Some company back in the 80s made a guitar bridge where you could flip switches at the base of each string to change its tuning . . . I think it worked fairly well, but was not widely used.
Would this be the Hipshot Trilogy, by any chance? This is still available (Stewart MacDonald's Guitar Supply still stock it. Hipshot Trilogy.)
There is a switch on each string that allows it to be tuned to three different notes.
I plan to use one when I build myself a guitar with a Lace Helix neck. That'd be one nifty axe....
HAL.
There was an individual who, during the mid-to-late nineties, wrote a package to run software from the original C64 GEOS on IBM PCs.
He never released it as CMD didn't want him to (they probably couldn't have stopped him, but he chose not to release it anyway).
With this free download release, that package may now reappear and become a bizarre yet effective way to put a tried-and-tested, low-cost office environment onto a low-powered handheld PC. (Highly suitable for low-resolution/low-colour screens!)
As the file formats are completely stable (there will be no ongoing development), handheld/PC synchronisation would be pretty future-proof, and if native GEOWrite file format support was to be added to StarOffice, we'd have a neatly integrated setup....
HAL.
Actually, I seem to recall my Edinburgh Uni Computer Graphics lecturer spelling it the US way -- and his argument for this was quite compelling.
The OED defines artefact thus: noun a functional or decorative man-made object.
Compression "artifacts" are (largely unwanted) side effects of a process. An artefact is the intended product of a process. Therefore, calling it a compression "artefact" is wrong. (However shaky the etymological basis for his reasoning is, I still prefer not to call it an "artefact".
I read a tribute article... or did I see something on the TV? Either way, Douglas Adams knew that the second head wouldn't really work, so he tried to rewrite it so that it wasn't there. His preferred solution was to have the second head under his coat so that he could open his coat and cut to a different shot whenever they needed to speak to the second head.
Executives vetoed this on the grounds that it wasn't like the radio series. Douglas was apparently a little miffed -- it was *his* radio series after all: why shouldn't he be allowed to change it?
I don't understand how people can bash someone for controlling distribution of their own work, and still support the GPL at the same time. The GPL is all about controlling distribution of your work.
This whole misunderstanding is about the use of the term "Operating System": most residents of Slashdotland take it to mean "the kernel". In the case of a single-use device, though, the operating system is all the software it needs to do its task -- OS layer, application backends, UI/frontend... the whole caboodle: each part is required for the operation of the system as intended. From the users' point of view it is all just part of the magical TiVo black box, even if in software engineering terms this is more than a vast oversimplification.
But what about electric typewriters? Those date back at least 30 years. I guess then again, so do computer terminals. Did RSI go undiagnosed for a really long time, or what?
Possibly, but remember that in those days a computer took so long to do things that most of your computer time was spent waiting rather than typing! (My uncle was one of the first computer programmers in Scotland. He worked in a brewery on IBM 360s doing batch runs from punch cards. The official waiting room was always empty: the programmers' unofficial waiting room was... elsewhere in the brewery. Programmers spent roughly three quarters of the working day drinking....)
Perhaps you don't know what really causes RSI. Keyboarding doesn't, or we would have seen RSI cases decades ago, long before computers existed.
Actually, current thinking disputes this. The reason RSI didn't affect typists (on mechanical typewriters) is due to the extra weight of the keys. The key return supplied enough movement that you wouldn't have to use any effort to lift your fingers the keys did it, whereas now you raise and lower the fingers in quick succession with a serious of poorly-coordinated muscle movements, causing pulling and straining. (This is also why most concert pianists find it impossible to play on a cheap Casio keyboard -- the poor return action means extra work leading to an inability to play fast.)
As an RSI sufferer (albeit mostly recovered) I find that I can't use a laptop keyboard for more than 15 minutes.
That said, I find the keyboard vastly preferential to the mouse. (I use the keyboard to navigate Windows menus -- there's a tip for the guy and his Maya gestures.) Also, one of the worst things I found was click-and-drag. The short travel buttons on a mouse need a not-inconsiderable amount of pressure to hold down....
I also understand that Brits seem to have tossed out the whole Nov 5th thing for the more commercial American import of Halloween
There's a typo there. What you meant was:
I also understand that Brits seem to have tossed out the Halloween thing for the more commercial American import of US Halloween... for indeed Hallowe'en (all hallow's[saints] eve) has been celebrated in Scotland and the north of England for generations.
Children would dress up and go round houses telling jokes, singing songs and reciting Spike Milligan in exchange for sweets, fruit and nuts. Valid enterprise through the dramatic arts.
Of course, imported television programmes put an end to that.
Now "kids" go down the "sidewalk" knocking on doors and saying "Trick or Treat", which is roughly equivalent to "nice car -- shame if anything should happen to it".
And of course we import those nasty sickly pumpkin things (what an export that must be for the ol US of A) instead of using the traditional housing for a halloween lantern: a turnip. And no, it's not called a swede -- it's a turnip.
Hal.
(Grumpy old twentysomething.)
Well, obviously the "grey goo" argument doesn't apply to nanometerials (bucky balls and the like) because they don't actually do anything.
However, what's wrong with the "grey goo" argument? What we must remember about nanomachines is that they (theoretically -- look at any of the CAD designs made in the last decade) have no redundancy whatsoever, so if one part goes wrong, the whole thing is broken.
The problem is that to safety mechanisms make things bigger. We can't fit long-range device tracking, multiple system redundancy and failsafes (the basic requirements for autonomous agent safety) in a nanomachine, so it can never be intrinsically safe.
I disagree. This form factor is surely an important break point in PDA size. In general, PDAs have always fell between two stools: too small to use easily but too big to carry easily.
The market is now mature enough to support several categories of PDAs, and I think that this may be the first example. Recently, a lot of work has been done to increase the screen size. This is great for people who intend to give their PDAs regular use, but it makes the devices bigger again.
The "credit card" form factor is ideal as although it is in real terms too small, it's a size that's instantly recognisable as being small and hassle-free.
Don't let the lack of success of the REX 6000 fool you -- the market is maturing on a day to day basis: by the time this thing rolls off the production lines there will be enough people who want to buy it for it to be a success.
Musicians always look so poor when I see them on television. Finally, they can afford the lifestyle they deserve.
Musicians that you get to see on TV that is.
Many musicians struggle on in obscurity, the cost of equipment and getting publicity taking everything they make out of music. Others, like myself just walk away from it all and get an office job.
Even those that you see on TV aren't really benefitting, with the exception of the few real superstars (Eminem, Madonna etc). The record companies like their charted artists to look rich, so they dress them up in expensive clothes and send them to flashy parties in fancy cars -- then send them the bill for it.
The average artist incurs more costs over the term of his contract than his earnings. As a result of "being in debt" to his record company, the company can then demand that the artist does not record for anyone else, even though they don't want to record him themselves. The artist then cannot record and loses his chosen way of earning a living.
Don't blame the artists for the work of the RIAA: we're as much victims of the music industry cartels as the consumer.
Newham hasn't been picked as an "easy win" for Microsoft: it's more of a "key win". Newham considers itself -- with fair justification -- as "a leader in local government ICT" (another Register article, new today). If Microsoft lose this one, other local councils may well see it as proof OSS is viable in place of MS' wares. For this reason, Microsoft are going to have to make sure the suits believe the hype....
Really, you can't expect programmers to generate enough coherent scenarios to keep players interested, can you? If these games were to involve interesting plots, you'd keep running into people who had done exactly the same things as you, except that the demon/warlord/killer pig had a slightly different name. Hang on -- doesn't that happen anyway?
No, human intervention is required to customise the experience, GM style. Smaller worlds are needed with restricted take-up of gamers.
Either that, or stick to the preprogrammed off-line games....
We already *have* an alternative to fossil fuels:
on
The End of the Oil Age
·
· Score: 1
Vegetable oil.
The diesel engine was invented by Mr. Diesel as a means of powering tractors from farm biproducts.
If governments would allow us to do it, we could all get diesel cars and run our vehicles off a truly renewable source of energy.
Unfortunately (and I assure you, I'm not a conspiracy theorist) vegetable oil is too freely available and there would be no way to tell whether someone had paid fuel tax/duty on their oil (as opposed to buying it from a catering supplier). In the UK, using vegetable oil in your car currently constitutes tax evasion.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an individual who, during the mid-to-late nineties, wrote a package to run software from the original C64 GEOS on IBM PCs. He never released it as CMD didn't want him to (they probably couldn't have stopped him, but he chose not to release it anyway). With this free download release, that package may now reappear and become a bizarre yet effective way to put a tried-and-tested, low-cost office environment onto a low-powered handheld PC. (Highly suitable for low-resolution/low-colour screens!) As the file formats are completely stable (there will be no ongoing development), handheld/PC synchronisation would be pretty future-proof, and if native GEOWrite file format support was to be added to StarOffice, we'd have a neatly integrated setup.... HAL.
The OED defines artefact thus: noun a functional or decorative man-made object.
Compression "artifacts" are (largely unwanted) side effects of a process. An artefact is the intended product of a process. Therefore, calling it a compression "artefact" is wrong. (However shaky the etymological basis for his reasoning is, I still prefer not to call it an "artefact".
HPH
Wrong! For audiophiles, FLAC is the very good thing. Ogg is compromise. (MP3 is a joke.)
This is incidentally why paid-for music downloads are a waste of time.
You're paying through the nose for sorely inadequate sound quality. (WMA? That joke's so bad it's not funny!) HPH
I read a tribute article ... or did I see something on the TV? Either way, Douglas Adams knew that the second head wouldn't really work, so he tried to rewrite it so that it wasn't there. His preferred solution was to have the second head under his coat so that he could open his coat and cut to a different shot whenever they needed to speak to the second head.
Executives vetoed this on the grounds that it wasn't like the radio series. Douglas was apparently a little miffed -- it was *his* radio series after all: why shouldn't he be allowed to change it?
This whole misunderstanding is about the use of the term "Operating System": most residents of Slashdotland take it to mean "the kernel". In the case of a single-use device, though, the operating system is all the software it needs to do its task -- OS layer, application backends, UI/frontend... the whole caboodle: each part is required for the operation of the system as intended. From the users' point of view it is all just part of the magical TiVo black box, even if in software engineering terms this is more than a vast oversimplification.
HTH, HPH
Possibly, but remember that in those days a computer took so long to do things that most of your computer time was spent waiting rather than typing! (My uncle was one of the first computer programmers in Scotland. He worked in a brewery on IBM 360s doing batch runs from punch cards. The official waiting room was always empty: the programmers' unofficial waiting room was... elsewhere in the brewery. Programmers spent roughly three quarters of the working day drinking....)
Actually, current thinking disputes this. The reason RSI didn't affect typists (on mechanical typewriters) is due to the extra weight of the keys. The key return supplied enough movement that you wouldn't have to use any effort to lift your fingers the keys did it, whereas now you raise and lower the fingers in quick succession with a serious of poorly-coordinated muscle movements, causing pulling and straining. (This is also why most concert pianists find it impossible to play on a cheap Casio keyboard -- the poor return action means extra work leading to an inability to play fast.)
As an RSI sufferer (albeit mostly recovered) I find that I can't use a laptop keyboard for more than 15 minutes.
That said, I find the keyboard vastly preferential to the mouse. (I use the keyboard to navigate Windows menus -- there's a tip for the guy and his Maya gestures.) Also, one of the worst things I found was click-and-drag. The short travel buttons on a mouse need a not-inconsiderable amount of pressure to hold down....
I also understand that Brits seem to have tossed out the whole Nov 5th thing for the more commercial American import of Halloween There's a typo there. What you meant was: I also understand that Brits seem to have tossed out the Halloween thing for the more commercial American import of US Halloween ... for indeed Hallowe'en (all hallow's[saints] eve) has been celebrated in Scotland and the north of England for generations.
Children would dress up and go round houses telling jokes, singing songs and reciting Spike Milligan in exchange for sweets, fruit and nuts. Valid enterprise through the dramatic arts.
Of course, imported television programmes put an end to that.
Now "kids" go down the "sidewalk" knocking on doors and saying "Trick or Treat", which is roughly equivalent to "nice car -- shame if anything should happen to it".
And of course we import those nasty sickly pumpkin things (what an export that must be for the ol US of A) instead of using the traditional housing for a halloween lantern: a turnip. And no, it's not called a swede -- it's a turnip.
Hal.
(Grumpy old twentysomething.)
However, what's wrong with the "grey goo" argument? What we must remember about nanomachines is that they (theoretically -- look at any of the CAD designs made in the last decade) have no redundancy whatsoever, so if one part goes wrong, the whole thing is broken.
The problem is that to safety mechanisms make things bigger. We can't fit long-range device tracking, multiple system redundancy and failsafes (the basic requirements for autonomous agent safety) in a nanomachine, so it can never be intrinsically safe.
I disagree. This form factor is surely an important break point in PDA size. In general, PDAs have always fell between two stools: too small to use easily but too big to carry easily.
The market is now mature enough to support several categories of PDAs, and I think that this may be the first example. Recently, a lot of work has been done to increase the screen size. This is great for people who intend to give their PDAs regular use, but it makes the devices bigger again.
The "credit card" form factor is ideal as although it is in real terms too small, it's a size that's instantly recognisable as being small and hassle-free.
Don't let the lack of success of the REX 6000 fool you -- the market is maturing on a day to day basis: by the time this thing rolls off the production lines there will be enough people who want to buy it for it to be a success.
Musicians that you get to see on TV that is.
Many musicians struggle on in obscurity, the cost of equipment and getting publicity taking everything they make out of music. Others, like myself just walk away from it all and get an office job.
Even those that you see on TV aren't really benefitting, with the exception of the few real superstars (Eminem, Madonna etc). The record companies like their charted artists to look rich, so they dress them up in expensive clothes and send them to flashy parties in fancy cars -- then send them the bill for it.
The average artist incurs more costs over the term of his contract than his earnings. As a result of "being in debt" to his record company, the company can then demand that the artist does not record for anyone else, even though they don't want to record him themselves. The artist then cannot record and loses his chosen way of earning a living.
Don't blame the artists for the work of the RIAA: we're as much victims of the music industry cartels as the consumer.
Newham hasn't been picked as an "easy win" for Microsoft: it's more of a "key win". Newham considers itself -- with fair justification -- as "a leader in local government ICT" (another Register article, new today). If Microsoft lose this one, other local councils may well see it as proof OSS is viable in place of MS' wares. For this reason, Microsoft are going to have to make sure the suits believe the hype....
No, human intervention is required to customise the experience, GM style. Smaller worlds are needed with restricted take-up of gamers.
Either that, or stick to the preprogrammed off-line games....
Vegetable oil.
The diesel engine was invented by Mr. Diesel as a means of powering tractors from farm biproducts.
If governments would allow us to do it, we could all get diesel cars and run our vehicles off a truly renewable source of energy.
Unfortunately (and I assure you, I'm not a conspiracy theorist) vegetable oil is too freely available and there would be no way to tell whether someone had paid fuel tax/duty on their oil (as opposed to buying it from a catering supplier). In the UK, using vegetable oil in your car currently constitutes tax evasion.
HPH
Keep the cards, ban the phone!