Works had a wonderful spell checker, up until 2000 though Word did not let you re-check a manual correction to a word without going through the spell checking process again. Which is just downright icky really, it is assuming that it knows with 100% accuracy any possible word that you might have wanted to spell.
Netscape 4.7 has the best spell checker in my opinion.
No wait scratch that, Google does. I wonder how it works, I bet that it is something close to most related searches performed for a sequence of letters similar to the ones inserted. . ..
There are only three or four oft misspellings of mine that Google cannot correct.
spellcheck.net works well for when I know that I have not seriously screwed up anything too bad. It lacks any sort of understanding of the vernacular though, and it has almost no tech vocabulary.
Of course I cross reference everything with Dictionary.com as well.:) If just to make sure that the corrected word is really what I want it to be and not really some OTHER word that is one letter off of my desired word but means something completely different. (lovely language English is in that way. . . .;) )
StarOffice actually has a bit better auto-corrector then word does, though I have not (and DO NOT plan on) used the latest version of word. Staroffice will not auto correct anything but a few very common errors by default (a handful really) but once you have it correct a misspelled word it will automatically correct that particular misspelling of the word to the chosen correction.
Nifty and rather useful.:) Makes it so that I do not have to tell it (or run a find - replace on) the same misspelled word fifty or so times.
After paying $900 for a digital camera excuse me if I do NOT feel like paying another $60+ for a battery just so I can get another hour and a half of use out of my digital camera.
(5 hours? well sure, as long as you don't have a decent LCD not to mention the LCD backlight. Or an autostabilizer. Or flash. Or anything else actualy, you know, turned ON).
Sony actualy HORRIBLY overcharges for all of their products. Check out their USB memory stick reader. Simular products from other reputable manufacturers cost $20, Sony's costs _$65_.
I can only imagine what the pricing markup on that item is. The batteries likely have a simular markup. Though granted the batteries likely cost more to make so the markup is likely not quite as great. . . . it is still nuts.
It'd be nice if they put those fancy CPUs to some USE though rather then just writting bigger code.
I imagine that some highly intensive AI spell checker would likely have high CPU requirements, but at least it could offer mabye a 5% or so increase in spellchecker accuracy in guessing what the user was originaly trying to spell.
Sure it would be practicaly useless, but most of the features out today are compleatly useless. . . .
Weird. Most flash animations that I come across FORCE the window size to 640x480.
A 200x200 display that was a few feet big, flash should work just fine on.:) After a certain point it is your PPI more then anything else that you are worrying about, it needs to be large enough for the pixels to be viewable! (of course after a certain minimum threshold you cannot reduce your image anymore without losing too much information to make the data unrecognizable).
"windows "accessability" support sucks sweaty donkey balls. Mac is said to be better, but hey, I can see and use my arms and hands, so what do I know. "
I wouldn't call it shitty.
Damn fine actually, in windows 2000 everything comes ready to run out of the box, from the speech synthesis engine to being able to use the numberpad to control your mouse cursor.
In addition to that, many product exist out there on the market that plug right on in to windows as a simple mouse replacement, HID and all that. It is also quite easy to map damn nearly anything you want to to control anything you want to in Windows, and many products have taken advantage of such.
Used to be before Win2K that some of those features required a separate (free) download from microsoft.
Now they are packed in standard. (for better or for worse.)
Windows also includes magnifier tools and such by default as well, and Mozilla's text zooming feature is NOTHING new, IE has done that for many years now. (though I must say Mozilla allows for a finer grain of control over it.)
I cannot use my keyboard to scroll around through the text.
Oh sure those features (well at least keyboard functionality) COULD be added to individual flash animations, but why? Seriously now, each movie would have to independently implement these features, oh joy, like that is ever going to happen.
When such features are reliant upon the OS the system works the same across EVERYTHING that is viewed.
Not to mention that Flash is unwieldy when you only need to, say, oh, put up an image gallery. See my site. Simple. It works in Lynx. (I know, I tried it. The tables degrade very gracefully).
How well does Flash work for the handicapped? The blind, those who cannot see well, or anybody who just wants to have a site read to them from their computer while they are out in the kitchen fetching a snake. Yah sure those people ARE the minority, but as digital voice syntheses gets better and better more and more people will begin to use such virtual web page readers.
Of course OCR could be ran on all the text, but, uh. . . After a certain point, you just have to ask yourself. If your web site consists of text and pictures, why in the HELL Would you want to use a delivery method that is built first and foremost around graphic content delivery? That is like saving all of your text as GIFs, and that went out of style LOOONG ago. (Remember when n00bs used to do that? ^_^:) )
Of course Flash can deliver text at a significantly lower size then a GIF file can, but it is still insane. Flash offers nothing to the majority of sites out there on the net. Think about it, how would Slashdot look as a Flash site? This is ignoring that Flash demands high levels of anti-aliasing to make anything look good. (though granted Flash does INDEED look good, more on this later.)
Then there is the matter of screen resolution.
You see the LOVELY thing about flash is that IN THEORY you can scale it to ANY resolution and, besides from any JPEG or other bitmap images embedded into it, the graphics will look just as good. (or bad. ^_^ )
Too bad WAAAY to many FRIGGIN IDIOTS decide to RESTRICT the size of their Flash animations. Oh lovely. Anybody on a 1600x1200 monitor who comes across a Flash animation in a browser window that is hard locked at 320x240 must have such a LOVELY time...
(this can be bypassed of course by viewing the page's source and going to the flash file directly, but it still is not all that nice...)
So one of flash's most lovely features is almost completely obliterated by user stupidity. Lovely.
(by comparison, few web sites place a lock on the size of their main site page, thankfully... )
In conclusion. Flash is overweight for general usage, has too high of a processor requirement for general usage, is platform dependent, requires IDEs to develop in (though I guess if you were REALLY patient. . . . . hmm, Flash was NOT made to be user editable on the text level though, HTML was) and has a nifty "run file on users computer" 'feature' that I really don't like. . . .:P
Flash _IS_ good for some things. Xiao Xiao rock . But taking 400mhz+ to render a page full of text? Noooo thanks. (ok 266mhz+ if the page is done properly. But you know how friggin EASY it is to screw up a movie and bloat the heck out of the size and kill all performance? Even for still scenes. . . . Flash is way to easy to make a costly mistake in. Bad HTML won't slow your system down to a crawl, though if your browser is feeling naughty it may crash.;) )
A good video encoder can start out with a DVD MPEG2 source and end up with a HIGHER quality MPEG4 source.
How?
They run the video stream through A LOT of filters.
This is especialy true if the original DVD video is interlaced (480i). When you are doing your deinterlacing and pulldown on a computer you have a lot more resources to spare, and the fact that you do not have to worry about doing things in real time (VS deinterlacing and pulldown on a DVD player) means that you can go for the highest quality possible. (there are MANY ways to deinterlace film, though I think that when you are dealing with a digital stream that it gets a bit simplier. Not to sure on that part.)
Since indeed a lot of MPEG2 video DOES show noticable compression artifacts, a proper filter set can deal with some of those as well. Not all of the artifacts mind you, but some of them. (You can take a not-so-good-but-not-ruined JPEG image into your favorite fully featured image editor and run it through some filters and image adjusters to prove that DCT compression can be partialy fixed if you want too. Do note though that as it is your first time it may take you a few hours to find out exactly how to do this.:) )
video then recompressed PROPERLY into MPEG4 (which is a lot of work) can then end up having less visable artifacts then its original MPEG2 stream.
Most of the people out there who strive for quality though for for 2*700Megabyte releases. I think that 655 megs is enough really, but hey, what ever.:) (2*700mbyte does of course look better)
Heck when I visit her I watch it with her, along with Law and Order (whatever version may be on) and Quincy.
(I happen to like Quincy)
I always categorized it in the same category as all of the other various murder mystery shows, just a bit more gruesome and with a bit more technical accuracy here and there.
Of course I also like Murder She Wrote, so. . ..
(And I loved Father Dowling Mysteries. . . . hmmm. For a Science Fiction fan I have some odd tastes in TV.:) )
Onlines games for instance. Few servers accept multiple players from ONE IP address.
A lot of FTP sites. Any one that does not allow multiple simultaneous connections from one IP. Or if it does, the number of connections is cut down to a fraction of what it was before.
Heck in an office building with a few hundred computers in it, hell, you'd be fucked. Or a household with two or three computers.
Hope you don't want to all play on the same CounterStrike server. . . . (hmm, can CS handle multiple connections per IP? Hmmm)
That is the simpliest way. From there on out it is a battle to get the the CLI, heh.
(hmm, wonder if they will ever think of just deleting the telnet program? ^_^ )
Since the data is not coming in over port 80, Bess ignores it. Yah.
Well by 2 or 3 ways to get by her, I should have said two or three more ways to get to the CLI.:)
if you can find an anonomious web proxy though (they are falling fast. . ..) that Bess has not blocked, then that should work also.
You can of course set one up from a PC of your own as well.:) have a forwarder basicaly, your machine does the HTTP gets and then forwards the data on to whatever machine you are using to access it.
You don't walk up to a black guy and call him a N******. Well not unless you want to be flat on your back.
Well we ARE pasty faced nerds here for the most part, but it is only alluded to jokingly. In addition one most often times has to admit to being such before one can use the term.
Also, if you say that sociological studies interest you, then broadband SHOULD be of a good deal of use to you. After all, a lot of internet communities can only be (meaningfully) accessed with broadband.
www.newgrounds.com has a very. . . . interesting culture to it. If you are not on broadband then you will not be able to witness half of it. Well you COULD witness half of it, but nobody has THAT much patience quite frankly.
I like my two minute videos to take two minutes to watch.
Oh, and if you want to reference TV, then you are not any dumber if you watch the educational shows on PBS, consider the history channel halfway decent TV but not in depth enough, and realize that Discovery is on crack (but that they still show some nifty gadgets from time to time. Just that most of the time you have read about them on/. a few years before.:) )
You want sociology compare the Ars-Technica Forums to the Hardocp Forums. BIIIG difference. Quite interesting too.
Also, on scientific proofs.
Saying that a piece of technology is going to die just because YOU do not like it is NOT accrete.
My own MOTHER likes broadband access. Why?
She does artsy stuff, and only has a small amount of her time to do it. Waiting four or five minutes for a page full of thumbnails to load is not exactly something that she wants to do.
A lot of elderly computer users like always on broadband, it is significantly easier to use then a dial up modem and the lack of any sort of a wait makes it seem a lot more like an appliance rather then a job that has to be worked at to get anything done.
(not to mention that if a person is 70 years old they do not need to be spending half of their remaining life span waiting for web pages to load.;) )
Artists like broadband access because it lets them do all sorts of nifty things with their computer. A lot of the Artist orientated sights out there on the net are VERY bandwidth intensive.
Or just for surfing www.elfwood.com it is nice to be able to actualy look at a picture.
Heck used to be that on the computer I would have my gameboy with tetris by my side so that I had something to do in between sites loading. Ouch.
Now the Gameboy wouldn't be able to even boot-up in-between sites.:)
Broadband has a VERY large potential market. In fact it can reach into some places that CableTV does not reach. A good deal of the artsy types do not care for TV but they just go cookoo over Flash animations and homemade movies. (...)
The elderly who do not want to spend all of their time waiting for pages to load.
Young children who do not have the patience for web pages to load. ( ^_^ )
Working aged Americans (hmm, already mentioned elderly.... oh wait, sorry, not a political debate here. };) ) who do not have a lot of extra time on their hands.
"There's no "streaming media" or whatever it's called on the Internet I can find that I can't just watch on TV. "
TV?
Oh, you mean that thing with commericals. . ..
I got spoiled by online video before I even got broadband.
Then again if you are the braindead idiototic type who can sit in front of a TV screen and let your brain slowly ooze outside of your head, then so be it.
(this, by the way folks, is where the sterotypes about females and computing come from. Ignoring that it is a troll, the last line insulting nerds is not a good thing. I am not pasty faced, though I do aim for it.:P )
I remember reading over on the Ars-Technica forums PeterB's message about how he rebooted a computer by poking at the proper bits. . . . ^_^
I do not know if the SYS command was in whatever version of DOS you were using, but if so that would have been another vulnerability.:)
I would have just attrib -r -h *.* and then deleted the boot.io (uh, I think that is the file, errr, been awhile ya know.:) and msdos.sys (once again, if my memory serves me correctly.:) )
Heh, nice to know that at least SOME stores encourage people to learn things.:)
I also got teacher access on my school computer network when I was in the third grade.
I thought them a valuable lesson about password selection.:)
Up until, ooh, say a day after I got access, the user name was the room number and the password was the teacher's first name. Heh. Took me three friggin weeks to find out how to SPELL the darn name, my spelling has always been horrid. -_- Damn sub caught me, main lab teacher wouldn't have likely noticed. I was just trying to add some more games to our selection, and I _ALMOST_ had the damn interface figured out too. Not bad for some odd weird IBM networking thing (uh, it had IBM in nice but ASCII letters as I recall on the login screen and had some sort of menu system. Took me a few weeks to find a bug in the program that allowed for me to drop out of the menu system, last week or school or so the lab admin showed me that there was a two button hotkey to do the same. ^_^ Oh well, my way would have worked even IF the hotkey had been disabled, which it should have been mind you.:P )
I was progressively working my way up to getting more and more access through the file system alone (this is after my week or so suspension from computer lab privileges, heh) by going around and slowly piece by piece opening up more pieces of the file system to access. (granted hind site being 20/20 I would have likely never gotten all the way in, there would most likely have been some point at which I was stopped.)
In related news, I found a few more ways today to get by that stupid proxy server BESS. On a computer that was completely 100.1% locked down too. (uh, hmm. Ok so I helped lock a good deal of that down with my 'bug reports'. Well when I was kind enough to tell the faculty that is. Amazing how many hooks into IE that Office has.;) Can we say Cmd.exe as a favorite?:) Remember that trick folks, MS officaly documented it, implemented a toggle for it, but many admins do not know about it. Really handy for when you are called in to fix something and the admin has vanished. . . . or nobody can remember the admin PW to begin with, grrr).
Suffice to say, Drag and Drop is fun. Especially when there is shortcut to a folder that no longer exists and thus the computer starts looking for it when you try and open it and gives you the option to 'browse'.
Which on these computers is the ONLY way to get to the file system.
Yup they had to lock out EVERYTHING. Even office only goes to one or two directories, hehe.
(hmm, notepad has free reign though.::adds that to list of potential vulnerabilities:: )
Now none of this would at first seem to be the LEAST bit important. But. . . .
You see this place uses the Smart Yet Stupid method of copying all the CAB files to a directory on the HD.
Ah, expand is such a lovely command. Annnyways.
Files in the CAB directory are obviously not read only, nor is the directory as a whole.
Which means that you can run all sorts of nifty neato fun stuff.
Such as the old 16bit file manager program. Which does not recognize a shitpot load of WinNT4+s file system security stuff. While it will not let you delete random files, you do get a bit more access.
Widdling way folks, widdling way.
(Honestly though, I use it to extract sol.exe. Yes I am addicted, so sue me.:P I break into the damn lab computers so that I can play solitaire. ^_^ )
Almost everything in my house is on wheels. Got some there awhile back I think, good place for nice solid METAL wheels. (those cheap ass plastic ones you buy new are not worth shit. At all. They will break on you in a second. I am talking about the roundish spherical ones, the cylinder ones are of course going to be made out of plastic.:) )
Re:OT Seattle Computer Parts
on
iWarez
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· Score: 1
Bleh, thats the rich end of seattle. I am on the other side.:P
Hmm, Map Quest gives me a ~30 minute trip time, hardly acceptable for a run out to the store for a printer cable. -_-
BTW: Addium to previous message posted, redmon is over 30 minutes as the brick drives.:)
I said ALMOST throw a brick, I live in seattle proper, which means it would be about a 20minute journy for the brick if it was driving a car.:) (and that if is it is not rush hour.:) )
Re:Oh that is so true...
on
iWarez
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"The reason for this is that margins are so slim on large purchases (like computers and DVD players) that retailers either break even or *lose* money on them. Cables and accessories are marked up to try to make up the loss."
Ugh, tell me about it. 3x markup for a SCSI cable, I eventually went online and bought it for $20 instead of the $60 that CompUSA wanted for it.
On the other hand, they are the ONLY store within ~20-30miles of me that have a decent selection of computer cables and such. Not a great selection mind you, but _A_ selection.
(I like in Seattle, I can damn nearly throw bricks at Microsoft, and there isn't a single d*mn friggin computer store around here! SHIT! Sucks big time.)
Hmm, reminds me of when I was younger, at some local computer store (since closed. . . . ) that sold "used" software (open box stuff, at an inflated price mind you) they had this kids center (hey, I said I was younger, around eleven or so).
Well all of the computers had some sort of funked out proprietary interface on them that sucked. It basically was a prettied up interface that led to games on the computer.
Well of course one of the first lessons I had learned on a computer was that the CLI is your friend. So. . ..
Reboot. Take notice of startup proccess. (DOS machine).
Reboot, bypass autoexec.bat and config.sys, start exploring HD to find any sort of interesting stuff.:)
Anyways, suffice to say some employee realized WTF I was doing (to my surprise, most store employees have NO idea what in the world a CLI is, and at many stores the employee's eyes just glaze over when they see a CLI and they just walk right on by.:) ) and told me to get off the computers and not come back.:)
"I cannot fathom why you think dynamically-generated pages consume more bandwidth. They consume more CPU on the server, sure, but bandwidth? I don't think so. "
Because of all of the mostly useless formatting information.
A site that uses bold italic size and a href tags along with the occasional img tag is going to consume a lot less BW then a site that, well shoot, does anything else.
I cannot even IMAGINE making a bare HTML page that is over 1k or so in size, and yet. . . . many sites have more then that much in waste.
(then again what I do tends to be text on white with 6 or so links.:)
::notes he should likely upgrade his moz version::
Comes in handy for Staroffice. Ah, the interface for certian things is a tad wee bit. . . . not so nice though. I like having my font size indicator right there on screen at all times when typing things (be it through a WYSIWYG HTML editor or my e-mail program.)
Actualy the lack of an (findable, it may be there, a lot of stuff IS there, damned if I can find it though) always visable font size selector is why I am still using Netscape 4.7 (No, seriously. . . . it bugs me THAT much. and shit, not like I'm using Netscape to actualy. . . you know. . . ./RENDER/ HTML or anything.:) I just use it to write e-mails and such.)
Hmm, Moz needs a way to custom setup all hotkeys and configure all toolbars through a nice nifty handy dandy UI of some sort. (that doesn't include a text editor.:P If I have to go through any actual. . . . work. . . I mine as well stick with 4.7, because, as I said, it is an e-mail program for me.:) )
I've also yet to find the famed disable javascript button that I heard so much about, though it appears that over the last few weeks two more themes have come out bringing the total number of themes avialble to me to a grand whopping total of. . . .
uh
4
(including the pack in. . ..)
Amen I don't give a shit about themes.:)
Hmm.::notes.9.8 is out:: damnit I always did get behind in the upgrade sprees.::groans:: Used netscape 4.1x until around 1999 or 2000 or so. (eventualy the y2k bug hit part of the program and it was refusing security certificates left and right, so I had to upgrade. ^_^ )
Because the LINKS still interest me, just not right NOW.
OR, alternatively;
the site is a links list (Hardocp, some days on Arstechnica, numerous Blogs, and so on) and the entire IDEA of the site is to go on down the list clicking on links.
DUH.
Or the site does what Dansdata.com (and many other sites do) and inserts seemingly random yet entertaining links in the middle of reviews and articles.
OR
The link is to a diagram of some sort picture of some sort, most often relating to a product being reviewed, and it is nice to have that diagram open while reading the review to be used for frequent reference. (Once again, see Ars-Technica)
Yes I can open it up myself, but the point is that if I am _ALWAYS_ opening up everything in a new window, it be convenient if everything was just automatically opened up in a new window to begin with.
The alternative is to have this as a standard option in browsers, which is granted a better solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Works had a wonderful spell checker, up until 2000 though Word did not let you re-check a manual correction to a word without going through the spell checking process again. Which is just downright icky really, it is assuming that it knows with 100% accuracy any possible word that you might have wanted to spell.
.
:) If just to make sure that the corrected word is really what I want it to be and not really some OTHER word that is one letter off of my desired word but means something completely different. (lovely language English is in that way. . . . ;) )
:) Makes it so that I do not have to tell it (or run a find - replace on) the same misspelled word fifty or so times.
Netscape 4.7 has the best spell checker in my opinion.
No wait scratch that, Google does. I wonder how it works, I bet that it is something close to most related searches performed for a sequence of letters similar to the ones inserted. . .
There are only three or four oft misspellings of mine that Google cannot correct.
spellcheck.net works well for when I know that I have not seriously screwed up anything too bad. It lacks any sort of understanding of the vernacular though, and it has almost no tech vocabulary.
Of course I cross reference everything with Dictionary.com as well.
StarOffice actually has a bit better auto-corrector then word does, though I have not (and DO NOT plan on) used the latest version of word. Staroffice will not auto correct anything but a few very common errors by default (a handful really) but once you have it correct a misspelled word it will automatically correct that particular misspelling of the word to the chosen correction.
Nifty and rather useful.
Sony's batteries also cost over $60 a piece.
After paying $900 for a digital camera excuse me if I do NOT feel like paying another $60+ for a battery just so I can get another hour and a half of use out of my digital camera.
(5 hours? well sure, as long as you don't have a decent LCD not to mention the LCD backlight. Or an autostabilizer. Or flash. Or anything else actualy, you know, turned ON).
Sony actualy HORRIBLY overcharges for all of their products. Check out their USB memory stick reader. Simular products from other reputable manufacturers cost $20, Sony's costs _$65_.
I can only imagine what the pricing markup on that item is. The batteries likely have a simular markup. Though granted the batteries likely cost more to make so the markup is likely not quite as great. . . . it is still nuts.
"Making this device requires the kind of machining that can only be done by specially-built equipment."
.
;)
.
:)
Which was originaly made by. . .
A bunch of geeks in a big ass garage.
Seriously though, one kid built a nuclear power plant, umm. . . . well yah nuclear bombs are quite a ways away, but still, it IS possible.
The machines can be made, granted for a high cost, and from those machines the more delicate and precise parts for the actual bomb can be made.
Of course I have no idea how much such a machine would cost. . .
"It's a Hollywood myth that some wild-eyed idiot with a deathwish can make a bomb. Only governments have the resources to make bombs. "
Governments or anybody else with a large amount of money.
Of course your efficency drops WAAAAY off if your just some lone psycho-genius working on this project, but hell, your crazy, you can wait.
It'd be nice if they put those fancy CPUs to some USE though rather then just writting bigger code.
I imagine that some highly intensive AI spell checker would likely have high CPU requirements, but at least it could offer mabye a 5% or so increase in spellchecker accuracy in guessing what the user was originaly trying to spell.
Sure it would be practicaly useless, but most of the features out today are compleatly useless. . . .
Weird. Most flash animations that I come across FORCE the window size to 640x480.
:) After a certain point it is your PPI more then anything else that you are worrying about, it needs to be large enough for the pixels to be viewable! (of course after a certain minimum threshold you cannot reduce your image anymore without losing too much information to make the data unrecognizable).
A 200x200 display that was a few feet big, flash should work just fine on.
"windows "accessability" support sucks sweaty donkey balls. Mac is said to be better, but hey, I can see and use my arms and hands, so what do I know.
"
I wouldn't call it shitty.
Damn fine actually, in windows 2000 everything comes ready to run out of the box, from the speech synthesis engine to being able to use the numberpad to control your mouse cursor.
In addition to that, many product exist out there on the market that plug right on in to windows as a simple mouse replacement, HID and all that. It is also quite easy to map damn nearly anything you want to to control anything you want to in Windows, and many products have taken advantage of such.
Used to be before Win2K that some of those features required a separate (free) download from microsoft.
Now they are packed in standard. (for better or for worse.)
Windows also includes magnifier tools and such by default as well, and Mozilla's text zooming feature is NOTHING new, IE has done that for many years now. (though I must say Mozilla allows for a finer grain of control over it.)
My scroll wheel does not work.
:) )
:P
;) )
I cannot use my keyboard to scroll around through the text.
Oh sure those features (well at least keyboard functionality) COULD be added to individual flash animations, but why? Seriously now, each movie would have to independently implement these features, oh joy, like that is ever going to happen.
When such features are reliant upon the OS the system works the same across EVERYTHING that is viewed.
Not to mention that Flash is unwieldy when you only need to, say, oh, put up an image gallery. See my site. Simple. It works in Lynx. (I know, I tried it. The tables degrade very gracefully).
How well does Flash work for the handicapped? The blind, those who cannot see well, or anybody who just wants to have a site read to them from their computer while they are out in the kitchen fetching a snake. Yah sure those people ARE the minority, but as digital voice syntheses gets better and better more and more people will begin to use such virtual web page readers.
Of course OCR could be ran on all the text, but, uh. . . After a certain point, you just have to ask yourself. If your web site consists of text and pictures, why in the HELL Would you want to use a delivery method that is built first and foremost around graphic content delivery? That is like saving all of your text as GIFs, and that went out of style LOOONG ago. (Remember when n00bs used to do that? ^_^
Of course Flash can deliver text at a significantly lower size then a GIF file can, but it is still insane. Flash offers nothing to the majority of sites out there on the net. Think about it, how would Slashdot look as a Flash site? This is ignoring that Flash demands high levels of anti-aliasing to make anything look good. (though granted Flash does INDEED look good, more on this later.)
Then there is the matter of screen resolution.
You see the LOVELY thing about flash is that IN THEORY you can scale it to ANY resolution and, besides from any JPEG or other bitmap images embedded into it, the graphics will look just as good. (or bad. ^_^ )
Too bad WAAAY to many FRIGGIN IDIOTS decide to RESTRICT the size of their Flash animations. Oh lovely. Anybody on a 1600x1200 monitor who comes across a Flash animation in a browser window that is hard locked at 320x240 must have such a LOVELY time...
(this can be bypassed of course by viewing the page's source and going to the flash file directly, but it still is not all that nice...)
So one of flash's most lovely features is almost completely obliterated by user stupidity. Lovely.
(by comparison, few web sites place a lock on the size of their main site page, thankfully... )
In conclusion. Flash is overweight for general usage, has too high of a processor requirement for general usage, is platform dependent, requires IDEs to develop in (though I guess if you were REALLY patient. . . . . hmm, Flash was NOT made to be user editable on the text level though, HTML was) and has a nifty "run file on users computer" 'feature' that I really don't like. . . .
Flash _IS_ good for some things. Xiao Xiao rock . But taking 400mhz+ to render a page full of text? Noooo thanks. (ok 266mhz+ if the page is done properly. But you know how friggin EASY it is to screw up a movie and bloat the heck out of the size and kill all performance? Even for still scenes. . . . Flash is way to easy to make a costly mistake in. Bad HTML won't slow your system down to a crawl, though if your browser is feeling naughty it may crash.
A good video encoder can start out with a DVD MPEG2 source and end up with a HIGHER quality MPEG4 source.
:) )
:) (2*700mbyte does of course look better)
How?
They run the video stream through A LOT of filters.
This is especialy true if the original DVD video is interlaced (480i). When you are doing your deinterlacing and pulldown on a computer you have a lot more resources to spare, and the fact that you do not have to worry about doing things in real time (VS deinterlacing and pulldown on a DVD player) means that you can go for the highest quality possible. (there are MANY ways to deinterlace film, though I think that when you are dealing with a digital stream that it gets a bit simplier. Not to sure on that part.)
Since indeed a lot of MPEG2 video DOES show noticable compression artifacts, a proper filter set can deal with some of those as well. Not all of the artifacts mind you, but some of them. (You can take a not-so-good-but-not-ruined JPEG image into your favorite fully featured image editor and run it through some filters and image adjusters to prove that DCT compression can be partialy fixed if you want too. Do note though that as it is your first time it may take you a few hours to find out exactly how to do this.
video then recompressed PROPERLY into MPEG4 (which is a lot of work) can then end up having less visable artifacts then its original MPEG2 stream.
Most of the people out there who strive for quality though for for 2*700Megabyte releases. I think that 655 megs is enough really, but hey, what ever.
My Grandma watches is. . . .
.
:) )
Heck when I visit her I watch it with her, along with Law and Order (whatever version may be on) and Quincy.
(I happen to like Quincy)
I always categorized it in the same category as all of the other various murder mystery shows, just a bit more gruesome and with a bit more technical accuracy here and there.
Of course I also like Murder She Wrote, so. . .
(And I loved Father Dowling Mysteries. . . . hmmm. For a Science Fiction fan I have some odd tastes in TV.
Hmm, what if we start FINING the trolls instead, eh?
:)
Seriously now, anybody who posts a friggin premade troll or a goatse link gets fined $5.
Okay so implementing it might be a bit hard, but, hmm.
If they don't pay up we hunt them down and cut off their balls? Yah, that'd work as insentive.
Is there going to be a Poor College Student toggle switch so those of us with no money do not have to look at the ads?
:)
After all it COSTS the advertisers money to show those ads, and well. . . . why show them to people who are not going to buy them?
I'll even e-mail a copy of my student ID if necessary.
Some things do NOT work with NAT.
Onlines games for instance. Few servers accept multiple players from ONE IP address.
A lot of FTP sites. Any one that does not allow multiple simultaneous connections from one IP. Or if it does, the number of connections is cut down to a fraction of what it was before.
Heck in an office building with a few hundred computers in it, hell, you'd be fucked.
Or a household with two or three computers.
Hope you don't want to all play on the same CounterStrike server. . . . (hmm, can CS handle multiple connections per IP? Hmmm)
Well it ain't pretty.
:) )
:)
.) that Bess has not blocked, then that should work also.
:) have a forwarder basicaly, your machine does the HTTP gets and then forwards the data on to whatever machine you are using to access it.
It involves telneting to a Lynx machine.
(uh, actualy thats pretty much it.
That is the simpliest way. From there on out it is a battle to get the the CLI, heh.
(hmm, wonder if they will ever think of just deleting the telnet program? ^_^ )
Since the data is not coming in over port 80, Bess ignores it. Yah.
Well by 2 or 3 ways to get by her, I should have said two or three more ways to get to the CLI.
if you can find an anonomious web proxy though (they are falling fast. . .
You can of course set one up from a PC of your own as well.
::notes profession::
.
/. a few years before. :) )
;) )
:)
:)
Okay, explains. . . . ah, some things.
Yes we take pride in being nerds, but. . .
Metaphor time.
You don't walk up to a black guy and call him a N******. Well not unless you want to be flat on your back.
Well we ARE pasty faced nerds here for the most part, but it is only alluded to jokingly. In addition one most often times has to admit to being such before one can use the term.
Also, if you say that sociological studies interest you, then broadband SHOULD be of a good deal of use to you. After all, a lot of internet communities can only be (meaningfully) accessed with broadband.
www.newgrounds.com has a very. . . . interesting culture to it. If you are not on broadband then you will not be able to witness half of it. Well you COULD witness half of it, but nobody has THAT much patience quite frankly.
I like my two minute videos to take two minutes to watch.
Oh, and if you want to reference TV, then you are not any dumber if you watch the educational shows on PBS, consider the history channel halfway decent TV but not in depth enough, and realize that Discovery is on crack (but that they still show some nifty gadgets from time to time. Just that most of the time you have read about them on
You want sociology compare the Ars-Technica Forums to the Hardocp Forums. BIIIG difference. Quite interesting too.
Also, on scientific proofs.
Saying that a piece of technology is going to die just because YOU do not like it is NOT accrete.
My own MOTHER likes broadband access. Why?
She does artsy stuff, and only has a small amount of her time to do it. Waiting four or five minutes for a page full of thumbnails to load is not exactly something that she wants to do.
A lot of elderly computer users like always on broadband, it is significantly easier to use then a dial up modem and the lack of any sort of a wait makes it seem a lot more like an appliance rather then a job that has to be worked at to get anything done.
(not to mention that if a person is 70 years old they do not need to be spending half of their remaining life span waiting for web pages to load.
Artists like broadband access because it lets them do all sorts of nifty things with their computer. A lot of the Artist orientated sights out there on the net are VERY bandwidth intensive.
Or just for surfing www.elfwood.com it is nice to be able to actualy look at a picture.
Heck used to be that on the computer I would have my gameboy with tetris by my side so that I had something to do in between sites loading. Ouch.
Now the Gameboy wouldn't be able to even boot-up in-between sites.
Broadband has a VERY large potential market. In fact it can reach into some places that CableTV does not reach. A good deal of the artsy types do not care for TV but they just go cookoo over Flash animations and homemade movies. (...)
The elderly who do not want to spend all of their time waiting for pages to load.
Young children who do not have the patience for web pages to load. ( ^_^ )
Working aged Americans (hmm, already mentioned elderly.... oh wait, sorry, not a political debate here. };) ) who do not have a lot of extra time on their hands.
Uh.
Wow that just about covers everyone.
Huh? Only ISPs can hand them out, therefore they have an automatic monopoly over IP addresses. Not to mention complete price control.
Hell ISPs should be PRAYING for IPv6 to come out and every device in a persons house + the toaster to have an IP address.
Think $1 per IP address.
Think 30 or more devices per house with IP addresses.
Tada, the average ISPs profit per customer just more then doubled.
(even broadband ISPs would be making an extra $30 on top of the ~$60 or so they already charge, 50% profit increase is STILL great!)
"There's no "streaming media" or whatever it's called on the Internet I can find that I can't just watch on TV. "
.
:P )
TV?
Oh, you mean that thing with commericals. . .
I got spoiled by online video before I even got broadband.
Then again if you are the braindead idiototic type who can sit in front of a TV screen and let your brain slowly ooze outside of your head, then so be it.
(this, by the way folks, is where the sterotypes about females and computing come from. Ignoring that it is a troll, the last line insulting nerds is not a good thing. I am not pasty faced, though I do aim for it.
Plastic brittle, plastic break. Me get tired, be clump down in chair. Me do this enough times brittle weak ass plastic wheels break.
There that simple enough for ya? No? Too bad.
Ouch, sweet deal.
:)
:) and msdos.sys (once again, if my memory serves me correctly. :) )
:)
:)
:P )
;) Can we say Cmd.exe as a favorite? :) Remember that trick folks, MS officaly documented it, implemented a toggle for it, but many admins do not know about it. Really handy for when you are called in to fix something and the admin has vanished. . . . or nobody can remember the admin PW to begin with, grrr).
::adds that to list of potential vulnerabilities:: )
:P I break into the damn lab computers so that I can play solitaire. ^_^ )
I remember reading over on the Ars-Technica forums PeterB's message about how he rebooted a computer by poking at the proper bits. . . . ^_^
I do not know if the SYS command was in whatever version of DOS you were using, but if so that would have been another vulnerability.
I would have just attrib -r -h *.* and then deleted the boot.io (uh, I think that is the file, errr, been awhile ya know.
Heh, nice to know that at least SOME stores encourage people to learn things.
I also got teacher access on my school computer network when I was in the third grade.
I thought them a valuable lesson about password selection.
Up until, ooh, say a day after I got access, the user name was the room number and the password was the teacher's first name. Heh. Took me three friggin weeks to find out how to SPELL the darn name, my spelling has always been horrid. -_- Damn sub caught me, main lab teacher wouldn't have likely noticed. I was just trying to add some more games to our selection, and I _ALMOST_ had the damn interface figured out too. Not bad for some odd weird IBM networking thing (uh, it had IBM in nice but ASCII letters as I recall on the login screen and had some sort of menu system. Took me a few weeks to find a bug in the program that allowed for me to drop out of the menu system, last week or school or so the lab admin showed me that there was a two button hotkey to do the same. ^_^ Oh well, my way would have worked even IF the hotkey had been disabled, which it should have been mind you.
I was progressively working my way up to getting more and more access through the file system alone (this is after my week or so suspension from computer lab privileges, heh) by going around and slowly piece by piece opening up more pieces of the file system to access. (granted hind site being 20/20 I would have likely never gotten all the way in, there would most likely have been some point at which I was stopped.)
In related news, I found a few more ways today to get by that stupid proxy server BESS. On a computer that was completely 100.1% locked down too. (uh, hmm. Ok so I helped lock a good deal of that down with my 'bug reports'. Well when I was kind enough to tell the faculty that is. Amazing how many hooks into IE that Office has.
Suffice to say, Drag and Drop is fun. Especially when there is shortcut to a folder that no longer exists and thus the computer starts looking for it when you try and open it and gives you the option to 'browse'.
Which on these computers is the ONLY way to get to the file system.
Yup they had to lock out EVERYTHING. Even office only goes to one or two directories, hehe.
(hmm, notepad has free reign though.
Now none of this would at first seem to be the LEAST bit important. But. . . .
You see this place uses the Smart Yet Stupid method of copying all the CAB files to a directory on the HD.
Ah, expand is such a lovely command. Annnyways.
Files in the CAB directory are obviously not read only, nor is the directory as a whole.
Which means that you can run all sorts of nifty neato fun stuff.
Such as the old 16bit file manager program. Which does not recognize a shitpot load of WinNT4+s file system security stuff. While it will not let you delete random files, you do get a bit more access.
Widdling way folks, widdling way.
(Honestly though, I use it to extract sol.exe. Yes I am addicted, so sue me.
Yah, that place DOES rock.
:) )
Almost everything in my house is on wheels. Got some there awhile back I think, good place for nice solid METAL wheels. (those cheap ass plastic ones you buy new are not worth shit. At all. They will break on you in a second. I am talking about the roundish spherical ones, the cylinder ones are of course going to be made out of plastic.
Bleh, thats the rich end of seattle. I am on the other side. :P
:)
Hmm, Map Quest gives me a ~30 minute trip time, hardly acceptable for a run out to the store for a printer cable. -_-
BTW: Addium to previous message posted, redmon is over 30 minutes as the brick drives.
I said ALMOST throw a brick, I live in seattle proper, which means it would be about a 20minute journy for the brick if it was driving a car. :) (and that if is it is not rush hour. :) )
"The reason for this is that margins are so slim on large purchases (like computers and DVD players) that retailers either break even or *lose* money on them. Cables and accessories are marked up to try to make up the loss."
.
:)
:) ) and told me to get off the computers and not come back. :)
Ugh, tell me about it. 3x markup for a SCSI cable, I eventually went online and bought it for $20 instead of the $60 that CompUSA wanted for it.
On the other hand, they are the ONLY store within ~20-30miles of me that have a decent selection of computer cables and such. Not a great selection mind you, but _A_ selection.
(I like in Seattle, I can damn nearly throw bricks at Microsoft, and there isn't a single d*mn friggin computer store around here! SHIT! Sucks big time.)
Hmm, reminds me of when I was younger, at some local computer store (since closed. . . . ) that sold "used" software (open box stuff, at an inflated price mind you) they had this kids center (hey, I said I was younger, around eleven or so).
Well all of the computers had some sort of funked out proprietary interface on them that sucked. It basically was a prettied up interface that led to games on the computer.
Well of course one of the first lessons I had learned on a computer was that the CLI is your friend. So. . .
Reboot. Take notice of startup proccess. (DOS machine).
Reboot, bypass autoexec.bat and config.sys, start exploring HD to find any sort of interesting stuff.
Anyways, suffice to say some employee realized WTF I was doing (to my surprise, most store employees have NO idea what in the world a CLI is, and at many stores the employee's eyes just glaze over when they see a CLI and they just walk right on by.
"I cannot fathom why you think dynamically-generated pages consume more bandwidth. They consume more CPU on the server, sure, but bandwidth? I don't think so. "
:)
Because of all of the mostly useless formatting information.
A site that uses bold italic size and a href tags along with the occasional img tag is going to consume a lot less BW then a site that, well shoot, does anything else.
I cannot even IMAGINE making a bare HTML page that is over 1k or so in size, and yet. . . . many sites have more then that much in waste.
(then again what I do tends to be text on white with 6 or so links.
Hmm
/RENDER/ HTML or anything. :) I just use it to write e-mails and such.)
:P If I have to go through any actual. . . . work. . . I mine as well stick with 4.7, because, as I said, it is an e-mail program for me. :) )
.)
:)
::notes .9.8 is out:: damnit I always did get behind in the upgrade sprees. ::groans:: Used netscape 4.1x until around 1999 or 2000 or so. (eventualy the y2k bug hit part of the program and it was refusing security certificates left and right, so I had to upgrade. ^_^ )
::notes he should likely upgrade his moz version::
Comes in handy for Staroffice. Ah, the interface for certian things is a tad wee bit. . . . not so nice though. I like having my font size indicator right there on screen at all times when typing things (be it through a WYSIWYG HTML editor or my e-mail program.)
Actualy the lack of an (findable, it may be there, a lot of stuff IS there, damned if I can find it though) always visable font size selector is why I am still using Netscape 4.7 (No, seriously. . . . it bugs me THAT much. and shit, not like I'm using Netscape to actualy. . . you know. . . .
Hmm, Moz needs a way to custom setup all hotkeys and configure all toolbars through a nice nifty handy dandy UI of some sort. (that doesn't include a text editor.
I've also yet to find the famed disable javascript button that I heard so much about, though it appears that over the last few weeks two more themes have come out bringing the total number of themes avialble to me to a grand whopping total of. . . .
uh
4
(including the pack in. . .
Amen I don't give a shit about themes.
Hmm.
::pounds head on wall::
Because the LINKS still interest me, just not right NOW.
OR, alternatively;
the site is a links list (Hardocp, some days on Arstechnica, numerous Blogs, and so on) and the entire IDEA of the site is to go on down the list clicking on links.
DUH.
Or the site does what Dansdata.com (and many other sites do) and inserts seemingly random yet entertaining links in the middle of reviews and articles.
OR
The link is to a diagram of some sort picture of some sort, most often relating to a product being reviewed, and it is nice to have that diagram open while reading the review to be used for frequent reference. (Once again, see Ars-Technica)
Yes I can open it up myself, but the point is that if I am _ALWAYS_ opening up everything in a new window, it be convenient if everything was just automatically opened up in a new window to begin with.
The alternative is to have this as a standard option in browsers, which is granted a better solution.