My first mp3 player, back in 1999 or 2000 or so, was a Rio PMP500. I have yet to see a player that does what it did, sadly.
Compact: smaller than a casette tape, truly pocket-sized
Simple, backlit LCD, capable of displaying two lines of text (or about three in a tiny font)
Great battery life
Very durable
Simple interface, capable of managing settings, albums, and playback with just a scroll-and-click wheel.
Sure, you can find various combinations of these features in various different players, but if there's one out there with all of those features (and without all sorts of expensive, irrelevant bells and whistles), it's flying beneath my radar. There are plenty of players out there that go well beyond these features, but I don't want to pay an extra $100 for a high-res, color LCD, when all I need it to do is display ID3 information.
If only my Rio had a) continued to work after four years of abuse, b) had more storage, and c) had a built-in rechargeable battery, I'd still be using it.
This is pretty nifty, but the submitter and I apparently have very different thresholds for considering something "high resolution". These are less than 150dpi, unless these were originally printed on 3×4" sheets of paper or something. If you wanted to print one of these out as a poster or something (hey, don't judge me!), they wouldn't be very attractive. Maybe if you tiled them all together, though.
Am I possibly missing the links to some even-higher-resolution versions?
You can mod it a troll, but there's more than just a grain of truth to that. I think the grandparent probably has a bit of an idealistic picture of the scientist. You'd probably have to really push them to get a statement like "science is an attempt to get at the truth" out of them, and they'd be giving you funny looks all the while.
In my experience, most scientists have better things to do that sit around trying to decide what they believe about science. They're too busy actually doing science, or, as the parent post suggests, pushing paper to make sure their lab stays afloat in the day and age of budget cuts. Truth doesn't pay the bills; efficacy does.
I hated Perl because it sat in the festering wasteland between shell scripting and full-blown compiled languages. Why would you want the complexity of C++ with the functionality of Bash? I learned the basic syntax about seven or eight years ago and decided there was no place for Perl in my toolbox. Not for lack of room; it just wasn't worth knowing.
Of course it turned out that I was competely wrong. I was sitting down to dinner with a friend, and he was going on and on about all the different ways the various brackets and braces and parentheses are interpreted in different contexts in Perl. It was actually very interesting in a morbid sort of way; like how your eyes fixate on the wreck on the other side of the highway.
Then my friend pointed out the simple joy of perl -ne '...'. This little construct kindled something in the back of my mind, and I knew when I got back to my computer that I'd have myriad uses for it. All of those things that I used to do with huge series of commandline pipes and the occasional chunk of Java could be compressed down into one line. One totally illegible and unreusable but completely accurate line.
Any idea what that does? No? Well, it doesn't really matter, since no one will ever use this code ever again, but it did its job, and it did it well!* Now that I've seen the light, there are all sorts of little tasks that I find Perl ideally suited to.
I no longer hate Perl.
* This code went through all of my mp3 file hierarchy, reformatted the filenames to start with the track number, based on the order they appeared in the.m3u playlist, then generated a new playlist with the new filenames.
A few people do, at least. There are some videos on Wikipedia (or more likely, the Wikimedia Commons) that use Theora. Check out the rather cool Controlled Impact Demonstration. You may need to install codecs to view the videos. (These are just the ones that the Media help page suggests; they worked fine for me.)
My anecdote, from the opposite direction in a sense, was that I needed to make a poster, and it also had to be done the next day. What I expected to only take a couple of hours basically turned into an all-nighter, just trying to get Illustrator to do very simple tasks like alignment, path editing, and whatno.
And as I've said, this is from someone who is quite adept with Photoshop; you'd think picking up the Illustrator interface would be easy (even if some of the concepts were rather foreign). I wish I had known about Inkscape then!
I have found that people get used to the annoying behaviors of computers very quickly but are also quick to recognize good behavior. Just because they expect the dialog box does not mean that they don't find it irritating. Give them a better solution, and they'll gladly accept it. A new media notifier doesn't have to be exactly what they're expecting, it just has to be intuitive (admittedly, not necessarily a trivial thing!).
It saddens me because I believe (though I have no hard evidence) that the Inkscape team has put vast amounts of work into making their interface easy to use. Usability in the Free / Open Source realm has been getting a lot of negative press lately, and Inkscape should be out there being touted as one of the positive examples, even at this early development stage.
It's sad to me that people do not seem to know what Inkscape is yet. It's a wonderful tool. Others have already made the Inkscape:Illustrator:: Gimp:Photoshop analogy. I would point out, though, that despite my preference of Photoshop over Gimp, Inkscape is far, far easier to use than Illustrator and yet still covers all of the basic vector graphics bases.
Even with my very minimal skill, I've managed to create some decent graphics. Here are a couple of traces, a decent Domo-kun, somecalligraphy, and all of the non-photo graphics on this page (hypercube projections) I did in Inkscape. I love it, and it's only on version 0.42!
Thanks for the fascinating links! Interesting trivia: To get the newly-cast 20-ton mirror out of the oven, they glue it onto a set of large metal discs, then lift it out. Now that's adhesion!
Errr.. but the government can and should set limitations on what data companies can or cannot collect about us.
Huh? Doesn't the government have better things to be doing? Whatever happened to being a conscientious consumer and exercising your right not to support a company whose policies you disagree with? Fuck 'em!
There's always an alternative; it's just a question of how hard you want to work for it. Kids have their heart set on going to Disney this summer? Be a better parent and use your imagination. (You haven't outgrown it yet, have you?) You can find something else that they'll be excited about.
Exactly. It's not an apology at all. It's like running over someone in a crosswalk and then saying, "I'm sorry you didn't get out of the way quickly enough." Fuat Kircaali does not believe even in the slightest that there was anything ethically questionable about the article, or he wouldn't have run it.
Pathetic. Anything for some extra traffic, I guess. They certainly got more hits from me than they ever have in the past. At the expense of never getting any more in the future, though. I hope it was worth it, Fuat!
Re:Nothing to see here... It's just a fork
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 1
Whoa, that's quite a difference! Of course, one has to wonder whether that's a static difference, or whether the difference is actually proprotional to the total amount of memory being used. If Firefox is still going to be using 250MB at the end of the day, a 50MB difference isn't going to matter that much. However, if Firefox will stay 1/3 as big throughout the day, that could be very significant!
If the latter ends up being true, perhaps it would be worth creating a separate profile that contains the Web Developer plugin. When you say you "uninstalled" it, do you mean you actually totally uninstalled it, or did you just disable it?
Here's an excessively verbose report from the InfoLister extension:)...
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
*** Extensions (enabled: 14, disabled: 2)
Download Sort 2.5.0 [disabled]
Download Statusbar 0.9.2
Go Up 0.9
Web Developer 0.9
Live HTTP Headers 0.10
Link Toolbar 0.9.1
Disable Targets For Downloads 0.8
Duplicate Tab 0.3.2
Tab Clicking Options 0.5
Compact Menu 1.7.2
Style Sheet Chooser 0.2
Foxylicious 0.3 [disabled]
del.icio.us 0.4.1-rc1
Linky 2.4.0
ColorZilla 0.8.2
InfoLister 0.8.2
*** Themes (1)
Firefox (default) 2.0 [selected]
*** Plugins (7)
QuickTime Plug-in 6.5.1
Mozilla Default Plug-in
Adobe SVG Viewer Plugin
Shockwave Flash
Adobe Acrobat
Microsoft® DRM
Windows Media Player Plug-in Dynamic Link Library
Admittedly, I could probably live without some of these, but some of the ones that I imagine are "heavier" (Web Dev, Color Picker, Download SB) would be tough to do without. For what it's worth, I've found that the more lightweight combo-punch of Tab Clicking Options and Duplicate Tab does basically all I need from the more complex Tabbrowser Preferences.
Next time I upgrade, I will probably just wipe my profile and do a clean install of everything. *sigh*
I complained about this in the last big Firefox thread, too. Let's see now. I've got two windows open and four tabs, two per window. One window is on a separate desktop, though I don't expect that to matter. Total memory use: 120MB! And this after having restarted Firefox only a couple of hours ago, and having used it fairly little since then.
Honestly, the only reason I ever restart Firefox (now that my extension selection has stabilized) is to free up memory. After an average day of web development at work, Firefox will typically be using around 250MB. I've seen it go as high as 400MB when I have several windows open and a dozen or so tabs going.
Hopefully none of my extensions are causing or exacerbating this problem; I'm not sure I could function online without them anymore!
Take everything from the plug_ins folder and move them to the "optional" folder.
Fantastic! Worked like a charm for me; XP Pro, Acrobat 6.0 full version. Now it starts up in roughly a half a second, compared to the 30-45 seconds it used to take. Thanks so much for the suggestion!
You're missing arguably the most useful subtraction: -blog. Blogs are fine for what they are, but the extremely high clique numbers in blogspace seem to give them ridiculously high page ranks. In the cases where I need information that may be best found in blogs (e.g. new web design tricks), I can remove the exclusion.
Granted, I'm only using Photoshop 7.0, but a lot of the most useful commands do not work in 16-bit mode: Unsharp Mask, Select Color Range, even Gaussian Blur, if I recall correctly. Of course you get (among others) the two most important commands to use in 16-bit mode: Levels and Curves. Still, very frustrating, particularly the lack of color range selection (particularly shadows or highlights). Do the later versions of Photoshop improve up this?
You'll have a lot more luck searching for a good camera with pan, tilt, and zoom capabilities if you look for "PTZ camera" (164,000 results) instead of TPZ camera" (2,330 results).
Slashdot Mirror
- Compact: smaller than a casette tape, truly pocket-sized
- Simple, backlit LCD, capable of displaying two lines of text (or about three in a tiny font)
- Great battery life
- Very durable
- Simple interface, capable of managing settings, albums, and playback with just a scroll-and-click wheel.
Sure, you can find various combinations of these features in various different players, but if there's one out there with all of those features (and without all sorts of expensive, irrelevant bells and whistles), it's flying beneath my radar. There are plenty of players out there that go well beyond these features, but I don't want to pay an extra $100 for a high-res, color LCD, when all I need it to do is display ID3 information.If only my Rio had a) continued to work after four years of abuse, b) had more storage, and c) had a built-in rechargeable battery, I'd still be using it.
Am I possibly missing the links to some even-higher-resolution versions?
In my experience, most scientists have better things to do that sit around trying to decide what they believe about science. They're too busy actually doing science, or, as the parent post suggests, pushing paper to make sure their lab stays afloat in the day and age of budget cuts. Truth doesn't pay the bills; efficacy does.
Of course it turned out that I was competely wrong. I was sitting down to dinner with a friend, and he was going on and on about all the different ways the various brackets and braces and parentheses are interpreted in different contexts in Perl. It was actually very interesting in a morbid sort of way; like how your eyes fixate on the wreck on the other side of the highway.
Then my friend pointed out the simple joy of perl -ne '...'. This little construct kindled something in the back of my mind, and I knew when I got back to my computer that I'd have myriad uses for it. All of those things that I used to do with huge series of commandline pipes and the occasional chunk of Java could be compressed down into one line. One totally illegible and unreusable but completely accurate line.
Any idea what that does? No? Well, it doesn't really matter, since no one will ever use this code ever again, but it did its job, and it did it well!* Now that I've seen the light, there are all sorts of little tasks that I find Perl ideally suited to.I no longer hate Perl.
* This code went through all of my mp3 file hierarchy, reformatted the filenames to start with the track number, based on the order they appeared in the .m3u playlist, then generated a new playlist with the new filenames.
A few people do, at least. There are some videos on Wikipedia (or more likely, the Wikimedia Commons) that use Theora. Check out the rather cool Controlled Impact Demonstration. You may need to install codecs to view the videos. (These are just the ones that the Media help page suggests; they worked fine for me.)
And as I've said, this is from someone who is quite adept with Photoshop; you'd think picking up the Illustrator interface would be easy (even if some of the concepts were rather foreign). I wish I had known about Inkscape then!
I have found that people get used to the annoying behaviors of computers very quickly but are also quick to recognize good behavior. Just because they expect the dialog box does not mean that they don't find it irritating. Give them a better solution, and they'll gladly accept it. A new media notifier doesn't have to be exactly what they're expecting, it just has to be intuitive (admittedly, not necessarily a trivial thing!).
It saddens me because I believe (though I have no hard evidence) that the Inkscape team has put vast amounts of work into making their interface easy to use. Usability in the Free / Open Source realm has been getting a lot of negative press lately, and Inkscape should be out there being touted as one of the positive examples, even at this early development stage.
If you're trying to load the images, just open a few of 'em in tabs in the background; you'll get through eventually. Sorry about that! :(
Even with my very minimal skill, I've managed to create some decent graphics. Here are a couple of traces, a decent Domo-kun, some calligraphy, and all of the non-photo graphics on this page (hypercube projections) I did in Inkscape. I love it, and it's only on version 0.42!
When you said "DRM", the word "devistate" immediately came to mind. Hmmm... :)
Thanks for the fascinating links! Interesting trivia: To get the newly-cast 20-ton mirror out of the oven, they glue it onto a set of large metal discs, then lift it out. Now that's adhesion!
Heh heh... thank you for making this story at least worth a few laughs! :)
There's always an alternative; it's just a question of how hard you want to work for it. Kids have their heart set on going to Disney this summer? Be a better parent and use your imagination. (You haven't outgrown it yet, have you?) You can find something else that they'll be excited about.
Pathetic. Anything for some extra traffic, I guess. They certainly got more hits from me than they ever have in the past. At the expense of never getting any more in the future, though. I hope it was worth it, Fuat!
If the latter ends up being true, perhaps it would be worth creating a separate profile that contains the Web Developer plugin. When you say you "uninstalled" it, do you mean you actually totally uninstalled it, or did you just disable it?
Next time I upgrade, I will probably just wipe my profile and do a clean install of everything. *sigh*
Honestly, the only reason I ever restart Firefox (now that my extension selection has stabilized) is to free up memory. After an average day of web development at work, Firefox will typically be using around 250MB. I've seen it go as high as 400MB when I have several windows open and a dozen or so tabs going.
Hopefully none of my extensions are causing or exacerbating this problem; I'm not sure I could function online without them anymore!
You're missing arguably the most useful subtraction: -blog. Blogs are fine for what they are, but the extremely high clique numbers in blogspace seem to give them ridiculously high page ranks. In the cases where I need information that may be best found in blogs (e.g. new web design tricks), I can remove the exclusion.
Great, thanks for the information! Now to see if there's room in the budget for an upgrade...
Granted, I'm only using Photoshop 7.0, but a lot of the most useful commands do not work in 16-bit mode: Unsharp Mask, Select Color Range, even Gaussian Blur, if I recall correctly. Of course you get (among others) the two most important commands to use in 16-bit mode: Levels and Curves. Still, very frustrating, particularly the lack of color range selection (particularly shadows or highlights). Do the later versions of Photoshop improve up this?
You'll have a lot more luck searching for a good camera with pan, tilt, and zoom capabilities if you look for "PTZ camera" (164,000 results) instead of TPZ camera" (2,330 results).