For music and games (and sometimes books) I use play.com and CD-WOW, which both have free delivery.
For books I generally still use 1-2-3 PriceCheck, which does a handy comparison of a dozen or so book stores, including Amazon. It also includes P&P in the comparison, to avoid sneaky charges.
Like the people who remove whitespace to 'save bytes'
And using short variable names too, I guess?
With interpreted languages like JavaScript it does does cut down the parsing and processing time a fraction, so why not? Check out the compact code on Google's homepage, which is downloaded a gazillion times, and benefits from the size reduction.
I don't see the difference between porting between Windows/Linux, and Windows/OS X (Intel). The same problems will still be there.
How about Macs only having a few known hardware configurations?
It's not quite as simple as targetting a console, but it's got to be much better than the zillions of driver/hardware combinations in Linux and Windows.
Would you agree that evolution is still only a theory, even if a theory you believe likely to be true?
Yes, though don't be misled by use of the word "theory" - scientific theories are almost never 100% proven. Gravity is still considered a scientific theory - should that be taught as such too?
Belief in God and evolution need not be mutually exclusive.
As an earlier post said, why can't the Creationists see Evolution as a way of explaining how God made things work?
That being said, evolution is as much a theory as creationism, and some may say it evolution relies on faith just as much (if not more) than creationism.
I disagree with that. Despite it being a theory, we have a model that predicts the mutations, and plenty of data (being added to all the time) that continues to fit the model. Proving the model is 100% true is like proving a complex program has no bugs. You can run it again and again with different data and show it works, but you can't prove that any future/unknown data will be handled correctly.
As a non-religious person's view of the Creationism side, the only evidence I see is a book. Everything then comes from faith in its contents, with Nostradamus-style interpretation used to apply it to anything. Everything is built completely on faith, and questioning it isn't really encouraged.
Really read up on evolution. There are huge missing factors. Darwin knew this.
It was a first draft for Darwin, but it seemed to do a pretty good job at explaining our observations. What are these "huge missing factors" you're referring to?
Look at the screen shop showing "My Music". Now look at the top left explorer bar and see the link that says "Purchase Music".
In my XP I have a "Shop for music online" link in the Tasks section of My Music. It has a tooltip of "Connects you to the Windows Media Web site where you can find music to download and buy".
It might be because I've got WMP 10 installed (as others have said), but it's nothing too new for Longhorn.
Wavelets sound neat but I don't think browsers can read wavlet encoded images. I think jpeg uses something else.
The browser doesn't need to understand the wavelet format directly, it's fed image sections after they've been re-encoded in a suitable format (JPEG usually). GetMapping deals with the image in 250x250-pixel blocks on the browser side. They're extracted from a master ECW and converted to JPG images on the server side, then streamed back to a set position in the browser. The source URL for each tile includes the tile position and resolution, and tiling the images returned gives the same overview effect you get at Google. They still use JavaScript to manage the user panning and zooming (I can't find the deep URL for the viewer on their site that does it as well as I remember).
Even if you store every resolution you need, you are only increasing the storage requirements by a factor of 5 or so.
If you've a fixed number of zoom steps (15 on Google?) and oodles of disk space (like Google!) it will definitely make more sense to do it like you suggest, returning pre-processed files with no extraction/re-encoding overhead.
Break the images into 200x200 pixel chunks at each resolution and save those chunks as individual image files
Put a javascript interface on
Rather than working with fixed resolution images, you're must better off using wavelet compression to store your images. As well as up to 50:1 compression ratios, you can easily stream out whatever resolution you need, without having to uncompress all the data first. ECW and related formats have been used by GIS systems for many years, long before Google joined the party. Still, it's nice to see so much information publically available.
I'm certainly looking forward to when Google add the UK data, so I don't have to rely on the limited service from GetMapping:-)
Would that even work for the Mac? With the application menu at the top of the screen, you'd be likely to lose the current focus as you move up the screen and pass over other windows.
No support for a folder of applications as a single widget on the dock.
That would be handy, though perhaps LaunchBar would cover it?
It's region locked.
As are all hardware players, as required by the DVD consortium - you can hardly blame Apple for that! There is a RPC2->1 hack for many of the Mac players, but not yet for the one in the latest G4 PowerBooks.
It only resizes to half/full/double/full screen instead of being arbitrarily sizable.
Compared to MS Windows, OS X comes with a LOT of extra stuff already. Seems like you want it to be a little too much like the X window system. Still, I'd be surprised if there weren't 3rd party solutions for most things you're after...
Re:Yes, requires a password for serious damage
on
Beginning AppleScript
·
· Score: 1
the root account is actually disabled on OS X (though it can be re-enabled with little work).
As a newbie OS X user, I found myself using sudo su - which is probably a bit naughty but does the job nicely:-)
How about making the browser more user-friendly and not requiring archaic commands in about:config?
Unfortunately, backwards compatability can't always be guaranteed, particularly in applications under rapid development like Firefox.
Refusing to use potentially incompatible components is the most user-friendly solution. I'd rather it did that than misbehave and potentially crash! about:config is not meant for the average user, but as a handy direct approach for power users (makes a change from editing config files, like I do in Opera).
I do still hope that things settle enough after 1.0 that extensions won't be invalidated on every minor update...
The perceived frailty of MS is (a) a hangover from the Win95/98/Me crap and (b) because of the UI and application communication layers, not the kernel.
What about the current inability to cancel create requests in the kernel? That's responsible for a lot of application-level hangs, without involving 3rd-party drivers. You also end up with unkillable processes - not just Unix-like zombie processes, but multi-megabyte monsters that won't go away. In such situations Shutdown is merely a wishful request, and even W2K/XP will struggle to complete it with hung applications.
And many aspects of Windows, from a developer perspective, are ahread of *nix.
Such as? I've been coding for Windows for 10 years, and I still yearn for the simpler and more powerful approach of Unix coding (which is mainly in my spare time at present). From a coder's point of view, the only thing Windows has going for it is Visual Studio, which is still much nicer than KDevelop. The new Visual Studio 2005 Beta is very sluggish, so I hope they've not ruined it.
I had the misfortune to be working on a file-system driver under Windows last year, and it's beyond a joke. Writing even a simple new filesystem requires spending thousands of dollars on the MS IFS kit, and it's far from easy from there. It's a complete spaghetti of interactions between your driver and the cache manager + OS, with many subtle pitfalls. Why else could OSR charge $50K for a driver framework kit just to aid development?? Did I mention that a file-system driver for 9x/Me is completely different from NT/W2K/XP? Now compare this to the simplicity of the VFS layer Unix, and weep...
Windows seems to go out of its way to make everything complicated, just for the sake of it. I'm pleased to see the push for.NET and Web Services is going "so well", as it's another step down the road to hell.
30 year old technology may be "mature", but its not always The Right Thing To Do for the future.
If it works well, why change it? As a coder I'd rather work with a tried an tested system. With Windows I seem to too much time testing on and coding round the subtle differences between different versions of Windows than , and I'm sure Longhorn is going to be yet another version to include.
I just got an email from steam asking why I don't connect anymore. I haven't responded yet, but the answer is that I like the Won system. Steam is cumbersome and annoying.
Then reply and tell them that - I did!
I detailed exactly the problem I had with using it, though your "cumbersome and annoying" pretty much sum up my feelings too. I know that Steam is due to be the only method of playing HL2 online, and am not too happy about that. Hopefully they're ironed out some of the bugs and slowness...
Unfortunately this means other, legitimate self-modifying code may also have issues..
We've already updated our software to handle this... It just requires allocating any self-modifying blocks with VirtualAlloc() instead of using a regular heap block, telling it the block is read/write/execute, and ideally removing the write ability if the block is static from that point on. You can even use VirtualProtect() to alter the page protection on existing blocks, which could be used to enable execution on the heap area (nasty hack!)
Slashdot Mirror
Another UK site for comparing games prices (PC and consoles) in different online stores is Games Tracker
For hardware purchases I use the same as you.
For music and games (and sometimes books) I use play.com and CD-WOW, which both have free delivery.
For books I generally still use 1-2-3 PriceCheck, which does a handy comparison of a dozen or so book stores, including Amazon. It also includes P&P in the comparison, to avoid sneaky charges.
Like the people who remove whitespace to 'save bytes'
And using short variable names too, I guess?
With interpreted languages like JavaScript it does does cut down the parsing and processing time a fraction, so why not? Check out the compact code on Google's homepage, which is downloaded a gazillion times, and benefits from the size reduction.
I don't see the difference between porting between Windows/Linux, and Windows/OS X (Intel). The same problems will still be there.
How about Macs only having a few known hardware configurations?
It's not quite as simple as targetting a console, but it's got to be much better than the zillions of driver/hardware combinations in Linux and Windows.
Would you agree that evolution is still only a theory, even if a theory you believe likely to be true?
Yes, though don't be misled by use of the word "theory" - scientific theories are almost never 100% proven. Gravity is still considered a scientific theory - should that be taught as such too?
Belief in God and evolution need not be mutually exclusive.
As an earlier post said, why can't the Creationists see Evolution as a way of explaining how God made things work?
That being said, evolution is as much a theory as creationism, and some may say it evolution relies on faith just as much (if not more) than creationism.
I disagree with that. Despite it being a theory, we have a model that predicts the mutations, and plenty of data (being added to all the time) that continues to fit the model. Proving the model is 100% true is like proving a complex program has no bugs. You can run it again and again with different data and show it works, but you can't prove that any future/unknown data will be handled correctly.
As a non-religious person's view of the Creationism side, the only evidence I see is a book. Everything then comes from faith in its contents, with Nostradamus-style interpretation used to apply it to anything. Everything is built completely on faith, and questioning it isn't really encouraged.
Really read up on evolution. There are huge missing factors. Darwin knew this.
It was a first draft for Darwin, but it seemed to do a pretty good job at explaining our observations. What are these "huge missing factors" you're referring to?
Look at the screen shop showing "My Music".
Now look at the top left explorer bar and see the link that says "Purchase Music".
In my XP I have a "Shop for music online" link in the Tasks section of My Music. It has a tooltip of "Connects you to the Windows Media Web site where you can find music to download and buy".
It might be because I've got WMP 10 installed (as others have said), but it's nothing too new for Longhorn.
Wavelets sound neat but I don't think browsers can read wavlet encoded images. I think jpeg uses something else.
The browser doesn't need to understand the wavelet format directly, it's fed image sections after they've been re-encoded in a suitable format (JPEG usually). GetMapping deals with the image in 250x250-pixel blocks on the browser side. They're extracted from a master ECW and converted to JPG images on the server side, then streamed back to a set position in the browser. The source URL for each tile includes the tile position and resolution, and tiling the images returned gives the same overview effect you get at Google. They still use JavaScript to manage the user panning and zooming (I can't find the deep URL for the viewer on their site that does it as well as I remember).
Even if you store every resolution you need, you are only increasing the storage requirements by a factor of 5 or so.
If you've a fixed number of zoom steps (15 on Google?) and oodles of disk space (like Google!) it will definitely make more sense to do it like you suggest, returning pre-processed files with no extraction/re-encoding overhead.
- Resize the image to various resolutions
- Break the images into 200x200 pixel chunks at each resolution and save those chunks as individual image files
- Put a javascript interface on
Rather than working with fixed resolution images, you're must better off using wavelet compression to store your images. As well as up to 50:1 compression ratios, you can easily stream out whatever resolution you need, without having to uncompress all the data first. ECW and related formats have been used by GIS systems for many years, long before Google joined the party. Still, it's nice to see so much information publically available.I'm certainly looking forward to when Google add the UK data, so I don't have to rely on the limited service from GetMapping
Is Zeta OS using NTFS as the default file system?
No, they still use BeFS. I imagine they're just showing that NTFS partitions can be mounted (not sure if they're read-only).
2) Introducing a product on April Fools day, a national holiday or 9/11.
:-)
Why not? It all adds to the is-it-or-isn't-it buzz. Gmail being announced 1 year ago today didn't seem to do them any harm at the time
Use the free PageDefrag utility from http://sysinternals.com.
Start-> Control Panel-> Add remove programs
Select Windows compontents. Uncheck WMP.
Click OK
What's the big deal?
That it removes only the shortcuts and leaves the bulk of the program on disk? (like many of the other "uninstall" options in XP).
No SSH server
System Preferences -> Sharing -> check the Remote Login box and your ssh server is running.
No autoscroll on the trackpad (fixed but only for new powerbooks)
Not standard, but if you have newish trackpad hardware you can use: http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/ (this was working last night but seems down at the moment)
Doesn't support focus on mouse
Would that even work for the Mac? With the application menu at the top of the screen, you'd be likely to lose the current focus as you move up the screen and pass over other windows.
No support for a folder of applications as a single widget on the dock.
That would be handy, though perhaps LaunchBar would cover it?
It's region locked.
As are all hardware players, as required by the DVD consortium - you can hardly blame Apple for that! There is a RPC2->1 hack for many of the Mac players, but not yet for the one in the latest G4 PowerBooks.
It only resizes to half/full/double/full screen instead of being arbitrarily sizable.
Try better placer, such as VLC.
Compared to MS Windows, OS X comes with a LOT of extra stuff already. Seems like you want it to be a little too much like the X window system. Still, I'd be surprised if there weren't 3rd party solutions for most things you're after...
the root account is actually disabled on OS X (though it can be re-enabled with little work).
:-)
As a newbie OS X user, I found myself using sudo su - which is probably a bit naughty but does the job nicely
And also why Nokia wanted out?
How about making the browser more user-friendly and not requiring archaic commands in about:config?
Unfortunately, backwards compatability can't always be guaranteed, particularly in applications under rapid development like Firefox.
Refusing to use potentially incompatible components is the most user-friendly solution. I'd rather it did that than misbehave and potentially crash! about:config is not meant for the average user, but as a handy direct approach for power users (makes a change from editing config files, like I do in Opera).
I do still hope that things settle enough after 1.0 that extensions won't be invalidated on every minor update...
Since there's a good chance extensions that worked under 1.0PR will be fine in 1.0 RC1.
My personal favourite, as found in "Pi and the Arithmetic Geometric Mean" by JM Borwein and PB Borwein, Wiley, 1987.
Then it'll only be confirming what the investigators already know from the tire marks left on the road.
Though, anti-lock brakes on most modern cars mean there may be no marks to see...
The perceived frailty of MS is (a) a hangover from the Win95/98/Me crap and (b) because of the UI and application communication layers, not the kernel.
.NET and Web Services is going "so well", as it's another step down the road to hell.
What about the current inability to cancel create requests in the kernel? That's responsible for a lot of application-level hangs, without involving 3rd-party drivers. You also end up with unkillable processes - not just Unix-like zombie processes, but multi-megabyte monsters that won't go away. In such situations Shutdown is merely a wishful request, and even W2K/XP will struggle to complete it with hung applications.
And many aspects of Windows, from a developer perspective, are ahread of *nix.
Such as? I've been coding for Windows for 10 years, and I still yearn for the simpler and more powerful approach of Unix coding (which is mainly in my spare time at present). From a coder's point of view, the only thing Windows has going for it is Visual Studio, which is still much nicer than KDevelop. The new Visual Studio 2005 Beta is very sluggish, so I hope they've not ruined it.
I had the misfortune to be working on a file-system driver under Windows last year, and it's beyond a joke. Writing even a simple new filesystem requires spending thousands of dollars on the MS IFS kit, and it's far from easy from there. It's a complete spaghetti of interactions between your driver and the cache manager + OS, with many subtle pitfalls. Why else could OSR charge $50K for a driver framework kit just to aid development?? Did I mention that a file-system driver for 9x/Me is completely different from NT/W2K/XP? Now compare this to the simplicity of the VFS layer Unix, and weep...
Windows seems to go out of its way to make everything complicated, just for the sake of it. I'm pleased to see the push for
30 year old technology may be "mature", but its not always The Right Thing To Do for the future.
If it works well, why change it? As a coder I'd rather work with a tried an tested system. With Windows I seem to too much time testing on and coding round the subtle differences between different versions of Windows than , and I'm sure Longhorn is going to be yet another version to include.
I just got an email from steam asking why I don't connect anymore. I haven't responded yet, but the answer is that I like the Won system. Steam is cumbersome and annoying.
Then reply and tell them that - I did!
I detailed exactly the problem I had with using it, though your "cumbersome and annoying" pretty much sum up my feelings too. I know that Steam is due to be the only method of playing HL2 online, and am not too happy about that. Hopefully they're ironed out some of the bugs and slowness...
ah, the old "chmod u+s post-it.note" trick. Works every time.
Hmmmm. Well it didn't work for me until I used "chmod a+t post-it.note".
uname -a now shows:(just a change of date)
You can get it here. Note: there's a 100 user limit on the server, and not all the mirrors have been updated yet.
Unfortunately this means other, legitimate self-modifying code may also have issues ..
We've already updated our software to handle this... It just requires allocating any self-modifying blocks with VirtualAlloc() instead of using a regular heap block, telling it the block is read/write/execute, and ideally removing the write ability if the block is static from that point on. You can even use VirtualProtect() to alter the page protection on existing blocks, which could be used to enable execution on the heap area (nasty hack!)
See the MSDN article for more details.
People have a tendency to use their emotions instead of logic to make purchases.
Shhhhhhh! My eBay bidders might hear you!