Just to fill in come context, SIOC is an RDF vocabulary that describes web content and communities. In my mind, any site that's based on a CMS or a database should export a version of itself in SIOC: SIOC, for instance, makes it possible to separate comments from the rest of a page, so search engines can separate comments from "official text", so we don't need to put a silly nofollow on comment links.
The "private beta" is a web 2.0 trope that's going to disappear in web 3.0. It's something you can afford to do when you've got a rich sugar daddy, but when you're trying to make a profitable site on your own dime, you've got to start early.
Yes, I know about the testability problems of community systems -- I've lived them. Web 3.0 finds answers to them. Web 3.0 succeeds where Web 2.0 failed.
Class-D amps aren't a common project for the electronic enthusiast: although the theory of the Class-D amp is beautiful and simple, there are a lot of details in the construction that are hard to master. Using an evaluation board, as the author does, is a good answer to the problem.
I agree. The author just picked up a reference design kit. It's a whole different matter to design the circuit itself. Picking the right MOSFETs, gate driver IC, feedback system are crucial to great performance. I'm not an audiophile but I know a great Class D engineer/audiophile who's designed a system with a THD+N of 0.003% (The Zetex amplifier the author chose has a THD+N of just 0.1%). It's cool to hear the engineer talk about the "color of sound".
[Addendum] THD+N is a measure of the purity of the output i.e how well the amplified audio signal matches the smaller input audio signal that's fed into the amplifier (from a CD player for example). So the lower the number the better. Typically, the amplifier circuit itself adds some distortions and noise to the actual audio signal. For example, if you fed a pure 1V 1kHz sine signal into the amplifier, your output might be a 20V 1kHz sine wave but with additional signals mixed in. These signals will include inherent noise generated by the amplifier and harmonics generated by the switching nature of the Class-D amplifer (if you look at your audio signal at the output of the MOSFET switches and before the low pass filter, it will look like a square wave or more specifically, a PWM).
I got a PhD but never found my voice writing as an academic. For a while I thought I was a bad writer, but I spent a year or two, a few years later, where the bulk of my income came from writing. I found it was more profitable to write software than to write computer books, but that was when I realized the problem was in academic writing, not in me.
Maybe it's the state I'm in, but whenever I've looked into high deductible plans it doesn't seem that they save much money.
Most of health insurance premiums go to pay for very expensive treatments, usually at the end of life. Routine medical bills don't add up to much: but bills can add up to $250k pretty quick if you get cancer.
How come people aren't looking at this from the other angle: a twitter client could pre-preemptively look up URLs from url shortening services and annotate the tweets with the full URLs?
For that matter, how about a twitter client with a memory? One that keeps dossiers on the people you follow?
How about a twitter client that isn't written in AIR?
Frontier DSL, which also serves communities around Rochester, NY has also been talking about a bandwidth cap -- at a ludicrously low 5 GB/month.
Frontier serves a number of rural areas where they're the only option people have for service: they've backed off on their threats when customers threatened to take their cases to their state PUCs.
Personally I'm not a fan of antidepressants. For me, Prozac had the side effect of extra-sensory perception: I couldn't do anything without having immediate karmic effects on people I knew who lived hundreds of miles away. I'd be sitting in bed talking to my wife about (essentially unpredictable) events that would happen to take place the next day. People think they might want those kind of powers, but you can count me out. I lasted about a week, but it took most of a month for the metabolites to wash out of my system.
One tablet of lexapro causes my interest in sex to disappear entirely for a week. Personally I think this simplifies my life, but three days of sleeplessness is quite a price to pay.
A friend of mine started taking Effexor, but then we found accounts of how it's impossible to stop taking Effexor: blood-curdling stories about pharmacists who'd dissassemble the pills and reassemble them to titrate the dose down, and who'd still be unable to get the dose to zero. He stopped in three days, before the damage was done.
Anyhow, all of those drugs affect serotonin metabolism, as do the 5-HT2A agonists that some people call psychedelics or entheogens. Alexander Shulgin did a 30-year research program on psychedelic phenethylamines (drugs structurally related to dextroamphetamine, mescaline and ecstacy) and found that certain drugs in that family have a synergism with alcohol much like what the author of that article describes.
After a whole lot of stuff coming down at once (divorce, December holiday season, back taxes due) I was prescribed with Prozac. I took it for maybe 3 months, then stopped. I noticed that I became a plodder for the time being, which worked well for all of the crises. I got over the ex, I got through the holidays, and I set up a repayment plan.
But all in all, I had zero creativity. I do not remember coding anything of significance. Pretty much just a maintenance lifestyle. I behaved the same with alcohol and cannabis, so it is probably my specific make-up.
I really enjoy the creative side, and I choose to remain clear. It makes for better relationships for me, all around. I also love what I do, and I seem to get better enjoyment from it.
Interesting. My father took Prozac for a while some years ago and his creativity shot through the roof. For the whole time he was on it, he became an almost expert woodworker - something he'd shown no interest in before - making some great pieces week after week. Once he came off, within a few weeks he was back to programming again, but no hands-on creative work anymore.
Good post. I think what you just explained is exactly how antidepressants should be thought of for 99% of the population. They are in almost all cases only meant for temporary use. Hell I was suicidal and basically a useless vegetable for a year and surprisingly survived before I got on three different anti-depressants (still on all three right now). But neither my psychiatrist nor I feel like I'll be taking any more than one in a year or two.
So Prozac definitely helped but yeah the creativity thing is a pain. I work like a robot now. I list out a schedule and have to follow it exactly or I get annoyed. I don't like to do anything out of the ordinary now :(
I think I lost you there, can you explain this line for me?
A friend of mine started taking Effexor, but then we found accounts of how it's impossible to stop taking Effexor:
blood-curdling stories about pharmacists who'd dissassemble the pills and reassemble them to titrate the dose down,
and who'd still be unable to get the dose to zero. He stopped in three days, before the damage was done.
For me, stopping Effexor after having taken it for a year was 2-3 weeks of misery. I have heard that for some people the withdrawal is so bad that they can't stay off the drug long enough for their body to finish returning to normal.
You might have been able to blame labor unions for the economic problems of the 1970's, but capital has been ascendant everywhere since the 1980's. Power has become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the rich, and now there's only one part of society to blame for the economic crisis.
Yes, the UAW plays a role in the problems of the US auto industry. The financial services industry, which is at the epicenter of the current crisis, is not unionized. You can't blame unions for AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bank Of America, Merrill Lynch, CDOs or the housing bubble.
I'm sick and tired of the "Atlas Shrugged" fantasies that many people have. Most billionaires are billionaires because they own large blocks of stocks in public companies. These are worth billions because:
(i) People buy their stock in the (false) hope that they will grow in value faster than the GDP and finance a comfortable retirement ()
(ii) There's a large population of people who have money to spend on goods and services. Mass prosperity is the trunk of the tree that holds the rich up.
(iii) People do work in their companies that creates a stream of revenue.
I'm no communist.
Capitalists play an important role in deciding where resources can be profitably used. The root of the financial crisis is that the financial system is no longer capable of performing this crucial role.
Capital and labor need to be in balance. The growth of capital's power over the past 30 years has destroyed the social infrastructure that it needs to create wealth: thus we've got a deflationary process that is making wealth disappear..
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() The stock market finances retirement on a pay-as-you-go basis, just as does social security. The number of dollars spent buying stocks has to equal the number of dollars made selling stocks. It's simple math.
The average return on investment across the economy equals the rate of growth of GDP in the long term: where can you get the returns from? from changing the way that wealth is partitioned in the economy. Some inequality of wealth creates an incentive for people to work and invest -- but the game ends when all of the money is in one person's pocket, just as it does in the game of monopoly.
We've managed to fool ourselves in the last decade by (i) taking on unsustainable debts, and (ii) stealing from ourselves as workers in the name of (imaginary) returns that we thought we'd benefit from when we're retired. Trouble is, the jig is up,
If you're far from the CO they use an ordinary DSL line card that communicates to the repeater, which itself contains both a DSL modem and a line card that talks to your DSL modem.
This strategy is good in the short term, but they'd be better off running a fiber bundle to the repeater farm in the long term.
Cable service terminates about 1.5 miles from my house: everyone who wants TV gets it by satellite, so Time Warner doesn't think it could get enough customers to justify further build-out.
The main trouble w/ Frontier is reliability: the ATM network that hooks up DSL line cards to the network goes down regularly, particularly on the weekends. They've been making noises about a preposterously low 5 GB cap, but haven't enforced it. I wouldn't mind having some reasonable way to pay $1 a GB or so past a certain point, but there's been no talk about that.
Perhaps white space would help, but I've got no faith in wireless broadband systems above 1 GHz. Our area is subdivided into narrow and long valleys that don't get cellphone coverage -- there's an independent ISP that offers tolerable WiMax service around the city of Ithaca, but they're having trouble getting a stable upstream connection and trouble getting high-performance DSL lines to support their infrastructure.
