My father, who once could program assembler with his eyes closed, fights against his essential tremor every day just to surf and send emails. This very day, he went out and spent $100 on a trackball in hopes that this would solve the problem, but was stressed that if it doesn't, he's out of luck. I've ordered one of these for him, and it can't arrive soon enough.
I'd say your numbers are either bogus, a worst-case scenario (flash on both tabs in firefox?), or all the tabs in Opera were of a blank page. A link to benchmarks would be more accurate, kthx.
Or he was using x86 hardware, running Linux or Windows.
My current (Windows XP on a laptop, four HTML-only pages open in tabs) memory usage for Firefox is 76,576K. Opening four more tabs, all blank: 76,656K. Closed all tabs except the one I'm making this comment in: 76,360K.
Sony still understands style, when it comes to laptops and desktops. The only laptops around my office that get "hey-let-me-see-it" attention other than powerbooks are VAIOs, and the black metal desktop towers they've recently released are, to me, nicer looking than the G5 towers -- I really, really want one.
Heh. I once worked at a production house where all the workstations were Macs, and so was the single server. All the server did was filesharing and NAT for a single ISDN on-demand line, not even email. And you know what? They still paid an outside consultant to come in once a week and fix anything that might be wrong with it, and when it broke in between visits, we either had to fix it ourselves or wait, because the bosses (four of them) couldn't be bothered.
Keep in mind these guys were cheap, and normally would take any steps necessary to avoid spending money. Yet they still found management of one server to be daunting.
Forgot to mention: yes, that does mean I have a G4 tower sitting in my house with 512mb of memory, two 27gb hard drives, and no purpose.
I thought seriously about using it as a server, but the server license for OSX starts at $499 -- while my current Dell x86 server running RedHat-based SME Server cost me nothing, and is running really well (and can be configured easily from a web GUI). So it's just going to keep on sitting here, I guess.
I dont understand why anyone would pick Linux over OS X besides the fact it's free.
I agreed with that, until I (recently) got a G4 box for free. I loaded it with Panther (OSX 10.3) and Debian Testing.
Here's the funny thing: Debian felt faster than Panther. Since I was already familiar with Debian, it took me longer to do things in Panther. I found myself really disliking the Dock in Panther, and wishing I could modify it to suit me like I do with Debian (Gnome, btw).
After a few days of playing with Panther, I started booting into Debian instead to get things done. Then I realized, hey, if I'm already booting to Debian on this G4, why don't I just go back to using my Debian-equipped PC (which has a much faster processor)?
So as surprising as it may seem, I'm one user who actually has the choice between OSX and a Linux distribution, and chooses Debian anyway.
I'll agree there. The Debian Testing desktop I'm running is at least as good as Windows 3.1 -- and that's a compliment, not a diss. Windows 95 wouldn't have been so popular if 3.1 hadn't worked so well in the mainstream.
I ever-so-much wish that Linux AND Windows worked like BeOS and OS9 did (and OSX does): installing an app means putting it on your hard drive, wherever you like, and when you run it, it writes any necessary preference files to your home directory (or equivalent in OS9).
Windows has great installers, sure, but that's because it NEEDS them; without those great installers, people would have just as hard a time installing in Windows as they do on Linux.
Why can't we just unite like all the good apps on windows, mac os, qnx, amiga.. and everything else with a real solid dev team?
Because you would lose the thing that makes Linux work: people work on it mostly because they enjoy it. If you start forcing them to do the work a certain way (other than the must-conform patch submission process type stuff), fewer people will enjoy it.
So start using a distribution that pays their real solid dev team to fix all those annoying issues: XandrOS, Linspire, Suse, RedHat, and so on and so forth.
Linux isn't a product, perhaps, but companies like RedHat et al have packaged Linux with support and distribution and are absolutely selling it as a product. Just sayin'.
802.11a = apathy. No one really paid much attention
You're right there, and this makes 802.11a a great thing to have. I'm running my home network on 802.11a, and here are the benefits I reap versus 802.11b/g:
1. When the hardware was available but on the way out, it was -very- cheap to pick up;
2. The range is much more limited than b/g, but big enough to cover my house and backyard, so I have less worry about "sharing" my connection with my neighbors than with b/g;
3. The 802.11a range is underutilized (my neighbors don't have 802.11a, and yours probably don't, either) and doesn't shut down by interference when you use the microwave;
4. Someone wardriving or just playing around with wireless sniffing tools from their bedroom are much less likely to be using 802.11a; in fact, until recently airsnort and related tools didn't even have 802.11a compatibility, and getting 802.11a working with Linux is a PITA compared to 802.11b/g.
So in a way, using 802.11a improves your odds of a secure and non-shared connection in the same way that using Opera improves your odds of picking up a javascript exploit from a web site. That's not security in and of itself, but coupled with VPN and the reduced range, it's very nice indeed.
There's a difference between "parents [not] even spend[ing] time to think of the health effects on their kids" and "obsessively limit[ing] their children's freedom out of vague concerns for safety", don't you think?
Consider: I'm sure when my children are eating solid food, they'll really like to eat delicious stuff that's crammed full of partially hydrogenated oil (trans fats), which are very bad for you. Now, if I limit my child's access to foods with trans fats, even though they really like to eat them, am I spending time to think of the health effects on my kids, or obsessively limiting their children's freedom out of vague concerns for safety?
This is an old hack
on
DVHS on a Budget
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, a similar trick can be used (and has been used for a long time) to use standard VHS tape in SVHS recording mode on SVHS VCRs.
The end result is a picture that's better than typical VHS, although whether or not you get the quality of a "real" SVHS tape depends solely on how good the quality of your VHS tape is.
The hack, IIRC, involved drilling an extra hole in the video tape. Easy peasy.
Okay, my above rant aside, I have played car racing video games for a long, long time. I've always wanted to race an ACTUAL car, but didn't have an opportunity, so video games took care of it. Mind you, video games didn't make me WANT to; that desire was already there when I was a kid. Video games just allowed me to do what I wanted to do without consequences or expense.
Well, recently I got an opportunity to take my car out on an actual racetrack. After years of playing video game car races, by the logic behind this bill I should have been so desensitized to the experience that I should have no fear and should do really well right out of the box.
Guess what? I was -terrified-. Not just until I got in the car, either -- the entire first twenty minute session. I drove much slower than I thought I would, I drove quite poorly, in fact, missing apexes and shifts left and right, and in general I just did a piss-poor job.
Now, after a few more sessions, I started to get the hang of it. I didn't take risks, and I still wasn't going as fast as I could have, but I was definitely getting more comfortable. This was because the ACTUAL act of doing it WAS NOT LIKE VIDEO GAMES.
In fact, the ACTUAL act of doing it was desensitizing me very quickly to the ACTUAL act of doing it, such that I made huge improvements in a short period of time -- more improvement than years of video game driving could provide. Now, yes, at one point I almost lost control of the car and corrected it by reflex, but tell me: was that my years of video game practice, or my years of driving on snowy Chicago streets? Hard to say.
And the fact that years of racing video games AND years of actual driving -- from 80mph+ on Los Angeles freeways to cavorting on icy Chicago roads in the middle of the night -- didn't desensitize me to the actuality of travelling at extremely high speeds around a racetrack.
So do I think violent video games make a kid THINK he would do well at violence in real life? Sure. I thought I'd be a better driver, too. But when the real, ACTUAL experience is staring you in the face, it's still going to be terrifying, and you're still going to do a lousy job at it the first time.
If a kid still presses on through that fear and ineptitude to commit the crime, then I truly believe they were going to do it whether or not they'd ever played a video game, and do it equally well (or poorly, as in my case).
Yes. Yes, the video game makers should be responsible for acts caused by their video games.
Of course, that means you have to hold movie makers accountable, too. Also television producers. Also performers. Also writers.
Oh, wait, you mean video games let kids ACT OUT the fantasy, instead of just silently watch and absorb it? Well, that's all the difference in the world!
Of course, you'll still need to make paintball gun makers responsible. And parents who teach their kids to hunt.
Oh, but wait, it's not using guns that does it; the video games let them actually pretend to KILL people. Oh, okay, that does make a difference. I can see that. I guess you can go ahead.
Hmm. I wonder how someone is going to prove that a video game caused the violence. That's a tricky one, yes? I mean, it might be troubles at home. Or a mental deficiency. Or something else that we just don't understand. Or maybe the kid was born a sadist. Or perhaps an antidepressant was the cause! I bet you'll need lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of lawyers for that.
So, who's sponsoring this bill, anyway? Doesn't say in the article. I'm gonna bet there's a lawyer or two involved in there somewhere, yes?
Just sayin'.
Not a big red hat fan right now
on
CentOs 4.0 Released
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
The only thing I take issue with on the legal action thing is their complaint about links to their site:
Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our client's web site without permission.
Is even RedHat going to take issue with linking from one site to another without express permission? That thing the web was made for? It's just stupid./rant
You surf porn sites and run "programs" to download porn, you're gonna get infected. You download illegally copied works, youre gonna get infected. You open absolutely every attachment, even if it says "happy98.exe", you're gonna get infected.
You think that surfing the web describes an accident between a surfer and a fishing trawler, you might be a redneck.
1. Your skillset is the single most important thing for your edit.
If you don't know how to use a piece of software, you won't use the full capabilities of it, and if you're taking the time to learn how to use it, that's time and attention away from the editing choices you're making. If you already know how to use a certain piece of software, use THAT. If you're using it and run into something you need to do that can't be done using the software you know, THEN go out and find software that can do that ONE THING, do that one thing in that software, and bring the composited piece back into your main edit on the software you know.
The hardest thing to do when editing with all these tools is remember that the best pieces can be (and usually are) done without the fancy tools at all. If your piece is only good because it contains a certain special effect, then it isn't any good, and if your piece is good, you can edit it on 16mm and still entertain/win awards.
2. Your footage is the second most important thing for your edit.
If your footage is sub-par, your edit will be sub-par, to a degree significantly larger than any improvement you might gain by the incrementally better output that one package might provide over another. Obviously you don't want a crappy consumer package that restricts your ability to import/export or only works at a low resolution, but most packages don't do any such thing. Pay attention to your lighting, your sound guy, your shot composition, and your actors.
3. Your time is the third most important thing for your edit.
If you're learning, you're not editing. If you're rendering, you're not editing. If you're rebooting, you're not editing. Make sure you have a stable computer that you know how to use, plenty of storage space and memory, and for goodness sake make an offline edit -- and a few re-edits, probably -- of the whole piece BEFORE you start compositing the special effects in. If at the end of the day you need to switch software packages or take your piece somewhere else for the online edit, you'll be much better off with a solid offline edit and no special effects than with a mediocre offline edit with tons of special effects that need to be redone because they're (surprise) only offline quality.
4. Your money is the fourth most important thing for your edit.
You don't have unlimited funds; would you rather spend it on a software package with extra features you'll never use, or on better makeup and that extra grip on the day you shoot?
Well, let's see: the idea behind censoring the airwaves is (or was) that it's a limited natural resource in the public trust, so it makes sense to mandate what it can and can't be used for.
Obviously, this doesn't apply to cable and satellite, so the only justification for this (other than stupid legal loophole nonsense) is that we're censoring the airwaves for some other purpose.
Further, if that purpose isn't about the technology itself, you could expand this to just about anything else over the coming years. How about videos distributed over the internet? Ooo, and eBooks, while we're at it? And how about books themselves? It'll be a riot. And the PHONES. Let's do the phones now!
Obviously, I'm taking this to an extreme, but broadcast television != cable/satellite television unless you're talking about the content delivered, and last I checked the FCC only mandates censorship of the content delivered because of the method in which it is delivered (that limited natural resource in the public trust thing again)./end rant
Let the creators create wonderful (and awful) things. Then, we can choose to either consumer those wonderful (and awful) things by making those judgements ourselves, or by enlisting the services of an editorial staff to do the majority of filtering.
You don't like violent games? There should be someone out there maintaining a list of games that are not violent, that you can choose to refer to if desired.
>> But it requires iTunes, so there's one more thing that I'm not going to buy from apple.---
>You do realize that iTunes is free
I believe the poster meant "the wireless playback unit requires iTunes, so the wireless playback unit is one more thing I'm not going to buy from apple, because I don't like/want iTunes."
Slashdot Mirror
Me fail French? C'est Unpossible!
My father, who once could program assembler with his eyes closed, fights against his essential tremor every day just to surf and send emails. This very day, he went out and spent $100 on a trackball in hopes that this would solve the problem, but was stressed that if it doesn't, he's out of luck. I've ordered one of these for him, and it can't arrive soon enough.
Do the words "Spoiler Warning" mean anything to you? Gee whiz.
I'd say your numbers are either bogus, a worst-case scenario (flash on both tabs in firefox?), or all the tabs in Opera were of a blank page. A link to benchmarks would be more accurate, kthx.
Or he was using x86 hardware, running Linux or Windows.
My current (Windows XP on a laptop, four HTML-only pages open in tabs) memory usage for Firefox is 76,576K. Opening four more tabs, all blank: 76,656K. Closed all tabs except the one I'm making this comment in: 76,360K.
Sony still understands style, when it comes to laptops and desktops. The only laptops around my office that get "hey-let-me-see-it" attention other than powerbooks are VAIOs, and the black metal desktop towers they've recently released are, to me, nicer looking than the G5 towers -- I really, really want one.
Heh. I once worked at a production house where all the workstations were Macs, and so was the single server. All the server did was filesharing and NAT for a single ISDN on-demand line, not even email. And you know what? They still paid an outside consultant to come in once a week and fix anything that might be wrong with it, and when it broke in between visits, we either had to fix it ourselves or wait, because the bosses (four of them) couldn't be bothered.
Keep in mind these guys were cheap, and normally would take any steps necessary to avoid spending money. Yet they still found management of one server to be daunting.
Forgot to mention: yes, that does mean I have a G4 tower sitting in my house with 512mb of memory, two 27gb hard drives, and no purpose.
I thought seriously about using it as a server, but the server license for OSX starts at $499 -- while my current Dell x86 server running RedHat-based SME Server cost me nothing, and is running really well (and can be configured easily from a web GUI). So it's just going to keep on sitting here, I guess.
I dont understand why anyone would pick Linux over OS X besides the fact it's free.
I agreed with that, until I (recently) got a G4 box for free. I loaded it with Panther (OSX 10.3) and Debian Testing.
Here's the funny thing: Debian felt faster than Panther. Since I was already familiar with Debian, it took me longer to do things in Panther. I found myself really disliking the Dock in Panther, and wishing I could modify it to suit me like I do with Debian (Gnome, btw).
After a few days of playing with Panther, I started booting into Debian instead to get things done. Then I realized, hey, if I'm already booting to Debian on this G4, why don't I just go back to using my Debian-equipped PC (which has a much faster processor)?
So as surprising as it may seem, I'm one user who actually has the choice between OSX and a Linux distribution, and chooses Debian anyway.
I'll agree there. The Debian Testing desktop I'm running is at least as good as Windows 3.1 -- and that's a compliment, not a diss. Windows 95 wouldn't have been so popular if 3.1 hadn't worked so well in the mainstream.
I ever-so-much wish that Linux AND Windows worked like BeOS and OS9 did (and OSX does): installing an app means putting it on your hard drive, wherever you like, and when you run it, it writes any necessary preference files to your home directory (or equivalent in OS9).
Windows has great installers, sure, but that's because it NEEDS them; without those great installers, people would have just as hard a time installing in Windows as they do on Linux.
Why can't we just unite like all the good apps on windows, mac os, qnx, amiga.. and everything else with a real solid dev team?
Because you would lose the thing that makes Linux work: people work on it mostly because they enjoy it. If you start forcing them to do the work a certain way (other than the must-conform patch submission process type stuff), fewer people will enjoy it.
So start using a distribution that pays their real solid dev team to fix all those annoying issues: XandrOS, Linspire, Suse, RedHat, and so on and so forth.
Linux isn't a product, perhaps, but companies like RedHat et al have packaged Linux with support and distribution and are absolutely selling it as a product. Just sayin'.
OT: How can AD and OD help me with my ADD?
802.11a = apathy. No one really paid much attention
You're right there, and this makes 802.11a a great thing to have. I'm running my home network on 802.11a, and here are the benefits I reap versus 802.11b/g:
1. When the hardware was available but on the way out, it was -very- cheap to pick up;
2. The range is much more limited than b/g, but big enough to cover my house and backyard, so I have less worry about "sharing" my connection with my neighbors than with b/g;
3. The 802.11a range is underutilized (my neighbors don't have 802.11a, and yours probably don't, either) and doesn't shut down by interference when you use the microwave;
4. Someone wardriving or just playing around with wireless sniffing tools from their bedroom are much less likely to be using 802.11a; in fact, until recently airsnort and related tools didn't even have 802.11a compatibility, and getting 802.11a working with Linux is a PITA compared to 802.11b/g.
So in a way, using 802.11a improves your odds of a secure and non-shared connection in the same way that using Opera improves your odds of picking up a javascript exploit from a web site. That's not security in and of itself, but coupled with VPN and the reduced range, it's very nice indeed.
There's a difference between "parents [not] even spend[ing] time to think of the health effects on their kids" and "obsessively limit[ing] their children's freedom out of vague concerns for safety", don't you think?
Consider: I'm sure when my children are eating solid food, they'll really like to eat delicious stuff that's crammed full of partially hydrogenated oil (trans fats), which are very bad for you. Now, if I limit my child's access to foods with trans fats, even though they really like to eat them, am I spending time to think of the health effects on my kids, or obsessively limiting their children's freedom out of vague concerns for safety?
Actually, a similar trick can be used (and has been used for a long time) to use standard VHS tape in SVHS recording mode on SVHS VCRs.
The end result is a picture that's better than typical VHS, although whether or not you get the quality of a "real" SVHS tape depends solely on how good the quality of your VHS tape is.
The hack, IIRC, involved drilling an extra hole in the video tape. Easy peasy.
I just saw a pile of PSP boxes in a Circuit City. Were those just empty pre-order boxes? They sure felt heavy...
Okay, my above rant aside, I have played car racing video games for a long, long time. I've always wanted to race an ACTUAL car, but didn't have an opportunity, so video games took care of it. Mind you, video games didn't make me WANT to; that desire was already there when I was a kid. Video games just allowed me to do what I wanted to do without consequences or expense.
Well, recently I got an opportunity to take my car out on an actual racetrack. After years of playing video game car races, by the logic behind this bill I should have been so desensitized to the experience that I should have no fear and should do really well right out of the box.
Guess what? I was -terrified-. Not just until I got in the car, either -- the entire first twenty minute session. I drove much slower than I thought I would, I drove quite poorly, in fact, missing apexes and shifts left and right, and in general I just did a piss-poor job.
Now, after a few more sessions, I started to get the hang of it. I didn't take risks, and I still wasn't going as fast as I could have, but I was definitely getting more comfortable. This was because the ACTUAL act of doing it WAS NOT LIKE VIDEO GAMES.
In fact, the ACTUAL act of doing it was desensitizing me very quickly to the ACTUAL act of doing it, such that I made huge improvements in a short period of time -- more improvement than years of video game driving could provide. Now, yes, at one point I almost lost control of the car and corrected it by reflex, but tell me: was that my years of video game practice, or my years of driving on snowy Chicago streets? Hard to say.
And the fact that years of racing video games AND years of actual driving -- from 80mph+ on Los Angeles freeways to cavorting on icy Chicago roads in the middle of the night -- didn't desensitize me to the actuality of travelling at extremely high speeds around a racetrack.
So do I think violent video games make a kid THINK he would do well at violence in real life? Sure. I thought I'd be a better driver, too. But when the real, ACTUAL experience is staring you in the face, it's still going to be terrifying, and you're still going to do a lousy job at it the first time.
If a kid still presses on through that fear and ineptitude to commit the crime, then I truly believe they were going to do it whether or not they'd ever played a video game, and do it equally well (or poorly, as in my case).
Yes. Yes, the video game makers should be responsible for acts caused by their video games.
Of course, that means you have to hold movie makers accountable, too. Also television producers. Also performers. Also writers.
Oh, wait, you mean video games let kids ACT OUT the fantasy, instead of just silently watch and absorb it? Well, that's all the difference in the world!
Of course, you'll still need to make paintball gun makers responsible. And parents who teach their kids to hunt.
Oh, but wait, it's not using guns that does it; the video games let them actually pretend to KILL people. Oh, okay, that does make a difference. I can see that. I guess you can go ahead.
Hmm. I wonder how someone is going to prove that a video game caused the violence. That's a tricky one, yes? I mean, it might be troubles at home. Or a mental deficiency. Or something else that we just don't understand. Or maybe the kid was born a sadist. Or perhaps an antidepressant was the cause! I bet you'll need lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of lawyers for that.
So, who's sponsoring this bill, anyway? Doesn't say in the article. I'm gonna bet there's a lawyer or two involved in there somewhere, yes?
Just sayin'.
The only thing I take issue with on the legal action thing is their complaint about links to their site:
/rant
Moreover, our client does not allow others to provide links to our client's web site without permission.
Is even RedHat going to take issue with linking from one site to another without express permission? That thing the web was made for? It's just stupid.
You surf porn sites and run "programs" to download porn, you're gonna get infected. You download illegally copied works, youre gonna get infected. You open absolutely every attachment, even if it says "happy98.exe", you're gonna get infected.
You think that surfing the web describes an accident between a surfer and a fishing trawler, you might be a redneck.
Oh, wait, what?
Here's what I can tell you.
---
1. Your skillset is the single most important thing for your edit.
If you don't know how to use a piece of software, you won't use the full capabilities of it, and if you're taking the time to learn how to use it, that's time and attention away from the editing choices you're making. If you already know how to use a certain piece of software, use THAT. If you're using it and run into something you need to do that can't be done using the software you know, THEN go out and find software that can do that ONE THING, do that one thing in that software, and bring the composited piece back into your main edit on the software you know.
The hardest thing to do when editing with all these tools is remember that the best pieces can be (and usually are) done without the fancy tools at all. If your piece is only good because it contains a certain special effect, then it isn't any good, and if your piece is good, you can edit it on 16mm and still entertain/win awards.
2. Your footage is the second most important thing for your edit.
If your footage is sub-par, your edit will be sub-par, to a degree significantly larger than any improvement you might gain by the incrementally better output that one package might provide over another. Obviously you don't want a crappy consumer package that restricts your ability to import/export or only works at a low resolution, but most packages don't do any such thing. Pay attention to your lighting, your sound guy, your shot composition, and your actors.
3. Your time is the third most important thing for your edit.
If you're learning, you're not editing. If you're rendering, you're not editing. If you're rebooting, you're not editing. Make sure you have a stable computer that you know how to use, plenty of storage space and memory, and for goodness sake make an offline edit -- and a few re-edits, probably -- of the whole piece BEFORE you start compositing the special effects in. If at the end of the day you need to switch software packages or take your piece somewhere else for the online edit, you'll be much better off with a solid offline edit and no special effects than with a mediocre offline edit with tons of special effects that need to be redone because they're (surprise) only offline quality.
4. Your money is the fourth most important thing for your edit.
You don't have unlimited funds; would you rather spend it on a software package with extra features you'll never use, or on better makeup and that extra grip on the day you shoot?
---
Okay, I'm done ranting now. Seriously: good luck.
Well, let's see: the idea behind censoring the airwaves is (or was) that it's a limited natural resource in the public trust, so it makes sense to mandate what it can and can't be used for.
/end rant
Obviously, this doesn't apply to cable and satellite, so the only justification for this (other than stupid legal loophole nonsense) is that we're censoring the airwaves for some other purpose.
Further, if that purpose isn't about the technology itself, you could expand this to just about anything else over the coming years. How about videos distributed over the internet? Ooo, and eBooks, while we're at it? And how about books themselves? It'll be a riot. And the PHONES. Let's do the phones now!
Obviously, I'm taking this to an extreme, but broadcast television != cable/satellite television unless you're talking about the content delivered, and last I checked the FCC only mandates censorship of the content delivered because of the method in which it is delivered (that limited natural resource in the public trust thing again).
Do the creators of these games have it? No.
But here's who SHOULD: editors.
Let the creators create wonderful (and awful) things. Then, we can choose to either consumer those wonderful (and awful) things by making those judgements ourselves, or by enlisting the services of an editorial staff to do the majority of filtering.
You don't like violent games? There should be someone out there maintaining a list of games that are not violent, that you can choose to refer to if desired.
But that's just my take.
>> But it requires iTunes, so there's one more thing that I'm not going to buy from apple.---
>You do realize that iTunes is free
I believe the poster meant "the wireless playback unit requires iTunes, so the wireless playback unit is one more thing I'm not going to buy from apple, because I don't like/want iTunes."