Don't look at it!!! It's just a cheap trick to make you watch the clip!!!
Everyone who watches it dies within seven days.
Or becomes a totally retarded Mac zealot who loses all grip on reality, spends 23 of 24 hours each day furiously masturbating over rumours that other zealots have invented about which product line Apple is going to point-upgrade for a $300 fee next, and dreams of being reincarnated as a hamster and living inside Steve Job's underwear draw. Personally I think I'd go for the dying after a week thing.
I keep my data on a proprietary system of my own devising - the gibbon/pigeonhole arrangement:
Deep inside my personal mountain lair is my own manually operated paperbased datacentre housing a colony of approximately 6,000 intricately trained gibbons who perform the day to day roles of system administration and data archiving.
When I access my partitions from windows in the comfort of my home, I'm not browsing local hard drives, oh no. I have had one of my gibbons integrate his brain into the windows kernel so that he is at one with my filesystems. I call him Ook. When I read/write to the partitions, Ook interprets the commands and passes them on to a waiting messenger gibbon, using a custom developed encrypted adaptation of the gibbon language, unintelligible to other gibbons in case big brother trains some gibbons of his own and infiltrates my workforce.
Anyway, the messenger gibbons (who are hand picked in a rigorous training scheme for their incredible memories) scamper off to my mountain datacentre, passing through retinal, palm, and voice identification scans, before entering a 128bit hexadecimal password (case sensitive) into a keyboard that is not QWERTY in format, but is made up of blocks in the ground which must be jumped on to enter each character. The blocks aren't labelled as such, but are cryptically imprinted with pictorial representations of the alphanumeric characters they represent (eg: picture of toast, rhymes with ghost, ghosts are scary, scary rhymes with hairy, hairy has five letres, thereforce that block represents the number 5, see?).
So anyhow, once the messenger gibbon enters the secure area of my datacentre, he passes the message on to one of the worker gibbons, light in build and superb gymnasts, who moves to the appropriate pigeon hole in a 2D array laid out on a rock wall measuring more or less 1km square in surface area. Each 5cm^2 pigeon hole houses a piece of paper, on which is written a 32bit binary word. The worker gibbons are trained to encrypt and decrypt the binary strings, as the binary is not regular binary, but is instead shuffled according to a complex mathematical hashing algorithm. Once the gibbon has decrypted and either memorised or modified and re-encrypted the binary, he scampers back to the messenger gibbon and using a proprietary gibbon dance, reports either a fail or a sucess in the operation, along with any data requested for a read operation.
This all comes back up the chain to Ook, who has windows tell me that everything is fine.
I'm sure you can't deny that it's as secure as all get out, and it's pretty much transparent apart from the half hour access times, which makes playing counter strike quite the bitch, but for your everyday Word and Email, it's perfect.
I do not buy that missing out on low and high end thing either
Look at the chart, it's all there - that's how our ears work. We aren't good at hearing lo and hi frequencies, so if we listen to material with a flat response, we perceive the 1kHz-4kHz range as being "louder".
because then we should be going to live performances with EQ-adjustable ears, which we don't.
At live performances, we have engineers whose job it is to equalise the performance material both according to the properties of the venue, and the frequency range of the music itself. Live sound is a very different case to portable audio and the two aren't really comparable.
Besides, most music does happen within that 1kHz-4kHz range
I'm sorry, but that's completely wrong. Vocals fall into that range, as do the fundamentals and initial harmonics of a few instruments, but since that range is relatively small (the best of us can hear everything between 20Hz and 22kHz, as well as the fact that frequencies outside our audible range can combine with those that are within range and have a very audible effect), there is more than enough material falling outside that range for us to palm it off as "accompaniment". Think about your average band setup - vocals, guitar, bass guitar, drums. The guitar will spend some time in the lo freq ranges, the bass will be there 100% of the time, and the kick drum likewise. Above 4kHz we've got the rest of the guitar work, and most of the drum kit. Try setting up a graphic EQ in the music player of your choice, attenuate everything outside 1k-4k and see how it sounds. Now come back and tell me that most music "happens within that range" it's simply not true.
Music does sounds livelier and closer to the source without EQ
A very broad and naiive statement, and again one that is completely untrue. Do you think when you listen to your favourite album that no EQ has gone into the production of it all? By the time sounds hit the recording medium, they'll have gone through at least two EQ processors, and that's before mastering. At the user end, true, most people see a GEQ and twiggle around with the sliders and then realise "Hey, I've cocked it all up", but if you use it properly and actively pick out frequency ranges in the material you're listening to and adjust accordingly (minor adjustments, nothing ridiculous), you can very effectively tune your setup to your own personal tastes, making tracks sound a lot livelier.
A flat response curve is highly desirable for a production or recording studio, because it lets you hear all the problems in the levels of various frequency ranges of the program material, and being in the studio, it's your job to fix those.
In a consumer portable MP3 player, and for most consumer grade audio playback, a flat frequency response is not such a good thing. Music will sound "flat" and dull, which is why pretty much all hi-fi systems have a built in EQ curve to add some depth to the mix, in addition to whatever other EQ options are provided.
Furthermore, the human ear doesn't perceive all frequencies equally loudly, as illustrated by the lines on an Equal Loudness Contour chart. If that ipod really does produce a near-flat response, users will be missing out on lo and hi frequency ranges, as we are much better at hearing frequencies in the 1kHz-4kHz range.
I know we're referring to the shuttle here, which is a budget player, but most current gen mp3 players provide user adjustable graphic EQ (not sure if big ipods do or not), enabling you to get around this whole issue in the first place.
Follow me, Jeff Tweiten, as I wait in line for 5 months in front of the Seattle Cinerama theatre for the opening of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
Thanks Jeff, that's a really kind offer and all, but I'll just stay here, indoors with central heating, away from the snow. And you.
It'd be just like late night UK Sky babecast stuff, only without boobs and jiggling. In that sense I suppose SimsTV has less to offer me.
Having said that, it'd be more likely that Sims on SimsTV would do what you tell them. No matter how many times I text in, the girls on babewatch never cover each other with peach yoghurt and enact my script for lesbo-yoghurt-monsters.
Regardless of any of this, I agree with the parent post that HDTV and Plasma hardly represent the 18th and 19th most important innovations of the last 25 years. Crystal based display panels maybe, but Plasma, and definitely HDTV are undeserving of their inclusion in the top 25.
I'm almost certain that that figure is too low. When new employees are set up at Sun, or new desktops are requested, services come and give you a SPARC box running Solaris (at least that's how it worked a year ago when I was there).
I'm sure that less than 61% of users are driven to switching OS. Most of the engineering people had laptops running Windows (which has to be "neutered" by a small application that locks down open ports before it's allowed anywhere near the corporate LAN) or OSX. They still used Solaris with various shells on top as their development environment, which still includes a lot of web use.
People outside eng and general management - I can't really see them having a real need to use any other OS other than for personal preference.
Re:What exactly is knighthood?
on
Sir Peter Molyneux?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Yes - they become Dames, but I'm pretty sure they are not included in the official decoration ceremony with the sword et al.
It's primarily a recognition of achievement or service to or in the name of the country.
Anyone can write to the PM (via his office) and recommend a citizen of Britain for an honour, and he then presents candidates to the Queen, who selects the recipients. I'm not sure how much involvement she has, my guess is that the list is already well narrowed down and her role is more one of officiation in the same way that the parliament is "hers".
Modern day knighthoods (or Bachelor Knighthoods in full) don't carry the same chivalrous connotations that a knighthood of olde bore, but you still get to call yourself a Sir or Dame. In addition to knighthoods there are a whole bunch of other honours, peerages, and orders such as the OBE discussed here.
Regarding quantities, the amount of knighthoods conveyed per year varies (21 this year), but there are limitations in place on the total number of knighthoods that can be in place at once (~100 iirc).
Knighthoods also are only applicable to civilians - the military have their own accolades.
Re:"do no evil" vs "nonprofit"?
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 1
I remember Hotmail tried offering a POP service of sorts, although it was more like IMAP in that it had to sync folders, and took about as long to do so as it would to use normal web Hotmail.
They stopped providing that after a few months though. Anyone else remember more about it?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't look at it!!! It's just a cheap trick to make you watch the clip!!!
Everyone who watches it dies within seven days.
Or becomes a totally retarded Mac zealot who loses all grip on reality, spends 23 of 24 hours each day furiously masturbating over rumours that other zealots have invented about which product line Apple is going to point-upgrade for a $300 fee next, and dreams of being reincarnated as a hamster and living inside Steve Job's underwear draw. Personally I think I'd go for the dying after a week thing.
Or, you could skip all that bollocks and notice that toast, ghost, scary, and hairy all are spelled with five letters...
Not nearly cryptic enough. Any potential wrongdoer would gain valuable seconds while hacking if this shortcut were adopted.
that dude at 67.13X.XXX.XX in Vancouver Washington
There's a Vancouver in Washington as well?
Or is that hacker in a parallel dimension where the founders of Vancouver, British Columbia got a bit lost somewhere around the Rockies?
I keep my data on a proprietary system of my own devising - the gibbon/pigeonhole arrangement:
Deep inside my personal mountain lair is my own manually operated paperbased datacentre housing a colony of approximately 6,000 intricately trained gibbons who perform the day to day roles of system administration and data archiving.
When I access my partitions from windows in the comfort of my home, I'm not browsing local hard drives, oh no. I have had one of my gibbons integrate his brain into the windows kernel so that he is at one with my filesystems. I call him Ook. When I read/write to the partitions, Ook interprets the commands and passes them on to a waiting messenger gibbon, using a custom developed encrypted adaptation of the gibbon language, unintelligible to other gibbons in case big brother trains some gibbons of his own and infiltrates my workforce.
Anyway, the messenger gibbons (who are hand picked in a rigorous training scheme for their incredible memories) scamper off to my mountain datacentre, passing through retinal, palm, and voice identification scans, before entering a 128bit hexadecimal password (case sensitive) into a keyboard that is not QWERTY in format, but is made up of blocks in the ground which must be jumped on to enter each character. The blocks aren't labelled as such, but are cryptically imprinted with pictorial representations of the alphanumeric characters they represent (eg: picture of toast, rhymes with ghost, ghosts are scary, scary rhymes with hairy, hairy has five letres, thereforce that block represents the number 5, see?).
So anyhow, once the messenger gibbon enters the secure area of my datacentre, he passes the message on to one of the worker gibbons, light in build and superb gymnasts, who moves to the appropriate pigeon hole in a 2D array laid out on a rock wall measuring more or less 1km square in surface area. Each 5cm^2 pigeon hole houses a piece of paper, on which is written a 32bit binary word. The worker gibbons are trained to encrypt and decrypt the binary strings, as the binary is not regular binary, but is instead shuffled according to a complex mathematical hashing algorithm. Once the gibbon has decrypted and either memorised or modified and re-encrypted the binary, he scampers back to the messenger gibbon and using a proprietary gibbon dance, reports either a fail or a sucess in the operation, along with any data requested for a read operation.
This all comes back up the chain to Ook, who has windows tell me that everything is fine.
I'm sure you can't deny that it's as secure as all get out, and it's pretty much transparent apart from the half hour access times, which makes playing counter strike quite the bitch, but for your everyday Word and Email, it's perfect.
I do not buy that missing out on low and high end thing either
Look at the chart, it's all there - that's how our ears work. We aren't good at hearing lo and hi frequencies, so if we listen to material with a flat response, we perceive the 1kHz-4kHz range as being "louder".
because then we should be going to live performances with EQ-adjustable ears, which we don't.
At live performances, we have engineers whose job it is to equalise the performance material both according to the properties of the venue, and the frequency range of the music itself. Live sound is a very different case to portable audio and the two aren't really comparable.
Besides, most music does happen within that 1kHz-4kHz range
I'm sorry, but that's completely wrong. Vocals fall into that range, as do the fundamentals and initial harmonics of a few instruments, but since that range is relatively small (the best of us can hear everything between 20Hz and 22kHz, as well as the fact that frequencies outside our audible range can combine with those that are within range and have a very audible effect), there is more than enough material falling outside that range for us to palm it off as "accompaniment". Think about your average band setup - vocals, guitar, bass guitar, drums. The guitar will spend some time in the lo freq ranges, the bass will be there 100% of the time, and the kick drum likewise. Above 4kHz we've got the rest of the guitar work, and most of the drum kit. Try setting up a graphic EQ in the music player of your choice, attenuate everything outside 1k-4k and see how it sounds. Now come back and tell me that most music "happens within that range" it's simply not true.
Music does sounds livelier and closer to the source without EQ
A very broad and naiive statement, and again one that is completely untrue. Do you think when you listen to your favourite album that no EQ has gone into the production of it all? By the time sounds hit the recording medium, they'll have gone through at least two EQ processors, and that's before mastering. At the user end, true, most people see a GEQ and twiggle around with the sliders and then realise "Hey, I've cocked it all up", but if you use it properly and actively pick out frequency ranges in the material you're listening to and adjust accordingly (minor adjustments, nothing ridiculous), you can very effectively tune your setup to your own personal tastes, making tracks sound a lot livelier.
A flat response curve is highly desirable for a production or recording studio, because it lets you hear all the problems in the levels of various frequency ranges of the program material, and being in the studio, it's your job to fix those.
In a consumer portable MP3 player, and for most consumer grade audio playback, a flat frequency response is not such a good thing. Music will sound "flat" and dull, which is why pretty much all hi-fi systems have a built in EQ curve to add some depth to the mix, in addition to whatever other EQ options are provided.
Furthermore, the human ear doesn't perceive all frequencies equally loudly, as illustrated by the lines on an Equal Loudness Contour chart. If that ipod really does produce a near-flat response, users will be missing out on lo and hi frequency ranges, as we are much better at hearing frequencies in the 1kHz-4kHz range.
I know we're referring to the shuttle here, which is a budget player, but most current gen mp3 players provide user adjustable graphic EQ (not sure if big ipods do or not), enabling you to get around this whole issue in the first place.
Follow me, Jeff Tweiten, as I wait in line for 5 months in front of the Seattle Cinerama theatre for the opening of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
Thanks Jeff, that's a really kind offer and all, but I'll just stay here, indoors with central heating, away from the snow. And you.
It'd be just like late night UK Sky babecast stuff, only without boobs and jiggling. In that sense I suppose SimsTV has less to offer me. Having said that, it'd be more likely that Sims on SimsTV would do what you tell them. No matter how many times I text in, the girls on babewatch never cover each other with peach yoghurt and enact my script for lesbo-yoghurt-monsters.
Regardless of any of this, I agree with the parent post that HDTV and Plasma hardly represent the 18th and 19th most important innovations of the last 25 years. Crystal based display panels maybe, but Plasma, and definitely HDTV are undeserving of their inclusion in the top 25.
I'm almost certain that that figure is too low. When new employees are set up at Sun, or new desktops are requested, services come and give you a SPARC box running Solaris (at least that's how it worked a year ago when I was there).
I'm sure that less than 61% of users are driven to switching OS. Most of the engineering people had laptops running Windows (which has to be "neutered" by a small application that locks down open ports before it's allowed anywhere near the corporate LAN) or OSX. They still used Solaris with various shells on top as their development environment, which still includes a lot of web use.
People outside eng and general management - I can't really see them having a real need to use any other OS other than for personal preference.
Yes - they become Dames, but I'm pretty sure they are not included in the official decoration ceremony with the sword et al.
It's primarily a recognition of achievement or service to or in the name of the country.
Anyone can write to the PM (via his office) and recommend a citizen of Britain for an honour, and he then presents candidates to the Queen, who selects the recipients. I'm not sure how much involvement she has, my guess is that the list is already well narrowed down and her role is more one of officiation in the same way that the parliament is "hers".
Modern day knighthoods (or Bachelor Knighthoods in full) don't carry the same chivalrous connotations that a knighthood of olde bore, but you still get to call yourself a Sir or Dame. In addition to knighthoods there are a whole bunch of other honours, peerages, and orders such as the OBE discussed here.
Regarding quantities, the amount of knighthoods conveyed per year varies (21 this year), but there are limitations in place on the total number of knighthoods that can be in place at once (~100 iirc).
Knighthoods also are only applicable to civilians - the military have their own accolades.
I remember Hotmail tried offering a POP service of sorts, although it was more like IMAP in that it had to sync folders, and took about as long to do so as it would to use normal web Hotmail. They stopped providing that after a few months though. Anyone else remember more about it?