Reminds me when I was in junior high (and the Internet was young), we all started trying www.dot-com's of each others' names. The girls' names usually led to porn sites. Come to think of it, that must be have been kind of hurtful when the girls see how they are just seen as sex objects
Agreed. The media will have you believe that the US markets can recover from any small slumps. Problem is, the government and business has borrowed all it can (even dipping into a multi trillion dollar derivative market for extra capital) and the US economy has simply run out of input capital. There's no more money flowing in!
If you have big money lying in equity investments, I strongly recommend searching Google for the following: derivatives, Soros, dollar collapse. The #1 message here for all investors is: the markets are not guaranteed to keep going up. Nobody can guarantee that, even though mutual fund vendors want you to believe that the best way to become rich is leave large sums of money lying in the stock market. bzzzzzt wrong.
interesting stuff... I didn't know the lights thing was a hoax. As for AdSense, I am happy with its performance (and I have used banner type ads over the years). It makes me a bit of money, it's honest, and the ads are not intrusive so I really have zero complaints.
At least the TI calculator I have runs on a Z80 processor, which you can easily code for using a cross compiler. Fun stuff!
A friend of mine wrote a Windows clone for his TI-83. You would shit your pants. You could click the Start button, it would pop up a few applications and you could run clones of notepad and some other scary stuff. Had nested menus and a desktop. Had a built in remote chat app. Although it was nifty, it used up about 90% of your memory and all the CPU power. The irony did not escape us. But common sense did, and he lost the entire progran without making a backup.
Seriously, I am going to try and overclock my TI-83 because I use this regularly for physics and engineering problems and the equation solver is a godsend.
That's interesting, I did not know that internap was harbouring so many spammers... check out those huge/24's in there, including Bluestream media. thanks for bringing this to my attention
(As an Engineer who has thoroughly studied ADC/DAC) I would say that the article presents a very good background on the issues of sampling and reconstruction of audio.
However, the rest of the article is approached from the heavily biased opinion point of an "audiophile", which the majority of the population is not. These audio experts have fantastic equipment and a keen sense of hearing, allowing them to distinguish between the subtle difference between high fidelity recording and playback. Such people like software like foobar2000 and care a lot about dynamic range, and for the most part think that lossy encoding is a shame. This is a bit about being picky, and a bit about showing off, but either way it's a minority viewpoint.
But such people are by far the minority of the public. Most of us don't get caught up in the subtle details of audio recording and playback, partially because we don't care, and partially because we don't have the fine equipment (electronics and human ear) to notice such things. So the article for instance completely dismisses lossy encoding, even though this is by far the most exciting frontier of modern audio compression. You can get 64 kbps (ogg vorbis) or 32 kbps (aac) streams that sound amazing to most people, as good as FM radio.
As an Engineer that is what I find exciting, because we can transport "essentially the same" amount of media in far, far less bandwidth than it required a decade ago. And the efficiency is improving all the time, ditto for video.
The blacklists we have been using for a long time -- SPEWS, Spamhaus, CBL, SORBS do work on DNS and they continue to work fine whether or not the spammer registers a domain after the spamrun. These blacklists work by looking up the connecting IP address that is sending mail, and that IP address can not be forged in TCP/IP. Whether or not the mail body contains IPs or domain names that are invalid or not, forged, etc is an auxiliary issue. Most spam can be blocked at the entrance point, the mail transfer (SMTP).
Idiot proof? For old people? yeah, ha ha... I know some grandpas that would school any of us; they've been using PCs a decade more than I. How about some of those idiot proof PCs for dumbass high school kids?
Mods, that wasn't a troll. It was a parody of a viewpoint that is dangerously widespread...
Thanks. Yup, apparently more widespread than I thought at first. I have long harboured a resentment towards older business people who have become very rich off the world's resources while being utterly disrespectful of the environment they take from. It is a true rape of the planet, and worse still, it leaves descendents to deal with the mess.
You can only consume so much, and expell so much trash (without replenishing natural capital) before the ecosystem becomes unable to cope with the upset balances. And then it's bad news for everyone. All of this is well established, and there is no gap in scientific knowledge. The great majority of the scientific community (over 90%) believe that climate change is happening. Even if climate change isn't due to human actions, there are other substantial, measurable, indisputable negative effects of human resource consumption such as increased toxicity of fresh water resources, decrease in global forestation, seafood stocks, biodiversity, etc..
We know the consequences of unchecked development with 100% certainty: death of the ecosystems we depend on for our very own lives. Doesn't that sound bad? All thanks to centuries of rapid development, from people happy to get rich at the time without consideration of future generations. Thanks, guys.
Universities are notorious for not having good network and server security (hard to hire the required large staff to oversee so much data). I now work in the computer security field, and when I look back at my university experience I see lots of very frightening things -- besides just the extent of the records the university keeps, they also tend to print things like your birth date on records. Having your date of birth intercepted is bad news, and it is really disturbing to see it printed in so many places, especially along side your SSN / SIN.
On top of that, network security in general is weak and so there are all these students using unencrypted shell logins, and exchanging sensitive data over email. Or doing online banking on public machines, where key loggers could easily be installed. Lots of students live at the university, so they have to use computers for sensitive tasks like banking (unless they happen to have a laptop).
The whole experience made me resolve to keep tight control of aspects of my privacy. If someone tries to hijack your identity, the tell tale signs are: money disappearing, and new accounts being opened. So you must keep accurate records of where your money is, and watch those balances. Also order yearly credit checks, which are free to do. If someone is opening accounts under your name, you can at least catch it.
I believe there is a Canadian company called Ballard (they do fuel cells for auto makers) that had some demo hydrogen buses deployed, including in British Columbia, west coast Canada. Anyone ever seen one of those?
OK, I'll say it -- who cares?! It doesn't affect me now, and it probably never will because I'll die long before all this climate change mess arrives at my front door. If I don't see it, it's not happening.
hmmm might have over reacted, I don't know where I'd be today without my Speak and Spell/Math. But I still don't want kids relying on marvels of technology for too much of their learning activities. Calculators in schools alone have really set back math skills, IMHO.
Anyone else think this is scary as all heck? Now, I'm not someone who avoids new technologies (I'm a computer engineer) but seriously, I think kids had better stick to pencils. Even at my age there is nothing I prefer more than a nice, simple mechanical pencil or a quality Pilot pen. We don't need computers in everything!
The problem is that most people fail to use descriptive directory and file names. If you use very descriptive file names, you will find that you can efficiently locate any file you need without resorting to a nasty/expensive file content cataloging operation. I'm working on a cross platform file search tool that is optimized for finding files by file name; faster than any of these 'desktop search' programs of course.
My solution to this is pretty damn simple (and platform independent)... I archive all my emails to individual files where the file name is composed of the Subject, To/From address, and time stamp. So I can search for any of my communications, on any platform, just by looking through a directory listing. Efficient, fast. This is also the format used by the jbmail mail client for archiving emails.
I agree with you, disorders like sleep apnea are a terrible problem. My mother has suffered from sleep apnea for years, and it has correlated with a significant weight gain and general decrease in healthiness. Mind you, I don't know the cause/effect between sleep apnea and weight gain. My mother was overweight before, but became much more overweight as he sleep suffered more. The CPAP machine has helped her, and it makes a huge difference in how she feels and acts after a good night's sleep.
The article mentions, correctly, that this does imply any cause-effect relationship. As a bit of a health nut, here are some of the possibilities I have thought of regarding the relationsip between sleep and being overweight/unhealthy:
People with irregular daily routines might not sleep as much as they need to, and similarly, may skip meals or snack excessively which is known to lead to unhealthy weights
Stressful lifestyles both impact sleep cycles, and one's diet and exercise routine (stress leading to unhealthiness)
People who are overweight may have trouble sleeping due to breathing difficulties, or other discomforts arising from a general lack of good health
People who are well disciplined may be better at adhering to exercise and healthy eating routines, and similarly, sticking to proper sleeping patterns and allocating enough hours for a good night's sleep.
Issues like this are killing Windows. I learned my lesson a few years ago that almost no shareware or freeware can be trusted. This makes Windows a lot less useful and is one of the many reasons why I usually run linux on my desktop.
Check out the new cleansoftware site for free windows software that is free from spyware, adware etc. Not unsurprisingly, most of the software listed there is open source (making a future transition to a UNIX platform much easier). So at least while Windows is dying you can still use proper software when you need to still need to boot Windows once in a while;)
Seems that many people don't know about this, but the latest versions of Winamp include something called the "media library", including a list of live television like streams. Nullsoft has pitched the NSV format, which works awfully well -- it is really mp3 audio plus VP3 for video. If this was improved to use ogg vorbis for audio and say ogg theora for video (theora is based on VP3), it would use even less bandwidth. My point is, if you browse through the media library you will quickly see that TV is gonna die soon. Streaming video works very well, there are already lots of streams available and by utilizing peer to peer to overcome bandwidth constraints we're going to see a heluvalot more public streams out there, with lots of interesting content.
Regular television offers us next to nothing, and everyone knows it.
So if they have all those UNIX servers, why aren't we getting ogg vorbis streams of their content? All they offer is that damn RealAudio, for which there is no good Windows software. The BBC has tried ogg as an experiment, and it sounded great but I don't know why they ditched that. It was a couple years ago they briefly offered ogg vorbis radio streams.
Interestingly, the BBC streaming exclusively in Real Audio has been one of the main reasons I find myself booting Linux daily instead of Windows, since there is a fantastic clean real audio player for UNIX variants.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me when I was in junior high (and the Internet was young), we all started trying www.dot-com's of each others' names. The girls' names usually led to porn sites. Come to think of it, that must be have been kind of hurtful when the girls see how they are just seen as sex objects
Agreed. The media will have you believe that the US markets can recover from any small slumps. Problem is, the government and business has borrowed all it can (even dipping into a multi trillion dollar derivative market for extra capital) and the US economy has simply run out of input capital. There's no more money flowing in!
If you have big money lying in equity investments, I strongly recommend searching Google for the following: derivatives, Soros, dollar collapse. The #1 message here for all investors is: the markets are not guaranteed to keep going up. Nobody can guarantee that, even though mutual fund vendors want you to believe that the best way to become rich is leave large sums of money lying in the stock market. bzzzzzt wrong.
interesting stuff... I didn't know the lights thing was a hoax. As for AdSense, I am happy with its performance (and I have used banner type ads over the years). It makes me a bit of money, it's honest, and the ads are not intrusive so I really have zero complaints.
At least the TI calculator I have runs on a Z80 processor, which you can easily code for using a cross compiler. Fun stuff!
A friend of mine wrote a Windows clone for his TI-83. You would shit your pants. You could click the Start button, it would pop up a few applications and you could run clones of notepad and some other scary stuff. Had nested menus and a desktop. Had a built in remote chat app. Although it was nifty, it used up about 90% of your memory and all the CPU power. The irony did not escape us. But common sense did, and he lost the entire progran without making a backup.
Seriously, I am going to try and overclock my TI-83 because I use this regularly for physics and engineering problems and the equation solver is a godsend.
For god sakes people, it's a Friday night! If Google went down I could see people panicking, but LiveJournal? Whatever... I'm going out.
That's interesting, I did not know that internap was harbouring so many spammers... check out those huge /24's in there, including Bluestream media. thanks for bringing this to my attention
you might think you're cooler than the parent, but you're the one arguing star trek on slashdot. need I say more?
(As an Engineer who has thoroughly studied ADC/DAC) I would say that the article presents a very good background on the issues of sampling and reconstruction of audio.
However, the rest of the article is approached from the heavily biased opinion point of an "audiophile", which the majority of the population is not. These audio experts have fantastic equipment and a keen sense of hearing, allowing them to distinguish between the subtle difference between high fidelity recording and playback. Such people like software like foobar2000 and care a lot about dynamic range, and for the most part think that lossy encoding is a shame. This is a bit about being picky, and a bit about showing off, but either way it's a minority viewpoint.
But such people are by far the minority of the public. Most of us don't get caught up in the subtle details of audio recording and playback, partially because we don't care, and partially because we don't have the fine equipment (electronics and human ear) to notice such things. So the article for instance completely dismisses lossy encoding, even though this is by far the most exciting frontier of modern audio compression. You can get 64 kbps (ogg vorbis) or 32 kbps (aac) streams that sound amazing to most people, as good as FM radio.
As an Engineer that is what I find exciting, because we can transport "essentially the same" amount of media in far, far less bandwidth than it required a decade ago. And the efficiency is improving all the time, ditto for video.
The blacklists we have been using for a long time -- SPEWS, Spamhaus, CBL, SORBS do work on DNS and they continue to work fine whether or not the spammer registers a domain after the spamrun. These blacklists work by looking up the connecting IP address that is sending mail, and that IP address can not be forged in TCP/IP. Whether or not the mail body contains IPs or domain names that are invalid or not, forged, etc is an auxiliary issue. Most spam can be blocked at the entrance point, the mail transfer (SMTP).
Idiot proof? For old people? yeah, ha ha... I know some grandpas that would school any of us; they've been using PCs a decade more than I. How about some of those idiot proof PCs for dumbass high school kids?
You can only consume so much, and expell so much trash (without replenishing natural capital) before the ecosystem becomes unable to cope with the upset balances. And then it's bad news for everyone. All of this is well established, and there is no gap in scientific knowledge. The great majority of the scientific community (over 90%) believe that climate change is happening. Even if climate change isn't due to human actions, there are other substantial, measurable, indisputable negative effects of human resource consumption such as increased toxicity of fresh water resources, decrease in global forestation, seafood stocks, biodiversity, etc..
We know the consequences of unchecked development with 100% certainty: death of the ecosystems we depend on for our very own lives. Doesn't that sound bad? All thanks to centuries of rapid development, from people happy to get rich at the time without consideration of future generations. Thanks, guys.
Universities are notorious for not having good network and server security (hard to hire the required large staff to oversee so much data). I now work in the computer security field, and when I look back at my university experience I see lots of very frightening things -- besides just the extent of the records the university keeps, they also tend to print things like your birth date on records. Having your date of birth intercepted is bad news, and it is really disturbing to see it printed in so many places, especially along side your SSN / SIN.
On top of that, network security in general is weak and so there are all these students using unencrypted shell logins, and exchanging sensitive data over email. Or doing online banking on public machines, where key loggers could easily be installed. Lots of students live at the university, so they have to use computers for sensitive tasks like banking (unless they happen to have a laptop).
The whole experience made me resolve to keep tight control of aspects of my privacy. If someone tries to hijack your identity, the tell tale signs are: money disappearing, and new accounts being opened. So you must keep accurate records of where your money is, and watch those balances. Also order yearly credit checks, which are free to do. If someone is opening accounts under your name, you can at least catch it.
I believe there is a Canadian company called Ballard (they do fuel cells for auto makers) that had some demo hydrogen buses deployed, including in British Columbia, west coast Canada. Anyone ever seen one of those?
OK, I'll say it -- who cares?! It doesn't affect me now, and it probably never will because I'll die long before all this climate change mess arrives at my front door. If I don't see it, it's not happening.
hmmm might have over reacted, I don't know where I'd be today without my Speak and Spell/Math. But I still don't want kids relying on marvels of technology for too much of their learning activities. Calculators in schools alone have really set back math skills, IMHO.
Anyone else think this is scary as all heck? Now, I'm not someone who avoids new technologies (I'm a computer engineer) but seriously, I think kids had better stick to pencils. Even at my age there is nothing I prefer more than a nice, simple mechanical pencil or a quality Pilot pen. We don't need computers in everything!
The problem is that most people fail to use descriptive directory and file names. If you use very descriptive file names, you will find that you can efficiently locate any file you need without resorting to a nasty/expensive file content cataloging operation. I'm working on a cross platform file search tool that is optimized for finding files by file name; faster than any of these 'desktop search' programs of course.
My solution to this is pretty damn simple (and platform independent)... I archive all my emails to individual files where the file name is composed of the Subject, To/From address, and time stamp. So I can search for any of my communications, on any platform, just by looking through a directory listing. Efficient, fast. This is also the format used by the jbmail mail client for archiving emails.
I agree with you, disorders like sleep apnea are a terrible problem. My mother has suffered from sleep apnea for years, and it has correlated with a significant weight gain and general decrease in healthiness. Mind you, I don't know the cause/effect between sleep apnea and weight gain. My mother was overweight before, but became much more overweight as he sleep suffered more. The CPAP machine has helped her, and it makes a huge difference in how she feels and acts after a good night's sleep.
Seems that many people don't know about this, but the latest versions of Winamp include something called the "media library", including a list of live television like streams. Nullsoft has pitched the NSV format, which works awfully well -- it is really mp3 audio plus VP3 for video. If this was improved to use ogg vorbis for audio and say ogg theora for video (theora is based on VP3), it would use even less bandwidth. My point is, if you browse through the media library you will quickly see that TV is gonna die soon. Streaming video works very well, there are already lots of streams available and by utilizing peer to peer to overcome bandwidth constraints we're going to see a heluvalot more public streams out there, with lots of interesting content.
Regular television offers us next to nothing, and everyone knows it.
So if they have all those UNIX servers, why aren't we getting ogg vorbis streams of their content? All they offer is that damn RealAudio, for which there is no good Windows software. The BBC has tried ogg as an experiment, and it sounded great but I don't know why they ditched that. It was a couple years ago they briefly offered ogg vorbis radio streams.
Interestingly, the BBC streaming exclusively in Real Audio has been one of the main reasons I find myself booting Linux daily instead of Windows, since there is a fantastic clean real audio player for UNIX variants.