There's even more to make "Bach Portrait" hilarious, that I didn't discover for some time afterwards: the music is that of "Lincoln Portrait", a piece by Aaron Copland with much more actually edifying quotes from Honest Abe. My favorite part of "Bach Portrait" is the very last quote, which turns the piece from a silly farce to a pretty sublime comment.
> As for the amateur photographer, why does he need a $700 Photoshop app when the $100 Elements app will do all he needs?
Perhaps... because Elements will _not_ do all he needs? For a technically serious amateur, such as, erm, myself (#include ), there are several features which, for instance, Elements lacks. Foremost, the Healing Brush. Color-channel control is extremely useful. Sixteen-bit color. And the Automation features. For this reason, um, many serious amateurs run a "special" version at home. I personally encouraged my school to purchase a number of educational licences for the computer/multimedia club's use, and intend to purchase a licence should I ever use it in any professional setting. I will definitely miss Photoshop when I move back to full-time OSS usage--GIMP is nice, but there is simply no serious comparison for one who has used Photoshop extensively for years.
Regarding your sig--there is not, necessarily, a client behind every sleazy lawyer.
(I have been, at various times, a paid employee of a very good law firm, and wish to remind everybody that there _are_ good lawyers.)
But back to the topic. By far the sleaziest lawyers are the great class-action filers, who organize so-called "class action" lawsuits solely for their own enrichment. Such practices can be hugely lucrative. One of my jobs as a legal investigator was to review the filings of the so-called "Citizens for Better Business Practices", incorporated by a disbarred attorney convicted of several counts of fraud (not to mention pimping and pandering... it's all in the State Bar Court files). These wonderful citizens filed no less than thirty-four seperate lawsuits, with a total of well over 130 defendants, on extremely poor grounds (a technicality of advertisement law). Resisting such a claim is expensive--and said Citizens accompanied each complaint with a letter "offering" to settle, for several thousand dollars.
I must disagree. It's quite obvious, if you see the movie--which you should, instead of bitching on/.--that that scene, while not necessarily intended to be silly, is supposed to be laughed at. The whole "Yoda is a badass Muppet" thing is really cool. In general, I was impressed with audience-interaction properties of AOTC. No uneasy, inappropriate laughter like in FotR, or the various other crimes audiences commit. The movie was a lot of fun to watch--not literary, mind you, but pretty (I'm a card-carrying chrome sucker) and lots of fun, with a few exceptions. (I appreciate the tragedy and love stories a lot more than most people, for reasons X, Y, and Z.)
Getting off topic, but... Isn't this the function of all those groups--THX and so forth--that you see at the end of the credits, to ensure high quality of the theaters? I know it's optimistic to expect much, but wouldn't a certain point come where their THX certification (and equivalents) might be challenged? I recall a phone number or two at the end of Star Wars, "If anything detracted from your appreciation of this film, call.."
(I saw SW in digital at the Grauman Chinese in Hollywood... the projection was excellent. Sharp, beautiful colors, sound kicked ass. Was it just me, though, or was the black point of the digital projector maybe a bit high? I need to see it again now.:)
One rather major correction of detail: I wrote "people who did darkroom... have mainly converted...". This is a miswording on my part. I meant to say that some "people" have "mainly converted" (now use digital processes more than chemical processes), not that master printers as a group had mainly converted to using digital processes. There is definitely still a major market for regular darkroom prints. But for the majority of amateurs and advanced amateurs, darkroom printing in color is Not Workable, leaving digital printing as the most workable option. There's a lot involved with printing digital images. The Digital Photography Review Printers and Printing forum is a good resource for all sorts of information about printing issues.
A little product nobody seems to have mentioned is the Constant Inking System. It is a little assembly of tubes and modified cartridges that will allow you to feed your Epson printer with bottled ink. The kit costs quite a bit--$130 to $270--but bottled ink can be very cheap. Also, there are plenty of inks to use: Generations archival inks, various imitations of the Epson inks, and the very neat Piezography inks, which are basically four or six shades of black/grey ink. These inks are reputed to give amazing black and white prints. (Standard black and white prints from inkjets are either of low density due to only using black ink, or display very noticeable color tinging by mixing the color inks to form a greyscale image.)
Many very well reputed photographers absolutely refuse to use third party inks, beleiving that the manufacturer inks are of higher color consistency and depth, are more reliable, and have better archival properties. A lot of these folks hold that proper inkjet prints can be better than traditional Cibachrome or other darkroom process prints. And people who did darkroom printing for thirty years or more, master printers, have mainly converted to using Photoshop and inkjets, beleiving it gives them better quality. I'm not going to disagree--after getting Issues straightened out, I'm extremely pleased with the photographic output of my Epson photo printer.
(However, I would never, ever, under any circumstances, use an inkjet as a primary printer. Try to find a cheap used laser printer. I've been using an Epson ActionLaser 1500 for pretty much all my life, it's served me extremely well. The printer claims it's printed 9600 pages, and I'm not sure it hasn't reset. I would never, ever deal with the noise, lack of speed, and cost of printing homework and so forth on an inkjet, and nobody else should either. Inkjet text looks nasty awful, anyway. Laser prints look muuuch nicer.)
There's a related fun-sounding way to calculate pi that's more elegant. Or, more unelegant. The digits of pi are, statistically, more or less pseudorandom. Therefore, instead of using human-generated numbers for your calculation of pi from random numbers, one can use the digits of pi itself. So, you can calculate pi, if you know pi. Of course, you lose a good amount of precision.
An advantage of digital photography, however, is that making your DOF shallower is trivial to pretty easy, except in some circumstances. God gave us a whole lot of blur/defocus filters (some quite advanced, even) for good reason.:)
Regarding the Canon D30, you may note that their new super-high-end camera, the EOS-1D, uses a CCD sensor, not a CMOS sensor. This decision was made for a variety of reasons; primarily, the CMOS sensors are not yet fast enough to do the 8fps (!!) continuous rate that Canon was aiming for (and pretty much achieved) with the 1D. By almost all reviews (I _wish_ I could afford a $5500-odd camera--that's not including lens, incidentally), the new 1D is far superior to the D30 in many issues of image quality. Most interestingly, the 1D can take reasonable pictures at absurdly high ISO equivalence--even ISO1600 (!!) yields amazing pictures, considering. The only real problem with the ("older") CCD design is slightly greater battery draw and an isssue with dust on the sensor (very minor). The color performance of the 1D is absurdly good.
Re:No, mp3 on headphones is torture
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
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· Score: 1
In my experience, a lot of the "artifacts" in mp3s--at least, most one I've spotted--fall into one of three categories: recording errors/mastering errors, CD ripping errors, playback errors. I listen to almost exclusively acoustic classical music, which I'd imagine is natural to compress, but I've yet to notice an obvious artifact with my untrained ears that's not either just a problem with the CD (ie audible on other CD players) or blamable on ripping/playback problems (ie fixable by using different ripper, playing again--there are a couple circumstances that make winamp particularly prone to buffer underruns or skipping).
The big factor in most audio for most people is the speakers, primarily. 90% of people don't have good enough speakers hooked up to their computer to really matter. When you have $500 studio monitors hooked up to your computer (as I do...), then it becomes more important.
It doesn't concern me much. Again as a classical music fan, I've found since getting these speakers that half of the recordings I like are much worse than the speakers or the codec or the sound card, so it doesn't really matter.:)
Maybe I'm hopelessly ignorant, but _how_ can you do a touch-and-go on full throttle, let alone burner? It doesn't bloody work out, unless you have _serious_ landing gear.:)
Or maybe you mean that the "go" part was on burner. That would make sense.:)
Amen. As a long-time student (I'm in 10th grade now), I completely agree with you. Boys will be boys, after all. Someone with brains needs to be around to tell the difference between a scary story laden with hints, a regular crappy gore story, and a serious death threat. I never went to public schools, and this is the sort of thing that makes me support school vouchers more and more, but that's a completely different issue.
I'm the same way. Bad TVs, speakers, random electronics, a bunch of stuff like that. Bugs the hell out of me. I appear to obsessively turn off TVs... when people, for instance, turn the VCR and then walk off (CRT is still active!) the little noise, even on new TVs, bugs all hell out of me. It'd be interesting to find out the frequencies involved, etc.
Rhyme does not a derivitive make. A direct descent from 'facit' to 'fuck' is highly unlikely, in my opinion. Facit means to make as in to fashion, compose, etc. To my knowledge, it has no sexual connotations- the Romans did not use such crude euphemisms. Fukar looks and sounds much more like the root of 'fuck'. A good dictionary will tell you the first evidence of the word is 'fuccus', encrypted, in some statement about a bunch of monks fucking the women of some city. (dict.org unfortunately does not have this definition, and my dictionary is not handy.) They identify fuccus as a Latinization of a colloquial, which makes a good deal of sense to me.
You might be right, but to my linguistic eyes and ears, you look quite mistaken. (Many derivitives are formed on the fourth principal part- facio's is 'factus' which results in fact, etc. I have never seen a derivitive based on a third person singular present, like facit.)
Abortion is not 'doing what you will with your own mind and body'.
Abortion is killing another. Do you consider any given cell in a fetus to belong to 'you'? If so, when does it stop belonging to 'you'? At birth? When does a human being gain the rights of such? What is the difference between a baby in the womb and a baby on the hospital bed? Or is it okay to kill newborns also? Then, is it okay to kill young children? Adolescents? Adults? Seniors?
I suggest you think just a little bit harder before being a goddamn troll.
TEMPEST is an armed forces standard for radiation emissions. Tempest-foiling would presumably mean that it doesn't leak enough radiation to, say, read the screen (not visually, by 'listening' to RF stuff, etc.) You can find out a lot about what a computer's doing by listening to all the stuff it gives off, if you're reasonably bright.
Slashdot Mirror
There's even more to make "Bach Portrait" hilarious, that I didn't discover for some time afterwards: the music is that of "Lincoln Portrait", a piece by Aaron Copland with much more actually edifying quotes from Honest Abe. My favorite part of "Bach Portrait" is the very last quote, which turns the piece from a silly farce to a pretty sublime comment.
Also, priests confess to other priests, bishops to other bishops, the Pope to other bishops.
"Were"! "Were"! Don't make me hit you with the subjunctive mood!
Honestly, if you're going to make such statements...
Ego sum rex Romanus et supra grammaticam.
If my flakey memory of my Childhood Years serves me right, it was something or other from the "First" Battle of Bull Run.
Mmm, Encyclopedia Brown. What fun!
> As for the amateur photographer, why does he need a $700 Photoshop app when the $100 Elements app will do all he needs?
Perhaps... because Elements will _not_ do all he needs? For a technically serious amateur, such as, erm, myself (#include ), there are several features which, for instance, Elements lacks. Foremost, the Healing Brush. Color-channel control is extremely useful. Sixteen-bit color. And the Automation features. For this reason, um, many serious amateurs run a "special" version at home. I personally encouraged my school to purchase a number of educational licences for the computer/multimedia club's use, and intend to purchase a licence should I ever use it in any professional setting. I will definitely miss Photoshop when I move back to full-time OSS usage--GIMP is nice, but there is simply no serious comparison for one who has used Photoshop extensively for years.
My cousin used to run a radio scanner with a similarly-treated Toshiba laptop. They may not work well, but the old ones were tough.
Regarding your sig--there is not, necessarily, a client behind every sleazy lawyer.
(I have been, at various times, a paid employee of a very good law firm, and wish to remind everybody that there _are_ good lawyers.)
But back to the topic. By far the sleaziest lawyers are the great class-action filers, who organize so-called "class action" lawsuits solely for their own enrichment. Such practices can be hugely lucrative. One of my jobs as a legal investigator was to review the filings of the so-called "Citizens for Better Business Practices", incorporated by a disbarred attorney convicted of several counts of fraud (not to mention pimping and pandering... it's all in the State Bar Court files). These wonderful citizens filed no less than thirty-four seperate lawsuits, with a total of well over 130 defendants, on extremely poor grounds (a technicality of advertisement law). Resisting such a claim is expensive--and said Citizens accompanied each complaint with a letter "offering" to settle, for several thousand dollars.
So no, that _is_ in fact a devil, not a daemon.
I must disagree. It's quite obvious, if you see the movie--which you should, instead of bitching on /.--that that scene, while not necessarily intended to be silly, is supposed to be laughed at. The whole "Yoda is a badass Muppet" thing is really cool. In general, I was impressed with audience-interaction properties of AOTC. No uneasy, inappropriate laughter like in FotR, or the various other crimes audiences commit. The movie was a lot of fun to watch--not literary, mind you, but pretty (I'm a card-carrying chrome sucker) and lots of fun, with a few exceptions. (I appreciate the tragedy and love stories a lot more than most people, for reasons X, Y, and Z.)
Getting off topic, but... Isn't this the function of all those groups--THX and so forth--that you see at the end of the credits, to ensure high quality of the theaters? I know it's optimistic to expect much, but wouldn't a certain point come where their THX certification (and equivalents) might be challenged? I recall a phone number or two at the end of Star Wars, "If anything detracted from your appreciation of this film, call.."
:)
(I saw SW in digital at the Grauman Chinese in Hollywood... the projection was excellent. Sharp, beautiful colors, sound kicked ass. Was it just me, though, or was the black point of the digital projector maybe a bit high? I need to see it again now.
One rather major correction of detail: I wrote "people who did darkroom... have mainly converted...". This is a miswording on my part. I meant to say that some "people" have "mainly converted" (now use digital processes more than chemical processes), not that master printers as a group had mainly converted to using digital processes. There is definitely still a major market for regular darkroom prints. But for the majority of amateurs and advanced amateurs, darkroom printing in color is Not Workable, leaving digital printing as the most workable option.
There's a lot involved with printing digital images. The Digital Photography Review Printers and Printing forum is a good resource for all sorts of information about printing issues.
(However, I would never, ever, under any circumstances, use an inkjet as a primary printer. Try to find a cheap used laser printer. I've been using an Epson ActionLaser 1500 for pretty much all my life, it's served me extremely well. The printer claims it's printed 9600 pages, and I'm not sure it hasn't reset. I would never, ever deal with the noise, lack of speed, and cost of printing homework and so forth on an inkjet, and nobody else should either. Inkjet text looks nasty awful, anyway. Laser prints look muuuch nicer.)
There's a related fun-sounding way to calculate pi that's more elegant. Or, more unelegant.
The digits of pi are, statistically, more or less pseudorandom. Therefore, instead of using human-generated numbers for your calculation of pi from random numbers, one can use the digits of pi itself. So, you can calculate pi, if you know pi. Of course, you lose a good amount of precision.
An advantage of digital photography, however, is that making your DOF shallower is trivial to pretty easy, except in some circumstances. God gave us a whole lot of blur/defocus filters (some quite advanced, even) for good reason. :)
Regarding the Canon D30, you may note that their new super-high-end camera, the EOS-1D, uses a CCD sensor, not a CMOS sensor. This decision was made for a variety of reasons; primarily, the CMOS sensors are not yet fast enough to do the 8fps (!!) continuous rate that Canon was aiming for (and pretty much achieved) with the 1D. By almost all reviews (I _wish_ I could afford a $5500-odd camera--that's not including lens, incidentally), the new 1D is far superior to the D30 in many issues of image quality. Most interestingly, the 1D can take reasonable pictures at absurdly high ISO equivalence--even ISO1600 (!!) yields amazing pictures, considering. The only real problem with the ("older") CCD design is slightly greater battery draw and an isssue with dust on the sensor (very minor). The color performance of the 1D is absurdly good.
In my experience, a lot of the "artifacts" in mp3s--at least, most one I've spotted--fall into one of three categories: recording errors/mastering errors, CD ripping errors, playback errors. I listen to almost exclusively acoustic classical music, which I'd imagine is natural to compress, but I've yet to notice an obvious artifact with my untrained ears that's not either just a problem with the CD (ie audible on other CD players) or blamable on ripping/playback problems (ie fixable by using different ripper, playing again--there are a couple circumstances that make winamp particularly prone to buffer underruns or skipping). :)
The big factor in most audio for most people is the speakers, primarily. 90% of people don't have good enough speakers hooked up to their computer to really matter. When you have $500 studio monitors hooked up to your computer (as I do...), then it becomes more important.
It doesn't concern me much. Again as a classical music fan, I've found since getting these speakers that half of the recordings I like are much worse than the speakers or the codec or the sound card, so it doesn't really matter.
Maybe I'm hopelessly ignorant, but _how_ can you do a touch-and-go on full throttle, let alone burner? It doesn't bloody work out, unless you have _serious_ landing gear. :)
:)
Or maybe you mean that the "go" part was on burner. That would make sense.
Amen. You make a very good point. It's a shame the number of people who think as straightforwardly as yourself is so small.
Poe rolls in his grave. Maybe it's the cognac, though.
Amen. As a long-time student (I'm in 10th grade now), I completely agree with you. Boys will be boys, after all. Someone with brains needs to be around to tell the difference between a scary story laden with hints, a regular crappy gore story, and a serious death threat. I never went to public schools, and this is the sort of thing that makes me support school vouchers more and more, but that's a completely different issue.
Incendo tuum catapultam.
I'm the same way. Bad TVs, speakers, random electronics, a bunch of stuff like that. Bugs the hell out of me. I appear to obsessively turn off TVs... when people, for instance, turn the VCR and then walk off (CRT is still active!) the little noise, even on new TVs, bugs all hell out of me. It'd be interesting to find out the frequencies involved, etc.
Rhyme does not a derivitive make. A direct descent from 'facit' to 'fuck' is highly unlikely, in my opinion. Facit means to make as in to fashion, compose, etc. To my knowledge, it has no sexual connotations- the Romans did not use such crude euphemisms. Fukar looks and sounds much more like the root of 'fuck'. A good dictionary will tell you the first evidence of the word is 'fuccus', encrypted, in some statement about a bunch of monks fucking the women of some city. (dict.org unfortunately does not have this definition, and my dictionary is not handy.) They identify fuccus as a Latinization of a colloquial, which makes a good deal of sense to me.
You might be right, but to my linguistic eyes and ears, you look quite mistaken. (Many derivitives are formed on the fourth principal part- facio's is 'factus' which results in fact, etc. I have never seen a derivitive based on a third person singular present, like facit.)
Abortion is not 'doing what you will with your own mind and body'.
Abortion is killing another. Do you consider any given cell in a fetus to belong to 'you'? If so, when does it stop belonging to 'you'? At birth? When does a human being gain the rights of such? What is the difference between a baby in the womb and a baby on the hospital bed? Or is it okay to kill newborns also? Then, is it okay to kill young children? Adolescents? Adults? Seniors?
I suggest you think just a little bit harder before being a goddamn troll.
TEMPEST is an armed forces standard for radiation emissions. Tempest-foiling would presumably mean that it doesn't leak enough radiation to, say, read the screen (not visually, by 'listening' to RF stuff, etc.) You can find out a lot about what a computer's doing by listening to all the stuff it gives off, if you're reasonably bright.