Same here... I just bought a Samsung ML-2851ND for $150 through microcenter.com after reading a bunch of reviews, usually starting with CNET
It does 1200x1200dpi and automatic duplexing, which is better than any of the even remotely affordable color lasers
I'm glad I didn't get a bigger laser printer... even with this one the lights dim and the UPS clicks on momentarily whenever I turn it on or when it warms up to start a print job.
If you're looking to go multifunction as well with a color inkjet (which supposedly does a better job with color prints than color laser printers) and a scanner, it looks like some of the Canon PIXMA line seems to have anything going for it as far as Linux support.
No personal experience with it, though we might eventually get one to complement the B&W laser.
'sup dawg, I heard you like to screw with w3c standards, so I got you a browser fo your browser so people can surf the net while they surf the net.
But really, as an earlier/. post had mentioned, this makes a lot of sense for Google, in that it's the only logical way to get their web services platform to be used by people who are stuck with IE6, 7, 8 (through ignorance or corporate policy or laziness).
I'd say it's quite a bit different between getting "You must install the Flash plugin to use this site" messages, as opposed to "For best results, please view this site with a w3c-standards compliant browser, and if you're too lazy to do that, just click the "allow" button for this plugin". I think it's great that they're giving users the option of keeping the interface and UI and bookmarks
and whatever that people are accustomed to. And I don't expect it to take long before the Mozilla people offer a gecko rendering plugin for IE if they haven't already:P
Funny coincidence, I just put in my pre-order for a Nokia N900 last night. Amazon has it at a 10% discount from Nokia's pre-order site.
I've been a long-time Palm fan (I'm still carrying my Palm T|X with the funky touchscreen around, for crying out loud, and still keep all of my PIM sync'd with jpilot). I'd been waiting eagerly for years for their new Linux-based PalmOS to save them, but the lack of expandable memory in the Pre convinced me to keep waiting.
Maemo has a free Palm Garnet emulator, so I should still be able to run most of the legacy PalmOS apps I've grown used to having. On the Pre, you have to pay extra for their legacy Palm app emulator:P
I've also been a big Debian fan for the past decade, so Maemo's roots in that will be quite welcome and well worth the extra premium.
I've been a Voicestream / T-mobile customer for even longer, but I don't care to renew my contract with them and am a bit antsy about the handset customization.
So throwing the mouse onto one corner of the screen locks X and puts on a pretty screensaver, another corner puts the display on standby, and one corner disables the screensaver for when I'm watching movies or slideshows or something like that.
At some point, I recompiled brightside to use xscreensaver-command instead of gnome-screensaver-command, but I eventually gave up on that.
I also use xbindkeys + xbindkeys-config to configure some of the extra keys on my multimedia keyboard to do things like that too.
The European version of L4D really ought to replace all of the violence with sex. It would take surprisingly little coding... you and your fellow vacationers are traipsing through streets filled with sex-crazed ravers who throw themselves at you and pile onto you in an orgy of lust, and only your fellow friends can rescue you by pleasing them with a variety of sex toys you have at your disposal.
Sound effects and animations can pretty much stay as-is, all they'd have to do is replace the weapons with dildos and vibrators.
OK, this is kinda backwards and probably something of a joke, but I'd boot the other computer off of a PendriveLinux (I like the LinuxMint variety). Then I mount the computer's disks and copy files to/from them. http://www.pendrivelinux.com/
Another wonky way to do this without rebooting into Linux is to have a small FAT partition with qemu or some other portable x86 emulator and boot the pendriveLinux in a virtual machine. Then use samba to transfer files from the USB filesystem to the host machine over the virtual network.
Hey, you did ask for creativity:P
FWIW, I actually have done both of these things before using KNOPPIX LiveCDs... just recently got around to making USBdrive versions of them now that large USB drives are a commodity. I'd never really gotten into USB pendrives since I mostly tend to move files over the network or would just access my computer remotely over VNC or ssh to get stuff done.
I'm eagerly awaiting for this unit to come out, since it looks like the only thing worth upgrading to from my elderly Palm TX.
Haven't been impressed much by any of the iPhones, Android, the Pre, and especially not any of the Blackberries I've been issued through work. I would have bought an N810 some time ago if it didn't look like the N900 was close on the horizon.
I actually like these things, if only because they take credit cards instead of having me search under my seat for loose change, or having to go accost nearby shopkeepers to break a 20. Baltimore started using them in the inner harbor area, and they're also somewhat similar to the way parking garages work at airports now.
I mean, they're designed for tourists. If you're a local, then you already have a parking space through work, or you know how to take transit downtown.
Anyway, I find them a wonderful improvement compared to regular parking meters, which also break or malfunction. If one of these deals goes south, you just walk a bit to the next one and buy a ticket. No lost parking spaces or parking tickets due to broken meters.
I don't really care for the other version of "smart meters" they have in some places - I think Rehoboth Beach uses them - where they consolidate 6 meters into 1 station, and you have to follow the signs and still have to pay for your particular assigned space, once you figure out which one it is since most of the numbers painted on the pavement get worn out. I guess perhaps it ostensibly eliminates the part where you have to walk back to your car to place your parking ticket... but I always find myself walking back and forth to make sure I paid for the right spot:P
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff I'd like to try to build in virtual communities like Second Life, but it's stuff like this that makes me shy away. I think if I had to create virtual mockups for architectural / engineering review, I'd try to use blender and maybe try to get it working in the unreal engine if the blender game engine wasn't enough. Not as much community access as SecondLife provides, but at least you work would be safe.
On a related note... I currently launch a copy of Windows running on an old laptop or even from VMware or VirtualBox to drive my cheap USB multifunction printer device from Linux. The drawback is that I have to print to ps or pdf files first and transfer them to the Windows box for printing, rather than printing directly.
Is there a way to turn that setup into a network postscript printer that can be printed to directly from *NIX? The regular Windows printer sharing still relies on the clients having the lousy Win32 printer drivers. There must be some software that you can run on a Windows box that can print to its printer using the proprietary drivers, but make the setup look like a normal postscript printer to the rest of the network. Google searches have turned up nothing promising:/
And yeah.. Why only present those Web oriented languages (although Perl could probably be taken out)..
Not that I've RTFA, but I'll bite...
one, they're languages that people are using with corporate backing
two, the web and "service oriented architectures" are where a lot of programming is going to take place in the future. You won't have programs running on individual computer systems so much anymore, but rather networked programs talking to other networked programs to get stuff done.
PERL was pretty web-oriented, back in the day... Slashdot was all perl at some point. Also I suppose its inclusion might represent or at least bridge to a lot of systems administration scripting languages, like sh, tcsh, maybe even tcl/tk which people wouldn't exactly take seriously for application development nowadays.
The annual estimates used by my current insurance provider seems to work well enough. And if that isn't proof enough, they could simply track my odometer readings when they do the emissions inspections or something.
Being an infrequent (and thus probably inexperienced) driver doesn't necessarily make you less of a risk. My car insurance is currently pretty dirt cheap ($400 / yr.) due to many factors (it's our only car, we're married and over 25, and our speeding and accident record has been clean for the past 5+ years). But we drive plenty, both for work and recreation... at least 15k / yr.
In fact, the one time I did get into an accident, it took two other morons acting in concert... one in front of me to stop at a green light, and one in a fully-loaded Mack behind me to stop not.
Anyway, I'm all in favor of using technology to improve things like traffic reporting and stuff like that, but I don't think insurance is one of the primary applications.
You probably don't necessarily want to find the "best quality" image, but rather the image that was closest to the original.
I take it you're either trying to eliminate the low-quality duplicates or thumbnails from a really large collection of pr0n, or trying to write an image search engine that tries to present the "best" rendition of a particular image first.
As a quick first pass (after you've run through to collect all the similar images into separate groups), you'd obviously want to find the version of the image with the highest resolution. This might let you easily throw out thumbnails or scaled down versions you might come across. Of course, some dorks will upscale images and post them somewhere, so you might still want to hang on to some of them for the second stage.
For the second pass, you'd likely want to scan through the metadata first, especially stuff exposed by EXIF. So you'd want to give higher scores to EXIF data that makes it sound like it came directly off a digital camera or scanner, and bump down the desirability of pictures that appeared to have been edited by any sort of photo editing software.
Then maybe you want to look at something that would rank down watermarks or other modifications.
Another step would be to compare compression quality, but I think that's what most of the other posts are concentrating on. But this is a difficult step because it can be easily fooled, since idiots can re-save a low quality image with the compression quality cranked all the way up so the file size becomes high even though the actual image quality is worse than the original. You probably need to run it through one of those "photoshop detectors" that could tell you whether the image has been through smoothing or other filters in a photo editor. The originals (especially in raw format and maybe high quality JPEG) will have a certain type of CCD noise signature that your software might be able to detect. In the same vein, a poorly-compressed JPEG will have lots of JPEG quantization artifacts that your software might be able to detect as well. Otherwise, you're kinda left with zooming in on pics and eyeballing it.
Finally you might be left with a group of images that are exactly the same but have different file names... you probably want some way to store some of the more useful bits of descriptive text as search/tag metadata, but then choose the most consistent file naming convention or slap on your own based on your own metadata.
Hopefully this gives you a start to important parts of the process that you might have overlooked...
I think Nagios should provide a good start.. they've recently added a lot of scalability features. Though it has a high learning curve and all of its configuration is done in text, I've always found it worth the time and effort. I currently use it to monitor services on a couple hundred machines.
Munin is a bit simpler, but I like the graphs it provides which occasionally are more useful than the data Nagios provides. In some cases, Nagios might tell me that a server went down, but I'd look at Munin and see that the server room temperature spiked to 90F before then. Also it's neat to see the uptime graphs for the year.
While it might not be practical to use GKrellm all the time, I'd find it useful for real-time feedback. You might set something up where you can launch a gkrellm client to a server of interest while you're working on it. Then you can see the effects of things you do without waiting for Nagios to refresh in 5-10 minutes.
Re:Why does VLC render video like crap?
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
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· Score: 1
There's additional deblocking that you can turn on by setting "Input & Codecs | Codecs / Muxers | Post-Processing quality" to 6. This will smooth out quantization artifacts due to high levels of compression -- essentially, it will get rid of the grey squares that seem to show up particularly in dark shadowy areas.
But everyone honors the honor system. Well, at least honest people. But as long as you can catch and reprimand the few crooks out there, then you've got a pretty good system going.
Frankly, I don't know why watermarking isn't in higher use. It could even add an element of personalization ("This album / movie expressly prepared for John Q. Smith") and help communities self-police themselves so we're not wasting government money on DRM enforcement / investigation etc. If the studios find out who's redistributing their work, it's a simple matter to report and disable their account.
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It does 1200x1200dpi and automatic duplexing, which is better than any of the even remotely affordable color lasers I'm glad I didn't get a bigger laser printer... even with this one the lights dim and the UPS clicks on momentarily whenever I turn it on or when it warms up to start a print job.
I originally wanted to go the multifunction route, and spent a long time jumping between the Linux printer compatibility list and the http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html">SANE compatibility list. Hardly any multifunction device was supported at all by both :/
If you're looking to go multifunction as well with a color inkjet (which supposedly does a better job with color prints than color laser printers) and a scanner, it looks like some of the Canon PIXMA line seems to have anything going for it as far as Linux support. No personal experience with it, though we might eventually get one to complement the B&W laser.
'sup dawg, I heard you like to screw with w3c standards, so I got you a browser fo your browser so people can surf the net while they surf the net.
But really, as an earlier /. post had mentioned, this makes a lot of sense for Google, in that it's the only logical way to get their web services platform to be used by people who are stuck with IE6, 7, 8 (through ignorance or corporate policy or laziness).
I'd say it's quite a bit different between getting "You must install the Flash plugin to use this site" messages, as opposed to "For best results, please view this site with a w3c-standards compliant browser, and if you're too lazy to do that, just click the "allow" button for this plugin". I think it's great that they're giving users the option of keeping the interface and UI and bookmarks :P
and whatever that people are accustomed to. And I don't expect it to take long before the Mozilla people offer a gecko rendering plugin for IE if they haven't already
Funny coincidence, I just put in my pre-order for a Nokia N900 last night. Amazon has it at a 10% discount from Nokia's pre-order site.
I've been a long-time Palm fan (I'm still carrying my Palm T|X with the funky touchscreen around, for crying out loud, and still keep all of my PIM sync'd with jpilot). I'd been waiting eagerly for years for their new Linux-based PalmOS to save them, but the lack of expandable memory in the Pre convinced me to keep waiting.
Maemo has a free Palm Garnet emulator, so I should still be able to run most of the legacy PalmOS apps I've grown used to having. On the Pre, you have to pay extra for their legacy Palm app emulator :P
I've also been a big Debian fan for the past decade, so Maemo's roots in that will be quite welcome and well worth the extra premium.
I've been a Voicestream / T-mobile customer for even longer, but I don't care to renew my contract with them and am a bit antsy about the handset customization.
I run "brightside" to enable hot corner actions in X.
http://lifehacker.com/263508/add-screen-actions-with-brightside
So throwing the mouse onto one corner of the screen locks X and puts on a pretty screensaver, another corner puts the display on standby, and one corner disables the screensaver for when I'm watching movies or slideshows or something like that.
At some point, I recompiled brightside to use xscreensaver-command instead of gnome-screensaver-command, but I eventually gave up on that.
I also use xbindkeys + xbindkeys-config to configure some of the extra keys on my multimedia keyboard to do things like that too.
3. ???
The European version of L4D really ought to replace all of the violence with sex. It would take surprisingly little coding... you and your fellow vacationers are traipsing through streets filled with sex-crazed ravers who throw themselves at you and pile onto you in an orgy of lust, and only your fellow friends can rescue you by pleasing them with a variety of sex toys you have at your disposal.
Sound effects and animations can pretty much stay as-is, all they'd have to do is replace the weapons with dildos and vibrators.
OK, this is kinda backwards and probably something of a joke, but I'd boot the other computer off of a PendriveLinux (I like the LinuxMint variety). Then I mount the computer's disks and copy files to/from them.
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/
Another wonky way to do this without rebooting into Linux is to have a small FAT partition with qemu or some other portable x86 emulator and boot the pendriveLinux in a virtual machine. Then use samba to transfer files from the USB filesystem to the host machine over the virtual network.
Hey, you did ask for creativity :P
FWIW, I actually have done both of these things before using KNOPPIX LiveCDs... just recently got around to making USBdrive versions of them now that large USB drives are a commodity. I'd never really gotten into USB pendrives since I mostly tend to move files over the network or would just access my computer remotely over VNC or ssh to get stuff done.
Brilliant!
If those are the logfiles, I'd hate to see what a coredump looks like.
Oh wait, inappropriate analogy :/
Even further - plant a tree.
... but then you'd have to cut the tree down to make paper for the book and that's like not cool dude. You totally misstepped there.
You're thinking of their MID: http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/19/nokias-maemo-5-rx-51-n900-tablet-gets-exhaustively-previewed/
I'm eagerly awaiting for this unit to come out, since it looks like the only thing worth upgrading to from my elderly Palm TX.
Haven't been impressed much by any of the iPhones, Android, the Pre, and especially not any of the Blackberries I've been issued through work. I would have bought an N810 some time ago if it didn't look like the N900 was close on the horizon.
I actually like these things, if only because they take credit cards instead of having me search under my seat for loose change, or having to go accost nearby shopkeepers to break a 20. Baltimore started using them in the inner harbor area, and they're also somewhat similar to the way parking garages work at airports now.
I mean, they're designed for tourists. If you're a local, then you already have a parking space through work, or you know how to take transit downtown.
Anyway, I find them a wonderful improvement compared to regular parking meters, which also break or malfunction. If one of these deals goes south, you just walk a bit to the next one and buy a ticket. No lost parking spaces or parking tickets due to broken meters.
I don't really care for the other version of "smart meters" they have in some places - I think Rehoboth Beach uses them - where they consolidate 6 meters into 1 station, and you have to follow the signs and still have to pay for your particular assigned space, once you figure out which one it is since most of the numbers painted on the pavement get worn out. I guess perhaps it ostensibly eliminates the part where you have to walk back to your car to place your parking ticket... but I always find myself walking back and forth to make sure I paid for the right spot :P
+5 insightful.
That's pretty much what my big company does.
Maybe the region/domain or functional group will be part of the FQDN, but the hostname will just be the service tag.
Yeah, there's a lot of stuff I'd like to try to build in virtual communities like Second Life, but it's stuff like this that makes me shy away. I think if I had to create virtual mockups for architectural / engineering review, I'd try to use blender and maybe try to get it working in the unreal engine if the blender game engine wasn't enough. Not as much community access as SecondLife provides, but at least you work would be safe.
Why wait for another Aliens movie? Grab your copy of Tremulous and get going! Pronto!
My nightmares involve not being able to pounce away from a chainsuit fast enough.
On a related note... I currently launch a copy of Windows running on an old laptop or even from VMware or VirtualBox to drive my cheap USB multifunction printer device from Linux. The drawback is that I have to print to ps or pdf files first and transfer them to the Windows box for printing, rather than printing directly.
Is there a way to turn that setup into a network postscript printer that can be printed to directly from *NIX? The regular Windows printer sharing still relies on the clients having the lousy Win32 printer drivers. There must be some software that you can run on a Windows box that can print to its printer using the proprietary drivers, but make the setup look like a normal postscript printer to the rest of the network. Google searches have turned up nothing promising :/
Huh, interesting... makes you wonder if playing Russian roulette counts as suicide...
And yeah.. Why only present those Web oriented languages (although Perl could probably be taken out)..
Not that I've RTFA, but I'll bite...
The annual estimates used by my current insurance provider seems to work well enough. And if that isn't proof enough, they could simply track my odometer readings when they do the emissions inspections or something.
Being an infrequent (and thus probably inexperienced) driver doesn't necessarily make you less of a risk. My car insurance is currently pretty dirt cheap ($400 / yr.) due to many factors (it's our only car, we're married and over 25, and our speeding and accident record has been clean for the past 5+ years). But we drive plenty, both for work and recreation... at least 15k / yr.
In fact, the one time I did get into an accident, it took two other morons acting in concert... one in front of me to stop at a green light, and one in a fully-loaded Mack behind me to stop not.
Anyway, I'm all in favor of using technology to improve things like traffic reporting and stuff like that, but I don't think insurance is one of the primary applications.
I've been buying more games than ever since I got started on Steam with the Orange Box late last year.
Most news sources are crediting the recession with a surge in gaming, being one of the cheaper entertainment options in hours-whiled-away-per-$
You probably don't necessarily want to find the "best quality" image, but rather the image that was closest to the original.
I take it you're either trying to eliminate the low-quality duplicates or thumbnails from a really large collection of pr0n, or trying to write an image search engine that tries to present the "best" rendition of a particular image first.
For the second pass, you'd likely want to scan through the metadata first, especially stuff exposed by EXIF. So you'd want to give higher scores to EXIF data that makes it sound like it came directly off a digital camera or scanner, and bump down the desirability of pictures that appeared to have been edited by any sort of photo editing software.
Then maybe you want to look at something that would rank down watermarks or other modifications.
Another step would be to compare compression quality, but I think that's what most of the other posts are concentrating on. But this is a difficult step because it can be easily fooled, since idiots can re-save a low quality image with the compression quality cranked all the way up so the file size becomes high even though the actual image quality is worse than the original. You probably need to run it through one of those "photoshop detectors" that could tell you whether the image has been through smoothing or other filters in a photo editor. The originals (especially in raw format and maybe high quality JPEG) will have a certain type of CCD noise signature that your software might be able to detect. In the same vein, a poorly-compressed JPEG will have lots of JPEG quantization artifacts that your software might be able to detect as well. Otherwise, you're kinda left with zooming in on pics and eyeballing it.
Finally you might be left with a group of images that are exactly the same but have different file names... you probably want some way to store some of the more useful bits of descriptive text as search/tag metadata, but then choose the most consistent file naming convention or slap on your own based on your own metadata.
Hopefully this gives you a start to important parts of the process that you might have overlooked...
Nah, old timers are actually kinda polite. You whippershnappers.
I think Nagios should provide a good start.. they've recently added a lot of scalability features. Though it has a high learning curve and all of its configuration is done in text, I've always found it worth the time and effort. I currently use it to monitor services on a couple hundred machines.
Munin is a bit simpler, but I like the graphs it provides which occasionally are more useful than the data Nagios provides. In some cases, Nagios might tell me that a server went down, but I'd look at Munin and see that the server room temperature spiked to 90F before then. Also it's neat to see the uptime graphs for the year.
While it might not be practical to use GKrellm all the time, I'd find it useful for real-time feedback. You might set something up where you can launch a gkrellm client to a server of interest while you're working on it. Then you can see the effects of things you do without waiting for Nagios to refresh in 5-10 minutes.
There's additional deblocking that you can turn on by setting "Input & Codecs | Codecs / Muxers | Post-Processing quality" to 6. This will smooth out quantization artifacts due to high levels of compression -- essentially, it will get rid of the grey squares that seem to show up particularly in dark shadowy areas.
Less money on software = more money for hardware. I can see how this can benefit Dell.
But everyone honors the honor system. Well, at least honest people. But as long as you can catch and reprimand the few crooks out there, then you've got a pretty good system going.
Frankly, I don't know why watermarking isn't in higher use. It could even add an element of personalization ("This album / movie expressly prepared for John Q. Smith") and help communities self-police themselves so we're not wasting government money on DRM enforcement / investigation etc. If the studios find out who's redistributing their work, it's a simple matter to report and disable their account.