Cygwin is basically the same concept as WINE (windows on unix) and Executor (macos 7ish(68k) on win32 and unix). Isn't it much easier to write this sort of thing for an open source operating system:).
Err, no. Cygwin does not make Windows binary-compatible with *NIX software the same way Wine makes *NIX binary-compatible with Win32 software. It still requires a recompilation into native Win32 executables.
Cygwin is a little more akin to WineLib -- it's a reimplimentation of the *NIX API. (Plus they throw in a lot of precompiled libs and helper programs like bash, which is nice.) For this, yes, having open-source software makes it a hell of a lot easier, since you know exactly what the hell the API you're trying to target is.
Very few, if any, drives currently available can saturate an ATA33 bus, sustained. The only thing these ludicrous improvments are doing are increasing performance to and from the drive cache.
Put two very fast hard drives on the same channel and you can push 100 or even 133 MB/sec pretty easily. Sure, it's going to be power-user and (once the RAID version of the card hits the streets) low-end server territory, but that's exactly Promise's market.
Very few, if any, drives currently available can saturate an ATA33 bus, sustained. The only thing these ludicrous improvments are doing are increasing performance to and from the drive cache.
Put two very fast hard drives on the same channel and you can push 100 or even 133 MB/sec pretty easily. Sure, it's going to be power-user and (once the RAID version of the card hits the streets) low-end server territory, but that's exactly Promise's market.
If that's what the link says, they're mistaken. The copy protection is embedded on the CD itself (it involved screwing with the audio and expecting the CD player to fix it using the error correction data, but that digital rips won't), so it's OS-independent.
I am told however that cdparanoia (which is *nix-only and very popular on Linux) can properly rip copy-protected CDs (I assume by using the error-correction data) so it's very possible that CmdrTaco had a copy protected CD but cdparanoia took care of it for him. It's much more likely though that whoever reported the CD as copy protected just didn't know what they were doing -- cheap CD-ROM drives in tandem with MusicMatch or RealJukebox will barf on some CDs that good CD/DVD-ROM drives coupled with cdparanoia or Exact Audio Copy will happily rip.
That's because Golden State is an Enhanced CD. Normally Windows shows audio tracks as.CDA files; Winamp registers itself to open these files. Since Enhanced CDs have actual data files in addition to audio tracks, the.CDA virtual files don't show up, and so you can't tell Winamp to open them. It's a problem with Winamp and all Enhanced CDs. Most CD players get around this by not relying on the.CDA filetype and instead reading the table-of-contents directly from the start of the disc, but Winamp unfortunately doesn't. If you manually start the Windows CD player (*shudder*) it should play fine; try it.
Copy-protection shouldn't affect Winamp anyhow since it only affects digital playback, and Winamp uses analog playback (unless you swap out the CD player plugin with one that uses digital ripping).
Most new motherboards I've seen have BIOS flashing programs actually built into the BIOS. You don't need any OS, just a floppy with the BIOS image on it. My guess is this is where the industry is headed, since flashing motherboard BIOSes in Windows is a little dicey.
Incidentally, Windows-based flashing programs for DVD and CD-RW firmware have been here for quite some time. I know that Pioneer, Mitsumi, Lite-On, and Ricoh use them, and I'm sure plenty of others do too.
Try a film or camera shop
on
8mm Film Transfer?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Our family got a film shop to transfer some old family films to VHS probably a decade ago, and I'd be shocked if there wasn't a similar service now to transfer to MiniDV. Needless to say, they will charge a fee for it (I was young at the time so I don't know how much, but I'm guessing it wasn't cheap) but they've got professional equipment that should do a much better job of transfering than consumer equipment.
If they don't offer a direct MiniDV transfer, you can get a VHS transfer and then use a MiniDV camcorder with analog dubbing capabilities to go from VHS to MiniDV. I've tried this personally with our tapes, and you shouldn't lose anything along the lines of quality because the original film will be the limiting factor.
Just what we need . . . soldiers who fight like Sims!
General: "Soldier, I want you to invade that building."
Soldier: "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!" [puts gun on ground]
General: "That's an order, Soldier!"
Soldier: "Blah, blah, blah!" [starts crying]
The difference is that Quake 3 is used for benchmarking a lot because with the detail cranked all the way up, it really stresses video cards in certain areas. Judging from the article, the ATI drivers intentionally ignore certain detail settings (like MiP mapping and some texture depths) above a certain level, automatically lowering them to something lower than what the user asked for. More damning is the fact they only do it when Q3A is running, which definitely suggests they're doing it to artificially raise benchmark scores.
This IMHO is deception because when I see benchmarks for Q3A High Detail I'm expecting a representation of how the card perfoms when rendering textures at the highest possible detail, not at detail levels lowered to boost benchmark scores. This would be like ATI advertising their cards' Medium Detail scores compared to nVidia's High Detail scores, and justifying it by saying that when I'm playing Q3A I probably won't notice the difference.
I was just reading the "Big Breakthrough" infographic, and this thing sure looks impressive. At long last, thanks to modern technology, I can finally have inexpensive, universal, portable optical media that stores 500 MB of any kind of data I want and can be written 10 times faster than a 1X CD burner!
I think when people keep telling me that American culture is going down the tubes, all they would have to do is point me to this as evidence and I would be pretty well convinced.
"All bills raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representives..." (Article I, section 7)
You mean just like:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" (Article I, Section 8)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." (Amendment I)
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." (Amendment IV)
Gotta wonder if they make it much smaller, if the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle will start taking effect. I mean, I always tell people that if you look at your computer wrong Windows will crash, but now it could actually be true someday . . .:)
300 bps? Luxury! When I was a kid, teachers told us one day in the future we might have 300 baud modems, and we didn't believe them.
Sure, we had modems, but they were slow, and line noise was awful. Usually it was just faster to pick up the phone, call the other person, and say "0 . . . 0 . . . 1 . . . 0 . .." and not worry about the line noise that ate up 3/4 of all the bits.
Plus, we had to crawl 4 miles in the snow uphill in broken glass to the store to buy that modem.
The extra mouse buttons work fine in Mozilla out-of-the-box, and have for quite some time. Maybe you need a newer release of Mozilla, or newer Intellimouse drivers.
How hard is it REALLY to parse out Word Documents and have it work???? I haven't been involved in the project, but I would really like to hear some feedback to why nobody can open freaking word documents. The TRUTH.. not our typical "MS Just Sucks".
Because the.DOC format is entirely undocumented. What little information people have comes mostly from reverse-engineering the.DOC format, which is a very slow process. Also I've been told that one of the MSDN CDs that Microsoft shipped out to developers once inadvertently included a partial (and not entirely accurate) specification for the.DOC format, but for all I know it's a myth, since I don't have a copy.
The best ones have always been those that abuse the rules, the compiler, or both.
A few years back somebody submitted the definitive self-replicating (i.e. prints its own source code) program. It consisted of a 0-byte C file. The author pointed out that even though it's not technically a legal C program, most C compilers (including the one the IOCCC uses) will in fact accept it and proceed to spit out a binary that does nothing.
The most evil entry though has to be the Spinellis entry from 1988, which consists of the line #include "/dev/tty". This actually caused a change in the rules so that programs can't require user intervention to compile anymore, short of running make.
USAToday discovers the new upgrade scheme, designed to milk every last cent out of those who've locked themselves into Windows.
You might have wanted to consider reading the article first before criticizing it. The article made it quite clear that what Microsoft is doing is saying that if you don't upgrade Windows, Office, etc. within a certain amount of time after a new version is released, you don't qualify for the upgrade. Your company wants to hold off upgrading to Office XP for a few months to see if Microsoft shakes the bugs out? Too bad. If they wait too long, they can't buy an upgrade, and have to pay the license fee as if they never owned a previous version of Office. Anybody who deals with bulk Microsoft licensing can tell you the upgrades are a hell of a lot cheaper than the standard editions.
This is really infuriating IT people -- a lot of large companies wait months, or even a couple of years, before doing an OS upgrade, mainly because they need to see if the new version will break anything. As it is, a lot of companies are still using NT4 over Win2K, because they haven't gotten around to upgrading, or because they're waiting for XP. If Microsoft had already instituted their proposed license changes, they would have to pay full price for XP, not just the price for an upgrade.
MS discusses its plans to control how you compute (by the way, the license agreement for Windows Media Player now allows Microsoft to disable any software on your computer - you do read those license agreements, don't you?)
Ooh, there's a good idea, let's trust Microsoft to decide what "disable" means. The examples you're giving don't actually disable the software -- they just change file associations. While you may be right -- maybe they just mean changing the file associations -- I don't want any software to come bundled with an OS with that kind of clause in the license, because it gives them a blank check to use in the future. And given the legislation they've pushed for, like the UCITA, I wouldn't put it past them.
cdparanoia does, or so I'm told. (I don't have a copy protected CD to try it on -- but come on, is there anything cdparanoia can't read?) But the RIAA's still got the upper hand here in the war against casual piracy, because (a) it's not available for Windows, meaning pretty much all casual observers won't be able to use it, and (b) no ripping software for Windows uses it anyway, and you forget the power of installed base.
Needless to say, this won't do much to deter techies who are really determined to rip their CDs, but this is the crowd that knows how to use optical cables, etc. anyway. (It's probably not going to help much as far as Gnutella & Co. goes anyway since all it takes is one person to get a ripped MP3 and suddenly it's all over the Internet.)
Slashdot Mirror
In which case it's only a matter of time before we get the option to moderate comments "-1 Worst. Comment. Ever!"
Cygwin is a little more akin to WineLib -- it's a reimplimentation of the *NIX API. (Plus they throw in a lot of precompiled libs and helper programs like bash, which is nice.) For this, yes, having open-source software makes it a hell of a lot easier, since you know exactly what the hell the API you're trying to target is.
I'll stick with the Athlon model numbers, thank you.
Problem solved.
Put two very fast hard drives on the same channel and you can push 100 or even 133 MB/sec pretty easily. Sure, it's going to be power-user and (once the RAID version of the card hits the streets) low-end server territory, but that's exactly Promise's market.
I am told however that cdparanoia (which is *nix-only and very popular on Linux) can properly rip copy-protected CDs (I assume by using the error-correction data) so it's very possible that CmdrTaco had a copy protected CD but cdparanoia took care of it for him. It's much more likely though that whoever reported the CD as copy protected just didn't know what they were doing -- cheap CD-ROM drives in tandem with MusicMatch or RealJukebox will barf on some CDs that good CD/DVD-ROM drives coupled with cdparanoia or Exact Audio Copy will happily rip.
Copy-protection shouldn't affect Winamp anyhow since it only affects digital playback, and Winamp uses analog playback (unless you swap out the CD player plugin with one that uses digital ripping).
Incidentally, Windows-based flashing programs for DVD and CD-RW firmware have been here for quite some time. I know that Pioneer, Mitsumi, Lite-On, and Ricoh use them, and I'm sure plenty of others do too.
If they don't offer a direct MiniDV transfer, you can get a VHS transfer and then use a MiniDV camcorder with analog dubbing capabilities to go from VHS to MiniDV. I've tried this personally with our tapes, and you shouldn't lose anything along the lines of quality because the original film will be the limiting factor.
General: "Soldier, I want you to invade that building."
Soldier: "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah!" [puts gun on ground]
General: "That's an order, Soldier!"
Soldier: "Blah, blah, blah!" [starts crying]
This IMHO is deception because when I see benchmarks for Q3A High Detail I'm expecting a representation of how the card perfoms when rendering textures at the highest possible detail, not at detail levels lowered to boost benchmark scores. This would be like ATI advertising their cards' Medium Detail scores compared to nVidia's High Detail scores, and justifying it by saying that when I'm playing Q3A I probably won't notice the difference.
I was just reading the "Big Breakthrough" infographic, and this thing sure looks impressive. At long last, thanks to modern technology, I can finally have inexpensive, universal, portable optical media that stores 500 MB of any kind of data I want and can be written 10 times faster than a 1X CD burner!
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" (Article I, Section 8)
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." (Amendment I)
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." (Amendment IV)
Gotta wonder if they make it much smaller, if the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle will start taking effect. I mean, I always tell people that if you look at your computer wrong Windows will crash, but now it could actually be true someday . . . :)
Sure, we had modems, but they were slow, and line noise was awful. Usually it was just faster to pick up the phone, call the other person, and say "0 . . . 0 . . . 1 . . . 0 . . ." and not worry about the line noise that ate up 3/4 of all the bits.
Plus, we had to crawl 4 miles in the snow uphill in broken glass to the store to buy that modem.
The extra mouse buttons work fine in Mozilla out-of-the-box, and have for quite some time. Maybe you need a newer release of Mozilla, or newer Intellimouse drivers.
A few years back somebody submitted the definitive self-replicating (i.e. prints its own source code) program. It consisted of a 0-byte C file. The author pointed out that even though it's not technically a legal C program, most C compilers (including the one the IOCCC uses) will in fact accept it and proceed to spit out a binary that does nothing.
The most evil entry though has to be the Spinellis entry from 1988, which consists of the line #include "/dev/tty". This actually caused a change in the rules so that programs can't require user intervention to compile anymore, short of running make.
This is really infuriating IT people -- a lot of large companies wait months, or even a couple of years, before doing an OS upgrade, mainly because they need to see if the new version will break anything. As it is, a lot of companies are still using NT4 over Win2K, because they haven't gotten around to upgrading, or because they're waiting for XP. If Microsoft had already instituted their proposed license changes, they would have to pay full price for XP, not just the price for an upgrade.
Ooh, there's a good idea, let's trust Microsoft to decide what "disable" means. The examples you're giving don't actually disable the software -- they just change file associations. While you may be right -- maybe they just mean changing the file associations -- I don't want any software to come bundled with an OS with that kind of clause in the license, because it gives them a blank check to use in the future. And given the legislation they've pushed for, like the UCITA, I wouldn't put it past them.Needless to say, this won't do much to deter techies who are really determined to rip their CDs, but this is the crowd that knows how to use optical cables, etc. anyway. (It's probably not going to help much as far as Gnutella & Co. goes anyway since all it takes is one person to get a ripped MP3 and suddenly it's all over the Internet.)