There doesn't seem to be anything for the various incarnations of UFS either. A shame; I'd prefer UFS2+FFS+SU to NTFS any day, but Windows just doesn't seem to encourage alternate filesystems. Even AmigaOS had a couple of alternatives.
Opera does this too, btw; it also keeps the normal scroll functionality when you're not hovering over a link. When you're hovering over the page bar, a middle click opens a new tab.
C-750's a bit bulky and aimed at the more demanding photographer.. for this market you'd be better off suggesting a compact with better automatic controls, like the Canon Ixus range.
It is a great camera though.. unfortunately mine lasted all of 3 weeks before it was stolen, partly because it's so bulky and difficult to carry around all the time.
Avoid the Durons, even on budget systems. Even an XP1900 will be significantly faster, and won't cost much more.
Careful when suggesting "Any" motherboard; again, the better boards don't cost a whole lot more (and often are one of the cheapest when you're looking at popular tried-and-tested stuff), but you'll be glad for the extra stability and support. You won't go wrong with Epox, though:)
HD wise, 80-120G is about the best price/size wise, and won't cost a lot more than 40G. 80G is still a single platter, so won't be any louder than 40G.
nVidia aren't a great choice for the low (any?) end; look at the ATI R9X00 series. They're typically cheaper, faster, and also come with sensible cooling arrangements.
512MB won't cost a lot more, but will greatly benefit games and multitasking.
Why get a CD-ROM when a DVD-ROM costs so little extra?
Case wise, I always aim for one with 3.5" bays in front of the intake fanbay. Even without a fan there, HD's appreciate the extra room and being around where cool air comes in.
Oh, and soundwise, I wouldn't touch Creative with a very long stick. The hardware tends to hog the PCI bus and the drivers aren't exactly the best you'll find. Try a SonicXplosion or so.
FLAC isn't an obscure codec (it's OGG's lossless codec of choice), MusePack isn't that obscure and is very popular among audiophiles since it has the best quality/size ratio of *any* lossy codec. I dare say that outside downloaded iTunes tracks there are more FLAC and MPC's around than AAC's.
refuse to use plug-ins
Excuse me? Foobar 2000 is nothing *but* plugins. What I refuse to do is hunt around for them when there's no legitimate reason for them not to be bundled. FLAC and MusePack I can (almost) forgive, even if they would add all of 60k to the download (unless QT plugins are really bloated), but Ogg? Hell, the plugin doesn't even seem to have been ported yet!
enjoy scripting your own database querys whenever you want to find a song's name
Er? That's what tags and playlists are for. What do I need scripting to find the name of a track for?
I'll say it again; iTunes is a music player, it is *precisely* it's responsibility to support every vaguely popular codec around out of the box, especially when they're trivial to support, and when the target userbase likely has no clue whatsoever what a plugin even is!
All of the plugins I've described are bundled with foobar2k, by the way; all that functionality (which frankly seems to completely trounce iTunes in most respects) in a download 1/10th the size. From where I'm standing, iTunes is just a bloated, overcomplex, underdeveloped, slow and poorly supported MP3 and AAC player. I certainly won't be recommending it to anyone.
99c for a single track encoded in a DRM protected low quality lossy codec? No thanks -- not when I can get lossless encodes of complete albums with cover art and protection against corruption and no DRM for free elsewhere. 99c * number_of_tracks isn't exactly cheap for what you actually get, especially when it goes towards supporting one of my least favourite organisations.
I'm not fearful or uncertain. My doubts seem well founded, my annoyances will be felt by plenty of other users, and are perfectly legitimate. My usage habits are not exactly out of the ordinary for someone who listens to a lot of music.
iTunes does support embeding ID3v2 track relative volume adjustments, which is basicall what ReplayGain is.
Great... so, what other players support that? Where's the spec? Did they use the well specified and supported ReplayGain algorithm, or did they invent their own? What about other formats?
I'm listening to a.ogg in iTunes (the mac version) right now via the open source Ogg component. Someone just has to port the component to windows.
Uh.. right. Foobar has ogg support as part of the standard decoder which also includes MusePack, MP3 and WAV support. Said decoder is less than 150k, is written by one person in his spare time for free, and comes with source under a BSD license. Now, why on earth is a large multinational corporation unable to even come *close* to him in terms of format support for a 20MB app?
And that 35MB footprint is only when it's streaming someone's library, normally it's arround 25MB, and neither of those numbers represent actual use, just what's allocated iirc.
Because decoding music is such a memory intensive activity, yeah;)
And, it's a matter of personal prefrence, but the GUI seems well laid out to me, and I haven't noticed any speed problems (although the visualizer could use some optimising).
The Windows version is seriously slow, believe me. Resizing the window is enough to make it enter jerk-o-vision on my.5GB 1.4GHz Athlon
fb2k provides a database of your music as part of metadata caching, which speeds up large (2,000+) playlists; a bundled component provides the ability to list it using the pervasive format string support and so can be tuned to your setup (mine: $if($or($not(%album%),$and($not(%artist%),$not(%al bum artist%)),%singletrack%),'Single Tracks',$if(%album artist%,%album artist%,%artist%))|[%album%]|[[%disc%.][$num(%trac knumber%,2).] ][%title%] -- handles single tracks, multiple artists, etc).
ID3 tag retrival can be used using a freedb plugin. You can save the resulting data (and change using a powerful masstagger plugin) using ID3v1, v2 (*spit*) or APEv2, as well as Vorbis comments, etc.
Online music shopping doesn't interest me unless it can compete with other sources which typically get me better quality encodings (wtf do I want an overpriced DRM crippled ABR 128kbps AAC when I can download a FLAC or APE?). I am also not interested if I can't buy or play them using the application of my choosing.
Burning to CD is provided by a plugin.
Smart playlists are.. what? There's a lot of functionality for searching the metadata database, manipulating multiple playlists (which are now tabbed, should you want such a feature), smart randomisation.. and the src for all this stuff is available so you can tune should you feel the need.
I am not interested in portable music players that don't use the USB Mass Storage standard. What legitimate reason is there for not supporting it?
On the other side of the coin, iTunes doesn't provide support for half as many formats out of the box (Sorry, I'm not interested enough to go hunting for QT plugins of questionable quality and source when it's either bundled or a this?), can't apply ReplayGain but instead seems to use it's own custom format using a tagging format I don't use and which will almost certainly not work on my prefered audio codecs, doesn't provide tools for ABX comparisons and the like, doesn't provide multiple GUI's to suit needs ranging from ultra-basic to over-the-top skinned crap, and doesn't come with source and a large developer community who fiddle with it all the time.
I guess I'm not the target user, but you lot.. damnit, you're all supposed to be geeks too!:P
... is a 20MB download, has a 35MB memory footprint, doesn't support FLAC, Ogg or MPC (hence doesn't play most of my music collection), doesn't seem to support ReplayGain, has a huge slow GUI, and doesn't seem to have a plugin system that would allow me or others to fix any of these things.
So why should I use it instead of foobar2000, or even WinAMP?
Well, PHP isn't exactly a speed demon either. Ruby has the advantage of being a far more flexible language, as well as being easier to extend in C and having more features which tend to reduce the size of applications written in it. Certainly, I've found it to be at *least* on par with PHP in most cases. And we can look forward to it getting more than 3 times faster, rawr:)
Well, that fits in to the "doing something wrong" category:)
Have you looked at Ruby? It's great for application server stuff, pretty fast, is far more elegant a language than PHP, and is much easier to extend in C/++ if you need to optimize a performance-critical hotspot.
The same system in java probably would not work, and if so would take up so many resources as to be no efficient.
Um, why not? A JIT compiled Java application server with the ability to perform object pooling and the like should outscale PHP in it's sleep, and probably be significantly faster at all levels to boot. If it does anything else, you did something wrong.
(Personally, however, I'm really favouring Ruby/FastCGI over both at the moment)
Whatever case you get, you want to get something suited to your needs and those of your hardware. If you've got a hot machine, you want to make sure you get a case with plenty of good airflow over the areas that get hot -- and it's no good if it keeps your motherboard cool if it's letting your HD's cook because they're in deadzones without even enough space for convection cooling.
Cheaper cases usually come with cheapo PSU's with poor specifications and build quality, which can easily lead to annoying (and even painful) setup, instability, and annoying vibrations you can't get rid of.
I paid 70 UKP for my case -- an Antex SLK3700 (review), based on a cheaper OEM case. It has good construction (aside from the plasticy facade), a beefy high quality PSU, and excellent airflow, especially over the generous number of drive bays (both requirements for me.. I lub my storage!).
I *could* have spent 20 UKP on a cheapo case, but it would have come with a nasty 5-quid PSU which might not last six months (hopefully not taking my hardware with it, assuming it's powerful enough to run it at all), no removable drive bays, poor stamped fan-bays which block 90% of airflow, no dust-guards, and no nice shiny finish.
Plus, if I need a decent case, I *know* I can just get another SLK3700 - I don't need to hunt through a load of generic OEM cases which will have changed by next week just to find something near what I want every time.
That's not to say I don't buy cheaper cases for people with modest requirements, but computer weenies like us typically appreciate a bit of quality -- it's just like getting a 90 UKP Epox motherboard instead of a 35 UKP PC Chips one; they both do pretty much the same job, but I know which I'd prefer to work with. Cases just have the benefit of not being *quite* so vital.
For more advanced users, PenguiNet - a lovely Windows SSH/telnet client. Not as lightweight or free as PuTTY, but more intuitive, and has my name on it:)
Um; if your drive's reporting a lot of reallocated sectors you should RMA it -- even with top-end 80G platters, sector remapping happens seldom.
There are plenty of failure modes which will result in lots of remapped sectors, but that's a side-effect of the drive having difficulty reading/writing in general due to component failure, which to be honest is probably less common now than it has been.. uh.. ever (cooked and/or shocked to death drives excepted).
This is untrue, sure there will be people who don't won't to buy anything at all. They are called thieves.
Please stop equating copyright infringement with thieft. It dilutes the term; thieves are the scum who broke into my friend's car and took my digital camera, clothes, books, etc. Thieves are the scum who broke into another friend's house and took 20K UKP worth of stuff, including his pile of CD-R backups containing the source-code that is his job. Thieves are the scum who deprive other people of their rightful property and security.
They are not people who get unauthorised copies of software or media -- they aren't depriving the owners of anything, much of the time not even potential sales.
Piracy is a similarly poor choice of term -- pirates are scum who murder, terrorise and steal from ships and the like. Equating them with people who copy and distribute media is like calling litterbugs rapists.
See my address up there? Yup, I'm not letting a few scumbags reduce my ability to use the Internet. I filter so much that I barely notice any more.
Of course, I take more care with other people's addresses; using mailto forms, intra-site private messaging systems, one-time-only addresses, that sort of thing. I also wrote a bit of PHP to munge email addresses (phps/php), but I don't actually use it.
You XHTML users better not be using these JS "solutions" which use document.write() by the way (that's HTML DOM, not XML DOM).. in fact, the entire idea of putting content in JS is so braindead you shouldn't be doing it anyway.
Audiophiles would probably prefer MPC support; it works at bitrates more suited to portables (usually lower than an -aps MP3) while preserving quality (for that warm fuzzy feeling). It's fast to encode too, making it suitable for on-the-fly transcoding.
With more processing power, maybe your camera will be able to save PNG's, instead of those crappy lossy JPG's, without taking 40s to save each shot, and without using huge amounts of available storage.
Maybe it can start taking really high speed shots one after another, instead of struggling to hit 2FPS.
Maybe it can do a bit more processing of the scene and avoid that odd over/underexposed image.
Maybe it can use a more powerful autofocus algorithm and execute it faster.
Maybe it can use a more powerful noise reduction system and push up to noise-free 1600 ISO sensitivity for all those indoor and nighttime shots.
And maybe Windows' Image Viewer can display and scale these shots a bit faster. Ever tried making it zoom a moderately large image? Ugh.
I, for one, would like to get old without all that awful growing old stuff; what's the point of hitting 90 if you've got a huge probability of ending up barely able to function?
Immortality may not be such a hot idea for a human, but I would sure like to have the option of a few more centuries... hell, my first couple of decades were hardly fun, I think I deserve a bit of extra time:P
We just need to deal with that whole overpopulation thing -- maybe I'll settle for living long enough to be transcribed into a virtual world:)
Slashdot Mirror
There doesn't seem to be anything for the various incarnations of UFS either. A shame; I'd prefer UFS2+FFS+SU to NTFS any day, but Windows just doesn't seem to encourage alternate filesystems. Even AmigaOS had a couple of alternatives.
Just one more step towards Google indexing the real world so I can finally find where my TV remote got to...
Full impulse is supposedly ~1/4 light speed; 167 million mph. Imagine the sort of kinetic weapons you could make with that...
Opera does this too, btw; it also keeps the normal scroll functionality when you're not hovering over a link. When you're hovering over the page bar, a middle click opens a new tab.
C-750's a bit bulky and aimed at the more demanding photographer.. for this market you'd be better off suggesting a compact with better automatic controls, like the Canon Ixus range.
It is a great camera though.. unfortunately mine lasted all of 3 weeks before it was stolen, partly because it's so bulky and difficult to carry around all the time.
Avoid the Durons, even on budget systems. Even an XP1900 will be significantly faster, and won't cost much more.
:)
Careful when suggesting "Any" motherboard; again, the better boards don't cost a whole lot more (and often are one of the cheapest when you're looking at popular tried-and-tested stuff), but you'll be glad for the extra stability and support. You won't go wrong with Epox, though
HD wise, 80-120G is about the best price/size wise, and won't cost a lot more than 40G. 80G is still a single platter, so won't be any louder than 40G.
nVidia aren't a great choice for the low (any?) end; look at the ATI R9X00 series. They're typically cheaper, faster, and also come with sensible cooling arrangements.
512MB won't cost a lot more, but will greatly benefit games and multitasking.
Why get a CD-ROM when a DVD-ROM costs so little extra?
Case wise, I always aim for one with 3.5" bays in front of the intake fanbay. Even without a fan there, HD's appreciate the extra room and being around where cool air comes in.
Oh, and soundwise, I wouldn't touch Creative with a very long stick. The hardware tends to hog the PCI bus and the drivers aren't exactly the best you'll find. Try a SonicXplosion or so.
Cool, that takes care of 15% of my music. What about the rest?
:)
No, don't bother, I'm really not interested
Such as?
FLAC isn't an obscure codec (it's OGG's lossless codec of choice), MusePack isn't that obscure and is very popular among audiophiles since it has the best quality/size ratio of *any* lossy codec. I dare say that outside downloaded iTunes tracks there are more FLAC and MPC's around than AAC's.
Excuse me? Foobar 2000 is nothing *but* plugins. What I refuse to do is hunt around for them when there's no legitimate reason for them not to be bundled. FLAC and MusePack I can (almost) forgive, even if they would add all of 60k to the download (unless QT plugins are really bloated), but Ogg? Hell, the plugin doesn't even seem to have been ported yet!
Er? That's what tags and playlists are for. What do I need scripting to find the name of a track for?
I'll say it again; iTunes is a music player, it is *precisely* it's responsibility to support every vaguely popular codec around out of the box, especially when they're trivial to support, and when the target userbase likely has no clue whatsoever what a plugin even is!
All of the plugins I've described are bundled with foobar2k, by the way; all that functionality (which frankly seems to completely trounce iTunes in most respects) in a download 1/10th the size. From where I'm standing, iTunes is just a bloated, overcomplex, underdeveloped, slow and poorly supported MP3 and AAC player. I certainly won't be recommending it to anyone.
99c for a single track encoded in a DRM protected low quality lossy codec? No thanks -- not when I can get lossless encodes of complete albums with cover art and protection against corruption and no DRM for free elsewhere. 99c * number_of_tracks isn't exactly cheap for what you actually get, especially when it goes towards supporting one of my least favourite organisations.
:)
It's not available in the UK either
I'm not fearful or uncertain. My doubts seem well founded, my annoyances will be felt by plenty of other users, and are perfectly legitimate. My usage habits are not exactly out of the ordinary for someone who listens to a lot of music.
Great... so, what other players support that? Where's the spec? Did they use the well specified and supported ReplayGain algorithm, or did they invent their own? What about other formats?
Uh.. right. Foobar has ogg support as part of the standard decoder which also includes MusePack, MP3 and WAV support. Said decoder is less than 150k, is written by one person in his spare time for free, and comes with source under a BSD license. Now, why on earth is a large multinational corporation unable to even come *close* to him in terms of format support for a 20MB app?
Because decoding music is such a memory intensive activity, yeah
The Windows version is seriously slow, believe me. Resizing the window is enough to make it enter jerk-o-vision on my
fb2k provides a database of your music as part of metadata caching, which speeds up large (2,000+) playlists; a bundled component provides the ability to list it using the pervasive format string support and so can be tuned to your setup (mine: $if($or($not(%album%),$and($not(%artist%),$not(%al bum artist%)),%singletrack%),'Single Tracks',$if(%album artist%,%album artist%,%artist%))|[%album%]|[[%disc%.][$num(%trac knumber%,2).] ][%title%] -- handles single tracks, multiple artists, etc).
:P
ID3 tag retrival can be used using a freedb plugin. You can save the resulting data (and change using a powerful masstagger plugin) using ID3v1, v2 (*spit*) or APEv2, as well as Vorbis comments, etc.
Online music shopping doesn't interest me unless it can compete with other sources which typically get me better quality encodings (wtf do I want an overpriced DRM crippled ABR 128kbps AAC when I can download a FLAC or APE?). I am also not interested if I can't buy or play them using the application of my choosing.
Burning to CD is provided by a plugin.
Smart playlists are.. what? There's a lot of functionality for searching the metadata database, manipulating multiple playlists (which are now tabbed, should you want such a feature), smart randomisation.. and the src for all this stuff is available so you can tune should you feel the need.
I am not interested in portable music players that don't use the USB Mass Storage standard. What legitimate reason is there for not supporting it?
On the other side of the coin, iTunes doesn't provide support for half as many formats out of the box (Sorry, I'm not interested enough to go hunting for QT plugins of questionable quality and source when it's either bundled or a this?), can't apply ReplayGain but instead seems to use it's own custom format using a tagging format I don't use and which will almost certainly not work on my prefered audio codecs, doesn't provide tools for ABX comparisons and the like, doesn't provide multiple GUI's to suit needs ranging from ultra-basic to over-the-top skinned crap, and doesn't come with source and a large developer community who fiddle with it all the time.
I guess I'm not the target user, but you lot.. damnit, you're all supposed to be geeks too!
... is a 20MB download, has a 35MB memory footprint, doesn't support FLAC, Ogg or MPC (hence doesn't play most of my music collection), doesn't seem to support ReplayGain, has a huge slow GUI, and doesn't seem to have a plugin system that would allow me or others to fix any of these things.
So why should I use it instead of foobar2000, or even WinAMP?
Well, PHP isn't exactly a speed demon either. Ruby has the advantage of being a far more flexible language, as well as being easier to extend in C and having more features which tend to reduce the size of applications written in it. Certainly, I've found it to be at *least* on par with PHP in most cases. And we can look forward to it getting more than 3 times faster, rawr :)
Well, that fits in to the "doing something wrong" category :)
Have you looked at Ruby? It's great for application server stuff, pretty fast, is far more elegant a language than PHP, and is much easier to extend in C/++ if you need to optimize a performance-critical hotspot.
Um, why not? A JIT compiled Java application server with the ability to perform object pooling and the like should outscale PHP in it's sleep, and probably be significantly faster at all levels to boot. If it does anything else, you did something wrong.
(Personally, however, I'm really favouring Ruby/FastCGI over both at the moment)
Whatever case you get, you want to get something suited to your needs and those of your hardware. If you've got a hot machine, you want to make sure you get a case with plenty of good airflow over the areas that get hot -- and it's no good if it keeps your motherboard cool if it's letting your HD's cook because they're in deadzones without even enough space for convection cooling.
Cheaper cases usually come with cheapo PSU's with poor specifications and build quality, which can easily lead to annoying (and even painful) setup, instability, and annoying vibrations you can't get rid of.
I paid 70 UKP for my case -- an Antex SLK3700 (review), based on a cheaper OEM case. It has good construction (aside from the plasticy facade), a beefy high quality PSU, and excellent airflow, especially over the generous number of drive bays (both requirements for me.. I lub my storage!).
I *could* have spent 20 UKP on a cheapo case, but it would have come with a nasty 5-quid PSU which might not last six months (hopefully not taking my hardware with it, assuming it's powerful enough to run it at all), no removable drive bays, poor stamped fan-bays which block 90% of airflow, no dust-guards, and no nice shiny finish.
Plus, if I need a decent case, I *know* I can just get another SLK3700 - I don't need to hunt through a load of generic OEM cases which will have changed by next week just to find something near what I want every time.
That's not to say I don't buy cheaper cases for people with modest requirements, but computer weenies like us typically appreciate a bit of quality -- it's just like getting a 90 UKP Epox motherboard instead of a 35 UKP PC Chips one; they both do pretty much the same job, but I know which I'd prefer to work with. Cases just have the benefit of not being *quite* so vital.
All my DOM stuff recently has actually found IE to be the problem of not implementing it properly. Sure you've looked at Opera since version 6?
Either way, as a web developer I'd much rather put up with a cripped DOM than a crippled CSS and HTML implementation and zero XHTML implementation.
Um; if your drive's reporting a lot of reallocated sectors you should RMA it -- even with top-end 80G platters, sector remapping happens seldom.
There are plenty of failure modes which will result in lots of remapped sectors, but that's a side-effect of the drive having difficulty reading/writing in general due to component failure, which to be honest is probably less common now than it has been.. uh.. ever (cooked and/or shocked to death drives excepted).
Please stop equating copyright infringement with thieft. It dilutes the term; thieves are the scum who broke into my friend's car and took my digital camera, clothes, books, etc. Thieves are the scum who broke into another friend's house and took 20K UKP worth of stuff, including his pile of CD-R backups containing the source-code that is his job. Thieves are the scum who deprive other people of their rightful property and security.
They are not people who get unauthorised copies of software or media -- they aren't depriving the owners of anything, much of the time not even potential sales.
Piracy is a similarly poor choice of term -- pirates are scum who murder, terrorise and steal from ships and the like. Equating them with people who copy and distribute media is like calling litterbugs rapists.
See my address up there? Yup, I'm not letting a few scumbags reduce my ability to use the Internet. I filter so much that I barely notice any more.
Of course, I take more care with other people's addresses; using mailto forms, intra-site private messaging systems, one-time-only addresses, that sort of thing. I also wrote a bit of PHP to munge email addresses (phps/php), but I don't actually use it.
You XHTML users better not be using these JS "solutions" which use document.write() by the way (that's HTML DOM, not XML DOM).. in fact, the entire idea of putting content in JS is so braindead you shouldn't be doing it anyway.
Audiophiles would probably prefer MPC support; it works at bitrates more suited to portables (usually lower than an -aps MP3) while preserving quality (for that warm fuzzy feeling). It's fast to encode too, making it suitable for on-the-fly transcoding.
With more processing power, maybe your camera will be able to save PNG's, instead of those crappy lossy JPG's, without taking 40s to save each shot, and without using huge amounts of available storage.
Maybe it can start taking really high speed shots one after another, instead of struggling to hit 2FPS.
Maybe it can do a bit more processing of the scene and avoid that odd over/underexposed image.
Maybe it can use a more powerful autofocus algorithm and execute it faster.
Maybe it can use a more powerful noise reduction system and push up to noise-free 1600 ISO sensitivity for all those indoor and nighttime shots.
And maybe Windows' Image Viewer can display and scale these shots a bit faster. Ever tried making it zoom a moderately large image? Ugh.
I, for one, would like to get old without all that awful growing old stuff; what's the point of hitting 90 if you've got a huge probability of ending up barely able to function?
:P
:)
Immortality may not be such a hot idea for a human, but I would sure like to have the option of a few more centuries... hell, my first couple of decades were hardly fun, I think I deserve a bit of extra time
We just need to deal with that whole overpopulation thing -- maybe I'll settle for living long enough to be transcribed into a virtual world
I've seen no significant change in my spam statistics since setting SlashDot to show my address unmunged. But then I do get about 100/day, so...