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Or you could use http://www.ping.be/~ping6758/ World!OfNumbers to search for the integer sequence.

When they first shipped one of their 8x CD Burners, it was a rebadged plextor. You could flash it with a slightly modified Plextor patch and basically turn it into a Plextor burner. This was the version of the drive that went out for reviews, and obviously it did well.

Shortly thereafter, they switched to a way cheaper rebadged Samsung (with less capabilities) and left the packaging the same. It was impossible to tell from the packaging which burner was in the box.

74 minutes of uncompressed audio at CD quality should take 650MB of space.

Actually, uncompressed CD audio is very close to 10MB/min, so that should be 740MB.

4 Bytes per stereo sample, 44100 samples/sec * 74 minutes = 783,216,000 Bytes, or 747MB.

(I refuse to use this mebibyte business. Bah. Silliness.)

You'll notice, of course, that CD-ROMs contain less data than audio CDs, because of the extra error correction they include.

- Peter

if you are going to go with a file that big, you might as well do shorten [ping.be] (.shn) files...

and hey, theres a plugin for winamp [etree.org] too!

... you mean this ?

Note that the report doesn't say "human impact is bad".

Really? Let me quote the report for you:

"The human footprint is a global driver of conservation crises on the planet."

"Crises" related to crisis meaning: "an unstable situation of extreme danger or difficulty". Sounds damn negative to me.

"...we need to find ways to moderate the negative impacts of human influence...

Can't even say they are implying that we have a negative impact. They flat out say it.

"Part of the solution is becoming better stewards of Nature across the gradient of human influence..."

Implies we are not good stewards!

"But the most important part of the solution is for human beings, as individuals, institutions and governments, to choose to moderate their influence..."

Implying once again that we do not moderate ourselves.

And that's just one section of the study and doesn't even mention the "sky is falling" spin CNN applied.

In fact I have no reason to suspect they're being dishonest.

I've seen at least twenty other posts pointing out flaws in their methodology. If the average slashdotter can find that many, that quick, I'd say there are issues with the report.

This is typical of how conservation organizations work, whether or not you want to believe it. Conservation organizations tend to be heavy in biologists.

Ah that's how you want them to work and if it was I'd be all for it. I have no evil goal of destroying the world here. But the fact remains that "greenies" are mostly undereducated knee-jerk reactionaries. i.e. First Earth day: "Global Cooling!!! Another ice age is only years away!". Todays: "Global Warming, We are all going to bake!". Or this report. Or my personal favorite the dam beavers.

So you see I have no problem with the goal of conserving nature, but I am skeptical of most groups that promote it because most feel that the majority of humans are a waste of space and would love to see them "just go away".

Damn, I messed up the link. That should have been this one instead. Sorry!

Here you go : EVP on your computer.

(your results may vary.)

Whoever mod'd this down to Offtopic doesnt know what they're doing. This is NOT offtopic.

EAC and LAME are the best way to rip and encode mp3s (respectively)

EAC: http://www.ping.be/satcp/eac00.htm Use secure mode when ripping, its slower but you wont get pops, clicks and bleeps.

LAME: http://www.hot.ee/smpman/mp3/

At the moment you should be using at least the LAME 3.89 executable to encode. If you are, use the following command line (EAC -> Compression Options -> External Compression -> Additional command line options):

--r3mix

Yes, that's all, "--r3mix", nothing else. For more information on this, visit http://www.r3mix.net

Toner transfer is my method of choice. I stuck transparencies, like you'd use in an overhead projector, into my laser printer. I crank up the darkness of the page, so it puts a lot of toner onto the transparency.
Then, I print my board layout, in mirror image, onto the transparency. Rest it on the blank, clean copper-clad board, and run a hot steam iron over it for a few minutes. With some practice, you'll be able to transfer enough of the toner onto the board that when you etch the blank board, your layout comes through.

• http://www.ping.be/~ping0751/thepcb.htm - *The* PCB FAQ. Extremely informative.
• http://www.lvr.com/pcbs.htm - Jan Axelson's PCB page. I bought her book a long time ago and found it quite useful.

You are somewhat correct, but not quite there. Since modern 3D games are more complex, the game may lag a little now and then and therefore we experience more skipping in motion than in simple 2D platform games. But this is not the whole truth (as in: why do Amiga and TV consoles fasciliate "perfect motion"?).

Searching for "human eye framerate" on Google provided this link. A very good point raised here is that the screen is turned on and off many times a second. This makes us much more perceptible to refresh rates above 30 Hz. Especially on TVs and monitor pictures with higher intensities, where white colour is the brightest. If you don't believe me, adjust your monitor refresh rate to 60 Hz and notice the difference. Compared to 100 Hz, I notice the blinking extremely well. Hell, I even notice it a little when switching from 100 Hz to 85 Hz. However, if you use a lower refresh rate, your "eyes" adjust after a while. Especially using darker colours on the screen makes it easier. This might be a synchronisation problem, and that we start synchronizing with the lower refresh rate after a while. However, we DO notice extremely well when comparing, and working on a lower refresh rate may give you more headaches!

Notice the difference between refresh rate and framerate. IMHO refresh rate has everything with how "smooth" motion you can have. With lower refresh rates, it's much easier to create completely "smooth" scrolling (we perceive the motion as continuous), but we might notice the blinking of the screen. This is why games on TV can look PERFECTLY smooth, but "horrible" on a high Hz monitor. The more Hz you have, the higher STABLE framerate you need to get the same effect. So if you want more smooth motion in games, I recommend learning to play at a lower monitor refresh rate. Really! Your head may throb, but it's smoooth ;-)

All in all, I think of the problem as in two parts:

A) A synchronisation problem between refresh rate and framerate. (Which is really the same as your conclusion) Sometimes, a frame can take longer than a refresh and people will notice.

B) A synchronisation problem between the eye and the refresh rate of the monitor and it's intensity (remember colours are frequency too!) Remember that the human eye isn't built for watching rapidly blinking objects.

They don't pay me, so I won't clarify much more than this. ;-)

- Steeltoe

There is a good article on it, as applied to the powervr (which is using the same kind of architecture) at http://www.ping.be/powervr/PVRSGRendMain.htm. As others already said, you can see the results on the Dreamcast, or on the arcade version, the Naomi.

The strenghts are obvious:

• Lower fillrate required because of the per-petch occulted triangles elimination
• The currently-rendered tile memory can be on-die, L1-grade, releasing the bandwitch for texture reading

The weaknesses are a little less obvious:

• Rendering start delayed because it requires having all the triangles available. Can be somewhat hidden by multi-buffering
• Alpha-blending slows things down hard, because it increases the required fillrate very fast, and these cards are designed with a lower fillrate in mind
• There is no Z-buffer anymore (at least at peak speed, it's not copied back to the main memory), and we know that the 3D programmers love to do tricks with the Z-buffer

As a result, these cards are nice, but mostly represent another set of tradeoffs, not necessarily a revolution.

OG.

Just because Microsoft have the market share does not mean they own the internet.

Exactly !
We don't want feudalism on OUR Web, do we ?

"Sorry Bill, Internet is not for sale !"

Narrow mind hurts it too !

It's like if you said: "As long as my fridge is full of what I like, it's none of my business if some people are dying hungry." Well, I'm glad for you if you have all what you need; and I'm really not jealous of what is in your fridge.
But I DO CARE that you don't have filled it by deprivating other people !

Your point of view is unacceptable as it is related to a medium (the Web) S H A R E D by people World Wide !!!

Why is it that there are so many incompatibilities problems on the Web ? Why is there often so poor support for standards like HTML 4.01, CSS 1 and 2, XHTML, DOM, SMIL, PNG, ... ? All of these standards are FREE, OPEN and DOCUMENTED !

Don't you have access to IE source code ? Can't you contribute to write code, report/fix bugs, suggest improvements, ... to make IE the ideal browser, fully compliant to the standards Microsoft (amongst others) has contributed to set up (Microsoft is a member of the W3C), and which EVERYONE can use ?

Or maybe you don't care ? Maybe you are more interested in grabbing stock shares from the WWW ?
Don't you know that EVEN the commercial activities on the Web are injured by this mess ?

(See also: Web Alert !)

Download them from this directory

Trolling is the ancient practice and art of being sarcastic, funny, and sometimes annoying. Trolling is said to date back to the 5th century BC, in northern Mongolia. But, back then trolling was punishable by death. Many troll martyrs have sacrificed their lives in their fight for the freedom of trolling. Trolls have a rich and diverse culture in modern times. They band together and fill our lives with wonder and heartfelt thanks to all that read their witty and insightful comments. But, the cuddly trolls have a dark enemy that threatens their very survival. They are the Moddur-Raetirs (more commonly known as the Moderators). The Moderators have declared all out war against the benign, peace-loving trolls. It is said the Moderators are evil creatures devoid of emotions and senses of humor that want to destroy anything bearing those qualities. But there are Rebel Moderators out there that have aquired these traits by trolling spells, and are helping the trolls in their never ending battle. Let us wish them luck.

Here are some troll links:

ustrolls

The boy who loved trolls

Rare photos of trolls

Troll page

Troll Lovers page

A wonderful little program (5.5k) by Tim Clarke called MARS.EXE let you move with your mouse through shaded voxel-based martian terrain under a cloudy sky. It an at fantastic speed even on a 386.

Read the original usenet posting here.