Almost all of this stuff has been tried on various systems through history, and hasn't exatly set the world on fire. VMS, Mozilla, and Psion/Symbian covered most of them already. Those features haven't found their way onto other systems, and for good reason.
If you want a better way to tell this guy is a know-nothing crackpot, notice that he includes the lack of a URL bar as a great interface feature, along with the rest of his overhyped claims of interface design magic...
That's not an interface improvement, that's a sense of style crippling functionality and security. You might as well call omitting access to the command-line, as a feature. After all it "simplifes the interface", and just happens to horribly and needlessly cripples the functionality of the system.
CD-Rs have the recording surface on top, which can flake off unless you buy halfway decent CD-Rs, which have always included a thick coating on top of the discs.
Why do so many people think you have to be thirfty with version numbers?
To delay hitting the V.2K bug, of course...
Re:h264 decoding on vlc player kicks ass!
on
VLC 0.8.6 Released
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· Score: 1
On windows platform, when I play h264 video files the cpu usage is considerably less than other players.
If you're interested, MPlayer for Windows should be faster still, and has numerous configurable options (-lavdopts) to speed-up h264 even more.
Re:h264 decoding on vlc player kicks ass!
on
VLC 0.8.6 Released
·
· Score: 1
I am not going to go dig for more recent numbers, but I saw comments in passing on the ffdshow-tryout mailing list about being their latest checkins being comparable to coreavc.
You must be thinking of something else, because that's really not the case today. Everyone's still trying to speed-up h264 (and trying to figure out how the hell CoreAVC is able to do it so much faster).
On the contrary I think we're all in this together and need to prepare for and help other countries do what we've already done.
You might as well "help" Bill Gates buy a Porche.
China has vastly more than the necessary means, knows the effects of pollution on themselves and others, and just intentionally chooses not to use pollution controls.
Maybe the UK should "help" the US control their pollution, rather than criticising them for not signing Kyoto.
I believe his assertion was that "if the sun was warming the earth, then it would have to warm the stratosphere too", not that "increase in solar heat output must warm the stratosphere"
You're splitting hairs. The increased solar output is, in fact, warming the earth. That fact has been very thoroughly proven.
Do you have an explanation of how the sun is going to warm the earth more than it warms the stratosphere,
The Earth is solid, and absorbs the light that hits it. The stratosphere is not solid, and light passes right through that.
Why anyone thinks the tempuratures in two very different areas are somehow utterly inseperable in is absolutely beyond by powers of reasoning. So, I'd either need an in-depth explation of the reasoning behind his claim (to discredit that), or I'd have to explain the field of climatology in it's entirety to explain it (at least to explain it any better than I did above).
Flash video works, and wmv doesn't consistently. Ooh, ooh, did I get it right? For me, yes.
No, you're entirely wrong.
I often have problems with recent versions of (or "protected" files encoded with) the Windows Media codec in both Xine and Mplayer.
You're probably talking about purchased or (P2P) pirated WMV files, which is utterly different than the subject at hand. Nobody would be stupid enough to publicly put up DRM'd WMV files, and this video is no exception.
Flash Video, on the other hand (which can be grabbed as a.flv file from YouTube quite easily using the DownloadHelper extension for Firefox) plays just fine in Mplayer.
Some FLV files work now. However, the majority do not. Many of the features of FLV are currently unimplimented in MPlayer.
just to remind you not to assume that everyone's else's experiences are the same as yours.
That is, moronic, to say the least.
I base my comments on the facts, not one-off anecdotal experiences.
How much code have you contributed to MPlayer lately?
Unfortunately since manufacturing in this country is nearly non-existant now and we import so much from China, a ban on Chinese imports would hurt the US far more than it would China and they know it.
No, absolutely NONE of that has the tiniest bit of truth behind it.
The US is the #1 manufacturer in the world, by FAR, at $1.79 trillion annually. Almost double that of #2 (which also still *isn't* China, BTW). Despite all the hype, China is still only #4 in the world.
The huge trade imbalance actually makes it quite profitable for the USA to ban Chinese trade, although there will of course be painful shortages if done suddenly.
or hold the power button down to force power off... or unplug the cord...
No, those are definately NOT safe ways to shut down your system. They're particularly dangerous when there's heavy disk activity.
Quickly hitting the power button sends an ACPI message to the system, telling it to start the fastest possible (safe) shutdown. It's nothing like cutting the power.
then why isn't the OS programmed to just shut off the damned power right away when I select "shut down" from the menu?
It's not programmed to be the fastest possible shutdown, because it's presumed hitting the power button is much more urgent than selecting from the menu.
Fast shutdown has the problem of potentially not saving absolutely everything (if you didn't save that Word document before hitting the button, too bad for you), and making the next start-up take slightly longer.
One of the hardest things on a computer (hard drive, motherboard, power supply, you name it) is starting up.
No, that's (almost entirely) baseless nonsense.
Computer hardware has a much easier time handling repeated power cycles, than it does dissipating the heat, and wear and tear on motors, bering, etc., created from idling for an hour. You shouldn't reboot every couple minutes, but even 15 minutes should be a net gain.
In addition, the power savings will very quickly add-up, so you can buy another computer every year from your savings on the electric bill.
Think of incandesent lightbulbs. Sure, they (generally) only burn-out when first switched-on, yet I don't see many people leaving their lights on 24 hours/day, just covering them when you want it to be dark.
The amount of human lifetimes that are wasted waiting for PC's to reboot is pretty horrifying - and there's a lot more than a million of them.
Only if everyone in the world sits around and waits for it to happen every single time, and does absolutely nothing else with that down time. It doesn't count if you spend that time even THINKING about another issue/problem. You have to sit there motionless, stare at the screen, and do absolutely nothing but age.
Personally, I can find plenty of things to do with my time when I know I can walk away.
The more significant issue, IMHO, is the responsiveness of programs. Forget boot-up times, when you don't even have to be there. How about the delay between clicking the Firefox icon, and waiting for it to start-up so you can do useful work? How about the delay between clicking on a link, and having that link load and render? How about the ammount of time the system is unresponsive as it does something (like render a webpage) in the background?
That, IMHO, is many times more important, and something I certainly have to deal with far more often than reboots. Personally, I have a 2GHz system, with 1GB of RAM, and I still strictly stick with GTK-1 programs, because it's so much faster and more responsive than GTK-2 (or QT) equivalents (as well as not uselessly wasting screen realestate). Ever program I use has a fully functional GTK-1 equivalent, so I'm not missing out on anything by sticking with it, it's just an occasional hassle to change the default configure option, or using a different program because the new version of whatever dropped GTK-1 support (like switching from GAIM to Ayttm). It's a rare issue, and well worth the improved performance anyhow.
When I tell a computer to shut down, I want it to _shut down_; I do not want to come back hours later and find it didn't do what I told it to.
It's called "auto end task", and it's just a couple settings in the Windows registry. I've been using it successfully for a VERY long time now, and it works exactly as you'd want:
So, when we chastise other nations for doing what we did 25 years ago, we may be hobbling them somewhat in the international market if we force them not to do that.
1) it's been more than 25 years ago...
2) back then, nobody had much of any idea of the effects.
3) what we were doing was the pinacle of high tech at the time. Pollution controls didn't exist, until we invented them.
Today, the Chinese government certainly knows the cause and effects of pollution, know the technology exists to significantly reduce the problem, and yet they don't bother to use it, anyhow, usually for reasons of national pride (they'd have to buy this tech from foreign companies, instead of using extremely dirty domesticly made products).
THAT is the difference.
offer them an inexpensive or practical alternative... or, hell, maybe even compensate them for lost wealth?
So China shouldn't have to pay for their own pollution or pollution controls? Somebody else should pay for it, for them?
Not likely. China is now quite wealthy, they just chose not to control their pollution, because nobody has forced them to do so. Threaten to ban Chinese imports if they aren't produced "green", and they'll straighten up real fast. Of course I realize the political will to play chicken with cheap Chinese junk just isn't there, but that's besides the point.
I happen to work with an environmental scientist and he says the number one bad thing that everyone is ignoring is the short-term, immediate affect on our health. We're slowly killing ourselves in our own pollution.
That makes no sense at all. For the past 100 years, there's been overwhelming support for reducing pollution that causes short-term health effects. The standards are always becoming continually more stringent, and there are several under way.
Where is this imaginary world, where the EPA doesn't exist?
If ANYTHING, it's long-term effects that are commonly ignored, while the short-term effects get overwhelming scrutiny.
If it is due to the Sun, the stratosphere would be warming as well; however, the stratosphere is cooling.
Way to discredit yourself...
You say it can't be due to the Sun, because that would heat-up the stratosphere, and the stratosphere is cooling. HOWEVER, the fact of the matter is that the Sun is hotter than ever recorded before.
it doesn't matter whether the observations of climactic change are attributable to anthropogenic warming or to some other cause,
It matters in how you should RESPOND to the problem.
Up to now, any discussion on reducing global warming by means OTHER than reducing industrial CO2 emissions, has gotten dismissed out-of-hand as being from a bunch of idiots who don't know their asses from a hole in the ground.
it's very easy to find great metal bands that have no affiliation with any RIAA members.
By all means, point me to them.
I've gone through a laundry list of non-RIAA sites, and the vast majority of it is 3 people who can't write, play, or sing, repeating 10 seconds of chords and absolutly mindless lyrics for 4 minutes.
I spent a couple days on music.download.com, getting a couple GBs worth of the highest ranked artists in Rock/Metal/etc. After listening to it all, over the course of a couple weeks, I determined that 90%+ of it was painfully lowsy crap, that a teen-aged garage band would be ashamed of.
The last 10%, which I've kept, is, at best, utterly mediocre and mundane (same old guitar riffs, same old drum rythm, same old verse chorus verse, same old mindless lyrics about nothing at all).
As opposed to Google, where searching for almost anything turns up an ad for buying it on eBay, an ad for downloading ringtones for your phone,
There's a world of difference between ads on the page, and unrelated search engine hits in the body.
a dozen price comparison/review sites (with a dozen links each) none of which has any human-written reviews of the search item, a sponsored ad for someone selling a related item, and a reference to the Wikipedia article?
There are a few of those, unfortunately. However, they are almost always on uncommon/rare terms, where they aren't as important (and you can always report that to Google as spam).
It's not a panacea, but it's several orders of magnitude better than things were before Google came along. Before Google, EVERYTHING was crap. Now, just a few select things are crap.
Or are you describing in fact, the world with the Web (just in its early days)?
In the earliest days, everyone copied Gopher, of course, since it was the standard. However, doing that meant lots of extra work and HTML markup, which Gopher didn't require at all.
The fact that HTML doesn't enforce a reasonably strict layout, and standard tags that can be easily parsed by machine, has been it's weakness, even if you can vaguely imitate the end result (in specific circumstances).
Slashdot Mirror
Almost all of this stuff has been tried on various systems through history, and hasn't exatly set the world on fire. VMS, Mozilla, and Psion/Symbian covered most of them already. Those features haven't found their way onto other systems, and for good reason.
If you want a better way to tell this guy is a know-nothing crackpot, notice that he includes the lack of a URL bar as a great interface feature, along with the rest of his overhyped claims of interface design magic...
That's not an interface improvement, that's a sense of style crippling functionality and security. You might as well call omitting access to the command-line, as a feature. After all it "simplifes the interface", and just happens to horribly and needlessly cripples the functionality of the system.
CD-Rs have the recording surface on top, which can flake off unless you buy halfway decent CD-Rs, which have always included a thick coating on top of the discs.
Fixed that for ya.
Very True. The Deep is absolutely the best episode in the series. "Frozen Seas" being second-best, IMHO.
The rest, I'm sorry to say, are mediocre, and most of their content you can just as redily find in any other nature shows, covering ocean life.
To delay hitting the V.2K bug, of course...
If you're interested, MPlayer for Windows should be faster still, and has numerous configurable options (-lavdopts) to speed-up h264 even more.
You must be thinking of something else, because that's really not the case today. Everyone's still trying to speed-up h264 (and trying to figure out how the hell CoreAVC is able to do it so much faster).
I have no idea how the (ffmpeg/libav) codecs could accomplish that, unless there was some serious bug in the past.
Sounds more likely due to VLC changing something like the video output method, or enabling postprocessing.
You might as well "help" Bill Gates buy a Porche.
China has vastly more than the necessary means, knows the effects of pollution on themselves and others, and just intentionally chooses not to use pollution controls.
Maybe the UK should "help" the US control their pollution, rather than criticising them for not signing Kyoto.
You're splitting hairs. The increased solar output is, in fact, warming the earth. That fact has been very thoroughly proven.
The Earth is solid, and absorbs the light that hits it. The stratosphere is not solid, and light passes right through that.
Why anyone thinks the tempuratures in two very different areas are somehow utterly inseperable in is absolutely beyond by powers of reasoning. So, I'd either need an in-depth explation of the reasoning behind his claim (to discredit that), or I'd have to explain the field of climatology in it's entirety to explain it (at least to explain it any better than I did above).
No, you're entirely wrong.
You're probably talking about purchased or (P2P) pirated WMV files, which is utterly different than the subject at hand. Nobody would be stupid enough to publicly put up DRM'd WMV files, and this video is no exception.
Some FLV files work now. However, the majority do not. Many of the features of FLV are currently unimplimented in MPlayer.
That is, moronic, to say the least.
I base my comments on the facts, not one-off anecdotal experiences.
How much code have you contributed to MPlayer lately?
No, absolutely NONE of that has the tiniest bit of truth behind it.
The US is the #1 manufacturer in the world, by FAR, at $1.79 trillion annually. Almost double that of #2 (which also still *isn't* China, BTW). Despite all the hype, China is still only #4 in the world.
The huge trade imbalance actually makes it quite profitable for the USA to ban Chinese trade, although there will of course be painful shortages if done suddenly.
No, those are definately NOT safe ways to shut down your system. They're particularly dangerous when there's heavy disk activity.
Quickly hitting the power button sends an ACPI message to the system, telling it to start the fastest possible (safe) shutdown. It's nothing like cutting the power.
It's not programmed to be the fastest possible shutdown, because it's presumed hitting the power button is much more urgent than selecting from the menu.
Fast shutdown has the problem of potentially not saving absolutely everything (if you didn't save that Word document before hitting the button, too bad for you), and making the next start-up take slightly longer.
100% strawman.
It's your assertion that a solar increse inherently requires warming of the stratosphere that is the bullshit here.
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!
No, that's (almost entirely) baseless nonsense.
Computer hardware has a much easier time handling repeated power cycles, than it does dissipating the heat, and wear and tear on motors, bering, etc., created from idling for an hour. You shouldn't reboot every couple minutes, but even 15 minutes should be a net gain.
In addition, the power savings will very quickly add-up, so you can buy another computer every year from your savings on the electric bill.
Think of incandesent lightbulbs. Sure, they (generally) only burn-out when first switched-on, yet I don't see many people leaving their lights on 24 hours/day, just covering them when you want it to be dark.
Only if everyone in the world sits around and waits for it to happen every single time, and does absolutely nothing else with that down time. It doesn't count if you spend that time even THINKING about another issue/problem. You have to sit there motionless, stare at the screen, and do absolutely nothing but age.
Personally, I can find plenty of things to do with my time when I know I can walk away.
The more significant issue, IMHO, is the responsiveness of programs. Forget boot-up times, when you don't even have to be there. How about the delay between clicking the Firefox icon, and waiting for it to start-up so you can do useful work? How about the delay between clicking on a link, and having that link load and render? How about the ammount of time the system is unresponsive as it does something (like render a webpage) in the background?
That, IMHO, is many times more important, and something I certainly have to deal with far more often than reboots. Personally, I have a 2GHz system, with 1GB of RAM, and I still strictly stick with GTK-1 programs, because it's so much faster and more responsive than GTK-2 (or QT) equivalents (as well as not uselessly wasting screen realestate). Ever program I use has a fully functional GTK-1 equivalent, so I'm not missing out on anything by sticking with it, it's just an occasional hassle to change the default configure option, or using a different program because the new version of whatever dropped GTK-1 support (like switching from GAIM to Ayttm). It's a rare issue, and well worth the improved performance anyhow.
It's called "auto end task", and it's just a couple settings in the Windows registry. I've been using it successfully for a VERY long time now, and it works exactly as you'd want:
http://www.winguides.com/registry/display.php/199
If the program doesn't end (30 seconds) after it gets the kill signal, it gets killed without requiring you to be there to hit the button.
With any remotely recent system, you just hit the power button, and get the fastest possible shutdown. Works great.
1) it's been more than 25 years ago...
2) back then, nobody had much of any idea of the effects.
3) what we were doing was the pinacle of high tech at the time. Pollution controls didn't exist, until we invented them.
Today, the Chinese government certainly knows the cause and effects of pollution, know the technology exists to significantly reduce the problem, and yet they don't bother to use it, anyhow, usually for reasons of national pride (they'd have to buy this tech from foreign companies, instead of using extremely dirty domesticly made products).
THAT is the difference.
So China shouldn't have to pay for their own pollution or pollution controls? Somebody else should pay for it, for them?
Not likely. China is now quite wealthy, they just chose not to control their pollution, because nobody has forced them to do so. Threaten to ban Chinese imports if they aren't produced "green", and they'll straighten up real fast. Of course I realize the political will to play chicken with cheap Chinese junk just isn't there, but that's besides the point.
That makes no sense at all. For the past 100 years, there's been overwhelming support for reducing pollution that causes short-term health effects. The standards are always becoming continually more stringent, and there are several under way.
Where is this imaginary world, where the EPA doesn't exist?
If ANYTHING, it's long-term effects that are commonly ignored, while the short-term effects get overwhelming scrutiny.
Way to discredit yourself...
You say it can't be due to the Sun, because that would heat-up the stratosphere, and the stratosphere is cooling. HOWEVER, the fact of the matter is that the Sun is hotter than ever recorded before.
It matters in how you should RESPOND to the problem.
Up to now, any discussion on reducing global warming by means OTHER than reducing industrial CO2 emissions, has gotten dismissed out-of-hand as being from a bunch of idiots who don't know their asses from a hole in the ground.
By all means, point me to them.
I've gone through a laundry list of non-RIAA sites, and the vast majority of it is 3 people who can't write, play, or sing, repeating 10 seconds of chords and absolutly mindless lyrics for 4 minutes.
I spent a couple days on music.download.com, getting a couple GBs worth of the highest ranked artists in Rock/Metal/etc. After listening to it all, over the course of a couple weeks, I determined that 90%+ of it was painfully lowsy crap, that a teen-aged garage band would be ashamed of.
The last 10%, which I've kept, is, at best, utterly mediocre and mundane (same old guitar riffs, same old drum rythm, same old verse chorus verse, same old mindless lyrics about nothing at all).
There's a world of difference between ads on the page, and unrelated search engine hits in the body.
There are a few of those, unfortunately. However, they are almost always on uncommon/rare terms, where they aren't as important (and you can always report that to Google as spam).
It's not a panacea, but it's several orders of magnitude better than things were before Google came along. Before Google, EVERYTHING was crap. Now, just a few select things are crap.
In the earliest days, everyone copied Gopher, of course, since it was the standard. However, doing that meant lots of extra work and HTML markup, which Gopher didn't require at all.
The fact that HTML doesn't enforce a reasonably strict layout, and standard tags that can be easily parsed by machine, has been it's weakness, even if you can vaguely imitate the end result (in specific circumstances).