"your opinion is irrelevant and your contribution worthless"
OhHH! Now you've done it. I've hated Dean and his muppet candidacy since long before his unholy squeal after his trouncing in Iowa, but I do happen to agree with you that it was blown entirely out of proportion (he was trying to energize a bunch of disappointed kids... sure, that's understandable.)
But I also think he was sort of asking for the negative attention--I mean, he'd spent the day criticizing the media for building up expectations for him. Now the media, when criticized, just love to find a way to strike back, and of course they pounced on him as soon as he did something a little silly. That the Doctor failed to understand this simple law of politics is an indication (like we needed any more) that if elected President, he wouldn't survive a day in Washington.
In fact, we wouldn't have to worry about his becoming President to begin with, since if he won the nomination the Democrats would be doomed come November--not only as far as the presidency goes, but as the most visible figure in the party he'd also manage to cripple the campaigns of dozens of Democratic senators and congresspersons running for (re)election, just by virtue of the fact that he is unelectable. He's likable, I'll grant you that, but in order to learn to like him you really have to spend some time watching him on TV and reading interviews with him, and even then I think most people would have to give him the benefit of the doubt to understand his rather oddball brand of enthusiasm.
And yes, electability is a significant issue in this campaign, and all campaigns for that matter. There could be a candidate out there who matches my views on every single issue, and I still wouldn't vote for him or her unless there were a realistic chance he or she could beat Bush.
Finally, to me, your leaden response to what (I'll admit) was essentially a tongue-in-cheek troll only serves as further proof that Dean supporters take the Doctor's candidacy waaay too seriously. People in that campaign just can't take a joke. Plus, they need to shower more often.
yours
PS. You want my real opinion? Raw and uncensored? People who support Dean are naive, idealistic college students who have never participated in the mainstream political process before, and by and large are propelling the Doctor forward because it's the cool thing to do. There was this Deaniac they interviewed on CNN a couple weeks ago who said something like, "I'm out here in Iowa because all my friends are here. It seemed like it would be fun and I'd get to meet a lot of cool people." Please. Give me a fucking break.
If it really bothers you that much you can always download something like SideTrack and assign trackpad tap to left click and thumb button to right click. Not an ideal solution if you're hellbent on having a separate button, I'll admit, but certainly better than bitching endlessly on Slashdot.
Personally, I find that I don't really need to right-click that much in Mac OS X anyway. The interface is well-designed enough that almost all of what I need to do doesn't require a right click, and frankly, even if Apple offered a two button model, I'd still spring for the one button. I happen to think it's just plain more elegant. YMMV.
I think, though I could be wrong, HFS+ is implemented in Darwin and is therefore open source. Evidence? A few months ago I recall there were some guys who were poking through the Darwin source, and discovered HFS+ optimizes frequently used blocks by moving them towards the platter edge. (IIRC, the code is actually commented with diagrams of little poofs and swooshes... leave it to Apple, I guess.)
I see you're still supporting that hopeless idealist who would call himself President. Tell me, are you doing it out of spite? Would you really want the First Lady to look like a rat*? And lastly, did you or did you not vote for Nader in 2000?
yours
* Don't get me wrong, I love ratty women. But it's just not First Ladylike. Neither is "YAAGH!" presidential.
(redundant) I gotta agree with you about LaunchBar. For those who don't know, LaunchBar is an amazing utility that gives you keyboard access to all your apps, documents, mp3s, address book entries, bookmarks, etc., and it learns shortcuts based on your typing habits. Hit command-space and then type "saf" to launch Safari, hit command-space and type "sd" to go to Slashdot. The best part is you can drag and drop things onto whatever you've typed, and drag things out too. It's the best of both worlds (GUI and CLI).
Well, that's enough shameless ass-kissing for one day...
Forgive me if this is old news to you, but there was once a company called sourceXchange that provided services much like those you describe:
the developer [can] hop over to the RFP (Request For Proposal) section and see if any of the unbid projects are of interest.... Each RFP includes what the contractor is looking for in terms of skills and deliverables and how much the contractor is willing to pay, both in cash and materials.
In the end, the company ultimately ran out of money and went under, as far as I can tell. Still, I hope you find this an interesting historical footnote.
If they have access to OUR jobs, then give me access to THEIR cost of living
Not to be snide, but (assuming I'm understanding your reference) you do have access to their cost of living--just move there.
Of course, in return you'll have to put up with a tidal wave of beggars who will plaintively ask you for tea, and strange public toilets with no toilet paper but a bucket of questionable water. Them's the breaks.
Mod me offtopic for this; I don't care. About your sig. Do you really hope Howard Dean wins the Democratic nomination? I mean, I understand the whole thing about frustration with the current political establishment, and that Dean is supposed to represent a fresh and new kind of politicking, but really--what gives you the impression that he has a snowball's chance in hell against Bush come November? Isn't supporting such a hopeless candidate, when it comes down to it, a selfish, spiteful way of expressing this frustration?
Did you vote for Nader in 2000?
I sincerely look forward to your reply, because I really am curious to know what your thoughts are.
Regarding overpopulation, people (in the West) have been sounding the same tired alarm for centuries, and they've always been wrong in the end. Personally, I don't see any reason why the world can't support 20, 30, 40 billion people in an environmentally sustainable fashion, especially given recent and continuing advances in agriculture and medicine. I think the grandparent poster is right--it's a social and political problem, not a technological one. Humanity is a hell of a lot more resilient than people think.
I guess it's one of those "640K should be enough for anybody" things.
That said, I think it'd be a great idea to go populate the rest of the universe and subject other worlds to the same kinds of ecological damage we've supposedly perpetrated here on Earth...:)
yours
Re:Why are people still using IE? Firebird rocks.
on
Mozilla 1.6 Released
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· Score: 1
You're absolutely right. I imagine Mozilla and Firebird are all right on other platforms, but they absolutely suck on Mac, not least from a UI and aesthetics perspective, although they're also a pain to configure and use. It seems that the latest Firebird build actually tries to imitate Aqua controls by redrawing them from scratch. Of course it gets it subtly (but completely) wrong, and therefore looks like shit.
I have to agree with Apple--Safari's the best browser on any platform.
I understand what you're saying, but as far as the consumer is concerned, the consumer product is the master lossless copy.
That's true, but my point was that technologies like AAC can reproduce the original signal more accurately, at any given bitrate, than a so-called "lossless" encoding like FLAC. Whether that original signal is a high-bitrate master or an analog soundwave is sort of beside the point.
Suppose you encode a ten minute song with FLAC at 44.1kHz/16 bit (downsampled from the original), and it comes out to 50 megabytes. Assuming you had the original master available to work with, you could have preserved the signal much more accurately with an AAC at 669 kbits/sec, which is what the size of that FLAC works out to.
As you say, of course, most consumers don't have access to the original master. But that's no reason to proclaim that "lossless" encoding is the be-all and end-all of audio compression. If recording studios released music compressed from the original masters with AAC at 669 kbit/sec, the accuracy of sound reproduction would definitely beat FLAC at the same bitrate.
Actually, the original master copy is stored at a significantly higher bitrate than 44kHz/16 bit CD quality--this needs to be the case for accurate mixing and editing--so you're already losing fidelity by downsampling to CD. In other words, CD quality is not lossless. An AAC file (for instance) made from the original master might actually be "truer" to the original signal than the CD, since the AAC encoder preserves the most "important" information while the CD tosses frequencies indiscriminately above 22kHz.
Of course, you'd have to encode from the original master to get better fidelity than the CD (this is what the iTunes Music Store engineers are doing, IIRC). The point is that if you want to store your music "losslessly" with better potential fidelity than AAC/MP3/etc., it's going to take a lot more disk space than you think.
Also, I disagree that "the only thing holding lossless back is bandwidth and disk space." Show me a hard disk that can hold ten thousand tunes encoded with FLAC (at the same fidelity as the original master), and I'll show you one that can hold ten million encoded with AAC. For the same price!
Fortunately, Photoshop comes with shortcut keys assigned to the most commonly-used tools and operations. These are not hard to learn, but if I want to change them, I can go to Apple menu -> System Preferences, click on Keyboard, and change my keyboard shortcuts there (bindings can be set on a per-application basis). Point being, why would I want to mess with the GIMP and its rc files when I could just get down to work using Photoshop?
Even if I was happy with The GIMP's keybindings, I still wouldn't be able to use it, since as of the last time I checked (last month), its interface is just devastatingly ugly. Sorry, but it's true. Perhaps I just don't know how to install a non-ugly window manager, but I don't want to have to read 50 pages of documentation just to get a decent window manager up and running on X11 or whatever it is.
Working with Photoshop can be a pain, but at least Photoshop doesn't make me feel like I'm working in a concrete cellblock. The GIMP's interface saps me of all inspiration, and that's a much bigger problem than the keybindings.
On a more serious note, the perception that the Gimp has a terrible user interface is a fallacy. Most people who complain are Photoshop users. D'uh! It's got a different UI to Photoshop, try using it for more than 5 minutes and you'll find that it's quite a nifty UI that is arguably better.
You're in denial. The GIMP's interface is terrible. It's not just about toolbars, button placements, key equivalents--though those things matter too--it's about the overall look and feel and consistency of the application. It's about the comfortable feeling you get from some applications (Photoshop) but not others (The GIMP) that the interface was designed with you in mind. Speaking for myself, the atmosphere of The GIMP simply isn't conducive to my creativity the way Photoshop is--it just doesn't inspire me to be creative. Until The GIMP fixes that, and I don't pretend to know how that might happen, I'll stick with Photoshop.
I know it's poor form to reply to your own post, but I'm dying of curiosity. Has anyone actually seen any cost/benefit analyses to determine the effects of the Big Dig, as outlined above? I'd be very interested.
But in any case, it's a waste of your money and mine...
The project is expected to improve property values across the entire Boston metro area, not to mention add (reclaim, really) 30 acres of prime real estate in downtown. Property tax revenue is going to soar, and the secondary effects of improved real estate (people going out more, spending more at restaurants, etc.) are going to be even bigger.
The Big Dig might actually end up paying for itself, and sooner than you think.
I'll humor you, but you're still not presenting a consistent philosophy. As you say, governments organize in order to secure certain rights that would otherwise be hard to guarantee. So while the private ownership of physical property may well be a "natural" concept, according to your definition of that word, the enforcement of property rights isn't (since enforcement is a consequence of government). Yet we consider this enforcement useful anyway, right? And that's why we do it.
Meanwhile, the private ownership of intellectual property is not a "natural" concept (again, according to your imprecise definition). But the thing is... whether or not it's "natural" is irrelevant. The real question is: Given that it's an incredibly useful construct, why should we not invent it and enforce it? Said enforcement, after all, would be no more unnatural than the enforcement of private property rights, for the reasons outlined above.
The inventor of insulin for diabeeties, nearly got into a fight to the death because they wanted to hold back his discovery untill they secured key patents
That's an interesting claim, but my few minutes of Googling failed to turn up anything remotely like that. I'm not saying you don't know what you're talking about, but can you provide a source? In any case, patents don't actually work that way.
Maybe I don't have an incentive to create AIDS drugs unless I can lock out children in Africa dying of AIDS from getting generics? maybe I don't have an incentive to grow cotton unless I can own slaves on the plantation? - The notion that incentive or systems define property rights is really screwed up.
Hey brother, nobody said the world wasn't a screwed-up place. Basically, we face a choice between:
A society that enforces intellectual property rights and produces AIDS drugs, but only for limited distribution.
A society that has no system for protecting intellectual property, and consequently never comes up with AIDS drugs for anybody.
A "screwed-up" choice indeed, but we must decide. If you ask me, I'd say that choice 1 is preferable to 2. But you're welcome to disagree. You'd be wrong, but you're also welcome to be wrong.
yours
(By the way, what the hell does slavery have to do with this discussion?)
Slashdot Mirror
How about a Kerry/Edwards ticket? That's what I'm crossing my fingers for, now that Kerry/McCain seems unlikely.
"your opinion is irrelevant and your contribution worthless"
OhHH! Now you've done it. I've hated Dean and his muppet candidacy since long before his unholy squeal after his trouncing in Iowa, but I do happen to agree with you that it was blown entirely out of proportion (he was trying to energize a bunch of disappointed kids... sure, that's understandable.)
But I also think he was sort of asking for the negative attention--I mean, he'd spent the day criticizing the media for building up expectations for him. Now the media, when criticized, just love to find a way to strike back, and of course they pounced on him as soon as he did something a little silly. That the Doctor failed to understand this simple law of politics is an indication (like we needed any more) that if elected President, he wouldn't survive a day in Washington.
In fact, we wouldn't have to worry about his becoming President to begin with, since if he won the nomination the Democrats would be doomed come November--not only as far as the presidency goes, but as the most visible figure in the party he'd also manage to cripple the campaigns of dozens of Democratic senators and congresspersons running for (re)election, just by virtue of the fact that he is unelectable. He's likable, I'll grant you that, but in order to learn to like him you really have to spend some time watching him on TV and reading interviews with him, and even then I think most people would have to give him the benefit of the doubt to understand his rather oddball brand of enthusiasm.
And yes, electability is a significant issue in this campaign, and all campaigns for that matter. There could be a candidate out there who matches my views on every single issue, and I still wouldn't vote for him or her unless there were a realistic chance he or she could beat Bush.
Finally, to me, your leaden response to what (I'll admit) was essentially a tongue-in-cheek troll only serves as further proof that Dean supporters take the Doctor's candidacy waaay too seriously. People in that campaign just can't take a joke. Plus, they need to shower more often.
yours
PS. You want my real opinion? Raw and uncensored? People who support Dean are naive, idealistic college students who have never participated in the mainstream political process before, and by and large are propelling the Doctor forward because it's the cool thing to do. There was this Deaniac they interviewed on CNN a couple weeks ago who said something like, "I'm out here in Iowa because all my friends are here. It seemed like it would be fun and I'd get to meet a lot of cool people." Please. Give me a fucking break.
If it really bothers you that much you can always download something like SideTrack and assign trackpad tap to left click and thumb button to right click. Not an ideal solution if you're hellbent on having a separate button, I'll admit, but certainly better than bitching endlessly on Slashdot.
Personally, I find that I don't really need to right-click that much in Mac OS X anyway. The interface is well-designed enough that almost all of what I need to do doesn't require a right click, and frankly, even if Apple offered a two button model, I'd still spring for the one button. I happen to think it's just plain more elegant. YMMV.
yours
I think, though I could be wrong, HFS+ is implemented in Darwin and is therefore open source. Evidence? A few months ago I recall there were some guys who were poking through the Darwin source, and discovered HFS+ optimizes frequently used blocks by moving them towards the platter edge. (IIRC, the code is actually commented with diagrams of little poofs and swooshes... leave it to Apple, I guess.)
yours
I see you're still supporting that hopeless idealist who would call himself President. Tell me, are you doing it out of spite? Would you really want the First Lady to look like a rat*? And lastly, did you or did you not vote for Nader in 2000?
yours
* Don't get me wrong, I love ratty women. But it's just not First Ladylike. Neither is "YAAGH!" presidential.
(redundant) I gotta agree with you about LaunchBar. For those who don't know, LaunchBar is an amazing utility that gives you keyboard access to all your apps, documents, mp3s, address book entries, bookmarks, etc., and it learns shortcuts based on your typing habits. Hit command-space and then type "saf" to launch Safari, hit command-space and type "sd" to go to Slashdot. The best part is you can drag and drop things onto whatever you've typed, and drag things out too. It's the best of both worlds (GUI and CLI).
Well, that's enough shameless ass-kissing for one day...
yours
Forgive me if this is old news to you, but there was once a company called sourceXchange that provided services much like those you describe:
In the end, the company ultimately ran out of money and went under, as far as I can tell. Still, I hope you find this an interesting historical footnote.
yours
Nice!
(offtopic)
If they have access to OUR jobs, then give me access to THEIR cost of living
Not to be snide, but (assuming I'm understanding your reference) you do have access to their cost of living--just move there.
Of course, in return you'll have to put up with a tidal wave of beggars who will plaintively ask you for tea, and strange public toilets with no toilet paper but a bucket of questionable water. Them's the breaks.
Mod me offtopic for this; I don't care. About your sig. Do you really hope Howard Dean wins the Democratic nomination? I mean, I understand the whole thing about frustration with the current political establishment, and that Dean is supposed to represent a fresh and new kind of politicking, but really--what gives you the impression that he has a snowball's chance in hell against Bush come November? Isn't supporting such a hopeless candidate, when it comes down to it, a selfish, spiteful way of expressing this frustration?
Did you vote for Nader in 2000?
I sincerely look forward to your reply, because I really am curious to know what your thoughts are.
yours
Regarding overpopulation, people (in the West) have been sounding the same tired alarm for centuries, and they've always been wrong in the end. Personally, I don't see any reason why the world can't support 20, 30, 40 billion people in an environmentally sustainable fashion, especially given recent and continuing advances in agriculture and medicine. I think the grandparent poster is right--it's a social and political problem, not a technological one. Humanity is a hell of a lot more resilient than people think.
:)
I guess it's one of those "640K should be enough for anybody" things.
That said, I think it'd be a great idea to go populate the rest of the universe and subject other worlds to the same kinds of ecological damage we've supposedly perpetrated here on Earth...
yours
You're absolutely right. I imagine Mozilla and Firebird are all right on other platforms, but they absolutely suck on Mac, not least from a UI and aesthetics perspective, although they're also a pain to configure and use. It seems that the latest Firebird build actually tries to imitate Aqua controls by redrawing them from scratch. Of course it gets it subtly (but completely) wrong, and therefore looks like shit.
I have to agree with Apple--Safari's the best browser on any platform.
</macfanboymode>
yours
I understand what you're saying, but as far as the consumer is concerned, the consumer product is the master lossless copy.
That's true, but my point was that technologies like AAC can reproduce the original signal more accurately, at any given bitrate, than a so-called "lossless" encoding like FLAC. Whether that original signal is a high-bitrate master or an analog soundwave is sort of beside the point.
Suppose you encode a ten minute song with FLAC at 44.1kHz/16 bit (downsampled from the original), and it comes out to 50 megabytes. Assuming you had the original master available to work with, you could have preserved the signal much more accurately with an AAC at 669 kbits/sec, which is what the size of that FLAC works out to.
As you say, of course, most consumers don't have access to the original master. But that's no reason to proclaim that "lossless" encoding is the be-all and end-all of audio compression. If recording studios released music compressed from the original masters with AAC at 669 kbit/sec, the accuracy of sound reproduction would definitely beat FLAC at the same bitrate.
yours
Actually, the original master copy is stored at a significantly higher bitrate than 44kHz/16 bit CD quality--this needs to be the case for accurate mixing and editing--so you're already losing fidelity by downsampling to CD. In other words, CD quality is not lossless. An AAC file (for instance) made from the original master might actually be "truer" to the original signal than the CD, since the AAC encoder preserves the most "important" information while the CD tosses frequencies indiscriminately above 22kHz.
Of course, you'd have to encode from the original master to get better fidelity than the CD (this is what the iTunes Music Store engineers are doing, IIRC). The point is that if you want to store your music "losslessly" with better potential fidelity than AAC/MP3/etc., it's going to take a lot more disk space than you think.
Also, I disagree that "the only thing holding lossless back is bandwidth and disk space." Show me a hard disk that can hold ten thousand tunes encoded with FLAC (at the same fidelity as the original master), and I'll show you one that can hold ten million encoded with AAC. For the same price!
yours
Fortunately, Photoshop comes with shortcut keys assigned to the most commonly-used tools and operations. These are not hard to learn, but if I want to change them, I can go to Apple menu -> System Preferences, click on Keyboard, and change my keyboard shortcuts there (bindings can be set on a per-application basis). Point being, why would I want to mess with the GIMP and its rc files when I could just get down to work using Photoshop?
Even if I was happy with The GIMP's keybindings, I still wouldn't be able to use it, since as of the last time I checked (last month), its interface is just devastatingly ugly. Sorry, but it's true. Perhaps I just don't know how to install a non-ugly window manager, but I don't want to have to read 50 pages of documentation just to get a decent window manager up and running on X11 or whatever it is.
Working with Photoshop can be a pain, but at least Photoshop doesn't make me feel like I'm working in a concrete cellblock. The GIMP's interface saps me of all inspiration, and that's a much bigger problem than the keybindings.
It's not my fault I have a sense of taste. Fucker.
You're in denial. The GIMP's interface is terrible. It's not just about toolbars, button placements, key equivalents--though those things matter too--it's about the overall look and feel and consistency of the application. It's about the comfortable feeling you get from some applications (Photoshop) but not others (The GIMP) that the interface was designed with you in mind. Speaking for myself, the atmosphere of The GIMP simply isn't conducive to my creativity the way Photoshop is--it just doesn't inspire me to be creative. Until The GIMP fixes that, and I don't pretend to know how that might happen, I'll stick with Photoshop.
How intuitive!
You're in denial. Until you snap out of it, there'll be no hope for The GIMP.
Yes. It prevented me from opening the file or even pasting it in.
I know it's poor form to reply to your own post, but I'm dying of curiosity. Has anyone actually seen any cost/benefit analyses to determine the effects of the Big Dig, as outlined above? I'd be very interested.
yours
But in any case, it's a waste of your money and mine...
The project is expected to improve property values across the entire Boston metro area, not to mention add (reclaim, really) 30 acres of prime real estate in downtown. Property tax revenue is going to soar, and the secondary effects of improved real estate (people going out more, spending more at restaurants, etc.) are going to be even bigger.
The Big Dig might actually end up paying for itself, and sooner than you think.
yours
Solution: Move to New York. Permanently.
Well, see, Steve tells me to buy, so I buy. It's that simple.
I'll humor you, but you're still not presenting a consistent philosophy. As you say, governments organize in order to secure certain rights that would otherwise be hard to guarantee. So while the private ownership of physical property may well be a "natural" concept, according to your definition of that word, the enforcement of property rights isn't (since enforcement is a consequence of government). Yet we consider this enforcement useful anyway, right? And that's why we do it.
Meanwhile, the private ownership of intellectual property is not a "natural" concept (again, according to your imprecise definition). But the thing is... whether or not it's "natural" is irrelevant. The real question is: Given that it's an incredibly useful construct, why should we not invent it and enforce it? Said enforcement, after all, would be no more unnatural than the enforcement of private property rights, for the reasons outlined above.
That's an interesting claim, but my few minutes of Googling failed to turn up anything remotely like that. I'm not saying you don't know what you're talking about, but can you provide a source? In any case, patents don't actually work that way.
Hey brother, nobody said the world wasn't a screwed-up place. Basically, we face a choice between:
A "screwed-up" choice indeed, but we must decide. If you ask me, I'd say that choice 1 is preferable to 2. But you're welcome to disagree. You'd be wrong, but you're also welcome to be wrong.
yours
(By the way, what the hell does slavery have to do with this discussion?)