The point is that the builders of the Berlin Wall intended to keep people in
No! re-read parent:
the wall was around West Berlin, which was entirely surrounded by East Germany
The people surrounded by the wall (West Berliners) didnt need to be kept in. They had no desire to wander off into East Germany! The Berlin Wall was keeping people out as well - keeping East Germans from the other half of Berlin from just walking down to the street into the Western zone, claiming refuge and then merrily heading elsewhere.
wow. I was using IE until I read this thread, then I went and downloaded Firefox, and holy shit, the difference is amazing. My internet is a gazillion times faster, this tab thing is cool as shit, and I am not getting 84983849384092 pop ups.
Thanks guys!!
You really dont need to try very hard to convince normal, non-geek sane people.
If you read his links, you'd see the likes of Schaeffer were "pioneering the field" in the 1950s. Honestly - TMBG are nothing like the Wright Brothers when it comes to music.
I quote from an essay I wrote at uni a couple of years ago (apologies for the closed format, heh):
Indeed, Holmes, discussing why computers have been so widely used for music, asserts that "the answer lies in the nature of music that has developed during the twentieth century... certain schools of composition [have] stressed a greater emphasis on the mathematics of music." One example is Stochasticism, whereby parts of the piece remain under the direct control of the composer, while other parts are decided by given probabilities. Naturally, this was not born of digital technology, or even electroacoustic music in general, but has a far-longer history dating back to Mozart's dice game (k.294d), for example. However, since computers are such exceptional 'number-crunchers' capable of tracking large numbers of probabilities, they have facilitated the evolution, from Stochasticism, of a new form: 'interactive composition'. Christopher Yavelow's essay 'Composition or Improvisation? Only the computer knows!' - whose title illustrates the way in which digital technology can blur the line between the two spheres in new ways - looked at various methods of of interactive composition available in 1988. These included 'Jam Factory', which used Markov chains, looking back n steps to base the decision on what to do next upon what had gone before. Somewhat different was 'M', descibed as "conduction an orchestra of ideas and transformational processes rather than humans playing instruments".
I think, by grouping them as one, you seriously fail to acknowledge the big difference between the demographics of "readers" and "posters".
I'd agree the majority of posters seem to fall into 1+2. I'd posit that the majority of readers fall into 3+4.
Personally - I installed slackware about 6 years ago when I was in my "playing with computers for the sheer hell of it" stage - found it far too hard, couldnt even get X working, gave up, never used Linux since.
But I have continued to read Slashdot every single day (or close enough) for those 6 years. Why? Because I'm still interested in tech stuff generally. In my first 5.5 years I think I posted about twice. In the last 6 months or so, I actually bothered getting an account at last, and have posted, um, maybe 10 times.
Within a few weeks of buying a 6Ghz machine, I can promise you that I'll have the CPU usage pinned at 100%, and planning the next upgrade.
My computer was bought primarily to act as a DAW. When I had a 750Mhz machine I got tracks finished, but when I got this (2.4Ghz, 1GB RAM) I was maxing it with the first project I did. I'd estimate that the last-but-one tune I made would have required a 20Ghz processor to play back all in realtime. By the time I finished I had mixed down so many high quality VSTi's through so many high quality VST fx - pretty much every element of that tune (eg, drums, bass, flute) would have maxed my current CPU to do live - and there were about 10 major 'elements' to it.
Its 4:30pm. I should be working til 5pm. But I came home at 3, because none of the bloody computers worked, thanks to Sasser.
Our IT dept run a very tightly maintained Windows network - firewalls, industrial email/attachment scanners, virus checkers, etc. I spend all day at work chucking as the spam+virus rolls in (hundreds per day) to our public mailboxes, every one correctly flagged, every dangerous attachment correctly stripped. I've only seen one false positive in 6 months, and that was marking a legit email as 'Spam?' - I've not seen it remove any attachment which was legit.
I'll think you'll find there are many companies and organisations whose IT staff are responsible and on-the-ball, but the shocking mess that is Windows, means that this crap beats them anyway. Honestly - I'm not one to bash Microsoft, but after this run of worms, I've realised that the state of OS security is inexcusable. Literally - there are no excuses for it, whatsoever. Its shoddy as fuck.
Allow me to underline the I'm-not-one-to-bash-MS topic. Yes, I think Windows security is a disgrace, but I dont blame the IT guys for not running Linux(etc) instead. We are too dependent on specific business apps. Similarly, I still run XP at home, and will switch to Linux, ooh, maybe when hell freezes over - not because I want it that way, really, but because I'm dependent on application level software.
I will, however, be setting up a physically separate PC running Linux or *BSD to act as a firewall - as soon as I have the money for another PC - which is, again, probably when hell freezes over, sadly.
they're trying to promote security-orientated php coding, and then explicity turning ON something which php has quite noisily just turned OFF in the default install, and currently depreciates, for security reasons!?!
Well, thats a nice utopia, but not entirely true. I'm in an independent band. We've had 33,000 downloads of our free MP3s in the last 2 years of having a website (whilst touring the country extensively, displaying a huge banner with our web address on it on stage every gig, and including the URL on every press pack, CD artwork, etc that we produce). And we've sold 2 CDs from the same page.
good to see /. delivering well targetted ads...
on
The Blues for LEDs
·
· Score: 3, Funny
... I saw this story accompanied by a ThinkGeek add for a "cool new LED clock" - blue, naturally:)
These days trackers arent really too visible - for the sort of niche you're talking about ("fun in the spare time") the likes of Fruityloops and Reason are more popular now, I think. Shame - I still think the tracker interface is unbeatable for drum programming.
The reason why they dont do that is actually very simple: they've already done it.
I visited the Chunnel "attraction" (visitor park? museum? donno what to call it really) about, hmm, 6-8 years ago. Alongside all the usual scale models, info-boards with history, plans and photos and so forth on... They had one of the tunnel boring machines outside, surrounded by a fence, and captioned with another infoboard.
No. Tony Blair is on your side. The majority of sane British people think Bush is one of the biggest retards ever born, never mind definitely the biggest retard ever to hold office.
(Case in point, the other day he appeared on BBC News saying "There is no middle ground between good and evil". WTF? Even 8 year olds have a more sophisticated weltanschaaung than that! Somebody send the man to a high school Ethics lesson. Even 12 year olds, when presented with a classic 'moral quandry' scenario, notice within about 5 minutes that there is almost nothing but middle ground.)
OTOH, the majority of sane Brits probably also have a general affection for the American people, culture, etc, and an appreciation that democratic capitalism is the worst system - except for all the others. This was the same feeling before Bush, the same during Bush, and will be the same after him.
Why do most slashdotters assume that just b/c you have an MBA you must be some evil hell bent individual?
I have to agree.
I work doing a vague assortment of database management / fiddling, VLE maintenance, and other IT-related tasks for the office that supports the MBA by Distance Learning of a major institution. (Cant name names, but its in the Financial Times top 20 DL MBAs).
I'm not a fan of business, globalism, etc. In fact, my natural philosphical/political tendencies would make most slashdotters decry me as a communist - (I'm in the UK, so our political right and your political left seem more or less identical, and i'm left of what passes for our left these days). So naturally I've felt very "alien" since starting this job. Our students are all types with 60K UKP pa salaries, who'll jump straight to 6 figures once they get the MBA - something which I would ordinarily find abhorrent in general. So I've thought quite a lot about the ethical aspects of all this stuff.
And basically s.a.m is 100% right. MBA is a ticket to evil corporate nastiness. Quite the opposite probably. Our programme has a "Business Ethics" component. I've read the course material, and I was extremely impressed. I have a degree in history - whilst many people seem to think history is learning dates, degree level history is basically the ultimate arts subject - required a carefully judged balance of economics, philosophy, politics, sociology, linguistics, etc, etc. And this material wasnt messing about. It wasnt "here's how to be evil". It covered advanced philosphical and economic thinking, from the classics like Kant or Smith, to twentieth century thinkers like Foucault. It was also very strong in covering the interaction between business and different cultures worldwide: I learned some extremely interesting things about how Islamic/Arabic religion/culture impacts on economic and business activity, for example.
Elsewhere in the finance components Enrol et al are regularly mentioned...
So, in short, MBAs dont teach people how to be evil. Far from it.
Actually, there is a band here in the UK called The Hamsters.
They have a sort-of "dual identity", with two entirely separate sets-- one of their original material, and the other, being probably Britain's best Hendrix tribute set.
he also didnt say that the OSS product worked upon, and the "final product" sold for money, were one and the same.
eg, they wrote a 3D app that runs on linux, the 3D app is closed source + for profit, but in order to make it run to the max, the coders encountered issues with the kernel or OS which they were able to fix/improve.
Priceless... Nobody need bother typing a complete rebuttal in any spam-related thread again. Just copy, paste, and move the (x)'s around. I applaud you most heartily:)
In that sort of situation, the advert can still make such statements provided the specify some detail/backup as well. So for example you can have adverts that say things like "the fastest car", it will come up with small print on screen saying something like "Source: Top Gear Magazine, 0-100bpm speed trials, July 2003" to clarify exactly what it means.
Shampoo and beauty ads take this to outrageous levels, claiming in the voicover "makes your hair 70% more radiant!" [WTF?] and subtitling: "Source: 70% of women interviewed agreed it improved radiance".
Carling (Lager) have a series of adverts based on subverting this law, "Probably the best lager in the world".
For the best viz I'm aware of on Windows, get yourself Winamp 2.91 + Milkdrop.
All my housemates agree that Milkdrop looks nicer on my PC with generic gfx card and monitor than iTunes viz looks on my housemate's Dual G4 with TFT flatscreen - its awesome.
Slashdot Mirror
the wall was around West Berlin, which was entirely surrounded by East Germany
The people surrounded by the wall (West Berliners) didnt need to be kept in. They had no desire to wander off into East Germany! The Berlin Wall was keeping people out as well - keeping East Germans from the other half of Berlin from just walking down to the street into the Western zone, claiming refuge and then merrily heading elsewhere.
Sorry, mangled link: fixed
2 converts so far:
wow. I was using IE until I read this thread, then I went and downloaded Firefox, and holy shit, the difference is amazing. My internet is a gazillion times faster, this tab thing is cool as shit, and I am not getting 84983849384092 pop ups.
Thanks guys!!
You really dont need to try very hard to convince normal, non-geek sane people.
It's all about the nine bars mate!
If you read his links, you'd see the likes of Schaeffer were "pioneering the field" in the 1950s. Honestly - TMBG are nothing like the Wright Brothers when it comes to music.
Bud is nasty cheap water- Budvar is a quality beer :)
I've got a degree and I got lost less than half way through ... I am hella stoned tho.
I quote from an essay I wrote at uni a couple of years ago (apologies for the closed format, heh):
Indeed, Holmes, discussing why computers have been so widely used for music, asserts that "the answer lies in the nature of music that has developed during the twentieth century... certain schools of composition [have] stressed a greater emphasis on the mathematics of music." One example is Stochasticism, whereby parts of the piece remain under the direct control of the composer, while other parts are decided by given probabilities. Naturally, this was not born of digital technology, or even electroacoustic music in general, but has a far-longer history dating back to Mozart's dice game (k.294d), for example. However, since computers are such exceptional 'number-crunchers' capable of tracking large numbers of probabilities, they have facilitated the evolution, from Stochasticism, of a new form: 'interactive composition'. Christopher Yavelow's essay 'Composition or Improvisation? Only the computer knows!' - whose title illustrates the way in which digital technology can blur the line between the two spheres in new ways - looked at various methods of of interactive composition available in 1988. These included 'Jam Factory', which used Markov chains, looking back n steps to base the decision on what to do next upon what had gone before. Somewhat different was 'M', descibed as "conduction an orchestra of ideas and transformational processes rather than humans playing instruments".
I'd agree the majority of posters seem to fall into 1+2. I'd posit that the majority of readers fall into 3+4.
Personally - I installed slackware about 6 years ago when I was in my "playing with computers for the sheer hell of it" stage - found it far too hard, couldnt even get X working, gave up, never used Linux since.
But I have continued to read Slashdot every single day (or close enough) for those 6 years. Why? Because I'm still interested in tech stuff generally. In my first 5.5 years I think I posted about twice. In the last 6 months or so, I actually bothered getting an account at last, and have posted, um, maybe 10 times.
I suspect there may be a lot of people like me...
My computer was bought primarily to act as a DAW. When I had a 750Mhz machine I got tracks finished, but when I got this (2.4Ghz, 1GB RAM) I was maxing it with the first project I did. I'd estimate that the last-but-one tune I made would have required a 20Ghz processor to play back all in realtime. By the time I finished I had mixed down so many high quality VSTi's through so many high quality VST fx - pretty much every element of that tune (eg, drums, bass, flute) would have maxed my current CPU to do live - and there were about 10 major 'elements' to it.
Its 4:30pm. I should be working til 5pm. But I came home at 3, because none of the bloody computers worked, thanks to Sasser.
Our IT dept run a very tightly maintained Windows network - firewalls, industrial email/attachment scanners, virus checkers, etc. I spend all day at work chucking as the spam+virus rolls in (hundreds per day) to our public mailboxes, every one correctly flagged, every dangerous attachment correctly stripped. I've only seen one false positive in 6 months, and that was marking a legit email as 'Spam?' - I've not seen it remove any attachment which was legit.
I'll think you'll find there are many companies and organisations whose IT staff are responsible and on-the-ball, but the shocking mess that is Windows, means that this crap beats them anyway. Honestly - I'm not one to bash Microsoft, but after this run of worms, I've realised that the state of OS security is inexcusable. Literally - there are no excuses for it, whatsoever. Its shoddy as fuck.
Allow me to underline the I'm-not-one-to-bash-MS topic. Yes, I think Windows security is a disgrace, but I dont blame the IT guys for not running Linux(etc) instead. We are too dependent on specific business apps. Similarly, I still run XP at home, and will switch to Linux, ooh, maybe when hell freezes over - not because I want it that way, really, but because I'm dependent on application level software.
I will, however, be setting up a physically separate PC running Linux or *BSD to act as a firewall - as soon as I have the money for another PC - which is, again, probably when hell freezes over, sadly.
they're trying to promote security-orientated php coding, and then explicity turning ON something which php has quite noisily just turned OFF in the default install, and currently depreciates, for security reasons!?!
Well, thats a nice utopia, but not entirely true. I'm in an independent band. We've had 33,000 downloads of our free MP3s in the last 2 years of having a website (whilst touring the country extensively, displaying a huge banner with our web address on it on stage every gig, and including the URL on every press pack, CD artwork, etc that we produce). And we've sold 2 CDs from the same page.
... I saw this story accompanied by a ThinkGeek add for a "cool new LED clock" - blue, naturally :)
These days trackers arent really too visible - for the sort of niche you're talking about ("fun in the spare time") the likes of Fruityloops and Reason are more popular now, I think. Shame - I still think the tracker interface is unbeatable for drum programming.
I visited the Chunnel "attraction" (visitor park? museum? donno what to call it really) about, hmm, 6-8 years ago. Alongside all the usual scale models, info-boards with history, plans and photos and so forth on... They had one of the tunnel boring machines outside, surrounded by a fence, and captioned with another infoboard.
No. Tony Blair is on your side. The majority of sane British people think Bush is one of the biggest retards ever born, never mind definitely the biggest retard ever to hold office.
(Case in point, the other day he appeared on BBC News saying "There is no middle ground between good and evil". WTF? Even 8 year olds have a more sophisticated weltanschaaung than that! Somebody send the man to a high school Ethics lesson. Even 12 year olds, when presented with a classic 'moral quandry' scenario, notice within about 5 minutes that there is almost nothing but middle ground.)
OTOH, the majority of sane Brits probably also have a general affection for the American people, culture, etc, and an appreciation that democratic capitalism is the worst system - except for all the others. This was the same feeling before Bush, the same during Bush, and will be the same after him.
I second that. My experience (personal and the large majority of people I know) supports this view.
I have to agree.
I work doing a vague assortment of database management / fiddling, VLE maintenance, and other IT-related tasks for the office that supports the MBA by Distance Learning of a major institution. (Cant name names, but its in the Financial Times top 20 DL MBAs).
I'm not a fan of business, globalism, etc. In fact, my natural philosphical/political tendencies would make most slashdotters decry me as a communist - (I'm in the UK, so our political right and your political left seem more or less identical, and i'm left of what passes for our left these days). So naturally I've felt very "alien" since starting this job. Our students are all types with 60K UKP pa salaries, who'll jump straight to 6 figures once they get the MBA - something which I would ordinarily find abhorrent in general. So I've thought quite a lot about the ethical aspects of all this stuff.
And basically s.a.m is 100% right. MBA is a ticket to evil corporate nastiness. Quite the opposite probably. Our programme has a "Business Ethics" component. I've read the course material, and I was extremely impressed. I have a degree in history - whilst many people seem to think history is learning dates, degree level history is basically the ultimate arts subject - required a carefully judged balance of economics, philosophy, politics, sociology, linguistics, etc, etc. And this material wasnt messing about. It wasnt "here's how to be evil". It covered advanced philosphical and economic thinking, from the classics like Kant or Smith, to twentieth century thinkers like Foucault. It was also very strong in covering the interaction between business and different cultures worldwide: I learned some extremely interesting things about how Islamic/Arabic religion/culture impacts on economic and business activity, for example.
Elsewhere in the finance components Enrol et al are regularly mentioned...
So, in short, MBAs dont teach people how to be evil. Far from it.
They have a sort-of "dual identity", with two entirely separate sets-- one of their original material, and the other, being probably Britain's best Hendrix tribute set.
</uk-music-geek>
eg, they wrote a 3D app that runs on linux, the 3D app is closed source + for profit, but in order to make it run to the max, the coders encountered issues with the kernel or OS which they were able to fix/improve.
Priceless... Nobody need bother typing a complete rebuttal in any spam-related thread again. Just copy, paste, and move the (x)'s around. I applaud you most heartily :)
Yes, plenty.
Ampcast
IUMA
Electronicscene
Perhaps you could start with me and my band's free music.
In that sort of situation, the advert can still make such statements provided the specify some detail/backup as well. So for example you can have adverts that say things like "the fastest car", it will come up with small print on screen saying something like "Source: Top Gear Magazine, 0-100bpm speed trials, July 2003" to clarify exactly what it means.
Shampoo and beauty ads take this to outrageous levels, claiming in the voicover "makes your hair 70% more radiant!" [WTF?] and subtitling: "Source: 70% of women interviewed agreed it improved radiance".
Carling (Lager) have a series of adverts based on subverting this law, "Probably the best lager in the world".
All my housemates agree that Milkdrop looks nicer on my PC with generic gfx card and monitor than iTunes viz looks on my housemate's Dual G4 with TFT flatscreen - its awesome.