As a recent PC-Mac switcher, I'm finding that I like Sidetrack's right-click (top right corner, medium-large range) much better than a traditional right-click button. Sidetrack lets me put it in a place that feels much more natural!
Microsoft has seemingly attempted to quash web standards by making early and strong support for CSS1 and CSS2 (thus making it a better renderer than Netscape 4), and then all but abandoning web standards in favor of Avalon. Does Mozilla have any plans to push web design technologies forward again, through more complete CSS2 support and CSS3? (and also widespread deployment of CSV?)
re: The whole point of the mac mini is it's small form factor
re: It completely ruins the point of having a Mac mini.
No, that's what YOU think the "point" of a Mac Mini is. To many (if not most) of us, the point is that it's an extremely affordable Mac.
re: Part of the mac's allure is it's [sic] stylish looks. This is just as dumb as putting a PC in a mac mini case.
Dumb to you. Cool to someone who didn't buy it for its sylish looks.
Holy crap, people. This is Slashdot. Some of like to take apart things. Some of us like to take cheap computers and make them perform like expensive computers. We're hobbyists and tinkerers. Why take apart the Mac Mini? We don't need any reason better than "because we can."
Hell, if I were to build a 5-desk office that needed a simple mail server and file server, the Mac Mini is just a RAID away from perfection, at less than a quarter the price of an XServe.
The Mac Mini is a beautiful piece of hardware. I'd love to have two -- one that never gets turned on or used, just left on the mantel in a glass box with the fine china, and another that's gutted, rebuilt, and folding 24/7.
It's nice that we have better tools for browsing now (tabs, extensions, etc.), but in order to build better/pages/ we need better tools (and by tools, I don't mean new brushes/editors, I mean new PAINTS).
A real, non-proprietary system for embedded fonts. Rotational text. Better box positioning abilities. etc.
Just because MS is satisfied with near-CSS2 support doesn't mean we should be.
SVG support would be keen too... imagine fully graphic sites that didn't even need image files! Don't forget, MS is working on their own, proprietary answers for these needs, in the form of Avalon; the Web needs to lead, not follow.
Le Guin has written another public apology, published at Slate.
I have mixed feelings about her reactions. She seems a lot more peeved with the skintones of her characters being changed than with the entire plot being gang-raped.
I'm really bummed that his Eschaton books didn't capture the public's imagination quite the way the Heechee books did. Well, perhaps they weren't quite as good, but they were darned good, and still don't feel quite concluded.
I bet someone here can answer this question for me. Why are all these optical discs (aside from the venerable Laserdisc) manufactured with the same dimensions as the Compact Disc?
Soon we'll have three or four 120mm discs. Why not make the Blu-Rays a little wider, so there's no chance of them being inserted into a non-Blu-Ray device? (and the side benefit of a few more tracks == more space) Backward compatibility would be maintained, of course.
Is it just because it's cheaper to reuse some of the manufacturing equipment from the CD assembly lines?
I was just browsing through some old issues of Wired and came across that article you wrote about laying cable in the pacific. ITBWT Command Line is also noteworthy nonfiction; do you have any other exercies in journalism or nonfiction in mind?
I wouldn't mind one bit if Irrational's new title turns out to be a "spiritual successor" rather than a new sequel. The videogame industry suffers from a plague of sequels and a dearth of original ideas.
I enjoyed SS2 as much as every person who was lucky enough to give it a try, but after being alone on a haunted starship/base battling zombie monsters and malfunctioning security systems in SS2, Halo, Doom3, etc. I've had enough.
System Shock's style -- FINE. GREAT. Do something new with it! (it's not as if the name Shodan even has meaning to all but a handful of the truly hard-core)
There was an excellent related article a couple weeks ago in the LA Weekly, "A Small New Future"
...These are but a few of the signs that the record business is coming to grips with a small new future. That doesn't mean the industry's overall revenues will shrink, nor that record sales will go down. Right now, record sales are plainly rising... They're just not rising in the ways we've become accustomed to -- the biggest, most famous artists are no longer posting ever more impressive sales figures. Suddenly, there are more and more records selling 10,000 to 500,000 copies each year, and less and less selling 1 million to 10 million. To put it simply, the patterns that used to govern sales no longer work. The industry's biggest successes are now small ones.
Industry insiders are just as confused by the good news as they are by the bad. Here are the kinds of questions they've been asking themselves: Why doesn't Eminem break out on the order of the Beatles and sell 10 million copies of every release? Why can't Britney, Whitney, Madonna and Mariah make hits like they used to? Why can't the Strokes break through to the mainstream, stymied at 500,000 units shifted? Conversely, they wonder how a one-off Sub Pop release like the Postal Service's Give Up -- a mash-up of the niche genres of bedroom electronica and emo-punk -- has sold well over 250,000 copies. How could Matador sell a half-million copies of the debut by an unheralded New York band like Interpol? Why are bands like Modest Mouse, the Shins, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Wilco selling hundreds of thousands of records, where a few years ago they would have -- optimistically -- sold 50 thousand?
Two reasons. First, a lot of those cards are going to be sold to OEMs like Dell, who have already shifted a huge chunk of their systems to PCI-E.
Second, quantities on these new chips are extremely limited; by selling PCI-E versions, they can carefully throttle out the line and avoid making it look like there's a shortage.
It's not the music store, it's the contract
on
Beatles vs Apple
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
All the posts regarding potential confusion between Apple Records and Apple Computer (and pointing out that it's called the iTunes Music Store, not Apple Music Store) are completely missing the point.
A deal was hashed out years ago after Jobs'n'Woz called their upstart company Apple. It wouldn't be unlike you starting a music store called Dell -- Michael might have some issues with that.
Apple and Apple made an agreement -- Jobs'n'Woz could keep their corporate name if they agreed not to get in the music business. And now they've broken that contract. QED
I'm sympathetic to Apple Computer, but they don't have a leg to stand on here.
at least Walmart can afford to reimburse those customers. After all, they skim a buck from every card every month they remain unused. (If you've got an unused Walmart card from last Christmas, it's lost $9 of its value.)
Why is it no big deal when Apple does the same thing? They've been disabling already-integrated features of their video GPUs (multiple monitor support, external displays at higher resolution) in their iBooks, iMacs and eMacs for years.
Say what you will about the relative quality of PC vs. Apple computers, but at least in the PC world the manufacturers keep their products competitive by adding features, not subtracting them.
Why not? Alpha blending allows web developers to make fine adjustments to page layouts with necessitating the "recutting" of overlapping layers in Photoshop. It also allows for variance in browser layout without causing visible breaks -- thus Mozilla and KDE don't need to render "exactly" like MSIE down to the last pixel in order for layouts to basically look the same.
GIF is gunk. Can we step into the 21st century yet?
Yup. Given my driving habits I'd be quite happy to let them track my "every" move (that is, every move in my car, which is practically none) if it meant sane insurance rates.
I work within walking distance of home. All I use my car for is visiting my sister in the suburbs every weekend, and an occasional errand. At ~$100/month insurance, that works out to about $10 per trip. I simply can't afford it or justify it, so I drive uninsured. (yeah, I know)
Contrast with my brother-in-law, who has a daily two-hour commute, and thanks to suburban sprawl can't even walk to see friends. His insurance works out to about $2/trip.
I consider myself an advocate of privacy, but if some shadows organization wants to know that my car goes out to my sister's every Sunday, and they want to offer me $20/month auto insurance, then by all means bring on the RFID.
(I don't believe for a moment that this program would lead to more-fair premiums overall, though, only to more-expensive premiums for higher-risk folk)
Slashdot Mirror
somebody hand me the Spoiler Stick, this guy needs a whackin'
As a recent PC-Mac switcher, I'm finding that I like Sidetrack's right-click (top right corner, medium-large range) much better than a traditional right-click button. Sidetrack lets me put it in a place that feels much more natural!
Microsoft has seemingly attempted to quash web standards by making early and strong support for CSS1 and CSS2 (thus making it a better renderer than Netscape 4), and then all but abandoning web standards in favor of Avalon. Does Mozilla have any plans to push web design technologies forward again, through more complete CSS2 support and CSS3? (and also widespread deployment of CSV?)
Seagate Baracuda 4 LYF yooooo
re: It completely ruins the point of having a Mac mini.
No, that's what YOU think the "point" of a Mac Mini is. To many (if not most) of us, the point is that it's an extremely affordable Mac.
re: Part of the mac's allure is it's [sic] stylish looks. This is just as dumb as putting a PC in a mac mini case.
Dumb to you. Cool to someone who didn't buy it for its sylish looks.
Holy crap, people. This is Slashdot. Some of like to take apart things. Some of us like to take cheap computers and make them perform like expensive computers. We're hobbyists and tinkerers. Why take apart the Mac Mini? We don't need any reason better than "because we can."
Hell, if I were to build a 5-desk office that needed a simple mail server and file server, the Mac Mini is just a RAID away from perfection, at less than a quarter the price of an XServe.
The Mac Mini is a beautiful piece of hardware. I'd love to have two -- one that never gets turned on or used, just left on the mantel in a glass box with the fine china, and another that's gutted, rebuilt, and folding 24/7.
It's nice that we have better tools for browsing now (tabs, extensions, etc.), but in order to build better /pages/ we need better tools (and by tools, I don't mean new brushes/editors, I mean new PAINTS).
A real, non-proprietary system for embedded fonts. Rotational text. Better box positioning abilities. etc.
Just because MS is satisfied with near-CSS2 support doesn't mean we should be.
SVG support would be keen too... imagine fully graphic sites that didn't even need image files! Don't forget, MS is working on their own, proprietary answers for these needs, in the form of Avalon; the Web needs to lead, not follow.
Le Guin has written another public apology, published at Slate.
I have mixed feelings about her reactions. She seems a lot more peeved with the skintones of her characters being changed than with the entire plot being gang-raped.
I'm really bummed that his Eschaton books didn't capture the public's imagination quite the way the Heechee books did. Well, perhaps they weren't quite as good, but they were darned good, and still don't feel quite concluded.
I bet someone here can answer this question for me. Why are all these optical discs (aside from the venerable Laserdisc) manufactured with the same dimensions as the Compact Disc?
Soon we'll have three or four 120mm discs. Why not make the Blu-Rays a little wider, so there's no chance of them being inserted into a non-Blu-Ray device? (and the side benefit of a few more tracks == more space) Backward compatibility would be maintained, of course.
Is it just because it's cheaper to reuse some of the manufacturing equipment from the CD assembly lines?
I was just browsing through some old issues of Wired and came across that article you wrote about laying cable in the pacific. ITBWT Command Line is also noteworthy nonfiction; do you have any other exercies in journalism or nonfiction in mind?
the iPod mini is also rumored to bump up to 6gb. (less is more, suckaz!)
I wouldn't mind one bit if Irrational's new title turns out to be a "spiritual successor" rather than a new sequel. The videogame industry suffers from a plague of sequels and a dearth of original ideas.
I enjoyed SS2 as much as every person who was lucky enough to give it a try, but after being alone on a haunted starship/base battling zombie monsters and malfunctioning security systems in SS2, Halo, Doom3, etc. I've had enough.
System Shock's style -- FINE. GREAT. Do something new with it! (it's not as if the name Shodan even has meaning to all but a handful of the truly hard-core)
lol... uh, my record's been skipping for six days now
So this only applies to users who are burning MP3s to LP, right?
:D
it's friday, cut me some slack
No DRM or compression, just twelve bucks per CD, choice between free slow shipping and expensive overnight. Q.E.diddledeeD
Two reasons. First, a lot of those cards are going to be sold to OEMs like Dell, who have already shifted a huge chunk of their systems to PCI-E.
Second, quantities on these new chips are extremely limited; by selling PCI-E versions, they can carefully throttle out the line and avoid making it look like there's a shortage.
All the posts regarding potential confusion between Apple Records and Apple Computer (and pointing out that it's called the iTunes Music Store, not Apple Music Store) are completely missing the point.
A deal was hashed out years ago after Jobs'n'Woz called their upstart company Apple. It wouldn't be unlike you starting a music store called Dell -- Michael might have some issues with that.
Apple and Apple made an agreement -- Jobs'n'Woz could keep their corporate name if they agreed not to get in the music business. And now they've broken that contract. QED
I'm sympathetic to Apple Computer, but they don't have a leg to stand on here.
at least Walmart can afford to reimburse those customers. After all, they skim a buck from every card every month they remain unused. (If you've got an unused Walmart card from last Christmas, it's lost $9 of its value.)
Say what you will about the relative quality of PC vs. Apple computers, but at least in the PC world the manufacturers keep their products competitive by adding features, not subtracting them.
Why not? Alpha blending allows web developers to make fine adjustments to page layouts with necessitating the "recutting" of overlapping layers in Photoshop. It also allows for variance in browser layout without causing visible breaks -- thus Mozilla and KDE don't need to render "exactly" like MSIE down to the last pixel in order for layouts to basically look the same.
GIF is gunk. Can we step into the 21st century yet?
Yup. Given my driving habits I'd be quite happy to let them track my "every" move (that is, every move in my car, which is practically none) if it meant sane insurance rates.
I work within walking distance of home. All I use my car for is visiting my sister in the suburbs every weekend, and an occasional errand. At ~$100/month insurance, that works out to about $10 per trip. I simply can't afford it or justify it, so I drive uninsured. (yeah, I know)
Contrast with my brother-in-law, who has a daily two-hour commute, and thanks to suburban sprawl can't even walk to see friends. His insurance works out to about $2/trip.
I consider myself an advocate of privacy, but if some shadows organization wants to know that my car goes out to my sister's every Sunday, and they want to offer me $20/month auto insurance, then by all means bring on the RFID.
(I don't believe for a moment that this program would lead to more-fair premiums overall, though, only to more-expensive premiums for higher-risk folk)
As long as backward-compatibility through browsers exists, a clean break could be a great idea if handled properly.
it was a joke, you tools. lighten up.
I hear that Konfabulator won a prize too, but it's the kind that you don't want to win and doesn't come with a shiny plaque.