I recently almost junked mail from a friend I hadn't heard from in over a year (and didn't have an e-mail address for!), simply because of the subject line. I usually look at the subject lines to select mail for the Junk button (OS X Mail), then check the already junk marked mails. Fortunately that time I looked at the From column and paused long enough to recognize the name. (It also helped that "G'day, $NAME" isn't a common subject line for spammers, who now prefer putt1ng l0ts 0f c-rap in subjact linas.)
Perhaps because there is some correlation between the people willing to spend money to upgrade to 2K/XP and the people willing to spend money on internet music stores? I've heard that most software purchases are within six months of buying a new computer, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar situation here.
Actually, the page that's broken is on www.vw.com. If you thought a broken link was bad, you should have seen the original site. It was entirely in Flash. And it barely gave any useful information anyhow, just a bunch of marketing hype. VW's web designers apparently make Apple's web designers look like Einsteins.
Hell, isn't the raw audio on the CD AIFF in the first place?
Nope, the raw data on the CD is literally raw data. It doesn't even have time codes more accurate than one second. OS X does an amazing job in presenting the disc to you as a bunch of.AIFF files. But it's all a trick. In order to reliably read the data in random order, a player has to go back to the previous second and count the sectors until the one (of 75) that is desired. (Fortunately, most CD-ROM drives do this automatically, so nothing quite as sophisticated as cdparanoia is required.) Then it has to figure out where the data would appear in an AIFF file and give you the right data.
In any event, with almost no compression, AIFF files from the CD are huge, 300+mb per song.
In fact, they take up more space if you re-burn them to a CD-R as AIFF files than they would on the original CD, because you're adding all the sector ID and error correction data that Red Book audio doesn't use in order to squeeze as much as possible onto a disc.
But to hell if I'm going ot rip a CD to iTunes with zero compression then download it to my iPod so I can hook the iPod up to my home audio equipment and call it trick! It's plain stupid, just go buy a CD player!
With even the smallest (10MB) iPod, you can store 30 CDs ripped to AIFF, with no changing of discs necessary, and no 30-disc CD case necessary either. Which is nice if you're not at home. And which is rather the point of an iPod. At home, a mini-ITX PC with an optical output is a much better option. I'm sure I could put something good together for the price of the top model of iPod.
160Kbps AAC is pretty damn good and disk space tidy
I usually rip to 160K VBR MP3 (regular stereo, not joint), which is more than good enough given that I either play it back in the car (MP3 CD player and tape adaptor) or on a laptop (cheap headphones or definitely non-audiophile Powerbook speakers). AAC is probably a bit better quality, but AFAIK, the iPod is the only portable player that supports it.
I'd be happy if I can rename a file over AFP longer than 31 characters. I can copy it to the local machine, rename it, and copy it back, but I can't rename it to a long file name. Huh? You're also right about the [ and ] in SMB. I've noticed that too. At least (IIRC) SMBFS allows you to rename a file longer than 31 characters.
As for the B&W rev 1, that's just too bad. The chip has a bug in it. If you really have a problem with that, get a PCI IDE card and hook your drive up to that. It'll be an improvement over the UDMA-33 as well. (Not that I care. I recently found a B&W rev 2 that I'm going to use as a DNS/DHCP/NAT/HTTP/IMAP server.)
You've also got to consider what the PC hardware was like in those days too. The ISA bus, with all its addressing limiations, was still king. IBM came out with Micro Channel as an attempt to move away from ISA, but it was too complicated, as can be expected from something designed by IBM. The industry went with VESA as an interim solution, and later EISA. PCI didn't appear until 1994.
Why am I babbling about PC busses? Because video performance is highly dependent upon the bus. The original pre-VESA pre-PCI version of VGA had to do wierd bank selecting and bit fiddling to put graphics on the screen. Apple went with NuBus, which was fully 32-bit, so they could use linear address mapping for video. Not only does this make for higher video performance (rather important with a GUI), but it also makes the graphics coding much simpler. The PC back then just had way too many legacy problems inherited from IBM's initial PC hardware design.
So now we're back to the old "if Apple had gone with Intel, they wouldn't have run on a beige box anyhow" issue. Apple's hardware was light-years ahead of PC hardware before PCI came out. And once PCI did come out, and Apple adopted it, they went into the years when they came out with their crappiest and lamest hardware. It took a reverse takeover by NeXT (and subsequent intravenous injection of Steve Jobs) to bring Apple back to life.
The way I heard it was this: IBM asked Motorola to commit to having production quanities by a certain date. The ever-conservative Motorola said "we can't guarantee that", so IBM went with Intel, who was happy to promise anything. Ironically, Motorola did have the 68000 ready by IBM's deadline, and even sooner than Intel had the 8088 ready.
One thing I found amusing was in Intel's old 8088 documentation, they called it an "8-bit processor", and were comparing it with code and benchmarks vs the Z-80 and 6809!
Actually, I've found that the DHCP server used by Internet Sharing can use NetInfo to specify fixed IP assignments. Ironically, I may end up running OS X client on a server and OS X Server on my normal use machine (because it's my home file server, and I want arbitrary AFP mount points, dammit).
The support under OS X is excellent, and it even breaks away from creaky old ShiftJIS. I'm not sure how hard it is to get Japanese language support running on Linux, and it probably is distro dependent too. (I heard Turbo Linux was a favorite in Japan back in its 4.0 days.)
But on the Mac, it's built-in and working by default. On all Macs running OS X, not just ones running the special localized version of the OS, which used to trail U.S. releases by six months or more back in the System 7 days.
Any chance that's got something to do with the switch? Meanwhile, I'm looking long-term to replace my last Linux box with OS X. Right now the main obstacle is to get the equivalent of IP Masquerading working with a proper DHCP server that lets me configure fixed IP assignments, instead of the one built into "Internet Sharing".
It's easy. All your prospective employer has to do is put a bunch of wierd job requirements that just coincidentally happen to match those on your resume, take a couple dozen other resumes, and strike them out because they don't have ten years experience in Java.
so it will resequence a series of requests so that they are executed in the order which requires the least movement of the head.
I think Unix-like operating systems have been doing that in the OS itself for, what, two decades now? Oooooh, now the hard drive can do it too, for when you're running crappy Redmondware.
How does that test anything other than the hard drive? Let's try it on a 4-drive striped RAID, okay? And are you measuring the time to just "copy" the file, or are you including the time to write the cache back to disk?
17 megabytes? That's so small, I don't think I would even see the copy progress dialog half the time.
I gotta agree with the original poster about the silent part. I was in the Dallas area Apple Store a couple of weeks ago and noticed how quite the place was... except whenever I walked past an MDD G4! Every other Mac model (not just the G5) was wonderfully silent. Steve Jobs may be crazy, but he's a genius.
What's wrong with getting the real thing? They're not all that hard to find. The only stuff that really needs to be modernized is cards that go into it, to take advantage of SIMM memory, IDE, and 10Base-T, for instance. Stuff that I'm pretty sure already exists and can easily be found with a Google search.
Now that I've RTFA, I have to wonder if there isn't a connection. Apparently there was some nutball in Philly whose views sounded an awful lot like what all these are about. The guy who wrote the KC Star article found that the nutball may even have been an old man who died earlier this year. (P.S. mod parent up!)
One other interesting thing I found via Google was one person's account of having found a freshly laid tile. Apparently the trick is that the tile was attached with multiple layers of tar paper glued together. Quick and quiet to attach, and after a few weeks of cars driving over it, the tar has seeped into the road surface, permanently attaching the tile.
The author of the article first saw this particular tile in 1996, and seven years later it's still there. If it was made out of the stuff that is normally used to paint roadways, it wouldn't last that long. Maybe the tile guy has unwittingly started a "Toynbee Convector" to improve the technology of road markings, just as Star Trek inspired people to make automatic sliding doors into an everyday thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I recently almost junked mail from a friend I hadn't heard from in over a year (and didn't have an e-mail address for!), simply because of the subject line. I usually look at the subject lines to select mail for the Junk button (OS X Mail), then check the already junk marked mails. Fortunately that time I looked at the From column and paused long enough to recognize the name. (It also helped that "G'day, $NAME" isn't a common subject line for spammers, who now prefer putt1ng l0ts 0f c-rap in subjact linas.)
Perhaps because there is some correlation between the people willing to spend money to upgrade to 2K/XP and the people willing to spend money on internet music stores? I've heard that most software purchases are within six months of buying a new computer, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a similar situation here.
Disabling the Messenger service is on the standard list of things I do when installing W2K. (right after installing SP2 and the latest RPC patch)
Actually, the page that's broken is on www.vw.com. If you thought a broken link was bad, you should have seen the original site. It was entirely in Flash. And it barely gave any useful information anyhow, just a bunch of marketing hype. VW's web designers apparently make Apple's web designers look like Einsteins.
Nope, the raw data on the CD is literally raw data. It doesn't even have time codes more accurate than one second. OS X does an amazing job in presenting the disc to you as a bunch of .AIFF files. But it's all a trick. In order to reliably read the data in random order, a player has to go back to the previous second and count the sectors until the one (of 75) that is desired. (Fortunately, most CD-ROM drives do this automatically, so nothing quite as sophisticated as cdparanoia is required.) Then it has to figure out where the data would appear in an AIFF file and give you the right data.
In any event, with almost no compression, AIFF files from the CD are huge, 300+mb per song.
In fact, they take up more space if you re-burn them to a CD-R as AIFF files than they would on the original CD, because you're adding all the sector ID and error correction data that Red Book audio doesn't use in order to squeeze as much as possible onto a disc.
But to hell if I'm going ot rip a CD to iTunes with zero compression then download it to my iPod so I can hook the iPod up to my home audio equipment and call it trick! It's plain stupid, just go buy a CD player!
With even the smallest (10MB) iPod, you can store 30 CDs ripped to AIFF, with no changing of discs necessary, and no 30-disc CD case necessary either. Which is nice if you're not at home. And which is rather the point of an iPod. At home, a mini-ITX PC with an optical output is a much better option. I'm sure I could put something good together for the price of the top model of iPod.
160Kbps AAC is pretty damn good and disk space tidy
I usually rip to 160K VBR MP3 (regular stereo, not joint), which is more than good enough given that I either play it back in the car (MP3 CD player and tape adaptor) or on a laptop (cheap headphones or definitely non-audiophile Powerbook speakers). AAC is probably a bit better quality, but AFAIK, the iPod is the only portable player that supports it.
You need to escape the angle brackets so that they don't get eaten as HTTP junk: \ / : * ? " < > |
As for the B&W rev 1, that's just too bad. The chip has a bug in it. If you really have a problem with that, get a PCI IDE card and hook your drive up to that. It'll be an improvement over the UDMA-33 as well. (Not that I care. I recently found a B&W rev 2 that I'm going to use as a DNS/DHCP/NAT/HTTP/IMAP server.)
Why am I babbling about PC busses? Because video performance is highly dependent upon the bus. The original pre-VESA pre-PCI version of VGA had to do wierd bank selecting and bit fiddling to put graphics on the screen. Apple went with NuBus, which was fully 32-bit, so they could use linear address mapping for video. Not only does this make for higher video performance (rather important with a GUI), but it also makes the graphics coding much simpler. The PC back then just had way too many legacy problems inherited from IBM's initial PC hardware design.
So now we're back to the old "if Apple had gone with Intel, they wouldn't have run on a beige box anyhow" issue. Apple's hardware was light-years ahead of PC hardware before PCI came out. And once PCI did come out, and Apple adopted it, they went into the years when they came out with their crappiest and lamest hardware. It took a reverse takeover by NeXT (and subsequent intravenous injection of Steve Jobs) to bring Apple back to life.
One thing I found amusing was in Intel's old 8088 documentation, they called it an "8-bit processor", and were comparing it with code and benchmarks vs the Z-80 and 6809!
In that case, what everyone really wants to know is: "Is AT&T allowed ?
Actually, I've found that the DHCP server used by Internet Sharing can use NetInfo to specify fixed IP assignments. Ironically, I may end up running OS X client on a server and OS X Server on my normal use machine (because it's my home file server, and I want arbitrary AFP mount points, dammit).
But on the Mac, it's built-in and working by default. On all Macs running OS X, not just ones running the special localized version of the OS, which used to trail U.S. releases by six months or more back in the System 7 days.
Any chance that's got something to do with the switch? Meanwhile, I'm looking long-term to replace my last Linux box with OS X. Right now the main obstacle is to get the equivalent of IP Masquerading working with a proper DHCP server that lets me configure fixed IP assignments, instead of the one built into "Internet Sharing".
Real Daleks don't climb stairs. They level the bloody building.
Until you try to wake your Powerbook from sleep.
$ whois -h whois.directnic.com slashdto.org
Registrant:
Joaquin Navarro
Plaza Lizana 6
Huesca, Huesca 45000
ES
0034963527520
Domain Name: SLASHDTO.ORG
And if you visit our site before September 30, they'll put an iPod up their {{xx||{{{x[x||{
NO CARRIER
It's easy. All your prospective employer has to do is put a bunch of wierd job requirements that just coincidentally happen to match those on your resume, take a couple dozen other resumes, and strike them out because they don't have ten years experience in Java.
I think Unix-like operating systems have been doing that in the OS itself for, what, two decades now? Oooooh, now the hard drive can do it too, for when you're running crappy Redmondware.
But does it have Dubly?
17 megabytes? That's so small, I don't think I would even see the copy progress dialog half the time.
I gotta agree with the original poster about the silent part. I was in the Dallas area Apple Store a couple of weeks ago and noticed how quite the place was... except whenever I walked past an MDD G4! Every other Mac model (not just the G5) was wonderfully silent. Steve Jobs may be crazy, but he's a genius.
So how much damage did Jayson Blair do to the NYT? Maybe Adrian and Jayson could get together to write a book or something.
What's wrong with getting the real thing? They're not all that hard to find. The only stuff that really needs to be modernized is cards that go into it, to take advantage of SIMM memory, IDE, and 10Base-T, for instance. Stuff that I'm pretty sure already exists and can easily be found with a Google search.
One other interesting thing I found via Google was one person's account of having found a freshly laid tile. Apparently the trick is that the tile was attached with multiple layers of tar paper glued together. Quick and quiet to attach, and after a few weeks of cars driving over it, the tar has seeped into the road surface, permanently attaching the tile.
The author of the article first saw this particular tile in 1996, and seven years later it's still there. If it was made out of the stuff that is normally used to paint roadways, it wouldn't last that long. Maybe the tile guy has unwittingly started a "Toynbee Convector" to improve the technology of road markings, just as Star Trek inspired people to make automatic sliding doors into an everyday thing.
I searched Google for some of the words in the text, and found this Metafilter article talking about Toynbee tiles, including this one.