I used this search tool for one of my favorite singers, Derek Webb, and was surprised to find he's on an RIAA label. I'm surprised because he has given away downloads of his last two albums for free (for a limited time, I think). The one I downloaded required you to enter the email addresses of some friends so that they could also go download the album for free (and also, of course, so that the album would get free publicity). As it happens, my friends like him too, so I felt fine notifying them, and they thanked me.
Some of you may see this as being like a profit-driven chain letter, but it is interesting to note that at least in this case, an RIAA member company (Sony) was willing to give away music in hopes that it would pay off.
By the way, the downloads were DRM-free mp3s - my favorite.:)
If you're targeting IE (and there's no reason not to), I'd expect you'd learn how to do things the IE way, and then tweak to work in IE and FF.
There is good reason not to code first for IE. For one thing, IE is forgiving of some code problems that will cause standards-compliant browsers to render incorrectly. If you check it first in IE, you won't know why it doesn't work in Firefox and Opera. If you check it in Firefox first, it will probably work in IE.
In other cases, where IE doesn't render correct code correctly, you may be able to throw it off with an alternate block of code, or let it ignore something it doesn't understand. But you're treating IE as the exception, because it IS the exception to established standards. If you code for IE first, you're pretending that all those Mac (and iPhone) users out there and all those Firefox users don't exist.
Rome had orginized armies over 2,000 years ago that would have made short work of the wandering tribes of the New World.
Sure, but there were some pretty advanced civilizations in the New World, too. Sorry that I can't be more specific, but I remember reading somewhere about Spanish explorers coming upon a marketplace in the New World which, by their admission, rivaled the ones in Europe - you could buy gemstones and exotic foods brought in by trade routes, get a haircut, etc etc.
Regarding an organized military, there is a part in "Guns Germs and Steel" where (I think) Pizarro and his men were so intimidated by a ceremonial display of (I think) the Incas' military might that one soldier said many of his comrades wet themselves. (I laughed out loud when I read that!) The way the Spaniards won that particular encounter was with a surprise attack in the middle of the ceremony, which started with a cannon firing and ended with mowing people down on horseback. So it was not just tactics in that case, but treachery.
Anyway, I understand your skepticism, and I certainly can't make the argument as well as the book did, but he seems to show that everything is tied together. Writing, for example, arose first in places where government officials needed to keep up with taxes and such, and governments arose where there was good enough agriculture to allow some people to stop farming and specialize in other tasks. And agriculture of that quality arose where there were good, domesticatible plants which could be spread over wide areas of similar climate - easy in an east-to-west land mass like Europe; hard in a north-to-south land mass like the Americas. (He also goes to great lengths to show that in every part of the world, people did domesticate the best plants and animals that they could, but some places just had better stuff to work with than others.)
So I guess what I'm saying is, I recommend you read the book. It's really really cool, and I can't explain it thoroughly here, but you sound like someone who would enjoy it.
Maybe if they had spent less time sacrificing humans and more time researching things like gunpowder they wouldn't have been rolled over by the Spanish.
I agree that the Aztecs were nasty, but I would observe that they, and all the other native peoples that Spanish explorers "rolled over," were wiped out more by the plague than by the Spaniards' superior tech.
Also, in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel," Jared Diamond makes a good case that the reasons why Europeans dominated the world had more to do with geography and resources (mineral, animal, and vegetable) than it had to do with effort or intelligence. Consider, for example, that the llama is about the only beast of burden that the Americas had to work with.
That's a lot of money for a relatively new technology. While I think the idea is cool, I'd rather wait a few years when it's cheaper, works better, and there's more competition in the field. Let the early adopters pay the high fee and the rest of us can reap the benefits when the costs come down.
And of course, every year we'll have a better idea of what the results actually mean.
Maybe one day it will be as simple as a home blood-sugar test - "use this combination finger pricker/USB drive to get an instant scan of your DNA!"
I believe Sprint has had something like this for a while now. "Sprint Family Locator" lets you see where your kids are using GPS, or, when unavailable, cell signal approximation.
My understanding is that many GPS apps use "Assisted GPS" like this, triangulating from cell towers for location help, since traditional GPS requires a clear view of the sky and that's not always practical (you're indoors, or in an urban or actual canyon, etc).
if it can come out into the atmosphere, and survive, then it is a living human.
How much help is it allowed to have? Full life support? A breathing machine? A pacemaker? Just a few pills?
Careful, or you may disqualify yourself in old age.
And as science progresses, viability moves to younger and younger ages. What if someday, with lots of help, a zygote can survive removal from the mother?
What's your scientific definition for human life, and when does it start?
While I'm much more pro-life than you are (better to err on the side of caution where human life may be at stake, I say), I agree very strongly with your statement here.
Nearly all the emotional arguments about abortion, pro and con, would be irrelevant if they were made about the life of a toddler. In that case the toddler's life would be equal to the mother's in value. What we need to decide is: when is that equality reached, and why?
The Constitution already protects a human's right to life. But what is a human? We should have sorted this out decades ago.
It also takes a lot of energy to run chicken plants and high schools and baseball stadiums, but I don't see a lot of companies making the same investment. Our government, especially, should already be doing this.
Yeah, that kind of stuff annoys me, too. If I need to search it's ctrl-K in Firefox and ctrl-F on the page I find. But if people are too lazy to learn the easy way (!), really, it's their problem. Nothing to get too upset about.
I feel your pain. But you can change your setting so that when you plug in your iPod, it doesn't load iTunes automatically. I did.
I still use iTunes, but it is not my default player. That way if I just want to open a sound file real quick, I can let Winamp handle that in 1 second. But if I'm going to start a nice long playlist while I hang out, I use iTunes.
My 50-something parents shouldn't have to learn about virus scans and disk defragmenting and registry maintenance in order to surf the web and send email. They have already spent their careers learning their own specialties.
Why should our tools need babysitting all the time?
The number one problem is all the idiots who are too stubborn/stupid to learn how to use their tools.
While this is true in some cases, I think it's mostly snobbery. Well-designed tools can be used intuitively.
Most people learn exactly as much as they see a need to learn. How much do you know about how your car works? Your plumbing? Your washing machine? Just the basics, I'd guess - enough to use it. Thankfully, your car's manufacturer has kept things simple for you.
The "idiots" you refer to may have advanced degrees in their field; they just don't happen to be IT people. Don't expect them to waste their time learning everything you know. If you need a lawyer, you'll hire one; if a lawyer needs an IT person, he'll hire one. But in ordinary circumstances neither the law nor technology should intrude in your normal activities.
Email may be more boring than Facebook, but it's a heck of a lot more organized. When these kids go to work, they will need to flag and prioritize and sort and search their messages to keep up with their job. And suddenly, email will be really useful, and they'll use it.
If the messages you're sending are so trivial that you never need to find them again, IM and social sites are fine. Otherwise, they're useless.
"In fact, I'd bet that most point-and-click novice Ubuntu users, for example, have a basic understanding of what a kernel is, what code is, how memory is used, file systems, rights and permissions, basic IO, networking, etc., etc."
That's great, and very useful, I'm sure. But it's still computer science. Look, I chose my username for a reason - I don't have tons of geek cred. I can write some HTML and CSS, I remember making batch programs in DOS, and I'm pretty quick to pick up tricks on the computer. I've got a job in cell phone tech support and I do intranet design as part of my job. In my office, that makes me the #2 geek (after the networking guy).
But I don't know what a kernel is. I know very little about networking. I know how to find files, but I don't know what the various file systems are about. I'm not saying that stuff isn't useful, but it ISN'T essential to my job, and certainly not to the jobs of most of the people in my office, who can get by with web and word processing.
You're talking about mechanics and engineering when most people just need a driver's license. Yes, they're both useful, but they are separate fields of study, and not all students need, or are able, to learn the mechanics.
"Historically, some of the worst atrocities have been carried out in the name of God."
Well, let's not forget Stalin, Hitler, Communist China, and others. Shining examples of people not controlled by "nutjob" religious ideas, eh?
They were all in the idealogical line of Rome, which killed Christians for not worshipping Ceaser. Atheists are capable of the worst atrocities by making Gods of themselves.
Years ago, I used Microsoft Works, and over the course of computer and software changes, many of those files became nearly unreadable. (Admittedly, a hard drive failure at one point had something to do with it.)
I switched to OpenOffice on my personal computer specifically so I could use a non-proprietary format, and I went so far as converting all my Word files to ODF. I don't often need to share files, but if I do, I'll use PDF.
I cheer for an open format, and hope to see OpenOffice continue to improve.
I do not understand the fascination with GIMP. I have used Photoshop for basic editing for years, and found GIMP to be a nightmare when I tried it.
Paint.net, on the other hand, is easy to use, works in basically the same way as Photoshop (many of the shortcut commands are even the same), and is free. I now use it almost every day at work for basic web stuff - resizing, erasing undesirable elements with the clone brush, converting formats, etc.
Maybe I misunderstand GIMP (maybe because I'm running XP), but you know Photoshop and you're looking for a free version, Paint.net will be a much easier transition.
Slashdot Mirror
I used this search tool for one of my favorite singers, Derek Webb, and was surprised to find he's on an RIAA label. I'm surprised because he has given away downloads of his last two albums for free (for a limited time, I think). The one I downloaded required you to enter the email addresses of some friends so that they could also go download the album for free (and also, of course, so that the album would get free publicity). As it happens, my friends like him too, so I felt fine notifying them, and they thanked me.
Some of you may see this as being like a profit-driven chain letter, but it is interesting to note that at least in this case, an RIAA member company (Sony) was willing to give away music in hopes that it would pay off.
By the way, the downloads were DRM-free mp3s - my favorite. :)
There is good reason not to code first for IE. For one thing, IE is forgiving of some code problems that will cause standards-compliant browsers to render incorrectly. If you check it first in IE, you won't know why it doesn't work in Firefox and Opera. If you check it in Firefox first, it will probably work in IE.
In other cases, where IE doesn't render correct code correctly, you may be able to throw it off with an alternate block of code, or let it ignore something it doesn't understand. But you're treating IE as the exception, because it IS the exception to established standards. If you code for IE first, you're pretending that all those Mac (and iPhone) users out there and all those Firefox users don't exist.
Great! Let me know what you think. :)
Sure, but there were some pretty advanced civilizations in the New World, too. Sorry that I can't be more specific, but I remember reading somewhere about Spanish explorers coming upon a marketplace in the New World which, by their admission, rivaled the ones in Europe - you could buy gemstones and exotic foods brought in by trade routes, get a haircut, etc etc.
Regarding an organized military, there is a part in "Guns Germs and Steel" where (I think) Pizarro and his men were so intimidated by a ceremonial display of (I think) the Incas' military might that one soldier said many of his comrades wet themselves. (I laughed out loud when I read that!) The way the Spaniards won that particular encounter was with a surprise attack in the middle of the ceremony, which started with a cannon firing and ended with mowing people down on horseback. So it was not just tactics in that case, but treachery.
Anyway, I understand your skepticism, and I certainly can't make the argument as well as the book did, but he seems to show that everything is tied together. Writing, for example, arose first in places where government officials needed to keep up with taxes and such, and governments arose where there was good enough agriculture to allow some people to stop farming and specialize in other tasks. And agriculture of that quality arose where there were good, domesticatible plants which could be spread over wide areas of similar climate - easy in an east-to-west land mass like Europe; hard in a north-to-south land mass like the Americas. (He also goes to great lengths to show that in every part of the world, people did domesticate the best plants and animals that they could, but some places just had better stuff to work with than others.)
So I guess what I'm saying is, I recommend you read the book. It's really really cool, and I can't explain it thoroughly here, but you sound like someone who would enjoy it.
Cheers! :)
I agree that the Aztecs were nasty, but I would observe that they, and all the other native peoples that Spanish explorers "rolled over," were wiped out more by the plague than by the Spaniards' superior tech.
Also, in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel," Jared Diamond makes a good case that the reasons why Europeans dominated the world had more to do with geography and resources (mineral, animal, and vegetable) than it had to do with effort or intelligence. Consider, for example, that the llama is about the only beast of burden that the Americas had to work with.
It's very interesting and worth a read.
That's a lot of money for a relatively new technology. While I think the idea is cool, I'd rather wait a few years when it's cheaper, works better, and there's more competition in the field. Let the early adopters pay the high fee and the rest of us can reap the benefits when the costs come down.
And of course, every year we'll have a better idea of what the results actually mean.
Maybe one day it will be as simple as a home blood-sugar test - "use this combination finger pricker/USB drive to get an instant scan of your DNA!"
...to welcome our drooling, pooping robot overlords.
I believe Sprint has had something like this for a while now. "Sprint Family Locator" lets you see where your kids are using GPS, or, when unavailable, cell signal approximation.
My understanding is that many GPS apps use "Assisted GPS" like this, triangulating from cell towers for location help, since traditional GPS requires a clear view of the sky and that's not always practical (you're indoors, or in an urban or actual canyon, etc).
How much help is it allowed to have? Full life support? A breathing machine? A pacemaker? Just a few pills?
Careful, or you may disqualify yourself in old age.
And as science progresses, viability moves to younger and younger ages. What if someday, with lots of help, a zygote can survive removal from the mother?
While I'm much more pro-life than you are (better to err on the side of caution where human life may be at stake, I say), I agree very strongly with your statement here.
Nearly all the emotional arguments about abortion, pro and con, would be irrelevant if they were made about the life of a toddler. In that case the toddler's life would be equal to the mother's in value. What we need to decide is: when is that equality reached, and why?
The Constitution already protects a human's right to life. But what is a human? We should have sorted this out decades ago.
Not to mention that the humans' biological energy had to come from food, which, working up the food chain, gets energy from the sun.
So in order to be extra evil and nasty, they lost energy on every step of the food chain instead of getting it straight from solar.
Yeah that part was dumb.
It also takes a lot of energy to run chicken plants and high schools and baseball stadiums, but I don't see a lot of companies making the same investment. Our government, especially, should already be doing this.
Yeah, that kind of stuff annoys me, too. If I need to search it's ctrl-K in Firefox and ctrl-F on the page I find. But if people are too lazy to learn the easy way (!), really, it's their problem. Nothing to get too upset about.
I feel your pain. But you can change your setting so that when you plug in your iPod, it doesn't load iTunes automatically. I did.
I still use iTunes, but it is not my default player. That way if I just want to open a sound file real quick, I can let Winamp handle that in 1 second. But if I'm going to start a nice long playlist while I hang out, I use iTunes.
If hammers needed constant maintenance to function normally, people would stop using hammers.
Mod parent up!
My 50-something parents shouldn't have to learn about virus scans and disk defragmenting and registry maintenance in order to surf the web and send email. They have already spent their careers learning their own specialties.
Why should our tools need babysitting all the time?
While this is true in some cases, I think it's mostly snobbery. Well-designed tools can be used intuitively.
Most people learn exactly as much as they see a need to learn. How much do you know about how your car works? Your plumbing? Your washing machine? Just the basics, I'd guess - enough to use it. Thankfully, your car's manufacturer has kept things simple for you.
The "idiots" you refer to may have advanced degrees in their field; they just don't happen to be IT people. Don't expect them to waste their time learning everything you know. If you need a lawyer, you'll hire one; if a lawyer needs an IT person, he'll hire one. But in ordinary circumstances neither the law nor technology should intrude in your normal activities.
Email may be more boring than Facebook, but it's a heck of a lot more organized. When these kids go to work, they will need to flag and prioritize and sort and search their messages to keep up with their job. And suddenly, email will be really useful, and they'll use it.
If the messages you're sending are so trivial that you never need to find them again, IM and social sites are fine. Otherwise, they're useless.
Anyway, the system fell into disuse after the computer was moved and the cat ate the speaker wire.
Ha! A very interesting post, but this was by far my favorite sentence.
Ooooooh..... the cat's eaten it.
Has he?
She, sir.
...everything looks like a nail.
When I first saw this headline, I gasped. They already eliminated Pluto - what ELSE could they disqualify!?
"In fact, I'd bet that most point-and-click novice Ubuntu users, for example, have a basic understanding of what a kernel is, what code is, how memory is used, file systems, rights and permissions, basic IO, networking, etc., etc."
That's great, and very useful, I'm sure. But it's still computer science. Look, I chose my username for a reason - I don't have tons of geek cred. I can write some HTML and CSS, I remember making batch programs in DOS, and I'm pretty quick to pick up tricks on the computer. I've got a job in cell phone tech support and I do intranet design as part of my job. In my office, that makes me the #2 geek (after the networking guy).
But I don't know what a kernel is. I know very little about networking. I know how to find files, but I don't know what the various file systems are about. I'm not saying that stuff isn't useful, but it ISN'T essential to my job, and certainly not to the jobs of most of the people in my office, who can get by with web and word processing.
You're talking about mechanics and engineering when most people just need a driver's license. Yes, they're both useful, but they are separate fields of study, and not all students need, or are able, to learn the mechanics.
"Historically, some of the worst atrocities have been carried out in the name of God."
Well, let's not forget Stalin, Hitler, Communist China, and others. Shining examples of people not controlled by "nutjob" religious ideas, eh?
They were all in the idealogical line of Rome, which killed Christians for not worshipping Ceaser. Atheists are capable of the worst atrocities by making Gods of themselves.
Years ago, I used Microsoft Works, and over the course of computer and software changes, many of those files became nearly unreadable. (Admittedly, a hard drive failure at one point had something to do with it.)
I switched to OpenOffice on my personal computer specifically so I could use a non-proprietary format, and I went so far as converting all my Word files to ODF. I don't often need to share files, but if I do, I'll use PDF.
I cheer for an open format, and hope to see OpenOffice continue to improve.
I do not understand the fascination with GIMP. I have used Photoshop for basic editing for years, and found GIMP to be a nightmare when I tried it.
Paint.net, on the other hand, is easy to use, works in basically the same way as Photoshop (many of the shortcut commands are even the same), and is free. I now use it almost every day at work for basic web stuff - resizing, erasing undesirable elements with the clone brush, converting formats, etc.
Maybe I misunderstand GIMP (maybe because I'm running XP), but you know Photoshop and you're looking for a free version, Paint.net will be a much easier transition.