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The C64 came with a demo disk which had that game on it. There's a big frog on the left side of the screen. The player presses numbers to control how high the frog "jumps" to catch flies which move about on the right side of the screen. http://home.freeuk.net/markk/CBM/C64_DEMODISKETTE.tar.gz

No, it isn't. It's the smartest possible choice. There is no loss of stereo separation in LAME "joint stereo" (actually, mid/side or matrix stereo), unlike in intensity stereo encoding, which isn't even implemented in LAME. How LAME works by default is that it analyses each frame separately to see whether it is more efficient to encode the frame in LR or MS. Most of the time, not every frame is encoded in "joint stereo". If there was an audible effect to stereo imaging from using MS encoding, the stereo image would continuously pump back and forth as the encoding method changes. Never heard of anyone complaining about that happening...

The drawback to MS encoding is that LAME is only optimised for stereo listening - if the compressed track is played back through a Dolby Pro Logic decoder, the quality of the rear channel sound can suffer audibly in some cases. In Dolby Stereo, the rear channel is L-R, just like the S channel in MS encoded stereo. LAME only optimises the decoded LR stereo signals for audible artifacts, not the S signal when listened to as is. As far as I know, that is the only scenario where using LAME in LR mode exclusively has been shown to improve sound quality. In all other situations, it performs much better in automatic LR/MS mode, or "joint stereo", so the encoder can decide where to use the bits available.

See this old page for an explanation of MS encoding. There's lots to be found on the topic in Hydrogenaudio's archives, but I can't be arsed to do a search right now.

OK, I'll indulge you. Why sendmail sucks, in a nutshell:

It was designed before Internet e-mail standards were established. As a result, it contains a general purpose rewriting engine that's Turing complete--the idea was it would be able to be configured to translate addresses between BITNET, UUCP, JANET, ARPAnet, CompuServe, FidoNet, and so on, without recompiling the sendmail binary. This was important because back in the 80s, those networks all had different address formats.

Nowadays the ability to arbitrarily rewrite addresses is completely unnecessary, but Sendmail keeps the old design. This leads to a number of major misfeatures.

1. Sendmail is a pig to configure. The "new improved" sendmail.mc is slightly better than the old sendmail.cf, but still awful compared to the alternatives because it's layered on top of M4, an ancient macro processor. Compare an example postfix config and an example sendmail config. And remember, that's the new .mc file that's compiled into the actual sendmail.cf; if you ever need to do something complex that requires editing the sendmail.cf itself, you'll be faced with something much nastier.

2. Sendmail has a continuing history of poor security. 16 vulnerabilities between 2000 and mid-2006, according to nvd.nist.gov. By comparison, Exim has had 9, Postfix has had 4, Qmail 3.

3. Sendmail has lousy performance. Postfix is 2-4x faster. Take a look at some benchmarks.

4. Sendmail was designed to parse and reconstruct the header of every e-mail going through it. This makes it brittle--give it something it isn't expecting, and the results are unpredictable. This has resulted in Bcc:ed recipients being revealed to each other, unknown header fields being destroyed, and so on. It also makes e-mail forensics difficult--just because the message looked like it had the right addresses when it arrived, didn't mean it had the right addresses when it was sent, if it has passed through sendmail. MTAs should not rewrite e-mail going through them; only e-mail being passed to them directly by a client.

5. It has broken behavior when sending to multiple recipients. For example, if the To: field is missing a comma between two addresses, sendmail will send copies of the e-mail to all the addresses that it can parse, then barf on the broken ones. This is unhelpful, because if the user then re-sends the mail, most people end up getting 2 copies.

So in short: it's broken, it's slow, it's insecure, and it's awkward to configure. There are other open source mailers that have a few of those defects, but sendmail is the only one that has them all. Do a search for "sendmail sucks" and you'll find plenty of people with the same opinion as me.

When I saw Fisher my mind went immediately to Fisher-Price. Yes, completely different, but does anyone else remember that Fisher-Price actually made a video camera at one time? It was called the Pixlevision and recorded to audio cassettes! The quality was poor, but just poor enough to look really cool. As I recall, they didn't stay on the market long.

A decent technical overview of the FAT filesystem can be found here:
http://home.freeuk.net/foxy2k/disk/disk1.htm

the only reason marijuana isn't legal today is that people make too much money on maintaining the status quo.

The reason it isn't legal in many countries is that the US is heavy handed against countries which make it legal. The reason it became illegal was to protect the synthetic rope manufacturers in the US in the early 20th century. Originally ropes were made from hemp and in the UK (I think) there's still a requirement on farmers to grow hemp for rope manufacture for the Navy. It's just that it's been superceded by the drugs laws.

More info here.

You can just get the abandonware version for PC; there are a few sites that have it up, including even the star map. Works great on multiboot OS/2, but then again, everything not expressly designed to be incompatible works great on OS/2.

Enjoy Freenet & Frost while you can.

I'm impressed that it's possible in sed. Here's a smaller one, in perl, but I dunno if it'll work on Win32.

this mirror should be faster for all living outside of russia.

Monday Begins on Saturday great and funny book, kinda douglas adams style

Hard to be a god same writers, much darker sf

The Master and Margarita kinda Faust in USSR, funny

There are several SID emulators out there, most notable Sidplay. There's also the High Voltage SID collection for those seeking some nostalgia on the old games.
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This is not a troll, I'd genuinely like to know people's experiences. I have been comparing it to Galeon v0.8 and Konqueror 1.9.8 on Debian GNU/Linux on a 200 Mhz pentium with 32 MB ram.

• speed. Opera seems to be slower than Galeon or Konqueror. On simple pages, or w3c-conformant pages, they're all tolerably fast. On complex pages, Opera seems to fall behind. After about half an hour of browsing, Opera starts churning the hard disk (presumably the swap partition, since this is with disk cache turned off). Neither Galeon 0.8 nor Konqueror suffer from this (although Galeon 0.7.6 did).
• stability. When given lots of complex pages in succession, Opera seems slightly less likely to crash than Galeon 0.8, and slightly more likely to crash than Konqueror 1.9.8. This is based on the pages I have tried, YMMV.
• w3c conformancy. Can't comment much on this; I've heard all three are pretty good. Certainly, all three are probably better than most of the web pages out there.
• Internationalization. Opera is *terrible*. I have international fonts installed, but Opera doesn't appear to be able to render non-roman text! (Or maybe I just haven't worked out how to configure it). It replaces the Japanese, Greek and Korean on my page with blank spaces. The least I would expect is a question-mark! Galeon and Konqueror are both fine at this. (BTW Lynx (2.8.3) is really cool at this - give it a try! - it transliterates the Japanese and the Greek and certain Polish letters into letters which it can display).

If other people's experiences are anything like mine, I don't see how Opera 4 for Linux sells. (Ok, I wouldn't buy it anyway because it's non-free, I just wanted to know how it compared to Galeon and Konqueror; but I couldn't see any technical merit in it either).

Is there something which Opera is good at which I haven't noticed from the pages I read?

• alt.books.iain-banks
• The website for the above group (http://members.tripod.com/a.b.i-b/html/)
• The culture faq (http://home.freeuk.net/m.stanfield/culture/cultur efaq.txt)

if you could show me 5 sites that have valid, strict HTML of any version, or XHTML, I would be impressed.

• Debian
• anybrowser.org
• My homepage
• Cambridge University
• Microsoft (cough)

Every word you have posted is a lie. You are a Microsoft user. You are a clueless newbie who has have never even written a device driver. I recieve six death threats off you every half hour. Furthermore, you are the originator of those emails which say Bill Gates will buy a trip to Disneyland for every recipient.

On an unrelated note, I use FreeUK. They are an excellent free ISP who give free telephone and email support. They will go out of their way to support non-standard setups, like Linux, and I would heartily reccommend them to anyone.