I walk around a good portion of my day talking to users and seeing how things are going. I am the opposite of aloof and quite approachable. However, I have been told on many occasions, "Why do you have to make things so complicated?". Drives me nuts.
They literally cannot tell the difference between bullshit and the truth. Both makes their eyes gloss over and they stop listening.
Do you think doctors are bullshitting you? Do you expect them to explain things to you in technical terms as if they were talking to another doctor?
So why IT?
That's the problem. Everyone expects computers to not be that complicated and that we are just overrated janitors. They have no idea just how complicated it can be, and no real appreciation either.
We are damned if we do, and damned if we don't as far as explanations go, and nobody wants to take any responsibility.
How about the famous line, "But you touched it last?!"
No standing up in the middle of the aisle, and demonstratively peeing at the stewardess' feet. That was just pure journalistic fantasy.
Well that was the story going about over here in the US. I got to admit, I like that story better. Gerard defiant in the aisle, manhood in hand, screaming, "I piss for France!".
It's just funnier that way. In any case, I support him. When you have to go that bad just let the person go to the bathroom in a dignified manner. From the story I heard he did explain how badly he needed to go and that he would not be able to hold it.
It's about perception, and that is what I think the author is trying to say. If you go into a restaurant and see bacon wrapped filet mignon with fresh vegetables for $1 would you not be suspicious about the quality?
The product has to be priced right. Open Source software is becoming more acceptable because people are not associating free with low quality. They understand that it is a different philosophy and that Open Source can have a lot of quality. Either that, or ad supported or light versions. The perception of quality is not nearly the same as the $1.
It's a funny thing, but even I feel suspicious about something priced like that and I know they are trying to go for volume in most cases.
I think what it really comes down too is that people have a feeling that software being sold at $1 might as well be free. Deep down they know their own time is worth more than that, so why would they even give a dollar for what should be free?
OTOH, software that has good features, seemingly good support, and solves a problem they have being sold at $20 actually seems like a more reasonable proposition.
The only exception being tiny games. Although I think even Angry Birds was more than $1. I wouldn't know, I purchased it for the PC. That game is damn addictive.
Expecting a homeless person to hold for an hour or so till they find somebody willing to let them use the toilet is expecting too much. Are they going to walk around with signs, "Will work for a place to shit?".
Reminds of the story with Gerard Depardieu peeing on the plane. He is an older guy, and when you got to go, you really have to go. Waiting 20-30 minutes is not optional. He whipped it out and just started peeing in the aisle. Better than peeing in his own pants sitting down for certain.
Bottom line is that if you don't give a human being an option on where to to put "it", "it" is just going to be put anywhere.
Try visiting China. Went through 20 different cities and rural areas.
Toilets are free, or at least everyone I saw was, but there were no toilet paper rolls, paper towels, etc. You brought your own paper napkins and toilet paper with you everywhere.
Visited a factory and the public bathroom was a nightmare. You had running water, but were expected to have your own soap and paper. The executives handed me them.
It was just normal there. We took around handiwipes with us everywhere.
The only exception were the 4-5 star hotels that catered to westerners. Only time I had a "regular" toilet that I could sit on with a toilet paper roll right next to me. Rest were the squat type.
I hear India and other places are not much different.
Not everyone believes in evolution, which is part of the problem, but this is an issue of time scales.
Species go extinct because they could not adapt to the environment. That is normal. What is not normal is man made acceleration of environmental changes. Where I live there used to be an ocean, but that was on geological time. What we are doing is like radically changing the temperature and pressure in a room in 1/1,000,000 of a second.
Evolution simply cannot allow species to adapt that fast, and there will be extremely few species that can. Man will probably be one of them, but I don't want to be around for that level of adaptation. It is going to suck.
Then factor in how complex the interaction is in the various ecosystems and you start having a chain reaction where all life might cease, or at least a mass extinction event where the planet "resets" itself and different live evolves all over again.
Heck, even in the Diamond Age there was still a human ractive / low class prostitute that guided the little lady through the ultimate education device experience:P
Uh huh. So far all you did was rant without addressing the question I posed.
One parent loses their job and family gets by on less. Taking two incomes to simply pay a mortgage in my view isn't wise. In reality it doesn't matter. It is your priority is to do it or not.
Really? Gets by on less? Lose half your income, lose your house, and you just "make it work"? If you can't just make it work and make it a priority it, implied by you, is just their problem?
Try addressing reality.
In order for homeschooling to work, regardless of any comparisons with public school, you need two things:
1) A parent that can stay at home and teach. Putting aside ability to teach for the moment, their ability to be there is fundamental. Not just for an hour or two. Teaching takes more time than that. 2) The lost opportunity and wages from that one parent is offset by the other parent in a sufficient amount to support the bare essentials of the family.
Right away we can see this cannot work for single parent families and children with divorced parents that have not remarried or are in cohabitation with another person.
Your assumption that I am wrong about the economy is basically, "One parent loses their job and the family gets by on less". Let's not let facts get in the way huh?
Before going on with your rant, please explain that a little bit further because loss of income is seemingly more important and a slightly more difficult obstacle than you let on.
You have some points but it seems that everybody is missing the 800 pound gorilla in the room....
suggests that the Nook and the Kindle have changed things in such a way that schools are becoming obsolete
different subjects to become accessible enough that parents can tutor their children at a price that just about everyone can afford.
I don't know what economy this author thinks he is in. Any parents that are still making 100k plus a year combined probably have their children in a good private school. Those are not so bad and the quality of education is higher. Especially in the top private schools that are run as hard as a Japanese prep school.
Public schools are poorly funded with the economic collapse we are suffering, and they were not that well off before the bubble burst. The amount of money we pay for public schooling pales in comparison to the loss of income from a single parent.
So without combined income from two parents, just how can a family afford to home school? That is what he is talking about. Which is far more intelligent than the recent article about technology replacing teachers (parents or otherwise) altogether.
The economy is far worse than the author understands and the families that are home schooling already live in places where they can afford to do so. I would be interested to know what changes are in the percentage of home schooled children in the last 4 years. I am willing to bet that some home schooled children were enrolled in public school because it was a choice between eviction, starvation, or both.
Home schooling has a stigma of being predominately populated with ultra religious families that want to teach a more faith based curriculum. In those circumstances I can imagine they would hold out as long as possible, but ultimately the money is going to win out. Especially when those families tend to have more than 2.5 average children.
In any case, this won't work for the average family. Every single family I know, that is in the middle class, is a two income family. So what he proposes costs an average person's salary per year.
I would suggest adding the "recent" advancement of paragraphs to your curriculum:)
That aside, you misunderstood me. I meant that home schooling is completely absurd beyond all measure, with electronic devices only.
Your hands approach is exactly what is required, which is to say actual parental involvement. I honestly don't think that kids left alone with electronic devices, even with very creative and innovative ways to present the material will succeed. If children had that much discipline, they would be adults. I say that while walking past a persons office today several times where all they did was play minesweeper. I'm chalking that up to the day after Christmas and they did not want to be in the office.
Education is a difficult thing to accomplish and we are doing it extremely poorly as a society right now in the US. I commend your sacrifices, which is the single most important ingredient to our success as a people right now, which is sorely lacking. Your children sound like they will be very well rounded adults.
You prove my most salient point in my post. Parental involvement in a child's development beyond just simply being there.
I think he was stuck on the many-worlds interpretation which allows for a universe to exist in which he is not a virgin in his mother's basement.
When you think about it in that context, of course anything could be possible.
Personally, I think that computing as it exists now is much like finding life in the universe similar to ours. If you think about it, so many things could have gone differently. Personal computing may have never taken off, languages could be different, etc. Imagine that the US lost World War II and you had a fascist state in which personal computing was trying to evolve. Not that hard to imagine considering that is where we are headed with legislation.....
The world of computing is in constant flux and changing from one moment to the next which is what makes it so interesting to me.
This needs to be put up here. I still can't stop laughing.
This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that's when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to 'howl at the moon' from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn't have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn't settle for the first thing that comes to him.
I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.
Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the 'guns'), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.
Wooden poles. Microfiber on the bottom and top. You can stack up over a thousand in just six feet. Very easy to build. In a regular closet you could put half dozen of them in there real easily.
Get a strong wooden base about 2 inches thick. 5 six foot wooden poles about 15mm. Easiest to get 1/2 inch. There is some play, but that is where the 4 poles come in. You put those in a square designed to give about 1mm of tolerance around the CD/DVDs. Not all are exactly the same size and temperature allows a slight variation (really slight). Attach it to a top wooden "cap" with tapped holes in the base. You can even put cross supports every 1 ft if you wanted with wooden rods tapped into the poles. I recommend that for stability.
Once it is filled you can tighten the whole assembly down and it is really stable to move if you need to as long you keep it straight up. I don't recommend moving it to much though. 1/2 inch poles are not that strong considering the weight. If you want to go all out you could use metal, but I think that is overboard.
Lately I have been debating about a strong plexiglass enclosure that I could create a vacuum in to prevent slow oxidation damage.
My parents have 7 of them in a closet with an 8th one being filled. Each one can store 1500 CD/DVDs. It's going to be quite some time before the 8th one is filled. We only amassed that many because of music over nearly 30 years. Movies accumulate much more slowly.
The pictures and heirlooms take up quite a bit more storage than CD/DVDs. Those we do have in the vacuum seal bags to prevent oxidation.
Of course a single fire takes it all out. At least we will have digital backups offsite. I maintain an entire copy myself.
It would be nice to have a fireproof safe, but there is not anything that large on market that does not cost as much as a freaking small car.
Some say the world is going to end this next year, but what if it doesn't? My parents and I like the idea that with technology getting better all the time we can keep our entire family history, as it is growing, for generations without degradation and multiple synced copies.
The CD/DVD storage spindles are just one part of it.
I said it in the other post, but I don't understand why you think a pirate would not be better at it?
They come across nearly every BD release and have to re-encode that content. That is a constantly developing skill that keeps them up to date on the latest decryption, codecs, tools, etc.
The pirate is automatically going to be in the top 1% of all people capable of doing the job. You may have a good understanding, but how much time did you spend to get it? Do you work with codecs and encoding on a regular basis?
In addition, piracy groups release the movie at different quality levels. You have the rip that is not much larger than a DVD rip, 1-2.5 gigs. You also have rips that are around the DVDR size 4-6 gigs, and then you have the full ISO levels that are the 25-30 gigs.
They are using the source in multiple ways and that does require a more sophisticated understanding of the encoders and their parameters.
Having played around with various encoders in Linux there are large MAN pages and websites dedicated to just explaining those parameters and how it affects encoding. You must know that, and you certainly imply that you do .
So how would a pirate not have a higher level of sophistication on average and not be very likely to be considered a professional?
Ah, so you're willing to support them with DVD because it's easier to break but not BD because it's harder?
I am willing to support it because it is fundamentally broken and no longer DRM in any meaningful sense. Everybody knows this, especially Big Content. When I purchase a DVD they know they have no control, and I know it as well.
When I purchase BD, they see it as support, or complacency, and it encourages them to continue. Purchasing a lower quality alternative to bypass more effective and restrictive DRM does send a message.
If you're happy with SD quality then fine ignore BD but don't bitch when others want that quality
I bitch when other people take the path of least resistance and keep buying into DRM models that only continue to hurt us. Just because it is increased quality is no excuse for being part of the problem. If nobody purchased BD at all, then they might start to change Big Content's mind.
shrugging and saying that pirates somehow do it better is laughable, they use the same tools as you would and I do.
It's laughable that you think it is laughable. That's like saying I can walk into a metal shop and use the tools the same way the worker does. Nooooo, more likely I would walk out missing some fingers.
The piracy groups are professionals at it. I should know having spent over 50 hours with testing on a headless CentOS server getting the parameters exactly right for an encoding process.
Knowledge and experience make all the difference and if you are so absorbed with quality you should be able to tell that a BD release was rushed because of the artifacts and "waterfalls" in the movie. That was the studio not spending the time and money for a quality encoding job.
As it stands right now I no more need anyone's permission to watch BD as I do DVD
Yes you do. Right now it is not Internet connected, but there is a problem in that not all BD players have the keys to all BD movies. Having to send out for a firmware DVD, or burning your own is not the same as permission, but is just like groveling and begging to me.
If I have to firmware update my player a couple times a year because they are battling piracy, I say fuck it. I'll stick with DVD where there is no battle.
Slashdot Mirror
Given the article, does the fact we all seem to have kingdoms to give away qualify as irony?
There is a flip side to that coin.
I walk around a good portion of my day talking to users and seeing how things are going. I am the opposite of aloof and quite approachable. However, I have been told on many occasions, "Why do you have to make things so complicated?". Drives me nuts.
They literally cannot tell the difference between bullshit and the truth. Both makes their eyes gloss over and they stop listening.
Do you think doctors are bullshitting you? Do you expect them to explain things to you in technical terms as if they were talking to another doctor?
So why IT?
That's the problem. Everyone expects computers to not be that complicated and that we are just overrated janitors. They have no idea just how complicated it can be, and no real appreciation either.
We are damned if we do, and damned if we don't as far as explanations go, and nobody wants to take any responsibility.
How about the famous line, "But you touched it last?!"
No standing up in the middle of the aisle, and demonstratively peeing at the stewardess' feet. That was just pure journalistic fantasy.
Well that was the story going about over here in the US. I got to admit, I like that story better. Gerard defiant in the aisle, manhood in hand, screaming, "I piss for France!".
It's just funnier that way. In any case, I support him. When you have to go that bad just let the person go to the bathroom in a dignified manner. From the story I heard he did explain how badly he needed to go and that he would not be able to hold it.
How do you know before paying?
It's about perception, and that is what I think the author is trying to say. If you go into a restaurant and see bacon wrapped filet mignon with fresh vegetables for $1 would you not be suspicious about the quality?
The product has to be priced right. Open Source software is becoming more acceptable because people are not associating free with low quality. They understand that it is a different philosophy and that Open Source can have a lot of quality. Either that, or ad supported or light versions. The perception of quality is not nearly the same as the $1.
It's a funny thing, but even I feel suspicious about something priced like that and I know they are trying to go for volume in most cases.
I think what it really comes down too is that people have a feeling that software being sold at $1 might as well be free. Deep down they know their own time is worth more than that, so why would they even give a dollar for what should be free?
OTOH, software that has good features, seemingly good support, and solves a problem they have being sold at $20 actually seems like a more reasonable proposition.
The only exception being tiny games. Although I think even Angry Birds was more than $1. I wouldn't know, I purchased it for the PC. That game is damn addictive.
When you got to go, you got to go.
Expecting a homeless person to hold for an hour or so till they find somebody willing to let them use the toilet is expecting too much. Are they going to walk around with signs, "Will work for a place to shit?".
Reminds of the story with Gerard Depardieu peeing on the plane. He is an older guy, and when you got to go, you really have to go. Waiting 20-30 minutes is not optional. He whipped it out and just started peeing in the aisle. Better than peeing in his own pants sitting down for certain.
Bottom line is that if you don't give a human being an option on where to to put "it", "it" is just going to be put anywhere.
Try visiting China. Went through 20 different cities and rural areas.
Toilets are free, or at least everyone I saw was, but there were no toilet paper rolls, paper towels, etc. You brought your own paper napkins and toilet paper with you everywhere.
Visited a factory and the public bathroom was a nightmare. You had running water, but were expected to have your own soap and paper. The executives handed me them.
It was just normal there. We took around handiwipes with us everywhere.
The only exception were the 4-5 star hotels that catered to westerners. Only time I had a "regular" toilet that I could sit on with a toilet paper roll right next to me. Rest were the squat type.
I hear India and other places are not much different.
Yeah, I was about to say. Nothing more ignorant and simplistic said on /. in awhile.
"Like just move"
That's worked out real well for the Ethiopians. The animals that are too "stupid" to move, well sucks to be them I guess.
Not everyone believes in evolution, which is part of the problem, but this is an issue of time scales.
Species go extinct because they could not adapt to the environment. That is normal. What is not normal is man made acceleration of environmental changes. Where I live there used to be an ocean, but that was on geological time. What we are doing is like radically changing the temperature and pressure in a room in 1/1,000,000 of a second.
Evolution simply cannot allow species to adapt that fast, and there will be extremely few species that can. Man will probably be one of them, but I don't want to be around for that level of adaptation. It is going to suck.
Then factor in how complex the interaction is in the various ecosystems and you start having a chain reaction where all life might cease, or at least a mass extinction event where the planet "resets" itself and different live evolves all over again.
"Don't be a dick."
Works anywhere.
Except pretty much all the Vagina on the planet.
Heck, even in the Diamond Age there was still a human ractive / low class prostitute that guided the little lady through the ultimate education device experience :P
Citation please
Uh huh. So far all you did was rant without addressing the question I posed.
One parent loses their job and family gets by on less. Taking two incomes to simply pay a mortgage in my view isn't wise. In reality it doesn't matter. It is your priority is to do it or not.
Really? Gets by on less? Lose half your income, lose your house, and you just "make it work"? If you can't just make it work and make it a priority it, implied by you, is just their problem?
Try addressing reality.
In order for homeschooling to work, regardless of any comparisons with public school, you need two things:
1) A parent that can stay at home and teach. Putting aside ability to teach for the moment, their ability to be there is fundamental. Not just for an hour or two. Teaching takes more time than that.
2) The lost opportunity and wages from that one parent is offset by the other parent in a sufficient amount to support the bare essentials of the family.
Right away we can see this cannot work for single parent families and children with divorced parents that have not remarried or are in cohabitation with another person.
Your assumption that I am wrong about the economy is basically, "One parent loses their job and the family gets by on less". Let's not let facts get in the way huh?
Before going on with your rant, please explain that a little bit further because loss of income is seemingly more important and a slightly more difficult obstacle than you let on.
Oh god.
There is no such thing as "cleavage" on a cellular level!
This scientist must be a scream on Rorschach tests.
"Boobies"
"More Boobies"
"Itty Bitty Tittie Committee"
"Dolly Parton"
"I need to go the bathroom"
You have some points but it seems that everybody is missing the 800 pound gorilla in the room....
suggests that the Nook and the Kindle have changed things in such a way that schools are becoming obsolete
different subjects to become accessible enough that parents can tutor their children at a price that just about everyone can afford.
I don't know what economy this author thinks he is in. Any parents that are still making 100k plus a year combined probably have their children in a good private school. Those are not so bad and the quality of education is higher. Especially in the top private schools that are run as hard as a Japanese prep school.
Public schools are poorly funded with the economic collapse we are suffering, and they were not that well off before the bubble burst. The amount of money we pay for public schooling pales in comparison to the loss of income from a single parent.
So without combined income from two parents, just how can a family afford to home school? That is what he is talking about. Which is far more intelligent than the recent article about technology replacing teachers (parents or otherwise) altogether.
The economy is far worse than the author understands and the families that are home schooling already live in places where they can afford to do so. I would be interested to know what changes are in the percentage of home schooled children in the last 4 years. I am willing to bet that some home schooled children were enrolled in public school because it was a choice between eviction, starvation, or both.
Home schooling has a stigma of being predominately populated with ultra religious families that want to teach a more faith based curriculum. In those circumstances I can imagine they would hold out as long as possible, but ultimately the money is going to win out. Especially when those families tend to have more than 2.5 average children.
In any case, this won't work for the average family. Every single family I know, that is in the middle class, is a two income family. So what he proposes costs an average person's salary per year.
I would suggest adding the "recent" advancement of paragraphs to your curriculum :)
That aside, you misunderstood me. I meant that home schooling is completely absurd beyond all measure, with electronic devices only.
Your hands approach is exactly what is required, which is to say actual parental involvement. I honestly don't think that kids left alone with electronic devices, even with very creative and innovative ways to present the material will succeed. If children had that much discipline, they would be adults. I say that while walking past a persons office today several times where all they did was play minesweeper. I'm chalking that up to the day after Christmas and they did not want to be in the office.
Education is a difficult thing to accomplish and we are doing it extremely poorly as a society right now in the US. I commend your sacrifices, which is the single most important ingredient to our success as a people right now, which is sorely lacking. Your children sound like they will be very well rounded adults.
You prove my most salient point in my post. Parental involvement in a child's development beyond just simply being there.
As a result you get the Avatar market equivalent of Garfield
So you advocate narcissistic overeating fat cats as suitable for children! How dare you, sir. How dare you.
Can you imagine the delicious irony of complaining that you can't arm your virtual bear avatar?
You want a vicious looking brute with armor and advanced weaponry and they keep telling you to put up a Care Bear. Think of the children.
The female nipples exist. Just get a water cooled rig and stop overclocking the shit out of your system. They'll "pop up" in no time.
I think he was stuck on the many-worlds interpretation which allows for a universe to exist in which he is not a virgin in his mother's basement.
When you think about it in that context, of course anything could be possible.
Personally, I think that computing as it exists now is much like finding life in the universe similar to ours. If you think about it, so many things could have gone differently. Personal computing may have never taken off, languages could be different, etc. Imagine that the US lost World War II and you had a fascist state in which personal computing was trying to evolve. Not that hard to imagine considering that is where we are headed with legislation.....
The world of computing is in constant flux and changing from one moment to the next which is what makes it so interesting to me.
This needs to be put up here. I still can't stop laughing.
This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that's when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to 'howl at the moon' from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn't have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn't settle for the first thing that comes to him.
I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.
Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the 'guns'), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.
Was it a Monster(tm) cable?
Wooden poles. Microfiber on the bottom and top. You can stack up over a thousand in just six feet. Very easy to build. In a regular closet you could put half dozen of them in there real easily.
Get a strong wooden base about 2 inches thick. 5 six foot wooden poles about 15mm. Easiest to get 1/2 inch. There is some play, but that is where the 4 poles come in. You put those in a square designed to give about 1mm of tolerance around the CD/DVDs. Not all are exactly the same size and temperature allows a slight variation (really slight). Attach it to a top wooden "cap" with tapped holes in the base. You can even put cross supports every 1 ft if you wanted with wooden rods tapped into the poles. I recommend that for stability.
Once it is filled you can tighten the whole assembly down and it is really stable to move if you need to as long you keep it straight up. I don't recommend moving it to much though. 1/2 inch poles are not that strong considering the weight. If you want to go all out you could use metal, but I think that is overboard.
Lately I have been debating about a strong plexiglass enclosure that I could create a vacuum in to prevent slow oxidation damage.
My parents have 7 of them in a closet with an 8th one being filled. Each one can store 1500 CD/DVDs. It's going to be quite some time before the 8th one is filled. We only amassed that many because of music over nearly 30 years. Movies accumulate much more slowly.
The pictures and heirlooms take up quite a bit more storage than CD/DVDs. Those we do have in the vacuum seal bags to prevent oxidation.
Of course a single fire takes it all out. At least we will have digital backups offsite. I maintain an entire copy myself.
It would be nice to have a fireproof safe, but there is not anything that large on market that does not cost as much as a freaking small car.
Some say the world is going to end this next year, but what if it doesn't? My parents and I like the idea that with technology getting better all the time we can keep our entire family history, as it is growing, for generations without degradation and multiple synced copies.
The CD/DVD storage spindles are just one part of it.
That won't work on children you sick bastard.
Although, I am implementing such a system in our cubicle farms starting in January.
I said it in the other post, but I don't understand why you think a pirate would not be better at it?
They come across nearly every BD release and have to re-encode that content. That is a constantly developing skill that keeps them up to date on the latest decryption, codecs, tools, etc.
The pirate is automatically going to be in the top 1% of all people capable of doing the job. You may have a good understanding, but how much time did you spend to get it? Do you work with codecs and encoding on a regular basis?
In addition, piracy groups release the movie at different quality levels. You have the rip that is not much larger than a DVD rip, 1-2.5 gigs. You also have rips that are around the DVDR size 4-6 gigs, and then you have the full ISO levels that are the 25-30 gigs.
They are using the source in multiple ways and that does require a more sophisticated understanding of the encoders and their parameters.
Having played around with various encoders in Linux there are large MAN pages and websites dedicated to just explaining those parameters and how it affects encoding. You must know that, and you certainly imply that you do .
So how would a pirate not have a higher level of sophistication on average and not be very likely to be considered a professional?
Ah, so you're willing to support them with DVD because it's easier to break but not BD because it's harder?
I am willing to support it because it is fundamentally broken and no longer DRM in any meaningful sense. Everybody knows this, especially Big Content. When I purchase a DVD they know they have no control, and I know it as well.
When I purchase BD, they see it as support, or complacency, and it encourages them to continue. Purchasing a lower quality alternative to bypass more effective and restrictive DRM does send a message.
If you're happy with SD quality then fine ignore BD but don't bitch when others want that quality
I bitch when other people take the path of least resistance and keep buying into DRM models that only continue to hurt us. Just because it is increased quality is no excuse for being part of the problem. If nobody purchased BD at all, then they might start to change Big Content's mind.
shrugging and saying that pirates somehow do it better is laughable, they use the same tools as you would and I do.
It's laughable that you think it is laughable. That's like saying I can walk into a metal shop and use the tools the same way the worker does. Nooooo, more likely I would walk out missing some fingers.
The piracy groups are professionals at it. I should know having spent over 50 hours with testing on a headless CentOS server getting the parameters exactly right for an encoding process.
Knowledge and experience make all the difference and if you are so absorbed with quality you should be able to tell that a BD release was rushed because of the artifacts and "waterfalls" in the movie. That was the studio not spending the time and money for a quality encoding job.
As it stands right now I no more need anyone's permission to watch BD as I do DVD
Yes you do. Right now it is not Internet connected, but there is a problem in that not all BD players have the keys to all BD movies. Having to send out for a firmware DVD, or burning your own is not the same as permission, but is just like groveling and begging to me.
If I have to firmware update my player a couple times a year because they are battling piracy, I say fuck it. I'll stick with DVD where there is no battle.