CD degrades the vinyl recording. If you know what you're doing it doesn't have to.
But doing it right is much more complicated than just sampling a filtered signal. Some professional A2D converters do it right, but not all.
Basically you have to sample at DVD audio quality and use algorithms to reduce the bandwidth and dither down the bit depth much more carefully than any analog circuit can do it.
As an aside I played with dithering sound a few months ago - if you use an error dispersion sort of dither you can easily hear a signal many decibles below the noise floor (my test signal was a song who's loudest point was 24 db below it).
A more common sort of dither gives you 2 to 3 more bits more or less.
High quality A2D convsion to redbook is hard - you've got to oversample, sample at a higher bit depth, do digital filtering and dithering. At least this has to happen at SOME level, maybe hidden in a chip. But the quality of chips, electronics and processing power has gone so far past what's necessary to do this that everyone who reads slash dot could get a cheap setup that does all this. So we never have to worry that going to analog and back is going to mess up our sound again. Therefore disk watermarks can be completely ignored as basically irrelevent.
Except for the (completely unsupported) thesis that a mutated FOXP2 gene is in some very vague way important to the evolution of language, the assertion of these articles are absolute truisms.
Almost all genes must be mutations of what came before them (the exceptions being genes that crossed species barriers because of viruses or something and genes that are extra copies).
Obviously we talk a little better than monkeys, so a few genes must have mutated along the way...
...but are guaranteed not to have the ethical overhead of others...
I guess if you don't consider strip mining pristine wilderness to be any big whoop.
I don't know which part of Canada diamonds come from, but if it's anything like the area I grew up in (think North Dakota) you don't have to worry about.
I used to tell people that I'd be all for the environment if we had one.
When two tribes warred, the winners took the losers as slaves... if you want to draw attention to the real cause of slavery in the US, look at the Africans who started the whole deal.
There's a simple cognitive mistake behind all bigotry and all apologies for bigotry. I think I can clear this up with an equally simple argument:
No matter where a slave came from an "African" who was sent over on a slave ship is not the same "African" who enslaved him.
The slaver who captured him committed a crime against humanity doing so. The person who was captured was a victim, whether that person was an innocent or guilty of committing crimes in his own life.
As, for the culpability of the Americans involved in the slave trade, anyone involved was obviously fully culpable. How can it make any moral difference whether you caught a free human being a made him or her a slave or if you paid someone else who did it for you?
No one was ever forced to buy a slave, so the fact that there were some African slaver owners willing to sell slaves in no way excuses any American buyers.
The Americans weren't buying African slaves in order to set the free after all.
Instead of fighting the world wide slave trade, they supported and participated in it, so they were as morally culpable as anyone else involved.
The basis of all bigotry is the cognitive mistake of not thinking of people as individuals.
Why not take your argument further and not think of anyone as a individual; then your argument could be, "the human race is guilty of many crimes including slavery therefore all humans deserve to be slaves."
but i'm just "too proud" to go from IT to making someone's food. it would disturb me, cuz i'd always feel that i'm doing less than i'm capable of.
Never. But I would feel that I was making $50,000 less than I was capable of!
Actually I HATE the pressure of being an applications engineer. Or at least I hate it when: 1. We don't really have enough money to finish the project, so we screw ourselves by making early deadlines (with terrible code) in order to make demos and impress investors. 2. Other programmers on my team are inexperienced and making a mess. 3. Managers are clueless about software development and think that tools, abstraction, and testing are unnecessary! Or they allow testing, but always look for a scapegoat when a bug is found - and it's not the idiot who throws things together too quickly and screwed the project up for the rest of us who's blamed, because he's the fastest (?!) and therefore the star.
Oh, and why do idiots who managed huge projects badly think they must know more about software development than experienced engineers? Arrgh!!!!
(panting hard) I could be serving coffee... right now!
A friend of mine (programmer and entrepreneur) had a sign in his office that said "I could be mowing lawns right now".
When thing were going well he could chuckle (fill with superiorty and haughty pride) and say, "I could be mowing lawns right now".
When he was hitting his head against a particulary stubborn piece of code and the bills were going unpaid, he could look at the sign like it was a the solution to all his problems and sigh, "Yeah, I could be mowing lawns... right now."
First they make crepes, then move up to manage creeps.
All that "slacking off" was simply a non-credit course in shmoozing, which is a very important skill that many of us geeks unfortunately never perfected.
Raw merit can be found in dollar-per-hour Indian programming sweatshops and desparate docile immigrants. If you want real money you have to learn to brown-nose with those who have it.
So far brown-nosing is the only thing left that is still tough to import.
Younger kids have Dilbert to explain the score to them, so I'm a member of what's probably the last generation that bought the bullshit that jobs that require intelligence and skill have high status and good pay.
Nope. Money and status are for people who already have money and for the (minimal number of) people they keep to protect their wealth. Programmers are paid whatever your bosses think they can get away with paying them - and not a cent more.
Why are managers paid so much more than their much more skilled employees? So that a class divide can be maintained between those who protect the owners wealth and those who generate it (as cheaply as possible). Solidarity between managers and employees could cause problems when execs decided to screw said employees, so it helps to place that class barrier between the two.
I'm not a communist, but I think we all need to understand how our system works. Capitalism doesn't actually generate meritocracies, it generates whatever system people with money think will buy them the most wealth at the moment. That's only good for workers when there's more demand for us than supply.
Welcome to the world of intergenerational warfare... Under Nixon an older, reactionary generation declared a War on Drugs, which was essentially a euphemism for a war on the lifestyle of the youth of that era and the values it represented (chemical experimentation, casual sex, a healthy skepticism of authority, and so on). Indeed, the prohibition of drugs and the actions that have been taken to try and stamp out its use has caused far greater harm, in both a humanitarian and economic sense, than the abuse of the substances themselves ever did or could have.
A War on Ourselves indeed, or at least a war on the younger generation, one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior, to the point where we now have over fifty beaurocracies fighting for the collected spoils seized from non-violent drug offendors.
Now, with the new War on Copyright Infringement, we are about to target today's youth, who trade their music, their movies, their videotapes online, instead of via cassette tape the way us older folk did when we were in high school and college.
I agree, partially. I've wondered about actual wars too, which seem a bit like parents slaughtering their young for next to no reason. Exactly why was communism in Viet Nam supposed to be more important to each American family that the lives (and and freedom, and health and hearts etc.) of the sons we were supposed to scrifice to it?
On the other hand, the Copywrite war seems more like the corporate class, having bought both the government and the media, using their power to insure their profits. It's not about young people, it's just money talking.
Also, having law inforcement go nuts over little things seems to fit the puritanical character of American society with its odd "cultural war" as Patrick Buccanan called it.
I grew up in Canada where there is no "cultural war". Someone pointed out to me that one difference between Canada and the US is that the Canadian government doesn't have the "separation of church and state". So, since religious folks aren't officially marginalized out the government, they don't feel so threatened and the result is peace instead of societal warfare. It's an example of how badly the law of unintended consequences can bite you.
Verizon has a CDMA 3G network in the bay area/silicon valley area.
I get about 120 kbaud with a latency from.4 sec for small packets to about 1 second for very large packets.
It's a shame. When we had Ricochet/Metricom the latency was low. I could run terminal services and file sharing across Ricochet. You just can't do that with Verizon.
I did a ping plot of Verizon's network and found that most of the time is in the first few hops, I think the first tier of the network must be connected with radio links. That implies that if you are in a cell closer to the backbone you'll get much lower latency. That also means that they could lower the latency if they spent a little more money.
Oddly enough, from the names of the nodes, I can tell that every packet goes to New York and back, but that takes very little time - I'm guessing there must be a fiber optic backbone.
Anyway if your dad knew a little about computer chess then he would have had no trouble beating the Vic, since the Vic didn't have enough memory for a hash table and so would have been incompetent in all end games. You see in the end game when there are very few pieces on the board, a human can figure out the invariants in the position and look many more moves ahead, or even use end game principles and not look ahead at all.
The trick for a computer is that in a end game, you see the same board configurations over and over again in the search tree, so that if the program makes a table of all of the positions its already evaluated it can look many moves deeper than it could without a hash table (I don't remember how deep, maybe 4 to 6 times as deep).
I'm terrible at chess, but I can still beat programs that run in very little memory by trading away all of my pieces as quickly as possible and blasting the poor program in the end game.
A few points. 1. you can't walk around a reflection hologram. 2. the viewing angles of reflection holograms are a little limited and since the color of an image (and it's position, slightly) will vary with the angle between the light source and the viewer, you need a point light source. 3. The image is harder to make than the drawing implied, they no doubt had to have apparatus that physically scanned the image source (and possibley light source) over the film to print on it.
Maybe Warren Robinett got screwed, but those were the good old days of royalties for programmers. I got 17.5% of gross for the game I released in the early 80's and the guys I knew who wrote 2600 cart games a few years before got 20% and even 25% of gross! NO programmers get sweet deals like that these days and royalties are rare (except for management). For one thing it takes a lot more than one person to write most games now (got to count the artists as well as programmers).
The "InPhase plan" page says Likewise, the company says its research shows that the media can be used in a rewritable format but won't discuss specifics for anything but its write-only product.
They must have meant "write once" or "read only". A disk you can write to but not read from would be less useful, eh?
So the proper credited names should be: UNIX/Linux and UNIX/Hurd. ... There is no proof that a GNU model works better than a BSD model. Only the rantings of RMS.
Right on.
I can't believe Stallman said:
The use of Bitkeeper for the Linux sources has a grave effect on the free software community, because anyone who wants to closely track patches to Linux can only do it by installing that non-free program. There must be dozens or even hundreds of kernel hackers who have done this. Most of them are gradually convincing themselves that it is ok to use non-free software, in order to avoid a sense of cognitive dissonance about the presence of Bitkeeper on their machines. What can be done about this?
One solution is to set up another repository for the Linux sources, using CVS or another free version control system, and arranging to load new versions into it automatically. This could use Bitkeeper to access the latest revisions, then install the new revisions into CVS. That update process could run automatically and frequently.
The FSF cannot do this, because we cannot install Bitkeeper on our machines. We have no non-free systems or applications on them now, and our principles say we must keep it that way. Operating this repository would have to be done by someone else who is willing to have Bitkeeper on his machine, unless someone can find or make a way to do it using free software.
"gradually convincing themselves that it is ok to use non-free software, in order to avoid a sense of cognitive dissonance..." ?!!! "we cannot install Bitkeeper on our machines. We have no non-free systems or applications on them now, and our principles say we must keep it that way." ?!!!
What a fucking nutcase!
Ohhh software without source code is so evil that Stalman can't even install any on a single machine?
The man has issues (and volumes and subscriptions).
God, the man needs to get laid or take a pill or something.
The hilarious tote bag that teaches kids disdain for hindus (Habu the hindu elephant says, "I have so many God's I don't know who to turn to" - Hey Habu, simplify you're life with... Jesus!) From "objective: christian ministries"
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/store/productdetail. as px?prodno=objectivemin.2019725
With
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/store/productdetail. as px?prodno=untouched.1287242
The "You Make Jesus Vomit" tote bag from Betty Bower's web site (so close to Jesus, we're thinking of taking seperate vacations this year).
Same seller, same product, same picture even (with different text photoshopped in).
Apparently we do know how Provigil works to the extent that we know what any brain drug does (we know what receptors it hits and to some extent how). modafinil (the generic name for Provigil)is an alpha1-adrenergic agonist. An agonist being a drug that stimulates a receptor directly, emulating some neuropeptide.
Anyway yohimbine is an alpha2-adrenergic agonist that you can find at many drug stores and health food stores. It's known for helping guys maintain erections and (from the time I took part of a pill), I'd say it has powerful psychoactive effects. I think it would be great for someone who has a hard time getting himself to exersize, when I took it I felt restless and in need of exersize. It put me in touch with some agressive side - I could imagine doing martial arts.
So. I wonder has anyone here tried and alpha1-adrenergic agonist like modafinil or adrafinil? Do they feel like yohimbine?
Also has anyone tried using yohimbine to stay awake? Would that work?
His writing is quite good. Personally I can't handle that much pessimism and bitterness in one place anymore.
And yes, in person, he's a big asshole. A friend of mine who (like me at the time) was a big Ellison fan, interviewed him for some campus radio station (I don't remember if Joe was a Santa Cruise or Berkeley at the time). Anyway Ellison ripped him to pieces.
Another friend of mine (who isn't a fan), managed to get back at Harlan. He met Harlan at a computer convention, Harlan mentioned the computer-game version of "I have no mouth and I must Scream" and my friend asked him if it was called "I have no mouse and I must click." Harlen scowled and acknowledged the pun.
The best we can do is figure out how to share songs at work legally, and I do believe it's possible by following one of the radio station server models. Remember there are individualized radio station servers on the internet, and as far as I know, no one has sued them.
So no doubt you can make a server legal by following the same rules that radio and shoutcast stations have to follow, possibly with the extentions that some of the pick-your-playlist internet stations use.
1. You can't choose to listen to individual songs - at least you can't choose WHEN to listen to a song.
2. It's all-right to have some sort of effect on the playlist. Picking a genre is what you do by choosing a radio station after all. There are individualized internet stations that let you go a series of steps: A) you choose and rate a number of genres B) you can take individual performers out of your playlist. C) you can stop and rate a song that's playing so that you won't hear it again or so that you'll hear it more often.
They seem to be skirting the law by having you exclude what you don't like instead of letting you include what you do like.
You could set up an individualized radio station server that allows you to have a number of identities, then edit your identities so that each one represents a playlist you like.
Interestingly, shared stations don't seem to have the "you can't pick when to play a song" restriction. A number of internet stations have automated request lines. You pick what song you want to hear next and are placed in a queue, so that everyone hears your choice next. So another way to deal with this is to set up a shared company station.
My cynicism makes me think that what protects the individualized internet stations is the fact that they link to sellers of whatever cd they are playing. It's all about money. If you included a link to an amazon page with every song you played, they'd be more likely to leave you alone.
Oh, I get it! I predict the Authors Guild will prepose new legislation requiring people to pay a royalty every time someone reads a book. Just like the movie industry and the music industry, reading a book will be considered a performance. Perhaps they'll write the law so that you'll owe a new royalty payment every time you re-read a sentence.
Thank God there's one group left in the world that can't afford to buy congress, or my little nightmare would come true.
Anyway I bought a used book on Amazon recently (it was out of print). The process was painless. This bull shit may just inspire me to buy used books when I don't have to. Who are they to tell me I shouldn't be offered used as well as new books?!!!
Well, why is XBox outsold by a 2-year old design at least 2:1 in all 3 markets?
I don't know. But in this market (Northern California) you can go down to any Best Buy and find the kids lining up to play XBox games while ignoring the PS2. That says to me that PS2 is only coasting around here - XBox has won until the next round of hardware comes out. Anyway I expect that the numbers will even out as more titles come out on the XBox.
Nobody cares about 4 times the resolution because everybody has a usual TV anyway.
Actually, the resolution matters a lot because the PS2 games (at least the ones I own) don't use interlace - they get half the resolution of a regular TV set vertically. This makes two player split-screen games unusable on the PS2 compared with XBox games (especially racing games). So the resolution DOES matter.
Also artwork DOES sell games, so the technical specs matter. The artist and effects programmers can just do much more on better hardware.
Nobody cares about poly count except PC-gamers who will abandon the XBox as soon as the next gen of PC-cards are out.
No, it doesn't work that way. Console games always look much better than PC games within 3 or 4 years of release because PC games have a bunch of contstraints that console games don't have: 1. The afor-mentioned memory bus bandwidth problems means that you can't push as many polygons/textures through a PC even if the chips in the PC are much better. 2. Publishers refuse to limit their PC games to only the highest end machines, so they don't target as high quality as they could. 3. A console is a known piece of hardware - a game developer only has to support 1 hardware configuration, 2 if you count the minor difference of PAL and NTSC. The configurations of PC hardware and software are endless. It's a big limiting factor. 4. There's much more money in console games. It helps to have the budget to do the cool stuff.
Aww, just flamebait. You and Trip Hawkings (3DO's CEO) are the only people who believe that. Oops, Trip just changed his mind - you are completely alone now.
Have you ever played any XBox games? The games are gorgeous, the machine has 4 times the resolution of a PS2, 5 times the poly count, hardware tables for reflection models etc etc. It also has a hard drive which makes a big difference.
You know, PC games aren't dead even though a single high end video card for a PC costs more than an XBox and does less because of memory bus bandwidth problems.
There are lots of people who can afford $300 for a game machine and will shell out when the games are cool enough.
I used to work in games, and I've always disliked the rush toward (imagination and style-free) realism and ever more gory violence.
Anyway I've noticed that there are some new and very good games that have stylized artwork. Check out Jet Grind Radio, Mad Dash and Cell Damage on the XBox (Cell Damage may be too hard, but I like the Warner Bros. look).
There's also lots of fantacy games that don't fall into the mindless violence game classes. I've played Ico on the PS2 and Shadow of Destiny on the Dream Cast and there are untold more.
Fewer Japanese games fall into the style-free category I whined about than American ones, but that's probably just a sign of overall quality.
The article didn't actually have much direction, but anyway...
There's a sort of esthetic that allows games to be games instead of insisting that they have to be representations of reality, and I've always prefered that esthetic. Besides there are moral issues involved in war, for instance, but no moral problems with playing go or chess, so I far prefer my strategy problems to NOT be disguised as murder.
Anyway I think part of the lack of style was just caused by the lack of sophistication that comes with new tools and technology.
Slashdot Mirror
CD degrades the vinyl recording.
If you know what you're doing it doesn't have to.
But doing it right is much more complicated than just sampling a filtered signal. Some professional A2D converters do it right, but not all.
Basically you have to sample at DVD audio quality and use algorithms to reduce the bandwidth and dither down the bit depth much more carefully than any analog circuit can do it.
As an aside I played with dithering sound a few months ago - if you use an error dispersion sort of dither you can easily hear a signal many decibles below the noise floor (my test signal was a song who's loudest point was 24 db below it).
A more common sort of dither gives you 2 to 3 more bits more or less.
Rocky J. Squirrel
High quality A2D convsion to redbook is hard - you've got to oversample, sample at a higher bit depth, do digital filtering and dithering. At least this has to happen at SOME level, maybe hidden in a chip. But the quality of chips, electronics and processing power has gone so far past what's necessary to do this that everyone who reads slash dot could get a cheap setup that does all this. So we never have to worry that going to analog and back is going to mess up our sound again. Therefore disk watermarks can be completely ignored as basically irrelevent.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Except for the (completely unsupported) thesis that a mutated FOXP2 gene is in some very vague way important to the evolution of language, the assertion of these articles are absolute truisms.
Almost all genes must be mutations of what came before them (the exceptions being genes that crossed species barriers because of viruses or something and genes that are extra copies).
Obviously we talk a little better than monkeys, so a few genes must have mutated along the way...
Rocky J. Squirrel
I guess if you don't consider strip mining pristine wilderness to be any big whoop.
I don't know which part of Canada diamonds come from, but if it's anything like the area I grew up in (think North Dakota) you don't have to worry about.
I used to tell people that I'd be all for the environment if we had one.
Rocky J. Squirrel
When two tribes warred, the winners took the losers as slaves ... if you want to draw attention to the real cause of slavery in the US, look at the Africans who started the whole deal.
There's a simple cognitive mistake behind all bigotry and all apologies for bigotry. I think I can clear this up with an equally simple argument:
No matter where a slave came from an "African" who was sent over on a slave ship is not the same "African" who enslaved him.
The slaver who captured him committed a crime against humanity doing so. The person who was captured was a victim, whether that person was an innocent or guilty of committing crimes in his own life.
As, for the culpability of the Americans involved in the slave trade, anyone involved was obviously fully culpable. How can it make any moral difference whether you caught a free human being a made him or her a slave or if you paid someone else who did it for you?
No one was ever forced to buy a slave, so the fact that there were some African slaver owners willing to sell slaves in no way excuses any American buyers.
The Americans weren't buying African slaves in order to set the free after all.
Instead of fighting the world wide slave trade, they supported and participated in it, so they were as morally culpable as anyone else involved.
The basis of all bigotry is the cognitive mistake of not thinking of people as individuals.
Why not take your argument further and not think of anyone as a individual; then your argument could be, "the human race is guilty of many crimes including slavery therefore all humans deserve to be slaves."
Rocky J. Squirrel
but i'm just "too proud" to go from IT to making someone's food. it would disturb me, cuz i'd always feel that i'm doing less than i'm capable of.
... right now!
Never. But I would feel that I was making $50,000 less than I was capable of!
Actually I HATE the pressure of being an applications engineer. Or at least I hate it when:
1. We don't really have enough money to finish the project, so we screw ourselves by making early deadlines (with terrible code) in order to make demos and impress investors.
2. Other programmers on my team are inexperienced and making a mess.
3. Managers are clueless about software development and think that tools, abstraction, and testing are unnecessary! Or they allow testing, but always look for a scapegoat when a bug is found - and it's not the idiot who throws things together too quickly and screwed the project up for the rest of us who's blamed, because he's the fastest (?!) and therefore the star.
Oh, and why do idiots who managed huge projects badly think they must know more about software development than experienced engineers?
Arrgh!!!!
(panting hard)
I could be serving coffee
Rocky J. Squirrel
A friend of mine (programmer and entrepreneur) had a sign in his office that said "I could be mowing lawns right now".
... right now."
When thing were going well he could chuckle (fill with superiorty and haughty pride) and say, "I could be mowing lawns right now".
When he was hitting his head against a particulary stubborn piece of code and the bills were going unpaid, he could look at the sign like it was a the solution to all his problems and sigh, "Yeah, I could be mowing lawns
Rocky J. Squirrel
First they make crepes, then move up to manage creeps.
All that "slacking off" was simply a non-credit course in shmoozing, which is a very important skill that many of us geeks unfortunately never perfected.
Raw merit can be found in dollar-per-hour Indian programming sweatshops and desparate docile immigrants. If you want real money you have to learn to brown-nose with those who have it.
So far brown-nosing is the only thing left that is still tough to import.
Younger kids have Dilbert to explain the score to them, so I'm a member of what's probably the last generation that bought the bullshit that jobs that require intelligence and skill have high status and good pay.
Nope. Money and status are for people who already have money and for the (minimal number of) people they keep to protect their wealth. Programmers are paid whatever your bosses think they can get away with paying them - and not a cent more.
Why are managers paid so much more than their much more skilled employees? So that a class divide can be maintained between those who protect the owners wealth and those who generate it (as cheaply as possible). Solidarity between managers and employees could cause problems when execs decided to screw said employees, so it helps to place that class barrier between the two.
I'm not a communist, but I think we all need to understand how our system works. Capitalism doesn't actually generate meritocracies, it generates whatever system people with money think will buy them the most wealth at the moment. That's only good for workers when there's more demand for us than supply.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Welcome to the world of intergenerational warfare... Under Nixon an older, reactionary generation declared a War on Drugs, which was essentially a euphemism for a war on the lifestyle of the youth of that era and the values it represented (chemical experimentation, casual sex, a healthy skepticism of authority, and so on). Indeed, the prohibition of drugs and the actions that have been taken to try and stamp out its use has caused far greater harm, in both a humanitarian and economic sense, than the abuse of the substances themselves ever did or could have.
A War on Ourselves indeed, or at least a war on the younger generation, one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior, to the point where we now have over fifty beaurocracies fighting for the collected spoils seized from non-violent drug offendors.
Now, with the new War on Copyright Infringement, we are about to target today's youth, who trade their music, their movies, their videotapes online, instead of via cassette tape the way us older folk did when we were in high school and college.
I agree, partially. I've wondered about actual wars too, which seem a bit like parents slaughtering their young for next to no reason. Exactly why was communism in Viet Nam supposed to be more important to each American family that the lives (and and freedom, and health and hearts etc.) of the sons we were supposed to scrifice to it?
On the other hand, the Copywrite war seems more like the corporate class, having bought both the government and the media, using their power to insure their profits. It's not about young people, it's just money talking.
Also, having law inforcement go nuts over little things seems to fit the puritanical character of American society with its odd "cultural war" as Patrick Buccanan called it.
I grew up in Canada where there is no "cultural war". Someone pointed out to me that one difference between Canada and the US is that the Canadian government doesn't have the "separation of church and state". So, since religious folks aren't officially marginalized out the government, they don't feel so threatened and the result is peace instead of societal warfare. It's an example of how badly the law of unintended consequences can bite you.
Rocky J Squirrel
Verizon has a CDMA 3G network in the bay area/silicon valley area.
.4 sec for small packets to about 1 second for very large packets.
I get about 120 kbaud with a latency from
It's a shame. When we had Ricochet/Metricom the latency was low. I could run terminal services and file sharing across Ricochet. You just can't do that with Verizon.
I did a ping plot of Verizon's network and found that most of the time is in the first few hops, I think the first tier of the network must be connected with radio links. That implies that if you are in a cell closer to the backbone you'll get much lower latency. That also means that they could lower the latency if they spent a little more money.
Oddly enough, from the names of the nodes, I can tell that every packet goes to New York and back, but that takes very little time - I'm guessing there must be a fiber optic backbone.
Rocky J Squirrel
I remember the Vic 20.
Anyway if your dad knew a little about computer chess then he would have had no trouble beating the Vic, since the Vic didn't have enough memory for a hash table and so would have been incompetent in all end games. You see in the end game when there are very few pieces on the board, a human can figure out the invariants in the position and look many more moves ahead, or even use end game principles and not look ahead at all.
The trick for a computer is that in a end game, you see the same board configurations over and over again in the search tree, so that if the program makes a table of all of the positions its already evaluated it can look many moves deeper than it could without a hash table (I don't remember how deep, maybe 4 to 6 times as deep).
I'm terrible at chess, but I can still beat programs that run in very little memory by trading away all of my pieces as quickly as possible and blasting the poor program in the end game.
I won't say that doing that is any fun though.
Rocky J. Squirrel
A few points.
1. you can't walk around a reflection hologram.
2. the viewing angles of reflection holograms are a little limited and since the color of an image (and it's position, slightly) will vary with the angle between the light source and the viewer, you need a point light source.
3. The image is harder to make than the drawing implied, they no doubt had to have apparatus that physically scanned the image source (and possibley light source) over the film to print on it.
Rocky J. Squirrel
Maybe Warren Robinett got screwed, but those were the good old days of royalties for programmers. I got 17.5% of gross for the game I released in the early 80's and the guys I knew who wrote 2600 cart games a few years before got 20% and even 25% of gross! NO programmers get sweet deals like that these days and royalties are rare (except for management). For one thing it takes a lot more than one person to write most games now (got to count the artists as well as programmers).
Rocky J. Squirrel
The "InPhase plan" page says
Likewise, the company says its research shows that the media can be used in a rewritable format but won't discuss specifics for anything but its write-only product.
They must have meant "write once" or "read only". A disk you can write to but not read from would be less useful, eh?
Rocky J. Squirrel
So the proper credited names should be:
UNIX/Linux and UNIX/Hurd.
...
There is no proof that a GNU model works better than a BSD model. Only the rantings of RMS.
Right on.
I can't believe Stallman said:
The use of Bitkeeper for the Linux sources has a grave effect on the free software community, because anyone who wants to closely track patches to Linux can only do it by installing that non-free program. There must be dozens or even hundreds of kernel hackers who have done this. Most of them are gradually convincing themselves that it is ok to use non-free software, in order to avoid a sense of cognitive dissonance about the presence of Bitkeeper on their machines. What can be done about this?
One solution is to set up another repository for the Linux sources, using CVS or another free version control system, and arranging to load new versions into it automatically. This could use Bitkeeper to access the latest revisions, then install the new revisions into CVS. That update process could run automatically and frequently.
The FSF cannot do this, because we cannot install Bitkeeper on our machines. We have no non-free systems or applications on them now, and our principles say we must keep it that way. Operating this repository would have to be done by someone else who is willing to have Bitkeeper on his machine, unless someone can find or make a way to do it using free software.
"gradually convincing themselves that it is ok to use non-free software, in order to avoid a sense of cognitive dissonance..."
?!!!
"we cannot install Bitkeeper on our machines. We have no non-free systems or applications on them now, and our principles say we must keep it that way."
?!!!
What a fucking nutcase!
Ohhh software without source code is so evil that Stalman can't even install any on a single machine?
The man has issues (and volumes and subscriptions).
God, the man needs to get laid or take a pill or something.
Rocky J. Squirrel
I was almost tempted to make some snide remarks, but unlike most religions, I DO let people make their own choices.
And I would have almost been tempted to reply to those snide remarks but I didn't get a chance to.
No one was tempted to write anything at all; we must live in the best of all possible worlds. Oops, I slipped.
;)
Rocky (More subjunctive than thou) Squirrel
Compare:
. as px?prodno=objectivemin.2019725
. as px?prodno=untouched.1287242
The hilarious tote bag that teaches kids disdain for hindus (Habu the hindu elephant says, "I have so many God's I don't know who to turn to" - Hey Habu, simplify you're life with... Jesus!)
From "objective: christian ministries"
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/store/productdetail
With
http://www.cafepress.com/cp/store/productdetail
The "You Make Jesus Vomit" tote bag from Betty Bower's web site (so close to Jesus, we're thinking of taking seperate vacations this year).
Same seller, same product, same picture even (with different text photoshopped in).
Rocky J. Squirrel
Apparently we do know how Provigil works to the extent that we know what any brain drug does (we know what receptors it hits and to some extent how). modafinil (the generic name for Provigil)is an alpha1-adrenergic agonist. An agonist being a drug that stimulates a receptor directly, emulating some neuropeptide.
. com/
Anyway yohimbine is an alpha2-adrenergic agonist that you can find at many drug stores and health food stores. It's known for helping guys maintain erections and (from the time I took part of a pill), I'd say it has powerful psychoactive effects. I think it would be great for someone who has a hard time getting himself to exersize, when I took it I felt restless and in need of exersize. It put me in touch with some agressive side - I could imagine doing martial arts.
So. I wonder has anyone here tried and alpha1-adrenergic agonist like modafinil or adrafinil? Do they feel like yohimbine?
Also has anyone tried using yohimbine to stay awake? Would that work?
Oh and here's some links
http://www.modafinil.com/
http://www.adrafinil
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/yohim.htm
Rocky J Squirrel
His writing is quite good. Personally I can't handle that much pessimism and bitterness in one place anymore.
And yes, in person, he's a big asshole. A friend of mine who (like me at the time) was a big Ellison fan, interviewed him for some campus radio station (I don't remember if Joe was a Santa Cruise or Berkeley at the time). Anyway Ellison ripped him to pieces.
Another friend of mine (who isn't a fan), managed to get back at Harlan. He met Harlan at a computer convention, Harlan mentioned the computer-game version of "I have no mouth and I must Scream" and my friend asked him if it was called "I have no mouse and I must click." Harlen scowled and acknowledged the pun.
Rocky J. Squirrel
The best we can do is figure out how to share songs at work legally, and I do believe it's possible by following one of the radio station server models. Remember there are individualized radio station servers on the internet, and as far as I know, no one has sued them.
So no doubt you can make a server legal by following the same rules that radio and shoutcast stations have to follow, possibly with the extentions that some of the pick-your-playlist internet stations use.
1. You can't choose to listen to individual songs - at least you can't choose WHEN to listen to a song.
2. It's all-right to have some sort of effect on the playlist. Picking a genre is what you do by choosing a radio station after all. There are individualized internet stations that let you go a series of steps:
A) you choose and rate a number of genres
B) you can take individual performers out of your playlist.
C) you can stop and rate a song that's playing so that you won't hear it again or so that you'll hear it more often.
They seem to be skirting the law by having you exclude what you don't like instead of letting you include what you do like.
You could set up an individualized radio station server that allows you to have a number of identities, then edit your identities so that each one represents a playlist you like.
Interestingly, shared stations don't seem to have the "you can't pick when to play a song" restriction. A number of internet stations have automated request lines. You pick what song you want to hear next and are placed in a queue, so that everyone hears your choice next. So another way to deal with this is to set up a shared company station.
My cynicism makes me think that what protects the individualized internet stations is the fact that they link to sellers of whatever cd they are playing. It's all about money. If you included a link to an amazon page with every song you played, they'd be more likely to leave you alone.
Rocky J Squirrel
Oh, I get it! I predict the Authors Guild will prepose new legislation requiring people to pay a royalty every time someone reads a book. Just like the movie industry and the music industry, reading a book will be considered a performance. Perhaps they'll write the law so that you'll owe a new royalty payment every time you re-read a sentence.
Thank God there's one group left in the world that can't afford to buy congress, or my little nightmare would come true.
Anyway I bought a used book on Amazon recently (it was out of print). The process was painless. This bull shit may just inspire me to buy used books when I don't have to. Who are they to tell me I shouldn't be offered used as well as new books?!!!
Rocky J. Squirrel
Well, why is XBox outsold by a 2-year old design at least 2:1 in all 3 markets?
I don't know. But in this market (Northern California) you can go down to any Best Buy and find the kids lining up to play XBox games while ignoring the PS2. That says to me that PS2 is only coasting around here - XBox has won until the next round of hardware comes out. Anyway I expect that the numbers will even out as more titles come out on the XBox.
Nobody cares about 4 times the resolution because everybody has a usual TV anyway.
Actually, the resolution matters a lot because the PS2 games (at least the ones I own) don't use interlace - they get half the resolution of a regular TV set vertically. This makes two player split-screen games unusable on the PS2 compared with XBox games (especially racing games). So the resolution DOES matter.
Also artwork DOES sell games, so the technical specs matter. The artist and effects programmers can just do much more on better hardware.
Nobody cares about poly count except PC-gamers who will abandon the XBox as soon as the next gen of PC-cards are out.
No, it doesn't work that way. Console games always look much better than PC games within 3 or 4 years of release because PC games have a bunch of contstraints that console games don't have:
1. The afor-mentioned memory bus bandwidth problems means that you can't push as many polygons/textures through a PC even if the chips in the PC are much better.
2. Publishers refuse to limit their PC games to only the highest end machines, so they don't target as high quality as they could.
3. A console is a known piece of hardware - a game developer only has to support 1 hardware configuration, 2 if you count the minor difference of PAL and NTSC. The configurations of PC hardware and software are endless. It's a big limiting factor.
4. There's much more money in console games. It helps to have the budget to do the cool stuff.
Rocky J Squirrel
XBox is dead already
Aww, just flamebait. You and Trip Hawkings (3DO's CEO) are the only people who believe that. Oops, Trip just changed his mind - you are completely alone now.
Have you ever played any XBox games? The games are gorgeous, the machine has 4 times the resolution of a PS2, 5 times the poly count, hardware tables for reflection models etc etc. It also has a hard drive which makes a big difference.
You know, PC games aren't dead even though a single high end video card for a PC costs more than an XBox and does less because of memory bus bandwidth problems.
There are lots of people who can afford $300 for a game machine and will shell out when the games are cool enough.
Too bad I bought a PS2 though...
Rocky J Squirrel
I used to work in games, and I've always disliked the rush toward (imagination and style-free) realism and ever more gory violence.
Anyway I've noticed that there are some new and very good games that have stylized artwork. Check out Jet Grind Radio, Mad Dash and Cell Damage on the XBox (Cell Damage may be too hard, but I like the Warner Bros. look).
There's also lots of fantacy games that don't fall into the mindless violence game classes. I've played Ico on the PS2 and Shadow of Destiny on the Dream Cast and there are untold more.
Fewer Japanese games fall into the style-free category I whined about than American ones, but that's probably just a sign of overall quality.
The article didn't actually have much direction, but anyway...
There's a sort of esthetic that allows games to be games instead of insisting that they have to be representations of reality, and I've always prefered that esthetic. Besides there are moral issues involved in war, for instance, but no moral problems with playing go or chess, so I far prefer my strategy problems to NOT be disguised as murder.
Anyway I think part of the lack of style was just caused by the lack of sophistication that comes with new tools and technology.
Rocky J Squirrel
By the way, looking at the page again, I realize that I looked at the san-serif example and not the serif example...
The serifed font is badly hinted and turing hinting off is a good thing in that case. The san-serif font on the other hand looks better hinted.
Rocky J. Squirrel