You shouldn't assume Google hasn't hired women. Perhaps they all quit after working for a while surrounded by nerds!
But I found the video fascinating and compelling. Dr. Bussard was every bit as interesting as I imagined him to be. This is The Guy whose name I read in the Larry Niven story about a guy traveling through the Galaxy at near-lightspeed in a Bussard Ramjet.
So why are people walking out as the video goes on? Firstly I wonder how these young guys have such weak bladders, and how much coffee and energy drinks they consume, but later the video shows the audience with EMPTY SEATS! I hope it's because they really had to report back to work, perhaps for a meeting, rather than getting bored with the talk.
Now I'm really wanting to work for Google just to be able to see their speakers.
Yeah, and then a self-replicating object would just drain everyone's virtual bank account, just like a phisher getting your real-life bank account and routing numbers.
This is amazing, these virtual worlds are becoming more and more like real life all the time.
Somewhere in "The Art of Computer Programming" Knuth recommends:
"How To Lie With Statistics", Darrel Huff, 1954. This book goes no deeper into the math of statistics than average, mean and mode, but the examples of such things as selection biases and the (mis)use of graphs in advertising and propaganda make this a classic book, AND a hoot. It may fall more into the humor category than technical, but what it does cover, it covers correctly. As the author says in the intro, it's actually how to protect yourself from those who would use statistics to lie to you.
Back to deep technical know-how: "Discrete-Time Signal Processing", 2nd. Ed., 1999, Oppenheim/Schafer/Buck This is effectively the Third Edition of the venerable "Digital Signal Processing" by Oppenheim&Schafer
Well, ok, while I'm posting, here's a third book, another on DSP, with free online and not-free dead-tree versions available here: http://dspguide.com/ It's a little more readable than "Discrete-Time..." and as a result you may actually get more out of it.
"The Art of Electronics" 2nd ed., 1989, ISBN 0521370957 Some of it, especially the stuff covering microprocessors, shows its age, but you won't find more practical info about electronics in one place than here. It requires some basic electronics knowledge (some DC and AC circuits, basic transistors), but from there it will take you a good ways. One coauthor (Hill) posts to Usenet, and rumors of a third edition have been made (many analog parts mentions need updating as well), but if it happens it will be a few years down the road before it appears.
Other notable titles: High-Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Howard Johnson 1993 ISBN 0133957241 Troubleshooting Analog Circuits Bob Pease ISBN 0750694998 (it seems at least as much design-related (and how to prevent trouble) as about troubleshooting) Anything (analog-related) by Jim Williams
Me being someone that's been electrocuted more times than I can count, you have to understand why this scares the living shit out of me.
Perhaps you have received electric shocks more than once, but you can only be electrocuted (killed by an electric shock) once.
The real danger here is excessive heating of living bodies, and possible RF burns if your hand gets too near the power transmitter. At 6 MHz, it's too high a frequency for the nervous system to respond, thus it won't shock you, but it still can hurt you.
Yes, the "tape tax" bill/law from the early 1990's is a tax on blank cassettes sold commercially, and (some of) this money goes to commercially recorded music artists (through their recording labels). This same tax applies to "Music CD-R's" which have the bit set needed for stand-along CD-R recorders to record on them. Of course, "data CD-R's" used on computers were mainly used for backup and legitimate data transfer way back when, and so are exempt from the tax, but now these are surely used mostly for making unlicensed copies of commercial music.
Hardware and media taxes are luducrous, and are unfair to those who use such items legally (podcasts, paid-for downloads from Itunes and similar sites, and musicians recording their own songs). The bad news is such taxes are here to stay. This story of a hardware manufacturer paying a "license fee" to a recording label isn't technically a tax, but with the other already existing taxes, this sets an informal precedent and paves the way for REAL taxes on such devices and blank media.
However, AOL users discovered the "Google Groups" interface to Usenet newsgroups, and there are surely more clueless AOL users (sorry for the redundancy) posting to Usenet through Google than there were posting "directly" to Usenet through AOL's interface in 1993. Thus, your date of "Monday, September 4815, 1993" is more-or-less correct.
It's fortunate that (AFAIK) no Usenetian has ridden on the Space Shuttle - his or her insistence that the date is always a day in September 1993 would have been too confusing for all others involved.
Maybe, but I'm hesitant to believe that. I'm a digital circuits guy... individual bits don't just disappear. They either flip or get corrected, or masses and droves of them disappear. It seems weird that their product would randomly and "frequently" flip bits. Please post an article or something outlining more clearly exactly what you're talking about.
It's not that it "flips" random bits, is that it does sample rate conversion (so that it does all its internal operations at 48k samples per second), which cannot be done without "changing bits." The SBLive and Audigy cards to ALL their internal processing at 48kHz. A digital output of a 44.1k signal through one of these cards gets converted to 48k and back to 44.1k. The bits don't come back the same. Whether the SOUND is similar enough to the original is a different argument.
So anyway, sorry for being longwinded... please cite a source which explains this phenomenon pertaining to SoundBlaster Live and Audigy products.
Is it actually going to reduce the quality below that of around say 192k?
It's rather hard to compare DAC/ADC distortions and analog noise with MP3 encoding/decoding artifacts, but 192k is significantly better than the commonly used 128k rate, and (even with my tin ears) I can hear the difference between those two. But that means you can hear cheap soundcard noise and distortion BETTER at 192k. I think the 128k listeners wouldn't be bothered by the difference between a built-in soundcard and a $100 "semi-pro" studio soundcard.
As a generalization, "consumer" (whether no-name or Creative/Soundblaster/SBLive) soundcards suck. A few years ago I tried using several I had lying around for recording LP's (RECORDS on a TURNTABLE!), and there were buzzes and noises I could hear through the LP's background noise. I finally spent $150 (the price at the time) for a Delta Audiophile 2496 (it's not that it's more bits, I still transfer LP's at 16/44, it's that the whole thing is designed to reduce digital trash injection into the analog signal, uses better op-amps, and in general with better quality audio in mind), and haven't looked back.
Is it just me or do other people notice that/. is late by about a day or sometimes more in reporting news stories. In the case of this story, I read about it yesterday on the New York Times...
It's just you.
Actually, Slashdot doesn't "report" stories, it (or those editor guys) just "approves" or "rejects" them.
Perhaps you've seen the link at the bottom of every Slashdot page named contribute story. You can write up your own short blurb about a story, include the link to the NYT webpage or wherever, and maybe the ed's will get around to approving it faster than if you wait a day or two for someone else to do it. I've submitted several stories over the years, and even had one or two approved (though that was over a year ago).
One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, "What good are you?"
Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, "We're no better than bacteria!"
I've heard estians, aka estholes (est, renamed Landmark Forum) say "We're all just tubes."
SPOILER: Have barf bag ready as you read:
The tubes thing refers to the human digestive system - our sole purpose in life is to eat and shit.
The "environmentalist" movement was taken over by socialists/anti-capitalists (if it looks like they have more than one agenda, it's because they do), but even more, they want to reprogram everyone's mind, just like a cult. "We're all no better than bacteria."
They're debasing the whole of humanity. How quaint.
I think most copyright laws have a clause in it that you can use excerpts from a book but not a whole book as long as you note the source of your information with the excerpt.
This is the "Fair Use" clause, described in the link below. The amount you can quote under fair use is legally fuzzy and situation dependent, but (though IANAL, I'll say that) it is almost certainly a lot less than Google makes available online, even if Google doesn't make the whole book available online.
From tfblurb about the article by the submitter: Do you think that Google's 'sneak peak' search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?"
Why can't it do both? And I'll not be surprised if it did both.
Wasn't this one of the arguments for "sharing" commercial music via MP3's and P2P networks? That it increases sales, thus it should be legal?
<sarcasm, mode="ON">
What if I hold a gun to every person who walks into a store and say "Buy this book or I'll shoot you" or "buy this CD or I'll shoot you?" Wouldn't that increase sales? And if it does, shouldn't it be LEGAL???
This soundclip and similar ones are under "R.S. examples" at this website: http://www.reversespeech.com/ And yes, I first heard this clip when this man was on Art Bell's radio show in the late '90's. And yes, I think he's a complete luna tick. No offense meant to true Moon residents or visitors.
Slashdot Mirror
[ this post intentionally left blank ]
That doesn't make this news.
C'mon, this is Slashdot. News of matter, stuff for nerds.
Interesting audience... the women are where?
You shouldn't assume Google hasn't hired women. Perhaps they all quit after working for a while surrounded by nerds!
But I found the video fascinating and compelling. Dr. Bussard was every bit as interesting as I imagined him to be. This is The Guy whose name I read in the Larry Niven story about a guy traveling through the Galaxy at near-lightspeed in a Bussard Ramjet.
So why are people walking out as the video goes on? Firstly I wonder how these young guys have such weak bladders, and how much coffee and energy drinks they consume, but later the video shows the audience with EMPTY SEATS! I hope it's because they really had to report back to work, perhaps for a meeting, rather than getting bored with the talk.
Now I'm really wanting to work for Google just to be able to see their speakers.
Yeah, and then a self-replicating object would just drain everyone's virtual bank account, just like a phisher getting your real-life bank account and routing numbers.
This is amazing, these virtual worlds are becoming more and more like real life all the time.
Somewhere in "The Art of Computer Programming" Knuth recommends:
"How To Lie With Statistics", Darrel Huff, 1954.
This book goes no deeper into the math of statistics than average, mean and mode, but the examples of such things as selection biases and the (mis)use of graphs in advertising and propaganda make this a classic book, AND a hoot. It may fall more into the humor category than technical, but what it does cover, it covers correctly. As the author says in the intro, it's actually how to protect yourself from those who would use statistics to lie to you.
Back to deep technical know-how:
"Discrete-Time Signal Processing", 2nd. Ed., 1999, Oppenheim/Schafer/Buck
This is effectively the Third Edition of the venerable "Digital Signal Processing" by Oppenheim&Schafer
Well, ok, while I'm posting, here's a third book, another on DSP, with free online and not-free dead-tree versions available here:
http://dspguide.com/
It's a little more readable than "Discrete-Time..." and as a result you may actually get more out of it.
"The Art of Electronics" 2nd ed., 1989, ISBN 0521370957
Some of it, especially the stuff covering microprocessors, shows its age, but you won't find more practical info about electronics in one place than here. It requires some basic electronics knowledge (some DC and AC circuits, basic transistors), but from there it will take you a good ways.
One coauthor (Hill) posts to Usenet, and rumors of a third edition have been made (many analog parts mentions need updating as well), but if it happens it will be a few years down the road before it appears.
Other notable titles:
High-Speed Digital Design: A Handbook of Black Magic by Howard Johnson 1993 ISBN 0133957241
Troubleshooting Analog Circuits Bob Pease ISBN 0750694998
(it seems at least as much design-related (and how to prevent trouble) as about troubleshooting)
Anything (analog-related) by Jim Williams
Me being someone that's been electrocuted more times than I can count, you have to understand why this scares the living shit out of me.
Perhaps you have received electric shocks more than once, but you can only be electrocuted (killed by an electric shock) once.
The real danger here is excessive heating of living bodies, and possible RF burns if your hand gets too near the power transmitter. At 6 MHz, it's too high a frequency for the nervous system to respond, thus it won't shock you, but it still can hurt you.
Yes, the "tape tax" bill/law from the early 1990's is a tax on blank cassettes sold commercially, and (some of) this money goes to commercially recorded music artists (through their recording labels). This same tax applies to "Music CD-R's" which have the bit set needed for stand-along CD-R recorders to record on them. Of course, "data CD-R's" used on computers were mainly used for backup and legitimate data transfer way back when, and so are exempt from the tax, but now these are surely used mostly for making unlicensed copies of commercial music.
Hardware and media taxes are luducrous, and are unfair to those who use such items legally (podcasts, paid-for downloads from Itunes and similar sites, and musicians recording their own songs). The bad news is such taxes are here to stay. This story of a hardware manufacturer paying a "license fee" to a recording label isn't technically a tax, but with the other already existing taxes, this sets an informal precedent and paves the way for REAL taxes on such devices and blank media.
"Endless September" technically ended last year, as these articles state:
2 100-1032_3-5550036.html
http://news.com.com/AOL+shutting+down+newsgroups/
http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/38978
However, AOL users discovered the "Google Groups" interface to Usenet newsgroups, and there are surely more clueless AOL users (sorry for the redundancy) posting to Usenet through Google than there were posting "directly" to Usenet through AOL's interface in 1993. Thus, your date of "Monday, September 4815, 1993" is more-or-less correct.
It's fortunate that (AFAIK) no Usenetian has ridden on the Space Shuttle - his or her insistence that the date is always a day in September 1993 would have been too confusing for all others involved.
Lying to a computer didn't work out well for Dave Bowman.
when it will reach 1 billion? in 2015?
That's the year MySpace reaches 1 billion users.
Maybe, but I'm hesitant to believe that. I'm a digital circuits guy... individual bits don't just disappear. They either flip or get corrected, or masses and droves of them disappear. It seems weird that their product would randomly and "frequently" flip bits. Please post an article or something outlining more clearly exactly what you're talking about.
It's not that it "flips" random bits, is that it does sample rate conversion (so that it does all its internal operations at 48k samples per second), which cannot be done without "changing bits." The SBLive and Audigy cards to ALL their internal processing at 48kHz. A digital output of a 44.1k signal through one of these cards gets converted to 48k and back to 44.1k. The bits don't come back the same. Whether the SOUND is similar enough to the original is a different argument.
So anyway, sorry for being longwinded... please cite a source which explains this phenomenon pertaining to SoundBlaster Live and Audigy products.
http://pages.sbcglobal.net/hamakerd/sbsrc/
Is it actually going to reduce the quality below that of around say 192k?
It's rather hard to compare DAC/ADC distortions and analog noise with MP3 encoding/decoding artifacts, but 192k is significantly better than the commonly used 128k rate, and (even with my tin ears) I can hear the difference between those two. But that means you can hear cheap soundcard noise and distortion BETTER at 192k. I think the 128k listeners wouldn't be bothered by the difference between a built-in soundcard and a $100 "semi-pro" studio soundcard.
As a generalization, "consumer" (whether no-name or Creative/Soundblaster/SBLive) soundcards suck. A few years ago I tried using several I had lying around for recording LP's (RECORDS on a TURNTABLE!), and there were buzzes and noises I could hear through the LP's background noise. I finally spent $150 (the price at the time) for a Delta Audiophile 2496 (it's not that it's more bits, I still transfer LP's at 16/44, it's that the whole thing is designed to reduce digital trash injection into the analog signal, uses better op-amps, and in general with better quality audio in mind), and haven't looked back.
Is it just me or do other people notice that /. is late by about a day or sometimes more in reporting news stories. In the case of this story, I read about it yesterday on the New York Times...
It's just you.
Actually, Slashdot doesn't "report" stories, it (or those editor guys) just "approves" or "rejects" them.
Perhaps you've seen the link at the bottom of every Slashdot page named contribute story. You can write up your own short blurb about a story, include the link to the NYT webpage or wherever, and maybe the ed's will get around to approving it faster than if you wait a day or two for someone else to do it. I've submitted several stories over the years, and even had one or two approved (though that was over a year ago).
Wait a minute, that didn't work, when did the US have to start looking up to Russia as an example of freedom and capitolism?
And spelling, too.
AllofMP3.com is located in Russia you idiot. US laws don't apply to other countries.
If Kiddie prOn were legal in Russia, you wouldn't have any problem with those in the US downloading it from Russia?
Just in case there's any doubt, I would.
Sorry I'm late to the party, but I brought an MP3...
http://www.songcity.co.uk/WeAreNotAlone.htm
These Druids talk like the planet is an organism of it's own, not made up of all the organisms on it.
)
That is "The Gaia Hypothesis" or some crap like that (not that I'm being judgemental of new-age beliefs or anything).
Here's the Wikipedia article on it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_theory_(science
Quoting that link:
One of Pianka's earliest points was a condemnation of anthropocentrism, or the idea that humankind occupies a privileged position in the Universe. He told a story about how a neighbor asked him what good the lizards are that he studies. He answered, "What good are you?"
Pianka hammered his point home by exclaiming, "We're no better than bacteria!"
I've heard estians, aka estholes (est, renamed Landmark Forum) say "We're all just tubes."
SPOILER: Have barf bag ready as you read:
The tubes thing refers to the human digestive system - our sole purpose in life is to eat and shit.
The "environmentalist" movement was taken over by socialists/anti-capitalists (if it looks like they have more than one agenda, it's because they do), but even more, they want to reprogram everyone's mind, just like a cult. "We're all no better than bacteria."
They're debasing the whole of humanity. How quaint.
" I'm starting to feel very lucky to have grown up in the Milky Way Galaxy."
Maybe the Anthropic Principle wouldn't have it any other way...
In fact, The Anthropic Principle was invented just for such people.
things get compressed by Black Holes.
I think most copyright laws have a clause in it that you can use excerpts from a book but not a whole book as long as you note the source of your information with the excerpt.
This is the "Fair Use" clause, described in the link below. The amount you can quote under fair use is legally fuzzy and situation dependent, but (though IANAL, I'll say that) it is almost certainly a lot less than Google makes available online, even if Google doesn't make the whole book available online.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
Do you think that Google's 'sneak peak' search access increases sales or violates copyrights on intellectual property?"
Why can't it do both? And I'll not be surprised if it did both.
Wasn't this one of the arguments for "sharing" commercial music via MP3's and P2P networks? That it increases sales, thus it should be legal?What if I hold a gun to every person who walks into a store and say "Buy this book or I'll shoot you" or "buy this CD or I'll shoot you?" Wouldn't that increase sales? And if it does, shouldn't it be LEGAL???
We will have to wait 90 years to learn whether or not some lifeform was listening.
It could be a lot longer if they decide not to respond. The word quarantine comes to mind.
This soundclip and similar ones are under "R.S. examples" at this website:
http://www.reversespeech.com/
And yes, I first heard this clip when this man was on Art Bell's radio show in the late '90's.
And yes, I think he's a complete luna tick. No offense meant to true Moon residents or visitors.