err, ok, but is that a "yeah it works great", or a "whatever, it's works, and i hate dancing paperclips and magically disappearing menus"? But i see what you mean.
A "yeah, it works great". I don't recall if Clippy was in Word '97, but if he was, I turned him off. I never had problems with magically disappearing menus.
The "one-time-use" camera sells for $29.99. When you're done shooting your 20 minutes of video, you return it and pay $12.99 to get the video transferred to DVD.
That's $42.98 per use... $2.15 cents per minute... not including sales tax.
Though people talk about hacking it, the people who could hack it are not the target market for it, as they can figure out how to use their camcorders and DVD burners.
How many of you have seen a single OS or even Linux distribution hit the market without massive beta testing and bug fixing?
I don't care how restrictive the NDA's were or how quiet Apple tried to keep it, if there was a release-grade version of OS/X for x86, someone would have leaked the news "anonymously" long before now. It's just too big, both in terms of impact and in terms of the number of people needed to get it to release quality, that it only starts "leaking" now.
That's not to say that it's not in the works. Announcing a public beta, or even just a developer beta (and who wants to run the pool on how many minutes it would take for the developer beta to hit the various file sharing nets?) would be at the outside of the realm of possible.
But going gold with OS/X for x86 would have to be at least 9-12 months out, during which time IBM could finally get "scared straight", resolve supply issues, and the beta is as far as it ever goes.
I'd LOVE to see OS/X for x86. But I think I'll see CNN's live broadcast of the sloooow video conference between second-term President Jeb Bush and the first American to land on Mars before I see OS/X commercially available for x86.
Currently Palm will give you a $50 "trade-in" gift certificate for any old Palm Pilot (including the M series) after you buy any new one (including the $99 Zire 21).
OTOH, in the "factory outlet", they are selling "open box" Zire 21s for $49.
Either way, the Zire (whether you get it new with a trade in, or used without) is basically worth $49. The likely replacement units will be refurb Zire 21s, meaning you'll get a $49 unit as a replacement.
OTOH, if you've been thinking about buying a new Palm, you can get a gift cert for $50 worth of accessories just by buying the one you want and trading in your old one.
Seems if you take the commercial trade in deal vs. the settlement deal, you'll come out a buck ahead.
I kept mine in a drawer after I switched to a Treo 600. I thought the lost data was a cost of doing business with an M100 and just backed up to and from Palm Desktop regularly.
I'll probably give the replacement unit to my wife if it's decent. If not, I'll sell it or donate it to charity.
CK: So, if there's anything I can do for you, or, more to the point, to you, you just let me know.
SS : Can you hammer a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?
CK : Not right now.
S : A girl's gotta have her standards
In many benchmarks, the results essentially break down to which hammer, using a swing of X velocity from Y distance with an arc of Z, will drive a threepenny nail N millimeters into a pine block. And they're very useful if you want to drive threepenny nails into pine blocks while swinging from Y distance with a Z arc at X velocity.
And in some cases, you really do want to do that. 80% of the time, you'll be pounding threepenny nails into pine blocks. So this particular benchmark is going to tell you which is the best hammer for you.
It's worth noting that all of these benchmark reports must be taken with a grain of salt, but more importantly, anyone planning to make decisions based on them should get a really strong idea of what they plan to do, then use them to figure out which hardware/OS/software combo will give them the best performance for their primary task.
If you're going to do all sorts of stuff, then a "general purpose" benchmark may be for you. But if you're mostly doing 3D modeling and rendering with Maya, then what is really useful is to know which processor/OS combo ekes out the highest scores on Maya tasks, not which processor is considered the best "workstation" based on benchmarks for software you don't use.
Every set of benchmarks makes it easier to eventually hunt down information that's relevant to the task you need benched, so I don't want to discourage journalists from posting these kinds of articles. In fact, I'd like to see more. But I'd like to see more application-based tests and less results based around arbitrary measurements like floating point operations.
I think the real question is whether nightlife exists on other planets. If there's intelligent life, but no clubs or bars, the planets won't be very much fun to visit.
Weird - I open up Synaptic, search for Firefox, mark it for installation (and do the same for any other software) and click Apply. Once its done, all apps are neatly categorised in the "K"-menu (Firefox is under Internet), rather than just being neatly splurged onto the end of the menu list.
If I go to the Firefox web site with Windows, download the installer, and run the installer I got from the Firefox site, it "just works". If I do it with Linux, I apparently need to go through a more convoluted and non-obvious process. Synaptic? What's that? This is supposed to support your argument?
Simpler directory structure? Set up Konqueror to show only the Home folder, and then make subdirectories for Pictures, Films, Music, whatever.
That would be simple user file arrangement. But what about my http doc root in Apache? In Windows, that's in C:\Program Files\Apache\ unless I manually change it. In Windows, I can usually find everything in C:\Program Files\[name of app or distributor]. I'm not hunting around/var/usr/etc to see where which distro and which app put what file or directory.
Your comment about OO.o is so trivial and petty that I won't even bother to address it, suffice to say that there are doubtless dozens of little things that OO.o can do that Word cannot.
Few, in my experience. One of the reasons MS Office is so huge and bloated is because it does so many things, tries to be so many things to so many people. 99% of it is annoying, but sometimes...
If it's that urgent, file a bug report - it has a damn sight better chance of getting incorporating into OO.o than into Word.
First, it would be a feature request, not a bug report. And how do you think so many features got incorporated into Word? Microsoft may seem like a huge monopoly, but it also has a huge marketing department that runs huge numbers of focus groups and user advisory panels.
The process of getting the feature added may be more transparent with OO.o, but it's just as much of a turkey shoot. Unless I want to learn to program and hack the internals of OO.o or figure out a way to write a plug-in that does it, I'm limited to waiting for someone to say "gee, it would be good to add that feature" and then either assign it or add it themselves. If I take off the "unless I want to learn to program...", it's the same boat I'm in with Microsoft.
Also, thus whole "tweak and tune" to get things like an Office Environment, Web Browser, e-mail, calendar etc - most Linux installs have these set-up by default.
No, they offer a bunch of options, but few have been "out of the box" useful in my experience. Not saying that Windows always is. But if you need to tweak and tune, I find it a LOT less confusing to do it in Windows than in Linux, and if you're just doing it for yourself instead of an office-wide install, I find Windows faster to get up and running with my choice of apps and configured the way I like it.
Linux has its strengths, I'm not saying it doesn't. But when people's minds jumpt to Apple as a Microsoft alternative instead of Linux, I find it VERY understandable. Linux has a well-earned reputation for being a DIY operating system and still has rough edges. The big, corporate, operating systems and applications don't just have traction because they're established in the workplace. They have it because they've spent years listening to customers, making their apps work the way customers want, and are driven by a "be adopted or die" economic reality that many open-source applications don't have hanging over their heads.
Very simple... on Suse 9.2, I get the Firefox installer. I download it to my desktop, run it, and it's installed on my desktop... I don't mean a symlink icon to the application is placed on my desktop. I mean all the program's files are installed to my desktop folder. If I go to my KDE start menu, there's no entry for the newly installed Firefox. I have to do that manually.
Should I decide to install Apache when I install Linux, where my http root is depends on the distro, not on a program default.
It's not just hardware that "just works" that makes Windows easier to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis than Linux. It's software. It's a simpler directory structure, better file manager, better integration with the desktop manager.
And let's face it, EVERY time I try to switch from Microsoft Office to a "just as good" competitor, I find that the competitor still lacks features I use and which are not stupid newbie things like "Clippy".
In Word Perfect Office (a number of years back) it was an inability to aplhabetically sort lists over a certain size. In current incarnations of OpenOffice.org, it is an inability to find/replace "special" characters like paragraph breaks. These may be minor to the general public, but I use them and Microsoft has them. I use Open Office right now, and I recently missed that ability to find/replace paragraph breaks big time.
Linux is a great desktop environment when you want to roll it out with a limited set of applications and limited privileges to an office environment, and can take the time to tweak and tune and get everything just right in a single install that will be duplicated across hundreds of machines that will be used by people who need e-mail, spreadsheet, word processing, calendar, browser, and that's it.
But for a user like me, I find Linux a curiosity to poke and prod, not a production environment desktop OS by any means.
Aside from being too expensive, the poster asked for something that fit inside a jacket pocket.
Simple Answer - Buy a Palm M100 used. You can pick them up on Ebay, Amazon, etc. for $20-25. Then pick up a mini keyboard for around $20. You've got 2 mb memory and can write freestyle in the "memo" app, then transfer via the Palm Desktop sync software.
Have to agree here. I don't want to sound like an RIAA or MPAA lawyer, but I see like 100 methods of abusing anonymity for each valid reason to have anonymity.
Aside from stuff like rape victims posting to support group boards with anonymity (one of the justifications people used for the old anon.penet.fi anonymizers) or protecting whistle blowers, I'm not getting the need for a public anonymizing network or how it will benefit us more than it hurts us.
What stops all sorts of jerks from trying to abuse it for spam, slander, harrassment, hacking, etc.? And if there are no safeguards, then how does the benefit of this outweigh the harm?
Seems to me like a bunch of geeks doing something because it can be done and worrying about the consequences later.
- Greg (who once used the anon.penet.fi server to post alt.personals ads from "Heddy", a disembodied head looking for people to chat with after the scientists left the lab for the night)
Although a lot of people are accusing the lawyers of trying to force deletion of e-mails, some companies would say it's lawyer *bills* forcing it. At the last bigco I worked for, that was their justification for their retention policy.
If your lawyers have to sort through all of a department's e-mails to determine which are useless, which must be turned over, and which must be fought over, do you want them sorting through 30-days worth or 3 years worth?
If we could see an itemized bill on what all of SCO's discovery requests have cost IBM just in lawyer fees to review the documents, you might be shocked.
Companies will lobby that 3 years is onerous, anti-business, etc. And in a way, it is. If someone wants to file a nuisance suit, all they have to do is get a broad discovery order to make settling for $100,000 more attractive than paying lawyers $100,000 just to sort e-mails.
Maybe the 3-year rule stands. Then the lawyers start fighting in court over which search terms must be matched to make e-mails relevant, so they can filter through the 3 years worth more effectively. Lowers the cost a bit, but some of that savings is made up on the motions and arguments fighting over the search terms (and additional depositions to make sure there were no code words used to refer to deals or clients).
All in all, IMO, e-mail retention law should be similar to paper retention law. And, as many have said before the advent of e-mail and after, if you don't want it on record, don't write it down... at all.
If standards compliant code doesn't work with the browser that is the de facto standard, that doesn't say much about the standards?
Screw pie-in-the-sky, ivory tower pedagoguery. "The way it should be done" and "the way it gets done in the least amount of time with acceptable results" are rarely the same. You want standards people will follow? Bring those two positions much closer together.
I peek at these books and agonize whether I should invest the hours in them to learn all the standards and back-implement them on old pages or use them in new ones... for about 15 minutes. Where style sheets make things easier for me (text formatting), I'm all over them. But where they don't... F 'em.
When all the browser makers distribute viruses that disable all their old browsers and force people to upgrade to fully standards-compliant ones, I'll consider going 100% compliant. Until then, I'll do what makes life simplest for me while keeping my pages accessible to 95%+ of the market.
they owe me whatever it is I feel like asking for or I'll go elsewhere.
And where, praytell, will you go?
If you know of a site that is as good as or better than Google, please share. If not, then the question becomes who suffers more when you go elsewhere, you or Google?
I find it interesting that Microsoft uses Tucows as their registrar. You think if any major tech company would be their own registrar, MSFT would be. And since Google has actually been approved to be a registrar, it's odd that they still have alldomains.com as their registrar instead of handling google.com themselves.
People on dial-up are going to use web accelerators. Concerns about privacy and the other nightmares accelerators cause (such as making graphics look like shit) are generally (though not exclusively) limited to people willing to pay $10-20 more a month for broadband (Netscape dial-up $9.95, AOL Dial-up $19.95, avg. DSL $29.95).
All this stuff we bitch and moan about here probably won't make a dent in the adoption of Google's accelerator and they're just going to run roughshod over webmasters whose sites don't comply. If they pick up X million users, you will code your site to work with their accelerator or face the consequences.
AC'97 (the standard for OB sound) sound likes crap. It's kind of like listening to mp3's with a chainsaw running in the background.
Not to be an anti-Microsoft troll, but the only time I've listened to something sounding like there was a saw running in the background (I'm thinking table saw, not chainsaw), it's generally playing on Microsoft Media Player and it was encoded in WMA/WMV. I've often noticed a tinny, ringing sound in WMA/WMV encoded stuff.
But I have a Shuttle XPC box with AC97 and a good speaker set from Creative and I find the sound on my MP3s, DVDs, etc. to be just fine. I'm no audiophile, at least not compared to some of my former co-workers (who owned vinyl turntables hooked to vacuum tube amps), but I have a decent ear.
Given, I haven't tried to hook it up for 5.1 surround, but I don't game and, aside from instructional DVDs, I'll use the hi-def big screen in the living room for my home theater experience.
It sounds more like their various recommendations lists, like the "So you'd like to..." and "listmania", where users create thematic lists of products, each product being represented by a web page. Of course, because this is a patent, they want to make it as overly broad as possible so someone can't change the page background from white to light grey and say that grey pages aren't within the scope of the patent.
More to the point, though, I seem to recall on numerous occasiona that Bezos has argued against certain types of patents and for patent reform. His justification for most of these patents is to get the patent filed before someone else does and then tries to extort Amazon. Essentially, he claims to be filing as a defensive measure, not offensive.
I could have a very bad memory, but except for the "one-click" patent, I can't recall another patent Amazon has actively enforced.
That way, whenever anybody in the world kicks somebody in the nuts, they also have to kick Jeff as well.
I have been using/. for years and this is the first time I've posted a "mod parent up" post. Holy crap. It almost made me force liquid through my nose.
I've always wondered...when a site is slashdotted, it implies that the site has been hit by high referrals from slashdot, causing it to become slow or go down totally.
But how does slashdot itself cope with the high traffic?
Remember that the site in this article was getting hit with over 3 gigabits of traffic a second under the pressure of a DDoS composed of an estimated 35k bots. Now imagine that your average dedicated server account comes with a 10 megabit pipe. It would take a lot fewer consistent requests to slow everything to a crawl. And often these sites are on shared servers, competing with anywhere from 5-200 other sites for the pipe and the processing power.
And in most cases they don't need it. Why would a site used to getting 20,000 hits a day put out the money for capacity 200,000 hits in a few minutes? They try to keep enough capacity to handle 20-50% daily usage spikes, sometimes maybe even 100%, but not a gazillion percent.
Slashdot has big pipes, multiple servers, load balancing and various optimizations that your average site doesn't. They even shut down certain functions under really heavy load (ever notice that sometimes the site search is theirs and sometimes it routes you to Google?). But except when being slashdotted, the average site doesn't need those.
Slashdot Mirror
A "yeah, it works great". I don't recall if Clippy was in Word '97, but if he was, I turned him off. I never had problems with magically disappearing menus.
I got 4 new PC's between 1997 and 2002. One office suite - Microsoft Office '97. Of course, this was just for Word and Excel.
- Greg
That's $42.98 per use... $2.15 cents per minute... not including sales tax.
Though people talk about hacking it, the people who could hack it are not the target market for it, as they can figure out how to use their camcorders and DVD burners.
- Greg
I don't care how restrictive the NDA's were or how quiet Apple tried to keep it, if there was a release-grade version of OS/X for x86, someone would have leaked the news "anonymously" long before now. It's just too big, both in terms of impact and in terms of the number of people needed to get it to release quality, that it only starts "leaking" now.
That's not to say that it's not in the works. Announcing a public beta, or even just a developer beta (and who wants to run the pool on how many minutes it would take for the developer beta to hit the various file sharing nets?) would be at the outside of the realm of possible.
But going gold with OS/X for x86 would have to be at least 9-12 months out, during which time IBM could finally get "scared straight", resolve supply issues, and the beta is as far as it ever goes.
I'd LOVE to see OS/X for x86. But I think I'll see CNN's live broadcast of the sloooow video conference between second-term President Jeb Bush and the first American to land on Mars before I see OS/X commercially available for x86.
- Greg
OTOH, in the "factory outlet", they are selling "open box" Zire 21s for $49.
Either way, the Zire (whether you get it new with a trade in, or used without) is basically worth $49. The likely replacement units will be refurb Zire 21s, meaning you'll get a $49 unit as a replacement.
OTOH, if you've been thinking about buying a new Palm, you can get a gift cert for $50 worth of accessories just by buying the one you want and trading in your old one.
Seems if you take the commercial trade in deal vs. the settlement deal, you'll come out a buck ahead.
- Greg
I'll probably give the replacement unit to my wife if it's decent. If not, I'll sell it or donate it to charity.
- Greg
SS : Can you hammer a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?
CK : Not right now.
S : A girl's gotta have her standards
Have you ever seen a body like that in your life?
I happen to be her father?
Then I guess you have.
- G
And in some cases, you really do want to do that. 80% of the time, you'll be pounding threepenny nails into pine blocks. So this particular benchmark is going to tell you which is the best hammer for you.
It's worth noting that all of these benchmark reports must be taken with a grain of salt, but more importantly, anyone planning to make decisions based on them should get a really strong idea of what they plan to do, then use them to figure out which hardware/OS/software combo will give them the best performance for their primary task.
If you're going to do all sorts of stuff, then a "general purpose" benchmark may be for you. But if you're mostly doing 3D modeling and rendering with Maya, then what is really useful is to know which processor/OS combo ekes out the highest scores on Maya tasks, not which processor is considered the best "workstation" based on benchmarks for software you don't use.
Every set of benchmarks makes it easier to eventually hunt down information that's relevant to the task you need benched, so I don't want to discourage journalists from posting these kinds of articles. In fact, I'd like to see more. But I'd like to see more application-based tests and less results based around arbitrary measurements like floating point operations.
- Greg
- Greg
If you leave CP/M out of the debate, you are in league with the devil and deserve the evil fate that befalls you!!!!
- Greg
If I go to the Firefox web site with Windows, download the installer, and run the installer I got from the Firefox site, it "just works". If I do it with Linux, I apparently need to go through a more convoluted and non-obvious process. Synaptic? What's that? This is supposed to support your argument? Simpler directory structure? Set up Konqueror to show only the Home folder, and then make subdirectories for Pictures, Films, Music, whatever.
That would be simple user file arrangement. But what about my http doc root in Apache? In Windows, that's in C:\Program Files\Apache\ unless I manually change it. In Windows, I can usually find everything in C:\Program Files\[name of app or distributor]. I'm not hunting around /var /usr /etc to see where which distro and which app put what file or directory.
Your comment about OO.o is so trivial and petty that I won't even bother to address it, suffice to say that there are doubtless dozens of little things that OO.o can do that Word cannot.
Few, in my experience. One of the reasons MS Office is so huge and bloated is because it does so many things, tries to be so many things to so many people. 99% of it is annoying, but sometimes...
If it's that urgent, file a bug report - it has a damn sight better chance of getting incorporating into OO.o than into Word. First, it would be a feature request, not a bug report. And how do you think so many features got incorporated into Word? Microsoft may seem like a huge monopoly, but it also has a huge marketing department that runs huge numbers of focus groups and user advisory panels.
The process of getting the feature added may be more transparent with OO.o, but it's just as much of a turkey shoot. Unless I want to learn to program and hack the internals of OO.o or figure out a way to write a plug-in that does it, I'm limited to waiting for someone to say "gee, it would be good to add that feature" and then either assign it or add it themselves. If I take off the "unless I want to learn to program...", it's the same boat I'm in with Microsoft.
Also, thus whole "tweak and tune" to get things like an Office Environment, Web Browser, e-mail, calendar etc - most Linux installs have these set-up by default.
No, they offer a bunch of options, but few have been "out of the box" useful in my experience. Not saying that Windows always is. But if you need to tweak and tune, I find it a LOT less confusing to do it in Windows than in Linux, and if you're just doing it for yourself instead of an office-wide install, I find Windows faster to get up and running with my choice of apps and configured the way I like it.
Linux has its strengths, I'm not saying it doesn't. But when people's minds jumpt to Apple as a Microsoft alternative instead of Linux, I find it VERY understandable. Linux has a well-earned reputation for being a DIY operating system and still has rough edges. The big, corporate, operating systems and applications don't just have traction because they're established in the workplace. They have it because they've spent years listening to customers, making their apps work the way customers want, and are driven by a "be adopted or die" economic reality that many open-source applications don't have hanging over their heads.
Now mod me down -1 Troll.
- Greg
Should I decide to install Apache when I install Linux, where my http root is depends on the distro, not on a program default.
It's not just hardware that "just works" that makes Windows easier to set up and manage on a day-to-day basis than Linux. It's software. It's a simpler directory structure, better file manager, better integration with the desktop manager.
And let's face it, EVERY time I try to switch from Microsoft Office to a "just as good" competitor, I find that the competitor still lacks features I use and which are not stupid newbie things like "Clippy".
In Word Perfect Office (a number of years back) it was an inability to aplhabetically sort lists over a certain size. In current incarnations of OpenOffice.org, it is an inability to find/replace "special" characters like paragraph breaks. These may be minor to the general public, but I use them and Microsoft has them. I use Open Office right now, and I recently missed that ability to find/replace paragraph breaks big time.
Linux is a great desktop environment when you want to roll it out with a limited set of applications and limited privileges to an office environment, and can take the time to tweak and tune and get everything just right in a single install that will be duplicated across hundreds of machines that will be used by people who need e-mail, spreadsheet, word processing, calendar, browser, and that's it.
But for a user like me, I find Linux a curiosity to poke and prod, not a production environment desktop OS by any means.
- Greg
Simple Answer - Buy a Palm M100 used. You can pick them up on Ebay, Amazon, etc. for $20-25. Then pick up a mini keyboard for around $20. You've got 2 mb memory and can write freestyle in the "memo" app, then transfer via the Palm Desktop sync software.
- Greg
Aside from stuff like rape victims posting to support group boards with anonymity (one of the justifications people used for the old anon.penet.fi anonymizers) or protecting whistle blowers, I'm not getting the need for a public anonymizing network or how it will benefit us more than it hurts us.
What stops all sorts of jerks from trying to abuse it for spam, slander, harrassment, hacking, etc.? And if there are no safeguards, then how does the benefit of this outweigh the harm?
Seems to me like a bunch of geeks doing something because it can be done and worrying about the consequences later.
- Greg (who once used the anon.penet.fi server to post alt.personals ads from "Heddy", a disembodied head looking for people to chat with after the scientists left the lab for the night)
If your lawyers have to sort through all of a department's e-mails to determine which are useless, which must be turned over, and which must be fought over, do you want them sorting through 30-days worth or 3 years worth?
If we could see an itemized bill on what all of SCO's discovery requests have cost IBM just in lawyer fees to review the documents, you might be shocked.
Companies will lobby that 3 years is onerous, anti-business, etc. And in a way, it is. If someone wants to file a nuisance suit, all they have to do is get a broad discovery order to make settling for $100,000 more attractive than paying lawyers $100,000 just to sort e-mails.
Maybe the 3-year rule stands. Then the lawyers start fighting in court over which search terms must be matched to make e-mails relevant, so they can filter through the 3 years worth more effectively. Lowers the cost a bit, but some of that savings is made up on the motions and arguments fighting over the search terms (and additional depositions to make sure there were no code words used to refer to deals or clients).
All in all, IMO, e-mail retention law should be similar to paper retention law. And, as many have said before the advent of e-mail and after, if you don't want it on record, don't write it down... at all.
- Greg
Screw pie-in-the-sky, ivory tower pedagoguery. "The way it should be done" and "the way it gets done in the least amount of time with acceptable results" are rarely the same. You want standards people will follow? Bring those two positions much closer together.
I peek at these books and agonize whether I should invest the hours in them to learn all the standards and back-implement them on old pages or use them in new ones... for about 15 minutes. Where style sheets make things easier for me (text formatting), I'm all over them. But where they don't... F 'em.
When all the browser makers distribute viruses that disable all their old browsers and force people to upgrade to fully standards-compliant ones, I'll consider going 100% compliant. Until then, I'll do what makes life simplest for me while keeping my pages accessible to 95%+ of the market.
Juan Epstein! Juan Epstein!
Epstein was the one who brought in notes signed "Epstein's Mother"
- Greg
And where, praytell, will you go?
If you know of a site that is as good as or better than Google, please share. If not, then the question becomes who suffers more when you go elsewhere, you or Google?
- G
- Greg
All this stuff we bitch and moan about here probably won't make a dent in the adoption of Google's accelerator and they're just going to run roughshod over webmasters whose sites don't comply. If they pick up X million users, you will code your site to work with their accelerator or face the consequences.
- Greg
Not to be an anti-Microsoft troll, but the only time I've listened to something sounding like there was a saw running in the background (I'm thinking table saw, not chainsaw), it's generally playing on Microsoft Media Player and it was encoded in WMA/WMV. I've often noticed a tinny, ringing sound in WMA/WMV encoded stuff.
But I have a Shuttle XPC box with AC97 and a good speaker set from Creative and I find the sound on my MP3s, DVDs, etc. to be just fine. I'm no audiophile, at least not compared to some of my former co-workers (who owned vinyl turntables hooked to vacuum tube amps), but I have a decent ear.
Given, I haven't tried to hook it up for 5.1 surround, but I don't game and, aside from instructional DVDs, I'll use the hi-def big screen in the living room for my home theater experience.
- Greg
More to the point, though, I seem to recall on numerous occasiona that Bezos has argued against certain types of patents and for patent reform. His justification for most of these patents is to get the patent filed before someone else does and then tries to extort Amazon. Essentially, he claims to be filing as a defensive measure, not offensive.
I could have a very bad memory, but except for the "one-click" patent, I can't recall another patent Amazon has actively enforced.
- Greg
That way, whenever anybody in the world kicks somebody in the nuts, they also have to kick Jeff as well.
I have been using /. for years and this is the first time I've posted a "mod parent up" post. Holy crap. It almost made me force liquid through my nose.
- Greg
Remember that the site in this article was getting hit with over 3 gigabits of traffic a second under the pressure of a DDoS composed of an estimated 35k bots. Now imagine that your average dedicated server account comes with a 10 megabit pipe. It would take a lot fewer consistent requests to slow everything to a crawl. And often these sites are on shared servers, competing with anywhere from 5-200 other sites for the pipe and the processing power.
And in most cases they don't need it. Why would a site used to getting 20,000 hits a day put out the money for capacity 200,000 hits in a few minutes? They try to keep enough capacity to handle 20-50% daily usage spikes, sometimes maybe even 100%, but not a gazillion percent.
Slashdot has big pipes, multiple servers, load balancing and various optimizations that your average site doesn't. They even shut down certain functions under really heavy load (ever notice that sometimes the site search is theirs and sometimes it routes you to Google?). But except when being slashdotted, the average site doesn't need those.
- Greg
Of course, Microsoft is coming out with their own alternative. It's called Coercion.
- Greg