I agree that 99.9% of animated gifs are junk, but I've seen some amazing things done with 50x50 forum avatars - mini anime movies done entirely freehand and fitting in under 100K... admittedly, though, although they're wonderful to look at, I do have to use Nuke Anything (or similar plugins) to be able to actually read the forum posts =P
Oh, before anyone tries the stage-lighting thing: it *worked*, but the plug got pretty hot and eventually the circuit breakers tripped. The problem was solved by splitting the load over two plugs on opposite sides of the stage =P
Ah, the days of helping out with school stage tech. I still don't think the music dept. has forgiven me for blowing up two of their (old, crappy, faulty-but-not-diagnosed-until-they-failed) PA amps in one night...
A couple of those, connected via heatpipe to a hotplate at the top of the case, would make an excellent hot-plate for a coffee or tea pot =)
As for the plugs - well, there's some way to go yet. At the moment, power supplies are on the order of 5-600W. An electric heater can put out up to 3000 or so watts.
I used to run a constantly-on heater, two PCs, three monitors, some random home networking equipment and a desk lamp all off a series of four-way power bars connected through a single 13A 230V UK plug. The plug didn't even get warm.
I've seen a small stage lighting rig - drawing tens of thousands of watts, at least - run off a single UK plug. Those things are insanely over-engineered for the loads that usually go through them.
That said, yes, looking for more efficient processors is a Good Thing. Even if it would be kinda cool to be able to throw away your case lighting and rely instead on the soft cherry-red glow coming from your heatsink...
Heh. Here in the UK a 128kbps/64kbps cable connection counts as broadband... yay for government redefining the term so they can say "We've ensured over 75% available broadband coverage for the UK!"...
Actually, if the user is a dialup, ISDN or slow cable user, the upgrade does cost. The monetary cost isn't as much as buying a copy of WinXP, but downloading takes time. Metered-by-the-minute dialup connections still exist.
I run Debian on three machines at home. It's fantastic, but even on a 150kbps cable line* upgrading is pretty slow - each machine needs about 200Mb of updates every month or two.
I was installing Windows XP for a dialup household the other week. I'd forgotten just how slow dialup was - even downloading Firefox and Adaware took almost an hour. Windows Update took most of a day just for the critical patches.
Admittedly, you can of course get away without upgrading anything unless it's necessary.
As for speed - I love Gnome and KDE, and I love the apps that go with them... but even on a modern machine, they're not particularly speedy. Going from X-with-a-window-manager-and-apps to a full KDE or Gnome environment is something of a shock.
*"150 kbps cable?!" - yeah, I'm in Britain, where "broadband" == anything faster than a modem...
Rabbits must have some sort of instinct when it comes to cables. We had a couple of rabbits who loved to chew cables. We went through a couple of phones, and many extension cables, but for the mains cables we couldn't replace, I got the job of rewiring around the nibbled areas.
The refridgerator cable went from being a meter long to being about ten cm long, in three or four rewirings. When you have to pull a full 5.5 foot fridge out from the wall every time the rabbits get behind it, it really doesn't improve your opinion of them...
The thing is, in all that chewing, they never got fried. They even managed to get down to the copper a couple of times, but they must have managed to hit the earth wire. Lucky rabbits.
I'm also wearing a pair of headphones which suffered the rabbit treatment. Soldering ultra-narrow-gauge headphone cable *really* isn't fun...
What, exactly, *is* a progressive scan DVD player?
Also, as someone in the UK, reading an article that talks about the back of a DVD player having 'all the usual ports' and not seeing a SCART socket on there is really weird =P
SCART is great... no idea why it's not in use over there. The only downside is the bulkiness and fragile pins in the sockets, but that's offset by the fact that it will transfer basically anything over a single cable.
Should really be "An.avi is just a.divx with a different extension. A bit like.wav can be.mp3 with a different extension." -.wav files can contain any type of compressed audio, as well as raw audio data, but.mp3 should only contain mp3-codec-compressed audio. Similarly,.avi can contain any type of compressed or uncompressed video. They're both RIFF-type files, where the content type is identified by the header of each chunk of data, rather than the extension.
I installed Firefox 0.8 for my dad after his machine got hosed by spyware. No extensions, since he's an IE user: the base browser has more functionality than basic IE as it is. The only thing I changed from the default install was to add a 'Go' button by the URL box. His favourites from IE imported with a couple of clicks, and he adapted to the browser with no bother whatsoever (well, apart from me explaining that 'Favourites' was now called 'Bookmarks'...)
I've never had a situation where I couldn't get Firefox working right out of the 'box'. The only times it's ever broken for me were related to bogus extensions.
The thing about Opera that I found (after using it for several months - I even registered it) is that although it comes with an awful lot of features, some of those don't quite work the way I want them to. With Firefox, if something doesn't work the way I want it to, chances are that someone else wants it to work differently too, and has coded up an extension to do so. Similarly, there's no way that Opera could have included all the features that every single user wanted, whereas Firefox has many extensions that are only of use to a small group of users (for instance, there's an extension written specifically for SomethingAwful forum mods...)
I installed Firefox 0.8 for my dad after his machine got hosed by spyware. No extensions, since he's an IE user: the base browser has more functionality than basic IE as it is. The only thing I changed from the default install was to add a 'Go' button by the URL box. His favourites from IE imported with a couple of clicks, and he adapted to the browser with no bother whatsoever (well, apart from me explaining that 'Favourites' was now called 'Bookmarks'...)
I've never had a situation where I couldn't get Firefox working right out of the 'box'. The only times it's ever broken for me were related to bogus extensions.
The thing about Opera that I found (after using it for several months - I even registered it) is that although it comes with an awful lot of features, some of those don't quite work the way I want them to. With Firefox, if something doesn't work the way I want it to, chances are that someone else wants it to work differently too, and has coded up an extension to do so. Similarly, there's no way that Opera could have included all the features that every single user wanted, whereas Firefox has many extensions that are only of use to a small group of users (for instance, there's an extension written specifically for SomethingAwful forum mods...)
If I recall, wasn't there a lawsuit against TIVO at one point, from TV companies who were pissed off that it allowed consumers to skip watching the ads?
Personally, I don't mind ads all that much - as long as they're interesting and not too intrusive. I like TV ads that make me smile because they're clever or nicely constructed. I hate TV ads with announcers that think shouting is the best way to make people notice their products. I like web ads such as Absolut's Flash series a while back, which had cool interactivity, but would just sit still and do nothing if you ignored them.
Now, if only everyone hired advertisers who did that sort of thing, rather than paying some dumb-ass who thinks that they can sell a product by irritating consumers to death (eg: pink/green flashing or jiggling banners)...
The Uni I go to (Strathclyde, Scotland) recently renamed their CS degree to CIS, renaming the entire CS dept. with it. As far as I know, though, the content of the degree hasn't changed...
My regular haunt in Uni is a Sun lab, but I find the keyboards rather irritating, because of the Control in the 'wrong' place. The thing is, although it's useful for VIM, it makes using ctrl-[z|x|c|v] really awkward because of the requirement to rotate the hand about 20-30 degrees or use strange finger-tucked-under-hand positions.
I have to agree about the coolness of compose, however: I have the 'Windows Context Menu' key on my Linux box mapped to Compose, and although I rarely use it, it's a wonderful thing to have handy.
I wish I knew what the 'Help' key on the Sun keyboard was meant to do, though. Neither it, nor the unmarked key in the upper left, actually do anything (on the machines in the lab, running Solaris with KDE)
Ah, well, at least I'm used to switching key layouts, considering I regularly switch between my (US layout) laptop, a UK-ish-layout laptop-style keyboard on my desktop, UK-layout regular keyboard on Linux box, and Sun keyboard at Uni...
...to scare people that know nothing about software, open source, operating systems, etc.
Hey, you are talking about "U.S. leadership" there. This is the stated target audience. A little respect, please.
Perhaps "...to scare people that know nothing..." would be more appropriate?
</flamebait>;)
Seriously, though, if I were a US high-heidyin who came from a non-technical background, and I were handed this report, I would probably have a good chance of trusting it over the opinions of a load of 'fanatical left-wing rabble who believe all software should be free'.
It's not my opinion, obviously - I'm all for Open Source - but I would not be surprised if people would be more inclined to believe a publication that came out in book form, written by a leader of an Institute, rather than anything from the great nebulous cloud of fact, FUD, opinion, bullshit, informed and uninformed debate and flamewars that can be found online.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that 99.9% of animated gifs are junk, but I've seen some amazing things done with 50x50 forum avatars - mini anime movies done entirely freehand and fitting in under 100K... admittedly, though, although they're wonderful to look at, I do have to use Nuke Anything (or similar plugins) to be able to actually read the forum posts =P
Oh, before anyone tries the stage-lighting thing: it *worked*, but the plug got pretty hot and eventually the circuit breakers tripped. The problem was solved by splitting the load over two plugs on opposite sides of the stage =P
Ah, the days of helping out with school stage tech. I still don't think the music dept. has forgiven me for blowing up two of their (old, crappy, faulty-but-not-diagnosed-until-they-failed) PA amps in one night...
A couple of those, connected via heatpipe to a hotplate at the top of the case, would make an excellent hot-plate for a coffee or tea pot =)
As for the plugs - well, there's some way to go yet. At the moment, power supplies are on the order of 5-600W. An electric heater can put out up to 3000 or so watts.
I used to run a constantly-on heater, two PCs, three monitors, some random home networking equipment and a desk lamp all off a series of four-way power bars connected through a single 13A 230V UK plug. The plug didn't even get warm.
I've seen a small stage lighting rig - drawing tens of thousands of watts, at least - run off a single UK plug. Those things are insanely over-engineered for the loads that usually go through them.
That said, yes, looking for more efficient processors is a Good Thing. Even if it would be kinda cool to be able to throw away your case lighting and rely instead on the soft cherry-red glow coming from your heatsink...
Heh. Here in the UK a 128kbps/64kbps cable connection counts as broadband... yay for government redefining the term so they can say "We've ensured over 75% available broadband coverage for the UK!"...
Actually, if the user is a dialup, ISDN or slow cable user, the upgrade does cost. The monetary cost isn't as much as buying a copy of WinXP, but downloading takes time. Metered-by-the-minute dialup connections still exist.
... but even on a modern machine, they're not particularly speedy. Going from X-with-a-window-manager-and-apps to a full KDE or Gnome environment is something of a shock.
I run Debian on three machines at home. It's fantastic, but even on a 150kbps cable line* upgrading is pretty slow - each machine needs about 200Mb of updates every month or two.
I was installing Windows XP for a dialup household the other week. I'd forgotten just how slow dialup was - even downloading Firefox and Adaware took almost an hour. Windows Update took most of a day just for the critical patches.
Admittedly, you can of course get away without upgrading anything unless it's necessary.
As for speed - I love Gnome and KDE, and I love the apps that go with them
*"150 kbps cable?!" - yeah, I'm in Britain, where "broadband" == anything faster than a modem...
Rabbits must have some sort of instinct when it comes to cables. We had a couple of rabbits who loved to chew cables. We went through a couple of phones, and many extension cables, but for the mains cables we couldn't replace, I got the job of rewiring around the nibbled areas.
The refridgerator cable went from being a meter long to being about ten cm long, in three or four rewirings. When you have to pull a full 5.5 foot fridge out from the wall every time the rabbits get behind it, it really doesn't improve your opinion of them...
The thing is, in all that chewing, they never got fried. They even managed to get down to the copper a couple of times, but they must have managed to hit the earth wire. Lucky rabbits.
I'm also wearing a pair of headphones which suffered the rabbit treatment. Soldering ultra-narrow-gauge headphone cable *really* isn't fun...
What, exactly, *is* a progressive scan DVD player?
... no idea why it's not in use over there. The only downside is the bulkiness and fragile pins in the sockets, but that's offset by the fact that it will transfer basically anything over a single cable.
Also, as someone in the UK, reading an article that talks about the back of a DVD player having 'all the usual ports' and not seeing a SCART socket on there is really weird =P
SCART is great
Should really be "An .avi is just a .divx with a different extension. A bit like .wav can be .mp3 with a different extension." - .wav files can contain any type of compressed audio, as well as raw audio data, but .mp3 should only contain mp3-codec-compressed audio. Similarly, .avi can contain any type of compressed or uncompressed video. They're both RIFF-type files, where the content type is identified by the header of each chunk of data, rather than the extension.
(Damn ... forgot to select plain text. )
I installed Firefox 0.8 for my dad after his machine got hosed by spyware. No extensions, since he's an IE user: the base browser has more functionality than basic IE as it is. The only thing I changed from the default install was to add a 'Go' button by the URL box. His favourites from IE imported with a couple of clicks, and he adapted to the browser with no bother whatsoever (well, apart from me explaining that 'Favourites' was now called 'Bookmarks'...)
I've never had a situation where I couldn't get Firefox working right out of the 'box'. The only times it's ever broken for me were related to bogus extensions.
The thing about Opera that I found (after using it for several months - I even registered it) is that although it comes with an awful lot of features, some of those don't quite work the way I want them to. With Firefox, if something doesn't work the way I want it to, chances are that someone else wants it to work differently too, and has coded up an extension to do so. Similarly, there's no way that Opera could have included all the features that every single user wanted, whereas Firefox has many extensions that are only of use to a small group of users (for instance, there's an extension written specifically for SomethingAwful forum mods...)
--
http://camtarn.org
I installed Firefox 0.8 for my dad after his machine got hosed by spyware. No extensions, since he's an IE user: the base browser has more functionality than basic IE as it is. The only thing I changed from the default install was to add a 'Go' button by the URL box. His favourites from IE imported with a couple of clicks, and he adapted to the browser with no bother whatsoever (well, apart from me explaining that 'Favourites' was now called 'Bookmarks'...) I've never had a situation where I couldn't get Firefox working right out of the 'box'. The only times it's ever broken for me were related to bogus extensions. The thing about Opera that I found (after using it for several months - I even registered it) is that although it comes with an awful lot of features, some of those don't quite work the way I want them to. With Firefox, if something doesn't work the way I want it to, chances are that someone else wants it to work differently too, and has coded up an extension to do so. Similarly, there's no way that Opera could have included all the features that every single user wanted, whereas Firefox has many extensions that are only of use to a small group of users (for instance, there's an extension written specifically for SomethingAwful forum mods...)
If I recall, wasn't there a lawsuit against TIVO at one point, from TV companies who were pissed off that it allowed consumers to skip watching the ads?
Personally, I don't mind ads all that much - as long as they're interesting and not too intrusive. I like TV ads that make me smile because they're clever or nicely constructed. I hate TV ads with announcers that think shouting is the best way to make people notice their products. I like web ads such as Absolut's Flash series a while back, which had cool interactivity, but would just sit still and do nothing if you ignored them.
Now, if only everyone hired advertisers who did that sort of thing, rather than paying some dumb-ass who thinks that they can sell a product by irritating consumers to death (eg: pink/green flashing or jiggling banners)...
The Uni I go to (Strathclyde, Scotland) recently renamed their CS degree to CIS, renaming the entire CS dept. with it. As far as I know, though, the content of the degree hasn't changed...
My regular haunt in Uni is a Sun lab, but I find the keyboards rather irritating, because of the Control in the 'wrong' place. The thing is, although it's useful for VIM, it makes using ctrl-[z|x|c|v] really awkward because of the requirement to rotate the hand about 20-30 degrees or use strange finger-tucked-under-hand positions.
I have to agree about the coolness of compose, however: I have the 'Windows Context Menu' key on my Linux box mapped to Compose, and although I rarely use it, it's a wonderful thing to have handy.
I wish I knew what the 'Help' key on the Sun keyboard was meant to do, though. Neither it, nor the unmarked key in the upper left, actually do anything (on the machines in the lab, running Solaris with KDE)
Ah, well, at least I'm used to switching key layouts, considering I regularly switch between my (US layout) laptop, a UK-ish-layout laptop-style keyboard on my desktop, UK-layout regular keyboard on Linux box, and Sun keyboard at Uni...
--
http://camtarn.org
Perhaps "...to scare people that know nothing..." would be more appropriate?
</flamebait> ;)
Seriously, though, if I were a US high-heidyin who came from a non-technical background, and I were handed this report, I would probably have a good chance of trusting it over the opinions of a load of 'fanatical left-wing rabble who believe all software should be free'.
It's not my opinion, obviously - I'm all for Open Source - but I would not be surprised if people would be more inclined to believe a publication that came out in book form, written by a leader of an Institute, rather than anything from the great nebulous cloud of fact, FUD, opinion, bullshit, informed and uninformed debate and flamewars that can be found online.