Grrrr... bloody Slashdot content mangling...
I meant, of course:
For instance, any unmodified app reading "Buffett-Volcano.mp3" would actually be reading the output of something that worked like "wav2mp3<Buffet-Volcano.wav"
Since it seems I'm not the only one facing the problem of deciding what format to use and yet wanting to avoid ever having to re-rip an entire CD collection, I'm going to ask if anyone's already solved this the obvious way:
A few Assumptions/Observations:
1) Every CD ripper (at least internally, if not as an explicit step) rips to WAV first, and then encodes to whatever compressed format is desired.
2) Hard disks are getting so big and cheap that it's now possible to contemplate storing the raw WAV or CDA files (BTW: Is the difference in these two? Only the header?)
3) Compatibility with various players (whether home component players like the Audiotron or portable MP3/WMA players) is required, but this is where it's hard to make a call as to what we'll want in the future.
Proposed/Possible Solution:
It seems then, that the "obvious" solution is to store the audio on disk in WMA format (remember #2 above - size has been declared irrelevant by fiat!), and filter/encode/convert it on the fly into other formats as needed by the varios player software and hardware.
On Unix-based systems, this could be easily done with a minor addition to a jukebox program that in addition to creating and managing the real WMA files would also create and manage symbolic links that pointed to a named pipe or a program that checks its $0 to see what it should grab and how it should massage it. (For instance, any unmodified app reading "Buffett-Volcano.mp3" would actually be reading the output of something that worked like "wav2mp3So, does anyone know of an audio management app that takes this approach to things? Other than the fact that it uses more space (see #2 above *again*), this seems like the most flexible way to future-proof an audio library. This sort of thing would make it possible to simultaneously support audio hw/sw that uses common (MP3 and WMA(yeck)) or not-yet-common (Ogg, etc.) without having to go re-rip hundreds of CDs from scratch every six months to support a new format or version.
One thing I noticed when I installed Redhat on a machine (I'm a Linux newbie) was that it was very usable by anyone, provided someone else configured it.
And that's a good reason to prefer Mandrake over its Red Hat cousin (or Caldera or Corel over either) in that situation. Half the bitching here and elsewhere about Linux could be eliminated if people would pick appropriate distros for the job at hand, rather than becoming too attached to a particular one, often for ideological reasons, which are often the wrong reasons. Try several - cheapbytes is your friend. When you find one you like, buy a boxed copy.
The "right" distro depends on what I'm trying to do: I prefer Caldera or Mandrake on the desktop, Red Hat on servers (it reduces support problems), e-smith for garden-variety multi-purpose office servers, Turbo or Red Hat on mainframes, and Lineo or BSD for embedded devices. Choosing wisely (and widely) keeps you from the IT equivalent of hammering in screws with a pair of vise grips...
Oh, and be flexible - the costs for switching between distros are low and becoming less as we move to LSB-land, so don't be afraid to switch when it makes sense.
Sorry, I just plain flat don't believe a word of this. It looks to me like you're just trying to slam AOL.
I've had several netcenter accounts, and know many other with one as well, and I've never encountered any of what you report.
I niether like nor dislike AOL - personally, I've always wanted a real Internet connection, so I couldn't even tell you what the AOL portal looks like. For the record, I have not found them to engage in any of the bad behavior you report, though...
Re:Why people use Netscape instead of IE or Mozill
on
Netscape 6.1
·
· Score: 2
A lot of us stick with Netscape because, in spite of its flaws, it still does a much better job than any version of IE.
There are a lot of things Netscape brings to the table that IE can't match, things like support for roaming profiles, excellent support for large and complex collections of bookmarks, slick javascript programmable "personal toolbar" buttons which can be very handy for instant searches and lookups of any term on any page, a very capable mail client written by people that bothered to read the MIME and MHTML RFCs before writing code, and an open mailbox format that interoperates with literally thousands of mailbox manipulation power tools.
As soon as IE can do all those things, all of which I use and rely on very heavily, I'll *think* about switching - until then, I'll stick with Netscape even though I would love to see a stable version of NS6 that includes all the features above. (Roaming in particular is absent in both NS6 and Mozilla, and there are no plans to fix this glaring hole. Grrrr.)
The probability of a Dot-Com failing is directly proportional to the ratio of Aerons Chairs.
Actually, this is just one more metric in a convincing series: Guy Kawasaki says in his talks that there is a perfect 1:1 correspondence between people that exhibit the following four traits and those that will lose all of your money (Remember, Guy is a VC himself these days...):
1. They drive German cars.
2. They have goatees.
3. They wear too much cologne.
4. They wear anything by Prada.
Remember, these aren't a causality, but do exhibit perfect 1:1 correlation:-)
Seriously, though, Aerons are good, but not the best of chairs, but they are indeed predictors of dotcom dain bramage. I knew it was time to get out of a company I worked for a couple of years ago when they outfitted the whole main conference room with a doxen and a half Aerons (separated by a floor-to-ceiling glass wall from the reception area, where it was absolutely useless for any sort of strategic planning or discussion of confidential client data (pretty much everything) making the entire room just a showpiece of the dotcom mentality...) Gee, that sentence was bad. Too bad...
This is ridiculous: The "IETF crowd" has been proven right time and time again. And they are well aware of the horrors that await in ASN.1 and other relics of OSI stupidity. Read Marshall Rose's books for more insight on this: "The Simple Book" is a good treatment of ASN.1 and SNMP, "The Internet Message" rails on (quite correctly) about the indescribable stupidity of X.400 mail, another OSI idiocy.
If you didn't live through those horrible days when the trendy crowd was all for OSI and claiming that OSI was the One True Way and would and should eliminate the scourge of the Internet and TCP/IP from the face of the earth, then you really don't get the evil of ASN.1 and its ilk...
On the other hand, Toshiba is the only laptop vendor I know of that supports Unix and Linux friendly keyboard layouts: Every Toshiba I've ever had came with an extra set of molded keytops that allows you to swap the control and caps lock keys, so you can put the control key next to the "A" where it ought to be. Then just flip a BIOS parameter and you've got the only real Unix laptop keyboard out there...
Batteries are a real rip-off item in the laptop industry. They don't cost the OEMs anywhere near what they an charge for them and they are extremely high-margin(profit) items, so they are responsible for several disturbing design trends in laptops:
1) All efforts to standardize on batteries have failed, despite several industry-wide attempts. The OEMS simply don't want you to have commodity batteries. Hardware lock-in lives on.
2) The OEMs *want* poor battery life, so that customers feel they have to buy at least one extra battery just to get by. The margin on an extra battery can be half as much as the margin on the whole laptop!
3) Have you noticed that you can't even buy replacement Li-Ion *cells* to fix old, tired battery packs? Granted, such repairs aren't for the faint-hearted, and you need to make sure charging circuitry, etc. is right to avoid fire hazard, but so far as I can tell from a search for single-A size cells to freshen a Toshiba Libretto battery pack a couple of weeks ago, these things might as well be unobtainium.
Laptop batteries are one of the great hardware scams of our time - right up there with computerized engine control units and CFC-free refrigeration and air conditioning.
You suggest Sony, IBM, or Dell. I'd add Toshiba to that list and drop Dell, since they once again exhibited their commitment to being Microsoft's #1 lackey this week by pulling support for Linux on the desktop just when Microsoft's new licensing scheme for XP is making many customers take a serious look at alternatives. (Linux desktops are now only available through "DellPlus" custom orders, which have a 50-unit minimum - mark my words, Dell will make it increasingly harder to get a desktop Linux box, since they march ONLY to Bill's tune. How do I know? I used to be point man for software for both Latitude and Inspiron at Dell, and I can tell you first hand that they really care much less about their customers than they do about keeping MS happy.)
The IBM's are weird but work well - I especially like the old 550, 560, and 570, which are truly portable and can be had used at pretty decent prices. Many of the laptops of a couple of years ago have the longest battery life readily available - the reason is that there were already low-power CPUs then, but the clock rates had't gotten so insane as to more than use up the savings as is the case in current laptops, some of which have pitiful battery life. (Realistically, is there anything you'll be doing on a laptop that requires more than say, 233 MHz? I doubt it.)
The larger Sonys are pretty good, but have the usual frustrating proprietariness of all Sony gear, and often Linux drivers only "sorta work" on Sonys in my experience. Like Compaq, Sony insists on "adding prporietary value" in ways that actually decrease the value of the hardware for those of us clever enough to try to use it in new ways. (FWIW, I think Compaq laptops aren't worth the trouble or the money for this very reason.)
Toshiba has been making good strides back after slipping for a few years. The new ones seem about as tough as the old ones that built their reputation, and they have some pretty good deals now. Avoid HP like the plague. Fujitsus are surprisingly good, but harder to find good deals on.
Sadly, no laptop vendor seems to be interested in building what I think most laptop users want: A true thin and light notebook with a good screen and a *slower* processor that would allow battery life of 8 hours or more. This is now easliy do-able, and would sell, as I think most people are wondering what they need gigahertz CPUs in their laptop for, since they can't use even a quarter of that power in their desktop machines. That and built-in 10/100 Ethernet, which still seems maddeningly rare in today's world.
Besides, MemoryStickItToEm isn't really even that competitive with other formats, especially CompactFlash, which can support enormous capacities as either FlashRAM or IBM MicroDrives. Remember that when you go to buy a camera or digital music player...
FWIW, I like Pepsi in cans and at the soda fountain, but I love Coke in the bottles. And yes, I think it is probably an emotional thing.
It's not just an emotional thing. There are still some places where you can get te old, good stuff - they really did make it differently back then: Just last week, I grabbed a 12 oz. *returnable* glass Coke bottle from Mexico at a Chevron station that sits by itself somewhere between Smithville and Bastrop on US 71 between Houston and Austin. I'm not even a serious Coca-Cola fan, but this was *good* - the taste of Coke I remember as a child: the old, original Coke formula, not "Classic" which never was the same.
For a real eye-opener, try a Dr. Pepper from the Dublin Dr. Pepper bottling company in Dublin, Texas: They're the last still making DP with sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, and there's all the difference in the world. I suspect real sugar may be the reason why those Mexican Cokes were so good, too...
OK, I'm sold. I'd grab it and try it in a heartbeat, if only there were decent audio gear that could use the format. (Requiring a PC just to listen to my music is the whole reason I haven't switched over to MP3/Vorbis/whatever. Who the heck wants to wait for their stereo to boot before listening to music?
As soon as somebody comes up with a box like the excellent Turtle Beach Audiotron that can read ogg files directly off a network file server, I'm all over it. Until then, I don't care how good it is - it's too big a pain.
It looks like we've got a bunch of Mozilla bigots posting here ("Surprise, surprise, surprise", in best Gomer Pyle voice...) - Mozilla still seems quite unstable to me (and beating 4.78 isn't hard, since stablilty has taken a big hit since 4.75.)
It is still completely incapable of handling either large bookmark files or large numbers of mail messages in folders. The mail functions are glacial, and blow up even more often than the browser. The only real news here is that after all these years, Mozilla *still* needs years more work at the current pace. I hate to say it, but Mozilla is the poster child for abject failures of the open source model.
How many good optimising compilers do you know of?
Sun's, to name one - it does an excellent job of not only standard optimizations, but also understanding what optimizations work to take full advantage of the UltraSPARC architecture, including the UPA and the other switching interconnects inside Sun boxes. (Remember, folks, Intel & AMD are archaic in this regard, REAL computer companies like Sun and IBM gave up buses in favor of switches for in-box interconnects years ago. That's the reason middling Sun boxes crank the I/O equivalent of the mainframes of a couple of years ago, more than Intel boxes can even dream of. (I know, I'm currently trying to get high performance I/O on an Intel platform (for software reasons), and it's darn near impossible - the I/O architecture is just garbage. If I could use a Suns or RS/6000s for this app, I could save a lot of money, and more grief.
There's a reason people are willing to part with all that money for big Unix boxes: It's that they're simply capable of doing (and thus cheaper for) the seriously heavy duty jobs. And no, Beowulf clusters don't help I/O, before anyone suggests that...:-)
Take a look at the bookshelf in Andy's room in Toy Story. I just about hit the floor laughing at the titles, which are references to Pixar's previous shorts, including Red's Dream and Luxo, Jr., IIRC.
Still, I think the Binford tool box falling down off the table was one of the best inside jokes in the movie - I wonder if Tim Allen asked for that?
The animation was great, but I was so disappointed that Disney/Pixar had to make the story so dark and unsuitable for young children that I've never seen the sequel.
The BSD license gives everyone permission to do whatever they like with the code...
And that's exactly the point, and the reason that a rapidly growing number of us consider BSD-style licenses to be *truly free* in an important way that the GPL can never be. Still, I applaud Borland's move, as I think they'll soon come to their senses and allow non-poisonous open source licenses. (I was going to say "non-viral" to avoid sounding like a troll, but the fact is that the GPL is closer to poisonous than viral - I'm not trying to start anything, just be precise. I'm looking at building some open source code now, and the GPL is a royal pain in the butt, as it makes commercial use of the code virtually impossible, and sets all sorts of land mines that we would have to conscientiously navigate to avoid having our own work unwillingly stolen in the future. That's not right.)
Why can't we use this to solve an OLD problem?
on
PDF Alternatives?
·
· Score: 3
At least a few people in this discussion have asked the question, "Why not just use HTML?"
Indeed, this is actually a very good question, and one which I have thought about for years. The "here's why" boils down to two main reasons:
1) HTML has no concept of physical page representation, including most importantly, page breaks. This breaks HTML as a reasonable alternative for documents that you want to print out, or simply view as they would be printed.
2) More importantly, there is no reasonable and accepted way to bundle up all the components of an HTML page and distrubute them as a single lump. This is a non-trivial problem, since many modern single web pages consist of dozens or even hundreds of component parts (scripts, graphics, HTML code, style sheets, etc.)
There appears to be no good way to fix problem #1 without making changes to HTML, or at least propagating enough clients that add the functionality to see this sort of thing take off. Given that HTML looks frozen in time and all new stuff will be XML, with its notoriously too-flexible self description, I'm not holding my breath on this one.
Still, HTML could be much more useful as an information dissemination format if it were simply possible to address problem #2. There's some good news here: It's been *possible* to do this for years.
The obvious way to deal with bundling up an arbitrary bunch of webpages would be to use the capabilities of MIME, which was invented just for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I've only ever found one mail/browser combo that was capable of making this work: The Novita Mail client from the now-defunct company of the same name, which was based on Sun's old HotJava web browser. (Which was both its strength and its weakness - Sun really hurt a lot of early Java adopters by urging them to use HotJava as the base for their applications, and then abondoning the platform and not upgrading it. That's too bad, because the idea was good, even if the implementation was not. Netscape was supposed to pick up the Hot Java ball with thier Javagator, but they still haven't even managed a usable next gen conventional browser let alone a good Java-based browser...)
In any case, everything that's needed is there, with one tiny exception: relative URLs need to be able to include pointers to specific MIME body parts in an MHTML construct in some reasonably standard and predictable way. Note that this works in Netscape and IE for things such as images, but that there appears to be no way to point to a "sub-page" of HTML code. You can easily verify this for yourself with Netscape or another mail client/web browser: It's pretty easy to create MIME messages by hand that contain all the correct parts, but so far as I know, Novita is the only browser ever to *properly* handle true multipart MHTML attachments - it was even capable of drag-and-drop insertion of live java applets into a message. (Note that both Netscape and IE claim MHTML support, but niether can perform this basic function - unless a recent IE has fixed this...)
In the case of an image embedded in an MHTML message, the relevant URL looks like this:
<img SRC="cid:part<n>.<random ID stuff>" height=98 width=66>
This works fine for images, but does not work for pointing to another page of HTML, even if you carefully construct the MHTML by hand in all the ways that would seem to make sense.
So I suppose the second problem spawns two questions:
1) Does anyone know how to do this?
2) Does anyone know of a mail/browser combo that already knows how to do this?
If the answer to both of the above is "no", then I think we should start looking to get this functionality into open source mailtools, ASAP, as it would dramatically increase the utility of these tools by allowing entire web site "trees" to be easily e-mailed, in some cases replacing PDFs and the like with something even better. Comments?
Re:I doubt he wants alternative PDF WRITERS
on
PDF Alternatives?
·
· Score: 2
How about good, old-fashioned HTML+images?
If only, somewhere along the line, someone had allowed HTML to define something as simple as a page break, this would work. Without this most basic function, HTML is and will remain useless for both document delivery and as a word-processing format.
Of course, there's the obligatory "you'll never be hit by a meteorite" statement too... Let me tell you, if this meteor were to hit you, you should do two things. Buy a lottery ticket. Win a million billion dollars if you survive. Impacts of objects that size will leave very large craters and very dark, dark skies. Humans tend not to survive, but strange things have happened..."
Actually, this particular strange thing happens more often then one might expect: Here is a NASA page listing *three* 20th century meteor strikes on US homes, one of which actually hit the occupant, a Mrs. Hodges of Alabama, in the hip, producing one heck of a bruise. Maybe astronomical odds aren't really so astronomical after all...
This is nonsense. Christianity is not banned in China.
Sorry, but it's your comment that seems to be rooted in nonsense. Christianity is indeed officially banned in China. House churches are outlawed, and only the decidedly non-Christian "Three Self" churches are allowed. Chinese prisons are, unfortunately, filled with those that tried to promote real Christian churches as an alternative. Those lucky enough to avoid prison find that they lose their jobs and "have no legal identity anymore" - a notable problem in a bureaucratic Communist society.
I recommend anyone interested in understanding the situation to read two things: First, this recent article about what's really going on with churches in China, and then, for the broader picture of why Communism and Christianity must be in opposition, the excellent book Witness, by the late former Communist Whittaker Chambers. (Just read the reviews, if nothing else - if you can possibly be open-minded about anything, they'll make you want to read the book, which is quite possibly the most influential autobiography of the past few centuries. Oh, and remember that the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of KGB records proved Chambers absolutely truthful and correct.
IMHO, no one should be allowed to post any sort of opinion on Communism until they've read Witness.:-) But seriously, it's that important - give it a read...
yout post, to me, illlustrates one of the biggest differences between the Ximian/Gnome and Kompany/KDE/Qt camps: The latter has both a sense of humor and working code, the former seems to be generally lacking both...
Easy: They *bought* it with illegal camaign contributions, doantions, and "sales" of Chinese building materials through the Clintons and their cronies: Look at these links for more info
Slashdot Mirror
Grrrr... bloody Slashdot content mangling...
I meant, of course:
For instance, any unmodified app reading "Buffett-Volcano.mp3" would actually be reading the output of something that worked like "wav2mp3<Buffet-Volcano.wav"
Since it seems I'm not the only one facing the problem of deciding what format to use and yet wanting to avoid ever having to re-rip an entire CD collection, I'm going to ask if anyone's already solved this the obvious way:
A few Assumptions/Observations:
1) Every CD ripper (at least internally, if not as an explicit step) rips to WAV first, and then encodes to whatever compressed format is desired.
2) Hard disks are getting so big and cheap that it's now possible to contemplate storing the raw WAV or CDA files (BTW: Is the difference in these two? Only the header?)
3) Compatibility with various players (whether home component players like the Audiotron or portable MP3/WMA players) is required, but this is where it's hard to make a call as to what we'll want in the future.
Proposed/Possible Solution:
It seems then, that the "obvious" solution is to store the audio on disk in WMA format (remember #2 above - size has been declared irrelevant by fiat!), and filter/encode/convert it on the fly into other formats as needed by the varios player software and hardware.
On Unix-based systems, this could be easily done with a minor addition to a jukebox program that in addition to creating and managing the real WMA files would also create and manage symbolic links that pointed to a named pipe or a program that checks its $0 to see what it should grab and how it should massage it. (For instance, any unmodified app reading "Buffett-Volcano.mp3" would actually be reading the output of something that worked like "wav2mp3So, does anyone know of an audio management app that takes this approach to things? Other than the fact that it uses more space (see #2 above *again*), this seems like the most flexible way to future-proof an audio library. This sort of thing would make it possible to simultaneously support audio hw/sw that uses common (MP3 and WMA(yeck)) or not-yet-common (Ogg, etc.) without having to go re-rip hundreds of CDs from scratch every six months to support a new format or version.
One thing I noticed when I installed Redhat on a machine (I'm a Linux newbie) was that it was very usable by anyone, provided someone else configured it.
And that's a good reason to prefer Mandrake over its Red Hat cousin (or Caldera or Corel over either) in that situation. Half the bitching here and elsewhere about Linux could be eliminated if people would pick appropriate distros for the job at hand, rather than becoming too attached to a particular one, often for ideological reasons, which are often the wrong reasons. Try several - cheapbytes is your friend. When you find one you like, buy a boxed copy.
The "right" distro depends on what I'm trying to do: I prefer Caldera or Mandrake on the desktop, Red Hat on servers (it reduces support problems), e-smith for garden-variety multi-purpose office servers, Turbo or Red Hat on mainframes, and Lineo or BSD for embedded devices. Choosing wisely (and widely) keeps you from the IT equivalent of hammering in screws with a pair of vise grips...
Oh, and be flexible - the costs for switching between distros are low and becoming less as we move to LSB-land, so don't be afraid to switch when it makes sense.
What we NEED instead of more stupid laws... I mean a law that explicitly states this...
ROFL - Is this true cognitive dissonance, or just the normal rantings of the average young Ritalin-drenched brain?
Sorry, I just plain flat don't believe a word of this. It looks to me like you're just trying to slam AOL.
I've had several netcenter accounts, and know many other with one as well, and I've never encountered any of what you report.
I niether like nor dislike AOL - personally, I've always wanted a real Internet connection, so I couldn't even tell you what the AOL portal looks like. For the record, I have not found them to engage in any of the bad behavior you report, though...
A lot of us stick with Netscape because, in spite of its flaws, it still does a much better job than any version of IE.
There are a lot of things Netscape brings to the table that IE can't match, things like support for roaming profiles, excellent support for large and complex collections of bookmarks, slick javascript programmable "personal toolbar" buttons which can be very handy for instant searches and lookups of any term on any page, a very capable mail client written by people that bothered to read the MIME and MHTML RFCs before writing code, and an open mailbox format that interoperates with literally thousands of mailbox manipulation power tools.
As soon as IE can do all those things, all of which I use and rely on very heavily, I'll *think* about switching - until then, I'll stick with Netscape even though I would love to see a stable version of NS6 that includes all the features above. (Roaming in particular is absent in both NS6 and Mozilla, and there are no plans to fix this glaring hole. Grrrr.)
The probability of a Dot-Com failing is directly proportional to the ratio of Aerons Chairs.
:-)
Actually, this is just one more metric in a convincing series: Guy Kawasaki says in his talks that there is a perfect 1:1 correspondence between people that exhibit the following four traits and those that will lose all of your money (Remember, Guy is a VC himself these days...):
1. They drive German cars.
2. They have goatees.
3. They wear too much cologne.
4. They wear anything by Prada.
Remember, these aren't a causality, but do exhibit perfect 1:1 correlation
Seriously, though, Aerons are good, but not the best of chairs, but they are indeed predictors of dotcom dain bramage. I knew it was time to get out of a company I worked for a couple of years ago when they outfitted the whole main conference room with a doxen and a half Aerons (separated by a floor-to-ceiling glass wall from the reception area, where it was absolutely useless for any sort of strategic planning or discussion of confidential client data (pretty much everything) making the entire room just a showpiece of the dotcom mentality...) Gee, that sentence was bad. Too bad...
This is ridiculous: The "IETF crowd" has been proven right time and time again. And they are well aware of the horrors that await in ASN.1 and other relics of OSI stupidity. Read Marshall Rose's books for more insight on this: "The Simple Book" is a good treatment of ASN.1 and SNMP, "The Internet Message" rails on (quite correctly) about the indescribable stupidity of X.400 mail, another OSI idiocy.
If you didn't live through those horrible days when the trendy crowd was all for OSI and claiming that OSI was the One True Way and would and should eliminate the scourge of the Internet and TCP/IP from the face of the earth, then you really don't get the evil of ASN.1 and its ilk...
On the other hand, Toshiba is the only laptop vendor I know of that supports Unix and Linux friendly keyboard layouts: Every Toshiba I've ever had came with an extra set of molded keytops that allows you to swap the control and caps lock keys, so you can put the control key next to the "A" where it ought to be. Then just flip a BIOS parameter and you've got the only real Unix laptop keyboard out there...
Batteries are a real rip-off item in the laptop industry. They don't cost the OEMs anywhere near what they an charge for them and they are extremely high-margin(profit) items, so they are responsible for several disturbing design trends in laptops:
1) All efforts to standardize on batteries have failed, despite several industry-wide attempts. The OEMS simply don't want you to have commodity batteries. Hardware lock-in lives on.
2) The OEMs *want* poor battery life, so that customers feel they have to buy at least one extra battery just to get by. The margin on an extra battery can be half as much as the margin on the whole laptop!
3) Have you noticed that you can't even buy replacement Li-Ion *cells* to fix old, tired battery packs? Granted, such repairs aren't for the faint-hearted, and you need to make sure charging circuitry, etc. is right to avoid fire hazard, but so far as I can tell from a search for single-A size cells to freshen a Toshiba Libretto battery pack a couple of weeks ago, these things might as well be unobtainium.
Laptop batteries are one of the great hardware scams of our time - right up there with computerized engine control units and CFC-free refrigeration and air conditioning.
You suggest Sony, IBM, or Dell. I'd add Toshiba to that list and drop Dell, since they once again exhibited their commitment to being Microsoft's #1 lackey this week by pulling support for Linux on the desktop just when Microsoft's new licensing scheme for XP is making many customers take a serious look at alternatives. (Linux desktops are now only available through "DellPlus" custom orders, which have a 50-unit minimum - mark my words, Dell will make it increasingly harder to get a desktop Linux box, since they march ONLY to Bill's tune. How do I know? I used to be point man for software for both Latitude and Inspiron at Dell, and I can tell you first hand that they really care much less about their customers than they do about keeping MS happy.)
The IBM's are weird but work well - I especially like the old 550, 560, and 570, which are truly portable and can be had used at pretty decent prices. Many of the laptops of a couple of years ago have the longest battery life readily available - the reason is that there were already low-power CPUs then, but the clock rates had't gotten so insane as to more than use up the savings as is the case in current laptops, some of which have pitiful battery life. (Realistically, is there anything you'll be doing on a laptop that requires more than say, 233 MHz? I doubt it.)
The larger Sonys are pretty good, but have the usual frustrating proprietariness of all Sony gear, and often Linux drivers only "sorta work" on Sonys in my experience. Like Compaq, Sony insists on "adding prporietary value" in ways that actually decrease the value of the hardware for those of us clever enough to try to use it in new ways. (FWIW, I think Compaq laptops aren't worth the trouble or the money for this very reason.)
Toshiba has been making good strides back after slipping for a few years. The new ones seem about as tough as the old ones that built their reputation, and they have some pretty good deals now. Avoid HP like the plague. Fujitsus are surprisingly good, but harder to find good deals on.
Sadly, no laptop vendor seems to be interested in building what I think most laptop users want: A true thin and light notebook with a good screen and a *slower* processor that would allow battery life of 8 hours or more. This is now easliy do-able, and would sell, as I think most people are wondering what they need gigahertz CPUs in their laptop for, since they can't use even a quarter of that power in their desktop machines. That and built-in 10/100 Ethernet, which still seems maddeningly rare in today's world.
As I used to have in my /. sig:
Sony:hardware::Microsoft:software
Besides, MemoryStickItToEm isn't really even that competitive with other formats, especially CompactFlash, which can support enormous capacities as either FlashRAM or IBM MicroDrives. Remember that when you go to buy a camera or digital music player...
FWIW, I like Pepsi in cans and at the soda fountain, but I love Coke in the bottles. And yes, I think it is probably an emotional thing.
It's not just an emotional thing. There are still some places where you can get te old, good stuff - they really did make it differently back then: Just last week, I grabbed a 12 oz. *returnable* glass Coke bottle from Mexico at a Chevron station that sits by itself somewhere between Smithville and Bastrop on US 71 between Houston and Austin. I'm not even a serious Coca-Cola fan, but this was *good* - the taste of Coke I remember as a child: the old, original Coke formula, not "Classic" which never was the same.
For a real eye-opener, try a Dr. Pepper from the Dublin Dr. Pepper bottling company in Dublin, Texas: They're the last still making DP with sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, and there's all the difference in the world. I suspect real sugar may be the reason why those Mexican Cokes were so good, too...
OK, I'm sold. I'd grab it and try it in a heartbeat, if only there were decent audio gear that could use the format. (Requiring a PC just to listen to my music is the whole reason I haven't switched over to MP3/Vorbis/whatever. Who the heck wants to wait for their stereo to boot before listening to music?
As soon as somebody comes up with a box like the excellent Turtle Beach Audiotron that can read ogg files directly off a network file server, I'm all over it. Until then, I don't care how good it is - it's too big a pain.
Some of us would argue that Lynx isn't a browser at all, but merely an HTML-to-ASCII transcoder... :-)
It looks like we've got a bunch of Mozilla bigots posting here ("Surprise, surprise, surprise", in best Gomer Pyle voice...) - Mozilla still seems quite unstable to me (and beating 4.78 isn't hard, since stablilty has taken a big hit since 4.75.)
It is still completely incapable of handling either large bookmark files or large numbers of mail messages in folders. The mail functions are glacial, and blow up even more often than the browser. The only real news here is that after all these years, Mozilla *still* needs years more work at the current pace. I hate to say it, but Mozilla is the poster child for abject failures of the open source model.
How many good optimising compilers do you know of?
:-)
Sun's, to name one - it does an excellent job of not only standard optimizations, but also understanding what optimizations work to take full advantage of the UltraSPARC architecture, including the UPA and the other switching interconnects inside Sun boxes. (Remember, folks, Intel & AMD are archaic in this regard, REAL computer companies like Sun and IBM gave up buses in favor of switches for in-box interconnects years ago. That's the reason middling Sun boxes crank the I/O equivalent of the mainframes of a couple of years ago, more than Intel boxes can even dream of. (I know, I'm currently trying to get high performance I/O on an Intel platform (for software reasons), and it's darn near impossible - the I/O architecture is just garbage. If I could use a Suns or RS/6000s for this app, I could save a lot of money, and more grief.
There's a reason people are willing to part with all that money for big Unix boxes: It's that they're simply capable of doing (and thus cheaper for) the seriously heavy duty jobs. And no, Beowulf clusters don't help I/O, before anyone suggests that...
Take a look at the bookshelf in Andy's room in Toy Story. I just about hit the floor laughing at the titles, which are references to Pixar's previous shorts, including Red's Dream and Luxo, Jr., IIRC.
Still, I think the Binford tool box falling down off the table was one of the best inside jokes in the movie - I wonder if Tim Allen asked for that?
The animation was great, but I was so disappointed that Disney/Pixar had to make the story so dark and unsuitable for young children that I've never seen the sequel.
The BSD license gives everyone permission to do whatever they like with the code...
And that's exactly the point, and the reason that a rapidly growing number of us consider BSD-style licenses to be *truly free* in an important way that the GPL can never be. Still, I applaud Borland's move, as I think they'll soon come to their senses and allow non-poisonous open source licenses. (I was going to say "non-viral" to avoid sounding like a troll, but the fact is that the GPL is closer to poisonous than viral - I'm not trying to start anything, just be precise. I'm looking at building some open source code now, and the GPL is a royal pain in the butt, as it makes commercial use of the code virtually impossible, and sets all sorts of land mines that we would have to conscientiously navigate to avoid having our own work unwillingly stolen in the future. That's not right.)
Indeed, this is actually a very good question, and one which I have thought about for years. The "here's why" boils down to two main reasons:
1) HTML has no concept of physical page representation, including most importantly, page breaks. This breaks HTML as a reasonable alternative for documents that you want to print out, or simply view as they would be printed.
2) More importantly, there is no reasonable and accepted way to bundle up all the components of an HTML page and distrubute them as a single lump. This is a non-trivial problem, since many modern single web pages consist of dozens or even hundreds of component parts (scripts, graphics, HTML code, style sheets, etc.)
There appears to be no good way to fix problem #1 without making changes to HTML, or at least propagating enough clients that add the functionality to see this sort of thing take off. Given that HTML looks frozen in time and all new stuff will be XML, with its notoriously too-flexible self description, I'm not holding my breath on this one.
Still, HTML could be much more useful as an information dissemination format if it were simply possible to address problem #2. There's some good news here: It's been *possible* to do this for years.
The obvious way to deal with bundling up an arbitrary bunch of webpages would be to use the capabilities of MIME, which was invented just for this sort of thing. Unfortunately, I've only ever found one mail/browser combo that was capable of making this work: The Novita Mail client from the now-defunct company of the same name, which was based on Sun's old HotJava web browser. (Which was both its strength and its weakness - Sun really hurt a lot of early Java adopters by urging them to use HotJava as the base for their applications, and then abondoning the platform and not upgrading it. That's too bad, because the idea was good, even if the implementation was not. Netscape was supposed to pick up the Hot Java ball with thier Javagator, but they still haven't even managed a usable next gen conventional browser let alone a good Java-based browser...)
In any case, everything that's needed is there, with one tiny exception: relative URLs need to be able to include pointers to specific MIME body parts in an MHTML construct in some reasonably standard and predictable way. Note that this works in Netscape and IE for things such as images, but that there appears to be no way to point to a "sub-page" of HTML code. You can easily verify this for yourself with Netscape or another mail client/web browser: It's pretty easy to create MIME messages by hand that contain all the correct parts, but so far as I know, Novita is the only browser ever to *properly* handle true multipart MHTML attachments - it was even capable of drag-and-drop insertion of live java applets into a message. (Note that both Netscape and IE claim MHTML support, but niether can perform this basic function - unless a recent IE has fixed this...)
In the case of an image embedded in an MHTML message, the relevant URL looks like this:
This works fine for images, but does not work for pointing to another page of HTML, even if you carefully construct the MHTML by hand in all the ways that would seem to make sense.
So I suppose the second problem spawns two questions:
1) Does anyone know how to do this?
2) Does anyone know of a mail/browser combo that already knows how to do this?
If the answer to both of the above is "no", then I think we should start looking to get this functionality into open source mailtools, ASAP, as it would dramatically increase the utility of these tools by allowing entire web site "trees" to be easily e-mailed, in some cases replacing PDFs and the like with something even better. Comments?
How about good, old-fashioned HTML+images?
If only, somewhere along the line, someone had allowed HTML to define something as simple as a page break, this would work. Without this most basic function, HTML is and will remain useless for both document delivery and as a word-processing format.
Of course, there's the obligatory "you'll never be hit by a meteorite" statement too... Let me tell you, if this meteor were to hit you, you should do two things. Buy a lottery ticket. Win a million billion dollars if you survive. Impacts of objects that size will leave very large craters and very dark, dark skies. Humans tend not to survive, but strange things have happened..."
Actually, this particular strange thing happens more often then one might expect: Here is a NASA page listing *three* 20th century meteor strikes on US homes, one of which actually hit the occupant, a Mrs. Hodges of Alabama, in the hip, producing one heck of a bruise. Maybe astronomical odds aren't really so astronomical after all...
This is nonsense. Christianity is not banned in China.
:-) But seriously, it's that important - give it a read...
Sorry, but it's your comment that seems to be rooted in nonsense. Christianity is indeed officially banned in China. House churches are outlawed, and only the decidedly non-Christian "Three Self" churches are allowed. Chinese prisons are, unfortunately, filled with those that tried to promote real Christian churches as an alternative. Those lucky enough to avoid prison find that they lose their jobs and "have no legal identity anymore" - a notable problem in a bureaucratic Communist society.
I recommend anyone interested in understanding the situation to read two things: First, this recent article about what's really going on with churches in China, and then, for the broader picture of why Communism and Christianity must be in opposition, the excellent book Witness, by the late former Communist Whittaker Chambers. (Just read the reviews, if nothing else - if you can possibly be open-minded about anything, they'll make you want to read the book, which is quite possibly the most influential autobiography of the past few centuries. Oh, and remember that the fall of the Soviet Union and the opening of KGB records proved Chambers absolutely truthful and correct.
IMHO, no one should be allowed to post any sort of opinion on Communism until they've read Witness.
yout post, to me, illlustrates one of the biggest differences between the Ximian/Gnome and Kompany/KDE/Qt camps: The latter has both a sense of humor and working code, the former seems to be generally lacking both...
Easy: They *bought* it with illegal camaign contributions, doantions, and "sales" of Chinese building materials through the Clintons and their cronies: Look at these links for more info