What's the news?.... I live in Carroll County Maryland. My provider is Adelphia... I've had 3Mbps down and 256 Kbps up since I got it. While I seldom really hit those speeds, I get close on most occasions. I don't remember ever being as slow as 1.5 Mbps down and they consistently provide well over 200 kbps up
and the Windows and Mac folks will think it's unformatted!
And this is a plus? THis just means my wife will put it in the machine, thinks its not formatted and format the damned thing. I am a computer geek and as such, one machine or another in my house always seems to be out of commission as I do something to it. She still uses floppies to store things like our household budget because at least she knows that that won't go away..
And finally a note on the electoral college -- you consider this anti-democratic, but it is there for a reason: in their wisdom, our Founding Fathers recognized that without such a mechanism, a few large states would govern the outcome of elections, and smaller states would have no voice at all. Doesn't sound very democratic, does it?
Our Founding Fathers thought that the average American was too stupid to make an informed decision and run their own government. The point of the electoral college was that you would vote for people smarter than you who would elect the President of the United States of America for you.
The same basic premise also goes for your legislators, while they are elected directly now, they were at one time chosen by your state government. Again, you elect people smarter than you to run your locality for you, they elect people smarter than themselves to run the country.
While electoral votes are not distributed exactly the same as actual voting population, (same as the number of senators + representatives from your state, since the number of representatives is determined by state population, its only the fixed number of senators that skews the numbers) but the same large states still can sway an election, either through electoral votes or popular votes. That is why you will see the candidates of all major parties campaign like crazy in California and New York, and they might make a stop in Alaska.
Its not a matter of the wisdom of our founding fathers, but the ignorance of our great-great-great-great (etc) grandfathers that caused this system. They simply thought the average American was too stupid, and you know what? They were right, and nothing has changed over the years.
That said. America is the worst country in the world, except for all the others
By all accounts, The original Star Wars was even fairly low grade sci-fi, but it struck a chord with kids at the time, and no wonder, it had the outerspace equivalents of everything kids (especially young boys) like, it had knights, sword, gunfights, dogfights, spaceships and monsters, elements of westerns, war movies, airplane fights and army battles. In reality, looking back at them today and even at the stories, they are hackneyed. Why do we love them still? Because our visions of the originals are clouded by nostalgia. Because we remember those times with fondness, so we go to see them. Its not wonder the kinds are not the big consumers of Star Wars, its not that good, and kids today have grown to expect better. We have nostalgia to make us want to see them, because we remember how great the orginal's special effects were at the time.
Kids today, however, have no nostalgia to fall back on. For them, its purely a matter of story and special effects, both or which are okay in AOTC, but nothign spectacular.
The real surprise is not that Spiderman beat Star Wars, the real surprise is that Star Wars is actually anywhere even close to holding its own, and this would not have been true in years past. It just so happens that the traditional mold of children and teenagers being the ones with the disposable income and driving movie sales is skewed. Gen X is large, and actually has a fairly large percentage of disposable income, more than people in theer demographic group in the past had.
The reason spiderman is kicking Star Wars but? simple, the special effects are good, the story is good. AOTC does nto measure up, but is still fairly decent. The only thing keeping it alive at all is the nostalgia factor, remove that, and Star Wars might as well be Howard the Duck
I have a 10000 x 10000 pixel cmyk image open in photoshop right now, as I browse, on a PIII/600 laptop with 192 megs of ram using photoshop 5.5 set to use no more than 70% of available ram.... An image of that size is 381.5 megs.... photoshop really likes to have 3x the picture's size in ram (one for the image, one for working space and one for undo purposes) so if you have a machine with 2 GB of ram and 70% allocated to photoshop, you would be working in real time, as it is, I can successfully manipulate an image that large scrolling around and making edits, even on a laptop.
As far as the Apple goes..... don't fall into that trap... A P4/2GHz with 2 GHz of Ram and the fastest 2d video card you can manage to get your hands on (lots of companies have not been pushing 2d performance lately, but there are some good ones out there, I have always liked ATIs cards for 2d performance/price ratio.
resolution (72 vs 300 dpi) is a non concern, a 10000 x 10000 pixel image is still the same file size regardless of resolution, the physical size can will be radically different dependant on the resolution in ppi, 300 being about 33x33 inches, and 72 being a little over 4 times that in each dimension, but its the file size/memory requirement that you need to deal with not physical size.
Sometimes Open Source is great, sometimes, there just is no substitute for the commercial offerings. I love GIMP, its a fantastic program, for what it does, but photoshop has been refined over a lot fo years into what it is, and for professional image manipulation, nothing can touch it (especially in the CMYK arena)
Lest anyone think I am just talking out of my ass, I spent 12 years working in printing, 9 of them doing desktop publishing/photo reoutching/typesetting and illustration work for commercial printers. My opinion? a nice P4/2+GHz or Athlon 2000+XP or better yet a dual setup if you can afford it, 2 GB Ram, a nice fast 2d video card and photoshop any version 5 or better (though my favorite is still 6.0)
Both NS and MS come out with competing formats for fonts for web pages at one time. Did this die the same horrible death as "Channels". I think MS's format used a program called WEFT to make fonts (web embedded font technology or some such) and was free. Netscape's used some technology developed by bitstream and I seem to remember the creation program being relatively expensive. Both worked quite well (at least on Mac and PC, I was not using linux at the time) What ever happened to this?
there are a lot of these type of games out there, look on that $10 shelf at your local CompUSA. I have picked up a lot of games that I played to death for only $10 or so. No, they don't have the most fabulous graphics you have ever seen, but some are pretty good, and they may not be the games that were just released (they came out a few months ago, or even a year ago, but I did not buy them then) you just have to look for them. The problem is that most want the $50 game for $10, not the $10 games.
Re:WMA is about 2x as compact as MP3....
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The only utilities that can encode wma files without the encryption are command line based utilities, right?
Wrong. you can use advanced WMA workshop under windows to make wma files. Very nice GUI support conversion to and from wma, wav, cda, mp3 (if you have lame installed), ogg... does resampling of existing files and even has batch conversion. Will optionally delete source files once its done to save space...everything you could want, except a linux version
I just bought a soul mp3 player. It has support for mp3 and wma files (which really do sound better at lower bitrates.. I'll put a 64kbps wma up against a 96kps mp3 any day, but not 2x better) the formware is upgradeable to support other formats..... give me a patch to use OGG files on it, and I will. Not because its better than WMA (which it is not, regardless of what you OSS zealots say) and not becuase I think everything MS is evil (WMA and WMV are fantastic formats) but because I don't want to see "windows only" as a standard for yet another anything.
Get the DSK, write the patch... I'll listen to OGG, not a problem. I would even be willing to transcode all my MP3s to OGG, but unless I can carry them with me in my car (without using my laptop) You don't have a chance
I have adelphia in Caroll County Maryland.... its all DHCP here buddy, so don't exepect to be able to connect to those servers once they change over.... I have been told that they may begin offering static IPs as an add on for an additional charge after the first of the year... I have similar issues and have not worked a way around it yet....still working on it though;-)
is the pre-cursor to the next generation of music device that eventually everyone will buy. When broadband is ubiquitous in 10 years or so, then instead of actually buying cds of music, which eventually someone finds a way to copy, you will just diap up the songs that you want from a share on a public facing server sanctioned by the RIAA. THe songs and number of times you hit the server gets logged by your IP, and you get billed for each play of the song. Wanna talk about a draconian scheme.
I guess when fiber to the home is a reality, video will be delivered the same way, this way you do not own the dvd, you merely select the film and your digital video device reaches out to the net and plays your music. You never have the ability to capture it in any other form......ingenious actually. Quite ingenious. Now when those cd recording appliances that they sell now and new tape decks are encoded to look for cues within the audio and stop the copy process (macrovision for music) the pieces will all be in place. A decent dsl/cable modem can do music today, and even video cd/vhs quality video... in the not to distant future, you will not have any media or any of your usic or video, and no way of copying it, and no way of actually playing it even if you do copy it (yes, I realize this is playing off your lan now, but its quite possible to make it only connect to certain servers)
select the ones under critical and hit download. They install automagically. been running 2k since it came out... Had IIS running on it since day 1....never been hit. Takes 5 minutes per week to run windows update.
Some time ago, third voice had their own way of modifying pages. When you had the lpugin installed, it simply asked third voice's server if there were comments about that page, then the plugin would modify the html to insert tags to display those comments. This I found unacceptable, so I wrote a little javascript that after tha pge had loaded, would go through the document links array and kill any links that pointed to thirdvoice and remove any graphics that came from third voice.... this worked wonderfully..... would it not be possible to have a jasvascript do the same thing...... create an array in the page somwhere containing allowable external links, then onLoad, loop through the pages links array, and if they are external, see if they are allowed, and if not, kill the links, otherwise leave it alone? sounds like it should be possible. Sicne I will never install XP on my machine, I have no real way of testing this, but if anyone out there has XP and can snag a page that smart tags are affecting, I will give it a shot and see if we can kill thems.
it can't be region 1. The article says The theatrical release is part of a promotion for the fall release of a DVD version. the region 1 dvd is already released. I already have it and have converted it to video cd so that I can take it anywhere I want and play it on any machine. (I prefer vcd to divx because it also plays on most dvd players as well
Someone else who remembers the old CNET days. God I remember spending hours keying in arcane key sequences to create Graphics file for C-Net BBS's. All of the boards I frequented were C-Nets, but the old DMBBS's were so colorful and had such "nice" graphics (Commodore keyboard graphics that was) I remember eventually writing my first real program to convert color Pet-SCII screen dumps from theDraw into C-Net format graphics. Man...the memories I think....therefore I am
So we calculate what size "asteroid" it would take to wipe out your favorite enemies biggest/capital city, which really should not be too large, maybe the size of a bus or so, and you send 2 space shuttles up, one containing a mined hunk of the hardest rock you can find about the size of said bus, the other containing fuel, computer,telemetry systems and propulsion (rockets). You rig the thing in high earth orbit (stable) under the guise of doing some nice normal experimenets and it looks like jut another piece of junk in space. When said enemy really pisses you off, you remotely control the thrust rockets to plunge the asteroid into the enemy's largets/capital city.
If propulsion systems are well camauflaged no one would likely notice this until too late. Of course you would have to calculate a nice compromise between destructive power and reprocussions for the rest of the earth (don't wanna end up like the dinosaurs now do we). Nice, clean, destructive to the enemy without leaving radioactive fallout for centuries... Maybe someone oughtta suggest this to Dubya., or even better, suggest it to some smaller country who maybe can afford a space program capable of launching these things, but can't afford a nuclear program....suddenly Dubya has real justification for SDI....hmmm I think....therefore I am
(ie: free software is bad. Only proprietary software can be good).
This is typical OS zealotry. Its not what the man said. There is good OSS software, and always will be, but admit it, there is also a lot of crap out there. Its the same in the Windows world. There is a lot of really good freeware and shareware out there, and there is a lot of junk. There is also a lot of good commercial software out there and some junk as well. In the commercial software arena, the signal to noise ratio is a bit better, as the REALLY poor software companies cannot afford to stay in business and disappear. In the free software arena, subpar software is accepted simply because "what do ou expect...its free" is the accpeted attitude. If the linux community did not mind paying for SOME of their software, some that is actually worth having (not to say that they cannot continue to use the truly good free stuff) you might find more quality developers moving into this space. Commercial developers will not move into a space where the attitude is "a half asssed peice of software that is free will beat a great piece of commercial software every time".
A (not so)prime example is GIMP. GIMP is a fantastic piece of software for 90% of the market, but for the other 10%, there simply is no substitute for photoshop, yet adobe, which does make a superior product (and whoever disagrees has obviously never really learned to use photoshop......flame if you will, but I've used GIMP extensively under linux and spent 12 years in printing where hot-retouching was a major part of my job, so I speak form experience) will never move into that space because there is a "good enough" attitude simply because GIMP is free and photoshop never could be. While many of you may argue that GIMP is not a good example (and I agree to the extent that GIMP is *very* close to commercial quality) there are many examples of this attitude.
When the linux community wakes up and realizes that some of us make a living at this stuff and have families and children who actually want to have food to eat and house to live in and we need people to pay for the services and software we create, the sooner linux will grow up.
Its not the technology behind linux that's keeping it from being mainstream, its the attitude of the community behind linux that keeps it from growing up.
As a flashcom victim myself, I can tell you that your delaings with Northpoint are probably not over. I tried to get dsl service with another provider, a covad reseller (my flashcom install was covad) and am told that I can not switch the line because flashcom still retains ownership of the circuit. Since flashcom will not respond to anyone's email or telephone calls, getting their permission to switch is impossible, and if you think that its only a matter of waiting until they finally switch off.....wrong. Verizon (my local exchange carrier) tells me that even if the company goes under, they still own the circuit as a company asset and they cannot switch it....Nice huh? If you sign up with a provider that they have authorized, you might be good to go, but all the providers that flashcom authorized to take possessions of the lines will only offer iDSL (since I live 14013 feet from the CO). The one provider I found who would offer me RADSL is not authorized and cannot switch the circuit......it ain't over yet folks...fasten your seatbelts...you're in for a bumpy ride;-) I think....therefore I am
while my machine can boot from cd, the win2k install cd *I* had was not bootable either...so I too had to use floppies too. no biggie. I had to boot my linux machine from a floppy to install linux too.
I live within the city limits of the 16th largest city in America, Baltimore, and the best I can do is 144k/144k IDSL. Its this or my old 56k modem. I think....therefore I am
actually e-Week had a comparison of web scripting languages about 2 months back and their recommendations. PHP was the fastest, by about 5-7%, then was ASP, then cold fusion and then JSP. Their recommendation was to stay clear of PHP as it was too difficult to maintain and scale. Cold fusion was their choice for rapid development. JSP, even though the slowest, was their overall best recommendation because of the robust feature set and the hopefully bright future of Java I think....therefore I am
Many folks who talk on cellophones seem to mysteriously think that just because the person next to them can't hear the other person on the phone that they can't be heard either. And because they are out in public, they seem to want to talk at an elevated volume. Its not the fact theat they are having a conversation, its the fact that the majority of the time, they seem to be yelling their half of the conversation apparently trying to be "heard above the background noise". Not all cell phone users are like this, I have a cell phone, and while it does not have a silent ring, I have it set to a single beep when I am in public, and I try my best to keep conversations quiet. If I think I might start talking a bit too loud, I generally excuse myself and walk outside or to a lobby for a few minutes. Again, not all cell phone users are annoying, just enough of them that I would not mind seeing cell phone jamming in restaraunts and theatres I think....therefore I am
I personally would love to see the US allow this, especially in movie theatres and restaurants. I'm personally tired of hearing someone's phone ring in a movie or listening to other people's conversations while I'm eating dinner, but of course, here in the US, someone will consider it your right to have your cell phone ring anywhere and anytime you want. I think....therefore I am
Slashdot Mirror
What's the news?.... I live in Carroll County Maryland. My provider is Adelphia... I've had 3Mbps down and 256 Kbps up since I got it. While I seldom really hit those speeds, I get close on most occasions. I don't remember ever being as slow as 1.5 Mbps down and they consistently provide well over 200 kbps up
speed test results
and the Windows and Mac folks will think it's unformatted!
And this is a plus? THis just means my wife will put it in the machine, thinks its not formatted and format the damned thing. I am a computer geek and as such, one machine or another in my house always seems to be out of commission as I do something to it. She still uses floppies to store things like our household budget because at least she knows that that won't go away..
And finally a note on the electoral college -- you consider this anti-democratic, but it is there for a reason: in their wisdom, our Founding Fathers recognized that without such a mechanism, a few large states would govern the outcome of elections, and smaller states would have no voice at all. Doesn't sound very democratic, does it?
Our Founding Fathers thought that the average American was too stupid to make an informed decision and run their own government. The point of the electoral college was that you would vote for people smarter than you who would elect the President of the United States of America for you.
The same basic premise also goes for your legislators, while they are elected directly now, they were at one time chosen by your state government. Again, you elect people smarter than you to run your locality for you, they elect people smarter than themselves to run the country.
While electoral votes are not distributed exactly the same as actual voting population, (same as the number of senators + representatives from your state, since the number of representatives is determined by state population, its only the fixed number of senators that skews the numbers) but the same large states still can sway an election, either through electoral votes or popular votes. That is why you will see the candidates of all major parties campaign like crazy in California and New York, and they might make a stop in Alaska.
Its not a matter of the wisdom of our founding fathers, but the ignorance of our great-great-great-great (etc) grandfathers that caused this system. They simply thought the average American was too stupid, and you know what? They were right, and nothing has changed over the years.
That said. America is the worst country in the world, except for all the others
John, John, John.....
By all accounts, The original Star Wars was even fairly low grade sci-fi, but it struck a chord with kids at the time, and no wonder, it had the outerspace equivalents of everything kids (especially young boys) like, it had knights, sword, gunfights, dogfights, spaceships and monsters, elements of westerns, war movies, airplane fights and army battles. In reality, looking back at them today and even at the stories, they are hackneyed. Why do we love them still? Because our visions of the originals are clouded by nostalgia. Because we remember those times with fondness, so we go to see them. Its not wonder the kinds are not the big consumers of Star Wars, its not that good, and kids today have grown to expect better. We have nostalgia to make us want to see them, because we remember how great the orginal's special effects were at the time.
Kids today, however, have no nostalgia to fall back on. For them, its purely a matter of story and special effects, both or which are okay in AOTC, but nothign spectacular.
The real surprise is not that Spiderman beat Star Wars, the real surprise is that Star Wars is actually anywhere even close to holding its own, and this would not have been true in years past. It just so happens that the traditional mold of children and teenagers being the ones with the disposable income and driving movie sales is skewed. Gen X is large, and actually has a fairly large percentage of disposable income, more than people in theer demographic group in the past had.
The reason spiderman is kicking Star Wars but? simple, the special effects are good, the story is good. AOTC does nto measure up, but is still fairly decent. The only thing keeping it alive at all is the nostalgia factor, remove that, and Star Wars might as well be Howard the Duck
Same goes for colors (just scan a picture of 'test pattern' and make a grid out of it).
;-)
Speaking as someone who worked in the printing industry doing just that sort of work for about 10 years, its is NOWHERE near that easy
I have a 10000 x 10000 pixel cmyk image open in photoshop right now, as I browse, on a PIII/600 laptop with 192 megs of ram using photoshop 5.5 set to use no more than 70% of available ram.... An image of that size is 381.5 megs.... photoshop really likes to have 3x the picture's size in ram (one for the image, one for working space and one for undo purposes) so if you have a machine with 2 GB of ram and 70% allocated to photoshop, you would be working in real time, as it is, I can successfully manipulate an image that large scrolling around and making edits, even on a laptop.
As far as the Apple goes..... don't fall into that trap... A P4/2GHz with 2 GHz of Ram and the fastest 2d video card you can manage to get your hands on (lots of companies have not been pushing 2d performance lately, but there are some good ones out there, I have always liked ATIs cards for 2d performance/price ratio.
resolution (72 vs 300 dpi) is a non concern, a 10000 x 10000 pixel image is still the same file size regardless of resolution, the physical size can will be radically different dependant on the resolution in ppi, 300 being about 33x33 inches, and 72 being a little over 4 times that in each dimension, but its the file size/memory requirement that you need to deal with not physical size.
Sometimes Open Source is great, sometimes, there just is no substitute for the commercial offerings. I love GIMP, its a fantastic program, for what it does, but photoshop has been refined over a lot fo years into what it is, and for professional image manipulation, nothing can touch it (especially in the CMYK arena)
Lest anyone think I am just talking out of my ass, I spent 12 years working in printing, 9 of them doing desktop publishing/photo reoutching/typesetting and illustration work for commercial printers. My opinion? a nice P4/2+GHz or Athlon 2000+XP or better yet a dual setup if you can afford it, 2 GB Ram, a nice fast 2d video card and photoshop any version 5 or better (though my favorite is still 6.0)
if its hydrogen dioxide, the it would be 1 hydrogen, 2 oxygen, not water which is 2 hydrogen, 1 oxygen
Both NS and MS come out with competing formats for fonts for web pages at one time. Did this die the same horrible death as "Channels". I think MS's format used a program called WEFT to make fonts (web embedded font technology or some such) and was free. Netscape's used some technology developed by bitstream and I seem to remember the creation program being relatively expensive. Both worked quite well (at least on Mac and PC, I was not using linux at the time) What ever happened to this?
there are a lot of these type of games out there, look on that $10 shelf at your local CompUSA. I have picked up a lot of games that I played to death for only $10 or so. No, they don't have the most fabulous graphics you have ever seen, but some are pretty good, and they may not be the games that were just released (they came out a few months ago, or even a year ago, but I did not buy them then) you just have to look for them. The problem is that most want the $50 game for $10, not the $10 games.
The only utilities that can encode wma files without the encryption are command line based utilities, right?
Wrong. you can use advanced WMA workshop under windows to make wma files. Very nice GUI support conversion to and from wma, wav, cda, mp3 (if you have lame installed), ogg... does resampling of existing files and even has batch conversion. Will optionally delete source files once its done to save space...everything you could want, except a linux version
I just bought a soul mp3 player. It has support for mp3 and wma files (which really do sound better at lower bitrates.. I'll put a 64kbps wma up against a 96kps mp3 any day, but not 2x better) the formware is upgradeable to support other formats..... give me a patch to use OGG files on it, and I will. Not because its better than WMA (which it is not, regardless of what you OSS zealots say) and not becuase I think everything MS is evil (WMA and WMV are fantastic formats) but because I don't want to see "windows only" as a standard for yet another anything.
Get the DSK, write the patch... I'll listen to OGG, not a problem. I would even be willing to transcode all my MP3s to OGG, but unless I can carry them with me in my car (without using my laptop) You don't have a chance
I have adelphia in Caroll County Maryland.... its all DHCP here buddy, so don't exepect to be able to connect to those servers once they change over.... I have been told that they may begin offering static IPs as an add on for an additional charge after the first of the year... I have similar issues and have not worked a way around it yet....still working on it though ;-)
is the pre-cursor to the next generation of music device that eventually everyone will buy. When broadband is ubiquitous in 10 years or so, then instead of actually buying cds of music, which eventually someone finds a way to copy, you will just diap up the songs that you want from a share on a public facing server sanctioned by the RIAA. THe songs and number of times you hit the server gets logged by your IP, and you get billed for each play of the song. Wanna talk about a draconian scheme.
I guess when fiber to the home is a reality, video will be delivered the same way, this way you do not own the dvd, you merely select the film and your digital video device reaches out to the net and plays your music. You never have the ability to capture it in any other form......ingenious actually. Quite ingenious. Now when those cd recording appliances that they sell now and new tape decks are encoded to look for cues within the audio and stop the copy process (macrovision for music) the pieces will all be in place. A decent dsl/cable modem can do music today, and even video cd/vhs quality video... in the not to distant future, you will not have any media or any of your usic or video, and no way of copying it, and no way of actually playing it even if you do copy it (yes, I realize this is playing off your lan now, but its quite possible to make it only connect to certain servers)
There is a muich simpler way......
start ---> windows update ---> product updates
select the ones under critical and hit download. They install automagically. been running 2k since it came out... Had IIS running on it since day 1....never been hit. Takes 5 minutes per week to run windows update.
Some time ago, third voice had their own way of modifying pages. When you had the lpugin installed, it simply asked third voice's server if there were comments about that page, then the plugin would modify the html to insert tags to display those comments. This I found unacceptable, so I wrote a little javascript that after tha pge had loaded, would go through the document links array and kill any links that pointed to thirdvoice and remove any graphics that came from third voice.... this worked wonderfully..... would it not be possible to have a jasvascript do the same thing...... create an array in the page somwhere containing allowable external links, then onLoad, loop through the pages links array, and if they are external, see if they are allowed, and if not, kill the links, otherwise leave it alone? sounds like it should be possible. Sicne I will never install XP on my machine, I have no real way of testing this, but if anyone out there has XP and can snag a page that smart tags are affecting, I will give it a shot and see if we can kill thems.
it can't be region 1. The article says The theatrical release is part of a promotion for the fall release of a DVD version. the region 1 dvd is already released. I already have it and have converted it to video cd so that I can take it anywhere I want and play it on any machine. (I prefer vcd to divx because it also plays on most dvd players as well
Someone else who remembers the old CNET days. God I remember spending hours keying in arcane key sequences to create Graphics file for C-Net BBS's. All of the boards I frequented were C-Nets, but the old DMBBS's were so colorful and had such "nice" graphics (Commodore keyboard graphics that was) I remember eventually writing my first real program to convert color Pet-SCII screen dumps from theDraw into C-Net format graphics. Man...the memories
I think....therefore I am
If propulsion systems are well camauflaged no one would likely notice this until too late. Of course you would have to calculate a nice compromise between destructive power and reprocussions for the rest of the earth (don't wanna end up like the dinosaurs now do we). Nice, clean, destructive to the enemy without leaving radioactive fallout for centuries... Maybe someone oughtta suggest this to Dubya., or even better, suggest it to some smaller country who maybe can afford a space program capable of launching these things, but can't afford a nuclear program....suddenly Dubya has real justification for SDI....hmmm
I think....therefore I am
This is typical OS zealotry. Its not what the man said. There is good OSS software, and always will be, but admit it, there is also a lot of crap out there. Its the same in the Windows world. There is a lot of really good freeware and shareware out there, and there is a lot of junk. There is also a lot of good commercial software out there and some junk as well. In the commercial software arena, the signal to noise ratio is a bit better, as the REALLY poor software companies cannot afford to stay in business and disappear. In the free software arena, subpar software is accepted simply because "what do ou expect...its free" is the accpeted attitude. If the linux community did not mind paying for SOME of their software, some that is actually worth having (not to say that they cannot continue to use the truly good free stuff) you might find more quality developers moving into this space. Commercial developers will not move into a space where the attitude is "a half asssed peice of software that is free will beat a great piece of commercial software every time".
A (not so)prime example is GIMP. GIMP is a fantastic piece of software for 90% of the market, but for the other 10%, there simply is no substitute for photoshop, yet adobe, which does make a superior product (and whoever disagrees has obviously never really learned to use photoshop......flame if you will, but I've used GIMP extensively under linux and spent 12 years in printing where hot-retouching was a major part of my job, so I speak form experience) will never move into that space because there is a "good enough" attitude simply because GIMP is free and photoshop never could be. While many of you may argue that GIMP is not a good example (and I agree to the extent that GIMP is *very* close to commercial quality) there are many examples of this attitude.
When the linux community wakes up and realizes that some of us make a living at this stuff and have families and children who actually want to have food to eat and house to live in and we need people to pay for the services and software we create, the sooner linux will grow up.
Its not the technology behind linux that's keeping it from being mainstream, its the attitude of the community behind linux that keeps it from growing up.
I think....therefore I am
As a flashcom victim myself, I can tell you that your delaings with Northpoint are probably not over. I tried to get dsl service with another provider, a covad reseller (my flashcom install was covad) and am told that I can not switch the line because flashcom still retains ownership of the circuit. Since flashcom will not respond to anyone's email or telephone calls, getting their permission to switch is impossible, and if you think that its only a matter of waiting until they finally switch off.....wrong. Verizon (my local exchange carrier) tells me that even if the company goes under, they still own the circuit as a company asset and they cannot switch it....Nice huh? If you sign up with a provider that they have authorized, you might be good to go, but all the providers that flashcom authorized to take possessions of the lines will only offer iDSL (since I live 14013 feet from the CO). The one provider I found who would offer me RADSL is not authorized and cannot switch the circuit......it ain't over yet folks...fasten your seatbelts...you're in for a bumpy ride ;-)
I think....therefore I am
I think....therefore I am
I live within the city limits of the 16th largest city in America, Baltimore, and the best I can do is 144k/144k IDSL. Its this or my old 56k modem.
I think....therefore I am
actually e-Week had a comparison of web scripting languages about 2 months back and their recommendations. PHP was the fastest, by about 5-7%, then was ASP, then cold fusion and then JSP. Their recommendation was to stay clear of PHP as it was too difficult to maintain and scale. Cold fusion was their choice for rapid development. JSP, even though the slowest, was their overall best recommendation because of the robust feature set and the hopefully bright future of Java
I think....therefore I am
Many folks who talk on cellophones seem to mysteriously think that just because the person next to them can't hear the other person on the phone that they can't be heard either. And because they are out in public, they seem to want to talk at an elevated volume. Its not the fact theat they are having a conversation, its the fact that the majority of the time, they seem to be yelling their half of the conversation apparently trying to be "heard above the background noise". Not all cell phone users are like this, I have a cell phone, and while it does not have a silent ring, I have it set to a single beep when I am in public, and I try my best to keep conversations quiet. If I think I might start talking a bit too loud, I generally excuse myself and walk outside or to a lobby for a few minutes. Again, not all cell phone users are annoying, just enough of them that I would not mind seeing cell phone jamming in restaraunts and theatres
I think....therefore I am
I personally would love to see the US allow this, especially in movie theatres and restaurants. I'm personally tired of hearing someone's phone ring in a movie or listening to other people's conversations while I'm eating dinner, but of course, here in the US, someone will consider it your right to have your cell phone ring anywhere and anytime you want.
I think....therefore I am