Now let's look at art. Music in particular.
It taught me discipline, motor coordination, time management, and finely tuned listening skills. Music develops connections in your brain that are useful for other things-- for example, musicians tend to make good programmers, since there's a lot of structural thinking on small and large scales in both disciplines. It also teaches communication, teamwork (gee THAT's never useful in the real world), and creative thinking.
I've always thought it to be a good thing to balance out one's disciplines, that's why I double-majored in physics and music. And if it weren't for the music programs in middle and high school, I would never have gotten that opportunity.
I've known too many engineers that really excel in just one thing. Why? People are capable of so much more than that!
In a nutshell, I just see Utilitarianism as being boring, but that's just me. I know many great minds who aren't engineers at all. However, they aren't as naive to think that great minds only work in their particular field.
I think Steve Jobs made an analogy between computers and bicycles.
A bicycle allows a human being (normally a rather slow mammal) to travel very fast while expending a smaller amount of energy, compared to running. He said a computer was a bicycle for the mind. So a computer is a tool in the purest sense.
However, if things get too automated and user-friendly, the computer will become the lazy man's SUV for the mind, and who wants that?
I have the Klipsch as well-- and my audio source is probably better than the THX-certified one in the Dell system (Santa Cruz).
I actually have two soundcards, an SB Live! for gaming and some MIDI work, going into a Mackie mixer. For MP3's and digital audio work I have an old Turtle Beach Pinnacle soundcard with s/pdif going into a Tascam DAT which can function as an external DAC, then into the mixer and the speakers. The Pinnacle is a few years old, and it's ISA, but it has better analog and digital IO than any mainstream consumer soundcard today. That is some killer sound quality, though only the Live uses all 4 speakers.
THX is a certification standard, not a technology.
THX certification requires all the audio components in your system to meet strict, specific requirements for quality. Also, the PC certification is different from the home audio certification last time I checked (the link is slashdotted right now so I don't know if it's been updated).
You're probably thinking of DTS or Dolby Digital, which are digital formats that you can use on a capable audio system, including THX-certified ones.
With ham radio, the antenna is not right next to your head. In fact if it's a high power rig, chances are it's strung up in a tree outside your house. Also, cell phones haven't supplanted ham radios, since 98.44% of the people using cell phones now never used a ham radio in the first place. Hams are used for a completely different purpose. It's the free and easy way to talk to somebody in, say, Nepal. Or those stupid Survivor people down in the Outback. Or the Space Shuttle.
Also, there wouldn't be a point in showing that there's a correlation between ham radio and tumors, because... there's nobody to sue! So why even study that? Sad but true.
And lastly, you don't need Morse Code to get a license these days. You still have to know the theory, which is good. Actually there are now 3 classes of licenses (as of 4/15/2000), code is optional for the "technician" class. The general and extra classes require code but it's only 5 words a minute. Anybody can learn that in a day, and those licenses have greater privileges.
Re:My guess: dynamically balanced unicycle
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
That's IT!!
It's the UniBot-5000 electric gyro-stabilized unicycle, which may include the optional AutoJuggler attachment.
Re:This is IT: INDEPENDENCE� 3000 IBOT� Transporte
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
Could use the same technology (gyro stabilized), but keep in mind the IBOT will be over $20,000, whereas one version of IT is supposed to be under $2000. It's also going to be "mass-marketed" which generally doesn't happen for devices designed to assist the disabled, like the IBOT.
However, the clues point to IT being a personal transport device of some sort.
OK, say you're going to process a stereo track you've got recorded on your PC. Maybe you want to do some sort of chorus feeding into a reverb and then compress/limit the whole thing, a pretty simple process.
Now, with all the external cheap boxes, you can do this by patching everything together, aux sends/returns, etc, making sure all the input levels are set correctly (may need adjusting for each track you do). You'd have to play the track on the PC, convert it to analog, send it through all the boxes (each adding to the noise floor) and then convert back to digital, recording on an additional track. Might sound OK but there would definitely be HISSSSS and it wouldn't be professional quality, that's for certain.
Or... use PC software to do it all, keeping it purely in the digital domain, with a much cleaner result. Keep in mind he's probably working with 24-bit, 96kHz audio, which has a MUCH higher S/N ratio than any analog gear you can pick up at the local music store. It also requires a helluva lotta power to process.
The only time I can see using the dedicated reverbs is when you want to record a wet sound in the first place, and you happen to like the color that a particular box adds (which does happen often)... as opposed to recording the dry sound and then processing via software later.
Another thing the CPU-based DSP is used for is mixing down. You finally get all the tracks sounding good, now you have to get 8 or whatever tracks of 96/24 audio mixed down into 2 tracks of 44.1kHz 16-bit that can be burned to CD audio.
I'm just barely scratching the surface here, but now you can see the limited (but still useful) function of the external DSP boxes.
The article never said they're dead, just niche.
Also this Seiko watch is a bit different in that it's battery powered, but movement charges the battery, as opposed to being purely mechanical.
It does look very, very cool though, I'm looking at the PDF file now. I want one too!
Anybody can read by a blacklight, at least on most paper. Chances are the paper will flouresce slightly, basically turning invisible UV into visible light. Some paper will flouresce more than others-- depends on how it was made, depending on the brand, etc.
What you see coming from a blacklight (violet) is only a fraction of what's actually there because it's mostly in the invisible part of the spectrum.
Now maybe our corneas also filter out some violet light that we would otherwise be able to see, but I don't know anything about that.
Incidentally, in a dark room with a blacklight on, you can see every single spot on the carpet where your cat has ever barfed, pissed, crapped or where somebody spilled something-- no matter how clean the carpet looks in normal light!
It's quite a hideous sight, although pretty useful for determining where you're supposed to pour the cleaning fluid.
Gore has a right to ask for manual recounts under Florda law
Yes, and the law says ALL the votes in a county must be hand-counted, not just a portion (or "contested ballots") to be valid. That's why 2 counties couldn't make the deadline. The law also doesn't specify any standards for counting, thus we had democrats changing the standards several times during the counting process.
Gore offered recounts in all counties
Gore doesn't have the authority to "offer" anything of the sort.
Of the recounts he wanted the only one was finished, two more where cut short due to time constraints (Yeah, we like democracy, but we really need to hurry to get Bush in office in January now).
And of course, you're conveniently forgetting who set the deadline of Sunday at 5pm.
The Democratic counties use older, more faulty machinery
I should add that I really, really, really wished that somebody would have taken over the Flight: Combat project when LGT folded. That looked incredibly cool, and it was very close to being finished.
Somebody may pick it up down the road, I haven't been keeping up with the rumors on that though.
I've done some combat sims (Falcon 3/4, EF2000), but it seems like I'm more interested in just flying the plane than worrying about tactical air combat. Seems like you gotta learn all the systems of a real jet before you can even stay alive in simulated combat!
So now I mainly like to terrorize downtown Seattle and outlying suburbs in Flight Unlimited 3... May Looking Glass Technology rest in peace.
:-(
I've always had a fascination with GA sims anyway, I should probably take up flying as a real hobby. I've had every version of Flight Simulator since even before it was assimilated by Microsoft (FS 2.0 on the Apple IIc, baby!)
There's some satisfaction in kamikaze-bombing Bill Gates' house right on the lakeshore in the P51. Both his house and the aircraft are rendered quite nicely in Flight Unlimited III.
Well, how would zero-g affect the hardware in a computer? I'm sure it'd have at least some effect on drive spin times.
None whatsoever. Spin times only have to do with rotational inertial (moment of inertia) and the torque of the motor. Air drag plays a tiny part too-- but not gravity, unless the bearings are so bad that turning the drive on its side (in gravity) causes extra drag due to the sideways loading.
It would primarily affect the cooling of the hardware-- in a computer case, you couldn't rely on convection in zero-G, so you gotta make sure that all your fans are blowing in the right places.
I will be a very happy man the day that I have to worry about how to cool my case in microgravity...
Since hard drives today are designed to perform identically in any physical orientation with respect to gravity (ie sideways, upside down) then it seems it would perform the same if there wasn't any gravity at all.
When I was but a wee li'l chillun, my parents bought an Atari 400. Used, but in the original box and everything!
The games.... who can forget those. We had a few cartridges (defender, pac-man) which were FAR superior to the 2600. But the best games were loaded off of cassette tapes (5 or 10 minutes to load a game!)
My favorite was Dog Daze, which was a 2-player game where you had to control your little dog and either pee on a blue fire hydrant, or throw your bone at it to turn it your color.
A couple years later, that gave way to a shiny new Apple//c. That really was a fine machine.
I still have all the old Apple Basic programs I wrote (and some games including the original Wolfenstein) running on my apple2 emulator. Good things never die.
NEW YORK-- Intel Stock (INTC) tumbled a quarter of a point when the corporation released news that it was recalling ALL of its new 1.13GHz CPU's today.
The 1.13GHz CPU, or Central Processing Unit, is the chipmaker's fastest consumer product to date. It is unclear as to how many of the units have shipped over the past few weeks, but based on the company's current yields, industry experts predict it may be as many as a dozen.
No need to keep apologizing, you're already supporting my analogy. The recent tests we did were actually with bacteria, which showed that the cells can indeed survive with the temperatures and radiation associated with space, for short periods at least.
But like I said in my last post, that's another story and was beside the point I was making anyway (raw materials).
Ever heard of an analogy?
It's only flawed if you take it too literally. Well there is the fact that we've learned that spores actually can survive in space, but that's another story...
Anyhoo, the raw ingredients required to make life can travel in from comets, etc. This just means you don't have to have a planet which inherently contains all the necessary ingredients, which would be very rare.
But, if a planet can hold liquid water, the chances may be pretty good that it'll get the "nourishment" it needs to spawn life from somewhere else.
Based on what's floating around out there, I'd say the probability is pretty high. Complex carbon compounds and even sugars have been detected in space.
I think it's just a matter of having the right conditions. Leave a wet piece of bread out and it's gonna get moldy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes engineering's worth is self-evident.
Now let's look at art. Music in particular.
It taught me discipline, motor coordination, time management, and finely tuned listening skills. Music develops connections in your brain that are useful for other things-- for example, musicians tend to make good programmers, since there's a lot of structural thinking on small and large scales in both disciplines. It also teaches communication, teamwork (gee THAT's never useful in the real world), and creative thinking.
I've always thought it to be a good thing to balance out one's disciplines, that's why I double-majored in physics and music. And if it weren't for the music programs in middle and high school, I would never have gotten that opportunity.
I've known too many engineers that really excel in just one thing. Why? People are capable of so much more than that!
In a nutshell, I just see Utilitarianism as being boring, but that's just me. I know many great minds who aren't engineers at all. However, they aren't as naive to think that great minds only work in their particular field.
I think Steve Jobs made an analogy between computers and bicycles.
A bicycle allows a human being (normally a rather slow mammal) to travel very fast while expending a smaller amount of energy, compared to running. He said a computer was a bicycle for the mind. So a computer is a tool in the purest sense.
However, if things get too automated and user-friendly, the computer will become the lazy man's SUV for the mind, and who wants that?
Volcanos do dump tons of nasty stuff into the air, having adverse consequences on the environtment worldwide.
Volcanos have been erupting on Earth for over 4 billion years. Long term, there would only be an adverse effect if they stopped erupting.
I have the Klipsch as well-- and my audio source is probably better than the THX-certified one in the Dell system (Santa Cruz).
I actually have two soundcards, an SB Live! for gaming and some MIDI work, going into a Mackie mixer. For MP3's and digital audio work I have an old Turtle Beach Pinnacle soundcard with s/pdif going into a Tascam DAT which can function as an external DAC, then into the mixer and the speakers. The Pinnacle is a few years old, and it's ISA, but it has better analog and digital IO than any mainstream consumer soundcard today. That is some killer sound quality, though only the Live uses all 4 speakers.
THX is a certification standard, not a technology.
THX certification requires all the audio components in your system to meet strict, specific requirements for quality. Also, the PC certification is different from the home audio certification last time I checked (the link is slashdotted right now so I don't know if it's been updated).
You're probably thinking of DTS or Dolby Digital, which are digital formats that you can use on a capable audio system, including THX-certified ones.
With ham radio, the antenna is not right next to your head. In fact if it's a high power rig, chances are it's strung up in a tree outside your house. Also, cell phones haven't supplanted ham radios, since 98.44% of the people using cell phones now never used a ham radio in the first place. Hams are used for a completely different purpose. It's the free and easy way to talk to somebody in, say, Nepal. Or those stupid Survivor people down in the Outback. Or the Space Shuttle.
Also, there wouldn't be a point in showing that there's a correlation between ham radio and tumors, because... there's nobody to sue! So why even study that? Sad but true.
And lastly, you don't need Morse Code to get a license these days. You still have to know the theory, which is good. Actually there are now 3 classes of licenses (as of 4/15/2000), code is optional for the "technician" class. The general and extra classes require code but it's only 5 words a minute. Anybody can learn that in a day, and those licenses have greater privileges.
That's IT!!
It's the UniBot-5000 electric gyro-stabilized unicycle, which may include the optional AutoJuggler attachment.
Could use the same technology (gyro stabilized), but keep in mind the IBOT will be over $20,000, whereas one version of IT is supposed to be under $2000. It's also going to be "mass-marketed" which generally doesn't happen for devices designed to assist the disabled, like the IBOT.
However, the clues point to IT being a personal transport device of some sort.
OK, say you're going to process a stereo track you've got recorded on your PC. Maybe you want to do some sort of chorus feeding into a reverb and then compress/limit the whole thing, a pretty simple process.
Now, with all the external cheap boxes, you can do this by patching everything together, aux sends/returns, etc, making sure all the input levels are set correctly (may need adjusting for each track you do). You'd have to play the track on the PC, convert it to analog, send it through all the boxes (each adding to the noise floor) and then convert back to digital, recording on an additional track. Might sound OK but there would definitely be HISSSSS and it wouldn't be professional quality, that's for certain.
Or... use PC software to do it all, keeping it purely in the digital domain, with a much cleaner result. Keep in mind he's probably working with 24-bit, 96kHz audio, which has a MUCH higher S/N ratio than any analog gear you can pick up at the local music store. It also requires a helluva lotta power to process.
The only time I can see using the dedicated reverbs is when you want to record a wet sound in the first place, and you happen to like the color that a particular box adds (which does happen often)... as opposed to recording the dry sound and then processing via software later.
Another thing the CPU-based DSP is used for is mixing down. You finally get all the tracks sounding good, now you have to get 8 or whatever tracks of 96/24 audio mixed down into 2 tracks of 44.1kHz 16-bit that can be burned to CD audio.
I'm just barely scratching the surface here, but now you can see the limited (but still useful) function of the external DSP boxes.
The article never said they're dead, just niche.
Also this Seiko watch is a bit different in that it's battery powered, but movement charges the battery, as opposed to being purely mechanical.
It does look very, very cool though, I'm looking at the PDF file now. I want one too!
And all too often, a patch is released later to add functionality that was promised on the outside of the box!
Anybody can read by a blacklight, at least on most paper. Chances are the paper will flouresce slightly, basically turning invisible UV into visible light. Some paper will flouresce more than others-- depends on how it was made, depending on the brand, etc.
What you see coming from a blacklight (violet) is only a fraction of what's actually there because it's mostly in the invisible part of the spectrum.
Now maybe our corneas also filter out some violet light that we would otherwise be able to see, but I don't know anything about that.
Incidentally, in a dark room with a blacklight on, you can see every single spot on the carpet where your cat has ever barfed, pissed, crapped or where somebody spilled something-- no matter how clean the carpet looks in normal light!
It's quite a hideous sight, although pretty useful for determining where you're supposed to pour the cleaning fluid.
Gore has a right to ask for manual recounts under Florda law
... and ... and
Yes, and the law says ALL the votes in a county must be hand-counted, not just a portion (or "contested ballots") to be valid. That's why 2 counties couldn't make the deadline. The law also doesn't specify any standards for counting, thus we had democrats changing the standards several times during the counting process.
Gore offered recounts in all counties
Gore doesn't have the authority to "offer" anything of the sort.
Of the recounts he wanted the only one was finished, two more where cut short due to time constraints (Yeah, we like democracy, but we really need to hurry to get Bush in office in January now).
And of course, you're conveniently forgetting who set the deadline of Sunday at 5pm.
The Democratic counties use older, more faulty machinery
Ummmmm, huh?
and
and?
I should add that I really, really, really wished that somebody would have taken over the Flight: Combat project when LGT folded. That looked incredibly cool, and it was very close to being finished.
Somebody may pick it up down the road, I haven't been keeping up with the rumors on that though.
I've done some combat sims (Falcon 3/4, EF2000), but it seems like I'm more interested in just flying the plane than worrying about tactical air combat. Seems like you gotta learn all the systems of a real jet before you can even stay alive in simulated combat!
So now I mainly like to terrorize downtown Seattle and outlying suburbs in Flight Unlimited 3... May Looking Glass Technology rest in peace.
:-(
I've always had a fascination with GA sims anyway, I should probably take up flying as a real hobby. I've had every version of Flight Simulator since even before it was assimilated by Microsoft (FS 2.0 on the Apple IIc, baby!)
There's some satisfaction in kamikaze-bombing Bill Gates' house right on the lakeshore in the P51. Both his house and the aircraft are rendered quite nicely in Flight Unlimited III.
Er... Naturally, I meant moment of inertia of the platters, and the motor's torque.
Well, how would zero-g affect the hardware in a computer? I'm sure it'd have at least some effect on drive spin times.
None whatsoever. Spin times only have to do with rotational inertial (moment of inertia) and the torque of the motor. Air drag plays a tiny part too-- but not gravity, unless the bearings are so bad that turning the drive on its side (in gravity) causes extra drag due to the sideways loading.
It would primarily affect the cooling of the hardware-- in a computer case, you couldn't rely on convection in zero-G, so you gotta make sure that all your fans are blowing in the right places.
I will be a very happy man the day that I have to worry about how to cool my case in microgravity...
Since hard drives today are designed to perform identically in any physical orientation with respect to gravity (ie sideways, upside down) then it seems it would perform the same if there wasn't any gravity at all.
When I was but a wee li'l chillun, my parents bought an Atari 400. Used, but in the original box and everything!
//c. That really was a fine machine.
The games.... who can forget those. We had a few cartridges (defender, pac-man) which were FAR superior to the 2600. But the best games were loaded off of cassette tapes (5 or 10 minutes to load a game!)
My favorite was Dog Daze, which was a 2-player game where you had to control your little dog and either pee on a blue fire hydrant, or throw your bone at it to turn it your color.
A couple years later, that gave way to a shiny new Apple
I still have all the old Apple Basic programs I wrote (and some games including the original Wolfenstein) running on my apple2 emulator. Good things never die.
NEW YORK-- Intel Stock (INTC) tumbled a quarter of a point when the corporation released news that it was recalling ALL of its new 1.13GHz CPU's today.
The 1.13GHz CPU, or Central Processing Unit, is the chipmaker's fastest consumer product to date. It is unclear as to how many of the units have shipped over the past few weeks, but based on the company's current yields, industry experts predict it may be as many as a dozen.
No need to keep apologizing, you're already supporting my analogy. The recent tests we did were actually with bacteria, which showed that the cells can indeed survive with the temperatures and radiation associated with space, for short periods at least.
But like I said in my last post, that's another story and was beside the point I was making anyway (raw materials).
Ever heard of an analogy?
It's only flawed if you take it too literally. Well there is the fact that we've learned that spores actually can survive in space, but that's another story...
Anyhoo, the raw ingredients required to make life can travel in from comets, etc. This just means you don't have to have a planet which inherently contains all the necessary ingredients, which would be very rare.
But, if a planet can hold liquid water, the chances may be pretty good that it'll get the "nourishment" it needs to spawn life from somewhere else.
Based on what's floating around out there, I'd say the probability is pretty high. Complex carbon compounds and even sugars have been detected in space.
I think it's just a matter of having the right conditions. Leave a wet piece of bread out and it's gonna get moldy.
Only Earth is the bread, and we're the mold!
Yeah we have something along those lines in the South called the Skeeter Hop.
Upon reading further down, I see that it's actually Italian in origin, not Spanish or Mexican like I said...