For an example, compare advertising graphic design with contemporary fine art. Which do YOU find more enjoyable.
I relate what you said to "compare television commerical jingles with contemporary music." Contemporary fine art is generally expensive (or at least not free, right?)
Instead, try "compare free contemporary fine art with expensive contemporary fine art." I don't think most people could truly decide which they find more enjoyable, without some further qualifying factor. Something tells me there's not a large supply of really excellent and "free" or "very cheap" contemporary fine art out there (but having witnessed it in person, I know it exists).
I don't disagree with your main point; as a long-time hobby programmer (and a will-be career programmer when I'm done with school) and proponent of open source software, I think it stands to reason that creating something out of simple love for it (and having much pride in doing it well) can/will ultimately lead to a superior product.
Well, what we really need is, an open source search engine like you say, and maybe a philanthropist since the large collection of terabytes required to index the entire web would be quite expensive (and probably insufficient after some time). Then there's that bandwidth issue of being able to crawl the entire web fast enough to keep the index up to date as well as turn over hundreds if not tens of thousands of queries per second, and the clusters needed to search the index in tiny fractions of a second.
So maybe we need a clever alternative... something like a P2P web index? THAT would solve the bandwidth, storage and processing issues, if the network was designed for it. If we learned from FreeNet and developed a system that reasonably prevented users from interfering with search queries/results and cached information, it could be the answer...
I'm on the same page as you in terms of finding an alternative to Google's massive marketing empire. I really get the "too good to be true" vibe with that company. They're going to get too huge and greedy someday... think, thirty years from now, how many of the original good hearted Google employees will still be there? Who is going to inherit this massive pile of too much information on everything (particularly us) which was created on the "do no evil" honor system?
Sorry if I'm a little off topic. And I like Google, really; I use Google Earth and Froogle quite frequently, as well as their web search. I even have a bunch of little widget toys on my search page. But, the whole thing is starting to scare me as well.
I know that if I was a famous RIAA artist or MPAA actor, I wouldn't dare get a Pay Pal tip jar. I'd realize that I alone didn't just sing and dance and have my ferrari delivered the next day to drive off to my new beachfront mansion. Therefore, by encouraging my fans to pay me directly I would be discouraging them from paying all of the people who really made all of the success happen, with my singing & dancing only being the main feature that sold the product. Whether I like them or not, they made the difference between being a Friday night band at the cafe and being in every teenager's iPod in the country.
I'm pretty sure any **AA member would get their tip jar contracted into oblivion anyway (i.e. we get a hefty dividend, behind the curtain of course so as not to encourage piracy, or you get rid of the tip jar).
How about Jamba Juice? They walk around in circles and push buttons. They have digital, timed, $1000 Vita-Mix 93 speed blenders, juice mixers and dispensers, a thing that's bigger than I am that makes 2 gallons of OJ in 5 minutes, etc. The only manual part of the process is scooping sherbet and chunks of frozen fruit. They eyeball it, although the recipe calls for volume by weight. If Jamba didn't want the site-show of people scooping with two hands and flipping fruit spoodles around like a ninja, they could easily automate this too.
There is a small issue of chunky smoothies that need to be blended longer than the blender will by default, but this usually has to do with the temperature of the product and how level the scoops were - these can be precisely controlled with a little more investment and a little better equipment, again if Jamba wanted a more techno-ish robotic feel instead of the warm cheery feel.
Having everything automated like this means you get your $4 smoothie in 1:15 minutes flat most of the time, and a three year old can make the smoothies. If you have six people, one in each station including register, pour/serve and bus/dishes, you can easily sell 100 or more smoothies in an hour. That's $400 an hour in revenue with less than 15% of it going to labor. It doesn't get much better than that! Whether you spend the 15% on humans or on robot design, manufacture, maintenance and calibration, security, etc. is negligible.
Having a computer-based shift manager is not a big deal; it's all procedure. Now, instead of memorizing procedure, the shift manager reads the procedure. Their register is on a company-wide network which calculates all of their profits, labor projections, order and level pars, and makes their schedule based on historical sales. They still have the same job and do the same things, and the company still has to pay them. Somebody still has to count the product, compare it with the computer's projected counts, walk incandescently to the bank with yesterday's money, listen to the district manager whine about labor and variance, fire the kid smoking pot in the freezer, etc.
When you step on the cement block(s), you're moved farther away from the center of the earth....and closer to the center of the cement block. Distance is going to be a bigger factor in terms of the cement block's gravity vs. the Earth's; realtive to your mass & size, Earth is so many billions of orders of magnitude bigger than you; whereas ten or fifteen cement blocks might equal your mass and exceed your density (and Earth's, at the surface anyway).
A terrestrial mass only a couple of kilometers in diameter owns enough gravity to hold itself together, IIRC from astronomy. If you were to climb a 5km mountain in Colorado, you'd be in a bigger gravity field than if you were below sea level in Holland or something.
Really, standing on a cement block probably wouldn't produce a measureable increase in gravity for decades to come (until we have the ability to measure it that precisely). But I'm certain standing on something that's on top of Earth's surface does increase the gravity you're subject to, if it has a greater density than you and a greater or equal density as Earth.
The really intersting question to ponder is, how significant is a human's own gravitational field? If you jump up and down, does the earth measurably oscillate accordingly? What if everyone in Japan jumped up and down synchronously? Given how many people per sq. km. there are?
I own a Logitech Cordless MX Duo, which includes an MX700 wireless mouse with Internet buttons (forward/backward), as well as a wireless iTouch keyboard which has multimedia and Internet buttons everywhere. None of these buttons are recognized under Linux, with any of the distributions I've used (SuSE, Kubuntu, Gentoo, older RedHat (4.1+) and Slackware (3.0+)). I've had similar, older Logitech models with the same problem.
While I don't much use the 'Shopping' button under Windows, I do use the multimedia buttons quite heavily. Thus, one of the little things that was keeping me on Windows was not having the very easy and convenient volume control & player controls. I use my soundcard as a preamp/mixer for a fairly nice stereo system with limited volume control. I also use my PC for DVD playing, TV, gaming and recording my guitar, so these buttons are more than convenient.
Additionally, I could never get the Win key to behave exactly like it does under Windows.
So, after lots of scripts and man page viewing, and some KDE control panel fussing and ALSA documentation reading, I've got it all glued together. The post ended up being huge, so I turned it into a journal entry:
I hope somebody finds this useful; it was a little more than trivial to put it all together. I realize this is more a series of general Linux/X tricks, but KDE is involved; and you did ask for non-KDE tricks as well.
Hmm, I think I meant to reply to the parent poster, but was sidetracked by your true comment about Chiltons' manuals being mailcious and destructive. Sorry.:)
When writing a program, you don't look up the meaning of a command in three sources do you?
Regularly. And only then do I get a complete description, if not find an error in one.
When wiring a house, you don't check three different copies of the electrical code.
If one, even. Really, if there were multiple versions (not copies) released at the same time, of course I would look at all of them.
When working on your car, all you need is your Chilton's.
And that's exactly why my interior door panel on my old 1993 Grand Am held on for dear life by three screws. Sure it was my fault for not being gentle; but the factory shop manual, I discovered, had a full blown illustration and much more detailed procedure. Chiltons and Haynes both throw five models over ten years into one book, making it useless for anything but drivetrain work. They may as well cut the interior and body work out of their manuals entirely, along with much of the electrical and vacuum system stuff.
Again, if Pontiac made several publications with varying but similar information, I'd want all of them, and I did own both the Haynes and Chiltons manuals, occasionally referring to all of them.
The point is, you really can't trust any source of information unless you've personally witnessed the accuracy of the information (i.e. it's your research, etc.) Information comes from imperfect humans, and you simply can't trust that 100% (if 10% in some cases). That's fundamental, not practical; if it turns out most of the info you research is accurate enough for your needs, which happens most of the time, you'll be okay for the most part.
Wikipedia is ultimately more helpful than it is harmful, but if you choose to use it for a single source of information where it's critical that the information be accurate, you HAVE to double check the info at least, if not simply use it to acquire other sources. Reason: There's no blaming Wikipedia and holding them responsible for your embarassing and possibly consequential mistake in your work.
The finest audio quality I've ever heard came from a (very high dollar) modern turntable. The matching CD most definitely sounded tinny in comparison, even with a number of different CD components (one with a Sony chip, one with a Phillips chip, etc.). With the turntable, I thought I was listening to the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Before this, I thought turntables were for older people who were desperately attached to the equipment they grew up with and that CDs could match any reproducable sound.
Incidentally, MP3s recorded @ 320Kbps are indistinguishable from CDs to my ear, even on audiophile equipment. Again, I used to think otherwise, but a friend of mine actually tricked me into thinking I was listening to a Pink Floyd CD when in reality it was a high quality (320Kbps) MP3.
The trick is that not all MP3 encoders are alike, and a 320Kbps MP3 can take on many different levels of quality and accuracy; it will always supply the same amount of information, but if you take extra time while you're encoding it (setting the quality factor all the way up, depending on your encoder) the information can be much more accurate. Even 128Kbps MP3s lose their "watery" effect and sound okay when encoded with a high quality factor (although nobody ever does this, in my experience).
But the most pleasing sounds I've ever heard were actually in movies; I didn't know my basement could sound like a movie theater until I watched the Matrix one day when nobody was home at a rather high volume. And I don't by any means have audiophile equipment; I have a Carver M400 cube amp on my front channels on my PC with Advent B2R towers (I have been very pleased with that amp and those speakers); then I have a Sony stereo receiver with cheap Aiwa bookshelf speakers on the rear channels. Good old 4.0 surround.
Actually, it's been in the works for almost 40 years... they're just not done yet.
It will require consumer-level storage capacity to increase on an order of terabytes, when it's eventually complete, as well as a new category number in the/usr/man directory.
It still won't include anything about women after 1968; a low-cost patch dvd set is planned at a later date...
You're kind of forgetting a few (bigger) key examples; Linux and the GNU toolset were both "experiments" (that were created by people who weren't terribly rich).
So was DOS, most pre-1996 PC video games like Wolfenstein 3D and SimCity, and lots of other successful software (let alone everything outside of the software domain that was originally an "experiment").
Not being rich doesn't mean you can't experiment; it just means you have to figure out how to experiment with someone else's money, or carry out your experiment over a longer time. Both of which can lead to getting rich.
...even if this meteor was "substantially bigger" than the 200-pound record holder, I find it extremely hard to believe that it would do even a miniscule fraction of the what the A-bomb did.
In 1980, Mt. St. Helens caused the largest landslide in history... then proceeded to level everything within many miles. Trees brushed over like toothpicks... valleys buried to hundreds of feet in ejecta and ash... it blew the entire north slope of the mountain away.
It had the force of 27,000 atomic bombs like the one dropped on Hiroshima (source). It managed to kill all of 57 people.
Please note that energy != destruction. If this meteorite crashed into Hiroshima, depending on the circumstances, the energy released on impact could have the potential to level the entire city and kill over 100,000 people.
And if Mt. St. helens was located in the right spot in Japan, it could have taken out FAR more than this (think millions).
"With all due respect, that's pure utter rubbish. ATT System V UNIX for the 386 PC's WERE binary compatible."
Please quote my use of Intel or the X86 architecture in my original post. I referred to Peachtree accounting, which was first released in 1976 and is still made today (although not by Peachtree Software). There was no SVR4, nor a 386 in 1976. There wasn't even System III (or System I for that matter) in 1976.
"The OP claimed that there wasn't binary compatibility on 12 or so platforms. That's pure nonsense. AT&T and Intel made certain that there was."
Sun was AT&T's partner there... yet, Solaris X86 code doesn't run on Solaris SPARC, does it? Please try to explain how AT&T ensured that UNIX only ran on 386's. I'm dying to know. Not to mention X86 didn't exist in the period of time to which I'm referring. SVR4 didn't define an assembly language; it included the definition of ELF, but that's just a format for storing machine code.
For fun, here's some architectures which have run a major, authentic UNIX release:
DEC/VAX (UNIX/V32)
DEC/Alpha (Digital UNIX)
Motorola 68000 (A/UX, others)
PA-RISC (Solaris, HP-UX, others)
Sparc (Solaris)
Prism (HP-UX)
MIPS (Irix)
IBM System/370 and cousins (AIX, z/OS)
RS-6000/Power PC (AIX)
X86 (Xenix, SCO, Solaris, many others)
Are any of these binary compatible? Nope! And this is far from some kind of exhaustive list by any means; there are plenty of variations, succesors, etc. to these, plus entirely different architectures altogether that have run UNIX, even before 1990. Think of all the UNIX mainframes and workstations that have come out since the late 60s/early 70s. Think of the many UNIX "standards" (go look up "UNIX wars" on Google or something).
Did you even read my post? There was a reason they used to sell software in source code form. Old UNIX's even used to come with their source code, and architecture-porting was one of the reasons why; that's how BSD started. Go figure out what you're talking about, and uncheck that AC box.
Well, I'm no expert on source code licensing, but I always take OSS to be the 'free' kind (like Linux). The word 'open' kind of has an up-in-the-air meaning these days, like with Open*L or OpenSuSE, both of which are 'Open' in a 'Free' kind of way. I look at Java as a pay-for product that comes with the source code (like many smaller libraries and applications), except that the product costs $0.00 and thus you can have it and the source code for nothing.
But if what you say is politically/semantically correct or whatever, I can appreciate that and stand corrected.:)
I enjoy scrolling up and down 15,000 line source code files as much as the next guy. That's why it's so much fun to look at the GCC sources.
Occasionally, it's actually useful to see how someone implemented something, for educational purposes.
But can I modify it, make it work on my new OS and processor and sell it without paying royalties? Maybe, distribute it under the GPL so it can come with FOS OS' in a truly free sense?
Having source code isn't everything. Back in the old days, there was always source code for everything; UNIX on any of twelve or so different platforms wasn't binary compatible, but source compatible. So if you wanted to make a program and sell it, like PeachTree (yeah it's that old), you HAD to distribute the source code. Otherwise, you'd either have to distribute dozens of different binaries or stick with a single platform, which wasn't profitable.
It was copyright infringement to make money by changing the code and selling it... and you couldn't give any of it away to someone who didn't have a license to it. And even if you did make modifications, you couldn't use them when the next release came out unless you ported them over each time.
There's a difference between something being OpenSource and just having the source. Even if it's a free product like Java.
What can you legally do with it? What separates it from being truly open source? I'd read the article, but it seems/.'d at the moment.
I put SuSE on my laptop a while back; you can go from having a blank hard drive and install SuSE without rebooting once. You install it, and when you're done, you log in and start using it.
It's easier to install than Windows, and if you're a business and you purchase SuSE, you get more for your money in every way...
But, I didn't use SuSE until it was owned by Novell, so... what's missing?
You know those X-Ray things that your laptop has to go through at airport security?
Have you ever seen a CD/DVD in the microwave? I realize it's a different energy... but I'll bet that a case of 1000s of DVDs is going to look suspcious enough on X-Ray to give them a perfectly legit reason to open the case; that is, if they can't immediately tell that they're DVDs.
Sorry, I don't know any facts here... they do use X-Ray on international FedEx packages, don't they? Wouldn't a DVD show up on it?
To be perfectly honest, I've never heard of these giant pirating rings in the US. That doesn't mean they're not there, but... it seems like the MPAA is trying to get the public to associate pirating with the same subcutlure as drugs. Everyone's nailed the coffin shut on the practicality with this. Why else would they resort to being so eccentric? Desperate, even.
And think of the poor dogs! Instead of enjoying the good life being someone's pet, or saving peoples' lives, or being attack hounds, they catch... movie bootleggers. What a life! Hehe.
The only thing that distinguishes "this" smiley face from any three year old's smiley face is the color yellow.
Does the "obvious" thing apply to trademarks? It's just too simple. It's been used too many times before. It's even on license plates.
I know this face from the "have a day" poster; it has dozens of variations of the face with labels like "have a silly day" or "have a cold day".
There's a reason it was in Forrest Gump, and there's a reason someone made a whole poster out of this smiley face; everybody knows that yellow smiley face (from somewhere).
Now, let me see if I get this straight. Some French guy comes along and threatens to trademark the smiley. I guess this implies that he wanted Wal-Mart to quit using it? Wal-Mart hadn't even moved to trademark it until he came along, right?
Slashdot Mirror
For an example, compare advertising graphic design with contemporary fine art. Which do YOU find more enjoyable.
I relate what you said to "compare television commerical jingles with contemporary music." Contemporary fine art is generally expensive (or at least not free, right?)
Instead, try "compare free contemporary fine art with expensive contemporary fine art." I don't think most people could truly decide which they find more enjoyable, without some further qualifying factor. Something tells me there's not a large supply of really excellent and "free" or "very cheap" contemporary fine art out there (but having witnessed it in person, I know it exists).
I don't disagree with your main point; as a long-time hobby programmer (and a will-be career programmer when I'm done with school) and proponent of open source software, I think it stands to reason that creating something out of simple love for it (and having much pride in doing it well) can/will ultimately lead to a superior product.
Well, what we really need is, an open source search engine like you say, and maybe a philanthropist since the large collection of terabytes required to index the entire web would be quite expensive (and probably insufficient after some time). Then there's that bandwidth issue of being able to crawl the entire web fast enough to keep the index up to date as well as turn over hundreds if not tens of thousands of queries per second, and the clusters needed to search the index in tiny fractions of a second.
So maybe we need a clever alternative... something like a P2P web index? THAT would solve the bandwidth, storage and processing issues, if the network was designed for it. If we learned from FreeNet and developed a system that reasonably prevented users from interfering with search queries/results and cached information, it could be the answer...
I'm on the same page as you in terms of finding an alternative to Google's massive marketing empire. I really get the "too good to be true" vibe with that company. They're going to get too huge and greedy someday... think, thirty years from now, how many of the original good hearted Google employees will still be there? Who is going to inherit this massive pile of too much information on everything (particularly us) which was created on the "do no evil" honor system?
Sorry if I'm a little off topic. And I like Google, really; I use Google Earth and Froogle quite frequently, as well as their web search. I even have a bunch of little widget toys on my search page. But, the whole thing is starting to scare me as well.
Seriously.
I know that if I was a famous RIAA artist or MPAA actor, I wouldn't dare get a Pay Pal tip jar. I'd realize that I alone didn't just sing and dance and have my ferrari delivered the next day to drive off to my new beachfront mansion. Therefore, by encouraging my fans to pay me directly I would be discouraging them from paying all of the people who really made all of the success happen, with my singing & dancing only being the main feature that sold the product. Whether I like them or not, they made the difference between being a Friday night band at the cafe and being in every teenager's iPod in the country.
I'm pretty sure any **AA member would get their tip jar contracted into oblivion anyway (i.e. we get a hefty dividend, behind the curtain of course so as not to encourage piracy, or you get rid of the tip jar).
LOL That would be appetizing.
Jamba uses plastic, two-sided spoodles to scoop their frozen fruit. I suppose a "spoodle" is a cross between a spoon and a ladle.
I'll suggest your poodle idea the next time I stop in.
How about Jamba Juice? They walk around in circles and push buttons. They have digital, timed, $1000 Vita-Mix 93 speed blenders, juice mixers and dispensers, a thing that's bigger than I am that makes 2 gallons of OJ in 5 minutes, etc. The only manual part of the process is scooping sherbet and chunks of frozen fruit. They eyeball it, although the recipe calls for volume by weight. If Jamba didn't want the site-show of people scooping with two hands and flipping fruit spoodles around like a ninja, they could easily automate this too.
There is a small issue of chunky smoothies that need to be blended longer than the blender will by default, but this usually has to do with the temperature of the product and how level the scoops were - these can be precisely controlled with a little more investment and a little better equipment, again if Jamba wanted a more techno-ish robotic feel instead of the warm cheery feel.
Having everything automated like this means you get your $4 smoothie in 1:15 minutes flat most of the time, and a three year old can make the smoothies. If you have six people, one in each station including register, pour/serve and bus/dishes, you can easily sell 100 or more smoothies in an hour. That's $400 an hour in revenue with less than 15% of it going to labor. It doesn't get much better than that! Whether you spend the 15% on humans or on robot design, manufacture, maintenance and calibration, security, etc. is negligible.
Having a computer-based shift manager is not a big deal; it's all procedure. Now, instead of memorizing procedure, the shift manager reads the procedure. Their register is on a company-wide network which calculates all of their profits, labor projections, order and level pars, and makes their schedule based on historical sales. They still have the same job and do the same things, and the company still has to pay them. Somebody still has to count the product, compare it with the computer's projected counts, walk incandescently to the bank with yesterday's money, listen to the district manager whine about labor and variance, fire the kid smoking pot in the freezer, etc.
This story should be tagged "duh".
When you step on the cement block(s), you're moved farther away from the center of the earth. ...and closer to the center of the cement block. Distance is going to be a bigger factor in terms of the cement block's gravity vs. the Earth's; realtive to your mass & size, Earth is so many billions of orders of magnitude bigger than you; whereas ten or fifteen cement blocks might equal your mass and exceed your density (and Earth's, at the surface anyway).
A terrestrial mass only a couple of kilometers in diameter owns enough gravity to hold itself together, IIRC from astronomy. If you were to climb a 5km mountain in Colorado, you'd be in a bigger gravity field than if you were below sea level in Holland or something.
Really, standing on a cement block probably wouldn't produce a measureable increase in gravity for decades to come (until we have the ability to measure it that precisely). But I'm certain standing on something that's on top of Earth's surface does increase the gravity you're subject to, if it has a greater density than you and a greater or equal density as Earth.
The really intersting question to ponder is, how significant is a human's own gravitational field? If you jump up and down, does the earth measurably oscillate accordingly? What if everyone in Japan jumped up and down synchronously? Given how many people per sq. km. there are?
I own a Logitech Cordless MX Duo, which includes an MX700 wireless mouse with Internet buttons (forward/backward), as well as a wireless iTouch keyboard which has multimedia and Internet buttons everywhere. None of these buttons are recognized under Linux, with any of the distributions I've used (SuSE, Kubuntu, Gentoo, older RedHat (4.1+) and Slackware (3.0+)). I've had similar, older Logitech models with the same problem.
While I don't much use the 'Shopping' button under Windows, I do use the multimedia buttons quite heavily. Thus, one of the little things that was keeping me on Windows was not having the very easy and convenient volume control & player controls. I use my soundcard as a preamp/mixer for a fairly nice stereo system with limited volume control. I also use my PC for DVD playing, TV, gaming and recording my guitar, so these buttons are more than convenient.
Additionally, I could never get the Win key to behave exactly like it does under Windows.
So, after lots of scripts and man page viewing, and some KDE control panel fussing and ALSA documentation reading, I've got it all glued together. The post ended up being huge, so I turned it into a journal entry:
X/KDE/ALSA Trick.
I hope somebody finds this useful; it was a little more than trivial to put it all together. I realize this is more a series of general Linux/X tricks, but KDE is involved; and you did ask for non-KDE tricks as well.
gameforge
Hmm, I think I meant to reply to the parent poster, but was sidetracked by your true comment about Chiltons' manuals being mailcious and destructive. Sorry. :)
Glad I included the OP's text...
When writing a program, you don't look up the meaning of a command in three sources do you?
Regularly. And only then do I get a complete description, if not find an error in one.
When wiring a house, you don't check three different copies of the electrical code.
If one, even. Really, if there were multiple versions (not copies) released at the same time, of course I would look at all of them.
When working on your car, all you need is your Chilton's.
And that's exactly why my interior door panel on my old 1993 Grand Am held on for dear life by three screws. Sure it was my fault for not being gentle; but the factory shop manual, I discovered, had a full blown illustration and much more detailed procedure. Chiltons and Haynes both throw five models over ten years into one book, making it useless for anything but drivetrain work. They may as well cut the interior and body work out of their manuals entirely, along with much of the electrical and vacuum system stuff.
Again, if Pontiac made several publications with varying but similar information, I'd want all of them, and I did own both the Haynes and Chiltons manuals, occasionally referring to all of them.
The point is, you really can't trust any source of information unless you've personally witnessed the accuracy of the information (i.e. it's your research, etc.) Information comes from imperfect humans, and you simply can't trust that 100% (if 10% in some cases). That's fundamental, not practical; if it turns out most of the info you research is accurate enough for your needs, which happens most of the time, you'll be okay for the most part.
Wikipedia is ultimately more helpful than it is harmful, but if you choose to use it for a single source of information where it's critical that the information be accurate, you HAVE to double check the info at least, if not simply use it to acquire other sources. Reason: There's no blaming Wikipedia and holding them responsible for your embarassing and possibly consequential mistake in your work.
You don't think CDs are either then, I presume?
The finest audio quality I've ever heard came from a (very high dollar) modern turntable. The matching CD most definitely sounded tinny in comparison, even with a number of different CD components (one with a Sony chip, one with a Phillips chip, etc.). With the turntable, I thought I was listening to the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. Before this, I thought turntables were for older people who were desperately attached to the equipment they grew up with and that CDs could match any reproducable sound.
Incidentally, MP3s recorded @ 320Kbps are indistinguishable from CDs to my ear, even on audiophile equipment. Again, I used to think otherwise, but a friend of mine actually tricked me into thinking I was listening to a Pink Floyd CD when in reality it was a high quality (320Kbps) MP3.
The trick is that not all MP3 encoders are alike, and a 320Kbps MP3 can take on many different levels of quality and accuracy; it will always supply the same amount of information, but if you take extra time while you're encoding it (setting the quality factor all the way up, depending on your encoder) the information can be much more accurate. Even 128Kbps MP3s lose their "watery" effect and sound okay when encoded with a high quality factor (although nobody ever does this, in my experience).
But the most pleasing sounds I've ever heard were actually in movies; I didn't know my basement could sound like a movie theater until I watched the Matrix one day when nobody was home at a rather high volume. And I don't by any means have audiophile equipment; I have a Carver M400 cube amp on my front channels on my PC with Advent B2R towers (I have been very pleased with that amp and those speakers); then I have a Sony stereo receiver with cheap Aiwa bookshelf speakers on the rear channels. Good old 4.0 surround.
> > create a second big bang that will obliterate the universe. (yes, some people actually worry about that)
> There is a Visine for that!
Yeah but...can you hear me now?
Actually, it's been in the works for almost 40 years... they're just not done yet.
/usr/man directory.
It will require consumer-level storage capacity to increase on an order of terabytes, when it's eventually complete, as well as a new category number in the
It still won't include anything about women after 1968; a low-cost patch dvd set is planned at a later date...
You of course made a backup of it for your own perusing, didn't you? Hehehe.
You're kind of forgetting a few (bigger) key examples; Linux and the GNU toolset were both "experiments" (that were created by people who weren't terribly rich).
So was DOS, most pre-1996 PC video games like Wolfenstein 3D and SimCity, and lots of other successful software (let alone everything outside of the software domain that was originally an "experiment").
Not being rich doesn't mean you can't experiment; it just means you have to figure out how to experiment with someone else's money, or carry out your experiment over a longer time. Both of which can lead to getting rich.
Sorry. I was having a moment. :)
You're certainly correct.
In 1980, Mt. St. Helens caused the largest landslide in history... then proceeded to level everything within many miles. Trees brushed over like toothpicks... valleys buried to hundreds of feet in ejecta and ash... it blew the entire north slope of the mountain away.
It had the force of 27,000 atomic bombs like the one dropped on Hiroshima (source). It managed to kill all of 57 people.
Please note that energy != destruction. If this meteorite crashed into Hiroshima, depending on the circumstances, the energy released on impact could have the potential to level the entire city and kill over 100,000 people.
And if Mt. St. helens was located in the right spot in Japan, it could have taken out FAR more than this (think millions).
Now THAT'S funny.
"Yet, I'd still have to wipe my own ass ?"
You may be the first person to suggest the iBidet.
Please quote my use of Intel or the X86 architecture in my original post. I referred to Peachtree accounting, which was first released in 1976 and is still made today (although not by Peachtree Software). There was no SVR4, nor a 386 in 1976. There wasn't even System III (or System I for that matter) in 1976.
"The OP claimed that there wasn't binary compatibility on 12 or so platforms. That's pure nonsense. AT&T and Intel made certain that there was."
Sun was AT&T's partner there... yet, Solaris X86 code doesn't run on Solaris SPARC, does it? Please try to explain how AT&T ensured that UNIX only ran on 386's. I'm dying to know. Not to mention X86 didn't exist in the period of time to which I'm referring. SVR4 didn't define an assembly language; it included the definition of ELF, but that's just a format for storing machine code.
For fun, here's some architectures which have run a major, authentic UNIX release:
Are any of these binary compatible? Nope! And this is far from some kind of exhaustive list by any means; there are plenty of variations, succesors, etc. to these, plus entirely different architectures altogether that have run UNIX, even before 1990. Think of all the UNIX mainframes and workstations that have come out since the late 60s/early 70s. Think of the many UNIX "standards" (go look up "UNIX wars" on Google or something).
Did you even read my post? There was a reason they used to sell software in source code form. Old UNIX's even used to come with their source code, and architecture-porting was one of the reasons why; that's how BSD started. Go figure out what you're talking about, and uncheck that AC box.
Well, I'm no expert on source code licensing, but I always take OSS to be the 'free' kind (like Linux). The word 'open' kind of has an up-in-the-air meaning these days, like with Open*L or OpenSuSE, both of which are 'Open' in a 'Free' kind of way. I look at Java as a pay-for product that comes with the source code (like many smaller libraries and applications), except that the product costs $0.00 and thus you can have it and the source code for nothing.
:)
But if what you say is politically/semantically correct or whatever, I can appreciate that and stand corrected.
I enjoy scrolling up and down 15,000 line source code files as much as the next guy. That's why it's so much fun to look at the GCC sources.
/.'d at the moment.
Occasionally, it's actually useful to see how someone implemented something, for educational purposes.
But can I modify it, make it work on my new OS and processor and sell it without paying royalties? Maybe, distribute it under the GPL so it can come with FOS OS' in a truly free sense?
Having source code isn't everything. Back in the old days, there was always source code for everything; UNIX on any of twelve or so different platforms wasn't binary compatible, but source compatible. So if you wanted to make a program and sell it, like PeachTree (yeah it's that old), you HAD to distribute the source code. Otherwise, you'd either have to distribute dozens of different binaries or stick with a single platform, which wasn't profitable.
It was copyright infringement to make money by changing the code and selling it... and you couldn't give any of it away to someone who didn't have a license to it. And even if you did make modifications, you couldn't use them when the next release came out unless you ported them over each time.
There's a difference between something being OpenSource and just having the source. Even if it's a free product like Java.
What can you legally do with it? What separates it from being truly open source? I'd read the article, but it seems
What's missing from the old SuSE?
I put SuSE on my laptop a while back; you can go from having a blank hard drive and install SuSE without rebooting once. You install it, and when you're done, you log in and start using it.
It's easier to install than Windows, and if you're a business and you purchase SuSE, you get more for your money in every way...
But, I didn't use SuSE until it was owned by Novell, so... what's missing?
You know those X-Ray things that your laptop has to go through at airport security?
Have you ever seen a CD/DVD in the microwave? I realize it's a different energy... but I'll bet that a case of 1000s of DVDs is going to look suspcious enough on X-Ray to give them a perfectly legit reason to open the case; that is, if they can't immediately tell that they're DVDs.
Sorry, I don't know any facts here... they do use X-Ray on international FedEx packages, don't they? Wouldn't a DVD show up on it?
To be perfectly honest, I've never heard of these giant pirating rings in the US. That doesn't mean they're not there, but... it seems like the MPAA is trying to get the public to associate pirating with the same subcutlure as drugs. Everyone's nailed the coffin shut on the practicality with this. Why else would they resort to being so eccentric? Desperate, even.
And think of the poor dogs! Instead of enjoying the good life being someone's pet, or saving peoples' lives, or being attack hounds, they catch... movie bootleggers. What a life! Hehe.
The only thing that distinguishes "this" smiley face from any three year old's smiley face is the color yellow.
Does the "obvious" thing apply to trademarks? It's just too simple. It's been used too many times before. It's even on license plates.
I know this face from the "have a day" poster; it has dozens of variations of the face with labels like "have a silly day" or "have a cold day".
There's a reason it was in Forrest Gump, and there's a reason someone made a whole poster out of this smiley face; everybody knows that yellow smiley face (from somewhere).
Now, let me see if I get this straight. Some French guy comes along and threatens to trademark the smiley. I guess this implies that he wanted Wal-Mart to quit using it? Wal-Mart hadn't even moved to trademark it until he came along, right?
Wal-Mart didn't do anything wrong. I'm shocked.