For starters your would need a microphone that has the sensitivity to hear every harmonic without distortion. Then how do you get the correct frequency after it's been corrupted by 1) ambient sound, or if you are in a quiet room 2) the sound from the adjacent frequencies? Perfect copy? Hardly. Once a signal becomes analog (from the instrument to your ear/microphone) it's impossible to be perfect.
The first distribution destroys the exclusivity, and most of the value is in the exclusivity. Therefore, the first unlicensed distribution destroys most of the value of the property.
So only upload songs you've previously downloaded, and never ones that you ripped from original, purchased media. Got it.
You caused a lot of confusion by saying "HDD caching" when you meant "virtual memory" or "paging".
Virtual memory and paging aren't the same thing. VM maps a location in a process's address space to a physical memory location. Two processes can both think they're writing to the same address, but instead be writing to a totally different location. This makes it basically impossible for a program to trash another's storage (yay security! yay stability!) and makes long-term memory leaks impossible (delete that memory map and the resources are automagically returned to the system).
Paging is a nifty hack that you can easily implement once you have a good VM system. If a process tries to access a memory address that isn't physically loaded into RAM, you pause it, copy the appropriate page from swap to RAM, update the process's memory map to say that the memory location refers to that new page you just copied up, then resume the process.
You can have each without the other. For instance, you could implement paging without virtual memory if you don't mind having all your processes share the same flat memory space. There were Amiga products that did exactly this. And even if you don't care about paging, virtual memory is enormously useful, to the point that it's not much of an exaggeration to say that modern computing would be impossible without it.
On a related topic does anyone know the state of the open source ATI driver?
As of about a week ago, FreeBSD imported versions of Mesa3D, libdrm, and RadeonHD drivers recent enough to enable 3D on my Radeon 3600. This is on a work desktop so I haven't tried many games on it, but KDE's compositing works perfectly for me as of today. I can only assume it would work as well on Linux.
it supports KMS (which is more important than 3D acceleration with many, such as myself)
Off-topic, but: why is KMS more important? Not (to my knowledge) being affected by any of the problems that it solves, I never understood why it was all that special. What does it do for you?
Remember that not everyone has an "OSS at any cost!" mentality. Some people use Linux for pragmatic reasons, not for ideological ones.
You're exactly correct. I won't use closed software unless absolutely unavoidable because it's the least pragmatic solution. When you don't "own" the code running on your system, you're at the mercy of someone else.
I had a FreeBSD desktop with a GeForce 4 AGP card. Just before the buffer overflow vulnerability was found that made it possible to crack a display using the closed NVidia drivers just by displaying an appropriately-formatted image, NVidia dropped support for the GeForce 4 series from their new drivers. They also announced that the vulnerability was fixed in the new drivers but that the old ones were EOLed and unsupported. The old drivers didn't support the currently released version of FreeBSD that I was using, and the new ones didn't support my graphics card. Furthermore, I couldn't find a new AGP card that would work on the motherboard I had at the time, and the rest of my hardware was a couple of years behind the then-modern stuff on Newegg.
In my opinion, having to choose between living with a known vulnerability that actually affects you and paying to replace your entire system, from graphics card to motherboard to CPU to RAM, is pretty freaking impractical. I would've been happy to have the option of switching to a working FOSS driver, even if the performance was a third of the closed driver's.
The only GUI system I'd used prior to that was a Xerox Star - which I'm pretty certain didn't have anything as fun or useful - so maybe I'm missing an earlier example.
Re:Keyboard shortcuts are better than scroll wheel
on
20 Years of Photoshop
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· Score: 1
I'd much rather hit 5 to set the opacity of my brush to 50% rather than scroll half way through the spinner.
That's reasonable, and I'd usually do the same. Hey, I'm a geek - sometimes I'm just not happy with the results until they're mathematically precise. However, artists (and sometimes I) don't always work that way, and will adjust values until "it looks right". If working with paints, they don't often mix 2.3mL of some shade of red with 1.45mL of a certain blue. Instead, they'll add a little more of one or the other until they're happy with the results. Well, same with computer graphics: they'll use a widget to slide back and forth across a range of values until they likes the look of it.
Hitting "5" to get "50%" is very precise. Precision isn't always what an artist wants.
Re:May be a good time to discuss alternatives
on
20 Years of Photoshop
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· Score: 4, Informative
This is off-topic but somewhat related to this article. First, I'm neutral on global warming. The evidence sure seems convincing, but the sources of the evidence looks pretty suspect. That out of the way, it seems pretty much impossible to avoid because of basic thermodynamics:
Wikipedia says the US consumes about 100*10^15BTU of energy each year. The volume of Lake Superior is about 12*10^15L. Converting all to metric, that would seem to indicate that we use (ie "convert to heat") enough energy each year to raise the temperature of Lake Superior about 2.7C.
Even if we had a perfectly clean energy source that emitted no pollutants whatsoever, that's a buttload of heat to be dumping into the environment. Wind, solar, and tidal energy get a free pass here in that they're moving energy from one part of the ecosystem to another. All other forms of energy production I know of basically extract energy from below-ground reservoirs and move it into the atmosphere. If this is correct, then isn't global warming thermodynamically unavoidable with almost all the energy sources we use today?
I'm pretty sure that my math is right, but I don't have a good sense of scale. Even if that seems like a huge number to me, maybe that amount of energy is lost in the background noise compared to transient sources like solar flares, volcanoes, etc. I don't know. Could someone explain whether I'm reasonably correct, and if not, why?
Disclaimers. To the left: I'm just trying to get a handle on all this. Don't crucify me to expressing (what I feel to be a healthy) skepticism. To the right: I don't own anything that smells like patchouli and my car's gas mileage sucks. I'm not a treehugger! I promise!
Yeah, they did - unless they don't mind being paid. Trust me on this: your doctor couldn't give two whits less what ID# they use for you. The problem is that all government agencies and (to the best of my knowledge) all insurance companies use your SSN as a primary key, and unless the doctor collects the information, they're not getting paid beyond whatever you give them at the time of service.
The quotation is not meant like an immutable law. There's a really good, important point there, but it's still just a meaningful aphorism. Let me help you with this -- when you see "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", read it as "given enough eyeballs, [almost all] bugs are shallow".
But that's not true, and the original version is correct. Given enough viewers - where "enough" might possibly be more than the number of people alive - every error will be obvious to at least one person.
Even IM apps have a good way to "run in the background" with push-notifications.
Note that "push" inherently means "tethering to a remote server". It's impossible to have an IM app that connects directly to AIM, Google Talk, etc. that stays online when you switch to another app. You have to trust a 3rd party service to connect on your behalf and tell your iPhone or iPod that you've received a message.
every state does this to lure companies and jobs to their states.
Well, exactly. Claiming that WA is losing $X or that Microsoft is getting $X in subsidies is no different from the RIAA claiming that a pirated song is the same as a lost sale. The actual cost to WA is the amount of money spent providing services to the Microsoft campus, not how much they would be paying if some tax or another were invoked. I dare say they get a lot more money from taxing Microsoft's employees than they they'd collect between the day they began taxing Microsoft directly and the day that Microsoft completed its move to another state.
I can't stand MSFT or their practices, but still think this arrangements benefits all involved, from MSFT to its employees to the state of Washington to its other residents.
A netbook on the other hand isn't really optimised for information entry at all. The keyboard isn't as good as a laptop, it's harder to operate a touchscreen on one than a tablet, and there's usually a pretty rubbish trackpad.
And yet I can do my job on a netbook with Emacs. Exactly how "multi" is "multi-touch"?
What is the bl**dy obsession with whether it multitasks or not?
I have an iPod Touch. I like to use it to listen to Pandora, but because it's restricted to single tasking, that's all I can do at once. Get an IM notification and want to reply to it? Tap the button to leave Pandora and go into the IM app and the music stops. Send the message. Hit the "home" button and find the Pandora icon again, wait for it to launch and re-buffer, then start listening again. About 10 seconds later, get a reply IM and repeat the process.
I can listen to my iPod playlists regardless of which app I'm in, but not so with Pandora or Last.fm. That is why I see the lack of multitasking as a complete PITA.
Oh, and while it wouldn't address the root problem, I wish there was a global stroke or gesture that would bounce you back to the previous app you were in. I had a hack on my old Palm that did exactly that so you could flip between two apps quickly without having to mess around with the launcher. That would at least ease a little of the pain.
We're adjusting our disklabel64 utility and kernel support to set the partition base offset such that it is physically aligned instead of slice-aligned, and we are using 32K alignment.
Darn bloated OS wasting 2% off the front of my floppy drive.
Ah, a millionaire complaining about class war, how quaint.
Ah, someone who things an $800,000 house in CA is a mansion. How quaint! Watch some of those home renovation shows sometime where a 2BR, 1200 square foot house in the hood goes for "just" $500,000.
BTW, I live in a place with saner prices. I paid less than $200K for a 5BR, 5,000 square foot house with a 1/4 yard, on a cul-de-sac in a nice part of town.
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For starters your would need a microphone that has the sensitivity to hear every harmonic without distortion. Then how do you get the correct frequency after it's been corrupted by 1) ambient sound, or if you are in a quiet room 2) the sound from the adjacent frequencies? Perfect copy? Hardly. Once a signal becomes analog (from the instrument to your ear/microphone) it's impossible to be perfect.
And yet we seem to manage.
The first distribution destroys the exclusivity, and most of the value is in the exclusivity. Therefore, the first unlicensed distribution destroys most of the value of the property.
So only upload songs you've previously downloaded, and never ones that you ripped from original, purchased media. Got it.
You caused a lot of confusion by saying "HDD caching" when you meant "virtual memory" or "paging".
Virtual memory and paging aren't the same thing. VM maps a location in a process's address space to a physical memory location. Two processes can both think they're writing to the same address, but instead be writing to a totally different location. This makes it basically impossible for a program to trash another's storage (yay security! yay stability!) and makes long-term memory leaks impossible (delete that memory map and the resources are automagically returned to the system).
Paging is a nifty hack that you can easily implement once you have a good VM system. If a process tries to access a memory address that isn't physically loaded into RAM, you pause it, copy the appropriate page from swap to RAM, update the process's memory map to say that the memory location refers to that new page you just copied up, then resume the process.
You can have each without the other. For instance, you could implement paging without virtual memory if you don't mind having all your processes share the same flat memory space. There were Amiga products that did exactly this. And even if you don't care about paging, virtual memory is enormously useful, to the point that it's not much of an exaggeration to say that modern computing would be impossible without it.
On a related topic does anyone know the state of the open source ATI driver?
As of about a week ago, FreeBSD imported versions of Mesa3D, libdrm, and RadeonHD drivers recent enough to enable 3D on my Radeon 3600. This is on a work desktop so I haven't tried many games on it, but KDE's compositing works perfectly for me as of today. I can only assume it would work as well on Linux.
it supports KMS (which is more important than 3D acceleration with many, such as myself)
Off-topic, but: why is KMS more important? Not (to my knowledge) being affected by any of the problems that it solves, I never understood why it was all that special. What does it do for you?
Remember that not everyone has an "OSS at any cost!" mentality. Some people use Linux for pragmatic reasons, not for ideological ones.
You're exactly correct. I won't use closed software unless absolutely unavoidable because it's the least pragmatic solution. When you don't "own" the code running on your system, you're at the mercy of someone else.
I had a FreeBSD desktop with a GeForce 4 AGP card. Just before the buffer overflow vulnerability was found that made it possible to crack a display using the closed NVidia drivers just by displaying an appropriately-formatted image, NVidia dropped support for the GeForce 4 series from their new drivers. They also announced that the vulnerability was fixed in the new drivers but that the old ones were EOLed and unsupported. The old drivers didn't support the currently released version of FreeBSD that I was using, and the new ones didn't support my graphics card. Furthermore, I couldn't find a new AGP card that would work on the motherboard I had at the time, and the rest of my hardware was a couple of years behind the then-modern stuff on Newegg.
In my opinion, having to choose between living with a known vulnerability that actually affects you and paying to replace your entire system, from graphics card to motherboard to CPU to RAM, is pretty freaking impractical. I would've been happy to have the option of switching to a working FOSS driver, even if the performance was a third of the closed driver's.
It's also surprising how little the UI has changed over 20 years.
25 years. It debuted in 1985 on Deluxe Paint for the Amiga.
The only GUI system I'd used prior to that was a Xerox Star - which I'm pretty certain didn't have anything as fun or useful - so maybe I'm missing an earlier example.
I'd much rather hit 5 to set the opacity of my brush to 50% rather than scroll half way through the spinner.
That's reasonable, and I'd usually do the same. Hey, I'm a geek - sometimes I'm just not happy with the results until they're mathematically precise. However, artists (and sometimes I) don't always work that way, and will adjust values until "it looks right". If working with paints, they don't often mix 2.3mL of some shade of red with 1.45mL of a certain blue. Instead, they'll add a little more of one or the other until they're happy with the results. Well, same with computer graphics: they'll use a widget to slide back and forth across a range of values until they likes the look of it.
Hitting "5" to get "50%" is very precise. Precision isn't always what an artist wants.
I've had a lot of luck with Krita.
This is off-topic but somewhat related to this article. First, I'm neutral on global warming. The evidence sure seems convincing, but the sources of the evidence looks pretty suspect. That out of the way, it seems pretty much impossible to avoid because of basic thermodynamics:
Wikipedia says the US consumes about 100*10^15BTU of energy each year. The volume of Lake Superior is about 12*10^15L. Converting all to metric, that would seem to indicate that we use (ie "convert to heat") enough energy each year to raise the temperature of Lake Superior about 2.7C.
Even if we had a perfectly clean energy source that emitted no pollutants whatsoever, that's a buttload of heat to be dumping into the environment. Wind, solar, and tidal energy get a free pass here in that they're moving energy from one part of the ecosystem to another. All other forms of energy production I know of basically extract energy from below-ground reservoirs and move it into the atmosphere. If this is correct, then isn't global warming thermodynamically unavoidable with almost all the energy sources we use today?
I'm pretty sure that my math is right, but I don't have a good sense of scale. Even if that seems like a huge number to me, maybe that amount of energy is lost in the background noise compared to transient sources like solar flares, volcanoes, etc. I don't know. Could someone explain whether I'm reasonably correct, and if not, why?
Disclaimers. To the left: I'm just trying to get a handle on all this. Don't crucify me to expressing (what I feel to be a healthy) skepticism. To the right: I don't own anything that smells like patchouli and my car's gas mileage sucks. I'm not a treehugger! I promise!
Something doesn't seem right about riding a more dangerous (the vespa) vehicle while at the same time looking feminine
...says the guy humping a cricket.
My wife's self-insured company uses an alternative identifier for claims. If you send the SSN on a claim, it will be rejected as invalid.
That's the way it should be going and I hope it continues. We're not anywhere near that being universal today, though.
Editing, typesetting, formatting, proofing, marketing, artwork, etc all still needs to be done.
Those are non-zero costs on ebooks?
That medical firm didn't really need my SSN
Yeah, they did - unless they don't mind being paid. Trust me on this: your doctor couldn't give two whits less what ID# they use for you. The problem is that all government agencies and (to the best of my knowledge) all insurance companies use your SSN as a primary key, and unless the doctor collects the information, they're not getting paid beyond whatever you give them at the time of service.
The quotation is not meant like an immutable law. There's a really good, important point there, but it's still just a meaningful aphorism. Let me help you with this -- when you see "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", read it as "given enough eyeballs, [almost all] bugs are shallow".
But that's not true, and the original version is correct. Given enough viewers - where "enough" might possibly be more than the number of people alive - every error will be obvious to at least one person.
Really?
Yes, really. And then you get to contend with people who think you're a bonehead because you're not happy with that.
McCarthy wasn't simply looking for Communists, he was looking for a threat to the American way of life. Oddly enough, it wasn't there.
Oh, yes, it was - just a little closer than Sen. McCarthy was willing to believe.
Even IM apps have a good way to "run in the background" with push-notifications.
Note that "push" inherently means "tethering to a remote server". It's impossible to have an IM app that connects directly to AIM, Google Talk, etc. that stays online when you switch to another app. You have to trust a 3rd party service to connect on your behalf and tell your iPhone or iPod that you've received a message.
every state does this to lure companies and jobs to their states.
Well, exactly. Claiming that WA is losing $X or that Microsoft is getting $X in subsidies is no different from the RIAA claiming that a pirated song is the same as a lost sale. The actual cost to WA is the amount of money spent providing services to the Microsoft campus, not how much they would be paying if some tax or another were invoked. I dare say they get a lot more money from taxing Microsoft's employees than they they'd collect between the day they began taxing Microsoft directly and the day that Microsoft completed its move to another state.
I can't stand MSFT or their practices, but still think this arrangements benefits all involved, from MSFT to its employees to the state of Washington to its other residents.
Also, how hot can a 3Mhz CPu run?
The power supply was also inside the case. It's not that either made so much heat as that there was nowhere for the head to go.
A netbook on the other hand isn't really optimised for information entry at all. The keyboard isn't as good as a laptop, it's harder to operate a touchscreen on one than a tablet, and there's usually a pretty rubbish trackpad.
And yet I can do my job on a netbook with Emacs. Exactly how "multi" is "multi-touch"?
What is the bl**dy obsession with whether it multitasks or not?
I have an iPod Touch. I like to use it to listen to Pandora, but because it's restricted to single tasking, that's all I can do at once. Get an IM notification and want to reply to it? Tap the button to leave Pandora and go into the IM app and the music stops. Send the message. Hit the "home" button and find the Pandora icon again, wait for it to launch and re-buffer, then start listening again. About 10 seconds later, get a reply IM and repeat the process.
I can listen to my iPod playlists regardless of which app I'm in, but not so with Pandora or Last.fm. That is why I see the lack of multitasking as a complete PITA.
Oh, and while it wouldn't address the root problem, I wish there was a global stroke or gesture that would bounce you back to the previous app you were in. I had a hack on my old Palm that did exactly that so you could flip between two apps quickly without having to mess around with the launcher. That would at least ease a little of the pain.
We're adjusting our disklabel64 utility and kernel support to set the partition base offset such that it is physically aligned instead of slice-aligned, and we are using 32K alignment.
Darn bloated OS wasting 2% off the front of my floppy drive.
Ah, a millionaire complaining about class war, how quaint.
Ah, someone who things an $800,000 house in CA is a mansion. How quaint! Watch some of those home renovation shows sometime where a 2BR, 1200 square foot house in the hood goes for "just" $500,000.
BTW, I live in a place with saner prices. I paid less than $200K for a 5BR, 5,000 square foot house with a 1/4 yard, on a cul-de-sac in a nice part of town.
Not if it costs them $6 a pop to process.