But seriously, don't bring too many expensive devices, and if you have to, don't show off them in the public.
This is good advice. Bring as little crap with you as possible. One, because there isn't much room in your dorm for it, and two, because you'd be surprised how little stuff you actually need.
As for security, as others have mentioned, a locked door is a good, low-tech solution. A roommate with cooler and more expensive gadgetry than you doesn't hurt either.
Thirdly, at least on my work computer, IE uses Quicktime to render PNG files.
IE has its own library for rendering PNGs. Obviously, though, the QuickTime browser plug-in can be set to handle image/png (no idea if this is the default behavior).
The plug-in approach could work. It worked for Flash (which is supported by IE out of the box these days, I think).
As far as convincing Apple to implement this, though, I'm sure they'll get around to it right after adding Ogg Vorbis support to the iPod.
* MSIE support sucks. It is getting better, but it still sucks (yes, I know this is a Microsoft issue not a PNG issue, but I'm not trying to place blame here.)
The only PNG features IE doesn't support are 8-bit transparency and animation.
Obviously, GIFs don't give you a full alpha channel either, so the first feature is moot. IE supports 1-bit transparency in PNGs, which puts them on par with GIFs.
PNG animation is a mess (when Mozilla leaves MNG support out because it's too bloated, you know something's wrong), but that a problem APNG hopes to solve. Remember that IE is being worked on again, so who knows? It has a chance of being implemented (certainly moreso than MNG does, anyway).
* Gamma value variation. Look at a PNG on one browser, and the blue value will match #0000CC, but look in another browser on another OS, and IT WON'T! Talk about maddening... this is one situation where the extra control by having the ability to specify a gamma value is a curse, not a blessing.
PNGCrush and PNGOut both get rid of the gamma value. You should run all your PNGs through one of those programs anyway to get the smallest file size, so it's a minor issue. Otherwise, get rid of it manually with TweakPNG.
It sounds like a lot of work to process a single image, but spending time shrinking download time is something web designers have been doing for over a decade (although I know a lot of people are lazy in the broadband age; it really isn't much more work, though, once you get into the habit of doing it and write some scripts to automate most of it, and it's worth it for the smaller file sizes and the 24-bit color).
I installed the beta of Windows Update v5 on a computer with a warezed copy of Windows XP, and while it installed fine, it wouldn't let me check for updates because it detected the pirate product key.
Interestingly, I tried to connect just now, and it downloaded the final version of Windows Update v5 and let me download an critical IE security patch. It looks like they've softened their stance again (throughout SP2's long and storied development cycle, they've been back and forth over whether they'd allow pirated copies to grab the update).
Re:My wife runs Win2K at work and sees several/day
on
Moving To Linux
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· Score: 1
Just start trying to actually use the more esoteric features of your apps...
BSODs in WinNT only occur when the kernel cannot recover from an error. Userland apps can't crash the kernel, "esoteric features" notwithstanding. If you're regularly getting stop errors in Win2k, it's more likely that you have a hardware problem and not that you're just especially l33t. More info here.
The review's introduction says that the Mac version is an emulator but the PC version is simply a VM like VMWare.
Microsoft's VirtualPC site calls the PC version "a powerful software virtualization solution" (not that these sorts of blurbs are noted for their technical accuracy, but take it for what it's worth).
How is this project any more interesting or useful than a confluence of any other human-specified arbitrary classification, e.g. visiting every peak who altitude in cubits is a prime number?
Yes, it's arbitrary, but you're missing the point. The project's objective is to photograph every area of the world. Why not use latitude and longitude confluence? It's a universally understood metric, it gives a pretty diverse snapshot of the world (not too specific, not too broad), and it gives them an easily quantified goal.
It sounds to me like a great way to use both the internet's worldwide reach and its ease of publishing to do something extrordinary: enable anyone to see any part of this big blue ball of ours. You can read about countries and landmarks in encyclopedias, but you really can't get any idea of just how gigantic and diverse our world is without a project like this.
In fact do any OEM's do this? - Because I seriously doubt it.
I had a Packard Bell (eek) in 1995 that had a sticker I had to break to open the case. The sticker, naturally, informed me that my warranty would be void if it were damaged.
I haven't seen one on a computer since then, although you still see them on a lot of other devices (I broke one just a couple of weeks ago when I took apart my Apex DVD player). In fact, most OEM towers have adopted easy-open cases with thumbscrews and such.
XML is a metalanguage; that is, it's a mark-up language for writing other mark-up languages. XHTML is one such language. It's basically plain old HTML but with XML's stricter rules. I like it because it discourages sloppy coding (sort of like preferring Java over Perl).
Other XML languages include SVG (for vector graphics), WML (for simple web pages designed for cell phones; never really took off), and RSS (for news feeds).
Who knows; the band has a history of stupid leaks:
Around 1981, before the release of their second album, October, a suitcase containing Bono's handwritten lyrics was stolen. Apparently, he sort of ad-libbed it in the studio.
In 1990, a three-disc bootleg of outtakes from the Achtung, Baby sessions was leaked. It contained rough takes that would eventually become the songs on the album
In 1996 or so, an MP3 of a rough edit of "Discotheque," the lead single for their Pop album, was leaked onto the internet.
Around 2000, Bono apparently lost a laptop containing rough mixes of songs from their upcoming All That You Can't Leave Behind. It was returned safely, though, and there wasn't a leak.
Later that year, though, the band decided to post 30-second snippets of each song from their new album. They were going to release one new snippet a week until the album was released. Unfortunately, the clueless webmasters had already uploaded all of the songs and just didn't link to them yet, so fans just guessed at the file names and downloaded all the snippets early.
In 2002, several different mixes of "Electrical Storm" were played on radio stations and were leaked onto the internet.
In any case, this new album is about three years overdue. Their last album was released in October 2000, and the tour supporting it wrapped up in December 2001. What the hell have they been doing since then? I dunno, I sort of lost track. Kind of sad when you don't know that one of your favorite bands is releasing a new album soon until you read it on Slashdot.
Most sites have access to their server access logs and then use a program such as Webalizer or AWStats to turn them into useful statistics. The type of people who'd use WebSideStory are the type who have their sites hosted on Geocities or such.
I go to NC State, and this program is on all of the lovely red iMacs scattered around campus. Basically, it's a full-screen web browser (the user agent string says "AppleWebToolkit," but it predates Safari and looks nothing like it besides, so...a modified OmniWeb?). There are some basic navigation controls but no location bar. The default page has links to the NCSU web site, webmail, and some other useful things for students. It goes back to the default screen when the user hits the pretty Aqua "Done" button in the toolbar or after a certain amount of idle time. I'd occasionally get around the lack of a location bar by going to the NCSU search page (which is powered by Google, so I can enter any arbitrary URL there and get a page like this).
One neat thing about the kiosks is that some of them have a slideshow screen saver setup that shows off different buildings on campus with brief descriptions of what they're for.
Overall, it's a pretty simple program. It doesn't let you do anything else with the computer. That's fine for a kiosk, where people just walk up, check their e-mail or whatever, and walk off, but for a computer lab, I think it's too limited in functionality.
Arik Hesseldahl: Had a small profit. OK. Any interest whatsoever, since in the open source OGG Vorbis format?
Steve Jobs: We're certainly not getting any requests from customers for it.
Cite. Basically what everyone already knows; they're unlikely to support Vorbis because consumers are unlikely to want it. Most of my music is in Ogg, so this is the main reaosn why I'm not interested in the iPod (even though the touchwheel thing is so damn slick), but I'm certainly not representative of the majority.
Re:I'm sure this is an excellent article...
on
Browser Wars Mark II
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· Score: 3, Informative
What (apparently crappy) browser are you using?
They're called cascading style sheets because they cascade; any modern browser lets the user use a custom style sheet in the absence of or to override author styles (and both IE and Mozilla let the user set the default background and foreground color for pages). My custom style sheet in Mozilla disables blink and marquee tags, for instance (and it's the underpinning of the FlashBlock extension).
If this site's designers ran the style sheet through the W3C's free CSS validator service, it would have warned them to always specify both a background and a foreground color together for this exact reason.
Why dump money into IE? It has a ridiculously large slice of the pie, and people will continue to use it, not because it has a superior feature-set to other browsers, but simply because it's there. It served its purpose, which was giving Microsoft control over internet "standards" and in general making it harder for people to get by without it (and therefore Windows).
Plus, any new features would have to be extensively tested; we're still seeing new IE exploits, and the thing's been stagnant for two or three years. One bug would affect millions and probably cost them an unreasonable amount to fix and support. Considering that any new features could barely extend IE's marketshare anymore at this point, it just isn't worth the trouble unless IE can give them more control somehow (see: tighter browser/OS integration in Longhorn).
I'd want to suggest that if Mozilla has a real future, it's with Firefox!
I'd want to suggest that while Mozilla has a future, Netscape doesn't. Not as anything but AOL's occasional bargaining chip, anyway. Netscape is only valuable to AOL because the brand name is well known, which can help them do things like, as the article says, maintain an internet portal. Or offer a low-price alternative to its own internet service. Or get a settlement with Microsoft. To do any of that, they need to keep the Netscape brand alive, and that's all this release is really for.
Vanilla Mozilla is more stable and polished, which is probably more important to them than fancy new features at this point. Plus, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach lets them tie in stuff like AIM more easily, and maybe the built-in mail client makes it an easier sell.
As for Mozilla/Netscape/XPFE/SeaMonkey/whatever, it's more of a proof-of-concept for XUL, Gecko, and all those other Mozilla Project technologies than an end product. Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, and the like are the end products. I wouldn't expect it to go away for a while, even as Firefox 1.0 looms on the horizon.
Slashdot Mirror
Can someone write a bot that posts the Linus FTP quote and then the Kazaa fake file joke every time a Slashdot story about backups is posted?
So I guess I can't interest you in a free iPod...?
This is good advice. Bring as little crap with you as possible. One, because there isn't much room in your dorm for it, and two, because you'd be surprised how little stuff you actually need.
As for security, as others have mentioned, a locked door is a good, low-tech solution. A roommate with cooler and more expensive gadgetry than you doesn't hurt either.
IE has its own library for rendering PNGs. Obviously, though, the QuickTime browser plug-in can be set to handle image/png (no idea if this is the default behavior).
The plug-in approach could work. It worked for Flash (which is supported by IE out of the box these days, I think).
As far as convincing Apple to implement this, though, I'm sure they'll get around to it right after adding Ogg Vorbis support to the iPod.
The only PNG features IE doesn't support are 8-bit transparency and animation.
Obviously, GIFs don't give you a full alpha channel either, so the first feature is moot. IE supports 1-bit transparency in PNGs, which puts them on par with GIFs.
PNG animation is a mess (when Mozilla leaves MNG support out because it's too bloated, you know something's wrong), but that a problem APNG hopes to solve. Remember that IE is being worked on again, so who knows? It has a chance of being implemented (certainly moreso than MNG does, anyway).
PNGCrush and PNGOut both get rid of the gamma value. You should run all your PNGs through one of those programs anyway to get the smallest file size, so it's a minor issue. Otherwise, get rid of it manually with TweakPNG.
It sounds like a lot of work to process a single image, but spending time shrinking download time is something web designers have been doing for over a decade (although I know a lot of people are lazy in the broadband age; it really isn't much more work, though, once you get into the habit of doing it and write some scripts to automate most of it, and it's worth it for the smaller file sizes and the 24-bit color).
I installed the beta of Windows Update v5 on a computer with a warezed copy of Windows XP, and while it installed fine, it wouldn't let me check for updates because it detected the pirate product key.
Interestingly, I tried to connect just now, and it downloaded the final version of Windows Update v5 and let me download an critical IE security patch. It looks like they've softened their stance again (throughout SP2's long and storied development cycle, they've been back and forth over whether they'd allow pirated copies to grab the update).
BSODs in WinNT only occur when the kernel cannot recover from an error. Userland apps can't crash the kernel, "esoteric features" notwithstanding. If you're regularly getting stop errors in Win2k, it's more likely that you have a hardware problem and not that you're just especially l33t. More info here.
The review's introduction says that the Mac version is an emulator but the PC version is simply a VM like VMWare.
Microsoft's VirtualPC site calls the PC version "a powerful software virtualization solution" (not that these sorts of blurbs are noted for their technical accuracy, but take it for what it's worth).
Yes, it's arbitrary, but you're missing the point. The project's objective is to photograph every area of the world. Why not use latitude and longitude confluence? It's a universally understood metric, it gives a pretty diverse snapshot of the world (not too specific, not too broad), and it gives them an easily quantified goal.
Wow, no one has a sense of wonder anymore.
It sounds to me like a great way to use both the internet's worldwide reach and its ease of publishing to do something extrordinary: enable anyone to see any part of this big blue ball of ours. You can read about countries and landmarks in encyclopedias, but you really can't get any idea of just how gigantic and diverse our world is without a project like this.
I had a Packard Bell (eek) in 1995 that had a sticker I had to break to open the case. The sticker, naturally, informed me that my warranty would be void if it were damaged.
I haven't seen one on a computer since then, although you still see them on a lot of other devices (I broke one just a couple of weeks ago when I took apart my Apex DVD player). In fact, most OEM towers have adopted easy-open cases with thumbscrews and such.
XML is a metalanguage; that is, it's a mark-up language for writing other mark-up languages. XHTML is one such language. It's basically plain old HTML but with XML's stricter rules. I like it because it discourages sloppy coding (sort of like preferring Java over Perl).
Other XML languages include SVG (for vector graphics), WML (for simple web pages designed for cell phones; never really took off), and RSS (for news feeds).
Who knows; the band has a history of stupid leaks:
In any case, this new album is about three years overdue. Their last album was released in October 2000, and the tour supporting it wrapped up in December 2001. What the hell have they been doing since then? I dunno, I sort of lost track. Kind of sad when you don't know that one of your favorite bands is releasing a new album soon until you read it on Slashdot.
Most sites have access to their server access logs and then use a program such as Webalizer or AWStats to turn them into useful statistics. The type of people who'd use WebSideStory are the type who have their sites hosted on Geocities or such.
If you have Windows XP Pro or Windows Server 2003, you can use the "systeminfo" command instead of that extremely old utility.
Seems to work for any arbitrary HTTP URL. E.g., http://http://www.google.com/ . Or just http://http . I don't understand it either.
Fairly neat: it seems that Mozilla has setup an official torrent tracker for this release.
Hah, haven't been to a movie lately, I see.
A 1.25 GHz FSB on the top-end model. Yeesh. Can't wait to see if this stacks up against Intel's and AMD's offerings nearly as well as Apple says.
Interestingly, they're still selling PowerMac G4s, and I don't think they've speed-bumped the Xserves yet (at least, there aren't any at 2.5 GHz).
I go to NC State, and this program is on all of the lovely red iMacs scattered around campus. Basically, it's a full-screen web browser (the user agent string says "AppleWebToolkit," but it predates Safari and looks nothing like it besides, so...a modified OmniWeb?). There are some basic navigation controls but no location bar. The default page has links to the NCSU web site, webmail, and some other useful things for students. It goes back to the default screen when the user hits the pretty Aqua "Done" button in the toolbar or after a certain amount of idle time. I'd occasionally get around the lack of a location bar by going to the NCSU search page (which is powered by Google, so I can enter any arbitrary URL there and get a page like this).
One neat thing about the kiosks is that some of them have a slideshow screen saver setup that shows off different buildings on campus with brief descriptions of what they're for.
Overall, it's a pretty simple program. It doesn't let you do anything else with the computer. That's fine for a kiosk, where people just walk up, check their e-mail or whatever, and walk off, but for a computer lab, I think it's too limited in functionality.
Found this while looking for a shot of the icon:
Cite. Basically what everyone already knows; they're unlikely to support Vorbis because consumers are unlikely to want it. Most of my music is in Ogg, so this is the main reaosn why I'm not interested in the iPod (even though the touchwheel thing is so damn slick), but I'm certainly not representative of the majority.
They're called cascading style sheets because they cascade; any modern browser lets the user use a custom style sheet in the absence of or to override author styles (and both IE and Mozilla let the user set the default background and foreground color for pages). My custom style sheet in Mozilla disables blink and marquee tags, for instance (and it's the underpinning of the FlashBlock extension).
If this site's designers ran the style sheet through the W3C's free CSS validator service, it would have warned them to always specify both a background and a foreground color together for this exact reason.
Read the fucking, uh, summary: "a 64-bit kernel as well as a 64 bit user space." OS X, while lovely, is not a 64-bit operating system.
(Also, PowerMac G5s aren't the only computers that use the PowerPC 970; IBM also sells some.)
Why dump money into IE? It has a ridiculously large slice of the pie, and people will continue to use it, not because it has a superior feature-set to other browsers, but simply because it's there. It served its purpose, which was giving Microsoft control over internet "standards" and in general making it harder for people to get by without it (and therefore Windows).
Plus, any new features would have to be extensively tested; we're still seeing new IE exploits, and the thing's been stagnant for two or three years. One bug would affect millions and probably cost them an unreasonable amount to fix and support. Considering that any new features could barely extend IE's marketshare anymore at this point, it just isn't worth the trouble unless IE can give them more control somehow (see: tighter browser/OS integration in Longhorn).
I'd want to suggest that while Mozilla has a future, Netscape doesn't. Not as anything but AOL's occasional bargaining chip, anyway. Netscape is only valuable to AOL because the brand name is well known, which can help them do things like, as the article says, maintain an internet portal. Or offer a low-price alternative to its own internet service. Or get a settlement with Microsoft. To do any of that, they need to keep the Netscape brand alive, and that's all this release is really for.
Vanilla Mozilla is more stable and polished, which is probably more important to them than fancy new features at this point. Plus, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach lets them tie in stuff like AIM more easily, and maybe the built-in mail client makes it an easier sell.
As for Mozilla/Netscape/XPFE/SeaMonkey/whatever, it's more of a proof-of-concept for XUL, Gecko, and all those other Mozilla Project technologies than an end product. Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, and the like are the end products. I wouldn't expect it to go away for a while, even as Firefox 1.0 looms on the horizon.