I only thing I really dislike about Headphones is that they suffer from low extension, due to the small size of the driver. There is no way they can even compete with a "real" sub say like SVS -- but for sheer portability, they win in spades. Headphones are "good enough."
After having listened to $2,000 5.1 (mine) and $5,000 horns (friend), I think most people don't value the quality of audio because they have never really listened to what music is supposed to sound like. When I got my speakers I went through most of my CD collection and was amazed at how much of the music I was missing on cheap cans. My center speaker was $500 just by itself and worth every penny -- for movie dialog it is crystal clear.
Agreed that speakers are on an exponential scale. For mains, you pretty much have to spend ~ 10 times as much to notice an increase in quality. i.e. $500 vs $5,000 vs $50,000.
Fortunately for headphones the scale isn't as large due to the relatively small price difference between low-end and high-end, say as in speakers.
> Is there any hope with netbooks? I think so. For $300 picked up a 1.6 GHz, 1 GB, 1024x600 Acer Aspire One. Also have a 9-Cell battery which lasts 7+ hours.
> [rant about how.PDFs suck deleted] If.PDFs suck, its because authors aren't spending the time to do it right. InDesign will natively export to PDF and you can get some beautiful results if you spend some time.
> you're either trying to be funny (but got modded +3 insightful), or are seriously trying to imply that a woman who's good at C.S. is as much of a freak as a pregnant man.
Try neither. I had no emoticon, and I had no implications -- I just asked a simple question, in order to why find out where this assumption is coming from.
I have seen this slippery-slope type of Political Censorship before and all it does is lead to reverse discrimination. Replace Women with Ethnic / Religion / X of your choice.
This completely focuses on the wrong problem by making a problem where one doesn't exist. The gender of a Computer Scientist doesn't fucking matter -- the only things that do are...
a) Are they competent? How well do they know their doman? How well can they solve problems?
b) How professional are they when interacting with
i) colleagues?
ii) the layman?
A better question to ask is "How effective are we teaching computer scientists?"
I still have never seen a good answer to this question.
>> However, wholesale file sharing of copyrighted material also strikes most people as wrong. > [citation needed] Go look at the p2p networks -- namely who is using them, and what is being shared.
Aside, just because something is copyrighted, doesn't mean it is illegal to share. i.e. Anything GPL'd is an example.
>>No it doesn't. Most people, when they think about it even a little, realise that copyright itself is in fact wrong. >[citation needed]
It's called Common Sense and History. You are ignorant of the whole reason of even _creating_ something in the first place -- to share it. There is very little point in creating something if you can't share it (aside from expressing yourself.)
Copyright in the US was a kludge, in that it was given a time-limited duration.
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
It is a tacit consent that the creator gets to (solely) enjoy the fruits of their creation, BEFORE turning it over to society as a whole to use/enjoy. If copyright was forever, it would eventually halt the progress of society.
Most young people recognize the absurdity of copyright -- meaning that "creator" gets to dictate who does and doesn't share their work, and they rightly say "That's stupid." If I invite a bunch of my friends over to listen to a CD I bought, no copyright has been broken even though someone else experienced the author's work AND the author was not paid. It does not matter if I digitally share this CD to thousands, or physically to tens. Most smart authors realize the BEST kind of advertising is WORD of MOUTH because it is free publicity.
Copyright started because _publishers_ didn't want other publishers from selling their work -- not because artists wanted to prevent people for sharing their works. The fact that we had Art for THOUSANDS of years even before there was such nonsense as copyright shows that it is all about control, and money.
In the coming centuries, copyright will disappear like other out-dated modes of thinking such as Imaginary Property Rights, as people spiritually grow up to the idea that their true value is in what they can give to others, not what they can get from others.
It's called taking a step back, and looking at the BIG picture of where humanity is going, not the myopic view of western commercialization.
-- "The only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil." - Carl Gustav Jung
Yup, it is a little ironic. And nice find! I didn't actually know that until I watched "Who Killed the Electric Car" today.:-)
The think the only real obstacle for EV is batteries -- once it hits the "magic" point of being able to do 500 miles on one charge, then I think it will take off. Thankfully the up-coming energy revolution is going to disrupt much more then electric vehicles.
I'm not sure if you are trolling, daft, or just asking a legitimate serious question...
> How can it make economic sense? You mean like how can the government afford to "bail out" a failing business model of the very same businesses that were against electric vehicles??
>Why on earth are we trying to build electric cars that make no sense Right, we don't need sense like far less pollution, safer, stilumate R&D, etc.
> I'm baffled... Here's a clue. Short-term last-millennium greed and thinking needs to be replaced with long term sustainability. Who Killed The Electric Car
and
"...During the Cold War era of the 1950s and early 1960s, General Motors (GM) urged patriotic U.S. citizens to "see the USA in your Chevrolet." Such advertisements on the part of the automobile industry served to seduce North Americans, as well as Australians, away from what was once a relatively well-developed mass transportation system that included passenger trains, numerous intercity bus lines, and extensive urban and interurban trolley or tram lines. Indeed, a consortium, called National City Lines, consisting of General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company had spent $9 million by 1950 to obtain control of street railway companies in sixteen states and converted them to less efficient GM buses. The companies were sold to operators who signed contracts specifying that they would buy GM equipment. National City Lines in the 1940s began buying up and scrapping parts of Pacific Electric, the world's largest interurban electric rail system, which by 1945 served 110 million passengers in 56 smog-free Southern California cities. Eleven hundred miles of Pacific Electric's track were torn up, and the system went out of service in 1961, as Southern California commuters came to rely primarily on freeways (Flink 1973:220). Unfortunately, Henry Huntington, the owner of Pacific Electric, used his interurban trolley company more as a scheme for promoting his real estate endeavors than providing a public service and often alienated citizens in various ways, including in his failure to provide lines that connected suburbs to each other as opposed to strictly city centers (Bottles 1992). A similar process in which a consortium of road interests colluded to destroy efficient trolley or trams systems occurred in numerous cities throughout the United States and Australia (Goddard 1994; Davison 2004).
In the 1950s, with the assistance of the Eisenhower administration, the development of an interstate highway system resulted in enormous profits for corporate interests and benefits to supportive politicians, while hindering the development of efficient public transportation, and thereby forcing the general public to purchase and use cars for transportation (Leavitt 1970). Indeed, Lewis Mumford (1963) argued that the federally funded highway programs of the 1950s contributed to the creation of a "one-dimensional transportation system." According to Crawford,
The Interstates gave truckers a subsidized route network that allowed them to compete successfully with railroads despite the labor and energy inefficiency of trucking. It also gave real estate developers the high-speed arteries leading to downtown that made large-scale suburban sprawl possible (Crawford 2000:88).
A powerful lobby consisting of the automobile industry, the American Automobile Association, petroleum companies, and trucking companies, continues to pose a barrier to the development of an effective public transportation system in the United States. Whereas heavy trucks contribute more than 95 percent of the highway deterioration in this country, trucking companies pay only 29 percent of the highway bill (Freund and Marti
It's easy to ignore the 7 cpus of the PS2 -- because most people don't have to deal with trying to synchronize between them all to maximize load balancing between Memory, EE, VUs, GS and the SPUs.
> And remember how so many hack developers were all whining how hard it was to program for the PS2? The PS1 was absurdly simple for what it did and they got lazy.
Quite trolling. How many games have you actually _shipped_ on PSX and PS2?
Having done both, you gotta be crazy to be sipping the typical Sony Arrogance juice. WHY complicate something when it doesn't need to be -- as I a developer I got better things to do (like focusing on gameplay) then trying to figure out someone's obscure hardware. The complexity increase from PSX to PS2 was five fold. And from what I hear from my fellow PS3 devs, the difficulty & complexity is the same jump from PS2 to PS3. Developing for Sony is like building a F1 car -- sure it can do 200 mph, but its a very techinical process. Microsoft took the ferrari approach --- easier & cheaper to build, and you have more fun getting there.
Let me know when you have shipped your first game.
> I don't know how anyone can enjoy a book by listening to it.
Some of us have this thing called a "commute." Audio-books are a great alternate to the crap they play on radio when you're stuck in traffic for 2 hours.
> Every book that is pirated, and to the same degree where a book is swapped on an internet site, means one less sale to the author which means less money in their pocket
Quite trolling.
We have these things called "Libraries", which has the exact same effect.
The thing is, if it weren't for libraries I wouldn't even be motivated to own my own sci-fi book collection.
> Warcraft 3 - the first game to successfully introduce RPG elements into an RTS. The RPG/RTS hybrid is becoming an increasingly important genre, as has been most recently demonstrated by Dawn of War 2.
No it wasn't -- try the Warcraft 2 Expansion. I know because I later worked with the guys who designed it (And it wasn't Blizzard.)
> there are questions that are permanently beyond the realm of science
Which proves my point that Science is woefully incomplete. Just because Science can't reach an answer, doesn't imply that there is no answer.
Science _IS_ dogmatic because it REFUSES to pursue these type of questions -- it uses the lame cop-out "Well, we can't prove this" when the matter of fact is that one CAN know, and is unwilling to investigate a means _outside_ of science to learn & understand the true reality of the universe.
You _do_ realize Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is itself incomplete. There are things you (can) KNOW to be true, but yet you can not prove them. Science has yet to reach this level of understanding.
"Not only did modernists [i.e., rationalists] believe in the inerrancy of science, they also had a devout faith in progress. The 'modern,' almost by definition, was superior to the past. The future would be even better."
Let me quote from one of the famous priests of Science, Albert Einstein.
"After religious teachers accomplish the refining process indicated they will surely recognize with joy that true religion has been ennobled and made more profound by scientific knowledge."
"But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
In my time of studying things since I was little, I undertook the study of physics when I was eleven. When I was in college getting my BS in it I came to the conclusion that at the level where I was in my studies, physics turned to philosophy, for what do things like time mean anyway?
And then after studying philosphy on my own for a few years, I arrived at the conclusion that philosophy turns to religion because if we can never know these things for sure, we still have to make a decision how we are going to live our lives, and that is religion. In my opinion, real religion is when we consciously decide what to believe on our own (although it can be from reading about religions), fake religion is when someone makes the decision for us.
Both Science and Religion are out-dated, and incomplete -- the only reason they are used is because of a) momementum, and b) people think there is nothing better to use. The proper solution is to combine them to compensate for the weaknesses of each other to reach the next level of understanding reality.
-- How can you understand Life if you don't even understand what happens after Death??
a) You have an hour commute at your old job, but your new one is only 15 mins away, with that time (and maybe gas) you save, you have more time to spend with the wife or hobbies.
b) Because (gasp!) you enjoy the work of the new more!
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Especially the last sentence in the summary, which should read...
"... such an action is necessary if Sony doesn't want to "lose support from game developers and publishers [you mean more then already?!]."
Sony's sales of PS2 are only toppled by Sony's arrogance.
Mod parent up as informative.
I only thing I really dislike about Headphones is that they suffer from low extension, due to the small size of the driver. There is no way they can even compete with a "real" sub say like SVS -- but for sheer portability, they win in spades. Headphones are "good enough."
After having listened to $2,000 5.1 (mine) and $5,000 horns (friend), I think most people don't value the quality of audio because they have never really listened to what music is supposed to sound like. When I got my speakers I went through most of my CD collection and was amazed at how much of the music I was missing on cheap cans. My center speaker was $500 just by itself and worth every penny -- for movie dialog it is crystal clear.
Agreed that speakers are on an exponential scale. For mains, you pretty much have to spend ~ 10 times as much to notice an increase in quality.
i.e.
$500 vs $5,000 vs $50,000.
Fortunately for headphones the scale isn't as large due to the relatively small price difference between low-end and high-end, say as in speakers.
> Is there any hope with netbooks?
I think so. For $300 picked up a 1.6 GHz, 1 GB, 1024x600 Acer Aspire One. Also have a 9-Cell battery which lasts 7+ hours.
> [rant about how .PDFs suck deleted] .PDFs suck, its because authors aren't spending the time to do it right. InDesign will natively export to PDF and you can get some beautiful results if you spend some time.
If
> The Chinese are a bit weird about death.
Denial doesn't make it go away.
--
How can you even understand Life if you don't even understand what happens after Death?
> happen to believe women are just as capable of being good computer scientists as men are.
Of course they can, that's not the point.
The question why does it matter what percentage the gender is split?
> means that upwards of half our best CS talent is going to waste.
That's an assumption, and have yet to see any stats to back that up in _any_ field.
> you're either trying to be funny (but got modded +3 insightful), or are seriously trying to imply that a woman who's good at C.S. is as much of a freak as a pregnant man.
Try neither. I had no emoticon, and I had no implications -- I just asked a simple question, in order to why find out where this assumption is coming from.
I have seen this slippery-slope type of Political Censorship before and all it does is lead to reverse discrimination. Replace Women with Ethnic / Religion / X of your choice.
This completely focuses on the wrong problem by making a problem where one doesn't exist. The gender of a Computer Scientist doesn't fucking matter -- the only things that do are...
a) Are they competent? How well do they know their doman? How well can they solve problems?
b) How professional are they when interacting with
i) colleagues?
ii) the layman?
A better question to ask is "How effective are we teaching computer scientists?"
I still have never seen a good answer to this question.
> The field could still use more women though.
Why?
Do you complain that we need more pregnant men also?
> It only takes the childish actions of a few to get Linux tarred with that brush. It's a shame really.
You can find assholes in ANY organization if you look long enough.
i.e.
"You can take the people out of politics, but you can't take the politics out of people."
Quite trolling.
>> However, wholesale file sharing of copyrighted material also strikes most people as wrong.
> [citation needed]
Go look at the p2p networks -- namely who is using them, and what is being shared.
Aside, just because something is copyrighted, doesn't mean it is illegal to share. i.e. Anything GPL'd is an example.
>>No it doesn't. Most people, when they think about it even a little, realise that copyright itself is in fact wrong.
>[citation needed]
It's called Common Sense and History. You are ignorant of the whole reason of even _creating_ something in the first place -- to share it. There is very little point in creating something if you can't share it (aside from expressing yourself.)
Copyright in the US was a kludge, in that it was given a time-limited duration.
It is a tacit consent that the creator gets to (solely) enjoy the fruits of their creation, BEFORE turning it over to society as a whole to use/enjoy. If copyright was forever, it would eventually halt the progress of society.
Most young people recognize the absurdity of copyright -- meaning that "creator" gets to dictate who does and doesn't share their work, and they rightly say "That's stupid." If I invite a bunch of my friends over to listen to a CD I bought, no copyright has been broken even though someone else experienced the author's work AND the author was not paid. It does not matter if I digitally share this CD to thousands, or physically to tens. Most smart authors realize the BEST kind of advertising is WORD of MOUTH because it is free publicity.
Copyright started because _publishers_ didn't want other publishers from selling their work -- not because artists wanted to prevent people for sharing their works. The fact that we had Art for THOUSANDS of years even before there was such nonsense as copyright shows that it is all about control, and money.
In the coming centuries, copyright will disappear like other out-dated modes of thinking such as Imaginary Property Rights, as people spiritually grow up to the idea that their true value is in what they can give to others, not what they can get from others.
It's called taking a step back, and looking at the BIG picture of where humanity is going, not the myopic view of western commercialization.
--
"The only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil." - Carl Gustav Jung
Yup, it is a little ironic. And nice find! I didn't actually know that until I watched "Who Killed the Electric Car" today. :-)
The think the only real obstacle for EV is batteries -- once it hits the "magic" point of being able to do 500 miles on one charge, then I think it will take off. Thankfully the up-coming energy revolution is going to disrupt much more then electric vehicles.
+1 Funny.
I'm not sure if you are trolling, daft, or just asking a legitimate serious question...
> How can it make economic sense?
You mean like how can the government afford to "bail out" a failing business model of the very same businesses that were against electric vehicles??
>Why on earth are we trying to build electric cars that make no sense
Right, we don't need sense like far less pollution, safer, stilumate R&D, etc.
> I'm baffled...
Here's a clue. Short-term last-millennium greed and thinking needs to be replaced with long term sustainability.
Who Killed The Electric Car
and
It's easy to ignore the 7 cpus of the PS2 -- because most people don't have to deal with trying to synchronize between them all to maximize load balancing between Memory, EE, VUs, GS and the SPUs.
> And remember how so many hack developers were all whining how hard it was to program for the PS2? The PS1 was absurdly simple for what it did and they got lazy.
Quite trolling. How many games have you actually _shipped_ on PSX and PS2?
Having done both, you gotta be crazy to be sipping the typical Sony Arrogance juice. WHY complicate something when it doesn't need to be -- as I a developer I got better things to do (like focusing on gameplay) then trying to figure out someone's obscure hardware. The complexity increase from PSX to PS2 was five fold. And from what I hear from my fellow PS3 devs, the difficulty & complexity is the same jump from PS2 to PS3. Developing for Sony is like building a F1 car -- sure it can do 200 mph, but its a very techinical process. Microsoft took the ferrari approach --- easier & cheaper to build, and you have more fun getting there.
Let me know when you have shipped your first game.
> Anything you've actually done comparable to designing something as complicated as an operating system?
Yup
> AND breaking complicated software encryption for the past 20 years by using a disassembler and some brains.
Been there, done that. Still do it for fun.
> Wait, killed the music industry?
[Music,Documentary] Before The Music Dies
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-856606244008931882&ei=tjuiScy9AZ7OqwLZwYHNCg&q=dave+matthews+band+before+the+music+died&hl=en
> I don't know how anyone can enjoy a book by listening to it.
Some of us have this thing called a "commute." Audio-books are a great alternate to the crap they play on radio when you're stuck in traffic for 2 hours.
> Every book that is pirated, and to the same degree where a book is swapped on an internet site, means one less sale to the author which means less money in their pocket
Quite trolling.
We have these things called "Libraries", which has the exact same effect.
The thing is, if it weren't for libraries I wouldn't even be motivated to own my own sci-fi book collection.
Popularity != Quality.
epic fail.
> Warcraft 3 - the first game to successfully introduce RPG elements into an RTS. The RPG/RTS hybrid is becoming an increasingly important genre, as has been most recently demonstrated by Dawn of War 2.
No it wasn't -- try the Warcraft 2 Expansion. I know because I later worked with the guys who designed it (And it wasn't Blizzard.)
WC3 just fleshed the concept out more.
Audiophiles don't listen to Crap Digital by definition -- CD's are not even close to "Hi Fidelity", only Convenient Data.
Go hang out on avsforums if you want to learn about true audiophiles.
> there are questions that are permanently beyond the realm of science
Which proves my point that Science is woefully incomplete. Just because Science can't reach an answer, doesn't imply that there is no answer.
Science _IS_ dogmatic because it REFUSES to pursue these type of questions -- it uses the lame cop-out "Well, we can't prove this" when the matter of fact is that one CAN know, and is unwilling to investigate a means _outside_ of science to learn & understand the true reality of the universe.
Tell me,
How can you prove to me that you love your wife?
You _do_ realize Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is itself incomplete. There are things you (can) KNOW to be true, but yet you can not prove them. Science has yet to reach this level of understanding.
What nonsense. Science is just as dogmatic, and has just as much faith as Religion. As they say, Science progresses one funeral at a time.
http://michaelprescott.freeservers.com/skeptic.htm
"Not only did modernists [i.e., rationalists] believe in the inerrancy of science, they also had a devout faith in progress. The 'modern,' almost by definition, was superior to the past. The future would be even better."
Let me quote from one of the famous priests of Science, Albert Einstein.
Religion of Science
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"After religious teachers accomplish the refining process indicated they will surely recognize with joy that true religion has been ennobled and made more profound by scientific knowledge."
"But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
And this beautiful post by rajafarian (49150), http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/02/163252
In my time of studying things since I was little, I undertook the study of physics when I was eleven. When I was in college getting my BS in it I came to the conclusion that at the level where I was in my studies, physics turned to philosophy, for what do things like time mean anyway?
And then after studying philosphy on my own for a few years, I arrived at the conclusion that philosophy turns to religion because if we can never know these things for sure, we still have to make a decision how we are going to live our lives, and that is religion. In my opinion, real religion is when we consciously decide what to believe on our own (although it can be from reading about religions), fake religion is when someone makes the decision for us.
Both Science and Religion are out-dated, and incomplete -- the only reason they are used is because of a) momementum, and b) people think there is nothing better to use. The proper solution is to combine them to compensate for the weaknesses of each other to reach the next level of understanding reality.
--
How can you understand Life if you don't even understand what happens after Death??
Yeah YHBT, but whatever....
a) You have an hour commute at your old job, but your new one is only 15 mins away, with that time (and maybe gas) you save, you have more time to spend with the wife or hobbies.
b) Because (gasp!) you enjoy the work of the new more!