Re:The Glory of Emacs
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GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Fortunately, Emacs comes bundled with an excellent text editing capabilities, even though they're not enabled by default. M-x viper-mode is your friend. (Set it on the "wizard" user level when it asks.) No need to lose the massive power of emacs to get efficient vi-style text editing.
I considered getting the Empeg, but decided to go with PhatNoise instead. It's also a hard-drive-based car MP3 player, but it emulates a CD changer and works with a standard head unit, and it's considerably cheaper and (for me) more convenient than Empeg. The company is at www.phatnoise.com - they seem to be pretty cool, and have both business and technical clue. The player doesn't support Ogg yet, but given that their desktop software lets you encode to Ogg, I'd expect that capability in a future firmware update.
I'm going to post a detailed review later, it'll be up at http://pobox.com/~jaffray/phatnoise.html. In the meantime, I posted this short review to rec.audio.car, and it would seem appropriate here as well:
I've had my PhatNoise system for about a month. The physical design is very
slick, and so is the software. It installed with no difficulty, just like
a normal CD changer. The sound quality seems excellent to me. I'll admit
that I'm not a golden ear, and my car system, while decent, isn't audiophile
quality; but in general listening, and in a few short non-blind A/B tests,
I can't distinguish quality of playback of my MP3s (encoded at 192kbps)
from the PhatNoise from playback of CDs in the head unit.
In usage, it behaves exactly like a really big CD changer, up to 99 discs.
In a way, that's good - your head unit controls are nicely refined to work
with such a changer. On the other hand, if you're trying to find a specific
album and song, you really want to have a tree-structured storage, with
folders containing subfolders of songs. On the third hand, it could be
argued that such an interface would be unsafe to use while driving, between
the cognitive load and the need to look at the LCD between button presses.
Some aspects are still a bit beta-ish. I had problems with occasional
skips; very infrequent, very minimal compared to CD skips, but still, MP3s
shouldn't do that. They went away when I upgraded to the most recent
firmware release a week ago. The PhatMan client software isn't fast
enough when handling huge collections (100GB+), even after speed improvements
in recent versions, and I've made it crash a few times. The firmware
update process isn't as smooth as it should be.
The system is very hackable. I swapped out the PhatCart's 6GB hard drive
for a 12GB drive I had lying around, which was easy, and I expect a larger
drive would be just as simple. (20GB 2.5" drives are $110 these days.)
The PhatBox itself is an ARM Linux system, the system files on the PhatCart
are unencrypted and in fairly obvious formats, and the PhatDock is just a
standard IDE-USB bridge. I've already written a simple client which uploads
albums to the PhatCart from Linux, so I don't need to use PhatMan in Windows.
Overall, the combination of excellent production values and relatively open
internals is refreshing. Hopefully they can be persuaded to open the source to the PhatBox's main player daemon as well...
Compared to the competition: The Rio Car (AKA empeg) is way cooler, without
a doubt, since it has its own display and controls and can use them more
flexibly. Unfortunately it's much more expensive, and it must be installed
in-dash and does not have a detachable face. For me, carrying around a
DIN-sized unit and inserting/removing it for every car trip is unacceptable.
On the other end of the price range, SSI makes a unit (the Neo 35) that's
somewhat cheaper, but they seem to be cutting corners (like using 3.5"
drives which are not intended for mobile use), the system doesn't seem
nearly as polished in general, and there are some reports from unhappy
customers out there.
Probably the most significant competition is from the various CDR-based
MP3 head units. Carrying around a handful of CDRs, each containing a
dozen albums, is a reasonable and cheaper alternative to hard-drive units
for many users. highwaymp3.com reviews such units, which have gotten a
lot better recently. Do your research carefully before buying one, though.
They generally don't have upgradeable firmware, meaning that any bugs or
missing capabilities will never be fixed. They also won't change in
response to emerging standards, so the useful lifetime may be short.
For example, imagine if you'd bought a MP3 player several years ago
that didn't support VBR, or that glitched when playing back tracks
with id3v2 tags. You'd probably want to replace it by now.
On the whole, I'm very glad I bought the PhatNoise. It's cool, it's useful,
I've really enjoyed having it in my car, and for $600 (plus another $100 or
$200 to bump up the capacity to 20-30GB), it's not all that expensive for
what it offers. I never have to change discs or plug in or unplug anything, I just have hundreds of hours of music available to me, all the time. I'd definitely recommend it to gadget fiends in its current
state, and when they ship the final release with up-to-date firmware and options
for more capacity, I'd have no reservations about recommending it even to
non-techies who just happen to want hundreds of hours of music on tap in
their car.
Hmmm. I don't think I'd have trouble moving with my AnthroCart, but I have a 36" wide unit that's big mostly in the vertical direction, so it comes apart into more pieces.
As for the tools, maybe they've changed what they ship. They shipped an allen screwdriver and a rubber mallet with mine, and they were both durable, good quality, not at all single-use, not the hexagonal twig of a "screwdriver" that's come with other RTA furniture I bought in the past.
Why is receiving DirecTV any different, legally, than tuning in a normal radio or TV? In both cases you're listening in to broadcasts and decoding the signal for display.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's illegal, but I'm curious what law covers it.
(Usual gripe about the absurd term "piracy" deleted for brevity.)
I am an EFF member. However, this is not the EFF's protest, and it will go on. With or without them.
The vast majority of participants on the free-sklyarov list, including the people running boycottadobe.com and the organizers of several of the protests, are determined that there will be protests on Monday regardless of this latest PR action by Adobe.
We have no evidence that Adobe is willing to do anything except share a cup of coffee and say "sorry, nothing we can do". The fact that they're trying to make EFF discourage protests as a precondition for talks, and making no commitments in advance, does not speak well for their good intentions. The EFF is not necessarily making a mistake by pulling out in order to get them at the table, but there is no reason for the rest of us to stay quiet.
The Dell you quote is the same price as the iBook, has an 800x600 screen instead of 1024x768 (big difference), Dell's lower-capacity battery (probably won't last three hours, let alone five), no Firewire, less video RAM, and is bulkier and heavier. I think you made the original poster's point for him.:-) The iBook really is an exceptional value.
The Gateway you quote has the same issues, and is almost a full inch thicker than the iBook.
Ten years ago, virtually no one had heard of ergonomics. Meanwhile, the number of people using computers all day at work, and often all night at home (with the rise of PCs and then the Internet), skyrockets.
This corresponds with a skyrocketing number of RSI cases a few years later.
Now, any self-respecting workplace gives some attention to ergonomic issues, often gives workplace training with education on the importance of taking breaks, setting up workstations appropriately, etc, and even relatively uninformed computer users are aware of the dangers and warning signs.
And gosh, whaddaya know, the number of RSI cases might be going down. (I say "might" because I see no numbers quoted in that article, and don't trust their quoted sources worth a damn.)
There is plenty of solid research backing up the validity of repetitive-strain-induced tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome. The fact that it's difficult to externally verify any given case, and might attract malingerers, does not refute this.
(Do not mistake reluctance to see a given doctor with evidence that the person is malingering... many doctors are uneducated and useless on RSI issues, many employers want employees to see company-recommended doctors who will dismiss the employee's symptoms so they won't be liable for disability claims or workplace accomodations, some doctors will try to force you to have inappropriate (but profitable) surgery or else accuse you of faking it, etc. The health care system is not necessarily an injured patient's friend.)
And yes, if you tell me to my face that the six months I spent in constant pain and unable to work or type, and the months I spent in physical therapy to fix the postural problems which were reducing bloodflow to my arms and increasing my proneness to injury, and the years of stretching and strengthening exercises to get my arms back to something close to healthy condition modulo occasional recurring pain and inability to resume some of my previous hobbies... if you tell me that all that was hysteria, you will soon have many decidedly nonpsychosomatic injuries to deal with.
I have a Silencer power supply from PC Power and Cooling. I was quite disappointed, it might be slightly more quiet than your average PS, but it's still pretty damn loud. It's enough to bother me at night from the next room, and I live in the middle of a city, it's not like I have an unusually low level of ambient noise.
Unfortunately a lot of the people reviewing supposedly silent components are PC hardware freaks who are judging them by the standards of roaring seven-fan cyclone setups intended for overclocked gamer rigs, rather than by any sane standards.:-P
Costco sells 6 packs of 1.25v AA size Panasonic Ni-Cad batteries. [...]
Um. My ThinkPad battery is 3200mAh, 10.8V. It'd take about 25 of those 1100mAh 1.25V AA's to satisfy the same power requirements. 25 AA's would not fit in the same space, and would be much heavier.
Re:Take a look at this Ruby Tutorial
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Programming Ruby
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· Score: 1
>> isn't a comment in Ruby; it uses # as a comment symbol. The lines like "2+2 >> 4" you saw in the tutorial were annotations by the tutorial authors, saying "that expression evaluates to this".
Recently, there was a despicable, unprovoked snowball attack on innocent MIT graduate students by Akamai customer care thugs.
"Unprovoked"? So, your ragtag little band of punks just happened to tromp out an insult in the snow outside our office while randomly wandering around building snowmen? I think not.
Gentle readers of Slashdot, do not let yourselves be deceived by the ravings of these pathological liars in LCS, the rotting remains of a once-great department, the dregs left behind when the real talent left to form Akamai. Read the full story and decide for yourself.
First Deja shifted from Usenet towards their lame shopping thing. Then they changed the Usenet searching interface to make it far less usable and more ad-heavy. Then they started inserting ad links into posts. Then they made all posts before... June 2000, was it?... "temporarily inaccessible" for many months, negating much of the value of the archive. And then they tanked; had nothing been done, they would have taken their entire archive with them.
In the middle of this, Google, the company with the absolute best search engine on the net and the most usable web site with the least ads and the best friendliness to geeks like us of any site like them, steps in and takes over the archive and promises development work to make ALL the data more available and more usefully searchable than ever.
This is GREAT! As a long-time Deja user, this makes me very happy and excited. Yes, it sucks that the archive is inaccessible for a few weeks, but that's not Google's fault. Deja shut down the servers, not Google - why on earth would Google ask them to? - and Google's providing some minimal functionality in the meantime. It beats the hell out of losing the information entirely.
Anyway, personally I'd choose some interruption of service with Google maintaining it afterwards, as compared to the status quo with Deja even if it were viable (which it wasn't). Having all the posts from 1995-1999 inaccessible was NOT an acceptable situation from my standpoint as a user.
I'm delighted that Google has done this. Mad props to the Googlistas responsible.
The strip encourage my cynicism (most humor is cynical by its very nature) and I wanted to - sorry I have to say this - find more positive storytelling. Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books.
Bloom County was negative? Negative humor is forgotten? It's obvious that Bloom County is anything but forgotten.
It's a shame that Breathed never grasped just how damn good he really was. I was entertained, and reassured, and inspired by Bloom County while I was growing up. So were my friends. So were countless others. It was a very positive thing. But I don't think he ever really believed that.
Children's books? With a few notable exceptions, I've found most of them forgettable. But I'll never forget Bloom County.
Censoring offensive material is exactly what MAPS is doing in this case. Some censorware is offended by pornography or the Ku Klux Klan and is designed to block that. MAPS is offended by websites which sell bulk email software, and is designed to block that.
providing any service which uses internet resources to support spamming: webpages or email or DNS or credit card handling for spam-promoted sites, or anything-to-email gateways
providing software or services for distributing spam, or providing connectivity to people who do
providing lists of harvested email addresses, or software or services to create such lists
So what MAPS RBL is designed to do is keep a list of hosts and networks that spam, or of hosts and networks that aid spammers. They are being added on the basis of their actions. What they're saying is irrelevant. This is why they're content-neutral.
You are objecting to their inclusion of spamware as something which aids spammers and should be blocked. This gets into two fairly tricky points. First, if something is both speech and action (the "fire in a crowded theater" example), where do you draw the line between allowing free speech and preventing harmful actions? Second, to what extent is software speech, and to what extent is it a tool?
We probably agree that blocking spam is acceptable, despite the weak argument that saying the same thing over and over is speech that should be protected. And we agree that a list of techniques that spammers use would be speech that should not be blocked. You could claim that spamware is like the list of techniques. MAPS might claim that selling someone a software package whose sole purpose is to spam is no different from taking their money and doing the spamming yourself. You both have decent arguments.
I do think, however, that even if you're convinced that there's a free-speech right to distribute spamware, labelling RBL as "censorware" based on a fraction of a fraction of the list violating this very debateable "right" is massive overkill.
"...they're not blocking innocent or guilty websites, they're blocking the network."
Isn't this slicing it a little thin? When you find a website you don't like, and then block all traffic from its IP number, I call that blocking a website.
No, not at all. Look at Media3. They've found a network they don't like, because it supports spamming in multiple ways. It hosts sites which are promoted by spam, and it hosts spamware vendors. They could change their AUP to prohibit this, but refuse to do so. And so they're blackholing the network.
This is not an overzealous or overbroad block; they are blocking exactly the network that they wanted to. They state in the docs that this approach can lead to blocking non-spam traffic, and warn you to use a different list; RSS for example; if you have a problem with this.
If you wanted to highlight the spamware free-speech argument, you could have chosen a better example. Spamware is not the only reason why Media3 is on the RBL, and there is no way to claim that hosting spam-promoted sites is anything but a content-neutral blocking policy.
Let's check the dictionary here.
censor: an official who examines material (as in publications or films) for offensive matter
Are SurfWatch, CyberPatrol, etc doing this? Yes. They spider the web looking for offensive material, and sell software that blocks it. Their software is a censor. Thus the term "censorware". (The fact that they make fraudulent claims for their software is incidental here.)
Is MAPS doing this? No. They are completely content-neutral. They don't examine anything for offensive material. They evaluate submissions of networks that spam, that provide spam support services, or that maintain open relays. They provide a list of such networks, and software to use that list to block traffic from those networks.
At no point is the content of the blocked traffic an issue. Yes, this means that their list blocks "innocent websites"; they're not blocking innocent or guilty websites, they're blocking the network. There is no deception here. They didn't claim to provide a list of spamware websites and then add Peacefire; they claimed to provide a list of networks that are friendly to spammers and added Media3, and Media3 is most definitely friendly to spammers.
Is it a good tactic? Should people choose to subscribe to RBL? Maybe, maybe not.
A.xxx TLD could be very dangerous for civil rights. How long do you think it would be before politicians would start pressing for laws requiring any "indecent" content to be in.xxx, or requiring ISPs to block.xxx unless they could prove that no kids were suscribed to their service?
"Privacy and First Amendment concerns may be raised by the clear identification of a 'red
light district' and the stigma involved in being found there, and the concern about a 'slippery slope' toward mandatory location in the gTLD."
It goes on to conclude:
The evaluation team concluded that at this early "proof of concept" stage with a limited number of new TLDs contemplated, other proposed TLDs without the controversy of an adult TLD would better serve the
goals of this initial introduction of new TLDs. If an adult TLD is to be introduced, moreover, it would be
beneficial to have a diversity of proposals, with a diversity of possible approaches to the various
problems, from which to choose.
While there are many legitimate gripes with ICANN, I think they got this one right.
Incidentally, wouldn't this discussion have been a lot more useful if Timothy had taken the two minutes necessary to find and include a link to the ICANN report, or maybe even the ten minutes necessary to read the relevant section and add a couple of comments?
This isn't a technical problem, it's a human problem. Students can destroy or lose any removable media; you don't hear about the lost floppies, because they don't come to you about it, but it's as much of a problem. And while they can't screw up a fileserver, and thus network storage is a better solution than removable media, they can still accidentally overwrite or delete stuff.
The only answer is better education. It's not perfect; there's only so much you can do to protect users from themselves; but it'll reduce the damage, and, well, education ought to be worth something in a university setting.:-)
When I worked in a university computer lab, I took some of the long-abandoned or hopelessly corrupted floppies that were lying in the drawers, broke and cut and folded and burned them, and made posters using them. "THIS WAS SOMEONE'S SENIOR THESIS. (insert mutilated disk) MAKE BACKUPS." I put them up all over the lab. They certainly drew attention, and I think they may have driven the message (you do not want to lose your work to unreliable media) into people's heads.
Re:Small display == good power consumption stats?
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Crusoe: new benchmarks
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· Score: 2
Somehow, testing this processor in a system with a tiny display doesn't seem like a very good way to compare it to a realistic real world notebook.
Some of us real realistic people in the realistic real world carry our real laptops to real places, and prefer not to lug around eight-pound monsters.:-)
Don't get me wrong, I love my dual-monitor 3200x1200 setup at home, but 500K pixels is easily enough to get useful work done. (Besides, standard laptops aren't much better at 1024x768. Only 50% more pixels.)
There is a large and growing market for subnotebooks, and it's obvious that's the part of the laptop market where a power-frugal processor would be most valuable. Most of the other Crusoe-powered laptops coming out have similar displays (Loox is 1024x480, TP240 is 800x600). It makes perfect sense to evaluate the processor in the context of the systems in which it'll actually be used, rather than big desktop-replacement laptops where nobody cares about power consumption...
That said, I am a bit disappointed to see this kind of subjective judgement used when deciding what to host or not. I'd rather they said "Damn, we don't want to get sued over this." Then we could call them paranoid and get on with our lives.:)
Get on with your life.:)
I swear, does anyone actually read the linked text before posting? Quote from one of the letters on Joey Smith's page, sent after the initial form letter and reply:
As you know, this is a hot legal issue right now. We're sorta being sued by enough people right now, I guess we'd like to keep out of court for a while, if that's okay....you'll need to fight the first amendment fight on your own on this issue, if that's okay.
Yes, there are strong ties between the hacker mindset and mysticism or alternative religions. Note that I said "hacker", not "programmer", and that's where the apparent decline comes from; there are a lot more non-hackers working with computers these days.
Hackers are highly intelligent and independent. If they're curious about something, they will investigate it themselves. In the case of spirituality and religion, this can lead to a "shop around" approach. There's a lot of weird stuff in this particular store, and hackers tend to like weird stuff...
Hackers tend to be strongly anti-authoritarian. For some, this can cause discontent with monotheistic faiths; or, at least, a discontent with how such faiths are often presented.
Contact with computers can lead to animism, a belief that objects can have spirits or lives of their own. It can be difficult to look at, say, a server hosting a MUD, with a virtual world and a couple hundred people inside, and not think of it as at least somewhat alive.
Coding is a magical activity. You gather your thoughts, wave your hands, and your will is made real. You are working with "clouds of pure thought-stuff", to quote Fred Brooks (a Christian). Approaching other problems with similar rituals is, for some, a natural extension.
Neo-paganism is, in its better forms, creative. "We do as the ancients did -- we make it up as we go along." Creativity and adaptability are hacker values.
Neo-pagans tend to be interesting, weird, and very often (as mentiond in the article) involved with computers. Groups of such people may appeal to hackers who are interested in group worship, ritual, or ceremony.
OTOH, there are also plenty of brilliant, interesting, weird Christian hackers out there. Just look at Larry Wall.:-)
I used to work as a sysadmin for a university library, and we wondered about this issue for the public web access terminals we were setting up.
The librarians were a lot less concerned than we were. They told us to just leave the access completely open, and if it became a problem, we'd address the problem at that time. We were a little surprised, but were happy to not deal with the technical and ethical issues.
The librarians were right. The machines were in well-trafficked areas, usually with reference librarians nearby, and we received no reports of any problems. I'm sure some people went and viewed porn on them a few times, but if so, then the simple shoulder-tap by a librarian sufficed to handle it.
The simple fact is that most people would rather view porn privately, and porn mags are cheaper and higher-quality than paying for online access to view porn in a public place, and people who are determined to make a scene have far better ways to do so than by using an public-access terminal.
You don't bar people from bringing in magazines just because someone could bring in a hardcore mag and show it to someone's nine-year-old, do you? No; you don't expect them to do that, and if you do, you tell them to buzz off. Same goes here.
Just put the terminals out there. Avoid dark corners, try to have them facing a staff person, but don't be too paranoid about it. Post the usage policies, and specifically point them out to new users, so they have no excuse for violating them. Address problems as they arise, but not sooner.
The one thing you might want to do is make sure that the browser restarts after 5-10 minutes of idle time. The main reason for this is to avoid user confusion -- if an inexperienced user walks up to a web browser and it's showing the ESPN homepage, for instance, they will often get the impression that all the terminal can do is browse ESPN's site. (Besides, you want to have a branded homepage with good links, and you want the user to see your page and your links, not ESPN's.) But it also has the side effect of ensuring that if someone has been browsing unsuitable sites, the next user won't see them on the screen and complain.
I've been looking at RAID setups over the last few days. I'm just yer average geek who doesn't have unlimited funds, but who likes speed, and really really wants to not lose data.
What I'm thinking of getting is 4x28GB 7200RPM IDE drives (4x$199), putting most of the first three drives into a software RAID 5 using a 2.2 kernel and the 0.90 md patches, and using the fourth disk as combination hot-spare, scratch space, and incremental backups for my home directory and other parts of the filesystem which a) change frequently and b) I want old revisions available in case I trash something important.
I have four IDE channels on my motherboard, so I can put each disk on a separate channel, and make the seldom-used CDROM and CDR drives slave drives. So contention between disks shouldn't be a problem.
I'm not sure about the backups. This still leaves me vulnerable to accidentally blowing away large quantities of un-backed-up data, but it's stuff I don't change much, and might have copies of on CDR. (Like the MP3 collection.) And I'm not sure what the alternative is.
Tape drives that have anywhere-near-enough native capacity seem ridiculously expensive. RAID with more devices and SCSI disks is also too damn expensive - 100GB of SCSI disk is like $2500, way out of my budget.
Setting up two drives in a RAID 0 and periodically copying the same data to another two drives is another possibility, and protects me against an "oops" that I notice immediately, but doesn't do anything about a bad mistake that I notice the next day, and ensures that I'll lose my day's work if one of the primary drives dies.
Thoughts? I've never set up something like this, and could use all the advice I could get.
Another question: What do people think of hard drive coolers, like the CoolerMaster? (Ars Technica review) Useful addition to preserve drive life, or a waste of money and bays?
Shortly after IE was released for Solaris, several people in my department tried it out. We were sick of Netscape crashes and bloat and speed problems, we liked a couple of features IE had, we wanted to be able to test sites in multiple browsers.
It was a complete joke. The process took about 30MB, largely non-shared, and was slow as hell. (Netscape at the time was well under 10MB, as was IE natively on Win32.) We abandoned it as unusable; as far as we could tell, its only purpose was to allow MS to say "IE runs on all platforms, even Unix!". (Unix == Solaris in marketroid-speak.)
Perhaps someone who has used IE under Unix more recently could comment on size and speed. If it's anything like it was back then, don't expect any useful applications to come out of this announcement.
Personally, I use LAME because it's fastest and not noticably worse (perhaps better) than the alternatives I've seen.
My preferred ripping/encoding frontend is Paloma. It does CDDB lookup, calls cdparanoia and an encoder, and stores your MP3s in a relational database. I really like the ability to generate playlists based on arbitrary queries of the database. It's very slick.
Paloma also supports division of the files into "buckets" of a fixed size. Say, 650MB. Useful if you want to burn your collection onto multiple CDRs, either for backup or to carry around with a laptop.
I only have about 10GB of MP3s so far, but I just bought a 27GB drive to store most of the rest of my collection, and I expect I'll fill it soon.
One suggestion for speeding the process of converting your collection, if you have several hundred CDs: Buy another CDROM drive! It only costs $30, and it speeds things up by a lot.
Maybe buy GCC from Cygnus? I have heard that the commertial version that they sell (GNUPro and CodeFusion) has new IA32 backend already installed. According to the ad for the CodeFusion on the Cygnus site, it has 80% speed increase over "net egcs" for Pentium II for specific benchmarks
Hmmm. That might be worth checking out. I wish they had an evaluation version; as Mindcraft recently reminded us, benchmarks can be used to prove anything. Also, I would like to know whether GNUPro contains the same compiler technology as CodeFusion, since I couldn't care less about their IDE.
I assume that purchasers of CodeFusion and GNUPro aren't free to redistribute source. Given that part of their product is a derivative of gcc/egcs, how do they manage that without violating GPL?
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Fortunately, Emacs comes bundled with an excellent text editing capabilities, even though they're not enabled by default. M-x viper-mode is your friend. (Set it on the "wizard" user level when it asks.) No need to lose the massive power of emacs to get efficient vi-style text editing.
I'm going to post a detailed review later, it'll be up at http://pobox.com/~jaffray/phatnoise.html. In the meantime, I posted this short review to rec.audio.car, and it would seem appropriate here as well:
I've had my PhatNoise system for about a month. The physical design is very slick, and so is the software. It installed with no difficulty, just like a normal CD changer. The sound quality seems excellent to me. I'll admit that I'm not a golden ear, and my car system, while decent, isn't audiophile quality; but in general listening, and in a few short non-blind A/B tests, I can't distinguish quality of playback of my MP3s (encoded at 192kbps) from the PhatNoise from playback of CDs in the head unit.
In usage, it behaves exactly like a really big CD changer, up to 99 discs. In a way, that's good - your head unit controls are nicely refined to work with such a changer. On the other hand, if you're trying to find a specific album and song, you really want to have a tree-structured storage, with folders containing subfolders of songs. On the third hand, it could be argued that such an interface would be unsafe to use while driving, between the cognitive load and the need to look at the LCD between button presses.
Some aspects are still a bit beta-ish. I had problems with occasional skips; very infrequent, very minimal compared to CD skips, but still, MP3s shouldn't do that. They went away when I upgraded to the most recent firmware release a week ago. The PhatMan client software isn't fast enough when handling huge collections (100GB+), even after speed improvements in recent versions, and I've made it crash a few times. The firmware update process isn't as smooth as it should be.
The system is very hackable. I swapped out the PhatCart's 6GB hard drive for a 12GB drive I had lying around, which was easy, and I expect a larger drive would be just as simple. (20GB 2.5" drives are $110 these days.) The PhatBox itself is an ARM Linux system, the system files on the PhatCart are unencrypted and in fairly obvious formats, and the PhatDock is just a standard IDE-USB bridge. I've already written a simple client which uploads albums to the PhatCart from Linux, so I don't need to use PhatMan in Windows. Overall, the combination of excellent production values and relatively open internals is refreshing. Hopefully they can be persuaded to open the source to the PhatBox's main player daemon as well...
Compared to the competition: The Rio Car (AKA empeg) is way cooler, without a doubt, since it has its own display and controls and can use them more flexibly. Unfortunately it's much more expensive, and it must be installed in-dash and does not have a detachable face. For me, carrying around a DIN-sized unit and inserting/removing it for every car trip is unacceptable. On the other end of the price range, SSI makes a unit (the Neo 35) that's somewhat cheaper, but they seem to be cutting corners (like using 3.5" drives which are not intended for mobile use), the system doesn't seem nearly as polished in general, and there are some reports from unhappy customers out there.
Probably the most significant competition is from the various CDR-based MP3 head units. Carrying around a handful of CDRs, each containing a dozen albums, is a reasonable and cheaper alternative to hard-drive units for many users. highwaymp3.com reviews such units, which have gotten a lot better recently. Do your research carefully before buying one, though. They generally don't have upgradeable firmware, meaning that any bugs or missing capabilities will never be fixed. They also won't change in response to emerging standards, so the useful lifetime may be short. For example, imagine if you'd bought a MP3 player several years ago that didn't support VBR, or that glitched when playing back tracks with id3v2 tags. You'd probably want to replace it by now.
On the whole, I'm very glad I bought the PhatNoise. It's cool, it's useful, I've really enjoyed having it in my car, and for $600 (plus another $100 or $200 to bump up the capacity to 20-30GB), it's not all that expensive for what it offers. I never have to change discs or plug in or unplug anything, I just have hundreds of hours of music available to me, all the time. I'd definitely recommend it to gadget fiends in its current state, and when they ship the final release with up-to-date firmware and options for more capacity, I'd have no reservations about recommending it even to non-techies who just happen to want hundreds of hours of music on tap in their car.
Hmmm. I don't think I'd have trouble moving with my AnthroCart, but I have a 36" wide unit that's big mostly in the vertical direction, so it comes apart into more pieces.
As for the tools, maybe they've changed what they ship. They shipped an allen screwdriver and a rubber mallet with mine, and they were both durable, good quality, not at all single-use, not the hexagonal twig of a "screwdriver" that's come with other RTA furniture I bought in the past.
Why is receiving DirecTV any different, legally, than tuning in a normal radio or TV? In both cases you're listening in to broadcasts and decoding the signal for display.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's illegal, but I'm curious what law covers it.
(Usual gripe about the absurd term "piracy" deleted for brevity.)
I am an EFF member. However, this is not the EFF's protest, and it will go on. With or without them.
The vast majority of participants on the free-sklyarov list, including the people running boycottadobe.com and the organizers of several of the protests, are determined that there will be protests on Monday regardless of this latest PR action by Adobe.
We have no evidence that Adobe is willing to do anything except share a cup of coffee and say "sorry, nothing we can do". The fact that they're trying to make EFF discourage protests as a precondition for talks, and making no commitments in advance, does not speak well for their good intentions. The EFF is not necessarily making a mistake by pulling out in order to get them at the table, but there is no reason for the rest of us to stay quiet.
The Gateway you quote has the same issues, and is almost a full inch thicker than the iBook.
Ten years ago, virtually no one had heard of ergonomics. Meanwhile, the number of people using computers all day at work, and often all night at home (with the rise of PCs and then the Internet), skyrockets.
... many doctors are uneducated and useless on RSI issues, many employers want employees to see company-recommended doctors who will dismiss the employee's symptoms so they won't be liable for disability claims or workplace accomodations, some doctors will try to force you to have inappropriate (but profitable) surgery or else accuse you of faking it, etc. The health care system is not necessarily an injured patient's friend.)
... if you tell me that all that was hysteria, you will soon have many decidedly nonpsychosomatic injuries to deal with.
This corresponds with a skyrocketing number of RSI cases a few years later.
Now, any self-respecting workplace gives some attention to ergonomic issues, often gives workplace training with education on the importance of taking breaks, setting up workstations appropriately, etc, and even relatively uninformed computer users are aware of the dangers and warning signs.
And gosh, whaddaya know, the number of RSI cases might be going down. (I say "might" because I see no numbers quoted in that article, and don't trust their quoted sources worth a damn.)
There is plenty of solid research backing up the validity of repetitive-strain-induced tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome. The fact that it's difficult to externally verify any given case, and might attract malingerers, does not refute this.
(Do not mistake reluctance to see a given doctor with evidence that the person is malingering
And yes, if you tell me to my face that the six months I spent in constant pain and unable to work or type, and the months I spent in physical therapy to fix the postural problems which were reducing bloodflow to my arms and increasing my proneness to injury, and the years of stretching and strengthening exercises to get my arms back to something close to healthy condition modulo occasional recurring pain and inability to resume some of my previous hobbies
I have a Silencer power supply from PC Power and Cooling. I was quite disappointed, it might be slightly more quiet than your average PS, but it's still pretty damn loud. It's enough to bother me at night from the next room, and I live in the middle of a city, it's not like I have an unusually low level of ambient noise.
:-P
Unfortunately a lot of the people reviewing supposedly silent components are PC hardware freaks who are judging them by the standards of roaring seven-fan cyclone setups intended for overclocked gamer rigs, rather than by any sane standards.
>> isn't a comment in Ruby; it uses # as a comment symbol. The lines like "2+2 >> 4" you saw in the tutorial were annotations by the tutorial authors, saying "that expression evaluates to this".
Gentle readers of Slashdot, do not let yourselves be deceived by the ravings of these pathological liars in LCS, the rotting remains of a once-great department, the dregs left behind when the real talent left to form Akamai. Read the full story and decide for yourself.
First Deja shifted from Usenet towards their lame shopping thing. Then they changed the Usenet searching interface to make it far less usable and more ad-heavy. Then they started inserting ad links into posts. Then they made all posts before ... June 2000, was it? ... "temporarily inaccessible" for many months, negating much of the value of the archive. And then they tanked; had nothing been done, they would have taken their entire archive with them.
In the middle of this, Google, the company with the absolute best search engine on the net and the most usable web site with the least ads and the best friendliness to geeks like us of any site like them, steps in and takes over the archive and promises development work to make ALL the data more available and more usefully searchable than ever.
This is GREAT! As a long-time Deja user, this makes me very happy and excited. Yes, it sucks that the archive is inaccessible for a few weeks, but that's not Google's fault. Deja shut down the servers, not Google - why on earth would Google ask them to? - and Google's providing some minimal functionality in the meantime. It beats the hell out of losing the information entirely.
Anyway, personally I'd choose some interruption of service with Google maintaining it afterwards, as compared to the status quo with Deja even if it were viable (which it wasn't). Having all the posts from 1995-1999 inaccessible was NOT an acceptable situation from my standpoint as a user.
I'm delighted that Google has done this. Mad props to the Googlistas responsible.
It's a shame that Breathed never grasped just how damn good he really was. I was entertained, and reassured, and inspired by Bloom County while I was growing up. So were my friends. So were countless others. It was a very positive thing. But I don't think he ever really believed that.
Children's books? With a few notable exceptions, I've found most of them forgettable. But I'll never forget Bloom County.
Let's look at what MAPS RBL is "designed to" do. http://mail-abuse.org/rbl/candidacy.html lists criteria for being in the RBL.
- spam origination - simple enough
- spam relaying - open mail relays
- spam support services
The last one breaks down into:- providing any service which uses internet resources to support spamming: webpages or email or DNS or credit card handling for spam-promoted sites, or anything-to-email gateways
- providing software or services for distributing spam, or providing connectivity to people who do
- providing lists of harvested email addresses, or software or services to create such lists
So what MAPS RBL is designed to do is keep a list of hosts and networks that spam, or of hosts and networks that aid spammers. They are being added on the basis of their actions. What they're saying is irrelevant. This is why they're content-neutral.You are objecting to their inclusion of spamware as something which aids spammers and should be blocked. This gets into two fairly tricky points. First, if something is both speech and action (the "fire in a crowded theater" example), where do you draw the line between allowing free speech and preventing harmful actions? Second, to what extent is software speech, and to what extent is it a tool?
We probably agree that blocking spam is acceptable, despite the weak argument that saying the same thing over and over is speech that should be protected. And we agree that a list of techniques that spammers use would be speech that should not be blocked. You could claim that spamware is like the list of techniques. MAPS might claim that selling someone a software package whose sole purpose is to spam is no different from taking their money and doing the spamming yourself. You both have decent arguments.
I do think, however, that even if you're convinced that there's a free-speech right to distribute spamware, labelling RBL as "censorware" based on a fraction of a fraction of the list violating this very debateable "right" is massive overkill.
No, not at all. Look at Media3. They've found a network they don't like, because it supports spamming in multiple ways. It hosts sites which are promoted by spam, and it hosts spamware vendors. They could change their AUP to prohibit this, but refuse to do so. And so they're blackholing the network.This is not an overzealous or overbroad block; they are blocking exactly the network that they wanted to. They state in the docs that this approach can lead to blocking non-spam traffic, and warn you to use a different list; RSS for example; if you have a problem with this.
If you wanted to highlight the spamware free-speech argument, you could have chosen a better example. Spamware is not the only reason why Media3 is on the RBL, and there is no way to claim that hosting spam-promoted sites is anything but a content-neutral blocking policy.
Let's check the dictionary here.
censor: an official who examines material (as in publications or films) for offensive matter
Are SurfWatch, CyberPatrol, etc doing this? Yes. They spider the web looking for offensive material, and sell software that blocks it. Their software is a censor. Thus the term "censorware". (The fact that they make fraudulent claims for their software is incidental here.)
Is MAPS doing this? No. They are completely content-neutral. They don't examine anything for offensive material. They evaluate submissions of networks that spam, that provide spam support services, or that maintain open relays. They provide a list of such networks, and software to use that list to block traffic from those networks.
At no point is the content of the blocked traffic an issue. Yes, this means that their list blocks "innocent websites"; they're not blocking innocent or guilty websites, they're blocking the network. There is no deception here. They didn't claim to provide a list of spamware websites and then add Peacefire; they claimed to provide a list of networks that are friendly to spammers and added Media3, and Media3 is most definitely friendly to spammers.
Is it a good tactic? Should people choose to subscribe to RBL? Maybe, maybe not.
But don't call it censorware. It's not.
To quote the ICANN report, which is in turn quoting the COPA commission:
It goes on to conclude: While there are many legitimate gripes with ICANN, I think they got this one right.Incidentally, wouldn't this discussion have been a lot more useful if Timothy had taken the two minutes necessary to find and include a link to the ICANN report, or maybe even the ten minutes necessary to read the relevant section and add a couple of comments?
This isn't a technical problem, it's a human problem. Students can destroy or lose any removable media; you don't hear about the lost floppies, because they don't come to you about it, but it's as much of a problem. And while they can't screw up a fileserver, and thus network storage is a better solution than removable media, they can still accidentally overwrite or delete stuff.
:-)
The only answer is better education. It's not perfect; there's only so much you can do to protect users from themselves; but it'll reduce the damage, and, well, education ought to be worth something in a university setting.
When I worked in a university computer lab, I took some of the long-abandoned or hopelessly corrupted floppies that were lying in the drawers, broke and cut and folded and burned them, and made posters using them. "THIS WAS SOMEONE'S SENIOR THESIS. (insert mutilated disk) MAKE BACKUPS." I put them up all over the lab. They certainly drew attention, and I think they may have driven the message (you do not want to lose your work to unreliable media) into people's heads.
Don't get me wrong, I love my dual-monitor 3200x1200 setup at home, but 500K pixels is easily enough to get useful work done. (Besides, standard laptops aren't much better at 1024x768. Only 50% more pixels.)
There is a large and growing market for subnotebooks, and it's obvious that's the part of the laptop market where a power-frugal processor would be most valuable. Most of the other Crusoe-powered laptops coming out have similar displays (Loox is 1024x480, TP240 is 800x600). It makes perfect sense to evaluate the processor in the context of the systems in which it'll actually be used, rather than big desktop-replacement laptops where nobody cares about power consumption...
Alan
I swear, does anyone actually read the linked text before posting? Quote from one of the letters on Joey Smith's page, sent after the initial form letter and reply:
- Hackers are highly intelligent and independent. If they're curious about something, they will investigate it themselves. In the case of spirituality and religion, this can lead to a "shop around" approach. There's a lot of weird stuff in this particular store, and hackers tend to like weird stuff...
- Hackers tend to be strongly anti-authoritarian. For some, this can cause discontent with monotheistic faiths; or, at least, a discontent with how such faiths are often presented.
- Contact with computers can lead to animism, a belief that objects can have spirits or lives of their own. It can be difficult to look at, say, a server hosting a MUD, with a virtual world and a couple hundred people inside, and not think of it as at least somewhat alive.
- Coding is a magical activity. You gather your thoughts, wave your hands, and your will is made real. You are working with "clouds of pure thought-stuff", to quote Fred Brooks (a Christian). Approaching other problems with similar rituals is, for some, a natural extension.
- Neo-paganism is, in its better forms, creative. "We do as the ancients did -- we make it up as we go along." Creativity and adaptability are hacker values.
- Neo-pagans tend to be interesting, weird, and very often (as mentiond in the article) involved with computers. Groups of such people may appeal to hackers who are interested in group worship, ritual, or ceremony.
OTOH, there are also plenty of brilliant, interesting, weird Christian hackers out there. Just look at Larry Wall.I used to work as a sysadmin for a university library, and we wondered about this issue for the public web access terminals we were setting up.
The librarians were a lot less concerned than we were. They told us to just leave the access completely open, and if it became a problem, we'd address the problem at that time. We were a little surprised, but were happy to not deal with the technical and ethical issues.
The librarians were right. The machines were in well-trafficked areas, usually with reference librarians nearby, and we received no reports of any problems. I'm sure some people went and viewed porn on them a few times, but if so, then the simple shoulder-tap by a librarian sufficed to handle it.
The simple fact is that most people would rather view porn privately, and porn mags are cheaper and higher-quality than paying for online access to view porn in a public place, and people who are determined to make a scene have far better ways to do so than by using an public-access terminal.
You don't bar people from bringing in magazines just because someone could bring in a hardcore mag and show it to someone's nine-year-old, do you? No; you don't expect them to do that, and if you do, you tell them to buzz off. Same goes here.
Just put the terminals out there. Avoid dark corners, try to have them facing a staff person, but don't be too paranoid about it. Post the usage policies, and specifically point them out to new users, so they have no excuse for violating them. Address problems as they arise, but not sooner.
The one thing you might want to do is make sure that the browser restarts after 5-10 minutes of idle time. The main reason for this is to avoid user confusion -- if an inexperienced user walks up to a web browser and it's showing the ESPN homepage, for instance, they will often get the impression that all the terminal can do is browse ESPN's site. (Besides, you want to have a branded homepage with good links, and you want the user to see your page and your links, not ESPN's.) But it also has the side effect of ensuring that if someone has been browsing unsuitable sites, the next user won't see them on the screen and complain.
Alan
I've been looking at RAID setups over the last few days. I'm just yer average geek who doesn't have unlimited funds, but who likes speed, and really really wants to not lose data.
What I'm thinking of getting is 4x28GB 7200RPM IDE drives (4x$199), putting most of the first three drives into a software RAID 5 using a 2.2 kernel and the 0.90 md patches, and using the fourth disk as combination hot-spare, scratch space, and incremental backups for my home directory and other parts of the filesystem which a) change frequently and b) I want old revisions available in case I trash something important.
I have four IDE channels on my motherboard, so I can put each disk on a separate channel, and make the seldom-used CDROM and CDR drives slave drives. So contention between disks shouldn't be a problem.
I'm not sure about the backups. This still leaves me vulnerable to accidentally blowing away large quantities of un-backed-up data, but it's stuff I don't change much, and might have copies of on CDR. (Like the MP3 collection.) And I'm not sure what the alternative is.
Tape drives that have anywhere-near-enough native capacity seem ridiculously expensive. RAID with more devices and SCSI disks is also too damn expensive - 100GB of SCSI disk is like $2500, way out of my budget.
Setting up two drives in a RAID 0 and periodically copying the same data to another two drives is another possibility, and protects me against an "oops" that I notice immediately, but doesn't do anything about a bad mistake that I notice the next day, and ensures that I'll lose my day's work if one of the primary drives dies.
Thoughts? I've never set up something like this, and could use all the advice I could get.
Another question: What do people think of hard drive coolers, like the CoolerMaster? ( Ars Technica review) Useful addition to preserve drive life, or a waste of money and bays?
Thanks,
Alan
Shortly after IE was released for Solaris, several people in my department tried it out. We were sick of Netscape crashes and bloat and speed problems, we liked a couple of features IE had, we wanted to be able to test sites in multiple browsers.
It was a complete joke. The process took about 30MB, largely non-shared, and was slow as hell. (Netscape at the time was well under 10MB, as was IE natively on Win32.) We abandoned it as unusable; as far as we could tell, its only purpose was to allow MS to say "IE runs on all platforms, even Unix!". (Unix == Solaris in marketroid-speak.)
Perhaps someone who has used IE under Unix more recently could comment on size and speed. If it's anything like it was back then, don't expect any useful applications to come out of this announcement.
Alan
Personally, I use LAME because it's fastest and not noticably worse (perhaps better) than the alternatives I've seen.
My preferred ripping/encoding frontend is Paloma. It does CDDB lookup, calls cdparanoia and an encoder, and stores your MP3s in a relational database. I really like the ability to generate playlists based on arbitrary queries of the database. It's very slick.
Paloma also supports division of the files into "buckets" of a fixed size. Say, 650MB. Useful if you want to burn your collection onto multiple CDRs, either for backup or to carry around with a laptop.
I only have about 10GB of MP3s so far, but I just bought a 27GB drive to store most of the rest of my collection, and I expect I'll fill it soon.
One suggestion for speeding the process of converting your collection, if you have several hundred CDs: Buy another CDROM drive! It only costs $30, and it speeds things up by a lot.
Hmmm. That might be worth checking out. I wish they had an evaluation version; as Mindcraft recently reminded us, benchmarks can be used to prove anything. Also, I would like to know whether GNUPro contains the same compiler technology as CodeFusion, since I couldn't care less about their IDE.
I assume that purchasers of CodeFusion and GNUPro aren't free to redistribute source. Given that part of their product is a derivative of gcc/egcs, how do they manage that without violating GPL?