I have an Xbox One. Sometimes, twice in the same month, it'll download a 4.7 GB update. That's almost 2/3 of the 15 GB they're proposing, without me even doing anything past turning on a console and hitting ok.
I notice you didn't throw specific criticism at Rogue One. I agree with you that Disney doesn't understand Star Wars, but I liked Rogue One anyway. It almost felt like Disney accidentally made a good one.
Just coming back here to say thanks for your insightful comment. I'm a bit of an extreme music lover, and I think about these things a lot more (I suspect) than most people, so well considered opinions are always appreciated.
Well, I'm starting to wonder about that. My evidence is only anecdotal, but I keep finding it everywhere. My step son (19) and his friends seem to spend far more time mining older music than listening to new stuff. They're more likely to sit around listening to Led Leppelin albums than anything current. If I walk into a music (instrument) store, I'm almost 100% sure to find some kid sitting there picking out Hotel California, and some other kid trying out an overdrive pedal by mashing out a bunch of AC/DC riffs. Hell, I've overheard groups of kids discussing the upcoming ABBA reunion. When I go to shows these days, the highest turnout of young people seems to be at things like Fleetwood Mac, Journey, Def Leppard. At the clubs, it seems like the best way to get people (of all ages) to hit the dance floor is by playing a 90s Prodigy track, or Blue Monday. The "kids" eat it up.
I love a lot of music, and I'll go see anything. I just went and saw Logic (with Kyle and NF), and I'll probably going to see Childish Gambino in a few weeks. But whenever I go to things like that, I don't see the same level of adoration from the kids. It's more like a casual fun time with the flavor of the week.
When you hear teenagers saying the opposite...asking why 20th century music was so much better, it's kind of odd. I suppose there's always been that segment of youth that tries to be cool, and seem cultured by digging into history. But these days it seems to be the norm, rather than the exception.
Sorry, I meant to say his award was for the Blipverts episode. I saw the movie from the UK, and agree it was better in a lot of ways. I did some digging though, and confirmed that Doug's award was for the American version of it. I have the series from when they released it on DVD a few years ago, and I can't help loving it, despite how ultra-cheesy so much of it was.
He also won an Emmy for sound editing on Max Headroom, in 1987. Specifically based on the Blipverts pilot episode, which I watch all the time, as it's my favorite hour of TV ever made. Going to watch it again now. RIP Doug, and thanks!
One other aspect of it is, she was a female CEO. One of the few prominent onece. If you throw her in jail, especially considering that it would be for actions that everyone knows are standard operating practice in business, then you turn this into an ugly gender issue.
The narrative will become: "The Patriarchy prevents women from becoming CEOs, and punishes them for emulating their male counterparts when they do."
192 kbps? Are you kidding? I can tell the difference almost instantly, and I've proven it in blind tests over and over. Now, I'll admit, I'm only very slight better than pure chance at guessing 320 kbps, but even then, I know that if I ever accidentally load up an album in mp3 instead of FLAC, about 10 - 15 minutes into listening to it, I'll start to feel like something's not quite right about the sound, and I'll end up checking and realizing what happened. OGG at Q10 (variable bitrate that goes up to 640 kbps, averaging 500), I've never been able to discern, except once my ears caught a tiny artifact on something where the original source had tape hiss and a high pitched shaker in the percussion.
I find it's psychological. Whenever I've demonstrated the "impossible ability", I've always described what I heard as the dead-giveaway that I'm listening to an mp3. The other people around will suddenly hear it to and go "oh my god, I hear what you're talking about! How did I never notice that before?! It's awful!"
Of course, I failed as a dev. My comment doesn't compile. Alas, I can't edit it properly. The fixes for the compiler are:
"that harsh of a standard" and
"Every character must be right."
Maybe I've been working too much this weekend, and drinking the whole time. Who knows?
This is the problem I see:
Developers are inherently held to a higher standard than everyone in a dev shop. Their code must pass the parser, the compiler, and execute properly. This means not a single typo. No errant semicolons or brackets. Every character must me right.
Nobody else has that harsh or a standard. I've seen high level PR and corporate releases that have typos in the first sentence. Cringe-worthy stuff. Even the New York Times and Washington Post issue articles with typos in the headlines, daily. The world has become so sloppy, it's unforgivable.
But developers can't get away with this, or the compiler craps out. So by inference, it's assumed that their flawless, meticulous attention to detail is universal, and not subject to question. Hence it falls further and further upon them to do their own internal code reviews, correction of flawed requirements, QA, documentation, and everything else around the code they write. Of course, because everyone else is too lazy and sloppy to produce the same level of results.
I'm in a dev shop now where the dev coders are on the hook for everything from requirements to post-deployment support, and everything in between. It just happened because they're they only people with any attention to detail, and pride in what they do, and any thought beyond putting in 8 hours a day of work and collecting a paycheck.
Welcome to the brave new world.
Not sure what you're saying, but I think you're making my point. When peaceful protests don't work, and only result in you being arrested, put on various "watch lists" or just being outright "disappeared", riots are just your way of saying "I'm so mad I'm going to burn my own house down to teach you a lesson". Soap, ballot, jury, ammo. The 4 boxes of meaningful change. I suspect that some people are getting dangerously close to realizing that the first 3 aren't working. I certainly don't condone violence, but I was just saying that taking any kind of non-violent action without at least expecting that you could end up dead is foolish.
Well, if you're trying to improve your country without lethal force, when it's clearly a given that the people who want to maintain the status quo have no qualms whatsoever about killing you to maintain it, then yes, that's crazy. Unless you specifically want to become a martyr. That's why, even as a citizen of a "free" country, I don't try to organize any kind of change, because I totally suck with ranged weapons.
Maybe it's where we are. I'm in Canada, and I'm in the same boat. As I said above in this thread, everyone I know with an iPhone has problems with it. Dozens of people. For some reason they all want to tell me about it, but I don't have any clue about supporting Apple products.
You know, the odd thing is, every single person I know with an iPhone (too many to count, dozens perhaps?) has all kinds of strange problems with it that they feel compelled to tell me about, I guess because I'm "IT guy". They all say the same thing. It must be just them, because otherwise, everybody would be screaming. My assumption is that there is something severely wrong with iPhone owners.
I had one of these, so there's at least one example of marketing tape drives for home use. I had a few of the 2GB tapes, and used them for backing up data from my audio projects, during the short span before CD-ROM burning was a thing. But generally speaking, you're right. Tapes for home use have never been a marketable "thing"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
- Slacking off is alright, if you balance it with a healthy dose of all-nighters of work to make up for it. Meeting deadlines is all that matters, not pacing.
- Cheating and plagiarization have value, as long as there's a fair balance, and you do it properly. One person can't attend all the classes and do all the assignments, as there aren't enough hours in the day. Early lessons in crowdsourcing, before that was a word.
- Money management. Do I use my pocket change to photocopy those pages from the textbook (I couldn't afford) that I need to study, or do I use it for bus fare so I can get home and get some sleep for the first time in 72 hours?
- Learning how to learn, as others have said.
- Women will only care about how tall, rich, and physically attractive you are, for many, many years to come. Plan on being shunned for the next couple decades (in my personal case, at least)
- Bureaucratic bullshit is a fact of life. Deal with it.
I'm sure there's more, but there's my top handful.
I don't know about online, since I haven't tried it, but I'll tell you, there's nothing like sitting at a dinner party, having three women arrive and sit across from you, have an engaging 2+ hour conversation with all three of them practically competing for your attention, all but ignoring the other men at the table...and then when it's time to leave, you all stand up, and you see their smiles fade just the slightest bit, and know that none of them will be calling you. I can't even count the number of times something like that had happened. I did manage, after many years, to find a woman who doesn't care that I'm short, but to say that it's an invalid point, well...I'm glad you think so, but I beg to differ.
Glad somebody came here to say this, as I was going to point out the same obvious fact. Even being relatively well off, a "nice" guy with a diversity of interests, etc. matters little when you're 5'5". I know this from +40 years of experience. I have so many amazing lifelong friends who think I'm an awesome guy, but during the periods where I was single for years, I was very cognizant of what the "deal-breaker" was. Study after study after study has proven this.
I know this to be true. I have a Fiio X3, and I notice that for a couple of the particularly cheap micro-SD cards I put in it, I can hear some weird noise that sounds a little like cell phone interference when I'm playing files off them. Of course, I have to have it cranked, and only notice it during the extremely quiet parts sections of my music. So there is something to this, as I can imagine it's hard to properly shield the output of the DAC properly on small hardware like this. Still, I'm not about to make a case for spending a lot of extra money, since most of my decent (ie. Sandisk and Kingston) micro-SD cards are fine.
I have a 1080p projector that I'm projecting onto a 116" screen. At 1080p, the results are acceptable to me, and it's the only video I ever look at that would really get much of a noticeable benefit from being 4K. So, when 4K projectors drop under $1600 CAD, I'll start to be interested.
I will attempt to answer. I went through a period over the last 3 or 4 years where I read a dozen PKD novels, and all 4 of the short stories collections. I have to say that MitHC was my least favorite of all of that. It was extremely bland for the most part, drawn out, and lacking in plot. The one idea it had that was interesting was the "alternate history where real history is a subversive work of alternate history fiction". But that certainly didn't carry the story through 275 pages. I read it under 2 years ago, and I've already forgotten most of it, as have most people I've talked to about it. Even his really obscure works like "Eye in the Sky" were far more memorable and interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had points to mod this up. Nicely done!
I have an Xbox One. Sometimes, twice in the same month, it'll download a 4.7 GB update. That's almost 2/3 of the 15 GB they're proposing, without me even doing anything past turning on a console and hitting ok.
I notice you didn't throw specific criticism at Rogue One. I agree with you that Disney doesn't understand Star Wars, but I liked Rogue One anyway. It almost felt like Disney accidentally made a good one.
Dammit, I wish I had mod points. But what's the down-mod for "too funny and made me spray my beer" ?
Just coming back here to say thanks for your insightful comment. I'm a bit of an extreme music lover, and I think about these things a lot more (I suspect) than most people, so well considered opinions are always appreciated.
Well, I'm starting to wonder about that. My evidence is only anecdotal, but I keep finding it everywhere. My step son (19) and his friends seem to spend far more time mining older music than listening to new stuff. They're more likely to sit around listening to Led Leppelin albums than anything current. If I walk into a music (instrument) store, I'm almost 100% sure to find some kid sitting there picking out Hotel California, and some other kid trying out an overdrive pedal by mashing out a bunch of AC/DC riffs. Hell, I've overheard groups of kids discussing the upcoming ABBA reunion. When I go to shows these days, the highest turnout of young people seems to be at things like Fleetwood Mac, Journey, Def Leppard. At the clubs, it seems like the best way to get people (of all ages) to hit the dance floor is by playing a 90s Prodigy track, or Blue Monday. The "kids" eat it up.
I love a lot of music, and I'll go see anything. I just went and saw Logic (with Kyle and NF), and I'll probably going to see Childish Gambino in a few weeks. But whenever I go to things like that, I don't see the same level of adoration from the kids. It's more like a casual fun time with the flavor of the week.
When you hear teenagers saying the opposite...asking why 20th century music was so much better, it's kind of odd. I suppose there's always been that segment of youth that tries to be cool, and seem cultured by digging into history. But these days it seems to be the norm, rather than the exception.
Just my random observation...
Sorry, I meant to say his award was for the Blipverts episode. I saw the movie from the UK, and agree it was better in a lot of ways. I did some digging though, and confirmed that Doug's award was for the American version of it. I have the series from when they released it on DVD a few years ago, and I can't help loving it, despite how ultra-cheesy so much of it was.
He also won an Emmy for sound editing on Max Headroom, in 1987. Specifically based on the Blipverts pilot episode, which I watch all the time, as it's my favorite hour of TV ever made. Going to watch it again now. RIP Doug, and thanks!
One other aspect of it is, she was a female CEO. One of the few prominent onece. If you throw her in jail, especially considering that it would be for actions that everyone knows are standard operating practice in business, then you turn this into an ugly gender issue.
The narrative will become: "The Patriarchy prevents women from becoming CEOs, and punishes them for emulating their male counterparts when they do."
Just watch...
192 kbps? Are you kidding? I can tell the difference almost instantly, and I've proven it in blind tests over and over. Now, I'll admit, I'm only very slight better than pure chance at guessing 320 kbps, but even then, I know that if I ever accidentally load up an album in mp3 instead of FLAC, about 10 - 15 minutes into listening to it, I'll start to feel like something's not quite right about the sound, and I'll end up checking and realizing what happened. OGG at Q10 (variable bitrate that goes up to 640 kbps, averaging 500), I've never been able to discern, except once my ears caught a tiny artifact on something where the original source had tape hiss and a high pitched shaker in the percussion.
I find it's psychological. Whenever I've demonstrated the "impossible ability", I've always described what I heard as the dead-giveaway that I'm listening to an mp3. The other people around will suddenly hear it to and go "oh my god, I hear what you're talking about! How did I never notice that before?! It's awful!"
Of course, I failed as a dev. My comment doesn't compile. Alas, I can't edit it properly. The fixes for the compiler are:
"that harsh of a standard" and
"Every character must be right."
Maybe I've been working too much this weekend, and drinking the whole time. Who knows?
This is the problem I see: Developers are inherently held to a higher standard than everyone in a dev shop. Their code must pass the parser, the compiler, and execute properly. This means not a single typo. No errant semicolons or brackets. Every character must me right. Nobody else has that harsh or a standard. I've seen high level PR and corporate releases that have typos in the first sentence. Cringe-worthy stuff. Even the New York Times and Washington Post issue articles with typos in the headlines, daily. The world has become so sloppy, it's unforgivable. But developers can't get away with this, or the compiler craps out. So by inference, it's assumed that their flawless, meticulous attention to detail is universal, and not subject to question. Hence it falls further and further upon them to do their own internal code reviews, correction of flawed requirements, QA, documentation, and everything else around the code they write. Of course, because everyone else is too lazy and sloppy to produce the same level of results. I'm in a dev shop now where the dev coders are on the hook for everything from requirements to post-deployment support, and everything in between. It just happened because they're they only people with any attention to detail, and pride in what they do, and any thought beyond putting in 8 hours a day of work and collecting a paycheck. Welcome to the brave new world.
This is true of a lot of old hardware. Not just computers. Never trash a TR-808 drum machine, or a Technics 1200 turntable, for example.
Not sure what you're saying, but I think you're making my point. When peaceful protests don't work, and only result in you being arrested, put on various "watch lists" or just being outright "disappeared", riots are just your way of saying "I'm so mad I'm going to burn my own house down to teach you a lesson". Soap, ballot, jury, ammo. The 4 boxes of meaningful change. I suspect that some people are getting dangerously close to realizing that the first 3 aren't working. I certainly don't condone violence, but I was just saying that taking any kind of non-violent action without at least expecting that you could end up dead is foolish.
Well, if you're trying to improve your country without lethal force, when it's clearly a given that the people who want to maintain the status quo have no qualms whatsoever about killing you to maintain it, then yes, that's crazy. Unless you specifically want to become a martyr. That's why, even as a citizen of a "free" country, I don't try to organize any kind of change, because I totally suck with ranged weapons.
Maybe it's where we are. I'm in Canada, and I'm in the same boat. As I said above in this thread, everyone I know with an iPhone has problems with it. Dozens of people. For some reason they all want to tell me about it, but I don't have any clue about supporting Apple products.
You know, the odd thing is, every single person I know with an iPhone (too many to count, dozens perhaps?) has all kinds of strange problems with it that they feel compelled to tell me about, I guess because I'm "IT guy". They all say the same thing. It must be just them, because otherwise, everybody would be screaming. My assumption is that there is something severely wrong with iPhone owners.
Amen. I've had a Blackberry Q10 for 1.5 years now. This one time, it crashed, and I had to reboot it. Once. I was shocked when it happened.
I had one of these, so there's at least one example of marketing tape drives for home use. I had a few of the 2GB tapes, and used them for backing up data from my audio projects, during the short span before CD-ROM burning was a thing. But generally speaking, you're right. Tapes for home use have never been a marketable "thing"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Off the top of my head..
- Slacking off is alright, if you balance it with a healthy dose of all-nighters of work to make up for it. Meeting deadlines is all that matters, not pacing.
- Cheating and plagiarization have value, as long as there's a fair balance, and you do it properly. One person can't attend all the classes and do all the assignments, as there aren't enough hours in the day. Early lessons in crowdsourcing, before that was a word.
- Money management. Do I use my pocket change to photocopy those pages from the textbook (I couldn't afford) that I need to study, or do I use it for bus fare so I can get home and get some sleep for the first time in 72 hours?
- Learning how to learn, as others have said.
- Women will only care about how tall, rich, and physically attractive you are, for many, many years to come. Plan on being shunned for the next couple decades (in my personal case, at least)
- Bureaucratic bullshit is a fact of life. Deal with it.
I'm sure there's more, but there's my top handful.
I don't know about online, since I haven't tried it, but I'll tell you, there's nothing like sitting at a dinner party, having three women arrive and sit across from you, have an engaging 2+ hour conversation with all three of them practically competing for your attention, all but ignoring the other men at the table...and then when it's time to leave, you all stand up, and you see their smiles fade just the slightest bit, and know that none of them will be calling you. I can't even count the number of times something like that had happened. I did manage, after many years, to find a woman who doesn't care that I'm short, but to say that it's an invalid point, well...I'm glad you think so, but I beg to differ.
Glad somebody came here to say this, as I was going to point out the same obvious fact. Even being relatively well off, a "nice" guy with a diversity of interests, etc. matters little when you're 5'5". I know this from +40 years of experience. I have so many amazing lifelong friends who think I'm an awesome guy, but during the periods where I was single for years, I was very cognizant of what the "deal-breaker" was. Study after study after study has proven this.
I know this to be true. I have a Fiio X3, and I notice that for a couple of the particularly cheap micro-SD cards I put in it, I can hear some weird noise that sounds a little like cell phone interference when I'm playing files off them. Of course, I have to have it cranked, and only notice it during the extremely quiet parts sections of my music. So there is something to this, as I can imagine it's hard to properly shield the output of the DAC properly on small hardware like this. Still, I'm not about to make a case for spending a lot of extra money, since most of my decent (ie. Sandisk and Kingston) micro-SD cards are fine.
I have a 1080p projector that I'm projecting onto a 116" screen. At 1080p, the results are acceptable to me, and it's the only video I ever look at that would really get much of a noticeable benefit from being 4K. So, when 4K projectors drop under $1600 CAD, I'll start to be interested.
I will attempt to answer. I went through a period over the last 3 or 4 years where I read a dozen PKD novels, and all 4 of the short stories collections. I have to say that MitHC was my least favorite of all of that. It was extremely bland for the most part, drawn out, and lacking in plot. The one idea it had that was interesting was the "alternate history where real history is a subversive work of alternate history fiction". But that certainly didn't carry the story through 275 pages. I read it under 2 years ago, and I've already forgotten most of it, as have most people I've talked to about it. Even his really obscure works like "Eye in the Sky" were far more memorable and interesting.