And: Strangers with Candy, Upright Citizen's Brigade, Strip Mall. Lowest-common-denominator and standup seems to be there focus, of late. Dunno who is running the channel but they've definitely focused on a different audience. Only show they can't cancel without serious public outcry is South Park. (Although I see the axe coming.)
"Now for something completely different!" Instead of going to CMU where the cold is cold and the hot is muggy, go to Santa Cruz, the university in the mountains by the beach...Weather is fantastic, close to the silly-valley for great shopping (esp. for geek stuff)...
They've just started up a graduate program in Software Engineering, and I know a couple students and faculty and I'm impressed. (CMU students and faculty are impressive as well, but why not go someplace nicer?)
'course, I've heard that graduate programs (esp. near the SF Bay Area) are severly impacted, thanks to the dot-bomb.
Amen to this, I think far too many "managers" out there are the cause of employee failure, not the employees themselves.
Given the areas that phamlen is asking the candidates, they have some skills...But perhaps the questions don't match the needs of the workplace or (I'd guess being just as likely) the workplace is not conducive to productivity and the managers are expecting far more than is humanly possible. Then again, anyone dumb enough to work for such a shop (and not quit) are fools as much as incompetent.
(Phamlen, had many people quit the project?)
Unluckily, asking/. how to solve your management problems is like asking random guy on the street, we don't understand your situation nor do you have confidence in our ability to address your concerns. Now back to our regularly scheduled advert^H^H^H^H^Hnews articles.
There's a very simple explanation (which you've all seemed to miss)...The cost to pay John Doe to make the cup of X is constant no matter how big the cup is. (Well, ok, I suppose it does take a bit longer to fill, but it's certainly not a linear relationship.) This, combined with a minimal cost of materials means that as drinks get larger, so do profit margins.
(Self-serve removes the labor cost entirely, of course!)
Then again, I prefer to buy a drink that meets my needs and the convenience of buying one 32-oz drink rather than two 16-oz drinks is worth the.50 more it costs, so I'll continue to buy the "grande", "supersize" and the like from the drink menu.
I recently heard about the VIA Cyrix processors and am quite impressed with their (lack) of power draw. If your 810-based mobo handles 100Mhz fsb, you can drop one of these chips in for real cheap (~$50) and save more energy than a Celeron (about half, judging from their heat dissipation characteristics.) Unluckily, my linux box's old mobo was 66Mhz fsb (a Celeron CPU) so the Cyrix chip didn't work. (But another $80 and I had a new, low-end mobo that works great, includes video and audio on-board.)
I have, however, found some faults with the Cyrix: I can't watch DVD's (even with a high-end agp video card) and playing the most modern 3-d games can be hit-or-miss (Giants is unplayable, Return to Wolfenstein is semi-unplayable). But web-surfing and mp3 playing is most of what I do anyways...:^)
If you're particularly brave, you should be able to go without a CPU fan (one is included with the CPU)...I don't think there's an intel-style temperature throttle so you might want a thermometer to watch the heat level, but others on the net have said that with proper case ventilation, the CPU can run with just a heat sink (as some of the older PII/Celeron chips can.)
But if Sony says humans will fly like birds in 10 years, 15-year-old boys will start saving their money now.
I suspect most of the added CPU power will be for DRM.;^o
Personally, I'll stick with my $50 dreamcast and $5 games. Who needs yet more fighters/racers/ff rpg ripoffs? What sells hardware is software (and most hardware is sold at a loss anyways) so why is Sony talking about h/w?
(However, DVI and/or stereooptic output would be enough to consider an upgrade. Or if some significant leaps in software paradigms occur, not just incremental improvements on formulas...)
Having a K7VE board in my computer, I had a bios on it that was NEWER than the one on the asus web site for many many months (> 6)...E-mail to the company was black-holed. Their site was (as of perhaps 6 months ago) barely usable and downloads were often unavailable.
Recent months, however, have seen improvements both in their website design, download performance, and up-to-date information...'course, this is only from personal experience. The whole experience with Asus has left me sour.
It also left me sour on the whole "hardware weenie" reviews (I purchased this MoBo based on Sharkyextreme.com's recommendation) 'cause they very much focus on overclocking and other hacker-heavy features whereas I just want a stable system (no overclocking/RAID/etc for me) with a good price. Anyone have any recommendations for websites that do their reviews more in tune with the "common man"? (I mean I'm still quite happy with my non-overclock, non-DDR, non-RAID 700Mhz Duron! I'm just considering upgrading my 366 Celeron Linux box at some point.)
Given, also, that the original submission date was April 2001, I agree (I suspect the author meant to have it in the '01 April edition as a joke but missed it so they're re-submitting it for April '02.)
Most of the article sounds plausable until they mention snooping from outside a building...I suppose it could be done but I'd guess that the distortion of glass, reflections and other ambient light levels would make this about as useful as using an IR remote from outside your house.
Oh, and you forgot the extreme price these iBriq's have, $1500 for a 500MHz G3...Certainly makes the Macs much more cost-effective unless you *really* need the rack-mount formfactor of these devices.
(Inquiring minds want to know how many have they shipped?)
Re:Which formats support simple batch manipulation
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Try the below script, you'll need Python, mpg123 and sox, all of which are easy to obtain for Linux. This process stores the volume in the comment as text, you might want to consider storing it at the end of the comment in binary if you use the comment field for real information. There are a multitude of other improvements that could be made to this script (command-line options would be a good start.)
I also have a fairly simple random MP3 player script that also uses mpg123 with the volume settings generated. It normalizes on a song-by-song basis (unlike many of the player plugins that normalize continuously, making the quiet parts of songs no longer play quiet.) It would be fairly easy to modify it to do album-by-album normalization if you so desired. (Assuming your MP3 collection is well organized.)
#!/usr/bin/env python
# standard Py libs
import os, sys, stat, random
# available from: http://id3-py.sourceforge.net/
import ID3
def compute_volume(song):
tmpfile = '/tmp/randplay%d.wav' % os.getpid()
os.system('mpg123 -w %s "%s" >/dev/null 2>&1' % (tmpfile, song))
p = os.popen('sox "%s" -e stat -v 2>&1' % tmpfile)
v = float(p.readline())
p.close()
os.system('rm %s' % tmpfile)
return v
def recurse(directory, callback):
for i in os.listdir(directory):
path = '%s/%s' % (directory, i)
m = os.stat(path)[stat.ST_MODE]
if stat.S_ISDIR(m): recurse(path, callback)
if stat.S_ISREG(m): callback(path)
def do(song):
if song[-4:] != '.mp3': return song
i = ID3.ID3(song)
v = 0.0
if i.comment and i.comment[0] in '0123456789':
v = float(i.comment)
#v = 0.0 # uncomment this to have the script (re)compute the volume of every file
if v >= 1.0:
print '%s: %f' % (song, v)
else:
print '%s: ' % song,
sys.stdout.flush()
v = compute_volume(song)
print '%f' % v
i.comment = '%f' % v
i.write()
return song
With various document-sharing systems commercially/freely available (WebDAV making them local-drive easy to use) why would you even want to send an attachment at all? Why not just store it in some arbitrary location on a shared filesystem and e-mail the URL?
(As we do at where I work.)
'course, this assumes people can actually use and get to said distributed filesystem...HTTP-based systems are by far the easiest to share Internet-wide.
Many very good games can be now had for 500 games) with the min/max # of players, game modes (deathmatch, coop, team, ctf, etc), the style of game, and how many players/cd.
A far more interesting question is how do you players deal with the varying levels of ability at your parties? Personally, I lean towards cooperative games or do ad-hoc handicaps (winner should always use the weakest weapon, etc). 'course, large parties can split up into multiple games and players can play what they're best at...
I hope that more game companies take after GoD in labelling/featuring cooperative campaign play (as labelled on Serious Sam.)
The auto-stepdown capability of the P4 is the first thing I've heard about Intel's latest CPUs to interest me away from AMD's, anyone have anecdotal experience of using a P4 for extended periods with passive heat dissipation? I'd *love* to set the CPU fan up on a switch (better yet, controlled via h/w so when I want to game, I run an app to turn the CPU fan on.)
I would not be suprised if computers came with variable-speed fans for CPU heat dissipation based on demand for lower power consumption.
I would not consider HDTV without also ensuring that the display includes a digital interface, particularly DVI-I. If you ever compare digital to analog interfaces on the same device, you'll never go back to analog. Besides, when you're blowing a few grand, an extra grand is going to be worth it in the long run.
(I purchased a Proxima projector about a year ago with the intention of getting a computer-based HDTV decoder solution.)
Agreed on the last point, while IBM continues to advertise their Linux support, you're *very* limited on the laptops you can buy from them with Linux preinstalled...Namely their higher-priced hardware...Not sure why.:^(
I'd hate to see IBM leave the desktop market but I wouldn't be suprised. (Although I doubt they'd leave the laptop market...)
The question is, would Reverend Crowley hold the copyright or would The Church of Satan? Guess it depends on the contract you have with your church.;^o
Not having any Scientology documents, I wonder who owns copyright on them as well.
As a side note: the US government cannot hold copyright...Any document written (including software developed) by a civil servant is uncopyrightable and, hence, public domain in all senses of the words.
Well, the cases regarding Scientology (if memory serves) that you're thinking of is more a copyright issue...So you can state that they are idiots and ugly and their mothers dress them funny but you can't back it up by directly including quotes from Dianetics or somesuch.:^( (IMHO, if you claim you're a religion and are getting non-profit status, you should not be able to retain copyright.)
I wonder, additionally, how this case affects people posting on message boards from their workplace (can people finally get rid of the "I do not represent {company X}" disclaimers?)
I've very much wanted to make my DC a firewall router for my dialup ISP access (dropped broadband when I realized 80% of my online time was surfing and when @Home decided to move me to DHCP without telling me first...Glad to see them bankrupt!)
I'd very much like an "off-the-shelf" serial cable (to 9-pin DIN), and it would seem to me that the game ports could also be made into serial interfaces (or parallel? I don't know the pinouts on 'em, being more of a s/w person than a h/w person.)
I and many of my co-workers have had various incarnations of USB and Firewire-connected IDE drives and had many failures (one for each of us so far.) Mine and others have been a software issue or an issue with the bridge, the drives worked fine when moved internally and reformatted...Something between the OS and the drive corrupted the filesystem bigtime. (This is under MacOS X and Win98SE, not Linux...so if it's an OS issue it might not be as much an issue on Linux...:)
My recommendation is to, instead, buy a $20US removable drive tray/rail system, I have 6 drives in trays of various sizes/makes and have *never* had a problem. (Note: no bus bridging involved.)
Or, at worst case, just make sure you make regular backups.
Agreed re: Pinkwater (being a minor collector). His works usually mix off-beat humor, food, New Jersey, and science fiction in a blender so you can suck it up with a straw.
He has a weekly radio show on NPR called "Chinwag Theater" that is worth listening to, although it usually spends more time playing a variety of music from the 20th century and clips from old radio comedies and the like.
This is the cheapest way to get into his work, and to hear him read it himself (with Scott Simon helping out.)
The URL: http://www.chinwagtheater.org/ (warning, uses flash.)
My personal favorite of his continues to be "Education of Robert Nifkin" (more of a young teen book) although "Borgel" is also quite good, incorporating space, time, and "other" travel (travelling between dimensions.)
Most of his books pop in and out of print, although compilations of many are available.
My understanding is that the bytecode language of Python is very stack based/rpn-like...It'd be a curious exercise to compile Python to Forth instead (Fython?)
Also, for more Forth-like fun, check out MUCKs, MUDs with an internal Forth language. (I spent far too much time hacking the internals of what would later become DaemonMUCK, almost ruining my college career...:)
I agree that early next year will likely see the prices seriously drop. One site had sales averages over the past few months and "summer moving season" definitely hit, with the # of sales much higher and prices jumping up a bit but dropping over the summer. I can dig it up if people are interested...
I'm starting the process of talking to agents at this point in the hopes of being able to take advantage of the serious downturn when it happens. I just have to hope the % loss on my place is less/equal to the larger/more expensive place I'll be buying.
Slashdot Mirror
And: Strangers with Candy, Upright Citizen's Brigade, Strip Mall. Lowest-common-denominator and standup seems to be there focus, of late. Dunno who is running the channel but they've definitely focused on a different audience. Only show they can't cancel without serious public outcry is South Park. (Although I see the axe coming.)
"Now for something completely different!" Instead of going to CMU where the cold is cold and the hot is muggy, go to Santa Cruz, the university in the mountains by the beach...Weather is fantastic, close to the silly-valley for great shopping (esp. for geek stuff)...
They've just started up a graduate program in Software Engineering, and I know a couple students and faculty and I'm impressed. (CMU students and faculty are impressive as well, but why not go someplace nicer?)
'course, I've heard that graduate programs (esp. near the SF Bay Area) are severly impacted, thanks to the dot-bomb.
Amen to this, I think far too many "managers" out there are the cause of employee failure, not the employees themselves.
/. how to solve your management problems is like asking random guy on the street, we don't understand your situation nor do you have confidence in our ability to address your concerns. Now back to our regularly scheduled advert^H^H^H^H^Hnews articles.
Given the areas that phamlen is asking the candidates, they have some skills...But perhaps the questions don't match the needs of the workplace or (I'd guess being just as likely) the workplace is not conducive to productivity and the managers are expecting far more than is humanly possible. Then again, anyone dumb enough to work for such a shop (and not quit) are fools as much as incompetent.
(Phamlen, had many people quit the project?)
Unluckily, asking
How many of you out there in Slashdot land remember 100-base-FAST (HP's competition to 100bT?) Learn from history, friends...
There's a very simple explanation (which you've all seemed to miss)...The cost to pay John Doe to make the cup of X is constant no matter how big the cup is. (Well, ok, I suppose it does take a bit longer to fill, but it's certainly not a linear relationship.) This, combined with a minimal cost of materials means that as drinks get larger, so do profit margins.
.50 more it costs, so I'll continue to buy the "grande", "supersize" and the like from the drink menu.
(Self-serve removes the labor cost entirely, of course!)
Then again, I prefer to buy a drink that meets my needs and the convenience of buying one 32-oz drink rather than two 16-oz drinks is worth the
I recently heard about the VIA Cyrix processors and am quite impressed with their (lack) of power draw. If your 810-based mobo handles 100Mhz fsb, you can drop one of these chips in for real cheap (~$50) and save more energy than a Celeron (about half, judging from their heat dissipation characteristics.) Unluckily, my linux box's old mobo was 66Mhz fsb (a Celeron CPU) so the Cyrix chip didn't work. (But another $80 and I had a new, low-end mobo that works great, includes video and audio on-board.)
I have, however, found some faults with the Cyrix: I can't watch DVD's (even with a high-end agp video card) and playing the most modern 3-d games can be hit-or-miss (Giants is unplayable, Return to Wolfenstein is semi-unplayable). But web-surfing and mp3 playing is most of what I do anyways...:^)
If you're particularly brave, you should be able to go without a CPU fan (one is included with the CPU)...I don't think there's an intel-style temperature throttle so you might want a thermometer to watch the heat level, but others on the net have said that with proper case ventilation, the CPU can run with just a heat sink (as some of the older PII/Celeron chips can.)
But if Sony says humans will fly like birds in 10 years, 15-year-old boys will start saving their money now.
;^o
I suspect most of the added CPU power will be for DRM.
Personally, I'll stick with my $50 dreamcast and $5 games. Who needs yet more fighters/racers/ff rpg ripoffs? What sells hardware is software (and most hardware is sold at a loss anyways) so why is Sony talking about h/w?
(However, DVI and/or stereooptic output would be enough to consider an upgrade. Or if some significant leaps in software paradigms occur, not just incremental improvements on formulas...)
Having a K7VE board in my computer, I had a bios on it that was NEWER than the one on the asus web site for many many months (> 6)...E-mail to the company was black-holed. Their site was (as of perhaps 6 months ago) barely usable and downloads were often unavailable.
Recent months, however, have seen improvements both in their website design, download performance, and up-to-date information...'course, this is only from personal experience. The whole experience with Asus has left me sour.
It also left me sour on the whole "hardware weenie" reviews (I purchased this MoBo based on Sharkyextreme.com's recommendation) 'cause they very much focus on overclocking and other hacker-heavy features whereas I just want a stable system (no overclocking/RAID/etc for me) with a good price. Anyone have any recommendations for websites that do their reviews more in tune with the "common man"? (I mean I'm still quite happy with my non-overclock, non-DDR, non-RAID 700Mhz Duron! I'm just considering upgrading my 366 Celeron Linux box at some point.)
Given, also, that the original submission date was April 2001, I agree (I suspect the author meant to have it in the '01 April edition as a joke but missed it so they're re-submitting it for April '02.)
Most of the article sounds plausable until they mention snooping from outside a building...I suppose it could be done but I'd guess that the distortion of glass, reflections and other ambient light levels would make this about as useful as using an IR remote from outside your house.
any rumours about a DVD release of the episodes?
(Considering Simpsons first season was released recently...This would be an excellent thing for those of us who want to re-live the best moments.)
Oh, and you forgot the extreme price these iBriq's have, $1500 for a 500MHz G3...Certainly makes the Macs much more cost-effective unless you *really* need the rack-mount formfactor of these devices.
(Inquiring minds want to know how many have they shipped?)
Try the below script, you'll need Python, mpg123 and sox, all of which are easy to obtain for Linux. This process stores the volume in the comment as text, you might want to consider storing it at the end of the comment in binary if you use the comment field for real information. There are a multitude of other improvements that could be made to this script (command-line options would be a good start.)
/dev/null 2>&1' % (tmpfile, song))
I also have a fairly simple random MP3 player script that also uses mpg123 with the volume settings generated. It normalizes on a song-by-song basis (unlike many of the player plugins that normalize continuously, making the quiet parts of songs no longer play quiet.) It would be fairly easy to modify it to do album-by-album normalization if you so desired. (Assuming your MP3 collection is well organized.)
#!/usr/bin/env python
# standard Py libs
import os, sys, stat, random
# available from: http://id3-py.sourceforge.net/
import ID3
def compute_volume(song):
tmpfile = '/tmp/randplay%d.wav' % os.getpid()
os.system('mpg123 -w %s "%s" >
p = os.popen('sox "%s" -e stat -v 2>&1' % tmpfile)
v = float(p.readline())
p.close()
os.system('rm %s' % tmpfile)
return v
def recurse(directory, callback):
for i in os.listdir(directory):
path = '%s/%s' % (directory, i)
m = os.stat(path)[stat.ST_MODE]
if stat.S_ISDIR(m): recurse(path, callback)
if stat.S_ISREG(m): callback(path)
def do(song):
if song[-4:] != '.mp3': return song
i = ID3.ID3(song)
v = 0.0
if i.comment and i.comment[0] in '0123456789':
v = float(i.comment)
#v = 0.0 # uncomment this to have the script (re)compute the volume of every file
if v >= 1.0:
print '%s: %f' % (song, v)
else:
print '%s: ' % song,
sys.stdout.flush()
v = compute_volume(song)
print '%f' % v
i.comment = '%f' % v
i.write()
return song
recurse(sys.argv[1], do)
With various document-sharing systems commercially/freely available (WebDAV making them local-drive easy to use) why would you even want to send an attachment at all? Why not just store it in some arbitrary location on a shared filesystem and e-mail the URL?
(As we do at where I work.)
'course, this assumes people can actually use and get to said distributed filesystem...HTTP-based systems are by far the easiest to share Internet-wide.
Many very good games can be now had for 500 games) with the min/max # of players, game modes (deathmatch, coop, team, ctf, etc), the style of game, and how many players/cd.
A far more interesting question is how do you players deal with the varying levels of ability at your parties? Personally, I lean towards cooperative games or do ad-hoc handicaps (winner should always use the weakest weapon, etc). 'course, large parties can split up into multiple games and players can play what they're best at...
I hope that more game companies take after GoD in labelling/featuring cooperative campaign play (as labelled on Serious Sam.)
The auto-stepdown capability of the P4 is the first thing I've heard about Intel's latest CPUs to interest me away from AMD's, anyone have anecdotal experience of using a P4 for extended periods with passive heat dissipation? I'd *love* to set the CPU fan up on a switch (better yet, controlled via h/w so when I want to game, I run an app to turn the CPU fan on.)
I would not be suprised if computers came with variable-speed fans for CPU heat dissipation based on demand for lower power consumption.
I would not consider HDTV without also ensuring that the display includes a digital interface, particularly DVI-I. If you ever compare digital to analog interfaces on the same device, you'll never go back to analog. Besides, when you're blowing a few grand, an extra grand is going to be worth it in the long run.
(I purchased a Proxima projector about a year ago with the intention of getting a computer-based HDTV decoder solution.)
Agreed on the last point, while IBM continues to advertise their Linux support, you're *very* limited on the laptops you can buy from them with Linux preinstalled...Namely their higher-priced hardware...Not sure why. :^(
I'd hate to see IBM leave the desktop market but I wouldn't be suprised. (Although I doubt they'd leave the laptop market...)
Good point...
;^o
The question is, would Reverend Crowley hold the copyright or would The Church of Satan? Guess it depends on the contract you have with your church.
Not having any Scientology documents, I wonder who owns copyright on them as well.
As a side note: the US government cannot hold copyright...Any document written (including software developed) by a civil servant is uncopyrightable and, hence, public domain in all senses of the words.
Well, the cases regarding Scientology (if memory serves) that you're thinking of is more a copyright issue...So you can state that they are idiots and ugly and their mothers dress them funny but you can't back it up by directly including quotes from Dianetics or somesuch. :^( (IMHO, if you claim you're a religion and are getting non-profit status, you should not be able to retain copyright.)
I wonder, additionally, how this case affects people posting on message boards from their workplace (can people finally get rid of the "I do not represent {company X}" disclaimers?)
I've very much wanted to make my DC a firewall router for my dialup ISP access (dropped broadband when I realized 80% of my online time was surfing and when @Home decided to move me to DHCP without telling me first...Glad to see them bankrupt!)
I'd very much like an "off-the-shelf" serial cable (to 9-pin DIN), and it would seem to me that the game ports could also be made into serial interfaces (or parallel? I don't know the pinouts on 'em, being more of a s/w person than a h/w person.)
I and many of my co-workers have had various incarnations of USB and Firewire-connected IDE drives and had many failures (one for each of us so far.) Mine and others have been a software issue or an issue with the bridge, the drives worked fine when moved internally and reformatted...Something between the OS and the drive corrupted the filesystem bigtime. (This is under MacOS X and Win98SE, not Linux...so if it's an OS issue it might not be as much an issue on Linux...:)
My recommendation is to, instead, buy a $20US removable drive tray/rail system, I have 6 drives in trays of various sizes/makes and have *never* had a problem. (Note: no bus bridging involved.)
Or, at worst case, just make sure you make regular backups.
Agreed re: Pinkwater (being a minor collector). His works usually mix off-beat humor, food, New Jersey, and science fiction in a blender so you can suck it up with a straw.
He has a weekly radio show on NPR called "Chinwag Theater" that is worth listening to, although it usually spends more time playing a variety of music from the 20th century and clips from old radio comedies and the like.
This is the cheapest way to get into his work, and to hear him read it himself (with Scott Simon helping out.)
The URL: http://www.chinwagtheater.org/ (warning, uses flash.)
My personal favorite of his continues to be "Education of Robert Nifkin" (more of a young teen book) although "Borgel" is also quite good, incorporating space, time, and "other" travel (travelling between dimensions.)
Most of his books pop in and out of print, although compilations of many are available.
Anyone have any pictures of this robot?
My understanding is that the bytecode language of Python is very stack based/rpn-like...It'd be a curious exercise to compile Python to Forth instead (Fython?)
Also, for more Forth-like fun, check out MUCKs, MUDs with an internal Forth language. (I spent far too much time hacking the internals of what would later become DaemonMUCK, almost ruining my college career...:)
I agree that early next year will likely see the prices seriously drop. One site had sales averages over the past few months and "summer moving season" definitely hit, with the # of sales much higher and prices jumping up a bit but dropping over the summer. I can dig it up if people are interested...
I'm starting the process of talking to agents at this point in the hopes of being able to take advantage of the serious downturn when it happens. I just have to hope the % loss on my place is less/equal to the larger/more expensive place I'll be buying.
Thanks for all of the comments and wish me luck!