I have a friend who lost 60+ lbs due to a DDR addiction.
It all depends on the game you play. If Nintendo picks up on the head targeting system for a few games, playing an hour of a Wii game could wind up being just shy of the calories burnt in a low height stepper-size class. And you'd get to shoot Nazis too!
Wiki has an article on it and the cite one of the same documents I used when I wrote my paper. I had a few others that dealt with more specific location and technologies that improved on it, but this one gives some info.
And the efficiency of a power plant, even coal burning plants, is still significantly higher than the efficiency of a gasoline IC engine. When you look at how much of the energy in the fuel makes it through the drive train to the road, it's something like 25%. I don't have a cite handy for that number though, and it has been a few years since I delved deep on the subject.
The problem with all these super fuel efficient cars is that they're too expensive for a second car, too small for a primary car and overall, they look like toys. My primary car is an 88 pontiac fiero. It has only 2 seats, less storage room, and also looks like a toy. We also have a 2006 VW TDI Golf that we use for hauling the family, driving with friends, and shopping. But my Fiero does a great job for 90% or more of my driving.
Finally, the last point, the car looks like its flimsy and just a toy. I wonder if they've done any crash testing on it. This is a place where RTFA really shines. They aren't yet producing the vehicle, so there are no live crash tests, but there are simulations which all look great. And even though the vehicle is registered as a motor cycle, it meets or exceeds every safety requirement for traditional 4-wheel economy size car. The simulations are showing that this vehicle is performing on par or better than other comparable vehicles. It doesn't have to compete with an SUV because it isn't marketed at people who want to buy SUVs. No one puts a 5th wheel hitch on a moped because if you wanted something with a 5th wheel, you wouldn't be at a moped dealer.
Full coverage Insurance will likely be expensive, but it is expensive regardless of the car you drive. My State minimum no-comprehensive insurance for my 88 fiero is about $200 a year. 6 months of State minimum comprehensive for my 2006 Golf is about $600.
I wish them luck, and maybe in a few generations it will be popular, but it's going to take a lot of work. At $3/gallon of gas it will be popular. At $4/gallon of gas it will be a phenomenon. We're not talking about generations, we're talking about months to years.
Look at it from the efficiency point of view. My Fiero gets maybe 22mpg, over a 12,000 mile year that's ~550 gallons of gas, or $1650 (at $3/g) to $2200 (at $4/g). Going to full electric for 90% of my mileage would cut my gas bill by $1485-$1980 a year. That's a $123-$165 monthly savings. With good credit and a couple $k down payment, you'd be looking at a $520 monthly payment. With the savings in gas though, your TOC would drop to $355-400, which is right about what you'd be paying for a slightly cheaper car with higher fuel costs. My Golf loan is at $300/month, diesel is going for about $3.50/gal and I get about 41mpg. Over a 12k mile year that's about $1100 in fuel costs, bringing the monthly cost up to $390.
So economically, this car is right in line with the current crop of quality economy cars available in the US, and has the added benefit that it's fuel cost will not likely surge in the near future.
Seriously, though, there have been studies done...I can't cite them offhand, but the conclusion I recall is that while you have the inefficiency of conversion and distribution (which is enormous) I did a research paper on distributed generation a few years ago and came across reports that cited the distribution loss of centrally generated power was only like 4-8%. Still a sizable amount, but not nearly as significant as I had expected it to be.
I agree, the geek squad guys are not agents of the State, so anything they find should be fair game. But at the same time, there is likely some language in the contract for the work that determines what the geek will and wont do. And if that contract forbids the geeks from surfing peoples' hard drives, then he should be able to sue them for breach of contract... from prison.
It will matter a lot on the resolution. He made a comment that the further away from the pen the remote is, the lower the resolution, so using this for Photoshop would work best with his personal setup where the remote was only ~3 feet away from the surface. Using an IR only LED would be a wise choice as well so you don't wind up with a red tinge to everything you try to click on.
A software engineer is to a computer scientist what a mechanical engineer is to a physicist. To take this one step further, a software developer is to a software engineer as a carpenter is to a mechanical engineer.
There are a lot more carpenters in this world than mechanical engineers. And that is not a necessarily a bad thing. I've seen people with nothing more than a tech degree and work experience develop projects that blow the doors off of things I've seen come from people with masters and Phds.
A lesson I learned long ago. If you walk into a retail store wearing khakis and a polo shirt, people will assume you work there. Even if your shirt is a different color and missing the store logo, they will just assume you are a manager.
The red cat is either a rather good photoshoping, or the real deal. If the cat were being lit by an external source, the fur would reflect the light. But the fur appears to be blocking the light.
My best guess for the picture though is that they used a UV/Low Light amplification filter. Then they pointed a UV light at the cats, and stuck some kind of obstruction between the light and the left cat. Thus the right cat and the tips of the left cat's ears appear green, while the left cat and the left side of the right cat's body appear black (save for the UV florescence off the left cat).
The fact that it was shot with a Low Light filter, and further compressed via JPG, means that there is a lot of noise and artifacting in the picture. That much distortion could easily mask modifications. So I would say it's either the real deal, or a fake done by someone with a lot of time and experience in producing quality fakes.
After the.Com bubble burst left the IT market in shambles, us contractors were scrambling for work. One of the odd jobs I wound up with in that time frame was doing exactly what the "Can you hear me now? Good!" guy did. Only I had a car, multiple phones, and a lap top with some really cool software.
I drove virtually every road from NW Chicago, to Door County Wisconsin, over to LaCrosse, and down to Iowa. And it only took a handful of days to start looking for route optimizations. We didn't have software to do it for us, we had state maps, plotter maps, and the laptop maps with GPS. Eliminating Left turns in busy areas, specifically those with out turn signals was always a high priority.
I can imagine the problem would be even more significant for UPS drives because of the number of left turns they will have to make in uncontrolled intersections. Turning left on a 4-lane avenue with no traffic lights into driveways, frontage roads, parking lots, what ever, can be a PITA in a car, let alone a straight-truck. The amount of gas they can save from idling, and gunning it hard to clear traffic probably adds up to a significant amount over the length of the day.
Pretty much. Learn from doing, and listen to those who have gone before.
My previous statement kinda mushed two aspects of design together. To clarify, there are two elements of design to consider. First is the application's design according to the needs the users have expressed (or intended to have expressed because what the ask for is seldom what they want). This part of the design you should have a lot of interaction with the users, project managers, DBA, etc... If this part of the design is screwed up, it is less the fault of the coder, and more the fault of the project manager, although a good senior programmer should be able to sit in these meetings and be able to guide the discussions in ways that better define the problems and solutions.
The other aspect is the actual function design of the code. There are a million ways to write code to do the exact same thing, so there are a lot of chances to do things poorly here. I've been coding these apps professionally for about 10 years now, and I can't even begin to surmise the things I've learned about design in those years, likewise I can hardly iterate the many more things that I have not learned;) But I can share some tips to get you pointed on the right path for large systems.
1) Break it down. Everything is a matter of simple logical steps. Whether it is a Hello World app, or a navigation system for a Mars lander, break the logic down into as small of steps as require for you to normalize them. Someone else in the discussion brought this up. It is a balancing point though, if you write everything into function, it'll be harder to follow the flow of the program (especially when you get 4+ function calls deep in the stack, or introduce threading), but having 1 super long function won't be easy to navigate either. My general rule of thumb, is that if it is called multiple times, it gets a function. If it is entirely closed in nature, it gets a function (such as generating an empty data set). If it is a very wordy piece of code that refers to a simple construct, it gets a function (such as using reflection to pull out info).
2) Abstraction!!! GUI -> Business -> DAL -> Database. The DAL (Data Abstraction Layer) is critical. Once you wrap your head around the concept of using a DAL, the difficulty of large scale projects melts into those simple little logic problems you were just thinking up. There are many options available for use (MS's built in data server/source, nHibernate, etc...) and if you are new to the concept, an off the shelf system would be a good idea. You can write one yourself, but the amount of work that goes into writing one is significant, and because it is the foundation of your applications, making changes late in the game can require major refactoring throughout your code. Anyways, once you have a DAL, you can abstract all of the functional logic (in the business layer) from the database. Not only does this give you a lot of portability with your code, but it also makes maintenance easier as you don't have to battle with database code while working with the business functionality. And likewise for the GUI, it should be completely separated from the DAL and Database, relying on the Business layer for population. Again, this greatly simplifies maintenance, AND if your management ever wants to transition from Windows desktop apps to Web or Linux, you will only have to re-code the UI for the appropriate medium and use the same Business and Data layers.
I have seen a large number of developers come to learn about this design paradigm. Heck, just last month I was at a user group meeting where the presenter was a developer who had just cracked into this design on a recent project. Point being, new and old programmers alike are discovering how much power a DAL can give them. Both in speeding development, easing maintenance, and providing flexibility.
Personally I think design is one of the most important subjects that should be taught in schools. I was greatly disappointed when the subjec
One of my coworkers told me the other day he loved my new authentication and credentials system I used for the Data Access Layer. So much so that he snagged it and used it in another system that had similar authentication requirements.
Now, I've written a lot of bad code in my life, and I'd like to think a lot of good code to. I've seen beautiful code before. New attack vectors and amazing ways to approach problems I never would have though of. And each time I see those nuggets of perfection, I snag them. They get added to my pile of code samples for later use. Either in a straight copy or as a foundation of an idea that gets recoded, depending on license requirements.
Bad code is easy enough to deal with, bad design however... that will kill a project. Bad code can be hot fixed, cleaned up, or straight up replaced. But bad design will require new work from the ground up, getting the users and management to come back to the white board, verifying the requirements... If the system is not designed to meet the needs of the users, a memory leak won't be an issue because no one will ever use the software.
But I don't see streaming video becoming the end-all-be-all answer in the immediate future.
There are still problems with it. Lower resolution, wait times for downloading, DRM restrictions, having to watch on a PC based system, etc...
Some of these can be corrected through technology. Like a 'NetFlix enabled Tivo' where the whole system is integrated into the existing DVR hardware solutions. The wait time isn't horrendous, but if I have a DVD in hand, I can watch it immediately, I don't have to wait 30 minutes from when I pick what movie I want to watch. Even then, with some smart ordering options (remote selection so you can start the download from work, time shifting, and other options to minimize the impact of the download) Resolution is a bad hit though, the better the res, the longer the wait, and who wants to watch a 320i version of a movie on your 54" 1080p HD plasma screen?
Anyways, the whole thing runs into the bandwidth limitation issues currently plaguing North America. As broad band improves, I can see the streaming option becoming better, but I've been hearing promises of consumer fiber since the 80's yet I'm still paying for a POS cable modem connection.
Agreed. Transitioning from APS 7.0 to CS, CS2 is an incremental change. New filters, a few new tools, better previews, all in all, if you have a solid grasp on 7.0, going to CS2 is not going to be a challenge. Although changing Alt-F,S from "Save" to "Open As" had to be one major step of retardation.
Flash 5 on the other hand... completely different beast. The students will probably be better off learning the concepts of an open source alternative.
I do. I have an MP3 player. It sits on my desk in my office. I used to listen to it quite a bit, but at this point I have every one of the songs memorized, so I only flip it on once a week or so.
Radio does 2 things your iPod cant:
1) It introduces the human element by having a human DJ to introduce songs, announce events, and what not. Such things could be tied into iPod software, but it is still lacking the human aspect. The unknown of what will come next.
2) It introduces new music of the Genre for you. Sure, using iTunes/Amazon or what ever your cup of tea is, you can go find similar music that you might like. But the radio does this work for you, AND it doesn't cost a dime to do.
Don't get me wrong, I think the iPod is a great device. But it isn't the radio. Maybe if you could combine Shout cast, and a local even coordinator with a decent quality text-to-speech engine... But all you'd wind up with is a quasi-off line version of an automated radio station.
Come to think of it... that might not be such a bad idea. Plug your iPod in at night and have it download music you might like and a local events calendar. Use a TTS engine to announce upcoming events and band/song names. Store the music in low quality (ie: Radio) MP3's. Put the whole thing on Shuffle...
Anyone know if it's patented yet? This would be totally do-able on my PDA. It would be a bit more challenging on an iPod, but I bet with a really solid business plan one could convince Apple of it's market-ability...
I'm pretty sure it was "I'm too sexy" by Right Said Fred that he played over and over for a few hours. I think it was "Take this job and shove it" that he was shouting drunkenly when the station manager (wasn't it Berry Alveras back then?) came to talk to him through the barricaded door. Not that Danger is the highlight of the station any more. Sean use to be the man until Hawk knocked him off the drive time slot. And the old night time line up rocked before the HD XL crap came on.
After WMAD reformatted to liberal talk radio, the old WMAD rock guys put up a new station that had a great morning line up. It was Quinn in the morning and he kicked ass. Unfortunately, Brad, the station manager suck balls drove the station into the ground in short order:(
If you think WJJO is nothing special, head out of Wisconsin for a while. There is a whole nation of really, really crappy rock stations. While in central/south central Wisconsin we have a number of decent options.
I used to work at WORT. I did bitch work for 'Luke the Prince of Darkness' and the 'Tuesday Morning Aneurysm'. We hung out with Matty Mo on Monday nights, and after I got out of the military and had been in the Goth/Industrial/Synthpop scene in DC I was much more interested in Ryan Park's show earlier in the evening. If you can follow their schedule, it is a great channel for a variety of music tastes, and there are a lot of good local story and liberal news programs.
WSUM is college radio. And like most college radio, it is a crap shoot. Sure, every once and a while the sun shines on that dog's shit caked asshole, but for the most part, it's not worth tuning in to.
We have WJJO 94.1 FM in Madison, WI. It's not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than most rock stations.
In fall 2001, when clear channel published the "These songs are not fit for broadcast after 9/11" list. The guys at WJJO went down the list and played every song of the appropriate genre (rock/metal) on it.
They recently dropped their local evening shows though which featured local artists and new song/bands/b-sides competitions, and local on scene coverage as a way to bring in a few new songs to the play list every week. In it's place they picked up that crap pile with Lee Brutus 'Hard Drive XL'. That thing just reeks of spoon fed commercialism.
The only thing Clear Channel has going for it out here is WMAD the Mic 92.1 FM. It's talk radio that broadcasts Jones Network and Air America. Both have a heavy dose of left wing bias, but it's refreshing to hear the news from a different point of view.
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That was my understanding as well, but I don't want to be the one fight the RIAA in court over where the bits came from.
-Rick
I have a friend who lost 60+ lbs due to a DDR addiction.
It all depends on the game you play. If Nintendo picks up on the head targeting system for a few games, playing an hour of a Wii game could wind up being just shy of the calories burnt in a low height stepper-size class. And you'd get to shoot Nazis too!
-Rick
Wiki has an article on it and the cite one of the same documents I used when I wrote my paper. I had a few others that dealt with more specific location and technologies that improved on it, but this one gives some info.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses
And the efficiency of a power plant, even coal burning plants, is still significantly higher than the efficiency of a gasoline IC engine. When you look at how much of the energy in the fuel makes it through the drive train to the road, it's something like 25%. I don't have a cite handy for that number though, and it has been a few years since I delved deep on the subject.
-Rick
Full coverage Insurance will likely be expensive, but it is expensive regardless of the car you drive. My State minimum no-comprehensive insurance for my 88 fiero is about $200 a year. 6 months of State minimum comprehensive for my 2006 Golf is about $600. I wish them luck, and maybe in a few generations it will be popular, but it's going to take a lot of work. At $3/gallon of gas it will be popular. At $4/gallon of gas it will be a phenomenon. We're not talking about generations, we're talking about months to years.
Look at it from the efficiency point of view. My Fiero gets maybe 22mpg, over a 12,000 mile year that's ~550 gallons of gas, or $1650 (at $3/g) to $2200 (at $4/g). Going to full electric for 90% of my mileage would cut my gas bill by $1485-$1980 a year. That's a $123-$165 monthly savings. With good credit and a couple $k down payment, you'd be looking at a $520 monthly payment. With the savings in gas though, your TOC would drop to $355-400, which is right about what you'd be paying for a slightly cheaper car with higher fuel costs. My Golf loan is at $300/month, diesel is going for about $3.50/gal and I get about 41mpg. Over a 12k mile year that's about $1100 in fuel costs, bringing the monthly cost up to $390.
So economically, this car is right in line with the current crop of quality economy cars available in the US, and has the added benefit that it's fuel cost will not likely surge in the near future.
-Rick
Seriously, though, there have been studies done...I can't cite them offhand, but the conclusion I recall is that while you have the inefficiency of conversion and distribution (which is enormous) I did a research paper on distributed generation a few years ago and came across reports that cited the distribution loss of centrally generated power was only like 4-8%. Still a sizable amount, but not nearly as significant as I had expected it to be.
-Rick
IMO.
-Rick
I agree, the geek squad guys are not agents of the State, so anything they find should be fair game. But at the same time, there is likely some language in the contract for the work that determines what the geek will and wont do. And if that contract forbids the geeks from surfing peoples' hard drives, then he should be able to sue them for breach of contract... from prison.
-Rick
It will matter a lot on the resolution. He made a comment that the further away from the pen the remote is, the lower the resolution, so using this for Photoshop would work best with his personal setup where the remote was only ~3 feet away from the surface. Using an IR only LED would be a wise choice as well so you don't wind up with a red tinge to everything you try to click on.
-Rick
You ever hear of "rear projection"? Completely eliminates the shadow issue.
-Rick
There are a lot more carpenters in this world than mechanical engineers. And that is not a necessarily a bad thing. I've seen people with nothing more than a tech degree and work experience develop projects that blow the doors off of things I've seen come from people with masters and Phds.
-Rick
Did anyone else misread that? Or are my eyes going bad on a Friday evening?
-Rick
A lesson I learned long ago. If you walk into a retail store wearing khakis and a polo shirt, people will assume you work there. Even if your shirt is a different color and missing the store logo, they will just assume you are a manager.
-Rick
The red cat is either a rather good photoshoping, or the real deal. If the cat were being lit by an external source, the fur would reflect the light. But the fur appears to be blocking the light.
My best guess for the picture though is that they used a UV/Low Light amplification filter. Then they pointed a UV light at the cats, and stuck some kind of obstruction between the light and the left cat. Thus the right cat and the tips of the left cat's ears appear green, while the left cat and the left side of the right cat's body appear black (save for the UV florescence off the left cat).
The fact that it was shot with a Low Light filter, and further compressed via JPG, means that there is a lot of noise and artifacting in the picture. That much distortion could easily mask modifications. So I would say it's either the real deal, or a fake done by someone with a lot of time and experience in producing quality fakes.
-Rick
After the .Com bubble burst left the IT market in shambles, us contractors were scrambling for work. One of the odd jobs I wound up with in that time frame was doing exactly what the "Can you hear me now? Good!" guy did. Only I had a car, multiple phones, and a lap top with some really cool software.
I drove virtually every road from NW Chicago, to Door County Wisconsin, over to LaCrosse, and down to Iowa. And it only took a handful of days to start looking for route optimizations. We didn't have software to do it for us, we had state maps, plotter maps, and the laptop maps with GPS. Eliminating Left turns in busy areas, specifically those with out turn signals was always a high priority.
I can imagine the problem would be even more significant for UPS drives because of the number of left turns they will have to make in uncontrolled intersections. Turning left on a 4-lane avenue with no traffic lights into driveways, frontage roads, parking lots, what ever, can be a PITA in a car, let alone a straight-truck. The amount of gas they can save from idling, and gunning it hard to clear traffic probably adds up to a significant amount over the length of the day.
-Rick
Pretty much. Learn from doing, and listen to those who have gone before.
;) But I can share some tips to get you pointed on the right path for large systems.
My previous statement kinda mushed two aspects of design together. To clarify, there are two elements of design to consider. First is the application's design according to the needs the users have expressed (or intended to have expressed because what the ask for is seldom what they want). This part of the design you should have a lot of interaction with the users, project managers, DBA, etc... If this part of the design is screwed up, it is less the fault of the coder, and more the fault of the project manager, although a good senior programmer should be able to sit in these meetings and be able to guide the discussions in ways that better define the problems and solutions.
The other aspect is the actual function design of the code. There are a million ways to write code to do the exact same thing, so there are a lot of chances to do things poorly here. I've been coding these apps professionally for about 10 years now, and I can't even begin to surmise the things I've learned about design in those years, likewise I can hardly iterate the many more things that I have not learned
1) Break it down. Everything is a matter of simple logical steps. Whether it is a Hello World app, or a navigation system for a Mars lander, break the logic down into as small of steps as require for you to normalize them. Someone else in the discussion brought this up. It is a balancing point though, if you write everything into function, it'll be harder to follow the flow of the program (especially when you get 4+ function calls deep in the stack, or introduce threading), but having 1 super long function won't be easy to navigate either. My general rule of thumb, is that if it is called multiple times, it gets a function. If it is entirely closed in nature, it gets a function (such as generating an empty data set). If it is a very wordy piece of code that refers to a simple construct, it gets a function (such as using reflection to pull out info).
2) Abstraction!!! GUI -> Business -> DAL -> Database. The DAL (Data Abstraction Layer) is critical. Once you wrap your head around the concept of using a DAL, the difficulty of large scale projects melts into those simple little logic problems you were just thinking up. There are many options available for use (MS's built in data server/source, nHibernate, etc...) and if you are new to the concept, an off the shelf system would be a good idea. You can write one yourself, but the amount of work that goes into writing one is significant, and because it is the foundation of your applications, making changes late in the game can require major refactoring throughout your code. Anyways, once you have a DAL, you can abstract all of the functional logic (in the business layer) from the database. Not only does this give you a lot of portability with your code, but it also makes maintenance easier as you don't have to battle with database code while working with the business functionality. And likewise for the GUI, it should be completely separated from the DAL and Database, relying on the Business layer for population. Again, this greatly simplifies maintenance, AND if your management ever wants to transition from Windows desktop apps to Web or Linux, you will only have to re-code the UI for the appropriate medium and use the same Business and Data layers.
I have seen a large number of developers come to learn about this design paradigm. Heck, just last month I was at a user group meeting where the presenter was a developer who had just cracked into this design on a recent project. Point being, new and old programmers alike are discovering how much power a DAL can give them. Both in speeding development, easing maintenance, and providing flexibility.
Personally I think design is one of the most important subjects that should be taught in schools. I was greatly disappointed when the subjec
One of my coworkers told me the other day he loved my new authentication and credentials system I used for the Data Access Layer. So much so that he snagged it and used it in another system that had similar authentication requirements.
Now, I've written a lot of bad code in my life, and I'd like to think a lot of good code to. I've seen beautiful code before. New attack vectors and amazing ways to approach problems I never would have though of. And each time I see those nuggets of perfection, I snag them. They get added to my pile of code samples for later use. Either in a straight copy or as a foundation of an idea that gets recoded, depending on license requirements.
Bad code is easy enough to deal with, bad design however... that will kill a project. Bad code can be hot fixed, cleaned up, or straight up replaced. But bad design will require new work from the ground up, getting the users and management to come back to the white board, verifying the requirements... If the system is not designed to meet the needs of the users, a memory leak won't be an issue because no one will ever use the software.
-Rick
Where do I sign up? Is there a fan boi bus yet? Can I drive?
-Rick
But I don't see streaming video becoming the end-all-be-all answer in the immediate future.
There are still problems with it. Lower resolution, wait times for downloading, DRM restrictions, having to watch on a PC based system, etc...
Some of these can be corrected through technology. Like a 'NetFlix enabled Tivo' where the whole system is integrated into the existing DVR hardware solutions. The wait time isn't horrendous, but if I have a DVD in hand, I can watch it immediately, I don't have to wait 30 minutes from when I pick what movie I want to watch. Even then, with some smart ordering options (remote selection so you can start the download from work, time shifting, and other options to minimize the impact of the download) Resolution is a bad hit though, the better the res, the longer the wait, and who wants to watch a 320i version of a movie on your 54" 1080p HD plasma screen?
Anyways, the whole thing runs into the bandwidth limitation issues currently plaguing North America. As broad band improves, I can see the streaming option becoming better, but I've been hearing promises of consumer fiber since the 80's yet I'm still paying for a POS cable modem connection.
-Rick
Agreed. Transitioning from APS 7.0 to CS, CS2 is an incremental change. New filters, a few new tools, better previews, all in all, if you have a solid grasp on 7.0, going to CS2 is not going to be a challenge. Although changing Alt-F,S from "Save" to "Open As" had to be one major step of retardation.
Flash 5 on the other hand... completely different beast. The students will probably be better off learning the concepts of an open source alternative.
-Rick
Nice. It seems a lot like Shout Cast except with music theory acting as the link instead of the social rating system. Defiantly getting tagged!
-Rick
I was trying to figure out what they meant by that too. Are they losing 3 PSI a day? Or is it just a reporter who doesn't understand the distinction?
-Rick
I do. I have an MP3 player. It sits on my desk in my office. I used to listen to it quite a bit, but at this point I have every one of the songs memorized, so I only flip it on once a week or so.
Radio does 2 things your iPod cant:
1) It introduces the human element by having a human DJ to introduce songs, announce events, and what not. Such things could be tied into iPod software, but it is still lacking the human aspect. The unknown of what will come next.
2) It introduces new music of the Genre for you. Sure, using iTunes/Amazon or what ever your cup of tea is, you can go find similar music that you might like. But the radio does this work for you, AND it doesn't cost a dime to do.
Don't get me wrong, I think the iPod is a great device. But it isn't the radio. Maybe if you could combine Shout cast, and a local even coordinator with a decent quality text-to-speech engine... But all you'd wind up with is a quasi-off line version of an automated radio station.
Come to think of it... that might not be such a bad idea. Plug your iPod in at night and have it download music you might like and a local events calendar. Use a TTS engine to announce upcoming events and band/song names. Store the music in low quality (ie: Radio) MP3's. Put the whole thing on Shuffle...
Anyone know if it's patented yet? This would be totally do-able on my PDA. It would be a bit more challenging on an iPod, but I bet with a really solid business plan one could convince Apple of it's market-ability...
-Rick
I'm pretty sure it was "I'm too sexy" by Right Said Fred that he played over and over for a few hours. I think it was "Take this job and shove it" that he was shouting drunkenly when the station manager (wasn't it Berry Alveras back then?) came to talk to him through the barricaded door. Not that Danger is the highlight of the station any more. Sean use to be the man until Hawk knocked him off the drive time slot. And the old night time line up rocked before the HD XL crap came on.
:(
After WMAD reformatted to liberal talk radio, the old WMAD rock guys put up a new station that had a great morning line up. It was Quinn in the morning and he kicked ass. Unfortunately, Brad, the station manager suck balls drove the station into the ground in short order
If you think WJJO is nothing special, head out of Wisconsin for a while. There is a whole nation of really, really crappy rock stations. While in central/south central Wisconsin we have a number of decent options.
I used to work at WORT. I did bitch work for 'Luke the Prince of Darkness' and the 'Tuesday Morning Aneurysm'. We hung out with Matty Mo on Monday nights, and after I got out of the military and had been in the Goth/Industrial/Synthpop scene in DC I was much more interested in Ryan Park's show earlier in the evening. If you can follow their schedule, it is a great channel for a variety of music tastes, and there are a lot of good local story and liberal news programs.
WSUM is college radio. And like most college radio, it is a crap shoot. Sure, every once and a while the sun shines on that dog's shit caked asshole, but for the most part, it's not worth tuning in to.
-Rick
We have WJJO 94.1 FM in Madison, WI. It's not perfect, but it is a hell of a lot better than most rock stations.
In fall 2001, when clear channel published the "These songs are not fit for broadcast after 9/11" list. The guys at WJJO went down the list and played every song of the appropriate genre (rock/metal) on it.
They recently dropped their local evening shows though which featured local artists and new song/bands/b-sides competitions, and local on scene coverage as a way to bring in a few new songs to the play list every week. In it's place they picked up that crap pile with Lee Brutus 'Hard Drive XL'. That thing just reeks of spoon fed commercialism.
The only thing Clear Channel has going for it out here is WMAD the Mic 92.1 FM. It's talk radio that broadcasts Jones Network and Air America. Both have a heavy dose of left wing bias, but it's refreshing to hear the news from a different point of view.
-Rick
You need better radio stations.
-Rick