I have far from the lowest/. ID, even in this article's comments, but I'm pretty early. Have loved the site since I first stumbled upon it way back when.
My little private company, NiEstu, has the distinction of being one of the first few advertisers to submit banner ads to Slashdot after the (very controversial at the time) decision was made to start posting them. Due to a screwup in the rotation software, my ads got way more impressions than I'd paid for. After a week or so of that, Rob sent me an angry email pointing it out and demanding that I pay for what I had (mistakenly) received. I wrote back, and as I recall I asked him to stop hatin', and to tell me how much extra he though I owed, so we could talk specifics. We went back and forth a couple times like that; after a while he said, ahh screwit, our ad system is all hosed, just forget about it. I always thought that was mighty big of him, and boded well for his future.
So congratulations on your successes, Rob, and may you have many more in the future!
Astronomer Mike Brown is tweeting his observations of the fire (from the "9th floor of Caltech Lib w/AC and comfy chair") on a very regular basis during daytime hours, in case anyone wants an eyewitness account from fairly close by. Just follow @plutokiller for his updates.
I'm a huge fan of Drs. Tyson and Kaku, as mentioned elsewhere. I'd suggest looking at some of the newer popularizers for your own younglings. People like Richard Wiseman, Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait, the colorful crew at Deep Sea News, and probably any number of other blogs linked from the above.
Get the little nibblers interested from the start! We can use all the scientists (or at least science-literate) that we can get.
So I cd into my mplayer tree, do a nice "grep -R caption *", and what do I find in sub_cc.c ?
"uses source from the xine closed captions decoder"
That's all well and good. But the mplayer docs tell you how to make it work. The xine docs don't. I've tried six ways from Sunday (including the mysterious and undocumented "subtitles.closedcaption.enabled" option) and still cannot see CC in xine. If you find somewhere in the mplayer comments how to make them actually work under xine, please do tell me!:)
Apparently VLC 1.0 supports them now, and since I heard about it only today, I was unaware of that support.
Xine may support them, but it's not mentioned in the docs at all. I did find that line in the xine config file, and changed it to "1", but that seemed to have no effect. None of the subtitle streams I select have the CC data on them. So if you know how to make it work, please tell me!
So what you're telling me is, this latest version of VLC now supports CC? Cool, once it shows up in Debian, I'll give it a try.
Thanks for the info!
Sticking with mplayer, thank you
on
VLC 1.0.0 Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I like VLC, I really do. For that matter, I like xine too. But neither one, as far as I can tell, can do one thing that mplayer does: Display closed captioning. No, that's not DVD subtitles. It's purely a US American thing, so is routinely ignored, or at least misunderstood, by the international communities that maintain these products.
I watched a thread on a VLC (or was it xine?) discussion forum where somebody asked about closed captioning support. After about twelve messages, they finally determined that no, it really wasn't the same as subtitles (some participants never were convinced of that fact), but was "some American thing", at which point amidst a lot of tongue clucking and regrets, the thread fizzled out.
So until a media player can display closed captions, I'm not really able to use it. But nice try, guys, and keep up the good work.
(Yes, I am sure I could dive into the mplayer code, locate the closed-captioning bits, extract them, and submit them to both VLC and xine as patches. I'll get right on that, mmm-hmmm!)
We may or may not find a role for men in space this generation, but space travel and investigation is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species. And no corporation will EVER do what needs to be done, because it's not profitable except indirectly.
I can think of no better time to quote J. Michael Straczynski, using the voice of Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, talking about why humans go to space:
Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
What is the real use of getting a man to Mars or another planet other thean bragging about it for the next 70 years? Somehow, some people are in favor of a manned space program. The question is, what is the tangible benifit of sending people to the moon/Mars/Jupiter/Proxima Centauri?
That's right up there next to the question "Why spend any money on space at all when we have so many problems that need solving right here on Earth?" I can't buy into either viewpoint. Manned spaceflight has its place, and I'll fight any effort to terminate it.
I feel that there is a lack of a concrete goal, something to stand behind.
Now this I can totally get behind. Goals are good, and a lack of them, or more accurately a continuous redefining of them, has crippled the US space program for decades.
Something that has a good probability of pay-off in the future. Is "finding out things about other planets" a goal that convinces people to support (manned or unmanned) spaceflight? What do we really want?
Sounds like your answers would be "No" and "Profit". The whole "pay-off" bit is a club that has been used to beat the space program repeatedly over the years. "What's in it for me? What's the return on my investment?" As with other forms of research and exploration, it's nearly always impossible to give firm answers to these questions. But experience has shown that the real answer usually is, "Far beyond expectations."
That would have been my first guess, given that there's a very vocal cadre who look for every opportunity to quash manned spaceflight, but TFA doesn't seem slanted in that direction. Could just be lip service, but I'm hoping it is what it says it is: A study to re-examine what we want to do, cross-index that with what we think we can do, and use that to create some concrete plans.
Then again, if the Obama administration turns NASA into the US Space Force, civil space pursuits at the national level may dry up entirely, leaving only military and private space efforts. Not sure I like the sound of that.
Most taxpayers do create jobs. They are the demand side of the economy.
Well, I guess I can't argue with that. But it's sorta like saying that human beings are the human gene's way of making more genes. Yes, demand "creates" jobs, in the sense that more demand leads to more jobs, but I don't think that's what the stimulus packages are thinking of.
Putting taxpayer money directly into the economy worked well in the 50's and 60's in building the Interstate Highway System, in building out educational infrastructure, even in setting NASA and DARPA - from all of which the downstream economic benefits have been immense (despite instances of spending idiocy).
Good point. I was thinking of Roosevelt, but you're right, those other "stimulus" programs had an enormous beneficial effect. And from everything BHO has said, that's the model he's hoping to use, too.
This doesn't point directly to an answer. It may not be what we do, but how we do it, that determines success or failure.
I cannot agree more. In the past, how the government did things usually left something to be desired. Let's hope that's about to change.
An IT build out though makes a lot of sense, and Obama has spoken strongly in favor of, for instance, the "smart grid." So wait a few weeks, and we'll see it beginning to happen.
You will get NO net jobs. Every penny spent on a "stimulus" must be taken from taxpayers, either directly or indirectly, either now or in the future, and that penny will NOT be spent creating jobs elsewhere.
This sounds a lot like "trickle-down economics". That is, give rich people money and they'll build factories and stores which will create new jobs. Fact is, most taxpayers don't create jobs, they just have them. Or not, in increasing numbers.
I do agree that shoveling taxpayer money directly into the economy hasn't worked very well in the past, not since the 1930s at least, and we have little reason to think it will work now. So what do you suggest we do? Just let things work themselves out? Let the Invisible Hand of the Market make everything better?
Can I ask, do you have a job right now? I don't. It got sent to Bangalore. I suspect our answers to the above questions would be quite different.
On a side note, I hope the poor bastard in India who got my job isn't hating it as much as I did near the end.:)
Bias alert: Huge fan of Obama's promises. Skeptical about his ability to implement them through the filter of the ponderous leviathan that is the US government.
As a US programmer whose job was recently sent overseas, I'd love to have some new opportunities present themselves. But years of evidence make me worry that a government job would be like government cheese: not of the highest quality.
Nevertheless, I remain optimistic! (You may all now line up to call me a fool.)
If you think this lawsuit is silly, is beyond the bounds of reason, is symptomatic of a legal system gone wrong, then you need to listen the next time a politician starts to talk about tort reform, because that's the name of the remedy that will need to be applied.
One caution: Be careful just which politician it is, and listen to exactly what he's saying. Most of them are lawyers themselves, and would rather masturbate naked on CNN than do something that could be percieved as harming the legal profession. Most of them talk a good line, but few actually follow through. You have to get a running start to take on a well-funded and strongly placed behemoth like the American legal system.
As an example, during his tenure as vice president, J. Danforth "Dan" Quayle (himself a lawyer, as is his wife--they met in law school) made tort reform one of his pet issues. As far as I know, Dan got about as many reforms enacted as miles he walked on Mars.
But if I thought that goofy sumbitch had a goat's chance of actually getting something done, hell, even I'd vote for him!
Should I moderate a post, I'm not going to jack it down just because I don't agree with it. But I am going to jack it down if it's not interesting. I think most moderators will do that.
Noble sentiment, and well spoken. To quote Ernest Hemingway, "Isn't it pretty to think so?" I can hope you are correct, but I cannot help but fear that you are not.
Fully agree. I said much the same thing in an earlier post. I notice that, while neither of our posts have been moderated down, neither were bumped up. They must not have been as relevant and pithy as some of those +2 "Checking my default score" posts above.:-)
(I'm guessing that our two posts have been, and ultimately will be, read by only a few people. We didn't get in early enough, and our default scores aren't high enough, to propel our comments into the "mainstream".)
The point is, the very word "moderation" implies a movement toward the mean, a limiting. And when you limit the very bad, you most often limit the very good along with it, leaving you with the Very Mediocre. I'm not certain that this new (or any other, for that matter) moderation system will drive/. toward a least-common-denominator position, but I must say the thought has crossed my mind.
I've already seen the trend toward a more homogeneous viewpoint. This isn't necessarily a bad thing--if you are looking to identify and reinforce a uniquely "Slashdot" identity, if the reduction in diversity isn't a negative for you, then this system is the right one.
In combination with the "sort by score" or "filter by score" options (and to a lesser extent, even without using either of those), it is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. People will see mostly posts which "conform" to the/. ethos, whatever that winds up being. Seeing them, other posters will tend, even unconsciously, to adopt that ethos. They will learn what characteristics cause a post to get a higher score. And so on.
It works for moderators, too. People who qualify are those who have adjusted their behavior (again, quite possibly without being conscious of it) to fit the/. norm. People who don't qualify will tend to be less interested, and thus less likely to participate in any way. They'll go read Salon or something instead.
The end result, I believe, is a smaller, less diverse community. Another, less pejorative way to characterize it is more tightly focused, more unified, and probably more peaceful and coherent. If that's what we want, this is how to get it.
That's one of those charming sayings that sound as if they ought to mean something, but really don't. Though I do often feel like wiping my ass with most of the memos that come to my desk!
When Slate premiered, it was ballyhooed as The Next Big Thing In Journalism. With a roster of not totally unimpressive talent, I expected they might have a chance to do something fairly impressive. I took the time to go to their site repeatedly, to sample their offerings and to give them a fair shake. If they were going to be a Major Event, I wanted to play too.
I found the articles to be almost uniformly stuffy, pretentious, and extremely content-poor. I believe the editorial guidelines must specify that neo-kitschy, faux-New-Yorker style. because I cannot believe it was by accident. It's aimed at somebody's sensibilities besides mine.
This is not to say that they didn't have the occasional thought-provoking, sometimes almost penetrating articles, but the bulk of them were either painfully self-conscious or stupefyingly boring. And "occasionally good" does not earn you a ticket onto my browser's startup page. When they announced that they were following through with their plan to go for-pay, I had a good four-minute laugh, dismissed them as hopeless, and got on with my life.
When they recently gave up the subscription thing as a bad job, I actually took the time to visit them once again. Not surprisingly, nothing had changed.
Slate--they can keep it. You say "can anybody wonder". I know I don't have any further questions!
I would have expected an article with this many errors to have been written maybe a year ago, but nowadays, most press outlets have gotten more of a clue than this. Or at least they are willing to do enough basic research to avoid such an embarrassing level of inaccuracy.
Couldn't have been done on purpose, could it? Heh.
I must add my voice to that of others who have pointed out that PNG can't displace GIF as a web standard until
It has a good standard way to do animation--that's the vaporware known as MNG, right?
It is fully and correctly supported by the Big Two browsers; this would include full alpha blending, for backgrounds as well as inlines. It would be A Good Thing to ensure that Mozilla does this.
I've also noted that PNG can be quite a lot larger than GIF for certain things, like those awful transparent spacer images, and certain small things like flat two-color text images such as those used occasionally as buttons or labels. Not the most important shortcoming, but a few of those can add up quickly.
Until then, PNG will remain a turbo-studly curiosity, used mostly in niche applications.
Slashdot Mirror
I have far from the lowest /. ID, even in this article's comments, but I'm pretty early. Have loved the site since I first stumbled upon it way back when.
My little private company, NiEstu, has the distinction of being one of the first few advertisers to submit banner ads to Slashdot after the (very controversial at the time) decision was made to start posting them. Due to a screwup in the rotation software, my ads got way more impressions than I'd paid for. After a week or so of that, Rob sent me an angry email pointing it out and demanding that I pay for what I had (mistakenly) received. I wrote back, and as I recall I asked him to stop hatin', and to tell me how much extra he though I owed, so we could talk specifics. We went back and forth a couple times like that; after a while he said, ahh screwit, our ad system is all hosed, just forget about it. I always thought that was mighty big of him, and boded well for his future.
So congratulations on your successes, Rob, and may you have many more in the future!
Astronomer Mike Brown is tweeting his observations of the fire (from the "9th floor of Caltech Lib w/AC and comfy chair") on a very regular basis during daytime hours, in case anyone wants an eyewitness account from fairly close by. Just follow @plutokiller for his updates.
I'm a huge fan of Drs. Tyson and Kaku, as mentioned elsewhere. I'd suggest looking at some of the newer popularizers for your own younglings. People like Richard Wiseman, Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait, the colorful crew at Deep Sea News, and probably any number of other blogs linked from the above.
Get the little nibblers interested from the start! We can use all the scientists (or at least science-literate) that we can get.
So I cd into my mplayer tree, do a nice "grep -R caption *", and what do I find in sub_cc.c ?
"uses source from the xine closed captions decoder"
That's all well and good. But the mplayer docs tell you how to make it work. The xine docs don't. I've tried six ways from Sunday (including the mysterious and undocumented "subtitles.closedcaption.enabled" option) and still cannot see CC in xine. If you find somewhere in the mplayer comments how to make them actually work under xine, please do tell me! :)
Apparently VLC 1.0 supports them now, and since I heard about it only today, I was unaware of that support.
Xine may support them, but it's not mentioned in the docs at all. I did find that line in the xine config file, and changed it to "1", but that seemed to have no effect. None of the subtitle streams I select have the CC data on them. So if you know how to make it work, please tell me!
So what you're telling me is, this latest version of VLC now supports CC? Cool, once it shows up in Debian, I'll give it a try.
Thanks for the info!
I like VLC, I really do. For that matter, I like xine too. But neither one, as far as I can tell, can do one thing that mplayer does: Display closed captioning. No, that's not DVD subtitles. It's purely a US American thing, so is routinely ignored, or at least misunderstood, by the international communities that maintain these products.
I watched a thread on a VLC (or was it xine?) discussion forum where somebody asked about closed captioning support. After about twelve messages, they finally determined that no, it really wasn't the same as subtitles (some participants never were convinced of that fact), but was "some American thing", at which point amidst a lot of tongue clucking and regrets, the thread fizzled out.
So until a media player can display closed captions, I'm not really able to use it. But nice try, guys, and keep up the good work.
(Yes, I am sure I could dive into the mplayer code, locate the closed-captioning bits, extract them, and submit them to both VLC and xine as patches. I'll get right on that, mmm-hmmm!)
We may or may not find a role for men in space this generation, but space travel and investigation is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species. And no corporation will EVER do what needs to be done, because it's not profitable except indirectly.
I can think of no better time to quote J. Michael Straczynski, using the voice of Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, talking about why humans go to space:
Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
I can't improve on that.
What is the real use of getting a man to Mars or another planet other thean bragging about it for the next 70 years? Somehow, some people are in favor of a manned space program. The question is, what is the tangible benifit of sending people to the moon/Mars/Jupiter/Proxima Centauri?
That's right up there next to the question "Why spend any money on space at all when we have so many problems that need solving right here on Earth?" I can't buy into either viewpoint. Manned spaceflight has its place, and I'll fight any effort to terminate it.
I feel that there is a lack of a concrete goal, something to stand behind.
Now this I can totally get behind. Goals are good, and a lack of them, or more accurately a continuous redefining of them, has crippled the US space program for decades.
Something that has a good probability of pay-off in the future. Is "finding out things about other planets" a goal that convinces people to support (manned or unmanned) spaceflight? What do we really want?
Sounds like your answers would be "No" and "Profit". The whole "pay-off" bit is a club that has been used to beat the space program repeatedly over the years. "What's in it for me? What's the return on my investment?" As with other forms of research and exploration, it's nearly always impossible to give firm answers to these questions. But experience has shown that the real answer usually is, "Far beyond expectations."
Ad astra per aspera!
And fund our research instead.
That would have been my first guess, given that there's a very vocal cadre who look for every opportunity to quash manned spaceflight, but TFA doesn't seem slanted in that direction. Could just be lip service, but I'm hoping it is what it says it is: A study to re-examine what we want to do, cross-index that with what we think we can do, and use that to create some concrete plans.
Then again, if the Obama administration turns NASA into the US Space Force, civil space pursuits at the national level may dry up entirely, leaving only military and private space efforts. Not sure I like the sound of that.
Most taxpayers do create jobs. They are the demand side of the economy.
Well, I guess I can't argue with that. But it's sorta like saying that human beings are the human gene's way of making more genes. Yes, demand "creates" jobs, in the sense that more demand leads to more jobs, but I don't think that's what the stimulus packages are thinking of.
Putting taxpayer money directly into the economy worked well in the 50's and 60's in building the Interstate Highway System, in building out educational infrastructure, even in setting NASA and DARPA - from all of which the downstream economic benefits have been immense (despite instances of spending idiocy).
Good point. I was thinking of Roosevelt, but you're right, those other "stimulus" programs had an enormous beneficial effect. And from everything BHO has said, that's the model he's hoping to use, too.
This doesn't point directly to an answer. It may not be what we do, but how we do it, that determines success or failure.
I cannot agree more. In the past, how the government did things usually left something to be desired. Let's hope that's about to change.
An IT build out though makes a lot of sense, and Obama has spoken strongly in favor of, for instance, the "smart grid." So wait a few weeks, and we'll see it beginning to happen.
From your lips ...
You will get NO net jobs. Every penny spent on a "stimulus" must be taken from taxpayers, either directly or indirectly, either now or in the future, and that penny will NOT be spent creating jobs elsewhere.
This sounds a lot like "trickle-down economics". That is, give rich people money and they'll build factories and stores which will create new jobs. Fact is, most taxpayers don't create jobs, they just have them. Or not, in increasing numbers.
I do agree that shoveling taxpayer money directly into the economy hasn't worked very well in the past, not since the 1930s at least, and we have little reason to think it will work now. So what do you suggest we do? Just let things work themselves out? Let the Invisible Hand of the Market make everything better?
Can I ask, do you have a job right now? I don't. It got sent to Bangalore. I suspect our answers to the above questions would be quite different.
On a side note, I hope the poor bastard in India who got my job isn't hating it as much as I did near the end. :)
Bias alert: Huge fan of Obama's promises. Skeptical about his ability to implement them through the filter of the ponderous leviathan that is the US government.
As a US programmer whose job was recently sent overseas, I'd love to have some new opportunities present themselves. But years of evidence make me worry that a government job would be like government cheese: not of the highest quality.
Nevertheless, I remain optimistic! (You may all now line up to call me a fool.)
One caution: Be careful just which politician it is, and listen to exactly what he's saying. Most of them are lawyers themselves, and would rather masturbate naked on CNN than do something that could be percieved as harming the legal profession. Most of them talk a good line, but few actually follow through. You have to get a running start to take on a well-funded and strongly placed behemoth like the American legal system.
As an example, during his tenure as vice president, J. Danforth "Dan" Quayle (himself a lawyer, as is his wife--they met in law school) made tort reform one of his pet issues. As far as I know, Dan got about as many reforms enacted as miles he walked on Mars.
But if I thought that goofy sumbitch had a goat's chance of actually getting something done, hell, even I'd vote for him!
(I'm guessing that our two posts have been, and ultimately will be, read by only a few people. We didn't get in early enough, and our default scores aren't high enough, to propel our comments into the "mainstream".)
The point is, the very word "moderation" implies a movement toward the mean, a limiting. And when you limit the very bad, you most often limit the very good along with it, leaving you with the Very Mediocre. I'm not certain that this new (or any other, for that matter) moderation system will drive /. toward a least-common-denominator position, but I must say the thought has crossed my mind.
Ah, well. It was good while it lasted.
In combination with the "sort by score" or "filter by score" options (and to a lesser extent, even without using either of those), it is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. People will see mostly posts which "conform" to the /. ethos, whatever that winds up being. Seeing them, other posters will tend, even unconsciously, to adopt that ethos. They will learn what characteristics cause a post to get a higher score. And so on.
It works for moderators, too. People who qualify are those who have adjusted their behavior (again, quite possibly without being conscious of it) to fit the /. norm. People who don't qualify will tend to be less interested, and thus less likely to participate in any way. They'll go read Salon or something instead.
The end result, I believe, is a smaller, less diverse community. Another, less pejorative way to characterize it is more tightly focused, more unified, and probably more peaceful and coherent. If that's what we want, this is how to get it.
That's one of those charming sayings that sound as if they ought to mean something, but really don't. Though I do often feel like wiping my ass with most of the memos that come to my desk!
I found the articles to be almost uniformly stuffy, pretentious, and extremely content-poor. I believe the editorial guidelines must specify that neo-kitschy, faux-New-Yorker style. because I cannot believe it was by accident. It's aimed at somebody's sensibilities besides mine.
This is not to say that they didn't have the occasional thought-provoking, sometimes almost penetrating articles, but the bulk of them were either painfully self-conscious or stupefyingly boring. And "occasionally good" does not earn you a ticket onto my browser's startup page. When they announced that they were following through with their plan to go for-pay, I had a good four-minute laugh, dismissed them as hopeless, and got on with my life.
When they recently gave up the subscription thing as a bad job, I actually took the time to visit them once again. Not surprisingly, nothing had changed.
Slate--they can keep it. You say "can anybody wonder". I know I don't have any further questions!
Couldn't have been done on purpose, could it? Heh.
- It has a good standard way to do animation--that's the vaporware known as MNG, right?
- It is fully and correctly supported by the Big Two browsers; this would include full alpha blending, for backgrounds as well as inlines. It would be A Good Thing to ensure that Mozilla does this.
I've also noted that PNG can be quite a lot larger than GIF for certain things, like those awful transparent spacer images, and certain small things like flat two-color text images such as those used occasionally as buttons or labels. Not the most important shortcoming, but a few of those can add up quickly.Until then, PNG will remain a turbo-studly curiosity, used mostly in niche applications.
I still love it, however, and want it to succeed.