Domain: sourceforge.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to sourceforge.net.
Comments · 31,462
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Re:Trade Space
I agree; trading space is the way to go. You might also like the Distributed Internet Backup System (DIBS) project. It provides a way to trade space with strangers and protects your data with cryptography, and error correction coding.
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My experiances
I did my final year project / dissertation on delta compression and created a java web service & GUI to allow the distribution of delta files that users could download and apply.
It still requires a fair bit of work to make it very usable (hardly the best software engineering development ever), the Swing code is awful because I had to learn it in a week and it could do with some object serialisers on the data it returns. It worked ok though.
If anyone's interested they can read my report [PDF] (2.3MB). The point of doing that project was the reason that it is a technology that was massivly under exploited. It is quite limited for some things however, especially compressed archives and to a certain extent binary compiled files. However if you want to compress tars of source code it's brilliant and massivly improves over zip technology.
The package I used at the time was a java port of the xdelta project, javaxdelta. It had some bugs in it at the time however which meant that it didn't always work, I think from the discussion on their maling list that they've been fixed recently. I don't think it's as fast as the normal C++ xdelta implementation and xdelta as an algorithm isn't as good as some others, notably vcdiff and zdelta (see Suel & Memon, Algorithms for Delta Compression and Remote File Synchronization (2002))
I'm happy though, there may be some money making opertunities for my project =) -
My experiances
I did my final year project / dissertation on delta compression and created a java web service & GUI to allow the distribution of delta files that users could download and apply.
It still requires a fair bit of work to make it very usable (hardly the best software engineering development ever), the Swing code is awful because I had to learn it in a week and it could do with some object serialisers on the data it returns. It worked ok though.
If anyone's interested they can read my report [PDF] (2.3MB). The point of doing that project was the reason that it is a technology that was massivly under exploited. It is quite limited for some things however, especially compressed archives and to a certain extent binary compiled files. However if you want to compress tars of source code it's brilliant and massivly improves over zip technology.
The package I used at the time was a java port of the xdelta project, javaxdelta. It had some bugs in it at the time however which meant that it didn't always work, I think from the discussion on their maling list that they've been fixed recently. I don't think it's as fast as the normal C++ xdelta implementation and xdelta as an algorithm isn't as good as some others, notably vcdiff and zdelta (see Suel & Memon, Algorithms for Delta Compression and Remote File Synchronization (2002))
I'm happy though, there may be some money making opertunities for my project =) -
Why not using PAR2 for the updates?
PAR is good for protecting your files, and as far as i understand PAR2 it could be used in the same way to update older fileversions to new ones, right?
http://parchive.sourceforge.net/
that would save some bandwith... -
Something like PAR2?
It's not quite what you are asking for, but parity files are great. PAR's have become a mandatory part of USENET binary groups. Plus, the crazy-magic math that is involved in PARs to recreate missing chunks of files can do wonders with damaged media - particularly the newer PAR2 algorithms. I run my little home data backups through it, and I feel pretty comfortable with it.
Somewhere there is webpage and graphics of someone testing PAR2 data recovery by using a felt pen to blot out chunks of a CD, and then recovering it with some sort of ISO maker plus the PAR software. I can't find the link, unfortunately.
the PAR site -
Re:As an owner of this phone...
Interesting that you'd be raving about BitPim while using an unsupported phone. I, too, have a CDM-8900 but that warning is pretty ominous. Maybe if they'd declared/limited a subset of what you could do (supported) and what was likely to break (unsupported)...
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Nice Software!
Thanks to a JNLP distribution, It took me all of 1 minute to get p2p-radio working. Too bad the station election sucks, but hopefully that'll change if this thing gets a good userbase.
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Heard of something similar
A similar incident was mentioned on the DVDAuthor users mailing list. Here's a link.
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unxutils
unxutils is great, doesn't require windows registry crap like cygwin does.
also, this topic is a dupe from like.. last year or so. someone will find the url.. -
Complementary Currencies an i-neighbors.orgI'm involved in the creation of a complementary currency, which will probably be peer to peer (JXTA) based. It will be similar to the timedollar. A complementary currency would be a useful addition to somthing like i-neighbors. Neighbors could offer and exchange services and goods through your system. Offering a localized Ebay-like platform would allow to exchange or lend used items locally (without any need for remote distribution). My own plans for such a system go even a little bit further and will include a booking system for reserving items electronically and an inventory where items to be sold later can be made visible ahead of time. In the extrem case a person or company can make items visible even before they are bought 1st hand and a 2nd hand buyer (or potential lender) can make a commitment to buy, share or lend the item later on.
There's a JSR (Java Specification Request) for complementary currencies at http://dem.sourceforge.net/JSR/.
I'm also involved in a PGP-based voting project. PGP-based voting might be an interesting addition to usual polls: A peer to peer network (Java JXTA, jxta.org) is used to collect PGP-signed votes which do not have a legal status but can be used to collect a public opinion with a very high credibility (in my case, to prepare for a direct democratic public poll about the european constitution as a next step). More information about this can be found at http://pgpid.sourceforge.net/. -
Complementary Currencies an i-neighbors.orgI'm involved in the creation of a complementary currency, which will probably be peer to peer (JXTA) based. It will be similar to the timedollar. A complementary currency would be a useful addition to somthing like i-neighbors. Neighbors could offer and exchange services and goods through your system. Offering a localized Ebay-like platform would allow to exchange or lend used items locally (without any need for remote distribution). My own plans for such a system go even a little bit further and will include a booking system for reserving items electronically and an inventory where items to be sold later can be made visible ahead of time. In the extrem case a person or company can make items visible even before they are bought 1st hand and a 2nd hand buyer (or potential lender) can make a commitment to buy, share or lend the item later on.
There's a JSR (Java Specification Request) for complementary currencies at http://dem.sourceforge.net/JSR/.
I'm also involved in a PGP-based voting project. PGP-based voting might be an interesting addition to usual polls: A peer to peer network (Java JXTA, jxta.org) is used to collect PGP-signed votes which do not have a legal status but can be used to collect a public opinion with a very high credibility (in my case, to prepare for a direct democratic public poll about the european constitution as a next step). More information about this can be found at http://pgpid.sourceforge.net/. -
Re:All I can say is....'WOW!'You may want to wait until Apple ships one with an ATI chipset. You have no chance of getting accelerated 3D with an Nvidia chipset under Linux PPC while with a bit of work you can get most ATI chipsets working with DRI.
besides, it's rarely a good idea to buy the 1st revision of any product.
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Unless you need to decompress ..
.. lzip is a must to have.
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Re:GPU vs CPUWhy does it matter which processor processes what? It's all bits, right? Why can't you process any data on either your CPU or your GPU?
There is the Sh language that tries to balance workload between the CPU and the GPU.
However, the CPU is a general purpose processor. The GPU is evolving into a general purpose parallel processor. That means the CPU can do this, then do that, then do something else very well. The GPU can do the exact same thing many times very well. So each processor has its pros.
Asynchronous execution. Think of the CPU as a client and the GPU as the server. The CPU says, "Hey, can you take care of this for me. I don't really need the results right away, but finish up as fast as you can." This is how the OpenGL API is designed. The CPU sends commands to the GPU (usually over a bus like AGP or PCI-X). The GPU queues these commands up and executes them in order.
So what the BionicFX guys are probably doing (I didn't actually RTFA), is telling the GPU to process the data in some manner. Then they send the GPU tons and tons of data. The GPU will out-process the CPU every day of the week on this type of task.
You don't want the CPU to readback the results from the GPU. That would cause a stall. The CPU would sit idle as the GPU would have to finish executing all of the commands. Then the GPU has to massage all the results before sending them back to the CPU.
Make sense? I'm missing tons of details, so ask away if you have any other questions.
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Re:ogg
Does it support Ogg files in your playlist yet?
MS will never support ogg. Howver, you don't need MS for that. You can get Ogg Vorbis DirectShow Filters to play ogg in WMP. You can also get Ogg Quicktime Components that allows Ogg encoding and playback in all MacOS and Win32 apps that use Apple Quicktime. -
Re:ogg
Glad to see somebody knows what they are talking about. What's next? people ask if WMP supports DivX and Xvid yet?
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Media PLayer ClassicMicrosoft digs it self further into it's hole while the open source media player classic gains ground.
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Re:If ATI can't be bothered producing quality driv
The 8500 and 9100 use the same core, the R200, but come in with various core clock and memory clock speeds. The 9000 uses the Rv250, a heavily modified R200 with a clockspeed increase and half the texture units per a pipeline. ATI rebadged the 8500 as the 9100 because the 8500 was faster than the 9000. The 9200 uses the Rv280. The Rv280 is a Rv250 modified to support AGP8x instead of AGP4x. source. Of course, none of this tells us anything about the various cards actual performance, which is why I asked the question.
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Re:I don't suppose...work with the most current stable kernel series?
We will not release any new 2.4.22 versions (2.24.22-3 is last).
openMosix Roadmap and Plan
2.4.24 release is pending test and review.
2.4.26 release will be the last official openMosix release for 2.4 and after that, we'll move to 2.6. -
Re:From reading these comments it is clear...
S3 supposedly has released the specs to the s4/s8 to the proper people, but the DRI project does not have any documentation about the card and they are not even for sale in the U.S. yet so
... I am just gonna sit on the sidelines and wait it out. If I really need a card to support 3d, I'll get a radeon 8500 or 9100. The 9200 is the last one ati released with open drivers. -
Ati and Linux??
I'll believe that when my crappy Radeon supports 3D and my TV tuner at the same time.
If ATI's drivers don't cut it for you, this project has been helping out for a long time. -
Re:Okay, nice, but...
I'm not sure what is popular in Finland, but
here in the USA, most J2EE projects involve Servlets, JSPs and EJBs (by far the most popular type of EJB are stateless session beans, most places stay away from Entity Beans). Many shops use Struts as well.
Download JBoss or JOnAS (open source J2EE App Servers) and get some experience on the above technologies.
One tool that will make your life a lot easier is XDoclet, but I would recommend that you do things "the hard way" a couple of times before you start using it.
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Re:Okay, nice, but...
I'm not sure what is popular in Finland, but
here in the USA, most J2EE projects involve Servlets, JSPs and EJBs (by far the most popular type of EJB are stateless session beans, most places stay away from Entity Beans). Many shops use Struts as well.
Download JBoss or JOnAS (open source J2EE App Servers) and get some experience on the above technologies.
One tool that will make your life a lot easier is XDoclet, but I would recommend that you do things "the hard way" a couple of times before you start using it.
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Re:One things Java needs...
I downloaded RC 5 last night, and ran the
SwingSetDemo. I noticed the GTK look and feel looks better than with JDK 1.4, it (more or less) uses the GTK theme you are using. I did notice a couple of bugs, sliders didn't display correctly, and the InternalFrames don't show up (the console displays a NullPointerException).
I like the Swing API, but I don't like the emulated Look and Feel. I like the native look and feel of SWT, but I don't like the API. The best solution for someone like me is to use SwingWT.
It is a wrapper around SWT, using the Swing API, porting existing Swing code to SwingWT is trivial,
just replace java.awt.* with swingwt.* and javax.swing.* with swingwtx.swing.* and you are done. -
Re:No problem with printer/network
Before you throw your printer away, though, check out Gimp-Print for Mac OS X. This is a really nifty open-source set of drivers for something like 600 printers in the latest release. I can still use my old Epson Color Stylus 600 on OS 10.3, thanks to that, saving me the purchase of a new inkjet (& the funky DCMA-protected ink cartridges they require). Gimp-Print & a USB-to-parallel cable will let you use all sorts of otherwise unsupported printers on a Mac.
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Re:Not worth the time to read it, summary below...
There are some, but I think they are for niche markets, eg BibDesk which integrates with LaTeX. (Good for me as I'm considering writing a PhD thesis in LaTeX!) It does seem like there is an opportunity for an open source project to take on Endnote, it is the de facto standard but as you say, it doesn't integrate well with anything but Word.
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Re:Penetratorw3m -dump does a very good job of converting html to text.
> Also - your default pdftotext setting...
I didn't write Penetrator, it just looks identical to the program I was planning to write before I found it
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Printer Problems: Meet Gimp-PrintOne of the wonderful things about OS X is that it plays nicely with all the Linux software that was written to support legacy devices.
Gimp-Print for OS X provides printer drivers for hundreds of legacy printers. Basicly, if you have some way to connect it (USB, or parallel with a USB converter), it'll probably work with OS X.
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Re:I like perl"the ability to read different programming languages is the same as being able to read different human languages. It's a matter of differing grammar, syntax and character notations. Not everyone can grasp chinese or russian or hebrew, but does that make them valueless languages? I didn't think so. You'll especially run into problems if you try and read/write chinese as if it were english, or perl as if it were C."
It's a little tough to say this without seeming dismissive of other cultures, but I'm going to try. Imagine for a second that I could say the Inuit language(I've never even heard it) is crap without implying anything about Eskimos.
Some spoken languages are crap, specifically I'm thinking about English. If you take a quick look here you can see a consistent theme is how English speakers are constantly adopting elements from other languages. This has created an inconsistent language with an extremely large and unnecessary vocabulary, which often give multiple ways to say the same thing.
While spoken Japanese is consistent and easy to learn, old written Japanese (Kanji) is sheer crap.
(Stolen Excerpt)
"Although tens of thousands of kanji have been used in the past, currently only 2000 or so are used in everyday language. Nevertheless, mastering the use of kanji is extremely difficult. Besides the necessity of memorizing large numbers of kanji, individual kanji adopt different meanings and pronunciations depending on their juxtaposition within a sentence or word. In Japan, the number of kanji a person knows and uses reflects his or her education."
Since programming is often expressing mathematical concepts, another example would be Roman Numerals versus Arabic Numerals. It should be obvious that Roman Numerals are valueless in comparisson.
Anyway, choosing a software language isn't like choosing a spoken language, on several levels.
One level is that you can work with a software language in a vacuum. If you like an obscure language, you can use it to write your project successfully. If you use an obscure spoken language, (Latin), you won't be able to function in modern society.
We tend to huddle around the good languages, which makes this topic alittle tougher. Also, I'm sure you've heard to the tool-kit analogy, about how you don't use a screw driver to knock down a nail, and you don't use Ruby for 3d modern video games or FORTRAN for text processing.
That said, some languages are more suited to more tasks, and other languages are not.
You'll notice that Source Forge's Language Distribution is fairly heavily scewed in certain directions.
Out of thousands of projects, not one person used COBOL.
Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis...it doesn't even have to agree with me. -
Re:As an owner of this phone...
Have you checked to see if your phone's compatible with BitPim?
I'm using an Audiovox CDM 8900 (another awesome phone that was crippled by Verizon), and it works great. Not only for uploading wallpapers and ringtones, but you can do a fair bit of hacking; getting rid of those obnoxious Verizon software banners and the like. -
Re:Was populous...
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Re:Use a pipe and untilities
PDF files[?]
strings filename | grep textI'm guessing you've never tried that search before. PDF stores the meat of a document in compressed data streams. strings would return a bunch of font names, headers and compressed garbage.
There are a few other tools available, at various stages of stability:
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Re:Use a pipe and untilities
PDF files[?]
strings filename | grep textI'm guessing you've never tried that search before. PDF stores the meat of a document in compressed data streams. strings would return a bunch of font names, headers and compressed garbage.
There are a few other tools available, at various stages of stability:
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Re:Verizon is developer-unfriendly
Verizon is currently using Qualcomm's Brew system, rebranded as Get It Now!.
If you want to get apps onto your Verizon handset, I suggset looking at Bitpim, you will require a datacable. (available online, or at a VZW store)
I believe Verizon is limiting access to bluetooth, simply to prevent people from using the data connection as a modem for they're laptops. Why this is, is beyond me. As they charge an arm and a leg for data transfers. -
Got to be better than XP's puppy dog, but
the problem I see isn't searching compressed or tarballed files- where the text inside is still largely in plaintext. It's just a different file format- but it's still bytes and I've seen supergrep programs in the past for both Linux and Windows that do this (try Tucows or SourceForge before posting on slashdot in search of freeware and shareware.) The problem I see is searching *encrypted* files, esepcially ones with different keys. Now that would be *hard*.
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Re:Good for them, but not far enough.Yahoo!'s DomainKeys is superior in every respect.
Records already published by 70000+ domains, including some very important ones like aol.com.
A way to guess a default record for any domain not yet publishing, that works for most existing mail servers.
Code already under development and in beta testing for all major MTAs.
Algorithm already implemented in upcoming SpamAssassin filter, which is currently in release testing
It's an inferior attempt at authentication.
Yeah, yeah, yeah... it has crypto, so it must be strong.
Like the grandparent says, it's all a big waste of time. I'm going to delete those TXT records right now...
And replace it with a yahoo DomainKey? How are you going to do that? Oh, you're going to go download the reference implementation, compile this alpha-release source code, and run the "dknewkey" to get something like this:
testkey._domainkey IN TXT "k=rsa; p=MFwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADSwAwSAJBANazc9du4IFEWnS
r idEMAuv9UvCojT8hiTg1L646F6T4dRTsz7MB0WdnG2cF5J6HgA AlvpIB8HN1bh43FBb1MqkCAwEAAQ=="Then you're going to head over head and grab this while ignoring the advisory section:
THIS IS PRE-RELEASE SOFTWARE, and should not be used in any critical production environments.
For someone highly concerned about what is and is not a waste of time (unlikely, posting to slashdot).... if you already did publish a SPF record, your best course of action is probably to just leave it there.
Certainly, Yahoo's DomainKeys is not yet to a degree of maturity to be actually used for much more than development and alpha testing.
In contrast, SPF is already protecting 70000+ domains and numerous sites are beginning to filter out forged messages pretending to be from those domains.
Very soon, SpamAssassin 3.x will be released (already on second release canidate), with SPF checking built in and turned on by default. Other anti-spam filters will follow.
From a practical point of view for the near future, choosing between installing a TXT record of the form "v=spf1..." or "k=rsa...", it's pretty clear which of these is useful today and which (unless you're a developer working on DomainKeys) is a waste of time.
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helpful win apps
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Powermonger
For those of you who liked Populous there is a game called Powermonger that is a somewhat similar and fun game. You will probably need DOSBox to play it. Check out some of the other games on Underdogs they have a bunch of classics.
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Re:Quality?
I believe the iTMS AAC is CBR, so the MSN service has definitely better quality.
iTMS AAC is a type of VBR known as ABR (Average Bit Rate). Instead of the frames being a variable number of bytes they are instead grouped into blocks of a constant size. This means that you can have variable-sized frames that have a constant, dependable size over the long-run. ABR is pretty much as good as regular VBR but it is a better format for streaming because of the regularity of the average bit rate.
There is an explanation of the formats here. -
Command-Tilde
One of the most annoying things to deal with is switching windows. On Windows you can alt-tab to each window, but on Apple Command-Tab moves from application to application. If you want to traverse through multiple windows in the same application it is Command-Tilde(~). Though this might seem minor, since I accidentally discovered command-tilde life has been sweet. Expose helps too, but sometimes you don't need the fancy graphics to switch windows. Also of importance, get these tools and life will be easier:
Quicksilver - Kick ass launcher
Desktop Manager - Pager OSX Style
SSHKeychain - Best OSX integrated SSH Key Management
MenuCalendarClock - Add a calendar linked to iCal to the date/time status bar (disable OSX's date/time display)
SubEthaEdit - Excellent code editor, especially in a group of other coders -
CD Burning, etc.I have an older PowerBook G4, and I have to say, im not very impressed with the Finder-integrated CD burning. Thusly, I heartily reccommend DiscBlaze. Its a quick download, only $25 (IIRC Nero/Roxio are 2-3 times that), and it comes with a free trial. It has plenty of features, but no bloat, which i think is nice, especially after using the unwieldy Nero and Roxio apps. (Im have no affiliation with DiscBlaze's developer, just a fan of their software.)
As other people have mentioned, iTerm is great too. Oddly, i dont recall anyone else mentioning Fink. Its essentially a huge collection of Unix apps ported to OS X, including X-Windows apps that run great under Panther's X11. It uses Debian tools like apt-get and dselect for package management, and includes such personal favorites as nethack, xemacs, and ethereal. good stuff
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VPNWhy not just set up a VPN? For example, OpenVPN is quite easy to configure and maintain, and also
allows for a variety of client systems to connect.I'm thinking of setting up a small WLAN using old equipment that i can get almost for free.
I would just plug another NIC in my OpenBSD firewall and keep nothing but the necessary ports for the VPN open.
There's a broad range of encryption and authentication methods available, and if the one I use
would be too weak, I could just change to another one instead of having
to buy new hardware such as PCMCIA cards, APs etc. -
dos and don'ts on a Mac
do...- use Drop Drawers as a Dock supplement or replacement
- use MPlayer as your media player
- read macosxhints when you need advice
don't...- use anti-virus software - it's not necessary
- use Internet Explorer - it's crap
- use Windows Media Player - not even your worst enemy deserves this crap
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Re:Now if we only had Gnumeric for Windows....
I guess you don't need documents in MS Word format then. OpenOffice actually does this. AbiWord does not. Also There is much more to Open Source for Windows than TheOpenCD. Check out The OSSwin project
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Re:Grammar checkers aren't as clever as humans
Your ideas about grammatical rules is slightly primitive: it's *hard* to check grammar.
My idea was a bit hand-wavy, I admit, but I still think it could work. For coding work, you need experienced software guys; but if you set up the project right, you can have language contributions from non-geeks. Start with existing natural-language tools like NLTK. If you need a dictionary, import one, such as Wiktionary. Set up an easily-parsed format for the rules, and let people submit rules.
The result would be about as good as the Word grammar checker; still brain-dead, still offering comments about things that might be wrong because it can't be sure, but by golly a grammar checker.
You figure it's ten years of work. If you can take advantage of work that has already been done (NLTK), and get help from many people (writing rules), it could shape up much quicker than that.
steveha -
As a switcher myself...
I'd say that if you're somewhat familiar with Linux/BSD you'll be very comfortable in OS X. Just start in the Terminal and work your way out. If you want your traditional UNIXy tools, install the Fink project (which often leaves much to be desired, especially when installing fink itself, but it'll get the job done)
For me, other essentials include Adium (a multi-protocol instant messenger), Firefox (sorry Safari) USB Overdrive (I find USB mice to move much too slowly even at max system settings), and Meteorologist (little weather-sensing menubar app).
macosxhints also has a good number of tips and tricks that you might want to through.
Other than that, I can't think of any real problems I had migrating over. It takes a few days to get used to, but it really is fairly intuitive. Try to experiment a bit, particularly with your normal 'window' habits. You may find you like to do things a different way. I used to run everything maximized, now I don't ever run something maximized anymore, despite having a smaller screen. I couldn't tell you why, it just feels more comfortable to do things this way for me. If you have any question, just remember there's a 'help' command in every application, the help docs are usually very nice. -
What makes my Clie worthwhile for me...
Two applications make my Clie totally worthwhile: PAdict and MegaWiki. PAdict is a Japanese-English dictionary and MegaWiki lets you take notes in a wiki-like fashion.
Apps like these are great because they're simple and get the job done. You're right, though, stuff like watching videos on this thing, or even looking at photographs, just ain't worth it. Features like that are just novelties. They wear out quick.
Maybe the problem is too many companies figured they could make these things beefier and added more features, but they forgot what made them good in the first place: they were simple easy to use. -
iTunes is no match for iRATEiRATE radio is a GPL'ed MP3 downloader and player. From the page:
iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people's to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.
According to iRATE's sourceforge statistics, it has had 15,344 downloads.I've been using iRATE for a little over a year now, and have downloaded about a thousand tracks with it. If I were a typical user, then that would suggest that iRATE users all together have downloaded about fifteen million songs, thus far surpassing iTunes' puny one million download total.
Now, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Some of iRATE's downloads were existing users fetching updates, and not everyone who uses it keeps using it. But it clearly shows that free, legal downloads are potentially dwarfing the paid downloads being tracked by the BBC.
Note that the RIAA doesn't get a penny from iRATE's downloads. They can't complain either, because the copyright holders - the musicians themselved - give permission to us to download their tracks when they post them on MP3 hosting services like the Internet Underground Music Archive.
I discuss not only iRATE but a lot of other places to get free music downloads in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads. Share the link with all your buddies who use p2p.
Thank you for your attention.
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iTunes is no match for iRATEiRATE radio is a GPL'ed MP3 downloader and player. From the page:
iRATE radio is a collaborative filtering system for music. You rate the tracks it downloads and the server uses your ratings and other people's to guess what you'll like. The tracks are downloaded from websites which allow free and legal downloads of their music.
According to iRATE's sourceforge statistics, it has had 15,344 downloads.I've been using iRATE for a little over a year now, and have downloaded about a thousand tracks with it. If I were a typical user, then that would suggest that iRATE users all together have downloaded about fifteen million songs, thus far surpassing iTunes' puny one million download total.
Now, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Some of iRATE's downloads were existing users fetching updates, and not everyone who uses it keeps using it. But it clearly shows that free, legal downloads are potentially dwarfing the paid downloads being tracked by the BBC.
Note that the RIAA doesn't get a penny from iRATE's downloads. They can't complain either, because the copyright holders - the musicians themselved - give permission to us to download their tracks when they post them on MP3 hosting services like the Internet Underground Music Archive.
I discuss not only iRATE but a lot of other places to get free music downloads in my article Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads. Share the link with all your buddies who use p2p.
Thank you for your attention.
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Re:I for one...
Try w3m instead.
It's incredible; it was to only browser that was actually usable on my Sharp Zaurus (unlike some pieces of bloatware that eat up 13MB for blank page.