These things looked really smooth and after all my fits with a WinXP laptop, I desperately want one. Problem is we're a Windoze shop.
That's exactly why you shouldn't get a powerbook. If your IT staff can't even properly support Windows machines in a secure environment, what makes you think they'll know fuck-all about supporting a Mac in that same environment? (Much less like you any more for adding to their existing headaches)
No matter what the price, and no matter how much the record industry complains about $0.99 per track (or gloats about $2.50 per track) the truth is that the majority of artists don't really make much money.
Once an artist on a three or five album deal starts enjoying a bit of mainstream success, that's when there's real money involved, and therefore it's also when there's something worth arguing over. Battles between hit artists and their labels are sometimes legendary.
Here's the usual path:
New artist establishes a scene in some local market as a live act, or is the cousin of a hot-shit producer, or the favorite new project of Madonna or Prince or Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, or whoever. Anyway, they get a deal to make a record.
The record, usually made up of their best ideas from years of being a struggling performer, becomes a hit, but not enough of a hit for the artist to pay back all the money the label fronted them. The artist is living well on their advances, but also badly in debt and constantly on tour to promote sales.
It is, however, enough of a hit for the label to sign the artist for a few more albums.
In order for the artist to keep their head above water (and in order for the label to cash in on the "new artist" hype) a second album is rushed out. If the artist is out of material and can't write new songs fast enough, half-thought-out songs are slapped togther, other writers are hired, or licenses are bought for a cover-song or two to pad out the album. Whatever it takes to get 35-40 minutes of music on a disk and get it out to the shopping malls.
More often than not, the album sucks and hardly anybody wants to buy it. This is often called "the sophomore jynx" among music critics. Artists who manage to work well enough under pressure to dodge this particular bullet often become the ones which the labels will latch on to and try to turn in to "the next Beatles."
Since there's a contract for a third album, and (for the bands who bombed on the second) no real rush to get another one out, the artist is able to take their time and make something which is guided more by their creative vision (or the creative vision of their producer, in the case of disposable pop acts), and generally a slightly better album is put out. If the critics like it, the artist just might get a chance to re-emerge as a hit machine.
At this point, the artists who had a hit on either their second or third album are likely to be in the black (unless they were ripped off by their management or ran out and bought their own soccer teams or something). This is when it gets interesting.
A label has a contract with that artist, one which is very profitable at this point. They want to keep that artist in their "stable", but doing so is likely to get a whole lot more expensive when the time comes to negotiate the next deal. There's two ways they can respond.
1. They can promote the shit out of the artist, make as much money as they can off the next album or two, and let the future take care of itself. Even if the artist bolts for another label, you can always exploit the material of theirs you own with yet another "greatest hits" collection or "retrospective" or "complete box set" every few years.
2. They can let the artist's popularity dwindle to next to nothing, making it cheaper to re-sign them, and then ramp the machine up again when you have a mutual committment for a few more years... or not. You can also make money off them as a "niche" act (as Crysalis did for years with Jethro Tull), by spending almost nothing to promote them while loyal fans buy their albums based on the artist's name alone.
Either choice is a risk. A lot of labels go with option #2, and that's when you get the really, truly entertaining hair-pulling, eye-poking, bitch-fests of rage from the likes of Prince or Metallica. The artist became a multi-millionaire by working with the label, but now they see vast sums of potential money their label
If they outlaw teaching evolution, only outlaws will teach evolution.
Btw-- All my friends in Kansas are wearing these in protest: Viva La Evolucion!
Yes, they are that bad of a bad polluter
on
Chinese Eco-Cities
·
· Score: 1
Is china actually that bad of a polluter? Let's talk per capita.
Screw "per capita". When pollution from china floats across the Pacific Ocean and poisons my water supply here in California, no amount of BS rationalizing is going to fix it.
Agreed. Letting a one-size-fits-all tool try to remove red-eye in a photo is asking for a dead picture. Without the right catch light in the eyes people tend to look like they belong in a George Romero movie. If you haven't the skill to select the offending red, and balance it back to neutral, it doesn't seem that you've got the skill to even use the program.
Well, for quick touchups I use the free program paint.net from Washington State University. Quick, simple, some power under the hood (it does layers!) and has more features than I know how to use.
I've downloaded GIMP... had no idea what to do with it so after a couple sessions of randomly pushing buttons left it sit to gather stray 0s and 1s that collect on my HDD much like the dust gathers on my Windows 95 MCP book.
A little searching tells me that the popular type of cell used in automotive applications is the PEM (Proton Exchange Membrane) type. These seem to peak out at just over 50% efficient. Not bad, but a well build IC engine can get into the upper 40's, so "much more efficient" becomes a point of contention.
Then consider that the PEMFC's output is electricity, which must be put through a motor to drive the vehicle. If we're generous and assume the motor is 90% efficient, you are now on par with a well built ICE powered vehicle...
This says nothing about the cost of the fuel. Even if you could "generate" the fuel yourself, the primary source of power is still fossil fuels. The only difference is the problem isn't in your back yard anymore. To add insult to injury, the best method to produce hydrogen (energy-in versus yield) is reforming of natural gas (methane) - as the home-refueling station in the article does. Guess what? You'd get more energy if you just burned the NG straight and you're still releasing CO2 into the atmosphere from the reforming process. At least they recover some energy for domestic hot water with their system, so it's not a total waste.
No, what it means is it's enabled as the default by default. That's what "default" means. If you don't want to use it, you add the skip-innodb option to your MySQL option file.
I see you mention Mac Mini noise, but others, even on the one page you reference, state exactly the opposite.
you got that impression from which part of the writeup. Was it the part where he says
"Anyways, if anyone has a hack where I can control the fan a bit more, I'd love to hear about it, because its bothersome when I'm playing WoW and the fan's going full-blast the entire time for very little reason - the same game on my Toshiba doesn't rev that engine nearly as much."
Now imagine how annoying that fan is when you're trying to watch a movie. Or enjoy some classical. The mac mini's a great little widget for certain things, but you don't need to prove a point by trying to shoehorn your square peg into a round hole.
InnoDB is not the default storage engine in MySQL... MyISAM is.
You sure about that? From the MySQL site:
"In MySQL 5.0, the InnoDB storage engine is enabled by default. If you don't want to use InnoDB tables, you can add the skip-innodb option to your MySQL option file."
(link)
Plus, since most of the text can be changed at any moment, how do I know that what I'm reading is accurate at this time, and not the opinion of some troll?
Which is why what wikipedia needs to do is have both "stable" and "unstable" branches of wikipedia, like the linux kernel does.
Make searches default to the stable page, with the option to add in the more recent changes by clicking a button. This has a number of advantages:
Removes the immediate payback for defacing a page.
Makes it possible to cite a stable version of a wikipedia page in an academic work without it being completely screwed up at a later date. (They should be archived quarterly/yearly/whatever).
Still allows up-to-the-minute information to be accessed by those looking for it.
(personal belief here) It would increase the credibility of the information. It's easier to research and verify a small set of changes to a stable page, than to check out a whole page. It's better that this research is done BEFORE some hapless individual uses incorrect information.
Agreed. But then hiding the server in the closet neutralizes two of your five points: (size, noise)
The portability is such that I can either have it in a closet, or have it with my other AV gear. (the closet comment was mostly to illustrate the "hands-off" aspect. set it and forget it, as it were).
It is still lacking compared to other free databases such as PostgreSQL and Firebird, but version 5 is a real improvement. (as mentioned, now you have things like triggers, stored procedures, views and sub-queries.) If you use strict mode integrity checking will work reasonably.
What I'm currently miss the most in the new version is that it can't handle domains and the ability add check constraints as you create tables is somewhat lacking. So, even if MySQL have done a tremendous job improving their product I would still go for PostgreSQL, or Firbird any day both for technical and legal reasons. Both Postgresql and Firebird also seam to be better at internationalization.
The fact that Oracle just bought the company that supplies the default MySQL storage engine doesn't spell good for the future. Even though MySQL could continue to use InnoDB in the future under the GPL licence it is in Oracles power to raise the licence fees for commercial use. That would mean less incomes to MySQL AB and that could hurt their ability to develop the product further. However, afaik Oracle have not said anything about raising the prices other than that the licence deal with MySQL is going to be renegotiated in '06. To me that sounds a bit ominous.
Almost every database out there impliments an ISO or similar SQL standard as it's base (SQL-92 in most cases). They then build on top of that by adding their own features, while still supporting the common SQL syntax. It's not about being a barebones implimentation of a standard, it's about supporting the standard as your base.
PostgreSQL supports SQL-92, while adding it's own extra features (which describes most other databases like Oracle and MS SQL too), including the support of the "LIMIT" statement. MySQL doesn't support any standard base, instead existing as an arbitrary mish mash of standard and propritary SQL. It wasn't until the current version, 4, that MySQL even bothered to add support for UNION.
With every other database you can start working safe in the knowledge that while having it's own extensions, you're working with a normal "SQL" database. MySQL, while posing as SQL, has little if anything in common (in particular see threads about optimization - getting fast code in MySQL means learning an entirely new system filled with quirks and vomit inducing workarounds to solve language faults)
Here's the thing. My server at home, which sits on a static IP address, is a mini-itx based machine. It provides me with: web hosting, email hosting, storage, inside network services and firewalls outside access to my TiVo. Why did I do this with a mini-itx instead of a Mac mini? Well, there are several disadvantages to the Mac Mini over Mini-itx:
Noise. The mac mini will produce a lot. The only moving part on my server is the hard drive platters, and they are hermetically sealed and use fluid dynamic bearings. As hard drives go, they are whisper quiet. I've bought a lot of fans in my time, even some rather expensive ultra-quiet ones. Given enough time, all of them eventually get dust in the bearings and start making a racket.
Size. The Mac mini is small, this thing is smaller.
Heat. There is not a single fan running on my server. The hottest component by far is the hard drives.
Power. This goes along with heat. The power supply's peak sustained output is 60W. I'd be suprised if the unit consumed more than 25W except during hard drive spin up.
Battery back up lifetime. This goes along with power. A standard consumer UPS will run this thing for many hours. It has survived 3 hour power outages.
Put all this together, and I can hide the server in a closet and forget about it. Just need a power drop and two network connections.
...does it run Linux? And when will we have a Beowulf Cluster of these...aka Skynet....
Which is why this article would be far more appropriate with my headline:
Cyborg Cells Sense Humidity, Find Sarah Connor (rejected)
In the comics and movies, the cyborgs had super strength, could run fast, maybe shoot lasers out of their frickin' eyes, and so on.
Well, currently, even the best artificial limbs are a poor substitute for the genuine article. People get artificial limbs because they have lost their natural limbs, and have no other choice -- we do not hate or shun these people any more than we hate or shun people with any other disability. However, if artificial limbs become far superior to natural limbs, people will be able to choose whether they want their (perfectly healthy) natural limbs removed in favor of mechanical ones. At that point you will certainly have fear and loathing between the people who undergo the procedure (the superior beings) and the people who don't (the all-natural people).
I have a friend who would qualify as a "cyborg". He's hearing-impaired and has a Cochlear Implant. Social-wise, it's kind of a mixed bag. On one side of the coin, people in general are fascinated by the prospect of restoring hearing that was lost and the very idea of having a biological implant in his head. On the other side, however, the Deaf community generally shuns them as their equivalent of "tools of Satan."
I think that you're always going to have people that favor the "natural" over the man-made, even to the point where they're completely separated from society (think about how we talk about the Amish)
In 2004, court-ordered wiretaps increased by 19%. This number doesn't even include terror-related wiretaps (which number an unheard of 1,754). It also doesn't include so-called "secret" wiretaps, allowed by Patriot.
The only groups these wiretaps hurt are the law-abiding citizens. The smart (read: dangerous) criminals have it all figured out-- Prepaid cell phones.
Pre-paid cell phones are literally disposable, one-use toys to the bad guys. You don't even need a fake ID, just cash, and not all that much at that. How can they tap your phone when you use a different phone for each call? The best they could do is tap all the pre-paid phones and listen to every conversation out there -- good luck with that! (wanna bet the NSA is big into voice recognition?)
I always find it interesting how the visual arts community attempts to capture the reality of the world based on the known principles of their day. Looking back through history at the artist rendering of our world provides us with a unique perspective on how wrong we were in describing the world in art.
Art is all about expressing ideas or concepts visually-- Certain portions of the world of science, especially quantum mechanics, are just too weird for us to capture in visual display. Perhaps it will take someone like Dali or Escher to provides us with a view of the quantum world.
It is pretty obvious that this license is not GPL compatable, and I am no lawyer. All you have to do is read it. These two provisions make it impossible:
Notice of any changes or modifications to the Original Work, including the date the changes were made.
Any modifications of the Original Work must be distributed in such a manner as to avoid any confusion with the Original Work of the copyright holders.
A software licensed under the GPL does not have to provide notice of any changes made from the original work. SO this makes it non-compatable.
I would probably say MS-PL's philosophy is: "You can do anything you want with this, as long as it does not dilute our empire"
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These things looked really smooth and after all my fits with a WinXP laptop, I desperately want one. Problem is we're a Windoze shop.
That's exactly why you shouldn't get a powerbook. If your IT staff can't even properly support Windows machines in a secure environment, what makes you think they'll know fuck-all about supporting a Mac in that same environment? (Much less like you any more for adding to their existing headaches)
No matter what the price, and no matter how much the record industry complains about $0.99 per track (or gloats about $2.50 per track) the truth is that the majority of artists don't really make much money.
Once an artist on a three or five album deal starts enjoying a bit of mainstream success, that's when there's real money involved, and therefore it's also when there's something worth arguing over. Battles between hit artists and their labels are sometimes legendary.
Here's the usual path:
New artist establishes a scene in some local market as a live act, or is the cousin of a hot-shit producer, or the favorite new project of Madonna or Prince or Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, or whoever. Anyway, they get a deal to make a record.
The record, usually made up of their best ideas from years of being a struggling performer, becomes a hit, but not enough of a hit for the artist to pay back all the money the label fronted them. The artist is living well on their advances, but also badly in debt and constantly on tour to promote sales.
It is, however, enough of a hit for the label to sign the artist for a few more albums.
In order for the artist to keep their head above water (and in order for the label to cash in on the "new artist" hype) a second album is rushed out. If the artist is out of material and can't write new songs fast enough, half-thought-out songs are slapped togther, other writers are hired, or licenses are bought for a cover-song or two to pad out the album. Whatever it takes to get 35-40 minutes of music on a disk and get it out to the shopping malls.
More often than not, the album sucks and hardly anybody wants to buy it. This is often called "the sophomore jynx" among music critics. Artists who manage to work well enough under pressure to dodge this particular bullet often become the ones which the labels will latch on to and try to turn in to "the next Beatles."
Since there's a contract for a third album, and (for the bands who bombed on the second) no real rush to get another one out, the artist is able to take their time and make something which is guided more by their creative vision (or the creative vision of their producer, in the case of disposable pop acts), and generally a slightly better album is put out. If the critics like it, the artist just might get a chance to re-emerge as a hit machine.
At this point, the artists who had a hit on either their second or third album are likely to be in the black (unless they were ripped off by their management or ran out and bought their own soccer teams or something). This is when it gets interesting.
A label has a contract with that artist, one which is very profitable at this point. They want to keep that artist in their "stable", but doing so is likely to get a whole lot more expensive when the time comes to negotiate the next deal. There's two ways they can respond.
1. They can promote the shit out of the artist, make as much money as they can off the next album or two, and let the future take care of itself. Even if the artist bolts for another label, you can always exploit the material of theirs you own with yet another "greatest hits" collection or "retrospective" or "complete box set" every few years.
2. They can let the artist's popularity dwindle to next to nothing, making it cheaper to re-sign them, and then ramp the machine up again when you have a mutual committment for a few more years... or not. You can also make money off them as a "niche" act (as Crysalis did for years with Jethro Tull), by spending almost nothing to promote them while loyal fans buy their albums based on the artist's name alone.
Either choice is a risk. A lot of labels go with option #2, and that's when you get the really, truly entertaining hair-pulling, eye-poking, bitch-fests of rage from the likes of Prince or Metallica. The artist became a multi-millionaire by working with the label, but now they see vast sums of potential money their label
If they outlaw teaching evolution, only outlaws will teach evolution.
Btw-- All my friends in Kansas are wearing these in protest: Viva La Evolucion!
Is china actually that bad of a polluter? Let's talk per capita.
Screw "per capita". When pollution from china floats across the Pacific Ocean and poisons my water supply here in California, no amount of BS rationalizing is going to fix it.
(link)
My experience is that if something has to be done, just do it - don't ask! They will thank you later,' he said."
yeah, that's also a good way to get fired.
Agreed. Letting a one-size-fits-all tool try to remove red-eye in a photo is asking for a dead picture. Without the right catch light in the eyes people tend to look like they belong in a George Romero movie. If you haven't the skill to select the offending red, and balance it back to neutral, it doesn't seem that you've got the skill to even use the program.
Well, for quick touchups I use the free program paint.net from Washington State University. Quick, simple, some power under the hood (it does layers!) and has more features than I know how to use.
I've downloaded GIMP... had no idea what to do with it so after a couple sessions of randomly pushing buttons left it sit to gather stray 0s and 1s that collect on my HDD much like the dust gathers on my Windows 95 MCP book.
A little searching tells me that the popular type of cell used in automotive applications is the PEM (Proton Exchange Membrane) type. These seem to peak out at just over 50% efficient. Not bad, but a well build IC engine can get into the upper 40's, so "much more efficient" becomes a point of contention.
Then consider that the PEMFC's output is electricity, which must be put through a motor to drive the vehicle. If we're generous and assume the motor is 90% efficient, you are now on par with a well built ICE powered vehicle...
This says nothing about the cost of the fuel. Even if you could "generate" the fuel yourself, the primary source of power is still fossil fuels. The only difference is the problem isn't in your back yard anymore. To add insult to injury, the best method to produce hydrogen (energy-in versus yield) is reforming of natural gas (methane) - as the home-refueling station in the article does. Guess what? You'd get more energy if you just burned the NG straight and you're still releasing CO2 into the atmosphere from the reforming process. At least they recover some energy for domestic hot water with their system, so it's not a total waste.
No, what it means is it's enabled as the default by default. That's what "default" means. If you don't want to use it, you add the skip-innodb option to your MySQL option file.
I see you mention Mac Mini noise, but others, even on the one page you reference, state exactly the opposite.
you got that impression from which part of the writeup. Was it the part where he says
"Anyways, if anyone has a hack where I can control the fan a bit more, I'd love to hear about it, because its bothersome when I'm playing WoW and the fan's going full-blast the entire time for very little reason - the same game on my Toshiba doesn't rev that engine nearly as much."
Now imagine how annoying that fan is when you're trying to watch a movie. Or enjoy some classical. The mac mini's a great little widget for certain things, but you don't need to prove a point by trying to shoehorn your square peg into a round hole.
InnoDB is not the default storage engine in MySQL... MyISAM is.
You sure about that? From the MySQL site: "In MySQL 5.0, the InnoDB storage engine is enabled by default. If you don't want to use InnoDB tables, you can add the skip-innodb option to your MySQL option file."
(link)
Which is why what wikipedia needs to do is have both "stable" and "unstable" branches of wikipedia, like the linux kernel does.
Make searches default to the stable page, with the option to add in the more recent changes by clicking a button. This has a number of advantages:
Agreed. But then hiding the server in the closet neutralizes two of your five points: (size, noise)
The portability is such that I can either have it in a closet, or have it with my other AV gear. (the closet comment was mostly to illustrate the "hands-off" aspect. set it and forget it, as it were).
Further, the Mac mini fan noise is a big issue, and makes it unsuitable for a home theater setting.
It is still lacking compared to other free databases such as PostgreSQL and Firebird, but version 5 is a real improvement. (as mentioned, now you have things like triggers, stored procedures, views and sub-queries.) If you use strict mode integrity checking will work reasonably.
What I'm currently miss the most in the new version is that it can't handle domains and the ability add check constraints as you create tables is somewhat lacking. So, even if MySQL have done a tremendous job improving their product I would still go for PostgreSQL, or Firbird any day both for technical and legal reasons. Both Postgresql and Firebird also seam to be better at internationalization.
The fact that Oracle just bought the company that supplies the default MySQL storage engine doesn't spell good for the future. Even though MySQL could continue to use InnoDB in the future under the GPL licence it is in Oracles power to raise the licence fees for commercial use. That would mean less incomes to MySQL AB and that could hurt their ability to develop the product further. However, afaik Oracle have not said anything about raising the prices other than that the licence deal with MySQL is going to be renegotiated in '06. To me that sounds a bit ominous.
Almost every database out there impliments an ISO or similar SQL standard as it's base (SQL-92 in most cases). They then build on top of that by adding their own features, while still supporting the common SQL syntax. It's not about being a barebones implimentation of a standard, it's about supporting the standard as your base.
PostgreSQL supports SQL-92, while adding it's own extra features (which describes most other databases like Oracle and MS SQL too), including the support of the "LIMIT" statement. MySQL doesn't support any standard base, instead existing as an arbitrary mish mash of standard and propritary SQL. It wasn't until the current version, 4, that MySQL even bothered to add support for UNION.
With every other database you can start working safe in the knowledge that while having it's own extensions, you're working with a normal "SQL" database. MySQL, while posing as SQL, has little if anything in common (in particular see threads about optimization - getting fast code in MySQL means learning an entirely new system filled with quirks and vomit inducing workarounds to solve language faults)
Put all this together, and I can hide the server in a closet and forget about it. Just need a power drop and two network connections.
when you can just buy a Shuttle or some other small form factor pc mostly put together already.
In the comics and movies, the cyborgs had super strength, could run fast, maybe shoot lasers out of their frickin' eyes, and so on.
Well, currently, even the best artificial limbs are a poor substitute for the genuine article. People get artificial limbs because they have lost their natural limbs, and have no other choice -- we do not hate or shun these people any more than we hate or shun people with any other disability. However, if artificial limbs become far superior to natural limbs, people will be able to choose whether they want their (perfectly healthy) natural limbs removed in favor of mechanical ones. At that point you will certainly have fear and loathing between the people who undergo the procedure (the superior beings) and the people who don't (the all-natural people).
I have a friend who would qualify as a "cyborg". He's hearing-impaired and has a Cochlear Implant. Social-wise, it's kind of a mixed bag. On one side of the coin, people in general are fascinated by the prospect of restoring hearing that was lost and the very idea of having a biological implant in his head. On the other side, however, the Deaf community generally shuns them as their equivalent of "tools of Satan."
I think that you're always going to have people that favor the "natural" over the man-made, even to the point where they're completely separated from society (think about how we talk about the Amish)
In 2004, court-ordered wiretaps increased by 19%. This number doesn't even include terror-related wiretaps (which number an unheard of 1,754). It also doesn't include so-called "secret" wiretaps, allowed by Patriot.
The only groups these wiretaps hurt are the law-abiding citizens. The smart (read: dangerous) criminals have it all figured out-- Prepaid cell phones.
Pre-paid cell phones are literally disposable, one-use toys to the bad guys. You don't even need a fake ID, just cash, and not all that much at that. How can they tap your phone when you use a different phone for each call? The best they could do is tap all the pre-paid phones and listen to every conversation out there -- good luck with that! (wanna bet the NSA is big into voice recognition?)
I always find it interesting how the visual arts community attempts to capture the reality of the world based on the known principles of their day. Looking back through history at the artist rendering of our world provides us with a unique perspective on how wrong we were in describing the world in art.
Art is all about expressing ideas or concepts visually-- Certain portions of the world of science, especially quantum mechanics, are just too weird for us to capture in visual display. Perhaps it will take someone like Dali or Escher to provides us with a view of the quantum world.
It is pretty obvious that this license is not GPL compatable, and I am no lawyer. All you have to do is read it. These two provisions make it impossible:
Notice of any changes or modifications to the Original Work, including the date the changes were made.
Any modifications of the Original Work must be distributed in such a manner as to avoid any confusion with the Original Work of the copyright holders.
A software licensed under the GPL does not have to provide notice of any changes made from the original work. SO this makes it non-compatable.
I would probably say MS-PL's philosophy is: "You can do anything you want with this, as long as it does not dilute our empire"
also, lack of a stupid fruit logo on said all-in-one device... BINGO.
I predict that Slashdot will have a headline next week that proclaims "Security flaws totally the fault of the end-user."
/sarcasm
Why re-state the obvious?
American's are in for a rough ride when China becomes the next superpower and greed is a major reason why.
I'm guessing fear, ignorance, and a religious erosion of our science base will be the major reasons why China becomes the next superpower.