The previous rev of the eMac used a truly horrendous CRT--not even a Trinitron, just a cheap triangular dot pitch CRT. Basically, the same display as the original all-in-one iMac, if you know what that looks like, but a bit bigger and slightly flatter.
Nintendo had the biggest-selling console. Then the console market was flooded with systems, and Nintendo came out victorious, didn't they?
Well, no, they didn't. Because the competitors went after a different market.
Nintendo's Game Boy has the 12 year old kid market sewn up, but there are people like me who'd go for a system that offered something other than endless cutesy platform games.
Yes, OK, that's a slight overgeneralization, but believe me--I wanted something like a Game Boy Advance to replace my Atari Lynx. I read through the reviews of the best Game Boy Advance games at metacritic, and I could only find a couple I'd be at all interested in playing.
It's like the GameCube vs PS2: The only GameCube games I really want to play are available on the PS2 anyway. Maybe I'd like Zelda, but I'm quite happy with Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Rayman, and so on to fulfil my 3D platform/adventure needs.
No, and the iTunes store doesn't use plain MPEG-4 AAC; it uses an undocumented proprietary variant with digital restrictions management built in.
That's the big problem with the iTunes store for me--I have an MP3 player, not an iPod. So I'd rather buy LAME-encoded MP3s from emusic.com. Better sound quality, and I can listen to them without dropping $300 on a new portable device or re-encoding.
Another thing I find surprising is how many people are raving about the sound quality of AAC, when in my own tests it's significantly worse than MP3 encoded with LAME at the same average bitrate.
I don't mean subtly worse, either. I mean AAC is so awful you'd have to be deaf to not hear the distortion. If you want to verify for yourself, encode Fischerspooner's "Emerge", and listen to the section starting about 38 seconds in.
Yet loads of Mac users are deleting all their MP3s and re-ripping to AAC. Talk about a victory for Steve Jobs and Apple! Get everyone to put their music collection in MPEG-4 format, and you won't see them switching to Windows Media any time soon. I suspect this is a big part of the motivation behind the store, the iPod firmware update, and the new iTunes--get MPEG-4 out there before Microsoft can kill it.
...the code that SCO themselves shipped under the GPL, as part of their Caldera Linux distribution? If so, shouldn't they be suing themselves for damages?
I have a hard time believing a judge will accept the argument "Yeah, we shipped that code under the GPL ourselves, but we had no idea it was ours".
The way I see it, consumers are entirely to blame for the state of the software they run. By consumers, I mean people who whine about the crappiness of Windows, yet still keep running it.
Don't give me that "I need Windows" bull. I've never purchased Microsoft software in my life, I use no Microsoft software on my computer... yet strangely enough life goes on. I write documents, browse the web, swap photos, play games, make spreadsheets, do my taxes, just like anyone else.
There are far more reliable, fully functional alternatives to Windows out there. Either install Xandros, or buy a Mac. If you're not willing to do either of those things then just shut the hell up about software quality, because you obviously don't care enough to actually do anything about it. In fact, given that the alternatives to Microsoft on PC hardware would also make your machine run faster, save you money, and guard your privacy, it's hard to see what more inducement you could need to get off your ass, find that install CD, and spend a few days making the switch.
It seems to me that the whining is really saying "I wish the government would wave a magic wand and make Microsoft write software that doesn't suck". Well, real life doesn't work that way. You have to take responsibility yourself, be an informed and responsible person, and create the changes you want to see.
If my computer crashes, I just reset it and get back to work. I don't bother to investigate what caused the bug, to try to reproduce it, to contact the vendor (hah!) and try to work out the problem. Crashes occur much too frequently for that.
Gee, I wonder what operating system you're running...
Hmm, I was waiting for Solaris too. The original DVD release was out of print by the time the remake was announced, so I imagine Netflix found themselves with way too much demand.
Anyway, a friend bought me the Criterion Collection remastered special edition, so I don't care any more.
I also don't care about the Netflix allocation algorithm much. I have about 60 movies in my queue, and so long as they send me something from the queue whenever I send back a disc I really don't care too much what it is.
(The only exception is that we've been trying to watch every single Bond movie in sequence... but now we're stalled because "Live and Let Die" is unavailable, as in not even in Netflix' database.)
The Canon PowerShot S series cameras are small and robust, with a metal case and a lens that retracts flat into the body and is protected by a retracting cover. They produce excellent pictures. I have an S100, which I've just replaced with an S400 because I liked it so much. (The S400 is the newest 4 megapixel descendant of the S100.)
For your situation, I'd add on the appropriate waterproof case. I imagine a PowerShot in one of those would stand up to falling from a truck, being dropped in wet cement and hurriedly rinsed off with beer, and so on.
I like what I've seen of Ruby. There's just one snag: no UNICODE support except via libraries.
I already know Perl. I'd like to learn something cleaner, and Ruby looks like exactly what I'm looking for. However, I'm not prepared to put in effort learning yet another language that doesn't have native multilingual text support.
Doing everything via library calls to get UNICODE support is an ugly hack... and like I say, I know Perl, so my ugly hack requirements are already adequately met.
I'm sure a few people might do such a thing, just like a few people used to run System 6 on Mac emulators on the Atari ST and Amiga. Not enough to be significant, however.
I rip all my CD's at 256kps, which means most albums are about 120mb. Only being able to carry 1 or 2 albums is pitiful; I want more variety and selection.
Maybe you should learn about VBR. If you're ripping at 256kbps CBR you are wasting huge amounts of space.
It is quite possible to record with two microphones, play back with two sound emitters, and get incredibly realistic 3D sound. You don't need any fancy electronics. All you need is to place the microphones in the same positions as a pair of human ears--that is, on either side of something that sonically resembles a human head.
There are various head-like objects used. Some use a flat sound-absorbent panel; some use an artificial head with microphones embedded where the ear canals would be. Personally, since I need to do stuff on the cheap, I use an actual human head, with the microphones worn like Walkman earbuds. You get incredible 3D sound, and best of all you don't need to remove the head from the body or carry it around in your hands. The only downside is you need to try and keep it still.
Stereo uses a couple of microphones positioned a few meters apart, usually in a line in front of the performers. Your stereo loudspeakers are thus ideally positioned the same way, to get an accurate representation of the original sound.
The problem is that most listening these days is on headphones, except in your car where stereo imaging is the least of your problems... but music is still recorded as if everyone's listening on loudspeakers. I don't really understand why this is, other than ignorance and inertia.
Sound recorded for loudspeakers but listened to on headphones doesn't sound quite right. Often the sound appears to be inside your head, and it can be quite fatiguing to listen to. Real enthusiasts get high-end headphone amps, which bleed part of the audio signal across to the other side of the headphones in a moderately complicated frequency-dependent way, to make it sound more natural.
Once it became practical to use a real-time DSP to process stereo audio to account for your ears not being two meters apart, it soon became possible to process four or six audio signals rather than two, and map quadrophonic or 5.1 surround sound into something resembling binaural as well. It's kind of a kludge, but it can be pretty effective. The best systems filter the signals supposed to be "behind" you, to simulate the absorbance of your ears and to introduce the appropriate phase difference to enhance the left-right position and widen the soundfield.
My DVD player does 5.1 to stereo using SRS Labs technology, and a good surround soundtrack can be nearly as good as a binaural recording if you listen on headphones, or are seated exactly equidistant from the speakers.
...unless the document represents the changed opinions as the original author's intent.
If I release a piece of code under the GPL, I have to accept that someone may come along and make changes to it which I am completely opposed to for philosophical and ethical reasons--for instance, they might take my code and make it run on.NET.
Why shouldn't people be allowed to do the same with documentation? Unless they alter the documentation to lie that the new views are those of the original author, I don't see a problem.
Personally, I don't think misrepresentation is the real issue here at all. I think the FSF just wants to be able to ensure that its rants get distributed with all its software.
Well, two can play at that game--let's all write high quality documentation for free software, and add a paragraph of dirt and gossip about Richard Stallman as an invariant part of the documentation. We'll soon see that GFDL change...
Or just put a few comments in about how "GNU would never have been able to deliver an operating system if Linus Torvalds hadn't helped them out by writing Linux"... as invariant sections.
If you're waiting for Apple to port OS X to commodity PC hardware, don't hold your breath. If they do switch to x86, which I view as unlikely, it'll require an Apple x86 machine with an Apple BIOS.
Personally, I think it's more likely that they'd switch straight to a 64-bit CPU from AMD, but that's just me.
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The previous rev of the eMac used a truly horrendous CRT--not even a Trinitron, just a cheap triangular dot pitch CRT. Basically, the same display as the original all-in-one iMac, if you know what that looks like, but a bit bigger and slightly flatter.
Nintendo had the biggest-selling console. Then the console market was flooded with systems, and Nintendo came out victorious, didn't they?
Well, no, they didn't. Because the competitors went after a different market.
Nintendo's Game Boy has the 12 year old kid market sewn up, but there are people like me who'd go for a system that offered something other than endless cutesy platform games.
Yes, OK, that's a slight overgeneralization, but believe me--I wanted something like a Game Boy Advance to replace my Atari Lynx. I read through the reviews of the best Game Boy Advance games at metacritic, and I could only find a couple I'd be at all interested in playing.
It's like the GameCube vs PS2: The only GameCube games I really want to play are available on the PS2 anyway. Maybe I'd like Zelda, but I'm quite happy with Jak and Daxter, Ratchet and Clank, Rayman, and so on to fulfil my 3D platform/adventure needs.
No, and the iTunes store doesn't use plain MPEG-4 AAC; it uses an undocumented proprietary variant with digital restrictions management built in.
That's the big problem with the iTunes store for me--I have an MP3 player, not an iPod. So I'd rather buy LAME-encoded MP3s from emusic.com. Better sound quality, and I can listen to them without dropping $300 on a new portable device or re-encoding.
Another thing I find surprising is how many people are raving about the sound quality of AAC, when in my own tests it's significantly worse than MP3 encoded with LAME at the same average bitrate.
I don't mean subtly worse, either. I mean AAC is so awful you'd have to be deaf to not hear the distortion. If you want to verify for yourself, encode Fischerspooner's "Emerge", and listen to the section starting about 38 seconds in.
Yet loads of Mac users are deleting all their MP3s and re-ripping to AAC. Talk about a victory for Steve Jobs and Apple! Get everyone to put their music collection in MPEG-4 format, and you won't see them switching to Windows Media any time soon. I suspect this is a big part of the motivation behind the store, the iPod firmware update, and the new iTunes--get MPEG-4 out there before Microsoft can kill it.
Rouge software? Spammers selling cosmetics now?
Happens with my GSM1900 phone.
..."MTV Music Listener", and we can cut humans out of the loop entirely and save untold billions of brain cells.
...the code that SCO themselves shipped under the GPL, as part of their Caldera Linux distribution? If so, shouldn't they be suing themselves for damages?
I have a hard time believing a judge will accept the argument "Yeah, we shipped that code under the GPL ourselves, but we had no idea it was ours".
Doesn't work with Mozilla 1.4a on Windows.
To turn off the blurry tracers, go to the options page.
I have absolutely no idea why they made motion blur the default for Vice City. It gave me a headache before I managed to work out how to turn it off.
Isn't "Protein-Packed Hard Drive" the title of a gay porn movie?
The way I see it, consumers are entirely to blame for the state of the software they run. By consumers, I mean people who whine about the crappiness of Windows, yet still keep running it.
Don't give me that "I need Windows" bull. I've never purchased Microsoft software in my life, I use no Microsoft software on my computer... yet strangely enough life goes on. I write documents, browse the web, swap photos, play games, make spreadsheets, do my taxes, just like anyone else.
There are far more reliable, fully functional alternatives to Windows out there. Either install Xandros, or buy a Mac. If you're not willing to do either of those things then just shut the hell up about software quality, because you obviously don't care enough to actually do anything about it. In fact, given that the alternatives to Microsoft on PC hardware would also make your machine run faster, save you money, and guard your privacy, it's hard to see what more inducement you could need to get off your ass, find that install CD, and spend a few days making the switch.
It seems to me that the whining is really saying "I wish the government would wave a magic wand and make Microsoft write software that doesn't suck". Well, real life doesn't work that way. You have to take responsibility yourself, be an informed and responsible person, and create the changes you want to see.
Gee, I wonder what operating system you're running...
It wouldn't hurt to get a director too.
And if you then do
% apt-get install exim
you keep the performance and security increases, and get all the original functionality...
Hmm, I was waiting for Solaris too. The original DVD release was out of print by the time the remake was announced, so I imagine Netflix found themselves with way too much demand.
Anyway, a friend bought me the Criterion Collection remastered special edition, so I don't care any more.
I also don't care about the Netflix allocation algorithm much. I have about 60 movies in my queue, and so long as they send me something from the queue whenever I send back a disc I really don't care too much what it is.
(The only exception is that we've been trying to watch every single Bond movie in sequence... but now we're stalled because "Live and Let Die" is unavailable, as in not even in Netflix' database.)
The Canon PowerShot S series cameras are small and robust, with a metal case and a lens that retracts flat into the body and is protected by a retracting cover. They produce excellent pictures. I have an S100, which I've just replaced with an S400 because I liked it so much. (The S400 is the newest 4 megapixel descendant of the S100.)
For your situation, I'd add on the appropriate waterproof case. I imagine a PowerShot in one of those would stand up to falling from a truck, being dropped in wet cement and hurriedly rinsed off with beer, and so on.
Yeah, like a conventional photographic print of an image originally captured on a negative can't be undetectably altered.
Negative -> Scanner -> Photoshop -> Ofoto
I'm thinking about getting a Sony with a 480x320 screen, but even those are kinda small.
I can't believe nobody makes a handheld with a screen the size of a paperback book. I don't even care what it runs, so long as it's not WinCE...
I like what I've seen of Ruby. There's just one snag: no UNICODE support except via libraries.
I already know Perl. I'd like to learn something cleaner, and Ruby looks like exactly what I'm looking for. However, I'm not prepared to put in effort learning yet another language that doesn't have native multilingual text support.
Doing everything via library calls to get UNICODE support is an ugly hack... and like I say, I know Perl, so my ugly hack requirements are already adequately met.
I'm sure a few people might do such a thing, just like a few people used to run System 6 on Mac emulators on the Atari ST and Amiga. Not enough to be significant, however.
Maybe you should learn about VBR. If you're ripping at 256kbps CBR you are wasting huge amounts of space.
It is quite possible to record with two microphones, play back with two sound emitters, and get incredibly realistic 3D sound. You don't need any fancy electronics. All you need is to place the microphones in the same positions as a pair of human ears--that is, on either side of something that sonically resembles a human head.
There are various head-like objects used. Some use a flat sound-absorbent panel; some use an artificial head with microphones embedded where the ear canals would be. Personally, since I need to do stuff on the cheap, I use an actual human head, with the microphones worn like Walkman earbuds. You get incredible 3D sound, and best of all you don't need to remove the head from the body or carry it around in your hands. The only downside is you need to try and keep it still.
Stereo uses a couple of microphones positioned a few meters apart, usually in a line in front of the performers. Your stereo loudspeakers are thus ideally positioned the same way, to get an accurate representation of the original sound.
The problem is that most listening these days is on headphones, except in your car where stereo imaging is the least of your problems... but music is still recorded as if everyone's listening on loudspeakers. I don't really understand why this is, other than ignorance and inertia.
Sound recorded for loudspeakers but listened to on headphones doesn't sound quite right. Often the sound appears to be inside your head, and it can be quite fatiguing to listen to. Real enthusiasts get high-end headphone amps, which bleed part of the audio signal across to the other side of the headphones in a moderately complicated frequency-dependent way, to make it sound more natural.
Once it became practical to use a real-time DSP to process stereo audio to account for your ears not being two meters apart, it soon became possible to process four or six audio signals rather than two, and map quadrophonic or 5.1 surround sound into something resembling binaural as well. It's kind of a kludge, but it can be pretty effective. The best systems filter the signals supposed to be "behind" you, to simulate the absorbance of your ears and to introduce the appropriate phase difference to enhance the left-right position and widen the soundfield.
My DVD player does 5.1 to stereo using SRS Labs technology, and a good surround soundtrack can be nearly as good as a binaural recording if you listen on headphones, or are seated exactly equidistant from the speakers.
...unless the document represents the changed opinions as the original author's intent.
.NET.
If I release a piece of code under the GPL, I have to accept that someone may come along and make changes to it which I am completely opposed to for philosophical and ethical reasons--for instance, they might take my code and make it run on
Why shouldn't people be allowed to do the same with documentation? Unless they alter the documentation to lie that the new views are those of the original author, I don't see a problem.
Personally, I don't think misrepresentation is the real issue here at all. I think the FSF just wants to be able to ensure that its rants get distributed with all its software.
Well, two can play at that game--let's all write high quality documentation for free software, and add a paragraph of dirt and gossip about Richard Stallman as an invariant part of the documentation. We'll soon see that GFDL change...
Or just put a few comments in about how "GNU would never have been able to deliver an operating system if Linus Torvalds hadn't helped them out by writing Linux"... as invariant sections.
If you're waiting for Apple to port OS X to commodity PC hardware, don't hold your breath. If they do switch to x86, which I view as unlikely, it'll require an Apple x86 machine with an Apple BIOS.
Personally, I think it's more likely that they'd switch straight to a 64-bit CPU from AMD, but that's just me.