Yeah, good point! This got me thinking: if a Mozilla rendering engine could be plugged into IE, all sorts of neato things are possible.
This creates a dilemma, because an XUL browser is only cool if there is some neato XUL out there to browse. So I think that's the first step. How about xul.slashdot.org? On second thought, the nerds here don't need extra reasons to switch to Firefox. How about Google news rendered as a XUL app? Yeah, maybe what we really need before the neato apps is a neato IDE for XUL. Then the apps would eventually come. Anyway, I like the way you're thinking. A lot of work already went into optimizing XUL, and if there is a bittersweet aspect to Firefox, it's that it pushed XUL into the background compared to the full suite.
So, people, suggest some things that can be done with XUL which you can't do with the other tools?
I was thinking of a similar point. The article says that the climate change effects of wind farms are local, and yet seemed to take it for granted that all such effects are bad. I agree with you, they don't have to be.
We can't do any engineering with greenhouse gas emissions, because they disperse globally in a way we can't control. But maybe we can intelligently place wind farms to prevent various catastrophes that we might foresee. So, if the arctic ice is melting and about to flood Florida, we can build wind farms to intercept a warm air stream going north. That way, we get power and keep the ice frozen.
Other dire predictions about Europe say that the continent will get colder as greenhouse gasses build up. Well, the biggest wind farm I know of is off the coast of Denmark in the North Sea. It's intercepting and slowing down cold air that's blowing towards land. Won't that make Denmark warmer? And isn't that a good thing? Maybe this research will help us build models so that strategically-placed wind farms can steer rain and warmth to fertile fields, and generate power at the same time. It doesn't look like a bad thing at all.
Sounds like you have a great system, but I find it funny that the stock 3000+ chip was already so much than your previous chip, and you still insisted of overclocking the crap out of it. With that graphics card it sounds to me like you are playing some recent games, so I suppose it makes sense. I just found it funny. Congratulations on this awesome system.
The thing I hate the most about computer sound is...
That the D/A conversion is done around so much EM noise, and that the analog outs are essentially unshielded and run through pathetic little wires. I'm not an audiophile, but even I recoil at the insult in the suggestion that you can get good sound out of a little 3mm analog plug in a computer. I don't care how good the chips are. You're asking for a miracle!
The solution is to have a unified digital-in/out audio interface, where the D/A and A/D converters are in a fully shielded break-out box that communicates digitally with the computer. Then you can use some decent cable to connect the box to the amplifier. What I'm describing doesn't have to be anything like expensive, maybe $10 more than a PCI soundcard for the extra materials. But it would make more than a $10 difference in sound you can count on that! I know they have these things for enthusiasts, but I don't see why they couldn't be made cheap and accessible to all.
Right on, I totally agree. I wrote something similar, proposing the ethernet runs over electrical lines. It pisses me off that computers do D/A conversion so early in the process, and once the signal is analog, it's completely bastardized with noise. Running it digitally as far as possible seems like the obviously right thing to do.
D/A converters certainly don't belong inside a COMPUTER CASE! I don't care how good the chips are. Any time you put an analog signal through those frail little wires (or even printed circuits on a circuit board!) near so much E/M noise, you're asking for shit and not sound.
I remember old DAK catalogs which let you run your audio over the 120V power wires in your house. So when you plugged in a speaker, it got power and the "signal" at the same time. Now, we can easily run data over a power line. It would be practical to even offer internet access this way, except for the fact that there are transformers in municipal grids which interrupt the signal. But on power lines inside the home, this should be no problem at all.
So instead of wireless plug-in speakers, I propose sending a 5.1 digital audio stream over the electrical wires, buy 5 speakers, and each would have a D/A converter and can be set to play one of 5 channels. Easy as pie; one wire, no analog degredation because of long/cheap speaker cables, and no wireless interference.
I wonder how much bandwidth you could squeeze through electrical wiring. I bet it's quite a bit (no pun). So maybe you could have something like 20 channels, and you can tune any room of the house to the audio output of one of many sources. Since it would come in as digital, distance would not mean a loss of quality.
(And while we're at it, could we do video the same way???)
It sounds like your nice 19" Samsung CRT is working just fine, so what's the deal? Is it that you're running out of space on your desk? Or did you find another use for your CRT monitor? If not, I think you need to tell us more about why you need a new monitor in the first place.
Are you sure you're not posting here just because you want the world do know that you're a "gamer" and that you're cool and rich enough to upgrade gear without any good reason?
Of course IBM wansn't going to have two separate PPC projects, one ("Cell") with Sony and another for Microsoft. But from Sony's hype, the Cell was supposed to be something quite revolutionary and specifically designed for their game machine. I was imagining lots of small cores, or somesuch thing.
So it is a surprise that the Xbox processor will essentially be the same. I expected it to be much more like the regular Power5 than like the Cell. So does this mean the Cell itself is really not so different from a regular Power5, despite the Sony hype, or does it mean that the Xbox will be getting some of the architectural goodies that Sony and IBM custom-designed for the Cell? Since the latter sounds so implausible, I have to believe the former. Either way, it's much more of a surprise (to me, at least) than you make it out to be.
It's not just that Bush removed a strong and secular government from Iraq, one that hated Osama's Islamicism, leaving the vacuum needed by religious fundamentalists sympathetic to Al Quaeda who want to grab power. (Al Sader is polling at 50% nationally!)
It's also that Bush is the best Al Quaeda recruiter that anyone could imagine. Sure, we've destroyed a nominal number of terrorists and training camps, but all the intelligence agencies report that new recruits pour in far faster than we are able to kill them.
So of course Bin Laden, and anyone sympathetic to Al Quaeda, wants Bush to stay in power. I can't imagine a US response to 9/11 which would have been better from the Al Quaeda point of view. Obviously, there would be an Afghanistan invasion. But such a tepid one, where we bribe local warlords to do our fighting, is something Osama could not have dreamed of. All he had to do is bribe them more, and he stays alive. Meanwhile, the recruiting is in full swing, not in concentrated training camps which are easy to hit, but all over the world, including the US and Europe. There is no hope of a systematic campaign against these new recruits, because this would certainly involve serious coordination between the US and other states, but Bush's America is so politically isolated now that this cooperation is impossible. So basically, Al Quaeda cells can drop their roots all over the world, and during their most vulnerable phase (the next four years) they have nothing to fear from the USA if Bush remains president.
The above is just so obvious that I can't imagine how it might escape someone, so I don't get how people might even consider the idea that Bin Laden would prefer that Kerry becomes president.
I suspect that disproportionately, Democrats know how to brew their own (decent!) coffee. It reminds me of that famous Killdozer song lyric ("You call this cup of shit coffee?; I'd rather drink from the dick of a goat.")
We now clearly see that a tiny majority of the misguided people who are willing to pay money for the worst coffee in the world are Republican. Wow!
Well, I suppose we also learn that some companies will take advantage of any situation in the effort to sell more product... and also, that Slashdot is happy to link to your promotional campaign for free if describe it right.
Open forum? Are you kidding? Bush? This guy doesn't even let you see him speak unless you swear a loyalty oath to him. Do you think he'd let you write on his website? He has all the open debate he can handle in a room with Rove, Wolfowitz, Rummsfeld and Ashcroft. He doesn't need "outside" input.
Alright, I'll go to those Republican districts in Florida and indiscriminately hassle people, claiming I need to see INS documents, proof of address, whether they have any unpaid trafic tickets, convictions, etc. You know, make sure that voting in the Republican districts goes nice and slow, all in the name of seeing to it that no illegitimate votes are cast. Would you think this is a dirty strategy to support my favored candidate? If so, you shouldn't look the other way when your party essentially announces they're about to do just this.
Yes, Democrats were sent in, but only to to try to keep the vote blockers under control, not to do their own blocking of Republican votes. Again, perhaps more nobility than these ugly circumstances warrant.
Re-read what you wrote. Doesn't that sound like the outline of a pretty solid argument? It's been a long time since Slashdot has led me to an article where some controversial view is defended so plausibly.
This is right, but I think Nader has made his point in 2000. I seriously thought that by now he would have had the decency to say "OK, it's too close to the election for the Democrats to adjust their platform in a more Naderish direction (or away from it), I've done all I can in exerting a little bit of influence, and now I'll bow and piss off and not undo the little good I might have done for the Democratic party by handing the election to Bush."
As I read in the news today, Nader is focusing his campaign money on Bush/Kerry swing states for maximum damage. This I don't understand, unless he really wants the Republicans to win. I do think that in some ways he's had an influence on the platform of the Democratic party. Not a huge one, but then again, he's just one man, and he's had more of an influence than almost any other individual. He might have wanted more, but at least from the Democrats, he got something, a whole lot more than he would get from Bush in his second term.
He's also doing a great deal of damage to his own reputation, since the majority of the US left wing, even if they didn't vote for Nader, really thought highly of him and valued his input. Nader's greatest weapon was his credibility, and with that one weapon he did a lot of good in the last four decades. Now his credibility is shot. Most left-wingers who used to admire him will never forgive him unless he asks for their forgiveness and stops screwing up plausible efforts to unseat Bush. Nader has done neither, so he basically marginalized himself. He has no audience anymore, except for fringe people who don't matter. It used to be different. And he has himself to blame. I for one am sad that this is how Nader is exiting the scene. I wish he didn't undermine himself the way he did so that he could continue to advocate for justice. I'm sad he threw that away; I don't know who can step in and replace the "old" Ralph Nader, the former conscience of this nation.
Good call - I always thought he sounded a bit robotic on the Rush albums as well. Of course I didn't mind, but I lost interest in Rush right about that time when Neil tried to rap on Roll the Bones. Wow, just the memory made me shiver.
Does this mean male geeks might find a way to perpetuate themselves after all? Well, the article didn't say the eggs could be fertilized, but... what if... your mother and father would be the same fish!
The computers may have won, but from the pictures, it looks like the humans had more fun. It will be a while before they make a computer that's better than we are at that (though it might be soon when a computer learns to post better jokes on slashdot than the typical human).
Acronis TrueImage saves my butt regularly
on
Backups to CD-R?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I wouldn't do this for any other commercial program, but I really have to sing the praises of Acronis TrueImage. It really makes me feel safe in this world of flaky hardware.
The principle behind it is that it backs up entire partitions so that they can be reconstituted bit-for-bit as they were when the backup was made. Since version 7, there has been an option to do incremental backups. The compression ratio is wonderful. I have a 2GB partition with Windows XP and all the Windows programs that I use, and the image file that TrueImage makes of it fits on a 700MB CD! What's more, you can burn a recovery CD that boots directly (TrueImage is based on Linux) and has full backup/restore functionality. Oh, and in Windows you can "mount" the backed-up partition images so that they appear as a read-only drive with its own letter--in case you just need to recover a couple of files from a backup and not the whole thing. Really, I don't know what they'll do for 8.0, because I think 7.0 is just about the perfect backup program, and it's so easy that even a lazy guy like me has developed good habits about backups.
Slashdot Mirror
This creates a dilemma, because an XUL browser is only cool if there is some neato XUL out there to browse. So I think that's the first step. How about xul.slashdot.org? On second thought, the nerds here don't need extra reasons to switch to Firefox. How about Google news rendered as a XUL app? Yeah, maybe what we really need before the neato apps is a neato IDE for XUL. Then the apps would eventually come. Anyway, I like the way you're thinking. A lot of work already went into optimizing XUL, and if there is a bittersweet aspect to Firefox, it's that it pushed XUL into the background compared to the full suite.
So, people, suggest some things that can be done with XUL which you can't do with the other tools?
We can't do any engineering with greenhouse gas emissions, because they disperse globally in a way we can't control. But maybe we can intelligently place wind farms to prevent various catastrophes that we might foresee. So, if the arctic ice is melting and about to flood Florida, we can build wind farms to intercept a warm air stream going north. That way, we get power and keep the ice frozen.
Other dire predictions about Europe say that the continent will get colder as greenhouse gasses build up. Well, the biggest wind farm I know of is off the coast of Denmark in the North Sea. It's intercepting and slowing down cold air that's blowing towards land. Won't that make Denmark warmer? And isn't that a good thing? Maybe this research will help us build models so that strategically-placed wind farms can steer rain and warmth to fertile fields, and generate power at the same time. It doesn't look like a bad thing at all.
Sounds like you have a great system, but I find it funny that the stock 3000+ chip was already so much than your previous chip, and you still insisted of overclocking the crap out of it. With that graphics card it sounds to me like you are playing some recent games, so I suppose it makes sense. I just found it funny. Congratulations on this awesome system.
The article link is here.
well said
That the D/A conversion is done around so much EM noise, and that the analog outs are essentially unshielded and run through pathetic little wires. I'm not an audiophile, but even I recoil at the insult in the suggestion that you can get good sound out of a little 3mm analog plug in a computer. I don't care how good the chips are. You're asking for a miracle! The solution is to have a unified digital-in/out audio interface, where the D/A and A/D converters are in a fully shielded break-out box that communicates digitally with the computer. Then you can use some decent cable to connect the box to the amplifier. What I'm describing doesn't have to be anything like expensive, maybe $10 more than a PCI soundcard for the extra materials. But it would make more than a $10 difference in sound you can count on that! I know they have these things for enthusiasts, but I don't see why they couldn't be made cheap and accessible to all.
D/A converters certainly don't belong inside a COMPUTER CASE! I don't care how good the chips are. Any time you put an analog signal through those frail little wires (or even printed circuits on a circuit board!) near so much E/M noise, you're asking for shit and not sound.
So instead of wireless plug-in speakers, I propose sending a 5.1 digital audio stream over the electrical wires, buy 5 speakers, and each would have a D/A converter and can be set to play one of 5 channels. Easy as pie; one wire, no analog degredation because of long/cheap speaker cables, and no wireless interference.
I wonder how much bandwidth you could squeeze through electrical wiring. I bet it's quite a bit (no pun). So maybe you could have something like 20 channels, and you can tune any room of the house to the audio output of one of many sources. Since it would come in as digital, distance would not mean a loss of quality.
(And while we're at it, could we do video the same way???)
Are you sure you're not posting here just because you want the world do know that you're a "gamer" and that you're cool and rich enough to upgrade gear without any good reason?
So it is a surprise that the Xbox processor will essentially be the same. I expected it to be much more like the regular Power5 than like the Cell. So does this mean the Cell itself is really not so different from a regular Power5, despite the Sony hype, or does it mean that the Xbox will be getting some of the architectural goodies that Sony and IBM custom-designed for the Cell? Since the latter sounds so implausible, I have to believe the former. Either way, it's much more of a surprise (to me, at least) than you make it out to be.
Thanks, the .wmv on ed2k works great (fast!) once you remove the space from the hash.
Was originally:
It's not just that Bush removed a strong and secular government from Iraq, one that hated Osama's Islamicism, leaving the vacuum needed by religious fundamentalists sympathetic to Al Quaeda who want to grab power. (Al Sader is polling at 50% nationally!)
It's also that Bush is the best Al Quaeda recruiter that anyone could imagine. Sure, we've destroyed a nominal number of terrorists and training camps, but all the intelligence agencies report that new recruits pour in far faster than we are able to kill them.
So of course Bin Laden, and anyone sympathetic to Al Quaeda, wants Bush to stay in power. I can't imagine a US response to 9/11 which would have been better from the Al Quaeda point of view. Obviously, there would be an Afghanistan invasion. But such a tepid one, where we bribe local warlords to do our fighting, is something Osama could not have dreamed of. All he had to do is bribe them more, and he stays alive. Meanwhile, the recruiting is in full swing, not in concentrated training camps which are easy to hit, but all over the world, including the US and Europe. There is no hope of a systematic campaign against these new recruits, because this would certainly involve serious coordination between the US and other states, but Bush's America is so politically isolated now that this cooperation is impossible. So basically, Al Quaeda cells can drop their roots all over the world, and during their most vulnerable phase (the next four years) they have nothing to fear from the USA if Bush remains president.
The above is just so obvious that I can't imagine how it might escape someone, so I don't get how people might even consider the idea that Bin Laden would prefer that Kerry becomes president.
I suspect that disproportionately, Democrats know how to brew their own (decent!) coffee. It reminds me of that famous Killdozer song lyric ("You call this cup of shit coffee?; I'd rather drink from the dick of a goat.")
Well, I suppose we also learn that some companies will take advantage of any situation in the effort to sell more product... and also, that Slashdot is happy to link to your promotional campaign for free if describe it right.
Open forum? Are you kidding? Bush? This guy doesn't even let you see him speak unless you swear a loyalty oath to him. Do you think he'd let you write on his website? He has all the open debate he can handle in a room with Rove, Wolfowitz, Rummsfeld and Ashcroft. He doesn't need "outside" input.
Thank you. I'm glad somebody here knows how to read.
Yes, Democrats were sent in, but only to to try to keep the vote blockers under control, not to do their own blocking of Republican votes. Again, perhaps more nobility than these ugly circumstances warrant.
Re-read what you wrote. Doesn't that sound like the outline of a pretty solid argument? It's been a long time since Slashdot has led me to an article where some controversial view is defended so plausibly.
As I read in the news today, Nader is focusing his campaign money on Bush/Kerry swing states for maximum damage. This I don't understand, unless he really wants the Republicans to win. I do think that in some ways he's had an influence on the platform of the Democratic party. Not a huge one, but then again, he's just one man, and he's had more of an influence than almost any other individual. He might have wanted more, but at least from the Democrats, he got something, a whole lot more than he would get from Bush in his second term.
He's also doing a great deal of damage to his own reputation, since the majority of the US left wing, even if they didn't vote for Nader, really thought highly of him and valued his input. Nader's greatest weapon was his credibility, and with that one weapon he did a lot of good in the last four decades. Now his credibility is shot. Most left-wingers who used to admire him will never forgive him unless he asks for their forgiveness and stops screwing up plausible efforts to unseat Bush. Nader has done neither, so he basically marginalized himself. He has no audience anymore, except for fringe people who don't matter. It used to be different. And he has himself to blame. I for one am sad that this is how Nader is exiting the scene. I wish he didn't undermine himself the way he did so that he could continue to advocate for justice. I'm sad he threw that away; I don't know who can step in and replace the "old" Ralph Nader, the former conscience of this nation.
Good call - I always thought he sounded a bit robotic on the Rush albums as well. Of course I didn't mind, but I lost interest in Rush right about that time when Neil tried to rap on Roll the Bones. Wow, just the memory made me shiver.
Wait... where in this country does the First Ammedment not apply? Are there places where the entire Constitution doesn't apply? (Don't say "Texas"!)
Does this mean male geeks might find a way to perpetuate themselves after all? Well, the article didn't say the eggs could be fertilized, but... what if... your mother and father would be the same fish!
The computers may have won, but from the pictures, it looks like the humans had more fun. It will be a while before they make a computer that's better than we are at that (though it might be soon when a computer learns to post better jokes on slashdot than the typical human).
The principle behind it is that it backs up entire partitions so that they can be reconstituted bit-for-bit as they were when the backup was made. Since version 7, there has been an option to do incremental backups. The compression ratio is wonderful. I have a 2GB partition with Windows XP and all the Windows programs that I use, and the image file that TrueImage makes of it fits on a 700MB CD! What's more, you can burn a recovery CD that boots directly (TrueImage is based on Linux) and has full backup/restore functionality. Oh, and in Windows you can "mount" the backed-up partition images so that they appear as a read-only drive with its own letter--in case you just need to recover a couple of files from a backup and not the whole thing. Really, I don't know what they'll do for 8.0, because I think 7.0 is just about the perfect backup program, and it's so easy that even a lazy guy like me has developed good habits about backups.