Back in the 90s, DAT was where it was at for professional-quality live recording. If PDA recording had come back then, it'd have been great. But now you can spend $90, and get a MiniDisc recorder (including shipping) which gives great sound quality, and is much better on batteries than DAT decks, and writes a removable and archivable medium. I leave my DAT deck at home these days.
Good marketing, Slashdot! It reminds me of the Coke machine fiasco a few years ago. They tested machines that had temperature controls -- when the temperature got hot, it would automatically raise the price of the bottles. The media caught wind of this and had a field day. If Coca Cola had only beaten them to the punch and billed it as a "machine that discounts soda in cold weather", they'd have been heros.
"Slashdot subscribers - you get news quicker!" Sounds a lot better than "Cheapskates: you get delayed news!", doesn't it?
Anyone know what in the world is with this? I know it's been around for months, but why would someone who owns the great domain "News.Com" redirect it to the obscure and confusing "News.Com.Com"? I've been wondering what the story behind it is, but it's impossible to search for it on the web because search engines try to "help" you correct your "typo".
We've had 11-digit dialing in Northwest Ohio for a year or so now. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass. I wish someone would come up with a domain registry for phone numbers.:)
Let the users do it. When an admin approves and posts a story, it must first be screened by the community. Anyone with sufficiently positive karma can vote on the pending stories, and if a certain story has enough votes marking it as a dupe, the admins are notified and it isn't posted without a manual override.
It could be a selection right below the metamoderation - "Review Pending Stories". Assuming it waits for 100 votes before deciding what to do, this would only delay the posting process by a few minutes, and it'd make for a much better Slashdot.
A different email address for stuff like this is a good idea, but I use a slightly different tactic. You need to own a domain for this one, and have all the wildcard email filter to your mailbox.
Whenever I register for a website, say Foobar.com, I use the email address foobar_com@mydomain.com. I have a procmail rule that spits *_com@mydomain.com into a separate mailbox. This way, I can still keep up with my possible spam mail without going nuts. The added benefit: if someone sells my address or spams me, I *know* where it came from, and best of all, I can filter *just* them.
It wasn't long ago that blank CDs cost that much, and many alternate backup mediums still cost a lot more than that. If you have a lot of data to backup, get yourself a swappable drive bay and a stack of drives. You've got a dirt cheap (and space-efficient!) terabyte of backups.
To be picky, this shouldn't be mistaken with the same quality as "A Live One" or "Slip Stich & Pass". The true commercial live albums they've produced are made in a very different fashion. These are simply a recording of the feed coming off the board containing the same stuff that goes into the house speakers at the show. While it's not optimized for home listening, it still sounds great.
True live albums are recorded differently, more like a studio album. One big difference is that they are always matrix recordings of the soundboard mixed with audience mics for ambiance. This makes it sound brighter and more alive. Also, professional live tapes are recorded to multitrack with each track a distinct instrument. Traditionally, this is done in a van outside the venue for sound isolation purposes.
So you're right in that the quality of these is better than audience tapes, they're still a notch below true live albums.
Phish does not allow soundboard patches at their shows (due to the illegal foreign "import" scene).
Actually, they discontinued the soundboard access due to the growing numbers of tapers, not any import problems. There was a taper in 1992 who took it upon himself to unplug a cable in the middle of a show which killed the PA system - that was the final straw. For smaller bands, controlling soundboard tapers is managable, but I don't know of any large bands who still allow board patches.
Because some people don't have the bandwidth or disk space to spare on something that's 5 times bigger and offers a marginal increase in quality. I care a lot about the quality of the music I listen to, and I'm unable to tell the difference of a 160k+ MP3 and uncompressed audio. Try it yourself and see if you can.
The thing that really makes me giggle like a girl are the SHN freaks who offer terrible-quality audience recordings with a million warnings in capital letters telling you that if you ever so much as think about encoding the music into MP3 form, that your first born will be sacrificed.
Ari Patrinos, a senior Energy Department administrator who will help oversee the project, said the organism was an attractive starting point to create a "minimal genome" because it is so minimal already. "We know even the simplest of cells is incredibly complicated," Patrinos said -- too complicated, at least so far, to understand completely. "This is a case where we're trying to cheat a little bit, to take the smallest and simplest and make it smaller and simpler."
So calculate the result yourself. Decide what constitutes a Shakespeare work, which characters need to match (say, [A-Z]), and calculate the number of permutations of your character set are needed to create something that matches (26 * 26 * 26 *...). If you care about the answer to questions like this, get a good mathematician to spend an hour to give you the result. Don't waste billions of hours of CPU time proving something we already know.
Am I ready for asynchronous logic? It doesn't really matter -- it can come along whenever it wants, and I'll come use it when I have some spare cycles.
Of course, this is only pumping out the dissolved air from the water, which will cause bubbles to rise from the top and look like boiling. Still pretty cool.
Speaking of interesting water temperature tricks, this one still freaks me out. Take two ice cube trays. Fill one with cold tap water, and the other with piping hot tap water. Put both of them on the floor of the freezer. Guess which one will fully freeze first? Hint: it ain't the cold one.
It sounds like you're trying to compress an ASCII file with a bunch of letters representing the genome data. This is going to compress a lot better than an encoded file with two-bit bytes due to the large number of repeated "garbage" data in the ASCII representation. That's not to say that the encoded representation wouldn't compress well, perhaps with a customized compression algorithm. Run-length encoding would probably catch a good number of runs.
Be really careful with those buggers, namely the box between the wall and the computer. It puts out a ton of heat. I once had one get stuck in the couch overnight and the plastic had *melted*. That was a close one. Be ye warned.
It's okay, though.. I'm sure the people who hacked the Nimda into the program also added a disclaimer into the Terms of Service for the software. After all, it's just another virus that gets installed when you install "free" software...
Not to side with the RIAA (shudder), but Clear Channel is a pretty ugly company. You probably listen to them now and don't even know it. There's a station list available at http://www.cjr.org/owners/clearchannel.asp
The Streets of SimCity only worked for SimCity 2000, which was two versions ago.:-( It was a cool idea, but wasn't as interesting as it could have been.
You discover new shows by giving away samples of shows for free. It's the same principal of your friendly neighborhood crack dealer: "Ah, I see you watch a lot of Simpsons episodes, try an episode of Futurama on us!"
I like what I see regarding the new localization features (esp. being able to budget individual schools, etc), but it seems to be mostly eye-candy features that were added. It seems to be missing a few of the more substantial things I'd been wanting:
Arbitrary road placement - It looks like it's still always tied to the grid. This makes it really hard to do any development on anything but flat land.
Drive-Thrus - It's hard to really get a good feel for your town. Imagine being able to have a car simulator where you get to experience what traveling is like in the city first-hand.
Resident Profiling - I'd love to take a random Joe Schmoe from a house and find out what he thinks of the city and his neighborhood, what he does, where he works (drive it?), etc.
The Sims Integration - An extension of the resident profiling, why could I take a random family from the city and micromanage them? They'd be able to explore the whole city.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the 90s, DAT was where it was at for professional-quality live recording. If PDA recording had come back then, it'd have been great. But now you can spend $90, and get a MiniDisc recorder (including shipping) which gives great sound quality, and is much better on batteries than DAT decks, and writes a removable and archivable medium. I leave my DAT deck at home these days.
Good marketing, Slashdot! It reminds me of the Coke machine fiasco a few years ago. They tested machines that had temperature controls -- when the temperature got hot, it would automatically raise the price of the bottles. The media caught wind of this and had a field day. If Coca Cola had only beaten them to the punch and billed it as a "machine that discounts soda in cold weather", they'd have been heros.
"Slashdot subscribers - you get news quicker!" Sounds a lot better than "Cheapskates: you get delayed news!", doesn't it?
Anyone know what in the world is with this? I know it's been around for months, but why would someone who owns the great domain "News.Com" redirect it to the obscure and confusing "News.Com.Com"? I've been wondering what the story behind it is, but it's impossible to search for it on the web because search engines try to "help" you correct your "typo".
I know what a hacker is, but what is a "cacker" or a "racker"?
(simple regular expression bugs in article titles explain a lot about why Slash is the way it is)
We've had 11-digit dialing in Northwest Ohio for a year or so now. Yeah, it's a pain in the ass. I wish someone would come up with a domain registry for phone numbers. :)
Let the users do it. When an admin approves and posts a story, it must first be screened by the community. Anyone with sufficiently positive karma can vote on the pending stories, and if a certain story has enough votes marking it as a dupe, the admins are notified and it isn't posted without a manual override.
It could be a selection right below the metamoderation - "Review Pending Stories". Assuming it waits for 100 votes before deciding what to do, this would only delay the posting process by a few minutes, and it'd make for a much better Slashdot.
> wait... garbage posts on slashdot!? it's already
> begun! how much are those trolls getting paid?!
They're doing it pro-boner.
A different email address for stuff like this is a good idea, but I use a slightly different tactic. You need to own a domain for this one, and have all the wildcard email filter to your mailbox.
Whenever I register for a website, say Foobar.com, I use the email address foobar_com@mydomain.com. I have a procmail rule that spits *_com@mydomain.com into a separate mailbox. This way, I can still keep up with my possible spam mail without going nuts. The added benefit: if someone sells my address or spams me, I *know* where it came from, and best of all, I can filter *just* them.
It wasn't long ago that blank CDs cost that much, and many alternate backup mediums still cost a lot more than that. If you have a lot of data to backup, get yourself a swappable drive bay and a stack of drives. You've got a dirt cheap (and space-efficient!) terabyte of backups.
Neat.
To be picky, this shouldn't be mistaken with the same quality as "A Live One" or "Slip Stich & Pass". The true commercial live albums they've produced are made in a very different fashion. These are simply a recording of the feed coming off the board containing the same stuff that goes into the house speakers at the show. While it's not optimized for home listening, it still sounds great.
True live albums are recorded differently, more like a studio album. One big difference is that they are always matrix recordings of the soundboard mixed with audience mics for ambiance. This makes it sound brighter and more alive. Also, professional live tapes are recorded to multitrack with each track a distinct instrument. Traditionally, this is done in a van outside the venue for sound isolation purposes.
So you're right in that the quality of these is better than audience tapes, they're still a notch below true live albums.
Actually, they discontinued the soundboard access due to the growing numbers of tapers, not any import problems. There was a taper in 1992 who took it upon himself to unplug a cable in the middle of a show which killed the PA system - that was the final straw. For smaller bands, controlling soundboard tapers is managable, but I don't know of any large bands who still allow board patches.
Because some people don't have the bandwidth or disk space to spare on something that's 5 times bigger and offers a marginal increase in quality. I care a lot about the quality of the music I listen to, and I'm unable to tell the difference of a 160k+ MP3 and uncompressed audio. Try it yourself and see if you can.
The thing that really makes me giggle like a girl are the SHN freaks who offer terrible-quality audience recordings with a million warnings in capital letters telling you that if you ever so much as think about encoding the music into MP3 form, that your first born will be sacrificed.
Hopefully the interface to this will be kept private, or someone will write a Brain Googlism program. I can see it now..
My boss is an insensitive clod.
My wife is a skanky nagging whore.
My secretery is not.
So calculate the result yourself. Decide what constitutes a Shakespeare work, which characters need to match (say, [A-Z]), and calculate the number of permutations of your character set are needed to create something that matches (26 * 26 * 26 * ...). If you care about the answer to questions like this, get a good mathematician to spend an hour to give you the result. Don't waste billions of hours of CPU time proving something we already know.
Am I ready for asynchronous logic? It doesn't really matter -- it can come along whenever it wants, and I'll come use it when I have some spare cycles.
Of course, this is only pumping out the dissolved air from the water, which will cause bubbles to rise from the top and look like boiling. Still pretty cool.
Speaking of interesting water temperature tricks, this one still freaks me out. Take two ice cube trays. Fill one with cold tap water, and the other with piping hot tap water. Put both of them on the floor of the freezer. Guess which one will fully freeze first? Hint: it ain't the cold one.
It sounds like you're trying to compress an ASCII file with a bunch of letters representing the genome data. This is going to compress a lot better than an encoded file with two-bit bytes due to the large number of repeated "garbage" data in the ASCII representation. That's not to say that the encoded representation wouldn't compress well, perhaps with a customized compression algorithm. Run-length encoding would probably catch a good number of runs.
Edgar Online is the defacto source for this kind of stuff. Here's the link.
Be really careful with those buggers, namely the box between the wall and the computer. It puts out a ton of heat. I once had one get stuck in the couch overnight and the plastic had *melted*. That was a close one. Be ye warned.
It's okay, though.. I'm sure the people who hacked the Nimda into the program also added a disclaimer into the Terms of Service for the software. After all, it's just another virus that gets installed when you install "free" software...
Not to side with the RIAA (shudder), but Clear Channel is a pretty ugly company. You probably listen to them now and don't even know it. There's a station list available at http://www.cjr.org/owners/clearchannel.asp
The Streets of SimCity only worked for SimCity 2000, which was two versions ago. :-( It was a cool idea, but wasn't as interesting as it could have been.
You discover new shows by giving away samples of shows for free. It's the same principal of your friendly neighborhood crack dealer: "Ah, I see you watch a lot of Simpsons episodes, try an episode of Futurama on us!"
- Arbitrary road placement - It looks like it's still always tied to the grid. This makes it really hard to do any development on anything but flat land.
- Drive-Thrus - It's hard to really get a good feel for your town. Imagine being able to have a car simulator where you get to experience what traveling is like in the city first-hand.
- Resident Profiling - I'd love to take a random Joe Schmoe from a house and find out what he thinks of the city and his neighborhood, what he does, where he works (drive it?), etc.
- The Sims Integration - An extension of the resident profiling, why could I take a random family from the city and micromanage them? They'd be able to explore the whole city.
Oh well, there's always SimCity 5..