...when executives use euphemisms like "right-sizing." (I have never heard of a company that "right-sized" by hiring more employees). Even "layoff" is a euphemism because a "layoff" means a temporary suspension. "We'll have to let you go" means that you want to leave and they are reluctantly but graciously acceding to your wishes.
They may be trying to make themselves feel more comfortable by pretending they aren't doing something hurtful to their employees.
As for how it makes employees feel, I wish I could find the origin of a wonderful quotation... but someone, possibly W. Somerset Maugham, once said "Don't hand me a turd and tell me it's a profiterole" (creampuff).
The use of enhanced images, illustrations, artists' conceptions, and diagrams in science education cuts both ways.
Even when I was growing up (in the 1950s) my first impressions of astronomy were formed by illustrations of the solar system--shown from a point of view outside the system, with the orbits displayed as brightly colored, ellipses, and the planets on a scale a thousand times larger than the scale of the orbits.
Something like this helps the child understand what it is that astronomers discovered, and what the spatial relationships actually are. That's good. On the other hand, it leaves them completely unprepared to see Jupiter or Venus out in the backyard on a clear summer night.
And it leaves them unable to appreciate the discovery, the sheer intellectual achievement of someone like Kepler. He figured that out? He didn't have any picture of ellipses? Just from measurements of positions of bright little dots of light that look like they're pinholes in a dome a few hundred feet away? Doing three dimensional trig with nothing but pencil and paper?
My first impressions of Halley's Comet were highly magnified photographic time exposures made by big observatories. The tail, viewed with my eye on the printed page, was bright and probably subtended thirty degrees of visual arc.
I don't think there's any layperson in the world who hasn't been disappointed and upset by their first view of a real comet in the real sky. It should be a wonder, a miracle, a creepy sort of thing--your left brain knows it isn't really a portent, but your right brain is sure it is. Instead, it's like a Peggy Lee refrain: "Is that all there is to a comet?"
What a thrill it ought to be to recognize the Andromeda Nebula with the naked eye. But not if you were expecting a sort of Fourth of July fireworks Catherine wheel instead of a faint smudge.
Understanding the scientific results is worthwhile, but it is almost more important to understand the bedrock experiential reality, and the discovery process.
I know that Jupiter has moons because one night I saw four little stars all in a line right next to it, and next night I saw them again but they'd moved. There is something terribly important in the direct experience, the personal verification. Good buddies, Galileo and me. I've seen something in the sky that wasn't moving around the earth, and so I know Galileo was right.
Last year I finally got around to buying the right kind of telescope for what I wanted to do, a wide aperture low-power "richest field" telescope. With it, I've seen the Andromeda Nebula for myself better than I've ever seen it before.
Boom! No guessing, no squinting, no waiting for a perfectly dark night, THERE IT IS. I'll have to take someone's word for its being a spiral. But I've seen it, me, with my own eyeball. Big faint oval, small bright center. No time exposures, no false color, no computer processed CCD imagery.
It's there, it's really there, I've seen it with my own eyes, not in a planetarium, not in a book, and the light from that sucker had to leave two and a half million years ago to get here just for me to see it. Wow.
"Ultimately it means you'll be able to find a recipe online, have the ingredient list and preparation instructions sent to your mobile device, and your smart oven will be automatically configured with the correct settings."
Boy, that sounds like sounding straight out of the 1950s... a Carousel of Progress from a World's Fair or something... Elektro the Robot, vocoders, and AT&T picturephones...
All it needs to complete the picture is a white woman in an apron, a white man smoking a pipe, and two smiling white children.
I suppose the article is vaguely interesting in pointing out how tasks simple for a human are complex for a robot, but if the point is doing laundry... file it under "ornithopters" (flying machines with flapping wings), pre-Singer sewing machines that tried to mimic the way a human being sews, and so forth.
If we really wanted robots to do laundry, the house, washing machine, and robots would coevolve in all sorts of ways--starting with variations on the laundry chute to deliver the clothing to a single station where they wouldn't need to be sorted out from other clutters. (A simple chute? A conveyor belt? A drone?) Washer doors would be modified to be robot-friendly, and so forth and so on.
When marketers wanted reel-to-reel tape technology to be more automated, engineers didn't built clever gadgets to sense and catch the free end of a piece of tape, they designed tape cassettes.
In the 1990s I remember seeing "Pronto" machines in a factory carrying parts and assemblies from place to place. They didn't need video and pattern recognition, they just followed a wire embedded in the concrete floor that emitted an RF signal.
It's just system thinking. Automating a process by dropping a robot into the middle of it without changing the rest of the process is a silly constraint to put on a solution. A robot clever enough to climb stairs and operate any kind of existing washer is going to cost a lot more than a dumb robot that operates a washer designed to be operated by a robot.
...wasn't it? I've sort of lost track, but I think Microsoft has made precisely this claim for every browser. Yes, here we go:
" That's your vision for IE7, to definitely support Web standards?
Chris: Absolutely, in IE7 we really are trying to support Web standards. Even at the expense of more backwards compatibility..."
Then much the same thing was said of IE8,
and then we read that "I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised to read this post on el reg that highlights that IE9 is currently the most standards compliant beta browser on the block. Iâ(TM)m really proud of the work the IE9 team is doing to nail the the things that were previously levelled at Internet Explorer for being a 'bad browser.'"
It's the same every time. They acknowledge that the previous browser wasn't standards-compliant after all, and promise the one they are now working on is.
Meeting the audience's expectation, and conforming to the cultural standards of drama at the time, whatever it is, always trumps literal truth.
I remember watching a dumb old black-and-white movie with my brother when I was a kid. I was the one who "knew about science." Someone was using a metal detector with a search coil, and it was dramatically "right" for them to find something. My brother says "Tick. Tick. Tick. Tickticktickticktick." I say, "Oh, no. That's a Geiger counter. This is a metal detector, and it does "Wheeeee-oooh, because the metal changes the resonant frequency of the coil and the oscillator--"
--and the metal detector goes "Tick. Tick. Tick. Tickticktickticktick."
If the applicant is seriously underqualified and likely to fail, they should say so, give the specific reasons, and advise them not to enter the program.
Nevertheless, if they've actually sent out an acceptance--if it wasn't a forgery--they should honor the acceptance.
I was born slightly too late to buy a "spinthariscope," a toy consisting of a zinc sulfide screen, a loupe-like magnifying glass, and a radiation source--quite possibly radium.
So, I made my own. We had a microscope, I had a Westclox Baby Ben with a luminous dial, I used a penknife to chip off a bit of the luminous paint, put it under the microscope, and turned out the light. Instead of a glowing dial, I could now see, clearly, individual flashes of lights.
I don't know where the Gilbert kit fits on the scale of danger, but I also had a geiger counter kit, and the instruction booklet had directions for how to keep records of background radiation and detect fallout from bomb tests. On the whole, I think we were subjected to more danger from bomb tests than from science kits.
A shame. I was just starting to think it was making a modest return to its roots.
When I visited one a few months ago, they had quite a decent little display of Makershed Arduino kits and books about the Arduino, and they had a kind of dense metal cabinet with shallow drawers filled with individual parts, a much larger selection than they used to have hanging on pegs in blister packs.
I needed a new soldering iron and I bought one there.
I think people forget just how quickly a snowstorm can get serious if people don't stay off the road. If the plows can't keep up, you are driving first through a light dusting, then an inch, then a couple of inches. Sooner or later cars start to skid. Or, you will have a chunk of interstate that uphill and ONE car isn't able to make it up the hill, stops, cars behind it stop, etc.
Maybe it's not "historic" but it's a big serious snowstorm.
The joke is for most of the song the typewriter is making convincingly realistic noises, but in a few places it makes sequences of sounds and rhythms that are impossible for a real typewriter. For example, a bridge passage:
Up until perhaps about the year 2000, almost everything electronic with a speaker that plugged into the wall, except for really good audiophile equipment, had a faint 60 Hz. hum audible during periods of silence in the program material. One easily learned to ignore it, but it was there. (It was very hard to avoid it in phonograph cartridges, for example).
The ubiquity of 60-Hz hum (or 60-cycle hum as it was called then) was the basis of a plot point in Theodore Sturgeon's psychoanalytic SF story, "The Other Man," for example.
The very characteristic rattle of a motion picture projector--most familiar from 16 mm projectors in classrooms or 8 mm projectors showing home movies, but also faintly audible in many movie theatres. Probably around 1900 to 1980 or so.
The whine of a reel-to-reel tape recorder rewinding, rising in pitch as the diameter of the remaining tape decrees, followed by the dramatic snapping noise as the end of the tape comes off the reel. 1945 to 1990 maybe.
"As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ahâ"a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension."--Sinclair Lewis, "Babbitt"
If you look at one of those Internet compilations of Photos you really need to look at to understand, it is very impressive just how confused you can be by chance juxtapositions of visual elements.
#18 is particularly interesting. It's not a precise juxtaposition. The shadow looks like the shadow of a flag; it's not shaped like the rug. You can understand intellectually what's happening in about five seconds. And yet it takes a real effort of will to perceive the rug is lying on the sand. Relax for an instant and it once again looks as if it is levitating.
Different technologies have different characteristics, and I guess one has to use one's personal weighting function. I had a pretty good system (AR turntable, top-of-the-line Shure cartridge, electrostatic earphones) and I love digital audio and honestly don't know how anyone can stand vinyl.
I used a dust bug, I used a DiscWasher, I treated my records very carefully, but there always came the dreaded moment when I would hear: "tick." And at that point, I'd always tense up, and only relax 1.8 seconds later if I didn't hear a second "tick." Three consecutive "ticks" 1.8 seconds apart would seriously interfere with my enjoyment of the sound. My success rate on removing them by cleaning was very low--more often then not, the cleaning attempt (even with the best D4 fluid etc.) would simply add a very delicate, light background crackle.
And I am not even talking about tape hiss, surface noise, warp wow, rumble, and a little trace of 60 Hz hum that I never could quite get rid of. And ugh, getting to the end of a symphony and having the big loud glorious coda come up in the inner groove (vinyl was pretty good at the outer edge, but no-kidding-obvious-problems in the slower-moving inner grooves).
And taking the occasional bad pressing back to the record store and arguing with the store clerk about exchanging it.
And changing the darn record every 20-30 minutes... and feeling guilty if I left it unattended and came back later to find it had been playing the end-groove for hours.
Even with a good tonearm and lightweight cartridge, vinyl does not sound as good on the tenth playing as it did on the first.
Digital audio may have its faults and if people enjoy the characteristics of vinyl, there can be no dispute about tastes. But to me the positives outweigh the negatives--by about a factor of ten.
I assume it's a loose reference to overlap between techies interested in open-source products.
In the very early days techies were among the earliest editors, and the content was heavily weighted toward software and computers. My personal introduction to Wikipedia occurred when I was Googling for information some technical details on ASCII--specifically, to confirm my suspicion that both DEC operating systems and CP/M ERRONEOUSLY had used CTRL-Z where CTRL-Y should have been used, confirming that CP/M got some of its ideas from DEC operating systems.
Anyway, by far the best article that came up in the search was Wikipedia's article on ASCII. It was the first time I'd seen Wikipedia, and of course I kept thinking it had something to do with Wiccans etc.
It seems as if there is some historical revisionism going on. My understanding is that Larry Sanger was a guiding light behind NuPedia, a web encyclopedia that was to be written by experts and vetted by authorities--and that after several years of work, only a few hundred articles were completed.
Wikipedia was started as a side-project and rapidly outpaced NuPedia. Sanger acknowledged its success but regretted Wikipedia's failure to value expertise, and proceeded to launch a new project, Citizendium, which has struggled and sputtered and currently survives with about 20,000 articles and relatively little prominence.
While Jimmy Wales acknowledges Sanger as a co-founder of Wikipedia, and has said that Sanger created many of the policies that to which Wales credits Wikipedia's success, nevertheless it seems a little disingenuous for Sanger to emphasize "Wikipedia."
Googling on 'site:slashdot.org "flying car"' turns up numerous references to flying cars, ALL in very advanced stages of development and ready for production, flying your way soon.
Terrafugia... "Flying Car Passes First Flight Test..."
PAL-V One, "Finally, a flying car for the masses" made its first maiden flight...
M400 flying car "more economical than SUV"...
"the SkyCar, an invention by Moller International" was to be "Ready by end of year." And that year was 1999.
These days Microsoft is changing their branding around faster than a huckster playing the shell game. No end-user knows what the implied promise of any of their brands is, and none of their brands are stable for long enough to figure out whether the implied promise is kept.
I'm guessing this is a reflection of inner turmoil, and that whenever some internal group gets a new manager, that manager gets to pick new names for everything.
Microsoft, like some other companies, doesn't quite get it that perception is only part of the reality, the reality is also part of the reality. You can't solve the problem of inconsistent user interfaces just by calling it all "Windows."
It's sort of cool, I guess, but I don't see the benefit of actually building physical robots rather than running a simulation. What has been achieved in the real world doesn't seem to have any practical application, even as an advertising gimmick or a work of sculpture.
I can't imagine sending out 100,000 of these gadget to do the half-time show at a football game, for example.
I didn't sense that this was just the beginning and that the same devices that self-assemble predetermined shapes could, with more advance software, harvest wheat or perform laser surgery.
When they reach the point where the simulated behavior actually has some real-world utility, THEN it makes sense to build them.
Slashdot Mirror
...when executives use euphemisms like "right-sizing." (I have never heard of a company that "right-sized" by hiring more employees). Even "layoff" is a euphemism because a "layoff" means a temporary suspension. "We'll have to let you go" means that you want to leave and they are reluctantly but graciously acceding to your wishes.
They may be trying to make themselves feel more comfortable by pretending they aren't doing something hurtful to their employees.
As for how it makes employees feel, I wish I could find the origin of a wonderful quotation... but someone, possibly W. Somerset Maugham, once said "Don't hand me a turd and tell me it's a profiterole" (creampuff).
The use of enhanced images, illustrations, artists' conceptions, and diagrams in science education cuts both ways.
Even when I was growing up (in the 1950s) my first impressions of astronomy were formed by illustrations of the solar system--shown from a point of view outside the system, with the orbits displayed as brightly colored, ellipses, and the planets on a scale a thousand times larger than the scale of the orbits.
Something like this helps the child understand what it is that astronomers discovered, and what the spatial relationships actually are. That's good. On the other hand, it leaves them completely unprepared to see Jupiter or Venus out in the backyard on a clear summer night.
And it leaves them unable to appreciate the discovery, the sheer intellectual achievement of someone like Kepler. He figured that out? He didn't have any picture of ellipses? Just from measurements of positions of bright little dots of light that look like they're pinholes in a dome a few hundred feet away? Doing three dimensional trig with nothing but pencil and paper?
My first impressions of Halley's Comet were highly magnified photographic time exposures made by big observatories. The tail, viewed with my eye on the printed page, was bright and probably subtended thirty degrees of visual arc.
I don't think there's any layperson in the world who hasn't been disappointed and upset by their first view of a real comet in the real sky. It should be a wonder, a miracle, a creepy sort of thing--your left brain knows it isn't really a portent, but your right brain is sure it is. Instead, it's like a Peggy Lee refrain: "Is that all there is to a comet?"
What a thrill it ought to be to recognize the Andromeda Nebula with the naked eye. But not if you were expecting a sort of Fourth of July fireworks Catherine wheel instead of a faint smudge.
Understanding the scientific results is worthwhile, but it is almost more important to understand the bedrock experiential reality, and the discovery process.
I know that Jupiter has moons because one night I saw four little stars all in a line right next to it, and next night I saw them again but they'd moved. There is something terribly important in the direct experience, the personal verification. Good buddies, Galileo and me. I've seen something in the sky that wasn't moving around the earth, and so I know Galileo was right.
Last year I finally got around to buying the right kind of telescope for what I wanted to do, a wide aperture low-power "richest field" telescope. With it, I've seen the Andromeda Nebula for myself better than I've ever seen it before.
Boom! No guessing, no squinting, no waiting for a perfectly dark night, THERE IT IS. I'll have to take someone's word for its being a spiral. But I've seen it, me, with my own eyeball. Big faint oval, small bright center. No time exposures, no false color, no computer processed CCD imagery.
It's there, it's really there, I've seen it with my own eyes, not in a planetarium, not in a book, and the light from that sucker had to leave two and a half million years ago to get here just for me to see it. Wow.
"Ultimately it means you'll be able to find a recipe online, have the ingredient list and preparation instructions sent to your mobile device, and your smart oven will be automatically configured with the correct settings."
Boy, that sounds like sounding straight out of the 1950s... a Carousel of Progress from a World's Fair or something... Elektro the Robot, vocoders, and AT&T picturephones...
All it needs to complete the picture is a white woman in an apron, a white man smoking a pipe, and two smiling white children.
I suppose the article is vaguely interesting in pointing out how tasks simple for a human are complex for a robot, but if the point is doing laundry... file it under "ornithopters" (flying machines with flapping wings), pre-Singer sewing machines that tried to mimic the way a human being sews, and so forth.
If we really wanted robots to do laundry, the house, washing machine, and robots would coevolve in all sorts of ways--starting with variations on the laundry chute to deliver the clothing to a single station where they wouldn't need to be sorted out from other clutters. (A simple chute? A conveyor belt? A drone?) Washer doors would be modified to be robot-friendly, and so forth and so on.
When marketers wanted reel-to-reel tape technology to be more automated, engineers didn't built clever gadgets to sense and catch the free end of a piece of tape, they designed tape cassettes.
In the 1990s I remember seeing "Pronto" machines in a factory carrying parts and assemblies from place to place. They didn't need video and pattern recognition, they just followed a wire embedded in the concrete floor that emitted an RF signal.
It's just system thinking. Automating a process by dropping a robot into the middle of it without changing the rest of the process is a silly constraint to put on a solution. A robot clever enough to climb stairs and operate any kind of existing washer is going to cost a lot more than a dumb robot that operates a washer designed to be operated by a robot.
...wasn't it? I've sort of lost track, but I think Microsoft has made precisely this claim for every browser. Yes, here we go:
" That's your vision for IE7, to definitely support Web standards?
Chris: Absolutely, in IE7 we really are trying to support Web standards. Even at the expense of more backwards compatibility..."
Then much the same thing was said of IE8,
and then we read that
"I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised to read this post on el reg that highlights that IE9 is currently the most standards compliant beta browser on the block. Iâ(TM)m really proud of the work the IE9 team is doing to nail the the things that were previously levelled at Internet Explorer for being a 'bad browser.'"
It's the same every time. They acknowledge that the previous browser wasn't standards-compliant after all, and promise the one they are now working on is.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Meeting the audience's expectation, and conforming to the cultural standards of drama at the time, whatever it is, always trumps literal truth.
I remember watching a dumb old black-and-white movie with my brother when I was a kid. I was the one who "knew about science." Someone was using a metal detector with a search coil, and it was dramatically "right" for them to find something. My brother says "Tick. Tick. Tick. Tickticktickticktick." I say, "Oh, no. That's a Geiger counter. This is a metal detector, and it does "Wheeeee-oooh, because the metal changes the resonant frequency of the coil and the oscillator--"
--and the metal detector goes "Tick. Tick. Tick. Tickticktickticktick."
If the applicant is seriously underqualified and likely to fail, they should say so, give the specific reasons, and advise them not to enter the program.
Nevertheless, if they've actually sent out an acceptance--if it wasn't a forgery--they should honor the acceptance.
It's the right thing to do.
I was born slightly too late to buy a "spinthariscope," a toy consisting of a zinc sulfide screen, a loupe-like magnifying glass, and a radiation source--quite possibly radium.
So, I made my own. We had a microscope, I had a Westclox Baby Ben with a luminous dial, I used a penknife to chip off a bit of the luminous paint, put it under the microscope, and turned out the light. Instead of a glowing dial, I could now see, clearly, individual flashes of lights.
I don't know where the Gilbert kit fits on the scale of danger, but I also had a geiger counter kit, and the instruction booklet had directions for how to keep records of background radiation and detect fallout from bomb tests. On the whole, I think we were subjected to more danger from bomb tests than from science kits.
A shame. I was just starting to think it was making a modest return to its roots.
When I visited one a few months ago, they had quite a decent little display of Makershed Arduino kits and books about the Arduino, and they had a kind of dense metal cabinet with shallow drawers filled with individual parts, a much larger selection than they used to have hanging on pegs in blister packs.
I needed a new soldering iron and I bought one there.
Close to 2 feet here and still coming down.
I think people forget just how quickly a snowstorm can get serious if people don't stay off the road. If the plows can't keep up, you are driving first through a light dusting, then an inch, then a couple of inches. Sooner or later cars start to skid. Or, you will have a chunk of interstate that uphill and ONE car isn't able to make it up the hill, stops, cars behind it stop, etc.
Maybe it's not "historic" but it's a big serious snowstorm.
The joke is for most of the song the typewriter is making convincingly realistic noises, but in a few places it makes sequences of sounds and rhythms that are impossible for a real typewriter. For example, a bridge passage:
-- taptaptaptap ding! (zip) taptaptaptap, taptap
-- taptaptaptap ding! (zip) taptaptaptap, taptap
-- taptaptaptap dingding! (zip) taptaptaptap, taptap...
A real typewriter couldn't make two rapidfire Dings! in a row.
Near the end, there are several measures in which the bell rings after only three keystrokes, and without the carriage return sound, also impossible:
tapatap-ding! tapatap-ding! tapatap-ding!
To someone familiar with the sound of a typewriter, when you hear the music you think "ah, a typewriter--WHOA? WHAT WAS THAT?"
It's similar to the disruption of the tick-tock pattern in "The Syncopated Clock."
Up until perhaps about the year 2000, almost everything electronic with a speaker that plugged into the wall, except for really good audiophile equipment, had a faint 60 Hz. hum audible during periods of silence in the program material. One easily learned to ignore it, but it was there. (It was very hard to avoid it in phonograph cartridges, for example).
The ubiquity of 60-Hz hum (or 60-cycle hum as it was called then) was the basis of a plot point in Theodore Sturgeon's psychoanalytic SF story, "The Other Man," for example.
The very characteristic rattle of a motion picture projector--most familiar from 16 mm projectors in classrooms or 8 mm projectors showing home movies, but also faintly audible in many movie theatres. Probably around 1900 to 1980 or so.
The whine of a reel-to-reel tape recorder rewinding, rising in pitch as the diameter of the remaining tape decrees, followed by the dramatic snapping noise as the end of the tape comes off the reel. 1945 to 1990 maybe.
"As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ahâ"a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension."--Sinclair Lewis, "Babbitt"
If you look at one of those Internet compilations of Photos you really need to look at to understand, it is very impressive just how confused you can be by chance juxtapositions of visual elements.
#18 is particularly interesting. It's not a precise juxtaposition. The shadow looks like the shadow of a flag; it's not shaped like the rug. You can understand intellectually what's happening in about five seconds. And yet it takes a real effort of will to perceive the rug is lying on the sand. Relax for an instant and it once again looks as if it is levitating.
... I'd love a Studebaker smartphone, but I would die for an Exidy Sorcerer smartphone.
Different technologies have different characteristics, and I guess one has to use one's personal weighting function. I had a pretty good system (AR turntable, top-of-the-line Shure cartridge, electrostatic earphones) and I love digital audio and honestly don't know how anyone can stand vinyl.
I used a dust bug, I used a DiscWasher, I treated my records very carefully, but there always came the dreaded moment when I would hear: "tick." And at that point, I'd always tense up, and only relax 1.8 seconds later if I didn't hear a second "tick." Three consecutive "ticks" 1.8 seconds apart would seriously interfere with my enjoyment of the sound. My success rate on removing them by cleaning was very low--more often then not, the cleaning attempt (even with the best D4 fluid etc.) would simply add a very delicate, light background crackle.
And I am not even talking about tape hiss, surface noise, warp wow, rumble, and a little trace of 60 Hz hum that I never could quite get rid of. And ugh, getting to the end of a symphony and having the big loud glorious coda come up in the inner groove (vinyl was pretty good at the outer edge, but no-kidding-obvious-problems in the slower-moving inner grooves).
And taking the occasional bad pressing back to the record store and arguing with the store clerk about exchanging it.
And changing the darn record every 20-30 minutes... and feeling guilty if I left it unattended and came back later to find it had been playing the end-groove for hours.
Even with a good tonearm and lightweight cartridge, vinyl does not sound as good on the tenth playing as it did on the first.
Digital audio may have its faults and if people enjoy the characteristics of vinyl, there can be no dispute about tastes. But to me the positives outweigh the negatives--by about a factor of ten.
I assume it's a loose reference to overlap between techies interested in open-source products.
In the very early days techies were among the earliest editors, and the content was heavily weighted toward software and computers. My personal introduction to Wikipedia occurred when I was Googling for information some technical details on ASCII--specifically, to confirm my suspicion that both DEC operating systems and CP/M ERRONEOUSLY had used CTRL-Z where CTRL-Y should have been used, confirming that CP/M got some of its ideas from DEC operating systems.
Anyway, by far the best article that came up in the search was Wikipedia's article on ASCII. It was the first time I'd seen Wikipedia, and of course I kept thinking it had something to do with Wiccans etc.
It seems as if there is some historical revisionism going on. My understanding is that Larry Sanger was a guiding light behind NuPedia, a web encyclopedia that was to be written by experts and vetted by authorities--and that after several years of work, only a few hundred articles were completed.
Wikipedia was started as a side-project and rapidly outpaced NuPedia. Sanger acknowledged its success but regretted Wikipedia's failure to value expertise, and proceeded to launch a new project, Citizendium, which has struggled and sputtered and currently survives with about 20,000 articles and relatively little prominence.
While Jimmy Wales acknowledges Sanger as a co-founder of Wikipedia, and has said that Sanger created many of the policies that to which Wales credits Wikipedia's success, nevertheless it seems a little disingenuous for Sanger to emphasize "Wikipedia."
...shrugs.
Googling on 'site:slashdot.org "flying car"' turns up numerous references to flying cars, ALL in very advanced stages of development and ready for production, flying your way soon.
Terrafugia... "Flying Car Passes First Flight Test..."
PAL-V One, "Finally, a flying car for the masses" made its first maiden flight...
M400 flying car "more economical than SUV"...
"the SkyCar, an invention by Moller International" was to be "Ready by end of year." And that year was 1999.
...would be running on more computers than all other operating systems combined by, IIRC, 2003.
And you can't even tell me which one that is--because they are all called "Windows."
These days Microsoft is changing their branding around faster than a huckster playing the shell game. No end-user knows what the implied promise of any of their brands is, and none of their brands are stable for long enough to figure out whether the implied promise is kept.
I'm guessing this is a reflection of inner turmoil, and that whenever some internal group gets a new manager, that manager gets to pick new names for everything.
Microsoft, like some other companies, doesn't quite get it that perception is only part of the reality, the reality is also part of the reality. You can't solve the problem of inconsistent user interfaces just by calling it all "Windows."
It's sort of cool, I guess, but I don't see the benefit of actually building physical robots rather than running a simulation. What has been achieved in the real world doesn't seem to have any practical application, even as an advertising gimmick or a work of sculpture.
I can't imagine sending out 100,000 of these gadget to do the half-time show at a football game, for example.
I didn't sense that this was just the beginning and that the same devices that self-assemble predetermined shapes could, with more advance software, harvest wheat or perform laser surgery.
When they reach the point where the simulated behavior actually has some real-world utility, THEN it makes sense to build them.