The Null Device
2000/5/29
mp3.com update: SubGenius ranters Phineas Narco have some material up on mp3.com; mostly consisting of found sounds and ranting over a beat. Praise "Bob"!
There's an online Java version of the old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game on Douglas Adams' website. (via Hear Ye)
Interesting article about the genesis of the MP3 algorithm: (via Pigs&Fishes)
'I was ready to fine-tune my compression algorithm,' Brandenburg recalls. 'Somewhere down the corridor a radio was playing [Suzanne Vega's song] 'Tom's Diner.' I was electrified. I knew it would be nearly impossible to compress this warm a capella voice.'... He wound up listening to the song thousands of times, and the result was a code that was heard around the world. When an MP3 player compresses music by anyone from Courtney Love to Kenny G, it is replicating the way that Brandenburg heard Suzanne Vega.
Wouldn't that only apply to MP3s encoded with the Fraunhofer psychoacoustic model?
`Nerverts' redux: The complex interplay between the hacker/geek culture and non-traditional sexuality: (Salon)
[Richard Stallman] says he has never had a monogamous sexual relationship, and he's also observed that programmers tend to favor polyamorous or non-monogamous relationships more than people in other jobs... he recognizes that the unconventional choices he has made as a software engineer are analogous to the choices he's made in his romantic life as well. "I believe in love, but not monogamy," he says plainly.
Deirdre Saoirse, a former employee of Linuxcare and founder of a Bay Area users group for people who use the Python scripting language, feels strongly that people involved in open source can be just as conservative and closed-minded as any other part of the population. "Some of my female and/or queer and/or transgendered friends have felt very out of place in the Linux community," she says emphatically. "I've seen a lot of sexism and not a lot of openness to alternative lifestyles among the community as a whole, even in the Bay Area."
Sounds like the Slashdot locker-room where "gay" is a pejorative they sling at Microsoft. --acb
"Geeks are introverts, we read a lot of science fiction, and we have bizarre socialization," says Muffy Barkocy, a non-monogamous bisexual working with Apache and Perl at Egreetings.com. She believes that a geek's stereotypical lack of socialization encourages a more experimental sexual life. "Because of our lack of socialization, we don't learn about the monogamous imperative. It just doesn't occur to us."