In the early days of cylinder recordings, there was no way to mass-produce them by molding. This was eventually solved, but it was one of the factors that led to the rise of the disk. There was a crude method called a "pantograph" that could make about 25 low-quality copies from a single original (while destroying the original in the process).
So, the way they made recordings was to set up about ten phonographs--more for a big, loud orchestra, fewer for an individual singer--and record batches of ten or so originals at a time. That meant about 250 salable copies per performance. Popular recordings might have sales in the tens of thousands, so popular performers had to have studio sessions in which they performed their piece over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.
If they could identify two cylinders that were made from the same performance, but from different originals, they'd have simultaneous recordings from two different vantage points... and if they could use the computer to take care of any synchronizing problems from the recorders running at different speeds... we could hear the Edison Concert Band playing "The Thunderer" March in stereo!
I had a stock certificate for four shares of Wang Laboratories, Inc. stock which had a "par value" of $0.50 per share, and thus would have been worth $2.00 except that I would have had to file some paperwork when Wang went chapter 11 and was briefly reorganized......but I was able to sell it to a scripophily dealer for $10.
OK, I'm completely baffled. My wife is a non-techie but cool-headed. She runs Win 98 SE and installs any critical Microsoft patches when the system prompts her that such updates are available.
I just checked the MS website and they say no patches are available for Windows 98 because it is not considered a "critical" problem and they only patch "critical" problems.
So presumably my wife will not even be informed of the problem.
Is there anything in particular that she ought to be doing?
The descriptions say that Windows 98 systems cannot be infected "but can spread the infection." How is this possible? How can a program that runs on a system and spreads an infection not be considered "an infection?" Does the infection-spreading-program-that's-not-an-infectio n survive a reboot?
"The Return of the King, which had more than 1500 special effects shots in it. By contrast the first movie had only 400 and the second 900."
The funny thing is that personally I lovedthe first movie, really liked the second, and... well... the third movie was pretty good too but seemed a little long.
Many factors could have contributed to this, but after hearing all of Jackson's encomia to model work and miniatures in the DVD "documentaries," I have to wonder whether the increased use of digital effects contributed in some subtle way to some loss of mood or atmosphere or reality in the third movie.
Frequency change=nonlinearity=high levels
on
Directed Sound
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Linear transformations cannot create new frequencies, only alter the relative intensity of frequencies that already exist. If ultrasonic sound is being heard, some nonlinearity somewhere is converting it to audible sound.
The thing that I have to wonder about is that this kind of nonlinearity implies fairly high (ultrasonic) sound intensities, and suggests that stuff inside your head is being driven beyond its elastic limit. The big thing that seems to me to be missing from the article is any statement of the ultrasonic sound power level, in decibels, that is being delivered to your head (and the ratio between the actual ultrasonic sound level and the apparent audible sound level).
How does this compare, for example, to the sound levels used for ultrasonic imaging in medicine?
I'm not suggesting that the process is necessarily dangerous, but it isn't obvious that it's intrinsically safe, either. It's one thing to be subjected to high-power ultrasound a few dozen times during your lifetime for the purpose of preserving your health. It's quite another to be subjected to it day in and day out, for your convenience in listening to music, or for some advertiser's convenience in interrupting your train of thought.
Yeah, right. Obviously you've fallen for the subliminal advertising the ad agencies put in their pitches to you.
Advertisers are not willing to pay much for ads that you notice "subconsciously."
Actually, I don't think anyone has believed the subconscious effect of advertising since, I dunno... the 1950s when Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders?
When I first saw the headline, I thought maybe this was the keyboard I've been waiting for since, oh, 1970 or so.
Namely, a keyboard in which the legends on the function keys are replaced by LED readouts--or fiber-optic bundles to a single LED readout--or something--so that instead of memorizing what F1, F2, F3 do, they would display legends that state their functions--software-controlled legends that would change according to the application you were running.
GUIs were supposed to get rid of all that, but they didn't...
In the days when HP terminal didn't have detachable keyboards, they had a system in which the display had an extra line that was dedicated to displaying soft "labels" that at least lined up with the keys. Not very good, but a little better than nothing.
Of course, given that software makers can't even be troubled to implement the functions carved in stone--well, molded into the plastic--on keys such as Print Scrn (which AFAIK has been on the keyboard for twenty years but hasnever printed the screen)--I'm sure that 99% of all programs would simply display "F1", "F2", "F3", anyway...
Usability, usability... why should it be so hard to have a keyboard with keys that says= what they do and do what they say? Because no software engineer is wimpy enough to admit to any difficulty in memorizing 256 key combinations per application (16 fkeys with 4 binary modifier keys), that why...
A finished, full-featured word processing program seems to be a pretty tall order.
If I had a nickel for all the projects that have been mentioned in the last few years that manage to come up, with say, a Word-alike toolbar, and a ruler with pretty tabs on it and a feature set comparable to AppleWorks, and partial RTF-format compatibility except for details like font display... that have all the capability you need for a business letter......that have gotten reviewed as "an excellent starting point,"......and that never evolved into a serious, finished product......I'd have, I dunno, $0.35 or $0.40. Easily.
Please spare me the products that are at an "excellent starting point." Wake me up when something crosses the finish line.
Doesn't something like this occur in Toy Story 2 in which the toys need to cross a busy street, so one of them hides under a traffic cone and rolls it into place?
...although, under present copyright law, everything is "born copyrighted" whether there is any notice or not--to put up material on a public website without a copyright notice, as was apparently done before adopting the Creative Commons license, seems to me to be inviting infringement.
Sure, the Lindows folks should have known better--but so should Klowner.
Just how hard is it to write "Copyright [year] by [so-and-so], all rights reserved?"
When in doubt, add a copyright notice. Whether or not it actually changes the legal situation, it definitely changes people's behavior. Even if you plan to grant permission to just about anyone for just about anything, putting a copyright notice on your work greatly increases the probability that people will ask.
Does the numeral posted here actually equal the product of the numerals posted here?
The last digit looks OK, anyway.:-)
No, don't bother to flame me for laziness... I already know...
There was a time when I would have tried to do that on paper by hand, just to keep in practice. These days, not only am I too lazy to try that, but I don't currently have any software system at hand that implements indefinite-sized integer arithmetic... and I'm too lazy to implement one.
One of the more interesting things about society in the United States is the way in which "dangerous" ideas can be neutralized and forgotten without actual censorship. Jack London, Helen Keller, and Albert Einstein are good examples of people whose political opinions were successfully submerged in the popular consciousness by elevating the non-threatening aspects of their life and work.
An example from the right rather than the left would be Charles Lindbergh.
I remember being surprised by my discovery, in the sixties, that a) many people of my parents' generation at least recognize the tune and words of The Internationale, that virtually nobody from the sixties generation does--not even the real lefties--and that people from my parents' generation were largely unaware that people from the next generation don't know it. A song and a political emblem, into the memory hole without benefit of telescreens.
Squids have giant axons, too--they were used for all the early studies of how neurons work because they're big enough to get electrode into.
The textbook theory is that molluscs did not evolved the myelin sheath. Without myelin sheaths, propagation speed is proportional to axon diameter. Thus molluscs that need rapid propagation speed do so by having big neurons.
There are fads in programming just as there are in clothing and management methodologies. And there are always people telling you to adopt the flavor of the month, I mean wave of the future if you don't want to become obsolete.
And you can usually ignore them.
I sat out PL/1, which, well, gee, it had BIG BLUE behind it (in a day when IBM's domination was far more complete than Microsoft's is now). And it doesn't seem to have done me much harm.
True, you can score big by being the person who actually has the "two years experience in" (language-that's-only-existed-for-two-years) that the recruitment ads want, but if you go this route remember that it's easy to be knowledgeable in the latest language if you've just spent some unpaid years in college learning it. If you want to make a career out of always having the skill that's in demand, keep in mind that the only reason the skill is in demand is because it is rare--and you'll need to be quite clever at guessing the next fad, and dedicated about finding out how to educate yourself in it while keeping your day job.
Anyone who has tried to work collaboratively on word-processing documents has quickly discovered that it doesn't work, UNLESS a) the collaborative document is almost free of anything above character-level formatting, or b) the collaborators are willing to learn and submit themselves to working within a very complete, rigid, predefined stylesheet that is not changed during the course of the collaboration.
In the real world, different people achieve the same printed appearance by very different semantic routes, and, as a result, it is almost impossible for person A to edit person B's document, or to cut and paste large portions of material, without messing up the formatting.
I of course am thinking about Microsoft Word here but that's just because it's dominant. The same problems occur with virtually any "modern" WYSIWYG word processors. (Although I will say that Word's automatically numbered lists and paragraphs are still a mystery to me and I have been completely unable to form any mental model that explains their innately perverse behavior).
Yes, I have no doubt that there are left-brained people who successfully work collaboratively with markup languages such as TeX, but in the world of casual "computer-literate" users I still frequently encounter paragraphs in which the first line indentation is achieved by typing five spaces.
Maybe he's exaggerating a bit, but I certainly have noticed the annoying trendiness of overbright blue LEDs. There's one in my face right now on my LaCie d2 52x24x52x CD writer.
The other day I was with a guy with a spiffy new cell phone where the whole thing lit up in bright blue. Stupid. Blue isn't a particularly easy-to-view color. He says he finds his cell phone screen hard to read because of it.
I normally watch television in an almost-dark room. My Radio Shack powered indoor antenna has a blue led on it that is so bright that even when it is TURNED AWAY there is an annoying blue glow from where it reflects off the wall immediately behind it.
Raymond Z. Gallun's story, "The Scarab," was published in Astounding in 1936 (and anthologized by Groff Conklin in Science Fiction Thinking Machines in 1954).
The story is set in the year 1987 and describes "a tiny thing, scarcely more than an inch and a half in length. The fancy of the craftsman who made it had given to the Scarab the form of the beetle of which it wa snamed. But its body had a metallic sheen, and its vitals were far more intricate than those of the finest watch."
It is capable of observing with its "quartz-lensed eyes" and sounds are "detectable to [its] sensitive, microphonic ears." It can fly at "terrific speed" to "the cold, unresistant texture of the stratosphere." It makes its way into meeting room where a dastardly plot is in progress. It is never made clear it relays information back to "the mind that controlled the Scarab," but when that mind "had seen and heard enough" it instructs the Scarab to land on the bad guy's neck and "a tiny part of a drop of liquid was injected into its victim's blood stream."
Well, of course, prior to the introduction of "energy-absorbing" steering columns... in the mid-sixties or thereabouts... the steering wheel to all intents and purposes did have a huge spike in the middle of it.
Slashdot Mirror
In the early days of cylinder recordings, there was no way to mass-produce them by molding. This was eventually solved, but it was one of the factors that led to the rise of the disk. There was a crude method called a "pantograph" that could make about 25 low-quality copies from a single original (while destroying the original in the process).
So, the way they made recordings was to set up about ten phonographs--more for a big, loud orchestra, fewer for an individual singer--and record batches of ten or so originals at a time. That meant about 250 salable copies per performance. Popular recordings might have sales in the tens of thousands, so popular performers had to have studio sessions in which they performed their piece over, and over, and over, and over, and over again.
If they could identify two cylinders that were made from the same performance, but from different originals, they'd have simultaneous recordings from two different vantage points... and if they could use the computer to take care of any synchronizing problems from the recorders running at different speeds... we could hear the Edison Concert Band playing "The Thunderer" March in stereo!
I had a stock certificate for four shares of Wang Laboratories, Inc. stock which had a "par value" of $0.50 per share, and thus would have been worth $2.00 except that I would have had to file some paperwork when Wang went chapter 11 and was briefly reorganized... ...but I was able to sell it to a scripophily dealer for $10.
OK, I'm completely baffled. My wife is a non-techie but cool-headed. She runs Win 98 SE and installs any critical Microsoft patches when the system prompts her that such updates are available.
o n survive a reboot?
I just checked the MS website and they say no patches are available for Windows 98 because it is not considered a "critical" problem and they only patch "critical" problems.
So presumably my wife will not even be informed of the problem.
Is there anything in particular that she ought to be doing?
The descriptions say that Windows 98 systems cannot be infected "but can spread the infection." How is this possible? How can a program that runs on a system and spreads an infection not be considered "an infection?" Does the infection-spreading-program-that's-not-an-infecti
"The Return of the King, which had more than 1500 special effects shots in it. By contrast the first movie had only 400 and the second 900."
The funny thing is that personally I lovedthe first movie, really liked the second, and... well... the third movie was pretty good too but seemed a little long.
Many factors could have contributed to this, but after hearing all of Jackson's encomia to model work and miniatures in the DVD "documentaries," I have to wonder whether the increased use of digital effects contributed in some subtle way to some loss of mood or atmosphere or reality in the third movie.
Linear transformations cannot create new frequencies, only alter the relative intensity of frequencies that already exist. If ultrasonic sound is being heard, some nonlinearity somewhere is converting it to audible sound.
The thing that I have to wonder about is that this kind of nonlinearity implies fairly high (ultrasonic) sound intensities, and suggests that stuff inside your head is being driven beyond its elastic limit. The big thing that seems to me to be missing from the article is any statement of the ultrasonic sound power level, in decibels, that is being delivered to your head (and the ratio between the actual ultrasonic sound level and the apparent audible sound level).
How does this compare, for example, to the sound levels used for ultrasonic imaging in medicine?
I'm not suggesting that the process is necessarily dangerous, but it isn't obvious that it's intrinsically safe, either. It's one thing to be subjected to high-power ultrasound a few dozen times during your lifetime for the purpose of preserving your health. It's quite another to be subjected to it day in and day out, for your convenience in listening to music, or for some advertiser's convenience in interrupting your train of thought.
Yeah, right. Obviously you've fallen for the subliminal advertising the ad agencies put in their pitches to you.
Advertisers are not willing to pay much for ads that you notice "subconsciously."
Actually, I don't think anyone has believed the subconscious effect of advertising since, I dunno... the 1950s when Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders?
...they've found that the reason people don't mind ads other than pop-ups is that they don't notice them.
Oops, so much for that business model.
When I first saw the headline, I thought maybe this was the keyboard I've been waiting for since, oh, 1970 or so.
Namely, a keyboard in which the legends on the function keys are replaced by LED readouts--or fiber-optic bundles to a single LED readout--or something--so that instead of memorizing what F1, F2, F3 do, they would display legends that state their functions--software-controlled legends that would change according to the application you were running.
GUIs were supposed to get rid of all that, but they didn't...
In the days when HP terminal didn't have detachable keyboards, they had a system in which the display had an extra line that was dedicated to displaying soft "labels" that at least lined up with the keys. Not very good, but a little better than nothing.
Of course, given that software makers can't even be troubled to implement the functions carved in stone--well, molded into the plastic--on keys such as Print Scrn (which AFAIK has been on the keyboard for twenty years but hasnever printed the screen)--I'm sure that 99% of all programs would simply display "F1", "F2", "F3", anyway...
Usability, usability... why should it be so hard to have a keyboard with keys that says= what they do and do what they say? Because no software engineer is wimpy enough to admit to any difficulty in memorizing 256 key combinations per application (16 fkeys with 4 binary modifier keys), that why...
Assuming this isn't a hacked site--and it certainly looks OK--please note that that ABC News Online Australia article concludes:
"The alleged discovery has been greeted with barely concealed mirth by the Mediterranean island's tourism office."
Editorializing a bit, are we?
A finished, full-featured word processing program seems to be a pretty tall order.
...that have gotten reviewed as "an excellent starting point," ... ...and that never evolved into a serious, finished product... ...I'd have, I dunno, $0.35 or $0.40. Easily.
If I had a nickel for all the projects that have been mentioned in the last few years that manage to come up, with say, a Word-alike toolbar, and a ruler with pretty tabs on it and a feature set comparable to AppleWorks, and partial RTF-format compatibility except for details like font display... that have all the capability you need for a business letter...
Please spare me the products that are at an "excellent starting point." Wake me up when something crosses the finish line.
Doesn't something like this occur in Toy Story 2 in which the toys need to cross a busy street, so one of them hides under a traffic cone and rolls it into place?
...although, under present copyright law, everything is "born copyrighted" whether there is any notice or not--to put up material on a public website without a copyright notice, as was apparently done before adopting the Creative Commons license, seems to me to be inviting infringement.
Sure, the Lindows folks should have known better--but so should Klowner.
Just how hard is it to write "Copyright [year] by [so-and-so], all rights reserved?"
When in doubt, add a copyright notice. Whether or not it actually changes the legal situation, it definitely changes people's behavior. Even if you plan to grant permission to just about anyone for just about anything, putting a copyright notice on your work greatly increases the probability that people will ask.
Does the numeral posted here actually equal the product of the numerals posted here?
:-)
The last digit looks OK, anyway.
No, don't bother to flame me for laziness... I already know...
There was a time when I would have tried to do that on paper by hand, just to keep in practice. These days, not only am I too lazy to try that, but I don't currently have any software system at hand that implements indefinite-sized integer arithmetic... and I'm too lazy to implement one.
One of the more interesting things about society in the United States is the way in which "dangerous" ideas can be neutralized and forgotten without actual censorship. Jack London, Helen Keller, and Albert Einstein are good examples of people whose political opinions were successfully submerged in the popular consciousness by elevating the non-threatening aspects of their life and work.
An example from the right rather than the left would be Charles Lindbergh.
I remember being surprised by my discovery, in the sixties, that a) many people of my parents' generation at least recognize the tune and words of The Internationale, that virtually nobody from the sixties generation does--not even the real lefties--and that people from my parents' generation were largely unaware that people from the next generation don't know it. A song and a political emblem, into the memory hole without benefit of telescreens.
Squids have giant axons, too--they were used for all the early studies of how neurons work because they're big enough to get electrode into.
The textbook theory is that molluscs did not evolved the myelin sheath. Without myelin sheaths, propagation speed is proportional to axon diameter. Thus molluscs that need rapid propagation speed do so by having big neurons.
...you can just view them from sixty feet away and the video delay will exactly compensate for the speed-of-sound delay. No problem.
And if you can afford one, you probably have a living room that big.
...Oh, wait... ...these machine don't provide a means for a recount, do they?
Never mind
http://www.local6.com/news/3022956/detail.html isn't slashdotted... yet...
Of course.
There are fads in programming just as there are in clothing and management methodologies. And there are always people telling you to adopt the flavor of the month, I mean wave of the future if you don't want to become obsolete.
And you can usually ignore them.
I sat out PL/1, which, well, gee, it had BIG BLUE behind it (in a day when IBM's domination was far more complete than Microsoft's is now). And it doesn't seem to have done me much harm.
True, you can score big by being the person who actually has the "two years experience in" (language-that's-only-existed-for-two-years) that the recruitment ads want, but if you go this route remember that it's easy to be knowledgeable in the latest language if you've just spent some unpaid years in college learning it. If you want to make a career out of always having the skill that's in demand, keep in mind that the only reason the skill is in demand is because it is rare--and you'll need to be quite clever at guessing the next fad, and dedicated about finding out how to educate yourself in it while keeping your day job.
Obviously it's a subliminal message... they believe our right brain will subconscously recognize LINSPIRE as an anagram of IN PERILS.
Anyone who has tried to work collaboratively on word-processing documents has quickly discovered that it doesn't work, UNLESS a) the collaborative document is almost free of anything above character-level formatting, or b) the collaborators are willing to learn and submit themselves to working within a very complete, rigid, predefined stylesheet that is not changed during the course of the collaboration.
In the real world, different people achieve the same printed appearance by very different semantic routes, and, as a result, it is almost impossible for person A to edit person B's document, or to cut and paste large portions of material, without messing up the formatting.
I of course am thinking about Microsoft Word here but that's just because it's dominant. The same problems occur with virtually any "modern" WYSIWYG word processors. (Although I will say that Word's automatically numbered lists and paragraphs are still a mystery to me and I have been completely unable to form any mental model that explains their innately perverse behavior).
Yes, I have no doubt that there are left-brained people who successfully work collaboratively with markup languages such as TeX, but in the world of casual "computer-literate" users I still frequently encounter paragraphs in which the first line indentation is achieved by typing five spaces.
...can be seen, re-animated, at this site.
Maybe he's exaggerating a bit, but I certainly have noticed the annoying trendiness of overbright blue LEDs. There's one in my face right now on my LaCie d2 52x24x52x CD writer.
The other day I was with a guy with a spiffy new cell phone where the whole thing lit up in bright blue. Stupid. Blue isn't a particularly easy-to-view color. He says he finds his cell phone screen hard to read because of it.
I normally watch television in an almost-dark room. My Radio Shack powered indoor antenna has a blue led on it that is so bright that even when it is TURNED AWAY there is an annoying blue glow from where it reflects off the wall immediately behind it.
Raymond Z. Gallun's story, "The Scarab," was published in Astounding in 1936 (and anthologized by Groff Conklin in Science Fiction Thinking Machines in 1954).
The story is set in the year 1987 and describes "a tiny thing, scarcely more than an inch and a half in length. The fancy of the craftsman who made it had given to the Scarab the form of the beetle of which it wa snamed. But its body had a metallic sheen, and its vitals were far more intricate than those of the finest watch."
It is capable of observing with its "quartz-lensed eyes" and sounds are "detectable to [its] sensitive, microphonic ears." It can fly at "terrific speed" to "the cold, unresistant texture of the stratosphere." It makes its way into meeting room where a dastardly plot is in progress. It is never made clear it relays information back to "the mind that controlled the Scarab," but when that mind "had seen and heard enough" it instructs the Scarab to land on the bad guy's neck and "a tiny part of a drop of liquid was injected into its victim's blood stream."
The good guys win.
Well, of course, prior to the introduction of "energy-absorbing" steering columns... in the mid-sixties or thereabouts... the steering wheel to all intents and purposes did have a huge spike in the middle of it.