Woz, you no doubt get asked countless questions, by countless numbers of people, some of which you have been asked and have answered multiple times to the point where you're sick of continually having to answer them (or don't even bother). Conversely, I imagine there's something you'd love to talk about if only someone would ask you about it, but no one has. What I want to know is: what question has no one ever asked you, a question that you wish someone would finally get around to asking you and that you would love to respond to, and what is the answer you would give to that question?
Less filling! Tastes great! LESS FILLING!!! TASTES GREAT!!!!
WYSIWIG Pros - For a general audience. Relative ease of use, fast results. WYSIWIG Cons - Manual overrides difficult. Cross-browser compatibility issues. Ties the site maintenance to a specific vendor (barring a full rewrite).
Hand-Coding Pros - More & complete control over all elements. Site maintenance not tied to a vendor. Hand-Coding Cons - Steeper learning curve. Not for a general audience. Longer development time (generally).
My S.O. and I are KCRW.com freaks. We also have FM radios throughout the house, along with the living room stereo system - where my S.O.'s PC also lives. I split the audio line from her PC: one line goes to the living room stereo, the other goes to a cheap C.C.Crane FM transmitter. This is the absolute cheapest way to get a single source of audio (CDs, MP3 library, streaming audio) into every room of the house. Note: the FM signal strength from the Crane transmitter sucked at first - then I found a web page that showed how you can open up the Crane transmitter and tweak the signal strength to maximum. Works great now.
I especially liked the use of the phrase "creative but musically untrained individual" and its implications. I would think a singer using this program would at the very least need to be able to sing on key and in a recognizable rhythm. Of course, given a melody in a time signature the program can't track, it may be capable of producing some aleatoric masterpieces.
I'd hate to be a NY Times fact checker assigned to verify the info in all those About.com explanations and tutorials... I mean, job security is all well and good but a verification project of that magnitude will take years!
"Electronic Pop" pioneers, to be precise. For the early electronic music composition pioneers, you gotta go back to people like Ussachevsky, Luenig, Schaeffer, Boulez, Stockhausen...
Oh, and as an addendum: I always take into account whether or not I have the necessary training and experience to solve the problem. If it looks like I will be learning how to fix the problem as I am fixing it, I usually reduce my hourly rate since asking the client to pay for my education seems a little unfair. In cases like that, the education itself serves as partial payment - since I'm likely to encounter the problem again in the future, and make more money off what I learned from fixing the problem before.
Charge what your time is worth to you. If you're not sure, and you have a day job, determine what you make in an hour at your day job and use that as a frame of reference. Generally, I use a sliding scale. I charge friends & family members little or nothing, or work out a barter arrangement, depending on the severity of the problem and how much time and effort I think fixing the problem will require. If I get a referral from a friend, I charge $15 just for the hour or less it takes to drive to the client's place and assess the problem, then I come up with an estimate of how long it will take me to fix the problem, multiply that by the hourly rate I've chosen for myself, and give the client a flat fee estimate. Generally, clients prefer a flat fee to an hourly rate quote because they know up front how much fixing the problem will cost; quoting your hourly rate leaves them feeling a little up in the air as to what the total cost will be. It also forces me to discipline myself to (a) come up with an accurate estimate, and (b) do my best to finish the work in a time frame as close to the estimate as I can. If I take longer to fix the problem than I estimated, I know I needed to pad more; if I take less time, I know I needed to pad less. If I am able to fix the problem in significantly less time than I estimated, I usually reduce the cost of the final bill - it makes for happier clients, which often translates to more referrals.
Amazing - Apple seems to have finally realized that when you market something high quality and feature rich at low cost, people will flock to your stores. There may be hope yet for mass market acceptance of the Mac platform.
The Mac Mini - Greatly Insane!
A question: can a Mac mouse/keyboard from an old G3 system be used with the Mini?
Many shareware/freeware games download sites have a link to a Windows version of Merlin (#81 on the list); unfortunately the site the link points to that hosted the download for many years is now gone. Does anyone know where I can acquire the download now?
There are also some very subtle cross-channel phase cancellations that happen to the stereo audio signal on vinyl when it is played back on a turntable. The left and right channels are not completely discrete, and the resulting phase cancellations can have the effect of seeming to enhance the stereo image. Hook up a turntable and a CD player to a stereo, cue up a vinyl and a CD version of the same recording so they are playing more or less in sync, switch back and forth between them, and listen carefully - the vinyl will sound more "stereo" than the CD.
There is also this odd little bit of arcana regarding analog reel to reel tape recorders: in order to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of analog tape, the signal must be modulated by a 100kHz sine wave during recording, and then "de-modulated" by a 100kHz sine wave upon playback. Without this, the noise floor of magnetic tape audio is entirely unacceptable. If the effect this modulation/de-modulation has on analog tape audio can be thought of as similar to the effect of sample rate on digital audio, then digital audio sampled at 96kHz (awfully close in rate to that 100kHz modulation signal) should in theory sound every bit as good as 30 i.p.s. analog tape... and a lot quieter as well.
I dunno, it does seem like a lot of people here derive a certain - how you say in your country - cathartic release in trashtalking the 2nd & 3rd parts. I chalk it up to the 1st part having set the bar so high, having presented so many interesting concepts and ideas in such a compelling fashion, that there was no way audience expectations were going to be satisfied by the followups. Strip away all the high concept baggage and eye-candy CGI, and what you're left with is an entertaining and engaging sci-fi roller-coaster ride marred by a little too much exposition where it is not needed, and too little exposition where it is very much needed. Taken in as a continuous storyline, I enjoyed it more and got more out of it in a marathon home DVD viewing session - skipping over the unnecessary shoe leather and replaying the scenes that truly advance the plot - than I did watching the three separate parts temporally fragmented in a movie theater.
I wholeheartedly concur. (This is an unsolicited testimonial, I do not work for nor am I affiliated with J&R in any way.) I used to visit their Park Row store in downtown NYC regularly (not far from the WTC site) when I worked for a brokerage house in the area, I got some good deals there and I was always impressed with the selection of merchandise and knowledgeable sales personnel. I don't work in the city any more, so these days I use their website (jandr.com) for online purchases.
I really hate these books that attempt to codify management processes in some kind of all-encompassing, one-size-fits-all way. By the time the processes have been codified and published, the economic climate and the state of things in the business to which the processes are to be applied have changed such that the processes rapidly lose their relevance and ultimately their usefulness. Other than as a way to make money for the authors, I just don't see any real sustainable benefit ever coming out of these books.
Old music formats never die, they just become niche markets. Vinyl is still around, and with CD/DVD drives on so many PCs, compact discs aren't really going to go away anytime soon. Moreover, one factor not taken into account is the packaging: what are they going to do, start printing fingernail-sized booklets of the artwork and lyrics that you can only read with an electron microscope?
Yep, I agree - capitalism is all about what the market will bear. If elected officials do things that piss off a sufficient number of people, then those officials won't get re-elected. If companies try to shove a product down people's throats and the people reject it, the companies abandon the product.
While I agree with some of Walker's observations about the directions in which things are moving, there's no guarantee people are gonna put up with the kind of draconian constraints he envisions... if enough people abandon the secure internet, the viability of all those constraints goes right out the window.
It was back in mid-April of this year that Slashdot posted an article mentioning John Walker's "Hacker's Diet." I am a 48 yr old male, 5' 7.5", sedentary programmer. My weight was pushing 173 and I was really starting to feel it. Walker's book lit a fire under me and while I have not yet adopted the exercise regimen, I have adhered to his core diet advice of eating less than I burn by (a) determining how much I burn (free diet assessment at caloriescount.com) and rigorously counting calories to keep intake below what I burn each day. It is now a little over 3 months since I started and I've lost 17 lbs. My goal is to reach 150 by the end of the year, at which time I can allow myself to eat as much as (but not more than) I burn. Exercise aside, the thing that is hardest for people to wrap their heads around is that this is not just a program of weight loss, it is a program of weight control and to be of any value it has to be something you are willing to commit to for the rest of your life. The mere act of counting calories and reading the labels on the packaging of the food I eat has given me a greater appreciation of making sure my body gets what it needs, not what my appetite and taste buds were telling me I wanted. After my body got over the initial shock of the adjustment (the program is, after all, a form of starvation in small increments), my appetite has adjusted to the point where it lets me know when I am at risk of overeating at one sitting. I've found acceptable substitues for my salty/crunchy jones (mini rice cakes and white cheddar soy crisps are great!) and I've replaced copious consumption of sodas with vitamin waters and Crystal Light. I've cut my consumption of coffe down to about 1/2 of what it was, and I use skim milk instaed of half & half (huge calorie savings there!). Problems I was having with acid reflux have disappeared, a most welcome side effect. And the best thing: my S.O. thinks I'm much cuter now (and lets me know in very physical ways...:) )
Slashdot Mirror
Woz, you no doubt get asked countless questions, by countless numbers of people, some of which you have been asked and have answered multiple times to the point where you're sick of continually having to answer them (or don't even bother). Conversely, I imagine there's something you'd love to talk about if only someone would ask you about it, but no one has. What I want to know is: what question has no one ever asked you, a question that you wish someone would finally get around to asking you and that you would love to respond to, and what is the answer you would give to that question?
Less filling! Tastes great! LESS FILLING!!! TASTES GREAT!!!!
WYSIWIG Pros - For a general audience. Relative ease of use, fast results.
WYSIWIG Cons - Manual overrides difficult. Cross-browser compatibility issues. Ties the site maintenance to a specific vendor (barring a full rewrite).
Hand-Coding Pros - More & complete control over all elements. Site maintenance not tied to a vendor.
Hand-Coding Cons - Steeper learning curve. Not for a general audience. Longer development time (generally).
Any chance of this?
... and see if Animal Kingdom can pull off another win.
My S.O. and I are KCRW.com freaks. We also have FM radios throughout the house, along with the living room stereo system - where my S.O.'s PC also lives. I split the audio line from her PC: one line goes to the living room stereo, the other goes to a cheap C.C.Crane FM transmitter. This is the absolute cheapest way to get a single source of audio (CDs, MP3 library, streaming audio) into every room of the house. Note: the FM signal strength from the Crane transmitter sucked at first - then I found a web page that showed how you can open up the Crane transmitter and tweak the signal strength to maximum. Works great now.
I especially liked the use of the phrase "creative but musically untrained individual" and its implications. I would think a singer using this program would at the very least need to be able to sing on key and in a recognizable rhythm. Of course, given a melody in a time signature the program can't track, it may be capable of producing some aleatoric masterpieces.
I'd hate to be a NY Times fact checker assigned to verify the info in all those About.com explanations and tutorials... I mean, job security is all well and good but a verification project of that magnitude will take years!
"Electronic Pop" pioneers, to be precise. For the early electronic music composition pioneers, you gotta go back to people like Ussachevsky, Luenig, Schaeffer, Boulez, Stockhausen...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_music
Oh, and as an addendum: I always take into account whether or not I have the necessary training and experience to solve the problem. If it looks like I will be learning how to fix the problem as I am fixing it, I usually reduce my hourly rate since asking the client to pay for my education seems a little unfair. In cases like that, the education itself serves as partial payment - since I'm likely to encounter the problem again in the future, and make more money off what I learned from fixing the problem before.
Charge what your time is worth to you. If you're not sure, and you have a day job, determine what you make in an hour at your day job and use that as a frame of reference. Generally, I use a sliding scale. I charge friends & family members little or nothing, or work out a barter arrangement, depending on the severity of the problem and how much time and effort I think fixing the problem will require. If I get a referral from a friend, I charge $15 just for the hour or less it takes to drive to the client's place and assess the problem, then I come up with an estimate of how long it will take me to fix the problem, multiply that by the hourly rate I've chosen for myself, and give the client a flat fee estimate. Generally, clients prefer a flat fee to an hourly rate quote because they know up front how much fixing the problem will cost; quoting your hourly rate leaves them feeling a little up in the air as to what the total cost will be. It also forces me to discipline myself to (a) come up with an accurate estimate, and (b) do my best to finish the work in a time frame as close to the estimate as I can. If I take longer to fix the problem than I estimated, I know I needed to pad more; if I take less time, I know I needed to pad less. If I am able to fix the problem in significantly less time than I estimated, I usually reduce the cost of the final bill - it makes for happier clients, which often translates to more referrals.
Amazing - Apple seems to have finally realized that when you market something high quality and feature rich at low cost, people will flock to your stores. There may be hope yet for mass market acceptance of the Mac platform.
The Mac Mini - Greatly Insane!
A question: can a Mac mouse/keyboard from an old G3 system be used with the Mini?
Many shareware/freeware games download sites have a link to a Windows version of Merlin (#81 on the list); unfortunately the site the link points to that hosted the download for many years is now gone. Does anyone know where I can acquire the download now?
We didn't even have ones and zeros, we had to make do with capitalized O and lower-case L.
There are also some very subtle cross-channel phase cancellations that happen to the stereo audio signal on vinyl when it is played back on a turntable. The left and right channels are not completely discrete, and the resulting phase cancellations can have the effect of seeming to enhance the stereo image. Hook up a turntable and a CD player to a stereo, cue up a vinyl and a CD version of the same recording so they are playing more or less in sync, switch back and forth between them, and listen carefully - the vinyl will sound more "stereo" than the CD.
... and a lot quieter as well.
There is also this odd little bit of arcana regarding analog reel to reel tape recorders: in order to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio of analog tape, the signal must be modulated by a 100kHz sine wave during recording, and then "de-modulated" by a 100kHz sine wave upon playback. Without this, the noise floor of magnetic tape audio is entirely unacceptable. If the effect this modulation/de-modulation has on analog tape audio can be thought of as similar to the effect of sample rate on digital audio, then digital audio sampled at 96kHz (awfully close in rate to that 100kHz modulation signal) should in theory sound every bit as good as 30 i.p.s. analog tape
I just wanna know what happens in the movie when the robot takes the blue pill.
The Wachowski Bros' reach must by definition exceed their grasp, or what's a mecha for?
I liked all 3 movies. Things blowed up real good.
I dunno, it does seem like a lot of people here derive a certain - how you say in your country - cathartic release in trashtalking the 2nd & 3rd parts. I chalk it up to the 1st part having set the bar so high, having presented so many interesting concepts and ideas in such a compelling fashion, that there was no way audience expectations were going to be satisfied by the followups. Strip away all the high concept baggage and eye-candy CGI, and what you're left with is an entertaining and engaging sci-fi roller-coaster ride marred by a little too much exposition where it is not needed, and too little exposition where it is very much needed. Taken in as a continuous storyline, I enjoyed it more and got more out of it in a marathon home DVD viewing session - skipping over the unnecessary shoe leather and replaying the scenes that truly advance the plot - than I did watching the three separate parts temporally fragmented in a movie theater.
I wholeheartedly concur. (This is an unsolicited testimonial, I do not work for nor am I affiliated with J&R in any way.) I used to visit their Park Row store in downtown NYC regularly (not far from the WTC site) when I worked for a brokerage house in the area, I got some good deals there and I was always impressed with the selection of merchandise and knowledgeable sales personnel. I don't work in the city any more, so these days I use their website (jandr.com) for online purchases.
I really hate these books that attempt to codify management processes in some kind of all-encompassing, one-size-fits-all way. By the time the processes have been codified and published, the economic climate and the state of things in the business to which the processes are to be applied have changed such that the processes rapidly lose their relevance and ultimately their usefulness. Other than as a way to make money for the authors, I just don't see any real sustainable benefit ever coming out of these books.
Old music formats never die, they just become niche markets. Vinyl is still around, and with CD/DVD drives on so many PCs, compact discs aren't really going to go away anytime soon. Moreover, one factor not taken into account is the packaging: what are they going to do, start printing fingernail-sized booklets of the artwork and lyrics that you can only read with an electron microscope?
Not to mention WPKN in Bridgeport CT... one of the best free-form radio stations in the country.
Yep, I agree - capitalism is all about what the market will bear. If elected officials do things that piss off a sufficient number of people, then those officials won't get re-elected. If companies try to shove a product down people's throats and the people reject it, the companies abandon the product.
While I agree with some of Walker's observations about the directions in which things are moving, there's no guarantee people are gonna put up with the kind of draconian constraints he envisions... if enough people abandon the secure internet, the viability of all those constraints goes right out the window.
If you believe
the study referenced in this article, then the whole issue of copy protecting audio CDs is pretty much dead in the water anyway.
A bunch of stuff happens.
It was back in mid-April of this year that Slashdot posted an article mentioning John Walker's "Hacker's Diet." I am a 48 yr old male, 5' 7.5", sedentary programmer. My weight was pushing 173 and I was really starting to feel it. Walker's book lit a fire under me and while I have not yet adopted the exercise regimen, I have adhered to his core diet advice of eating less than I burn by (a) determining how much I burn (free diet assessment at caloriescount.com) and rigorously counting calories to keep intake below what I burn each day. It is now a little over 3 months since I started and I've lost 17 lbs. My goal is to reach 150 by the end of the year, at which time I can allow myself to eat as much as (but not more than) I burn. Exercise aside, the thing that is hardest for people to wrap their heads around is that this is not just a program of weight loss, it is a program of weight control and to be of any value it has to be something you are willing to commit to for the rest of your life. The mere act of counting calories and reading the labels on the packaging of the food I eat has given me a greater appreciation of making sure my body gets what it needs, not what my appetite and taste buds were telling me I wanted. After my body got over the initial shock of the adjustment (the program is, after all, a form of starvation in small increments), my appetite has adjusted to the point where it lets me know when I am at risk of overeating at one sitting. I've found acceptable substitues for my salty/crunchy jones (mini rice cakes and white cheddar soy crisps are great!) and I've replaced copious consumption of sodas with vitamin waters and Crystal Light. I've cut my consumption of coffe down to about 1/2 of what it was, and I use skim milk instaed of half & half (huge calorie savings there!). Problems I was having with acid reflux have disappeared, a most welcome side effect. And the best thing: my S.O. thinks I'm much cuter now (and lets me know in very physical ways... :) )