Fine, I'll throw away all my CDs, if you can just tell me where and when I can next catch a local live performance of...
an Indian raga. Arab hip-hop. my favorite composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim. my favorite pianist, Bill Evans. Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" Jimi Hendrix Bolivian folklore music.
As a matter of fact, I do perform music with friends, for a live audience, in real life, every month, and that is the most entertaining, enjoyable musical experience I have these days.
But having convenient access to recorded music from different styles, cultures, and eras, by artists whose greatness is recognized both universally and personally, is a pretty nifty thing.
Without it, my enjoyment of actively performing music would be much more difficult, if not poorer.
The thing that frustrates me the most about Blender is not so much the fact that it's key-driven (as opposed to menu-driven), but that it's almost universally taught through keystrokes and keystrokes only. There are menus or buttons existing for almost every command, but just about every tutorial or forum post by an expert explaining a feature says something like "...select the edge, then press WKEY 1KEY." WKEY 1KEY tells me absolutely nothing about what I am doing. And even if you tell me ten times that WKEY 1KEY subdivides an edge, I will probably forget it. Just tell me once instead to go to the Mesh -> Edges -> Subdivide menu so I know that what I am doing is subdividing the edge, rather than W-ing 1-ing. And I will remember that much more easily.
When I was working through the Blender newbie tutorial, in frustration I went through every page and scratched out every damned "XKEY AKEY" with the corresponding menu, so I knew just what the hell was being done.
They're called shortcut keys for a reason - a shorter, quicker way to do something which you are already familiar with. Once I'm familiar with the commands and selecting from multi-level menus becomes a drag, I will be quickly keying my way, but until then, let me explore its capabilities through menus which let me see what is available -- the whole concept behind menu-based GUIs.
Re:09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
on
Censoring a Number
·
· Score: 2, Funny
That reminds me of the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied a 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 , and in those days, nickels had pictures of 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 on 'em. 'Give me five bees for 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0,' you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah -- the important thing was that I had a 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0's because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
Nothing makes me think a computer could efficiently recognize speech piped through a tinny speaker and sent over static-filled copper telephone wires, any more than a human could. But a computer could probably understand that same speech by that same person, in the same noisy room, if placed 30cm directly in front of the speaker's mouth. Just like a human could.
Now imagine your work environment. I'm in an open-plan office here, and I can clearly hear the many people around me, even quite far away. Imagine if they were all talking to their computers!
Yup. Bedlam. Shouting. Not the office of the future, but like a stockmarket of the past.
You don't shout at your co-workers, do you? What makes you think you'd have to shout at your computer?
How can you tell that those people are far away and not speaking straight into your ear? If someone calls out to you from a random spot in the room, can you recognize his voice and know who it is without wondering which desk it came from? Do you ever wonder if any of those voices are coming out of your computer speaker and not from a person in the room?
It may be bedlam, but you have the capablity to judge the direction and distance of sounds, to recognize a voice as that of a particular person, and distinguish a sound coming straight out of someone's vocal chords from the same person's speech pumped through a speaker. They are all unconscious human skills, but in the end it's your brain doing some signal processing on a set of raw sound waves, and there's nothing that prevents a computer system from doing the same thing as well, if not better.
At first there may be social/human barriers to humans carrying out vocal conversations with their computer (though game-based or text-based conversations are something we've easily become comfortable with). But the acoustics of speech recognition just need time to perfect, and perfected it will be.
My step daughter is taking a class in biology. The first quiz is a bit of a doozy when tasked against my own knowledge, but it did bring out an aspect of this story. Today's kids are tasked with finding answers in what equates to an ocean of information compared to what was available when I was in school. Plagiarism is not good, but in this 'ocean of information' it is difficult to know what that really is. When studying, an answer from wikipedia is as good as one from another paper available on the Internet.
I think it leads to lax standards as to where the answer came from when the point is to find the answer. Term papers and those efforts required of students that require actual personal thought and effort are not dead, they simply need to be pressed with more effort. Finding information is no longer the problem that it used to be. Expressing your own thoughts on the question at hand is a skill that many people never learn, never mind figure out how to express when they are 18-ish.
It is problematic to discuss things in a black and white manner as this story seems to. The issue is not plagiarism or term papers, it is expression of thought, and that is what is endangered most by the 'ocean of information' that is now available to us all.
It's a truly fowl practice, among the wurst around. These plagiarists steal the meat of others' writing, and then, when goosed into confessing their crime, spread the blame on others.
>> What does this show? It shows that given the choice, people would probably take cars, but because more people want to do that than there is space on the road or parking spaces available, those without large amounts of surplus time and money are pushed onto mass transit. >>
That's like saying that given the choice, most people would chose not to work, and eat only their favorite foods rather than healthy stuff, and just throw off all the unpleasant responsibilities of life.
Some people can pull it off, but for most people it's not practical or sustainable to live like that, either as individuals and as members of society. So they choose not to. And if they try it, it only lasts until they're staring at an empty bank account, poor health, and dirty looks from people around them. And even if they temporarily regain enough resources to revert to the "life of sloth", they usually decide it's not worth it.
Gridlock, pollution, and a mess over in Iraq are the empty bank account, poor health, and dirty looks from the rest of the world.
People driving private automobiles for leisure isn't really a problem in itself. And where I live, a lot of people do own cars, which they drive only on weekends, for trips out to the countryside and such, because they enjoy it.
But to try to justify the vast majority of private automobile use in the U.S. -- the experience of driving stop-and-go, back and forth over the same route at the same time, every day, when you'd really rather be doing something else -- as "driving an auto for the sheer enjoyment of it because a car to me is more than mere transportation, it's the freedom of the road!" is nothing but delusional.
If you live in a low-density rural area, getting around by car is fine by me. The problem is the large cities, where single-driver automobile commuting is utterly unsustainable, but most people are stuck with the mentality is that it's their "right" to drive to work.
>> Just because all you know is the city you've never left, does not mean you are absolutely right. However, I appreciate your passion for the little of the world you know, and your readiness to criticize places for not meeting your ideal. >>
I spent well over a decade living in Seattle, a city consistently ranked in the top 10 for worst traffic congestion in the U.S. And, incidentally, never owned a car the whole time -- nothing but foot, bus, and bicycle.
Well, I just happened to ride to work this morning on a "generic people transporter" (otherwise known as a subway) along with millions of others in the city. (Yes, millions. ). The people on the subway were dressed fashionably, not in standardized jumpsuits. And for lunch today I had a tasty, enjoyable meal, not a pile of gray gloopy "human nutritional fuel".
Just because 90% of the population in your part of the world is addicted to a horribly wasteful of resources under the excuse of "personal freedom" doesn't mean it's justified or can't change.
I guess I'm just an old fart, thinking back on when the great musicians were those that wrote and performed their own stuff, the average artists were those who performed songs written for them by other songwriters, and anyone who actually took a sound recording made by someone else, included it as part of another recording, then put their name on it and tried to sell it, was considered a plagiarist and lacking even a shred of artististic creativity or originality.
>>Yes, dihydrogen monoxide is tens of thousands times more toxic than the MON 863 maize. But you are not eating it everyday without being able to choose.
Yes, I think it's absolutely essential that we try to eliminate any accidental ingestion of dihydrogen monoxide.
And what terroristic purpose would be served by crashing an airliner that's already poised to land into an airport runway? No damage to anything significant, and it's probably not even going to kill all the passengers.
The 9-11ers didn't set out to crash a bunch of airliners as end in itself.
So if some glaciers like this one, which have been essentially unchanged in size for thousands of years, are shrinking to the point of disappearing within five years, while others are growing, (even at the same rate, which is highly doubtful), they somehow "balance out" and thus there's no global trend to be seen or to worry about?
It's like these folks who are saying "The Eastern seaboard has had its coldest winter or record! Global warming is bunk!" What matters is not so much whether it's heating or cooling, it's the drastic, volatile nature of recent climate change, which is pretty hard to dispute.
...it comes from snow and rainfall in that area, which presumably will continue as before.
And that's one huge and unsupported presumption. The cause of the glaciers' melting is change in local climate. How do we know that the clouds will continue to dump precipitation, or that the rivers will continue to evaporate, in the same way, if the temperature is different?
Is there anything anyone here can actually do to help rescue Jim Gray? I'd say almost certainly not.
So what are we to do? Those who have a connection with the man (knew him, worked with him, admire his work, etc.) will have serious and informative comments to make. But for the rest who've never heard of him, there's just nothing to discuss -- the story's not about technology in any way, it's just about a human being who happens to be related to technology. And death is easiest thing in the world to come up with jokes about -- "I bet he died because [a common failure in whatever area of technology he is related to]...ha,ha". Yes, the Microsoft/bluescreen jokes are pretty lame, but the SQL/database ones get a chuckle out of me.
Oh, right. The editorial review board of Neuropsychologia, the medical journal publishing this study, is still incapable of clearly distinguishing between causality and correlation, after 40 years of publishing scientific research.
I myself notice a link between Slashdot readers who read about a study claiming something that they don't want to believe, and those readers then attempting to dismiss them through trite posts about basic scientific practice. I can't say whether that link is causality or mere correlation, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, I'll throw away all my CDs, if you can just tell me where and when I can next catch a local live performance of...
an Indian raga.
Arab hip-hop.
my favorite composer, Antonio Carlos Jobim.
my favorite pianist, Bill Evans.
Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring"
Jimi Hendrix
Bolivian folklore music.
As a matter of fact, I do perform music with friends, for a live audience, in real life, every month, and that is the most entertaining, enjoyable musical experience I have these days.
But having convenient access to recorded music from different styles, cultures, and eras, by artists whose greatness is recognized both universally and personally, is a pretty nifty thing.
Without it, my enjoyment of actively performing music would be much more difficult, if not poorer.
The thing that frustrates me the most about Blender is not so much the fact that it's key-driven (as opposed to menu-driven), but that it's almost universally taught through keystrokes and keystrokes only. There are menus or buttons existing for almost every command, but just about every tutorial or forum post by an expert explaining a feature says something like "...select the edge, then press WKEY 1KEY." WKEY 1KEY tells me absolutely nothing about what I am doing. And even if you tell me ten times that WKEY 1KEY subdivides an edge, I will probably forget it. Just tell me once instead to go to the Mesh -> Edges -> Subdivide menu so I know that what I am doing is subdividing the edge, rather than W-ing 1-ing. And I will remember that much more easily.
When I was working through the Blender newbie tutorial, in frustration I went through every page and scratched out every damned "XKEY AKEY" with the corresponding menu, so I knew just what the hell was being done.
They're called shortcut keys for a reason - a shorter, quicker way to do something which you are already familiar with. Once I'm familiar with the commands and selecting from multi-level menus becomes a drag, I will be quickly keying my way, but until then, let me explore its capabilities through menus which let me see what is available -- the whole concept behind menu-based GUIs.
That reminds me of the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied a 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 , and in those days, nickels had pictures of 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 on 'em. 'Give me five bees for 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 ,' you'd say.
Now where were we? Oh yeah -- the important thing was that I had a 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0's because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
Well, he may well have been well hung, but well never know, well we?
Nothing makes me think a computer could efficiently recognize speech piped through a tinny speaker and sent over static-filled copper telephone wires, any more than a human could. But a computer could probably understand that same speech by that same person, in the same noisy room, if placed 30cm directly in front of the speaker's mouth. Just like a human could.
Now imagine your work environment. I'm in an open-plan office here, and I can clearly hear the many people around me, even quite far away. Imagine if they were all talking to their computers!
Yup. Bedlam. Shouting. Not the office of the future, but like a stockmarket of the past.
You don't shout at your co-workers, do you? What makes you think you'd have to shout at your computer?
How can you tell that those people are far away and not speaking straight into your ear? If someone calls out to you from a random spot in the room, can you recognize his voice and know who it is without wondering which desk it came from? Do you ever wonder if any of those voices are coming out of your computer speaker and not from a person in the room?
It may be bedlam, but you have the capablity to judge the direction and distance of sounds, to recognize a voice as that of a particular person, and distinguish a sound coming straight out of someone's vocal chords from the same person's speech pumped through a speaker. They are all unconscious human skills, but in the end it's your brain doing some signal processing on a set of raw sound waves, and there's nothing that prevents a computer system from doing the same thing as well, if not better.
At first there may be social/human barriers to humans carrying out vocal conversations with their computer (though game-based or text-based conversations are something we've easily become comfortable with). But the acoustics of speech recognition just need time to perfect, and perfected it will be.
I know what you mean.
My step daughter is taking a class in biology. The first quiz is a bit of a doozy when tasked against my own knowledge, but it did bring out an aspect of this story. Today's kids are tasked with finding answers in what equates to an ocean of information compared to what was available when I was in school. Plagiarism is not good, but in this 'ocean of information' it is difficult to know what that really is. When studying, an answer from wikipedia is as good as one from another paper available on the Internet.
I think it leads to lax standards as to where the answer came from when the point is to find the answer. Term papers and those efforts required of students that require actual personal thought and effort are not dead, they simply need to be pressed with more effort. Finding information is no longer the problem that it used to be. Expressing your own thoughts on the question at hand is a skill that many people never learn, never mind figure out how to express when they are 18-ish.
It is problematic to discuss things in a black and white manner as this story seems to. The issue is not plagiarism or term papers, it is expression of thought, and that is what is endangered most by the 'ocean of information' that is now available to us all.
It's a truly fowl practice, among the wurst around. These plagiarists steal the meat of others' writing, and then, when goosed into confessing their crime, spread the blame on others.
>>
What does this show? It shows that given the choice, people would probably take cars, but because more people want to do that than there is space on the road or parking spaces available, those without large amounts of surplus time and money are pushed onto mass transit.
>>
That's like saying that given the choice, most people would chose not to work, and eat only their favorite foods rather than healthy stuff, and just throw off all the unpleasant responsibilities of life.
Some people can pull it off, but for most people it's not practical or sustainable to live like that, either as individuals and as members of society. So they choose not to. And if they try it, it only lasts until they're staring at an empty bank account, poor health, and dirty looks from people around them. And even if they temporarily regain enough resources to revert to the "life of sloth", they usually decide it's not worth it.
Gridlock, pollution, and a mess over in Iraq are the empty bank account, poor health, and dirty looks from the rest of the world.
People driving private automobiles for leisure isn't really a problem in itself. And where I live, a lot of people do own cars, which they drive only on weekends, for trips out to the countryside and such, because they enjoy it.
But to try to justify the vast majority of private automobile use in the U.S. -- the experience of driving stop-and-go, back and forth over the same route at the same time, every day, when you'd really rather be doing something else -- as "driving an auto for the sheer enjoyment of it because a car to me is more than mere transportation, it's the freedom of the road!" is nothing but delusional.
If you live in a low-density rural area, getting around by car is fine by me. The problem is the large cities, where single-driver automobile commuting is utterly unsustainable, but most people are stuck with the mentality is that it's their "right" to drive to work.
>>
Just because all you know is the city you've never left, does not mean you are absolutely right. However, I appreciate your passion for the little of the world you know, and your readiness to criticize places for not meeting your ideal.
>>
I spent well over a decade living in Seattle, a city consistently ranked in the top 10 for worst traffic congestion in the U.S. And, incidentally, never owned a car the whole time -- nothing but foot, bus, and bicycle.
Well, I just happened to ride to work this morning on a "generic people transporter" (otherwise known as a subway) along with millions of others in the city. (Yes, millions. ). The people on the subway were dressed fashionably, not in standardized jumpsuits. And for lunch today I had a tasty, enjoyable meal, not a pile of gray gloopy "human nutritional fuel".
Just because 90% of the population in your part of the world is addicted to a horribly wasteful of resources under the excuse of "personal freedom" doesn't mean it's justified or can't change.
I guess I'm just an old fart, thinking back on when the great musicians were those that wrote and performed their own stuff, the average artists were those who performed songs written for them by other songwriters, and anyone who actually took a sound recording made by someone else, included it as part of another recording, then put their name on it and tried to sell it, was considered a plagiarist and lacking even a shred of artististic creativity or originality.
>>Yes, dihydrogen monoxide is tens of thousands times more toxic than the MON 863 maize. But you are not eating it everyday without being able to choose.
Yes, I think it's absolutely essential that we try to eliminate any accidental ingestion of dihydrogen monoxide.
Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge
http://carvallo.ytmnd.com/
And what terroristic purpose would be served by crashing an airliner that's already poised to land into an airport runway? No damage to anything significant, and it's probably not even going to kill all the passengers.
The 9-11ers didn't set out to crash a bunch of airliners as end in itself.
If he'd just change his first name to "Stephard" it would be perfect...
Actually I bet that the combined weight of the top 5 opera singers in the world really would be close to a ton.
So if some glaciers like this one, which have been essentially unchanged in size for thousands of years, are shrinking to the point of disappearing within five years, while others are growing, (even at the same rate, which is highly doubtful), they somehow "balance out" and thus there's no global trend to be seen or to worry about?
It's like these folks who are saying "The Eastern seaboard has had its coldest winter or record! Global warming is bunk!" What matters is not so much whether it's heating or cooling, it's the drastic, volatile nature of recent climate change, which is pretty hard to dispute.
And that's one huge and unsupported presumption. The cause of the glaciers' melting is change in local climate. How do we know that the clouds will continue to dump precipitation, or that the rivers will continue to evaporate, in the same way, if the temperature is different?
...are heavily fragmented. This could degrade performance in creating offspring.
Would you like to optimize your chromosomes?
[Yes] [No] [Cancel]
-1, Pretentious Musician
>>I've been a fan of Mike Hawk's photography...
Wow, mine can't take pictures. (Say it out loud... and his name is actually Thomas.)
Is there anything anyone here can actually do to help rescue Jim Gray? I'd say almost certainly not.
So what are we to do? Those who have a connection with the man (knew him, worked with him, admire his work, etc.) will have serious and informative comments to make. But for the rest who've never heard of him, there's just nothing to discuss -- the story's not about technology in any way, it's just about a human being who happens to be related to technology. And death is easiest thing in the world to come up with jokes about -- "I bet he died because [a common failure in whatever area of technology he is related to]...ha,ha". Yes, the Microsoft/bluescreen jokes are pretty lame, but the SQL/database ones get a chuckle out of me.
What's the harm?
Oh, right. The editorial review board of Neuropsychologia , the medical journal publishing this study, is still incapable of clearly distinguishing between causality and correlation, after 40 years of publishing scientific research.
I myself notice a link between Slashdot readers who read about a study claiming something that they don't want to believe, and those readers then attempting to dismiss them through trite posts about basic scientific practice. I can't say whether that link is causality or mere correlation, though.
1 cold witch's tit = 3.3333 brass monkey's balls = 0.216 well digger's ass