But they cost less; back then I paid something like 300 $ for a 300 DPI ink-jet printer, which took minutes to print a single page, and required the user to replace its print head to switch between colour and B&W printing. Oh, and it included a mechanical ink pump to clear its nozzles.
Now I can buy an inkjet multifunction with a much higher print quality for less than half that price. Or I can buy a laser colour printer for 120 $: this would have been unimaginable in the 90s.
No, he's right. Adobe have explicitly stated that they're phasing out flash and have already started firing employees who were working on it. We've had countless stories here on/. about the process.
The question is: will my battery became unusable (i.e. no longer rechargeable) if I leave my tesla car unplugged for too long? I think it's a fair question and it would deserve a clear answer.
Can somebody explain to me what's broken with the current governance model of the Internet, that has to be fixed?
I'm not from the USA, and I'm critical of their positions more often than not, but honestly with the Internet they're playing fair; what's the chance that, whoever takes over, will be a better replacement?
I don't think that any kidnapper would give hints of his whereabouts on Twitter.
This is not about increasing police presence, hardening penalties for criminals, adding more cameras in public places - this is about tracking every single life on the internet at the highest possible level of detail, and without a warrant from any judicial authority. As someone else said, "Stalin's dream".
Amen to that. I usually have to use directx's graph builder (which is itself hard to find, I don't remember if it's currently buried in the Platform SDK or the Directx SDK) to troubleshoot codec problems on Windows.
I'm not against an operating system-wide codec system; I think it's a important piece of a modern OS. I'm disappointed that Windows' one is under-documented, messy and generally not meant to be user-maintainable (just like so many Windows subsystems). This is the kind of complexity which results in OS reinstallation being the time-honoured, quickest solution to fix certain problems on Windows.
I should have written that in a different way: "It's nice for end users to be able to double-click a file and see it play without needing to know what a codec is".
I do not advocate users' ignorance / walled gardens / software dumbdown, I just think that letting more people take advantage of computers is a nice thing even for us advanced users.
So it sounds like Windows Media Player, except it's not modular and easy for end users to add new codecs?
It's designed to play everything without ever installing any codec. End users shouldn't know what a "codec" is, they should double-click a file and see it play, which is what VLC is all about.
And it's just now getting Blu-Ray support?
It think that after Mplayer, it's the first free media player getting support for it. Windows Media Player doesn't support Blu-Ray yet, for example.
Not that I've ever really had a problem with codecs.
Many people have. It's very easy to run into problems with codecs if you use them. There is no standard user interface to maintain them, so you have to rely on their installers to do the right thing when you install and uninstall them. Which often doesn't happen.
Videos just seem to work on WMP and MPC just fine every time I try, and I never install any "codec pack" or anything other than XviD perhaps. Honestly I can't figure out why I'd want this still.
That's because you only used one of the few formats supported by WMP - in this case you have little to gain from VLC. But suppose your grandmother wants to see some family clips taken with somebody else's digital camera. She will double-click them and they won't play. You can either:
- ask her to dig the FOURCC identification in the video clips, ask her what OS she uses and what version, find a codec online which is good for her case, tell her to download and install it, then cross your fingers and hope it works because there is no well-defined way to debug problems if things don't go well at this point. Note that a broken codec will harm *all* media playback on her machine.
- tell her do download and install VLC and double click those videos again.
"Self contained" seems like a big downside to me. It doesn't even compete with VNC or RDP?? The name is pretty misleading as well.
You can capture your desktop and stream it to another room via IP. Or you can capture a football match from your TV card and stream it into your neighbour's house. Or you can convert a DVD into another format. It's both a generic tool for advanced users and an easy to use player for regular users.
After the upgrade, I get video stuttering in WMV files after seeking, and the MP4 videos coming from my old N73 play like a slideshow. The installer also tries to install the Mozilla and ActiveX plugins by default, IIRC this feature was off by default before, and I don't know if I want it, but that's just my personal preference.
No, I still need a better translation. The employers of those people are rich. In fact, they're filthy rich. They live in America, are American-rich and therefore can afford to pay American-sized salaries.
I don't understand. Are you suggesting that the Chinese get paid too little because they're not productive? People who work almost for free, and eat and sleep almost in the same rooms where they work?
Are you suggesting that Apple can't pay the Chinese enough because they can't afford better means of production for they've accumulated not enough capital, when they have a market cap of 450 billions $?
In order for the "slice" to increase in size, they only need to move cake from the large slices that investors and managers keep for themselves, into the infinitely tiny slices that are given to people who actually build the products that make the company rich. For example by making them work in factories that don't explode.
When I was in Russia in the late 90s, bus fare was less than 5 cents in the city I was in.
And this means that Russia in the 90s was very poor. I also live in a relatively poor area, and prices here are much lower here than in the richest parts of the country. This means that we won't starve, not that we're rich. A dollar is a dollar everywhere in the world.
You can't compare dollar incomes to living standards like that.
Let's make an internal comparison. The iPhone in China costs 5,000 yuan (793 $). The wages at Foxconn start at $130. Therefore a Chinese has to work at Foxconn for slightly more than six months, without eating, dressing himself, getting sick, buying gasoline, only to buy the phone he builds.
This theory assumes that there are no barriers to entry for building new factories (false, only a few people on the planet have the economic resources required to build a microelectronics factory), that the number of factories is infinite (false, and instead of competing with each other, they will happily reach gentlemen's agreements between them), that the consumer is a rational and optimising entity (false, e.g. people line up in front of Apple stores before even knowing what their products are), does not take into account things such as the fact that people can not work for a wage lower than a certain level (even the Chinese will starve if not fed enough). And we haven't talked about real-life disturbances such as patents, scarcity of resouces, transportation costs and so on.
The "invisible hand" does not exist more than the Carnot machine. It won't fix the workers' conditions.
And who was the foreign investor that forced people in the USA to work like slaves or starve, in the 19th century?
United States in the 19th century were developing themselves. China is being exploited by already developed nations who have no reason to resort to slavery, but greed. Don't make it appear as an inevitable law of nature.
At least until 2012 Nokia did make its most imporant phones in Finland. Paying adult, educated workes who were protected by European welfare and safety laws, and who could even buy the phones that they manufactured.
Not only Apple wouldn't dream of opening a single factory in the USA, they also had the arrogance to make declarations such as "it's not our job to fix unemployment in the USA". While exploiting slavery in China, at the same time they plan to build a spaceship-like building for their managers in the USA. While at Foxconn people killed themselves, or perished in explosions, or coughed blood because of gas leaks, Steve Jobs said: "hey, but they have restaurants and swimming pools". Let them have cake - at Foxconn's restaurants.
And Enlightenment too. I'm currently a refugee there because GNOME just doesn't want me to use it and KDE has increased the vapour/solidity ratio a bit too much for my taste after the KDE 4 armageddon (and they're already starting to talk about KDE 5...).
The cult of personality that their leader attained has no match in any "brand loyalty" phenomenon in history.
Just an example of how his figure was perceived: a communist party in Italy found that they had nothing better to do to help the proletariat than covering Rome with posters of grievance for the death of Steve Jobs - the sweatshop-exploiter and employee-firer.
Why is it so wrong to use the proprietary drivers?
It's not wrong - it's just that open source drivers work out of the box, while proprietary drivers need some tinkering and only support the latest hardware. Compare with the experience you get with Linux on PCs with Intel graphics - almost everything just works and at full performance, with no need to hunt for drivers, download firmware blobs, etc. And Intel start updating their drivers to support new products months before they're released to the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I can buy an inkjet multifunction with a much higher print quality for less than half that price. Or I can buy a laser colour printer for 120 $: this would have been unimaginable in the 90s.
No, he's right. Adobe have explicitly stated that they're phasing out flash and have already started firing employees who were working on it. We've had countless stories here on /. about the process.
The question is: will my battery became unusable (i.e. no longer rechargeable) if I leave my tesla car unplugged for too long? I think it's a fair question and it would deserve a clear answer.
...have always distinguished themselves by good taste. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGO2hVA3P58
I'm not from the USA, and I'm critical of their positions more often than not, but honestly with the Internet they're playing fair; what's the chance that, whoever takes over, will be a better replacement?
Some examples of wasteful, government-enforced research: man in space, GPS, the Internet.
and who cares how much they know as long as you have nothing to hide
(as if there weren't plenty of things that people don't want everyone else to see, even though there's nothing wrong with them)
This is not about increasing police presence, hardening penalties for criminals, adding more cameras in public places - this is about tracking every single life on the internet at the highest possible level of detail, and without a warrant from any judicial authority. As someone else said, "Stalin's dream".
We are at least two; and add to the list:
- is slow on a core i7
I'm not against an operating system-wide codec system; I think it's a important piece of a modern OS. I'm disappointed that Windows' one is under-documented, messy and generally not meant to be user-maintainable (just like so many Windows subsystems). This is the kind of complexity which results in OS reinstallation being the time-honoured, quickest solution to fix certain problems on Windows.
I do not advocate users' ignorance / walled gardens / software dumbdown, I just think that letting more people take advantage of computers is a nice thing even for us advanced users.
It's designed to play everything without ever installing any codec. End users shouldn't know what a "codec" is, they should double-click a file and see it play, which is what VLC is all about.
It think that after Mplayer, it's the first free media player getting support for it. Windows Media Player doesn't support Blu-Ray yet, for example.
Many people have. It's very easy to run into problems with codecs if you use them. There is no standard user interface to maintain them, so you have to rely on their installers to do the right thing when you install and uninstall them. Which often doesn't happen.
That's because you only used one of the few formats supported by WMP - in this case you have little to gain from VLC. But suppose your grandmother wants to see some family clips taken with somebody else's digital camera. She will double-click them and they won't play. You can either:
- ask her to dig the FOURCC identification in the video clips, ask her what OS she uses and what version, find a codec online which is good for her case, tell her to download and install it, then cross your fingers and hope it works because there is no well-defined way to debug problems if things don't go well at this point. Note that a broken codec will harm *all* media playback on her machine.
- tell her do download and install VLC and double click those videos again.
"Self contained" seems like a big downside to me. It doesn't even compete with VNC or RDP?? The name is pretty misleading as well.
You can capture your desktop and stream it to another room via IP. Or you can capture a football match from your TV card and stream it into your neighbour's house. Or you can convert a DVD into another format. It's both a generic tool for advanced users and an easy to use player for regular users.
Seems to work fine otherwise.
Wasn't the CSS history trick disabled years ago?
No, I still need a better translation. The employers of those people are rich. In fact, they're filthy rich. They live in America, are American-rich and therefore can afford to pay American-sized salaries.
I don't understand. Are you suggesting that the Chinese get paid too little because they're not productive? People who work almost for free, and eat and sleep almost in the same rooms where they work?
Are you suggesting that Apple can't pay the Chinese enough because they can't afford better means of production for they've accumulated not enough capital, when they have a market cap of 450 billions $?
In order for the "slice" to increase in size, they only need to move cake from the large slices that investors and managers keep for themselves, into the infinitely tiny slices that are given to people who actually build the products that make the company rich. For example by making them work in factories that don't explode.
And this means that Russia in the 90s was very poor. I also live in a relatively poor area, and prices here are much lower here than in the richest parts of the country. This means that we won't starve, not that we're rich. A dollar is a dollar everywhere in the world.
Let's make an internal comparison. The iPhone in China costs 5,000 yuan (793 $). The wages at Foxconn start at $130. Therefore a Chinese has to work at Foxconn for slightly more than six months, without eating, dressing himself, getting sick, buying gasoline, only to buy the phone he builds.
The "invisible hand" does not exist more than the Carnot machine. It won't fix the workers' conditions.
United States in the 19th century were developing themselves. China is being exploited by already developed nations who have no reason to resort to slavery, but greed. Don't make it appear as an inevitable law of nature.
Not only Apple wouldn't dream of opening a single factory in the USA, they also had the arrogance to make declarations such as "it's not our job to fix unemployment in the USA". While exploiting slavery in China, at the same time they plan to build a spaceship-like building for their managers in the USA. While at Foxconn people killed themselves, or perished in explosions, or coughed blood because of gas leaks, Steve Jobs said: "hey, but they have restaurants and swimming pools". Let them have cake - at Foxconn's restaurants.
And Enlightenment too. I'm currently a refugee there because GNOME just doesn't want me to use it and KDE has increased the vapour/solidity ratio a bit too much for my taste after the KDE 4 armageddon (and they're already starting to talk about KDE 5...).
Just an example of how his figure was perceived: a communist party in Italy found that they had nothing better to do to help the proletariat than covering Rome with posters of grievance for the death of Steve Jobs - the sweatshop-exploiter and employee-firer.
The problem will appear again soon - rumor has it Apple is porting OS X to Arm.
Well, Sandy Bridge graphics aren't as bad as old Intel chips used to be, and I hear that Ivy Bridge will be much faster.
It's not wrong - it's just that open source drivers work out of the box, while proprietary drivers need some tinkering and only support the latest hardware. Compare with the experience you get with Linux on PCs with Intel graphics - almost everything just works and at full performance, with no need to hunt for drivers, download firmware blobs, etc. And Intel start updating their drivers to support new products months before they're released to the market.