A 'tech savvy' person in a wired, urban area already has a lot of other viewing options: Netflix, local DVD rental shops, TiVO, digital cable, broadband media content (streaming video, audio downloads, pirated movies), etc.
Umm... Netflix and Tivo work perfectly well in rural areas.
With Tivo, you could put together a queue of a few hundred movies in a few hours (at an internet cafe or library) and then go home and not need to visit the site again for years...
As for Tivo... I have a DVR (homebuilt) that I've been using for about 4 years now. I can tell you that ~95% of what I watch is on regular broadcast channels, and only a few shows (eg. Daily Show, Naked Science) do you need cable for, and I wouldn't mind, too much, living without them.
In fact, once all the channels have switched to HDTV (2009), I'm going to try finding an antenna expert, and see if it's possible to recieve the HDTV signals, since I'm at the edge of the signal range, and surrounded by mountains, which makes reception rather tricky.
Here in Southern California, Verizon is more than delivering on their promised speeds.
I had the 1.5Mbps/256Kbps plan until a few months ago, and they delivered just a bit more than that 99% of the time. Since they significantly lowered the price of the lower plan, I've dropped to the 768/128Kbps plan, and I'm getting that speed, all day, every day.
I've checked my family member's DSL connections, and verified that they're getting just about exactly the same speed as well, despide being at a much greater distance from the telco.
So I'm not seeing anything like the problems you're reporting. And, if many other people were having the same problems, I'd have expected to have heard loads about it, long ago.
I suggest you take a look at your telephone lines, and make sure they're very well connected. Particularly at the house/network interchange, I've seen some really half-assed wiring jobs, and wires that corrode to pieces after a few years of exposure. In-fact, plugging a long telephone line directly into the interchange box is a good way to see if the problem is in your house, or not.
The second thing to check is your modem. With cable, I called out Charter repair service about 10 god dammed times, and they kept replacing the coax connectors, resetting the modem, seeing that it worked for a few seconds, and leaving, despite my repeated objections... then a few minutes later, I'd call up for service again, and have another guy come out and replace the connectors again... They NEVER replaced the obviously defective modem they were "leasing" to me, so I demanded a refund for the months I couldn't use it, and switched to DSL. I don't really have a point here, I'm just still pissed at those completely incompotent morons, all around... So try a different modem.
If that doesn't work, you can try getting service through the DSL branch, but it'll be a real hassle, and take forever, but replacing the line might fix your problem, particularly if you're in an older house.
Also the same people who have blocked construction of new nuclear power plants consistently over the past 25 years
I have to take exception with this one.
The US is a big country, with lots of wide-open space. It's patently ridiculous that nuclear reactors should be built ANYWHERE near population centers. The stupidity of having something even potentially toxic so near to dense population centers, only to save a tiny fraction of line-losses, was a moronic move from day 1.
It's not the nuclear reactors people are afraid of, it's that they lost their faith in the US government to make sane policies, and reasonably protect them from potential dangers.
You can see exactly the same thing with childhood innoculations, genetically modified foods, perscription drugs, etc. Nobody has some specific information that one of those is bad for them, they just don't believe, anymore, that being legal and approved (by eg. the FDA) is any assurance of it being safe.
After you select a domain name, it will present you with a SWF captcha at the bottom of the page. Not having Flash installed, I couldn't see it, so I used the "View Page Info" option, and it was trivial to figure out. The last value of the request in the number that the captcha will have... So if the embed URL ends in "?cval=31337", you input 31337, and you're through.
It's like they're going out of their way to prevent PEOPLE from using their site, while making it easy for SCRIPTS to create all the accounts they want. .
But the worst of them all are the smashed-together and overlaping captchas that are almost completely unreadable, and to make matters worse, half of the 20-line form you filled out has to be re-entered every time you get it wrong... Damn idiots designing websites!
The specs are serious overkill for a think client. You don't need anywhere near a 1.2GHz x86 CPU to run RDP/Citrix/VNC/X11. You can use a 20MHz x386 most of the time.
Still, the specs for the power and size are impressive, and it leads me to wonder... Why are they making stationary devices, and not handhelds, sub-sub notebooks with serious battery life, etc.? Portable computers seem a much better fit for this product's specs.
As far as I can tell, this is just a case of these companies getting greedy, and steping over the line.
Everyone here, older than 13, should remember that Rambus was overpriced, overhyped, and under-performing. The only break that they got was that Intel decided to use only RDRAM on their motherboards, and support only RDRAM with their chipsets.
The writing was on the wall. It just looks like the other companies got a little worried that it might catch-on, and instead of each companies independantly lowering their prices to compete, they conspired to do so. It seems strange, since one big company lowering their price would have forced the rest to do the same, anyhow.
It's also hard to consider this very immoral, since it was a case of several smaller companies getting together so they'd have a better chance to compete with a much larger one (Intel, not really Rambus).
It's just surprising that they broke the law, when it seems they didn't really NEED to, to get the desired result.
You know, people complain about this being a litigious society, but really, the reason is because law enforcement is doing NOTHING to pursue clear violations like this, which are happening more and more often.
If companies didn't lie through their teeth, and do absolutely immoral activities like this one, we wouldn't NEED "tort reform"* in the first place.
* Note: "tort reform" is the political code-word for eliminating your right to your day in court, even when companies have, in fact, broken the law. See: "Death Tax"
If that was the case, congress would get even less done than they do now. They'd have no time for anything but renewing laws, and arguing with whatever party is dominant that we really DO need to keep-up the drunk driving law, the arson law, etc., etc.
I can't wait until they let the murder law laps for a couple days, so I can kill everyone I want, and face NO criminal punishment for it.
You can choose to smoke cigarettes around a newborn baby, even blowing smoke in its face, and it's completely legal, but to gamble your own money should be a crime?
Gambling has been illegal for a long time... Smoking cigarettes has only recently been found to be bad...
You would have to be crazy or stupid to think you can just up and outlaw something that has long been legal, because you've just found out there's something wrong with it. These things take time. In 100 years, we might be talking about a law that gives you serious jail time for smoking cigarettes.
Your only point here seems to be that you think gambling should be legal... That's not insightful, that's just redundant.
Because they can tax the cigarettes, but it's difficult to enforce taxes on online winnings.
No, because gambling has been outlawed for a long time, and cigarettes are still on the path to being outlawed. If they legalized online gambling, they COULD tax it. If they really cared about taxes a fraction as much as you say, they'd be going entirely the wrong way with this.
Hell, we're adults, and yet these are still crimes in some states.
No, they aren't crimes in any states. The supreme court ruled that Texas' anti-sodomy law was unconstitutional, which means any similar state's law is unconstitutional, and unenforceable.
Surely with all those PHD's there Google can come up with a more modern solution. Otherwise...wheres the next Google? Clusty.com ?
I was thinking that myself. However, I came to realize that Clusty really only even WORKS because they leech off the search results of Google to begin with. If google goes down, Clusty will be tied to them as well.
You DID see the screenshot, and DO realize I AM using Firefox... don't you?
The center column gets squished and eventually covered up if the font size is huge and the window is beneath the minimum width. Not really a concern, imho.
Quite the opposite, it is a big concern. Not everyone has their browser window maximized, not everyone has a 1280x1024 screen, etc.
That being the case, the page should fail gracefully... If something needs to be squished/cut-off, it should be any of the columns EXCEPT the center. I don't visit slashdot for the site navigation, or the slashboxes, and I doubt anybody else does.
Will try this; in my experience -vo gl has been slower (or, at least, no faster) than -vo xv, but perhaps the additional switches will make a difference.
I should mention that -vo gl underwent some major changes after 1.0pre7, so you need a CVS snapshot or wait for 1.0pre8 (probably a couple weeks away).
Big difference. JavaScript is OK (its part of the web), Java and other plugins are not.
Javascript is NOT okay. 99% of it's use is to do crap that the user does NOT WANT. Hiding stuff, poping-up windows, etc. It's a really terrible mess, and such powers over your own browser, and indeed, computer, should not be given up to the anonymous author of any website you happen to visit.
Thank goodness for the NoScript Firefox extension, which allows me to have it disabled by default, and allowed only for the 4 sites that really have a need for it. It also makes it quite easy to temporarily enable it for the site you're on, for testing, or one-time use of a random website. Otherwise, I'd have javascript disabled all-together (and did, for more years than I can recall).
Nothing pisses me off more than the complete morons who design websites that depend on drop-down boxes, but don't bother to include a simple BUTTON next to them that would make them usable without javascript. It's the worst kind of stupidity.
My main concern, though, is that these "advanced" interfaces are making Slashdot harder and harder to read in browsers like Links.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I have to point and laugh at you now...
Changes to the CSS, now and in the future, can't possibly make it easier or harder for links to render the page, because even the newest versions of Links (GUI or text) have ZERO CSS support, which is my single biggest complaint with Links. The writers of Links2 are asking for donations to continue development, so I don't expect to see any improvements comming from them. And links-1 hasn't seen any improvements for a LONG time.
So, I'm afraid Links appears to be EOL, which is a real terrible shame, since no other browser, GUI or otherwise, can be navigated so easily without a mouse... Opera has a bit of similar nav functions in place, but it's still a cheap, uncomfortable, limited imitation at best.
It used to be totally text-browser friendly, but that is no longer the case. Sad for a so-called techie site...
It's frustrating when technology marches on, and otherwise great programs don't keep-up, but that's the sad fact of life. Nobody is willing to add basic CSS support to Links, so Links is getting more and more limited by the day, and, effectively dying.
The fact remains that in my experience analog channels take up much more space per hour than non-HD digital channels, whose signals are of course much cleaner.
Bitrate and filesize of an analog capture are traits that YOU SET, not some inherent property the video has. If you would have said "my cable box encodes them at..." or "they don't look very good below this size..." etc., I likely would have understood.
With (apparently) better hardware MPEG-2 capture cards, only perhaps a bitrate of half that would be necessary for practically perfect picture. With software encoding to MPEG-2, it's much, much lower still.
(x264 isn't yet in the cards, alas, for Linux. The other codecs should be, though.)
One of us is confused. x264 is the name of a GPLd h.264 implimentation, specifically for Linux, written by the VLC guys. If you can't select it with whatever tools Myth provides these days, you can certainly use it via programs like MPlayer/mencoder, which handle MythTV streams just fine, in fact.
Not sure how denoising would help on my clean, no-analog-involved-anywhere MPEG2 HD recordings, anyway.
I can assure you, it does. I use it encoding from any source, including fully digital sources like DVDs.
The CCDs, digital cameras or film sources produce noise... Hardware MPEG-2 encoders add noise... too-subtle-to-notice camera movements produce noise. etc. Even if you film a perfectly solid white or black wall, upon playback you'll see different glitches, color artifacts, aliasing... basically: noise.
My MythTV frontend/primary backend is indeed a 3GHz Pentium 4 and it indeed displays 1080p happily with Xv (not XvMC) and a Nvidia 6200.
The key here is that the H.264 video codec, which is very CPU-intensive, and used by the 1080p (24fps) trailers on apple.com. Even if your computer is fast enough to handle them with a few cycles to spare, it still might not be able to for 30fps content.
Incidentally, HD playback may be much faster with OpenGL, rather than Xv. Try "mplayer -nortc -dr -vo gl", and perhaps try adding "-vf format=bgr24" to that command-line.
Watch out for the superparamagnetic effect though.
After reading the article, I think I can sum it up in one word:
superparamagneticarealdensitiesallowidocious
Is it just me, or did it seem like the writer is getting paid by the sheer number of letters, and kept saying the same dammed things (in the most verbose way possible) over and over again?
Analog channels such as TCM generate about 2900MB/hour due to the extra noise.
GAH! Information... lacking... all... context...
A high-bandwidth HDTV channel (defined as HDNet or Discovery HD Theater and most network affiliates over cable or over-the-air) generates 7400-7700MB/hour . ..
HDTV streams have HORRIBLY poor compression. They encode with a constant bitrate, and use a very, very small GOP size (so you don't have to wait very long for the picture to appear when channel-surfing).
Using a better codec (eg. lavc, Xvid, x264) with a much larger keyint, varible bitrate (2-pass) encoding, etc., you can get that down to at least 1/4th the size, with really no quality loss at all. Throw some good denoising into the mix (lavc's "nr" denoiser is great, and takes almost 0 CPU time) and you'll get it significantly smaller, still, and it will look *better* than the original.
In addition, commercials are very fast, flashy, etc., and use-up much more than their fair-share of the bitrate. Editing them out will reduce the video length by 1/3rd, and reduce the overall bitrate even more (assuming VBR re-encoding).
If you don't have a very fast CPU (~3GHz/3000+) h.264/x264 is out-of-the-question. However, MPEG-4 decoding is actually FASTER than MPEG-2 decoding with a decent codec.
*And if your system is about 2GHz/2000+ or so, hardware decoding (XVMC) will use up as much or more CPU-time than decoding in software, unless you've got an AGP2x bus/card, or DMA doesn't work on your motherboard/videocard.
I have just one serious complaint with the winner... The center column, which is the IMPORTANT part of the site, gets very, very badly smashed if your browser window isn't full screen-width, while the other 2 columns are full-width. Big mistake!
Fix that one issue, and I won't complain much. It will be a big improvement over traditional/. and much better than the runner-up, IMHO.
Two minor things though, if anyone is interested:
Many others have already said it, and I agree... There's just too much whitespace around everything. The nav-bar and slashboxes at the sides are twice as tall now, for no good reason. Having 50% whitespace doesn't look good... Not at all.
Please make it a somewhat different color. The "dark-green into black" gradient is very hard on the eyes, and doesn't fit in with the white page anyhow. Either start from a much lighter green, or make it a gradient to white (or grey, or yellow, or anything else that is NOT BLACK!).
I could be mistaken, but I don't think they would have been able to do this had Darwin been based on GPL'ed software.
A good point. You have BSD software to thank for all standards.
NFS still hasn't seen any replacement, even though it has serious limitations, because most all the alternatives are GPLd, or otherwise encumbered like AFS.
Telnet had vastly outlived it's useful life, but was still forced into service, with a few hacks like skey auth, kerberos auth, and encryption. It remained in service until OpenSSH came along.
PGP/GPG, though being very good, have not become standard at all, and instead e-mail and other communications channels remain plain-text.
The MKV (matroska) file format is quite good, but GPLd, and so the Ogg/Ogm container remains more popular, although it is admitedly quite limited and flaky, so it isn't getting too widely adopted, either.
Hardware players like the Rio Karma include support for formats like Vorbis and FLAC, but not musepack and the like, because it was previously GPL'd, and releasing their firmware, or making the firmware modular to keep the code seperate, was unacceptable to the developers. While Vorbis and FLAC may not be quickly taking over the world, they do continue to get wider support every day. Before FLAC was BSD licensed, you couldn't even find any hardware players with lossless compression at all, even though there were several popular formats. Their license were too restrictive.
People talk about how great Aqua is, but it's not exactly taking the world by storm. OpenStep is GPLd, and is really failing miserably to get a foothold against GTK, QT and Motif toolkits, as well as native X11 (QT and Lestif are GPL'd, but they have closed-source commercial counterparts for those willing to pay).
I could go on, and on, but I think that's enough to make my point. If you want a standard, you can't use the GPL.
A better example of the GPL's strength would be the Linksys WRT54G router. I've got one myself and it does all kinds of awesome things it wasn't able to do out of the box (hell, you can even run an OpenVPN server on it), all because Linksys was forced to release their source code under the GPL.
That's a very trivial example. The same could be said of something like the iPod, which doesn't use GPL'd software at all, and you can still load Linux on it and get extra features unavailable with the built-in firmware. Or most other embedded hardware, like hundreds of handhelds which have Linux/BSD ported to them.
I believe that the core focus of the OSS community should be on GPL'ed software (because "embrace and extend" does in fact happen)
What people fail to realize is that "embrace and extend" doesn't take away any of the work you've done, never manages to catch-on, and you're really throwing the baby out with the bathwater trying to prevent it.
I can only conclude that spammers must avoid spamcop.net email.
Maybe they don't bruteforce addresses @spamcop.net like they do with other providers, but they certainly don't avoid spamcop addresses all-together.
I average about 20 spams per days on my spamcop.net account after a couple years of active use (99% are correctly filtered), apparently entirely from mailing lists, since I use spamgourmet to forward everything else.
I've thought of switching to gmail myself, but I'm hesitant, since they can always pull a Yahoo and just discontinue their POP service at any time.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm... Netflix and Tivo work perfectly well in rural areas.
With Tivo, you could put together a queue of a few hundred movies in a few hours (at an internet cafe or library) and then go home and not need to visit the site again for years...
As for Tivo... I have a DVR (homebuilt) that I've been using for about 4 years now. I can tell you that ~95% of what I watch is on regular broadcast channels, and only a few shows (eg. Daily Show, Naked Science) do you need cable for, and I wouldn't mind, too much, living without them.
In fact, once all the channels have switched to HDTV (2009), I'm going to try finding an antenna expert, and see if it's possible to recieve the HDTV signals, since I'm at the edge of the signal range, and surrounded by mountains, which makes reception rather tricky.
Hey, Wal-Mart's doing it, so Disney wants to get-in on the action, too.
You make it sound like this happened decades ago. It was only finished in 2003. This is very, very recent.
Here in Southern California, Verizon is more than delivering on their promised speeds.
I had the 1.5Mbps/256Kbps plan until a few months ago, and they delivered just a bit more than that 99% of the time. Since they significantly lowered the price of the lower plan, I've dropped to the 768/128Kbps plan, and I'm getting that speed, all day, every day.
I've checked my family member's DSL connections, and verified that they're getting just about exactly the same speed as well, despide being at a much greater distance from the telco.
So I'm not seeing anything like the problems you're reporting. And, if many other people were having the same problems, I'd have expected to have heard loads about it, long ago.
I suggest you take a look at your telephone lines, and make sure they're very well connected. Particularly at the house/network interchange, I've seen some really half-assed wiring jobs, and wires that corrode to pieces after a few years of exposure. In-fact, plugging a long telephone line directly into the interchange box is a good way to see if the problem is in your house, or not.
The second thing to check is your modem. With cable, I called out Charter repair service about 10 god dammed times, and they kept replacing the coax connectors, resetting the modem, seeing that it worked for a few seconds, and leaving, despite my repeated objections... then a few minutes later, I'd call up for service again, and have another guy come out and replace the connectors again... They NEVER replaced the obviously defective modem they were "leasing" to me, so I demanded a refund for the months I couldn't use it, and switched to DSL. I don't really have a point here, I'm just still pissed at those completely incompotent morons, all around... So try a different modem.
If that doesn't work, you can try getting service through the DSL branch, but it'll be a real hassle, and take forever, but replacing the line might fix your problem, particularly if you're in an older house.
I have to take exception with this one.
The US is a big country, with lots of wide-open space. It's patently ridiculous that nuclear reactors should be built ANYWHERE near population centers. The stupidity of having something even potentially toxic so near to dense population centers, only to save a tiny fraction of line-losses, was a moronic move from day 1.
It's not the nuclear reactors people are afraid of, it's that they lost their faith in the US government to make sane policies, and reasonably protect them from potential dangers.
You can see exactly the same thing with childhood innoculations, genetically modified foods, perscription drugs, etc. Nobody has some specific information that one of those is bad for them, they just don't believe, anymore, that being legal and approved (by eg. the FDA) is any assurance of it being safe.
It's a credibility gap.
I keep seeing incredibly stupid implimentations of captchas, which can't possibly slow down a script, but only impede legit users.
For instance, visit: http://xoompages.com/cgi-bin/xpanel/register.cgi
After you select a domain name, it will present you with a SWF captcha at the bottom of the page. Not having Flash installed, I couldn't see it, so I used the "View Page Info" option, and it was trivial to figure out. The last value of the request in the number that the captcha will have... So if the embed URL ends in "?cval=31337", you input 31337, and you're through.
It's like they're going out of their way to prevent PEOPLE from using their site, while making it easy for SCRIPTS to create all the accounts they want.
.
But the worst of them all are the smashed-together and overlaping captchas that are almost completely unreadable, and to make matters worse, half of the 20-line form you filled out has to be re-entered every time you get it wrong... Damn idiots designing websites!
The specs are serious overkill for a think client. You don't need anywhere near a 1.2GHz x86 CPU to run RDP/Citrix/VNC/X11. You can use a 20MHz x386 most of the time.
Still, the specs for the power and size are impressive, and it leads me to wonder... Why are they making stationary devices, and not handhelds, sub-sub notebooks with serious battery life, etc.? Portable computers seem a much better fit for this product's specs.
As far as I can tell, this is just a case of these companies getting greedy, and steping over the line.
Everyone here, older than 13, should remember that Rambus was overpriced, overhyped, and under-performing. The only break that they got was that Intel decided to use only RDRAM on their motherboards, and support only RDRAM with their chipsets.
The writing was on the wall. It just looks like the other companies got a little worried that it might catch-on, and instead of each companies independantly lowering their prices to compete, they conspired to do so. It seems strange, since one big company lowering their price would have forced the rest to do the same, anyhow.
It's also hard to consider this very immoral, since it was a case of several smaller companies getting together so they'd have a better chance to compete with a much larger one (Intel, not really Rambus).
It's just surprising that they broke the law, when it seems they didn't really NEED to, to get the desired result.
Three cheers for Corporate America!
You know, people complain about this being a litigious society, but really, the reason is because law enforcement is doing NOTHING to pursue clear violations like this, which are happening more and more often.
If companies didn't lie through their teeth, and do absolutely immoral activities like this one, we wouldn't NEED "tort reform"* in the first place.
* Note: "tort reform" is the political code-word for eliminating your right to your day in court, even when companies have, in fact, broken the law. See: "Death Tax"
Doing it in a crowded building is still incredibly wreckless, and IF someone where to be killed, you SHOULD be held accountable.
The whole "I've done incredibly wreckless things multiple times and haven't hurt anyone yet" justification is nothing but a cop-out...
Hey, as the owner of a pesticide plant, I've been dumping explosive chemicles into the ocean for YEARS now, and nobody has been killed yet!
If that was the case, congress would get even less done than they do now. They'd have no time for anything but renewing laws, and arguing with whatever party is dominant that we really DO need to keep-up the drunk driving law, the arson law, etc., etc.
I can't wait until they let the murder law laps for a couple days, so I can kill everyone I want, and face NO criminal punishment for it.
Gambling has been illegal for a long time... Smoking cigarettes has only recently been found to be bad...
You would have to be crazy or stupid to think you can just up and outlaw something that has long been legal, because you've just found out there's something wrong with it. These things take time. In 100 years, we might be talking about a law that gives you serious jail time for smoking cigarettes.
Your only point here seems to be that you think gambling should be legal... That's not insightful, that's just redundant.
No, because gambling has been outlawed for a long time, and cigarettes are still on the path to being outlawed. If they legalized online gambling, they COULD tax it. If they really cared about taxes a fraction as much as you say, they'd be going entirely the wrong way with this.
No, they aren't crimes in any states. The supreme court ruled that Texas' anti-sodomy law was unconstitutional, which means any similar state's law is unconstitutional, and unenforceable.
I was thinking that myself. However, I came to realize that Clusty really only even WORKS because they leech off the search results of Google to begin with. If google goes down, Clusty will be tied to them as well.
You DID see the screenshot, and DO realize I AM using Firefox... don't you?
Quite the opposite, it is a big concern. Not everyone has their browser window maximized, not everyone has a 1280x1024 screen, etc.
That being the case, the page should fail gracefully... If something needs to be squished/cut-off, it should be any of the columns EXCEPT the center. I don't visit slashdot for the site navigation, or the slashboxes, and I doubt anybody else does.
I should mention that -vo gl underwent some major changes after 1.0pre7, so you need a CVS snapshot or wait for 1.0pre8 (probably a couple weeks away).
Javascript is NOT okay. 99% of it's use is to do crap that the user does NOT WANT. Hiding stuff, poping-up windows, etc. It's a really terrible mess, and such powers over your own browser, and indeed, computer, should not be given up to the anonymous author of any website you happen to visit.
Thank goodness for the NoScript Firefox extension, which allows me to have it disabled by default, and allowed only for the 4 sites that really have a need for it. It also makes it quite easy to temporarily enable it for the site you're on, for testing, or one-time use of a random website. Otherwise, I'd have javascript disabled all-together (and did, for more years than I can recall).
Nothing pisses me off more than the complete morons who design websites that depend on drop-down boxes, but don't bother to include a simple BUTTON next to them that would make them usable without javascript. It's the worst kind of stupidity.
I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I have to point and laugh at you now...
Changes to the CSS, now and in the future, can't possibly make it easier or harder for links to render the page, because even the newest versions of Links (GUI or text) have ZERO CSS support, which is my single biggest complaint with Links. The writers of Links2 are asking for donations to continue development, so I don't expect to see any improvements comming from them. And links-1 hasn't seen any improvements for a LONG time.
So, I'm afraid Links appears to be EOL, which is a real terrible shame, since no other browser, GUI or otherwise, can be navigated so easily without a mouse... Opera has a bit of similar nav functions in place, but it's still a cheap, uncomfortable, limited imitation at best.
It's frustrating when technology marches on, and otherwise great programs don't keep-up, but that's the sad fact of life. Nobody is willing to add basic CSS support to Links, so Links is getting more and more limited by the day, and, effectively dying.
Bitrate and filesize of an analog capture are traits that YOU SET, not some inherent property the video has. If you would have said "my cable box encodes them at..." or "they don't look very good below this size..." etc., I likely would have understood.
With (apparently) better hardware MPEG-2 capture cards, only perhaps a bitrate of half that would be necessary for practically perfect picture. With software encoding to MPEG-2, it's much, much lower still.
One of us is confused. x264 is the name of a GPLd h.264 implimentation, specifically for Linux, written by the VLC guys. If you can't select it with whatever tools Myth provides these days, you can certainly use it via programs like MPlayer/mencoder, which handle MythTV streams just fine, in fact.
I can assure you, it does. I use it encoding from any source, including fully digital sources like DVDs.
The CCDs, digital cameras or film sources produce noise... Hardware MPEG-2 encoders add noise... too-subtle-to-notice camera movements produce noise. etc. Even if you film a perfectly solid white or black wall, upon playback you'll see different glitches, color artifacts, aliasing... basically: noise.
The key here is that the H.264 video codec, which is very CPU-intensive, and used by the 1080p (24fps) trailers on apple.com. Even if your computer is fast enough to handle them with a few cycles to spare, it still might not be able to for 30fps content.
Incidentally, HD playback may be much faster with OpenGL, rather than Xv. Try "mplayer -nortc -dr -vo gl", and perhaps try adding "-vf format=bgr24" to that command-line.
After reading the article, I think I can sum it up in one word:
superparamagneticarealdensitiesallowidocious
Is it just me, or did it seem like the writer is getting paid by the sheer number of letters, and kept saying the same dammed things (in the most verbose way possible) over and over again?
GAH! Information... lacking... all... context...
HDTV streams have HORRIBLY poor compression. They encode with a constant bitrate, and use a very, very small GOP size (so you don't have to wait very long for the picture to appear when channel-surfing).
Using a better codec (eg. lavc, Xvid, x264) with a much larger keyint, varible bitrate (2-pass) encoding, etc., you can get that down to at least 1/4th the size, with really no quality loss at all. Throw some good denoising into the mix (lavc's "nr" denoiser is great, and takes almost 0 CPU time) and you'll get it significantly smaller, still, and it will look *better* than the original.
In addition, commercials are very fast, flashy, etc., and use-up much more than their fair-share of the bitrate. Editing them out will reduce the video length by 1/3rd, and reduce the overall bitrate even more (assuming VBR re-encoding).
If you don't have a very fast CPU (~3GHz/3000+) h.264/x264 is out-of-the-question. However, MPEG-4 decoding is actually FASTER than MPEG-2 decoding with a decent codec.
*And if your system is about 2GHz/2000+ or so, hardware decoding (XVMC) will use up as much or more CPU-time than decoding in software, unless you've got an AGP2x bus/card, or DMA doesn't work on your motherboard/videocard.
He's operating on the mistaken impression that you have to FILL every hard drive in your array.
Obviously, if you have twice as many disks in your array (each half as large) it will be much faster.
I have just one serious complaint with the winner... The center column, which is the IMPORTANT part of the site, gets very, very badly smashed if your browser window isn't full screen-width, while the other 2 columns are full-width. Big mistake!
f r.png
/. and much better than the runner-up, IMHO.
eg.: http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/7969/slashdot0
Fix that one issue, and I won't complain much. It will be a big improvement over traditional
Two minor things though, if anyone is interested:
Many others have already said it, and I agree... There's just too much whitespace around everything. The nav-bar and slashboxes at the sides are twice as tall now, for no good reason. Having 50% whitespace doesn't look good... Not at all.
Please make it a somewhat different color. The "dark-green into black" gradient is very hard on the eyes, and doesn't fit in with the white page anyhow. Either start from a much lighter green, or make it a gradient to white (or grey, or yellow, or anything else that is NOT BLACK!).
No, actually, in the digital world, it is much EASIER to check.
Restricting input to alphanumeric characters of no more than 1000 digits takes maybe a line or two. That's all.
A good point. You have BSD software to thank for all standards.
NFS still hasn't seen any replacement, even though it has serious limitations, because most all the alternatives are GPLd, or otherwise encumbered like AFS.
Telnet had vastly outlived it's useful life, but was still forced into service, with a few hacks like skey auth, kerberos auth, and encryption. It remained in service until OpenSSH came along.
PGP/GPG, though being very good, have not become standard at all, and instead e-mail and other communications channels remain plain-text.
The MKV (matroska) file format is quite good, but GPLd, and so the Ogg/Ogm container remains more popular, although it is admitedly quite limited and flaky, so it isn't getting too widely adopted, either.
Hardware players like the Rio Karma include support for formats like Vorbis and FLAC, but not musepack and the like, because it was previously GPL'd, and releasing their firmware, or making the firmware modular to keep the code seperate, was unacceptable to the developers. While Vorbis and FLAC may not be quickly taking over the world, they do continue to get wider support every day. Before FLAC was BSD licensed, you couldn't even find any hardware players with lossless compression at all, even though there were several popular formats. Their license were too restrictive.
People talk about how great Aqua is, but it's not exactly taking the world by storm. OpenStep is GPLd, and is really failing miserably to get a foothold against GTK, QT and Motif toolkits, as well as native X11 (QT and Lestif are GPL'd, but they have closed-source commercial counterparts for those willing to pay).
I could go on, and on, but I think that's enough to make my point. If you want a standard, you can't use the GPL.
That's a very trivial example. The same could be said of something like the iPod, which doesn't use GPL'd software at all, and you can still load Linux on it and get extra features unavailable with the built-in firmware. Or most other embedded hardware, like hundreds of handhelds which have Linux/BSD ported to them.
What people fail to realize is that "embrace and extend" doesn't take away any of the work you've done, never manages to catch-on, and you're really throwing the baby out with the bathwater trying to prevent it.
Maybe they don't bruteforce addresses @spamcop.net like they do with other providers, but they certainly don't avoid spamcop addresses all-together.
I average about 20 spams per days on my spamcop.net account after a couple years of active use (99% are correctly filtered), apparently entirely from mailing lists, since I use spamgourmet to forward everything else.
I've thought of switching to gmail myself, but I'm hesitant, since they can always pull a Yahoo and just discontinue their POP service at any time.