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Call it silver-backing, that will be a smashing buzzword.

Hmmm... "silver-backed backups" or simply "silver backups" actually would be a pretty cool name for the "process" described by this quote attributed to Linus Torvalds: "Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."

Well, of course DVI connectors are expensive if nobody uses them. They should be everywhere now, preferably the kind that also carries VGA signals, for those analog projectors.

I've used laptops as my main workstations since about 1997, and I've found that they are generally higher quality than desktop hardware. I think it's because you can't easily add or replace parts, so they have to be good quality. Also the choice of connectors is crucial, to get maximum use out of a limited selection.

This is obviously a problem for these new low-cost laptops. Also, my "small business" laptop bought in 2005 has a VGA output, though otherwise it's great quality.

PNGs have another problem -- gamma correction. If you're using transparency or a white background, it's not a problem, but if you try to mix a png's color with a css/html color, it may be painfully obvious.

People are leaving MSIE, if not also MS Windows, in droves. So flexing their M$ agenda by requiring MSIE would backfire quite nastily at this point.

Well, also seeing as the banks have been replacing secure ATMs with insecure ATMs due to putting the M$ ideological ahead of technological factors, it's only natural that they begin to follow the M$ practice of blaming the customer.

Further, some major banks took that ideology two steps further and started destroying crucial components of their infrastructure by replacing it with M$. It's so bad that Microsoft's XSS hole causes state consumer agencies to tell people to file for damages from Sampo Bank, Danske Bank and the others. Too bad so many advertising budgets are dependent on M$ otherwise we'd hear about it in the mainstream media.

Again, the M$ tactic of blame the user helps the banks. At the least it creates a smoke screen that allows the public to get all indignant about such preposterous attitudes thus drawing the focus of the banks' home made catastrophy or willful negligence.

Please do: http://iki.fi/teknohog/music/

The most amazing demo I've ever seen is Animate! , a 4k demo from 1995. Wow.

Firefox, Safari and Opera have an "Almost Standards Compliant Mode" in addition to the Quirks Mode and Standards Compliant Mode. It shouldn't shock anyone that Microsoft is adding a third... See http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/

The whole idea of the browser selecting when to enforce the standards makes it not very supportive of the standards. Opera lets you play with settings that make ti disobey the standard, but that's the user's control, which is different.

All the popular browsers do that. If the author of the web page goes through the trouble of specifying a correct doctype, the browser will follow the standards. If the doctype is missing or incorrect the browser gives up and tries its best. By default Opera uses the doctype to choose quirks or standards mode just like all the rest, but it is the only one I know of that lets the user force standards or quirks mode.

See here for how Opera does it. Here for Firefox. Here for some old info on Konqueror. And here for more general info.

It doesn't require the USER to turn on "standards mode", it is done by the DOCTYPE specified by the web page itself. This is nothing new, the current versions of IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. do the same thing.

Here's more info on the process:

http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/

He wasn't lying according to this overview he was just very good at suggestion a large market share which they obviously don't have. Notice linux is allready ahead of microsoft.

Linux's CPU frequency scaler has this option. For example the 'conservative' governor has the file /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/conservative/ignore_nice_load. So a program running with lower than default priority will not increase CPU frequency.

I use a script to handle CPU frequency changes. When I'm at home with my laptop, I use the "ignore nice" option which in practice will turn the fan off. YMMV. When I go somewhere, I can set the CPU to full steam.

I use Linux for making music. As with any hardware/OS combination, if you intend to use Linux, you should do your homework on supported devices. That way you'll also encourage further Linux-friendly hardware development.

Linux.

All the meaty goodness you could want, along with links to everything mentioned in the article (including the news groups, and all that other random crap).

As well, if you do a Search for "linux history" (with or without the "), you get Linux the big picture, Linux History and a much better history then the one in the article, History of Linux (though not the first from the search result).

Basically, the article is rehashing stuff that is very easily found, presenting it in a format that isn't even very interesting (a short blurb at the beginning and then a copy of all the other stuff..., sounds hard to do!) and leaves out a bunch of relevant information (such as all the GNU stuff that made it usable...)!

Geolocation is a possible additional filter (think "local news" section of a newspaper), but I guess most people are interested in items from their field of interest regardless of the physical location where the post was made.

I made some experiments on a more open source version of the "secret sauce". It seems quite easy to determine relevance of posts using the various social news services out there.

Quick, someone register http://all.your.dtds.are.belong.to.us/ :-)

Seriously though, we don't need dedicated hosting for DTDs. We need XML language spec writers, authors and user agent vendors to realise that DTDs are useless. Web browser vendors realised this a long time ago. No browser ever read HTML's SGML DTDs, and they do not use validating parsers for XHTML either (although, they use a hack to parse a subset of the DTD to handle XHTML and MathML entity references).

DTDs are bad for several reasons:

1. DTDs pollute the document with schema-specific syntax. Since the document itself declares the rules, the question on answered by DTD validation is not the question that should be asked. DTD validation aswers the question "Does this document conform to the rules it declares itself?" The interesting question is "Does this document conform to these rules?" when the person who asks the question chooses the rules the question is about.

2. DTDs mix a validation mechanism, an inclusion mechanism and an infoset augmentation mechanism. The inclusion mechanism is mainly used for cheracter entities, which solve (but only it if the DTD is processed and processing it is not required!) an input problem by burdening the recipient instead of keeping input matters between the editing software and the document author.

3. DTDs aren't particularly expressive.

4. DTDs don't support Namespaces in XML.

Support schmupport. There are lots of things in computing that Just Work (TM) without being 'supported' officially by the manufacturer. Conversely, 'support' doesn't guarantee very much, it's just a meaningless buzzword. Then again, I41 welcome our new PWRficient overlords, especially when you can get laptops with them.

You were supposed to begin here:
http://www.he.iki.fi/favorites.mpeg

(originally posted to nanog. If someone has a better link, by all means, post it)

As it happens, that multipage version is one I hacked together yesterday, using the html5lib parser and an HTML5 innerHTML-like serialiser. The original and more-official version of the spec (from which the multipage one is derived) validates as HTML 4.01 Strict - the only problem is that it's quite large and makes browsers unhappy, hence the new multipage version.

(The multipage one does conform as HTML5 - but the conformance checker and the spec are still far from stable, so that doesn't mean a lot.)

http://hsivonen.iki.fi/doctype/

According to http://hsivonen.iki.fi/png-gamma/, the problem with gamma correction was also present in Opera and Mozilla. But it doesn't really matter since it's been "fixed" for a while now.

Tidy, as others have already mentioned, will be your very best new friend.

Install the 'Web Developer' extension for Firefox, and use some of the HTML/CSS validators in the Tools submenu.

Get a good handle on regex searching & replacing (if you're doing this from Windows, I suggest Funduc's "Search & Replace").

If you're migrating your GIFs to PNG (which I would recommend), then you need to get yourself pngout, to compress them to their smallest possible size (Photoshop SUCKS at this).

And as someone else said, make an empty new standards compliant template, and get to cutting and pasting; it can be a *brutal* initial process, but you'll probably save yourself time in the long run, depending on how clean you want to eventually get the code. If you just want it to be standards compliant, then you can just do a clean up job. If you want to do it 'right,' you'll want to develop a new template and coding style to properly integrate the HTML and CSS. Things like not putting everything in a DIV (a sure sign you're a newbie to CSS), just to style something. Figure out why you should be using H1, H2 tags (& TBODY & TH tags if you're using tables for outer layout), etc, without having to use a lot of unnecessary DIVs all over the place. Inline styles = bad.

Figure out why XHTML may not be the best choice over HTML. Know which DTDs to specify. Know the difference in IE6 between standards mode and quirks mode, and which DTD to use to make IE6 behave. Know that IE7's quirks mode is supposedly identical to IE6's; you supposedly won't get the new 'more-standards compliancy' in IE7 without a DTD.

Oh yeah - the guy who posted about replacing spacer gifs with 'spacer DIVs'? Don't do that to yourself, okay? Yikes.

Learn about usability and readability. Learn about typography, and how light-on-black text should be sized differently from black-on-light. Thinking about grey text on black or grey text on white? Don't be stupid. Make the stuff readable! Learn that sans serif fonts are more easily read at screen density (opposite of print). Learn why Verdana is usually not your friend (go for Trebuchet MS or even Arial).

Oh, and learn to intent your freaking HTML!

Some nice resources:

Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the Doctype Declaration

Quirksmode - a GREAT resource. Awesome info here. Memorize it.

For some reason, my laptop has a working USB socket hidden in the bottom just next to the hard drive. I can only make sense of it, if I think about using a flash drive as a semi-permanent HD replacement. I might want to keep the HD for some extra storage. I'm just a little concerned about the limited rewrite lifetime of flash chips.

Eh... PHP isn't exactly installed as widely as Perl, Python or even Ruby on non-web-server machines. And I usually see PHP just installed as Apache mod_php rather than the CGI interpreter.

Also, I'm kind of divided on whether the "everything in one place" is actually true. PHP can be compiled with different modules. So can other scripting languages, actually. Installing the stuff that's missing from your site's particular bit is either surprisingly simple if you're root (apt-get install php5-whatever) or surprisingly painful if you aren't (recompile the entire shebang), which is actually exact same thing as the other languages have.

And you complain that getting new Python libraries is difficult - may be, I haven't checked that out, but it most definitely isn't painful on Perl (CPAN) or Ruby (RubyGems).

As for "getting things done", that's a bit wrong argument. You "get things done" in PHP. I "get things done" in Perl or (more frequently now) in Ruby. For "getting things done", there's only one real choice of language, and that's the language you're most comfortable with to do this stuff with.

And without making this a flamefest, I'll just link to my PHP rant here so you can just flame me email about that and leave rational discussion here. =)

This is true of IE6 as well. It's really stunning how many "developers" out there still do not know about DOCTYPE rendering modes.

For the curious: Activating the Right Layout Mode Using the Doctype Declaration

You should try http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/movies.cgi?inpure= Y Air.

http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/

Make that here.

When making a Tool-Assisted Speedrun, minimizing lag is one of many optimizations--sometimes a seemingly suboptimal route must be taken because it involves fewer sprites and thus less lag. Of course, hardware overclocking doesn't help those runs since they're meant to be something you could do on stock hardware if you had <16ms reaction times.

This site seems to be pretty popular: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/

This was on google videos popular list for quite a while: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6590364564 874563352

Not to mention all the WoW stuff I constantly see on google video...

Birthday picture.

Some Japanese kid beat Super Mario Brother's 3 in 11 minutes by using an emulator to slow down the game play, then speeding the video back up to normal speed, and even then I think he did it dozens of times over before getting it right. I bet the Numa Numa guy or Star Wars Kid get more smiles from girls in the hallway than a kid who has devoted his life to SMB3. I watched the video once, thought it was way cool. I watched it a second time to show a friend, at which point it lost it's magic. Then I found out it was a setup.

This is called a "tool assisted time attack." It is done for a completely different reason than a speedrun, and shares more in common with the art of claymation than game-playing. With claymation, you are working against gravity, the heat of the lights, your own dexterity, etc. to achieve a series of "perfect", artistically representative frames. With a T-ATA, you're working against the game engine, the input ability of the emulator, and other such things to create a sequence of perfect inputs (button presses) that recreate the artistic experience in the "player"'s mind.

Tool-assisted time attacks don't actually take much devotion to accomplish; they're simply a hobby. The main factor reducing the necessity of such devotion is that, having learned the tricks and secrets of one game, it becomes much clearer and simpler to discover the same kinds of tricks and secrets in other games.

For a few of the more impressive examples of this (don't take this whole thing as a plug, please): NESVideos.

"Backups are for wimps.
Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it."

Hope that works out for y'alls!

I believe Mozilla needed cross-platform widgets around the 1999 timeframe (where it had already been under development for a year or two before I started using it). WayBack says:

http://web.archive.org/web/19990508065645/www.gtk. org/announce.html

"""GTK+ is also being ported to Win32. For further information see: http://www.iki.fi/tml/gimp/win32/.""" ...which theoretically shows that Gimp was working on Win32 at the time although probably not landed in the existing GTK Branches. (http://web.archive.org/web/19990202104158/user.sg ic.fi/~tml/gimp/win32/)

But keep in mind a few other requirements:

    1- Browser Theming / Skinning (see if you can find that recent slashdot link about Mozilla / FireFox history and marketing requirements).

    2- Cross-Platform UI (Windows, Mac, Linux, etc)

    3- CSS / Web styling on HTML buttons (http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/100601-1.sh tml) ... probably would have been difficult with stock GTK (I think GTK uses system-wide themes rather than arbitrary themes generated on the fly from CSS per control per page

Once you've got to render buttons on web-pages with CSS 100% reliably anyway, and you add in that cross platform and themeable UI requirement, it's not that much of a stretch to add a Tab, Listbox, and Menu elements that can hook into your user interface. Yeah, it's kindof strange but it's helpful to remember the context of the time.

--Robert

Centrino defines the CPU, the chipset and the WLAN chip. AFAIK it's possible to have a Centrino laptop with a different video card. My Centrino laptop has an Intel card though, and it has a working OpenGL acceleration with opensource Xorg drivers. In fact most of the chips, such as sound card, are made by Intel, which is a good thing for Linux. As much as I like to support the underdog, I've found that a thoroughly Intel-based laptop was the best for Linux compatibility.

So, if you're buying a Centrino laptop for Linux use, make sure there are drivers for other components as well. There's a lot of it besides the parts that make up Centrino.

Anyone else used these? I got mine in 1987, you could compare it to something like Commodore 16, though it used a Z80. I wrote a little page about my computing timeline for occasions like this, so I don't have to repeat everything here :)

I actually started composing music with trackers in 1992, and did some collaborations and remixes, but mostly good tracker pieces come from single authors. Ideas and samples, on the other hand, can flow freely and influence others. It happens in any kind of music, even if you don't have the 'source'.

Now that I work more with MIDI equipment and other instruments, it's a lot harder to share the source. Most of the notation is only in my head anyway. Plus, it isn't practical to put all those gigs of unorganized material available online. But of course, if anyone's interested in tinkering with some of my music, I'll be happy to provide the source material.

Sorry for the delay. You can get the links with http://iki.fi/lindi/google-video-url

I'm not familiar with the Speed Demos Archive, but I do know that NESVideos (a similar site) only takes submissions in the form of emulator movies - basically a recorded set of inputs. They load it up with their own rom of the game (known to be good), and record the actual video from that.

of course it was all scripted. What makes a beat'em up cool is how much cool stuff you can do in each scene, and God of War had tons of it. If you want to see how a good beat'em up is meant to be played go here and download the Streets of Rage 2 run. Gezz, next thing you'll be saying Space Invaders was a bad game because it was all scripted!

I'm a member of IKI, a Finnish society of Internet users that provides redirection addressess for web and mail. My website has been running in a number of different places over the years, but the same http://iki.fi/user/ address (including any file/directory path within) works every time, as long as I've updated the redirect target. Same goes for mail.

It's a society for Finnish users only, so I wonder if there's anything similar for the rest of the world. As for the cost, I paid a one-time fee of 25 EUR upon joining, and there are no annual fees.

I'm a member of IKI, a Finnish society of Internet users that provides redirection addressess for web and mail. My website has been running in a number of different places over the years, but the same http://iki.fi/user/ address (including any file/directory path within) works every time, as long as I've updated the redirect target. Same goes for mail.

It's a society for Finnish users only, so I wonder if there's anything similar for the rest of the world. As for the cost, I paid a one-time fee of 25 EUR upon joining, and there are no annual fees.

http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/WhyAndHow.html

I downloaded uTorrent so I could watch their metroid and super metroid runs ---- amazing!! Not real play, but fun to watch anyway.

You can see the endings in this speedrun archive: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/

This page on that site goes on and on about Quirks Mode, Almost Strict Mode (a unique-to-Mozilla beast), and Strict Mode. This page goes further and delineates how different browsers pick among those three modes.

If you always code Strict and never have to support a quirks-only browser, then lucky you!

Personally, there's a reason I never became a web developer and I keep my HTML simple. :-)

Many game endings can also be seen in the tool-assisted game movies on http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/ . In fact, you get more than just the endings there - you also get to see the entire games, played perfectly (or at least nearly so).

(And for the record, no, I'm not affiliated with that site in any way or shape at all - I'm just a fan who enjoys those movies.)

1993 according to this.

I quote:
During 1992 and 1993, the Linux kernel gathered all the necessary features it required to work as a replacement for Unix workstations, including TCP/IP networking and a graphical windowing system (the X Window System). Linux also received plenty of industry attention, and several small companies were started to develop and distribute Linux. Dozens of user groups were founded, and the Linux Journal magazine started to appear in early 1994.

Just one of several examples of doing a google search on Linux History. I personally have bene using Linux on my desktop and servers since I discovered Slackwarein 1996. (Thanks Patrick! :-)

There's a direct link to that video on the original site with a link to the torrent for it for those of you that want to save it.

There's a direct link to that video on the original site with a link to the torrent for it for those of you that want to save it.

Wohoo! It works! Thanks a lot!
Seems there were also issues with paths that contain spaces since the program tries to open
20818 stat64("/home/lindi/local/raster/Rasterbator%20Sta ndalone/itextsharp.dll", 0xbfffef84) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
Any idea if mono should handle these or is it a bug in rasterbator?
For the record I've put all the necessary modifications online to

http://iki.fi/lindi/Rasterbator.buildfix1.diff

On my main machine I have a screen with pine, emacs and a few other things. I can get to it from work etc. without restarting any of the programs. When you have multiple documents open in emacs, this makes a lot of sense.

On my media box, screen is usually running with a few Bittorrent console clients, emacs and comms.

I only wish there was a screen equivalent for X. I think there was a project called xmove that basically did this, but it seems to be dead.