Eh, what's that sonny? I used a 6-button turbo trackball on the mac from system 8 on. But you're right about the crashy business, some machines just kept chuggin' along, and some just wouldn't go for more than a few minutes. System 7 - 9, any flavour of windows and NT, they all worked like a charm or had gremlins ('winfax' --- shudder). But we still got the work done.
There's nothing I hate more than being slave to my mouse.
I agree that having to hack the system (see above re: stability) folder in order to get full keyboard navigation was boneheaded design. But it didn't really matter after I got Keyquencer, which as an OS X'er I miss, since most important operations got reduced to a key combination macro -- fast, rock solid, make the machine do backflips, really, anything nearly, one program saved me months. But this newfangled 'nixy goodness is like being young again, roaming through the university network, even if the interface isn't as productive to old farts like me (I still boot up the old toastermac for fun sometimes), running with no reboot for 5 months at a time makes up for it.
I majored in economics in college. I have been to lectures at Columbia, NYU, and half a dozen other "top" univerities and colleges. I was raised on stock market analysis, had issues of Value Line sitting around when I was a kid, and was reading John Stewart Mill before most people in this discussion were born.... That statement is utter and complete horseshit.
Obviously you skipped out on some of your literature classes, or they've faded into the dim mists of the ages, as RTFP comes to mind...
You can talk all the Fortune Magazine eyewash you want to the great empty-headed sheep out there but don't try peddling it here on/. where quite a few of us make our livings as real systems optimizers. We know better.... Take a look at the SAP implementation at Pierson and come back and try again.
You aren't writing at me, are you? do I need to put sarcasm tags around everything with a hint of irony? You do realize that I'm agreeing with you all the while you're frothing at me? My semi-old-fartedness [same age] and non-fortune1000-ladder experiences corroborate yours. I even resorted to rooftop garden projects myself, so chill.
1. Window washing residences and commercial storefronts. Pros: startup costs approximately $300 for a good ladder, promo materials, and proper Ettore squeegee gear; once you get in the groove, it's a great job for an active mind to roam. Cons: not as easy as it sounds, you need to learn some tricks to get your speed and quality up. Most storefronts already have windowwasher contractors.
2. Landscaping. -1 redundant, 'nuf said.
3. Document prep: I used to do wordprocessing on my rare and ubermodern Atari. That morphed with time and tech into desktop publishing, a universally needed and generally badly done activity. Pros: Once you get some design principles down, not too hard to float above the scum. Cons: everyone thinks they're a designer, and only the good get paid well; as well, the client will always revise things at the last minute.
4. Databases for small business. It blows me away how many retail and service businesses use crappy data management. I did this in Filemaker because it's good at interfaces (incl. web-based) and flexible form queries (good for users, challenging for developing) as well as cross platform and cheap (at the time). Perfect for that segment, fast to develop in so good cash. Nowadays I'd do it in MySQL with a browser interface when possible, ymmv. Pros: only a few of these contracts needed over a summer, so you can market F2F, and it's a great ladder up to other IT as it often requires some basic networking too. Cons: clients can really take you for a ride through feature creep and not knowing what they really need.
5. Oh, I can't bring myself to admit to this one.
6. Tutoring. -2 Redundant.
7. Sell stuff over the 'net. Set up a website with shopping cart, go nuts marketing (short of spamdammit). Good way to do this is to find a distribution problem (eg. partner with some local craftspeople who're good but not getting their stuff out there). Or work ebay, work it hard, hit all the estate sales. Pros: flexibility, no F2F with nutty clients, decent $ opportunity. Cons: risk of a serious bomb.
8. Sell souvlaki on a nude beach. OK, you may not have the opportunity to do this, but hey! what a great entrepeneurial summer job that was. Mind you, I cashed a good portion of my profits on the all-too-available cold beer supplies at same beach. Pros: who cares if it doesn't go on your resume...;-) Cons: sand in everything, and moldy pita bread.
It's more than just a joke. A group of online friends and I who led quite innocent lives at the time decided that one solution to the developing surveillance of email (this was about '95-8) was to munge our sig files with noise; thus, benign conversations were finished off by keywords that would be sure to catch any filters. [Things like AK-47, bomb, cocaine, etc. as in the parent, only more thorough.] Our hope was to be mildly irritating, a gentle kind of monkeywrenching, in order to discourage any hidden observers.
Of course, no clue as to whether the 30 of us made a whit of difference.
If something's in the air, it's only natural that people working on the same problem will be influenced by the ideas that are already out there, then come to the same or similar conclusions. Not all the duplication in blogs is unethical, nor would it be fair to characterize it as mere coincidence.
Just one typical example: After finishing a grad thesis, then going to a conference to give a lecture, I sat through an excruciating keynote that preceeded my presentation. Not that it was boring or bad, it just stated some of my core themes, and came to conclusions that, when I was writing, I thought were rare, if not unique. I distinctly remember my supervisor sitting two rows in front of me turning around to give me the ol' raised eyebrows look, as if to say, "did you plagiarize her?" and me shrugging deflatedly.
Hey, who called MBA's evil? I just said semi-mockingly that they have a secret, or at least get exposed to a taboo: that enhancing shareholder value is the foundation of any ethics at a publicly-held company. Or haven't you got to that stage of synthesizing your studies yet?
I myself have worked for a variety of ethically-conscious corporations: but they've been either private or not-for-profit corporations, so that gave me some perspective on the range of dilemmas. The publicly held companies I've worked for realized shareholder value at the expense of good global citizenship, virtual individuals [without the full range of responsibility of a meat individual, and pathological liars to boot] run by some really nice people, who act like assholes when making business decisions.
You'll see. It's easier to convince yourself that you're not being an asshole if you don't consider the full impact of your decisions and actions.
If you're an asshole now, as a person or a corporation, it will come back to get you one way or another.
Oh how I wish that were more true. Maybe it is in some narrow sense, like with a service-oriented company (are you listening Intuit?), but not for the nut-and-bolts economy, and certainly not with nasties like Monsanto, BASF, those who financed the Nazis and supplied them with vehicles and steel (ad infinitum with other totalitarian states), land-mine and explosive toy manufacturers, and Haliburton (and the like, who plan ahead on profiting from the more gruesome effects of war). The list just goes on: profitable companies, propelled ahead through innovations and opportunity-making designed by assholes. And I mean that in a relative sense, because even though the sweatshop economy ultimately relies on assholes farther down the chain, there are few other options, so even nice companies/managers have to choose these parts/products. Generally, there is an alternative, a kinder gentler friendlier and oh yeah ethical route, but it doesn't enhance shareholder value.
Sure it's not honorable, but it's something any large business would do.
Look, stop saying things like that, people. You're giving away the MBA secret that big business is not honourable.
OK, it's not really a secret, just a taboo topic unless you're the so-called left-loonie fringe trying to change it. The amazing thing is, so many accept this kind of underlying failure of democracy and free markets without so much as a shrug! So is MS a success story or a travesty to you?
The reason that there are no references to other worlds or ETs is that these desert nomads didn't have the vaguest concept that such things might exist.
Well, they had an existing mythology full of angels, demons, and other beings to populate, and visions or experiences or whatever got shoehorned into it. Then there's some wild 'n crazy stuff like Ezekiel (maybe after eating some slightly off rye;-)
I looked, and I saw a windstorm coming out of the north-- an immense cloud with flashing lighting and surrounded by brilliant light. The center of the fire looked like glowing metal, and in the fire was what looked like four living creatures. In appearance their form was that of a man, but each of them had four faces and four wings.
Their legs were straight; their feet were like those of a calf and gleamed like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had the hands of a man. All four of them had faces and wings, and their wings touched one another. Each one went straight ahead; they did not turn as they moved. (1:4-9)
Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a man, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. Such were their faces. Their wings were spread out upward; each had two wings, one touching the wing of another creature on either side, and two wings covering its body. Each one went straight ahead. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, without turning as they went. The appearance of the living creatures was like burning coals of fire or like torches; it was bright, and lightning flashed out of it. The creatures sped back and forth like flashes of lightning. (1:10-14)
As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces. This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like chrysolite, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel. As they moved, they would go in any one of the four directions the creatures faced; the wheels did not turn about as the creatures went. their rims were high and awesome, and all four rims were full of eyes all around. (1:15-18)
When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures rose from the ground, the wheels also rose. Wherever the spirit would go, they would go, and the wheels would rise along with them, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels... When the creatures moved, I heard the sound of their wings, like the roar of the Almighty, like the tumult of an army. (1:19-20, 24,)
One of the interesting things was the bacteria and molds that the scientists hid within some of the probes to "seed" Mars. And in defiance of some of their collegues that wanted a pristine Mars.
Even more interesting is KSR's exploration of the tension between culture, faith, science, and politics, leading to a series of really complex contradictions expressed as a movement. The Reds (mars' version of our Greens) resort to sabotage and an underground in order to reverse terraforming, according to a kind of scientific-spiritual code of respect for the new wilderness. If you can stand the occasional boredom of 300 year-olds with memory loss, the trilogy's a good mix of hard SF and political conjecture.
The last version of WP that ran on the Mac carried the version number 3.5e. It's a pretty nice wordprocessor, with a metatoolbar that allows you to pop toolbars open as you need them, and other features that were great in 1997 (the year that Apple was gonna die, remember?). Corel killed it after that, made it available for free for awhile, and now you can't even download it from their site.
Once you've updated it properly, it runs fine in classic mode, and is pretty zippy. I have to use it periodically because the university I work at monomaniacally standardized on wintel (despite having healthy fine arts, media, and comp sci depts., duh) and many use WP, so us mac users constantly receive official missives attached as a.wpd file. Fortunately, the old mac application opens even new files without choking.
Re:Minimize CPU usage, Maximize distance from the
on
Quieting Your G5?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Anything from Avid or digidesign is going to suck your CPU dry, even if it's a 14THz quad with the cosmic quantum option. [cynic] Means they can leverage their proprietary hardware better. [/cynic] It also means they can guarantee throughput and latency.
Another option for voiceovers is to use a simple recording tool, there are some free and or cheap programs on freshmeat or versiontracker, and they won't use the entire energy output of Hydro Quebec to do it.
Hi. I'm right now spec'ing out a handful of TRV-22's for teaching entry level video editing. They're a good price point and fairly good quality, with some reliability.
And, they're EASY. Easy, easy, easy. Video tech here is Mac-based. Here's how it works:
1. shoot video 2. boot computer 3. turn on camera (make sure it's set to video not stills), set to Play or VTR, plug iLink port on camera to firewire 400 port on computer using a 4-6 pin $12 cable 4. boot up iMovie/FCP/whatever 5. capture your footage
Really, that's all. Oh, well, for stills it's a bit different:
1. shoot photos 2. boot computer 3. turn on camera, set to stills (or card) playback 4. plug USB cable into camera and keyboard 5. sit back and wait for iPhoto, then import
As always, RTFM! In this case that's about 20 minutes investment. Once you've done that, you can worry about gotchas, like having to eject a USB connection, or whether to leave your camera plugged in by firewire between any reboots (don't - but you're using OS X, why reboot?).
I guess I'm going to disappoint you, but here's my view of that.
Wow, you just jumped all over that "other fields" thing, eh? That was an aside, merely a nod to the unknown. I'm really just asking about EM here. The emissions at the skin that I mentioned were in reference to the 150mV/mm or so that happen around a wound, or the general battery-like potential of the skin (you can see this exploited if your physiotherapist ever uses 'transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation' for pain management, common enough though not really understood).
What I really am looking for is an index of the frequencies and strength of various EM emissions that have been observed in and around the human body.
As for the intercellular wireless systems, what would be the need for them if the cells are already connected through bloodstream, hormones, neural signals, etc.?
Well, we don't really know, do we? The body is as mysterious as the cosmos. But my buddy thinks it might explain how we go through such rapid and massive mitosis while sleeping, or why some cellular reactions seem to happen faster than the chemical/neural vector would allow, and he was talking about something way over my head, cell reprogramming or some such. Anyway, it doesn't take much imagination to answer your question "why" more fundamentally: for speed, redundancy, reliability, maybe?
Great! so can you confirm for us that endogenous electrical (& other) fields are hardly studied beyond specifics like embryonic organ development and healing, and some particular emission at the skin? Also, anyone have a link to information about the frequencies and intensities of endogenous EMF generated by humans?
A geneticist I know thinks there may be a case for something like an intercellular wireless system inside the body, and the idea's been rattling around in me cranium.
OH yes. Welcome to the wonderful wacky world of MKULTRA.
This is the true origin of the tinfoil hat stuff! And damn if they aren't still doinGHGHRSKKKKKT&!ffftt...er...
It's a good thing that militaries around the world stopped all that research; anyone who tells you otherwise just needs a little prozac.
Re:Controlling sexual predators through technology
on
Mind Over Machine
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· Score: 1
Try thinking about not breathing without thinking about breathing.
The classic example used in phenomenology that I've read is "try not to think of a white bear"-- which since it is an image derived from speech shows how we experience the world around us in a sociolinguistic sense (among other things).
Being aware of breathing without thinking about it is a trick used by Theravada and some Vipassana Buddhism as well as some Zen to demonstrate the impulsive nature of thinking and to train in awareness without sociolinguistic overlay [OK that's my non-buddhist interpretation, not canon]. However, the interesting thing is that sometimes it does happen, something difficult to describe.
i am a bipedal broadcast station
on
Mind Over Machine
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Just another bipedal bag of mineral salts and trace elements capable of complex EMF broadcasting at low-range, subtle super-conduction at room temperature, and high-voltage carpet-capacitance pitching in my 2 coppers here...
Look developers, just get speech recognition running already, willya? If what your software does to my luminous eloquence is any example of the current state of interface tech, that thinking-cap UI is going to lead to some pretty psychedelic dyslexic synaesthesia in photoshop once it gets that olfactory plugin I've been waiting for...
are there other people who have been doing this for a while?
Hildegard Westerkamp wrote about Walkmans and personal audio space as a key part of her 1988 thesis "Listening and Soundmaking-A Study of Music-as- Environment", but the World Soundscape Project generally had a pretty good analysis of this right from the beginning of the phenomenon.
The composer R. Murray Shafer's concept of "schizophonia" became used to describe an effect of electroacoustic tech: essentially something you hear that happens in another place and time. Barry Truax's definitive book Acoustic Communication develops the whole idea further.
The thing about PLD's is that they supplant the actual soundscape with a soundtrack, often a remedy to noise and stress but usually just fun. There may be a long-term chronic danger from extreme schizophonia, but I don't think it's been studied empirically. Soundscape studies is fringe, most of the work being done in the area is engineering and psych.
Yes, we know that the Apple curve is below the Dell curve for that fucking supercomputer you've spec'd out. But do the same comparison on equipment that would be okay for most home users, and it's a bit of a different story
True, but the grandparent post asked us to imagine a cheaper decked-out g5.
However, other factors come into play when considering value for most home users, who don't care about rendering speed: they want things to just damn well work like an appliance. Cheap Dells are, well, cheap and MS-laden, and you pay for junk later instead of up front. Price is no simple scale of comparison when there's little basis for equivalence. Even old used iMacs sell for more than those new bottom-end Dells, which is another measure of value -- they're worth it.
OK so they aren't exactly equivalent. The Dell includes a floppy; the Apple's missing a mouse button. More, the Apple comes with optical sound connects, firewire800, and gigabit ethernet (no mention of the Dell's onboard networking in the summary). The Superdrive is way better than the Dell's DVD+RW. The Dell has a better video card by a bit. Some think that the Xeons would be faster but that probably depends heavily on application, and the g5's have a huge bus bandwidth. Not to mention other technology differences underneath it all, like case design and wireless integration. Oh, and, umm, bundled software and the operating systems.
Disclaimer: I'm comparing Apples and Dells because they're tier 1 manufacturers and people think Dells are cheap.
So, like, DUDE! why is the Dell costing $1600+ more than the Apple? Is it worth it? Which one is better made, longer lasting, which one is faster over all, which the better deal?
"Windows is the best platform for specifically running a flower shop."
That depends on how specific their needs are. A custom filemaker database can cost under $1000 and be both very user friendly and precisely matched to small retailers' needs. Filemaker's a great tool for small retailers and non-profits, because of the customizable cross platform solutions out there for them.
what kind of a world would we be in if silence becomes patented?
Noisy.
It doesn't really matter, anyway, silence (meaning quiet, really) has suffered the "tragedy of the commons" and barely exists. There are almost no acoustic wildernesses left (where you can't hear internal combustion, eg.) and silence has become a golden commodity reflected in real estate values and construction techniques. We're habituated to the constant hum of fans and machinery and all policy decisions on the topic are oriented towards noise reduction, not quiet protection; technological solutions are generally oriented towards masking or reduction, not noise elimination.
In communication studies, silence is like the water we fish swim in: everyone notices it's there, but almost no-one studies it. Without some degree of relative silence, acoustic communication is impossible. We've traded some of that away for progress, and the results are subtle but disturbing.
That's a good start for a list; MPLAB and PSPICE are the kind of extremely specialized products that we want to see under development for OS X and getting distribution through freshmeat.net. I'll wager that there are equivalent special apps in different areas that are mac-only for now, as well, (plug-ins etc. for creative producers, eg.) so it isn't an earth shattering difference. Certainly, for me, I keep looking at Linux as an option as a media producer, but the tools just aren't there in an integrated and rapidly useable way--and I don't have the money or time to run a wintel-based production shop, despite many clued-out pressures to do so.
As far as freeware imageviewers and muddding options, you wouldn't likely have to work too hard to find acceptable options on OS X. Our scanning station is Win2K (lousy HP drivers!) and irfanview can be a real limiter at times, so we wound up springing for photoshop, which now integrates nicely with our macs that do the heavy lifting. However, we still use Preview.app and iPhoto with Photoshop for rapid file management (despite their warts).
It all depends on what one needs. This thread doesn't establish any general superior suitability of any platform. For (vastly) most wintel users, however, OS X may be more what they need than what they're using.
By filming in Canada, the production companies don't have to pay union rates to the hordes of support personal required to make the films.
I call hooey on you. You can't make a feature-length mainstream in Vancouver without relying heavily on IATSE local 891. They're just too useful.
No, every Amurrican producer/director I've talked to about working in Canada describes the experience as dominated by working with extremely skilled and unassuming crews and actors (the phrase that keeps coming up is that they don't have the 'sense of entitlement' that crews in LA do).
The Hollywood North thing isn't about union-busting so much as about exchange rate and financial incentives, great locations, and really good resources when it comes to crew, facilities, and post.
California Bud's pretty legendary too, so I don't think it's that... uh,
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, what's that sonny? I used a 6-button turbo trackball on the mac from system 8 on. But you're right about the crashy business, some machines just kept chuggin' along, and some just wouldn't go for more than a few minutes. System 7 - 9, any flavour of windows and NT, they all worked like a charm or had gremlins ('winfax' --- shudder). But we still got the work done.
There's nothing I hate more than being slave to my mouse.
I agree that having to hack the system (see above re: stability) folder in order to get full keyboard navigation was boneheaded design. But it didn't really matter after I got Keyquencer, which as an OS X'er I miss, since most important operations got reduced to a key combination macro -- fast, rock solid, make the machine do backflips, really, anything nearly, one program saved me months. But this newfangled 'nixy goodness is like being young again, roaming through the university network, even if the interface isn't as productive to old farts like me (I still boot up the old toastermac for fun sometimes), running with no reboot for 5 months at a time makes up for it.
Obviously you skipped out on some of your literature classes, or they've faded into the dim mists of the ages, as RTFP comes to mind...
You can talk all the Fortune Magazine eyewash you want to the great empty-headed sheep out there but don't try peddling it here on /. where quite a few of us make our livings as real systems optimizers. We know better. ... Take a look at the SAP implementation at Pierson and come back and try again.
You aren't writing at me, are you? do I need to put sarcasm tags around everything with a hint of irony? You do realize that I'm agreeing with you all the while you're frothing at me? My semi-old-fartedness [same age] and non-fortune1000-ladder experiences corroborate yours. I even resorted to rooftop garden projects myself, so chill.
1. Window washing residences and commercial storefronts. Pros: startup costs approximately $300 for a good ladder, promo materials, and proper Ettore squeegee gear; once you get in the groove, it's a great job for an active mind to roam. Cons: not as easy as it sounds, you need to learn some tricks to get your speed and quality up. Most storefronts already have windowwasher contractors.
;-) Cons: sand in everything, and moldy pita bread.
2. Landscaping. -1 redundant, 'nuf said.
3. Document prep: I used to do wordprocessing on my rare and ubermodern Atari. That morphed with time and tech into desktop publishing, a universally needed and generally badly done activity. Pros: Once you get some design principles down, not too hard to float above the scum. Cons: everyone thinks they're a designer, and only the good get paid well; as well, the client will always revise things at the last minute.
4. Databases for small business. It blows me away how many retail and service businesses use crappy data management. I did this in Filemaker because it's good at interfaces (incl. web-based) and flexible form queries (good for users, challenging for developing) as well as cross platform and cheap (at the time). Perfect for that segment, fast to develop in so good cash. Nowadays I'd do it in MySQL with a browser interface when possible, ymmv. Pros: only a few of these contracts needed over a summer, so you can market F2F, and it's a great ladder up to other IT as it often requires some basic networking too. Cons: clients can really take you for a ride through feature creep and not knowing what they really need.
5. Oh, I can't bring myself to admit to this one.
6. Tutoring. -2 Redundant.
7. Sell stuff over the 'net. Set up a website with shopping cart, go nuts marketing (short of spamdammit). Good way to do this is to find a distribution problem (eg. partner with some local craftspeople who're good but not getting their stuff out there). Or work ebay, work it hard, hit all the estate sales. Pros: flexibility, no F2F with nutty clients, decent $ opportunity. Cons: risk of a serious bomb.
8. Sell souvlaki on a nude beach. OK, you may not have the opportunity to do this, but hey! what a great entrepeneurial summer job that was. Mind you, I cashed a good portion of my profits on the all-too-available cold beer supplies at same beach. Pros: who cares if it doesn't go on your resume...
It's more than just a joke. A group of online friends and I who led quite innocent lives at the time decided that one solution to the developing surveillance of email (this was about '95-8) was to munge our sig files with noise; thus, benign conversations were finished off by keywords that would be sure to catch any filters. [Things like AK-47, bomb, cocaine, etc. as in the parent, only more thorough.] Our hope was to be mildly irritating, a gentle kind of monkeywrenching, in order to discourage any hidden observers.
Of course, no clue as to whether the 30 of us made a whit of difference.
Just one typical example: After finishing a grad thesis, then going to a conference to give a lecture, I sat through an excruciating keynote that preceeded my presentation. Not that it was boring or bad, it just stated some of my core themes, and came to conclusions that, when I was writing, I thought were rare, if not unique. I distinctly remember my supervisor sitting two rows in front of me turning around to give me the ol' raised eyebrows look, as if to say, "did you plagiarize her?" and me shrugging deflatedly.
[aside: the conference in question was "The Tuning of the World" and the keynote was "Silence and the Notion of the Commons" by Ursula Franklin. While I was honoured to be in illustrious company, I felt badly upstaged.]
Hey, who called MBA's evil? I just said semi-mockingly that they have a secret, or at least get exposed to a taboo: that enhancing shareholder value is the foundation of any ethics at a publicly-held company. Or haven't you got to that stage of synthesizing your studies yet?
I myself have worked for a variety of ethically-conscious corporations: but they've been either private or not-for-profit corporations, so that gave me some perspective on the range of dilemmas. The publicly held companies I've worked for realized shareholder value at the expense of good global citizenship, virtual individuals [without the full range of responsibility of a meat individual, and pathological liars to boot] run by some really nice people, who act like assholes when making business decisions.
You'll see. It's easier to convince yourself that you're not being an asshole if you don't consider the full impact of your decisions and actions.
Oh how I wish that were more true. Maybe it is in some narrow sense, like with a service-oriented company (are you listening Intuit?), but not for the nut-and-bolts economy, and certainly not with nasties like Monsanto, BASF, those who financed the Nazis and supplied them with vehicles and steel (ad infinitum with other totalitarian states), land-mine and explosive toy manufacturers, and Haliburton (and the like, who plan ahead on profiting from the more gruesome effects of war). The list just goes on: profitable companies, propelled ahead through innovations and opportunity-making designed by assholes. And I mean that in a relative sense, because even though the sweatshop economy ultimately relies on assholes farther down the chain, there are few other options, so even nice companies/managers have to choose these parts/products. Generally, there is an alternative, a kinder gentler friendlier and oh yeah ethical route, but it doesn't enhance shareholder value.
Look, stop saying things like that, people. You're giving away the MBA secret that big business is not honourable.
OK, it's not really a secret, just a taboo topic unless you're the so-called left-loonie fringe trying to change it. The amazing thing is, so many accept this kind of underlying failure of democracy and free markets without so much as a shrug! So is MS a success story or a travesty to you?
Well, they had an existing mythology full of angels, demons, and other beings to populate, and visions or experiences or whatever got shoehorned into it. Then there's some wild 'n crazy stuff like Ezekiel (maybe after eating some slightly off rye ;-)
So how do you like them martians?
Even more interesting is KSR's exploration of the tension between culture, faith, science, and politics, leading to a series of really complex contradictions expressed as a movement. The Reds (mars' version of our Greens) resort to sabotage and an underground in order to reverse terraforming, according to a kind of scientific-spiritual code of respect for the new wilderness. If you can stand the occasional boredom of 300 year-olds with memory loss, the trilogy's a good mix of hard SF and political conjecture.
There are still a few places to pick it up: try Cal State or Radix's FTP site.
Once you've updated it properly, it runs fine in classic mode, and is pretty zippy. I have to use it periodically because the university I work at monomaniacally standardized on wintel (despite having healthy fine arts, media, and comp sci depts., duh) and many use WP, so us mac users constantly receive official missives attached as a .wpd file. Fortunately, the old mac application opens even new files without choking.
Anything from Avid or digidesign is going to suck your CPU dry, even if it's a 14THz quad with the cosmic quantum option. [cynic] Means they can leverage their proprietary hardware better. [/cynic] It also means they can guarantee throughput and latency.
Another option for voiceovers is to use a simple recording tool, there are some free and or cheap programs on freshmeat or versiontracker, and they won't use the entire energy output of Hydro Quebec to do it.
Hi. I'm right now spec'ing out a handful of TRV-22's for teaching entry level video editing. They're a good price point and fairly good quality, with some reliability.
And, they're EASY. Easy, easy, easy. Video tech here is Mac-based. Here's how it works:
1. shoot video
2. boot computer
3. turn on camera (make sure it's set to video not stills), set to Play or VTR, plug iLink port on camera to firewire 400 port on computer using a 4-6 pin $12 cable
4. boot up iMovie/FCP/whatever
5. capture your footage
Really, that's all. Oh, well, for stills it's a bit different:
1. shoot photos
2. boot computer
3. turn on camera, set to stills (or card) playback
4. plug USB cable into camera and keyboard
5. sit back and wait for iPhoto, then import
As always, RTFM! In this case that's about 20 minutes investment. Once you've done that, you can worry about gotchas, like having to eject a USB connection, or whether to leave your camera plugged in by firewire between any reboots (don't - but you're using OS X, why reboot?).
Wow, you just jumped all over that "other fields" thing, eh? That was an aside, merely a nod to the unknown. I'm really just asking about EM here. The emissions at the skin that I mentioned were in reference to the 150mV/mm or so that happen around a wound, or the general battery-like potential of the skin (you can see this exploited if your physiotherapist ever uses 'transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation' for pain management, common enough though not really understood).
What I really am looking for is an index of the frequencies and strength of various EM emissions that have been observed in and around the human body.
As for the intercellular wireless systems, what would be the need for them if the cells are already connected through bloodstream, hormones, neural signals, etc.?
Well, we don't really know, do we? The body is as mysterious as the cosmos. But my buddy thinks it might explain how we go through such rapid and massive mitosis while sleeping, or why some cellular reactions seem to happen faster than the chemical/neural vector would allow, and he was talking about something way over my head, cell reprogramming or some such. Anyway, it doesn't take much imagination to answer your question "why" more fundamentally: for speed, redundancy, reliability, maybe?
Great! so can you confirm for us that endogenous electrical (& other) fields are hardly studied beyond specifics like embryonic organ development and healing, and some particular emission at the skin? Also, anyone have a link to information about the frequencies and intensities of endogenous EMF generated by humans?
A geneticist I know thinks there may be a case for something like an intercellular wireless system inside the body, and the idea's been rattling around in me cranium.
This is the true origin of the tinfoil hat stuff! And damn if they aren't still doinGHGHRSKKKKKT&!ffftt...er...
It's a good thing that militaries around the world stopped all that research; anyone who tells you otherwise just needs a little prozac.
The classic example used in phenomenology that I've read is "try not to think of a white bear"-- which since it is an image derived from speech shows how we experience the world around us in a sociolinguistic sense (among other things).
Being aware of breathing without thinking about it is a trick used by Theravada and some Vipassana Buddhism as well as some Zen to demonstrate the impulsive nature of thinking and to train in awareness without sociolinguistic overlay [OK that's my non-buddhist interpretation, not canon]. However, the interesting thing is that sometimes it does happen, something difficult to describe.
Look developers, just get speech recognition running already, willya? If what your software does to my luminous eloquence is any example of the current state of interface tech, that thinking-cap UI is going to lead to some pretty psychedelic dyslexic synaesthesia in photoshop once it gets that olfactory plugin I've been waiting for...
Hildegard Westerkamp wrote about Walkmans and personal audio space as a key part of her 1988 thesis "Listening and Soundmaking-A Study of Music-as- Environment", but the World Soundscape Project generally had a pretty good analysis of this right from the beginning of the phenomenon.
The composer R. Murray Shafer's concept of "schizophonia" became used to describe an effect of electroacoustic tech: essentially something you hear that happens in another place and time. Barry Truax's definitive book Acoustic Communication develops the whole idea further.
The thing about PLD's is that they supplant the actual soundscape with a soundtrack, often a remedy to noise and stress but usually just fun. There may be a long-term chronic danger from extreme schizophonia, but I don't think it's been studied empirically. Soundscape studies is fringe, most of the work being done in the area is engineering and psych.
True, but the grandparent post asked us to imagine a cheaper decked-out g5.
However, other factors come into play when considering value for most home users, who don't care about rendering speed: they want things to just damn well work like an appliance. Cheap Dells are, well, cheap and MS-laden, and you pay for junk later instead of up front. Price is no simple scale of comparison when there's little basis for equivalence. Even old used iMacs sell for more than those new bottom-end Dells, which is another measure of value -- they're worth it.
OK, I'm shopping right now anyway. I go to dell.ca and apple.ca and try to build equivalents.
Dell:
Dual Xeon 3GHz, 1GB RAM, 250GB SATA, modem, good keyboard low-end mouse, DVD+RW/CD-ROM, Audigy Soundblaster w/ firewire, ATI Fire GL X1 128MB, Win2K, no monitor:
$6,711 [CDN]
Apple:
Dual 2GHz G5, 1GB RAM, 250GB SATA, modem, Superdrive, Radeon 9800 pro, everything else standard, no monitor:
$5,044.00 [CDN]
OK so they aren't exactly equivalent. The Dell includes a floppy; the Apple's missing a mouse button. More, the Apple comes with optical sound connects, firewire800, and gigabit ethernet (no mention of the Dell's onboard networking in the summary). The Superdrive is way better than the Dell's DVD+RW. The Dell has a better video card by a bit. Some think that the Xeons would be faster but that probably depends heavily on application, and the g5's have a huge bus bandwidth. Not to mention other technology differences underneath it all, like case design and wireless integration. Oh, and, umm, bundled software and the operating systems.
Disclaimer: I'm comparing Apples and Dells because they're tier 1 manufacturers and people think Dells are cheap.
So, like, DUDE! why is the Dell costing $1600+ more than the Apple? Is it worth it? Which one is better made, longer lasting, which one is faster over all, which the better deal?
"Windows is the best platform for specifically running a flower shop."
That depends on how specific their needs are. A custom filemaker database can cost under $1000 and be both very user friendly and precisely matched to small retailers' needs. Filemaker's a great tool for small retailers and non-profits, because of the customizable cross platform solutions out there for them.
Noisy.
It doesn't really matter, anyway, silence (meaning quiet, really) has suffered the "tragedy of the commons" and barely exists. There are almost no acoustic wildernesses left (where you can't hear internal combustion, eg.) and silence has become a golden commodity reflected in real estate values and construction techniques. We're habituated to the constant hum of fans and machinery and all policy decisions on the topic are oriented towards noise reduction, not quiet protection; technological solutions are generally oriented towards masking or reduction, not noise elimination.
In communication studies, silence is like the water we fish swim in: everyone notices it's there, but almost no-one studies it. Without some degree of relative silence, acoustic communication is impossible. We've traded some of that away for progress, and the results are subtle but disturbing.
That's a good start for a list; MPLAB and PSPICE are the kind of extremely specialized products that we want to see under development for OS X and getting distribution through freshmeat.net. I'll wager that there are equivalent special apps in different areas that are mac-only for now, as well, (plug-ins etc. for creative producers, eg.) so it isn't an earth shattering difference. Certainly, for me, I keep looking at Linux as an option as a media producer, but the tools just aren't there in an integrated and rapidly useable way--and I don't have the money or time to run a wintel-based production shop, despite many clued-out pressures to do so.
As far as freeware imageviewers and muddding options, you wouldn't likely have to work too hard to find acceptable options on OS X. Our scanning station is Win2K (lousy HP drivers!) and irfanview can be a real limiter at times, so we wound up springing for photoshop, which now integrates nicely with our macs that do the heavy lifting. However, we still use Preview.app and iPhoto with Photoshop for rapid file management (despite their warts).
It all depends on what one needs. This thread doesn't establish any general superior suitability of any platform. For (vastly) most wintel users, however, OS X may be more what they need than what they're using.
More lists!
I call hooey on you. You can't make a feature-length mainstream in Vancouver without relying heavily on IATSE local 891. They're just too useful.
No, every Amurrican producer/director I've talked to about working in Canada describes the experience as dominated by working with extremely skilled and unassuming crews and actors (the phrase that keeps coming up is that they don't have the 'sense of entitlement' that crews in LA do).
The Hollywood North thing isn't about union-busting so much as about exchange rate and financial incentives, great locations, and really good resources when it comes to crew, facilities, and post.
California Bud's pretty legendary too, so I don't think it's that... uh,