> One of the most disappointing aspects of American College life is how incurious everybody seemed to be.
This reflects the world as a whole. Most people aren't curious about things that don't directly affect them, so I'm not surprised to see it reflected in the college population.
Many people in the US treat college as a vocational school, probably in large part because the US pushed hard to increase college attendance. So 75 years ago, someone would graduate high school and apprentice at a job and work their way up, today, they likely start at colloege then jump into the labor force, but they pick their major based on the job they want (just like apperenticing in a field.)
Personnaly, I treated college as an instructor led encyclopedia, and just took classes I wanted to learn about. I have never earned a penny with the degrees I received, but I never intended to. Most of my college carreer was spend in tandem with working a full time job. I've only stopped college for a while because my job is sucking up too much of my time. Once I retire, I'll go back to college to get a PhD in math (probabilities, specifically) as background for what I want to study in philosophy (bayesian epistomology)
914s had an engine and transmission from the VW Bus. Since the VW Bus had a rear engine setup the shift rod was straight into the very front of the transaxle. IIRC, when they reversed the transmission to put the engine in front of the transmission, the shift input eas now in the very rear so the shift rod started in the middle/front of the car, had to transit back, around the engine and transaxle assembly then completely reverse into the what was now the very rear of the transmission. Which is why the 914s were notorious for sloppy transmissions. Later years of 914 made a change in the transmission so the shift rod entered the side of the transmission, which probably helped a little.
I don't know anything about its data encoding, but Alesis had a system--ADAT--that stored 8 trackes of 24bit, 48khz audio on SVHS tapes. There was a period of time in which it was a pretty revolutionary product. It preceeded the time when storing lots of digital audio on your local computer was practical (1991/1992).
Velvia 100 is gone, but Velvia 50 is still available (though the large sizes aren't imported to the US). Then there's Fuji Provia, my favorite of Fuji's reversal films. In fact I just ordered 10 rolls of Provia in 120 film.
the first story "How the World was Saved" in the Cyberiad is a super short story, what writers usually call "flash fiction". Maybe 4-5 pages, and perfectly sets the mood for the rest of the book. But is is very different than Fiasco. Lem seemed to have two styles--light and filled with clever wordplay, and dark tragic, with a keen focus on our species hubris (Solaris, Fiasco). Fiasco is probably my third favorite after Cyberiad and Solaris. The Ijon Tichy stories are mostly of the light variety.
reminds me of my 1963 VW Bus. The throttle pedal pressed down on a 90 degree arm/bellcrank which pulled on the throttle cable that ran to the rear engine. Because the throttle cable was old it had more friction internally, and the undercarriage of the vehicle wasn't in the best of shape. So the flat piece of metal on the body that the bellcrank attached to started to rip, so when I pressed the pedal down, the assembly would deflect and very little motion would be transferred to the cable. I took a small needlenose nose vise grip and clamped it over the rip in the metal, and then continued to drive it like that for the next 5 years.
I'd never heard of "navy seal copypasta", so I googled it, and to my read, its very hard to see any >wink< >wink< in the text, which ends after a long screed, with threats of violence against the poster. So I think its reasonable to believe that maybe on of the people on the twitter abuse team didn't get the joke and instead saw what on its surface looks like a threat. I don't know twitter's ToS, but I'm guessing that if taken literally that text could violate them.
agree or disagree with the list, is is very USA-centric. As a US citizen I can look to all the events he cites and agree at least to their impact, but aside from the internet and Ukraine, these are all things that happened to the US. I wonder how important the assasination of JFK, RFK, and MLK, or 9/11 were to non-US citizens? (I'm genuinely curious, I know that the reach on the US means that almost everyone is impacted becuase we strongly impact other countries with our actions, but are they seen as turning points outside of the US?)
There are some universes where old software or hardware is still heavily used or valuable. One area where I dabble is electronic music. Sure there are lots of new things, but a 50 year old guitar is still a viable instrument, so why not a 30 year old synthesizer? So in this universe, some people go to great lengths to maintain software that supports these instruments. I have a Yamaha VL1. Released in the mid 90s, it was Yamaha’s flagship “tech preview” for waveguide physical modeling software. You could play the instrument and tweak some very basic parameters without a computer, but if you want to actually edit the modeling, you need the “expert editor” which requires MacOS System 7 and a direct serial MIDI port or Apples long gone “midi manager” software. I keep an old 68k laptop around for that purpose alone.
Korg released an audio DSP playground in a PCI card called the OasysPCI which never got OSX drivers, so I have a MDD PPC Mac to run that. There are probably better things running natively today, hey instruments are things that shouldn’t be obsoleted, since they all have their own sound. Most of the rest of the ancient software I run is run under Wine (which worked quite well up to Mojave, but became difficult when Apple killed 32 bit support) because Microsoft has done better at retaining backwards compatibility. So now I have a laptop permanently stuck on Mojave.
not me. I always read the article if it interests me, I sometimes read the comments on HN. While I appreciate the discussion, with the type of articles I read I want the reported info first before I read a bunch of opinions.
Except if the URL says twitter.com--my brain can't process twitter threads, with their constant breaks, so I never go to twitter for anything. Give me a 10,000 word article any day over a twitter thread.
I have never by choice used rar /or/ 7z. I'm not a heavy user of compression, just the occasional "compress for transport", so to me any savings in file size is an unnoticable rounding error, even 15 years ago. Far more important to me is the simplicity of having tools for compression/decompression built into pretty much any computer that might receive my file, and where the receiver of the file, who may not be technologically adept, knows what it is without me having to explain that it is a compressed file and they neeed to get some tool to decompress it.
What’s not clear to me from the article, initially what’s discussed are use land features, but with these changes are they also turning off access for dealer repair shops as well? Just so the don’t have to give access to third parties? Won’t this bite them by reducing the quality of first party repairs? Or am I misunderstanding?
I can't speak for other people, but for me the size issue isn't about how big the phone is in my pocket, but the size in use, specifically whether my thumb can reach any point on the screen. So a compact phone that unfolds to a large screen defeats the entire purpose for me.
while I don't necessarily agree with the extreme negative view of crypto (though I definitely don't have a positive view), this is already a commonly practiced thing called Pigovian taxation:
this article seems to miss why I participate on forums. I'm not interacting with the software, I'm not creating some great post that will live on in history. I'm interacting with another person, who has asked a question. Should I refuse to answer because that person asked the question on a vbulletin system? (* I've never used reddit or discord. With the exception of HN, the only forums I use are old school--small, single purpose vbulletin, SMF, or PHPBB forums.)
If you take a creative writing class you’ll find it is very common to give characters agency beyond what the author wants (e.g. I was going to have her do this, but she disagreed and did that…) and part of that is building a larger world, creating backstory for the characters. A great example is in the Quentin Tarantino film “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” the main character stars in a Hollywood wester TV series. Even though the movie only shows a tiny bit of the series while they’re filming a couple scenes, apparently Tarantino wrote several full episodes of the hypothetical series. This kind of backstory writing seems to be pretty common. (My MFA is in creative writing, so I spent a lot of time with other writers.)
I have a job, and everything else I do I do for myself, and I have no expectations whatsoever for anyone else using it (and in most cases, no one else will ever see it because I don't make it public.)
I'm still using a first gen SE as well, specifically because every phone available today doesn't have the one feature I'm looking for that the SE has--size. I'm considering keeping it in service, and just removing anything that might be a security risk--like my bank's app.
(Yes I know there are tiny Android phones, but pretty much all of them are from iffy sources where I'm unlikely to get a year of updates, let alone 6 years. Most have aweful screens, or other reasons not to buy. I have come close to trying them, but always found too many potential issues. The closes I came to trying is the Palm phone.)
The is actually kind of annoying behavior. My work's phone system emails me voicemails as a sime email with a wav file attached (why wav? arent we 30 years past that for spoken text?). When I tap the wav file to listen to it, fine, but then I get in my car and it fires up and plays that voicemail.
I defintely find "large" phones to be very uncomfortable and cramping to use for more than a few minutes. Thats why I haven't upgraded from my first gen iPhone SE. Thats even a little too big--the iPhone 4 and previous iPhones were the perfect size. I'm not a heavy smart phone user, but for the two weeks I had an XS, it was the most difficult phone I ever had. I couldn't hold onto it, and was dropping it constantly. So I gave it to my brother and bought another SE used (before the XS, I had an SE that got water damaged.)
I still use floppies a lot. I know, why? Well there is a lot of hardware from the 80's and 90's that, unlike simple PCs, does not really obsolete.* I know this affects a lot of areas, but mine is synthesizers and samplers. Synths allows you to save sounds you created or banks of sounds, and depending on the synth, possibly other things. Samplers recorded short snippets of digital audio and then allows you to place that sound in a configuration that allowed you to play it like a synthesizer.
Fortunately, most synths no longer really need the floppy since most of what it gets you is easily replaced with MIDI SYSEX, and dump requests. Samplers on the other hand, while many did implement MIDI SDS, dumping digital audio at 31.25kbps is an exercise in boredom. Some of the later samplers have SCSI, so saving off to SD cards is easy (thanks to the SCSI2SD boards) but for some, I still have to save off to floppy.
* While there are newer devices of this type available without the floppy dependancy, each musical instrument is a unique creation with its own sound, so just because there is something new it doesn't mean that new thing is a replacement for the original thing (just as a trumpet isn't a relacement for a violin.)
"If those students can be identified..." It sounds from the statement that they don't know who they are at this point. This sounds to me like an initial statement before a full investigation has completed. I would also say that for the rights of other students, there should be some kind of fair process to ensure that the accused are fairly treated.
I was a huge Peter Jackson fan prior, due primarily to Meet the Feebles (still my secret guilty pleasure), and it was just so bizarre to see him move from low budget camp like MTF and Dead Alive, to a $300million dollar massive endeavor.
From my very limited experience as a DP on several friends low budget films, the organizational efforts to produce a film the size of LOTR is lightyears beyond films like MTF. Of course later films like The Frighteners or Heavenly Creatures probably helped him build up to being able to manage that.
I think the exhibition should include the Van Meegerens. The fake Vermeers are famous enough that seeing them alongside real Vermeers would be fascinating.
this always baffles me. If my search terms return zero hits, THAT is helpful and meaningful to know, when they change my search to enable hits, that isn't helpful, because it 99% of the time will not have the information I want, and frequently I won't know that they are ignoring search term, so I'll click through to half a dozen hits before I discover what theyve done. I got to the point that as soo as I clicked a link, the first thing I'd do on the landing page was command-f, and search for the most specific term in my google query. If it wasn't found, I'd instantly hit the back button and do the next hit.
This really got to me about 6 months ago, so I changed all my default searches on all my browsers and mobile to DDG, and haven't looked back. I tried DDG ~5 years ago, and there was no way it could have replaced google for me then, but when I did it 6 months ago, it didn't seem any worse, maybe a little better.
I have a huge list of movies (and a few TV shows) that don't seem to have made the jump. Some are great (the BBC series of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People), some of them are very cult (Meet the Feebles), and some are just bad (Poor White Trash II, originally titled Scum of the Earth). Everyone said that streaming would make the "long tail" accessible because the costs to transfer and distribute would be so low, but that doesn't seem to have happened, at least to the extent that I'd like.
(I've had the same issue with music--my MP3 collection consists of a few dozen LPs that I've ripped because they were never digitized and added to the different services.)