Dvorak and Cringely consistently produce great columns with insight about the state of computing. Dvorak himself has done so for many years before his comments on the new Mac iBooks (or whatever they're called) ruffled the feathers of the MacFanatics (as opposed to "reasonable Mac users") Can you elaborate why he wouldn't be respected?
You have a valid point when comparing the analogue outputs, but external sound modules such as Yamaha's MU-10 get around the noise problem by externalizing the card. Admittedly, the price is higher than a consumer card, but not by much.
The SoundBlaster Live has a surprisingly good analogue output, even in the value edition. If you rip your tracks from CD directly you will get more than acceptable results from even a Value. For the audiophiles, the SBLive (full) has an SPDIF digital output, which is a fairly standard interface on high end amps/powered speakers. Third party manufacturers (such as Hoontech) also make optical digital output daughterboards for the Value for exceptionally low prices. Coupled with the Live's internal 6-point sample interpolation, this gives a consumer level card professional quality output for an amazingly low price.
The only drawback is that the sample rate of the digital output is fixed at 48kHz, which is not a standard rate (CD's play at 44.1kHz) - you'll need to make sure your equipment can handle this rate before splashing out. Hoontech also manufacture an affordable digital amp which can handle this, and I'm sure if you looked hard you could find plenty of others.
Hi. I had this problem with Emacs too, but found it only affected text written in the foreground text colour (I use RedHat's default colour scheme). To fix it, just change the colour setting for normal text to a similar colour, but different name (I think I settled on Peach or something like that) - that might save a big download.
The spurious underline problem is still there, if that means occasionally single characters have a black underline...
I assume if OpenBSD puts such an emphasis on security, shadowed passwords would be a default setting which would have stopped the method you've outlined here. I'm amazed that the disgruntled system admin didn't use them, but that may go some way to explain why he was let go.
As for OpenBSD's security, 2.5 years without a security alert speaks for itself I think.
Sorry, you're dead wrong. Marijuana is not physically addictive, unlike heroin, nicotine or alcohol. You can safely cold turkey marijuana and experience no adverse side affects, no sickening withdrawal symptoms.
Sure, some people get psychologically addicted to marijuana. I did. But during the two year period where I smoked at least three times a day, it was never the high of the drug that kept me going, it was the enhanced appreciation of music.
When I finally decided to quit, it was my own decision. You need the strength of character to stop completely, but it's not impossible. Hell, I'll even say it's not hard. Please don't take this personally, but your attitude is tranferring the blame from your own psychological dependence to the drug itself, and is typical of the "it's not my fault" attitude that seems to permeate society today - the same attitude that causes people to sue video game manufacturers for the actions of a murderous lunatic.
As for the divide and pick routine, this is a side effect of drug prohibition. Do you honestly think that this would be the case if the drug was legalized? (and hence, prices lowered?)
I'm talking from personal experience here, but if you need qualifications, I spent 2+ years in medical school, and extensive reading of medical journals and studies on marijuana use before I drew my conclusions.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of the the article, but it seemed pretty down-to-earth and straightforward.
What I can vouch for, is the quality of the two pieces of software he mentions (Music-X and FTA) - they were both outstanding programs that I would still use today, if I still had my Amiga. Hmmm, I wonder what happened to microillusions?
This goes for Linux too. Is the best you can come up with is KDE and Gnome? Ripoffs of a poor ripoff(Windows) of the MacOS? And you think Linux is going to conquer the desktop? Snicker...
The same way Apple currently rules the desktop - at what, 20% market share? Snicker...
Mandrake's pretty much exactly the same as RedHat with a few optimizations - hell, they even have a hat as a logo. Yet they're widely accepted and embraced in the Linux community.
Ars Technica seem to have just the right level of information, mixed in with some self-deprecatory humour sadly lacking on Tom's site.
Don't get me wrong, I still read Tom's every now and then, but since he got all corporate, the articles have become unnecessarily wieldy, technical and bogged down with ads. Ars is clean, and informative without resorting to statistical overload (I mean, how many *game* video benchmarks do your have to perform...and why include the ones which were obviously CPU limited???)
Anand is alright, I just can't take a 16 yr old kid that seriously, but he's too verbose and tries to be a bit too worldy wise sometimes...in a few years though, he'll really kick ass I think. Bright kid:)
I haven't seen BWP, but I have seen Pi, and have to say I was for the most part disappointed. The makers seemed to draw a lot of the "mood" from eraserhead, but the technical details were just crap, as was most of the plot - I mean come on, he gets a classifed super CPU, places it on a socket (doesn't even *plug* the damned thing in), and he's ready to rock? Jeez. It looked like a supercomputer made up of old XT boards. Even worse was the 64 (?) digit number that held the key to the universe - what the hell has that to do with Pi (the number)? IMNSHO, the number Pi is infinitely more interesting.
Oh well, it wasn't terrible, but not as good as over-eager arts/philosophy students would have you believe. Massive Attack shouldn't have lent Angel to the soundtrack (and where were the other artists' songs on the CD?)
That's the benchmark for flat polygons. Expect a significantly lower count for textured and shaded polygons, like the ones used in most games today. I can't recall the exact figures quoted before, but something like 15-20 millions polygons for textured, which is still pretty excellent.
To all the dweebs ranting about how this is old news, the original announcement was that SGI was going to release XFS under an open source license, but did not specify GPL. As I recall, someone from SGI said at the time that the company lawyers had to take a good look at the wording of the GPL to make sure it was compliant with the company's objectives. After all this time, it looks like it passed. Considering SGI must have some pretty expensive legal eagles working for them, this is a major validation of the GPL.
That a large company like SGI has enough confidence in the GPL to commit one of their major intellectual properties to it is a major news story to me (and one superior to *ahem* certain other proprietary solutions). Maybe even more important than the XFS filesystem itself.
Programming is 1% inspiration, and 99% plagiarism.
Multias are really slow by today's standards, and require some pretty expensive add-on hardware to function properly. You're probably better off buying a second hand Pentium and putting Linux on it. The only attraction would be the nice case - oh, and of course "Alpha" bragging rights:)
For the longest time, Telstra (formerly Telecom Australia) was government owned, and had a monopoly on local and overseas/mobile calls. A few years back, overseas/mobile calls were deregulated (well, duopolied) and prices went down a bit. Now, part of Telstra's been floated, everything's been opened up, and we're only starting to reap the benefits of competitive overseas prices. Local calls have remained fixed.
Telstra were talking about changing over to untimed calls a while back, that they claimed would actually be cheaper for the average local call (5 minutes) - obviously concerned by people spending hours on a 25c data call. This will put the brakes on that idea, based on what happened with international calls (and rightly so).
Programming is 1% inspiration, and 99% plagiarism.
If this thing only costs 350M pounds, I wonder how expensive it would be to construct a machine that could deliberately produce these strangelets. Something for the Dr Evil's of the future to consider anyway...
I'm surprised at the number of people speculating on the E2K processor from the evidence given. All we have is some guy processing a large number of keys putting "E2K is real power" in his tagline, and all of a sudden people are assuming he's running an E2K processor. I'm not saying it's a fraud, but maybe we're reading too much into this - we're all familiar with how non-English speakers can be easily misinterpreted. Hmmm...
The lack of details is a bit disappointing - I think this achievement is more a proof of concept of manufacture, than a validation of nanotechnology as a whole. Also, building a nanocomputer with a chemical process seems akin to building a computer with vacuum tubes...
This article was posted months ago I'm sure. If you're wondering why the QT library was chosen, have a look at who the partners doing the porting are - TrollTech.
I personally think it's a good move. The TrollTech guys showed they were able to port a browser quickly with QTzilla, and the people who are likely to fork out for a browser are not the kind of people who'd be ideologically opposed to QT. Horses for courses.
In the meantime, I'll wait around for Mozilla. Netscape suits me just fine at the moment.
The Amiga port of WordPerfect was not done by Corel at all, but by the original WordPerfect Corp, that was subsequently bought out by Novell, *then* Corel. You can hardly blame Corel for abandoning the platform at that point.
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Dvorak and Cringely consistently produce great columns with insight about the state of computing. Dvorak himself has done so for many years before his comments on the new Mac iBooks (or whatever they're called) ruffled the feathers of the MacFanatics (as opposed to "reasonable Mac users") Can you elaborate why he wouldn't be respected?
You have a valid point when comparing the analogue outputs, but external sound modules such as Yamaha's MU-10 get around the noise problem by externalizing the card. Admittedly, the price is higher than a consumer card, but not by much.
The SoundBlaster Live has a surprisingly good analogue output, even in the value edition. If you rip your tracks from CD directly you will get more than acceptable results from even a Value. For the audiophiles, the SBLive (full) has an SPDIF digital output, which is a fairly standard interface on high end amps/powered speakers. Third party manufacturers (such as Hoontech) also make optical digital output daughterboards for the Value for exceptionally low prices. Coupled with the Live's internal 6-point sample interpolation, this gives a consumer level card professional quality output for an amazingly low price.
The only drawback is that the sample rate of the digital output is fixed at 48kHz, which is not a standard rate (CD's play at 44.1kHz) - you'll need to make sure your equipment can handle this rate before splashing out. Hoontech also manufacture an affordable digital amp which can handle this, and I'm sure if you looked hard you could find plenty of others.
Hi. I had this problem with Emacs too, but found it only affected text written in the foreground text colour (I use RedHat's default colour scheme). To fix it, just change the colour setting for normal text to a similar colour, but different name (I think I settled on Peach or something like that) - that might save a big download.
The spurious underline problem is still there, if that means occasionally single characters have a black underline...
Daniel.
Ack, I just finished pressing submit before I hit my forehead with my hand and said "D'oh". Point taken :)
I assume if OpenBSD puts such an emphasis on security, shadowed passwords would be a default setting which would have stopped the method you've outlined here. I'm amazed that the disgruntled system admin didn't use them, but that may go some way to explain why he was let go.
As for OpenBSD's security, 2.5 years without a security alert speaks for itself I think.
Sorry, you're dead wrong. Marijuana is not physically addictive, unlike heroin, nicotine or alcohol. You can safely cold turkey marijuana and experience no adverse side affects, no sickening withdrawal symptoms.
Sure, some people get psychologically addicted to marijuana. I did. But during the two year period where I smoked at least three times a day, it was never the high of the drug that kept me going, it was the enhanced appreciation of music.
When I finally decided to quit, it was my own decision. You need the strength of character to stop completely, but it's not impossible. Hell, I'll even say it's not hard. Please don't take this personally, but your attitude is tranferring the blame from your own psychological dependence to the drug itself, and is typical of the "it's not my fault" attitude that seems to permeate society today - the same attitude that causes people to sue video game manufacturers for the actions of a murderous lunatic.
As for the divide and pick routine, this is a side effect of drug prohibition. Do you honestly think that this would be the case if the drug was legalized? (and hence, prices lowered?)
I'm talking from personal experience here, but if you need qualifications, I spent 2+ years in medical school, and extensive reading of medical journals and studies on marijuana use before I drew my conclusions.
Daniel.
I can't vouch for the accuracy of the the article, but it seemed pretty down-to-earth and straightforward.
What I can vouch for, is the quality of the two pieces of software he mentions (Music-X and FTA) - they were both outstanding programs that I would still use today, if I still had my Amiga. Hmmm, I wonder what happened to microillusions?
This goes for Linux too. Is the best you can come up with is KDE and Gnome? Ripoffs of a poor ripoff(Windows) of the MacOS? And you think Linux is going to conquer the desktop? Snicker...
The same way Apple currently rules the desktop - at what, 20% market share? Snicker...
Mandrake's pretty much exactly the same as RedHat with a few optimizations - hell, they even have a hat as a logo. Yet they're widely accepted and embraced in the Linux community.
Take the blinders off buddy.
Ars Technica seem to have just the right level of information, mixed in with some self-deprecatory humour sadly lacking on Tom's site.
:)
Don't get me wrong, I still read Tom's every now and then, but since he got all corporate, the articles have become unnecessarily wieldy, technical and bogged down with ads. Ars is clean, and informative without resorting to statistical overload (I mean, how many *game* video benchmarks do your have to perform...and why include the ones which were obviously CPU limited???)
Anand is alright, I just can't take a 16 yr old kid that seriously, but he's too verbose and tries to be a bit too worldy wise sometimes...in a few years though, he'll really kick ass I think. Bright kid
Daniel.
*TINY SPOILERS FOLLOW*
I haven't seen BWP, but I have seen Pi, and have to say I was for the most part disappointed. The makers seemed to draw a lot of the "mood" from eraserhead, but the technical details were just crap, as was most of the plot - I mean come on, he gets a classifed super CPU, places it on a socket (doesn't even *plug* the damned thing in), and he's ready to rock? Jeez. It looked like a supercomputer made up of old XT boards. Even worse was the 64 (?) digit number that held the key to the universe - what the hell has that to do with Pi (the number)? IMNSHO, the number Pi is infinitely more interesting.
Oh well, it wasn't terrible, but not as good as over-eager arts/philosophy students would have you believe. Massive Attack shouldn't have lent Angel to the soundtrack (and where were the other artists' songs on the CD?)
Daniel.
Sound like the Street Fighter 2 crack to me ;)
UUDDLRLRBABA
Only for Player 2 though...
That's the benchmark for flat polygons. Expect a significantly lower count for textured and shaded polygons, like the ones used in most games today. I can't recall the exact figures quoted before, but something like 15-20 millions polygons for textured, which is still pretty excellent.
Daniel.
To all the dweebs ranting about how this is old news, the original announcement was that SGI was going to release XFS under an open source license, but did not specify GPL. As I recall, someone from SGI said at the time that the company lawyers had to take a good look at the wording of the GPL to make sure it was compliant with the company's objectives. After all this time, it looks like it passed. Considering SGI must have some pretty expensive legal eagles working for them, this is a major validation of the GPL.
That a large company like SGI has enough confidence in the GPL to commit one of their major intellectual properties to it is a major news story to me (and one superior to *ahem* certain other proprietary solutions). Maybe even more important than the XFS filesystem itself.
Programming is 1% inspiration, and 99% plagiarism.
Is this so new? Apparently radio waves from TV broadcasts perpetuate for years without limit, so this would be something similar right?
Multias are really slow by today's standards, and require some pretty expensive add-on hardware to function properly. You're probably better off buying a second hand Pentium and putting Linux on it. The only attraction would be the nice case - oh, and of course "Alpha" bragging rights :)
...they've made a deal with ATI to supply video stuff, another big Canadian player.
For the longest time, Telstra (formerly Telecom Australia) was government owned, and had a monopoly on local and overseas/mobile calls. A few years back, overseas/mobile calls were deregulated (well, duopolied) and prices went down a bit. Now, part of Telstra's been floated, everything's been opened up, and we're only starting to reap the benefits of competitive overseas prices. Local calls have remained fixed.
Telstra were talking about changing over to untimed calls a while back, that they claimed would actually be cheaper for the average local call (5 minutes) - obviously concerned by people spending hours on a 25c data call. This will put the brakes on that idea, based on what happened with international calls (and rightly so).
Programming is 1% inspiration, and 99% plagiarism.
If this thing only costs 350M pounds, I wonder how expensive it would be to construct a machine that could deliberately produce these strangelets. Something for the Dr Evil's of the future to consider anyway...
Yeah, and Faust was the source of all evil for signing a deal with the devil.
Sheesh, get over your Apple infatuation. Sometimes they're wrong you know.
I'm surprised at the number of people speculating on the E2K processor from the evidence given. All we have is some guy processing a large number of keys putting "E2K is real power" in his tagline, and all of a sudden people are assuming he's running an E2K processor. I'm not saying it's a fraud, but maybe we're reading too much into this - we're all familiar with how non-English speakers can be easily misinterpreted. Hmmm...
The lack of details is a bit disappointing - I think this achievement is more a proof of concept of manufacture, than a validation of nanotechnology as a whole. Also, building a nanocomputer with a chemical process seems akin to building a computer with vacuum tubes...
> I guess this is the point where Microsoft announce benchmarks showing that their player is faster on a quad Xeon system with 4Gb of RAM :-)
:)
...yeah, faster at displaying a single black AVI frame
This article was posted months ago I'm sure. If you're wondering why the QT library was chosen, have a look at who the partners doing the porting are - TrollTech.
I personally think it's a good move. The TrollTech guys showed they were able to port a browser quickly with QTzilla, and the people who are likely to fork out for a browser are not the kind of people who'd be ideologically opposed to QT. Horses for courses.
In the meantime, I'll wait around for Mozilla. Netscape suits me just fine at the moment.
The Amiga port of WordPerfect was not done by Corel at all, but by the original WordPerfect Corp, that was subsequently bought out by Novell, *then* Corel. You can hardly blame Corel for abandoning the platform at that point.