The fact is, I would be much more willing to work for a given company if I had a less than school-age child for whom the company would provide daycare services. I'd say that this is a benefit which would make workers much happier than free cell phones or even company cars.
In light of this revelation, I am actually happier that the Court decided not to hear the Microsoft case yet. The appellate judges are not likely to return a decision for at least a year, and probably two years. During this time, Rehnquist will probably step down from the Court (after all, he is a very old man). By delaying the case, he is avoiding a major conflict of interest.
Yes, the appellate court may side in Microsoft's favor, but I would rather see that than have the Supreme Court return an all-too-typical 5-4 decision in Microsoft's favor, with Rehnquist as the deciding vote.
For some caffeine addicts, I could foresee dropping this gene into a harmless bacterium that produces a steadily decreasing amount of caffeine as time goes on. This would allow stimulants addicts (cocaine, amphetamines, methamphetamine, etc.) to get somewhat of a "buzz" without ever having to touch a caffeinated beverage.
A digital audio file of any format has to be converted into analog audio to be playable. I can get a Y-cord (or, even better, an S/PDIF output) out of my soundcard that can go to a DAT machine or another computer. While the watermark is still there, what's going to stop me from using this now highly ordinary WAV file? Furthermore, even if audio delivery systems of the future have watermark detection that doesn't allow you to play a file if the watermark is present, wouldn't take all of 15 minutes for someone to write an algorithm that would do an FFT on a sound file and remove the offending frequency?
Sounds like the SDMI people aren't the brightest minds out there.
I think there's a misconception among a great many professional musicians that an artist who sells maybe 500,000 copies of an album should be able to:
1. Live like rock stars did in the '70s (e.g. large mansions, limousines everywhere, their own LearJet, a steady supply of cocaine, etc.). 2. Play venues that hold more people than can be found in the artist's hometown.
I remember the Salon article on musicians' anger toward Napster and MP3 in general, on the grounds of "How are we supposed to make money? Selling T-shirts? I'm already in debt!" My response is, "Well, what did you spend your money on?" I think the happiest musicians are the ones who are comfortable living at their level of income, whereas many live far, far above their actual means.
I think it's a major delusion on artists' part that a person who generates perhaps $10 million in revenue for a company should be entitled to all of it. You signed the contract, you take the consequences. Do salesmen who generate that much revenue for their company expect to be able to live like kings? Does a professional programmer expect to be given $5 million a year for a project
Artists should be compensated for their work. Artists should be able to own their publishing and recording copyrights. However, living the life of a "rock star" is an artist's privilege, not his/her right.
The man who started this is better known for the pseudoscience he pushed in the Dow Corning breast implant trial, as well as the fake "detection kits" he sold. Don't touch any of this man's product with a ten-foot pole.
You know what Thomas Jefferson said about the "tyranny of the majority?" It still applies. When legislators willfully ignore large numbers of their constituents (and how many non-Mormon legislators are there in Utah, compared to the number of non-Mormon citizens?) in favor of catering to the religious beliefs of the majority, I become afraid.
Abortion is not a First Amendment issue. This is. I have no end of trouble with state government declaring decency standards when certain communities who are in fact a majority in certain localities may not agree with these standards.
Being a proudly non-Utah Mormon (doesn't mean I don't keep/love the faith, just that I hate Utah), I've become fairly well-versed in the ways of that state. Within Utah itself, the LDS Church can be considered just like any other fundamentalist church. Fundie churches encourage their members to exert a disproportionate influence over their local communities; Rob and Emmett know this very well.
The centralized nature of the LDS Church encourages all of its members to feel as part of one community--which is fine on a spiritual basis and in times of need, but breaks down on a day-to-day temporal level. The average Salt Lake Mormon feels that he is a part of the same community as a Mormon in Spanish Fork, even though the former city is minority-LDS and the latter is pretty near 100%. Therefore, since the state congressmen from Salt Lake have more allegiance to the Church than their local communities, they will tend to ignore the desires of these communities--a Bad Thing.
Here's hoping that this doesn't catch on in Mississippi, Alabama, and other fundamentalist-dominated states. It's dangerous and undemocratic.
What kind of finish did he put on it? I ask because many polyester and polyurethane finishes reduce heat dissipation (a serious problem for any handheld computing device). It looks like he put a pretty thick coat on, too.
I used to think that the Southwest was a bastion of freedom and tolerance. After all, it is the base of libertarianism in this country and produced the most civilly liberal political figure since Jefferson, Barry Goldwater. And now this?
Between the garrote of technocratic government on the Pacific coast and the Northeast, and the smothering reactionism of the South (and increasingly the Midwest), is there anywhere for an American to go if he just wants to be left alone in his ways and maybe pay a few taxes?
As cool as this sounds, I'd like higher-capacity routers for handling those nifty multi-wavelength fiber signals, please. I feel so spoiled with my pair of T3s, but yeesh...
Remember, way back in the day, when Firewire was supposed to blow both SCSI and EIDE away with its throughput (480 megabytes/second, IIRC) and its cheapness?
Did it just sink in a quagmire of "industry standard" arguments? Talk about a promising technology that's biting the dust.
Well, the liquid components don't really get broken down; instead, they go through drainage tile--ideally, with holes poked in it--and into gravel, where they can soak into the ground.
When my family's house was built, the inbred developer (no joke!) had his equally gifted brother put in the septic tank. Instead of gradually draining out over a large area, everything just sort of dumped out onto the slope from our front yard into our back. This resulted in a pleasant-smelling little "puddle" that didn't make our neighbors especially happy. Unfortunately, this didn't happen until three years after we had moved in, so we couldn't sue the developer despite the terrible work he had done. We had to get the septic tank, gravel, and drainage tile re-laid, and our lawn--which we had worked our butts off growing from seed--was pretty much ruined. It also cost at least $3000.
So I'd like to reverse my earlier post: thank goodness for sewers. Because of sewers, one can run the washing machine more than once a day and not worry about a lake of urine forming in the backyard.
Tom's Hardware noted that the new parallel-processing video card from ATI, the Rage MAXX, has to wait 2 frames to accept a user input, as opposed to 1 for most single-chip solutions. Even though SLI has every chip working on the same frame, does it still suffer from the same delayed-input problem?
It wouldn't have been a problem in the days of the Voodoo2 SLI setup, as any player with one could get frame rates typically twice as fast or faster than pretty much every 3D accelerator out there, so the 2-frame lag would be the same or less time as the single-frame delay. However, with the ungodly frame rates offered by a single GeForce 256 with Double Data Rate RAM, if there were a two-frame delay for someone with a Voodoo5 5500, in a LAN game of Quake III the Voodoo5 user would be toast.
These students had it coming to them, if anything. If you're going to serve up illegal material from your computer, make sure that you make it impossible for "administrative" types (who are incompetent more often than not) to find it. I attend Cornell University, whose NT-loving sysadmins occasionally go looking on various SMB shares for MP3s. The students who get caught are the ones who publicly share their MP3s in an un-pw'ed Windows workgroup (the network contract I signed did not authorize them to crack my box). That's one thing. Putting your MP3s on anonymous FTP is quite the same--you're asking for trouble. I have no pity for students who get caught because they were stupid. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Linux should be able to secure their box against the feeble probings of sysadmins who are scared s***less of a command line.
Note that I didn't say "all classically-trained musicians." I listen to enough classical music to know that there's a huge amount of interpretive leeway and that wonderful intangible feel. There are a bazillion different ways to treat dynamic markers, accents, staccatos, etc. However, there are a lot of classical musicians for whom technique comes before feeling (just like rock musicians...do Yngwie Malmsteen and Stu Hamm come to mind?).
I'm not dissing classical training--without it, a lot of my favorite musicians wouldn't be as good as they are. Robert Fripp and John Myung (the latter of Dream Theater) spring to mind.
Maybe these new musician-simulation algorithms can simulate hacks in any style. An uncreative classically-trained, on-the-beat musician will be easy to emulate; so will a random garage-band hack. But can this thing simulate real genius? Will there ever be a virtual Jaco Pastorius? How about Adrian Belew? Thelonious Monk? Frank Zappa? John Coltrane? Odds are, no. What separates the legendary music-makers from their legions of imitators (no matter how well-practiced and skillful) is that the geniuses have feel. I can practice my bass for eight hours a day for five years like Jaco Pastorius did, but I'll never have his ears or his sense of harmony. The fact is, at our current level of technology, a computer can determine what sounds correct, but not what sounds good. And until neuroscience tells us why it is we can judge right or wrong, good or bad, the past and future creative geniuses don't have much to worry about.
If anyone was having an argument with themselves whether to get a K--er, Athlon or a 133MHz PIII, I think this pretty much eliminates the viability of the 133MHz PIII.
Not to be picky, but as a bassist I must correct you...
The Fender Precision Bass has had a split-coil pickup since 1957. The Jazz has two single-coils pickups (one in the middle, one in front of the bridge).
So far as I know, the only guitar I've ever seen with split-coil pickups is a G&L. This nano-guitar looks more like an Ibanez Iceman with that huge lower horn.
The famous studies done during World War II which supposedly showed how much quicker the Dvorak layout was compared to QWERTY, even on manual typewriters, were subsidized by none other than the inventor of the Dvorak keyboard, which makes them suspect. An issue of The Economist had an article on this topic a few months back.
At least "Itanium" is a reasonably original name, whereas Pentium--which originally referred to its status as the i586--was used again for the i686 and i786 chips. Still, it is a dreadful name. Here I was thinking that "Athlon" was bad...
CPU nomenclature should revert to numbers and acronyms--there's just something that feels good about the words "SPARC" or "486DX2," for example.
Those servers had better be armor-plated securitywise, because if client-server systems become the standard in schools, script kiddies are going to get a whole load more of targets.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is, I would be much more willing to work for a given company if I had a less than school-age child for whom the company would provide daycare services. I'd say that this is a benefit which would make workers much happier than free cell phones or even company cars.
In light of this revelation, I am actually happier that the Court decided not to hear the Microsoft case yet. The appellate judges are not likely to return a decision for at least a year, and probably two years. During this time, Rehnquist will probably step down from the Court (after all, he is a very old man). By delaying the case, he is avoiding a major conflict of interest.
Yes, the appellate court may side in Microsoft's favor, but I would rather see that than have the Supreme Court return an all-too-typical 5-4 decision in Microsoft's favor, with Rehnquist as the deciding vote.
For some caffeine addicts, I could foresee dropping this gene into a harmless bacterium that produces a steadily decreasing amount of caffeine as time goes on. This would allow stimulants addicts (cocaine, amphetamines, methamphetamine, etc.) to get somewhat of a "buzz" without ever having to touch a caffeinated beverage.
Sorry, I meant what you were talking about. Forgive me for lack of clarity.
A digital audio file of any format has to be converted into analog audio to be playable. I can get a Y-cord (or, even better, an S/PDIF output) out of my soundcard that can go to a DAT machine or another computer. While the watermark is still there, what's going to stop me from using this now highly ordinary WAV file? Furthermore, even if audio delivery systems of the future have watermark detection that doesn't allow you to play a file if the watermark is present, wouldn't take all of 15 minutes for someone to write an algorithm that would do an FFT on a sound file and remove the offending frequency?
Sounds like the SDMI people aren't the brightest minds out there.
I think there's a misconception among a great many professional musicians that an artist who sells maybe 500,000 copies of an album should be able to:
1. Live like rock stars did in the '70s (e.g. large mansions, limousines everywhere, their own LearJet, a steady supply of cocaine, etc.).
2. Play venues that hold more people than can be found in the artist's hometown.
I remember the Salon article on musicians' anger toward Napster and MP3 in general, on the grounds of "How are we supposed to make money? Selling T-shirts? I'm already in debt!" My response is, "Well, what did you spend your money on?" I think the happiest musicians are the ones who are comfortable living at their level of income, whereas many live far, far above their actual means.
I think it's a major delusion on artists' part that a person who generates perhaps $10 million in revenue for a company should be entitled to all of it. You signed the contract, you take the consequences. Do salesmen who generate that much revenue for their company expect to be able to live like kings? Does a professional programmer expect to be given $5 million a year for a project
Artists should be compensated for their work. Artists should be able to own their publishing and recording copyrights. However, living the life of a "rock star" is an artist's privilege, not his/her right.
The man who started this is better known for the pseudoscience he pushed in the Dow Corning breast implant trial, as well as the fake "detection kits" he sold. Don't touch any of this man's product with a ten-foot pole.
You know what Thomas Jefferson said about the "tyranny of the majority?" It still applies. When legislators willfully ignore large numbers of their constituents (and how many non-Mormon legislators are there in Utah, compared to the number of non-Mormon citizens?) in favor of catering to the religious beliefs of the majority, I become afraid.
Abortion is not a First Amendment issue. This is. I have no end of trouble with state government declaring decency standards when certain communities who are in fact a majority in certain localities may not agree with these standards.
Being a proudly non-Utah Mormon (doesn't mean I don't keep/love the faith, just that I hate Utah), I've become fairly well-versed in the ways of that state. Within Utah itself, the LDS Church can be considered just like any other fundamentalist church. Fundie churches encourage their members to exert a disproportionate influence over their local communities; Rob and Emmett know this very well.
The centralized nature of the LDS Church encourages all of its members to feel as part of one community--which is fine on a spiritual basis and in times of need, but breaks down on a day-to-day temporal level. The average Salt Lake Mormon feels that he is a part of the same community as a Mormon in Spanish Fork, even though the former city is minority-LDS and the latter is pretty near 100%. Therefore, since the state congressmen from Salt Lake have more allegiance to the Church than their local communities, they will tend to ignore the desires of these communities--a Bad Thing.
Here's hoping that this doesn't catch on in Mississippi, Alabama, and other fundamentalist-dominated states. It's dangerous and undemocratic.
What kind of finish did he put on it? I ask because many polyester and polyurethane finishes reduce heat dissipation (a serious problem for any handheld computing device). It looks like he put a pretty thick coat on, too.
I used to think that the Southwest was a bastion of freedom and tolerance. After all, it is the base of libertarianism in this country and produced the most civilly liberal political figure since Jefferson, Barry Goldwater. And now this?
Between the garrote of technocratic government on the Pacific coast and the Northeast, and the smothering reactionism of the South (and increasingly the Midwest), is there anywhere for an American to go if he just wants to be left alone in his ways and maybe pay a few taxes?
As cool as this sounds, I'd like higher-capacity routers for handling those nifty multi-wavelength fiber signals, please. I feel so spoiled with my pair of T3s, but yeesh...
Remember, way back in the day, when Firewire was supposed to blow both SCSI and EIDE away with its throughput (480 megabytes/second, IIRC) and its cheapness?
Did it just sink in a quagmire of "industry standard" arguments? Talk about a promising technology that's biting the dust.
Well, the liquid components don't really get broken down; instead, they go through drainage tile--ideally, with holes poked in it--and into gravel, where they can soak into the ground.
When my family's house was built, the inbred developer (no joke!) had his equally gifted brother put in the septic tank. Instead of gradually draining out over a large area, everything just sort of dumped out onto the slope from our front yard into our back. This resulted in a pleasant-smelling little "puddle" that didn't make our neighbors especially happy. Unfortunately, this didn't happen until three years after we had moved in, so we couldn't sue the developer despite the terrible work he had done. We had to get the septic tank, gravel, and drainage tile re-laid, and our lawn--which we had worked our butts off growing from seed--was pretty much ruined. It also cost at least $3000.
So I'd like to reverse my earlier post: thank goodness for sewers. Because of sewers, one can run the washing machine more than once a day and not worry about a lake of urine forming in the backyard.
Thank the heavens for septic tanks, then.
Tom's Hardware noted that the new parallel-processing video card from ATI, the Rage MAXX, has to wait 2 frames to accept a user input, as opposed to 1 for most single-chip solutions. Even though SLI has every chip working on the same frame, does it still suffer from the same delayed-input problem?
It wouldn't have been a problem in the days of the Voodoo2 SLI setup, as any player with one could get frame rates typically twice as fast or faster than pretty much every 3D accelerator out there, so the 2-frame lag would be the same or less time as the single-frame delay. However, with the ungodly frame rates offered by a single GeForce 256 with Double Data Rate RAM, if there were a two-frame delay for someone with a Voodoo5 5500, in a LAN game of Quake III the Voodoo5 user would be toast.
These students had it coming to them, if anything. If you're going to serve up illegal material from your computer, make sure that you make it impossible for "administrative" types (who are incompetent more often than not) to find it. I attend Cornell University, whose NT-loving sysadmins occasionally go looking on various SMB shares for MP3s. The students who get caught are the ones who publicly share their MP3s in an un-pw'ed Windows workgroup (the network contract I signed did not authorize them to crack my box). That's one thing. Putting your MP3s on anonymous FTP is quite the same--you're asking for trouble. I have no pity for students who get caught because they were stupid. Anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Linux should be able to secure their box against the feeble probings of sysadmins who are scared s***less of a command line.
I'm not dissing classical training--without it, a lot of my favorite musicians wouldn't be as good as they are. Robert Fripp and John Myung (the latter of Dream Theater) spring to mind.
Maybe these new musician-simulation algorithms can simulate hacks in any style. An uncreative classically-trained, on-the-beat musician will be easy to emulate; so will a random garage-band hack. But can this thing simulate real genius? Will there ever be a virtual Jaco Pastorius? How about Adrian Belew? Thelonious Monk? Frank Zappa? John Coltrane? Odds are, no. What separates the legendary music-makers from their legions of imitators (no matter how well-practiced and skillful) is that the geniuses have feel. I can practice my bass for eight hours a day for five years like Jaco Pastorius did, but I'll never have his ears or his sense of harmony. The fact is, at our current level of technology, a computer can determine what sounds correct, but not what sounds good. And until neuroscience tells us why it is we can judge right or wrong, good or bad, the past and future creative geniuses don't have much to worry about.
If anyone was having an argument with themselves whether to get a K--er, Athlon or a 133MHz PIII, I think this pretty much eliminates the viability of the 133MHz PIII.
The Fender Precision Bass has had a split-coil pickup since 1957. The Jazz has two single-coils pickups (one in the middle, one in front of the bridge).
So far as I know, the only guitar I've ever seen with split-coil pickups is a G&L. This nano-guitar looks more like an Ibanez Iceman with that huge lower horn.
CPU nomenclature should revert to numbers and acronyms--there's just something that feels good about the words "SPARC" or "486DX2," for example.
It's why I'm not touching that field with a ten-parsec pole.
Those servers had better be armor-plated securitywise, because if client-server systems become the standard in schools, script kiddies are going to get a whole load more of targets.