The last time I checked, the cable operators weren't excited about the greater quality of hdtv, they were excited about the ability of a digital signal to squeeze more channels onto the co-ax. The quality would still be poor.
You've hit that on the head -- my roommate had Bell Xpress-Vue for a while here, and the Spike (?) channel was broadcasting such heavily-compressed episodes of some shows, you could see MPEG block artifacts everywhere. It was as bad as a downloaded AVI. I mean, what a bunch of cheap-asses. Not worth the money by any means.
I agree, as I have been recently poring through the code for PINE (the email program)... man, the code is very good about checking its pointers and function return codes, but they do it in the most obscure way, using the short-circuit evaluation features of the C language to its max -- as well as implicitly assuming that NULL == 0 == FALSE, which is bad in my opinion as the C standard never guarantees that NULL is actually 0 and FALSE is not a built-in data type.
I always find it harder to grok
if( !ptr || !func() )
return(0);
than
if( (ptr != NULL) ) {
if( func() == 0 )
return (0); }.. while the code is correct, it's MUCH harder to parse.
Many actual expressions in pine/send.c, for example, have as much as 6 terms in a single if statement which do a combination of NULL pointer checks, function calls, return codes and error returns.
Although, his mis-spelling brings up another dirty tactic like this, in the book industry. Calculus really hasn't changed that much in the last 50 years, probably more... yet there's a new Calculus/Bio/Chem book for freshmen every year or so. Chapters are usually just shuffled around and questions changed slightly, so that students can't easily follow along with the teacher using an older book, or worse, can't even complete their assignments if the questions are assigned from the chapters. Planned obsolescence at its worst.
The book publishers even want to make it worse, with electronics books or books with CD-ROMs and companion software that expires after the school year, forcing renewed purchases and killing the used book market.
Read Robert Zubrin's book, "The Case for Mars" and stop spreading the radiation bogeyman.
Astronauts on a trip to Mars only need a layer of 2 feet or so of water surrounding their craft (which they would need to bring for initial water supplies anyways) to protect them from solar radiation during the trip.
As well, air-tight underground housing could easiliy be constructed using adobe brick techniques, using Martian soil and plasticized coatings sprayed on the inner walls. A few metres under the Martian surface, or in Mars-direct habitats as described in his book, and you're completely shielded from radiation.
International airline pilots receive as much radiation during their careers as Martian colonists would receive on *multiple* Earth-Mars transits and regular living on or under the surface. It's not an issue.
It's already almost this bad.. I made a little Valentine program for my gf (yes, I post to/. and have one... don't bother) that I wrote in Delphi -- it was totally innocuous -- just put up a picture and played an embedded MP3 stream via TMediaPlayer.
But the very fact that it is a win32 executable means Hotmail refuses to deliver it, period. No virus-like activity, just becuase it's a valid.EXE file.
I guess I can understand.. but it's pretty sad that the virus/worm epidemic has basically made it necessary to completely break email attachments. The baby's being thrown out with the bath-water. Between spam and worms, SMTP is sorely in need of a secure replacement.
Hoorah for OS-9! What a cool OS. An RTOS, yet also self-hosting and with a full suite of interactive shell tools. Shared libraries, object-oriented design: everything -- the kernel, drivers, programs, shared library, even shared memory) were organized into 'modules', well-defined code objects that were re-entrant as well.
Too bad Microware couldn't market themselves very well. The big RTOSes like Vxworks *still* don't have a proper process model and user-system space separation like OS-9 did nearly 20 years ago. Just goes to show that marketing, not technology, is still king. Sigh.
It was also so well-documented and understood by OS-9ers back then that it was only a step or two away from having an open-source re-implementation done. There is a full re-write that's GPL-licensed for the 6809 I think.. Nitr-OS9? But I wish it had happened for the 68k or PPC or ARM -- I'd run it in a heartbeat just for the pure beauty of the programming model.
Funny, the U.S. seems to be quite willing to deal with other regimes such as the Chinese government, with their (still) abysmal human rights policies. And for all their huffing about North Korea, they seem quite content to let things slide as long as the nuclear threat isn't too bad (why is it OK for the US to have nuclear weapons, but it isn't for anyone else, by the way? They blow up just as badly no matter who launches them).. heaven help them if huge oil reserves were ever discovered there.
It's quite a widely-held opinion that the US wouldn't have done a thing to Iraq if they didn't have so much oil.
Not to nitpick, but to more closely follow Voltaire's original saying, shouldn't "Apple" and "Microsoft" be swapped? (Unless you think Apple is closer to the Devil than Microsoft...):-)
Sounds good -- maybe if all the horny people in the world could get their frustrations worked out we'd stop making so many damn babies every year. 6B+ is already about 3X too much for a species our size.
... but real frustration with real problems -- Usenet has been all but killed by impolite people who refuse to follow etiquette ('newbie' or not), and of course, the ever-growing spam.
More constructively, you could have suggested that if people long for the old BBS-style interactions, to find some telnet BBSes. (No links handy; easy enough to search for via Google).
Aha. So others are having this problem too then. I suspected it was something to do with our straw-sized work internet connection. I never see these problems at home, but through the work connection it happens quite often...
I'd agree that it's probably some interaction between slashcode and slow net connections and/or buggy firewalls, and not Firefox's rendering engine.
Original poster never mentioned the former leader of WWII Germany. Furthermore, said leader blatantly (through invasions) demonstrated his will to attack other countries in Europe, and eventually, to become a world power threatening nations on other continents; Saddam never presented such a threat, and probably never would have (no access to huge war machine such as Germany had).
If he had remained in power, and did somehow rise to become such a threat, then his removal would have been warranted, and likely supported by the rest of the world.
Funny this story should appear today.. I have been trying to find a mirror of hashcash.org for the last few days to read up on the whole idea. It's been down for a while now (or is there just some problem on my end?)
Rename any.mp3 or.wav files to.rec BEFORE uploading them to your iRiver. The unit will play them just fine. The Manager software doesn't actually verify what type of file you're transferring, it just prohibits taking files with certain extensions back onto your PC. At least that's true with my iFP-595T and v1.3x of the Manager software.
It's a boneheaded, bullshit limitation put in to appease the RIAA. I have been meaning to find the hex bytes to hack so that I don't have to rename all files to.REC sometime...
... and P-code came before Java (in what, 1983?). It's like a broken record, reading about these stupid patents that have *obvious* prior art to anyone "skilled in the craft", as the patent office used to say. Sun should have stood up to them and slammed them to the wall.
Re:Offtopic...but in good will. Need a Gmail accou
on
Web Search Garage
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· Score: 1
I entered a pun contest once; I entered 10 different ones, hoping at least one would win. But no pun in ten did.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I checked, the cable operators weren't excited about the greater quality of hdtv, they were excited about the ability of a digital signal to squeeze more channels onto the co-ax. The quality would still be poor.
You've hit that on the head -- my roommate had Bell Xpress-Vue for a while here, and the Spike (?) channel was broadcasting such heavily-compressed episodes of some shows, you could see MPEG block artifacts everywhere. It was as bad as a downloaded AVI. I mean, what a bunch of cheap-asses. Not worth the money by any means.
I agree, as I have been recently poring through the code for PINE (the email program)... man, the code is very good about checking its pointers and function return codes, but they do it in the most obscure way, using the short-circuit evaluation features of the C language to its max -- as well as implicitly assuming that NULL == 0 == FALSE, which is bad in my opinion as the C standard never guarantees that NULL is actually 0 and FALSE is not a built-in data type.
.. while the code is correct, it's MUCH harder to parse.
I always find it harder to grok
if( !ptr || !func() )
return(0);
than
if( (ptr != NULL) )
{
if( func() == 0 )
return (0);
}
Many actual expressions in pine/send.c, for example, have as much as 6 terms in a single if statement which do a combination of NULL pointer checks, function calls, return codes and error returns.
Although, his mis-spelling brings up another dirty tactic like this, in the book industry. Calculus really hasn't changed that much in the last 50 years, probably more... yet there's a new Calculus /Bio/Chem book for freshmen every year or so. Chapters are usually just shuffled around and questions changed slightly, so that students can't easily follow along with the teacher using an older book, or worse, can't even complete their assignments if the questions are assigned from the chapters. Planned obsolescence at its worst.
The book publishers even want to make it worse, with electronics books or books with CD-ROMs and companion software that expires after the school year, forcing renewed purchases and killing the used book market.
Read Robert Zubrin's book, "The Case for Mars" and stop spreading the radiation bogeyman.
Astronauts on a trip to Mars only need a layer of 2 feet or so of water surrounding their craft (which they would need to bring for initial water supplies anyways) to protect them from solar radiation during the trip.
As well, air-tight underground housing could easiliy be constructed using adobe brick techniques, using Martian soil and plasticized coatings sprayed on the inner walls. A few metres under the Martian surface, or in Mars-direct habitats as described in his book, and you're completely shielded from radiation.
International airline pilots receive as much radiation during their careers as Martian colonists would receive on *multiple* Earth-Mars transits and regular living on or under the surface. It's not an issue.
It's already almost this bad.. I made a little Valentine program for my gf (yes, I post to /. and have one... don't bother) that I wrote in Delphi -- it was totally innocuous -- just put up a picture and played an embedded MP3 stream via TMediaPlayer.
.EXE file.
But the very fact that it is a win32 executable means Hotmail refuses to deliver it, period. No virus-like activity, just becuase it's a valid
I guess I can understand.. but it's pretty sad that the virus/worm epidemic has basically made it necessary to completely break email attachments. The baby's being thrown out with the bath-water. Between spam and worms, SMTP is sorely in need of a secure replacement.
Hoorah for OS-9! What a cool OS. An RTOS, yet also self-hosting and with a full suite of interactive shell tools. Shared libraries, object-oriented design: everything -- the kernel, drivers, programs, shared library, even shared memory) were organized into 'modules', well-defined code objects that were re-entrant as well.
Too bad Microware couldn't market themselves very well. The big RTOSes like Vxworks *still* don't have a proper process model and user-system space separation like OS-9 did nearly 20 years ago. Just goes to show that marketing, not technology, is still king. Sigh.
It was also so well-documented and understood by OS-9ers back then that it was only a step or two away from having an open-source re-implementation done. There is a full re-write that's GPL-licensed for the 6809 I think.. Nitr-OS9? But I wish it had happened for the 68k or PPC or ARM -- I'd run it in a heartbeat just for the pure beauty of the programming model.
Funny, the U.S. seems to be quite willing to deal with other regimes such as the Chinese government, with their (still) abysmal human rights policies. And for all their huffing about North Korea, they seem quite content to let things slide as long as the nuclear threat isn't too bad (why is it OK for the US to have nuclear weapons, but it isn't for anyone else, by the way? They blow up just as badly no matter who launches them).. heaven help them if huge oil reserves were ever discovered there.
It's quite a widely-held opinion that the US wouldn't have done a thing to Iraq if they didn't have so much oil.
Not to nitpick, but to more closely follow Voltaire's original saying, shouldn't "Apple" and "Microsoft" be swapped? (Unless you think Apple is closer to the Devil than Microsoft...) :-)
Highly actionable of you to dialog with him on that.
Sounds good -- maybe if all the horny people in the world could get their frustrations worked out we'd stop making so many damn babies every year. 6B+ is already about 3X too much for a species our size.
... but real frustration with real problems -- Usenet has been all but killed by impolite people who refuse to follow etiquette ('newbie' or not), and of course, the ever-growing spam.
More constructively, you could have suggested that if people long for the old BBS-style interactions, to find some telnet BBSes. (No links handy; easy enough to search for via Google).
Aha. So others are having this problem too then. I suspected it was something to do with our straw-sized work internet connection. I never see these problems at home, but through the work connection it happens quite often...
I'd agree that it's probably some interaction between slashcode and slow net connections and/or buggy firewalls, and not Firefox's rendering engine.
Straw man argument.
Original poster never mentioned the former leader of WWII Germany. Furthermore, said leader blatantly (through invasions) demonstrated his will to attack other countries in Europe, and eventually, to become a world power threatening nations on other continents; Saddam never presented such a threat, and probably never would have (no access to huge war machine such as Germany had).
If he had remained in power, and did somehow rise to become such a threat, then his removal would have been warranted, and likely supported by the rest of the world.
Nice try though.
Ah, but there is proof that the Saudi government and/or royal family *was* directly funding Osama.
r vi ews.html
Jean-Charles Brisard, a French investigator, found direct financial paper trails. CBC did a great documentary a while back on this:
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/conspiracytheories/
The bit on Brisard is quite a ways in:
http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/conspiracytheories/inte
Oops, never mind. If anyone wants the Mozilla HTML Composer as a standlone app, go here.
Offtopic maybe, as this is a question about Firefox, not Mozilla per se;
I really miss the HTML editor in Mozilla when using Firefox. Is there a build that has the editor? Or, better yet, an extension/plug-in?
So true.. he who controls the language controls the discussion. Same with the word "piracy".
Just another musician who hates having to pay the RIAA for every blank CD-R he buys...
At least give credit where credit is due, to the great Bob & Doug Mackenzie, for the improved Canadian version. Hoser. :-)
Now I want to track down their "Strange Brew" album that had that tune on it.. damn.
Funny this story should appear today.. I have been trying to find a mirror of hashcash.org for the last few days to read up on the whole idea. It's been down for a while now (or is there just some problem on my end?)
Please post mirrors.
On the Canadian side, FutureShop is exactly like that : Best price policy, overpriced stuff...
Well, I have been told Future Shop is owned now by Best Buy (for the last year or so).. can anyone confirm this?
Rename any .mp3 or .wav files to .rec BEFORE uploading them to your iRiver. The unit will play them just fine. The Manager software doesn't actually verify what type of file you're transferring, it just prohibits taking files with certain extensions back onto your PC. At least that's true with my iFP-595T and v1.3x of the Manager software.
.REC sometime...
It's a boneheaded, bullshit limitation put in to appease the RIAA. I have been meaning to find the hex bytes to hack so that I don't have to rename all files to
It was pretty obvious to me.. guess I hang around /. too much. Sigh.
I suspect he wore a green shirt underneath to cancel the red shirt out.
... and P-code came before Java (in what, 1983?). It's like a broken record, reading about these stupid patents that have *obvious* prior art to anyone "skilled in the craft", as the patent office used to say. Sun should have stood up to them and slammed them to the wall.
I entered a pun contest once; I entered 10 different ones, hoping at least one would win. But no pun in ten did.