Good points. It should also be noted that speedups and slowdowns aren't incompatible with click tracks. The author of TFA doesn't seem to take this into account, and assumes that if there are speedups and slowdowns, there is no click track.
In Steinberg's popular Cubase multitrack recording software, for example, you can use a pencil tool to draw a "tempo map" which is like a graph of the tempo of the song over time (similar to the graphs in TFA) and the click track will speed up and slow down as you record, to make the tempo of the song match the tempo map.
Even in the 1970s, the producer could speed up and slow down the metronome manually as the song was recorded. This would allow the song to "breathe" yet still keep the tempo more consistent. Drummers, especially inexperienced ones, have a tendency to speed up during fills, and playing to a click helps to stabilize the beat.
Good point. For me, Netflix does the same thing for movies. Why would I bother to download a movie illegally if I can just put it in my Neflix queue and it shows up in my mailbox a couple of days later? I pay a reasonable subscription fee each month, and for that I get to watch almost any movie that has been commercially released in the last couple of decades. If a movie is very old or too artsy-fartsy for any of the big companies to bother with, it might be necessary to resort to a torrent, but that's pretty rare. Netflix has taken care of my needs for recent movies pretty nicely.
Also, between Emusic and buying directly from bands, I'm able to get the recently-made music I want legally and cost-effectively. Buying a $30 DVD or a $20 CD from a brick-and-mortar store is a thing of the past. Companies that offer a good product at a reasonable price (and to me, a subscription fee of $20 per month for all the movies I might want to watch or the mp3 equivalent of a handful of CDs each month is perfectly reasonable) will do well. Organizations like the RIAA and MPAA that want bizarre levels of profitability, on the other hand, can only survive for as long as they can keep on bribing politicians.
I don't mind paying for content as long as the price is reasonable, and I don't think I'm alone in this.
They have started making CF bulbs that are designed to work with dimmer switches. I have one that I got at Home Depot (sorry, don't remember the brand) and it works great with the dimmer switch in my house.
Back in the day I installed plenty of ISA and PCI sound cards that didn't need 16-bit drivers under Windows 95. There were some older ISA cards that needed them, especially if they weren't popular enough to get a Microsoft-written driver, but in my experience (thousands of cases) that was the exception rather than the rule. Your mileage may have varied if you had a lot of funky old cards.
If you want the OS itself to be able to access the CDROM drive, and not just your one application, you *need* drivers for CDROM access in DOS. Hard-coding ATA CDROM support in a DOS app would have resulted in an app that didn't work with SCSI CDROM drives, and it would also be a serious case of reinventing the wheel. MSCDEX was already written, hardware manufacturers wrote device drivers to work with it, and it was the only serious choice for getting CDROM support in DOS.
Windows 95, like Windows 98, used modular, 32-bit drivers for CDROM access and generally did not require MSCDEX. If MSCDEX were present in the autoexec.bat and a matching device driver were present in the config.sys, it would be used instead of the 32-bit drivers, and this would generally degrade performance significantly as opposed to just using the proper 32-bit Windows driver. Windows 3.1, on the other hand, relied on DOS for its CDROM support, therefore it needed MSCDEX.
The question of whether 9x "rides on top of" DOS is related to the two somewhat distinct issues of the use of DOS during the boot process, and support for DOS device drivers once Windows 95 has booted.
To me, the fact that the DOS 7 kernel IO.SYS is used to bootstrap Windows 95 does not indicate that 9x "rides on top of DOS" any more than the fact that LILO or GRUB might be used to bootstrap Linux means that Linux "rides on top of" LILO or GRUB.
The fact that legacy DOS device drivers can be loaded during the real-mode portion of the 9x boot process (but need not be kept around afterwards, and by default are not) only indicates that Windows has been designed to tolerate DOS device drivers in order to provide backwards compatibility.
This is a big difference between 9x and 3.x, which requires DOS drivers for sound and CDROM support. This is also the biggest difference between 9x and NT as regards DOS support - NT will not tolerate legacy DOS device drivers at all. This fact makes it perfectly clear that NT does not "ride on top of" DOS, while the fact that 9x is built to tolerate DOS drivers muddies the waters as to whether or not 9x "rides on top of" DOS. To me, the fact that these legacy drivers are not required indicates that 9x is an OS rather than a GUI, and that is the point I was getting at with the CD-ROM driver example.
Taking this reasoning a step farther, the fact that 32-bit hard disk drivers are available under Windows 3.1 leads some to consider 3.1 itself to be somewhat of an OS (or, along with DOS, one of the two components of an OS) rather than simply a GUI, because previous GUIs such as GEM for DOS had no device drivers of their own and relied entirely on DOS for driver support. There is some merit to this argument, and my take on the situation is that there isn't a clear line between GUI and OS where early versions of Windows are concerned, but rather a gradual shift from total reliance on and tolerance of DOS for bootstrapping and drivers in early versions of Windows (which were mere window managers like GEM) to a total lack of reliance on DOS code for these functions in later versions starting with NT 3.1, which first used NTLDR to begin the boot process. Windows 95's place on this spectrum is that it requires some DOS code to boot, but afterwards doesn't require any non-32-bit device drivers at all.
If, when we say that Windows 3.11 "rides on top of" DOS 6, we mean that Windows 3.11 is an application environment which takes advantage of the filesystem and driver support provided by DOS, I don't think that we can accurately say the same thing about Windows 95, which is an OS with a 32-bit kernel and some 16-bit components which uses DOS for bootstrapping but does not need any DOS filesystem or driver support once it's up and running. To me this doesn't equate to having DOS "hiding underneath" Windows 9x. It seems more accurate to me to say that Windows 9x has built-in support for DOS drivers and apps for backwards-compatibility reasons, and uses it during the boot process.
Here's some fun trivia: Contrary to popular belief, Windows only rode on top of DOS through version 3.11. 95 and 98 only looked like they did, by optionally loading 16-bit legacy DOS drivers as part of the Windows startup process, and by providing both DOS VMs and an option to boot into DOS Mode (which actually was MS-DOS) for backwards compatibility with legacy DOS apps.
This page has a pretty good overview of Windows 95 architecture, with some diagrams that show the various OS components, none of which is a full copy of DOS that has a GUI riding on top of it as found in Windows 3.11 and earlier. Instead, there is a 32-bit kernel which uses 32-bit device drivers exclusively, unless the user installs a legacy DOS driver.
If any DOS apps are run within Windows 95, they run in their own DOS virtual machine, and if no DOS apps are running, no DOS VM is created. These VMs are similar to those in Windows NT; what is not similar to Windows NT is the ability to load DOS device drivers to support legacy hardware that had no 32-bit protected-mode driver.
Those DOS drivers almost always ran slower than 32-bit drivers and frequently caused problems, to the extent that one of the first steps in troubleshooting a Windows 95 system was to check the autoexec.bat and config.sys for unneeded DOS drivers, or simply renaming those files to get rid of the gunk.
If there really were a copy of DOS running underneath Windows 95, renaming autoexec.bat and config.sys would have removed all the device drivers, leaving you with no access to your CD-ROM drive due to a lack of MSCDEX.EXE, which is needed by all versions of DOS, including the "DOS Mode" of Windows 95.
There's no reason why growing marijuana should be a "high-priority" crime, either (no pun intended) yet it is... and with file sharing, there's a more realistic argument that someone somewhere is being harmed by the activity.
Personally, I would prefer the FBI to focus on the aforementioned muggers, killers, and rapists, as those people seem much more likely to harm me and my family than Cheech-and-Chong types or teenyboppers with ill-gotten Britney Spears MP3s.
Even today I don't underestimate the value of staying away from the doctor's office, where there are tons of sick people coughing all over the place.
Homeopathic remedies, then, have two helpful benefits: the scientifically-proven placebo effect, plus the benefits of keeping people isolated at home when they are sick rather than having them congregate at a doctor's office to swap pathogens.
Now I'm off to throw a cat turd in a swimming pool to create 100,000 gallons of homeopathic Cat Scratch Fever Cure, which I will sell outside Ted Nugent concerts for $10 per bottle.
You make an excellent point. As much as I would like someone or something to make people think about what they are about to do before they do it, the government is clearly the wrong entity for the job, for all the reasons you mentioned.
I'm just going to have to request that Baby Jesus show up and provide wise counsel for every pair of idiots who are about to get it on, yet shouldn't.
I hadn't thought about it before reading your post, but a test sounds like a good idea... you have to take a driving test, so why not a f**king test? It could cover basic knowledge of birth control, STD, and "how stuff works."
The red states could have a catch-22 "abstinence only" version with only one question: "Do you want to have sex?" If the test-taker answers yes, they fail.
Or, if it didn't kill them, it might create a superhero with awesome computational powers and the ability to communicate over great distances via radio waves.
It doesn't make any less sense than getting bitten by a radioactive spider, right?
Good point. Another thing you could do along those lines would be to buy the physical book and then give it to someone else who would like to read it, but who wouldn't have bought it for themselves because they don't have the money for it. This results in a sale for the book store, a free book they wouldn't have been able to obtain otherwise for the third party, and a warm fuzzy feeling for you, knowing you've done all this without depriving anyone of any potential sales, reducing the number of existing physical copies of an out-of-print book, or, like you say, being wasteful.
You don't need to be a rational agent to have rights, only to respect the rights of others. We recognize the rights of unconscious persons and persons with disabled mental capacity even though they are not capable of being rational agents.
What philosophical foundation can there be for animal welfare outside of animal rights? Is there justification to be kind to some animals but not others, at our whim? Does might make right? If we were conquered by an alien race as superior in intelligence to us as we are to the animals, would we acknowledge their right to do with us as they pleased, or would we ask them to respect our concept of human rights? On what basis is human suffering important and animal suffering not important?
Animal welfare and animal rights cannot exist without each other. Without animal rights, there is no solid basis for working towards animal welfare other than simple human preference, which isn't much of a basis at all... if you prefer that your neighbor not beat his dog, and he prefers to beat his dog, on what basis can you tell him that he shouldn't?
On the flip side, anyone who recognizes animal rights must also recognize that those rights involve having the animals' welfare respected. So they are both two sides of the same coin, and it's not likely to have much of one without the other.
I think that what you're really saying is that respecting animals' rights a little bit, enough to prevent the kind of animal abuse that might disturb you if you find out about it, is OK, but if you are asked to start respecting animals' rights enough that it inconveniences you (such as asking you to change your consumption habits so that animals won't have to be killed in slaughterhouses) then it's going too far. Finding the most far-out PETA theoretician and equating his most far-out ideas "animal rights" allows you to write off the entire idea pretty easily.
The idea that someday there are no pets doesn't seem to matter much to the current situation. I personally don't think that will ever happen, because cats and dogs seem to like us, and it seems to be in their best interest to hang out with us. Being bred as pets and then thrown away as they are in the current situation (my city, for example, kills over 100 healthy, adoptable ex-pets every day) is not in their best interest, but I think a stable population can eventually be found where every cat or dog has a good home, and they are only killed if they are sick and suffering (the same kind of euthanasia that I would want for myself if I were in that situation.) And if that stable population were found, PETA theorists would probably stop dreaming of a day when there is no more breeding and even no more pets. It's kind of like the "Back to Africa" movement dying out as conditions for Blacks in the US have improved over the decades.
I like Manage Engine Applications Manager (although it has a pretty horrible name.) It's a slick, good-looking product that runs as a.jsp inside its own instance of Tomcat, monitors a wide variety of servers from various vendors, and if you have less than 10 servers, it's free.
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Good points. It should also be noted that speedups and slowdowns aren't incompatible with click tracks. The author of TFA doesn't seem to take this into account, and assumes that if there are speedups and slowdowns, there is no click track.
In Steinberg's popular Cubase multitrack recording software, for example, you can use a pencil tool to draw a "tempo map" which is like a graph of the tempo of the song over time (similar to the graphs in TFA) and the click track will speed up and slow down as you record, to make the tempo of the song match the tempo map.
Even in the 1970s, the producer could speed up and slow down the metronome manually as the song was recorded. This would allow the song to "breathe" yet still keep the tempo more consistent. Drummers, especially inexperienced ones, have a tendency to speed up during fills, and playing to a click helps to stabilize the beat.
Shhh... The first law of text editors is that you do not talk about text editors!
To assert that it did would not be write!
I like to use a HRM to measure annoyance with CRM systems...
Good point. For me, Netflix does the same thing for movies. Why would I bother to download a movie illegally if I can just put it in my Neflix queue and it shows up in my mailbox a couple of days later? I pay a reasonable subscription fee each month, and for that I get to watch almost any movie that has been commercially released in the last couple of decades. If a movie is very old or too artsy-fartsy for any of the big companies to bother with, it might be necessary to resort to a torrent, but that's pretty rare. Netflix has taken care of my needs for recent movies pretty nicely.
Also, between Emusic and buying directly from bands, I'm able to get the recently-made music I want legally and cost-effectively. Buying a $30 DVD or a $20 CD from a brick-and-mortar store is a thing of the past. Companies that offer a good product at a reasonable price (and to me, a subscription fee of $20 per month for all the movies I might want to watch or the mp3 equivalent of a handful of CDs each month is perfectly reasonable) will do well. Organizations like the RIAA and MPAA that want bizarre levels of profitability, on the other hand, can only survive for as long as they can keep on bribing politicians.
I don't mind paying for content as long as the price is reasonable, and I don't think I'm alone in this.
It seems that DRM, like gambling, is a thinly-disguised tax on stupidity.
If only California could find a way to keep the Federal government goons out of their state, their laws wouldn't be subverted.
They have started making CF bulbs that are designed to work with dimmer switches. I have one that I got at Home Depot (sorry, don't remember the brand) and it works great with the dimmer switch in my house.
This is what would happen, according to a classic sci-fi story by Arthur C. Clarke.
Back in the day I installed plenty of ISA and PCI sound cards that didn't need 16-bit drivers under Windows 95. There were some older ISA cards that needed them, especially if they weren't popular enough to get a Microsoft-written driver, but in my experience (thousands of cases) that was the exception rather than the rule. Your mileage may have varied if you had a lot of funky old cards.
If you want the OS itself to be able to access the CDROM drive, and not just your one application, you *need* drivers for CDROM access in DOS. Hard-coding ATA CDROM support in a DOS app would have resulted in an app that didn't work with SCSI CDROM drives, and it would also be a serious case of reinventing the wheel. MSCDEX was already written, hardware manufacturers wrote device drivers to work with it, and it was the only serious choice for getting CDROM support in DOS.
Windows 95, like Windows 98, used modular, 32-bit drivers for CDROM access and generally did not require MSCDEX. If MSCDEX were present in the autoexec.bat and a matching device driver were present in the config.sys, it would be used instead of the 32-bit drivers, and this would generally degrade performance significantly as opposed to just using the proper 32-bit Windows driver. Windows 3.1, on the other hand, relied on DOS for its CDROM support, therefore it needed MSCDEX.
The question of whether 9x "rides on top of" DOS is related to the two somewhat distinct issues of the use of DOS during the boot process, and support for DOS device drivers once Windows 95 has booted.
To me, the fact that the DOS 7 kernel IO.SYS is used to bootstrap Windows 95 does not indicate that 9x "rides on top of DOS" any more than the fact that LILO or GRUB might be used to bootstrap Linux means that Linux "rides on top of" LILO or GRUB.
The fact that legacy DOS device drivers can be loaded during the real-mode portion of the 9x boot process (but need not be kept around afterwards, and by default are not) only indicates that Windows has been designed to tolerate DOS device drivers in order to provide backwards compatibility.
This is a big difference between 9x and 3.x, which requires DOS drivers for sound and CDROM support. This is also the biggest difference between 9x and NT as regards DOS support - NT will not tolerate legacy DOS device drivers at all. This fact makes it perfectly clear that NT does not "ride on top of" DOS, while the fact that 9x is built to tolerate DOS drivers muddies the waters as to whether or not 9x "rides on top of" DOS. To me, the fact that these legacy drivers are not required indicates that 9x is an OS rather than a GUI, and that is the point I was getting at with the CD-ROM driver example.
Taking this reasoning a step farther, the fact that 32-bit hard disk drivers are available under Windows 3.1 leads some to consider 3.1 itself to be somewhat of an OS (or, along with DOS, one of the two components of an OS) rather than simply a GUI, because previous GUIs such as GEM for DOS had no device drivers of their own and relied entirely on DOS for driver support. There is some merit to this argument, and my take on the situation is that there isn't a clear line between GUI and OS where early versions of Windows are concerned, but rather a gradual shift from total reliance on and tolerance of DOS for bootstrapping and drivers in early versions of Windows (which were mere window managers like GEM) to a total lack of reliance on DOS code for these functions in later versions starting with NT 3.1, which first used NTLDR to begin the boot process. Windows 95's place on this spectrum is that it requires some DOS code to boot, but afterwards doesn't require any non-32-bit device drivers at all.
If, when we say that Windows 3.11 "rides on top of" DOS 6, we mean that Windows 3.11 is an application environment which takes advantage of the filesystem and driver support provided by DOS, I don't think that we can accurately say the same thing about Windows 95, which is an OS with a 32-bit kernel and some 16-bit components which uses DOS for bootstrapping but does not need any DOS filesystem or driver support once it's up and running. To me this doesn't equate to having DOS "hiding underneath" Windows 9x. It seems more accurate to me to say that Windows 9x has built-in support for DOS drivers and apps for backwards-compatibility reasons, and uses it during the boot process.
Here's some fun trivia: Contrary to popular belief, Windows only rode on top of DOS through version 3.11. 95 and 98 only looked like they did, by optionally loading 16-bit legacy DOS drivers as part of the Windows startup process, and by providing both DOS VMs and an option to boot into DOS Mode (which actually was MS-DOS) for backwards compatibility with legacy DOS apps.
This page has a pretty good overview of Windows 95 architecture, with some diagrams that show the various OS components, none of which is a full copy of DOS that has a GUI riding on top of it as found in Windows 3.11 and earlier. Instead, there is a 32-bit kernel which uses 32-bit device drivers exclusively, unless the user installs a legacy DOS driver.
If any DOS apps are run within Windows 95, they run in their own DOS virtual machine, and if no DOS apps are running, no DOS VM is created. These VMs are similar to those in Windows NT; what is not similar to Windows NT is the ability to load DOS device drivers to support legacy hardware that had no 32-bit protected-mode driver.
Those DOS drivers almost always ran slower than 32-bit drivers and frequently caused problems, to the extent that one of the first steps in troubleshooting a Windows 95 system was to check the autoexec.bat and config.sys for unneeded DOS drivers, or simply renaming those files to get rid of the gunk.
If there really were a copy of DOS running underneath Windows 95, renaming autoexec.bat and config.sys would have removed all the device drivers, leaving you with no access to your CD-ROM drive due to a lack of MSCDEX.EXE, which is needed by all versions of DOS, including the "DOS Mode" of Windows 95.
There's no reason why growing marijuana should be a "high-priority" crime, either (no pun intended) yet it is... and with file sharing, there's a more realistic argument that someone somewhere is being harmed by the activity.
Personally, I would prefer the FBI to focus on the aforementioned muggers, killers, and rapists, as those people seem much more likely to harm me and my family than Cheech-and-Chong types or teenyboppers with ill-gotten Britney Spears MP3s.
Didn't you hear the news? 2009 is going to be the Year of Esparanto on the Desktop!
Even today I don't underestimate the value of staying away from the doctor's office, where there are tons of sick people coughing all over the place.
Homeopathic remedies, then, have two helpful benefits: the scientifically-proven placebo effect, plus the benefits of keeping people isolated at home when they are sick rather than having them congregate at a doctor's office to swap pathogens.
Now I'm off to throw a cat turd in a swimming pool to create 100,000 gallons of homeopathic Cat Scratch Fever Cure, which I will sell outside Ted Nugent concerts for $10 per bottle.
You make an excellent point. As much as I would like someone or something to make people think about what they are about to do before they do it, the government is clearly the wrong entity for the job, for all the reasons you mentioned.
I'm just going to have to request that Baby Jesus show up and provide wise counsel for every pair of idiots who are about to get it on, yet shouldn't.
Please, Baby Jesus?
...
9. Profit!!!
I hadn't thought about it before reading your post, but a test sounds like a good idea... you have to take a driving test, so why not a f**king test? It could cover basic knowledge of birth control, STD, and "how stuff works."
The red states could have a catch-22 "abstinence only" version with only one question: "Do you want to have sex?" If the test-taker answers yes, they fail.
Or, if you are using Microsoft Toilet 2008, an animated roll of toilet paper that says "It looks like you are taking a dump. Would you like help?"
Or, if it didn't kill them, it might create a superhero with awesome computational powers and the ability to communicate over great distances via radio waves.
It doesn't make any less sense than getting bitten by a radioactive spider, right?
Good point. Another thing you could do along those lines would be to buy the physical book and then give it to someone else who would like to read it, but who wouldn't have bought it for themselves because they don't have the money for it. This results in a sale for the book store, a free book they wouldn't have been able to obtain otherwise for the third party, and a warm fuzzy feeling for you, knowing you've done all this without depriving anyone of any potential sales, reducing the number of existing physical copies of an out-of-print book, or, like you say, being wasteful.
You don't need to be a rational agent to have rights, only to respect the rights of others. We recognize the rights of unconscious persons and persons with disabled mental capacity even though they are not capable of being rational agents.
What philosophical foundation can there be for animal welfare outside of animal rights? Is there justification to be kind to some animals but not others, at our whim? Does might make right? If we were conquered by an alien race as superior in intelligence to us as we are to the animals, would we acknowledge their right to do with us as they pleased, or would we ask them to respect our concept of human rights? On what basis is human suffering important and animal suffering not important?
Animal welfare and animal rights cannot exist without each other. Without animal rights, there is no solid basis for working towards animal welfare other than simple human preference, which isn't much of a basis at all... if you prefer that your neighbor not beat his dog, and he prefers to beat his dog, on what basis can you tell him that he shouldn't?
On the flip side, anyone who recognizes animal rights must also recognize that those rights involve having the animals' welfare respected. So they are both two sides of the same coin, and it's not likely to have much of one without the other.
I think that what you're really saying is that respecting animals' rights a little bit, enough to prevent the kind of animal abuse that might disturb you if you find out about it, is OK, but if you are asked to start respecting animals' rights enough that it inconveniences you (such as asking you to change your consumption habits so that animals won't have to be killed in slaughterhouses) then it's going too far. Finding the most far-out PETA theoretician and equating his most far-out ideas "animal rights" allows you to write off the entire idea pretty easily.
The idea that someday there are no pets doesn't seem to matter much to the current situation. I personally don't think that will ever happen, because cats and dogs seem to like us, and it seems to be in their best interest to hang out with us. Being bred as pets and then thrown away as they are in the current situation (my city, for example, kills over 100 healthy, adoptable ex-pets every day) is not in their best interest, but I think a stable population can eventually be found where every cat or dog has a good home, and they are only killed if they are sick and suffering (the same kind of euthanasia that I would want for myself if I were in that situation.) And if that stable population were found, PETA theorists would probably stop dreaming of a day when there is no more breeding and even no more pets. It's kind of like the "Back to Africa" movement dying out as conditions for Blacks in the US have improved over the decades.
I like Manage Engine Applications Manager (although it has a pretty horrible name.) It's a slick, good-looking product that runs as a .jsp inside its own instance of Tomcat, monitors a wide variety of servers from various vendors, and if you have less than 10 servers, it's free.