A previous Apple update fixed a DNS bug where large DNS reponses (typically from Akamai-based sites) would get dropped. The most notable victim was Apple itself.
10.2.6 appears to re-introduce this bug, making Safari pretty much useless for me.
"People who have upgraded older iPods to 1.3 are reporting the same "electrostatic pop"."
I have a two week old 10 GB iPod with the new firmware, and while I hear a power on tick, there are no inter-track pops or clicks, even at full volume.
"- at massively lower sound and video quality than in a real movie theater"
I don't know where you go to watch movies, but when I went to see the first Lord of the Rings movie, the experience was so bad that I started researching home theater projectors.
The room lights go out at the proper time in my living room, there isn't any light shining on the screen from the open doors that the non-existent ushers forgot to close, my sub doesn't rattle, and no-one talks during the important parts (well, I have this one friend...)
I haven't been to a movie theater since I bought the projector. I don't miss it in the least.
I forgot to address the mounting issue the original poster mentioned.
My projector and DVD player actually live under the couch. This requires a pretty clean room from couch to screen, as the image is about 2' off the floor at the screen.
Why is the DVD player under there too? It enabled me to have the shortest possible video run. Audio to the A/V receiver is digital over coax, so it survives the long run much better than the analog video would.
A. (who's trying to resist the urge to go watch a movie)
"Has anyone here used any of these high res projectors to put movies and TV in their homes?"
I do this. I have a DLP projector which has a resolution of 852 x 480 in 16:9 mode (using TI's original dual-mode chip). This happens to match the native resolution of DVDs (which are 720 x 480 - remember that DV to PC conversion factor).
The recommended maximum screen size for the projector is 80" (diagonal). I therefore used a 100" screen.:-)
This makes for an impressive image, with some caveats. The room must be movie-theater dark, and if you remember reading movie/DVD reviews where the reviewer complained about washed-out movies and you never saw a problem - you will know exactly what he was talking about.
The setup is coming up on its one-year anniversary. I'm still happy, my friends are still jealous, and the original bulb has a few more hours left on it.
"The problem with DLP projectors like the one my roomate bought is the "screendoor" effect that makes it look like you are viewing the image through a screendoor"
This is odd, since one of the sellings points of DLP is that it has far less of a 'screen door' effect than LCD.
Of course if you blow up the image large enough, you'll always have some of this - but it's less with DLP than it is with LCD.
"I eagerly await your search engine implementation which directly determines page rank based on relevancy."
The quality of Google's search engine is not based on whether or not I write another. Nor does my programming ability (or lack thereof) have any bearing on the discussion.
"Google's algorithm isn't perfect but it beats the pants off of nearly everything else"
On this we are in violent agreement. But the whole point of this topic was to illustrate that Google isn't perfect. It's great. It's awesome. It's the best. (It still throws away characters that I put in quotes! - damnit).
"Nonsense. Google's page ranking system ensures that less popular things will remain less popular because, *shocker*, it is rarer that people will click through to things they are less interested in."
Well, perhaps you are making my point for me, though I suppose it depends on what you want Google to do.
To me, Google is a search engine. That means I want to give it words and have it do the best job possible in *finding what I'm looking for*.
A search engine, I am taught, is judged on two scales. How much of the desired data available is returned, and how little of the undesireable data that comes along with it. More wheat, less chaff please.
Now, I happen to be a particularly misanthropic geek, so find *popular* things isn't necessarily useful to me. I'm usually searching for something that I can't find easily. My complaint with page ranking is that the well-known/well-linked 'popular' data is pushed to the top. Well, if it was that easy to find, I didn't *need* a search engine!
Take for example the current thread. Use Google and try and find the *original* reference to the 'Second Superpower'. No cheating and using the Register article as a hint for search terms. If you can do it at all, you'll have wade though pages of chaff. By definition, that's a bad search engine.
"Grow up."
You might try taking your own advice. Using an ad hominem attack because you've run out of relevant things to say isn't a very polished debate technique.
"The idea of page-ranking surely is more to do with relevance of a search term than to find information that is hard to find"
Is something more 'relevant' just because a lot of people link to it? I might suggest that this is not always so.
"Popular" and "relevant" are not equivalent terms. If we are discussing social relevance then the meaning changes a bit, but we are talking about relevance with regard to the thing being searching for, and the fact that an item is popular does not automatically make it a better match.
"Call me cynical, but you wouldn't happen to be a webmaster who didn't get ranked highly, would you?"
No. I don't have a web page. I have very little to say to the entire world (that's printable, anyway:-). I prefer a slightly more directed method of communication.
Please don't get me wrong - I *like* Google. I think it's the greatest. But it isn't perfect, and sometimes it is downright annoying. Throwing away characters in a quoted string is my current peeve.
I didn't say that, though I did imply that it was undesireable.
"You must not remember the web around 96 or so. . .."
I'm not sure what leads you to this conclusion. I remember it quite well. Indeed, I had been reading Wired for three years by then.
Google won't let me do some things that I could do then. It doesn't really respect a quoted string (try to find "A.R.P.A." without finding "ARPA", for example).
I do agree with you about web-based forums, I still mostly hate them. I wish is was all netnews under the covers so I could search it in Google (I don't think Google Groups uses page rank).
Permit me to disagree. Google *was* the next big thing.
This page-ranking nonsense almost guarantees that hard to find things remain hard to find. Why? Because the easier to find things float to the top (people have *found* them and linked to them).
I already have to include -this and -that all the time to get rid of the common junk that I *don't* need to search for.
A.
Re:If Ars Technica is so concerned about usability
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"It's easier to read because paper's natural state is white."
No it isn't. Paper is made out of wood. It's 'natural' color is a nasty dirty brown. We bleach the hell out of it to make it white.
off topic:
when I was in college, my professor was highlighting the volume of nasty chemicals used to process the things in our homes. One example was this: If you take a roll of toilet paper, soak it overnight in a jar of water, then drink the water, it'll probably kill you. Kids, don't try this at home.
A.
Re:OS X Finder Laundry List - Please add yours.
on
A Better Finder?
·
· Score: 1
"Too many files: Apple's Finder chokes on multiple thousands of files. If I want to put/copy/paste that many files in a folder, I damn well should be able to without the system grinding to a halt or finder crashing. I had to use 'Path Finder' ( a finder replacement, ala Windows Explorer) to handle this situation."
I could not reproduce this problem. I have a folder with 10,596 files in it (I have all my old mail - sick, I know) and Finder didn't have any issues opening and displaying it. It did take 10 seconds to do it, but I don't think that's unreasonable.
off topic:
I remember trying to get this collection off of it's original machine using FTP (didn't have tar/zip). It was a serious challenge finding a PC client that could deal with that many files. "mget *" would usually cause a long pause followed by an application crash:-)
"you can not send enough power to electrocute someone over a low guage phone pair. get real."
You should get real. It requires very little 'power' to disrupt the heart. The resistance of the skin is what usually keeps this from happening. If you have bare dry hands, you're probably right - but:
The C.O. will send enough voltage to make an old-style mechanical ringer operate. It's a constant-current source (ie: it will raise the voltage until the appropriate current flows). With no phone on the line, you'll get maximum voltage as the C.O. attempts to make the electrons flow.
Again, the resistance of your skin is the deciding factor. Get your hands wet, or let the wires pierce your skin at the same time the C.O. decides to ring your phone and could could easily become dead (remember to hold one wire in each hand if this is your goal).
As a reference (current in *milliamps*):
Unsafe current values:
8 mA to 15 mA Painful shock; individual can let go at will since muscular control is not lost.
15 mA to 20 mA Painful shock; control of adjacent muscles lost; victim can not let go.
50 mA to 100 mA Ventricular fibrillation - a heart condition that can result in death - is possible.
100 mA to 200 mA Ventricular fibrillation occurs.
200 mA and over Servere burns, severe muscular contractions - so severe that chest muscles clamp the heart and stop it for the duration of the shock. (This prevents ventricular fibrillation).
" I really doubt if the 9/11 thugs sent a message it would ONLY be on the morning they left."
That's not what he said.
With our previous monitoring, we had already intercepted communications between these people. We were unable to interpret these messages in time to be useful. Collecting even *more* data does not help this problem.
The last popular use of this word was circa 1965, by Tom Lehrer:
So Long Mom (That Was The Year That Was)
(AKA The World War III Folk Song)
So long mom, I'm off to drop the bomb So don't wait up for me But while you swelter down there in your shelter You can see me... On your TV... While we're attacking frontally Watch Brink-e-ly and Hunt-e-ly Describing contrapuntally the cities we have lost No need for you to miss a minute Of the agonizing holocaust! Yeah!
Little Johnny Jones he was a U.S. pilot And no shrinking violet was he... He was mighty proud when World War III was declared He wasn't scared no sirreee... And this is what he said on His way to Armegeddon...
So long mom, I'm off to drop the bomb So don't wait up for me But though I may roam I'lll come back to my home Although it may be... a pile of debris.. Remember mommy I'm off to get a commie... So send me a salami and try to smile somehow... I'll look for you when the war is over: An hour and a half from now!
I remember a newspaper article a few years back where doctors were using leeches to promote blood flow in fingers and toes which had been crushed or otherwise had damage to the blood vessels.
Seems like a similar application of natural 'tools' to solve a medical problem.
(the reason I remember the article was that many/most people were a little creeped out by the process. Grown men had to look away while doctors put the leeches on. Little boys, on the other hand, insisted on applying the leeches themselves:-)
A.
Re:Filing date is not important
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 2
The rights to the first multi-user, multi-node chat program that I know of were sold to a small software development house in 1985 (or so).
This program pre-dated IRC, and it's predecessor, Relay.
Slashdot Mirror
A previous Apple update fixed a DNS bug where large DNS reponses (typically from Akamai-based sites) would get dropped. The most notable victim was Apple itself.
10.2.6 appears to re-introduce this bug, making Safari pretty much useless for me.
Did anyone else notice this un-fix?
A.
"People who have upgraded older iPods to 1.3 are reporting the same "electrostatic pop"."
I have a two week old 10 GB iPod with the new firmware, and while I hear a power on tick, there are no inter-track pops or clicks, even at full volume.
A.
"- at massively lower sound and video quality than in a real movie theater"
I don't know where you go to watch movies, but when I went to see the first Lord of the Rings movie, the experience was so bad that I started researching home theater projectors.
The room lights go out at the proper time in my living room, there isn't any light shining on the screen from the open doors that the non-existent ushers forgot to close, my sub doesn't rattle, and no-one talks during the important parts (well, I have this one friend...)
I haven't been to a movie theater since I bought the projector. I don't miss it in the least.
A.
(replying to my own post - how tacky)
I forgot to address the mounting issue the original poster mentioned.
My projector and DVD player actually live under the couch. This requires a pretty clean room from couch to screen, as the image is about 2' off the floor at the screen.
Why is the DVD player under there too? It enabled me to have the shortest possible video run. Audio to the A/V receiver is digital over coax, so it survives the long run much better than the analog video would.
A.
(who's trying to resist the urge to go watch a movie)
"Has anyone here used any of these high res projectors to put movies and TV in their homes?"
:-)
I do this. I have a DLP projector which has a resolution of 852 x 480 in 16:9 mode (using TI's original dual-mode chip). This happens to match the native resolution of DVDs (which are 720 x 480 - remember that DV to PC conversion factor).
The recommended maximum screen size for the projector is 80" (diagonal). I therefore used a 100" screen.
This makes for an impressive image, with some caveats. The room must be movie-theater dark, and if you remember reading movie/DVD reviews where the reviewer complained about washed-out movies and you never saw a problem - you will know exactly what he was talking about.
The setup is coming up on its one-year anniversary. I'm still happy, my friends are still jealous, and the original bulb has a few more hours left on it.
A.
"The problem with DLP projectors like the one my roomate bought is the "screendoor" effect that makes it look like you are viewing the image through a screendoor"
This is odd, since one of the sellings points of DLP is that it has far less of a 'screen door' effect than LCD.
Of course if you blow up the image large enough, you'll always have some of this - but it's less with DLP than it is with LCD.
A.
(who owns a DLP projector)
"I eagerly await your search engine implementation which directly determines page rank based on relevancy."
The quality of Google's search engine is not based on whether or not I write another. Nor does my programming ability (or lack thereof) have any bearing on the discussion.
"Google's algorithm isn't perfect but it beats the pants off of nearly everything else"
On this we are in violent agreement. But the whole point of this topic was to illustrate that Google isn't perfect. It's great. It's awesome. It's the best. (It still throws away characters that I put in quotes! - damnit).
A
"Nonsense. Google's page ranking system ensures that less popular things will remain less popular because, *shocker*, it is rarer that people will click through to things they are less interested in."
Well, perhaps you are making my point for me, though I suppose it depends on what you want Google to do.
To me, Google is a search engine. That means I want to give it words and have it do the best job possible in *finding what I'm looking for*.
A search engine, I am taught, is judged on two scales. How much of the desired data available is returned, and how little of the undesireable data that comes along with it. More wheat, less chaff please.
Now, I happen to be a particularly misanthropic geek, so find *popular* things isn't necessarily useful to me. I'm usually searching for something that I can't find easily. My complaint with page ranking is that the well-known/well-linked 'popular' data is pushed to the top. Well, if it was that easy to find, I didn't *need* a search engine!
Take for example the current thread. Use Google and try and find the *original* reference to the 'Second Superpower'. No cheating and using the Register article as a hint for search terms. If you can do it at all, you'll have wade though pages of chaff. By definition, that's a bad search engine.
"Grow up."
You might try taking your own advice. Using an ad hominem attack because you've run out of relevant things to say isn't a very polished debate technique.
A.
"The idea of page-ranking surely is more to do with relevance of a search term than to find information that is hard to find"
Is something more 'relevant' just because a lot of people link to it? I might suggest that this is not always so.
"Popular" and "relevant" are not equivalent terms. If we are discussing social relevance then the meaning changes a bit, but we are talking about relevance with regard to the thing being searching for, and the fact that an item is popular does not automatically make it a better match.
A.
"Call me cynical, but you wouldn't happen to be a webmaster who didn't get ranked highly, would you?"
:-). I prefer a slightly more directed method of communication.
No. I don't have a web page. I have very little to say to the entire world (that's printable, anyway
Please don't get me wrong - I *like* Google. I think it's the greatest. But it isn't perfect, and sometimes it is downright annoying. Throwing away characters in a quoted string is my current peeve.
A.
"You think that is bad?"
."
I didn't say that, though I did imply that it was undesireable.
"You must not remember the web around 96 or so. . .
I'm not sure what leads you to this conclusion. I remember it quite well. Indeed, I had been reading Wired for three years by then.
Google won't let me do some things that I could do then. It doesn't really respect a quoted string (try to find "A.R.P.A." without finding "ARPA", for example).
I do agree with you about web-based forums, I still mostly hate them. I wish is was all netnews under the covers so I could search it in Google (I don't think Google Groups uses page rank).
A.
"Google is the Next Big Thing"
Permit me to disagree. Google *was* the next big thing.
This page-ranking nonsense almost guarantees that hard to find things remain hard to find. Why? Because the easier to find things float to the top (people have *found* them and linked to them).
I already have to include -this and -that all the time to get rid of the common junk that I *don't* need to search for.
A.
"It's easier to read because paper's natural state is white."
No it isn't. Paper is made out of wood. It's 'natural' color is a nasty dirty brown. We bleach the hell out of it to make it white.
off topic:
when I was in college, my professor was highlighting the volume of nasty chemicals used to process the things in our homes. One example was this: If you take a roll of toilet paper, soak it overnight in a jar of water, then drink the water, it'll probably kill you. Kids, don't try this at home.
A.
"Too many files: Apple's Finder chokes on multiple thousands of files. If I want to put/copy/paste that many files in a folder, I damn well should be able to without the system grinding to a halt or finder crashing. I had to use 'Path Finder' ( a finder replacement, ala Windows Explorer) to handle this situation."
:-)
I could not reproduce this problem. I have a folder with 10,596 files in it (I have all my old mail - sick, I know) and Finder didn't have any issues opening and displaying it. It did take 10 seconds to do it, but I don't think that's unreasonable.
off topic:
I remember trying to get this collection off of it's original machine using FTP (didn't have tar/zip). It was a serious challenge finding a PC client that could deal with that many files. "mget *" would usually cause a long pause followed by an application crash
A.
"Okay, okay, I guess I should have said "15 years ago""
Yes, your point was well taken. On the other hand, I was reading net.audio (now rec.audio) circa 1983. Hand me my cane, willya?
A.
"Ten years ago I couldn't participate in a discussion like this with people across the country."
You couldn't? You poor thing. What were you doing while the rest of us were discussing Shark Cheese on talk.bizarre?
A.
"Employees are also facing 4 day working weeks to cut costs."
That's State Employees, not teachers.
A.
You might want to try imapxfer from the UW-IMAP toolkit:
r .Z
http://www.washington.edu/imap/
The source for the utilities is at:
ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap-utils.ta
A.
"you can not send enough power to electrocute someone over a low guage phone pair. get real."
You should get real. It requires very little 'power' to disrupt the heart. The resistance of the skin is what usually keeps this from happening. If you have bare dry hands, you're probably right - but:
The C.O. will send enough voltage to make an old-style mechanical ringer operate. It's a constant-current source (ie: it will raise the voltage until the appropriate current flows). With no phone on the line, you'll get maximum voltage as the C.O. attempts to make the electrons flow.
Again, the resistance of your skin is the deciding factor. Get your hands wet, or let the wires pierce your skin at the same time the C.O. decides to ring your phone and could could easily become dead (remember to hold one wire in each hand if this is your goal).
As a reference (current in *milliamps*):
Unsafe current values:
8 mA to 15 mA
Painful shock; individual can let go at will since muscular control is not lost.
15 mA to 20 mA
Painful shock; control of adjacent muscles lost; victim can not let go.
50 mA to 100 mA
Ventricular fibrillation - a heart condition that can result in death - is possible.
100 mA to 200 mA
Ventricular fibrillation occurs.
200 mA and over
Servere burns, severe muscular contractions - so severe that chest muscles clamp the heart and stop it for the duration of the shock. (This prevents ventricular fibrillation).
http://www.elec-toolbox.com/Safety/safety.htm
A.
" I really doubt if the 9/11 thugs sent a message it would ONLY be on the morning they left."
That's not what he said.
With our previous monitoring, we had already intercepted communications between these people. We were unable to interpret these messages in time to be useful. Collecting even *more* data does not help this problem.
A.
I use one of these:
http://www.baltinc.com/keyrite.phtml
It's not perfect - it doesn't go low enough to let you slouch on a low couch, otherwise it is exactly what I wanted.
Better hurry, the dark mahagony one is discontinued!
A.
The last popular use of this word was circa 1965, by Tom Lehrer:
:-)
So Long Mom (That Was The Year That Was)
(AKA The World War III Folk Song)
So long mom, I'm off to drop the bomb
So don't wait up for me
But while you swelter down there in your shelter
You can see me... On your TV...
While we're attacking frontally
Watch Brink-e-ly and Hunt-e-ly
Describing contrapuntally the cities we have lost
No need for you to miss a minute
Of the agonizing holocaust! Yeah!
Little Johnny Jones he was a U.S. pilot
And no shrinking violet was he...
He was mighty proud when World War III was declared
He wasn't scared no sirreee...
And this is what he said on
His way to Armegeddon...
So long mom, I'm off to drop the bomb
So don't wait up for me
But though I may roam I'lll come back to my home
Although it may be... a pile of debris..
Remember mommy I'm off to get a commie...
So send me a salami and try to smile somehow...
I'll look for you when the war is over:
An hour and a half from now!
A.
"So, is this a bandwidth grab of internet users from ham radio?"
Hard to call it a bandwidth grab when it's already their band...
A.
I remember a newspaper article a few years back where doctors were using leeches to promote blood flow in fingers and toes which had been crushed or otherwise had damage to the blood vessels.
:-)
Seems like a similar application of natural 'tools' to solve a medical problem.
(the reason I remember the article was that many/most people were a little creeped out by the process. Grown men had to look away while doctors put the leeches on. Little boys, on the other hand, insisted on applying the leeches themselves
A.
The rights to the first multi-user, multi-node chat program that I know of were sold to a small software development house in 1985 (or so).
This program pre-dated IRC, and it's predecessor, Relay.
A.