Comment Still Slacking After All These Years (Score 1) 867
1996: Slackware? -> Yggdrasil -> Slackware -> TurboLinux -> Slackware/Ubuntu.
Still Slacking After All These Years.
Neil Young Pushes Pono, Says Piracy Is the New Radio 361
Hugh Pickens writes "Kia Makarechi reports that Neil Young isn't particularly concerned with the effects of piracy on artists but is more concerned that the files that are being shared are of such low quality. 'It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,' says Young. 'I look at the radio as gone. Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.' Young is primarily concerned about whether the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint. Young's main concern is that your average MP3 file only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording and is pushing a new format called Pono that would be 'high-resolution' digital tracks of the same quality as that produced during the studio recording. Young wants to see better music recording and high resolution recording, but we're not anywhere near that and hopes that 'some rich guy' will solve the problem of creating and distributing '100 percent' of the sound in music. 'Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.'"
Comment Re:iOS Maps (Score 1) 484
The Calendar and Newsstand apps icons are dynamic, they ought to make Maps like that too.
Comment Re:Philosophical thought experiment (Score 1) 580
This view that viewing something somehow metaphysically harms or otherwise affects the subject of the image is outright absurd.
Suppose that we decide to base punishment, or any action for that matter, on such "harm-at-a-distance". Keep in mind that we're not basing punishment on the ascertainable *effect* that the pornography has had on on the subject, we are basing it on a completely separate act in a completely context: the act of someone viewing the image, which the subject may not have any knowledge of.
And what if we later find out that the subject has been dead for years? What happened, then? Did the viewing of the image cause harm to a dead person? The person's soul? Or do we, on the other hand, determine that because the person was dead, it turns out no "harm waves" were "emitted" by the viewing waves? So the harm waves actually know whether the subject is alive or dead, happy or sad, offended or unconcerned?
Comment The design looks familiar (Score 1) 59
Classic, even.
Copyrights To Reach Deep Space 247
bs0d3 writes "Voyager 1 is expected to reach interstellar space soon. It will be the first made made object to cross the heliosphere, which is the final stop in our solar system. Voyager 1, famously contained a gold phonographic record. The record was filled with iconic sights, images, and sounds from earth, and the prevailing message, "we come in peace". The disc was [composed] by a man named Carl Sagan, and it contained many pieces of art, songs, and images, that are all copy-written. According to NASA, 'Most of the material they used was copyrighted by the creators/owners and Sagan had to get copyright releases in order to assemble the original record. Subsequently, Warner Multimedia was able to obtain copyright releases for the 1992 version of "Murmurs of Earth" .. Unfortunately, the book and CDROM are no longer being published and are hard to find as a set.'"
Comment Programming for fun? Lisp and Smalltalk (Score 2) 530
You say you want to "code for personal reasons", which I take to mean because you find programming enjoyable and want to write programs for fun.
Then I would absolutely recommend Lisp and Smalltalk. For Lisp, you can get started with Lisp In A Box and Peter Siebels' "Practical Common Lisp". For Smalltalk, try Squeak accompanied by Squeak by Example. It's all free.
No, you are probably not going to get a job writing in either of these languages, but learning them may indeed help you get a job, as they are both conceptually deep, and their influences are broader than many realize: JavaScript borrows heavily from Lisp, and Ruby and Objective C from Smalltalk. Even Python and Perl have some Lisp concepts in them. In fact it seems that every new dynamic language to come out in the last twenty years owes something to these two languages. They are like the Greek and Latin of programming languages.
Report Finds Google Supervisors Knew About Wi-Fi Data Harvesting 197
bonch writes "According to the FCC report, Google's collection of Street View data was not the unauthorized act of a rogue engineer, as Google had portrayed it, but an authorized program known to supervisors and at least seven other engineers. The original proposal contradicts Google's claim that there was no intent to gather payload data: 'We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing.'"
Comment The one time I saw Bill Gates in person (Score 1) 342
was when I heard him give a talk on OS/2 and how it was the future of Microsoft. This was at the University of Washington, and obviously sometime between late 1987 and 1988. A very narrow slice of history indeed.
Comment Re:What does it mean to have a price? (Score 1) 119
So the price is $100 and proof that you are part of a large government organization. The price of the second element Is variable, and is a combination of time, money, effort, and circumstance.
Comment Re:Lighten up (Score 1) 85
Mid-forties; nowhere near old age.
In my comment I was just making the point that I am one of those poor people - ZOMG, I could die any day from an earthquake or radiation poisoning!!! - that the parent poster thinks people should not make jokes in front of.
More radioactive rabid robot monkey jokes, please.
Comment Lighten up (Score 3, Insightful) 85
Bah. I live in Japan, was born here, and will probably die here; hopefully from old age, perhaps from radiation or from earthquakes, who knows?
But hey, monkeys are funny. They are also fascinating.
And I love stupid Planet of the Apes jokes. Even stupid Godzilla and radiation jokes don't bother me. They probably don't bother the researchers either, and they sure as hell don't bother the monkeys. After all, they're monkeys! And get your stinking paws off me you damned dirty apes!
Japanese Use Wild Monkeys To Track Radiation 85
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Scientists in Japan are taking a novel approach to measuring the impact of radiation in a forest affected by the Fukushima nuclear crisis: enlisting the help of local wild monkeys. Takayuki Takahashi, a professor of robotic technology at Fukushima University, told CNN Wednesday his team was working on a collar fitted with a dosimeter to measure radiation levels that could be fitted to the monkeys before they are released back into the wild. Takahashi said the experiment would help researchers understand how radiation in the forest can affect human beings, as well as wild animals. While human scientists have been monitoring radiation levels from the air, the use of monkey 'assistants' will give them a clearer idea of conditions on the ground."
Comment GamePro has certainly served me well for 22 years! (Score 1) 91
Though I haven't even read the magazine once in the past two decades, I have a beach/bath towel with the GamePro logo on it, which I received as a giveaway at the June 1989 Consumer Electronics Show, which would make it right when the mag started. I was doing graphic design/advertising at my first job then, and there might be an ad I worked on in the very first issue.
The towel is still in excellent condition - not a tear and little wear. I'll be sure to use it after this evening's shower.
