Re: Good (not bad) article (interview)
on
Hacking Quartz
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'm with Twirlip; italics have their place (to emphasise words, titles, &c), and parentheses have their place (to set off supplementary text). You should only italicise a parenthesis if you want to emphasise it particularly in addition to setting it off from the main text; there's very rarely reason to do so.
Nothing personal, you understand:)
Oh, and while I'm in pedant mode, you probably meant 'sous chef' -- 'sous' being French for 'under'. A 'soup chef', if such a role exists, would be someone who only cooks soup, so would probably give you your filets mignons back uncooked, and tell you to take them to the head chef. Or the, er, sous chef...
HTML and PDF serve different purposes. One is designed (or at least, was originally designed) to describe the text, and leave the user's machine to decide how best to present it. In other words, the user has control over how they wish to view it -- what window size and shape, font size, colour, &c. You can view HTML across a massive 30" monitor, or on a PDA screen, and it should reformat as needed to be readable in each case.
PDF, on the other hand, is designed to present a fixed image. The layout, fonts, page size and shape, colours, &c are all fixed. In other words, the creator has control over every aspect of the document. Which is just what you need in some cases (e.g. technical documents, documents for printing). But it's not ideal for general reading.
The problem AISI is that authors want ultimate control over their documents. So many web authors try to control, or at least make assumptions about, the viewing environment, to the detriment of anyone who doesn't fit their narrow view. So they're naturally attracted to PDF, which gives ultimate control, not because the circumstances deserve it, but because it massages their egos.
Inappropriate PDFs are just a symptom of this battle for control.
Good point, but a little naive in this context. AIUI, we're looking at music that's already at CD quality (having lost a little or a lot, depending on how golden your ears are...), and then considering further loss.
Personally, I'm quite happy with 128kbps AAC, partly coz my non-golden ears can't hear much difference between that and CD, and partly coz even at that rate my music collection's pretty much filled my HD, and I value being able to listen to lots more stuff over an almost undetectable (by me) improvement in quality.
I'm not totally happy with DRM, though, so all my AACs are from my own CDs, or downloaded from various sources, mostly www.allofmp3.com.
Actually, come to mention it, that site could be rather relevant. Since it allows you to choose the format and bitrate for most tracks you download, even up to lossless for some of them, it'd be interesting to see what rates people choose. I suspect that 128 AAC and 192 MP3 are rather popular, and that much higher bitrates less so. Anyone have any info on this?
Erm... that's not a definition of 'perfect pitch' I've ever heard of. And I'm a muso, albeit an amateur one. More to the point, it's not a definition that either of my dictionaries (Chambers, Oxford) recognise. They both identify 'perfect pitch' with 'absolute pitch', the ability to recognise the pitch of a note, or sing any given note.
BTW, it's not a skill that's necessarily of much use. (I don't have it, for example; I do have rather good relative pitch, with which I can recognise intervals, and pitch notes relative to others.) Although it can be useful for getting starting notes when singing unaccompanied, it severely hinders your ability to transpose music, e.g. singing something in a different key.
Anyway, I can't see how either relative or absolute pitch have much to do with hearing audio compression artefacts. IME, musos are generally pretty bad at hearing things like that -- I think it's because we're so used to listening to the music -- the texture, harmonies, rhythms, timbre, melodies, structure, arrangement, &c, that we're simply not listening for the same sorts of things that audiophiles do; maybe we even mentally 'fill in' any imperfections!
He's right, though, it is called X-Windows. It may not be called that by the authors, but it's called that by the majority of people that call it anything at all. It may not be the official name, but lots of people call it that, ergo, among other names, that's what it is called.
I've just joined allofmp3. You basically pay $0.01 per MB you download. (Aside: it's great! Pretty good range of stuff, great site, and you can choose the audio format and bitrate you want.)
I also buy the odd ebook &c from Fictionwise. Prices for short stories are only a few cents.
In both these cases, it's simply not feasible to pay for each purchase by VISA or whatever, so each one maintains an account for me; I can fill the balance on this account in large enough chunks via VISA or whatever, and can then use it to pay for music or books as necessary.
This is a workable solution; however, it's hassle for the web site keeping track of everyone's accounts &c, and it's hassle for me remembering that they hold a certain (small) amount of my money. It'd be much better all round if I could pay small amounts straight from my CC or whatever.
If he just meant that, he might have said 'have sex', 'make love', 'shag', 'get down to it', 'have intercourse', 'screw', or any of the thousands of other terms and euphemisms we have.
But he didn't. He chose that particular word, with all its stark Anglo-Saxon sound, its history of offence and transgression, and its incongruity. DNA was clearly an author who cared about the words he used, and he must have chosen that one carefully. So I can only assume he intended it to be, well, shocking. Or at least notably crude.
But if a name itself isn't a big thing, then why should they need it?
The argument doesn't make sense either way: if it's just a name, and not something they can use to identify you, then there's no reason they should compel you to provide it. And if it is about unique ID, then you should be afraid. Very afraid.
'Sokay, we don't mind. As long as we can refer to the US as 'the 40th county'!
(Except, of course, that the number of counties varies a lot depending on whether you're talking about traditional divisions, administrative areas, postal districts -- and when...)
would expand to all the filenames you wanted. Alternatively,
cd/cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/Anonymous\ Coward/My\ Documents/My\ Music echo **/a*.mp3
would do it a lot easier. You don't need to muck about with option, pipes, &c.
And zsh handles most of find's more advanced options -- it's dead easy to select files based on permissions, type, owner, group, access times, size, results of executing a shell command, you name it; and you can control the sorting of results &c.
I'm really surprised zsh is not more widely used. It's free, it's supplied as standard with OSs such as Mac OS X, it can pretend to be ksh but does just about everything that bash and other modern shells do too.
(I have no interest other than as a happy user who's pleased not to have to use find any more!)
The root problem, AISI, is with the law that would make ISPs liable for the content they host. If they had full common-carrier protection (not just until they were notified), then none of this would happen -- if people had a beef with web content, they'd have to take it up with whoever's running the site, not the ISP.
Of course, that could still leave them in plenty of trouble, but that's no worse than any other medium; and meanwhile, they can decide for themselves whether to remove the content, and/or they can post a public defence.
The difference is that M$ was (is?) able to use its monopoly power to effectively force dealers to include their applications, and exclude others'. That was unfair.
Apple has no such hold over them -- they are free to include iTunes or not, and/or include other music software. It's their free choice, which is fair.
I find it strange and depressing that a community which is, in general, so careful and precise about its use of computer languages, should be so cavalier in its treatment of human ones...
Wasn't '\Program Files' chosen deliberately, so that the length and the embedded space would break programs that weren't aware of the (then-new) long filenames? I think they were hoping this would encourage developers to make everything long-filename-aware ASAP.
If the licence allows code to be copied into Linux or whatever, doesn't it also allow code to be copied from Linux or whatever? Maybe Sun can gain directly from this, too?
The day someone can buy a printer that comes with a CD, stick the CD into the drive, a menu comes up to install the binary driver, and afterward the printer works.
No. The day Linux is good enough to win over users from other OSs is the day when you plug in your printer and it just works. You shouldn't need to faff around with drivers or CDs at all, let alone config files or whatever.
Seriously, I think this illustrates a major failing. With the amount of technology and cleverness that's gone into the various bits of Unix, you'd think that getting stuff like printers working would be easy. And yet folk don't even seem to aim as high as MS on that score, let alone what's possible.
Maybe things are different where you're from. My degree is perfectly valid: B.Sc. (Hons) (Dunelm) -- from Durham University, UK. The late Sir Peter Ustinov was chancellor at the time; I got to shake his hand. (Claim to fame!)
I don't think this is anything you have to worry about, really. As someone with an honours degree in mathematics, I can't really see the connection between RPN and the chain rule, either:)
I wouldn't worry too much about a flash calculator, either. The important things in mathematics go on in your head, and on paper. The basic arithmetic functions are jolly useful, and the trig functions (ideally including hyperbolic ones) can be quite handy, but if you can't work out the graph of a function yourself, then a calculator isn't really going to help you.
What I found helpful when learning calculus was to think of it in mechanical terms where possible. Functions and graphs can be a bit abstract, but calculus is really about rates of change, and I found that thinking in terms of speeds and accelerations tended to give me a good mental picture of what was going on, at least to start with.
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Nothing personal, you understand :)
Oh, and while I'm in pedant mode, you probably meant 'sous chef' -- 'sous' being French for 'under'. A 'soup chef', if such a role exists, would be someone who only cooks soup, so would probably give you your filets mignons back uncooked, and tell you to take them to the head chef. Or the, er, sous chef...
I vote for 'OS XI'. Pronounced 'Oh, sexy!'.
You don't think that Psion getting there nine years earlier counts, then? Even the Series 3 beat the Newton by a couple of years.
HTML and PDF serve different purposes. One is designed (or at least, was originally designed) to describe the text, and leave the user's machine to decide how best to present it. In other words, the user has control over how they wish to view it -- what window size and shape, font size, colour, &c. You can view HTML across a massive 30" monitor, or on a PDA screen, and it should reformat as needed to be readable in each case.
PDF, on the other hand, is designed to present a fixed image. The layout, fonts, page size and shape, colours, &c are all fixed. In other words, the creator has control over every aspect of the document. Which is just what you need in some cases (e.g. technical documents, documents for printing). But it's not ideal for general reading.
The problem AISI is that authors want ultimate control over their documents. So many web authors try to control, or at least make assumptions about, the viewing environment, to the detriment of anyone who doesn't fit their narrow view. So they're naturally attracted to PDF, which gives ultimate control, not because the circumstances deserve it, but because it massages their egos.
Inappropriate PDFs are just a symptom of this battle for control.
Personally, I'm quite happy with 128kbps AAC, partly coz my non-golden ears can't hear much difference between that and CD, and partly coz even at that rate my music collection's pretty much filled my HD, and I value being able to listen to lots more stuff over an almost undetectable (by me) improvement in quality.
I'm not totally happy with DRM, though, so all my AACs are from my own CDs, or downloaded from various sources, mostly www.allofmp3.com.
Actually, come to mention it, that site could be rather relevant. Since it allows you to choose the format and bitrate for most tracks you download, even up to lossless for some of them, it'd be interesting to see what rates people choose. I suspect that 128 AAC and 192 MP3 are rather popular, and that much higher bitrates less so. Anyone have any info on this?
BTW, it's not a skill that's necessarily of much use. (I don't have it, for example; I do have rather good relative pitch, with which I can recognise intervals, and pitch notes relative to others.) Although it can be useful for getting starting notes when singing unaccompanied, it severely hinders your ability to transpose music, e.g. singing something in a different key.
Anyway, I can't see how either relative or absolute pitch have much to do with hearing audio compression artefacts. IME, musos are generally pretty bad at hearing things like that -- I think it's because we're so used to listening to the music -- the texture, harmonies, rhythms, timbre, melodies, structure, arrangement, &c, that we're simply not listening for the same sorts of things that audiophiles do; maybe we even mentally 'fill in' any imperfections!
He's right, though, it is called X-Windows. It may not be called that by the authors, but it's called that by the majority of people that call it anything at all. It may not be the official name, but lots of people call it that, ergo, among other names, that's what it is called.
I've just joined allofmp3. You basically pay $0.01 per MB you download. (Aside: it's great! Pretty good range of stuff, great site, and you can choose the audio format and bitrate you want.)
I also buy the odd ebook &c from Fictionwise. Prices for short stories are only a few cents.
In both these cases, it's simply not feasible to pay for each purchase by VISA or whatever, so each one maintains an account for me; I can fill the balance on this account in large enough chunks via VISA or whatever, and can then use it to pay for music or books as necessary.
This is a workable solution; however, it's hassle for the web site keeping track of everyone's accounts &c, and it's hassle for me remembering that they hold a certain (small) amount of my money. It'd be much better all round if I could pay small amounts straight from my CC or whatever.
But he didn't. He chose that particular word, with all its stark Anglo-Saxon sound, its history of offence and transgression, and its incongruity. DNA was clearly an author who cared about the words he used, and he must have chosen that one carefully. So I can only assume he intended it to be, well, shocking. Or at least notably crude.
Hmmm... How do I break this to you gently?
The argument doesn't make sense either way: if it's just a name, and not something they can use to identify you, then there's no reason they should compel you to provide it. And if it is about unique ID, then you should be afraid. Very afraid.
(Except, of course, that the number of counties varies a lot depending on whether you're talking about traditional divisions, administrative areas, postal districts -- and when...)
zsh's recursive file completion has made find unnecessary for me -- in your example here, the expression
would expand to all the filenames you wanted. Alternatively, would do it a lot easier. You don't need to muck about with option, pipes, &c.And zsh handles most of find's more advanced options -- it's dead easy to select files based on permissions, type, owner, group, access times, size, results of executing a shell command, you name it; and you can control the sorting of results &c.
I'm really surprised zsh is not more widely used. It's free, it's supplied as standard with OSs such as Mac OS X, it can pretend to be ksh but does just about everything that bash and other modern shells do too.
(I have no interest other than as a happy user who's pleased not to have to use find any more!)
Erm, you are aware that Windows 2000 was effectively NT 5? And that Windows XP is effectively NT 5.1?
Of course, that could still leave them in plenty of trouble, but that's no worse than any other medium; and meanwhile, they can decide for themselves whether to remove the content, and/or they can post a public defence.
Apple has no such hold over them -- they are free to include iTunes or not, and/or include other music software. It's their free choice, which is fair.
Er, no, it doesn't 'beg' the question. It raises it without answering it, certainly; but that's not what begging a question means.
Begging a question is assuming it, using it in a circular argument.
[pontificate mode: on]
I find it strange and depressing that a community which is, in general, so careful and precise about its use of computer languages, should be so cavalier in its treatment of human ones...
Wasn't '\Program Files' chosen deliberately, so that the length and the embedded space would break programs that weren't aware of the (then-new) long filenames? I think they were hoping this would encourage developers to make everything long-filename-aware ASAP.
If the licence allows code to be copied into Linux or whatever, doesn't it also allow code to be copied from Linux or whatever? Maybe Sun can gain directly from this, too?
No. The day Linux is good enough to win over users from other OSs is the day when you plug in your printer and it just works. You shouldn't need to faff around with drivers or CDs at all, let alone config files or whatever.
Seriously, I think this illustrates a major failing. With the amount of technology and cleverness that's gone into the various bits of Unix, you'd think that getting stuff like printers working would be easy. And yet folk don't even seem to aim as high as MS on that score, let alone what's possible.
(Some of us would have properly capitalised 'English', too...)
Yes, but you'll never get the advertising industry to realise or admit this. Not as long as they measure their success in direct click-throughs...
Maybe things are different where you're from. My degree is perfectly valid: B.Sc. (Hons) (Dunelm) -- from Durham University, UK. The late Sir Peter Ustinov was chancellor at the time; I got to shake his hand. (Claim to fame!)
I wouldn't worry too much about a flash calculator, either. The important things in mathematics go on in your head, and on paper. The basic arithmetic functions are jolly useful, and the trig functions (ideally including hyperbolic ones) can be quite handy, but if you can't work out the graph of a function yourself, then a calculator isn't really going to help you.
What I found helpful when learning calculus was to think of it in mechanical terms where possible. Functions and graphs can be a bit abstract, but calculus is really about rates of change, and I found that thinking in terms of speeds and accelerations tended to give me a good mental picture of what was going on, at least to start with.
Oh, aren't most of them written and directed by robots already?