I find that most people get Nero along with their CD/DVD drive - the Nero BackitUp program can do exactly what you want - you can specify no compression if you like, and it will automatically shuffle everything to maximise your DVD use. I would have assumed that most modern CD/DVD writing packages would offer something similar.
Let's not be so hasty:
"FEMA can trace its beginnings to the Congressional Act of 1803. This act, generally considered the first piece of disaster legislation, provided assistance to a New Hampshire town following an extensive fire. In the century that followed, ad hoc legislation was passed more than 100 times in response to hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters."
http://www.fema.gov/about/history.shtm
Sorry to have to tell you this, but Pamela Anderson has already remade Casablanca - in the movie Barbed Wire (Pamela was of course in the Bogart part, while Temuera Morrison played a lovely Ingrid Bergman). Movie was updated to your standard Mad-Max future state, but otherwise, all plot elements survived intact, from the bar in the neutral zone to the policeman to the last minute ending. And no, it wasn't any good.
Actually, the makers of 98lite (which was great for stripping out the bloated win98 internet-explorer integration) now have out XPlite which lets you cut down a lot of the cruft in 2000/XP - http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html
Fair enough general point, but I think you started your "good enough" list too early for Photoshop - while I have felt no need to install any MS Office app after Office97, I would say that PS5 would be the minimum starter with Photoshop, primarily due to the lack of multiple undo.
(I upgraded to PS7 due to it's transparent gif handling, but have seen no real reason for me to pay for the CS upgrade yet)
I looked at all those options as well, and decided that with the way the market is going, there will be a more kick-arse version of anything I buy within 6 months. (I'm not just talking standard technology advances better, I'm talking everyone getting into the field better)
I know that you specified wireless, (which I considered, as I already have an 802.11g AP plugged into my network) but for now I have ended up getting a Hauppage MediaMVP and putting in a run of cat5 to it.
The MediaMVP is basically just a small remote-control driven, network-connected set-top box which plays content from a server on a win2000/xp machine. Linux drivers have been made though, and the built in mpeg decoder makes it a good combo for the standard Hauppage PVR cards.
On the positive side, the sound quality is good, and the price is hard to beat ($99 retail, can be found for less).
Unfortunately the interface is shit. Very basic mp3 browsing - can move through the directories and playlists on your shared computer and select songs/playlists/directories. Unfortunately, there is no real skipping while playing several songs - the default setup if you choose a song is to play that one song and then stop. You can choose to play all songs in a directory, (shuffled if you wish), but it deosn't let you skip songs - if you choose another song, it just plays that one. The "skip" button just moves to the next page on the directory listing - an even worse interface on this first generation device than on my other first generation devices from preceding years.
The gui should however get better with firmware releases - already the latest firmware lets you add streaming radio stations (although not realaudio) and play divx files (although these have to be transcoded by your server). The MVP internals run on linux as well, so there are good possibility of future improvements.
As I said - there's quite a few similar devices coming out at the moment (eg this buffalo one ), and in six or seven months there will undoubtedly be something much better - but if I really want one of those I can buy it then, and I consider $99 a good price for 6-7 months of music.
Although we will of course have to wait for them to get out of Japan, I wouldn't mind buying a product like these nagase or buffalo players, or even this one
They've been out a while now, so most of the bugs should be gone, and I'd say that with the number of machines coming out, within a year they will be as ubiquitous as those supermarket $70 divx dvd players.
The comments so far seem to be missing the point with this one. Half appear to be trying to define BIOS or proving they've read snowcrash, and the rest are complaining about DRM or saying a DVD player is cheaper.
The intended audience for this is obviously the living-room entertainment machine sort of application. For instance, rather than have to wait while the OS loads, and then use some software-based UI just to play a CD, you just have to push the on-button, drop in your mp3 or audio CD and it'll automatically start playing within seconds - no having to turn on the TV to check things are ready/you've pushed a button on your remote keyboard at the wrong time etc.
If you want to play standard applications - just boot into your normal OS and fire up your divx player, stepmania etc. If you have replaced your home entertainment CD/mp3/DVD player with this and just want to access one of those functions in a UI that you haven't kludged together, with no OS wait/booting screens etc - no problem.
My only major request would be that it plays xvid/divx encoded avis in the BIOS environment as well - licence issues aside, I can easily foresee this being a great addition to one of those hushpc computers.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but really - blindly advocating ogg and blanket-denigrating mp3s isn't really the way to go.
Maybe if you were talking about the mp3s speed-encoded a couple of years ago with the Xing encoder at 128K CBR you might have a point, but there really isn't any excuse to settle for below-average audio quality no matter what the format.
I use the latest version of lame with the "extreme" preset, and the quality of my hi-fi system is more limiting than the encoding system used. In return I get usability across a wide range of consumer devices.
If your stand was on philosophical grounds of course, that woiuld be a different matter.
That's basically what the pen computer mentioned a week or so ago was on about - another example of a device looking at integrating a small-scale projector (Picture of pen computer in use). The keyboard was from canesta and the display was an LED projector. The article was a bit hazy on whether their display model contained a working version or not, but as the prototype did cost around $30,000, it might be a few weeks before it gets particularly cheap.
Surely the definition from a 53 year old dictionary is perfectly acceptable if there are no alternative definitions?
As for a recent dictionary, you can check it out right no in the current COD
Re:Beer in sun bad
on
PeltierBeer
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Link looks OK to me. You could try again, download the pdf
version, or read below:
The smell of ultra-violet
Many things in the everyday world can have an adverse effect on a bottle
of beer, but the single worst offender is simple ultra-violet (UV) light. The
hops flowers that are used to add flavor to most fine beers are extremely sensitive
to UV light. When exposed to UV for even a short period--as, for example, in
as little as 15 minutes under fluorescent lighting in a store's cooler case
or in direct sunlight-- beer promptly undergoes a chemical reaction that creates
an organic compound, 3-methyl crotyl mercaptan. Not only does this not even
sound like something you'd want to put in your mouth, it's actually the same
compound that skunks spray to ward off foes. Hence the slang term skunky
for a beer that is affected.
This is not mere hypothesis, but a well documented chemical reaction, reported
most recently by the researcher Denis de Keukeliere of the State University
of Ghent, Belgium, in a September 1991 article titled Photochemistry of
Beer in The Spectrum, Vol. 4, Issue 2. Other scholarly journal articles
on the subject go back as far as a report in the German Lehrbuch der Bierbrauerei
in 1875.
What's more, you can conduct a simple test yourself. Take two bottles of
a fine import (Pilsner Urquell would be a good one) out of the original packing
case, to ensure that they have never been exposed to light. Keep one dark; place
the other in direct sunlight--or adjacent to the fluorescents in your cooler
box--for a couple of hours. Chill and open both, and taste the difference!
Remarkably, many consumers of mass-produced European lagers believe that
this aroma of skunk juice in light struck beer is normal, since
many of them have never tasted a fresh, unafflicted sample. Green glass bottles
allow the highest transmission of UV light. Brown bottles are somewhat better,
and canned and kegged beer is not in danger from ultra-violet light. The American
brewers who use clear-glass bottles resort to the use of hydrogenated hop extracts
instead of fresh hops, which solves the skunk problem but results
in a beverage that lacks the full flavor of a natural beer.
Unfortunately, many retail display cases are illuminated by fluorescent
lighting. This simple and popular marketing presentation looks attractive, but
it rapidly destroys the flavor of the beers that retailers are so proudly displaying
for sale.
We strongly recommend that fine beers displayed for sale in refrigerated
cases not be exposed to fluorescent light. Fluorescent lighting in refrigerated
cases should be turned off, at least in that portion of the display devoted
to top-quality imports and American microbrewery beers. We suggest that this
strategy can be turned into a marketing advantage, by the simple use of a poster
or sign explaining that quality beers are best displayed in dark surroundings.
This not only protects the beer, but displays the retailer's knowledge and proper
care. By the same token, we recommend that fine beers on the shop floor be kept
in the original sealed packing cartons.
We believe that these measures would demonstrate the kind of care for beer
that makes us want to patronize a shop. As a minimum, however, we hope that
any retailer would be agreeable to a connoisseur's request for a
six-pack out of a closed carton in the back room rather than one that's been
sitting under the lights.
Slashdot Mirror
I find that most people get Nero along with their CD/DVD drive - the Nero BackitUp program can do exactly what you want - you can specify no compression if you like, and it will automatically shuffle everything to maximise your DVD use. I would have assumed that most modern CD/DVD writing packages would offer something similar.
Just go to the source: http://files.upl.silentwhisper.net/upload7/weee.jp g (Not that I have any idea what the hell they are doing)
Australia has New Zealand - that's not very kind: let's give Tasmania a bit more recognition here shall we?
I believe reven has already written a front-end MAME plugin for GB-PVR - see here or here. (And yep - it's my PVR of choice too).
Let's not be so hasty: "FEMA can trace its beginnings to the Congressional Act of 1803. This act, generally considered the first piece of disaster legislation, provided assistance to a New Hampshire town following an extensive fire. In the century that followed, ad hoc legislation was passed more than 100 times in response to hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and other natural disasters." http://www.fema.gov/about/history.shtm
Sorry to have to tell you this, but Pamela Anderson has already remade Casablanca - in the movie Barbed Wire (Pamela was of course in the Bogart part, while Temuera Morrison played a lovely Ingrid Bergman). Movie was updated to your standard Mad-Max future state, but otherwise, all plot elements survived intact, from the bar in the neutral zone to the policeman to the last minute ending. And no, it wasn't any good.
Actually, the makers of 98lite (which was great for stripping out the bloated win98 internet-explorer integration) now have out XPlite which lets you cut down a lot of the cruft in 2000/XP - http://www.litepc.com/xplite.html
Fair enough general point, but I think you started your "good enough" list too early for Photoshop - while I have felt no need to install any MS Office app after Office97, I would say that PS5 would be the minimum starter with Photoshop, primarily due to the lack of multiple undo.
(I upgraded to PS7 due to it's transparent gif handling, but have seen no real reason for me to pay for the CS upgrade yet)
I looked at all those options as well, and decided that with the way the market is going, there will be a more kick-arse version of anything I buy within 6 months. (I'm not just talking standard technology advances better, I'm talking everyone getting into the field better)
I know that you specified wireless, (which I considered, as I already have an 802.11g AP plugged into my network) but for now I have ended up getting a Hauppage MediaMVP and putting in a run of cat5 to it.
The MediaMVP is basically just a small remote-control driven, network-connected set-top box which plays content from a server on a win2000/xp machine. Linux drivers have been made though, and the built in mpeg decoder makes it a good combo for the standard Hauppage PVR cards.
On the positive side, the sound quality is good, and the price is hard to beat ($99 retail, can be found for less).
Unfortunately the interface is shit. Very basic mp3 browsing - can move through the directories and playlists on your shared computer and select songs/playlists/directories. Unfortunately, there is no real skipping while playing several songs - the default setup if you choose a song is to play that one song and then stop. You can choose to play all songs in a directory, (shuffled if you wish), but it deosn't let you skip songs - if you choose another song, it just plays that one. The "skip" button just moves to the next page on the directory listing - an even worse interface on this first generation device than on my other first generation devices from preceding years.
The gui should however get better with firmware releases - already the latest firmware lets you add streaming radio stations (although not realaudio) and play divx files (although these have to be transcoded by your server). The MVP internals run on linux as well, so there are good possibility of future improvements.
As I said - there's quite a few similar devices coming out at the moment (eg this buffalo one ), and in six or seven months there will undoubtedly be something much better - but if I really want one of those I can buy it then, and I consider $99 a good price for 6-7 months of music.
Although we will of course have to wait for them to get out of Japan, I wouldn't mind buying a product like these nagase or buffalo players, or even this one
They've been out a while now, so most of the bugs should be gone, and I'd say that with the number of machines coming out, within a year they will be as ubiquitous as those supermarket $70 divx dvd players.
The intended audience for this is obviously the living-room entertainment machine sort of application. For instance, rather than have to wait while the OS loads, and then use some software-based UI just to play a CD, you just have to push the on-button, drop in your mp3 or audio CD and it'll automatically start playing within seconds - no having to turn on the TV to check things are ready/you've pushed a button on your remote keyboard at the wrong time etc.
If you want to play standard applications - just boot into your normal OS and fire up your divx player, stepmania etc. If you have replaced your home entertainment CD/mp3/DVD player with this and just want to access one of those functions in a UI that you haven't kludged together, with no OS wait/booting screens etc - no problem.
My only major request would be that it plays xvid/divx encoded avis in the BIOS environment as well - licence issues aside, I can easily foresee this being a great addition to one of those hushpc computers.
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but really - blindly advocating ogg and blanket-denigrating mp3s isn't really the way to go. Maybe if you were talking about the mp3s speed-encoded a couple of years ago with the Xing encoder at 128K CBR you might have a point, but there really isn't any excuse to settle for below-average audio quality no matter what the format. I use the latest version of lame with the "extreme" preset, and the quality of my hi-fi system is more limiting than the encoding system used. In return I get usability across a wide range of consumer devices. If your stand was on philosophical grounds of course, that woiuld be a different matter.
That's basically what the pen computer mentioned a week or so ago was on about - another example of a device looking at integrating a small-scale projector (Picture of pen computer in use). The keyboard was from canesta and the display was an LED projector. The article was a bit hazy on whether their display model contained a working version or not, but as the prototype did cost around $30,000, it might be a few weeks before it gets particularly cheap.
Surely the definition from a 53 year old dictionary is perfectly acceptable if there are no alternative definitions? As for a recent dictionary, you can check it out right no in the current COD
Link looks OK to me. You could try again, download the pdf version, or read below:
The smell of ultra-violet
Many things in the everyday world can have an adverse effect on a bottle of beer, but the single worst offender is simple ultra-violet (UV) light. The hops flowers that are used to add flavor to most fine beers are extremely sensitive to UV light. When exposed to UV for even a short period--as, for example, in as little as 15 minutes under fluorescent lighting in a store's cooler case or in direct sunlight-- beer promptly undergoes a chemical reaction that creates an organic compound, 3-methyl crotyl mercaptan. Not only does this not even sound like something you'd want to put in your mouth, it's actually the same compound that skunks spray to ward off foes. Hence the slang term skunky for a beer that is affected.
This is not mere hypothesis, but a well documented chemical reaction, reported most recently by the researcher Denis de Keukeliere of the State University of Ghent, Belgium, in a September 1991 article titled Photochemistry of Beer in The Spectrum, Vol. 4, Issue 2. Other scholarly journal articles on the subject go back as far as a report in the German Lehrbuch der Bierbrauerei in 1875.
What's more, you can conduct a simple test yourself. Take two bottles of a fine import (Pilsner Urquell would be a good one) out of the original packing case, to ensure that they have never been exposed to light. Keep one dark; place the other in direct sunlight--or adjacent to the fluorescents in your cooler box--for a couple of hours. Chill and open both, and taste the difference!
Remarkably, many consumers of mass-produced European lagers believe that this aroma of skunk juice in light struck beer is normal, since many of them have never tasted a fresh, unafflicted sample. Green glass bottles allow the highest transmission of UV light. Brown bottles are somewhat better, and canned and kegged beer is not in danger from ultra-violet light. The American brewers who use clear-glass bottles resort to the use of hydrogenated hop extracts instead of fresh hops, which solves the skunk problem but results in a beverage that lacks the full flavor of a natural beer.
Unfortunately, many retail display cases are illuminated by fluorescent lighting. This simple and popular marketing presentation looks attractive, but it rapidly destroys the flavor of the beers that retailers are so proudly displaying for sale.
We strongly recommend that fine beers displayed for sale in refrigerated cases not be exposed to fluorescent light. Fluorescent lighting in refrigerated cases should be turned off, at least in that portion of the display devoted to top-quality imports and American microbrewery beers. We suggest that this strategy can be turned into a marketing advantage, by the simple use of a poster or sign explaining that quality beers are best displayed in dark surroundings. This not only protects the beer, but displays the retailer's knowledge and proper care. By the same token, we recommend that fine beers on the shop floor be kept in the original sealed packing cartons.
We believe that these measures would demonstrate the kind of care for beer that makes us want to patronize a shop. As a minimum, however, we hope that any retailer would be agreeable to a connoisseur's request for a six-pack out of a closed carton in the back room rather than one that's been sitting under the lights.