Well, i've avoided writing web stuff for my whole career but when I got lumbered with a project at work I used GWT.
Firstly, I had loads of problems. However they were mainly down to broken stuff in the RC builds (all fixed now that it's out of beta) and the fact that I was learning Java as I went along. Nothing that was a major problem was down to the architecture of GWT.
If i'd have written pure javascript instead then doubtless it'd have taken far longer and worked less well.
GWT rocks for anything where you need to write anything with a rich web gui and a large amount of interaction between this and a backend. I can use Eclipse to single step through my Java code, with breakpoints and all that stuff. GWT also takes all the browser specific hassles away, for example with the differing rich text area implementations used by all the browsers. Without these niceties i'd have given up on web development before i'd even started.
Oh and the google group for GWT is great - i've had problems answered within ten minutes. The Google team are very visible and are obviously proud of their product. Rightly so, too.
Foobar2000 is my choice for *managing* my collection, which is currently about 55000 tracks split equally between aac and musepack files, totalling about 320gb.
The tagging and conversion features are unsurpassed and it's still nimble even with a collection that size. I don't use it for actual playback, for that I use mpd on my linux box.
What sort of person buys their software at a supermarket?
Yeah, I better grab some milk.. Brown eggs. Not white eggs.. A loaf of whole wheat.. Tampons.. Hey! An office suite!
Who are these people?
This is where 'genuine advantage' will start to bite Microsoft in the ass. Whereas beforehand the clueless millions were happy with their warezed copy of Microsoft Office they'll now know it's not kosher. For them, a £20 office suite will be a deal stealer.
On a related note just how good/bad is Ability Office that Tesco are repackaging? Panda AV is ok, but does Ability (for example) read Microsoft Office files?
I read the linked announcement thread and browsed through the replies. I don't think i've ever seen such a bunch of drama queens since last time I got lost in Blackpool with a cargo of wigs. It's like all their collective dogs got shot.'Corporate bullshit' was an oft used phrase. In which case what are they doing putting all their boring crap on some corporate site? Go get some parchment and head for the hills instead folks!
Nice that they're prepackaging all this and supplying the drivers and all. But this seems to me to be a 6150 Mobo and case w/ remote. Good Mobo (use a 6100 for 2 Linux WoW machines), though sound was a pain to configure (ended up getting a external card).
I had many problems with the same board, but the sound problems are sorted now with the latest ALSA. If you take the latest FC5 respin and install fresh from that you'll have no problems at all apart from suspend support.
I have always seemed to find a better, or at least far less intrusive, alternative to the Norton products
Amen to that. We must remember that one of the main problems with malware is that it slows down the machine and eats system resources. It goes therefore that a permanently on a/v scanner shouldn't hog resources itself, which Norton does with style, otherwise it is exhibiting the same effects it is meant to deal with.
Together with the numerous security flaws found in Norton which can make it less secure than running without a/v software, I don't know how they sell any copies to anyone with a clue. Putting Norton on the cover with a stethoscope was excellent marketing.
If I fix a computer one of the first things I do is remove Norton and install freeware AVG + Spyboy S&D. It's far more effective and less pimped out with ridiculous bloat extravaganzas.
Go be a cop for 18 years, then reply. Focus on what I was saying, not distorting it.
Good point. Citing 99% of cops being twats is ridiculous, I know good ones but the bad ones reduce the publics view of them disproportionately as a whole.
That said i'm from England and the first time I went abroad on holiday was to New York at the millennium. What should have been a great night was ruined by cops being overzealous at confiscating alcohol and seeing a bloke in front of me cuffed beaten and dragged out by the cuffs for daring to ask to get nearer to Times Square (there was space at the block in front). Not to mention the number of times I saw cops going to the front of a queue at Burger King, usually fat guys tapping their fingers on their holsters as if to say "yeah im fat and im cheating the queue but i've got a gun".
Our police system (in the UK) to me seems less likely to breed dickheads like this.
Probably. I lived in Swindon (UK) when they were trialing it ~10 years ago and it was crap, though to be fair this was mainly down to the implementation. It took 20 seconds for it to take your money on the bus, as you can imagine with loads of passengers waiting it was a bit irritating.
I only ever used it in anger when Mackenzies Bar were offering 1/2 price drinks if you paid with Mondex...
As others have pointed out, defining a tune by a single genre is at best useless and worse incorrect. It takes no account of mood, tunes that straddle >1 genre and doesn't help with the context a song was made in. Is 'britpop' a genre? Are Spearhead 'hip-hop', 'rap', or 'funk'?
No service offers this - the nearest is AMG who provie multiple styles, genres, moods and instrumentation per artist. As far as I know there is no official automated tool which rips this information.
You'll be better off with your own rips using APEv2 tags which allows multiple genres and no retarded 32 byte limit on field lengths. Foobar2000 works great with ape tags and allows fine control over how your sound comes out.
no-one seems to be particularly hindered by the DRM in iTunes
I'd disagree with this. I have a music server that serves Foobar2000 on my windows PC, Amarok on my Linux HTPC and Music Player Daemon/Icecast so I can listen to my CDs at work. Much as i'd love to buy from itunes occasionally their DRM stops me from just dropping the tunes on my Linux server and using them as I see fit.
The same goes for the audiophile types who spend 30k+ on home music server systems for the same reasons - Apples DRM prohibits them from using their legally bought music as they see fit.
I had a bit of an emergency at work today - we're doing a demonstration tomorrow and the VIVO (Video In/Video Out) graphics card on one of our demo setups died, so we had to go to a local store and buy *anything* that matched this spec:
ATI (cos we didn't want to rewrite some of our code) PCI Express VIVO
So we got stung for ~£200 for an ATI X800 variant. Which I don't mind, but it came in the biggest-ass box you've ever seen. The cover had some rendered image of a woman with enormous tits and the heatpipe had the manufacturers name stamped in it, as if the thing had been carried down by Moses straight from/dev/deity
Why can't somebody just do a nice card with *stable* 2d and nice video acceleration under Linux, with 3d acceleration as good as you can get without pumping out loads of heat or having a fan? Matrox are nice for 2D but you couldn't ever play the occasional 3D game on them. Why does every card have to be marketed to the sort of kid who has neons underneath their car?
I bought a couple of Terastations at work in lieu of a 'real' file server that i'd have to patch/look after etc. They're nice but a bit slow. This isn't a problem for most media file serving (which is generally serial in nature) but you might have problems writing to the RAID array on the thing while reading (as you might want to do on a networked Mythtv setup, like I do at home)
Nice boxes, but i'd rather pay £50 extra for something with a little faster CPU.
I take it by 'communication service' the article was on about the Messenger service. I agree with this completely, but the reverse is true too - I installed Windows Server 2003 on a new server at work last week and IE has all the usual MSN radio links built into the favourites. WTF? And why is the indexing service built into a consumer OS when nobody uses it?
I usually don't care for Microsoft bashing but they especially need to learn how to differentiate a consumer and corporate OS rather than through having different splash screens.
I bought a Coolermaster ATC-630 case for my lounge HTPC, with a nice new Asus motherboard with integrated nvidia graphics and everything else on board. It's a mythtv box so needs to be nice and quiet.
I got Cool 'n' Quiet working with the Athlon64 under Linux no problem so the fan throttles down to ~600rpm when it's not doing much. The psu supplied with the case was a different matter - horrendously loud and didn't throttle under low loads.
I looked everywhere for external PSUs but as mentioned the only ones available are low wattage mini-itx ones. So I just bought a nice quiet enermax 300watt psu, bought some extension cables and have it hanging out the back of the machine.
It looks a bit ghetto, but I don't care as the thing is sat in a hifi rack anyway so most people won't see it, and even better it means the psu heat stays outside the case. Works like a charm and I can't hear the box now, even under load. I'll probably dremel a hole in the case at some point though so I can route the cables better and ditch the extensions.
The psu is an Enermax EG285SX, and I highly recommend it. The motherboard is an Asus K8N-VM CSM with integrated DVI and everything. The motherboard I can't recommend though, until Asus fix their fecking BIOS and website.
For the love of don't use a Geode based SBC. I've whinged about this before, but they're awful. For one thing all the media hardware (frame buffer and audio) is software emulated in the slow BIOS, but the serial ports don't work (don't know if you care), DMA crashes the board, the 'watchdog' is software and therefore useless; and finally interrupts act if they feel like it. My day job has shown me just how s*it thick these boards are. They look nice and fanless, ideal for MPD or Slimserver, but they're not worth the hassle.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the old joke goes like this:
:)
WOMAN (to Scotsman wearing a kilt): Excuse me, Sir, but is anything worn underneath the kilt?
SCOTSMAN: Ach no lassie, it's not worn, it's as good as it's ever been
Well, i've avoided writing web stuff for my whole career but when I got lumbered with a project at work I used GWT.
Firstly, I had loads of problems. However they were mainly down to broken stuff in the RC builds (all fixed now that it's out of beta) and the fact that I was learning Java as I went along. Nothing that was a major problem was down to the architecture of GWT.
If i'd have written pure javascript instead then doubtless it'd have taken far longer and worked less well.
GWT rocks for anything where you need to write anything with a rich web gui and a large amount of interaction between this and a backend. I can use Eclipse to single step through my Java code, with breakpoints and all that stuff. GWT also takes all the browser specific hassles away, for example with the differing rich text area implementations used by all the browsers. Without these niceties i'd have given up on web development before i'd even started.
Oh and the google group for GWT is great - i've had problems answered within ten minutes. The Google team are very visible and are obviously proud of their product. Rightly so, too.
Foobar2000 is my choice for *managing* my collection, which is currently about 55000 tracks split equally between aac and musepack files, totalling about 320gb.
The tagging and conversion features are unsurpassed and it's still nimble even with a collection that size. I don't use it for actual playback, for that I use mpd on my linux box.
hth
This is where 'genuine advantage' will start to bite Microsoft in the ass. Whereas beforehand the clueless millions were happy with their warezed copy of Microsoft Office they'll now know it's not kosher. For them, a £20 office suite will be a deal stealer.
On a related note just how good/bad is Ability Office that Tesco are repackaging? Panda AV is ok, but does Ability (for example) read Microsoft Office files?
Given an hour with that link it's exactly what i'd use it for.
I read the linked announcement thread and browsed through the replies. I don't think i've ever seen such a bunch of drama queens since last time I got lost in Blackpool with a cargo of wigs. It's like all their collective dogs got shot.'Corporate bullshit' was an oft used phrase. In which case what are they doing putting all their boring crap on some corporate site? Go get some parchment and head for the hills instead folks!
~writes new MS-DOS compatible apps~
I had many problems with the same board, but the sound problems are sorted now with the latest ALSA. If you take the latest FC5 respin and install fresh from that you'll have no problems at all apart from suspend support.
Amen to that. We must remember that one of the main problems with malware is that it slows down the machine and eats system resources. It goes therefore that a permanently on a/v scanner shouldn't hog resources itself, which Norton does with style, otherwise it is exhibiting the same effects it is meant to deal with.
Together with the numerous security flaws found in Norton which can make it less secure than running without a/v software, I don't know how they sell any copies to anyone with a clue. Putting Norton on the cover with a stethoscope was excellent marketing.
If I fix a computer one of the first things I do is remove Norton and install freeware AVG + Spyboy S&D. It's far more effective and less pimped out with ridiculous bloat extravaganzas.
Good point. Citing 99% of cops being twats is ridiculous, I know good ones but the bad ones reduce the publics view of them disproportionately as a whole.
That said i'm from England and the first time I went abroad on holiday was to New York at the millennium. What should have been a great night was ruined by cops being overzealous at confiscating alcohol and seeing a bloke in front of me cuffed beaten and dragged out by the cuffs for daring to ask to get nearer to Times Square (there was space at the block in front). Not to mention the number of times I saw cops going to the front of a queue at Burger King, usually fat guys tapping their fingers on their holsters as if to say "yeah im fat and im cheating the queue but i've got a gun".
Our police system (in the UK) to me seems less likely to breed dickheads like this.
Gotta love that move to the intel architecture :D
When EA started they were great. Anyone else here remember M.U.L.E??
http://atarimule.neotechgaming.com/
Probably. I lived in Swindon (UK) when they were trialing it ~10 years ago and it was crap, though to be fair this was mainly down to the implementation. It took 20 seconds for it to take your money on the bus, as you can imagine with loads of passengers waiting it was a bit irritating.
I only ever used it in anger when Mackenzies Bar were offering 1/2 price drinks if you paid with Mondex...
I wonder if he got permission to publish that? I know it's vaguely approving in an infomercial kind of way, but there is genuine criticism too.
>>it's a VERY simple programming trick.
No it isn't. Most of the problem is that ActiveX and other MS native components on a webpage aren't supported in other browsers, and for good reason.
Windows Update for example always calls IE and uses ActiveX. Changing the default browser is going to break WU.
As others have pointed out, defining a tune by a single genre is at best useless and worse incorrect. It takes no account of mood, tunes that straddle >1 genre and doesn't help with the context a song was made in. Is 'britpop' a genre? Are Spearhead 'hip-hop', 'rap', or 'funk'?
No service offers this - the nearest is AMG who provie multiple styles, genres, moods and instrumentation per artist. As far as I know there is no official automated tool which rips this information.
You'll be better off with your own rips using APEv2 tags which allows multiple genres and no retarded 32 byte limit on field lengths. Foobar2000 works great with ape tags and allows fine control over how your sound comes out.
sean
I'd disagree with this. I have a music server that serves Foobar2000 on my windows PC, Amarok on my Linux HTPC and Music Player Daemon/Icecast so I can listen to my CDs at work. Much as i'd love to buy from itunes occasionally their DRM stops me from just dropping the tunes on my Linux server and using them as I see fit.
The same goes for the audiophile types who spend 30k+ on home music server systems for the same reasons - Apples DRM prohibits them from using their legally bought music as they see fit.
Back to P2P again then...
I had a bit of an emergency at work today - we're doing a demonstration tomorrow and the VIVO (Video In/Video Out) graphics card on one of our demo setups died, so we had to go to a local store and buy *anything* that matched this spec:
/dev/deity
ATI (cos we didn't want to rewrite some of our code)
PCI Express
VIVO
So we got stung for ~£200 for an ATI X800 variant. Which I don't mind, but it came in the biggest-ass box you've ever seen. The cover had some rendered image of a woman with enormous tits and the heatpipe had the manufacturers name stamped in it, as if the thing had been carried down by Moses straight from
Why can't somebody just do a nice card with *stable* 2d and nice video acceleration under Linux, with 3d acceleration as good as you can get without pumping out loads of heat or having a fan? Matrox are nice for 2D but you couldn't ever play the occasional 3D game on them. Why does every card have to be marketed to the sort of kid who has neons underneath their car?
I bought a couple of Terastations at work in lieu of a 'real' file server that i'd have to patch/look after etc. They're nice but a bit slow. This isn't a problem for most media file serving (which is generally serial in nature) but you might have problems writing to the RAID array on the thing while reading (as you might want to do on a networked Mythtv setup, like I do at home)
Nice boxes, but i'd rather pay £50 extra for something with a little faster CPU.
aka the "Dressing up a turd" competition.
Having to change the aesthetic of the computer to hide the fact your paid for content is under someone elses control is exactly that.
I take it by 'communication service' the article was on about the Messenger service. I agree with this completely, but the reverse is true too - I installed Windows Server 2003 on a new server at work last week and IE has all the usual MSN radio links built into the favourites. WTF? And why is the indexing service built into a consumer OS when nobody uses it?
I usually don't care for Microsoft bashing but they especially need to learn how to differentiate a consumer and corporate OS rather than through having different splash screens.
I bought a Coolermaster ATC-630 case for my lounge HTPC, with a nice new Asus motherboard with integrated nvidia graphics and everything else on board. It's a mythtv box so needs to be nice and quiet.
I got Cool 'n' Quiet working with the Athlon64 under Linux no problem so the fan throttles down to ~600rpm when it's not doing much. The psu supplied with the case was a different matter - horrendously loud and didn't throttle under low loads.
I looked everywhere for external PSUs but as mentioned the only ones available are low wattage mini-itx ones. So I just bought a nice quiet enermax 300watt psu, bought some extension cables and have it hanging out the back of the machine.
It looks a bit ghetto, but I don't care as the thing is sat in a hifi rack anyway so most people won't see it, and even better it means the psu heat stays outside the case. Works like a charm and I can't hear the box now, even under load. I'll probably dremel a hole in the case at some point though so I can route the cables better and ditch the extensions.
The psu is an Enermax EG285SX, and I highly recommend it. The motherboard is an Asus K8N-VM CSM with integrated DVI and everything. The motherboard I can't recommend though, until Asus fix their fecking BIOS and website.
http://www.hwpr0n.se/
:D
That pretty much covers it
For the love of don't use a Geode based SBC. I've whinged about this before, but they're awful. For one thing all the media hardware (frame buffer and audio) is software emulated in the slow BIOS, but the serial ports don't work (don't know if you care), DMA crashes the board, the 'watchdog' is software and therefore useless; and finally interrupts act if they feel like it. My day job has shown me just how s*it thick these boards are. They look nice and fanless, ideal for MPD or Slimserver, but they're not worth the hassle.
Hey, I did a little digging and it seems this idiot is from my hometown - Preston, England.
:)
i ted.html
Give him hell
http://www.download-by.net/company/retrocoder-lim
Address: 329 Preston Road
Grimsargh
Preston
Lancashire
Zip/postal code: PR2 5JT