My 14 year old son was digging around in the basement last year and found my collection of around 1200 record albums (sealed and properly stored in air-tight containers). Since then, he's been busily digitizing them, even where he has the "remastered" CD version (the record companies say "remastered" as if it's a good thing). It appears they sound better to his young ears, even with the occasional clicks and pops, and while he can't explain why, he prefers them to the more modern alternatives.
No wonder the new audio format discs haven't taken off.
As for me, my ears have deteriorated from going to too many rock concerts over the years. It all sounds the same to me now.
The Linux community has always been split between the Pragmatists and the Faithful, so this is nothing new. Gnu/Linux thrives in spite of this fact (or perhaps, horror or horrors, *because* of it), and that won't change anytime soon.
The NSA, et al, have been doing this sort of tracking and collating for years. Think of it as a lost opportunity: the NSA could have been selling ads all this time!
In my experience, I've found that, even more than the old fashioned ball mouse, track balls seem to wear out rather quickly. Maybe it's the weight of the large ball that stresses the cheap plastic wheels used underneath, which tend to develop flat spots, but after going through two or three in about 18 months, I gave up on the whole thing and stuck with the optical mouse. Don't know if the trackballs made today are any better than yesteryear's, but I sort of doubt it. Companies need to make these things as cheap as they can, and the hidden parts of the thing are the best places to shave cost, because most people won't notice right off the bat.
The only problem with using a trackball today is I'd miss all those extra buttons when I play First Person Shooters.
By the time Windows 7 is released, everybody will finally be used to the Vista UI, and know where the bloddy hell Microsoft moved all the XP features and commands to.
Then, Windows 7 will arrive, removing menus, forcing all apps to use ribbons instead, and move all the features and commands to yet another hiding place, so we're all back to square one. In fact, the only people who will find themselves on familiar ground will be the malware writers!
Minimum requirements for Windows 7: quad core processor (dual quad core recommended), dual video cards with 1GB dedicated video memory (2GB recommended), 1TB hard drive space required for installation. Think I'm kidding? Wait till you see what Symantec's gonna need by then!
Gee, I can't wait. Pass me the Kool Aide, will ya, someone?
I'm a consultant and get to talk with IT folks in various organizations. When I ask their opinion of Vista, it's like they just sucked on a lemon. XP is bad enough -- a lot of their computers are still running 2000 -- but Vista is not an option. There are two reasons: hardware drivers that they've heard are either buggy or unavailable for existing equipment, and the inability of existing computers to run it. Not to mention the high cost of new computers capable of running it. Everyone has gotten used to being able to buy cheap, name-brand machines for the organization. Then there's the concern about mixing Vista with XP in the organization. Supporting the users on Vista is no slam-dunk.
It will take a while for these organizations to start buying into the whole Vista thing, and will only happen once the older computers and peripherals are retired. Until then, and only then, XP will remain the preferred operating system over Vista. This shouldn't be earth-shaking news, since a lot of old companies are still using older versions of windows (I wouldn't be surprised if there are still a few Windows 98 and NT4 installations out there), and are only now considering a migration to XP. Microsoft justs needs to have a little patience. Vista will start gaining traction with these organizations in 2009.
Pah-leeze! To date, I have made two honest attempts to switch from XP to Vista, and both times I ended up wiping the Vista install and going back to XP. First of all, not all hardware from XP is supported (I suspect the new DRM requirements in the OS for my difficulties here), and some of the hardware that is supported suffers from buggy drivers (e.g., nVidia). Then, there's the user interface. Not as ugly as XP's Fischer-Price interface, but nothing to write home about, either. I'd rather not waste the CPU and GPU cycles on it, thank you very much. Then, they *moved* everything around. I waste more time trying to find things I know are there, but which the Boys in Redmond decided in their infinite wisdom to move. The first example that comes to mind is mapping a network drive. Why the heck they moved it off the My Computer (what do they call it now, "Bill's Computer"?) window I'll never know. There are a lot of other examples. Then, there's the fact that Vista is a big fat pig when it comes to resources.
I have too much work to do on a computer to bother with this nonsense. Even if I bought a new computer, which would solve the hardware problems, I'd probably want Vista off it for something (anything) else. When XP came out, I upgraded right away, and was happy with it, even though at the time it, too, was a bloated pig. But not this time. Sorry. I gave it the old college try, but Vista's just a piece of crap.
You don't need math skills to be a good computer programmer. I, for one, have awful math skills, and don't like dealing with numbers (and yes this does get in the way from time to time, but that is rare.)
Computers are all about logic, and due to a minor learning problem I've had since childhood, I've always leaned heavily on logic to get better-than-average grades throughout school. As long as a subject lends itself to being *understood* rather than *memorized*, I'm in-like-flint.
When you program a computer, you don't think to yourself "what's the square root of seventeen multiplied by e to the twenty seventh", you think in terms of "if-then-else" (even if the syntax is different, it often comes down to that simple bit of logic).
So is math useful to the computer programmer? Absolutely. Is it necessary? Absolutely not. As long as you can *think* like the computer -- in other words, using logic -- you're better off than someone who just knows their sums. I've been doing this for over 25 years, and politically correct or not, this idea has worked just fine for me.
the only music will be loud and obnoxious "LISTEN TO ME" stuff.
It's far too late to worry about that happening, it's already a done deal. The record companies remaster all the music they release so that it sounds like it would on the radio. Loud. Obnoxious. Crap. You want subtle? You want quality? Find some 30-year-old vinyl recordings. The music world ended when it went digital.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this response, but I just cannot let it go.
How is it that a license to distribute *software* has the right (legal or moral) to force hardware manufacturers to effectively open-source the *hardware* as well? I thought the whole purpose of the GPL was to give your code-changes back to the community so that everyone can benefit from them, *not* guarantee that any particular hardware device can be hacked. IMHO, this is carrying things much too far, and will harm the FOSS movement in the long run. Right now, I bet Apple's glad it based its OS on BSD, instead of using Linux as Tivo did.
Just like most users, the hackers can't find their way around the new OS, either. Just wait until Service Pack 1 comes out. I hear Vista gets ribbons! Now it will be *really* super-secure.
In the last few decades, recorded music has met with a steady decline on all fronts, not just sales. It's the quality aspect that bothers me. Much has been said about the way record companies hack the sound to pieces by making everything sound like it does on the radio (as if radio isn't total crap). Even older recordings are "remastered" in this way, thereby removing any incentive I have to purchase albums that might be missing from my collection.
Production: What is interesting is the reviews I see occasionally complaining when a band "sweetens" the music too much -- in other words, adds instruments, or perhaps a whole orchestra to make the recording sound like it wasn't made in somebody's basement or garage. Let's not equate primitive production for good sound, folks.
Then there's the artists. For every great singer out there, there are a dozen Bob Dylan wannabes. Hey, let's face it, Dylan sounds like he gargles with broken glass every morning.
Songwriting quality: where are all the pop bands with something to say, other than how much they want to rape and abuse women? Rare, indeed.
Record companies: In their greed to promote the big hit single in this digital age, they've abandoned the artists capable of holding your interest for an entire album, artists with long-term playability. Pop music today is down right *boring*. The old artists are either dying off or have lost their touch (e.g., Paul McCartney should just give up music and open up a vegetable stand somewhere), while the new artists pay too much attention to what the companies tell them.
Buy CD's? What on earth for?
I'll tell you something. My fourteen year old has discovered my LP collection from the 60's, 70's and 80's (about 1200 have survived the ravages of time), and he spends his spare time digitizing them onto the computer. He loves the music and the sound of these old dinosaurs, and will "rip" an LP even where I already have the CD. He hates what's on the radio, and feels like he's found buried treasure in these old archives.
Buy CD's? Why on earth would he want to do that? He's not finished listening to my LP's yet!
And there's perhaps the real reason CD sales are in decline: it has too much competition from what people already own. Something like Windows Vista having XP to contend with, I guess.
As a heavy Bulletin Board programmer/user in the mid 80's, I can tell you that one of the answers was something called Fido Net. This was a network of computers linked by phone lines. In the early morning hours of each day, each "node" would telephone its local designated hub, and transfer message packets destined for some other computer. The hub would call *its* hub, and so forth. Data would be received the same way.
But no matter how you slice it, "browsing" at 300 baud really sucks. Gives new meaning to "crawling the net"!
On two separate occasions I made a good faith effort to switch to Vista, the first time doing a fresh install, and the second as an upgrade to XP Pro (making sure everything worked in XP before the upgrade). First of all, Vista is a big fat pig, requiring far too expensive a machine for most computer uses. Dual Core processor and 2GB or RAM just to run email and write letters? Pah-leeze! Besides that, however, between the occasional blue screens in Vista (which I have never seen in XP) and the difficulty in finding anything in it -- seems Microsoft moved things just for sake of moving them, and I have a hard time getting anything done -- I was frustrated enough to give up right there. But the real PIA trouble came from the %$#*& DRM built into Vista's audio visual system. Because my drivers are old XP ones (the manufacturer refuses to update them for Vista, and instructs me to purchase new hardware to fix the problem -- ah, NO!), my video capture card produces a black screen and no sound in all Vista software except ones *designed* to bypass the protection. Unfortunaely, they don't do what I want. Oh, I've tried these drivers and programs in Server 2003, and they all work fine, which points another finger at Vista's DRM as the culprit. What else is it going to interfere with down the road? Do I really want to put myself in that situation? Can I honestly recommend companies I deal with use Vista when I don't trust it myself? Talk about Trustworthy Computing!
Not to start a flame war, but right now, I have *far* better hardware support in Ubuntu than Windows Vista, and that's just pathetic. Microsoft is supposed to be better than that. For the foreseeable future, I'm sticking with XP and/or 2003. When professionals like myself have a bad taste in their mouth from trying to use an OS, you can imagine what's going to happen when a PHB takes a sip of the Kool Aide!
IMHO, you can definitely call Vista "Windows Me 2"
If you were to put your ear close the the needle while the record was playing, you would hear -- very faintly -- the sound of the recording. The record player performs two functions: spins the platter at a steady speed, and amplifies the sound emanating from the spinning plastic. In fact, the original record players amplified the sound using a specially designed megaphone (a great big cone-shaped piece of paper or cardboard), and not an electrical amplifier at all. These first record players spun the platter by use of a wound spring, and none of the belts or direct drives that were used later. No electricity, and no batteries required. Remember that the next time you forget to recharge your ipod.
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Because isn't that what Hollywood asked Microsoft to do?
If you've seen one Broadcast Flag, you've seem 'em all.
Here it is: Open a terminal, go to the root directory and type the following:
sudo rm -rf
It will uninstall *everything* for you. Next question.
My 14 year old son was digging around in the basement last year and found my collection of around 1200 record albums (sealed and properly stored in air-tight containers). Since then, he's been busily digitizing them, even where he has the "remastered" CD version (the record companies say "remastered" as if it's a good thing). It appears they sound better to his young ears, even with the occasional clicks and pops, and while he can't explain why, he prefers them to the more modern alternatives.
No wonder the new audio format discs haven't taken off.
As for me, my ears have deteriorated from going to too many rock concerts over the years. It all sounds the same to me now.
...is just the lead singer trying to hit that high note.
Nothing to hear here, move along.
Hey, everyone familiar with Microsoft products knows that!
The Linux community has always been split between the Pragmatists and the Faithful, so this is nothing new. Gnu/Linux thrives in spite of this fact (or perhaps, horror or horrors, *because* of it), and that won't change anytime soon.
The NSA, et al, have been doing this sort of tracking and collating for years. Think of it as a lost opportunity: the NSA could have been selling ads all this time!
(straightening my tinfoil hat)
In my experience, I've found that, even more than the old fashioned ball mouse, track balls seem to wear out rather quickly. Maybe it's the weight of the large ball that stresses the cheap plastic wheels used underneath, which tend to develop flat spots, but after going through two or three in about 18 months, I gave up on the whole thing and stuck with the optical mouse. Don't know if the trackballs made today are any better than yesteryear's, but I sort of doubt it. Companies need to make these things as cheap as they can, and the hidden parts of the thing are the best places to shave cost, because most people won't notice right off the bat.
The only problem with using a trackball today is I'd miss all those extra buttons when I play First Person Shooters.
...and all of them running in a virtual machine on Linux, safely cut off from the rest of the Universe. Three chairs ... I mean cheers ... for Balmer
I watch all my old movies on Laser Disc. I think it's a terrific improvement over my old BetaMax machine!
"The new rules would allow a suspect to be detained indefinitely, without being charged or put on trial."
It's a good thing America doesn't do anything like that, right?
Oh, wait.
By the time Windows 7 is released, everybody will finally be used to the Vista UI, and know where the bloddy hell Microsoft moved all the XP features and commands to.
Then, Windows 7 will arrive, removing menus, forcing all apps to use ribbons instead, and move all the features and commands to yet another hiding place, so we're all back to square one. In fact, the only people who will find themselves on familiar ground will be the malware writers!
Minimum requirements for Windows 7: quad core processor (dual quad core recommended), dual video cards with 1GB dedicated video memory (2GB recommended), 1TB hard drive space required for installation. Think I'm kidding? Wait till you see what Symantec's gonna need by then!
Gee, I can't wait. Pass me the Kool Aide, will ya, someone?
I'm a consultant and get to talk with IT folks in various organizations. When I ask their opinion of Vista, it's like they just sucked on a lemon. XP is bad enough -- a lot of their computers are still running 2000 -- but Vista is not an option. There are two reasons: hardware drivers that they've heard are either buggy or unavailable for existing equipment, and the inability of existing computers to run it. Not to mention the high cost of new computers capable of running it. Everyone has gotten used to being able to buy cheap, name-brand machines for the organization. Then there's the concern about mixing Vista with XP in the organization. Supporting the users on Vista is no slam-dunk.
It will take a while for these organizations to start buying into the whole Vista thing, and will only happen once the older computers and peripherals are retired. Until then, and only then, XP will remain the preferred operating system over Vista. This shouldn't be earth-shaking news, since a lot of old companies are still using older versions of windows (I wouldn't be surprised if there are still a few Windows 98 and NT4 installations out there), and are only now considering a migration to XP. Microsoft justs needs to have a little patience. Vista will start gaining traction with these organizations in 2009.
... and don't exercise.
Film at eleven.
Pah-leeze!
To date, I have made two honest attempts to switch from XP to Vista, and both times I ended up wiping the Vista install and going back to XP. First of all, not all hardware from XP is supported (I suspect the new DRM requirements in the OS for my difficulties here), and some of the hardware that is supported suffers from buggy drivers (e.g., nVidia). Then, there's the user interface. Not as ugly as XP's Fischer-Price interface, but nothing to write home about, either. I'd rather not waste the CPU and GPU cycles on it, thank you very much. Then, they *moved* everything around. I waste more time trying to find things I know are there, but which the Boys in Redmond decided in their infinite wisdom to move. The first example that comes to mind is mapping a network drive. Why the heck they moved it off the My Computer (what do they call it now, "Bill's Computer"?) window I'll never know. There are a lot of other examples. Then, there's the fact that Vista is a big fat pig when it comes to resources.
I have too much work to do on a computer to bother with this nonsense. Even if I bought a new computer, which would solve the hardware problems, I'd probably want Vista off it for something (anything) else. When XP came out, I upgraded right away, and was happy with it, even though at the time it, too, was a bloated pig. But not this time. Sorry. I gave it the old college try, but Vista's just a piece of crap.
There's something to this.
You don't need math skills to be a good computer programmer. I, for one, have awful math skills, and don't like dealing with numbers (and yes this does get in the way from time to time, but that is rare.)
Computers are all about logic, and due to a minor learning problem I've had since childhood, I've always leaned heavily on logic to get better-than-average grades throughout school. As long as a subject lends itself to being *understood* rather than *memorized*, I'm in-like-flint.
When you program a computer, you don't think to yourself "what's the square root of seventeen multiplied by e to the twenty seventh", you think in terms of "if-then-else" (even if the syntax is different, it often comes down to that simple bit of logic).
So is math useful to the computer programmer? Absolutely. Is it necessary? Absolutely not. As long as you can *think* like the computer -- in other words, using logic -- you're better off than someone who just knows their sums. I've been doing this for over 25 years, and politically correct or not, this idea has worked just fine for me.
the only music will be loud and obnoxious "LISTEN TO ME" stuff.
It's far too late to worry about that happening, it's already a done deal. The record companies remaster all the music they release so that it sounds like it would on the radio. Loud. Obnoxious. Crap. You want subtle? You want quality? Find some 30-year-old vinyl recordings. The music world ended when it went digital.
Nothing to listen to here, move along.
I know I'm going to get flamed for this response, but I just cannot let it go.
How is it that a license to distribute *software* has the right (legal or moral) to force hardware manufacturers to effectively open-source the *hardware* as well? I thought the whole purpose of the GPL was to give your code-changes back to the community so that everyone can benefit from them, *not* guarantee that any particular hardware device can be hacked. IMHO, this is carrying things much too far, and will harm the FOSS movement in the long run. Right now, I bet Apple's glad it based its OS on BSD, instead of using Linux as Tivo did.
When translated the banner said "Mission Accomplished". That confirms it. The crew were actually Americans from the future.
Just like most users, the hackers can't find their way around the new OS, either. Just wait until Service Pack 1 comes out. I hear Vista gets ribbons! Now it will be *really* super-secure.
In the last few decades, recorded music has met with a steady decline on all fronts, not just sales. It's the quality aspect that bothers me. Much has been said about the way record companies hack the sound to pieces by making everything sound like it does on the radio (as if radio isn't total crap). Even older recordings are "remastered" in this way, thereby removing any incentive I have to purchase albums that might be missing from my collection.
Production: What is interesting is the reviews I see occasionally complaining when a band "sweetens" the music too much -- in other words, adds instruments, or perhaps a whole orchestra to make the recording sound like it wasn't made in somebody's basement or garage. Let's not equate primitive production for good sound, folks.
Then there's the artists. For every great singer out there, there are a dozen Bob Dylan wannabes. Hey, let's face it, Dylan sounds like he gargles with broken glass every morning.
Songwriting quality: where are all the pop bands with something to say, other than how much they want to rape and abuse women? Rare, indeed.
Record companies: In their greed to promote the big hit single in this digital age, they've abandoned the artists capable of holding your interest for an entire album, artists with long-term playability. Pop music today is down right *boring*. The old artists are either dying off or have lost their touch (e.g., Paul McCartney should just give up music and open up a vegetable stand somewhere), while the new artists pay too much attention to what the companies tell them.
Buy CD's? What on earth for?
I'll tell you something. My fourteen year old has discovered my LP collection from the 60's, 70's and 80's (about 1200 have survived the ravages of time), and he spends his spare time digitizing them onto the computer. He loves the music and the sound of these old dinosaurs, and will "rip" an LP even where I already have the CD. He hates what's on the radio, and feels like he's found buried treasure in these old archives.
Buy CD's? Why on earth would he want to do that? He's not finished listening to my LP's yet!
And there's perhaps the real reason CD sales are in decline: it has too much competition from what people already own. Something like Windows Vista having XP to contend with, I guess.
Isn't that the "ice cream of the future" you see advertised all over the place? Just asking.
As a heavy Bulletin Board programmer/user in the mid 80's, I can tell you that one of the answers was something called Fido Net. This was a network of computers linked by phone lines. In the early morning hours of each day, each "node" would telephone its local designated hub, and transfer message packets destined for some other computer. The hub would call *its* hub, and so forth. Data would be received the same way.
But no matter how you slice it, "browsing" at 300 baud really sucks. Gives new meaning to "crawling the net"!
On two separate occasions I made a good faith effort to switch to Vista, the first time doing a fresh install, and the second as an upgrade to XP Pro (making sure everything worked in XP before the upgrade). First of all, Vista is a big fat pig, requiring far too expensive a machine for most computer uses. Dual Core processor and 2GB or RAM just to run email and write letters? Pah-leeze! Besides that, however, between the occasional blue screens in Vista (which I have never seen in XP) and the difficulty in finding anything in it -- seems Microsoft moved things just for sake of moving them, and I have a hard time getting anything done -- I was frustrated enough to give up right there. But the real PIA trouble came from the %$#*& DRM built into Vista's audio visual system. Because my drivers are old XP ones (the manufacturer refuses to update them for Vista, and instructs me to purchase new hardware to fix the problem -- ah, NO!), my video capture card produces a black screen and no sound in all Vista software except ones *designed* to bypass the protection. Unfortunaely, they don't do what I want. Oh, I've tried these drivers and programs in Server 2003, and they all work fine, which points another finger at Vista's DRM as the culprit. What else is it going to interfere with down the road? Do I really want to put myself in that situation? Can I honestly recommend companies I deal with use Vista when I don't trust it myself? Talk about Trustworthy Computing!
Not to start a flame war, but right now, I have *far* better hardware support in Ubuntu than Windows Vista, and that's just pathetic. Microsoft is supposed to be better than that. For the foreseeable future, I'm sticking with XP and/or 2003. When professionals like myself have a bad taste in their mouth from trying to use an OS, you can imagine what's going to happen when a PHB takes a sip of the Kool Aide!
IMHO, you can definitely call Vista "Windows Me 2"
If you were to put your ear close the the needle while the record was playing, you would hear -- very faintly -- the sound of the recording. The record player performs two functions: spins the platter at a steady speed, and amplifies the sound emanating from the spinning plastic. In fact, the original record players amplified the sound using a specially designed megaphone (a great big cone-shaped piece of paper or cardboard), and not an electrical amplifier at all. These first record players spun the platter by use of a wound spring, and none of the belts or direct drives that were used later. No electricity, and no batteries required. Remember that the next time you forget to recharge your ipod.