Don't take the laptop; it's fraught with temptations for things you probably shouldn't do on your honeymoon (and I don't just mean pr0n).
But you do want to take a digital camera; and you don't want to run out of 'film.' So get a digital wallet, like the Terapin Mine, or the Minds@Work MindStor or Digital Wallet.
It's funny, but they support IMAP too. So does mutt, in fact. There's no reason to not use IMAP just because you only provide shell access... and to follow Ashley's line, if you have a laptop, then IMAP with locally cached messages gives you much better access to your mail if you travel.
And, if you ever provide mail for people in a different state or country, a mail system that's not dependent upon a constant and fast connection to your machine is pretty much necessary.
Take the taste test: consider setting up a super-small machine to host your mail for a little while, on IMAP; configure vm to use IMAP; go ahead and download the imap-utils package from UWash (it gives you things like icat, that cats messages from the server). See if you notice a real difference or not. A little Sparc IPX would be enough for this, with a tiny 3-4G drive. Just give it a try... heck, email me if you need help.
I don't think its fair to say that cyrus doesn't use the Maildir format... it certainly does
Eh? Your 'counter' to the factual claim that it doesn't is... an unsupported claim that it does?
It is not Maildir format. Maildir specifies the delivery method as well as the file format; by your logic, Maildir is nothing but mh. But it's not just "single file per message," and neither is Cyrus; and they're not mh in different ways. Cyrus does not use the new/tmp/cur subdirectory setup, Maildir does not use CRLF to represent newlines.
Cyrus mailboxes are not designed to permit multiple processes, unaware of each other, to access mail without failure - that was the primary design consideration of Maildir. Cyrus side-stepped that problem, and was therefore able to improve performance more (do an 'ls' in a Maildir with a thousand messages - that's what a client has to do to read that folder).
In short, there are superficial similarities of design, but they are different.
All in all, storing each message to its own file is not really *that* bad
Correct. The only complaint of Cyrus's format seems to be that it uses too many inodes. Well, in any situation where you're at risk of running out of inodes for mail, you're going to a) keep Cyrus's playground on separate disks, and b) take advantage of Cyrus's partitioning ability to spread it out over several different filesystems on multiple disks...
This can be a problem for Maildir, since in the general setup Maildirs are spread out all over the place, making it hard to consolidate to 'mail only' partitions.
Re:Old timers will remember...
on
X11 Alternatives?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
They just didn't bother porting -NXHost to PDF from PostScript, I suppose.
Nah, from what I read it was a design decision - keeping all the layers necessary to do that was a real performance hit, so they cheated and cut through some layers of abstraction. And, given the performance of Aqua, I can't say I blame them.
The 270 is color, which the Kyocera is not, but it's got the flip screen cover, which the Samsung lacks. I despise the keypad personally, not only do I not use QWERTY but I don't do QWERTY with my thumbs.
For folks that are buying right now, I'd say go with the Kyocera or the Treo 180g.
Bluetooth is the way of the future, though. It can reduce your need to keep all devices immediately accessible (why phone/PDA combos are so popular), and it can let you upgrad individual parts of your personal setup as you need new pieces. But it's not hugely feasible right now, Bt headsets are ridiculously expensive but they represent a necessary building block in keeping your actual phone in secondary storage like a briefcase or backpack (since the headset is much less bulky).
Sure there is... although you beat me on registrations, you probably couldn't have beaten me on reading Chips & Dips before registration...:-)
Discrete Wavelet Transform is fun stuff - I played with it a little bit a few years ago with a professor at Pitt looking at wavelet-based image compression (a field that looks to have completely died in the intervening period <grin>).
(my other email address is mcweigel@cs.cmu.edu - drop an email sometime if you want to talk wavelets...)
Allowing wifi on the trolley sounds like a great idea, too (at least for me;-).
Man, that would be great. Right now I commute about 45min over public transit each way, spending more of that online and able to work would me excellent.
I fully understand overstaffing call centers, so that peak time is handled well. This is good customer service, and on the surface it's not a bad idea, especially when the customer is paying for it anyway.
Letting your staff waste their free time 7 hours (or whatever) a night of vid game playing is a corporate strategy that will eventually land your company out of business, and all of your happy nightshift guys out of jobs.
Yeah yeah... this is why Apple went out of business a decade ago - they charged more for a better product, and since people never want anything but the lowest price product, nobody bought Macs in the previous dip in the economy.
What's that you say? Apple is still in business, and is the only computer manufacturer that has so much demand they're having to increase prices!? Surely that's not possible...
The one thing that bugs me more than all the libertarian geeks is the libertarian geek that doesn't understand economics. It might just happen that the time wasted waiting for an understaffed help center to get around to the customer is actually costing that customer more than the extra cost of helping to pay for an overstaffed help center. It might just happen a lot, actually... or at least enough that there will always be enough customers who are saving money by spending it intelligently.
Is it just me, or are they deliberately making fun of so-called audiophiles? "Enjoy audiophile quality playback anywhere" and "5000 songs at 128kbps" send two very, very different messages. I'm not an audiophile (I spent around $50 on my stereo receiver), or even someone who puts much effort into mp3 encoding... and I found 192 to be the range where my sucky hearing stopped detecting problems.
So are they going after audiophiles, or are they going after losers who believe Creative hype about what audiophiles use, need, and buy? For that matter, given Creative's history, why am I even asking this question?:-)
Bah. As soon as they or Rio start posting the weight of their devices when they begin the hype, instead of doing their best to make it look small, I'll pay attention. Until then, I know without picking one up that it's not what I want.
If you use a PC. If your only use of that PC is in X11.
I happen to use Irix and OS X most of the time, and they make it fairly difficult - the control key on my iBook is literally incapable of being remapped, and thus far I've missed the special foo that Irix seems to need for it.
When I'm not using OS X or Irix, I tend to use a vga console on a PC... again, no easy and consistent way to remap CapsLock.
Do it in hardware: it's reliable, doesn't surprise you, and it's a damn fine keyboard anyways.
Yes, it's worth it. It's not that it doesn't have Caps Lock, it's that it does have Ctrl somewhere that doesn't strain your hand to reach. I am exceedingly happy with it (the Lite2), and if I ever need a number pad I'll just get a USB jobbie for it.
I switched to Dvorak at the same time, and the pain I sometimes got from typing (particularly using Unix, or writing TeX) completely disappeared.
You are misinformed. The presence of a web interface for complex functions does not preclude the existance of a simple RC interface for simple functions.
Further, of course, it is unreasonable to expect that all listening of music - and hence manipulation of what is playing - occur within a radius of six feet, even if your misinformed claim about the soundstage of mp3s were correct.
But, as you point out, anyon who would think that it was a good unit for mp3s probably isn't being consistent with their misinformed beliefs unless they swear off mp3s entirely.
This unit is a piece of crap catering to people who think that expensive is good, and haven't seen a good interface to a large library of music.
For a new component? Hell no. Think about it: you're paying as much for the service and the software as you are for the box itself.
The software that, apparently, prevents you from doing most operations more than 6-8 feet away. You want me to spend $1500 on that?
And though you can say very easily that you could find quality ripping, encoding and navigation software and add that to your $800 box, the fact is it still won't have the correct footprint, decent enough optical out, clean enough analogue out, a nice resolution mini monitor or a decent controller.
Why add it to an $800 box? For $500 you can buy a cheap computer that does nothing but serve files (hell, you can probably find an IPX for $50, throw some more at it for disk space), and an Audiotron.
No optical out, though - is an optical out worth $1000 and a worse interface to you?
No great mini-monitor either - you'll have to make do with a web interface that provides more functionality at a greater distance (sorry).
Clean enough audio out? Heh. Clean enough so that you can hear the difference between 128k and 192k mp3s, I wager.
I figure the software that went into this machine took at least as much care as my Sun Cobalt webserver ($1900 for similar power), plus it's got that sweet little display. $1500 may be a lot for a computer -- but for this device, it's worth it and when the price drops in two or three months it'll be even more worth it.
That's wishful thinking. If care went into it, it would have ethernet, not HPNA. It would have a web interface, not a tiny little LCD. This is exactly what I would expect from SonicBlue, who seems to specialize in failing to add value for the money. That's why I have an iPod instead of a Rio... just because it's expensive doesn't mean it's worth it.
Unfortunately, you get one smooth GUI, and if you don't like it, you're stuck. Such are the joys of closed systems.
The alternative in a free system being, you get lots of crap GUIs, crap hardware support, crap APIs....
Hey, I like Freenix and I have been a pretty happy camper using OpenBSD as my desktop system. But I didn't even hope to do things with it that I expect to simply work under OS X.
Also, I don't know about you, but a lot of my friends who rag OS X about being proprietary absolutely insist on using qmail. My apologies if you actually eat your own dog food.
The window management and (lack of) keyboard shortcuts were, to me, impossibly clunky.
I'm curious what your problem was? Cmd-H (hide), Cmd-~ (switch window within app), and Cmd-Tab (switch app) seem to do well enough. Of course I prefer Windows-style app-switching, but Apple decided a while back (OS8?) that they didn't.
While preferences in keyboard vary, I found that the keyboard hurt my hands much more than my ThinkPad 600 or various Dell laptops
Well, Thinkpads have the best keyboards bar none; I don't much care for Dell keyboards, but I did find that the iBook has a better keyboard than the TiBook - I'm not sure why Apple let that happen, but I've seen a lot of people agree with me on that.
PCI has been available for Octanes and O2s for quite some time - externally. And they've had a better bus for everything integrated for quite some time too. All you get, in terms of PCI, with this system is an internal card cage.
Good to know. IBM's (part number 19K5680) don't. The only alternative I've found so far is to get a firewire hub which provides itself - thanks for the heads-up.
That's actually what I recommended to my friend, because you might be able to find a battery-powered hub for times where you don't have an AC outlet.
So, in this instance, USB's bandwidth is not "good enough". Thats fair. In most cases I've seen (cameras, mostly), this is not the case.
I hope Firewire takes off, as it already seems to have fewer substandard hardware problems than USB has. Of course, those are a direct result of consumer market popularity, but still...
Still cameras, that's true. Camcorders, hard drives (yes including mp3 hard drives:), and CD-RW are good examples of things that can be more compelling with Firewire. The two of them complement each other very well, esp. for us laptop users.
I've yet to find a firewire CardBus card which does supply power. I know the iPod requires a power supply to actually realize its plugged into a host, though.
Orange-Micro's does, with an optional AC adapter. I think the problem is passing that much power through the PCMCIA port, since it takes more power than USB (for which you can generally find powered PC Cards).
Friend recently bought an iPod for her older PowerBook, and had a fun time figuring out how to get her shiny new Firewire card talking to it.
Firewire has been a consumer product all along, and although its mostly had its market stolen away by USB (for the same reason 10BaseT devices are still common: performance is "good enough" and the price blows the competition away)
I beg to differ. The market for, e.g., Firewire CD-RWs is ramping up, while the market for USB CD-RWs appears to be slacking - my experience was that they were doing fine while Apple's consumer computers didn't have Firewire, but the gain is real enough (8,16,24, even 32x vs. 4x, for a CD-RW) that people want it.
I have a 40 gig USB HD for my iOpener-based car MP3 player.
If the initial load is *THAT* important to you-- that is you want your favorite 5 gigs uploaded in 15 minutes, instead of a couple of hours-- then pay the premium. I personally am willing to let the thing run overnight once to get my favorite 20 gigs onto it.
Well... for a car stereo, I quite agree with you. Most people don't spend enough time in their cars to need constantly updated 5GB of mp3s, and the beauty of it being in a car is... you don't have to carry it.
The appeal of the iPod is that its drive is big enough that you can have a lot of variety in your music (more than the album 64MB players give you, or the small collection a single CD in a CD player gives you), and its fast enough that if it still doesn't hold all of your music, it can be switched over quickly.
Something like the Riot, or your 40GB car unit, however, can only really be usable with incremental changes in their storage. If your needs ever outgrow it (I do know a few people who can/will overflow 40GB, and you yourself have already topped 20GB), it loses a lot of utility. And, of course, you won't be carrying your iOpener when you go jogging, or this Riot either.
It bears repeating: the iPod isn't revolutionary or neat or interesting because it's completely new, but because it was clearly designed from the ground up to be used the way people would like to use an mp3 player. It's big enough that you could listen to it all day without hearing a repeat, it's small enough that you can carry it with you where ever you go all day, and it's fast enough that it doesn't have to hold all of your music to be useful.
You're saying that people will wait a year for a technology that they can't distinguish between current technology? The transfer times are immaterially different (anyone frustrated by USB1.1 mp3 devices right now would not care whether they can transfer songs in 6 seconds or 5), the cost of entry is immaterially different (buy a 1394 card, or a USB2.0 card - 1394 cards are cheaper now), but one is available right now. Heck, Creative is even stickin' 'em in their sound cards.
1. Take a look at literate programming tools, like noweb or doc++ (language specific).
Given the broad nature of you query it's not clear what is most appropriate for you; but literate programming might be what you need.
2. Framemaker. I've never used it myself, but I have known people who did all of their word processing in it. Pretty output, can do web output too, and definitely intended for larger documents.
3. Look at [La]TeX again. Seriously. Some of the stuff you need may not be easily provided, but I don't know. Get the book on LaTeX and see if that doesn't handle your previous problems.
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Don't take the laptop; it's fraught with temptations for things you probably shouldn't do on your honeymoon (and I don't just mean pr0n).
But you do want to take a digital camera; and you don't want to run out of 'film.' So get a digital wallet, like the Terapin Mine, or the Minds@Work MindStor or Digital Wallet.
I mean, it's not like there's going to be a bigger calculator in the universe than, well, the universe itself.
It's funny, but they support IMAP too. So does mutt, in fact. There's no reason to not use IMAP just because you only provide shell access... and to follow Ashley's line, if you have a laptop, then IMAP with locally cached messages gives you much better access to your mail if you travel.
And, if you ever provide mail for people in a different state or country, a mail system that's not dependent upon a constant and fast connection to your machine is pretty much necessary.
Take the taste test: consider setting up a super-small machine to host your mail for a little while, on IMAP; configure vm to use IMAP; go ahead and download the imap-utils package from UWash (it gives you things like icat, that cats messages from the server). See if you notice a real difference or not. A little Sparc IPX would be enough for this, with a tiny 3-4G drive. Just give it a try... heck, email me if you need help.
Eh? Your 'counter' to the factual claim that it doesn't is... an unsupported claim that it does?
It is not Maildir format. Maildir specifies the delivery method as well as the file format; by your logic, Maildir is nothing but mh. But it's not just "single file per message," and neither is Cyrus; and they're not mh in different ways. Cyrus does not use the new/tmp/cur subdirectory setup, Maildir does not use CRLF to represent newlines.
Cyrus mailboxes are not designed to permit multiple processes, unaware of each other, to access mail without failure - that was the primary design consideration of Maildir. Cyrus side-stepped that problem, and was therefore able to improve performance more (do an 'ls' in a Maildir with a thousand messages - that's what a client has to do to read that folder).
In short, there are superficial similarities of design, but they are different.
Correct. The only complaint of Cyrus's format seems to be that it uses too many inodes. Well, in any situation where you're at risk of running out of inodes for mail, you're going to a) keep Cyrus's playground on separate disks, and b) take advantage of Cyrus's partitioning ability to spread it out over several different filesystems on multiple disks...
This can be a problem for Maildir, since in the general setup Maildirs are spread out all over the place, making it hard to consolidate to 'mail only' partitions.
Nah, from what I read it was a design decision - keeping all the layers necessary to do that was a real performance hit, so they cheated and cut through some layers of abstraction. And, given the performance of Aqua, I can't say I blame them.
The 270 is color, which the Kyocera is not, but it's got the flip screen cover, which the Samsung lacks. I despise the keypad personally, not only do I not use QWERTY but I don't do QWERTY with my thumbs.
For folks that are buying right now, I'd say go with the Kyocera or the Treo 180g.
Bluetooth is the way of the future, though. It can reduce your need to keep all devices immediately accessible (why phone/PDA combos are so popular), and it can let you upgrad individual parts of your personal setup as you need new pieces. But it's not hugely feasible right now, Bt headsets are ridiculously expensive but they represent a necessary building block in keeping your actual phone in secondary storage like a briefcase or backpack (since the headset is much less bulky).
Sure there is... although you beat me on registrations, you probably couldn't have beaten me on reading Chips & Dips before registration... :-)
Discrete Wavelet Transform is fun stuff - I played with it a little bit a few years ago with a professor at Pitt looking at wavelet-based image compression (a field that looks to have completely died in the intervening period <grin>).
(my other email address is mcweigel@cs.cmu.edu - drop an email sometime if you want to talk wavelets...)
They're called Bluetooth headsets, and yes, they cost a ridiculous amount (in the range of $200).
Man, that would be great. Right now I commute about 45min over public transit each way, spending more of that online and able to work would me excellent.
Nuts, you beat me to it. I was reading responses to see if anyone else got it... and I guess you did :-)
Yeah yeah... this is why Apple went out of business a decade ago - they charged more for a better product, and since people never want anything but the lowest price product, nobody bought Macs in the previous dip in the economy.
What's that you say? Apple is still in business, and is the only computer manufacturer that has so much demand they're having to increase prices!? Surely that's not possible...
The one thing that bugs me more than all the libertarian geeks is the libertarian geek that doesn't understand economics. It might just happen that the time wasted waiting for an understaffed help center to get around to the customer is actually costing that customer more than the extra cost of helping to pay for an overstaffed help center. It might just happen a lot, actually... or at least enough that there will always be enough customers who are saving money by spending it intelligently.
Is it just me, or are they deliberately making fun of so-called audiophiles? "Enjoy audiophile quality playback anywhere" and "5000 songs at 128kbps" send two very, very different messages. I'm not an audiophile (I spent around $50 on my stereo receiver), or even someone who puts much effort into mp3 encoding... and I found 192 to be the range where my sucky hearing stopped detecting problems.
So are they going after audiophiles, or are they going after losers who believe Creative hype about what audiophiles use, need, and buy? For that matter, given Creative's history, why am I even asking this question? :-)
Bah. As soon as they or Rio start posting the weight of their devices when they begin the hype, instead of doing their best to make it look small, I'll pay attention. Until then, I know without picking one up that it's not what I want.
If you use a PC. If your only use of that PC is in X11.
I happen to use Irix and OS X most of the time, and they make it fairly difficult - the control key on my iBook is literally incapable of being remapped, and thus far I've missed the special foo that Irix seems to need for it.
When I'm not using OS X or Irix, I tend to use a vga console on a PC... again, no easy and consistent way to remap CapsLock.
Do it in hardware: it's reliable, doesn't surprise you, and it's a damn fine keyboard anyways.
Yes, it's worth it. It's not that it doesn't have Caps Lock, it's that it does have Ctrl somewhere that doesn't strain your hand to reach. I am exceedingly happy with it (the Lite2), and if I ever need a number pad I'll just get a USB jobbie for it.
I switched to Dvorak at the same time, and the pain I sometimes got from typing (particularly using Unix, or writing TeX) completely disappeared.
You are misinformed. The presence of a web interface for complex functions does not preclude the existance of a simple RC interface for simple functions.
Further, of course, it is unreasonable to expect that all listening of music - and hence manipulation of what is playing - occur within a radius of six feet, even if your misinformed claim about the soundstage of mp3s were correct.
But, as you point out, anyon who would think that it was a good unit for mp3s probably isn't being consistent with their misinformed beliefs unless they swear off mp3s entirely.
This unit is a piece of crap catering to people who think that expensive is good, and haven't seen a good interface to a large library of music.
The software that, apparently, prevents you from doing most operations more than 6-8 feet away. You want me to spend $1500 on that?
Why add it to an $800 box? For $500 you can buy a cheap computer that does nothing but serve files (hell, you can probably find an IPX for $50, throw some more at it for disk space), and an Audiotron.
No optical out, though - is an optical out worth $1000 and a worse interface to you?
No great mini-monitor either - you'll have to make do with a web interface that provides more functionality at a greater distance (sorry).
Clean enough audio out? Heh. Clean enough so that you can hear the difference between 128k and 192k mp3s, I wager.
That's wishful thinking. If care went into it, it would have ethernet, not HPNA. It would have a web interface, not a tiny little LCD. This is exactly what I would expect from SonicBlue, who seems to specialize in failing to add value for the money. That's why I have an iPod instead of a Rio... just because it's expensive doesn't mean it's worth it.
The alternative in a free system being, you get lots of crap GUIs, crap hardware support, crap APIs....
Hey, I like Freenix and I have been a pretty happy camper using OpenBSD as my desktop system. But I didn't even hope to do things with it that I expect to simply work under OS X.
Also, I don't know about you, but a lot of my friends who rag OS X about being proprietary absolutely insist on using qmail. My apologies if you actually eat your own dog food.
I'm curious what your problem was? Cmd-H (hide), Cmd-~ (switch window within app), and Cmd-Tab (switch app) seem to do well enough. Of course I prefer Windows-style app-switching, but Apple decided a while back (OS8?) that they didn't.
Well, Thinkpads have the best keyboards bar none; I don't much care for Dell keyboards, but I did find that the iBook has a better keyboard than the TiBook - I'm not sure why Apple let that happen, but I've seen a lot of people agree with me on that.
Errr... Coriolis has a couple of books on this - one on core kernel and one on the TCP/IP stack. Up-to-date for 2.22
PCI has been available for Octanes and O2s for quite some time - externally. And they've had a better bus for everything integrated for quite some time too. All you get, in terms of PCI, with this system is an internal card cage.
That's actually what I recommended to my friend, because you might be able to find a battery-powered hub for times where you don't have an AC outlet.
Still cameras, that's true. Camcorders, hard drives (yes including mp3 hard drives :), and CD-RW are good examples of things that can be more compelling with Firewire. The two of them complement each other very well, esp. for us laptop users.
Orange-Micro's does, with an optional AC adapter. I think the problem is passing that much power through the PCMCIA port, since it takes more power than USB (for which you can generally find powered PC Cards).
Friend recently bought an iPod for her older PowerBook, and had a fun time figuring out how to get her shiny new Firewire card talking to it.
I beg to differ. The market for, e.g., Firewire CD-RWs is ramping up, while the market for USB CD-RWs appears to be slacking - my experience was that they were doing fine while Apple's consumer computers didn't have Firewire, but the gain is real enough (8,16,24, even 32x vs. 4x, for a CD-RW) that people want it.
Well... for a car stereo, I quite agree with you. Most people don't spend enough time in their cars to need constantly updated 5GB of mp3s, and the beauty of it being in a car is... you don't have to carry it.
The appeal of the iPod is that its drive is big enough that you can have a lot of variety in your music (more than the album 64MB players give you, or the small collection a single CD in a CD player gives you), and its fast enough that if it still doesn't hold all of your music, it can be switched over quickly.
Something like the Riot, or your 40GB car unit, however, can only really be usable with incremental changes in their storage. If your needs ever outgrow it (I do know a few people who can/will overflow 40GB, and you yourself have already topped 20GB), it loses a lot of utility. And, of course, you won't be carrying your iOpener when you go jogging, or this Riot either.
It bears repeating: the iPod isn't revolutionary or neat or interesting because it's completely new, but because it was clearly designed from the ground up to be used the way people would like to use an mp3 player. It's big enough that you could listen to it all day without hearing a repeat, it's small enough that you can carry it with you where ever you go all day, and it's fast enough that it doesn't have to hold all of your music to be useful.
This is a really bizarre bit of logic.
You're saying that people will wait a year for a technology that they can't distinguish between current technology? The transfer times are immaterially different (anyone frustrated by USB1.1 mp3 devices right now would not care whether they can transfer songs in 6 seconds or 5), the cost of entry is immaterially different (buy a 1394 card, or a USB2.0 card - 1394 cards are cheaper now), but one is available right now. Heck, Creative is even stickin' 'em in their sound cards.
Nice flamebait, though.
1. Take a look at literate programming tools, like noweb or doc++ (language specific).
Given the broad nature of you query it's not clear what is most appropriate for you; but literate programming might be what you need.
2. Framemaker. I've never used it myself, but I have known people who did all of their word processing in it. Pretty output, can do web output too, and definitely intended for larger documents.
3. Look at [La]TeX again. Seriously. Some of the stuff you need may not be easily provided, but I don't know. Get the book on LaTeX and see if that doesn't handle your previous problems.