My Olympus C-750UZ digital camera and 384MB of xD cards were stolen from a friend's car outside some Manchester Uni building September last year. On said cards were pictures from one of the best weekends of my life (needless to say, I was feeling a ill at the time, hence little thought was put on the camera at the time). It was stolen with a load of other stuff too (clothes, 128M thumbdrive, batteries, charger, lens adaptor and filters..)
Camera has serial number A0050332140929A, but frankly I'd be happy just to get the pictures, or the head of the guy who took it and most likely threw most of it in a bin somewhere.
Using divs everywhere is a really bad idea; if you've got a list of links, make it a UL; if you've got a section heading, use a Hn; if you've got a selection of paragraphs, use P. DIV and it's inline cousin SPAN should be treated as a last resort when some more meaningful and more usefully rendered-by-default tag isn't available, not as your most used element. If your document doesn't stand alone from the CSS without devolving into unformatted drivel, you're doing something wrong.
And even with CSS, you often end up with little presentation-dependent bits in your markup; be it with document ordering, flicking between class names for a specific style you can't otherwise achieve without fancy selectors IE doesn't support, and so on; having these things seperated out from the main logic of your application is a significant win.
Even php's serialize() (also available for Ruby<plug>) does that; but this patent also talks about checksums, encryption, and back/forward compatability, so.. say.. like XML + schema + crypto of your choice.
TBH you can put anything you like in a cookie, binary or not; you just base64 encode it or so. After that, well, people have been making file formats like this for years, and Amazon get a patent just for putting one in a cookie? Lame.
Eh, this is really outside the scope of PHP to fix; it's something for CGI suexec, FastCGI, Apache's perchild MPM, or some other higher level system for web based scripting to deal with.
If you don't want to take PHP seriously, do so because of it's instability (and poor release engineering), it's lack of speed (which has been partially fixed several times, but hey; Zend need to make their money!), the complete mess it's extensions are in, the inflexibility of the language (again, partially dealt with in Zend 2, but still a world away from some other dynamic languages, with lots held back by the extreme bittersweetness of backwards compatibility, which seems to break a lot anyway), the userbase mostly consisting of programming newbies, the ever-bickering devteam, or any of a thousand other issues you can pick on PHP about.
But hey, I still use it. Doesn't mean I have to like it.
(And of course you can encode from FLAC to MP3, Vorbis, AAC, or whatever audio format your portable device supports.. when you upgrade your portable player, you can reencode your music to keep up with it, too.)
Lossless is the One True Way for storing music on a PC.
Most set-top DVD players have some hack or other to make them multiregion; a quick Google on "dvd multiregion hack" gives me this as the first hit. Good luck:)
Well, I'm in the UK, but that doesn't stop me having half a dozen region 1 DVD's. You really shouldn't let the movie industry push you around with such things, especially when they're as easy to get around as region codes.
Ogg Vorbis has been shown to be non-transparent in a number of situations all the way up to -q10 as a result of issues with preecho and the like (with the standard reference encoder at least). Even MusePack, widely regarded as the most well tuned lossy audio format around, isn't perfect in all situations. As for MP3, well.. if Vorbis and MusePack have to hit 400+kbps to remain transparent on some tracks, MP3 sure as hell can't hope to do so with it's limit of 320kbps; the very format itself is inadeqate.
Even ignoring that, there are plenty of other reasons to go lossless; transcoding and such are *much* better with a lossless source; doing so from a Vorbis or MP3 file is almost certainly going to produce artifacts you can ABX. With a lossless file, I can convert to any format I like as many times as I like, since I effectively have the original.
As for the extra bandwidth consumed; well, not everyone values quality as much as I do - it's not such a big deal if one in 1000 of your users uses a few times more bandwidth, not to mention that those users are likely to be willing to pay a bit extra for it. Even if they're not, bandwidth isn't exactly *that* costly; the difference between downloading a Vorbis file and a FLAC file is going to be a couple of pence at most. If your margins are that slim you might as well give up now.
foobar2000 and foo_record. Can play and record pretty much every audio format imaginable (although you probably want to find the 0.7 diskwriters until they're all ported to the new 0.8 API.. ask me if you need a hand, but you should be able to find stuff on the very useful forum) in 64 bit float precision. It can apply software DSP's, perform tagging operations at a level which puts the likes of Tag & Rename to shame, and is more configurable than any other audio player out there (because it's more than just an audio player;)
Most of the components are BSD licensed too. And don't let the default look put you off; it's skinnable and you can go a *long* way with nice formatting strings.
I could go on, but I should really stop gushing. I've successfully converted quite a few peeps by doing this though, so there must be some truth in it:)
Look at a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 or so; they's practically silent (I have 4 of them; an 80G, 2 160G's and a 200G. My ball bearing 80G Maxtor is probably louder than all of them put together. Other new drives are similarly quiet, of course, but Seagate are still regarded as being the quietest. Check Storage Review:)
Heh, I remember how Amigas used to have a more powerful FDD controller than PC's, meaning they could squeeze more on a disk; the space-optimized filesystems there let you squeeze almost 1MB onto a single DD floppy vs the already impressive default of 880k; and yup, you got nearly 2M from a HD floppy!;)
Anyone wanting to try such amazing technology today can use a Catweasel, although I'm not sure if it supports anything more exotic than standard Mac/Amiga floppies.
2 Slashdot windows (article with 50 nested comments and this reply), Penny Arcade, FX Networks, 3 random mozilla.org pages: 31MB. This is Opera 7.50 preview 2 under windows XP using automatic memory cache and a skinned interface. Browser's been open about 2 and a half hours.
What browser are you using?:P
Re:Yeah ! AMD64 rulez ! Now if the could just...
on
AMD Back in the Black
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Performance isn't just a factor of clockrate. The latest Barton chips have twice as much cache as previous models, so they typically perform better than older models at the same clockrate. That's the entire point of the rating system!
Is someone who spends 6 hours a week in a chat room socially better off than someone who spends 5 hours a week hanging out with friends at a mall?
I work on a computer most of the day; as luck would have it, I can sit on IRC at the same time and talk to most of my friends. I can feed my desire for meaningless chatter, intelligent conversation, gain sympathy and respect, get support when I'm feeling down, share (often deeply personal) problems and do the same for others. Much of this in time where other forms of social interaction are either much less significant or just unavailable.
Maybe if I only spent a few hours a week on IRC it would be less rewarding, but as it is I can fit in hours a day easily. It spills out into real life too, and that's a whole bunch of real life friends I wouldn't have otherwise. Not bad for something that I can fit into short breaks working which would otherwise be spent staring into space, eating junk, mindlessly reloading/., etc.
Don't forget disk space rapidly climbs in price when you start needing to add redundancy and speed, especially when you hit scalability limits of your current hardware. It's still cheap compared with what it was (duh;), but it's still not at a point where it's "cheap enough" for me.
When we can store all the information in the universe on a single budget drive with the reliability at least equal to that of atomic nuclei, then I'll be happy for development to slow down. *shakes fist at R&D* -- get researching the creation of artificial universes!;)
You're spot on; I do my best to make sure all my music is in FLAC format; it's what I rip to and it's what I try to download (from legitimate or *cough* sources). It's not because I really notice any difference, or even pretend I can; it's because I don't have to worry about what encoder settings to use, what version of lame or oggenc, whether MusePack or AAC really the better format. I don't even have to worry significantly over what lossless format I choose because I can change whenever I like.
If I get a portable music player, I can *trivially* encode them to the best format it supports (e.g. 64kbps Ogg Vorbis may be perfect for a portable, since you likely won't notice the lower quality and you can fit more music on, but I sure as hell don't want to listen to them through my Sennheisers) direct from my main music player.
Disk space once held me back from switching to lossless; but now I can get a practically silent 160G drive for around 80; I've got nearly half a TB in my desktop machine now, so why should I care?
Not everyone thinks it's worth it, obviously; that's why we have lossy formats in the first place. Lossless is still *the* way to go, and I'm quite happy to pay extra to get it.
MP3 VBR: 74meg zip of high quality MP3 VBR files. (about VBR MP3)
As well as a listing of each track, downloadable as MP3 or WAV. Note they don't claim 128kbps MP3 is "high quality"; note they do offer "high quality" VBR MP3 (lame --alt-preset standard iirc, not some unnamed encoder with some crappy badly tuned settings); note they also offer Ogg Vorbis; note they even cater for people like me with FLAC, which frankly makes me want to have their babies. You should too:P
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My Olympus C-750UZ digital camera and 384MB of xD cards were stolen from a friend's car outside some Manchester Uni building September last year. On said cards were pictures from one of the best weekends of my life (needless to say, I was feeling a ill at the time, hence little thought was put on the camera at the time). It was stolen with a load of other stuff too (clothes, 128M thumbdrive, batteries, charger, lens adaptor and filters..)
Camera has serial number A0050332140929A, but frankly I'd be happy just to get the pictures, or the head of the guy who took it and most likely threw most of it in a bin somewhere.
The last being SimpleTemplate; this actually reminds me that I really should do a 2.1 release...
Anyway, it's simple, compiles templates to php, and generates fairly nice code. If Smarty's a bit heavyweight for you, it might be worth a look.
Using divs everywhere is a really bad idea; if you've got a list of links, make it a UL; if you've got a section heading, use a Hn; if you've got a selection of paragraphs, use P. DIV and it's inline cousin SPAN should be treated as a last resort when some more meaningful and more usefully rendered-by-default tag isn't available, not as your most used element. If your document doesn't stand alone from the CSS without devolving into unformatted drivel, you're doing something wrong.
And even with CSS, you often end up with little presentation-dependent bits in your markup; be it with document ordering, flicking between class names for a specific style you can't otherwise achieve without fancy selectors IE doesn't support, and so on; having these things seperated out from the main logic of your application is a significant win.
Even php's serialize() (also available for Ruby<plug>) does that; but this patent also talks about checksums, encryption, and back/forward compatability, so.. say.. like XML + schema + crypto of your choice.
TBH you can put anything you like in a cookie, binary or not; you just base64 encode it or so. After that, well, people have been making file formats like this for years, and Amazon get a patent just for putting one in a cookie? Lame.
Eh, this is really outside the scope of PHP to fix; it's something for CGI suexec, FastCGI, Apache's perchild MPM, or some other higher level system for web based scripting to deal with.
If you don't want to take PHP seriously, do so because of it's instability (and poor release engineering), it's lack of speed (which has been partially fixed several times, but hey; Zend need to make their money!), the complete mess it's extensions are in, the inflexibility of the language (again, partially dealt with in Zend 2, but still a world away from some other dynamic languages, with lots held back by the extreme bittersweetness of backwards compatibility, which seems to break a lot anyway), the userbase mostly consisting of programming newbies, the ever-bickering devteam, or any of a thousand other issues you can pick on PHP about.
But hey, I still use it. Doesn't mean I have to like it.
With some XUL magic it shouldn't be too difficult to make Firefox's preferences dialog look and work more like IE's :o
(And of course you can encode from FLAC to MP3, Vorbis, AAC, or whatever audio format your portable device supports.. when you upgrade your portable player, you can reencode your music to keep up with it, too.)
Lossless is the One True Way for storing music on a PC.
Most set-top DVD players have some hack or other to make them multiregion; a quick Google on "dvd multiregion hack" gives me this as the first hit. Good luck :)
Well, I'm in the UK, but that doesn't stop me having half a dozen region 1 DVD's. You really shouldn't let the movie industry push you around with such things, especially when they're as easy to get around as region codes.
Looking at Play I see no less than four R2 versions of the DVD, so why are you putting up with Korean bootlegs?
About right:I think you overestimate the cost of bandwidth though.
Ogg Vorbis has been shown to be non-transparent in a number of situations all the way up to -q10 as a result of issues with preecho and the like (with the standard reference encoder at least). Even MusePack, widely regarded as the most well tuned lossy audio format around, isn't perfect in all situations. As for MP3, well.. if Vorbis and MusePack have to hit 400+kbps to remain transparent on some tracks, MP3 sure as hell can't hope to do so with it's limit of 320kbps; the very format itself is inadeqate.
Even ignoring that, there are plenty of other reasons to go lossless; transcoding and such are *much* better with a lossless source; doing so from a Vorbis or MP3 file is almost certainly going to produce artifacts you can ABX. With a lossless file, I can convert to any format I like as many times as I like, since I effectively have the original.
As for the extra bandwidth consumed; well, not everyone values quality as much as I do - it's not such a big deal if one in 1000 of your users uses a few times more bandwidth, not to mention that those users are likely to be willing to pay a bit extra for it. Even if they're not, bandwidth isn't exactly *that* costly; the difference between downloading a Vorbis file and a FLAC file is going to be a couple of pence at most. If your margins are that slim you might as well give up now.
It already happened, but they don't limit to crappy lossy formats; you get those for free :o
foobar2000 and foo_record. Can play and record pretty much every audio format imaginable (although you probably want to find the 0.7 diskwriters until they're all ported to the new 0.8 API.. ask me if you need a hand, but you should be able to find stuff on the very useful forum) in 64 bit float precision. It can apply software DSP's, perform tagging operations at a level which puts the likes of Tag & Rename to shame, and is more configurable than any other audio player out there (because it's more than just an audio player ;)
:)
Most of the components are BSD licensed too. And don't let the default look put you off; it's skinnable and you can go a *long* way with nice formatting strings.
I could go on, but I should really stop gushing. I've successfully converted quite a few peeps by doing this though, so there must be some truth in it
Look at a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 or so; they's practically silent (I have 4 of them; an 80G, 2 160G's and a 200G. My ball bearing 80G Maxtor is probably louder than all of them put together. Other new drives are similarly quiet, of course, but Seagate are still regarded as being the quietest. Check Storage Review :)
Heh, I remember how Amigas used to have a more powerful FDD controller than PC's, meaning they could squeeze more on a disk; the space-optimized filesystems there let you squeeze almost 1MB onto a single DD floppy vs the already impressive default of 880k; and yup, you got nearly 2M from a HD floppy! ;)
Anyone wanting to try such amazing technology today can use a Catweasel, although I'm not sure if it supports anything more exotic than standard Mac/Amiga floppies.
2 Slashdot windows (article with 50 nested comments and this reply), Penny Arcade, FX Networks, 3 random mozilla.org pages: 31MB. This is Opera 7.50 preview 2 under windows XP using automatic memory cache and a skinned interface. Browser's been open about 2 and a half hours.
:P
What browser are you using?
Performance isn't just a factor of clockrate. The latest Barton chips have twice as much cache as previous models, so they typically perform better than older models at the same clockrate. That's the entire point of the rating system!
I think so.
*waves to him across the IRC channel*
(well, he's not really my boss, but he's the closest thing I have
You know what they say; you don't miss what you've never had
I work on a computer most of the day; as luck would have it, I can sit on IRC at the same time and talk to most of my friends. I can feed my desire for meaningless chatter, intelligent conversation, gain sympathy and respect, get support when I'm feeling down, share (often deeply personal) problems and do the same for others. Much of this in time where other forms of social interaction are either much less significant or just unavailable.
Maybe if I only spent a few hours a week on IRC it would be less rewarding, but as it is I can fit in hours a day easily. It spills out into real life too, and that's a whole bunch of real life friends I wouldn't have otherwise. Not bad for something that I can fit into short breaks working which would otherwise be spent staring into space, eating junk, mindlessly reloading
Don't forget disk space rapidly climbs in price when you start needing to add redundancy and speed, especially when you hit scalability limits of your current hardware. It's still cheap compared with what it was (duh ;), but it's still not at a point where it's "cheap enough" for me.
;)
When we can store all the information in the universe on a single budget drive with the reliability at least equal to that of atomic nuclei, then I'll be happy for development to slow down. *shakes fist at R&D* -- get researching the creation of artificial universes!
You're spot on; I do my best to make sure all my music is in FLAC format; it's what I rip to and it's what I try to download (from legitimate or *cough* sources). It's not because I really notice any difference, or even pretend I can; it's because I don't have to worry about what encoder settings to use, what version of lame or oggenc, whether MusePack or AAC really the better format. I don't even have to worry significantly over what lossless format I choose because I can change whenever I like.
If I get a portable music player, I can *trivially* encode them to the best format it supports (e.g. 64kbps Ogg Vorbis may be perfect for a portable, since you likely won't notice the lower quality and you can fit more music on, but I sure as hell don't want to listen to them through my Sennheisers) direct from my main music player.
Disk space once held me back from switching to lossless; but now I can get a practically silent 160G drive for around 80; I've got nearly half a TB in my desktop machine now, so why should I care?
Not everyone thinks it's worth it, obviously; that's why we have lossy formats in the first place. Lossless is still *the* way to go, and I'm quite happy to pay extra to get it.
As well as a listing of each track, downloadable as MP3 or WAV. Note they don't claim 128kbps MP3 is "high quality"; note they do offer "high quality" VBR MP3 (lame --alt-preset standard iirc, not some unnamed encoder with some crappy badly tuned settings); note they also offer Ogg Vorbis; note they even cater for people like me with FLAC, which frankly makes me want to have their babies. You should too
2 years? The One True Threading Algorithm was developed for Netscape 2!
Mine is a dual 466MHz Celeron; great little machine, used to be my desktop :)
Budget SMP seems to have peaked at the BP6; it's a shame AMD don't support it with their XP's. They would make for some *nice* machines.