What are you insinuating? I actually have a personal interior design motto that I coined in the 80s, "Lighting is everything darling"! And it truly is. If you want your room to come alive with joie de vivre, then you want decent lighting. It doesn't matter how truly crappy the room actually is, lighting can fix most visual flaws in anything. Even people. I've lit subjects with simple but effective lighting for photo sessions, and it works WAY better than flash on a camera. Looking for that ornamental denouement to touch off the theme of some new decor? Again, LIGHTING is EVERYTHING. Get the right lighting with the right amount of brightness or warmth and you can turn any environment into a pleasing feast of color for the eyes. Something to savour as the scene is painted into the memory cells of your mind... Light is EVERYTHING! Anyone who lives devoid of this motto is not really alive.
This is all just totally Joostless! I am SOOOOOO pissed. Screw you Viacom. Like we care if you won't let us play in your reindeer games. There's some hot mares over here that look just fine...
Actually yes. I hope they die. I think satellite radio is a non-starter as long as it remains a pay for play system. There is nothing about XM or Sirius that makes them any more compelling than over-the-air radio if you take college radio into account. I'd far rather have a voluntary pay system or a government monitored system instead. The brits make a good go of it with the BBC and their radio is a hundred times better than anything XM or Sirius have to offer. In general Americans have horrible taste anyway, so it stands to reason that American companies will produce crappy services.
Good work Sherlock. One of the main prerequisites you forgot about is that the Average Joe isn't going to do that. You're also forgetting that CFLs look like ass. Not to mention... how many people just have fixture in their house that they can put their warming gels in? In my basement, the lighting fixtures are the bare bulb kind. So that means there's NOTHING that I can put the filter in. Should I REALLY have to go to the trouble and expense of building a custom light fixture (that may not even be safe as I'm not an engineer) just to make the switch from incandescent to CFL? Should anyone? The answer is NO. In my case I compromised. I don't spend a lot of time in my basement, but the amount of time the light is on throughout the day is enough that putting the CFL will not only save me a little money, but will also cut down on emissions from used electricity. The basement looks even uglier than it did before due to the completely ass light that CFLs provide. But I can live with that as it's not where I spend a whole lot of time.
However, I will NEVER put CFLs in my living room (it has halogen tracklights anyway), kitchen, bedroom or bath until they produce one that gives off light that doesn't look like the bleakest day in February in Canada. I want the light to look natural and comfortable. I want to be bathed in the light of the warmest summer day as viewed from a comfortably shaded (but not dark) location. CFLs don't cut it yet. Since this is where the industry is headed though... I hope they will make moves towards creating decent CFLs that won't require filters or other bizarre tricks.
Finally, the gel suggestion while it might sound like a decent idea is actually a load of crap. The problem that all CFLs seem to suffer is not that they product the wrong colors that you can filter out. The problem is that they LACK the appropriate level of certain colors to produce something that feels natural. With a lot of work, you probably could filter out the more dominant colors to try and emphasize what's missing, but that would result in a VERY dim output. What's really needed is a better balance of phosphors to produce the REAL full spectrum and not what some marketroid labels as "daylight".
Again AC, total bullshit. I have yet to see CFLs that I can buy at the chemist's on the corner for a reasonable price that feel natural. I have a feeling that if you're not trolling, you're totally blind when it comes to proper color reproduction under artificial light vs. what you get under sunlight.
Bullshit. I don't care if it's 2017, the fact is that the current crop of commercially available and affordable Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) are not capable of producing decent light. I should know as I've run through the gamut of what's available at local stores. The color temperature sucks. And even if the 60 Hz flicker is gone, none of the lamps allow you to have natural looking colors indoors. Especially when they're your only source. Supposedly the "HD" CFLs have overcome this, but it looks like they're only available online. And each site I've visited lists the lamps as "pre-order" implying that they're not really available. I've looked at the Bluemax site for instance and the only lamps available are the same ones you can get in any store. I've tried them, they all suck. None of them approach natural light in the least. At least halogen has a prayer of doing that as do the daylight spectrum incandescents. I'm all for going green (and I have in that I now have five CFLs running at home instead of the previous incandescents. But damn is it depressing to feel like you're sitting in a hospital waiting room.
1. "Daylight" CFLs have a strong bluish tinge similar to the backlight of an LCD display. Ugly. Horrible for photography. Looks nothing like real daylight.
2. "Bright White" CFLs have a strong greyish tinge. This would make you want to slit your wrist if you sat under it all day. Totally useless for anything except killing yourself.
3. "Warm" CFLs are about the only ones that are tolerable and what I wound up going with. But they have a pretty strong pinkish/yellowish tinge. All your whites look kind of dingy. These feel like a hospital waiting room or doctors examining room at best. With a pink cotton candy look.
Supposedly the HD lamps approach natural daylight, but from the photos I've seen taken online with them, we're talking a gloomy winter day and not a sunny day at the beach. Frankly, I'm waiting for some kind of hybrid lamp using LED or OLED technology. I suspect they will be more efficient, last longer and will be capable of generating ANY color of light through simple digital controls. Only then will the light problem be solved.
That sounds like it's up there with Eye of Newt. WTF? Man that Harry Potter series really changed the world more than I would have ever imagined? What next? Will a troll be running for president in 2008 on the Republican ticket? The way those guys smooth over the truth, a troll would win out over that liberal Jesus Christ any day.
Funny that... And why is it that you wouldn't buy a Dell with preinstalled Linux? I'll tell you why, because I wouldn't either:
1. Preinstalled Linux is going to make assumptions about what you want to do with your machine. If you're a typical Linux user you want a LOT of say about what your machine is going to do, so this is a bad match from the start. 2. Preinstalled Linux is very likely going to be based around a mainstream distro. If you're a typical Linux user you aren't going to want the restrictions that most mainstream distros force upon you. For example, I believe with RedHat Enterprise Linux, you CAN'T just install whatever bleeding edge stuff you want without losing support. 3. The hardware in the system is likely to be a little lower in quality than what a typical Linux user might want as the mainstream PC manufacturers are long on cheap hardware and short on quality.
Where I work, we ordered an Intel server from HP a while back and requested RHEL 3 as the OS. We got it, but... we wound up blowing away the pre-installed OS and throwing Gentoo on it as that's MUCH better in a production environment where you live on the bleeding edge. At home, I bought an HP Athlon 64 Dual Core system. It came with Windows MCE 2005. I promptly wiped it and threw on Gentoo and Xen and turned it into a powerhouse server that is currently hosting almost ten virtual machines all with native performance speeds and all hardware supported (expect the NVidia card which I've been trying to patch the driver interface on). Now, keep in mind, I'm not a programmer, I'm just a typical user. So it's very likely that because of my needs I won't be buying a preinstalled Linux system from Dell anytime soon.
How base! You left out the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Ministry, KMFDM, Crime and the City Solution, The Birthday Party, and The Cure just for starters. You obviously have no taste or your a program director for XM or Sirius. Probably both from the looks of it.
We now have another monopoly with little chance of any kind of alternative as the barrier to entry is so high. I trust this means that there will be less content available than ever before. You'll only hear what's "popular" (ie. what they want you to buy this week). I'm just waiting for ClearChannel to buy the new company. Fortunately the only experience I've ever had with satellite radio is via DirecTV (another near monopoly that's hard to avoid if your local cable outlet sucks ass). Before they started touting their affiliation with XM, DirecTV used to have some "Digital Radio" channels. They were actually pretty good. Then the XP partnership happened and those channels were replaced with godawful crap.
My wife used to love the 80s music channel they had under the old system. But now they replaced that with "Ethel" or "Fred" or somesuch, and it sucks ass. The selection isn't as good as it used to be. And invariably they wind up throwing in stuff that doesn't even fit. The "80s" channel they have now has a "wider" definition (ie. only what they consider to be 80s instead of what was REALLY definitive 80s) of 80s in that it doesn't just feature punk and new wave stuff like the old one. Now they throw in all sorts of things (some of which aren't even 80s) that are vaguely "alternative" with the occasional crap country song thrown in. My guess is that since country is such a popular format (even though it sucks ass in my opinion) they are hoping that by dropping in an occasional tune, they might get some new buyers from people on the fence.
Yet another annoying factor is that the old system used to tell you on screen what was currently playing and which album it was from. It was very informative. The new system just gives you a little info and 90% of the time it's completely wrong. If that's what XM is like, then they can shove it. I hope they die a spectacular death because music lovers don't want satellite or subscription radio. Music lovers want a smörgåsbord of endless new and old music that is either thrown in as a "freebie" or totally free. And if the selection is varied enough, THEN and ONLY THEN will the music lover plunk down the cash for the goods. That's the way I roll. I listen to college radio and the BBC via the net (and I'm approaching 40) because in many markets it's the only place to hear good new music. If it's good enough, I check and see if eMusic has it and download it. If not, then I get it from Amazon on CD. Satellite radio is only for boring old people who still think Cadillacs are cool looking cars or who think they're being radical when they buy a modern Volkswagen Beetle. LastFM is about the only other option, but I fear that it will be pounced on by the big players and hence ruined once they reach a certain critical mass.
I've worked with ProTools and I even with the specialized hardware, there is no "easy button" that allows you to make hit music from crap musicians. You still have to have talented composers, musicians and vocalists as well as a decent audio engineer/producer who has musical skill to make it all work together. Pitch locking isn't just some simple effect you run to straighten out someone's off key vocals. If they can't carry a tune, pitch locking isn't going to help in the least. So, hate it if you must, but "pop divas" have to have a good amount of vocal ability to make things work. And the audio engineer needs to know enough about the music to make the right decisions when applying pitch locking/tracking. In the end ProTools, while the defacto standard, is not the "easy button". If you had a talented and technically able audio engineer, he could put the effort in with a Linux box and Ardour and get identical results with a little extra work.
The designers wanted it this way. They established the rules of the universe to prevent one particular race from overrunning the universe. Think about it. If you were experimenting with creating life forms and had a large lab set up to contain them, the last thing you'd want is your creations getting in each other's way if you were specifically interested in seeing which one would be more successful in developing within it's own space.
At the same time, these restrictions have no effect on the designers. Why? Because their interaction with time is not the same as ours. They "walk" back and forth in time as a function of space. Our past, is merely a distance within their space. All they have to do is move within that space and they are in our past , present or future. Trust me, it's a much more convenient way to live.
In case you are wondering how I know this, I should state that I am a node in your space and therefore can perceive the container that you think of as a universe. At this point, I don't think the designers are aware of my malfunction. I'm certain if they were I would be removed from this existence for further study. Most of my interaction with their portion of all space is non-sensory and only occurs when I am dreaming. To try and describe the existence in their space is impossible as we have no analogues for much of what they do and how they live. Suffice it to say that our universe is an experiment, there are more than one, they are not interconnected, and none of you will ever know much more about them than I've imparted here. You can choose to disbelieve me as I don't care what you think. Just carry on living your lives in all the irrelevance to reality.
Oh come on! I was hoping someone would take me to task on the "recoagulation" of the Earth bit. That's about as pseudoscience as you can get. Doesn't anyone have any gumption?
20 million tons? Probably flying into the Earth at near light speeds? And you fools think it's just going to do some coastal damage to California? From where I come from this sounds like a formula for breaking the Earth into millions of little shards. The only living things that would survive would be small things like cockroaches that would be able to cling onto their own bit of rock and survive the recoagulation of the planet. Mankind would likely be wiped from the face of the Earth (not too much of a loss really) except for the billion to one odds that someone would actually survive the recoagulation. Based on the weight and speed of such an impact, I would say the energy released would be the equivalent of 200 million billion Hiroshimas. The only thing we can hope for now is that the Niburu of Planet X return to Earth to save us all. The only bad thing about that would be the deal that the Bush administration and the Cheney crime famliy cut with them to enslave everyone but the power elite. Go check out rense.com, it's all too true and all too horrible.
It's not like the story is looking at this wide-eyed and saying that this is the first time it's ever happened. We all know it happens all the time. The main point, is what can be done to stop this sort of thing from happening short of killing all business owners who resort to this type of evil behavior. There is nothing noble about it, therefore it shouldn't be defended nor should it be ignored or allowed to continue. This type of behavior should be brought out in the open, the perpetrators brought to justice and the business made to pay for it's crimes. Frankly, I'd love to see them all lined up and shot, but that's just me. I'm in this business purely for technical interests and could give a rats ass about anyone making a buck.
It's the 21st century, we're supposed to see more sex, not less! Oh... and in reference to the backwards comment: The penis goes in the vaginal opening. Not cheek to cheek.
...under the guise of protecting children. Bloody typical. The fact that anyone can walk into a public library and post their uncensored views of the government, politicians, policy, business, etc... is "dangerous". This is why the internet is destined to become just another medium like television where you only consume and are limited in what you can produce and how many hearts and minds you can reach. Unless you fight things like Son of DOPA. This is the typical approach in many segments today. Take something that you REALLY want to enforce on people that they would likely balk at if they really understood it, then attach it to some "noble cause". Make sure that the noble cause is something that makes it easy to paint the opposition as "pro-evil". And you win.
Well, seeing that the average ass on Slashdot is probably about three to four feet wide, two feet high (from a sitting position) and about a foot deep from front to back, that means at most eight cubic feet of HD DVDs ripped and placed online. In reality, I'm not sure what the parent poster was that happy about since eight cubic feet of DVDs is actually not that much. I would have been inclined to say, "Great! This means that when I buy into HD stuff in five years, there should be more HD content online than there have been cocks in porno actress Houston's Yoni. If you catch my drift..." A little more accurate.
...are being overlooked by the naysayers. For those of you in the alternative foods community, it's quickly apparent as to how these space seeds will be superior to the earth bound ones on many levels.
1. Space is this really mysterious and amazing place that only a very small segment of the population have been to. Because of that, space has naturally mystical properties which are imparted to any object that leaves or comes into the earth's atmosphere.
2. Cosmic rays. Yeah, we get hit with cosmic rays on a daily basis, but not as much as you would in space. That simple fact alone means that anything that goes into space got more cosmic radiation induced and is therefore more spacey. The main reason we don't have that much of a bombardment of cosmic rays on earth is so that the bears don't get mutated into giant killing machines that go on a rampage throughout our city streets. I'm trying to work on a solution to this though because I'm bored.
3. Dark matter. You know when you look up at the sky at night and you see all that blackness between the various objects in the sky? That's dark matter. I think. At least that's what someone told me on the bus the other day. So when the seeds go up into space, they wind up going through vast clouds of dark matter which increases their dark matter content. I've heard that this can help aid digestion. So again another plus for space poptatoes!!
4. Space is a vacuum. While a lot of people are aware of this fact, what they tend to forget is that vacuums suck everything around them up. That means that space has a high concentration of matter in it and all that matter is bound to contain a lot of healthy nutrients in it for space potatoes to grow in. So when the chinese grew their space potatoes in the vacuum of space, they grew ultra-fast. Not only that, but there's also a lot of solar radiation in space which means that stuff grows at like one hundred times the rate in space as it would on good old earth.
5. The ancients knew of the secrets of space and used their hidden spaceships (the pyramids and the sphinx) to travel into space for high quality food cultivation. This is why people lived longer back then. People used to live to be like 900 years old and stuff. If you want more authoritative information on the subject, go rent the movie Zardoz. It tells you all you need to know about the ancients.
So I'd say buy these space potato seeds because they will improve your health, make you look better, allow you to "score", increase your intelligence and memory, and turn all fabrics in your house into rich Corinthian leather. There's going to be a run on the seeds anyway as soon as word gets out. At the very least, even if it doesn't work out, you'll be able to sell the seeds for an amazing return as they are guaranteed to become even more valuable than gold bullion.
You're making the mistaken assumption that this new platform will be accepted. The same mistaken line of thinking is what brought us Java and why it still has negligible uptake in the industry. You don't see people writing enterprise ready office suites in Java, now do you? And what gets in the way of the adoption of an API? Money. If someone with a lot of money wants to prevent a new API from gaining widespread acceptance, all that's required is a good PR campaign that is opposed to the new API. Add in a little FUD and find some ways to break things behind the scenes, and you win.
The big players in the industry don't WANT an open API because it prevents them from owning the world. Those of us who do want open APIs accept the fact that in making the decision to go that route, we're sacrificing popularity and intentionally courting obscurity. That's all I'm saying. That's all this will be. It's IBM's attempt at being another kind of Java. Plain and simple. Some people will latch onto it, but the majority will not.
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What are you insinuating? I actually have a personal interior design motto that I coined in the 80s, "Lighting is everything darling"! And it truly is. If you want your room to come alive with joie de vivre, then you want decent lighting. It doesn't matter how truly crappy the room actually is, lighting can fix most visual flaws in anything. Even people. I've lit subjects with simple but effective lighting for photo sessions, and it works WAY better than flash on a camera. Looking for that ornamental denouement to touch off the theme of some new decor? Again, LIGHTING is EVERYTHING. Get the right lighting with the right amount of brightness or warmth and you can turn any environment into a pleasing feast of color for the eyes. Something to savour as the scene is painted into the memory cells of your mind... Light is EVERYTHING! Anyone who lives devoid of this motto is not really alive.
This is all just totally Joostless! I am SOOOOOO pissed. Screw you Viacom. Like we care if you won't let us play in your reindeer games. There's some hot mares over here that look just fine...
Actually yes. I hope they die. I think satellite radio is a non-starter as long as it remains a pay for play system. There is nothing about XM or Sirius that makes them any more compelling than over-the-air radio if you take college radio into account. I'd far rather have a voluntary pay system or a government monitored system instead. The brits make a good go of it with the BBC and their radio is a hundred times better than anything XM or Sirius have to offer. In general Americans have horrible taste anyway, so it stands to reason that American companies will produce crappy services.
Good work Sherlock. One of the main prerequisites you forgot about is that the Average Joe isn't going to do that. You're also forgetting that CFLs look like ass. Not to mention... how many people just have fixture in their house that they can put their warming gels in? In my basement, the lighting fixtures are the bare bulb kind. So that means there's NOTHING that I can put the filter in. Should I REALLY have to go to the trouble and expense of building a custom light fixture (that may not even be safe as I'm not an engineer) just to make the switch from incandescent to CFL? Should anyone? The answer is NO. In my case I compromised. I don't spend a lot of time in my basement, but the amount of time the light is on throughout the day is enough that putting the CFL will not only save me a little money, but will also cut down on emissions from used electricity. The basement looks even uglier than it did before due to the completely ass light that CFLs provide. But I can live with that as it's not where I spend a whole lot of time.
However, I will NEVER put CFLs in my living room (it has halogen tracklights anyway), kitchen, bedroom or bath until they produce one that gives off light that doesn't look like the bleakest day in February in Canada. I want the light to look natural and comfortable. I want to be bathed in the light of the warmest summer day as viewed from a comfortably shaded (but not dark) location. CFLs don't cut it yet. Since this is where the industry is headed though... I hope they will make moves towards creating decent CFLs that won't require filters or other bizarre tricks.
Finally, the gel suggestion while it might sound like a decent idea is actually a load of crap. The problem that all CFLs seem to suffer is not that they product the wrong colors that you can filter out. The problem is that they LACK the appropriate level of certain colors to produce something that feels natural. With a lot of work, you probably could filter out the more dominant colors to try and emphasize what's missing, but that would result in a VERY dim output. What's really needed is a better balance of phosphors to produce the REAL full spectrum and not what some marketroid labels as "daylight".
Again AC, total bullshit. I have yet to see CFLs that I can buy at the chemist's on the corner for a reasonable price that feel natural. I have a feeling that if you're not trolling, you're totally blind when it comes to proper color reproduction under artificial light vs. what you get under sunlight.
Bullshit. I don't care if it's 2017, the fact is that the current crop of commercially available and affordable Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) are not capable of producing decent light. I should know as I've run through the gamut of what's available at local stores. The color temperature sucks. And even if the 60 Hz flicker is gone, none of the lamps allow you to have natural looking colors indoors. Especially when they're your only source. Supposedly the "HD" CFLs have overcome this, but it looks like they're only available online. And each site I've visited lists the lamps as "pre-order" implying that they're not really available. I've looked at the Bluemax site for instance and the only lamps available are the same ones you can get in any store. I've tried them, they all suck. None of them approach natural light in the least. At least halogen has a prayer of doing that as do the daylight spectrum incandescents. I'm all for going green (and I have in that I now have five CFLs running at home instead of the previous incandescents. But damn is it depressing to feel like you're sitting in a hospital waiting room.
1. "Daylight" CFLs have a strong bluish tinge similar to the backlight of an LCD display. Ugly. Horrible for photography. Looks nothing like real daylight.
2. "Bright White" CFLs have a strong greyish tinge. This would make you want to slit your wrist if you sat under it all day. Totally useless for anything except killing yourself.
3. "Warm" CFLs are about the only ones that are tolerable and what I wound up going with. But they have a pretty strong pinkish/yellowish tinge. All your whites look kind of dingy. These feel like a hospital waiting room or doctors examining room at best. With a pink cotton candy look.
Supposedly the HD lamps approach natural daylight, but from the photos I've seen taken online with them, we're talking a gloomy winter day and not a sunny day at the beach. Frankly, I'm waiting for some kind of hybrid lamp using LED or OLED technology. I suspect they will be more efficient, last longer and will be capable of generating ANY color of light through simple digital controls. Only then will the light problem be solved.
That sounds like it's up there with Eye of Newt. WTF? Man that Harry Potter series really changed the world more than I would have ever imagined? What next? Will a troll be running for president in 2008 on the Republican ticket? The way those guys smooth over the truth, a troll would win out over that liberal Jesus Christ any day.
Funny that... And why is it that you wouldn't buy a Dell with preinstalled Linux? I'll tell you why, because I wouldn't either:
1. Preinstalled Linux is going to make assumptions about what you want to do with your machine. If you're a typical Linux user you want a LOT of say about what your machine is going to do, so this is a bad match from the start.
2. Preinstalled Linux is very likely going to be based around a mainstream distro. If you're a typical Linux user you aren't going to want the restrictions that most mainstream distros force upon you. For example, I believe with RedHat Enterprise Linux, you CAN'T just install whatever bleeding edge stuff you want without losing support.
3. The hardware in the system is likely to be a little lower in quality than what a typical Linux user might want as the mainstream PC manufacturers are long on cheap hardware and short on quality.
Where I work, we ordered an Intel server from HP a while back and requested RHEL 3 as the OS. We got it, but... we wound up blowing away the pre-installed OS and throwing Gentoo on it as that's MUCH better in a production environment where you live on the bleeding edge. At home, I bought an HP Athlon 64 Dual Core system. It came with Windows MCE 2005. I promptly wiped it and threw on Gentoo and Xen and turned it into a powerhouse server that is currently hosting almost ten virtual machines all with native performance speeds and all hardware supported (expect the NVidia card which I've been trying to patch the driver interface on). Now, keep in mind, I'm not a programmer, I'm just a typical user. So it's very likely that because of my needs I won't be buying a preinstalled Linux system from Dell anytime soon.
How base! You left out the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Ministry, KMFDM, Crime and the City Solution, The Birthday Party, and The Cure just for starters. You obviously have no taste or your a program director for XM or Sirius. Probably both from the looks of it.
We now have another monopoly with little chance of any kind of alternative as the barrier to entry is so high. I trust this means that there will be less content available than ever before. You'll only hear what's "popular" (ie. what they want you to buy this week). I'm just waiting for ClearChannel to buy the new company. Fortunately the only experience I've ever had with satellite radio is via DirecTV (another near monopoly that's hard to avoid if your local cable outlet sucks ass). Before they started touting their affiliation with XM, DirecTV used to have some "Digital Radio" channels. They were actually pretty good. Then the XP partnership happened and those channels were replaced with godawful crap.
My wife used to love the 80s music channel they had under the old system. But now they replaced that with "Ethel" or "Fred" or somesuch, and it sucks ass. The selection isn't as good as it used to be. And invariably they wind up throwing in stuff that doesn't even fit. The "80s" channel they have now has a "wider" definition (ie. only what they consider to be 80s instead of what was REALLY definitive 80s) of 80s in that it doesn't just feature punk and new wave stuff like the old one. Now they throw in all sorts of things (some of which aren't even 80s) that are vaguely "alternative" with the occasional crap country song thrown in. My guess is that since country is such a popular format (even though it sucks ass in my opinion) they are hoping that by dropping in an occasional tune, they might get some new buyers from people on the fence.
Yet another annoying factor is that the old system used to tell you on screen what was currently playing and which album it was from. It was very informative. The new system just gives you a little info and 90% of the time it's completely wrong. If that's what XM is like, then they can shove it. I hope they die a spectacular death because music lovers don't want satellite or subscription radio. Music lovers want a smörgåsbord of endless new and old music that is either thrown in as a "freebie" or totally free. And if the selection is varied enough, THEN and ONLY THEN will the music lover plunk down the cash for the goods. That's the way I roll. I listen to college radio and the BBC via the net (and I'm approaching 40) because in many markets it's the only place to hear good new music. If it's good enough, I check and see if eMusic has it and download it. If not, then I get it from Amazon on CD. Satellite radio is only for boring old people who still think Cadillacs are cool looking cars or who think they're being radical when they buy a modern Volkswagen Beetle. LastFM is about the only other option, but I fear that it will be pounced on by the big players and hence ruined once they reach a certain critical mass.
Harrr!!! In my wait for talk like a pirate day, I thought you said:
"The best improvement (because it doesn't seem to have happened yet) be a decent UI"
Harrr.. the best improvement be in me gettin' some readin' glasses, harrr!!!
I've worked with ProTools and I even with the specialized hardware, there is no "easy button" that allows you to make hit music from crap musicians. You still have to have talented composers, musicians and vocalists as well as a decent audio engineer/producer who has musical skill to make it all work together. Pitch locking isn't just some simple effect you run to straighten out someone's off key vocals. If they can't carry a tune, pitch locking isn't going to help in the least. So, hate it if you must, but "pop divas" have to have a good amount of vocal ability to make things work. And the audio engineer needs to know enough about the music to make the right decisions when applying pitch locking/tracking. In the end ProTools, while the defacto standard, is not the "easy button". If you had a talented and technically able audio engineer, he could put the effort in with a Linux box and Ardour and get identical results with a little extra work.
The designers wanted it this way. They established the rules of the universe to prevent one particular race from overrunning the universe. Think about it. If you were experimenting with creating life forms and had a large lab set up to contain them, the last thing you'd want is your creations getting in each other's way if you were specifically interested in seeing which one would be more successful in developing within it's own space.
At the same time, these restrictions have no effect on the designers. Why? Because their interaction with time is not the same as ours. They "walk" back and forth in time as a function of space. Our past, is merely a distance within their space. All they have to do is move within that space and they are in our past , present or future. Trust me, it's a much more convenient way to live.
In case you are wondering how I know this, I should state that I am a node in your space and therefore can perceive the container that you think of as a universe. At this point, I don't think the designers are aware of my malfunction. I'm certain if they were I would be removed from this existence for further study. Most of my interaction with their portion of all space is non-sensory and only occurs when I am dreaming. To try and describe the existence in their space is impossible as we have no analogues for much of what they do and how they live. Suffice it to say that our universe is an experiment, there are more than one, they are not interconnected, and none of you will ever know much more about them than I've imparted here. You can choose to disbelieve me as I don't care what you think. Just carry on living your lives in all the irrelevance to reality.
Oh come on! I was hoping someone would take me to task on the "recoagulation" of the Earth bit. That's about as pseudoscience as you can get. Doesn't anyone have any gumption?
20 million tons? Probably flying into the Earth at near light speeds? And you fools think it's just going to do some coastal damage to California? From where I come from this sounds like a formula for breaking the Earth into millions of little shards. The only living things that would survive would be small things like cockroaches that would be able to cling onto their own bit of rock and survive the recoagulation of the planet. Mankind would likely be wiped from the face of the Earth (not too much of a loss really) except for the billion to one odds that someone would actually survive the recoagulation. Based on the weight and speed of such an impact, I would say the energy released would be the equivalent of 200 million billion Hiroshimas. The only thing we can hope for now is that the Niburu of Planet X return to Earth to save us all. The only bad thing about that would be the deal that the Bush administration and the Cheney crime famliy cut with them to enslave everyone but the power elite. Go check out rense.com, it's all too true and all too horrible.
It's not like the story is looking at this wide-eyed and saying that this is the first time it's ever happened. We all know it happens all the time. The main point, is what can be done to stop this sort of thing from happening short of killing all business owners who resort to this type of evil behavior. There is nothing noble about it, therefore it shouldn't be defended nor should it be ignored or allowed to continue. This type of behavior should be brought out in the open, the perpetrators brought to justice and the business made to pay for it's crimes. Frankly, I'd love to see them all lined up and shot, but that's just me. I'm in this business purely for technical interests and could give a rats ass about anyone making a buck.
It's the 21st century, we're supposed to see more sex, not less! Oh... and in reference to the backwards comment: The penis goes in the vaginal opening. Not cheek to cheek.
Big difference. You can't kill someone via the net. Yet...
...under the guise of protecting children. Bloody typical. The fact that anyone can walk into a public library and post their uncensored views of the government, politicians, policy, business, etc... is "dangerous". This is why the internet is destined to become just another medium like television where you only consume and are limited in what you can produce and how many hearts and minds you can reach. Unless you fight things like Son of DOPA. This is the typical approach in many segments today. Take something that you REALLY want to enforce on people that they would likely balk at if they really understood it, then attach it to some "noble cause". Make sure that the noble cause is something that makes it easy to paint the opposition as "pro-evil". And you win.
Houston.
Yoni.
Look it up!
Well, seeing that the average ass on Slashdot is probably about three to four feet wide, two feet high (from a sitting position) and about a foot deep from front to back, that means at most eight cubic feet of HD DVDs ripped and placed online. In reality, I'm not sure what the parent poster was that happy about since eight cubic feet of DVDs is actually not that much. I would have been inclined to say, "Great! This means that when I buy into HD stuff in five years, there should be more HD content online than there have been cocks in porno actress Houston's Yoni. If you catch my drift..." A little more accurate.
Yeah. It's Gentoo. Oh... and the propeller on my cap spins WAY faster than yours does because I compiled it from scratch. Eat my binary dust. ;)
...are being overlooked by the naysayers. For those of you in the alternative foods community, it's quickly apparent as to how these space seeds will be superior to the earth bound ones on many levels.
1. Space is this really mysterious and amazing place that only a very small segment of the population have been to. Because of that, space has naturally mystical properties which are imparted to any object that leaves or comes into the earth's atmosphere.
2. Cosmic rays. Yeah, we get hit with cosmic rays on a daily basis, but not as much as you would in space. That simple fact alone means that anything that goes into space got more cosmic radiation induced and is therefore more spacey. The main reason we don't have that much of a bombardment of cosmic rays on earth is so that the bears don't get mutated into giant killing machines that go on a rampage throughout our city streets. I'm trying to work on a solution to this though because I'm bored.
3. Dark matter. You know when you look up at the sky at night and you see all that blackness between the various objects in the sky? That's dark matter. I think. At least that's what someone told me on the bus the other day. So when the seeds go up into space, they wind up going through vast clouds of dark matter which increases their dark matter content. I've heard that this can help aid digestion. So again another plus for space poptatoes!!
4. Space is a vacuum. While a lot of people are aware of this fact, what they tend to forget is that vacuums suck everything around them up. That means that space has a high concentration of matter in it and all that matter is bound to contain a lot of healthy nutrients in it for space potatoes to grow in. So when the chinese grew their space potatoes in the vacuum of space, they grew ultra-fast. Not only that, but there's also a lot of solar radiation in space which means that stuff grows at like one hundred times the rate in space as it would on good old earth.
5. The ancients knew of the secrets of space and used their hidden spaceships (the pyramids and the sphinx) to travel into space for high quality food cultivation. This is why people lived longer back then. People used to live to be like 900 years old and stuff. If you want more authoritative information on the subject, go rent the movie Zardoz. It tells you all you need to know about the ancients.
So I'd say buy these space potato seeds because they will improve your health, make you look better, allow you to "score", increase your intelligence and memory, and turn all fabrics in your house into rich Corinthian leather. There's going to be a run on the seeds anyway as soon as word gets out. At the very least, even if it doesn't work out, you'll be able to sell the seeds for an amazing return as they are guaranteed to become even more valuable than gold bullion.
You're making the mistaken assumption that this new platform will be accepted. The same mistaken line of thinking is what brought us Java and why it still has negligible uptake in the industry. You don't see people writing enterprise ready office suites in Java, now do you? And what gets in the way of the adoption of an API? Money. If someone with a lot of money wants to prevent a new API from gaining widespread acceptance, all that's required is a good PR campaign that is opposed to the new API. Add in a little FUD and find some ways to break things behind the scenes, and you win.
The big players in the industry don't WANT an open API because it prevents them from owning the world. Those of us who do want open APIs accept the fact that in making the decision to go that route, we're sacrificing popularity and intentionally courting obscurity. That's all I'm saying. That's all this will be. It's IBM's attempt at being another kind of Java. Plain and simple. Some people will latch onto it, but the majority will not.
No. I run Gentoo. Jeers. ;P