You should get HBO On Demand. Movies and -- better -- original series shows any time you want to see them. Sopranos, Rome, Deadwood, Extras, Carnivale, Curb Your Enthusiasm... once you get hooked on these shows you might never go back to network TV with all of its editing and commercials. Forget Netflix.
Spoken like a true Mac cultist. Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines and, nowadays, are putting GNU/Linux and other free software OSes on them. In fact, I've met tech journalists that hate Apple and all that they stand for. Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe. And, as a computer hardware expert, I will attest to the fact that Macintosh computers are no better engineered or manufactured than Dell systems, and in fact I would actually put them a cut below Dell because of the problems their overstyled chassis designs cause. You have it completely backwards.
I am a technology writer, and I know a lot of technology writers. Most use Linux or Windows because that's their beat and it's hard to write about a platform that you don't use. But unless they write for an Apple-centric pub, tech journalists do not usually use Macs, especially the most tech-savvy of the lot.
I'd like to, but Gentoo only has 2.2.10, FreeBSD had 2.0 last I checked (probably newer now, but I doubt it's newer than 2.2.x). On my laptop I have SUSE 10, and the latest version in the package repo is 2.2.9
Word processors and text editors are to me what operating systems are to sysadmins: I need something reliable. I love AbiWord's font rendering and I'd practically kill for even a mostly decent grammar checker, but it has never been very stable on my computers. Maybe 2.4 is totally different, but I won't know until it hits Portage or Ports.
AbiWord would be awesome -- moreso now that it has a grammar checker -- if it didn't crash almost every time I try to open or save a document, and sometimes just because it feels like crashing randomly. Then there's the fact that no distro has the latest AbiWord build in its package tree.
And to those who don't think a grammar checker is necessary: you don't do much writing, do you? Grammar checkers will not -- and never claimed to -- make anyone into a world-class writer. What they WILL do is catch typos that get by the spell checker. So for all those times that you type "on" instead of "one" or "to" instead of "too," the grammar checker will catch them. That is why it is valuable.
That brings up a good point. Reading reviews and seeing a preview, Serenity looks like it should be called "The Adventures of Han Solo." Is this not just a Han Solo-like character in a Millennium Falcon-like ship doing what Han Solo did (smuggling), and avoiding the organized oppressive bad guys with bigger ships?
Yeah, but how do you know that WebSideStory's numbers aren't taken from sites that attract mostly Windows-only users? For all we know, some of the sites that they monitor could exclude all non-IE browsers.
Where there's smoke, there's mirrors. To believe any numbers, I need to know all the details of the data collection, including and especially demographics, site requirements, and the target readership of the monitored sites.
From what I see from WebSideStory's website, they are online marketers. They appear to sell software that monitors traffic. So if you are not a WebSideStory customer, your data is not counted. This seems to be the software they got the data from, and there is no mention of what web servers are supported. What if it only runs on IIS? That would exclude a HUGE number of Mozilla-based browsers, because Apache sites wouldn't be able to report anything.
I doubt these numbers. The Jem Report gets about 3k visitors per day, and no more than 25% of them are using a version of IE. Mozilla-based browsers are almost twice that number.
Looking at two other sites I have that have much less traffic, IE's numbers are around 20% or less. Two months ago it was the opposite -- IE was around 50% of TJR's traffic, and certainly more than 20% on the other sites. Something big happened in the past two or three months that drastically changed browser numbers. I think WebSideStory's data is old or just plain inaccurate.
The way to overcome this, of course, is to have a day when everyone agrees to wear backpacks to work. When all 25k rush hour commuters are carrying something, the searches will eventually stop.
Undoubtedly someone here will bitch about how The GIMP has none of the important features that Photoshop has. So in an attempt to get some useful information out of such rants, please be specific as to what Photoshop can do that The GIMP cannot. Name individual features and capabilities.
Don't knock Walt Disney. The man was a genius, and the pioneer of modern animated films. The corporate Disney that we know today should not diminish the work of one of the 20th century's greatest imaginative minds.
Opterons were not designed to go above 8 parallel CPUs. SPARC/POWER/IA64 systems, two of which are RISC and one of which is VLIW, were designed for massively parallel computing. That they are used in lower-end 1 and 2-CPU systems doesn't diminish the fact that they can do much more.
When I typed the original message I forgot about Itanium2, so being RISC is not a prerequisite for massively parallel systems. All of the above are superscalar designs.
AMD64 may outperform SPARC at a lower price when you're talking about a 4-CPU system, but how many 128-CPU Opteron servers do you see? Only POWER and UltraSPARC can do that as far as I know. Maybe low-end SPARC workstations will die out, but high-end servers will always need serious superscalar RISC processors.
If a form letter asking for a telephone screening constitutes a job offer for Eric Raymond, I wonder if porn spam counts as a proposition for sex for him too.
And each Nigerian scammer is an offer for a multimillion-dollar business deal, I suppose?
As it is, the cold cathode fluorescent lamp in LCDs doesn't last all that long. 50k-100k hours before it loses 50% of its brightness. Turning it on and off a lot does not lengthen its life. As with all electronic or electromechanical devices, the most amount of thermal stress you can put on them under standard conditions is to turn them on and off.
So what are we looking at with these new screens? Maybe half the already limited brightness half-life? CCFL tubes are not generally replaceable, even by technicians, and when the CCFL dies, you may as well throw the LCD in the garbage, because you'll never see it again.
Maybe Philips will make a user-replaceable CCFL module that you can just slip in and out?
That's some seriously half-assed Elizabethan English. Try this instead:
He did dare to blaspheme. He hath the deride of the holy OS on/. and, lo, he shall feel the wrath of yonder moderators this day. -1 troll, ye shall be known to him as destruction to Sodom and Gomorrah!
Those are some odd selections taken out of context from the articles. Why don't you actually read them? It's hard to accept a lot of his advice at first, but then you put it into practice and find out for yourself that it works.
Regarding the manipulation thing, that's silly. In fact, Doc even wrote a column about that once. I'm not going to chase down a link for you -- use Google or the AskMen.com site search function.
I don't know Doc Love or any of the staff of AskMen.com -- I just think it's an outstanding online men's magazine with good advice. In fact I'd put it up against any dead tree men's mag in terms of content.
Women want men who are aloof and unavailable, yet still social and personable. It may seem like a paradox, but it's not. It's best summed up by saying, "Look like you're interesting but never interested."
Women do like smart men very much. The "geek effect" is when smart men do stupid social things like acting too interested in a woman or acting like an idiot around her. Just walk up to her, talk to her, make her laugh, ask for her phone number, and if she gives it to you, wait at least a week to call her. Don't make a date on a weekend, make it on a weeknight. If she is otherwise taken, ask if she has a friend that she'd like to set up on a blind date. Never walk away embarrassed or disappointed -- that's weak and women don't like it.
Women don't want what is bad for them, they want what they think they can't have. It makes them think that they might not be good enough for you, and if you play your cards right in dating and socializing, she will be happy to be with a smart, intelligent man who has piqued her interest . She'll feel like she's doing better than she should be.
Go read Doc Love's column on AskMen.com. It's damn good advice, and it works.
No, that's not the only reason. On my 64-bit Opteron workstation with 64-bit Gentoo, I have to compile every browser plugin for 32-bit, or download precompiled 32-bit binaries for them. That's the PDF reader, Java, Flash, MPlayer, and RealPlayer. Three of those are 32-bit only anyway. So in order to view most Web media (aside from graphics), I have to have several workarounds for programs that are not 64-bit clean or have 64-bit binaries available. Performance doesn't matter as much as the integrity of the software stack and the ease with which it is maintained and updated. It's not hard to get a 32-bit binary of Firefox from Portage, but MPlayer and Java won't work with it because they're compiled for 64-bit. SUSE and Mandrake for AMD64 have everything compiled for 64-bit except OpenOffice.org -- so the situation is even worse there because everything is installed as a precompiled binary. The solution that I have on Gentoo now is to use 64-bit Mozilla and 32-bit Firefox, and switch between the two according to what I need to see on a Web site.
The way you're suggesting I do this is hacky and hard to maintain. And there's no good reason why there should not be 64-bit plugins for Acrobat, Flash, and RealPlayer -- at least, from a user standpoint.
Yes, but it's still 32-bit software on your PPC machine. And if you want a Flash Player for Linux on that machine, you're out of luck. That's even mentioned in TFA. In essence you've completely missed the point, possibly intentionally just so you can nitpick. I don't understand why people do this; perhaps you can explain it to me.
GPLFlash, any way you put it, is a good thing for people who want to run 64-bit operating systems... and for people concerned with software freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
You should get HBO On Demand. Movies and -- better -- original series shows any time you want to see them. Sopranos, Rome, Deadwood, Extras, Carnivale, Curb Your Enthusiasm... once you get hooked on these shows you might never go back to network TV with all of its editing and commercials. Forget Netflix.
-Jem
Spoken like a true Mac cultist. Those who know a lot about technology build their own machines and, nowadays, are putting GNU/Linux and other free software OSes on them. In fact, I've met tech journalists that hate Apple and all that they stand for. Apple computers have never been geared toward the tech savvy; they have always been marketed to the artistic technophobe. And, as a computer hardware expert, I will attest to the fact that Macintosh computers are no better engineered or manufactured than Dell systems, and in fact I would actually put them a cut below Dell because of the problems their overstyled chassis designs cause. You have it completely backwards.
I am a technology writer, and I know a lot of technology writers. Most use Linux or Windows because that's their beat and it's hard to write about a platform that you don't use. But unless they write for an Apple-centric pub, tech journalists do not usually use Macs, especially the most tech-savvy of the lot.
On the off chance that someone who is dealing with Jack Thompson reads this, here is the procedure for filing a complaint against a Florida lawyer.
I would do it myself, but you have to be in some way involved with the lawyer (client or opponent) to file a complaint, it seems.
I'd like to, but Gentoo only has 2.2.10, FreeBSD had 2.0 last I checked (probably newer now, but I doubt it's newer than 2.2.x). On my laptop I have SUSE 10, and the latest version in the package repo is 2.2.9
Word processors and text editors are to me what operating systems are to sysadmins: I need something reliable. I love AbiWord's font rendering and I'd practically kill for even a mostly decent grammar checker, but it has never been very stable on my computers. Maybe 2.4 is totally different, but I won't know until it hits Portage or Ports.
AbiWord would be awesome -- moreso now that it has a grammar checker -- if it didn't crash almost every time I try to open or save a document, and sometimes just because it feels like crashing randomly. Then there's the fact that no distro has the latest AbiWord build in its package tree.
And to those who don't think a grammar checker is necessary: you don't do much writing, do you? Grammar checkers will not -- and never claimed to -- make anyone into a world-class writer. What they WILL do is catch typos that get by the spell checker. So for all those times that you type "on" instead of "one" or "to" instead of "too," the grammar checker will catch them. That is why it is valuable.
That brings up a good point. Reading reviews and seeing a preview, Serenity looks like it should be called "The Adventures of Han Solo." Is this not just a Han Solo-like character in a Millennium Falcon-like ship doing what Han Solo did (smuggling), and avoiding the organized oppressive bad guys with bigger ships?
As long as McGuyver is up on all the latest technology so he can save random people from domestic terrorists, I'm satisfied.
oops -- the link didn't take, for some reason. This is their browser/OS data collection program:
s /datainsights/statmarket/overview.html
http://www.websidestory.com/products/web-analytic
Yeah, but how do you know that WebSideStory's numbers aren't taken from sites that attract mostly Windows-only users? For all we know, some of the sites that they monitor could exclude all non-IE browsers.
Where there's smoke, there's mirrors. To believe any numbers, I need to know all the details of the data collection, including and especially demographics, site requirements, and the target readership of the monitored sites.
From what I see from WebSideStory's website, they are online marketers. They appear to sell software that monitors traffic. So if you are not a WebSideStory customer, your data is not counted. This seems to be the software they got the data from, and there is no mention of what web servers are supported. What if it only runs on IIS? That would exclude a HUGE number of Mozilla-based browsers, because Apache sites wouldn't be able to report anything.
I doubt these numbers. The Jem Report gets about 3k visitors per day, and no more than 25% of them are using a version of IE. Mozilla-based browsers are almost twice that number.
Looking at two other sites I have that have much less traffic, IE's numbers are around 20% or less. Two months ago it was the opposite -- IE was around 50% of TJR's traffic, and certainly more than 20% on the other sites. Something big happened in the past two or three months that drastically changed browser numbers. I think WebSideStory's data is old or just plain inaccurate.
The way to overcome this, of course, is to have a day when everyone agrees to wear backpacks to work. When all 25k rush hour commuters are carrying something, the searches will eventually stop.
If the RIAA is profiting from P2P, doesn't that threaten their lawsuits against file sharers?
Undoubtedly someone here will bitch about how The GIMP has none of the important features that Photoshop has. So in an attempt to get some useful information out of such rants, please be specific as to what Photoshop can do that The GIMP cannot. Name individual features and capabilities.
Don't knock Walt Disney. The man was a genius, and the pioneer of modern animated films. The corporate Disney that we know today should not diminish the work of one of the 20th century's greatest imaginative minds.
Opterons were not designed to go above 8 parallel CPUs. SPARC/POWER/IA64 systems, two of which are RISC and one of which is VLIW, were designed for massively parallel computing. That they are used in lower-end 1 and 2-CPU systems doesn't diminish the fact that they can do much more.
When I typed the original message I forgot about Itanium2, so being RISC is not a prerequisite for massively parallel systems. All of the above are superscalar designs.
-Jem
AMD64 may outperform SPARC at a lower price when you're talking about a 4-CPU system, but how many 128-CPU Opteron servers do you see? Only POWER and UltraSPARC can do that as far as I know. Maybe low-end SPARC workstations will die out, but high-end servers will always need serious superscalar RISC processors.
-Jem
And each of the accused will be taken captive via SWAT team, then made to pay for their own information collection, right?
If a form letter asking for a telephone screening constitutes a job offer for Eric Raymond, I wonder if porn spam counts as a proposition for sex for him too.
And each Nigerian scammer is an offer for a multimillion-dollar business deal, I suppose?
Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a bannana.
As it is, the cold cathode fluorescent lamp in LCDs doesn't last all that long. 50k-100k hours before it loses 50% of its brightness. Turning it on and off a lot does not lengthen its life. As with all electronic or electromechanical devices, the most amount of thermal stress you can put on them under standard conditions is to turn them on and off.
So what are we looking at with these new screens? Maybe half the already limited brightness half-life? CCFL tubes are not generally replaceable, even by technicians, and when the CCFL dies, you may as well throw the LCD in the garbage, because you'll never see it again.
Maybe Philips will make a user-replaceable CCFL module that you can just slip in and out?
That's some seriously half-assed Elizabethan English. Try this instead:
He did dare to blaspheme. He hath the deride of the holy OS on /. and, lo, he shall feel the wrath of yonder moderators this day. -1 troll, ye shall be known to him as destruction to Sodom and Gomorrah!
Those are some odd selections taken out of context from the articles. Why don't you actually read them? It's hard to accept a lot of his advice at first, but then you put it into practice and find out for yourself that it works.
Regarding the manipulation thing, that's silly. In fact, Doc even wrote a column about that once. I'm not going to chase down a link for you -- use Google or the AskMen.com site search function.
I don't know Doc Love or any of the staff of AskMen.com -- I just think it's an outstanding online men's magazine with good advice. In fact I'd put it up against any dead tree men's mag in terms of content.
Women want men who are aloof and unavailable, yet still social and personable. It may seem like a paradox, but it's not. It's best summed up by saying, "Look like you're interesting but never interested."
Women do like smart men very much. The "geek effect" is when smart men do stupid social things like acting too interested in a woman or acting like an idiot around her. Just walk up to her, talk to her, make her laugh, ask for her phone number, and if she gives it to you, wait at least a week to call her. Don't make a date on a weekend, make it on a weeknight. If she is otherwise taken, ask if she has a friend that she'd like to set up on a blind date. Never walk away embarrassed or disappointed -- that's weak and women don't like it.
Women don't want what is bad for them, they want what they think they can't have. It makes them think that they might not be good enough for you, and if you play your cards right in dating and socializing, she will be happy to be with a smart, intelligent man who has piqued her interest . She'll feel like she's doing better than she should be.
Go read Doc Love's column on AskMen.com. It's damn good advice, and it works.
No, that's not the only reason. On my 64-bit Opteron workstation with 64-bit Gentoo, I have to compile every browser plugin for 32-bit, or download precompiled 32-bit binaries for them. That's the PDF reader, Java, Flash, MPlayer, and RealPlayer. Three of those are 32-bit only anyway. So in order to view most Web media (aside from graphics), I have to have several workarounds for programs that are not 64-bit clean or have 64-bit binaries available. Performance doesn't matter as much as the integrity of the software stack and the ease with which it is maintained and updated. It's not hard to get a 32-bit binary of Firefox from Portage, but MPlayer and Java won't work with it because they're compiled for 64-bit. SUSE and Mandrake for AMD64 have everything compiled for 64-bit except OpenOffice.org -- so the situation is even worse there because everything is installed as a precompiled binary. The solution that I have on Gentoo now is to use 64-bit Mozilla and 32-bit Firefox, and switch between the two according to what I need to see on a Web site.
The way you're suggesting I do this is hacky and hard to maintain. And there's no good reason why there should not be 64-bit plugins for Acrobat, Flash, and RealPlayer -- at least, from a user standpoint.
-Jem
Yes, but it's still 32-bit software on your PPC machine. And if you want a Flash Player for Linux on that machine, you're out of luck. That's even mentioned in TFA. In essence you've completely missed the point, possibly intentionally just so you can nitpick. I don't understand why people do this; perhaps you can explain it to me.
GPLFlash, any way you put it, is a good thing for people who want to run 64-bit operating systems... and for people concerned with software freedom.
-Jem