I think Zappa mostly appeals to people who appreciate weirdness for weirdness' sake, honestly. I like some of his stuff, the rest is just too strange.
No, if you want weirdness for weirdness' sake, listen to Captain Beefheart. Zappa was weird and was often categorized as "comedy music", but he was at heart a modern avant garde composer with heavy classical and R&B influences. The fact that he made rock and roll was because "nobody ever made any money playing classical music" (can't remember source of the quote).
The guy was a genius, but of a flavor that most people would spit out and stay away from because it tasted weird. As others have said, you either get it or you don't, but no fault if you don't because it isn't easily consumed.
OK, so someone was listening to Frank's music and thinking about how to make a Slashdot story about it. Some story moderator thought it was cool to accept.
I can appreciate that someone thought about these things and tied them together into a Zappa reference. Hey, I can get into that and I'm as excited to see it on here as CmdrTaco was when he first posted a story related to The Who 10 years or so ago (no, I'm not going to look it up and hyperlink it! grin). But what does annoy me is the claim that he had anything more to do with Linux than Beethoven, Taco Bell, Ford Pintos or rubber dog biscuits.
C'mon. Zappa's struggles over the years had nothing to do with computers or freedom of the tools he had. It was all about business, musician unions and satirical observations of "the world".
Sure, I could come up with something like, "hey! Opus the penguin from Bloom County was all about the position in society of the Linux user, and obviously because of the penguin reference!". Why not. But if anything, Frank had over 60 studio albums of material released and I'm sure one could make a lot more connections if they thought about it.
The author of the story says that Apple was influenced by LSD. While Jobs has been on record with the statement that it was one of the most important things he did in his life, I'm not ready to chalk up more than a few small points of that company's history to it. People claim to have grand visions and revelations under the influence, so maybe Jobs was just good at recording or remembering his revelations rather than just grabbing a bag of doritos and sitting on the couch listening to Pink Floyd. There were a lot of other things that contributed to Apple's success that had nothing to do with drugs or brainstorms thereof (see: Xerox, Homebrew Computer Club, IBM, Palm, etc).
So how is Linux influenced by Zappa? Linux was influenced by the entire history of UNIX and other commercial operating systems, not some avant garde musician. As well, why would he be using Linux? As others have mentioned, I'm sure he would be using whatever the best tool is. He made heavy use of the Synclavier back in the day because it was THE tool for electronic music and was capable of playing the complex compositions he defined and had someone program in for him (see: G-Spot Tornado and just about everything on Civilization Phaze III). I appreciate the progress that we've made in regards to music production on Linux, but from everything I've ever read about Frank, he's not going to use Linux for music production because of the philosophy. Yes, he was a tinkerer, but there isn't anything about Linux that you couldn't do with another platform when it comes to music.
Frank dedicated his time to his music and his family. I honestly don't think he'd have time for the difficulties involved with using Linux when he could just buy a Mac for Pro Tools or Digital Performer. Besides, I think I saw Mac Book Pro or two at a Dweezil Zappa show recently;-)
Very fair points by the both of you. While I don't think I can speak for Florence, I can at least say the reason why New Yorkers probably get a bit more aggravated is that this kind of thing happens all year around at all hours of the day. There is no "off season" in NY.
Tell you what, though.. keep letting me drink the blueberry wine and I'll leave you alone next time you're staring at the high rises;-)
This is a picture up 5th avenue just south of 23rd street. The building to the right is the Flatiron building and is a heavily congested tourist area.
Frankly, I'm not surprised that someone picked this spot. Every day that you walk through that part of town (especially on the north side of 23rd street) and you will find hordes of people taking random pictures and gawking at the building and surroundings. I hate to be cynical, but it starts to make you think that every person who shelled out cash for a SLR thinks they're getting some creation by focusing on a nose with the building in the background, and the 300 people with point-and-shoots getting their friends in the shot.
But I'd be more annoyed at the thought of the city wanting to spend $31mm on shutting down 34th street so that people can also gawk at the Empire State Building. Who does this serve? Tourists. Tell you what - you pay me $31mm and I'll close the street for you and even throw in some tables and chairs.
Who cares about the PC - the Amiga had colour done right, right from the start.
No it didn't. It had this hack mode (that was really clever, but most definitely not "done right") where it would change the color pallate on every scan line to simulate higher color depth.
Ermmm.. you don't know much about the Amiga technically then. The hack you're referring to is HAM mode which was one of numerous graphics modes that the Amiga supported. Natively on the 1985 Amiga 1000 was a 16 color true 640x400 mode (interlaced; half the 'Y' non-interlaced). This is from a palette of 4096 colors. This was no hack and didn't work at all like HAM.
For comparison around this time:
Amiga 1000 (1985, about $1200) supported 320x200 up to 640x400 in 16-bit native colors plus the HAM mode. Further tricks taking advantage of the hardware (like multiple screens in AmigaOS) could virtually display more because of the flexibility of the copper chip.
Apple IIgs (1986, about $999 at introduction) supported a similar capability as the Amiga. However, it's "high color" mode was inferior to the Amiga's HAM as it worked by letting you change the 16-color palette for every scan line thus limiting you to a maximum of roughly 3200 colors unique maximum if you didn't duplicate colors across two scanlines.
Macintosh II (1987, about $4000 without graphics or monitor) did support 8-bit color and up to six monitors. However, the proprietary equipment costs were $350 for the 1/2/4-bit adapter base plus another $100 for the 8-bit upgrade and another $700 for monitor.
IBM CGA (1981) was a joke. Tandy 1000 and EGA (1987?) was better, but didn't reach the Apple or Amiga status.
Worth noting that there WAS eventually a 24-bit color adapter for the Mac II, but it wasn't available until quite a bit later.
So I'm not sure how Apple did it any more right than the Amiga here other than the video being upgradable with a card, but then again, we're talking two completely different architectures.
Unfortunately, wake me up when Open Office writer supports a proper "outline mode". If you've ever had to write documentation, this is the most valuable feature of a MS Word.
I DO use OO at home, but I'm not doing anything serious with it there.
I think it was attempted in the past but didn't prove very useful.
Two things to realize:
The bandwidth of the graphics memory is extremely fast, but that doesn't mean it is fast to the rest of the system. I don't believe there is DMA to the entire video RAM on video cards (otherwise, your 1GB GDDR3 card would eat 1/3rd of your 32-bit OS's usable memory space). In other words, you have to pump it through some I/O window, I'd imagine.
Flip the GPU into any 3D mode and there is the chance that it'll want to claim the memory your virtual disk is using. Considering Vista, Win7 and OS X do this to render their desktops, this might be a limitation.
I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I remember thinking about the idea in the past and possibly seeing that someone tried and failed to come up with something useful.
Not exactly for the "efficiency". The Apple 1/2/3 lines' 6502 CPU consumed the same amount of electricity regardless of being idle or not. If you weren't do anything, the CPU was in some kind of "busy loop" waiting for the next activity to happen. There was no "sleep until an interrupt happens and then wake up the CPU" like more modern devices (e.g. later x86, Motorola 68k, etc). The only exception was if the disk drive was used, since those would only spin up when necessary. However, that was not the cause of the heat issue described.
I'm not even sure about the awesomeness of the eBook reader... any chance you can see this at all in the bright sun on a beach? That's one big criteria for eBook readers in my mind. A big reason for an eBook reader -- it's much more portable than your PC. It has to at the very least run all day, and needs to work in bright light, outdoors, etc.
Dave, I completely agree with you on the "bright sun on the beach" point, but what would the point be for Apple to just release another eBook reader? The market already has three great examples filling this niche. Of course, I'm taking the definition of a device that uses a very low-power, sunlight friendly screen like we've seen with the Kindle.
Yeah, the iPad does eBooks, but they're promoting it as a leisure device for reading/watching/browsing content. There are plenty of times that I wouldn't need a full-on laptop at home (think: just clicking around, very light typing), and going off to the (home) office to use my computer is antisocial to my family. While I don't personally think I need one of these devices, I certainly see the niche they're providing a solution for.
Going back to the beach sunlight point, I'm sure that while you could take this outside and such, they're not seeing it for that. I'm sure it glares like a mirror in the sun! However, something like this is going to spend 99% of its time in the home, on a commute, in a car/train/plane. The screen will be adequate.
I don't see myself buying one, but I would certainly use it for these purposes if I happened to have one at my disposal.
Give me a Pentium 3, 512MB of PC3200, a decent GPU, and some people that know how to write tight optimized assembly code, and I'd laugh at anything anybody puts out today. The only reason we need more of anything, is because most people simply don't know how to program and rely upon high-level abstracted development interfaces and languages to achieve the same performance on beastly hardware that we got using pure assembler and plug-in math co-processors a decade ago.
Now apply that to video encoding.
Yes, there are more abstractions and sloppier coders (lord knows I see it every day), but you can't say that the architectural improvements and additions of vector operations are pointless in comparison to a tight Pentium III coder.
Of course, I'll disregard the NetBurst P4 architecture - just skip over that horrid mess.
I think this is being confused with the Sony Walkman which didn't technically support MP3s when it first came out, only the ATRAC format. However, you could convert your MP3s to ATRAC, but where's the fun in that?
Oops. Yeah, it has since moved to http://dronefone.com/wtc/wtc.html since tribrothers went out of business (no affiliation with me other than I helped them build an initial version of their website).
I can concur that the only thing working was the internet. In fact, since I couldn't make any phone calls (except, by miracle, one call to my family to tell them I was alive!) the only way I could communicate to the world was through the dial-up connection in my apartment. The overload of people asking me on AIM what happened and was I OK drove me to write an email which ultimately became widespread (and noted on Slashdot). Wasn't a good day, but it was invaluable to have an internet connection when all other means of communicating were out of commission.
Forget getting a cell phone signal. Forget calling outside of your local PBX. Local call to your neighbor or ISP? sure.
actually, you'll notice the problem more when you're playing games that do different actions based on left versus right click. For example, in an FPS where left fire is shoot and right click is change weapon, you HAVE to lift your fingers to change weapons.
Before you say, "well, you're just making sure that you really want to change weapons!", remember that sometimes you don't have the twitch response time to think about it.
I own a Mighty Mouse, but it is packed in the drawer and I use an older Microsoft-type Mouse when playing games and a Kensington track ball for everything else.
Yeah, but this happens with almost every revision of their hardware. If you look at the historical specs of Apple hardware, they've gone back and forth almost every year. On top of that, for the PowerMac / Mac Pro (read: you have a choice of graphics chip), they've always offered nVidia and ATi options.
Lots of people like to save their emails - some kind of window into what was happening in your life at that point. Of course, depends heavily on what kind of content is in your inbox...
BTW I was wrong about the needle hovering over the videorecord. It touches the groove for purposes of tracking, and is moved by tiny motors... kinda similar to how a floppy head is moved back-and-forth.
So I guess this would be similar to linear tracking turntables, a technology I've only seen on my stereo and one other's in the past. Basically the tone arm doesn't ride the groove, it is "positioned" to be in the middle of the groove as best it can. The arm slides along the back wall of the player instead of a typical single pivot on the back corner and is driven by a motor to move left/right. The movement is triggered by the tone arm moving a very small percentage away from 90 degrees perpendicular. By doing this, you get much wider frequency range out of the vinyl, the neither the record or the needle wear down as fast since there is less friction on these parts. This, combined with a simple sensor to detect the gaps, allowed for "CD-like programming" of your record and skipping to the next song.
I imagine that the CED devices used this technology simply because they needed the wider frequency spectrum, allowed for "fast forwarding" in the movie and also allowed the records to last longer.
I never really looked closely at one, I just remember seeing them in the A/V section of a Sam Goody back in the early 1980's.
There is one difference that will move corporations away from XP, however: 64-bit.
Yeah, you could make the argument that corporate customers don't run that much software and that the extended memory space afforded by 64-bit only matters to people dealing with audio/video/photo or developers. However, for large corporations with IT departments developing internal software (say large banks and trading software) they tend to develop larger and larger footprint applications. With the modern popular frameworks, you're seeing much larger application sizes and thus that 2GB of RAM starts becoming a bit of a liability.
At least, I know I see this every day at my job. I can't wait to get SOMETHING other than 32-bit XP.
They've offered to take your Wii in for repair (basically a motherboard replacement), but if they find that you have the Homebrew channel installed (or any other "hack"), then they will charge you the $120 or whatever it is for service. They will only waive the fee if the machine is clean of any exploits.
Worth noting because the speculation is that the only reason for the latest ROM release was to thwart homebrewers.
When I bought a Dell Dimension XPS 200n back in 1996, it came with Windows NT 3.51 and a free upgrade to Windows NT 4.0 when it was released. One day, I just received the CD-ROM in the mail! It's unfortunate that they've now changed their policies when most people would be just fine with a simple cardboard mailer and be done with it.
How about installing Firefox as a second browser? It doesn't require administrative privileges to install as long as you install for yourself and don't try to put it in c:\Program Files or some other protected directory.
IE6? Hate it, but some intranet sites at work simply require it.
QuickTake? Gaahh... I borrowed one from work 14 years ago or so and took a bunch of photos with it. Glad to have them, but looking back now, the quality is HORRIBLE. The colors were right and all, but the pictures are so pixelated as to be almost a joke. Then again, I took most of the pictures as 320x240 because I couldn't stand taking only 8 pictures before reconnecting to the computer. (you could take 32 in the 320 mode).
Slashdot Mirror
No, if you want weirdness for weirdness' sake, listen to Captain Beefheart. Zappa was weird and was often categorized as "comedy music", but he was at heart a modern avant garde composer with heavy classical and R&B influences. The fact that he made rock and roll was because "nobody ever made any money playing classical music" (can't remember source of the quote).
The guy was a genius, but of a flavor that most people would spit out and stay away from because it tasted weird. As others have said, you either get it or you don't, but no fault if you don't because it isn't easily consumed.
No, that'd be "Pick Me, I'm Clean".
C'mon. Zappa's struggles over the years had nothing to do with computers or freedom of the tools he had. It was all about business, musician unions and satirical observations of "the world".
Sure, I could come up with something like, "hey! Opus the penguin from Bloom County was all about the position in society of the Linux user, and obviously because of the penguin reference!". Why not. But if anything, Frank had over 60 studio albums of material released and I'm sure one could make a lot more connections if they thought about it.
The author of the story says that Apple was influenced by LSD. While Jobs has been on record with the statement that it was one of the most important things he did in his life, I'm not ready to chalk up more than a few small points of that company's history to it. People claim to have grand visions and revelations under the influence, so maybe Jobs was just good at recording or remembering his revelations rather than just grabbing a bag of doritos and sitting on the couch listening to Pink Floyd. There were a lot of other things that contributed to Apple's success that had nothing to do with drugs or brainstorms thereof (see: Xerox, Homebrew Computer Club, IBM, Palm, etc).
So how is Linux influenced by Zappa? Linux was influenced by the entire history of UNIX and other commercial operating systems, not some avant garde musician. As well, why would he be using Linux? As others have mentioned, I'm sure he would be using whatever the best tool is. He made heavy use of the Synclavier back in the day because it was THE tool for electronic music and was capable of playing the complex compositions he defined and had someone program in for him (see: G-Spot Tornado and just about everything on Civilization Phaze III). I appreciate the progress that we've made in regards to music production on Linux, but from everything I've ever read about Frank, he's not going to use Linux for music production because of the philosophy. Yes, he was a tinkerer, but there isn't anything about Linux that you couldn't do with another platform when it comes to music.
Frank dedicated his time to his music and his family. I honestly don't think he'd have time for the difficulties involved with using Linux when he could just buy a Mac for Pro Tools or Digital Performer. Besides, I think I saw Mac Book Pro or two at a Dweezil Zappa show recently ;-)
Tell you what, though.. keep letting me drink the blueberry wine and I'll leave you alone next time you're staring at the high rises ;-)
Frankly, I'm not surprised that someone picked this spot. Every day that you walk through that part of town (especially on the north side of 23rd street) and you will find hordes of people taking random pictures and gawking at the building and surroundings. I hate to be cynical, but it starts to make you think that every person who shelled out cash for a SLR thinks they're getting some creation by focusing on a nose with the building in the background, and the 300 people with point-and-shoots getting their friends in the shot.
But I'd be more annoyed at the thought of the city wanting to spend $31mm on shutting down 34th street so that people can also gawk at the Empire State Building. Who does this serve? Tourists. Tell you what - you pay me $31mm and I'll close the street for you and even throw in some tables and chairs.
Ermmm.. you don't know much about the Amiga technically then. The hack you're referring to is HAM mode which was one of numerous graphics modes that the Amiga supported. Natively on the 1985 Amiga 1000 was a 16 color true 640x400 mode (interlaced; half the 'Y' non-interlaced). This is from a palette of 4096 colors. This was no hack and didn't work at all like HAM.
For comparison around this time:
Worth noting that there WAS eventually a 24-bit color adapter for the Mac II, but it wasn't available until quite a bit later.
So I'm not sure how Apple did it any more right than the Amiga here other than the video being upgradable with a card, but then again, we're talking two completely different architectures.
I DO use OO at home, but I'm not doing anything serious with it there.
Two things to realize:
I don't claim to be an expert on this, but I remember thinking about the idea in the past and possibly seeing that someone tried and failed to come up with something useful.
Not exactly for the "efficiency". The Apple 1/2/3 lines' 6502 CPU consumed the same amount of electricity regardless of being idle or not. If you weren't do anything, the CPU was in some kind of "busy loop" waiting for the next activity to happen. There was no "sleep until an interrupt happens and then wake up the CPU" like more modern devices (e.g. later x86, Motorola 68k, etc). The only exception was if the disk drive was used, since those would only spin up when necessary. However, that was not the cause of the heat issue described.
Dave, I completely agree with you on the "bright sun on the beach" point, but what would the point be for Apple to just release another eBook reader? The market already has three great examples filling this niche. Of course, I'm taking the definition of a device that uses a very low-power, sunlight friendly screen like we've seen with the Kindle.
Yeah, the iPad does eBooks, but they're promoting it as a leisure device for reading/watching/browsing content. There are plenty of times that I wouldn't need a full-on laptop at home (think: just clicking around, very light typing), and going off to the (home) office to use my computer is antisocial to my family. While I don't personally think I need one of these devices, I certainly see the niche they're providing a solution for.
Going back to the beach sunlight point, I'm sure that while you could take this outside and such, they're not seeing it for that. I'm sure it glares like a mirror in the sun! However, something like this is going to spend 99% of its time in the home, on a commute, in a car/train/plane. The screen will be adequate.
I don't see myself buying one, but I would certainly use it for these purposes if I happened to have one at my disposal.
Now apply that to video encoding.
Yes, there are more abstractions and sloppier coders (lord knows I see it every day), but you can't say that the architectural improvements and additions of vector operations are pointless in comparison to a tight Pentium III coder.
Of course, I'll disregard the NetBurst P4 architecture - just skip over that horrid mess.
I think this is being confused with the Sony Walkman which didn't technically support MP3s when it first came out, only the ATRAC format. However, you could convert your MP3s to ATRAC, but where's the fun in that?
Oops. Yeah, it has since moved to http://dronefone.com/wtc/wtc.html since tribrothers went out of business (no affiliation with me other than I helped them build an initial version of their website).
Forget getting a cell phone signal. Forget calling outside of your local PBX. Local call to your neighbor or ISP? sure.
Before you say, "well, you're just making sure that you really want to change weapons!", remember that sometimes you don't have the twitch response time to think about it.
I own a Mighty Mouse, but it is packed in the drawer and I use an older Microsoft-type Mouse when playing games and a Kensington track ball for everything else.
If you have PalmOS, I suggest Strip. There is also an iPhone version, but I don't know that platform very well.
Yeah, but this happens with almost every revision of their hardware. If you look at the historical specs of Apple hardware, they've gone back and forth almost every year. On top of that, for the PowerMac / Mac Pro (read: you have a choice of graphics chip), they've always offered nVidia and ATi options.
Lots of people like to save their emails - some kind of window into what was happening in your life at that point. Of course, depends heavily on what kind of content is in your inbox...
So I guess this would be similar to linear tracking turntables, a technology I've only seen on my stereo and one other's in the past. Basically the tone arm doesn't ride the groove, it is "positioned" to be in the middle of the groove as best it can. The arm slides along the back wall of the player instead of a typical single pivot on the back corner and is driven by a motor to move left/right. The movement is triggered by the tone arm moving a very small percentage away from 90 degrees perpendicular. By doing this, you get much wider frequency range out of the vinyl, the neither the record or the needle wear down as fast since there is less friction on these parts. This, combined with a simple sensor to detect the gaps, allowed for "CD-like programming" of your record and skipping to the next song.
I imagine that the CED devices used this technology simply because they needed the wider frequency spectrum, allowed for "fast forwarding" in the movie and also allowed the records to last longer.
I never really looked closely at one, I just remember seeing them in the A/V section of a Sam Goody back in the early 1980's.
Yeah, you could make the argument that corporate customers don't run that much software and that the extended memory space afforded by 64-bit only matters to people dealing with audio/video/photo or developers. However, for large corporations with IT departments developing internal software (say large banks and trading software) they tend to develop larger and larger footprint applications. With the modern popular frameworks, you're seeing much larger application sizes and thus that 2GB of RAM starts becoming a bit of a liability.
At least, I know I see this every day at my job. I can't wait to get SOMETHING other than 32-bit XP.
Worth noting because the speculation is that the only reason for the latest ROM release was to thwart homebrewers.
When I bought a Dell Dimension XPS 200n back in 1996, it came with Windows NT 3.51 and a free upgrade to Windows NT 4.0 when it was released. One day, I just received the CD-ROM in the mail! It's unfortunate that they've now changed their policies when most people would be just fine with a simple cardboard mailer and be done with it.
IE6? Hate it, but some intranet sites at work simply require it.
Still, it was a neat device for the time.
So... you come here often?