arrogance that is at fault. I again have demonstrated and proven my Intellectual and Scientific superiority and again I am being denied credit, recognition, and public awareness so depriving me of financial remuneration which hinders and stops me from getting my major Fusion and Space projects underway in Australia with International involvement. The Media deceives and confuses the Public of the credibility of my achievements with its' silence.