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Which is funny, because I have questioned whether it was actually necessary in a specific case: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bk093/i_work_at_google_hence_posting_as_ac_really/ (I realize that it may be in some cases, but...)

VLC has a bug which causing Theora to show up very blurred, it's been fixed in development versions of VLC but not released versions.

I found this out here, after making an ass of myself when I tried to make fun of Theora.

If your output doesn't look like those screenshots by nullc than there something is wrong with your software.

As far as recommended tools: Firefox 3.5/3.6 is the best cross platform recommendation I've heard.

I don't know where the below comment about postprocessing is coming from. Very few tools enable post-processing for Theora. Theora has in-loop deblocking, making it less reliant on post-processing than just about any other codec except H.264.

What theora needs for good quality is sufficient bitrate. It can take less bitrate before falling down than mpeg2 or xvid, but H.264 is still better for very low rates. With sufficient bitrate Theora looks excellent, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

That argument can equally be applied to legitimate patents, and so is not an argument at all. The reason math and software cannot and should not be patented is because software is a description of abstract ideas, where patents protect physical inventions. If you cannot patent Harry Potter, then you cannot patent software.

We already have protection of abstract ideas called "copyright". Abstract ideas and physical devices have very different properties which is why the rules governing their use are so different; physical devices require tools and raw materials to copy, where abstract ideas do not. This is why software and math both belong under copyright and have no place gaining patent protection.

I've debated this issue a thousand times on reddit, so I'll just point you to the good posts here, here, here, and this epic thread.

That argument can equally be applied to legitimate patents, and so is not an argument at all. The reason math and software cannot and should not be patented is because software is a description of abstract ideas, where patents protect physical inventions. If you cannot patent Harry Potter, then you cannot patent software.

We already have protection of abstract ideas called "copyright". Abstract ideas and physical devices have very different properties which is why the rules governing their use are so different; physical devices require tools and raw materials to copy, where abstract ideas do not. This is why software and math both belong under copyright and have no place gaining patent protection.

I've debated this issue a thousand times on reddit, so I'll just point you to the good posts here, here, here, and this epic thread.

That argument can equally be applied to legitimate patents, and so is not an argument at all. The reason math and software cannot and should not be patented is because software is a description of abstract ideas, where patents protect physical inventions. If you cannot patent Harry Potter, then you cannot patent software.

We already have protection of abstract ideas called "copyright". Abstract ideas and physical devices have very different properties which is why the rules governing their use are so different; physical devices require tools and raw materials to copy, where abstract ideas do not. This is why software and math both belong under copyright and have no place gaining patent protection.

I've debated this issue a thousand times on reddit, so I'll just point you to the good posts here, here, here, and this epic thread.

That argument can equally be applied to legitimate patents, and so is not an argument at all. The reason math and software cannot and should not be patented is because software is a description of abstract ideas, where patents protect physical inventions. If you cannot patent Harry Potter, then you cannot patent software.

We already have protection of abstract ideas called "copyright". Abstract ideas and physical devices have very different properties which is why the rules governing their use are so different; physical devices require tools and raw materials to copy, where abstract ideas do not. This is why software and math both belong under copyright and have no place gaining patent protection.

I've debated this issue a thousand times on reddit, so I'll just point you to the good posts here, here, here, and this epic thread.

Or perhaps Fuzzybunn?

It was uploaded to Reddit 12 hours ago; that's probably why it's just reaching Slashdot now.

The reddit blog discussed the issue recently.

They claim it is not an EC2 issue, but simply the site getting bigger than it was designed to.

Their lastest entry discusses why they switched to cassandra. I guess we'll wait for next week to see if the expected performance benefits materialize.

The reddit blog discussed the issue recently.

They claim it is not an EC2 issue, but simply the site getting bigger than it was designed to.

Their lastest entry discusses why they switched to cassandra. I guess we'll wait for next week to see if the expected performance benefits materialize.

Reddit also recently switched to Cassandra.

Gordon Freeman from CERN is there with his crowbar, in case of cascade.

You seem like the kinda person who'd fit in great here: http://www.reddit.com/r/shittyadvice

AMD processors and the newer (i3, i5, i7) Intel processors have the memory (DRAM) controller built in. The ECC here is for the DRAM, I have no idea about internal cache. Google released a study a few months ago with various information about actual observed memory error rates... after a bit of crunching on their numbers, I came up with an expected 1/5 chance of a single random bit-flip over a 6-year lifespan, and a 1/3 chance of part of your memory going bad (and causing crashes, corruption, etc, if not caught with ECC) after a couple years.

Try visiting (WARNING this will likely crash your browser if you have flash installed) this page then. If you have Flash installed, your browser will likely crash. Adobe have know about this issue for years, but marked the bug 'private' whilst bullshitting that there were no known expliots in their engine. You can read about it via the reddit page - and this is just one of many similar 'known but undisclosed' issues

That's a nice story, but that doesn't mean it never happens.

See my Slashdot and Reddit submissions on the problems of shareholder value and agency theory, it has info on what is happening here:
http://slashdot.org/submission/1159318/The-problems-of-the-shareholder-value-ideology http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/axwzw/the_problems_of_shareholder_value_and_agency/ (another new Slashdot submission is coming up soon on this)

Yea, the problems of shareholder value and agency theory. After I tried to submit a submission twice that have lots of links on this issue and got rejected, I submitted it to the reddit instead. Here is the links to the submissions: http://slashdot.org/submission/1159318/The-problems-of-the-shareholder-value-ideology http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/axwzw/the_problems_of_shareholder_value_and_agency/

Yep, the problems of shareholder value and agency theory yet again. After my slashdot submission being rejected twice, I submitted it to the Reddit instead: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/axwzw/the_problems_of_shareholder_value_and_agency/

Except that it never was true. I wrote a Slashdot submission about this, and a Reddit one too: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/axwzw/the_problems_of_shareholder_value_and_agency/

By virtue of the de facto status, it seems like anything that the majority of people use will never be superceded by anything that barely matches or only slightly improves on the de facto standard. From what I've read [reddit.com] Theora is quite bare-bones compared to H.264 and hasn't been designed with hardware decoding in mind.

And if you actually read what you linked you'll see it immediately debunked. Theora is up to scratch and has been designed with hardware decoding in mind. It's slightly behind H.264, but come on, we're not talking double the bit rate or anything. It never stopped MP3 being the defacto standard when better stuff was around. Universal availability trumps technical excellence always.

By virtue of the de facto status, it seems like anything that the majority of people use will never be superceded by anything that barely matches or only slightly improves on the de facto standard. From what I've read Theora is quite bare-bones compared to H.264 and hasn't been designed with hardware decoding in mind.

You can post this as often as you want, the comparison is still full of errors as a result of an ffmpeg bug (it was previously believed to be intentional). It uses x264, which is an opensource h264 encoder. The x264 developers responded to this comparison on reddit, highlighting the many errors in it: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8iphn/theora_encoder_improvments_comparable_to_h264/

Right. But if you make the 'track' sufficiently long like I mentioned you could do it with 12gs.
I added to it on my post on reddit:

I'd think that you would want a vehicle about the size of the space shuttle orbiter (109,000 kg loaded). so given:

        E = 1/2 MV^2 The kinetic energy of something that massive moving at 10,000 m/s is 5,450,000,000,000 Joules. That would be a lot of juice. However, you wouldn't need it all at once since the acceleration would occur over about 69 seconds. Since 1 joule per second = 1 watt. 5,450,000,000,000 / 69 = 789,855,072,463 watts (790 gigawatts)

The largest power-plant in the world is the Three Gorges Damn in China with an estimated maximum output of around 22Gw.

The High Magnetic Field Laboratory Dresden at the Rossendorf Research Center has the worlds largest capacitor array which can store 50 megajoules and cost 10 million Euros .

So, unless we scale up nuclear power plants or create a capacitor array capable of storing 5.5 terawatts or reduce the size of the vehicle we're at least an order of magnitude off. But it still seems like it could work.

I have a fledgling theory that this is largely the result of women in the workplace (and school is a workplace). Women are more concerned with feelings. Their own, and others. I'm not saying this by itself is necessarily bad, by itself, but when feelings take a back seat to actually getting things done, you end up precisely where we are. People feel better, but are less useful.

here's a perfect example.

It's completely irrational to broadcast that everyone reading a site is a strong, confidant woman.

Those things are feelings, not quantifiable qualities, or concrete measures of worth, just feelings.

Besides, when a woman says, "strong, confidant woman", the second poster in this picture is who comes to mind.

Absolutely strong and confidant.

If the studies aren't convincing enough, just read up on the physics to see why cell phone radiation is not dangerous.

For e.g. in India 85% of people do NOT have Bank Accounts.

On Slashdot, the moderation system keeps good comments at the top and bad comments hidden. This is why the quality seems so good: one only has to read the top of the comment page to get really good discussion. So, regardless of how many trolls there are, they remain out of view. This was Slashdot's greatest innovation, IMO.

Reddit deals with the same issues: plenty of smart users, so they need a good ranking to keep the good comments at the top. Reddit used to use Slashdot's approach to ranking, but the inherent moderation system is different so it didn't work. The average comment in an active story on Reddit can get dozens of mods VS less than 1 on Slashdot. Reddit's problem was Slashdot's system heavily biased in favor of comments with a lot of moderation (upvotes minus downvotes is scaled higher). Typically, the first few non-troll comments were fixed at the top. On Slashdot this isn't a problem because mod points are rare so people use them with more care; also, the maximum score is capped at 5.

Reddit recently started using a more statistically sound approach which rewards high upvote:downvote ratios, and the comment quality has drastically improved. It saved the site, IMO. Slashdot is still known for having better quality comments than Reddit, and I commend them for it.

See http://blog.reddit.com/2009/10/reddits-new-comment-sorting-system.html for more information on reddit's new system.

Any chance you'd do a Reddit IAMA?

My time online is generally during working hours. The prospect of having to field hundreds of questions is a little intimidating, to be honest.

But much of what I do is public in nature. I write two columns (one IT-related) for our national newspapers. They're collected on my website (see my profile). I also take a lot of photos.

If you're interested in learning still more, I'd suggest taking a membership in the Pacific Islands Chapter of the Internet Society. PICISOC is a pretty active and engaged community, and there's lots of talk about this kind of work. I'm a frequent contributor to the noise.

Any chance you'd do a Reddit IAMA?

This is a response to these other postings.

Somebody asked this question on reddit
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9s3ww/would_you_hire_a_programmer_that_does_not_write/

A while ago my company interviewed someone who, in the course of some standard question, said that after the 5 o'clock whistle blows, they avoid computers totally. They don't have any hobbies involving their PC and often don't turn it on unless they are expecting an important email or need to look up directions. I followed up to ask how they got into programming and they said they took the right courses in college and now has had a few jobs doing it.

Would you hire a software engineer who isn't a hobbyist programmer? What if they avoid computers totally at home? Does it matter if a candidate has strictly a professional interest in software and just pretends it doesn't exist outside the office?

And was answered with this:

http://github.com/raganwald/homoiconic/blob/master/2009-10-08/no_hire.md
No, I Wouldn't Hire a Programmer That Has No Interest in Programming Outside of Business Hours

Here's another way to frame this question: Would I even interview a programmer who only works their programming job from 9-5? If not, why not?

The answer is remarkably simple. No, I would not interview them, for the simple reason that I don't know who they are and they don't know who I am. When I am hiring, my first and best source of prospective colleagues is my network. Industry people I know. Where do I get to know people? Conferences. Open source. Blogging. Twitter. I don't advertise my job openings on monster.com. So how did this person come to sit in front of me to tell me he(?) pretends software doesn't exist outside of the office?

I think you have to align your values with your complete hiring process, not just with your interview questions. If you value people who are passionate about their craft, you have to use a different means of selecting prospects than if you value having warm bodies sitting in chairs. If you want a warm body with a certain minimal competence in a chair, you use monster.com and recruiters to find people. if you value community and craft, you use your network and your community.

Done this way, questions like the above tend to take care of themselves.

What "people"?

This post on reddit shows people aren't treating Sun any differently than Apple in this regard.

Almost as soon as people realized there was something strange going on, the programming subreddit started discussing the code.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9oobq/someone_put_a_malicious_java_script_comment_on_at/

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9oo8j/source_code_for_the_redditfirefox_exploit/

Almost as soon as people realized there was something strange going on, the programming subreddit started discussing the code.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9oobq/someone_put_a_malicious_java_script_comment_on_at/

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9oo8j/source_code_for_the_redditfirefox_exploit/

This is nothing new. There is a quiet tradition of Reddit users finding the weak points of the site, like this for example.

Putting javascript:$(".up").click()() in the address bar upvotes everything on the page.

http://shapado.com/ is an AGPL "StackOverFlow clone", just recently started, but has some neat features ( http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9mzjg/hey_reddit_checkout_my_agpl_stackoverflow_like/ ).

Of course, the _community_ is what makes StackOverFlow great, so no matter how many neat features Shapado has, they're gonna have trouble getting as big...

Will all of you please go back from whence you came ... and do not return. Thank you.

Atoms are mostly empty space. The photo is of the electric field caused by the electrons.

This photo is better. The article says it is a 20-hour time exposure. The photo was available through a Reddit story yesterday.

You should see the real original picture before MS photoshopped in those two non-Busey guys.

(Yes, stolen from reddit.)

PayPal, Comcast, Microsoft, Verizon, and the U.S. government are merging to be the meanest company ever.

You'll be charged to kill Iraqis even though you can't find Iraq on the map. Everything the merged company will do will have some element of dishonesty and abuse.

The EULA will say that you agree to be attacked by mosquitos.

Your money will become increasingly worthless, using a technique called The Great American Bubble Machine.

The black helicopters need to be sent in here. Gas Mileage like that is un-American. Before you know it, the schematics for the water-car will get out.

It almost did. That's why they killed Billy Mays! Yes, he had cocaine in his system but that was because he loved eating copious amounts of cash.

I once experimented with producing summaries that people like you might appreciate. Turns out they don't work so well.

http://www.reddit.com/search?q=xkcd+nytimes

Yes, we noticed on Reddit and talked about it when it was NEWs.

The issue was reported on Reddit.com 16 hours ago. At no time, apparently, was access to img.4chan.org slow. Also, at present the IP address 207.126.64.181 connects directly to 4chan.org, as it should.

So, AT&T, is not blocking img.4chan.org, the company is only blocking some of its users. Check 4chan status. Quote: "UPDATE: Some coverage on TechCrunch, Digg, reddit, and Google News. Also, note that AT&T has yet to contact us."

The issue was reported on Reddit.com 16 hours ago. At no time, apparently, was access to img.4chan.org slow. Also, at present the IP address 207.126.64.181 connects directly to 4chan.org, as it should.

So, AT&T, is not blocking img.4chan.org, the company is only blocking some of its users. Check 4chan status. Quote: "UPDATE: Some coverage on TechCrunch, Digg, reddit, and Google News. Also, note that AT&T has yet to contact us."

One problem with bittorrent is that it has a centralized tracker. You see what is happening to The Pirate Bay.

This may be of interest.

For those who can't be arsed to follow the link:

TPB has been owned by a company for the last years since the raid so nothing there will really change except the names of the owners. The talk about TPB are going to be a pay site is wrong, the CEO that said that does not know what he is talking about. Now, the BIG change is that the tracker is going to be outsourced to a new formed company that wont know what they track, just that they connect peers, and the torrent listings will be handed by an other new company that will have torrents but they will not know either content or who is using the torrents. This setup will be practically impossible to take down or find anyone liable to sue. The 3d party company services will have APIs, so you can on your blog or whatever have your own small torrent listings just as you now pull in twitter feeds. remember how the twitter design totally havoced the iranian attempts to block it as ppl just used another side that pulled in the feeds and read it there instead? well that goes for torrents and TPB to. All in all, this is not the end of the world as some are seeing it but a rather interesting technical improvement. And dont worry, not a dime will go to the media industries spectrial prize money what i know of but a really nice fund for doing cool stuff. /krs - co.founder of TPB and PB, not involved in TPB anymore and have no stake in any cash.

More importantly, Gordon Freeman is apparently an engineer at CERN.

No worries though, he has a crowbar now.

Since 1994 with the introduction of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994.
I cant take credit for this info though, shamelessly stolen from the discussion on reddit yesterday.

Hopefully that money will be used to help the EU Pirate Party in future elections.

I was hoping that too, but according to this interview with TPB founder Peter Sunde the money will go to a foundation which can only spend the money on new, unfunded projects, one of which will probably be a kind of distributed tracker.

This reddit comment has more info, too.

The following comment was made by krs on another site

To clarify a bit..

TPB has been owned by a company for the last years since the raid so nothing there will really change except the names of the owners. The talk about TPB are going to be a pay site is wrong, the CEO that said that does not know what he is talking about.

Now, the BIG change is that the tracker is going to be outsourced to a new formed company that wont know what they track, just that they connect peers, and the torrent listings will be handed by an other new company that will have torrents but they will not know either content or who is using the torrents. This setup will be practically impossible to take down or find anyone liable to sue.

The 3d party company services will have APIs, so you can on your blog or whatever have your own small torrent listings just as you now pull in twitter feeds. remember how the twitter design totally havoced the iranian attempts to block it as ppl just used another side that pulled in the feeds and read it there instead? well that goes for torrents and TPB to.

All in all, this is not the end of the world as some are seeing it but a rather interesting technical improvement.

And dont worry, not a dime will go to the media industries spectrial prize money what i know of but a really nice fund for doing cool stuff. /krs - co.founder of TPB and PB, not involved in TPB anymore and have no stake in any cash.