With modern production techniques, does it really matter? Virtually every song that comes out today is so highly engineered and compressed for that "wall of sound" that extra fidelity just doesn't seem to make a difference. I feel like an old man, but I actually miss some of the "old" AAD CDs that were taken simply from the old master tapes. I was never a big fan of vinyl, hating all the hisses and pops etc. that would eventually accumulate, so I appreciate a good CD.
Is there something I have missed from this new release? Will sound engineers be able to give us albums and songs without all the compression? Better said, will they want to?
Re:When I think about the internet in 1996
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 1
Since given to another VW Passat enthusiast... we spent hours answering emails, hanging out in #volkswagen and comparing the performance of this mod or that mod. Ugh, to think of the time wasted... if I had spent that time making an online dating site or something I'd be rich!
How stupid was it that I just tried this. It took me a second to realize what happened. Duh, click back on the web browser icon, log-in, and post here. I guess in the 1996 Internet that I knew, through Prodigy, we didn't have those conversations.
I still was ops on an IRC channel though... #volkswagen on Undernet... so I wasn't that much of an IRC newbie!
You are already getting a lot of responses of "never on mine". Well I agree, every kernel upgrade trashes my menu.lst also. And to avoid that if I answer "do a three way merge" to the Synaptic prompts there have been times when it still was screwed up.
However this may be because I have a custom menu.lst where I put Windows as the first boot option and Ubuntu (and backup kernels) as second, third etc. options.
I have a whole family on my mother's side, dating back several centuries, that have been masons in Scotland, Wales and eventually England. However I just cannot get past having to "state a belief in a supreme deity". No agnostics allowed, apparently. It's too bad since I am the first of the family not to become a mason.
If you think the 50's were any better, I suggest you watch any number of movies that quite accurately portray how it was. In The Heat Of The Night with Sidney Poitier is a good start. It hasn't been anything like the democratic & free paradise that people are whining about *ever*.
I think you might want to revisit your geography. New York has hundred of miles of Atlantic coastline. Of course, this is Long Island and it is unlikely that the rest of the state will wedge itself between New Jersey and Connecticut on its way out to sea, but don't forget about LI!
Leave Manhattan as Manhattan and instead focus your efforts on controlling waste and returning the Northeast to massive forests (for some reason Americans love to overlook the ridiculous logging that took place here while we bitch and moan about the rain forests).
As any pilot who has flown over the Northeast will tell you, the trees are doing amazingly well here. In fact, during the summer it can get increasingly difficult to find the ground over many suburban areas. Yes, this may not be the old growth forests that were here 200 years ago, but we have recovered remarkably well from the completely denuded landscape of the late 19th century.
In fact, this past fall I went on a walk through a very dense patch of woods. The tour guide told us that the whole town used to be completely open and that the trees there were less than 100 years old, since we no longer had to cut down all the trees to burn for heat.
Behind my house is a prime example of land that used to be actively cultivated. There is a tree there that would have been in the middle of a field, based on the rock walls - a smooth barked beech that has "1923 KH + LM" carved on it about 8 feet up. (I did my part and added our initials alongside lots of other ones from 1923 to 1945) It is about 60 feet tall. Reforestation is not the problem. Hell, with the real estate bubble burst we don't even have to worry about developers knocking down *all* the trees to make a new subdivision since they aren't doing that anymore anyway.
To a large degree, they already do. And therein lies the problem. With significantly reduced compensation & employment on Wall Street, their tax revenue is significantly lower. Factor in lower consumption and you have an even greater revenue shortfall.
Connecticut is facing a similar problem. Fairfield County is one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. And yet tax revenues are *way* down while unemployment is way up. What is the state doing to compensate? Talk of speed cameras... ugh!
I post this three hours after this story hit the front page of slashdot and there are 32 comments. I take this as indicative of the interest among Slashdot readers in this new technology. Contrast that to the interest, a few days ago, in the Kindle and you can draw your own conclusions. My own conclusion is that this will not fare well, at least in this demographic, and O'Reilly/ePub may want to consider some additional marketing/buzz generation schemes.
Then again, I think someone said that about the iPod years ago, so maybe this post will go down in the historical lore of Slashdot. In 2012: "You remember when the Bookwork was first announced and no one on Slashdot was interested!?!"
I read the article, and the guy uses right, like and whatever an awful lot. I realize it was supposed to read like a conversation, but it was awfully annoying.
It was also quite rambling. I would have loved more detail on the kinds of things he took apart as a kid, or some of the neat things he built with his 200 in 1 radio shack kit. These are the kinds of comments that inspire future hackers & product designers. But they spent very little time on what he had actually done.
All in all not a bad article, and certainly fodder for additional reading into this guy. I will say that the Chumby is getting some interest in my office. Folks have latched onto it in a "Web 2.0" kind of way, using it as an emblem of what the future of commerce, not just ecommerce, will be in the future.
What makes the vote of a resident of a smaller state more important that one of a populous state? I live in Connecticut about 5 minutes over the border from New York. What makes my vote any more or less important than my cousin 10 minutes away? Why should he get screwed simply because he lives in a populous state? (he gets screwed badly enough by high taxes and lack of representation in his state government)
I know there are both sides of the story, and have heard the old proverb about democracy being two wolves and a lamb deciding what to eat for dinner, but I still don't get what is wrong with one person one vote.
I think the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell explained how this happens well. He said there are three rules for this kind of spreading of fads... the law of the few, stickiness factor and the power of context.
I won't repeat it all, however it seems to me that the best memes have a few central people, with lots of friends, who spread it around. Malcolm spends a great deal of time giving examples of how fads and trends all start by getting to one of these well connected communicators. His first example is of Paul Revere.
Generally speaking you have more handling and fuel performance issues with having too *little* air in the tires. 27% of cars, according to the US DOT, have at least one underinflated tire.
So what's the problem? Well, as you say, you get a harsher ride from an overinflated tire, but you get far many more problems with underinflation, which is probably far more common. Some of those problems include poor braking, slow steering, poor handling/road grip, and worse fuel economy... worse than can be made up by funky new regenerative shocks.
I know lots of people made fun of Barack Obama during the Presidential campaign for his plea to check the tire pressures, but the reality is that drivers the world over could save millions of gallons of oil annually by simply keeping tires inflated properly. In cold climates this also means double checking the pressures when the outside temperature drops by 10 degrees.
One other thing to add would be shifting political priorities by the incumbent Senator. Joe Lieberman came really close to losing his Senate seat in Connecticut... and he rewarded the state and the majority party here by going on the stump for John McCain. I read a Quinnipiac opinion poll yesterday that shows Christopher Dodd, the Sr. Senator from CT, is in trouble with the electorate. The poll does not indicate whether people would prefer a republican in his place, or just a new democrat, but the public is ready for a change it seems. There has been no massive demographic shift - this state has always been somewhat left of center, largely due to Fairfield County philanthropists and the rest of the state having some very poor cities.
So not disagreeing with you about the likelihood of an incumbent Senator losing their seat, but there may be other reasons besides felonies and demographic shifts that drive change.
This whole eBook thing drives me nuts. I recently purchased a PDF "eBook" and the author explicitly states that the eBook is for a single user only, not to be printed, shared, stored on shared drives or otherwise distributed. I wrote to the author and received a nice reply, which was basically 'I make my living from these books and distribute them with this license to keep my revenue stream solid.' I wrote back that it seemed absurd that I could not, unlike a regular hard-copy book (that would, incidentally, likely be 30% cheaper), read the book and then when finished with it put it on my bookshelf to be shared with a co-worker in the future. I also wrote a nice note challenging his position, but did not resolve anything. I am not a pirate, so will live within the terms of his license but I will not encourage my co-workers to purchase another copy of the book - I will instead take the knowledge learned and paraphrase it for them.
Yep, I believe you can use OpenDNS servers by themselves without any account setup. However you can also set up an account with them to enable setting custom filtering among other things, and control over your proxy/privacy settings. So it is, indeed, on their website after you set up an account. They don't ask for much of anything to set up an account, so I have used a throwaway email address in the past... tho they do still have your IP if you are really worried.
By default, yes it does. Since your post is right on top at the moment, I'll post something I shared earlier: Here is OpenDNS response to the privacy concerns: http://www.opendns.com/support/article/244
You can easily turn off the proxy by changing your settings, under the Advanced section at the bottom.
For those that have OpenDNS running, you go to Settings, Advanced and then at the bottom there is the Network Shortcuts section. Uncheck the box "Enable OpenDNS Proxy".
I have the service and I am quite happy to trade a little privacy for the content filtering done by someone else, without requiring any software installs or any maintenance of IPTables or anything else on my part. It is passive safety, I know, but gives some peace of mind with a teenager who knows his way around computers. It blocks proxies too. If there is an alternative, I'd love to read about it.
50's and 60's? As 4th graders in 1977 we collected cans by the side of the road to be melted down from all over town. I even found a set of baskets to bolt onto my bike - we had a magnet and on one side we would put the old steel cans and on the other side we'd put the new aluminum cans. Inevitably there'd be more aluminium cans as the summer wore on and we'd be upset because steel cans were worth a whole lot more than aluminum ones back then. You could also sometimes tell just by looking at the pull tab - this was before the pop top - they had different shapes. I earned a ton of money picking up cans to supplement my paper route.
Kids these days have no idea - my kids want an allowance for emptying the friggin' dishwasher and walking the dog. Sheesh. I know as parents we don't make it easy for them, hell I was roaming a 10 mile radius of suburbia at that time, and I hardly ever lose sight of my kids today.
There are lots of engineers involved. My father ran a small medical startup some years ago and they made a very high tech (for the time) artificial ventilator that used rapid pulses of air rather than the typical high pressure slow pulses. They did lots of experiments on animals and had to jump through all kinds of hoops with the FDA just to be allowed to put the ventilator on a human subject. Essentially the only way, after the animal trials, to get the ventilator on a human patient was for the patient to be unresponsive to conventional treatment, at significant risk of death without intervention, and received signed autorization from the patient or guardian. (get those living wills drawn up and signed if you haven't already!)
It took years, huge personal and venture capital investment, and eventually the company was bought out and I think the techology disappeared or otherwise got incorporated into standard ventilators. I posted this to illustrate all the work that needs to go into a medical device before it is allowed to be tried on humans... and even then, promising, even successful technology does not always make it in the marketplace. Believe it or not, Doctors are some of the *worst* luddites around and it is incredibly difficult to get enough momentum for a new technology to take hold.
Market share may not be important to you, but to entrepreneurs considering making a new business, or to venture capitalists considering investment in an upcoming software business, it makes a huge difference. The stability, potential income and potential clients that are highlighted by "Linux increases market share!!!!!" articles are fuel to the fire of the open source software movement. This eventually trickles down to you because more developers are then working on improving lots of aspects of Linux (e.g. not just the GUI).
I think you misunderestimate the 'Merican people and their desire for retaliation, not healing, at a time of crisis. It didn't take long to go from shock on 9/11 to "who can we kill that did this?" Amid the cries of NYPD-this and NYFD-that there were lots of "bomb the muslim world".
Slashdot Mirror
With modern production techniques, does it really matter? Virtually every song that comes out today is so highly engineered and compressed for that "wall of sound" that extra fidelity just doesn't seem to make a difference. I feel like an old man, but I actually miss some of the "old" AAD CDs that were taken simply from the old master tapes. I was never a big fan of vinyl, hating all the hisses and pops etc. that would eventually accumulate, so I appreciate a good CD.
Is there something I have missed from this new release? Will sound engineers be able to give us albums and songs without all the compression? Better said, will they want to?
Meet my page on Geocities: http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/1108/
Since given to another VW Passat enthusiast... we spent hours answering emails, hanging out in #volkswagen and comparing the performance of this mod or that mod. Ugh, to think of the time wasted... if I had spent that time making an online dating site or something I'd be rich!
How stupid was it that I just tried this. It took me a second to realize what happened. Duh, click back on the web browser icon, log-in, and post here. I guess in the 1996 Internet that I knew, through Prodigy, we didn't have those conversations.
I still was ops on an IRC channel though... #volkswagen on Undernet... so I wasn't that much of an IRC newbie!
It wasn't just Europe either. I tried logging in at 5:45 a.m. Eastern Time and could not get a response.
You are already getting a lot of responses of "never on mine". Well I agree, every kernel upgrade trashes my menu.lst also. And to avoid that if I answer "do a three way merge" to the Synaptic prompts there have been times when it still was screwed up.
However this may be because I have a custom menu.lst where I put Windows as the first boot option and Ubuntu (and backup kernels) as second, third etc. options.
I have a whole family on my mother's side, dating back several centuries, that have been masons in Scotland, Wales and eventually England. However I just cannot get past having to "state a belief in a supreme deity". No agnostics allowed, apparently. It's too bad since I am the first of the family not to become a mason.
If you think the 50's were any better, I suggest you watch any number of movies that quite accurately portray how it was. In The Heat Of The Night with Sidney Poitier is a good start. It hasn't been anything like the democratic & free paradise that people are whining about *ever*.
I think you might want to revisit your geography. New York has hundred of miles of Atlantic coastline. Of course, this is Long Island and it is unlikely that the rest of the state will wedge itself between New Jersey and Connecticut on its way out to sea, but don't forget about LI!
As any pilot who has flown over the Northeast will tell you, the trees are doing amazingly well here. In fact, during the summer it can get increasingly difficult to find the ground over many suburban areas. Yes, this may not be the old growth forests that were here 200 years ago, but we have recovered remarkably well from the completely denuded landscape of the late 19th century.
In fact, this past fall I went on a walk through a very dense patch of woods. The tour guide told us that the whole town used to be completely open and that the trees there were less than 100 years old, since we no longer had to cut down all the trees to burn for heat.
Behind my house is a prime example of land that used to be actively cultivated. There is a tree there that would have been in the middle of a field, based on the rock walls - a smooth barked beech that has "1923 KH + LM" carved on it about 8 feet up. (I did my part and added our initials alongside lots of other ones from 1923 to 1945) It is about 60 feet tall. Reforestation is not the problem. Hell, with the real estate bubble burst we don't even have to worry about developers knocking down *all* the trees to make a new subdivision since they aren't doing that anymore anyway.
To a large degree, they already do. And therein lies the problem. With significantly reduced compensation & employment on Wall Street, their tax revenue is significantly lower. Factor in lower consumption and you have an even greater revenue shortfall.
Connecticut is facing a similar problem. Fairfield County is one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. And yet tax revenues are *way* down while unemployment is way up. What is the state doing to compensate? Talk of speed cameras... ugh!
I post this three hours after this story hit the front page of slashdot and there are 32 comments. I take this as indicative of the interest among Slashdot readers in this new technology. Contrast that to the interest, a few days ago, in the Kindle and you can draw your own conclusions. My own conclusion is that this will not fare well, at least in this demographic, and O'Reilly/ePub may want to consider some additional marketing/buzz generation schemes.
Then again, I think someone said that about the iPod years ago, so maybe this post will go down in the historical lore of Slashdot. In 2012: "You remember when the Bookwork was first announced and no one on Slashdot was interested!?!"
I read the article, and the guy uses right, like and whatever an awful lot. I realize it was supposed to read like a conversation, but it was awfully annoying.
It was also quite rambling. I would have loved more detail on the kinds of things he took apart as a kid, or some of the neat things he built with his 200 in 1 radio shack kit. These are the kinds of comments that inspire future hackers & product designers. But they spent very little time on what he had actually done.
All in all not a bad article, and certainly fodder for additional reading into this guy. I will say that the Chumby is getting some interest in my office. Folks have latched onto it in a "Web 2.0" kind of way, using it as an emblem of what the future of commerce, not just ecommerce, will be in the future.
What makes the vote of a resident of a smaller state more important that one of a populous state? I live in Connecticut about 5 minutes over the border from New York. What makes my vote any more or less important than my cousin 10 minutes away? Why should he get screwed simply because he lives in a populous state? (he gets screwed badly enough by high taxes and lack of representation in his state government)
I know there are both sides of the story, and have heard the old proverb about democracy being two wolves and a lamb deciding what to eat for dinner, but I still don't get what is wrong with one person one vote.
I think the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell explained how this happens well. He said there are three rules for this kind of spreading of fads... the law of the few, stickiness factor and the power of context.
I won't repeat it all, however it seems to me that the best memes have a few central people, with lots of friends, who spread it around. Malcolm spends a great deal of time giving examples of how fads and trends all start by getting to one of these well connected communicators. His first example is of Paul Revere.
Generally speaking you have more handling and fuel performance issues with having too *little* air in the tires. 27% of cars, according to the US DOT, have at least one underinflated tire.
http://www.dot.gov/affairs/nhtsa4601.htm
So what's the problem? Well, as you say, you get a harsher ride from an overinflated tire, but you get far many more problems with underinflation, which is probably far more common. Some of those problems include poor braking, slow steering, poor handling/road grip, and worse fuel economy... worse than can be made up by funky new regenerative shocks.
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/225/could-we-conserve-gasoline-by-putting-more-air-in-our-tires
I know lots of people made fun of Barack Obama during the Presidential campaign for his plea to check the tire pressures, but the reality is that drivers the world over could save millions of gallons of oil annually by simply keeping tires inflated properly. In cold climates this also means double checking the pressures when the outside temperature drops by 10 degrees.
Better to pump up the tires than not.
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=todd+knarr+farm+animals&aq=f
This has already shown up in Google. Furthermore, won't it blow our minds when it gets put into Wikipedia in a self-referencing entry?
Note: I do not personally believe that Todd Knarr has sex with farm animals, just in case Todd Knarr is reading this and thinking of suing.
One other thing to add would be shifting political priorities by the incumbent Senator. Joe Lieberman came really close to losing his Senate seat in Connecticut... and he rewarded the state and the majority party here by going on the stump for John McCain. I read a Quinnipiac opinion poll yesterday that shows Christopher Dodd, the Sr. Senator from CT, is in trouble with the electorate. The poll does not indicate whether people would prefer a republican in his place, or just a new democrat, but the public is ready for a change it seems. There has been no massive demographic shift - this state has always been somewhat left of center, largely due to Fairfield County philanthropists and the rest of the state having some very poor cities.
So not disagreeing with you about the likelihood of an incumbent Senator losing their seat, but there may be other reasons besides felonies and demographic shifts that drive change.
This whole eBook thing drives me nuts. I recently purchased a PDF "eBook" and the author explicitly states that the eBook is for a single user only, not to be printed, shared, stored on shared drives or otherwise distributed. I wrote to the author and received a nice reply, which was basically 'I make my living from these books and distribute them with this license to keep my revenue stream solid.' I wrote back that it seemed absurd that I could not, unlike a regular hard-copy book (that would, incidentally, likely be 30% cheaper), read the book and then when finished with it put it on my bookshelf to be shared with a co-worker in the future. I also wrote a nice note challenging his position, but did not resolve anything. I am not a pirate, so will live within the terms of his license but I will not encourage my co-workers to purchase another copy of the book - I will instead take the knowledge learned and paraphrase it for them.
Yep, I believe you can use OpenDNS servers by themselves without any account setup. However you can also set up an account with them to enable setting custom filtering among other things, and control over your proxy/privacy settings. So it is, indeed, on their website after you set up an account. They don't ask for much of anything to set up an account, so I have used a throwaway email address in the past... tho they do still have your IP if you are really worried.
By default, yes it does. Since your post is right on top at the moment, I'll post something I shared earlier: Here is OpenDNS response to the privacy concerns: http://www.opendns.com/support/article/244
You can easily turn off the proxy by changing your settings, under the Advanced section at the bottom.
You can turn this feature off. http://www.opendns.com/support/article/244 is their response to questions about privacy.
For those that have OpenDNS running, you go to Settings, Advanced and then at the bottom there is the Network Shortcuts section. Uncheck the box "Enable OpenDNS Proxy".
I have the service and I am quite happy to trade a little privacy for the content filtering done by someone else, without requiring any software installs or any maintenance of IPTables or anything else on my part. It is passive safety, I know, but gives some peace of mind with a teenager who knows his way around computers. It blocks proxies too. If there is an alternative, I'd love to read about it.
50's and 60's? As 4th graders in 1977 we collected cans by the side of the road to be melted down from all over town. I even found a set of baskets to bolt onto my bike - we had a magnet and on one side we would put the old steel cans and on the other side we'd put the new aluminum cans. Inevitably there'd be more aluminium cans as the summer wore on and we'd be upset because steel cans were worth a whole lot more than aluminum ones back then. You could also sometimes tell just by looking at the pull tab - this was before the pop top - they had different shapes. I earned a ton of money picking up cans to supplement my paper route.
Kids these days have no idea - my kids want an allowance for emptying the friggin' dishwasher and walking the dog. Sheesh. I know as parents we don't make it easy for them, hell I was roaming a 10 mile radius of suburbia at that time, and I hardly ever lose sight of my kids today.
Sorry. Can you please get off my lawn now?
There are lots of engineers involved. My father ran a small medical startup some years ago and they made a very high tech (for the time) artificial ventilator that used rapid pulses of air rather than the typical high pressure slow pulses. They did lots of experiments on animals and had to jump through all kinds of hoops with the FDA just to be allowed to put the ventilator on a human subject. Essentially the only way, after the animal trials, to get the ventilator on a human patient was for the patient to be unresponsive to conventional treatment, at significant risk of death without intervention, and received signed autorization from the patient or guardian. (get those living wills drawn up and signed if you haven't already!)
It took years, huge personal and venture capital investment, and eventually the company was bought out and I think the techology disappeared or otherwise got incorporated into standard ventilators. I posted this to illustrate all the work that needs to go into a medical device before it is allowed to be tried on humans... and even then, promising, even successful technology does not always make it in the marketplace. Believe it or not, Doctors are some of the *worst* luddites around and it is incredibly difficult to get enough momentum for a new technology to take hold.
Market share may not be important to you, but to entrepreneurs considering making a new business, or to venture capitalists considering investment in an upcoming software business, it makes a huge difference. The stability, potential income and potential clients that are highlighted by "Linux increases market share!!!!!" articles are fuel to the fire of the open source software movement. This eventually trickles down to you because more developers are then working on improving lots of aspects of Linux (e.g. not just the GUI).
I think you misunderestimate the 'Merican people and their desire for retaliation, not healing, at a time of crisis. It didn't take long to go from shock on 9/11 to "who can we kill that did this?" Amid the cries of NYPD-this and NYFD-that there were lots of "bomb the muslim world".