...but if you've got Windows Media Player, I can embed a script in Microsoft's.asx format and have WMP serve up whatever sort of mischief I can code up, cleverly hidden in an audio or video media file. Supposedly Microsoft has been paying attention to the issue, but just between you and me I wouldn't have your bank's login page open in IE while playing any unfamiliar.asx or.asf files:
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
"What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea."
* * * * *
The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
Not sure I understand what's supposed to happen. After clicking on the vid (on Chapin Information Service's demo), am I supposed to automatically go to Google? Chapin's demo exploit seems to tell me that I would be redirected to Google.com. It didn't...it went to YouTube where I was logged in under my normal user:pass. I didn't see any sign of anything in the address bar revealing my Chapin user:pass. Is the fact that I already had a YouTube account registered with Password Manager what caused the exploit to fail? Also, my popup blocker stopped Chapin's site from launching something first time through. Was this what threw a wrench in it? I tried manually going to Google.com immediately after clicking on the vid another time through (registering the same user:pass as the first time), but I just don't see anything to indicate that the exploit worked (my user:pass from the demo appears in Googe's address bar? Not that I could see.). Can someone please explain in a bit more detail what should have happened? Mozilla's exploit demo seemed to fail as well, dumping me on a "server not found" error page, but maybe that's what it's supposed to do if the exploit worked.
Tried the second demo on Mozilla's bugtracker. My popup blocker stopped a new window from launching. Nothing else happened that I could tell.
Appreciation expressed in advance to anyone who can enlighten me on what I should be experiencing
in Firefox 2. Is this a Windows-version-only thing? I'm on Fedora Core 5.
* * * * *
All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move. --Benjamin Franklin
...how often Google Maps/Earth updates their satellite photos. When I zoom in on my place, I can see the house next door that was demolished 3+ years ago. The sad part: I like that house better than mine.
* * * * *
What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad. --Dave Barry
what? is ZUNE content not supported on PLAYSFORSURE devices, or is PLAYSFORSURE content not supported on ZUNE? or both??
Here's how I keep it straight in my head: Any product I buy that has the "PlaysForSure" logo and slogan associated with it may or may not Play For Sure with other products. Depending.
I hope this helps. It has certainly kept me from getting confused about the PlaysForSure concept. Or not.
* * * * * *
I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. --Mark Twain
I set the immutable flag on everything in my home directory. Not even root can screw with stuff now, never mind those nasty little Proof Of Concept bugs. Funny thing, though--I can't update that sales report I started last month. Weird.
* * * * *
It's only when you look at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realise how often they burst into flames. --Harry Hill
So, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that what seems easy and natural to Linux geeks is definitely not what regular people consider easy and natural. Hence, the preference towards Windows.
Because Windows folks can get a Linux Zealot to install Windows programs for them? Funny, you just made the point by your example that the hapless Windows users can't install their own software without help from somebody on another OS.
* * * * *
Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe, with the other five being Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers. --Dave Barry
There really aren't all that many places to sell 500 or more systems at a time, at least in the US.
According to the US Census Bureau, in 2003 there were:
16,845 businesses with 1,000 or more employees.
24,399,315 businesses with 100 or fewer employees (what the US Gov defines as "small business;" also includes the self-employed).
Persons employed by businesses with less than 500 employees: 76,096,684
Persons employed by businesses with more than 500 employees: 55,950,473
Actually, what Microsoft is doing is focusing (apparently) on big business while pissing off the small business majority. Although, for the life of me, I can't see how any size business can be happy about the direction the company seems to be headed lately.
* * * * *
All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties. --Charles W. Eliot
It wouldn't render fonts correctly for me unless I turned off the render acceleration, and even then fonts wouldn't render under WINE.
Much as I'd like to have the acceleration features of the card, I can't until nVidia figures out how to get their drivers relatively bug-free with FreeType and Xorg R7. That might take a while, so I'll just have to bide my time with the stock "nv" driver. Google Earth will be incredibly slow for me until that time:
"Google Earth is now downloading the entire planet to your GPU. Google Earth can not locate a valid driver for your graphics card. Please be patient, this will take decades. Would you like to save time by skipping Mauritania, Poland, Liberia and Panama? Select Yes or No."
* * * * *
It's only when you look at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realise how often they burst into flames. --Harry Hill
If so much of the creative process is made so easy, where's the need for traditional animators spending exponentially larger amounts of time to create work of equal or lesser quality?
Here's a quote, usually attributed to the WWI German flying ace, Baron Von Richthofen:
"It's not the crate...it's the man inside the crate."
I'm gonna ask you to ponder this and extrapolate to the imagined quandary you propose. Also, I'm going to leave you with a bit of personal history:
I started in the graphic design business back in the early 70's, when a well-stocked "micro-studio" would set you back about around $50,000 (in 1974 dollars) for equipment, which included: a digital typesetter, process camera, film/paper photo processor, drafting table, waxer, light table...plus a few other lesser (though expensive) goodies. A decade later, inexpensive (relatively) personal computers with laser printers and scanners could be had for less than $10,000, essentially replacing my studio gear. Meaning every small business on the planet could suddenly be competing with me in the graphic design biz on some level. Predictably, a whole bunch of them tried. Did it put all the typographers/designers/pre-press craftsmen out of business? Well, it separated the wheat from the chaff, certainly, casting adrift the bottom 20% (subjective talent evaluation on my part) of the professional industry. It also produced an explosion of amazingly awful graphic design/typography, produced by folks whose accountants convinced them to attempt to save money by doing it themselves. However, those of us who actually had some skills/talent/Mojo actually thrived, selling our work by pitching the client on a comparison of our stuff to the examples of sub-par work that resulted from trying to replace talent with technology. Yes, I pitched a lot of FUD back then, showing a potential client the absolute worst examples of things produced by People Who Really Shouldn't Be Allowed to Touch Photoshop. Only...maybe it really wasn't really FUD. 'Cause when you objectively look at it, the good Baron's quote still rings true:
"It's not the crate...it's the man inside the crate."
All the computer programs in the world, along with all the hardware in the world, don't help if you don't got that Mojo to begin with. The tools are subservient to the talent, not the other way around. At least until someone develops a keyboard with a button that says "creativity."
* * * * *
Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there. --Josh Billings
So can anyone tell me if these new features would be useful for improving the responsiveness of media applications in Linux?
Well, Stanford University's Media Lab offers the Planet CCRMA Linux distro (based on Fedora Core). One of its features has been custom kernels (two "speeds," even) compiled with Mr. Molnar's real-time patch (which I think is much the same as what is being discussed in this article). Planet CCRMA terms it a "low latency" fix and it's important in certain types of audio production where you want to record a "live" track in sync with a track that's already been laid down. Too much lag in the system (just a few milliseconds) can make the whole deal unworkable when trying to do "sound with sound" recording (musicians do this a bunch). I can tell you from personal experience that Audacity's usefulness goes down a couple of notches without it.:)
You can read more about the patched kernel here, down the page:
That's right. Everybody knows that Element 119 is Oatmealium, which is now the heaviest element. Especially if you let it dry out and harden in the bowl for a couple of days.
Little-known factoid: CornNuts is the Official Disease of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
* * * * *
Wanted: Used sig. Must be low mileage, in good condition. Will be used by my mother as an everyday "go to work" sig. Will pay top dollar for the right one.
Unless you want to do something totally and completely out there, like using a ridiculously common Linksys wireless card (WPC54Gv2) on a laptop.
Hey, I'll trade you a native Linux WPC54Gv2 driver (pre-compiled and packaged for your distro) if you'll send me a Windows XP x64 driver for a Belkin F5D8010. How long has x64 been out? Close to 2 years? Apparently Belkin feels the Windows world isn't ready for the experience of 64-bit wireless computing. And apparently, that feeling extends to just about every other wireless OEM, according to what I'm reading over at PlanetAMD64.com. You've never read a sadder collection of laments than a forum full of hapless Athlon 64 users looking for Windows drivers. Fortunately, for my Linux box there's the NDISwrapper kludge, although I'd really prefer a native Linux driver.
* * * * *
It is a good idea to 'shop around' before you settle on a doctor. Ask about the condition of his Mercedes. Ask about the competence of his mechanic. Don't be shy! After all, you're paying for it. --Dave Barry
Actually, it's not that the lifespan of the gas releaser increases. It's that the lifetimes of those in close proximity to the gas releaser tend to be shortened, thus making the releaser's own life seem longer by comparison. This is known to biologists as the Fluglemann Effect. Biologists also note a related phenomenon: the Gas Density Relative Dispersal Effect (known by its acronym, GDRDE), wherein a population of animals or people will tend to disperse into the environment over time in vectors orienting away from the position of the gas releaser. Biologists are still debating the cause of the effect, although the phenomenon itself is easily observable and quantifiable.
Some easy experiments you can perform yourself to investigate these phenomena:
Release gas in the broom closet at the end of the hall (you know, the one next to the upstairs bathroom that nobody ever uses). Lock your kid sister in there by blocking the door in some fashion. Release her from the closet after exactly 10 minutes have passed, and ask her to estimate how long she thought she was locked in. Now, repeat this experiment 3 times a week for the next 60 years and record the date of her death, then compare with the average lifespan for women in your same country within the same ethnic group and of the same social class, income level and access to health care who were born in the same year.
Release gas in the lobby of a large theater during intermission (a movie will do; an opera is better) and plot the exact movement of every other person in the lobby as a function of time. EXTRA CREDIT: try to convince the manager to give you a refund on your ticket because the theater "smells funny."
* * * * *
I used to be Snow White, but I drifted. --Mae West
Now all we need to do is fill in the missing pieces of the DNA with frog DNA...
Ok, work with me here...
Instead of filling in the holes with frog DNA, what would happen if we used the late Liberace's DNA? I can imagine immediate benefits to both zoological research and Vegas. Would we get, for instance:
A T-Rex who looks absolutely stunning in a sequined tux?
A dinosaur who can bang out a mean Rachmaninoff and wear the biggest pompadour ever seen this side of Memphis?
Scientists who are able, at long last, to study first hand--through direct behavioral observation--the evolution of Broadway show tunes, filling in vital missing pieces in our understanding of how the simple grunts, growls and calls of prehistoric life evolved into the entire catalog of Andrew Lloyd Webber?
Entertainment on such a COLOSSAL SCALE that even Wayne Newton can't compete for gigs?
(Thought experiment segues into dream sequence. Location: Mr. Newton's agent's office. We only hear the agent's end of the phone conversation in progress.)
"...but Wayne, baby...you know this is killing me as much as it's killing you! All I'm saying is that ya just can't get a paying gig in this town anymore unless you weight 6,000 pounds, are greenish-brown and can belt out show tunes on a Steinway. This Liberzilla fellow has just got the entire place by the short hairs! Listen--Wayne, sweetheart...I got an idea! I know this plastic surgeon, see, who also dabbles around with Human Growth Hormone...what's that? You know it, Kiddo, the stuff's illegal...but this is your career we're talking about! So hear me out here..."
(Dream sequence fast forwards 10 years ahead)
Slashdot headline:
Apple Calls It Quits on the iPod and iTunes
brontobassist writes,
"The venerable show biz bible, Variety, has published an article in this week's edition that purports to contain excerpts of email exchanged between top Apple executives disclosing plans to kill the entire iPod product line and discontinue the iTunes online music purchase service. According to the article, the continued revitalization and popularization of live music has killed the public's appetite for canned tunes. Blame is placed squarely on the shoulders of Vegas entertainer Liberzilla, who refuses to record his performances, thereby forcing his legions of fans to make pilgramage to the live shows and spend money on tickets, airfare and hotels rather than other music and entertainment venues. Speculation has been ripe for the past 18 months on the future of Apple's iTunes franchise after the complete collapse of the recorded music divisions of Sony, EMI, Universal and Warner over the past decade. Mr. Liberzilla's spokesreptile had no comment on the article."
(End Dream Sequence. End thought experiment.)
* * * * *
The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we'll find their money. —Ed Bluestone
but the implementations should get better, much better (think Flash-like performance and possibilities; it's all in the standard)
I think Opera is way ahead of the Mozilla folks on the SVG implementation. That being said, I understand Firefox 2.x will implement SVG 1.1 stuff, like scripting. How well will it implement the new features? Pretty poorly at first, I'm sure. My needs are for basic multimedia implementations, like getting SVG to animate and sync with an audio file. Which is why I'm particularly interested in:
SMIL:http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/ Internet Explorer and RealPlayer implement some or all of the current SMIL specs, Firefox hasn't even heard of it, Opera is said to be a bit buggy. I'm hoping this catches on in a big way, but I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, and Flash can be very buggy on Linux. A real estate broker client of mine had his company Website done. It was done almost completely in Flash...barely 6 lines of HTML on the entire site (of course I'm being hyperbolic but not by much). Renders swell on Windows, but for me the entire right half of his property description page just simply disappears. Mid-word, mid-photo. Very strange. I'm guessing a white rectangle is getting rendered above where it should be (wrong Z-index in HTML terms...I don't do Flash so I don't know Flash's terminology). He was livid when I showed him what his Website looked like on my monitor, and Adobe doesn't seem to be in a big hurry to update the Flash plugins for Linux.
One thing I do like about using a scripting language to animate DOM objects in HTML (the current SVG way) is that your "bounding box" can be larger than the browser's display window. Meaning that you can have objects move into the display from off-screen (done this in the past on a development site; will be doing this on a redesign of my company's site). Perhaps you can do this with Flash as well, but I've never seen it. Flash almost always gives me the feeling of looking through a small porthole that appears as a very obvious child window of the browser's parent; manipulating DOM objects via a scripting language means the entire browser window (and beyond) is my canvas to play with and there's no "porthole" effect. I like that.
* * * * *
An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission. —Fred Allen
It isn't a standard, it was a submission to the W3C for consideration, by Microsoft and some of its useful idiots (HP, Macromedia, Autodesk, Visio). Submissions don't automagically get the thumbs up from the W3C. According to Wikipedia, Adobe, Sun and others submitted a proposal for a competing technology called PGML. Best features of the two technologies were then merged and improved upon to produce:
SVG became a W3C recommendation on September 4, 2001. Later versions of Opera, Firefox and some other browsers implement at least limited support for SVG. It's also a standard vector graphics creation/exchange format for many open source graphic apps like Inkscape and Scribus. Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw also support SVG fairly capably. Guess whose browser pointedly doesn't support SVG?
I've got a Belkin F5D8230-4 MIMO wireless router and the matching F5D8010 cards. Airgo makes the chipset on both. Guess what the router's internal OS is? Guess which OS doesn't have driver support from Belkin/Airgo for the card? I know--this is probably off-topic, as Airgo does release some parts of the router's bits and pieces to the public. That being said, however, to me it's like a violation of the spirit of the GPL to make use of the GPL'd OS to make your product a success, then turn around and very pointedly ignore the support needs of the folks whose code you depended on to get your product off the ground (and Belkin wireless pre-N stuff is exceedingly popular now, as even a casual scan of the Wireless Aisle at the Usual Retail Outlets will confirm). Reading the forums, there's a lot of Linux folks out there who'd love to have a bona fide driver available from the OEM. Probobably a few of whom have contributed code to the OS at one point or another which Belkin/Airgo is dependent on.
At least you can get the card to work via the NDIS kludge (but not in every case, and not even using Belkin's Win32 drivers). I guess I shouldn't complain. WinXP-64 campers are completely out in the cold with this kit, so my partner won't be able to upgrade her Win2K any time soon.
* * * * *
The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
The Grumman Cheetah was designed for a rapid response air superiority role, taking head-on the mounting threat of Eastern Block birds and large flying insects. Its maintainability and multi-role versatility made this little aircraft a staple among third world air forces and fishing guides the world over...
Is that a Cheetah? Or was there a "Leopard?" As I recall, Grumman's civilian craft of that era were named after cats. I took a 15-minute ride stuffed way in the back of something Grumman that looks like what you've got, about 22 years ago, doing an air tour of a race course. Nice little plane and I was really impressed that it could haul three very large guys and the pilot's wife aloft with such little apparent effort. To tell you the truth, I was nervous: "There's way too much tuna packed into this tin can to get off the ground." Happily, I was way wrong.
* * * * *
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. --Groucho Marx
At the other end of the issue, we've used animals as agents of destruction in some pretty weird ways. Probably everybody here has heard of the U.S. Navy's experiments using dolphins or porpoises as a delivery system for below-the-water-line bombs targeting ships. The weirdest I've ever heard of was the Army's Bat Bomb project during WWII:
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you can use a Microsoft tool to do dangerous stuff in .asf/.wmv files:
http://www.plattsburgh.edu/technology/it/help/str...but if you've got Windows Media Player, I can embed a script in Microsoft's .asx format and have WMP serve up whatever sort of mischief I can code up, cleverly hidden in an audio or video media file. Supposedly Microsoft has been paying attention to the issue, but just between you and me I wouldn't have your bank's login page open in IE while playing any unfamiliar .asx or .asf files:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/828026
* * * * * *
Adobe Illustrator is a programmer's idea of how a graphic artist should work. CorelDraw is a graphic artist's idea of how a programmer should code.
"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
"What do I think of Western civilization? I think it would be a very good idea."
* * * * *
The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
Not sure I understand what's supposed to happen. After clicking on the vid (on Chapin Information Service's demo), am I supposed to automatically go to Google? Chapin's demo exploit seems to tell me that I would be redirected to Google.com. It didn't...it went to YouTube where I was logged in under my normal user:pass. I didn't see any sign of anything in the address bar revealing my Chapin user:pass. Is the fact that I already had a YouTube account registered with Password Manager what caused the exploit to fail? Also, my popup blocker stopped Chapin's site from launching something first time through. Was this what threw a wrench in it? I tried manually going to Google.com immediately after clicking on the vid another time through (registering the same user:pass as the first time), but I just don't see anything to indicate that the exploit worked (my user:pass from the demo appears in Googe's address bar? Not that I could see.). Can someone please explain in a bit more detail what should have happened? Mozilla's exploit demo seemed to fail as well, dumping me on a "server not found" error page, but maybe that's what it's supposed to do if the exploit worked.
Tried the second demo on Mozilla's bugtracker. My popup blocker stopped a new window from launching. Nothing else happened that I could tell.
Appreciation expressed in advance to anyone who can enlighten me on what I should be experiencing in Firefox 2. Is this a Windows-version-only thing? I'm on Fedora Core 5.
* * * * *
All mankind is divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move.
--Benjamin Franklin
...how often Google Maps/Earth updates their satellite photos. When I zoom in on my place, I can see the house next door that was demolished 3+ years ago. The sad part: I like that house better than mine.
* * * * *
What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.
--Dave Barry
Here's how I keep it straight in my head: Any product I buy that has the "PlaysForSure" logo and slogan associated with it may or may not Play For Sure with other products. Depending.
I hope this helps. It has certainly kept me from getting confused about the PlaysForSure concept. Or not.
* * * * * *
I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
--Mark Twain
I set the immutable flag on everything in my home directory. Not even root can screw with stuff now, never mind those nasty little Proof Of Concept bugs. Funny thing, though--I can't update that sales report I started last month. Weird.
* * * * *
It's only when you look at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realise how often they burst into flames.
--Harry Hill
...get a graphic artist to help you. I've got everything running you couldn't get going under FC5. Plus lots, lots more.
* * * * *
A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me. I'm afraid of widths.
--Stephen Wright
I love it.
http://slashdot.org/~hullabalucination/journal/142 227
* * * * *
A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink.
--W.C. Fields
Because Windows folks can get a Linux Zealot to install Windows programs for them? Funny, you just made the point by your example that the hapless Windows users can't install their own software without help from somebody on another OS.
* * * * *
Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe, with the other five being Gravity,
Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers.
--Dave Barry
There really aren't all that many places to sell 500 or more systems at a time, at least in the US.
According to the US Census Bureau, in 2003 there were:
16,845 businesses with 1,000 or more employees.
24,399,315 businesses with 100 or fewer employees (what the US Gov defines as "small business;" also includes the self-employed).
Persons employed by businesses with less than 500 employees: 76,096,684
Persons employed by businesses with more than 500 employees: 55,950,473
Actually, what Microsoft is doing is focusing (apparently) on big business while pissing off the small business majority. Although, for the life of me, I can't see how any size business can be happy about the direction the company seems to be headed lately.
* * * * *
All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties.
--Charles W. Eliot
The reason you're having problems attracting good candidates is that sign in the hallway leading to the interviewer's office. It reads:
ATTENTION:
Beatings will continue
until morale improves.
Thank you.
The Management
* * * * *
A man's got to believe in something. I believe I'll have another drink.
--W.C. Fields
Where's the Mac and Linux versions? Out here in the real world, business has always run multiple platforms.
It wouldn't render fonts correctly for me unless I turned off the render acceleration, and even then fonts wouldn't render under WINE.
Much as I'd like to have the acceleration features of the card, I can't until nVidia figures out how to get their drivers relatively bug-free with FreeType and Xorg R7. That might take a while, so I'll just have to bide my time with the stock "nv" driver. Google Earth will be incredibly slow for me until that time:
* * * * *
It's only when you look at an ant through a magnifying glass on a sunny day that you realise how often they burst into flames.
--Harry Hill
Here's a quote, usually attributed to the WWI German flying ace, Baron Von Richthofen:
"It's not the crate...it's the man inside the crate."
I'm gonna ask you to ponder this and extrapolate to the imagined quandary you propose. Also, I'm going to leave you with a bit of personal history:
I started in the graphic design business back in the early 70's, when a well-stocked "micro-studio" would set you back about around $50,000 (in 1974 dollars) for equipment, which included: a digital typesetter, process camera, film/paper photo processor, drafting table, waxer, light table...plus a few other lesser (though expensive) goodies. A decade later, inexpensive (relatively) personal computers with laser printers and scanners could be had for less than $10,000, essentially replacing my studio gear. Meaning every small business on the planet could suddenly be competing with me in the graphic design biz on some level. Predictably, a whole bunch of them tried. Did it put all the typographers/designers/pre-press craftsmen out of business? Well, it separated the wheat from the chaff, certainly, casting adrift the bottom 20% (subjective talent evaluation on my part) of the professional industry. It also produced an explosion of amazingly awful graphic design/typography, produced by folks whose accountants convinced them to attempt to save money by doing it themselves. However, those of us who actually had some skills/talent/Mojo actually thrived, selling our work by pitching the client on a comparison of our stuff to the examples of sub-par work that resulted from trying to replace talent with technology. Yes, I pitched a lot of FUD back then, showing a potential client the absolute worst examples of things produced by People Who Really Shouldn't Be Allowed to Touch Photoshop. Only...maybe it really wasn't really FUD. 'Cause when you objectively look at it, the good Baron's quote still rings true:
"It's not the crate...it's the man inside the crate."
All the computer programs in the world, along with all the hardware in the world, don't help if you don't got that Mojo to begin with. The tools are subservient to the talent, not the other way around. At least until someone develops a keyboard with a button that says "creativity."
* * * * *
Be like a postage stamp. Stick to one thing until you get there.
--Josh Billings
So can anyone tell me if these new features would be useful for improving the responsiveness of media applications in Linux?
Well, Stanford University's Media Lab offers the Planet CCRMA Linux distro (based on Fedora Core). One of its features has been custom kernels (two "speeds," even) compiled with Mr. Molnar's real-time patch (which I think is much the same as what is being discussed in this article). Planet CCRMA terms it a "low latency" fix and it's important in certain types of audio production where you want to record a "live" track in sync with a track that's already been laid down. Too much lag in the system (just a few milliseconds) can make the whole deal unworkable when trying to do "sound with sound" recording (musicians do this a bunch). I can tell you from personal experience that Audacity's usefulness goes down a couple of notches without it. :)
You can read more about the patched kernel here, down the page:
http://ccrma.stanford.edu/planetccrma/software/ins talltwosix.html
Hopefully, this will mean that the Media Lab folks at Stanford won't have to bother to maintain the custom kernels in the near future.
* * * * *
Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.
--Dave Barry
Dude, for the last time, that's not Element 119.
That's right. Everybody knows that Element 119 is Oatmealium, which is now the heaviest element. Especially if you let it dry out and harden in the bowl for a couple of days.
Little-known factoid: CornNuts is the Official Disease of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
* * * * *
Wanted: Used sig. Must be low mileage, in good condition. Will be used by my mother as an everyday "go to work" sig. Will pay top dollar for the right one.
Unless you want to do something totally and completely out there, like using a ridiculously common Linksys wireless card (WPC54Gv2) on a laptop.
Hey, I'll trade you a native Linux WPC54Gv2 driver (pre-compiled and packaged for your distro) if you'll send me a Windows XP x64 driver for a Belkin F5D8010. How long has x64 been out? Close to 2 years? Apparently Belkin feels the Windows world isn't ready for the experience of 64-bit wireless computing. And apparently, that feeling extends to just about every other wireless OEM, according to what I'm reading over at PlanetAMD64.com. You've never read a sadder collection of laments than a forum full of hapless Athlon 64 users looking for Windows drivers. Fortunately, for my Linux box there's the NDISwrapper kludge, although I'd really prefer a native Linux driver.
* * * * *
It is a good idea to 'shop around' before you settle on a doctor. Ask about the condition of his Mercedes. Ask about the competence of his mechanic. Don't be shy! After all, you're paying for it.
--Dave Barry
Actually, it's not that the lifespan of the gas releaser increases. It's that the lifetimes of those in close proximity to the gas releaser tend to be shortened, thus making the releaser's own life seem longer by comparison. This is known to biologists as the Fluglemann Effect. Biologists also note a related phenomenon: the Gas Density Relative Dispersal Effect (known by its acronym, GDRDE), wherein a population of animals or people will tend to disperse into the environment over time in vectors orienting away from the position of the gas releaser. Biologists are still debating the cause of the effect, although the phenomenon itself is easily observable and quantifiable.
Some easy experiments you can perform yourself to investigate these phenomena:
* * * * *
I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.
--Mae West
Ok, work with me here...
Instead of filling in the holes with frog DNA, what would happen if we used the late Liberace's DNA? I can imagine immediate benefits to both zoological research and Vegas. Would we get, for instance:
(Thought experiment segues into dream sequence. Location: Mr. Newton's agent's office. We only hear the agent's end of the phone conversation in progress.)
"...but Wayne, baby...you know this is killing me as much as it's killing you! All I'm saying is that ya just can't get a paying gig in this town anymore unless you weight 6,000 pounds, are greenish-brown and can belt out show tunes on a Steinway. This Liberzilla fellow has just got the entire place by the short hairs! Listen--Wayne, sweetheart...I got an idea! I know this plastic surgeon, see, who also dabbles around with Human Growth Hormone...what's that? You know it, Kiddo, the stuff's illegal...but this is your career we're talking about! So hear me out here..."
(Dream sequence fast forwards 10 years ahead)
Slashdot headline:
Apple Calls It Quits on the iPod and iTunes
brontobassist writes,
(End Dream Sequence. End thought experiment.)
* * * * *
The sooner all the animals are extinct, the sooner we'll find their money.
—Ed Bluestone
I think Opera is way ahead of the Mozilla folks on the SVG implementation. That being said, I understand Firefox 2.x will implement SVG 1.1 stuff, like scripting. How well will it implement the new features? Pretty poorly at first, I'm sure. My needs are for basic multimedia implementations, like getting SVG to animate and sync with an audio file. Which is why I'm particularly interested in:
SMIL: http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/ Internet Explorer and RealPlayer implement some or all of the current SMIL specs, Firefox hasn't even heard of it, Opera is said to be a bit buggy. I'm hoping this catches on in a big way, but I'm not holding my breath.
Oh, and Flash can be very buggy on Linux. A real estate broker client of mine had his company Website done. It was done almost completely in Flash...barely 6 lines of HTML on the entire site (of course I'm being hyperbolic but not by much). Renders swell on Windows, but for me the entire right half of his property description page just simply disappears. Mid-word, mid-photo. Very strange. I'm guessing a white rectangle is getting rendered above where it should be (wrong Z-index in HTML terms...I don't do Flash so I don't know Flash's terminology). He was livid when I showed him what his Website looked like on my monitor, and Adobe doesn't seem to be in a big hurry to update the Flash plugins for Linux.
One thing I do like about using a scripting language to animate DOM objects in HTML (the current SVG way) is that your "bounding box" can be larger than the browser's display window. Meaning that you can have objects move into the display from off-screen (done this in the past on a development site; will be doing this on a redesign of my company's site). Perhaps you can do this with Flash as well, but I've never seen it. Flash almost always gives me the feeling of looking through a small porthole that appears as a very obvious child window of the browser's parent; manipulating DOM objects via a scripting language means the entire browser window (and beyond) is my canvas to play with and there's no "porthole" effect. I like that.
* * * * *
An advertising agency is 85 percent confusion and 15 percent commission.
—Fred Allen
It isn't a standard, it was a submission to the W3C for consideration, by Microsoft and some of its useful idiots (HP, Macromedia, Autodesk, Visio). Submissions don't automagically get the thumbs up from the W3C. According to Wikipedia, Adobe, Sun and others submitted a proposal for a competing technology called PGML. Best features of the two technologies were then merged and improved upon to produce:
SVG: http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG10/
SVG became a W3C recommendation on September 4, 2001. Later versions of Opera, Firefox and some other browsers implement at least limited support for SVG. It's also a standard vector graphics creation/exchange format for many open source graphic apps like Inkscape and Scribus. Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw also support SVG fairly capably. Guess whose browser pointedly doesn't support SVG?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_Markup_Languag e Check out the code samples. The SVG code is quite a bit more compact than its VML equivalent.
Folks on SVG-rendering browsers (Firefox 1.5.x, Opera 8 and above) will possibly enjoy this little demonstration: http://isthis4real.com/orbit.xml
* * * * *
It's a small world, but I wouldn't want to have to paint it.
—Stephen Wright
I've got a Belkin F5D8230-4 MIMO wireless router and the matching F5D8010 cards. Airgo makes the chipset on both. Guess what the router's internal OS is? Guess which OS doesn't have driver support from Belkin/Airgo for the card? I know--this is probably off-topic, as Airgo does release some parts of the router's bits and pieces to the public. That being said, however, to me it's like a violation of the spirit of the GPL to make use of the GPL'd OS to make your product a success, then turn around and very pointedly ignore the support needs of the folks whose code you depended on to get your product off the ground (and Belkin wireless pre-N stuff is exceedingly popular now, as even a casual scan of the Wireless Aisle at the Usual Retail Outlets will confirm). Reading the forums, there's a lot of Linux folks out there who'd love to have a bona fide driver available from the OEM. Probobably a few of whom have contributed code to the OS at one point or another which Belkin/Airgo is dependent on.
At least you can get the card to work via the NDIS kludge (but not in every case, and not even using Belkin's Win32 drivers). I guess I shouldn't complain. WinXP-64 campers are completely out in the cold with this kit, so my partner won't be able to upgrade her Win2K any time soon.
* * * * *
The preceding poster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the the Mitsubishi Corporation and his post may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the consent of Major League Baseball.
From the history:
The Grumman Cheetah was designed for a rapid response air superiority role, taking head-on the mounting threat of Eastern Block birds and large flying insects. Its maintainability and multi-role versatility made this little aircraft a staple among third world air forces and fishing guides the world over...
Is that a Cheetah? Or was there a "Leopard?" As I recall, Grumman's civilian craft of that era were named after cats. I took a 15-minute ride stuffed way in the back of something Grumman that looks like what you've got, about 22 years ago, doing an air tour of a race course. Nice little plane and I was really impressed that it could haul three very large guys and the pilot's wife aloft with such little apparent effort. To tell you the truth, I was nervous: "There's way too much tuna packed into this tin can to get off the ground." Happily, I was way wrong.
* * * * *
The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
--Groucho Marx
At the other end of the issue, we've used animals as agents of destruction in some pretty weird ways. Probably everybody here has heard of the U.S. Navy's experiments using dolphins or porpoises as a delivery system for below-the-water-line bombs targeting ships. The weirdest I've ever heard of was the Army's Bat Bomb project during WWII:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_bomb
Does anyone here watch the History Channel (North America)? Didn't they run a documentary on this project a couple of years ago?
* * * * *
My goal is to someday be the person my dog thinks I am.
--Unknown