The thing I like about YouTube is that they have their videos as standard shockwave files...I can't get most other sites to run on my browser/OS.
Gaaaaaaahhhh.
1. I HATE Flash, and don't have it install. I'm not interested in a load of bloated software, with a history of open security holes for months before they get fixed.
2. Installing Flash is exceptionally difficult on any platform other than Win/Mac-PPC/Linux-x86. On the BSDs, you have to load-up on hundreds of MBs of Linux libraries to run the Linux version.
3. You've got a seriously limited selection of browsers. Some browsers have added Mozilla compatibility because of it, but not many.
4. With standard embedded video files, you can always just use "View Info" (in Moz/Firefox) or "View Source" (in any browser) to get the URL to download, and can play that locally with whatever video player you like.
5. With standard embedded video files, there are numerous, open source, browser plug-ins. They all allow easy downloading of the videos, playback with whatever program you use, etc.
Nothing pisses me off more than a site which uses crappy SWF for their videos. I just go elsewhere.
For larger files, most people probably won't want to view it in the browser anyway, so I upload to RapidShare ( http://www.rapidshare.de/ ) which allows a maximum of 100MB and unlimited downloads.
I obviously missed the point. In fact I still do. I guess I gave you too much credit, assuming you were trying to make a point about the inhumanity (amorality as you said later) of corporations.
...both companies and cars need something to make them go and without it they stop.
If that really was your point, it's so banal and inspid that I can't understand why you even went through the trouble of posting it.
FUD and dumping don't justify a boycott, at least to me.
I wasn't trying to suggest one at all. I was simply making the point that companies DO respond to how their customers treat them, and have means to "reciprocate your feelings".
Those forms of consumer revolt deny the company money. Just like denying a car gasoline this will cause the company to eventually stop functioning.
The car, however, doesn't know you're going to stop giving it gasoline if it doesn't do what you want, and can't possibly respond. So TERRIBLE analogy. A company is certainly far closer to a human than a mindless machine.
My problem with them is the boards made for them (this is personal experience only) tend to become unstable after a couple of years. Intel boards, in my experience, stay stable longer.
You're comparing one brand of motherboard (Intel) with a very large GROUP of motherboards (any Socket-A compatible). For it to be fair, you'd have to compare something like Asus Intel motherboards to Asus AMD motherboards.
That said, I believe the problems I have had with AMD come from the fact that none of the boards are made by AMD.
Guess what, Intel doesn't make motherboards either. They contract with Asus or another company to sell their motherboards with the Intel brand on it.
So, you might as well say that Sony makes great optical drives, while Lite-on makes junk. (Sony re-brands Lite-on drives)
If Intel comes out with a better, cheaper processor tomorrow, don't buy the AMD one, buy the intel one. Their is no point treating a company like a person.
Clearly you've never heard of a boycott, picket, or any other similar form of consumer revolt.
If gzip gets 98% of what's possible, then what the hell are bzip2 and 7zip doing?
Despite the obvious answer (he's simply wrong), 7zip is somewhat "cheating" in this 3-way comparison, as it uses a much, much, much larger block-size (memory). You can set it to use hundreds of MBs of RAM, whereas gzip and bzip2 are both limited to 9KB max. .
Off-topic Rant: I was actually quite impressed with 7zip and it's lzma/ppmd compression methods when I first saw it compressing better than bzip2. However, once the novelty wore off, I began to realize it just takes far too-much memory. There is no possible chance of using them on an embedded system, a handheld computer, or even just a fairly old PC with less-than around 64MBs of RAM (or much higher, depending on requested block-size). It also takes a serious ammount of extra time over gzip/bzip2, while being only a trivial compression improvement in the large majority of cases. The exceptional cases are... neat... but they don't make LZMA/PPMd practical for normal use.
Look, I'd never go back, but the 20 MHz 286 handled my spreadsheets just fine. Lotus 123 v 2.4 is very efficient. The bottleneck was my typing, and sometimes the printer; never the CPU.
Well then, you must simply not have needed to type-up very math-intensive spreadsheets.
When you have several hundred lines of calcs depending on each other, changing one single number means break-time.
Using 286s in 1996? Most people were on 300MHz Pentium IIs by then. I could see Pentiums, even old 486s, but certainly not 286s. They are probably still up running some custom control software in back-rooms, but surely not being used to write-up spreadsheets. Hell, the wasted electricity over the course of a month, while you wait for the spreadsheet to re-calculate, would have paid for much newer hardware, even in '96.
From what I understand, his style is to pick a fight and make a lot of noise about it in the press.
The defendants are usually judged guilty by the court of public opinion, long before an actualy jury gets near the case.
This is disingenuous at least. These companies were convicted in the court of public opinion LONG before Spitzer got involved.
The fact that the Attorney General is prosecuting the companies that 99% of the public-at-large believe NEED to be sued, seems just about EXACTLY what his position is supposed-to entail. We're just so used-to corporate/political bribery and favors that we're shocked when we see elected officials aggressively doing their job.
Keep in mind that most spyware is installed alongside other programs during "legitimate" installations
Yeah, but it's still perfectly fair to blame Microsoft for the ~10% of spyware installations that happen due to bugs in Internet Explorer, DirectX, VBScript, etc.
Contrary to popular belief the OpenSSL project has nothing to do with OpenBSD.
That may not be the case for long. OpenSSL is in the cross-hairs for replacement, just as SSH, IPF, CVS, NetBSD, and others were before it. Primarily due to the OpenSSL repeatedly breaking their own licensing terms, most recently by accepting patented elliptic-curve encryption code from Sun.
When you have such liberal licensing terms, don't bitch about people not giving back.
Shut up. The BSD license makes it legal for them to turn a profit on the code, without giving any money back (just like the GPL and any other open-source license), but it doesn't make it any less immoral, and it certainly doesn't mean they shouldn't be publicly shamed for it.
Particularly when these companies are full of hot-air about how much they support open source.
There's really no difference... It's the same developers, working on the same codebase, using the same CVS server, on the same hardware, trying to pay the same bills, etc.
Look how fat America is. We're not a people who naturally cut back on anything.
Oh yeah, how about exercise? Seems people must have cut way-back on that... "Conserving Energy" and all.
It's not the nation's $18,000/year citizens who are buying H2's. They're driving pickups and old cars with shitty gas mileage
Cars with great gas-mileage like Geo Metros are pretty cheap old cars that even the poorest can afford.
I can't blame a skeptical nation for being hesitant to abandon their lifestyle because a bunch of government scientists think the temperature is going to go up 2 degrees in 200 years, long after we're all dead, and that it might cause a famine.
Actually, the nation isn't hesitant at all:
Also on Wednesday, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Civil Society Institute released a survey that found 83 percent of Americans wanted more leadership from the federal government to reduce the pollution linked to global warming. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=1729 344&page=2
If the "commercial" providers of child pornography in certain countries stop existing, pedophiles will continue swapping home made movies.
I didn't say child porn would stop existing entirely. I said the sheer ammount of it would decrease, as the profit motive decreases/disappears.
Don't you think there is something wrong with people that enjoy other peoples suffering?
Yes, and yet American Idol viewers continue to walk free, and elude justice.
Don't you think people like that need (at the very least) some help to realise that what they're enjoying is just completely wrong?
You're making a LOT of asumptions there. First, you're assuming they can be helped at all. Second, you're assuming they would be caught if not for Freenet (very, very unlikely, as they've done fine with low-tech means for several centuries). Finally, you're assuming that allowing sick people to watch a sick video is somehow significantly harmful to society... This has not been where the law has stood on similar issues, like pornography.
All of this not-withstanding... It's not as if freenet is making this possible for the first time. The trackable internet file-sharing of child porn hasn't lead to people getting caught, so I don't really see freenet as a change at all, except to make it more visible.
The same low-tech methods that lead to people getting caught, will continue to function. When they take in their PC to get serviced, they'll be found-out by the technichian, not by some ultra-advanced Carnivore, or other system run by the FBI.
Distributing child pornography isn't necessarily a bad thing. If it's distributed for free on FreeNet, that means fewer and fewer people paying for it, which hopefully means less child porn all-together.
Now, if you think potentially allowing more people to VIEW child pornography is inherently bad, and will lead to more child abuse, for instance, this isn't much consolation. However, the supreme court has even ruled that *fake* child pornography is not criminal, so viewing animated or CGI child porn, for instance, isn't even illegal. So, as disgusting as it may be, there doesn't seem to be a concensus that individuals privately viewing something that appears to be child porn is bad for society, and will lead to serious crimes.
As an added bonus, the wider and more public spread of child porn, while it can't be traced back to the IP address that shared it, the picture can be tracked back using visual clues as to who is involved, and possibly making it easier for police to apprehend the actual suspects (just not the person sharing it, in this case).
Quality of UMD is actually comparable with DVD. Resolution is 480x272 progressive, so for a normal TV you probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference
That's ridiculous. That's just slightly higher resolution than VCDs, and anybody without serious eyesight problems can tell the difference between a VCD and a DVD.
It would probably compete with VHS tapes, but certainly not with DVDs, or even SVCDs.
Yes, erasing it will only take 1 min or so, but the point was you need to spend another 15 minutes re-recording the whole disc, every time you want to delete even a single file.
Something like DVD-RAM would be a much better fit for this kind of use. Packet-based CD writing would work, except you'll never find an MP3 CD player that would read such discs.
Neither have I, but if you're worried about speed, you might as well be using the CD-Rs.
Speed is only one concern. Being unable to erase CD-Rs would turn that into a cash-hole pretty quickly as well, as you're often throwing away discs.
Transfering 700MB to a disc at 12x doesn't really take all that long.
15 minutes per disc can be quite a long time to wait. Just think, does it take 8 hours for you to load-up a 20GB iPod? Would you find that acceptable? Besides that, CD-RWs have to be complete erased, and rewritten every time you want to make the smallest change... That gets old very fast.
There is a need, it's just that it can be met by other (low-tech) means (read: books) less completely, and less effeciently. PCs should be a huge improvement, but the price-tag is awfully high as well.
Personally, I'm astonished how horribly expensive each of these projects is turning out. Low-end CPU, RAM/Flash, B&W LCD screen, small battery, motor and crank, etc. I can't imagine why nobody is making (fully capable) ~$30 computers.
Even in the USA, I can buy a $10 digital camera, with most of the above integrated. I can buy $20 worth of parts and wire together something that would put an Apple II or 386PC to shame... Color screens are anything but a necessity (just as Palm users), and wifi might be nice, but the hassle of wired ports (maybe RS232? 10base2?) would surely be more workable than a vastly higher price point.
I would have thought that other infrastructure is more important to developing nations than having access to a PC.
They won't be porn-surfing, they'll be reading hundreds of bundled books, learning math (far away from any instructors), etc. Being more prepared for tech jobs in the future is a nice bonus, I'm sure (just ask a developing nation, like India).
No. There is a hell of a lot of very large, perfectly legal files. archive.org, v2v.cc, download.music.com, Live Concerts, BSD/Linux isos, etc.
Cable and satellite networks are an infrastructure capable of giving you as many channels as you want through iptv.
Not even remotely true, I'm afraid. First of all, no satellite/cable network on earth can provide the millions of channels that are available across the internet (streams) already, let alone the additional ones that would surely spring-up if set-top-boxes with this functionality came along.
Besides, there's an imesurable distance between what that COULD do, and what they WILL do.
You COMPLETELY ignored my point about decoupling the service provider from the content providers. That is very significant, and would not just stop, but completly reverse the ever-increasing prices we're seeing with cable/satellite providers, as well as increasing diversity, and improving programming at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
Gaaaaaaahhhh.
1. I HATE Flash, and don't have it install. I'm not interested in a load of bloated software, with a history of open security holes for months before they get fixed.
2. Installing Flash is exceptionally difficult on any platform other than Win/Mac-PPC/Linux-x86. On the BSDs, you have to load-up on hundreds of MBs of Linux libraries to run the Linux version.
3. You've got a seriously limited selection of browsers. Some browsers have added Mozilla compatibility because of it, but not many.
4. With standard embedded video files, you can always just use "View Info" (in Moz/Firefox) or "View Source" (in any browser) to get the URL to download, and can play that locally with whatever video player you like.
5. With standard embedded video files, there are numerous, open source, browser plug-ins. They all allow easy downloading of the videos, playback with whatever program you use, etc.
Nothing pisses me off more than a site which uses crappy SWF for their videos. I just go elsewhere.
I obviously missed the point. In fact I still do. I guess I gave you too much credit, assuming you were trying to make a point about the inhumanity (amorality as you said later) of corporations.
If that really was your point, it's so banal and inspid that I can't understand why you even went through the trouble of posting it.
I wasn't trying to suggest one at all. I was simply making the point that companies DO respond to how their customers treat them, and have means to "reciprocate your feelings".
The car, however, doesn't know you're going to stop giving it gasoline if it doesn't do what you want, and can't possibly respond. So TERRIBLE analogy. A company is certainly far closer to a human than a mindless machine.
You're comparing one brand of motherboard (Intel) with a very large GROUP of motherboards (any Socket-A compatible). For it to be fair, you'd have to compare something like Asus Intel motherboards to Asus AMD motherboards.
Guess what, Intel doesn't make motherboards either. They contract with Asus or another company to sell their motherboards with the Intel brand on it.
So, you might as well say that Sony makes great optical drives, while Lite-on makes junk. (Sony re-brands Lite-on drives)
Clearly you've never heard of a boycott, picket, or any other similar form of consumer revolt.
Despite the obvious answer (he's simply wrong), 7zip is somewhat "cheating" in this 3-way comparison, as it uses a much, much, much larger block-size (memory). You can set it to use hundreds of MBs of RAM, whereas gzip and bzip2 are both limited to 9KB max.
.
Off-topic Rant:
I was actually quite impressed with 7zip and it's lzma/ppmd compression methods when I first saw it compressing better than bzip2. However, once the novelty wore off, I began to realize it just takes far too-much memory. There is no possible chance of using them on an embedded system, a handheld computer, or even just a fairly old PC with less-than around 64MBs of RAM (or much higher, depending on requested block-size). It also takes a serious ammount of extra time over gzip/bzip2, while being only a trivial compression improvement in the large majority of cases. The exceptional cases are... neat... but they don't make LZMA/PPMd practical for normal use.
Well then, you must simply not have needed to type-up very math-intensive spreadsheets.
When you have several hundred lines of calcs depending on each other, changing one single number means break-time.
There must be a typo in there somewhere...
Using 286s in 1996? Most people were on 300MHz Pentium IIs by then. I could see Pentiums, even old 486s, but certainly not 286s. They are probably still up running some custom control software in back-rooms, but surely not being used to write-up spreadsheets. Hell, the wasted electricity over the course of a month, while you wait for the spreadsheet to re-calculate, would have paid for much newer hardware, even in '96.
Nah. Low-speed accidents in parking-lots are probably below your deductible, 99% of the time.
The other 1% are because of god-dammed airbags going off in 2MPH accidents, because the people dsigning cars are completely morons (had to be said).
This is disingenuous at least. These companies were convicted in the court of public opinion LONG before Spitzer got involved.
The fact that the Attorney General is prosecuting the companies that 99% of the public-at-large believe NEED to be sued, seems just about EXACTLY what his position is supposed-to entail. We're just so used-to corporate/political bribery and favors that we're shocked when we see elected officials aggressively doing their job.
Yeah, but it's still perfectly fair to blame Microsoft for the ~10% of spyware installations that happen due to bugs in Internet Explorer, DirectX, VBScript, etc.
That may not be the case for long. OpenSSL is in the cross-hairs for replacement, just as SSH, IPF, CVS, NetBSD, and others were before it. Primarily due to the OpenSSL repeatedly breaking their own licensing terms, most recently by accepting patented elliptic-curve encryption code from Sun.
Shut up. The BSD license makes it legal for them to turn a profit on the code, without giving any money back (just like the GPL and any other open-source license), but it doesn't make it any less immoral, and it certainly doesn't mean they shouldn't be publicly shamed for it.
Particularly when these companies are full of hot-air about how much they support open source.
There's really no difference... It's the same developers, working on the same codebase, using the same CVS server, on the same hardware, trying to pay the same bills, etc.
Oddly enough, the story link appears on the front-page, but disappears if you click-through to the article.
Oh yeah, how about exercise? Seems people must have cut way-back on that... "Conserving Energy" and all.
Cars with great gas-mileage like Geo Metros are pretty cheap old cars that even the poorest can afford.
Actually, the nation isn't hesitant at all:
I didn't say child porn would stop existing entirely. I said the sheer ammount of it would decrease, as the profit motive decreases/disappears.
Yes, and yet American Idol viewers continue to walk free, and elude justice.
You're making a LOT of asumptions there. First, you're assuming they can be helped at all. Second, you're assuming they would be caught if not for Freenet (very, very unlikely, as they've done fine with low-tech means for several centuries). Finally, you're assuming that allowing sick people to watch a sick video is somehow significantly harmful to society... This has not been where the law has stood on similar issues, like pornography.
All of this not-withstanding... It's not as if freenet is making this possible for the first time. The trackable internet file-sharing of child porn hasn't lead to people getting caught, so I don't really see freenet as a change at all, except to make it more visible.
The same low-tech methods that lead to people getting caught, will continue to function. When they take in their PC to get serviced, they'll be found-out by the technichian, not by some ultra-advanced Carnivore, or other system run by the FBI.
Distributing child pornography isn't necessarily a bad thing. If it's distributed for free on FreeNet, that means fewer and fewer people paying for it, which hopefully means less child porn all-together.
Now, if you think potentially allowing more people to VIEW child pornography is inherently bad, and will lead to more child abuse, for instance, this isn't much consolation. However, the supreme court has even ruled that *fake* child pornography is not criminal, so viewing animated or CGI child porn, for instance, isn't even illegal. So, as disgusting as it may be, there doesn't seem to be a concensus that individuals privately viewing something that appears to be child porn is bad for society, and will lead to serious crimes.
As an added bonus, the wider and more public spread of child porn, while it can't be traced back to the IP address that shared it, the picture can be tracked back using visual clues as to who is involved, and possibly making it easier for police to apprehend the actual suspects (just not the person sharing it, in this case).
That's ridiculous. That's just slightly higher resolution than VCDs, and anybody without serious eyesight problems can tell the difference between a VCD and a DVD.
It would probably compete with VHS tapes, but certainly not with DVDs, or even SVCDs.
Yes, erasing it will only take 1 min or so, but the point was you need to spend another 15 minutes re-recording the whole disc, every time you want to delete even a single file.
Something like DVD-RAM would be a much better fit for this kind of use. Packet-based CD writing would work, except you'll never find an MP3 CD player that would read such discs.
Speed is only one concern. Being unable to erase CD-Rs would turn that into a cash-hole pretty quickly as well, as you're often throwing away discs.
15 minutes per disc can be quite a long time to wait. Just think, does it take 8 hours for you to load-up a 20GB iPod? Would you find that acceptable? Besides that, CD-RWs have to be complete erased, and rewritten every time you want to make the smallest change... That gets old very fast.
Personally, I'm astonished how horribly expensive each of these projects is turning out. Low-end CPU, RAM/Flash, B&W LCD screen, small battery, motor and crank, etc. I can't imagine why nobody is making (fully capable) ~$30 computers.
Even in the USA, I can buy a $10 digital camera, with most of the above integrated. I can buy $20 worth of parts and wire together something that would put an Apple II or 386PC to shame... Color screens are anything but a necessity (just as Palm users), and wifi might be nice, but the hassle of wired ports (maybe RS232? 10base2?) would surely be more workable than a vastly higher price point.
They won't be porn-surfing, they'll be reading hundreds of bundled books, learning math (far away from any instructors), etc. Being more prepared for tech jobs in the future is a nice bonus, I'm sure (just ask a developing nation, like India).
No. There is a hell of a lot of very large, perfectly legal files. archive.org, v2v.cc, download.music.com, Live Concerts, BSD/Linux isos, etc.
Not even remotely true, I'm afraid. First of all, no satellite/cable network on earth can provide the millions of channels that are available across the internet (streams) already, let alone the additional ones that would surely spring-up if set-top-boxes with this functionality came along.
Besides, there's an imesurable distance between what that COULD do, and what they WILL do.
You COMPLETELY ignored my point about decoupling the service provider from the content providers. That is very significant, and would not just stop, but completly reverse the ever-increasing prices we're seeing with cable/satellite providers, as well as increasing diversity, and improving programming at the same time.