In my will, I have specified a spot to find a box containing important papers, including passwords, account names and numbers, etc. It requires a GPS and a shovel to get to though.
That doesn't help once they've confiscated every bit of electronics in my house, destroyed them, then kept them in storage for five years "just in case". Yeah I don't get charged with child porn, but all of my creative works and personal data are gone.
My guess would be because books that are on the "do not buy" list aren't worth reviewing, or even finishing for that matter. Personally, I've gotten part way into a few of those type of books and I wouldn't even bother telling anyone about them, let alone writing a rewview.
Total Annihilation had something similar. By holding down the shift key, you could queue up a bunch of commands for a unit to do, and the unit would do them until they were done or it was destroyed. You could even make one of those commands a patrol command (complete with waypoints), and it would run the patrol. I used it extensively. Autmated sweeps of the map to wipe out raiding parties, explore terrain, build units and structures, etc. It was great. If I had the skills, I would clone TA for Linux since Atari seems content to just shove it under their couch.
That only works until they get your e-mail address from one of your friend's compromised machines, or said friend isn't as cautious with handing out your e-mail address as you are. I've done the redirectors trick before as well, but eventually, they will find you.
I for one (And checking the replies to your message, it seems I'm not alone) do not have a problem with the GIMP interface. in fact, I like it very much. I have a window on the left side for the GIMP controls, one on the right for layers, histogram, undo history, and other tools that I require then X number of windows for the graphics I'm working on. How this is more difficult to use than a single Word-style window eludes me. I've used GIMP on virtual desktops, on full-screen desktops, and even across dual monitors and it Just Works(tm). The biggest problem I have with it is on Click-To-Focus desktops that require that I click twice on icons in non-focused widgets and I fail to see how crippling the GIMP to satisfy their busted-ass UI model is going to make it better.
First, he probably can't shell out the $558 for Photoshop CS, and it's not like they have an R&D budget.
Second, if they know Photoshop like the back of their hand, they're going to be inclined to follow Photoshop's method of doing things, which is not the Holy Grail of UI design.
I've used Photoshop on a friend's Mac and it is remarkably like GIMP 2's interface. I only use two windows besides the graphic window when I'm using the GIMP, and they are not difficult to use once you know where things are, and that's the same issue they will have with ANY UI design.
Personally, I prefer Ogg Vorbis over MP3 for several reasons.
Bit for bit, it sounds better so I have a choice of the same sound quality for a lower bitrate (More songs per MB on my flash-based player) or better sound quality. Its psycho-acoustic model beats the pants off of MP3. Yeah, it's not lossless like FLAC is, but I can detect no audible artifacts no matter what system I play it through.
It isn't locked down, patented, proprietary, or otherwise encumbered. It doesn't live or die with the whims of its parent company. It is free for anyone to use (BSD-licensed) and I'm not required by law to tip the parent company anything per rip I make. It's fully documented with reference code available for just about everything capable of processing a digital data stream.
It is flexible and powerful. It supports arbitrary data encoded into the stream so things like lyrics, URLs, album art, etc. can be encoded into the stream, and anything that can play Ogg can understand them. Bitrates can go from 0 (silence) to over 300. Compare that with MP3 players that show unusually long play times for files with ID3v2 tags at the beginning and play garbage sound for the first second or so as it spins through the album art, or those that play silence as the song flies by at 5x normal speed.
How did this get modded up as informative? Is Slashdot giving out mod points to completely clueless noobs now? Ogg Vorbis has had a fixed-point, interger-only decoder for a while now. It's called Tremor, is under the BSD license, and actually takes up slightly less CPU time playing.ogg files on my Zaurus than.mp3 files take to play.
Currently, one of the two main criteria for me in choosing my next music player is Ogg Vorbis support. I have a good number of CDs ripped in Vorbis format (VBR, quality 5), and they sound fantastic. The only thing I still need is the whole stack of them in my backpack or the dashboard of the car.
Having used camera equipment in the field, I can tell you that being limited to 512mb or even 1gb of space when on an extended shoot is horrible for anything other than just snapshots. With RAW pictures coming out to something like 20mb each, your drive would only hold 24-60 pictures, and it's much easier to lug around four 1gb microdrives or real flash drives than the laptop and extra batteries you'd need to remove the images from a fixed-memory camera.
Plus, the first time you run out of space in the middle of something interesting, you're going to curse... pretty much everything. Being able to swap cards in 20 seconds with gloves on can be a life-saver.
As for digital camera sizes, a 4mp camera will give you maybe a 9x13 picture before everything becomes pixelated. A good 6mp or 8mp should get you up to something in the neighborhood of 11x17.
Personally, I have a Canon Powershot S45. It's a digicam rather than an SLR, but unless I'm night-shooting, it does rather well.
But I still always carry extra cards and batteries, even though I generally don't take more than two cards or two batteries worth of pictures. I know some people who snap 1000+ frames over three days.
I've owned a few PDAs in my time and used several others that friends/coworkers have owned, and I have owned a few laptops over the years (starting with a Pentium 1 120mHz w/ 16mb RAM), and while I'm sure this response will get lost in the flood that is Slashdot, I'll voice my own opinions:
Size: Small enough to fit in my front pants pocket. That means at most 8"x4"x1", but more ideally 6x3x0.75 (About the size of my Zaurus). It should have a protective sleeve I can slide it quickly into and out of (That saved my Visor on more occasions than I can remember).
Screen: 4-inch or more (diagonal), 640x480 would be best, touch screen of course. I've used everything from 128x128 to 320x240, and they all feel (somewhat) cramped, especially when desktop apps are ported to the palmtop. GUIs would still have to be clean and uncluttered, but at that resolution, web pages would almost be readable. Screen must also be transflective, evenly lit, with adjustable levels of brightness and contrast. Sometimes I want really strong contrast so I can read things like books and e-mail; other times I want softer contrast for things like video. It should also be readable in a well lit room with the back light turned off, and should be able to rotate between portrait and landscape views.
CPU: Playing MPEG1/2, MP3, OGG, and AAC are about the most strenuous things I do on my palmtop. Right now, a StrongARM 206mHz can barely keep up. 333 or 400mHz would be better, but would have to be able to control its power requirements based on system usage.
Power: I don't care if the batteries are AA, AAA or LiON, but they must be removable/replaceable easily and should last at least 8 hours under regular usage, preferably more than 10. Currently, I barely get five hours out of my Palmtop with the screen turned off playing music. I don't want something that I have to religiously plug in every day. Light usage, such as checking appointments and reading books should last a couple of days (16-24 hours) on a charge. Ideally, the batteries would be about 2200-3000mA, and like a laptop battery, I could carry more than one and switch them by putting the system to sleep and swapping the batteries in a minute or less.
RAM: 64mb to 128mb RAM, possibly using some of it as a RAM drive. Flash is slow and wears out in a few years. Battery-backed RAM has essentially infinite write cycles and is much faster. Syncing periodically between flash storage and the RAM drive would also be a good idea for the times when I'm not able to charge it quickly enough.
Storage: I would prefer flash media for durability. The PDA should have 64mb of internal flash. Hard disk drives and flash cards are very nice, but I want to be able to boot the thing without them and hot-swap them.
Expansion: It must have at least one CF and one SD card slot, but more is better. The CF slot(s) must be type 2 and the SD slot(s) must support SDIO. Microdrives are up to 4gb now and SD up to 1gb in consumer models. That's a lot of storage for my pocket, and with a CF Wifi card, I would effectively have unlimited storage. Any expansion cards for the device should have a tiny bit of memory built into them to store the device driver and the driver should be auto-loading on insertion.
Proponents keep touting Bluetooth's low power and cheap components, and I would like to have it in the perfect Palmtop. That way it could sync with my Linux box, iBook, and phone, without carrying a cable around. I could "beam" files, appointments, notes, reminders, and such between Palmtops without having to try and get their IR ports lined up correctly or worry about the reflectivity of the table top they're sitting on. Having Bluetooth would also mean I could send text messages through a properly equipped phone and see who's calling without having to dig the thing out of my pocket. Hell, with enough ingenuity the Palmtop could automatically direct certain calls to voice mail at certain times o
Oh, don't think 5v doesn't generate quite a bit of heat after a while. On my iBook, the hard disk gets by far the hottest of the whole system, and I know it's the disk because I've taken the bloody thing apart and replaced the disk with a larger one. I've also got a 2.5" disk in a USB/FireWire enclosure and after about 20-30 minutes of heavy or constant disk utilization, the disk drive will heat up noticably, sometimes uncomfortably hot. I've taken to not using my iBook on my lap for more than an hour because it starts to get annoyingly hot.
While notepad.exe is one of Microsoft's more stable and less bloated programs, it is still idiocyncratic.
This is from personal experience.
Under Win9x/ME, Notepad is limited to files of < 30k bytes.
Under Win2k/XP, Notepad has problems with files over 30k bytes. Turning on text-wrap and saving the file moves the cursor to a random spot within the last ~500 chars of where it was before. Also, it randomly puts in newlines at the end of each line when you save the file.
Under all platforms, it cannot read UNIX-style text files correctly. It places a block symbol where the new lines are supposed to go. Even EDIT doesn't do that.
Personally, I want to know if it's actually the thickness of an MMC card, or the thickness of an SD card. I've also got an MP3 phone, but it only handles the thinner MMC cards, I can't even get an SD card into the slot.
Unless said mugger is standing hehind you with one pressed against your spine. Happened to a guy I work with. He thought the same way you do. Fortunately for him, it was a paint-ball gun and the guy ran like a rabbit afterward. He ended up with two in the back and one in the side.
I don't know what kind of rig you have, but my Athlon 1800+, 512MB RAM, GeForce 3 ti 200 plays is very well at 1024x768 with most everything on "normal" or higher.
Did you play Onslaught for more than 30-40 seconds? It doesn't matter how many nodes you have if you can't hold them. I've played games where we had all the nodes and were assaulting the enemy generator, but were eventually pushed back to our own base and defeated.
You realise there are two different rocket launchers now, and one is an excellent vehicle destroyer. Oh wait, no you probably don't.
Also the assault rifle has a much higher rate of fire than the Enforcer ever did and in UT2004 you can have two at a time, so it's possible once again to go double-fisted. It's at least as acurate as the Enforcer ever was, more so than that useless "gangsta-style rapid fire".
Maybe you just suck and should stick with your original UT. I don't see anyone holding a gun to your head to buy UT2k4.
Personally, I'd say Cory is the person to say it worked well. Or at least well enough that it made him (and his publisher, Tor Books) want to do it again. Granted, we don't know if he would have done better if he had not released electronic copies of it in addition to his dead-tree version, but considering that he is still a new author and that new authors need advertising like a fish needs water, I can see how this would have helped his sales more than hurt them.
Uh, if by "unpacking everything and throwing away the bits you don't want" you mean "parsing the entire file" then yes, it does do that. However I have never had a problem extracting a single file, directory of files or pattern of names from a tarball. Even compressed tarballs (remember -j or -z). You just have to feed it the right path or wildcard(s) in quotes. Only the files I want come out of the tarball.
De-facto standards and proprietary standards get started becuase no one has an alternative. If an open standard is created, I'm sure users and the market will prefer that one.
Slashdot Mirror
And never, ever, ever change them again!
In my will, I have specified a spot to find a box containing important papers, including passwords, account names and numbers, etc. It requires a GPS and a shovel to get to though.
That doesn't help once they've confiscated every bit of electronics in my house, destroyed them, then kept them in storage for five years "just in case". Yeah I don't get charged with child porn, but all of my creative works and personal data are gone.
My guess would be because books that are on the "do not buy" list aren't worth reviewing, or even finishing for that matter. Personally, I've gotten part way into a few of those type of books and I wouldn't even bother telling anyone about them, let alone writing a rewview.
Total Annihilation had something similar. By holding down the shift key, you could queue up a bunch of commands for a unit to do, and the unit would do them until they were done or it was destroyed. You could even make one of those commands a patrol command (complete with waypoints), and it would run the patrol. I used it extensively. Autmated sweeps of the map to wipe out raiding parties, explore terrain, build units and structures, etc. It was great. If I had the skills, I would clone TA for Linux since Atari seems content to just shove it under their couch.
That only works until they get your e-mail address from one of your friend's compromised machines, or said friend isn't as cautious with handing out your e-mail address as you are. I've done the redirectors trick before as well, but eventually, they will find you.
Dear non-GIMP-contributor,
Thank you for speaking for the rest of the world.
I for one (And checking the replies to your message, it seems I'm not alone) do not have a problem with the GIMP interface. in fact, I like it very much. I have a window on the left side for the GIMP controls, one on the right for layers, histogram, undo history, and other tools that I require then X number of windows for the graphics I'm working on. How this is more difficult to use than a single Word-style window eludes me. I've used GIMP on virtual desktops, on full-screen desktops, and even across dual monitors and it Just Works(tm). The biggest problem I have with it is on Click-To-Focus desktops that require that I click twice on icons in non-focused widgets and I fail to see how crippling the GIMP to satisfy their busted-ass UI model is going to make it better.
First, he probably can't shell out the $558 for Photoshop CS, and it's not like they have an R&D budget.
Second, if they know Photoshop like the back of their hand, they're going to be inclined to follow Photoshop's method of doing things, which is not the Holy Grail of UI design.
I've used Photoshop on a friend's Mac and it is remarkably like GIMP 2's interface. I only use two windows besides the graphic window when I'm using the GIMP, and they are not difficult to use once you know where things are, and that's the same issue they will have with ANY UI design.
Personally, I prefer Ogg Vorbis over MP3 for several reasons.
Right, just like asthma and near-sightedness. More and more people have those. Must be evolution...
How did this get modded up as informative? Is Slashdot giving out mod points to completely clueless noobs now? Ogg Vorbis has had a fixed-point, interger-only decoder for a while now. It's called Tremor, is under the BSD license, and actually takes up slightly less CPU time playing .ogg files on my Zaurus than .mp3 files take to play.
Currently, one of the two main criteria for me in choosing my next music player is Ogg Vorbis support. I have a good number of CDs ripped in Vorbis format (VBR, quality 5), and they sound fantastic. The only thing I still need is the whole stack of them in my backpack or the dashboard of the car.
Having used camera equipment in the field, I can tell you that being limited to 512mb or even 1gb of space when on an extended shoot is horrible for anything other than just snapshots. With RAW pictures coming out to something like 20mb each, your drive would only hold 24-60 pictures, and it's much easier to lug around four 1gb microdrives or real flash drives than the laptop and extra batteries you'd need to remove the images from a fixed-memory camera.
... pretty much everything. Being able to swap cards in 20 seconds with gloves on can be a life-saver.
Plus, the first time you run out of space in the middle of something interesting, you're going to curse
As for digital camera sizes, a 4mp camera will give you maybe a 9x13 picture before everything becomes pixelated. A good 6mp or 8mp should get you up to something in the neighborhood of 11x17.
Personally, I have a Canon Powershot S45. It's a digicam rather than an SLR, but unless I'm night-shooting, it does rather well.
But I still always carry extra cards and batteries, even though I generally don't take more than two cards or two batteries worth of pictures. I know some people who snap 1000+ frames over three days.
I've owned a few PDAs in my time and used several others that friends/coworkers have owned, and I have owned a few laptops over the years (starting with a Pentium 1 120mHz w/ 16mb RAM), and while I'm sure this response will get lost in the flood that is Slashdot, I'll voice my own opinions:
Size: Small enough to fit in my front pants pocket. That means at most 8"x4"x1", but more ideally 6x3x0.75 (About the size of my Zaurus). It should have a protective sleeve I can slide it quickly into and out of (That saved my Visor on more occasions than I can remember).
Screen: 4-inch or more (diagonal), 640x480 would be best, touch screen of course. I've used everything from 128x128 to 320x240, and they all feel (somewhat) cramped, especially when desktop apps are ported to the palmtop. GUIs would still have to be clean and uncluttered, but at that resolution, web pages would almost be readable. Screen must also be transflective, evenly lit, with adjustable levels of brightness and contrast. Sometimes I want really strong contrast so I can read things like books and e-mail; other times I want softer contrast for things like video. It should also be readable in a well lit room with the back light turned off, and should be able to rotate between portrait and landscape views.
CPU: Playing MPEG1/2, MP3, OGG, and AAC are about the most strenuous things I do on my palmtop. Right now, a StrongARM 206mHz can barely keep up. 333 or 400mHz would be better, but would have to be able to control its power requirements based on system usage.
Power: I don't care if the batteries are AA, AAA or LiON, but they must be removable/replaceable easily and should last at least 8 hours under regular usage, preferably more than 10. Currently, I barely get five hours out of my Palmtop with the screen turned off playing music. I don't want something that I have to religiously plug in every day. Light usage, such as checking appointments and reading books should last a couple of days (16-24 hours) on a charge. Ideally, the batteries would be about 2200-3000mA, and like a laptop battery, I could carry more than one and switch them by putting the system to sleep and swapping the batteries in a minute or less.
RAM: 64mb to 128mb RAM, possibly using some of it as a RAM drive. Flash is slow and wears out in a few years. Battery-backed RAM has essentially infinite write cycles and is much faster. Syncing periodically between flash storage and the RAM drive would also be a good idea for the times when I'm not able to charge it quickly enough.
Storage: I would prefer flash media for durability. The PDA should have 64mb of internal flash. Hard disk drives and flash cards are very nice, but I want to be able to boot the thing without them and hot-swap them.
Expansion: It must have at least one CF and one SD card slot, but more is better. The CF slot(s) must be type 2 and the SD slot(s) must support SDIO. Microdrives are up to 4gb now and SD up to 1gb in consumer models. That's a lot of storage for my pocket, and with a CF Wifi card, I would effectively have unlimited storage. Any expansion cards for the device should have a tiny bit of memory built into them to store the device driver and the driver should be auto-loading on insertion.
Proponents keep touting Bluetooth's low power and cheap components, and I would like to have it in the perfect Palmtop. That way it could sync with my Linux box, iBook, and phone, without carrying a cable around. I could "beam" files, appointments, notes, reminders, and such between Palmtops without having to try and get their IR ports lined up correctly or worry about the reflectivity of the table top they're sitting on. Having Bluetooth would also mean I could send text messages through a properly equipped phone and see who's calling without having to dig the thing out of my pocket. Hell, with enough ingenuity the Palmtop could automatically direct certain calls to voice mail at certain times o
Oh, don't think 5v doesn't generate quite a bit of heat after a while. On my iBook, the hard disk gets by far the hottest of the whole system, and I know it's the disk because I've taken the bloody thing apart and replaced the disk with a larger one. I've also got a 2.5" disk in a USB/FireWire enclosure and after about 20-30 minutes of heavy or constant disk utilization, the disk drive will heat up noticably, sometimes uncomfortably hot. I've taken to not using my iBook on my lap for more than an hour because it starts to get annoyingly hot.
Yeah, like Novell who now owns SUSE and Ximian.
Nuke SUSE!
Really? Are negative border and margin offsets part of CSS2 only then? I ask because IE reliably barfs up big hairballs.
While notepad.exe is one of Microsoft's more stable and less bloated programs, it is still idiocyncratic.
This is from personal experience.
Under Win9x/ME, Notepad is limited to files of < 30k bytes.
Under Win2k/XP, Notepad has problems with files over 30k bytes. Turning on text-wrap and saving the file moves the cursor to a random spot within the last ~500 chars of where it was before. Also, it randomly puts in newlines at the end of each line when you save the file.
Under all platforms, it cannot read UNIX-style text files correctly. It places a block symbol where the new lines are supposed to go. Even EDIT doesn't do that.
Personally, I want to know if it's actually the thickness of an MMC card, or the thickness of an SD card. I've also got an MP3 phone, but it only handles the thinner MMC cards, I can't even get an SD card into the slot.
Unless said mugger is standing hehind you with one pressed against your spine. Happened to a guy I work with. He thought the same way you do. Fortunately for him, it was a paint-ball gun and the guy ran like a rabbit afterward. He ended up with two in the back and one in the side.
Yeah, stay in the twentieth.
No, that's what you put on a Korean dog dish.
Oh, wait. That's mongrel tartar.
I don't know what kind of rig you have, but my Athlon 1800+, 512MB RAM, GeForce 3 ti 200 plays is very well at 1024x768 with most everything on "normal" or higher.
Did you play Onslaught for more than 30-40 seconds? It doesn't matter how many nodes you have if you can't hold them. I've played games where we had all the nodes and were assaulting the enemy generator, but were eventually pushed back to our own base and defeated.
You realise there are two different rocket launchers now, and one is an excellent vehicle destroyer. Oh wait, no you probably don't.
Also the assault rifle has a much higher rate of fire than the Enforcer ever did and in UT2004 you can have two at a time, so it's possible once again to go double-fisted. It's at least as acurate as the Enforcer ever was, more so than that useless "gangsta-style rapid fire".
Maybe you just suck and should stick with your original UT. I don't see anyone holding a gun to your head to buy UT2k4.
There. I'm done with my monthly troll-feeding.
Holy crap, I didn't know you read Slashdot.
Mod parent up. This is the horse's mouth, people.
Personally, I'd say Cory is the person to say it worked well. Or at least well enough that it made him (and his publisher, Tor Books) want to do it again. Granted, we don't know if he would have done better if he had not released electronic copies of it in addition to his dead-tree version, but considering that he is still a new author and that new authors need advertising like a fish needs water, I can see how this would have helped his sales more than hurt them.
Uh, if by "unpacking everything and throwing away the bits you don't want" you mean "parsing the entire file" then yes, it does do that. However I have never had a problem extracting a single file, directory of files or pattern of names from a tarball. Even compressed tarballs (remember -j or -z). You just have to feed it the right path or wildcard(s) in quotes. Only the files I want come out of the tarball.
De-facto standards and proprietary standards get started becuase no one has an alternative. If an open standard is created, I'm sure users and the market will prefer that one.
You mean like Ogg/Vorbis?