I have actually specifically told my friends when it's come up in conversation that if, somehow, I was approached by NASA and they told me that I could got to Mars, that I would never be coming back, that I would die there, and that I would never see my friends and family again, and I had to leave right now with no time to say goodbye or get any of my things, I would absolutely do it, no questions asked. People have told me that's a stupid thing to think, or that I'm a jerk because I would leave everyone I know so quickly, but that's just the way it is. If I could go to outer space, my life's meaning would change so drastically that it wouldn't even be worth it to think in those terms to me, and I think to my friends and family as well.
-Julius
Ah, makes sense; the main NIST campus in Gaithersburg isn't too far away from Greenbelt. I used to work there, a lot of the electronics still say NBS since they can't ever throw anything away and a lot of it is still functional. I'm glad to live in a state that values its ability to get the time by phone, there's just something comforting about knowing that woman will always be on the other end to tell me what the time will be at the tone.
OK, now after fully reading TFA (and I guess just the summary), I'm a little confused, as they say that California and Nevada are the only ones who still have it. But I did call time just yesterday, and I did it again just now, it's the same as always ("at the tone, the time will be whatever and whatever seconds... BEEP"), Does Maryland just have a different system, is the article incorrect, or am I just missing something?
I was testing out my new land line yesterday and called Time. I can't believe they're getting rid of it, it even has its own exchange (at least in Maryland). (Area code)-844-[any number]. It's odd though, it never occurred to me that it was run by AT I always just assumed it was NIST.
I beg to differ... if you have a solid acrylic turntable that is properly acoustically and electrostatically isolated (as well as all of your other equipment, i.e. class A preamp, amp, and cables), nice Ortofon diamond stylus, and high-end speakers, and you take proper care of your goddamn vinyl (clean before and after each use including the stylus), you can reach amazing fidelity. The reason most people don't understand this is because you can't do this without a really, really high end system; an audio system is only as good as its worst component and it takes a lot of components to really do it right. A lot of the stereophile hype is just that, hype. However, there are reasons behind it all. True, the average homeowner with a nice turntable and a decent system will be able to get higher fidelity out of their class A CD player, but when you go all the way up to the top, the only way to beat it is with a higher definition digital medium or a prohibitively expensive tape system. The trouble you have to go through to get the maximum practical fidelity out of vinyl is often just not worth the trouble or the money. But don't rule out a medium based on your personal experience with what you believe is the "best" turntable; it probably wasn't, and that's only one part of the equation.
Absolutely I can tell the difference between 320kb/s and lossless. I play drum set, and even with my significant hearing loss in both ears, I can still tell the difference. I have never heard an MP3 encoder that gave enough information to the drums; they just can't do it, cymbals and snare drums have too many overtones and are too ambiguous to properly quantify how important they are to the human ear at any one point in time. Because of that, there is always something missing from the drums, and it's easy to hear if you listen to it carefully. I think that's the real reason behind all this, though, if people were sitting down in their radio rooms and listening to music the way they would look at a painting, people would notice. When it's blasting out of someone's crappy car stereo at 115 db or coming out of someone's piezo headphones, they're usually not going to be listening to music in a way that 320kb/s is going to be a big problem.
I don't know about all that, I mean, this is a movie theater, they hate people who pirate movies, and they will do everything in their power to try and minimize it. She was videotaping a new movie in a theater, what the hell did she think was going to happen? Who cares if she didn't mean anything by it? just don't do it, it's not that hard. She just needed to accept that she would have to simply tell her brother using words instead of video that he should go see the movie. That sucks if he needs a clip of it in addition to the longer-than-twenty-second trailer in order to be convinced to see the movie, but this is why they have trailers and why they release singles before the album. Do you steal food from a bakery just to show someone how good it tastes? It's not a perfect analogy since something physical is actually being taken from the owner, but it's still the same concept. Forget the laws and their ambiguities, what she did was really, really stupid; she got caught and now she has to suffer the consequences. I personally pirate media much more discreetly and in the privacy of my own home.
You forgot "You must have a thorough understanding of theoretical computer science (P, NP books, 'Do you have an extra 'go to 10' line?')"
I do disagree with your overall point, however. I think that even without knowledge of any of those things, it's still a witty show, the humor itself I feel is often complex and very satisfying, and the sci-fi is really great. The characters are deep and explored often, and the entire series has a cohesive plot that loops back on itself with elements even from the first episode hidden until mear the end of the last season. All in all a great show for almost anyone, but it just didn't take off like it should have.
I agree... now that I have a WM5 phone, I can't imagine using anything else. I can activesync to my exchange server in three different ways, it has a great built in browser as well as supports the Opera browser (which looks to be coming along nicely), I can edit the registry and load whatever I want on it, I use it as my MP3 player in my car, and the best feature, which the iPhone can't do right now (to my knowledge): I can play any NES, SNES, and Sega game I want, and they look and play great. I'd pay $150 just for a portable NES, then when you add all the other stuff I just can't imagine going back to a clamshell with an OS that was coded in assembler just for that hardware.
That brings me to my main point: Phones are built the way computers were before the advent of industry-standard ISAs. One would think that after the way the ISA revolutionized the computer industry, the cell phone industry would start out with standard hardware interfaces. Instead, every crappy phone that comes out is built my hand in assembler (I think that's correct, I'm not mistaken, right?) so once everything is implemented and tested and they want to come out with a new phone, they have to start from scratch! How will anything ever improve like that? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, it seems so backwards for the 21st century. The development cycle that the phone companies must have... it just seems to me to be so cumbersome and retrogressive that I can't see them ever making phones the right way until someone else comes out of nowhere and shows them how it could be done. Speaking of which, I really can't wait for that OpenMoko, it seems to be designed correctly from the ground up, and it runs Linux. The possibilities with something like that just seem endless. It'll be more of a tiny laptop with phone feature than a phone with extra functionality. I'm sure the major service providers will royally screw us to get it working in the US when it finally get out of beta, though.
If you dig a little deeper, you'll find that it was just one guy's study at one university in Germany; all he did was place a cell phone near a bee hive and apparently this caused them to become "disoriented." http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/2 7/1724239&from=rss At the time that this was all being hyped up, I couldn't find any details of the "experiment," and several articles I read had claimed that other than the one quote from the primary researcher, there was absolutely nothing else released about the study. Now there may have been more details since then, but when someone makes a claim like that, and then doesn't publish or release any of their methods, I don't give it a single ounce of credit; it's an automatic dismissal, unless of course they release more information later. Not like every major news publication in America didn't jump on this thing like a pack of rabid wolves. That's why I only get my science from the Weekly World News.
It was more of a statement pertaining to the cost of transistors, the number of transistors was just one part of the concept. Ars Technica has a great article on it by Jon Stokes: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/moore.a rs/1
I dislike pointless rants as much as the next person, but I feel like you can at least give a little credence to posts like this. I'd imagine it's extremely frustrating dealing with this type of thing; the general reader doesn't really have any idea that this is a problem (I've been reading/. on an hourly basis for the past 4 years, but it' always possible that I just never paid enough attention to hear about this), but apparently it's something that he has to deal with on a regular basis. If he's making a post on the main page, it's obviously something that he feels is a serious issue and he's looking to the community for support and feedback. Rag on Slashdot all you want, but if you're posting on this then you obviously read it a good deal and hopefully get useful/interesting information from it. Why can't a founder of such an excellent (in my opinion) site complain and ask for feedback on an issue that's obviously important and causes serious problems in a way that most likely the users and the admins never anticipated or know how to deal with? Maybe if we all were running 640x480 or browsing with Lynx we could legitimately complain about the post taking up important news space, but in the majority we're not, and in addition Slashdot caters to such a wide variety of readers that you're never going to be interested in every single news post on the front page, even with the customizations. (if you are then I want your job).
On that note, I don't actually have anything to say about the topic at hand, but then again, neither did the parent.
The majority of the episodes had nothing to do with the mythology; most of the show was concerned with individual incidents and one-time characters. I don't see why, if they take this in the horror-suspense direction, that it couldn't be a great movie. the episodes were in between the length of a normal T.V. show and a movie already, so I'd imagine it'll just be a really good, extra-long, badass episode. At least, that's what I hope will happen.
Several boards have come out that have 3 x16 PCI-express slots, two for video and the extra for a physics card. Ah well, a man can dream... a man can dream.
Of course there are going to be false positives! People want Myspace to check for these people, but the fact of the matter is that anyone can register with any name and birthdate, and using the information publicly available to identify sex offenders is only going to lead to misidentification. In my opinion, there's not going to be a reliable way of dealing with this issue other than parents being more in tune with their kids' internet habits and education. I honestly can't believe they actually tried to implemented a server-side solution to this problem. Hopefully Myspace will simply say "I told you so" and move on.
-Julius
I completely agree, although I don't have big hands or anything; those giant original XBox controllers felt very comfortable to me. I like having my left thumb going straight up, as opposed to the Dual Shock that has both thumbs going towards the middle; I find that style extremely uncomfortable and straining on my hands. My vote for worst controls, although a handheld, has to be the PSP, it's like they took everything wrong with the Dual Shock and made it worse. I can't play that thing for more than ten minutes without having to take a half-hour break to take the pain from my fingers. My vote for best, however, would probably be Gamecube or Wii, they're just so damn natural feeling.
Haha, wow, my whole life I've had that phrase wrong. I knew something was up when I didn't see any comments on it, probably should have googled it first:-)
I actually can't believe the top tags right now consist of "communications, hardware, space," I would have expected "terminator, connor, ill_be_back..." or others to that effect. Honestly, maybe I'm just a little ignorant, but I never knew there was a real-life Skynet, even though Wikipedia tell me the first rocket was launched in 1969. Ah well, [[generic terminator reference #4419]].
From the tone of the post, it seems like they're making an argument against hybrid cars by showing that they're no more efficient than regular cars with this new tech... but why not just stop comparing the two and combine them? Shouldn't the title read "Hybrid Car Efficiency Improves Even More with new Technology?"
You can rate them from 1 to 100... but I don't see which one is better. Is it 1 for 1st most influential or 100 for 100% influential? I might just be missing some part of the page where that is explained, I gave him a score of 100, hopefully that's the best. I'm a huge fan, I have the Triforce tattooed on my back and a Link outfit in my apartment. I think if Miyamoto asked the public for $400 before he announced a product, and simply told us it would be worth it,I would mail my check today.
-Julius
Contrary to popular belief, water organizes into layers when compressed into a nano-sized channel.
I can't believe the popular notions of water in a nano-sized channel are false! Soon they'll be saying that the attorney general acts like a solid under pressure in a nano-sized tube. If we can't believe the popular notions of nano-tube water behavior, what can we believe? My life is a lie!
Slashdot Mirror
I have actually specifically told my friends when it's come up in conversation that if, somehow, I was approached by NASA and they told me that I could got to Mars, that I would never be coming back, that I would die there, and that I would never see my friends and family again, and I had to leave right now with no time to say goodbye or get any of my things, I would absolutely do it, no questions asked. People have told me that's a stupid thing to think, or that I'm a jerk because I would leave everyone I know so quickly, but that's just the way it is. If I could go to outer space, my life's meaning would change so drastically that it wouldn't even be worth it to think in those terms to me, and I think to my friends and family as well. -Julius
Ah, makes sense; the main NIST campus in Gaithersburg isn't too far away from Greenbelt. I used to work there, a lot of the electronics still say NBS since they can't ever throw anything away and a lot of it is still functional. I'm glad to live in a state that values its ability to get the time by phone, there's just something comforting about knowing that woman will always be on the other end to tell me what the time will be at the tone.
OK, now after fully reading TFA (and I guess just the summary), I'm a little confused, as they say that California and Nevada are the only ones who still have it. But I did call time just yesterday, and I did it again just now, it's the same as always ("at the tone, the time will be whatever and whatever seconds... BEEP"), Does Maryland just have a different system, is the article incorrect, or am I just missing something?
I was testing out my new land line yesterday and called Time. I can't believe they're getting rid of it, it even has its own exchange (at least in Maryland). (Area code)-844-[any number]. It's odd though, it never occurred to me that it was run by AT I always just assumed it was NIST.
I beg to differ... if you have a solid acrylic turntable that is properly acoustically and electrostatically isolated (as well as all of your other equipment, i.e. class A preamp, amp, and cables), nice Ortofon diamond stylus, and high-end speakers, and you take proper care of your goddamn vinyl (clean before and after each use including the stylus), you can reach amazing fidelity. The reason most people don't understand this is because you can't do this without a really, really high end system; an audio system is only as good as its worst component and it takes a lot of components to really do it right. A lot of the stereophile hype is just that, hype. However, there are reasons behind it all. True, the average homeowner with a nice turntable and a decent system will be able to get higher fidelity out of their class A CD player, but when you go all the way up to the top, the only way to beat it is with a higher definition digital medium or a prohibitively expensive tape system. The trouble you have to go through to get the maximum practical fidelity out of vinyl is often just not worth the trouble or the money. But don't rule out a medium based on your personal experience with what you believe is the "best" turntable; it probably wasn't, and that's only one part of the equation.
Absolutely I can tell the difference between 320kb/s and lossless. I play drum set, and even with my significant hearing loss in both ears, I can still tell the difference. I have never heard an MP3 encoder that gave enough information to the drums; they just can't do it, cymbals and snare drums have too many overtones and are too ambiguous to properly quantify how important they are to the human ear at any one point in time. Because of that, there is always something missing from the drums, and it's easy to hear if you listen to it carefully. I think that's the real reason behind all this, though, if people were sitting down in their radio rooms and listening to music the way they would look at a painting, people would notice. When it's blasting out of someone's crappy car stereo at 115 db or coming out of someone's piezo headphones, they're usually not going to be listening to music in a way that 320kb/s is going to be a big problem.
I don't know about all that, I mean, this is a movie theater, they hate people who pirate movies, and they will do everything in their power to try and minimize it. She was videotaping a new movie in a theater, what the hell did she think was going to happen? Who cares if she didn't mean anything by it? just don't do it, it's not that hard. She just needed to accept that she would have to simply tell her brother using words instead of video that he should go see the movie. That sucks if he needs a clip of it in addition to the longer-than-twenty-second trailer in order to be convinced to see the movie, but this is why they have trailers and why they release singles before the album. Do you steal food from a bakery just to show someone how good it tastes? It's not a perfect analogy since something physical is actually being taken from the owner, but it's still the same concept. Forget the laws and their ambiguities, what she did was really, really stupid; she got caught and now she has to suffer the consequences. I personally pirate media much more discreetly and in the privacy of my own home.
You forgot "You must have a thorough understanding of theoretical computer science (P, NP books, 'Do you have an extra 'go to 10' line?')" I do disagree with your overall point, however. I think that even without knowledge of any of those things, it's still a witty show, the humor itself I feel is often complex and very satisfying, and the sci-fi is really great. The characters are deep and explored often, and the entire series has a cohesive plot that loops back on itself with elements even from the first episode hidden until mear the end of the last season. All in all a great show for almost anyone, but it just didn't take off like it should have.
Heh, if only he'd read Heinlein
I agree... now that I have a WM5 phone, I can't imagine using anything else. I can activesync to my exchange server in three different ways, it has a great built in browser as well as supports the Opera browser (which looks to be coming along nicely), I can edit the registry and load whatever I want on it, I use it as my MP3 player in my car, and the best feature, which the iPhone can't do right now (to my knowledge): I can play any NES, SNES, and Sega game I want, and they look and play great. I'd pay $150 just for a portable NES, then when you add all the other stuff I just can't imagine going back to a clamshell with an OS that was coded in assembler just for that hardware.
That brings me to my main point: Phones are built the way computers were before the advent of industry-standard ISAs. One would think that after the way the ISA revolutionized the computer industry, the cell phone industry would start out with standard hardware interfaces. Instead, every crappy phone that comes out is built my hand in assembler (I think that's correct, I'm not mistaken, right?) so once everything is implemented and tested and they want to come out with a new phone, they have to start from scratch! How will anything ever improve like that? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, it seems so backwards for the 21st century. The development cycle that the phone companies must have... it just seems to me to be so cumbersome and retrogressive that I can't see them ever making phones the right way until someone else comes out of nowhere and shows them how it could be done. Speaking of which, I really can't wait for that OpenMoko, it seems to be designed correctly from the ground up, and it runs Linux. The possibilities with something like that just seem endless. It'll be more of a tiny laptop with phone feature than a phone with extra functionality. I'm sure the major service providers will royally screw us to get it working in the US when it finally get out of beta, though.
If you dig a little deeper, you'll find that it was just one guy's study at one university in Germany; all he did was place a cell phone near a bee hive and apparently this caused them to become "disoriented." http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/2 7/1724239&from=rss At the time that this was all being hyped up, I couldn't find any details of the "experiment," and several articles I read had claimed that other than the one quote from the primary researcher, there was absolutely nothing else released about the study. Now there may have been more details since then, but when someone makes a claim like that, and then doesn't publish or release any of their methods, I don't give it a single ounce of credit; it's an automatic dismissal, unless of course they release more information later. Not like every major news publication in America didn't jump on this thing like a pack of rabid wolves. That's why I only get my science from the Weekly World News.
It was more of a statement pertaining to the cost of transistors, the number of transistors was just one part of the concept. Ars Technica has a great article on it by Jon Stokes: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/moore.a rs/1
I dislike pointless rants as much as the next person, but I feel like you can at least give a little credence to posts like this. I'd imagine it's extremely frustrating dealing with this type of thing; the general reader doesn't really have any idea that this is a problem (I've been reading /. on an hourly basis for the past 4 years, but it' always possible that I just never paid enough attention to hear about this), but apparently it's something that he has to deal with on a regular basis. If he's making a post on the main page, it's obviously something that he feels is a serious issue and he's looking to the community for support and feedback. Rag on Slashdot all you want, but if you're posting on this then you obviously read it a good deal and hopefully get useful/interesting information from it. Why can't a founder of such an excellent (in my opinion) site complain and ask for feedback on an issue that's obviously important and causes serious problems in a way that most likely the users and the admins never anticipated or know how to deal with? Maybe if we all were running 640x480 or browsing with Lynx we could legitimately complain about the post taking up important news space, but in the majority we're not, and in addition Slashdot caters to such a wide variety of readers that you're never going to be interested in every single news post on the front page, even with the customizations. (if you are then I want your job).
On that note, I don't actually have anything to say about the topic at hand, but then again, neither did the parent.
The majority of the episodes had nothing to do with the mythology; most of the show was concerned with individual incidents and one-time characters. I don't see why, if they take this in the horror-suspense direction, that it couldn't be a great movie. the episodes were in between the length of a normal T.V. show and a movie already, so I'd imagine it'll just be a really good, extra-long, badass episode. At least, that's what I hope will happen.
Several boards have come out that have 3 x16 PCI-express slots, two for video and the extra for a physics card. Ah well, a man can dream... a man can dream.
Of course there are going to be false positives! People want Myspace to check for these people, but the fact of the matter is that anyone can register with any name and birthdate, and using the information publicly available to identify sex offenders is only going to lead to misidentification. In my opinion, there's not going to be a reliable way of dealing with this issue other than parents being more in tune with their kids' internet habits and education. I honestly can't believe they actually tried to implemented a server-side solution to this problem. Hopefully Myspace will simply say "I told you so" and move on. -Julius
I completely agree, although I don't have big hands or anything; those giant original XBox controllers felt very comfortable to me. I like having my left thumb going straight up, as opposed to the Dual Shock that has both thumbs going towards the middle; I find that style extremely uncomfortable and straining on my hands. My vote for worst controls, although a handheld, has to be the PSP, it's like they took everything wrong with the Dual Shock and made it worse. I can't play that thing for more than ten minutes without having to take a half-hour break to take the pain from my fingers. My vote for best, however, would probably be Gamecube or Wii, they're just so damn natural feeling.
Haha, wow, my whole life I've had that phrase wrong. I knew something was up when I didn't see any comments on it, probably should have googled it first :-)
Isn't it "mono-a-mono..." or "one-on-one?" Am I mistaken/not getting a joke?
I actually can't believe the top tags right now consist of "communications, hardware, space," I would have expected "terminator, connor, ill_be_back..." or others to that effect. Honestly, maybe I'm just a little ignorant, but I never knew there was a real-life Skynet, even though Wikipedia tell me the first rocket was launched in 1969. Ah well, [[generic terminator reference #4419]].
Ah, now I am beginning to see. So it appears these two technologies are mutually exclusive, unless I'm misinterpreting what you are saying.
From the tone of the post, it seems like they're making an argument against hybrid cars by showing that they're no more efficient than regular cars with this new tech... but why not just stop comparing the two and combine them? Shouldn't the title read "Hybrid Car Efficiency Improves Even More with new Technology?"
You can rate them from 1 to 100... but I don't see which one is better. Is it 1 for 1st most influential or 100 for 100% influential? I might just be missing some part of the page where that is explained, I gave him a score of 100, hopefully that's the best. I'm a huge fan, I have the Triforce tattooed on my back and a Link outfit in my apartment. I think if Miyamoto asked the public for $400 before he announced a product, and simply told us it would be worth it,I would mail my check today. -Julius
I can't believe the popular notions of water in a nano-sized channel are false! Soon they'll be saying that the attorney general acts like a solid under pressure in a nano-sized tube. If we can't believe the popular notions of nano-tube water behavior, what can we believe? My life is a lie!