The approved standard is tentative. The group will meet again next year to approve the real standard. This isn't coming to market for some time yet. register article
On the plus side, it will be usable in many countries rather than just North America like 802.11a (which is in a different spectrum) and it should be easier to share the RF section with 802.11b.
On the down side, it is in the same spectrum with 802.11b so you won't be bringing it up in parallel without interference and possible slow downs.
I haven't seen any predicted comparisons for cost, real world bandwidth vs. distance numbers or watts/byte numbers. These will be critical for determining which standard wins acceptance in various markets. No, I'm just kidding. The marketing departments of the manufacturers will choose which we use. I am guessing 'g' because it is later in the alphabet and clearly must be more advanced, but 'a' has that whole letter-grade thing going for it. Could go either way.
Tired of people who think they are owed immediate support.
Tired of being yelled at by above people.
Tired of people that complain about bugs but won't help fix. note: you do not need to be a coder to help fix. testers and analyzers are always handy
Tired of defending decisions.
Tired of people using the mailing list instead of the docs.
Tired of working with people that make money off of other peoples work without credit. here we get to some of the headline.
Tired of working with some specific offenders of the above.
Tired of spending every waking hour on fink.
repeat variations of the above some more...
Sounds more like just plain tired than GPL violations, but then I'm not a slashdot media spinner.
Christoph deserves a great big THANKS from the world of computer users. I have worked on similar ports to other processors and it is mind numbing tedious work that stretches to the horizon and beyond. Every day you know that you will spend it fixing bugs in a dozen programs, bugs that will range from the trivial to the near impossible to find.
You do not plan and execute your plan as in the development of a program. You work your way down the list of unwashed packages, build them, test them, fix them and check them off only to find more packages added to the list than you checked off that day. Most of the packages you won't give a rat's ass about, but you do them because someone, somewhere will be wanting it.
Take a break Christoph. Get caught up in school, then when that itch returns create another wonderful thing.
Re:Why keep re-inventing SCSI? - its the cables
on
Firewire and Linux?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
When you dig down into the SBP-2 layer of IEEE-1394 you will find that it is SCSI. SCSI commands and responses are used for the mass storage device on IEEE-1394. The only thing that is different is the physical and low level signal transmission. So, at the software level (once you get above the lowest level packet sender/receiver) there is no difference from scsi.
At the physical level you get to trade a 50 or 68 pin connector and cable for a 6 or 4 pin connector and cable. The controller chips probably cost about the same in volume, maybe a couple of bucks different. A good SCSI cable (and don't mess with bad ones) is $50. A good firewire cable is $7.
There is your reason. A $300 disk is $350 with
SCSI and $308 with Firewire. (I added a dollar for the $0.50 license fee on the ports at each end of the cable.:-) A 12% cost savings will win in the end.
Non-tangibles such as easy configuration, the ability to pile a dump truck load of disks on a single interface, and not becoming ensnared in a wriggling mass of cables are just nice bonuses.
(I have used SCSI for ages, but now prefer IEEE-1394 for my archival storage machines. I still use SCSI for my high reliability and high performance machines, but that is more a Linux driver issue than anything intrinsically IEEE-1394.)
The iBook with OS-X covers a lot of what the poster asks...
yes - nice clear screen...
yes - decent 2d video... antialiasing...
yes - Good physical utility... no special bag... this is how I use mine, it is holding up fine to such abuse. It scratches if you put it in with sharp things, but its a plastic computer, not Achilles.
no - Insanely long battery life... wants a week That is not happening, but it is better than most and the new power adapters are portable. No Bad bad yoyo. I don't carry a power adapter and get through my day just fine. YBLMV
yes - Get networking... 10/100 + 802.11b
well... - Needs to run linux or at least OpenBSD/FreeBSD. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Maybe they suck in odd ways. Darwin and its BSD world are pretty good. I develop there then build on Linux. Obviously this isn't a good idea if you want to work on the Linux kernel, but then I avoid queer hardware entirely for that.
yes - rugged I've thrown mine on the floor and it is fine. Well, it is slightly bent. It doesn't sit quite flat anymore, but other than that it is fine.
no - Exudes cool ubergeek factor of carrying around a custom built laptop. But consider if you really want that. I mean, ubergeek is great and all, but it doesn't wash off and you can't conceal it with a hat and nice clothes. People will instantly know you are a geek anywhere, anytime, even if you don't have the device with you or tell them about it. Its just that way.
Cost isn't outrageous, certainly not compared to building your own. $1299 + sam ram from elsewhere gets you going. (DVD or CD/RW will kick the cost up, wireless adds $100, but as of today it is 128 bit encryption.) Think about it as $2/day to have a computer.
People with only one partition were not harmed. You had to have more than one partition and have one of them named like the first one with another word after it. "Disk" and "Disk 2" would do it.
Very few mac users use more than one partition. There isn't a compelling reason for most people.
Yep, lost that 90 day warranty. I suspect anything that survives shipping lasts 90 days.
It worries me a bit that they put such a short warantee on it. Apple knows how to set warantees. The early Airport base stations had a huge failure rate after just over one year. (Bad capacitors. Thank goodness a google search and a trip to radio shack will get you back in business.)
Re:No, its just a scale replica - with bandaids on
on
Da Vinci Bridge Built
·
· Score: 2
Yes, not only is it 1/3 the length and made out of a material unavailable to DaVinci, but it doesn't look to be supporting itself well.
Notice in the picture the four T shaped supports holding up the spans outside the bows. Even with these supports the near span is visibly sagging. In DaVinci's design that area was to be filled with masonry, I hope they do something other than leave those inappropriate supports in place.
And while I suppose the handrails are required by local building codes, they do spoil the entire effect. All those little vertical lines ruin the effect the clean span. Of course, a series of fatal accidents involving skateboarders and bicyclists falling onto the highway below would probably also spoil the bridge's reputation...
(And no, I have no idea how to make a visually appropriate hand rail. I'm not an architect, just a critic.:-)
Those who haven't read it yet should read this link where Ron L. Toms launches people with a trebuchet. (You can also find him jumping the grand canyon if you look around.)
ardax makes the point above, but is only scored 1, so...
First, about your analogies...
If I wear out the door key to my car, the car should not burst into flames when I try to open the door.
If my car runs out of fuel, I expect that after rectifying that little problem (and bleeding the injectors) it will be just like new. I do not expect that it will ruin my tires.
And yes, I have kept my refrigerator outdoors. I kept it on the front porch for two months while the house was being renovated 10 years ago. It worked just fine. It is 30 years old now (Thats 15 PC generations to you young whippersnappers. Moores law says the new fridges should be 1,000,000 times colder now.:-) and I expect it to continue running indefinately. About every 5 years I put a drop of oil on the fan shaft behind the freezer to keep it from squealing. Software has a ways to go.
About the cubase incident...
Yes, the CD is scratched. I expect that I won't be able to re-authorize my copy of the software, but don't ruin ALL the data on my hard drive! (Its actually worse. It was my wife's laptop. You do NOT want to have to tell my wife that you just wiped out her laptop.)
About Word...
Destroying the on disk copy of a document before successfully writing out the new copy is just plain stupid. Particularly on a Mac where there is a special file system function to swap two files. You write the new copy under a fake name, swap it atomically (even over file severs) with the original file, then delete the fake named file (which now contains the old data). No one gets hurt in error conditions, no one can ever have bad luck timing and read a partially written file off the file sever. Life is good.
The third case (The PSC) you don't mention, but it isn't really a case of graceful degradation. Its just an irritating bug. Honestly I'd dump the device because of the irritation, but it actually feeds card stock out of its paper tray! A rare quality in a printer.
I suppose the more explicit point I should have made is that bad things are going to happen to software and it requires effort from the programmer to deal with it. Sometimes just a tiny bit of effort. Cubase performed so badly with a bad CD that I suspect they never tested it. They write about it in their documentation, but they probably didn't test it. The Word example is just careless programming which could have been trivially avoided if the programmers understood the platform's file system calls.
How about the cost? I estimate that it probably doubles the engineering effort to handle the exception cases to a degree that would cover the incidents I note above. In the calculus of software development the benefits do not out way that cost.
I was just re-re-reauthenticating my Cubase installation. The key CD is now scratched which hangs the authenticator forced a quite ungraceful reboot and corrupted my hard drive. (Perhaps a $150 upgrade will help. I'll never know.)
The last time I used Word a drive filled during a save operation and left me with just a mutilated copy of the original file. (I will not use it again.)
My HP PSC 750xi software informs me every morning that its controlling software was exploded and I should reboot the host computer. (I'll wait for the OS-X drivers. If they are still bad the PSC goes out the door.)
The most amazing part is that this state of affairs doesn't surprise me. If my refrigerator intermittently defrosted and melted icecream all over the kitchen I'd be ticked. If my car mysteriously dies at stop signs I get it fixed.
Programmers have managed to beat down everyone's expectations to the point where half-assed is pretty good.
The only way I see to fix it is for consumers to refuse to buy flawed products, or legislators to pass laws allowing redress for flawed products.
I don't think either is likely.
I now use OSS for my mission critical work and fix what needs it.
OmniWeb works. So of the browsers I've tested and posted as replies here, only the Mozilla derived one failed. iCab and OmniWeb are both independent code bases.
Galeon 0.12.4 is blocked. It offers to let me download some windows and mac browsers, but nothing that will help on the computer I'm actually using.
I suspect you can, I ran a similar experiment
on
Apple releases iPod
·
· Score: 2
I dropped my white iBook a couple weeks ago. Well, not dropped so much as flung. I snatched the briefcase off a chest high pile of boxes, saw the lid come open, nearly caught the ibook with my other hand as it flew past me, hit the door and fell to the floor. (standard cheap office carpet over concrete)
Its a little bent. It only sits on two feet when on a flat surface, but other than that its fine. Heck, it didn't even reboot. Just woke right up from sleep when I opened it.
I'll bet they do at least as well with a handheld device.
The security watchdogs of the net have no obligation to me. I am glad they do their tasks, but the owe me nothing.
My software providers have an obligation to provide me with secure software or none at all. I commend both Debian and Apple for responding to their occasional security problems in a timely manner.
In the olden days when watchdogs did not release sample code some software providers downplayed their flaws as theoretical problems. If the software providers had been responsive to security flaws, there would be no need for sample code.
Consider a hypothetical tv show which displayed a solid, bright, red background. Your red LED would need to put out enough light to illuminate your screen bright red. Now, take your Photon microlight out of your pocket. (Surely all slashot readers have at least one of those by now. Ultra bright LED on a keychain.) Sit in a lit room and shine the microlight on a white surface, adjust the distance from the surface until your red (or white, or whatever color your microlight is) spot is about as bright as you would like the TV to be. Compute the area of the spot on the white surface. Mine is four square inches with a white microlight in a dim room. Maybe calibrate your idea of brightness by looking at your TV up close and then comparing to your illuminated spot.
Using the `no free lunch' rule of physics, you need to admit that a single LED is only going to provide enough light to adequatly illuminate 4 square inches. Hence, a 100" tv (4800sq in) is going to take 1200 LEDs. The way bright LEDs are something like $3 each in huge quantity, thats $3600 before you add optics, mechnical oscillators, and electronics.
Rather than baffle all your legitimate callers, you should first register with the Direct Market Association. The marketers don't want to waste time calling hostile people. Use this to register as a hostile customer. In a bizarre twist, if you register online it is $5. If you register by snail mail it is free. Use snail mail.
I registered quite some time ago and almost all of my sales calls went away. Just the little local people an newspapers were still calling.
You might also check with your state. In Missouri you can sign up here and it becomes illegal for people to call you (with some exceptions for people with powerful lobbies.) I am on this list as well and can't remember the last time I got a sales call.
I don't maintain a play list, I just let it do my whole mp3 directory tree. I don't delete the songs because I like to keep the albums intact for research purposes. Say I'm studying a particular bass player. I will then want to listen to all of his tracks, even though I don't listen to them recreationally.
I rip mp3 at 256k. Long ago when I started ripping with lame I compared 128, 192, and 256. The difference from 192 to 256 was noticable on my material. In particular, the stereo imaging was off much worse at 192 than 256. There is still a noticable difference from 256 to CD, but I can live with it.
I listen with a set of Boston Acoustics speakers with an external subwoofer. It has a tiny sweetspot, about head sized, but for a single listener they are quite good, especially the stereo imaging. (I also have a set of their less expensive model that I got at compusa, these are not so good. You want the ones with the bigger speakers.)
Although I listen mostly at my linux machines, I also use a Mac for portable work. As soon as there is an ogg plugin for itunes I will switch to ogg and re-encode all my CDs. I'll redo the bitrate selection exercise at that time.
Re:Tivo-like controls? thumbs up and down
on
Winamp Alpha for Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
IDNOAT, but I hear Tivos have a "thumbs up" and a "thumbs down" function to allow you to give feedback to it about what you like.
The interesting part is that half of that user interface is already in an mp3 player, they just need to take advantage of it.
Consider...
I have about 4000 tracks in my mp3 library. I leave xmms on shuffle play. There are tracks that I almost always skip. Sometimes it is a weak track on an album, sometimes it has especially inflamatory lyrics and isn't appropriate for the office, sometimes it is an artist that has ticked me off (Randy Newman isn't getting played much lately).
The player should keep track of which tracks or artists I habitually skip reduce their probability in the play list. If I stop skipping them then it should start reducing their penalty. (Say Randy Newman drops his suit against mp3.com and apologizes, I might stop skipping his tracks.)
There, no complicated user interface required. Just a player that pays attention and learns a wee bit. For bonus points, add a "i like it" button to the user interface and allow tracks to acquire 'thumbs up' points as well.
...is convincing the new *NIX admin to not hit ctrl-alt-delete.
Edit/etc/inittab and disable ctrl-alt-del as a reboot. Just too easy to make that mistake in a mixed environment. If you
really have an environment where you need to trigger a reboot and can't get logged in then you probably should think twice about calling that a production machine. Worst case, hook up the joystick daemon with a reboot button and duct tape a $4 game pad to the side of the machine as a reboot button.:-)
...is reminding that the root user cannot log in from telnet.
Mercy! telnet? Use ssh and allow root login. (Use the keys for authentication too while you are at it. Much more flexible than passwords when there may be more than one admin.) If you have a religious opposition to people entering a machine as root, then use
sudo and configure it so certain users can easily pop up to root.
...is getting accustomed to a CLI.
Well, not so much accustomed to the CLI but learning the two dozen commands and dozen config files you are going to need to keep the machine running. You can get a long way just blundering around in a GUI looking for something that suggests it might help. In *nix you will probably end up
reading about it before you do it.
Nice idea that is. Think first, then do. As soon as I finish getting that through to my 7 year old I'll start on the Windows admins.:-)
Whoa there AC! I don't recall saying people should not use Powerpoint. I was just asking about anecdotes of people failing to use it well.
As a software developer, if large numbers of my customers can't figure out how to use my software, I have failed. I should review my interface or documentation and address it.
As a presenter, if my presentation tool is distracting people from the message, it is failing.
In the example of the `phantom forwarding presentation' the user was probably faced with a much more complicated tool than they really needed. That may point to the need for a default `simple' mode in the software.
(I myself never using anything more than text bullets, and embedded diagrams that I generate elsewhere in a presentation. I use a presentation for communicating, not entertaining. And to be specific. I use AppleWorks. It is relatively feature free, but it does everything I've ever needed in an office suite except for log scales on graphs and its free (as in beer).)
I was attending a presentation by some state officials last week. The presenter's Powerpoint presentation was set to autoadvance every 30 seconds or so and apparently they couldn't make it stop, so she had an assistant sit at the computer and backup the slide everytime it jumped ahead prematurely.
So who else has watched someone by victimized by powerpoint? Add your anectdote as a reply.
Slashdot Mirror
The approved standard is tentative. The group will meet again next year to approve the real standard. This isn't coming to market for some time yet. register article
On the plus side, it will be usable in many countries rather than just North America like 802.11a (which is in a different spectrum) and it should be easier to share the RF section with 802.11b.
On the down side, it is in the same spectrum with 802.11b so you won't be bringing it up in parallel without interference and possible slow downs.
I haven't seen any predicted comparisons for cost, real world bandwidth vs. distance numbers or watts/byte numbers. These will be critical for determining which standard wins acceptance in various markets. No, I'm just kidding. The marketing departments of the manufacturers will choose which we use. I am guessing 'g' because it is later in the alphabet and clearly must be more advanced, but 'a' has that whole letter-grade thing going for it. Could go either way.
Sounds more like just plain tired than GPL violations, but then I'm not a slashdot media spinner.
Christoph deserves a great big THANKS from the world of computer users. I have worked on similar ports to other processors and it is mind numbing tedious work that stretches to the horizon and beyond. Every day you know that you will spend it fixing bugs in a dozen programs, bugs that will range from the trivial to the near impossible to find.
You do not plan and execute your plan as in the development of a program. You work your way down the list of unwashed packages, build them, test them, fix them and check them off only to find more packages added to the list than you checked off that day. Most of the packages you won't give a rat's ass about, but you do them because someone, somewhere will be wanting it.
Take a break Christoph. Get caught up in school, then when that itch returns create another wonderful thing.
When you dig down into the SBP-2 layer of IEEE-1394 you will find that it is SCSI. SCSI commands and responses are used for the mass storage device on IEEE-1394. The only thing that is different is the physical and low level signal transmission. So, at the software level (once you get above the lowest level packet sender/receiver) there is no difference from scsi.
:-) A 12% cost savings will win in the end.
At the physical level you get to trade a 50 or 68 pin connector and cable for a 6 or 4 pin connector and cable. The controller chips probably cost about the same in volume, maybe a couple of bucks different. A good SCSI cable (and don't mess with bad ones) is $50. A good firewire cable is $7.
There is your reason. A $300 disk is $350 with
SCSI and $308 with Firewire. (I added a dollar for the $0.50 license fee on the ports at each end of the cable.
Non-tangibles such as easy configuration, the ability to pile a dump truck load of disks on a single interface, and not becoming ensnared in a wriggling mass of cables are just nice bonuses.
(I have used SCSI for ages, but now prefer IEEE-1394 for my archival storage machines. I still use SCSI for my high reliability and high performance machines, but that is more a Linux driver issue than anything intrinsically IEEE-1394.)
Comments like the parent should really be written in German. It is far superior for this sort of speech.
Cost isn't outrageous, certainly not compared to building your own. $1299 + sam ram from elsewhere gets you going. (DVD or CD/RW will kick the cost up, wireless adds $100, but as of today it is 128 bit encryption.) Think about it as $2/day to have a computer.
People with only one partition were not harmed. You had to have more than one partition and have one of them named like the first one with another word after it. "Disk" and "Disk 2" would do it.
Very few mac users use more than one partition. There isn't a compelling reason for most people.
Yep, lost that 90 day warranty. I suspect anything that survives shipping lasts 90 days.
It worries me a bit that they put such a short warantee on it. Apple knows how to set warantees. The early Airport base stations had a huge failure rate after just over one year. (Bad capacitors. Thank goodness a google search and a trip to radio shack will get you back in business.)
Yes, not only is it 1/3 the length and made out of a material unavailable to DaVinci, but it doesn't look to be supporting itself well.
:-)
Notice in the picture the four T shaped supports holding up the spans outside the bows. Even with these supports the near span is visibly sagging. In DaVinci's design that area was to be filled with masonry, I hope they do something other than leave those inappropriate supports in place.
And while I suppose the handrails are required by local building codes, they do spoil the entire effect. All those little vertical lines ruin the effect the clean span. Of course, a series of fatal accidents involving skateboarders and bicyclists falling onto the highway below would probably also spoil the bridge's reputation...
(And no, I have no idea how to make a visually appropriate hand rail. I'm not an architect, just a critic.
Those who haven't read it yet should read this link where Ron L. Toms launches people with a trebuchet. (You can also find him jumping the grand canyon if you look around.)
ardax makes the point above, but is only scored 1, so...
:-) and I expect it to continue running indefinately. About every 5 years I put a drop of oil on the fan shaft behind the freezer to keep it from squealing. Software has a ways to go.
First, about your analogies...
If I wear out the door key to my car, the car should not burst into flames when I try to open the door.
If my car runs out of fuel, I expect that after rectifying that little problem (and bleeding the injectors) it will be just like new. I do not expect that it will ruin my tires.
And yes, I have kept my refrigerator outdoors. I kept it on the front porch for two months while the house was being renovated 10 years ago. It worked just fine. It is 30 years old now (Thats 15 PC generations to you young whippersnappers. Moores law says the new fridges should be 1,000,000 times colder now.
About the cubase incident...
Yes, the CD is scratched. I expect that I won't be able to re-authorize my copy of the software, but don't ruin ALL the data on my hard drive! (Its actually worse. It was my wife's laptop. You do NOT want to have to tell my wife that you just wiped out her laptop.)
About Word...
Destroying the on disk copy of a document before successfully writing out the new copy is just plain stupid. Particularly on a Mac where there is a special file system function to swap two files. You write the new copy under a fake name, swap it atomically (even over file severs) with the original file, then delete the fake named file (which now contains the old data). No one gets hurt in error conditions, no one can ever have bad luck timing and read a partially written file off the file sever. Life is good.
The third case (The PSC) you don't mention, but it isn't really a case of graceful degradation. Its just an irritating bug. Honestly I'd dump the device because of the irritation, but it actually feeds card stock out of its paper tray! A rare quality in a printer.
I suppose the more explicit point I should have made is that bad things are going to happen to software and it requires effort from the programmer to deal with it. Sometimes just a tiny bit of effort. Cubase performed so badly with a bad CD that I suspect they never tested it. They write about it in their documentation, but they probably didn't test it. The Word example is just careless programming which could have been trivially avoided if the programmers understood the platform's file system calls.
How about the cost? I estimate that it probably doubles the engineering effort to handle the exception cases to a degree that would cover the incidents I note above. In the calculus of software development the benefits do not out way that cost.
I was just re-re-reauthenticating my Cubase installation. The key CD is now scratched which hangs the authenticator forced a quite ungraceful reboot and corrupted my hard drive. (Perhaps a $150 upgrade will help. I'll never know.)
The last time I used Word a drive filled during a save operation and left me with just a mutilated copy of the original file. (I will not use it again.)
My HP PSC 750xi software informs me every morning that its controlling software was exploded and I should reboot the host computer. (I'll wait for the OS-X drivers. If they are still bad the PSC goes out the door.)
The most amazing part is that this state of affairs doesn't surprise me. If my refrigerator intermittently defrosted and melted icecream all over the kitchen I'd be ticked. If my car mysteriously dies at stop signs I get it fixed.
Programmers have managed to beat down everyone's expectations to the point where half-assed is pretty good.
The only way I see to fix it is for consumers to refuse to buy flawed products, or legislators to pass laws allowing redress for flawed products.
I don't think either is likely.
I now use OSS for my mission critical work and fix what needs it.
OmniWeb works. So of the browsers I've tested and posted as replies here, only the Mozilla derived one failed. iCab and OmniWeb are both independent code bases.
iCab works if it identifies as IE. It may be caching, but it also works if it identifies as iCab. Must be a bug in MSN's blocker logic.
Galeon 0.12.4 is blocked. It offers to let me download some windows and mac browsers, but nothing that will help on the computer I'm actually using.
I dropped my white iBook a couple weeks ago. Well, not dropped so much as flung. I snatched the briefcase off a chest high pile of boxes, saw the lid come open, nearly caught the ibook with my other hand as it flew past me, hit the door and fell to the floor. (standard cheap office carpet over concrete)
Its a little bent. It only sits on two feet when on a flat surface, but other than that its fine. Heck, it didn't even reboot. Just woke right up from sleep when I opened it.
I'll bet they do at least as well with a handheld device.
The security watchdogs of the net have no obligation to me. I am glad they do their tasks, but the owe me nothing.
My software providers have an obligation to provide me with secure software or none at all. I commend both Debian and Apple for responding to their occasional security problems in a timely manner.
In the olden days when watchdogs did not release sample code some software providers downplayed their flaws as theoretical problems. If the software providers had been responsive to security flaws, there would be no need for sample code.
IANAEE, I got tired three credits short, but...
Consider a hypothetical tv show which displayed a solid, bright, red background. Your red LED would need to put out enough light to illuminate your screen bright red. Now, take your Photon microlight out of your pocket. (Surely all slashot readers have at least one of those by now. Ultra bright LED on a keychain.) Sit in a lit room and shine the microlight on a white surface, adjust the distance from the surface until your red (or white, or whatever color your microlight is) spot is about as bright as you would like the TV to be. Compute the area of the spot on the white surface. Mine is four square inches with a white microlight in a dim room. Maybe calibrate your idea of brightness by looking at your TV up close and then comparing to your illuminated spot.
Using the `no free lunch' rule of physics, you need to admit that a single LED is only going to provide enough light to adequatly illuminate 4 square inches. Hence, a 100" tv (4800sq in) is going to take 1200 LEDs. The way bright LEDs are something like $3 each in huge quantity, thats $3600 before you add optics, mechnical oscillators, and electronics.
Rather than baffle all your legitimate callers, you should first register with the Direct Market Association. The marketers don't want to waste time calling hostile people. Use this to register as a hostile customer. In a bizarre twist, if you register online it is $5. If you register by snail mail it is free. Use snail mail.
I registered quite some time ago and almost all of my sales calls went away. Just the little local people an newspapers were still calling.
You might also check with your state. In Missouri you can sign up here and it becomes illegal for people to call you (with some exceptions for people with powerful lobbies.) I am on this list as well and can't remember the last time I got a sales call.
I don't maintain a play list, I just let it do my whole mp3 directory tree. I don't delete the songs because I like to keep the albums intact for research purposes. Say I'm studying a particular bass player. I will then want to listen to all of his tracks, even though I don't listen to them recreationally.
I rip mp3 at 256k. Long ago when I started ripping with lame I compared 128, 192, and 256. The difference from 192 to 256 was noticable on my material. In particular, the stereo imaging was off much worse at 192 than 256. There is still a noticable difference from 256 to CD, but I can live with it.
I listen with a set of Boston Acoustics speakers with an external subwoofer. It has a tiny sweetspot, about head sized, but for a single listener they are quite good, especially the stereo imaging. (I also have a set of their less expensive model that I got at compusa, these are not so good. You want the ones with the bigger speakers.)
Although I listen mostly at my linux machines, I also use a Mac for portable work. As soon as there is an ogg plugin for itunes I will switch to ogg and re-encode all my CDs. I'll redo the bitrate selection exercise at that time.
IDNOAT, but I hear Tivos have a "thumbs up" and a "thumbs down" function to allow you to give feedback to it about what you like.
The interesting part is that half of that user interface is already in an mp3 player, they just need to take advantage of it.
Consider...
I have about 4000 tracks in my mp3 library. I leave xmms on shuffle play. There are tracks that I almost always skip. Sometimes it is a weak track on an album, sometimes it has especially inflamatory lyrics and isn't appropriate for the office, sometimes it is an artist that has ticked me off (Randy Newman isn't getting played much lately).
The player should keep track of which tracks or artists I habitually skip reduce their probability in the play list. If I stop skipping them then it should start reducing their penalty. (Say Randy Newman drops his suit against mp3.com and apologizes, I might stop skipping his tracks.)
There, no complicated user interface required. Just a player that pays attention and learns a wee bit. For bonus points, add a "i like it" button to the user interface and allow tracks to acquire 'thumbs up' points as well.
Whoa there AC! I don't recall saying people should not use Powerpoint. I was just asking about anecdotes of people failing to use it well.
As a software developer, if large numbers of my customers can't figure out how to use my software, I have failed. I should review my interface or documentation and address it.
As a presenter, if my presentation tool is distracting people from the message, it is failing.
In the example of the `phantom forwarding presentation' the user was probably faced with a much more complicated tool than they really needed. That may point to the need for a default `simple' mode in the software.
(I myself never using anything more than text bullets, and embedded diagrams that I generate elsewhere in a presentation. I use a presentation for communicating, not entertaining. And to be specific. I use AppleWorks. It is relatively feature free, but it does everything I've ever needed in an office suite except for log scales on graphs and its free (as in beer).)
I was attending a presentation by some state officials last week. The presenter's Powerpoint presentation was set to autoadvance every 30 seconds or so and apparently they couldn't make it stop, so she had an assistant sit at the computer and backup the slide everytime it jumped ahead prematurely.
So who else has watched someone by victimized by powerpoint? Add your anectdote as a reply.
And if you don't permit web sites to execute code on your computer, or are using Netscape 4 on linux and his javascript doesn't work...2 0hash.jpg
http://www.benhammersley.com/peshawar/man%20with%