I seriously hope he's got a backup strategy for that DOS box.
Readit Newsicarus_drowning commented on George R. R. Martin Still Uses A DOS Word Processor youtube.com/watch?v=X5REM... · Posted by u/skozz
Think about what it means to the HN culture to have a subject that normally would have been flagged out of existence as overtly political suddenly be featured front and center
It means that a bunch of people who once thought they were somehow above or apart from politics find that they are not, and that the things that happen in the world constitute news of real interest to hackers. That's growth.
It's also misleading to talk about this as an issue of ideological purity. People talk about purity when the politics of the public figure in question are not extreme enough. The problem is that she helped start a war that killed rather a lot of people, none of whom are now able to lend their voices to the discussion, and those who wish to remember those people are obliged to speak on their behalf. You don't mind her politics, and that's cool. But no one's forcing me to pay Dropbox anything. So I won't anymore.
It means that a bunch of people who once thought they were somehow above or apart from politics find that they are not, and that the things that happen in the world constitute news of real interest to hackers. That's growth.
Unless the views that "unite" them are repulsive. If Rice's viewpoints were the polar opposite and we were all jumping on the bandwagon to boycott dropbox because they didn't support torture enough, would that be "growth"?
Of course not.
You don't like Rice's views on this issue, and want to convince people-- including the HN community-- that she was wrong on this issue, and that her views on other issues (warantless wiretaps, etc.) are dangerous for a business like dropbox. Moreover, you don't want to support dropbox now that Rice is a board member. Fine. But to claim that just because we all (or at least most of us) disagree with her views, that in and of itself means that we're "growing" as a community is genuinely dangerous-- because at some point, most of us are going to be wrong about something, and arguing on ideological merit is going to be the only thing that can "save" us. Simply saying that "we all agree, and that's growth" will just ensure that we're all wrong forever.
icarus_drowning commented on Time-Machine-style backup with rsync github.com/laurent22/rsyn... · Posted by u/plessthanpt05
Could you please share how you did that in Automaton? I'd love to do that to my backups.
I found that just running an Automator script for the "new disk image from selection" command on the root of the drive worked perfectly-- set an iCal event to run that script once a day, and you're done.
Be sure to test this to make sure it restores, but in my case it works flawlessly.
icarus_drowning commented on Time-Machine-style backup with rsync github.com/laurent22/rsyn... · Posted by u/plessthanpt05
I would guess something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDPzVdohrck#t=1m13s
Oh, and integration with the OS X recovery partition / OS reinstallation mechanism that allows you to point to a Time Machine backup as the recovery point for your re-installation.
The integration with OS reinstall works very well, and is pretty seamless from the user's perspective. I used to do two backups-- a local TM backup and a separate cloud backup, but I found it was actually easier to just use Automator to up mount my TM volume once a day, image it, and send that up to the cloud. When my TM volume failed last year, I just pulled the latest image and put it on a replacement drive, and I was back up and running.
TM has had a few problems, but by and large it is one of the quiet successes in OS X, and probably my favorite feature if the OS. Why Microsoft hasn't put something like it in Windows is baffling to me.
icarus_drowning commented on A Sneak Peek at Eric Schlosser's New Book on Nuclear Weapons motherjones.com/politics/... · Posted by u/edw519
Seems like a good place to mention: "Ignition - An informal history of liquid rocket propellants"
http://www.amazon.com/Ignition-informal-history-liquid-prope...
Also, if you're looking for a short, but surprisingly informative video on the matter, Scott Manley's "WTF is rocket fuel anyway" video is fantastic:
icarus_drowning commented on Those Mac Pros are going to be expensive marco.org/2013/08/10/ivy-... · Posted by u/mh_
Does it matter? This Marco guy will buy anything with an Apple logo anyway - and sprout tweetable one-liners about how good and revolutionary said products are. I don't see why his articles are cross-posted here anyway, it is just fanboyism and praise. Nothing worth discussing. Here come the downvotes.
Well at least you expect the downvotes. Which leads me to wonder why you thought this comment would be informative and helpful in the first place.
I use all of them daily.
First things first. What I quickly discovered was that Logic _sounds_ better. Just dragging in a sample from you desktop seemed to reveal that logic was processing it in a higher quality. A weird thing, and maybe it's placebo, but everytime I go back to ableton I notice this. Furthermore, the bottom line is, my productions just sounds better in Logic. Maybe it's the workflow it encourages, I'm not sure. All I know is that no serious audio engineer would use anything else than Pro Tools or Logic for a serious recording, and I agree. At least that's my experience.
Regarding Reason: In my opinion, it has some of the best synths in the business. Which is why i rewire into Logic. A couple of youtube tutorials on Thor and you'll be going strong.
Ableton, well, I don't care much for it. The only thing i really miss is how easy it is to manipulate audio in it. A lot of people talk about how fast it is, but the design always seemed to get in my way. Personal preference i guess...
The Normalize on export function in Logic is works weirdly well too, especially considering you have almost no control over it. I almost always leave it on and in 5 years of professional composition work, have only chosen to switch it off once or twice-- and only because it was pushing some audio artifacts to the forefront that I had previously corrected.
No 32-bit plugins is an interesting choice. Logic 9 can be launched in 64-bit mode with a 32-bit bridge that opens/closes based on whether or not you have any 32-bit VST/AU plugins trying to run. I've got a couple of Sonnox plugins that aren't available in 64-bit which is going to keep me off Logic X until they [Sonnox] get their act together.
Edit: Clarifying a poor use of a pronoun.
I was under the impression that SpaceX was trying to make the first re-usable rocket stage, but I've recently found out that that isn't true. The space shuttle already holds that title.
I'm also kindof curious why they decided to go with a vertical-landing-design, instead of putting some wings on it and having it glide home like the shuttle did. Is that a weight-concern? Aerodynamics, mabye, but couldn't the wings be articulated in the same way that the landing legs are right now?
(I will admit some ignorance in this field. I'm definitely a fan, but I'm definitely not a historian or a rocket scientist)
As for gliding back: the Falcon booster does not actually achieve orbit-- when the main engine cuts off, it is on a ballistic trajectory back to the ocean. While it may be possible to design some sort of gliding apparatus to "save" a booster on a sub-orbital trajectory, it is (again, as I understand it), much simpler to simply adjust that trajectory via a boostback burn that reverses or slows that trajectory, and to then perform a suicide burn[2] to recover the stage, either on a barge or (on lower orbit missions) back on a land-based pad.
I am not a rocket scientist, nor do I have experience in the space industry-- these thoughts are just based on what I've read following the SpaceX reusability program as closely as I can for the past few years.
I do play a lot of Kerbal Space Program, though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Space_Shuttle...
[2] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10307/what-is-a-sui...