Are you kidding me? No matter how great the rest of the features, "scary lockups" are not something most people will just ignore - especially when they cause the hard drive to seek for 40 continuous minutes, draining the battery. I'll keep my iPod, thanks very much, and when I want to replace it, this Rio will not be on my list for consideration.
This has been a configuration option on every laptop I've ever used, going back seven or eight years. On older APM machines it was in the BIOS; on my new ACPI machine, it's an OS-level utility program/event handler. On the old machines it was sometimes a trick to find the key that gets you into the BIOS, but it was always there somewhere. Who knows where it is an a Mac- NVRAM maybe?
A lot of programs can read it. I think the latest versions of PHP have Exif support built in. The latest GIMP might have Exif support. I wrote my own software that was in Sourceforge as Exif-tools, but I no longer maintain it and I believe the project has been removed. If you're looking for a command-line tool, jhead might read Exif tags. Even Windows XP can read them.
The most useful tag is DateTimeOriginal, which tells you when the photo was taken. Some cameras also record info like shutter speed, flash setting, aperture, focus distance, lighting conditions, and other interesting info.
Adobe is very smart about this. It's based on TIFF, so it's a pretty easy to read standard as there are a lot of libraries to read TIFF...
TIFF is also a format that most camera makers are already comfortable with. The files that come out of most cameras conform to the Exif spec. Exif is the JFIF (JPEG) file format with metadata embedded using TIFF tags. It will be interesting to see (I haven't read the specs yet) whether Adobe wants to keep any or all of the Exif tags, or wants to ignore them and invent their own. It would be smart of Adobe to try to design something that can live happily with what users and manufacturers are already familiar with
My guess is that there is something wrong with the video drivers, or the mouse drivers, or some other part of his computer that's causing these problems.
If I remember the specs I saw when I was shopping for an LCD monitor about 18 months ago, LCD update rates are characterized in tens of milliseconds. The ones I was considering were in the 20 to 28 ms range. That's between one and two screen refreshes at 60 Hz. That's fast enough not to be noticeable.
If the monitor were causing the mouse to have a noticable lag, then everything else would appear to lag too. The guy needs to do some other tests - if he brings up a window and types, do the characters appear to be delayed too?
I'm with you - I think it's his mouse driver or some sort of strange interaction between the mouse driver and something he installed with the new drivers.
the target address of the email itself may [cease to exist]
Furthermore, the people you want to send that last e-mail to might change addresses even while you're incapacitated for the last few years of your life. I think the old letter in a drawer might be the better answer.
However, what if this company, instead of trying to send out an e-mail, instead stores a web page with your final message on it. Then you leave the URL of the final page in an envelope in the drawer.
You'd still have the problem of whether the company will stay in business longer than you live. If you operate your own web site, you might as well set up the page yourself. You could even keep on a hidden page in an otherwise visible site. Leave the URL in that envelope in your desk drawer. If you're smart, you'll also set up a cron job to periodically wget or curl the page, to ensure that it doesn't accidently get deactivated, or otherwise screwed up.
Excellent answer! I didn't notice the remote-play link in my first look at the site. My skepticism is about learning from a computer, but learning from another person is fine, I think, whether they're sitting across the board or across the world.
As someone who's terrible at strategy games...
on
Hikarunix: The Go Distro
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· Score: 4, Insightful
...I have to ask: isn't learning Go from a computer sort of like learning sex from a porn site? You can pick up some basic concepts and maybe even some effective strategies, but until you have a real, live, flesh-and-blood human partner you're just not getting the full effect and are never going to be truly good.
Re:Can someone say "Bad Idea Jeans"?
on
Broken Links No More?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Obviously if wanted to link to a site about baseball, all of those (other than ESPN) are really entirely irrelevant.
Yep. Because Major League Baseball has strong conceptual similarity to several other concepts: the game of baseball, professional sports, American culture, and others. Granted some are more specific than others, but that's a pretty tough judgment call that depends on the context in which the original link occurred. If I link to mlb.com from a site about baseball, then it means something different than if I link to mlb.com from a site about American culture, and if mlb.com goes dead, then the link would have to be replaced in different ways for the different sites. So this link-replacement software has to be smart about both the destination and the source (context) of a link in order to replace a dead one properly.
I wouldn't go so far as to say this has to be done manually. In theory, software could handle it, but I've never seen software smart enough to automate the task for a such a broad information source as the Internet.
(Disclaimer: no, I have not RTFA; just reacting to an interesting post.)
Well said. Sun does some amazing engineering. They write some rock-solid software. But they're badly in need of some strong, visionary leadership in front of all that ingenuity. Stealing sales from your resellers is not visionary. Changing direction every other week is not visionary.
When I was a kid, my Mom told me not to touch the stove because it was hot and would burn me. How hot? Would it hurt that much if I touched it? What if I touched it really really fast? Would that hurt too? What if I could touch it fast enough that it would not hurt too much? I stood there for a few minutes, transfixed by the red glow of the stove eye, trying to overcome the irresistable urge to touch it...
What's happening is that Sun is being run by chaos theory. How many different strategies has Sun had toward Linux over the past few years? How many different "philosophies" regarding open source? How many different strategies regarding x86 support? Maybe somebody who follows Sun more closely than I can answer some of these questions. I know it seems to me as if Sun changes direction more often than the wind. Name any important issue in the past few years and Sun will have had two or three positions on the issue - even more if you count the "unofficial" positions. They need a strong leader and sense of direction more desperately than any group except, maybe, the Democratic Party.
If I'm wrong, PLEASE let me know. I'm a Sun user and I like Sun, I really do... I just never know where they're going from one day to the next.
I've had a Gmail account for about the same length of time, and I see a huge amount of spam getting past its filter. I'm forwarding all my e-mail to Gmail from an address that - unfortunately - the spammers know very well. So I'm hitting my Gmail account with a stream of 100 to 150 spams per day. Its accuracy rate is, I would guess, in the 80 to 90 percent range. A help, but far from overwhelming.
That said, I don't understand why Gmail's filtering isn't better. They've got a huge number of people (the users) looking at every message that comes in. Once the number of people who have classified an e-mail as spam passes a certain threshold, then no one else should have to see it. In other words, I'd like to see Google combine the massive power of all those eyeballs with their magical search/categorization capabilities to provide its users with the most effective spam filter ever. Sure, some people are going to see spam every now and then, but on the average not very much. Surely the rate would be better than it is now.
On the other hand, what is spam to one person may not be spam to the next, so they'd have to leave a way to opt out, but I would bet that most people wouldn't.
CRM114 is a filter, just like SpamAssassin, so you can run it alongside SA if that helps you make the transition. Run everyone's e-mail through both filters; each will leave its own X-headers in the message. Users can then filter against whichever headers they prefer.
CRM114's author recommends against training it with a history of spam, and instead recommends train-on-error only. This means that, at first, you get a LOT of errors, both false positives and negatives, but the accuracy improves very very quickly.
One thing I like about CRM114 is that it's easy to retrain. If you get a false positive or negative, you simply run it through the filter again, with a special command-line flag, and CRM114 retrains itself. This makes fixing errors easy with a Courier IMAP server - you just set aside a special folder as a train-on-error folder. When you see misclassified e-mail, you just drop it into that folder. Every hour or so, you have a cron job wake up and look in the corresponding Maildir directory; if there's any messages in there, run them through CRM114 again to reclassify them. This, in effect, means that you can reclassify any errors with any IMAP client that can move mail from one folder to another - in other words, from pretty much anywhere. You can probably do the same thing for SA too.
I only get about 75% reduction because SA-Learn doesn't seem to work very well.
Try CRM114 My SA results weren't very good either, despite training it with a year's worth of both spam and non-spam, and two month of continuous re-training. CRM114 was easier to train even though its author recommends that you do NOT train it with your spam cache. Its accuracy was only about 50% at first, but within two weeks it was over 90. After about three months, I'd guess its accuracy is around 98% - not quite the 99.94 its author claims, but still very good. My only gripe is about the occasional false-positive, but it does have a whitelisting feature you can use to make sure mail from known correspondents doesn't get misclassified.
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Are you kidding me? No matter how great the rest of the features, "scary lockups" are not something most people will just ignore - especially when they cause the hard drive to seek for 40 continuous minutes, draining the battery. I'll keep my iPod, thanks very much, and when I want to replace it, this Rio will not be on my list for consideration.
It sounds like the plot of a Neal Stephenson book.
Hmm... Also reminds me of the plot of a Jules Verne book - one that predates Stephenson by a number of years.
As Henry David Thoreau observed 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.'
And Pink Floyd said "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way."
Well, hmm... I thought I'd something more to say...
You should check out Mississipi John Hurt's "Stack'O'Lee" (also based on this incident).
Or the Clash's "Wrong 'em Boyo" on London Calling, though their version has the dispute over cheating at cards, not politics.
Gawd... not even Vogon poetry is THAT bad!
Seem to exist for me...? :) Maybe you're in a parallel dimension?
I'm a karma whore, what can I say? The site exists, the site doesn't exist. I'll take the mod points one way or the other.
(But it did exist when I posted.)
For more enjoyment and greater efficiency, consumption is being standardized: http://www.newsobserver.com.nyud.net:8090/opinion/ story/1686331p-7930186c.html.
...our scientists are no longer able to monitor and analyze any vulcanic activity online.
Not to worry. Vulcan has returned to his perch and we are not expecting more vulcanic activity any time soon.
This has been a configuration option on every laptop I've ever used, going back seven or eight years. On older APM machines it was in the BIOS; on my new ACPI machine, it's an OS-level utility program/event handler. On the old machines it was sometimes a trick to find the key that gets you into the BIOS, but it was always there somewhere. Who knows where it is an a Mac- NVRAM maybe?
A lot of programs can read it. I think the latest versions of PHP have Exif support built in. The latest GIMP might have Exif support. I wrote my own software that was in Sourceforge as Exif-tools, but I no longer maintain it and I believe the project has been removed. If you're looking for a command-line tool, jhead might read Exif tags. Even Windows XP can read them.
The most useful tag is DateTimeOriginal, which tells you when the photo was taken. Some cameras also record info like shutter speed, flash setting, aperture, focus distance, lighting conditions, and other interesting info.
DING! DING!
Except for Adobe haters, who will pronounce it "dung" and porn photographers, who will pronounce it "dong".
Adobe is very smart about this. It's based on TIFF, so it's a pretty easy to read standard as there are a lot of libraries to read TIFF...
TIFF is also a format that most camera makers are already comfortable with. The files that come out of most cameras conform to the Exif spec. Exif is the JFIF (JPEG) file format with metadata embedded using TIFF tags. It will be interesting to see (I haven't read the specs yet) whether Adobe wants to keep any or all of the Exif tags, or wants to ignore them and invent their own. It would be smart of Adobe to try to design something that can live happily with what users and manufacturers are already familiar with
My guess is that there is something wrong with the video drivers, or the mouse drivers, or some other part of his computer that's causing these problems.
If I remember the specs I saw when I was shopping for an LCD monitor about 18 months ago, LCD update rates are characterized in tens of milliseconds. The ones I was considering were in the 20 to 28 ms range. That's between one and two screen refreshes at 60 Hz. That's fast enough not to be noticeable.
If the monitor were causing the mouse to have a noticable lag, then everything else would appear to lag too. The guy needs to do some other tests - if he brings up a window and types, do the characters appear to be delayed too?
I'm with you - I think it's his mouse driver or some sort of strange interaction between the mouse driver and something he installed with the new drivers.
the target address of the email itself may [cease to exist]
Furthermore, the people you want to send that last e-mail to might change addresses even while you're incapacitated for the last few years of your life. I think the old letter in a drawer might be the better answer.
However, what if this company, instead of trying to send out an e-mail, instead stores a web page with your final message on it. Then you leave the URL of the final page in an envelope in the drawer.
You'd still have the problem of whether the company will stay in business longer than you live. If you operate your own web site, you might as well set up the page yourself. You could even keep on a hidden page in an otherwise visible site. Leave the URL in that envelope in your desk drawer. If you're smart, you'll also set up a cron job to periodically wget or curl the page, to ensure that it doesn't accidently get deactivated, or otherwise screwed up.
Seems like I've been waiting forever for it to finish...
May be, but at least it keeps your memory banks free of bloodthirsty demons like Boradis, Keslack, and Rejick.
Fortunately, I learned about sex before I owned a computer!
Excellent answer! I didn't notice the remote-play link in my first look at the site. My skepticism is about learning from a computer, but learning from another person is fine, I think, whether they're sitting across the board or across the world.
...I have to ask: isn't learning Go from a computer sort of like learning sex from a porn site? You can pick up some basic concepts and maybe even some effective strategies, but until you have a real, live, flesh-and-blood human partner you're just not getting the full effect and are never going to be truly good.
Obviously if wanted to link to a site about baseball, all of those (other than ESPN) are really entirely irrelevant.
Yep. Because Major League Baseball has strong conceptual similarity to several other concepts: the game of baseball, professional sports, American culture, and others. Granted some are more specific than others, but that's a pretty tough judgment call that depends on the context in which the original link occurred. If I link to mlb.com from a site about baseball, then it means something different than if I link to mlb.com from a site about American culture, and if mlb.com goes dead, then the link would have to be replaced in different ways for the different sites. So this link-replacement software has to be smart about both the destination and the source (context) of a link in order to replace a dead one properly.
I wouldn't go so far as to say this has to be done manually. In theory, software could handle it, but I've never seen software smart enough to automate the task for a such a broad information source as the Internet.
(Disclaimer: no, I have not RTFA; just reacting to an interesting post.)
...unless the vision is corporate suicide.
When I was a kid, my Mom told me not to touch the stove because it was hot and would burn me. How hot? Would it hurt that much if I touched it? What if I touched it really really fast? Would that hurt too? What if I could touch it fast enough that it would not hurt too much? I stood there for a few minutes, transfixed by the red glow of the stove eye, trying to overcome the irresistable urge to touch it...
I have that same feeling riiiiight now.
What's happening is that Sun is being run by chaos theory. How many different strategies has Sun had toward Linux over the past few years? How many different "philosophies" regarding open source? How many different strategies regarding x86 support? Maybe somebody who follows Sun more closely than I can answer some of these questions. I know it seems to me as if Sun changes direction more often than the wind. Name any important issue in the past few years and Sun will have had two or three positions on the issue - even more if you count the "unofficial" positions. They need a strong leader and sense of direction more desperately than any group except, maybe, the Democratic Party.
If I'm wrong, PLEASE let me know. I'm a Sun user and I like Sun, I really do... I just never know where they're going from one day to the next.
I've had a Gmail account for about the same length of time, and I see a huge amount of spam getting past its filter. I'm forwarding all my e-mail to Gmail from an address that - unfortunately - the spammers know very well. So I'm hitting my Gmail account with a stream of 100 to 150 spams per day. Its accuracy rate is, I would guess, in the 80 to 90 percent range. A help, but far from overwhelming.
That said, I don't understand why Gmail's filtering isn't better. They've got a huge number of people (the users) looking at every message that comes in. Once the number of people who have classified an e-mail as spam passes a certain threshold, then no one else should have to see it. In other words, I'd like to see Google combine the massive power of all those eyeballs with their magical search/categorization capabilities to provide its users with the most effective spam filter ever. Sure, some people are going to see spam every now and then, but on the average not very much. Surely the rate would be better than it is now.
On the other hand, what is spam to one person may not be spam to the next, so they'd have to leave a way to opt out, but I would bet that most people wouldn't.
CRM114 is a filter, just like SpamAssassin, so you can run it alongside SA if that helps you make the transition. Run everyone's e-mail through both filters; each will leave its own X-headers in the message. Users can then filter against whichever headers they prefer.
CRM114's author recommends against training it with a history of spam, and instead recommends train-on-error only. This means that, at first, you get a LOT of errors, both false positives and negatives, but the accuracy improves very very quickly.
One thing I like about CRM114 is that it's easy to retrain. If you get a false positive or negative, you simply run it through the filter again, with a special command-line flag, and CRM114 retrains itself. This makes fixing errors easy with a Courier IMAP server - you just set aside a special folder as a train-on-error folder. When you see misclassified e-mail, you just drop it into that folder. Every hour or so, you have a cron job wake up and look in the corresponding Maildir directory; if there's any messages in there, run them through CRM114 again to reclassify them. This, in effect, means that you can reclassify any errors with any IMAP client that can move mail from one folder to another - in other words, from pretty much anywhere. You can probably do the same thing for SA too.
I only get about 75% reduction because SA-Learn doesn't seem to work very well.
Try CRM114 My SA results weren't very good either, despite training it with a year's worth of both spam and non-spam, and two month of continuous re-training. CRM114 was easier to train even though its author recommends that you do NOT train it with your spam cache. Its accuracy was only about 50% at first, but within two weeks it was over 90. After about three months, I'd guess its accuracy is around 98% - not quite the 99.94 its author claims, but still very good. My only gripe is about the occasional false-positive, but it does have a whitelisting feature you can use to make sure mail from known correspondents doesn't get misclassified.