I happen to like Bing better than Google but Microsoft's China policy sucks. Therefore I continue to use Google.
Um... Their policies are the same. Google capitulated. Hong Kong is still China. In fact the PRC suggested to Google to redirect to Hong Kong. Given Article 23, the CPC is still in control.
If Google really wanted to make a statement, they would have shutdown, or better yet opened up google.cn and let the CPC shut them down.
While such a tree may for a simple lookup, (my thing and iTunes used similar naming conventions), if you want to search the for something specific, you need still need to index the metadata. Also, if you want to add something like genre then you're really screwed because bands, and even songs belong to different, even multiple genres.
A single hierarchy begins to breakdown as soon as you want to search for something, beyond a simple keyword lookup. Sure you can do something with symlinks. Say a metaband like "The Ubiquitous Metaband Various Artists (w/ Emanuel Lewis)" and create subdirectory for every multiartist album, each containing symlinks to the actual mp3s that have been sprayed all over the tree, but these require maintenance, and this doesn't really scale beyond the special case of multiartist albums.
Maybe I'm a bit biased. I do work on search engines that solve this problem of hierarchies, and I happen to have ~200 GB of mp3z. I'm not necessarily the typical user.
My main problem with most music player software today is the idea of a 'media library'. In order to play a file, you first have to put it in the library. I understand such a database has its benefits, but to me it is unnecessary complication of a simple operation. In fact, I do have a custom script for managing music files burnt to DVDs, but in the unix spirit I like to keep thing separate, so I am free to use different players.
Years ago, I made a web based mp3 jukebox called Grind!.
If you've ever glimpsed at the utter clusterfuck of metadata in music files, you understand why there are databases. ID3 tags were often wrong or in a weird format. (Bonus points if the ID3v1 and the ID3v2 conflicted.), and FreeDB had a very annoying format back in the early 2000s when I did this. (Storing both title and artist information in the same field in a trivially extensible tagged metadata format is beyond stupid.)
Even if you fixed all the metadata and coupled it with each individual track by using ID3v2 or something like it (and you should in order to be a good citizen), you still need to cache the metadata outside of individual files for performance reasons. You don't want to have to crawl the disk, opening, seeking to the end, and reading and reading the last 1k or so, to list every artist in the music collection. Crawling a disk like this really slow.
That said, that the metadata store just needs to be consistent, but not overly tight. By overly tight, I mean the original music files have to be easily extractable. Back when I was made jukebox, most of the other web based jukeboxes were copying every mp3 into MySQL as a blob column for god awful reason. That's super dumb. All you need is the path to the file, after all, the file system already stores generic bytes. If the db crashes, you're super screwed. Especially when you consider that many people are going to delete their original files after they've been copied into the db, since music collections are large and there's no reason to keep two copies on a disk.
The other thing you'd like in a media library is the ability to get the metadata back out of the library. This is the main reason why you want to keep a copy of the metadata tightly coupled (i.e. integrated) with the media files. It's my data. I'll do what I want to with them.
In all honesty, iTunes does a relatively good of this. The media files are stored on the disk in an easily understandable form (i.e. hashed names) under ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/ , and the metadata is stored in uncompressed xml file named ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml The only thing I'm not sure about is the album artwork, and whether it updates the id3v2 tags to be consistent with the assumed correct information stored in the xml file. It's a good system. It's unixy.
KB? SI units are meant to be computationally convenient, not arbitrarily assigned.
In all honesty, I don't know what to make of your.sig . So are you for kB or kiB? Powers of 2 are computationally convenient in this context, while a power of 10 would be arbitrary, whereas outside the context of bits, the reverse would be true.
Oh come on. This is not a troll. This is a fact. In fact, it's well known by scholars of early Christianity.
The fact is that there is no authoritative early version of any book of the Bible. It's just a historical fact. It's not even a "suppressed" fact. What do you think the Council of Nicea (of Nicene Creed fame) was doing? They not only compiled the Bible, but sat around arguing what exactly Christianity was.
I'm really disappointed that some need their own religion explained to them. Read Misquoting Jesus. It was written by a born-again evangelical from crying out loud.
I have to say, I've never understood this argument. I would regard the loss of my freedom as being as bad as the loss of my life.
What's not to understand? You can let someone out of prison. You can't bring someone back to life.
Granted, when your mom told you you couldn't go out with your friends, you might have said that you "could just die," or "would rather die," but you didn't. You didn't kill yourself. You didn't mean it then. You don't mean it now. Even from the dawn of time, instituting the death penalty for all offensives has been considered barbaric. (And that's what you're talking about when you equate freedom with life.)
Simply because even as a child, you understood that after a non-lethal event, you could move on. You make the best of it, and move on.
When you're dead, you can't do anything, except rot.
Are you really going to tell me that the state can repay someone who spent 30 years behind bars for a crime they didn't commit?
Well as much as anyone else can. The reason why the courts deal with money is simply because it's impossible to undo an event.
It's called restitution, and is intrinsic to the very concept of justice. Just because it's the government doesn't mean they're not liable. If I held someone prisoner for 30 years, I'd have to pay restitution, both to the state (in the form of prison), and to the prisoner (in the form of monetary payments as a result of the inevitable civil suit).
A democracy is a form of government where the citizens vote. It can either be a direct democracy where the citizens vote -- wait for it -- directly on the laws. (i.e a plebiscite or referendum) (which, we have at the state and local levels) or a representative democracy, where the people vote for -- wait for it -- a representative. The word comes from the Greek word dimokratia, which means "popular government," or "the people's government."
A republic is a government where the public chooses their leaders. The word comes from the Latin phrase res publica, which means "a public affair."
Now let me spell this out for slow learners in the group. THESE ARE NOT OPPOSING IDEAS!
Come on people. They cover this in 5th grade social studies. This argument hinges on pseudohyperintellectualism that has not been seen since Oswald Bates left television. Even PJ O'Rourke doesn't understand this "controversy".
Castro is as irrelevant as ever. Seriously. If you're dusting off the boogeyman of our grandparents, you are irrelevant as well. Oh! Have we all forgotten the gulags that Social Security and Amtrak ushered in?
So what if some third world hasbeen has praised us? So has everyone else in the entire rest of the world, lest we forget.
Seriously, you link to World Net Daily? That's the same outfit that rails about UN Peacekeepers building gulags in Kansas, while saying that having the President unilaterally declare citizens "unlawful combatants" and indefinitely imprisoning them without trial and having them tortured is a-okay.
If the people want someone dead in a democracy, that's that. It isn't contrary the the ideology of democracy. On the opposite, it affirms what the democratic process is all about.
No. That's not that. That's not democracy. That's mob rule. That's why we have the rule of law. Due process, and the rights of the minority.
Well in all honesty, he's not quite a dictator, since there still are binding elections, which he does occasionally lose. Now that doesn't mean he doesn't want to be a dictator. He's certainly setting himself up as one, and his actions clearly show that he wants no opposition to his rule. Keep in mind, Hugo Chavez came to (inter)national attention during the failed 1992 coup against Pérez.
What is really interesting is that Venezuela is falling apart (perhaps most bizarrely having massive blackouts in an OPEC country) because he placed political ideology above practical needs, and got predictable results.
Is he a dictator? I think he's worse than that. He's a pudgy tin horn wannabe dictator, that revels in the trying externalizing his own short comings on the yanqis. He's a threat to no one except perhaps his own people, and maybe not even to them beyond an economic threat.
Oh come on, Everyone knows GPS can't detect obstacles and this gets modded as insightful? Yet rear obstacle avoidance systems is available on many models today, as is adaptive cruise control, and *shockingly* collision avoidance systems.
Not only does this technology exist today, but it is standard on some models.
Go back to putting a six foot wing on your Civic. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Luckily the pain went away after a few more hours, but it was our first glimpse at how poor ER care has become.
It's well known that ER visits have increased because people that do no have health insurance put off seeing a doctor until it becomes an emergency and then visit the ER for non emergency conditions because the ER can't turn you away.
This problem doesn't exist in rest of the industrialized world because of national health insurance.
It's a well known problem, with a well known solution. The far right of the US simply denies there's a problem.
Trouble is...the Federal govt. really doesn't have the constitutional power to mandate that every citizen purchase insurance or anything else really.
You have no understanding of constitutional law.
1. It's interstate commerce. The health insurance companies operate across state lines, and thus are interstate companies. Furthermore, health insurance is an interstate market, which federal government has the power to regulate. This includes single state only companies, as the regulation is part of a comprehensive reform.
2. The "fine" is actually a tax. It's administered through the Internal Revenue Service. This is no different that any other sumptuary tax, which exist for all sorts of behavior where one one (i.e. a polluting company) wants to socialize their costs on the public.
All this 10th Amendment talk is just typical election year ploys to appeal the base of the Republican party. The only thing more laughable is the talk about repeal, because let's face it. Who wants to reopen the donut hole in GWB's prescription drug benefit (Medicare Part D) and say that children should be denied health insurance?
No. The GOP bet the farm that by denying that there was a problem with skyrocketing healthcare costs, people losing everything do to catastrophic healthcare needs, and having their wages reduced by increasing healthcare premiums, that they would win. They failed. They brought nothing to the table.
Given that spam has been around for 32 years now, and with state of the art classifiers, spam really isn't that much of a problem for users. Most "spam" that gets delivered is actually from sites that the user has dealt with. Buy baseball tickets, and it seems like MLB emails you every two weeks. Buy concert tickets online, and you're autosubscribed to a marketing mailing.
While spam may be problem for network administrators, as a user, I simply don't care. It's literally not my problem.
Honestly. Even my parents don't get random spam and phishing attacks.
When it comes down to it, a social network is nothing more than a series of RSS feeds. Only instead of "subscribing" you "friend" them. RSS and OpenID is all you really need. The reason why people don't do this is because people need a hosting service and an easy index to find/add other people. This index (and the recommender system it enables) is what really makes a social network valuable to users.
I wouldn't have a problem with FB and the like being an indexing service like Google, but I do have a problem with them hosting all my data. Zuck says, "You own your data," but doesn't provide a way to export it. As Lessig said, "Code is law."
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I happen to like Bing better than Google but Microsoft's China policy sucks. Therefore I continue to use Google.
Um... Their policies are the same. Google capitulated. Hong Kong is still China. In fact the PRC suggested to Google to redirect to Hong Kong. Given Article 23, the CPC is still in control.
If Google really wanted to make a statement, they would have shutdown, or better yet opened up google.cn and let the CPC shut them down.
But they didn't. They kept sucking at that tit.
People will just end up using the google website instead.
No. They'll use the default. They always use the default.
While such a tree may for a simple lookup, (my thing and iTunes used similar naming conventions), if you want to search the for something specific, you need still need to index the metadata. Also, if you want to add something like genre then you're really screwed because bands, and even songs belong to different, even multiple genres.
A single hierarchy begins to breakdown as soon as you want to search for something, beyond a simple keyword lookup. Sure you can do something with symlinks. Say a metaband like "The Ubiquitous Metaband Various Artists (w/ Emanuel Lewis)" and create subdirectory for every multiartist album, each containing symlinks to the actual mp3s that have been sprayed all over the tree, but these require maintenance, and this doesn't really scale beyond the special case of multiartist albums.
Maybe I'm a bit biased. I do work on search engines that solve this problem of hierarchies, and I happen to have ~200 GB of mp3z. I'm not necessarily the typical user.
My main problem with most music player software today is the idea of a 'media library'. In order to play a file, you first have to put it in the library. I understand such a database has its benefits, but to me it is unnecessary complication of a simple operation. In fact, I do have a custom script for managing music files burnt to DVDs, but in the unix spirit I like to keep thing separate, so I am free to use different players.
Years ago, I made a web based mp3 jukebox called Grind!.
If you've ever glimpsed at the utter clusterfuck of metadata in music files, you understand why there are databases. ID3 tags were often wrong or in a weird format. (Bonus points if the ID3v1 and the ID3v2 conflicted.), and FreeDB had a very annoying format back in the early 2000s when I did this. (Storing both title and artist information in the same field in a trivially extensible tagged metadata format is beyond stupid.)
Even if you fixed all the metadata and coupled it with each individual track by using ID3v2 or something like it (and you should in order to be a good citizen), you still need to cache the metadata outside of individual files for performance reasons. You don't want to have to crawl the disk, opening, seeking to the end, and reading and reading the last 1k or so, to list every artist in the music collection. Crawling a disk like this really slow.
That said, that the metadata store just needs to be consistent, but not overly tight. By overly tight, I mean the original music files have to be easily extractable. Back when I was made jukebox, most of the other web based jukeboxes were copying every mp3 into MySQL as a blob column for god awful reason. That's super dumb. All you need is the path to the file, after all, the file system already stores generic bytes. If the db crashes, you're super screwed. Especially when you consider that many people are going to delete their original files after they've been copied into the db, since music collections are large and there's no reason to keep two copies on a disk.
The other thing you'd like in a media library is the ability to get the metadata back out of the library. This is the main reason why you want to keep a copy of the metadata tightly coupled (i.e. integrated) with the media files. It's my data. I'll do what I want to with them.
In all honesty, iTunes does a relatively good of this. The media files are stored on the disk in an easily understandable form (i.e. hashed names) under ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music/ , and the metadata is stored in uncompressed xml file named ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes\ Music\ Library.xml The only thing I'm not sure about is the album artwork, and whether it updates the id3v2 tags to be consistent with the assumed correct information stored in the xml file. It's a good system. It's unixy.
KB? SI units are meant to be computationally convenient, not arbitrarily assigned.
In all honesty, I don't know what to make of your .sig . So are you for kB or kiB? Powers of 2 are computationally convenient in this context, while a power of 10 would be arbitrary, whereas outside the context of bits, the reverse would be true.
Oh come on. This is not a troll. This is a fact. In fact, it's well known by scholars of early Christianity.
The fact is that there is no authoritative early version of any book of the Bible. It's just a historical fact. It's not even a "suppressed" fact. What do you think the Council of Nicea (of Nicene Creed fame) was doing? They not only compiled the Bible, but sat around arguing what exactly Christianity was.
I'm really disappointed that some need their own religion explained to them.
Read Misquoting Jesus. It was written by a born-again evangelical from crying out loud.
Jesus said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
No. He didn't. It's not in the earliest copies of the Gospel of John.
It's a good parable. It gives a good moral. But it's a fabrication. Although, a fabrication that even Jesus would have approved of.
I have to say, I've never understood this argument. I would regard the loss of my freedom as being as bad as the loss of my life.
What's not to understand? You can let someone out of prison. You can't bring someone back to life.
Granted, when your mom told you you couldn't go out with your friends, you might have said that you "could just die," or "would rather die," but you didn't. You didn't kill yourself. You didn't mean it then. You don't mean it now. Even from the dawn of time, instituting the death penalty for all offensives has been considered barbaric. (And that's what you're talking about when you equate freedom with life.)
Simply because even as a child, you understood that after a non-lethal event, you could move on. You make the best of it, and move on.
When you're dead, you can't do anything, except rot.
Are you really going to tell me that the state can repay someone who spent 30 years behind bars for a crime they didn't commit?
Well as much as anyone else can. The reason why the courts deal with money is simply because it's impossible to undo an event.
It's called restitution, and is intrinsic to the very concept of justice. Just because it's the government doesn't mean they're not liable. If I held someone prisoner for 30 years, I'd have to pay restitution, both to the state (in the form of prison), and to the prisoner (in the form of monetary payments as a result of the inevitable civil suit).
Someone must really like that movie.
Hell, I one time given a burned copy, of a torrented version, of Equilibrium, and still felt cheated!
When will the conspiracy end!
You are wrong on all points.
A democracy is a form of government where the citizens vote. It can either be a direct democracy where the citizens vote -- wait for it -- directly on the laws. (i.e a plebiscite or referendum) (which, we have at the state and local levels) or a representative democracy, where the people vote for -- wait for it -- a representative. The word comes from the Greek word dimokratia, which means "popular government," or "the people's government."
A republic is a government where the public chooses their leaders. The word comes from the Latin phrase res publica, which means "a public affair."
Now let me spell this out for slow learners in the group. THESE ARE NOT OPPOSING IDEAS!
Come on people. They cover this in 5th grade social studies. This argument hinges on pseudohyperintellectualism that has not been seen since Oswald Bates left television. Even PJ O'Rourke doesn't understand this "controversy".
Stop. Just stop.
Well, given that every poll has more opposition that support for the recent Heathcare legislation, I'd have to say it wasn't populist.
BULL-FUCKING-SHIT.
Castro is as irrelevant as ever. Seriously. If you're dusting off the boogeyman of our grandparents, you are irrelevant as well. Oh! Have we all forgotten the gulags that Social Security and Amtrak ushered in?
So what if some third world hasbeen has praised us? So has everyone else in the entire rest of the world, lest we forget.
It's no longer an abbreviation, It's been nouned.
I suggest you go back to the dictionary. Your attempt at being pedantic is full of fail.
You look quite fetching in that tin foil hat.
Seriously, you link to World Net Daily? That's the same outfit that rails about UN Peacekeepers building gulags in Kansas, while saying that having the President unilaterally declare citizens "unlawful combatants" and indefinitely imprisoning them without trial and having them tortured is a-okay.
If the people want someone dead in a democracy, that's that. It isn't contrary the the ideology of democracy. On the opposite, it affirms what the democratic process is all about.
No. That's not that. That's not democracy. That's mob rule. That's why we have the rule of law. Due process, and the rights of the minority.
Well in all honesty, he's not quite a dictator, since there still are binding elections, which he does occasionally lose. Now that doesn't mean he doesn't want to be a dictator. He's certainly setting himself up as one, and his actions clearly show that he wants no opposition to his rule. Keep in mind, Hugo Chavez came to (inter)national attention during the failed 1992 coup against Pérez.
What is really interesting is that Venezuela is falling apart (perhaps most bizarrely having massive blackouts in an OPEC country) because he placed political ideology above practical needs, and got predictable results.
Is he a dictator? I think he's worse than that. He's a pudgy tin horn wannabe dictator, that revels in the trying externalizing his own short comings on the yanqis. He's a threat to no one except perhaps his own people, and maybe not even to them beyond an economic threat.
Oh come on, Everyone knows GPS can't detect obstacles and this gets modded as insightful? Yet rear obstacle avoidance systems is available on many models today, as is adaptive cruise control, and *shockingly* collision avoidance systems.
Not only does this technology exist today, but it is standard on some models.
Go back to putting a six foot wing on your Civic. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Luckily the pain went away after a few more hours, but it was our first glimpse at how poor ER care has become.
It's well known that ER visits have increased because people that do no have health insurance put off seeing a doctor until it becomes an emergency and then visit the ER for non emergency conditions because the ER can't turn you away.
This problem doesn't exist in rest of the industrialized world because of national health insurance.
It's a well known problem, with a well known solution. The far right of the US simply denies there's a problem.
Trouble is...the Federal govt. really doesn't have the constitutional power to mandate that every citizen purchase insurance or anything else really.
You have no understanding of constitutional law.
1. It's interstate commerce. The health insurance companies operate across state lines, and thus are interstate companies. Furthermore, health insurance is an interstate market, which federal government has the power to regulate. This includes single state only companies, as the regulation is part of a comprehensive reform.
2. The "fine" is actually a tax. It's administered through the Internal Revenue Service. This is no different that any other sumptuary tax, which exist for all sorts of behavior where one one (i.e. a polluting company) wants to socialize their costs on the public.
All this 10th Amendment talk is just typical election year ploys to appeal the base of the Republican party. The only thing more laughable is the talk about repeal, because let's face it. Who wants to reopen the donut hole in GWB's prescription drug benefit (Medicare Part D) and say that children should be denied health insurance?
No. The GOP bet the farm that by denying that there was a problem with skyrocketing healthcare costs, people losing everything do to catastrophic healthcare needs, and having their wages reduced by increasing healthcare premiums, that they would win. They failed. They brought nothing to the table.
Given that spam has been around for 32 years now, and with state of the art classifiers, spam really isn't that much of a problem for users. Most "spam" that gets delivered is actually from sites that the user has dealt with. Buy baseball tickets, and it seems like MLB emails you every two weeks. Buy concert tickets online, and you're autosubscribed to a marketing mailing.
While spam may be problem for network administrators, as a user, I simply don't care. It's literally not my problem.
Honestly. Even my parents don't get random spam and phishing attacks.
One could say the same thing about the web.
When it comes down to it, a social network is nothing more than a series of RSS feeds. Only instead of "subscribing" you "friend" them. RSS and OpenID is all you really need. The reason why people don't do this is because people need a hosting service and an easy index to find/add other people. This index (and the recommender system it enables) is what really makes a social network valuable to users.
I wouldn't have a problem with FB and the like being an indexing service like Google, but I do have a problem with them hosting all my data. Zuck says, "You own your data," but doesn't provide a way to export it. As Lessig said, "Code is law."
I would simply be happy if it wasn't all done by *one* company. You know. Competition?