And having been able to receive Bob & Tom on their flagship WFBQ for years before their national syndication, I can confirm the fact that, yes, they've been hilarious for years and years, and yes, they now pretty much are forced to suck because of the FCC and the idiot lawmakers out there.
At the station where I work, we all, out of habit, tape any part of the show in which the mics in the studio are live (there's a tape deck that does it automatically, so long as it has tape in it).
However, the technology involved with taping and storing every second of broadcast is asinine. The sheer amount of physical or HD / Tape required to store all this is ridiculous. (60-90 days in MP3 is roughly equal to 64GB in 60 days, 100GB in 90 days @.75 MB / minute). That's a dedicated computer recording the stream all the time.
And then, it is, presumably, the broadcaster's responsibility to produce the recording when the FCC comes a-knockin. Combined with the increased ease of filing a complaint, I assume this means any radio station that wants to air a "controversial" show (although of course not Rush or Hannity, because they're never indecent; they Tell It Like It Is) will have to hire a full-time Cover Our Tails person.
And do you know what that means? Corporate has to hire someone else, so we're going to have to fire another on-air staff member. That's how it works in radio.
Radio, at least, is going to go further down the shitter beacuse of this rule, if it goes in effect. It's all the FCC's fault. Yes, that was hyperbole. But still.
What, are you kidding? Come on, seriously, have you ever seen a GIF image that didn't make you want to puke, aside from your own beloved buddy icon? Of course not. No graphic ever created in GIF is a useful contribution to society. Somebody SHOULD be charging a royalty and then using that money to pay for the people who've gone crazy watching the little dancing Tux or the little guy bouncing the ball around his square.
PNG may not be as popular, but does that even matter? It need not be popular, only a) useful and b) relatively ubiquitous to be a success. If it has those two things, it should, by all rights, catch on. All recent versions of major browsers support PNG (right, IE does now? if not, then I apologize and retract the second paragraph of my smart-ass reply), and that's really all that matters. You're free to build a standards-compliant website now with PNGs and reap all the alpha-channel goodness you want (oh wait, IE doesn't support that, really, does it?). Well, you can still use PNG within reason and build a free-as-in-speech-and-beer website and have a great time of it.
All you have to do is use PNGs so nobody will notice, and the world is a better place.
MNG, on the other hand, is a truly useless, unsupported format. Although again, referencing the animation ability of GIF lamented above, I can't say that MNG falling through is the worst development I've heard of, either.
$.02 that shouldn't hurt my karma too badly...
Re:Is a GNU/Linux biz feasible?
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Widespread anti-American sentiments have been enough to drive me to using linux and supporting F/OSS...and I'm a lifelong resident of Indiana.
Hey now, Ferarri has lost (once) this year (in nine races).
Glad I didn't pay to get in at Indy again. I was there last when Kimi was driving for Sauber and made it like four laps or something.
Mika Hakkinen won, though, so that was nice. I've seen enough of Schumi winning on TV that seeing it in person would be a bit of a letdown, I imagine;)
And responding to a tangential thread, when is Kasey Kahne going to get his first win and his "most adorable rookie" award?:-P Sheesh, the kid's hungry.
Thanks, developers:) I love F/OSS programs and all the good schtuff they do... on my four-year-old P3 / 733. It's a poor college student's dream! Bless you all!
Yeah, I have to say, Purdue's WiFi, affectionately known as AirLink, is pretty cool beans. It was my motivation for purchasing a cheap laptop and putting off upgrading the desktop another year or so.
As long as I shut the damn thing off when I'm in class, it isn't too distracting. It's so fantastic to be able to get a burrito or whatever in the Union, sit, catch up on email, do research (with the purdue.edu IPs it's easy to get into the library's online journals and stuff), listen to Air America Radio's stream, and so on.
If it hasn't made me more productive, I feel more productive, at least. And perception of functionality always trumps actual functionality!
I took my first trip to New England about a year ago. I busted out laughing on first sight of a NH license plate, which clearly reads "Live Free or Die."
You all better bend over and kiss your asses goodbye, becuase we're getting less-free by the hour.
You're right--SaX2 is a GREAT X11 setup tool; it's saved my skin several times. The picture on my LCD is now unquestionably better in X than in Windows. That's absolutely awesome!
YaST is a great tool, and it's nice to see SuSE / Novell / Ximian all playing nicely together. I think you're on the right track with this (that is, that we can expect to see more powerful tools on the way from SuSE, probably in SL-10), and frankly, I'm *proud* of SuSE for GPL'ing YaST.
That's a pretty profound statement. I'm PROUD of a company whose software I'm using. I think they're doing things right. In my experience, their software runs better on my HW than anyone else's, and gives me the tools I want to get things working. They've now locked me in even more by demonstrating a commitment to my recently-found (in the last year), and dearly-loved new F/OSS community.
First off, congrats to Nat and Miguel and all the Ximian folks. I love XD2 and Evolution and the OOo redistro they've put together. SuSE gave me what I wanted when I first booted into linux with YaST and all that good stuff. KDE was pretty. Ximian, though, with Red Carpet and all their great software, gave me what I needed to stay put. In fact, they gave me reason to never go back to Windows on my primary machine, and I guarantee you I've used Windows as long as any other 21-year-old nerd out there:)
This really looks like a great deal all around--SuSE can keep KDE for all their bretheren, but with XD2 available defacto, with (presumably) better tweaks for SuSE... It's great news, as far as I can tell.
My gut feeling is that SuSE, Ximian, and Novell are all going to shake shit up here really soon!
Those folks who basically say that we as humans don't miss the forest for the trees, but that we see a forest where there are *only* trees.
To elaborate:
Cat the green over jumped fence the.
Your internalized grammar can sort that out into an intelligible (though not necessarily what I meant--"green" could modify "cat" or "fence, for example) string of words; you *can* comprehend it, even though it's wrong. Linguistically, we do this a lot, especially with the example from U of BC.
Something that I've not seen discussed in conjunction with this, though, are the studies that show that, even though vowels and other sonorants are the parts of speech we prolong while talking or singing, the semantic content of language is carried primarily in the consonants:
Tr t yrslf--s hw mn wrds y cn ndrstnd, vn whn y dnt wrt dwn vwls n th pg.
(Try it yourself--see how many words you can understand, even when you don't write down vowels on the page).
Chew on that, just please don't destroy my good karma.
No, really. You're shitting me? I mean, as another Purdue student.... I have to ask why the hell there's not any spread-the-word movements about this. That's ridiculous, especially after spending $200 (yeah, it was a lite semester) on books last week.:-P Thx for the info.
It's called "epenthesis"--the insertion of a sound becuase the language seems to dictate it.
Ex. A + hour ---> "An hour"
In this case, the [n] sound is epenthetic.
I'm sure some folks studying phonology can give us the official formula for English... I guess the [n] only pops up between the determiner "a" and a vowel sound-initial word. The "yoo" sound in "universe" is a semivowel:-P
Well, this is going to get a solid 1 - (Stupid) mod, but...
As soon as I saw that headline, it felt like going over the top of the hill on a roller coaster. What can I say? I really, really like the package presented by Ximian Desktop 2--enough that Windows no longer has a place on my hard drive (tho it is on the old computer for jukebox purposes... damn WiMP-requiring audio feeds...).
I'm happy in the coporate sense for Nat & Miguel and everyone--but please, don't take my desktop!
The only reply that needs to be made to this is to just ask you to read something direct from the horse's mouth, not something from the horse's @$$;) May I humbly sumbit the Dean For America homepage?
Different languages exhibit numerous different properties. You speakers of Japanese probably notice English sentences end with verbs much less often than sentences in Japanese. You who speak French might notice that your "R" [voiceless egressive uvular fricative] sound doesn't appear in many other languages.
What does that have to do with anything, I'm sure you're asking... Well, there's a fun little hypothesis that understanding language, linguistic properties (prosodic, semantic, phonotactic, syntactic, mophologic, etc.), and language acquisition gives us a better idea of the physiology of the brain. We know of areas in the brain discovered by Broca and Wernicke that create specific language impairment... that must tell us something about where language cognition takes place. We know that babies can acquire almost everything they need to know about a language between 18 and 30 months of age, and syntacticians study WHY; the presumptive encoding of some base set of language rules (universal grammar) that is present in the typically-developing human brain.
The reason keeping indigenous languages alive is important, beyond that of the Sapir-Whorf angle, is that some of these languages exhibit features that simply aren't found in other languages. We've been able to document enough universality in language that we can say it's not just an arbitrary sort of collection of sounds that make words, words that make sentences, and sentences that make stories. It would be tragic to allow bits of significant evidence to slip through the cracks that might allow us to unearth the key to, say, developing a new treatment for specific language impairment, or the key to adequately parsing English via computational algorithms.
Now if only I could've written that coherently...;)
Good consumerism and common sense should really make mandatory licensing moot. Should Shop X be required to make its techs get certified? Of course not. Consumers concerned about the well-being of the equipment that's being worked on should demand (IRL sometimes they do, sometimes they don't) that the tech be certified. I always carry my card with me, and if there's any question, I have my information right there.
Just like the Better Business Bureau and the Chamber of Commerce, there's nothing that needs to be mandatory about certification. But for the sake of good public image and marketing--essential for any good, well-run business--it needs to be done.
The certs aren't there to impress people like a lot of/.ers who make a hobby and sometimes a living out of fixing computers. They're there to assure Joe Consumer that he's getting a trained technician. They're there for John Shopowner as a marketing point and as an easy way of discriminating who is and who is not qualified to work at his shop.
As a devil's advocate... Lots and lots of used stores sell promo discs. Typically, these are just like the normal production-run CDs only they've been distributed to radio stations for use in promos and contesting. (Whether or not that's payola is another thing entirely.)
I work at a radio station in one of the smallest reporting markets in the country, and we still get tons of this shit (and by shit, I mean "Shania Twain.") Typically, cases that are cut or drilled or discs and liner notes that are otherwise marked are quite explicitly marked "Not for resale!" or whatever. Used disc stores that *do* resell these are clearly and unqestionably in violation of the copyright, as are the folks that sold it to the store in the first place.
While reselling a normal disc isn't (and indeed, shouldn't be) illegal, oftentimes tons of drilled and marked discs are up for sale at these joints, and that's a legitimate bitching point for Hillary and all my friends at RIAA. Anyone who has a problem with what RIAA does should get the satisfaction of knowing they got a disc the record labels are taking a loss on and not allow RIAA's moaning to have credence.
The other day, I had the delight of working on a Win 3.11 system... and about the only reason I say "delight" is because the first thing I was able to do is CLOSE THE HELL OUT OF WINDOWS!
Don't get me wrong... I use XP as my main box, and like what it does for me and what I can do with it. But the freedom, the fun, the old days when a three-button serial mouse and a green monitor were cutting-edge... ahhh... you could write batch files and edit them on the fly and...
I don't think you really have much to worry about, Dan. Don't forget several important things about this:
-Most reassuringly, this new plan requires a pretty big change of listening habit for the end user. Every single radio every last one of us owns right now is obsolete as far as digital broadcasting is concerned.
-It's going to cost Clear Channel the same arm and a leg it'll cost you, me, or anyone else to install digital simulcasting.
-I'd venture to say the biggest impact this could ever have would be in the car, of course, with drive times being radio's big listenership numbers (as opposed to TV's prime time in the evening). I'm forced to ask what the hell difference a digital stream would make in the car: Great stereo system or not, you're still fighting LOTS of ambient noise in an environment like that. At least in my car, there's really no dramatic jump in signal quality from FM to CD.
-Digital anything means you either got it or you don't. Lots of rural markets won't be able to get the signal anyway, because they're on the fringe of the signal as it is. It sounds OK analog on a decent receiver, but it'll be silent if it's grabbing a digital broadcast.
My broadcast experience makes me moderate this story (1, Yawn).
Slashdot Mirror
A little opinionated? What's that?
;) I'll try harder next time. Damn.
Usually it's over the top
And having been able to receive Bob & Tom on their flagship WFBQ for years before their national syndication, I can confirm the fact that, yes, they've been hilarious for years and years, and yes, they now pretty much are forced to suck because of the FCC and the idiot lawmakers out there.
.75 MB / minute). That's a dedicated computer recording the stream all the time.
At the station where I work, we all, out of habit, tape any part of the show in which the mics in the studio are live (there's a tape deck that does it automatically, so long as it has tape in it).
However, the technology involved with taping and storing every second of broadcast is asinine. The sheer amount of physical or HD / Tape required to store all this is ridiculous. (60-90 days in MP3 is roughly equal to 64GB in 60 days, 100GB in 90 days @
And then, it is, presumably, the broadcaster's responsibility to produce the recording when the FCC comes a-knockin. Combined with the increased ease of filing a complaint, I assume this means any radio station that wants to air a "controversial" show (although of course not Rush or Hannity, because they're never indecent; they Tell It Like It Is) will have to hire a full-time Cover Our Tails person.
And do you know what that means? Corporate has to hire someone else, so we're going to have to fire another on-air staff member. That's how it works in radio.
Radio, at least, is going to go further down the shitter beacuse of this rule, if it goes in effect. It's all the FCC's fault. Yes, that was hyperbole. But still.
What, are you kidding? Come on, seriously, have you ever seen a GIF image that didn't make you want to puke, aside from your own beloved buddy icon? Of course not. No graphic ever created in GIF is a useful contribution to society. Somebody SHOULD be charging a royalty and then using that money to pay for the people who've gone crazy watching the little dancing Tux or the little guy bouncing the ball around his square.
PNG may not be as popular, but does that even matter? It need not be popular, only a) useful and b) relatively ubiquitous to be a success. If it has those two things, it should, by all rights, catch on. All recent versions of major browsers support PNG (right, IE does now? if not, then I apologize and retract the second paragraph of my smart-ass reply), and that's really all that matters. You're free to build a standards-compliant website now with PNGs and reap all the alpha-channel goodness you want (oh wait, IE doesn't support that, really, does it?). Well, you can still use PNG within reason and build a free-as-in-speech-and-beer website and have a great time of it.
All you have to do is use PNGs so nobody will notice, and the world is a better place.
MNG, on the other hand, is a truly useless, unsupported format. Although again, referencing the animation ability of GIF lamented above, I can't say that MNG falling through is the worst development I've heard of, either.
$.02 that shouldn't hurt my karma too badly...
Widespread anti-American sentiments have been enough to drive me to using linux and supporting F/OSS...and I'm a lifelong resident of Indiana.
Go Iraq!
Hey now, Ferarri has lost (once) this year (in nine races).
;)
:-P Sheesh, the kid's hungry.
Glad I didn't pay to get in at Indy again. I was there last when Kimi was driving for Sauber and made it like four laps or something.
Mika Hakkinen won, though, so that was nice. I've seen enough of Schumi winning on TV that seeing it in person would be a bit of a letdown, I imagine
And responding to a tangential thread, when is Kasey Kahne going to get his first win and his "most adorable rookie" award?
Thanks, developers :) I love F/OSS programs and all the good schtuff they do... on my four-year-old P3 / 733. It's a poor college student's dream! Bless you all!
Are you going to vote?
Yeah, I have to say, Purdue's WiFi, affectionately known as AirLink, is pretty cool beans. It was my motivation for purchasing a cheap laptop and putting off upgrading the desktop another year or so.
As long as I shut the damn thing off when I'm in class, it isn't too distracting. It's so fantastic to be able to get a burrito or whatever in the Union, sit, catch up on email, do research (with the purdue.edu IPs it's easy to get into the library's online journals and stuff), listen to Air America Radio's stream, and so on.
If it hasn't made me more productive, I feel more productive, at least. And perception of functionality always trumps actual functionality!
I took my first trip to New England about a year ago. I busted out laughing on first sight of a NH license plate, which clearly reads "Live Free or Die."
You all better bend over and kiss your asses goodbye, becuase we're getting less-free by the hour.
"Andreesssen" (from the headline). Sheesh, that's giving me a headache... knew I drank too much last night, but still!
You're right--SaX2 is a GREAT X11 setup tool; it's saved my skin several times. The picture on my LCD is now unquestionably better in X than in Windows. That's absolutely awesome!
YaST is a great tool, and it's nice to see SuSE / Novell / Ximian all playing nicely together. I think you're on the right track with this (that is, that we can expect to see more powerful tools on the way from SuSE, probably in SL-10), and frankly, I'm *proud* of SuSE for GPL'ing YaST.
That's a pretty profound statement. I'm PROUD of a company whose software I'm using. I think they're doing things right. In my experience, their software runs better on my HW than anyone else's, and gives me the tools I want to get things working. They've now locked me in even more by demonstrating a commitment to my recently-found (in the last year), and dearly-loved new F/OSS community.
Cheers!
But here goes...
:)
First off, congrats to Nat and Miguel and all the Ximian folks. I love XD2 and Evolution and the OOo redistro they've put together. SuSE gave me what I wanted when I first booted into linux with YaST and all that good stuff. KDE was pretty. Ximian, though, with Red Carpet and all their great software, gave me what I needed to stay put. In fact, they gave me reason to never go back to Windows on my primary machine, and I guarantee you I've used Windows as long as any other 21-year-old nerd out there
This really looks like a great deal all around--SuSE can keep KDE for all their bretheren, but with XD2 available defacto, with (presumably) better tweaks for SuSE... It's great news, as far as I can tell.
My gut feeling is that SuSE, Ximian, and Novell are all going to shake shit up here really soon!
The only way this merger will ever happen is over Sergey Brin's cold, dead body.
...And you actually think Microsoft can't arrange that?!? Look at Expedia! Clearly, they already know where you live ;)
Those folks who basically say that we as humans don't miss the forest for the trees, but that we see a forest where there are *only* trees.
To elaborate:
Cat the green over jumped fence the.
Your internalized grammar can sort that out into an intelligible (though not necessarily what I meant--"green" could modify "cat" or "fence, for example) string of words; you *can* comprehend it, even though it's wrong. Linguistically, we do this a lot, especially with the example from U of BC.
Something that I've not seen discussed in conjunction with this, though, are the studies that show that, even though vowels and other sonorants are the parts of speech we prolong while talking or singing, the semantic content of language is carried primarily in the consonants:
Tr t yrslf--s hw mn wrds y cn ndrstnd, vn whn y dnt wrt dwn vwls n th pg.
(Try it yourself--see how many words you can understand, even when you don't write down vowels on the page).
Chew on that, just please don't destroy my good karma.
No, really. You're shitting me? I mean, as another Purdue student.... I have to ask why the hell there's not any spread-the-word movements about this. That's ridiculous, especially after spending $200 (yeah, it was a lite semester) on books last week. :-P Thx for the info.
It's called "epenthesis"--the insertion of a sound becuase the language seems to dictate it.
:-P
Ex. A + hour ---> "An hour"
In this case, the [n] sound is epenthetic.
I'm sure some folks studying phonology can give us the official formula for English... I guess the [n] only pops up between the determiner "a" and a vowel sound-initial word. The "yoo" sound in "universe" is a semivowel
Well, this is going to get a solid 1 - (Stupid) mod, but...
As soon as I saw that headline, it felt like going over the top of the hill on a roller coaster. What can I say? I really, really like the package presented by Ximian Desktop 2--enough that Windows no longer has a place on my hard drive (tho it is on the old computer for jukebox purposes... damn WiMP-requiring audio feeds...).
I'm happy in the coporate sense for Nat & Miguel and everyone--but please, don't take my desktop!
The only reply that needs to be made to this is to just ask you to read something direct from the horse's mouth, not something from the horse's @$$ ;) May I humbly sumbit the Dean For America homepage?
:)
Thanks
Throw it out and buy an HP, of course :)
What does that have to do with anything, I'm sure you're asking... Well, there's a fun little hypothesis that understanding language, linguistic properties (prosodic, semantic, phonotactic, syntactic, mophologic, etc.), and language acquisition gives us a better idea of the physiology of the brain. We know of areas in the brain discovered by Broca and Wernicke that create specific language impairment... that must tell us something about where language cognition takes place. We know that babies can acquire almost everything they need to know about a language between 18 and 30 months of age, and syntacticians study WHY; the presumptive encoding of some base set of language rules (universal grammar) that is present in the typically-developing human brain.
The reason keeping indigenous languages alive is important, beyond that of the Sapir-Whorf angle, is that some of these languages exhibit features that simply aren't found in other languages. We've been able to document enough universality in language that we can say it's not just an arbitrary sort of collection of sounds that make words, words that make sentences, and sentences that make stories. It would be tragic to allow bits of significant evidence to slip through the cracks that might allow us to unearth the key to, say, developing a new treatment for specific language impairment, or the key to adequately parsing English via computational algorithms.
Now if only I could've written that coherently... ;)
Good consumerism and common sense should really make mandatory licensing moot. Should Shop X be required to make its techs get certified? Of course not. Consumers concerned about the well-being of the equipment that's being worked on should demand (IRL sometimes they do, sometimes they don't) that the tech be certified. I always carry my card with me, and if there's any question, I have my information right there.
/.ers who make a hobby and sometimes a living out of fixing computers. They're there to assure Joe Consumer that he's getting a trained technician. They're there for John Shopowner as a marketing point and as an easy way of discriminating who is and who is not qualified to work at his shop.
Just like the Better Business Bureau and the Chamber of Commerce, there's nothing that needs to be mandatory about certification. But for the sake of good public image and marketing--essential for any good, well-run business--it needs to be done.
The certs aren't there to impress people like a lot of
"Donated $50 to the American Civil Liberties Union to become a "card-carrying" member. Received an FBI probe for aiding the terrorists."
I understand this is officially to become part of the ACLU membership package! Three cheers for the Fourth Amendment!
I've signed up... Have you?
As a devil's advocate... Lots and lots of used stores sell promo discs. Typically, these are just like the normal production-run CDs only they've been distributed to radio stations for use in promos and contesting. (Whether or not that's payola is another thing entirely.)
I work at a radio station in one of the smallest reporting markets in the country, and we still get tons of this shit (and by shit, I mean "Shania Twain.") Typically, cases that are cut or drilled or discs and liner notes that are otherwise marked are quite explicitly marked "Not for resale!" or whatever. Used disc stores that *do* resell these are clearly and unqestionably in violation of the copyright, as are the folks that sold it to the store in the first place.
While reselling a normal disc isn't (and indeed, shouldn't be) illegal, oftentimes tons of drilled and marked discs are up for sale at these joints, and that's a legitimate bitching point for Hillary and all my friends at RIAA. Anyone who has a problem with what RIAA does should get the satisfaction of knowing they got a disc the record labels are taking a loss on and not allow RIAA's moaning to have credence.
The other day, I had the delight of working on a Win 3.11 system... and about the only reason I say "delight" is because the first thing I was able to do is CLOSE THE HELL OUT OF WINDOWS!
:) Just thought I'd share!
Don't get me wrong... I use XP as my main box, and like what it does for me and what I can do with it. But the freedom, the fun, the old days when a three-button serial mouse and a green monitor were cutting-edge... ahhh... you could write batch files and edit them on the fly and...
*walks down memory lane*
Sorry
I don't think you really have much to worry about, Dan. Don't forget several important things about this:
-Most reassuringly, this new plan requires a pretty big change of listening habit for the end user. Every single radio every last one of us owns right now is obsolete as far as digital broadcasting is concerned.
-It's going to cost Clear Channel the same arm and a leg it'll cost you, me, or anyone else to install digital simulcasting.
-I'd venture to say the biggest impact this could ever have would be in the car, of course, with drive times being radio's big listenership numbers (as opposed to TV's prime time in the evening). I'm forced to ask what the hell difference a digital stream would make in the car: Great stereo system or not, you're still fighting LOTS of ambient noise in an environment like that. At least in my car, there's really no dramatic jump in signal quality from FM to CD.
-Digital anything means you either got it or you don't. Lots of rural markets won't be able to get the signal anyway, because they're on the fringe of the signal as it is. It sounds OK analog on a decent receiver, but it'll be silent if it's grabbing a digital broadcast.
My broadcast experience makes me moderate this story (1, Yawn).