Re:CPU usage with Xine, mplayer, etc.
on
Mplayer Revisited
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· Score: 1
Are you using gmplayer (the mplayer GUI) or just mplayer? Actually, I haven't used Xine in almost a year, but I know that gmplayer takes about 4.5% of the processor time on my Athlon 1333 MHz when idle and a similar increase while playing. Freaky. It doesn't affect playback much as far as I can tell, but I don't use the GUI much. Also, although I haven't compared them recently, other posters have an say that Xine has trouble rendering sometimes and also that it allows frame dropping by default, while mplayer does not (there is a -framedrop switch, though). Meh, I like mplayer, even if the manpage is worse than BASH's (just because it is so hard to tell what section you're in).
I thought that SATA was backwards compatible with Parallel ATA. I think I read in Maximum PC or CPU magazine that it would appear to be the same as a regular ATA controller. Not that it really matters -- better safe than sorry and all that stuff.
Apparently "Interesting" is now a synonym for "Factually Incorrect"
Of course. If he was correct, he would be modded "Informative". However, we indeed could use a "-1 Stupid" modifier, as that would have weeded his post out.
I don't want a voice operated computer. What I want is something like the Matrix where I can not only download info right into my brain (or at least learn it at 1000x speed), but interact with the computer so that I can use the computer as a direct extention of my brain. When I think "Hmm, the square root of three is...", the computer will instantly let my head think "Ahh, it is ~1.7320508". Or if I need to remember something, I will remember it at exactly the right time. The computer will truely be a tool for enhancing the human mind.
The Audigy 2 says, rather promenantly that it is THX certified. Whether that means crap, though, is still being debated. There probably are more accurate cards than the Audigy 2 (maybe something from M-Audio [Midman]), but the Audigy has the certification. My Megaworks 550's are THX certified, and they indeed do sound good (and will sound better when I get something that has decent Linux/ALSA support, not my Santa Cruz), but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't buy a non-THX system if it was better. What would be nice is for some not-for-profit group of audio engineers to write up a certification for accurate audio reproducation and have people certify against that, with the only cost being that to have the engineer hear the system. That being said, IANAA(udio)E(ngineer).
I have a TI-83 Plus and I must say that it rather sucks. I want to get an 89 so I can put an RPN shell on it. I don't like having to go back into my equation to put in parenthesis I forgot and it is very slow. I need to get my TI-34 back from someone I loaned it to because it was the only calculator that I really enjoyed doing arithmetic with. The new 34's have that editable line that I don't like--it's just like the 83 style: you forget a parenthesis, and must scroll back and put it in.
Not everything that is old is bad. Are Unix-like systems bad because they are based on 60's computer science? Are Windows and C++ better than Unix and C just because they are newer? Is the steering wheel bad because it has been around for 100 years?
My friend recently got a TI-89 and, while it's not an HP, it is able to download programs from the computer. He was able to download an RPN shell and he loves it. Of course, we are both high school seniors, so he gets bored. Since he doesn't have any games on there, he winds up putting in random equations and having it solve for x. Last time, it took the calculator about a day of computing and it would have taken more had the batteries not run out.
Oooh, 1.2 TB on USB 2.0. That would be scary. Mwahahahaha! What, USB can do 127 devices per bus, right? Minus two for mouse and keyboard (unless you want to go oldschool), and buy 125 of these and you have yourself 15 TB of HD space all LVM'ed into various partitions. To make it efficient, you'd have to fill your ~6 PCI slots with some of these USB 2.0 cards and stripe the drives, although you would still have only ~30 USB ports. Oh, duh, it wouldn't matter because they aren't all on the same bus... Anyhoo, we need a baseline anyway, so that's about 5 drives per port, which is still going to suck, but not if you stripe them properly. Actually, all thoes drives would cost about $26500 before shipping, and would draw an ungodly amount of power. Is anyone willing to see whether it will work?
Like my frankensetup that I had. I had rigged a $20 CompUSA 2.1 speaker system to be my front speakers, and just for kicks hooked another 2.0 system to the rear output for surround sound! All from my integrated motherboard audio! Damn, that sounded like sh*t. Then I bought my awewome Creative/Cambridge SoundWorks Megaworks 550 system and a Santa Cruz and it sounds great. Too bad the ALSA driver for the Santa Cruz doesn't support surround sound yet (it's not synchronized at all).
While I'm here, what good 5.1 channel soundcards are there that have full ALSA drivers? I may sell my Santa Cruz.
The plane undoubtedly flew by itself. It used its 13 horsepower engine to maintain enough airspeed (the speed of air going over the wings -- the speed that counts for keeping the plane in the air) long enough to travel a couple hundred feet. To fly it didn't really need to even be going forewards, it just had to have enough air going over the wings to not stall (stall==fall out of the sky due to lack of lift). The thing about gliders is that they can't maintain a sufficient airspeed without using gravity, while the Wright plane could. Could it take off without the derrick to assist it? No, the engine wasn't powerful enough. Could it fly? Yes, because the engine could maintain enough airspeed to keep it aloft.
>It's no coincidence that hang gliding is a hugely popular sport in Kittyhawk.
And the Wrights had built a couple gliders themselves before they mounted an engine and props on one.
Or you could use SIMPLE: the Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Language Environment.
$ fortune -m SIMPLE
And I quote "...[SIMPLE] was designed to make it impossible to write code with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN, END, and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make a syntax error."
I think we have a solution to all our bug problems!
Agreed. I liked the beginning of FotR because it was pretty accurate and the way it was done was just good. Then, things just went downhill as the movie kept diverging from the book and stuff was written out of the script so more boring visuals could be put in. Oh, and I don't like the soundtrack.
Re:Three Major Vulnerabilities
on
Windows ATMs by 2005
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· Score: 2, Informative
* The customer sticks a card in and punches buttons. This is reasonably safe now, when you have little more than a numeric keypad with "Cancel" and "Enter" buttons. But the more Windoze crap they add -- they're talking about "lottery tickets and soft drinks" -- the more robust the UI will have to be. Are you sure you checked that buffer overflow?
Umm, those Coinstar machines are running windows, and they only have ~five buttons. It's not like they are going to be installing full terminals. They probably won't be much different from any current ATM you run into. You may not even be able to tell it's Windoze because the GUI will take up the whole screen. In reality, there are two vulnerabilites: the actual ATM program interfacing with the user, and the networking part. I'm more scared of the networking part being compromised. Of course, there is always some dumb person who puts a backdoor into the GUI to test whether it will actually dispense cash and never take it out, but that's not an OS problem.
Yes, but all of those things you mentioned are priveledges [sp?}, not rights. It is a right for someone to communicate with another person and rights aren't licensed, are they? As long as you protect yourself, you will not be hit with much of the sh*t that flys around the internet, unless you are popular with people who use Outlook:-)
Licensing internet usage is like licensing speaking in a public place. You can say just about anything in a public place (within reason) without restriction -- why is the internet different? Just because there are 300 other people in my HS lunchroom making a massive racket doesn't mean I can't communicate effectively. There is no control in that case, and there doesn't need to be. If you don't want to pick up other people's conversations, don't listen. That's like using a firewall.
Of course I'm almost oversimplifying the situation, but my point stands, and maybe when we develop new protocols some of these problems will go away and we'll have more tolerable problems in their place. We just need Air the Next Generation to communicate over!
How fast of a modem is that? Hmm, maybe around 20 to 30 bit/s? How many times can you say EF or A7 a second? Or will people resort to moving to a larger base to say it faster? I'm sure someone could match a 300 baud modem eventually.
Do the Macs at CompUSA allow people to access the CD drive? If so, just waltz in, pop in the disc, test it, get your disc, and waltz out. Heck, people have copied entire office suites before this way. Or, you could just post it on the web and use a networked Mac to access it. I often go to NewEgg.com to look at reviews while at CompUSA.
I recently switched from GNOME to Enlightenment just because it doesn't get in my way. It seemed to me that GNOME was very good at giving me half-baked features, I don't like the panel at the top of the screen (if it worked like a Mac, maybe), and I love the idea of clicking on the desktop to get a customized menu. I still follow GNOME devel, though, because it may eventually be my desktop again, but from 1.4->2.2, too much was culled. I may actually never go back, though. I like using E to only manage windows, manage desktops, and give me a cool desktop menu. I like the simplicity.
But if I had my way, everything would be an object , windows would only render the objects (like documents, images, movies, etc), manipulation of the objects would NOT be done by menus and buttons in the window, and DnD would work so I could embed my objects anywhere. But I am not that good at programming, so I will just have to wait.
My microwave has settings for "Dinner Plate", "Popcorn", "Soup", "Muffin", "Potato", and others, but I don't see the "Compact Disc" setting. Should I go out and look for a new microwave because mine is outdated or is this like the vaporware that Slashdot always is talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
Are you using gmplayer (the mplayer GUI) or just mplayer? Actually, I haven't used Xine in almost a year, but I know that gmplayer takes about 4.5% of the processor time on my Athlon 1333 MHz when idle and a similar increase while playing. Freaky. It doesn't affect playback much as far as I can tell, but I don't use the GUI much. Also, although I haven't compared them recently, other posters have an say that Xine has trouble rendering sometimes and also that it allows frame dropping by default, while mplayer does not (there is a -framedrop switch, though). Meh, I like mplayer, even if the manpage is worse than BASH's (just because it is so hard to tell what section you're in).
I thought that SATA was backwards compatible with Parallel ATA. I think I read in Maximum PC or CPU magazine that it would appear to be the same as a regular ATA controller. Not that it really matters -- better safe than sorry and all that stuff.
I don't want a voice operated computer. What I want is something like the Matrix where I can not only download info right into my brain (or at least learn it at 1000x speed), but interact with the computer so that I can use the computer as a direct extention of my brain. When I think "Hmm, the square root of three is...", the computer will instantly let my head think "Ahh, it is ~1.7320508". Or if I need to remember something, I will remember it at exactly the right time. The computer will truely be a tool for enhancing the human mind.
The Audigy 2 says, rather promenantly that it is THX certified. Whether that means crap, though, is still being debated. There probably are more accurate cards than the Audigy 2 (maybe something from M-Audio [Midman]), but the Audigy has the certification. My Megaworks 550's are THX certified, and they indeed do sound good (and will sound better when I get something that has decent Linux/ALSA support, not my Santa Cruz), but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't buy a non-THX system if it was better. What would be nice is for some not-for-profit group of audio engineers to write up a certification for accurate audio reproducation and have people certify against that, with the only cost being that to have the engineer hear the system. That being said, IANAA(udio)E(ngineer).
...and hysterically laughed at if he mentioned that he was using XP.
I have a TI-83 Plus and I must say that it rather sucks. I want to get an 89 so I can put an RPN shell on it. I don't like having to go back into my equation to put in parenthesis I forgot and it is very slow. I need to get my TI-34 back from someone I loaned it to because it was the only calculator that I really enjoyed doing arithmetic with. The new 34's have that editable line that I don't like--it's just like the 83 style: you forget a parenthesis, and must scroll back and put it in.
Not everything that is old is bad. Are Unix-like systems bad because they are based on 60's computer science? Are Windows and C++ better than Unix and C just because they are newer? Is the steering wheel bad because it has been around for 100 years?
My friend recently got a TI-89 and, while it's not an HP, it is able to download programs from the computer. He was able to download an RPN shell and he loves it. Of course, we are both high school seniors, so he gets bored. Since he doesn't have any games on there, he winds up putting in random equations and having it solve for x. Last time, it took the calculator about a day of computing and it would have taken more had the batteries not run out.
Oooh, 1.2 TB on USB 2.0. That would be scary. Mwahahahaha! What, USB can do 127 devices per bus, right? Minus two for mouse and keyboard (unless you want to go oldschool), and buy 125 of these and you have yourself 15 TB of HD space all LVM'ed into various partitions. To make it efficient, you'd have to fill your ~6 PCI slots with some of these USB 2.0 cards and stripe the drives, although you would still have only ~30 USB ports. Oh, duh, it wouldn't matter because they aren't all on the same bus... Anyhoo, we need a baseline anyway, so that's about 5 drives per port, which is still going to suck, but not if you stripe them properly. Actually, all thoes drives would cost about $26500 before shipping, and would draw an ungodly amount of power. Is anyone willing to see whether it will work?
Huh?
$ lilo -v
LILO version 22.4.1, [snip....]
Like my frankensetup that I had. I had rigged a $20 CompUSA 2.1 speaker system to be my front speakers, and just for kicks hooked another 2.0 system to the rear output for surround sound! All from my integrated motherboard audio! Damn, that sounded like sh*t. Then I bought my awewome Creative/Cambridge SoundWorks Megaworks 550 system and a Santa Cruz and it sounds great. Too bad the ALSA driver for the Santa Cruz doesn't support surround sound yet (it's not synchronized at all).
While I'm here, what good 5.1 channel soundcards are there that have full ALSA drivers? I may sell my Santa Cruz.
Time to...
/dev/null http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/1/4/6144b 69b-826e-4633-9ded-a7f7fa954329/MSDRMClient.exe; done
$ while true; do wget -O
Talk about some major Slashdotting if we can get enough people to run up their internet bills!
It's not called irony when its intentional.
The plane undoubtedly flew by itself. It used its 13 horsepower engine to maintain enough airspeed (the speed of air going over the wings -- the speed that counts for keeping the plane in the air) long enough to travel a couple hundred feet. To fly it didn't really need to even be going forewards, it just had to have enough air going over the wings to not stall (stall==fall out of the sky due to lack of lift). The thing about gliders is that they can't maintain a sufficient airspeed without using gravity, while the Wright plane could. Could it take off without the derrick to assist it? No, the engine wasn't powerful enough. Could it fly? Yes, because the engine could maintain enough airspeed to keep it aloft.
>It's no coincidence that hang gliding is a hugely popular sport in Kittyhawk.
And the Wrights had built a couple gliders themselves before they mounted an engine and props on one.
Or you could use SIMPLE: the Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Language Environment.
$ fortune -m SIMPLE
And I quote "...[SIMPLE] was designed to make it impossible to write code with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN, END, and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make a syntax error."
I think we have a solution to all our bug problems!
Agreed. I liked the beginning of FotR because it was pretty accurate and the way it was done was just good. Then, things just went downhill as the movie kept diverging from the book and stuff was written out of the script so more boring visuals could be put in. Oh, and I don't like the soundtrack.
Umm, those Coinstar machines are running windows, and they only have ~five buttons. It's not like they are going to be installing full terminals. They probably won't be much different from any current ATM you run into. You may not even be able to tell it's Windoze because the GUI will take up the whole screen. In reality, there are two vulnerabilites: the actual ATM program interfacing with the user, and the networking part. I'm more scared of the networking part being compromised. Of course, there is always some dumb person who puts a backdoor into the GUI to test whether it will actually dispense cash and never take it out, but that's not an OS problem.
Windows ATM's?
o Not worried.
o Vaguely worried.
o Sorta worried.
o Kinda worried.
o Somewhat worried.
o Fairly worried.
o Worried.
o FEAR FEAR FEAR
I'd buy a SCO license if it was printed on a T-shirt.
Yes, but all of those things you mentioned are priveledges [sp?}, not rights. It is a right for someone to communicate with another person and rights aren't licensed, are they? As long as you protect yourself, you will not be hit with much of the sh*t that flys around the internet, unless you are popular with people who use Outlook :-)
Licensing internet usage is like licensing speaking in a public place. You can say just about anything in a public place (within reason) without restriction -- why is the internet different? Just because there are 300 other people in my HS lunchroom making a massive racket doesn't mean I can't communicate effectively. There is no control in that case, and there doesn't need to be. If you don't want to pick up other people's conversations, don't listen. That's like using a firewall.
Of course I'm almost oversimplifying the situation, but my point stands, and maybe when we develop new protocols some of these problems will go away and we'll have more tolerable problems in their place. We just need Air the Next Generation to communicate over!
How fast of a modem is that? Hmm, maybe around 20 to 30 bit/s? How many times can you say EF or A7 a second? Or will people resort to moving to a larger base to say it faster? I'm sure someone could match a 300 baud modem eventually.
Do the Macs at CompUSA allow people to access the CD drive? If so, just waltz in, pop in the disc, test it, get your disc, and waltz out. Heck, people have copied entire office suites before this way. Or, you could just post it on the web and use a networked Mac to access it. I often go to NewEgg.com to look at reviews while at CompUSA.
I recently switched from GNOME to Enlightenment just because it doesn't get in my way. It seemed to me that GNOME was very good at giving me half-baked features, I don't like the panel at the top of the screen (if it worked like a Mac, maybe), and I love the idea of clicking on the desktop to get a customized menu. I still follow GNOME devel, though, because it may eventually be my desktop again, but from 1.4->2.2, too much was culled. I may actually never go back, though. I like using E to only manage windows, manage desktops, and give me a cool desktop menu. I like the simplicity.
But if I had my way, everything would be an object , windows would only render the objects (like documents, images, movies, etc), manipulation of the objects would NOT be done by menus and buttons in the window, and DnD would work so I could embed my objects anywhere. But I am not that good at programming, so I will just have to wait.
Of course not. It would be measuring temperature!
My microwave has settings for "Dinner Plate", "Popcorn", "Soup", "Muffin", "Potato", and others, but I don't see the "Compact Disc" setting. Should I go out and look for a new microwave because mine is outdated or is this like the vaporware that Slashdot always is talking about?