The yodelling data does actually exist. I remember a story on NPR's All Things Considered wherein they made measurements of yodelling. They also looked at the carrying distance of some obscure African languages.
Yes, certainly those focusing on a career in software development should look at "moving up the ladder", but the chances are that if they are that good at algorithmic thinking, they will always be coding.
Geeks who start companies and end up as a high corporate executive still code. On their PCs and laptops, these guys want good workstations, and are prepared to write the scripts! I've seen guys like that hacking up Python scripts for their Red Hat installation, as a daily part of their work. And as a result, they get higher-up jobs also based on their programming experience (albeit less directly).
It is not only video technology that is driven by porn merchants. The quality and smartness of search engines - more specifically, their ranking algorithms - has been totally driven by the tricks employed by seedy online advertisers and money makers, who (almost) invariably focus on pornography in some way.
Recently, I spent a week at the University of Sydney, coding a search engine for a small chairty site, in Python. A lecturer/programmer who was holding lectures and tutorials for us, named Dr James, explained some of the more common tricks.
In the beginning it was rather quaint, with things like blocks of text at the bottom of a page that was the same colour as the page's background (and thus rendered unnoticed by most porn-hungry surfers) containing copius amounts of popular keywords, with actual relevancy taking a backseat to the ad-revenue-generating "hit words".
Then, Google came to the forefront with the Stanford-educated founders' special pafge ranking algorithms (which factored in links to and from the page into an "integrity" score of some sort). The porn folks started creating hundreds of near identical, yet slightly differently located pages (on different domains, and more importantly, different machines), all containing links to one another, resulting in one very confusing, un-trustworthy conglomerate askuing for your hard earned cash. This became the monster that is the experience of going around in circles in these pages, trying to actually get to the.... uh... honey (I recall someone writing an article about the same phenomenon within warez circles). To my knowledge, Google then began to look more thouroughly at content in order to discern what belonged to one "conglomerate" and what was legitemately a seperate entity; looking at headers and IPs was totally uneffective at this stage.
I was only truly impressed when I heard about this scam: porn merchants actually writing scripts that served dynamic content based on who visited. This ability is obviously legitimately useful and indispensable for many sites providing dynamic content (Slashdot being one of them), but these chaps set it up so that is it was one of Google, Altavista, Yahoo, whoever's machines pulling down a web page for indexing, they got a different page than any surfer who came along. One result was when people searched for Disney, one of the first results' descriptions in Google appeared as Disney's official site, and then when clicked on by anyone, was - surprise surprise - an eshop for a knock-off merchandiser's product-line. Eventually some angry Disney executive contacted the search engine and IIRC legal action was taken.
Suffice to say, the development of search engines' technology has been fueled by those out to make a quick, slimey buck. The result, however, is not simply better protection from the sleaze; there is a "side-effect" of search results picked even among all-legit sites being vastly superior in relevancy, and a general improvement in the state of computation linguistics which can be applied for other purposes.
But what about all those aliens coming to Earth that only wanted to share their knowledge and love of flying in formation with us? Huh? Insensitive bastard...
The leadership we're talking about here is production only. I don't see how having more low wage workers to exploit equates to development leadership. I don't mean to use the word "exploit" too negatively though, this will probably be a good thing.
The more low-paid jobs available, the more competition for labour, and as a result, better working conditions and pay.
Could the Slashdot editors possibly have taken this seriously??! This is a small website with zero artists. A good thing I guess, but definetly not an industry revolution
This is good, it means less seedy companies setting up domains with cheesy, mid-nineties-looking pseudo portal websites. Damn I hate those things. I wonder what will be placed on the available domains.
I remember that cheat. I had the same problem. I was so envious of the bastards with 3rd party rapid-fire controls where they could do that stuff. If I remember correctly, the same cheat (performed at start-up) also made the player "Super Sonic" the entire time. And before I forget, who actually ever got more than one or two of those blasted chaos emeralds??
The memories are flooding back, that was such a fun game.
Nolan, I hereby blame you for the parent, and all other failed attempts at humour, like this one. No one blunts society's witt and gets away with it! Down with you, you bastard!
I ought to blow you away with my DD4 Dostovel, or my flying hat, or my paddle, or, or, or..... damn.
Yeah, all the things you said are right, but when I was saying cheap, I meant *cheap*, as in for highschool kids. And when talking about this Magic technology, I more meant in 5-10 years if/when it becomes common-place on all guitars.
Anyway, seeing as you have some experience you may be able to answer me something.
> Every el-cheapo amp with a line-out will also do fine, in my esteem.
Really? If so then that's good, because I had a friend who had done some recording who told me that I can forget using the line-out on a real amp for input to a soundcard. I have a fairly nice 50 watt Jade (Aussie brand) amp that I use at home and have messed around with enough to get the sound I like quickly. I read stuff about the line levels on amp line out being different to a sound card and that trying this may harm the card. That's what stoped me from experimenting.
If you're fairly sure that this would do the trick, then it would solve one or two problems for me!
This could be really, really good for young bands and such who are making demos so they can get signed to *gasp*, a major label, or even indie recording. Most people assume that it would be very easy to record guitar and get a good sound. Well when I set about recording a demo for my band, I found out just how wrong I was.
'Till now, if you wanted to record on a PC (and some of this also applies to 8-tracks and tape systems), you'd either need a really good stack, a proffesional pre-amp, or one of those new-fangled V-Amps. But none of those come dirt cheap, so lots of people have to download software amp sims from Kazaa, and stick with that. Not great.
In a few years, if this tech makes it into low-end guitars, beautiful, full, well equalised tones for everybody! And I also imagine that when this becomes common place, it will bring the quality of cheap & expensive axes much closer together.
Nowadays, alot of rich kids, or kids with parents or brothers or whatever in the industry make it because they are the only ones that get to prove themselves. Even without being conscious of it, the A&R rep at the studio will prefer a real nice sounding, well produced demo than something cheap, because it makes the songs sound better, and in music, what else is there? In the long run, this technology could be really beneficial. But for now all the struggling artists will have to keep hearing audiophile elitists crapping on about how anything mastered at anything less than perfect 96khz audio hurts their ears.
Does anyone have any clue why it's in Perth? That is literally as far away as you can get from the main population centers and still be on the Island. What on earth is the motive for this? If it was held in Darling Harbour exhibition centre or Homebush, many people I know (including me) would go.
...the analog networks have totally disappeared. The 3 cell providers here (Optus, Telstra and Vodafone) have ceased all anolog service. You can't buy an analog phone here. I assumed it was the same in the US. The only place there is an anolog service of some sort is in the outback (but that barely exists).
I once read that chimps have the intelligence of an average human three year old. Three year olds usually have a fairly (it's all relative) usable vocabulary. The reason I heard for why chimps can't speak is that they never developed a "speech center" in the brain. Is this really such a black-and-white thing? My cat has some sort of vocal expression happening, but isn't of course smart enough to use a complex language like English.
Since chimps are supposedly smart enough to do this, how long will it be before there is an organism other than a human that can speak English (or any complex human language) and actually know what they're talking about? I think that would be pretty interesting, to talk to another species.
For that price, you could build a dual CPU box with 2 PIII class chips. You could match the RAM, video/sound cards, HDD etc. A system that could do almost everything this one can could have been built 12 months ago.
Before people say that this is different because it's a desktop (unmodified), do I need to point out that the average user won't need this much power? The people that buy this will be rich techies, or businesses. Alot of techies prefer dual CPU stuff for the value, so this has no real market. Too new, too expensive.
I am not confused. I understand the principles of OSS and believe it is very important that developers make their source available, perhaps in a.tgz file.
What I will say, however, is that the average office/home user should not have to deal with the source and build the app. Now as for the argument about RPMs being platform specific, you are absolutely right. What you haven't thought about though is that the most popular format for a desktop UNIX user is by far Linux on x86. If the developers included an RPM for x86 Linux, that would be enough to keep most people happy,and that's what it's all about.
Chances are that every *BSD user knows how to build a program, same with the average Solaris user. Linux is different, because it has in the last year or two gone where no open (not OS X) UNIX has gone before: The Desktop. Linux will become more and more used by non-computer people. This is a Good Thing, and resistance won't work, we've been waiting for powerful, open, free desktop UNIX for 5 years.
Hmm... it's not me I'm worried about. About a year ago I knew nothing about UNIX systems and was a little scared by compiling problems, but I have no problems now. It's the more end user types that Linux is now attracting that I'm worried about. Slashdotters for the most part aren't the kind of people that need RPMs and such.
In offices in various places in the world, Linux is becoming widely used. It is being used as a workstation by average non-computer proffesionals. Newbies have asked me many times what they should do to install tgz's. See just because they are end-users, that doesn't mean they don't need niche programs eg. graphics, audio engineering, scientific apps. Now these aren't likely to be packaged, but there is no alernative for these people.
With all the talk of bringing Linux to the desktop, we are forgetting that many people need more than just office software, a browser and a decent mail client.
One of the big problems with Linux today is how hard some software is to install. RPM's and.deb's are good, but it is almost hard to believe how much software is still distibuted in.tgz format. What's worse is that it has to be compiled in GCC.
If we want Linux to be as slick as it should be, we can't expect beginners to have to run "make install" and "configure./". Often these things don't work, and they are just so damn ugly.
So, to all developers: Please, please, please make all your software available in RPM (or.deb) format! Have tarred, gzipped sources as an extra for geeks by all means, but make package manager files the main format.
Software installation ticks of new UNIX users more than you realise.
They are giving the truck manufacturers all the ammunition they need to make trucks.
Trucks give these so-called truck companies the very tools needed to have a truck company, which provides a perfect cocktail for the CD-R retailers to get their greedy, dishonest hands on the product.
I'm really really sorry for the above post. It wasn't actually me. I'm at a LAN party and walked away for a few minutes. I don't actually know who did that yet. Mod it down if you have to...
Damn. That's really annoying, I feel like an idiot.
As for the question, I think the cheapest option is a modified laptop. Maybe with a totally new case (if you want to modify), and a new motherboard. I know there are alot of "Mini-PC" solutions around that may be able to support what you need, if you could only modify one to be portable with a monitor/periphs.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't find a link, but someone may've heard it.
I think this person has missed the point of number ratings; they don't puppourt to sum up the entire game in a digit.
Hint: That's what those weird-looking "paragraphs of descriptive text" are for.
Geeks who start companies and end up as a high corporate executive still code. On their PCs and laptops, these guys want good workstations, and are prepared to write the scripts! I've seen guys like that hacking up Python scripts for their Red Hat installation, as a daily part of their work. And as a result, they get higher-up jobs also based on their programming experience (albeit less directly).
Just my AUD$0.05 (US$0.03).
It is not only video technology that is driven by porn merchants. The quality and smartness of search engines - more specifically, their ranking algorithms - has been totally driven by the tricks employed by seedy online advertisers and money makers, who (almost) invariably focus on pornography in some way.
Recently, I spent a week at the University of Sydney, coding a search engine for a small chairty site, in Python. A lecturer/programmer who was holding lectures and tutorials for us, named Dr James, explained some of the more common tricks.
In the beginning it was rather quaint, with things like blocks of text at the bottom of a page that was the same colour as the page's background (and thus rendered unnoticed by most porn-hungry surfers) containing copius amounts of popular keywords, with actual relevancy taking a backseat to the ad-revenue-generating "hit words".
Then, Google came to the forefront with the Stanford-educated founders' special pafge ranking algorithms (which factored in links to and from the page into an "integrity" score of some sort). The porn folks started creating hundreds of near identical, yet slightly differently located pages (on different domains, and more importantly, different machines), all containing links to one another, resulting in one very confusing, un-trustworthy conglomerate askuing for your hard earned cash. This became the monster that is the experience of going around in circles in these pages, trying to actually get to the.... uh... honey (I recall someone writing an article about the same phenomenon within warez circles). To my knowledge, Google then began to look more thouroughly at content in order to discern what belonged to one "conglomerate" and what was legitemately a seperate entity; looking at headers and IPs was totally uneffective at this stage.
I was only truly impressed when I heard about this scam: porn merchants actually writing scripts that served dynamic content based on who visited. This ability is obviously legitimately useful and indispensable for many sites providing dynamic content (Slashdot being one of them), but these chaps set it up so that is it was one of Google, Altavista, Yahoo, whoever's machines pulling down a web page for indexing, they got a different page than any surfer who came along. One result was when people searched for Disney, one of the first results' descriptions in Google appeared as Disney's official site, and then when clicked on by anyone, was - surprise surprise - an eshop for a knock-off merchandiser's product-line. Eventually some angry Disney executive contacted the search engine and IIRC legal action was taken.
Suffice to say, the development of search engines' technology has been fueled by those out to make a quick, slimey buck. The result, however, is not simply better protection from the sleaze; there is a "side-effect" of search results picked even among all-legit sites being vastly superior in relevancy, and a general improvement in the state of computation linguistics which can be applied for other purposes.
But what about all those aliens coming to Earth that only wanted to share their knowledge and love of flying in formation with us? Huh? Insensitive bastard...
I said "more competition for labour", that is, the corporations competing for workers, not competition for jobs on the part of the workers.
The leadership we're talking about here is production only. I don't see how having more low wage workers to exploit equates to development leadership. I don't mean to use the word "exploit" too negatively though, this will probably be a good thing.
The more low-paid jobs available, the more competition for labour, and as a result, better working conditions and pay.
No submission to Slashdot gets away without being 'Dotted somehow. Muhahaha...
Maybe you could, uh, buy that firewall product the spammer advertised....
that's kind of... weird though.
Could the Slashdot editors possibly have taken this seriously??! This is a small website with zero artists. A good thing I guess, but definetly not an industry revolution
These things do "take time".
This is good, it means less seedy companies setting up domains with cheesy, mid-nineties-looking pseudo portal websites. Damn I hate those things. I wonder what will be placed on the available domains.
The memories are flooding back, that was such a fun game.
I ought to blow you away with my DD4 Dostovel, or my flying hat, or my paddle, or, or, or..... damn.
Anyway, seeing as you have some experience you may be able to answer me something.
> Every el-cheapo amp with a line-out will also do fine, in my esteem.
Really? If so then that's good, because I had a friend who had done some recording who told me that I can forget using the line-out on a real amp for input to a soundcard. I have a fairly nice 50 watt Jade (Aussie brand) amp that I use at home and have messed around with enough to get the sound I like quickly. I read stuff about the line levels on amp line out being different to a sound card and that trying this may harm the card. That's what stoped me from experimenting.
If you're fairly sure that this would do the trick, then it would solve one or two problems for me!
'Till now, if you wanted to record on a PC (and some of this also applies to 8-tracks and tape systems), you'd either need a really good stack, a proffesional pre-amp, or one of those new-fangled V-Amps. But none of those come dirt cheap, so lots of people have to download software amp sims from Kazaa, and stick with that. Not great.
In a few years, if this tech makes it into low-end guitars, beautiful, full, well equalised tones for everybody! And I also imagine that when this becomes common place, it will bring the quality of cheap & expensive axes much closer together.
Nowadays, alot of rich kids, or kids with parents or brothers or whatever in the industry make it because they are the only ones that get to prove themselves. Even without being conscious of it, the A&R rep at the studio will prefer a real nice sounding, well produced demo than something cheap, because it makes the songs sound better, and in music, what else is there? In the long run, this technology could be really beneficial. But for now all the struggling artists will have to keep hearing audiophile elitists crapping on about how anything mastered at anything less than perfect 96khz audio hurts their ears.
Does anyone have any clue why it's in Perth? That is literally as far away as you can get from the main population centers and still be on the Island. What on earth is the motive for this? If it was held in Darling Harbour exhibition centre or Homebush, many people I know (including me) would go.
I will now unveil the website you've all been waiting for... Tribute To The GNUWinII Chick
...the analog networks have totally disappeared. The 3 cell providers here (Optus, Telstra and Vodafone) have ceased all anolog service. You can't buy an analog phone here. I assumed it was the same in the US. The only place there is an anolog service of some sort is in the outback (but that barely exists).
Since chimps are supposedly smart enough to do this, how long will it be before there is an organism other than a human that can speak English (or any complex human language) and actually know what they're talking about? I think that would be pretty interesting, to talk to another species.
Before people say that this is different because it's a desktop (unmodified), do I need to point out that the average user won't need this much power? The people that buy this will be rich techies, or businesses. Alot of techies prefer dual CPU stuff for the value, so this has no real market. Too new, too expensive.
What I will say, however, is that the average office/home user should not have to deal with the source and build the app. Now as for the argument about RPMs being platform specific, you are absolutely right. What you haven't thought about though is that the most popular format for a desktop UNIX user is by far Linux on x86. If the developers included an RPM for x86 Linux, that would be enough to keep most people happy,and that's what it's all about.
Chances are that every *BSD user knows how to build a program, same with the average Solaris user. Linux is different, because it has in the last year or two gone where no open (not OS X) UNIX has gone before: The Desktop. Linux will become more and more used by non-computer people. This is a Good Thing, and resistance won't work, we've been waiting for powerful, open, free desktop UNIX for 5 years.
The time has come.
In offices in various places in the world, Linux is becoming widely used. It is being used as a workstation by average non-computer proffesionals. Newbies have asked me many times what they should do to install tgz's. See just because they are end-users, that doesn't mean they don't need niche programs eg. graphics, audio engineering, scientific apps. Now these aren't likely to be packaged, but there is no alernative for these people.
With all the talk of bringing Linux to the desktop, we are forgetting that many people need more than just office software, a browser and a decent mail client.
If we want Linux to be as slick as it should be, we can't expect beginners to have to run "make install" and "configure ./". Often these things don't work, and they are just so damn ugly.
So, to all developers: Please, please, please make all your software available in RPM (or .deb) format! Have tarred, gzipped sources as an extra for geeks by all means, but make package manager files the main format.
Software installation ticks of new UNIX users more than you realise.
They are giving the truck manufacturers all the ammunition they need to make trucks.
Trucks give these so-called truck companies the very tools needed to have a truck company, which provides a perfect cocktail for the CD-R retailers to get their greedy, dishonest hands on the product.
Damn. That's really annoying, I feel like an idiot.
As for the question, I think the cheapest option is a modified laptop. Maybe with a totally new case (if you want to modify), and a new motherboard. I know there are alot of "Mini-PC" solutions around that may be able to support what you need, if you could only modify one to be portable with a monitor/periphs.