Presumably, destinyland is seeking a tablet which also has the the ability to be read in sunlight like a Kindle. This is set up as a competitor to the iPad, which doesn't behave particularly well in sunlight.
It's a tablet rather than a dedicated e-reader, and since tablets can run programs that require fast response times (which the Kindle's screen can't do), they're hoping for the best of both worlds.
The original article says that they will "no longer offer a plan that includes both unlimited streaming and DVDs by mail," but the example they cite only includes 1 DVD at a time. When they were DVD-only, it was usually 3 or 4 at a time.
The implication is that they're going to stop offering those plans at all come September. That seems premature: the streaming catalog is getting better, but it's far from complete.
I have the 3 plan and am currently paying $24 a month for it. Currently, each additional disk costs either $5 or $6. They could be planning to raise that to $8, or just not offering it at all, which would be kind of odd.
It has been possible to make a career as a musician. Not as a get-rich-quick scheme, but by being talented, working hard, and all that other classic stuff. Traveling even regionally makes it hard to hold down a regular job, and playing only local gigs saturates your market. Even your avid fans don't want to see you every week.
As with any profession, there's a difference in quality between somebody who plays the occasional bar gig and a band who can really take the time to perfect their stagecraft. Part time work gets you part-time results.
Unfortunately, it was always insanely difficult to do music as a career, and has now become practically impossible, no matter how hard you work. It's just reality, and musicians have to get used to it. But it's too bad that we'll likely miss out on some great music we could have had.
Absolutely. There are people who can do more than sing; the most famous ones are entertainers, rather than just singers. It's more than just adding dance or special effects; it's a special talent that's hard to put your finger on but some people definitely have it.
Really good producers are still kind of a rare bird, but now that there are consumer-grade versions of their tools there's not quite as vast a gap between professional production and garage bands as there used to be. A good musician (not just a good singer, but a good musician) can put together a credible production.
Still, even at the top 1%, there are still tens of thousands out there just as good as you, and even more tens of thousands who aren't as good but good enough to be entertaining, and the marketplace is too crowded. Music as a lifestyle was always rare, even with the RIAA propping you up, but the democratization of music isn't going to help. If anything, it just means fewer big winners.
A lot of artists already have, and the vast majority discover that they still don't make any money.
The problem isn't the distribution, which can be handled by anybody with five bucks for a web site. The problem is promotion: getting people to come to your web site and pay anything at all for your item, out of the ten gazillion other artists doing exactly the same thing. Distribution isn't too hard; in fact, it's too easy.
The RIAA does distribution, but that's just a sideline. They used to spend more on it, getting actual records to actual stores, but it still wasn't the big part. The big part was the huge sums of money on promotion: TV ads, radio ads, payola for radio stations, billboards, etc. Fortunately for them, people seemed to like mostly listening to the same things as their friends, so they could promote a few big acts who could do fairly well financially. Everybody else was left with the scraps.
The "big acts" theory is falling apart as people get more choices, but what's left is still scraps. Divide Justin Bieber's annual income by every artist on the planet who can dump a song onto YouTube, and everybody gets enough for lunch at McD's. If you want to make a million dollars at it, step 1 is to get a million dollars that you can spend on promotion.
I keep assuming the spammers will start filtering out the + parts, since it's unnecessary. Maybe they figure you're prioritizing stuff with the + parts and leaving it in. Or (more likely) just sending it to both.
I have my own domain and similarly managed to prove to HP that they'd either sold my data or had it stolen. I think the customer rep I spoke to was convinced. Nobody up the chain seemed to care.
At least in theory, homeopathic medicine bottles are carefully labeled with something to the tune of "The FDA has not evaluated [product] for safety or efficacy," and they have to be very careful in phrasing their health claims. It's easy to be misled, and pretty dubious, but it's (barely, on a technicality) not illegal.
Fake AV software is more explicit in its claims, and definitely fraud. The distinction is pretty arbitrary, of course.
The distance limit is more about what you can demo in a lab. I see no reason why the concept couldn't be expanded to a battlefield.
If the net result is a better way to interact with the machine, you may be able to get more bang for your buck: better reaction time, more precise movements, application of kinaesthetic senses currently going unused. That ain't necessarily the case, but you won't know until you give it a try. It's a user-interface question; they're nothing necessarily optimal about the button-and-joystick interfaces on whatever they're using. UI only improves by trying new things in the lab first.
I think you're confusing being irked with hate. I didn't say the research was valueless; it was valuable for what it is. It was just that something it wasn't was prominently featured in the summary.
When I said I saw "nothing" in the data, I meant "nothing about chord progressions". The mention of chord progressions is buried in the subjunctive mood ("What if..."), so its not actually false, but it is misleading, since it wasn't a variable you actually considered.
And that brought up a more serious concern about the research. I would expect you'd find a lot of I-vi-IV-V progressions. It's a property shared by both hit and non-hit songs. If you're not distinguishing between them, then you're not learning what makes hits; you're learning what makes songs. The non-hits are your control group. I didn't see whether it was there or not, because I got distracted by the bit of music theory that managed to be both irrelevant and wrong but prominently featured.
Something from the summary really irked me: I doubt they'd find that the best songs use a I-III-IV progression. Pop songs practically all start with a I-IV-V progression. (Remember the lyrics to Hallelujah? "It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth...")
When the III is used, it's usually minor, though the minor vi is more common ("The minor fall.."). The I-vi-IV-V sequence has been the basis of rock and pop since the 50s. Learn those four chords, and you can play practically any top 40 hit. (You know the guy complaining about Pachelbel's Canon? Most of them are really just using the I-vi-IV-V, which happens to mesh nicely with Pachelbel's real progression: I-V-vi-iii-IV-I-IV-V.)
So I checked their data and discovered... nothing. Nowhere in their data do they talk about chord progressions. That's not really surprising, since figuring out the chord progressions is much trickier than figuring out the tempo. But they mention it in the summary. Why?
Because that progression is so universal, of course you'd see it in the top 40 hits. You're also going to see it in the songs you've never heard of. If they really had found that I-III-IV was a frequent hit, they'd actually have learned something.
This wasn't really intended as news. It's old stuff with new visualization applied. It's a student exercise passed off as research by people who don't actually know the state of the art, like the stories about "Students build 9,000 mpg car; why can't Detroit do that?"
It just irks me that they're talking a little music theory and betraying their lack of understanding of music theory in the process. What I've just talked about is something every, EVERY musician knows.
At this point, the junk is subsidizing the bills. You don't like the bills, but you need to get them.
Unlike spam, the cost of sending a piece of mail is very high, and the Post Office is always broke. As long as they're going out, though, carrying the extra junk mail is a small marginal cost, and their willingness to carry the junk means that the price of stamps remains relatively low. (It astonishes me that you can send a letter thousands of miles in a day or two for less than half a buck.)
The "Resident" mail is designed to make it cheaper for them. It's not just that they want to reach somebody, though that's nice, too. It means the Post Office doesn't have to drag it back if refused, and they give the sender a break on that.
It's not great for the environment, obviously, but at least at the moment they're still required to offer mail service to everybody. It's less like spam and more like Google AdWords: irritating, but a bit less irritating if you know why it's there. If it wasn't, some good things would disappear.
Those good things may disappear anyway: more and more bills are switching online, and the Post Office may one day knuckle under. You'll probably spend more for a letter, but you'll get (and send) even less physical mail than you do now. That will probably happen only after they decide that internet service, like mail, is a right rather than a privilege.
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
You get a lot of 2pis when you compute circumferences, but you would end up with just as many tau/4 when computing areas with diameters.
But that doesn't change your x-ray absorption cross-section, and they rays that don't scatter off your skins are still absorbed someplace in your body or transmitted to the far side, just like in penetrative x-ray imaging.
Right, but because they're only trying to penetrate clothing and not a whole body, they need only much, much lower dosages to accomplish their goal.
I don't know what kind of testing they apply, but since normal operation includes a digital X-ray receiver, it could presumably be set to warn them if they're reading vast amounts of X-rays. I don't know if they do, but they should at least know if they're really putting out the x-rays they think they are.
It doesn't answer the question of whether having very-long-term exposure to trivial amounts of x-rays has unexpected negative consequences, but that's a case where I'd shift the burden of proof to those who claim that it does.
Re:Always show your work
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 2
Then your teacher failed at teaching you about significant figures. 67*pi=210.49, not 210.38. The difference is small, but you were only working with 3 significant figures of pi, so everything past the decimal point is going to be random. It just so happens that the next decimal places are small (.00159), which helps on the next digit, but the final digit is pretty much entirely junk.
210 is good enough for most purposes, for the same reason that 3.14 is good enough for most purposes, and the teacher should have marked extra digits as wrong. Honestly, it was easier to leave it at 67*pi, and more correct.
In the case of the iPod, the joke was part of the marketing. They compared it to a packet of gum, to impress you with how small it was. Nobody expected you to try to eat it; the fake warning was a bit of humor.
I have no idea how many of the others are jokes, or how many of them have other stories that make them less than they might appear. I do know that the authors of the article didn't try to find out.
Not a chance in hell. The Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act that Frank has been submitting for a decade never gets out of committee, and it's much less broad-minded than this bill.
It's nice to see that somebody is at least trying, but we're not even close to have to worry about a veto.
An 11 year old is pretty light, but since the point clearly has nothing to do with designing a vehicle to move people around, why not just replace the entire machine with a two-pound computer?
The Challenge is held on a closed track, so it's not like anybody would get hurt. With the driver removed, we could ratchet the number up to 10,000 miles, I'm sure.
Why would you want to? I have no idea, but then, I have no idea what the point of this demonstration is in the first place except to print "large numbers of miles per gallon" in a newspaper. So why not just take it to its logical conclusion?
I didn't intend to pretend that nobody likes modern music, but there is less of an attachment to it. Music has always been ephemeral, but when the RIAA controlled the means of distribution, they were able to attract a lot of people to a small number of artists. That made excellent material for parody: everybody knew the same songs.
I didn't mean to say that the classic rock was inherently "better" than modern music; that's a subjective judgment that I wouldn't presume to make. But the RIAA has had increasingly to appeal to lowest-common-denominator stuff to get the broadest audience, while more and more niche groups are peeling off into stuff that appeals to them. That lowest-common-denominator stuff doesn't attract much personal devotion.
Right now, the biggest thing the RIAA has is re-hashing their old favorite in the form of Glee, which is selling like crazy, and somebody like Lady Gaga, who puts on a hell of a spectacle but leaves the fans less attached to the music itself.
I was an immense fan of "In 3D", and one of the most notable things about it is the polka versions of classics (Hey Jude, My Generation, etc.) Some of the parodies were pending classics, like Eat It, Rye or the Kaiser, and King of Suede.
But we've run out of classics. Can you really parody Lady Gaga, herself essentially a parody of the music industry today?
Al is a gifted musician; his grasp of style and ability to mimic it are extraordinary: Songs like Mr. Popeil and Dog Eat Dog show a tremendous grasp of what makes the B-52s and the Talking Heads distinctive. Often his original works are funnier than the parodies, especially since parody so often relies on the meat of source material. Today's source material doesn't seem to HAVE any meat.
I looked at the video of his Lady Gaga parody. It's obviously a huge amount of work, and it's funny for that. That kind of effort is what Lady Gaga brings to the table, when the song material is forgettable.
This is not a dig on Al; it's a dig on the music industry, which as we've often noted here is dying, and with good reason. I'm thrilled that Al is still applying his tremendous gifts. I just wish he had better stuff to work with.
Slashdot Mirror
I stand corrected. Sorry about that; having the inane ramblings of a Slashdot editor attributed to me would be very upsetting.
Presumably, destinyland is seeking a tablet which also has the the ability to be read in sunlight like a Kindle. This is set up as a competitor to the iPad, which doesn't behave particularly well in sunlight.
It's a tablet rather than a dedicated e-reader, and since tablets can run programs that require fast response times (which the Kindle's screen can't do), they're hoping for the best of both worlds.
A better computer.
Computers have always been good for doing tedious jobs that people don't want to do.
Like reading manuals.
I'm on the 3-at-a-time plan right now, and it costs $21.19. So it's a $3 bump. Not thrilled, but not enough to make me cancel.
The original article says that they will "no longer offer a plan that includes both unlimited streaming and DVDs by mail," but the example they cite only includes 1 DVD at a time. When they were DVD-only, it was usually 3 or 4 at a time.
The implication is that they're going to stop offering those plans at all come September. That seems premature: the streaming catalog is getting better, but it's far from complete.
I have the 3 plan and am currently paying $24 a month for it. Currently, each additional disk costs either $5 or $6. They could be planning to raise that to $8, or just not offering it at all, which would be kind of odd.
It has been possible to make a career as a musician. Not as a get-rich-quick scheme, but by being talented, working hard, and all that other classic stuff. Traveling even regionally makes it hard to hold down a regular job, and playing only local gigs saturates your market. Even your avid fans don't want to see you every week.
As with any profession, there's a difference in quality between somebody who plays the occasional bar gig and a band who can really take the time to perfect their stagecraft. Part time work gets you part-time results.
Unfortunately, it was always insanely difficult to do music as a career, and has now become practically impossible, no matter how hard you work. It's just reality, and musicians have to get used to it. But it's too bad that we'll likely miss out on some great music we could have had.
Absolutely. There are people who can do more than sing; the most famous ones are entertainers, rather than just singers. It's more than just adding dance or special effects; it's a special talent that's hard to put your finger on but some people definitely have it.
Really good producers are still kind of a rare bird, but now that there are consumer-grade versions of their tools there's not quite as vast a gap between professional production and garage bands as there used to be. A good musician (not just a good singer, but a good musician) can put together a credible production.
Still, even at the top 1%, there are still tens of thousands out there just as good as you, and even more tens of thousands who aren't as good but good enough to be entertaining, and the marketplace is too crowded. Music as a lifestyle was always rare, even with the RIAA propping you up, but the democratization of music isn't going to help. If anything, it just means fewer big winners.
A lot of artists already have, and the vast majority discover that they still don't make any money.
The problem isn't the distribution, which can be handled by anybody with five bucks for a web site. The problem is promotion: getting people to come to your web site and pay anything at all for your item, out of the ten gazillion other artists doing exactly the same thing. Distribution isn't too hard; in fact, it's too easy.
The RIAA does distribution, but that's just a sideline. They used to spend more on it, getting actual records to actual stores, but it still wasn't the big part. The big part was the huge sums of money on promotion: TV ads, radio ads, payola for radio stations, billboards, etc. Fortunately for them, people seemed to like mostly listening to the same things as their friends, so they could promote a few big acts who could do fairly well financially. Everybody else was left with the scraps.
The "big acts" theory is falling apart as people get more choices, but what's left is still scraps. Divide Justin Bieber's annual income by every artist on the planet who can dump a song onto YouTube, and everybody gets enough for lunch at McD's. If you want to make a million dollars at it, step 1 is to get a million dollars that you can spend on promotion.
I keep assuming the spammers will start filtering out the + parts, since it's unnecessary. Maybe they figure you're prioritizing stuff with the + parts and leaving it in. Or (more likely) just sending it to both.
I have my own domain and similarly managed to prove to HP that they'd either sold my data or had it stolen. I think the customer rep I spoke to was convinced. Nobody up the chain seemed to care.
At least in theory, homeopathic medicine bottles are carefully labeled with something to the tune of "The FDA has not evaluated [product] for safety or efficacy," and they have to be very careful in phrasing their health claims. It's easy to be misled, and pretty dubious, but it's (barely, on a technicality) not illegal.
Fake AV software is more explicit in its claims, and definitely fraud. The distinction is pretty arbitrary, of course.
The distance limit is more about what you can demo in a lab. I see no reason why the concept couldn't be expanded to a battlefield.
If the net result is a better way to interact with the machine, you may be able to get more bang for your buck: better reaction time, more precise movements, application of kinaesthetic senses currently going unused. That ain't necessarily the case, but you won't know until you give it a try. It's a user-interface question; they're nothing necessarily optimal about the button-and-joystick interfaces on whatever they're using. UI only improves by trying new things in the lab first.
I think you're confusing being irked with hate. I didn't say the research was valueless; it was valuable for what it is. It was just that something it wasn't was prominently featured in the summary.
When I said I saw "nothing" in the data, I meant "nothing about chord progressions". The mention of chord progressions is buried in the subjunctive mood ("What if..."), so its not actually false, but it is misleading, since it wasn't a variable you actually considered.
And that brought up a more serious concern about the research. I would expect you'd find a lot of I-vi-IV-V progressions. It's a property shared by both hit and non-hit songs. If you're not distinguishing between them, then you're not learning what makes hits; you're learning what makes songs. The non-hits are your control group. I didn't see whether it was there or not, because I got distracted by the bit of music theory that managed to be both irrelevant and wrong but prominently featured.
Something from the summary really irked me: I doubt they'd find that the best songs use a I-III-IV progression. Pop songs practically all start with a I-IV-V progression. (Remember the lyrics to Hallelujah? "It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth...")
When the III is used, it's usually minor, though the minor vi is more common ("The minor fall.."). The I-vi-IV-V sequence has been the basis of rock and pop since the 50s. Learn those four chords, and you can play practically any top 40 hit. (You know the guy complaining about Pachelbel's Canon? Most of them are really just using the I-vi-IV-V, which happens to mesh nicely with Pachelbel's real progression: I-V-vi-iii-IV-I-IV-V.)
So I checked their data and discovered... nothing. Nowhere in their data do they talk about chord progressions. That's not really surprising, since figuring out the chord progressions is much trickier than figuring out the tempo. But they mention it in the summary. Why?
Because that progression is so universal, of course you'd see it in the top 40 hits. You're also going to see it in the songs you've never heard of. If they really had found that I-III-IV was a frequent hit, they'd actually have learned something.
This wasn't really intended as news. It's old stuff with new visualization applied. It's a student exercise passed off as research by people who don't actually know the state of the art, like the stories about "Students build 9,000 mpg car; why can't Detroit do that?"
It just irks me that they're talking a little music theory and betraying their lack of understanding of music theory in the process. What I've just talked about is something every, EVERY musician knows.
At this point, the junk is subsidizing the bills. You don't like the bills, but you need to get them.
Unlike spam, the cost of sending a piece of mail is very high, and the Post Office is always broke. As long as they're going out, though, carrying the extra junk mail is a small marginal cost, and their willingness to carry the junk means that the price of stamps remains relatively low. (It astonishes me that you can send a letter thousands of miles in a day or two for less than half a buck.)
The "Resident" mail is designed to make it cheaper for them. It's not just that they want to reach somebody, though that's nice, too. It means the Post Office doesn't have to drag it back if refused, and they give the sender a break on that.
It's not great for the environment, obviously, but at least at the moment they're still required to offer mail service to everybody. It's less like spam and more like Google AdWords: irritating, but a bit less irritating if you know why it's there. If it wasn't, some good things would disappear.
Those good things may disappear anyway: more and more bills are switching online, and the Post Office may one day knuckle under. You'll probably spend more for a letter, but you'll get (and send) even less physical mail than you do now. That will probably happen only after they decide that internet service, like mail, is a right rather than a privilege.
You get a lot of 2pis when you compute circumferences, but you would end up with just as many tau/4 when computing areas with diameters.
No skin off my nose either way.
But that doesn't change your x-ray absorption cross-section, and they rays that don't scatter off your skins are still absorbed someplace in your body or transmitted to the far side, just like in penetrative x-ray imaging.
Right, but because they're only trying to penetrate clothing and not a whole body, they need only much, much lower dosages to accomplish their goal.
I don't know what kind of testing they apply, but since normal operation includes a digital X-ray receiver, it could presumably be set to warn them if they're reading vast amounts of X-rays. I don't know if they do, but they should at least know if they're really putting out the x-rays they think they are.
It doesn't answer the question of whether having very-long-term exposure to trivial amounts of x-rays has unexpected negative consequences, but that's a case where I'd shift the burden of proof to those who claim that it does.
Then your teacher failed at teaching you about significant figures. 67*pi=210.49, not 210.38. The difference is small, but you were only working with 3 significant figures of pi, so everything past the decimal point is going to be random. It just so happens that the next decimal places are small (.00159), which helps on the next digit, but the final digit is pretty much entirely junk.
210 is good enough for most purposes, for the same reason that 3.14 is good enough for most purposes, and the teacher should have marked extra digits as wrong. Honestly, it was easier to leave it at 67*pi, and more correct.
So it's got "unusual syntax" AND builtin oxymorons? Sign me up!
In the case of the iPod, the joke was part of the marketing. They compared it to a packet of gum, to impress you with how small it was. Nobody expected you to try to eat it; the fake warning was a bit of humor.
I have no idea how many of the others are jokes, or how many of them have other stories that make them less than they might appear. I do know that the authors of the article didn't try to find out.
Not a chance in hell. The Medical Marijuana Patient Protection Act that Frank has been submitting for a decade never gets out of committee, and it's much less broad-minded than this bill.
It's nice to see that somebody is at least trying, but we're not even close to have to worry about a veto.
An 11 year old is pretty light, but since the point clearly has nothing to do with designing a vehicle to move people around, why not just replace the entire machine with a two-pound computer?
The Challenge is held on a closed track, so it's not like anybody would get hurt. With the driver removed, we could ratchet the number up to 10,000 miles, I'm sure.
Why would you want to? I have no idea, but then, I have no idea what the point of this demonstration is in the first place except to print "large numbers of miles per gallon" in a newspaper. So why not just take it to its logical conclusion?
I didn't intend to pretend that nobody likes modern music, but there is less of an attachment to it. Music has always been ephemeral, but when the RIAA controlled the means of distribution, they were able to attract a lot of people to a small number of artists. That made excellent material for parody: everybody knew the same songs.
I didn't mean to say that the classic rock was inherently "better" than modern music; that's a subjective judgment that I wouldn't presume to make. But the RIAA has had increasingly to appeal to lowest-common-denominator stuff to get the broadest audience, while more and more niche groups are peeling off into stuff that appeals to them. That lowest-common-denominator stuff doesn't attract much personal devotion.
Right now, the biggest thing the RIAA has is re-hashing their old favorite in the form of Glee, which is selling like crazy, and somebody like Lady Gaga, who puts on a hell of a spectacle but leaves the fans less attached to the music itself.
I cannot BELIEVE I left that setup there without noticing it.
I was an immense fan of "In 3D", and one of the most notable things about it is the polka versions of classics (Hey Jude, My Generation, etc.) Some of the parodies were pending classics, like Eat It, Rye or the Kaiser, and King of Suede.
But we've run out of classics. Can you really parody Lady Gaga, herself essentially a parody of the music industry today?
Al is a gifted musician; his grasp of style and ability to mimic it are extraordinary: Songs like Mr. Popeil and Dog Eat Dog show a tremendous grasp of what makes the B-52s and the Talking Heads distinctive. Often his original works are funnier than the parodies, especially since parody so often relies on the meat of source material. Today's source material doesn't seem to HAVE any meat.
I looked at the video of his Lady Gaga parody. It's obviously a huge amount of work, and it's funny for that. That kind of effort is what Lady Gaga brings to the table, when the song material is forgettable.
This is not a dig on Al; it's a dig on the music industry, which as we've often noted here is dying, and with good reason. I'm thrilled that Al is still applying his tremendous gifts. I just wish he had better stuff to work with.