What about independent electronic musicians like myself, who want to produce refined albums and be able to sell them, either as a cd or as an online digital download. Would selling a zip of FLAC or MP3 files on my website for a nice low price even work out these days or in the future? If someone could easily throw those on a torrent site, would people still buy them enough to generate some kind of living? I doubt it, as I've talked to some fantastic independent musicians who've made wonderful albums but have struggled making any more than just some extra pocket change on places like CDBaby. If all musicians are supposed to play live to make a living in the future, it reduces the chance of artists making any career in producing/selling independent electronic music albums. Just wanted to share that viewpoint!
Excuse me? All he implied was (jokingly) that Christians don't make much sense. And you are not making sense here with your defensive comments either, blowing a funny comment out of proportion.
That's if you never accelerate once in space. Also, there's the Bussard ramjet idea, which could point to a solution to interstellar travel in the future.
Indeed, this news is joy for any webdesigner. I stopped testing against IE6 a little while ago and I'm glad to see it go. IE7 still has many of its rendering issues, but IE8 is a truly solid, solid browser. The first browser from Microsoft I could call a quality product. They even made it possible to debug IE7 bugs with compatibility mode and the developer tools in IE8. Great work Microsoft - killing IE6 in a single shot. Keep doing stuff like this M$, and you may just earn back some credibility:)
I'm not sure about it being as easy. I recently decided to try Ubuntu as a home theater pc system. After about 3 days of searching through forums and talking on IRC, modifying config files, running console commands, and editing settings that should be defaults, I finally managed to get it to play surround sound properly and play video. Average Joe probably wouldn't have gotten to this point, but OK if it worked after that, I'd be happy. Unfortunately the various video player applications I tried randomly quit to desktop every once in a while, and this happened often enough that I was fed up after a couple of weeks.
Formatted, installed Windows XP, and an hour later the system was ready and worked perfectly.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and feel somewhat crippled when I don't have the command prompt & various tools, but it's far from being a solid, easy to use OS for home purposes at this point. Not to mention the lack of all the simple 'home' applications that Windows has - I know that's not the fault of the OS, but still is a problem.
Anyways, if Ubuntu is supposed to be so easy for home use, why should it take even a geek like me hours, days, to get it working for home theater use? Why aren't there better defaults set? Why do you have to go into the console to edit some simple settings or do a surround sound test?
Apparently a webcam recording of improv on that theme, in a YouTube video with a couple hundred views threatens their company somehow. I'd send them a counter notice, but apparently I'd be "subject to liability" and "under penalty of perjury" if I was wrong ( http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=59826 ), so I gave up. I imagine most people in my situation would do the same instead of dealing with the hassle and risk, and thus we can arrive almost at a form of odd.. censorship ?
I got sent a YouTube infringement/takedown notice for posting a video of me improvising on the theme of "Summertime" on my midi keyboard. Is using the chord structure of a popular song and playing an original improv on it really infringing copyright?
But the problem is that it's usually quite a pain to develop a game (or any other real-time application) using the over-hacked, buggy collection of plugins and Javascript frameworks that work differently in every single browser. Even when using the most successful Javascript frameworks that compensate for browser inconsistencies, developers commonly run into absurd bugs and problems and spend much effort working around them.
Flash, for the most part, runs 100% identically whether it's running on FF3/IE6/IE7/IE Mobile/Safari/Opera/etc.. There are a few minor inconsistencies dealing with embedding and HTTP requests, but in general a developer can sleep easy and focus on his code instead of dealing with the horrible mess of browser and OS problems. Actionscript 3 is also a great language to work with. It allows relative beginners to use the integrated graphics, sound, and animation facilities, while providing a good OOP and Event architecture that lets you create complex structured applications and games. There are 3d engines built using classes that allow access to lower level rendering -- try doing something on the level of Away3d with JS?
The Xbox 360 and Dreamcast are not exactly failures. Sure, the Dreamcast didn't penetrate the market as well as it should have. That doesn't prevent it from being a great product that still sold (until the PS2 problem). And the 360, well, considering that it's the only modern console i'd ever think of buying these days (although I am probably just going to stick with my trusty PC) I would consider it a massive success.
The fact that this study shows results similar to what I have been experiencing myself is interesting.
I am a Type 1 Diabetic using an insulin pump, a device which continually pumps a steady (x units/hr) dosage of insulin to me throughout the day but does not automatically react to changes in my blood sugar like a working pancreas would. Since I keep a lifestyle which maintains my sugar levels at the most stable level possible, I have the opportunity to see how various things affect my blood glucose levels, making them deviate from their controlled state. I have been finding that intense brainstorming sessions and work meetings where I am very active always cause my blood sugar levels to plummet. Despite the fact that I am doing no physical exercise at the time, mental effort seems to eat up a lot of sugar. Low blood sugar increases appetite, and perhaps this is why people eat more when they think hard.
Indeed, I'm on Shaw's Xtreme-I service here in BC, and I get 100GB down for the somewhat substantial price I pay for it.
Considering I highly prefer using digital download services like Steam for my computer games, and that many software providers these days are starting to offer their software as digital downloads, any legitimate user can run through that limit quite fast. I purchased a product from kirkhunterstudios.com, and after downloading it (and having to redownload a couple of broken pieces), I had almost used up my quota for the entire month. When we see more and more products, games, hd podcasts, os distros, and other types of digital media being provided as digital download services, when will internet providers start increasing the cap limits?
US users getting 250 GB for the entry level service is quite nice, and hopefully Comcast's higher tier internet services allow more. Disclosing the cap amounts could also allow for competition between ISPs that would achieve the goal of improving the internet.. though with internet providers having near-monopolies in North America it makes you wonder if that will ever happen.
Capcom just released Bionic Commando Rearmed for $15 on their site. I saw the trailer, thought to myself "damn, I really want this...", opened the Capcom website and saw their digital download. 10 minutes later I'm happily playing the game. If more companies did this with larger retail games, I would happily buy a lot of their products. Steam is another good example, but they do need to improve their download speeds, in my opinion. You need to appeal to the "I want it -right now-" psychology and you'll get a lot of customers.
I use the "oldbar" Add-on that restores the look of the firefox 2 address bar. I actually prefer having the new text searching in the address bar.. for example to open this article again all I had to do was type "fire nag" and this article was the first result. Otherwise with the old address bar I'd have to type at least "tech.slash" and then scroll through pages of old slashdot results to find it.
Interesting.
I've always thought that the best game bot would be a piece of hardware that connects to the monitor output of the graphics card and into a USB port, acting as a mouse/keyboard. It could send the image data to some AI-like software which basically plays the game for you as any human would..
Opens a whole other can of worms. Robot AI's should be able to enjoy playing games too !!
I think many people are quick to close their minds once they decide on their preferred world view (reality tunnel).
Lets pretend we had knowledge of all the exact laws and constants that govern the way our universe ticks. We might then develop a piece of software that would simulate all of these laws in a virtual universe. Generate a whole bunch of atoms (perhaps on a smaller scale than our universe because of memory limitations (though we don't know our universe yet to be sure)) and hit Run (perhaps at a fraction of true speed because of computation limits, speed of light etc, though again: we don't know enough about our universe and physics yet to be certain of this need). Wouldn't we then not be considered gods of this simulated universe? Could we not step in and modify the simulation to move atoms around or speed certain developments up to our preference? If forms of 'life' developed in our simulated universe, I don't see why we couldn't run some code that would affect virtual atoms in a way that seemed (rightly) supernatural to these virtual denizens.
Perhaps Christianity or other religions are actual records of such supernatural influence. Or perhaps our universe was born billions of years ago and life grew out of terribly convenient positions of atoms resulting in primitive analog machines that (by surprising luck) formed in a design that could replicate and become more complex. There are endless other possibilities.
What if we invented a technology that could take a record of all matter and energy in a particular moment.. say, a snapshot of all matter and energy (and whatever other variables we don't know about) in our galaxy. If we could then convert this information into a form that could be fed into our simulated universe, we then have a copy of the Milky Way galaxy that you could argue was 'created' without any complex evolutionary processes.
Just wanted to share these simple perspectives to say, maybe claiming certain atheist views while scoffing at religion is hypocritical in a sense?
Bah, lucky you. I was stuck with the internal PC speaker. Played through all of Doom and Doom II hearing those synthesized representations of monster noises and weapon sounds. Now when I play old games on a modern computer, I still have to turn on the PC speaker audio mode to bring back the chills and nostalgia.
I remember one shareware pinball game for DOS which used the PC speaker so well that it shocked me when I first played the game. Instead of beeps and simplistic noises, the game used the PC speaker to play actual wave data, including REAL music and sound effects. I was quite amazed at the time that my computer could actually produce semi-realistic sounds without a sound card. Mind you, it was still relatively low bit and no comparison to a Sound Blaster.
Proverbs 23:13-14: "Withold not discipline from the child, for if you strike and punish him with the rod, he will not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell."
Some insightful 2000 year old advice. Though the 'rod' bit sounds a tad harsh, I must admit.
I think the issue here is that people enjoy 'jumping onto a bandwagon', regardless of what bandwagon that is, really. People like feelings of solidarity, nationalism, and group-supported behaviour that perhaps they may be lacking in their lives. It seems the CoS and Anonymous share similarities in this respect.
I honestly don't believe many of the Anonymous protesters have originally had any personal beefs with Scientology. The motivation of joining the pack, and the opportunity to think less but feel important, is probably the driving factor behind this 'War on Scientology'.
That last sentence made me wonder.. Would there be any chance of a small asteroid (one that could cause some problems) currently heading for earth not be detected yet by scientists?
Another fantastic example of this is Emil Gilels playing Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtuMVBLEWJU ). You simply don't see that at all in the score (hell, it says pp in the dynamics.. but that doesn't account for the melody line) I've heard many western pianists ignore that completely and follow the score resulting in a bland muddy rendering. Even Rachmaninoff himself didn't follow the dynamics shown on the score. The music is meant to be interpreted.
Slashdot Mirror
What about independent electronic musicians like myself, who want to produce refined albums and be able to sell them, either as a cd or as an online digital download. Would selling a zip of FLAC or MP3 files on my website for a nice low price even work out these days or in the future? If someone could easily throw those on a torrent site, would people still buy them enough to generate some kind of living? I doubt it, as I've talked to some fantastic independent musicians who've made wonderful albums but have struggled making any more than just some extra pocket change on places like CDBaby. If all musicians are supposed to play live to make a living in the future, it reduces the chance of artists making any career in producing/selling independent electronic music albums. Just wanted to share that viewpoint!
Excuse me? All he implied was (jokingly) that Christians don't make much sense. And you are not making sense here with your defensive comments either, blowing a funny comment out of proportion.
Peter Wiggin
I must add that the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is a fantastic natural history museum as well.
That's if you never accelerate once in space. Also, there's the Bussard ramjet idea, which could point to a solution to interstellar travel in the future.
It's highly unlikely that the form of our proteins are compatible with anything the aliens can digest (if they eat and digest food at all, that is).
I have considered giving all of my money away, simply because it is a burden.
Well, if you're still considering that, I could definitely use a few grand right now! :)
Indeed, this news is joy for any webdesigner. I stopped testing against IE6 a little while ago and I'm glad to see it go. IE7 still has many of its rendering issues, but IE8 is a truly solid, solid browser. The first browser from Microsoft I could call a quality product. They even made it possible to debug IE7 bugs with compatibility mode and the developer tools in IE8. Great work Microsoft - killing IE6 in a single shot. Keep doing stuff like this M$, and you may just earn back some credibility :)
I'm not sure about it being as easy. I recently decided to try Ubuntu as a home theater pc system. After about 3 days of searching through forums and talking on IRC, modifying config files, running console commands, and editing settings that should be defaults, I finally managed to get it to play surround sound properly and play video. Average Joe probably wouldn't have gotten to this point, but OK if it worked after that, I'd be happy. Unfortunately the various video player applications I tried randomly quit to desktop every once in a while, and this happened often enough that I was fed up after a couple of weeks.
Formatted, installed Windows XP, and an hour later the system was ready and worked perfectly.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and feel somewhat crippled when I don't have the command prompt & various tools, but it's far from being a solid, easy to use OS for home purposes at this point. Not to mention the lack of all the simple 'home' applications that Windows has - I know that's not the fault of the OS, but still is a problem.
Anyways, if Ubuntu is supposed to be so easy for home use, why should it take even a geek like me hours, days, to get it working for home theater use? Why aren't there better defaults set? Why do you have to go into the console to edit some simple settings or do a surround sound test?
Yep :(
Apparently a webcam recording of improv on that theme, in a YouTube video with a couple hundred views threatens their company somehow. I'd send them a counter notice, but apparently I'd be "subject to liability" and "under penalty of perjury" if I was wrong ( http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=59826 ), so I gave up. I imagine most people in my situation would do the same instead of dealing with the hassle and risk, and thus we can arrive almost at a form of odd.. censorship ?
I got sent a YouTube infringement/takedown notice for posting a video of me improvising on the theme of "Summertime" on my midi keyboard. Is using the chord structure of a popular song and playing an original improv on it really infringing copyright?
But the problem is that it's usually quite a pain to develop a game (or any other real-time application) using the over-hacked, buggy collection of plugins and Javascript frameworks that work differently in every single browser. Even when using the most successful Javascript frameworks that compensate for browser inconsistencies, developers commonly run into absurd bugs and problems and spend much effort working around them. Flash, for the most part, runs 100% identically whether it's running on FF3/IE6/IE7/IE Mobile/Safari/Opera/etc.. There are a few minor inconsistencies dealing with embedding and HTTP requests, but in general a developer can sleep easy and focus on his code instead of dealing with the horrible mess of browser and OS problems. Actionscript 3 is also a great language to work with. It allows relative beginners to use the integrated graphics, sound, and animation facilities, while providing a good OOP and Event architecture that lets you create complex structured applications and games. There are 3d engines built using classes that allow access to lower level rendering -- try doing something on the level of Away3d with JS?
The Xbox 360 and Dreamcast are not exactly failures. Sure, the Dreamcast didn't penetrate the market as well as it should have. That doesn't prevent it from being a great product that still sold (until the PS2 problem). And the 360, well, considering that it's the only modern console i'd ever think of buying these days (although I am probably just going to stick with my trusty PC) I would consider it a massive success.
The fact that this study shows results similar to what I have been experiencing myself is interesting. I am a Type 1 Diabetic using an insulin pump, a device which continually pumps a steady (x units/hr) dosage of insulin to me throughout the day but does not automatically react to changes in my blood sugar like a working pancreas would. Since I keep a lifestyle which maintains my sugar levels at the most stable level possible, I have the opportunity to see how various things affect my blood glucose levels, making them deviate from their controlled state. I have been finding that intense brainstorming sessions and work meetings where I am very active always cause my blood sugar levels to plummet. Despite the fact that I am doing no physical exercise at the time, mental effort seems to eat up a lot of sugar. Low blood sugar increases appetite, and perhaps this is why people eat more when they think hard.
Indeed, I'm on Shaw's Xtreme-I service here in BC, and I get 100GB down for the somewhat substantial price I pay for it.
Considering I highly prefer using digital download services like Steam for my computer games, and that many software providers these days are starting to offer their software as digital downloads, any legitimate user can run through that limit quite fast. I purchased a product from kirkhunterstudios.com, and after downloading it (and having to redownload a couple of broken pieces), I had almost used up my quota for the entire month. When we see more and more products, games, hd podcasts, os distros, and other types of digital media being provided as digital download services, when will internet providers start increasing the cap limits?
US users getting 250 GB for the entry level service is quite nice, and hopefully Comcast's higher tier internet services allow more. Disclosing the cap amounts could also allow for competition between ISPs that would achieve the goal of improving the internet.. though with internet providers having near-monopolies in North America it makes you wonder if that will ever happen.
Capcom just released Bionic Commando Rearmed for $15 on their site. I saw the trailer, thought to myself "damn, I really want this...", opened the Capcom website and saw their digital download. 10 minutes later I'm happily playing the game. If more companies did this with larger retail games, I would happily buy a lot of their products. Steam is another good example, but they do need to improve their download speeds, in my opinion. You need to appeal to the "I want it -right now-" psychology and you'll get a lot of customers.
I use the "oldbar" Add-on that restores the look of the firefox 2 address bar. I actually prefer having the new text searching in the address bar.. for example to open this article again all I had to do was type "fire nag" and this article was the first result. Otherwise with the old address bar I'd have to type at least "tech.slash" and then scroll through pages of old slashdot results to find it.
Why do you hate vegans?
Interesting. I've always thought that the best game bot would be a piece of hardware that connects to the monitor output of the graphics card and into a USB port, acting as a mouse/keyboard. It could send the image data to some AI-like software which basically plays the game for you as any human would.. Opens a whole other can of worms. Robot AI's should be able to enjoy playing games too !!
I think many people are quick to close their minds once they decide on their preferred world view (reality tunnel).
Lets pretend we had knowledge of all the exact laws and constants that govern the way our universe ticks. We might then develop a piece of software that would simulate all of these laws in a virtual universe. Generate a whole bunch of atoms (perhaps on a smaller scale than our universe because of memory limitations (though we don't know our universe yet to be sure)) and hit Run (perhaps at a fraction of true speed because of computation limits, speed of light etc, though again: we don't know enough about our universe and physics yet to be certain of this need). Wouldn't we then not be considered gods of this simulated universe? Could we not step in and modify the simulation to move atoms around or speed certain developments up to our preference? If forms of 'life' developed in our simulated universe, I don't see why we couldn't run some code that would affect virtual atoms in a way that seemed (rightly) supernatural to these virtual denizens.
Perhaps Christianity or other religions are actual records of such supernatural influence. Or perhaps our universe was born billions of years ago and life grew out of terribly convenient positions of atoms resulting in primitive analog machines that (by surprising luck) formed in a design that could replicate and become more complex. There are endless other possibilities.
What if we invented a technology that could take a record of all matter and energy in a particular moment.. say, a snapshot of all matter and energy (and whatever other variables we don't know about) in our galaxy. If we could then convert this information into a form that could be fed into our simulated universe, we then have a copy of the Milky Way galaxy that you could argue was 'created' without any complex evolutionary processes.
Just wanted to share these simple perspectives to say, maybe claiming certain atheist views while scoffing at religion is hypocritical in a sense?
Bah, lucky you. I was stuck with the internal PC speaker. Played through all of Doom and Doom II hearing those synthesized representations of monster noises and weapon sounds. Now when I play old games on a modern computer, I still have to turn on the PC speaker audio mode to bring back the chills and nostalgia. I remember one shareware pinball game for DOS which used the PC speaker so well that it shocked me when I first played the game. Instead of beeps and simplistic noises, the game used the PC speaker to play actual wave data, including REAL music and sound effects. I was quite amazed at the time that my computer could actually produce semi-realistic sounds without a sound card. Mind you, it was still relatively low bit and no comparison to a Sound Blaster.
Proverbs 23:13-14: "Withold not discipline from the child, for if you strike and punish him with the rod, he will not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell."
Some insightful 2000 year old advice. Though the 'rod' bit sounds a tad harsh, I must admit.
I think the issue here is that people enjoy 'jumping onto a bandwagon', regardless of what bandwagon that is, really. People like feelings of solidarity, nationalism, and group-supported behaviour that perhaps they may be lacking in their lives. It seems the CoS and Anonymous share similarities in this respect.
I honestly don't believe many of the Anonymous protesters have originally had any personal beefs with Scientology. The motivation of joining the pack, and the opportunity to think less but feel important, is probably the driving factor behind this 'War on Scientology'.
That last sentence made me wonder.. Would there be any chance of a small asteroid (one that could cause some problems) currently heading for earth not be detected yet by scientists?
Sorry, I actually meant Richter's performance of Chopin's Etude Op 25 No.11 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fym7EOV5f1A ).
Another fantastic example of this is Emil Gilels playing Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtuMVBLEWJU ). You simply don't see that at all in the score (hell, it says pp in the dynamics.. but that doesn't account for the melody line) I've heard many western pianists ignore that completely and follow the score resulting in a bland muddy rendering. Even Rachmaninoff himself didn't follow the dynamics shown on the score. The music is meant to be interpreted.