Its not unusual in the north for homeless people to commit small crimes during the Fall so they can go to jail for the winter. The police really hate Fall.
go for walks? you could get hit by a car, that's risky. Don't go for walks? Not exercising is dangerous. Spend time outside? you could get skin cancer, not my problem. Don't spend time outside? You're not getting Vitamin D or enough activity, you'll probably have a heart attack.
Basically if you don't live exactly the way that i do, and make all the same judgement calls i do, you're clearly a crazy risk-taker or lazy bum who caused their own problems. My illness, however, is just bad luck.
It must be tough to live your whole life worrying that someone, somewhere is having something good happen that they didn't "deserve". And of course if something bad happens, fuck that person, they obviously did deserve it. got cancer? Fuck you, here's a free bullet, grandma. Go suck some dick in a back alley if you want chemotherapy. Also, we need tort reform so that grandma can't sue the company that told her Asbestos was safe to eat in her breakfast cereal every morning for 30 years even though they had proof it was deadly. I don't want ambulance chasers affecting my 401k.
Fuck you sick people, if you weren't such lazy and immoral people you'd be healthy and rich like me!
LOL. Your plan for health care reform in America is very straightforward, I'll give you that!
1) Be born to middle class or upper class parents. if your parents don't have insurance, you should have picked a wealthier vagina. 2) Get a job from a company that provides excellent health care. If you are ever fired, laid off, or outsourced, kill yourself. Ignore the fact that fewer companies provide health insurance these days, and that major employers like Wal*Mart will be sure to schedule your work hours so that you never qualify. 3) When you are old, the government will suddenly become an acceptable solution. But not before then, because if you're taking care of old people it's compassion. Taking care of young people is communism.
This story is clearly a troll, thank you for pointing it out. The man obviously has health insurance, as you have so aptly proven -- everyone in America does! He must be wanting to go to jail for the lulz.
You do not get to pound your fist about free speech and then deny it on your own website.
Why not?
I'm all in favor of free speech, and the KKK should be able to march down main street just as frequently as the Shriners do. The government shouldn't be in the business of telling us what is acceptable to march for. But if you start spouting racist stuff on my web page or in my living room, I'm going to kick your ass out.
I've built and worked on several Drupal sites, and it is definitely a love/hate relationship. It is a system built by programmers, for programmers, with some site building stuff tacked on. It has gotten better over the years, but it still feels a lot like a college programming project that grew too big. There's lots of theoretical greatness to it, while it seems to have been built by people who never actually built a real web site before. Basic things like adding images, or trying to change layouts has historically been a huge PITA. But every site gets a slogan and primary/secondary menus. WTF?
"IT people are usually of higher than average IQ... " You obviously don't understand how averages work.
How so? Are you claiming that any given set will always be statistically representative of any sets it is a member of? If you can show that is the case, you'll win a Nobel prize in Mathematics.
Has it ever occurred to you or Jason that some of those people are perfectly proud of and content with who they are, but they recognize their society/company/family/neighborhood isn't quite so forgiving? It isn't Jason's or your decision to make to "out" someone simply because you think it would serve some greater theoretical sociological purpose.
Of course, this is all post-hoc justification. Jason admitted from day one he was doing it all for the LULZ. He didn't care who he hurt or how, as long as he could entertain himself, that was all that mattered. Nobody else's feelings were important, their lives weren't real, the rest of the world only existed insofar as it amused him.
Of course it can be amusing to you, too, because it requires effort to empathize with complete strangers, and it would require you to accept that someone you judged to be okay is actually quite rotten at the core and would happily harm you or your loved ones to amuse himself. Given the choice between someone you know and the theoretical "other people" hurt by him, of course you'll rationalize to yourself that really what happened was perfectly acceptable under the circumstances (circumstances he created, of course), and if not, they deserved it based on the "kind of people" they are (the kind of people who would seek out dozens of strangers to harm and then laugh about their pain?).
He just doesn't care to pander to people's feelings or their frequently false sense of security. When you know him and expect it, it's amusing.
There's a significant difference between not pandering to other people's feelings and actively seeking to harm other people.
I'm sure Ted Bundy was capable of grilling up delicious burgers, too -- most sociopaths are very charming precisely because they know all the rules of society and feel no remorse at using those rules to manipulate other people for their own amusement.
Who are you to question that? You don't know him. That's just a whole bunch of other fallacies.
We know of his actions, which are morally reprehensible by most people's sense of decency. Judging someone by their actions is perfectly logical, indeed the only logical way to judge someone and predict their future behavior. The guy may be lovely to his mother and adore puppies, but the fact that he would go out of his way to humiliate complete strangers is all I need to know about him to decide he's a jerk at his core, regardless of how "cool" he is the other 99.999% of the time.
It's like the old rule of thumb that you don't learn anything by seeing how somebody treats their peers or superiors -- see how they treat waitstaff and other people who don't have equal power and you'll see the real content of their character.
Then what you need is rdiff-backup, works like rsync except it keeps older copies stored as diffs.
When it works, that it. The problem with rdiff-backup is that ultimately it's a massive script with no error-checking, and if anything ever goes wrong (including just the network having difficulty), you have to "fix" your backup, and then start over again. Of course the process of fixing usually takes twice or three times as long as actually performing the backup, so you can wind up with a backup that's impossible to continue since you're spending more time working around the limitations of the script than you are actually transferring backup data.
This is a field that really needs a decent commercial piece of software with a full-time developer.
Hrm, I'm not sure why Apple would see Vorbis as "competition", since they don't make any money off of codecs or particularly care about them past the point of supporting the ones customers expect. they don't advertise comparisons against Vorbis because nobody outside of internet forums knows what Vorbis is. Everyone knows MP3 and CDs, so they compare to that in advertising. Listening tests at Hydrogenaudio and elsewhere generally conclude that all the next-gen codecs are equivalent in terms of quality.
I also don't see that Apple has ever particularly advertised any of their stuff as "sounds the best", because again, that isn't the market they're targeting. Audiophiles have always been disappointed in Apple's hardware offerings, and it hasn't hurt Apple in the market at all. For portable players, sound quality is generally not the #1 factor people care about.
I think iTunes still defaults to 128kbps CBR, which is hardly great quality no matter what codec, but it is fast and small and that means convenient for the user to rip CDs. It's the same thing with the iTunes "sound check" feature, which does audio normalization -- all it does is peak normalization because that's fast. If they made it do replaygain calculations by default, everyone would think their computer was broken because it would take ten times as long to process a file, even though it would sound better in the end.
At the end of the day, people who love Vorbis are welcome to feel like a persecuted minority, but they aren't. there's no conspiracy to keep their format oppressed, the sad truth is just that nobody cares about it. Sure, it may show up in lots of interesting places, and if I were building a digital audio device of some sort I'd probably use it too, so I wouldn't have to pay the MPEG licensing fees. But Apple has to pay those fees anyways, they have no real reason to care about Vorbis one way or the other until it gains market share in digital distribution. For example, if Amazon were to start selling all their music downloads in Vorbis by default, I'd bet Apple would add support very quickly.
Ogg vorbis is as good as AAC. They couldn't have said "Our codec is best" if they also shipped ogg vorbis.
Except that AAC isn't "their codec", it's just the current MPEG audio codec. The patent and legal issues are up front with it, and everyone else in the computer and audio industries signed on board to make AAC files work, so there's little fear (in the long run) that AAC files created by a given application won't be playable in the future.
Nobody is claiming Apple shouldn't or couldn't support Vorbis/Theora, just that it takes work to do (there is no "checkbox" they're turning off out of spite when they compile everything), and they probably have better things to do with their limited developer resources than support the few people on Earth who care about the political aspect of multimedia codecs.
I was thinking more along the lines of disproving the original parent's point about Apple allowing third-party software to interface with their systems.
They do allow third-parties to integrate with the software they sell, and even modify the code to the vast majority of it. But they don't sell iTunes Music Store IP connections as a service, they only sell the content from the store.
It's like complaining that your supermarket won't let you buy food off the back of their delivery truck.
Of course what Steve Jobs says goes, if he wants the whole company to start making automotive air filters tomorrow, the shareholders would probably trust him.
But your claim that ANY feature that is integrated into an OS, a major application distributed on two different OSes, and several very different pieces of hardware, could be added in a few minutes "with a checkbox" is absurd.
The community is NOT supporting codecs on OS X and Windows and iPods. Sure, some community-released OS X Quicktime plugins have been made and have different levels of functionality depending on which codec you're talking about, but that's a far cry from the 100% feature-complete integration that a codec would need to have to ship as part of iTunes and on the hardware. So there is no "checkbox" to make it happen -- nobody has released 100% drop-in functionality. You can play back some files, but the metadata is a complete mystery to iTunes, which means someone somewhere in Apple is going to have to sit down and write code to process that metadata and deal with any data collisons from different field definitions, as well as figure out how to deal with any quirks or bugs this other container format has (does it do double-byte character fields? How do we deal with kanji characters for our customers in the far east if the container format doesn't support it? Do we just rip the Ogg container off the Vorbis data and replace it with a quicktime container? Won't that cause all sorts of conspiracy theories about us trying to "lock in" customers?)
And even if some guy did release an open source 100% functional drop-in codec, what happens if that guy drops dead of a heart attack tomorrow? Apple has to support that codec for years and years if they ship it today. You can wave your hands and point at "the community" all you want, but at the end of the day it is Apple who is responsible for documenting and supporting the code they ship. If they add a feature, it has to work on both OSes, on all their hardware devices, and any new software or hardware they develop for years to come, or customers will be upset that their files don't work. They can't tell customers to call Richard Stallman if their iPod3D isn't playing back Vorbis files any more, they have to take that call and spend the money to solve the problme.
There's training and certification from Apple (run by third parties) that Apple Authorized Service Providers go through before they can work on hardware. Apple Geniuses and higher-level tech support people are generally certified.
I actually just checked their site since I was curious, and it looks like they've conglomerated all their certification into one big "Apple Hardware" certification now -- I remember it used to be broken down by hardware category.
And... What? Demand that Apple remove support for them? At that point, fine -- it took two hours to add support, it'll take maybe 20 minutes to remove support.
And sue for billions in back patent fees and penalties? That's how patent infringement works.
It's great if you work in an environment where you can personally make changes to running code in a few minutes and aren't expected to support any given feature or your code ever again, but that's not how major companies (good ones, at least) work.
Adding code means testing --testing that would NOT have been done if you hadn't added that code. Testing that is now more complicated for all the other code, because now if something is going wrong in the audio playback there are more places to look, more variable involved, and more mailing lists for the developers to keep up with -- you don't just "add support" for a OSS codec and then walk away, you have to MAINTAIN support for it over time, provide security fixes, add patches so the main codebase works well in your implementation, and adjust those patches as new code is added upstream.
Adding a new codec means documenting things for the other developers that wouldn't have been documented otherwise. It means interacting with the user interface people to figure out how to expose the feature to users, and the technical writers who provide help files for end users, as well as documentation for support agents. it means someone explaining to the marketing people what these features mean so they can advertise them properly.
Adding new code means working with database fields (we are dealing with a huge metadata database when talking about iTunes). It means mapping those fields correctly from other softwares' implementation of that metadata so it is read correctly, it means checking that backwards and forward compatibility of that metadata exists in all software you write and support.
It means the people you pay to answer phone calls for someone whose iPod isn't working now need to be trained on one more thing, they have to troubleshoot one more thing, and that means more time on the phones and more money spent on support.
Adding one more codec means that every feature you add to the playback application in the future now has to be added to that codec or your documentation and marketing (and legal liability) get a lot more complicated, and your users get disappointed more frequently. Simple things like gapless playback are handled very differently depending on the codec, so now your application has to have branches to handles those cases, and it takes longer to develop and test and document every future version of iTunes and the iPod firmware.
No feature takes "just a few hours" and can then be forgotten, not in the commercial software world.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not unusual in the north for homeless people to commit small crimes during the Fall so they can go to jail for the winter. The police really hate Fall.
go for walks? you could get hit by a car, that's risky. Don't go for walks? Not exercising is dangerous. Spend time outside? you could get skin cancer, not my problem. Don't spend time outside? You're not getting Vitamin D or enough activity, you'll probably have a heart attack.
Basically if you don't live exactly the way that i do, and make all the same judgement calls i do, you're clearly a crazy risk-taker or lazy bum who caused their own problems. My illness, however, is just bad luck.
It must be tough to live your whole life worrying that someone, somewhere is having something good happen that they didn't "deserve". And of course if something bad happens, fuck that person, they obviously did deserve it. got cancer? Fuck you, here's a free bullet, grandma. Go suck some dick in a back alley if you want chemotherapy. Also, we need tort reform so that grandma can't sue the company that told her Asbestos was safe to eat in her breakfast cereal every morning for 30 years even though they had proof it was deadly. I don't want ambulance chasers affecting my 401k.
Fuck you sick people, if you weren't such lazy and immoral people you'd be healthy and rich like me!
God bless America.
Sure, you pay for mine, I'll pay for yours. Average it out over 300 million people and you've got a large insurance pool.
LOL. Your plan for health care reform in America is very straightforward, I'll give you that!
1) Be born to middle class or upper class parents. if your parents don't have insurance, you should have picked a wealthier vagina.
2) Get a job from a company that provides excellent health care. If you are ever fired, laid off, or outsourced, kill yourself. Ignore the fact that fewer companies provide health insurance these days, and that major employers like Wal*Mart will be sure to schedule your work hours so that you never qualify.
3) When you are old, the government will suddenly become an acceptable solution. But not before then, because if you're taking care of old people it's compassion. Taking care of young people is communism.
This story is clearly a troll, thank you for pointing it out. The man obviously has health insurance, as you have so aptly proven -- everyone in America does! He must be wanting to go to jail for the lulz.
Oh, you would rather have two cars, cable, and a big house than health insurance? That is your choice, stop whining to me about it.
Also, if homeless people would stop buying gold dubloons and fine art, maybe they could buy a nice house, too!
Awesome! All you have to do is stay 20 forever, and never get sick and you're set.
You do not get to pound your fist about free speech and then deny it on your own website.
Why not?
I'm all in favor of free speech, and the KKK should be able to march down main street just as frequently as the Shriners do. The government shouldn't be in the business of telling us what is acceptable to march for. But if you start spouting racist stuff on my web page or in my living room, I'm going to kick your ass out.
I've built and worked on several Drupal sites, and it is definitely a love/hate relationship. It is a system built by programmers, for programmers, with some site building stuff tacked on. It has gotten better over the years, but it still feels a lot like a college programming project that grew too big. There's lots of theoretical greatness to it, while it seems to have been built by people who never actually built a real web site before. Basic things like adding images, or trying to change layouts has historically been a huge PITA. But every site gets a slogan and primary/secondary menus. WTF?
How so? Are you claiming that any given set will always be statistically representative of any sets it is a member of? If you can show that is the case, you'll win a Nobel prize in Mathematics.
People who are not liable for anything the corporation says on their behalf?
Has it ever occurred to you or Jason that some of those people are perfectly proud of and content with who they are, but they recognize their society/company/family/neighborhood isn't quite so forgiving? It isn't Jason's or your decision to make to "out" someone simply because you think it would serve some greater theoretical sociological purpose.
Of course, this is all post-hoc justification. Jason admitted from day one he was doing it all for the LULZ. He didn't care who he hurt or how, as long as he could entertain himself, that was all that mattered. Nobody else's feelings were important, their lives weren't real, the rest of the world only existed insofar as it amused him.
Of course it can be amusing to you, too, because it requires effort to empathize with complete strangers, and it would require you to accept that someone you judged to be okay is actually quite rotten at the core and would happily harm you or your loved ones to amuse himself. Given the choice between someone you know and the theoretical "other people" hurt by him, of course you'll rationalize to yourself that really what happened was perfectly acceptable under the circumstances (circumstances he created, of course), and if not, they deserved it based on the "kind of people" they are (the kind of people who would seek out dozens of strangers to harm and then laugh about their pain?).
There's a significant difference between not pandering to other people's feelings and actively seeking to harm other people.
I'm sure Ted Bundy was capable of grilling up delicious burgers, too -- most sociopaths are very charming precisely because they know all the rules of society and feel no remorse at using those rules to manipulate other people for their own amusement.
We know of his actions, which are morally reprehensible by most people's sense of decency. Judging someone by their actions is perfectly logical, indeed the only logical way to judge someone and predict their future behavior. The guy may be lovely to his mother and adore puppies, but the fact that he would go out of his way to humiliate complete strangers is all I need to know about him to decide he's a jerk at his core, regardless of how "cool" he is the other 99.999% of the time.
It's like the old rule of thumb that you don't learn anything by seeing how somebody treats their peers or superiors -- see how they treat waitstaff and other people who don't have equal power and you'll see the real content of their character.
When it works, that it. The problem with rdiff-backup is that ultimately it's a massive script with no error-checking, and if anything ever goes wrong (including just the network having difficulty), you have to "fix" your backup, and then start over again. Of course the process of fixing usually takes twice or three times as long as actually performing the backup, so you can wind up with a backup that's impossible to continue since you're spending more time working around the limitations of the script than you are actually transferring backup data.
This is a field that really needs a decent commercial piece of software with a full-time developer.
Hrm, I'm not sure why Apple would see Vorbis as "competition", since they don't make any money off of codecs or particularly care about them past the point of supporting the ones customers expect. they don't advertise comparisons against Vorbis because nobody outside of internet forums knows what Vorbis is. Everyone knows MP3 and CDs, so they compare to that in advertising. Listening tests at Hydrogenaudio and elsewhere generally conclude that all the next-gen codecs are equivalent in terms of quality.
I also don't see that Apple has ever particularly advertised any of their stuff as "sounds the best", because again, that isn't the market they're targeting. Audiophiles have always been disappointed in Apple's hardware offerings, and it hasn't hurt Apple in the market at all. For portable players, sound quality is generally not the #1 factor people care about.
I think iTunes still defaults to 128kbps CBR, which is hardly great quality no matter what codec, but it is fast and small and that means convenient for the user to rip CDs. It's the same thing with the iTunes "sound check" feature, which does audio normalization -- all it does is peak normalization because that's fast. If they made it do replaygain calculations by default, everyone would think their computer was broken because it would take ten times as long to process a file, even though it would sound better in the end.
At the end of the day, people who love Vorbis are welcome to feel like a persecuted minority, but they aren't. there's no conspiracy to keep their format oppressed, the sad truth is just that nobody cares about it. Sure, it may show up in lots of interesting places, and if I were building a digital audio device of some sort I'd probably use it too, so I wouldn't have to pay the MPEG licensing fees. But Apple has to pay those fees anyways, they have no real reason to care about Vorbis one way or the other until it gains market share in digital distribution. For example, if Amazon were to start selling all their music downloads in Vorbis by default, I'd bet Apple would add support very quickly.
I have no idea what your message is trying to say.
AAC is the default codec in iTunes, but somehow I don't think that's what you're trying to communicate.
Except that AAC isn't "their codec", it's just the current MPEG audio codec. The patent and legal issues are up front with it, and everyone else in the computer and audio industries signed on board to make AAC files work, so there's little fear (in the long run) that AAC files created by a given application won't be playable in the future.
Nobody is claiming Apple shouldn't or couldn't support Vorbis/Theora, just that it takes work to do (there is no "checkbox" they're turning off out of spite when they compile everything), and they probably have better things to do with their limited developer resources than support the few people on Earth who care about the political aspect of multimedia codecs.
They do allow third-parties to integrate with the software they sell, and even modify the code to the vast majority of it. But they don't sell iTunes Music Store IP connections as a service, they only sell the content from the store.
It's like complaining that your supermarket won't let you buy food off the back of their delivery truck.
Of course what Steve Jobs says goes, if he wants the whole company to start making automotive air filters tomorrow, the shareholders would probably trust him.
But your claim that ANY feature that is integrated into an OS, a major application distributed on two different OSes, and several very different pieces of hardware, could be added in a few minutes "with a checkbox" is absurd.
The community is NOT supporting codecs on OS X and Windows and iPods. Sure, some community-released OS X Quicktime plugins have been made and have different levels of functionality depending on which codec you're talking about, but that's a far cry from the 100% feature-complete integration that a codec would need to have to ship as part of iTunes and on the hardware. So there is no "checkbox" to make it happen -- nobody has released 100% drop-in functionality. You can play back some files, but the metadata is a complete mystery to iTunes, which means someone somewhere in Apple is going to have to sit down and write code to process that metadata and deal with any data collisons from different field definitions, as well as figure out how to deal with any quirks or bugs this other container format has (does it do double-byte character fields? How do we deal with kanji characters for our customers in the far east if the container format doesn't support it? Do we just rip the Ogg container off the Vorbis data and replace it with a quicktime container? Won't that cause all sorts of conspiracy theories about us trying to "lock in" customers?)
And even if some guy did release an open source 100% functional drop-in codec, what happens if that guy drops dead of a heart attack tomorrow? Apple has to support that codec for years and years if they ship it today. You can wave your hands and point at "the community" all you want, but at the end of the day it is Apple who is responsible for documenting and supporting the code they ship. If they add a feature, it has to work on both OSes, on all their hardware devices, and any new software or hardware they develop for years to come, or customers will be upset that their files don't work. They can't tell customers to call Richard Stallman if their iPod3D isn't playing back Vorbis files any more, they have to take that call and spend the money to solve the problme.
There's training and certification from Apple (run by third parties) that Apple Authorized Service Providers go through before they can work on hardware. Apple Geniuses and higher-level tech support people are generally certified.
I actually just checked their site since I was curious, and it looks like they've conglomerated all their certification into one big "Apple Hardware" certification now -- I remember it used to be broken down by hardware category.
http://training.apple.com/certification/acmt
So your idea of freedom is that other companies have to support software they didn't write?
And sue for billions in back patent fees and penalties? That's how patent infringement works.
It's great if you work in an environment where you can personally make changes to running code in a few minutes and aren't expected to support any given feature or your code ever again, but that's not how major companies (good ones, at least) work.
Adding code means testing --testing that would NOT have been done if you hadn't added that code. Testing that is now more complicated for all the other code, because now if something is going wrong in the audio playback there are more places to look, more variable involved, and more mailing lists for the developers to keep up with -- you don't just "add support" for a OSS codec and then walk away, you have to MAINTAIN support for it over time, provide security fixes, add patches so the main codebase works well in your implementation, and adjust those patches as new code is added upstream.
Adding a new codec means documenting things for the other developers that wouldn't have been documented otherwise. It means interacting with the user interface people to figure out how to expose the feature to users, and the technical writers who provide help files for end users, as well as documentation for support agents. it means someone explaining to the marketing people what these features mean so they can advertise them properly.
Adding new code means working with database fields (we are dealing with a huge metadata database when talking about iTunes). It means mapping those fields correctly from other softwares' implementation of that metadata so it is read correctly, it means checking that backwards and forward compatibility of that metadata exists in all software you write and support.
It means the people you pay to answer phone calls for someone whose iPod isn't working now need to be trained on one more thing, they have to troubleshoot one more thing, and that means more time on the phones and more money spent on support.
Adding one more codec means that every feature you add to the playback application in the future now has to be added to that codec or your documentation and marketing (and legal liability) get a lot more complicated, and your users get disappointed more frequently. Simple things like gapless playback are handled very differently depending on the codec, so now your application has to have branches to handles those cases, and it takes longer to develop and test and document every future version of iTunes and the iPod firmware.
No feature takes "just a few hours" and can then be forgotten, not in the commercial software world.
So your idea of freedom is that other people and companies have to do what you tell them to do?
Except get technical support, since the FSF is actively preventing people from seeing their local support person. Hence this article.