Get over the movie, and read the book. It's much better, though it makes a different point (although I suppose you should say that the movie makes a different point).
Just finished the book last night...good read. It doesn't have the somewhat cartoonish tone of the movie (which no doubt borrowed some of that schtick from RoboCop...not that it's a Bad Thing), and it goes into greater detail on the future world in which the story takes place.
Does anyone else remember the good old days when OS upgrades were free? When newer version of the OS for the Apple ][ line were released
The difference here is that Apple had already made its money when you bought your computer. An Apple II or a Mac can be thought of as a complete system comprising hardware and software, so it would follow that updates to ProDOS 8, GS/OS, or MacOS ought to be free. (For MacOS, that changed somewhere around the time the Mac clones first surfaced (or maybe a bit earlier), when a more Microsoft-like situation was possible.)
With Windows, you're dealing with software from a source other than the manufacturer of your machine. This isn't all that different from the earlier years...when I built my first x86 box about ten years ago, I bought DR DOS 6.0 separately (more goodies than MS-DOS 5.0).
(FWIW, the final versions of ProDOS 8 and GS/OS are still free downloads from Apple's FTP site. The only snag is that they're archived in a Mac-only format. Grr.)
But On a PC I always remove the ID3 tags because they're a pain to maintain, and difficult to keep consistent, especially when you have some ordinary albums and some compilation albums.
If you have a directory structure that makes sense, it's not much trouble at all to auto-generate a shell script that runs id3ed (the latest version compiles under Cygwin too, so running Windows is no longer an excuse) to fix your ID3s. I usually do this with all the MP3s I pick up, as more often than not the tags that come with the file were done by a crack-monkey without a clue.
Broadband is doing just fine where I live (Central NJ). Most of my neighbors have cable modems on Optimum Online with it's great 1 Mb/sec up 5 Mb/sec down service at $29.95/mo.
Cox has done fairly well in Las Vegas with its own service (neither @Home nor Roadrunner). There are cheaper levels of service available now, but for $50/month, I get 1.5 Mbps downstream, 128 kbps upstream, a static IP, and no guff if I want to run a webserver, a mail server, or whatever. It's been fairly reliable, too...only one or two outages in the nearly two years I've had the service.
Don't get DSL, though...Sprint couldn't keep a DSLAM running if its life depended on it. We have both cable-modem and DSL service at work (don't ask why), and while DSL has improved somewhat recently, there was a period of about a month when you could count on the DSL cutting in and out several times in the morning. Fortunately, it's not too big a deal to switch the DSL users over to the cable modem if necessary (move a network cable, switch floppies in the router, reboot the router, and wait a couple of minutes for it to start up again...Coyote Linux is schweet).
"Multimedia" compression is without exception lossy compression
There are lossless media-compression codecs available. I use Huffyuv all the time for video editing. It reduces uncompressed video to about a fourth of its original size without loss. It's not as aggressive as MPEG, but I only encode finished, edited video to MPEG as the final step before burning to CD. While editing, it keeps files to a more reasonable size (and keeps disk bandwidth down...the two harddrives I have are among the fastest IDE drives you can get, but even they can get bogged down if you pull uncompressed 2/3-D1 video off of them).
I think I've heard of lossless compressed-audio codecs, but I can't recall any names off the top of my head. For video editing, WAV has been sufficient as the few hundred megs needed for audio is nothing compared to the tens of gigabytes needed for video. As for MP3, I've been using 160-kbps VBR lately with LAME for CD rips. I can't tell the difference, but then I don't claim to have "golden ears" either. Tape rips get 128-kbps VBR as there's already been a fair amount of loss introduced when the tape was produced.
Bzzt...wrong answer, thanks for playing. The United States has never been a democracy; the Founding Fathers set out to avoid setting up a democracy on the (correct) belief that democracy is little more than mob rule.
Fact is, more people want something that you don't want. You're in the minority.
Is that supposed to mean anything? If a majority of people decided to kill everybody who was born on a Friday the 13th, would you find that acceptable since a majority of people was for it? What if a majority voted itself checks for $10k each, to be paid by the top 1% of income-earners (who by definition are a small minority)? This "tyranny of the majority" is sufficient argument against democracy.
That's just what the people, who brought you the player in subject did for you. And you can buy the results of their labor for $300. Even if all the parts were free for you, I don't see how you can manage to do this yourself in less than a day. Even if the result is just as good as their unit, your time must be worth more than $300/8hours = $37.50/hour. In the US that is...
Not everybody attempts to put a dollar value on every single minute of time...especially not on stuff that's for fun. Someone who does that doesn't have his priorities straight, IMNSHO. If you enjoy doing something (whatever it is), why would your time matter to the extent that you would be compelled to attach a monetary value to it?
If you get a fast cdrom, a decent CPU, and a good ripper/encoder, like MusicMatch, the entire process takes no more than 5 minutes or so per CD
How good is "good," though? What ripping and encoding engines does MusicMatch use if it's able to go that fast? EAC and LAME usually take around 20-30 minutes (IIRC) to reduce a CD to 160-kbps VBR MP3s, and that's on a 1.2-GHz Athlon with a 10x DVD-ROM under Win2K. Everything I've read indicates that those are the best ripper and the best encoder you can get right now. Some other encoders (like Xing) are really fast, but they sound like sh*t by comparison.
Originally, when Social Security ID's were being created, Congress had to make a law against using it as a national ID system.
If your card is old enough (mine isn't), it even has a notation on it that it isn't to be used for identification purposes. Your parents' cards would almost certainly be marked that way. Some time in the 70s or 80s, they quit putting that on there...probably to disabuse people of the notion that it would never be used as an ID.
i had an erector set in the early seventies! im i that old?
They were still available into at least some time in the '80s...mine probably go back to '82 or '83. Some of the parts were different (semi-pneumatic tires and a wired remote control that controlled two motors in two directions at variable speed), but it was still primarily nuts, bolts, and girders.
I don't know if they're still available...can't say that I've been in a toy store anytime recently.
I had a few different sizes of those electronics kits, the 300-in-1 (the biggest, I think) is still in my closet. I killed one of the smaller ones (either 200 or 180) by hooking all the batteries in series straight to the 3 LEDs in series to see how bright they'd get (at least I was smart enough not to just use ONE light).
I started with the 200-in-1 kit...never got the crystal-radio circuits to work, but one of the amplified ones was able to pick up a station or two. I blew out the speaker by literally plugging it into the wall. I figured 60 Hz ought to make some noise. What I didn't figure was that 120 volts into an 8-ohm load is much more than a quarter-watt speaker can handle. (Ohm's Law? What's that?)
A 300-in-1 kit (with more of a digital-logic orientation) was added on a couple of years later, along with the computer kit (a smallish console with a 4-bit microcontroller with a built-in 128-word memory, some LEDs and switches, and a speaker). AFAIK, my parents still have this stuff, along with an Erector set or two. At least I hope they still have it. (The Legos and Tinkertoys are long gone...probably lost the smaller bits to the vacuum cleaner, and the bigger bits by themselves aren't that interesting.)
Operating systems should use mime types and/or magic bytes in the file to determine its type.
If you see a file named "Foo," how do you know if it's a chunk of HTML, some sound, or whatever? Some sort of metadata ought to identify the type of content. With what you propose, you (or the OS) would have to open the file to determine what type of content is inside. Multiply that by however many files are in a given directory (1904 files in my c:\winnt\system32, for instance) and it would take a while. Without this information stored with the file (either as an extension or as some other form of metadata), any file browser would need to dig into the file to present the user with information about what the file contains...not good.
If you don't want this information in the filename, you could design the filesystem to hold identifying information in some other way. Apple, for instance, has always stored filetype information along with the other metadata. ProDOS filesystems (used by Apple IIs) allocate 8 bits for a filetype and 16 bits for an auxiliary type for each file, while HFS filesystems (used mainly by the Mac, though the IIGS can use them as well) use 32 bits each for filetype and creator fields. I can have a file on my GS named CS301.PAPER and know that it's an AppleWorks word-processor document because that info is stored along with the other metadata. Without the filetype, what clue would the Finder have that CS301.PAPER is an AppleWorks file and not plain-text, ProTERM settings, a GIF, an application (whether 8-bit or 16-bit), or whatever?
That is still available, if you hold down Shift as you right-click.
...and in Win2K, it's available with just a right-click for most files. It'll also remember what programs you've used to open a particular type of file, so (for instance) right-clicking an AVI might give you the option to open it with Windows Media Player or VirtualDub...or if you have a new program that groks AVIs, you can navigate to it once and it'll be remembered for future use. It's slicker than greased dogsh*t.:-)
Actually, zmodem is great when I just have a quick file I want to move from a Windows machine and all I have is TTSSH. I'm sure there's got to be a better way, but I haven't thought of it yet.
pscp works pretty well, and it's small enough that you can throw it on your website and download it from there whenever you need it. PuTTY is the same way, and (IMHO) it's better than any other Win32 SSH client I've run across.
What's the role of SMART in this whole discussion? I thought SMART was supposed to prevent this kind of stuff?
It'll only tell you if a drive is about to go south (or if it already has)...and it'll only do that if it's enabled. While nearly every BIOS supports it, many (most?) have it disabled by default. If the first thing you do when you install a new motherboard isn't going through all the setup screens, there's a fair chance that SMART isn't enabled on your system.
Upgraded? Exactly what is left of your original system except the sound and video cards?
It still has the 5.25" floppy drive that I first built into a 286-12 ten years ago.:-) (Don't laugh...it still gets used occasionally, usually when someone digs up a floppy that needs to be read as nobody else has one.) Most of the other storage (including DVD-ROM and CD-RW) stayed the same as well. The video card, soundcard, and NIC were also retained. Beyond that, it is nearly an all-new computer.
(Of that old 286, the only stuff I still have is the floppy drive, the keyboard, and the 14.4 modem. Everything else got sold to pay for upgrades over the years.)
I have a feeling that part of the problem is environment related- maybe the 75GXP doesn't handle heat or weak power supplies, or vibrations, or something.
That's one theory that's been put forth in comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage, especially given how some people like to cheap out on power supplies and such in order to get a faster processor, faster/bigger hard drive, or whatever. If you're trying to run a 75GXP in one of those el-cheapo PC Chips barebones systems, you're asking for trouble. (Hell, if you're running anything that involves components from PC Chips, you're asking for trouble.) Some of the people reporting problems have mentioned having various cheap-ass components in their systems, especially power supplies that don't regulate worth a damn. (What good is a 450W power supply if +5V can sag by half-a-volt or more under full load?)
FWIW, I upgraded my main system earlier this year...replaced a 5.1GB Western Digital with a 45GB 75GXP. Since the processor also got upgraded from a 450-MHz K6-III to a 1.0-GHz Athlon (and an appropriate motherboard and memory), the power supply got beefed up from a 250W Deer to a 330W Enermax (with dual fans and the 4-pin P4 power connector, though that sits unused). I've not had even a hint of trouble from the drive (other than run out of space:-)...added a 100GB Western Digital alongside it to fix that).
Self-contained artificial heart appears to be here. I think we're now up to patient #3.
At this point, it's still battery-powered. A smallish battery is implanted along with the heart that can keep it going for a few minutes; a larger battery pack is worn on a belt that lasts several hours (IIRC, it uses some sort of inductive power transfer to eliminate the need for wires poking out of the chest). Given that the AbioCor is an electromechanical device, I suspect it draws a fair amount of power...much more than you could get out of some thermocouple-based power source. (Yes, RTGs use thermocouples and can deliver a fair amount of power...but do you really want a lump of radioactive material implanted in you to drive an artificial organ?)
There are a number of skills I wish that I had acquired before I went out into the wider world. I would have liked a course on getting a job. It could have included:
Resume writing
Researching companies as potential employers
Interviewing skills
FWIW, I took a course over the summer that went into these areas (among others). For the catalog under which I'm graduating (I'm on the "ten-year graduation plan":-) ), this is a required course. The degree requirements in the current catalog (and the past two or three) haven't included it, however; instead of ENG 404 (technical writing), CSC 472 (software design and development, which is primarily a group-project class) is now required. Odds are fair that you have something similar to ENG 404 available; if you're interested in it, you should be able to take it as one of your open electives...or maybe even just for sh*ts and grins, if you're so inclined (it was an easy A, and as a summer-session class, it only took five weeks).
What do you mean, fixed resolution? Are you saying that you cannot change resolutions at all on LCD screens (which I seem to be able to)?
You can change resolution, but it looks like crap since the image has to be scaled (and pixels interpolated) to fill in. The worst displays used to be 800x600 panels run at 640x480; the available controllers usually just doubled some rows/columns to produce a chunky, uneven image. Newer displays interpolate the pixels so it doesn't look as nasty, but the image still has a blurred appearance at anything other than its intended resolution (typically 1024x768).
Are you talking about the one in McLean, Virginia?
I was thinking of Las Vegas, but either (1) they're a national chain or (2) it's such a common name that everyone and their brothers' uncles uses it. After all, just how original is "Best Buy?"
On a somewhat related note, back in the '80s, Radio Shack nearly lost a trademark-infringement suit it had brought against an upstart company called Computer Shack. While Radio Shack's usage of "shack" was upheld, the judge acknowledged that it was a weak trademark composed of common words (or something to that effect...IANAL, and it's been a while since I read about it, though you might check your back issues of Nibble from 1985 onward for the legal column by (IIRC) Owen Linzmayer, as I think that's where I read about it). It took them forever to remove the space, though...this suit was from sometime in the early-to-mid-80s, but it was only on the past two or three years that they've called themselves RadioShack instead.
IANAL, but I doubt that the drexel furniture company owns a trademark on 'Drexel' as the name applies to education. The trademark only covers what they make it cover, i.e. furniture.
So i could finally build my long-dream McDonalds automobile and not face trouble with the fast-food chain accidently posing under the same name ?
As long as you don't put the golden arches, Ronald, etc. on the trunk or whatever, you ought to be OK. For another example of "trademark overloading," there's a local furniture retailer with basically the same name as a certain electronics retailer. This local furniture retailer even has a similar (though not identical) logo, based on a yellow pricetag tilted at an angle. Because they're in different lines of business, there's no conflict and no reason for one to sue the other.
Since each banner ad needs to be HTTP requested from the server - and proxies tend to remove instances of <img src="bannerad.gif"... with their own blank image, its a doddle to track.
That'll work for maybe two seconds...right now, my proxy redirects requests for known banners to a 1-pixel transparent GIF on my server, but it shouldn't be too big a deal to set it instead to download the fscking banner and funnel it to/dev/null. The ad still doesn't show up on my screen, and their scheme to ram the "punch the monkey and win $50" banner down my throat is foiled.
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With Windows, you're dealing with software from a source other than the manufacturer of your machine. This isn't all that different from the earlier years...when I built my first x86 box about ten years ago, I bought DR DOS 6.0 separately (more goodies than MS-DOS 5.0).
(FWIW, the final versions of ProDOS 8 and GS/OS are still free downloads from Apple's FTP site. The only snag is that they're archived in a Mac-only format. Grr.)
Don't get DSL, though...Sprint couldn't keep a DSLAM running if its life depended on it. We have both cable-modem and DSL service at work (don't ask why), and while DSL has improved somewhat recently, there was a period of about a month when you could count on the DSL cutting in and out several times in the morning. Fortunately, it's not too big a deal to switch the DSL users over to the cable modem if necessary (move a network cable, switch floppies in the router, reboot the router, and wait a couple of minutes for it to start up again...Coyote Linux is schweet).
I think I've heard of lossless compressed-audio codecs, but I can't recall any names off the top of my head. For video editing, WAV has been sufficient as the few hundred megs needed for audio is nothing compared to the tens of gigabytes needed for video. As for MP3, I've been using 160-kbps VBR lately with LAME for CD rips. I can't tell the difference, but then I don't claim to have "golden ears" either. Tape rips get 128-kbps VBR as there's already been a fair amount of loss introduced when the tape was produced.
I don't know if they're still available...can't say that I've been in a toy store anytime recently.
A 300-in-1 kit (with more of a digital-logic orientation) was added on a couple of years later, along with the computer kit (a smallish console with a 4-bit microcontroller with a built-in 128-word memory, some LEDs and switches, and a speaker). AFAIK, my parents still have this stuff, along with an Erector set or two. At least I hope they still have it. (The Legos and Tinkertoys are long gone...probably lost the smaller bits to the vacuum cleaner, and the bigger bits by themselves aren't that interesting.)
If you don't want this information in the filename, you could design the filesystem to hold identifying information in some other way. Apple, for instance, has always stored filetype information along with the other metadata. ProDOS filesystems (used by Apple IIs) allocate 8 bits for a filetype and 16 bits for an auxiliary type for each file, while HFS filesystems (used mainly by the Mac, though the IIGS can use them as well) use 32 bits each for filetype and creator fields. I can have a file on my GS named CS301.PAPER and know that it's an AppleWorks word-processor document because that info is stored along with the other metadata. Without the filetype, what clue would the Finder have that CS301.PAPER is an AppleWorks file and not plain-text, ProTERM settings, a GIF, an application (whether 8-bit or 16-bit), or whatever?
(Of that old 286, the only stuff I still have is the floppy drive, the keyboard, and the 14.4 modem. Everything else got sold to pay for upgrades over the years.)
FWIW, I upgraded my main system earlier this year...replaced a 5.1GB Western Digital with a 45GB 75GXP. Since the processor also got upgraded from a 450-MHz K6-III to a 1.0-GHz Athlon (and an appropriate motherboard and memory), the power supply got beefed up from a 250W Deer to a 330W Enermax (with dual fans and the 4-pin P4 power connector, though that sits unused). I've not had even a hint of trouble from the drive (other than run out of space :-)...added a 100GB Western Digital alongside it to fix that).
On a somewhat related note, back in the '80s, Radio Shack nearly lost a trademark-infringement suit it had brought against an upstart company called Computer Shack. While Radio Shack's usage of "shack" was upheld, the judge acknowledged that it was a weak trademark composed of common words (or something to that effect...IANAL, and it's been a while since I read about it, though you might check your back issues of Nibble from 1985 onward for the legal column by (IIRC) Owen Linzmayer, as I think that's where I read about it). It took them forever to remove the space, though...this suit was from sometime in the early-to-mid-80s, but it was only on the past two or three years that they've called themselves RadioShack instead.