The only thing that is needed to make Winamp a viable front end for something like this is a full screen skin for Winamp 3.x. I personally would like 1024x768 one for the notebook in the kitchen... 800x600 would be good for some of the cheaper commidity touchscreens out there, too.
Actually, there's a good number of them used in notebooks today that work just fine. I personally think Winmodems were a bit ahead of their time. When they came out back in the days of 486s and Pentiums, they would regularly use 40% of the CPU, leaving not much left for anything you want to run. These days with >1GHz machines being found almost everywhere, it doesn't take much CPU to use a Winmodem. That, combined with the hugely improved driver support of Win98/2K/XP (over DOS and 3.xx) makes all the difference.
This isn't trolling, so I hope I don't get flamed, but here goes...
Have you tried getting Microsoft MapPoint 2002 to run under Wine? I've been playing with the MSDN version from work and it seems to work real well. It's just, obviously, Win32-based. It might be worth investigating... Huge install, but that's all the maps.
Here's one reason why I like a faster frame rate. I don't know about most people, but I can clearly see a difference between 25 FPS and 60 FPS. I'm one of those people who gets headaches from florescant lights and monitors that are running at 60 Hz. With a first person shooter (or similar game) running at anywhere below ~60 FPS (even if the monitor is at 85 Hz) I tend to get motion sickness after maybe 20 minutes of play.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm using such a large monitor, but it really gets irritating.
Detroit News Spammer Article
on
Meet the Spammers
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· Score: 5, Informative
On Sunday the Detroit News featured three articles about spammers, including a front page story. Take a look here: http://detnews.com/2002/technology/0208/04/index.h tm for the stories. (Scroll down a little past the headlines)
Try going into Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> (Uncheck) Reuse windows for launching shortcuts
I believe the problem you are having is with IE's handling of shortcuts to URLs, which is all that Favorates actually are. If you have this option checked and hit a favorate, it will open the favorate in the last used window. This often turns out to be the first one you opened.
I, personally, would happily take spam over real, physical junk mail any day. Every day I go to the mail box, checking for bills and the occasional real letter. Almost all I ever receive are junk mail, credit card offers, and crappy ad-funded local newspapers. I'd imagine that I fill a kitchen sized garbage can once a month with junkmail. That's a LOT. Imagine if your whole neighborhood received that much? Your county? Your state? What a waste of paper...
Give me spam any day. At least I can write filters to eliminate most of it, costing only a few bits. At least I'm not destroying trees, filling up landfills, and spewing chemicals all over.
-Steve
PS: You can cut down on some junkmail by calling 1-888-567-8688 to opt out of preapproved credit card offers. It won't get rid of all of them, but it'll cut down on those twice-daily offers of high interest plastic.
I agree with what you are saying, but that replacement XBox is likely to be bought by someone else (an average consumer), along with some games, etc. Thus lessening the financial burden on MS.
I think that this argument is sort of circular and we both are right.
I feel, anyone who buys an XBox (including you and I) is very likely to buy at least one or two games, and maybe a second controller, thereby dampening the financial hit to MS through the license fees that they will recoup. (Then again, buying "used" titles wouldn't give any more money to MS, it'd just keep it floating around in more private circles...) I fel that even if someone doesn't want to buy games initially (simply in order to buy a XBox to 'hurt' MS or to play Divx titles) would want to use the system to it's full capacity eventually.
In light of this, and the fact that (as far as I'm aware, please correct me if I'm wrong) there isn't an established third party / underground development community (like there is for DC and GBA), I feel that if you are trying not to support MS it would still be 'best' to not buy a XBox.
(I hope I don't get flamed down for making Anti-MS statements. That's not what this is. This is just a clarification.)
Remember that while MS may lose $100 on the sale of an XBox, that same XBox sitting on the shelf unsold would be a $300 (or greater) loss for MS as they would be shelling out the entire cost of the product and recouping nothing.
In short, if you truely desire to hit MS where it hurts, don't buy an XBox. Just let it sit there on the shelf.
That case isn't too bad, but the problem I have with it is that for the most part it just appears to be a plain mid tower with a penguin painted on to the front. I can't tell if there are any mold lines to give it any depth. (Does anyone have this case or better pictures of it) It just simply looks like they adapted an existing case to be a penguin. Now if there was a full-size cute penguin case out there, I know at least two people (not counting me) who would be desperately waiting for the UPS person to deliver it.
I placed an order for this Doggie Case from Nikao a few days ago. $45 and $10 to ship via Pricewatch.
Now, a bunch of you are probably going to ask me why or call me a fag or say that I don't understand the meaning of case modding. What I'd really like to know is why there aren't more humorous/non-manly styled cases. There are plenty of girls out there as well as guys who just appreciate asian culture and random cute things. I think after I get this case I'll get a review up.
-Steve
PS: And no, I'm not talking about the damn Barbie computers. Remember those?
If you're looking for a Neo Geo and find the prices of the home consoles high, look into one of the arcade games themselves. The arcade versions are high, but the low price of the games balances things out. I picked up (locally) a 4-slot (meaning, capable of holding four games at once and switching between them) Neo Geo with a 27" monitor for $500 - $600. Throw in another $30 for new buttons and joysticks (that anyone with a basic knowledge should be able to install) and it'll play just like new. MVS (arcade version) games on eBay typically go for much less than their AES (home version) because they were produced in larger quantities. Many games weren't even released for home play ever. You can find games anywhere from $3/ea to $300/ea, but you should be able to assemble a complete Neo Geo MVS arcade collection for under $1000. I did.
There's just something so much nicer about the original hardware. Even if you do build your own emulation machine. (Which is also in my collection: http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/arcade)
I thought I remembered some Java-specific hardware. Here it is... http://www.inside-java.com/articles/javachips/micr ojava.htm. If we could get one of these in every PC, then would there be any problems with speed? MS seems to hold quite a bit of sway over the hardware mfg's, though. I don't think we'd see this anytime soon...
Hrm, thanks for the info... That might not be so bad then. Do you have any pointers to a more realistic spec, one that details length of cable, etc? serialata.com doesn't seem to have anything, and the linked site is dead (of course).
-Steve
Serial ATA Replacing SCSI in Workstations?
on
Serial ATA Coming
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· Score: 1
One thing I'd like to know about Serial ATA, and can't seem to find, is weather or not it eliminates one of the biggest issues with IDE. That is the fact that only one device per channel (the master or the slave) can be 'talking' at a time. This is the reason why IDE RAID is generally only faster if your two drives are on different channels, why you don't want to master/slave a CD-ROM and CD-Writer, etc. If this limitation remains, Serial ATA will still only be truely usable in home machines. If this limitation remains, I'll still keep on running my perihperals (CD-RW, CD-ROM, DAT) on SCSI and hard drives via Fibre Channel.
For us (at a rather large IT company with an auto mfg as one of our clients) we use something along these lines. One of our servers would be named something like USCHINAWK009 where US is the country code, CHI is the city (use a nice abbreviation for whatever location you have), NAWK would be the specific application of the group of servers (say, W2KC for Windows 2000 Cluster or TIME if it's a time server, pick your own) and then the number is this server's serial in the group. This allows you to add servers at the same site that perform the same task by simply incrementing a number, and when you remove a server, the lower numebr just goes away. It works well, every server has a unique and recognizable name, the number is really easy to deal with as it's rare that you'd get too many servers at a site of each type. It's not pretty, it's not fancy, it doesn't have a cartoon character or elemental name, but it works. Well.
Actually, what I was meaning is when you use a docking station. PCMCIA works good, but when you plug into a docking station it adds things, often including another PCI bus, hard drives, network stuff, cd-rom, etc. Hell, Microsoft couldn't even get it right until at least Windows 98. The only OS I've seen not die under repeated docking and undocking so far is 2000. (XP I haven't even bother trying. When ClearType came around I just abandoned using the dock all together.)
I'm sure I'll get flamed or modded down for not trashing MS and pumping Linux, but here goes anyways:
I would imagine that what the users are talking about is the inability to copy and paste all formats of data from anywhere to anywhere. Like copying a table from a HTML document and pasting it into Excel. That's just useful sometimes when your manager is breathing down your neck looking for a report of something that could just be looked up online. We all know how it is.
About the more stable thing... The last time I tried making ANY in-depth spreadsheets on *nix, I tended to take the app (I think it was Star Office) right down. Or sometimes when importing data from other existing sources the app would either blow up or fail to import the data. Users can't have that when they have deadlines. On the other hand I've been sitting here for the last five hours working up process documentation in Excel (yep, management can't get it done, I want a faster process, I'll write it myself) without a single issue.
Yes, I love Linux, but I don't think it's ready for the desktop. MS has it right with near-universal copy and paste and stability is no longer an issue. On a properly configured machine there is no reason that 2000 or XP should crash. Ever. My machines don't, yours can too. I still believe that Linux's best place is on the back end. Passing out files with Samba without people thinking about it. Serving internal websites with Apache. Watching what's going on with Snort. There's many, many good places for Linux, but the desktop just isn't there yet.
Not to mention notebooks... I've yet to see a Linux distro that can transparently handle being undocked, taken to a conference room, hooked up with a PCMCIA NIC, worked on, then docked again. If I'm wrong here, please correct me and provide links...
Well, v3 *is* a beta... I'd expect some crashes. Also, remember that v3 is also completely skinnable, not like the older versions were. Go download some of the more useful new skins and see how you like it then. I think that once the stability is taken care of it'll be real nice to use.
Rmember the I-Opener that everyone was so happy about sucking up and hacking to run Windows/Linux/NetBSD/whatever? The original I-Opener is pretty much exactly what you're describing. It booted up, allowed a connection to the internet, and that's about it. Too bad it died, but then again, most people don't want internet appliances. They want an all-in-one PC.
IIRC Autechre uses a Nord Modular, Opcode MAX, an audio out of some sort (I'd imagine a USB-based solution), and a mixer. Nothing more. On a side note, USB 2.0 starting to be standard on motherboards should really open some horizons for USB-based audio solutions.
Even though this is the US, likely the most overtly Christian nation in the world, December 25th (Christmas) is no longer about celebrating the birth of Christ (which didn't even happen on December 25th). Christmas is now about buying kids (people in general) things that they want, spending money because you feel obligated, and generally being a good little consumer. Even though it is a very hard (nearly impossible) thing to do, everyone should think about not buying gifts for people next year. Instead, make something or do something nice for them. (I'm rebuilding my mom's PC for her for Christmas, parts excluded.) It'll save everyone money, stop the agony over what to buy, give you more free time, and allow you to generally make each other happier.
Stop spending, start sharing. Christmas shouldn't be about gifts and money, it should be about family and helping each other and being nice to each other.
If your machine got hit with Nimda that soon, you were obviously installing it after Nimda started going around. Since it was already going around, you should have known about it and taken necessaray precausions (eg: installing the OS with the network cable unplugged, only plugging it in to download and install patches AFTER IIS and Indexing Service have been disabled). If you (or whoever did the install) didn't think enough in advance to keep and properly install a machine securely, it's your fault. Linux won't save you if you're not bright enough to think ahead.
Example: I just bought a new printer and I want to install it. I can just plug it in and install the driver, right?
Not quite... How about with printers that support duplexing, stapling, and things like that? Perhaps using CUPS would make things easier, but definately not perfect. Setting up printers in Windows is as simple as it could get. Linux (as well as Unix and other Unix workalikes) tends to fall on it's face when it comes to printing. And MIDI. Don't get me started on MIDI... No, not the soundcard to make little piano sounds, but real, professional-grade MIDI.
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The only thing that is needed to make Winamp a viable front end for something like this is a full screen skin for Winamp 3.x. I personally would like 1024x768 one for the notebook in the kitchen... 800x600 would be good for some of the cheaper commidity touchscreens out there, too.
Actually, there's a good number of them used in notebooks today that work just fine. I personally think Winmodems were a bit ahead of their time. When they came out back in the days of 486s and Pentiums, they would regularly use 40% of the CPU, leaving not much left for anything you want to run. These days with >1GHz machines being found almost everywhere, it doesn't take much CPU to use a Winmodem. That, combined with the hugely improved driver support of Win98/2K/XP (over DOS and 3.xx) makes all the difference.
This isn't trolling, so I hope I don't get flamed, but here goes...
Have you tried getting Microsoft MapPoint 2002 to run under Wine? I've been playing with the MSDN version from work and it seems to work real well. It's just, obviously, Win32-based. It might be worth investigating... Huge install, but that's all the maps.
Here's one reason why I like a faster frame rate. I don't know about most people, but I can clearly see a difference between 25 FPS and 60 FPS. I'm one of those people who gets headaches from florescant lights and monitors that are running at 60 Hz. With a first person shooter (or similar game) running at anywhere below ~60 FPS (even if the monitor is at 85 Hz) I tend to get motion sickness after maybe 20 minutes of play.
Maybe it's the fact that I'm using such a large monitor, but it really gets irritating.
On Sunday the Detroit News featured three articles about spammers, including a front page story. Take a look here: http://detnews.com/2002/technology/0208/04/index.h tm for the stories. (Scroll down a little past the headlines)
Try going into Tools -> Internet Options -> Advanced -> (Uncheck) Reuse windows for launching shortcuts
I believe the problem you are having is with IE's handling of shortcuts to URLs, which is all that Favorates actually are. If you have this option checked and hit a favorate, it will open the favorate in the last used window. This often turns out to be the first one you opened.
I, personally, would happily take spam over real, physical junk mail any day. Every day I go to the mail box, checking for bills and the occasional real letter. Almost all I ever receive are junk mail, credit card offers, and crappy ad-funded local newspapers. I'd imagine that I fill a kitchen sized garbage can once a month with junkmail. That's a LOT. Imagine if your whole neighborhood received that much? Your county? Your state? What a waste of paper...
Give me spam any day. At least I can write filters to eliminate most of it, costing only a few bits. At least I'm not destroying trees, filling up landfills, and spewing chemicals all over.
-Steve
PS: You can cut down on some junkmail by calling 1-888-567-8688 to opt out of preapproved credit card offers. It won't get rid of all of them, but it'll cut down on those twice-daily offers of high interest plastic.
I agree with what you are saying, but that replacement XBox is likely to be bought by someone else (an average consumer), along with some games, etc. Thus lessening the financial burden on MS.
I think that this argument is sort of circular and we both are right.
I feel, anyone who buys an XBox (including you and I) is very likely to buy at least one or two games, and maybe a second controller, thereby dampening the financial hit to MS through the license fees that they will recoup. (Then again, buying "used" titles wouldn't give any more money to MS, it'd just keep it floating around in more private circles...) I fel that even if someone doesn't want to buy games initially (simply in order to buy a XBox to 'hurt' MS or to play Divx titles) would want to use the system to it's full capacity eventually.
In light of this, and the fact that (as far as I'm aware, please correct me if I'm wrong) there isn't an established third party / underground development community (like there is for DC and GBA), I feel that if you are trying not to support MS it would still be 'best' to not buy a XBox.
(I hope I don't get flamed down for making Anti-MS statements. That's not what this is. This is just a clarification.)
Remember that while MS may lose $100 on the sale of an XBox, that same XBox sitting on the shelf unsold would be a $300 (or greater) loss for MS as they would be shelling out the entire cost of the product and recouping nothing.
In short, if you truely desire to hit MS where it hurts, don't buy an XBox. Just let it sit there on the shelf.
That case isn't too bad, but the problem I have with it is that for the most part it just appears to be a plain mid tower with a penguin painted on to the front. I can't tell if there are any mold lines to give it any depth. (Does anyone have this case or better pictures of it) It just simply looks like they adapted an existing case to be a penguin. Now if there was a full-size cute penguin case out there, I know at least two people (not counting me) who would be desperately waiting for the UPS person to deliver it.
-Steve
I placed an order for this Doggie Case from Nikao a few days ago. $45 and $10 to ship via Pricewatch.
Now, a bunch of you are probably going to ask me why or call me a fag or say that I don't understand the meaning of case modding. What I'd really like to know is why there aren't more humorous/non-manly styled cases. There are plenty of girls out there as well as guys who just appreciate asian culture and random cute things. I think after I get this case I'll get a review up. -Steve PS: And no, I'm not talking about the damn Barbie computers. Remember those?
Unfortunately the Mega Joy 2 seems to be PAL only. A converter would help, but it'd be nice to just take it anywhere and plug it in.
-Steve
If you're looking for a Neo Geo and find the prices of the home consoles high, look into one of the arcade games themselves. The arcade versions are high, but the low price of the games balances things out. I picked up (locally) a 4-slot (meaning, capable of holding four games at once and switching between them) Neo Geo with a 27" monitor for $500 - $600. Throw in another $30 for new buttons and joysticks (that anyone with a basic knowledge should be able to install) and it'll play just like new. MVS (arcade version) games on eBay typically go for much less than their AES (home version) because they were produced in larger quantities. Many games weren't even released for home play ever. You can find games anywhere from $3/ea to $300/ea, but you should be able to assemble a complete Neo Geo MVS arcade collection for under $1000. I did.
There's just something so much nicer about the original hardware. Even if you do build your own emulation machine. (Which is also in my collection: http://www.nuxx.net/gallery/arcade)
Mmm... Magical Drop III tournaments on a 27".
-Steve
I thought I remembered some Java-specific hardware. Here it is... http://www.inside-java.com/articles/javachips/micr ojava.htm. If we could get one of these in every PC, then would there be any problems with speed? MS seems to hold quite a bit of sway over the hardware mfg's, though. I don't think we'd see this anytime soon...
-Steve
Hrm, thanks for the info... That might not be so bad then. Do you have any pointers to a more realistic spec, one that details length of cable, etc? serialata.com doesn't seem to have anything, and the linked site is dead (of course).
-Steve
One thing I'd like to know about Serial ATA, and can't seem to find, is weather or not it eliminates one of the biggest issues with IDE. That is the fact that only one device per channel (the master or the slave) can be 'talking' at a time. This is the reason why IDE RAID is generally only faster if your two drives are on different channels, why you don't want to master/slave a CD-ROM and CD-Writer, etc. If this limitation remains, Serial ATA will still only be truely usable in home machines. If this limitation remains, I'll still keep on running my perihperals (CD-RW, CD-ROM, DAT) on SCSI and hard drives via Fibre Channel.
-Steve
For us (at a rather large IT company with an auto mfg as one of our clients) we use something along these lines. One of our servers would be named something like USCHINAWK009 where US is the country code, CHI is the city (use a nice abbreviation for whatever location you have), NAWK would be the specific application of the group of servers (say, W2KC for Windows 2000 Cluster or TIME if it's a time server, pick your own) and then the number is this server's serial in the group. This allows you to add servers at the same site that perform the same task by simply incrementing a number, and when you remove a server, the lower numebr just goes away. It works well, every server has a unique and recognizable name, the number is really easy to deal with as it's rare that you'd get too many servers at a site of each type. It's not pretty, it's not fancy, it doesn't have a cartoon character or elemental name, but it works. Well.
-Steve
Actually, what I was meaning is when you use a docking station. PCMCIA works good, but when you plug into a docking station it adds things, often including another PCI bus, hard drives, network stuff, cd-rom, etc. Hell, Microsoft couldn't even get it right until at least Windows 98. The only OS I've seen not die under repeated docking and undocking so far is 2000. (XP I haven't even bother trying. When ClearType came around I just abandoned using the dock all together.)
-Steve
I'm sure I'll get flamed or modded down for not trashing MS and pumping Linux, but here goes anyways:
I would imagine that what the users are talking about is the inability to copy and paste all formats of data from anywhere to anywhere. Like copying a table from a HTML document and pasting it into Excel. That's just useful sometimes when your manager is breathing down your neck looking for a report of something that could just be looked up online. We all know how it is.
About the more stable thing... The last time I tried making ANY in-depth spreadsheets on *nix, I tended to take the app (I think it was Star Office) right down. Or sometimes when importing data from other existing sources the app would either blow up or fail to import the data. Users can't have that when they have deadlines. On the other hand I've been sitting here for the last five hours working up process documentation in Excel (yep, management can't get it done, I want a faster process, I'll write it myself) without a single issue.
Yes, I love Linux, but I don't think it's ready for the desktop. MS has it right with near-universal copy and paste and stability is no longer an issue. On a properly configured machine there is no reason that 2000 or XP should crash. Ever. My machines don't, yours can too. I still believe that Linux's best place is on the back end. Passing out files with Samba without people thinking about it. Serving internal websites with Apache. Watching what's going on with Snort. There's many, many good places for Linux, but the desktop just isn't there yet.
Not to mention notebooks... I've yet to see a Linux distro that can transparently handle being undocked, taken to a conference room, hooked up with a PCMCIA NIC, worked on, then docked again. If I'm wrong here, please correct me and provide links...
-Steve
Well, v3 *is* a beta... I'd expect some crashes. Also, remember that v3 is also completely skinnable, not like the older versions were. Go download some of the more useful new skins and see how you like it then. I think that once the stability is taken care of it'll be real nice to use.
-Steve
Rmember the I-Opener that everyone was so happy about sucking up and hacking to run Windows/Linux/NetBSD/whatever? The original I-Opener is pretty much exactly what you're describing. It booted up, allowed a connection to the internet, and that's about it. Too bad it died, but then again, most people don't want internet appliances. They want an all-in-one PC.
-Steve
IIRC Autechre uses a Nord Modular, Opcode MAX, an audio out of some sort (I'd imagine a USB-based solution), and a mixer. Nothing more. On a side note, USB 2.0 starting to be standard on motherboards should really open some horizons for USB-based audio solutions.
Even though this is the US, likely the most overtly Christian nation in the world, December 25th (Christmas) is no longer about celebrating the birth of Christ (which didn't even happen on December 25th). Christmas is now about buying kids (people in general) things that they want, spending money because you feel obligated, and generally being a good little consumer. Even though it is a very hard (nearly impossible) thing to do, everyone should think about not buying gifts for people next year. Instead, make something or do something nice for them. (I'm rebuilding my mom's PC for her for Christmas, parts excluded.) It'll save everyone money, stop the agony over what to buy, give you more free time, and allow you to generally make each other happier.
Stop spending, start sharing. Christmas shouldn't be about gifts and money, it should be about family and helping each other and being nice to each other.
-Steve
If your machine got hit with Nimda that soon, you were obviously installing it after Nimda started going around. Since it was already going around, you should have known about it and taken necessaray precausions (eg: installing the OS with the network cable unplugged, only plugging it in to download and install patches AFTER IIS and Indexing Service have been disabled). If you (or whoever did the install) didn't think enough in advance to keep and properly install a machine securely, it's your fault. Linux won't save you if you're not bright enough to think ahead.
-Steve
Example: I just bought a new printer and I want to install it. I can just plug it in and install the driver, right?
Not quite... How about with printers that support duplexing, stapling, and things like that? Perhaps using CUPS would make things easier, but definately not perfect. Setting up printers in Windows is as simple as it could get. Linux (as well as Unix and other Unix workalikes) tends to fall on it's face when it comes to printing. And MIDI. Don't get me started on MIDI... No, not the soundcard to make little piano sounds, but real, professional-grade MIDI.