A rustic farmer is sitting on his porch. In the distance a "toom toom toom" noise can be heard. A pissed off look crosses the farmer's face as he reaches for his shotgun. He opens the breach of the gun and inserts shells that look distinctly like Energizer batteries. As he looks out over his cornfield, a pair of white ears can be seen serenely sliding above one of the rows. He takes aim and then bolts of lightning lash out of the shotgun towards the stately sliding ears. Drumsticks, drumpieces, and exploded bits of Energizer bunny fly everywhere. A smoking pair of sunglasses lands right at the farmer's feet.
Maybe I'm an art house bourgeois uppity bastard who only like foreign films, but I'd like for one day in my life to be able to turn on the radio or TV and see something that is more than just "entertainment". I'd like to see art.
You won't get art. You won't even get entertainment that has a shred of respect for your intelligence. Once these MPAA and RIAA goons finish taking a foot howitzer to themselves, others with a more realistic grasp of how the media markets now work will step up. What they produce will be mostly pap because the appetite for pap is bottomless.
If you're lucky, they'll be able to more efficiently serve smaller markets made up of people like yourselves. You may have an easier and cheaper time filling out your art house film collection but the mass market outlets like TV will continue to carry Joe Sixpack friendly fare. It sucks but that is the way it will be.
There is one bright spot. After the xxAA suffer their little apocalypse, there will be a period where the money to make blockbusters like Spiderman 2 and remakes of The Posieden Adventure won't be available. Such sums of money absolutely demand a sure fire return. This leads to less risk taking by the likes of Kubrick, Spielburg, and Lucas and that means comic book franchises and endless remakes of past successes. So what you will have is a host of smaller productions that will at least have to employ some originality to stand out from the rest. I think you can safely hope for a little originality anyway.
The following practices will remove many of the irritations of using Netatalk.
Use jfs formatted with the case-preserving option so that the resulting share will have the filename case-preserving behaivor that Macs expect. Samba imposes case-preserving semantics. Netatalk doesn't so you have to use the underlying filesystem to do it. I've found that JFS is the only viable way to do this in Linux. This is because JFS filesystems can be created and fscked entirely on Linux systems and also don't do hideous things to charsets and filenames. Keep in mind that you pretty much have to just use the share to service Mac clients; every once in a while you can really confuse Linux scripts that expect case-sensitive behaivor.
No end of application flakiness disappears this way. Since Macs are case-preserving, software devs play fast in loose with the filenames they are passing around. If your application is using data from "Database.dbx" but writes updates to "database.dbx" then hilarity ensues. Using a case-preserving filesystem on the server prevents such nastiness. . Create your netatalk share filesystem thusly:
mkfs.jfs -O/dev/whatever
Put/dev/whatever into your fstab, mount, and modify Applevolumes.default accordingly.
The -O is an uppercase letter O.
Secondly, make sure you are running the cnid_metad daemon and use the dbd cnidscheme for your shares. That will keep your Mac OS aliases nice and happy.
We need to get out there and start doing something, so who's gonna be the brave one to help start?
To start with, we can get out this November and vote. More people voted for the latest American Idol than in the last election. This apathy to who's in charge is what got us an oilman and his Halliburton buddies looting the treasury and using the Bill of Rights for toliet paper rather than anything even remotely resembling statesmanship.
Conservatives who still care about what this country is supposed to stand for can let the Republicans know they are very displeased with them. Whatever else the Republicans are these days, they are not a party of true conservatives. They are a band of hacks who can reliably turn out a moderately sized swarm of hornets on election day by pushing buttons labeled "abortion", "darwinism", "gay marriage", and "heathen terrorists". Hell, their radio pundits even deride fiscal conservatism as a "liberal" value. Not that I like the Democrats much either. The Democrats mostly just piss me off, especially when the Hollywood contingent gets their asses licked for ever more DRM and IP expansions. The Republicans on the other hand both scare me and piss me off. They are in charge of all three branches of government and think they can get away with anything.
The parent poster is dead correct. Not being spied on and continually asked "Your papers comrade" was supposed to be one of the touchstones of American citizenship. When I was growing up, I was often told that not enduring such things and NOT TOLERATING them was one of the many things that made us better than the Russians. People used to care enough about that citizenship to even brook contemplating the traitorous ideas Gonzales and the rest of the Bush administration keep coming up with.
The people in charge right now really suck. But the lack of spine being showed by the People means they suck worse. We should be howling for these clowns' heads on platters.
I'm often called upon to answer "How do I?....." questions. If the person I'm answering the question for whips out a pad and writes down every step and menu dialog in detail then the person is NOT computer literate. Such users basically need a recipe to follow for any action they use the machine for. If it is something they use everyday like a web based studing grading app then they'll gain some proficiency but will be completely flummoxed in the event that something on the server is changed. Ditto for new versions of Office or any other software they use. I sometimes characterize such people as "brittle users". Only the slightest of changes will break such a user because their file of Post-It recipes has been invalidated. I've overseen migrations from Win98 to XP and from Mac OS 9 to X. It was user breakage galore.
Literate users on the other hand seem to grok "input -> transformation -> output" on one level or another even if they wouldn't use such terminology. They don't need to know every menu option of every software in detail nor do they need a file of recipes. If I tell such a user "Your pictures are taking forever to print because the camera was in high quality mode and you need to size them down.", he or she will likely find a way to size the pictures down on their own. For the brittle user, I'll have to run down a simple photo batching software and give them a step by step recipe to get the pictures off the camera, point the resizer at them, then you import them back into the photo software, and then you...........
The best analogy really seems to be cooking. A person who knows at least the rudiments of cookery can go through the cabinets and whip up something edible. It may not be fit for a five star restaurant but it will suffice. The person who isn't a "loyal Good Eats viewer" will likely have to go to the store as she must work from a recipe and ingredients are missing.....
You're trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer. RDP and X are two different protocols full stop. That doesn't mean things are bleak. Linux/BSD can use rdesktop as an RDP client and X servers both paid and free exist for Windows.
Unless you have something substantial to contribute to that project be it your money, time, or coding expertise then either use a paid support option or buy something proprietary. I know you are having a hard time wrapping your head around this but if someone gives you something for free then you don't have a right to bitch. It isn't true for free pop, free ice-cream or even free beer. Software isn't some special exception to that rule. Constructively criticize maybe (and only if the devs are in the mood...) bitch...no.
The code is written either to solve a developer's problem or whoever immediately paid that developer. If those parties are happy the "good name" you are going on about is less than relavent. Yes, that is true. In that case, a bitch from J. Random User who isn't a paying customer of one sort or another is less than noteworthy. Bitching privileges are most definitely a billable item. You aren't paying in coin of some sort? STFU.
If you thought the 2600 version rocked, then you need to try the original. Get yourself a copy of Atari800 then find the Star Raiders rom for it. Atari also had a line of 6502 based 8bit machines that competed with Apple II and C64. Many people bought them in 1979-1981 just to play Star Raiders.
There is a circa 1995 DOS game called Star Rangers that was very much an homage to Star Raiders. You may have good luck with it in DOSBox. It successfully captured much of the flavor.
2600 Pacman had to be the most disappointing game ever.
My brother and I saved up our paper route money, bottle and can deposits, etc, preordered the game, waited about a month for it, popped it in and "WTF is this? You call *THIS* PACMAN?!?!"
Some enterprising homebrew coders have taken it upon themselves to rectify the Pac-Man situation on the 2600.
There's "Mr. Pac-Man" which is a hack OF a hack of Ms. Pacman.
Pac-Man Plus was one of the later variants of Pac-Man. I believe it was a "conversion" used to make the investment in an arcade cab last longer. Somebody hacked 2600 Ms. Pac-Man into a passable version of it.
Nukey Shay at AtariAge wondered how far the ORIGINAL codebase for 2600 Pac-Man could be pushed. 2600 Pac-Man was a 4k rom. Nukey's hack is a bank-switched 8k rom. It still has the goofy maze but the colors are correct. The "Bread And Butter" has been replaced by Cherries, Strawberries, and so-forth. I believe it has the siren and other aspects of the game have been corrected. Scroll down to the bottom of this. It is attached to a forum posting.
None of that changes the fact that Chapter 21 is a bag hanging off the side of the story. I don't disagree with what you said; I just disagree with Chapter 21. The prison pastor was correct. Alex wasn't "good". He simply got the barfing anxiety attack if he tried to do what he enjoyed most. Alex would never credibly be moral or decent; I can only credit a kind of cynical wisdom. Being intelligent, I could see Alex giving up simple robbery and "ultraviolence" but not changing his essential nature in any way, Ludivico or not.
The book ending didn't really fit all that well with the rest of the book. 20 chapters of mayhem, prison nastiness, a psychological chamber of horrors and then Alex just up and decides to outgrow being a sociopathic homicidal little shit? I could have believed Alex growing into more sophisticated corruption as he aged, perhaps even aspiring to be like Frederick or maybe a super slick mafia boss. Hell, even a ruthless corporate head wouldn't have been a bad fit. Given the way the writer was ultimately treated and that the prisons were to be reserved "for political prisoners" if the Ludivico Treatment worked, I'd say Frederick was a pretty nasty piece of work and a sterling role model for Alex to look up to.
I think Burgess was too appalled by his own creation to follow it to its logical conclusion and chucked in a little gratuitous redemption.
The nice saleman does not make me sign a contract before handing over the box. I hand him him money; I get a box. That copy is then my property. This is the way commerce worked before the relative novelty of computer products allowed a pack of weasels to fundamentally alter the nature of property AND contract law. You're bleating on about quasicontracts; clickwraps and shrinkwraps are no sort of reasonably legitimate contract....even though bought politicians now say so. I'm talking about moral legitimacy. The law and morality don't have one hell of a lot to do with each other these days. Will I allow other to pirate that copy? No. Am I going to be told what I can do with it once it is mine? No. And no amount of legal sophistry will convince me otherwise. There is a reason for the infamous recommendation to "First, Kill all the lawyers."
In truth, I wouldn't buy the copy in the first place. Not because of the "contract" on it. But because I'm not going to fund such dangerous foolishness.
You cannot do things like sell yourself into slavery or sell an arm and leg so this "don't like a contract" business is not an automatic slam-dunk for you. It is possible to have things that are too immoral to put in a contract. It most certainly is possible to have illegal contract provisions. Agree to a contract to sell your child and see what happens.
Secondly, shrinkwrap and clickwrap contracts do not impress me. That politicians have been bought so they have some sort of legal status does not impress me. Any law that has been bought by a monied interest does not impress me. My compliance with such only happens if they can reasonably come after me.
Real contracts require consideration of exchange and an actual agreement between individuals or organizations. A dialog box thrown up by a product I have a sales receipt for is no such thing. If I own a copy of OS X or any other software then I will do as I will with it within the bounds of copyright. What passes for contracts in your or Gates or Jobs minds isn't going to move me.
You can't just have a libertarian fit, throw up your hands, and leave it to Adam Smith's invisible hand to sort everything out. Pollution can and has killed in definitely non-subjective ways:
Suppose unreasonable contract provisions can be made because a law was bought and paid for. I feel zero guilt about violating such. Much of what is permissible in modern EULAs did not come about in any way remotely resembling what I learned about government in HS and college. I'd tar and feather the whores who allowed it to happen. My EULA invitation to Steve stands.
I had previously shied away from KOffice/Kword because although the earlier versions offered the ability to save/print to pdf file, the pdf file it created sometimes wasn't compatible with Acroread or Windows or even OO.org.
I'm running on Ubuntu Dapper and had EXTREME problems creating non-broken pdfs. It turns out that the culprit was gs-esp. In/etc/alternatives, I renamed the old gs->/usr/bin/gs-esp symlink to gs.old and made a new gs symlink that points gs->/usr/bin/gs-gpl. That fixed pdf creation across a whole range of apps and I'm still able to print to the postscript laser printers I'm using.
Ironically, recent versions of Scribus insist on the latest gs-esp builds to "support advanced pdf features". I don't see the point of advanced pdfs that bomb out in anything but gv.
I was comparing standard mp3 formats to m4a, not LAME
We seem to be in violent agreement then. However mp3s produced by LAME aren't nonstandard in any way. They'll play on any device mp3s produced by another encoder will. It may also be the case that m4a is more rigidly defined than mp3 and that one encoder won't make much of a difference over another but psychoacoustics being what they are, I doubt it. In any case, Apple has sufficient motivation to make their implementation good. The plethora of lousy encoders (not the problem it used to be) certainly didn't do much to enhance mp3's reputation nor does the ocean of badly encoded ones floating about the p2p networks. I still stand by my assertion that mp3 represents one side of a portability/size tradeoff. Provided decent software is used to create and play mp3, audio quality isn't really an issue.
You said that "mp3 SUCKS". YOU started the ripping; I likewise apologized if "you are merely appreciate good kit with resorting to trek style technobabble". Slashdot has been graced with the styings of tweak audiophiles before. It is a loaded term here. That style of audiophile has no technical or science clue at all ESPECIALLY as regards the physics of sound...even though they think so. Most of them disdain digital music much less compressed music or any sort of audio whatsover that hasn't been run through $15,000 unobtanium tube amplifiers. There is nonetheless a subspecies that engages in codec dicksize wars.
m4a files being smaller IS a good reason to prefer them over mp3 but that doesn't make mp3 "suck". On the other hand, not all portable players will play m4as (or wmvs) for that matter. Excepting Sony's bizarro crap, most any portable WILL play mp3 and that is an equally good reason to take a slight size hit for some people. If bitrate and relative size aren't fixed then audio quality is no reason to prefer one over the other. My entire collection fits in 18 GB of quality encoded LAME mp3s. That is about 300 odd CDs worth of stuff and the quality of those files even played on a good stereo is more than acceptable and I can use them in most any player or platform context. I'm certainly not being killed by the storage requirements of my collection. m4a would save me perhaps 3-5 GB of storage for the same quality. That is not worth the time I would put into re-ripping and encoding my collection then losing the ability to use it in some contexts.
There is nothing wrong with m4a but it's merits do not exceed the value I get from mp3's portability. If portability isn't such a concern then happy listening but don't complain about being "ripped on" when you yourself throw around words like "sucks". Right tool for the job and all that.....
Audiophiles? Are we talking about the same group of people who pay $500 for little felt squares to put on their back walls that "expand the spatiality field" or something. Are we talking about the same group of people who use the language of art critics to critique the technical workings of sound equipment? Or are they they people who run 5 inch thick oxygen free silver straps to their speakers to cut down on skin effect and gush on the superior audio quality of hand-rolled unobtanium capacitors? Those for who Stereophile and The Absolute Sound are gospel? The tweaks who make the likes of Bob Carver laugh at them all the way to the bank? If you're speaking of one merely appreciates decent stereo kit without resorting to Star Trek style technobabble then I apologize.
mp3's encoded at a decent bitrate with decent encoder like LAME can sound every bit as good as m4a files. They'll just be a bit larger. Even using LAME's alt-preset-extreme, you can still fit seven to nine CDs in one cd's worth of storage and the resulting files will sound perfectly fine as long as the "audiophile" isn't told beforehand which is which (tweak style audiophiles hate anything that throws the harsh light of objectivity on their treknobabble). If you have enough storage then there is little need to bother with either m4a or mp3. You can use Apple Lossless or Flac and transcode to the lossy format of your choice for portables and car use.
If I have a boxed copy of OS X and a sales receipt for it then I'll cordially invite Steve Jobs to roll the EULA into a cigar shape, bend over, and gently insert.
And it would instantly ramp up and handle the event as fast as it possible could.
I'm not so sure about instantly. Active electronics have a figure of merit called slew rate. In an analog circuit, it the fastest speed voltage levels can rise at. In digital circuitry, it is the fastest rate at a transistor or other switch can go from one distinct state to the other.
Transistors these days have much higher slew rates than they did in the fifties but they can't go infinitely high. This is the reason square waves are often depicted with sloped sides rather than the idealized vertical sides. You truly can't go from on to off instantly. Along with clock speeds, we have been getting closer to that vertical ideal. Like clockspeed and feature size, all of the low-hanging research fruit has been plucked. Twice the money will have to be spent to get half of the last improvement on slew rates. Geeks years from now will still be having dicksize wars over the relative speed of their gear. But the important figures of merit will change.
That's probably the reason why Apple won't release a virtualization solution, ever: Make it possible to run Windows, but make it complicated enough (having windows a save-everything-and-reboot away kinda works, but it's not for regular use), so people will mostly stay inside OS X.
It is too obvious a thing that many Mac users will want. If Apple doesn't develop it then someone else will. In the rest of the x86 market, virtualization competitors are falling all over themselves with freebies and loss leaders. What finally comes out for Intel OS X will probably cost $80-$100 but the Mac users that want it won't mind paying it.
Slashdot Mirror
A rustic farmer is sitting on his porch. In the distance a "toom toom toom" noise can be heard. A pissed off look crosses the farmer's face as he reaches for his shotgun. He opens the breach of the gun and inserts shells that look distinctly like Energizer batteries. As he looks out over his cornfield, a pair of white ears can be seen serenely sliding above one of the rows. He takes aim and then bolts of lightning lash out of the shotgun towards the stately sliding ears. Drumsticks, drumpieces, and exploded bits of Energizer bunny fly everywhere. A smoking pair of sunglasses lands right at the farmer's feet.
"I jes hate it when rabbits get in ma corn."
Maybe I'm an art house bourgeois uppity bastard who only like foreign films, but I'd like for one day in my life to be able to turn on the radio or TV and see something that is more than just "entertainment". I'd like to see art.
You won't get art. You won't even get entertainment that has a shred of respect for your intelligence. Once these MPAA and RIAA goons finish taking a foot howitzer to themselves, others with a more realistic grasp of how the media markets now work will step up. What they produce will be mostly pap because the appetite for pap is bottomless.
If you're lucky, they'll be able to more efficiently serve smaller markets made up of people like yourselves. You may have an easier and cheaper time filling out your art house film collection but the mass market outlets like TV will continue to carry Joe Sixpack friendly fare. It sucks but that is the way it will be.
There is one bright spot. After the xxAA suffer their little apocalypse, there will be a period where the money to make blockbusters like Spiderman 2 and remakes of The Posieden Adventure won't be available. Such sums of money absolutely demand a sure fire return. This leads to less risk taking by the likes of Kubrick, Spielburg, and Lucas and that means comic book franchises and endless remakes of past successes. So what you will have is a host of smaller productions that will at least have to employ some originality to stand out from the rest. I think you can safely hope for a little originality anyway.
The following practices will remove many of the irritations of using Netatalk.
/dev/whatever
/dev/whatever into your fstab, mount, and modify Applevolumes.default accordingly.
Use jfs formatted with the case-preserving option so that the resulting share will have the filename case-preserving behaivor that Macs expect. Samba imposes case-preserving semantics. Netatalk doesn't so you have to use the underlying filesystem to do it. I've found that JFS is the only viable way to do this in Linux. This is because JFS filesystems can be created and fscked entirely on Linux systems and also don't do hideous things to charsets and filenames. Keep in mind that you pretty much have to just use the share to service Mac clients; every once in a while you can really confuse Linux scripts that expect case-sensitive behaivor.
No end of application flakiness disappears this way. Since Macs are case-preserving, software devs play fast in loose with the filenames they are passing around. If your application is using data from "Database.dbx" but writes updates to "database.dbx" then hilarity ensues. Using a case-preserving filesystem on the server prevents such nastiness. . Create your netatalk share filesystem thusly:
mkfs.jfs -O
Put
The -O is an uppercase letter O.
Secondly, make sure you are running the cnid_metad daemon and use the dbd cnidscheme for your shares. That will keep your Mac OS aliases nice and happy.
We need to get out there and start doing something, so who's gonna be the brave one to help start?
To start with, we can get out this November and vote. More people voted for the latest American Idol than in the last election. This apathy to who's in charge is what got us an oilman and his Halliburton buddies looting the treasury and using the Bill of Rights for toliet paper rather than anything even remotely resembling statesmanship.
Conservatives who still care about what this country is supposed to stand for can let the Republicans know they are very displeased with them. Whatever else the Republicans are these days, they are not a party of true conservatives. They are a band of hacks who can reliably turn out a moderately sized swarm of hornets on election day by pushing buttons labeled "abortion", "darwinism", "gay marriage", and "heathen terrorists". Hell, their radio pundits even deride fiscal conservatism as a "liberal" value. Not that I like the Democrats much either. The Democrats mostly just piss me off, especially when the Hollywood contingent gets their asses licked for ever more DRM and IP expansions. The Republicans on the other hand both scare me and piss me off. They are in charge of all three branches of government and think they can get away with anything.
Give me gridlock or give me death.
The parent poster is dead correct. Not being spied on and continually asked "Your papers comrade" was supposed to be one of the touchstones of American citizenship. When I was growing up, I was often told that not enduring such things and NOT TOLERATING them was one of the many things that made us better than the Russians. People used to care enough about that citizenship to even brook contemplating the traitorous ideas Gonzales and the rest of the Bush administration keep coming up with.
The people in charge right now really suck. But the lack of spine being showed by the People means they suck worse. We should be howling for these clowns' heads on platters.
I'm often called upon to answer "How do I?....." questions. If the person I'm answering the question for whips out a pad and writes down every step and menu dialog in detail then the person is NOT computer literate. Such users basically need a recipe to follow for any action they use the machine for. If it is something they use everyday like a web based studing grading app then they'll gain some proficiency but will be completely flummoxed in the event that something on the server is changed. Ditto for new versions of Office or any other software they use. I sometimes characterize such people as "brittle users". Only the slightest of changes will break such a user because their file of Post-It recipes has been invalidated. I've overseen migrations from Win98 to XP and from Mac OS 9 to X. It was user breakage galore.
...........
Literate users on the other hand seem to grok "input -> transformation -> output" on one level or another even if they wouldn't use such terminology. They don't need to know every menu option of every software in detail nor do they need a file of recipes. If I tell such a user "Your pictures are taking forever to print because the camera was in high quality mode and you need to size them down.", he or she will likely find a way to size the pictures down on their own. For the brittle user, I'll have to run down a simple photo batching software and give them a step by step recipe to get the pictures off the camera, point the resizer at them, then you import them back into the photo software, and then you
The best analogy really seems to be cooking. A person who knows at least the rudiments of cookery can go through the cabinets and whip up something edible. It may not be fit for a five star restaurant but it will suffice. The person who isn't a "loyal Good Eats viewer" will likely have to go to the store as she must work from a recipe and ingredients are missing.....
You're trying to use a screwdriver as a hammer. RDP and X are two different protocols full stop. That doesn't mean things are bleak. Linux/BSD can use rdesktop as an RDP client and X servers both paid and free exist for Windows.
Unless you have something substantial to contribute to that project be it your money, time, or coding expertise then either use a paid support option or buy something proprietary. I know you are having a hard time wrapping your head around this but if someone gives you something for free then you don't have a right to bitch. It isn't true for free pop, free ice-cream or even free beer. Software isn't some special exception to that rule. Constructively criticize maybe (and only if the devs are in the mood...) bitch...no.
The code is written either to solve a developer's problem or whoever immediately paid that developer. If those parties are happy the "good name" you are going on about is less than relavent. Yes, that is true. In that case, a bitch from J. Random User who isn't a paying customer of one sort or another is less than noteworthy. Bitching privileges are most definitely a billable item. You aren't paying in coin of some sort? STFU.
If you thought the 2600 version rocked, then you need to try the original. Get yourself a copy of Atari800 then find the Star Raiders rom for it. Atari also had a line of 6502 based 8bit machines that competed with Apple II and C64. Many people bought them in 1979-1981 just to play Star Raiders.
There is a circa 1995 DOS game called Star Rangers that was very much an homage to Star Raiders. You may have good luck with it in DOSBox. It successfully captured much of the flavor.
2600 Pacman had to be the most disappointing game ever. My brother and I saved up our paper route money, bottle and can deposits, etc, preordered the game, waited about a month for it, popped it in and "WTF is this? You call *THIS* PACMAN?!?!"
Some enterprising homebrew coders have taken it upon themselves to rectify the Pac-Man situation on the 2600.
There's "Mr. Pac-Man" which is a hack OF a hack of Ms. Pacman.
http://www.atariage.com/hack_page.html?SystemID=26 00&SoftwareHackID=146
Pac-Man Plus was one of the later variants of Pac-Man. I believe it was a "conversion" used to make the investment in an arcade cab last longer. Somebody hacked 2600 Ms. Pac-Man into a passable version of it.
http://www.atariage.com/hack_page.html?SystemID=26 00&SoftwareHackID=151
Nukey Shay at AtariAge wondered how far the ORIGINAL codebase for 2600 Pac-Man could be pushed. 2600 Pac-Man was a 4k rom. Nukey's hack is a bank-switched 8k rom. It still has the goofy maze but the colors are correct. The "Bread And Butter" has been replaced by Cherries, Strawberries, and so-forth. I believe it has the siren and other aspects of the game have been corrected. Scroll down to the bottom of this. It is attached to a forum posting.
http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic =54937&st=150&p=955745&#entry955745
A generic postscript driver just doesn't exist for Windows.
This is true. However the HP Laserjet 4 PS driver does pretty nicely if you need a dummy Postscript printer or some such.
None of that changes the fact that Chapter 21 is a bag hanging off the side of the story. I don't disagree with what you said; I just disagree with Chapter 21. The prison pastor was correct. Alex wasn't "good". He simply got the barfing anxiety attack if he tried to do what he enjoyed most. Alex would never credibly be moral or decent; I can only credit a kind of cynical wisdom. Being intelligent, I could see Alex giving up simple robbery and "ultraviolence" but not changing his essential nature in any way, Ludivico or not.
The book ending didn't really fit all that well with the rest of the book. 20 chapters of mayhem, prison nastiness, a psychological chamber of horrors and then Alex just up and decides to outgrow being a sociopathic homicidal little shit? I could have believed Alex growing into more sophisticated corruption as he aged, perhaps even aspiring to be like Frederick or maybe a super slick mafia boss. Hell, even a ruthless corporate head wouldn't have been a bad fit. Given the way the writer was ultimately treated and that the prisons were to be reserved "for political prisoners" if the Ludivico Treatment worked, I'd say Frederick was a pretty nasty piece of work and a sterling role model for Alex to look up to.
I think Burgess was too appalled by his own creation to follow it to its logical conclusion and chucked in a little gratuitous redemption.
The google toolbar also has a spellchecker. I've basically been using it just for the spellchecker.
The nice saleman does not make me sign a contract before handing over the box. I hand him him money; I get a box. That copy is then my property. This is the way commerce worked before the relative novelty of computer products allowed a pack of weasels to fundamentally alter the nature of property AND contract law. You're bleating on about quasicontracts; clickwraps and shrinkwraps are no sort of reasonably legitimate contract....even though bought politicians now say so. I'm talking about moral legitimacy. The law and morality don't have one hell of a lot to do with each other these days. Will I allow other to pirate that copy? No. Am I going to be told what I can do with it once it is mine? No. And no amount of legal sophistry will convince me otherwise. There is a reason for the infamous recommendation to "First, Kill all the lawyers."
In truth, I wouldn't buy the copy in the first place. Not because of the "contract" on it. But because I'm not going to fund such dangerous foolishness.
Now if someone gave me a legit copy...guess what?
You cannot do things like sell yourself into slavery or sell an arm and leg so this "don't like a contract" business is not an automatic slam-dunk for you. It is possible to have things that are too immoral to put in a contract. It most certainly is possible to have illegal contract provisions. Agree to a contract to sell your child and see what happens.
Secondly, shrinkwrap and clickwrap contracts do not impress me. That politicians have been bought so they have some sort of legal status does not impress me. Any law that has been bought by a monied interest does not impress me. My compliance with such only happens if they can reasonably come after me.
Real contracts require consideration of exchange and an actual agreement between individuals or organizations. A dialog box thrown up by a product I have a sales receipt for is no such thing. If I own a copy of OS X or any other software then I will do as I will with it within the bounds of copyright. What passes for contracts in your or Gates or Jobs minds isn't going to move me.
You can't just have a libertarian fit, throw up your hands, and leave it to Adam Smith's invisible hand to sort everything out. Pollution can and has killed in definitely non-subjective ways:
s ion4/27/greatsmog52.htm
http://www.portfolio.mvm.ed.ac.uk/studentwebs/ses
Suppose unreasonable contract provisions can be made because a law was bought and paid for. I feel zero guilt about violating such. Much of what is permissible in modern EULAs did not come about in any way remotely resembling what I learned about government in HS and college. I'd tar and feather the whores who allowed it to happen. My EULA invitation to Steve stands.
I had previously shied away from KOffice/Kword because although the earlier versions offered the ability to save/print to pdf file, the pdf file it created sometimes wasn't compatible with Acroread or Windows or even OO.org.
I'm running on Ubuntu Dapper and had EXTREME problems creating non-broken pdfs. It turns out that the culprit was gs-esp. In /etc/alternatives, I renamed the old gs->/usr/bin/gs-esp symlink to gs.old and made a new gs symlink that points gs->/usr/bin/gs-gpl. That fixed pdf creation across a whole range of apps and I'm still able to print to the postscript laser printers I'm using.
Ironically, recent versions of Scribus insist on the latest gs-esp builds to "support advanced pdf features". I don't see the point of advanced pdfs that bomb out in anything but gv.
I was comparing standard mp3 formats to m4a, not LAME
We seem to be in violent agreement then. However mp3s produced by LAME aren't nonstandard in any way. They'll play on any device mp3s produced by another encoder will. It may also be the case that m4a is more rigidly defined than mp3 and that one encoder won't make much of a difference over another but psychoacoustics being what they are, I doubt it. In any case, Apple has sufficient motivation to make their implementation good. The plethora of lousy encoders (not the problem it used to be) certainly didn't do much to enhance mp3's reputation nor does the ocean of badly encoded ones floating about the p2p networks. I still stand by my assertion that mp3 represents one side of a portability/size tradeoff. Provided decent software is used to create and play mp3, audio quality isn't really an issue.
You said that "mp3 SUCKS". YOU started the ripping; I likewise apologized if "you are merely appreciate good kit with resorting to trek style technobabble". Slashdot has been graced with the styings of tweak audiophiles before. It is a loaded term here. That style of audiophile has no technical or science clue at all ESPECIALLY as regards the physics of sound...even though they think so. Most of them disdain digital music much less compressed music or any sort of audio whatsover that hasn't been run through $15,000 unobtanium tube amplifiers. There is nonetheless a subspecies that engages in codec dicksize wars.
m4a files being smaller IS a good reason to prefer them over mp3 but that doesn't make mp3 "suck". On the other hand, not all portable players will play m4as (or wmvs) for that matter. Excepting Sony's bizarro crap, most any portable WILL play mp3 and that is an equally good reason to take a slight size hit for some people. If bitrate and relative size aren't fixed then audio quality is no reason to prefer one over the other. My entire collection fits in 18 GB of quality encoded LAME mp3s. That is about 300 odd CDs worth of stuff and the quality of those files even played on a good stereo is more than acceptable and I can use them in most any player or platform context. I'm certainly not being killed by the storage requirements of my collection. m4a would save me perhaps 3-5 GB of storage for the same quality. That is not worth the time I would put into re-ripping and encoding my collection then losing the ability to use it in some contexts.
There is nothing wrong with m4a but it's merits do not exceed the value I get from mp3's portability. If portability isn't such a concern then happy listening but don't complain about being "ripped on" when you yourself throw around words like "sucks". Right tool for the job and all that.....
Audiophiles? Are we talking about the same group of people who pay $500 for little felt squares to put on their back walls that "expand the spatiality field" or something. Are we talking about the same group of people who use the language of art critics to critique the technical workings of sound equipment? Or are they they people who run 5 inch thick oxygen free silver straps to their speakers to cut down on skin effect and gush on the superior audio quality of hand-rolled unobtanium capacitors? Those for who Stereophile and The Absolute Sound are gospel? The tweaks who make the likes of Bob Carver laugh at them all the way to the bank? If you're speaking of one merely appreciates decent stereo kit without resorting to Star Trek style technobabble then I apologize.
mp3's encoded at a decent bitrate with decent encoder like LAME can sound every bit as good as m4a files. They'll just be a bit larger. Even using LAME's alt-preset-extreme, you can still fit seven to nine CDs in one cd's worth of storage and the resulting files will sound perfectly fine as long as the "audiophile" isn't told beforehand which is which (tweak style audiophiles hate anything that throws the harsh light of objectivity on their treknobabble). If you have enough storage then there is little need to bother with either m4a or mp3. You can use Apple Lossless or Flac and transcode to the lossy format of your choice for portables and car use.
If I have a boxed copy of OS X and a sales receipt for it then I'll cordially invite Steve Jobs to roll the EULA into a cigar shape, bend over, and gently insert.
And it would instantly ramp up and handle the event as fast as it possible could.
I'm not so sure about instantly. Active electronics have a figure of merit called slew rate. In an analog circuit, it the fastest speed voltage levels can rise at. In digital circuitry, it is the fastest rate at a transistor or other switch can go from one distinct state to the other.
Transistors these days have much higher slew rates than they did in the fifties but they can't go infinitely high. This is the reason square waves are often depicted with sloped sides rather than the idealized vertical sides. You truly can't go from on to off instantly. Along with clock speeds, we have been getting closer to that vertical ideal. Like clockspeed and feature size, all of the low-hanging research fruit has been plucked. Twice the money will have to be spent to get half of the last improvement on slew rates. Geeks years from now will still be having dicksize wars over the relative speed of their gear. But the important figures of merit will change.
That's probably the reason why Apple won't release a virtualization solution, ever: Make it possible to run Windows, but make it complicated enough (having windows a save-everything-and-reboot away kinda works, but it's not for regular use), so people will mostly stay inside OS X.
It is too obvious a thing that many Mac users will want. If Apple doesn't develop it then someone else will. In the rest of the x86 market, virtualization competitors are falling all over themselves with freebies and loss leaders. What finally comes out for Intel OS X will probably cost $80-$100 but the Mac users that want it won't mind paying it.