That'd be CentreCom. I know that CPL isn't bad either. But check The Age's Green Guide - there's heaps of other cheap stores out there (though can't comment on their service).
I've put together a TON of systems myself, and I'll be honest, until you've tested a combo of MB/CPU/Mem a significant number of times it is hard to guarantee reliability, there are a lot of little edge cases that you can spend a lot of time working on.
Never had this problem - but then I generally go for a standard big-brand MB and RAM: it doesn't make much of a difference in cost. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I would have thought that if you're not overclocking things and not playing around with dodgy generic brands you'd be pretty safe. The nice thing with white-boxes is that you can specify exactly what you want.
I guess I havn't run into many shops that do a super easy return policy and reasonable prices.
Here in Melbourne, Australia, the place that I consider to be the cheapest I know from experience has a very easy return policy. They seem to make their profits through high turn-over and are rapidly turning into a major chain, so I guess they're doing something right!
Basically I'm looking for the Dell equivelant in the AMD world, someone who cranks them out in great quantities. I checked out HP etc, wasn't blown away. Also open to a smaller shop if they come with a good recommendation (and without the insanely gaudy cases, no rounded plastic please).
Just because you dislike the idea of building your own system doesn't mean you should ignore white boxes from the dodgy-bros. local store. IME, you get exactly the parts you want, there's no proprietary crap and you get it all at the cheapest price (you generally get a discount for buying a system, so getting someone to put it together for you works out cheaper than doing it yourself) You don't need to pay for a useless OS, either. And if something does go wrong with a part, it's no sweat to replace it yourself even in the unlikely event that the shop won't - you save so much you'll still be ahead on the deal.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
on
GIMP 2.2 Released
·
· Score: 1
If GIMP was not open source, would you use it? Does it have anything over Photoshop in terms of Functionality or Ease of USe?
If the GIMP cost as much as PS, I probably wouldn't use either. However, here at work (Win2K PCs) we have a PS site-licence... and I use both it and the GIMP for image processing.
Simply, there's some things that the GIMP is clumsy at, and there's others that PS is clumsy at. As a linux user, I'm more familiar with the GIMP's interface (and prefer it), so I'll use the GIMP unless I need a PS-only feature.
Wrong on both counts. According to the Mozilla store the firefox is a red panda (Ailurus fulgens), not a fox and not a canine of any kind.
However, according to the logo creator the actual inspiration of the logo was not a red panda at all, but a ordinary fox (the designer writes, "A firefox is actually a cute red panda, but it didn't really conjure up the right imagery.")
If you're not still not convinced, have a look at some images of red pandas and foxes and then compare them to the Firefox logo. No way in a bunch of politically correct Sundays is that thing going to become a red panda!:)
For mp3 to sound good, you need to use a good encoder (LAME), VBR, and joint stereo. And when those settings are used, its universally accepted that the maximum quality attainable by MP3 is higher than that for OGG. (and MPC beats them both). But OGG is definately a more effecient format (destroys mp3 below 160K), so given enough time/effort to fine tune the psychoacoustic models, it will one day surpass mp3 at high bitrates.
Don't know about the "universally accepted" hand-waving, but I had a hunt for your source and found a good analysis here
Note, however, that this is dated from 2001, using oggvorbis 1.0beta4 and LAME 3.88. Anyone know of a more up-to-date comparison of high-bitrate encoding?
He hasn't, but due to the linking clause his part of the code has to be GPL too, and then everybody can freely trade copies of CherryOS without paying a cent. So who would buy a copy?
Well, you'd think that people would freely distribute the software and no-one would buy it. But in fact this hasn't happened with one software developer who takes GPL'd code and rebrands it - have a look at 9.95soft... they sell PalmOS software, most of which is taken straight from abandoned GPL'd projects (some credit is given on the web pages at least, don't know about the software itself). But you have to pay for the software before you can download a copy, and I've not seen any copies floating around on the web for free download - even though it'd be completely legal for any owner to do it.
Presumably with this sort of business model, the uninformed users who don't know what the GPL is will buy the respectable looking clone that costs money, and those who realise what's going on simply continue using the original freely available version. But the problem with all this is that money is given to the marketer rather than the developer of the software:(
I've never heard Ogg mentioned except on slashdot and sites linked to from it. The average person couldn't give a shit.
I used to think that was the case too - I'm a vorbis user and I've got used to people not knowing what on earth ogg vorbis is. But recently I've noticed that amongst my contemporaries (who are not geeks but who use the internet and mp3s as much as any twenty-something person) quite a few people have not only heard about vorbis before I mention it to them, but have heard so much positive information that several of them have been considering trying it out. One of them who was thinking of buying a HD-based player even asked me if I knew what players supported ogg vorbis.
I realise that's only anecdotal, but IME there's a growth in ogg recognition out there. And I think part of it has to do with users starting to play mp3 files on their hifi equipment and being disatisfied with the result - they're looking for something better and they've heard of ogg as a possible solution.
This is only partially true. You only can charge from a USB 1.1 port, not USB 2.0.
Nope, mine charges from my USB 2.0 (high-speed) port just fine... It's not something that I use much, mind you, but it's nice knowing that it's there:)
Charge from the USB connector? Oh my, that's what a two yeard old Zire does!
And my Tungsten E. What's interesting to me is that in design this looks a lot more like an upgrade of the Tungsten E than the T3: no sliding thingy, the buttons and finish (oh no! you'd think Palm'd learn from their mistakes!) and form appear identical to the TE, and there's no voice recorder, the speaker's on the back, etc, etc.
So I'm guessing that the T5 uses the same connector as the Zires and the TE. Which has always seemed a great idea to me (I love that the hotsync cable is just a mini-USB cable and I can charge from it), but will piss-off those who like their universal connector products...
I am ready to use it, except I am waiting a tad bit longer just for Firefox to iron out a few more bugs for the 1.0 final (supposedly in October?).
I have to ask - what specific bugs were you thinking of? I've used Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox since 0.1 and IMO it was highly usable since 0.5 and stable since 0.6.
Or are you just one of the many people who assign some wierd significance to release version "1.0"?
As the usage of Firefox goes up - so too does the interest from exploit kiddies. Can the Mozilla / Firefox team keep ahead of the net nasties when it attains the majority of Internet users?
Heh, considering the pain of installing new extensions using 1.0PR, I'd say yes:)
(For those who haven't tried it yet, any site attempting to install an xpi is automatically blocked and you have to manually enable it - and there's currently no preference override to allow automatic installation from every site. Then, of course, even once you've allowed a site xpi installation privileges, you have to wait two seconds looking at the install dialogue before the install button is activated... This is serious paranoia, and maybe even luser-proof - it's certainly going to discourage people from downloading extensions)
The thing I can't get over is that it comes with an ebook reader! On a 2.2" screen!! Reading ebooks on a PDA screen is bad enough - reading books on a phone would be close to torture...
Why aren't graphics companies working on decent motion blur then?
Maybe because you'd have to internally render at a higher frame rate, or at the very least internally interpolate the motion vectors and somehow add blurring? I'm not an expert on 3D games, but I imagine that the increased performance hit in motion blurring would counteract any improvement in visual perception. (And since I don't think openGL has any motion-blurring capabilities (other than a simple recursive overlay of previous frames which doesn't achieve any great visual perception benefit), you'd probably lose all the benefits of 3D acceleration... so the performance hit would be extremely high)
TV's are interlaced. That is they only display one new frame every 2hz (by showing half a frame every hz). NTSC, with the 60hz cycle, has a 30fps rate.
But you can display different information in those two half frames, and I believe that this is what the xbox and playstation do... so in effect you get the motion advantages of 50 or 60 fps (albeit at crappy resolution). I'm not sure of this, though - it's pretty difficult finding any information on this on the web.
Gamers can have huge issues with getting only 30fps in a computer game, yet if you put them behind a playstation or xbox, also running at 30fps, they don't have any problems with it anymore. And 30 fps is even high. Movies are only 24 fps, and you never read movie reviews going "man, I wish the framerate had been higher"
That's because movies are captured from smooth motion, so any motion depicted is blurred and links perfectly with the next frame. Your eyes are great at interpolating the blurred images, so you don't notice the low frame rate.
However, games display individually renderred frames which lack any motion blur. Without the blurring your brain doesn't interpolate the motion, and 30fps is easily slow enough for you to see the jumps between each separate location. (btw, your comment about the framerate of playstation and xbox games seems to be incorrect - the display rate of an ordinary TV monitor is 50Hz and the consoles, from what I can quickly find on the web, display at this rate.)
I have found Encyclopedia Brittanica to be extremely and subtly destructive. The short entry for Nobel prize winner Barbara McClintock gave no idea that her scientific articles spanned a width of 80 feet when put together.
So all encyclopaedia articles on famous scientists should include a note as to how many papers they've published, measured in feet-when-put-together (that well known SI unit)??
I'll give you a hint: (volume of papers == importance of author) only where university administrators are concerned. Generally, quantity != quality. (Not that I'm deriding McClintock, mind you, only your method for judging her scientific impact:)
Wikipedia has the advantage of being written by enthusiasts.
And enthusiasts are always highly impartial and never indulge in polemics, so they're by far the best qualified...
Re:Have it do something worthwhile
on
Palmtop Nirvana?
·
· Score: 1
The PDA gets you what? A note pad with a search engine?
I find this feature (along with the general todo/appointments/calendar function) by far the most useful of my PDA and you shouldn't underestimate it. I have notes on just about anything and everything (from lab protocols to bits of trivia to recipes), and it's simple to find even the most obscure details that I've jotted down four years ago thanks to the ability to search the database. What's more, since my PDA is always in my pocket and thus highly accessible, whenever I want to make a new note of something it's there.
(incidentally, I also find my PDA useful as a map reader when I go hiking: just scan the maps, save them onto your SD card and you've got a map that's tiny and fits in your pocket, opens up to where you last left it and doesn't fall apart at the creases:)
Why don't they just make a screen that can change size.. so when you want a tiny pda you have it, and if you wanna look at big spread sheets or watch movies you just have to expand the screen..
You mean, like this??? The T3's been around for almost a year now, it's not like it's new technology!
Well, I do, for one. The main reason being that I don't want locate wasting resources while I'm using my computer (which is only on when I'm using it - I don't leave it running 24/7). Provided you know the approximate location of the file (and you always do) and you're using even relatively modern hardware, find takes no more than a couple of seconds to run (and is generally instantaneous).
locate is useful if your computer is running with no down-time and you can schedule it to run every morning at 2am or whatever. But if you're an ordinary user who cares more about power bills than uptime-boasting, then locate's not much use.
Did you even bother to try googling for it??:) Have a look at the third hit, esp. the last paragraph...
"Over the years, Otis dominated the escalator business, but lost the product's trademark. The word escalator lost its proprietary status and its capital "e" in 1950 when the U.S. Patent Office ruled that the word "escalator" had become just a common descriptive term for moving stairways."
Actually, the big problem with using viruses is that you get random insertion of the DNA into the genome. And if your virus DNA inserts in such a way that it disrupts the expression pattern of an oncogene you end up with cancer. This is exactly what happened in the much-publicised SCID (bubble-kids) gene therapy trials. It's not *all* that likely to happen, mind you, but would you undergo gene therapy that had a 5-10% chance of giving you cancer (and thus actually reduce your athletic potential - I realise that athletes who take steroids aren't worried about long term consequences like death:) if you didn't have a life-threatening disease?
Using viruses are not the answer - the real solution is to use human artificial chromosomes (HACs) where the DNA doesn't integrate and can segregate normally with cell division. However, the problems with HACs are enormous - delivery is currently impossible, genetic manipulation is difficult and stability is questionable. I actually work in a lab where our main focus is the creation of a HAC for gene therapy, and I can tell you that we're not going to see these things anytime soon.
Maybe in ten years' time, you might want to start worrying...
Slashdot Mirror
That'd be CentreCom. I know that CPL isn't bad either. But check The Age's Green Guide - there's heaps of other cheap stores out there (though can't comment on their service).
I've put together a TON of systems myself, and I'll be honest, until you've tested a combo of MB/CPU/Mem a significant number of times it is hard to guarantee reliability, there are a lot of little edge cases that you can spend a lot of time working on.
Never had this problem - but then I generally go for a standard big-brand MB and RAM: it doesn't make much of a difference in cost. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I would have thought that if you're not overclocking things and not playing around with dodgy generic brands you'd be pretty safe. The nice thing with white-boxes is that you can specify exactly what you want.
I guess I havn't run into many shops that do a super easy return policy and reasonable prices.
Here in Melbourne, Australia, the place that I consider to be the cheapest I know from experience has a very easy return policy. They seem to make their profits through high turn-over and are rapidly turning into a major chain, so I guess they're doing something right!
Basically I'm looking for the Dell equivelant in the AMD world, someone who cranks them out in great quantities. I checked out HP etc, wasn't blown away. Also open to a smaller shop if they come with a good recommendation (and without the insanely gaudy cases, no rounded plastic please).
Just because you dislike the idea of building your own system doesn't mean you should ignore white boxes from the dodgy-bros. local store. IME, you get exactly the parts you want, there's no proprietary crap and you get it all at the cheapest price (you generally get a discount for buying a system, so getting someone to put it together for you works out cheaper than doing it yourself) You don't need to pay for a useless OS, either. And if something does go wrong with a part, it's no sweat to replace it yourself even in the unlikely event that the shop won't - you save so much you'll still be ahead on the deal.
If GIMP was not open source, would you use it? Does it have anything over Photoshop in terms of Functionality or Ease of USe?
... and I use both it and the GIMP for image processing.
If the GIMP cost as much as PS, I probably wouldn't use either. However, here at work (Win2K PCs) we have a PS site-licence
Simply, there's some things that the GIMP is clumsy at, and there's others that PS is clumsy at. As a linux user, I'm more familiar with the GIMP's interface (and prefer it), so I'll use the GIMP unless I need a PS-only feature.
Install Linux on someone's computer when they're not looking. Or someone who can hardly use Windows. See how well it goes. Here's a hint: BADLY.
If they can hardly use Windows, it's not exactly surprising if they can hardly use Linux, now, is it?
The problem is that they're too scared to use a computer, be it Windows, Linux or even a Mac.
For some people, work /= meetings.
... OK, I'll agree with that!
work = work / meetings ???
Thus the amount of work you do is inversely proportional to the number of meetings you have
Wrong on both counts. According to the Mozilla store the firefox is a red panda (Ailurus fulgens), not a fox and not a canine of any kind.
:)
However, according to the logo creator the actual inspiration of the logo was not a red panda at all, but a ordinary fox (the designer writes, "A firefox is actually a cute red panda, but it didn't really conjure up the right imagery.")
If you're not still not convinced, have a look at some images of red pandas and foxes and then compare them to the Firefox logo. No way in a bunch of politically correct Sundays is that thing going to become a red panda!
For mp3 to sound good, you need to use a good encoder (LAME), VBR, and joint stereo. And when those settings are used, its universally accepted that the maximum quality attainable by MP3 is higher than that for OGG. (and MPC beats them both). But OGG is definately a more effecient format (destroys mp3 below 160K), so given enough time/effort to fine tune the psychoacoustic models, it will one day surpass mp3 at high bitrates.
Don't know about the "universally accepted" hand-waving, but I had a hunt for your source and found a good analysis here
Note, however, that this is dated from 2001, using oggvorbis 1.0beta4 and LAME 3.88. Anyone know of a more up-to-date comparison of high-bitrate encoding?
He hasn't, but due to the linking clause his part of the code has to be GPL too, and then everybody can freely trade copies of CherryOS without paying a cent. So who would buy a copy?
... they sell PalmOS software, most of which is taken straight from abandoned GPL'd projects (some credit is given on the web pages at least, don't know about the software itself). But you have to pay for the software before you can download a copy, and I've not seen any copies floating around on the web for free download - even though it'd be completely legal for any owner to do it.
:(
Well, you'd think that people would freely distribute the software and no-one would buy it. But in fact this hasn't happened with one software developer who takes GPL'd code and rebrands it - have a look at 9.95soft
Presumably with this sort of business model, the uninformed users who don't know what the GPL is will buy the respectable looking clone that costs money, and those who realise what's going on simply continue using the original freely available version. But the problem with all this is that money is given to the marketer rather than the developer of the software
I've never heard Ogg mentioned except on slashdot and sites linked to from it. The average person couldn't give a shit.
I used to think that was the case too - I'm a vorbis user and I've got used to people not knowing what on earth ogg vorbis is. But recently I've noticed that amongst my contemporaries (who are not geeks but who use the internet and mp3s as much as any twenty-something person) quite a few people have not only heard about vorbis before I mention it to them, but have heard so much positive information that several of them have been considering trying it out. One of them who was thinking of buying a HD-based player even asked me if I knew what players supported ogg vorbis.
I realise that's only anecdotal, but IME there's a growth in ogg recognition out there. And I think part of it has to do with users starting to play mp3 files on their hifi equipment and being disatisfied with the result - they're looking for something better and they've heard of ogg as a possible solution.
This is only partially true. You only can charge from a USB 1.1 port, not USB 2.0.
... It's not something that I use much, mind you, but it's nice knowing that it's there :)
Nope, mine charges from my USB 2.0 (high-speed) port just fine
Charge from the USB connector?
...
Oh my, that's what a two yeard old Zire does!
And my Tungsten E. What's interesting to me is that in design this looks a lot more like an upgrade of the Tungsten E than the T3: no sliding thingy, the buttons and finish (oh no! you'd think Palm'd learn from their mistakes!) and form appear identical to the TE, and there's no voice recorder, the speaker's on the back, etc, etc.
So I'm guessing that the T5 uses the same connector as the Zires and the TE. Which has always seemed a great idea to me (I love that the hotsync cable is just a mini-USB cable and I can charge from it), but will piss-off those who like their universal connector products
I am ready to use it, except I am waiting a tad bit longer just for Firefox to iron out a few more bugs for the 1.0 final (supposedly in October?).
I have to ask - what specific bugs were you thinking of? I've used Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox since 0.1 and IMO it was highly usable since 0.5 and stable since 0.6.
Or are you just one of the many people who assign some wierd significance to release version "1.0"?
As the usage of Firefox goes up - so too does the interest from exploit kiddies. Can the Mozilla / Firefox team keep ahead of the net nasties when it attains the majority of Internet users?
:)
... This is serious paranoia, and maybe even luser-proof - it's certainly going to discourage people from downloading extensions)
Heh, considering the pain of installing new extensions using 1.0PR, I'd say yes
(For those who haven't tried it yet, any site attempting to install an xpi is automatically blocked and you have to manually enable it - and there's currently no preference override to allow automatic installation from every site. Then, of course, even once you've allowed a site xpi installation privileges, you have to wait two seconds looking at the install dialogue before the install button is activated
The thing I can't get over is that it comes with an ebook reader! On a 2.2" screen!! Reading ebooks on a PDA screen is bad enough - reading books on a phone would be close to torture ...
Why aren't graphics companies working on decent motion blur then?
... so the performance hit would be extremely high)
... so in effect you get the motion advantages of 50 or 60 fps (albeit at crappy resolution). I'm not sure of this, though - it's pretty difficult finding any information on this on the web.
Maybe because you'd have to internally render at a higher frame rate, or at the very least internally interpolate the motion vectors and somehow add blurring? I'm not an expert on 3D games, but I imagine that the increased performance hit in motion blurring would counteract any improvement in visual perception. (And since I don't think openGL has any motion-blurring capabilities (other than a simple recursive overlay of previous frames which doesn't achieve any great visual perception benefit), you'd probably lose all the benefits of 3D acceleration
TV's are interlaced. That is they only display one new frame every 2hz (by showing half a frame every hz). NTSC, with the 60hz cycle, has a 30fps rate.
But you can display different information in those two half frames, and I believe that this is what the xbox and playstation do
Gamers can have huge issues with getting only 30fps in a computer game, yet if you put them behind a playstation or xbox, also running at 30fps, they don't have any problems with it anymore. And 30 fps is even high. Movies are only 24 fps, and you never read movie reviews going "man, I wish the framerate had been higher"
That's because movies are captured from smooth motion, so any motion depicted is blurred and links perfectly with the next frame. Your eyes are great at interpolating the blurred images, so you don't notice the low frame rate.
However, games display individually renderred frames which lack any motion blur. Without the blurring your brain doesn't interpolate the motion, and 30fps is easily slow enough for you to see the jumps between each separate location. (btw, your comment about the framerate of playstation and xbox games seems to be incorrect - the display rate of an ordinary TV monitor is 50Hz and the consoles, from what I can quickly find on the web, display at this rate.)
I have found Encyclopedia Brittanica to be extremely and subtly destructive. The short entry for Nobel prize winner Barbara McClintock gave no idea that her scientific articles spanned a width of 80 feet when put together.
:)
...
So all encyclopaedia articles on famous scientists should include a note as to how many papers they've published, measured in feet-when-put-together (that well known SI unit)??
I'll give you a hint: (volume of papers == importance of author) only where university administrators are concerned. Generally, quantity != quality. (Not that I'm deriding McClintock, mind you, only your method for judging her scientific impact
Wikipedia has the advantage of being written by enthusiasts.
And enthusiasts are always highly impartial and never indulge in polemics, so they're by far the best qualified
The PDA gets you what? A note pad with a search engine?
:)
I find this feature (along with the general todo/appointments/calendar function) by far the most useful of my PDA and you shouldn't underestimate it. I have notes on just about anything and everything (from lab protocols to bits of trivia to recipes), and it's simple to find even the most obscure details that I've jotted down four years ago thanks to the ability to search the database. What's more, since my PDA is always in my pocket and thus highly accessible, whenever I want to make a new note of something it's there.
(incidentally, I also find my PDA useful as a map reader when I go hiking: just scan the maps, save them onto your SD card and you've got a map that's tiny and fits in your pocket, opens up to where you last left it and doesn't fall apart at the creases
Why don't they just make a screen that can change size.. so when you want a tiny pda you have it, and if you wanna look at big spread sheets or watch movies you just have to expand the screen..
You mean, like this??? The T3's been around for almost a year now, it's not like it's new technology!
Who the hell uses find to search for stuff?
Well, I do, for one. The main reason being that I don't want locate wasting resources while I'm using my computer (which is only on when I'm using it - I don't leave it running 24/7). Provided you know the approximate location of the file (and you always do) and you're using even relatively modern hardware, find takes no more than a couple of seconds to run (and is generally instantaneous).
locate is useful if your computer is running with no down-time and you can schedule it to run every morning at 2am or whatever. But if you're an ordinary user who cares more about power bills than uptime-boasting, then locate's not much use.
When was escalator ever a brand?
:) Have a look at the third hit, esp. the last paragraph ...
Did you even bother to try googling for it??
"Over the years, Otis dominated the escalator business, but lost the product's trademark. The word escalator lost its proprietary status and its capital "e" in 1950 when the U.S. Patent Office ruled that the word "escalator" had become just a common descriptive term for moving stairways."
2) My weekly backup is about 1.8 GB.
You generate 1.8 Gig of new/modified data each week?? That's impressive!
Actually, the big problem with using viruses is that you get random insertion of the DNA into the genome. And if your virus DNA inserts in such a way that it disrupts the expression pattern of an oncogene you end up with cancer. This is exactly what happened in the much-publicised SCID (bubble-kids) gene therapy trials. It's not *all* that likely to happen, mind you, but would you undergo gene therapy that had a 5-10% chance of giving you cancer (and thus actually reduce your athletic potential - I realise that athletes who take steroids aren't worried about long term consequences like death :) if you didn't have a life-threatening disease?
...
Using viruses are not the answer - the real solution is to use human artificial chromosomes (HACs) where the DNA doesn't integrate and can segregate normally with cell division. However, the problems with HACs are enormous - delivery is currently impossible, genetic manipulation is difficult and stability is questionable. I actually work in a lab where our main focus is the creation of a HAC for gene therapy, and I can tell you that we're not going to see these things anytime soon.
Maybe in ten years' time, you might want to start worrying
I'll add a caveat though. You can't do this:
...
...
blah($_); blahblah($_) for @x;
Well
map {blah($_); blahblah($_)} @x;
seems simple enough to me