Important Note from Jimbo to news media: I see that some news media have picked this story up as if it is important. Please please please don't do that. This is one of many changes to the software which are coming soon, including the ability to put pages into a 'validated' state (better name should be determined) and so on. Treating this as a major policy change is therefore a huge huge error being made by people who have no understanding of how Wikipedia works.--Jimbo Wales 16:00, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
He couldn't possibly be referring to Slashdot editors, now could he? They? Not understand how something works? Inconceivable!
Anyone who has ever taken a stab at playing guitar or another instrument that can be tabbed out knows how unreliable most online tabs are. Sometimes I cannot believe how wildly inaccurate they are
Dear god, I thought I was the only one. I'm teaching myself to play bass (with no prior musical experience) and 99% of the tabs I find online are so far off the mark it isn't funny. Seriously, they're just bad. I'll listen to the song a few times, start playing the tab and after a few bars, I'm like, "what the shit?! This isn't even the same song!"
The best use I've found for online bass tabs so far has been to use them just enough to get some of the basic notes and then figure out the rest on my own. Of course, the more I practice, the more songs I'm starting to learn without the benefit of tablature...
All of the screenshots posted here actually look rather crappy for a modern PS2 game. (Not really the artwork, but the graphics themselves.) Part of it, I think, is that Square must have taken these screenshots on a development station. On a television, the jaggies would be "naturally" smoothed out and the lower resolution hides the imperfection of the 3D models.
First, don't reply to the first high-score comment in order to get your comment to appear at the top of the page. That's just annoying. Your post had nothing to do with the parent.
Second, if you think about Microsoft's attitude towards previous competitors, this is an enormous step forward. I mean, I'm still in shock myself. Cooperating with the competition (though MS probably still considers Firefox, Konqueror, and Safari small fry) is unheard of and practically blasphemous. It seems to me that the MS is actually trying to take IE7 in the direction of a really decent web browser rather than just another tool to monopolize the desktop. If the result of this cooperation is that IE7 turns out to be a halfway decent browser, I might not be quite so adamant that all my friends and family use Firefox exclusively in the future. The one thing I'm still waiting to hear on is actual web standards compliance.
Third, how do you know for sure that an RSS icon is all they talked about? The icon is probably the only thing they decided on for sure. We don't know what issues they might have been discussing tentatively, but there must have been a lot more. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. This meeting opens the door for future collaboration.
Agreed for the most part. However, when the Wikipedians made the point that Wikipedia articles tended to be longer, they make the implication that it also contains more information. I don't know if this is true or not, but assuming it is, it seems like a fairly valid metric for error rate.
MS realizes at this point, that it's going to be quite hard or impossible to beat out OpenDocument. So what do they do? Well, they simply suggest that there will be two standards, and that they will at some time converge into one. But taking these statements apart and considering Microsoft's prior attitudes and actions toward difficult competition, we arrive at some very strong assertions from a Microsoftian point of view:
1) We will sooner curl up, die, and/or join the open source movement before letting a non-MS Office document standard become any sort of official or de facto standard.
2) There will be two incompatible standards in popular use. Yes, that does defeat the entire purpose of standards in the first place, but you have to realize that we're Microsoft and that we will never stop pushing our own solutions, even if they're inferior, evil, or expensive. Even if everyone on the planet rejects them, it will not hinder us. But we will succeed eventually.
3) Our standard will converge with the competition's in response to market forces. And if the market doesn't force it, we will, and we'll just make it sound like we didn't.
4) We plan to be in charge of this convergence. And by "converge," we mean "effectively replace that one with ours." We'll be in full control of the result.
Insane... using flash and javascript to render unhighlightable text? Surely usability is more important than typography, no?
RTFM. And try the sIFR demo. If you did either of these, you'd see that the text certainly can be highlighted, copied and pasted, and so on. It's even searchable and degrades gracefully since non-flash and non-javascript browsers simply get an unstyled version of the text. This is the whole point to sIFR. The worst thing that I've seen about it is that the Adblock Firefox extension puts little tabs above the content block. But most users won't see this since relatively few people use Adblock and I can certainly live with it.
Finally, your post had nothing to do with the parent. If you mean to start a new thread, do it. Don't reply to an early post just to get yours near the top of the comments page.
Agreed. El Wife and I got a puppy recently (at about 6 weeks old) and I started training her from day one. After only having her for about 3 weeks, she was already quite good at sitting, staying, and running up when called for. Humans, by contrast, take a couple years before they comprehend the simplest words and actions.
The word that got me was "nostalgia". Gaming nostalgia to me is Legend of Zelda on the SNES but I'm sure many here can recall hours of wasted youth on the Atari 2600 or during the arcade boom.
The dreamcast was like 5 years ago? Nostalgia indeed. More like the last gasping breath of a tiny but vocal community dying to hang on despite any hope or sense of reason. I mean, the dreamcast was a fine console and died an early death, but for pete's sake, let it go. They must not have gotten the memo yet: SEGA KILLED IT. By themselves. And with careful premeditation. It was an unfortunate but necessary business decision. And it's time to let it go. Let it live in memories, used machines, and emulation. Netcraft won't confirm it, but it's a done deal.
Disclaimer: I'm a lowly airman and have no idea what really goes on at the top, but this is what I can glean from my perspective.
Is this to say that the Air Force will be in charge of any "cyberspace"-related activity?
No. Loads of people are reading this wrong, though it's not entirely their fault since they don't understand how the Air Force works. The best way to visualize the AF is as a gigantic (even international) company dedicated to US defense through air power. By and large, the AF does its own thing and hardly ever mingles with the other branches except to provide air support in joint-service operations.
The cyberspace that the AF will be in charge of is it's own cyberspace. On the surface it seems redundant that they'd include cyberspace in its mission statement. Of course they're going to protect their own information systems. But I think they were primarily driven to include cyberspace in the statement due to the ever-increasing numbers of attacks on Air Force information assets. Particularly those connected to the Internet.
The AF has one of the largest information systems in the world. So it's a huge target. Also, the AF is extremely reliant these days on their information technology. Every single member has an email account that they're expected to monitor and almost everyone needs a computer to access applications that they need in order to do their job.
Finally, those running this huge information network are incompetent. More often than not, they're civilian contractors with paper MCSEs who just sort of bumble along and solve problems based on trial and error rather than having actual knowledge of how things work. (Trust me, I've met a few of them and most revealed themselves as MS fanboys during casual conversation.) The enlisted members in the info admin shops are undertrained, underbugeted, and understaffed. To top it all off, the entire Air Force information system is based on high-powered expensive Microsoft solutions that are extremely fragile and just rarely work.
(As an example, our netadmins are *always* sending out notices to everyone telling them not to open emails with a particular subject line or attachment. But of course they wouldn't have to burden us, the end users, with this crap if they just filtered viruses out properly at the mail server.)
These result of all of these factors is that the Air Force is frequently on the receiving end of script kiddies, hackers, and viruses. This new missions statement indicates to me that the AF leadership have reached the unfortunate conclusion that they merely need to fight harder to protect our information assets rather than wake up and realize that they really just need to bring in some I.T. people and vendors with a clue.
There still is a difference between RAM and storage and there's no indication that that will change any time soon. A Save button gives us the control that we still need. In a word processor, for example, a quick typer could generate as many as 15 or more individual changes to the document per second. Yes, you could save at predefined intervals, but that number would need to be tweaked depending on the software and hardware situation. There's no one save interval that would fit all needs.
There is another possible reason for the save button to exist... occasionally there are situations where I want to open a document and even possibly modify it but not save it. Rare, I know, but automatic saving would be a drawback in this case.
In the end, removing the Save button from applications would only introduce more problems than it would cure. In an ideal world, I can see where it would work (Apple would be the first to do it), but with today's hardware, software, and users as error-prone as they are, it's much better to just leave it there.
To solve the wall-wart issue, there's always the Power Strip Liberator. I always ask for these for xmas, and I always seem to run out near the end of the year.
What credit card companies offer them and how do you go about making them?
I checked Discover's site (the card I have) and it looks like they offer one-time numbers as a free service. They have some stupid thing that integrates with IE, but there's also a version that lists "Netscape 6.2.something" as a requirement, so that one might work for all graphical browsers that support Flash 5.0 and up.
Would gift cards be the same thing?
Gift cards are definitely not the same thing and have a few drawbacks besides. You'll have to pay for the gift card with cash or money order, few online vendors even have gift cards (stores like Target and Sears probably don't honor gift cards online), and you can never get a cash refund on a gift card.
"the lack of a powerful email application could hinder the adoption of Linux on the desktop"
Uh, what? The selection of email clients for *nix OSes is one area that isn't lacking too sorely. We have email clients for darn near every kind of user and situation. Evolution, KMail, Thunderbird, Pine, Mutt, Opera,/usr/bin/mail, you name it we got it. Most home and business users are happy to use webmail at any rate, so the availability of a native desktop client doesn't seem to me like something that would "hinder the adoption of Linux". In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Linux actually outpaces the mail client availability of any other OS.
Unless of course, by "powerful email application," the original author meant to say, "Microsoft Outlook." In which case, the author shouldn't be taken to seriously anyway.
I was in the same boat not too long ago... it took me a few days to get back up to speed, but my method was basically to hit up Wikipedia for the terms and technologies I knew nothing about, shopped around taking notes on what was available, and then finally read reviews on the specific items that I was considering. Eventually those items with the best value got my buy.
Here's a hint on how to get the best value when buying certain kinds of components and money is not an overriding factor. When narrowing down your search for that one component, you'll reach a point where you've found a line of processors, memory, or hard disks that have the features you want. The only difference among your choices is speed or size. The price increases with those numbers, but almost never linearly. Graph speed/size vs price of any current processor model to see what I mean.
At the lower left, you'll see the line rise steadily and then about midway through it starts to rise more rapidly. At any point above that rise, you're paying significantly more money at each increment for only moderate or even insignificant performance gains. The sweet spot for value is right before that rise.
This is all fairly old news. Quite a while ago, OASIS, an international e-business standards consortium, wanted to standardize on one particular document format for office suites. The two main contenders ended up being OpenDocument and Microsoft's XML format for Office 12. In May of this year, they chose OpenDocument because Microsoft kept parading on about how their XML format was open and free and lovely, yet a reasonable inspection revealed that it still an encumbered format. One of the requirements of the OASIS standard was that the format be open enough that it could be implemented in wholly separate software by wholly separate vendors to specifically avoid vendor lock-in.
Microsoft thought that just because they could advertise their format as being "XML," then they could fool everyone into thinking that it was free and open as well, which couldn't be further from the truth.
As it turns out, Microsoft has patented important aspects of the Office 12 formats, charges royalties for implementing them, and makes you sign an NDA just to look at the XML schema. I can't believe the balls they must have to refer to this in any way, shape, or form as "open".
Arrrr, I hate JPEG in general, and wish that format would finally die. Why even bother putting something online if you're going to compress the hell out of it?
Err, because by compressing the image it then takes up less space and bandwidth to download. Which saves time and money for every involved in creating, storing, and viewing the image.
There's nothing wrong with compression in general or JPEG in specific, except that it's encumbered by patents. JPEG is the best algorithm in common use for compressing photographic images.
What you perceive as a poor algorithm is really just people (probably including yourself) using it incorrectly. You can create a JPEG image that renders each and every single pixel as exactly as captured, one that tosses away so much information that all that remains is a few dozen unrecognizable blocks, or one that meets a middle ground by discarding some information, but none that you'd actually notice when comparing it to the original.
Oh, and the file size will be 1/10th or less the size of the equivalent non-JPEG image.
I really appreciate the informative replies. Unfortunately, we're on the low end of a middle class income and aren't yet ready to do that kind of extensive remodeling just to save on heating costs. However, I'm installing new insulation where I can (particularly the attic and upstairs crawlspace between the kneewall and roof) and I'm constantly on the hunt to ways to further conserve energy. If we ever happen upon $10-$15k, it's much more likely to end up as a down payment on a bigger house. However, thanks to my experience with this house and your advice, I'm probably going to keep a sharper eye out for inefficient construction next time.
In fact, they have just increased their rates from 45 to 50 CAD/month for their 5Mbit service.
Sorry to hear that, but in most US cities, cable providers charge $60 USD for 1 to 4Mbit service. And those 4 megabits depend on how many other people in your neighborhood have the same service. If it's too many... well, lets just say that before I got DSL, I also had a $14.95 dialup account because the latency and bandwidth was far better than cable between the hours of 6 and 10PM. And no, the cable company wouldn't do anything about it because the contract they make you sign explicitly states that they don't have to provide any particular speed or even service at all for your $60 per month.
Sorry if this seems like a bit of a rant. Guess I'm still mad about the whole thing.
My wife and I recently bought a house in Michigan that was built just before World War II and had a second-floor addition about 5-10 years later. It was built solidly, taken care of extremely well, and our inspector had no complaints so we figured it was a pretty safe purchase.
After the purchase but before moving in, we started giving the interior a cosmetic facelift. Even in March, we noticed that the furance was running almost constantly. We found out why when we started to remodel some of the rooms: In 1945, they hadn't bothered to insulate most of the house. The upstairs bedrooms had some very old tarpaper and fiberglass insulation, but only in the ceiling, which was about 50% of the whole roof. The sidewalls had no insulation at all... apparently in 1945, popular opinion was that heat couldn't go sideways.
I'm leading the crusade to do everything we can to keep heat either in or out depending on the season, but our options are limited. From what I've been able to tell while rewiring all the outlets and lights, the entire first floor is not insulated at all. But we might not be able to do anything about it without hiring a very expensive professional to cut holes in the plaster walls, blow some insulation in, and then patch the holes up good enough to tell that they weren't there. (Neither of us have the skill to do this of course.) Maybe if/when we spring for vinyl siding, we can do it from the outside instead, but that could be a few years off.
I have a Netgear WG511T that works great on all Linux distributions that I've tried it with. Some, like Ubuntu, even detect it and set it up automatically upon plugging it in. For all other distros, you'll have to install the madwifi drivers. These drivers support b and g, but not the speedboost mode or whatever its called that only works with other similarly-enabled Netgear cards and routers.
Slashdot Mirror
From the page linked in the summary:
Important Note from Jimbo to news media: I see that some news media have picked this story up as if it is important. Please please please don't do that. This is one of many changes to the software which are coming soon, including the ability to put pages into a 'validated' state (better name should be determined) and so on. Treating this as a major policy change is therefore a huge huge error being made by people who have no understanding of how Wikipedia works.--Jimbo Wales 16:00, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
He couldn't possibly be referring to Slashdot editors, now could he? They? Not understand how something works? Inconceivable!
Anyone who has ever taken a stab at playing guitar or another instrument that can be tabbed out knows how unreliable most online tabs are. Sometimes I cannot believe how wildly inaccurate they are
Dear god, I thought I was the only one. I'm teaching myself to play bass (with no prior musical experience) and 99% of the tabs I find online are so far off the mark it isn't funny. Seriously, they're just bad. I'll listen to the song a few times, start playing the tab and after a few bars, I'm like, "what the shit?! This isn't even the same song!"
The best use I've found for online bass tabs so far has been to use them just enough to get some of the basic notes and then figure out the rest on my own. Of course, the more I practice, the more songs I'm starting to learn without the benefit of tablature...
All of the screenshots posted here actually look rather crappy for a modern PS2 game. (Not really the artwork, but the graphics themselves.) Part of it, I think, is that Square must have taken these screenshots on a development station. On a television, the jaggies would be "naturally" smoothed out and the lower resolution hides the imperfection of the 3D models.
But you're not bitter, right?
Yeah, I'm personally wondering why this "breaking news" appeared on the front page of Slashdot if nobody used the damn stuff...
First, don't reply to the first high-score comment in order to get your comment to appear at the top of the page. That's just annoying. Your post had nothing to do with the parent.
Second, if you think about Microsoft's attitude towards previous competitors, this is an enormous step forward. I mean, I'm still in shock myself. Cooperating with the competition (though MS probably still considers Firefox, Konqueror, and Safari small fry) is unheard of and practically blasphemous. It seems to me that the MS is actually trying to take IE7 in the direction of a really decent web browser rather than just another tool to monopolize the desktop. If the result of this cooperation is that IE7 turns out to be a halfway decent browser, I might not be quite so adamant that all my friends and family use Firefox exclusively in the future. The one thing I'm still waiting to hear on is actual web standards compliance.
Third, how do you know for sure that an RSS icon is all they talked about? The icon is probably the only thing they decided on for sure. We don't know what issues they might have been discussing tentatively, but there must have been a lot more. A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. This meeting opens the door for future collaboration.
Agreed for the most part. However, when the Wikipedians made the point that Wikipedia articles tended to be longer, they make the implication that it also contains more information. I don't know if this is true or not, but assuming it is, it seems like a fairly valid metric for error rate.
MS realizes at this point, that it's going to be quite hard or impossible to beat out OpenDocument. So what do they do? Well, they simply suggest that there will be two standards, and that they will at some time converge into one. But taking these statements apart and considering Microsoft's prior attitudes and actions toward difficult competition, we arrive at some very strong assertions from a Microsoftian point of view:
1) We will sooner curl up, die, and/or join the open source movement before letting a non-MS Office document standard become any sort of official or de facto standard.
2) There will be two incompatible standards in popular use. Yes, that does defeat the entire purpose of standards in the first place, but you have to realize that we're Microsoft and that we will never stop pushing our own solutions, even if they're inferior, evil, or expensive. Even if everyone on the planet rejects them, it will not hinder us. But we will succeed eventually.
3) Our standard will converge with the competition's in response to market forces. And if the market doesn't force it, we will, and we'll just make it sound like we didn't.
4) We plan to be in charge of this convergence. And by "converge," we mean "effectively replace that one with ours." We'll be in full control of the result.
Insane... using flash and javascript to render unhighlightable text? Surely usability is more important than typography, no?
RTFM. And try the sIFR demo. If you did either of these, you'd see that the text certainly can be highlighted, copied and pasted, and so on. It's even searchable and degrades gracefully since non-flash and non-javascript browsers simply get an unstyled version of the text. This is the whole point to sIFR. The worst thing that I've seen about it is that the Adblock Firefox extension puts little tabs above the content block. But most users won't see this since relatively few people use Adblock and I can certainly live with it.
Finally, your post had nothing to do with the parent. If you mean to start a new thread, do it. Don't reply to an early post just to get yours near the top of the comments page.
Agreed. El Wife and I got a puppy recently (at about 6 weeks old) and I started training her from day one. After only having her for about 3 weeks, she was already quite good at sitting, staying, and running up when called for. Humans, by contrast, take a couple years before they comprehend the simplest words and actions.
The word that got me was "nostalgia". Gaming nostalgia to me is Legend of Zelda on the SNES but I'm sure many here can recall hours of wasted youth on the Atari 2600 or during the arcade boom.
The dreamcast was like 5 years ago? Nostalgia indeed. More like the last gasping breath of a tiny but vocal community dying to hang on despite any hope or sense of reason. I mean, the dreamcast was a fine console and died an early death, but for pete's sake, let it go. They must not have gotten the memo yet: SEGA KILLED IT. By themselves. And with careful premeditation. It was an unfortunate but necessary business decision. And it's time to let it go. Let it live in memories, used machines, and emulation. Netcraft won't confirm it, but it's a done deal.
I'd rather wait for vim 7. :P
Disclaimer: I'm a lowly airman and have no idea what really goes on at the top, but this is what I can glean from my perspective.
Is this to say that the Air Force will be in charge of any "cyberspace"-related activity?
No. Loads of people are reading this wrong, though it's not entirely their fault since they don't understand how the Air Force works. The best way to visualize the AF is as a gigantic (even international) company dedicated to US defense through air power. By and large, the AF does its own thing and hardly ever mingles with the other branches except to provide air support in joint-service operations.
The cyberspace that the AF will be in charge of is it's own cyberspace. On the surface it seems redundant that they'd include cyberspace in its mission statement. Of course they're going to protect their own information systems. But I think they were primarily driven to include cyberspace in the statement due to the ever-increasing numbers of attacks on Air Force information assets. Particularly those connected to the Internet.
The AF has one of the largest information systems in the world. So it's a huge target. Also, the AF is extremely reliant these days on their information technology. Every single member has an email account that they're expected to monitor and almost everyone needs a computer to access applications that they need in order to do their job.
Finally, those running this huge information network are incompetent. More often than not, they're civilian contractors with paper MCSEs who just sort of bumble along and solve problems based on trial and error rather than having actual knowledge of how things work. (Trust me, I've met a few of them and most revealed themselves as MS fanboys during casual conversation.) The enlisted members in the info admin shops are undertrained, underbugeted, and understaffed. To top it all off, the entire Air Force information system is based on high-powered expensive Microsoft solutions that are extremely fragile and just rarely work.
(As an example, our netadmins are *always* sending out notices to everyone telling them not to open emails with a particular subject line or attachment. But of course they wouldn't have to burden us, the end users, with this crap if they just filtered viruses out properly at the mail server.)
These result of all of these factors is that the Air Force is frequently on the receiving end of script kiddies, hackers, and viruses. This new missions statement indicates to me that the AF leadership have reached the unfortunate conclusion that they merely need to fight harder to protect our information assets rather than wake up and realize that they really just need to bring in some I.T. people and vendors with a clue.
How is it obsolete?
There still is a difference between RAM and storage and there's no indication that that will change any time soon. A Save button gives us the control that we still need. In a word processor, for example, a quick typer could generate as many as 15 or more individual changes to the document per second. Yes, you could save at predefined intervals, but that number would need to be tweaked depending on the software and hardware situation. There's no one save interval that would fit all needs.
There is another possible reason for the save button to exist... occasionally there are situations where I want to open a document and even possibly modify it but not save it. Rare, I know, but automatic saving would be a drawback in this case.
In the end, removing the Save button from applications would only introduce more problems than it would cure. In an ideal world, I can see where it would work (Apple would be the first to do it), but with today's hardware, software, and users as error-prone as they are, it's much better to just leave it there.
To solve the wall-wart issue, there's always the Power Strip Liberator. I always ask for these for xmas, and I always seem to run out near the end of the year.
What credit card companies offer them and how do you go about making them?
I checked Discover's site (the card I have) and it looks like they offer one-time numbers as a free service. They have some stupid thing that integrates with IE, but there's also a version that lists "Netscape 6.2.something" as a requirement, so that one might work for all graphical browsers that support Flash 5.0 and up.
Would gift cards be the same thing?
Gift cards are definitely not the same thing and have a few drawbacks besides. You'll have to pay for the gift card with cash or money order, few online vendors even have gift cards (stores like Target and Sears probably don't honor gift cards online), and you can never get a cash refund on a gift card.
"the lack of a powerful email application could hinder the adoption of Linux on the desktop"
/usr/bin/mail, you name it we got it. Most home and business users are happy to use webmail at any rate, so the availability of a native desktop client doesn't seem to me like something that would "hinder the adoption of Linux". In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Linux actually outpaces the mail client availability of any other OS.
Uh, what? The selection of email clients for *nix OSes is one area that isn't lacking too sorely. We have email clients for darn near every kind of user and situation. Evolution, KMail, Thunderbird, Pine, Mutt, Opera,
Unless of course, by "powerful email application," the original author meant to say, "Microsoft Outlook." In which case, the author shouldn't be taken to seriously anyway.
(and certainly in contradiction to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle).
Yes, but by the 24th century this can be compensated for.
I was in the same boat not too long ago... it took me a few days to get back up to speed, but my method was basically to hit up Wikipedia for the terms and technologies I knew nothing about, shopped around taking notes on what was available, and then finally read reviews on the specific items that I was considering. Eventually those items with the best value got my buy.
Here's a hint on how to get the best value when buying certain kinds of components and money is not an overriding factor. When narrowing down your search for that one component, you'll reach a point where you've found a line of processors, memory, or hard disks that have the features you want. The only difference among your choices is speed or size. The price increases with those numbers, but almost never linearly. Graph speed/size vs price of any current processor model to see what I mean.
At the lower left, you'll see the line rise steadily and then about midway through it starts to rise more rapidly. At any point above that rise, you're paying significantly more money at each increment for only moderate or even insignificant performance gains. The sweet spot for value is right before that rise.
This is all fairly old news. Quite a while ago, OASIS, an international e-business standards consortium, wanted to standardize on one particular document format for office suites. The two main contenders ended up being OpenDocument and Microsoft's XML format for Office 12. In May of this year, they chose OpenDocument because Microsoft kept parading on about how their XML format was open and free and lovely, yet a reasonable inspection revealed that it still an encumbered format. One of the requirements of the OASIS standard was that the format be open enough that it could be implemented in wholly separate software by wholly separate vendors to specifically avoid vendor lock-in.
Microsoft thought that just because they could advertise their format as being "XML," then they could fool everyone into thinking that it was free and open as well, which couldn't be further from the truth.
As it turns out, Microsoft has patented important aspects of the Office 12 formats, charges royalties for implementing them, and makes you sign an NDA just to look at the XML schema. I can't believe the balls they must have to refer to this in any way, shape, or form as "open".
Arrrr, I hate JPEG in general, and wish that format would finally die. Why even bother putting something online if you're going to compress the hell out of it?
Err, because by compressing the image it then takes up less space and bandwidth to download. Which saves time and money for every involved in creating, storing, and viewing the image.
There's nothing wrong with compression in general or JPEG in specific, except that it's encumbered by patents. JPEG is the best algorithm in common use for compressing photographic images.
What you perceive as a poor algorithm is really just people (probably including yourself) using it incorrectly. You can create a JPEG image that renders each and every single pixel as exactly as captured, one that tosses away so much information that all that remains is a few dozen unrecognizable blocks, or one that meets a middle ground by discarding some information, but none that you'd actually notice when comparing it to the original.
Oh, and the file size will be 1/10th or less the size of the equivalent non-JPEG image.
I really appreciate the informative replies. Unfortunately, we're on the low end of a middle class income and aren't yet ready to do that kind of extensive remodeling just to save on heating costs. However, I'm installing new insulation where I can (particularly the attic and upstairs crawlspace between the kneewall and roof) and I'm constantly on the hunt to ways to further conserve energy. If we ever happen upon $10-$15k, it's much more likely to end up as a down payment on a bigger house. However, thanks to my experience with this house and your advice, I'm probably going to keep a sharper eye out for inefficient construction next time.
In fact, they have just increased their rates from 45 to 50 CAD/month for their 5Mbit service.
Sorry to hear that, but in most US cities, cable providers charge $60 USD for 1 to 4Mbit service. And those 4 megabits depend on how many other people in your neighborhood have the same service. If it's too many... well, lets just say that before I got DSL, I also had a $14.95 dialup account because the latency and bandwidth was far better than cable between the hours of 6 and 10PM. And no, the cable company wouldn't do anything about it because the contract they make you sign explicitly states that they don't have to provide any particular speed or even service at all for your $60 per month.
Sorry if this seems like a bit of a rant. Guess I'm still mad about the whole thing.
My wife and I recently bought a house in Michigan that was built just before World War II and had a second-floor addition about 5-10 years later. It was built solidly, taken care of extremely well, and our inspector had no complaints so we figured it was a pretty safe purchase.
After the purchase but before moving in, we started giving the interior a cosmetic facelift. Even in March, we noticed that the furance was running almost constantly. We found out why when we started to remodel some of the rooms: In 1945, they hadn't bothered to insulate most of the house. The upstairs bedrooms had some very old tarpaper and fiberglass insulation, but only in the ceiling, which was about 50% of the whole roof. The sidewalls had no insulation at all... apparently in 1945, popular opinion was that heat couldn't go sideways.
I'm leading the crusade to do everything we can to keep heat either in or out depending on the season, but our options are limited. From what I've been able to tell while rewiring all the outlets and lights, the entire first floor is not insulated at all. But we might not be able to do anything about it without hiring a very expensive professional to cut holes in the plaster walls, blow some insulation in, and then patch the holes up good enough to tell that they weren't there. (Neither of us have the skill to do this of course.) Maybe if/when we spring for vinyl siding, we can do it from the outside instead, but that could be a few years off.
I have a Netgear WG511T that works great on all Linux distributions that I've tried it with. Some, like Ubuntu, even detect it and set it up automatically upon plugging it in. For all other distros, you'll have to install the madwifi drivers. These drivers support b and g, but not the speedboost mode or whatever its called that only works with other similarly-enabled Netgear cards and routers.