Of course they aren't balanced. Which, in a sort of paradox, makes them balanced since they now singlehandendly counterbalance the 'progressive' biases of the rest of the nets.
I guess they have an easy job then, considering the rest are vast conglomerates that materially support politicians like George Bush and lean toward an absolutist view of property.
Tell me about Fox's glory when the majority of network journalists warm up to the "drown the private sector in a bucket" mentality (turning around a popular RW sentiment), or that trade unions should operate everywhere and replace the CEO and the boardroom. Maybe then I'll believe in this mythical Fox "balance". But until then, they're a group of Right-wing extremists in a field that is incrementally more moderate.
What that says about the steepness of your own biases, I'll leave you to ponder.
They should change their slogan to: "Fox News. We stop just short of BARKING the news at you!":-)
The stories they choose to cover would seem to indicate the world is chock-full of petty gansters and rogue states who would have their way with your fair-skinned daughter if they could. Its the Republican Conspiracy Theorist mindset, presented to the viewer as "links to alQueda" and chicken sheds that MUST be WMD factories.... like an international, 24hr version of 'COPS'.
But hey, according to you they all have biases and are basically the same in that respect, right? Well then I'll just give my conscience a nice rest: WHEW! That feels so much better.
Summary: The Internet may be forced to devolve into Cable TV, so we need to read George Lakoff's book and start talking about the Internet as a place in order to save it.
(...tongue firmly in cheek. OK, so I agree about the devoling part.)
If we want to get through to the people, one thing we need to do is banish "consumer" from the public vocabulary. I, for one, am not a "consumer!" No, I am a customer, and more importantly, a citizen! I WILL NOT BE FUCKED WITH!
Ethics are a philosophical system based on human rights and skeptical empiricism. An assertion that slavery is ethical might be accepted into the halls of wisdom at first blush, but it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny for very long.
Moriality tends to be more arbitrary in its constituent values, and often must be bostered by religion or other form of mass credulity.
That's what worries me about Ubuntu in general... 'Great package management'.
IMO if the OS maintainers are trying to manage your apps (and conversely, your apps are causing automatic changes in your system folders) then its just the same towering heap of Linux nuts and bolts as everything else.
Ubuntu should take a cue from DCCA and create a "Core" repository which defines the OS and another "Extras" repositroy containing most of the free apps. Dependency for most of the simple apps will look like "Ubuntu 6.0; LSB 3.0" instead of a list of low-level components.
If they're just going to re-do Debian Testing with a sleeker desktop configuration, frequent upgrades, and some nice configuration applets, then they won't bridge the gap between "Linux 2005" and a consumer-oriented OS.
What they will have is another Mandriva or SuSE, and those planes aren't flying because they too are welded onto their airports.
Also a desktop OS should receive upgrades about every 2 years with frequent bugfixes along the way. Ubuntu would have to slow down its realeases (but not its development) to become an acceptable alternative to most people.
But saying those things doesn't make them true (much less rational), nor does it paint an accurate picture of where said countries are headed. If you don't have facts, then spouting patriotic sentiments and applying labels becomes an utterly empty exercise (what is often called "hot air").
In the case of France, with a system best described as mixed socialist/capitalist with a conservative leader at present, their handling of unemployment data makes U.S. methods seem Dickensian at best (Soviet at worst). Everyone is accounted for and there are few quantitative evasions. What do they get in return? A population that strikes and riots from time to time: Burnt cars, vandalized buildings (and a few really unnecessary casualties). Horrific isn't it? Yet it still hasn't oblitterated communities or caused mass casualties. And I suppose the worst aspect of all this would be tremendously increased resentment between rioting communities and the rest of the country... But then again, very many white French people do essentially the same thing (only for somewhat different reasons) with alarming regularity. So for many, the riots could generate feelings of solidarity because what they're doing is in some sense very French.
We'll see. If it goes in the other direction and alienation intensifies by much, with a long-term swelling of the prisons, then France will have truly "Gone American".
In the near term, the riots are perhaps the most obvious signal that the conservative government has overstayed its welcome.
I don't think China is trying hard to look like a paradise of some sort. They do have one of the highest rates of capital punishment, for instance, and make no bones about it. The same holds true for poverty and worsening economic disparity.
OTOH we weren't even discussing China. Do you have to use China as a comparison in order to defend the United States? Why sink that low?
So please, before you go waving your nose in the air about an issue you clearly have not researched, indeed, before you start sprouting anti-CNN and anti-Fox News propaganda, do a little reasearch. I have no pity for the French, nor do any of my "neighbors." If you ask me, I'd say let the country burn.
Is this troll an example of the well-considered viewpoints you've been watching in American media?
At least this kind of antipathy wouldn't lead to a city like New Orleans being stripped of necessary funding for hurricane preparedness. No, that would never happen...
...Including the riots. Thank goodness not everyone is as docile as American blacks:
With only five percent of the world's people, the U.S. accounts for 25 percent of the planet's prisoners - fully half of them Black. One out of eight prisoners on Earth is African American.
Think of it as Welfare if you like; only a very extensive, controlled, grey, and brutalizing one.
IMO the French model is preferable to a system that leaves a city of over 1.2 million people vulnerable to oblitteration and hundreds of people dead (I am referring to hurricane Katrina and the government's willful unpreparedness and non-response).
What I see in this discussion is a lot of posturing over political concepts, and few with the gonads to make a real comparison. If this story is just another excuse to wave the libertarian flag (which looks all-white to many, in more ways than one) then its not going to help.
Its awesome for archiving web pages, searching them, and even sharing web archives between computers. Saying that Scrapbook is feature-rich would be putting it mildly.
I bought my first Mac in February: a 12" iBook G4. Now I use Xandros Linux on my desktop and Mac OSX (something new and interesting!) on the notebook. It was an easy choice, knowing how clumsy Linuxes are with notebook power management. I'm a little taken aback by the iBook's apetite for memory, but most everything else has really impressed me.
Either that, or we would all be islands floating in a sea of AOL.;-)
Seriously, its interesting how promoting standards as "the greatest common denominator" actually works to everyone's advantage. Even AOL wouldn't have grown to the extent it did, if it weren't an easy way to "get onto the Internet".
Come to think of it, how many people bought Windows systems (or any computer) for the first time because they were easily bundled with Netscape and Trumpet Winsock?
I look at them all as variations on Debian which are KDE-focused, though I tend to stick with Xandros.
Kubuntu Breezy should not be mailed out for free until it is fixed. Any Linux distro that always fails to save the LAN gateway address you type in isn't worth the CD its burned on. Plus the dialogs that cannot be fully viewed on an XGA screen (with plenty of empty space in the dialogs) plus a host of other problems I ran into within the first 90 min of use. (Yes, I filed those bugs. You're welcome.) So in short, they didn't test it.
Kubuntu is *very* nice looking though. That aspect is top-notch.
OTOH even as a KDE fan I'm glad Novel chose one desktop, Gnome. Every distro should chose one desktop. Its unnerving when you try out a distro as prestigious as SuSE 10 and you can't delete any files from Konqueror because "Protocol 'Trash' does not exist".
As a Corel-> Xandros Linux user going back to 1999, I can say that watching the lack of focus and sloppy execution on these other 'portentious' distros (you know who they are) has been absolutely comic.
I have to wonder if Ubuntu will suffer by elevating KDE to the level of Gnome.
Learn how to install Linux software yourself, then there's no "vendor lock-in" as you mis-characterize CNR.
IMO its better than expecting Korean teeny-boppers (who have much better things to do with their time) to learn arcane installation techniques in order to play non-free media formats in the varied ways a modern OS does.
The full Linspire may not be free, but you won't have people pulling their hair out linking rtsp:// type protocols to their browser, and getting threatening warnings from their friends when they ask about installing DVD playback wares. And that doesn't even address browser plugins, a sane working sound system (its not just a choice between oss, alsa, esound and arts...but how they and the apps are configured by default), and the sometimes critical nonfree device drivers. You want Flash? You want Java and Real? How about WMV and QT? How about just encoding MP3s???
None of them? Then Ubuntu is perfect. Your neighbors will surely be happy to install AND license everything piecemeal. No wait! Give them OpenOffice to access their media... It's "fully functional"! Or just maybe raw Ubuntu is unsuitable for consumers.
I found a good deal on Linspire, and though I don't use it and much prefer Xandros, I know that any Linux I choose from now on (Ubuntu, MEPIS, etc) I can pull down win32codecs and libdvdcss and still be "licensed". As for integrating that stuff, its still a headache even on Xandros but at least some of the work is already done for me and I'm a grown-up techie who can take care of myself.
Of course, I do dream of having whole nations clamoring to pay me to personally keep their Linux desktops working and configured. But I doubt they would consider it much better than Windows.
Considering the pressure you're under: The most universally-playable mp4 'subformat' I've seen for the AVI container is what ffmpeg calls "msmpeg4v2". The FOURCC tag for this is "MP42". Oddly, not that many players seem to support plain.mp4 files, though I haven't tested this in WMP since I am a Mac/Linux person. The AVI/MP42 combination plays fine in VLC, Mplayer, Xine and QuickTime... and the subformat originates from MS so I'd bet WMP handles it no problem.
However if you want to generate "plain plain" MPEG4, then you can have ffmpeg do it. You can get it from Sourceforge. Just make sure to specify an output file with ".mp4" extension.
Variants of MPEG4 are DIVX, XVID, MSMPEG4 and I think H.264. In some cases they are competely interchangeable for playback if you change the FOURCC tag at the beginning of an AVI file, for instance. You caan do this with transcode's "avifix -F" command. Many players react badly to "MP4" tagged AVI files for some reason, yet all of them apparently have no problem with "DX50" (which is DIVX) so I often change those MP4 AVI files to DX50.
You all might like to know that the AMD systems kick Intel's ass when crunching the ClimatePrediction.net models.
Interestingly, the project at first used an Intel Fortran compiler which switches-off SSE instructions when running on AMD processors, and we are still living with those binaries in most areas of the project. Yet AMD still compares favorably!
Thanks Intel for costing a certain scientific research project valuable processing time. It may be the last time that most of us participating in this (widespread) distributed computing effort will choose Intel processors or compilers. Way to go.
Its the ones who know a little too much who are stupid.
I've never had a problem recommending AMD systems to non-techies. All they want to know is whether it has Windows, so they usually buy the AMD system on my word with no guff.
OTOH the last programming job I had, I was given the task of shopping for all-new replacement systems for myself and 5 others. I was told I should stick with IBM because purchasing dept. does those in volume. So after shopping a while on IBMs site, I decided it would be nice to stop staring at bubble-screens and get the more costly Flat CRTs instead. (This was circa 1999.) Lo, IBM had some less-expensive Athlons that would fit the bill and let me stay within budget with the flat 19" screens we all desired.
Now get this: Two co-workers who comprised the VB/Access contingent asked me why "Intel" could not be found in the system description, and when I explained they said they would not agree to any system which might be 'incompatible' with Windows! And here was IBM itself, selling the system with Windows preinstalled! So because of two bozo 'programmers', who were being oh-so-discerning, we bought the Intel-with-bubble-srcreen setups and just lived with the eyestrain.
As it happens, I never saw fit to purchase Intel after that.
Its not much of a concern for ATI while Linux adoption rates remain so low. They're likely to remain low while the community fails to realistically set new users' expectations WRT hardware.
New users are led to believe they can take hardware compatability for granted as they did with Windows, and as a result often leave Linux with a bad taste in their mouths. What they experienced before leaving can be characterized like this: 20% of the community tells them they can't get XYZ gadget to work because they chose the wrong distro; another 20% insults them; the next 20% are also new and lost; and the remaining 40% (including their Linux vendor!) are indifferent and neglect their Hardware Compatability List if they even offer one.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they aren't balanced. Which, in a sort of paradox, makes them balanced since they now singlehandendly counterbalance the 'progressive' biases of the rest of the nets.
I guess they have an easy job then, considering the rest are vast conglomerates that materially support politicians like George Bush and lean toward an absolutist view of property.
Tell me about Fox's glory when the majority of network journalists warm up to the "drown the private sector in a bucket" mentality (turning around a popular RW sentiment), or that trade unions should operate everywhere and replace the CEO and the boardroom. Maybe then I'll believe in this mythical Fox "balance". But until then, they're a group of Right-wing extremists in a field that is incrementally more moderate.
What that says about the steepness of your own biases, I'll leave you to ponder.
They should change their slogan to: :-)
"Fox News. We stop just short of BARKING the news at you!"
The stories they choose to cover would seem to indicate the world is chock-full of petty gansters and rogue states who would have their way with your fair-skinned daughter if they could. Its the Republican Conspiracy Theorist mindset, presented to the viewer as "links to alQueda" and chicken sheds that MUST be WMD factories.... like an international, 24hr version of 'COPS'.
But hey, according to you they all have biases and are basically the same in that respect, right? Well then I'll just give my conscience a nice rest: WHEW! That feels so much better.
Summary:
The Internet may be forced to devolve into Cable TV, so we need to read George Lakoff's book and start talking about the Internet as a place in order to save it.
(...tongue firmly in cheek. OK, so I agree about the devoling part.)
Oooooo.....
Can I have your baby?
Ethics are a philosophical system based on human rights and skeptical empiricism. An assertion that slavery is ethical might be accepted into the halls of wisdom at first blush, but it wouldn't stand up to scrutiny for very long.
Moriality tends to be more arbitrary in its constituent values, and often must be bostered by religion or other form of mass credulity.
That's what worries me about Ubuntu in general... 'Great package management'.
IMO if the OS maintainers are trying to manage your apps (and conversely, your apps are causing automatic changes in your system folders) then its just the same towering heap of Linux nuts and bolts as everything else.
Ubuntu should take a cue from DCCA and create a "Core" repository which defines the OS and another "Extras" repositroy containing most of the free apps. Dependency for most of the simple apps will look like "Ubuntu 6.0; LSB 3.0" instead of a list of low-level components.
If they're just going to re-do Debian Testing with a sleeker desktop configuration, frequent upgrades, and some nice configuration applets, then they won't bridge the gap between "Linux 2005" and a consumer-oriented OS.
What they will have is another Mandriva or SuSE, and those planes aren't flying because they too are welded onto their airports.
Also a desktop OS should receive upgrades about every 2 years with frequent bugfixes along the way. Ubuntu would have to slow down its realeases (but not its development) to become an acceptable alternative to most people.
...it ticcles!
But saying those things doesn't make them true (much less rational), nor does it paint an accurate picture of where said countries are headed. If you don't have facts, then spouting patriotic sentiments and applying labels becomes an utterly empty exercise (what is often called "hot air").
In the case of France, with a system best described as mixed socialist/capitalist with a conservative leader at present, their handling of unemployment data makes U.S. methods seem Dickensian at best (Soviet at worst). Everyone is accounted for and there are few quantitative evasions. What do they get in return? A population that strikes and riots from time to time: Burnt cars, vandalized buildings (and a few really unnecessary casualties). Horrific isn't it? Yet it still hasn't oblitterated communities or caused mass casualties. And I suppose the worst aspect of all this would be tremendously increased resentment between rioting communities and the rest of the country... But then again, very many white French people do essentially the same thing (only for somewhat different reasons) with alarming regularity. So for many, the riots could generate feelings of solidarity because what they're doing is in some sense very French.
We'll see. If it goes in the other direction and alienation intensifies by much, with a long-term swelling of the prisons, then France will have truly "Gone American".
In the near term, the riots are perhaps the most obvious signal that the conservative government has overstayed its welcome.
I don't think China is trying hard to look like a paradise of some sort. They do have one of the highest rates of capital punishment, for instance, and make no bones about it. The same holds true for poverty and worsening economic disparity.
OTOH we weren't even discussing China. Do you have to use China as a comparison in order to defend the United States? Why sink that low?
So please, before you go waving your nose in the air about an issue you clearly have not researched, indeed, before you start sprouting anti-CNN and anti-Fox News propaganda, do a little reasearch. I have no pity for the French, nor do any of my "neighbors." If you ask me, I'd say let the country burn.
Is this troll an example of the well-considered viewpoints you've been watching in American media?
At least this kind of antipathy wouldn't lead to a city like New Orleans being stripped of necessary funding for hurricane preparedness. No, that would never happen...
Think of it as Welfare if you like; only a very extensive, controlled, grey, and brutalizing one.
IMO the French model is preferable to a system that leaves a city of over 1.2 million people vulnerable to oblitteration and hundreds of people dead (I am referring to hurricane Katrina and the government's willful unpreparedness and non-response).
What I see in this discussion is a lot of posturing over political concepts, and few with the gonads to make a real comparison. If this story is just another excuse to wave the libertarian flag (which looks all-white to many, in more ways than one) then its not going to help.
Its awesome for archiving web pages, searching them, and even sharing web archives between computers. Saying that Scrapbook is feature-rich would be putting it mildly.
http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/
I bought my first Mac in February: a 12" iBook G4. Now I use Xandros Linux on my desktop and Mac OSX (something new and interesting!) on the notebook. It was an easy choice, knowing how clumsy Linuxes are with notebook power management. I'm a little taken aback by the iBook's apetite for memory, but most everything else has really impressed me.
Either that, or we would all be islands floating in a sea of AOL. ;-)
Seriously, its interesting how promoting standards as "the greatest common denominator" actually works to everyone's advantage. Even AOL wouldn't have grown to the extent it did, if it weren't an easy way to "get onto the Internet".
Come to think of it, how many people bought Windows systems (or any computer) for the first time because they were easily bundled with Netscape and Trumpet Winsock?
It will be interesting to see what happens.
"K3B and Klipper kept me on KDE for a looooong time."
.NET/Mono technologies that make growing programmers choose OS X. :-)
Just having file dialogs kept me on KDE for some time! (*Shudders* when I think about picking files with older Gnome apps.)
But at least Gnome has that healthy mishmash of C, CORBA, Central Registry, and
I look at them all as variations on Debian which are KDE-focused, though I tend to stick with Xandros.
Kubuntu Breezy should not be mailed out for free until it is fixed. Any Linux distro that always fails to save the LAN gateway address you type in isn't worth the CD its burned on. Plus the dialogs that cannot be fully viewed on an XGA screen (with plenty of empty space in the dialogs) plus a host of other problems I ran into within the first 90 min of use. (Yes, I filed those bugs. You're welcome.) So in short, they didn't test it.
Kubuntu is *very* nice looking though. That aspect is top-notch.
OTOH even as a KDE fan I'm glad Novel chose one desktop, Gnome. Every distro should chose one desktop. Its unnerving when you try out a distro as prestigious as SuSE 10 and you can't delete any files from Konqueror because "Protocol 'Trash' does not exist".
As a Corel-> Xandros Linux user going back to 1999, I can say that watching the lack of focus and sloppy execution on these other 'portentious' distros (you know who they are) has been absolutely comic.
I have to wonder if Ubuntu will suffer by elevating KDE to the level of Gnome.
Learn how to install Linux software yourself, then there's no "vendor lock-in" as you mis-characterize CNR.
IMO its better than expecting Korean teeny-boppers (who have much better things to do with their time) to learn arcane installation techniques in order to play non-free media formats in the varied ways a modern OS does.
The full Linspire may not be free, but you won't have people pulling their hair out linking rtsp:// type protocols to their browser, and getting threatening warnings from their friends when they ask about installing DVD playback wares. And that doesn't even address browser plugins, a sane working sound system (its not just a choice between oss, alsa, esound and arts...but how they and the apps are configured by default), and the sometimes critical nonfree device drivers. You want Flash? You want Java and Real? How about WMV and QT? How about just encoding MP3s???
None of them? Then Ubuntu is perfect. Your neighbors will surely be happy to install AND license everything piecemeal. No wait! Give them OpenOffice to access their media... It's "fully functional"! Or just maybe raw Ubuntu is unsuitable for consumers.
I found a good deal on Linspire, and though I don't use it and much prefer Xandros, I know that any Linux I choose from now on (Ubuntu, MEPIS, etc) I can pull down win32codecs and libdvdcss and still be "licensed". As for integrating that stuff, its still a headache even on Xandros but at least some of the work is already done for me and I'm a grown-up techie who can take care of myself.
Of course, I do dream of having whole nations clamoring to pay me to personally keep their Linux desktops working and configured. But I doubt they would consider it much better than Windows.
Everything has a "problem with installing it." Welcome to computing.
OTOH from your message it doesn't sound like you asked for formal support.
Considering the pressure you're under: The most universally-playable mp4 'subformat' I've seen for the AVI container is what ffmpeg calls "msmpeg4v2". The FOURCC tag for this is "MP42". Oddly, not that many players seem to support plain .mp4 files, though I haven't tested this in WMP since I am a Mac/Linux person. The AVI/MP42 combination plays fine in VLC, Mplayer, Xine and QuickTime... and the subformat originates from MS so I'd bet WMP handles it no problem.
Good luck!
However if you want to generate "plain plain" MPEG4, then you can have ffmpeg do it. You can get it from Sourceforge. Just make sure to specify an output file with ".mp4" extension.
Variants of MPEG4 are DIVX, XVID, MSMPEG4 and I think H.264. In some cases they are competely interchangeable for playback if you change the FOURCC tag at the beginning of an AVI file, for instance. You caan do this with transcode's "avifix -F" command. Many players react badly to "MP4" tagged AVI files for some reason, yet all of them apparently have no problem with "DX50" (which is DIVX) so I often change those MP4 AVI files to DX50.
You all might like to know that the AMD systems kick Intel's ass when crunching the ClimatePrediction.net models.
Interestingly, the project at first used an Intel Fortran compiler which switches-off SSE instructions when running on AMD processors, and we are still living with those binaries in most areas of the project. Yet AMD still compares favorably!
Thanks Intel for costing a certain scientific research project valuable processing time. It may be the last time that most of us participating in this (widespread) distributed computing effort will choose Intel processors or compilers. Way to go.
Its the ones who know a little too much who are stupid.
I've never had a problem recommending AMD systems to non-techies. All they want to know is whether it has Windows, so they usually buy the AMD system on my word with no guff.
OTOH the last programming job I had, I was given the task of shopping for all-new replacement systems for myself and 5 others. I was told I should stick with IBM because purchasing dept. does those in volume. So after shopping a while on IBMs site, I decided it would be nice to stop staring at bubble-screens and get the more costly Flat CRTs instead. (This was circa 1999.) Lo, IBM had some less-expensive Athlons that would fit the bill and let me stay within budget with the flat 19" screens we all desired.
Now get this: Two co-workers who comprised the VB/Access contingent asked me why "Intel" could not be found in the system description, and when I explained they said they would not agree to any system which might be 'incompatible' with Windows! And here was IBM itself, selling the system with Windows preinstalled! So because of two bozo 'programmers', who were being oh-so-discerning, we bought the Intel-with-bubble-srcreen setups and just lived with the eyestrain.
As it happens, I never saw fit to purchase Intel after that.
This is what LSB 3.0 and the DCCA are going to address: A minimum spec for a functional desktop, and a distro that reflects it.
http://www.dccalliance.org/
Its not much of a concern for ATI while Linux adoption rates remain so low. They're likely to remain low while the community fails to realistically set new users' expectations WRT hardware.
New users are led to believe they can take hardware compatability for granted as they did with Windows, and as a result often leave Linux with a bad taste in their mouths. What they experienced before leaving can be characterized like this: 20% of the community tells them they can't get XYZ gadget to work because they chose the wrong distro; another 20% insults them; the next 20% are also new and lost; and the remaining 40% (including their Linux vendor!) are indifferent and neglect their Hardware Compatability List if they even offer one.