Productive, as opposed to creative? Are you implying that creative work can not be productive, or that art isn't productive?
Composing, arranging, training, performing and recording are all tasks that require a lot of manpower and money, but in the end, there's certainly a service (live music) or a product (a record).
At least I'd like to believe that the work I put into the music I play is productive.
I recall Mark Twain saying:
"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
The comparison isn't too removed from reality. When writing subordinate clauses or clauses with modal verbs, the inflected verb always comes last in the clause. Much like the operator in RPN.
Re:Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
DOS essentially forced programmers to write stable, robust code and you're calling this a bad thing?
I sincerely don't recall DOS programs being particularly robust. They crashed just as often as programs today, but instead of an OS coming to the rescue by killing or suspending the offending app, it just hung.
You picked the sloppiness and bulk of windows games as an example, and I can't help but ask:
do you remember early-mid-90s Origin games?
There's no need to be careful today, because if your program misbehaves Windows will try to shut it down, fail, crash and take all the blame.
Here you have a completely valid beef, especially with Windows 9x: the error recovery was still poor, leading many to think every applications crash was caused by the OS. This is much, much better with Windows 2k. Still, I can't say applications have become more unstable with time. Bulkier and bloated, certainly, but they're still as (un)stable as they were in the DOS days.
That's precisely what killed DOS games/demos. Demosceners in particular wrote some of the most perverted display hacks I've ever seen, but platform independence wasn't in their books. If you didn't have the same setup, tough.
Many great demos lost their shot at the prize money when they simply wouldn't run on the competion machine. Many great games were a pain to run, often requiring painful fiddling with TSR:s. (I still have my falcon 3.0 bootdisk hung up on my wall - it loaded a mouse driver, a CD driver, and even the Sound Blaster drivers, while still keeping 630kb of base memory free)
DirectX changed all this, with the cost of some performance, but with the advent of consumer 3d accelerator cards, it was no longer an issue.
Quick and Dirty Interrupt Handler
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Calling MS-DOS an operating system is stretching the concept quite a bit.
DOS was nothing but a glorified interrupt handler. It wasn't unstable, since there was practically nothing to be unstable with.
It didn't protect itself from userland programs, which is generally considered a bad thing. Granted, this gave the programmer freedom to completely work around the operating system, but at the same time allowed said programs to royally mess things up.
From a single-task, single-user system, it was quite good, provided the programs behaved nicely. DOS Extensions even provided it with protected memory, making life a bit easier.
New command interpreters, like 4DOS, injected new life into the system.
If you accepted it as a single-user, single-task enviroment, it was adequate.
I find the decision to remove any and all CLI from Windows a bit odd, considering that Apple went the opposite direction with Mac OS X.
Actually, small companies have very lax security because of this. Doors are frequently left unlocked, and people don't even notice if someone enters, since everyone is busy doing theri job instead of caring for security.
Bits and bytes on a computer are great for transmitting information, but too often legal reasons demand you have something on paper.
These laws can be changed. Basically, the division shouldn't be between "legal" and "casual".
There is no reason not to send information electronically, other than the artificial barriers that will change. Information is well suited for transmission via electronic medium, since it's by definition something you can't touch.
Products and supplies on the other hand, are solid structures, that are impossible to send electronically.
Nicholas Negroponte drew this distinction about six years ago, when he talked about "Bits and Atoms". "Bits", that is, all information and media (movies and music included) should be transferred electronically, since it can be stored electronically.
"Atoms", on the other hand, can't be transferred electronically, and therefore shouldn't.
Snail-mail letters should die. They are pure text and pictures, pure information.
Snail-mail packages will live, since there is nothing to replace them with.
Actually, the fact that it's an electric guitar helps a lot. Electric guitars have magnetic pickups that transform the magnetic fluctuation caused by a vibrating steel string above a magnetic pole into an electric signal.
The reason the sound isn't thin is that the frame and the neck of the guitar resonate in this model - they obviously had one or two luthiers involved.
Normal electrig guitars are entirely made out of more or less solid wood (there are semi-acoustics, of course) and it is quite possible to hear the difference between two different types of wood.
And, in my living room, I might get 5 small ones to hang from my ceiling fan.
Wouldn't the fact that the speaker cabinets rotate generate a leslie (rotary speaker) effect? An excellent effect if you're playing a hammond, but not exactly something I'd recommend for playback.
Try listening to a speaker tied to the roof with strings. The sound is a bit thin, now isn't it?
There are multiple reasons for using a cabinet. The obvious one is holding the speakers in place, and allowing the cones to vibrate. Handling a cabinet is far easier than handling loose speakers.
In addition, speaker cabinets themselves have a certain frequency response, depending on the shape and the materials used. This enchances the sound.
A good cabinet design also allows the speakers to drive air more efficiently. Speaker cabinet also usually have some amount of electronics in them, usually a band-pass filter the purpose of which is to cancel frequencies the speaker can't handle, thus avoiding unneccessary speaker damage and poor sound.
It is still possibler to blow a speaker by doing stupid, stupid things. Ask any roadie or audio engineer.
This is newspeak.
Microsoft has given new meanings to words and phrases before, and as such this doesn't surprise me the least.
They've already diluted purchasing to mean nothing but a obtaining a license for a limited time, i.e. renting.
Purchasing is renting, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery.
Microsoft has simply to give the phrase "opening a pandora's box" a new meaning.
Actually, it's called newspeak, coined as a term by Geroge Orwell in 1984. The idea is, that once you give the same meaning to two words taht used to be opposites.
Ignorance is Strength.
Freedom is Slavery.
War is Peace.
How can the people act for freedom when the first thing they think upon hearing the word is slavery?
Microsoft has been using newspeak extensively in their licensing and marketing.
Purchasing does no longer mean an exchange of goods for money, at least not in the world of Microsoft. - it's merely a right to a license for a limited time. Yet they still use the very word purchase.
There are countless of other examples of newspeak from Redmond, and I'm not the least bit surprised that they've decided to give the phrase "Pandora's box" a new meaning.
Good is evil.
Freedom is Slavery.
Purchasing is renting.
*Ignorance is strength.*
True to some degree. It is possible to access a vending machine or pay for a car wash with your mobile phone. This is done by calling a special number, which is usually specified on the vending machine. The cost is then added to your mobile phone bill.
Visa Electron and Mastercard Maestro, together with the local Avanti eCash-card are making a breaktrough, as more and more places are accepting them. I've seen them in record stores, tiny cafe's, fast food joints, and the like. It's very convenient.
A better hoppy than listening to music? You must be joking. I'm hard pressed to find anything as intense and satisfying as great music.
Not all record labels are in it for the money. Go ahead and check your local record stores, and you're bound to find some stores with vinyl records and recent releases from a horde of indie labels.
Support your local bands, and go to gigs. You'll find a band you like, and you'll be content, since you can see them live more often than you'd ever see any major act.
Not quite.
They programmed Deep Blue, for example, by feeding it's heuristical engine with data from thousands of previous games. This data, together with the learning ability of the machine and the raw computation power yields to a chess computer far more effective than the people who programmed it.
Not that it neccessarily is any better than a human being: Deep Blue didn't win every game against Kasparov, it merely won more games in the turney.
My female friend actually got an offer to be in a pornographic movie. The offer stood at $10000.
As far as the morality of porn industry goes, she was underage at the time, which is why the offer was that high. Does anyone _still_ think there is a healthy sense of moral in that industry?
Surely you must have realized that the movie in question was a work of fiction.
That said, humans aren't exactly efficient as an energy source. Bioelectricity is very difficult to harness at this moment.
One of the easiest ways of harnessin humans as an energy source is heat: we produce 40W of excess heat. This fact makes cuddling up next to someone a very pleasent ordeal:)
Re:Why haven't others used wood?
on
Hardwoodware
·
· Score: 2
Metal cases have some electrical properties to their advantage, mainly by being faraday cages. Wood and plastic computer cases need to have metal insulation in order to achieve this.
Back when computers had clock rates of 90Mhz-100Mhz, their clock rates landed squarely in the middle of the FM band spectrum. Thus, if you had the case off, it didn't act as a faraday cage and caused interference with nearby FM equipment at those frequencies. The interference was weak, but still audible. Putting the case back on took away the interference, since the faraday cage didn't let radio frequencies through.
Besides, metal cases are very durable and very cheap to manufacture, not to mention that they are a proven concept.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a slashdot interview with the congressmen in question? Surely they would at least consider it, at least from a public relations standpoint.
Productive, as opposed to creative?
Are you implying that creative work can not be productive, or that art isn't productive?
Composing, arranging, training, performing and recording are all tasks that require a lot of manpower and money, but in the end, there's certainly a service (live music) or a product (a record).
At least I'd like to believe that the work I put into the music I play is productive.
Overdosing on these also leads to an untimely death. Beta-blockers are the medicine of choice for many people commiting suicide.
How about sticking a 9V battery on your tongue? Still claiming you can't feel anything?
Besides, it's not the voltage that counts, its the product of voltage and current.
I recall Mark Twain saying:
"Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
The comparison isn't too removed from reality. When writing subordinate clauses or clauses with modal verbs, the inflected verb always comes last in the clause. Much like the operator in RPN.
DOS essentially forced programmers to write stable, robust code and you're calling this a bad thing?
I sincerely don't recall DOS programs being particularly robust. They crashed just as often as programs today, but instead of an OS coming to the rescue by killing or suspending the offending app, it just hung.
You picked the sloppiness and bulk of windows games as an example, and I can't help but ask: do you remember early-mid-90s Origin games?
There's no need to be careful today, because if your program misbehaves Windows will try to shut it down, fail, crash and take all the blame.
Here you have a completely valid beef, especially with Windows 9x: the error recovery was still poor, leading many to think every applications crash was caused by the OS. This is much, much better with Windows 2k. Still, I can't say applications have become more unstable with time. Bulkier and bloated, certainly, but they're still as (un)stable as they were in the DOS days.
That's precisely what killed DOS games/demos. Demosceners in particular wrote some of the most perverted display hacks I've ever seen, but platform independence wasn't in their books. If you didn't have the same setup, tough.
Many great demos lost their shot at the prize money when they simply wouldn't run on the competion machine. Many great games were a pain to run, often requiring painful fiddling with TSR:s. (I still have my falcon 3.0 bootdisk hung up on my wall - it loaded a mouse driver, a CD driver, and even the Sound Blaster drivers, while still keeping 630kb of base memory free)
DirectX changed all this, with the cost of some performance, but with the advent of consumer 3d accelerator cards, it was no longer an issue.
Calling MS-DOS an operating system is stretching the concept quite a bit.
DOS was nothing but a glorified interrupt handler. It wasn't unstable, since there was practically nothing to be unstable with.
It didn't protect itself from userland programs, which is generally considered a bad thing. Granted, this gave the programmer freedom to completely work around the operating system, but at the same time allowed said programs to royally mess things up.
From a single-task, single-user system, it was quite good, provided the programs behaved nicely. DOS Extensions even provided it with protected memory, making life a bit easier.
New command interpreters, like 4DOS, injected new life into the system.
If you accepted it as a single-user, single-task enviroment, it was adequate.
I find the decision to remove any and all CLI from Windows a bit odd, considering that Apple went the opposite direction with Mac OS X.
Actually, small companies have very lax security because of this. Doors are frequently left unlocked, and people don't even notice if someone enters, since everyone is busy doing theri job instead of caring for security.
Bits and bytes on a computer are great for transmitting information, but too often legal reasons demand you have something on paper.
These laws can be changed. Basically, the division shouldn't be between "legal" and "casual".
There is no reason not to send information electronically, other than the artificial barriers that will change. Information is well suited for transmission via electronic medium, since it's by definition something you can't touch.
Products and supplies on the other hand, are solid structures, that are impossible to send electronically.
Nicholas Negroponte drew this distinction about six years ago, when he talked about "Bits and Atoms". "Bits", that is, all information and media (movies and music included) should be transferred electronically, since it can be stored electronically.
"Atoms", on the other hand, can't be transferred electronically, and therefore shouldn't.
Snail-mail letters should die. They are pure text and pictures, pure information.
Snail-mail packages will live, since there is nothing to replace them with.
Actually, the fact that it's an electric guitar helps a lot. Electric guitars have magnetic pickups that transform the magnetic fluctuation caused by a vibrating steel string above a magnetic pole into an electric signal.
The reason the sound isn't thin is that the frame and the neck of the guitar resonate in this model - they obviously had one or two luthiers involved.
Normal electrig guitars are entirely made out of more or less solid wood (there are semi-acoustics, of course) and it is quite possible to hear the difference between two different types of wood.
Wouldn't the fact that the speaker cabinets rotate generate a leslie (rotary speaker) effect? An excellent effect if you're playing a hammond, but not exactly something I'd recommend for playback.
Try listening to a speaker tied to the roof with strings. The sound is a bit thin, now isn't it?
There are multiple reasons for using a cabinet. The obvious one is holding the speakers in place, and allowing the cones to vibrate. Handling a cabinet is far easier than handling loose speakers.
In addition, speaker cabinets themselves have a certain frequency response, depending on the shape and the materials used. This enchances the sound.
A good cabinet design also allows the speakers to drive air more efficiently. Speaker cabinet also usually have some amount of electronics in them, usually a band-pass filter the purpose of which is to cancel frequencies the speaker can't handle, thus avoiding unneccessary speaker damage and poor sound.
It is still possibler to blow a speaker by doing stupid, stupid things. Ask any roadie or audio engineer.
Pushing vast amounts of data on the stack is a bad, bad, bad idea. Use dynamic memory allocation - that's what it's there for.
This is newspeak.
Microsoft has given new meanings to words and phrases before, and as such this doesn't surprise me the least.
They've already diluted purchasing to mean nothing but a obtaining a license for a limited time, i.e. renting.
Purchasing is renting, War is Peace, Ignorance is Strength, Freedom is Slavery.
Microsoft has simply to give the phrase "opening a pandora's box" a new meaning.
Actually, it's called newspeak, coined as a term by Geroge Orwell in 1984. The idea is, that once you give the same meaning to two words taht used to be opposites.
Ignorance is Strength.
Freedom is Slavery.
War is Peace.
How can the people act for freedom when the first thing they think upon hearing the word is slavery?
Microsoft has been using newspeak extensively in their licensing and marketing.
Purchasing does no longer mean an exchange of goods for money, at least not in the world of Microsoft. - it's merely a right to a license for a limited time. Yet they still use the very word purchase.
There are countless of other examples of newspeak from Redmond, and I'm not the least bit surprised that they've decided to give the phrase "Pandora's box" a new meaning.
Good is evil.
Freedom is Slavery.
Purchasing is renting.
*Ignorance is strength.*
True to some degree. It is possible to access a vending machine or pay for a car wash with your mobile phone. This is done by calling a special number, which is usually specified on the vending machine. The cost is then added to your mobile phone bill.
Visa Electron and Mastercard Maestro, together with the local Avanti eCash-card are making a breaktrough, as more and more places are accepting them. I've seen them in record stores, tiny cafe's, fast food joints, and the like. It's very convenient.
Better yet, buy albums by indie artists. Not a dime is going to land in the pocket of the RIAA.
A better hoppy than listening to music? You must be joking. I'm hard pressed to find anything as intense and satisfying as great music.
Not all record labels are in it for the money. Go ahead and check your local record stores, and you're bound to find some stores with vinyl records and recent releases from a horde of indie labels.
Support your local bands, and go to gigs. You'll find a band you like, and you'll be content, since you can see them live more often than you'd ever see any major act.
Not quite. They programmed Deep Blue, for example, by feeding it's heuristical engine with data from thousands of previous games. This data, together with the learning ability of the machine and the raw computation power yields to a chess computer far more effective than the people who programmed it. Not that it neccessarily is any better than a human being: Deep Blue didn't win every game against Kasparov, it merely won more games in the turney.
My female friend actually got an offer to be in a pornographic movie. The offer stood at $10000. As far as the morality of porn industry goes, she was underage at the time, which is why the offer was that high. Does anyone _still_ think there is a healthy sense of moral in that industry?
Actually, i found the switch particularly painless, even with redhat 6.x. It was merely a matter of compiling and installing the new modutils.
Surely you must have realized that the movie in question was a work of fiction. That said, humans aren't exactly efficient as an energy source. Bioelectricity is very difficult to harness at this moment. One of the easiest ways of harnessin humans as an energy source is heat: we produce 40W of excess heat. This fact makes cuddling up next to someone a very pleasent ordeal :)
Metal cases have some electrical properties to their advantage, mainly by being faraday cages. Wood and plastic computer cases need to have metal insulation in order to achieve this.
Back when computers had clock rates of 90Mhz-100Mhz, their clock rates landed squarely in the middle of the FM band spectrum. Thus, if you had the case off, it didn't act as a faraday cage and caused interference with nearby FM equipment at those frequencies. The interference was weak, but still audible. Putting the case back on took away the interference, since the faraday cage didn't let radio frequencies through.
Besides, metal cases are very durable and very cheap to manufacture, not to mention that they are a proven concept.