Our high school rock band used ribbon mics because the bass player's dad still had a couple he never bothered to sell when he was a young musician. We tried, with unabated failure, to use them to amplify the vocals at shows; the signal was way too quiet compared to the rest of the mics. In a studio, though, where you can balance channels more easily, they really do give a nice warm sound to the voice or instruments. Thank god we had a condenser mic for the drums, though.
If Yahoo mail
would give me POP3 access for a small fee, I'd pay the fee, but instead they force me to download spam. So I don't use
it.
Okay, strictly speaking you have a point. But realistically, I do this, and I get one message from yahoo-spam every 2-4 weeks. This is about 2% of the amount of unrequested, unjustified spam that gets sent to my inbox by random people for no reason at all. I think it's an incredibly small price to pay for POP service. I think it helps that I UN-checked every single "interest" in their list of categories... now I don't match many advertisers' profiles:)
(Irony: the Secretary of Culture who wrote this bill is also on record speaking
against software patents.)
Not ironic at all, at least not to him. I couldn't read that link, I got a 404, but he probably thinks, as we do, that software patents often grant exculsive access to obvious algorithms to be used for an unfair business advantage.
So how could such an intelligent, forward-thinking man promote region-coding? Well, I imagine that's not the point for him. The POINT is probably that some lobbying group has convinced him that the theatres lose money when a video, be it dvd or vhs, gets imported (lobbyists probably say "smuggled") before the first-run is over, thereby taking money away from legitimate French businesses and giving to these evil American pig-dogs.
Stereotypes and Monty Python jokes aside, he probably has a point: local theatre owners get screwed by so-called "pirated" movies. I don't have statistics on this, and they probably don't either, so maybe the problem is negligible. But maybe it's not.
Yeah, I think releasing movies at the same time worldwide might be an okay fix to that problem. Region coding is not, and it wasn't really the point of this legislation, I'm guessing. He basically used "Zone 1" to mean "DVDs of movies which we're still showing in theatres."
Printf is a prime source of "Heisenbugs" in multithreaded code, because it causes code to be serialized behind the big printf lock. Programs with race conditions frequently work fine when printf is used for debugging.
Well, then just put in "printf("");" everywhere and your program should work perfectly! What's the problem?!
To suggest a lack of willpower, suggests a lack of intelligence and understanding from the person who made such a suggestion. And even smacks of racism or eugenics! (I'll see your ad hominem attack, and raise you Godwin's law!)
Hm. Okay, I hope you don't think I was actually trying to attack anyone, or assert that either homosexuals or overeaters have a "lack of willpower." I was just responding to the suggestion that "homosexuals can't help it, it's not their fault." In fact, whether or not they can "help" it, I don't think it's A fault, and to call it a genetic irregularity insults the people who have chosen that lifestyle.
Of course, there are hereditary predispositions to all sorts of things. It's just that the studies I've seen regarding hereditary homosexuality have been shoddy at best.
unless they eat enough to feed a dozen starving African refugees...
Okay, lots of people seem to be latching on to this phrase. I think it's important to realize that it's being used simply for comparison, and not to imply that sending half of each huge-ass American steak to Africa would really solve anything.
There are many, many reasons that people starve in all areas of the world. Americans eating a lot is generally not one of them. Having been to East Africa, I can tell you that there's PLENTY of food there. Portions in restaurants are generally huge, and it's often considered rude if you're invited over for dinner and don't have 2 or 3 large helpings of the host's painstakingly prepared meal.
The problem is almost always one of local distribution, particularly in times of draught (which are more frequent and generally more serious than here in America). Even in the best of times, the people who live closest to production (eg, corn farmers) are just barely subsisting because commodity prices are so low that they frequently lose money on a harvest. So, even though they're almost swimming in food, they can't always provide proper nutrition to themselves and their families.
When there actually is a food shortage, things are even worse. Scarcity of resources drives the prices up, theoretically, but the market is often controlled by corrupt officials and sometimes tons of produce gets sold on the international market for slightly higher prices, without helping the local sitation at all. Result: people starve, farmers still get screwed.
And, sending food from here often doesn't help. Frequently it gluts the market, screwing the farmers again, and often even rots in transit, so ends up being useless when it gets there. There are all kinds of examples of mismanaged world bank programs that have miserable effects on indigenous cultures everywhere even when they're trying to do good in this way.
So, go ahead and have your porterhouse. It doesn't cause anyone else to starve. But please also give to charities to help the hungry in America, and try to buy FairTrade commodities (like coffee) to help the agriculturists world-over.
Oh man, I'd like to see what you're basing that on. I know plenty of people who flat out insist that they CHOOSE to be homosexual, and could go either way.
If this is based on that one study supposedly showing that gay men have smaller hypothalamus glands or whatever, go back to the drawing board. First of all, the research (to my knowledge) has never been reproduced, causality was not demonstrated, and there was certainly no genetic connection clearly demonstrated. The only good way to go about this would be to measure the size of men's hypo-T glands throughout life and see if guys with the smaller ones go on to be gay. Except I think he had to tear their brains apart to make his "discovery."
Plus, how does that explain female homosexuality at all?
In addition, it's a ridiculous argument at this stage in the game. I think it was an effort to align homosexuality with previously successful civil rights campaigns, all of which centered around liberating a group that was repressed based on traits with which they were born (african americans, women). If homosexuality is one of those, we can't really persecute it, can we? But I think America has finally started the more difficult process of realizing that one lifestyle system isn't right for everyone, and we just have to accept other peoples' non-socially-destructive actions, whether they disgust us or not.
This isn't the first research in this direction.
Here is an AP article about a study with monkeys, and
there is also an interview here with 2 scientists who did similar studies on rats at U-dub Madison. I could've sworn one of those two followed a "restricted calorie" diet himself, but that could be someone else... ah, hell, I can't find that. Anyway, lots of preliminary evidence out there.
So is the P4 not multiplier-locked, then? That's a strange step for intel to take. I was under the impression that they locked the multipliers so that people couldn't market celeron 566s as celeron 650s (of course that forced them to use a 100MHz bus instead of 66 and sell it as an "850 MHZ SPEED DEMON!") or whatever. So has Intel given up on this "fraud prevention" technique? If so, can it last?
Or maybe these guys increased the 400MHz bus to 410:)
My first response to this news was to say "YAY!" and send a thank you comment on the feedback page. Yes, really.
Because I think thanks is all they're going to have to go on after not too long. I mean, this seems awesome, but didn't they start that product review junk because maintaining a huge-ass usenet archive just isn't profitable? So it seems like going backwards 2 years doesn't really get them anywhere financially except no longer barking up that particular wrong tree.
Still some work to do to stay in business, though...
Nah, it wasn't so bad. Back when it was "The Internet Bookstore" instead of "The Internet K-mart," I enjoyed browsing thousands upon thousands of titles - more than any bookstore I had in town. Then B&N moved in (yes, this happened AFTER I found amazon!), and I didn't care so much about amazon. And, eventually, they started to become concerned with profits rather than revenues, and their loss-leader selection dried up considerably.
Yeah, Amazon used to be cool and no longer is, but they've got worse problems than cruft.
um... why not hit Ctrl-Alt-backspace and kill your X server yourself? Then you're dropped back to the xdm prompt to login again (right?). Granted, you still lose all the work in progress, but it seems safer than blithely hitting reset.
Combine time-pressures, market pressures, upper-management pressures, and a lack of training and professional standards, and you have a whole class of employee (the project manager) who has only incentives to lie and hedge, and no incentive to be honest about schedule, feature set, state-of-the-project, internal project problems, etc.
... also apply to the people who write those "sufficiently developed" "wealth of frameworks and libraries." I resent people who say that the tools are good but the work we do with them is shoddy. The tools are merely another level of software which, unfortunately, often has all of the same problems as end-user apps.
Take the apple WebObjects framework, for example. More specifically, the EnterpriseObject backend. Basically this has to do with an OO interface to database transactions; neat stuff. So why was my application crashing every couple of days after eating all the machine's available memory? Because there was an outstanding issue in the framework which failed to deallocate internal database objects. My app crashed and it wasn't my fault, and I'm still trying to find a workaround.
Um... no offense, but duh. I thought that was one of those things taught in high school alongside "Columbus discovered America" and "Atoms look just like the Bohr model predicts" -- that the cultural revolution named the Renaissance was a direct result of cheap, widely availably printing and the ensuing increased literacy of the non-aristocratic class (sidenote: it was also assisted by the huge masses of wealth -- including cloth recycled into paper -- left after 1/3 of europe's population died in the plague. heh).
And to save this comment from being flamebait or troll or whatever, let's examine how the current "technology revolution" is different from the printing press. I think it's critical to focus on the printing press's effect of increased literacy among the non-aristocracy. This didn't instantly propel them into power positions and topple the aristocracy or anything, but it DID increase awareness of injustice, and led (indirectly at least) to cultural revolutions that involved the common person demanding more power and autonomy.
Where is this happening nowadays? I guess we could argue that the outrage against the DMCA etc is an example of this, but it seems kind of early to tell where that's going. I certainly don't think any governments are going to be overthrown soon. Reformed? Let's hope so.
Oh man. I guess this would be optimal behavior for a server situation where you compiled your own kernel with exactly the right drivers (etc...) for your precise hardware, and any weirdness represented failure.
But in most other situations, I think this could conceptually be way more of a pain than it's worth. If you think about it, the kernel is actually pretty damn tolerant of hardware "failure," which (for me, anyway:) often ACTUALLY indicates a misconfiguration. I mean, I've run the wrong X Server, wrong sound card drivers, bad hard drive, and probably tons of other stuff, and linux at least BOOTS, even if I have to use single-user mode to fix my fsck-ups.
Personally, I'm glad it works this way, and I honestly would've expected some kind of similar fallback behavior in case of an unrecognized CPU. I mean, I see your point, but that seems more appropriate to an industrial-strength OS with an approved hardware list, which Linux decidedly doesn't have.
Amen! And I wouldn't mind seeing the members of the RIAA come crashing down if they can't reconcile themselves to lower prices.
Problem is, they aren't the ones who are going to take the losses, ever. First to go are going to be the small local record stores who don't have the option to sell CDs as a loss leader, since that's their only business.
After that, I fear, if music wholesalers simply must cut prices, they're going to start gouging the artists even more than they currently do. I just don't think BMG, for example, is ever going to hurt from this.
Okay, I'm going to play the devil's advocate and say this probably isn't the best way to get started.
However, that depends on your definition of "best." There's a lot you can learn from starting your own open source program from scratch, but the problem is, that's about the limit: there's a lot you will learn. In terms of contributing to open source as a whole, you might or might not get anything done.
If you do have a great idea for something that just NEEDS to be written, at least check out Sourceforge first and try to make sure someone else hasn't started it yet. If there is someone else out there, great! Consider it a head start on the app of your dreams.
On the other hand, if there's nothing in particular that "itches," then certainly don't start anything new. Flex your newfound programming muscle by finding an interesting program and add a feature (I would say "fix a bug," but I don't want to scare you away). I think my next thing, after I recompile my own kernel on my new machine, is going to be installing KDE2 and contributing to the mail client. I use the KDE1.1 kmail, and kind of hate some things about it.
[ That said, I wouldn't really want to discourage someone from starting their own new project. Just be realistic about expecting it to make a difference in the community. Chances are your pet project is just that - yours. ]
Yeah, but I thought the rule was 2 or 3 groups of 3 or 4 - so I think we're still fine using 10-digit numbers.
The other thing, and this isn't a psychological theory but just something I've noticed, is that I really don't remember certain area codes as sequences of numbers anymore. For example, where I'm from in michigan, the area code is 616. No one from there tells me their area code, I just know it. And I don't put any effort into remembering it. It's getting to be like that with my new area code (520) as well. I imagine it's something akin to a Chinese speaker remembering a certain pictograph; the area code only takes up one "chunk" of memory. And if we were this familiar with, say, the area code AND the LATA, then all we'd really have to remember as a sequence would be somebody's last 4 numbers.
Oh, come now. Think how java is used:
1) on the server side. Most input and output will be going through network connections, not to stdout/err.
2) on the client side. Most input and output will be going into cute graphical widgets, not to the console.
Basically, the only thing you ever use System.out for is to write debug stuff. Unless you're writing a command line app in Java (someone email me if you've EVER done this, 'kay?). So it's fine that it's buried under some heirarchy called "System." It's kind of like a programmer's backdoor (in a good way!) to get things done efficiently. If it makes you feel better, think of System.out as a Singleton and look up the Singleton pattern in "Design Patterns." Lots of applications have things that you only need one of, all around the code. That doesn't have to ruin the object heirarchy, and I don't think it does here.
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
·
· Score: 2
Users literally scream for new features, and the developer has to implement them, and FAST
Well, the client screams for new features, at least. Many times the end user is shown a feature and says, "oh, your program can do THAT? I never knew!" Of course, this assumes being a consultant. Maybe replace "client" with "manager," I don't know.
Okay! As you can see even from the blurb, and certainly from ruling itself, this isn't exactly the victory claimed in the headline. It's an *affirmation* of an injunction which was previously issued.
Which effectively means, the COPA-esque thing is currently on the books in Michigan, but there's an injuction against enforcing it until this suit comes to trial. The language of the injunction is pretty harsh, calling the law "unconstitutional," but that's not the final verdict! We have a while to wait before this is sorted out.
Perhaps that's true, but all the motherboard + CPU combos in the range you mention had integrated sound and video, which I try to shy away from because 1) they're frequently incompatible with linux, and 2) it's much more difficult to repair, replace, or upgrade those integrated components.
Slashdot Mirror
Our high school rock band used ribbon mics because the bass player's dad still had a couple he never bothered to sell when he was a young musician. We tried, with unabated failure, to use them to amplify the vocals at shows; the signal was way too quiet compared to the rest of the mics. In a studio, though, where you can balance channels more easily, they really do give a nice warm sound to the voice or instruments. Thank god we had a condenser mic for the drums, though.
Okay, strictly speaking you have a point. But realistically, I do this, and I get one message from yahoo-spam every 2-4 weeks. This is about 2% of the amount of unrequested, unjustified spam that gets sent to my inbox by random people for no reason at all. I think it's an incredibly small price to pay for POP service. I think it helps that I UN-checked every single "interest" in their list of categories... now I don't match many advertisers' profiles :)
Not ironic at all, at least not to him. I couldn't read that link, I got a 404, but he probably thinks, as we do, that software patents often grant exculsive access to obvious algorithms to be used for an unfair business advantage.
So how could such an intelligent, forward-thinking man promote region-coding? Well, I imagine that's not the point for him. The POINT is probably that some lobbying group has convinced him that the theatres lose money when a video, be it dvd or vhs, gets imported (lobbyists probably say "smuggled") before the first-run is over, thereby taking money away from legitimate French businesses and giving to these evil American pig-dogs.
Stereotypes and Monty Python jokes aside, he probably has a point: local theatre owners get screwed by so-called "pirated" movies. I don't have statistics on this, and they probably don't either, so maybe the problem is negligible. But maybe it's not.
Yeah, I think releasing movies at the same time worldwide might be an okay fix to that problem. Region coding is not, and it wasn't really the point of this legislation, I'm guessing. He basically used "Zone 1" to mean "DVDs of movies which we're still showing in theatres."
Well, then just put in "printf("");" everywhere and your program should work perfectly! What's the problem?!
; )
Hm. Okay, I hope you don't think I was actually trying to attack anyone, or assert that either homosexuals or overeaters have a "lack of willpower." I was just responding to the suggestion that "homosexuals can't help it, it's not their fault." In fact, whether or not they can "help" it, I don't think it's A fault, and to call it a genetic irregularity insults the people who have chosen that lifestyle.
Of course, there are hereditary predispositions to all sorts of things. It's just that the studies I've seen regarding hereditary homosexuality have been shoddy at best.
Okay, lots of people seem to be latching on to this phrase. I think it's important to realize that it's being used simply for comparison, and not to imply that sending half of each huge-ass American steak to Africa would really solve anything.
There are many, many reasons that people starve in all areas of the world. Americans eating a lot is generally not one of them. Having been to East Africa, I can tell you that there's PLENTY of food there. Portions in restaurants are generally huge, and it's often considered rude if you're invited over for dinner and don't have 2 or 3 large helpings of the host's painstakingly prepared meal.
The problem is almost always one of local distribution, particularly in times of draught (which are more frequent and generally more serious than here in America). Even in the best of times, the people who live closest to production (eg, corn farmers) are just barely subsisting because commodity prices are so low that they frequently lose money on a harvest. So, even though they're almost swimming in food, they can't always provide proper nutrition to themselves and their families.
When there actually is a food shortage, things are even worse. Scarcity of resources drives the prices up, theoretically, but the market is often controlled by corrupt officials and sometimes tons of produce gets sold on the international market for slightly higher prices, without helping the local sitation at all. Result: people starve, farmers still get screwed.
And, sending food from here often doesn't help. Frequently it gluts the market, screwing the farmers again, and often even rots in transit, so ends up being useless when it gets there. There are all kinds of examples of mismanaged world bank programs that have miserable effects on indigenous cultures everywhere even when they're trying to do good in this way.
So, go ahead and have your porterhouse. It doesn't cause anyone else to starve. But please also give to charities to help the hungry in America, and try to buy FairTrade commodities (like coffee) to help the agriculturists world-over.
Oh man, I'd like to see what you're basing that on. I know plenty of people who flat out insist that they CHOOSE to be homosexual, and could go either way.
If this is based on that one study supposedly showing that gay men have smaller hypothalamus glands or whatever, go back to the drawing board. First of all, the research (to my knowledge) has never been reproduced, causality was not demonstrated, and there was certainly no genetic connection clearly demonstrated. The only good way to go about this would be to measure the size of men's hypo-T glands throughout life and see if guys with the smaller ones go on to be gay. Except I think he had to tear their brains apart to make his "discovery." Plus, how does that explain female homosexuality at all?
In addition, it's a ridiculous argument at this stage in the game. I think it was an effort to align homosexuality with previously successful civil rights campaigns, all of which centered around liberating a group that was repressed based on traits with which they were born (african americans, women). If homosexuality is one of those, we can't really persecute it, can we? But I think America has finally started the more difficult process of realizing that one lifestyle system isn't right for everyone, and we just have to accept other peoples' non-socially-destructive actions, whether they disgust us or not.
This isn't the first research in this direction. Here is an AP article about a study with monkeys, and there is also an interview here with 2 scientists who did similar studies on rats at U-dub Madison. I could've sworn one of those two followed a "restricted calorie" diet himself, but that could be someone else... ah, hell, I can't find that. Anyway, lots of preliminary evidence out there.
And ever since, people have put about that much thought into the content of their emails...
Or maybe these guys increased the 400MHz bus to 410 :)
Because I think thanks is all they're going to have to go on after not too long. I mean, this seems awesome, but didn't they start that product review junk because maintaining a huge-ass usenet archive just isn't profitable? So it seems like going backwards 2 years doesn't really get them anywhere financially except no longer barking up that particular wrong tree.
Still some work to do to stay in business, though...
Yeah, Amazon used to be cool and no longer is, but they've got worse problems than cruft.
um... why not hit Ctrl-Alt-backspace and kill your X server yourself? Then you're dropped back to the xdm prompt to login again (right?). Granted, you still lose all the work in progress, but it seems safer than blithely hitting reset.
Because these same pressures...
Combine time-pressures, market pressures, upper-management pressures, and a lack of training and professional standards, and you have a whole class of employee (the project manager) who has only incentives to lie and hedge, and no incentive to be honest about schedule, feature set, state-of-the-project, internal project problems, etc.
... also apply to the people who write those "sufficiently developed" "wealth of frameworks and libraries." I resent people who say that the tools are good but the work we do with them is shoddy. The tools are merely another level of software which, unfortunately, often has all of the same problems as end-user apps.
Take the apple WebObjects framework, for example. More specifically, the EnterpriseObject backend. Basically this has to do with an OO interface to database transactions; neat stuff. So why was my application crashing every couple of days after eating all the machine's available memory? Because there was an outstanding issue in the framework which failed to deallocate internal database objects. My app crashed and it wasn't my fault, and I'm still trying to find a workaround.
Damn!
And to save this comment from being flamebait or troll or whatever, let's examine how the current "technology revolution" is different from the printing press. I think it's critical to focus on the printing press's effect of increased literacy among the non-aristocracy. This didn't instantly propel them into power positions and topple the aristocracy or anything, but it DID increase awareness of injustice, and led (indirectly at least) to cultural revolutions that involved the common person demanding more power and autonomy.
Where is this happening nowadays? I guess we could argue that the outrage against the DMCA etc is an example of this, but it seems kind of early to tell where that's going. I certainly don't think any governments are going to be overthrown soon. Reformed? Let's hope so.
But in most other situations, I think this could conceptually be way more of a pain than it's worth. If you think about it, the kernel is actually pretty damn tolerant of hardware "failure," which (for me, anyway :) often ACTUALLY indicates a misconfiguration. I mean, I've run the wrong X Server, wrong sound card drivers, bad hard drive, and probably tons of other stuff, and linux at least BOOTS, even if I have to use single-user mode to fix my fsck-ups.
Personally, I'm glad it works this way, and I honestly would've expected some kind of similar fallback behavior in case of an unrecognized CPU. I mean, I see your point, but that seems more appropriate to an industrial-strength OS with an approved hardware list, which Linux decidedly doesn't have.
The leading UK government web site since 1994
Do they have a lot of competition for this honor?
: )
Problem is, they aren't the ones who are going to take the losses, ever. First to go are going to be the small local record stores who don't have the option to sell CDs as a loss leader, since that's their only business.
After that, I fear, if music wholesalers simply must cut prices, they're going to start gouging the artists even more than they currently do. I just don't think BMG, for example, is ever going to hurt from this.
Okay, I'm going to play the devil's advocate and say this probably isn't the best way to get started.
However, that depends on your definition of "best." There's a lot you can learn from starting your own open source program from scratch, but the problem is, that's about the limit: there's a lot you will learn. In terms of contributing to open source as a whole, you might or might not get anything done.
If you do have a great idea for something that just NEEDS to be written, at least check out Sourceforge first and try to make sure someone else hasn't started it yet. If there is someone else out there, great! Consider it a head start on the app of your dreams.
On the other hand, if there's nothing in particular that "itches," then certainly don't start anything new. Flex your newfound programming muscle by finding an interesting program and add a feature (I would say "fix a bug," but I don't want to scare you away). I think my next thing, after I recompile my own kernel on my new machine, is going to be installing KDE2 and contributing to the mail client. I use the KDE1.1 kmail, and kind of hate some things about it.
[ That said, I wouldn't really want to discourage someone from starting their own new project. Just be realistic about expecting it to make a difference in the community. Chances are your pet project is just that - yours. ]
The other thing, and this isn't a psychological theory but just something I've noticed, is that I really don't remember certain area codes as sequences of numbers anymore. For example, where I'm from in michigan, the area code is 616. No one from there tells me their area code, I just know it. And I don't put any effort into remembering it. It's getting to be like that with my new area code (520) as well. I imagine it's something akin to a Chinese speaker remembering a certain pictograph; the area code only takes up one "chunk" of memory. And if we were this familiar with, say, the area code AND the LATA, then all we'd really have to remember as a sequence would be somebody's last 4 numbers.
1) on the server side. Most input and output will be going through network connections, not to stdout/err.
2) on the client side. Most input and output will be going into cute graphical widgets, not to the console.
Basically, the only thing you ever use System.out for is to write debug stuff. Unless you're writing a command line app in Java (someone email me if you've EVER done this, 'kay?). So it's fine that it's buried under some heirarchy called "System." It's kind of like a programmer's backdoor (in a good way!) to get things done efficiently. If it makes you feel better, think of System.out as a Singleton and look up the Singleton pattern in "Design Patterns." Lots of applications have things that you only need one of, all around the code. That doesn't have to ruin the object heirarchy, and I don't think it does here.
Well, the client screams for new features, at least. Many times the end user is shown a feature and says, "oh, your program can do THAT? I never knew!" Of course, this assumes being a consultant. Maybe replace "client" with "manager," I don't know.
Which effectively means, the COPA-esque thing is currently on the books in Michigan, but there's an injuction against enforcing it until this suit comes to trial. The language of the injunction is pretty harsh, calling the law "unconstitutional," but that's not the final verdict! We have a while to wait before this is sorted out.
Perhaps that's true, but all the motherboard + CPU combos in the range you mention had integrated sound and video, which I try to shy away from because 1) they're frequently incompatible with linux, and 2) it's much more difficult to repair, replace, or upgrade those integrated components.