It stands out in your body of work as a steaming pile of used hay. It was written after your "retirement." I am quite pleased that y's theou've continued to write fiction - Zeitgeist would have been a fine last book, but I've enjoyed almost everything you've written since then. Zenith Angle, however, was a true stinker. After my friends and I read it, we would often smoke and speculate that Someone In Government paid you more than your usual per-word rate to come out of retirement to write some recruiting materials. Which were crap. What's the deal, yo?
Couldn't you just mount the magnet in a little setting, and have it put in like a stud? Or as a barbell, in that whats-it-called, the webbing between thumb and index finger? I'd love to have this done (useful not only at work, but also in my off-time as a wierdo electronic musician), but I am dubious about amateur surgeons, not to mention crappy housings for things I'm going to put in my body. It is useful, but by no means necessary, to have it mounted in the fingertips.
For that matter, couldn't you get similar results by manufacturing a, um, neodynium thimble? Or neodynium fingerpicks?
When I was an outsourced tech support trog for $BIGVENDOR, holding down the power button after unplugging was part of the ritual we made users go through before mucking about inside the case. Usually, but not always, the fan would twitch when we did this. I always figured that it was the hardware manufactured by a Taiwanese firm and supplied to $BIGVENDOR (among others) that had this feature.
Speaking as a self-indulgent experimental musician, with far more than my fair share of running cable for audio installations, I can tell you that your plan for splitting the soundcard out into six long cables running throughout the house will have lots of audio interference. However, you might be able to keep it down to something acceptable (as in, picking up not much more interference than your probably-poorly-shielded soundcard picks up from the rest of your computer) if you use shielded cables, and then place them wisely. The rule of thumb is to never let an audio cable come near an appliance or cross a power cable at right angles. Route your cables in such a way as to avoid coming near stuff that generates an EM field (appliances, your home's wiring, and so on). If you're careful, you can probably get away with running well-shielded cables all over the house, and have pretty damn listenable audio, assuming you're not going to try to impress any audiophiles.
This very much depends on the quality of your house's wiring. I live in an old house in Portland, so I'd never try this without a powered mixer - my house wiring acts as an antenna with our old solid-state amp, and intermittently picks up CB operators for miles around. It would also fail, for me in my old, poorly-wired house, on cost-effectiveness of the cable I'd buy.
Furthermore, do you really want all the audio in your house going at once? Buy a powered mixer, and some unpowered speakers, and some really good cable. Or, alternately, buy a soundcard with more RCA outs. "Pro-sumer" PCI audio cards are getting dirt cheap, as all of us non-professional hobbyists with pro tastes in gear are buying Firewire cards when we want 6 ins/6 outs, instead of the PCI cards we would have bought five years ago.
The first-order quotes (around the word 'pirated') indicate that the word was lifted from another source. The second-order quotes (the words 'quote' and 'unquote') indicate that the writer thinks that piracy is a term of dubious utility, and they're "saying" those words "out loud" in order to indicate this. These second-order quotes are, in fact, snigger quotes.
The third-order quotes (the quotes around the words 'quote' and 'unquote') are ALSO snigger quotes - jeez, can't take anything seriously, can you? - indicating a sneer at the use of snigger quotes. So, if I was mocking someone for saying "quote unquote" out loud for being pretentious, I might hang "air quotes" around those "snigger quotes." E.g., I'm unable to take snigger quotes seriously, so I have to mark them as something I don't take seriously, with more snigger quotes.
So, is that all clear? Think of it as expressing a cooler-than-thou sneer, with Lisp-like syntax.
PS - Next time you're speaking aloud, and need to insert an aside into a longer phrase, I strongly encourage you to hang "air parentheses" around it.
I'm with you 100% on your intuitive/ubiquitous observation. However, I would like to observe that some kinds of knowledge do seem to be available osmotically. F'rinstance, my coworkers, ranging in age from 17 to 37, are usually really pleased when I show them a new keyboard shortcut that makes tasks faster & easier. The 17yo in particular has taken note of the fact that I can whip through icon-shuffling on the keyboard with blinding speed.
As fond as they are of my keyboard advice, some kinds of icon-manipulations just aren't sinking in for them. The fact that you can alt-tab between apps but can only sometimes control-tab through open tabs or windows within an app (this is win2k; I did say this is at work, right?) just isn't sinking in for some of my coworkers. Alt-tabbing and tabbed browsing in particular seem to be pretty incomprehensible, for some people who didn't grow up around computers (loads of people, it turns out). I feel like this backs up your statement about something ubiquitous and designed being percieved as natural.
However, I'm going to show the video and the demo to my coworkers tomorrow, and I bet you they eat it up. People, er, consumers, they just seem to love eye-candy that cartoonifies the physical world. The video looks like a Disneyification of the process of flipping through papers. The way it works is immediately obvious, in a way that causing little cartoony things to flicker on a screen by tapping at a keyboard just cannot match. I'll still have to teach them how to use it, but they'll clamor to be taught, and it will take about ninety seconds for the crucial info to be imparted.
The thing that is going to force me to move the office off of Win2K is not going to be its impending EOL or a lack of compatibility in a critical app; it's going to be the relevant link from the article.
My fellow USians might be more familiar with it as a verb, as in: "He doled out the last of the rations." Parent post is right, but USian usage of dole is more like "distribute sparingly" and less "distribute charitably," the second of which is what the dictionary seems to say on both sides of the pond.
And, um, uncle poster that control+c, control+v'ed the dictionary definition left off the best bit:
Well, this hypothetical device is the holy grail of electronic musicians. There are no guitarists in my band, but there's a fair number of stompboxes and other electronics distributed among 5 people. If they were all manufactured by (if we were sponsored by!!!) Boss, then everything would be running at 9V DC, as specified immediately above. However, our stuff varies as much as the original Ask/.er, so there's just NO HOPE. My bass microsynth runs at 15V DC. The Handsonic pulls an amp at 12V. Only about 1/3 of our devices share a voltage, and it's a real shame, because no 1 person has 2 9V DC boxes. Therefore, a concentrated power solution doesn't really work. So, we wind up making do with little velcro strips and gaff tape.
Somewhere, I saw an interview with the sound/tech guy for one of those bands that is a vaguely electronic pop/rock band. (It wasn't Radiohead, but it was some similar band.) They had a whole 9U rack devoted to a power solution for the whole band. It had a power conditioner in it, as well as a serious UPS. It provided clean power for the whole band, across a whole range of DC voltages, in different amperages, as well as AC. I priced out JUST those parts that were commercially available, not even counting the homebrew stuff, and it worked out to be something like fifteen hundred dollars.
So, the answer to your Ask Slashdot?
"Get rich & famous, then hire somebody else to tame your cables."
Well, if you're on a major, or one of the larger indie labels, the CD (paid for by the label) is the ad. However, if I want to put out my own full-length, that's X times ten to the third power dollars for a run of 1000 CDs that I can sell. That's an expensive ad. On the other hand, once you've paid the hosting fees, the MP3s are the ad.
The CD (okay, the physical disc, with nifty artwork) is the merchandise I sell at the show, along with the t-shirt, stickers, etc. Because, unless you have a large preexisting fanbase (i.e., what you have AFTER successfully promoting your independent avant-psych improv-pop, which is the promotion we're talking about at the moment), your cut of the cover probably won't amount to that much.
It should go without saying that I'm not in this for money at all, seeing as avant-psych improv-pop isn' exactly filling the stadiums in Hoboken. However, anyone out there trying to make a living by playing their own music knows that there's a million musicians who are willing to play for free, for promotional reasons, or ego-stroking reasons, or just for the love of an appreciative audience. This kind of shoots down the whole business model of supporting oneself by playing live and using 'net.distro as a promo device.
Hey, I'm one of those people who has a perfectly nice IT job who plays out for fun. I've been railed at by my "serious" musician friends for making it impossible for them to make a living, because I'm willing to play for a few drink tickets. I think their beef is legit, but it's not stopping me. Besides, there are worlds of difference between trying to make it big and trying to make it as a gigging trad musician in PDX. (and trying to make it into the Wire, or tyring to make ones' friends happy.)
You need a JP EN tech dictionary. What's edict's technical coverage like?
As a point of reference, one of my EN -> JP translators (who is primarily a social-services-and-tourism translator, not a tech translator) owns about $1200 USD worth of JP EN tech dictionaries (that's two dictionaries, fyi). She owns about $6-8K USD worth of dictionaries all told (to cover both JP EN and JP whatever-the-lang-code-is-for-German).
It's not always true, but usually, free dictionaries are crap for translation purposes - or so say my translators. Thr only dissenting opinion is one of my BSC translators (Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian); he uses a 4-lang text file I tracked down to precisely identify colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions. (It's gotta be tough to keep 'em straight, if you're the offspring of a Bosniak & a Croat raised among Serbs.)
Moral: Pay your translators well.
Wait, your bosses have budgeted for translators, right?
I'd happily shell out 2-3 un-DRMed dollars for about 2-3 hours worth of DRMed digital entertainment. That's what I pay when I rent movies, be it from my neighborhood $NATIONALVIDEOCHAIN, or from the local arty DVD rental shop.
Therefore, I think of iTMS as a bad deal; they're expecting me to pay what I pay for a CD, full retail. I never buy music from the majors; my tastes are sufficiently obscure that it makes sense for me to buy records directly from the labels I like, and that tends to be $9-15 for a CD or LP. (I rarely have the "1 hit and a bunch of filler" problem with my esoteric tastes.) So, if Apple were to sell uncrippled music in a lossless format, I'd pay their prices.
However, the music sold by iTMS is not that crippled, and AAC is not very lossy. So, their biz.plan is really close to roping me in. If they've actually started selling music in their lossless format (ALE?), I could wind up with a "lineage" like:
iTMS -> my HD -> CD-R -> EAC -> WAV -> FLAC -> back to my RAID w/tape backup in uncrippled, lossless, dare I say archival, format.
Or, they could erally clamp down with their DRM, and "sell" me tracks (actually, rent me tracks for some long-but-unspecified length of time, until iTMS or Apple collapse, or until I've run out of ways to move it to a new computer, or until Apple's whim changes the license) for, oh 15 to 25 cents apiece. Either way.
For some things simple analog controls work fine, things like on/off switches, potentiometer based volume knobs, and tuning knobs.
I can't stand the current generation of car stereos because the volume goes in steps, either just a little bit too loud, or a little bit to quiet. In the old days I could fiddle with the tuning knob to get in a hard to reach signal. Now I can only go up or down.1 Hz, if that doesn't work, give it up. I don't want everything else to be a similar way.
I have the same problem, but I'm a musician, so it's hugely frustrating in many areas. I don't see why it's so hard to build an analog system with pots that actually control real values, then piggyback a digital control system on top of it. Here, I'm thinking of real hammers-and-strings pianos that have midi control systems added to them. (If you're a musician yourself, google the Andromeda synth, which is a similar idea - a true analog synth that has a contemporary digital interface.)
I can understand why this would be unworkable for the office buildings of corporate America, but when I wire my own home, I would like to be able to control the heating over the net, and also be able to crank a real knob on the thermostat when my house router has been fried.
seriously, this is the first mention I've seen of safety in a knife-devoted thread. If what you're doing is setting dip switches, clipping wire, and smoking joints, the knife is not an issue. however, if you were going to use that knife to, oh, I don't know, CUT SOMETHING, and perhaps you were intending to cut something more than once, then for all our sakes, get a locking blade!
Sorry to hear about yr. thumb, guy. I myself have a secret hidden scar, but it's in a place that... er... well, I don't use it as often as you use your thumb.
Just to cast some light on the above comments about the HP 4 series, 1100, and 4000 series... I get to support all three in a nonprofit environment. The 1100 is as bad as everyone above says it is; I can't believe that I have to support it in a (putatively) businesslike setting. I'm pretty sure that the 4050 is older than the 1100, and has been worked (~300k pages or so), but is in much better shape. It's getting noisy, and sometimes it needs to be nursed a bit, but it's still perfectly functional. I wouldn't buy a newer HP printer.
The laserjet 4mp has been in the office longer than I have. It's given me far less trouble than either of the other two.
And when my 4050 got a piece of paper wrapped around its fixer roller, it was... err, I don't want to say it was a snap, but at least it was completely doable. If the same thing happened to the 1100, I'd toss it in the garbage.
Re:Why don't you just say he's an animation artist
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New Yorker on Miyazaki
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how about, because, unlike Torvalds or Hawking, he has no impact on anything tangent to reality???
I'm VERY interested in what happens sociopolitically in Japan, when the millions of kids who grew up watching his movies (and consuming the themes of "dark, apocalyptic environmentalism" contained therein at very impressionable ages) are the ones running the country (what, 20-30 years from now?).
Do people think about the effect of "the Disney ethos" or people who were raised by hippies on American politics? Not really; I think America's too culturally heterogeneous to make that sort of extrapolation possible. (For the most part; check local politics in rural northern California if you want a comparison.) However, Japan is comparatively culturally homogenous, and has this history of undergoing radical culture change in a very short period of time. Meiji Restoration, anyone?
I personally look forward to celebrating the Ghibli Restoration from atop NTV Island.
Anybody recognize artspeak when they read it? Try reading the phrase "an apparatus that forces one to reconsider and question notions of [buzzwords]" or "challenging conventional assumptions about [buzzwords]" to figure out what is going on here. The actual tech content is not what the FA is about (I did R the FA, BTW). These are the phrases that you put in your artist's statement, either to please the people who funded you, or to try to please people who might fund you. So, the text that you're reading as "check out this great new technology!" is, in fact, not saying that at all.
So, it's not supposed to solve anybody's problems, unless they're having funding problems.
The big question for me is: Is this a/. editor trying to sneak some culture into yr. daily surf, or did aforementioned editor miss out on the fact that this is an ART PROJECT?
(I think it's a pretty cool art project, actually, but not one that should be covered here on/.; if you could mass-produce the damn things, it might be different. Anyone remember how Usenet worked, back in the eighties? See, if you're a digital-art-nerd, you read about this project and immediately envision a city-wide collaborative WAN, one that's just about as anarchic as Usenet was, immediately pre-WWW.)
RTL text entry in OS X doesn't work so hot for non-Hebrew languages, it seems. My translators (I work for a nonprofit translation firm) have never seemed to get along very well with any Apple RTL text entry methods (mmm... worldscript) at all. I am aware of one guy who seems to be pretty happy with OS X, but he's a graphic designer and a decent coder, right?
It sure doesn't seem like OpenOffice is localized in Farsi, or even really has Farsi input support. A quick search of the discussions on the site mainly reveals the gripes of farsi-speaking folks with how OOo handles RTL stuff, and "It would be great if you could also add Farsi to the Arabic language family supported when it is activated." Um.
A couple of posts up, someone was asking after dual-localized systems. Can someone KDE-knowledgeable sound off? Can it switch languages on the fly? Or would a dual-boot be the best solution? I might approach the folks at freegeek if they wanna collaborate on low-end dual-language systems for Farsi-speaking refugees, if this thing is as promising as it looks.
Naussica isn't available by itself, I think, but it's definately available as part of the Studio Ghibli DVD box-set. It's the first time I've ever seen Naussica without the fan-sub. The box set is Japan-only, I'm pretty sure, but Naussica is certainly part of it.
It's also the first time I saw the one about the raccoon-alikes; it rocked my world. Can anyone come up with a title for it?
Also, when they reach behind their legs and stretch their scrota out as parachutes, that's not a sight gag, is it? I kinda thought it may have been lost in a culture gap; it was a pretty emotionally moving scene, except for the, um, scrotachutes. I know that the, um, resilent and elastic nature of coon scrota has been covered before on/. but I'm looking for someone to verify my guess as to the emotional tenor of the scene...
(for the uninitiated - I'm not joking. Please, don't mod this as funny.)
When GTA3 appeared in our music studio, there was some pretty serious gaming that went on for a while (an unusual circumstance; usually, the toys we play with are exclusively musical, but the appearance of the PS2 caused a weeks-long hiatus). Now, I rarely drive cars at all, as PDX is an extremely bike-friendly town. However, I noticed that on those occasions when I remained sober to drive those alkie bandmembers home, I noticed that some part of my brain had associated the act of driving a Real(TM) Car with playing GTA3.
At no point did I seriously consider flattening pedestrians or ramming cops off the road. Keep this in mind - my ability to distinguish fact from fiction remains intact, despite a world-class suspension-of-disbelief-generator mounted on a microscopic rack bolted to the inside of my skull.
However, when I looked to the left or right of the vehicle, I sure did use my index fingers on the steering wheel as if I were holding a PS2 controller - L2 for looking left out the window. I would spend a microscopic instant considering flight everytime I saw a guy in a black European Audi-lookin' car - those are Mafia, they have serious ordinance, they'll fsck joo up!
Most disturbing, every time I heard a chopper overhead, even when on foot or bicycle, the most proper and immediate response in my mind (for an instant, mind you) was to whip out the bazooka and take it out.
This state of affairs lasted for about a week and a half, during which time my daily consumption of GTA3 could be reckoned to hover somewhere around 2-3 hours a day, every day. I haven't played any game that much since ultima 6. As soon as I stopped playing daily, these sensations went away.
BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
1) I wasn't kidding about my world-class suspension-of-disbelief generator.
2) Even though I can cause myself to temporarily believe almost anything for a while, these GTA3-inspired beliefs never caused me to take any untoward actions. Every time I felt a desire to ram that guy in the Patriot off the road, I was able to recognize same as a game-generated impulse and squash it without effort.
3) Lots of folks are better at separating the rules and regs of the mundane world from their digital fantasy worlds better than myself.
4) We're going to have to assume that some folks do NOT perform this separation as competently as we might hope - certainly less competently than myself.
5) Perhaps some of the people in #4 also play more games than do I.
6) Perhaps some of the remaining people found in #5 are quite young.
7) I know I'm not alone in having GTA3 leak into my brain when I'm not actually playing. Many of my friends have reported the same sort of sensations that I described above, similar to that which the AC poster described (perhaps humorously). None of us, of course, have gone and DONE any GTA3-inspired crimes, but we have carefully reinforced grips-on-reality.
See, what we want to make in our music studios and game-design thinktanks and writer's groups is art that moves people - that comes back to haunt them long after they've put the book down or pressed STOP on their (insert media-reproduction device here). That's why I make media, anyways - because my life has been permanently altered by the stuff I put in my head, and some of that stuff haunts me forever after, and I have basically unlimited respect for the folks what make it. Right now, I'm particularly haunted by the works of Neal Stephenson, Scott Herren, and Arvo Part - they've made stuff that follows me around everywhere.
However, for a few brief days, I was consistently haunted by a piece of media made by the guys at Rockstar Games. That GTA3 is some pretty potent mind-altering stuff. Just like the booze, just like the prescription drugs, I say: keep out of reach of children.
As a social anthropologist and veteran Portland dumpster-diver, I'm going to have to take issue with this. It would be relatively easy to design a study (this isn't actually an experiment, of course) to take this into account.
"When someone in your house reads a porno mag, does s/he toss it when it's soiled, or keep it?"
"... no one in this house reads pornos."
Next garbage day, I find that my informants not only toss the pornos, but toss them when they appear to be unsoiled! Not that I investigate too closely, mind you...
THis is a fictional account of how one might design a simple study that 1) wasn't full of sh1t, and 2) reveals some truths about the consumption patterns of the house in question. It's all about how you ask; good questions are hard to think up, and that's more than 90% of good anthropology.
Now, using dumpster diving to make a point about inconsistent standards in privacy, that doesn't require any good study design standards at all. Moral inconsistencies are really easy to reveal, and even clueless laymen (read: willie week reporters) can pull it off without a sweat.
However, don't write off the truths that can be found in the garbage just because not *every* study that involves trash is done with rigor - good design goes a lot further than nifty jscript menus.
(no, anthro isn't a science. just wanted to get that out of the way. of course, that doesn't mean that it can't establish truths in a rigorous manner...)
sorry, but yeah... my nonprofit translation-firm job is such that I do all kinds of prepress stuff on my laptop. Separations, imposition, blah blah blah.
I'm fond of the lunatic fringe. Any social theory that obviously springs from the mind of someone "not addicted to ritual thinking" (like, say, providing citations, or reading any of the foundational theorists) is bound to have some genuine gutbusters.
First off, any theory which claims to "provid[e] an explicit, physical interpretation" of any of the Gnostic Gospels is a winner. Anything that make the Gospel of Thomas more comprehensible without the use of hallucinogenic drugs is a valuable resource in my intellectual toolkit. I will put that document in the toolkit, right next to the hallucinogenic drugs.
Secondly, any theory that discusses a social structure using terms generally applied to operating systems (http://www.melloworld.com/Reciprocality/r1/index. html) makes me wonder about whether or not I'm still under warrantee.
"Hi, thanks for calling the Western Culture Manufacturing Corporation Technical Support Line, my name is Marcel, how may I help you today?"
"Uhh, I downloaded the Irony Service Pack, and I was trying to install, but I got this error... it was, like, explorer.exe caused an invalid meme fault in humor.dll..."
"Okay, run Scandisk and delete all your temorary friends, then restart your life. That should work fine."
[hold music]
I'm usually pretty skeptical about theories that declare the theorists as "immune" or "above" a pathology or unsavory trait present in all those not approved of by the theorist. But nothing beats being told that, since I'm a singularly unimaginative coder, I'm addicted to boredom, and I don't even know it! And here I was, thinking that The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Captialism explained the spread of european industrial culture across the face of the earth, when in fact, all those poor "natives" were simply addicted to their own unhealthy thought processes!
DISCLAIMER: I'm not a computer geek, really, but a social science geek. I rarely speak up on/. because my field of expertise is touched on so rarely. Lucky you! I'm in the middle of a ~5 year project studying flirtation behavior.
The authors agree; they say that if you watch people talking who are receptive to each other, they share the same posture, gestures, and level of eye-contact. They also say that you can CREATE rapport by intentionally matching your conversation partner's state & style of communication.
If you thought this was smart, please avoid books on NLP and head straight for Erving Goffman, whom you can thank for ideas like "personal space." NLP (when yanked out of the theoretical realm and applied in genuine flirty-type social situations)is fraught with silly assumptions.
F'rinstance, if a girl was flirting with you, and you "intentionally match your conversation partner's state & style of communication," you are essentially emulating heteronormative female flirtation behavior, which might be endearing to a bi-punk-chick, but will almost certainly put off a girl who expects you to flirt in the manner of a straight boy, such as the old-fashioned girls cited in the article above.
(Furthermore, if your Jedi mind trick actually works on the lady, think of the shame when she finds your bookmark on the "how to get laid" chapter of your silly New Age concieve-of-the-human-mind-as-a-hunk-of-programmab le-silicon book.)
If you really need to read about this sort of non-verbal social communication, head straight for _Interaction_Ritual_, by the aforementioned Goffman, for a chaper on (I think) "Embarassment and Social Form."
oh, and BTW: sorry for the anthro jargon. Heteronormative means basically "according to norms for straight people."
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It stands out in your body of work as a steaming pile of used hay. It was written after your "retirement." I am quite pleased that y's theou've continued to write fiction - Zeitgeist would have been a fine last book, but I've enjoyed almost everything you've written since then. Zenith Angle, however, was a true stinker. After my friends and I read it, we would often smoke and speculate that Someone In Government paid you more than your usual per-word rate to come out of retirement to write some recruiting materials. Which were crap. What's the deal, yo?
Why does it have to be an implant?
Couldn't you just mount the magnet in a little setting, and have it put in like a stud? Or as a barbell, in that whats-it-called, the webbing between thumb and index finger? I'd love to have this done (useful not only at work, but also in my off-time as a wierdo electronic musician), but I am dubious about amateur surgeons, not to mention crappy housings for things I'm going to put in my body. It is useful, but by no means necessary, to have it mounted in the fingertips.
For that matter, couldn't you get similar results by manufacturing a, um, neodynium thimble? Or neodynium fingerpicks?
"Help, I'm stuck to my banjo."
When I was an outsourced tech support trog for $BIGVENDOR, holding down the power button after unplugging was part of the ritual we made users go through before mucking about inside the case. Usually, but not always, the fan would twitch when we did this. I always figured that it was the hardware manufactured by a Taiwanese firm and supplied to $BIGVENDOR (among others) that had this feature.
Speaking as a self-indulgent experimental musician, with far more than my fair share of running cable for audio installations, I can tell you that your plan for splitting the soundcard out into six long cables running throughout the house will have lots of audio interference. However, you might be able to keep it down to something acceptable (as in, picking up not much more interference than your probably-poorly-shielded soundcard picks up from the rest of your computer) if you use shielded cables, and then place them wisely. The rule of thumb is to never let an audio cable come near an appliance or cross a power cable at right angles. Route your cables in such a way as to avoid coming near stuff that generates an EM field (appliances, your home's wiring, and so on). If you're careful, you can probably get away with running well-shielded cables all over the house, and have pretty damn listenable audio, assuming you're not going to try to impress any audiophiles.
This very much depends on the quality of your house's wiring. I live in an old house in Portland, so I'd never try this without a powered mixer - my house wiring acts as an antenna with our old solid-state amp, and intermittently picks up CB operators for miles around. It would also fail, for me in my old, poorly-wired house, on cost-effectiveness of the cable I'd buy.
Furthermore, do you really want all the audio in your house going at once? Buy a powered mixer, and some unpowered speakers, and some really good cable. Or, alternately, buy a soundcard with more RCA outs. "Pro-sumer" PCI audio cards are getting dirt cheap, as all of us non-professional hobbyists with pro tastes in gear are buying Firewire cards when we want 6 ins/6 outs, instead of the PCI cards we would have bought five years ago.
No, no, no.
The first-order quotes (around the word 'pirated') indicate that the word was lifted from another source. The second-order quotes (the words 'quote' and 'unquote') indicate that the writer thinks that piracy is a term of dubious utility, and they're "saying" those words "out loud" in order to indicate this. These second-order quotes are, in fact, snigger quotes.
The third-order quotes (the quotes around the words 'quote' and 'unquote') are ALSO snigger quotes - jeez, can't take anything seriously, can you? - indicating a sneer at the use of snigger quotes. So, if I was mocking someone for saying "quote unquote" out loud for being pretentious, I might hang "air quotes" around those "snigger quotes." E.g., I'm unable to take snigger quotes seriously, so I have to mark them as something I don't take seriously, with more snigger quotes.
So, is that all clear? Think of it as expressing a cooler-than-thou sneer, with Lisp-like syntax.
PS - Next time you're speaking aloud, and need to insert an aside into a longer phrase, I strongly encourage you to hang "air parentheses" around it.
I'm with you 100% on your intuitive/ubiquitous observation. However, I would like to observe that some kinds of knowledge do seem to be available osmotically. F'rinstance, my coworkers, ranging in age from 17 to 37, are usually really pleased when I show them a new keyboard shortcut that makes tasks faster & easier. The 17yo in particular has taken note of the fact that I can whip through icon-shuffling on the keyboard with blinding speed.
As fond as they are of my keyboard advice, some kinds of icon-manipulations just aren't sinking in for them. The fact that you can alt-tab between apps but can only sometimes control-tab through open tabs or windows within an app (this is win2k; I did say this is at work, right?) just isn't sinking in for some of my coworkers. Alt-tabbing and tabbed browsing in particular seem to be pretty incomprehensible, for some people who didn't grow up around computers (loads of people, it turns out). I feel like this backs up your statement about something ubiquitous and designed being percieved as natural.
However, I'm going to show the video and the demo to my coworkers tomorrow, and I bet you they eat it up. People, er, consumers, they just seem to love eye-candy that cartoonifies the physical world. The video looks like a Disneyification of the process of flipping through papers. The way it works is immediately obvious, in a way that causing little cartoony things to flicker on a screen by tapping at a keyboard just cannot match. I'll still have to teach them how to use it, but they'll clamor to be taught, and it will take about ninety seconds for the crucial info to be imparted.
The thing that is going to force me to move the office off of Win2K is not going to be its impending EOL or a lack of compatibility in a critical app; it's going to be the relevant link from the article.
(well, maybe not, but it sounded good.)
My fellow USians might be more familiar with it as a verb, as in: "He doled out the last of the rations." Parent post is right, but USian usage of dole is more like "distribute sparingly" and less "distribute charitably," the second of which is what the dictionary seems to say on both sides of the pond.
And, um, uncle poster that control+c, control+v'ed the dictionary definition left off the best bit:
4. Archaic. One's fate.
uh, gotta work on my resume.
Well, this hypothetical device is the holy grail of electronic musicians. There are no guitarists in my band, but there's a fair number of stompboxes and other electronics distributed among 5 people. If they were all manufactured by (if we were sponsored by!!!) Boss, then everything would be running at 9V DC, as specified immediately above. However, our stuff varies as much as the original Ask/.er, so there's just NO HOPE. My bass microsynth runs at 15V DC. The Handsonic pulls an amp at 12V. Only about 1/3 of our devices share a voltage, and it's a real shame, because no 1 person has 2 9V DC boxes. Therefore, a concentrated power solution doesn't really work. So, we wind up making do with little velcro strips and gaff tape.
Somewhere, I saw an interview with the sound/tech guy for one of those bands that is a vaguely electronic pop/rock band. (It wasn't Radiohead, but it was some similar band.) They had a whole 9U rack devoted to a power solution for the whole band. It had a power conditioner in it, as well as a serious UPS. It provided clean power for the whole band, across a whole range of DC voltages, in different amperages, as well as AC. I priced out JUST those parts that were commercially available, not even counting the homebrew stuff, and it worked out to be something like fifteen hundred dollars.
So, the answer to your Ask Slashdot?
"Get rich & famous, then hire somebody else to tame your cables."
Well, if you're on a major, or one of the larger indie labels, the CD (paid for by the label) is the ad. However, if I want to put out my own full-length, that's X times ten to the third power dollars for a run of 1000 CDs that I can sell. That's an expensive ad. On the other hand, once you've paid the hosting fees, the MP3s are the ad.
The CD (okay, the physical disc, with nifty artwork) is the merchandise I sell at the show, along with the t-shirt, stickers, etc. Because, unless you have a large preexisting fanbase (i.e., what you have AFTER successfully promoting your independent avant-psych improv-pop, which is the promotion we're talking about at the moment), your cut of the cover probably won't amount to that much.
It should go without saying that I'm not in this for money at all, seeing as avant-psych improv-pop isn' exactly filling the stadiums in Hoboken. However, anyone out there trying to make a living by playing their own music knows that there's a million musicians who are willing to play for free, for promotional reasons, or ego-stroking reasons, or just for the love of an appreciative audience. This kind of shoots down the whole business model of supporting oneself by playing live and using 'net.distro as a promo device.
Hey, I'm one of those people who has a perfectly nice IT job who plays out for fun. I've been railed at by my "serious" musician friends for making it impossible for them to make a living, because I'm willing to play for a few drink tickets. I think their beef is legit, but it's not stopping me. Besides, there are worlds of difference between trying to make it big and trying to make it as a gigging trad musician in PDX. (and trying to make it into the Wire, or tyring to make ones' friends happy.)
You need a JP EN tech dictionary. What's edict's technical coverage like?
As a point of reference, one of my EN -> JP translators (who is primarily a social-services-and-tourism translator, not a tech translator) owns about $1200 USD worth of JP EN tech dictionaries (that's two dictionaries, fyi). She owns about $6-8K USD worth of dictionaries all told (to cover both JP EN and JP whatever-the-lang-code-is-for-German).
It's not always true, but usually, free dictionaries are crap for translation purposes - or so say my translators. Thr only dissenting opinion is one of my BSC translators (Bosnian-Serbian-Croatian); he uses a 4-lang text file I tracked down to precisely identify colloquialisms and idiomatic expressions. (It's gotta be tough to keep 'em straight, if you're the offspring of a Bosniak & a Croat raised among Serbs.)
Moral: Pay your translators well.
Wait, your bosses have budgeted for translators, right?
I'd happily shell out 2-3 un-DRMed dollars for about 2-3 hours worth of DRMed digital entertainment. That's what I pay when I rent movies, be it from my neighborhood $NATIONALVIDEOCHAIN, or from the local arty DVD rental shop.
Therefore, I think of iTMS as a bad deal; they're expecting me to pay what I pay for a CD, full retail. I never buy music from the majors; my tastes are sufficiently obscure that it makes sense for me to buy records directly from the labels I like, and that tends to be $9-15 for a CD or LP. (I rarely have the "1 hit and a bunch of filler" problem with my esoteric tastes.) So, if Apple were to sell uncrippled music in a lossless format, I'd pay their prices.
However, the music sold by iTMS is not that crippled, and AAC is not very lossy. So, their biz.plan is really close to roping me in. If they've actually started selling music in their lossless format (ALE?), I could wind up with a "lineage" like:
iTMS -> my HD -> CD-R -> EAC -> WAV -> FLAC -> back to my RAID w/tape backup in uncrippled, lossless, dare I say archival, format.
Or, they could erally clamp down with their DRM, and "sell" me tracks (actually, rent me tracks for some long-but-unspecified length of time, until iTMS or Apple collapse, or until I've run out of ways to move it to a new computer, or until Apple's whim changes the license) for, oh 15 to 25 cents apiece. Either way.
I have the same problem, but I'm a musician, so it's hugely frustrating in many areas. I don't see why it's so hard to build an analog system with pots that actually control real values, then piggyback a digital control system on top of it. Here, I'm thinking of real hammers-and-strings pianos that have midi control systems added to them. (If you're a musician yourself, google the Andromeda synth, which is a similar idea - a true analog synth that has a contemporary digital interface.)
I can understand why this would be unworkable for the office buildings of corporate America, but when I wire my own home, I would like to be able to control the heating over the net, and also be able to crank a real knob on the thermostat when my house router has been fried.
mod parent up.
hey, it's funny AND informative!
seriously, this is the first mention I've seen of safety in a knife-devoted thread. If what you're doing is setting dip switches, clipping wire, and smoking joints, the knife is not an issue. however, if you were going to use that knife to, oh, I don't know, CUT SOMETHING, and perhaps you were intending to cut something more than once, then for all our sakes, get a locking blade!
Sorry to hear about yr. thumb, guy. I myself have a secret hidden scar, but it's in a place that... er... well, I don't use it as often as you use your thumb.
Just to cast some light on the above comments about the HP 4 series, 1100, and 4000 series... I get to support all three in a nonprofit environment. The 1100 is as bad as everyone above says it is; I can't believe that I have to support it in a (putatively) businesslike setting. I'm pretty sure that the 4050 is older than the 1100, and has been worked (~300k pages or so), but is in much better shape. It's getting noisy, and sometimes it needs to be nursed a bit, but it's still perfectly functional. I wouldn't buy a newer HP printer.
The laserjet 4mp has been in the office longer than I have. It's given me far less trouble than either of the other two.
And when my 4050 got a piece of paper wrapped around its fixer roller, it was... err, I don't want to say it was a snap, but at least it was completely doable. If the same thing happened to the 1100, I'd toss it in the garbage.
I'm VERY interested in what happens sociopolitically in Japan, when the millions of kids who grew up watching his movies (and consuming the themes of "dark, apocalyptic environmentalism" contained therein at very impressionable ages) are the ones running the country (what, 20-30 years from now?).
Do people think about the effect of "the Disney ethos" or people who were raised by hippies on American politics? Not really; I think America's too culturally heterogeneous to make that sort of extrapolation possible. (For the most part; check local politics in rural northern California if you want a comparison.) However, Japan is comparatively culturally homogenous, and has this history of undergoing radical culture change in a very short period of time. Meiji Restoration, anyone?
I personally look forward to celebrating the Ghibli Restoration from atop NTV Island.
Anybody recognize artspeak when they read it? Try reading the phrase "an apparatus that forces one to reconsider and question notions of [buzzwords]" or "challenging conventional assumptions about [buzzwords]" to figure out what is going on here. The actual tech content is not what the FA is about (I did R the FA, BTW). These are the phrases that you put in your artist's statement, either to please the people who funded you, or to try to please people who might fund you. So, the text that you're reading as "check out this great new technology!" is, in fact, not saying that at all.
/. editor trying to sneak some culture into yr. daily surf, or did aforementioned editor miss out on the fact that this is an ART PROJECT?
/.; if you could mass-produce the damn things, it might be different. Anyone remember how Usenet worked, back in the eighties? See, if you're a digital-art-nerd, you read about this project and immediately envision a city-wide collaborative WAN, one that's just about as anarchic as Usenet was, immediately pre-WWW.)
So, it's not supposed to solve anybody's problems, unless they're having funding problems.
The big question for me is: Is this a
(I think it's a pretty cool art project, actually, but not one that should be covered here on
RTL text entry in OS X doesn't work so hot for non-Hebrew languages, it seems. My translators (I work for a nonprofit translation firm) have never seemed to get along very well with any Apple RTL text entry methods (mmm... worldscript) at all. I am aware of one guy who seems to be pretty happy with OS X, but he's a graphic designer and a decent coder, right?
It sure doesn't seem like OpenOffice is localized in Farsi, or even really has Farsi input support. A quick search of the discussions on the site mainly reveals the gripes of farsi-speaking folks with how OOo handles RTL stuff, and "It would be great if you could also add Farsi to the Arabic language family supported when it is activated." Um.
A couple of posts up, someone was asking after dual-localized systems. Can someone KDE-knowledgeable sound off? Can it switch languages on the fly? Or would a dual-boot be the best solution? I might approach the folks at freegeek if they wanna collaborate on low-end dual-language systems for Farsi-speaking refugees, if this thing is as promising as it looks.
Naussica isn't available by itself, I think, but it's definately available as part of the Studio Ghibli DVD box-set. It's the first time I've ever seen Naussica without the fan-sub. The box set is Japan-only, I'm pretty sure, but Naussica is certainly part of it.
/. but I'm looking for someone to verify my guess as to the emotional tenor of the scene...
It's also the first time I saw the one about the raccoon-alikes; it rocked my world. Can anyone come up with a title for it?
Also, when they reach behind their legs and stretch their scrota out as parachutes, that's not a sight gag, is it? I kinda thought it may have been lost in a culture gap; it was a pretty emotionally moving scene, except for the, um, scrotachutes. I know that the, um, resilent and elastic nature of coon scrota has been covered before on
(for the uninitiated - I'm not joking. Please, don't mod this as funny.)
Y'know, I'm not sure this is humor at all.
When GTA3 appeared in our music studio, there was some pretty serious gaming that went on for a while (an unusual circumstance; usually, the toys we play with are exclusively musical, but the appearance of the PS2 caused a weeks-long hiatus). Now, I rarely drive cars at all, as PDX is an extremely bike-friendly town. However, I noticed that on those occasions when I remained sober to drive those alkie bandmembers home, I noticed that some part of my brain had associated the act of driving a Real(TM) Car with playing GTA3.
At no point did I seriously consider flattening pedestrians or ramming cops off the road. Keep this in mind - my ability to distinguish fact from fiction remains intact, despite a world-class suspension-of-disbelief-generator mounted on a microscopic rack bolted to the inside of my skull.
However, when I looked to the left or right of the vehicle, I sure did use my index fingers on the steering wheel as if I were holding a PS2 controller - L2 for looking left out the window. I would spend a microscopic instant considering flight everytime I saw a guy in a black European Audi-lookin' car - those are Mafia, they have serious ordinance, they'll fsck joo up!
Most disturbing, every time I heard a chopper overhead, even when on foot or bicycle, the most proper and immediate response in my mind (for an instant, mind you) was to whip out the bazooka and take it out.
This state of affairs lasted for about a week and a half, during which time my daily consumption of GTA3 could be reckoned to hover somewhere around 2-3 hours a day, every day. I haven't played any game that much since ultima 6. As soon as I stopped playing daily, these sensations went away.
BUT WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
1) I wasn't kidding about my world-class suspension-of-disbelief generator.
2) Even though I can cause myself to temporarily believe almost anything for a while, these GTA3-inspired beliefs never caused me to take any untoward actions. Every time I felt a desire to ram that guy in the Patriot off the road, I was able to recognize same as a game-generated impulse and squash it without effort.
3) Lots of folks are better at separating the rules and regs of the mundane world from their digital fantasy worlds better than myself.
4) We're going to have to assume that some folks do NOT perform this separation as competently as we might hope - certainly less competently than myself.
5) Perhaps some of the people in #4 also play more games than do I.
6) Perhaps some of the remaining people found in #5 are quite young.
7) I know I'm not alone in having GTA3 leak into my brain when I'm not actually playing. Many of my friends have reported the same sort of sensations that I described above, similar to that which the AC poster described (perhaps humorously). None of us, of course, have gone and DONE any GTA3-inspired crimes, but we have carefully reinforced grips-on-reality.
See, what we want to make in our music studios and game-design thinktanks and writer's groups is art that moves people - that comes back to haunt them long after they've put the book down or pressed STOP on their (insert media-reproduction device here). That's why I make media, anyways - because my life has been permanently altered by the stuff I put in my head, and some of that stuff haunts me forever after, and I have basically unlimited respect for the folks what make it. Right now, I'm particularly haunted by the works of Neal Stephenson, Scott Herren, and Arvo Part - they've made stuff that follows me around everywhere.
However, for a few brief days, I was consistently haunted by a piece of media made by the guys at Rockstar Games. That GTA3 is some pretty potent mind-altering stuff. Just like the booze, just like the prescription drugs, I say: keep out of reach of children.
As a social anthropologist and veteran Portland dumpster-diver, I'm going to have to take issue with this. It would be relatively easy to design a study (this isn't actually an experiment, of course) to take this into account.
"When someone in your house reads a porno mag, does s/he toss it when it's soiled, or keep it?"
"... no one in this house reads pornos."
Next garbage day, I find that my informants not only toss the pornos, but toss them when they appear to be unsoiled! Not that I investigate too closely, mind you...
THis is a fictional account of how one might design a simple study that 1) wasn't full of sh1t, and 2) reveals some truths about the consumption patterns of the house in question. It's all about how you ask; good questions are hard to think up, and that's more than 90% of good anthropology.
Now, using dumpster diving to make a point about inconsistent standards in privacy, that doesn't require any good study design standards at all. Moral inconsistencies are really easy to reveal, and even clueless laymen (read: willie week reporters) can pull it off without a sweat.
However, don't write off the truths that can be found in the garbage just because not *every* study that involves trash is done with rigor - good design goes a lot further than nifty jscript menus.
(no, anthro isn't a science. just wanted to get that out of the way. of course, that doesn't mean that it can't establish truths in a rigorous manner...)
sorry, but yeah... my nonprofit translation-firm job is such that I do all kinds of prepress stuff on my laptop. Separations, imposition, blah blah blah.
wierder things have happened.
mmm... nonprofits.
I'm fond of the lunatic fringe. Any social theory that obviously springs from the mind of someone "not addicted to ritual thinking" (like, say, providing citations, or reading any of the foundational theorists) is bound to have some genuine gutbusters.
. html) makes me wonder about whether or not I'm still under warrantee.
First off, any theory which claims to "provid[e] an explicit, physical interpretation" of any of the Gnostic Gospels is a winner. Anything that make the Gospel of Thomas more comprehensible without the use of hallucinogenic drugs is a valuable resource in my intellectual toolkit. I will put that document in the toolkit, right next to the hallucinogenic drugs.
Secondly, any theory that discusses a social structure using terms generally applied to operating systems (http://www.melloworld.com/Reciprocality/r1/index
"Hi, thanks for calling the Western Culture Manufacturing Corporation Technical Support Line, my name is Marcel, how may I help you today?"
"Uhh, I downloaded the Irony Service Pack, and I was trying to install, but I got this error... it was, like, explorer.exe caused an invalid meme fault in humor.dll..."
"Okay, run Scandisk and delete all your temorary friends, then restart your life. That should work fine."
[hold music]
I'm usually pretty skeptical about theories that declare the theorists as "immune" or "above" a pathology or unsavory trait present in all those not approved of by the theorist. But nothing beats being told that, since I'm a singularly unimaginative coder, I'm addicted to boredom, and I don't even know it! And here I was, thinking that The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Captialism explained the spread of european industrial culture across the face of the earth, when in fact, all those poor "natives" were simply addicted to their own unhealthy thought processes!
If you thought this was smart, please avoid books on NLP and head straight for Erving Goffman, whom you can thank for ideas like "personal space." NLP (when yanked out of the theoretical realm and applied in genuine flirty-type social situations)is fraught with silly assumptions.
F'rinstance, if a girl was flirting with you, and you "intentionally match your conversation partner's state & style of communication," you are essentially emulating heteronormative female flirtation behavior, which might be endearing to a bi-punk-chick, but will almost certainly put off a girl who expects you to flirt in the manner of a straight boy, such as the old-fashioned girls cited in the article above.
(Furthermore, if your Jedi mind trick actually works on the lady, think of the shame when she finds your bookmark on the "how to get laid" chapter of your silly New Age concieve-of-the-human-mind-as-a-hunk-of-programma
If you really need to read about this sort of non-verbal social communication, head straight for _Interaction_Ritual_, by the aforementioned Goffman, for a chaper on (I think) "Embarassment and Social Form."
oh, and BTW: sorry for the anthro jargon. Heteronormative means basically "according to norms for straight people."