2007-01-31
一張不貴的 Linksys 802.11G PC card，買了整整半年，初時滿心歡喜，買回來後才發覺怎樣也動不了，連卡也偵測不到，搞了一段時間，實在覺得太浪費光陰而丢到一旁去。昨晚下定決定拿出來再試一次，搞了一輪設定，終於能用了，同時也完全感受到 Linux 肯定只能夠成為 technical user 和 developer 的玩意，絕對沒可能為大眾接受，除非一些大公司指定買某款大廠的機種而且要預先安裝 Linux，但那也只是在商業環境使用而已，而且還要預先確定硬件才行。
無論別的軟件開發者怎樣努力，桌面做到能唱能跳，OpenOffice 能超越 M$ Office，也一樣沒用，因為頭號問題 — 硬件 — 一天不容易安裝，就永遠不能接近普通用家。我想像不到一個普通用戶如果能夠從一行（GUI 見不到的）error message 判斷出要下載某個特定的 command line 程式，將硬件的某個 driver 檔案截取其中的 firmware 出來放到某個特定的目錄之下。
從 day 1 開始，Linux 就不是為了接近大眾而存在的系統，而是給 technical user 一個學習的平台。怨氣太重了，不得不發洩一下，雖然我是自願做白老鼠，發生甚麼事也是自招的。就放長雙眼看看我的 Logitech laser mouse 何時能正確地使用所有按鈕吧，說不定這一天永遠不會來。現在的 evdev 對我來說和垃圾無異。
2007-01-29
Never rip MP3 with variable bitrate enabled encoder, since various players don’t have good support for that. Several Linux music players (like Rhythmbox and Muine misreport the time and/or bitrate with absurd values. Even more amusing thing is, Nautilus reports a random song length every time I want to check their file properties.
The worst among them is Real Player. How does Real Player handle VBR mp3? Chops it randomly. At random location near end of song (random location even for the same song), so random that there is even a small chance that the song is played at full length, not chopped at all. At first I tried it on the Real Player bundled with Motorola E680i; a while ago tried it again on PC, and got the same result.
One shall pay the price for saved disk space.
2007-01-26
在眾多報導 IT 的新聞網站中，我比較喜歡 The Register，不是因為消息夠多夠快，而是因為間中它會突然加一句半句別人想不到的說話，有咀嚼的餘地。例如：
Sun does the impossible - blackens ink
Feels like the first time
Somebody slap someone. Sun Microsystems has turned a profit.…
2007-01-23
不止一本了。即使我看日文就像看雞腸一樣（除了「の」還勉強能懂之外），也能夠很明顯地說文化傳信發行的日本漫畫的翻譯是垃圾。這情形在所有別的看過的漫畫都不存在，至少文句和意境都通順。文化傳信的人翻譯就像是大陸翻譯技術文件一樣，不用說文句狗屁不通，意境也消失殆盡。不知道大陸如何翻譯技術文件？大體上可以說，是每個英文字找字典第一個中文解釋，一個個地串在一起，那便是中文了。
記得最清楚的是《武裝錬金》。在武藤和維克托一起射上太空時，蝶面人忿慨自己唯一的宿敵消失了，以後再沒有人有資格叫自己的本名，但文化傳信的人譯成：
「這樣的話，沒有人再呼喚我的名字！」
就只差在沒將感嘆號變成句號而已。
還有在 After 那一集錬金戰團的人和蝶面人最後決戰時要先對付蝶面人的手下，其中一個戰友對另一個說「我交給他們了。你先走吧。」……該是「他們交給我了。」才對吧？
很明顯地，這不是草草譯完等收錢，就是對這些翻譯沒興趣卻又沒別的工作可以做，所以隨便做完等收工。
2007-01-23
Hm, silly me. When searching for a heritage map of Linux distro, this mind map style graph catches my first attention. Naively thinking that nobody has made a timeline style one, I fire up dia and attempt to make my own, only to find that somebody has made it available and is fairly complete. Luckily I didn’t spend too much time starting from scratch.
03:54 edit: There is an interesting table of early Linux history unavailable in other news or data source.
2007-01-21
Sometimes it’s fun to track down how a piece of news is spreading. Slashdot ‘news’ aren’t news. It’s picking up epochtimes, which in turn is an incomplete translation based on its chinese counterpart. That’s nothing more than a rehash of old news — Brune Schneier has already posted the paper more than 1.5 years ago. Probably the lack of availability of original paper contributes to such misinformation. (Bruce said that Wang probably mistakenly thought the paper must not be published in any way).
2007-01-19
平常只有賭場才會常有高科技出千，現在這種風氣竟然曼延到棋賽了。現在還是國際象棋，何時輪到中國象棋？雖然中國象棋的棋手現在大多都沒錢買這種玩意，但難保將來沒有。
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