"If Spotify dropped the ad-supported model, I'd stump up for the monthly subscription in an instant." - ummm but that's one of the major features of the premium, monthly-subscription service - there are no ads. Ads are only on the free trial version...
Lets be clear there are an absolute hat-full of major countries that don't *use* the SI day to day whatever they may have 'adopted'. Forty four years on from UK adoption, my car has a speedometer which is in mph as are the road signs. There are public outrages on central european efforts to prosecute small shop owners for being unwilling to sell fruit and veg in grams yet I have never heard anyone ask for '200 grammes of carrots'. People talk about their weight in stones and pounds and the only time you hear kilos is in international sports. Aircraft power is rate in lbs per square inch....
No I don't think that works at all. If signing more artists would increase the profit of a business they would do it regardless of any constraining factor. It's just straight forward p&l. Each unit of production is either profit positive or in loss. The number of units of revenue additive positive production you engage is not affected by piracy - you'd have them already!
It is truly crippling to see the mental fails that keep being propogated by the press and even supposedly academia here. "Piracy (filesharing) was the driving force behind increased creative output". It's simply not true that one caused the other. There isn't an artist or an amorphous group of artists who are outputting more per artist because they are thinking ex-ante "shit I'm going to get paid less than I used to so I better produce more". That might work for widgets and industry but for artistic output? Total rubbish. I'm not entering into the debate about the pros and cons of filesharing by the way but this sort of causative fail is just depressing and so utterly prevalent.
"Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts". Eh???? Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive? Orly??? Seems like such a normal combo nobody would comment on the fact surely? Then it becomes clear - he actually means the opposite of what that sentence says given the next sentence is as follows "'It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun -- war is not fun -- but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way.'" What he meant was fun and entertainment don't have to go together or 'fun and entertainment aren't mutually *inclusive*' in the context of real-world military conflict which is what the dev quoted is saying.
You were surprised how confident and competent the NSA seems here? Honestly that got me scratching my head hugely. Not because I have some god given insight into the strength of the NSA but simply because this was an *under-grad* evaluation where they pitched the task as slightly too hard for the best under-grad team. Nuff respect to under-grads who study hard, but being an under-grad is just part of the journey and you have so much more you can develop when you finish that phase of your life. You really think it's surprising the NSA (or for that any fact any corporation / organisation / entity) is fairly or in fact let's make that *hugely* more advanced than the undergrads entering it? For every genius entrepreneur who comes out of college with a hot idea, there's a million who are just beginning their development. The world would be f$cked if we stoppped at that point...
The downstairs of my house has thick walls and (tin?)foil insulation in it. Combined with odd corners and lack of line of sight it's a wireless-killer par excellence. In the end, getting fed up with lack of wireless signal, I cabled from the router in the garage, out on the outside of the house (couldn't get under the floors), with external pvc clad cat 6 (6 for future proofing) and brought it in through the walls for a port in every room. Cat 6 has a plastic wire separator in the middle and it makes it very unflexible and unaccomodating to lay and plug. Network is now fab but my hearty recommendation is do *not* do this until and unless you need to:)
One thing TFA suggests (and a comment or two here) is that click tracks are necessary to allow digital editing. That's not really the case and isn't the reason people use clicks. You can sync an editor to a live track and in any event, if you need to push or pull an off-timed beat you can just adjust manually or snap to grids with accuracy in the hundredths of a beat in Protools or whatever. And its not drummer tempo consistency. The vast majority of pro drummers are perfectly tight and the human ear enjoys their slight variations in timing (although My Chemical Romance got rid of their first one for it among other things). No, the real reason that clicks are used 9 times out of 10 is where there are sequenced keyboard, bass line or percussion type parts and the click is used to keep the drummer in time with the pre-programmed parts.
Actually that's not right. The New Years Honours list has been drawn up by the political party that's in government for decades and not the Queen at all. This was what caused the "Cash for peerages" scandal a few years back. It was long known that honours went to the i) media-popular as in the over-weight of sports stars in today's list and ii) the correlated worthy-achievers who just happened to be on the same side of the political spectrum as the government in power when they get their honours. Liz II might get an input but it is pretty minor.
At not even two years old, a child is still totally grappling with training its motor functions. A tiny keboard is a rubbish interface for a child of that age. Using a mouse (a trackpad is no good for this) with child-related software is as much as you can do but at not even two they are too young for this as well. You mistake that the Fisher-Price type stuff looks like a rip-off and is bad but the point is that it's also taken into account creating interfaces that are actually helpful and child-friendly. Get your child some interactive books / systems that are specially targeted at development and which you can sit and do with them. Leapfrog have graded kit from 12-36 months and up in age brackets thereafter. http://www.leapfrog.com/en/families/leapster/leapster_learning0/leapster.html . My 3 and 6 year old have had this stuff from an early age and the ability to use laptops, pcs and Nintendo DS etc. I found that between the ages of 2 to 4 / 5 they still preferred the Leapster etc.
In defense of the Baroque Cycle
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The Baroque Cycle is just an utterly different (huge) work to anything like Snowcrash or Diamond Age. It needs an editor who isn't scared of Stephenson in places but it is one of the most fantastic feats of human imagination I have ever read. If you can only deal with sci-fi then clearly a novel about Baroque England with Isaac Newton, a half-dicked pirate king and a fabulous ex-Hareem girl turned Duchess with diverse characters and fantastical imaginings isn't going to be your thing. But I can hardly remember a book that left me more open-mouthed with the sheer imagination and achievement of the author. The B.C. is a book that will never leave me.
The CEO agrees there's an issue but doesn't fix it. Hmmm.... So maybe the CEO is a klutz - welcome to the wonderful world of work - but there's a little alarm bell ringing for me; perhaps you thought it wasn't important for a post here on/. , but in the 200 words you use to describe that you have an issue, you don't explain *at all* what the effect is on the business - how does it actually hinder what is going on? Nor do you explain how things could be better if someone did focus on software quality....
CEO's of companies change stuff if they think it will benefit the company. However they are typically generalists / or sales people who need a fair bit of help with granular issues. I've lost count of the number of times in business I've seen someone from a particular discipline explain a problem in their terms aka 'the double flange flux capacitor has under-ubered the Klutz-point interzone metapoint' which sure enough gets a nod (you've got to nod a lot when you're a CEO) but is then promptly ignored because the generalist doesn't acutally get the detrimental impact to business or possibilities for improvement. Where the specialist says 'the software is crap and the business impact is that customer complaints are high compared to the competion and 43% of clients rate it 'unintuitive' or 'difficult' compared to XYZ Competitor Co. where only 18% give the same feedback' then you'll notice the CEO sit up. If you then tell him what benefits could be got by fixing it - substantive ones, not just that the software will be better - and the cost of doing the work, then you've got a CEO that is ready to go.
Now perhaps that's what you did here already but like I say, it's a mistake I commonly see....
"This is more than a bunch of athletes my friend. Go back and watch the opening ceremonies, and tell me that country does not scare the fuck out of you. The level of discipline demonstrated by the performers, the sheer precision of it all... it all far exceeds anything the West could possibly pull off. And that's DAMNED scary"
My friend, you are not wrong about that. Us Londoners get to do the next Olympics in 2012 and we were sat around watching the opening ceremony going 'ohshit...omfg...we are SO doomed'. And a bit later 'wtf are we going to celebrate about modern London? Teenage pregnancies? Knife crime?'!
Luxury. Well when I were a lad, our dad used to make 160 of us live in a shoebox in the middle of deep space. Millikelvins?? We *dreamed* of millikelvins....
In the UK all police forces have a policy of not prosecuting people who are just slightly over the speedlimit so as not to bring the police force into disrepute with their local citizens.
Well.... but then of course, James Bond would tell you the classic Martini is made with three parts gin AND one part vodka;
'A dry martini,' he said. 'One. In a deep champagne goblet.'
'Oui, monsieur.'
'Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's [an English gin], one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. [this is not vermouth by the way] Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?'
'Certainly, monsieur.' The barman seemed pleasant with the idea.
"Using the 'noone can get to the cockpit' thought, have the cockpit be a separate unit entirely: an armoured capsule at the front of the plane. Having it only accessible via an external door, you limit hijacking to before takeoff, or by terrorists with jetpacks. No real risk of forced entry then, and you limit options in a hostage situation (they can't demand control, only negotiate destination)."
Going to make having a wazz on a long flight, if you're the pilot just a teensy bit inconvenient eh?:)
"Not to disagree with you, just wanted to point out that this law is not popular [bbc.co.uk] in Britain."
Just for completeness, the comments you link are from the sort of people that are motivated enough to post on a bbc website. The BBC's own flagship radio news programme ('Today' on Radio 4) this morning, in covering the story, mentioned several times that levels of public support for this proposal "far outweighed" the narrow squeak the government got through yesterday.
"Its a pity that Radiohead's music is not country/hip-hop"
Yeah, it'd be a load frikkin better if Radiohead were like Oxford's equivalent of Kid Rock *8)
Radiohead finished their term with EMI Parlophone who originally signed them. In the usual way, their ex-record label are now pushing out as much as they can to cash in - 'Best of Radiohead' just having been released for instance. I suspect this is the cause. Mind you after the crap rip-quality of the In Rainbows interweb release and the volte face of the cd release following, I have less sympathy than I once would have done despite the quality of the work.
Slashdot Mirror
"If Spotify dropped the ad-supported model, I'd stump up for the monthly subscription in an instant." - ummm but that's one of the major features of the premium, monthly-subscription service - there are no ads. Ads are only on the free trial version...
Lets be clear there are an absolute hat-full of major countries that don't *use* the SI day to day whatever they may have 'adopted'. Forty four years on from UK adoption, my car has a speedometer which is in mph as are the road signs. There are public outrages on central european efforts to prosecute small shop owners for being unwilling to sell fruit and veg in grams yet I have never heard anyone ask for '200 grammes of carrots'. People talk about their weight in stones and pounds and the only time you hear kilos is in international sports. Aircraft power is rate in lbs per square inch....
Do you mind? It's just taken us 8 years to get a fossilised dinosaur out of the Oval Office....
No I don't think that works at all. If signing more artists would increase the profit of a business they would do it regardless of any constraining factor. It's just straight forward p&l. Each unit of production is either profit positive or in loss. The number of units of revenue additive positive production you engage is not affected by piracy - you'd have them already!
It is truly crippling to see the mental fails that keep being propogated by the press and even supposedly academia here. "Piracy (filesharing) was the driving force behind increased creative output". It's simply not true that one caused the other. There isn't an artist or an amorphous group of artists who are outputting more per artist because they are thinking ex-ante "shit I'm going to get paid less than I used to so I better produce more". That might work for widgets and industry but for artistic output? Total rubbish. I'm not entering into the debate about the pros and cons of filesharing by the way but this sort of causative fail is just depressing and so utterly prevalent.
Much better; http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1192503/Close-encounter-rock-kind-Schoolboy-survives-direct-hit-meteorite-travelling-30-000mph.html/
Yeah, well, we were last at war with the French in 1815, 194 years ago..... and that particular grudge ain't going away *any* time soon :>
"Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive, especially when it comes to entertainment based on real-world military conflicts". Eh???? Fun and entertainment aren't mutually exclusive? Orly??? Seems like such a normal combo nobody would comment on the fact surely? Then it becomes clear - he actually means the opposite of what that sentence says given the next sentence is as follows "'It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun -- war is not fun -- but it is possible to create an experience that is informative, appealing, and startling in a positive way.'" What he meant was fun and entertainment don't have to go together or 'fun and entertainment aren't mutually *inclusive*' in the context of real-world military conflict which is what the dev quoted is saying.
You were surprised how confident and competent the NSA seems here? Honestly that got me scratching my head hugely. Not because I have some god given insight into the strength of the NSA but simply because this was an *under-grad* evaluation where they pitched the task as slightly too hard for the best under-grad team. Nuff respect to under-grads who study hard, but being an under-grad is just part of the journey and you have so much more you can develop when you finish that phase of your life. You really think it's surprising the NSA (or for that any fact any corporation / organisation / entity) is fairly or in fact let's make that *hugely* more advanced than the undergrads entering it? For every genius entrepreneur who comes out of college with a hot idea, there's a million who are just beginning their development. The world would be f$cked if we stoppped at that point...
The downstairs of my house has thick walls and (tin?)foil insulation in it. Combined with odd corners and lack of line of sight it's a wireless-killer par excellence. In the end, getting fed up with lack of wireless signal, I cabled from the router in the garage, out on the outside of the house (couldn't get under the floors), with external pvc clad cat 6 (6 for future proofing) and brought it in through the walls for a port in every room. Cat 6 has a plastic wire separator in the middle and it makes it very unflexible and unaccomodating to lay and plug. Network is now fab but my hearty recommendation is do *not* do this until and unless you need to :)
One thing TFA suggests (and a comment or two here) is that click tracks are necessary to allow digital editing. That's not really the case and isn't the reason people use clicks. You can sync an editor to a live track and in any event, if you need to push or pull an off-timed beat you can just adjust manually or snap to grids with accuracy in the hundredths of a beat in Protools or whatever. And its not drummer tempo consistency. The vast majority of pro drummers are perfectly tight and the human ear enjoys their slight variations in timing (although My Chemical Romance got rid of their first one for it among other things). No, the real reason that clicks are used 9 times out of 10 is where there are sequenced keyboard, bass line or percussion type parts and the click is used to keep the drummer in time with the pre-programmed parts.
If I could mod this +6 insightful, I would....
Actually that's not right. The New Years Honours list has been drawn up by the political party that's in government for decades and not the Queen at all. This was what caused the "Cash for peerages" scandal a few years back. It was long known that honours went to the i) media-popular as in the over-weight of sports stars in today's list and ii) the correlated worthy-achievers who just happened to be on the same side of the political spectrum as the government in power when they get their honours. Liz II might get an input but it is pretty minor.
At not even two years old, a child is still totally grappling with training its motor functions. A tiny keboard is a rubbish interface for a child of that age. Using a mouse (a trackpad is no good for this) with child-related software is as much as you can do but at not even two they are too young for this as well. You mistake that the Fisher-Price type stuff looks like a rip-off and is bad but the point is that it's also taken into account creating interfaces that are actually helpful and child-friendly. Get your child some interactive books / systems that are specially targeted at development and which you can sit and do with them. Leapfrog have graded kit from 12-36 months and up in age brackets thereafter. http://www.leapfrog.com/en/families/leapster/leapster_learning0/leapster.html . My 3 and 6 year old have had this stuff from an early age and the ability to use laptops, pcs and Nintendo DS etc. I found that between the ages of 2 to 4 / 5 they still preferred the Leapster etc.
The Baroque Cycle is just an utterly different (huge) work to anything like Snowcrash or Diamond Age. It needs an editor who isn't scared of Stephenson in places but it is one of the most fantastic feats of human imagination I have ever read. If you can only deal with sci-fi then clearly a novel about Baroque England with Isaac Newton, a half-dicked pirate king and a fabulous ex-Hareem girl turned Duchess with diverse characters and fantastical imaginings isn't going to be your thing. But I can hardly remember a book that left me more open-mouthed with the sheer imagination and achievement of the author. The B.C. is a book that will never leave me.
The CEO agrees there's an issue but doesn't fix it. Hmmm.... So maybe the CEO is a klutz - welcome to the wonderful world of work - but there's a little alarm bell ringing for me; perhaps you thought it wasn't important for a post here on /. , but in the 200 words you use to describe that you have an issue, you don't explain *at all* what the effect is on the business - how does it actually hinder what is going on? Nor do you explain how things could be better if someone did focus on software quality....
CEO's of companies change stuff if they think it will benefit the company. However they are typically generalists / or sales people who need a fair bit of help with granular issues. I've lost count of the number of times in business I've seen someone from a particular discipline explain a problem in their terms aka 'the double flange flux capacitor has under-ubered the Klutz-point interzone metapoint' which sure enough gets a nod (you've got to nod a lot when you're a CEO) but is then promptly ignored because the generalist doesn't acutally get the detrimental impact to business or possibilities for improvement. Where the specialist says 'the software is crap and the business impact is that customer complaints are high compared to the competion and 43% of clients rate it 'unintuitive' or 'difficult' compared to XYZ Competitor Co. where only 18% give the same feedback' then you'll notice the CEO sit up. If you then tell him what benefits could be got by fixing it - substantive ones, not just that the software will be better - and the cost of doing the work, then you've got a CEO that is ready to go.
Now perhaps that's what you did here already but like I say, it's a mistake I commonly see....
I suppose it is inevitable that the original poster couldn't spell 'penetration'. It is Slashdot, after all ;)
My friend, you are not wrong about that. Us Londoners get to do the next Olympics in 2012 and we were sat around watching the opening ceremony going 'ohshit...omfg...we are SO doomed'. And a bit later 'wtf are we going to celebrate about modern London? Teenage pregnancies? Knife crime?'!
Luxury. Well when I were a lad, our dad used to make 160 of us live in a shoebox in the middle of deep space. Millikelvins?? We *dreamed* of millikelvins....
In the UK all police forces have a policy of not prosecuting people who are just slightly over the speedlimit so as not to bring the police force into disrepute with their local citizens.
'A dry martini,' he said. 'One. In a deep champagne goblet.'
'Oui, monsieur.'
'Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon's [an English gin], one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. [this is not vermouth by the way] Shake it very well until it's ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?'
'Certainly, monsieur.' The barman seemed pleasant with the idea.
'Gosh that's certainly a drink,' said Leiter.
(Casino Royale)
Going to make having a wazz on a long flight, if you're the pilot just a teensy bit inconvenient eh? :)
"Not to disagree with you, just wanted to point out that this law is not popular [bbc.co.uk] in Britain." Just for completeness, the comments you link are from the sort of people that are motivated enough to post on a bbc website. The BBC's own flagship radio news programme ('Today' on Radio 4) this morning, in covering the story, mentioned several times that levels of public support for this proposal "far outweighed" the narrow squeak the government got through yesterday.
"Its a pity that Radiohead's music is not country/hip-hop" Yeah, it'd be a load frikkin better if Radiohead were like Oxford's equivalent of Kid Rock *8)
Radiohead finished their term with EMI Parlophone who originally signed them. In the usual way, their ex-record label are now pushing out as much as they can to cash in - 'Best of Radiohead' just having been released for instance. I suspect this is the cause. Mind you after the crap rip-quality of the In Rainbows interweb release and the volte face of the cd release following, I have less sympathy than I once would have done despite the quality of the work.