> Hi everybody, it's time to play, spot the idiot. The idiot > has several characteristics, the most notable one is the > inability to form a sentence without being absolutely wrong.
Ironically, the above two sentences are grammatically inaccurate.
-JC
PS: Commas should, be used, rather, ju,di,ci,ous,l,y, in a, se,,nte,nc,,,e.
> Yeah right, and I bet we could also hire Saddam Hussein as a human rights > cop because he knows all about mass murdering his own people.
Yeah, except Saddam never cared about the consequences of his actions and how they affected others, whereas Mitnick never really applied his skills towards knowingly hurting anyone or knowingly causing actual palpable damage. Huuuuge difference there.
> Just about every legal solution to a technological problems end up backfiring. > The problem is that most laws are so broadly written that they usually end up making > something legitimate illegal as well. > Usually these laws end up fining someone who sends 'spam' described in legalese. Then, > you forward a joke to someone who gets offended by it, calls it an unsolicited e-mail message, > and then uses the law to extract money from your wallet. Meanwhile, since the spammers never > send anything using their own return address, they just continue doing what they always > have done.
I dunno. None of this happened when they passed laws against fax spamming. In fact, fax spamming as a whole has generally stopped. I certainly don't get any more than 1% spams from my company's fax machine, whereas roughly 80% of my incoming emails are spam.
> Okay, theory: There is an infinite number or parallel universes. > This implies that there is at least one universe wehre any given situation can happen. > This implies there is at least one universe where there are no parallel universes. > Which would prove the theory wrong. > I love bad logic.:)
I know you're just funnin', but I still wanted to point out one counterexample to your hypothesis:
There could be an infinite number of universes that happen to be exactly, precisely the same.
> How do they manage to include both of these in > the same theory? So the Universe started from > nothing 14 billion years ago, and has expanded > to fill an infinite non-curved space?
Is it perhaps not impossible that the universe is shaped like an n-dimensional extrapolation of r=cos(n*theta)? That way, each universe shares a common "big bang" center but is locally contiguous and generally flat to spherical, right?
I know that's not non-curved, but I'm just thinking and stuff. IANAP, as you can see, but this is still fun stuff to a n00b like me.:)
-JC
PS: (to clarify to casual readers) The equation I described above is a "flower pattern" where the "petals" only touch at the very center point. The number "n" denotes the number of petals and number of analogous universes. The line forming the petals' edges are actually the "surface" of each universe (the equation only describes a one dimensional universe, largely because the graphing software that I just downloaded can't do equations of r based on theta in dimensionalities(word?) greater than 2.
> Saying something like "I always lie" > creates an interesting logical paradox
No, it doesn't. If you say "I always lie", then you are lying. But saying NOT("I always lie") does not equate to "I always tell the truth". So there is no paradox.
> Aside from the standard./configure; make; make install, > what makes MPlayer so friggin' hard to configure? > You DON'T really have to tweak it. It's about as brainless > as anything gets. I just don't understand this issue.
Well, I did have to separately install lame and perhaps a couple other prerequisites, but I'm used to that with POSIX installs.
The different codecs require different methods of installation. ogg/vorbis stuff have to be installed (libogg, libvorbis) before MPlayer is installed. Windows codecs have to be copied to a directory before you run make. It doesn't say that Quicktime codecs have to be predownloaded, but you have to use a special flag when you./configure the MPlayer source. Other codecs can be copied any time. But to where? The standard documentation isn't always clear about locations.
The Win32 Lite codec pack is just a subset of the Win32 pack, so I don't need both, right? Hmmm. Okay. The QuickTime DLL pack goes into the win32 codec directory, but do the QuickTime Extras go into the same place? The documentation doesn't seem to acknowledge those.
Should I point out that I have a RADEON 8500, but -vo vidix doesn't seem to work with it, despite what the docs say? Luckily, the default settings work, but if I try to set the driver in the preferences of gmplayer, nothing will work, and the only way of fixing it is to delete the conf file.
It'd be nice if the system made fonts a bit easier. Usually, you don't have to copy fonts into various directories to get a program to work properly, even in linux. So it gives a link to fonts, but there are four packs there. Which should I use? I don't know. I randomly picked one, and I think it worked. I have an OSD, though I can't get subtitles to work. I think that there was a parameter for that in./configure, but I'm sure that I did it right. Of course, for each user, I have to manually link the font to ~/.mplayer/font or explicitly tell mplayer where to look. Most programs know which directories store their default data files.
MPlayer doesn't work with TV input on my computer, but I think that's ATI's fault for crappy V4L support.
The problem isn't that this stuff is impossible. I mean, I got MPlayer installed with almost all features activated. I have no idea if it's at all decently optimized for my video or sound, but it plays virtually everything and it really nice interface-wise. But "as brainless as anything gets" is not applicable to the MPlayer install. If you want it installed properly and fully, you have to be prepared to read through a *lot* of documentation, you have to be careful about which./configure parameters you use, you have to double check which files are manually loaded to which locations (why can't make install just automagically put the relevant codecs/skins/fonts to/usr/local/share/* or/usr/local/lib/* or something like that?) and you have to be anally attentive to which drivers you need, a requirement that we don't really see for any other media player for any platform.
But it does rock, and is one of the best applications ever made.
http://vobsub.edensrising.com/mpc.php Media Player Classic, a hack (or clone or something) of an older version Windows Media Player, except that it more or less works out of the box with a ton of formats. I was happy to find out that it played the (quicktime) Matrix trailer without requiring me to think. It wasn't completely smooth, but I'm running a crapload of programs right now (Opera, 60MB; Mozilla, 33MB; Eudora, 23MB; bittorrent, 20MB; excel, 16MB; spampal, 10MB; editpad, 10MB; PowerDesk, 20MB; ICQ, 7MB; IE5.5, hidden bloat; United Devices distributed anti-cancer program thing, 18MB). It's quite possible that MPC would play the MOV file more smoothly than QT, since it's less bloaty overall.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/ This is the greatest movie viewing tool I've ever used. It's annoying to set up, but it plays absolutely everything that I throw at it, can be played with a fully skinnable gui or just from the command line, has excellent key mappings, and could be compiled for embedded devices like the Zaurus or (possibly, though I'm not going to hold my breath) the 3Com Audrey (a QNX-based "internet appliance" that happened to be really awesome, but the price was far beyond the realistic market value of the product).
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html I'll also throw in good words for VideoLan. I originally got this so that I could play around with the idea of streaming mpegs over my LAN to the downstairs win32 PC from my room's Mandrake box. It worked pretty nicely, though at the time it couldn't support the exact format I most wanted (SVCD, I think it was). But VideoLan happens to also be a regular multimedia player that plays a buttload of formats but also works across many platforms.
http://xine.sourceforge.net/ xine is making great inroads. When I started playing with it a year or two ago, it paled in comparison to mplayer, though it worked out of the box without requiring the intense RTFMability that mplayer warrants. xine is probably not as multiplatform as the other players, but it apparently now plays a craptastic amount of formats. The interface has improved, thanks to a decent skinnability, though I haven't noticed if it can do decent keymappings (mplayer has support for skipping forward and backward by 10 seconds, one minute and ten minute intervals, which is insanely useful). I use xine currently in those rare instances when mplayer fails (for example, mplayer couldn't open the audio for a low quality south park ASF movie for some reason, so I popped it into xine and watched it).
Windows Media Player is a pretty good program. It's not as good as it used to be in terms of interface (the "classic" skin almost makes it as good as the classic interface, but not quite), but it's good enough to earn the title of fourth or fifth best multimedia viewer out there. But I wish that people knew that there were these other players out there that might make their viewing experiences a bit nicer. Bundling's a bitch, eh?;)
>...the distinction between a good sysadim and one with credentials. > Mutually exclusive, but the good ones have both.
Wait. How can they be mutually exclusive if one is a subset of the other?
Re:Why USB is better than UART
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 1
> Yes. A UART interface is trivial. Except when > you have to find out why it's not working (oops, > it's disabled or set up in the BIOS as an IRDA > port).
What, and USB is never set incorrectly at the BIOS level? Hah!
I love serial. I can just dump characters into it instead of having to figure out the horrible APIs available for other interface types. Yeah, it's lazy, but some of us don't exactly receive the funding or time to be creative in all aspects of our programming.:p
That said, I easily see the advantages the USB/Fireware/Parallel have over Serial ports. I'm just being difficult to annoy you.
> and an unconfirmed beta, which i think is false, > but i'll list in anyways:
> Windows 98 Lite Beta (0.36mb rar file)
Just for clarification, Windows 98 Lite is a program that modifies Windows 98 (by replacing the 98 IE-based shell with the Windows 95 Explorer shell). It is not the operating system itself.
Well, I think that's the case here, at least.
I believe that 98Lite was actually part of the government's case against Microsoft after Microsoft claimed that removing IE from 98 would "break" the OS.
> > The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred in September 2001
> I'm wondering, what's the worse
"Worst"
> thing you imply happened before recorded history? A few hundred > wolves terrorizing a big herd of sheeps a few million years ago? > Or are you counting the dino-killing asteroid as a terrorist attack?
Cain slaying Abel. A terrorist attack singlehandedly killing off a quarter of the world's population.
> Before I whip out my credit card and ask a friend in the U.S. to forward this on to me since hsn doesn't ship to Canada:-( > - How's the battery life? ~4 hours? ~20 hours? How much do you > use your s and how often do you have to recharge?
I have a SL-5000D, which has a much smaller battery than the SL-5600. It gets a little better battery life than the Handspring Visor Prism, if that helps. Actually, it's probably much better in the summertime, since the Prism's screen is unreadable in the daylight, but I could totally turn off the front-light on the Zaurus in daytime (for longer hours and all that). Still, I keep mine plugged in as often as possible, though I do have it set up to have all my data on the Flash ROM, so I don't lose anything (even installed apps, even prefs, whatever) if I do lose power.
> - The OS that comes presinstalled, it's linux based right?
Yeah. Based on Debian's arm-ported binaries, though it's not Debian itself. I think that there is a debian port (with X and all), but that's just insane, man!
> Do I get a shell with it?
Sharp put its terminal program on the CD. It's easy enough to install, but there are better choices. There's a port of Konsole (the tabbed terminal program used in KDE) for the Zaurus that is very popular.
> Can I compile and run most linux apps?
Good question. If you're good at cross compiling, you'll probably have good luck with command-line apps. Graphical apps are a little different. The Zaurus doesn't normally use X. X is huge for a PDA. You could get it, but that's... well, it's insane. Anyway, programs requiring X libs obviously won't work. Zaurus uses Qtopia, which is a PDA-ish environment based on Trolltech's Qt, a widget set and toolkit for many operating systems. It's neat. I use Qt for my programs (it makes programming a lot easier), and I can easily cross compile gui apps between x86/Linux, x86/win32, ppc/macosx (well, I could if I had the compiler for OS X, and it'd help if I had OS X itself!) and the Zaurus.
> What's the deal with OpenZaurus?
It's mostly just a different ROM with different default applications. It uses Konqueror/Embedded instead of the Opera browser. It's made with ssh in mind instead of the insecure ftp that the Zaurus normally uses. It has better scripting support, though I haven't really looked at that stuff. The launcher configuration is amazing, at least compared to what Sharp offers for the SL-5000D. I can change background images for each category, I can change fonts, I can alter the widget style, I can have transparent menus... lots of stuff like that. Oh, OZ also lets me use the Flash ROM for storage and the DRAM exclusively for memory access, though Sharp does that now, too.
On the negative side, OZ 3.0 can be a bit crashy and there's a few things that it doesn't work with (Opera, most Hancom Office -- the best office suite for PDAs, bar none -- stuff, and java apps), so if your life depends on that stuff, you might want to stick with Sharp.
> let's say I bought one of these. what do I do with it? I > have Mac, Linux, BSD machines only, no Windows in sight.. > will I be able to play with it at all or is Win req'd?
I can't help you with syncing (since I don't do that), but for all other types of access, the Zaurus is unbeatable in connecting to a Linux desktop.
The connection is IP over USB. So you can set up an ftp server, or an ssh server (I use scp to transfer files) on the Z. You could probably set up a samba (Windows SMB) share or something similar and mount the Zaurus's filesystem from your desktop. You could run apache on your Zaurus and communicate like that.
It's practically trivial. In comparison, hotsync is like pulling out your hair.
The initial setup might be hard. It took me a little bit of work to get the IP over USB working on Mandrake 8, but I am a newbie at all this, so you'd likely have better luck.
> So, how do the two compare to each other? SL-5600 has faster > processor (at least in theory), 5500 has more RAM (64MB vs 32MB), > but 5600 has more Flash-RAM. Which one is faster?
To clarify this a little:
The 5500 splits its DRAM in two. Half the DRAM is used for memory, and the other half is used for storage. So the 5500 in its default setup has 32MB storage, 32MB memory.
The 5600 uses the DRAM exclusively for memory, and the 64MB Flash is used for storage, and 32MB DRAM is, as I said, memory only. So, in all, we're in a position where the 5600 has an equal amount of memory but twice as much storage.
The situation is such that the storage would be faster on the 5500 (being DRAM and not Flash), but the memory accesses would be faster on the 5500 (being that the DRAM controller doesn't have to manage between the storage and memory functioning of the DRAM). I have no idea how this works out in the end. But I really do like the larger storage, and the fact that the data won't disappear when you run out of power is kind of nice.
My SL-5000D has something like 32MB DRAM and 16MB Flash. I'm using OpenZaurus, an alternative ROM for the device, and that allows me to use the Flash as storage. To avoid out-of-memory errors, I have all of that 32MB from the DRAM set for memory. The device uses the internal Flash for storage, though very little of that is available for me to install applications. I use an SD card for most of my apps and for various types of data files (books, Qt programming docs, NES ROMs, et al).
This seems to work very nicely, which is good. I've had this tradition of buying a new PDA around this time each year (last three purchases were Visor Prism, HandEra 330 and SL-5000D). But I'm finding that the meager salary of a programmer/webmaster/computer repair guy/etc. ($24k/yr) isn't really enough to absorb the $300 price of a new PDA, so I'm very happy that the Zaurus is working well for me. I've recently cut down my personal website's cost by $150 (down from $350 to $200 per year or so), and I'm about to cancel a long-running subscription to the OmniSky service, and that should save me something like thirty bucks more a month. The dual expansion of the Zaurus is one of the things that'll allow me to keep going with it. I have this unlimited storage, but I might (due to the above budget cuts) be able to put a neat wifi connection onto it in a couple months. Yay!:)
Zaurus is awesome. It's awesome because I can compile my regular applications (the applications that I write for Windows 2000) on it without necessarily needing to change any of the code. It's awesome because I can pretty much do anything I need with it (reading books, running the occasional PalmOS app, albeit slowly, playing nintendo, etc.). And it's awesome because I get that groovy feeling knowing that most of the applications I use were made by people who made them simply to contribute to the community. That's a nice sort of feeling.:)
> It was invented by xerox but quickly perfected by Microsoft and has > stayed pretty much unchanged in over 20 years. People keep talking > about new 3D OS's and stuff but the fact is that that most of the design > in current OS's is excellent and needs no improvement, browsers included.
Bah, I declare shenanigans on that. There's tons of room for improvement in the windows ui for both power users and normal people.
The Start Menu needs a complete overhaul. It's not intuitive once you open up the "Programs" list. Currently, if you want to find a mail program, you'd have to search through each container, since each container typically refers to a company. Want to write a composition (high school term meaning "text file")? What is your choice of programs for that? Where are they located? Well, on my machine, two of them are in "Accessories" (NotePad and WordPad), one is in "EditPad Lite", one is under "OpenOffice.org 1.0" and one is at the bottom of the list, not in any particular container. That's really inconsistant, and it would confuse users who weren't already totally used to it.
The intuitive way would be to categorize programs. That's how they do it in linux. It's how I categorize my programs in Windows 2000 (though I have to manually hack stuff around, and that breaks the uninstallers a little). Yeah, it's not always easy to put everything into unique categories, but it's a heck of a lot easier than having a flat list of mixed between company names and program names. All the programs for the above task are under either "Applications -> Text Editors" (for simple text editors) or "Office -> Wordprocessors" (for more complex editors). I don't have to hunt through my entire list of programs to find something that does what I want, and I don't have to rely on some default link button on my application bar in the hopes that it'll take me to the best program.
I also like having every executable in the path. This may be a bit power-userish, but it's sometimes a lot faster and easier to hit "ALT-F2" (to bring up the "Run" dialog) and type in "opera" than wasting time reaching for the mouse and hunting out where the link to the program is. I wish that I could type Win-R and "opera" on this Win2k machine, but it would simply take forever to put every single applicable directory into the file path.
Meh, there's a lot of things that could change to substantially improve the usability of the interface for normal users. People still don't understand the difference between a button (one click to run this program) and an icon (two clicks to run this program, unless you have it configured for one click, but then get ready to confuse people who actually got used to double clicking, because they double click everything, even web links!). Many people still don't understand that you can open more than one program without needing to close the current program. These things are not obvious to most people because the system does not make it easy enough to understand. Heck, it was probably a huge mistake to put both the current task list and the shortcut icons on the same bar. If the taskbar were just a vanilla taskbar, then maybe the masses would have taken to the concept of "if I see a name on this bar, that means that the program/application with this name is doing something even though I can't see it". But now, if a button is on the bar, it might be a task that's running, it might be a launchable program that's not running, it might be in that bizarre in-between realm of the system tray, or it might make that list pop up with the "Settings" and the "Programs" and the list of fifteen AOL and MSN related buttons above the "Programs" thing.
Heck, I'm not even touching the power user stuff, like mouse gestures and virtual desktops and soforth. The reason why people don't move to newer interfaces isn't because the interface is excellent. It's because these people spent a decade struggling
> My CPU is running at 266mhz now, what improvment would I see if > I upgraded to a 333mhz bus chip with the same clock speed?
Do you mean a 266MHz chip with a 333MHz bus? That'd be odd, and such a creature does not exist. You'd probably get a substantial performance boost in data access intensive applications, ones that don't have a small code loop and don't exercise much redundancy. For small loops with lots of redundancy (which is not too uncommon), the caches on your processor offset some of the lower performance of the older memory bus.
But some apps benefit tremendously. A lot of games depend on loading massive amounts of textures continuously, so a jump from 66/66MHz (533MB/s) to 333/166MHz (2667MB/s) would alleviate a lot of low framerate problems. Anything with a lot of loading and saving to disk would probably benefit a lot, too.
But it's tough to say exactly how much you'd benefit. The reason why they decided to keep the bus speed ramp lighter than the cpu speed ramp is because caches could compensate for the performance loss, and putting caches into chips is much cheaper than the harsh work of getting the entire system to run at the cpu frequency.
> Even with half the stated bus throughput, the Athlon seems to > do a good job keeping up with the P4, and at a lower price.
It is also valid to note that the Athlon is at this almost-equivalent level even though Intel's fabrication progress is at least half a year more advanced than AMD. Intel goes through process shrinks six to nine months earlier than AMD. This is a huge advantage, as it means that if AMD and Intel were using the exact same chip architecture, the Intel-fabbed chips would be nontrivially faster. So it says a lot for the AMD microarchitecture that they're getting similar performance versus chips coming out of Intel's factories, which are a half year ahead of them.
That's why I like the AMD microprocessor design teams, I think. They can make a non-inferior product using a comparably primitive manufacturing technology. It's as if some guy made a helicopter out of chalk that happened to be just as structurally stable as your Humvee.
> Notice the "Coward" part of Anonymous Coward. > Only a communist liberal bashes this way....
Be fair. Both Liberals and Conservatives bash. Both Liberals and Conservatives make silly, critical remarks from hidden places. This is a thing that humans do normally. Belonging to any particular political party or idealism does not suddenly mutate you into some angelic being incable of ill will.
> damn vegans..... next you'll be telling > us that slaughtering millions of cows and > chickens each year is genocide......
More like slavery, since we try to keep the population existant, though the analogy to concentration camps is interesting.
The anti-poster has an interesting point. Ever since I moved away from milk and towards cola (sometimes Pepsi One, which tastes good but has nasty chemicals, which you can prove by simply leaving it out in cold weather and watching it explode), I've gone from 26% to 17% body fat content (since October/November) and moved up from being able to do half a push-up a day to being able to do several hundred push-ups a day (since January).
Granted, I happen to have a milk tooth (er, I mean, a "sweet tooth" for milk), evidenced by my ability to eat entire bars of cream cheese for a midnight snack, so I probably experienced a greater than average benefit from avoiding the stuff.;)
-JC
PS: And Methylphenidate helps a little, too, being an appetite inhibitor, though it's notable that I was only using it sporadically and rarely during my periods of most rapid (~5lbs/wk) and most consistent (every week for two months) weight loss (yay).
Slashdot Mirror
> Hi everybody, it's time to play, spot the idiot. The idiot
> has several characteristics, the most notable one is the
> inability to form a sentence without being absolutely wrong.
Ironically, the above two sentences are grammatically inaccurate.
-JC
PS: Commas should, be used, rather, ju,di,ci,ous,l,y, in a, se,,nte,nc,,,e.
,
> Yeah right, and I bet we could also hire Saddam Hussein as a human rights
> cop because he knows all about mass murdering his own people.
Yeah, except Saddam never cared about the consequences of his actions and how they affected others, whereas Mitnick never really applied his skills towards knowingly hurting anyone or knowingly causing actual palpable damage. Huuuuge difference there.
-JC
> Just about every legal solution to a technological problems end up backfiring.
> The problem is that most laws are so broadly written that they usually end up making
> something legitimate illegal as well.
> Usually these laws end up fining someone who sends 'spam' described in legalese. Then,
> you forward a joke to someone who gets offended by it, calls it an unsolicited e-mail message,
> and then uses the law to extract money from your wallet. Meanwhile, since the spammers never
> send anything using their own return address, they just continue doing what they always
> have done.
I dunno. None of this happened when they passed laws against fax spamming. In fact, fax spamming as a whole has generally stopped. I certainly don't get any more than 1% spams from my company's fax machine, whereas roughly 80% of my incoming emails are spam.
Looks like the laws worked there.
-JC
Easy. It's because they wanted to have "42" somewhere in this particular explanation of the Universe.
-JC
PS: Not to mention Life and Everything
> Okay, theory: There is an infinite number or parallel universes. :)
> This implies that there is at least one universe wehre any given situation can happen.
> This implies there is at least one universe where there are no parallel universes.
> Which would prove the theory wrong.
> I love bad logic.
I know you're just funnin', but I still wanted to point out one counterexample to your hypothesis:
There could be an infinite number of universes that happen to be exactly, precisely the same.
-JC
> How do they manage to include both of these in
:)
> the same theory? So the Universe started from
> nothing 14 billion years ago, and has expanded
> to fill an infinite non-curved space?
Is it perhaps not impossible that the universe is shaped like an n-dimensional extrapolation of r=cos(n*theta)? That way, each universe shares a common "big bang" center but is locally contiguous and generally flat to spherical, right?
I know that's not non-curved, but I'm just thinking and stuff. IANAP, as you can see, but this is still fun stuff to a n00b like me.
-JC
PS: (to clarify to casual readers) The equation I described above is a "flower pattern" where the "petals" only touch at the very center point. The number "n" denotes the number of petals and number of analogous universes. The line forming the petals' edges are actually the "surface" of each universe (the equation only describes a one dimensional universe, largely because the graphing software that I just downloaded can't do equations of r based on theta in dimensionalities(word?) greater than 2.
> Saying something like "I always lie"
> creates an interesting logical paradox
No, it doesn't. If you say "I always lie", then you are lying. But saying NOT("I always lie") does not equate to "I always tell the truth". So there is no paradox.
-JC
> Yeah, but out of curiousity, what's
> the average tax % rate in France?
I'd be willing to pay more taxes for both more government services AND less complexity in the tax system.
-JC
> Aside from the standard ./configure; make; make install,
./configure the MPlayer source. Other codecs can be copied any time. But to where? The standard documentation isn't always clear about locations.
./configure, but I'm sure that I did it right. Of course, for each user, I have to manually link the font to ~/.mplayer/font or explicitly tell mplayer where to look. Most programs know which directories store their default data files.
./configure parameters you use, you have to double check which files are manually loaded to which locations (why can't make install just automagically put the relevant codecs/skins/fonts to /usr/local/share/* or /usr/local/lib/* or something like that?) and you have to be anally attentive to which drivers you need, a requirement that we don't really see for any other media player for any platform.
> what makes MPlayer so friggin' hard to configure?
> You DON'T really have to tweak it. It's about as brainless
> as anything gets. I just don't understand this issue.
Well, I did have to separately install lame and perhaps a couple other prerequisites, but I'm used to that with POSIX installs.
The different codecs require different methods of installation. ogg/vorbis stuff have to be installed (libogg, libvorbis) before MPlayer is installed. Windows codecs have to be copied to a directory before you run make. It doesn't say that Quicktime codecs have to be predownloaded, but you have to use a special flag when you
The Win32 Lite codec pack is just a subset of the Win32 pack, so I don't need both, right? Hmmm. Okay. The QuickTime DLL pack goes into the win32 codec directory, but do the QuickTime Extras go into the same place? The documentation doesn't seem to acknowledge those.
Should I point out that I have a RADEON 8500, but -vo vidix doesn't seem to work with it, despite what the docs say? Luckily, the default settings work, but if I try to set the driver in the preferences of gmplayer, nothing will work, and the only way of fixing it is to delete the conf file.
It'd be nice if the system made fonts a bit easier. Usually, you don't have to copy fonts into various directories to get a program to work properly, even in linux. So it gives a link to fonts, but there are four packs there. Which should I use? I don't know. I randomly picked one, and I think it worked. I have an OSD, though I can't get subtitles to work. I think that there was a parameter for that in
MPlayer doesn't work with TV input on my computer, but I think that's ATI's fault for crappy V4L support.
The problem isn't that this stuff is impossible. I mean, I got MPlayer installed with almost all features activated. I have no idea if it's at all decently optimized for my video or sound, but it plays virtually everything and it really nice interface-wise. But "as brainless as anything gets" is not applicable to the MPlayer install. If you want it installed properly and fully, you have to be prepared to read through a *lot* of documentation, you have to be careful about which
But it does rock, and is one of the best applications ever made.
-JC
http://vobsub.edensrising.com/mpc.php
;)
Media Player Classic, a hack (or clone or something) of an older version Windows Media Player, except that it more or less works out of the box with a ton of formats. I was happy to find out that it played the (quicktime) Matrix trailer without requiring me to think. It wasn't completely smooth, but I'm running a crapload of programs right now (Opera, 60MB; Mozilla, 33MB; Eudora, 23MB; bittorrent, 20MB; excel, 16MB; spampal, 10MB; editpad, 10MB; PowerDesk, 20MB; ICQ, 7MB; IE5.5, hidden bloat; United Devices distributed anti-cancer program thing, 18MB). It's quite possible that MPC would play the MOV file more smoothly than QT, since it's less bloaty overall.
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/
This is the greatest movie viewing tool I've ever used. It's annoying to set up, but it plays absolutely everything that I throw at it, can be played with a fully skinnable gui or just from the command line, has excellent key mappings, and could be compiled for embedded devices like the Zaurus or (possibly, though I'm not going to hold my breath) the 3Com Audrey (a QNX-based "internet appliance" that happened to be really awesome, but the price was far beyond the realistic market value of the product).
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html
I'll also throw in good words for VideoLan. I originally got this so that I could play around with the idea of streaming mpegs over my LAN to the downstairs win32 PC from my room's Mandrake box. It worked pretty nicely, though at the time it couldn't support the exact format I most wanted (SVCD, I think it was). But VideoLan happens to also be a regular multimedia player that plays a buttload of formats but also works across many platforms.
http://xine.sourceforge.net/
xine is making great inroads. When I started playing with it a year or two ago, it paled in comparison to mplayer, though it worked out of the box without requiring the intense RTFMability that mplayer warrants. xine is probably not as multiplatform as the other players, but it apparently now plays a craptastic amount of formats. The interface has improved, thanks to a decent skinnability, though I haven't noticed if it can do decent keymappings (mplayer has support for skipping forward and backward by 10 seconds, one minute and ten minute intervals, which is insanely useful). I use xine currently in those rare instances when mplayer fails (for example, mplayer couldn't open the audio for a low quality south park ASF movie for some reason, so I popped it into xine and watched it).
Windows Media Player is a pretty good program. It's not as good as it used to be in terms of interface (the "classic" skin almost makes it as good as the classic interface, but not quite), but it's good enough to earn the title of fourth or fifth best multimedia viewer out there. But I wish that people knew that there were these other players out there that might make their viewing experiences a bit nicer. Bundling's a bitch, eh?
-JC
> ...the distinction between a good sysadim and one with credentials.
> Mutually exclusive, but the good ones have both.
Wait. How can they be mutually exclusive if one is a subset of the other?
> Yes. A UART interface is trivial. Except when
:p
> you have to find out why it's not working (oops,
> it's disabled or set up in the BIOS as an IRDA
> port).
What, and USB is never set incorrectly at the BIOS level? Hah!
I love serial. I can just dump characters into it instead of having to figure out the horrible APIs available for other interface types. Yeah, it's lazy, but some of us don't exactly receive the funding or time to be creative in all aspects of our programming.
That said, I easily see the advantages the USB/Fireware/Parallel have over Serial ports. I'm just being difficult to annoy you.
-JC
> He suggests that going with the Itanium instead of x86 will curtail piracy.
He's right, inasmuch as a zero user base would be considered really secure.
> and an unconfirmed beta, which i think is false,
> but i'll list in anyways:
> Windows 98 Lite Beta (0.36mb rar file)
Just for clarification, Windows 98 Lite is a program that modifies Windows 98 (by replacing the 98 IE-based shell with the Windows 95 Explorer shell). It is not the operating system itself.
Well, I think that's the case here, at least.
I believe that 98Lite was actually part of the government's case against Microsoft after Microsoft claimed that removing IE from 98 would "break" the OS.
-JC
> > The worst terrorist attack in recorded history occurred in September 2001
> I'm wondering, what's the worse
"Worst"
> thing you imply happened before recorded history? A few hundred
> wolves terrorizing a big herd of sheeps a few million years ago?
> Or are you counting the dino-killing asteroid as a terrorist attack?
Cain slaying Abel. A terrorist attack singlehandedly killing off a quarter of the world's population.
-JC
(joyously plagiarizing Jeremy Pascal)
> Before I whip out my credit card and ask a friend in the U.S. to forward this on to me since hsn doesn't ship to Canada :-(
... well, it's insane. Anyway, programs requiring X libs obviously won't work. Zaurus uses Qtopia, which is a PDA-ish environment based on Trolltech's Qt, a widget set and toolkit for many operating systems. It's neat. I use Qt for my programs (it makes programming a lot easier), and I can easily cross compile gui apps between x86/Linux, x86/win32, ppc/macosx (well, I could if I had the compiler for OS X, and it'd help if I had OS X itself!) and the Zaurus.
... lots of stuff like that. Oh, OZ also lets me use the Flash ROM for storage and the DRAM exclusively for memory access, though Sharp does that now, too.
> - How's the battery life? ~4 hours? ~20 hours? How much do you
> use your s and how often do you have to recharge?
I have a SL-5000D, which has a much smaller battery than the SL-5600. It gets a little better battery life than the Handspring Visor Prism, if that helps. Actually, it's probably much better in the summertime, since the Prism's screen is unreadable in the daylight, but I could totally turn off the front-light on the Zaurus in daytime (for longer hours and all that). Still, I keep mine plugged in as often as possible, though I do have it set up to have all my data on the Flash ROM, so I don't lose anything (even installed apps, even prefs, whatever) if I do lose power.
> - The OS that comes presinstalled, it's linux based right?
Yeah. Based on Debian's arm-ported binaries, though it's not Debian itself. I think that there is a debian port (with X and all), but that's just insane, man!
> Do I get a shell with it?
Sharp put its terminal program on the CD. It's easy enough to install, but there are better choices. There's a port of Konsole (the tabbed terminal program used in KDE) for the Zaurus that is very popular.
> Can I compile and run most linux apps?
Good question. If you're good at cross compiling, you'll probably have good luck with command-line apps. Graphical apps are a little different. The Zaurus doesn't normally use X. X is huge for a PDA. You could get it, but that's
> What's the deal with OpenZaurus?
It's mostly just a different ROM with different default applications. It uses Konqueror/Embedded instead of the Opera browser. It's made with ssh in mind instead of the insecure ftp that the Zaurus normally uses. It has better scripting support, though I haven't really looked at that stuff. The launcher configuration is amazing, at least compared to what Sharp offers for the SL-5000D. I can change background images for each category, I can change fonts, I can alter the widget style, I can have transparent menus
On the negative side, OZ 3.0 can be a bit crashy and there's a few things that it doesn't work with (Opera, most Hancom Office -- the best office suite for PDAs, bar none -- stuff, and java apps), so if your life depends on that stuff, you might want to stick with Sharp.
-JC
> let's say I bought one of these. what do I do with it? I
> have Mac, Linux, BSD machines only, no Windows in sight..
> will I be able to play with it at all or is Win req'd?
I can't help you with syncing (since I don't do that), but for all other types of access, the Zaurus is unbeatable in connecting to a Linux desktop.
The connection is IP over USB. So you can set up an ftp server, or an ssh server (I use scp to transfer files) on the Z. You could probably set up a samba (Windows SMB) share or something similar and mount the Zaurus's filesystem from your desktop. You could run apache on your Zaurus and communicate like that.
It's practically trivial. In comparison, hotsync is like pulling out your hair.
The initial setup might be hard. It took me a little bit of work to get the IP over USB working on Mandrake 8, but I am a newbie at all this, so you'd likely have better luck.
-JC
> So, how do the two compare to each other? SL-5600 has faster
:)
:)
> processor (at least in theory), 5500 has more RAM (64MB vs 32MB),
> but 5600 has more Flash-RAM. Which one is faster?
To clarify this a little:
The 5500 splits its DRAM in two. Half the DRAM is used for memory, and the other half is used for storage. So the 5500 in its default setup has 32MB storage, 32MB memory.
The 5600 uses the DRAM exclusively for memory, and the 64MB Flash is used for storage, and 32MB DRAM is, as I said, memory only. So, in all, we're in a position where the 5600 has an equal amount of memory but twice as much storage.
The situation is such that the storage would be faster on the 5500 (being DRAM and not Flash), but the memory accesses would be faster on the 5500 (being that the DRAM controller doesn't have to manage between the storage and memory functioning of the DRAM). I have no idea how this works out in the end. But I really do like the larger storage, and the fact that the data won't disappear when you run out of power is kind of nice.
My SL-5000D has something like 32MB DRAM and 16MB Flash. I'm using OpenZaurus, an alternative ROM for the device, and that allows me to use the Flash as storage. To avoid out-of-memory errors, I have all of that 32MB from the DRAM set for memory. The device uses the internal Flash for storage, though very little of that is available for me to install applications. I use an SD card for most of my apps and for various types of data files (books, Qt programming docs, NES ROMs, et al).
This seems to work very nicely, which is good. I've had this tradition of buying a new PDA around this time each year (last three purchases were Visor Prism, HandEra 330 and SL-5000D). But I'm finding that the meager salary of a programmer/webmaster/computer repair guy/etc. ($24k/yr) isn't really enough to absorb the $300 price of a new PDA, so I'm very happy that the Zaurus is working well for me. I've recently cut down my personal website's cost by $150 (down from $350 to $200 per year or so), and I'm about to cancel a long-running subscription to the OmniSky service, and that should save me something like thirty bucks more a month. The dual expansion of the Zaurus is one of the things that'll allow me to keep going with it. I have this unlimited storage, but I might (due to the above budget cuts) be able to put a neat wifi connection onto it in a couple months. Yay!
Zaurus is awesome. It's awesome because I can compile my regular applications (the applications that I write for Windows 2000) on it without necessarily needing to change any of the code. It's awesome because I can pretty much do anything I need with it (reading books, running the occasional PalmOS app, albeit slowly, playing nintendo, etc.). And it's awesome because I get that groovy feeling knowing that most of the applications I use were made by people who made them simply to contribute to the community. That's a nice sort of feeling.
-JC
> It was invented by xerox but quickly perfected by Microsoft and has
> stayed pretty much unchanged in over 20 years. People keep talking
> about new 3D OS's and stuff but the fact is that that most of the design
> in current OS's is excellent and needs no improvement, browsers included.
Bah, I declare shenanigans on that. There's tons of room for improvement in the windows ui for both power users and normal people.
The Start Menu needs a complete overhaul. It's not intuitive once you open up the "Programs" list. Currently, if you want to find a mail program, you'd have to search through each container, since each container typically refers to a company. Want to write a composition (high school term meaning "text file")? What is your choice of programs for that? Where are they located? Well, on my machine, two of them are in "Accessories" (NotePad and WordPad), one is in "EditPad Lite", one is under "OpenOffice.org 1.0" and one is at the bottom of the list, not in any particular container. That's really inconsistant, and it would confuse users who weren't already totally used to it.
The intuitive way would be to categorize programs. That's how they do it in linux. It's how I categorize my programs in Windows 2000 (though I have to manually hack stuff around, and that breaks the uninstallers a little). Yeah, it's not always easy to put everything into unique categories, but it's a heck of a lot easier than having a flat list of mixed between company names and program names. All the programs for the above task are under either "Applications -> Text Editors" (for simple text editors) or "Office -> Wordprocessors" (for more complex editors). I don't have to hunt through my entire list of programs to find something that does what I want, and I don't have to rely on some default link button on my application bar in the hopes that it'll take me to the best program.
I also like having every executable in the path. This may be a bit power-userish, but it's sometimes a lot faster and easier to hit "ALT-F2" (to bring up the "Run" dialog) and type in "opera" than wasting time reaching for the mouse and hunting out where the link to the program is. I wish that I could type Win-R and "opera" on this Win2k machine, but it would simply take forever to put every single applicable directory into the file path.
Meh, there's a lot of things that could change to substantially improve the usability of the interface for normal users. People still don't understand the difference between a button (one click to run this program) and an icon (two clicks to run this program, unless you have it configured for one click, but then get ready to confuse people who actually got used to double clicking, because they double click everything, even web links!). Many people still don't understand that you can open more than one program without needing to close the current program. These things are not obvious to most people because the system does not make it easy enough to understand. Heck, it was probably a huge mistake to put both the current task list and the shortcut icons on the same bar. If the taskbar were just a vanilla taskbar, then maybe the masses would have taken to the concept of "if I see a name on this bar, that means that the program/application with this name is doing something even though I can't see it". But now, if a button is on the bar, it might be a task that's running, it might be a launchable program that's not running, it might be in that bizarre in-between realm of the system tray, or it might make that list pop up with the "Settings" and the "Programs" and the list of fifteen AOL and MSN related buttons above the "Programs" thing.
Heck, I'm not even touching the power user stuff, like mouse gestures and virtual desktops and soforth. The reason why people don't move to newer interfaces isn't because the interface is excellent. It's because these people spent a decade struggling
> My CPU is running at 266mhz now, what improvment would I see if
> I upgraded to a 333mhz bus chip with the same clock speed?
Do you mean a 266MHz chip with a 333MHz bus? That'd be odd, and such a creature does not exist. You'd probably get a substantial performance boost in data access intensive applications, ones that don't have a small code loop and don't exercise much redundancy. For small loops with lots of redundancy (which is not too uncommon), the caches on your processor offset some of the lower performance of the older memory bus.
But some apps benefit tremendously. A lot of games depend on loading massive amounts of textures continuously, so a jump from 66/66MHz (533MB/s) to 333/166MHz (2667MB/s) would alleviate a lot of low framerate problems. Anything with a lot of loading and saving to disk would probably benefit a lot, too.
But it's tough to say exactly how much you'd benefit. The reason why they decided to keep the bus speed ramp lighter than the cpu speed ramp is because caches could compensate for the performance loss, and putting caches into chips is much cheaper than the harsh work of getting the entire system to run at the cpu frequency.
-JC
> Even with half the stated bus throughput, the Athlon seems to
> do a good job keeping up with the P4, and at a lower price.
It is also valid to note that the Athlon is at this almost-equivalent level even though Intel's fabrication progress is at least half a year more advanced than AMD. Intel goes through process shrinks six to nine months earlier than AMD. This is a huge advantage, as it means that if AMD and Intel were using the exact same chip architecture, the Intel-fabbed chips would be nontrivially faster. So it says a lot for the AMD microarchitecture that they're getting similar performance versus chips coming out of Intel's factories, which are a half year ahead of them.
That's why I like the AMD microprocessor design teams, I think. They can make a non-inferior product using a comparably primitive manufacturing technology. It's as if some guy made a helicopter out of chalk that happened to be just as structurally stable as your Humvee.
-JC
> 6. "Miss Wet T-Shirt" competitions...?
At sixty degrees below freezing, you'd kill all the contestants.
I like my skimpily-dressed women alive, thank you.
-JC
> Notice the "Coward" part of Anonymous Coward.
> Only a communist liberal bashes this way....
Be fair. Both Liberals and Conservatives bash. Both Liberals and Conservatives make silly, critical remarks from hidden places. This is a thing that humans do normally. Belonging to any particular political party or idealism does not suddenly mutate you into some angelic being incable of ill will.
-JC
> damn vegans..... next you'll be telling
;)
> us that slaughtering millions of cows and
> chickens each year is genocide......
More like slavery, since we try to keep the population existant, though the analogy to concentration camps is interesting.
The anti-poster has an interesting point. Ever since I moved away from milk and towards cola (sometimes Pepsi One, which tastes good but has nasty chemicals, which you can prove by simply leaving it out in cold weather and watching it explode), I've gone from 26% to 17% body fat content (since October/November) and moved up from being able to do half a push-up a day to being able to do several hundred push-ups a day (since January).
Granted, I happen to have a milk tooth (er, I mean, a "sweet tooth" for milk), evidenced by my ability to eat entire bars of cream cheese for a midnight snack, so I probably experienced a greater than average benefit from avoiding the stuff.
-JC
PS: And Methylphenidate helps a little, too, being an appetite inhibitor, though it's notable that I was only using it sporadically and rarely during my periods of most rapid (~5lbs/wk) and most consistent (every week for two months) weight loss (yay).
> Ganymede and Titan are both larger than Mercury. This is important because
> there's no argument about Mercury's standing as a "real" planet.
It does help, though, that Mercury has an orbit without a comet-like eccentricity.
And, well, it doesn't have a local center of gravity outside its own mass, but that's not as important, imo.
-JC