I fail to see why including an FM tuner in a personal digital audio player is some great "feature." I use a personal MP3 player precisely because commercial FM radio sucks the sweat from a syphillitic donkey's testicles. WhyTF do Creative and iRiver think that's a killer addition to the capabilities of their products? Now, a digital audio player with integrated XM/Sirius real-time receiver (not recorded from a base-station), and a user-replaceable Li-ion battery pack - that'd be an iPod "killer."
Indeed -- 40 years ago consumer film and prints were fine. You can easily find film and prints from the 40s,50s, and some of the 60s that are nearly perfect. And then you see the shit that is left from the 70s and 80s and realize just how much we all "saved" when film got 12 cents cheaper per roll and our prints got doubled free of charge.
What has changed here isn't the quality of the film - that has got better, rather than worse. Chemicals and emulsions have consistently improved in performance and longevity. What has changed is that in the 80's, photo finishing went from being done by Kodak/Agfa in their big central quality-controlled facilities (or a small lab run by professionals) to discount minilabs of dubious levels of maintenance. All the PBTC at the Rite Aid knows how to do is put the cartridge in the Fuji or Agfa automated minilab and hit the bwight gween button - whether the chemicals are replenishing at a proper rate, the blix isn't exhausted, and the stabilizer/rinse hasn't degraded is anyone's guess.
Yes, dyes are inherently less stable than silver crystals. However, the dyes in color negative print films are formed by the same processes as those in color transparancies (slides), and are generally considered to be archival to 75 years or more. The only difference is how the latent image that activates the dye couplers is generated. Again - a properly processed, fixed, and stabilized color positive or negative should outlive most photographers, if properly stored. Get marginal processing and store your film badly, and you end up with a stack of shitty, nasty looking, useless celluloid. Bad minilabs ensured the former, and most casual snapshot photographers behave according to the latter - the film itself is not the weakest link.
Unfortunately, people who trust photographic prints should realize that pretty much any current consumer process is guaranteed to make a print that will be worthless in ten to twenty years even if kept in a sealed vault. Your original negative film might last another decade past that.
If your film is only lasting 20-30 years, you have big problems. I've transparencies that date from 40 years ago that have been stored absolutely awfully, and they exhibit little degradation. I can pull excellent scans from them if need be and have a print in minutes. And these were slides that were stuffed into a cardboard box and dropped in the drawer of a desk kept in the back of a garage.
Properly fixed and washed, stored in non-reactive sheets or sleeves, black and white film is archival. Color chromes and negs processed with proper dye stabilizers should outlast you. Old cellulose nitrate films have been falling apart for ages (which is why cellulose acetate bases were developed), and motion-picture emulsions are very touchy (many are never dye stabilized). Other than that, any piece of film should outlast its owner or various digital media format changes and still be usable to produce a print. If you're an idiot and keep your negs in reactive or outgassing containers, in a damp, hot place, yes - they'll deteriorate pretty badly over a shorter period of time.
Fuji Crystal Archive paper (which should be used in any minilab running Fuji gear) is rated for a 60-75 year display lifetime - hanging on a wall in a frame. Black and white prints on fiber-base archival paper, properly stored, will be around for longer than you, your children, and probably your grandchildren.
QuantumLink/QLink was one of their products, dedicated to Commodore64/128 users. America Online was the blending of two of their other platform specific products: PCLink and AppleLink, which had already been re-christened by the time it was available for IBM-compatibles. AppleLink for Apple II-series machines and Macs was renamed AOL in '89 I believe, and the character-based PC-DOS interface for PCLink was dumped in favor of a Geoworks shell for the PC version of AOL in 1991. As the Commodore micros lapsed into quaintness in the late 80's and early 90's, QuantumLink was unceremoniously taken behind the barn and shot, with a Free Ad for the new America Online service mailed to you in your last billing statement.
I started with the Qlink disk that came with my oh so wonderful Commodore 1660 modem - 300 bps, no indicators whatsoever, and you had to hook the C64/128's SID (sound) chip output to it via an RCA splitter so that the computer could generate DTMF tones for dialing. One of my first ever homebrew electronics projects was a breakout box with LED's for off-hook, carrier detect, Tx and Rx that I soldered to my C64's "user port" via a ribbon cable. It was just so I could tell whether or not my QLink session was hung (again), or if I was just waiting on something to trickle down that slow connection. Oh the days of MagicTerm with built-in bluebox codes.
UnixWare7 introduced the SVR5 branch way back in Q1 1998. Prior to that release, it was pretty much vanilla ATT/USG SVR4.2 as purchased from Novell, as acquired by the absorption of the Unix Support Group.
OpenServer was SystemV R3.2 via OpenDesktop (SCO UNIX 3.2.4), via SCO Unix SystemV/386 R3, via a mix of XENIX System V/386 R2.3 and USG Unix SystemV R3. The resulting patchwork mess of cruft showed its scar tissue anytime you tried to do anything remotely useful with it. I still have flashbacks.
The predominant photographic-quality printers you'll find in professional shops are either Epson large-format inkjets or various dye-sublimation units for "standard" print packages (wallet prints, 5x7's, 8x10's). For large-format prints, generally it's an Epson Ultrachrome-system inkjet with a CIF (Continuous Ink Flow) system installed. Laser printers, with a few exceptions, are restricted to 8.5"-wide paper, and can't print on thick art boards, specialty papers, and canvas like pigment inkjet systems.
Color laser printers also tend to band, and have a narrower color gamut. Dye-subs produce a true continuous-tone image, though at the expense of sharpness and format size. Inkjets produce both an acceptable quality print for exhibition/sale as a fine-art piece, as well as offering a large range of materials and sizes that can be printed.
See the folks at Lyson and MediaStreet for continuous inking systems and professional-quality bulk inks.
"And even among those that are, they're all a rip off of the same thing. Have any "popular" online comics NOT done the whole "tech support sucks HAHAHAHAH!" thing yet? Have any of them not done "end users suck and I hate working in tech support HAHAHAHA!"... Most of them are trying really hard to be User Friendly, which itself isn't all that bad. I think a lot of people just have the idea that what they do is so unique and remarkable that THE MAN -- *SOME* MAN -- must be HOLDIN' THEM DOWN."
Your exposure to webcomics must be rather minimal. "Most" webcomics are ripping off UF? All the "popular" webcomics riff on tech support? Hardly. While a number of the long-running strips do takes on geek humor, that's understandable. When they started, us nerds were the only ones reading webcomics, and they were geared to their audience.
Take a look at The Bunny. How about Chopping Block? Randy Milholland's Something Positive, Sinfest, and Penny Arcade wouldn't make it into newspaper syndication without a major change in theme and writing. None of them ever mimicked User Friendly, and there are many more like them than there are copies of Iliad's work.
The sad thing is that this rant is seen as "insightful," when it's really just shallow and mis-informed. These folks aren't complaining that they're not superstars via their work. They went off on their own so that they could create, be rewarded for their creativity, and not have to give up a large chunk of the returns on said creativity to a third party. There's a whole passel of middle-men out there who latch themselves onto artists, and drain them dry, turn them into "product", and reap the lion's share of the rewards. Need evidence? Look at the releases from the major record labels - crap, mostly. Hollywood is busy making a ghetto-version "Honeymooners," re-hashing "Bewitched", and remaking every moderately successful flick from the 60's and 70's - they're out of "product" and unwilling to take risk, so they're recycling the same swill. The comics syndicates have been playing it safe for years, distributing humorless pabulum while bleeding away the intellectual property of the original artists. Many of the old-school comics guys went broke while the syndicates raked in the bucks on their output.
Not every artist is a prima donna. Most of them are just trying to make a living without getting raped in the process. It's something that every independent business person must deal with, but it's worse for creative folks because there's an entire industry solely based on getting as big a cut as possible from their work.
Holy hell - they better not check out that enclave of Arab terrorist activity - Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, our third president. They give all their change under $10 for visitor's fees in $2 bills (which are peeled off a stack of fresh, consecutively numbered notes), because it's got Jefferson's portrait on the front, dontcha know.
And to think, it's in the state right next door to Maryland, and only a couple hours from our nation's capital! Raise the terror rainbow to red! We must mount a counterinsurgency force! To arms! To arms!
The head of a company who has a vested interest in widespread adoption of broadband technology says that "broadband access will replace DVDs." That's a shocker.
More accurate statement: "We'll attempt to replace physical media with a bitstream that we control, can force you to pay for over and over again in order to maintain access, and can attach all sorts of licensing and DRM to. Oh, by the way, you'll need our special CinemaFiend Broadband service pack at $49.95 a month in addition to regular content subscription fees to make it work."
On-demand video streams will become more available, and supplement the sale of physical media. They'll obsolete DVDs in the same way that radio obsoleted records.
I use my PDA constantly. I use it to jot notes when wandering through equipment racks, to record meetings in audio, to maintain my contact list, and for a number of other lighterweight applications that don't require a PC, or need to be very portable. I've got functions programmed into a calculator that calculate protocol overhead, latency, and tx/rx window size figures for various network types, among other things. In extracurricular activities, I use a Palm-based photographic depth-of-field calculator and an E6-B flight computer.
In addition, it's got integrated GPS, and provides all of my mapping, auto-routing, and voice navigation when in the car cradle. Appointments and contact listings have GPS mapping coordinates associated with them for driving directions.
It's also my default MP3/Ogg player, since with a 1G flash card, I can store a good selection of tracks along with detail mapping data and recorded audio.
Just because you don't find a tool useful, doesn't mean it has no use.
So what if there's a fork? So what if Linux experiences the same sort of trial-by-fire that occured when BSD went head-to-head with AT&T SysV? Sure, there was bickering between the BSD and SysV camps over the "right" way to do things. However, for the most part, the best methods won out by right of acclaim and attrition. There are few "pure" SysV systems, the BSD/SysV wars are ancient history, and *nix is probably the better for having gone through it.
Art is not in the mechanics of making the work. Art is not the camera, the paint brush, the canvas, the paper, the instrument. Art is not the tools, the raw materials, or the technique.
Art is the thoughts, emotions, and ideas that a work engenders. It's the vision and execution of the artist, how well they are able to communicate their vision to you, and the degree that they are able to allow you to share and participate in that vision.
A painting is not art. A painting is pigment, in a carrier base, smeared onto a surface. Art is how you are cunningly roped into having an emotional or intellectual response to those smears. A photograph isn't art. Photographic art is how the photographer manipulates his or her tools, the environment, and light in order to render their subject in a manner that evokes a connection with the viewer.
Say I took a group of 200 random images from a traffic camera (or cameras), and laid them all out in a large-format print. Among the bog-standard frames, I blend in a few images of serious collisions and pedestrian accidents. One casual observer might remark, "That's not art - it's just frames from a traffic camera." Another might notice the accident frames and say, "That's horrible - that's not artistic." A third may look at the same work and share my intent and vision - to show that tragedy mostly just occurs in boring, mundane, day-to-day life, barely noticeable.
So, I propose that the criteria for determining "art" is: Does the work have the potential to invoke a deeper appreciation than mere superficial stimulus? By saying "potential," we can try to limit the suggestive assessment of the success of the artist in doing so.
I haven't used the calendaring component yet, but right now Thunderbird is still beta-quality code. I'm rather disappointed that they released the current build as 1.0 - lots of bugs all over the place.
Fix the message duplication problem, the mail filtering, the RSS feed integration (odd that FireFox handles RSS properly, but Thunderbird dupes article headings), and various/sundry other things that go boom in TBird, and I'll have a little more confidence in this bundle as an Outlook challenger. As it stands, TBird 1.0 barely goes toe-to-toe with OE. And being a complete, unabashed fan of FFox, this is a real letdown.
I've got the sneaking suspicion that the relative runaway success of their browser tree has gone to the heads of the Mozilla.org folks. They think they're big-boy legitimate "contendahs" across the board, and are rushing stuff out the door to prop up the posturing that open-source alternatives are/will be kicking Microsoft arse up and down the 'net. They need to be careful that they don't do a crash-n-burn by spewing half-baked crap on the coattails of a solid product.
Cadaver studies are done in many interesting fields where trauma to the human body needs to be explored. In automotive crash tests, they don't usually strap a corpse into the driver seat and run the Nash Rambler into a wall.
Human cadavers are used for two purposes: calibrating test instruments and assessing traumatic effects of measured forces. The first use is simple - you can measure a force, but what exactly does that mean? Is it enough to crush a ribcage, or to fracture an average skull? Test dummies are designed to mimic tolerances determined by cadaver studies, and research with corpses continues in order to further development on the next generation of dummy and computer models. The second use is more medical - what happens to a joint, bone, or other tissue when subjected to a massive impact or torsional force? How does the body fail, and what methods can be used to repair it?
Current automotive cadaver studies are frequently being done with limb prosections, not the whole body. Automotive engineering protects the body trunk pretty well, to the point where previously fatal accidents are frequently survivable. Nowadays, the focus is on crippling injuries to the extremities - people are surviving, but are being left with crushed legs, hands, arms, etc.
I think Dillusional is really thinking about Solaris domains. On the old E10000 and newer SunFire servers, one can partition the box into completely independent systems. Each "domain" has a set of hardware resources (CPU, Memory, boot devices, etc.) allocated to it via the DR facility. Each has its own boot image and runs its own kernel. You can run multiple environments or even different versions of Solaris on the same box, provided that they support DR and domaining.
Under the hood, however, this is nothing like the zoning feature being described by the OP.
For an inexpensive, solid 35mm SLR body, I would definitely recommend the Nikon FE/FG's. The FE2 and FG are both readily available used in the price range that you are looking for. The FE2 provides a fast 1/4000 shutter and 1/250 flash sync, and has an aperture-priority Auto mode. The FG has a slower shutter (1/1000) and sync (1/90), but adds a fully automatic Program mode.
Both are manual focus, feature center-weighted Through-The-Lens metering, and take the same 1/3N lithium cell battery. A key feature of the Nikon system is that a new autofocus D-mount (AF-D) will fit a 20 or 30 year old camera just fine, and work perfectly with Nikon's auto-index (AI) aperture. You can start with an old manual-advance, manual-focus body and accumulate a selection of nice lenses, both manual focus (AI) and AF. Then, you can transfer those to a more recent AF system, or even transfer those D-mount lenses to a new digital body (like the D100).
I was only hit twice by comment-spammers before I took action.
Using image-text to verify humanity on the other end of the connection wasn't an option, as it excluded sight-impared users. User registration was a no-go: I don't want to have to spend time validating user accounts. I did enough of that in my BBS Sysop days. Even MT-Blacklist is a bit of a pain, as you've got to deal with each spam comment individually once posted.
However, one thing I found in common between my spammers and the attacks I've seen on other sites was that prior to the spamming run, the site was crawled. So, I excluded the locations of the comment scripts in my robots.txt and set a trap to auto-ban any crawler that doesn't obey the excludes.
Well-behaved spiders/'bots can index the site. Ill-behaved or malicious crawlers that download the whole file tree regardless of excludes trigger a tripwire that locks them out. You can eyeball the details in this entry on my site: Setting a Spider Trap
I've been part of the Sun beta software program, and one of my colleagues just returned from SunOne. We've been looking at this roadmap for some time, as it promises a set of features that we can exploit rather effectively should they come to fruition.
Behind the marketing-speak, N1 is merely Sun's attempt to provide the same types of services as MOSIX. They want to provide a utility computing resource that spans servers. This, combined with a set of management tools for creating/administering rulesets, can be used to automagically reconfigure Solaris domains with additional resources in order to meet spot demand.
The end result would be a cluster of x800 Starfire-class boxen linked with Sun's Wildcat bus interconnect. The domaining featureset will be extended so that individual Solaris domains could span physical servers. Memory and CPU could be held in reserve to be brought online to meet demand, or domains could be dynamically re-sized (a swamped domain could steal processors from one with lots of idle time).
Storage would be provided to the virtualized operating environments via SAN or NAS services. Solaris 9's network QoS and Mobile IP facilities could be leveraged to make the network interfaces transparent.
The phrase "eliminating sysadmins" is loaded with hyperbole, as the cluster would still need to be monitored, backed up, have its hardware maintained, have filesystems cleaned out and reorganized, etc. There's no "A.I." involved. There's no "click here to create a secure ordering and inventory system" button that magically translates a spec into an application, at least as far as I've seen.
Never work with a project manager who hasn't been a developer himself.
If one were to follow that advice, one would be in a constant search for employment in today's world. The fact is that the vast majority of Project Managers are business grads who have little, if any, technical knowledge. Their responsibilities are to develop the business cases and ensure that the product meets their needs.
The problem arises when one of two situations occurs: the project manager wants to make technical decisions, or the developer refuses to take the business case into account. As a systems engineer and product developer, I see both of these frequently, and the key to resolving them is tact. In a development role, I always try to keep technical scope and specifications under control. I also consult with the PM to ensure that I understand the business need, so that I may prioritize development efforts. Too often, developers feel the need to do what they consider the "Right Way" or "elegant", and completely miss the mark on what the end user wants.
become a project manager yourself, it's not rocket science.
Yes, sometimes you do need to think like a manager. There will be times when expectations are totally unrealistic. Then, your own management skills must kick in. Negotiate priorities, flex timelines, get more resources allocated. If the parameters are completely bogus, you need to be able to not just point out what won't work, but to offer workable alternatives in order to achieve the desired end result. If there's no budging on any of these criteria, then perhaps you're in a bad situation. However, to dismiss every PM out-of-hand because they haven't been in the trenches as a coder or engineer only sets one up for failure.
Soft-synths, improved digital recording software, better sequencers, and the proliferation of digital effects plugins will not turn Average Joe into a virtuoso performer. These things are tools. One still needs to have either innate talent or a basic schooling in musical theory and practice to take advantage of them.
I have a small digital home studio, comprised of an Alesis keyboard, an Athlon-based audio workstation, and packages such as Reason, ReBirth, Cubase, Reaktor, B4, and a stack of others. None of these made me a better musician. They did, however, provide me with a banquet of options from which to pick and choose as my skills develop.
The primary benefit of the digital and electronic home recording industry is this: people with talent who couldn't afford to produce professional-quality work can now do so. The hardware and software combinations that I've spend around $8,000 on, rival the capabilities of a $150 an hour studio of ten years ago. In addition, I have full control as musician and engineer.
Another benefit of software-based synthesizers is the accessibility of their parameters. Though slightly less convenient than the analog beasts of years past, a soft-synth with individual on-screen controls is many times easier to deal with than a digital hardware synth sporting a 4-line LCD in which to do all your parameter editing.
I use discrete hardware, still, for various purposes. However, digital sound generation, editing, post-production, and mixdown make my life much easier. That is its main appeal.
Not being a businessman on the hardware side of the world, there's one question that I've been wanting an answer to for some time. Is there a viable market for PC systems in the less-than-$700 price range? It would seem that educational institutions (especially public school disctricts) and the less-affluent consumer would be the perfect targets for this sort of marketing.
I realize that as technology ages, margins get slimmer and slimmer. What, however, is the floor? It would seem that in a world of "faster, smaller, cheaper," that there would be use for $200-300 machines that are new, out of the box, with warranty service, but are fully functional PCs. Net appliances were interesting, but for the average consumer nothing more than a pretty terminal device. Is it possible in this marketplace for a company to build and sell a cheap Wintel box to the budget consumer and still turn a profit?
It would sure beat having school districts full of old, beat-up, barely functional corporate write-off machines.
I ran 1:261/1093, "Outside the Wall" in Baltimore, MD for seven years (the list states '92-97, but I went online August 1990). I met a number of friends who I still talk to and of whom I still have many fine memories. It's kinda neat to see that name pop up again after so many years.
I remember the thrill of getting everything working right for the first time. I remember marvelling at the fact that echomail really worked. I remember spending more time editing batch files than was healthy. I remember pulling consecutive all-nighters to reconstruct a crashed system. I remember begging for donations for a drive upgrade!
... and I remember, sadly, pulling the plug after seven long years. The new wave of ISP's wiped out the BBS world around 1996. I stayed around for another year, hoping it would pass. It didn't. I went from 20 calls/day to the board to one or two in a week.
What a shame - gone were the user group parties, the sysop picnics, and the fidonet bullshit meetings. Since then, I've yet to duplicate the experience. The internet is Mardi Gras in New Orleans. BBS's were the corner beer joint where you could just drink with your buddies.
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I fail to see why including an FM tuner in a personal digital audio player is some great "feature." I use a personal MP3 player precisely because commercial FM radio sucks the sweat from a syphillitic donkey's testicles. WhyTF do Creative and iRiver think that's a killer addition to the capabilities of their products? Now, a digital audio player with integrated XM/Sirius real-time receiver (not recorded from a base-station), and a user-replaceable Li-ion battery pack - that'd be an iPod "killer."
Indeed -- 40 years ago consumer film and prints were fine. You can easily find film and prints from the 40s,50s, and some of the 60s that are nearly perfect. And then you see the shit that is left from the 70s and 80s and realize just how much we all "saved" when film got 12 cents cheaper per roll and our prints got doubled free of charge.
What has changed here isn't the quality of the film - that has got better, rather than worse. Chemicals and emulsions have consistently improved in performance and longevity. What has changed is that in the 80's, photo finishing went from being done by Kodak/Agfa in their big central quality-controlled facilities (or a small lab run by professionals) to discount minilabs of dubious levels of maintenance. All the PBTC at the Rite Aid knows how to do is put the cartridge in the Fuji or Agfa automated minilab and hit the bwight gween button - whether the chemicals are replenishing at a proper rate, the blix isn't exhausted, and the stabilizer/rinse hasn't degraded is anyone's guess.
Yes, dyes are inherently less stable than silver crystals. However, the dyes in color negative print films are formed by the same processes as those in color transparancies (slides), and are generally considered to be archival to 75 years or more. The only difference is how the latent image that activates the dye couplers is generated. Again - a properly processed, fixed, and stabilized color positive or negative should outlive most photographers, if properly stored. Get marginal processing and store your film badly, and you end up with a stack of shitty, nasty looking, useless celluloid. Bad minilabs ensured the former, and most casual snapshot photographers behave according to the latter - the film itself is not the weakest link.
Unfortunately, people who trust photographic prints should realize that pretty much any current consumer process is guaranteed to make a print that will be worthless in ten to twenty years even if kept in a sealed vault. Your original negative film might last another decade past that.
If your film is only lasting 20-30 years, you have big problems. I've transparencies that date from 40 years ago that have been stored absolutely awfully, and they exhibit little degradation. I can pull excellent scans from them if need be and have a print in minutes. And these were slides that were stuffed into a cardboard box and dropped in the drawer of a desk kept in the back of a garage.
Properly fixed and washed, stored in non-reactive sheets or sleeves, black and white film is archival. Color chromes and negs processed with proper dye stabilizers should outlast you. Old cellulose nitrate films have been falling apart for ages (which is why cellulose acetate bases were developed), and motion-picture emulsions are very touchy (many are never dye stabilized). Other than that, any piece of film should outlast its owner or various digital media format changes and still be usable to produce a print. If you're an idiot and keep your negs in reactive or outgassing containers, in a damp, hot place, yes - they'll deteriorate pretty badly over a shorter period of time.
Fuji Crystal Archive paper (which should be used in any minilab running Fuji gear) is rated for a 60-75 year display lifetime - hanging on a wall in a frame. Black and white prints on fiber-base archival paper, properly stored, will be around for longer than you, your children, and probably your grandchildren.
QuantumLink/QLink was one of their products, dedicated to Commodore64/128 users. America Online was the blending of two of their other platform specific products: PCLink and AppleLink, which had already been re-christened by the time it was available for IBM-compatibles. AppleLink for Apple II-series machines and Macs was renamed AOL in '89 I believe, and the character-based PC-DOS interface for PCLink was dumped in favor of a Geoworks shell for the PC version of AOL in 1991. As the Commodore micros lapsed into quaintness in the late 80's and early 90's, QuantumLink was unceremoniously taken behind the barn and shot, with a Free Ad for the new America Online service mailed to you in your last billing statement.
I started with the Qlink disk that came with my oh so wonderful Commodore 1660 modem - 300 bps, no indicators whatsoever, and you had to hook the C64/128's SID (sound) chip output to it via an RCA splitter so that the computer could generate DTMF tones for dialing. One of my first ever homebrew electronics projects was a breakout box with LED's for off-hook, carrier detect, Tx and Rx that I soldered to my C64's "user port" via a ribbon cable. It was just so I could tell whether or not my QLink session was hung (again), or if I was just waiting on something to trickle down that slow connection. Oh the days of MagicTerm with built-in bluebox codes.
UnixWare7 introduced the SVR5 branch way back in Q1 1998. Prior to that release, it was pretty much vanilla ATT/USG SVR4.2 as purchased from Novell, as acquired by the absorption of the Unix Support Group.
OpenServer was SystemV R3.2 via OpenDesktop (SCO UNIX 3.2.4), via SCO Unix SystemV/386 R3, via a mix of XENIX System V/386 R2.3 and USG Unix SystemV R3. The resulting patchwork mess of cruft showed its scar tissue anytime you tried to do anything remotely useful with it. I still have flashbacks.
The predominant photographic-quality printers you'll find in professional shops are either Epson large-format inkjets or various dye-sublimation units for "standard" print packages (wallet prints, 5x7's, 8x10's). For large-format prints, generally it's an Epson Ultrachrome-system inkjet with a CIF (Continuous Ink Flow) system installed. Laser printers, with a few exceptions, are restricted to 8.5"-wide paper, and can't print on thick art boards, specialty papers, and canvas like pigment inkjet systems.
Color laser printers also tend to band, and have a narrower color gamut. Dye-subs produce a true continuous-tone image, though at the expense of sharpness and format size. Inkjets produce both an acceptable quality print for exhibition/sale as a fine-art piece, as well as offering a large range of materials and sizes that can be printed.
See the folks at Lyson and MediaStreet for continuous inking systems and professional-quality bulk inks.
Your exposure to webcomics must be rather minimal. "Most" webcomics are ripping off UF? All the "popular" webcomics riff on tech support? Hardly. While a number of the long-running strips do takes on geek humor, that's understandable. When they started, us nerds were the only ones reading webcomics, and they were geared to their audience.
Take a look at The Bunny. How about Chopping Block? Randy Milholland's Something Positive, Sinfest, and Penny Arcade wouldn't make it into newspaper syndication without a major change in theme and writing. None of them ever mimicked User Friendly, and there are many more like them than there are copies of Iliad's work.
The sad thing is that this rant is seen as "insightful," when it's really just shallow and mis-informed. These folks aren't complaining that they're not superstars via their work. They went off on their own so that they could create, be rewarded for their creativity, and not have to give up a large chunk of the returns on said creativity to a third party. There's a whole passel of middle-men out there who latch themselves onto artists, and drain them dry, turn them into "product", and reap the lion's share of the rewards. Need evidence? Look at the releases from the major record labels - crap, mostly. Hollywood is busy making a ghetto-version "Honeymooners," re-hashing "Bewitched", and remaking every moderately successful flick from the 60's and 70's - they're out of "product" and unwilling to take risk, so they're recycling the same swill. The comics syndicates have been playing it safe for years, distributing humorless pabulum while bleeding away the intellectual property of the original artists. Many of the old-school comics guys went broke while the syndicates raked in the bucks on their output.
Not every artist is a prima donna. Most of them are just trying to make a living without getting raped in the process. It's something that every independent business person must deal with, but it's worse for creative folks because there's an entire industry solely based on getting as big a cut as possible from their work.
One core to thread them all
One core to find(1) them
One core to flush them all
And in inittab, BIND them
Holy hell - they better not check out that enclave of Arab terrorist activity - Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, our third president. They give all their change under $10 for visitor's fees in $2 bills (which are peeled off a stack of fresh, consecutively numbered notes), because it's got Jefferson's portrait on the front, dontcha know.
And to think, it's in the state right next door to Maryland, and only a couple hours from our nation's capital! Raise the terror rainbow to red! We must mount a counterinsurgency force! To arms! To arms!
The head of a company who has a vested interest in widespread adoption of broadband technology says that "broadband access will replace DVDs." That's a shocker.
More accurate statement: "We'll attempt to replace physical media with a bitstream that we control, can force you to pay for over and over again in order to maintain access, and can attach all sorts of licensing and DRM to. Oh, by the way, you'll need our special CinemaFiend Broadband service pack at $49.95 a month in addition to regular content subscription fees to make it work."
On-demand video streams will become more available, and supplement the sale of physical media. They'll obsolete DVDs in the same way that radio obsoleted records.
::Raises Hand::
I use my PDA constantly. I use it to jot notes when wandering through equipment racks, to record meetings in audio, to maintain my contact list, and for a number of other lighterweight applications that don't require a PC, or need to be very portable. I've got functions programmed into a calculator that calculate protocol overhead, latency, and tx/rx window size figures for various network types, among other things. In extracurricular activities, I use a Palm-based photographic depth-of-field calculator and an E6-B flight computer.
In addition, it's got integrated GPS, and provides all of my mapping, auto-routing, and voice navigation when in the car cradle. Appointments and contact listings have GPS mapping coordinates associated with them for driving directions.
It's also my default MP3/Ogg player, since with a 1G flash card, I can store a good selection of tracks along with detail mapping data and recorded audio.
Just because you don't find a tool useful, doesn't mean it has no use.
So what if there's a fork? So what if Linux experiences the same sort of trial-by-fire that occured when BSD went head-to-head with AT&T SysV? Sure, there was bickering between the BSD and SysV camps over the "right" way to do things. However, for the most part, the best methods won out by right of acclaim and attrition. There are few "pure" SysV systems, the BSD/SysV wars are ancient history, and *nix is probably the better for having gone through it.
Almost anything can be art.
Art is not in the mechanics of making the work. Art is not the camera, the paint brush, the canvas, the paper, the instrument. Art is not the tools, the raw materials, or the technique.
Art is the thoughts, emotions, and ideas that a work engenders. It's the vision and execution of the artist, how well they are able to communicate their vision to you, and the degree that they are able to allow you to share and participate in that vision.
A painting is not art. A painting is pigment, in a carrier base, smeared onto a surface. Art is how you are cunningly roped into having an emotional or intellectual response to those smears. A photograph isn't art. Photographic art is how the photographer manipulates his or her tools, the environment, and light in order to render their subject in a manner that evokes a connection with the viewer.
Say I took a group of 200 random images from a traffic camera (or cameras), and laid them all out in a large-format print. Among the bog-standard frames, I blend in a few images of serious collisions and pedestrian accidents. One casual observer might remark, "That's not art - it's just frames from a traffic camera." Another might notice the accident frames and say, "That's horrible - that's not artistic." A third may look at the same work and share my intent and vision - to show that tragedy mostly just occurs in boring, mundane, day-to-day life, barely noticeable.
So, I propose that the criteria for determining "art" is: Does the work have the potential to invoke a deeper appreciation than mere superficial stimulus? By saying "potential," we can try to limit the suggestive assessment of the success of the artist in doing so.
I haven't used the calendaring component yet, but right now Thunderbird is still beta-quality code. I'm rather disappointed that they released the current build as 1.0 - lots of bugs all over the place.
Fix the message duplication problem, the mail filtering, the RSS feed integration (odd that FireFox handles RSS properly, but Thunderbird dupes article headings), and various/sundry other things that go boom in TBird, and I'll have a little more confidence in this bundle as an Outlook challenger. As it stands, TBird 1.0 barely goes toe-to-toe with OE. And being a complete, unabashed fan of FFox, this is a real letdown.
I've got the sneaking suspicion that the relative runaway success of their browser tree has gone to the heads of the Mozilla.org folks. They think they're big-boy legitimate "contendahs" across the board, and are rushing stuff out the door to prop up the posturing that open-source alternatives are/will be kicking Microsoft arse up and down the 'net. They need to be careful that they don't do a crash-n-burn by spewing half-baked crap on the coattails of a solid product.
Cadaver studies are done in many interesting fields where trauma to the human body needs to be explored. In automotive crash tests, they don't usually strap a corpse into the driver seat and run the Nash Rambler into a wall.
Human cadavers are used for two purposes: calibrating test instruments and assessing traumatic effects of measured forces. The first use is simple - you can measure a force, but what exactly does that mean? Is it enough to crush a ribcage, or to fracture an average skull? Test dummies are designed to mimic tolerances determined by cadaver studies, and research with corpses continues in order to further development on the next generation of dummy and computer models. The second use is more medical - what happens to a joint, bone, or other tissue when subjected to a massive impact or torsional force? How does the body fail, and what methods can be used to repair it?
Current automotive cadaver studies are frequently being done with limb prosections, not the whole body. Automotive engineering protects the body trunk pretty well, to the point where previously fatal accidents are frequently survivable. Nowadays, the focus is on crippling injuries to the extremities - people are surviving, but are being left with crushed legs, hands, arms, etc.
An absolutely fascinating book is Mary Roach's Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.
/me pulls string on the back of Automobile Barbie...
>zip<
"Cars are haaaaard. ::tee hee::"
>zip<
"My seats match my outfit!"
>zip<
"Can you check my oil with your dipstick, Mr. Mechanic?"
I think Dillusional is really thinking about Solaris domains. On the old E10000 and newer SunFire servers, one can partition the box into completely independent systems. Each "domain" has a set of hardware resources (CPU, Memory, boot devices, etc.) allocated to it via the DR facility. Each has its own boot image and runs its own kernel. You can run multiple environments or even different versions of Solaris on the same box, provided that they support DR and domaining.
Under the hood, however, this is nothing like the zoning feature being described by the OP.
For an inexpensive, solid 35mm SLR body, I would definitely recommend the Nikon FE/FG's. The FE2 and FG are both readily available used in the price range that you are looking for. The FE2 provides a fast 1/4000 shutter and 1/250 flash sync, and has an aperture-priority Auto mode. The FG has a slower shutter (1/1000) and sync (1/90), but adds a fully automatic Program mode.
Both are manual focus, feature center-weighted Through-The-Lens metering, and take the same 1/3N lithium cell battery. A key feature of the Nikon system is that a new autofocus D-mount (AF-D) will fit a 20 or 30 year old camera just fine, and work perfectly with Nikon's auto-index (AI) aperture. You can start with an old manual-advance, manual-focus body and accumulate a selection of nice lenses, both manual focus (AI) and AF. Then, you can transfer those to a more recent AF system, or even transfer those D-mount lenses to a new digital body (like the D100).
I was only hit twice by comment-spammers before I took action.
Using image-text to verify humanity on the other end of the connection wasn't an option, as it excluded sight-impared users. User registration was a no-go: I don't want to have to spend time validating user accounts. I did enough of that in my BBS Sysop days. Even MT-Blacklist is a bit of a pain, as you've got to deal with each spam comment individually once posted.
However, one thing I found in common between my spammers and the attacks I've seen on other sites was that prior to the spamming run, the site was crawled. So, I excluded the locations of the comment scripts in my robots.txt and set a trap to auto-ban any crawler that doesn't obey the excludes.
Well-behaved spiders/'bots can index the site. Ill-behaved or malicious crawlers that download the whole file tree regardless of excludes trigger a tripwire that locks them out. You can eyeball the details in this entry on my site: Setting a Spider Trap
I've been part of the Sun beta software program, and one of my colleagues just returned from SunOne. We've been looking at this roadmap for some time, as it promises a set of features that we can exploit rather effectively should they come to fruition.
Behind the marketing-speak, N1 is merely Sun's attempt to provide the same types of services as MOSIX. They want to provide a utility computing resource that spans servers. This, combined with a set of management tools for creating/administering rulesets, can be used to automagically reconfigure Solaris domains with additional resources in order to meet spot demand.
The end result would be a cluster of x800 Starfire-class boxen linked with Sun's Wildcat bus interconnect. The domaining featureset will be extended so that individual Solaris domains could span physical servers. Memory and CPU could be held in reserve to be brought online to meet demand, or domains could be dynamically re-sized (a swamped domain could steal processors from one with lots of idle time).
Storage would be provided to the virtualized operating environments via SAN or NAS services. Solaris 9's network QoS and Mobile IP facilities could be leveraged to make the network interfaces transparent.
The phrase "eliminating sysadmins" is loaded with hyperbole, as the cluster would still need to be monitored, backed up, have its hardware maintained, have filesystems cleaned out and reorganized, etc. There's no "A.I." involved. There's no "click here to create a secure ordering and inventory system" button that magically translates a spec into an application, at least as far as I've seen.
Never work with a project manager who hasn't been a developer himself.
If one were to follow that advice, one would be in a constant search for employment in today's world. The fact is that the vast majority of Project Managers are business grads who have little, if any, technical knowledge. Their responsibilities are to develop the business cases and ensure that the product meets their needs.
The problem arises when one of two situations occurs: the project manager wants to make technical decisions, or the developer refuses to take the business case into account. As a systems engineer and product developer, I see both of these frequently, and the key to resolving them is tact. In a development role, I always try to keep technical scope and specifications under control. I also consult with the PM to ensure that I understand the business need, so that I may prioritize development efforts. Too often, developers feel the need to do what they consider the "Right Way" or "elegant", and completely miss the mark on what the end user wants.
become a project manager yourself, it's not rocket science.
Yes, sometimes you do need to think like a manager. There will be times when expectations are totally unrealistic. Then, your own management skills must kick in. Negotiate priorities, flex timelines, get more resources allocated. If the parameters are completely bogus, you need to be able to not just point out what won't work, but to offer workable alternatives in order to achieve the desired end result. If there's no budging on any of these criteria, then perhaps you're in a bad situation. However, to dismiss every PM out-of-hand because they haven't been in the trenches as a coder or engineer only sets one up for failure.
Soft-synths, improved digital recording software, better sequencers, and the proliferation of digital effects plugins will not turn Average Joe into a virtuoso performer. These things are tools. One still needs to have either innate talent or a basic schooling in musical theory and practice to take advantage of them.
I have a small digital home studio, comprised of an Alesis keyboard, an Athlon-based audio workstation, and packages such as Reason, ReBirth, Cubase, Reaktor, B4, and a stack of others. None of these made me a better musician. They did, however, provide me with a banquet of options from which to pick and choose as my skills develop.
The primary benefit of the digital and electronic home recording industry is this: people with talent who couldn't afford to produce professional-quality work can now do so. The hardware and software combinations that I've spend around $8,000 on, rival the capabilities of a $150 an hour studio of ten years ago. In addition, I have full control as musician and engineer.
Another benefit of software-based synthesizers is the accessibility of their parameters. Though slightly less convenient than the analog beasts of years past, a soft-synth with individual on-screen controls is many times easier to deal with than a digital hardware synth sporting a 4-line LCD in which to do all your parameter editing.
I use discrete hardware, still, for various purposes. However, digital sound generation, editing, post-production, and mixdown make my life much easier. That is its main appeal.
Not being a businessman on the hardware side of the world, there's one question that I've been wanting an answer to for some time. Is there a viable market for PC systems in the less-than-$700 price range? It would seem that educational institutions (especially public school disctricts) and the less-affluent consumer would be the perfect targets for this sort of marketing.
I realize that as technology ages, margins get slimmer and slimmer. What, however, is the floor? It would seem that in a world of "faster, smaller, cheaper," that there would be use for $200-300 machines that are new, out of the box, with warranty service, but are fully functional PCs. Net appliances were interesting, but for the average consumer nothing more than a pretty terminal device. Is it possible in this marketplace for a company to build and sell a cheap Wintel box to the budget consumer and still turn a profit?
It would sure beat having school districts full of old, beat-up, barely functional corporate write-off machines.
Anne Madison! (Rob Novak - 1:261/1093)
It's there. It's under area code 410. I found OTW. Keeping Room's listed as well. Oh, the days of Opus Message Reader and BlueWave!
I ran 1:261/1093, "Outside the Wall" in Baltimore, MD for seven years (the list states '92-97, but I went online August 1990). I met a number of friends who I still talk to and of whom I still have many fine memories. It's kinda neat to see that name pop up again after so many years.
I remember the thrill of getting everything working right for the first time. I remember marvelling at the fact that echomail really worked. I remember spending more time editing batch files than was healthy. I remember pulling consecutive all-nighters to reconstruct a crashed system. I remember begging for donations for a drive upgrade!
... and I remember, sadly, pulling the plug after seven long years. The new wave of ISP's wiped out the BBS world around 1996. I stayed around for another year, hoping it would pass. It didn't. I went from 20 calls/day to the board to one or two in a week.
What a shame - gone were the user group parties, the sysop picnics, and the fidonet bullshit meetings. Since then, I've yet to duplicate the experience. The internet is Mardi Gras in New Orleans. BBS's were the corner beer joint where you could just drink with your buddies.