Wait, when was the last iBook released that didn't come with a built in optical drive that could read DVD-ROMs? When was "no optical drive" ever a choice? It think even the very first of the white ibooks had this functionality. Maybe you'd have to go back to the mult-colored toilet seat models to find one with an optical drive that doesn't read DVD-ROM.
Outpost.com is almost perpetually running $50 rebates on all manners of Seagate drives over the past few weeks. I'm not affiliated, but I grabbed one a while back, just thought I'd pass it on.
MPEG2 is used across the country for any real video work because it is basically uncompressed
What are you talking about? MPEG-2 video is usually compressed somewhere between 8:1 and 30:1. And nobody uses it for (serious) editing. Video is often distributed in MPEG-2 just because there is a very good quality to compression ratio. It's portable, and fits on DVDs because it's compressed.
Yeah right. You know that, late at night, when all the other coders have gone home, after the custodian has come by his office...he peeks out of his office to make sure the coast is clear...draws the blinds, locks the door...and he's dual booting, man, he's dual booting so hard. And it's wrong, but it feels so right.
Yeah, the kg is the basic unit in the m-kg-s SI system. It's silly, but it's true. Waaaay back in college, I remember my intro physics prof giving us this tip: Don't think of kg as a kilogram, think of it as its own unit--the "kug" he called. This way you're not tempted to think of the base units as their metric roots. (Please don't flame me with pedantic points about kilokugs and millikugs being wrong, everything ends up getting written in scientific notation anyway in intro physics, but the units needed to be SI)
Also, as for as the tautology of using Avogadro's number to define the "kug," given that Avogadro's number was itself derived on the basis of the kug...who cares? It's all arbitrary. The mass we've come to know and love as the kg has its own history, but is fundamentally an arbitrary mass. We're just trying to find a natural phenomenon to base this predetermined arbitrary quantity. Avogadro kind of already did the work for us.
What I didn't understand from the article is that the authors claim that the experimental work to establish with necessary precision this arbitrary quantity is not finished, but we should go ahead and convert the standard anyway now. Why? What's the rush? The platinum-iridium bar heading for the smelter sometime soon? Does anyone actually mass this thing for practical purposes ever? Scales and whatnots already have a standard mass programmed that's probably much less precise (but plenty precise enough) than the standard. This is all pro forma. What's the rush?
AWWW. Damn you. I actually did misread the caption, which in actuality reads:
Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web"....
CERN Hard-onic festival?! Wha wha wha?!!!! I thought they were Swiss not Swedes...
But damn. The second one from the left..niiiice. Got that Susanna Hoffs thang going on.
And FM receiver or FM transmitter for use in your car? I can find lots of transmitters, but I can't find a receiver with some perfunctory googling. Maybe you can point to one.
I don't know why the grandparent post was modded down. I also complained about no FM tuning on the iPod a while back and get modded down. iPod fans seem really sensitive about this. There still exist SOME great independent FM music stations, and I would like to listen to NPR, just like some want to listen to their AM talk radio stations. Plus, my gym transmits the audio portion of TVs set up in front of the stationary machinery over local FM. I would use this feature a lot more often than showing off or storing vacation photos.
This is an old, deep problem in computation. Just because our brains are so good at what they can do, doesn't mean we understand them well enough to go and implement it in hardware. The entire field of computational neuroscience exists just to figure out how a bunch of slow, noisy, messy computational units like neurons represent meaningful information. It's not fully understood. Rate codes, population codes, temporal codes, frequency codes (aka oscillatory synchrony)--there is a rich and ongoing debate on how the brain represents data. See Lytton's great text "From Computer to Brain" or Dayan and Abbot's more technical (and highly regarded) "Theoretical Neuroscience" for overviews.
But the main thing is, parallelization is great, but it comes with a big cost: Software has to be designed to be parallelized. And, while our brains operate in parallel, we THINK serially (more or less--this is an old debate in the field of cognitive psychology--the symbolic processing approach vs. the parallel distributed processing (neural network or subsymbolic) approach). And that's a big clue: it's just really hard to effectively parallelize a lot of problems. However, If you think about it, cluster computing, SMP, grid computing all take advantage of exactly what you're suggesting, just kind of at a different level. But there's a lot of overhead needed to make it efficient.
But there is a huge, huge gulf between the pure-parallel-cum-emergent-seriality of the brain, on the one hand, and the fundamentally-von-neumann-cum-hacked-on-parallelis m of distributed computing systems.
(Attention 13 year olds: cum is latin for "with." It's an expression. You can stop giggling now.)
Your rabidly moderate position is radically neutral and fanatically level-headed! It's that kind of zealous commitment to dispassionate consideration that will cause us to wildly err on the side of fervent caution! You sir, are an extremist in your moderation!
1) My gym has TVs in front of treadmills with FM broadcast of the audio portion. I'd like to run while I watch. Also, listening to NPR while I walk across campus wouldn't be bad from time to time.
2) While I don't need or use it, using mp3 players as audio recorders for lectures, concerts, note taking is an extremely popular feature.
And, yeah, the kids like their clear channel crap and recording the same from radio and friend's CDs. And while these uses may be too pedestrian for you, it doesn't mean there aren't better ones, and that all of them would sell more ipods and bring them in line with what a personal media device ought to do.
Not in my estimation, no. Let me dispense with something immediately: I don't think copying is OK because *I* think something is too expensive, or *I* am morally offended by corporate practices, or any other rationale that justifies copying as a form of civil disobedience or protest. These reasons only underscore my thinking, but are not the basis for it.
crazy rationalizations about how downloading things that don't belong to you and that you didn't pay for isn't "stealing"
These things don't belong to me, true, but they do belong (in my book of ethics) to the person providing them (the file sharer). And the file sharer is providing them freely, and, I would argue, ought to be able to. I am receiving what they are offering.
I am not sneaking into their computer, or making an image surrepitiously--I am making an image of an image they are freely providing. And they, in turn, HAVE paid a consideration to the original creators by buying the thing from a retailer. Or if not them, then the person who freely provided THEM with the image may have, or the one before them, or whoever. The point is that the work was not swiped from the artist (in this example), but purchased, or bartered, or obtained by whatever agreement the two parties entered into. If the store says to have this CD you need to fork over $15, then fine, those are the terms, and to take it otherwise IS stealing. But notice that, likewise, at every point down the file sharing chain, the file sharer and file seeker are similarly freely entering into an agreement of transaction regarding something the sharer now controls.
I have no moral qualms with this arrangement whatsover. I know it's illegal, but not, in my book, immoral.
The key here is control. The artist surrenders control to the publisher. The publisher surrenders control, partially, to the consumer. The part they do not surrender is, at least according to the law, the right to distribute. But ought they be able to withhold that right? What does the consumer's consideration actually buy them? A license? (..and all attendant complications with that?) And why does the publisher's right of control trump the consumer's rights of control? And what happens when the publishers, in their efforts to retain control inadvertantly, impact other consumer rights, weakly called "fair use," but more broadly, what ought to be my right as a consumer to manipulate, transform, transfer or otherwise with something I bought?
None of this even touches the problems a sibling poster notes about the artificial creation of scarcity copyright protection produces, given that, yes, reproduction of information has vanishing marginal cost, and, shitty as it may be to you, there is not material deprivation of the producer (sorry, but it's true).
This is simply about control. Control of the product by the seller or buyer after a sale.
Slashdot Mirror
How small our stones have gotten, eh? :)
Speak for yourself, tiny.
Thanks, you're right. Useful link.
Wait, when was the last iBook released that didn't come with a built in optical drive that could read DVD-ROMs? When was "no optical drive" ever a choice? It think even the very first of the white ibooks had this functionality. Maybe you'd have to go back to the mult-colored toilet seat models to find one with an optical drive that doesn't read DVD-ROM.
Woah, woah woah! Wait a MINUTE. I know DAMN well what CVS is. It's where I get my drugz, man.
[mutter mutter call me stupid]
-End User.
Yes, Seagate drives are typically more expensive
Outpost.com is almost perpetually running $50 rebates on all manners of Seagate drives over the past few weeks. I'm not affiliated, but I grabbed one a while back, just thought I'd pass it on.
MPEG2 is used across the country for any real video work because it is basically uncompressed
What are you talking about? MPEG-2 video is usually compressed somewhere between 8:1 and 30:1. And nobody uses it for (serious) editing. Video is often distributed in MPEG-2 just because there is a very good quality to compression ratio. It's portable, and fits on DVDs because it's compressed.
Yeah right. You know that, late at night, when all the other coders have gone home, after the custodian has come by his office...he peeks out of his office to make sure the coast is clear...draws the blinds, locks the door...and he's dual booting, man, he's dual booting so hard. And it's wrong, but it feels so right.
Bill Hoffman? Or Bill Frenchman?
Cool nicknames? C'mon, you know his friends just call him "Poon."
The second one from the left is Silvano's wife.
D'OH!
Yeah, the kg is the basic unit in the m-kg-s SI system. It's silly, but it's true. Waaaay back in college, I remember my intro physics prof giving us this tip: Don't think of kg as a kilogram, think of it as its own unit--the "kug" he called. This way you're not tempted to think of the base units as their metric roots. (Please don't flame me with pedantic points about kilokugs and millikugs being wrong, everything ends up getting written in scientific notation anyway in intro physics, but the units needed to be SI)
Also, as for as the tautology of using Avogadro's number to define the "kug," given that Avogadro's number was itself derived on the basis of the kug...who cares? It's all arbitrary. The mass we've come to know and love as the kg has its own history, but is fundamentally an arbitrary mass. We're just trying to find a natural phenomenon to base this predetermined arbitrary quantity. Avogadro kind of already did the work for us.
What I didn't understand from the article is that the authors claim that the experimental work to establish with necessary precision this arbitrary quantity is not finished, but we should go ahead and convert the standard anyway now. Why? What's the rush? The platinum-iridium bar heading for the smelter sometime soon? Does anyone actually mass this thing for practical purposes ever? Scales and whatnots already have a standard mass programmed that's probably much less precise (but plenty precise enough) than the standard. This is all pro forma. What's the rush?
AWWW. Damn you. I actually did misread the caption, which in actuality reads:
...
Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web".
CERN Hard-onic festival?! Wha wha wha?!!!! I thought they were Swiss not Swedes...
But damn. The second one from the left..niiiice. Got that Susanna Hoffs thang going on.
Don't let this guy read any Slashdot comments in that case.
Found one, but it's not even available yet, and it's apparently a "first."
And FM receiver or FM transmitter for use in your car? I can find lots of transmitters, but I can't find a receiver with some perfunctory googling. Maybe you can point to one.
I don't know why the grandparent post was modded down. I also complained about no FM tuning on the iPod a while back and get modded down. iPod fans seem really sensitive about this. There still exist SOME great independent FM music stations, and I would like to listen to NPR, just like some want to listen to their AM talk radio stations. Plus, my gym transmits the audio portion of TVs set up in front of the stationary machinery over local FM. I would use this feature a lot more often than showing off or storing vacation photos.
This is an old, deep problem in computation. Just because our brains are so good at what they can do, doesn't mean we understand them well enough to go and implement it in hardware. The entire field of computational neuroscience exists just to figure out how a bunch of slow, noisy, messy computational units like neurons represent meaningful information. It's not fully understood. Rate codes, population codes, temporal codes, frequency codes (aka oscillatory synchrony)--there is a rich and ongoing debate on how the brain represents data. See Lytton's great text "From Computer to Brain" or Dayan and Abbot's more technical (and highly regarded) "Theoretical Neuroscience" for overviews.
s m of distributed computing systems.
But the main thing is, parallelization is great, but it comes with a big cost: Software has to be designed to be parallelized. And, while our brains operate in parallel, we THINK serially (more or less--this is an old debate in the field of cognitive psychology--the symbolic processing approach vs. the parallel distributed processing (neural network or subsymbolic) approach). And that's a big clue: it's just really hard to effectively parallelize a lot of problems. However, If you think about it, cluster computing, SMP, grid computing all take advantage of exactly what you're suggesting, just kind of at a different level. But there's a lot of overhead needed to make it efficient.
But there is a huge, huge gulf between the pure-parallel-cum-emergent-seriality of the brain, on the one hand, and the fundamentally-von-neumann-cum-hacked-on-paralleli
(Attention 13 year olds: cum is latin for "with." It's an expression. You can stop giggling now.)
Your rabidly moderate position is radically neutral and fanatically level-headed! It's that kind of zealous commitment to dispassionate consideration that will cause us to wildly err on the side of fervent caution! You sir, are an extremist in your moderation!
How dare you, sir! How dare you.
Seriously. This shit is so juvenile. It's nothing but a publicity ploy. I'd like bills to be acts of law not acts of public relations.
Dude! Panera rockz! My favorite? "Vulgar Display of Flour."
There's no factual certainty in current research.
Are you certain of this?
Well, that's what current research indicates anyway.
Mmmmmm....magic melon.
No cynic like an anonymous cynic, but here goes.
1) My gym has TVs in front of treadmills with FM broadcast of the audio portion. I'd like to run while I watch. Also, listening to NPR while I walk across campus wouldn't be bad from time to time.
2) While I don't need or use it, using mp3 players as audio recorders for lectures, concerts, note taking is an extremely popular feature.
And, yeah, the kids like their clear channel crap and recording the same from radio and friend's CDs. And while these uses may be too pedestrian for you, it doesn't mean there aren't better ones, and that all of them would sell more ipods and bring them in line with what a personal media device ought to do.
Satellite shmatellite. How about a damn FM tuner and recording to step up to the feature set of every other high end MP3 player?
It's a dirty, dirty acronym for among the foulest of slurs:
Motherchristfucker!
Which is what most people utter when they discover they have no way of decoding MXF.
Do I have that about right?
Not in my estimation, no. Let me dispense with something immediately: I don't think copying is OK because *I* think something is too expensive, or *I* am morally offended by corporate practices, or any other rationale that justifies copying as a form of civil disobedience or protest. These reasons only underscore my thinking, but are not the basis for it.
crazy rationalizations about how downloading things that don't belong to you and that you didn't pay for isn't "stealing"
These things don't belong to me, true, but they do belong (in my book of ethics) to the person providing them (the file sharer). And the file sharer is providing them freely, and, I would argue, ought to be able to. I am receiving what they are offering.
I am not sneaking into their computer, or making an image surrepitiously--I am making an image of an image they are freely providing. And they, in turn, HAVE paid a consideration to the original creators by buying the thing from a retailer. Or if not them, then the person who freely provided THEM with the image may have, or the one before them, or whoever. The point is that the work was not swiped from the artist (in this example), but purchased, or bartered, or obtained by whatever agreement the two parties entered into. If the store says to have this CD you need to fork over $15, then fine, those are the terms, and to take it otherwise IS stealing. But notice that, likewise, at every point down the file sharing chain, the file sharer and file seeker are similarly freely entering into an agreement of transaction regarding something the sharer now controls.
I have no moral qualms with this arrangement whatsover. I know it's illegal, but not, in my book, immoral.
The key here is control. The artist surrenders control to the publisher. The publisher surrenders control, partially, to the consumer. The part they do not surrender is, at least according to the law, the right to distribute. But ought they be able to withhold that right? What does the consumer's consideration actually buy them? A license? (..and all attendant complications with that?) And why does the publisher's right of control trump the consumer's rights of control? And what happens when the publishers, in their efforts to retain control inadvertantly, impact other consumer rights, weakly called "fair use," but more broadly, what ought to be my right as a consumer to manipulate, transform, transfer or otherwise with something I bought?
None of this even touches the problems a sibling poster notes about the artificial creation of scarcity copyright protection produces, given that, yes, reproduction of information has vanishing marginal cost, and, shitty as it may be to you, there is not material deprivation of the producer (sorry, but it's true).
This is simply about control. Control of the product by the seller or buyer after a sale.