Xing makes some great products for audio compression. The latest version of AudioCatylist does variable bit rate mp3 compression that produces the best sounding files I've heard. I rip and compress at highest quality, which varies from 384k down, and get files similar in size to 128k and much better sounding. Really the high quality VBR encoding is good stuff.
I'm sure the aquisition of this encoding technology will be a good thing for Real. I can't wait to listen to NPR on the net and hear the same quality I get on my radio.
CSS is alive and well on our Intranet
on
Gecko under Review
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· Score: 2
The lack of CSS on "popular sites" certainly does not mean it has died. You forget that vast amounts of private content exist on Intranets... documents that will never be seen by the general public but nevertheless can benefit greatly from CSS.
I link all pages I manage to a central stylesheet. I'm even playing with shtml that links documents to the stylesheet as they are served. This is easier for me and easier for users posting documents to my sites. It saves time, and promotes consistency and usability across sites.
I would have to say that the complex formatting attributes of CSS that "popular sites" might use don't really matter to me. CSS solves my problems nicely and certainly isn't dead in the nursery.
Stewart Alsop specifically mentions music and film as mediums that might best go without the protection of intellectual property laws. He states one can still make money on music when people are free to copy it. He has "seen business plans for at least three companies that are planning to answer that question by building businesses around unprotected music."
He fails to mention that it would be the organization with the best distribution capabilities making the money, and not the artist.
I picked up a pair of these Benwin speakers about three weeks ago. They are the one of the cooler geek toys I've seen, but the sound isn't up to par with other speakers in the price range.
The problem is not however with the flat-panel speaker part. The panels sound good. It is the amplifier/subwoofer module. You/must/ plug the speakers into this module. You can not drive them off a laptop or disc player otherwise. The problem with the sub module is it stinks. Really there is no good sound coming from it. My soultion was to pass the signal first through a yamaha powered subwoofer to clean out the bass. This sounds really good, and never fails to impress.
As for mounting them on the wall, I can't figure it out. There is no way given the provided supplies to mount them on anything other than the provided plastic pedestals. They are very light though, 3 oz by my best guess, so it should be easy to hack something together.
All in all though, for the price, they aren't worth it yet. Once Benwin comes up with a better sub module I would recommend them.
I'm sorry, but you must not know anything about DVD if you think it blows. You just try putting a VHS player and a dozen videos in your backpack next time you fly somewhere.
I think the DVD player in my ThinkPad is the greatest advance in portable technology since the CD. I like the letterbox format movies, the alternate language soundtracks, and even the multi-lingual subtitles.
Divx offers none of those advantages, and isn't portable. If you take a movie to another player you need to pay again to see it, even if you are within a paid viewing period.
So farewell to Divx, long live DVD, and blow something else, PhoneMonkey.
I wish people would read the articles before posting. This is about a website, and totally plays on the general public's misunderstanding about the obligation of the Internic to provide services under their contract with the government.
Who among us actually goes to the Internic website to look up domain registration information?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
Internic is making it harder for people to use their website. They're probably trying to make money too. They certainly aren't doing anything else. Open a shell and type "whois slashdot.org" and in a few short milliseconds you'll have an answer.
They are/not/ restricting access to the whois database, and they never will.
(which is too bad, IMHO. I'm tired of getting spam because of having domains registered in my name.)
I have an AS200 4/233, 8MB TGA card, 96MB ram and a bunch of drives, running RH 5.2 and kernel 2.2.3. It makes a fine server, though not as fast as a comprably priced Intel box. Apache is repsonsive and samba is tolerable.
As a workstation it sucks; the only stable web browser I know of is the KDE browser. I did run it for a while, but KDE is a dog on alpha.
Installation was also a pain... without comp.os.linux.alpha I'd have never gotten past the initial install issues and X configuration.
I'd say if you have an Alpha sitting around or you can get one for next to nothing, do it. I wouldn't recommend spending a lot of money on a machine as your workstation unless you need the computational power and are prepared to write or modify applications so they will run. Don't expect it to be easy.
web navigation is only one of many ways to use hyperbolic tree. The Inxite applett is being used where I work to navigate databases and to build database queries. This is really cool stuff.
I wonder if M$ thinks mom is a software developer?
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Windows ID
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· Score: 1
I used the MSDN CD to install 98 on her system. It inserted it's own serial number during the install. I wonder if they can track that number to a specific subscription? I wonder if she'll start getting invites to M$ events? I wonder what mom would do at an Exchange seminar?
figure if we're going this far off topic I might as well bring up a line only a true loser would remember from having to suffer through summers of boy scout camp.
Hmm... the topic was the PIII. What a waste. It's all about AMD this year... I see their stock at least doubling by the end of 1999. Nasdaq is getting nailed now, but it will rally in another month, AMD will ride that wave up, and the popular press will cry "the King is dead, long like the King!"
I do a lot of my work (Intranet) with CSS now, and Netscape never fails to piss me off with its miserable non-compliance to standards that have been around since 1996. Especially in how it renders tables, and forgets inherited properties. Yuck.
It is just a stupid javascript that can't tell what your browser is. Kind of like reading in user agent with a cgi. Maybe you are reporting something other than 4.5.
The wonderful Intel box that you will put together for half the cost will not be designed from the ground up to get the most speed out of your parts. With the DEC machines you have very tight hardware integration... things tuned to work with each other.
Your beefy Pentium box would be like a Camaro with a blower. Ok on the strip, but I wouldn't want to be driving it around all the time.
And if anyone is curious, my AS200 4/233 runs X with KDE beautifully with only 32 MB ram. Only one crash in the past month. My Compaq PII 400 has 256MB ram and still crashes at least once a week.
apple could rot and mac users would be just fine.
on
After Linux-Apple?
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· Score: 1
About that circus of PC makers enabling the architecture to live forever...
Why would Mac users be screwed if Apple went away?
Standard 72 Pin Simms were used in the first round of Power Macintoshes. Standard SDRAM Dimms are used in the current G3s. Hard disks come in SCSI or IDE. With the advent of MultiSync displays, all Macs became able to use PC monitors. How about PCI cards? Last time I checked you could use many PCI ethernet cards in both Macs and PCs with different drivers. Video cards are different somewhat, but near-identical models can be purchased for PCs and Macs now.
Absolutely the ONLY proprietary hardware is the motherboard and chip.
So I think that if Cupertino fell into the Pacific ocean that mac users would go happily about their business for many years to come. While users may be stuck with an old OS, most certainly wouldn't be bothered with it. I know of many people who are happy running System 7.1 on their older Macs, and don't have plans to upgrade.
And about those older computers they've been left with. Think about how old your fridge or washing machine is. You haven't replaced it because it still does what you bought it to do.
So I think most Mac users would be fine if Apple went away. Of course it won't.
I find that it is much easier to impress people with a PC server inside a double-wide 14 bay server case (with redundant PS, of course) than it is to impress them with the same guts in a regular case that would do the same job.
And as stupid as this may sound, it is important to impress people, especially people who pay the bills. You guys just don't know how many times a manager has had me show off cool looking equiptment to customers just because it looks cool. (that's why I prefer to buy purple hubs, yellow Cat5, and chartruse patch cables.)
-JB
It's all about understanding the beasts.
on
After Linux-Apple?
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· Score: 1
Sorry dude, the Mac is a fantastic platform.
Once you understand how it runs you can do amazing things. If it crashes and locks it is because you just don't understand the OS.
My 1994 PowerMac 7100AV was capturing video out of the box. I plugged my Yahama DX27 keyboard into a MidiMan and had Finale transcribing what I played in a matter of an hour. And by the time I went to OS 8.0, I could go two weeks without rebooting. Try that with Win95/98.
So to get on with your spew...
They are better for graphics / multimedia. I own Photoshop, Director, and Quark for both Win and MacOS, and Mac versions are easier to work with. Bryce also renders as fast on an iMac as it does on my PII 400.
OS overhead does not negate speed increases. MacOS can be very stable and take little overhead if trimmed down from a standard install. And it is much friendlier than Windows in terms of trimming down the OS. Try removing DLLs from your windows directory as easily as I can remove extentions from a Mac System file. (or try thinning down and compiling linux 2.2)*grin*
So learn about your Macs and quit complaining.
- jonbrewer
BTW, I've owned systems based on 680xx, PowerPC, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro (SMP), Pentium II and Alpha. Liked them all too.
10 base 2??? Who spec'd out this? A Moron It Seems
on
Space Station's LAN
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· Score: 1
Good chemists tend to be using IRIX now, on SGI Origin 2000 machines.
I know there are a lot of Alpha people out there reading, so I'll ask an off-topic question.
Does anyone have a web browser other than lynx running on their Alpha under Linux?
I've finally got X running on my AS 200 and now I don't even know what to do with it. I've been using the machine as a web server and to play with Samba. I'd sure like to be able to surf the web with it. I'm the hacker equivalent of a *script-kiddie* when it comes to programming, so I'm looking for compiled binaries that are known to work. Help, anyone?
Photoshop Premiere After Affects Infini-D Strata Studio
run on i386 linux? (they run on NT and MacOS)
Please don't tell me that I can use the gimp to get my work done under linux. I'd rather use Photoshop 3 on a Mac IIci. Work would get done much faster and with much less pain.
I don't think linux makes sense for these workstations.
I have heard that most versions of MacOS and Open Transport do not implement DHCP in the standard way. I was given the example that MacOS, when shut down and restarted, attempts to grab the address it had during the previous session. And I have heard that it does numerous other sloppy and un-standard things that make DHCP servers unhappy and can lead to address conflicts.
This all was related to me by a M$ guru at my place of employ. (I know that is an oxymoron)
But I tend to believe what he says because of several corporate networks I know of that still assign all Macs static IP addresses, even though they are capable of using DHCP.
This *could* be a reason Bell Atlantic is not supporting Macs other than the iMac. They know that the iMac will be running at least System 8, and a modern implementation of Open Transport.
I'd suggest to the poor guy that he buy the ADSL service from the Telco and get his Internet from another ISP.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure the aquisition of this encoding technology will be a good thing for Real. I can't wait to listen to NPR on the net and hear the same quality I get on my radio.
The lack of CSS on "popular sites" certainly does not mean it has died. You forget that vast amounts of private content exist on Intranets... documents that will never be seen by the general public but nevertheless can benefit greatly from CSS.
I link all pages I manage to a central stylesheet. I'm even playing with shtml that links documents to the stylesheet as they are served. This is easier for me and easier for users posting documents to my sites. It saves time, and promotes consistency and usability across sites.
I would have to say that the complex formatting attributes of CSS that "popular sites" might use don't really matter to me. CSS solves my problems nicely and certainly isn't dead in the nursery.
Stewart Alsop specifically mentions music and film as mediums that might best go without the protection of intellectual property laws. He states one can still make money on music when people are free to copy it. He has "seen business plans for at least three companies that are planning to answer that question by building businesses around unprotected music."
He fails to mention that it would be the organization with the best distribution capabilities making the money, and not the artist.
What are your feelings on pimps and whorehouses?
Beat this man over the head with a copy of Atlas Shrugged. Now I know why I read Forbes and not Fortune.
I picked up a pair of these Benwin speakers about three weeks ago. They are the one of the cooler geek toys I've seen, but the sound isn't up to par with other speakers in the price range.
/must/ plug the speakers into this module. You can not drive them off a laptop or disc player otherwise. The problem with the sub module is it stinks. Really there is no good sound coming from it. My soultion was to pass the signal first through a yamaha powered subwoofer to clean out the bass. This sounds really good, and never fails to impress.
The problem is not however with the flat-panel speaker part. The panels sound good. It is the amplifier/subwoofer module. You
As for mounting them on the wall, I can't figure it out. There is no way given the provided supplies to mount them on anything other than the provided plastic pedestals. They are very light though, 3 oz by my best guess, so it should be easy to hack something together.
All in all though, for the price, they aren't worth it yet. Once Benwin comes up with a better sub module I would recommend them.
I'm sorry, but you must not know anything about DVD if you think it blows. You just try putting a VHS player and a dozen videos in your backpack next time you fly somewhere.
I think the DVD player in my ThinkPad is the greatest advance in portable technology since the CD. I like the letterbox format movies, the alternate language soundtracks, and even the multi-lingual subtitles.
Divx offers none of those advantages, and isn't portable. If you take a movie to another player you need to pay again to see it, even if you are within a paid viewing period.
So farewell to Divx, long live DVD, and blow something else, PhoneMonkey.
I wish people would read the articles before posting. This is about a website, and totally plays on the general public's misunderstanding about the obligation of the Internic to provide services under their contract with the government.
/not/ restricting access to the whois database, and they never will.
Who among us actually goes to the Internic website to look up domain registration information?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
Internic is making it harder for people to use their website. They're probably trying to make money too. They certainly aren't doing anything else. Open a shell and type "whois slashdot.org" and in a few short milliseconds you'll have an answer.
They are
(which is too bad, IMHO. I'm tired of getting spam because of having domains registered in my name.)
- JB
HP 9100 Digital Sender. It plugs into the Ethernet and will send as an email message anything you choose to scan in.
I have an AS200 4/233, 8MB TGA card, 96MB ram and a bunch of drives, running RH 5.2 and kernel 2.2.3. It makes a fine server, though not as fast as a comprably priced Intel box. Apache is repsonsive and samba is tolerable.
As a workstation it sucks; the only stable web browser I know of is the KDE browser. I did run it for a while, but KDE is a dog on alpha.
Installation was also a pain... without comp.os.linux.alpha I'd have never gotten past the initial install issues and X configuration.
I'd say if you have an Alpha sitting around or you can get one for next to nothing, do it. I wouldn't recommend spending a lot of money on a machine as your workstation unless you need the computational power and are prepared to write or modify applications so they will run. Don't expect it to be easy.
web navigation is only one of many ways to use hyperbolic tree. The Inxite applett is being used where I work to navigate databases and to build database queries. This is really cool stuff.
I used the MSDN CD to install 98 on her system. It inserted it's own serial number during the install. I wonder if they can track that number to a specific subscription? I wonder if she'll start getting invites to M$ events? I wonder what mom would do at an Exchange seminar?
"This site has been blocked by XXXXXX. If this address has been blocked in error, please use this form to request that it be unblocked."
So how do I get around this?
figure if we're going this far off topic I might as well bring up a line only a true loser would remember from having to suffer through summers of boy scout camp.
Hmm... the topic was the PIII. What a waste.
It's all about AMD this year... I see their stock at least doubling by the end of 1999. Nasdaq is getting nailed now, but it will rally in another month, AMD will ride that wave up, and the popular press will cry "the King is dead, long like the King!"
IE 4.0 is a great browser.
I do a lot of my work (Intranet) with CSS now, and Netscape never fails to piss me off with its miserable non-compliance to standards that have been around since 1996. Especially in how it renders tables, and forgets inherited properties. Yuck.
It is just a stupid javascript that can't tell what your browser is. Kind of like reading in user agent with a cgi. Maybe you are reporting something other than 4.5.
Can we dispel the myth that geeks tend to be conservative republicans?
/. poll. I think Jerry Falwell is...
I for one would be much more uncomfortable with my (hypothetical) kids watching the 700 club than with them watching a gay teletubby.
Maybe this could be a
The wonderful Intel box that you will put together for half the cost will not be designed from the ground up to get the most speed out of your parts. With the DEC machines you have very tight hardware integration... things tuned to work with each other.
Your beefy Pentium box would be like a Camaro with a blower. Ok on the strip, but I wouldn't want to be driving it around all the time.
And if anyone is curious, my AS200 4/233 runs X with KDE beautifully with only 32 MB ram. Only one crash in the past month. My Compaq PII 400 has 256MB ram and still crashes at least once a week.
About that circus of PC makers enabling the architecture to live forever...
Why would Mac users be screwed if Apple went away?
Standard 72 Pin Simms were used in the first round of Power Macintoshes. Standard SDRAM Dimms are used in the current G3s. Hard disks come in SCSI or IDE. With the advent of MultiSync displays, all Macs became able to use PC monitors. How about PCI cards? Last time I checked you could use many PCI ethernet cards in both Macs and PCs with different drivers. Video cards are different somewhat, but near-identical models can be purchased for PCs and Macs now.
Absolutely the ONLY proprietary hardware is the motherboard and chip.
So I think that if Cupertino fell into the Pacific ocean that mac users would go happily about their business for many years to come. While users may be stuck with an old OS, most certainly wouldn't be bothered with it. I know of many people who are happy running System 7.1 on their older Macs, and don't have plans to upgrade.
And about those older computers they've been left with. Think about how old your fridge or washing machine is. You haven't replaced it because it still does what you bought it to do.
So I think most Mac users would be fine if Apple went away. Of course it won't.
funny you mention size...
I find that it is much easier to impress people with a PC server inside a double-wide 14 bay server case (with redundant PS, of course) than it is to impress them with the same guts in a regular case that would do the same job.
And as stupid as this may sound, it is important to impress people, especially people who pay the bills. You guys just don't know how many times a manager has had me show off cool looking equiptment to customers just because it looks cool. (that's why I prefer to buy purple hubs, yellow Cat5, and chartruse patch cables.)
-JB
Sorry dude, the Mac is a fantastic platform.
Once you understand how it runs you can do amazing things. If it crashes and locks it is because you just don't understand the OS.
My 1994 PowerMac 7100AV was capturing video out of the box. I plugged my Yahama DX27 keyboard into a MidiMan and had Finale transcribing what I played in a matter of an hour. And by the time I went to OS 8.0, I could go two weeks without rebooting. Try that with Win95/98.
So to get on with your spew...
They are better for graphics / multimedia.
I own Photoshop, Director, and Quark for both Win and MacOS, and Mac versions are easier to work with. Bryce also renders as fast on an iMac as it does on my PII 400.
OS overhead does not negate speed increases.
MacOS can be very stable and take little overhead if trimmed down from a standard install. And it is much friendlier than Windows in terms of trimming down the OS. Try removing DLLs from your windows directory as easily as I can remove extentions from a Mac System file. (or try thinning down and compiling linux 2.2)*grin*
So learn about your Macs and quit complaining.
- jonbrewer
BTW, I've owned systems based on 680xx, PowerPC, 286, 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro (SMP), Pentium II and Alpha. Liked them all too.
Good chemists tend to be using IRIX now, on SGI Origin 2000 machines.
I know there are a lot of Alpha people out there reading, so I'll ask an off-topic question.
Does anyone have a web browser other than lynx running on their Alpha under Linux?
I've finally got X running on my AS 200 and now I don't even know what to do with it. I've been using the machine as a web server and to play with Samba. I'd sure like to be able to surf the web with it. I'm the hacker equivalent of a *script-kiddie* when it comes to programming, so I'm looking for compiled binaries that are known to work. Help, anyone?
Let's see... do apps like
Photoshop
Premiere
After Affects
Infini-D
Strata Studio
run on i386 linux? (they run on NT and MacOS)
Please don't tell me that I can use the gimp to get my work done under linux. I'd rather use Photoshop 3 on a Mac IIci. Work would get done much faster and with much less pain.
I don't think linux makes sense for these workstations.
He used FrontPage to pump that stuff out. yuck!
I have heard that most versions of MacOS and Open Transport do not implement DHCP in the standard way. I was given the example that MacOS, when shut down and restarted, attempts to grab the address it had during the previous session. And I have heard that it does numerous other sloppy and un-standard things that make DHCP servers unhappy and can lead to address conflicts.
This all was related to me by a M$ guru at my place of employ. (I know that is an oxymoron)
But I tend to believe what he says because of several corporate networks I know of that still assign all Macs static IP addresses, even though they are capable of using DHCP.
This *could* be a reason Bell Atlantic is not supporting Macs other than the iMac. They know that the iMac will be running at least System 8, and a modern implementation of Open Transport.
I'd suggest to the poor guy that he buy the ADSL service from the Telco and get his Internet from another ISP.
- Jon
PS. I love Macs. I've owned several.