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There are lots of double blind tests. Most that mean anything are between CD quality and above. No difference found after a year plus of testing. If you want to hear some differences in what's left out when items are compressed A refutation of the validity of double-blind audio tests The main point would be that a well mastered CD is better than a poorly mastered 192kHz/24 bit recording, and the same goes for a poorly mastered CD vs a 192 encoded well mastered piece. However, when the original quality material is of like quality, many can tell the differences until they get to CD quality. After that, a smaller segment can tell. What's been destroying music is the large group of folks who've never heard anything that wasn't put through a pipe filled with a wet sponge first. If that's all you've been exposed to, even the clear trill of a bird might sound unpleasantly harsh in its clarity.

Actually there is an AdBlocker.css file available for Opera users. You can download it here: http://members.chello.nl/b.kroonspecker/opera/styles/user/AdBlocker.css

I remember that when I had Comcast, my network traffic was pretty constant -- even if I wasn't doing anything! When I switched to a DSL line, that all stopped. I never did figure out what all the Comcast traffic was about.

Anyway, you can find LanSpeed at
http://members.chello.nl/~m.vanosta/orcasoft/index .htm It is a fun little utility but, again, I don't know how accurate it is. The relative speeds are close to what I'm seeing.

Enjoy!

Try this site: http://www.gurpslabs.com/ You should be redirected to this site (mine) http://members.chello.nl/l.deckers3

GURPSLabs had an Star Wars version using the GURPS 3rd Edition rules. Someone named Dark Lord Azagthoth has taken over from Francis Martell and is currently making a Star Wars version using the GURPS 4th Edition.

http://www.gurpslabs.com/
http://members.chello.nl/l.deckers3.com

Well, try not to take this offensively, but maybe you should get some friends?

I was only into PC gaming until I started spending time hanging out at other people's houses, playing with them on playstations and dreamcasts. Now I appreciate that there are great experiences to be had on other platforms too.
Perhaps you're too old (or young) to be doing that and you've missed the gamer demographic... in which case, sorry. Try the arcade, or reading a site like eurogamer.net to see if something appeals. Or download an N64 emulator and some of these:
http://members.chello.nl/~c.lieberwirth/n64a.htm
I thought Nintendo games were stupid until I played Mario 64 on my PC. Now I have a Gamecube and a DS!

While your mileage may of course vary, as the saying goes, Stereophile Magazine has done at least one review of the iPod, and regardless of what you think of Stereophile and that segment of the audio market, one has to give them credit for being pretty thorough in reviews. They hooked it up to some very high end listening gear, plus a battery of electronic test equipment, and seemed very impressed by the quality when it wasn't being compressed. If anyone is getting mediocre audio quality out of theirs, then I would seriously look into the encoding they were using. I know that for playing straight AIFFs and Apple Lossless files, my 3G iPod sounds better (ever so slightly) than the headphone output of my Mac. I'm not sure whether it's just the lack of electronic noise or what, but it's there. And it's better than any other portable music device I've heard.

Stereophile's review of the 3G iPod 10/2003
More quantitative analysis of the 3G

Personally, I have a 3G, and I listen to it almost exclusively through a set of Grado SR80s (32-ohm cans, which some people will tell you are less than optimal for iPod use) and have been nothing but impressed with it. I've never A/Bed it versus a 4G or 5G though, so I can't say that Apple didn't cut some corners in the new ones. It's no secret that the general public doesn't give a damn about audio quality past the point where you can identify what's playing, so it wouldn't be totally surprising (although sad) if they did.

By contrast, on a site like Maxboxing, going ten rounds with its ridiculous Flash layout is out of the question. A few lines in a CSS style sheet in Opera takes care of that. I modified the very good adblocker.css found here: http://members.chello.nl/b.kroonspecker/opera/

When visiting corporate media sites, I block all the ads. Not merely to reduce annoyance; out of principle, in fact. While it's important to keep tabs on corporate news, reading one set of lies is quite enough, thank you.

As for TV ads...heh, come on. HBO only features house ads.

The AdBlocker.css file works like a charm. Check out the "Opera config files". When coupled with the autoproxy option in eDexter, and a nice hosts file, you get an excellent AdBlock replacement.

But what would Stereophile and their testing equipment know?

Those graphs are for the lineout and aren't that impressive. For more enlightenment, try reading these pages.

perhaps a little dated (doesn't include a lot of the latest players) but still interesting.

http://members.chello.nl/~m.heijligers/ipod/Perfor mance/compared.html

The legend of the brave Dutch boy - by others thought to be named Hans Brinker - who supposedly put his finger in the dyke to prevent a flood, was actually a literary invention by the American writer Mary Elizabeth Mapes Dodge (1831-1905), who was born in New York.

You might want to try the User-CSS Stylesheet for Adblocking from here

I'll just take that money from you now because we all know the Xbox gets a GSOD

Frequency Response
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~m.heijligers/ipo d/Performance/measurements.html
and comparison
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~m.heijligers/ipo d/Performance/compared.html

Frequency Response
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~m.heijligers/ipo d/Performance/measurements.html
and comparison
http://members.brabant.chello.nl/~m.heijligers/ipo d/Performance/compared.html

I find it an interesting coincidence the power outage happened so soon after that the Xenu article was featured.

Gee, you just had to mention the X-word! Now this thread won't load for most Scientologists because the keyword filters they were forced to install by their Church will see "Xenu" and block the site. After all the mere sight of the word could cause "pneumonia and death" if you haven't paid the Church of Scientology for the proper preparation.

Wikipedia's Xenu article has an interesting history if you look, as I did the other night when it was featured. Scientologists vandalize it regularly. You're supposed to pay them a half million (or some absurd sum of money) to find out about Xenu. After you find out, you're too embarrassed to admit to anybody that you paid a half million to learn that your problems are caused by bad science fiction, when you could have bought a house in Silicon Valley instead. So they obviously don't want a Wikipedia article giving away their half-million-dollar "trade secret" for free.

One trick I saw was to use HTML entities to spell out insults at the top of the article- like "only an idiot would believe this" or something. In the editor window, the entities weren't rendered and each letter appeared as a hex code.

A more effective attack took a different approach. The vandal in this case changed "Scientologists" to "Muslims", "Scientology" to "Islam", and inserted a boring-sounding sentence at the end of the first paragraph claiming that "Xenu" is another name that Muslims use for "Allah". It completely discouraged you from reading further. If you didn't know better you wouldn't find out how "Allah" distributed the thetans around volcanoes on various planets and blew them up with hydrogen bombs, and how their blown-up spirits cause problems in your personal life today.

This is OT, but what the hell, why not whack a beehive? Additional information on Xenu:
Operation Clambake (Hubbard maintained that humans are descended from clams)
The Xenu leaflet (all about Xenu- this information can save you lots of $$$$$)
The road to Xenu (authored by a woman who got suckered)
The Google cache of Wikipedia's Xenu article is also a must read.

I'm wondering if I'll get a lot of freaks, downmoderations, and hostile AC replies after I post this. After all, that's the kind of thing that Hubbard called "fair game". If it sinks below default visibility I'll repost it again with my karma bonus, so you theta-clear-wannabes out there can save your points for someone else.

iPod 3G has a 220uF capacitor at the headphone output stage

The later Wolfson WM8750 (PortalPlayer iPods use WM8731 and WM8721) offers "No DC blocking capacitors required (capless mode)"

SigmaTel's D-Majors have a <0.05% THD headphone driver, including anti-pop and short-circuit protection

Why would it need short-circuit protection? Hmmm....

After that, make your changes to gtk-file-selector.c and make libgtk-x11-2.whatever, then copy that file into /usr/lib or wherever your gtk lives. You should probably back up your old version first.

Check out this selector before you start implementing your own. You may find ideas or code you want to copy.

That's pretty good, but check out this setup. An amazing 13 screen setup, and he's even found an app that can use all of them.

If you hate Tk and want to forget Tcl, I recommend Ruby/Tk. The tutorial web page is almost as ugly as the output!

Jar-Jar - http://members.rott.chello.nl/cplanken/vedman_grou ndjarjar.jpg

I'm not stuck on DVD as next generation or big floppy. I'm not even thinking DVD as next generation VHS. I'm discussing the passing trends of technology. VHS hit houses in the 70s and 80s, becoming fairly ubiquitous in the late 80s and early 90s. I've got a few VCRs, but I can't remember the last time I rented or purchased a tape, and I know I'm not alone. DVD has started replacing VHS which lasted, therefore, about 20 years on top.

Whatever you stick on the DVD doesn't matter. Whatever the purpose of your sticking things on the disk doesn't matter, either. Yes, there are stand-alone devices that make it unlike computers. I concede. You missed some of my point, but I got yours. You win.

My mention of broadband was not to imply an extension of PPV. On the contrary, I was simply suggesting that bandwidth can become a medium for delivery of movies or data delivered by other than physical media. The other discussions in this thread have kicked that horse to death, but here's my take:

Consider the possibility that out-of-band delivery or really high speed makes it so that time isn't the problem; now downloading many GB of data (including the MPEG encoded movies) can take hours longer than going to your video outlet and making a purchase. You instead order your purchase from Amazon. It's delivered to your home entertainment server, or made available in perpetuity from some remote server (in the example, bandwidth isn't a big deal, but maybe storage is). You watch the digital any time you want, same as having the disk in the drive. You want to take it with you, you move it to your portable player, just like music on an iPod, or you access your video server account from your buddy's player when you want to share.

Even wire as a medium might fade. Wireless is nearly everywhere, and if the bandwidth and access can become ubiquitous, too, maybe that'll open the system up so you don't need the comfort of holding the plastic disk in your hand.

Given that, I believe even today's technology surpasses PPV and DVD. Small changes to PVR software could allow technology to integrate and deliver content differently than today. You set up your PVR to record the movie to watch later, poof it's there; there until you don't want it any more. Better than DVD, it gets the resolution best suited for your video and storage device, lanugage preference, and viewing preference (letterbox, directors' cut, whatever). You've go the right setup (I've got nearly a TB of storage on 11 different servers in my house), you probably never have to get rid of it. Sure, licensing needs to be worked out. BitTorrent ripped DVDs aren't always legal (although there is legal content, too), but here I'm just pointing out different technology, not advocating theft.

That's what Bill was talking about. Not the shitty "watch on demand" crap from your cable company.

DVD as a medium? It'll pass. I bet it'll pass a lot faster than albums have (which have gone through their own transitions such as two sided, 78-, 45-, and 33-RPM, stereo, etc, so it's not like they turned out the best phonograph 100 years ago). It takes a lot of gear to make a DVD work, instead of just a needle and something to vibrate for a phonograph. That technology will change more rapidly than it has to bring us DVD. High-definition, surround-sound, extra features, all that jazz will push the limits of the media, and it'll shift. You want to record your own stuff on DVD? That's not where it will be either (and you have to concede, nearly no one ever recorded albums at home).

I think the medium of DVD will be around for a long time. I hope so--I have hundreds of the damned things (exaggerated, but not unrealistic). I also think the next best thing will be here before we send men to Mars.

You can download a copy for your own PDA or you can make an up-to-date one yourself.

I have many times thought about putting a "Don't Panic!" sticker on the cover of my PDA. What fun.

Colin Powel's proof for the UN security council.

• Select some text, go to middle-click-paste but discover that the destination already has text in it (this Ask Slashdot issue).
• The clipboard disappears when you quit the application. Try it: copy some text, quit the app that you copied it from, and then try to paste.
• You can only copy and paste plain text. Sure, it's theoretically possible to push alternate mime types up there too but that gets heavy really quick. I have yet to see a non-plain-text clipboard move correctly between two different Linux apps.

Almost every text-entry box ever made has some sort of label or widget on its left identifying it (the URL bar has little "Go" or world icons, dialog boxes have "Labels: ", etc). Just adopt the convention that a middle-click on the text box's label replaces all the text in the box with the primary X selection. For example, middle clicking on the little world icon next to the left of the URL box would replace the URL with the current selection (but would not automatically go there, allowing you to edit it before hitting return). A middle click inside the textbox itself inserts text as it always has.

It's intuitive, consistent, finger-compatible and easy to implement, especially if the toolkits support it natively.

One Ford Escort + one hour + one roll of saran wrap/cling film

It does not allow one to navigate as they would be with somthing like the KDE file dialog.

Fortunetely, there is an alternative

Monsters, John! Monsters... from the id!

First you need something else!

The fealing on the GTK list seems to be that there's a need for an entire new widget GtkFileChooser, and programs will eventually convert to this new API. IMHO, this is a very bad idea, as the oldstyle will never really go away any more than the win3.1 style has in the windows world. I think we ought to just add the new features and protect future APIs with preprocessor flags. Code for that might look like:

fs=gtk_file_selecter_new(_("Open File..."));
#ifdef _GTK_FILE_SELECTER_IS_EXTENDED
gtk_file_selecter_prepend_filter ("<Fonts>*.ttf/*.pcf");
#endif /*_GTK_FILE_SELECTER_IS_EXTENDED*/

I do not understand why cut and paste cannot be corrected. If a program is closed, what was just copied from it disappears from the buffer.

This falls out from the way X was designed. I agree it's annoying. There is a fix now:

http://members.chello.nl/~h.lai/gnome-clipboard-da emon/index.html

steveha

There is some info here about sound quality:

here

and here

These guys also seem to have a lot of info, but their site seems a little flaky right now.

Actually, there really isn't a great reason to use Sky OS over Linux or BSD... and that's not the point. Sky OS is one of many smaller projects whose primary purpose is to satisfy the hobby needs of the creator... Kind of like where Linux was when Linus decided his schoolwork was too boring.

There are many other examples out there. Contiki, Triangle Os, and many others.

There are also Open Source, commercial, and potentially useful hobbyist systems out there. However, if you are looking for the most comprehensive, useful desktop suite, look elsewhere. All of these Os's are unique and well-intentioned, but very few are actually practical.

Practicality is not the point. Curiosity is the point. What would a different implementation look like? What if all the graphics subsystems were contained in the kernel? How would a real-time OS feel to the user? These questions can't be answered by just releasing a new X theme, and there aren't very many people curious enough to find out.

These people are true geeks... Software for software's sake. Kudos to you all.

Link 1

Link 2

Link 1

Link 2

This seemed to jibe with what I found at This Site that compares the ipod's sound quality to other MP3 players. He said he found that the line out was good, but that the headphone seemed to be lacking.

I'll have to listen again, but that would stink because the ipod is almost perfect in other ways. I might still get it even with imperfect sound!

Anyone remember the flight sim one?

I think it just got owned...

Gah now I want one... put it on my entire desk...
/me drools

You can always use this one in the meantime.

This guy has an um.. interesting setup.

In relation to FS games, This guy here has got da bomb setup 9 PCs, 13 monitors, one plane. Since some idiot mod put me to -1 me down as troll for replying to an AC with the subject line of "eat shit and die", I'll try this again and wish a speedy death to the mod in question.

You can't put "first post" achievements on a resume - surely you know this. (and if you do you'll look like an asshole, so in retrospect, go for it) As for the topic at hand, I have always loved flight sim games - played them for almost ten years now. This guy here has got da bomb setup 9 PCs, 13 monitors, one plane.

Check out this page and look at the date on the bottom photo : does that look like a 1 1/3 year old news or is it just me ?

Way to go /. ...

16.5

22.95

Dutch Cube Day in Leiden

16.5

22.95

Dutch Cube Day in Leiden

Beware, though, that Creative doesn't open-source drivers for all of their products. I bought their very inexpensive Webcam, for instance. I was only able to find this independently produced driver, which I haven't been able to get working.

I really should be stoned for this one...

I sure do!

A picture says a thousand words.

> However, I'd use photoshop anyday over gimp,
> based on the interface alone, without even going
> into the capabilities.

Yes, you would. But I wouldn't. I've been using Gimp for years, and I'm completely used to it's interface. Thanks to rightclicking (I don't have to move my mouse all the way up) and things like tearoff menus I can access operations faster than, say, Paint Shop Pro.

Everything you know and think is "normal" is learned. Gimp's interface is not worse, it's different. I prefer Gimp's interface over Paint Shop Pro.

> Then there's the text editing capabilities. You
> can do so much more in PS 6 with text than in
> Gimp - balloon, scrunch,

Well that's nice, but Joe Average doesn't need or almost never use those functions.

> drop shadow with a click

Gimp has a drop shadow script-fu.

> outline,

Bonus point for you.

> inner shadow, etc.

I don't know what you mean by that.

> gradient overlay, pattern overlay,

What's this?

> And don't display articles about professionals
> using gimp over photoshop that are from
> sourceforge and gnomedesktop. That's equivilant
> to a link to a slashdot editorial proclaiming
> how popular linux is. Go out and buy a graphics
> art design magazine at borders.

Have you read those pages at all? They're not trying to convince you why Gimp is so good, they informing you that Hollywood is using Gimp for actual production use!

> There is nothing in the graphics art world that
> needs doing that photoshop does not do that
> gimp does.

Yes yes Photoshop is better, but that's not my point. But what really matters is that Gimp is good enough for most people. Linux is better than Windows as a server but that doesn't stop people from using Win2k webservers.

> If you think gimp is better than photoshop,
> you've never done any graphics art design

Re-read my post. I never said it is better. I said it is good enough, even for professional usage (Hollywood).

not always.