This is good. A friend of mine committed suicide a little over a year ago and her Facebook page is the primary place that people talk about her, both right after the event and at various marker points. It's nice to check in on her page and see if anyone has posted anything new when I'm thinking about her.
Wait, so we're still allowing George Lucas into the highest tier of sci-fi demigods? I was pretty sure he demoted himself down to 2nd tier, and that's granting him some charity between balancing the 1st trilogy, which he didn't get to make like he wanted, what with the surly actors and limited special effects, and the 2nd, which he got to make EXACTLY like he wanted.
Leave it to a geek to invent the greatest sex bed the world has ever seen and then use it to jostle his brain into jelly in order to wake up in the morning.
I'd appreciate something like that because I mostly prefer to listen to full albums, but I still have plenty of random single songs floating around in my library. I would love to be able to say I only want to see my albums.
Exactly it.
I have around 40 days worth of music. Most of that is albums, but some is also random tracks I've downloaded over the years. I want a playlist that is only complete albums.
Yes, I can manually put one together, but being able to make a smart playlist that auto updates would be nice.
One feature I found missing when Apple bought Coverflow was the ability to create a properly filtered playlist where Coverflow is actually useful.
I see that Songbird has something similar to Coverflow, but here's my question: can one create a playlist that meets such criteria as
1.) all tracks are tagged with track numbers (1 of 12, etc).
2.) all tracks are part of an album with at least x tracks.
And the long shot...
3.) all tracks are part of albums where all tracks of the album are present, so that if each track says there are 12 tracks in the album, but there are only 11 tracks from that album in the collection, that album is excluded.
I really preferred Coverflow before it was integrated into iTunes. Much more useful as a stand alone app as you could filter using criteria 1 and 2 above.
I remember them being energy in "The Rise of Endymion" (the scene where Raul and Anena fly around inside the Treesphere) but more like liquid in the two Hyperion books, although my memory may not be quite right. As for why I chose a FORCE assault rifle and a Hawking-Drive starship... I couldn't think of any really cool weapons from the two Endymion books that I'd want, and would you really want to be pulverized and resurrected every time you took your Archangel starship out for a spin? Give me the Consul's ship, actually, with all his booze and his piano skills.
They're still going to be making next generation space suits out of cloth? The hell with that! Give me the energy skinsuits from Dan Simmon's Hyperion books. While we're at it, I wouldn't mind a pair of Ouster angel wings, a FORCE assault rifle, and Hawking-Drive equipped starship.
The new goal should be the total opposite: decentralisation, community sovereignty, individual freedoms. Instead of creating a centralized state to control everything, lets create global networks of autonomous local communities and workplaces. No central authority, no presidents, effectively no nation-states. Democracy works best when people can meet in real life, face to face. Direct democracy, or horizontal democracy (no hierarchy) means everyone can have a say on issues that effect them. That means small scale is best.
A good idea... funny, Marx has the exact same idea! If you actually read Marx, and most people who are willing to voice opinions on Marx have read nothing, or only the Manifesto (which he was asked to write, and really didn't want to), you realize that most of the problems with the attempts at Marxist systems, regardless of what other flaws exist in Marx's thinking (and there are lots!), was the way they went about trying to get to a Marxist system. Sovietism is a perfect example: the word "Soviet" literally refers to small, worker controlled, local governmental bodies. The original idea, if you read Lenin's writings, was that the USSR was going to be a loose confederate of these Soviets, working together for the common good. Obviously, that's not what happened.
The real problem with all of the 20th century attempts at Marxism is no one ever figured out how to fundamentally change the way people thought, or at least attempt it, without a strong centralized system. The original thinking was that once that strong, centralized government achieved its goal, it could simply melt away, leaving a fully functional Marxist society behind with little or no centralization. I don't think there has ever been a strong government that just decided its work was done, folded up shop, and went home.
A better question is why wouldn't you compress portable music? Audiophiles make up a very, very small portion of the population (Americans' idea of good sound seems to usually mean lots and lots of base), and the vast majority of the cans out there (earbud or bigger) don't yield any quality difference between an uncompressed or losslessly compressed CD track and a 192 kbps MP3 or AAC (I have no experience with WMA or Real Audio's format). I use Ety ER-6is with my Nano and AKG 240Ss at home, so one might say I'm a minor, minor audiophile, and I really have trouble hearing the difference with quality cans between a 192 kbps file and the original CD track. With any of the stock earbuds that come with various DMPs I have trouble hearing the difference between the original CD file and a 160 kbps file, and sometimes even lowly 128.
So yes, some people out there would pay extra for a digital file that is uncompressed or losslessly compressed, but as most people use crap cans or speakers, most of those people would be wasting their money. If you want maximum fidelity, stick with the physical CD or vinyl.
As always, let those who need the very latest and greatest fund the next round of R&D so that the rest of us can buy Rev B or C that has most of the bugs worked out.
For those of you who think this is true, it's not.
Both the Americans and the Russians used pencils in orbital flights in the early days of the space race. However, they both realized that it was kind of a bad idea to be using something that shedded little bits of graphite or lead into a zero-G, high-oxygen, stuffed-with-electronics environment. So a company, Fischer maybe, not the US government, spent about a million US dollars developing the "space pen" which was then sold to both the Russians and NASA.
Last time I checked, you couldn't burn a video file you buy off iTMS onto a CD or DVD, or even put it on an external hard drive. Being able to have it on five computers is not "backing" up, that's just fair use, since some people only have one computer. Plus being able to put the files I pay for on a non-volatile medium is kind of important.
Mine was just stolen too... but it's going to get replaced by a bigger capacity 4th Gen, maybe one with a color screen if I feel lavish and ultra-modern. More power to Apple for leading the charge on portable video playback, but until they start letting me backup the video files I buy from them, no thanks, I'll keep using BitTorrent (and yes, I realize that probably Apple wants to let people backup, but the networks won't let that into the DRM yet, but the problem remains).
It is a well known fact among audiophiles that any portable music device will not have enough omph to drive big headphones. Anything bigger than over-ear cheapos is going to be too big. Firmware hacks aren't going to solve the problem, because the sound will be mushy and horrid just because you're still dealing with the problem of there not being enough power. The best option is to use a portable amp. Here's a forum posting that lists a pretty large selection of various portable amps: http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showthread.php?s=dd 844ed9021132e56c49ebe61b8bfed0&t=103327. Great site in general.
I'd never use my AKG 240Ss with my iPod, or any other portable device. My full sized cans are for listening off of my computer and nothing else. For my iPod I'm all about the canal-phones, in my case Etymotic ER-6is.
Another great account of Feynman's involvement in the post-Challenger investigation is in James Gleick's biography of Feynman, Genius, which is a great book otherwise. Incredible mind, awesome person, that Feynman was, I wish I could have met him...
Not so funny, I'm sure, if you fall for one of their tricks. Just buy for the good ones, seriously, B&H, Adorama, etc... (although I know tons of people have horror stories about both of those, and any other reputable camera dealer).
But your definition is how one "uses their time efficiently" is basically an arbitrary one that comes from how your generation grew up, and what values you gleaned from your parents, society, and simply yourself as you reacting to the society around you.
I would agree that it is a "waste of time" to spent all day surfing MySpace, just as it is a waste of time to spend all day surfing Slashdot, but again, these are TEENAGERS! For the past century, at least in the United States, teenagers have spent most of their free time doing things the adults around them would consider worthless and a waste: driving around, binge drinking, rallying for a revolution that never came, watching TV, MTV, playing Nintendo, blogging (on MySpace and elsewhere), IMing, talking on the phone, practicing in bands that never got anywhere, and so on. Part of growing up in any society is figuring out the balance between what you want to do and be, and what you need to do and be in order to function in society, and the teenage years, in our society, is when one first really starts figuring out that one has this whole world available to them outside of their parents. They're going to do things which the generation behind them simply can't understand beyond that generation being open to the fact that they probably pissed off their preceding generation with all their "worthless" activities.
Furthermore, some "worthless" activities turn into huge parts of society. Early rock and roll bands, kids tinkering with computers in the 70s, kids tinkering with photography in the first half of the 20th century, and so on. Hard to tell what will be useful skills when the next generation comes into power, but fun to watch.
Whenever there's a discussion on Slashdot that involves teenagers, the deeper you go into any particular thread there are more and more comments like this one. Given that language, aesthetics, all forms of art, the very forms of art themselves, forms of empirical knowledge (remember that modern science is based around a very particular, and ultimately arbitrary view of the way empiricism fits into the whole mind vs. matter issue), forms of inductive knowledge (math, computers, logic) and the very nature of "civilization" itself change over time, sometimes very quickly, what basis are you using to state that "kids are increasingly stupid"?
The answer is that there is none. Every time a particular culture comes up with one, it is only relevant to that particular culture at that particular time. As the culture changes the ideals shift (see IQ tests), and as cultures die out, they simply become irrelevant, historical curiosities. There is no objective way or measuring Intelligence, because there is no one Intelligence, but rather a multitude, perhaps and infinite number of different intelligences, which can only be gauged by how well they "function" in the actual material world. Given that this "MySpace Generation" (what a lame name...) is making the next fold in US culture simply by being the generation that will be coming into power, I'm sure they will function very well. Each new generation creates its own new categories for functionality, and in the process of doing this, in their youth, are invariably declared a dysfunctional generation because they do things different than the previous generation.
Making declarations like this shows that one is incapable of seeing that something is changing from what they are used to, comfortable with, without making an objective value judgement which is invariably wrong, and thereby showing themselves to possess a very small world view which is basically entirely occupied by their own personal view.
Maybe this is why I spend more time reading my friend's MySpace blogs than Slashdot discussions like this one. They may not exactly be though provoking, but at least they're not dangerously stupid.
Click on the downturned triangle on your station after you add the first artist, and it'll let you add as many other artists as you want. Not Rachmaninov though, they haven't done Classical yet.
Oh wait, I don't care. Because both the email (Mail) and IM program (Adium) I use have nicely unobtrusive but conspicuous alerts in the Dock when a new message comes in. Adium also uses Growl notifications, if you want them.
I'm a big fan of Logitech devices, but this sounds like a really bad idea. Between the fact that most people generally cover most of the mouse with their hand, and the simple fact that a mouse is not there to be looked at, I seriously think Logitech engineers may have been smoking something leafy when they came up with this one... lights man...
What this guy did was about as dumb as buying books/magazines/journals on these subjects, and then having sticky bookmarks on all this kind of info when the police search your home. Not that different from the countless individuals who get caught with child porn because they forget, or simply don't know how, to clean our their caches and histories.
If he had been using Safari on OS X, he could have been in "Private" mode and avoided this whole mess. OS X! Great for the creative and criminally minded!
Seems to work fine for me. What version of Safari are you running? Even tried typing in XFree86 and didn't get any dancing spyglass telling me "Looks like you're doing an adult search, would you like to..." Definitely a blatant ripoff of Google though.
Slashdot Mirror
This is good. A friend of mine committed suicide a little over a year ago and her Facebook page is the primary place that people talk about her, both right after the event and at various marker points. It's nice to check in on her page and see if anyone has posted anything new when I'm thinking about her.
Wait, so we're still allowing George Lucas into the highest tier of sci-fi demigods? I was pretty sure he demoted himself down to 2nd tier, and that's granting him some charity between balancing the 1st trilogy, which he didn't get to make like he wanted, what with the surly actors and limited special effects, and the 2nd, which he got to make EXACTLY like he wanted.
For some reason, as someone who gets around almost entirely by bicycle, this seems like an incredibly bad idea to me.
Leave it to a geek to invent the greatest sex bed the world has ever seen and then use it to jostle his brain into jelly in order to wake up in the morning.
I'd appreciate something like that because I mostly prefer to listen to full albums, but I still have plenty of random single songs floating around in my library. I would love to be able to say I only want to see my albums.
Exactly it.
I have around 40 days worth of music. Most of that is albums, but some is also random tracks I've downloaded over the years. I want a playlist that is only complete albums.
Yes, I can manually put one together, but being able to make a smart playlist that auto updates would be nice.
I see that Songbird has something similar to Coverflow, but here's my question: can one create a playlist that meets such criteria as
1.) all tracks are tagged with track numbers (1 of 12, etc).
2.) all tracks are part of an album with at least x tracks.
And the long shot...
3.) all tracks are part of albums where all tracks of the album are present, so that if each track says there are 12 tracks in the album, but there are only 11 tracks from that album in the collection, that album is excluded.
I really preferred Coverflow before it was integrated into iTunes. Much more useful as a stand alone app as you could filter using criteria 1 and 2 above.
I remember them being energy in "The Rise of Endymion" (the scene where Raul and Anena fly around inside the Treesphere) but more like liquid in the two Hyperion books, although my memory may not be quite right. As for why I chose a FORCE assault rifle and a Hawking-Drive starship... I couldn't think of any really cool weapons from the two Endymion books that I'd want, and would you really want to be pulverized and resurrected every time you took your Archangel starship out for a spin? Give me the Consul's ship, actually, with all his booze and his piano skills.
They're still going to be making next generation space suits out of cloth? The hell with that! Give me the energy skinsuits from Dan Simmon's Hyperion books. While we're at it, I wouldn't mind a pair of Ouster angel wings, a FORCE assault rifle, and Hawking-Drive equipped starship.
The new goal should be the total opposite: decentralisation, community sovereignty, individual freedoms. Instead of creating a centralized state to control everything, lets create global networks of autonomous local communities and workplaces. No central authority, no presidents, effectively no nation-states. Democracy works best when people can meet in real life, face to face. Direct democracy, or horizontal democracy (no hierarchy) means everyone can have a say on issues that effect them. That means small scale is best.
A good idea... funny, Marx has the exact same idea! If you actually read Marx, and most people who are willing to voice opinions on Marx have read nothing, or only the Manifesto (which he was asked to write, and really didn't want to), you realize that most of the problems with the attempts at Marxist systems, regardless of what other flaws exist in Marx's thinking (and there are lots!), was the way they went about trying to get to a Marxist system. Sovietism is a perfect example: the word "Soviet" literally refers to small, worker controlled, local governmental bodies. The original idea, if you read Lenin's writings, was that the USSR was going to be a loose confederate of these Soviets, working together for the common good. Obviously, that's not what happened.
The real problem with all of the 20th century attempts at Marxism is no one ever figured out how to fundamentally change the way people thought, or at least attempt it, without a strong centralized system. The original thinking was that once that strong, centralized government achieved its goal, it could simply melt away, leaving a fully functional Marxist society behind with little or no centralization. I don't think there has ever been a strong government that just decided its work was done, folded up shop, and went home.
So yes, some people out there would pay extra for a digital file that is uncompressed or losslessly compressed, but as most people use crap cans or speakers, most of those people would be wasting their money. If you want maximum fidelity, stick with the physical CD or vinyl.
As always, let those who need the very latest and greatest fund the next round of R&D so that the rest of us can buy Rev B or C that has most of the bugs worked out.
Both the Americans and the Russians used pencils in orbital flights in the early days of the space race. However, they both realized that it was kind of a bad idea to be using something that shedded little bits of graphite or lead into a zero-G, high-oxygen, stuffed-with-electronics environment. So a company, Fischer maybe, not the US government, spent about a million US dollars developing the "space pen" which was then sold to both the Russians and NASA.
Last time I checked, you couldn't burn a video file you buy off iTMS onto a CD or DVD, or even put it on an external hard drive. Being able to have it on five computers is not "backing" up, that's just fair use, since some people only have one computer. Plus being able to put the files I pay for on a non-volatile medium is kind of important.
Mine was just stolen too... but it's going to get replaced by a bigger capacity 4th Gen, maybe one with a color screen if I feel lavish and ultra-modern. More power to Apple for leading the charge on portable video playback, but until they start letting me backup the video files I buy from them, no thanks, I'll keep using BitTorrent (and yes, I realize that probably Apple wants to let people backup, but the networks won't let that into the DRM yet, but the problem remains).
I'd never use my AKG 240Ss with my iPod, or any other portable device. My full sized cans are for listening off of my computer and nothing else. For my iPod I'm all about the canal-phones, in my case Etymotic ER-6is.
Another great account of Feynman's involvement in the post-Challenger investigation is in James Gleick's biography of Feynman, Genius, which is a great book otherwise. Incredible mind, awesome person, that Feynman was, I wish I could have met him...
Not so funny, I'm sure, if you fall for one of their tricks. Just buy for the good ones, seriously, B&H, Adorama, etc... (although I know tons of people have horror stories about both of those, and any other reputable camera dealer).
I would agree that it is a "waste of time" to spent all day surfing MySpace, just as it is a waste of time to spend all day surfing Slashdot, but again, these are TEENAGERS! For the past century, at least in the United States, teenagers have spent most of their free time doing things the adults around them would consider worthless and a waste: driving around, binge drinking, rallying for a revolution that never came, watching TV, MTV, playing Nintendo, blogging (on MySpace and elsewhere), IMing, talking on the phone, practicing in bands that never got anywhere, and so on. Part of growing up in any society is figuring out the balance between what you want to do and be, and what you need to do and be in order to function in society, and the teenage years, in our society, is when one first really starts figuring out that one has this whole world available to them outside of their parents. They're going to do things which the generation behind them simply can't understand beyond that generation being open to the fact that they probably pissed off their preceding generation with all their "worthless" activities.
Furthermore, some "worthless" activities turn into huge parts of society. Early rock and roll bands, kids tinkering with computers in the 70s, kids tinkering with photography in the first half of the 20th century, and so on. Hard to tell what will be useful skills when the next generation comes into power, but fun to watch.
The answer is that there is none. Every time a particular culture comes up with one, it is only relevant to that particular culture at that particular time. As the culture changes the ideals shift (see IQ tests), and as cultures die out, they simply become irrelevant, historical curiosities. There is no objective way or measuring Intelligence, because there is no one Intelligence, but rather a multitude, perhaps and infinite number of different intelligences, which can only be gauged by how well they "function" in the actual material world. Given that this "MySpace Generation" (what a lame name...) is making the next fold in US culture simply by being the generation that will be coming into power, I'm sure they will function very well. Each new generation creates its own new categories for functionality, and in the process of doing this, in their youth, are invariably declared a dysfunctional generation because they do things different than the previous generation.
Making declarations like this shows that one is incapable of seeing that something is changing from what they are used to, comfortable with, without making an objective value judgement which is invariably wrong, and thereby showing themselves to possess a very small world view which is basically entirely occupied by their own personal view.
Maybe this is why I spend more time reading my friend's MySpace blogs than Slashdot discussions like this one. They may not exactly be though provoking, but at least they're not dangerously stupid.
Click on the downturned triangle on your station after you add the first artist, and it'll let you add as many other artists as you want. Not Rachmaninov though, they haven't done Classical yet.
Oh wait, I don't care. Because both the email (Mail) and IM program (Adium) I use have nicely unobtrusive but conspicuous alerts in the Dock when a new message comes in. Adium also uses Growl notifications, if you want them.
I'm a big fan of Logitech devices, but this sounds like a really bad idea. Between the fact that most people generally cover most of the mouse with their hand, and the simple fact that a mouse is not there to be looked at, I seriously think Logitech engineers may have been smoking something leafy when they came up with this one... lights man...
What this guy did was about as dumb as buying books/magazines/journals on these subjects, and then having sticky bookmarks on all this kind of info when the police search your home. Not that different from the countless individuals who get caught with child porn because they forget, or simply don't know how, to clean our their caches and histories.
If he had been using Safari on OS X, he could have been in "Private" mode and avoided this whole mess. OS X! Great for the creative and criminally minded!
Seems to work fine for me. What version of Safari are you running? Even tried typing in XFree86 and didn't get any dancing spyglass telling me "Looks like you're doing an adult search, would you like to..." Definitely a blatant ripoff of Google though.
Maybe my HTML skills are leaving me... not sure, but the link works.
Cornell/Athena Updates (Pops)