> And I would only be in luck if the "standard" lent itself well to very large numbers (tens of > thousands) of messages. It is painfully slow when there are that many messages.
It does lend itself well to large numbers of messages. I have all my email from early 1998, heavily filtered into hundreds of mailboxes. Before I started backweeding to get out the tens of thousands of old spams, I probably had something on the order of over a hundred thousand emails.
Despite the larger size of the file, access to emails is very quick due to the index files. And the plain text nature of the files means that reading from and writing to are very quick (the lack of compression, in fact, makes it faster, for obvious reasons). It helps, for me, that attachments are taken out of the mbox code as it downloads from the server.
> Compression, I > don't care about. Hard drives are so big now that I don't even have to delete apps to make room > for my porn collection.
Wow. I had to buy another 160GB hard drive space in order to make room for my TV episode collection, and that's with a couple hundred burned CD-Rs. I don't even bother much with porn anymore. You're not trying if you're not working with a nearly full disk.
> ATI has gotten their act together - it seems the > drivers for their "good" cards, i.e. 8500, 9700 > actually work
Oh-HO!
I have an AiW 8500. The Windows drivers suck. On Windows 2000 (a recent reinstall, I should note), the system becomes unstable a nontrivial percentage of the time whenever I close the TV viewing application.
To watch TV reliably, I have to boot into Linux (Mandrake 9.0), and xawtv runs perfectly. Unfortunately, ATI's are pretty much the only TV cards whose Linux drivers don't work with standard Video4Linux applications, so xawtv is the *only* TV application that works, and I can't run both an mplayer (or xine) movie file at the same time as having the TV on screen (because the crummy ATI driver only lets one program grab the resources, so one of the two programs would just show a blank rectangle), and I can't use the reportedly awesome PVR (Tivo-like) applications for Linux, like MythTV or Freevo. I do have an old Hauppauge TV card which would give me this functionality, but I'd have to deal with: * disabling the TV part of my ATI card, and it probably will resist my efforts! * the fact that the Hauppauge card has weaker reception, enhanced by the generally bad cable wiring at my house * Windows 2000's near inability to recognize said TV card (it's an OEM card that somebody donated to me, and while Linux autodetects it, I only get it working in Win2k if I'm very careful about which drivers/programs I install and the order of said installation).
Right. ATI. Act together. Yeah. Maybe on OS X or something.
> Bayes appears to be much smarter and adaptable than custom rulesets.
Bayesian filtering has an excellent track record, but it's not perfect. One of the problems is that it counts words, so many foreign language spams tend to slip through. Also, spams adapt pretty quickly, and there are spams that happen to have different wording than anything you've seen before. And there are empty spams (usually from worms).
And there are false positives. I have to look through my messages that have been flagged for spam *just in case* they're false positives.
I ended up using a combination of regexp filtering, blacklisting and Bayesian. It works pretty well, but it still requires frequent maintenance.
> And seriously, that's about all. I've tried remote administration via my phone > (Sprint A500 has a VNC client as well), Crackberry, and PDA. SSH is the best (IMHO), > VNC screen rendering is impractical on such a small device (so are the other alternatives > like RDesktop and TermServ). I also tried SonicAdmin without much fan fare from me.
SSH is very nice, but it depends on the device. 160x160 PalmOS devices are crappy with ssh, because you can't get too many characters in a line, and that messes up terminal emulation settings. Oh, and it's difficult to get a good implementation of SSH2, although I think that they're available as payware these days (I'm one of those "poor" hackers who have to use Linux on everything to avoid having to spend hundreds of dollars on software, so that's not too good of an option for me). VNC on a PalmOS actually isn't all that bad, and it is usable if you're connected to an 802.11b network. Otherwise, yeah, it's impractical.
I am happy that you can use webmin to admin servers via PalmOS web browsers. I haven't really had much of a need to use it, but the option is nice.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/ (Starflight on your Linux or Win32 PC -- maybe OS X, if you have Qt/Mac)
Just so you don't think he erred in his correction, Opera (as a joke and to prove a point) released a few months ago a version of their web browser that converted MSN pages to Swedish Chef language (as in "bork bork bork!").
> Uh huh...lets see. > Windows has 90-95% of the desktop OS market. > [Looks on Kaaza] > Lots of copyrighted movies, music, and games. > Kind of shoots your argument down, doesn't it?
Yeah, it is really amazing that when I moved from Windows 2000 to Mandrake Linux 9.0, I pretty much reduced my amount of technically illegal activity from "shitloads" to "none".
My only real vice right now is that I download copies of shows recently played on television. For some reason, I just prefer watching them on my computer. Hmm.
> But Mozilla still lacks crash recovery (not only > for crashs but also when you close it, don't > know what it's called then); the best thing > about opera is that I can have dozens of windows > open then close it and when I start it up again > it's as if I never ended it; it remembers the > tabs, the history of each tab, settings like > text size etc.
I'm pretty sure that Multizilla (the enhanced tabbed browsing add-on for Mozilla) can do that, since I use it, and it does. I'm not 100% sure that it always work on crashing, but I do know that it always reopens my last closed window's tab group. My only gripe is that it usually loads the tabs in different order from when they were closed.
Oddly enough, Opera for Linux doesn't always autorecover my open pages when I start it up. That's really annoying, since Opera is my primary browser and I usually work with at least forty open pages at once.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
Re:Long distance repairs
on
SOHO Is Back
·
· Score: 1
> Wouldn't it be a hoot if, say, 50 years from > now, a couple of astronauts found it, dusted it > off, replaced the batteries, hit the master > reset button (or whatever) and it sprang back to life!
Given the collapse of the Space Age in the US, I think it'd be a hoot if astronauts made it even halfway to the nearest (non-Earth) planet before I'm dead.
> A one bedroom apartment in Arlington, VA > requires a $74,000 salary to qualify.
What does "to qualify" mean?
I make $24000 a year, minus about five thousand dollars a year for transportation-related charges (a couple thousand for gasoline, plus either maintenance for the past couple years or the '99 Altima that I had to buy last week), so that's about $19000 a year. On that, I can afford the basic amenities, plus financing my internet addiction (cell phone plus broadband -- the latter of which just went up 40% for no reason -- plus hosting for my website figures to about $1400 a year), plus food plus the monthly stipend I send to my family. As it works out, I'm slowly bleeding cash, largely due to having to buy that car. If it turns out to be low maintenance (and it's starting out that way, especially since the higher fuel efficiency means that I'm filling the gas tank up less than half as often on a tank that's ten to twenty percent smaller!), then I'll be cash flow positive, although I eschew many luxuries that others embrace.
I cannot afford to live alone on this salary. I still live with my parents, as does my sister, who recently graduated from college (we're all graduates -- me in CS, mom in Sociology, sister in Psychology, father also in Psychology, though he got all the way to a Master's Degree, which is probably why he got that "high paying" $40k/yr job as an exterminator/carpenter/handy-man.
Grousing aside, I checked apartments.com for rates in my area. Yeah, this isn't in a city, but it's Nassau county, a rather densely packed suburb within walking distance of Queens County, a borough of NYC. It lists one bedroom apartments for as low as $750, and that particular one seems to include internet access (I'll assume that that's an optional added expense, though, just like water and electricity). Assuming that that's a lowball and padding for both that and the utilities, I can pretty comfortably say that that we're looking at a total monthly cost of something like $1200, including my cell phone service. I hope that I'm not poorly estimating utility costs. I do know that I paid under $400 a month in a shared rented house when I went to college a few years ago, and I used less utilities than most people in the house, so the damage to me probably wouldn't be too bad, and I might even be overestimating that cost. But I'll stick to $1200.
$1200 a month is $14400 a year. That's $10400 above what I'm currently paying for room/board/internet/cellphone/water/electricity/he ating. And I'd probably be closer to work, which reduces those annoying car costs (but I'll ignore this part). My base salary is $24000, so that plus $10400 would be $34400. Therefore, it would seem that in this suburbian area, I could afford to live on my own for less than the low point of the $35K-60K range specified in ancestral post.
A quick look in Queens and Brooklyn, two of the boroughs of New York City, show that you can get apartments for under $1000 a month, though they would tend to be in less comfy high-rise buildings. But we're not talking about luxury here. We're measuring how much it'd cost to live. My rash guesstimate is that the price difference per year from Nassau County to Queens or Brooklyn would be well under $5000. Which means that for under $40K per year, you could live in a New York City apartment.
Don't bring up Manhattan. Only crazy people live in the dead center of the city.
So I ask again: What does "to qualify" mean? If you make $74000 per year, then you could likely rent an entire hallway of apartment rooms in some places (at the least, you could get five of the $1k/month ones)! So "to qualify" must mean something different than "to afford".
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/ (it's not cool that most of my friends are intelligent and hardworking yet still must live with their parents -- I'd blame the liberals or conservatives or something, but what'd be the point?)
> I think he's scaling it, using MS Office as the base (100).
That still doesn't answer the question (though your point is useful).
Which app is he testing? Is he doing a complex spreadsheet batch function? Is he repaginating War and Peace? Is he testing how long the app takes to load?
It's entirely possible that OpenOffice is inferior in some aspects of performance while MSOffice is inferior in other aspects of performance.
Of course, that's why I use EditPad and Kate. Can't beat the sheer speed of a plain text editor.;)
> FWIW, I've been using Opera for a year or so and > absolutely love it. why? Mouse gestures. Plain > and simple. They are TheNextBigThing(tm) in UIs.
Mozilla supports mouse gestures, and if you install MyIE2, you'll basically have Internet Explorer with mouse gestures (and tabbed MDI, as well as popup blocking).
That said, opera is my primary browser. It works everywhere (even in one of my PDAs!) and has multiple ways of doing everything. I really like choosing between ALT-PgDn and MouseRight+Scroll and soforth.:)
> I multi window surf all the time. I frequently have 10+ browser windows open.
> Weak the force is on you.
> 10+, pff.
Yeah, seriously. I have forty-two pages open right now, and it's only that low because I seriously pruned my work stuff yesterday. That's forty-two web pages, eighteen email (Eudora) windows open, one EditPad window open (normally, it's more like ten, what with all the.h files and.html files that I have to mess with, but I just started my computer), and two term/cmd/dos/eConsole windows open (and it'd be more if I could get the damned thing into MDI!). It's only this low because I just got into work. I have yet to open Word (with the neato MDI bar!) and Excel. I have yet to open up my new email messages. I usually open up a couple more eConsole or CMD.exe sessions for my work. I usually have a few more web pages open. I'll have several more files open for editing.
When all is, as they say, "said and done", I'd probably have upwards of eighty documents open. Do you realize how much that would sodomize my user experience if every single document was represented on one tiny, stinking bar at the bottom of my screen?!?
That's dumb. Instead, for the most part, each *application* is represented on the OS's task bar, and each application controls access to its own documents. I pretty much have everything down pat with this more efficient system, including msie but sadly excluding command line boxes (I'm still looking). But it's just more efficient when there are few enough buttons on the taskbar for me to actually read what they say instead of having a bunch of tiny icons to which I must mouse hover in order to identify!
> I am too lazy to look, but I'm sure that the > CAT 5 has a better range (180m?) than USB > (9m?). Also cat-5 cable is $50 for 1000' > retail. USB is $20 for 6'
IANAEE, but perhaps CAT5 (just checked, by the way, and it's a 100m limit) can only handle that maximum range with the specific signal levels used in ethernet and soforth (fsck, I used to put together these networks, and now my memory is all swiss-cheesed!). It's entirely possible that CAT5 wouldn't be able to transmit higher levels of signal (for supplying electrical power and soforth) without having a more severe drop-off that makes the spec useless at much shorter than the normal ranges.
That said, I think that USB sucks. It's a spec that's caused more hardship than anything else. Sure, maybe it's more mature now, but the damage to my fragile psyche has already been done due to the Spastic Adventures of Windows 9x.
You mean at most, right? The largest distance that Mars gets from Earth is something like 24 light-minutes. I don't know the minimum distance in those units offhand, but it about 55 million kilometers. Earth's distance from Sol is almost three times that distance, so the minimum distance to Mars from Earth is probably something like three light-minutes.
> All competing algorithms and eventually ZIP won [or more so deflate] > for the most part and BZIP2 to a certain degree...
Hmmm. While most of the formats are not as popular, I see RAR files all the time. It seems to be (by far) the choice for usenet posters, where large binaries are split into a huge wad of *.r?? files. ACE is commonly used among warez folk, I think, but it's fairly gone. JAR.... isn't that the java file archives? They're all over the place, then..gz and.tgz files are everywhere for me. Half the programs I install are in this format (notably, almost all the programs for my zaurus are gzipped tar files, renamed to ".ipk").
Of course, it's also notable that ZIP files didn't win because of their superiority. They're certainly not better than RAR (or bz2, which you mentioned) in compression.
Aargh. Sorry if I'm at all incoherent. I'm code-zoned or something. I'm making a program that parses CSV files and trans-somethings directory structures and saves files and paints some pretty output to a 24-pin USB dot matrix printer and sends data over the internet and stuff. And I have ADD, and I'm on drugs, which help somewhat, but I've just done a lot of compiling and recompiling, and my brain got messed up a little when I spent my lunch break in the presence of a really, really bright sun.
> That's simply not true. iPaq H3955 has the same screen, the same > processor, and more of usable RAM, for $100 less.
You misspelled "an inferior screen" unless you think that the iPaq's 240x320 screen has the same resolution as the Palm's 320x320 screen (hint: for every 3 iPaq pixels, there are four Palm pixels).
> I am not a biologist, but I bet the threat is more than 0.3 percent > that this could happen. This SARS outbreak has me thinking.
I agree with your suspicions, but SARS is a bad example to use. It's not *that* hyper-communicable, and it's not very deadly (I don't know the kill rate, as it's still in contention, but it seems to be as low as one out of twenty people, much less if you discount the elderly).
A much more interesting example would be the disease from the Showtime channel's program, "Jeremiah". It wiped out nearly every human who'd already hit puberty. And, yay, the government made it. *_*
> > Internet Explorer anyone? > You think Netscape 4 was better?
W3C was better. Remember, we're talking about standards here, not products. With IE's dominance, anything it adopts becomes a de facto "standard", regardless of how much better or worse it is when compared to the selected-by-democracy equivalent standards.
> onono, it is two men enter, ONE man leaves....so > it's obviously possible to escape.
Your post's parent was referencing the type of interaction with a black hole where the energy creates a virtural particle that splits into two opposite charge particles, one of which escapes from the hole.
That is a bit different from TDome. In this case, it seems more like "zero men enter, one man leaves".
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Quicktime in all its iterations > is the most widely distributed program, even surpassing Windows.
This could be the case, but I would imagine that Adobe Acrobat Reader, which has been on the vast majority of program CDs that I've seen, may contest that a little.
> Really, it takes no made-up-numbers. I can state for a fact from what my room-mate last year did > (total anime fanatic) that you can reliably download 6 gigs/day if you keep on top of your > download lists, and that's using DC++.
> No way in hell just browsing can keep up with that, and there isn't enough new software updates > from keeping up-to-date to counterbalance that kind of draw.
What about usenet (newsgroups, that is)? That involves the continuous transfer of crap from isp to isp even if the user *doesn't* download anything.
Slashdot Mirror
> And I would only be in luck if the "standard" lent itself well to very large numbers (tens of
> thousands) of messages. It is painfully slow when there are that many messages.
It does lend itself well to large numbers of messages. I have all my email from early 1998, heavily filtered into hundreds of mailboxes. Before I started backweeding to get out the tens of thousands of old spams, I probably had something on the order of over a hundred thousand emails.
Despite the larger size of the file, access to emails is very quick due to the index files. And the plain text nature of the files means that reading from and writing to are very quick (the lack of compression, in fact, makes it faster, for obvious reasons). It helps, for me, that attachments are taken out of the mbox code as it downloads from the server.
> Compression, I
> don't care about. Hard drives are so big now that I don't even have to delete apps to make room
> for my porn collection.
Wow. I had to buy another 160GB hard drive space in order to make room for my TV episode collection, and that's with a couple hundred burned CD-Rs. I don't even bother much with porn anymore. You're not trying if you're not working with a nearly full disk.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> ATI has gotten their act together - it seems the
> drivers for their "good" cards, i.e. 8500, 9700
> actually work
Oh-HO!
I have an AiW 8500. The Windows drivers suck. On Windows 2000 (a recent reinstall, I should note), the system becomes unstable a nontrivial percentage of the time whenever I close the TV viewing application.
To watch TV reliably, I have to boot into Linux (Mandrake 9.0), and xawtv runs perfectly. Unfortunately, ATI's are pretty much the only TV cards whose Linux drivers don't work with standard Video4Linux applications, so xawtv is the *only* TV application that works, and I can't run both an mplayer (or xine) movie file at the same time as having the TV on screen (because the crummy ATI driver only lets one program grab the resources, so one of the two programs would just show a blank rectangle), and I can't use the reportedly awesome PVR (Tivo-like) applications for Linux, like MythTV or Freevo. I do have an old Hauppauge TV card which would give me this functionality, but I'd have to deal with:
* disabling the TV part of my ATI card, and it probably will resist my efforts!
* the fact that the Hauppauge card has weaker reception, enhanced by the generally bad cable wiring at my house
* Windows 2000's near inability to recognize said TV card (it's an OEM card that somebody donated to me, and while Linux autodetects it, I only get it working in Win2k if I'm very careful about which drivers/programs I install and the order of said installation).
Right. ATI. Act together. Yeah. Maybe on OS X or something.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
Actually, this is more akin to event-driven programming.
void sue( Company *c )
{
lawyers->barratry( c );
revenue--;
stockoptions += 10000000;
}
void main()
{
for( uint i; i < planet->companylist()->count(); i++ )
{
sue( planet->companylist()->at(i) );
}
}
void counterSuitEvent( suitEvent *e )
{
sue( e->plaintiff );
}
> Bayes appears to be much smarter and adaptable than custom rulesets.
Bayesian filtering has an excellent track record, but it's not perfect. One of the problems is that it counts words, so many foreign language spams tend to slip through. Also, spams adapt pretty quickly, and there are spams that happen to have different wording than anything you've seen before. And there are empty spams (usually from worms).
And there are false positives. I have to look through my messages that have been flagged for spam *just in case* they're false positives.
I ended up using a combination of regexp filtering, blacklisting and Bayesian. It works pretty well, but it still requires frequent maintenance.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
(open source Starflight -- yay)
> And seriously, that's about all. I've tried remote administration via my phone
> (Sprint A500 has a VNC client as well), Crackberry, and PDA. SSH is the best (IMHO),
> VNC screen rendering is impractical on such a small device (so are the other alternatives
> like RDesktop and TermServ). I also tried SonicAdmin without much fan fare from me.
SSH is very nice, but it depends on the device. 160x160 PalmOS devices are crappy with ssh, because you can't get too many characters in a line, and that messes up terminal emulation settings. Oh, and it's difficult to get a good implementation of SSH2, although I think that they're available as payware these days (I'm one of those "poor" hackers who have to use Linux on everything to avoid having to spend hundreds of dollars on software, so that's not too good of an option for me). VNC on a PalmOS actually isn't all that bad, and it is usable if you're connected to an 802.11b network. Otherwise, yeah, it's impractical.
I am happy that you can use webmin to admin servers via PalmOS web browsers. I haven't really had much of a need to use it, but the option is nice.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
(Starflight on your Linux or Win32 PC -- maybe OS X, if you have Qt/Mac)
> "borken" eh?
Just so you don't think he erred in his correction, Opera (as a joke and to prove a point) released a few months ago a version of their web browser that converted MSN pages to Swedish Chef language (as in "bork bork bork!").
And that was what he was referencing.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> Uh huh...lets see.
> Windows has 90-95% of the desktop OS market.
> [Looks on Kaaza]
> Lots of copyrighted movies, music, and games.
> Kind of shoots your argument down, doesn't it?
Yeah, it is really amazing that when I moved from Windows 2000 to Mandrake Linux 9.0, I pretty much reduced my amount of technically illegal activity from "shitloads" to "none".
My only real vice right now is that I download copies of shows recently played on television. For some reason, I just prefer watching them on my computer. Hmm.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> But Mozilla still lacks crash recovery (not only
> for crashs but also when you close it, don't
> know what it's called then); the best thing
> about opera is that I can have dozens of windows
> open then close it and when I start it up again
> it's as if I never ended it; it remembers the
> tabs, the history of each tab, settings like
> text size etc.
I'm pretty sure that Multizilla (the enhanced tabbed browsing add-on for Mozilla) can do that, since I use it, and it does. I'm not 100% sure that it always work on crashing, but I do know that it always reopens my last closed window's tab group. My only gripe is that it usually loads the tabs in different order from when they were closed.
Oddly enough, Opera for Linux doesn't always autorecover my open pages when I start it up. That's really annoying, since Opera is my primary browser and I usually work with at least forty open pages at once.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> Wouldn't it be a hoot if, say, 50 years from
> now, a couple of astronauts found it, dusted it
> off, replaced the batteries, hit the master
> reset button (or whatever) and it sprang back to life!
Given the collapse of the Space Age in the US, I think it'd be a hoot if astronauts made it even halfway to the nearest (non-Earth) planet before I'm dead.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> A one bedroom apartment in Arlington, VA
e ating. And I'd probably be closer to work, which reduces those annoying car costs (but I'll ignore this part). My base salary is $24000, so that plus $10400 would be $34400. Therefore, it would seem that in this suburbian area, I could afford to live on my own for less than the low point of the $35K-60K range specified in ancestral post.
> requires a $74,000 salary to qualify.
What does "to qualify" mean?
I make $24000 a year, minus about five thousand dollars a year for transportation-related charges (a couple thousand for gasoline, plus either maintenance for the past couple years or the '99 Altima that I had to buy last week), so that's about $19000 a year. On that, I can afford the basic amenities, plus financing my internet addiction (cell phone plus broadband -- the latter of which just went up 40% for no reason -- plus hosting for my website figures to about $1400 a year), plus food plus the monthly stipend I send to my family. As it works out, I'm slowly bleeding cash, largely due to having to buy that car. If it turns out to be low maintenance (and it's starting out that way, especially since the higher fuel efficiency means that I'm filling the gas tank up less than half as often on a tank that's ten to twenty percent smaller!), then I'll be cash flow positive, although I eschew many luxuries that others embrace.
I cannot afford to live alone on this salary. I still live with my parents, as does my sister, who recently graduated from college (we're all graduates -- me in CS, mom in Sociology, sister in Psychology, father also in Psychology, though he got all the way to a Master's Degree, which is probably why he got that "high paying" $40k/yr job as an exterminator/carpenter/handy-man.
Grousing aside, I checked apartments.com for rates in my area. Yeah, this isn't in a city, but it's Nassau county, a rather densely packed suburb within walking distance of Queens County, a borough of NYC. It lists one bedroom apartments for as low as $750, and that particular one seems to include internet access (I'll assume that that's an optional added expense, though, just like water and electricity). Assuming that that's a lowball and padding for both that and the utilities, I can pretty comfortably say that that we're looking at a total monthly cost of something like $1200, including my cell phone service. I hope that I'm not poorly estimating utility costs. I do know that I paid under $400 a month in a shared rented house when I went to college a few years ago, and I used less utilities than most people in the house, so the damage to me probably wouldn't be too bad, and I might even be overestimating that cost. But I'll stick to $1200.
$1200 a month is $14400 a year. That's $10400 above what I'm currently paying for room/board/internet/cellphone/water/electricity/h
A quick look in Queens and Brooklyn, two of the boroughs of New York City, show that you can get apartments for under $1000 a month, though they would tend to be in less comfy high-rise buildings. But we're not talking about luxury here. We're measuring how much it'd cost to live. My rash guesstimate is that the price difference per year from Nassau County to Queens or Brooklyn would be well under $5000. Which means that for under $40K per year, you could live in a New York City apartment.
Don't bring up Manhattan. Only crazy people live in the dead center of the city.
So I ask again: What does "to qualify" mean? If you make $74000 per year, then you could likely rent an entire hallway of apartment rooms in some places (at the least, you could get five of the $1k/month ones)! So "to qualify" must mean something different than "to afford".
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
(it's not cool that most of my friends are intelligent and hardworking yet still must live with their parents -- I'd blame the liberals or conservatives or something, but what'd be the point?)
> I think he's scaling it, using MS Office as the base (100).
;)
That still doesn't answer the question (though your point is useful).
Which app is he testing? Is he doing a complex spreadsheet batch function? Is he repaginating War and Peace? Is he testing how long the app takes to load?
It's entirely possible that OpenOffice is inferior in some aspects of performance while MSOffice is inferior in other aspects of performance.
Of course, that's why I use EditPad and Kate. Can't beat the sheer speed of a plain text editor.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> FWIW, I've been using Opera for a year or so and
:)
> absolutely love it. why? Mouse gestures. Plain
> and simple. They are TheNextBigThing(tm) in UIs.
Mozilla supports mouse gestures, and if you install MyIE2, you'll basically have Internet Explorer with mouse gestures (and tabbed MDI, as well as popup blocking).
That said, opera is my primary browser. It works everywhere (even in one of my PDAs!) and has multiple ways of doing everything. I really like choosing between ALT-PgDn and MouseRight+Scroll and soforth.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> Tabbed browsing should be patented NOW
> because that spanks IE.
Mozilla didn't invent tabbed browsing. They just took MDI and changed the name. Opera did it first, and possibly others.
--
-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> I multi window surf all the time. I frequently have 10+ browser windows open.
.h files and .html files that I have to mess with, but I just started my computer), and two term/cmd/dos/eConsole windows open (and it'd be more if I could get the damned thing into MDI!). It's only this low because I just got into work. I have yet to open Word (with the neato MDI bar!) and Excel. I have yet to open up my new email messages. I usually open up a couple more eConsole or CMD.exe sessions for my work. I usually have a few more web pages open. I'll have several more files open for editing.
> Weak the force is on you.
> 10+, pff.
Yeah, seriously. I have forty-two pages open right now, and it's only that low because I seriously pruned my work stuff yesterday. That's forty-two web pages, eighteen email (Eudora) windows open, one EditPad window open (normally, it's more like ten, what with all the
When all is, as they say, "said and done", I'd probably have upwards of eighty documents open. Do you realize how much that would sodomize my user experience if every single document was represented on one tiny, stinking bar at the bottom of my screen?!?
That's dumb. Instead, for the most part, each *application* is represented on the OS's task bar, and each application controls access to its own documents. I pretty much have everything down pat with this more efficient system, including msie but sadly excluding command line boxes (I'm still looking). But it's just more efficient when there are few enough buttons on the taskbar for me to actually read what they say instead of having a bunch of tiny icons to which I must mouse hover in order to identify!
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> I am too lazy to look, but I'm sure that the
> CAT 5 has a better range (180m?) than USB
> (9m?). Also cat-5 cable is $50 for 1000'
> retail. USB is $20 for 6'
IANAEE, but perhaps CAT5 (just checked, by the way, and it's a 100m limit) can only handle that maximum range with the specific signal levels used in ethernet and soforth (fsck, I used to put together these networks, and now my memory is all swiss-cheesed!). It's entirely possible that CAT5 wouldn't be able to transmit higher levels of signal (for supplying electrical power and soforth) without having a more severe drop-off that makes the spec useless at much shorter than the normal ranges.
That said, I think that USB sucks. It's a spec that's caused more hardship than anything else. Sure, maybe it's more mature now, but the damage to my fragile psyche has already been done due to the Spastic Adventures of Windows 9x.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> Since when is a VIA CPU sweet?
Since they started using solid, low power cores based on Centaur team designs.
> Remember Cyrix anyone?
You mean the team that VIA disbanded when they decided to go with primarily Centaur-derived technology? What about them?
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
(the above contains exaggerations, but less so than parent)
> Well, at least 20 minutes from Mars orbit.
You mean at most, right? The largest distance that Mars gets from Earth is something like 24 light-minutes. I don't know the minimum distance in those units offhand, but it about 55 million kilometers. Earth's distance from Sol is almost three times that distance, so the minimum distance to Mars from Earth is probably something like three light-minutes.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/coding/SFi/
> Remember LZH, ARC, PAK, ARJ, JAR, ZIP, RAR, ACE, ZOO, ...
.gz and .tgz files are everywhere for me. Half the programs I install are in this format (notably, almost all the programs for my zaurus are gzipped tar files, renamed to ".ipk").
> All competing algorithms and eventually ZIP won [or more so deflate]
> for the most part and BZIP2 to a certain degree...
Hmmm. While most of the formats are not as popular, I see RAR files all the time. It seems to be (by far) the choice for usenet posters, where large binaries are split into a huge wad of *.r?? files. ACE is commonly used among warez folk, I think, but it's fairly gone. JAR.... isn't that the java file archives? They're all over the place, then.
Of course, it's also notable that ZIP files didn't win because of their superiority. They're certainly not better than RAR (or bz2, which you mentioned) in compression.
Aargh. Sorry if I'm at all incoherent. I'm code-zoned or something. I'm making a program that parses CSV files and trans-somethings directory structures and saves files and paints some pretty output to a 24-pin USB dot matrix printer and sends data over the internet and stuff. And I have ADD, and I'm on drugs, which help somewhat, but I've just done a lot of compiling and recompiling, and my brain got messed up a little when I spent my lunch break in the presence of a really, really bright sun.
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-JC
http://www.jc-news.com/career
> That's simply not true. iPaq H3955 has the same screen, the same
> processor, and more of usable RAM, for $100 less.
You misspelled "an inferior screen" unless you think that the iPaq's 240x320 screen has the same resolution as the Palm's 320x320 screen (hint: for every 3 iPaq pixels, there are four Palm pixels).
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-JC
> Besides, when the x-wife gets within striking distance of my wallet,
> the hair goes up on the back of my neck
X-Wife? Telekinetic hair-raising powers? Is she one of those filthy mutants, or have I been watching too many Marvel 'toons lately?
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-JC
> I am not a biologist, but I bet the threat is more than 0.3 percent
> that this could happen. This SARS outbreak has me thinking.
I agree with your suspicions, but SARS is a bad example to use. It's not *that* hyper-communicable, and it's not very deadly (I don't know the kill rate, as it's still in contention, but it seems to be as low as one out of twenty people, much less if you discount the elderly).
A much more interesting example would be the disease from the Showtime channel's program, "Jeremiah". It wiped out nearly every human who'd already hit puberty. And, yay, the government made it. *_*
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-JC
> > Internet Explorer anyone?
> You think Netscape 4 was better?
W3C was better. Remember, we're talking about standards here, not products. With IE's dominance, anything it adopts becomes a de facto "standard", regardless of how much better or worse it is when compared to the selected-by-democracy equivalent standards.
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-JC
> onono, it is two men enter, ONE man leaves....so > it's obviously possible to escape.
Your post's parent was referencing the type of interaction with a black hole where the energy creates a virtural particle that splits into two opposite charge particles, one of which escapes from the hole.
That is a bit different from TDome. In this case, it seems more like "zero men enter, one man leaves".
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-JC
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Quicktime in all its iterations
> is the most widely distributed program, even surpassing Windows.
This could be the case, but I would imagine that Adobe Acrobat Reader, which has been on the vast majority of program CDs that I've seen, may contest that a little.
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-JC
> Really, it takes no made-up-numbers. I can state for a fact from what my room-mate last year did
> (total anime fanatic) that you can reliably download 6 gigs/day if you keep on top of your
> download lists, and that's using DC++.
> No way in hell just browsing can keep up with that, and there isn't enough new software updates
> from keeping up-to-date to counterbalance that kind of draw.
What about usenet (newsgroups, that is)? That involves the continuous transfer of crap from isp to isp even if the user *doesn't* download anything.
-JC