To the development site or somewhere else I can get more info and maybe even an interperter to finally get off the fence and try playing with this language?
I checked the linked articles but couldn't find anything.
Well, the reason I wanted one is becuase CDs even CD's packed full of MP3's are completely unsuited for the environment I wanted to run one of these things.
I do a lot of off-roading in my truck in very sandy and dusty areas - this is murder on CD's and pretty much anything mechanical that isn't completely sealed.
I wish I had the money to get an EMPEG but instead I've been working on piecing together my own system since I can't drop $1,000 all at once like that.
My biggest problem has been finding an affordable HD that can take enough abuse to live in the environment I want to run it. I'm leaning towards just using CF cards but then I'm back at the price problems again.
My favorite tech cheat was in high school. A few friends and I were taking an AP programming course, at the time my friends and I had just bought brand new 486's while the school had just bought 2 new 286's with no hard drives and thought they got an amzaing deal paying twice what we did for our 486's. But that's just to give you an idea for how non tech savvy the school was.
My friend and I always seemed to finish our projects before most of the class even got started, so we had a lot of spare time on our hands and having the highest grades in class got to use the 286's (oh joy). We were just getting into the joys of networking and had just discovered the internet though a dialup at a local college. So we decided to make our own lan between the 286's without telling our prof.
We ended up with basically a homemade version of LapLink that ran over parallel and let us do chat and share files. Not much but we were impressed that we pulled it off at all.
Unfortunatly my friend had slacked off on the current official project to finish our mini-lan. So we decided to use the lan to fake his project.
I sat on one end of the room pretending to be the computer and my friend sat with the prof at the other inputting math formulas for the program to solve. You should have heard my friends excuses for why the 'computer' was so slow to come up with responses:)
Finally he admitted what was up to the prof in hopes of saving his grade by showing off the program he did write after I started giving unbelievable wrong answers:) I really wanted to see the teachers reaction to him getting an answer like "orange cat" for "45*(23^4/5)" and yes it was worth screwing my friends grade to see that reaction.
I worked at a high end one hour lab for about 4 years and we only recycled the disposable cameras for about the first 3 months I worked there. Kodak had a program for returning them but it costs the photofinished to ship the empty cameras back.
The only recycling that went on was all of us who worked there reusing the batteries, flashes, and some of the nicer disposables.
Some are very easy to reload and WILL take normal film. But for most you have rewind your own film onto the original spool and use a new cartridge case. It's a pain but some other friends who were into photography got a real kick out of me giving them "disposable B&W" cameras.
I also used the flashes which with a little bit of work can be made into nice slave units. At college I was able to blow off using the studio for some projects because I had enough little flashes to get the same effect at home:)
Also when I first started working at that lab I was still in high school. I put together a project where I made a bunch of B&W disposables and gave them to incoming freshmen who were interested in photography. Kind of like shooting with a Holga to learn about how it's not the equiptment but the photographer....only this is even cheaper:)
I've never trusted "control panel" type of setups and much prefer to get my hands dirty in the configs. That way I KNOW what's being changed.
Last year we had a BUNCH of problems with our host who will for now remain nameless. Let's just say they're big and they've had several ownership changes in the past year and are now a part of a subsidiary of a large company who's name starts with M and ends with icron and who manufacture memory as well as selling full systems.
Anways durring the heat of these problems I had tech support telling me to stop modifying things by hand and ONLY use the web based interface because they had made changes to things any only their interface would be capable of making the updates properly. Well after two days of tech support hell and the problem (a fairly major one involving e-mail not getting delivered) not getting solved tech support finally said "Oh, wait you're using the web interface. Stop doing that. It dosen't work right and we know it".
I'll still use these control panels for looking up information but I'll never use them for actually changing anything.
If the job had been done properly using the tools available at the time this situation would never have come up. I'm sorry but I can't feel bad for a government agency which did a poor job and now wants us to feel sorry for them because they're being told to correct the problem.
Go spend an afternoon browsing through the W3C archives, useit.com, and htmlhelp.com and when you realize that this is nothing new but rather exactly what those with clear vision have been advocating since the dawn of the web maybe you'll just have to crawl back to your post and do your job properly.
One very important thing to keep in mind when choosing your speakers is are you going to be listening primarially to music, or is this a theatre system. But your question was about amps/reciever.
Make sure that whatever you get is rated to deliver it's peak wattage across all 6 channels simultaneously. A lot of manufacturers will show funny numbers by combining the power to each channel and quoting that number. And if you're using it for DVD's (And are a geek) you NEED full power to all 6 channels of amplification.
Some people are very against the optical connectors for digital out and swear by the RCA jack digital outputs instead. The reason they cite is Jitter, however it's more a technical probelm than it is anything you'll actually hear. Personally I get a kick out of having fiber optics connecting my components.
I bought the precursor to the/. DVD player two years ago from Sony and love it. I also ended up going all sony for compatibility and because of a funky little geek toy called the "Slink-E". You can find out about these things from http://www.nirvis.com and they rock for sony setups! You can control anything that uses the sony s-link protocol and if your patient you can even teach it to recognize and emulate almost any IR codes for non sony equipment. With a several hundred dish changer this thing gets really neat and will automatically lookup and database all of your CD's. I love mine...just wish I had time to put my CD's back into my changer after moving!
The problem is if you want a blank page to come up instead of a start page you no longer have that option. Be this because you don't want to wait for AOL's news page or because you don't want to read AOL's news or because you want to open./ as your home page instead dosen't matter. You can't change you home page at all.
While this is their choice to remove this option it is one that I can easily see upsetting many people just for the reasons listed above.
However even worse is the possibilities hinted at that Time Warner/AOL could use this to help sway public opinion in their favor. Image all of the people who use AOL having no choice but to at least be exposed to the news that TW/AOL chooses to show them. This could be highly biased "reporting" about why AOL is the only "real choice" for internet acces, or it could be a presidential endoresement. Heck it could be an ad for dog food. It dosen't matter these people are being help as a captive audience.
One of the great things about the web is that you are never forced to view anything you don't want to. Well, that just ended for AOL users.
Even worse this now gives the 'net a major down side against all other media. With your TV you can choose what channel appears when you turn it just by leaving it tuned to the channel you want. With your Cable box, VCR, or Stereo same thing. You can choose what you want. If you don't want to hear KGOD - all catholic metal all day then you don't have to. But with this new change for AOL if you use AOL as your ISP you no longer have a choice what you are subjected to when you log on.
This is indeed a very scary thing. Image it spreading to your TV and stereo and then ask yourself why this is important.
Actually what you said struck a note with what this article had me thinking. They're only capturing 512x512 images, in greyscale, with the use of a strobe system that can keep up with that kind of frame rate.
I wonder how fast you could reprogram an off-the shelf camera to capture super low resolution greyscale...pretty damn fast I'm betting if you can get one of those things to run MAME. If you can take over the camera at a low enough level you could probably get it to go very fast at 512x512.
Then just hook up your strobe system and go. I haven't finished exploring their site but it really sounds like nothing more than the strobe doing the freezing (unlike in straight high-speed film where the shutter speed alone does the freezing) and then the digital camera just having to be able to write captures to disk as fast as the strobe can go.
And even if you can't hack the cameras that deep, with the crazy stuff PIC hackers are doing it can't be too long before some nutcase decides to create a do it yourself digital camera. Probably using the guts of a disposable camera. Hmmm....I need some napkins, I feel an idea coming on.
Seriously though I need to crunch some numbers and see just how much time it would take to do a stripped down streamlined capture at that resolution with an off the shelf CCD. I need to go find some spec sheets and my calculator.
This scare DC to death. Not joe hacker playing with the device. Not Joe sucker getting a dozen of them. But having a dozen of competitors that uses the output of the device to emulate the part of their Business Plan where they intended to make money.
Ahh, but what scares them even more IS joe hacker. Because if joe hacker beats thei competitors to creating a killer app for their hardware then no one makes money off of them, and with no one making money there's no one to sue.
If another company were to start endorsing the use of the 'Cat with their software...and I don't know...maybe... hyping that it dosen't do the serial# lookup suddenly they've got a target they can hit. I'm scared for Readerware because of this (http://www.readerware.com). And the new AzaleaQTools package for creating Cue style bar codes.
But oh, woulden't it just burn them up worse than anything if someone was to beat them all to finding the target for their product...and gave it away. And already the OS community is so close.
I've seen sites that have everything you need to catalog books with your cuecat for free. UPC lookups for free. And I'm sure there's a way to use PeaPod or Homegrocer or someone to lookup food UPC items. And there are already sample apps which pull this together. All we need is one of them to tie everything together and let the user make it what they want.
Could be a damn powerfull system for home inventory and media collections.
I'm starting to think that UPS actually has no clue what the hell they're doing when it comes to international shipping.
I recently setup a full e-commerce site for a client who was located in Mexico. His site is run out of the US and his credit card processing is done through Bermuda but all his shipments come direct from the manufacturer in Mexico. Most of the comapnies we had to deal with had no problem understaning this....but not UPS.
We wanted to use some of the tools UPS has been hyping for e-bussiness. Specifically we wanted the tools for calculating shipping costs, estimating shipping times, generating tracking numbers, and for integrating shipping with your existing site. But after nearly two months of e-mail and phone calls I still had not made any progress getting these tools from UPS.
On thier website the say they have to licences availabe a developer licence which gives you full access to their tools so you can use them with all of your clients. And the end-user licence which must be filled out and applied for by the company doing the shipping. I filled out the form for the developer license explaining that I had a number of clients who were intersted in using these tools and that at least one of them was located in Mexico. I got back a form letter saying that perhaps the end-user tools would be better for me.
I e-mailed their customer support saying that the end-user tools really weren't a solution for me since I wasn't about to have all of my clients go to the UPS website and register separately. I never received a reply. Nor did I receive a reply to the second or third e-mails sent at weekly intervals.
On the phone I was told "Just fill out the form on the website and someone will get back to you". Even after I explained that I had already done that and that my e-mails were being ignored. Finally a rep told me that there really was no such thing as the developers license and he had no idea why their website (Which had been redesigned a week earlier) still had references to it.
Eventually their rep directed me to a different page and told me to fill out the form there with my clients information and that I would get a username and password to download the tools with. But on that page Mexico was not a choice for country of origin. I told the rep this and he said "Oh don't worry just fill out that form". When I told him I would have to enter incorrect informaiton to do so he told me "Yeah, just fill it out.". I then asked point blank "So you are telling me to lie on this form graning me legal permission to use your software? You really want me to enter false information and lie about the country of origin?". Of course he came back saying "oh no, I can't tell you that".
Finally after his local rep in Mexico had ignored him for almost 2 months my client managed to get an address out of his local rep which would allow you to register from Mexico. But only for the tracking tool none of the others.
And then to rub salt in my wounds the next three packages I received shipped by UPS all arrived heavily dammaged. I e-mailed customer support at UPS with a polite letter explaining all the problems I've had dealing with them and saying that receiving three heavily damaged packages in a row was the final straw. As a consumer I was going to vote with my money and no longer choose UPS as my shipper. Two weeks later I received a phone call from UPS appologising but saying they needed my shipper ID number to register the complaint. At which point I explained again as I did in my letter than I am not a shipper I am a consumer who often chooses UPS as a shipper when I order through the web or mail-order because of their price and usual quality of service. Apparantly this was too much for the rep to understand as she appologized and said she'd have soneone else contact me.
The next person to contact me again required a shipper ID! Finally after 10 minutes on the phone trying to explain the whole thing I said "Look this is silly. I don't have the time to waste on this. Just tell your manager I'm upset because you've consistantly done a bad job and that UPS just lost a customer".
Some very excelent points, unforunatly you caught me on a morning when I actually feel like following up to a follow up...of my own no less.
I guess I should have been more clear in my original reply. I agree that photography as a profession most certinally can suffer as did painting as a profession with the advent of photography.
However the fact stands that just as you pointed out yourself photos don't tend to receive the same quality of display as paintings do. I do disagree on the point of "... have you ever seen a huge photgraph of someone prominently displayed in someone's house? No,..." since I most certinally have seen huge photographic portraits on display in peoples houses. But they are a far cry from the snapshot that most people associate with modern photography. Just like any easily accessibly media there is going to be a lot more fluff out there that was made possible by the lower cost of entry. And even so you can still today have a portrait comissioned in paint if you wish. And while the market for comissioned paintings is quite small compared to the market for photographic portraits the price difference still makes it possible for people to exist as professional painters today.
But the changes to photography by the advent of digital photography are quite a far cry from the changes from painting to photography espically in how they affect the ability of a professional to change from one to the other.
When photography was making it's impact on painters making it much more difficult for them to support themselves through their art the cost of entry to photography was exceedingly high. Espcially since many painters had spent lifetimes aquiring the skills and tools necessary to make their craft possible. Early photography was not the point and click drop it off at the corner story that we see today and asking a painter to learn the new skills of photography while still trying to spend enough time painting to stay profitable is quite a tall order.
But moving from photography to digital photography is really much more of an extension. I would compare it more to moving from watercolor paints to oil based paints or from painting frescoes to painting on canvas. In both cases you're still using the same basic skill set with the same foundation only applying it differently. With digital photography and the computers of today there is very little extra knowledge needed to move from photography to digital photography. And as digital photography advances the ease of entry becomes even greater and the benefits of a firm foundation in tradional photography truely do help when moving into digital photography.
For joe-blow who's used to the 1 hour photo store on the corner the new complexity of digital photography may seem overwhelming. But coming from more or less a tradional photography background I can tell you very little of that added complexity is new to full time professional photographers. The only diffence is in how you can control the variables.
Besides who says photography is so set as to be a standard. Film stock has been advancing in quality at a rate that until the advent of the computer was practically unheard of. Look at photos taken 5 years apart and printed on current modern paper and you'll see a noticable increase in detail and acuity. And the same advances have been made in paper technology allowing tradional photography to continue improving the quality of image available. And that's just with current cemical processes, no one is to say what new materials may someday become availabe making film technology suddenly leap even further ahead.
Ok, I'm wanding pretty far off track. And since I'm debating someone who agrees with my feelings for the most part I'm felly pretty silly. So I'll cut myself off now and go do something productive instead.
Same old argument and I'll give the same old rebuttal:
If technology really did replace the tradional meida that it augments thing would be very different. But time and history have shown that new technology never completely replaces older technology and there will always be people who embrace the older technology for a variety of reasons.
Looking back at the history of photography for instance there have been literally hundreds of processes that all result in what we would consider a "photographic image". But they all have pros and cons. Many of the earliest processes were incapable of creating the detail and control that is available to todays photographer, even though when they were first introduced painters were scared that they would be replaced by these automated machines. But today not only do we still see professional painters but we still see people using the "outdated" early photographic processes.
New technology very seldom replaces the old technology that it grows from, instead people embrace new tools and widen their horizons and capabilities. If it was true that only the best solution would live on then today there would be no painters, and there would be no photographers working in alternative processes. But in the art world where aesthetics win out over practicality both of these are still thriving. And even if someday digital photography does reach a point where it is indistinguishable from tradional photography I guarante you there will still be people out there using wet plates and collodian processes just because the "like the look" that it gives.
No I'm not the poster you were commenting to, but I do agree with them.
And yes I did read the article and do understand their testing methodology. I did load their test page and the "super amazing happy safe 22 color pallette" that they reccomend. But even on my relativily mainstream system their 22 colors didn't all match the backgrounds. And that's on a Win2k box with a TNT2 card and recent drivers. Sure at 24 bit color where I normally spend my time they all matched up just fine. But at 16-bit and 256 color even the 22 "Safe colors" didn't all match gif to background.
And that's precisely what they claim won't happen. This is windows (which they claim to have tested) and it is Netscape (which they claim to have tested) and the colors they claim won't shift did indeed shift. So by their own arguments there are at least 5 more colors that should be dropped from their list.
I won't get sucked back into the argument that the web is fundamentally different than any other design media currently in existance and why you have to give up some control to work with it since I'm getting sick of it. I do deal with it on a daily basis when talking to clients (I just had one who wanted his site to match the colors on a building across the street from his office!) and 9 times out of 10 a few minutes of explanation and a quick demonstration of shifting color settings on their monitor and they start to "get it".
But after viewing Razorfishes own website a few months ago when that whole thing blew up about them getting sued for doing a piss poor job I'm not surprised that some of their senior designers don't "Get it". And frankly after looking at their site I don't see how a company could have expected a well designed and functioning site from them. Don't people even visit the homepage of the people they hire?
Actually my major was "Multimedia Design" and both of the courses mentioned were required. The major was ment to be a melding of tradional CS (which I swore off due to the math requirements) and tradional design (which I swore off because I'm not an artsy fartsy type).
The problem in my particular case was that they let the design people have too much say in what the major should be and didn't let the CS people have much of a say at all. But none of this was obvious until you took the courses. (one of the problems of being a batch of "test students" feeling out the new major).
Believe me if I had known what the major was goign to turn out like I would have just majored in Business or some other easy to coast through BS major and taken my design and CS courses as electives. As it turned out I got more out of my elective courses than I ever could have from the required courses for my chosen major.
Currently they're still teaching "Multimedia Design" from a design perspective with no technical grounding, but hyping it to prospective students as a technically orientated major. I guess in the end the best lesson I got out of the whole thing was don't EVER trust the hype. Espically the part about "We'll help you mold the major to be what you want it to be".
And yes this was a well respected 4 year college who I'm keeping nameless because as much as I'm dissapointed in what they did I don't want to go dragging their name around in the mud. I knew plenty of people in my major who were happy being deluded into thinking they were being prepared to go out and do what I'm doing now. Of course if any of them came to me for a job based on no experience but with outstanding grades and a degree I'd probably laugh.
You may have time to read cnet, NyTimes, Yahoo News, AP feeds, Reuters feeds, The Register, and all the other sources that are often linked from/. but that dosen't mean we all do!
Personally I love/. for what it is. "News for Nerds Stuff That Matters" I think of it kind of like TiVo for web news. I can either spend all morning combing a dozen or so news sites - or I can spend 15 minutes scanning headlines on/. to see what may be interesting to me.
Sure there are things that are BS on/. and there are things in other news media that I'd find facinating. But my time is valuable and/. helps me make the most of my time.
Ahh, but that is just the lie that sucked me into college. I wrongly assumed that college unlike highschool was designed to teach us how to learn and think for ourselves. Instead what I found was the teaching of skills with no foundation and a bunch of professors claimiing that they're teaching the foundation without skills.
At the time I left in 1998 the well respected school I was attending was still teaching web-design by having students create pages in Photoshop then choping them up and making image maps with PageMill. And I was required to take this class and create pages this way even though I had already created an award winning, industry leading site for an international manufacturing company. Since I had already tought myself the basic foundation of what makes the web different from tradional design I was able to use both skills to create something which was both aesthetically and technically advanced. The school however still had no idea what made the web different and kept trying to push tradional design into a non-tradional media by throwing all the new abilities out the window.
Even worse was the multimeda design class I took using Macromedia Director. In Anticipation of the class I "Borrowed" a copy of Director and bought a few Lingo books. By the time I took the class I was already writing presentations which were more advanced than anything the two quarter class would ever cover. At least in this instance I had a professor who appreciated by ability to "learn outside the box" and rewarded for for it rather than punish me as the web design professor did. The worst part was that the class never even attempted to teach students the basic skills that could be applied to a Director project. Instead they tried to teach students how to do the "monkey work" of basic assembly and preparation of materials for a multimedia project. And while those skills are important to understand it was IMHO hypocritical of the school to be claiming that they were teaching students how to become "Leaders in the Field of Multimedia" while the actual course work created students who where capable of little more than the most basic jobs in multimedia.
Way too much of college today is structured around teaching students how to perform tasks in the prescribed way rather than how to find their own solutions to the problems they are presented. I was bought up being told that this is what Technical Schools are for and that colleges are designed to teach you how to think.
Don't get me wrong here, I loved my time at college and learned more about life by being there than I could have in pretty much any other venue. But as for learning how to learn and grow for a lifetime of meaningfull employment I got much more out of high school.
Maybe I was lucky to attend and outstanding high school and unlucky enough to attend a college which just "Didn't get it". But when it came to the point of me teaching my professors (as it did in both the web and multimedia classes) I had to ask myself why I was paying for this. And once I realized that my professors were learning more from the class than the class was learning from the professors I decided the only way I could stay and finish my degree was if I was being paid to do it. So I left and started my own consulting business.
Since then I've been offered numerous jobs based on my performance and skills. And all I can say is it feels great to be appreciated for what I've proven I'm capable of, not for some piece of paper that shows I can be "trained".
Less than a hundred bucks if you're willing to do a little hardware hacking. I scored a brand new still shrink wrapped reader (Even still had a covered sticky pad on the bottom for mounting) for about $12 from an on-line surplus outlet. If anyone really needs the info I still have their address here somewhere, no promises on wether or not they still have card readers. It's got TTL output but with a little bit code on a PIC chip it will talk serial just fine. There's probably an easier way to do it but I had a bunch of PIC's laying around.
The best part was justifying it to my friends..."I'm sick of typing in my credit card number every time I want to buy something on-line!". Most of them just assumed I was trying to find a way to hack more money into my cards (not possible since it's not stored on the card, and this thing is a reader only).
I'm not sure how much one with a serial interface would run but for $12 I love mine!
This is just what Apple had coming for sueing eMachines over the eOne. Apparantly it's ok to make computers in other shapes and colors if your're Apple but not for anyone else.
Frankly I'd love to see Apple's previous ruling come back to smack them on this one.
I'd love to see Cobalt loose because I don't think any company should be able to hold a trademark on something like the shape of a computer, but at the same time I really want to see Apple get a taste of their own medicine.
It exists but the selection is so limited that frankly I coulden't find much of anything I wanted. At least not as far as "popular" music is concerned. I'd love to buy my music that way but unless the major lables unlock their vast libraries completely and make them all as available as they are on CD no thanks.
There are however some great Jazz and classical selections available. And while I do enjoy jazz and classical even there the selection is very limited.
For what it's worth even having a client surf the web and give you examples of what they want isn't always that helpfull. We recently had a client who did just this and kept giving examples that just plain could not be appiled to his situation. He was selling home decorating goods and he was surfing only on-line flower delivery services.
He liked the way many of the flower sites used flowers throughout the site as visual elements. And asked if we could do the same with his products. But when he saw it he realized what we tried to tell him at the start, his products just don't look as good displayed that way.
Even worse was one client who requested a single page site to advertise his private medical practice, and wanted it to look like CNBC. Trying to explain that most of the design on CNBC is links to content and that he had no content to link to didn't help. We did come up with a design that was visually similar and just used his text in place of the links, but he still wanted the link boxes to have links....but didn't have any content he wanted links to or any sites he wanted links to. From what we could tell he just wanted links that didn't really go anywhere or do anything?!
The bigger problem is clients who know what they want but don't know how to communicate what they want to the designer...and who want to fit square pegs into round holes and make them look like triangles while doing it.
I still say if you hire an artist you should expect to get something similar to what that artist has done in the past. No one is going to hire a band to play at their wedding without any knowledge of what the band sounds like or what kind of music they play, yet companies are falling all over themselves to hire designers without ever having seen any examples of the designers work.
Of course all this is way OT since frankly this sounds like razorfish did not meet the terms of their own contract. But may be slightly OT since a brief look at razorfishes own site convinced me that I woulden't hire them to do anything. Makes me wonder if IAM even looked at RF's site before hiring them or if they just went on a recomendation from a "friend".
I've been following the whole carnivore thing since just before the story appeared on/. since I saw it on some other news service a few hours earlier. The one thing that keeps bothering me that no one seems to have mentioned is that the FBI is going about this the wrong way.
Afterall when they get a warrant to tap someone's phone they don't go to the Central Office and tap every line hoping they can pick up some of the person's conversations by listening for keywords. Instead they tap the line that feeds that person's home/business line(s). I don't see any reason why they can't do internet wiretaps in the same way. I can't be any more work to "decode" a modem signal or other data transmission than it is to search literally gigs of information per second. In fact in the long term it's probably easier and would take less computing power. So why can't they just tap the lines of the person they want to listen to.
Just like with a tradional wiretap if the suspect being watched uses a phone at some strangers house chances are the feds won't be able to listen in. But so what that's a limitiation they've had to live with for years in order to protect our privacy since we do still live in a country which believes in the presumption of innocence.
The only explanation I can come up with is that this is a thinly veiled attempt by the FBI to try and take away more of our constutional rights without going through the proper channels. It's happened before so I see no reason it can't be happening now.
While I'm no fan of Reno I seriously hope she managed to prove she deserves her job by putting a stop to this nonsense now and pointing out that there's no reason tradional wiretapping measures can't be used for this purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
To the development site or somewhere else I can get more info and maybe even an interperter to finally get off the fence and try playing with this language?
I checked the linked articles but couldn't find anything.
Well, the reason I wanted one is becuase CDs even CD's packed full of MP3's are completely unsuited for the environment I wanted to run one of these things.
I do a lot of off-roading in my truck in very sandy and dusty areas - this is murder on CD's and pretty much anything mechanical that isn't completely sealed.
I wish I had the money to get an EMPEG but instead I've been working on piecing together my own system since I can't drop $1,000 all at once like that.
My biggest problem has been finding an affordable HD that can take enough abuse to live in the environment I want to run it. I'm leaning towards just using CF cards but then I'm back at the price problems again.
My favorite tech cheat was in high school. A few friends and I were taking an AP programming course, at the time my friends and I had just bought brand new 486's while the school had just bought 2 new 286's with no hard drives and thought they got an amzaing deal paying twice what we did for our 486's. But that's just to give you an idea for how non tech savvy the school was.
:)
:) I really wanted to see the teachers reaction to him getting an answer like "orange cat" for "45*(23^4/5)" and yes it was worth screwing my friends grade to see that reaction.
My friend and I always seemed to finish our projects before most of the class even got started, so we had a lot of spare time on our hands and having the highest grades in class got to use the 286's (oh joy). We were just getting into the joys of networking and had just discovered the internet though a dialup at a local college. So we decided to make our own lan between the 286's without telling our prof.
We ended up with basically a homemade version of LapLink that ran over parallel and let us do chat and share files. Not much but we were impressed that we pulled it off at all.
Unfortunatly my friend had slacked off on the current official project to finish our mini-lan. So we decided to use the lan to fake his project.
I sat on one end of the room pretending to be the computer and my friend sat with the prof at the other inputting math formulas for the program to solve. You should have heard my friends excuses for why the 'computer' was so slow to come up with responses
Finally he admitted what was up to the prof in hopes of saving his grade by showing off the program he did write after I started giving unbelievable wrong answers
Hmm, I know of a few car lots that can't come CLOSE to that guarantee :)
I worked at a high end one hour lab for about 4 years and we only recycled the disposable cameras for about the first 3 months I worked there. Kodak had a program for returning them but it costs the photofinished to ship the empty cameras back.
:)
:)
The only recycling that went on was all of us who worked there reusing the batteries, flashes, and some of the nicer disposables.
Some are very easy to reload and WILL take normal film. But for most you have rewind your own film onto the original spool and use a new cartridge case. It's a pain but some other friends who were into photography got a real kick out of me giving them "disposable B&W" cameras.
I also used the flashes which with a little bit of work can be made into nice slave units. At college I was able to blow off using the studio for some projects because I had enough little flashes to get the same effect at home
Also when I first started working at that lab I was still in high school. I put together a project where I made a bunch of B&W disposables and gave them to incoming freshmen who were interested in photography. Kind of like shooting with a Holga to learn about how it's not the equiptment but the photographer....only this is even cheaper
I've never trusted "control panel" type of setups and much prefer to get my hands dirty in the configs. That way I KNOW what's being changed.
Last year we had a BUNCH of problems with our host who will for now remain nameless. Let's just say they're big and they've had several ownership changes in the past year and are now a part of a subsidiary of a large company who's name starts with M and ends with icron and who manufacture memory as well as selling full systems.
Anways durring the heat of these problems I had tech support telling me to stop modifying things by hand and ONLY use the web based interface because they had made changes to things any only their interface would be capable of making the updates properly. Well after two days of tech support hell and the problem (a fairly major one involving e-mail not getting delivered) not getting solved tech support finally said "Oh, wait you're using the web interface. Stop doing that. It dosen't work right and we know it".
I'll still use these control panels for looking up information but I'll never use them for actually changing anything.
What are ya a communist? You think we designed this legal system for fun or something?
[God, I hope someone else has a sense of humor like mine]
If the job had been done properly using the tools available at the time this situation would never have come up. I'm sorry but I can't feel bad for a government agency which did a poor job and now wants us to feel sorry for them because they're being told to correct the problem.
Go spend an afternoon browsing through the W3C archives, useit.com, and htmlhelp.com and when you realize that this is nothing new but rather exactly what those with clear vision have been advocating since the dawn of the web maybe you'll just have to crawl back to your post and do your job properly.
One very important thing to keep in mind when choosing your speakers is are you going to be listening primarially to music, or is this a theatre system. But your question was about amps/reciever.
/. DVD player two years ago from Sony and love it. I also ended up going all sony for compatibility and because of a funky little geek toy called the "Slink-E". You can find out about these things from http://www.nirvis.com and they rock for sony setups! You can control anything that uses the sony s-link protocol and if your patient you can even teach it to recognize and emulate almost any IR codes for non sony equipment. With a several hundred dish changer this thing gets really neat and will automatically lookup and database all of your CD's. I love mine...just wish I had time to put my CD's back into my changer after moving!
Make sure that whatever you get is rated to deliver it's peak wattage across all 6 channels simultaneously. A lot of manufacturers will show funny numbers by combining the power to each channel and quoting that number. And if you're using it for DVD's (And are a geek) you NEED full power to all 6 channels of amplification.
Some people are very against the optical connectors for digital out and swear by the RCA jack digital outputs instead. The reason they cite is Jitter, however it's more a technical probelm than it is anything you'll actually hear. Personally I get a kick out of having fiber optics connecting my components.
I bought the precursor to the
(OB Reply to firewall challange)
Hey I did too and all I found was porn, porn, porn, and more porn. And all stuff I'd seen before!
(Oh well, I didn't really need that Karma for anything anyway did I? Let's just hope enough people understand the joke in all of this.)
The problem is if you want a blank page to come up instead of a start page you no longer have that option. Be this because you don't want to wait for AOL's news page or because you don't want to read AOL's news or because you want to open ./ as your home page instead dosen't matter. You can't change you home page at all.
While this is their choice to remove this option it is one that I can easily see upsetting many people just for the reasons listed above.
However even worse is the possibilities hinted at that Time Warner/AOL could use this to help sway public opinion in their favor. Image all of the people who use AOL having no choice but to at least be exposed to the news that TW/AOL chooses to show them. This could be highly biased "reporting" about why AOL is the only "real choice" for internet acces, or it could be a presidential endoresement. Heck it could be an ad for dog food. It dosen't matter these people are being help as a captive audience.
One of the great things about the web is that you are never forced to view anything you don't want to. Well, that just ended for AOL users.
Even worse this now gives the 'net a major down side against all other media. With your TV you can choose what channel appears when you turn it just by leaving it tuned to the channel you want. With your Cable box, VCR, or Stereo same thing. You can choose what you want. If you don't want to hear KGOD - all catholic metal all day then you don't have to. But with this new change for AOL if you use AOL as your ISP you no longer have a choice what you are subjected to when you log on.
This is indeed a very scary thing. Image it spreading to your TV and stereo and then ask yourself why this is important.
Actually what you said struck a note with what this article had me thinking. They're only capturing 512x512 images, in greyscale, with the use of a strobe system that can keep up with that kind of frame rate.
I wonder how fast you could reprogram an off-the shelf camera to capture super low resolution greyscale...pretty damn fast I'm betting if you can get one of those things to run MAME. If you can take over the camera at a low enough level you could probably get it to go very fast at 512x512.
Then just hook up your strobe system and go. I haven't finished exploring their site but it really sounds like nothing more than the strobe doing the freezing (unlike in straight high-speed film where the shutter speed alone does the freezing) and then the digital camera just having to be able to write captures to disk as fast as the strobe can go.
And even if you can't hack the cameras that deep, with the crazy stuff PIC hackers are doing it can't be too long before some nutcase decides to create a do it yourself digital camera. Probably using the guts of a disposable camera. Hmmm....I need some napkins, I feel an idea coming on.
Seriously though I need to crunch some numbers and see just how much time it would take to do a stripped down streamlined capture at that resolution with an off the shelf CCD. I need to go find some spec sheets and my calculator.
This scare DC to death. Not joe hacker playing with the device. Not Joe sucker getting a dozen of them. But having a dozen of competitors that uses the output of the device to emulate the part of their Business Plan where they intended to make money.
Ahh, but what scares them even more IS joe hacker. Because if joe hacker beats thei competitors to creating a killer app for their hardware then no one makes money off of them, and with no one making money there's no one to sue.
If another company were to start endorsing the use of the 'Cat with their software...and I don't know...maybe... hyping that it dosen't do the serial# lookup suddenly they've got a target they can hit. I'm scared for Readerware because of this (http://www.readerware.com). And the new AzaleaQTools package for creating Cue style bar codes.
But oh, woulden't it just burn them up worse than anything if someone was to beat them all to finding the target for their product...and gave it away. And already the OS community is so close.
I've seen sites that have everything you need to catalog books with your cuecat for free. UPC lookups for free. And I'm sure there's a way to use PeaPod or Homegrocer or someone to lookup food UPC items. And there are already sample apps which pull this together. All we need is one of them to tie everything together and let the user make it what they want.
Could be a damn powerfull system for home inventory and media collections.
I'm starting to think that UPS actually has no clue what the hell they're doing when it comes to international shipping.
I recently setup a full e-commerce site for a client who was located in Mexico. His site is run out of the US and his credit card processing is done through Bermuda but all his shipments come direct from the manufacturer in Mexico. Most of the comapnies we had to deal with had no problem understaning this....but not UPS.
We wanted to use some of the tools UPS has been hyping for e-bussiness. Specifically we wanted the tools for calculating shipping costs, estimating shipping times, generating tracking numbers, and for integrating shipping with your existing site. But after nearly two months of e-mail and phone calls I still had not made any progress getting these tools from UPS.
On thier website the say they have to licences availabe a developer licence which gives you full access to their tools so you can use them with all of your clients. And the end-user licence which must be filled out and applied for by the company doing the shipping. I filled out the form for the developer license explaining that I had a number of clients who were intersted in using these tools and that at least one of them was located in Mexico. I got back a form letter saying that perhaps the end-user tools would be better for me.
I e-mailed their customer support saying that the end-user tools really weren't a solution for me since I wasn't about to have all of my clients go to the UPS website and register separately. I never received a reply. Nor did I receive a reply to the second or third e-mails sent at weekly intervals.
On the phone I was told "Just fill out the form on the website and someone will get back to you". Even after I explained that I had already done that and that my e-mails were being ignored. Finally a rep told me that there really was no such thing as the developers license and he had no idea why their website (Which had been redesigned a week earlier) still had references to it.
Eventually their rep directed me to a different page and told me to fill out the form there with my clients information and that I would get a username and password to download the tools with. But on that page Mexico was not a choice for country of origin. I told the rep this and he said "Oh don't worry just fill out that form". When I told him I would have to enter incorrect informaiton to do so he told me "Yeah, just fill it out.". I then asked point blank "So you are telling me to lie on this form graning me legal permission to use your software? You really want me to enter false information and lie about the country of origin?". Of course he came back saying "oh no, I can't tell you that".
Finally after his local rep in Mexico had ignored him for almost 2 months my client managed to get an address out of his local rep which would allow you to register from Mexico. But only for the tracking tool none of the others.
And then to rub salt in my wounds the next three packages I received shipped by UPS all arrived heavily dammaged. I e-mailed customer support at UPS with a polite letter explaining all the problems I've had dealing with them and saying that receiving three heavily damaged packages in a row was the final straw. As a consumer I was going to vote with my money and no longer choose UPS as my shipper. Two weeks later I received a phone call from UPS appologising but saying they needed my shipper ID number to register the complaint. At which point I explained again as I did in my letter than I am not a shipper I am a consumer who often chooses UPS as a shipper when I order through the web or mail-order because of their price and usual quality of service. Apparantly this was too much for the rep to understand as she appologized and said she'd have soneone else contact me.
The next person to contact me again required a shipper ID! Finally after 10 minutes on the phone trying to explain the whole thing I said "Look this is silly. I don't have the time to waste on this. Just tell your manager I'm upset because you've consistantly done a bad job and that UPS just lost a customer".
Some very excelent points, unforunatly you caught me on a morning when I actually feel like following up to a follow up...of my own no less.
..." since I most certinally have seen huge photographic portraits on display in peoples houses. But they are a far cry from the snapshot that most people associate with modern photography. Just like any easily accessibly media there is going to be a lot more fluff out there that was made possible by the lower cost of entry. And even so you can still today have a portrait comissioned in paint if you wish. And while the market for comissioned paintings is quite small compared to the market for photographic portraits the price difference still makes it possible for people to exist as professional painters today.
I guess I should have been more clear in my original reply. I agree that photography as a profession most certinally can suffer as did painting as a profession with the advent of photography.
However the fact stands that just as you pointed out yourself photos don't tend to receive the same quality of display as paintings do. I do disagree on the point of "... have you ever seen a huge photgraph of someone prominently displayed in someone's house? No,
But the changes to photography by the advent of digital photography are quite a far cry from the changes from painting to photography espically in how they affect the ability of a professional to change from one to the other.
When photography was making it's impact on painters making it much more difficult for them to support themselves through their art the cost of entry to photography was exceedingly high. Espcially since many painters had spent lifetimes aquiring the skills and tools necessary to make their craft possible. Early photography was not the point and click drop it off at the corner story that we see today and asking a painter to learn the new skills of photography while still trying to spend enough time painting to stay profitable is quite a tall order.
But moving from photography to digital photography is really much more of an extension. I would compare it more to moving from watercolor paints to oil based paints or from painting frescoes to painting on canvas. In both cases you're still using the same basic skill set with the same foundation only applying it differently. With digital photography and the computers of today there is very little extra knowledge needed to move from photography to digital photography. And as digital photography advances the ease of entry becomes even greater and the benefits of a firm foundation in tradional photography truely do help when moving into digital photography.
For joe-blow who's used to the 1 hour photo store on the corner the new complexity of digital photography may seem overwhelming. But coming from more or less a tradional photography background I can tell you very little of that added complexity is new to full time professional photographers. The only diffence is in how you can control the variables.
Besides who says photography is so set as to be a standard. Film stock has been advancing in quality at a rate that until the advent of the computer was practically unheard of. Look at photos taken 5 years apart and printed on current modern paper and you'll see a noticable increase in detail and acuity. And the same advances have been made in paper technology allowing tradional photography to continue improving the quality of image available. And that's just with current cemical processes, no one is to say what new materials may someday become availabe making film technology suddenly leap even further ahead.
Ok, I'm wanding pretty far off track. And since I'm debating someone who agrees with my feelings for the most part I'm felly pretty silly. So I'll cut myself off now and go do something productive instead.
Same old argument and I'll give the same old rebuttal:
If technology really did replace the tradional meida that it augments thing would be very different. But time and history have shown that new technology never completely replaces older technology and there will always be people who embrace the older technology for a variety of reasons.
Looking back at the history of photography for instance there have been literally hundreds of processes that all result in what we would consider a "photographic image". But they all have pros and cons. Many of the earliest processes were incapable of creating the detail and control that is available to todays photographer, even though when they were first introduced painters were scared that they would be replaced by these automated machines. But today not only do we still see professional painters but we still see people using the "outdated" early photographic processes.
New technology very seldom replaces the old technology that it grows from, instead people embrace new tools and widen their horizons and capabilities. If it was true that only the best solution would live on then today there would be no painters, and there would be no photographers working in alternative processes. But in the art world where aesthetics win out over practicality both of these are still thriving. And even if someday digital photography does reach a point where it is indistinguishable from tradional photography I guarante you there will still be people out there using wet plates and collodian processes just because the "like the look" that it gives.
And yes I did read the article and do understand their testing methodology. I did load their test page and the "super amazing happy safe 22 color pallette" that they reccomend. But even on my relativily mainstream system their 22 colors didn't all match the backgrounds. And that's on a Win2k box with a TNT2 card and recent drivers. Sure at 24 bit color where I normally spend my time they all matched up just fine. But at 16-bit and 256 color even the 22 "Safe colors" didn't all match gif to background.
And that's precisely what they claim won't happen. This is windows (which they claim to have tested) and it is Netscape (which they claim to have tested) and the colors they claim won't shift did indeed shift. So by their own arguments there are at least 5 more colors that should be dropped from their list.
I won't get sucked back into the argument that the web is fundamentally different than any other design media currently in existance and why you have to give up some control to work with it since I'm getting sick of it. I do deal with it on a daily basis when talking to clients (I just had one who wanted his site to match the colors on a building across the street from his office!) and 9 times out of 10 a few minutes of explanation and a quick demonstration of shifting color settings on their monitor and they start to "get it".
But after viewing Razorfishes own website a few months ago when that whole thing blew up about them getting sued for doing a piss poor job I'm not surprised that some of their senior designers don't "Get it". And frankly after looking at their site I don't see how a company could have expected a well designed and functioning site from them. Don't people even visit the homepage of the people they hire?
The problem in my particular case was that they let the design people have too much say in what the major should be and didn't let the CS people have much of a say at all. But none of this was obvious until you took the courses. (one of the problems of being a batch of "test students" feeling out the new major).
Believe me if I had known what the major was goign to turn out like I would have just majored in Business or some other easy to coast through BS major and taken my design and CS courses as electives. As it turned out I got more out of my elective courses than I ever could have from the required courses for my chosen major.
Currently they're still teaching "Multimedia Design" from a design perspective with no technical grounding, but hyping it to prospective students as a technically orientated major. I guess in the end the best lesson I got out of the whole thing was don't EVER trust the hype. Espically the part about "We'll help you mold the major to be what you want it to be".
And yes this was a well respected 4 year college who I'm keeping nameless because as much as I'm dissapointed in what they did I don't want to go dragging their name around in the mud. I knew plenty of people in my major who were happy being deluded into thinking they were being prepared to go out and do what I'm doing now. Of course if any of them came to me for a job based on no experience but with outstanding grades and a degree I'd probably laugh.
You may have time to read cnet, NyTimes, Yahoo News, AP feeds, Reuters feeds, The Register, and all the other sources that are often linked from
Personally I love
Sure there are things that are BS on
At the time I left in 1998 the well respected school I was attending was still teaching web-design by having students create pages in Photoshop then choping them up and making image maps with PageMill. And I was required to take this class and create pages this way even though I had already created an award winning, industry leading site for an international manufacturing company. Since I had already tought myself the basic foundation of what makes the web different from tradional design I was able to use both skills to create something which was both aesthetically and technically advanced. The school however still had no idea what made the web different and kept trying to push tradional design into a non-tradional media by throwing all the new abilities out the window.
Even worse was the multimeda design class I took using Macromedia Director. In Anticipation of the class I "Borrowed" a copy of Director and bought a few Lingo books. By the time I took the class I was already writing presentations which were more advanced than anything the two quarter class would ever cover. At least in this instance I had a professor who appreciated by ability to "learn outside the box" and rewarded for for it rather than punish me as the web design professor did. The worst part was that the class never even attempted to teach students the basic skills that could be applied to a Director project. Instead they tried to teach students how to do the "monkey work" of basic assembly and preparation of materials for a multimedia project. And while those skills are important to understand it was IMHO hypocritical of the school to be claiming that they were teaching students how to become "Leaders in the Field of Multimedia" while the actual course work created students who where capable of little more than the most basic jobs in multimedia.
Way too much of college today is structured around teaching students how to perform tasks in the prescribed way rather than how to find their own solutions to the problems they are presented. I was bought up being told that this is what Technical Schools are for and that colleges are designed to teach you how to think.
Don't get me wrong here, I loved my time at college and learned more about life by being there than I could have in pretty much any other venue. But as for learning how to learn and grow for a lifetime of meaningfull employment I got much more out of high school.
Maybe I was lucky to attend and outstanding high school and unlucky enough to attend a college which just "Didn't get it". But when it came to the point of me teaching my professors (as it did in both the web and multimedia classes) I had to ask myself why I was paying for this. And once I realized that my professors were learning more from the class than the class was learning from the professors I decided the only way I could stay and finish my degree was if I was being paid to do it. So I left and started my own consulting business.
Since then I've been offered numerous jobs based on my performance and skills. And all I can say is it feels great to be appreciated for what I've proven I'm capable of, not for some piece of paper that shows I can be "trained".
Less than a hundred bucks if you're willing to do a little hardware hacking. I scored a brand new still shrink wrapped reader (Even still had a covered sticky pad on the bottom for mounting) for about $12 from an on-line surplus outlet. If anyone really needs the info I still have their address here somewhere, no promises on wether or not they still have card readers. It's got TTL output but with a little bit code on a PIC chip it will talk serial just fine. There's probably an easier way to do it but I had a bunch of PIC's laying around.
The best part was justifying it to my friends..."I'm sick of typing in my credit card number every time I want to buy something on-line!". Most of them just assumed I was trying to find a way to hack more money into my cards (not possible since it's not stored on the card, and this thing is a reader only).
I'm not sure how much one with a serial interface would run but for $12 I love mine!
This is just what Apple had coming for sueing eMachines over the eOne. Apparantly it's ok to make computers in other shapes and colors if your're Apple but not for anyone else.
Frankly I'd love to see Apple's previous ruling come back to smack them on this one.
I'd love to see Cobalt loose because I don't think any company should be able to hold a trademark on something like the shape of a computer, but at the same time I really want to see Apple get a taste of their own medicine.
It exists but the selection is so limited that frankly I coulden't find much of anything I wanted. At least not as far as "popular" music is concerned. I'd love to buy my music that way but unless the major lables unlock their vast libraries completely and make them all as available as they are on CD no thanks.
There are however some great Jazz and classical selections available. And while I do enjoy jazz and classical even there the selection is very limited.
For what it's worth even having a client surf the web and give you examples of what they want isn't always that helpfull. We recently had a client who did just this and kept giving examples that just plain could not be appiled to his situation. He was selling home decorating goods and he was surfing only on-line flower delivery services.
He liked the way many of the flower sites used flowers throughout the site as visual elements. And asked if we could do the same with his products. But when he saw it he realized what we tried to tell him at the start, his products just don't look as good displayed that way.
Even worse was one client who requested a single page site to advertise his private medical practice, and wanted it to look like CNBC. Trying to explain that most of the design on CNBC is links to content and that he had no content to link to didn't help. We did come up with a design that was visually similar and just used his text in place of the links, but he still wanted the link boxes to have links....but didn't have any content he wanted links to or any sites he wanted links to. From what we could tell he just wanted links that didn't really go anywhere or do anything?!
The bigger problem is clients who know what they want but don't know how to communicate what they want to the designer...and who want to fit square pegs into round holes and make them look like triangles while doing it.
I still say if you hire an artist you should expect to get something similar to what that artist has done in the past. No one is going to hire a band to play at their wedding without any knowledge of what the band sounds like or what kind of music they play, yet companies are falling all over themselves to hire designers without ever having seen any examples of the designers work.
Of course all this is way OT since frankly this sounds like razorfish did not meet the terms of their own contract. But may be slightly OT since a brief look at razorfishes own site convinced me that I woulden't hire them to do anything. Makes me wonder if IAM even looked at RF's site before hiring them or if they just went on a recomendation from a "friend".
I've been following the whole carnivore thing since just before the story appeared on /. since I saw it on some other news service a few hours earlier. The one thing that keeps bothering me that no one seems to have mentioned is that the FBI is going about this the wrong way.
Afterall when they get a warrant to tap someone's phone they don't go to the Central Office and tap every line hoping they can pick up some of the person's conversations by listening for keywords. Instead they tap the line that feeds that person's home/business line(s). I don't see any reason why they can't do internet wiretaps in the same way. I can't be any more work to "decode" a modem signal or other data transmission than it is to search literally gigs of information per second. In fact in the long term it's probably easier and would take less computing power. So why can't they just tap the lines of the person they want to listen to.
Just like with a tradional wiretap if the suspect being watched uses a phone at some strangers house chances are the feds won't be able to listen in. But so what that's a limitiation they've had to live with for years in order to protect our privacy since we do still live in a country which believes in the presumption of innocence.
The only explanation I can come up with is that this is a thinly veiled attempt by the FBI to try and take away more of our constutional rights without going through the proper channels. It's happened before so I see no reason it can't be happening now.
While I'm no fan of Reno I seriously hope she managed to prove she deserves her job by putting a stop to this nonsense now and pointing out that there's no reason tradional wiretapping measures can't be used for this purpose.