Not true. An acquaintance of mine is a contractor there and he blogs it on his LJ. 1. He always carries a gun. 2. His company provides mercs for extra protection.
Its not for everyone, by far, I wouldn't do it either, but if you want to, its not a total death warrant. The aforementioned acquaintance has been there for a year now, with his gf who is also doing contractor work.
They have a lot more singles than albums, many of them quite rare. It makes sense that they price the singles higher. They have albums for as cheap as $4.25 anyway.
While I applaud the news of more of Miyazaki's work finding appreciation in the western world, the Nausicaa film is a pale shadow compared to the original manga.
The original manga was much longer, and investigated many more of the ecological and sociopolitical issues that Miyazaki setup in his wonderfully interesting post eco-disaster future. If you find the Nausicaa film interesting, by all means check out the manga, Viz comics publishes very high quality translated editions.(Note: I don't know Japanese so I can only speculate on the quality of the manga translation, but Viz generally does a good job)
Mmm.. fjords..
on
Earth as Art
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Having interviewed and also know personally the people who work at ADD (asynchronous digital design), the company in pasadena that is working on asynchronous VLSI, I can tell you that there are definitely new paradigms for datapath and computation flow construction that make modern designs easy to create in asynchronous technology. The caltech AVLSI research group has succeeded in creating a MIPS core using VLSI technology, and their current work in ADD will take them even further. One of the advantages of asynchronous design is that once you create a working unit, you can plug units together without worrying about any timing issues and assuming the units are fully tested, the entire system should work out of the box. A lot of current vlsi design involves recreating a lot of structures in order to optimize for the latest architecture scheme. There's more than just Sutherland working on this, in fact some big names and some big people are interested in AVLSI technology.
Asmodean / Naru Sundar
Uh.. yes, but there are other image formats **PNG** which support alpha channels, and having mozilla support them will be really nice. What i'm really interested in right now though is if M16 has working crypto support, because working crypto is the only thing holding me back from using mozilla full time.
Umm... given that I have a Sony Music Clip MP3 Player and given that i'm listening to a random selection of my mp3's right now i think you're a little bit in the error there...
The Sony Music Jukebox software allows you to import mp3s into it WITHOUT downcoding it to ATRAC3... its been working fine for me so far..
These are my suggestions in a pretty random, off-the-cuff order:
Dune by Frank Herbert (i'd suggest the rest of the series too) This is a wonderfully rich series dealing with the consequences and results of the messiah archetype, conflicts between church and state and the like. Well worth reading through the series.
Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
This is a very unique and well written Hugo award winning set of books. They deal with a strange mix of religion and technocracy, with a large dose of the poetry of Keat's thrown in.
Neuromancer by William Gibson Distraction by Bruce Sterling
Two books in the forefrunt of the cyberpunkish, dark future genre... well known and must-reads..
there are probably more... but i'm too tired to list them right now =)
This kind of ruling was something I was expecting for a while. There's been a large rash of blatant privacy violations that have been working their way up the courts. This precedent is a good stepping stone for other privacy violations that are on the ballot...
What we really need, is a distributed form of the napster service. The protocol could be based loosely around IRC.. in fact it might just be easier to sit it on top of the IRC protocol. In any case, its not a terribly complex protocol.. and it would be so much nicer if the servers were distributed. Granted there is the whole speed issue.. but with some caching thrown in it could be pretty decent. We need a completely decentralized file search service...
oh... and of course.. it'd be much harder for people to squash the service for distributing ~1 TB of mp3s =]
I'm an avid Sandman fan. In fact I'm an avid Gaiman fan. When Harlan Ellison of all people calls someone a genius, one should stop and listen. Neil Gaiman's characters are brilliant, witty and provocative -- and Sandman shines for it. The series is chock full of wonderful little references and tidbits. If there is any candidate to prove that the comic medium can tell just a good enough tale as the written medium -- this is it.
This new book is worth it. I had it on pre-order from buy.com for a month but eventually couldn't wait and ran out and grabbed a copy from the local comic book store. Amano first off is a brilliant illustrator, his style works with the essence of a picture and focuses on only the elements neccessary to convey meaning. This sort of subtle minimalism goes hand in hand with Gaiman's flair for protomythology. Some might argue that the tale is too simple, but having read most of Gaiman's work, it is the elegance of the simplicity that puts the seal of approval on this book.
Go read this book, heck, go read the Sandman. You won't regret it.
ACK! I thought the party was tomorrow bowie.. oh well.. In any case, I might as well post my little blurb about things. The last couple of months have been quite interesting. I started Revelation about the beginning of the summer, and through some wonderful help from the themes.org and geeknews.net people (who posted news about Revelation), I was able to get up to about an 8k/day hit average within a week. Running Propaganda will be highly enjoyable.. I've seen the posts about people who don't know what Propaganda is or are confused by us.
We are the propaganda arm of the Linux movement!:)
There's a great JFK received that I'd like to point out in this respect. It was from a sysadmin who had seen the cool screenshots on Propaganda and had been so interested by them that he ended up installing a Linux partition. This is our lifelong mission: to go where no Linux-er has gone before, to go into the heathen lands of M$ and rescue the poor lost souls =)
Anyway, Propaganda won't change all too much, the same crazy storylines, the same cool tiles.. (just a slightly different style =)..
Remember kids: Same propaganda time, same propaganda channel!
The network i was using this summer had machines named after 3 letter words:
zot tow ...
My personal machines are named asmodean and lanfear (from Robert Jordan's wheel of time).. and i'll probably end up registering saidin.org one of these days..
i've also seen the hitchhiker's guide as a theme..
I know a company that uses planets/moons as their network theme (io, juiptar, terra, luna, europa, etc..)
one of the campus networks use alice in wonderland names (white-rabbit, cheshire-cat, alice...)
the general campus network uses cities, the cs cluster uses instruments..
a multimedia devel company i worked at during high school produced a story much like yours... the sysadmin there had named his computers something amusing (forgot exactly what).. the PR woman got pissy and decided to name the computers by function.. we ended up with (Sales 1, Sales 2, Marketing, Production, Production 1)...
i think in the main few people come up against naming issues (at least from upper management)..
i'm sure though that you can come up with something interesting that satisfies the anal helpdesk person.. =)
Having seen fight club, I am not about to say that fight club is not a good movie, in fact it was an excellent movie.
What really annoys me though, are people who dismiss anime movies as silly or juvenile. Some are, but then c'mon.. so are a lot of live action movies (you know you've seen them).
When the good artist/innovators like Miyazaki set down to do a movie or a manga, they create thought provoking artistic works that deserve the proper amount of merit. A big fan of miyazaki myself (mainly through Nausicaa), i've been waiting a long time for this one to come to the US. The fact that Gaiman, one of my favourite authors, did the translation is yet another reason to go see it.
I've tried and talked to people who encode a lot, so this has some backing.
BladeEnc while fast, is not a very good encoder from a frequency response perspective. Audibly, it takes a good ear to hear the diff though. I prefer LAME as an encoder. Now a lot of people say FhG (fraunhoffer) is better.. but I've tried fraunhoffer and it has some faults:
1. It takes a hell of a long time to encode 2. It does sound a bit muddy at times 3. There are a few songs where the encoder has problems (Track 1, Snivilization by Orbital, last 5 seconds).
Most of the previous comments seem to make criticism of the poster's vague generalism over implementation. I think the more interesting point is the idea of running some small module that used your computer's processing time for ANY program as opposed to RC5 or SETI. This is just an idea, but I'd like to see people's responses. Consider if each participating computer ran a tiny servlet (similar to the RC5 crackers or the SETI processors) that ran code during idle cycles. From a global point of view, the entire system is a widely distributed parallel computer. Fine, so let everyone have access to it. Administer a system where one gets an account on the system as a whole, and runs programs on it. This could be very useful for large scale simulations where computing mass is a critical point. That this is doable with current systems is beyond a doubt. As long as it happens in idle cycles, I really don't care what my computer is doing (and considering its a dual celeron 500, its got spare cycles to boot).
The immediate concern is computing congestion. I'm sure if every Tom, Dick and Harry wanted to run his or her gigantic overly complex simulation on the worlds biggest parallel network, cycle response would get sluggish indeed, so perhaps some arbiter is need to chose who gets access.
If anyone's read the novel "Permutation City," the author's solution to congestion was to make the system a pay-per-cycle one where people bought computing time.
I'm not sure to what extent the logistics of the implementation would affect the simplicity of the essential idea, but I think it'd be great if the desktop computers of the world contributed to the world's largest supercomputer in its idle time..
The article has its point in that digital media and technology are advancing the long arm of the media hounds, but one must ask the question, is the technology creating a problem? Or is it merely pointing out the obvious. The kind of glitzy television specials on the life and times of the Kennedys, and the recurring image of young JFK Jr. saluting his father have been all over the media in the past week. But the media game is not solely based on bringing us the news. Today, the media game is as competitive as wall street -- and they're out to catch our eyes. For every person that scoffs at the over publicization of the accident, there will be a thousand who watched with baited breath for every little scrap of news, a thousand who treated the scenes before their eyes as some soap opera in which they were ogling participants. And every soap opera has its heroic figures, and so the media paints a picture of JFK Jr. as a paragon of virtue, a noble hero for our times, not because its what they believe, not even because its the truth. I don't denigrate JFK Jr. here at all, he was a fine citizen of this country, a glitzy editor of a reasonably splashy political magazine -- but he was not the kind of nobility that the media ascribe. The media know though that a great many people in their audience would latch on to such false epics, such sentimentality, as bees to honey. They harp on that fact, and thus exaggerate, overemphasize and glitz the truth till what's left is a bizarre carricature -- but a carricature that catches the eye and keeps it there. And where is technology in all this? Its merely another tool, I don't think its time yet when the media are the kinds of information pushes that Katz implies. Remember, we still have that screen between us and them, we posess the simple power of the "off" button. We can close our eyes, we can think, we can strip away the falsity and look at the truth ourselves. We are not yet at that stage where truth and lies are indistinguishable. We can blame the media, we can be angry at them, but for now at least some of them stay true to their purpose. And is not that enough?
Slashdot Mirror
Not true. An acquaintance of mine is a contractor there and he blogs it on his LJ. 1. He always carries a gun. 2. His company provides mercs for extra protection.
Its not for everyone, by far, I wouldn't do it either, but if you want to, its not a total death warrant. The aforementioned acquaintance has been there for a year now, with his gf who is also doing contractor work.
As a note about the single prices:
;)
They have a lot more singles than albums, many of them quite rare. It makes sense that they price the singles higher. They have albums for as cheap as $4.25 anyway.
Fuck me, my harddrive is screwed.
While I applaud the news of more of Miyazaki's work finding appreciation in the western world, the Nausicaa film is a pale shadow compared to the original manga.
The original manga was much longer, and investigated many more of the ecological and sociopolitical issues that Miyazaki setup in his wonderfully interesting post eco-disaster future. If you find the Nausicaa film interesting, by all means check out the manga, Viz comics publishes very high quality translated editions.(Note: I don't know Japanese so I can only speculate on the quality of the manga translation, but Viz generally does a good job)
Someone give Slartybartfast a prize...
Having interviewed and also know personally the people who work at ADD (asynchronous digital design), the company in pasadena that is working on asynchronous VLSI, I can tell you that there are definitely new paradigms for datapath and computation flow construction that make modern designs easy to create in asynchronous technology. The caltech AVLSI research group has succeeded in creating a MIPS core using VLSI technology, and their current work in ADD will take them even further. One of the advantages of asynchronous design is that once you create a working unit, you can plug units together without worrying about any timing issues and assuming the units are fully tested, the entire system should work out of the box. A lot of current vlsi design involves recreating a lot of structures in order to optimize for the latest architecture scheme. There's more than just Sutherland working on this, in fact some big names and some big people are interested in AVLSI technology. Asmodean / Naru Sundar
Uh.. yes, but there are other image formats **PNG** which support alpha channels, and having mozilla support them will be really nice. What i'm really interested in right now though is if M16 has working crypto support, because working crypto is the only thing holding me back from using mozilla full time.
Umm... given that I have a Sony Music Clip MP3 Player and given that i'm listening to a random selection of my mp3's right now i think you're a little bit in the error there...
The Sony Music Jukebox software allows you to import mp3s into it WITHOUT downcoding it to ATRAC3... its been working fine for me so far..
These are my suggestions in a pretty random, off-the-cuff order:
Dune by Frank Herbert (i'd suggest the rest of the series too) This is a wonderfully rich series dealing with the consequences and results of the messiah archetype, conflicts between church and state and the like. Well worth reading through the series.
Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
This is a very unique and well written Hugo award winning set of books. They deal with a strange mix of religion and technocracy, with a large dose of the poetry of Keat's thrown in.
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Distraction by Bruce Sterling
Two books in the forefrunt of the cyberpunkish, dark future genre... well known and must-reads..
there are probably more... but i'm too tired to list them right now =)
This kind of ruling was something I was expecting for a while. There's been a large rash of blatant privacy violations that have been working their way up the courts. This precedent is a good stepping stone for other privacy violations that are on the ballot...
What we really need, is a distributed form of the napster service. The protocol could be based loosely around IRC.. in fact it might just be easier to sit it on top of the IRC protocol. In any case, its not a terribly complex protocol.. and it would be so much nicer if the servers were distributed. Granted there is the whole speed issue.. but with some caching thrown in it could be pretty decent. We need a completely decentralized file search service ...
oh... and of course.. it'd be much harder for people to squash the service for distributing ~1 TB of mp3s =]
I'm an avid Sandman fan. In fact I'm an avid Gaiman fan. When Harlan Ellison of all people calls someone a genius, one should stop and listen. Neil Gaiman's characters are brilliant, witty and provocative -- and Sandman shines for it. The series is chock full of wonderful little references and tidbits. If there is any candidate to prove that the comic medium can tell just a good enough tale as the written medium -- this is it.
This new book is worth it. I had it on pre-order from buy.com for a month but eventually couldn't wait and ran out and grabbed a copy from the local comic book store. Amano first off is a brilliant illustrator, his style works with the essence of a picture and focuses on only the elements neccessary to convey meaning. This sort of subtle minimalism goes hand in hand with Gaiman's flair for protomythology. Some might argue that the tale is too simple, but having read most of Gaiman's work, it is the elegance of the simplicity that puts the seal of approval on this book.
Go read this book, heck, go read the Sandman. You won't regret it.
erg... it seems like the ABA's capacity for poor idea is on an exponential increase. Go here, i'm sure people will get a kick out of this.. =)
ACK! I thought the party was tomorrow bowie.. oh well.. In any case, I might as well post my little blurb about things. The last couple of months have been quite interesting. I started Revelation about the beginning of the summer, and through some wonderful help from the themes.org and geeknews.net people (who posted news about Revelation), I was able to get up to about an 8k/day hit average within a week. Running Propaganda will be highly enjoyable.. I've seen the posts about people who don't know what Propaganda is or are confused by us.
:)
We are the propaganda arm of the Linux movement!
There's a great JFK received that I'd like to point out in this respect. It was from a sysadmin who had seen the cool screenshots on Propaganda and had been so interested by them that he ended up installing a Linux partition. This is our lifelong mission: to go where no Linux-er has gone before, to go into the heathen lands of M$ and rescue the poor lost souls =)
Anyway, Propaganda won't change all too much, the same crazy storylines, the same cool tiles.. (just a slightly different style =)..
Remember kids: Same propaganda time, same propaganda channel!
The network i was using this summer had machines named after 3 letter words:
zot
tow
...
My personal machines are named asmodean and lanfear (from Robert Jordan's wheel of time).. and i'll probably end up registering saidin.org one of these days..
i've also seen the hitchhiker's guide as a theme..
I know a company that uses planets/moons as their network theme (io, juiptar, terra, luna, europa, etc..)
one of the campus networks use alice in wonderland names (white-rabbit, cheshire-cat, alice...)
the general campus network uses cities, the cs cluster uses instruments..
a multimedia devel company i worked at during high school produced a story much like yours... the sysadmin there had named his computers something amusing (forgot exactly what).. the PR woman got pissy and decided to name the computers by function.. we ended up with (Sales 1, Sales 2, Marketing, Production, Production 1)...
i think in the main few people come up against naming issues (at least from upper management)..
i'm sure though that you can come up with something interesting that satisfies the anal helpdesk person.. =)
Having seen fight club, I am not about to say that
fight club is not a good movie, in fact it was an excellent movie.
What really annoys me though, are people who dismiss anime movies as silly or juvenile. Some are, but then c'mon.. so are a lot of live action movies (you know you've seen them).
When the good artist/innovators like Miyazaki set down to do a movie or a manga, they create thought provoking artistic works that deserve the proper amount of merit. A big fan of miyazaki myself (mainly through Nausicaa), i've been waiting a long time for this one to come to the US. The fact that Gaiman, one of my favourite authors, did the translation is yet another reason to go see it.
http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/99se p/uf001080.gif
I've tried and talked to people who encode a lot, so this has some backing.
BladeEnc while fast, is not a very good encoder from a frequency response perspective. Audibly, it takes a good ear to hear the diff though. I prefer LAME as an encoder. Now a lot of people say FhG (fraunhoffer) is better.. but I've tried fraunhoffer and it has some faults:
1. It takes a hell of a long time to encode
2. It does sound a bit muddy at times
3. There are a few songs where the encoder
has problems (Track 1, Snivilization by Orbital, last 5 seconds).
In conclusion INMSHO use LAME.
Most of the previous comments seem to make criticism of the poster's vague generalism over implementation. I think the more interesting point is the idea of running some small module that used your computer's processing time for ANY program as opposed to RC5 or SETI. This is just an idea, but I'd like to see people's responses. Consider if each participating computer ran a tiny servlet (similar to the RC5 crackers or the SETI processors) that ran code during idle cycles. From a global point of view, the entire system is a widely distributed parallel computer. Fine, so let everyone have access to it. Administer a system where one gets an account on the system as a whole, and runs programs on it. This could be very useful for large scale simulations where computing mass is a critical point. That this is doable with current systems is beyond a doubt. As long as it happens in idle cycles, I really don't care what my computer is doing (and considering its a dual celeron 500, its got spare cycles to boot).
The immediate concern is computing congestion. I'm sure if every Tom, Dick and Harry wanted to run his or her gigantic overly complex simulation on the worlds biggest parallel network, cycle response would get sluggish indeed, so perhaps some arbiter is need to chose who gets access.
If anyone's read the novel "Permutation City," the author's solution to congestion was to make the system a pay-per-cycle one where people bought computing time.
I'm not sure to what extent the logistics of the implementation would affect the simplicity of the essential idea, but I think it'd be great if the desktop computers of the world contributed to the world's largest supercomputer in its idle time..
The article has its point in that digital media and technology are advancing the long arm of the media hounds, but one must ask the question, is the technology creating a problem? Or is it merely pointing out the obvious. The kind of glitzy television specials on the life and times of the Kennedys, and the recurring image of young JFK Jr. saluting his father have been all over the media in the past week. But the media game is not solely based on bringing us the news. Today, the media game is as competitive as wall street -- and they're out to catch our eyes. For every person that scoffs at the over publicization of the accident, there will be a thousand who watched with baited breath for every little scrap of news, a thousand who treated the scenes before their eyes as some soap opera in which they were ogling participants. And every soap opera has its heroic figures, and so the media paints a picture of JFK Jr. as a paragon of virtue, a noble hero for our times, not because its what they believe, not even because its the truth. I don't denigrate JFK Jr. here at all, he was a fine citizen of this country, a glitzy editor of a reasonably splashy political magazine -- but he was not the kind of nobility that the media ascribe. The media know though that a great many people in their audience would latch on to such false epics, such sentimentality, as bees to honey. They harp on that fact, and thus exaggerate, overemphasize and glitz the truth till what's left is a bizarre carricature -- but a carricature that catches the eye and keeps it there. And where is technology in all this? Its merely another tool, I don't think its time yet when the media are the kinds of information pushes that Katz implies. Remember, we still have that screen between us and them, we posess the simple power of the "off" button. We can close our eyes, we can think, we can strip away the falsity and look at the truth ourselves. We are not yet at that stage where truth and lies are indistinguishable. We can blame the media, we can be angry at them, but for now at least some of them stay true to their purpose. And is not that enough?