I used linux for over a year, and when I gave it up, all of my files were in some sort of shitty proprietary format that only OpenOffice could read WTF is that all about?
How do they explain away the layer of iridium rich clay (around the world) from around the time of the mass extinction. Current theory says it's vaporized impact material.
What matters most to me is the fact that the mastering of the time of vinyl is of much, MUCH higher quality than today's. Despite the higher noise floor of the vinyl medium, audio engineers of today feel the need to compress an entire album to a range of a only a fraction of the potential of PCM. My god, there's CLIPPING in modern records, for God's sake. The loudness war on CDs is taking a toll on the quality of modern music.
Please don't blame the engineers. While I agree that the mastering of most modern albums sucks horse balls, it isn't always the fault of whoever is doing the mastering. Some friends of mine built a sound studio above their garage. (It's not super high end, but it's better than most professional ones in the area.) I've helped them engineer and produce a number of paid and pro-bono projects. As well as a number of local kids just playing around.
My favorite people to work with are the older rockers, because they know what dynamic range is. These younger punks want their music to be squeezed and mutilated until it sounds like shit.
I've always been able to hear how terrible the mastering has been getting, but it had never truly hit home until just recently. I was chopping up some tracks to make myself some mp3 ringtones. My brother asked me to make him one from one of his cd's. So I ripped the track and loaded it into Audacity. Apparently my cry of "Holy Shit" was louder than I thought, because he came running back into the room thinking something bad had happened. The waveform of the track was almost solid blue from the top to the bottom of the range, the whole length of the track. He didn't see anything wrong until I showed him the waveform from a track off my new Clapton cd. He still didn't think that his stuff sounded any different.
My response to this is that I just don't listen to an album if I don't like the way it was mastered. There are bands who's music that I like, but I can't stand to listen to it. Most of them even manage to sound like that live, which is even worse. The funny part is that I am only 23 and I get all kinds of strange reactions from my peers over what I hear in music. Oh well, to each his own.
I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song
For me that's not entirely true. I still have music that I like to listen to. I make sure everything is tagged with the genre, and some days I just feel like one kind of music or another. My philosophy isn't that it's overload, but that it's having a song for every situation. It's being able to hit play on "Viva Las Vegas" (ZZ Top version) as you pass the welcome sign, or queueing up "Teenage Wasteland" when my friends' kids are having a "teen" moment (that didn't help the situation any, but it was funny).
When I start a new character, I end up sending some items and materials to it from my higher level ones. This lets me get a jump on leveling up my skills and speeds things up from there.
JVC isn't the only one who manipulates the customers. I went into the local Sears to look at displays, because they have the best selection in our area. I quickly noticed that the high priced, sexy, flat panel(read: "high commission") models had crystal clear feeds. The slightly older tv's, and the crt models had an obviously doped feed that was fuzzy and had a little bit of static.
I pointed out the poor picture quality to the person I was with, and the nearest sales droid jumped in and informed us that those weren't the tv's that we wanted. That we wanted to look at the ones on that wall. I looked him in the eye and said, "sure, but only if those ones are playing the same feed as these"
droid: "oh, well, yes they are. These just aren't as good as those" me: "No, they aren't. This tv is getting a doped signal" droid: "No it's not" me: "If it's all the same, then swap the input cables of this "inferior" tv with that $5,000 72 inch over there" droid: (turns red)"No, we can't do that. It's against store policy to mess with the cabling"
He turned his head to call over backup, and when he looked back we were around the corner and gone.
Like the difference between copy, download, and install. Far to many people say things like: "Give me the cd so that I can download the program onto my computer", or "I'm going to download these mp3s onto my player"
Actually, would it really be such a bad idea if apple turned over (sold) the final aggregated data to the record companies? I'm sure that the data would go a long way towards proving why nobody buys their shit music. Maybe they would wonder why 10,000 people only ever listen to 1 song out of a whole cd, or why whole swaths of artists/albums never get listened to more than a couple of times.
I doubt the record companies would believe the data (they are way too fond of blaming everything from bad sales to crop circles on piracy) but it would be one more nail in the coffin.
The registry is a centralized database of configuration settings for the OS and applications.
Sort of offtopic, but I might point out that many of the individual teams working on Vista components are no longer storing certain data in the registry. This is to promote the least privilege method for development (about damn time). It is also in preparate for when WinFS actually gets in place and everything goes back into the database, but this time it will be organized.
Well, thats for the developers to fix!
Exactly! So many devs write all kinds of crap to HKLM instead of current user. This is going to take a while to get into a lot of thick skulls, but they need to stop doing that. In the meantime, I noticed that one of the program managers said that when applications try to write to places they shouldn't, then Windows will trap that operation and transparently redirect the operation to somewhere that is safer. If everything goes well, then the application will never know any different.
My only problem with getting prints done, is that some photo places that prints from digital media will refuse my business because they believe that my photos are "too good" for an amateur like myself and believe I have stolen the work of a "real" photographer. Most of the pictures I deem worthy to get prints of are taken with a Canon 20D and tweaked in photoshop and I end up with some fairly good stuff. I finally managed to convince one of the shops to make prints for me, but it took bringing my camera laptop and actually showing them how I get my end result.
I'd have no end of problems because my mouse hand doesn't sit still. I'm constantly figeting with the mouse. I tap, fiddle, stroke (shut up, there's no other way to describe it), and other idle motions that have nothing to do with any action on the screen. All of this takes place without anything weird happening because the mouse buttons "resist". I also prefer keyboards with a slightly higher (but not too high) tactile response.
They have some amazingly high dot matrix printers on CSI. It's hard to tell because they are inside a inkjet housing but if you listen closely, they sound like a dot matrix.
What I'm worried about is that the state will collect a small recycle tax on all electronics and then forget what the money is for and use it to fund some stupid program. It's the same thing that always happens. Or worse, and equally likely. The new bureaucracy will cost more than the tax to run.
Longhorn's kernel is not managed, nor should it be
Duh, I can't believe how many people seem to think this is the way to go. I know there has been some preliminary work in that direction, but until processors can directly execute clr bytecode (efficently and speedily) a managed kernel is just not going to happen..NET was never intended to do that anyway. It is nothing more than a set of (great) tools to ease development and integration. (You can go back to COM if you don't like that)
I read an article a while back (dang where is that link, somewhere in a Longhorn FAQ I think) that gives some perspective on how important to Longhorn.NET is. It stated that a lot of Longhorn stuff is being written and compiled on workstations running current longhorn builds with usable bits from orcas (the next version of visual studio).
I would be happy if the large notebooks (17 and now 19 inches) would actually use a larger size keyboard. We have all of the space, but these little tiny laptop keyboards with 3 or more inches of empty space on either side. It doesn't have to be a full 104 key keyboard, just maybe something a little more spread out. Perhaps they could use some of that room to put the keys in something resembling a familiar layout.
Most tech support people I've talked to, depending on the problem, ask if the drivers are up to date. This should make it a little less stressfull for the customer.
It should also eliminate the need to have to lie about rebooting when talking with tech support.
Personally, if it passed, I'd just buy in the US and bring it into Canada
I have absolutely no problem with that. Just so long as I get to buy my drugs in canada. In fact lets set up a program and call it, "Music for Meds". We'll start a website that matches up people who need drugs with people who need an mp3 player. We can exchange shopping lists by email, or by posting on the website. Then we just meet in a border town and make the exchange.
I'll drink to that. Building spreadsheet applications that do things only a spreadsheet can do, is one thing. Building entire databases in excel is another. Sometimes I'd rather see them do it in Access *shudder* than use excel. "But that's what we're familiar with". Let's become more familiar with my friend, Mr. ClueBat (He's french).
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I used linux for over a year, and when I gave it up, all of my files were in some sort of shitty proprietary format that only OpenOffice could read WTF is that all about?
How do they explain away the layer of iridium rich clay (around the world) from around the time of the mass extinction. Current theory says it's vaporized impact material.
Easy, that is explained here (search for iridium)
Current global warming problems are explained here
You mean a la Fifth Element? I'll laugh when your perfect woman breaks your neck for groping her.
Rigidity? Please explain.
Imagine what you could do with a beowulf cluster of these.
What matters most to me is the fact that the mastering of the time of vinyl is of much, MUCH higher quality than today's. Despite the higher noise floor of the vinyl medium, audio engineers of today feel the need to compress an entire album to a range of a only a fraction of the potential of PCM. My god, there's CLIPPING in modern records, for God's sake. The loudness war on CDs is taking a toll on the quality of modern music.
Please don't blame the engineers. While I agree that the mastering of most modern albums sucks horse balls, it isn't always the fault of whoever is doing the mastering. Some friends of mine built a sound studio above their garage. (It's not super high end, but it's better than most professional ones in the area.) I've helped them engineer and produce a number of paid and pro-bono projects. As well as a number of local kids just playing around.
My favorite people to work with are the older rockers, because they know what dynamic range is. These younger punks want their music to be squeezed and mutilated until it sounds like shit.
I've always been able to hear how terrible the mastering has been getting, but it had never truly hit home until just recently. I was chopping up some tracks to make myself some mp3 ringtones. My brother asked me to make him one from one of his cd's. So I ripped the track and loaded it into Audacity. Apparently my cry of "Holy Shit" was louder than I thought, because he came running back into the room thinking something bad had happened. The waveform of the track was almost solid blue from the top to the bottom of the range, the whole length of the track. He didn't see anything wrong until I showed him the waveform from a track off my new Clapton cd. He still didn't think that his stuff sounded any different.
My response to this is that I just don't listen to an album if I don't like the way it was mastered. There are bands who's music that I like, but I can't stand to listen to it. Most of them even manage to sound like that live, which is even worse. The funny part is that I am only 23 and I get all kinds of strange reactions from my peers over what I hear in music. Oh well, to each his own.
Now get off my lawn you damned whippersnappers!
I have noticed that the more music I have ripped on my pc the less I listen to each song
For me that's not entirely true. I still have music that I like to listen to. I make sure everything is tagged with the genre, and some days I just feel like one kind of music or another. My philosophy isn't that it's overload, but that it's having a song for every situation. It's being able to hit play on "Viva Las Vegas" (ZZ Top version) as you pass the welcome sign, or queueing up "Teenage Wasteland" when my friends' kids are having a "teen" moment (that didn't help the situation any, but it was funny).
When I start a new character, I end up sending some items and materials to it from my higher level ones. This lets me get a jump on leveling up my skills and speeds things up from there.
JVC isn't the only one who manipulates the customers. I went into the local Sears to look at displays, because they have the best selection in our area. I quickly noticed that the high priced, sexy, flat panel(read: "high commission") models had crystal clear feeds. The slightly older tv's, and the crt models had an obviously doped feed that was fuzzy and had a little bit of static.
I pointed out the poor picture quality to the person I was with, and the nearest sales droid jumped in and informed us that those weren't the tv's that we wanted. That we wanted to look at the ones on that wall. I looked him in the eye and said, "sure, but only if those ones are playing the same feed as these"
droid: "oh, well, yes they are. These just aren't as good as those"
me: "No, they aren't. This tv is getting a doped signal"
droid: "No it's not"
me: "If it's all the same, then swap the input cables of this "inferior" tv with that $5,000 72 inch over there"
droid: (turns red)"No, we can't do that. It's against store policy to mess with the cabling"
He turned his head to call over backup, and when he looked back we were around the corner and gone.
Like the difference between copy, download, and install. Far to many people say things like: "Give me the cd so that I can download the program onto my computer", or "I'm going to download these mp3s onto my player"
Or the difference between memory and disk space.
Although, for a lot of people, no amount of explaining is going to help.
Actually, would it really be such a bad idea if apple turned over (sold) the final aggregated data to the record companies? I'm sure that the data would go a long way towards proving why nobody buys their shit music. Maybe they would wonder why 10,000 people only ever listen to 1 song out of a whole cd, or why whole swaths of artists/albums never get listened to more than a couple of times.
I doubt the record companies would believe the data (they are way too fond of blaming everything from bad sales to crop circles on piracy) but it would be one more nail in the coffin.
The registry is a centralized database of configuration settings for the OS and applications.
Sort of offtopic, but I might point out that many of the individual teams working on Vista components are no longer storing certain data in the registry. This is to promote the least privilege method for development (about damn time). It is also in preparate for when WinFS actually gets in place and everything goes back into the database, but this time it will be organized.
Well, thats for the developers to fix!
Exactly! So many devs write all kinds of crap to HKLM instead of current user. This is going to take a while to get into a lot of thick skulls, but they need to stop doing that. In the meantime, I noticed that one of the program managers said that when applications try to write to places they shouldn't, then Windows will trap that operation and transparently redirect the operation to somewhere that is safer. If everything goes well, then the application will never know any different.
My only problem with getting prints done, is that some photo places that prints from digital media will refuse my business because they believe that my photos are "too good" for an amateur like myself and believe I have stolen the work of a "real" photographer. Most of the pictures I deem worthy to get prints of are taken with a Canon 20D and tweaked in photoshop and I end up with some fairly good stuff. I finally managed to convince one of the shops to make prints for me, but it took bringing my camera laptop and actually showing them how I get my end result.
Hmmm...mine just has W, A, S, D, LShift, and LCtrl rubbed off
I'd have no end of problems because my mouse hand doesn't sit still. I'm constantly figeting with the mouse. I tap, fiddle, stroke (shut up, there's no other way to describe it), and other idle motions that have nothing to do with any action on the screen. All of this takes place without anything weird happening because the mouse buttons "resist".
I also prefer keyboards with a slightly higher (but not too high) tactile response.
But that's just me, individual results may vary.
Don't forget the infinite number of web servers filled with hundreds of variations of the same pages with circular links, porn, and no real content.
Back in "the day" I wasted quite a bit of time on those until I gave up and have been happily paying retail price ever since. *shifty eyes*
But the price point for the rural area that I live in will still probably not be good enough to for the telco's to care, and I'll still have dialup.
They have some amazingly high dot matrix printers on CSI. It's hard to tell because they are inside a inkjet housing but if you listen closely, they sound like a dot matrix.
What I'm worried about is that the state will collect a small recycle tax on all electronics and then forget what the money is for and use it to fund some stupid program. It's the same thing that always happens. Or worse, and equally likely. The new bureaucracy will cost more than the tax to run.
Longhorn's kernel is not managed, nor should it be
.NET was never intended to do that anyway. It is nothing more than a set of (great) tools to ease development and integration. (You can go back to COM if you don't like that)
.NET is. It stated that a lot of Longhorn stuff is being written and compiled on workstations running current longhorn builds with usable bits from orcas (the next version of visual studio).
Duh, I can't believe how many people seem to think this is the way to go. I know there has been some preliminary work in that direction, but until processors can directly execute clr bytecode (efficently and speedily) a managed kernel is just not going to happen.
I read an article a while back (dang where is that link, somewhere in a Longhorn FAQ I think) that gives some perspective on how important to Longhorn
I would be happy if the large notebooks (17 and now 19 inches) would actually use a larger size keyboard. We have all of the space, but these little tiny laptop keyboards with 3 or more inches of empty space on either side. It doesn't have to be a full 104 key keyboard, just maybe something a little more spread out. Perhaps they could use some of that room to put the keys in something resembling a familiar layout.
Dell makes their own floppy drives and internal bays, which have their own proprietary screw arangement.
Several companies sell products specifically geared toward fixing this problem.
Here is one of my favorites. There have also been certain times when exreme measures have been needed.
Most tech support people I've talked to, depending on the problem, ask if the drivers are up to date. This should make it a little less stressfull for the customer.
It should also eliminate the need to have to lie about rebooting when talking with tech support.
Personally, if it passed, I'd just buy in the US and bring it into Canada
I have absolutely no problem with that. Just so long as I get to buy my drugs in canada. In fact lets set up a program and call it, "Music for Meds". We'll start a website that matches up people who need drugs with people who need an mp3 player. We can exchange shopping lists by email, or by posting on the website. Then we just meet in a border town and make the exchange.
I'll drink to that. Building spreadsheet applications that do things only a spreadsheet can do, is one thing. Building entire databases in excel is another. Sometimes I'd rather see them do it in Access *shudder* than use excel. "But that's what we're familiar with". Let's become more familiar with my friend, Mr. ClueBat (He's french).
And guess who has to fix it when they screw up?