Hard drive space is plentiful. Just rip everything to a lossless format, such as FLAC, or even.wav or.aiff if you can't be bothered with the hassle, then make a convenient shell script to convert everything into another format as and when required. That way, you get the best sounding MP3s or Ogg Vorbis files with none of the bad side effects of transcoding, and as soon as any given codec is improved or replaced by a better one, you won't have to worry about not taking advantage of the shiny new algorithms.
Fight Club was slightly better and even less cheesy, in my opinion. At least, the running-around-slipping-up-on-fat scene wasn't in the film, which had to be a good move, and the person who adapted it had a few ideas that Chuck Pilahniuk didn't.
Yesterday my wife and I were trying to figure out why some people get turned on by S&M. We just couldn't see the attraction. Then it occurred to me that it has to do with guilt: crime and punishment.
It seems to me that it's hard enough for someone to figure out why they're turned on by something, let alone why other people are turned on by something else. I've found BDSM to be interesting and fun roleplaying, with no psychological baggage. It's just something that turns some people on, and needn't be analyzed.
Don't you mean an n-dimensional vector? Wouldn't it be only three dimensional if they're only measuring three characteristics?
If the idea behind this is as oversimplified as I think it is, it's probably just measuring frequencies on one axis and time on another, and measuring the amplitude of any given frequency at any given time. Kinda like SETI probably does (I could be wrong about either, though). Then it could see if there's any correlation (the same way people think they see patterns where there aren't, now computers can do it too).
If you're RMS, you probably believe that no one has the right to own anything and all inventions and ideas belong to the public, but the majority of us will agree that that's a tad extreme. So whaddya'll think?
I have to side with RMS. I much prefer the rights of the people to the rights of corporations. To be honest, I'm still mildly annoyed that the very good compression algorithms used in bzip were protected by patents, so they had to come up with an inferior version instead and called that version bzip2.
...the Feds will use this guy to break into private computer networks and steal information of interest to them. They will keep him at arms length in case he gets caught. This is the way law enforcement (unfortunately) works...
I remember watching in The Corporation that you could do the same job for a big corporation too. It seems that ethics apparently don't apply to governments or corporations. To be honest, that scares me.
...top 25 innovations of the past 25 years.. e-mail (#5)
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't e-mail invented more than 25 years ago?
Personally I think spreadsheets should be somewhere on that list if we're talking about computer innovations in particular (this being Slashdot and all)...
Have you ever looked at a website running on linux/bsd/apache?
Such as Microsoft's own Hotmail, for instance. Sure, they make rival products to FreeBSD and Apache, but they use the free (as in freedom) OS and web server instead, or at least they used to.
But I'm just a student and wonder: if you do it for free how will you eat?
You could make customised software for companies that only they will get any use out of during the daytime, to get paid, to buy food, and then occasionally write free software on the side because you believe in it. The former would be useful to just the company you work for (like, say, a customised database front end) whereas the latter would be the kind of software that many different people can get a use out of (like, say, a part of an operating system or word processor).
I wonder what everyone's doing with all these huge drives, other than indulging a compulsive collecting habit. How much music can one listen to, and how many movies can one possibly watch?
Well you could do something creative like make your own music/photos/films. Say you write songs. You wouldn't just have the end result mp3/ogg/flac/whatever files, you'd have the.wav files they originate from. On top of that, the.wav file in turn would be comprised of many other.wav files, one for each instrument or timbre in the mix. If you're using your computer as a glorified four-track tape recorder, even at a mere CD quality you can use up a lot of space quickly.
Eating a Wendys burger with a can of RC Cola, Wearing British Knighs Snearkers, Running OS X, on a Power PC Processor, but I have a nVidia graphics card... Damn! I guess I am just a Puppet of the Man!
As long as you don't see it for what it is, but instead mix it up with images of bloodshed and destruction, your judgement is clouded.
I can't speak for anyone else, but although piracy in the true sense of the word does still exist (people board small boats slowly navigating narrow straits in order to steal the cash used to pay payroll and port fees, according to Wikipedia), and although the term now means illegally reproducing media ever since people used to broadcast music from boats just offshore where laws no longer applied, to me the word "pirate" will always conjure up imagery of insult sword fighting, eye patches, bandanas and wooden legs.
Arr, the stereotypin'!
Does it really cause that much harm to call people who break copyright pirates?
I think I'll let others be the guinea pigs. Even after clinic trials (which only involve a few thousand people watched for only a year or so) doctors only have the barest of clues as to the effects and side-effects of a drug.
Aren't these things tested on non-human animals first? There's this quote about how the reason scientists morally justify testing on animals is because they're not like humans, and the reason they claim to need to do it is because they are like humans. Wasn't tobacco allowed to be sold because it didn't appear to harm rats or something?
Please don't call Bill Gates and Steve Jobs great innovators. You're making me cringe.
Steve Wozniak, yes. His recent speeches at The Fifth Hope were very inspiring, just listening to him enthuse about getting a theoretical computer he'd invented down from needing many chips to just a few because he couldn't afford to buy many chips.
"If you want to work on it then you need to do that PLUS you need to make it pass the Bobby Accessibility Guidelines".
Beware that just because something passes Bobby, it doesn't necessarily mean it's completely accessible. As the W3C themselves point out, there is no automated test that can prove or disprove that your site is accessible. Several people have come up with accessibility checklists, however, which are a good place to start (as is Bobby, for that matter; it's just not a good place to finish).
One of the legal uses of P2P networking listed is ringtone sharing, but ringtones are the same as any other form of music: the owner of the copyright dictates whether anyone is allowed to copy them or not. This means that ringtones based on chart music or TV theme tunes, for example, cannot legally be copied.
It's not uncommon these days for a record company to make more money from a ringtone of a single than the actual CD sales, so I wouldn't be surprised if they got upset about them being shared freely.
What if a CD copy-protection system was developed, which did not compromise sound quality nor cause compatibility problems...
...The disc will present itself as a CD-ROM to PCs, a Mac CD-ROM to Mac computers, a VCD to DVD players and CDDA disc to audio CD players.
Hmm, something that will be compatible with everything and not compromise sound quality... I couldn't see any mention of VideoCDs in the article, but it's a video format that uses mp3 as the audio layer. Would it feature the music videos as well? Either way, the audio would be lossy. Then there's the Mac and PC (which presumably should be "Windows") compatible layers. Do they have.wav or.flac files on them? Oh no, because anyone can copy those. They'll probably just be very low bitrate lossily compressed files that no one would want to copy as there's no way to stop people copying computer files. So that would be lossy. Then there's the CD audio layer (what's left of it after a fair amount of the space on the disc has been taken up with the other layers). Assuming CD players can actually find and read it, it'll be lossless, but there will be far less room for any actual music.
I seriously doubt this will be compatible with everything and not compromise sound quality. There is a format that is completely lossless and works on all of the above mentioned media players. It's the regular CD audio standard, and it really shouldn't be tampered with.
Slashdot Mirror
MIDI
Saying that MIDI sounds bad is like saying that ASCII has a bad font.
My full rant's on E2 if you'd like more detail on the matter.
Hard drive space is plentiful. Just rip everything to a lossless format, such as FLAC, or even .wav or .aiff if you can't be bothered with the hassle, then make a convenient shell script to convert everything into another format as and when required. That way, you get the best sounding MP3s or Ogg Vorbis files with none of the bad side effects of transcoding, and as soon as any given codec is improved or replaced by a better one, you won't have to worry about not taking advantage of the shiny new algorithms.
Wow, a wooden computer would look really nice with a wooden MIDI keyboard plugged into it (at least, for us music geeks, anyway).
Download free music.
Fight Club was slightly better and even less cheesy, in my opinion. At least, the running-around-slipping-up-on-fat scene wasn't in the film, which had to be a good move, and the person who adapted it had a few ideas that Chuck Pilahniuk didn't.
Could this be the end of lazy IE-only scripted webpages?
Slashdot is not the place to ask. Their site constantly displays incorrectly in Firefox. They'd do well to take heed of their own articles.
Yesterday my wife and I were trying to figure out why some people get turned on by S&M. We just couldn't see the attraction. Then it occurred to me that it has to do with guilt: crime and punishment.
It seems to me that it's hard enough for someone to figure out why they're turned on by something, let alone why other people are turned on by something else. I've found BDSM to be interesting and fun roleplaying, with no psychological baggage. It's just something that turns some people on, and needn't be analyzed.
Don't you mean an n-dimensional vector? Wouldn't it be only three dimensional if they're only measuring three characteristics?
If the idea behind this is as oversimplified as I think it is, it's probably just measuring frequencies on one axis and time on another, and measuring the amplitude of any given frequency at any given time. Kinda like SETI probably does (I could be wrong about either, though). Then it could see if there's any correlation (the same way people think they see patterns where there aren't, now computers can do it too).
If you're RMS, you probably believe that no one has the right to own anything and all inventions and ideas belong to the public, but the majority of us will agree that that's a tad extreme. So whaddya'll think?
I have to side with RMS. I much prefer the rights of the people to the rights of corporations. To be honest, I'm still mildly annoyed that the very good compression algorithms used in bzip were protected by patents, so they had to come up with an inferior version instead and called that version bzip2.
I remember watching in The Corporation that you could do the same job for a big corporation too. It seems that ethics apparently don't apply to governments or corporations. To be honest, that scares me.
I want to see a great movie, not a great special effect.
If it's anything like the original book, you won't be disappointed.
Um, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't e-mail invented more than 25 years ago?
Personally I think spreadsheets should be somewhere on that list if we're talking about computer innovations in particular (this being Slashdot and all)...
Have you ever looked at a website running on linux/bsd/apache?
Such as Microsoft's own Hotmail, for instance. Sure, they make rival products to FreeBSD and Apache, but they use the free (as in freedom) OS and web server instead, or at least they used to.
But I'm just a student and wonder: if you do it for free how will you eat?
You could make customised software for companies that only they will get any use out of during the daytime, to get paid, to buy food, and then occasionally write free software on the side because you believe in it. The former would be useful to just the company you work for (like, say, a customised database front end) whereas the latter would be the kind of software that many different people can get a use out of (like, say, a part of an operating system or word processor).
I wonder what everyone's doing with all these huge drives, other than indulging a compulsive collecting habit. How much music can one listen to, and how many movies can one possibly watch?
Well you could do something creative like make your own music/photos/films. Say you write songs. You wouldn't just have the end result mp3/ogg/flac/whatever files, you'd have the .wav files they originate from. On top of that, the .wav file in turn would be comprised of many other .wav files, one for each instrument or timbre in the mix. If you're using your computer as a glorified four-track tape recorder, even at a mere CD quality you can use up a lot of space quickly.
Eating a Wendys burger with a can of RC Cola, Wearing British Knighs Snearkers, Running OS X, on a Power PC Processor, but I have a nVidia graphics card... Damn! I guess I am just a Puppet of the Man!
Yeah, grow your own damn food. :)
I saw the guys who did Re-code.com at 2600's 5th hope this summer in NYC.
You can hear their speech here.
As long as you don't see it for what it is, but instead mix it up with images of bloodshed and destruction, your judgement is clouded.
I can't speak for anyone else, but although piracy in the true sense of the word does still exist (people board small boats slowly navigating narrow straits in order to steal the cash used to pay payroll and port fees, according to Wikipedia), and although the term now means illegally reproducing media ever since people used to broadcast music from boats just offshore where laws no longer applied, to me the word "pirate" will always conjure up imagery of insult sword fighting, eye patches, bandanas and wooden legs.
Arr, the stereotypin'!
Does it really cause that much harm to call people who break copyright pirates?
At the risk of comparing Linus to Jesus...
Do not be tempted! Follow Saint Ignucius!
I think I'll let others be the guinea pigs. Even after clinic trials (which only involve a few thousand people watched for only a year or so) doctors only have the barest of clues as to the effects and side-effects of a drug.
Aren't these things tested on non-human animals first? There's this quote about how the reason scientists morally justify testing on animals is because they're not like humans, and the reason they claim to need to do it is because they are like humans. Wasn't tobacco allowed to be sold because it didn't appear to harm rats or something?
I think I'll wait as well!
Except she didn't start out as a woman.
No one did; we all start out as babies and grow up from there. Besides, this is about gender, not sex.
Please don't call Bill Gates and Steve Jobs great innovators. You're making me cringe.
Steve Wozniak, yes. His recent speeches at The Fifth Hope were very inspiring, just listening to him enthuse about getting a theoretical computer he'd invented down from needing many chips to just a few because he couldn't afford to buy many chips.
Yes, the ladies do have Grace Hopper, and...Ada Byron (who was pretty poor with the technical details by all acounts), and...that's about it?
And Dani Bunten (of M.U.L.E. fame). I'd love to know who else, there have to be more role models than that...
"If you want to work on it then you need to do that PLUS you need to make it pass the Bobby Accessibility Guidelines".
Beware that just because something passes Bobby, it doesn't necessarily mean it's completely accessible. As the W3C themselves point out, there is no automated test that can prove or disprove that your site is accessible. Several people have come up with accessibility checklists, however, which are a good place to start (as is Bobby, for that matter; it's just not a good place to finish).
One of the legal uses of P2P networking listed is ringtone sharing, but ringtones are the same as any other form of music: the owner of the copyright dictates whether anyone is allowed to copy them or not. This means that ringtones based on chart music or TV theme tunes, for example, cannot legally be copied.
It's not uncommon these days for a record company to make more money from a ringtone of a single than the actual CD sales, so I wouldn't be surprised if they got upset about them being shared freely.
Free music you can copy
What if a CD copy-protection system was developed, which did not compromise sound quality nor cause compatibility problems...
Hmm, something that will be compatible with everything and not compromise sound quality... I couldn't see any mention of VideoCDs in the article, but it's a video format that uses mp3 as the audio layer. Would it feature the music videos as well? Either way, the audio would be lossy. Then there's the Mac and PC (which presumably should be "Windows") compatible layers. Do they have .wav or .flac files on them? Oh no, because anyone can copy those. They'll probably just be very low bitrate lossily compressed files that no one would want to copy as there's no way to stop people copying computer files. So that would be lossy. Then there's the CD audio layer (what's left of it after a fair amount of the space on the disc has been taken up with the other layers). Assuming CD players can actually find and read it, it'll be lossless, but there will be far less room for any actual music.
I seriously doubt this will be compatible with everything and not compromise sound quality. There is a format that is completely lossless and works on all of the above mentioned media players. It's the regular CD audio standard, and it really shouldn't be tampered with.
Free music!