Contrary to claims made by some people that music does not fit the open source model, a visit to a local bluegrass festival has left me convinced that it does.
A group named "Spontaneous Combustion" is essentially a novelty act, performing bluegrass versions mainly of Beatles songs and of other rock & roll standards. But while the first time you hear a rock song done as bluegrass it may seem to be a radical innovation, listening to a concert set of them quickly shows how old the joke can get.
These songs are copyright, fixed-interpretation songs, and they don't adapt to different formats well.
Listening to the wealth of musical invention and co-operation happening around the rest of the festival, you hear songs that have been passed on by ear for hundreds of years. Connie Dover performs versions of ancient Celtic songs, then segues into the Appalachan versions. These songs are truely alive, being modified and interpreted, adapted to the modern ear by each performer.
Even more vibrant and creative are the jam sessions, where artists who have never played together before play musical games of follow-the-leader, and call-and-response. True inovation happens here.
By contrast, the world of studio recorded, copyright protected CD music is dead as a doornail.
Napster, however, allows this dead music to form a fertile ground for new innovation. One can think of a song heard years ago, and have a listenable copy in fifteen minutes. A single song covered by a dozen artists over the years can quickly be collected and compared.
The RIAA has no clue what's reall happening on-line. Two thirds of the music I've "pirated" would never be found in a music store, even an on-line one. Untill I can go into a store and get a copy of any recording ever made, on any lable, at any time, Napster and it's decendants will continue to be a completely different world, one they'll never catch on to.
The ABM treaties (SALT II, I think) are currently honored between the US and Russia; we are in the process of renegotiating them to allow the ABM systems that are being contemplated here.
It's been in the mundane news media for months. The Russians are, of course, not pleased, the Whacko Right Wing in Congress says "the hell with them, we'll bomb 'em into the stone age if they don't like it". (NB: Dan Quayle supported moves to make a preemprive first strike against the USSR. Many of his party still support this idea.)
In all the articles I see on this topic, in print and on line, the main theme seems to be targeted advertising - as if this were a Bad Thing!
People, Targeted Advertising is a Good Thing! It means less meaningless crap spamgunned at you in hopes that you're one of the two percent interested in it!
NONE of the articles I've seen on this address the real problem: the potential for abuse of the data that tracks your purchases, shopping, and surfing habits. Nobody says anything about that, they just say that "advertisers will use this data to more precicely target their advertising".
I say horay for the advertisers! Now will somebody please take a look at what ELSE is going on here? At the potential for abuse, and what is actually being done to address it?
I've studied repetitive stress injuries and ergonomics as a network administrator, so I'll have the right answers for users who have problems. I think the funniest thing is that the single best way to determine if someone is statistically likely to have problems with RSI is to ask them "Is your boss an idiot?". If they say yes, then they'll probably have trouble.
RSI is stress related - if you're tense and driving yourself too hard, that's when it's likely to show up.
Two things you know: Once this happens, you've got it for life, and SURGERY WILL NOT MAKE YOU WELL!!!
Surgery has a good chance of keeping further damage from occurring, PROVIDED YOU STOP DOING WHAT CAUSED THE INJURY. Surgery will NOT return you to your pre RSI condition! You will have discomfort ranging to pain for the rest of your life from the surgery.
The good thing is that if the injury has gone far enough that the nerves are being damaged even without the stimulus that caused the original injury, surgery can arrest further damage and give you some chance of normal life. It's an emergency treatment, it stops the problem from getting worse, but it's not good for you and it doesn't FIX the problem.
If there's any other therapy you can try, please do try it. What's very important is to realise that you are seriously injured, and that if you continue to work in the way you have been, you will end up crippled. Seriously. Not just unable to type, but unable to use your hands as anything but a blunt, painful club.
You may be able to get disability leave to deal with this, but one way or another you've got to change what you're doing with your hands.
Not knowing how far your problem has really gone, it might be enough just to radically change your ergonomics (how your body relates to your hardware) and your work pattern. RSI is from REPETITIVE motion - constantly doing the same stuff. If you can limit your typing to fifteen minute periods, with periods in between where you use your hands for an activity that is mechanically different, that will help. You should seek professional advice on this, and you should NOT settle for vague answers - get a specific, detailed plan of how you will change what you're doing to stop this injury.
There are a lot of popular misconceptions about fluorescent lighting, and I see a lot expressed here.
Good quality modern fluorescent lights that are operating properly don't have a perceivable flicker. Easy to prove: Hold a stick (pen, pencil ruler) up in front of you while looking at the light. Hold it by the end and shake it back and forth rapidly in an arc. You should see a smooth blur. Do the same thing in front of your monitor. You'll see a strobe effect, several apparently stationary images of the stick or whatever.
(Do this in front of a TV (in the US, NTSC type) and you'll see a curved image of the stick.)
The reason they don't flicker is the same reason you can still see the image at the top of a monitor when the electron beam is scanning the bottom of it - persistence. The phosphor that gives off the light continues to glow after the electrons stop hitting it.
Different phosphors have different persistence, which is a good thing. If you had a long-persistence phosphor on your TV screen you would get trailing images when objects moved rapidly.
Phosphors used in lighting today have fairly long persistence. You may be able to detect the variation using something like a strobe wheel (spinner with lines spaced at regular intervals, often used or found on record turntables), but you shouldn't be able to see it in normal circumstances.
The "flicker" rate is 2x the rate of your AC current - 60hz in the US, 50hz in some other countries. Because the current has a peak voltage in each "direction" once per cycle, you get two peaks and two "troughs" in one cycle, so the correct rate for the US would be 120hz.
Aircraft and some military installations, along with some unusual building installations, use 400hz AC power, which would yield 800 "flickers" per second.
Different phosphors also give off different colors. Depending on what you want to light, you can choose the color. Grocery meat counters are often cited as a place where a warmer, redder light makes the product look better. Graphic design studios would want a more even color for accurate perception of what they are working with.
The pinkish high-pressure sodium vapor lamps actually have a pretty neutral color, unlike the older mercury vapor designs, which are blue to green. Many people didn't like the new style at first because it seemed so pink next to the mercury.
LOW-pressure sodium lamps are monochromatic yellow. They were cheap, they didn't attract as many bugs at night, but you often could not tell the color of a car under them.
If you're getting headaches at work, it's not because you're under fluorescent light. It's most likely that the lighting isn't appropriate to the work you're doing (or there's some other factor like your monitor).
It COULD be because you're under BAD florescent light. Fixtures need to be cleaned, bulbs need to be replaced, and so do ballasts on a regular basis. A fluorescent lamp can loose fifty percent of it's light output before it finally quits. More than sixty percent of the possible output is often lost to dirt on the lamp and fixture.
Cheap fluorescent lamps might not have good phosphors in them, giving bad color and possible 120hz flicker.
Bad ballasts CAN induce a noticeable flicker. They're noisy, and noise causes fatigue, and they're dangerous - they can catch fire and even explode.
One reason STROBE lights or lights without phosphor can cause people problems is that there are natural brain wave patterns that will try to synchronize with the frequency of the strobe. One of these is slightly below 60hz, and early research on Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) thought that fluorescent lights were speeding this up and causing the hyperactivity of the kids. (For the reasons above, this theory was discarded.)
So if you're getting headaches at work, don't bitch about it being from fluorescent lamps. If the lamps flicker, try to get them serviced. If the ballast gets noisy, it's going to go out soon and needs to be replaced. Report it. Look at other factors such as glare, too much or too little light, bad positioning of your monitor, poor monitor quality, and for those of us over 40, failing near vision. A good rule for the lighting level around your monitor is that objects you see around it should have about the same light level. A black screen with white or other bright colored text against a well-lit bright background will cause problems, as will a white screen with some dark text against a dark or window.
The controller for the displays are usually imbedded in the motherboard, and there's no direct conversion that would let you connect a VGA/SVGA card BUT: It's possible that there would be a signal/cable correspondence between say a Toshiba laptop display and a Toshiaba flat-panel monitor. See if you can find some specs on the adaptor and cable for one of those. It may be that there's enough other stuff in the flat panel box that you're not saving anything with the laptop screen, but it's worth looking at (so to speak).
I have an NT server that's down three floors, across the street, and back up three floors. When I need to run something on it, I fire up PCAnywhere, log in, run the thing, and it's cool. I usually do the same when I need to do something on the NT server on the other side of my partition. And I could do the same thing with my home system; I could scan a picture remotely and transfer it here.
I think X is pretty comparable to MSW in resource consumption. Sometimes I think it loads/responsds a little slower on the same hardware. It definately eats a chunk of CPU though - on a slower machine you startx, make coffee, click, wait, click...
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to claims made by some people that music does not fit the open source model, a visit to a local bluegrass festival has left me convinced that it does.
A group named "Spontaneous Combustion" is essentially a novelty act, performing bluegrass versions mainly of Beatles songs and of other rock & roll standards. But while the first time you hear a rock song done as bluegrass it may seem to be a radical innovation, listening to a concert set of them quickly shows how old the joke can get.
These songs are copyright, fixed-interpretation songs, and they don't adapt to different formats well.
Listening to the wealth of musical invention and co-operation happening around the rest of the festival, you hear songs that have been passed on by ear for hundreds of years. Connie Dover performs versions of ancient Celtic songs, then segues into the Appalachan versions. These songs are truely alive, being modified and interpreted, adapted to the modern ear by each performer.
Even more vibrant and creative are the jam sessions, where artists who have never played together before play musical games of follow-the-leader, and call-and-response. True inovation happens here.
By contrast, the world of studio recorded, copyright protected CD music is dead as a doornail.
Napster, however, allows this dead music to form a fertile ground for new innovation. One can think of a song heard years ago, and have a listenable copy in fifteen minutes. A single song covered by a dozen artists over the years can quickly be collected and compared.
The RIAA has no clue what's reall happening on-line. Two thirds of the music I've "pirated" would never be found in a music store, even an on-line one. Untill I can go into a store and get a copy of any recording ever made, on any lable, at any time, Napster and it's decendants will continue to be a completely different world, one they'll never catch on to.
The ABM treaties (SALT II, I think) are currently honored between the US and Russia; we are in the process of renegotiating them to allow the ABM systems that are being contemplated here.
It's been in the mundane news media for months.
The Russians are, of course, not pleased, the Whacko Right Wing in Congress says "the hell with them, we'll bomb 'em into the stone age if they don't like it". (NB: Dan Quayle supported moves to make a preemprive first strike against the USSR. Many of his party still support this idea.)
In all the articles I see on this topic, in print and on line, the main theme seems to be targeted advertising - as if this were a Bad Thing!
People, Targeted Advertising is a Good Thing! It means less meaningless crap spamgunned at you in hopes that you're one of the two percent interested in it!
NONE of the articles I've seen on this address the real problem: the potential for abuse of the data that tracks your purchases, shopping, and surfing habits. Nobody says anything about that, they just say that "advertisers will use this data to more precicely target their advertising".
I say horay for the advertisers! Now will somebody please take a look at what ELSE is going on here? At the potential for abuse, and what is actually being done to address it?
Just wait until after the November elections.
If they have their way it will be gop.gov
I've studied repetitive stress injuries and ergonomics as a network administrator, so I'll have the right answers for users who have problems. I think the funniest thing is that the single best way to determine if someone is statistically likely to have problems with RSI is to ask them "Is your boss an idiot?". If they say yes, then they'll probably have trouble.
RSI is stress related - if you're tense and driving yourself too hard, that's when it's likely to show up.
Two things you know: Once this happens, you've got it for life, and SURGERY WILL NOT MAKE YOU WELL!!!
Surgery has a good chance of keeping further damage from occurring, PROVIDED YOU STOP DOING WHAT CAUSED THE INJURY. Surgery will NOT return you to your pre RSI condition! You will have discomfort ranging to pain for the rest of your life from the surgery.
The good thing is that if the injury has gone far enough that the nerves are being damaged even without the stimulus that caused the original injury, surgery can arrest further damage and give you some chance of normal life. It's an emergency treatment, it stops the problem from getting worse, but it's not good for you and it doesn't FIX the problem.
If there's any other therapy you can try, please do try it. What's very important is to realise that you are seriously injured, and that if you continue to work in the way you have been, you will end up crippled. Seriously. Not just unable to type, but unable to use your hands as anything but a blunt, painful club.
You may be able to get disability leave to deal with this, but one way or another you've got to change what you're doing with your hands.
Not knowing how far your problem has really gone, it might be enough just to radically change your ergonomics (how your body relates to your hardware) and your work pattern. RSI is from REPETITIVE motion - constantly doing the same stuff. If you can limit your typing to fifteen minute periods, with periods in between where you use your hands for an activity that is mechanically different, that will help. You should seek professional advice on this, and you should NOT settle for vague answers - get a specific, detailed plan of how you will change what you're doing to stop this injury.
This is NOT the Mohller (sp?) air car, which has been in the works for more than 30 years.
The air car is supposedly in actual FAA certification testing this year though, so it's about to become a reality.
Flying is expensive and requires a LOT more attention and training than most people are willing to put out.
There are a lot of popular misconceptions about fluorescent lighting, and I see a lot expressed here.
Good quality modern fluorescent lights that are operating properly don't have a perceivable flicker. Easy to prove: Hold a stick (pen, pencil ruler) up in front of you while looking at the light. Hold it by the end and shake it back and forth rapidly in an arc. You should see a smooth blur. Do the same thing in front of your monitor. You'll see a strobe effect, several apparently stationary images of the stick or whatever.
(Do this in front of a TV (in the US, NTSC type) and you'll see a curved image of the stick.)
The reason they don't flicker is the same reason you can still see the image at the top of a monitor when the electron beam is scanning the bottom of it - persistence. The phosphor that gives off the light continues to glow after the electrons stop hitting it.
Different phosphors have different persistence, which is a good thing. If you had a long-persistence phosphor on your TV screen you would get trailing images when objects moved rapidly.
Phosphors used in lighting today have fairly long persistence. You may be able to detect the variation using something like a strobe wheel (spinner with lines spaced at regular intervals, often used or found on record turntables), but you shouldn't be able to see it in normal circumstances.
The "flicker" rate is 2x the rate of your AC current - 60hz in the US, 50hz in some other countries. Because the current has a peak voltage in each "direction" once per cycle, you get two peaks and two "troughs" in one cycle, so the correct rate for the US would be 120hz.
Aircraft and some military installations, along with some unusual building installations, use 400hz AC power, which would yield 800 "flickers" per second.
Different phosphors also give off different colors. Depending on what you want to light, you can choose the color. Grocery meat counters are often cited as a place where a warmer, redder light makes the product look better. Graphic design studios would want a more even color for accurate perception of what they are working with.
The pinkish high-pressure sodium vapor lamps actually have a pretty neutral color, unlike the older mercury vapor designs, which are blue to green. Many people didn't like the new style at first because it seemed so pink next to the mercury.
LOW-pressure sodium lamps are monochromatic yellow. They were cheap, they didn't attract as many bugs at night, but you often could not tell the color of a car under them.
If you're getting headaches at work, it's not because you're under fluorescent light. It's most likely that the lighting isn't appropriate to the work you're doing (or there's some other factor like your monitor).
It COULD be because you're under BAD florescent light. Fixtures need to be cleaned, bulbs need to be replaced, and so do ballasts on a regular basis. A fluorescent lamp can loose fifty percent of it's light output before it finally quits. More than sixty percent of the possible output is often lost to dirt on the lamp and fixture.
Cheap fluorescent lamps might not have good phosphors in them, giving bad color and possible 120hz flicker.
Bad ballasts CAN induce a noticeable flicker. They're noisy, and noise causes fatigue, and they're dangerous - they can catch fire and even explode.
One reason STROBE lights or lights without phosphor can cause people problems is that there are natural brain wave patterns that will try to synchronize with the frequency of the strobe. One of these is slightly below 60hz, and early research on Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) thought that fluorescent lights were speeding this up and causing the hyperactivity of the kids. (For the reasons above, this theory was discarded.)
So if you're getting headaches at work, don't bitch about it being from fluorescent lamps. If the lamps flicker, try to get them serviced. If the ballast gets noisy, it's going to go out soon and needs to be replaced. Report it. Look at other factors such as glare, too much or too little light, bad positioning of your monitor, poor monitor quality, and for those of us over 40, failing near vision. A good rule for the lighting level around your monitor is that objects you see around it should have about the same light level. A black screen with white or other bright colored text against a well-lit bright background will cause problems, as will a white screen with some dark text against a dark or window.
The controller for the displays are usually imbedded in the motherboard, and there's no direct conversion that would let you connect a VGA/SVGA card BUT: It's possible that there would be a signal/cable correspondence between say a Toshiba laptop display and a Toshiaba flat-panel monitor. See if you can find some specs on the adaptor and cable for one of those. It may be that there's enough other stuff in the flat panel box that you're not saving anything with the laptop screen, but it's worth looking at (so to speak).
I have an NT server that's down three floors, across the street, and back up three floors. When I need to run something on it, I fire up PCAnywhere, log in, run the thing, and it's cool. I usually do the same when I need to do something on the NT server on the other side of my partition. And I could do the same thing with my home system; I could scan a picture remotely and transfer it here.
I think X is pretty comparable to MSW in resource consumption. Sometimes I think it loads/responsds a little slower on the same hardware. It definately eats a chunk of CPU though - on a slower machine you startx, make coffee, click, wait, click...