To my knowledge, only the import DVD players from China sold over the gray market offers unlimited changes to the player's DVD region as a feature.
Wow, really? I'm guessing you're in the US? Sounds like an odd situation to be in. Where I am, in NZ, just about the only DVD players I see that aren't multi-region are the ones built into Apple or Dell computers. So, for example, if I were to move to the US (just supposing it were still possible to get a visa without bending over in all directions), would I not be allowed to bring my DVD player with me?
Ah well. In that case, go China-free-trade-agreement go!
Not everyone uses the Roman Alphanumerics system. Arabic and Asian languages come to mind.
I totally agree. I work with languages in multiple alphabets and a thing like this would be a wonderful tool. Have you ever tried to find a keyboard appropriately marked for polytonic Greek? Well, I'm pretty sure they don't exist... anyway, I just drooled and drooled over the pictures. Think of scholars trying to type out cuneiform or Linear B, or pretty much any non-European language, and it's not hard to think of applications. I'd love for a keyboard like this to exist and be practical!
Ogg is better, and I'm a fan of it - my music library is almost all in Ogg format, and I'm very happy indeed with my 20 GB DAP that supports Ogg and has a 30+ hour battery life.
But Ogg will never catch on in a populist way. By the time it has a chance to catch on, increasing bandwidth will have made compression such a non-issue that everyone will be using lossless formats anyway, - something which Ogg most certainly is not.
Still, for those who are in the know, it is indeed the right tool for the time. Until broadband becomes the standard everywhere in the world, not just in North America, Europe, and East Asia, I agree Ogg is the best format for transmitting compressed audio. But its days are numbered... I don't know how long we're going to continue to need lossy compression formats, but I shall treasure Ogg until that day and remember it fondly afterwards.
But mark my words, the real fight is going to be over which lossless compression is going to rule the world. Stop pushing Ogg; it's never going to be a winner. Start pushing OSS lossless formats so that WMA or Apple Lossless don't win the day.
According to the Dirac FAQ they can't do streaming yet, but they've already got better compression "performance" than Theora (not clear whether that means better compression speed or size).
Because an understanding of the difference between 'present' and 'absent' is a much more fundamental idea than that of 'number'. Treating them as related concepts is a big step:
If it's here it's 'present'; if not, it's 'absent'
So, E-tax is windows-only. Big deal. The ATO is working with the lowest common denominator. Sadly for the zealots out there, that's not linux. And , as an Aussie citizen, this is *my* tax dollars at work. I'm not interested in them spending (say) $1 million to code up a working linux version and do support for it. I want my cash to go to more important things.
[...]
When linux is 25% of the installed Australian PC user base, they might consider it. But you'll probably see a Mac version first. Personally, I'm glad that they've made the first step and actually made online returns possible, because it's a hell of a lot better than the old paper-chase.
Not precisely analogous, but here goes:
So, E-tax is incompatible with screen-readers. Big deal. The ATO is working with the lowest common denominator. Sadly for the zealots out there, that's not people with eyesight problems. And, as an Aussie citizen, this is *my* tax dollars at work. I'm not interested in them spending (say) $1 million to code up a version that blind or short-sighted people can use. I want my cash to go to more important things.
When blind people are 25% of the population, they might consider it. But you'll probably see a version for colour-blind people first. Personally, I'm glad that they've made the first step and actually made online returns possible, because it's a hell of a lot better than the old paper-chase.
Best that government agencies should work on the principle of excluding people from the facilities and resources they offer. Not.
To further clarify the above: there is not much of a magnetic north and south on Mars, as noted elsewhere in this discussion. Mars has been known to have a magnetic field since about 1997, but the planet's magnetisation is largely undifferentiated. Some regions, as also noted elsewhere in this discussion, do reach magnetic variation of up to 400 nT, which is not insignificant (see e.g. this article (pdf format)).
However, 'borealis' and 'australis' are not originally terms used in connection with magnetic fields, and Mars clearly does have poles in the sense that it rotates - which is why the GP post struck me as a very weird thing to say.
I am a researcher in Astronomy and I have found that Google Schalor is very lacking in my field. They have bigger competition in Astronomy than in most fields...
I am a researcher in a humanities discipline and I find the Web of Science, Scopus, Citeseer, and eBizSearch to be completely useless to me.
Clearly if they're no use to me, these tools must be of no use whatsoever to anyone at all!
I should hope that, with a little thought, it's obvious to all here present that different tools suit different fields. In my field Google Scholar is of some use - perhaps not as useful as HighWire Press, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Google Print - but still of some use.
One thing VHS can do that DVD cannot do is remember where in the program you are when you want to take the medium out and move to another room and resume in another player.
This is especially important for using multimedia in the classroom. Scenario: you want to show a 2-minute clip from a movie to the class. How do you prepare this beforehand? If you're using VHS, dead easy. If you're using a DVD, f***ing difficult and takes several minutes of embarrassing yourself in front of the class, because on the school-supplied DVD player pressing the ff button just for an instant fast-forwards the movie by 3 minutes.
Naturally, my university has now removed all VHS players from lecture theatres. Thanks, guys. DVDs in the classroom are a sodding nightmare.
Yeah, yeah, I know it'd be easier to convert a segment from the DVD to wmv/mov format and play that instead... but universities sometimes get a bit het up about activities which make use of illegal (DVD-decoding) technology like that.
... intelligent people do not need to go to school to get ahead.
Hm, perhaps what you actually meant to say is this:
People who are intelligent, incredibly well-motivated, charismatic, and very very lucky, sometimes under some circumstances do not need to go to school to get ahead.
I third that. My iAudio M3 makes me very happy. In addition to the features mentioned in the parent, the M3 has a 20 GB hard drive, a battery life of ca. 35 hours (according to the documentation, and that seems pretty much accurate so far), I like the way it looks more than any other DAP I've seen (including the iPod), and I like the separation of the HDD component and the control doohicky. It's all good.
Does anyone who ever worked on Outlook ever get on a plane? Ever? Do they know what a time zone is?
I have taken Outlook with me on a plane crossing time-zones once. Just once. Never ever ever again; it caused me to miss the plane coming back. Was I idiotic? Perhaps yes - for trusting Outlook with my information. (Such is life with E-tickets: the information about the itinerary has to go somewhere, and look what happens if it goes to Outlook.) Well, that one incident means I will never touch f***ing Outlook ever ever again: if I can't trust it, it's no good to me.
Oh, and what do I use for a calendar? Nowadays I use one made of paper. I find it much more reliable, versatile, portable, and cost-effective than anything else I've tried.
"The program doesn't run on windows."
"You asked for a linux platform, it's running flawlessly on linux."
"TOLD YOU GUYS, IT'S JOHNS FAULT IT DOESN'T WORK!"
A university where the IT services dept is willing to support Linux? Boy, I wish I was working there.
Why all this lack of concern with survival of the race?
We shouldn't treat our planet irresponsibly - I agree we have moral obligations to our children - but... will you really be shedding tears if humanity comes to an end 100 years after your death? Because, er, you won't be there. Just in case there was any doubt about that. You see, that's not how it works. Perhaps you're thinking of some kind of "life after death", but it actually works the other way round.
I can already say that Open Office, for as nice as it is, cannot load MS Word files that have embedded jpeg images. Even the latest beta versions have this problem.
Actually, at work I generally find the issue to be that Microsoft Word cannot load Microsoft Word files that have embedded jpeg images.
The reason? Probably no one will ever know. I don't really care: the people who are sending me these files can worry about it.
Oh, wait - hang on! Maybe it's something to do with how people are saving Microsoft Word files with embedded jpeg images... hmm, now there's an idea.
Sue me for sharing th enote I take, too. Forking morons. Mini-cassette has been doing this for forking years.
At my university, for several years now students have had to sign a disclaimer form before being allowed to record lectures. This is precisely for IP reasons. And, mind you, this is not in the USA.
As for notes taken by students, they are clearly the IP of the student writing them. Lecture notes written by the lecturer, however, are the IP of either the lecturer or the university, depending on university regulations. At one university I was at previously, my department had a strict policy of lecturers not posting their notes on open-access websites, for that very reason.
They also claim to have Zizek and Baudrillard on their faculty. It does look to me like a highly-polished scam. But the bibliography seems accurate, anyway. (Still I should have checked my Googling more carefully...)
I think you underestimate the willingness of some intellectually bankrupt individuals in the humanities to put up with (a) any kind of relativism, no matter how nonsensical, and (b) any degree of obfuscation. And yes, there are highly-respected cultural theorists who would genuinely and seriously agree that "physical ``reality''... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct": try reading one of Judith Butler's books one day. (For fun, see if you manage to find more than two comprehensible sentences in the book!)
Try The Postmodernism Generator. I've showed its products to a couple of academic colleagues who genuinely could not see what was wrong with the text.
This certainly isn't universal, but it's enough for someone like Sokal to get a good joke out of it.
Sokal's hoax has not actually changed anything much: viewpoints like Homburg's (the gp post) are still the norm to which people doing cultural theory are supposed to adhere. And the best thing about it is that Homburg can claim to have been making a joke, or being serious, and that, too, is how cultural theorists are supposed to behave - everything is a joke, nothing is sincere. Holding intellectually bankrupt individuals up to ridicule actually changes nothing, because someone like Homburg can always come along and say "Aha! it's a joke, but actually it's also true." And there's nothing anyone can ever do to stop it.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, really? I'm guessing you're in the US? Sounds like an odd situation to be in. Where I am, in NZ, just about the only DVD players I see that aren't multi-region are the ones built into Apple or Dell computers. So, for example, if I were to move to the US (just supposing it were still possible to get a visa without bending over in all directions), would I not be allowed to bring my DVD player with me?
Ah well. In that case, go China-free-trade-agreement go!
I totally agree. I work with languages in multiple alphabets and a thing like this would be a wonderful tool. Have you ever tried to find a keyboard appropriately marked for polytonic Greek? Well, I'm pretty sure they don't exist ... anyway, I just drooled and drooled over the pictures. Think of scholars trying to type out cuneiform or Linear B, or pretty much any non-European language, and it's not hard to think of applications. I'd love for a keyboard like this to exist and be practical!
Ogg is better, and I'm a fan of it - my music library is almost all in Ogg format, and I'm very happy indeed with my 20 GB DAP that supports Ogg and has a 30+ hour battery life.
But Ogg will never catch on in a populist way. By the time it has a chance to catch on, increasing bandwidth will have made compression such a non-issue that everyone will be using lossless formats anyway, - something which Ogg most certainly is not.
Still, for those who are in the know, it is indeed the right tool for the time. Until broadband becomes the standard everywhere in the world, not just in North America, Europe, and East Asia, I agree Ogg is the best format for transmitting compressed audio. But its days are numbered ... I don't know how long we're going to continue to need lossy compression formats, but I shall treasure Ogg until that day and remember it fondly afterwards.
But mark my words, the real fight is going to be over which lossless compression is going to rule the world. Stop pushing Ogg; it's never going to be a winner. Start pushing OSS lossless formats so that WMA or Apple Lossless don't win the day.
According to the Dirac FAQ they can't do streaming yet, but they've already got better compression "performance" than Theora (not clear whether that means better compression speed or size).
According to the Dirac FAQ they're aiming to get it into beta by the end of 2005.
Because an understanding of the difference between 'present' and 'absent' is a much more fundamental idea than that of 'number'. Treating them as related concepts is a big step:
Can you? Go on, count to 5i.
Not precisely analogous, but here goes:
Best that government agencies should work on the principle of excluding people from the facilities and resources they offer. Not.
Yup. Even now, playing Dark Castle in colour just feels somehow wrong ...
To further clarify the above: there is not much of a magnetic north and south on Mars, as noted elsewhere in this discussion. Mars has been known to have a magnetic field since about 1997, but the planet's magnetisation is largely undifferentiated. Some regions, as also noted elsewhere in this discussion, do reach magnetic variation of up to 400 nT, which is not insignificant (see e.g. this article (pdf format)).
However, 'borealis' and 'australis' are not originally terms used in connection with magnetic fields, and Mars clearly does have poles in the sense that it rotates - which is why the GP post struck me as a very weird thing to say.
Yes, because (just to clarify the above statement) clearly there's no such thing as north and south on Mars.
I am a researcher in a humanities discipline and I find the Web of Science, Scopus, Citeseer, and eBizSearch to be completely useless to me.
Clearly if they're no use to me, these tools must be of no use whatsoever to anyone at all!
I should hope that, with a little thought, it's obvious to all here present that different tools suit different fields. In my field Google Scholar is of some use - perhaps not as useful as HighWire Press, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Google Print - but still of some use.
Damn that's a funny signature. First out-loud laugh I've had today. Sorry, I'm a language teacher. We're geeks too, just in a different way ...
This is especially important for using multimedia in the classroom. Scenario: you want to show a 2-minute clip from a movie to the class. How do you prepare this beforehand? If you're using VHS, dead easy. If you're using a DVD, f***ing difficult and takes several minutes of embarrassing yourself in front of the class, because on the school-supplied DVD player pressing the ff button just for an instant fast-forwards the movie by 3 minutes.
Naturally, my university has now removed all VHS players from lecture theatres. Thanks, guys. DVDs in the classroom are a sodding nightmare.
Yeah, yeah, I know it'd be easier to convert a segment from the DVD to wmv/mov format and play that instead ... but universities sometimes get a bit het up about activities which make use of illegal (DVD-decoding) technology like that.
Hm, perhaps what you actually meant to say is this:
I third that. My iAudio M3 makes me very happy. In addition to the features mentioned in the parent, the M3 has a 20 GB hard drive, a battery life of ca. 35 hours (according to the documentation, and that seems pretty much accurate so far), I like the way it looks more than any other DAP I've seen (including the iPod), and I like the separation of the HDD component and the control doohicky. It's all good.
I have taken Outlook with me on a plane crossing time-zones once. Just once. Never ever ever again; it caused me to miss the plane coming back. Was I idiotic? Perhaps yes - for trusting Outlook with my information. (Such is life with E-tickets: the information about the itinerary has to go somewhere, and look what happens if it goes to Outlook.) Well, that one incident means I will never touch f***ing Outlook ever ever again: if I can't trust it, it's no good to me.
Oh, and what do I use for a calendar? Nowadays I use one made of paper. I find it much more reliable, versatile, portable, and cost-effective than anything else I've tried.
You're nuts, stupid, dead, and other things! You complete $#€$!&!?! Your platform is dead! Etc, etc, etc.
(Just so you don't feel unfulfilled or anything.)
A university where the IT services dept is willing to support Linux? Boy, I wish I was working there.
We shouldn't treat our planet irresponsibly - I agree we have moral obligations to our children - but ... will you really be shedding tears if humanity comes to an end 100 years after your death? Because, er, you won't be there. Just in case there was any doubt about that. You see, that's not how it works. Perhaps you're thinking of some kind of "life after death", but it actually works the other way round.
What, you mean like Kryptos does?
Actually, at work I generally find the issue to be that Microsoft Word cannot load Microsoft Word files that have embedded jpeg images.
The reason? Probably no one will ever know. I don't really care: the people who are sending me these files can worry about it.
Oh, wait - hang on! Maybe it's something to do with how people are saving Microsoft Word files with embedded jpeg images ... hmm, now there's an idea.
At my university, for several years now students have had to sign a disclaimer form before being allowed to record lectures. This is precisely for IP reasons. And, mind you, this is not in the USA.
As for notes taken by students, they are clearly the IP of the student writing them. Lecture notes written by the lecturer, however, are the IP of either the lecturer or the university, depending on university regulations. At one university I was at previously, my department had a strict policy of lecturers not posting their notes on open-access websites, for that very reason.
They also claim to have Zizek and Baudrillard on their faculty. It does look to me like a highly-polished scam. But the bibliography seems accurate, anyway. (Still I should have checked my Googling more carefully ...)
I think you underestimate the willingness of some intellectually bankrupt individuals in the humanities to put up with (a) any kind of relativism, no matter how nonsensical, and (b) any degree of obfuscation. And yes, there are highly-respected cultural theorists who would genuinely and seriously agree that "physical ``reality'' ... is at bottom a social and linguistic construct": try reading one of Judith Butler's books one day. (For fun, see if you manage to find more than two comprehensible sentences in the book!)
Try The Postmodernism Generator. I've showed its products to a couple of academic colleagues who genuinely could not see what was wrong with the text.
This certainly isn't universal, but it's enough for someone like Sokal to get a good joke out of it.
Sokal's hoax has not actually changed anything much: viewpoints like Homburg's (the gp post) are still the norm to which people doing cultural theory are supposed to adhere. And the best thing about it is that Homburg can claim to have been making a joke, or being serious, and that, too, is how cultural theorists are supposed to behave - everything is a joke, nothing is sincere. Holding intellectually bankrupt individuals up to ridicule actually changes nothing, because someone like Homburg can always come along and say "Aha! it's a joke, but actually it's also true." And there's nothing anyone can ever do to stop it.
Nothing legal, anyway.