Points about the inadequacies of digital photography well taken, but I think the point is to have it preserved and documented with the best technology currently available. No it isn't perfect, but it's probably the best we can do right now. Maybe in a few years or decades we will have significantly improved upon the standards of digital photography, and this work will be rendered obsolete. Then again, maybe some of the work that went into this will get folded into mainstream image processing. You'd need some pretty big iron, but imagine what kind of crazy Photoshop (or GIMP, for all you OSS geeks) plugins could conceivably come out of this!
In the insterest of full disclosure, I'll point out that I'm a PhD student in the humanities. Having said that, I strongly disagree with your statement that subjects like history, English, and math are never used by the average worker. Congratulations on your excellent job - you probably make a lot more than I do, and I went to a renowned liberal arts college and am currently enrolled in a major research university. But there are other things in life at least as important as making a buck. How is one supposed to be a responsible citizen without knowing history, civics, or economics? What about the increasing importance of reading and writing skills - even in technical fields? What about the much-maligned and neglected foreign language study? (Like it or not, you don't really think English is still going to be the sole lingua franca in fifty years?) What about the arts - an area which teaches critical thinking, discipline, and teamwork, as well as aesthetics? Beyond that, just because IT is the big field right now (or was 10 years ago), who's to say what it might be in twenty?
Bill Gates may be fantastically rich, but he's also a college dropout. He's also hardly a self-made man: his family connections and the role they played in making him who he is today are well-documented elsewhere. While I applaud his philanthropy and sense of civic duty, I would like to see what makes him an expert on education.
For what it's worth, I hated high school, was terribly bored, and became a good student only in college. I'm currently a PhD student and I teach undergraduate courses. It is true that many students come in lacking what I thought were basic skills (I'm in the humanities, so I'm talking about writing, history, foreign language, critical thinking, etc.) However, one must consider that a far greater percentage of US high school students _do_ go on to some post-secondary education than in most other countries (Canada being an exception). In most European countries, for example, students are tracked from secondary school on. Japanese students take rigorous exams just to get into a pre-college high school. Of course the tradeoff is that a college education costs far more in the US than just about anywhere else, but I think a big part of the reason that so many US university students come in unprepared is that we accept students who probably wouldn't get in if they were in another country. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Some of these students work hard and get a good education. The rest flunk out, but hopefully they've learned something along the way.
My other big beef is with standardized test scores. What we really ought to be teaching students is logical, critical thinking, not rote memorization, which is really what standardized test scores measure. And we shouldn't be taking students out of the classroom to take these inane tests. Talk about a waste of classrom time! Education is to a large degree subjective, and you really can't easily quantify it the way these business types would like. Even if you could, comparisons with other nations are unfair, since most other countries test only the top (university-bound) students, whereas the US test all (or nearly all) students. Statistically, this would skew the results nastily.
Technical, scholarly, or scientific literature frequently does end up being easier to read in or translate from a foreign language than fiction or poetry, or sometimes even newspapers. Part of the reason is the international language of much technical terminology: terms of Latin or Greek origin tend to be pretty similar across the major European languages. Another is the fact that the writing style deliberately favors clarity and transparency, sometimes to the detriment of linguistic subtlety and grace.
Find a neighbor who's got wireless and offer to pay half the cost.
My landlord got wireless a few months ago. I was still on dialup at home at the time, but I had wireless in my laptop for hitting the hotspots. He told me to go ahead and use his connection, since he's paying for it anyway. (I did offer to cover half of the cost, but he simply repeated that he's paying for it anyway, so he didn't care.)
I think you have it right when you said that Iraq has potentially ruined the legitimacy of American foreign policy. I do think that the US invasion of Iraq and deposition of its leader has been the primary motivating force behind the increasing belligerance of both North Korea and Iran. Nothing motivates a people like being called "evil" by the President of a hostile nation. The fact of the matter is that Bush blew it. We had a strong consensus on world security during the Clinton and first Bush administrations, one which endured into the early days of W's first term and was arguably at its peak in the immediate weeks after 9/11. But Bush chose to squander his alliances. George W. Bush is no FDR, he's no JFK, he's no Reagan - he's not even Nixon. His utter failure as both statesman and commander-in-chief is manifest in both his mishandling of the war in Iraq and his inability to adequately deal with both Iran and North Korea. I have no doubt that North Korea is a miserable place, run by an utter madman. I have no doubt that Kim is simply posturing for more aid and concessions. But I think that any world leader, faced with a far more powerful enemy whose head of state freely applies the epithet "evil" to anyone he doesn't like, would be looking for ways to defend himself.
All well and good, but I use mine for real-time DSP (Max/MSP). I really need all the horsepower I can get. I've had my eye on the iMac G5 since it came out, but I don't have that kind of money.
Does anyone know if you can overclock a PowerBook? I know that overclocking notebooks is generally considered a bad idea (heat dissipation), but if you can overclock a mini, why not? I've got a much used and abused 12" 867 AlBook that I would love to get up to 1 Ghz.
Max/MSP isn't free, but PD and jMax are. Max/MSP is a lot nicer to use, but an OSC-midi translator is a pretty trivial thing to build, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone didn't already have one for download somewhere on the net.
I am a professional composer and sound engineer. I use midi everyday. I have been using midi for about 15 years. I own several midi devices spread across 2 computers. Actually, I kind of do wish midi would just die already. It's broken. If you work for a synth designer, then you know that: 1. It's slow. 2. It requires *yet another cable* 3. Sysex is ugly. 4. MMC and other midi-based control systems are ugly hacks at best. 5. 7 bits? WTF? Lost of times, you just need more than 127 possible values! 6. Support for non-12-tone equal-tempered intervals is nearly nonexistent. (Yes, I realize that a lot of people don't care about that, but I do, and there are others who do as well.) Midi is related to a very outdated conception of how music works. If you just want synths that do the same things that traditional acoustic instruments do well, then midi is great. However, many of us use electronics because we want to do other things. I would gladly buy any synth that started using a USB/Firewire/Ethernet non-midi protocol, so that I could have more control over shaping the sound and intonation of the synth. What would be really great would be something more like the control voltage system of analog synths.
Cool! Now all we need is a bass-playing bot, and we could have a fully robotic jazz quartet with Toyota's trumpet-playing robot, PEART, and a Yamaha Disklavier (solenoid-actuated midi-controlled acoustic piano). And you could have some algorithmic composition software like Max or OpenMusic driving the improvisation....
As many posters have pointed out, even Apple were to do this (which they won't), software support on a hypothetical X86 OSX would be pretty much nonexistent. One of OSX's greatest strengths is that it allows *nix-derived FOSS apps and mainstream commercial software to coexist pretty nicely on the same platform. But do you really think that all those commerical vendors, who pretty recently went through the trouble of porting their flagship apps from OS9, or 'Doze, or even *nix to PPC OSX are going to port them to x86 OSX? Does Adobe really want to have three binaries of Photoshop to have to worry about maintaining? And I highly doubt that it would be a simple matter of recompiling, because of stuff like optimizations. In my case, I'm typing this on an x86 Linux box, but I also own a G4 P-book. I love OSX, but I went with it because of app support - not eye candy, or style. I'm not talking about M$ Office here, either - I mean pro audio stuff. I need to run ProTools and Max/MSP (yes, I tried Ardour and Pd - good, but not there yet). Audio, video, and graphics people are still Apple's core market. That's why there desktop machines are workstation-class behemoths. You're just not going to get the commercial app support on an X86 OSX, and while there are a lot of great F/OSS apps that would run great on it, if that's what you want, you might as run Linux or *BSD.
The problem isn't with democratic capitalism per se. The original poster said "what's wrong with democratic capitalism as we have it at the moment." I wouldn't want to see fascism, or communism, or feudalism, or even true anarchism instituted, but the present system is broken. It is neither truly democratic (with the interestes of huge segments of the population un- or under-represented) nor truly capitalist (with a few large firms completely dominating the econony, rampant anti-competitive practices, and government handouts aplenty). It' become a cliche to say that we are inching towards fascism, and I'm going to resist judgement on that one for the time being, but it's enough to have smarter people than me bery worried.
Uhh.... OK, I know this is going to be considered trolling, but I always wonder about politicians who claim to be Christians and yet espouse anti-welfare, pro-death penalty, or pro-gun positions. I don't think any of those positions are consistent with the New Testament I read. Call me a hippie, but I was always under the impression that the Gospel advocated justice, equality, peace, non-violence, respect for one's neighbor, and responsible stewardship of the Earth. Flame on....
I always get bothered when people make statements like "Canada and socialist European countries are being left in our economic dust." Yes, it's true that the richest Europeans are not as rich as the richest Americans. But the poorest Europeans are nowhere near as poor as the poorest Americans. What does it matter if most of the most profitable corporations are based in the US if we have the highest illiteracy and infant mortality rates in the developed world? How can one have "economic freedom" when the purchasing power of the middle class (to say nothing of the working class) continues to fall?
Don't mean to break your heart further, but I bought my IPX for $5 at a Thrift Shop back in 2000. I think some CS student got it from Carnegie Mellon University's surplus, and then needed to get rid of it....
The thing that strike me as even stranger is the close relationship between Apple and IBM. Remember, all through most of the '80's it was IBM, not M$FT, that Apple was really seen as trying to copete with. Enter the mid-90's, and they're collaborating on the PPC. Now you've got IBM hosting sites touting Linux (or even OSX) on a Mac G5 as a good platform for developing PPC code for POWER4 Linux and AIX boxen. But IBM seems to make a lot of its money from hardware, and I guess that includes Macs with IBM PPC chips.
Sorry if I appear to be "lumping all libertarians in a single container". And FWIW, I wouldn't consider myself a "knee-jerk statist", either. But this touches on what is, for me a fundamental problem: I'm actually fairly sympathetic to a lot of libertarian positions. I probably don't trust big government any more than you do. But at the same time, (and maybe this is just cynical flamebait) I sure as hell don't trust big business. Ideally, it should be a system of checks and balances, with private citizens keeping the government in line, and the government making sure everyone plays nicely. (Of course I realzie that it sadly doesn't work out that way.) Now, of course, I'm all for private citizens and watchdog groups keeping an eye on things, and there definitely needs to be limitations on what the government can do (and it can probably do far too much right now), but somehow it strikes me as rather naive to assume that litigation, or the threat thereof, would be an adequate deterrent to pollution (or any other sort of corporate crime, for that matter.)
That's not the point. I have an M-Audio 1010 (with breakout box) in my 1.1 Ghz T-Bird. I've never been able to get rid of crackles - under several flavors of both Linux and Windows. There is a well-documented problem with Athlons and Via chipsets and many pro-audio cards. (Unfortunately it wasn't very well-documented when I bought the card!) However, I don't think that more recent mobos (at least the better ones) have this problem. I do know people successfully using AMD systems for audio. In general, I would tend to support AMD over Intel - but I've more or less abandoned X86 for audio in general.
Slashdot Mirror
How about this: I, for one, welcome our new railgun-wielding overlords!
Points about the inadequacies of digital photography well taken, but I think the point is to have it preserved and documented with the best technology currently available. No it isn't perfect, but it's probably the best we can do right now. Maybe in a few years or decades we will have significantly improved upon the standards of digital photography, and this work will be rendered obsolete. Then again, maybe some of the work that went into this will get folded into mainstream image processing. You'd need some pretty big iron, but imagine what kind of crazy Photoshop (or GIMP, for all you OSS geeks) plugins could conceivably come out of this!
In the insterest of full disclosure, I'll point out that I'm a PhD student in the humanities. Having said that, I strongly disagree with your statement that subjects like history, English, and math are never used by the average worker. Congratulations on your excellent job - you probably make a lot more than I do, and I went to a renowned liberal arts college and am currently enrolled in a major research university. But there are other things in life at least as important as making a buck. How is one supposed to be a responsible citizen without knowing history, civics, or economics? What about the increasing importance of reading and writing skills - even in technical fields? What about the much-maligned and neglected foreign language study? (Like it or not, you don't really think English is still going to be the sole lingua franca in fifty years?) What about the arts - an area which teaches critical thinking, discipline, and teamwork, as well as aesthetics? Beyond that, just because IT is the big field right now (or was 10 years ago), who's to say what it might be in twenty?
Bill Gates may be fantastically rich, but he's also a college dropout. He's also hardly a self-made man: his family connections and the role they played in making him who he is today are well-documented elsewhere. While I applaud his philanthropy and sense of civic duty, I would like to see what makes him an expert on education. For what it's worth, I hated high school, was terribly bored, and became a good student only in college. I'm currently a PhD student and I teach undergraduate courses. It is true that many students come in lacking what I thought were basic skills (I'm in the humanities, so I'm talking about writing, history, foreign language, critical thinking, etc.) However, one must consider that a far greater percentage of US high school students _do_ go on to some post-secondary education than in most other countries (Canada being an exception). In most European countries, for example, students are tracked from secondary school on. Japanese students take rigorous exams just to get into a pre-college high school. Of course the tradeoff is that a college education costs far more in the US than just about anywhere else, but I think a big part of the reason that so many US university students come in unprepared is that we accept students who probably wouldn't get in if they were in another country. And I don't think that's a bad thing. Some of these students work hard and get a good education. The rest flunk out, but hopefully they've learned something along the way. My other big beef is with standardized test scores. What we really ought to be teaching students is logical, critical thinking, not rote memorization, which is really what standardized test scores measure. And we shouldn't be taking students out of the classroom to take these inane tests. Talk about a waste of classrom time! Education is to a large degree subjective, and you really can't easily quantify it the way these business types would like. Even if you could, comparisons with other nations are unfair, since most other countries test only the top (university-bound) students, whereas the US test all (or nearly all) students. Statistically, this would skew the results nastily.
Technical, scholarly, or scientific literature frequently does end up being easier to read in or translate from a foreign language than fiction or poetry, or sometimes even newspapers. Part of the reason is the international language of much technical terminology: terms of Latin or Greek origin tend to be pretty similar across the major European languages. Another is the fact that the writing style deliberately favors clarity and transparency, sometimes to the detriment of linguistic subtlety and grace.
Find a neighbor who's got wireless and offer to pay half the cost. My landlord got wireless a few months ago. I was still on dialup at home at the time, but I had wireless in my laptop for hitting the hotspots. He told me to go ahead and use his connection, since he's paying for it anyway. (I did offer to cover half of the cost, but he simply repeated that he's paying for it anyway, so he didn't care.)
I think you have it right when you said that Iraq has potentially ruined the legitimacy of American foreign policy. I do think that the US invasion of Iraq and deposition of its leader has been the primary motivating force behind the increasing belligerance of both North Korea and Iran. Nothing motivates a people like being called "evil" by the President of a hostile nation.
The fact of the matter is that Bush blew it. We had a strong consensus on world security during the Clinton and first Bush administrations, one which endured into the early days of W's first term and was arguably at its peak in the immediate weeks after 9/11. But Bush chose to squander his alliances. George W. Bush is no FDR, he's no JFK, he's no Reagan - he's not even Nixon. His utter failure as both statesman and commander-in-chief is manifest in both his mishandling of the war in Iraq and his inability to adequately deal with both Iran and North Korea.
I have no doubt that North Korea is a miserable place, run by an utter madman. I have no doubt that Kim is simply posturing for more aid and concessions. But I think that any world leader, faced with a far more powerful enemy whose head of state freely applies the epithet "evil" to anyone he doesn't like, would be looking for ways to defend himself.
All well and good, but I use mine for real-time DSP (Max/MSP). I really need all the horsepower I can get. I've had my eye on the iMac G5 since it came out, but I don't have that kind of money.
Does anyone know if you can overclock a PowerBook? I know that overclocking notebooks is generally considered a bad idea (heat dissipation), but if you can overclock a mini, why not? I've got a much used and abused 12" 867 AlBook that I would love to get up to 1 Ghz.
Head over to the forums at electrical.com. I assure you, there is no shortage of analogue fanatics to this day.
You know, in the days of Asscroft and the Patriot Act, that's not even funny.
Max/MSP isn't free, but PD and jMax are. Max/MSP is a lot nicer to use, but an OSC-midi translator is a pretty trivial thing to build, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone didn't already have one for download somewhere on the net.
I am a professional composer and sound engineer. I use midi everyday. I have been using midi for about 15 years. I own several midi devices spread across 2 computers. Actually, I kind of do wish midi would just die already. It's broken. If you work for a synth designer, then you know that:
1. It's slow.
2. It requires *yet another cable*
3. Sysex is ugly.
4. MMC and other midi-based control systems are ugly hacks at best.
5. 7 bits? WTF? Lost of times, you just need more than 127 possible values!
6. Support for non-12-tone equal-tempered intervals is nearly nonexistent. (Yes, I realize that a lot of people don't care about that, but I do, and there are others who do as well.)
Midi is related to a very outdated conception of how music works. If you just want synths that do the same things that traditional acoustic instruments do well, then midi is great. However, many of us use electronics because we want to do other things. I would gladly buy any synth that started using a USB/Firewire/Ethernet non-midi protocol, so that I could have more control over shaping the sound and intonation of the synth. What would be really great would be something more like the control voltage system of analog synths.
Cool! Now all we need is a bass-playing bot, and we could have a fully robotic jazz quartet with Toyota's trumpet-playing robot, PEART, and a Yamaha Disklavier (solenoid-actuated midi-controlled acoustic piano). And you could have some algorithmic composition software like Max or OpenMusic driving the improvisation....
As many posters have pointed out, even Apple were to do this (which they won't), software support on a hypothetical X86 OSX would be pretty much nonexistent. One of OSX's greatest strengths is that it allows *nix-derived FOSS apps and mainstream commercial software to coexist pretty nicely on the same platform. But do you really think that all those commerical vendors, who pretty recently went through the trouble of porting their flagship apps from OS9, or 'Doze, or even *nix to PPC OSX are going to port them to x86 OSX? Does Adobe really want to have three binaries of Photoshop to have to worry about maintaining? And I highly doubt that it would be a simple matter of recompiling, because of stuff like optimizations. In my case, I'm typing this on an x86 Linux box, but I also own a G4 P-book. I love OSX, but I went with it because of app support - not eye candy, or style. I'm not talking about M$ Office here, either - I mean pro audio stuff. I need to run ProTools and Max/MSP (yes, I tried Ardour and Pd - good, but not there yet). Audio, video, and graphics people are still Apple's core market. That's why there desktop machines are workstation-class behemoths. You're just not going to get the commercial app support on an X86 OSX, and while there are a lot of great F/OSS apps that would run great on it, if that's what you want, you might as run Linux or *BSD.
The problem isn't with democratic capitalism per se. The original poster said "what's wrong with democratic capitalism as we have it at the moment." I wouldn't want to see fascism, or communism, or feudalism, or even true anarchism instituted, but the present system is broken. It is neither truly democratic (with the interestes of huge segments of the population un- or under-represented) nor truly capitalist (with a few large firms completely dominating the econony, rampant anti-competitive practices, and government handouts aplenty). It' become a cliche to say that we are inching towards fascism, and I'm going to resist judgement on that one for the time being, but it's enough to have smarter people than me bery worried.
Uhh.... OK, I know this is going to be considered trolling, but I always wonder about politicians who claim to be Christians and yet espouse anti-welfare, pro-death penalty, or pro-gun positions. I don't think any of those positions are consistent with the New Testament I read. Call me a hippie, but I was always under the impression that the Gospel advocated justice, equality, peace, non-violence, respect for one's neighbor, and responsible stewardship of the Earth. Flame on....
Very interesting. I didn't even realize AmigaOnes were shipping. Is that something you would need to do at a BIOS level? Do A-1's use OpenFirmware?
I, for one, welcome our new, liquid nitrogen-cooled, 6 Ghz overlords! (...and I'm not even an Intel fan...)
Can you overclock a G5? I didn't know that Macs (or IBM workstations, for that matter) could be overclocked at all.
I always get bothered when people make statements like "Canada and socialist European countries are being left in our economic dust." Yes, it's true that the richest Europeans are not as rich as the richest Americans. But the poorest Europeans are nowhere near as poor as the poorest Americans. What does it matter if most of the most profitable corporations are based in the US if we have the highest illiteracy and infant mortality rates in the developed world? How can one have "economic freedom" when the purchasing power of the middle class (to say nothing of the working class) continues to fall?
Don't mean to break your heart further, but I bought my IPX for $5 at a Thrift Shop back in 2000. I think some CS student got it from Carnegie Mellon University's surplus, and then needed to get rid of it....
The thing that strike me as even stranger is the close relationship between Apple and IBM. Remember, all through most of the '80's it was IBM, not M$FT, that Apple was really seen as trying to copete with. Enter the mid-90's, and they're collaborating on the PPC. Now you've got IBM hosting sites touting Linux (or even OSX) on a Mac G5 as a good platform for developing PPC code for POWER4 Linux and AIX boxen. But IBM seems to make a lot of its money from hardware, and I guess that includes Macs with IBM PPC chips.
Sorry if I appear to be "lumping all libertarians in a single container". And FWIW, I wouldn't consider myself a "knee-jerk statist", either. But this touches on what is, for me a fundamental problem: I'm actually fairly sympathetic to a lot of libertarian positions. I probably don't trust big government any more than you do. But at the same time, (and maybe this is just cynical flamebait) I sure as hell don't trust big business. Ideally, it should be a system of checks and balances, with private citizens keeping the government in line, and the government making sure everyone plays nicely. (Of course I realzie that it sadly doesn't work out that way.) Now, of course, I'm all for private citizens and watchdog groups keeping an eye on things, and there definitely needs to be limitations on what the government can do (and it can probably do far too much right now), but somehow it strikes me as rather naive to assume that litigation, or the threat thereof, would be an adequate deterrent to pollution (or any other sort of corporate crime, for that matter.)
That's not the point. I have an M-Audio 1010 (with breakout box) in my 1.1 Ghz T-Bird. I've never been able to get rid of crackles - under several flavors of both Linux and Windows. There is a well-documented problem with Athlons and Via chipsets and many pro-audio cards. (Unfortunately it wasn't very well-documented when I bought the card!) However, I don't think that more recent mobos (at least the better ones) have this problem. I do know people successfully using AMD systems for audio. In general, I would tend to support AMD over Intel - but I've more or less abandoned X86 for audio in general.