It's nice to see a -consistent- looking GUI for a change. The icons, the buttons, the sliders, they all appear to be created by a single artist, or at least by a well managed team. I havn't seen that kind of consistency since Kieth Ohlfs left NeXT. (He's now at PixelSight if you care...)
Reading this article, I can't help but thinking of Konrad Zuse working in his parents apartment, building a -mechanical- memory system for his computers back in the 30s. Yikes. Sure, it was a binary system, but it was a far cry from modern computers.
Quantum computing is at much the same stage right now. Some brainy-folk have shown that the math works, and it should be possible to build these things, but now we need to invent ways of making it practical.
The only thing that worries me is that I'm going to need to learn how this stuff works some day if I want to keep a job in the industry!
The thing is, some linux, has gotten bloated also. Anyone every use netscape!? It runs slow on a AMD 400 w/ 256 megs of ram. [munch] Is there any open source browser that are faster, leaner, meaner, not as bloated or buggy as netscape? Just pictures and text, no java, no java scripts, no nothing , runs under X with pictures and text, that is all anything else in it, is bloat.
If you just want pictures and text, then why not run Mosaic 2.0 or Netscape 1.1? That's pretty much all they they do. And they are small and fast. Nevermind that they won't display 90% of all web pages properly, since most web pages contain a lot more than just pictures and text now.
No-one forces you to upgrade. If you want to use old software with fewer features, go for it.
Come on folks, haven't you all learned to give out your Hotmail account instead of your regular email? I mean, what better place to collect huge piles of spam than on Microsofts servers, at Microsofts expense?
Anyhow, as has been said, X-10 has a different sale on every day. There are several items that are -always- on sale (starter kits, etc.), and there is always something you get for free with every item (usually remotes of various sizes and flavours.)
If you can wait, decide what you want, wait for a deal you like to come along (should only take a few weeks at most), and order it. This stuff is cheap, so it's not like it's a huge up-front investment. I ordered the $19.99 starter kit with the remote just so I can have a new universal remote that will also allow me to control the lighting in the TV room. Easily worth $20.
Now if I could wire up caller-id to the TV, wire up a speaker phone into the TV room that I can control with X.10, and rig up a remote lock for the front door so the pizza guy can let himself in, I'd never have to get up again (well, maybe for some things...)
This could finally explain why the radio reception on my 1976 Honda Civic improved when I jammed an old, twisted-up coat hanger in place of the broken off antenna...
I wonder which fractals make the best antennas, though? Hmmmm, I smell a research project.
Those designs make the iMac look beautiful. Tacky, ugly, and nausiating are three words that come to mind.
Why is it that there have been hardly any really good looking (personal) computers? The NeXTcube was quite nice. The iMac has some apeal, although the colour choice is lacking. There were several slick looking SGI models a few years back. But for the most part, computers are either boring beige, or twisted, horrifying designs like those shown by Intel.
Like has been said by others, RAM is dirt-cheap today, so a little bloat can be tollorated.
But it still boggles my mind that I was using a desktop that was as good or better than what is available today over 8 years ago, on a machine with a 25MHz chip and 8MB of RAM. In fact, I still have my NeXTstation '040 machine at home, and it still works fine. Not that bloat didn't affect that platform either, though. It ran quite well under NeXTstep 2.x, but 3.x and 4.x forced me to upgrade to 20MB of RAM.
Most coders today are more concerned with proper OO technique than they are about efficiency.
Of course, some things have suffered bloat for longer than I care to remember ([X|GNU]emacs being my favorite!)
I just hope that KDE and GNOME never, ever try to do something as insane as the Windows Registry. Yikes.
Sometime in the future, the RIAA is going to force labels to actually change the way that CDDA is written to a CD. Somehow they are going to tag the CDs that you buy at the corner store as "secure" CDs. This will have to be done so that the new CDs will play on old CD-players. Perhaps an extra track at the very end of the CD with a small amount of data on it (hell, if they are going to do that, then I would also like to see them include the track and CD info, ala CDDB, right on the CD!)
The new ripper software will detect this tag on the new CDs, and will only allow the audio to be ripped to a 'secure' format. More than likely, this secure format will be tagged such that it only plays on a single device, so you would need to re-rip the audio if you have multiple devices.
The devices which incorprate this SDMI technology would be able to play MP3s, as well as this new format, which the RIAA is calling MP3, but really isn't (unless I am mistaken, there is no provision for encyption or locking in the MP3 spec...)
So this requires that the CD makers, the CD-ripper makers, and the MP3-player makers all sign up for this plan.
Perhaps if you use an all-in-one solution that comes with your portable MP3 player, this would be feasible. But if you continue to use any of the freely available CD-rippers/MP3 encoder solutions that are around today, this just can't work.
Anyone else have an idea as to how they plan to make this work?
ADSL, Cable modems, how quaint. I'm counting down the days until I can get wireless high-speed connectivity...
Check out http://www.storm.ca/corp_services/corp_serv_dedica tedserv.htm#jetstream
Mmmmm, nice. With line-of-sight microwave digital TV (www.look.ca), my PCS phone (www.clearnet.com), and this wireless internet service, the only lines running into my house are going to be for the electricity.
Most audiophiles are over 30 and can't hear the full range that their speakers are capable of reproducing anyhow.
Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Like a prof I had at the UofC. Back in the early days of CD's, he could actually hear the frequency modulations in cheaper players. To fix it, he would encase the quartz crystal in many pounds of lead (I think) and bee's wax. He pretty much built his own CD players and converted many of his audiophile friends to them, at a time when audiophiles just snickered at CD players for their lack of decent sound.
For those from the UofC, yes, I'm talking about Chris "Mr. Tangent" Walpole.
The true die-hard Star Wars fans are taking May 18th off, and showing up to work a few hours late on the 19th. Since the first showing is going to be at 12:01AM on the 19th, you'll need to get in line plenty early on the 18th. Don't forget to take a nap after lunch so you can stay up until 8AM and catch the show 4 times.
Seeing as the big THX theatre here is showing it 24 times on the 19th, I think I'll be able to get into at least one showing!
I agree, it is a damned good product. I had pretty much given up on finding a CD Ripper that would work properly on my Dell machine running Windows NT 4.0. Everything I tried did a terrible job of ripping the audio. BladeEnc did a fine job of converting a WAV file to MP3, but it was slow, usually only running at about.8X speed. RealJukebox rips and encodes at about 3.5X speed on this same system. Very nice.
I wish it would allow you to put the MP3s into a folder with the name of the artist, though, to make sorting easier. And I don't like the limited choices for MP3 encoding either. But it works better than any other ripper/enocder combination I have tried on this machine.
Now if they can combine that keyboard/armrest system with my Aeron chair (the Ultimate Sitting Machine:-), I might buy one. Better yet, sell it as an upgrade to my existing Aeron chair, and I'll definately buy one.
Current portable CD players with a 50-second anti-skip memory system never skip while walking, but skip a lot while jogging or running.
But if the same system could be used for MP3s, then you would have a 500-second anti-shock memory. It would start to skip a lot too if you were jogging for a while.
How about this idea; install a shock sensor (like the article about the PalmPilot hack a few days ago) to detect when the unit is experiencing a level of shock that won't cause skipping. Spin up that 32X CD player, and read 500 seconds of music into memory, then spin down the CD.
It will definately eat more batteries than a solid-state memory system, but it also will let you store over 11 hours of music on super-cheap removeable media. I'd love to have my entire music colection on a few dozen $2 CDs, instead of a few $300 hard drives (ala the Empeg car system).
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It's nice to see a -consistent- looking GUI for a change. The icons, the buttons, the sliders, they all appear to be created by a single artist, or at least by a well managed team. I havn't seen that kind of consistency since Kieth Ohlfs left NeXT. (He's now at PixelSight if you care...)
Reading this article, I can't help but thinking of Konrad Zuse working in his parents apartment, building a -mechanical- memory system for his computers back in the 30s. Yikes. Sure, it was a binary system, but it was a far cry from modern computers.
Quantum computing is at much the same stage right now. Some brainy-folk have shown that the math works, and it should be possible to build these things, but now we need to invent ways of making it practical.
The only thing that worries me is that I'm going to need to learn how this stuff works some day if I want to keep a job in the industry!
The thing is, some linux, has gotten bloated also. Anyone every use netscape!? It runs slow on a AMD 400 w/ 256 megs of ram.
[munch]
Is there any open source browser that are faster, leaner, meaner, not as bloated or buggy as netscape? Just pictures and text, no java, no java scripts, no nothing , runs under X with pictures and text, that is all anything else in it, is bloat.
If you just want pictures and text, then why not run Mosaic 2.0 or Netscape 1.1? That's pretty much all they they do. And they are small and fast. Nevermind that they won't display 90% of all web pages properly, since most web pages contain a lot more than just pictures and text now.
No-one forces you to upgrade. If you want to use old software with fewer features, go for it.
Come on folks, haven't you all learned to give out your Hotmail account instead of your regular email? I mean, what better place to collect huge piles of spam than on Microsofts servers, at Microsofts expense?
Anyhow, as has been said, X-10 has a different sale on every day. There are several items that are -always- on sale (starter kits, etc.), and there is always something you get for free with every item (usually remotes of various sizes and flavours.)
If you can wait, decide what you want, wait for a deal you like to come along (should only take a few weeks at most), and order it. This stuff is cheap, so it's not like it's a huge up-front investment. I ordered the $19.99 starter kit with the remote just so I can have a new universal remote that will also allow me to control the lighting in the TV room. Easily worth $20.
Now if I could wire up caller-id to the TV, wire up a speaker phone into the TV room that I can control with X.10, and rig up a remote lock for the front door so the pizza guy can let himself in, I'd never have to get up again (well, maybe for some things...)
This could finally explain why the radio reception on my 1976 Honda Civic improved when I jammed an old, twisted-up coat hanger in place of the broken off antenna...
I wonder which fractals make the best antennas, though? Hmmmm, I smell a research project.
Those designs make the iMac look beautiful. Tacky, ugly, and nausiating are three words that come to mind.
Why is it that there have been hardly any really good looking (personal) computers? The NeXTcube was quite nice. The iMac has some apeal, although the colour choice is lacking. There were several slick looking SGI models a few years back. But for the most part, computers are either boring beige, or twisted, horrifying designs like those shown by Intel.
> Leeches probably won't raise a stir though
> because people tend to care less about
> things that aren't as cute.
This is quite true. If there were using, say, baby seal neurons, Greenpeace would be all over them.
Like has been said by others, RAM is dirt-cheap today, so a little bloat can be tollorated.
But it still boggles my mind that I was using a desktop that was as good or better than what is available today over 8 years ago, on a machine with a 25MHz chip and 8MB of RAM. In fact, I still have my NeXTstation '040 machine at home, and it still works fine. Not that bloat didn't affect that platform either, though. It ran quite well under NeXTstep 2.x, but 3.x and 4.x forced me to upgrade to 20MB of RAM.
Most coders today are more concerned with proper OO technique than they are about efficiency.
Of course, some things have suffered bloat for longer than I care to remember ([X|GNU]emacs being my favorite!)
I just hope that KDE and GNOME never, ever try to do something as insane as the Windows Registry. Yikes.
So let me see if I have this straight...
Sometime in the future, the RIAA is going to force labels to actually change the way that CDDA is written to a CD. Somehow they are going to tag the CDs that you buy at the corner store as "secure" CDs. This will have to be done so that the new CDs will play on old CD-players. Perhaps an extra track at the very end of the CD with a small amount of data on it (hell, if they are going to do that, then I would also like to see them include the track and CD info, ala CDDB, right on the CD!)
The new ripper software will detect this tag on the new CDs, and will only allow the audio to be ripped to a 'secure' format. More than likely, this secure format will be tagged such that it only plays on a single device, so you would need to re-rip the audio if you have multiple devices.
The devices which incorprate this SDMI technology would be able to play MP3s, as well as this new format, which the RIAA is calling MP3, but really isn't (unless I am mistaken, there is no provision for encyption or locking in the MP3 spec...)
So this requires that the CD makers, the CD-ripper makers, and the MP3-player makers all sign up for this plan.
Perhaps if you use an all-in-one solution that comes with your portable MP3 player, this would be feasible. But if you continue to use any of the freely available CD-rippers/MP3 encoder solutions that are around today, this just can't work.
Anyone else have an idea as to how they plan to make this work?
ADSL, Cable modems, how quaint. I'm counting down the days until I can get wireless high-speed connectivity...
a tedserv.htm#jetstream
Check out http://www.storm.ca/corp_services/corp_serv_dedic
Mmmmm, nice. With line-of-sight microwave digital TV (www.look.ca), my PCS phone (www.clearnet.com), and this wireless internet service, the only lines running into my house are going to be for the electricity.
Most audiophiles are over 30 and can't hear the full range that their speakers are capable of reproducing anyhow.
Of course, there are exceptions to the rule. Like a prof I had at the UofC. Back in the early days of CD's, he could actually hear the frequency modulations in cheaper players. To fix it, he would encase the quartz crystal in many pounds of lead (I think) and bee's wax. He pretty much built his own CD players and converted many of his audiophile friends to them, at a time when audiophiles just snickered at CD players for their lack of decent sound.
For those from the UofC, yes, I'm talking about Chris "Mr. Tangent" Walpole.
The true die-hard Star Wars fans are taking May 18th off, and showing up to work a few hours late on the 19th. Since the first showing is going to be at 12:01AM on the 19th, you'll need to get in line plenty early on the 18th. Don't forget to take a nap after lunch so you can stay up until 8AM and catch the show 4 times.
Seeing as the big THX theatre here is showing it 24 times on the 19th, I think I'll be able to get into at least one showing!
My Netscape 4.05, 4.06, 4.5, and 4.51 all present me with the lovely "Big Black Screen Of Nothingness". I've had to resort to IE4.0 to access /. today.
I agree, it is a damned good product. I had pretty much given up on finding a CD Ripper that would work properly on my Dell machine running Windows NT 4.0. Everything I tried did a terrible job of ripping the audio. BladeEnc did a fine job of converting a WAV file to MP3, but it was slow, usually only running at about .8X speed. RealJukebox rips and encodes at about 3.5X speed on this same system. Very nice.
I wish it would allow you to put the MP3s into a folder with the name of the artist, though, to make sorting easier. And I don't like the limited choices for MP3 encoding either. But it works better than any other ripper/enocder combination I have tried on this machine.
Now if they can combine that keyboard/armrest system with my Aeron chair (the Ultimate Sitting Machine :-), I might buy one. Better yet, sell it as an upgrade to my existing Aeron chair, and I'll definately buy one.
Current portable CD players with a 50-second anti-skip memory system never skip while walking, but skip a lot while jogging or running.
But if the same system could be used for MP3s, then you would have a 500-second anti-shock memory. It would start to skip a lot too if you were jogging for a while.
How about this idea; install a shock sensor (like the article about the PalmPilot hack a few days ago) to detect when the unit is experiencing a level of shock that won't cause skipping. Spin up that 32X CD player, and read 500 seconds of music into memory, then spin down the CD.
It will definately eat more batteries than a solid-state memory system, but it also will let you store over 11 hours of music on super-cheap removeable media. I'd love to have my entire music colection on a few dozen $2 CDs, instead of a few $300 hard drives (ala the Empeg car system).