I think the main issue with "keyword" metatags is that they're completely unreliable for search engine use, since it's easy to abuse them by stuffing them with terms that users search for that aren't necessarily related to the content of your page. Fine, I think that's obvious. Nobody's really going to argue that one.
The "description" metatag is still EXTREMELY useful, though. Even if a search engine doesn't use the metatags for ranking purposes, it can still use the "description" metatag to display a nice human-readable summary of the page. Often search engines just display the first N characters of text on the page and use that for a summary, which usually is not a good or readable summary for the site.
The problem with Google is that it seems to randomly use the "Description" metatag sometimes, but not others. Here's an example. Notice how the second "Anime Expo 2002 at Bootyproject" link has a nice readable summary under it, but the first one doesn't. (It may have changed between the time I posted it and the time you view it, who knows) Which makes no sense to me, because if you look at the source for each of the two pages, the metatag information is identical for both pages. I don't get it, I dunno if Google's just a little broken in that respect, or if I screwed something up. Sorry to pimp my own site there... it's just an example I'm obviously quite familiar with.:P
But anyway, when search engines and authors use the description metatag properly (ie, the search engine doesn't use it for ranking, and the author takes the time to write a nice summary), it's pretty nice.
Of course, ASCI White (or, even better, Japan's new super computer) could probably crack RC5-64 in a matter of hours.
According to D.Net's press release, the peak rate achieved by D.Net on this effort was equivalent to ~46,000 2GHZ Athlon XP's working in tandem. Can even ASCI White or Japan's supercomputer match this sort of processing power?
I'll admit that the RC5-64 project had very little practical use, but it was a heck of a proof-of-concept in terms of people's willingness to donate vast amounts of CPU time and the staggering amount of otherwise-wasted computing power that's out there and waiting to be utilized.
I'd stuck with D.Net over the years even as more useful distributed applications cropped up, out of some sort of loyalty since I'd already invested so much (CPU) time in it. Now, I think I'll pick a more "useful" application like protein folding or something to occupy my spare cycles...
This Will Make More and More People Switch...
on
DRM: How To Boil A Frog
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
To operating systems that don't support this kind of bullshit.
I've been using DOS/Windows ever since 1992 or so when I was 12. Before that I used Apple II's. Right now I'm using Win2K because like a lot of people I've just sort of followed the Microsoft upgrade path since then. Windows has done what I've needed it to do, I feel comfortable with it, and I've never had to pay for it, so I've never been forced out of my comfort zone with it.
I've just never seen a big enough payoff to switch to another operating system. I'm a professional computer programmer, I build my own boxes, and I've even installed Linux on a couple of them, so it's not like there's technical hurdles to running another OS.
The point is that Windows has been Good Enough (tm) for me, and that there are literally millions and millions of people who continue to use Windows for just the reasons I outlined.
But now, as Windows gets more and more shitty baggage like this, it stops being good enough. It's actively becoming an obstacle to the things I want to do. I've already given up on PC gaming, because the technical troubles are such bullshit that I'd rather play on a console. The last two games I bought recommended that I "buy a new CDROM drive" as a solution to my problems running the game due to their copy-protection schemes. And this is on top of the typical driver-related and other compatibility issues that have plagued PC gaming since Day One.
Now, Microsoft is trying to pollute the user experience even further with this DRM stuff. It turns me off even more. I think Win2K is the last version of Windows I'll be using. Linux and/or OSX is next for me. It's funny, proponents and developers of non-Windows OS's have been frantically trying to promote and improve their products in order to get users to switch... but the real key for a lot of people might be once Microsoft actively starts taking *away* things that users take for granted.
this might be offtopic, but why can't the RAM on graphics cards be modular, like the stuff we stick in computers?
Another reason in addition to the ones posted by other users... when are you going to upgrade the memory on your graphics card? Perhaps 12 months after you bought it? Two years?
--If you're going to stay close the cutting edge in PC graphics, you'd be buying a new card at the point. Considering the pace at which PC graphics card technology increases, your card would be fairly dated by that point anyway and you'd be looking at another one.
--If you were going to buy the extra video memory fairly soon after purchasing your card when it's still bleeding-edge, why not buy a card with that much RAM in the first place?
Of course, other posters have noted lots of good reasons as well such as the profits made by board/chip manufacturers on the extra RAM, physical RAM connection issues, etc, etc.
I want uncompressed, 2 or more channels of 48 Kbps 16-bit PCM, or nothing
This isn't a feasible option- at least not without giving up a lot of the audio options that make DVD's cool.
A DVD holds about 8GB of data, correct? Uncompressed stereo PCM takes roughly 600MB an hour. For a two hour movie, that's 1.2GB.
One of the big selling points of DVD's is obviously the 5.1 surround sound. If you add another 4 channels of uncompressed sound on top of the stereo PCM, you could be talking 3.6GB of data just for ONE audio track. Already, this is cutting WAY into the space available for the video.
Another huge selling point of DVD's is multiple audio tracks for different languages and director's commentary and such. Two uncompressed 5.1 audio tracks would consume nearly the entire DVD.
I suppose that once the technology becomes available, perhaps they'll come up with a format based on optical media with a raw capacity much higher than DVD, like maybe 50GB. Then your wishes will become feasible.
I wouldn't hold my breath for such a standard, though- an increase in output quality would simply not be noticeable on the AV setups found in 99.9% of homes today.
Once there's an HDTV in nearly every house, you may see enough consumer demand for a format offering higher-fidelity than DVD. But not before.
The person is talking about going from master->ogg resulting in an ogg a lot of people thought sounded a lot nicer than the CD.
Would encoding an Ogg from the master sound subjectively better than the original? Perhaps. These tests certainly suggest it might.
Would it be closer to the original? No, because a lot more information is discarded in lossy Ogg compression than during a plain-Jane downsmaple from the master recording to CD-quality 44.1/16 audio.
# There is no such thing as the "original", the material on CD is also a digitalized, sampled version of the real thing. A 256kbps ogg created with a higher sampling rate would probably be closer to the real "original" than what is currently shipped on CD.
Absolutely false. Some information is lost when converting to the CD master. More information is lost when converting from the CD audio --> OGG. How could the OGG possibly be closer to the original than the CD? By definitiion, no matter what bit rate it's encoded at it contains less information than the CD audio.
Well, I'm speaking from a scientific standpoint, anyway. I suppose that various compression schemes could result in a sound which is artificially "crisper" at certain frequencies, causing it to be more pleasing to listeners' ears than the CD audio.
That's possible, I suppose, but that's sort of "faking it". Because the artificially-induced "crispness" or whatever is really an even-great deviation from the original.
Push some of the songs via P2P. Better yet, release them under a license that ALLOWS redistribution so long as credit is given to your band. The idea is to push your band and get it greater exposure.
But nobody, or next to nobody, will bother to download them over P2P if they don't know who the band is.
It's fine to allow your music to be traded over P2P, but you'd have to get the word out about the band FIRST... yep, right back to his original question!
If you do make them available over P2P (not like you really have a choice) you might consider embedding your URL in the ID3 tags. I believe Id3 v2 has a URL field. Also I noticed that appending a ~ in front of the URL forces Winamp to open a minibrowser window to that URL. It's been a while since i've played with that, so I'm not sure if other mp3 players work that way, or if Winamp even still works that way... it always seemed a bit odd, arbitrary, and undocumented to me. Also it's potentially annoying for users, which is why I say you *might* consider it. I dunno if it's worth it.:P
I don't think anything I said was "rude". Given the vast number of repeated stories, and the fact that I went out of my way to say "I like Slashdot, I like cowboyNeal", I don't feel my remarks were rude at all.
I suppose it's a bit much to ask, considering that most people don't even read the link before posting, but if you'd take a moment to read my posting history you'd see that I've refrained from Slashdot-bashing in the 5 years or so I've been posting.
I like how the editors instantly mod down any posts complaining about duplicate posts. Nice abuse of power, guys... I guess criticism hurts most when it's true.
I'm 26 now. Last year, my girlfriend's cute and popular-seeming 14-year-old-ish cousin thought I was a nerd because I didn't use any instant messenger stuff.
In high school, when I *did* use that stuff, kids thought I was nerdy BECAUSE I used that stuff!
I don't get it. If you like Outlook Express (I have no idea why, but okay...) then what's stopping you from using OE for a mail client, and Opera for your browser? You even said you didn't care if it was integrated into the browser or a separate program!
On a related note, I've found the mail client in Mozilla to be *extremely* nice. Nice address book capability, and unlike Opera you can compose HTML-formatted email. Also, you can view all of your mailboxes and subfolders at once in sort of a tree-view (like OE, basically), as opposed to clicking through a drop-down list in Opera's mail client. Which is a pain when you've got 7-8 mail accounts.
Also, Mozilla's mail client has some filtering rules that I think are more on a par with Outlook's capabilities than OE's (disclaimer: i haven't used OE much since OE4).
I know you're mostly poking fun, but living in a city and walking/using public transportation produces much less pollution than living outside of a city and driving everywhere.
Also, buying that latte as opposed to making it yourself is also more environmentally sound, since they presumably buy things in bulk at the coffee shop. This may be negated somewhat if they serve it to you in a DISPOSABLE cup, but I don't buy coffee from places like that.:)
Otherwise the names are just based on the perceptions of whoever names the sizes.
But then, by your logic, if a store sells 40-oz, 60-oz, and 100-oz drinks, then they should call the 40-oz drink "small".
Surely that is illogical! A 40-oz drink is fucking huge yet you'd insist it be called "small" in this case. That is certainly more of a misrepresentation than calling a 16-oz drink "medium".
Also, by your logic, if I walk into a clothing store for "big and tall" men, the shirts should be labeled S, M, and L instead of XXL, XXXL, and XXXXL. I mean, it doesn't make sense to label the smallest shirt XXL, does it?
Yes, we really are stupid enough that we accept them calling the smallest size on the menu "medium", in blatant contradiction of all that is sensible and logical in the world
Now, now, I hate marketing brainwash-speak too. But what you're railing against seems almost logical to me... or maybe I'm just brainwashed. Just because it's the smallest one on the menu doesn't mean it's actually small.
If the smallest size is 16oz, which seems to be the trend at many places, that's not really "small" in my book. I think "medium" is an apt description for that. "Small" to me would indicate like 10oz. or less.
Now, if they called an 8 or 10oz. drink "medium" in order to try and trick you into thinking it was larger than it actually was... now that I'd have a problem with.
The DVD gets interploted when it's scaled up so I do get better quality at a higer res.(ok the source is no better quality!)
No, you don't get better quality. It's just... bigger. 500 lines of resolution are 500 lines of resolution whether each line is 1 micron or 1 kilometer thick.
I could wathch a DVD on my PC monitor at 1600x 1200 (far better than HDTV) but It looks fine on
my crap old TV
You're not gettng it. Well, it doesn't matter much if you watch a DVD on your crap old TV, or your monitor at 1600x1200, or ever 4000x3000 for that matter. The source material (DVD) only has about ~500 lines of resolution. So increasing the resolution on your monitor beyond 500 lines or so won't have any affect on the visual quality on the DVD you're watching.
This new standard, though, supports many more lines of resolution (~1000 if i'm correct). So DVD's in this new format WILL look better on HDTV's and hires computer monitors and such....
Slashdot Mirror
I think the main issue with "keyword" metatags is that they're completely unreliable for search engine use, since it's easy to abuse them by stuffing them with terms that users search for that aren't necessarily related to the content of your page. Fine, I think that's obvious. Nobody's really going to argue that one.
:P
The "description" metatag is still EXTREMELY useful, though. Even if a search engine doesn't use the metatags for ranking purposes, it can still use the "description" metatag to display a nice human-readable summary of the page. Often search engines just display the first N characters of text on the page and use that for a summary, which usually is not a good or readable summary for the site.
The problem with Google is that it seems to randomly use the "Description" metatag sometimes, but not others. Here's an example. Notice how the second "Anime Expo 2002 at Bootyproject" link has a nice readable summary under it, but the first one doesn't. (It may have changed between the time I posted it and the time you view it, who knows) Which makes no sense to me, because if you look at the source for each of the two pages, the metatag information is identical for both pages. I don't get it, I dunno if Google's just a little broken in that respect, or if I screwed something up. Sorry to pimp my own site there... it's just an example I'm obviously quite familiar with.
But anyway, when search engines and authors use the description metatag properly (ie, the search engine doesn't use it for ranking, and the author takes the time to write a nice summary), it's pretty nice.
Of course, ASCI White (or, even better, Japan's new super computer) could probably crack RC5-64 in a matter of hours.
According to D.Net's press release, the peak rate achieved by D.Net on this effort was equivalent to ~46,000 2GHZ Athlon XP's working in tandem. Can even ASCI White or Japan's supercomputer match this sort of processing power?
I'll admit that the RC5-64 project had very little practical use, but it was a heck of a proof-of-concept in terms of people's willingness to donate vast amounts of CPU time and the staggering amount of otherwise-wasted computing power that's out there and waiting to be utilized.
I'd stuck with D.Net over the years even as more useful distributed applications cropped up, out of some sort of loyalty since I'd already invested so much (CPU) time in it. Now, I think I'll pick a more "useful" application like protein folding or something to occupy my spare cycles...
To operating systems that don't support this kind of bullshit.
I've been using DOS/Windows ever since 1992 or so when I was 12. Before that I used Apple II's. Right now I'm using Win2K because like a lot of people I've just sort of followed the Microsoft upgrade path since then. Windows has done what I've needed it to do, I feel comfortable with it, and I've never had to pay for it, so I've never been forced out of my comfort zone with it.
I've just never seen a big enough payoff to switch to another operating system. I'm a professional computer programmer, I build my own boxes, and I've even installed Linux on a couple of them, so it's not like there's technical hurdles to running another OS.
The point is that Windows has been Good Enough (tm) for me, and that there are literally millions and millions of people who continue to use Windows for just the reasons I outlined.
But now, as Windows gets more and more shitty baggage like this, it stops being good enough. It's actively becoming an obstacle to the things I want to do. I've already given up on PC gaming, because the technical troubles are such bullshit that I'd rather play on a console. The last two games I bought recommended that I "buy a new CDROM drive" as a solution to my problems running the game due to their copy-protection schemes. And this is on top of the typical driver-related and other compatibility issues that have plagued PC gaming since Day One.
Now, Microsoft is trying to pollute the user experience even further with this DRM stuff. It turns me off even more. I think Win2K is the last version of Windows I'll be using. Linux and/or OSX is next for me. It's funny, proponents and developers of non-Windows OS's have been frantically trying to promote and improve their products in order to get users to switch... but the real key for a lot of people might be once Microsoft actively starts taking *away* things that users take for granted.
this might be offtopic, but why can't the RAM on graphics cards be modular, like the stuff we stick in computers?
Another reason in addition to the ones posted by other users... when are you going to upgrade the memory on your graphics card? Perhaps 12 months after you bought it? Two years?
--If you're going to stay close the cutting edge in PC graphics, you'd be buying a new card at the point. Considering the pace at which PC graphics card technology increases, your card would be fairly dated by that point anyway and you'd be looking at another one.
--If you were going to buy the extra video memory fairly soon after purchasing your card when it's still bleeding-edge, why not buy a card with that much RAM in the first place?
Of course, other posters have noted lots of good reasons as well such as the profits made by board/chip manufacturers on the extra RAM, physical RAM connection issues, etc, etc.
I'm sure the next 1,000,000 posts will point this out. :-)
...buy a pre-karma'd Slashdot account with a +1 posting bonus?
..to have MY car dropped out of the sky, but I'm pretty sure I'd pay a buck or two to see what it looks like when somebody ELSE's car is dropped!
I think that you're thinking of the Atari Lynx handheld, not the Jaguar. The Jaguar was a console. And the Sega you're thinking of is the Game Gear.
:-P
I can see why you're not working in the game retail business anymore!
I want uncompressed, 2 or more channels of 48 Kbps 16-bit PCM, or nothing
This isn't a feasible option- at least not without giving up a lot of the audio options that make DVD's cool.
A DVD holds about 8GB of data, correct? Uncompressed stereo PCM takes roughly 600MB an hour. For a two hour movie, that's 1.2GB.
One of the big selling points of DVD's is obviously the 5.1 surround sound. If you add another 4 channels of uncompressed sound on top of the stereo PCM, you could be talking 3.6GB of data just for ONE audio track. Already, this is cutting WAY into the space available for the video.
Another huge selling point of DVD's is multiple audio tracks for different languages and director's commentary and such. Two uncompressed 5.1 audio tracks would consume nearly the entire DVD.
I suppose that once the technology becomes available, perhaps they'll come up with a format based on optical media with a raw capacity much higher than DVD, like maybe 50GB. Then your wishes will become feasible.
I wouldn't hold my breath for such a standard, though- an increase in output quality would simply not be noticeable on the AV setups found in 99.9% of homes today.
Once there's an HDTV in nearly every house, you may see enough consumer demand for a format offering higher-fidelity than DVD. But not before.
The person is talking about going from master->ogg resulting in an ogg a lot of people thought sounded a lot nicer than the CD.
Would encoding an Ogg from the master sound subjectively better than the original? Perhaps. These tests certainly suggest it might.
Would it be closer to the original? No, because a lot more information is discarded in lossy Ogg compression than during a plain-Jane downsmaple from the master recording to CD-quality 44.1/16 audio.
# There is no such thing as the "original", the material on CD is also a digitalized, sampled version of the real thing. A 256kbps ogg created with a higher sampling rate would probably be closer to the real "original" than what is currently shipped on CD.
Absolutely false. Some information is lost when converting to the CD master. More information is lost when converting from the CD audio --> OGG. How could the OGG possibly be closer to the original than the CD? By definitiion, no matter what bit rate it's encoded at it contains less information than the CD audio.
Well, I'm speaking from a scientific standpoint, anyway. I suppose that various compression schemes could result in a sound which is artificially "crisper" at certain frequencies, causing it to be more pleasing to listeners' ears than the CD audio.
That's possible, I suppose, but that's sort of "faking it". Because the artificially-induced "crispness" or whatever is really an even-great deviation from the original.
Push some of the songs via P2P. Better yet, release them under a license that ALLOWS redistribution so long as credit is given to your band. The idea is to push your band and get it greater exposure.
:P
But nobody, or next to nobody, will bother to download them over P2P if they don't know who the band is.
It's fine to allow your music to be traded over P2P, but you'd have to get the word out about the band FIRST... yep, right back to his original question!
If you do make them available over P2P (not like you really have a choice) you might consider embedding your URL in the ID3 tags. I believe Id3 v2 has a URL field. Also I noticed that appending a ~ in front of the URL forces Winamp to open a minibrowser window to that URL. It's been a while since i've played with that, so I'm not sure if other mp3 players work that way, or if Winamp even still works that way... it always seemed a bit odd, arbitrary, and undocumented to me. Also it's potentially annoying for users, which is why I say you *might* consider it. I dunno if it's worth it.
I don't think anything I said was "rude". Given the vast number of repeated stories, and the fact that I went out of my way to say "I like Slashdot, I like cowboyNeal", I don't feel my remarks were rude at all.
I suppose it's a bit much to ask, considering that most people don't even read the link before posting, but if you'd take a moment to read my posting history you'd see that I've refrained from Slashdot-bashing in the 5 years or so I've been posting.
I like how the editors instantly mod down any posts complaining about duplicate posts. Nice abuse of power, guys... I guess criticism hurts most when it's true.
...and this DUPLICATE STORY was the first result!
seriously, the editors have stopped trying. i mean i like Slashdot, i like CowboyNeal, but they've stopped trying.
I'm 26 now. Last year, my girlfriend's cute and popular-seeming 14-year-old-ish cousin thought I was a nerd because I didn't use any instant messenger stuff.
In high school, when I *did* use that stuff, kids thought I was nerdy BECAUSE I used that stuff!
Man, I can't win!
Hahaha okay, I misunderstood. Glad you're having fun with Mozilla. Hope it works out for you! :)
I don't get it. If you like Outlook Express (I have no idea why, but okay...) then what's stopping you from using OE for a mail client, and Opera for your browser? You even said you didn't care if it was integrated into the browser or a separate program!
On a related note, I've found the mail client in Mozilla to be *extremely* nice. Nice address book capability, and unlike Opera you can compose HTML-formatted email. Also, you can view all of your mailboxes and subfolders at once in sort of a tree-view (like OE, basically), as opposed to clicking through a drop-down list in Opera's mail client. Which is a pain when you've got 7-8 mail accounts.
Also, Mozilla's mail client has some filtering rules that I think are more on a par with Outlook's capabilities than OE's (disclaimer: i haven't used OE much since OE4).
With QuickLaunch enabled, Mozilla launches just as fast as IE. Sure, it "cheats" and preloads a bunch of stuff... but that's what IE does anyway. :)
I know you're mostly poking fun, but living in a city and walking/using public transportation produces much less pollution than living outside of a city and driving everywhere.
:)
Also, buying that latte as opposed to making it yourself is also more environmentally sound, since they presumably buy things in bulk at the coffee shop. This may be negated somewhat if they serve it to you in a DISPOSABLE cup, but I don't buy coffee from places like that.
The pr0n-viewing people could just fight back. But I don't want to think about what they'd be spraying the robots with! YUCK!
Otherwise the names are just based on the perceptions of whoever names the sizes.
But then, by your logic, if a store sells 40-oz, 60-oz, and 100-oz drinks, then they should call the 40-oz drink "small".
Surely that is illogical! A 40-oz drink is fucking huge yet you'd insist it be called "small" in this case. That is certainly more of a misrepresentation than calling a 16-oz drink "medium".
Also, by your logic, if I walk into a clothing store for "big and tall" men, the shirts should be labeled S, M, and L instead of XXL, XXXL, and XXXXL. I mean, it doesn't make sense to label the smallest shirt XXL, does it?
Yes, we really are stupid enough that we accept them calling the smallest size on the menu "medium", in blatant contradiction of all that is sensible and logical in the world
Now, now, I hate marketing brainwash-speak too. But what you're railing against seems almost logical to me... or maybe I'm just brainwashed. Just because it's the smallest one on the menu doesn't mean it's actually small.
If the smallest size is 16oz, which seems to be the trend at many places, that's not really "small" in my book. I think "medium" is an apt description for that. "Small" to me would indicate like 10oz. or less.
Now, if they called an 8 or 10oz. drink "medium" in order to try and trick you into thinking it was larger than it actually was... now that I'd have a problem with.
The DVD gets interploted when it's scaled up so I do get better quality at a higer res.(ok the source is no better quality!)
No, you don't get better quality. It's just... bigger. 500 lines of resolution are 500 lines of resolution whether each line is 1 micron or 1 kilometer thick.
I could wathch a DVD on my PC monitor at 1600x 1200 (far better than HDTV) but It looks fine on my crap old TV
You're not gettng it. Well, it doesn't matter much if you watch a DVD on your crap old TV, or your monitor at 1600x1200, or ever 4000x3000 for that matter. The source material (DVD) only has about ~500 lines of resolution. So increasing the resolution on your monitor beyond 500 lines or so won't have any affect on the visual quality on the DVD you're watching.
This new standard, though, supports many more lines of resolution (~1000 if i'm correct). So DVD's in this new format WILL look better on HDTV's and hires computer monitors and such....