Agreed. I'm secretly hoping the Videolan folks will prove to be the ones to get it right. We need something stable, cross-platform (including Windows!) and compatible for starters. If VLMC can be to the NLE world what Avidemux is to the simple video editors world, that will be an important step in improving the viability of Linux. Anything that challenges Premiere and Vegas is good.
Having recently struggled with some 1080p AVCHD files, I know where you are coming from. Unless you're running something like a i7, you need either some GPU dxva / Cuda magic or some multithreaded cpu magic to play back these high bitrate files. In the open source world, currently that means turning to MediaPlayerClassic-HC for dxva, or enabling the experimental ffmpeg-mt decoder in ffdshow for multithreaded decoding. I'm not sure about MPlayer.
VLC is based on the ffmpeg stable branch, so hopefully when ffmpeg-mt becomes stable, VLC will take advantage of that. No ETA of this though.
Here's one thing I ran into after switching from XP to 7.
My "Stereo Mix" option (That's "What U Hear" for you Creative soundcard owners) has disappeared from the sound recording options. Even after ticking the "reveal disabled/hidden devices" thing, it doesn't come up. That means I can't record or stream over (through things like Ventrilo etc.) what I am listening to at the moment on the PC. This was very nice for piping over soundbytes from a tv program I was watching (analog tv card) as well as useful for acting as a bridge between two different voice chat programs.
I suspect this is one attempt to "plug the analog hole". With this method you could record soundtracks off YouTube as the video played for example. There's an anti-feature for you, and it sucks.
Re:This isn't sensationalist, it's the truth
on
Leaving the GPL Behind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Exactly. Anyone who is railing against the GPL for "not being free enough" should advocate orbit-nuking proprietary software 24/7 or is a hypocrite.
Somewhere, somehow an odd disconnect is taking place between those two archetype FF users (I wouldn't call them trolls). I myself have been using this FF thing since 0.2, on XP with no memory usage problems whatsoever. I also use FF on Ubuntu since I think 2.0, again with no mem usage issues to notice. Always same add-ons, namely ABP, BugMeNot. This mem usage skyrocketing issue so often reported thus always appears as a mystery to me, and I assume to others who don't experience the problems. I really wonder what is going on.
As a social scientist I can't live with myself if I let this slip.
Actually Hobbes's depiction of life as "nasty, brutish and short" is the exact opposite of a "prediction". It describes life not in the future but in the hypothetical and long past "state of nature", before the development of civilized society and the State (The Leviathan) which puts an end to "the war of each against all" that causes life to be "nasty, brutish and short" in the "state of nature". The transformation is purely social, based on a contract between individuals who agree to submit to a strong authority in exchange for personal security. The development of technology etc. does not come into the discussion in any significant manner in Hobbes, although you could argue for that as a factor independently.
I don't see the cause for panic. The donations system appears to work great. I just donated $10 through paypal when I saw the funding drive. It's easily the most useful website online and is ad-free. If $6M/year covers the expenses, we could do this every year no problem with the 150M/month visitor base. Why risk a working system with an inherently contradictory, alienating revenue model that is ads ?
Yet my dear Euthyphro, it appears to be the other way around. Considering RMS is a God, a thing is not free because Stallman likes it but it is rather that Stallman likes a thing because it is free.
Btw, I can offer this piece for a short introduction to and summary of the affair for those interested.
"Geopolitical Chess: Background to a Mini-war in the Caucasus", Immanuel Wallerstein
http://fbc.binghamton.edu/239en.htm
These are all valid points and open to discussion. I am in no way arguing that Russia is a benign force. Russia used the affair as a wonderful opportunity to advance its own imperialist interests in the region. This happens in a context of USA and NATO's ambitions, the missile shield conflict etc. Neither do I have a strong opinion on the validity of Ossetia's claim to independence, or of Kosovo's for that matter. I simply felt the need to remind us of the obvious, that Russia's intervention came as a response to Georgia's attack on Ossetia, a fact which appears to be lost on some. For this feat I think we can thank the almighty American media spin. That had to be cleared in order to have a discussion at all. When it comes to 1 and 2, I don't have well formed opinions and think these are extremely complicated matters, although I wonder once again how you can come up with the idea that Russia did a "sneak attack", when it was the Georgians who took the first military action. I am amazed that this elementary fact of the whole conflict somehow vanishes from thought.
While I'm all for condemning Russia for Georgian casualties and imperialism in the region, you do realize that Georgia, counting on US support and the Olympics distraction, was the aggressor. Saakashvili launched the military attack on separatist Ossetia, which Russia responded by driving the Georgians out of Ossetia, as well as using the occasion as a golden opportunity to push even further into Georgia and press their terms. This is in no way comparable to what the USA did to Iraq. The analogy is arguably with Kosovo, which Russia had explicitly referred to in the past, stating that the recognition of Kosovo's independence sets a precedent for similar separatists in the Caucass region.
Your caricaturized analogies apply to all organized social movements. You may attempt to devalue any pursuit of social objective as "religious", as religions are also organized social movements in pursuit of an objective.
Here:
- Neoliberal capitalism is a form of church.
- State protection of industries are the original sin.
- Milton Friedman is the prophet who will save us from our sins.
- The Bretton-Woods institutions are the equivalent of missonaries spreading the gospel of neoliberalism to "3rd world countries.
- Karl Marx is the devil.
And this demonstrates, what?
Anarchists have not been bomb-throwing at world trade meetings.
And The Free Software Movement does appear to be in line with Libertarian Socialism (classical anarchism). That is everyone contributes to the good of the public of their own accord and free will.
I agree. I've stayed in the Netherlands as a student between 2004-2006 and watched Amsterdam decline in an Islamophobia craze. Carrying ID's was made mandatory, the police will demand it for stupid shit like bicycle traffic violations (like only having 1 light instead of 2) and they discriminate like hell, targetting people with dark skin, people who look poor, punk kids, whoever looks like trouble to them. It's the classic pass a law that can incriminate everyone, and then selectively enforce it on the vulnerable trick. Btw, my backpack was stolen at a bar with my passport in it. I would never carry it with me if it wasn't for that stupid ID law. I reported to the police and it was never recovered naturally. Once the novelty of the weed and the naked women in the windowpanes wears out it's just another war-on-crime city.
Once the prices come down and the tech matures a little more, a nice small 32-64GB SSD for the apps and a 1TB+ for storage should be a great overall solution.
This could even happen in form of an elegant hybrid unit.
"Anarcho-capitalism"... You can't be much anarcho if you're economy is based on private tyrannies called corporations where the will of hundreds of persons (workers) are systematically subjected to a few (owner, boss, management..)
"Anarcho-capitalism" or right libertarianism* is a childish school of thought stuck in the very early stage of capitalism where the state hardly existed and robber barons ran rampant, typical of the American expansion into the West, where everyone was "free from central authority" to viciously oppress others. Recreating such a society is impossible in modern capitalism which is heavily intertwined with the state, therefore the rhetoric of anarcho-capitalism equates to little more than "I don't want to pay taxes to this oppressive government", which in turn justifies more tax cuts for the rich. It is not a coincidence that "anarcho-capitalists", "libertarians" etc. vote Republican in the USA. Anarcho-capitalism is the teenager's neo-conservatism.
Fortunately this confusing term is pretty much limited to the USA.
*Left libertarians are; anarchists, anarchosynidcalists, libertarian socialists etc..
Actually it tries to replace it with "participatory planning". As workers you provide input from one direction, as consumers you provide input from the other direction. You determine relative effort yes, but it is not decided centrally. You're supposed to come to an agreement iteratively, workers and consumers negotiating to draw a plan in 4-5 rounds. The workers estimate how much can be produced in the future x months at what cost, and consumers estimate how much needs to be consumed. A board facilitates the negotiation rounds. The whole process should be cooperative, unlike a market where every actor's motivation is to take what they can, buy cheap and sell dear.
We need some sort of model that would allow us to remunerate programmers. I will attempt a VERY ROUGH sketch for it. Try to get the basic idea and I would love responses. It's based on ParEcon which I believe shoots for the best values an economic system can produce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parecon
The ideal would be to remunerate according to "effort & sacrifice". Trouble is how can we figure out who is expending the most effort and doing the hardest work? We've got to turn to evaluation of coworkers or project collaborators to find out.
Letting aside corporate backed or other projects which income other than "donations" for the sake of argument, we could then try to balance remuneration across different FOSS projects. If one project is more tedious, difficult and unrewarding they should be better remunerated for their sacrifice. Projects that are empowering, rewarding in of themselves will have lesser priority.
To organize the whole thing, we would also need to find out which projects are actually useful. Since users can't really see beyond GUI's, asking users won't be ideal. We could base it on an objective statistic of how many users use which products, let's say Ubuntu phones home to report the stats (if the user wishes to participate in this and privacy stuff is figured out etc.).
The whole thing of course must come together in an organization of FOSS programmers to manage the information about who's doing how much of the most useful work. Funds from donations could be pooled and distributed accordingly instead of direct patronage. Perhaps SourceForge can be a starting point.
What do you think?
If a CPU is going to crash or go up in smoke after heatsink removal under load it will do so within 30 seconds.
Since it hasn't done so yet and considering it's a 1W energy efficient CPU the only effect should be a reduction in its longterm lifespan (maybe it will only run 2 years rather than 8).
I don't see the excitement here, until they take a hairdryer to it which they say they will do after two weeks. That should be interesting.
I stopped reading at "Now that sections of Islam have declared war on Western civilisation.."
Let me fix that for you:
"Now that Western imperialist wars on Islamic countries have triggered terrorist responses.."
Please, please get it right. Contrary to what you hear from adults around the playground "Who started it" is very important.
From the pidgin FAQ:
"Why are file transfers so slow?
MSN file transfer support is limited to the proxied version of file transfer support in the protocol. This means that the files are sent to MSN's servers, then the server sends the data to the other user. We don't know if or when we will ever support any of the peer-to-peer file transfer methods available in the MSN protocol."
What would it take to add direct connection transfer support to Pidgin so I can actually send someone a file on MSN? Currently it maxes out around 4KB/s which is useless. I always wondered why this is not a priority.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I'm secretly hoping the Videolan folks will prove to be the ones to get it right. We need something stable, cross-platform (including Windows!) and compatible for starters. If VLMC can be to the NLE world what Avidemux is to the simple video editors world, that will be an important step in improving the viability of Linux. Anything that challenges Premiere and Vegas is good.
Having recently struggled with some 1080p AVCHD files, I know where you are coming from. Unless you're running something like a i7, you need either some GPU dxva / Cuda magic or some multithreaded cpu magic to play back these high bitrate files. In the open source world, currently that means turning to MediaPlayerClassic-HC for dxva, or enabling the experimental ffmpeg-mt decoder in ffdshow for multithreaded decoding. I'm not sure about MPlayer. VLC is based on the ffmpeg stable branch, so hopefully when ffmpeg-mt becomes stable, VLC will take advantage of that. No ETA of this though.
Here's one thing I ran into after switching from XP to 7. My "Stereo Mix" option (That's "What U Hear" for you Creative soundcard owners) has disappeared from the sound recording options. Even after ticking the "reveal disabled/hidden devices" thing, it doesn't come up. That means I can't record or stream over (through things like Ventrilo etc.) what I am listening to at the moment on the PC. This was very nice for piping over soundbytes from a tv program I was watching (analog tv card) as well as useful for acting as a bridge between two different voice chat programs. I suspect this is one attempt to "plug the analog hole". With this method you could record soundtracks off YouTube as the video played for example. There's an anti-feature for you, and it sucks.
Exactly. Anyone who is railing against the GPL for "not being free enough" should advocate orbit-nuking proprietary software 24/7 or is a hypocrite.
Somewhere, somehow an odd disconnect is taking place between those two archetype FF users (I wouldn't call them trolls). I myself have been using this FF thing since 0.2, on XP with no memory usage problems whatsoever. I also use FF on Ubuntu since I think 2.0, again with no mem usage issues to notice. Always same add-ons, namely ABP, BugMeNot. This mem usage skyrocketing issue so often reported thus always appears as a mystery to me, and I assume to others who don't experience the problems. I really wonder what is going on.
As a social scientist I can't live with myself if I let this slip. Actually Hobbes's depiction of life as "nasty, brutish and short" is the exact opposite of a "prediction". It describes life not in the future but in the hypothetical and long past "state of nature", before the development of civilized society and the State (The Leviathan) which puts an end to "the war of each against all" that causes life to be "nasty, brutish and short" in the "state of nature". The transformation is purely social, based on a contract between individuals who agree to submit to a strong authority in exchange for personal security. The development of technology etc. does not come into the discussion in any significant manner in Hobbes, although you could argue for that as a factor independently.
I don't see the cause for panic. The donations system appears to work great. I just donated $10 through paypal when I saw the funding drive. It's easily the most useful website online and is ad-free. If $6M/year covers the expenses, we could do this every year no problem with the 150M/month visitor base. Why risk a working system with an inherently contradictory, alienating revenue model that is ads ?
Yet my dear Euthyphro, it appears to be the other way around. Considering RMS is a God, a thing is not free because Stallman likes it but it is rather that Stallman likes a thing because it is free.
In the spirit of and beyond Co-Ops one can also consider the ParEcon model. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics
Btw, I can offer this piece for a short introduction to and summary of the affair for those interested. "Geopolitical Chess: Background to a Mini-war in the Caucasus", Immanuel Wallerstein http://fbc.binghamton.edu/239en.htm
These are all valid points and open to discussion. I am in no way arguing that Russia is a benign force. Russia used the affair as a wonderful opportunity to advance its own imperialist interests in the region. This happens in a context of USA and NATO's ambitions, the missile shield conflict etc. Neither do I have a strong opinion on the validity of Ossetia's claim to independence, or of Kosovo's for that matter. I simply felt the need to remind us of the obvious, that Russia's intervention came as a response to Georgia's attack on Ossetia, a fact which appears to be lost on some. For this feat I think we can thank the almighty American media spin. That had to be cleared in order to have a discussion at all. When it comes to 1 and 2, I don't have well formed opinions and think these are extremely complicated matters, although I wonder once again how you can come up with the idea that Russia did a "sneak attack", when it was the Georgians who took the first military action. I am amazed that this elementary fact of the whole conflict somehow vanishes from thought.
Military aggression, in this case Georgia's attack on Ossetia is not equivalent to "wearing a dress". How does this escape you?
While I'm all for condemning Russia for Georgian casualties and imperialism in the region, you do realize that Georgia, counting on US support and the Olympics distraction, was the aggressor. Saakashvili launched the military attack on separatist Ossetia, which Russia responded by driving the Georgians out of Ossetia, as well as using the occasion as a golden opportunity to push even further into Georgia and press their terms. This is in no way comparable to what the USA did to Iraq. The analogy is arguably with Kosovo, which Russia had explicitly referred to in the past, stating that the recognition of Kosovo's independence sets a precedent for similar separatists in the Caucass region.
Your caricaturized analogies apply to all organized social movements. You may attempt to devalue any pursuit of social objective as "religious", as religions are also organized social movements in pursuit of an objective. Here: - Neoliberal capitalism is a form of church. - State protection of industries are the original sin. - Milton Friedman is the prophet who will save us from our sins. - The Bretton-Woods institutions are the equivalent of missonaries spreading the gospel of neoliberalism to "3rd world countries. - Karl Marx is the devil. And this demonstrates, what?
Anarchists have not been bomb-throwing at world trade meetings. And The Free Software Movement does appear to be in line with Libertarian Socialism (classical anarchism). That is everyone contributes to the good of the public of their own accord and free will.
I agree. I've stayed in the Netherlands as a student between 2004-2006 and watched Amsterdam decline in an Islamophobia craze. Carrying ID's was made mandatory, the police will demand it for stupid shit like bicycle traffic violations (like only having 1 light instead of 2) and they discriminate like hell, targetting people with dark skin, people who look poor, punk kids, whoever looks like trouble to them. It's the classic pass a law that can incriminate everyone, and then selectively enforce it on the vulnerable trick. Btw, my backpack was stolen at a bar with my passport in it. I would never carry it with me if it wasn't for that stupid ID law. I reported to the police and it was never recovered naturally. Once the novelty of the weed and the naked women in the windowpanes wears out it's just another war-on-crime city.
Once the prices come down and the tech matures a little more, a nice small 32-64GB SSD for the apps and a 1TB+ for storage should be a great overall solution. This could even happen in form of an elegant hybrid unit.
"Anarcho-capitalism"... You can't be much anarcho if you're economy is based on private tyrannies called corporations where the will of hundreds of persons (workers) are systematically subjected to a few (owner, boss, management..) "Anarcho-capitalism" or right libertarianism* is a childish school of thought stuck in the very early stage of capitalism where the state hardly existed and robber barons ran rampant, typical of the American expansion into the West, where everyone was "free from central authority" to viciously oppress others. Recreating such a society is impossible in modern capitalism which is heavily intertwined with the state, therefore the rhetoric of anarcho-capitalism equates to little more than "I don't want to pay taxes to this oppressive government", which in turn justifies more tax cuts for the rich. It is not a coincidence that "anarcho-capitalists", "libertarians" etc. vote Republican in the USA. Anarcho-capitalism is the teenager's neo-conservatism. Fortunately this confusing term is pretty much limited to the USA. *Left libertarians are; anarchists, anarchosynidcalists, libertarian socialists etc..
Actually it tries to replace it with "participatory planning". As workers you provide input from one direction, as consumers you provide input from the other direction. You determine relative effort yes, but it is not decided centrally. You're supposed to come to an agreement iteratively, workers and consumers negotiating to draw a plan in 4-5 rounds. The workers estimate how much can be produced in the future x months at what cost, and consumers estimate how much needs to be consumed. A board facilitates the negotiation rounds. The whole process should be cooperative, unlike a market where every actor's motivation is to take what they can, buy cheap and sell dear.
We need some sort of model that would allow us to remunerate programmers. I will attempt a VERY ROUGH sketch for it. Try to get the basic idea and I would love responses. It's based on ParEcon which I believe shoots for the best values an economic system can produce: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parecon The ideal would be to remunerate according to "effort & sacrifice". Trouble is how can we figure out who is expending the most effort and doing the hardest work? We've got to turn to evaluation of coworkers or project collaborators to find out. Letting aside corporate backed or other projects which income other than "donations" for the sake of argument, we could then try to balance remuneration across different FOSS projects. If one project is more tedious, difficult and unrewarding they should be better remunerated for their sacrifice. Projects that are empowering, rewarding in of themselves will have lesser priority. To organize the whole thing, we would also need to find out which projects are actually useful. Since users can't really see beyond GUI's, asking users won't be ideal. We could base it on an objective statistic of how many users use which products, let's say Ubuntu phones home to report the stats (if the user wishes to participate in this and privacy stuff is figured out etc.). The whole thing of course must come together in an organization of FOSS programmers to manage the information about who's doing how much of the most useful work. Funds from donations could be pooled and distributed accordingly instead of direct patronage. Perhaps SourceForge can be a starting point. What do you think?
Haven't heard of electromigration, but have seen this video back in 2001: http://www.tomshardware.com/pentium-athalon-test,video-272.html (same vid) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrEaAMt9SnA I also have seen some modern Intel systems run without any cooling on a daily basis for months. Point is if it can manage the first 2 minutes, it most likely will manage 2, 4, or 50 weeks. That has been my practical experience.
If a CPU is going to crash or go up in smoke after heatsink removal under load it will do so within 30 seconds. Since it hasn't done so yet and considering it's a 1W energy efficient CPU the only effect should be a reduction in its longterm lifespan (maybe it will only run 2 years rather than 8). I don't see the excitement here, until they take a hairdryer to it which they say they will do after two weeks. That should be interesting.
I stopped reading at "Now that sections of Islam have declared war on Western civilisation.." Let me fix that for you: "Now that Western imperialist wars on Islamic countries have triggered terrorist responses.." Please, please get it right. Contrary to what you hear from adults around the playground "Who started it" is very important.
From the pidgin FAQ: "Why are file transfers so slow? MSN file transfer support is limited to the proxied version of file transfer support in the protocol. This means that the files are sent to MSN's servers, then the server sends the data to the other user. We don't know if or when we will ever support any of the peer-to-peer file transfer methods available in the MSN protocol." What would it take to add direct connection transfer support to Pidgin so I can actually send someone a file on MSN? Currently it maxes out around 4KB/s which is useless. I always wondered why this is not a priority.
Out of the closet, into jDome!