Unfortunately, that's not what he asked. I use the ogg DirectShow filters, and yes, WMP (9) can play oggs.
However, there are two problems:
1) it *always* asks me if I'm sure I want to play the file, no matter how many times I tell it to remember that I said yes 2) oggs won't show up in the playlists or media library
It was that second point that the OP was asking about, I think.
Imperial College? I graduated with a Physics degree from there in '97, then finally left after quitting a PhD in Plasma Physics in '99.
Thinking about it, one of our lecturers was killed crossing the road just outside *on a zebrea crossing* when he was hit by a car. Fucking shame, he was a damn good lecturer and a really nice guy.
I've probably been lucky with respect to not seeing too many accidents; I lived near Gloucester Road for a year, then two years in Clapham Junction, followed by 2 in Turnpike Lane, 1 in Clapton, then Elm Park (Essex, Zone 6) til now. Mind you, I don't drive or cycle, so the majority of my travelling is done by Tube.
Incidentally, the siteing of the cameras is also illegal under the CCTV extensions to the data protection act. But that's okay, they're the government.
So, make a complaint to the relevant authorities. If that gets you nowhere, escalate it. If you still have no luck after going right up to the top of the chain, contact the press and your local MP.
Chances are whoever actually decided where the cameras should go didn't know the rules, but somewhere up the chain, someone will. Speak to them, it's their *job* to care.
Whereabouts did you live? I've lived in London for about 10 years, in various areas, studying and working in Central London the whole time, and I've seen maybe one accident (cyclist hit by a bus).
Sure, I've seen a lot of traffic james - when I lived in Clapham Junction, for example, in the mornings I'd regularly beat the bus walking to the station (10 minutes walk, give or take) even when starting out at exactly the same time (ie it was right there when I started walking), but my overall experience couldn't be more different than yours.
a toll that's really not that great compared to parking charges
That's a good point, and one I've not seen made before - parking fees in Central London are *insane*. You can easily pay 4 or 5 times the congestion charge to park for a day, depending on the area.
If the tube is overcrowded, what's wrong with taking the bus or, heaven forbid, walking?
For me personally, coming in from Zone 6 to central London every day, neither of those alternatives is feasible.
Re:Balmer: Research it yourselves.
on
Ballmer on Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
Heck, even here on/. I'm constantly inundated with pro-MS server banner ads
MS is spending money, giving it to slashdot/OSDN, to advertise products that 90%+ of the readership isn't interested in, and you're somehow upset about this?
They spend money to gain nothing; OSDN/slashdot gain money and lose nothing. You need to get your priorities straight, I think...
Re:At least now it's out in the open.
on
Ballmer on Linux
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· Score: 1
Buy Windows today. Consider it "protection money."
Bullshit. If you didn't buy Windows, they you wouldn't be using it, and so any legal action targetting MS customers would be none of your concern anyway.
This isn't "pay us or suffer", this is "pay us and we'll make sure no-one makes you suffer for paying us", which is entirely different.
However, the vast majority of Windows attacks rely not on remote (or even local) exploits, but on tricking the user to run code themselves. There's absolutely nothing that Linux can do to protect against a user who has the root password and who has been convinced to run an untrustworthy executable.
Should Linux ever gain significant desktop market share, malware writers will target it. You will start getting emails with infected/spyware attachments, and bodies that try to convince the user to run the attachment. You will start to see downloadable applications that install spyware and adware silently (a la Kazaa on Windows).
These things will happen, and there's nothing that Linux's superior security can do to stop it. Only user education will prevent it, and in my experience, if user education is your only hope you're out of luck.
Even if it was just me, I wouldn't want to uproot and move to the States; all my friends and family are here in the UK. As it is, though, I have a partner and a daughter; I'm not about to drag them off to another country on the off-chance of making a name for myself in an industry I'm already in, in order to maybe have a shot at getting the sort of salary that I'll most likely be able to get anyway, given a bit of hard work and a bit of luck.
If not, well, it's only money; as long as you have enough to live comfortably, who cares? It's not like I'm not pretty well-paid as it is.
if you legally purchase albums the old fashioned way (CD), you can put any songs you *do* manage to rip to MP3 from them onto an iPod as well.
Not here in the UK you can't; as I understand it, there's no provision for format shifting or similar fair use in this case. No, no-one's going to be prosecuted for it, but that doesn't make it legal.
It's been a while since I installed WinXP, but I'm pretty sure that single-click activation (and underlining of names, like hyperlinks) is the default. I'm prepared to be proved wrong though:-)
Not using file extensions on today's file system is a bad idea. They are the easiest way for most people to identify a type of file.
The default Windows install (what "most people" will be using) is configured to not display the extension for known filetypes.
Most clueful windows people enable file extensions immediately.
That's true, but the vast majority of "unsafe to click" files are named something like readme.txt.scr; without file extension viewing on, you'll still see the.txt bit (as it's *not* the extension), so even if the icon doesn't tell you there's something wrong, that should.
And if the above is not enough. I haven't seen anyone proposing elimination of.c and.h extensions yet.
That's actually the strongest argument against ditching extension-based content determination that I've seen so far. I doubt very much that any amount of magic can distinguish between a.c and.h file based purely on content; it'd be tough enough to distinguish between plain-text and.c, let alone (say).c and.java or.cs.
That's easily handled by moving the content information from the file extension to the attributes of the file. There are pitfalls with that, of course - clueless/careless users could be caught out by a "readme" file that's actually an executable, but that seems to me to be a problem for two other areas:
1) icon design - make the icons for different file types clearly different 2) user education - if you're not absolutely sure of what a file is, check it
I'd personally like to see extension-based content determination phased out. I don't actually care what application opens my cv or a letter I'm working on, as long as it's the right one ie the one I used to create it. Putting ".txt" or ".doc" on the end is utterly unnecessary for me, and shouldn't be necessary for the computer. That's just my opinion, though, but it is based on two decades of using a variety of computer systems.
It helps that my menu items are named after the FUNCTION rather than the application that provides it. When you see 'music' it runs juk, when you click 'web' it opens firefox, etc.
That only works for the case where you have a single application that provides each function, though. For example, were I to rename the shortcut for Mozilla to "web", what would I call the ones to Opera, IE and firefox? Sure, I'm a special case, but everyone working in the web is (or should be) in terms of using multiple browsers.
The Windows-style taskbar interface is pretty weak if you intend to keep your session running for days or weeks instead of hours.
My machine at work goes down for power outages and office moves only, and so is up for weeks or months at a time. I run XP, and have noticed no weakness in the taskbar interface based on length of uptime; would you care to elaborate?
If enough of the big names went the open source route they would benefit from best in class architecture components.
You mean like the Doom 3 and Unreal engines? They're not going to be open source until their respective developers judge that they have earnt all they can from them in licensing fees. Those earnings, incidentally, are already factored into the general budget for a big name game. I'd be surprised if long development time games like Half Life 2 and Doom 3 actually made much of a profit just on the retail game sales; I'd imagine that a fair chunk of it comes from licensing the engine.
The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees, yet you still have to expend the time and money to develop the engine in the first place.
what's to stop you connecting inside, then walking outside to enjoy the sunshine?
The rules. If the library is providing the bandwidth, and ask you nicely to only use it within the library, then you have no right to not comply with the request. Sure, you can ask, and they may even say yes - but you should ask, and respect their wishes if they say no.
you're only allowed to use the public, wireless network within a defined area
But it's not public. It's publicly owned and funded, but it is provided for library patrons only, and then only for use within the library itself. Yes, the library could expend more time, effort and money putting technological restrictions in place to force the issue, but why should they have to?
Look at it this way - if I leave my house unlocked, and someone walks in and steals stuff, it's still a crime. Sure, I'll have trouble claiming on the insurance, and sure, I'd have been an idiot, but the guy(s) would still be liable for prosecution, if caught.
Just because you *can* do something doesn't mean that you *should*. Is it really that hard to abide by the library's wishes? Hell, if you do, you may even be able to use their electricity rather than run off your battery.
I have a number of CD-Rs from a few years ago that are discoloured in the extreme; a few of them I ditched, as they were indeed unusable.
I don't suppose it's rust, but it's certainly a degradation of the materials involved. I don't recall seeing such degradation on any comercially-produced, pressed CDs, though.
Is LongHorn delayed bcos MS couldn't implement this simple stuff?
Don't be ridiculous. Windows (since 2000 at least) has had an equivalent to Linux's (s)locate tool. Clearly that's not what this is about, as it already exists!
I can't think of a word to describe this feeling of anger, fury and loathing combined.
Why are you so angry? Are you losing money (or anything at all!) because of the delay? Seriously, if Longwait being delayed and scaled back in scope makes you that angry, you need to sort your priorities out.
Because file extensions suck, that's why. All the rest of the meta-data abouta file (creation time, owner, author, etc) is in attributes, which should the type be encoded in the name?
Practical example: I have a couple of VCDs. My daughter wanted to watch one, on the PC (as my gf was watching TV). It didn't auto-play, and no application was associated with VCDs, so I had to try to work out how to play it. In the end, I realised that the ~700MB.dat file was the film itself. Now,.dat is associated with Notepad on that PC - had I just double-clicked it, it would've opened in Notepad. So I had to right click, choose "Open with...", and select media player.
I can't associate all.dat files with media player, as the vast majority aren't films. If the file type was determined by the contents of the file (or some meta-data other than the name), then I could've just double-clicked and relied on my OS to work out what to do with the file. Sure, it's not difficult to choose something to open it with, but then I'm technically-minded. My parents (and some of my friends) would've been unable to play the disc.
That doesn't matter. What you might well be doing is sucking up more bandwidth than they'd like you to, and as they're their servers, it's their bandwidth and it's their service, if they don't want you to do it, tough on you.
Hell, for that matter, if they just don't want you to do this because they just don't want you to, tough on you; they don't need any reason at all.
Just an unexplained dropoff in purchases will, as you suggest, be explained by the RIAA in such a manner as to demonize their opponents.
But of course it will. It is a fact that people are sharing songs via the Internet. Whether or not that has lead to a drop in sales I'll not debate, but that's what the RIAA believes (or at least is claiming). A further drop will of course be taken as further evidence of an increasing problem, unless they're told otherwise. Of course, even then, they may choose not to believe it (or to spin it their way anyway), but that's another issue.
I've never gotten the Clippy/Microsoft Bob obsession around here.
It's because they're about the only two things that you can justifiably take the piss out of about MS that actually are undeniably bad. All the rest of their software, including IIS, Outlook, Win9x, etc has its good points as well as its bad. At least with Clippy and Bob, the zealots are on safe ground.
They want to bring an enterprise technology to the masses (NT, XP was really just a dry run for that)
But XP *is* NT, with an updated user interface and additional features. The kernel is the NT kernel - Win2k is NT 5, XP is NT 5.1.
I'll accept that XP is a dry run for getting users used to running as a non-admin account, and I fully expect Longwait to create accounts as normal users by default. But saying that XP is a dry run for getting users to use NT is wrong, because it *is* NT.
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Unfortunately, that's not what he asked. I use the ogg DirectShow filters, and yes, WMP (9) can play oggs.
However, there are two problems:
1) it *always* asks me if I'm sure I want to play the file, no matter how many times I tell it to remember that I said yes
2) oggs won't show up in the playlists or media library
It was that second point that the OP was asking about, I think.
went to uni in S. Ken
Imperial College? I graduated with a Physics degree from there in '97, then finally left after quitting a PhD in Plasma Physics in '99.
Thinking about it, one of our lecturers was killed crossing the road just outside *on a zebrea crossing* when he was hit by a car. Fucking shame, he was a damn good lecturer and a really nice guy.
I've probably been lucky with respect to not seeing too many accidents; I lived near Gloucester Road for a year, then two years in Clapham Junction, followed by 2 in Turnpike Lane, 1 in Clapton, then Elm Park (Essex, Zone 6) til now. Mind you, I don't drive or cycle, so the majority of my travelling is done by Tube.
Incidentally, the siteing of the cameras is also illegal under the CCTV extensions to the data protection act. But that's okay, they're the government.
So, make a complaint to the relevant authorities. If that gets you nowhere, escalate it. If you still have no luck after going right up to the top of the chain, contact the press and your local MP.
Chances are whoever actually decided where the cameras should go didn't know the rules, but somewhere up the chain, someone will. Speak to them, it's their *job* to care.
Whereabouts did you live? I've lived in London for about 10 years, in various areas, studying and working in Central London the whole time, and I've seen maybe one accident (cyclist hit by a bus).
Sure, I've seen a lot of traffic james - when I lived in Clapham Junction, for example, in the mornings I'd regularly beat the bus walking to the station (10 minutes walk, give or take) even when starting out at exactly the same time (ie it was right there when I started walking), but my overall experience couldn't be more different than yours.
a toll that's really not that great compared to parking charges
That's a good point, and one I've not seen made before - parking fees in Central London are *insane*. You can easily pay 4 or 5 times the congestion charge to park for a day, depending on the area.
If the tube is overcrowded, what's wrong with taking the bus or, heaven forbid, walking?
For me personally, coming in from Zone 6 to central London every day, neither of those alternatives is feasible.
Heck, even here on /. I'm constantly inundated with pro-MS server banner ads
MS is spending money, giving it to slashdot/OSDN, to advertise products that 90%+ of the readership isn't interested in, and you're somehow upset about this?
They spend money to gain nothing; OSDN/slashdot gain money and lose nothing. You need to get your priorities straight, I think...
Buy Windows today. Consider it "protection money."
Bullshit. If you didn't buy Windows, they you wouldn't be using it, and so any legal action targetting MS customers would be none of your concern anyway.
This isn't "pay us or suffer", this is "pay us and we'll make sure no-one makes you suffer for paying us", which is entirely different.
Yes, Linux is by design more secure.
However, the vast majority of Windows attacks rely not on remote (or even local) exploits, but on tricking the user to run code themselves. There's absolutely nothing that Linux can do to protect against a user who has the root password and who has been convinced to run an untrustworthy executable.
Should Linux ever gain significant desktop market share, malware writers will target it. You will start getting emails with infected/spyware attachments, and bodies that try to convince the user to run the attachment. You will start to see downloadable applications that install spyware and adware silently (a la Kazaa on Windows).
These things will happen, and there's nothing that Linux's superior security can do to stop it. Only user education will prevent it, and in my experience, if user education is your only hope you're out of luck.
Yes I'm serious!
Even if it was just me, I wouldn't want to uproot and move to the States; all my friends and family are here in the UK. As it is, though, I have a partner and a daughter; I'm not about to drag them off to another country on the off-chance of making a name for myself in an industry I'm already in, in order to maybe have a shot at getting the sort of salary that I'll most likely be able to get anyway, given a bit of hard work and a bit of luck.
If not, well, it's only money; as long as you have enough to live comfortably, who cares? It's not like I'm not pretty well-paid as it is.
if you legally purchase albums the old fashioned way (CD), you can put any songs you *do* manage to rip to MP3 from them onto an iPod as well.
Not here in the UK you can't; as I understand it, there's no provision for format shifting or similar fair use in this case. No, no-one's going to be prosecuted for it, but that doesn't make it legal.
Imagine how many people would rather work for Google than have the cash prize.
That's fine for people who live near them, or are prepared to move, but what about those who aren't, say because they don't even live in the US?
Living in the UK, I'd very much rather take the cash, personally.
It's been a while since I installed WinXP, but I'm pretty sure that single-click activation (and underlining of names, like hyperlinks) is the default. I'm prepared to be proved wrong though :-)
Not using file extensions on today's file system is a bad idea. They are the easiest way for most people to identify a type of file.
.txt bit (as it's *not* the extension), so even if the icon doesn't tell you there's something wrong, that should.
.c and .h extensions yet.
.c and .h file based purely on content; it'd be tough enough to distinguish between plain-text and .c, let alone (say) .c and .java or .cs.
The default Windows install (what "most people" will be using) is configured to not display the extension for known filetypes.
Most clueful windows people enable file extensions immediately.
That's true, but the vast majority of "unsafe to click" files are named something like readme.txt.scr; without file extension viewing on, you'll still see the
And if the above is not enough. I haven't seen anyone proposing elimination of
That's actually the strongest argument against ditching extension-based content determination that I've seen so far. I doubt very much that any amount of magic can distinguish between a
That's easily handled by moving the content information from the file extension to the attributes of the file. There are pitfalls with that, of course - clueless/careless users could be caught out by a "readme" file that's actually an executable, but that seems to me to be a problem for two other areas:
1) icon design - make the icons for different file types clearly different
2) user education - if you're not absolutely sure of what a file is, check it
I'd personally like to see extension-based content determination phased out. I don't actually care what application opens my cv or a letter I'm working on, as long as it's the right one ie the one I used to create it. Putting ".txt" or ".doc" on the end is utterly unnecessary for me, and shouldn't be necessary for the computer. That's just my opinion, though, but it is based on two decades of using a variety of computer systems.
It helps that my menu items are named after the FUNCTION rather than the application that provides it. When you see 'music' it runs juk, when you click 'web' it opens firefox, etc.
That only works for the case where you have a single application that provides each function, though. For example, were I to rename the shortcut for Mozilla to "web", what would I call the ones to Opera, IE and firefox? Sure, I'm a special case, but everyone working in the web is (or should be) in terms of using multiple browsers.
The Windows-style taskbar interface is pretty weak if you intend to keep your session running for days or weeks instead of hours.
My machine at work goes down for power outages and office moves only, and so is up for weeks or months at a time. I run XP, and have noticed no weakness in the taskbar interface based on length of uptime; would you care to elaborate?
If enough of the big names went the open source route they would benefit from best in class architecture components.
You mean like the Doom 3 and Unreal engines? They're not going to be open source until their respective developers judge that they have earnt all they can from them in licensing fees. Those earnings, incidentally, are already factored into the general budget for a big name game. I'd be surprised if long development time games like Half Life 2 and Doom 3 actually made much of a profit just on the retail game sales; I'd imagine that a fair chunk of it comes from licensing the engine.
The trouble with open sourcing the engines is that you can no longer charge those licensing fees, yet you still have to expend the time and money to develop the engine in the first place.
what's to stop you connecting inside, then walking outside to enjoy the sunshine?
The rules. If the library is providing the bandwidth, and ask you nicely to only use it within the library, then you have no right to not comply with the request. Sure, you can ask, and they may even say yes - but you should ask, and respect their wishes if they say no.
you're only allowed to use the public, wireless network within a defined area
But it's not public. It's publicly owned and funded, but it is provided for library patrons only, and then only for use within the library itself. Yes, the library could expend more time, effort and money putting technological restrictions in place to force the issue, but why should they have to?
Look at it this way - if I leave my house unlocked, and someone walks in and steals stuff, it's still a crime. Sure, I'll have trouble claiming on the insurance, and sure, I'd have been an idiot, but the guy(s) would still be liable for prosecution, if caught.
Just because you *can* do something doesn't mean that you *should*. Is it really that hard to abide by the library's wishes? Hell, if you do, you may even be able to use their electricity rather than run off your battery.
I don't think I've ever seen a "rusted" CD...
I have a number of CD-Rs from a few years ago that are discoloured in the extreme; a few of them I ditched, as they were indeed unusable.
I don't suppose it's rust, but it's certainly a degradation of the materials involved. I don't recall seeing such degradation on any comercially-produced, pressed CDs, though.
Is LongHorn delayed bcos MS couldn't implement this simple stuff?
Don't be ridiculous. Windows (since 2000 at least) has had an equivalent to Linux's (s)locate tool. Clearly that's not what this is about, as it already exists!
I can't think of a word to describe this feeling of anger, fury and loathing combined.
Why are you so angry? Are you losing money (or anything at all!) because of the delay? Seriously, if Longwait being delayed and scaled back in scope makes you that angry, you need to sort your priorities out.
Because file extensions suck, that's why. All the rest of the meta-data abouta file (creation time, owner, author, etc) is in attributes, which should the type be encoded in the name?
.dat file was the film itself. Now, .dat is associated with Notepad on that PC - had I just double-clicked it, it would've opened in Notepad. So I had to right click, choose "Open with...", and select media player.
.dat files with media player, as the vast majority aren't films. If the file type was determined by the contents of the file (or some meta-data other than the name), then I could've just double-clicked and relied on my OS to work out what to do with the file. Sure, it's not difficult to choose something to open it with, but then I'm technically-minded. My parents (and some of my friends) would've been unable to play the disc.
Practical example: I have a couple of VCDs. My daughter wanted to watch one, on the PC (as my gf was watching TV). It didn't auto-play, and no application was associated with VCDs, so I had to try to work out how to play it. In the end, I realised that the ~700MB
I can't associate all
That doesn't matter. What you might well be doing is sucking up more bandwidth than they'd like you to, and as they're their servers, it's their bandwidth and it's their service, if they don't want you to do it, tough on you.
Hell, for that matter, if they just don't want you to do this because they just don't want you to, tough on you; they don't need any reason at all.
Just an unexplained dropoff in purchases will, as you suggest, be explained by the RIAA in such a manner as to demonize their opponents.
But of course it will. It is a fact that people are sharing songs via the Internet. Whether or not that has lead to a drop in sales I'll not debate, but that's what the RIAA believes (or at least is claiming). A further drop will of course be taken as further evidence of an increasing problem, unless they're told otherwise. Of course, even then, they may choose not to believe it (or to spin it their way anyway), but that's another issue.
I've never gotten the Clippy/Microsoft Bob obsession around here.
It's because they're about the only two things that you can justifiably take the piss out of about MS that actually are undeniably bad. All the rest of their software, including IIS, Outlook, Win9x, etc has its good points as well as its bad. At least with Clippy and Bob, the zealots are on safe ground.
I've never seen such a thing with *any* retail application. Even XP only makes you do this when you first install it, not every time you fire it up.
Quake 3 checks your CD key against a master server when you go online, and it's by no means the only game to do so.
They want to bring an enterprise technology to the masses (NT, XP was really just a dry run for that)
But XP *is* NT, with an updated user interface and additional features. The kernel is the NT kernel - Win2k is NT 5, XP is NT 5.1.
I'll accept that XP is a dry run for getting users used to running as a non-admin account, and I fully expect Longwait to create accounts as normal users by default. But saying that XP is a dry run for getting users to use NT is wrong, because it *is* NT.
He's refering to something. this chair, he says. Obviously, if he can reference it, its there.
And I can reference the 2 tonne pink elephant stood next to me who answers to the name of "Bubba", but that doesn't mean that it's really there.