Sigh. In fact, herein lies another perfect example of co-discovery and/or "the wrong one gets the credit" [delete as appropriate], for although Edison always gets the credit for the light bulb, Joseph Swan actually filed a patent for it *months* before Edison, and even had the first house in the world lit by electric light (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan). Edison's patent in the US was for *a direct copy of the Swan light*, and his work was mostly based on improving Swan's invention (I know Wikipedia's not always the authoritative source on these things, but this chimes with other documentaries I've seen on the subject).
The iPad is simply a piece of consumer electronics, it is not what we would consider a true PC. As such, it doesn't matter if it's not open, can't run random application "x" or whatever, in the same way as I don't mind that my Logitech Squeezebox isn't a SatNav or my microwave oven can't show TV pictures (even though it looks like it could). I would never buy an iPad at the current price, but I might buy one if it ever got down to ~$200, just to leave lying around the lounge for some casual browsing or game play, even though I would prefer to be able to install whatever applications I wanted. I would *never* buy one to replace my laptop or desktop - these are where I code and hack about and edit photos by the thousand - something that the iPad is never going to be good for. Netbooks are cute 'n' all, and are generally an improvement over the ipad in someways, given a real keyboard and software open-ness, but they still wouldn't fulfill my needs for many of the things I do. If I really had to choose out of the two, a netbook would win for various reasons, but if I had enough cash to burn there would be a place for all of these different devices. Horses for courses.
So, I think the Governor should re-examine the issue and maybe get rid of schools but keep the books. I am not kidding.
Ah yes, great idea - because isolating an entire generation in their own rooms [ok, more than usual], with no real human contact, will really help to foster sociability and reinforce social cohesion. "Other humans: yes, we've heard of them..."
On the face of it, no they can't... in just the same way that Norway wasn't "encouraged" to go after 'DVD' Jon, or the Brits didn't turn a blind eye to CIA flights, or the way Europe doesn't go after infringers of US copyrights. In fact, if they don't do it already I bet it'll provide them with a great scapegoat: the EU can say that they implemented biometric passports because the US "told them to", the US can now sweep aside resistance to data retention there because the "EU told them to". Governments love it when it's someone else's fault...
There's one thing that's bugging me about a lot of the posts here: It's all very well saying "I download WMV and use such-and-such tool to strip out the DRM and turn it into MP3 for my player", but that's just extra-crapifying an already-crappy source IMO. Am I the only person on the planet who listens to my (own) ripped/MP3d music through a decent stereo? It's the one reason I don't (and currently won't) use download services - either they're poor bitrate-encoded or they're DRMd or both. I'm dreading the day when CDs really do disappear if this is all we've got to replace it. We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of quality HiFi components, because after CDs (or their original-source equivalents) have gone and all that's left are poor-quality downloads, what'll be the point?
It doesn't work very well at the moment, but why on earth is it not possible to devote more resources into creating some sort of undetectable (quantum?) watermarking instead of the pointless pursuit of locking by encryption?? Watermarks, or signatures, do nothing to restrict fair-use, copying, format-shifting or whatever. However, if watermarked media is illegally released on P2P or the 'net, it's easy to determine where it came from and apply the full extent of existing legislation to the perp.
The problem currently is that re-sampling or otherwise altering a watermarked resource breaks the mark, but I would certainly go as far as to agree to allowing transcoding software (e.g. rippers and so on) to maintain the watermark whatever I do to the media (obviously, one would still be free to compile a bespoke version of OSS without such a function, which is a bit of a loophole). The reason? It doesn't restrict my use or re-use of the stuff I've bought in any way. All it means is that if I'm naughty and put it on P2P, The Man (tm) can come and get me.
I vaguely remember that Thai Baht generally has the symbol at the end. And of course, pretty much all currencies put their fractional sign (usually hundreths, such as (p)ence, (c)ent, etc) at the end...
Perhaps they are, or soon could be. In the UK at least, there's been a subtle change in Dell's TV adverts. Where the ads used to say "Dell PCs contain Intel Pentium 4 processors" (Intel pays for a percentage of the cost of the advert if they play that annoying "Duuuh... duh du du duuh" splash), they now say "This PC contains..." on what appears to be a case-by-case basis. This looks to me like they're warming up to offering PCs that, shock horror, maybe don't contain Intel CPUs. Or maybe it's just something to do with that whole EU anti-competitive thing...
What gives, do I have a weird bone structure in my hand or something?
Quite possibly. I started playing the piano at 8 and using computers at 11 and in the 25-odd years in-between, my hands' orientation has become physiologically adapted to keyboard use, so that when I hold my arms out, instead of my hands pointing ahead roughly in line with my arms, they actually point outwards at about 45 degrees (north-west for left, north-east for right). However, at the keyboard they are perfectly aligned straight ahead with no wrist-twisting required. For this reason, I cannot use a split ("natural") keyboard as the pain is just too much. I don't know how common this is amongst the long-term keyboard-using community though...
Then real fun with the flipping of the magnetic field is not that it moves uniformly from one pole to another over time, but that as it breaks down, tens or hundreds of "north" and "south" poles can develop which are spread all over the planet - see this article in New Scientist. With any luck, maybe my house might end up at one of these new "North Poles" for a while, so at least I can say I've been there:-)
There's an interesting article about the creators of the Dr. Who theme, the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, here (especially the section entitled "early days"). The Workshop is indeed often credited with introducing electronic music (influenced to a degree by the French "Music Concrète" school) into the mainstream, at least in the UK. There were all sorts of cool tales about the hacks they used to create their effects, for example tape-loops that were so long the tape would be fed out of one room, down the corridor and back through another office.
Hehe - I read this and assumed Plymouth, Devon - Needham Market, Suffolk (UK), a distance of around 350 miles. To do that distance in 50 minutes means an average speed of 420 miles per hour. I wish my car did that:-(
Wireless data rates are not unlike modem data rates, in that you're fairly unlikely to get the maximum speed unless conditions are optimal. In the case of a modem with, say, a maximum potential speed of 56k, that normally means being within a mile of your exchange on a good line (most of the time I get connect rates of 40-48kbps). In the case of packet data on a mobile network, your base station provides a fixed number of data "slots". Your phone can negotiate for up to the maximum number of slots it can handle at once (for example, in GPRS the Nokia 7650 handles 4 "down" slots and 1 "up" (or maybe 3/1). If your cell is busy, you may only get 3, 2 or even 1 "down" slot (this direction is the one which sends data to you, and so directly influences your experience of network "speed"). Also, data rates fall off as a reciprocal of the distance to the base-station. Combine these two factors and it's easy to see that you're fairly unlikely to achieve the maximum theoretical rate, no matter what the operator tells you:-) EDGE may work slightly differently (the previous relates to GPRS) but I suspect that the principal's the same.
There's an increasing suspicion in some circles that life may have first evolved in extreme locations: some believe that Black Smokers may have harboured the first life, or a recent article in New Scientist postulates that the heat generated by meteor/comet impacts may have created local "hot spots" that could have given rise to the earliest extremophiles (aparently larger impacts can remain hot for around a million years - long enough for simple life to evolve). Only later would these organisms have spread out to occupy cooler climes. Or so that particular theory goes...
Laptops are cool 'n' all, but I don't think you can beat custom-built PCs for this kind of thing. I have a 10-track digital recorder (for real-time live recording) built into an aluminium photographer's case, using an Athlon 1.7GHz and 5 Audigy soundcards - there's just no way you're going to stuff that into a laptop:-). I also play Hammond Organ in a band using Native Instrument's B4 software running on another custom PC (a bit like this one I built earlier), and an Edirol MIDI controller keyboard to drive it. It sounds awesome, and even seasoned musos are impressed with how life-like it is. It sure as hell beats a $10k pricetag for a real B3, let alone not having to lug around a 400-pound monster to every gig I do:-)
Maybe, but fibre/fiber's no good for controlling what are affectively analogue processes (flaps, ailerons, landing gear). To do that would mean that the end of every circuit would require an optical-to-electrical converter, together with an A/D (or D/A, depending on which end you were) converter. Granted, these are easy enough to do but it adds to the cost, weight and complexity of the aircraft's systems. On the other hand, the one thing that a fibre system *would* do would be to push the vulnerable part of this system (i.e. the electrical susbsystem and D/A conversion) right out to the point of use, and away from most of the in-cabin interference.
I have a cheapie 19" monitor, and if my mobile goes off anywhere within 3 feet of it it is absolutely toast (the screen wobbles all *over* the place). You wouldn't have thought that a device which uses 15-25 kilovolts to function should be affected by a few-hundred-milliwatt transmitter, but there you go...
The ability to shield avionics and wires has pretty much been already ruled out because of the increased weight. There can be miles of cabling in an aircraft: to install additional shielding over-and-above that which is already there would probably mean having to remove 20 seats-worth of payload (numbers made up, but you get the idea). Given that airlines make their money from either a) suits paying for business-class on expenses, or b) packing in as many as possible into cattle class, they're not going to lose capacity over something as uneconomic as passenger safety...
That's because since smoking was banned on (all?) flights, the airlines have turned off the aircon scrubbers that they used to have to use to clean smoke particles from the air - hence it really is "staler" than it used to be:-)
The history of -our/-or spellings
on
Flavor vs. Flavour
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From what I vaguely remember from the Bill Bryson book "Mother Tongue", the spelling of "colour" as "color" happened in Britain as well in the 18th century. There was a period where it was fashionable to try and "improve" the inconstistencies in English, and the supposedly stray extra vowel was dropped (even though the pronunciation of the first syllable differs to the second - it's more like kull-err). This was, more or less, at the time of the American War of Independence, and after that point the two languages diverged, with the then-current British reductionist fashion holding sway - maybe, in a tiny way, to affirm a linguistic independence from the former colonial power's historical spellings.
Anyhoo - I'm an English (British/European/whatever) web developer of over 8 years and am so indoctrinated with the Americanisms of HTML and its ilk, that when it comes to programming or anything computer related, the spelling of "colour" now appears incorrect, at least with a programmer's hat on. These are, after all, merely symbols to the compiler or intepreter, so their actual spelling is largely irrelevant, as long as it remains consistent throughout the project in question. I would think that the worldwide geek nation must surely consider "color" (when used for code, but not neccessarily comments) to be the de-facto standard by now, or at least anyone who has used a programming language of any sort in the last 20 years probably would...
So... you can buy a dvd. And, what... watch it 35 times because you like that eposide?
If BSkyB (Satellite broadcaster here in the UK - a natch to move into VOD) is anything to go by, I think the parent post had a point: take The Simpsons - there are now just over 300 episodes, but Sky TV seems to show the same 50 time and time again - I've seen this limited selection *sooo* many times now (although I still watch coz hey - it's The Simpsons:-). I'm sure that if Sky were in the VOD business, they'd probably still only offer the same selection.
There will also undoubtedly be situations where content partnerships, licencing, or whatever means that your particular VOD supplier only has access to a certain Pigopolists' content (AOL as VOD provider? See only TW content, etc). At least with physical media, you have access to whoever's content you want, and not which your VOD provider decrees.
I'm fairly neutral about all this stuff, but I would still question a couple of your assumptions: just exactly where does a resistance to glyphosate (a widely used herbicide made by a certain famously litigous megacorp) occur in nature? For 'tis this gene that was inserted into Bt Corn making it impervious to this weedkiller. That's something a whole level above regular cross breeding as it works by the insertion of more-or-less artificial genetic code. Also, most of these crops never make it anywhere near the "third world" as the patents on them normally preclude such non-profit uses.
I'm not sure whether it counts as having "some awful customised interface" or not, but I've used the (now) open-source Jazz++ sequencer (http://www.jazzware.com/cgi-bin/Zope.cgi/jazzware/) with some success...
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. In fact, herein lies another perfect example of co-discovery and/or "the wrong one gets the credit" [delete as appropriate], for although Edison always gets the credit for the light bulb, Joseph Swan actually filed a patent for it *months* before Edison, and even had the first house in the world lit by electric light (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Swan). Edison's patent in the US was for *a direct copy of the Swan light*, and his work was mostly based on improving Swan's invention (I know Wikipedia's not always the authoritative source on these things, but this chimes with other documentaries I've seen on the subject).
The iPad is simply a piece of consumer electronics, it is not what we would consider a true PC. As such, it doesn't matter if it's not open, can't run random application "x" or whatever, in the same way as I don't mind that my Logitech Squeezebox isn't a SatNav or my microwave oven can't show TV pictures (even though it looks like it could). I would never buy an iPad at the current price, but I might buy one if it ever got down to ~$200, just to leave lying around the lounge for some casual browsing or game play, even though I would prefer to be able to install whatever applications I wanted. I would *never* buy one to replace my laptop or desktop - these are where I code and hack about and edit photos by the thousand - something that the iPad is never going to be good for. Netbooks are cute 'n' all, and are generally an improvement over the ipad in someways, given a real keyboard and software open-ness, but they still wouldn't fulfill my needs for many of the things I do. If I really had to choose out of the two, a netbook would win for various reasons, but if I had enough cash to burn there would be a place for all of these different devices. Horses for courses.
So, I think the Governor should re-examine the issue and maybe get rid of schools but keep the books. I am not kidding.
Ah yes, great idea - because isolating an entire generation in their own rooms [ok, more than usual], with no real human contact, will really help to foster sociability and reinforce social cohesion. "Other humans: yes, we've heard of them..."
On the face of it, no they can't... in just the same way that Norway wasn't "encouraged" to go after 'DVD' Jon, or the Brits didn't turn a blind eye to CIA flights, or the way Europe doesn't go after infringers of US copyrights. In fact, if they don't do it already I bet it'll provide them with a great scapegoat: the EU can say that they implemented biometric passports because the US "told them to", the US can now sweep aside resistance to data retention there because the "EU told them to". Governments love it when it's someone else's fault...
There's one thing that's bugging me about a lot of the posts here: It's all very well saying "I download WMV and use such-and-such tool to strip out the DRM and turn it into MP3 for my player", but that's just extra-crapifying an already-crappy source IMO. Am I the only person on the planet who listens to my (own) ripped/MP3d music through a decent stereo? It's the one reason I don't (and currently won't) use download services - either they're poor bitrate-encoded or they're DRMd or both. I'm dreading the day when CDs really do disappear if this is all we've got to replace it. We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of quality HiFi components, because after CDs (or their original-source equivalents) have gone and all that's left are poor-quality downloads, what'll be the point?
Sure, here you go...
It doesn't work very well at the moment, but why on earth is it not possible to devote more resources into creating some sort of undetectable (quantum?) watermarking instead of the pointless pursuit of locking by encryption?? Watermarks, or signatures, do nothing to restrict fair-use, copying, format-shifting or whatever. However, if watermarked media is illegally released on P2P or the 'net, it's easy to determine where it came from and apply the full extent of existing legislation to the perp.
The problem currently is that re-sampling or otherwise altering a watermarked resource breaks the mark, but I would certainly go as far as to agree to allowing transcoding software (e.g. rippers and so on) to maintain the watermark whatever I do to the media (obviously, one would still be free to compile a bespoke version of OSS without such a function, which is a bit of a loophole). The reason? It doesn't restrict my use or re-use of the stuff I've bought in any way. All it means is that if I'm naughty and put it on P2P, The Man (tm) can come and get me.
I vaguely remember that Thai Baht generally has the symbol at the end. And of course, pretty much all currencies put their fractional sign (usually hundreths, such as (p)ence, (c)ent, etc) at the end...
Perhaps they are, or soon could be. In the UK at least, there's been a subtle change in Dell's TV adverts. Where the ads used to say "Dell PCs contain Intel Pentium 4 processors" (Intel pays for a percentage of the cost of the advert if they play that annoying "Duuuh... duh du du duuh" splash), they now say "This PC contains..." on what appears to be a case-by-case basis. This looks to me like they're warming up to offering PCs that, shock horror, maybe don't contain Intel CPUs. Or maybe it's just something to do with that whole EU anti-competitive thing...
Then real fun with the flipping of the magnetic field is not that it moves uniformly from one pole to another over time, but that as it breaks down, tens or hundreds of "north" and "south" poles can develop which are spread all over the planet - see this article in New Scientist. With any luck, maybe my house might end up at one of these new "North Poles" for a while, so at least I can say I've been there :-)
There's an interesting article about the creators of the Dr. Who theme, the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop, here (especially the section entitled "early days"). The Workshop is indeed often credited with introducing electronic music (influenced to a degree by the French "Music Concrète" school) into the mainstream, at least in the UK. There were all sorts of cool tales about the hacks they used to create their effects, for example tape-loops that were so long the tape would be fed out of one room, down the corridor and back through another office.
Hehe - I read this and assumed Plymouth, Devon - Needham Market, Suffolk (UK), a distance of around 350 miles. To do that distance in 50 minutes means an average speed of 420 miles per hour. I wish my car did that :-(
...but all of Bill's classes were two thirds girls
Is that like as in Thai Ladyboys or something?
Wireless data rates are not unlike modem data rates, in that you're fairly unlikely to get the maximum speed unless conditions are optimal. In the case of a modem with, say, a maximum potential speed of 56k, that normally means being within a mile of your exchange on a good line (most of the time I get connect rates of 40-48kbps). In the case of packet data on a mobile network, your base station provides a fixed number of data "slots". Your phone can negotiate for up to the maximum number of slots it can handle at once (for example, in GPRS the Nokia 7650 handles 4 "down" slots and 1 "up" (or maybe 3/1). If your cell is busy, you may only get 3, 2 or even 1 "down" slot (this direction is the one which sends data to you, and so directly influences your experience of network "speed"). Also, data rates fall off as a reciprocal of the distance to the base-station. Combine these two factors and it's easy to see that you're fairly unlikely to achieve the maximum theoretical rate, no matter what the operator tells you :-) EDGE may work slightly differently (the previous relates to GPRS) but I suspect that the principal's the same.
There's an increasing suspicion in some circles that life may have first evolved in extreme locations: some believe that Black Smokers may have harboured the first life, or a recent article in New Scientist postulates that the heat generated by meteor/comet impacts may have created local "hot spots" that could have given rise to the earliest extremophiles (aparently larger impacts can remain hot for around a million years - long enough for simple life to evolve). Only later would these organisms have spread out to occupy cooler climes. Or so that particular theory goes...
Laptops are cool 'n' all, but I don't think you can beat custom-built PCs for this kind of thing. I have a 10-track digital recorder (for real-time live recording) built into an aluminium photographer's case, using an Athlon 1.7GHz and 5 Audigy soundcards - there's just no way you're going to stuff that into a laptop :-). I also play Hammond Organ in a band using Native Instrument's B4 software running on another custom PC (a bit like this one I built earlier), and an Edirol MIDI controller keyboard to drive it. It sounds awesome, and even seasoned musos are impressed with how life-like it is. It sure as hell beats a $10k pricetag for a real B3, let alone not having to lug around a 400-pound monster to every gig I do :-)
Maybe, but fibre/fiber's no good for controlling what are affectively analogue processes (flaps, ailerons, landing gear). To do that would mean that the end of every circuit would require an optical-to-electrical converter, together with an A/D (or D/A, depending on which end you were) converter. Granted, these are easy enough to do but it adds to the cost, weight and complexity of the aircraft's systems. On the other hand, the one thing that a fibre system *would* do would be to push the vulnerable part of this system (i.e. the electrical susbsystem and D/A conversion) right out to the point of use, and away from most of the in-cabin interference.
I have a cheapie 19" monitor, and if my mobile goes off anywhere within 3 feet of it it is absolutely toast (the screen wobbles all *over* the place). You wouldn't have thought that a device which uses 15-25 kilovolts to function should be affected by a few-hundred-milliwatt transmitter, but there you go...
The ability to shield avionics and wires has pretty much been already ruled out because of the increased weight. There can be miles of cabling in an aircraft: to install additional shielding over-and-above that which is already there would probably mean having to remove 20 seats-worth of payload (numbers made up, but you get the idea). Given that airlines make their money from either a) suits paying for business-class on expenses, or b) packing in as many as possible into cattle class, they're not going to lose capacity over something as uneconomic as passenger safety...
That's because since smoking was banned on (all?) flights, the airlines have turned off the aircon scrubbers that they used to have to use to clean smoke particles from the air - hence it really is "staler" than it used to be :-)
From what I vaguely remember from the Bill Bryson book "Mother Tongue", the spelling of "colour" as "color" happened in Britain as well in the 18th century. There was a period where it was fashionable to try and "improve" the inconstistencies in English, and the supposedly stray extra vowel was dropped (even though the pronunciation of the first syllable differs to the second - it's more like kull-err). This was, more or less, at the time of the American War of Independence, and after that point the two languages diverged, with the then-current British reductionist fashion holding sway - maybe, in a tiny way, to affirm a linguistic independence from the former colonial power's historical spellings.
Anyhoo - I'm an English (British/European/whatever) web developer of over 8 years and am so indoctrinated with the Americanisms of HTML and its ilk, that when it comes to programming or anything computer related, the spelling of "colour" now appears incorrect, at least with a programmer's hat on. These are, after all, merely symbols to the compiler or intepreter, so their actual spelling is largely irrelevant, as long as it remains consistent throughout the project in question. I would think that the worldwide geek nation must surely consider "color" (when used for code, but not neccessarily comments) to be the de-facto standard by now, or at least anyone who has used a programming language of any sort in the last 20 years probably would...
So... you can buy a dvd. And, what... watch it 35 times because you like that eposide?
If BSkyB (Satellite broadcaster here in the UK - a natch to move into VOD) is anything to go by, I think the parent post had a point: take The Simpsons - there are now just over 300 episodes, but Sky TV seems to show the same 50 time and time again - I've seen this limited selection *sooo* many times now (although I still watch coz hey - it's The Simpsons :-). I'm sure that if Sky were in the VOD business, they'd probably still only offer the same selection.
There will also undoubtedly be situations where content partnerships, licencing, or whatever means that your particular VOD supplier only has access to a certain Pigopolists' content (AOL as VOD provider? See only TW content, etc). At least with physical media, you have access to whoever's content you want, and not which your VOD provider decrees.
I'm fairly neutral about all this stuff, but I would still question a couple of your assumptions: just exactly where does a resistance to glyphosate (a widely used herbicide made by a certain famously litigous megacorp) occur in nature? For 'tis this gene that was inserted into Bt Corn making it impervious to this weedkiller. That's something a whole level above regular cross breeding as it works by the insertion of more-or-less artificial genetic code. Also, most of these crops never make it anywhere near the "third world" as the patents on them normally preclude such non-profit uses.
I'm not sure whether it counts as having "some awful customised interface" or not, but I've used the (now) open-source Jazz++ sequencer (http://www.jazzware.com/cgi-bin/Zope.cgi/jazzware /) with some success...