You've been leapfrogged -- the kernel already showed up in one movie, and the boot loader was in the title of another. I'm waiting for the Torvalds & Stallman stuffed toys any day now...:-)
Amusing, but iDVD can be bought as part of the iLife media productivity suite. In fact, the only point in buying iLife is to get iDVD, because the other software available with the suite -- iTunes, iPhoto, & iMovie -- can all be downloaded for free from Apple's site.
I can only assume that the only reason Apple has bothered to set up the "iDVD + freeware" package as a standalone product is that they indend to add other non-free components to the suite someday. Maybe it'll be iCook or something:-)
Beowulf clusters are good for problems that are "embarrassingly parallel": you need to figure out a vey large number of things, but the outcome of any given result isn't dependant on the values of any of the others.
Traditional supercomputers, with their vector processing, are more suited for situations where the results of each element in the data set or experiment do depend on the value or outcome of one or more other nodes.
To explain this, it helps to assume that the average experiment is analyzing what happens in a certain field, and that this field can be divided up into discrete cells. Further, I'll assume that for any experiment looking at how something changes over time, you need to divide up the expeiment's timeframe into a series of windows, and you need to know how each cell in your field is being transformed at each stage in the timeframe.
So for example, if you wanted to model what happens in a nuclear weapon or the core of a star, the results of every cell & every timeslice are highly dependant: you've got material moving rapidly across the field, disrupting what would be happening across myriad pathways, and pulling out any one cell for independent analysis is probably meaningless because the environment in that cell is so chaotic. Problems like this are really only suitable for traditional supercomputers.
On the other hand, consider the analysis of weather patterns. You can calculate each point in your field more or less independently, but before moving on to the next timeslice, each node has to exchange data with all its neighbors. A situation like this probably wouldn't be a strong candidate for Beowulf computing unless you can come up with a clever approach, or the network bandwidth of sharing all that neighbor data will kill your performance.
Then you've got problems like, say, analysis of markets or elections. Here, it's probably safe to assume that most actors in the market act independently, and the amount of data exchange among elements is low enough not to be a severe bottleneck.
The trick is to analyze carefully the nature of the problem to be studied. The more the elements in the problem are interdependent, the less appropriate the Beowulf approach. On the other hand, the more you can use Beowulf, the cheaper the experiment, which is probably why the approach is used more than it is perhaps suited do be doing. As in everything else in life, the economic angle has to be part of the decision, even if what's cheapest is sometimes the opposite of what's most appropriate.
However, if they're not logged in, then there should be no conflicts with that user -- right? It's a problem, but the effects of the failure case shouldn't be that damaging most of the time, except for the case where the person logs in immediately after the message was sent, and then immediately tries to launch the database.
Extension of your point: all instant messaging systems I can think of will have the same limitation. AIM, Jabber, iChat (not that that's relevant here), MSN, etc. will not queue up messages for users when they aren't logged in. I seem to remember that ICQ would store up messages, but how many people use ICQ anymore? In any case, the only IM server that can reasonably be run by yourself is Jabber, and as far as I know (I welcome corrections) it won't queue up messages.
As some in this thread have said, Jabber is probably the best band-aid over this particular problem, but fixing the multiuser aspects of the database software is the true cure. If Quickbooks Pro can do the job, it should be considered. Alternatively -- and this may be a stretch, depending on your needs & your trust in free software -- GnuCash can be configured to run PostgreSQL as the back-end data storage. This should address all the concurrency & stability issues beautifully; the only issue is that, as near as I can tell, this is still a beta quality feature, and the database schema seems to be evolving.
That and GnuCash might run more happily on Linux, which could scotch the idea if you're really an all XP shop...:-(
If that's the case, the QBpro is probably the safest option -- it should be examined.
There's actually an argument to be made for the technology assisted approach though. You say pushing keys is easier as if its a bad thing, but you could also argue that doing that can allow patterns to emerge & provoke thoughts that might be longer in coming if you approached the material "unarmed".
By way of comparison, I took four years of Latin in high school. As most people who have taken Latin (or other foreign languages) would know, most of the early material involves the rote memorization of tables of words and all the dozens of ways that these words can be inflected, declined, put into correct case, etc.
I hated that crap. My strength was always in the reading & translation exercises, because I had a knack for recognizing the word-roots, then chaining them together in such a way that the translation was roughly correct. As much as I could help it, I just pretended that grammar nonsense wasn't happening, and while that didn't help my score on some parts of quizzes & tests, I was able to do well enough at actually understanding the text that I could more or less wing it.
It wasn't until near the end of the last year that I started to really get line endings in a meaningful way. "Wait, you mean every time I've been translating $foo and I added 'should it not be the case' after the word $bar, you mean to say that this was what that crap at the end of $bar was telling me to do?" It all came together fairly quickly after the delayed start:-)
If you think about it, this is how people normally learn their first language as well -- almost no one learns to speak by having parents recite a grammar textbook & a copy of "Strunk & White" at them in the cradle. No -- we mimic, improvise, and only start to understand what's going structurally later, if at all.
I'd argue that this isn't such a bad way to learn advanced mathematics such as calculus. The principles being taught in a subject like this aren't that complex, but the mechanics involved in implementing or deconstructing these principles can be so daunting that most people have a very hard time with it. As a result of the work that goes into those mechanics, it's much harder to "wing it" & tease out the right answer to a question in calculus the way I was able to do with Latin. While I wouldn't advocate introducing technology to language instruction (yeah... Babelfish assisted translation -- that will clarify things for students...:-), in a math class it can help the students to set the mechanics aside long enough for the principles to start making sense, and then they can revisit those basics to get a better understanding of things work "under the hood."
(On a similar note, I also think that intro comp-sci students should be taught in a high level language like Python or Scheme before having to deal with more systems-level languages like C or Java. Tools like these help set aside the underlying mechanics of compilation, linking, machine code, etc so that the student can focus instead on the principles & practice of programming. Once they've got their heads around that, then they can come back to mess with opcodes and registers and what have you, but I really think that material should be treated as extra for most students, and it's the same line of thought with computer languages as it is with mathematics. For me anyway, not that I'm a teacher or anything, just someone with hunches about what would work well for many students based on the complaints that come up over & over.)
Oh man, I forgot about that place. When I was in college, there were a couple of Blockbuster Music stores that I would go to sometimes, when the indie store near campus didn't have what I was looking for. For a big corporate chain, the prices weren't bad, the selection was broad, and they had a listening station with a bank of 10 cd players, and the staff would let you slip on a pair of nice headphones and listen to any discs you want for free. If you didn't buy it, no big deal, they'd just re-shrinkwrap it and put it back on the shelf.
Then Blockbuster spun off the chain, one of the Blockbuster Music stores closed down, and the other one was given the awful, awful name Wherehouse Music. Goog gawd that's a stupid name.
First thing they did, unplug all the listening stations. Second thing they did, jack up all the prices. The once nice change was a small used CD section, but then they had the asinine policy that all purchases must leave the store in one of those disposeable plastic bags, which is a major pet peeve of mine -- if I can't get a 2 ounce cd out to my car then how is a bag (which of course is just going to end up in the trash 10 seconds after purchase) going to make that any easier or otherwise better? When I realized that they would rather lose sales than let me purchase goods while declining a stupid plastic bad, that was end end of me using their store.
I hope they're all out of business now. Some companies deserve it.
The problem with the bands you cite here is that they're all pretty much hippie jam bands, and IMO hippie jam bands are almost by defnition boring.
Obviously not every agrees with that, but I feel pretty strongly about it:-)
The more interesting example to me is a band like Fugazi, where the approach has been to do everything they possibly can by themselves: run the label & studio, set up distribution channels & organize tours, and do everything possible on a strict budge. For a long time they had their famous "no show over five bucks" policy, though in fact in reality they just keep things as cheap as possible by e.g. avoiding expensive venues & ticket distribution channels (though I have bought a Fugazi ticket from a TicketMaster outlet before, so they don't seem to be philosophically opposed as much as they are pragmatically opposed.
The cool thing about Fugazi's approach is that it has allowed them to make a living putting out creatively challenging work for nearly 20 years now, because they are their own bosses and there are as few middlemen as possible between the band and the audience. It works out well for the audience too: you can get one of their albums for $10 or $15 at your local record store, or you can get it for $8 or $10 postpaid directly from Dischord Records -- and if you take the latter, cheaper approach, then the band still makes more off the sale than they do from the traditional record stores.
The problem is that their approach has taken a lot of dedication. Bands like "Man or Astroman" have written on their sites about why it has been difficult for them to replicate Fugazi's success, partly because the whole point of what Fugazi managed to do was that they recorded & toured without tapping into any of the RIAA infrastructure for these things, and while the internet may make some aspects of this easier, it's probably just as much work today as it was in the 80s.
Someday, the Fugazi/Dischord story is going to make great material for some student's master's thesis: "How to be more successful than the average MBA without stooping to their level in the process":-)
[....] it would run on more Microsoft operating systems than NT.
Out of curiosity, how many Microsoft operating systems does NT run on? And why would running a hosted virtual machine version of NT on, say, Win3.1 be desirable?
This may depend where you live, I'm not sure. I've been a Cingular customer for three years now (from back when they were CellularOne around here), and I got a letter in the mail a few months ago saying that I was eligible for a free upgrade.
I liked my old Nokia 6120i a lot, so got the current equivalent, the 6340i -- which happens to now be the tri-band GSM/CDMA/analog phone.
From what the sales staff told me recently, this phone is the only one they offer now that'll work on their west coast service, as that's all GSM now. In the middle & east of the country they're still working through the switch, and GSM is just an extra around here.
My hunch is that they'll have to have a generation of tri-band phones (where generation here means maybe 2 or 3 years, and isn't meant as a reference to 3G etc) before they can switch off their non-GSM network around here. Maybe they're trying to move more quickly than that, but I'd think it'll take time to get all their users to want to upgrade.
My one observation with the new GSM phone, unlike the older 6210i, is that I end up jumping networks a lot. VoiceStream is the only provider with antennas on the subway system at this point, so whenever I'm on the T my phone says that I'm on their network rather than Cingular's. Likewise whenever I'm going under the Big Dig tunnels, if I can get a signal at all it's as likely to be AT&T or Verizon as Cingular, and the same sort of thing happens when I hit random dead spots in the area: I rarely have no signal at all, but I frequently end up on someone else's network.
At first this freaked me out, thinking I'd be paying roaming fees, but as long as you're in your covered calling area then it doesn't matter -- the billing just looks funny and, as another commenter noted, sometimes there's a delay before it shows up on your bill.
Basically, as far as I can tell, GSM might or might not make any difference in the call quality (I for one can't tell any difference), but having the capability has made the stability of my connection much more reliable, even if I'm on someone else's network.
That and the ability to transfer the SIM card to a new phone someday is a nice future capability (down with re-keying all your data!), and the ability to exchange data between the phone's IR port, my palm pilot, and any IR equipped laptop computer has just been spectacular to me -- not that that's a GSM thing:-)
low-self-esteem books, n. Also called books for the baddled.
Any book riding on the huge success of DOS for Dummies (Dan Gookin, IDG
Books, San Mateo, Calif.).
My contest for rival titles (UNIX Review, October 1993) invoked: Visual
BASIC for the Blind; MIDI for the Dead; Pacsal for the Dyxlesic; REXX
for Ex-Monarchs; C++ for the Nonplussed; dBASE for the Debased; Quicken
for the Dead; 1-2-3 for the Innumerate; CLU for the Clueless; and LISP
for the Listless. In spite of this ridicule, the genre has grown to
include The Complete Idiot's Guide to Brain Surgery.
-- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, (c) 1995
The bulk of this code comes right out of the readme file for the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple module. The main changes I made were to add the LWP call to download the source file, and I tweaked the line to split up the columns (as later replies went over & fixed).
CPAN should get the credit for this -- I'm mainly cargo culting:-)
I was going to put a variant like print join("\t", @data);, but if the module puts each cell into an array element, then a simple join isn't enough to split out the (optional) numbers in the second column -- and there are only two columns anyway.
I think your second variant is much closer to the mark of what I was trying to do, but I'd have to try it to see. I think the regex probably needs to look for one or more digits, and once you've got that you can probably standardize the data by adding a line to clean up the last column, such as:
This way you should have data for all columns. Someone cleverer than me might find a way to combine those two lines, but I think this does the job & is fairly clear to read, so it'll do.
I've got a hunch that making sure that the third column is clean might get annoying, but this should get at least 95% of the way there...
Hmm, actually that join("\t", split(/ */, $data[1])) trick isn't going to behave the way I intended -- multi-word song titles are going to be expanded into multiple columns. I'm too tired to fix it now though, I'm sure there's a decent one-line fix that can be plugged in there...
Here's one untested way to do it, based on the sample code given (Slashcode doesn't agree well with nicely indented Perl, so I've replaced standard indentation with vertical space instead to retain some clarity):
#!/path/to/perl -w
use strict;
use Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple;
use LWP::Simple;
my $content = get("http://www.slyck.com/misc/p2p.xls");
open my $fh_excel, "p2p.xls" or die "cant write: $!";
print $fh_excel $content;
my $xls = Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple->read('p2p.xls');
foreach my $sheet ($xls->sheets) {
And hey presto -- if all goes well, the spreadsheet in question should end up being magically downloaded & converted to a tab delimited table on the fly.
Now that wasn't so bad, was it? And you didn't even have to do any of the work...:-)
In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell talks about how among pretty much all religions, the laity & clergy get caught up in how their religion is better than all the others (the classical religious wars). However, most of these religions have a mystical wing -- monks, yogis, etc -- and in general the members of these groups are much more willing to reach out to the other groups and not try to paint things in terms of "us vs. them".
Kernighan sounds like he applies this kind of perspective to computers. From what I've read, for all the flame wars about Perl vs. Python, Vi vs. Emacs, *NIX vs. Windows, etc, the "monks" in these groups seem to be much more focused on the commonalities among systems rather than the differences between one and another. Kernighan talks about all the languages and operating systems he uses; Larry Wall gleefully puts the best of every language he can get his paws on into Perl; Guido van Rossum doesn't seem to object to letting a future version of Python run on top of Perl6's Parrot runtime engine; Craig Mundie has no fear preaching the Microsoft word at the Open Source Conference; and Tim O'Reilly tells people that he gets along well with all the people he has met at Microsoft.
It's worth mentioning the whole generative art subculture, as researchable at (predictably enough) generative.net. These people are making music & other artworks to challenge the notion that computers can't create art, by coming up with automatic processes that as a side effect of their action product music, visual art, probably even sculpture if you look around hard enough.
The idea is that, according to much conventional wisdom, "computers can't create creative, expressionistic artwork." But what is a computer program other than the pure, embodied result of some human's creative expression? If then someone creates a program to generate possibly interesting sounds or animations, is the art-piece that sound or animation, or are those merely a byproduct of the true art in the program itself?
This is the sort of "angels on pinheads" question that can get the right group of people worked up into a tremendous debate:-)
In any case, I'm willing to accept that this kind of generative work can produce interesting results.
One of the most interesting things I've read about was a Perl script that took as input the archives of a mailing list and transformed it into a 10 minute musical piece, doing things like assigning different instruments to different people, having all the messages in a particular discussion thread be played in a certain note or key, etc. The net result was that you could very tangibly visualize the cadence of time, as the tempo of the music quickened or slowed, and certain threads would produce frantic bursts of noise while certain people's "voice" could be picked out here & there across the continuum.
Arguably, this was just another way of "visually" representing the dataset; maybe a retooled version of the script could have produced some kind of mosiac or tapestry, or (more prosaically, but maybe more tantalizingly) a simple graph or chart. From that point of view, what this program did with the data was no more interesting than what a program like Excel does with spreadsheet graphs. But then you start to appreciate just how creative that must be on some level, and then start to wonder about the possibilities of expressing boring old tabular data sonically rather than visually.
Would people have caught on to Enron's game sooner if their annual reports had been presented as a four part concerto in the key of D? Maybe...:-)
Warning: when discussing beer mugs that can automatically communicate with another computer in order to pass along a request to the waitstaff, the term "server" will strongly resist contextual disambiguation.
Use caution & precision:-)
Re:RFIDs would suck in Star Wars...
on
Another Beer Please
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Fortunately, "globally unique" doesn't mean so much when you're intragalactic adventurers.
Obi-Wan: There seems to be some mistake, I have owned this robe for a long, long timee -- what was that name you called me again? -- and these droids were purchased at Imperial auction on Coruscant several years ago. I assure you, these are not the droids you are looking for. I can show you papers if you like...
Storm Trooper 1: Gee, I dunno sir, don't you think the chances of that ID being the same is kind of a huge coincidence?
Storm Trooper 2: Well, he did say he bought the droids on Coruscant...
Storm Trooper 1: That's true, but I still think we better check in with the Captain...
But neither Worldcom nor Enron actually went out of business. Both seem to be in the late stages of emerging from bankruptcy, and the burden of their lost billions is going to sit squarely on the shares of their hoodwinked investors even as they live to screw everyone over another day. Don't it make ya proud?
Thank you. The only digital camera I've spent any time using is a consumer level Olympus. I've been holding off on the high end stuff because I want to be able to go digital Nikon SLR, with the ability to exchange lenses with standard film cameras, but the prices have only recently come low enough to start getting my attention. Now that I can maybe talk myself into affording one of these beasts, I'm starting to think through what features would be useful, and automatic recording of exposure settings is an obvious one. Apparently I'm not the only person that it is obvious to:-)
For that matter, do these high end SLRs encode information about shutter speed, aperature, focal length, etc into the image somehow? It would be cool to be able to examine the photos later and say "ahh okay, the ones I liked best all seem to have been shot at f/5.6 & 1/250, with the zoom lens at around 120mm -- I'll have to keep those settings in mind next time out...".
The biggest pain in the ass in learning to use a traditional SLR camera is getting the hang of how these different variables manipulate the captured image. You can keep a journal of what each exposure was set to, but that's tedious & people make mistakes. A camera like this should be able to do that work for you, but can it?
Slashdot Mirror
Spelling & grammar are both so sloppy around here -- from the editorial staff on down -- that I've pretty much given up on clarity or good diction.
I only hope these illiterates don't write code the way they write English... :)
Dual G4/450mhz processors, 896mb ram. Your Linux box is either newer, or Linux itself is a faster platform for running /bin/ps.
NOW THE WORLD KNOWS.
You've been leapfrogged -- the kernel already showed up in one movie, and the boot loader was in the title of another. I'm waiting for the Torvalds & Stallman stuffed toys any day now... :-)
I can only assume that the only reason Apple has bothered to set up the "iDVD + freeware" package as a standalone product is that they indend to add other non-free components to the suite someday. Maybe it'll be iCook or something :-)
Traditional supercomputers, with their vector processing, are more suited for situations where the results of each element in the data set or experiment do depend on the value or outcome of one or more other nodes.
To explain this, it helps to assume that the average experiment is analyzing what happens in a certain field, and that this field can be divided up into discrete cells. Further, I'll assume that for any experiment looking at how something changes over time, you need to divide up the expeiment's timeframe into a series of windows, and you need to know how each cell in your field is being transformed at each stage in the timeframe.
So for example, if you wanted to model what happens in a nuclear weapon or the core of a star, the results of every cell & every timeslice are highly dependant: you've got material moving rapidly across the field, disrupting what would be happening across myriad pathways, and pulling out any one cell for independent analysis is probably meaningless because the environment in that cell is so chaotic. Problems like this are really only suitable for traditional supercomputers.
On the other hand, consider the analysis of weather patterns. You can calculate each point in your field more or less independently, but before moving on to the next timeslice, each node has to exchange data with all its neighbors. A situation like this probably wouldn't be a strong candidate for Beowulf computing unless you can come up with a clever approach, or the network bandwidth of sharing all that neighbor data will kill your performance.
Then you've got problems like, say, analysis of markets or elections. Here, it's probably safe to assume that most actors in the market act independently, and the amount of data exchange among elements is low enough not to be a severe bottleneck.
The trick is to analyze carefully the nature of the problem to be studied. The more the elements in the problem are interdependent, the less appropriate the Beowulf approach. On the other hand, the more you can use Beowulf, the cheaper the experiment, which is probably why the approach is used more than it is perhaps suited do be doing. As in everything else in life, the economic angle has to be part of the decision, even if what's cheapest is sometimes the opposite of what's most appropriate.
Extension of your point: all instant messaging systems I can think of will have the same limitation. AIM, Jabber, iChat (not that that's relevant here), MSN, etc. will not queue up messages for users when they aren't logged in. I seem to remember that ICQ would store up messages, but how many people use ICQ anymore? In any case, the only IM server that can reasonably be run by yourself is Jabber, and as far as I know (I welcome corrections) it won't queue up messages.
As some in this thread have said, Jabber is probably the best band-aid over this particular problem, but fixing the multiuser aspects of the database software is the true cure. If Quickbooks Pro can do the job, it should be considered. Alternatively -- and this may be a stretch, depending on your needs & your trust in free software -- GnuCash can be configured to run PostgreSQL as the back-end data storage. This should address all the concurrency & stability issues beautifully; the only issue is that, as near as I can tell, this is still a beta quality feature, and the database schema seems to be evolving.
That and GnuCash might run more happily on Linux, which could scotch the idea if you're really an all XP shop... :-(
If that's the case, the QBpro is probably the safest option -- it should be examined.
By way of comparison, I took four years of Latin in high school. As most people who have taken Latin (or other foreign languages) would know, most of the early material involves the rote memorization of tables of words and all the dozens of ways that these words can be inflected, declined, put into correct case, etc.
I hated that crap. My strength was always in the reading & translation exercises, because I had a knack for recognizing the word-roots, then chaining them together in such a way that the translation was roughly correct. As much as I could help it, I just pretended that grammar nonsense wasn't happening, and while that didn't help my score on some parts of quizzes & tests, I was able to do well enough at actually understanding the text that I could more or less wing it.
It wasn't until near the end of the last year that I started to really get line endings in a meaningful way. "Wait, you mean every time I've been translating $foo and I added 'should it not be the case' after the word $bar, you mean to say that this was what that crap at the end of $bar was telling me to do?" It all came together fairly quickly after the delayed start :-)
If you think about it, this is how people normally learn their first language as well -- almost no one learns to speak by having parents recite a grammar textbook & a copy of "Strunk & White" at them in the cradle. No -- we mimic, improvise, and only start to understand what's going structurally later, if at all.
I'd argue that this isn't such a bad way to learn advanced mathematics such as calculus. The principles being taught in a subject like this aren't that complex, but the mechanics involved in implementing or deconstructing these principles can be so daunting that most people have a very hard time with it. As a result of the work that goes into those mechanics, it's much harder to "wing it" & tease out the right answer to a question in calculus the way I was able to do with Latin. While I wouldn't advocate introducing technology to language instruction (yeah... Babelfish assisted translation -- that will clarify things for students... :-), in a math class it can help the students to set the mechanics aside long enough for the principles to start making sense, and then they can revisit those basics to get a better understanding of things work "under the hood."
(On a similar note, I also think that intro comp-sci students should be taught in a high level language like Python or Scheme before having to deal with more systems-level languages like C or Java. Tools like these help set aside the underlying mechanics of compilation, linking, machine code, etc so that the student can focus instead on the principles & practice of programming. Once they've got their heads around that, then they can come back to mess with opcodes and registers and what have you, but I really think that material should be treated as extra for most students, and it's the same line of thought with computer languages as it is with mathematics. For me anyway, not that I'm a teacher or anything, just someone with hunches about what would work well for many students based on the complaints that come up over & over.)
Then Blockbuster spun off the chain, one of the Blockbuster Music stores closed down, and the other one was given the awful, awful name Wherehouse Music. Goog gawd that's a stupid name.
First thing they did, unplug all the listening stations. Second thing they did, jack up all the prices. The once nice change was a small used CD section, but then they had the asinine policy that all purchases must leave the store in one of those disposeable plastic bags, which is a major pet peeve of mine -- if I can't get a 2 ounce cd out to my car then how is a bag (which of course is just going to end up in the trash 10 seconds after purchase) going to make that any easier or otherwise better? When I realized that they would rather lose sales than let me purchase goods while declining a stupid plastic bad, that was end end of me using their store.
I hope they're all out of business now. Some companies deserve it.
Obviously not every agrees with that, but I feel pretty strongly about it :-)
The more interesting example to me is a band like Fugazi, where the approach has been to do everything they possibly can by themselves: run the label & studio, set up distribution channels & organize tours, and do everything possible on a strict budge. For a long time they had their famous "no show over five bucks" policy, though in fact in reality they just keep things as cheap as possible by e.g. avoiding expensive venues & ticket distribution channels (though I have bought a Fugazi ticket from a TicketMaster outlet before, so they don't seem to be philosophically opposed as much as they are pragmatically opposed.
The cool thing about Fugazi's approach is that it has allowed them to make a living putting out creatively challenging work for nearly 20 years now, because they are their own bosses and there are as few middlemen as possible between the band and the audience. It works out well for the audience too: you can get one of their albums for $10 or $15 at your local record store, or you can get it for $8 or $10 postpaid directly from Dischord Records -- and if you take the latter, cheaper approach, then the band still makes more off the sale than they do from the traditional record stores.
The problem is that their approach has taken a lot of dedication. Bands like "Man or Astroman" have written on their sites about why it has been difficult for them to replicate Fugazi's success, partly because the whole point of what Fugazi managed to do was that they recorded & toured without tapping into any of the RIAA infrastructure for these things, and while the internet may make some aspects of this easier, it's probably just as much work today as it was in the 80s.
Someday, the Fugazi/Dischord story is going to make great material for some student's master's thesis: "How to be more successful than the average MBA without stooping to their level in the process" :-)
Out of curiosity, how many Microsoft operating systems does NT run on? And why would running a hosted virtual machine version of NT on, say, Win3.1 be desirable?
I liked my old Nokia 6120i a lot, so got the current equivalent, the 6340i -- which happens to now be the tri-band GSM/CDMA/analog phone.
From what the sales staff told me recently, this phone is the only one they offer now that'll work on their west coast service, as that's all GSM now. In the middle & east of the country they're still working through the switch, and GSM is just an extra around here.
My hunch is that they'll have to have a generation of tri-band phones (where generation here means maybe 2 or 3 years, and isn't meant as a reference to 3G etc) before they can switch off their non-GSM network around here. Maybe they're trying to move more quickly than that, but I'd think it'll take time to get all their users to want to upgrade.
My one observation with the new GSM phone, unlike the older 6210i, is that I end up jumping networks a lot. VoiceStream is the only provider with antennas on the subway system at this point, so whenever I'm on the T my phone says that I'm on their network rather than Cingular's. Likewise whenever I'm going under the Big Dig tunnels, if I can get a signal at all it's as likely to be AT&T or Verizon as Cingular, and the same sort of thing happens when I hit random dead spots in the area: I rarely have no signal at all, but I frequently end up on someone else's network.
At first this freaked me out, thinking I'd be paying roaming fees, but as long as you're in your covered calling area then it doesn't matter -- the billing just looks funny and, as another commenter noted, sometimes there's a delay before it shows up on your bill.
Basically, as far as I can tell, GSM might or might not make any difference in the call quality (I for one can't tell any difference), but having the capability has made the stability of my connection much more reliable, even if I'm on someone else's network.
That and the ability to transfer the SIM card to a new phone someday is a nice future capability (down with re-keying all your data!), and the ability to exchange data between the phone's IR port, my palm pilot, and any IR equipped laptop computer has just been spectacular to me -- not that that's a GSM thing :-)
The bulk of this code comes right out of the readme file for the Spreadsheet::ParseExcel::Simple module. The main changes I made were to add the LWP call to download the source file, and I tweaked the line to split up the columns (as later replies went over & fixed).
CPAN should get the credit for this -- I'm mainly cargo culting :-)
Right, but if there is no number in parentheses, then that column is empty; all I did was convert an empty value into the 1 that was implied.
I think your second variant is much closer to the mark of what I was trying to do, but I'd have to try it to see. I think the regex probably needs to look for one or more digits, and once you've got that you can probably standardize the data by adding a line to clean up the last column, such as:
This way you should have data for all columns. Someone cleverer than me might find a way to combine those two lines, but I think this does the job & is fairly clear to read, so it'll do.I've got a hunch that making sure that the third column is clean might get annoying, but this should get at least 95% of the way there...
...and I was having fun in dispensing with their one area of complaint :-)
Hmm, actually that join("\t", split(/ */, $data[1])) trick isn't going to behave the way I intended -- multi-word song titles are going to be expanded into multiple columns. I'm too tired to fix it now though, I'm sure there's a decent one-line fix that can be plugged in there...
Here's one untested way to do it, based on the sample code given (Slashcode doesn't agree well with nicely indented Perl, so I've replaced standard indentation with vertical space instead to retain some clarity):
And hey presto -- if all goes well, the spreadsheet in question should end up being magically downloaded & converted to a tab delimited table on the fly.
Now that wasn't so bad, was it? And you didn't even have to do any of the work... :-)
Kernighan sounds like he applies this kind of perspective to computers. From what I've read, for all the flame wars about Perl vs. Python, Vi vs. Emacs, *NIX vs. Windows, etc, the "monks" in these groups seem to be much more focused on the commonalities among systems rather than the differences between one and another. Kernighan talks about all the languages and operating systems he uses; Larry Wall gleefully puts the best of every language he can get his paws on into Perl; Guido van Rossum doesn't seem to object to letting a future version of Python run on top of Perl6's Parrot runtime engine; Craig Mundie has no fear preaching the Microsoft word at the Open Source Conference; and Tim O'Reilly tells people that he gets along well with all the people he has met at Microsoft.
I think that's wisdom.
The idea is that, according to much conventional wisdom, "computers can't create creative, expressionistic artwork." But what is a computer program other than the pure, embodied result of some human's creative expression? If then someone creates a program to generate possibly interesting sounds or animations, is the art-piece that sound or animation, or are those merely a byproduct of the true art in the program itself?
This is the sort of "angels on pinheads" question that can get the right group of people worked up into a tremendous debate :-)
In any case, I'm willing to accept that this kind of generative work can produce interesting results.
One of the most interesting things I've read about was a Perl script that took as input the archives of a mailing list and transformed it into a 10 minute musical piece, doing things like assigning different instruments to different people, having all the messages in a particular discussion thread be played in a certain note or key, etc. The net result was that you could very tangibly visualize the cadence of time, as the tempo of the music quickened or slowed, and certain threads would produce frantic bursts of noise while certain people's "voice" could be picked out here & there across the continuum.
Arguably, this was just another way of "visually" representing the dataset; maybe a retooled version of the script could have produced some kind of mosiac or tapestry, or (more prosaically, but maybe more tantalizingly) a simple graph or chart. From that point of view, what this program did with the data was no more interesting than what a program like Excel does with spreadsheet graphs. But then you start to appreciate just how creative that must be on some level, and then start to wonder about the possibilities of expressing boring old tabular data sonically rather than visually.
Would people have caught on to Enron's game sooner if their annual reports had been presented as a four part concerto in the key of D? Maybe... :-)
Warning: when discussing beer mugs that can automatically communicate with another computer in order to pass along a request to the waitstaff, the term "server" will strongly resist contextual disambiguation.
Use caution & precision :-)
But neither Worldcom nor Enron actually went out of business. Both seem to be in the late stages of emerging from bankruptcy, and the burden of their lost billions is going to sit squarely on the shares of their hoodwinked investors even as they live to screw everyone over another day. Don't it make ya proud?
Thank you. The only digital camera I've spent any time using is a consumer level Olympus. I've been holding off on the high end stuff because I want to be able to go digital Nikon SLR, with the ability to exchange lenses with standard film cameras, but the prices have only recently come low enough to start getting my attention. Now that I can maybe talk myself into affording one of these beasts, I'm starting to think through what features would be useful, and automatic recording of exposure settings is an obvious one. Apparently I'm not the only person that it is obvious to :-)
The biggest pain in the ass in learning to use a traditional SLR camera is getting the hang of how these different variables manipulate the captured image. You can keep a journal of what each exposure was set to, but that's tedious & people make mistakes. A camera like this should be able to do that work for you, but can it?