"CBC is the Canadian government owned national broadcaster. "
That makes our dear CBC sound like a wing of Canada's Government, which it is not. CBC may be publicly funded, but it does have independance. There have been many times when CBC has been the loudest critic of Government actions, presenting the case with much less bias than the other media conglomerates that live here.
CBC is public broadcasting. That means, or it is supposed to mean, that the people of Canada own the broadcaster. I pay taxes to keep them on the air, and (for once) I'm very pleased to do so.
Perhaps your computer wasn't slow enough. I, with my incredible 8mhz Kaypro 2000+ laptop, did indeed watch space quest II render piece-by-piece on my 8-colour (actually 8 shades of blue) screen. I remember the wait times vividly, as you may imagine. The horizon would appear, then the trees, then the %#^$% maze that I was perpetually dying in, because I couldn't differentiate between two very similar shades of blue.
I know that it seems impossible to design a website *without* purposefully working around browser inadequacies, but that's almost what we have to do.
As far as I'm aware, "browser compatibility tables" are artefacts of the past -- there's simply too many weird versions out there (and that's only considering Netscape 4!) to have a hope of covering it all. Besides, if we code around every single problem, we encourage users to stick with their current browsers for ever and ever, generally enshrining the errors for future posterity.
I have found that if you follow "generally accepted good coding practises", most modern browsers can take it. If they can't, the breakdown is not horrible -- not like the hacks of the 1990s that completely fly apart on Mozilla today.
If you perpetually correct for all of today's faults, you hold the web back. If you code for compliance with an eye out for any serious showstopping errors, you help the evolution continue... and that's something we really need.
It was bad enough that I had to worry about unexpected silicone ingredients in the opposite sex. Now I'll have to wonder if her skin came from a WORM...
HotBot has ALWAYS used other results
on
HotBot Returns
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I'm not sure why everyone is condemning HotBot's upgrade as a shift to "mere metasearch". The site was born out of Wired Mag's ancient search engine expose article, where they all decided Inktomi was the one to use. HotBot has been powered by Inktomi since day one, they're just offering other sources now.
I do remember this one from 1999, and have been keeping a distant (envious) watch on the technology. Original website was at Engineering System Co, a company that seems eternally poised to make the next big thing. A different spin on the helicopter specs can be seen at this wayback page from 2000... the four separate engines sound good.
So now it's over two years late, costs just as much (only now we're in a recession), and I still want one! A landing pad would look great on our back lawn.
I just saw the John de Lancie episode "Cui Bono" and was surprised to find that it was, well, okay. Not great, but also not as utterly rotten as the rest of Season 3 has been. For those of you keeping score, that's a *big* trend upwards. Sorbo actually shut up for large parts of the show, and the rest of the crew got to do actual stuff.
Also, Rev Bem is coming back this season. No clue if it's a guest appearance or a recurring role.
So maybe there's a tunnel at the end of... er, that is, a light at the end of the tunnel. We can hope.
When I see a title like that, I don't think of a massive collection of songs -- no, I think of just one song, and one in particular. So here's geek remix version, something called Rapsod-C. It seems the most appropriate for this forum. I'm not sure if these lyrics are relevant to the article... but then, is Audiogalaxy? Not really.
Is this the real world? Is this just fantasy? Caught in a LAN-slide -- no ESC to reality. Open your files, look after your while()s in C; Its just a cheap toy, but dearer than SymphonyT With it's wheezy cough, noisy beep Address clash, little sleep Anything but WindowsT, Nothing beats class lib'ries to me, To me.
Mama, just killed a RAM Got some static on its pins, Now I don't see the dust bin, Mama, 'Write' had just been run, But now I've got to throw it all away Mama, ooooooh, didn't mean to make it fry If I've no stack to overflow tomorrow, Carry one, carry one, 'Cause there's nothing like class lib'ries.
Too late, my Time has come Send lightning down my line Stop my make before it's tme Goodbye, everybody, I've got to go, Gotta leave you all behind and read Knuth.
Mama, ooooooh, (Anything but Windows T) I don't want to *sigh* I sometimes wish I'd never known Bourne at all.
I see a little silhouetto of a man Scarramouche, Scarramouche, Did you run the test script yet? Thunderbolt and lightning, Blowing up my modem, me. Gone away now, Gone away now, Gone away now, Windows T froze. Its worse than crap (oh oh oh oh)
It's just a cheap toy, ev'rybody has three It's just a cheap toy from a cheap company Spare us our lifes from this monstrosity! Wheezy cough, noisy beep, will you let us sleep? Drink Miller! GNU! We will not let you sleep! (let us sleep!) Drink Miller! GNU! We will not let you sleep! (let us sleep!) Drink Miller! Will not let you sleep (let us sleep!) Will not let you sleep (let us sleep!) Will not let you sleep (let us sleep!) GNU, GNU, GNU, GNU, GNU, GNU GNU! Oh Mama mia, mama mia, Mama mia, let us sleep! Be-el-ze-Gates has a widget put beside my tree, my tree, my tree!
So you think you can force me to use '95? So you think you can love me and leave me no drives? Oh, baby, can't do this to me baby, Just gotta c-out, just gotta get Write out of here.
Nothing beats class lib'ries, Anything in C, Nothing beats class lib'ries, Nothing beats class lib'ries to me...
Yeah, I'll say it's scary. According to the pictures, that fish is carrying cold hard cash -- as well as a recent issue of The Sunday Capital. Could this be the world's first upwardly mobile aquatic lifeform?
I emailed Thomas C. Greene about some nasty writing habits of his last year, and thanks to his outraged reply, I can report that he signs his name "T.G.". Maybe he's changed to signing "tcg" -- or maybe that poster ain't the real Tommy.
A couple of the new Epson inkjets feature a mixture of Pigment & Dye inks (previous Epson printers just used Dye).
The advantages of Pigment ink, aside from crisper black/colour, no bleeding, and 70 years of lightfastness, is that the cartridges last a lot longer. I have an Epson C80 which really does print out a thousand detailed sheets of black text in one go. I know that's not a lot compared to laser land, but it sure beats the rest of the consumer inkjet offerings. This technology has trickled down from their professional line of printers -- the C80 is very cheap. Inkjet vs. Laser could go the way of ATA vs. SCSI, in terms of the poorer technology improving so much that it's acceptable for most people.
1. Google gives us a large piece of the Internet, but not the whole thing.
2. Google's results can be quite fresh, but they're certainly not realtime.
Until technology can solve both of those problems, a delayed indexing system like Google's will never give us a full *or* reliable picture of the Internet -- only a partial sketch. The fact that the sketch is vastly better than any other Search Engine doesn't change this.
Meanwhile, the website statistics for my girlfriend's site display some very odd searching trends. A high number of people, in order to reach her site, were actually searching for "www.superchick.com" in the engines. These people had never learned how to manually enter a domain, and were in fact restricted to the matches that their Search Engine provided.
This jives with my own experiences while working for a local ISP. One fine spring day, I moved our "websearch" tool off our company's home page (used as a portal for our subscriber base). Within minutes, the tech support lines were ringing! Outraged and disoriented customers claimed that "the Internet" (their choice of words) was gone from our homepage, and that it was no longer possible for them to use the web. They too were doing all of their surfing from a search window.
This is the kind of "Google Effect" (/misnomer) that I find quite worrying, for if too many users begin to surf the web in this manner, they will only find sites that are in a Relevant Index. This seems to place far too much faith & responsibility on the Search Engines themelves.
I suppose all this technical talk is appropriate for where we are, but before the battle escalates further -- shouldn't some of you actually take a listen? This is not about numbers. Us humans hear in analogue. As a somewhat dramatic friend once said, "specifications... will never tell you how the violin actually sounds." And he was right.
I had the opportunity to listen to the first Sony SACD player to arrive in my province, when it passed through Vancouver on a Canadian tour. While wandering around at a high-end shop I heard this incredible Jazz music; following the sound through a fairly indiscrete door I entered a listening room that's generally off limits, and there it was, playing softly away. There were no salespeople about, so for a good half hour I just played with the thing.
And, how was the music? It was.... right there. Live, transparent. All the good words. I have heard many expensive CD players in the $50 to $100,000 CDN range, coupled with some fairly kick-ass speakers, and this stuff could not compare. I don't even *like* Jazz, and there I was, absolutely enthraled.
One thing -- the speakers I listened to weren't by Sony. For whatever reason, Sony speakers have always been incredibly bad. If you listen to an SACD player, don't even bother if it's paired with their speakers.
At any rate. From Sony's point of view, the SACD format was invented to make digital sound more like vinyl -- brand new virgin vinyl, with none of the nasty drawbacks. CDs cannot compete. Nor can DVD-A, but that's another flame war.
The SACD-1 player has already been given the highest quality rating by every audio magazine I've been able to find. These are ratings that generally go to CD players (or turntables!) worth about 20 times more than the unit is going for.
This format rocks. It will also be compatible with CD players (you can play a hybrid SACD disc on a regular CD player, and you can play CDs on a SACD player... and they sound damn good). As for the price -- a player cost $5000 US last year, so this year's $1200 bodes well. Remember how expensive CD players were when they *first* came out? Anyone?
If you can't go and hear a SACD player any time soon, grab a copy of Stereophile from your library or zine stand -- each issue has good SACD coverage and real reviews. Also, if no one's mentioned this link, here's the Sony SACD Info page.
Slashdot Mirror
Another "P-Ink" that glows iridescently at the flick of a switch is, of course, cat urine.
Good suggestion. But you say...
"CBC is the Canadian government owned national broadcaster. "
That makes our dear CBC sound like a wing of Canada's Government, which it is not. CBC may be publicly funded, but it does have independance. There have been many times when CBC has been the loudest critic of Government actions, presenting the case with much less bias than the other media conglomerates that live here.
CBC is public broadcasting. That means, or it is supposed to mean, that the people of Canada own the broadcaster. I pay taxes to keep them on the air, and (for once) I'm very pleased to do so.
Perhaps your computer wasn't slow enough. I, with my incredible 8mhz Kaypro 2000+ laptop, did indeed watch space quest II render piece-by-piece on my 8-colour (actually 8 shades of blue) screen. I remember the wait times vividly, as you may imagine. The horizon would appear, then the trees, then the %#^$% maze that I was perpetually dying in, because I couldn't differentiate between two very similar shades of blue.
Strangely enough, I enjoyed it immensely.
My God... for those of you who've seen the article, isn't that a giant yellow jacket behind the middle chair? These guys really do work for Symantec.
On an vaguely related note, here's a suspicious screensnap from Konqueror's website. Note the Aqua, fellers... that's where the trouble begins!
I know that it seems impossible to design a website *without* purposefully working around browser inadequacies, but that's almost what we have to do.
As far as I'm aware, "browser compatibility tables" are artefacts of the past -- there's simply too many weird versions out there (and that's only considering Netscape 4!) to have a hope of covering it all. Besides, if we code around every single problem, we encourage users to stick with their current browsers for ever and ever, generally enshrining the errors for future posterity.
I have found that if you follow "generally accepted good coding practises", most modern browsers can take it. If they can't, the breakdown is not horrible -- not like the hacks of the 1990s that completely fly apart on Mozilla today.
If you perpetually correct for all of today's faults, you hold the web back. If you code for compliance with an eye out for any serious showstopping errors, you help the evolution continue... and that's something we really need.
It was bad enough that I had to worry about unexpected silicone ingredients in the opposite sex. Now I'll have to wonder if her skin came from a WORM...
I'm not sure why everyone is condemning HotBot's upgrade as a shift to "mere metasearch". The site was born out of Wired Mag's ancient search engine expose article, where they all decided Inktomi was the one to use. HotBot has been powered by Inktomi since day one, they're just offering other sources now.
While digging... near the Mexico City airport, crews found this skull, believed to be the oldest human skull ever found in the Americas.
Perhaps *now* the airlines will admit that interflight delays are getting out of hand?
I do remember this one from 1999, and have been keeping a distant (envious) watch on the technology. Original website was at Engineering System Co, a company that seems eternally poised to make the next big thing. A different spin on the helicopter specs can be seen at this wayback page from 2000... the four separate engines sound good.
So now it's over two years late, costs just as much (only now we're in a recession), and I still want one! A landing pad would look great on our back lawn.
I just saw the John de Lancie episode "Cui Bono" and was surprised to find that it was, well, okay. Not great, but also not as utterly rotten as the rest of Season 3 has been. For those of you keeping score, that's a *big* trend upwards. Sorbo actually shut up for large parts of the show, and the rest of the crew got to do actual stuff.
Also, Rev Bem is coming back this season. No clue if it's a guest appearance or a recurring role.
So maybe there's a tunnel at the end of... er, that is, a light at the end of the tunnel. We can hope.
I retail this product. It's called the SANcube. A Windows-Compatible variant is also available, but it appears to be a single-user Raid 0 only.
Could this technology be used to moderate slashdot posts, in a manner even more astonishingly random than before?
I mean, it's obviously in use in story-submission already. May as well be efficient.
The Canadian paper, the National Post, is reporting on a plan...
"The" Canadian Paper? Our country does have more than one, you know. Conrad Black wasn't quite that successful.
I retail ATI in Canada and they don't have any low-profile cards available for me, boxed or OEM. If they did, I'd be a happier retailer.
I forget the site for it though.
The Macquarium isn't just a site... it's an entire Open Directory Category!
Yeah, I'll say it's scary. According to the pictures, that fish is carrying cold hard cash -- as well as a recent issue of The Sunday Capital. Could this be the world's first upwardly mobile aquatic lifeform?
I emailed Thomas C. Greene about some nasty writing habits of his last year, and thanks to his outraged reply, I can report that he signs his name "T.G.". Maybe he's changed to signing "tcg" -- or maybe that poster ain't the real Tommy.
A couple of the new Epson inkjets feature a mixture of Pigment & Dye inks (previous Epson printers just used Dye).
The advantages of Pigment ink, aside from crisper black/colour, no bleeding, and 70 years of lightfastness, is that the cartridges last a lot longer. I have an Epson C80 which really does print out a thousand detailed sheets of black text in one go. I know that's not a lot compared to laser land, but it sure beats the rest of the consumer inkjet offerings. This technology has trickled down from their professional line of printers -- the C80 is very cheap. Inkjet vs. Laser could go the way of ATA vs. SCSI, in terms of the poorer technology improving so much that it's acceptable for most people.
Hang on just a minute --
1. Google gives us a large piece of the Internet, but not the whole thing.
2. Google's results can be quite fresh, but they're certainly not realtime.
Until technology can solve both of those problems, a delayed indexing system like Google's will never give us a full *or* reliable picture of the Internet -- only a partial sketch. The fact that the sketch is vastly better than any other Search Engine doesn't change this.
Meanwhile, the website statistics for my girlfriend's site display some very odd searching trends. A high number of people, in order to reach her site, were actually searching for "www.superchick.com" in the engines. These people had never learned how to manually enter a domain, and were in fact restricted to the matches that their Search Engine provided.
This jives with my own experiences while working for a local ISP. One fine spring day, I moved our "websearch" tool off our company's home page (used as a portal for our subscriber base). Within minutes, the tech support lines were ringing! Outraged and disoriented customers claimed that "the Internet" (their choice of words) was gone from our homepage, and that it was no longer possible for them to use the web. They too were doing all of their surfing from a search window.
This is the kind of "Google Effect" (/misnomer) that I find quite worrying, for if too many users begin to surf the web in this manner, they will only find sites that are in a Relevant Index. This seems to place far too much faith & responsibility on the Search Engines themelves.
-Joseph
I suppose all this technical talk is appropriate for where we are, but before the battle escalates further -- shouldn't some of you actually take a listen? This is not about numbers. Us humans hear in analogue. As a somewhat dramatic friend once said, "specifications... will never tell you how the violin actually sounds." And he was right.
I had the opportunity to listen to the first Sony SACD player to arrive in my province, when it passed through Vancouver on a Canadian tour. While wandering around at a high-end shop I heard this incredible Jazz music; following the sound through a fairly indiscrete door I entered a listening room that's generally off limits, and there it was, playing softly away. There were no salespeople about, so for a good half hour I just played with the thing.
And, how was the music? It was.... right there. Live, transparent. All the good words. I have heard many expensive CD players in the $50 to $100,000 CDN range, coupled with some fairly kick-ass speakers, and this stuff could not compare. I don't even *like* Jazz, and there I was, absolutely enthraled.
One thing -- the speakers I listened to weren't by Sony. For whatever reason, Sony speakers have always been incredibly bad. If you listen to an SACD player, don't even bother if it's paired with their speakers.
At any rate. From Sony's point of view, the SACD format was invented to make digital sound more like vinyl -- brand new virgin vinyl, with none of the nasty drawbacks. CDs cannot compete. Nor can DVD-A, but that's another flame war.
The SACD-1 player has already been given the highest quality rating by every audio magazine I've been able to find. These are ratings that generally go to CD players (or turntables!) worth about 20 times more than the unit is going for.
This format rocks. It will also be compatible with CD players (you can play a hybrid SACD disc on a regular CD player, and you can play CDs on a SACD player... and they sound damn good). As for the price -- a player cost $5000 US last year, so this year's $1200 bodes well. Remember how expensive CD players were when they *first* came out? Anyone?
If you can't go and hear a SACD player any time soon, grab a copy of Stereophile from your library or zine stand -- each issue has good SACD coverage and real reviews. Also, if no one's mentioned this link, here's the Sony SACD Info page.
And yes, you self-titled nerds: the technical whitepaper is there too.
-Joseph