Thanks for the ideas. My collection works out to around 22GB at present, so not too far from yours size-wise. I'll definitely have a look at gstreamer; that rings a faint bell somewhere.
And that song dropping issue, I think it has to do with Rhythmbox updating its song database regardless of whether or not you've told it to actively scan any folder. On the up side, it was annoying enough to prompt me to track down a race condition in how my DHCP server was set up on my router that would sporadically leave my NFS share unmounted...
Good to know about Juk and Amarok, if a bit disappointing. All the same, I just recently downloaded the new Mandriva, which I gather is still using KDE as the default, so I might give it a spin just to see.
Have you figured out how to get it to play a sizable playlist of music files in multiple different formats, without choking?
Running whatever the most updated version is for Ubuntu 9.04 (have downloaded 9.10, haven't had time to install just yet).
I can't figure why, but every time I just set it to play my full collection, or even a sizable subset thereof, Rhythmbox will inevitably choke at the start of playback of some song (different songs all the time) at no regular interval. I can't tell for sure, but it might be when it moves on from one file to another in a different format. I've got mostly mp3s, some m4as, and a sprinkling of oggs. Rhythmbox thinks it's playing -- the Play button up top is still shown as pressed -- but no output. Pausing and playing again does nothing. Stopping and playing again does nothing except make Rhythmbox hang, from which it might or might not recover, only to sit there again and do nothing. Quitting and then trying to play the same file will make it work again, but that's a drag when the whole point of what you're trying to do is to get it to play a long playlist with no intervention.:(
So I've got to ask, does this have any synchronic significance with the recent 40-year anniversary of Sesame Street recently splashed around Google's main page?
Hmm... "This episode brought to you by the letters P, L, and I, and the number pi!":)
Yes, as things currently stand in most of *nix land, +x on a directory simply allows you to enter it. Apple has added some other magic to make the "directory" executable, as it were, probably by executing a specifically-named file therein. I'm not familiar enough with OSX to know what that might be...
Good example for using cp where a default -r would screw things up; thank you for that.
Try adding David Grisman to a station you've created based on classic rock. Might not rock out as much as you're used to (almost 100% acoustic, since he's a mandoline player), but the man is a genius.
Wow, Grisman would *have* to be a genius to play the mandoline musically, as that's a kitchen gizmo for slicing things. But then I have heard him play the (no "e") mandolin, and yes, the man is a genius, or at the very least extremely much more talented than I am.:) Heck, I think there's even an established style of mando playing named after him -- sure enough, his Wiki article makes mention of "Dawg Music".
Whatever he's playing though, it'll probably sound pretty damn good.
My objection is that any such hierarchy of data could be stored as files.
Linux needs tools so that a directory can be manipulated as a file more easily. For instance cp/mv/etc should pretty much act like -r/-a is on all the time, and such recursive operations should be provided by libc and the kernel by default. Then programs are free to treat any point in the hierarchy as a "file". A fat binary would just be a bunch of binaries stuck in the same directory, and you would run it by exec of the directory itself.
I've often wondered about that -- what usefulness is there in trying to mv or cp a populated directory *without* the -r/-a flags? Is this some Unix appendix, a leftover with no remaining useful function? Or is there some residual utility in requiring the flags, that I'm simply unaware of? Seriously, if anyone has any insight, by all means please post it.
And being able to set a directory itself as executable (such that the contents are run) sounds an awful lot like what Apple's done with their.app packages -- but there I have to wonder if there might not be some security implications.
Can you remind me again of the advantages of such fat binaries over a tar/deb/rpm file with multiple binaries? Thank you.
icebraining here brings up a very salient point -- if the whole reason for fat binaries is simply distributing multiple versions of application X, one for each target platform, all in one package, it seems to me that we already *have* such a mechanism...
Which leads me to ask, what am I missing here? Or is the FatELF project really a solution in search of a problem?
The one point they missed then and now is, that the network coverage is carp...
I knew I smelled something fishy.
But in all seriousness, yah, this Litl sure won't fly with me -- not least as I live in the boonies. Wi-Max? Fuhgeddaboudit. Even cell phone coverage only happens when the weather's right and my wife doesn't open the fridge or turn on the microwave. Just before dinner while we're cooking is really a bad time to call me -- which at least helps weed out a lot of telemarketers.:)
The number of voters represented by each congressman.
Seriously, have a look. A fascinating take on how the basic structure of our no-longer-so-representational government has changed over the years, watering down the significance of any single member of the electorate.
Just as you would expect, the local warlords use all the money from this revenue to buy guns, which allows them to control the market completely. Now the region is free of government control...
Hm, sure sounds like government control to me, albeit at a more basic, primal state -- the warlords *are* the government. Perhaps you mean something more like "free of control by any internationally / diplomatically recognized governing entity"?
Not razzing here, just pointing out that groups of armed people making the rules is pretty much the standard definition of a "government". There are refined governments, with things like bureaucracies and forms to fill out, and the more basic, no-frills models, where men with weapons tell you straight up what you can and cannot do, sometimes without bothering with niceties such as words.
ranging from 768 kbps for $20 / month to 15 Mbps for $57 / month
When I moved to Japan in autumn 2002, the lowest tier with the least service was about $30/month for 12mbps.
When I left Japan in summer 2005, my service had been upgraded at no additional cost, still in the lowest tier, to 18mbps, and that was very soon to be phased out for 24mbps.
Correlation, causation, and all that, but it's worth noting that there's a lot more competition for internet access there than just about anywhere I've seen or heard about in the US.
(And before anyone brings out that tired old argument about population densities, explain why the major US cities -- which are quite densely populated -- still don't have widely available and similarly inexpensive broadband. And yet Finland does.)
Oh, no, I fully agree -- Sony, Starforce, et al are excellent examples. In my previous post, I don't mean to imply that TC is in any way *needed* to implement DRM. It simply makes things easier to implement and easier to hide, and it is in that sense that I call it an enabling technology.
To me TC isn't taking your freedoms away, the applications using it are.
Yet, it is precisely TC that enables those applications to restrict your freedoms; without TC, there would not be such restrictions.
This is the same reason certain other classes of items are subject to regulation: weapons, encryption, chemicals, etc. It is not the thing itself that is problemmatic -- the trouble comes from what other people do with that thing.
FWIW, many years ago I attended a College of Pharmacy. It wasn't until just over 4 years into the program that I realized I didn't want to work in the industry for ethical reasons. The thing that got me the most... the pharma industry, including the colleges, described "quality of life" to be the biggest issue. Not curing disease, not curing underlying causes... but maintenance treatment of symptoms, and underlying causes of those symptoms.
Good for you for holding to your sense of ethics (I'm interpreting your comment to mean that you do not work in pharmaceuticals). That takes a lot of guts, and considerable bull-headedness. Maith thú (good on you)!
Helping my wife deal with her varied health issues over the years (sinusitis, food allergies, asthma, appendicitis, over-prescribed antibiotics, etc.), I've had fun seeing both the Western pharmaceutical machine in action, and traditional Chinese pharmacology as practiced in Japan, California, and now Washington state. Suffice it to say that I have very little faith in the pharmaceutical industry.
One example: For her asthma, the Western medical system prescribed the so-called "hockey puck" regimen of inhaled corticosteroids. Reading around, there seems to be a growing body of evidence that these drugs do well to keep symptoms maintained, but that they may also ultimately worsen the underlying asthmatic condition, such that when an asthma attack *does* happen, it's significantly worse than for people not taking these drugs.
Meanwhile, the Chinese pharmacist we had found (actually a Japanese woman, but trained in the Chinese pharmacological tradition) prescribed changes in diet (avoiding sugars, avoiding fungi including yeast) combined with a custom-mixed powder she compounded in the back during our visit. She explained that the theory is to gradually adjust the body back into a healthier equilibrium, and as such, the medicine would have a slower effect compared to Western drugs, but also ultimately become unneeded. And she was right -- after several months and various changes to the mix, my wife's asthma grew progressively less severe, until our pharmacist judged the medicine unneeded. By now (knock on wood), my wife hasn't had an asthma attack in over a year -- and the last one she had was when she had gone back to eating sugared foods.
Sure, YMMV, anecdotes, and all that, yada yada. Take it for what it's worth.:)
Cheers,
Ret's Belly Guddo Engrish!!
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
My favorite T-shirt design (emblazoned across some teeny-bopper girl's chest in the north of Japan):
I speak Japanese, but thought "Caizen" = Chinese
on
KDE 4.3 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm fluent in Japanese; I earn my bread and butter by translating Japanese documents into English. But this "Caizen" silliness had me scratching my head wondering what Chinese word it was supposed to be. "C" followed by a vowel is the usual romanization from Chinese for a "ts" sound plus a vowel. Meanwhile, unless someone's trying to get cute, the hard "K" sound in Japanese words is always romanized as a "K". Given too the KDE project's tendency to use "K"s in software titles, the deliberate non-"K"-ness of "Caizen" made me think they must be trying to spell something pronounced without a hard "K" sound.
Can anyone more familiar with the rocket design explain this perplexing quote?
This is how it works: The launch vehicle takes off like a plane, carrying the spaceship between twin booms; once it gets to a certain height, the spaceship drops from the launch vehicle, firing its hybrid nitrous oxide and rubber rocket engine to climb vertically at almost four times the speed of sound; once it reaches 62 miles - the edge of space - it floats back down and uses its wings like a badminton shuttlecock to re-enter the atmosphere and land like a plane.
The previous Slashdot thread included the tidbit that the first noctilucent clouds mentioned in recorded history were in 1887 (also noted here). So unless someone was using hydrogen-oxygen rocketry almost a full century before the first shuttle launch, it would seem that they are not purely anthropogenic.
My memory's a little fizzy^Wfuzzy, but they have a number of similar products in Japan and Korea, with some having been developed almost a century ago. About the only differences I can think of are generally less sugar (or at least not so oh-my-god-sweet), and no carbonation -- though a number of the drinks are acidic and fermenty enough to seem almost carbonated.
Genetics in robots is basically hard-coded or predefined information.
... except when we're trying to model mental illness, and we don't know all the many genetic factors (let alone environmental ones -- diet, allergies, etc.) that might come into play. That's one of my bigger beefs with this Markram guy -- his whole premise rests on modeling, but to accurately model anything, you have to know at least most of what's going on, and with mental illness, we really have only the faintest glimmerings of a clue as to what's going on. The more you deal with corner cases, the more accurate your model needs to be to get an accurate understanding -- and mental illnesses are certainly the corner cases.
I certainly wish the effort good luck, but I won't be holding my breath that they find the "cure" to all mental illness. My less cynical and more realistic hope is that they help establish a solid foundation for future modeling efforts.
Slashdot Mirror
Oo, scriptability sounds fun. Thanks! I'll definitely take a look at mpd.
Cheers,
Thanks for the ideas. My collection works out to around 22GB at present, so not too far from yours size-wise. I'll definitely have a look at gstreamer; that rings a faint bell somewhere.
And that song dropping issue, I think it has to do with Rhythmbox updating its song database regardless of whether or not you've told it to actively scan any folder. On the up side, it was annoying enough to prompt me to track down a race condition in how my DHCP server was set up on my router that would sporadically leave my NFS share unmounted...
Good to know about Juk and Amarok, if a bit disappointing. All the same, I just recently downloaded the new Mandriva, which I gather is still using KDE as the default, so I might give it a spin just to see.
Cheers,
Have you figured out how to get it to play a sizable playlist of music files in multiple different formats, without choking?
Running whatever the most updated version is for Ubuntu 9.04 (have downloaded 9.10, haven't had time to install just yet).
I can't figure why, but every time I just set it to play my full collection, or even a sizable subset thereof, Rhythmbox will inevitably choke at the start of playback of some song (different songs all the time) at no regular interval. I can't tell for sure, but it might be when it moves on from one file to another in a different format. I've got mostly mp3s, some m4as, and a sprinkling of oggs. Rhythmbox thinks it's playing -- the Play button up top is still shown as pressed -- but no output. Pausing and playing again does nothing. Stopping and playing again does nothing except make Rhythmbox hang, from which it might or might not recover, only to sit there again and do nothing. Quitting and then trying to play the same file will make it work again, but that's a drag when the whole point of what you're trying to do is to get it to play a long playlist with no intervention. :(
Anyway, curious if you have any ideas.
Cheers,
Shouldn't that be G,ooo,ooo? Or perhaps the first "o" for the zeroth release, so the upcoming first release will be Gone? :)
Cheers,
So I've got to ask, does this have any synchronic significance with the recent 40-year anniversary of Sesame Street recently splashed around Google's main page?
Hmm... "This episode brought to you by the letters P, L, and I, and the number pi!" :)
Cheers,
Hello goose-incarnated, thanks for the reply --
Yes, as things currently stand in most of *nix land, +x on a directory simply allows you to enter it. Apple has added some other magic to make the "directory" executable, as it were, probably by executing a specifically-named file therein. I'm not familiar enough with OSX to know what that might be...
Good example for using cp where a default -r would screw things up; thank you for that.
Cheers,
Wow, Grisman would *have* to be a genius to play the mandoline musically, as that's a kitchen gizmo for slicing things. But then I have heard him play the (no "e") mandolin, and yes, the man is a genius, or at the very least extremely much more talented than I am. :) Heck, I think there's even an established style of mando playing named after him -- sure enough, his Wiki article makes mention of "Dawg Music".
Whatever he's playing though, it'll probably sound pretty damn good.
Cheers,
I've often wondered about that -- what usefulness is there in trying to mv or cp a populated directory *without* the -r/-a flags? Is this some Unix appendix, a leftover with no remaining useful function? Or is there some residual utility in requiring the flags, that I'm simply unaware of? Seriously, if anyone has any insight, by all means please post it.
And being able to set a directory itself as executable (such that the contents are run) sounds an awful lot like what Apple's done with their .app packages -- but there I have to wonder if there might not be some security implications.
Cheers,
icebraining here brings up a very salient point -- if the whole reason for fat binaries is simply distributing multiple versions of application X, one for each target platform, all in one package, it seems to me that we already *have* such a mechanism...
Which leads me to ask, what am I missing here? Or is the FatELF project really a solution in search of a problem?
Cheers,
I knew I smelled something fishy.
But in all seriousness, yah, this Litl sure won't fly with me -- not least as I live in the boonies. Wi-Max? Fuhgeddaboudit. Even cell phone coverage only happens when the weather's right and my wife doesn't open the fridge or turn on the microwave. Just before dinner while we're cooking is really a bad time to call me -- which at least helps weed out a lot of telemarketers. :)
Cheers,
Seriously, have a look. A fascinating take on how the basic structure of our no-longer-so-representational government has changed over the years, watering down the significance of any single member of the electorate.
http://www.thirty-thousand.org/
Cheers,
The winter in Poland is already plenty cold enough...
:-P
Cheers,
Hm, sure sounds like government control to me, albeit at a more basic, primal state -- the warlords *are* the government. Perhaps you mean something more like "free of control by any internationally / diplomatically recognized governing entity"?
Not razzing here, just pointing out that groups of armed people making the rules is pretty much the standard definition of a "government". There are refined governments, with things like bureaucracies and forms to fill out, and the more basic, no-frills models, where men with weapons tell you straight up what you can and cannot do, sometimes without bothering with niceties such as words.
Cheers,
Quoted pricing for Cincinnati:
When I moved to Japan in autumn 2002, the lowest tier with the least service was about $30/month for 12mbps.
When I left Japan in summer 2005, my service had been upgraded at no additional cost, still in the lowest tier, to 18mbps, and that was very soon to be phased out for 24mbps.
Correlation, causation, and all that, but it's worth noting that there's a lot more competition for internet access there than just about anywhere I've seen or heard about in the US.
(And before anyone brings out that tired old argument about population densities, explain why the major US cities -- which are quite densely populated -- still don't have widely available and similarly inexpensive broadband. And yet Finland does.)
Cheers,
Oh, no, I fully agree -- Sony, Starforce, et al are excellent examples. In my previous post, I don't mean to imply that TC is in any way *needed* to implement DRM. It simply makes things easier to implement and easier to hide, and it is in that sense that I call it an enabling technology.
Cheers,
Yet, it is precisely TC that enables those applications to restrict your freedoms; without TC, there would not be such restrictions.
This is the same reason certain other classes of items are subject to regulation: weapons, encryption, chemicals, etc. It is not the thing itself that is problemmatic -- the trouble comes from what other people do with that thing.
Cheers,
I dunno what it means, but it sounds unpleasant. And possibly messy. Hmm, better watch where I step... :P
Cheers,
At least post the link... ;)
Cheers,
Good for you for holding to your sense of ethics (I'm interpreting your comment to mean that you do not work in pharmaceuticals). That takes a lot of guts, and considerable bull-headedness. Maith thú (good on you)!
Helping my wife deal with her varied health issues over the years (sinusitis, food allergies, asthma, appendicitis, over-prescribed antibiotics, etc.), I've had fun seeing both the Western pharmaceutical machine in action, and traditional Chinese pharmacology as practiced in Japan, California, and now Washington state. Suffice it to say that I have very little faith in the pharmaceutical industry.
One example: For her asthma, the Western medical system prescribed the so-called "hockey puck" regimen of inhaled corticosteroids. Reading around, there seems to be a growing body of evidence that these drugs do well to keep symptoms maintained, but that they may also ultimately worsen the underlying asthmatic condition, such that when an asthma attack *does* happen, it's significantly worse than for people not taking these drugs.
Meanwhile, the Chinese pharmacist we had found (actually a Japanese woman, but trained in the Chinese pharmacological tradition) prescribed changes in diet (avoiding sugars, avoiding fungi including yeast) combined with a custom-mixed powder she compounded in the back during our visit. She explained that the theory is to gradually adjust the body back into a healthier equilibrium, and as such, the medicine would have a slower effect compared to Western drugs, but also ultimately become unneeded. And she was right -- after several months and various changes to the mix, my wife's asthma grew progressively less severe, until our pharmacist judged the medicine unneeded. By now (knock on wood), my wife hasn't had an asthma attack in over a year -- and the last one she had was when she had gone back to eating sugared foods.
Sure, YMMV, anecdotes, and all that, yada yada. Take it for what it's worth. :)
Cheers,
My favorite T-shirt design (emblazoned across some teeny-bopper girl's chest in the north of Japan):
Taxi Drivers Whip
The Sprinkle Dressing
Gotta love teh Engrish.
Cheers,
I'm fluent in Japanese; I earn my bread and butter by translating Japanese documents into English. But this "Caizen" silliness had me scratching my head wondering what Chinese word it was supposed to be. "C" followed by a vowel is the usual romanization from Chinese for a "ts" sound plus a vowel. Meanwhile, unless someone's trying to get cute, the hard "K" sound in Japanese words is always romanized as a "K". Given too the KDE project's tendency to use "K"s in software titles, the deliberate non-"K"-ness of "Caizen" made me think they must be trying to spell something pronounced without a hard "K" sound.
Silly me; silly them.
Cheers,
Can anyone more familiar with the rocket design explain this perplexing quote?
So, does this thing literally burn rubber? :D
Cheers,
The previous Slashdot thread included the tidbit that the first noctilucent clouds mentioned in recorded history were in 1887 (also noted here). So unless someone was using hydrogen-oxygen rocketry almost a full century before the first shuttle launch, it would seem that they are not purely anthropogenic.
Cheers,
My memory's a little fizzy^Wfuzzy, but they have a number of similar products in Japan and Korea, with some having been developed almost a century ago. About the only differences I can think of are generally less sugar (or at least not so oh-my-god-sweet), and no carbonation -- though a number of the drinks are acidic and fermenty enough to seem almost carbonated.
Cheers,
... except when we're trying to model mental illness, and we don't know all the many genetic factors (let alone environmental ones -- diet, allergies, etc.) that might come into play. That's one of my bigger beefs with this Markram guy -- his whole premise rests on modeling, but to accurately model anything, you have to know at least most of what's going on, and with mental illness, we really have only the faintest glimmerings of a clue as to what's going on. The more you deal with corner cases, the more accurate your model needs to be to get an accurate understanding -- and mental illnesses are certainly the corner cases.
I certainly wish the effort good luck, but I won't be holding my breath that they find the "cure" to all mental illness. My less cynical and more realistic hope is that they help establish a solid foundation for future modeling efforts.
Cheers,