*whoosh* I wrote my first SMP code in 2001, and it was the typical thing to do in scientific computing, had been for decades. Thus I occasionally like to comment on the recent years' "multicore" marketing phenomenon, where even some developers seem to think they have a completely new problem and they need completely new tools.
If you want to keep your ideas to yourselves, do not publish them. It's the best way to keep them safe. But once something is out there, it's out there.
Excellent idea! Perhaps his style is too close to David Tennant though, and they wanted something different. Also, Laurie is probably too old for a role that seems to be getting younger at each iteration.
I never said they were any different, there are probably just more of them. Even if you turn down the brightness, you're still staring at a light source, and with the brightness down, you might be straining more to read anyway.
So it is really about contrast, not brightness. A real ink stays black, whereas there's always light bleeding through the "black" of an LCD.
But thinking about it, there very well might be some differences. LCD monitors have a different color temperature than bed side lamps. Polarity might be an issue. Does an LCD monitor polarize the light? Reflected light on a page might be more scattered and less uniform. I really don't know.
It is probably only visible with TN panels, and even then not always. At the work I had a pretty basic panel at a relatively high brightness, due to the overall lighting levels, but at home I never see it. (My laptop is well dimmed, and my media center has a P-MVA panel.) So there's one more reason to avoid TN panels.
I've read technical articles and a 200-page novel on my N800, which has an LCD. In the past I've also read a novel on a laptop, which was not a particularly pleasant experience.
The main thing about the N800 display is that it's over 200 DPI, so it looks like proper text, whereas text on a regular computer LCD is either blocky or blurry. I think the latter (antialiasing, with or without subpixels) is the problem because our eyes cannot focus so well on something blurry. Of course, reading on the N800 requires a properly adjusted backlight, so I believe e-ink would be much better in practice.
Google is taking this new technology to amazing heights!
Actually, Google should probably sue them for making an "Android". After all, they did threaten the Finnish robotics company Zendroid on the same basis.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, I use the filesystem hierarchy as metadata: Artist/Album/Tracknumber.Title.ext. Metadata tags that happen to work are just a nice bonus, this way you don't have to rely on them. My music database is a list of paths, so I can use grep to find what I want. It's a very simple script to save these paths into one file per DVD, for example.
Well, Rhythmbox "Library" is nothing more than manually changable path to folder where all your music are stored. Then it does fast tag reading and uses kernel notification services to get new tracks when they are added. No special treatement, point to your music directory and it just works.
This is still a problem to me. Some of my music files are burned to DVDs, others are on external HDs. Not a unique scenario by any measures. Should I point the player to / then?
Actually, symbolic links should solve this, and I've already done it to help manage my music anyway. But it adds an extra stage of file management you must take care of, when changing your system. It's a solution to a problem that should not exist, and indeed does not exist on the kinds of players I like to use.
<rant>
In the good old days, people used to manage their files by using descriptive file names and sensible directory hierarchies. Nowadays it seems like people throw all their files in some random location, and let higher level software manage it all. It does not always work, particularly because you need descriptive metadata in the first place, and the same data could just as well be in the form of a directory/file hierarchy. Now get off my lawn!
</rant>
I work with sound effects and speech clips a lot, usually ones that I've been sent as part of a project, and one of the things I want to be able to do is play a bunch of short files quickly and easily, with no messing around. I used to use XMMS, but it kind of faded away. I use mocp a lot now, more recently audacious. Having to register something into a database when I only want to listen to it once just quickly to make sure the recording was okay, that's just a pain in the ass.
I have worked as a theatrical sound designer/technician, and I have also used XMMS/Audacious, even in the final performances in some cases. However, for the kind of working stages you describe, I often use mplayer. Besides simply playing some number of files after another, it has a simple playlist where you can move back and forth.
During a performance, you can pause mplayer when a file has finished (but not quite moved on to the next one). Then at your next cue, you can simply press enter to start the next track. In some ways this is more convenient than using any typical player, once you get the hang of it. It's harder to move further or backwards in the playlist, but it's not something you always need.
I currently use Herrie where I formerly used XMMS and Audacious. It is a light textmode player that does everything I want. In fact, I originally wrote a textmode frontend for XMMS/Audacious simply because it was more convenient to use that way. Later it turned out to have other uses, for example controlling my media machine via ssh from my work computer.
My main problem with most music player software today is the idea of a 'media library'. In order to play a file, you first have to put it in the library. I understand such a database has its benefits, but to me it is unnecessary complication of a simple operation. In fact, I do have a custom script for managing music files burnt to DVDs, but in the unix spirit I like to keep thing separate, so I am free to use different players.
I'm still looking for an A1138 for a reasonable price. I imagine fewer people know the number reference, so it must be cooler. (As for primality, both numbers have two prime factors, so that's a draw.)
Dunno about Intrinsity, but I feel bad about the other company Apple had bought, and this seems like a similar case.
PA Semi had developed a particularly power-efficient version of PowerPC. Something like a dual-core G4 or G5, except that it only consumed around 10 watts at 2 GHz. Including the integrated memory controller, etc. Who wouldn't want that? Well, Apple bought them, and thus we have not heard of their wonderful technology again. And if we do, it will only be available inside an Apple product.
I agree with the general idea. Open source happened largely because lots of amateurs had access to cheap machines. This is probably much more due to clones of IBM PC than the original, but Microsoft's effect is notable nevertheless. However, I'm pretty sure there were other, equally capable OS vendors at the time; for example the one that had actually written the DOS Microsoft sold to IBM, and the guy that missed the meeting with IBM. Then again, it's equally possible that this other vendor would have become equally evil.
It's easy for us to look at them now and claim to have been all visionary like "oo I never liked them I knew they were bad guys". Bullshit. You had a PC, and you loved it. You played games on it. You did *not* know that in the late 90s MS would become an industrial and political bully.
I did not exactly love my PC , but it was the best thing I could have at the moment. (It was a 286, while most of my fellow geeks had at least a 386, so they had access to much better software;) I remember when Digital announced the Alpha, and of course it was every geek's dream architecture, but completely out of our league as teenagers. The PC was the most affordable machine for somewhat serious computing.
However, I also remember when Windows 95 was announced. It was all oohs and aahs of marketing, and I did not see any technical improvement. Some of my geek friends realized this as well, others did not. Eventually, I moved from DOS and Windows 3.1 to Linux.
The various "scripting" languages have been moving towards VM architectures, and some are quite good, but none that I know of actually feature any kind of ahead-of-time compilation, even to bytecode. That includes Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and plenty of others.
Python is, by default, compiled to bytecode before execution. There are also third party compilers to native code.
It's April 2nd in Finland now, so I hope some of you might actually believe this. There is a guy called Alan Grant at CERN, he was one of my supervisors during my Summer Studentship in 2001. There is also the Jura mountain range that passes by CERN. I climbed up to the nearest summit one day. It's the mountain range that gives name to the prehistoric Jurassic period.
PS is a full programming language, as witnessed by those web servers and fractal generators that, I imagine, take ages to run on a printer. Thus PDF was originally created as a simpler page description language, but have you ever heard of PS exploits?
Slashdot Mirror
SMP doesn't necessarily mean multi-core.
That was kind of my point, as I had a dual P3 system way before this "multicore" stuff, and I knew it was not particularly new or special even then.
*whoosh* I wrote my first SMP code in 2001, and it was the typical thing to do in scientific computing, had been for decades. Thus I occasionally like to comment on the recent years' "multicore" marketing phenomenon, where even some developers seem to think they have a completely new problem and they need completely new tools.
Too bad multiprocessing did not exist back then, as Intel had yet to invent the Core.
I've had it with these motherfucking eels on this motherfucking hovercraft!
If you want to keep your ideas to yourselves, do not publish them. It's the best way to keep them safe. But once something is out there, it's out there.
Any true geek should have watched enough MacGyver to know that Murdoc is the bad guy.
I wonder what they're doing now: perhaps they just decided that i386 and "amd64" are different enough to serve their purpose.
They probably have something running on the PPC that powers Xbox 360.
No one can stop the x86 train, not even Intel.
Maybe not. But certainly some people are trying to strong-ARM the situation.
What people would those be? Not even IBM has that kind of POWER.
Excellent idea! Perhaps his style is too close to David Tennant though, and they wanted something different. Also, Laurie is probably too old for a role that seems to be getting younger at each iteration.
I never said they were any different, there are probably just more of them. Even if you turn down the brightness, you're still staring at a light source, and with the brightness down, you might be straining more to read anyway.
So it is really about contrast, not brightness. A real ink stays black, whereas there's always light bleeding through the "black" of an LCD.
But thinking about it, there very well might be some differences. LCD monitors have a different color temperature than bed side lamps. Polarity might be an issue. Does an LCD monitor polarize the light? Reflected light on a page might be more scattered and less uniform. I really don't know.
Polarization is indeed an issue, I used to see this a lot at my previous work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger's_brush
It is probably only visible with TN panels, and even then not always. At the work I had a pretty basic panel at a relatively high brightness, due to the overall lighting levels, but at home I never see it. (My laptop is well dimmed, and my media center has a P-MVA panel.) So there's one more reason to avoid TN panels.
I've read technical articles and a 200-page novel on my N800, which has an LCD. In the past I've also read a novel on a laptop, which was not a particularly pleasant experience.
The main thing about the N800 display is that it's over 200 DPI, so it looks like proper text, whereas text on a regular computer LCD is either blocky or blurry. I think the latter (antialiasing, with or without subpixels) is the problem because our eyes cannot focus so well on something blurry. Of course, reading on the N800 requires a properly adjusted backlight, so I believe e-ink would be much better in practice.
Google is taking this new technology to amazing heights!
Actually, Google should probably sue them for making an "Android". After all, they did threaten the Finnish robotics company Zendroid on the same basis.
As pointed out elsewhere in this thread, I use the filesystem hierarchy as metadata: Artist/Album/Tracknumber.Title.ext. Metadata tags that happen to work are just a nice bonus, this way you don't have to rely on them. My music database is a list of paths, so I can use grep to find what I want. It's a very simple script to save these paths into one file per DVD, for example.
Well, Rhythmbox "Library" is nothing more than manually changable path to folder where all your music are stored. Then it does fast tag reading and uses kernel notification services to get new tracks when they are added. No special treatement, point to your music directory and it just works.
This is still a problem to me. Some of my music files are burned to DVDs, others are on external HDs. Not a unique scenario by any measures. Should I point the player to / then?
Actually, symbolic links should solve this, and I've already done it to help manage my music anyway. But it adds an extra stage of file management you must take care of, when changing your system. It's a solution to a problem that should not exist, and indeed does not exist on the kinds of players I like to use.
<rant> In the good old days, people used to manage their files by using descriptive file names and sensible directory hierarchies. Nowadays it seems like people throw all their files in some random location, and let higher level software manage it all. It does not always work, particularly because you need descriptive metadata in the first place, and the same data could just as well be in the form of a directory/file hierarchy. Now get off my lawn! </rant>
I work with sound effects and speech clips a lot, usually ones that I've been sent as part of a project, and one of the things I want to be able to do is play a bunch of short files quickly and easily, with no messing around. I used to use XMMS, but it kind of faded away. I use mocp a lot now, more recently audacious. Having to register something into a database when I only want to listen to it once just quickly to make sure the recording was okay, that's just a pain in the ass.
I have worked as a theatrical sound designer/technician, and I have also used XMMS/Audacious, even in the final performances in some cases. However, for the kind of working stages you describe, I often use mplayer. Besides simply playing some number of files after another, it has a simple playlist where you can move back and forth.
During a performance, you can pause mplayer when a file has finished (but not quite moved on to the next one). Then at your next cue, you can simply press enter to start the next track. In some ways this is more convenient than using any typical player, once you get the hang of it. It's harder to move further or backwards in the playlist, but it's not something you always need.
I currently use Herrie where I formerly used XMMS and Audacious. It is a light textmode player that does everything I want. In fact, I originally wrote a textmode frontend for XMMS/Audacious simply because it was more convenient to use that way. Later it turned out to have other uses, for example controlling my media machine via ssh from my work computer.
My main problem with most music player software today is the idea of a 'media library'. In order to play a file, you first have to put it in the library. I understand such a database has its benefits, but to me it is unnecessary complication of a simple operation. In fact, I do have a custom script for managing music files burnt to DVDs, but in the unix spirit I like to keep thing separate, so I am free to use different players.
I'm still looking for an A1138 for a reasonable price. I imagine fewer people know the number reference, so it must be cooler. (As for primality, both numbers have two prime factors, so that's a draw.)
Dunno about Intrinsity, but I feel bad about the other company Apple had bought, and this seems like a similar case.
PA Semi had developed a particularly power-efficient version of PowerPC. Something like a dual-core G4 or G5, except that it only consumed around 10 watts at 2 GHz. Including the integrated memory controller, etc. Who wouldn't want that? Well, Apple bought them, and thus we have not heard of their wonderful technology again. And if we do, it will only be available inside an Apple product.
I agree with the general idea. Open source happened largely because lots of amateurs had access to cheap machines. This is probably much more due to clones of IBM PC than the original, but Microsoft's effect is notable nevertheless. However, I'm pretty sure there were other, equally capable OS vendors at the time; for example the one that had actually written the DOS Microsoft sold to IBM, and the guy that missed the meeting with IBM. Then again, it's equally possible that this other vendor would have become equally evil.
It's easy for us to look at them now and claim to have been all visionary like "oo I never liked them I knew they were bad guys". Bullshit. You had a PC, and you loved it. You played games on it. You did *not* know that in the late 90s MS would become an industrial and political bully.
I did not exactly love my PC , but it was the best thing I could have at the moment. (It was a 286, while most of my fellow geeks had at least a 386, so they had access to much better software ;) I remember when Digital announced the Alpha, and of course it was every geek's dream architecture, but completely out of our league as teenagers. The PC was the most affordable machine for somewhat serious computing.
However, I also remember when Windows 95 was announced. It was all oohs and aahs of marketing, and I did not see any technical improvement. Some of my geek friends realized this as well, others did not. Eventually, I moved from DOS and Windows 3.1 to Linux.
Look harder!
That's exactly why I got the piercings in the first place.
The various "scripting" languages have been moving towards VM architectures, and some are quite good, but none that I know of actually feature any kind of ahead-of-time compilation, even to bytecode. That includes Perl, Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and plenty of others.
Python is, by default, compiled to bytecode before execution. There are also third party compilers to native code.
Will MeeGo bring up the Linux OS static up on web sites in future?
Only on non-dynamic web sites.
It's April 2nd in Finland now, so I hope some of you might actually believe this. There is a guy called Alan Grant at CERN, he was one of my supervisors during my Summer Studentship in 2001. There is also the Jura mountain range that passes by CERN. I climbed up to the nearest summit one day. It's the mountain range that gives name to the prehistoric Jurassic period.
PS is a full programming language, as witnessed by those web servers and fractal generators that, I imagine, take ages to run on a printer. Thus PDF was originally created as a simpler page description language, but have you ever heard of PS exploits?
The obligatory XKCD is the obligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/703/