This is my highest numbered account, my first one (three digits as I recall) got lost in some sort of database snafu in the early days and my second one I forgot the password to. I only ever read via RSS though... (and even then I mostly just skim).
Ha! I wasn't even logged in when I typed that. *sigh*
Ribbon Microphones are still used by several bands... because of their "warm sound."
I'm sure that some of the others on this list are still in wide use today. I've seen Pneumatic Posts in all sorts of banks, and some large stores. (Nike Town in Downtown portland uses them to move around shoes...)
The Amiga is not quite dead too. I'm not sure about WordStar, but I know people who still swear by WordPerfect 6.0 (the blue an white version in DOS).
My grandpa still uses a slide rule to figure out all sorts of math. I think he's just showing off, but when he's faster at it then I am with a TI-89, I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Reel mowers are still in use. Not just by old farts who refuse to change either. They're waaaay cheaper, and for small lawns not all that inconvenient.
Automatic Watches... uhhh Seiko Kinetic? Anyone?
Everytime I see football I see airships. Granted they're not used for transportation, except for the crew, but they're still there, and useful.
It's interesting to see a list of things that are refered to as passed technologies, all of which are still in use somewhere today. Perhaps people need to open their eyes and see that these things are out there with their loser elegance beating out the "winners" that lack simplicity.
Here in Portland Oregon we recently switched over to 10 digit dialing, and I must say, I love it. I mean I've never had such luck with women before. Every time I dial someone up these days it seems like a mysterious and intriguing women wants to talk to me...
"You must dial an area code when dialing this number. You must now hang up and try again."
As much as I despise censorship on the Internet, I find it blasphemous that anyone would even suggest that Guinness could suck. Guinness is the nectar of the gods. In fact, I think I'll go register guinness-is-the-best-god-damn-beer-ever.com, oh wait, that'd probably be "identical or confusingly similar to" their trademark on the word "Guinness." Oh well.:)
I like Adams work, but I don't like the way that he took pictures. I guess this is sort of analogous to Picasso where lots of people who like his work will readily admit that he was a total jerk.
Ansel was in the (unfortunate?) position of being the leader of an emerging artform. How many people before him became famous as a photographer? How many people after him? I think in some ways he abused this position in the books that he wrote on how one should take pictures. Zone photography worked for him, fine. But that's no reason for photography instructors years and years later (not that he's to blame) to say "This is the way you take pictures if you want them to come out 'right'." But, then again, I think fewer people would treat it as the photography serman on the mount if he hadn't presented it as such.
Going back to Lucas, he's in the same sort of position. He defined SciFi movies that actually made people money. I don't think it's a good thing if all of a sudden people stop experimenting with how they make SciFi movies, just because Lucas was wildly successful in his approach (eg. taking a bunch of potentially crappy shots anf fixing them later with digital technology).
That said, I too would love to see what Ansel would have done in the digital medium. I don't think we'd see him carrying around a Mavica, but he sure as hell would be using a high end slide scanner, and I'm sure that some of those KPT filters would have tempted him at some point...
Uh... This isn't a very good example. I mean Ansel carried his heavy gear onto big mountains, yes, but in the end he was composing with light more than snapping pictures. A lot of the "magic" in his scenes comes from the fact that he's taken about a million framed shots of a given landscape and then manipulated the hell out of them in the darkroom.
He wrote books and books about getting the (7) proper zones of light into every frame. If you've ever tried zone photography you know just how unfun, unspontaneous, and inorganic it really is.
I suppose the same could really be said what Lucas is doing with movies. He's starting with a whole bunch of potentially crappy hurried shots and then tweaking the hell out of them in the digital darkroom. If Ansel were shoooting today he'd surely be tempted to use the same digital technology to fuck with shots that Lucas is. One of the reasons that there are very few color Ansel prints is that he never felt that he could express the light properly in a color medium. I think that with a digital approach we'd be seeing all sorts of (crappy) color Ansel landscapes.
This isn't a defense of Lucas as much as it is a condemnation of Ansel... I think that both of their approaches really ruin their respective art forms.
This is apparently the product of an ASP. From their About page:
WiredX.net is an ASP which provides pure JavaTM X Window System servers. WiredX and WiredX-Lite enable access to Unix applications on your LAN from your non-Unix desktops (Windows 95/98/NT/2000) via web browsers(IE, Netscape and Mozilla). WiredX.net also provides free downloading services of restricted WiredX and WiredX-Lite to WiredX.net members.
According to the about page the service is free to all WiredX members, and membership is free... So a cool X-Server with Alpha transparency that lets you access a nix machine from the web.
It would have been a damn shame if all of us Irix users had been blocked out just because we don't run Linux... I mean how else would I have gotten all of the "hot" and late breaking information about such hits as Worlds Wildest Police Videos?
Remote Solution?s [sic] PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour...
Assuming that "less than $10" means $9.99, which it almost always does, then this puppy is going to be at least $799... spendy.
This is by far the best mp3 encoder out there. It's a combination of the Audiograbber software (an awesome cd ripper), and the Xing encoder and player. It also has normalization and enough different bitrates to keep just about anyone happy.
It's so easy to use that you can plop a CD into the drive, hit the CDDB button, put check marks next to the songs you want to encode and then you can leave. Come back in a little while and the songs will be ripped, normalized, and encoded at the bitrate you specified in the directory you specified with the songnames downloaded off the Internet.
You can definitely hobble together several different programs (Xing makes an encoder for Linux last I checked) under Linux to do the same thing, but it's really worthwhile to reboot into Windows for this one...
I'm not really sure if your specific complaints are addressed in the new ruleset (which debuts with Neverwinter Nights), but I know that the abilty to use two weapons (doubling the number of attacks) is an added feature.
Baldur's Gate rocked. The only other CRPG I've ever really liked was Wasteland (granted I haven't played too many of them, and I have never played a pen and paper), but I'm really excited about Neverwinter Nights.
I mean... it's from the same people who brought the world Baldur's Gate. It has to be good, but this time I get to play it from Linux, which makes it even better.
That's why responsible people wear earplugs when going to concerts.:P
I do, my ears still ring afterwards. Anyone who has lived in Portland Oregon and has/had been to La Luna (R.I.P.) knows how loud some of the promoters here like to turn the speakers up to.
Concerts and clubs aren't the only place where your hearing has a good chance of getting messed up though... any loud movie in a THX theater will do (theater owners here seem to think that THX, SDDS, etc. mean 'turn up the volume'). Not to mention construction sites, drag races, monster truck rallies, noisy streets, headphones on a Walkman (try turning the sound limiter on on a modern Walkman and think about how much louder you usually listen to it...)
My point was this:
Our hearing gets fucked. To hear the sound difference in MP3s you have to have pretty good ears, pretty good speakers, and know what you're listening for... by the time they perfect the lossy compression, or at least improve it, the difference won't be noticable to most people.
Actually, the audible range of hearing goes all the way down to about 20 Hz
*Smack* I knew that... middle C lies somewhere right around 530Hz.
Down below 20Hz it starts to become low enough to feel it, but not hear it. I believe the Army has used very low sounds as weapons before... it forces people to lose control of their bowels at a certain frequencies if I remember right.:)
Go to a rock concert or a loud club. You just lost some of your ability to hear higher pitched sounds. Now go once or twice a week... pretty soon your upper range is gone. Little kids can hear so much more than "grown-ups."
The range of human hearing is something like 4,000Hz to 20,000Hz, but that's only if you haven't damaged your hearing, which most, if not all, of us have.
Interestingly enough CD manufacturing takes advantage of this. They run a high pass (or low pass... can't remember) filter over the data so that they don't get any clipping in the upper ranges caused by overtones that are beyond their ability to properly represent in CD format (the idea of the warmth of LPs comes from this). Hardly anyone can notice though since we've all shot our upper range.
When I say I hope to have destroyed my hearing enough not to care I mean that I hope that my range is poor enough by then that I won't notice the crappy sound quality which mostly manifests itself in the upper ranges...
The idea behind an MP3 is that the human brain is too feeble/slow to hear all of the music. An MP3 takes a good 80-90% of the sound that is present in the actual recording and throws it away. The human brain doesn't notice though because we can only concentrate on so much of the music at once.
A lot of the research that went into the compression involved in MP3s was basically seeing how much could be taken away before you started to notice. The MP3 encoder then samples the "important" part of the song at a variable rate.
For instance, a high quality mp3 (not the ones you listen to when you're listening to samples on artist webpages or online CD stores) takes more samples of the important part of the music. The crappy quality ones take fewer samples.
Listen to an MP3 with lots of cymbal crashes on some really good speakers. Not on computer really good speakers, something like studio monitors... you'll be able to tell right away that something is very wrong with the cymbals. Then everything starts to sound really flat, and pretty soon it starts to drive you crazy, and you have to go find the CD that you copied it from and listen to it, just to make sure that you're not going completely out of your mind.
VFQ and AAC (AAC is the Sony MiniDisc format, VFQ is something that Yamaha dreamed up) both try to fix some of the problems with MP3s. AAC sounds the best to me, but some people swear by VQF. I suppose MP4s or whatever the hell they'll be called will fix some problems too.
I'm also sure that at some point people are just going to accept that the music doesn't sound as good as it could, and that, for convenience's sake, we can all just live with it. Our stereos will be connected to the cable in our house, and we'll be able to download the song that's been stuck in our head for $.99... By then I hope to have destroyed my hearing enough not to care, but there will always be a gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that I'm missing something.
"I think trying to direct Linux is like herding cats. Cats are not motivated by anything resembling what motivates you, but if you get enough cats, some portion of them will go the right direction just by chance."
Notting Hill was rated PG-13... and it's WAY worse. I think that the MPAA is getting a lot less strict with dialogue and sexual innuendo, and a lot more strict with violence and explicit sex scenes.
I think with the recent pushes from President Clinton and family type organizations to stop kids from viewing violence and sex in movies we'll see more and more movies come out PG-13 that would have been R a couple of years ago. Not because they're any less raunchy, but because right now violence is the current target. I'm kind of surprised that Phantom Menace got the PG rating. A certain Darth Maul scene really did (IMHO) deserve a PG-13 rating, and Lucas must have thought the same thing since he did the scene two different ways (hopefully that was spoiler free enough).
I think it will be interesting to see how Hollywood reacts to the latest attacks on violence from politicians. There are already quite a few studios who demand R ratings, how long will it be before PG-13 is as far as a director can take a movie and still get good funding? Even some of the independent/smaller studios (can we say Mirimax) are shying away from more violent/sexually explicit films. I have a strong stomach for sex and violence (my girlfriend always complains that all of the movies we watch are too dark, hence the occasional Notting Hill), but I fear that some day soon I won't even be able to watch violent art house movies on the big screen anymore.
I think the fix he made was in the Quake source...
on
John Carmack on Linux
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· Score: 2
According to his plan file he found that he'd been making some incorrect assumptions about OpenGL, and the bug was a result of his incorrect assumptions.
It appears that he figured out that his assumption was wrong because he had access to the driver sources and could see that it was his code, not the OpenGL code, that was incorrect. So, not only do Linux users benefit from the Open Source drivers (the textures that were broken before are working now), but all gamers will benefit. He says in his plan that the fix will improve performance on most cards by a couple of percentage points...
Just another reason why Operating Systems and drivers benefit from being Open Source.
I waited over seven hours yesterday only to see a mob of High School kids rush the front of the line causing utter chaos. By the time I finally got to the front (after waiting two hours in what can only be described as a weak mosh-pit) almost all of the shows were sold out. I know for a fact that some of the people behind me had camped out, and were going to end up seeing it on the 20th.
Other theatres in town were just fine, this one, however, seemed to have no cap on the number of tickets one could purchase. One lady who was wearing a cap from a scalping agency walked off with a pile of about 80 tickets... About half an hour after tickets went on sale 12:01 seats were going for $25 (they're originally $7.50).
The chaos caused by everyone rushing the box office two hours before it opened didn't help much either.
Screenshots don't do this game justice.
on
Mac Q3Test Shots
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· Score: 1
Of course you're not impressed by the screenshots, they look boring to me too. But this game really does rock; the way things move really needs to be seen to be believed...
ID has raised the bar yet once again, and oddly enough it looks good even on a Mac.
DON'T go for a Yamaha. The support (at least for mine) is flaky at best.
I have to boot into DOS, load the setupsa.exe drivers to initialize it, and then use loadlin to boot into Linux. Even then the mixer doesn't work, so everything is really, really quiet.
I think Alan Cox mentioned buying an OPL3SAx in his diary the other day, so the support could improve soon, but for now I'd go SB16/SB64 Value all the way.
Slashdot Mirror
This is my highest numbered account, my first one (three digits as I recall) got lost in some sort of database snafu in the early days and my second one I forgot the password to. I only ever read via RSS though... (and even then I mostly just skim).
Ha! I wasn't even logged in when I typed that. *sigh*
http://www.tri-met.org/max.htm
Ribbon Microphones are still used by several bands... because of their "warm sound."
I'm sure that some of the others on this list are still in wide use today. I've seen Pneumatic Posts in all sorts of banks, and some large stores. (Nike Town in Downtown portland uses them to move around shoes...)
The Amiga is not quite dead too. I'm not sure about WordStar, but I know people who still swear by WordPerfect 6.0 (the blue an white version in DOS).
My grandpa still uses a slide rule to figure out all sorts of math. I think he's just showing off, but when he's faster at it then I am with a TI-89, I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Reel mowers are still in use. Not just by old farts who refuse to change either. They're waaaay cheaper, and for small lawns not all that inconvenient.
Automatic Watches... uhhh Seiko Kinetic? Anyone?
Everytime I see football I see airships. Granted they're not used for transportation, except for the crew, but they're still there, and useful.
It's interesting to see a list of things that are refered to as passed technologies, all of which are still in use somewhere today. Perhaps people need to open their eyes and see that these things are out there with their loser elegance beating out the "winners" that lack simplicity.
"You must dial an area code when dialing this number. You must now hang up and try again."
It's great!
As much as I despise censorship on the Internet, I find it blasphemous that anyone would even suggest that Guinness could suck. Guinness is the nectar of the gods. In fact, I think I'll go register guinness-is-the-best-god-damn-beer-ever.com, oh wait, that'd probably be "identical or confusingly similar to" their trademark on the word "Guinness." Oh well. :)
Ansel was in the (unfortunate?) position of being the leader of an emerging artform. How many people before him became famous as a photographer? How many people after him? I think in some ways he abused this position in the books that he wrote on how one should take pictures. Zone photography worked for him, fine. But that's no reason for photography instructors years and years later (not that he's to blame) to say "This is the way you take pictures if you want them to come out 'right'." But, then again, I think fewer people would treat it as the photography serman on the mount if he hadn't presented it as such.
Going back to Lucas, he's in the same sort of position. He defined SciFi movies that actually made people money. I don't think it's a good thing if all of a sudden people stop experimenting with how they make SciFi movies, just because Lucas was wildly successful in his approach (eg. taking a bunch of potentially crappy shots anf fixing them later with digital technology).
That said, I too would love to see what Ansel would have done in the digital medium. I don't think we'd see him carrying around a Mavica, but he sure as hell would be using a high end slide scanner, and I'm sure that some of those KPT filters would have tempted him at some point...
He wrote books and books about getting the (7) proper zones of light into every frame. If you've ever tried zone photography you know just how unfun, unspontaneous, and inorganic it really is.
I suppose the same could really be said what Lucas is doing with movies. He's starting with a whole bunch of potentially crappy hurried shots and then tweaking the hell out of them in the digital darkroom. If Ansel were shoooting today he'd surely be tempted to use the same digital technology to fuck with shots that Lucas is. One of the reasons that there are very few color Ansel prints is that he never felt that he could express the light properly in a color medium. I think that with a digital approach we'd be seeing all sorts of (crappy) color Ansel landscapes.
This isn't a defense of Lucas as much as it is a condemnation of Ansel... I think that both of their approaches really ruin their respective art forms.
WiredX.net is an ASP which provides pure JavaTM X Window System servers. WiredX and WiredX-Lite enable access to Unix applications on your LAN from your non-Unix desktops (Windows 95/98/NT/2000) via web browsers(IE, Netscape and Mozilla). WiredX.net also provides free downloading services of restricted WiredX and WiredX-Lite to WiredX.net members.
According to the about page the service is free to all WiredX members, and membership is free... So a cool X-Server with Alpha transparency that lets you access a nix machine from the web.
The TOS (for those interested) are here.
RT, Keystone, and php Helpdesk would be good starting points.
http://www.fox.com supports not only linux, but Irix too!
It would have been a damn shame if all of us Irix users had been blocked out just because we don't run Linux... I mean how else would I have gotten all of the "hot" and late breaking information about such hits as Worlds Wildest Police Videos?
Remote Solution?s [sic] PJB-100 stores over 80 playback hours (1200 songs) or 100 CD's, and incorporates an IBM 4.86 GB, 2.5 inch hard drive selected for its rugged reliability. The PJB-100 offers exceptional music capacity vs cost less than $10 per playback hour...
Assuming that "less than $10" means $9.99, which it almost always does, then this puppy is going to be at least $799... spendy.
It's so easy to use that you can plop a CD into the drive, hit the CDDB button, put check marks next to the songs you want to encode and then you can leave. Come back in a little while and the songs will be ripped, normalized, and encoded at the bitrate you specified in the directory you specified with the songnames downloaded off the Internet.
You can definitely hobble together several different programs (Xing makes an encoder for Linux last I checked) under Linux to do the same thing, but it's really worthwhile to reboot into Windows for this one...
Baldur's Gate rocked. The only other CRPG I've ever really liked was Wasteland (granted I haven't played too many of them, and I have never played a pen and paper), but I'm really excited about Neverwinter Nights.
I mean... it's from the same people who brought the world Baldur's Gate. It has to be good, but this time I get to play it from Linux, which makes it even better.
I thought that it was impossible to write drivers for winmodems. Is someone actually taking this on, or are the people at C|Net high?
I do, my ears still ring afterwards. Anyone who has lived in Portland Oregon and has/had been to La Luna (R.I.P.) knows how loud some of the promoters here like to turn the speakers up to.
Concerts and clubs aren't the only place where your hearing has a good chance of getting messed up though... any loud movie in a THX theater will do (theater owners here seem to think that THX, SDDS, etc. mean 'turn up the volume'). Not to mention construction sites, drag races, monster truck rallies, noisy streets, headphones on a Walkman (try turning the sound limiter on on a modern Walkman and think about how much louder you usually listen to it...)
My point was this:
Our hearing gets fucked. To hear the sound difference in MP3s you have to have pretty good ears, pretty good speakers, and know what you're listening for... by the time they perfect the lossy compression, or at least improve it, the difference won't be noticable to most people.
*Smack* I knew that... middle C lies somewhere right around 530Hz.
Down below 20Hz it starts to become low enough to feel it, but not hear it. I believe the Army has used very low sounds as weapons before... it forces people to lose control of their bowels at a certain frequencies if I remember right. :)
The range of human hearing is something like 4,000Hz to 20,000Hz, but that's only if you haven't damaged your hearing, which most, if not all, of us have.
Interestingly enough CD manufacturing takes advantage of this. They run a high pass (or low pass... can't remember) filter over the data so that they don't get any clipping in the upper ranges caused by overtones that are beyond their ability to properly represent in CD format (the idea of the warmth of LPs comes from this). Hardly anyone can notice though since we've all shot our upper range.
When I say I hope to have destroyed my hearing enough not to care I mean that I hope that my range is poor enough by then that I won't notice the crappy sound quality which mostly manifests itself in the upper ranges...
A lot of the research that went into the compression involved in MP3s was basically seeing how much could be taken away before you started to notice. The MP3 encoder then samples the "important" part of the song at a variable rate.
For instance, a high quality mp3 (not the ones you listen to when you're listening to samples on artist webpages or online CD stores) takes more samples of the important part of the music. The crappy quality ones take fewer samples.
Listen to an MP3 with lots of cymbal crashes on some really good speakers. Not on computer really good speakers, something like studio monitors... you'll be able to tell right away that something is very wrong with the cymbals. Then everything starts to sound really flat, and pretty soon it starts to drive you crazy, and you have to go find the CD that you copied it from and listen to it, just to make sure that you're not going completely out of your mind.
VFQ and AAC (AAC is the Sony MiniDisc format, VFQ is something that Yamaha dreamed up) both try to fix some of the problems with MP3s. AAC sounds the best to me, but some people swear by VQF. I suppose MP4s or whatever the hell they'll be called will fix some problems too.
I'm also sure that at some point people are just going to accept that the music doesn't sound as good as it could, and that, for convenience's sake, we can all just live with it. Our stereos will be connected to the cable in our house, and we'll be able to download the song that's been stuck in our head for $.99... By then I hope to have destroyed my hearing enough not to care, but there will always be a gnawing feeling in the back of my mind that I'm missing something.
"I think trying to direct Linux is like herding cats. Cats are not motivated by anything resembling what motivates you, but if you get enough cats, some portion of them will go the right direction just by chance."
Lotteries are nothing more than a way to get stupid people to fund schools and other state projects.
(And yes I do play when the prize goes above $100 million, but I like to think of it as donation to schools rather than a chance at millions).
Smaller person: "That 'Jar-Jar' character belittles my people"
Larry King: "I think he's an insult to all of us, little man (*snicker*)"
I think with the recent pushes from President Clinton and family type organizations to stop kids from viewing violence and sex in movies we'll see more and more movies come out PG-13 that would have been R a couple of years ago. Not because they're any less raunchy, but because right now violence is the current target. I'm kind of surprised that Phantom Menace got the PG rating. A certain Darth Maul scene really did (IMHO) deserve a PG-13 rating, and Lucas must have thought the same thing since he did the scene two different ways (hopefully that was spoiler free enough).
I think it will be interesting to see how Hollywood reacts to the latest attacks on violence from politicians. There are already quite a few studios who demand R ratings, how long will it be before PG-13 is as far as a director can take a movie and still get good funding? Even some of the independent/smaller studios (can we say Mirimax) are shying away from more violent/sexually explicit films. I have a strong stomach for sex and violence (my girlfriend always complains that all of the movies we watch are too dark, hence the occasional Notting Hill), but I fear that some day soon I won't even be able to watch violent art house movies on the big screen anymore.
It appears that he figured out that his assumption was wrong because he had access to the driver sources and could see that it was his code, not the OpenGL code, that was incorrect. So, not only do Linux users benefit from the Open Source drivers (the textures that were broken before are working now), but all gamers will benefit. He says in his plan that the fix will improve performance on most cards by a couple of percentage points...
Just another reason why Operating Systems and drivers benefit from being Open Source.
Other theatres in town were just fine, this one, however, seemed to have no cap on the number of tickets one could purchase. One lady who was wearing a cap from a scalping agency walked off with a pile of about 80 tickets... About half an hour after tickets went on sale 12:01 seats were going for $25 (they're originally $7.50).
The chaos caused by everyone rushing the box office two hours before it opened didn't help much either.
ID has raised the bar yet once again, and oddly enough it looks good even on a Mac.
I have to boot into DOS, load the setupsa.exe drivers to initialize it, and then use loadlin to boot into Linux. Even then the mixer doesn't work, so everything is really, really quiet.
I think Alan Cox mentioned buying an OPL3SAx in his diary the other day, so the support could improve soon, but for now I'd go SB16/SB64 Value all the way.