Erm...no, no that wouldn't be similar to/usr/bin./usr/bin is the place where quite a few programs get installed, usually utilities, so it is similar to c:\windows or c:\winnt.
IMO it's more similar to "Program Files" than either "Application Data" or "WINNT".
Any good story has four parts, intro, building, climax, and denoument(sp?)...if you expect Ep. I to have a full story, you totally missed the boat. Ep I was the intro/setup to a lot of background in the dual-trilogy...
So what you're saying is ep 1 is not a good story or movie just by itself. Great, then we're all in agreement.
It is possible to introduce characters and still craft a good movie. I don't think I have to point out the obvious example.
Personally, I'm hyped to see ep II, as it looks to be pretty good. Note that with ep I, I conciously learned nothing about the movie before I saw it. I didn't see any trailers, I didn't see any pics, and I didn't read any reviews. I also like to think the only expectations I had for the movie were that it would fit with the rest of the star wars universe, and not be worse than ROTJ.
When I look for warez/pr0n/movies/music I use IRC before I use ICQ. Which was (I think) the posters original comment, that maybe piracy has dropped because kids aren't using old progs, and a napster for warez doesn't exist.
In fact, I assumed this was standard industry practice. I had been informed that to have a new motherboard windows compatible (not just XP, but any windows) you must be unable to control whether ACPI is enabled/disabled.
I bought my KT7A in April of last year, and got a SB Live, which had so many problems together it behoves me to think about it. The thing that ended up solving it was reinstalling windows without ACPI, since you can't control it in the BIOS anymore...
Re: plz don't make fun of my head brace plz, k?
on
Missing Kernel Patches
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Besides, you operate under the assumption that I haven't contributed anything to the kernel, which would be wrong.
I think the assumption he operates on is that you can't be bothered to go through and submit patches, as you were complaining that someone should to do it.
It's not an issue that people aren't working on the kernel enough, it's that there are too many mad scientists, and not enough henchmen.
And, of course, on top of all of the above is the issue that Joe Sixpack will invariably see 2 GHz as faster than 750 MHz no matter what. Have fun with that one.
Seems like AMD may have let Intel off the hook with this one by starting to label CPU's irrespective of clock speed.
I wouldn't be suprised to see an Intel IT-2500 that's clocked at 750Mhz.
How about getting rid of drive letters in Windows/Dos and having mount points!
I suppose windows isn't fully there, however with 2000 you can mount any partition in a directory, and disconnect the drive mapping. You can still mount a partition to a directory in XP, but I wasn't able to disconnect the drive mapping when I tried.
Technically I guess you still need one drive for C:\, but it's a hell of a lot easier for most windows users if you don't have to teach them all about mount points.
LoTR:FoTR broke the record for largest opening weekend in December.
I don't know if it will beat Potter, but you should remember that the holiday season is hectic, and now that it's quieted down, many people are now finding the time to go see movies again. This should give LoTR good legs at the box office.
The same was true of the dot-com era. There was a suspension of disbelief -- people actually thought we really could provide moon vacations. BTW, I use "rockets" because I suspect that the next overhyped tech bubble is going to space (that, or biotech).
So you're saying I should invest in space and/or biotech now then?
Good luck. I avoided all the trailers for Ep 1. Unfortunately I think I missed the best part of Ep 1, which would be seeing the trailer. First and last time I try to avoid trailers.:)
1) Hear one song on MPEGRadio that sounds cool. Portishead's "Glory Box," to cite a real-life instance. That song was six years old when I heard it for the first time; I'm damned sure not going to stumble across it on eMpTyV or what passes for Top-40 radio ("All Britney, All The Time") these days.
As a somewhat odd occurance, I saw the video for Glory Box not more than 1 week ago on MTV. Granted it was MTV Europe, and it was at 3:00am.:)
Now if you want 'steal' some stuff you'll never hear on the radio or MTV, 'steal' some Quasimoto, some Delarosa and Asora, or some DJ Statik.
In case anyone didn't notice, Final Fantasy has thus far bombed. A 3 week take of only $30 million domestically for a movie which reportedly cost $130+ million to make does not spell well for Square financially.
Hopefully FF:TSW will get most of it's money back when it comes to international and DVD markets, however I can't imagine this bodes well for the future of photorealistic movies. (or maybe it just doesn't bode well for the future of Square movies)
When you buy a car, do you buy a car with a steering wheel from a Mercedes, an engine from a Ford, brakes from a Toyota?.
When you buy a car from Ford do you have to use a Ford stereo? Is there a component in the stereo which is used by your anti-lock brakes, so that if you don't own a Ford(tm) stereo your ABS will not work? Sure, you could install a second stereo with better features, but why bother if you must have the Ford one as well.
Since I'm a karma whore, and it seems like a lot of these replies are by people who don't know what goes on with mp3s, heres the gist:
I'm going to assume everyone understands that an audio file (mp3 or wave) is a series of frames, where each frame has information about the decibel level of every frequency which makes up that frame (if you're thinking in terms of Amplitude-vs-Frequency). MP3 compression works because of a principle of psychoacoustics called 'frequency masking'. The basic idea is that in your frame, if your amplitude at 440hz is 80db, then that loud sound will mask all frequencies between 430hz & 450hz. (these numbers are all made up, they are only used to illustrate the basic idea).
Now, to the original comment that said '[t]he amount of data that is lost in MP3 compression is tiny', that's full of shit. MP3s @ 128kbps compress wavs about 1:10 or 1:11. Now as for the _meaningfull_ data lost, that's a matter of opinion. Now, the bitrate of an MP3 (128/160/192/etc) is used to denote how much space is allocated the 44100 frames (1 second of music @ 44.1khz). The problem with MP3s is that encoders don't make judgements on when to stop getting rid of information based on how their frequency masks will effect sound, they simply keep cutting the most masked sounds until they get to 128kbps.
For some songs, this makes little difference, because frequency wise, they may not be very complex (and hence not effected by the frequency masks). For some songs (esp those with a lot of range, ie classical music), this encoding turns the music from beautiful to crap.
I'm a big proponent of Variable Bitrate Encoding (VBR) because you can set the quality you want the output file to have (low, med, high) and the encoder will make frequency masks of different sizes for each frame depending on how much space it needs. This obviously makes much more sense, as fixed bitrate encoding requires the same amount of information to convey silence as it does a crescendo.
PS. To the person complaining that mp3s cut off frequencies above 20khz, you aren't going to get any better with cds. CDs are 16bit/44.1khz. A refresh rate of 44.1khz will only detect frequencies up to 22.05khz (which is used so that there is no clipping when you have a 20khz sound. it doesn't actually store meaningful information above 20khz). Now there are some encoders which cut off above 16khz. _Those_ are shit.
Roger ebert also gave Tomb Raider 3 out of 4 stars.
I also havn't seen him give a new release less than 2 stars in a few weeks (I check his reviews every week). Maybe he's just seen a lot of good movies recently.
Or maybe Disney has finally perfected Ebertbot1.0.
are filled with ads. Open up any newspaper, and take a look at how much of each page is advertising. Probably 1/2 or more of each issue. As much as it sucks that advertising is coming to the web, IMO it's still not nearly as obtrusive as print ads which take up the first 17 pages of a magazine.
Outrage that things aren't like they were 2 years ago is pretty futile. VC isn't paying the bills anymore (for most sites), and I'd rather see an X10 ad than see the site go under. The only thing that bothers me is that I don't think pop-ups are any more effective at enticing buyers than banner ads. Skyscrapers which run down the side of the entire article are IMO the most eye catching.
Re:Wasn't the suit in federal court?
on
Fortune on Rambus
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· Score: 1
I believe the cap is on punative damages. Not total damages. If I'm not mistaken (but I'm pretty certain I am), punitive damages are to punish the offending company, and have nothing to with your (as the plantiff's) losses.
For all those who are continuing the rumour that Kevin Smith cut TPE:
Friday, May 18, 2001
Kevin's Non-Involvement In Star Wars: The Phantom Edit
Just a quick word about that news that's appearing on TheForce.Net today (and has resulted in no less than 50 e-mails at least in the inbox today) regarding the Star Wars Episode 1.1: The Phantom Edit (story originally appeared on Editorsnet by author Erin Lauten. Apparently, a mysterious video cassette containing a re-edited version of George Lucas' "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" has started circulating around Hollywood. Why is this relevant here, do you ask? Well, folks are theorizing that the tape itself may have been a project of Kevin Smith's.
We contacted Kevin about this immediately, who assures us that while he's had nothing to do with the project, he HAS seen a copy and can confirm that is does exist. Interesting. So, who's got a copy they wanna pass along? Drop us a line! There ya have it, folks.
Taken from newsaskew.com, about the most reliable news source about Kevin Smith.
Perhaps I'm biased cause Perl is what I've been using for a while, but I think Perl would be a fantastic language to learn programming. The big reason for this is the Perl philosophy: TIMTOWTDI (There's more than one way to do it). As learning programming goes, I think Perl is a great choice because of this.
Perl 5 is fully object oriented, but only if you want it to be. I find Java is too bulky of a programming language to be truly effective as a teaching language. There is too much stuff you must learn before you can get anything of any use done. Perl is great because you can jump right in very easily, and write low complexity programs quickly. (one liners anyone?)
Perl also has probably the best set of standardized libraries aside from Java. CPAN has a module for just about anything you could need, all with well published OO interfaces. Perl has many features which could be considered syntactic sugar (several different ways to perform 'if-then' program control), but are actually very powerful for writing coherant (understandable/maintainable) programs.
I also think theres nothing wrong with BASIC or Visual BASIC (aside from MS only) in high school. With 1ghz machines, high school students will most likely not program anything that's going to benefit from the fast execution that C and C++ offer, and the learning curve and time to program are too big. BASIC is great for learning control flow and the very basics of programming.
While I appreciate that learning memory allocation and what is actually being performed at the assembly level are paramount to being a professional programmer, these details will only slow down beginners.
As a background on me, I learned (in chronological order):
I havn't looked into it much, but I've also heard really good things about Python.
ps. As has been mentioned before, the _most_ important thing when teaching is to teach how to think algorithmically and develop maintainable solutions which perform correctly in the appropriate time. Language is not the most important thing.
To understand why it even existed, we have to go back to Alan Freed's Rock and Roll Show in 1960. One of the first rock'n'roll DJs, Freed was busted in 1960 for taking $2,500 in bribes to play records. He claimed the money was just a thank-you with no influence, but he still went down. He only paid a small fine, but his career was ruined and he died soon after.
If you're interested in more information about this, I just finished reading a book called "Last night a DJ saved my life: The history of the Disc Jockey". It outlines the rise of dance music in the 20th century, and starts with an in depth history of radio disc jockeys.
One of the interesting things it mentioned was that although Freed was the first person busted for 'payola', he was by no means the only one accepting it at the time. Apparently it was common practice at that time too. The book claims that Freed was busted instead of other DJs because of his love for rock made by black musicians, which he would play instead of the sanitized rock made by white musicians.
There was an interesting description of an idiot savant who could do just this in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" by Oliver Sacks (wrote Awakenings).
I agree that I'm not sure how remarkable it is that this algorithm can merely be computed in ones head. However for people who have never had the algorithm described to them, (maybe the savant had allready read about this algorithm, who can be sure), it shows great ingenuity to come up with an algorithm like this for themselves.
It's not the act of executing the algorithm that would make them genius material. It's whether they read the solution and were good at menial math, or whether they were inventive and (re)created an algorithm themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm...no, no that wouldn't be similar to /usr/bin. /usr/bin is the place where quite a few programs get installed, usually utilities, so it is similar to c:\windows or c:\winnt.
IMO it's more similar to "Program Files" than either "Application Data" or "WINNT".
Do a search for the 686B bug. I've had nothing but problems with my KT7A, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
Any good story has four parts, intro, building, climax, and denoument(sp?)...if you expect Ep. I to have a full story, you totally missed the boat. Ep I was the intro/setup to a lot of background in the dual-trilogy...
So what you're saying is ep 1 is not a good story or movie just by itself. Great, then we're all in agreement.
It is possible to introduce characters and still craft a good movie. I don't think I have to point out the obvious example.
Personally, I'm hyped to see ep II, as it looks to be pretty good. Note that with ep I, I conciously learned nothing about the movie before I saw it. I didn't see any trailers, I didn't see any pics, and I didn't read any reviews. I also like to think the only expectations I had for the movie were that it would fit with the rest of the star wars universe, and not be worse than ROTJ.
Maybe I was setting the bar a bit too high.
When I look for warez/pr0n/movies/music I use IRC before I use ICQ. Which was (I think) the posters original comment, that maybe piracy has dropped because kids aren't using old progs, and a napster for warez doesn't exist.
In fact, I assumed this was standard industry practice. I had been informed that to have a new motherboard windows compatible (not just XP, but any windows) you must be unable to control whether ACPI is enabled/disabled.
I bought my KT7A in April of last year, and got a SB Live, which had so many problems together it behoves me to think about it. The thing that ended up solving it was reinstalling windows without ACPI, since you can't control it in the BIOS anymore...
Besides, you operate under the assumption that I haven't contributed anything to the kernel, which would be wrong.
I think the assumption he operates on is that you can't be bothered to go through and submit patches, as you were complaining that someone should to do it.
It's not an issue that people aren't working on the kernel enough, it's that there are too many mad scientists, and not enough henchmen.
And, of course, on top of all of the above is the issue that Joe Sixpack will invariably see 2 GHz as faster than 750 MHz no matter what. Have fun with that one.
Seems like AMD may have let Intel off the hook with this one by starting to label CPU's irrespective of clock speed.
I wouldn't be suprised to see an Intel IT-2500 that's clocked at 750Mhz.
How about getting rid of drive letters in Windows/Dos and having mount points!
I suppose windows isn't fully there, however with 2000 you can mount any partition in a directory, and disconnect the drive mapping. You can still mount a partition to a directory in XP, but I wasn't able to disconnect the drive mapping when I tried.
Technically I guess you still need one drive for C:\, but it's a hell of a lot easier for most windows users if you don't have to teach them all about mount points.
LoTR:FoTR broke the record for largest opening weekend in December.
I don't know if it will beat Potter, but you should remember that the holiday season is hectic, and now that it's quieted down, many people are now finding the time to go see movies again. This should give LoTR good legs at the box office.
I'm pretty certain I read an interview with Peter Jackson the pretty much said he wouldn't be doing the hobbit, although I don't have a URL handy.
The same was true of the dot-com era. There was a suspension of disbelief -- people actually thought we really could provide moon vacations. BTW, I use "rockets" because I suspect that the next overhyped tech bubble is going to space (that, or biotech).
So you're saying I should invest in space and/or biotech now then?
Get in while the gettings good!
I didn't see the Episode 1 trailer until after I saw the movie. I didn't want the trailer to ruin anything for me; the movie still sucked hard. :)
Good luck. I avoided all the trailers for Ep 1. Unfortunately I think I missed the best part of Ep 1, which would be seeing the trailer. First and last time I try to avoid trailers. :)
As a somewhat odd occurance, I saw the video for Glory Box not more than 1 week ago on MTV. Granted it was MTV Europe, and it was at 3:00am. :)
Now if you want 'steal' some stuff you'll never hear on the radio or MTV, 'steal' some Quasimoto, some Delarosa and Asora, or some DJ Statik.
Who? Exactly.
Hopefully FF:TSW will get most of it's money back when it comes to international and DVD markets, however I can't imagine this bodes well for the future of photorealistic movies. (or maybe it just doesn't bode well for the future of Square movies)
When you buy a car, do you buy a car with a steering wheel from a Mercedes, an engine from a Ford, brakes from a Toyota?.
When you buy a car from Ford do you have to use a Ford stereo? Is there a component in the stereo which is used by your anti-lock brakes, so that if you don't own a Ford(tm) stereo your ABS will not work? Sure, you could install a second stereo with better features, but why bother if you must have the Ford one as well.
I'm going to assume everyone understands that an audio file (mp3 or wave) is a series of frames, where each frame has information about the decibel level of every frequency which makes up that frame (if you're thinking in terms of Amplitude-vs-Frequency). MP3 compression works because of a principle of psychoacoustics called 'frequency masking'. The basic idea is that in your frame, if your amplitude at 440hz is 80db, then that loud sound will mask all frequencies between 430hz & 450hz. (these numbers are all made up, they are only used to illustrate the basic idea).
Now, to the original comment that said '[t]he amount of data that is lost in MP3 compression is tiny', that's full of shit. MP3s @ 128kbps compress wavs about 1:10 or 1:11. Now as for the _meaningfull_ data lost, that's a matter of opinion. Now, the bitrate of an MP3 (128/160/192/etc) is used to denote how much space is allocated the 44100 frames (1 second of music @ 44.1khz). The problem with MP3s is that encoders don't make judgements on when to stop getting rid of information based on how their frequency masks will effect sound, they simply keep cutting the most masked sounds until they get to 128kbps.
For some songs, this makes little difference, because frequency wise, they may not be very complex (and hence not effected by the frequency masks). For some songs (esp those with a lot of range, ie classical music), this encoding turns the music from beautiful to crap.
I'm a big proponent of Variable Bitrate Encoding (VBR) because you can set the quality you want the output file to have (low, med, high) and the encoder will make frequency masks of different sizes for each frame depending on how much space it needs. This obviously makes much more sense, as fixed bitrate encoding requires the same amount of information to convey silence as it does a crescendo.
PS. To the person complaining that mp3s cut off frequencies above 20khz, you aren't going to get any better with cds. CDs are 16bit/44.1khz. A refresh rate of 44.1khz will only detect frequencies up to 22.05khz (which is used so that there is no clipping when you have a 20khz sound. it doesn't actually store meaningful information above 20khz). Now there are some encoders which cut off above 16khz. _Those_ are shit.
I also havn't seen him give a new release less than 2 stars in a few weeks (I check his reviews every week). Maybe he's just seen a lot of good movies recently.
Or maybe Disney has finally perfected Ebertbot1.0.
Outrage that things aren't like they were 2 years ago is pretty futile. VC isn't paying the bills anymore (for most sites), and I'd rather see an X10 ad than see the site go under. The only thing that bothers me is that I don't think pop-ups are any more effective at enticing buyers than banner ads. Skyscrapers which run down the side of the entire article are IMO the most eye catching.
I believe the cap is on punative damages. Not total damages. If I'm not mistaken (but I'm pretty certain I am), punitive damages are to punish the offending company, and have nothing to with your (as the plantiff's) losses.
Anyone with a better explanation?
Friday, May 18, 2001 Kevin's Non-Involvement In Star Wars: The Phantom Edit
Just a quick word about that news that's appearing on TheForce.Net today (and has resulted in no less than 50 e-mails at least in the inbox today) regarding the Star Wars Episode 1.1: The Phantom Edit (story originally appeared on Editorsnet by author Erin Lauten. Apparently, a mysterious video cassette containing a re-edited version of George Lucas' "Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace" has started circulating around Hollywood. Why is this relevant here, do you ask? Well, folks are theorizing that the tape itself may have been a project of Kevin Smith's.
We contacted Kevin about this immediately, who assures us that while he's had nothing to do with the project, he HAS seen a copy and can confirm that is does exist. Interesting. So, who's got a copy they wanna pass along? Drop us a line! There ya have it, folks.
Taken from newsaskew.com, about the most reliable news source about Kevin Smith.
Perhaps I'm biased cause Perl is what I've been using for a while, but I think Perl would be a fantastic language to learn programming. The big reason for this is the Perl philosophy: TIMTOWTDI (There's more than one way to do it). As learning programming goes, I think Perl is a great choice because of this.
Perl 5 is fully object oriented, but only if you want it to be. I find Java is too bulky of a programming language to be truly effective as a teaching language. There is too much stuff you must learn before you can get anything of any use done. Perl is great because you can jump right in very easily, and write low complexity programs quickly. (one liners anyone?)
Perl also has probably the best set of standardized libraries aside from Java. CPAN has a module for just about anything you could need, all with well published OO interfaces. Perl has many features which could be considered syntactic sugar (several different ways to perform 'if-then' program control), but are actually very powerful for writing coherant (understandable/maintainable) programs.
I also think theres nothing wrong with BASIC or Visual BASIC (aside from MS only) in high school. With 1ghz machines, high school students will most likely not program anything that's going to benefit from the fast execution that C and C++ offer, and the learning curve and time to program are too big. BASIC is great for learning control flow and the very basics of programming.
While I appreciate that learning memory allocation and what is actually being performed at the assembly level are paramount to being a professional programmer, these details will only slow down beginners.
As a background on me, I learned (in chronological order):
1. BASIC
2. Visual BASIC
3. Java
4. Prolog/Scheme (minimally)
5. 6811 Assembly
6. C/C++
7. Perl
I havn't looked into it much, but I've also heard really good things about Python.
ps. As has been mentioned before, the _most_ important thing when teaching is to teach how to think algorithmically and develop maintainable solutions which perform correctly in the appropriate time. Language is not the most important thing.
All your bandw...
Never mind.
If you're interested in more information about this, I just finished reading a book called "Last night a DJ saved my life: The history of the Disc Jockey". It outlines the rise of dance music in the 20th century, and starts with an in depth history of radio disc jockeys.
One of the interesting things it mentioned was that although Freed was the first person busted for 'payola', he was by no means the only one accepting it at the time. Apparently it was common practice at that time too. The book claims that Freed was busted instead of other DJs because of his love for rock made by black musicians, which he would play instead of the sanitized rock made by white musicians.
Telestra: All your bandwidth are belong to us.
There was an interesting description of an idiot savant who could do just this in "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" by Oliver Sacks (wrote Awakenings).
I agree that I'm not sure how remarkable it is that this algorithm can merely be computed in ones head. However for people who have never had the algorithm described to them, (maybe the savant had allready read about this algorithm, who can be sure), it shows great ingenuity to come up with an algorithm like this for themselves.
It's not the act of executing the algorithm that would make them genius material. It's whether they read the solution and were good at menial math, or whether they were inventive and (re)created an algorithm themselves.