Just because you can say something, doesn't mean it's always the best idea to say certain things.
Excuse me, but when it's "not the best idea" to say something, due to fear of violent reprisal by worldwide gangs of militant thugs, that is called coertion and intimidation.
Fuck them. I refuse to be coerced, and I will not be intimidated.
To all of you out there - Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew and all - Your religion does not make you fucking special! You were, and still are, special from the day of your birth - by virtue of your own precious humanity. Now all of you, get down of your chosen holier-than-thou narcisstic highhorses and join the rest of the human race, before you fuckers are the death of us all.
This is more accurately a social restraint on nerds breeding. I've never seen any information to suggest that there is a lower rate of fertility among autistic / aspergers individuals, or even common nerds.
Over the large span of human evolution, characteristics such as physical strength, size, agression and so forth had much more to do with the ability of an individual to procreate, as opposed to the ability to smooth-talk a member of the opposite sex.
Our modern social conventions are obviously much 'nicer', but as for the positive / negative consequences for our gene pool, only time will tell.
Except that the European Arabs are young and having lots of kids.
Perhaps you meant European Muslims? The vast majority of Muslims living in France, Scandinavia, the UK etc are of North African and Pakistani extraction. Neither of these groups are Arabs.
But the basic premise is true; these groups have much higher birthrates than their European hosts.
Isnt that what the WIKI is all about, and why ultimately its doomed to fail?
You mean in the same sense that our early hominid ancestors 'failed'? If out of necessity the Wiki model evolves, over time, due to environmental pressures, you might term that a failure - but I for one would not.
With specific respect to Wikipedia, I had always assumed that the current model served the purposes of building a large base of users, interest and articles. By the same assumption, I felt that at some totally arbitrary time, they would start to tighten the reigns of (quality) control.
If the board uses one of the larger DIP style EEPROM BIOS chips, wouldn't it be simple to identify the write lines (from the manufacturer's data sheet)? You could then pull the chip, and 'flag' the associated pins (bend them out, so they no longer enter the socket) and re-insert the chip.
A little tricky maybe, but better than nothing for now..
If a CPU (let's take a 486DX as an example) is using 10A @ 5V, it's said to be consuming 50W of power. Question is, what is it doing with all that power?
In relative terms, electrons are pretty light little things. Sure, there are brazillians of them moving about the CPU, but their cumulative mass is still negligible. It can't take much real power to shuffle them around (nothing like rolling a giant boulder to the top of a hill) - unless of course, you account for electrical resistance (which we will).
Of that 50W consumed by the CPU, how much is lost as heat? I'd tend to think that pretty much all of it is.. 99% let's say. Is that right, or is there some other 'work' being done that I'm not aware of?
If CPUs were inherently superconducting devices, would they only use a tiny fraction (like 1%) of that nominal 50W?
This reminds me of the gasoline / oil eating fungus that was created over a decade ago to clean up oil spills. I realize that this is a slightly different scenario, but it still has some disturbing parallels.
The engineered fungus (naturally) made it into the environment, and eventually ended up in the gasoline supply chain. It wasn't a problem for vehicles that regularly burned through tanks of fuel (it acts slowly), but for vehicles in storage, it was a mini-disaster.
Starting in the mid-late 1980's, we (motorcycle mechanics) started seeing a new form of carburetor fouling on bikes that had been stored. Once the gasoline had sat for a few weeks, and many of the volatiles had fumed off, the fungus would sttack the stale gas - turning it into a nasty, sticky green slimy mess with a distinct odor. This was some of the worst, most difficult to clean fouling you can imagine - and unless you had a real pro to handle the cleaning, the carbs were on the verge of being scrap metal. Normal carb cleaning products wouldn't touch the green residue, only one particular product from Yamaha that was designed for just this type of fouling. I can only imagine how much monetary damage this caused to motorcycle owners, shops and manufacturers. I assume the situation was similar in the seasonal power equipment field.
I can visualize an engineered algae or fungus, that thrives on hydrocarbons and their products of combustion, setting up a dinner table in my car's oilpan. Just some food for thought (ugh).
It's not all Soviet Russia and flamewars, though you can see it from here. Despite the failings,/. is still kinda cool, and once in a while you find some real gems among the rubble (or is that rabble?). That's what keeps me coming back.
That was a series of fairly astute observations, but one of your comments is particularly interesting:
I would also argue that the iPod and iTunes have the potential to change the way we buy music. Seriously, how many times have you bought an album on the strength of maybe one or two songs heard on the radio, only to find the rest of the album sucked?
To answer the question - as for myself, zero (in the last 20 years or so). Once I got wise to the concept of filler material, I'd just tape the 'hits' off the radio, and play them on my Walkman.. but that's ancient history. These days, I never buy a new record unless I'm already familiar with it, or it comes from an artist that I know and trust. Yes, I said record - as in vinyl. I don't normally buy CDs, but will occasionally buy one that is produced by a local band, to support their efforts.
But getting back to your point.. something very big could come of this. The law of supply and demand dictates that if there is no demand for the filler tracks, that they may no longer be supplied. Instead of Jessica producing a record with two hits, and twelve filler tracks - Jessica releases an EP. By the same token, an artist who understands the concept of an 'album' and produces the deep cuts required to create one gets to release a full record.
This force might actually cause some semblance of an artistic merit-based system to re-emerge in the music industry. If Sony/BMG doesn't need to waste their money producing and promoting ten tracks of filler for the pop goddess du jour, perhaps those funds could be directed at other artist's efforts. While I can't say this will absolutely be the case, I can say with relative certainty that no industry will waste itself producing products that nobody wants to buy. And unless they plan to get out of the music business, they need sellable product.
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out (ugh..) over time. Maybe iPod and friends aren't just recycled Walkmans, and really do have the ability to change things for the better. Thanks again for your comments.
Growing up in the 70's and 80's, our generation had the Sony Walkman, and a hundred similar portable music players. They were very cool, and very trendy for a time, but eventually the hype wore off and they became fairly mundane and commonplace. Fast forward (pun) a decade or two, and we get iPod. The iPod seems nothing but the obvious, logical progression from older tech to newer - when I say that, I mean that when I first became aware of the device, my reaction was "hm, that was pretty predictable".
So what's the point? The point is, that while the iPod has a much larger music capacity than a cassette player, it's still just another portable music player.; it looks, feels and acts much like any other device of this type. The portable music 'revolution' occurred some twenty years ago - I know, I was there, and I lived it. And in kind, we had our stacks of duped cassettes - the 'free music' of the day, if you will.
In all seriousness - can someone please explain to me why the iPod merits such earth-shattering cultural status? To me, it just seems like "more of the same", rather than some fantastic new paradigm. What warrants the unstoppable media and cultural coverage of this reborn technology?
Please take this at face value - these are earnest questions.
You're quite correct. The big problem is caused by the fact that MP3 uses more than just simple compression, it takes advantage of various psychoaccoustic phenomena to (in a sense) trick the brain into hearing soemthing that isn't quite what it seems to be. The conversion to WMA isn't a particularly intelligent process - in fact, I'll go out on a limb and conjecture that the MP3 is first decompressed to a PCM stream, then the PCM stream is re-encoded as WMA. Since WMA is not prepared for the trickery (it's all still there, just without the compression), it parses it all like basic musical signal - totally oblivious of any existing pre/de-emphasis, phase shift, etc.
I've only experimented with convering a few MP3 to WMA, but the results always sounded odd and occasionally downright glitchy. To draw a comparison - I suspect that MP3->WMA to my ears would be very much like replicated sushi to my palate (USS Enterprise - Captain Kirk era, when transporters could still make evil twins).
Since the AllPeers applet is still in the box, it's impossible to say whether or not it's a killer app. Since we cannot directly observe AllPeers, it must be existing in a meta-state where it is at once both a killer app, and in fact not.
Up until recently (well, the introduction of the iPod is still in the realm of what used to be considered 'recent') the term 'Pod' has had nothing but negative connotations. Think about it:
In traditional geek lingo, a 'pod' is a term for a person who is devoid of intelligence or basic humanity (comes from Invasion of the Body Snatchers - a great yet campy cold-war era horror/thriller). Pods, Pod People, "he seems like some kind of pod", and so forth. When I hear the term 'podcast', it immediately evokes the idea that the info therein is directed at Pods, or created by Pods. Apparently, they are directed at iPods, but since I don't own one of those, I obviously have no use for a Podcast (logical?).
Consider that the iPod presents a method of isolating oneself from the other humans in one's vacinity. In doing so, it dehumanizes the user and all others around them. Not to put too fine a point on it - but humankind exists today because traditionally, as human beings, we were willing to interact with the others around us.
Despite the inherent confusion, I've come to feel that the terms iPod and Podcast are very well chosen, but from the perspective of dark irony.
When I first subscribed to Comcast, the line was roughly 3Mbit. Over the last couple of years, the downstream speed was first bumped to 4.5Mbit, and then recently to 6Mbit. I live in a generally poor urban area (85% of the households receive some form of assistance, mine not among them) and I think I'm the only one on the local node - because I get every last bit of that 6Mbit, 24/7. Sounds great, eh?
Well, truth be told, I just don't need that much bandwidth for my use. What would be ideal, is having the option to use only 3Mbit, for roughly half the current monthly rate. Most of the time, I feel like half my monthly bill is being wasted on unnecessary service. Believe it or not, I'm strongly considering going *back* to DSL, just to cut the bills. And if I'm finding the rates a little high, I can easily understand why I seem to be the only user in the local hood.
Bad bad broadband bandwidth rollouts are great, and availability is a must - but in my view, breaking the affordability barrier is currenly a greater priority than breaking any new speed barriers.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you can say something, doesn't mean it's always the best idea to say certain things.
Excuse me, but when it's "not the best idea" to say something, due to fear of violent reprisal by worldwide gangs of militant thugs, that is called coertion and intimidation.
Fuck them. I refuse to be coerced, and I will not be intimidated.
To all of you out there - Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew and all - Your religion does not make you fucking special! You were, and still are, special from the day of your birth - by virtue of your own precious humanity. Now all of you, get down of your chosen holier-than-thou narcisstic highhorses and join the rest of the human race, before you fuckers are the death of us all.
Who would shell out for a second phone? We're not talking poultry amounts of scratch here.
I shouldn't lay my karma on the line like this.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you our new Slashdot motto.
This is more accurately a social restraint on nerds breeding. I've never seen any information to suggest that there is a lower rate of fertility among autistic / aspergers individuals, or even common nerds.
Over the large span of human evolution, characteristics such as physical strength, size, agression and so forth had much more to do with the ability of an individual to procreate, as opposed to the ability to smooth-talk a member of the opposite sex.
Our modern social conventions are obviously much 'nicer', but as for the positive / negative consequences for our gene pool, only time will tell.
Except that the European Arabs are young and having lots of kids.
Perhaps you meant European Muslims? The vast majority of Muslims living in France, Scandinavia, the UK etc are of North African and Pakistani extraction. Neither of these groups are Arabs.
But the basic premise is true; these groups have much higher birthrates than their European hosts.
Isnt that what the WIKI is all about, and why ultimately its doomed to fail?
You mean in the same sense that our early hominid ancestors 'failed'? If out of necessity the Wiki model evolves, over time, due to environmental pressures, you might term that a failure - but I for one would not.
With specific respect to Wikipedia, I had always assumed that the current model served the purposes of building a large base of users, interest and articles. By the same assumption, I felt that at some totally arbitrary time, they would start to tighten the reigns of (quality) control.
They can do that, you know.
We played that game to death on the C-64, alongside Archon.
If the board uses one of the larger DIP style EEPROM BIOS chips, wouldn't it be simple to identify the write lines (from the manufacturer's data sheet)? You could then pull the chip, and 'flag' the associated pins (bend them out, so they no longer enter the socket) and re-insert the chip.
A little tricky maybe, but better than nothing for now..
Help me out here.. I sure one of y'all know this:
If a CPU (let's take a 486DX as an example) is using 10A @ 5V, it's said to be consuming 50W of power. Question is, what is it doing with all that power?
In relative terms, electrons are pretty light little things. Sure, there are brazillians of them moving about the CPU, but their cumulative mass is still negligible. It can't take much real power to shuffle them around (nothing like rolling a giant boulder to the top of a hill) - unless of course, you account for electrical resistance (which we will).
Of that 50W consumed by the CPU, how much is lost as heat? I'd tend to think that pretty much all of it is.. 99% let's say. Is that right, or is there some other 'work' being done that I'm not aware of?
If CPUs were inherently superconducting devices, would they only use a tiny fraction (like 1%) of that nominal 50W?
Wine Is Not Electrolyzed
If we want to travel beyond our solar system, we ought to build something like Earth, only smaller.
Hmm.. you mean like Mars?
No, that would be a black hole, not a star.
Oh, goatee, my bad.
Now that's some insight..
Well put.
Symantec asserts that SpyBot is corrupting Norton Ghost images - well, is it, or isn't it?
I mean, this isn't like determining the existence of god is it? The image is either corrupt, or it is not. So which is it?
Anyone?
Reason is what separates us from primates.
Also, the ability to weasel out of various obligations is what separates us from other animals in general.
Except of course, the weasel
This reminds me of the gasoline / oil eating fungus that was created over a decade ago to clean up oil spills. I realize that this is a slightly different scenario, but it still has some disturbing parallels.
The engineered fungus (naturally) made it into the environment, and eventually ended up in the gasoline supply chain. It wasn't a problem for vehicles that regularly burned through tanks of fuel (it acts slowly), but for vehicles in storage, it was a mini-disaster.
Starting in the mid-late 1980's, we (motorcycle mechanics) started seeing a new form of carburetor fouling on bikes that had been stored. Once the gasoline had sat for a few weeks, and many of the volatiles had fumed off, the fungus would sttack the stale gas - turning it into a nasty, sticky green slimy mess with a distinct odor. This was some of the worst, most difficult to clean fouling you can imagine - and unless you had a real pro to handle the cleaning, the carbs were on the verge of being scrap metal. Normal carb cleaning products wouldn't touch the green residue, only one particular product from Yamaha that was designed for just this type of fouling. I can only imagine how much monetary damage this caused to motorcycle owners, shops and manufacturers. I assume the situation was similar in the seasonal power equipment field.
I can visualize an engineered algae or fungus, that thrives on hydrocarbons and their products of combustion, setting up a dinner table in my car's oilpan. Just some food for thought (ugh).
Hey, thanks for the good words.
It's not all Soviet Russia and flamewars, though you can see it from here. Despite the failings, /. is still kinda cool, and once in a while you find some real gems among the rubble (or is that rabble?). That's what keeps me coming back.
That, and there are some really amusing trolls.
That was a series of fairly astute observations, but one of your comments is particularly interesting:
I would also argue that the iPod and iTunes have the potential to change the way we buy music. Seriously, how many times have you bought an album on the strength of maybe one or two songs heard on the radio, only to find the rest of the album sucked?
To answer the question - as for myself, zero (in the last 20 years or so). Once I got wise to the concept of filler material, I'd just tape the 'hits' off the radio, and play them on my Walkman.. but that's ancient history. These days, I never buy a new record unless I'm already familiar with it, or it comes from an artist that I know and trust. Yes, I said record - as in vinyl. I don't normally buy CDs, but will occasionally buy one that is produced by a local band, to support their efforts.
But getting back to your point.. something very big could come of this. The law of supply and demand dictates that if there is no demand for the filler tracks, that they may no longer be supplied. Instead of Jessica producing a record with two hits, and twelve filler tracks - Jessica releases an EP. By the same token, an artist who understands the concept of an 'album' and produces the deep cuts required to create one gets to release a full record.
This force might actually cause some semblance of an artistic merit-based system to re-emerge in the music industry. If Sony/BMG doesn't need to waste their money producing and promoting ten tracks of filler for the pop goddess du jour, perhaps those funds could be directed at other artist's efforts. While I can't say this will absolutely be the case, I can say with relative certainty that no industry will waste itself producing products that nobody wants to buy. And unless they plan to get out of the music business, they need sellable product.
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out (ugh..) over time. Maybe iPod and friends aren't just recycled Walkmans, and really do have the ability to change things for the better. Thanks again for your comments.
Growing up in the 70's and 80's, our generation had the Sony Walkman, and a hundred similar portable music players. They were very cool, and very trendy for a time, but eventually the hype wore off and they became fairly mundane and commonplace. Fast forward (pun) a decade or two, and we get iPod. The iPod seems nothing but the obvious, logical progression from older tech to newer - when I say that, I mean that when I first became aware of the device, my reaction was "hm, that was pretty predictable".
So what's the point? The point is, that while the iPod has a much larger music capacity than a cassette player, it's still just another portable music player.; it looks, feels and acts much like any other device of this type. The portable music 'revolution' occurred some twenty years ago - I know, I was there, and I lived it. And in kind, we had our stacks of duped cassettes - the 'free music' of the day, if you will.
In all seriousness - can someone please explain to me why the iPod merits such earth-shattering cultural status? To me, it just seems like "more of the same", rather than some fantastic new paradigm. What warrants the unstoppable media and cultural coverage of this reborn technology?
Please take this at face value - these are earnest questions.
If we weren't detaining people, tapping their phones, and beating information out of someone, I'd be pissed. I'm paying the government to protect me.
Careful now.. if and when they come for you, there may be no one left to say anything.
You're quite correct. The big problem is caused by the fact that MP3 uses more than just simple compression, it takes advantage of various psychoaccoustic phenomena to (in a sense) trick the brain into hearing soemthing that isn't quite what it seems to be. The conversion to WMA isn't a particularly intelligent process - in fact, I'll go out on a limb and conjecture that the MP3 is first decompressed to a PCM stream, then the PCM stream is re-encoded as WMA. Since WMA is not prepared for the trickery (it's all still there, just without the compression), it parses it all like basic musical signal - totally oblivious of any existing pre/de-emphasis, phase shift, etc.
I've only experimented with convering a few MP3 to WMA, but the results always sounded odd and occasionally downright glitchy. To draw a comparison - I suspect that MP3->WMA to my ears would be very much like replicated sushi to my palate (USS Enterprise - Captain Kirk era, when transporters could still make evil twins).
For the most part, you Liberal Arts types need only concern yourselves with one type of joint.
To be blunt.
Since the AllPeers applet is still in the box, it's impossible to say whether or not it's a killer app. Since we cannot directly observe AllPeers, it must be existing in a meta-state where it is at once both a killer app, and in fact not.
But I'm slightly uncertain about this.
Up until recently (well, the introduction of the iPod is still in the realm of what used to be considered 'recent') the term 'Pod' has had nothing but negative connotations. Think about it:
In traditional geek lingo, a 'pod' is a term for a person who is devoid of intelligence or basic humanity (comes from Invasion of the Body Snatchers - a great yet campy cold-war era horror/thriller). Pods, Pod People, "he seems like some kind of pod", and so forth. When I hear the term 'podcast', it immediately evokes the idea that the info therein is directed at Pods, or created by Pods. Apparently, they are directed at iPods, but since I don't own one of those, I obviously have no use for a Podcast (logical?).
Consider that the iPod presents a method of isolating oneself from the other humans in one's vacinity. In doing so, it dehumanizes the user and all others around them. Not to put too fine a point on it - but humankind exists today because traditionally, as human beings, we were willing to interact with the others around us.
Despite the inherent confusion, I've come to feel that the terms iPod and Podcast are very well chosen, but from the perspective of dark irony.
When I first subscribed to Comcast, the line was roughly 3Mbit. Over the last couple of years, the downstream speed was first bumped to 4.5Mbit, and then recently to 6Mbit. I live in a generally poor urban area (85% of the households receive some form of assistance, mine not among them) and I think I'm the only one on the local node - because I get every last bit of that 6Mbit, 24/7. Sounds great, eh?
Well, truth be told, I just don't need that much bandwidth for my use. What would be ideal, is having the option to use only 3Mbit, for roughly half the current monthly rate. Most of the time, I feel like half my monthly bill is being wasted on unnecessary service. Believe it or not, I'm strongly considering going *back* to DSL, just to cut the bills. And if I'm finding the rates a little high, I can easily understand why I seem to be the only user in the local hood.
Bad bad broadband bandwidth rollouts are great, and availability is a must - but in my view, breaking the affordability barrier is currenly a greater priority than breaking any new speed barriers.