Incremental backups are not always the right way to go... if you have huge files with parts that change frequently, it's bad. Incremental backups copy whole files, not just the portions that changed like rsync does.
Bad case examples would be large DBM/GDBM hash table files, or (worst case): backing up a file system containing MySQL databases. MySQL keeps each database in single huge files.
All I'm saying is, be aware of what kind of data you're backing up (how much changes between incrementals, how large the files are, etc.)
I've been listening to mp3's for a number of years now and discovered I can hear a good bit of difference between 128kbps and the real CD. Especially on some albums like Madonna's Ray of Light album, or good triphop like Olive, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation, or Morcheeba.
Any time the sound starts from 0-volume and builds up (Madonna:Ray of Light:Nothing Really Matters), on 128kbps the first portion is missing(!) - and the first part you actually hear doesn't sound exactly right.
But you're right, you need good equipment to hear it. I tried a lot if different computer speaker/amplifier sets in the "about $50 range" 2-3 years ago and settled on Labtec speakers. They rock. I can tell the difference with that, or my nice pair of Sony headphones.
Ripping at 192kbps makes a world of difference over 128kbps. That's probably why you're seeing more 192kbps mp3s on gnutella than ever before.
As for oggs... well, I haven't tried 'em yet. I don't know have any rippers that can do it. I usually use musicmatch jukebox for ripping and winamp for playback. Ogg software suggestions for the windoze world, anyone?
Re:When will Mozilla Innovate?
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
·
· Score: 1
I just thought of an interesting idea. There otta be a new section to the Bugzilla software that is all about future features. They could be named, described, discussed, time/difficulty-estimated, and finally ranked by all members on usefulness.
Then, after 1.0 is out, people can start implementing the most highly ranked features first.
(disclaimer: I haven't looked at Bugzilla for a while, apologies if this already exists)
When people ask things like "what's the total bandwidth of the world?" you can tell they don't understand the basic fundamentals of radio transmission. Some things to remember are:
The higher frequency you use, the quicker the signal dies out with distance (for a given power).
Example: shortwave radio (lowish frequencies by today's standards) can transmit around the world, AM/FM radio and TV take tons of power to only transmit across a large city, cellphones (high frequency) only transmit a few miles at most.
I know that's not a very scientific comparison, but the general idea is sound.
If a transmission on a high frequency can't be received more than a few miles, this can be a good thing - you can reuse that frequency at many other locations!
So within a given radius, a whole bunch of high frequencies can be used for various transmissions, and further away the same frequencies can be re-used for other transmissions. With relay equipment connecting the two areas, you can relay information point to point, across much larger distances (ala Packet Radio). So if you're trying to talk to someone in your same city, the transmission stays within that city (possibly relayed a few times). If its destination is across the country, more relaying must occur (or land-lines used for the major span of distance).
All you need is some kind of registrar to make sure no transmitter uses frequencies that will conflict with other nearby transmitters. Hmm, a central authority that organizes who uses what numbers, where have we seen that idea before? All it takes is an InterNIC for radio frequencies, which we already have... they're called the FCC in the United States; similar organizations in other countries.
A lot of people misunderstand why running old keys is worse than running new keys. When given a choice, always process a new keyblock. Throwing away a block of keys you failed to run is never a bad thing. The longer you hang on to keys and don't process them, the higher the chance that someone else has crunched them for you, and your results will be useless to the project. This can happen two ways: (1) all remaining keys have been assigned to people so the keyserver begins re-assigning old blocks that were never returned; (2) people running the client in off-line mode to crunch random keyblocks have already processed your block.
In fact, the closer the project gets to 100% completion, the more quickly unreturned blocks are re-assigned (and re-re-assigned) just to try to get somebody (anybody!) to crunch them and return the results. When a project begins, a block of 10-day-old keys is still mostly useful to the project. But near the end, there's a very high chance most of those keys have been handled already.
Your computers have a finite amount of compute-power to offer the Distributed project. The best thing you can do with that power is make sure that 100% of the blocks you work on are useful to the project. The closest you can get to guaranteeing this is to process the newest blocks you can get from the keyserver.
"But what if the keys I throw away had the one!" Keys are assigned in random order from the keyserver. Nobody knows if the one is in the beginning, middle, or end of the entire sequence of keys to check. The winning key has an equal chance of being in the old block you're considering throwing away as it does in any new block you could download from the keyserver, so what the heck - just take the new keys. (In fact, there's a slightly higher chance that a new block will have the winning key - some parts of your old block may have already been processed by others, right? And nobody's won yet, right?)
The biggest problem with PG that I see is the lame web page. How we access data is sometimes more important than the data itself. PG has all the fundamental parts - indexed by title, by author, and a search engine - but the web page presents it all very poorly.
The main web page needs to be simple and powerful. Put the search engine front & center! Don't make me click a link to get to a search engine. Put the A-B-C-D-E-... links for Author and Title lookups right there on the main page, and don't make me have to scroll down to reach it. The least important thing is the gigantic text file of every book you have available, yet you put that on the main page, occupying over half the visual space on my browser. Another huge chunk of visual space is dedicated to FTP sites containing the texts, and even HOW TO USE ftp sites (!) -- the instructions for GETTING THE INSTRUCTIONS takes up an entire paragraph.
The fundamental aspect of good web pages for the next century is: MINIMAL WORDS
For example, the bottom of the PG web page says:
If you try to download a book and you get an error, try to find a solution in our
Help page
I feel uncomfortable wasting my time reading that entire sentence just for the concept:
An entire sentence digested down to 3 words, and you can make all 3 a link to the help page, giving the user a larger target to click on than just the word "Help".
The third paragraph talking about FTP also has combined within it discussion of subscribing to a mailing list/newsletter. Different concepts should be visually separated.
And lastly, there's way way way too much text at the top of every Etext that has nothing to do with what the user is attempting to read. Learn from the GNU project - one simple paragraph with the basic facts, and a pointer to a web page where they can read more. This solves another problem for you - if you have to change that text, you only have to change 1 web page, not the tops of 10,000 documents.
SUMMARY Make the user's life quicker & easier, and you will get returning visitors. The way your web page looks today, I don't want to come back.
I hope the PG team accepts these comments as constructive criticism, because I strongly believe in the purpose and goals of PG. Keep up the good work!
We could figure out the criteria, given enough data points.... Here's my data (I was rejected):
household income: $25k-75k liquid net worth: $20k-25k total portfolio: $10-20k investing time.... stock: 2+ years options: 2+ years mutual funds: 0 IPOs: 0 US Treas: 0 Municip Bonds: 0 Corp Bonds: 0 Knowledge of investing: good Understand market is volatile? Yes objectives: aggressive growth, growth not affiliated with anyone in stock market
I certainly hope this thing is real, the RC5 project needs as much CPU power as it can get. A lot of people switched their computers over to the SETI project and I think it's impacting RC5 a lot, which is a shame. At yesterday's block rate the last RC5 block will be cracked on January 4, 2007! But of course, the secret key could be found at any time....
It sounds like with only 1 video connector you can't address the left/right LCD screens separately. That's ashame, two video inputs would be great for stereo image viewing.
Two eyes. Two video inputs. Two video cards. That much closer to virtual reality...
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Bad case examples would be large DBM/GDBM hash table files, or (worst case): backing up a file system containing MySQL databases. MySQL keeps each database in single huge files.
All I'm saying is, be aware of what kind of data you're backing up (how much changes between incrementals, how large the files are, etc.)
But you're right, you need good equipment to hear it. I tried a lot if different computer speaker/amplifier sets in the "about $50 range" 2-3 years ago and settled on Labtec speakers. They rock. I can tell the difference with that, or my nice pair of Sony headphones.
Ripping at 192kbps makes a world of difference over 128kbps. That's probably why you're seeing more 192kbps mp3s on gnutella than ever before.
As for oggs... well, I haven't tried 'em yet. I don't know have any rippers that can do it. I usually use musicmatch jukebox for ripping and winamp for playback. Ogg software suggestions for the windoze world, anyone?
Then, after 1.0 is out, people can start implementing the most highly ranked features first.
(disclaimer: I haven't looked at Bugzilla for a while, apologies if this already exists)
- have AIM bundled with it
- display a "running man" icon linked to AIM
- play a voice saying "you have new porn!"
- required a two-word password of the form SKREW/YEW
- arrive as a CDROM in my physical mail once a week for the rest of my natural life
Yet none of this has happened. Sorry, the facts just don't indicate it.The higher frequency you use, the quicker the signal dies out with distance (for a given power).
If a transmission on a high frequency can't be received more than a few miles, this can be a good thing - you can reuse that frequency at many other locations!
So within a given radius, a whole bunch of high frequencies can be used for various transmissions, and further away the same frequencies can be re-used for other transmissions. With relay equipment connecting the two areas, you can relay information point to point, across much larger distances (ala Packet Radio). So if you're trying to talk to someone in your same city, the transmission stays within that city (possibly relayed a few times). If its destination is across the country, more relaying must occur (or land-lines used for the major span of distance).
All you need is some kind of registrar to make sure no transmitter uses frequencies that will conflict with other nearby transmitters. Hmm, a central authority that organizes who uses what numbers, where have we seen that idea before? All it takes is an InterNIC for radio frequencies, which we already have... they're called the FCC in the United States; similar organizations in other countries.
In fact, the closer the project gets to 100% completion, the more quickly unreturned blocks are re-assigned (and re-re-assigned) just to try to get somebody (anybody!) to crunch them and return the results. When a project begins, a block of 10-day-old keys is still mostly useful to the project. But near the end, there's a very high chance most of those keys have been handled already.
Your computers have a finite amount of compute-power to offer the Distributed project. The best thing you can do with that power is make sure that 100% of the blocks you work on are useful to the project. The closest you can get to guaranteeing this is to process the newest blocks you can get from the keyserver.
"But what if the keys I throw away had the one!" Keys are assigned in random order from the keyserver. Nobody knows if the one is in the beginning, middle, or end of the entire sequence of keys to check. The winning key has an equal chance of being in the old block you're considering throwing away as it does in any new block you could download from the keyserver, so what the heck - just take the new keys. (In fact, there's a slightly higher chance that a new block will have the winning key - some parts of your old block may have already been processed by others, right? And nobody's won yet, right?)
So who volunteers to port MAME to Gameboy!
Mmmm, 1,800 arcade games in one...
Elm 2.4 PL25 (November 11, 1995) used by RedHat 5.0, 5.1, 5.2 (the latest elm updates at RedHat site for these OS versions) has this year 100 bug too.
Solution: download,build,install the latest Elm 2.5.2 from ftp://ftp.virginia.edu/pub/elm
It builds on RH 5.x with no problems.
Now-- if this was useful to you, shame on you! Upgrade to RH6.1! (pointing finger at self)
The main web page needs to be simple and powerful. Put the search engine front & center! Don't make me click a link to get to a search engine. Put the A-B-C-D-E-... links for Author and Title lookups right there on the main page, and don't make me have to scroll down to reach it. The least important thing is the gigantic text file of every book you have available, yet you put that on the main page, occupying over half the visual space on my browser. Another huge chunk of visual space is dedicated to FTP sites containing the texts, and even HOW TO USE ftp sites (!) -- the instructions for GETTING THE INSTRUCTIONS takes up an entire paragraph.
The fundamental aspect of good web pages for the next century is: MINIMAL WORDS
For example, the bottom of the PG web page says:
I feel uncomfortable wasting my time reading that entire sentence just for the concept: An entire sentence digested down to 3 words, and you can make all 3 a link to the help page, giving the user a larger target to click on than just the word "Help".The third paragraph talking about FTP also has combined within it discussion of subscribing to a mailing list/newsletter. Different concepts should be visually separated.
And lastly, there's way way way too much text at the top of every Etext that has nothing to do with what the user is attempting to read. Learn from the GNU project - one simple paragraph with the basic facts, and a pointer to a web page where they can read more. This solves another problem for you - if you have to change that text, you only have to change 1 web page, not the tops of 10,000 documents.
SUMMARY
Make the user's life quicker & easier, and you will get returning visitors. The way your web page looks today, I don't want to come back.
I hope the PG team accepts these comments as constructive criticism, because I strongly believe in the purpose and goals of PG. Keep up the good work!
We could figure out the criteria, given enough data points.... Here's my data (I was rejected):
household income: $25k-75k
liquid net worth: $20k-25k
total portfolio: $10-20k
investing time....
stock: 2+ years
options: 2+ years
mutual funds: 0
IPOs: 0
US Treas: 0
Municip Bonds: 0
Corp Bonds: 0
Knowledge of investing: good
Understand market is volatile? Yes
objectives: aggressive growth, growth
not affiliated with anyone in stock market
I opened a new Etrade account with $4500.
RESULT: rejected.
I certainly hope this thing is real, the RC5 project needs as much CPU power as it can get. A lot of people switched their computers over to the SETI project and I think it's impacting RC5 a lot, which is a shame. At yesterday's block rate the last RC5 block will be cracked on January 4, 2007! But of course, the secret key could be found at any time....
It sounds like with only 1 video connector you can't address the left/right LCD screens separately. That's ashame, two video inputs would be great for stereo image viewing.
Two eyes. Two video inputs. Two video cards. That much closer to virtual reality...