Mark James was certainly not incredulous. Judge Wells probably was. Anyone who reads about it, probably is. Incredible: hard to believe. Incredulous: a person who finds something hard to believe.
I know I shouldn't be harping on about these kinds of things, but it's a common error and maybe someone will learn something.
KF *sucks* and that was one point. TD saw that in a week, the song had *half a million downloads* and that's a second point. I think TD is entirely within his rights. He's still alive, he's still producing music, he created the original riff, and it should be his, for a decent period of time. Another thing: he bought back all the copyrights to all his materials from his old record label, so they are truly his. It's not like when the RIAA is going out on the warpath on behalf of an artist, when the artist in question isn't actually getting a damn thing from the RIAA for their supposed protection. See George Clinton's fights with his record labels for examples of that. Clearly, the RIAA is interested in protecting themselves and their profit margins. Artists who do work that isn't associated with the RIAA, and whose work threatens the RIAA, will be targetted even more furiously than the people who are just consuming in a way that doesn't maximize RIAA profits, because artists are leveraged more heavily. The problem (probably) is that the RIAA is clearly mutually beneficial to pop phenomenons, so there's a big financial incentive on both sides, besides just self-preservation, for the RIAA to continue existing. But for small artists, not so much, and for innovative artists, the RIAA is a threat (since they're a threat to it.)
I had an interesting discussion with one of the design engineers for the antiballistic missile systems Raytheon's been working on for a decade or so. His contention was that if the system ever did finally work, it was a trivial fix for the opposing side to mask their targets, so it was a stupid project to begin with. His suggestion for a workaround for the masking system was to have a secondary targetting system that would track the masking system.
I can't help but think of the same thing with this. Plane takes off. Nogoodnik launches missile with IR sensors, targetting an engine (one assumes.) Plane notices exhaust signature, turns on big IR spotlight/laser to blind the IR sensor. Clever missile sees IR sensor saturate, and since it has two fins in a + shape over the sensor, it can then determine by comparing the gain on the four quadrants of the sensor, exactly what direction the incoming IR spotlight/laser is from the missile. (I built one of these, only it wasn't a missile: it just tracked flashlights or the sun. It used about $3 of audio amplifiers and a couple of motors, and four solar cells.) Now, the missile has a very strong signal leading it directly where it wants to go. If the plane turns it off, the missile is back to going after an engine.
So, by installing something that's incredibly expensive, to fight off a nonexistent danger, we might be making it easier for a clever missile by giving it a much bigger signal to track.
It's likely that the people who designed this have already thought about it a lot, but given my experience talking to the ABM engineer, I bet what they've decided is "oh, well, those don't exist right NOW, so let's release this and kludge something else together when it DOES exist."
>I'd be happy to know if there are artists out there who really don't want their art in others' mixes.
Yes. Thomas Dolby, he of "She Blinded Me With Science", would be quite happy to talk to you about this. Kevin Federline wrote and distributed a rap song that used a clearly recognizeable sample from Blinded Me With Science, via MySpace, and TD thinks the song stinks, is offensive, and lousy music, so filed a C&D against KF. (He tried to do it on MySpace itself, on KF's page, by becoming KF's friend and then posting a comment, but MySpace choked on the wording of the C&D.
I know all this because I went to a recent TD concert -- which was fabulous, by the way -- and he talked about it for quite a while. He said, "even if I'd been asked first, I probably would've said no" because TD found KF's musical style offensive and didn't want to be associated with it.
I have *never* understood how railguns work. Here is an explanation, although it still leaves me frowning and making funny shapes with my fingers all stretched out.
One presumes there are sonic booms associated with this. Anyone know if they're louder or quieter than the explosions associated with heavy ship artillery?
Seriously? That's crazy. Huh. I could've sworn the HP server systems I was working on in the late '90's advertised 15krpm. I still have a couple of them from 1999, but maybe they were just 10k. They're unbelievably loud: they sound like someone winding up a Ducati, especially under high disc activity.
Ya know... it's really hard. I'm not great at linux but I'm not bad, and *for what I need* it does a fabulous job, but what I need is casual web browsing and lots of programming and hardware interface hacking. What she needs -- there are workarounds, but she already knows Photoshop and Pagemaker and it's really, really hard to convince someone to learn something new when the tool the person already knows, works perfectly well. (Why SHOULD they learn something new when what they have does what they want?) If her firewall software weren't feuding with my NAT box, she'd be using Windows all the time and that'd be a reasonable behavior.
I've tried a SUSE, Fedora Core 4, and Mepis. Mepis was, by *far*, the easiest transition. With the others, she wouldn't use anything other than the browser and even that she'd kvetch and cavail. With Mepis, the scanner works with usable, if not obvious (to her) software, the digital camera can be made to work, ditto the thumbdrive, the ipod basically works -- the stuff she needs, she can at least manage. Plus some of the stuff Mepis does is really smart: things that I really miss when I'm using Windows, like context-sensitive menus. (I right-click on a jpg and I can rotate it! I right-click on anything and it'll give me an option to move or copy the file/directory to anywhere! that *rocks*.)
And, not having to fight stupid freaking viruses, commercial firewalls, or anything -- that is wonderful. We both go to nasty places on the net, with comparative impunity, whereas I keep fixing her parents' computer because of stuff they don't even *do*, just coz their friends are morons who send them virus-encrusted stuff. If I were more competent I'd try and set up windows in vmware or something, but I don't know anywhere nearly enough about computers for that kind of shenanigans.
Putting it in a 2.5" package is pretty cool, but there have been 15k rpm 3.5" drives since the early '90's, as far as I recall. My desktop Dell has one. Here's a review of three popular ones. And, for the record, the edge velocity on a 3.5" is considerably higher than a 2.5" for the same rpm. Correct me if I'm wrong here: 3.5" x 3.14 = 11 cm circumference, *15,000 = 1.6E5 cm/min,/100 = 1.6E3 m/min, *60 = 98910 km/hour.
My girlfriend does. Not happily: she curses and yells a lot, especially when one of her friends has a link to a Flash 9 Damned Thing, but she uses it. Mostly that's because her anti-spyware-infested Windows machine refuses to connect to my network, but hey, that's not MY problem... and we illustrate yet again part of why women don't like IT so much.
I know you're joking, but back in the day, HP Labs division used to be awesome, where everyone at HP wanted to work, just like PARC used to be for Xerox. I'm glad to know that something still exists there, although at this point it's like the convulsive twitches of a cat that just got hit by a car.
>I don't get why the "man has no effect" crowd are so vehemently against taking any action.
Easy: because they figure they stand to lose more than they gain by taking action: they either think it'll cost a lot (which it might) or that they won't be particularly affected by the result of no action.
I live in Colorado. I don't give two hoots about houses being designed for earthquake surviveability or tidal wave warning systems. Why should I pay for research into these areas? I'm in good health: why should I pay for surgery for someone who can't afford medical care? I'm young: why do I care about age discrimination? Same mindset.
Whoah. I'm completely wrong: there are lots of people still speaking Frisian. Not so many where he grew up (Sylt) but still tens of thousands of them. Go, wikipedia!
> that person will become adept at languages, sooner or later
It depends (I think) on the person. I know a woman who was raised until age 6 in the Phillipines, moved to Costa Rica with one parent, then to the US with the other, and now she basically speaks no languages -- she can communicate, poorly, in English, Spanish, and Filipino, but can really only write English and even that's pretty hard to read. She is, frankly, not very bright. I don't know how her Filipino is, since I don't speak it, but she claims to not remember it at all; her English and Spanish are both heavily accented and full of basic grammar errors.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, my grandfather grew up in a bilingual household: his mother spoke Frisian (now a dead language) and his father Danish. They spoke a whole different language as a family: Plautdeutsch, because that's what the locals spoke. At school they taught in Danish and German, so he picked that up, and during WWI, when he was fourteen and serving in the German Army, he learned French and Italian from being stationed there, and finally learned English in his late '20's when he moved here. He never managed to get 'V' and 'W' consistently straight (so he routinely referred to wee-8 engines, which I thought was uproarious) and had a little trouble with 'j' but generally spoke english beautifully, and wrote perfectly, considering it was his sixth or seventh language.
First off, the metric system is the only system that has been officially recognized as a legal system for trade, in 1866. Secondly, the existing Imperial system was officially based on the metric system in 1893, known as the Mendenhall Order. (References.
So, we're already using Metric. We just use funny names for cm, g, and l. Those of us who are into unilateral, pre-emptive metrification use the regular names, instead of the funny names, and eventually we'll win. Nobody ever changes anyone else's mind: you just wait for the fogeys to die off and the revolution will be successful.
>Also, you have to consider that people have shown a willingness to spend $300 for just an iPod. Let's say Apple made an iPod with a screen as big as the screen on the iPhone. Would people be willing to spend $300 on it? Yes. If you made a smartphone as slick as the iPhone without the iPod components, would people spend $200 on it? Certainly. So why are people saying that no one will pay $500 for the iPhone?
I spent about $4 on lunch at Subway today. I'll probably spend $4 tomorrow at Schlotzky's. It does not follow that I would pay $800 for a year's supply of lunches. Humans have a non-linear, and non-logical, response to purchase price. At some point, dependent on standard of living, inflation, and what-have-you, purchases are no longer easily justifiable to people. Just because the iPhone is a bargain, considering its capabilities, doesn't mean it'll sell.
Slashdotters weren't wrong about the iPod: they were wrong about consumers. I think that's a very important distinction, because the chances are that even though there are new technologies, the consumers are the same. The point being: slashdotters aren't representative of the broad market, but they assume they are. That's where the problems lie.
Or, to extend the analogy, buying from allofmp3.com is *expanding* my musical purchases, not *replacing* them. So it's okay! Whew, what a relief: I'm sure the RIAA will be thrilled.
>'[Offshoring] was used almost entirely as a form of expansion, not as a replacement.'
Yeah, coz I'm sure he'd have no problem if I took all the interest he made on his investments and put it in MY bank account. He wouldn't lose money, so he'd be perfectly happy, right?
And, by the way, buy yourself a reasonable DVM. It doesn't have to have all the bells and whistles, but being able to measure voltage and amperage, continuity/ohms, and diode polarity, is really helpful. Many now have frequency and some even have oscilloscopes (although I think that's a bit of overkill.) Getting one that can measure capacitance could be nice, but not necessary. When you outgrow the DVM, go to ebay and start looking at test&measurement equipment.
Personally I use a good double-output power supply (or two singles) and a bench volt/ammeter far more often than I use my 'scope or function generator or other fancy things like that. But a reasonable scope can act as a voltmeter, just like a reasonable voltmeter with an interface and some programming can act like a (lousy) scope.
You can never have too many power supplies or test leads/alligator clips.
Like other people said: once Mimms is easy, Horowitz and Hill. I've learned a lot from epanorama's tutorials, and some from web-ee -- both are collections of other sites.
But my strongest advice would be: figure out what you want to do and focus on that. Saying you want to learn more about electronics is like saying you want to learn more about languages -- and you can do that, it's called linguistics, but if you want to learn a language that's a different proposition.
If you're an audiophile, learn about amplifiers: concentrate on analog and find some older books about tubes. If you're into automation, learn about interfacing: some digital, some transducers, don't sweat transistor theory or analog stuff much. If you're into programming, spend your time on digital and get a cheap PIC programmer. Just don't try to teach yourself everything. You'll only become frustrated.
Dude. From now on, that's what I'm going to say about Zunes: "why would I want one of those? It's brown and it squirts." So, bless you for giving me a great cut-down.
>It is clear to me that the Second Coming is merely a license to not give a flying fuck.
It's always nice when a situation that will economically benefit people, is conveniently covered by their religious beliefs.
A decent proportion of Christians have believed that the Second Coming would happen within their lifetimes, since 300 AD. I don't think that's going to stop any time soon.
I think there was a storm just as large in 1982, that hit on/about Dec 23. (I know there was a storm two/three days before Christmas, I don't know it was '82.) I was young, but I remember our big Olds sedan being completely covered in snow -- as in we couldn't find it the next day -- and hiking through chest-high snow when we abandoned the car and lit out for a nearby house. When we did get home, we shoveled out the driveway and I think I have pictures of my dad standing beside a wall of snow higher than his head.
Leadville, meanwhile, has very little snow right now, and hasn't all winter. The joy of multiple upslopes.
Slashdot Mirror
Mark James was certainly not incredulous. Judge Wells probably was. Anyone who reads about it, probably is.
Incredible: hard to believe. Incredulous: a person who finds something hard to believe.
I know I shouldn't be harping on about these kinds of things, but it's a common error and maybe someone will learn something.
KF *sucks* and that was one point.
TD saw that in a week, the song had *half a million downloads* and that's a second point.
I think TD is entirely within his rights. He's still alive, he's still producing music, he created the original riff, and it should be his, for a decent period of time.
Another thing: he bought back all the copyrights to all his materials from his old record label, so they are truly his. It's not like when the RIAA is going out on the warpath on behalf of an artist, when the artist in question isn't actually getting a damn thing from the RIAA for their supposed protection. See George Clinton's fights with his record labels for examples of that.
Clearly, the RIAA is interested in protecting themselves and their profit margins. Artists who do work that isn't associated with the RIAA, and whose work threatens the RIAA, will be targetted even more furiously than the people who are just consuming in a way that doesn't maximize RIAA profits, because artists are leveraged more heavily.
The problem (probably) is that the RIAA is clearly mutually beneficial to pop phenomenons, so there's a big financial incentive on both sides, besides just self-preservation, for the RIAA to continue existing. But for small artists, not so much, and for innovative artists, the RIAA is a threat (since they're a threat to it.)
I had an interesting discussion with one of the design engineers for the antiballistic missile systems Raytheon's been working on for a decade or so. His contention was that if the system ever did finally work, it was a trivial fix for the opposing side to mask their targets, so it was a stupid project to begin with. His suggestion for a workaround for the masking system was to have a secondary targetting system that would track the masking system.
I can't help but think of the same thing with this. Plane takes off. Nogoodnik launches missile with IR sensors, targetting an engine (one assumes.) Plane notices exhaust signature, turns on big IR spotlight/laser to blind the IR sensor. Clever missile sees IR sensor saturate, and since it has two fins in a + shape over the sensor, it can then determine by comparing the gain on the four quadrants of the sensor, exactly what direction the incoming IR spotlight/laser is from the missile. (I built one of these, only it wasn't a missile: it just tracked flashlights or the sun. It used about $3 of audio amplifiers and a couple of motors, and four solar cells.) Now, the missile has a very strong signal leading it directly where it wants to go. If the plane turns it off, the missile is back to going after an engine.
So, by installing something that's incredibly expensive, to fight off a nonexistent danger, we might be making it easier for a clever missile by giving it a much bigger signal to track.
It's likely that the people who designed this have already thought about it a lot, but given my experience talking to the ABM engineer, I bet what they've decided is "oh, well, those don't exist right NOW, so let's release this and kludge something else together when it DOES exist."
>I'd be happy to know if there are artists out there who really don't want their art in others' mixes.
Yes. Thomas Dolby, he of "She Blinded Me With Science", would be quite happy to talk to you about this. Kevin Federline wrote and distributed a rap song that used a clearly recognizeable sample from Blinded Me With Science, via MySpace, and TD thinks the song stinks, is offensive, and lousy music, so filed a C&D against KF. (He tried to do it on MySpace itself, on KF's page, by becoming KF's friend and then posting a comment, but MySpace choked on the wording of the C&D.
I know all this because I went to a recent TD concert -- which was fabulous, by the way -- and he talked about it for quite a while. He said, "even if I'd been asked first, I probably would've said no" because TD found KF's musical style offensive and didn't want to be associated with it.
I have *never* understood how railguns work. Here is an explanation, although it still leaves me frowning and making funny shapes with my fingers all stretched out.
One presumes there are sonic booms associated with this. Anyone know if they're louder or quieter than the explosions associated with heavy ship artillery?
I suck at math. That's why I got a microbiology degree. Sheesh: good thing I'm not designing brake systems on cars.
Seriously? That's crazy. Huh. I could've sworn the HP server systems I was working on in the late '90's advertised 15krpm. I still have a couple of them from 1999, but maybe they were just 10k. They're unbelievably loud: they sound like someone winding up a Ducati, especially under high disc activity.
Ya know... it's really hard. I'm not great at linux but I'm not bad, and *for what I need* it does a fabulous job, but what I need is casual web browsing and lots of programming and hardware interface hacking. What she needs -- there are workarounds, but she already knows Photoshop and Pagemaker and it's really, really hard to convince someone to learn something new when the tool the person already knows, works perfectly well. (Why SHOULD they learn something new when what they have does what they want?) If her firewall software weren't feuding with my NAT box, she'd be using Windows all the time and that'd be a reasonable behavior.
I've tried a SUSE, Fedora Core 4, and Mepis. Mepis was, by *far*, the easiest transition. With the others, she wouldn't use anything other than the browser and even that she'd kvetch and cavail. With Mepis, the scanner works with usable, if not obvious (to her) software, the digital camera can be made to work, ditto the thumbdrive, the ipod basically works -- the stuff she needs, she can at least manage. Plus some of the stuff Mepis does is really smart: things that I really miss when I'm using Windows, like context-sensitive menus. (I right-click on a jpg and I can rotate it! I right-click on anything and it'll give me an option to move or copy the file/directory to anywhere! that *rocks*.)
And, not having to fight stupid freaking viruses, commercial firewalls, or anything -- that is wonderful. We both go to nasty places on the net, with comparative impunity, whereas I keep fixing her parents' computer because of stuff they don't even *do*, just coz their friends are morons who send them virus-encrusted stuff. If I were more competent I'd try and set up windows in vmware or something, but I don't know anywhere nearly enough about computers for that kind of shenanigans.
Putting it in a 2.5" package is pretty cool, but there have been 15k rpm 3.5" drives since the early '90's, as far as I recall. My desktop Dell has one. Here's a review of three popular ones. And, for the record, the edge velocity on a 3.5" is considerably higher than a 2.5" for the same rpm. /100 = 1.6E3 m/min, *60 = 98910 km/hour.
Correct me if I'm wrong here: 3.5" x 3.14 = 11 cm circumference, *15,000 = 1.6E5 cm/min,
My girlfriend does. Not happily: she curses and yells a lot, especially when one of her friends has a link to a Flash 9 Damned Thing, but she uses it.
Mostly that's because her anti-spyware-infested Windows machine refuses to connect to my network, but hey, that's not MY problem... and we illustrate yet again part of why women don't like IT so much.
I know you're joking, but back in the day, HP Labs division used to be awesome, where everyone at HP wanted to work, just like PARC used to be for Xerox. I'm glad to know that something still exists there, although at this point it's like the convulsive twitches of a cat that just got hit by a car.
Methinks you didn't notice the sarcastic tone of my post.
>I don't get why the "man has no effect" crowd are so vehemently against taking any action.
Easy: because they figure they stand to lose more than they gain by taking action: they either think it'll cost a lot (which it might) or that they won't be particularly affected by the result of no action.
I live in Colorado. I don't give two hoots about houses being designed for earthquake surviveability or tidal wave warning systems. Why should I pay for research into these areas? I'm in good health: why should I pay for surgery for someone who can't afford medical care? I'm young: why do I care about age discrimination? Same mindset.
Whoah. I'm completely wrong: there are lots of people still speaking Frisian. Not so many where he grew up (Sylt) but still tens of thousands of them. Go, wikipedia!
> that person will become adept at languages, sooner or later
It depends (I think) on the person. I know a woman who was raised until age 6 in the Phillipines, moved to Costa Rica with one parent, then to the US with the other, and now she basically speaks no languages -- she can communicate, poorly, in English, Spanish, and Filipino, but can really only write English and even that's pretty hard to read. She is, frankly, not very bright. I don't know how her Filipino is, since I don't speak it, but she claims to not remember it at all; her English and Spanish are both heavily accented and full of basic grammar errors.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, my grandfather grew up in a bilingual household: his mother spoke Frisian (now a dead language) and his father Danish. They spoke a whole different language as a family: Plautdeutsch, because that's what the locals spoke. At school they taught in Danish and German, so he picked that up, and during WWI, when he was fourteen and serving in the German Army, he learned French and Italian from being stationed there, and finally learned English in his late '20's when he moved here. He never managed to get 'V' and 'W' consistently straight (so he routinely referred to wee-8 engines, which I thought was uproarious) and had a little trouble with 'j' but generally spoke english beautifully, and wrote perfectly, considering it was his sixth or seventh language.
First off, the metric system is the only system that has been officially recognized as a legal system for trade, in 1866.
Secondly, the existing Imperial system was officially based on the metric system in 1893, known as the Mendenhall Order.
(References.
So, we're already using Metric. We just use funny names for cm, g, and l. Those of us who are into unilateral, pre-emptive metrification use the regular names, instead of the funny names, and eventually we'll win. Nobody ever changes anyone else's mind: you just wait for the fogeys to die off and the revolution will be successful.
>Also, you have to consider that people have shown a willingness to spend $300 for just an iPod. Let's say Apple made an iPod with a screen as big as the screen on the iPhone. Would people be willing to spend $300 on it? Yes. If you made a smartphone as slick as the iPhone without the iPod components, would people spend $200 on it? Certainly. So why are people saying that no one will pay $500 for the iPhone?
I spent about $4 on lunch at Subway today. I'll probably spend $4 tomorrow at Schlotzky's.
It does not follow that I would pay $800 for a year's supply of lunches.
Humans have a non-linear, and non-logical, response to purchase price. At some point, dependent on standard of living, inflation, and what-have-you, purchases are no longer easily justifiable to people. Just because the iPhone is a bargain, considering its capabilities, doesn't mean it'll sell.
Slashdotters weren't wrong about the iPod: they were wrong about consumers. I think that's a very important distinction, because the chances are that even though there are new technologies, the consumers are the same. The point being: slashdotters aren't representative of the broad market, but they assume they are. That's where the problems lie.
Or, to extend the analogy, buying from allofmp3.com is *expanding* my musical purchases, not *replacing* them. So it's okay! Whew, what a relief: I'm sure the RIAA will be thrilled.
>'[Offshoring] was used almost entirely as a form of expansion, not as a replacement.'
Yeah, coz I'm sure he'd have no problem if I took all the interest he made on his investments and put it in MY bank account. He wouldn't lose money, so he'd be perfectly happy, right?
And, by the way, buy yourself a reasonable DVM. It doesn't have to have all the bells and whistles, but being able to measure voltage and amperage, continuity/ohms, and diode polarity, is really helpful. Many now have frequency and some even have oscilloscopes (although I think that's a bit of overkill.) Getting one that can measure capacitance could be nice, but not necessary. When you outgrow the DVM, go to ebay and start looking at test&measurement equipment.
Personally I use a good double-output power supply (or two singles) and a bench volt/ammeter far more often than I use my 'scope or function generator or other fancy things like that. But a reasonable scope can act as a voltmeter, just like a reasonable voltmeter with an interface and some programming can act like a (lousy) scope.
You can never have too many power supplies or test leads/alligator clips.
Like other people said: once Mimms is easy, Horowitz and Hill. I've learned a lot from epanorama's tutorials, and some from web-ee -- both are collections of other sites.
But my strongest advice would be: figure out what you want to do and focus on that. Saying you want to learn more about electronics is like saying you want to learn more about languages -- and you can do that, it's called linguistics, but if you want to learn a language that's a different proposition.
If you're an audiophile, learn about amplifiers: concentrate on analog and find some older books about tubes.
If you're into automation, learn about interfacing: some digital, some transducers, don't sweat transistor theory or analog stuff much.
If you're into programming, spend your time on digital and get a cheap PIC programmer.
Just don't try to teach yourself everything. You'll only become frustrated.
Dude. From now on, that's what I'm going to say about Zunes: "why would I want one of those? It's brown and it squirts." So, bless you for giving me a great cut-down.
>It is clear to me that the Second Coming is merely a license to not give a flying fuck.
It's always nice when a situation that will economically benefit people, is conveniently covered by their religious beliefs.
A decent proportion of Christians have believed that the Second Coming would happen within their lifetimes, since 300 AD. I don't think that's going to stop any time soon.
I think there was a storm just as large in 1982, that hit on/about Dec 23. (I know there was a storm two/three days before Christmas, I don't know it was '82.) I was young, but I remember our big Olds sedan being completely covered in snow -- as in we couldn't find it the next day -- and hiking through chest-high snow when we abandoned the car and lit out for a nearby house. When we did get home, we shoveled out the driveway and I think I have pictures of my dad standing beside a wall of snow higher than his head.
Leadville, meanwhile, has very little snow right now, and hasn't all winter. The joy of multiple upslopes.