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Too bad we can't run this...

The MacOS pre-quicktime also offered the most consistent user experience ever.

Assembly; enough said.

No, he just doesn't want a bunch of people funded by exxon-mobil selectively quoting tiny portions of his data to support bullshit positions,

Funnily enough, none of the people who asked for the data were funded by Exxon-Mobil. Its boring how facts get submerged by a straightforward lie.

Uh, except actually they were. It's not even particualry a secret-- take a look at who funds the "Heartland Institute" (Hint: Exxon Mobil). Google the "American Petroleum Institute".

For a while they were even offering a payment of ten thousand dollars to every scientist who published a paper casting doubt on global warming. (They stopped this when it got publicized in the Guardian.)

UI for this has been around for quite some time, at least in a few browsers. Unfortunately, the best implementation for Firefox that I've seen, the cmSiteNavigation extension, no longer works with 3.x. Anyone want to update it?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if various governments actually tried prohibiting some (lawfully prohibited) uses of encryption for private citizens.

France placed restrictions on encryption from 1990 to 1999. At various times it was either illegal to use encryption, the encryption was limited to 40-bits or some other breakable level, or you had to place the key in escrow with a third party to allow the government access on demand.

http://www.praxagora.com/andyo/ar/crypto_model.html
http://www.euronet.nl/~rembert/echelon/maginot.html

You might also read up on the "Clipper chip" proposals that failed in the United States under the Clinton administration. There have been other proposals since then, including some by McCain. Restrictions on encryption is a never-ending battle.

This story reminds me of the recent "predictions" of a potentially devastating hurricane season with greater than average frequency hurricanes and more of these hurricanes being Category 5 (the strongest hurricane defined). On what basis?

On the buzz around global warming and its effect on hurricanes among other things, and the recent "example" season of a record-breaking number of hurricanes. So, naturally the prediction for this season was "lots of big hurricanes". I'm not sure, but so far I don't recall any hurricanes well into the season

We know more than ever about the sun, but the more we know the less we know how to predict what it's going to do... "Satellite operators and NASA mission planners are bracing for this next solar cycle because it is expected to be exceptionally stormy, perhaps the stormiest in decades".... That is purely conjecture -- no more likely to be correct than not.

I always forget what (not) to do with yellow snow, luckily my machine has reminder utils:
$ xsnow -sc yellow
Xsnow-1.42, December 14th 2001 by Rick Jansen (rja@euronet.nl)
WWW: http://www.euronet.nl/~rja/Xsnow/

Warning: don't eat yellow snow!

So the sketch of a comparison I'm seeing is that "Catcher" would be among the big novels of the breaking wave of paperbacks from the 1950s -- a new pop phenomenon that scared people. It's had a long history of censorship over controversial content, which the people objecting to it say will "promote" various immoral activities. Doom, similarly, was in the breaking wave of a new form of popular entertainment, and is said to "promote" violence.

I can see a couple of pretty obvious distinctions.

One is that, while the pulp paperbacks of Catcher's day could be described as a publishing phenomenon, they wouldn't rate discussion as an entirely new medium with a fundamentally different ability to immerse the poor, easily misled (and condescended to) public. The FPS depended on a completely new technology; certain people fear new technologies instinctively.

Another is that Doom and the FPS genre consists mostly of flat-out action that's nearly always devoid of any real moral content or discussion. You kill 1,000 Zombies to get to a switch, not to decide whether to turn Jim in to the folks of Hannibal; most games don't involve particularly moral choices as part of their canned levels. Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, was objected to (and these are some censors' own words) for:

'excess vulgar language, sexual scenes, and things concerning moral issues.'

I love that phrasing: "things." For my money, people who'd ban Catcher in the Rye are afraid of even confronting moral choices; they think the book's out of bounds in dealing with them as nakedly as it does. The stereotyped FPS, on the other hand, is an example of the culture those very same people deserve: morally empty trash entertainment that (so they say) desensitizes us to violence. Hey, they don't want us to exercise our consciences, so let's work our trigger fingers.

One of them is morally empty, the other's too full of moral argument. Be interesting to compare the groups that want to ban Doom, Catcher, and pRon... curious overlaps there.

As for there not being a US presence in the war following a Soviet collapse, I'm not sure why - perhaps Japan would have attacked the Soviets then, which would have delayed the war with America, but the US would have been drawn in eventually. But certainly if the Soviet collapse was delayed until 1942 then the US would have been in the war already.

Thanks for dropping the insults.

"But right now!" you yell, "I'm just as safe as you!" The problem is, that your safety is an illusion, and history has shown that you have only so many steps until you hit the next mine.

Perhaps surprisingly, I don't run Windows. I've been a GNU/Linux user and developer since 1996. During that time I've seen Windows evolve from a sorry piece of unfixable rubbish to a painful but technically salvageable marketing instrument.

History has also shown that no mine has ever exploded for the Mac OS X user.

I don't know. Several viruses could have been written to exploit this vulnerability. It's issues like these that lead me to question the significance of OS X's BSD heritage wrt security.

And so we don't go through this again, it's absolutely certain that some of this is due to market share, but not all of it. Mac OS X is harder to exploit.

Windows XP SP2 is pretty hard to exploit as well (if we discount trojans, even though these cause the most problems). What's more I see no reason to assume, as you do, that Microsoft's past performance can be extrapolated into the future. I expect the opposite, really.

On Windows, you make life hard if you are not an Administrator,

I agree that this is one of the biggest remaining issues with Windows security, and I cede the "softer" points as well (use of verbs in dialog boxes, ActiveX, etc.).

Apple only offers up to 7.5.3 for free (though there is a 7.5.5 updater available too.) Above that, only updaters are available.

6.0.8 is highly reccomended for your the SE, compact, rock solid and hyper fast. Head over to System 6 Heaven for your System 6 needs. Available in over two dozen languages!

1. Console access. These include Speakup ftp://ftp.braille.uwo.ca/pub/speakup/, Screader http://www.euronet.nl/~acj/eng-screader.html, YASR http://yasr.sourceforge.net/, and many folks' favorite BrlTTY http://dave.mielke.cc/brltty/

2. Specialized environment. The most obvious option here is emacspeak http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ but there are others.

3. GUI Access. The only real option today is the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier http://www.baum.ro/gnopernicus.html that is part of the GNOME desktop http://www.gnome.org/start via the GNOME Accessibility Project http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/ (though other options are being explored). Note: my day job is as Sun's Accessibility Architect, working on the GNOME Accessibility Project and helping with the development of things like Gnopernicus, and another amazing product for people with physical impairments - GOK http://www.gok.ca/.

A pretty complete list of F/OSS accessibility projects can be found at the Linux Accessibility Resource Site (LARS) http://lars.atrc.utoronto.ca/current.html. I maintain a blog on this stuff as well, which has lots more information: http://blogs.sun.com/korn.

Now, you can call me paranoid, if you want, but just look at the number of errors that are related to this kind of hadling prtocols. While it is really nice to have all these protocols accessible in one common and uniform manner, this also looks like a road to Microsoft-like hell. It only takes one bug in one of the protocol handlers and one "link" embedded in HTML document to wreak havoc over application, desktop or even worse complete user profile.

I.e., something such as this OS X problem?

"The most common format of music on an iPod is 'stolen'."

Funny he should say that, considering the entire Windows GUI, among other MS "innovations", are also stolen. Pot. Kettle. Black.

PCWs are still hanging on, occasionally. Z80-based, usually 256 or 512kB of memory, 720kB floppies (3.5" for the recent models, 3" for the older ones). Suprisingly large monochrome screen; roughly 90x30 8x8 characters, IIRC. They worked because they were word processing appliances; take it out of the box, plug it in, and it Just Works. They came with Locoscript, a word processor that was its own operating system and came on a bootable floppy.

They also came with CP/M so that you could run other software and were pretty well respected as cheap CP/M machines. Locomotive Basic and Dr. Logo were supplied on the utilities disk. You could get all kinds of upgrades for them, including hard disks!

Pretty nice machines; didn't do much, but what they did they did reasonably well.

(I wrote a bunch of games and half a novel on one. Then I discovered that it's a really good idea to make sure that the right disk is in the drive when you reformat it... and at the same time I learned why it's important to make backups. Hmm. Excuse me, I must go and make a backup.)

"the UK is part of the EU, but its intelligence services are among Echelon's sponsors."

It's kind of an open secret that the UK and the US together spy on Europe. In particular, there is evidence that the US used intelligence supplied from UK-based surveillance stations in order to give American companies advantages. One of those stations is at Menwith Hill. Mark Thomas did a stunt by flying over it IIRC in a balloon to see what would happen and had a party too.

well this says 34.74 knots

Wonder if anyone remembers the theremin - this was invented by a Soviet scientist Leon Theremin in 1918, it had no strings, no pipes or keys.

Absolutely! If you want to build your own, check out the PAiA Theremax or Bob Moog's own Big Briar Etherwave. I've built several of both, and recommend the Big Briar as being a better quality instrument as well as more professional kit. The PAiA has a real geek factor to it though, probably good for Slackware fans ;)

If you're interested in a cheap but fun project, search the net (or lots of the good circuit bending links in this story comments thread) for a "light theremin". Instead of using heterodyne principles, it gets a similar sound/action by modulating a simple oscilator using infrared light sensors that you can still play with your hands.

If you're really interested...there's a huge Synth DIY community on the net, from people that build giant modulars from scratch, to simple kits from the above mentioned PAiA all the way to the completely badassed and never-ending MOTM (MOTher of all Modulars, Module Of The Month).

from this link

...Today most computer users know computer technology only through Microsoft products. They no longer learn about computing; the Windows user interface discourages anything beyond point-and-click actions. Like toddlers they point at small pictures and they think they are knowledgeable about computers, while the marketroids wax lyrical about how easy and exciting it is, as long as we all keep buying more and more of the same junk. that is the basis on which many IT managers choose the platforms for their future investments! That and the comforting knowledge that "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft." God help us.

...Of course, technophiles have always been exasperated by the 'ignorance' of non-techies. But these days we're dealing with a generation of users that can't even understand the need to know the basics. All they have to do is double-click on a document, and things start to happen. Of course as soon as the document's file extension (which is hidden by default in the first place) isn't properly associated with an application, the average user is immediately lost. Users have never been invited to learn. They've been told that they no longer need to know about the basics of driving, so they just expect their cars to take them wherever they want to go today.

so the problem is - users. every os can be screwed by ignorant users. of course windows is screwed much more due to very flawed design. so only solution is, like with cars, bikes etc, people should be allowed to use computer only after getting "license" to do it. or something like that. or we all screwed. because today consumer computers has become dangerous weapon... we are in "monkey with grenade" situation and "longhorn" or "shorthorn" or "bighorn" or "otherhorn" will not help it...

Eventually, if everyone moves to linux, we will have the same problems as windows users wrt worms and viruses.

wrong. that's why.

A lot of programs/routines in linux will have to be refined if there is any chance of linux become a usable desktop operating system.

in that sentence word "linux" should be changed to "windows". and that's why.

Eventually, if everyone moves to linux, we will have the same problems as windows users wrt worms and viruses.

wrong. that's why.

A lot of programs/routines in linux will have to be refined if there is any chance of linux become a usable desktop operating system.

in that sentence word "linux" should be changed to "windows". and that's why.

If this isn't a monopoly, I don't know what is.

it's a World domination by Billgatus of Borg.

The whole singing thing really wouldn't be my kind of thing to enjoy. But the orchestra I would definitely buy a ticket for.
You can actually find it out on a CD here and some Ogg and MP3 files in a another directory here

icab is crap, and no one uses it anymore.

iCab is impressive in the fact that it's essentially the work of one man. Two if you count the InScript (iCab's ECMAScript engine) developer. Until Opera got into the Mac scene, it was the number three GUI browser for the Mac, and it had implemented the link tag, which spurred Opera and then Mozilla to do so. With that in place, intelligent pre-fetching became possible, and Herr Clauss implemented that too. For these reasons alone iCab is important. Add that it's the only actively developed browser for Classic MacOS that I know of, and definitely the only actively developed browser for 68k Macs, and it is definitely worth mentioning. These niches may be small, but if you're in that niche, iCab is the most important browser out there. My mother-in-law has a 6100, and iCab is the only modern browser (broken ol' Netscape 4 is not really an option) she can run with acceptable speed.

P.S. Nice try on the sig. Those are for APPLICATIONS not Linux you dolt. Here is my new sig

31 Unpatched IE security holes
Server attacks stump Microsoft
Credit card theft feared in Windows flaw
Microsoft issues patch for "serious" XP hole
Windows flaw threatens PC services
Microsoft's Source Code Actions Speak Louder Than Words
Why I hate Microsoft
bsod_videowall
bsod_airport
License to plunder
Microsoft Media Player logs users' DVD picks
MS wanted to 'extend, embrace and extinguish' competition
Microsoft Palladium
Control with fine print
Microsoft WinXP Update spies on other PC software
Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design
Microsoft software "riddled with vulnerabilities", trade body claims
Microsoft Issues Five New Security Warnings
Why Open Source Software / Free Software

P.S. Nice try on the sig. Those are for APPLICATIONS not Linux you dolt. Here is my new sig

31 Unpatched IE security holes
Server attacks stump Microsoft
Credit card theft feared in Windows flaw
Microsoft issues patch for "serious" XP hole
Windows flaw threatens PC services
Microsoft's Source Code Actions Speak Louder Than Words
Why I hate Microsoft
bsod_videowall
bsod_airport
License to plunder
Microsoft Media Player logs users' DVD picks
MS wanted to 'extend, embrace and extinguish' competition
Microsoft Palladium
Control with fine print
Microsoft WinXP Update spies on other PC software
Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design
Microsoft software "riddled with vulnerabilities", trade body claims
Microsoft Issues Five New Security Warnings
Why Open Source Software / Free Software

P.S. Nice try on the sig. Those are for APPLICATIONS not Linux you dolt. Here is my new sig

31 Unpatched IE security holes
Server attacks stump Microsoft
Credit card theft feared in Windows flaw
Microsoft issues patch for "serious" XP hole
Windows flaw threatens PC services
Microsoft's Source Code Actions Speak Louder Than Words
Why I hate Microsoft
bsod_videowall
bsod_airport
License to plunder
Microsoft Media Player logs users' DVD picks
MS wanted to 'extend, embrace and extinguish' competition
Microsoft Palladium
Control with fine print
Microsoft WinXP Update spies on other PC software
Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design
Microsoft software "riddled with vulnerabilities", trade body claims
Microsoft Issues Five New Security Warnings
Why Open Source Software / Free Software

With regards to tibet, the military significance of a country is influenced to a large degree by its economic importance. With massive mineral wealth, including minerals needed for high technology and the space programme, china had to invade them. Add that fact to the fact that the China-Russia oil pipeline is on schedule and underway, you can see why America has to take more resources from other nations just to maintain the balance of power.

Why do you think we went to war in iraq? If we were concerned with humanitarian issues, we would be all over Uzbekistan.

We're not.

Why? Their main wealth is derived from cotton, which is deminishing because massive use of agrochemicals has destroyed their environment and ariable lands. Furthermore, they're useless as a base right now, but that may change in future.

With regards to Imperialism, yes since the 20th Century empire building was frowned upon. Instead the superpowers started up client states which they armed, used to extract natural resourses and committed to proxy wars. The only major difference between a colony and a client state is that a colony has a Governer General, and a client state has a Benevolant-President-For-Life.

The bottom line is that Empires never went out of fashion since the day they were invented in ancient sumeria. Some people ran from them and settled out in Australia, or Northern Europe or Central America. Some empires fell over and died, because running empires is hard to do. But eventually one empire or another will come for you.

Unless you are an empire yourself, you are screwed.

You've got the attitude backwards, it is not "the rest of the world be damned so long as we are wealthy and safe."

The hard truth of the matter is "To remain alive, safe and reasonably well off, we must damn the rest of the world."

The planet earth is closed. Few things fall from the cosmos to provide us wealth. Under this atmosphere it is a zero sum game.

Anybody who uses a computer or a cell phone has funded the violence in the congo because both sides are arming themselves with the sale of the mineral coltan which is used to make capacitors for high technology electronics like cell phones and 802.11b. We don't stop buying from the militias, simply because there is no other source to mine. Instead we let people like you buy a computer or a car or a nice pair of jeans or a public transport ticket or any number of other blood soaked consumer products knowing that you will never truly find out how the atoms which come together to provide those products and services are actually the result of untold human misery.

This is the truth in which we live. Once upon a time, when the first human beings (or their ancestors) could travel faster than they could overpopulate and area, we were able to spread from messopotamia and walk over oceans during the great ice age. We didn't have to take the fruits of creation from another person's mouth just to feed our own.

I propose to use any means needed to go back to those days. If it takes a nuclear rocket to take us to the stars. So be it. If it takes research which might produce a stable negative strangelet (a particle which reacts with normal matter to produce more stable negative strangelets) so be it.

We have to get off the planet, and begin spreading the human empire to other stars. If we don't we will mine this planet dry and strangle each other fighting over the scraps. And if we somehow avert that, then somebody else who beleives in imperial power will get us.

In fact, I would even hazard a guess that somebody who belie

Check out the excellent symphony by Johan de Meij.

Here's an amateur performance of it.

Click here.

That's not the role of the forward button; you want the link tag.
e.g.
<link rel="Next" href="day3.html" />

While not all browsers support these, it is well worth using them for those that do (such as Mozilla, iCab and Lynx). They are standard HTML/XHTML. For more examples, see this excellent article.

I read the Silmarillion before I started on The Lord of the Rings. I liked it a lot! I found LOTR to be a bit boring and long after the Silmarillion. I haven't men anyone who agrees with me on this though...

I did finish LOTR eventually, but mainly because I wanted to finish it before performing the five part piece by Johan de Meij, which is much better than the music to pt I or II to the film series. Especially part III Gollum is great. You can find an amateur version of the piece here (I figure since this is by no means a professional performance it's ok to link it).

I read the Silmarillion before I started on The Lord of the Rings. I liked it a lot! I found LOTR to be a bit boring and long after the Silmarillion. I haven't men anyone who agrees with me on this though...

I did finish LOTR eventually, but mainly because I wanted to finish it before performing the five part piece by Johan de Meij, which is much better than the music to pt I or II to the film series. Especially part III Gollum is great. You can find an amateur version of the piece here (I figure since this is by no means a professional performance it's ok to link it).

And here we have yet another Slashdotter doesn't know what they're talking about. They seem to come crawling out of the woodwork every time the "vinyl is better" boobs start slinging their BS around.

> FACT: most people can hear up to at least 30 kHz.

FACT: Nobody can hear up to 30kHz. People *might* be able to hear harmonics of sounds above 20kHz, provided those harmonics fall within the range of human hearing, but they won't be able to hear the actual pure tones themselves (as you yourself indicated). Since any medium - such as CD - that records sounds up to 20kHz will also record the harmonics of tones above 20kHz, provided they fall within the range of human hearing, what exactly would we be missing? And apart from percussion or certain electronic instruments, what instruments are out there generating gobs of ultrasonic information, anyhow? And what microphones are capable of picking up such information? And what analog tape decks are capable of recording such information? And - here's the kicker - how many speakers are capable of reproducing such information? The answer to each of these questions is, vanishing few. Many tape decks filter out or fail to record tones much beyond 20kHz. Few microphones can pick them up to begin with. And most speakers are lucky to maintain a flat frequency response even out to 20kHz, let alone to 25 or 30kHz. You'd practically have to live in a laboratory to record and then accurately reproduce ultrasonic information. A 50-year-old format like the vinyl LP certainly isn't ideal for such a thing, given its noise, distortion, dynamic range, separation and phase issues. Only the high quality analog tape decks found in professional studios or digital recording formats utilizing higher sampling rates than 44.1kHz could hope to accurately record and reproduce such audio.

>Yes, such transients are reproduced on vinyl.

Maybe on audiophile grade, quarter-speed mastered vinyl played back on a $5,000 turntable equipped with a $1,500 cartridge run through a $2,000 preamp they are. Poorly. With oceans of harmonic distortion and waves of crashing high-frequency noise. Assuming, of course, the original performance was picked up using microphones and mic preamps capable of dealing with much of anything beyond 20kHz (such mics cost in excess of $2,000, and the preamps aren't much cheaper) onto tape decks capable of recording much of anything beyond 20-25kHz. None of which is likely, outside of studiously recorded audiophile sessions.

>Your final star'ed points are just dumb. You don't give any references,
>because of course you don't have any.

You must really enjoy looking like a boob. Hey, if you want to play the (in your case, irrelevant and apparently unavailable on the web) references game, I'd love to! (Actually, one "reference" you posted is available on the web - marketing material from a stereo company plugging their overpriced audiophile gear. You should have provided us with a link to the guy selling $10,000 tinfoil hats to protect us from government mind control rays, too.) Here are my bullet points, plus any references I could dig up (though much of this should be obvious to anyone with a brain in their skull):

* Loud tics and pops caused by stray dust and wear, resulting in a *negative* signal to noise ratio - i.e. the noise can become louder than the music! (with N'Stynk, I suppose this would be a blessing in disguise . . . or simply redundant.)

Well, this one is obvious. Whenever a tick or pop is louder than the music (happens a lot with vinyl, and even with tape during quiet passages), the signal to noise ratio goes negative.

* Rumbling caused by the turntable's motor and the friction of the stylus as it passes through the groove

Another obvious point. Many turntables even include rumble measurements in their specifications, though that's for the platter only and doesn't take into account additional noise caused by the friction of the stylus dragging through the groove.

* Wow and flutter, caused by speed irregularities in the turntable's drive system and by any imperfections in the geometry of the disc.

Another spec that's included for most turntables and even analog tape decks. Hard to see how this one is, "just dumb", unless you're so ignorant you've never looked at the specs for a turntable or tape deck.

* Phase irregularities caused by the RIAA equalization and the subsequent need for the preamp to de-equalize the signal.

Another obvious point. Anytime you process the signal to emphasize or de-emphasize certain frequencies, you're going to introduce phase discrepancies. Here's a $2,000 preamp from Daniels Audio that attempts to compensate for the phase issues. Notice I say "attempts". Even a manufacturer of $2,000 stereo components won't claim to be able to eliminate such issues. And who knows what issues all that additional processing is going to introduce.

* Frequency response irregularities caused by the RIAA equalization / de-equalization process

Again, a no-brainer. If the frequency response curve used to produce the wax master doesn't precisely match the frequency response curve in your preamp (and it never will), certain frequencies are going to be emphasized upon playback while others will be de-emphasized. Here's a big page detailing the design issues faced by folks trying to build the RIAA de-equalization circuits for a preamp. Notice the difficulties he's having making the response curve come close to the RIAA ideal. Even by the end, he's off by more than a quarter dB at many frequencies, including some smack dab in the middle of the most sensitive range of human hearing.

* The inability to reproduce loud bass accurately (the cutter making the wax master would pop out of its groove if it tried to reproduce the kind of bass CDs can handle effortlessly)

For references, please see this, this, this, or this.

* The tendency for the turntable, platter and even the disc to function as microphones, picking up room reverberations and - particularly - the sound being produced by the speakers, smearing and distorting the audio in numerous ways

I should think this one would be obvious. Lots of turntable manufacturers sell heavy weights to sit on top of a record while it's playing. If you don't believe this is true, jump up and down next to your turntable while it's playing, or set it on top of a speaker pumping out a lot of bass. You'll get an "extreme" demonstration of the effect, but the truth is it's happening all the time.

* Cartridge / tonearm misalignments, causing inaccurate stylus pickup, accelerated record wear, or both.

Again, an obvious issue. Good luck getting it right!

* 30dB of stereo separation, vs. CD's 70+dB of separation

See this, or the specs for the cartridges themselves here. You'll be lucky to find a preamp that can come close to the 70-90dB of separation even a cheap CD player can provide, let alone a pickup.

* A theoretical maximum of 60dB of dynamic range for virgin vinyl of the highest quality (and only at certain frequencies - obviously, not in the low bass) vs. around 90dB of dynamic range from even the cheapest CD players, across the entire spectrum.

References to this abound. If you don't believe me, take it from an expert.

* In practice, roughly 40dB of usable dynamic range across the majority of the spectrum

See the reference above.

* A relatively flat frequency response from only around 60 Hz to 15 kHz, with severe rolloffs beyond those limits.

This one has been covered already.

* The need for mastering engineers to severely compress and re-equalize the signal in order to steer clear of the format's limitations relative to CD, which requires no such distortion-educing compensation.

Again, see the references above.

* Pitch and frequency errors caused by the speed difference between the cutter used to produce the wax master and your turntable.

That's another obvious fact to anyone but a blithering idiot.

* The tendency of the media itself to wear out as its played, and to be damaged during routine handling with audible results

Well, duh. On to dissect the remainder of your post:

>The reverse of most of what you say is true. E.g. your claim
>of 60dB dynamic range is nuts: the range is over 100 dB.
>You are confusing the noise floor of a high-hiss record with
>dynamic range--but you can hear 20 dB into that noise, and a
>good record need not have high hiss. Vinyl has poor bass???
>It's much better than CD. And so on.

Oh my. There doesn't seem to be anything left to dissect. I've already covered these points up above. Vinyl is *lucky* to hit 60dB of dynamic range with audiophile pressings played back on incredibly expensive equipment. No "confusion" with vinyl's truly outrageous noise floor is necessary. And the dynamic range decreases drastically as the length of the record increases - a problem digital formats don't suffer from. And as for vinyl's bass performance, I think half the links I posted up above note how crappy vinyl is at capturing loud, low bass.

Next time, you might want to learn something about a subject before you proceed to open your mouth and cram your foot down your throat.

Apple is trying to kill off native AppleTalk and just using AFP via TCP/IP.

AFAIK, Jaguar supports mounting Windows shares out of the box. For Mac OS 9.x, you can get DAVE from Thursby.

There is also a means to get OS X machines to speak old-school AppleTalk. Dunno if it'll work in your situation, but you enable it by using the NetInfo Manager application. Go to /config/AppleFileServer, and modify the attribute "use_appletalk" from 0 to 1. A full description of the procedure can be found at the bottom of this page, but what I wrote above is enough to get an OS X Mac speaking old AppleTalk.

~Philly

Yep. A few years ago someone (I think it may even have been Dr. Dobbs or something similar) put out a CP/M CDROM that had both the OS and pretty much everything ever written for it on one CD. At least I think it had the OS...a quick Google search turns up something from Walnut Creek Software no longer available (http://www.euronet.nl/users/fvempel/walnut.html). Oh well. A Xenix CD would be cool, but yeah, I doubt one exists.

I guess I have old Win3.1 on a CD too, but dunno if I really consider that an OS. I've thought about adding old CDs of Netware 3.X or the like, but I guess technically newer versions of Netware are still available from Novell, so it doesn't really meet my definition of a dead OS. Probably ought to :-)

> Iridium also provides secure encryption for the military and qualified governmnet users. A nice touch for those that need it.

Yeah, I'm sure the association with the government will assure your privacy.

eventhough chances to recover data from floppy get slimmer by the year (sigh). oh! some inventive cabling required ;-)

XSnow was much cooler than XEyes. (XSnow has snow falling in the background of the screen, and it piles up on the top ledge of windows and the bottom of the screen.) XPenguin isn't bad either.

A link would be nice. I found xsnow at freshmeat.

But where is the monitor displaying xsnow?

I've been running that every December since 1994. Don't like the new Sanda art, though. Outta dig out my Sun SPARCstation IPC and see if I still have an ancient vesion of it installed.

Lynx has had it almost forever. Mosaic had it. Even though I'd been using <link rel="author"> since I started making web pages, I first realized the possibilities when I saw it in iCab. There are a few others. Here are a few good articles about it.

• Jakob Nielsen's structural navigation article
• Sander's <link> page (Sander now works for Opera)
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While the replies to this thread are all sarcastic and full of self-righteous indignation, let's not forget that a big part of why the US and its allies won World War II was the fact that we were able to break the enemy's encryption like the German Enigma -- and that they were unable to break ours.

We're all yelling and screaming about "what's next", taking away "more of our freedoms" and such like. Someone raised the point that the freedom to assemble in private, to learn to fly aircraft, to be free from random searches of houses, were also contributing factors to these terrorist acts. The problem is, if the government was able to monitor communications, restrictions on those activities wouldn't even be talked about -- the activities themselves are innocuous, but in the right combination they could indicate something sinister. This is the reason that people buying huge quantities of nitrogen-rich fertilizer are monitored because of its bomb making potential.

I'm not advocating "back doors" in encryption products, mainly because it's too late for those to be useful when perfectly effective encryption is already out there for terrorists and anyone else to use. But the fact remains that the ability of people to unbreakably encrypt their grocery lists does have consequences beyond merely ensuring their privacy.

In truth Germany was beaten after it failed to capture Moscow in fall 1941. The Germans were completely unprepared for a winter campaign, not even having adequate clothing for their soldiers let alone other supplies. After the failure to take Moscow, Hitler dismissed many of his top generals including the father of German armor Heinz Guderian. Perhaps his decision to order the army to stand fast in the face of a strong Soviet counterattack that winter saved the front from total collapse, but otherwise, Hitler in command was an endless series of catastrophes such as Stalingrad and Kursk.

The argument I suppose is that had Great Britain been strangled by the German U-boats than the Soviet Union would not have been supplied by Lend Lease. Lend Lease provided all sorts of supplies including I believe basically the entire truck force that gave the Red Army mobility in the counterattack. However, the facts are that by December 1941 the Germans were already in retreat, they were going to lose stupendous numbers of men in the winter because of unpreparedness, the Soviets had a tank the T-34 coming into mass production better than any tank the Germans could ever produce in mass quantities, and Hitler was in personal command. Even with no Great Britain, Germany after 1941 needed to learn how to fight a defensive war to force a stalemate, precisely the type of strategy Hitler would never have authorized. And in addition, the Germans would not have been able to complete an atomic bomb for many years. Sure they would have had V2s but the Soviets had the more battlefield effective Katyusha. (Okay mass deployment was helped by those Lense Lease trucks.) Soviet technology was sufficient to counter Germany's, with the possible exception of rocket-powered fighters, a technology that Hitler delayed until it was too late due to his obsession with rocket bombers.

It is possible that a hundred years from now the real intelligence agency story of World War II will be how Joseph Stalin in his paranoid purges destroyed the finest network of spies ever assembled. Think of this, a time when Communism still had sway as an effective religion to produce loyal agents in any country. The United States for the past few decades has been continuously learning that one can't buy that type of loyal fanatic agent abroad, which is why the US is so dependent on high tech and American citizen agents, a combination totally incapable of predicting anything in hostile areas. Even though Stalin tried to order all his foreign agents back to the Soviet Union to be executed, there was still enough of a remnant such as the Red Orchestra to give Stalin a precise warning of when the Germans would attack. But Stalin had screwed things up so badly that the Soviets were caught totally unprepared. The initial catastrophe of the first few months when Soviet forces were repeatedly surrounded and annihilated was the only reason the Germans got as far as they did. Had Stalin followed through using the human intelligence network he had at his disposal, Germany would have been beaten years sooner, and perhaps all of continental Europe is occupied by the Red Army.

Its all about marketing....see for yourself
click here for a Xbox demo (playable!)

Um, don't forget ASM-One, the wonderful assembler/editor/debugger/monitor environment... Hm, on second though, who wants to code x86 assembly, regardless of the environment? I know I don't. ;^)

Man, what's wrong with some of you guys? Creative is doing just fine, with the CVS EMU10K1 driver and it is coming along just great, almost every issue at bugzilla is now dealt with..
Sound output is stable, it works with almost any app and on SMP systems and you can play upto 32!! wave streams at the sametime.. I just bought come cheapo speakerset with fake surround for the rear speaker output and it sounds nice, we even have a way to get the rear-volume slider to work now..

Okay, the AC97 mixer is really messed up, but that was because the soundcard specific register specs where lacking. Jon went to great lengths to sort out what could be released outside the NDA, well done!

And indeed, people like Alan Cox went into great trouble, to try to Unix-fy the driver, cleaning it up and making it readable, also to other programmers..

'and the support under linux is bad. It's rather non-standard.' Well, thank you.. that must me an insult to my adress I guess... I'll keep it in mind next time, if you mail me for help..


Manuel Beunder AKA MBr Webmaster Linux-Sound Blaster Live! page:

I fully agree on this matter! Emailing the manufacturer, especially their software design department, works! Also putting up a site will draw the attention of the software developers and the people responsable.

Check some of my correspondence: Europe developer support and US developer support
The amount of people that do this, is also important and remember, look at things from their perspective when emailing. Things like this, will eventual frustrate them and make 'm think...
Manuël Beunder, maintainer of The SB Live! Linux page

ps, I also forgot to mention that releasing a GPL-ed source, means they support GPL, making it also possible for ALSA to start working again on the drivers...

I fully agree on this matter! Emailing the manufacturer, especially their software design department, works! Also putting up a site will draw the attention of the software developers and the people responsable.

Check some of my correspondence: Europe developer support and US developer support
The amount of people that do this, is also important and remember, look at things from their perspective when emailing. Things like this, will eventual frustrate them and make 'm think...
Manuël Beunder, maintainer of The SB Live! Linux page

ps, I also forgot to mention that releasing a GPL-ed source, means they support GPL, making it also possible for ALSA to start working again on the drivers...

I fully agree on this matter! Emailing the manufacturer, especially their software design department, works! Also putting up a site will draw the attention of the software developers and the people responsable.

Check some of my correspondence: Europe developer support and US developer support
The amount of people that do this, is also important and remember, look at things from their perspective when emailing. Things like this, will eventual frustrate them and make 'm think...
Manuël Beunder, maintainer of The SB Live! Linux page

ps, I also forgot to mention that releasing a GPL-ed source, means they support GPL, making it also possible for ALSA to start working again on the drivers...