I'm a lecturer. When asked that question I always say, "Why, that's a very good idea. Thank you for the suggestion!" (No, it's not done in such a way as to embarrass the student asking the question, it's just a joke. Mostly.)
Quite right. It's sad to see how many people don't realise that academia, research, and innovation are all actually fictional. They never really happened. They were all invented by Marx or Darwin or someone like that a hundred years ago. All those people claiming to be researchers are just figments of your imagination.
The axle, or bearing if you prefer, is a far more important invention than the wheel. If you want "wheel" to stand as a shorthand for a "wheel, axle, and bearing" combo, I'll be happier:-) And the plough should be at least number 2!
I agree with you about The Pirate Planet, but I think we may be among the very few.:-) Sadly, I've only seen it the once -- when it was first broadcast (in the 1970s?); made a big impression, though. Incidentally, IIRC the script for Shada was completed, but not the filming; so Adams reused a lot of the plot in the first Dirk Gently book.
Sorry to disillusion you, but I teach at a university and I can confirm the GP's depiction. Being incapable of reliably constructing a coherent sentence is par for the course. I'm teaching a language course at the moment and most 18-year-old students can't detect the verb in the sentence "Why is the sky blue?" (I kid you not, about a third of 18-year-olds will identify "blue" as the verb. Another third will claim there is no verb. But I digress.) I've taught at universities in three first-world anglophone countries and it's pretty much the same in all of them.
However, almost no university anywhere can afford to turn away students, no matter how poorly-educated they are.
In the book version of 2001, the objective of the space mission was one of Saturn's moons, viz. Iapetus, and there was a lot of time devoted to the tricky business of slingshotting the spaceship around Jupiter along the way; in the movie Kubrick simplified it by making one of Jupiter's moons, viz. Io, the objective of the mission. IIRC the book and the movie came out in the same year. I'm afraid I don't know the details of which bits of which version got what from where, except that Clarke came up with the story in the first place.
I don't recall the details of the original short story ("The Guardian", it was called, wasn't it?) other than that it was set on Earth's moon. I can't remember where the guardian was sending its signal to.
If it's any comfort, I heard about it in New Zealand before seeing it on Slashdot.:-) Plus I'm going to be in a plane flying that route just before Christmas. This story makes me feel all nice and fuzzy inside.
You're right about it still being a comparatively small market, but you're wrong about the "less" popular bit. Go check on CD sales and concert attendance -- classical music is booming.
It's not a case of one's right, the other's wrong. They're variant readings. 666 is standard in most manuscripts; 616 is in one early manuscript and a few other sources; neither reading stands out as obviously superior to the other.
If a singles album has ten songs on it and costs ten dollars, but only two of those songs are any good, then we are being charged ten dollars for two dollars worth of goods and being told we got our money's worth.
It's obvious to anyone with a brain that this story a symptom of people still thinking of the basic unit of music as being "the song". But I'd expect that for a lot of people who like music -- especially people who are not RIAA executives, and who are not 14-year-olds -- this is probably not actually the case.
This is why there has been a trend in the last 10 years towards music tracks getting longer. In 1990 a track that lasted 5 minutes was daring, and one that lasted 10 minutes would be unheard-of -- except on the revered EP, of course. Nowadays 10 minute tracks are nothing out of the ordinary, and 20 minute tracks are often seen. And people like them, and buy them. Obviously that's going to change the shape of albums too.
I don't see this as the demise of the album, I see it as the demise of the 1980s-style album that the parent describes. There's still plenty of room for albums that are coherent works of art (even if it does feel like a return to the days of Pink Floyd, as others here have noticed). People still write hour-long symphonies for classical orchestras -- and that's an area of the music industry that is booming at the moment. I'm quite sure the album will hang around too. Just not in the shape that the RIAA wants it to be; and once the medium of the CD goes the way of the cylinder, I'm sure the length of the "album" will change drastically too.
Come to think of it, you might well find Dell UK preferring to think in Euros too. -- if you call their customer service centre, you'll quickly spot that it is in fact not in the UK, but in the Republic of Ireland.
Audiograbber has a nice feature that allows you to normalise a batch of files as though they were a single file. I like this feature very much and use it frequently. Windows-only, though.
For curiosity, I'd like to know what sample rate is "good enough" for digitising vinyl. How does 96 KHz do? the higher the better, obviously, but at some point there's going to have to be a trade-off between file size and sample rate.
-- then only very very very rich people would ever dare to sue anyone. Sometimes people who aren't so well-off have cause to sue big wealthy corporations; under your system they would be absolutely totally screwed for life if they lost. The current system favours the incredibly wealthy; so does the system you propose.
Just about any e-mail service should enable the use of non-ascii characters. Any halfway decent e-mail client will; if you're using Thunderbird or Mail or Pegasus, just set the character set to UTF-8; I believe Pine allows UTF-8 too. (Personally I can't imagine any reason for not using UTF-8 as default; I use it all the time, even though almost all of my e-mails are in English.) Most web-interfaces allow it as well: Gmail certainly does, for example; I'm pretty sure Yahoo does.
However, the GGP was specifically talking about the possibility of using multiple character sets in the same URL, which I think would be wholly impractical, and unnecessary given the widespread use of the UCS.
Speaking out of ignorance here: surely some languages require multiple character sets? If you're using English, French, German, or Spanish, fine, ASCII will do fine. But If you're using Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, Ma_ori, or Turkish, you're going to have to use a combination of basic Roman characters plus characters with a variety of diacritics or other modifications, aren't you? I guess there's something I'm missing.
Anyway, even presuming I am missing something, it looks to me like it'd still be pretty easy to phish by using, say, Turkish for your character set, but make it look like basic Roman except that one of the 'i's is missing a dot.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a lecturer. When asked that question I always say, "Why, that's a very good idea. Thank you for the suggestion!" (No, it's not done in such a way as to embarrass the student asking the question, it's just a joke. Mostly.)
Quite right. It's sad to see how many people don't realise that academia, research, and innovation are all actually fictional. They never really happened. They were all invented by Marx or Darwin or someone like that a hundred years ago. All those people claiming to be researchers are just figments of your imagination.
The axle, or bearing if you prefer, is a far more important invention than the wheel. If you want "wheel" to stand as a shorthand for a "wheel, axle, and bearing" combo, I'll be happier :-) And the plough should be at least number 2!
I agree with you about The Pirate Planet, but I think we may be among the very few. :-) Sadly, I've only seen it the once -- when it was first broadcast (in the 1970s?); made a big impression, though. Incidentally, IIRC the script for Shada was completed, but not the filming; so Adams reused a lot of the plot in the first Dirk Gently book.
http://paknet.pakuranga.school.nz/pages.asp?MenuID =1&DeptID=51&PageID=5430
Very nice, thank you. My menu bar is now much more concise.
Glad it's not just me.
... and that would mean only very very very rich people would ever dare to sue anyone.
Just as well that only rich people ever have legitimate civil complaints, isn't it? Oh wait that's not true.
Sorry to disillusion you, but I teach at a university and I can confirm the GP's depiction. Being incapable of reliably constructing a coherent sentence is par for the course. I'm teaching a language course at the moment and most 18-year-old students can't detect the verb in the sentence "Why is the sky blue?" (I kid you not, about a third of 18-year-olds will identify "blue" as the verb. Another third will claim there is no verb. But I digress.) I've taught at universities in three first-world anglophone countries and it's pretty much the same in all of them.
However, almost no university anywhere can afford to turn away students, no matter how poorly-educated they are.
In the book version of 2001, the objective of the space mission was one of Saturn's moons, viz. Iapetus, and there was a lot of time devoted to the tricky business of slingshotting the spaceship around Jupiter along the way; in the movie Kubrick simplified it by making one of Jupiter's moons, viz. Io, the objective of the mission. IIRC the book and the movie came out in the same year. I'm afraid I don't know the details of which bits of which version got what from where, except that Clarke came up with the story in the first place.
I don't recall the details of the original short story ("The Guardian", it was called, wasn't it?) other than that it was set on Earth's moon. I can't remember where the guardian was sending its signal to.
If it's any comfort, I heard about it in New Zealand before seeing it on Slashdot. :-) Plus I'm going to be in a plane flying that route just before Christmas. This story makes me feel all nice and fuzzy inside.
Indeed. Plus another option will become open once GPLv3 is finalised, and once a Solaris kernel is available under GPLv3.
You're right about it still being a comparatively small market, but you're wrong about the "less" popular bit. Go check on CD sales and concert attendance -- classical music is booming.
No, GP was right: Kubrick. Check the book, it's different from the film.
It's not a case of one's right, the other's wrong. They're variant readings. 666 is standard in most manuscripts; 616 is in one early manuscript and a few other sources; neither reading stands out as obviously superior to the other.
It's obvious to anyone with a brain that this story a symptom of people still thinking of the basic unit of music as being "the song". But I'd expect that for a lot of people who like music -- especially people who are not RIAA executives, and who are not 14-year-olds -- this is probably not actually the case.
This is why there has been a trend in the last 10 years towards music tracks getting longer. In 1990 a track that lasted 5 minutes was daring, and one that lasted 10 minutes would be unheard-of -- except on the revered EP, of course. Nowadays 10 minute tracks are nothing out of the ordinary, and 20 minute tracks are often seen. And people like them, and buy them. Obviously that's going to change the shape of albums too.
I don't see this as the demise of the album, I see it as the demise of the 1980s-style album that the parent describes. There's still plenty of room for albums that are coherent works of art (even if it does feel like a return to the days of Pink Floyd, as others here have noticed). People still write hour-long symphonies for classical orchestras -- and that's an area of the music industry that is booming at the moment. I'm quite sure the album will hang around too. Just not in the shape that the RIAA wants it to be; and once the medium of the CD goes the way of the cylinder, I'm sure the length of the "album" will change drastically too.
Even more relevant: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusche.
Come to think of it, you might well find Dell UK preferring to think in Euros too. -- if you call their customer service centre, you'll quickly spot that it is in fact not in the UK, but in the Republic of Ireland.
Thanks for that, very informative. I've got a friend who wants to back up a rather large vinyl collection and he'll find this most helpful.
Audiograbber has a nice feature that allows you to normalise a batch of files as though they were a single file. I like this feature very much and use it frequently. Windows-only, though.
For curiosity, I'd like to know what sample rate is "good enough" for digitising vinyl. How does 96 KHz do? the higher the better, obviously, but at some point there's going to have to be a trade-off between file size and sample rate.
-- then only very very very rich people would ever dare to sue anyone. Sometimes people who aren't so well-off have cause to sue big wealthy corporations; under your system they would be absolutely totally screwed for life if they lost. The current system favours the incredibly wealthy; so does the system you propose.
Just about any e-mail service should enable the use of non-ascii characters. Any halfway decent e-mail client will; if you're using Thunderbird or Mail or Pegasus, just set the character set to UTF-8; I believe Pine allows UTF-8 too. (Personally I can't imagine any reason for not using UTF-8 as default; I use it all the time, even though almost all of my e-mails are in English.) Most web-interfaces allow it as well: Gmail certainly does, for example; I'm pretty sure Yahoo does.
Speaking out of ignorance here: surely some languages require multiple character sets? If you're using English, French, German, or Spanish, fine, ASCII will do fine. But If you're using Polish, Lithuanian, Czech, Ma_ori, or Turkish, you're going to have to use a combination of basic Roman characters plus characters with a variety of diacritics or other modifications, aren't you? I guess there's something I'm missing.
Anyway, even presuming I am missing something, it looks to me like it'd still be pretty easy to phish by using, say, Turkish for your character set, but make it look like basic Roman except that one of the 'i's is missing a dot.
I'm a bit more worried about the person who modded my post "informative".
Sure you do. On the 31st of April :-)