The Noritsu and Fuji Frontier digital printers that are found in most everywhere you see this service provided already do what you think, i.e. create a virtual negative and print this on standard photographic paper. The virtual negative is created with lasers or LEDs depending on the system. To top it all off, they usually do this even if you are printing from a physical negative. They scan your physical negative and print from the virtual negative. They do this to allow the system to automatically "fix" your prints, and I'm sure to maximize throughput. (They can keep a printer humming along while various minilab/scanners feed it digital "negatives".
FYI: The Nortisu I usually use at my local Costco recommends preparing digital files at 320 dpi, as that is the printer's native resolution. So you might be able to do higher resolution from a home printer, but it's hard to beat the durability of standard prints.
You're assuming that people instinctively know how to hold a mouse, with their primary finger on the primary button.
Unfortunately my 2 year old didn't get the memo, and likes to hold the mouse askew so that his right index finder ends up on the right button. (Perhaps it is a better fit for his small hands that way even though I already set the kids up with a smaller Logitech notebook mouse). This behavior drives his 4 year old brother nuts as the little one is "runining all his games."
When I get a chance, I plan to install Mouseware and assign both buttons as left clicks as the standard XP driver only lets you switch buttons not assign them to arbitrary functions.
And, when the Intel based Mac Mini comes out next year, it's going to replace the box they currently use, probably with one of these mice.
My two cents on this since I just converted the 17 disc Harry Potter to bookmarkable AAC. I used iTunes 4.9 to rip the CDs using the new Podcast "optimize for voice" preset. NOTE: Bigger files are supposed to be more skip prone and eat more battery life due to the way the hd & cache are handled so I kept my files to single chapters which were about 40 minutes each, encoded at 64kbps.
I used "Join Tracks" to gather each chapter into an individual file), but a few chapters were spread over 2 consecutive discs and I wanted to combine them, so I used mp4box (Windows, Linux, but not OS X) to losslessly concatenate the AAC files. I then manually used a hex editor to change the file type from "M4A " to "M4B " and changed the file extension from.m4a to.m4b and changed the genre from "Books & Spoken" to "Audiobook". (AFAIK the rename trick only works on Windows, while the hex editing also works on OS X) Created a Smart Playslist for the whole set of files and enjoyed.
A few more possibly useful links MarkAble (Windows only) is supposed to help automate the process I went through, but I'm not sure how it concatenates the files and wanted to learn, and the aforementioned Doug's Applescripts has Join Together (OS X only), but that requires QTPro and it is still not clear whether this is a lossless concatenation or not.
By the looks of it, "the doctor who replaced her infected computer", and "says she no longer clicks on pop-ups" did more than replace her comupter.
She switched to a Mac (and spent a bit more than $500 for that 51" Powerbook;-)).
B
This patent is a continuation of an earlier patent application, and as such, the ONLY thing they can change in the specification (including the abstract/summary) is the reference material. If they did need to change the spec they would have a continuation in part. A CIP also allows one to add inventors. They also used this since according to Delphion this application is a CIP or two even earlier applications. A decent description of these "related applications" can be found here: http://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/matters/matte rs-0406.html
The subject of claims must be described somewhere in the specification, including any material "incorporated by reference" but need not be explicit in the abstact.
Why is this useful? For example, what may have been considered to be a minor variation on the original idea and was described in the specification has become valuable. So new claims have been drafted to address that point.
The big advantage of a continuation is that the original early priority date is maintained, making it harder to invalidate with prior art. As others have mentioned, it is the inventors/attorney's duty to present to the PTO any possible prior art they know of, and the patent is stronger if all that material has already been considered by the PTO.
AT&T Wireless has had its own version of this for a while now, #ID. http://www.wirelessweek.com/article/CA521810.html. Looks like this offering is from MusiKube as mentioned in the linked article.
Note that from a PC you could always use http://www.musicbrainz.org/ if you're trying to fix those ID3 tags.
B
x86 itself doesn't imply loss of control
on
Apple's First Flops
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
IMHO running OSX on "x86" doesn't necessarily imply generic beige boxes. For example, Apple could easily build its own x86 boxes and still maintain hardware control, or they could have someone else build boxes to a particular spec that would be OSX-x86 compatible. The Xbox and Xbox 360 are good examples of controlled x86 and PPC hardware from the "other guys".
What I think would be really cool would be a box that is designed specifically to run OSX-x86, but can also run XP and/or XP apps natively without emulation (dual boot, vmware, wine,...).
Just a note that for $600 you could have bought 3 4G iPod minis and had some redundancy and far better reliability. Plus you could listen to music on them.;-)
One big difference is that XP, out of the box, has no f-ing clue what to do with an ISO image. You need third party programs to do what can be done with the built in tools in OS X.
Here's a good link to a page that compares the two. http://www.xvsxp.com/burning/. Maybe the OP should have tried the Cdburn.exe utility the article mentions.
That's not to say that the OS X tools are complete and you don't need something else to supplement them (Toast?), but IMHO the built-in CD-RW/DVD support in XP really sucks! And many of the included iLife apps support burning media natively...
Amen. I picked up an iBook for exactly the reasons you cited. Portability, stability, usable built-in WiFi, iLife... Definitely tired of all the same old Wintel BS, and it really wasn't that much more expensive than an equivalent Dell.
Like you I find the hardware limiting for CPU intensive tasks like video editing, but the tools are equal to one I spent bucks on on Windows XP.
(e.g. I just love the fact that you can export slideshows from iPhoto using a soundtrack from iTunes to iDVD painlessly.)
And, I still have my 2.8GHz P4 for when I need speed.
All else being equal, I'd probably run Linux on the desktop and have previously run an RH6 server for a few years. IMHO OSX truly is a better desktop unix, and you can still use many of the same FOSS tools under the hood from a bash prompt as you would on Linux, but you don't HAVE to.
My own personal experience has been that you can easily get samples of small quantities of generic components, often for free. This is particulalry true if you already do business with the company and/or are familiar with their offerings. This has not been the case for subassemblies such as this power inverter that can be fairly custom in form/fit/function for a given product.
Basically, unless the part is already offered to the public you are unlikely to get anywhere asking the supplier for a model # PI64567342, but you might be able to get something if you tell them more generic specs (e.g. 5V in 50 V out, 2"x3"), but you might not be able to determine all of those specs by looking at the non-functional unit you are trying to repair.;-).
Personally I use EAC or PlexTools Pro to rip to FLAC and embed the cuesheet and then have been using Nero ImageDrive to mount the image as a virtual drive and rip into iTunes, so I get all the tags in the usual way.
I ran into the same issue you reported with iTunes not recognizing the virtual drive until I did some digging and found the following file: "C:\Program Files\iTunes\CD Configuration\gcdroem.cfg". In there you'll find a section like
Remove or edit the offending entry and you're off to the races.
B
They both make knives for the Swiss Army ...
on
New Mac System Specs
·
· Score: 4, Informative
They have both made knives for the Swiss Army since the late 19th century. This describes what I recall as the case.
The Compromise of 1908
The company from which Wenger emerged had been a supplier to the Swiss Army as early as 1893, and its competitor, Victorinox, since 1890. Wenger is in the French-speaking Jura region, and its competitor is in the German-speaking canton of Schwyz. To avoid friction between the two cantons, the Swiss government decided in 1908 to use each supplier for half of its requirements. So while Victorinox can lay claim to be the "original", Wenger can state that its Swiss Army Knives are the "genuine". In any case, both have been manufacturing Swiss Army Knives for over 100 years and both must meet identical specifications laid down by the army.
Of course once you have become an OEM you'll need to figure out what to do with the 1000 part minimum order you just got;-)
I hope you were trying to be funny, since most OEM suppliers would not sell a part developed for a specific OEM to anyone else, at least that's how it works in my business.
I was in the market for a new laptop earlier this year, and I opted for an iBook G4 instead of the generic Dell. Part of that decision was definitely due to how much I enjoy my iPod, and iTunes is a big part of that. Another part of that arose from struggling with a couple of Windows boxes at the time we were making the decision. The final straw was that for equivalent specs, the list prices was not significantly different, unless I caught a special at Dell, I would have paid only $50 more for the iBook than a similarly configured Dell. The last factor was that I was also looking at the Mac Mini, to get my feet wet with OSX. Since, I still have my XP desktop, I don't count that as swtiching, just adding another box to the mix.
So far, things I really like: battery life, great Airport range, a beautiful screen, it's unix inside (bash, gcc, etc.. work out of the box), iLife '05, iWork '05.
Things I like less: speed (the system doesn't feel slow, but it's no speed demon on floating point math), the keyboard key positions (but that's true of most laptops) and yes, the single button touchpad.
I'm also still seriously considering adding a Mac Mini to the mix a bit later in the year as to replace the desktop as the "always on" box, relegating the Dell to only tasks where high speed is required (e.g. DVD mastering) but will wait until later in the year when Tiger is here.
I've tried a bunch of things over the years, but my favorite for CDs that originally came in a standard jewel box is discsox. The allow me to store lots more CDs in a given volume and still keep the original inserts handy.
For other stuff, e.g. backups, I tend to stack 'em on spindles. For example, I've just finished ripping my audio CD collections to FLAC/CUE images, which I have burned to DVR+R, so my 750+ CD collection is now losslessly backed up to just over 50 DVD+Rs kept on a spindle.
There's a fairly comprehensive history of Kraft's mergers and acquistitions
here and related pages. It would appear that Suchard Jacobs was integrated in 1990. (After gobbling up many other companies including Tobler, the makers of Toblerone, since 1970.) I grew up in Geneva and Suchard was every day chocolate, like Hershey, but I always preferred Tobler's offerings. The one that shocked me recently was seeing the Nestle logo on a box of After Eights instead of Rowntree.;-)
I take it you've never seen the iPod's FW cable? Both FW and USB cables that came with my 4G 20G clickwheel are equally thin and flexible (and yes, white;-)).
Actually more like 52 DVDs if you assume FLAC gives you ~50% compression.
Also, how many CDs really have 74 minutes of music on them? If it's anything like my collection the average is closer to 40 minutes/pressed CD, reducing the number of DVDs by another factor of 2 (i.e. 26 DVDs).
Not bad, you end up with something close to a ~25X space compression this way assuming on average 50% space savings each from FLAC and half-full discs and the 6x capacity of the DVD vs. CD-R.
I'm actually doing this for my ~650 disc collection myself and the approach holds up fairly well.
This is exactly what I was planning on doing myself, just using MyDVD as the AC-3 encoder and using *anything* else to actually master the DVD (I even prefer Nero to MyDVD, though DVDlab sounds very appealing). My current (prior to MyDVD 5.2) process is to use Scenalyzer to grab the video, TMPGEnc to MPEG-2 VBR, and then Nero to VOB.
NOTE: It looks as though there may be another low cost AC-3 DVD authoring alternative to MyDVD in TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.5/AC-3 plug-in. for $90. Unfortunately for me the plug in not compatible with TMPGEnc Plus 2.5, and requires periodic license checks.
Slashdot Mirror
You must also be nuts (or desperate) to pay $0.40 for prints. $0.20 is typical for Costco/Sam's club/Wal-Mart Costco is $0.17 Sam's claims to be as low as $0.11
FYI: The Nortisu I usually use at my local Costco recommends preparing digital files at 320 dpi, as that is the printer's native resolution. So you might be able to do higher resolution from a home printer, but it's hard to beat the durability of standard prints.
BYou're assuming that people instinctively know how to hold a mouse, with their primary finger on the primary button.
Unfortunately my 2 year old didn't get the memo, and likes to hold the mouse askew so that his right index finder ends up on the right button. (Perhaps it is a better fit for his small hands that way even though I already set the kids up with a smaller Logitech notebook mouse). This behavior drives his 4 year old brother nuts as the little one is "runining all his games."
When I get a chance, I plan to install Mouseware and assign both buttons as left clicks as the standard XP driver only lets you switch buttons not assign them to arbitrary functions.
And, when the Intel based Mac Mini comes out next year, it's going to replace the box they currently use, probably with one of these mice.
BalamMy two cents on this since I just converted the 17 disc Harry Potter to bookmarkable AAC. I used iTunes 4.9 to rip the CDs using the new Podcast "optimize for voice" preset. NOTE: Bigger files are supposed to be more skip prone and eat more battery life due to the way the hd & cache are handled so I kept my files to single chapters which were about 40 minutes each, encoded at 64kbps.
I used "Join Tracks" to gather each chapter into an individual file), but a few chapters were spread over 2 consecutive discs and I wanted to combine them, so I used mp4box (Windows, Linux, but not OS X) to losslessly concatenate the AAC files. I then manually used a hex editor to change the file type from "M4A " to "M4B " and changed the file extension from .m4a to .m4b and changed the genre from "Books & Spoken" to "Audiobook". (AFAIK the rename trick only works on Windows, while the hex editing also works on OS X) Created a Smart Playslist for the whole set of files and enjoyed.
A few more possibly useful links MarkAble (Windows only) is supposed to help automate the process I went through, but I'm not sure how it concatenates the files and wanted to learn, and the aforementioned Doug's Applescripts has Join Together (OS X only), but that requires QTPro and it is still not clear whether this is a lossless concatenation or not.
BalamMe too. Wishful thinking or dyslexia? B
By the looks of it, "the doctor who replaced her infected computer", and "says she no longer clicks on pop-ups" did more than replace her comupter. She switched to a Mac (and spent a bit more than $500 for that 51" Powerbook ;-)).
B
http://www.neooffice.org/
The subject of claims must be described somewhere in the specification, including any material "incorporated by reference" but need not be explicit in the abstact.
Why is this useful? For example, what may have been considered to be a minor variation on the original idea and was described in the specification has become valuable. So new claims have been drafted to address that point.
The big advantage of a continuation is that the original early priority date is maintained, making it harder to invalidate with prior art. As others have mentioned, it is the inventors/attorney's duty to present to the PTO any possible prior art they know of, and the patent is stronger if all that material has already been considered by the PTO.
BalamAT&T Wireless has had its own version of this for a while now, #ID. http://www.wirelessweek.com/article/CA521810.html. Looks like this offering is from MusiKube as mentioned in the linked article.
Note that from a PC you could always use http://www.musicbrainz.org/ if you're trying to fix those ID3 tags.
BIMHO running OSX on "x86" doesn't necessarily imply generic beige boxes. For example, Apple could easily build its own x86 boxes and still maintain hardware control, or they could have someone else build boxes to a particular spec that would be OSX-x86 compatible. The Xbox and Xbox 360 are good examples of controlled x86 and PPC hardware from the "other guys".
What I think would be really cool would be a box that is designed specifically to run OSX-x86, but can also run XP and/or XP apps natively without emulation (dual boot, vmware, wine, ...).
B6.1 surround sound baby!
BJust a note that for $600 you could have bought 3 4G iPod minis and had some redundancy and far better reliability. Plus you could listen to music on them. ;-)
BOne big difference is that XP, out of the box, has no f-ing clue what to do with an ISO image. You need third party programs to do what can be done with the built in tools in OS X.
Here's a good link to a page that compares the two. http://www.xvsxp.com/burning/. Maybe the OP should have tried the Cdburn.exe utility the article mentions.
That's not to say that the OS X tools are complete and you don't need something else to supplement them (Toast?), but IMHO the built-in CD-RW/DVD support in XP really sucks! And many of the included iLife apps support burning media natively...
BAmen. I picked up an iBook for exactly the reasons you cited. Portability, stability, usable built-in WiFi, iLife... Definitely tired of all the same old Wintel BS, and it really wasn't that much more expensive than an equivalent Dell.
Like you I find the hardware limiting for CPU intensive tasks like video editing, but the tools are equal to one I spent bucks on on Windows XP. (e.g. I just love the fact that you can export slideshows from iPhoto using a soundtrack from iTunes to iDVD painlessly.) And, I still have my 2.8GHz P4 for when I need speed.
All else being equal, I'd probably run Linux on the desktop and have previously run an RH6 server for a few years. IMHO OSX truly is a better desktop unix, and you can still use many of the same FOSS tools under the hood from a bash prompt as you would on Linux, but you don't HAVE to.
BMy own personal experience has been that you can easily get samples of small quantities of generic components, often for free. This is particulalry true if you already do business with the company and/or are familiar with their offerings. This has not been the case for subassemblies such as this power inverter that can be fairly custom in form/fit/function for a given product.
Basically, unless the part is already offered to the public you are unlikely to get anywhere asking the supplier for a model # PI64567342, but you might be able to get something if you tell them more generic specs (e.g. 5V in 50 V out, 2"x3"), but you might not be able to determine all of those specs by looking at the non-functional unit you are trying to repair. ;-).
B.Personally I use EAC or PlexTools Pro to rip to FLAC and embed the cuesheet and then have been using Nero ImageDrive to mount the image as a virtual drive and rip into iTunes, so I get all the tags in the usual way.
I ran into the same issue you reported with iTunes not recognizing the virtual drive until I did some digging and found the following file: "C:\Program Files\iTunes\CD Configuration\gcdroem.cfg". In there you'll find a section like
Remove or edit the offending entry and you're off to the races.B
The Compromise of 1908
The company from which Wenger emerged had been a supplier to the Swiss Army as early as 1893, and its competitor, Victorinox, since 1890. Wenger is in the French-speaking Jura region, and its competitor is in the German-speaking canton of Schwyz. To avoid friction between the two cantons, the Swiss government decided in 1908 to use each supplier for half of its requirements. So while Victorinox can lay claim to be the "original", Wenger can state that its Swiss Army Knives are the "genuine". In any case, both have been manufacturing Swiss Army Knives for over 100 years and both must meet identical specifications laid down by the army.
BOf course once you have become an OEM you'll need to figure out what to do with the 1000 part minimum order you just got ;-)
I hope you were trying to be funny, since most OEM suppliers would not sell a part developed for a specific OEM to anyone else, at least that's how it works in my business.
BI was in the market for a new laptop earlier this year, and I opted for an iBook G4 instead of the generic Dell. Part of that decision was definitely due to how much I enjoy my iPod, and iTunes is a big part of that. Another part of that arose from struggling with a couple of Windows boxes at the time we were making the decision. The final straw was that for equivalent specs, the list prices was not significantly different, unless I caught a special at Dell, I would have paid only $50 more for the iBook than a similarly configured Dell. The last factor was that I was also looking at the Mac Mini, to get my feet wet with OSX. Since, I still have my XP desktop, I don't count that as swtiching, just adding another box to the mix.
So far, things I really like: battery life, great Airport range, a beautiful screen, it's unix inside (bash, gcc, etc.. work out of the box), iLife '05, iWork '05.
Things I like less: speed (the system doesn't feel slow, but it's no speed demon on floating point math), the keyboard key positions (but that's true of most laptops) and yes, the single button touchpad.
I'm also still seriously considering adding a Mac Mini to the mix a bit later in the year as to replace the desktop as the "always on" box, relegating the Dell to only tasks where high speed is required (e.g. DVD mastering) but will wait until later in the year when Tiger is here.
BI've tried a bunch of things over the years, but my favorite for CDs that originally came in a standard jewel box is discsox. The allow me to store lots more CDs in a given volume and still keep the original inserts handy.
For other stuff, e.g. backups, I tend to stack 'em on spindles. For example, I've just finished ripping my audio CD collections to FLAC/CUE images, which I have burned to DVR+R, so my 750+ CD collection is now losslessly backed up to just over 50 DVD+Rs kept on a spindle.
BThere's a fairly comprehensive history of Kraft's mergers and acquistitions here and related pages. It would appear that Suchard Jacobs was integrated in 1990. (After gobbling up many other companies including Tobler, the makers of Toblerone, since 1970.) I grew up in Geneva and Suchard was every day chocolate, like Hershey, but I always preferred Tobler's offerings. The one that shocked me recently was seeing the Nestle logo on a box of After Eights instead of Rowntree. ;-)
BI take it you've never seen the iPod's FW cable? Both FW and USB cables that came with my 4G 20G clickwheel are equally thin and flexible (and yes, white ;-)).
BActually more like 52 DVDs if you assume FLAC gives you ~50% compression.
Also, how many CDs really have 74 minutes of music on them? If it's anything like my collection the average is closer to 40 minutes/pressed CD, reducing the number of DVDs by another factor of 2 (i.e. 26 DVDs).
Not bad, you end up with something close to a ~25X space compression this way assuming on average 50% space savings each from FLAC and half-full discs and the 6x capacity of the DVD vs. CD-R.
I'm actually doing this for my ~650 disc collection myself and the approach holds up fairly well.
BThis is exactly what I was planning on doing myself, just using MyDVD as the AC-3 encoder and using *anything* else to actually master the DVD (I even prefer Nero to MyDVD, though DVDlab sounds very appealing). My current (prior to MyDVD 5.2) process is to use Scenalyzer to grab the video, TMPGEnc to MPEG-2 VBR, and then Nero to VOB.
NOTE: It looks as though there may be another low cost AC-3 DVD authoring alternative to MyDVD in TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.5/AC-3 plug-in. for $90. Unfortunately for me the plug in not compatible with TMPGEnc Plus 2.5, and requires periodic license checks.
BYou're wrong, and so am I. The AC-3 encoder is in the deluxe version of the product, available for $70. http://www.sonic.com/products/mydvd/deluxe/default .asp
"Dolby Digital(R) encoding for 50% more video per disc"
BalamSonic MyDVD
Balam