I find it mildly humorous that the US has been able to get foreign countries to buy our debt when we can print as much of it as we like at any time.
You must not know anything about economics. Printing money to pay off billions of dollars of debt would completely destroy the economy. Investors have faith that the US isn't short-sighted enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Besides, the bonds don't even pay very well! Americans won't buy them because their return is too low. They'd rather buy shares in an American company, because almost any company does better than American bonds.
Companies go under, the US does not. You have a huge ammount of risk if you invest in stocks, and the return can be huge, or a complete loss. The entire country was up in arms when Enron went under because Enron stock was a big part of their retirement fund. IMHO, you have to be stupid to invest money you DEPEND ON in stocks.
US bonds generally give you better interest than a bank, and you can get big tax breaks from them, which make them rather more valuable.
Yes, and the difference now is that the Chinese economy is propping up the American government, both by financing our massive debt/deficit and providing our consumer based economy with cheap goods, fueling our economy and tax base.
Err, no... That's not a "difference", that's a "similarity". Japan *was* providing cheaper goods and they *were* holding a large share of US debt.
And we don't have to wait for our ISPs, either. I've been using 6to4 (IPv6 tunneled over IPv4) for years.
Yeah, I'm sure 6to4 is going to work perfectly for everybody, particularly the US government. Who needs to buy new routers, when you can just tunnel everything? Woohoo!
The difference is that this is for the IT department of the state. That is, this is policy affecting only the government, not the governed.
Unless you need to READ any of the documents your state makes available, or you need to electronically SUBMIT any documents to the state government. I would say that's a whole lot of governed people being affected.
It is a pdf. It was not authored as a fill-in form and as far as I can tell it is not editable in any way (I made a half hearted attempt with a full version of Adobe 5)
You have several options...
On Windows you can use the free Foxit PDF reader, which allows you to write text overlayed on PDFs, and allows you to print the results. I would suggest printing to file, with any postscript (PS) print driver, then convert to PDF with ghostscript, ps2pdf.com, acrobat distiller, etc.
On Unix or Windows, you can open PDFs using GIMP, and add in text like you would with any image. Then you can convert the images to a big PDF document if you like.
Personally, I would use something like pdf2html (requires ghostscript), and edit the resulting HTML document. From there you can decide if you want to return it as HTML, or convert it back into PDF.
They can't drink until they are 21 but can die for their country when they are 18.
I think "kill for their country" is much more appropriate.
People die all the time, at ages much younger than 18. Whether or not it's "for their country" is just a question of whether the circumstances which lead to their deaths was something considered important to the country.
Look on the bright side at least you didn't have a topic go from +5 insightful to -1 insightful (damn over rated), like I have several times. I'm starting to wonder if I have made a few enemies modding me down when I get a high rated comment.
I see a handful of bad mods here and there, but never 5 on a single comment.
I don't know about your exact comments, but often wrong/ pointless comments are modded way up by idiots, then get read by a lot of non-idiots with mod points, and down they go.
#6 and #1 are odd enough that I might buy them as gifts for someone. #6 I'd buy even if it was just a paperweight. #1 is just so insane I'd have to buy it.
4 is tiny, so it could be a very good purchase, although the combo USB/SD drives would be more useful.
As for the rest... just WHY??? Who wants to make their USB thumb-drive 10X bigger so it can look like sushi?
I've used one for 4.7 hours. I watched "thunderball" (130 Minutes) and "Forrest Gump" (142 minutes) at one sitting one rainy day. No problems. Maybe you've used a tablet that was flaking out?
Sounds more like you've got a heavy-duty one that is built much better than most.
USA TV has 525 lines, a bit more than the screen's 480.
Forgot to address this in my reply...
NTSC is broadcast at 525 lines, but only 480 of those are visible picture. The rest is used for synchronization, time delay, closed captions, etc.
there's about 4 million dots per second per every 55 microsecond scan line, and about half that many color changes, so that's only about 440 pixels across.
From your statement, I can't tell if you even actually know what you've calculated there... It's well-known that chroma ("color changes") are subsampled to luma, hence the 4:2:2 designation. Resolution is certainly not dependant on there being a chroma channel for every line, so the resolution is 720x480, even though there are only half as many chroma lines as luma lines.
Do your own homework. NTSC is 525 horizontal lines,
Well that's just moronic. NTSC is broadcast at 525 lines, but those are not all picture. It includes lots of non-picture information like closed captioning. Of the 525, 480 is visible.
which at 4:3 means 700x525,
No. On something like a computer monitor, with square pixels, 700x525 would be a 4/3 aspect ratio. On a TV, pixels are NOT square, which is why the resolution is 720x480 and 4/3.
and what amount of that is viewable depends on the device you're using.
There is a very small variation between television sets, but they are all very close to 704x480 viewable.
Create a DVD with black bars on both sides, so the video is only actually 640x480 wide. You can play it on any TV you want, and you'll see that there are black bars at the side.
Think. These screens were designed to sit on top of overhead projectors.
There were designed for short presentations, not hour after hour of use.
I've never seen one overheat and quit.
They don't "quit", the picture gets badly distorted and unwatchable. The fact that you've never seen it doesn't prove anything... except that you've never tried it.
Not true. Standard TV in Slashdot-land is NTSC. Go do some homework.
Do your own homework. NTSC is actually 720x480 at 4/3, hence the resolution of NTSC DVDs. Although, it is more generally accepted as only 704 of that 720 being visible, so you could call it 704x480, and I don't think anyone would complain. Still, it's notably higher than 640.
The graphic at the bottom of that Wikipedia article (saying that NTSC is 640x480) is just simply, factually, wrong.
Go visit your high school A/V department. If they're like most, they have a back room with a stack of overhead projection tablets that nobody uses anymore because they're 480x640.
Gee, how nice. Then you can have a 640x480 image (lower-res than a standard TV) scaled up to 50". I'm sure that'll look great.
I wouldn't even go for 1024x768. 1920x1080 is the minimum these days, IMHO, otherwise everyone is going to want to upgrade, just a year or two down the road.
Oh, and you forgot the last step. Attach a couple large powerful fans to the LCD screen, so it doesn't get completely COOKED after an hour of use. Then just TRY to find some way to silence the whole thing (or turn up your home theatre to ear-bleed volume levels).
The question is not whether the threat from cyberterrorism (what a stupid term) is credible, but who in their right mind sees it necessary to put critical systems online?
Who says it's more secure to have them off the internet? I'd say dial-in access to them is even less secure,just because then people won't plan for daily intrusions.
The question you should be asking, is whether it is necessary to make these critical systems remotely operable.
MPlayer will build. However, the whole point to this topic is that you cannot use the binary-only, x86 only dll files on non-x86 systems.
No, that isn't the topic at hand. I assume you simply didn't read the posts I was replying to, as they weren't modded up.
Sure, MPlayer has support for many formats, however if you get a QuickTime Sorenson file or a newer WMV9, etc, you are SOL.
Not true. SVQ1 has been in there for a LONG time now, and SVQ3 has also been in there for quite a while now. The WMV3 (aka WMV9) reverse-engineering is in-progress. You can try it out if you like, but it'll probably only play keyframes at this point:-)
The DLL files will only work on 32-bit x86.
No, you can get them to work under 64-bit x86 as well. See my other comments in this story.
Just read the README from MPLayer:
I generally don't need to read the docs, I *wrote* several parts of them.
Well, someone needs to fix the FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports. mplayer and others will complain that the port is x86 only and refuse to build.
That's just simply, purely, totally wrong. Not only would a cursory reading of the Makefile for those ports tell you that they compile on other architectures, but I have personally built both the OpenBSD and FreeBSD ports on non-x86 machines.
Don't let me interrupt your trolling, but those were hypotheticals anyhow, and I wasn't even implying that they were necessarily true, let alone, universally true.
BrainInAJar voluntarily put himself in a situation where he refuses to use Microsoft products.
I certainly didn't read him say anywhere that he refuses to use Windows on principle (as opposed to practical reasons, like non-Microsoft OSes being less expensive, more flexible and stable, suiting him better, working on his non-x86 platform, etc). I also don't consider it "intellectually bankrupt" to not use the OS, and yet want to be able to use the media player or perhaps just their media format. Many people that don't use Mac OS want to use Quicktime, or the codecs Quicktime is based upon. Nothing wrong with that.
Also, I may refuse to buy and use the OS, but I'd be happy to use other Microsoft software, if only they made that possible. They do not, in almost all cases.
However, they are basically 32-bit x86 only, so if you are not running 32-bit x86, you are SOL. Maybe the GP is running PPC Linux or a 64-bit Linux?
32-bit DLLs work fine on 64-bit x86 Linux. You have to compile MPlayer as a 32-bit program, of course, but you're still running it on a 64-bit processor, and a 64-bit Linux OS.
Slashdot Mirror
You must not know anything about economics. Printing money to pay off billions of dollars of debt would completely destroy the economy. Investors have faith that the US isn't short-sighted enough to cut off their nose to spite their face.
Companies go under, the US does not. You have a huge ammount of risk if you invest in stocks, and the return can be huge, or a complete loss. The entire country was up in arms when Enron went under because Enron stock was a big part of their retirement fund. IMHO, you have to be stupid to invest money you DEPEND ON in stocks.
US bonds generally give you better interest than a bank, and you can get big tax breaks from them, which make them rather more valuable.
Err, no... That's not a "difference", that's a "similarity". Japan *was* providing cheaper goods and they *were* holding a large share of US debt.
Yeah, I'm sure 6to4 is going to work perfectly for everybody, particularly the US government. Who needs to buy new routers, when you can just tunnel everything? Woohoo!
Unless you need to READ any of the documents your state makes available, or you need to electronically SUBMIT any documents to the state government. I would say that's a whole lot of governed people being affected.
You have several options...
On Windows you can use the free Foxit PDF reader, which allows you to write text overlayed on PDFs, and allows you to print the results. I would suggest printing to file, with any postscript (PS) print driver, then convert to PDF with ghostscript, ps2pdf.com, acrobat distiller, etc.
On Unix or Windows, you can open PDFs using GIMP, and add in text like you would with any image. Then you can convert the images to a big PDF document if you like.
Personally, I would use something like pdf2html (requires ghostscript), and edit the resulting HTML document. From there you can decide if you want to return it as HTML, or convert it back into PDF.
I think "kill for their country" is much more appropriate.
People die all the time, at ages much younger than 18. Whether or not it's "for their country" is just a question of whether the circumstances which lead to their deaths was something considered important to the country.
I see a handful of bad mods here and there, but never 5 on a single comment.
I don't know about your exact comments, but often wrong/ pointless comments are modded way up by idiots, then get read by a lot of non-idiots with mod points, and down they go.
#6 and #1 are odd enough that I might buy them as gifts for someone. #6 I'd buy even if it was just a paperweight. #1 is just so insane I'd have to buy it.
4 is tiny, so it could be a very good purchase, although the combo USB/SD drives would be more useful.
As for the rest... just WHY??? Who wants to make their USB thumb-drive 10X bigger so it can look like sushi?
This would have been a good top 3 list...
Sounds more like you've got a heavy-duty one that is built much better than most.
Forgot to address this in my reply...
NTSC is broadcast at 525 lines, but only 480 of those are visible picture. The rest is used for synchronization, time delay, closed captions, etc.
From your statement, I can't tell if you even actually know what you've calculated there... It's well-known that chroma ("color changes") are subsampled to luma, hence the 4:2:2 designation. Resolution is certainly not dependant on there being a chroma channel for every line, so the resolution is 720x480, even though there are only half as many chroma lines as luma lines.
Well that's just moronic. NTSC is broadcast at 525 lines, but those are not all picture. It includes lots of non-picture information like closed captioning. Of the 525, 480 is visible.
No. On something like a computer monitor, with square pixels, 700x525 would be a 4/3 aspect ratio. On a TV, pixels are NOT square, which is why the resolution is 720x480 and 4/3.
There is a very small variation between television sets, but they are all very close to 704x480 viewable.
Create a DVD with black bars on both sides, so the video is only actually 640x480 wide. You can play it on any TV you want, and you'll see that there are black bars at the side.
There were designed for short presentations, not hour after hour of use.
They don't "quit", the picture gets badly distorted and unwatchable. The fact that you've never seen it doesn't prove anything... except that you've never tried it.
Do your own homework. NTSC is actually 720x480 at 4/3, hence the resolution of NTSC DVDs. Although, it is more generally accepted as only 704 of that 720 being visible, so you could call it 704x480, and I don't think anyone would complain. Still, it's notably higher than 640.
The graphic at the bottom of that Wikipedia article (saying that NTSC is 640x480) is just simply, factually, wrong.
Gee, how nice. Then you can have a 640x480 image (lower-res than a standard TV) scaled up to 50". I'm sure that'll look great.
I wouldn't even go for 1024x768. 1920x1080 is the minimum these days, IMHO, otherwise everyone is going to want to upgrade, just a year or two down the road.
Oh, and you forgot the last step. Attach a couple large powerful fans to the LCD screen, so it doesn't get completely COOKED after an hour of use. Then just TRY to find some way to silence the whole thing (or turn up your home theatre to ear-bleed volume levels).
Who says it's more secure to have them off the internet? I'd say dial-in access to them is even less secure,just because then people won't plan for daily intrusions.
The question you should be asking, is whether it is necessary to make these critical systems remotely operable.
If so, what can be done to secure them?
If not, disconnect them from the outside world.
China doesn't have the technology, just yet, for chips as complex as high-speed CPUs, so I'd say probably another 5 years.
Actually, it is. "grandma soccer mom" just installs the eg. SUSE-x86_64 RPMs from the CD/Internet, and everything works.
No, that isn't the topic at hand. I assume you simply didn't read the posts I was replying to, as they weren't modded up.
Not true. SVQ1 has been in there for a LONG time now, and SVQ3 has also been in there for quite a while now. The WMV3 (aka WMV9) reverse-engineering is in-progress. You can try it out if you like, but it'll probably only play keyframes at this point
No, you can get them to work under 64-bit x86 as well. See my other comments in this story.
I generally don't need to read the docs, I *wrote* several parts of them.
That's just simply, purely, totally wrong. Not only would a cursory reading of the Makefile for those ports tell you that they compile on other architectures, but I have personally built both the OpenBSD and FreeBSD ports on non-x86 machines.
You haven't bothered to mentioned this on the mplayer mailing list, or I would have heard about it before now.
You probably compiled mplayer from source without the correct options, or are using unofficial binary packages that are screwed-up in numerous ways.
Don't let me interrupt your trolling, but those were hypotheticals anyhow, and I wasn't even implying that they were necessarily true, let alone, universally true.
Doesn't have to. You can always convert it to another format, even if you can only do it in a fraction of realtime.
Do people say you can't watch a video, just because it's downloading to slowly to be streamed in realtime?
I certainly didn't read him say anywhere that he refuses to use Windows on principle (as opposed to practical reasons, like non-Microsoft OSes being less expensive, more flexible and stable, suiting him better, working on his non-x86 platform, etc). I also don't consider it "intellectually bankrupt" to not use the OS, and yet want to be able to use the media player or perhaps just their media format. Many people that don't use Mac OS want to use Quicktime, or the codecs Quicktime is based upon. Nothing wrong with that.
Also, I may refuse to buy and use the OS, but I'd be happy to use other Microsoft software, if only they made that possible. They do not, in almost all cases.
32-bit DLLs work fine on 64-bit x86 Linux. You have to compile MPlayer as a 32-bit program, of course, but you're still running it on a 64-bit processor, and a 64-bit Linux OS.
Just like nothing, aside from your own principles, is stopping you from getting a fuel-effecient hybrid car.
I guess money must be a matter of principle now.