"What i don't like are sites which force you to download files within the browser (which are designed for browsing, and generally have very poor download functions) instead of just presenting a url which you can cut+paste to wget."
I'm with you about the browser being a poor download mechanism. Especially for those of us that still have crummy bandwidth available to them. (Yeah, we have "broadband"... for sufficiently small values of "broad".) I much prefer a tool like wget that allows me to limit the amount of bandwidth it uses for the download as well as having a handy means of continuing a previously interrupted download. It's nicely scriptable as well. (Being bandwidth-starved like we are at home, I don't even use wget for really big files like Linux distributions. That's what Cheapbytes is for.)
As for those sites that seem to insist that you download through the browser, I found that, with a little work, you can, sometimes, wait until just before the download starts and grab the URL there. You may have to paste a couple of bits of text together to get the URL and it isn't always an option. If it looks like the site is going to be a pain and force me to use the browser, I tend to keep that tab open until just before I turn in for the night and let the browser have at it while I'm asleep. By then, nobody at home is going to be complaining about slow internet access. (If the transfer fails during the night, so be it. I can always try again.)
I guess it's a freakin' miracle I survived childhood what with having an Erector set (Ooh! Dangerous screwdrivers), a Gilbert Chemlab (Omygod there are so many nasty things in one of those it boggles the mind), a microscope (Horrors! You could cut yourself with those glass slides), Heathkits (Giving a kid a soldering iron? What, are you nuts?!) and, hell, I can't even count the number of things I had as a kid that would now be banned for some perceived danger to children. Let's face it, just about everything kids played with back when I was growing up would now be taken off the market by the Toy Police; they'd find something wrong with nearly everything.
Why don't we just place children in a bubble at birth to protect them from all hazards? How long before these "safety panel" idiots actually start considering that in the name of protecting the children? (My guess is sooner than we think.)
Crimeny! See the above post about treating LPS as consumables. Using a tracking force of 3 grams reminds me of what you sometimes did with one of those crap portable turntables with the built-in speakers that were popular in the '60s: place a dime or a penny on top of the tonearm so your scuffed up 45s would play.
Nowadays I use either 1.0 or 1.25 grams and have no problems. The stylus might not track very well at that weight on a badly worn record but that description doesn't fit with the vast majority of my collection.
... and we had the ol' Vista Cruiser. (Looking down wasn't possible, though, nor would it have been very interesting.)
Just a few random thoughts:
* Wouldn't a transparent floor in a plane give the passengers an exciting view of not so much the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, or the Taj Mahal, but... the luggage?
* Forget being able to see the stars at night. I think it'd be even better to fly at night when there are thunderstorms along the flight path. That would be an E-ticket ride.
* I have to wonder how the materials they plan on using for this are going to wear. Any scratches on the transparent portion are going to be difficult to deal with. Imagine the additional maintenance costs of having to polish the fuselage in order for the paying customers to be able to see the stars. Imagine the complaints from the customers when they can't see the stars because the carrier skimped on maintenance and the transparent material isn't so, uh, transparent.
* How will the carriers protect the passengers from the sun when flying during the day? You can get one hell of a sunburn when sitting next to a plexiglas window on a plane. I wonder what precautions they'll take to prevent that and reduce the passengers' increased risk of skin cancer? (One hopes that this magical material provides excellent UV protection.)
* Ever been to a restaurant and asked the management or that couple sitting next to the window to close the blinds because the sun was shining in your face and blinding you? Now think that request going unheeded in a close environment where many of the people have been drinking.
* Interiors made of plant fibres? One wonders if the interior will go up like flash paper in the event of a crash.
"We told our engineers to give their imaginations free rein."
Did you tell them to take drugs before they started brainstorming? 'cuz it seems that they did.
Back when the Open Group was a going entity, Bill Gates made some asinine statement to the effect that Windows should be considered an Open system. (He might have even been semi-serious about thinking Microsoft ought to be a member of the group.) Why should it be considered an open system? Well, because you could buy x86-based hardware from just about any vendor that Windows could run on. (I seem to recall it was an article in Digital Review or one of the other DEC-related newsletters of the day in the very early-90s before those rags went all high glossy paper and low content articles.)
I still want to laugh out loud when I think about Microsoft and open systems.
... is probably a bunch of old crap that's on QIC-02 tapes.
I still have bad memories of having to use SCO back in the mid/late-90s. When I left that job, I left the SCO manuals -- that I bought on my own dime -- in the bottom drawer of my desk. I couldn't bear having any evidence of having used that atrocity of a UNIX; didn't want anyone to know I'd been exposed to it. They might ask me to work with it again.
Time for another critical, no-you-can't-wait-until-tomorrow patch that the corporate patch service will insist be loaded now! while I'm in the middle of performing a complex task on a remote system. (Yesterday it was while assisting on a critical ticket and it forced a reboot in the middle of that work.) It seems these are being discovered and emergency patches being forced onto our PCs with increasing frequency. If only I could convince the Powers That Be (tm) that letting me access the VPN using my Linux desktop would be a much better proposition. Especially if the goal is for me to get more work done without being interrupted. (Which, apparently, it isn't.)
Wasn't there an article on Slashdot some years ago about how the Pentagon was trying to reduce the use of PowerPoint in briefings because of the lack of information content and how they were fostering poor communications? For some reason the phrase "PowerPoint Rangers" sticks in my mind from the article. Apparently, the higher ups in the Pentagon were unsuccessful in their attempts to stave off the use of the software. This guy must have had to sit through one too many PowerPoint presentation with unnecessary animated bullet points -- with the ever-popular Yellow text on a DarkBlue background, of course.
I'm thinking that saying that the script kiddies are sending you their code is a little like saying that the people throwing bricks through your windows (no pun intended) are giving them to you for your new backyard BBQ pit.
And one surely hopes that this is not a large part of Microsoft's security research thought it might explain how so many Windows vulnerabilities are announced after they're already seen in the wild.
Wasn't Michelangelo (sp?) transmitted via infected floppy disks back in the late '80s/early '90s? SneakerNet will never really die. The media just changes.
Us Illinoisans had a politician (I wish I could remember the guy's name; it was back in the '60s or early '70s) who stashed gobs of cash in shoe boxes he kept in his closet. He was better at it too. His shoe boxes weren't discovered until after he died so he, apparently, got away with whatever it was he was doing to (ahem) "earn" the cash payments.
Not that everything that has the "Monster" label on it isn't completely overpriced. It is and the hell of it is that they've almost cornered the market on audio/video cables in certain stores (*cough* Best Buy *cough*). (At least when I go looking for a cable theirs are the only ones on the rack.)
... to have driven the broadcast radio market to having the least variety and choice available to listeners in my lifetime (and I was glued to and listening to radio since the early '60s). Now they want to force that lack of variety onto equipment that allows the consumer (lord how I hate that term but it seems appropriate here) to load and listen to the music they want to listen to and not what some record executive or station manager has decided people will listen to. (Yeah, I know it's always been true that the station managers have always had that sort of "here's what you DJs are going to be playing" control but the past few years, there's been a marked decrease in the variety of music played on the radio. "This song's used in a commercial; we're going to play that every couple of hours." And don't even get me started on the decrease in the music-to-commercial ratio. I can't listen to radio for more than an hour or so any more. Except for the local classical station that has announcer-read ads. And -- big plus -- far fewer ads.)
Then there's the uselessness of the whole idea. FM receivers need a fairly substantial antenna in order to pick up signals without a lot of dropouts and other forms of distortion. Just how does the RIAA expect manufacturers to get that into a tiny cellphone? Apple had a hard enough time getting a decent antenna into their latest phone. And, at least for me, a bit of distortion in a conversation is tolerable; having that same amount of distortion in music is incredibly annoying. I have a Cowon player that, where I live anyway, you pretty much have to hold it out at arm's length to get a consistently strong FM signal to listen without distortion. (Same thing with my daughter's Sansa.) Or is there some technical reason cellphone antennas would actually be able to pull in enough signal to keep the music quality high enough to listen to?
I see this as just one more data point on the graph showing just how out of touch the RIAA is with the people who actually enjoy and listen to music.
Heck, even if the battery life was only an afternoon or so, I'd be interested in something like this. Especially if you could get it to record the position data at some defined interval and extract it later using a simple application on Linux. (I'd be interested even if all it provided was timestamped pseudoranges. Good opportunity to track down that old GPS software I've got on a 5.25" floppy down in the basement and convert it from FORTRAN to something "newer".) I could stuff something like this into my cycling jersey and track my rides without pleading with the major GPS vendors to make their data available to something other than the two proprietary operating systems they seem to prefer working with. (And paying them through the nose for the privilege.)
Ugh. That looks even worse on my browser. I found that "View->Page Style->No Style" worked much better. At least the text was easier to read. And no time was spent searching for an obscure plug-in.
"First off, mp3 is simply not good enough for Classical. If you must buy digital, go for 320 kbps or lame alt-preset-extreme equivalent."
Agreed. I find 192Kbps fine for folk/pop/rock but classical definitely needs as high a bit rate as you can manage. I don't hold myself to be any sort of "golden ear" but I was able to hear the difference between 192 and 320 Kbps in an MP3 I made of a Glenn Gould recording; especially when listing with headphones or earbuds and the outside noise is minimized. When listening in the car (Hey! Why not?!) I'm sure you could get by with the lower bit rate MP3. (I first thought some of the additional distortion in the 192Kbps version might have been some of Gould's humming that I'd missed hearing before.)
BTW, as another classical listener disappointed by the lack of good brick-n-mortar music stores, I'd like to pass along a word of thanks for the link to ArkivMusic. (I'm still bummed from the time when Rose Records stopped stocking their music by label and catalog number and hung Schaums catalogs around the store for customers to refer to. Then Tower bought them and we all know what's happened since then.) If you are looking for another place to hear classical, you might try (Chicago based) WFMT's web site. They live stream their daily shows and the schedule on their web site includes the label/catalog number of what's played so you can look for recordings. While my personal opinion is that the quality of their programming declined a bit when their only classical competitor in town changed formats at least they're still around. Otherwise it'd be very difficult to hear anything other than classical "greatest hits". If that.
"though with one gone, another will takes its place..."
Ain't that the truth. It seems every time one of these gets shut down, my daily spam volume decreases for a few days and then rises back to the previous levels and maybe even higher.
I can't be sure which one. On second thought, make that second one ``stupidity''. I still can't decide which one's really at work.
I attend a daily conference call where I hear case after case where people are waiting for SAN space to be reclaimed so that it can be reassigned to other systems. People are either being told their projects cannot proceed because there's not enough disk space or other projects have been held up while the space they've been allocated is scaled back to allow others to work.
I'm not sure what the storage team or (as I suspect) the clueless architects are doing when someone implementing a new application asks for space on the SAN but the procedure seems to be ``whatever the project says it needs, multiply that by ten (or more)''. During one conference call I heard that the project had been placed on hold while some of the disk space they'd been allocated was reclaimed for use on other projects. When I asked how much they were having to give up, I was told that to migrate an existing database from an environment where they were using less than 1TB of disk space they had been given 20TB on the new hardware environment. (Heh... Did I same some of the disk space? I should have said most.)
Slashdot Mirror
Um... just what did the attempted Times Square bombing have to do with cybersecurity? Was he parked outside an ISP?
Is the American public at-large really that clueless? Or was that just a badly structured sentence?
They want him to appear onstage during the announcement wearing a white turtleneck. Jobs is having none of that.
I'm with you about the browser being a poor download mechanism. Especially for those of us that still have crummy bandwidth available to them. (Yeah, we have "broadband"... for sufficiently small values of "broad".) I much prefer a tool like wget that allows me to limit the amount of bandwidth it uses for the download as well as having a handy means of continuing a previously interrupted download. It's nicely scriptable as well. (Being bandwidth-starved like we are at home, I don't even use wget for really big files like Linux distributions. That's what Cheapbytes is for.)
As for those sites that seem to insist that you download through the browser, I found that, with a little work, you can, sometimes, wait until just before the download starts and grab the URL there. You may have to paste a couple of bits of text together to get the URL and it isn't always an option. If it looks like the site is going to be a pain and force me to use the browser, I tend to keep that tab open until just before I turn in for the night and let the browser have at it while I'm asleep. By then, nobody at home is going to be complaining about slow internet access. (If the transfer fails during the night, so be it. I can always try again.)
How did we get to this point?
I guess it's a freakin' miracle I survived childhood what with having an Erector set (Ooh! Dangerous screwdrivers), a Gilbert Chemlab (Omygod there are so many nasty things in one of those it boggles the mind), a microscope (Horrors! You could cut yourself with those glass slides), Heathkits (Giving a kid a soldering iron? What, are you nuts?!) and, hell, I can't even count the number of things I had as a kid that would now be banned for some perceived danger to children. Let's face it, just about everything kids played with back when I was growing up would now be taken off the market by the Toy Police; they'd find something wrong with nearly everything.
Why don't we just place children in a bubble at birth to protect them from all hazards? How long before these "safety panel" idiots actually start considering that in the name of protecting the children? (My guess is sooner than we think.)
Crimeny! See the above post about treating LPS as consumables. Using a tracking force of 3 grams reminds me of what you sometimes did with one of those crap portable turntables with the built-in speakers that were popular in the '60s: place a dime or a penny on top of the tonearm so your scuffed up 45s would play.
Nowadays I use either 1.0 or 1.25 grams and have no problems. The stylus might not track very well at that weight on a badly worn record but that description doesn't fit with the vast majority of my collection.
... and we had the ol' Vista Cruiser. (Looking down wasn't possible, though, nor would it have been very interesting.)
Just a few random thoughts:
* Wouldn't a transparent floor in a plane give the passengers an exciting view of not so much the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids, or the Taj Mahal, but ... the luggage?
* Forget being able to see the stars at night. I think it'd be even better to fly at night when there are thunderstorms along the flight path. That would be an E-ticket ride.
* I have to wonder how the materials they plan on using for this are going to wear. Any scratches on the transparent portion are going to be difficult to deal with. Imagine the additional maintenance costs of having to polish the fuselage in order for the paying customers to be able to see the stars. Imagine the complaints from the customers when they can't see the stars because the carrier skimped on maintenance and the transparent material isn't so, uh, transparent.
* How will the carriers protect the passengers from the sun when flying during the day? You can get one hell of a sunburn when sitting next to a plexiglas window on a plane. I wonder what precautions they'll take to prevent that and reduce the passengers' increased risk of skin cancer? (One hopes that this magical material provides excellent UV protection.)
* Ever been to a restaurant and asked the management or that couple sitting next to the window to close the blinds because the sun was shining in your face and blinding you? Now think that request going unheeded in a close environment where many of the people have been drinking.
* Interiors made of plant fibres? One wonders if the interior will go up like flash paper in the event of a crash.
Did you tell them to take drugs before they started brainstorming? 'cuz it seems that they did.
Back when the Open Group was a going entity, Bill Gates made some asinine statement to the effect that Windows should be considered an Open system. (He might have even been semi-serious about thinking Microsoft ought to be a member of the group.) Why should it be considered an open system? Well, because you could buy x86-based hardware from just about any vendor that Windows could run on. (I seem to recall it was an article in Digital Review or one of the other DEC-related newsletters of the day in the very early-90s before those rags went all high glossy paper and low content articles.)
I still want to laugh out loud when I think about Microsoft and open systems.
... is probably a bunch of old crap that's on QIC-02 tapes.
I still have bad memories of having to use SCO back in the mid/late-90s. When I left that job, I left the SCO manuals -- that I bought on my own dime -- in the bottom drawer of my desk. I couldn't bear having any evidence of having used that atrocity of a UNIX; didn't want anyone to know I'd been exposed to it. They might ask me to work with it again.
And I thought I was an old-timer.
Time for another critical, no-you-can't-wait-until-tomorrow patch that the corporate patch service will insist be loaded now! while I'm in the middle of performing a complex task on a remote system. (Yesterday it was while assisting on a critical ticket and it forced a reboot in the middle of that work.) It seems these are being discovered and emergency patches being forced onto our PCs with increasing frequency. If only I could convince the Powers That Be (tm) that letting me access the VPN using my Linux desktop would be a much better proposition. Especially if the goal is for me to get more work done without being interrupted. (Which, apparently, it isn't.)
Wasn't there an article on Slashdot some years ago about how the Pentagon was trying to reduce the use of PowerPoint in briefings because of the lack of information content and how they were fostering poor communications? For some reason the phrase "PowerPoint Rangers" sticks in my mind from the article. Apparently, the higher ups in the Pentagon were unsuccessful in their attempts to stave off the use of the software. This guy must have had to sit through one too many PowerPoint presentation with unnecessary animated bullet points -- with the ever-popular Yellow text on a DarkBlue background, of course.
I'm thinking that saying that the script kiddies are sending you their code is a little like saying that the people throwing bricks through your windows (no pun intended) are giving them to you for your new backyard BBQ pit.
And one surely hopes that this is not a large part of Microsoft's security research thought it might explain how so many Windows vulnerabilities are announced after they're already seen in the wild.
Wasn't Michelangelo (sp?) transmitted via infected floppy disks back in the late '80s/early '90s? SneakerNet will never really die. The media just changes.
What! Millimeters?! Call me when we can build of these with a "Vaporize Bulldozer" setting.
... of the clinical trials.
Us Illinoisans had a politician (I wish I could remember the guy's name; it was back in the '60s or early '70s) who stashed gobs of cash in shoe boxes he kept in his closet. He was better at it too. His shoe boxes weren't discovered until after he died so he, apparently, got away with whatever it was he was doing to (ahem) "earn" the cash payments.
I thought they were being sold by "Pear".
Not that everything that has the "Monster" label on it isn't completely overpriced. It is and the hell of it is that they've almost cornered the market on audio/video cables in certain stores (*cough* Best Buy *cough*). (At least when I go looking for a cable theirs are the only ones on the rack.)
... have that spelled out?
Even someone who's only casually following American politics would have been able to deduce the Maes was a teabagger.
... to have driven the broadcast radio market to having the least variety and choice available to listeners in my lifetime (and I was glued to and listening to radio since the early '60s). Now they want to force that lack of variety onto equipment that allows the consumer (lord how I hate that term but it seems appropriate here) to load and listen to the music they want to listen to and not what some record executive or station manager has decided people will listen to. (Yeah, I know it's always been true that the station managers have always had that sort of "here's what you DJs are going to be playing" control but the past few years, there's been a marked decrease in the variety of music played on the radio. "This song's used in a commercial; we're going to play that every couple of hours." And don't even get me started on the decrease in the music-to-commercial ratio. I can't listen to radio for more than an hour or so any more. Except for the local classical station that has announcer-read ads. And -- big plus -- far fewer ads.)
Then there's the uselessness of the whole idea. FM receivers need a fairly substantial antenna in order to pick up signals without a lot of dropouts and other forms of distortion. Just how does the RIAA expect manufacturers to get that into a tiny cellphone? Apple had a hard enough time getting a decent antenna into their latest phone. And, at least for me, a bit of distortion in a conversation is tolerable; having that same amount of distortion in music is incredibly annoying. I have a Cowon player that, where I live anyway, you pretty much have to hold it out at arm's length to get a consistently strong FM signal to listen without distortion. (Same thing with my daughter's Sansa.) Or is there some technical reason cellphone antennas would actually be able to pull in enough signal to keep the music quality high enough to listen to?
I see this as just one more data point on the graph showing just how out of touch the RIAA is with the people who actually enjoy and listen to music.
Heck, even if the battery life was only an afternoon or so, I'd be interested in something like this. Especially if you could get it to record the position data at some defined interval and extract it later using a simple application on Linux. (I'd be interested even if all it provided was timestamped pseudoranges. Good opportunity to track down that old GPS software I've got on a 5.25" floppy down in the basement and convert it from FORTRAN to something "newer".) I could stuff something like this into my cycling jersey and track my rides without pleading with the major GPS vendors to make their data available to something other than the two proprietary operating systems they seem to prefer working with. (And paying them through the nose for the privilege.)
Worried that your board might show you the door?
Ugh. That looks even worse on my browser. I found that "View->Page Style->No Style" worked much better. At least the text was easier to read. And no time was spent searching for an obscure plug-in.
Agreed. I find 192Kbps fine for folk/pop/rock but classical definitely needs as high a bit rate as you can manage. I don't hold myself to be any sort of "golden ear" but I was able to hear the difference between 192 and 320 Kbps in an MP3 I made of a Glenn Gould recording; especially when listing with headphones or earbuds and the outside noise is minimized. When listening in the car (Hey! Why not?!) I'm sure you could get by with the lower bit rate MP3. (I first thought some of the additional distortion in the 192Kbps version might have been some of Gould's humming that I'd missed hearing before.)
BTW, as another classical listener disappointed by the lack of good brick-n-mortar music stores, I'd like to pass along a word of thanks for the link to ArkivMusic. (I'm still bummed from the time when Rose Records stopped stocking their music by label and catalog number and hung Schaums catalogs around the store for customers to refer to. Then Tower bought them and we all know what's happened since then.) If you are looking for another place to hear classical, you might try (Chicago based) WFMT's web site. They live stream their daily shows and the schedule on their web site includes the label/catalog number of what's played so you can look for recordings. While my personal opinion is that the quality of their programming declined a bit when their only classical competitor in town changed formats at least they're still around. Otherwise it'd be very difficult to hear anything other than classical "greatest hits". If that.
Ain't that the truth. It seems every time one of these gets shut down, my daily spam volume decreases for a few days and then rises back to the previous levels and maybe even higher.
I can't be sure which one. On second thought, make that second one ``stupidity''. I still can't decide which one's really at work.
I attend a daily conference call where I hear case after case where people are waiting for SAN space to be reclaimed so that it can be reassigned to other systems. People are either being told their projects cannot proceed because there's not enough disk space or other projects have been held up while the space they've been allocated is scaled back to allow others to work.
I'm not sure what the storage team or (as I suspect) the clueless architects are doing when someone implementing a new application asks for space on the SAN but the procedure seems to be ``whatever the project says it needs, multiply that by ten (or more)''. During one conference call I heard that the project had been placed on hold while some of the disk space they'd been allocated was reclaimed for use on other projects. When I asked how much they were having to give up, I was told that to migrate an existing database from an environment where they were using less than 1TB of disk space they had been given 20TB on the new hardware environment. (Heh... Did I same some of the disk space? I should have said most.)