Just because Princeton has higher tuition rates doesn't mean that the majority of students don't receive financial aid. If anything, MORE students receive it rather than at a cheaper school because it's needed more.
FYI, Princeton made headlines in NJ in the past year or two for a plan to drastically increase financial aid (which is already pretty good to begin with - A family friend of mine is going to Princeton on a pretty good package.), in order to directly compete with cheaper schools.
Note: You still have to be Really Damn Smart to get in. But Princeton, along with all of the other Ivies, are need-blind. (The exception is Brown - Unless things have changed they are the only non need-blind Ivy - Now THAT is a rich kids' school!)
It probably helps that Ice T has plenty of other (and likely FAR more lucrative) sources of income.
His regular role on Law and Order: SVU alone is probably far more income than he was making in the music industry. Add to that the few movies he's been in.
(I don't really remember which movies those were, but I have to admit he seems to be doing well on L&O:SVU)
If you're good at math/science in general, in a lot of parts of the country, the job market for high school teachers is pretty good. Schools are DESPERATE and hiring vastly underqualified math/science educators.
HS teacher is my backup if this job ever goes sour. Will give me more time to focus on my hobbies and maybe start up a small business for myself once things improve.
I'm not sure, but unless their mail server forbids sending with a return address other than bellsouth.net (Most allow this as long as it comes from a customer IP), the server can't tell the difference between a machine running Sendmail with a DS entry and a machine that's sending the mail directly from Outlook, Eudora, etc.
Or find the equivalent for whatever mail server you want to run.
The DS entry is your friend.
Read: I run a local mail server to handle all of my family's outgoing mail, but all mail from that machine is relayed to the outside world via my ISP. I have had no problems with getting blocked despite being in a Cablevision OptimumOnline subnet, which is on numerous dialup/DSL/cablemodem endpoint blocklists.
Nothing says you can't simply use a smarthost (DS) entry on your sendmail config. That's what I do on my machine. That gives me full local control of outgoing mail, while having my ISP's mailserver handle the final delivery.
This gives you all the control you need, while using your ISP's server in the end. It's the way you SHOULD be doing it.
Face it, dialup and cable/DSL endpoints are already blocked by a LOT of ISPs. If anything, AOL is behind the game in this regard. I would've thought that most Slashdotters that were decent mail admins were already using dialup/DSL blacklists on their mailservers.
If you were at all familiar with RedHat versioning, you'd know that all revisions within a major version are binary compatible with each other, and major versions are not guaranteed to be binary compatible with each other. (Some may work fine, other binaries won't. Mostly this pertains to C++ apps, but in RH9, this pertained to anything that used threading.) RedHat decided that it was best for the distribution to move to a new threading architecture. It happened that this new threading system broke binary compatibility with RedHat 8.
As a result, consistent with RedHat's versioning policies, it was called RedHat 9.
I will admit that it does have a fringe marketing benefit, but the main reason for 9 was that it broke binary compatibility with RH8.
Don't know about 1280x720, but at 960x540, I cannot tell the difference between 2-pass encoded WM9 and 2-pass DivX.
1-pass is a different story - WM9's encoder defaults seem to be more flexible with a wider variety of videos, so WM9 excels when you only use one-pass encoding. But as soon as you use two-pass encoding, WM9 loses all of its advantages.
(Where did I get a good 960x540 source? WCBS-DT's HD broadcasts, I record using my HDTV tuner card and then transcode while throwing out every other field and scaling horizontal res down by two to end up at half the vertical and half the horizontal resolution of the original 1080i broadcast.)
At least that's the max bitrate for TMPGenc when encoding DVD format, and I think for transcode too.
Either way, 8 Mbits/sec will allow you to fit about 80 minutes of video onto a single-layer DVD. (20 minutes takes around 1.1-1.2 GB at 8 Mbits/sec, single-layer DVD is 4.7 GB.) A dual-layer DVD will be able to hold 160 minutes at the same bitrate.
If the mastering is done well, there is a point to progressive-scan DVD players. NTSC is approx. 720x480 interlaced, and almost always 4:3.
A properly mastered 16:9 anamorphic DVD is 720x480 progressive scan, which will look quite a bit better than NTSC if scaled and displayed properly.
As to TV shows looking/not looking super-badass, it depends on how they were mastered. Expect CSI to look super-badass on DVD compared to any analog broadcast if the master is decent, as CSI is originally filmed in widescreen on 35mm film. Expect CSI on DVD to look like super ass-crap if you're used to it being broadcasted in 1080i HD like I am. (I have an HDTV tuner card, and display to my 18" LCD. It looks stunning even though I'm throwing away a good chunk of pixels, scaling 1920x1080i down to 1280x720p.)
Other TV shows won't look as good. For example, CBS's film transfers of JAG are nowhere near as good as their CSI and CSI:Miami film transfers. Might not notice a difference for DVD, but CSI and CSI:Miami look sooo much better than JAG on my WCBS-DT. I've heard that ABC's HD mastering of Alias and WB's mastering of Smallville are also excellent, unfortunately neither are broadcasting in HD in my area currently. (They used to, before 9/11. After that, it was all most of those stations could do just to get on the air with analog. Fortunately the Bayonne tower has finally been aproved for construction...)
WM9 is nothing more than a hacked-up version of MPEG-4. Its only apparent advantage is that the default WM9 encoder is a bit more flexible/less picky as far as bitrate control than other MPEG-4 implementations (XviD/DivX). Yes, DivX is a bit of a hacked-up version of MPEG-4 itself, but less so and the format is much more open. (See XviD).
For a while I believed that WM9 was superior to DivX for encoding home movies, although I had a feeling that there was something weird going on as I'd gotten much better results in the past. It turns out that the RC defaults of DivX 5.0.x aren't good for converting homemade DV video shot in low light. Once I started doing two-pass encoding in DivX, I could no longer tell the difference between WM9 and DivX. (Note: two-pass encoding did not benefit at all in WM9.)
So for one-pass encoding, WM9 is superior. For two-pass encoding, WM9 gains nothing and DivX catches up in quality.
Many.EXE files that encapsulate media files are self-extracting ZIPs. Under Linux, try "unzip foo.exe".
Believe it or not this will work on a pretty good percentage of EXEs that are self-extracting archives. (Although that percentage seems to be slowly decreasing.)
All you need to do is install one.deb for CSS support and vlc will play DVDs. You can either install it on each startup instance you want DVD support, or remaster the.ISO.
One disadvantage is that unless you install to your HD, you will need your DVD drive to be seperate from your boot CD drive.
Is that there is a vaccine for measles and people are routinely vaccinated against it.
Same for polio and many of the other worst nasties. Same for smallpox before it was considered near-extinct to the point where it wasn't a threat. (Damn the shitty security at Russia's storage facility...)
I had an apartmentmate with a 7500. There was a cover on the bottom of the machine that kept falling off and exposing (I think) either the RAM or the battery. I looked at the way it was fastened and it was a horrible design.
My 8200's covers are much more securely fastened.:)
WinCE is getting its butt kicked in the embedded marketplace. It's doing so-so in the PDA market, but PDAs are only a tiny fraction of the embedded market.
Simply put, WinCE is too huge and bloated for many embedded apps. (Someone said the kernel is 1 MB - That's a monstrosity in this particular market, where every kilobyte counts.)
Linux is a bit too big for some applications, but for the mid-sized embedded systems, it blows away CE. The embedded market is a place where Linux has been making HUGE inroads and MS has been going nowhere.
In addition, it sounds like some parts of CE are licensed from other developers. i.e. what MS is releasing is crippleware. MS wants to pull a BSD (i.e. remove all of the code they don't control and rewrite it), but they're too lazy. So they want other people to do the work for them.
Other people fix their code, MS retains all control. Those other people will have to be extremely careful about ever working on another OS in the future.
My dad, 3-4 friends at my alma mater, and my research lab there all had Inspiron 8000s, all of them were rock solid and we loved them.
4 years ago or so (Inspiron 7500s for example), Dells did suck, they were in a major quality slump during my sophomore year in college, but starting around the time of the Inspiron 8000 series they shaped up a lot.
Toshibas were good deals, but all were a bit on the flimsy side. This may have changed, I stopped looking at Toshibas long ago.
Acers - I never liked their form factors, and IMHO their tech support *sucks* (My old laptop was a TI/Acer Travelmate, that thing was a real mess.)
Apple - Good quality, but their displays lag behind PC laptops. And if this guy's GF is a PC person, then Apple isn't really an option.
IBM - Expensive, but I will agree with you here, the only thing tougher than a ThinkPad is a Panasonic ToughBook. ThinkPads seem to last forever. (I worked in the computer sales/service department of my campus store a few years back. The average age of IBMs coming in for service was 2-3 years or more older than everything else, and most of the problems they did have were minor ones or user-created problems like a Coke spilled in the keyboard.)
A lot of the smaller laptops aren't as small and portable as they seem. Most of them achieve small size by making their peripherals external. If you want those peripherals when you travel, if anything they're worse than a larger integrated all-in-one unit. (Size of original peripherals plus external enclosure plus cables.)
Whether you get her a Dell or an Apple depends on what she's used to. If she's a PC person, get her a Dell. I have an Inspiron 8200 and love it. It's big and a bit heavy, but it has EVERYTHING, including a screen that blows away all of the Apple screens except maybe the 17" one. (Bad screens are one of the biggest problems the Apples have... The 17 inch PB only has a resolution of 1440x900, the Dell 8x00 series has *two* different 15" 1600x1200 screens - If you go with Dell, *get the UltraSharp version of the UXGA screen* - The difference between the USharp screens and the original one in contrast and viewing angle is like night and day. (My dad has the original one on his 8000, although he prefers the lowered viewing angle for business confidentiality reasons, less chance of someone seeing his work on an airplane.)
I love my 8200. A number of friends had 8000s in college and loved them, my dad likes his 8000, and my research lab in school had an 8000 that all of the researchers coveted.
The scenario you mentioned was a bit of overkill - Nothing that a Knoppix CD couldn't have done in a fraction of the time. (Boot up, copy to floppy/network/whatever, rather than taking out the HD, risking frying it with static, and finding a *third* machine)
A cool one nonetheless, though.:) Just not as sturdy and reliable as I'd like it to be. (CDs can be dropped at heights that not even a Panasonic ToughBook could survive.)
I hope that soon someone writes an SBP-2 endpoint driver for Linux. (i.e. not a driver to access SBP-2 devices, but to ACT like an SBP-2 device.)
For some people it's not about weight loss. For diabetics, it can be the only option for refreshment. (One can get sick of plain old water quite quickly.)
Aspartame (And relatives such as acesulfame-K and Splenda) is the difference between diabetes being a major and possibly intolerable lifestyle change and a minor annoyance. (I'm diabetic, I have plenty of experience with this.)
Everything I've read about aspartame appeared to be complete paranoia due to it containin trace amounts of methanol, which is poisonous if too much is consumed. Now, if you fed a rat a few grams of aspartame on a regular basis, maybe that would hurt it. But aspartame is so sweet that in a liter of diet soda there are probably only micrograms in there. Just living within 50 miles of New York City is a greater health risk.
Or does the book cover easier ways to embed C into Perl, such as SWIG.
SWIG rocks. SWIG is your friend. I'll agree that extending Perl by embedding C is hell and the documentation sucks, but SWIG makes it all (relatively) easy. With SWIG all you have to do is be careful about data types. (Mainly, you can't directly pass a Perl array to C code, you have to convert it into a C array first. How to handle situations like this with SWIG is well documented.)
I spent five days trying to figure out how to embed some C functions into Perl. Then I discovered SWIG and was up and running in 3-4 hours.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because Princeton has higher tuition rates doesn't mean that the majority of students don't receive financial aid. If anything, MORE students receive it rather than at a cheaper school because it's needed more.
FYI, Princeton made headlines in NJ in the past year or two for a plan to drastically increase financial aid (which is already pretty good to begin with - A family friend of mine is going to Princeton on a pretty good package.), in order to directly compete with cheaper schools.
Note: You still have to be Really Damn Smart to get in. But Princeton, along with all of the other Ivies, are need-blind. (The exception is Brown - Unless things have changed they are the only non need-blind Ivy - Now THAT is a rich kids' school!)
It probably helps that Ice T has plenty of other (and likely FAR more lucrative) sources of income.
His regular role on Law and Order: SVU alone is probably far more income than he was making in the music industry. Add to that the few movies he's been in.
(I don't really remember which movies those were, but I have to admit he seems to be doing well on L&O:SVU)
If you're good at math/science in general, in a lot of parts of the country, the job market for high school teachers is pretty good. Schools are DESPERATE and hiring vastly underqualified math/science educators.
HS teacher is my backup if this job ever goes sour. Will give me more time to focus on my hobbies and maybe start up a small business for myself once things improve.
I'm not sure, but unless their mail server forbids sending with a return address other than bellsouth.net (Most allow this as long as it comes from a customer IP), the server can't tell the difference between a machine running Sendmail with a DS entry and a machine that's sending the mail directly from Outlook, Eudora, etc.
Or find the equivalent for whatever mail server you want to run.
The DS entry is your friend.
Read: I run a local mail server to handle all of my family's outgoing mail, but all mail from that machine is relayed to the outside world via my ISP. I have had no problems with getting blocked despite being in a Cablevision OptimumOnline subnet, which is on numerous dialup/DSL/cablemodem endpoint blocklists.
Nothing says you can't simply use a smarthost (DS) entry on your sendmail config. That's what I do on my machine. That gives me full local control of outgoing mail, while having my ISP's mailserver handle the final delivery.
This gives you all the control you need, while using your ISP's server in the end. It's the way you SHOULD be doing it.
Face it, dialup and cable/DSL endpoints are already blocked by a LOT of ISPs. If anything, AOL is behind the game in this regard. I would've thought that most Slashdotters that were decent mail admins were already using dialup/DSL blacklists on their mailservers.
Until you want to play UT2003. Oh wait, it won't work because ATI's driver support blows (read: missing S3TC support.)
Same with NV drivers. You're welcome to use the open-source drivers, but if you actually want performance, you'll have to go binary-only.
Not sure, but I believe NVidia used to be part of STMicro.
As far as RH going straight from 8->9
If you were at all familiar with RedHat versioning, you'd know that all revisions within a major version are binary compatible with each other, and major versions are not guaranteed to be binary compatible with each other. (Some may work fine, other binaries won't. Mostly this pertains to C++ apps, but in RH9, this pertained to anything that used threading.) RedHat decided that it was best for the distribution to move to a new threading architecture. It happened that this new threading system broke binary compatibility with RedHat 8.
As a result, consistent with RedHat's versioning policies, it was called RedHat 9.
I will admit that it does have a fringe marketing benefit, but the main reason for 9 was that it broke binary compatibility with RH8.
Both of those were at 4 Mbits/sec video bitrate. (Approx. 20-22 minutes of video on a 700M CD.)
At 2 Mbits/sec (Twice the length on the same CD), both start to show artifacting, I'd say about equally.
Don't know about 1280x720, but at 960x540, I cannot tell the difference between 2-pass encoded WM9 and 2-pass DivX.
1-pass is a different story - WM9's encoder defaults seem to be more flexible with a wider variety of videos, so WM9 excels when you only use one-pass encoding. But as soon as you use two-pass encoding, WM9 loses all of its advantages.
(Where did I get a good 960x540 source? WCBS-DT's HD broadcasts, I record using my HDTV tuner card and then transcode while throwing out every other field and scaling horizontal res down by two to end up at half the vertical and half the horizontal resolution of the original 1080i broadcast.)
At least that's the max bitrate for TMPGenc when encoding DVD format, and I think for transcode too.
Either way, 8 Mbits/sec will allow you to fit about 80 minutes of video onto a single-layer DVD. (20 minutes takes around 1.1-1.2 GB at 8 Mbits/sec, single-layer DVD is 4.7 GB.) A dual-layer DVD will be able to hold 160 minutes at the same bitrate.
It's designed to guard against page-widening posts.
If the mastering is done well, there is a point to progressive-scan DVD players. NTSC is approx. 720x480 interlaced, and almost always 4:3.
A properly mastered 16:9 anamorphic DVD is 720x480 progressive scan, which will look quite a bit better than NTSC if scaled and displayed properly.
As to TV shows looking/not looking super-badass, it depends on how they were mastered. Expect CSI to look super-badass on DVD compared to any analog broadcast if the master is decent, as CSI is originally filmed in widescreen on 35mm film. Expect CSI on DVD to look like super ass-crap if you're used to it being broadcasted in 1080i HD like I am. (I have an HDTV tuner card, and display to my 18" LCD. It looks stunning even though I'm throwing away a good chunk of pixels, scaling 1920x1080i down to 1280x720p.)
Other TV shows won't look as good. For example, CBS's film transfers of JAG are nowhere near as good as their CSI and CSI:Miami film transfers. Might not notice a difference for DVD, but CSI and CSI:Miami look sooo much better than JAG on my WCBS-DT. I've heard that ABC's HD mastering of Alias and WB's mastering of Smallville are also excellent, unfortunately neither are broadcasting in HD in my area currently. (They used to, before 9/11. After that, it was all most of those stations could do just to get on the air with analog. Fortunately the Bayonne tower has finally been aproved for construction...)
WM9 is nothing more than a hacked-up version of MPEG-4. Its only apparent advantage is that the default WM9 encoder is a bit more flexible/less picky as far as bitrate control than other MPEG-4 implementations (XviD/DivX). Yes, DivX is a bit of a hacked-up version of MPEG-4 itself, but less so and the format is much more open. (See XviD).
For a while I believed that WM9 was superior to DivX for encoding home movies, although I had a feeling that there was something weird going on as I'd gotten much better results in the past. It turns out that the RC defaults of DivX 5.0.x aren't good for converting homemade DV video shot in low light. Once I started doing two-pass encoding in DivX, I could no longer tell the difference between WM9 and DivX. (Note: two-pass encoding did not benefit at all in WM9.)
So for one-pass encoding, WM9 is superior. For two-pass encoding, WM9 gains nothing and DivX catches up in quality.
Many .EXE files that encapsulate media files are self-extracting ZIPs. Under Linux, try "unzip foo.exe".
Believe it or not this will work on a pretty good percentage of EXEs that are self-extracting archives. (Although that percentage seems to be slowly decreasing.)
All you need to do is install one .deb for CSS support and vlc will play DVDs. You can either install it on each startup instance you want DVD support, or remaster the .ISO.
One disadvantage is that unless you install to your HD, you will need your DVD drive to be seperate from your boot CD drive.
Is that there is a vaccine for measles and people are routinely vaccinated against it.
Same for polio and many of the other worst nasties. Same for smallpox before it was considered near-extinct to the point where it wasn't a threat. (Damn the shitty security at Russia's storage facility...)
I had an apartmentmate with a 7500. There was a cover on the bottom of the machine that kept falling off and exposing (I think) either the RAM or the battery. I looked at the way it was fastened and it was a horrible design.
:)
My 8200's covers are much more securely fastened.
The basic idea:
WinCE is getting its butt kicked in the embedded marketplace. It's doing so-so in the PDA market, but PDAs are only a tiny fraction of the embedded market.
Simply put, WinCE is too huge and bloated for many embedded apps. (Someone said the kernel is 1 MB - That's a monstrosity in this particular market, where every kilobyte counts.)
Linux is a bit too big for some applications, but for the mid-sized embedded systems, it blows away CE. The embedded market is a place where Linux has been making HUGE inroads and MS has been going nowhere.
In addition, it sounds like some parts of CE are licensed from other developers. i.e. what MS is releasing is crippleware. MS wants to pull a BSD (i.e. remove all of the code they don't control and rewrite it), but they're too lazy. So they want other people to do the work for them.
Other people fix their code, MS retains all control. Those other people will have to be extremely careful about ever working on another OS in the future.
And it works perfectly. (Inspiron 8200)
My dad, 3-4 friends at my alma mater, and my research lab there all had Inspiron 8000s, all of them were rock solid and we loved them.
4 years ago or so (Inspiron 7500s for example), Dells did suck, they were in a major quality slump during my sophomore year in college, but starting around the time of the Inspiron 8000 series they shaped up a lot.
Toshibas were good deals, but all were a bit on the flimsy side. This may have changed, I stopped looking at Toshibas long ago.
Acers - I never liked their form factors, and IMHO their tech support *sucks* (My old laptop was a TI/Acer Travelmate, that thing was a real mess.)
Apple - Good quality, but their displays lag behind PC laptops. And if this guy's GF is a PC person, then Apple isn't really an option.
IBM - Expensive, but I will agree with you here, the only thing tougher than a ThinkPad is a Panasonic ToughBook. ThinkPads seem to last forever. (I worked in the computer sales/service department of my campus store a few years back. The average age of IBMs coming in for service was 2-3 years or more older than everything else, and most of the problems they did have were minor ones or user-created problems like a Coke spilled in the keyboard.)
A lot of the smaller laptops aren't as small and portable as they seem. Most of them achieve small size by making their peripherals external. If you want those peripherals when you travel, if anything they're worse than a larger integrated all-in-one unit. (Size of original peripherals plus external enclosure plus cables.)
Whether you get her a Dell or an Apple depends on what she's used to. If she's a PC person, get her a Dell. I have an Inspiron 8200 and love it. It's big and a bit heavy, but it has EVERYTHING, including a screen that blows away all of the Apple screens except maybe the 17" one. (Bad screens are one of the biggest problems the Apples have... The 17 inch PB only has a resolution of 1440x900, the Dell 8x00 series has *two* different 15" 1600x1200 screens - If you go with Dell, *get the UltraSharp version of the UXGA screen* - The difference between the USharp screens and the original one in contrast and viewing angle is like night and day. (My dad has the original one on his 8000, although he prefers the lowered viewing angle for business confidentiality reasons, less chance of someone seeing his work on an airplane.)
I love my 8200. A number of friends had 8000s in college and loved them, my dad likes his 8000, and my research lab in school had an 8000 that all of the researchers coveted.
The scenario you mentioned was a bit of overkill - Nothing that a Knoppix CD couldn't have done in a fraction of the time. (Boot up, copy to floppy/network/whatever, rather than taking out the HD, risking frying it with static, and finding a *third* machine)
:) Just not as sturdy and reliable as I'd like it to be. (CDs can be dropped at heights that not even a Panasonic ToughBook could survive.)
A cool one nonetheless, though.
I hope that soon someone writes an SBP-2 endpoint driver for Linux. (i.e. not a driver to access SBP-2 devices, but to ACT like an SBP-2 device.)
For some people it's not about weight loss. For diabetics, it can be the only option for refreshment. (One can get sick of plain old water quite quickly.)
Aspartame (And relatives such as acesulfame-K and Splenda) is the difference between diabetes being a major and possibly intolerable lifestyle change and a minor annoyance. (I'm diabetic, I have plenty of experience with this.)
Everything I've read about aspartame appeared to be complete paranoia due to it containin trace amounts of methanol, which is poisonous if too much is consumed. Now, if you fed a rat a few grams of aspartame on a regular basis, maybe that would hurt it. But aspartame is so sweet that in a liter of diet soda there are probably only micrograms in there. Just living within 50 miles of New York City is a greater health risk.
Or does the book cover easier ways to embed C into Perl, such as SWIG.
SWIG rocks. SWIG is your friend. I'll agree that extending Perl by embedding C is hell and the documentation sucks, but SWIG makes it all (relatively) easy. With SWIG all you have to do is be careful about data types. (Mainly, you can't directly pass a Perl array to C code, you have to convert it into a C array first. How to handle situations like this with SWIG is well documented.)
I spent five days trying to figure out how to embed some C functions into Perl. Then I discovered SWIG and was up and running in 3-4 hours.