So, are the ~50% of 'Americans' who think that the first amendment goes to far the same ~50% who don't know how long it takes the Earth to go around the Sun? Can't they just move to a country with a more opressive government (or a planet with a different length year)?
Even without a known/consistent set of times for commercials to run (although most shows are cut into predictable length chunks) or an automatic way of detecting transitions, if some people were willing to watch a show and produce an 'edit script' with marks at the commercial break beginnings and ends, you could set up a network to distribute and apply the edit scripts to shows that people had recorded themselves. This way you only transmit a few bytes of script, not a whole program. You'd need a way to time synch the edit script with the recording, but if the PVR can time synch on the network thats no problem. If not, you may need to include some kind of signature derived from the first few frames of the show. Of course people would probably try to buy legislation preventing this, but it's just a more advanced method than 'dude, right after it fades to black, hold FF for 14.3 seconds.' You might also want some kind of karma-like system in place to rate user's ability to provide good edit scripts, to prevent TV stations from distributing fake edit scripts which skip the show and play the commercials, or advertisers' distributing edit scripts which skip everyone else's commercials...
One of the saving graces of the NYC subway is that, for the most part, people pretty much shut the fuck up.
Perhaps you enjoy reading and re-reading ads and subway maps, but not everyone considers sitting in silence to be the most constructive use of their time. Assumably you wouldn't begrudge me a conversation with the person sitting next to me, so until you want to engage me in an interesting and stimulating conversation (about polite use of cell phones, perhaps), i'd appreciate being allowed to talk on a cell phone as long as i'm not unnecessarily loud or obnoxious about it. Besides, if you really have something which is a better use of everyone's time than talking to whomever they want, we won't need to ban cell phones: everyone will just do your thing.
And as long as i'm ranting, i'll the same thing is applicable in general. You don't need to be upset by people walking around talking on cell phones unless 1) you would be upset by them walking around talking to another person (in which you need help) or 2) they are being really loud, obnoxious, or dangerously distracted, or 3) nonstandard reasons like they're causing radio interference (which should be an FCC issue) or they're talking to your wife (again not the phone's fault).
Personally, i think cell phones are useful for talking to people during time which would otherwise be useless (ie transit). I think they're also useful for getting in touch with people. I do find it amazing that my mom carries a cell phone and won't turn it on, but expects me to able to find her in croweded (1000+ people) places. Maybe i'm just lame (well, not maybe, i am), but the off chance that one of my friends wants to talk to me is worth the risk that i have to spend 30 seconds of my time helping a colleague with something. If you refuse to carry a communication device because you don't want Work communicating with you, maybe you need to have a discussion with Work./rant
ohmigod. not to be a whiny bitch, but maybe you could have tried that in esperanto first? or whatever it takes to write in readable english. your sentences make my head swim, dude.
It would stop me. I don't try to be an asshole (usually), i'm just forgetful. I tend to switch to silent when i go to a movie/lecture whatever, leave it on silent until i miss a call, switch it back to ring until it inturrupts someone, switch to silent. rinse repeat.
What i'd like to see, and haven't seen mentioned yet, is a standard for cell phones to switch to vibrate/standby/whatever upon recieving a 'silence beacon' signal. The phone would just have a 3rd setting: ring, silent, or auto. If it comes in range of a silence beacon, it switches to silent. When it goes out of range, it can switch back to ring. It's voluntary, so if you're expecting life or death communications you can leave it on ring, but people are still free to take you phone and throw it. This, along with a ringer schedule to switch to vibrate during meetings and classes, should help a lot if people are willing to use them.
There's an article about the evil of barbie here, including the 'math is hard' bit. The Simpsons episode (514 1F012 Original Airdate: 2/17/94) was social commentary.
Alesis makes bad-ass 8-channel 20-bit digital audio recorders like the XT20 which store data on S-VHS tapes just fine . If you're just tuning in, the beauty of digital is that you can optimize your information storage/transmission for the medium/channel. (this is why Shannon is so cool) If you know the effective storage capacity of a piece of magnetic tape which is getting old has been stretched a bit, you encode the data at that capacity. That way the media can degrade a bit and you don't loose anything. If you use a nice robust encoding method, the media can degrade beyond that point and you still dont loose much. If you wanted to use regular VHS instead of a higher capacity tape, you just run the tape faster and don't pack the bits as tightly (probably not an issue as there's no mention in the article of using _actual_ VHS tapes, and 1. im sure they want to use more expensive media to prevent copying and 2. _actual_ VHS tapes should have been designed to hold about as much info as they do, and while going digital lets you optimize the space you have, HDTV may require more info than you can fit on conventional VHS tapes) Granted, you can destroy a tape, but you can destroy an optical disk too.
So, yeah, that was my short answer to "Seems to me you'd lose a lot of that HD picture after a few viewings too.";-)
I'm not sure about that. Unless you're using the water as a coolant system and just happen to have fish which tolerate a wide range of temperatures, it doesn't seem that different from having a fish tank next to the computer. Although i admit it's an accomplishment to get them to match, i'd rather see some integration or something. Like a computer case/hamster cage. You could set it up with onscreen readouts of hamster wheel speed and tell people it actually effected your processor speed. And it'd be a great excuse: sorry, i didn't get your message last night. Furball was sleeping and i didn't want to wake her up just to check my email... ok, maybe not.
Ok, so i downloaded some of the mp3s and listened to them. I would have thought my soundcard died, except i was listening to _music_ a few minutes before and i could hear it just fine. That's when i looked at the spectum analyzer it was blank. No sound to hear. So i though "i could do better than that." So here's a recording of my Altec computer speakers cranked, outputting noise from the rest of my system. The persistent message-from-space style thumping is the jornada- i think that's from the usb connection to the cradle but it has an 802.11b card so it could be that. (If i removed the jornada from the cradle the thumping would become less frequent, but the undocking sound would blow the speakers.) At about 10 seconds i started moving my cordless mouse, which makes a (vaugely lightsabre-ish) humming noise and, odly, a bit of a thud every time it goes over a link in mozilla (fukt if i know why that happens). Perhaps it's not better, but you can at least hear it. And if you happen to be offering record contracts you can check my contact info page;-)
Re:What about sound quality?
on
lowercase music
·
· Score: 1
In example, instead of your sample range range being from 0-65535 it is 0-4096, it may be 'lowercase music', but it could also be represented in just 12 bits instead of 16
Ok, geeze. someone needs to be an anal bastard here, may as well be me: your could represent 0-4095 in 12 bits. 0-4096 would take 13.
But I agree entirely. Lowering the recording volume really just cuts the signal to noise ratio, not the actual listening volume.
Not sure how popular the x10 cameras are on campuses these days, but someone has to be buying them. And perhaps blindly broadcasting god knows what around the dorms. Which might have immense blackmail value if recorded with an x10 reciever and cheap camcorder or framegrabber (either of which could be cool things to have by themselves).
And I can't agree enough with the quarters. Preferably a sock full of quarters. Great for laying the smack down, laundry, vending machines, making change (good way to get friends OR $1 for $0.75, usually not both...) etc. Not that any of these are nearly as important as pinball. Mmm, pinball.
And for the more subversive stuff, maybe a linesman's handset, screwdrivers, wire, pliers, etc.
Ohhh, and an 802.11b card.
ok, that's about it. 'cept maybe some fuel. Everyone in college likes fire. I preffer isopropyl alcohol.
We saw a cultural and generational coup d'etat this month, at least in cinematic terms -- if we were watching. Star Wars was challenged by millions of rebellious kids, who decided to choose a new kind of myth. The next generation unseated its elders -- as is the right of every generation - and is making its own culture....
What the shit? Is this engli... oh, its katz. nevermind. Not that i really agree with bashing something cause it's popular, but this is rediculous.
Well, kinda. Assuming the player program caches the information locally, Gracenote's records show what disks people are putting into their computers the first time they put them in. Granted, that gives older records a better representaiton than current sales, but still not that accurate. Of course, if most people re-install windoze as often as i need to, the accuracy could increase signifigantly...
Cellular phone jammers are illegal in the USA... is anyone else up for joining me on a bill that allows (If not mandates.) jamming devices to be installed in every theatre in the country?
What i'd rather see is a protocol to let cell phones conform to rules for the environment. Theatres and libraries could have transponders which tell the phones to switch to vibrate as long as they are in range of the transponder. Classrooms too. Airplanes could have transponders which turn the phone off and schedule it to turn back on at flight time + 15 minutes. Then there's no high power jamming intereference, doctors or whoever else _need_ to use their phones can (and trust me, if you have a heart attack you don't want your doctor be starting watching LOTR and be out of reach until s/he leaves the theatre), and people who insist on being assholes about it are still going to be assholes, but there wasnt much you could do about that anyways.
While we're at it, do any of the new plam/phones have ringer control in the scheduling, so i can hit a checkbox on an appointment and the phone switches to vibrate for that hour and then back when it's over? And do any phones have vibrate VIBRATE ring RING modes? and if not, why the fuck not?
This sounds like great fun in places that sell macs and CDs. Just sneak a celene dion disk from the music section over the the computer section and drop it in a new imac. Not that i condone evil acts like this, i'm just saying it sounds fun.
BTW- if you are opening CDs in a store and don't intend to buy them, leave the sticker seal on the top edge and just unhinge the jewel case to get the CD out. That way you can put them back still 'sealed.'
I just had another thought- if i did a bit-for-bit copy of the malicious part of the cd and then distributed that to mess up cd drives, would i be a malicious hacker?
How could a CD screw up the player? All the CDROM does is read bits off of a CD. The data should not be able to alter the program (in this case firmware) at all.
Well, in general, firmware is sortof a program which is kinda permanent. It determines how some programmable electronic system will operate. Firmware is often upgradable, so logically there has to be some firware update procedure, and if the beginning of a celene dion disk has something which is sufficiently close to the 'erase the old firmware now and replace it with whatever comes after this' sequence, the disk could wreak havoc on the system. What if i wrote a disk which booted and played music in macs but which booted and flashed the bios in intel machines? More likely, considering this disk is engineered towards some end, is that it contains some kind of 'su' command to change the operating mode of the device. This way, the disk could do things it shouldn't be able to, like take control of the drive away from the computer to prevent the disk from being read. It may be the case that when you're messing with the part of the system that says listen to computer/dont listen to computer, you also have too much access to the firware. just saying...
Or find one of the grocery stores that will link a phone number to the card, like the Vons and Ralphs chains is CA. Make up a number, or use the store's phone number, the microsoft piracy tip line, whatever. Then post it online, like so: 858 336 2714, and explain that it should work at ralphs, vons, safeway, pavilions, and some affiliated stores.
Slashdot Mirror
So, are the ~50% of 'Americans' who think that the first amendment goes to far the same ~50% who don't know how long it takes the Earth to go around the Sun? Can't they just move to a country with a more opressive government (or a planet with a different length year)?
Even without a known/consistent set of times for commercials to run (although most shows are cut into predictable length chunks) or an automatic way of detecting transitions, if some people were willing to watch a show and produce an 'edit script' with marks at the commercial break beginnings and ends, you could set up a network to distribute and apply the edit scripts to shows that people had recorded themselves. This way you only transmit a few bytes of script, not a whole program. You'd need a way to time synch the edit script with the recording, but if the PVR can time synch on the network thats no problem. If not, you may need to include some kind of signature derived from the first few frames of the show.
Of course people would probably try to buy legislation preventing this, but it's just a more advanced method than 'dude, right after it fades to black, hold FF for 14.3 seconds.' You might also want some kind of karma-like system in place to rate user's ability to provide good edit scripts, to prevent TV stations from distributing fake edit scripts which skip the show and play the commercials, or advertisers' distributing edit scripts which skip everyone else's commercials...
I think Springsteen said it best "57 channels and nothin' on".
I'd actually go with Pink Floyd: "Got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from."
One of the saving graces of the NYC subway is that, for the most part, people pretty much shut the fuck up.
/rant
Perhaps you enjoy reading and re-reading ads and subway maps, but not everyone considers sitting in silence to be the most constructive use of their time. Assumably you wouldn't begrudge me a conversation with the person sitting next to me, so until you want to engage me in an interesting and stimulating conversation (about polite use of cell phones, perhaps), i'd appreciate being allowed to talk on a cell phone as long as i'm not unnecessarily loud or obnoxious about it. Besides, if you really have something which is a better use of everyone's time than talking to whomever they want, we won't need to ban cell phones: everyone will just do your thing.
And as long as i'm ranting, i'll the same thing is applicable in general. You don't need to be upset by people walking around talking on cell phones unless 1) you would be upset by them walking around talking to another person (in which you need help) or 2) they are being really loud, obnoxious, or dangerously distracted, or 3) nonstandard reasons like they're causing radio interference (which should be an FCC issue) or they're talking to your wife (again not the phone's fault).
Personally, i think cell phones are useful for talking to people during time which would otherwise be useless (ie transit). I think they're also useful for getting in touch with people. I do find it amazing that my mom carries a cell phone and won't turn it on, but expects me to able to find her in croweded (1000+ people) places. Maybe i'm just lame (well, not maybe, i am), but the off chance that one of my friends wants to talk to me is worth the risk that i have to spend 30 seconds of my time helping a colleague with something. If you refuse to carry a communication device because you don't want Work communicating with you, maybe you need to have a discussion with Work.
Please tell me why I need a scroll wheel capable of blinking in 16.7 million different colors.
Preach on. My sorry colorblind eyes have enough trouble with the 1-bit color redgreen LED on my Treo. (anyone working on a blink-rate hack?)
I have two words for you: lazy evaluation.
Thank you. I'm glad i'm not the only person who's offended by reading that logical fallacy. And your argument is better than what i would have posted.
ohmigod. not to be a whiny bitch, but maybe you could have tried that in esperanto first? or whatever it takes to write in readable english. your sentences make my head swim, dude.
2. Sell said music on $.01 plastic disks in $.04 plastic boxes for $17.95.
4. Use some of said profit to buy legislation ensuring your ability to do 2.
Well, so much for the 'slashdotting never strikes twice' theory....
And now it is illegal to kill someone using a computer
Well, wait, if this is only about killing people by hacking, then I should still be able to off my enemies by crushing them under Big Iron, right?
Do you really think this will stop people?
It would stop me. I don't try to be an asshole (usually), i'm just forgetful. I tend to switch to silent when i go to a movie/lecture whatever, leave it on silent until i miss a call, switch it back to ring until it inturrupts someone, switch to silent. rinse repeat.
What i'd like to see, and haven't seen mentioned yet, is a standard for cell phones to switch to vibrate/standby/whatever upon recieving a 'silence beacon' signal. The phone would just have a 3rd setting: ring, silent, or auto. If it comes in range of a silence beacon, it switches to silent. When it goes out of range, it can switch back to ring. It's voluntary, so if you're expecting life or death communications you can leave it on ring, but people are still free to take you phone and throw it. This, along with a ringer schedule to switch to vibrate during meetings and classes, should help a lot if people are willing to use them.
There's an article about the evil of barbie here, including the 'math is hard' bit. The Simpsons episode (514 1F012 Original Airdate: 2/17/94) was social commentary.
Just leave your tracking device on and hit every strip club in the world.
Wow, they have 802.11b at strip clubs now? What for? So you can download pr0n?
Alesis makes bad-ass 8-channel 20-bit digital audio recorders like the XT20 which store data on S-VHS tapes just fine . If you're just tuning in, the beauty of digital is that you can optimize your information storage/transmission for the medium/channel. (this is why Shannon is so cool) If you know the effective storage capacity of a piece of magnetic tape which is getting old has been stretched a bit, you encode the data at that capacity. That way the media can degrade a bit and you don't loose anything. If you use a nice robust encoding method, the media can degrade beyond that point and you still dont loose much. If you wanted to use regular VHS instead of a higher capacity tape, you just run the tape faster and don't pack the bits as tightly (probably not an issue as there's no mention in the article of using _actual_ VHS tapes, and 1. im sure they want to use more expensive media to prevent copying and 2. _actual_ VHS tapes should have been designed to hold about as much info as they do, and while going digital lets you optimize the space you have, HDTV may require more info than you can fit on conventional VHS tapes) Granted, you can destroy a tape, but you can destroy an optical disk too.
;-)
So, yeah, that was my short answer to "Seems to me you'd lose a lot of that HD picture after a few viewings too."
I'm not sure about that. Unless you're using the water as a coolant system and just happen to have fish which tolerate a wide range of temperatures, it doesn't seem that different from having a fish tank next to the computer. Although i admit it's an accomplishment to get them to match, i'd rather see some integration or something. Like a computer case/hamster cage. You could set it up with onscreen readouts of hamster wheel speed and tell people it actually effected your processor speed. And it'd be a great excuse: sorry, i didn't get your message last night. Furball was sleeping and i didn't want to wake her up just to check my email...
ok, maybe not.
Ok, so i downloaded some of the mp3s and listened to them. I would have thought my soundcard died, except i was listening to _music_ a few minutes before and i could hear it just fine. That's when i looked at the spectum analyzer it was blank. No sound to hear. So i though "i could do better than that." So here's a recording of my Altec computer speakers cranked, outputting noise from the rest of my system. The persistent message-from-space style thumping is the jornada- i think that's from the usb connection to the cradle but it has an 802.11b card so it could be that. (If i removed the jornada from the cradle the thumping would become less frequent, but the undocking sound would blow the speakers.) At about 10 seconds i started moving my cordless mouse, which makes a (vaugely lightsabre-ish) humming noise and, odly, a bit of a thud every time it goes over a link in mozilla (fukt if i know why that happens). Perhaps it's not better, but you can at least hear it. And if you happen to be offering record contracts you can check my contact info page ;-)
In example, instead of your sample range range being from 0-65535 it is 0-4096, it may be 'lowercase music', but it could also be represented in just 12 bits instead of 16
Ok, geeze. someone needs to be an anal bastard here, may as well be me: your could represent 0-4095 in 12 bits. 0-4096 would take 13.
But I agree entirely. Lowering the recording volume really just cuts the signal to noise ratio, not the actual listening volume.
Not sure how popular the x10 cameras are on campuses these days, but someone has to be buying them. And perhaps blindly broadcasting god knows what around the dorms. Which might have immense blackmail value if recorded with an x10 reciever and cheap camcorder or framegrabber (either of which could be cool things to have by themselves).
And I can't agree enough with the quarters. Preferably a sock full of quarters. Great for laying the smack down, laundry, vending machines, making change (good way to get friends OR $1 for $0.75, usually not both...) etc. Not that any of these are nearly as important as pinball. Mmm, pinball.
And for the more subversive stuff, maybe a linesman's handset, screwdrivers, wire, pliers, etc.
Ohhh, and an 802.11b card.
ok, that's about it. 'cept maybe some fuel. Everyone in college likes fire. I preffer isopropyl alcohol.
We saw a cultural and generational coup d'etat this month, at least in cinematic terms -- if we were watching. Star Wars was challenged by millions of rebellious kids, who decided to choose a new kind of myth. The next generation unseated its elders -- as is the right of every generation - and is making its own culture....
What the shit? Is this engli... oh, its katz. nevermind. Not that i really agree with bashing something cause it's popular, but this is rediculous.
it shows what people are actually listening to
Well, kinda. Assuming the player program caches the information locally, Gracenote's records show what disks people are putting into their computers the first time they put them in. Granted, that gives older records a better representaiton than current sales, but still not that accurate. Of course, if most people re-install windoze as often as i need to, the accuracy could increase signifigantly...
Cellular phone jammers are illegal in the USA... is anyone else up for joining me on a bill that allows (If not mandates.) jamming devices to be installed in every theatre in the country?
What i'd rather see is a protocol to let cell phones conform to rules for the environment. Theatres and libraries could have transponders which tell the phones to switch to vibrate as long as they are in range of the transponder. Classrooms too. Airplanes could have transponders which turn the phone off and schedule it to turn back on at flight time + 15 minutes. Then there's no high power jamming intereference, doctors or whoever else _need_ to use their phones can (and trust me, if you have a heart attack you don't want your doctor be starting watching LOTR and be out of reach until s/he leaves the theatre), and people who insist on being assholes about it are still going to be assholes, but there wasnt much you could do about that anyways.
While we're at it, do any of the new plam/phones have ringer control in the scheduling, so i can hit a checkbox on an appointment and the phone switches to vibrate for that hour and then back when it's over? And do any phones have vibrate VIBRATE ring RING modes? and if not, why the fuck not?
This sounds like great fun in places that sell macs and CDs. Just sneak a celene dion disk from the music section over the the computer section and drop it in a new imac. Not that i condone evil acts like this, i'm just saying it sounds fun.
BTW- if you are opening CDs in a store and don't intend to buy them, leave the sticker seal on the top edge and just unhinge the jewel case to get the CD out. That way you can put them back still 'sealed.'
I just had another thought- if i did a bit-for-bit copy of the malicious part of the cd and then distributed that to mess up cd drives, would i be a malicious hacker?
How could a CD screw up the player? All the CDROM does is read bits off of a CD. The data should not be able to alter the program (in this case firmware) at all.
Well, in general, firmware is sortof a program which is kinda permanent. It determines how some programmable electronic system will operate. Firmware is often upgradable, so logically there has to be some firware update procedure, and if the beginning of a celene dion disk has something which is sufficiently close to the 'erase the old firmware now and replace it with whatever comes after this' sequence, the disk could wreak havoc on the system. What if i wrote a disk which booted and played music in macs but which booted and flashed the bios in intel machines?
More likely, considering this disk is engineered towards some end, is that it contains some kind of 'su' command to change the operating mode of the device. This way, the disk could do things it shouldn't be able to, like take control of the drive away from the computer to prevent the disk from being read. It may be the case that when you're messing with the part of the system that says listen to computer/dont listen to computer, you also have too much access to the firware.
just saying...
5% discounts at your local grocery store
Or find one of the grocery stores that will link a phone number to the card, like the Vons and Ralphs chains is CA. Make up a number, or use the store's phone number, the microsoft piracy tip line, whatever. Then post it online, like so: 858 336 2714, and explain that it should work at ralphs, vons, safeway, pavilions, and some affiliated stores.