A question for the ages (geekery)
On that note, any good recommendations for cheap UPSes?
On that note, any good recommendations for cheap UPSes?
I'll just keep it brief here since there's been plenty of other people reviewing it too.
The positive points:
One of the (minor but important) parts of the Topaz format is, of course, the DRM, which has so far eluded being compromised, which is funny because it's actually a pretty trivial "secret-sauce" algorithm which was implemented under some pretty ridiculous constraints (I had limited time to implement it, wasn't allowed to pull in any external libraries, and had to keep it performing quickly without using much memory on an already-constrained device), and somehow it's eluded being cracked for a bit over two years.
Until now.
There were plenty of results on a Google search for the key phrase, but none of them provided a solution (plenty of them blamed everything but Outlook, though). Fortunately, I found a workaround which seems to work for now, but it relies on still having the original meeting request messages available and an external IMAP client (so obviously you need to be able to talk to Exchange via IMAP).
Basically, I just deleted the meetings from my calendar, and then found the original request messages. They still showed me as being the organizer with the added wrinkle that the items were "no longer on the calendar," BUT if I used a different email client (i.e. Thunderbird over IMAP) and moved the items back into my inbox, then Outlook finally saw them as they originally were, and I was able to accept the meetings appropriately.
It's fortunate that both of these long-term recurring meetings happened to have been originated recently, though. If I didn't still have the original meeting request emails, I'd have been out of luck.
However, there is still one issue with it which has been bothering me since version 7 at least (and maybe even earlier): it would be really nice if it were smarter about prefetching upcoming audio files, so that if I've, say, had a project open and idle for a few hours, it doesn't give me an "audio engine overload" error every single time the playhead touches a new uncached file for the first time.
The easy workaround is to just do an offline bounce but that's silly, and only partially solves it for extremely complex projects. Most of the time Logic is sitting there with an empty HD load indicator, so I know it could be better about actively prefetching assets. It's not like playhead motion is a Turing-complete problem or whatever (it only moves in one direction and usually doesn't even change speed that much).
Obviously, freeze tracks aren't the answer, since it just replaces a bunch of small un-cached files with a bunch of large uncached files.
Maybe there's a buried setting. It's not like Logic is short on obscure preference panes after 20 years of accretion...
So, of course, the worst possible thing happened, and many people (including at least two friends of mine) were lost without their data and any way to recover it. I'm sure that basically none of them had a backup, because Danger went out of their way to make it difficult to keep your data synchronized or backed up externally.
"Cloud" computing as a promise is nice, but in execution it usually means "having all your data held up under lock and key by a single provider." You have to trust that provider to keep your data safe.
It helps that they finally fixed network share automounting either in 10.5 or 10.6 (I haven't tried it since 10.4 when it was still horribly broken).
Anyway, this makes it much easier for me to get music via my Magnatune subscription and the random mp3s that friends post on Twitter and the like.
Once again I trained my telescope on Jupiter, and we managed to see it. Unfortunately, right now Jupiter is about the only interesting thing up in the sky, and the Galileoscope is still not particularly good for looking at it. I also looked at a few other random stars, but those basically aren't at all exciting unless you have a really good telescope. Now I'm thinking about buying a $250ish wide-field from Edmund Scientific.
We spent the next hour just yammering on about computers and anime and whatever, as we usually do, so it was still a worthwhile excursion.
On my way home, the back row of the bus had a bunch of high school students. They made me feel very old. When I was their age, the Internet was just what nerds like me used, and these cool kids were talking about their Facebook friends issues and whatever. THey also used the word "hella" in ways I never thought hella possible. When I realized the jacket I was wearing was probably older than they were, I suddenly felt very old.
But not as old as the stars.
Also, "8GB of storage for free" is a bit disingenuous when it only applies to an iPod Nano which doesn't actually have any music loaded on it.
On that note, I also found Phil Schiller's comments about gaming to be a bit off-kilter. Yeah, there are a lot more games for the iPod than for the PSP or DS, but how many third-rate Same Game knockoffs does a platform need, anyway? Also, his mention of the "purchase experience" being bad on the PSP and DS because of the supposed lack of an app store is just an outright lie. (Okay, the iPhone App Store is admittedly a somewhat nicer experience than the PSP's, but he made it sound like the PSP could only play UMDs.)
The travel charger which came with the phone was a bit dumb in that it's a little wallwart puck with a USB jack, and you still need to carry a mini-USB cable around with you to plug them together. This charging dock is a bit dumb in that there's an integrated USB cable (for plugging into the computer) and a separate mini-USB jack for plugging in the included AC adapter (which has an integrated mini-USB lead). Fortunately, those dumbnesses cancel out — I plug the integrated USB cable of the charging dock into the included OEM travel charger, and use the charging dock's mini-USB-plug charger as my travel charger with integrated cable. Both problems solved. (Of course, I generally don't use a travel charger anyway — my netbook makes a perfectly useful USB power source, and I always have a mini-USB cable in my bag.)
The other problem is that there is a bright blue LED at the bottom of a little hole (which seems to be intended to showcase the clear plastic stylus which came with the dock, which is funny because the HTC Magic screen is capacitive and thus doesn't work with a stylus). Fortunately the hole is also the right size for a cotton swab to be stuffed in, and failing that there's plenty of other ways to plug the hole (putty, electrical tape, etc.).
I did run into a somewhat major issue with the alarm clock this morning, though. If a notification (such as an email) comes in while the alarm is playing, the alarm just sits there in silence. Fortunately I set my alarm early enough that even oversleeping by an hour didn't make me late for work anyway. But it's definitely something to watch out for. The Android bug tracking system is full of alarm clock-related issues, though, and in the meantime I might just finally learn Android app development enough to just Do It Right anyway.
Personally, I prefer the term "freefall," since it explains exactly what's going on and follows every implication perfectly (relativistic effects included). What do other people think?
This seems like it's the most basic function of a telephone, and the primary reason for a cellphone in particular.
There is absolutely no reason to use base-2 file sizes. Yes, computers deal with things in terms of base 2, but nobody else does. When you look at a file that is 104768926 bytes big, you think, "oh, 105 megabytes," not "100 megabytes." As files get bigger and bigger, the disparity between MB and MiB gets worse and worse.
People have long accused hard drive manufacturers of "inflating" drive sizes by using base-10 instead of base-2, but really it's been the fault of OS makers for deflating it, based on some really ridiculous legacy which dates back to the 70s, namely that it was a lot easier for OSes to just say how many 1K clusters were available, or divide the bytes available by >>10 instead of /1024, or whatever.
The practice of 1024-as-K has also led to all sorts of weirdness, like 1.44MB disks (which were 1440KiB, i.e. 1474560 bytes - neither 1.44MB nor 1.44MiB).
"But computer parts are sold in terms of 1024 units!" is also crap. The only part that has ever been sold on that basis is RAM, which actually makes sense for various technological reasons not worth getting into. CPU speed is base-10. Network adapters are base-10. Bus speed is base-10. And hard drives are sold based on base-10, but reported based on base-2.
Okay, so RAM sizes will be somewhat disparate from hard disk sizes, but really, why does that matter? RAM sizes only matter to programmers, and as a ballpark figure for users for having "enough" memory. Just because a file on disk takes 1200KB doesn't mean it will take 1200KB of RAM; chances are it will take much more. (Granted, there are a lot of spots where it makes sense for code to use power-of-2 sizes, for things like memory allocation and caches and the like, but that doesn't need to be reported to the user.)
The only place where hard disk size really has any base-2 issue is because file systems tend to allocate things in base-2-sized chunks (usually 512 or 1024 bytes), but that's not counting overhead of the filesystem itself, and anyway the vast majority of files (the ones which take enough space for hard drive availability to be an issue) are so large that the cluster size essentially just amounts to rounding error anyway. Okay, so the "real" storage space taken by a 123456789-byte file is actually 123457536 bytes, but that's still a lot closer to 123.4MB than it is to 117.7MB!
In short: Apple is doing a good thing by finally freeing us of some ridiculous legacy which has no bearing on reality.
Okay, so it does mean there will be a mismatch between file sizes reported on OSX 10.6 vs. any other OS, but when does that actually matter?