I just wanted to expand on the 'learning about Linux' point...
It's obviously not suitable for all occasions or people, but building a Gentoo system from Stage 1 is an excellent way to learn about Linux's structure and how packages, libraries and tools fit together. It's like a guided tour of the workings of a distribution.
It takes time, but installing a Gentoo system has helped me get a handle on a few of those 'how does that work?' thoughts that have been bothering me since I first started out with Linux (RH5 CD's from CheapBytes IIRC).
All your points are excellent. It's sad that the vocal/. Gentoo crowd seem to be so... well, you know what I mean. Everyone please bear in mind that for every "I compiled gpm with -O3 and now I can select text twice as fast as I could with Fedora on the same system!" person, there's a dozen people who use Gentoo for much more sane reasons.
You're right of course, but what I was trying to say is that there's no procedural equivalent to the Windows shortcut.
I'd say Cmd+S is the procedural & functional equivalent of Windows's Ctrl+S. It's a menu item keyboard shortcut.
The point I was making is that Windows allows direct access not only to menu items via direct shortcuts, but also offers easy navigation of the menu bar itself via the keyboard. Although (with Full Keyboard Access enabled) OS X provides Ctrl+F2 to begin navigating the menubar via the keyboard, the Mac's appropach to keyboard accelerators doesn't lend itself quite so easily to generalised navigation of the menu bar.
In practice, this really doesn't matter -- direct menui item shortcuts are much more consistent on the Mac, which makes the ability to hop through the menus via the keyboard a la Windows much less necessary.
Indeed - I forgot that! I believe this is called 'dead key' modification, and the way OS X does it is fantastic.
It's intuitive enough that a someone like myself who's not used to entering accented characters on a standard US or UK keyboard can pick it up really easilly.
... pretty much what I would say in reply (albeit in a slightly more combative manner).
There is no direct equivalent which entails navigating through the menu bar.
The closest (which is a little cumbersome, and requires Full Keyboard Access to be turned on in System Prefs) is:
- Ctrl+F2 to drop down the Apple menu - Right Arrow twice to choose File menu - Press S until Save is highlighted - Hit Space to select.
HOWEVER... this isn't a criticism of the Mac really. I've found that the Cmd+[whatver] shortcuts, with Option modifier is more than a good alternative, simply because it's so consistent and so widely implemented. Not to mention that any..nib-based application can have its menus re-ordered, renamed and shortcut keys altered just by loading the nib file up in Xcode.
The Win Key isn't used for contextual actions. That'll be the context menu key, which is used by about 3 people in the universe.
The Win key is oddly under-used. There's a few notable uses (Win+D - show desktop, Win+E open Explorer, Win - show start menu). I've yet to see it do anything particularly useful.
On the Mac, Command (the Apple Key, or the 'Splat' key) is the 'do something' key. Cmd+H - Hide this app. Cmd+O (in Finder, and most apps) open, Cmd+S save, etc. Basically the Win equivalent of Control.
Option is a modifier, most often used to slightly alter the behaviour of a Command+[something] shortcut. For example, Cmd+I in Finder shows the Get Info (Properties for Win folk) panel. Cmd+Opt+I shows the Inspector. If Get Info is the Mac equivalent of Properties, the Inspector is a variant of the Properties window that dynamically updates based on the current selection.
For those who have access to a Mac, try dropping down a menu and tapping the Option key. The menu options will toggle between their standard and alternative uses.
The Control key's a bit of an oddity on the Mac. Its use is largely app-specific. It's not all that often it's used as menu or dialog shortcuts.
Having used Windows in all its variations since Win 3.11, and a Mac since 2001, I've got to say that I find the Mac's approach rather more elegant. Not to say that it's perfect -- some GUI navigation's a bit half-assed (i.e. no direct equivalent to Windows's Alt+F (file menu) S (save)). But that's largely mitigated by the consistency and utility of standard shortcuts.
Oddly enough, on the Mac, it probably will do (at least, with iTunes itself, not the Store).
iTunes Mac has just worked with every single MP3 player I've ever plugged into my Mac. Creative Zen thingies all the way down to little no-name USB players. iTunes grants Mac-using owners of these devices almost every bit of functionality that they'd get with an iPod.
However, iTunes on the Windows side works only with the iPod.
As a Firefox user (and, dare I say it... 'fan'), I totally agree with you.
I've always viewed them as separate products, united by common technology (Gecko) and a common organisation (Moz.org -> MoFo).
From a lay-developer's POV, I'm really keen on getting the GRE fully componentised. I can imagine a time when GRE's made available as a discrete product in and of itself. Perhaps this would help contributors focus on the area that they're most keen on. App developers would work on the GRE client apps, layout and rendering gurus who know the W3C's publications like the backs of their hands could get their kicks working on GRE.
Updates to the GRE could be pushed via Mozilla Update, and *boom*... every installed GRE client gets the bugfixes and enhancements, without the client's developers needing to touch a line of code.
From what I've heard, the build system's unpleasant to say the least. It'd be cool if a dev interested in the GRE could get the GRE code from CVS, complete with a really basic GRE container app for testing... all ready to go.
Likewise, those interested in Client X (Seamonkey, FF, TB, nvu, SB, Camino, etc.) could grab the client source from CVS and hack away.
Apologies if I'm spouting nonsense. I can code, but never tried tinkering with something the size or complexity of Mozilla. I think the real question I'm asking is:
Would some behind-the-scenes code reorganisation (possibly centred around componentising the GRE) make supporting the development of multiple projects that much easier? If the project inter-dependencies were minimised, would there be more freedom for devs to scratch their itches with the projects they like, whilst remaining under the umbrella of the Foundation?
... and this is exactly what iTunes and the iPod/iPod mini seem to do (no idea about the shuffle).
Hit Play when shuffle's enabled, and it will shuffle the playlist before commencing playback. You're guaranteed not to get repeats until the playlist loops. The other benefit is that you can skip forward and back through the shuffled playlist normally. Mine often randomly picks 4 or 5 songs in a row that go well together, so I'm able to skip back and listen to those in that order when I like.
I'd love to hear the answer to this from an Esperanto speaker.
This is exactly the sort of thing where I'd imagine that synthetic languages would trip up. Personally, I'd say that evolution, interaction with various dialects and corruption is invaluable to the usefulness of a language. How does Esperanto deal with this?
(n.b. not attempting to flame: I'm genuinely interested)
So the US steel industry is entirely at the whim of market forces is it?
Apparently not: http://www.freetrade.org/issues/steel.html Or what about $600million subsidy to the Lumber industry which the US Federal Government reported to the WTO?
Now, whether or not subsidies are good or bad is another issue. However, there's very little point in either the US or the EU bitching about the other's subsidies -- they're each as "guilty" as the other.
Amongst programmers, 'checkboxes' is understood. But if I were to tell a user to put a check in that checkbox, I'd get an odd look.
Although we do have checklists, which (oddly) are usually ticked-off. Even though the person doing the ticking would announce 'Check!'. Checkpoints are indeed 'check'points, unless you're referring to those cheque-cashing (no, not caching) shops which sometimes call themselves 'Chequepoints'.
Schoolkids will get ticks on their work, not checks.
And yes -- flashlights are torches. It's 99.9% certain that the person hearing the word will understand whether or not it's of the 'flaming' variety, based on context. That other 0.1% of the time can be quite funny/dangerous/deadly. But only to D&D players who take things too far.
I'm a liberal (although a European one, so that means something different to those in the US).
And I pretty much agree with everything you said.
Until:
Well guess what - I will. If you're a single mother, you made a mistake. I don't support your decision and I think the world would be a better place if abortions were forced upon you.
Thanks. If you had your way, I would never have been born.
Now, don't take this too personally (not that you will), but on that comment in isolation, allow me to reply: "fuck you". A single parent is certainly capable of raising a law-abiding, well educated, stable, successful and considerate child. My upbringing's taught me not to take things for granted. And most of all, that your kind of thinking on the subject is absolutely wrong. Now I'm by no means special or unique. So simple logic would suggest that there are hundreds of thousands of single-parent children out there who are just as healthy individuals as I am, if not more so.
Just the other night I saw on the news a 19 year old girl who had 3 children and was being brought up on child neglect charges. It is simply sickening.
... and if they had waited until married before they had those kids, things would be absolutely perfect and stable? This 19 year old girl was simply shitty at caring for children. She wouldn't magically be less shitty were she married. Here's the deal: stupid people do stupid things. Answer: Make sure everyone has every opportunity, no matter what their background to receive a high-quality education throughout their upbringing. None of this 'we can't teach that subject because we can't afford it'. It's an absolute necessity.
Society, as a whole, needs to tell these swine that if you have that many children and that young of an age, you are the scum of the Earth and the planet would be better off without you.
Hehe. Now, if you were just talking about stupid people here, and this comment hadn't been coloured by your earlier parental-quantity slur, I'd have to say that I find myself agreeing with you at times. It turns my stomach that parents seem to prefer to buy their kids new trainers every week than pay for daycare, books, or something useful.
But that's not because of their age. It's because of their priorities which are not always linked to their numerical age.
Mindless government pay-outs are just feeding this disposition. However that's what happens when you privatise everything. Government 'welfare' becomes the simple case of throwing money at the poor (and/or uneducated). Then we act all surprised when the schools that serve them are shit, and they'd rather spend the money on 'flashy' consumer goods than anything that'd actually help get them out of the rut.
Government welfare should be services. Guaranteed quality of education. Childcare, so parents can work without harming their children. You know the rest...
Being a young mother doesn't automatically make you a bad mother. It's immaturity, or lack of support (parental, spousal, societal), or illiteracy or ill-education which makes you a bad parent.
Had the Live! (non-platinum). I bought the Optical I/O bracket separately. Worked fine for ages.
Then I moved my PC to another case. Like you, I was using an IDE cable (for extra length) instead of the supplied one. Accidentally got it round the wrong way. Plastic melted from a few of the wires in the ribbon, nasty acrid smoke and a popping noise.
The Live! survived, but both the cable and the optical I/O card were kaput.
Destroyed a few floppy drives by getting the power cable upside down. Often, the drives will just have 4 bare pins for the power, without the plastic guide. My BIOS supports USB booting, so these days I just keep a USB floppy drive in a drawer.
In 22 years, that's the only breakages I've personally caused. Although my bacon's been saved several times by PSU's with thermal fuses.
Aside from dead PC components all my computers are still alive... Acorn Electron, Atari 520ST-FM, Atari Falcon030, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx[*]...... actually, the Lynx is sorta crippled. The AC input came loose. I was too lazy (and probably, at that time, a bit too young) to resolder it. But I found that feeding 9V into the Comlynx (networking) port also powered the system. After about 6 months of this, it started doing odd things. The LCD display became permanently too bright when on AC, and always too dim when on batteries. Fun little machine though...
[*] yes, by 1994 I was basically single-handedly responsible for providing Atari's only income:-)
Just swapping volume around won't change the contents of the channels.
Ah - yes, that's what I want to do -- swap channels.
However, those utilities might allow you to do something like that, and you could always ask about it on one of the ASLA user mailing lists. It may even be a feature that could be added, as I'd think your scenario would be starting to be common enough.
I'll be sure to take a look! Before I start asking on lists, I'll have to get myself up to speed on Linux audio systems/daemons/etc. The last time I had a good crack at building a desktop media-capable Linux system, I think OSS was the only option. Clearly, I need to some learning!
I didn't think my situation was all that obscure, but it's good to hear it from someone else.
Thanks for that! Not something I'd thought of before.
I'm by no means someone who underestimates the difficulty of space flight (I'm still pretty awed even by unmanned routine Arianne launches). But it's still something of a surprise (or maybe disappointment) to find how primitive our efforts are in the grand scheme of things.
I'm nothing more than an interested layman. From what you've said, it figures that (unsurprisingly!) propulsion is where we need to progress. Get that nailed, and the economics of everything else begins to fit... does that follow?
Assuming that's the case, I'd like to see robotic missions continue, alongside propulsion research to make other projects more useful/economical.
Some of the recent robotic missions have been great. Maybe we could do more. Would higher bandwidth comms be possible, so we could collect even more data, images and audio in higher fidelity... if only for the 'money shots' for the public?
Seeing as Slashdot has more than a handful of people who know their arse from their elbow in these matters, it seems like a good place to ask. Have we reached a point where we've exploited physics and materials as far as we can with our current knowlegde? Is it a case of plugging along with baby-steps in areas that we don't fully grasp until the next watershed advance?
I bet sometimes everyone wishes science developed just like in Civ3. Discovered X? Great! Now start work on Y and wait 10 turns:-)
Thanks -- I'll have to take a look at that once I've finished compiling my gentoo system (no jokes please!:-D)
Will this allow me to actually swap which audio channels are output to which physical connectors?
I'd basically want to rotate the speaker config 90 degrees, so that the proper audio channels come from the correct speaker.
I'll definitely take a look once everything's emerged. This is my first 'from-scratch' linux system in a few years, so I guess I'm heading down a voyage of discovery... I've not even used a 2.6.x kernel yet!
And you've hit on something I'd love to see -- full surround speaker configuration.
I've got 6-channel (5.1) audio running from my PC to my amp. The computer's also connected to both a monitor at the desk, and a TV against the other wall. The upshot of which is, when I'm facing the TV, the surround's coming from the correct channels. But when facing the monitor, I've got the right-front and right-rear infront of me, and the left-front and left-rear behind.
I'd love to be able to set up presets to flip the audio to the correct channels depending on where I'm facing!
Has anyone come across the ability to do this? Either in Linux or Windows?
Slashdot Mirror
I just wanted to expand on the 'learning about Linux' point...
/. Gentoo crowd seem to be so... well, you know what I mean. Everyone please bear in mind that for every "I compiled gpm with -O3 and now I can select text twice as fast as I could with Fedora on the same system!" person, there's a dozen people who use Gentoo for much more sane reasons.
It's obviously not suitable for all occasions or people, but building a Gentoo system from Stage 1 is an excellent way to learn about Linux's structure and how packages, libraries and tools fit together. It's like a guided tour of the workings of a distribution.
It takes time, but installing a Gentoo system has helped me get a handle on a few of those 'how does that work?' thoughts that have been bothering me since I first started out with Linux (RH5 CD's from CheapBytes IIRC).
All your points are excellent. It's sad that the vocal
You're right of course, but what I was trying to say is that there's no procedural equivalent to the Windows shortcut.
I'd say Cmd+S is the procedural & functional equivalent of Windows's Ctrl+S. It's a menu item keyboard shortcut.
The point I was making is that Windows allows direct access not only to menu items via direct shortcuts, but also offers easy navigation of the menu bar itself via the keyboard. Although (with Full Keyboard Access enabled) OS X provides Ctrl+F2 to begin navigating the menubar via the keyboard, the Mac's appropach to keyboard accelerators doesn't lend itself quite so easily to generalised navigation of the menu bar.
In practice, this really doesn't matter -- direct menui item shortcuts are much more consistent on the Mac, which makes the ability to hop through the menus via the keyboard a la Windows much less necessary.
Funnily enough, that's about the only one I use on a regular basis.
If I'm at a user's machine and need to know the machine name, the quickest way I've found to get to it is:
- Win+Break (brings up My Computer's properties window)
- Ctrl+Tab (brings forward the Computer Name tab)
Indeed - I forgot that! I believe this is called 'dead key' modification, and the way OS X does it is fantastic.
It's intuitive enough that a someone like myself who's not used to entering accented characters on a standard US or UK keyboard can pick it up really easilly.
... pretty much what I would say in reply (albeit in a slightly more combative manner).
... this isn't a criticism of the Mac really. I've found that the Cmd+[whatver] shortcuts, with Option modifier is more than a good alternative, simply because it's so consistent and so widely implemented. Not to mention that any. .nib-based application can have its menus re-ordered, renamed and shortcut keys altered just by loading the nib file up in Xcode.
There is no direct equivalent which entails navigating through the menu bar.
The closest (which is a little cumbersome, and requires Full Keyboard Access to be turned on in System Prefs) is:
- Ctrl+F2 to drop down the Apple menu
- Right Arrow twice to choose File menu
- Press S until Save is highlighted
- Hit Space to select.
HOWEVER
The Win Key isn't used for contextual actions. That'll be the context menu key, which is used by about 3 people in the universe.
... sorry .. and OT at that!)
The Win key is oddly under-used. There's a few notable uses (Win+D - show desktop, Win+E open Explorer, Win - show start menu). I've yet to see it do anything particularly useful.
On the Mac, Command (the Apple Key, or the 'Splat' key) is the 'do something' key. Cmd+H - Hide this app. Cmd+O (in Finder, and most apps) open, Cmd+S save, etc. Basically the Win equivalent of Control.
Option is a modifier, most often used to slightly alter the behaviour of a Command+[something] shortcut. For example, Cmd+I in Finder shows the Get Info (Properties for Win folk) panel. Cmd+Opt+I shows the Inspector. If Get Info is the Mac equivalent of Properties, the Inspector is a variant of the Properties window that dynamically updates based on the current selection.
For those who have access to a Mac, try dropping down a menu and tapping the Option key. The menu options will toggle between their standard and alternative uses.
The Control key's a bit of an oddity on the Mac. Its use is largely app-specific. It's not all that often it's used as menu or dialog shortcuts.
Having used Windows in all its variations since Win 3.11, and a Mac since 2001, I've got to say that I find the Mac's approach rather more elegant. Not to say that it's perfect -- some GUI navigation's a bit half-assed (i.e. no direct equivalent to Windows's Alt+F (file menu) S (save)). But that's largely mitigated by the consistency and utility of standard shortcuts.
(phew, quite a rant
Oddly enough, on the Mac, it probably will do (at least, with iTunes itself, not the Store).
iTunes Mac has just worked with every single MP3 player I've ever plugged into my Mac. Creative Zen thingies all the way down to little no-name USB players. iTunes grants Mac-using owners of these devices almost every bit of functionality that they'd get with an iPod.
However, iTunes on the Windows side works only with the iPod.
First 5 air-strikes a year for FREE!?
USAF endorsement of the Flight Simulator series?
A free G-Suit for Ballmer? (much more effective than that girdle he borrowed from Shatner, I bet).
We should be told...
As a Firefox user (and, dare I say it... 'fan'), I totally agree with you.
I've always viewed them as separate products, united by common technology (Gecko) and a common organisation (Moz.org -> MoFo).
From a lay-developer's POV, I'm really keen on getting the GRE fully componentised. I can imagine a time when GRE's made available as a discrete product in and of itself. Perhaps this would help contributors focus on the area that they're most keen on. App developers would work on the GRE client apps, layout and rendering gurus who know the W3C's publications like the backs of their hands could get their kicks working on GRE.
Updates to the GRE could be pushed via Mozilla Update, and *boom*... every installed GRE client gets the bugfixes and enhancements, without the client's developers needing to touch a line of code.
From what I've heard, the build system's unpleasant to say the least. It'd be cool if a dev interested in the GRE could get the GRE code from CVS, complete with a really basic GRE container app for testing... all ready to go.
Likewise, those interested in Client X (Seamonkey, FF, TB, nvu, SB, Camino, etc.) could grab the client source from CVS and hack away.
Apologies if I'm spouting nonsense. I can code, but never tried tinkering with something the size or complexity of Mozilla. I think the real question I'm asking is:
Would some behind-the-scenes code reorganisation (possibly centred around componentising the GRE) make supporting the development of multiple projects that much easier? If the project inter-dependencies were minimised, would there be more freedom for devs to scratch their itches with the projects they like, whilst remaining under the umbrella of the Foundation?
... and this is exactly what iTunes and the iPod/iPod mini seem to do (no idea about the shuffle).
Hit Play when shuffle's enabled, and it will shuffle the playlist before commencing playback. You're guaranteed not to get repeats until the playlist loops. The other benefit is that you can skip forward and back through the shuffled playlist normally. Mine often randomly picks 4 or 5 songs in a row that go well together, so I'm able to skip back and listen to those in that order when I like.
Either I'm a fast reader, or that didn't take 4'33" to read.
:-) thanks, that made me laugh on an otherwise crappy day!
I'd love to hear the answer to this from an Esperanto speaker.
This is exactly the sort of thing where I'd imagine that synthetic languages would trip up. Personally, I'd say that evolution, interaction with various dialects and corruption is invaluable to the usefulness of a language. How does Esperanto deal with this?
(n.b. not attempting to flame: I'm genuinely interested)
So the US steel industry is entirely at the whim of market forces is it?
Apparently not:
http://www.freetrade.org/issues/steel.html
Or what about $600million subsidy to the Lumber industry which the US Federal Government reported to the WTO?
Or agriculture subsidies?
Now, whether or not subsidies are good or bad is another issue. However, there's very little point in either the US or the EU bitching about the other's subsidies -- they're each as "guilty" as the other.
Nope -- we have ticks :)
Tickboxes, Tickmarks are just 'ticks'.
Amongst programmers, 'checkboxes' is understood. But if I were to tell a user to put a check in that checkbox, I'd get an odd look.
Although we do have checklists, which (oddly) are usually ticked-off. Even though the person doing the ticking would announce 'Check!'. Checkpoints are indeed 'check'points, unless you're referring to those cheque-cashing (no, not caching) shops which sometimes call themselves 'Chequepoints'.
Schoolkids will get ticks on their work, not checks.
And yes -- flashlights are torches. It's 99.9% certain that the person hearing the word will understand whether or not it's of the 'flaming' variety, based on context. That other 0.1% of the time can be quite funny/dangerous/deadly. But only to D&D players who take things too far.
And I pretty much agree with everything you said.
Until:
Thanks. If you had your way, I would never have been born.
Now, don't take this too personally (not that you will), but on that comment in isolation, allow me to reply: "fuck you". A single parent is certainly capable of raising a law-abiding, well educated, stable, successful and considerate child. My upbringing's taught me not to take things for granted. And most of all, that your kind of thinking on the subject is absolutely wrong. Now I'm by no means special or unique. So simple logic would suggest that there are hundreds of thousands of single-parent children out there who are just as healthy individuals as I am, if not more so.
Hehe. Now, if you were just talking about stupid people here, and this comment hadn't been coloured by your earlier parental-quantity slur, I'd have to say that I find myself agreeing with you at times. It turns my stomach that parents seem to prefer to buy their kids new trainers every week than pay for daycare, books, or something useful.
But that's not because of their age. It's because of their priorities which are not always linked to their numerical age.
Mindless government pay-outs are just feeding this disposition. However that's what happens when you privatise everything. Government 'welfare' becomes the simple case of throwing money at the poor (and/or uneducated). Then we act all surprised when the schools that serve them are shit, and they'd rather spend the money on 'flashy' consumer goods than anything that'd actually help get them out of the rut.
Government welfare should be services. Guaranteed quality of education. Childcare, so parents can work without harming their children. You know the rest...
Being a young mother doesn't automatically make you a bad mother. It's immaturity, or lack of support (parental, spousal, societal), or illiteracy or ill-education which makes you a bad parent.
"It's Megamaid, sir! She's gone from suck to blow!"
:)
Hehehe
(almost) the same story here :)
... actually, the Lynx is sorta crippled. The AC input came loose. I was too lazy (and probably, at that time, a bit too young) to resolder it. But I found that feeding 9V into the Comlynx (networking) port also powered the system. After about 6 months of this, it started doing odd things. The LCD display became permanently too bright when on AC, and always too dim when on batteries. Fun little machine though...
:-)
Had the Live! (non-platinum). I bought the Optical I/O bracket separately. Worked fine for ages.
Then I moved my PC to another case. Like you, I was using an IDE cable (for extra length) instead of the supplied one. Accidentally got it round the wrong way. Plastic melted from a few of the wires in the ribbon, nasty acrid smoke and a popping noise.
The Live! survived, but both the cable and the optical I/O card were kaput.
Destroyed a few floppy drives by getting the power cable upside down. Often, the drives will just have 4 bare pins for the power, without the plastic guide. My BIOS supports USB booting, so these days I just keep a USB floppy drive in a drawer.
In 22 years, that's the only breakages I've personally caused. Although my bacon's been saved several times by PSU's with thermal fuses.
Aside from dead PC components all my computers are still alive... Acorn Electron, Atari 520ST-FM, Atari Falcon030, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx[*]...
[*] yes, by 1994 I was basically single-handedly responsible for providing Atari's only income
Just swapping volume around won't change the contents of the channels.
Ah - yes, that's what I want to do -- swap channels.
However, those utilities might allow you to do something like that, and you could always ask about it on one of the ASLA user mailing lists. It may even be a feature that could be added, as I'd think your scenario would be starting to be common enough.
I'll be sure to take a look! Before I start asking on lists, I'll have to get myself up to speed on Linux audio systems/daemons/etc. The last time I had a good crack at building a desktop media-capable Linux system, I think OSS was the only option. Clearly, I need to some learning!
I didn't think my situation was all that obscure, but it's good to hear it from someone else.
...but it seemed to be an easy joke...
... which is probably why it was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the 'what separates stars from planets' line...
:)
Always nice of Slashdot to remind me that my humour is basic, childish, and not very funny
Thanks for that! Not something I'd thought of before.
:-)
I'm by no means someone who underestimates the difficulty of space flight (I'm still pretty awed even by unmanned routine Arianne launches). But it's still something of a surprise (or maybe disappointment) to find how primitive our efforts are in the grand scheme of things.
I'm nothing more than an interested layman. From what you've said, it figures that (unsurprisingly!) propulsion is where we need to progress. Get that nailed, and the economics of everything else begins to fit... does that follow?
Assuming that's the case, I'd like to see robotic missions continue, alongside propulsion research to make other projects more useful/economical.
Some of the recent robotic missions have been great. Maybe we could do more. Would higher bandwidth comms be possible, so we could collect even more data, images and audio in higher fidelity... if only for the 'money shots' for the public?
Seeing as Slashdot has more than a handful of people who know their arse from their elbow in these matters, it seems like a good place to ask. Have we reached a point where we've exploited physics and materials as far as we can with our current knowlegde? Is it a case of plugging along with baby-steps in areas that we don't fully grasp until the next watershed advance?
I bet sometimes everyone wishes science developed just like in Civ3. Discovered X? Great! Now start work on Y and wait 10 turns
Thanks! So that's my Dolby Digital streams sorted (that's AC3, right?).
Now, I'd love to be able to do the same for games with surround audio.
I guess there's nothing really low-level that could be tweaked which would apply to all audio APIs/filters?
Thanks -- I'll have to take a look at that once I've finished compiling my gentoo system (no jokes please! :-D)
Will this allow me to actually swap which audio channels are output to which physical connectors?
I'd basically want to rotate the speaker config 90 degrees, so that the proper audio channels come from the correct speaker.
I'll definitely take a look once everything's emerged. This is my first 'from-scratch' linux system in a few years, so I guess I'm heading down a voyage of discovery... I've not even used a 2.6.x kernel yet!
Exactly.
And you've hit on something I'd love to see -- full surround speaker configuration.
I've got 6-channel (5.1) audio running from my PC to my amp. The computer's also connected to both a monitor at the desk, and a TV against the other wall. The upshot of which is, when I'm facing the TV, the surround's coming from the correct channels. But when facing the monitor, I've got the right-front and right-rear infront of me, and the left-front and left-rear behind.
I'd love to be able to set up presets to flip the audio to the correct channels depending on where I'm facing!
Has anyone come across the ability to do this? Either in Linux or Windows?
OS X v10.4 will support full resolution-independence. That's on a per-app basis too, so different windows can appear at different dpi's.
Quartz has apparently been able to do this forever, but the higher-level app stuff had to be put in place so it would work seamlessly.