Yes, I know. I didn't feel like going into detail, but I was a music director for a dominant medium-market AM radio station in the 70s, and one of my music "reps" was a former high school buddy who worked for one of the very, very major distributors. The stories he told, and the deals I was offered via "announcement parties," were chilling, to say the least.
He once asked me if I knew where he could get a 12-year-old boy for a music director in a neighboring city who would not otherwise play his "product." I quit the biz some short while later...but that's another story.
Only a few months ago, it was charged in the US Congress that record companies have been paying radio stations (again, like in the fifties) to play their records.
Now they want the stations to pay them?
Playing a recording on the air is better than advertising it, and the record companies know it.
This effort is bound to fail, if not ignite laughter.
He's being prosecuted under the TN law, part of which is included in the article, which gives some background regarding SCOTUS' ruling and the rush of states to rewrite the virtual part of the law.
This or a case like it may go back to the Federal Courts on constitutional grounds and, eventually, back to SCOTUS. Whether they would revisit such a case is open to question.
Not a possibility in my case, as I was using a lot of programs then (Pan, Sylpheed-claws, e, ytree, blackbox) that were not available in.rpms from RH or anyone else; they had to be compiled from source. This was Back in the Day while they were alpha and beta applications -- say around 2000-2001.
I last installed a RH/Fedora OS almost ten years ago -- RedHat 6.0. I loved it. I pulled down sources from RPMFind.net and compiled them to try them out. I used that distro until the wheels fell off -- GCC became out-of-date and could not be updated nor could programs written for GCC-4 be compiled successfully under GCC-3, or so I heard. Same for the kernel, RH-6.0 being one of the first users of the 2.4 series (2.4.11, IIRC). The most modern kernel I remember installing on it was 2.4.35!
That took about five years. (I HATE installing and especially configuring new OSes!)
I used Knoppix 3.2.x for a year or so as a hard drive install but it would not update, Knoppix maintaining no repositories themselves, and the distro being incompatible (libraries) with Debian's repos.
I moved on to Ubuntu clones, Mepis-6 (two years) and Ultimate-2.0 XMas (six months.) No probs except I feel left out of the process. When I installed UE first time, a few things didn't work quite right. I ignored them for the time being, spending time finding and installing programs useful for the way I live -- Ufraw, ufraw-Gimp, Gimp, Digikam, (I have a pro-level DSLR and shoot RAW-DNG) and such. Then, after an update, the probs went away. Obviously, the updates fixed them, but I was not aware of how. Then, I was offered an opportunity to upgrade the distro to the newest one, and I tried it. Now, the system is not borked but imperfect, so time to install another.
I will try Fedora 11 (it's downloading now) with workstation compiling tools and see if I can keep it going for five years or so like RH-6. Or at least until GCC-5 and kernel 2.8.x become ubiquitous, whichever comes first.
Did I mention I HATE installing and configuring OSes?
I just installed Opera-10 beta bc Opera says it is 100% acid3 compliant, and went over to Bing and chose to search for an image. When I tried to modify the search filter settings from the default (moderate) to no filter, the popup that had the checkboxes appeared UNDER the image windows, making a selection impossible.
was busted by auditors who found the books were "cooked" by applying the law of first numbers described in the/. blurb and TFA. The independent auditors found the first figures were randomly distributed instead of following Benford's law with the number 1 the most plentiful and nine the least -- therefore, the entries were fraudulent.
Benford's law knocked my out at the time; I thought of how many bogus figures I had entered in my expense accounts over the years....
I've used it as a desktop drive for four months so far, and, using hdparm -T as a benchmark (I know, I know, but it's on a desktop!) it has the same throughput as it ever did. I download torrents to it.
It would copy completed torrents to a platter-drive at 60MB/sec when new and will still do 60MB/sec now.
I don't see a problem. Opera/Firefox open in less that one second (by wristwatch!) instead of ten on a platter-drive (Pentium-M, 1.6 GHz). The whole computer seems more responsive -- even modern in terms of speed.
Thumbs up on SSDs! My Patriot drive was on sale at Fry's for about $70 US (32GB). Best upgrade I ever made; I boot from it (less than 20 seconds on Ubuntu 9.04) but use a platter drive for/home and swap.
We casual computer users will use the applications we find unless they don't do what we want.
I never wanted to learn computer science, I wanted to use a word processor instead of a typewriter back in 1990 when I got my first PC. I used WordPerfect-5.1, had to learn DOS memory management to get WP to run in (faster) expanded memory mode. Note I said "had to" not "wanted to." I even wrote macros to make editing docs more rational than WP's infamous interface.
When Windows 95 came out, DOS was obviously deprecated, and I got on the upgrade treadmill, installing WP-6.0a for WIndows. Alas, my macros wouldn't work. Also I hated Windows' registry. I could still run WP-5.1 under DOS, but W95 kept crashing under it.
I tried Linux in 1997. Got SuSE 5.0 installed and it was ugly. Tried again in 1998 when WP ported version 8 to Linux. My distro was Caldera 1.3; I liked KDE, which seemed more advanced than W95 to me, and ran WP-5.1 under DOSemu. I moved to Red Hat 6.0, which I used for six years, learning to update and upgrade with RPM and by compiling. By then, I needed a newsgroup client; Pan was just coming into existence, and I volunteered to build RPMs for that project while using NX under Wine as Pan was still unstable as all hell.
Now I use an Ubuntu variant and run WP-5,1 under QEMU. Pan is now useful, so I quit using FA; VLC, Dragon Player, Gnome viewer and Digikam have replaced Irfanview under WINE for me. Ytree has replaced Xtree Gold. Sylpheed mail replaced Forte Free Agent under Wine.
I found Linux programs I needed on the internet, gradually, over time, the same way I found Windows apps.
As I said, I never *wanted* to learn CS. But I have, I have.
And doubtless many other unwilling CS hobbyists will do the same, find Adept or Synaptic and explore it, or find mention of an app on the internet and try to install it.
Shuttleworth is quite right, but after almost twenty years, I have NOT replaced WP-5.1 with emacs or the like; I most profoundly do NOT want to learn another macro language. WP-5.1 serves me very, very well still, thanks to Freedos http://www.freedos.org/ Ultimate Ubuntu and QEMU.
Perhaps you read less into my post. Or. more accurately and less stylistically, perhaps you amplified my thinking in a different direction. What you say may be true, I don't know, but it does not take into account metaphor.
The human mind cannot fabricate a concept out of nothingness; this is a fundamental concept. A mind cannot conceive of what it cannot imagine or find outside. That which is discovered must be understood in a way the human mind understands things. The image of the Benzene ring came out of a dream's metaphor of a snake eating its tail, but one does not even have to be that dramatic to understand the concept.
As the "big bang" concept (matter/time/space after, unknown before) is a metaphor for our own human birth (matter, time and space after, unknown before) the quantum uncertainty concept is related to the mind's processes as described in TFA. In fact, that relationship is the entire point of the paper.
In essence, I meant to say the precise nature of the universe can never be known except in terms the mind can understand, which seems to give the universe human psychological properties. Which is so obvious as to be redundant!
And I paraphrase Feynmann as accurately as I can from memory of the reports of his address given by Newsweek on the event of his prize.
Richard Feynmann said almost exactly the same thing in his remarks to the 1975 Nobel award ceremony audience after being chosen winner of that year's prize in physics.
His point was that a grad student using an electron microscope will see precisely what he was trained to (expects to) see. This, of course, is derived from the basic quantum concept that the observer affects the observed.
This is just one more thread seeming to show quantum mechanics and psychology are two threads of the same fabric; metaphor weaves them together.
My uncle was one of the actuaries who originally figured Social Security out. He was called out of retirement in the 70s iirc to brief Congress on the mathematical bases for the programs, which had been forgotten or lost.
He explained it is a successful Ponzi scheme as long as more newbies are enrolled than retire. That figures. A government-controlled Ponzi scheme based on generational population growth. It fails when population declines. Currently, the U.S. is growing in population because of immigration; otherwise, US pop would have continued to decline since the early 70s.
NB: The biggest baby boom in history is happening RIGHT NOW!
Wall St. as we know it started out as a way to make gambling on stocks seem a constructive activity: they rationalized that they were creating pools of capital to increase industrialization.
It is a legal and regulated form of gambling including elements of Ponzi, pyramid (especially fiat currencies) and other fraudulent bits that is seen as socially useful.
Like organized sports, started about the same time, and sanctioned boxing bouts, the social good was thought to be improved by regulating behaviors that could not be stopped.
I am old. I've been driving for 50 years. About half that time, I've been a good, insured, licensed driver. The other half, I was a good, uninsured or unlicensed (long story) driver.
I have never (that is not even once in about 25 years) had an accident or been pulled over by a cop *for any reason* when unlicensed or uninsured.
I have had three minor fender-benders when insured and licensed. I was cited for speeding twice in two different states while insured and licensed.
Do I drive carelessly when I know I am legal and insured? Not consciously.
Do I drive more carefully when I need to "stay beneath the radar?" Yes, I am always aware of my illegal status.
Licenses and insurance do not necessarily make for safer streets.
Do you remember the old 286 and 386 math co-processor chips makers like AMD and C&T marketed? If push should come to shove over this (which I wholeheartedly doubt b'cause both have too much to lose) you might see motherboard makers including a socket for an AMD 64-bit/GPU chip, which will be an add-on to an Intel x86 32-bit CPU.
But neither company is so stupid as to muddy the water exactly when Nvidia is looking for a way to make chips with or without Intel's permission.
...making blanket statements about how stupid those religions are, is not bigotry, it's pointing out that a set of ideas is stupid.
Religious *faith* gives some people hope and serenity. It doesn't matter if you don't agree, their faith helps them get through the rough times, or loneliness. If they believe in Holy Cows, or talking turtles, or spacemen or a virgin who gave birth to an infant-god, it helps them cope. You may not need their faith, and you may even think their belief benighted, but they cling to it as a drowning man clings to a straw.
By denigrating their belief(s), you damage the quality of their lives.
...said the download was slow and that KDE-3.5.10 was the desktop. I corrected both misstatements in my post. I did not recommend PCLinuxOS. I said I was downloading the Gnome version...to test it out.
If you want to check out PCLinuxOS and want a fast link, my post should be of value.
If you know you won't like it or don't need it, don't download it from my fast link.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I know. I didn't feel like going into detail, but I was a music director for a dominant medium-market AM radio station in the 70s, and one of my music "reps" was a former high school buddy who worked for one of the very, very major distributors. The stories he told, and the deals I was offered via "announcement parties," were chilling, to say the least.
He once asked me if I knew where he could get a 12-year-old boy for a music director in a neighboring city who would not otherwise play his "product." I quit the biz some short while later...but that's another story.
Only a few months ago, it was charged in the US Congress that record companies have been paying radio stations (again, like in the fifties) to play their records.
Now they want the stations to pay them?
Playing a recording on the air is better than advertising it, and the record companies know it.
This effort is bound to fail, if not ignite laughter.
He's being prosecuted under the TN law, part of which is included in the article, which gives some background regarding SCOTUS' ruling and the rush of states to rewrite the virtual part of the law.
This or a case like it may go back to the Federal Courts on constitutional grounds and, eventually, back to SCOTUS. Whether they would revisit such a case is open to question.
Not a possibility in my case, as I was using a lot of programs then (Pan, Sylpheed-claws, e, ytree, blackbox) that were not available in .rpms from RH or anyone else; they had to be compiled from source. This was Back in the Day while they were alpha and beta applications -- say around 2000-2001.
I last installed a RH/Fedora OS almost ten years ago -- RedHat 6.0. I loved it. I pulled down sources from RPMFind.net and compiled them to try them out. I used that distro until the wheels fell off -- GCC became out-of-date and could not be updated nor could programs written for GCC-4 be compiled successfully under GCC-3, or so I heard. Same for the kernel, RH-6.0 being one of the first users of the 2.4 series (2.4.11, IIRC). The most modern kernel I remember installing on it was 2.4.35!
That took about five years. (I HATE installing and especially configuring new OSes!)
I used Knoppix 3.2.x for a year or so as a hard drive install but it would not update, Knoppix maintaining no repositories themselves, and the distro being incompatible (libraries) with Debian's repos.
I moved on to Ubuntu clones, Mepis-6 (two years) and Ultimate-2.0 XMas (six months.) No probs except I feel left out of the process. When I installed UE first time, a few things didn't work quite right. I ignored them for the time being, spending time finding and installing programs useful for the way I live -- Ufraw, ufraw-Gimp, Gimp, Digikam, (I have a pro-level DSLR and shoot RAW-DNG) and such. Then, after an update, the probs went away. Obviously, the updates fixed them, but I was not aware of how. Then, I was offered an opportunity to upgrade the distro to the newest one, and I tried it. Now, the system is not borked but imperfect, so time to install another.
I will try Fedora 11 (it's downloading now) with workstation compiling tools and see if I can keep it going for five years or so like RH-6. Or at least until GCC-5 and kernel 2.8.x become ubiquitous, whichever comes first.
Did I mention I HATE installing and configuring OSes?
I just installed Opera-10 beta bc Opera says it is 100% acid3 compliant, and went over to Bing and chose to search for an image. When I tried to modify the search filter settings from the default (moderate) to no filter, the popup that had the checkboxes appeared UNDER the image windows, making a selection impossible.
As usual MS seems to be ignoring standards.
The correct address for Freestyle Photographic Supplies is www.freestylephoto.bix instead of the squatters' site I incorrectly listed.
Sorry.
FujiFilm Company in Japan, not a small company, makes film for Polaroid cameras which is available from www.freestyle.com .
They just don't seem to get the point of netbooks.
Bigger screens, bigger disks, faster processors, more memory, Windows7.
That's not a netbook anymore (small, light and mobile) but an ordinary laptop without an optical drive.
was busted by auditors who found the books were "cooked" by applying the law of first numbers described in the /. blurb and TFA. The independent auditors found the first figures were randomly distributed instead of following Benford's law with the number 1 the most plentiful and nine the least -- therefore, the entries were fraudulent.
Benford's law knocked my out at the time; I thought of how many bogus figures I had entered in my expense accounts over the years....
Sorry, misinformation. The command should have been "hdparm -t".
Sorry for the confusion -- my bad
I've used it as a desktop drive for four months so far, and, using hdparm -T as a benchmark (I know, I know, but it's on a desktop!) it has the same throughput as it ever did. I download torrents to it.
It would copy completed torrents to a platter-drive at 60MB/sec when new and will still do 60MB/sec now.
I don't see a problem. Opera/Firefox open in less that one second (by wristwatch!) instead of ten on a platter-drive (Pentium-M, 1.6 GHz). The whole computer seems more responsive -- even modern in terms of speed.
Thumbs up on SSDs! My Patriot drive was on sale at Fry's for about $70 US (32GB). Best upgrade I ever made; I boot from it (less than 20 seconds on Ubuntu 9.04) but use a platter drive for /home and swap.
I stand corrected.
We casual computer users will use the applications we find unless they don't do what we want.
I never wanted to learn computer science, I wanted to use a word processor instead of a typewriter back in 1990 when I got my first PC. I used WordPerfect-5.1, had to learn DOS memory management to get WP to run in (faster) expanded memory mode. Note I said "had to" not "wanted to." I even wrote macros to make editing docs more rational than WP's infamous interface.
When Windows 95 came out, DOS was obviously deprecated, and I got on the upgrade treadmill, installing WP-6.0a for WIndows. Alas, my macros wouldn't work. Also I hated Windows' registry. I could still run WP-5.1 under DOS, but W95 kept crashing under it.
I tried Linux in 1997. Got SuSE 5.0 installed and it was ugly. Tried again in 1998 when WP ported version 8 to Linux. My distro was Caldera 1.3; I liked KDE, which seemed more advanced than W95 to me, and ran WP-5.1 under DOSemu. I moved to Red Hat 6.0, which I used for six years, learning to update and upgrade with RPM and by compiling. By then, I needed a newsgroup client; Pan was just coming into existence, and I volunteered to build RPMs for that project while using NX under Wine as Pan was still unstable as all hell.
Now I use an Ubuntu variant and run WP-5,1 under QEMU. Pan is now useful, so I quit using FA; VLC, Dragon Player, Gnome viewer and Digikam have replaced Irfanview under WINE for me. Ytree has replaced Xtree Gold. Sylpheed mail replaced Forte Free Agent under Wine.
I found Linux programs I needed on the internet, gradually, over time, the same way I found Windows apps.
As I said, I never *wanted* to learn CS. But I have, I have.
And doubtless many other unwilling CS hobbyists will do the same, find Adept or Synaptic and explore it, or find mention of an app on the internet and try to install it.
Shuttleworth is quite right, but after almost twenty years, I have NOT replaced WP-5.1 with emacs or the like; I most profoundly do NOT want to learn another macro language. WP-5.1 serves me very, very well still, thanks to Freedos http://www.freedos.org/ Ultimate Ubuntu and QEMU.
Perhaps you read less into my post. Or. more accurately and less stylistically, perhaps you amplified my thinking in a different direction. What you say may be true, I don't know, but it does not take into account metaphor.
The human mind cannot fabricate a concept out of nothingness; this is a fundamental concept. A mind cannot conceive of what it cannot imagine or find outside. That which is discovered must be understood in a way the human mind understands things. The image of the Benzene ring came out of a dream's metaphor of a snake eating its tail, but one does not even have to be that dramatic to understand the concept.
As the "big bang" concept (matter/time/space after, unknown before) is a metaphor for our own human birth (matter, time and space after, unknown before) the quantum uncertainty concept is related to the mind's processes as described in TFA. In fact, that relationship is the entire point of the paper.
In essence, I meant to say the precise nature of the universe can never be known except in terms the mind can understand, which seems to give the universe human psychological properties. Which is so obvious as to be redundant!
And I paraphrase Feynmann as accurately as I can from memory of the reports of his address given by Newsweek on the event of his prize.
Richard Feynmann said almost exactly the same thing in his remarks to the 1975 Nobel award ceremony audience after being chosen winner of that year's prize in physics.
His point was that a grad student using an electron microscope will see precisely what he was trained to (expects to) see. This, of course, is derived from the basic quantum concept that the observer affects the observed.
This is just one more thread seeming to show quantum mechanics and psychology are two threads of the same fabric; metaphor weaves them together.
In the past, every time some Microsoft salesman has said something similar, a dramatic, new hack was shortly announced.
Can't they grok reality?
My uncle was one of the actuaries who originally figured Social Security out. He was called out of retirement in the 70s iirc to brief Congress on the mathematical bases for the programs, which had been forgotten or lost.
He explained it is a successful Ponzi scheme as long as more newbies are enrolled than retire. That figures. A government-controlled Ponzi scheme based on generational population growth. It fails when population declines. Currently, the U.S. is growing in population because of immigration; otherwise, US pop would have continued to decline since the early 70s.
NB: The biggest baby boom in history is happening RIGHT NOW!
Wall St. as we know it started out as a way to make gambling on stocks seem a constructive activity: they rationalized that they were creating pools of capital to increase industrialization.
It is a legal and regulated form of gambling including elements of Ponzi, pyramid (especially fiat currencies) and other fraudulent bits that is seen as socially useful.
Like organized sports, started about the same time, and sanctioned boxing bouts, the social good was thought to be improved by regulating behaviors that could not be stopped.
Here's why:
If it illegal to take someone's money by use of force, so it should *not* be legal to do the same with a pen or a computer.
If the strong of body cannot rob the weak, the strong of mind should be prohibited from doing the same.
I am old. I've been driving for 50 years. About half that time, I've been a good, insured, licensed driver. The other half, I was a good, uninsured or unlicensed (long story) driver.
I have never (that is not even once in about 25 years) had an accident or been pulled over by a cop *for any reason* when unlicensed or uninsured.
I have had three minor fender-benders when insured and licensed. I was cited for speeding twice in two different states while insured and licensed.
Do I drive carelessly when I know I am legal and insured? Not consciously.
Do I drive more carefully when I need to "stay beneath the radar?" Yes, I am always aware of my illegal status.
Licenses and insurance do not necessarily make for safer streets.
Do you remember the old 286 and 386 math co-processor chips makers like AMD and C&T marketed? If push should come to shove over this (which I wholeheartedly doubt b'cause both have too much to lose) you might see motherboard makers including a socket for an AMD 64-bit/GPU chip, which will be an add-on to an Intel x86 32-bit CPU.
But neither company is so stupid as to muddy the water exactly when Nvidia is looking for a way to make chips with or without Intel's permission.
Religious *faith* gives some people hope and serenity. It doesn't matter if you don't agree, their faith helps them get through the rough times, or loneliness. If they believe in Holy Cows, or talking turtles, or spacemen or a virgin who gave birth to an infant-god, it helps them cope. You may not need their faith, and you may even think their belief benighted, but they cling to it as a drowning man clings to a straw.
By denigrating their belief(s), you damage the quality of their lives.
Who is self-centered now?
...said the download was slow and that KDE-3.5.10 was the desktop. I corrected both misstatements in my post. I did not recommend PCLinuxOS. I said I was downloading the Gnome version...to test it out.
If you want to check out PCLinuxOS and want a fast link, my post should be of value.
If you know you won't like it or don't need it, don't download it from my fast link.
PClinuxOS-KDE ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/texstar/pclinuxos/live-cd/english/preview/pclinuxos-2009.1.iso
PClinux-Gnome http://linuxgator.org/PCLinuxOS/iso/pclos-gnome2009.1.iso
I get full speed from the KDE link. YMMV.