Well, you're getting a higher-quality, DRM-free song. That's worth more.,
3. You can't hear the difference, only 1 in 10 could and it was statistical noise.
I can hear a huge difference. My music player handles unencrypted AAC files, so the new ones sound like music, and the old ones sound like, well, silence.
4. You can fit fewer tracks on a player because they bigger.
That's what "higher-bitrate" usually means. Scratch that: always.
5. Apple are playing a game here.
Yes. It's called the "charge more for enhanced product" game that every company since the history of capitalism has played.
More often than not, I find that I need to set the Windows master volume to an extremely low level - one or two pixels above silence.
Note that this absolutely destroys the sound quality. Remember, you only get a 16-bit integer to represent sound levels. Well, if you have the app volume at 1/16th and the master volume also at 1/16th, you're effectlively lopping off eight bits of resolution.
As a better alternative, sit more than 2 inches away from those 300 watt Klipsch speakers.
Hey, in all fairness, I believe in some chiropracty (is that a word)? I threw out my back a few years ago while helping a college buddy move. The pain was worst at night; I'd take some Flexeril and Aleve right before bed and it'd recede enough that I could get 3 or 4 hours of sleep. After that, though, I was wide awake and in tears.
So, after going to a few MDs of various specialties with no real results (just more Flexeril), I finally took my dad's advice and went to his chiropractor. He ran one of those dubious meters they talk about on Quackwatch up and down my spine, said aha!, had me lay down, and popped my back. I almost fainted from the pain but then it got a little better. That night, I got my first solid night's sleep in months, and by the next day I was completely over it.
I claim no knowledge of the workings or theory of chiropractors, but in my case, one particular doctor absolutely fixed me. I know that some of them have some bizarre theories like a misaligned back causing cancer and things like that, but there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that at least some of them know what they're doing.
I love modern medicine - ask my wife, a surgeon - but that doesn't mean that there aren't any worthwhile ideas outside med school. Well, not homeopathy; that's just stupid.
Here is my over all conclusion. Apple/Mac users are dumb.
Here's my overall conclusion: Apple/Mac users tend to have a lot more money than you and different values. I have a Mac because the last thing I want to do at night after playing around inside the guts of *BSD and Linux machines all day is go home and do more of the same.
Normal people don't consider BMW drivers dumb because they spend more than absolutely necessary on their transportation. Well, same deal here. Yeah, I paid more for a Mac than I probably would have for a PC. I wanted it and could afford it and it suits my needs, so why not?
No, I think you did. The dead easiest way for any CMS to make static pages is to put a proxy server in front of it. A visitor requests foo.php, the proxy saves the output to disk, and the next visitor gets the cached ("static") copy.
This has huge advantages. First, you don't have to to pre-generate every single page on your site whether it's going to be served or not. Second, the cache doesn't expire everything simultaneously so your CMS can idle along happily only generating content periodically, rather than having long periods of disuse punctuated by huge bursts of activity.
To answer your question directly: I don't know of any CMSes that will spit out static HTML. However, since I've never imagined the need for it in favor of better alternatives, I've never really looked.
Is it possible to generate static web pages by Drupal? If this is not possible by Drupal, which open source CMS can satisfy my requirement?
Alternatively, you could park the whole thing behind a Squid reverse proxy, or even use Apache's own caching. One tenth the effort and all the performance.
I just bought the Nintendo DS Browser (Opera), and the sole problem I have with it is that it doesn't store passwords or cookies. Is there a way to bookmark a login URL for Drupal so that I don't have to manually log in each time? I've tried replacing the POST with a GET in the normal login form, but I'm guessing that it expects some cookies to be set before you can actually submit that.
Bonus points and a case of beer for anyone who knows how to write a Squid plugin to store and transmit cookies on a per-user, authenticated basis.
Well, I love Zope, or at least like it an awful lot. I "get" Plone. But it seemed like the opposite of its goals, like a giant interdependent ball of dependencies. Drupal was such a breath of fresh air. Want stock quotes? Install the stock quote module and add it to the lefthand column. I'm always a little skeptical of PHP-based projects because so many of them are awful, but Drupal seems like a very decently engineered package. Plus, those sub-second page load times without setting up ZEO clusters and Squid frontend proxies are definitely nice.
I just tried Drupal for the first time a few weeks ago whenever Google was having problems with their personalized site and I wanted to make a self-hosted equivalent. I have to say that it's just about the slickest CMS I've played with. I installed a couple of modules, configured everything through the web admin, and got my own personal My Yahoo! workalike.
I liked Plone but it always felt over-engineered and sluggish. Drupal, on the other hand, seems light and quick. I don't really have much else to add the the conversation, except to say that it's worth trying if you're looking at CMSes.
What's interesting is your fond recollection, that trolltalk was noble and glorious council, that the sublime art of trolling was a magnificent contribution to Slashdot and Internet culture. To everyone else here, the trolls - regardless of education or social standing or media visibility - were a bunch of asshat punks dead set on ruining a good thing for everyone.
You laughed at the PWP hacks. We sighed at the interesting stories that were made unreadable.
You liked all the homosexual rape serials. We learned not to read anything more than a couple of paragraphs long.
You waxed nostalgic about goatse. We cringed and trained ourselves not to click links.
I'm sure that somewhere out there, a couple of guys are kicking back and talking about the time they lit a cat on fine - you know, the good old days. To the rest of the world, they're not a couple of new-millenium James Deans. They're just a couple of sociopathic misfits that don't care what they ruin for their own entertainment. Well, enjoy your happy memories of those halcyon days, but don't be surprised that no one outside your clique has the same take on events.
Slashdot is older and more mature and a little more boring these days. And to be honest, that's just fine.
Imagine if few dozen farmer planted altered grain near seed field. Within a few years our entire agricultural system would be wiped out except for a few select seed producers.
In the first year, the financial losses would be covered by a crop insurance company, which would then turn around and sue Monsanto into the stone ages. Think "big agriculture" is scary? See what a scorned insurance company can do. Those guys make IBM law division look like preschool teachers.
Now, I'm tracking -RELEASE and not -HEAD, so maybe they removed half the code for 7.0, but the 6.2 codebase is significantly larger than the Linux kernel.
Pretty much everything you buy has restrictions and guidelines that are specified or implied that prevent you from doing absolutely anything you want with it, as your original post suggested.
You couldn't possibly be more wrong. There are exactly two things restricting you from using your own property as you see fit:
Contractual oblications, and
The law.
If the law doesn't forbid it and you haven't signed a contract stating otherwise, you can do anything you want with your property. Anything. If I want to turn my toaster into an attack robot, or use my Faberge egg for a hammer, that's my right. My stuff - my decicion.
You listed a bunch of illegal acts as examples of restrictions on what you can do with your property, and not one of those is relevant to the subject at hand.
His opinions should carry some weight, especially since he should know more than anyone what the limitations of SCM software is when it comes to larger projects like the linux kernel.
The thing is, Linux is actually a pretty small project. Much larger projects would include FreeBSD, which uses CVS not only for the kernel but for every line of source of the entire OS. Now, Linus is a smart guy, but I don't know why he thinks CVS (and SVN by extension) won't work for large projects. It clearly can. It may not be suitable for the way he wants to run his project, but that's a different issue.
It's about effing time... maybe chip manufacturers have finally clued in that cache is the single biggest characteristic of a processor that affects (NOT impacts) performance.
Tell me about it. Those jackass chip hackers at Intel and AMD have been ignoring my advice for years in favor of their own cost/benefit analysis and engineering tradeoffs. If only they'd listen to us expects on Slashdot, there's no telling what they could accomplish!
What killed Circuit City for me was that stupid restocking fee. They can argue and explain until the end of the world about how it's fair and reasonable and helps keep costs down, but when it's CC or Wal-Mart for the same price, and Wal-Mart will give me no-hassle returns, I'm not buying from CC.
True story: I bought a graphics card from CC on sale for $20 a few years back. It was going in a cheapie desktop, so I basically wanted something that could put color on a screen. Anyway, I got home and it was DOA, so I returned and found that they were sold out of that particular model and their next cheapest card was $100. The clerk gave me the choice between upgrading to a part 400% more expensive or paying a 15% restocking fee to get a refund. Well, long story short, by the time I left (with my full refund), two managers and a security guard were involved.
I will never, ever, to my dying day, spend another penny at Circuit City. Maybe they feel OK charging for returns, but as a potential customer, I'll take my business someplace that treats me well. I'm not out to rip anyone off and I won't deal with someone who tells me that I am.
On the other hand, if a business wants to get rich by restricting freedoms on code, then why should they be entitled to do it on the backs of others that gave theirs away?
It's OK to make money selling Free Software. However, I see no moral reason why someone deserves the right to make money by turning around and effectively making it non-Free. If your business plan counts on slave labor to make it work, then maybe it's time to re-evaluate it. I'm very pro-business, but don't think anyone's entitled to a free ride.
My understanding of a lossless CODEC is that there is a limit to amount of compression that can be accomplished because to go below that amount would cause it to become lossy since elements of the original file would have to be deleted to compress it further.
Lossless codecs aren't lossy codecs that just haven't been cranked down enough. The fundamental difference is that lossy encoding is happy throwing away parts of the input that it thinks you won't miss. But take the example of a sine wave at a constant frequency. A CBR MP3 will dutifully store that wave in 128kbps glory. An ideal lossy compressor will write "play a sine wave at 2KHz for 1:30" into a few bytes and be done. In that admittedly contrived situation, a lossless compressor could have much better compression.
I know what you meant and you're right in general, but those aren't universal truths - just what happens to be correct in most common cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you're getting a higher-quality, DRM-free song. That's worth more.,
I can hear a huge difference. My music player handles unencrypted AAC files, so the new ones sound like music, and the old ones sound like, well, silence.
That's what "higher-bitrate" usually means. Scratch that: always.
Yes. It's called the "charge more for enhanced product" game that every company since the history of capitalism has played.
Note that this absolutely destroys the sound quality. Remember, you only get a 16-bit integer to represent sound levels. Well, if you have the app volume at 1/16th and the master volume also at 1/16th, you're effectlively lopping off eight bits of resolution.
As a better alternative, sit more than 2 inches away from those 300 watt Klipsch speakers.
...was absorbed into Adium. It no longer exists.
Hey, in all fairness, I believe in some chiropracty (is that a word)? I threw out my back a few years ago while helping a college buddy move. The pain was worst at night; I'd take some Flexeril and Aleve right before bed and it'd recede enough that I could get 3 or 4 hours of sleep. After that, though, I was wide awake and in tears.
So, after going to a few MDs of various specialties with no real results (just more Flexeril), I finally took my dad's advice and went to his chiropractor. He ran one of those dubious meters they talk about on Quackwatch up and down my spine, said aha!, had me lay down, and popped my back. I almost fainted from the pain but then it got a little better. That night, I got my first solid night's sleep in months, and by the next day I was completely over it.
I claim no knowledge of the workings or theory of chiropractors, but in my case, one particular doctor absolutely fixed me. I know that some of them have some bizarre theories like a misaligned back causing cancer and things like that, but there is no doubt whatsoever in my mind that at least some of them know what they're doing.
I love modern medicine - ask my wife, a surgeon - but that doesn't mean that there aren't any worthwhile ideas outside med school. Well, not homeopathy; that's just stupid.
Here's my overall conclusion: Apple/Mac users tend to have a lot more money than you and different values. I have a Mac because the last thing I want to do at night after playing around inside the guts of *BSD and Linux machines all day is go home and do more of the same.
Normal people don't consider BMW drivers dumb because they spend more than absolutely necessary on their transportation. Well, same deal here. Yeah, I paid more for a Mac than I probably would have for a PC. I wanted it and could afford it and it suits my needs, so why not?
So... what if you modify the EULA text before agreeing to it? Having not agreed to it yet, you're not bound by terms to not modify it.
No, I think you did. The dead easiest way for any CMS to make static pages is to put a proxy server in front of it. A visitor requests foo.php, the proxy saves the output to disk, and the next visitor gets the cached ("static") copy.
This has huge advantages. First, you don't have to to pre-generate every single page on your site whether it's going to be served or not. Second, the cache doesn't expire everything simultaneously so your CMS can idle along happily only generating content periodically, rather than having long periods of disuse punctuated by huge bursts of activity.
To answer your question directly: I don't know of any CMSes that will spit out static HTML. However, since I've never imagined the need for it in favor of better alternatives, I've never really looked.
Alternatively, you could park the whole thing behind a Squid reverse proxy, or even use Apache's own caching. One tenth the effort and all the performance.
I just bought the Nintendo DS Browser (Opera), and the sole problem I have with it is that it doesn't store passwords or cookies. Is there a way to bookmark a login URL for Drupal so that I don't have to manually log in each time? I've tried replacing the POST with a GET in the normal login form, but I'm guessing that it expects some cookies to be set before you can actually submit that.
Bonus points and a case of beer for anyone who knows how to write a Squid plugin to store and transmit cookies on a per-user, authenticated basis.
Well, I love Zope, or at least like it an awful lot. I "get" Plone. But it seemed like the opposite of its goals, like a giant interdependent ball of dependencies. Drupal was such a breath of fresh air. Want stock quotes? Install the stock quote module and add it to the lefthand column. I'm always a little skeptical of PHP-based projects because so many of them are awful, but Drupal seems like a very decently engineered package. Plus, those sub-second page load times without setting up ZEO clusters and Squid frontend proxies are definitely nice.
As a Unix/network admin typing this on a Kubuntu box: huh? What would a Linux admin need that Ubuntu doesn't provide?
I just tried Drupal for the first time a few weeks ago whenever Google was having problems with their personalized site and I wanted to make a self-hosted equivalent. I have to say that it's just about the slickest CMS I've played with. I installed a couple of modules, configured everything through the web admin, and got my own personal My Yahoo! workalike.
I liked Plone but it always felt over-engineered and sluggish. Drupal, on the other hand, seems light and quick. I don't really have much else to add the the conversation, except to say that it's worth trying if you're looking at CMSes.
What's interesting is your fond recollection, that trolltalk was noble and glorious council, that the sublime art of trolling was a magnificent contribution to Slashdot and Internet culture. To everyone else here, the trolls - regardless of education or social standing or media visibility - were a bunch of asshat punks dead set on ruining a good thing for everyone.
You laughed at the PWP hacks. We sighed at the interesting stories that were made unreadable.
You liked all the homosexual rape serials. We learned not to read anything more than a couple of paragraphs long.
You waxed nostalgic about goatse. We cringed and trained ourselves not to click links.
I'm sure that somewhere out there, a couple of guys are kicking back and talking about the time they lit a cat on fine - you know, the good old days. To the rest of the world, they're not a couple of new-millenium James Deans. They're just a couple of sociopathic misfits that don't care what they ruin for their own entertainment. Well, enjoy your happy memories of those halcyon days, but don't be surprised that no one outside your clique has the same take on events.
Slashdot is older and more mature and a little more boring these days. And to be honest, that's just fine.
Every farmer doesn't have to. A few significant, insurable losses to large producers is all that's required to set things in motion.
And I can equally promise that your average insurance company will do scary-level things to avoid having to pay out of their own pocket.
You're thinking of IBM.
In the first year, the financial losses would be covered by a crop insurance company, which would then turn around and sue Monsanto into the stone ages. Think "big agriculture" is scary? See what a scorned insurance company can do. Those guys make IBM law division look like preschool teachers.
That's much funnier if you can picture Miguel de Icaza as the gnome.
When did Linus start working for Circuit City?
$ find /usr/src -type f | xargs cat | wc -l
13193911
Now, I'm tracking -RELEASE and not -HEAD, so maybe they removed half the code for 7.0, but the 6.2 codebase is significantly larger than the Linux kernel.
You couldn't possibly be more wrong. There are exactly two things restricting you from using your own property as you see fit:
If the law doesn't forbid it and you haven't signed a contract stating otherwise, you can do anything you want with your property. Anything. If I want to turn my toaster into an attack robot, or use my Faberge egg for a hammer, that's my right. My stuff - my decicion.
You listed a bunch of illegal acts as examples of restrictions on what you can do with your property, and not one of those is relevant to the subject at hand.
The thing is, Linux is actually a pretty small project. Much larger projects would include FreeBSD, which uses CVS not only for the kernel but for every line of source of the entire OS. Now, Linus is a smart guy, but I don't know why he thinks CVS (and SVN by extension) won't work for large projects. It clearly can. It may not be suitable for the way he wants to run his project, but that's a different issue.
Tell me about it. Those jackass chip hackers at Intel and AMD have been ignoring my advice for years in favor of their own cost/benefit analysis and engineering tradeoffs. If only they'd listen to us expects on Slashdot, there's no telling what they could accomplish!
What killed Circuit City for me was that stupid restocking fee. They can argue and explain until the end of the world about how it's fair and reasonable and helps keep costs down, but when it's CC or Wal-Mart for the same price, and Wal-Mart will give me no-hassle returns, I'm not buying from CC.
True story: I bought a graphics card from CC on sale for $20 a few years back. It was going in a cheapie desktop, so I basically wanted something that could put color on a screen. Anyway, I got home and it was DOA, so I returned and found that they were sold out of that particular model and their next cheapest card was $100. The clerk gave me the choice between upgrading to a part 400% more expensive or paying a 15% restocking fee to get a refund. Well, long story short, by the time I left (with my full refund), two managers and a security guard were involved.
I will never, ever, to my dying day, spend another penny at Circuit City. Maybe they feel OK charging for returns, but as a potential customer, I'll take my business someplace that treats me well. I'm not out to rip anyone off and I won't deal with someone who tells me that I am.
On the other hand, if a business wants to get rich by restricting freedoms on code, then why should they be entitled to do it on the backs of others that gave theirs away?
It's OK to make money selling Free Software. However, I see no moral reason why someone deserves the right to make money by turning around and effectively making it non-Free. If your business plan counts on slave labor to make it work, then maybe it's time to re-evaluate it. I'm very pro-business, but don't think anyone's entitled to a free ride.
Lossless codecs aren't lossy codecs that just haven't been cranked down enough. The fundamental difference is that lossy encoding is happy throwing away parts of the input that it thinks you won't miss. But take the example of a sine wave at a constant frequency. A CBR MP3 will dutifully store that wave in 128kbps glory. An ideal lossy compressor will write "play a sine wave at 2KHz for 1:30" into a few bytes and be done. In that admittedly contrived situation, a lossless compressor could have much better compression.
I know what you meant and you're right in general, but those aren't universal truths - just what happens to be correct in most common cases.