Analog storage is limited by the speed of the recording medium and the amount of surface area utilized to store the analog soundwaves (in whatever fashion).
When you characterize the difference like that you make it sound as if analog doesn't have any meaningful limits at all. Just a tiny fraction of the density and speed that newer backup tapes get would serve pro audio tape gear just fine.
it all boils down to analog devices not maintaining an exact representation of the sound they are conveying.
Well, sure, that's the important advantage of digital.
A lot of modern historical scholarship suggests this is a slander invented during the Enlightenment. While the Dark Ages were certainly a period of political upheaval and unrest, the damage to learning was not as great as is commonly believed.
What's a good text on that subject? I have to admit that I've pretty thoroughly bought into what I guess would be the enlightenment POV, and I suppose I could muster some reasons for that, but I haven't read THAT much history.
I said educated people of the Renaissance knew the Earth was round, and had a good idea of its precise size.
Okay, that's fair, but it is also the reason why I don't think you really managed to refute my point (that "people" thought for a long time the Earth was flat), even though you meant to. People ought to have known better, yes, and a select few did: we're in total agreement about that. I guess it's about the imprecision of the term "people."
So when Christopher Columbus went to bankers and kings trying to get funding for his trip around the world, these people didn't laugh at the notion. They knew it was right. They'd been taught it by their tutors, and odds are a lot of them had repeated the experiment.
That is a pretty interesting point. They would not have laughed, but they might not have believed with much confidence it would work, either. If they had that kind of confidence they certainly would have sent a mission sooner. Why not? I doubt Columbus's ships were much more capable than the ships of a century or two before, and there was money to be made if it worked.
The thing about physical exploration and discovery is that it smashes preconceived notions and fears in a way theory does not. The trip became easier after Columbus did it, not just because of his maps, but because of the psychological barrier that had been broken.
You certainly overstate the case by making it sound as if everyone agreed with Eratosthenes and there was a consensus. I take your point, but...
Eratosthenes published his discovery far and wide, and it was a standard part of education throughout the Roman Empire, throughout the Dark Ages, on into the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.
Come on. The whole problem with the Dark Ages was that truths were forgotten by people and had to be rediscovered. Again, you're overstating your case here.
As evidenced by the fact you think that for a long time people thought the Earth was flat.
Of course they did. The flaw in your argument is that you think the masses ("people") listen to their greatest thinkers and absorb their findings right away. There are some pretty obvious counterexamples to this, even in these enlightened times in which we live, so of course it would be vastly more of a problem when very few were privilaged with education.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ ne ws/2005/01/02/weden02.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/01/02/ ixworld.html
The whole point about the great unwashed masses being generally slow and dumb as fuck is pretty relevant to the wikipedia question, too, since those unwashed masses are now writing the encyclopedia alongside the, ahem... washed masses? And guess which group is bigger!
If you are running Windows, Crystal CPUID will tell you what the real processor is, if they only changed the label. If they physically changed the part itself, it won't do any good.
That's too bad. The common change now, to get from a 2500+ to a 3200+, involves changing a couple of bridges on the top of the package (as well as the label, I guess). If there were a unique serial number ID in the chip, I don't think they could change THAT. (although perhaps you could change the microcode in the BIOS if you were selling an entire OEM system...)
A satellite that had weapons on board, however, would be a different story altogether. If true, this would be an obvious next step after BMD (ballistic missle defense).
If you look at the engineering independently of politics or perhaps even strategy, it's an obvious next step before missile defense. I'd much rather design a missile defense system to shoot down at warheads, ideally before they reach full speed, than a system to shoot up at them from the earth.
We're talking about the same MS that directly cloned Apple's interface right down to fixed-sized elevators, and Dave Cutler's operating system right down to the spelling mistakes?
There, fixed that for you.
And is this the same Sun Microsystems whose Unix is one of the more difficult (in relative terms) to port Linux code to due to the differences between them?
What do you mean by "Linux" code? You must not mean "free software" or "GNU software" since Sun workstations were a useful target for most free software while most Linuxheads were still shitting their diapers. It's always been an easier target than AIX or IRIX, as well.
Are these utilities of any use? http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/Technica lResou rces/0,,30_182_871_2364,00.html
I guess a serial number you could actually call and check with AMD about would cause the privacy worriers to shit themselves, but it would be useful in this case.
I don't consider someone who knows a great deal about something an expert.
That's charming, but you've already acknowledged that you don't think there are any experts, so this is just a predictable aspect of your kooky belief system.
I refuse to be considered an expert because no one is worthy of holding any kind of final authority on a subject. My problem isn't with the word expert but more in how it is used. Someone who is deemed an expert by others can be easily mistaken as the final authority.
That doesn't invalidate the idea of an expert, "a person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject." I feel the point you're trying to make is that nobody, whether they are an expert or not, should commit the "argument from authority" fallacy. I agree with you on that. Anyone ought to be required to make a decent argument when they are making their point.
The fact that we expect experts to behave just like everyone else doesn't eradicate the fact that there are experts. Come on.
There are some rare exceptions to this, but in most cases information always changes and yesterday's so-called experts become irrelevant.
I can't imagine why you think this is true, there are so many obvious counterexamples. Pick a handful of scientists who interest you the most and study their lives. How many were productive until the ends of their lives? How many got so stupid, senile or disconnected from their field that people would cease to describe them as experts in their field? Honestly.
Unfortunately the organization that conducted the investigation was the same organization that perpetrated the offense, the Army.
The Taguba report wasn't really that bad. The wingnuts have coped with the nasty revelations therein by the simple expedient of not reading it, as far as I can tell. Or maybe one of their right-wing demagogues said it was full of lies.
While Abu Ghraib is definitely an abuse situation, there were no cases of rape involved
That is simply not true. You're not even trying very hard, here: just google up the Taguba report and read. You might not rate the quality of the report very high, but how could you make such a confident statement after having read it? You obviously haven't, or you're one of those with an agenda.
The page on Abu Ghraib doesn't even mention rape except that one prisoner is claiming it without proof.
One wonders what sort of proof would satisfy someone like you.
I've stopped looking at Wiki with the assumption of objectivity.
The notion that an encyclopedia can be unbiased is ridiculous when if you sat twenty scientists in a room and gave them one article an academic fight would break out with many subjects.
The interesting thing is, if they were mostly experts in their field you could publish a transcript of that fight and it would probably have some academic interest. Most discussion pages in wikipedia are considerably less interesting, but still: when you're studying a wikipedia entry you ought to study both the entry proper and the discussion page. We probably ought to regard them as being one, and if we do then even a flawed entry might give some special insight that a normal encyclopedia entry would lack, through study of the discussion. Wishful thinking?
This is not to say that these people don't know a great deal, but there is not one person on the planet that can be called an expert.
Uh... so, have you redefined "expert" to mean "omnipotent"? Then no, there aren't any experts. But most of us think of experts as being "people who know a great deal" about a subject, and you've just acknowledged that they exist.
My point is that there can be no experts because information is not immutable.
You mean, once people started seriously thinking about it? Not very long at all, actually.
That's fine, but it's a bit beside the point. The point was that an assertion is not necessarily true because people have believed it a long time. You can add in your additional criteria along the lines of "people appear to have been seriously thinking about the assertion for a long time" and it's still a pretty useless criteria to use for determining truth.
Re:Long intervies processes suck
on
Defining Google
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· Score: 1
In the UK employers cannot fire you for furthering yourself
I'm actually sympathetic to the view that an employer ought to be prevented from firing employees for interviewing, but filing those interviews under "furthering yourself" seems like a stretch even to me.
all you have to do is tell them you have a Job Interview and they have to give you off reasonable time for it, not sure if its paid or unpaid, pretty sure its paid.
If it's paid, well, that just strikes me as silly.
There is a decidedly revisionist, politically correct, liberal, secular humanist bent to the Wikipedia that prevents it from becoming an entirely reliable source.
This isn't 100% right IMO. By lumping all that together you make it seem as though "political correctness" is still exclusively a tool of the left, which simply isn't true. The techniques of PC, making your opponent look like a bad guy because of what they've said or the way they said it, appealing to sentiment rather than engaging their arguments, is pretty skillfully used by the right nowadays. All done in the service of the greater good, of course...
Pretty much everything you've mentioned except the "secular humanist" bit are offenses the right are quite frequently guilty of. That's politics, I guess, but it has spread beyond the political campaigns into the "discourse," which is sort of sad.
Give me a break here. For real linux-servers you'd better roll your own linux (remember, a real server takes a real admin...) or at the very least compile the critical runtime stuff (usually database, webserver, app server) and ofcourse the kernel from scratch.
Since none of the commercial middleware and relational database vendors support anything except the commercial "enterprise" distributions, running stock kernels and stock everything else, you're pretty much blowing hot air here. Unless you think that the multi-cpu Oracle systems running on RHEL and SLES aren't "real" servers, which would be a pretty interesting position to take.
Slashdot Mirror
Victoria's Secret?
For the first, there's this innovation known as "circuit breakers." For the second, the procedure is to point and laugh.
When you characterize the difference like that you make it sound as if analog doesn't have any meaningful limits at all. Just a tiny fraction of the density and speed that newer backup tapes get would serve pro audio tape gear just fine.
Well, sure, that's the important advantage of digital.
What's a good text on that subject? I have to admit that I've pretty thoroughly bought into what I guess would be the enlightenment POV, and I suppose I could muster some reasons for that, but I haven't read THAT much history.
Okay, that's fair, but it is also the reason why I don't think you really managed to refute my point (that "people" thought for a long time the Earth was flat), even though you meant to. People ought to have known better, yes, and a select few did: we're in total agreement about that. I guess it's about the imprecision of the term "people."
That is a pretty interesting point. They would not have laughed, but they might not have believed with much confidence it would work, either. If they had that kind of confidence they certainly would have sent a mission sooner. Why not? I doubt Columbus's ships were much more capable than the ships of a century or two before, and there was money to be made if it worked.
The thing about physical exploration and discovery is that it smashes preconceived notions and fears in a way theory does not. The trip became easier after Columbus did it, not just because of his maps, but because of the psychological barrier that had been broken.
Here's a summary for those of you too lazy to click:
"Oh yes you SHOULD worry about Indians taking all your jobs!!! LOLOLOL!!!!!11111ONE111
Come on. The whole problem with the Dark Ages was that truths were forgotten by people and had to be rediscovered. Again, you're overstating your case here.
Of course they did. The flaw in your argument is that you think the masses ("people") listen to their greatest thinkers and absorb their findings right away. There are some pretty obvious counterexamples to this, even in these enlightened times in which we live, so of course it would be vastly more of a problem when very few were privilaged with education.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=
The whole point about the great unwashed masses being generally slow and dumb as fuck is pretty relevant to the wikipedia question, too, since those unwashed masses are now writing the encyclopedia alongside the, ahem... washed masses? And guess which group is bigger!
Ha. Not a professional DBA, are we?
That's too bad. The common change now, to get from a 2500+ to a 3200+, involves changing a couple of bridges on the top of the package (as well as the label, I guess). If there were a unique serial number ID in the chip, I don't think they could change THAT. (although perhaps you could change the microcode in the BIOS if you were selling an entire OEM system...)
Uh... no.
http://www.etl.noaa.gov/technology/othr/
That's silly.
If you look at the engineering independently of politics or perhaps even strategy, it's an obvious next step before missile defense. I'd much rather design a missile defense system to shoot down at warheads, ideally before they reach full speed, than a system to shoot up at them from the earth.
There, fixed that for you.
What do you mean by "Linux" code? You must not mean "free software" or "GNU software" since Sun workstations were a useful target for most free software while most Linuxheads were still shitting their diapers. It's always been an easier target than AIX or IRIX, as well.
Are these utilities of any use?a lResou rces/0,,30_182_871_2364,00.html
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/Technic
I guess a serial number you could actually call and check with AMD about would cause the privacy worriers to shit themselves, but it would be useful in this case.
That's charming, but you've already acknowledged that you don't think there are any experts, so this is just a predictable aspect of your kooky belief system.
That doesn't invalidate the idea of an expert, "a person with a high degree of skill in or knowledge of a certain subject." I feel the point you're trying to make is that nobody, whether they are an expert or not, should commit the "argument from authority" fallacy. I agree with you on that. Anyone ought to be required to make a decent argument when they are making their point.
The fact that we expect experts to behave just like everyone else doesn't eradicate the fact that there are experts. Come on.
I can't imagine why you think this is true, there are so many obvious counterexamples. Pick a handful of scientists who interest you the most and study their lives. How many were productive until the ends of their lives? How many got so stupid, senile or disconnected from their field that people would cease to describe them as experts in their field? Honestly.
The Taguba report wasn't really that bad. The wingnuts have coped with the nasty revelations therein by the simple expedient of not reading it, as far as I can tell. Or maybe one of their right-wing demagogues said it was full of lies.
That is simply not true. You're not even trying very hard, here: just google up the Taguba report and read. You might not rate the quality of the report very high, but how could you make such a confident statement after having read it? You obviously haven't, or you're one of those with an agenda.
One wonders what sort of proof would satisfy someone like you.
Don't blame you for that.
The interesting thing is, if they were mostly experts in their field you could publish a transcript of that fight and it would probably have some academic interest. Most discussion pages in wikipedia are considerably less interesting, but still: when you're studying a wikipedia entry you ought to study both the entry proper and the discussion page. We probably ought to regard them as being one, and if we do then even a flawed entry might give some special insight that a normal encyclopedia entry would lack, through study of the discussion. Wishful thinking?
Uh... so, have you redefined "expert" to mean "omnipotent"? Then no, there aren't any experts. But most of us think of experts as being "people who know a great deal" about a subject, and you've just acknowledged that they exist.
That doesn't make a bit of sense.
That's fine, but it's a bit beside the point. The point was that an assertion is not necessarily true because people have believed it a long time. You can add in your additional criteria along the lines of "people appear to have been seriously thinking about the assertion for a long time" and it's still a pretty useless criteria to use for determining truth.
I'm actually sympathetic to the view that an employer ought to be prevented from firing employees for interviewing, but filing those interviews under "furthering yourself" seems like a stretch even to me.
If it's paid, well, that just strikes me as silly.
This isn't 100% right IMO. By lumping all that together you make it seem as though "political correctness" is still exclusively a tool of the left, which simply isn't true. The techniques of PC, making your opponent look like a bad guy because of what they've said or the way they said it, appealing to sentiment rather than engaging their arguments, is pretty skillfully used by the right nowadays. All done in the service of the greater good, of course...
Pretty much everything you've mentioned except the "secular humanist" bit are offenses the right are quite frequently guilty of. That's politics, I guess, but it has spread beyond the political campaigns into the "discourse," which is sort of sad.
How long did people think the world was flat?
Inertia doesn't have much to do with truth.
It's something plenty of employers will fire you for, even when they're not unhappy with your performance.
Since none of the commercial middleware and relational database vendors support anything except the commercial "enterprise" distributions, running stock kernels and stock everything else, you're pretty much blowing hot air here. Unless you think that the multi-cpu Oracle systems running on RHEL and SLES aren't "real" servers, which would be a pretty interesting position to take.
Like any distro adhering to the LSB, or in reality just about any distro except Slackware or Gentoo.