I both buy and sell on eBay. I've stopped listing auctions with the BuyItNow! option because too many of my auctions have been ended when a brand new bidder (i.e. someone who joined eBay within the last couple of days) comes and uses BuyItNow! to end the auction, then disappears completely and is never heard from/never logs into eBay again. Negative feedback doesn't help in this case, because these bidders inevitably have a feedback of zero or at best one and don't care if they lose one point.
Even without BuyItNow, I've had a number of auctions close and then never heard from the high bidder again, forcing me to relist and costing me time and money. In the worst case, one of my auctions closed at just over $300, the buyer e-mailed me a simply said "I changed my mind I don't want it sorry" and when I left negative feedback saying so, I of course got the retaliatory "FRAUD! Took my money and never delivered!" feedback. Legal action got the feedback removed, but that cost me as well.
I think that eBay should require a bank account number as a pre-requisite for buying or bidding. You agree when you join that if you default on a bid or if you are accused by n people of fraud, your assets will be frozen until the situation can be resolved and those involved can get the money owed to them.
I use a lot of "conversational no-ops" when I converse in e-mail or I/M and Alice seems completely unable to handle these. Sentences like:
"Okay, so who is Bob?"
"Yeah, I was thinking it was about time to try it."
"Nah, I don't think you're right."
"Nice day outside, eh?"
Alice invariably splits these at the comma. If the "no-op" word is at the beginning of a sentence, Alice will completely lose track of the conversation on the clause after the comma. If the "no-op" word is at the end of a sentence (like the last example), Alice handles the first part of the sentence right and then goes way wierd on me when trying to handle the last word.
This happened to me on the first sentence of the conversation. Alice said:
>What do you do in your spare time?
I said:
"Well, mostly drink and try to get laid."
Alice split the sentence at the comma, got completely lost and handled both parts of the sentence incorrectly.
*bzzzzt* this judge things it's a computer, and not much better than Eliza.
Why do you say that GNOME is dying? Is the code somehow becoming less functional? That would be a first!
YES, the GNOME code is becoming less functional. I wasn't the biggest fan of GNOME 1.0, but it worked better for me than any subsequent release or patchwork CVS grab of GNOME. On my machines at least, every time I play with GNOME it seems *less* stable and *more* resource hungry. GNOME is definitely going in directions that I had hoped it wouldn't go in. I'm not speaking as a developer, I haven't done any GNOME development at all. I'm speaking as a prospective user who remembers when Gtk applications seemed like the *more* stable of the bunch.
A few years ago, it was a toss-up between what seemed like a resource-hungry KDE 1.x and an unstable GNOME 1.x and everyone was wondering who would end up the de-facto standard. Today, for better or for worse, there is only one free Unix desktop de-facto and that is KDE, for obvious reasons -- people are having less and less success using GNOME as a desktop in real-world environments, while KDE continues to become more and more usable by the day and memory, hard drive space and CPU power on commodity machines are cheaper than ever.
Probably I will be moderated to "-10 Anti-GNU Asshole" for saying that, but it has to be said again and again until I can accept it, and others may as well do the same. I can't give you any specific reasons why I and others sense that GNOME seems to have been its own worst enemy, but one definitely gets that feeling more and more with each checkout.
Don't switch too fast. IBM's other drive lines are still some of the best in the business, including 60GXP drives of similar capacities.
Meanwhile, Maxtor's drive failure rate in my experience is nothing wonderful, and while IBM will switch every one of your IBM drives that fails quickly and without complaint, Maxtor is *much* harder to work with when something fails, especially if it fails repeatedly.
One or two unreliable products backed by incredible service may be better (especially for the little guy) than a slightly less unreliable product with problematic service. Just my experience.
I've only seen a couple of consumer "photo printers" but they were 300 dpi with a 4-color process -- basically really poor ink-jet printers that could only print on 4x5 paper -- which results in output at about 75dpi, basically very poor and fuzzy.
With a 2880dpi inkjet using 4-color, you get about 500-600 dpi effective res, which is enough not to dampen the resolution of the camera.
1. Photo printers are crap, most only print at 300dpi -- no way that will look like a real photo! What you want is a nice inkjet (2880 dpi Epson or HP) and some high-quality paper (glossy photo paper or glossy plastic film). My 8x10's printed this way impress the HELL out of my shutterbug friends and look MUCH better than any 8x10's you can get done commercially -- only those friends who self-develop manage better prints.
2. Your DV camcorder does not take 4 megapixel shots. My digital camera does, meaning I can get lots of detail into an 8x10 photo, while you would get nice blurs at that size, especially with wide-angle or distance shots.
Don't forget, they have had a lot of name recognition for "instant photos" on the world market. They could have had a big jump on the rest when it came to marketing digital camera technology.
That's why I bought a Polaroid digital camera a few years ago when I was looking that (at the time) cost me $350.00. I figured that if anyone was going to take care to make a nice digital camera it would be Polaroid, considering the importance of their name and their stake in instant photography. I had been a long time Polaroid film camera user, and felt like I'd be willing to pay a little more (once again) for someone who did instant (this time digital) photography properly.
The camera was a total piece of 1-megapixel-shit. It took horrible, grainy, blurry pictures whose colors bled into each other. The chromatic aberration was something to behold, the hue reproduction was nasty (everything was brown!), the flash was weak, and it would eat a set of lithium AA batteries in only about 10 minutes of use. The worst part of it was that the construction was horribly cheap -- battery and connector doors were like parts of a McDonald's happy meal toy -- made of thin, brittle plastic and held in place by friction alone.
Figuring that maybe I had just been unlucky and got ahold of a lemon or a preproduction model or a customer return or something, I took it back and exchanged it for another. Same deal. I was about to give up on digital photography. It still hadn't occurred to me that Polaroid was at fault for putting out a truly lousy product.
Then I had a chance to work with a friend's Olympus digital camera in the same price range. It took great pictures that really completely outdid 35mm consumer-level products. Compared to the Polaroid camera I had bought, it had a similar 1-megapixel resolution, had more features, had removable/expandable memory (via SmartMedia), was built very solidly, and was about the same price as the Polaroid with batteries lasting about four times longer.
I bought the Olympus camera and was thrilled at the first download of photos, which were TRULY great (esp. the macro shots) and was able to compare and see just how awful the Polaroid's photos were.
Since then, a number of friends who were considering Polaroid digital cameras have looked at my early shots and decided to buy Olympus instead. And last year, when I wanted to upgrade to a higher resolution camera to get 8x10 photos out of it, I ended up going with a Nikon Coolpix without even considering Polaroid after using their film cameras for years.
With their initial foray into digital, they lost me and many of my friends as customers. Too bad they didn't take the technology more seriously.
Most of my friends have 300-600 CDs. I've got 400 here. Furthermore, where are you getting an average of 8 songs per CD? A sampling of 10 of my CDs (admittedly small sample, but sounds right) gives me an average of 11 songs per disc. Maybe we just like different genres of music?
I don't have mine all to MP3 either (I've scripted up for it and started the process a couple of times, but then LAME comes out with something new that sounds better and I start all over...) but thats an estimated 4,400 MP3's for me, and I don't consider myself a big music junkie...
I just have a collection that I've been building since the late '80s, that's all. Someone who's bought one CD a week for a decade has 520+ CDs now. That's no stretch of the imagination, it sounds very reasonable to me.
The anti-piracy assholes are getting out of control. I don't mind buying software or music, but I'm getting tired of having to defend my 400+ CDs or 200+ games every time the subject comes up. If nobody's going to believe that I bought them anyway, I wish I had just copied them from the beginning, god knows I'd be a lot richer right now.
Yikes... 2.4.11 bugs, 2.4.12 freezes, time for -ac
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Kernel 2.4.12 Released
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· Score: 2
I had been bullish on the Linus+AA kernels (2.4.10 ran pretty well with week-long uptimes) but 2.4.11 had the symlink thing and only got 8 hours up before 2.4.12, which just locked hard under load after only about 4 hours.
I guess it's time to hit 2.4.10-ac11 and see what Alan+Rik can do for me. The 2.4 series so far has been a crap shoot... I wonder if they can save it before 2.4.15-20 or so?
My vote (I don't know these people so it's by no means binding): Linus starts 2.5 and leaves this 2.4 nonsense behind (sooner we get a 2.6 the better) and Alan makes a big, ugly change to allow user-select at compile time of Rik's VM vs. AA VM. Both Rik and AA then both get to keep going nuts trying to keep the 2.4 boxes up...
Woah... Don't be under the impression that AMD and Intel CPUs are "the same architecture" -- they are radically different, they just happen to share the same instruciton set... This is a huge difference.
Say you come up with a "scale factor" of 1.4 (like you did). This only applies accurately to one facet of the comparison. For example, it may be accurate for integer performance, but woefully inaccurate for floating point performance, cache performance, and memory bandwidth capability.
Make no mistake, the Athlon CPU and the Intel P4 are *different CPU architectures* from different companies and though they can execute the same instructions, each of those instructions will have different performance characteristcs and impacts on each of the two chips.
That is why, even with a "scale factor", MHz is meaningless between AMD and Intel. In fact, it's even meaningless between P4 and P3, both Intel chips. Intel has pulled a neat trick in getting the public to buy CPUs like they buy light bulbs -- based on a single number.
Perhaps what AMD *should* do is re-engineer things a little at the "edges" of the Athlon core so that they can run the Athlon 1400 MHz core using, say, a 4x external multiplier. Then, they could claim to have a 5.6 GHz chip without having to redesign the bulk of the core, thus beating Intel at its own game.
Or, we could just (as so many have now suggested) ignore MHz altogether...
No, clock cycles do not mean anything about performance to "some talented computer users." Here's why, using CPUs other than AthlonXP and Pentium4 so as not to inflame anyone:
The old Intel 8-bit CPU used in PC/XT machines ran at 4.77 MHz (4,770,000 clock cycles per second) but this does *not* mean that it could do 4,770,000 *things* per second, because each time it needed to execute an instruction, it took several (i.e. more than one) clock cycles to do so. Furthermore, the largest numbers it could operate on natively were generally 8-bits long -- a 32-bit calculation, for example, required user code to complete, which of course meant many, many more cycles.
The Hitachi 6309 CPU of the same time period, by comparison, ran at 2.0 MHz (2,000,000 cycles per second), but was **MUCH** faster for the same types of tasks than the Intel 8-bit CPU because it could *often* finish a complete instruction in only one clock cycle and because it had 16-bit registers and a 32-bit register and could thus do MANY types of math *natively*, in just one or several cycles, that the Intel CPU needed user code (and thus, hundreds or thousands of cycles) to complete.
Because of these types of _architectural_ differences, clock cycles have little or nothing to do with the real speeds of different chips performing real-world tasks (which, for gamers, includes things like Quake 3). In fact, clock cycles and MHz are *the same thing*, as MHz on a CPU simply means "number, in millions, of cycles per second."
You will find no statistical correlation between the *actual* clock speed on an AthlonXP and each of the benchmarks vs., say, a Pentium4 at 1800 MHz. Yes, one is running at ~1,500,000,000 cycles/second and one is running at ~1,800,000,000 cycles per second, but that doesn't tell you how many cycles each one is spending doing different types of tasks or (as is often the case) sitting around waiting for data from the rest of the system or from the bus.
NewtonOS 2.1 + HyperNewt is what you just described, in fairly precise detail.
There is still nothing on the market, PC-wise or PDA-wise, to compete with what the EMate and the Newton 2x00 series accomplished in terms of usability, intuitiveness and productivity. Too bad Apple killed them.
For a while, someone was working on a Linux-based replacement but it doesn't look like that project is going anywhere at the moment...
I've got two DTLA-307045 (75GXP, 45GB, IIRC) that have been in use for about a year now. When I first connected them up, they were both showing read errors and sounding like hell right out of the box. I checked the supply voltage and connectors and replaced the UDMA cable; all seemed good. I was about to RMA both of them when the new 550W power supply I'd ordered arrived (the old one on this box was an 'AMD-certified' 400W supply).
As luck would have it, I decided to wire up the 550W supply before sending the IBM drives back. Once I did, the drives formatted without further read errors and have been in service ever since without problems, streaming video to capacity about twice a day at around 12MB/sec. The other drives in the system (2xMaxtor 40GB drives) didn't seem to have the same trouble with the old power supply when all four drives were installed.
The system is an Athlon (Thunderbird) at 1GHz with 768MB RAM and a GeForce2 card, plus some video editing equipment, maybe enough to cause some strain on the 400W supply that wasn't serious enough to bug other equipment. My sense is that the IBM drives may be much more sensitive to power fluctuations or undervoltage than the Maxtor drives, which can be a problem these days with most users running at least one large CPU (Athlon, P4) and one heavy-duty video controller (GeForce2, GeForce3) on smallish (250W-300W) power supplies.
Of course, this wouldn't explain failures on larger installations with enterprise-class hardware, so all bets are off...
I'm not familiar enough with the "real" Aqua products to understand what just went down here.
It sounds to me like Apple did say it was okay to make an Aqua-like Mozilla -- but only using the "real" Apple tools, and therefore (purely my extrapolation) for Mac OS X users only. Aqua look-and-feel through "emulation" is still strictly forbidden.
Yes?
If this is the case, then the Slashdot was not overreacting at all -- it's still a "legitimate Aqua" sues "homebrew Aqua look" issue in which all non-MacOS users are forbidden from using nice shiny sea-blue widgets, etc.
Caldera OpenLinux and the KDE project have two major things in common.
1) Both have been savagely attacked by Slashdot readers and members of the OSS community. Half were upset at KDE's licensing/GPL options because KDE wasn't make-a-buck friendly for companies wanting more restrictive licenses and retail presence. Meanwhile, the other half are upset at Caldera's licensing/GPL options because Caldera is making-a-buck with more restrictive licenses and retail presence. Neither is violating anyone else's license. You can never win.
2) Both Caldera OpenLinux and KDE are superior products to other alternatives. KDE just works (unlike GNOME, which is *still* a hodgepodge that varies according to distributor and is difficult to get working in the real world, even from Ximian). Similarly, I used Caldera OpenLinux on my own systems and on those I administer from version 1.2 until version 2.4 specificially because of the quality of the product. OpenLinux 1.3 was the most usable distribution of its era, bar none, and I tried them all. I've finally switched away to Red Hat 7.1 recently when needing to upgrade from eDesktop 2.4 because of mild discomfort about these licensing issues, but it was a tough decision.
Red Hat 7.1 doesn't come close. As I was evaluating options, I also tried Debian 2.2, Corel 2.0, Slackware 8, S.u.S.E. 7.2 and Mandrake 8.0.Each had its own strenghths and weaknesses... but nothing compared to the user experience with eDesktop 2.4. If the current Caldera release is similar in any way to their past releases it, like KDE, will just work out of the box -- and the user won't have to worry about a lot of those little annoying details that typically mar Linux use (broken printcap after install, broken XF86Config after install, misconfigured services, etc., etc., etc.)
I think Caldera's OpenLinux and KDE are two of the most underappreciated products to have come out of the open source community, and it's a shame.
Same benefit. Third nipple == more food for the little 'uns.
Re:The views of a Muslim in NY
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More WTC News
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Thank god someone has said this.
Too many Americans have no idea what "Islam" is or what "Muslim" means -- they only see sensational media images of machine-gun-toting four-year-olds that are designed to get ratings.
What this person says is true: Jews, Christians and Muslims all pray to the same God. I do not mean this in some literary, allusory sense; I mean it literally. Most Christians know enough history to understand the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Most Christians in the western world do not realize, however, that a similar historical closeness exists between these two and Islam. The three religions are as family, and they do share the same God, no matter how they pronounce that God's name in their own language.
Furthermore, the basic tenets of all three religions include a respect for human life. Don't be fooled by people who use Islam as an excuse for violence; they are just as misguided as the Catholic inquisitors were hundreds of years ago.
Please, do not hate your Islamic or Arabic neighbors in the US, and please do not hate those in other countries based solely on religious or ethnic origin either. Do not hate, period. Desire instead to compassionately and methodically stamp out violence wherever it exists in the world and through whatever means it occurs (these means to not always consist of physical force).
I guess that's my rant. It's been smouldering for two days...
Re:Rotten dot com expresses all of our feelings:
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More WTC News
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You've been working with computers too long. Think executable as in executioner (a.k.a. e-chair guy) and you'll get it.
Being one who likes to try new things and who already uses fully AA KDE as my desktop, I thought it would be a good thing to download this and try it out.
But it only seems to anti-alias the text on buttons and in menus, not in text input or output panes!? So basically, it anti-aliases the parts of your applications that you look at least.
If your neighbor was only a few hundred cells big, it'd be fine to kill 'em off. Nobody thinks about killing a mouse, yet a mouse is infinitely more complex than a human embryo, with a bigger brain and more feelings to boot.
Treating an embryo as a human because it has "potential" is ridiculous. Why don't we just execute all humans because they have the "potential" to become murderers or guarantee everyone a seven-figure salary because the have the "potential" to be a CEO? This is reality. Potential doesn't count unless you start giving aid and punishment based on "potential" (which is what we're about to do -- just look at what's done in the name of crime prevention [DMCA!]).
Things are what they are. Potential is a drunken wish at best, an excuse for the totalitarian at worst. An embryo is like a fly: simple, disposable life. Anyone who equates killing an embryo with killing a 1-year-old is a reactionary living in a politically correct world.
The definition of PDA == organizer is far too restrictive. After all, PDA is supposed to be a 'personal digital assistant' or 'personal data assistant' or something else involving 'personal' and 'assistant.'
An assitant assists, in whatever a person needs done with data when on the move. That does not mean calendar, contacts and to-do for every person; some people do other stuff with data and with their lives. Should they not have PDAs? The Palm crowd especially seem violently opposed to devices assisting anyone but executives who have too many meetings to keep. I for one am glad that the PocketPC has become more flexible, so that it can assist everyone to some extent, rather than only assisting the rich, anal executive in the expensive suit.
Keep your Palm, but I have no use for it. I will, however, continue to use PocketPC/WindowsCE.
You're right, I've got a lot of old data but mine is all on DDS -- the rest is people bringing me still image or video data on these formats (i.e. Zip, QIC-6150, 8mm!) I've got to get a 250 Zip to replace the 100 Zip. The QIC drive rarely gets used these days (though I did have someone last Friday) but Zip and 8mm are still heavily used.
The CD-R drive is still there because I burn at least a hundred a week and I don't want to kill the new DVD-R (*grrrrr*) with that workload.
The two optical drives are connected because I'm working with someone using a large set of data which has been stored over the years that way: for each disc containing database text, there is a second, matching disc containing the related image data. To get at the stuff seamlessly, both must be mounted!
The scanners are both used very heavily so I'm not ready to do away with either one yet. The 300dpi unit is actually much faster at 300dpi (it "starts" a scan quicker, if that means anything). The drives could (admittedly) be replaced by a newer drive configuration (I have a pair of 75GB SCSI waiting to replace all), but I keep putting it off and depending on my DAT24 backups because the move will be a pain and will shut me down (by completely occupying my attention and waiting for everything to copy) for a day or two while I make the switch.
I do have a CF/SmartMedia reader because I get digital camera stuff in here all the time, too. Unfortunately, it's on the parallel port.:P
IDE is clumsy and slow compared to SCSI when you start to get many devices in the same machine.
I have a 3-channel LVD SCSI controller in my video system and it's talking to devices of all vintages:
1) Three 18.2GB Barracuda LVD drives in a RAID-0.
2) Four 9.1GB Micropolis UW drives in a RAID-0.
3) 8x CD-R (not CD-RW) drive.
4) Brand new DVD-R drive (whoopee!)
5) Two 1.3GB 5.25" Magneto-Optical drives.
6) 7/14GB 8mm tape drive.
7) 12/24GB 4mm tape drive.
8) Very old (but needed) Archive 2150S (QIC-150).
9) 100 MB Zip drive.
10) 300 DPI scanner (for rough stuff).
11) 1200 DPI scanner (for more important stuff).
The system lives in a server case with dual 450W power supplies, so of these devices, only the two optical drives and the two scanners are external. There are only three cables inside the case for the lot. Theoretically, there are 28 more SCSI IDs available for use.
Now, the nice thing about this is that I can have damn near all of them running at the same time without any appreciable slowdown -- something that never happens on my "play" system with IDE drives.
On my IDE system, I've got two hard drives, a CD-RW and an IDE tape, and the IDE channels often seem to slow each other down and fight for control when I start to burn, backup, and do lots of disk I/O at the same time. I've been told that this is because a single IDE interface doesn't do concurrent access to both drives.
Either way, I love using the SCSI system. It's an I/O monster. And I love being able to just hang whatever kind of device I need to use off of the external connector and know with reasonable certainty that Linux will support it. Long live SCSI.
Hmmm... Everyone I know pronounces it SCSI, too, but 'secsi' might not be a bad idea. After all, SCSI evolved from SASI (Shugart Associates System Interface) which is pronounced "sassy" if I remember correctly.
"sexy and sassy" go together better than "scuzzy and sassy" in my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
What about all of the bad buyers?
I both buy and sell on eBay. I've stopped listing auctions with the BuyItNow! option because too many of my auctions have been ended when a brand new bidder (i.e. someone who joined eBay within the last couple of days) comes and uses BuyItNow! to end the auction, then disappears completely and is never heard from/never logs into eBay again. Negative feedback doesn't help in this case, because these bidders inevitably have a feedback of zero or at best one and don't care if they lose one point.
Even without BuyItNow, I've had a number of auctions close and then never heard from the high bidder again, forcing me to relist and costing me time and money. In the worst case, one of my auctions closed at just over $300, the buyer e-mailed me a simply said "I changed my mind I don't want it sorry" and when I left negative feedback saying so, I of course got the retaliatory "FRAUD! Took my money and never delivered!" feedback. Legal action got the feedback removed, but that cost me as well.
I think that eBay should require a bank account number as a pre-requisite for buying or bidding. You agree when you join that if you default on a bid or if you are accused by n people of fraud, your assets will be frozen until the situation can be resolved and those involved can get the money owed to them.
I use a lot of "conversational no-ops" when I converse in e-mail or I/M and Alice seems completely unable to handle these. Sentences like:
"Okay, so who is Bob?"
"Yeah, I was thinking it was about time to try it."
"Nah, I don't think you're right."
"Nice day outside, eh?"
Alice invariably splits these at the comma. If the "no-op" word is at the beginning of a sentence, Alice will completely lose track of the conversation on the clause after the comma. If the "no-op" word is at the end of a sentence (like the last example), Alice handles the first part of the sentence right and then goes way wierd on me when trying to handle the last word.
This happened to me on the first sentence of the conversation. Alice said:
>What do you do in your spare time?
I said:
"Well, mostly drink and try to get laid."
Alice split the sentence at the comma, got completely lost and handled both parts of the sentence incorrectly.
*bzzzzt* this judge things it's a computer, and not much better than Eliza.
YES, the GNOME code is becoming less functional. I wasn't the biggest fan of GNOME 1.0, but it worked better for me than any subsequent release or patchwork CVS grab of GNOME. On my machines at least, every time I play with GNOME it seems *less* stable and *more* resource hungry. GNOME is definitely going in directions that I had hoped it wouldn't go in. I'm not speaking as a developer, I haven't done any GNOME development at all. I'm speaking as a prospective user who remembers when Gtk applications seemed like the *more* stable of the bunch.
A few years ago, it was a toss-up between what seemed like a resource-hungry KDE 1.x and an unstable GNOME 1.x and everyone was wondering who would end up the de-facto standard. Today, for better or for worse, there is only one free Unix desktop de-facto and that is KDE, for obvious reasons -- people are having less and less success using GNOME as a desktop in real-world environments, while KDE continues to become more and more usable by the day and memory, hard drive space and CPU power on commodity machines are cheaper than ever.
Probably I will be moderated to "-10 Anti-GNU Asshole" for saying that, but it has to be said again and again until I can accept it, and others may as well do the same. I can't give you any specific reasons why I and others sense that GNOME seems to have been its own worst enemy, but one definitely gets that feeling more and more with each checkout.
Don't switch too fast. IBM's other drive lines are still some of the best in the business, including 60GXP drives of similar capacities.
Meanwhile, Maxtor's drive failure rate in my experience is nothing wonderful, and while IBM will switch every one of your IBM drives that fails quickly and without complaint, Maxtor is *much* harder to work with when something fails, especially if it fails repeatedly.
One or two unreliable products backed by incredible service may be better (especially for the little guy) than a slightly less unreliable product with problematic service. Just my experience.
I've only seen a couple of consumer "photo printers" but they were 300 dpi with a 4-color process -- basically really poor ink-jet printers that could only print on 4x5 paper -- which results in output at about 75dpi, basically very poor and fuzzy.
With a 2880dpi inkjet using 4-color, you get about 500-600 dpi effective res, which is enough not to dampen the resolution of the camera.
Okay, listen to this, naysayer, and see if you can figure it out.
I use Linux.
I have used Linux since 1993.
I have to work.
Work uses Windows.
I have to bring work home.
Linux can't open many Windows files.
I have to keep buying Windows.
I like games.
There aren't many Linux games.
There are many Windows games.
I have to keep buying Windows.
Windows is expensive.
I don't want to keep buying Windows.
Software is software.
I have nothing against games companies.
If Linux will run games, I will be happy.
Data is data.
I have nothing against data made with Windows.
If Linux will open all data, I will be happy.
Okay? I want to work and play like a human being. I also want to use Linux. So shoot me. Why don't you go and hide in a bunker in Montana?
1. Photo printers are crap, most only print at 300dpi -- no way that will look like a real photo! What you want is a nice inkjet (2880 dpi Epson or HP) and some high-quality paper (glossy photo paper or glossy plastic film). My 8x10's printed this way impress the HELL out of my shutterbug friends and look MUCH better than any 8x10's you can get done commercially -- only those friends who self-develop manage better prints.
2. Your DV camcorder does not take 4 megapixel shots. My digital camera does, meaning I can get lots of detail into an 8x10 photo, while you would get nice blurs at that size, especially with wide-angle or distance shots.
Don't forget, they have had a lot of name recognition for "instant photos" on the world market. They could have had a big jump on the rest when it came to marketing digital camera technology.
That's why I bought a Polaroid digital camera a few years ago when I was looking that (at the time) cost me $350.00. I figured that if anyone was going to take care to make a nice digital camera it would be Polaroid, considering the importance of their name and their stake in instant photography. I had been a long time Polaroid film camera user, and felt like I'd be willing to pay a little more (once again) for someone who did instant (this time digital) photography properly.
The camera was a total piece of 1-megapixel-shit. It took horrible, grainy, blurry pictures whose colors bled into each other. The chromatic aberration was something to behold, the hue reproduction was nasty (everything was brown!), the flash was weak, and it would eat a set of lithium AA batteries in only about 10 minutes of use. The worst part of it was that the construction was horribly cheap -- battery and connector doors were like parts of a McDonald's happy meal toy -- made of thin, brittle plastic and held in place by friction alone.
Figuring that maybe I had just been unlucky and got ahold of a lemon or a preproduction model or a customer return or something, I took it back and exchanged it for another. Same deal. I was about to give up on digital photography. It still hadn't occurred to me that Polaroid was at fault for putting out a truly lousy product.
Then I had a chance to work with a friend's Olympus digital camera in the same price range. It took great pictures that really completely outdid 35mm consumer-level products. Compared to the Polaroid camera I had bought, it had a similar 1-megapixel resolution, had more features, had removable/expandable memory (via SmartMedia), was built very solidly, and was about the same price as the Polaroid with batteries lasting about four times longer.
I bought the Olympus camera and was thrilled at the first download of photos, which were TRULY great (esp. the macro shots) and was able to compare and see just how awful the Polaroid's photos were.
Since then, a number of friends who were considering Polaroid digital cameras have looked at my early shots and decided to buy Olympus instead. And last year, when I wanted to upgrade to a higher resolution camera to get 8x10 photos out of it, I ended up going with a Nikon Coolpix without even considering Polaroid after using their film cameras for years.
With their initial foray into digital, they lost me and many of my friends as customers. Too bad they didn't take the technology more seriously.
Above average?
Most of my friends have 300-600 CDs. I've got 400 here. Furthermore, where are you getting an average of 8 songs per CD? A sampling of 10 of my CDs (admittedly small sample, but sounds right) gives me an average of 11 songs per disc. Maybe we just like different genres of music?
I don't have mine all to MP3 either (I've scripted up for it and started the process a couple of times, but then LAME comes out with something new that sounds better and I start all over...) but thats an estimated 4,400 MP3's for me, and I don't consider myself a big music junkie...
I just have a collection that I've been building since the late '80s, that's all. Someone who's bought one CD a week for a decade has 520+ CDs now. That's no stretch of the imagination, it sounds very reasonable to me.
The anti-piracy assholes are getting out of control. I don't mind buying software or music, but I'm getting tired of having to defend my 400+ CDs or 200+ games every time the subject comes up. If nobody's going to believe that I bought them anyway, I wish I had just copied them from the beginning, god knows I'd be a lot richer right now.
I had been bullish on the Linus+AA kernels (2.4.10 ran pretty well with week-long uptimes) but 2.4.11 had the symlink thing and only got 8 hours up before 2.4.12, which just locked hard under load after only about 4 hours.
I guess it's time to hit 2.4.10-ac11 and see what Alan+Rik can do for me. The 2.4 series so far has been a crap shoot... I wonder if they can save it before 2.4.15-20 or so?
My vote (I don't know these people so it's by no means binding): Linus starts 2.5 and leaves this 2.4 nonsense behind (sooner we get a 2.6 the better) and Alan makes a big, ugly change to allow user-select at compile time of Rik's VM vs. AA VM. Both Rik and AA then both get to keep going nuts trying to keep the 2.4 boxes up...
Woah... Don't be under the impression that AMD and Intel CPUs are "the same architecture" -- they are radically different, they just happen to share the same instruciton set... This is a huge difference.
Say you come up with a "scale factor" of 1.4 (like you did). This only applies accurately to one facet of the comparison. For example, it may be accurate for integer performance, but woefully inaccurate for floating point performance, cache performance, and memory bandwidth capability.
Make no mistake, the Athlon CPU and the Intel P4 are *different CPU architectures* from different companies and though they can execute the same instructions, each of those instructions will have different performance characteristcs and impacts on each of the two chips.
That is why, even with a "scale factor", MHz is meaningless between AMD and Intel. In fact, it's even meaningless between P4 and P3, both Intel chips. Intel has pulled a neat trick in getting the public to buy CPUs like they buy light bulbs -- based on a single number.
Perhaps what AMD *should* do is re-engineer things a little at the "edges" of the Athlon core so that they can run the Athlon 1400 MHz core using, say, a 4x external multiplier. Then, they could claim to have a 5.6 GHz chip without having to redesign the bulk of the core, thus beating Intel at its own game.
Or, we could just (as so many have now suggested) ignore MHz altogether...
Chip still runs on a clock, so what?
No, clock cycles do not mean anything about performance to "some talented computer users." Here's why, using CPUs other than AthlonXP and Pentium4 so as not to inflame anyone:
The old Intel 8-bit CPU used in PC/XT machines ran at 4.77 MHz (4,770,000 clock cycles per second) but this does *not* mean that it could do 4,770,000 *things* per second, because each time it needed to execute an instruction, it took several (i.e. more than one) clock cycles to do so. Furthermore, the largest numbers it could operate on natively were generally 8-bits long -- a 32-bit calculation, for example, required user code to complete, which of course meant many, many more cycles.
The Hitachi 6309 CPU of the same time period, by comparison, ran at 2.0 MHz (2,000,000 cycles per second), but was **MUCH** faster for the same types of tasks than the Intel 8-bit CPU because it could *often* finish a complete instruction in only one clock cycle and because it had 16-bit registers and a 32-bit register and could thus do MANY types of math *natively*, in just one or several cycles, that the Intel CPU needed user code (and thus, hundreds or thousands of cycles) to complete.
Because of these types of _architectural_ differences, clock cycles have little or nothing to do with the real speeds of different chips performing real-world tasks (which, for gamers, includes things like Quake 3). In fact, clock cycles and MHz are *the same thing*, as MHz on a CPU simply means "number, in millions, of cycles per second."
You will find no statistical correlation between the *actual* clock speed on an AthlonXP and each of the benchmarks vs., say, a Pentium4 at 1800 MHz. Yes, one is running at ~1,500,000,000 cycles/second and one is running at ~1,800,000,000 cycles per second, but that doesn't tell you how many cycles each one is spending doing different types of tasks or (as is often the case) sitting around waiting for data from the rest of the system or from the bus.
There is still nothing on the market, PC-wise or PDA-wise, to compete with what the EMate and the Newton 2x00 series accomplished in terms of usability, intuitiveness and productivity. Too bad Apple killed them.
For a while, someone was working on a Linux-based replacement but it doesn't look like that project is going anywhere at the moment...
I've got two DTLA-307045 (75GXP, 45GB, IIRC) that have been in use for about a year now. When I first connected them up, they were both showing read errors and sounding like hell right out of the box. I checked the supply voltage and connectors and replaced the UDMA cable; all seemed good. I was about to RMA both of them when the new 550W power supply I'd ordered arrived (the old one on this box was an 'AMD-certified' 400W supply).
As luck would have it, I decided to wire up the 550W supply before sending the IBM drives back. Once I did, the drives formatted without further read errors and have been in service ever since without problems, streaming video to capacity about twice a day at around 12MB/sec. The other drives in the system (2xMaxtor 40GB drives) didn't seem to have the same trouble with the old power supply when all four drives were installed.
The system is an Athlon (Thunderbird) at 1GHz with 768MB RAM and a GeForce2 card, plus some video editing equipment, maybe enough to cause some strain on the 400W supply that wasn't serious enough to bug other equipment. My sense is that the IBM drives may be much more sensitive to power fluctuations or undervoltage than the Maxtor drives, which can be a problem these days with most users running at least one large CPU (Athlon, P4) and one heavy-duty video controller (GeForce2, GeForce3) on smallish (250W-300W) power supplies.
Of course, this wouldn't explain failures on larger installations with enterprise-class hardware, so all bets are off...
I'm not familiar enough with the "real" Aqua products to understand what just went down here.
It sounds to me like Apple did say it was okay to make an Aqua-like Mozilla -- but only using the "real" Apple tools, and therefore (purely my extrapolation) for Mac OS X users only. Aqua look-and-feel through "emulation" is still strictly forbidden.
Yes?
If this is the case, then the Slashdot was not overreacting at all -- it's still a "legitimate Aqua" sues "homebrew Aqua look" issue in which all non-MacOS users are forbidden from using nice shiny sea-blue widgets, etc.
Or am I misunderstanding?
Caldera OpenLinux and the KDE project have two major things in common.
1) Both have been savagely attacked by Slashdot readers and members of the OSS community. Half were upset at KDE's licensing/GPL options because KDE wasn't make-a-buck friendly for companies wanting more restrictive licenses and retail presence. Meanwhile, the other half are upset at Caldera's licensing/GPL options because Caldera is making-a-buck with more restrictive licenses and retail presence. Neither is violating anyone else's license. You can never win.
2) Both Caldera OpenLinux and KDE are superior products to other alternatives. KDE just works (unlike GNOME, which is *still* a hodgepodge that varies according to distributor and is difficult to get working in the real world, even from Ximian). Similarly, I used Caldera OpenLinux on my own systems and on those I administer from version 1.2 until version 2.4 specificially because of the quality of the product. OpenLinux 1.3 was the most usable distribution of its era, bar none, and I tried them all. I've finally switched away to Red Hat 7.1 recently when needing to upgrade from eDesktop 2.4 because of mild discomfort about these licensing issues, but it was a tough decision.
Red Hat 7.1 doesn't come close. As I was evaluating options, I also tried Debian 2.2, Corel 2.0, Slackware 8, S.u.S.E. 7.2 and Mandrake 8.0.Each had its own strenghths and weaknesses... but nothing compared to the user experience with eDesktop 2.4. If the current Caldera release is similar in any way to their past releases it, like KDE, will just work out of the box -- and the user won't have to worry about a lot of those little annoying details that typically mar Linux use (broken printcap after install, broken XF86Config after install, misconfigured services, etc., etc., etc.)
I think Caldera's OpenLinux and KDE are two of the most underappreciated products to have come out of the open source community, and it's a shame.
Same benefit. Third nipple == more food for the little 'uns.
Thank god someone has said this.
Too many Americans have no idea what "Islam" is or what "Muslim" means -- they only see sensational media images of machine-gun-toting four-year-olds that are designed to get ratings.
What this person says is true: Jews, Christians and Muslims all pray to the same God. I do not mean this in some literary, allusory sense; I mean it literally. Most Christians know enough history to understand the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Most Christians in the western world do not realize, however, that a similar historical closeness exists between these two and Islam. The three religions are as family, and they do share the same God, no matter how they pronounce that God's name in their own language.
Furthermore, the basic tenets of all three religions include a respect for human life. Don't be fooled by people who use Islam as an excuse for violence; they are just as misguided as the Catholic inquisitors were hundreds of years ago.
Please, do not hate your Islamic or Arabic neighbors in the US, and please do not hate those in other countries based solely on religious or ethnic origin either. Do not hate, period. Desire instead to compassionately and methodically stamp out violence wherever it exists in the world and through whatever means it occurs (these means to not always consist of physical force).
I guess that's my rant. It's been smouldering for two days...
You've been working with computers too long. Think executable as in executioner (a.k.a. e-chair guy) and you'll get it.
Being one who likes to try new things and who already uses fully AA KDE as my desktop, I thought it would be a good thing to download this and try it out.
But it only seems to anti-alias the text on buttons and in menus, not in text input or output panes!? So basically, it anti-aliases the parts of your applications that you look at least.
Not quite what I was hoping for...
If your neighbor was only a few hundred cells big, it'd be fine to kill 'em off. Nobody thinks about killing a mouse, yet a mouse is infinitely more complex than a human embryo, with a bigger brain and more feelings to boot.
Treating an embryo as a human because it has "potential" is ridiculous. Why don't we just execute all humans because they have the "potential" to become murderers or guarantee everyone a seven-figure salary because the have the "potential" to be a CEO? This is reality. Potential doesn't count unless you start giving aid and punishment based on "potential" (which is what we're about to do -- just look at what's done in the name of crime prevention [DMCA!]).
Things are what they are. Potential is a drunken wish at best, an excuse for the totalitarian at worst. An embryo is like a fly: simple, disposable life. Anyone who equates killing an embryo with killing a 1-year-old is a reactionary living in a politically correct world.
The definition of PDA == organizer is far too restrictive. After all, PDA is supposed to be a 'personal digital assistant' or 'personal data assistant' or something else involving 'personal' and 'assistant.'
An assitant assists, in whatever a person needs done with data when on the move. That does not mean calendar, contacts and to-do for every person; some people do other stuff with data and with their lives. Should they not have PDAs? The Palm crowd especially seem violently opposed to devices assisting anyone but executives who have too many meetings to keep. I for one am glad that the PocketPC has become more flexible, so that it can assist everyone to some extent, rather than only assisting the rich, anal executive in the expensive suit.
Keep your Palm, but I have no use for it. I will, however, continue to use PocketPC/WindowsCE.
You're right, I've got a lot of old data but mine is all on DDS -- the rest is people bringing me still image or video data on these formats (i.e. Zip, QIC-6150, 8mm!) I've got to get a 250 Zip to replace the 100 Zip. The QIC drive rarely gets used these days (though I did have someone last Friday) but Zip and 8mm are still heavily used.
:P
The CD-R drive is still there because I burn at least a hundred a week and I don't want to kill the new DVD-R (*grrrrr*) with that workload.
The two optical drives are connected because I'm working with someone using a large set of data which has been stored over the years that way: for each disc containing database text, there is a second, matching disc containing the related image data. To get at the stuff seamlessly, both must be mounted!
The scanners are both used very heavily so I'm not ready to do away with either one yet. The 300dpi unit is actually much faster at 300dpi (it "starts" a scan quicker, if that means anything). The drives could (admittedly) be replaced by a newer drive configuration (I have a pair of 75GB SCSI waiting to replace all), but I keep putting it off and depending on my DAT24 backups because the move will be a pain and will shut me down (by completely occupying my attention and waiting for everything to copy) for a day or two while I make the switch.
I do have a CF/SmartMedia reader because I get digital camera stuff in here all the time, too. Unfortunately, it's on the parallel port.
IDE is clumsy and slow compared to SCSI when you start to get many devices in the same machine.
I have a 3-channel LVD SCSI controller in my video system and it's talking to devices of all vintages:
1) Three 18.2GB Barracuda LVD drives in a RAID-0.
2) Four 9.1GB Micropolis UW drives in a RAID-0.
3) 8x CD-R (not CD-RW) drive.
4) Brand new DVD-R drive (whoopee!)
5) Two 1.3GB 5.25" Magneto-Optical drives.
6) 7/14GB 8mm tape drive.
7) 12/24GB 4mm tape drive.
8) Very old (but needed) Archive 2150S (QIC-150).
9) 100 MB Zip drive.
10) 300 DPI scanner (for rough stuff).
11) 1200 DPI scanner (for more important stuff).
The system lives in a server case with dual 450W power supplies, so of these devices, only the two optical drives and the two scanners are external. There are only three cables inside the case for the lot. Theoretically, there are 28 more SCSI IDs available for use.
Now, the nice thing about this is that I can have damn near all of them running at the same time without any appreciable slowdown -- something that never happens on my "play" system with IDE drives.
On my IDE system, I've got two hard drives, a CD-RW and an IDE tape, and the IDE channels often seem to slow each other down and fight for control when I start to burn, backup, and do lots of disk I/O at the same time. I've been told that this is because a single IDE interface doesn't do concurrent access to both drives.
Either way, I love using the SCSI system. It's an I/O monster. And I love being able to just hang whatever kind of device I need to use off of the external connector and know with reasonable certainty that Linux will support it. Long live SCSI.
Hmmm... Everyone I know pronounces it SCSI, too, but 'secsi' might not be a bad idea. After all, SCSI evolved from SASI (Shugart Associates System Interface) which is pronounced "sassy" if I remember correctly.
"sexy and sassy" go together better than "scuzzy and sassy" in my opinion.
*shrug*