Perhaps ZIP+4 resolves to just a few people, but the TiVo is only told your 5-digit zip... TiVo, Inc. could correlate it with mailing addresses I s'pose, but I doubt that they do, it would generate an absurd data file and could not be honestly called "aggregate."
I think this is great - it means that TiVo users, who as early adopters of technology tend to have tastes more like mine, will have a greater say in what shows get produced and kept on the air!
Perhaps with this, Firefly would not have been cancelled...
Honestly, try out the Logitech wireless controllers. I love mine, they feel much better in my hands than either the vendor's controllers or the MadCatz, both for the PS2 and the XBox.
I've considered going with a lossless format, and my next time around I might very well do that - for the moment, the $/GB ratio on external FW disks isn't quite low enough. That will probably change by the next time I do this.
As for Ogg Vorbis... I'd love to, but until iPods play 'em, that's not an option.
They're both great suggestions, though, they just don't happen to work for the technology choices I've made.
A critical piece to this working is that I cut several pieces of MDF to act as seperators in the lateral file cabinet.
Without them, once you have more than 20-30 pages, the pages all tend to slump over and slide beneath each other. The MDF seperators keep them in line and firmly packed, they work like a charm.
I have roughly 1500 CDs. I've ripped them all to an external 160 GB firewire disk (with another one for backup), so I want to store them in compact a way as possible.
What I do is go buy those CD folders, in as large a size as possible. I cut them open (much cheaper than buy loose pages in packs), take the pages, fill them with CDs by band, and then file them in a lateral file cabinet which also functions as my printer & scanner stand.
I can get them at any time, and it's still reasonably compact. In fact, right now I'm in the middle of reripping from 256 KBps mp3s to 160 Kbps AACs, so having them arranged this way works pretty well.
I then spool music to several near-silent computers in the house over Ethernet. In this case, the whole thing is using Macs and iTunes, but it's just as feasible to do it all with x86 boxes - my first rev used an OpenBSD server spooling through icecast.
Acutally, Logitech makes the best damned feeling gamepads I've ever held in my hands. Both their wireless XBox and wireless PS2 controllers are a wonder to hold, hands down better than other companies' for the same platforms.
IMO, of course. But they are definitely worth checking out and I intend to use the Logitech wireless XBox gamepad with my macs.
If its a 600Mhz G3 running OS X, then it WILL be slow.
Nonsense. I'm writing this an a 600 MHz G3, a white iBook. It's quite zippy, thank you. I can tell the difference between this and my dual 1 GHZ G4 at home, but this is quite acceptable, enough so that I use the laptop most of the time at home when I'm not doing something where I really need the G4s, like running Virtual PC.
The key is to have enough memory, I have 640 MB. I'd bet that the people who complain about 600 MHz G3s just don't have enough memory.
After 18 months, a machine at the same price point should be twice as fast. That's basic Moore's law, and PeeCees follow the rule. The technical details will of course be different - Moore's law is about bang for buck, not about particulars of the processors, G4, G3, or whatever.
I'm comparing machines at the same or similar price-point. The 12-inch PowerBook costs almost twice what I paid for my 600 MHz iBook, so you really can't compare them.
But, come on... even Apple didn't think enough of this to say that the iBooks have been upgraded their front page. Their store redesign is bigger news in their opinion.
Hate to say it, but this is pretty disappointing. I bought my current iBook 18 months ago - it's a 600 MHz G3, very close in configuration to these iBooks. Only a 50% speed bump in a year and a half? That's just pathetic.
It seems pretty clear to me that Apple is holding their iBook line back, limiting them to G3s, to encourage sales of their pro laptops. They are the only system Apple still sells with G3s, the iMac went G4 a long time ago and the low-end eMac is thoroughly G4. Oh well.
I love my iBook, and I'd love to upgrade it after this long - but not for only a 50% increase in speed. I might be an Apple die-hard, but I'm not quite that eager to give them my money.
Yes, it can be so argued. However, the reason I say that it'll be more difficult to make that argument is that there are hard statistics for fax machines. Paper and toner are concrete, it's easy to put a value on them - the court quoted estimates that fax owners spend roughly $100/year printing junk faxes.
While in theory both fax messages and email messages are printed only at the discretion of the recipients, the fact is that 80% of all faxes received are automatically printed - read the court's opinion.
It's the ability to put hard numbers on the costs that this opinion rested upon, which is why I question the direct applicability to spam.
The court considered two ways in which faxes hurt the recipients:
They cost the recipient substantial resources ($100/year)
They deny the recipient use of their own equipment
Spammers could argue that neither of these apply to spam. The first is an issue because 80% of faxes automatically print, consuming paper and and ink. The argument having to do email is much more nebulous, requiring the court to consider the time consumed in deleting faxes as a resource. While it might be a reasonable argument to make, it's tricky when considered against a first amendment argument.
The second point is even harder to make against spam. While a fax machine is completely consumed while receiving a fax, a computer can do other things while receiving spam. The strongest argument that could be made is that the bandwidth of a dialup modem is consumed by the spam, which is still a weaker argument than is presented for fax machines.
So while both of the points are certainly arguable, it's not as easy an argument as it is with faxes. I do believe that antispam legislation is constitutional, I'm not sure that this particular decision does much to further that cause.
It's actually really straightforward, I do it all the time.
Go to your Windows control panel ->printers folder. Add a printer of type "Mac Printer (inkjet)" or "...(postscript)". Tell it that you want to be local, you'll be using the Mac OS X printing system to do the transport.
I didn't have to do any more configuring, since my network printer is my Mac OS X default printer.
I'd strongly disagree. If you want more free-form gaming, you're probably best off going with a system designed around story telling, like White Wolf's system.
The thing about the older D&D systems, IMO of course, is that they took a lot of different ideas and tried to be everything. You ended up with an incoherent mess.
And, my personal taste says that d20 is very well suited for story-telling - once you "get" the rules, it becomes very, very easy to "shoot from the hip". I've judged many d20 RPGA tournaments, and it's really a breeze, you can model just about anything the players want to do, and usually reduce it to a single roll of a d20.
But hey, that's just my opinion and experience. 2nd edition D&D had lost me to TSR/WotC, I couldn't stand it. 3rd edition won me back.
Out of curiosity, those of you who have played all three and a half revisions of D&D, which one did you like the most?
Definitely 3rd edition/d20. It's the scientist/geek in me, but the fact that 3rd Edition is so darned internally consistent, through and through, is truly wonderful. To make a long reach of an analogy, by the time D&D->AD&D-> became v2, it was like trying to edit code that had been on by 10 different people, each of whom favored a different programming style. Any attempt to generalize was guaranteed to contradict another rule somewhere else. If you like to use rules to your own advantage, great, but it always threatened the willing suspension of disbelief.
d20 D&D (3ed) was revamped from the ground up by people with actual game design experience and it thoroughly shows.
The only real complaint I have is that it's very much 2-dimensional - when you start dealing with situations with entities at different elevations, you have to fall back on common sense a bit too often, too often because everybody was issued a different version of "common sense."
Is it possible to take an OpenDarwin install and put the closed source Mac OS X on top of it? I'd love to be able to play with the stuff underneath my Mac OS X install, but don't care to bother if I won't be able to run the pretty Quartz stuff on top of it.
The more music you have, the more important it is to have random access to that music. It's no great shakes to find a CD you want to listen to if you have 10 or 100 CDs. Not so for > 1000.
I have roughly 1300 CDs, bought since 1985 (so far, 1081 ripped, which is 13,938 songs). Without random access, finding that one CD that I have a hankering to hear is a nightmare - even with the CDs filed in 8-CD sheets in a lateral file cabinet. With those CDs in iTunes, it's a matter of typing a few letters into the music browser. Do I want to hear a random selection of Grateful Dead tunes? No sweat. Pink Floyd from beginning to end? Easy. Yes, including solo projects by its various members? A little more difficult, but I won't break a sweat.
Almost 14000 (or extrapolating for the rest, 18200) is an uncomfortably large percentage of the iTunes limit of 32000. It's not quite large enough that I'm going apeshit about this, but somebody who had only twice as many CDs as I do would be screwed, for no good reason.
(Advice to others with large collections: buy an external Firewire disk and back your library up!!)
The Opera folks are getting cranky at Apple, but the fact is that it isn't Apple that's cooked their goose, it's open source that has (via KHTML).
Opera is a result of the duplication of a lot of the KHTML work, and they were relying on Mozilla's bloatedness to be their competitve advantage. All Apple has done with Safari is put a (very nice) wrapper around KHTML.
This is important. Many of the GNU uber alles crowd believe that its their mission to put the proprietary software vendors out of the intellectual property business. This is a success for them.
Slashdot Mirror
3D modelling and rendering would be helped quite a bit.
Check out SketchUp - expensive software, but the downloadale demo gives you 8 hours in which to become addicted to it.
Perhaps ZIP+4 resolves to just a few people, but the TiVo is only told your 5-digit zip... TiVo, Inc. could correlate it with mailing addresses I s'pose, but I doubt that they do, it would generate an absurd data file and could not be honestly called "aggregate."
I think this is great - it means that TiVo users, who as early adopters of technology tend to have tastes more like mine, will have a greater say in what shows get produced and kept on the air!
Perhaps with this, Firefly would not have been cancelled...
Flamebait? WTF??!?
Honestly, try out the Logitech wireless controllers. I love mine, they feel much better in my hands than either the vendor's controllers or the MadCatz, both for the PS2 and the XBox.
I've considered going with a lossless format, and my next time around I might very well do that - for the moment, the $/GB ratio on external FW disks isn't quite low enough. That will probably change by the next time I do this.
As for Ogg Vorbis... I'd love to, but until iPods play 'em, that's not an option.
They're both great suggestions, though, they just don't happen to work for the technology choices I've made.
Oh, something I forgot to add.
A critical piece to this working is that I cut several pieces of MDF to act as seperators in the lateral file cabinet.
Without them, once you have more than 20-30 pages, the pages all tend to slump over and slide beneath each other. The MDF seperators keep them in line and firmly packed, they work like a charm.
Oy, tell me about it.
I have roughly 1500 CDs. I've ripped them all to an external 160 GB firewire disk (with another one for backup), so I want to store them in compact a way as possible.
What I do is go buy those CD folders, in as large a size as possible. I cut them open (much cheaper than buy loose pages in packs), take the pages, fill them with CDs by band, and then file them in a lateral file cabinet which also functions as my printer & scanner stand.
I can get them at any time, and it's still reasonably compact. In fact, right now I'm in the middle of reripping from 256 KBps mp3s to 160 Kbps AACs, so having them arranged this way works pretty well.
I then spool music to several near-silent computers in the house over Ethernet. In this case, the whole thing is using Macs and iTunes, but it's just as feasible to do it all with x86 boxes - my first rev used an OpenBSD server spooling through icecast.
I was more intrigued by the "1.8 GHZ per second" claim.
1.8 Billion instructions per second per second. It's about time that somebody made an accelerating chip - way to go, IBM!
Ummm...
Acutally, Logitech makes the best damned feeling gamepads I've ever held in my hands. Both their wireless XBox and wireless PS2 controllers are a wonder to hold, hands down better than other companies' for the same platforms.
IMO, of course. But they are definitely worth checking out and I intend to use the Logitech wireless XBox gamepad with my macs.
The key is to have enough memory, I have 640 MB. I'd bet that the people who complain about 600 MHz G3s just don't have enough memory.
You're totally missing what I'm saying.
After 18 months, a machine at the same price point should be twice as fast. That's basic Moore's law, and PeeCees follow the rule. The technical details will of course be different - Moore's law is about bang for buck, not about particulars of the processors, G4, G3, or whatever.
Apples and Oranges. Er....
I'm comparing machines at the same or similar price-point. The 12-inch PowerBook costs almost twice what I paid for my 600 MHz iBook, so you really can't compare them.
But, come on... even Apple didn't think enough of this to say that the iBooks have been upgraded their front page. Their store redesign is bigger news in their opinion.
Hate to say it, but this is pretty disappointing. I bought my current iBook 18 months ago - it's a 600 MHz G3, very close in configuration to these iBooks. Only a 50% speed bump in a year and a half? That's just pathetic.
It seems pretty clear to me that Apple is holding their iBook line back, limiting them to G3s, to encourage sales of their pro laptops. They are the only system Apple still sells with G3s, the iMac went G4 a long time ago and the low-end eMac is thoroughly G4. Oh well.
I love my iBook, and I'd love to upgrade it after this long - but not for only a 50% increase in speed. I might be an Apple die-hard, but I'm not quite that eager to give them my money.
Yes, it can be so argued. However, the reason I say that it'll be more difficult to make that argument is that there are hard statistics for fax machines. Paper and toner are concrete, it's easy to put a value on them - the court quoted estimates that fax owners spend roughly $100/year printing junk faxes.
While in theory both fax messages and email messages are printed only at the discretion of the recipients, the fact is that 80% of all faxes received are automatically printed - read the court's opinion.
It's the ability to put hard numbers on the costs that this opinion rested upon, which is why I question the direct applicability to spam.
Spammers could argue that neither of these apply to spam. The first is an issue because 80% of faxes automatically print, consuming paper and and ink. The argument having to do email is much more nebulous, requiring the court to consider the time consumed in deleting faxes as a resource. While it might be a reasonable argument to make, it's tricky when considered against a first amendment argument.
The second point is even harder to make against spam. While a fax machine is completely consumed while receiving a fax, a computer can do other things while receiving spam. The strongest argument that could be made is that the bandwidth of a dialup modem is consumed by the spam, which is still a weaker argument than is presented for fax machines.
So while both of the points are certainly arguable, it's not as easy an argument as it is with faxes. I do believe that antispam legislation is constitutional, I'm not sure that this particular decision does much to further that cause.
I prefer the adventure shells.
The core cannot defend itself. It dies.
It's actually really straightforward, I do it all the time.
Go to your Windows control panel ->printers folder. Add a printer of type "Mac Printer (inkjet)" or "...(postscript)". Tell it that you want to be local, you'll be using the Mac OS X printing system to do the transport.
I didn't have to do any more configuring, since my network printer is my Mac OS X default printer.
I'd strongly disagree. If you want more free-form gaming, you're probably best off going with a system designed around story telling, like White Wolf's system.
The thing about the older D&D systems, IMO of course, is that they took a lot of different ideas and tried to be everything. You ended up with an incoherent mess.
And, my personal taste says that d20 is very well suited for story-telling - once you "get" the rules, it becomes very, very easy to "shoot from the hip". I've judged many d20 RPGA tournaments, and it's really a breeze, you can model just about anything the players want to do, and usually reduce it to a single roll of a d20.
But hey, that's just my opinion and experience. 2nd edition D&D had lost me to TSR/WotC, I couldn't stand it. 3rd edition won me back.
d20 D&D (3ed) was revamped from the ground up by people with actual game design experience and it thoroughly shows.
The only real complaint I have is that it's very much 2-dimensional - when you start dealing with situations with entities at different elevations, you have to fall back on common sense a bit too often, too often because everybody was issued a different version of "common sense."
Nope. I want to play with modifying the kernel, I already run X11, gimp, etc.
Oh well.
OK, this is tangential but relevent.
Is it possible to take an OpenDarwin install and put the closed source Mac OS X on top of it? I'd love to be able to play with the stuff underneath my Mac OS X install, but don't care to bother if I won't be able to run the pretty Quartz stuff on top of it.
Thanks...
The more music you have, the more important it is to have random access to that music. It's no great shakes to find a CD you want to listen to if you have 10 or 100 CDs. Not so for > 1000.
I have roughly 1300 CDs, bought since 1985 (so far, 1081 ripped, which is 13,938 songs). Without random access, finding that one CD that I have a hankering to hear is a nightmare - even with the CDs filed in 8-CD sheets in a lateral file cabinet. With those CDs in iTunes, it's a matter of typing a few letters into the music browser. Do I want to hear a random selection of Grateful Dead tunes? No sweat. Pink Floyd from beginning to end? Easy. Yes, including solo projects by its various members? A little more difficult, but I won't break a sweat.
Almost 14000 (or extrapolating for the rest, 18200) is an uncomfortably large percentage of the iTunes limit of 32000. It's not quite large enough that I'm going apeshit about this, but somebody who had only twice as many CDs as I do would be screwed, for no good reason.
(Advice to others with large collections: buy an external Firewire disk and back your library up!!)
Personally, I use those 160 GB firewire drives.
The Opera folks are getting cranky at Apple, but the fact is that it isn't Apple that's cooked their goose, it's open source that has (via KHTML).
Opera is a result of the duplication of a lot of the KHTML work, and they were relying on Mozilla's bloatedness to be their competitve advantage. All Apple has done with Safari is put a (very nice) wrapper around KHTML.
This is important. Many of the GNU uber alles crowd believe that its their mission to put the proprietary software vendors out of the intellectual property business. This is a success for them.
Actually, no, case insensitivity is a bad thing. Not for aesthetic reasons, but precisely because it violates POSIX.