I have found several bands that I like by listening to mp3s. Some of which I own the CDs and some of which I don't. One that comes to mind is the Bobs. They sing acapella and sell their own CDs. I now own several after hearing their music on mp3s.
I just wish small bands would release their own mp3s and fill in the ID3 tags. There are a couple of bands that I would *love* to have CDs, but I can't find them. One of them, the songs I have are labeled as being by "big daddy". The songs are usually the lyrics of one song sung to the music of another. Really funny stuff. For example they sing "Welcome to the jungle" to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". (Anybody know anything about them?)
If I were a small band, I would release some of my best songs on mp3. Set up a computer to serve them to Napster and Gnutella, put them on the web, and make sure they had a web address in the ID3 tag so that people who want more could come buy the CD. (Please, Please, Please do this all musicians!!!!!)
It is impossible to produce a double sided cd that is backwards compatible. The best you could do would be to double the thickness of the CD. You wouldn't be able to insert it into many players, but the laser stuff would still work.
In addition to the dimensions of a CD being specified, other little details such as the distance of the pits from the surface and the refraction coefficient of the plastic are as well. If you made the plastic half as thick the laser beam wouldn't be able to focus on the pits. You could try to ajust the refraction coefficient to make up for this, but I really doubt that you could do it. Especially not in a way that would work for all existing players that use the assumptions about the disk in the spec.
I never thought that class I took in college about CDs would actually be all that useful!;-)
If you want a free dead tree format poster of the radio frequencies, look at Omega.com. They make scientific instruments, and give away literature to promote their business.
Having a colorful poster of the radio frequencies hanging in your office really makes you look like a geek.
I think that mozilla has reached a turning point. Bugs are finally being fixed faster than I can find them.
I have submitted about 20 bugs and all but about 5 of them are fixed at this point. In the last week a javascript bug that kept many of my companies web pages from working was fixed and as of last night mozilla works with junkbuster again.
I still have a few bugs that I want to see fixed before I can get rid of netscape: Mozilla crashes with some animated gifs, doesn't let you find on a page that contains frames, and the nightly builds don't handle encryption.
It still may be a while, but it really is coming. I can see it.
OK. Six moderators have said this is funny. Six other moderators have marked it down.
Can somebody explain the humor in this to those of us who don't get it? It looks like a straight troll to me....
The only references I could find to Caleb Jaffa on net searches was as the author of some peice of software available at developer.com http://www.developer.com/downloads/code/dir.util ity3.html
If you have an open source project written in java, you can get free cvs space at the Giant Java Tree.
In addition to cvs access the gjt will compile your program, create zip files of your program that can be downloaded. There is a Web based interface to the CVS (a servlet) which you can download and set up elsewhere if you wish.
There is also a CVS client written in java that I highly recommend for anybody that likes a bit of a GUI for using CVS. It works well under both windows and linux.
The whole thing is run by Tim Enders, and is simply amazing.
I remember reading about somebody teaching an FPGA to differentiate between the spoken words "Stop" and "Go". IIRC, he randomly programmed the FPGA many times, seeing which random programming did the best job, then took the best and altered it a bit in many ways and tried again and again and again....
Anyway, when he was done he had an FPGA that could tell the difference between "Stop" and "Go". The interesting part was that the program that it used wouldn't work on other FPGAs. Apparently, it was using analog effects that were specific to the individual chip. Furthermore, it was really efficient. Only a small percentage of the chip was being used. (Does this sound like your brain at all to anyone else?)
I was wondering if anybody had heard anything more about this research. I think it is facsinating.
I used to code only on windows. After I was introduced to linux, I found that the command line was amazing and that gcc and other gnu apps just rocked.
From the cygwin project, you can get bash and other gnu apps (including gcc) for windows. Now my windows interface and linux interface are very similar. I can comfortably develop from either. The OS should just get out of your way. I can make either do that.
However, each has tools that the other doesn't that I find indespensible at times. My suggestion is to develop on both. That way your programs may end up cross platform as well....
As part of a project for a multimedia class that I took as a Senior in college, we had to write software to count the number of people in an mpeg video. It was a very open ended project and we weren't expected to be able to get the right answer all the time.
The professor suggested that we start with skin tones. He pointed us to research that tried to pick out the parts of the spectrum considered "skin tone". There were some simple algorithms that were suggested. We did this and it worked decently well, but there were a lot of things that looked like skin to it. Especially light colored woodwork.
An algorithm like this may be able to filter a lot of stuff off the web. But it will filter a lot of other stuff too. I can also think of 100 ways to fool it. The easiest being put images through a color filter before posting them, or post them in black and white. Other people have pointed out that it will filter portraits and other shots of humans that arn't porn.
It can also lead to such things as improved ecology, as by definition higher productivity means making more out of fewer resources.
During our entire history of industrialization the standard of living has skyrocketed. We have also trashed our environment. There will be no ecological benifit from higher productivity. Higher productivity does not (sadly) mean making more out of fewer resources, but consuming resources faster.
As the standard of living increases, everybody wants a bigger house, more stuff, and more time to travel. Even if we don't use up all of our resources, we will pollute the earth and crowd out everything else on it.
If I recall correctly when I read about the making of myst, there were other limiting factors besides processing power. Most notably cd-rom speed. I believe that they had to take the image quality down quite a bit to get it to run off the CD.
If you were running the 3-D version, I'd expect that you would have to have a *heck* of a lot of memory and hard drive space available. That world was rather complex.
Re:Why don't we give this a chance to mirror...
on
Mozilla M16 Released
·
· Score: 1
Mozilla has developed some serious bugs in the last few weeks. Right now it doesn't even work with Junkbuster.
But its coming. It just needs everybody to test it out and submit bugs.
I'm thinking about all the factors that cause me to become a different typist. The first of course is keyboard layout. I usually use dvorak and can type about 90 wpm but I can use qwerty and can type about 50. When I use one, I make totally different errors than on the other and type with different patterns and speed. The music would have to be tailored for one, keeping me from listening to my music. When I'm not at one of my computers I usually don't have the option of switching to dvorak easily.
I also hunt and peck for passwords most of the time so that I can keep my hand on the mouse. Or how about network lag between keystrokes over a slow network connection when using telnet, WinVN, or other remote access? Or how about as your typing changes over time as you get better, or as you develop carpal tunnel syndrom and it gets worse?
I don't think I'll be buying music with this security. Sounds a bit too easy for me to lose it or not be able to listen to it.
When I read "A Breif History of Time" I had a question about this. What makes all the negative particles fall in and the positive ones fall out? Wouldn't it work the other way around about half the time? Then wouldn't that mean that the black hole isn't really going to radiate anything at all?
My guess is that this theory is a bit deeper than this, or that the way that S.H presented it is more of an analogy, but still, I'm curious.
I'm not saying that it isn't a hard problem, but not one that is impossible. If you played an mp3 of a song to somebody and played the cd to them, they could tell it was the same music. In fact, the mp3 format was designed for that.
I subscribe the the theory that if a human can do it, a computer can do it. The entire field of artificial intelligence is based on that premesis.
If I recall correctly, doing some sort of fourier transform an music data puts it into a format such that similar stuff looks similar. I wish I remembered all the details.
When I got a copy of the love bug, I just about jumped for joy. Microsoft has finally released a programming language bundled with their OS. I guess its been there for some time, but its the first I had heard about it. Now if I want to to some programming for windows, I don't have to buy Visual Basic or Developer Studio. I don't have to setup cygwin and figure out how to call windows api from programs I write from GCC. I don't have to use java and hope that users will be able to figure out how to download and install a runtime environment. VBScript rocks. I have already started to use it for creating windows installation scripts for some of my java programs. It nicely complements the shell scripts I have for unix. (Don't even suggest that I pay hundreds of dollars for Install Shield.) I just wish I had known about it years ago.
Anybody else feel weirded out using a language that isn't case sensitive though?
Within 2 years the cost of car mp3 players will probably drop drastically.
You have to ask if you can continue offer competitive prices as the competition increases. I would say that any company that is selling them for $1500 now is bleeding the high end market to make a few bucks and is willing to come down significanty as soon as they see some competition.
I'll bet that eventually you will see some for under $150. (Especially as hard drives get even cheaper.)
Slashdot Mirror
I give hime a week.
Or you could just pay artists to record songs that are nothing but big advertisments. A certain Abercrombie and Fitch song comes to mind.
I've spent 200 hours playing Diablo II already.
I just wish small bands would release their own mp3s and fill in the ID3 tags. There are a couple of bands that I would *love* to have CDs, but I can't find them. One of them, the songs I have are labeled as being by "big daddy". The songs are usually the lyrics of one song sung to the music of another. Really funny stuff. For example they sing "Welcome to the jungle" to "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". (Anybody know anything about them?)
If I were a small band, I would release some of my best songs on mp3. Set up a computer to serve them to Napster and Gnutella, put them on the web, and make sure they had a web address in the ID3 tag so that people who want more could come buy the CD. (Please, Please, Please do this all musicians!!!!!)
In addition to the dimensions of a CD being specified, other little details such as the distance of the pits from the surface and the refraction coefficient of the plastic are as well. If you made the plastic half as thick the laser beam wouldn't be able to focus on the pits. You could try to ajust the refraction coefficient to make up for this, but I really doubt that you could do it. Especially not in a way that would work for all existing players that use the assumptions about the disk in the spec.
I never thought that class I took in college about CDs would actually be all that useful! ;-)
Having a colorful poster of the radio frequencies hanging in your office really makes you look like a geek.
More of a dot con
Indexing things by hand is a good idea, but yahoo can't do it well enough by hiring people. You need the power of open source.
I have submitted about 20 bugs and all but about 5 of them are fixed at this point. In the last week a javascript bug that kept many of my companies web pages from working was fixed and as of last night mozilla works with junkbuster again.
I still have a few bugs that I want to see fixed before I can get rid of netscape: Mozilla crashes with some animated gifs, doesn't let you find on a page that contains frames, and the nightly builds don't handle encryption.
It still may be a while, but it really is coming. I can see it.
Moderation Totals:Offtopic=4, Troll=1, Funny=6, Overrated=1, Total=12.
l ity3.html
OK. Six moderators have said this is funny. Six other moderators have marked it down.
Can somebody explain the humor in this to those of us who don't get it? It looks like a straight troll to me....
The only references I could find to Caleb Jaffa on net searches was as the author of some peice of software available at developer.com
http://www.developer.com/downloads/code/dir.uti
In addition to cvs access the gjt will compile your program, create zip files of your program that can be downloaded. There is a Web based interface to the CVS (a servlet) which you can download and set up elsewhere if you wish.
There is also a CVS client written in java that I highly recommend for anybody that likes a bit of a GUI for using CVS. It works well under both windows and linux.
The whole thing is run by Tim Enders, and is simply amazing.
Anyway, when he was done he had an FPGA that could tell the difference between "Stop" and "Go". The interesting part was that the program that it used wouldn't work on other FPGAs. Apparently, it was using analog effects that were specific to the individual chip. Furthermore, it was really efficient. Only a small percentage of the chip was being used. (Does this sound like your brain at all to anyone else?)
I was wondering if anybody had heard anything more about this research. I think it is facsinating.
From the cygwin project, you can get bash and other gnu apps (including gcc) for windows. Now my windows interface and linux interface are very similar. I can comfortably develop from either. The OS should just get out of your way. I can make either do that.
However, each has tools that the other doesn't that I find indespensible at times. My suggestion is to develop on both. That way your programs may end up cross platform as well....
The professor suggested that we start with skin tones. He pointed us to research that tried to pick out the parts of the spectrum considered "skin tone". There were some simple algorithms that were suggested. We did this and it worked decently well, but there were a lot of things that looked like skin to it. Especially light colored woodwork.
An algorithm like this may be able to filter a lot of stuff off the web. But it will filter a lot of other stuff too. I can also think of 100 ways to fool it. The easiest being put images through a color filter before posting them, or post them in black and white. Other people have pointed out that it will filter portraits and other shots of humans that arn't porn.
During our entire history of industrialization the standard of living has skyrocketed. We have also trashed our environment. There will be no ecological benifit from higher productivity. Higher productivity does not (sadly) mean making more out of fewer resources, but consuming resources faster.
As the standard of living increases, everybody wants a bigger house, more stuff, and more time to travel. Even if we don't use up all of our resources, we will pollute the earth and crowd out everything else on it.
Hopefully not. But I'm feeling pessimistic today.
If you were running the 3-D version, I'd expect that you would have to have a *heck* of a lot of memory and hard drive space available. That world was rather complex.
But its coming. It just needs everybody to test it out and submit bugs.
I also hunt and peck for passwords most of the time so that I can keep my hand on the mouse. Or how about network lag between keystrokes over a slow network connection when using telnet, WinVN, or other remote access? Or how about as your typing changes over time as you get better, or as you develop carpal tunnel syndrom and it gets worse?
I don't think I'll be buying music with this security. Sounds a bit too easy for me to lose it or not be able to listen to it.
MenTalguY had a complaint
Isn't a haiku just a bit quaint?
But little he knew
He wrote one too
A realization that caused him to faint
If C-Net has any brains they will license their patent to anyone, with the stipulation that all information collected is funneled back to C-Net.
We will have one company with all the info on us.
My guess is that this theory is a bit deeper than this, or that the way that S.H presented it is more of an analogy, but still, I'm curious.
I subscribe the the theory that if a human can do it, a computer can do it. The entire field of artificial intelligence is based on that premesis.
If I recall correctly, doing some sort of fourier transform an music data puts it into a format such that similar stuff looks similar. I wish I remembered all the details.
Anybody else feel weirded out using a language that isn't case sensitive though?
Because if thats all I have to do to get a slashdot story about me, I would in a heartbeat. ;-)
You have to ask if you can continue offer competitive prices as the competition increases. I would say that any company that is selling them for $1500 now is bleeding the high end market to make a few bucks and is willing to come down significanty as soon as they see some competition.
I'll bet that eventually you will see some for under $150. (Especially as hard drives get even cheaper.)