As a happy Honda Insight CVT owner (which is rated at 57MPG highway), the lifetime average on my 2001 model is 56.1 MPG. I bought it used, and the previous owner had averaged 54.1 MPG. My personal average is 62.1 MPG. The manual transmission Insight can do even better.
So while there are some hybrids that fail to live up to the mileage claims, with careful driving your average Honda Insight can beat the EPA estimate by an appreciable margin. But a key is careful driving. If you're a foot-to-the-floor driver, or frequently drive on roads well in excess of the EPA "highway" speed (50-60MPH), your mileage will definitely take a dive.
You're not going to get anywhere near the rated mileage doing 85 on the freeway, or if your commute is all stop-and-go.
Edgy is probably the wrong word for your book. Disgusting is probably much more appropriate.
And yet... I read it. The whole thing, cover-to-cover (well, virtual cover, anyway). The idea and implementation were compelling, and as you backed off over the second half and began to deal more with ramifications of a death-obsessed (well, virtual death-obsessed) society, I began to enjoy it more, and realized the graphic violence towards the start was necessary.
I ended up walking away after reading it, thinking "what a powerful novelette". It ranked right up there from the "changing the way I look at life" with The Bicentennial Man, Ender's Game, and the original Foundation trilogy. Even the preservation of life, taken to an extreme, can become an evil thing.
Yet it still grossed me out for the first half. And I wouldn't buy it in a dead-tree edition, simply because I wouldn't want my kids to touch it until they are at least 16 or so. Isn't that odd.
Oh, and back on-topic, I'm planning on reading Doctorow's book. So far, free musical content has caused me to purchase quite a few music albums I'd never have thought of otherwise, mostly from small local bands; I'm eager to see if it works the same way on me for books.
Putting a picture on a technical resume is almost a sure ticket to the bottom of the wastepaper basket. If you were an actor, of course you'd include a headshot. As a techie, however, you are expected to be hired on your merits, and it's a big turn-off to many employers for you to plant your mug on your resume.
I've been on both sides of the fence, and the nearly-universal opinion of hiring managers regarding resumes with a picture is that they are a really, really bad idea when applying for a technical position.
I find myself wondering, in response to this suggestion, if an ebay-like approach would work really well. Make it easy to register for the service, keep your costs low to none (a few bucks, like ebay, rather than a few hundred, like some former notables), skim just a touch off the amount transacted, and you're done.
The principal pitfalls of such a system would seem to be:
1. Delayed delivery. Commitment to engineer something, and then delivering on that commitment, can take days, weeks, or months. 2. Confirmation of work completed -- how do you track that in the system? 3. Achieving sufficient volume to pay for operations.
I dunno, those don't seem insurmountable. To someone who has a hosting account somewhere, some spare time, and one of several ebay-like open source projects currently going, it seems like it would be easy to open up for business...
Hmm, I wonder what a fun domain would be that I could set something like this up on my server...
Seeing this openly advertised gives me a great deal of hope for future open development efforts. Having some monetary incentive is a pretty big barrier to lots of programmers who are otherwise interested -- it's just the standard geek reward of "people will praise me for my effort" isn't enough for them.
In this particular case, the bounties appear to be for very specific features to existing products. Looks like it's working! But it seems the bounties are oriented solely toward individual programmers. I have to wonder how such a bounty would apply to larger-scale projects? I mean, for instance, what would the ramifications be of creating a bounty for a less-specific domain, or one in which there are numerous contributors so that one person couldn't solely claim responsiblity for the feature or program?
I suppose someone would have to decide how much effort each person put into the feature or program, and pro-rate the bounty to each person based on that decision. Could be a recipe for some hard feelings.
I think bounties are a great idea, but the way those bounties are implemented will make a pretty sizeable difference in developer response.
I like this approach, though. It's an individual, saying "I have a fund this large, and am willing to pay this much for these things to get done". Much better than some big corporate bid match-up service that falls flat on its face like some notables over the last few years...
Very cool to know. Important, as well, since I've never ever purchased Red Hat Enterprise Linux in my life. Sure hope there's a "student edition" so I can make sure I know my stuff when exam time comes:)
I was a bit URI-challenged for a few seconds due to the space in the URI, the link is actually:
I'm thinking, rather than the money going to RedHat now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union might both be really good candidates for my dollars. The only unfortunate thing from where I sit is that when I bought a boxed RedHat set, I'd have some CD's and a nifty package to add to my collection.
EFF: For $120 I'd get a sticker, a T-shirt, a hat, and twelve months to use an anonymizing proxy.
ACLU: For that same $120, I get, erm, a card for twenty bucks that says I'm a member, and a tax-deductible contribution of $100 to the ACLU Foundation.
The EFF sounds much better from the "cool goodies" standpoint. Then again, I could give $20 to the ACLU for a card, and $100 to the EFF for the goodies:)
I dunno, tough choices all around. Maybe I'll just blow another $120 on a Transgaming subscription that I won't use because it doesn't support the only game I boot to Windows to play...
I totally agree, AC. That was our rationale where I used to work until recently (see my sig). We'd just purchase up2date subscriptions and per-incident support on a few key machines. I don't think we ever really used RedHat tech support for anything more than "cover your butt" protection on annual budgets, indicating we had technical support available if we needed it, at minimal cost compared to the expense of several hundred people not being able to do the money-making work.
I'm not positive RedHat will make this fly, really. I think to some extent the free and personal editions of their product drove some of the Advanced Server sales via familiarity. Several companies I know are already seeking alternative support avenues now that RedHat is retiring their product, and they are realizing that there are dozens of good support companies vying for their business that are entirely distribution-agnostic...
I've been using RedHat since 5.0. I've purchased each new release. Not much different, in my way of thinking, from showing my support for Baskin-Robbins good product by going there when I want ice cream. Those 25 cent cones down at the deli counter of the local grocery store generally aren't quite as good.
OK, so yeah, it's different because if we extended the simile out to ridiculous proportions there would be nearly identical Baskin-Robbins stores as far as the eye could see, some of them selling at dramatically reduced rates, and others giving it to you merely for the cost of your time to go out of your way to get it. Such is the nature of metaphor.
But sure, it's a blood-sucking, money-grubbing corporation. Founded by some people who had a solid vision of an integrated distribution that paved the way for much of the healthy competition we enjoy today in the GNU/Linux arena.
They employ talented hackers who support projects I enjoy. OK, yeah, I could give that money to a more "worthy cause", but it was convenient to pick up the CD's when I wanted them, rather than waiting hours downloading (or overnight). I could feel good that at least some of that money I forked over was being used to support the free software I used (notably, kernel development and Gnome).
Now, if you want to argue over whom I should hand $60 twice a year to, now that Redhat has abandoned their desktop distributions, that's a fair question for which I have no good answer yet...
1. They weren't making money on commercial RedHat releases. There are a few zealots like myself that run down to CompUSA (or whatever) to grab the latest release when it hits the shelves, but it was mostly to show our support for the company.
2. There is a lot of profit to be made in "support" in boxed product sales, and the enormous expense of Windows server licenses validate this proposition. They just need to be priced considerably below Windows support levels to compete.
3. Most desktop users want a bleeding-edge distribution so they can run the latest games and apps, and RedHat didn't want the tech support headaches and expense.
I think they just looked around at the playing field, saw that they could do little or nothing to prevent people from repackaging their product and selling it for a couple of bucks a CD, saw the numbers from their standard box sales versus the impressive revenue from comparatively few Enterprise Linux sales, and said "screw it, it's not worth our money to try to sell what everybody gets for free anyway".
Sad fact of life, that. Not enough freaks like me that like to buy the boxed set, I guess.
But I'm excited that Fedora is coming out with a release hot on the heels of the end-of-life announcements on RedHat boxed products. I think they'll find that the flexibility afforded them by a more open development model for their distribution, ala Mozilla.org, will help keep their server products competitive and "feed" the Advanced Server distribution with good ideas.
It remains to be seen how well it will take off, though... an awful lot of "mindshare" of hard-core Linux geeks is already invested in other distributions. As for me, I think they are doing it right, and although I'm certain they'll be off for 4-6 months of a rocky start, within a year they'll have a pretty solid volunteer contribution effort and a distribution that finally keeps up with cutting-edge features of other distributions. They've been behind the curve a long time (ugh "up2date" sucked vs. apt-get upgrade) on keeping their distro fresh; it is nice to see they've moved to a method that, perhaps, can keep it more current.
I wonder how they plan to handle RHCE's? I plan on taking the exam as soon as I finish reviewing for it, but I can't help but wonder if this move to Fedora on the desktop means that soon-to-be prospective RHCE's will no longer be able to just download the latest Redhat release and go, or if they'll need some special "student edition" of their Enterprise Linux product?
Re:They always say it...
on
Hackers On Atkins
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· Score: 2, Informative
I'd have to disagree with the "Exercise does zilch" statement. I've followed the Hacker's Diet plan on and off for the last two years, and can confirm that an hour of aerobic exercise, six days a week (really tough to do for the first week or two, then it gets easier) causes me to burn an extra 200-400 calories per day overall versus an identical diet with no exercise. Just going for a half-hour walk every day doesn't give nearly the same results -- for me, an 100-200 calories a day or so -- but still adds up over time.
With aerobic exercise, that's about an extra pound every two weeks lost that wouldn't be lost otherwise. When I do the numbers, I come out ahead. Yeah, it's not "make or break" on any diet, and exercising won't help you eat "whatever you want" and still lose weight, but it's that little difference that makes a big difference over the course of several months.
Here are a couple of IE CSS bugs that cause massive problems on my web sites:
Try setting table width to 100% inside of a nested DIV tag. IE suddenly flushes your page layout out the window by expanding that nested TD to 100% of the browser window width -- regardless of how wide the DIV it's nested inside is! This blows away right-hand columns on my web site, and is extraordinarily annoying. You end up with a scrollbar on the bottom of the page to see the whole thing. If you try to work around this by doing some math and setting, for instance, width to 50%, well, now it looks OK in IE, but in every other browser on the planet that cell is suddenly 1/2 the width it's supposed to be.
Yeah, that's an incredibly obnoxious thing, and all my pages are XHTML. If you're designing your page, you have to avoid tables in nested DIVs due to IE's bugs in CSS.
OK, problem number two bites: if I set background-color in #main on a page, IE won't display any images inside DIVs. This can be worked around by turning off background-color in #main entirely, and IE will read the background-color of the first attribute and apply this to the whole page, but it's still obnoxious that I have to be careful where I set that attribute or else IE will randomly re-draw backgrounds overtop of images.
I freely admit, I'm a casual HTML coder. I know several programming languages, and have been a sysadmin for nine years, so my forte is back-end systems and not HTML. But even in my limited experience, these two have been obnoxious and painful, requiring hours of research to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it on my sites.
I make sure that my pages all validate as XHTML 1.0 and render correctly in Mozilla, IE, and Opera. The only causes I've ever had to break that validation is when something is screwed in IE and I have to work around it (like needing a wrap attribute, which is not valid XHTML, on a form input field or else IE goes buggy on it). IE mis-understanding CSS has caused me many hours of frustration due to its bugs.
As an amateur web developer, the statement "IE isn't so bad" is utterly false. IE is the worst. Period. Pages don't render pixel-perfect because it mis-handles font sizes as if they matter to the size of a div with a height attribute.
Mozilla and Opera do it right. Internet Explorer does not render pages "pixel perfect" without hours of tweaking to work around its problems with CSS. Yeah, you can design attractive sites that look perfect in all browsers, but at much, much, much more time expense for anything but very simple sites. And virtually all the extra time is spent accomodating IE's broken, buggy behavior.
Don't forget Drupal. Kind of the spiritual successor to Geeklog, in my opinion. It's stuck in a world of its own, where it can't quite decide if it's a blogging tool or a content management system. I kind of enjoy that "in-between-ness"; it's powerful, but not bizarre, it's easy enough to operate (once set up) that anybody can do it, and it's really easy to program for and debug...
...for a geek. It's what I run my blog on, and so far it's far easier to customize than Movable Type ever was for me.
Yes, the natural tendency to trend away from the slight dissonance of an even-tempered scale, and into the sweetness of a Pythagorean, is well-documented. If you set your filter to +2 and do a search for "Doc Hopper" on this board, you'll see my lengthy response to an Anonymous Coward who just didn't get it.
The only unfortunate thing is that, if you introduce a piano into a symphony orchestra, suddenly most players in the same range have to adjust their tuning slightly. Most string players adjust without thinking about it (or keep playing sour notes, if they are less experienced), but it's still jarring for the conductor to go from experiencing a sweet, pure Pythagorean major or minor seventh chord with their string section, for instance, to the slightly more dissonant even-tempered version of the same. However, given that string players tend to vary by up to 10 cents or so from one another anyway, it's often not noticeable to an audience member.
The fact there are different tuning methods isn't a good thing, and isn't a bad thing -- it's just a thing that experienced musicians are aware of and accomodate instinctively.
Tuning, pitch, and scale are closely correlated. The two most common "tunings" in the western world are even-tempered and Pythagorean. The most common "scales" are Ionian and Aeolian (major and minor), with Dorian and Phrygian sometimes chiming in on popular music, but rarely others. Other cultures offer non-pentatonic scales with sometimes only five notes. I'm not confusing pitch and scale. I'm explaining that often pitch correction is necessary, particularly in some unusual recording situations, due to the conflict between modern even-tempered 12-tone tuning of certain instruments and the natural instinct of a singer or inexact-pitch instrument (such most strings, which depend on finger position for pitch, and some woodwinds where one can slightly adjust pitch via jaw tension) to gravitate towards a sweeter, non-logarithmic tuning.
It appears you've never done harmonic analysis of choral music, or tried to match an accompaniment to an in-tune choral arrangement when said piece was first performed a cappella. Any competent digital piano will allow you to change tunings (note: NOT change pitch, A=440 all the way here) to match the harpsichord needs of pre-Baroque pieces or gain the sweet sound of a perfect Pythagorean chord.
If a piano is tuned to the Pythagorean scale in, say, the key of B flat, trying to play a piece in C major on the same piano without retuning will sound horrible. This is perfectly well-understood in the music community. If you wish to play an even-tempered instrument in multiple keys, you accept a slight dissonance across all ranges of the keyboard in exchange for the flexibility of playing in any key without unbearable dissonance. It is perfectly possible, and often done even today with harpsichords, to tune a keyboard instrument to a non-even-tempered scale in order to provide "perfect" consonance in playing pre-Baroque period pieces.
Now on to the rest of your nearly-coherent rant:
Good singers have perfect pitch
Baloney. You can be a good singer with good relative pitch. "Perfect Pitch", as inexpertly named for this article, is a totally different thing from singing in tune, or having good relative pitch. Given that I mentioned "imperfect pitch", above, I stand by what I said: all singers have imperfect pitch. They will not always nail the note perfectly, particularly at the end of an exhausting recording session. There will be times that pitch correction is welcomed as a practical measure in many vocalist's lives. There are, of course, purists who will raise holy hell if someone were to pitch-correct them.
Since when does a key change sound awful?
If your instrument is even-tempered, key changes within a piece do not sound awful, although there is a slight dissonance to this tuning. If you are using a natural temperament or other alternative, sweeter tuning, it will sound awful in other keys, particularly if those keys don't have a fundamental on the major fourth or fifth with few accidentals versus the primary scale. Since you are obviously a complete novice to the understanding of tuning systems, allow me to recommend checking out this brief talk on "Math and Music". These days, we've taken the even-tempered scale a bit further by using logarithmic tuning devices rather than simply dividing octaves by 12, but even those tuning devices are not quite "perfect" when tuning a piano. You need to stretch the octaves on the upper regions of the piano in order to avoid perceived dissonance on the part of the listener, and that is a skill that takes a long time to master.
It is not and has never been called the Cher Effect. Its called over compression.
Obviously our perspectives differ. I think the effects, including auto-tuning when used well can dramatically enhance the performance and my experience as an audience participant. The oft-maligned sound engineer(s) running the show backstage often put in impressive performances that simply make the guys on stage look better.
You're paying to see some people larger-than-life perform music you know and love. Why deny them the right to use any reasonable means to ensure you get the quality, consistent performance you paid for?
Casting someone who uses auto-tune as a "robot", can easily be a straw man argument; additionally, asking the rhetorical "at what point do they become robots" is a slippery slope. You're paying for the illusion, anyway -- if the performance is fun and you enjoy the heck out of it, who cares what technology they used to create it? You and I both know there are excellent performers who use whatever gadgets they can to improve the performance, and the audience still gets their money's worth -- whether they are pitch-corrected or not. Try a Rush concert sometime, they use an amazing amount of tech to get their music across, and pull it off wonderfully.
Thus the beauty of auto-tune. If you have to sing in-tune with an even-tempered instrument, why not have a device to make slight 3-10 cent corrections in your pitch to be in tune with its intonation?
This is one of the common causes of the complaint that someone is singing "flat". They aren't, but particularly the third in most even tempered scales is quite sharp compared to what the harmonics tell a singer should be the third. Therefore they must accomodate the limitations of the accompaniment. Some singers do this naturally, while others can use a little nudge.
Most autotuners have adjustable delay and sensitivity settings, and can detect transients very well. Too liberal of a setting, though, and they only catch the long sustains. Too tight of a setting, and they create the "Cher Effect".
If you expect many glissandos in a song, as a sound engineer you'd either shut it off for those passages, or reduce the sensitivity. It's pretty trivial.
Not quite spot-on. Most pitch correction devices can accomodate passages within certain parameters of bending, as wide as you like it. They can also be set to turn off at certain points in a song, which is easily scriptable with SMPTE or MTC (MIDI time code). Most modern performances have something clocking the back end (notice the drummers normally wear headphones? Bassists too?) to add effects and tape tracks in. Pitch correction is amazingly adjustable.
Admittedly, my experience with "live" autotuning is very limited, but in the studio I can choose to use it where it's needed and where it's not.
And, frankly, it offends me as a singer.
Why be offended? Those who wish to demonstrate their talent sans pitch correction will do so. Those that choose to use it will do so. What's the big deal? Is a painter less of a painter because he uses an airbrush instead of hand paints?
And this is the perfect reason for pitch correction: the singer naturally wants to sing to a different tuning than the even-tempered scale (which, by the way, was most widely popularized, though not invented by, Johann Sebastian Bach). You might be singing perfectly on-pitch on a Pythagorean scale, yet be several cents flat or sharp on the even-tempered scale. It's the fault of our tuning system. Pitch correction helps remedy this.
I intentionally developed the ability in high school using certain pitches as reference points. For instance, I know what a "B" sounds like at all times (from the Journey song, "Faithfully"), what a "D" sounds like (from the Journey song, "Open Arms"), and what a G sounds like (from the Depeche Mode song, "Somebody"). From those, I can work semitones to whatever pitch I'm hearing or need to sing, and it became second nature after a while.
On the other hand, I don't have nearly a perfect ability to hold a note when singing. I make use of Antares Auto-Tune on my recordings, and you can graphically see how far off you are. I do massive numbers of retakes to get as close as I can, but occasionally there's just a note you can't hit cleanly for one reason or another that a judicious application of pitch-shifting can fix in a jiffy.
It's much, much, much faster to pitch-correct a couple of takes of a track than to do twenty takes of the same thing. And that, to me, is a really big deal when producing music on a deadline. I can get to the meat of what I want to get across without spending days in the studio trying to get one line perfect.
That's really what it boils down to: improvement of a performance for only the cost of the pitch-correction. Most musicians would take the choice of getting more free time with no downside; I'm happily in that camp.
If the artist is so off key that they need this device then you paid $50 dollars too much to see a no-talent hack.
While I find myself partially agreeing with your opinion, at the same time pitch correction and adjustment is vital to many performances these days. Many songs require more harmony parts than the band can create live. Given the choice between hiring three backup singers, or plunking down a couple thousand for a good adjustment rig that doesn't require food and a trailer, which would you pick? Judicious use of pitch adjustment (or "tweakers") to create multiple harmony lines can really improve the experience without introducing extraneous singers. Many performers also value the ability to create a completely on-key performance (really tough when you're performing gymnastics up there) so that they can have a good selection of listenable tunes for a live CD.
There are a lot of different reasons to use technology to enhance a performance. When's the last time you saw a band performing in a large arena without amplifiers, effects units, and various other techno-gadgets to improve the performance?
Auto-tuning is just a nonissue. People complained about synthesizers taking the place of string sections, too. Life goes on, technology improves, and people can do more with less.
The electric guitar is a unique phenomenon. The guitar is not the instrument. The amplifier is not the instrument. It is the synthesis of these two together, and the unique effects you can apply to the signal, that together create the instrument.
It's an amazing instrument. Distortion, delay, and other effects create new sounds to play with, and new ways of creating music.
If you need distortion and effects to make your music good, it means you aren't a good enough musician yet
Your statement is insulting. Allow me to rephrase:
Distortion and effects can be used to make good music.
The former statement creates a corollary that using effects diminishes your musical ability, or that you are using it as a crutch. The latter statement reinforces that these are new tools in the musical repertoire, and only enhance what is already there. The electric guitar is a unique instrument, and using it to its full abilities, including effects, brings out new dimensions in musicality.
Would you have a clarinet player abandon use of the trill? Or forbid a pianist the use of the sostenuto? Of course not. The guitarist is no less for his judicious application of his instrument's sinular abilities.
So, what, you prefer that artists take the stage in front of 30,000 screaming fans and try to perform with no technology? No mikes, no compressors, no amps, no distortion, no synthesizers, no speakers?
Every one of these pieces of technology alters the music. If you invite a musician into your home to play, you have a good chance of getting a completely unaltered performance. But in large performances, compression, pitch correction, subtle analog distortion, artificial delay and reverb, and many other techniques are required so that the performance can even be remotely as nice as the theoretical one-on-one performance in your living room.
I'll break it to you: a lot of these "boy bands" actually have tremendous talent. I challenge you to sing on-pitch while dancing your heart out. It's a hard job. Disparage them all you want, but virtually all successful musicians work their asses off just to hand you a performance that doesn't suck. Attractiveness is part of the package, but just because their music is "pop" and they have a slick marketing campaign behind them doesn't mean they aren't good artists in their own right. Yeah, sometimes the material they are given is trite and bland. But you need to realize that the record companies exert massive influence in the career of any given artist, effectively forcing them to perform music chosen by the corporation or take a 25% pay cut.
Don't knock talent just because it's pretty. They are lucky to be blessed with a beautiful voice and a beautiful face, but to insult their talent because luck has dealt them a better hand than your own is simply spiteful.
Hate to disagree here, but this is pure nostalgia on your part. "Back when I was a young'un, things were so much better". There are a ton of bands with excellent talent today, supported by record labels that are not the massive pre-packaged dreck you refer to. The music market is much more massive than it used to be, with the few top studios releasing fewer artists with more mass appeal, but you don't have to look very hard to find bands with amazing live presence.
Just check out Garageband. Excellent music (and utter crap) is more accessible today than ever, and there's more talent than ever before because the price barrier to entry has been lowered. Get past the romanticized notions of yesteryear, and go check out a few live bands at your local stage. You'll be disappointed a lot, but occasionally absolutely blown away.
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As a happy Honda Insight CVT owner (which is rated at 57MPG highway), the lifetime average on my 2001 model is 56.1 MPG. I bought it used, and the previous owner had averaged 54.1 MPG. My personal average is 62.1 MPG. The manual transmission Insight can do even better.
So while there are some hybrids that fail to live up to the mileage claims, with careful driving your average Honda Insight can beat the EPA estimate by an appreciable margin. But a key is careful driving. If you're a foot-to-the-floor driver, or frequently drive on roads well in excess of the EPA "highway" speed (50-60MPH), your mileage will definitely take a dive.
You're not going to get anywhere near the rated mileage doing 85 on the freeway, or if your commute is all stop-and-go.
Edgy is probably the wrong word for your book. Disgusting is probably much more appropriate.
And yet... I read it. The whole thing, cover-to-cover (well, virtual cover, anyway). The idea and implementation were compelling, and as you backed off over the second half and began to deal more with ramifications of a death-obsessed (well, virtual death-obsessed) society, I began to enjoy it more, and realized the graphic violence towards the start was necessary.
I ended up walking away after reading it, thinking "what a powerful novelette". It ranked right up there from the "changing the way I look at life" with The Bicentennial Man, Ender's Game, and the original Foundation trilogy. Even the preservation of life, taken to an extreme, can become an evil thing.
Yet it still grossed me out for the first half. And I wouldn't buy it in a dead-tree edition, simply because I wouldn't want my kids to touch it until they are at least 16 or so. Isn't that odd.
Oh, and back on-topic, I'm planning on reading Doctorow's book. So far, free musical content has caused me to purchase quite a few music albums I'd never have thought of otherwise, mostly from small local bands; I'm eager to see if it works the same way on me for books.
Putting a picture on a technical resume is almost a sure ticket to the bottom of the wastepaper basket. If you were an actor, of course you'd include a headshot. As a techie, however, you are expected to be hired on your merits, and it's a big turn-off to many employers for you to plant your mug on your resume.
I've been on both sides of the fence, and the nearly-universal opinion of hiring managers regarding resumes with a picture is that they are a really, really bad idea when applying for a technical position.
I find myself wondering, in response to this suggestion, if an ebay-like approach would work really well. Make it easy to register for the service, keep your costs low to none (a few bucks, like ebay, rather than a few hundred, like some former notables), skim just a touch off the amount transacted, and you're done.
The principal pitfalls of such a system would seem to be:
1. Delayed delivery. Commitment to engineer something, and then delivering on that commitment, can take days, weeks, or months.
2. Confirmation of work completed -- how do you track that in the system?
3. Achieving sufficient volume to pay for operations.
I dunno, those don't seem insurmountable. To someone who has a hosting account somewhere, some spare time, and one of several ebay-like open source projects currently going, it seems like it would be easy to open up for business...
Hmm, I wonder what a fun domain would be that I could set something like this up on my server...
Seeing this openly advertised gives me a great deal of hope for future open development efforts. Having some monetary incentive is a pretty big barrier to lots of programmers who are otherwise interested -- it's just the standard geek reward of "people will praise me for my effort" isn't enough for them.
In this particular case, the bounties appear to be for very specific features to existing products. Looks like it's working! But it seems the bounties are oriented solely toward individual programmers. I have to wonder how such a bounty would apply to larger-scale projects? I mean, for instance, what would the ramifications be of creating a bounty for a less-specific domain, or one in which there are numerous contributors so that one person couldn't solely claim responsiblity for the feature or program?
I suppose someone would have to decide how much effort each person put into the feature or program, and pro-rate the bounty to each person based on that decision. Could be a recipe for some hard feelings.
I think bounties are a great idea, but the way those bounties are implemented will make a pretty sizeable difference in developer response.
I like this approach, though. It's an individual, saying "I have a fund this large, and am willing to pay this much for these things to get done". Much better than some big corporate bid match-up service that falls flat on its face like some notables over the last few years...
Very cool to know. Important, as well, since I've never ever purchased Red Hat Enterprise Linux in my life. Sure hope there's a "student edition" so I can make sure I know my stuff when exam time comes :)
# rhel3_rhce (Clickable is good!)
I was a bit URI-challenged for a few seconds due to the space in the URI, the link is actually:
http://www.redhat.com/training/rhce/rhce_faq.html
I'm thinking, rather than the money going to RedHat now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union might both be really good candidates for my dollars. The only unfortunate thing from where I sit is that when I bought a boxed RedHat set, I'd have some CD's and a nifty package to add to my collection.
:)
EFF: For $120 I'd get a sticker, a T-shirt, a hat, and twelve months to use an anonymizing proxy.
ACLU: For that same $120, I get, erm, a card for twenty bucks that says I'm a member, and a tax-deductible contribution of $100 to the ACLU Foundation.
The EFF sounds much better from the "cool goodies" standpoint. Then again, I could give $20 to the ACLU for a card, and $100 to the EFF for the goodies
I dunno, tough choices all around. Maybe I'll just blow another $120 on a Transgaming subscription that I won't use because it doesn't support the only game I boot to Windows to play...
I totally agree, AC. That was our rationale where I used to work until recently (see my sig). We'd just purchase up2date subscriptions and per-incident support on a few key machines. I don't think we ever really used RedHat tech support for anything more than "cover your butt" protection on annual budgets, indicating we had technical support available if we needed it, at minimal cost compared to the expense of several hundred people not being able to do the money-making work.
I'm not positive RedHat will make this fly, really. I think to some extent the free and personal editions of their product drove some of the Advanced Server sales via familiarity. Several companies I know are already seeking alternative support avenues now that RedHat is retiring their product, and they are realizing that there are dozens of good support companies vying for their business that are entirely distribution-agnostic...
I've been using RedHat since 5.0. I've purchased each new release. Not much different, in my way of thinking, from showing my support for Baskin-Robbins good product by going there when I want ice cream. Those 25 cent cones down at the deli counter of the local grocery store generally aren't quite as good.
OK, so yeah, it's different because if we extended the simile out to ridiculous proportions there would be nearly identical Baskin-Robbins stores as far as the eye could see, some of them selling at dramatically reduced rates, and others giving it to you merely for the cost of your time to go out of your way to get it. Such is the nature of metaphor.
But sure, it's a blood-sucking, money-grubbing corporation. Founded by some people who had a solid vision of an integrated distribution that paved the way for much of the healthy competition we enjoy today in the GNU/Linux arena.
They employ talented hackers who support projects I enjoy. OK, yeah, I could give that money to a more "worthy cause", but it was convenient to pick up the CD's when I wanted them, rather than waiting hours downloading (or overnight). I could feel good that at least some of that money I forked over was being used to support the free software I used (notably, kernel development and Gnome).
Now, if you want to argue over whom I should hand $60 twice a year to, now that Redhat has abandoned their desktop distributions, that's a fair question for which I have no good answer yet...
My interpretation of their move is this:
1. They weren't making money on commercial RedHat releases. There are a few zealots like myself that run down to CompUSA (or whatever) to grab the latest release when it hits the shelves, but it was mostly to show our support for the company.
2. There is a lot of profit to be made in "support" in boxed product sales, and the enormous expense of Windows server licenses validate this proposition. They just need to be priced considerably below Windows support levels to compete.
3. Most desktop users want a bleeding-edge distribution so they can run the latest games and apps, and RedHat didn't want the tech support headaches and expense.
I think they just looked around at the playing field, saw that they could do little or nothing to prevent people from repackaging their product and selling it for a couple of bucks a CD, saw the numbers from their standard box sales versus the impressive revenue from comparatively few Enterprise Linux sales, and said "screw it, it's not worth our money to try to sell what everybody gets for free anyway".
Sad fact of life, that. Not enough freaks like me that like to buy the boxed set, I guess.
But I'm excited that Fedora is coming out with a release hot on the heels of the end-of-life announcements on RedHat boxed products. I think they'll find that the flexibility afforded them by a more open development model for their distribution, ala Mozilla.org, will help keep their server products competitive and "feed" the Advanced Server distribution with good ideas.
It remains to be seen how well it will take off, though... an awful lot of "mindshare" of hard-core Linux geeks is already invested in other distributions. As for me, I think they are doing it right, and although I'm certain they'll be off for 4-6 months of a rocky start, within a year they'll have a pretty solid volunteer contribution effort and a distribution that finally keeps up with cutting-edge features of other distributions. They've been behind the curve a long time (ugh "up2date" sucked vs. apt-get upgrade) on keeping their distro fresh; it is nice to see they've moved to a method that, perhaps, can keep it more current.
I wonder how they plan to handle RHCE's? I plan on taking the exam as soon as I finish reviewing for it, but I can't help but wonder if this move to Fedora on the desktop means that soon-to-be prospective RHCE's will no longer be able to just download the latest Redhat release and go, or if they'll need some special "student edition" of their Enterprise Linux product?
I'd have to disagree with the "Exercise does zilch" statement. I've followed the Hacker's Diet plan on and off for the last two years, and can confirm that an hour of aerobic exercise, six days a week (really tough to do for the first week or two, then it gets easier) causes me to burn an extra 200-400 calories per day overall versus an identical diet with no exercise. Just going for a half-hour walk every day doesn't give nearly the same results -- for me, an 100-200 calories a day or so -- but still adds up over time.
With aerobic exercise, that's about an extra pound every two weeks lost that wouldn't be lost otherwise. When I do the numbers, I come out ahead. Yeah, it's not "make or break" on any diet, and exercising won't help you eat "whatever you want" and still lose weight, but it's that little difference that makes a big difference over the course of several months.
Here are a couple of IE CSS bugs that cause massive problems on my web sites:
Try setting table width to 100% inside of a nested DIV tag. IE suddenly flushes your page layout out the window by expanding that nested TD to 100% of the browser window width -- regardless of how wide the DIV it's nested inside is! This blows away right-hand columns on my web site, and is extraordinarily annoying. You end up with a scrollbar on the bottom of the page to see the whole thing. If you try to work around this by doing some math and setting, for instance, width to 50%, well, now it looks OK in IE, but in every other browser on the planet that cell is suddenly 1/2 the width it's supposed to be.
Yeah, that's an incredibly obnoxious thing, and all my pages are XHTML. If you're designing your page, you have to avoid tables in nested DIVs due to IE's bugs in CSS.
OK, problem number two bites: if I set background-color in #main on a page, IE won't display any images inside DIVs. This can be worked around by turning off background-color in #main entirely, and IE will read the background-color of the first attribute and apply this to the whole page, but it's still obnoxious that I have to be careful where I set that attribute or else IE will randomly re-draw backgrounds overtop of images.
I freely admit, I'm a casual HTML coder. I know several programming languages, and have been a sysadmin for nine years, so my forte is back-end systems and not HTML. But even in my limited experience, these two have been obnoxious and painful, requiring hours of research to figure out what's wrong and how to fix it on my sites.
I make sure that my pages all validate as XHTML 1.0 and render correctly in Mozilla, IE, and Opera. The only causes I've ever had to break that validation is when something is screwed in IE and I have to work around it (like needing a wrap attribute, which is not valid XHTML, on a form input field or else IE goes buggy on it). IE mis-understanding CSS has caused me many hours of frustration due to its bugs.
As an amateur web developer, the statement "IE isn't so bad" is utterly false. IE is the worst. Period. Pages don't render pixel-perfect because it mis-handles font sizes as if they matter to the size of a div with a height attribute.
Mozilla and Opera do it right. Internet Explorer does not render pages "pixel perfect" without hours of tweaking to work around its problems with CSS. Yeah, you can design attractive sites that look perfect in all browsers, but at much, much, much more time expense for anything but very simple sites. And virtually all the extra time is spent accomodating IE's broken, buggy behavior.
Yes, the natural tendency to trend away from the slight dissonance of an even-tempered scale, and into the sweetness of a Pythagorean, is well-documented. If you set your filter to +2 and do a search for "Doc Hopper" on this board, you'll see my lengthy response to an Anonymous Coward who just didn't get it.
The only unfortunate thing is that, if you introduce a piano into a symphony orchestra, suddenly most players in the same range have to adjust their tuning slightly. Most string players adjust without thinking about it (or keep playing sour notes, if they are less experienced), but it's still jarring for the conductor to go from experiencing a sweet, pure Pythagorean major or minor seventh chord with their string section, for instance, to the slightly more dissonant even-tempered version of the same. However, given that string players tend to vary by up to 10 cents or so from one another anyway, it's often not noticeable to an audience member.
The fact there are different tuning methods isn't a good thing, and isn't a bad thing -- it's just a thing that experienced musicians are aware of and accomodate instinctively.
It appears you've never done harmonic analysis of choral music, or tried to match an accompaniment to an in-tune choral arrangement when said piece was first performed a cappella. Any competent digital piano will allow you to change tunings (note: NOT change pitch, A=440 all the way here) to match the harpsichord needs of pre-Baroque pieces or gain the sweet sound of a perfect Pythagorean chord.
If a piano is tuned to the Pythagorean scale in, say, the key of B flat, trying to play a piece in C major on the same piano without retuning will sound horrible. This is perfectly well-understood in the music community. If you wish to play an even-tempered instrument in multiple keys, you accept a slight dissonance across all ranges of the keyboard in exchange for the flexibility of playing in any key without unbearable dissonance. It is perfectly possible, and often done even today with harpsichords, to tune a keyboard instrument to a non-even-tempered scale in order to provide "perfect" consonance in playing pre-Baroque period pieces.
Now on to the rest of your nearly-coherent rant:
Baloney. You can be a good singer with good relative pitch. "Perfect Pitch", as inexpertly named for this article, is a totally different thing from singing in tune, or having good relative pitch. Given that I mentioned "imperfect pitch", above, I stand by what I said: all singers have imperfect pitch. They will not always nail the note perfectly, particularly at the end of an exhausting recording session. There will be times that pitch correction is welcomed as a practical measure in many vocalist's lives. There are, of course, purists who will raise holy hell if someone were to pitch-correct them.
If your instrument is even-tempered, key changes within a piece do not sound awful, although there is a slight dissonance to this tuning. If you are using a natural temperament or other alternative, sweeter tuning, it will sound awful in other keys, particularly if those keys don't have a fundamental on the major fourth or fifth with few accidentals versus the primary scale.
Since you are obviously a complete novice to the understanding of tuning systems, allow me to recommend checking out this brief talk on "Math and Music". These days, we've taken the even-tempered scale a bit further by using logarithmic tuning devices rather than simply dividing octaves by 12, but even those tuning devices are not quite "perfect" when tuning a piano. You need to stretch the octaves on the upper regions of the piano in order to avoid perceived dissonance on the part of the listener, and that is a skill that takes a long time to master.
OK.
Obviously our perspectives differ. I think the effects, including auto-tuning when used well can dramatically enhance the performance and my experience as an audience participant. The oft-maligned sound engineer(s) running the show backstage often put in impressive performances that simply make the guys on stage look better.
You're paying to see some people larger-than-life perform music you know and love. Why deny them the right to use any reasonable means to ensure you get the quality, consistent performance you paid for?
Casting someone who uses auto-tune as a "robot", can easily be a straw man argument; additionally, asking the rhetorical "at what point do they become robots" is a slippery slope. You're paying for the illusion, anyway -- if the performance is fun and you enjoy the heck out of it, who cares what technology they used to create it? You and I both know there are excellent performers who use whatever gadgets they can to improve the performance, and the audience still gets their money's worth -- whether they are pitch-corrected or not. Try a Rush concert sometime, they use an amazing amount of tech to get their music across, and pull it off wonderfully.
Thus the beauty of auto-tune. If you have to sing in-tune with an even-tempered instrument, why not have a device to make slight 3-10 cent corrections in your pitch to be in tune with its intonation?
This is one of the common causes of the complaint that someone is singing "flat". They aren't, but particularly the third in most even tempered scales is quite sharp compared to what the harmonics tell a singer should be the third. Therefore they must accomodate the limitations of the accompaniment. Some singers do this naturally, while others can use a little nudge.
Most autotuners have adjustable delay and sensitivity settings, and can detect transients very well. Too liberal of a setting, though, and they only catch the long sustains. Too tight of a setting, and they create the "Cher Effect".
If you expect many glissandos in a song, as a sound engineer you'd either shut it off for those passages, or reduce the sensitivity. It's pretty trivial.
Admittedly, my experience with "live" autotuning is very limited, but in the studio I can choose to use it where it's needed and where it's not.
Why be offended? Those who wish to demonstrate their talent sans pitch correction will do so. Those that choose to use it will do so. What's the big deal? Is a painter less of a painter because he uses an airbrush instead of hand paints?
And this is the perfect reason for pitch correction: the singer naturally wants to sing to a different tuning than the even-tempered scale (which, by the way, was most widely popularized, though not invented by, Johann Sebastian Bach). You might be singing perfectly on-pitch on a Pythagorean scale, yet be several cents flat or sharp on the even-tempered scale. It's the fault of our tuning system. Pitch correction helps remedy this.
I intentionally developed the ability in high school using certain pitches as reference points. For instance, I know what a "B" sounds like at all times (from the Journey song, "Faithfully"), what a "D" sounds like (from the Journey song, "Open Arms"), and what a G sounds like (from the Depeche Mode song, "Somebody"). From those, I can work semitones to whatever pitch I'm hearing or need to sing, and it became second nature after a while.
On the other hand, I don't have nearly a perfect ability to hold a note when singing. I make use of Antares Auto-Tune on my recordings, and you can graphically see how far off you are. I do massive numbers of retakes to get as close as I can, but occasionally there's just a note you can't hit cleanly for one reason or another that a judicious application of pitch-shifting can fix in a jiffy.
It's much, much, much faster to pitch-correct a couple of takes of a track than to do twenty takes of the same thing. And that, to me, is a really big deal when producing music on a deadline. I can get to the meat of what I want to get across without spending days in the studio trying to get one line perfect.
That's really what it boils down to: improvement of a performance for only the cost of the pitch-correction. Most musicians would take the choice of getting more free time with no downside; I'm happily in that camp.
There are a lot of different reasons to use technology to enhance a performance. When's the last time you saw a band performing in a large arena without amplifiers, effects units, and various other techno-gadgets to improve the performance?
Auto-tuning is just a nonissue. People complained about synthesizers taking the place of string sections, too. Life goes on, technology improves, and people can do more with less.
It's an amazing instrument. Distortion, delay, and other effects create new sounds to play with, and new ways of creating music.
Your statement is insulting. Allow me to rephrase:
The former statement creates a corollary that using effects diminishes your musical ability, or that you are using it as a crutch. The latter statement reinforces that these are new tools in the musical repertoire, and only enhance what is already there. The electric guitar is a unique instrument, and using it to its full abilities, including effects, brings out new dimensions in musicality.
Would you have a clarinet player abandon use of the trill? Or forbid a pianist the use of the sostenuto? Of course not. The guitarist is no less for his judicious application of his instrument's sinular abilities.
So, what, you prefer that artists take the stage in front of 30,000 screaming fans and try to perform with no technology? No mikes, no compressors, no amps, no distortion, no synthesizers, no speakers?
Every one of these pieces of technology alters the music. If you invite a musician into your home to play, you have a good chance of getting a completely unaltered performance. But in large performances, compression, pitch correction, subtle analog distortion, artificial delay and reverb, and many other techniques are required so that the performance can even be remotely as nice as the theoretical one-on-one performance in your living room.
I'll break it to you: a lot of these "boy bands" actually have tremendous talent. I challenge you to sing on-pitch while dancing your heart out. It's a hard job. Disparage them all you want, but virtually all successful musicians work their asses off just to hand you a performance that doesn't suck. Attractiveness is part of the package, but just because their music is "pop" and they have a slick marketing campaign behind them doesn't mean they aren't good artists in their own right. Yeah, sometimes the material they are given is trite and bland. But you need to realize that the record companies exert massive influence in the career of any given artist, effectively forcing them to perform music chosen by the corporation or take a 25% pay cut.
Don't knock talent just because it's pretty. They are lucky to be blessed with a beautiful voice and a beautiful face, but to insult their talent because luck has dealt them a better hand than your own is simply spiteful.
Hate to disagree here, but this is pure nostalgia on your part. "Back when I was a young'un, things were so much better". There are a ton of bands with excellent talent today, supported by record labels that are not the massive pre-packaged dreck you refer to. The music market is much more massive than it used to be, with the few top studios releasing fewer artists with more mass appeal, but you don't have to look very hard to find bands with amazing live presence.
Just check out Garageband. Excellent music (and utter crap) is more accessible today than ever, and there's more talent than ever before because the price barrier to entry has been lowered. Get past the romanticized notions of yesteryear, and go check out a few live bands at your local stage. You'll be disappointed a lot, but occasionally absolutely blown away.