I think that many people percieve the music business to be a competition, one where, ideally, the best music wins and the not so great doesn't. Well, it obvoiusly doesn't work that way, I am sorry to say. So much for captialism!
This is just another nail in the coffin of today's music business. As alternate routes for music become available, and can be secured by the equivalent of a GPL, then the music business will either change or die off.
They make one ofthe best/cheapest digital recording cards out there. For about $300 (US), you can get a card that supports 8 inputs at up to 48 KHz sampling, plus 4 out puts, S/PDIF I/O, and two MIDI interfaces! It comes with a special edition of Cool Edit, but is supported Cubase and all the other biggies. You need a fast HD, though, no IDE if you want to do all 8 imputs at the same time!
And it is a well done card...I can turn up the volume on my studio monitors, and I still hear no noise...very nice!
ttyl
Farrell J. McGovern
Amature Recording Engineer
Gee, what about that thing called The World Wide Web? Anyone with a connection to the Internet can either put up a server, or browse with a browser.
It is the same thing as Napster, or Gnutella,etc... Centralized server holds the addresses of the hosts (DNS...), a person runs a server app (just because Gnutella/Napster/etc have a combined server/browser doesn't make a big difference), and makes a list of his/her files to share available (ie, web server with a list of files, with or without an index.html.). You use a search engine to find the files you want (Nap et al. simply have that built in, again).
ttyl
Farrell
BBS SysOp, Novell Admin, OS/2 pro, Linux Guru, Unix Adept, Practicing Druid (ADF), Calligrapher, Home Music Studio owner, Musician, SF Faan, SF Convention organizer, etc.
Was an early member of the Fidonet, one of the first 500 or so nodes. And was a founding member of Magicknet, which later became PODSnet. Information on PODSnet mailing lists, echos that have made the jump over to the Internet is available. Email me...farrellj@sympatico.fnordca Take away the fnord to get the real address.
ttyl
Farrell
SysOp, Data/SFnet & Solsbury Hill BBSs
The book did not come after the movie...it was written during the movie, and was finished before the movie was finally finished, that is why there is a difference between Jupiter and Saturn.
Back in the days of Electronic Bulletin Board Systems, many BBS softwares tried to "police" the language of the users, to make sure that words like Fuck, Shit, and all of that list of the famous 7 words and their cousins were not able to be posted...and many ways were found to get around this...so much so that they eventually gave up. Someone should have asked a computer historian if trying to block specific words would everwork...and saved a lot of time, money and frustration in this case.
ttyl
Farrell
Re:They were from the AVROW Arrow Team!
on
Review: The Dish
·
· Score: 1
Off the shelf in terms that the parts were all standard, they didn't design special screws to hold things in, they used standard screws...and so on.Helped reduce the cost of things. The fly-by-wire was almost 30 years ahead of it's time! Amazing!
ttyl
Farrell
They were from the AVROW Arrow Team!
on
Review: The Dish
·
· Score: 1
All because the US forced us to kill the Avro Arrow project...the US doesn't like it when their allies make a better jet than they do! To think, a MACH 2 fighter with an operational ceiling of 50,000 feet, in 1957. It must have freaked the US. And it used all off-the-shelf tech. In a test flight, the prototype reach Mach 1.98 *CLIMBING*, and with less powerful engines. It's no wonder that NASA was able to put a man on the moon with a whole lot of Canadian Know-How.
In addition to the afor mentioned "Geometry, Relativity, and the 4th Dimension", there is also _The Sex Sphere_. The story is about a hyperdimenstional being by the name of Babs, and her interaction with the charactors in the book. Lots of fun, kinda kinky at times...and all based upon math! Well worth the read.
ttyl
Farrell
To combine the coolest technologies here for audio, it sounds like you would need the following for a "dream" system.
Plasma tweeters
Electrostatics for the midrange
Sub-Woofer for low range & subsonics
Add a nice tube amp or at least a harmon/kardon or my poor departed Pioneer Spec-2, a decent pre-am (I miss my Pioneer Spec-1 as well), a Nak cassette deck, revox linear track turntable (with good quality cartrige&needle), Ampex DVD with the "right" roms (maybe not that Hi-Fi, but worth it anyways to play out of zone DVDs), and a decent laptop to run MP3s...but when you have a system in this range...most MP3s really sound like shit. Now a DBX encoded vinyl LP of pipe organ music....that will show you what the difference is between a good analog system and the best digital.
Years from now they will bemoan the fact that so much music of the 20th and 21st centuries is almost unlistenable because it was released with only 16 bit at 44.1 KHertz!
ttyl
Farrell
Some things the reviewer missed...
on
Noir
·
· Score: 1
This book is a Satire of the current day intellectual property trends. Violating copyright is a capital offence.
The main charactor McNihil, has an interesting name...Mc is a Gaelic construct that means "son of", and Nihil...nihilist, son of a nihilist...also, from Webster's Revised Unabridged
Dictionary:
-Nihil album (L., white nothing) (Chem.), oxide of zinc. See under (Zinc).
-Nihil debet (L., he owes nothing) (Law), the general issue in certain actions of debt.
-Nihil dicit (L., he says nothing) (Law), a declinature by the defendant to plead or answer.
Any of these can apply to our friend Mr. McNihil.
I am sure that if we took the time, we would find many other interesting things about all of the charactors names under similar analysis.
And I would disagree that there is no "cyberspace"...you see, the prowlers are essentially bio-robots that you can be linked
to, and vicariously do things, without catching a disease, or a tatoo. An interesting concept...tatoos that travel like a virus,
or chain letter. But the prowlers are the closest thing to cyberspace, since in this universe where copyright violation is a capital crime, what do you think they would do to hackers? You
can't have a consentual reality for VR, since you really can't share intellectual property. Thus you have ways to do it vicariosly...and since you own the prowler, what you do is your own IP.
Another name, "asp-head" comes from ASCAP, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. These are the people that
collect royalties and pay them to the people who own the copyrights.
An error, he did not sell is wife to get his "Noir" eyes, he couldn't afford to pay off her debts to allow her to "die" peacefully, because he had his eyes modified (among other things, you laterfind out) You see, in this universe, if you die owning money, your creditors revive you, and sell off your body parts to pay off your debts. You can't escape debt by death.
There is also the reference to BDSM culture..."A bottom always want's to be topped", that is a submissive always find someone to dominate them. And that is how corperate people manage and
sell products. They call it "Pimp Style" management.
There is reference some of his other books, like Dr. Adder. Hence the Dr. Adder clomes (clome being another reference to an earlier work). I haven't read his other books in a long time, but this could be set in the same cyberpunk universe a few of his books are, which are excellent cyberpunk. I guess that is why he was chosen to do the "Bladerunner" books. I also like the fact that he used us Erisians as characators in some of his
early cyberpunk books.
I am a tad bit annoyed, since I was in the middle of re-reading the book to submit a Slashdot Review.:-(
I did Netware up to 3.x, and it was wonderfully stable. I upgraded a bunch of high schools' servers, and the had been been up an average of 3 years without a crash. I was moving them all to newer servers...A couple of the servers died physically when turned off and on again. The ones that had not been up that long had either been downed due to either hardware failure, or power outages longer than the life of their UPS. OS/2 was similarly stable. I ran a BBS on Fidonet for years on OS/2. It was only with the advent of MS-Windows that flakiness has been a common feature of popular computing.
Usually here I would insert the "Glad I live in Canada, not the States"...but I don't know if we are any better. I wish schools were about learning, not making drone factory workers!
I don't know about true broadband, but they are selling internet access through their phones in the ads they have on TV here in Canada.
Imagine! We will finally be able to get the internet on our dogsleads and in our ingloos! [please ignore the dripping sarcasim]
ttyl
Farrell
What happened to AdventureSHELL?
on
MUD Shell
·
· Score: 1
Last I saw, it was in the source code for BASH, it was a bash-script that you could run and turn all your commands into Adventure commands...the original AdventureSHELL had the nice feature that you could "feed" your documents to the printer daemon, and it would eat them...leaving no trace . You are supposed to throw it at the printer daemon if you want it to print it!
They use IDE drives...a great way to kill performance is using an IDE drive on a SUN arch. machine. Since your hard drive is used so heavily on a Unix machine, an IDE bus, which the wire is only 16 bit, makes for a huge bottleneck. That is what made the Ultra Workstations suck. So the first thing to do is add a SCSI interface, and dump the IDE drive. Although the 7200 RPM drives (Barracuda? I don't seem them using IBMs!) will help, I am sure you will be able to notice the difference.
Put it another way...my old SPARCStation 10 with a pair of 50 MHz processors feels about the same, speed wise, as my Celeron 366 system. Both running Slackware, it is only when I do some math-intensive computing that I really notice the difference.
Geepers, some of us have been watching Japanese Animation, Anime, since the 80s...Macross, which was repackaged for the NA market as Robotech, was a good show, and as was Lupin, Cat's Eye (my fave), Mobile Suit Gundam (which Canada's YTV has been playing recently), and a host of other shows were what we traded for, or watched at those who traded.
ttyl
Farrell
Early Adopter of...Anime, Linux, PCs, Paganism, etc...
Hal Clement is the name that Harry Stubbs uses when he writes Science Fiction. When he does astronomical artwork, he uses the name of George Richards. He is a member of First Fandom, meaning he predates almost all of us as a Science Fiction Fan, and was a Pilot during World War II. I have had the priveledge to have Hal/Harry/George as a guest at the Science Fiction convention that I helped to create and run, CANCON.
If you ever get a chance to meet him, please make the effort to do so, because he is a wonderful person to chat with, in addition to be a great writer, famous fan and talented artist.
ttyl
Slashdot Mirror
IBM will re-introduce the Microchannel bus, claim that the PS3 is the next generation IBM PS2...
ttyl
Farrell
I think that many people percieve the music business to be a competition, one where, ideally, the best music wins and the not so great doesn't. Well, it obvoiusly doesn't work that way, I am sorry to say. So much for captialism!
This is just another nail in the coffin of today's music business. As alternate routes for music become available, and can be secured by the equivalent of a GPL, then the music business will either change or die off.
ttyl
Farrell
With 8 inputs, 4 outputs and S/PDIF I/O?
I don't think so!
ttyl
Farrell
They make one ofthe best/cheapest digital recording cards out there. For about $300 (US), you can get a card that supports 8 inputs at up to 48 KHz sampling, plus 4 out puts, S/PDIF I/O, and two MIDI interfaces! It comes with a special edition of Cool Edit, but is supported Cubase and all the other biggies. You need a fast HD, though, no IDE if you want to do all 8 imputs at the same time!
And it is a well done card...I can turn up the volume on my studio monitors, and I still hear no noise...very nice!
ttyl
Farrell J. McGovern
Amature Recording Engineer
Gee, what about that thing called The World Wide Web? Anyone with a connection to the Internet can either put up a server, or browse with a browser.
It is the same thing as Napster, or Gnutella,etc... Centralized server holds the addresses of the hosts (DNS...), a person runs a server app (just because Gnutella/Napster/etc have a combined server/browser doesn't make a big difference), and makes a list of his/her files to share available (ie, web server with a list of files, with or without an index.html.). You use a search engine to find the files you want (Nap et al. simply have that built in, again).
THE INTERNET IS PEER 2 PEER in it's very design.
ttyl
Farrell
Specialization is for Insects!
Let's hear it for us Generalists!
ttyl
Farrell
BBS SysOp, Novell Admin, OS/2 pro, Linux Guru, Unix Adept, Practicing Druid (ADF), Calligrapher, Home Music Studio owner, Musician, SF Faan, SF Convention organizer, etc.
Was an early member of the Fidonet, one of the first 500 or so nodes. And was a founding member of Magicknet, which later became PODSnet. Information on PODSnet mailing lists, echos that have made the jump over to the Internet is available. Email me...farrellj@sympatico.fnordca Take away the fnord to get the real address.
ttyl
Farrell
SysOp, Data/SFnet & Solsbury Hill BBSs
The book did not come after the movie...it was written during the movie, and was finished before the movie was finally finished, that is why there is a difference between Jupiter and Saturn.
ttyl
Farrell
Back in the days of Electronic Bulletin Board Systems, many BBS softwares tried to "police" the language of the users, to make sure that words like Fuck, Shit, and all of that list of the famous 7 words and their cousins were not able to be posted...and many ways were found to get around this...so much so that they eventually gave up. Someone should have asked a computer historian if trying to block specific words would everwork...and saved a lot of time, money and frustration in this case.
ttyl
Farrell
Off the shelf in terms that the parts were all standard, they didn't design special screws to hold things in, they used standard screws...and so on.Helped reduce the cost of things. The fly-by-wire was almost 30 years ahead of it's time! Amazing!
ttyl
Farrell
All because the US forced us to kill the Avro Arrow project...the US doesn't like it when their allies make a better jet than they do! To think, a MACH 2 fighter with an operational ceiling of 50,000 feet, in 1957. It must have freaked the US. And it used all off-the-shelf tech. In a test flight, the prototype reach Mach 1.98 *CLIMBING*, and with less powerful engines. It's no wonder that NASA was able to put a man on the moon with a whole lot of Canadian Know-How.
ttyl
Farrell
In addition to the afor mentioned "Geometry, Relativity, and the 4th Dimension", there is also _The Sex Sphere_. The story is about a hyperdimenstional being by the name of Babs, and her interaction with the charactors in the book. Lots of fun, kinda kinky at times...and all based upon math! Well worth the read. ttyl Farrell
To combine the coolest technologies here for audio, it sounds like you would need the following for a "dream" system.
Plasma tweeters
Electrostatics for the midrange
Sub-Woofer for low range & subsonics
Add a nice tube amp or at least a harmon/kardon or my poor departed Pioneer Spec-2, a decent pre-am (I miss my Pioneer Spec-1 as well), a Nak cassette deck, revox linear track turntable (with good quality cartrige&needle), Ampex DVD with the "right" roms (maybe not that Hi-Fi, but worth it anyways to play out of zone DVDs), and a decent laptop to run MP3s...but when you have a system in this range...most MP3s really sound like shit. Now a DBX encoded vinyl LP of pipe organ music....that will show you what the difference is between a good analog system and the best digital.
Years from now they will bemoan the fact that so much music of the 20th and 21st centuries is almost unlistenable because it was released with only 16 bit at 44.1 KHertz!
ttyl
Farrell
This book is a Satire of the current day intellectual property trends. Violating copyright is a capital offence.
:-(
The main charactor McNihil, has an interesting name...Mc is a Gaelic construct that means "son of", and Nihil...nihilist, son of a nihilist...also, from Webster's Revised Unabridged
Dictionary:
-Nihil album (L., white nothing) (Chem.), oxide of zinc. See under (Zinc).
-Nihil debet (L., he owes nothing) (Law), the general issue in certain actions of debt.
-Nihil dicit (L., he says nothing) (Law), a declinature by the defendant to plead or answer.
Any of these can apply to our friend Mr. McNihil.
I am sure that if we took the time, we would find many other interesting things about all of the charactors names under similar analysis.
And I would disagree that there is no "cyberspace"...you see, the prowlers are essentially bio-robots that you can be linked
to, and vicariously do things, without catching a disease, or a tatoo. An interesting concept...tatoos that travel like a virus,
or chain letter. But the prowlers are the closest thing to cyberspace, since in this universe where copyright violation is a capital crime, what do you think they would do to hackers? You
can't have a consentual reality for VR, since you really can't share intellectual property. Thus you have ways to do it vicariosly...and since you own the prowler, what you do is your own IP.
Another name, "asp-head" comes from ASCAP, The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. These are the people that
collect royalties and pay them to the people who own the copyrights.
An error, he did not sell is wife to get his "Noir" eyes, he couldn't afford to pay off her debts to allow her to "die" peacefully, because he had his eyes modified (among other things, you laterfind out) You see, in this universe, if you die owning money, your creditors revive you, and sell off your body parts to pay off your debts. You can't escape debt by death.
There is also the reference to BDSM culture..."A bottom always want's to be topped", that is a submissive always find someone to dominate them. And that is how corperate people manage and
sell products. They call it "Pimp Style" management.
There is reference some of his other books, like Dr. Adder. Hence the Dr. Adder clomes (clome being another reference to an earlier work). I haven't read his other books in a long time, but this could be set in the same cyberpunk universe a few of his books are, which are excellent cyberpunk. I guess that is why he was chosen to do the "Bladerunner" books. I also like the fact that he used us Erisians as characators in some of his
early cyberpunk books.
I am a tad bit annoyed, since I was in the middle of re-reading the book to submit a Slashdot Review.
Hail Eris!
Farrell
I did Netware up to 3.x, and it was wonderfully stable. I upgraded a bunch of high schools' servers, and the had been been up an average of 3 years without a crash. I was moving them all to newer servers...A couple of the servers died physically when turned off and on again. The ones that had not been up that long had either been downed due to either hardware failure, or power outages longer than the life of their UPS. OS/2 was similarly stable. I ran a BBS on Fidonet for years on OS/2. It was only with the advent of MS-Windows that flakiness has been a common feature of popular computing.
ttyl
Farrell
Talk about hardening a server!
ttyl
Farrell
That's all I could think ofwhen I heard they were going to splash the station...
Image if this bug survies and likes plastic? We would be deaddeaddead.
ttyl
Farrell
With apologies to King Arthur & Co.
ttyl
Farrell
Truly, There Ain't No Justice!
Usually here I would insert the "Glad I live in Canada, not the States"...but I don't know if we are any better. I wish schools were about learning, not making drone factory workers!
ttyl
Farrell
Wow, this would make an excellent firewall machine!
ttyl
Farrell
I don't know about true broadband, but they are selling internet access through their phones in the ads they have on TV here in Canada.
Imagine! We will finally be able to get the internet on our dogsleads and in our ingloos! [please ignore the dripping sarcasim]
ttyl
Farrell
Last I saw, it was in the source code for BASH, it was a bash-script that you could run and turn all your commands into Adventure commands...the original AdventureSHELL had the nice feature that you could "feed" your documents to the printer daemon, and it would eat them...leaving no trace . You are supposed to throw it at the printer daemon if you want it to print it!
ttyl
Farrell
They use IDE drives...a great way to kill performance is using an IDE drive on a SUN arch. machine. Since your hard drive is used so heavily on a Unix machine, an IDE bus, which the wire is only 16 bit, makes for a huge bottleneck. That is what made the Ultra Workstations suck. So the first thing to do is add a SCSI interface, and dump the IDE drive. Although the 7200 RPM drives (Barracuda? I don't seem them using IBMs!) will help, I am sure you will be able to notice the difference.
Put it another way...my old SPARCStation 10 with a pair of 50 MHz processors feels about the same, speed wise, as my Celeron 366 system. Both running Slackware, it is only when I do some math-intensive computing that I really notice the difference.
ttyl
Farrell
Geepers, some of us have been watching Japanese Animation, Anime, since the 80s...Macross, which was repackaged for the NA market as Robotech, was a good show, and as was Lupin, Cat's Eye (my fave), Mobile Suit Gundam (which Canada's YTV has been playing recently), and a host of other shows were what we traded for, or watched at those who traded.
ttyl
Farrell
Early Adopter of...Anime, Linux, PCs, Paganism, etc...
Hal Clement is the name that Harry Stubbs uses when he writes Science Fiction. When he does astronomical artwork, he uses the name of George Richards. He is a member of First Fandom, meaning he predates almost all of us as a Science Fiction Fan, and was a Pilot during World War II. I have had the priveledge to have Hal/Harry/George as a guest at the Science Fiction convention that I helped to create and run, CANCON.
If you ever get a chance to meet him, please make the effort to do so, because he is a wonderful person to chat with, in addition to be a great writer, famous fan and talented artist.
ttyl
Farrell