What kind of hardware are you using? A minute or more for KDE to start up is not realistic on even semi-modern hardware. It takes less than 15 seconds on my P4 2.6GHz from KDM to fully running KDE 3.5 desktop.
But it's probably still faster than opening a command prompt (though a "command prompt here" option in the folder right click menu helps), loading the file into edit.com and resaving it.
My point was that even though edit.com has been removed from Vista, there still remains a built-in editor which handles different line endings properly. Now, why Notepad still doesn't do this, I have no idea.
The only PC that even tempts me is the Acer Ferrari. Not because I'm a slave to status symbols or flashy logos (I'm not) but because it looks like quality. It's laid out well with great attention to detail, same as Macs.
If you ever buy one, you're going to be sorely disappointed. They're just like any other Acer laptop; cheap, flimsy and prone to breaking. Except for the nice paint and the prancing pony, it's really nothing to get worked up over.
The only x86 laptops apart from Macbooks that are properly put together and built to last are Thinkpads and Panasonic Toughbooks. And perhaps Fujitsu Lifebooks, a few of HP's professional models and some of Toshiba's higher-end models.
Everything else is plagued with flimsy hinges, wobbly screens, lousy keyboards and connectors that come lose at the most inappropriate times.
It may look like quality, but trust me, it isn't. For the same kind of money you'd spend on an Acer Ferrari, there are lots and lots of much better options.
Re:Panasonic say: Buy Our TVs Film At 11.
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 1
I don't have a link nor the catalogue, unfortunately.
But I do know that for instance the BeoSystem 3 has the functionality built in. Also, the Beo4 was designed from the ground up to be programmable, unlike the hardcoded older remotes. Your B&O dealer might be able to help you there, although it would only be able to interface directly with other 455khz equipment.
Any good IR blaster/receiver would work, though. As long as it is able to receive 455khz, translate the Beo4 signals into the signals needed for your DVR etc. and output the other needed frequencies (most likely 38khz), you should be golden.
But really, your B&O dealer should be able to help you with this. When putting together a BeoLiving home cinema system, they usually equip it with motorized drapes, light dimmers, a motorized projection screen and a projector, none of which are made by B&O. But it all works from a single Beo4, so it's definitely possible.
Re:Panasonic say: Buy Our TVs Film At 11.
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 1
The Beo4 can control non-B&O gear, it just takes an IR receiver/blaster to do it, and you have to teach the Beo4 which commands to send.
The reason you need an IR receiver/blaster is that B&O uses a 455khz carrier frequency for their IR and most other manufacturers use 36, 38 or 56khz.
It's no worse than buying a normal universal remote control and teaching it, really.
Re:Panasonic say: Buy Our TVs Film At 11.
on
Plasma or LCD?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Disclaimer: I work for Bang & Olufsen.
Much of the added price is the name and the nice box, which is more expensive than you might think, being that "everything is what it seems to be", ie. the metal-looking bits really are metal all the way through (mostly aluminum, seeing as they have their own very highly regarded aluminum works), the build quality is very sturdy and well-built and so on.
But the internal components are also B&O-spec and developed in house with high-grade components, and the internal testing of both assembled components and finished products is very rigorous.
The image calibration and automatic adjustments ("Adaptive Black", contrast adjustments according to ambient light, image filtering and smoothing of analog inputs on LCDs and plasmas etc.) are very nicely done as well. You really don't notice the adjustments working until you really look for it, since it's so smoothly and non-intrusively implemented. Bang & Olufsen have long been known for having some of the very best and most consistent image quality.
Also, the integration between products of various kinds is second to none. The Beo4 remote controls every single Bang & Olufsen product from the last 25 years or so, and everything including lighting and curtains can be controlled using a single remote.
So yes, you pay for the name. Bang & Olufsen being a premium "scandinavian lifestyle" type brand, it's pretty much implied that a premium will be charged. But you also pay for the quality and the integration. You admittedly won't really enjoy the integration until you have lots of Bang & Olufsen stuff, but it is possible to control products from other manufacturers, via an IR receiver and IR blaster.
Bang & Olufsen is like Apple, in a way. They have the same "It just works" mentality, and lots of people really like that, especially after having tried it themselves. More tech-savvy people may scoff at their products for being to simple and too expensive, but they are not the target market. The target market is people with enough money to spend and no interest in tweaking.
Even with the set number of writes, we're talking maybe 5 years before your flash drive goes bad, even with moderately heavy usage. That's on par with most hard disks these days.
And unlike hard disks, when the flash drive wears down its cells, it remains in a read-only state, allowing you to copy over your data to a new disk. I've had enough hard disks die on me to really appreciate that particular aspect of flash drives.
As soon as the flash drives come down in price enough (to withing twice the $/MB) , I'm putting a 32GB flash drive and as much RAM as possible in my laptop, disable swapping altogether (because swapping really eats up write cycles) and enjoy not having to worry about hard disk crashes anymore.
The maximum volume size for FAT32 is 8TB. That's 8 terabytes, some 40 times larger than my 200GB disk. If a camera will not accept FAT32 volumes above 32GB in size, their implementation of FAT32 is flawed.
I do know (and wikipedia backs this up) that you cannot use Microsoft's own scandisk on FAT32 volumes larger than ~120GB or so. Using dosfsck from *nix works just fine, though.
Unfortunately, I do not own a digital camera myself, so I have no way of testing where the problem lies as of now. But one of my friends has a camera (a Lumix, I think) which simply refuses to use some SD cards, no matter the file system. It works fine in other cameras and card readers, just not in his camera.
It is only Microsoft's own cut-rate implementation of a disk manager that insists on making FAT32 volumes a maximum of 32GB in size, and I suspect it is solely because they want people to use NTFS instead.
Offload parameters for eth0:
Cannot get device tcp segmentation offload settings: Operation not supported
Cannot get device udp large send offload settings: Operation not supported
rx-checksumming: on
tx-checksumming: on
scatter-gather: on
tcp segmentation offload: off
udp fragmentation offload: off
Stupid ASUS... why did they have to use a Marvell NIC and not an Intel?
Oddly enough, my sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts (Bitstream Vera Sans, for example) look quite a bit better on KDE (with "hinting" set to "slight") than Cleartype fonts do on XP, on the very same LCD. The X.org implementation is simply superior to Cleartype, which I find makes the text way too fuzzy. If I wanted fuzzy text, I would have gotten a CRT instead.
Even if I use the unsupported Cleartype tuning applet, it simply cannot look as good as the fonts on my KDE desktop.
I just did a quick test with the 1812 Overture (the Telarc release, if it matters), and it went from 160MB to 69MB for a 14-minute piece of music. Admittedly, this is probably one of the best results I have seen with flac, and I was using -8 (maximum compression), but still, savings of around 57% is pretty darn good. Bzip2 (-9) managed ~26%.
For good measure, I tried it with the other tracks from the same album and got ~50% compression on average with flac -8.
With more *ahem* modern music I get slightly worse compression, the worst case ~25%, but since it was a black metal track, it was pretty darn close to random noise anyway;-)
I've used my dad's Sensor Excel a few times, and it is quite a bit better than the Mach 3 ever was. But unfortunately, finding Sensor Excel cartridges these days seems to be impossible.
I threw away my Gillette Mach 3 and bought a good old-fashioned safety razor which takes good old-fashioned double-edged razor blades. I pay less than 1/10th the prize for blades now, and they last just as long as the Mach 3 cartridges did. Reading the Shave My Face site helped me find the good stuff.
I have great respect for the late King Camp Gillette, who invented the cheap mass-produced double-edged razor blade, and no respect at all for the Gillette Company who seem to have turned into a marketing machine.
Ideally, I would shave with a straight razor, but I'm kinda scared...
Dumping cartridge razor was definitely one of the best decisions I ever took, though
My dad bought a fancy Denon integrated DVD player and surround amplifier to get rid of all the different boxes under his TV (yeah I know. I thought it was a silly idea, too).
It absolutely refuses to play copy-"protected" CDs. If he puts one in it will refuse to function in any way until the disk is removed again, due to function locking while the disk is loading. The kicker is that if he copies the disk on his computer (which will luckily read the "protected" CDs just fine), the Denon player accepts the copy right away, every single time.
So the only way for him to play copy-"protected" CDs is by copying the damn things! How's that for ironic?
I would not be surprised at all if it acted the same way with these new "protected" DVDs.
I understand the romanticism of wanting to know how it was done in the old days (similar to knowing how to shave with a straight razor, navigate by the stars or shoot a bow & arrow)
The biggest reason why some people shave with a straight razor is because it gives the closest shave humanly possible. Of course, there is a lot of romaticism involved with the collecting and honing and stropping, but for the most part, it's a matter of shave quality. If you've never had a proper old-fashioned straight razor shave at a real barbershop, you're definitely missing out.
I'm not manly enough to shave with a bare blade so sharp it'll cut me if I let it rest on my skin, but since I ditched my Gillette Mach 3 for a double-edged safety razor (and of course proper shaving cream instead of that weird stuff that comes in pressurized cans), shaving has become much less of a chore... I actually look forward to shaving now, and I get much more comfortable shaves.
I always change every single file dialog I encounter in KDE and Windows to the "detail" view... Vertical scrolling is much saner than horizontal scrolling.
I have the I-IV albums on CD, and the cases are speficially referred to as "vinyl replica". The covers are cardboard mimicking the original vinyl covers in look and function, just CD-sized. And the CDs look exactly like the original stickers on the vinyls. Most people would find it useless, but I absolutely love it. It's a great way to pay tribute to the original release.
OMG! After the Project H.A.M.M.E.R. bit and just before the Zelda bit, there was sort of a flyby of the Resident Evil REmake version of the Spencer Mansion...
RE1, remade RE4 style? It can't be true. It's just way too cool to be true.
Slashdot Mirror
KDE does have Human Interface Guidelines, and has had them since KDE 2. They've elvolved along the way, on the way to KDE 3, of course.
:-)
A a part of the development of KDE 4, they are working on new HIGs.
The GNOME people may have been more vocal (and radical) when it came to their HIGs, but the KDE camp was never left behind in any way
What kind of hardware are you using? A minute or more for KDE to start up is not realistic on even semi-modern hardware. It takes less than 15 seconds on my P4 2.6GHz from KDM to fully running KDE 3.5 desktop.
But it's probably still faster than opening a command prompt (though a "command prompt here" option in the folder right click menu helps), loading the file into edit.com and resaving it.
My point was that even though edit.com has been removed from Vista, there still remains a built-in editor which handles different line endings properly. Now, why Notepad still doesn't do this, I have no idea.
For what it's worth, Wordpad also handles UNIX line endings properly.
The only x86 laptops apart from Macbooks that are properly put together and built to last are Thinkpads and Panasonic Toughbooks. And perhaps Fujitsu Lifebooks, a few of HP's professional models and some of Toshiba's higher-end models.
Everything else is plagued with flimsy hinges, wobbly screens, lousy keyboards and connectors that come lose at the most inappropriate times.
It may look like quality, but trust me, it isn't. For the same kind of money you'd spend on an Acer Ferrari, there are lots and lots of much better options.
I don't have a link nor the catalogue, unfortunately.
But I do know that for instance the BeoSystem 3 has the functionality built in. Also, the Beo4 was designed from the ground up to be programmable, unlike the hardcoded older remotes. Your B&O dealer might be able to help you there, although it would only be able to interface directly with other 455khz equipment.
Any good IR blaster/receiver would work, though. As long as it is able to receive 455khz, translate the Beo4 signals into the signals needed for your DVR etc. and output the other needed frequencies (most likely 38khz), you should be golden.
But really, your B&O dealer should be able to help you with this. When putting together a BeoLiving home cinema system, they usually equip it with motorized drapes, light dimmers, a motorized projection screen and a projector, none of which are made by B&O. But it all works from a single Beo4, so it's definitely possible.
The Beo4 can control non-B&O gear, it just takes an IR receiver/blaster to do it, and you have to teach the Beo4 which commands to send.
The reason you need an IR receiver/blaster is that B&O uses a 455khz carrier frequency for their IR and most other manufacturers use 36, 38 or 56khz.
It's no worse than buying a normal universal remote control and teaching it, really.
Disclaimer: I work for Bang & Olufsen.
Much of the added price is the name and the nice box, which is more expensive than you might think, being that "everything is what it seems to be", ie. the metal-looking bits really are metal all the way through (mostly aluminum, seeing as they have their own very highly regarded aluminum works), the build quality is very sturdy and well-built and so on.
But the internal components are also B&O-spec and developed in house with high-grade components, and the internal testing of both assembled components and finished products is very rigorous.
The image calibration and automatic adjustments ("Adaptive Black", contrast adjustments according to ambient light, image filtering and smoothing of analog inputs on LCDs and plasmas etc.) are very nicely done as well. You really don't notice the adjustments working until you really look for it, since it's so smoothly and non-intrusively implemented. Bang & Olufsen have long been known for having some of the very best and most consistent image quality.
Also, the integration between products of various kinds is second to none. The Beo4 remote controls every single Bang & Olufsen product from the last 25 years or so, and everything including lighting and curtains can be controlled using a single remote.
So yes, you pay for the name. Bang & Olufsen being a premium "scandinavian lifestyle" type brand, it's pretty much implied that a premium will be charged. But you also pay for the quality and the integration. You admittedly won't really enjoy the integration until you have lots of Bang & Olufsen stuff, but it is possible to control products from other manufacturers, via an IR receiver and IR blaster.
Bang & Olufsen is like Apple, in a way. They have the same "It just works" mentality, and lots of people really like that, especially after having tried it themselves. More tech-savvy people may scoff at their products for being to simple and too expensive, but they are not the target market. The target market is people with enough money to spend and no interest in tweaking.
Even with the set number of writes, we're talking maybe 5 years before your flash drive goes bad, even with moderately heavy usage. That's on par with most hard disks these days.
And unlike hard disks, when the flash drive wears down its cells, it remains in a read-only state, allowing you to copy over your data to a new disk. I've had enough hard disks die on me to really appreciate that particular aspect of flash drives.
As soon as the flash drives come down in price enough (to withing twice the $/MB) , I'm putting a 32GB flash drive and as much RAM as possible in my laptop, disable swapping altogether (because swapping really eats up write cycles) and enjoy not having to worry about hard disk crashes anymore.
The maximum volume size for FAT32 is 8TB. That's 8 terabytes, some 40 times larger than my 200GB disk. If a camera will not accept FAT32 volumes above 32GB in size, their implementation of FAT32 is flawed.
I do know (and wikipedia backs this up) that you cannot use Microsoft's own scandisk on FAT32 volumes larger than ~120GB or so. Using dosfsck from *nix works just fine, though.
Unfortunately, I do not own a digital camera myself, so I have no way of testing where the problem lies as of now. But one of my friends has a camera (a Lumix, I think) which simply refuses to use some SD cards, no matter the file system. It works fine in other cameras and card readers, just not in his camera.
I have a 200GB disk formatted as FAT32...
It is only Microsoft's own cut-rate implementation of a disk manager that insists on making FAT32 volumes a maximum of 32GB in size, and I suspect it is solely because they want people to use NTFS instead.
My onboard Gbit NIC doesn't, though:
02:05.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13)
Offload parameters for eth0:
Cannot get device tcp segmentation offload settings: Operation not supported
Cannot get device udp large send offload settings: Operation not supported
rx-checksumming: on
tx-checksumming: on
scatter-gather: on
tcp segmentation offload: off
udp fragmentation offload: off
Stupid ASUS... why did they have to use a Marvell NIC and not an Intel?
Maybe he was dictating it?
Oddly enough, my sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts (Bitstream Vera Sans, for example) look quite a bit better on KDE (with "hinting" set to "slight") than Cleartype fonts do on XP, on the very same LCD. The X.org implementation is simply superior to Cleartype, which I find makes the text way too fuzzy. If I wanted fuzzy text, I would have gotten a CRT instead.
Even if I use the unsupported Cleartype tuning applet, it simply cannot look as good as the fonts on my KDE desktop.
I just did a quick test with the 1812 Overture (the Telarc release, if it matters), and it went from 160MB to 69MB for a 14-minute piece of music. Admittedly, this is probably one of the best results I have seen with flac, and I was using -8 (maximum compression), but still, savings of around 57% is pretty darn good. Bzip2 (-9) managed ~26%.
;-)
For good measure, I tried it with the other tracks from the same album and got ~50% compression on average with flac -8.
With more *ahem* modern music I get slightly worse compression, the worst case ~25%, but since it was a black metal track, it was pretty darn close to random noise anyway
I've used my dad's Sensor Excel a few times, and it is quite a bit better than the Mach 3 ever was. But unfortunately, finding Sensor Excel cartridges these days seems to be impossible.
I threw away my Gillette Mach 3 and bought a good old-fashioned safety razor which takes good old-fashioned double-edged razor blades. I pay less than 1/10th the prize for blades now, and they last just as long as the Mach 3 cartridges did. Reading the Shave My Face site helped me find the good stuff.
I have great respect for the late King Camp Gillette, who invented the cheap mass-produced double-edged razor blade, and no respect at all for the Gillette Company who seem to have turned into a marketing machine.
Ideally, I would shave with a straight razor, but I'm kinda scared...
Dumping cartridge razor was definitely one of the best decisions I ever took, though
My dad bought a fancy Denon integrated DVD player and surround amplifier to get rid of all the different boxes under his TV (yeah I know. I thought it was a silly idea, too).
It absolutely refuses to play copy-"protected" CDs. If he puts one in it will refuse to function in any way until the disk is removed again, due to function locking while the disk is loading. The kicker is that if he copies the disk on his computer (which will luckily read the "protected" CDs just fine), the Denon player accepts the copy right away, every single time.
So the only way for him to play copy-"protected" CDs is by copying the damn things! How's that for ironic?
I would not be surprised at all if it acted the same way with these new "protected" DVDs.
I'm not manly enough to shave with a bare blade so sharp it'll cut me if I let it rest on my skin, but since I ditched my Gillette Mach 3 for a double-edged safety razor (and of course proper shaving cream instead of that weird stuff that comes in pressurized cans), shaving has become much less of a chore... I actually look forward to shaving now, and I get much more comfortable shaves.
I always change every single file dialog I encounter in KDE and Windows to the "detail" view... Vertical scrolling is much saner than horizontal scrolling.
Hey? What's wrong with The Alan Parsons Project?
I'm listening to Tales Of Mystery And Imaginations right now, actually (on CD, though)...
I have the I-IV albums on CD, and the cases are speficially referred to as "vinyl replica". The covers are cardboard mimicking the original vinyl covers in look and function, just CD-sized. And the CDs look exactly like the original stickers on the vinyls. Most people would find it useless, but I absolutely love it. It's a great way to pay tribute to the original release.
It isn't?!?
:-P
That WOULD explain those mysterious stomach cramps I've been having lately, though...
I just can't help it... I love chips
OMG! After the Project H.A.M.M.E.R. bit and just before the Zelda bit, there was sort of a flyby of the Resident Evil REmake version of the Spencer Mansion...
RE1, remade RE4 style? It can't be true. It's just way too cool to be true.