Re:What's wrong with Live!?
on
Testing the Audigy
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I can understand the need to constantly upgrade video cards, but in the way of sound most people do not go much beyond stereo sound, and those that do will usually end up with some 4-5 point 3D sound setup.
Which is why I have Soundblaster PCI128s in all of
my machines. Unlike a new grpahics card, where you
can see the difference, to me, a cheap sound card
doesn't sound significantly different to a top of
the range one, so why bother? 3D audio? More of a
marketing gimmick than genuinely useful. My oggs
sound fine in normal stereo, as does Serious Sam.
I'm not a professional musician, so I don't need
huge banks of stored sounds, or heavy duty MIDI
control, so why would I need to spend a 3 figure sum on a soundcard?
IMHO, you can't make an artist friendly PC for
$1000, purely because an artist friendly monitor
alone will set you back that much. You'd need a
high end CRT (don't even think about
going for an LCD screen). I'd recommend an Eizo
Flexscan T761. If you can't stretch to that, then
you can get an LG Flatron 915FT+ for a fair bit
less. The monitor is by far the most
important factor in an artist's PC. You certainly
don't need the latest and greatest video card,
for example, even though that may seem counter
intuitive. Buy the best monitor you can afford,
and then build the rest of the machine with the
budget you have left. Anything else is false
economy, and you'll regret it later.
Mozilla doesn't seem to want to recognize the plugin
Odd. It Just Worked for me. I've been using
the flash plugin in Mozilla since 0.8 or so without
too many problems. In fact, the only major problem
I have it that it hangs the browser if another
application has/dev/dsp open and a flash movie
tries to do sound until the first app is closed.
Oh, and of course it doesn't work on my non-x86
Linux boxen (currently Sparc and Alpha). But I
don't really miss flash enough to bothered to
try Olivier Debon's free flash plugin.
As others have pointed out, there are options
for flash authoring under Unix, but I can't say
I've needed to use them (but then I've never yet come
across a web site that benefited from having
flash).
Plus, of course, the watch isn't even true binary.
It's binary coded sexagesimal. There used to be an
X11 clock (I cant' remember what it was called)
that showed the time in thousandths of a day.
Now that'd be a truly geeky watch...
encourage light banter and to get people meeting each other, which would make this party a big success?
A big success in whose eyes? The people you're
supposedly throwing the party for, or those in
upper and middle management who want to see
everyone "bonding" like they do. If you company
is really full of introverts, then if they're
anything like me, they won't enjoy the
sort of party you're trying to set up. As others
have pointed out, introverts
have no desire to have others force them to be
artificially extrovert. Let them be, and accept
that the party won't be what you'd traditionally
expect it to be. That doesn't mean the participants
won't be enjoying themselves. Just that their
idea of fun is probably different to yours.
my conclusion was that only the first and the last (Chapterhouse: Dune to which Heretics of Dune was a reasonable 'intro') were worth reading.
Odd. While I agree wholeheartedly about the first
book, I found the last to be the worst of the lot,
with only the third showing any of the promise from
the first one.
Problem is that the unix way with small applications sucks ass when you're trying to do your work in an intuitive way.
I'm not convinced this is true. I think there's a
fair amount of people thinking the way MS has presented things is intuitive, just because they've
had to put up with it for so long. Never
underestimate the power of familiarity.
For example,
I've had Windows users complain at me because
they have to double click the top left button to
close a window when using my machine, and "that's
not intuitive". Never mind the fact that Windows
used to work that way until Win95, and that the
rest of the world has worked that way since the dawn of windowing systems. No one complained that
it wasn't intuitive until Win95 appeared (even
NeXT users didn't have a problem with it).
I don't think monolithic applications like Outlook
(or Evolution, or Netscape or Emacs for that matter)
are fundamentally better than small separate apps.
There is definitely a case for having a single,
consistent interface to present to the user,
but that doesn't mean integrating everything into
a single huge app. It would be far better to have
an editor application that was called to compose
a new message than having an integrated editor
in Evolution. So long as that editor can be parented in any window the calling app chooses,
the end user need never know it's a separate app.
But it'll give them the flexibility to swap it
out for something different, should they choose
to do so (the biggest problem I have with
virtually every GUI mail client I've tried is
that I can't compose my messages in vi:-)
Re:get your terms correct
on
CPU Wars
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I meant that no one ever uses MICROMETER
No, but we do use the micrometre. The same way we use microfarads, microseconds and microvolts. I guess in the US you still use microns, but then you still use feet, inches, pounds and ounces, too. You have a perfectly good system of SI units, so why not use them? At least micron is just another name for a valid SI unit. Unlike Angstroms, which are just an abomination against nature (they should have just used nm or pm as appropriate).
Hopefully in the future stereos will move away from plain uncompressed stuff and towards things like MP3s.
Lets hope not. Some of us actually care about sound quality. As a friend of mine said, high fidelity and lossy compression can't exist in the same sentence. There's plenty of scope for lossless compression in the future, but lossless compression works by removing redundancy, which in turn narrows the scope for error correction. It's always a trade off, and IMHO, we should be aiming somewhere in the middle -- modest lossless compression, while still retaining a degree of error correction.
As long as they offer Free TV with advertising being their source of revenue they are going to have to follow the rules set forth essentially by the advertisors.
If you think advertisers object to nudity, you're wrong. Here in the UK, a significant proportion of the ads on TV are paid for by the same global corporations that pay for US ads, yet the UK doesn't suffer from the same sort of censorship that US TV does. In fact nudity is even used in ads themselves (although not to the same extent or frequency that it is in continental Europe, it has to be said).
DVD-RAM discs aren't supported in much else apart from another DVD-RAM drive...
DVD-RAM media comes in two options, Type I and Type II. Apparently, Type II media is removable from its caddy, and can be used as a normal DVD. I've yet to verify this, though, as I only have Type I media. BTW, my Panasonic LF-D101 DVD-RAM is SCSI, and has worked fine for me so far. I, too, would recommend SCSI for this sort of thing. But thinking about it, I'm the sort of person that would recommend SCSI for pretty much everything anyway:-)
Mostly more hectic action. Because Quake was the first of the poly-based FPS games, the hardware at the time wasn't capable of putting enough enemies on screen at any one time. Whereas Doom made your heart race as hordes of enemies all rushed towards you at once, Quake was a much slower paced game. It was many, many years before another game came along that rivalled Doom in terms of sheer "they're all out to get me" panic. That game was Serious Sam, and it blows every other FPS out of the water, IMHO.
And FWIW, I preferred Doom to Quake for multiplayer games, too. The only drawback was the 4 player limitation. Other games managed to get the multiplayer aspect right a lot sooner. UT was a great multiplayer game, for example.
And no matter how good it is, people will say 'Ahhh I enjoyed the original more.'
Are you sure? From the trailer [wolfensteinx.com] and the multiplayer preview [wolfensteinx.com] it looks awesome - check the realistic explosion on the building, the physics of the soldiers flying in with parachutes, and, or course, the flamethrower
All of which are completely irrelevant. They're just eye candy, and while they may look great, it's the gameplay that will determine whether it's better than the original or not. If you look at some of the greatest games of all time (e.g., Tetris, Angband, Doom, Hybris, Galaga) they may not have realistic explosions, or accurate physics models, but what all of them have, in buckets, is amazing gameplay. Compare Quake and Doom. Quake had far, far better eye candy, but Doom was the better and more playable game.
Place the cursor to the begining of the URL bar and hit ctrl+k
Or place the cursor *anywhere* in the URL bar, and use ctrl-U. My only complaint about this is that some fool chose to overload ctrl-U and make it the keyboard accelerator for view source, so if you haven't quite clicked in the URL bar, you don't get the result you expect... which leads me nicely onto my #1 wishlist for Mozilla: easily configurable key mappings. Yes, I know it can be done via the prefs file, but I've yet to see suitable documentation for it, and it would be much better served by having an option in Edit->Preferences.
Only about 1% of eveything I know came from lectures, and half of that is that lectures are dumb.
I slept through many of my lectures, mostly because they failed to sutain my interest. However, I did go to nearly all of mine, because occasionally, a topic came up that piqued my interest, and that made it all worthwhile. I remember troff being mentioned as an aside when someone asked how the lecture notes were formatted, and that prompted me to go off (outside the lecture, on my own time), and learn about it insude and out. That single comment made up for going to the other less interesting lectures. The end result was that I graduated with lesser marks than others in the year, but probably knowing more about Unix than pretty much all of them, and it's payed off later in my career.
Every line of code in OpenSSH has been security audited, which explains why the commercial ssh has been found vulnerable to a number of attacks, while OpenSSH has (for the most part) been OK.
OpenSSH will save your company money. This has to be balanced against the lack of a commercial support contract, although I'm sure you could find someone prepared to sell you a supoprt contract for OpenSSH. Where the balance swings depends on your companies priorities.
OpenSSH gives you peace of mind that the software you're depending on isn't vulnerable to the financial failure of a commercial company.
Commercial ssh has a few features that aren't yet present in OpenSSH (twofish and IDEA ciphers, for example, or host based authentication).
have a local/etc/hosts file with all existing hosts
You may joke, but on a small scale, it works. I have all of our production servers set up to use local hosts files. They don't need to know about anything outside of our production network, which is small enough and static enough that we simply don't need DNS, so we don't use it. There is no DNS traffic on our production network, and we're not vulnerable to DNS security flaws. On the rare occasions when we need to make changes, a simple script copies the new hosts file to each server with scp.
Real men surf the net using ip addresses. (And NOT in base 10)
Of course they use base 10, just without this wimpy business of splitting addresses into four octets. Real men have no need for such things: http://3277650428
Why does everyone thing DNS zone's must be contained in flat text files? I would like to see a nice SQL backed system.
What on earth for? SQL is a general purpose query language designed to maximize flexibility over performance. SQL lets you do all sorts of complex nested subqueries and joins which simply aren't needed for DNS, so why have the overhead? It all comes down to using the right tool for the job. And in this case, a fast non-SQL database (such as Berkeley DB, for example) is far more suited to the job. Too many people equate the term "database" with "SQL", when that's just one of the options. Often it's the right choice, but sometimes it isn't, and this is one of those times.
MBAs are smart people who have gone through a certain amount of schooling learning how business works.
In my experience (and yes, I'll admit to finding a few rare exceptions) MBAs are not smart people. They're generally slightly above average intelligence, but no more. That said, they will still be better than the average engineer at running a company. Again, there are exceptions to that:-)
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Which is why I have Soundblaster PCI128s in all of my machines. Unlike a new grpahics card, where you can see the difference, to me, a cheap sound card doesn't sound significantly different to a top of the range one, so why bother? 3D audio? More of a marketing gimmick than genuinely useful. My oggs sound fine in normal stereo, as does Serious Sam. I'm not a professional musician, so I don't need huge banks of stored sounds, or heavy duty MIDI control, so why would I need to spend a 3 figure sum on a soundcard?
Just like I use the telnet client, but never to log on to remote systems...
IMHO, you can't make an artist friendly PC for $1000, purely because an artist friendly monitor alone will set you back that much. You'd need a high end CRT (don't even think about going for an LCD screen). I'd recommend an Eizo Flexscan T761. If you can't stretch to that, then you can get an LG Flatron 915FT+ for a fair bit less. The monitor is by far the most important factor in an artist's PC. You certainly don't need the latest and greatest video card, for example, even though that may seem counter intuitive. Buy the best monitor you can afford, and then build the rest of the machine with the budget you have left. Anything else is false economy, and you'll regret it later.
Odd. It Just Worked for me. I've been using the flash plugin in Mozilla since 0.8 or so without too many problems. In fact, the only major problem I have it that it hangs the browser if another application has /dev/dsp open and a flash movie
tries to do sound until the first app is closed.
Oh, and of course it doesn't work on my non-x86
Linux boxen (currently Sparc and Alpha). But I
don't really miss flash enough to bothered to
try Olivier Debon's free flash plugin.
As others have pointed out, there are options
for flash authoring under Unix, but I can't say
I've needed to use them (but then I've never yet come
across a web site that benefited from having
flash).
Plus, of course, the watch isn't even true binary. It's binary coded sexagesimal. There used to be an X11 clock (I cant' remember what it was called) that showed the time in thousandths of a day. Now that'd be a truly geeky watch...
A big success in whose eyes? The people you're supposedly throwing the party for, or those in upper and middle management who want to see everyone "bonding" like they do. If you company is really full of introverts, then if they're anything like me, they won't enjoy the sort of party you're trying to set up. As others have pointed out, introverts have no desire to have others force them to be artificially extrovert. Let them be, and accept that the party won't be what you'd traditionally expect it to be. That doesn't mean the participants won't be enjoying themselves. Just that their idea of fun is probably different to yours.
Odd. While I agree wholeheartedly about the first book, I found the last to be the worst of the lot, with only the third showing any of the promise from the first one.
I'm not convinced this is true. I think there's a fair amount of people thinking the way MS has presented things is intuitive, just because they've had to put up with it for so long. Never underestimate the power of familiarity. For example, I've had Windows users complain at me because they have to double click the top left button to close a window when using my machine, and "that's not intuitive". Never mind the fact that Windows used to work that way until Win95, and that the rest of the world has worked that way since the dawn of windowing systems. No one complained that it wasn't intuitive until Win95 appeared (even NeXT users didn't have a problem with it).
I don't think monolithic applications like Outlook (or Evolution, or Netscape or Emacs for that matter) are fundamentally better than small separate apps. There is definitely a case for having a single, consistent interface to present to the user, but that doesn't mean integrating everything into a single huge app. It would be far better to have an editor application that was called to compose a new message than having an integrated editor in Evolution. So long as that editor can be parented in any window the calling app chooses, the end user need never know it's a separate app. But it'll give them the flexibility to swap it out for something different, should they choose to do so (the biggest problem I have with virtually every GUI mail client I've tried is that I can't compose my messages in vi :-)
No, but we do use the micrometre. The same way we use microfarads, microseconds and microvolts. I guess in the US you still use microns, but then you still use feet, inches, pounds and ounces, too. You have a perfectly good system of SI units, so why not use them? At least micron is just another name for a valid SI unit. Unlike Angstroms, which are just an abomination against nature (they should have just used nm or pm as appropriate).
This is one of those times I really wish I wasn't out of moderator points...
Lets hope not. Some of us actually care about sound quality. As a friend of mine said, high fidelity and lossy compression can't exist in the same sentence. There's plenty of scope for lossless compression in the future, but lossless compression works by removing redundancy, which in turn narrows the scope for error correction. It's always a trade off, and IMHO, we should be aiming somewhere in the middle -- modest lossless compression, while still retaining a degree of error correction.
Encrypted filesystems are useless without deniability. Rubberhose gives you that: http://www.rubberhose.org
Here in London, yes they do. Not all of them, but I think that's probably just a matter of time...
If you think advertisers object to nudity, you're wrong. Here in the UK, a significant proportion of the ads on TV are paid for by the same global corporations that pay for US ads, yet the UK doesn't suffer from the same sort of censorship that US TV does. In fact nudity is even used in ads themselves (although not to the same extent or frequency that it is in continental Europe, it has to be said).
DVD-RAM media comes in two options, Type I and Type II. Apparently, Type II media is removable from its caddy, and can be used as a normal DVD. I've yet to verify this, though, as I only have Type I media. BTW, my Panasonic LF-D101 DVD-RAM is SCSI, and has worked fine for me so far. I, too, would recommend SCSI for this sort of thing. But thinking about it, I'm the sort of person that would recommend SCSI for pretty much everything anyway :-)
Mostly more hectic action. Because Quake was the first of the poly-based FPS games, the hardware at the time wasn't capable of putting enough enemies on screen at any one time. Whereas Doom made your heart race as hordes of enemies all rushed towards you at once, Quake was a much slower paced game. It was many, many years before another game came along that rivalled Doom in terms of sheer "they're all out to get me" panic. That game was Serious Sam, and it blows every other FPS out of the water, IMHO.
And FWIW, I preferred Doom to Quake for multiplayer games, too. The only drawback was the 4 player limitation. Other games managed to get the multiplayer aspect right a lot sooner. UT was a great multiplayer game, for example.
Are you sure? From the trailer [wolfensteinx.com] and the multiplayer preview [wolfensteinx.com] it looks awesome - check the realistic explosion on the building, the physics of the soldiers flying in with parachutes, and, or course, the flamethrower
All of which are completely irrelevant. They're just eye candy, and while they may look great, it's the gameplay that will determine whether it's better than the original or not. If you look at some of the greatest games of all time (e.g., Tetris, Angband, Doom, Hybris, Galaga) they may not have realistic explosions, or accurate physics models, but what all of them have, in buckets, is amazing gameplay. Compare Quake and Doom. Quake had far, far better eye candy, but Doom was the better and more playable game.
Or place the cursor *anywhere* in the URL bar, and use ctrl-U. My only complaint about this is that some fool chose to overload ctrl-U and make it the keyboard accelerator for view source, so if you haven't quite clicked in the URL bar, you don't get the result you expect... which leads me nicely onto my #1 wishlist for Mozilla: easily configurable key mappings. Yes, I know it can be done via the prefs file, but I've yet to see suitable documentation for it, and it would be much better served by having an option in Edit->Preferences.
I slept through many of my lectures, mostly because they failed to sutain my interest. However, I did go to nearly all of mine, because occasionally, a topic came up that piqued my interest, and that made it all worthwhile. I remember troff being mentioned as an aside when someone asked how the lecture notes were formatted, and that prompted me to go off (outside the lecture, on my own time), and learn about it insude and out. That single comment made up for going to the other less interesting lectures. The end result was that I graduated with lesser marks than others in the year, but probably knowing more about Unix than pretty much all of them, and it's payed off later in my career.
OpenSSH will save your company money. This has to be balanced against the lack of a commercial support contract, although I'm sure you could find someone prepared to sell you a supoprt contract for OpenSSH. Where the balance swings depends on your companies priorities.
OpenSSH gives you peace of mind that the software you're depending on isn't vulnerable to the financial failure of a commercial company.
Commercial ssh has a few features that aren't yet present in OpenSSH (twofish and IDEA ciphers, for example, or host based authentication).
You may joke, but on a small scale, it works. I have all of our production servers set up to use local hosts files. They don't need to know about anything outside of our production network, which is small enough and static enough that we simply don't need DNS, so we don't use it. There is no DNS traffic on our production network, and we're not vulnerable to DNS security flaws. On the rare occasions when we need to make changes, a simple script copies the new hosts file to each server with scp.
Of course they use base 10, just without this wimpy business of splitting addresses into four octets. Real men have no need for such things: http://3277650428
What on earth for? SQL is a general purpose query language designed to maximize flexibility over performance. SQL lets you do all sorts of complex nested subqueries and joins which simply aren't needed for DNS, so why have the overhead? It all comes down to using the right tool for the job. And in this case, a fast non-SQL database (such as Berkeley DB, for example) is far more suited to the job. Too many people equate the term "database" with "SQL", when that's just one of the options. Often it's the right choice, but sometimes it isn't, and this is one of those times.
In my experience (and yes, I'll admit to finding a few rare exceptions) MBAs are not smart people. They're generally slightly above average intelligence, but no more. That said, they will still be better than the average engineer at running a company. Again, there are exceptions to that
...and when you work for a company that forbids you to install it, what then?