It's interesting to chart the course of stuff like this. After 300/350mb rips, people moved to a semi-standardized 700mb AVI with DivX/XviD and MP3 (later proper AC-3). This was mostly motivated by speed of encoding - even with a largish 700mb file, they could do AC-3 passthrough and quickly encode the video. Now some more properly done rips are appearing - either 350mb files with x264 (equal quality) or higher-quality 1.2 or 1.4gb rips (usually scaled down from HD sources).
I'd hesitate to include Britain with continental Europe. The two are very different places.
Also, besides France and Italy (and Germany's censorship which will probably manifest itself in a filter soon), who else has filters? It's not the entirety of Western Europe - not Ireland, not Spain, not Belgium, not Switzerland, not Holland...
As well, the fact that he doesn't make too much of an effort to try and deal with businesses on their own level is what makes him such a convincing speaker. We don't all need to be RMS, but just about every movement needs an RMS to be successful.
That's a ridiculous generalization. You speak of Europe like it's a homogenous entity. In reality, only a handful of countries are even thinking about what you're suggesting, and most of those are just simple corruption and greed (see: Italy) rather than anything major. Scandinavian countries are still largely separate from the stuff that's been going on in the west.
Also, eastern europe is pretty much a dark spot - does anyone know if there is filtering or throttling there, and, if so, how much?
I'd like you to review the concept of a "PERSONAL Computer".
Also, running HDMI cable is fairly easy as long as you take into account the low AWG number (i.e.: thick cables). It's best if you don't try to force it into narrow curves, but it's very reliable.
Also, the HDMI spec covers, AFAIK, up to 25m. I've seen and used 30-35m ones, and there are 50m ones out there. Despite the length, if you buy cheaper cable (which isn't really any different from the top-end monster cable) it'll only cost you $30-60, which is roughly the price of a cheap DVD player and much, much cheaper than Blu-Ray players. It's also not affected by format shifts, so as long as you're not going to use anything bigger than 1080p, you're fine.
I like how their revisionist history likes to pretend that Bittorrent was the beginning of piracy and filesharing. I like to contrast this with cracking groups like Fairlight or Razor1911 that are proud of their Amiga heritage. For some reason, very few people realize that piracy has gone on ever since the 80s and many of the people involved were adult hobbyists who saw it as sharing games and software with friends. It's only due to some very recent campaigns (you've probably seen them if you've ever been forced to watch the {info,com}mercials) that pirates have been portrayed as the stereotypical "pimpy teenage hacker".
Exactly. My HDTV is just another output device for me; I just run videos on my PC and use my wireless keyboard to control it (play, pause, etc). Something like this never occurred to most people. Instead of buying a DVD and then a Blu-Ray player, I just spend a few bucks on a cheap HDMI cable (no Monster cables for me) and I'm basically immune to all of the screwing around that has happened with BR players, yet I can still watch HD video.
Also, before someone says "well, obviously you have a top-of-the-line machine" - no I do not. It is trivial to play HD video, all modern video cards are optimized for a variety of codecs (NVIDIA has PureVideo, I forget what ATI has). I've tried out the GT 220 (the second-cheapest card available for the current gen of NVIDIA cards) and it can handle 1080p just fine.
The moral of the story? Getting a $10-30 HDMI cable and keeping your current PC hardware (or maybe buying a BD-ROM drive if you actually use the discs) can save you hundreds of bucks and eliminate the need for completely unnecessary hardware that can only play a handful of codecs, as well as not allowing you to do basic things like fast-forwarding past FBI/Interpol warnings and commercials.
Because, while many PC gamers play online, a lot (especially FPS and RTS players, two of the biggest groups) will play with their friends on LAN to reduce lag and latency times and to provide control (if the game supports dedicated servers).
Charging money for access to servers wouldn't really do anything and would just make a lot more people drop the faster.
Basic HTML is taught to kids in elementary and high school. This is supposed to be Apple's target crowd (12-24?). People are more knowledgeable than you think.
Why not? It's a standard feature on every browser out there, so not having it just seems ridiculous. Rather than asking why it should be added, ask why it wasn't included. Also, viewing the source of a webpage isn't "highly" technical, as just about everyone knows HTML by now.
Re:It's not a computer, it's a living-room applian
on
iPad Review
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· Score: 1
So you're advocating replacing mouse-based GUIs with something even more annoying?
My main quarrel with Apple is heuristics. It tries to use heuristics with everything and to have the computer think for the user. This is a problem for many people who want a computer to behave exactly as they tell it to and to follow rules they've defined themselves, i.e. "do nothing by default".
I agree. Saying "well, all the people I know who smoke are smart" is just saying that you know a lot of smart people rather than a wide variety of smokers.
But what if he was unaware? In a large company (which are usually the ones that do the kind of things we are trying to prevent) it is impossible for a single person to manage everything without some delegation. This means that middle management has more independence than in a smaller company.
Also, your analogy is flawed. The reason why parents are responsible is because a child has been judged to be too stupid to know what to do and what not to do, and that the parent is burdened with the responsibility of making sure they don't blow everything up. If they fail, they've failed as a parent and deserve it. With management, managers and executives aren't expected to be aware of every single thing their employees do that is company-related.
As well, your potential accountability law would have some serious loopholes - what if a middle manager ordered something that he knew would get his superiors fired, so that he could move up another rung and perhaps become a junior executive?
I'm sorry, but that just doesn't work. The distributed nature of authority within corporations means that there is no "smoking man" sitting in a dark room pulling all the strings; executives run the corporation, the CEO runs the executives... but HR departments still control hiring and firing, and it is all supposedly being managed for the stockholders. The corporation is the sum total of all of its employees and workers, and most bad decisions are things done by committee, not by a single person with an agenda. When voting in a committee, people will support things they'd never support alone.
It's easy. Compare the cost of each. With one, they might potentially lose money. With the other, they lose lives. And money wins over lives every time.
It doesn't matter. Once you say "oh, it's 99% copyrighted anyway", you're basically saying that a site that has some copyrighted material (but isn't devoted to it) still deserves to be shut down. This would provide an easy way to take down any site that allows media uploads: 1. Upload copyrighted material, 2. Report it, 3. Site is taken down. It basically allows any site to be taken down for very weak reasons.
It's interesting that more and more stuff is being put on private trackers, completely changing the dynamics of things. Instead of being a large, massively distributed system, it's a small, private system between groups of hard-to-pin-down people.
The issue isn't OpenSolaris no longer being FOSS, the issue is that Oracle is more likely to make it atrophy (cut off the important updates until it's so out-of-date compared to Solaris, Linux, BSD, et. al. that any sane person would switch away). Their strategy is probably to kill OpenSolaris and try to force people to pay for Solaris as a cheap way of trying to squeeze some short-term money out of the situation.
Seriously, do they think that any piece of crap content delivery system (to use their buzzwords against them) will supplant webpages? I just find it unbelievably arrogant for them to think that people will abandon a mature, (somewhat) stable system to use whatever crazy stuff they're cooking up.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this method of optimization is surprisingly... non-optimized.
It's interesting to chart the course of stuff like this. After 300/350mb rips, people moved to a semi-standardized 700mb AVI with DivX/XviD and MP3 (later proper AC-3). This was mostly motivated by speed of encoding - even with a largish 700mb file, they could do AC-3 passthrough and quickly encode the video. Now some more properly done rips are appearing - either 350mb files with x264 (equal quality) or higher-quality 1.2 or 1.4gb rips (usually scaled down from HD sources).
I'm talking about a personal computer in the sense of a computer that is owned and operated by a sole owner without sharing between several users.
I'd hesitate to include Britain with continental Europe. The two are very different places.
Also, besides France and Italy (and Germany's censorship which will probably manifest itself in a filter soon), who else has filters? It's not the entirety of Western Europe - not Ireland, not Spain, not Belgium, not Switzerland, not Holland...
As well, the fact that he doesn't make too much of an effort to try and deal with businesses on their own level is what makes him such a convincing speaker. We don't all need to be RMS, but just about every movement needs an RMS to be successful.
That's a ridiculous generalization. You speak of Europe like it's a homogenous entity. In reality, only a handful of countries are even thinking about what you're suggesting, and most of those are just simple corruption and greed (see: Italy) rather than anything major. Scandinavian countries are still largely separate from the stuff that's been going on in the west.
Also, eastern europe is pretty much a dark spot - does anyone know if there is filtering or throttling there, and, if so, how much?
I'd like you to review the concept of a "PERSONAL Computer".
Also, running HDMI cable is fairly easy as long as you take into account the low AWG number (i.e.: thick cables). It's best if you don't try to force it into narrow curves, but it's very reliable.
Also, the HDMI spec covers, AFAIK, up to 25m. I've seen and used 30-35m ones, and there are 50m ones out there. Despite the length, if you buy cheaper cable (which isn't really any different from the top-end monster cable) it'll only cost you $30-60, which is roughly the price of a cheap DVD player and much, much cheaper than Blu-Ray players. It's also not affected by format shifts, so as long as you're not going to use anything bigger than 1080p, you're fine.
I like how their revisionist history likes to pretend that Bittorrent was the beginning of piracy and filesharing. I like to contrast this with cracking groups like Fairlight or Razor1911 that are proud of their Amiga heritage. For some reason, very few people realize that piracy has gone on ever since the 80s and many of the people involved were adult hobbyists who saw it as sharing games and software with friends. It's only due to some very recent campaigns (you've probably seen them if you've ever been forced to watch the {info,com}mercials) that pirates have been portrayed as the stereotypical "pimpy teenage hacker".
Exactly. My HDTV is just another output device for me; I just run videos on my PC and use my wireless keyboard to control it (play, pause, etc). Something like this never occurred to most people. Instead of buying a DVD and then a Blu-Ray player, I just spend a few bucks on a cheap HDMI cable (no Monster cables for me) and I'm basically immune to all of the screwing around that has happened with BR players, yet I can still watch HD video.
Also, before someone says "well, obviously you have a top-of-the-line machine" - no I do not. It is trivial to play HD video, all modern video cards are optimized for a variety of codecs (NVIDIA has PureVideo, I forget what ATI has). I've tried out the GT 220 (the second-cheapest card available for the current gen of NVIDIA cards) and it can handle 1080p just fine.
The moral of the story? Getting a $10-30 HDMI cable and keeping your current PC hardware (or maybe buying a BD-ROM drive if you actually use the discs) can save you hundreds of bucks and eliminate the need for completely unnecessary hardware that can only play a handful of codecs, as well as not allowing you to do basic things like fast-forwarding past FBI/Interpol warnings and commercials.
Because, while many PC gamers play online, a lot (especially FPS and RTS players, two of the biggest groups) will play with their friends on LAN to reduce lag and latency times and to provide control (if the game supports dedicated servers).
Charging money for access to servers wouldn't really do anything and would just make a lot more people drop the faster.
Basic HTML is taught to kids in elementary and high school. This is supposed to be Apple's target crowd (12-24?). People are more knowledgeable than you think.
You're right, and I'm sorry. I forgot that we were talking about Mac users.
Why not? It's a standard feature on every browser out there, so not having it just seems ridiculous. Rather than asking why it should be added, ask why it wasn't included. Also, viewing the source of a webpage isn't "highly" technical, as just about everyone knows HTML by now.
So you're advocating replacing mouse-based GUIs with something even more annoying?
My main quarrel with Apple is heuristics. It tries to use heuristics with everything and to have the computer think for the user. This is a problem for many people who want a computer to behave exactly as they tell it to and to follow rules they've defined themselves, i.e. "do nothing by default".
I now have moved to pipe tobacco that is all natural with no chemicals, and smoke about once a week for enjoyment while drinking a cognac or brandy.
Are you a hobbit, by any chance?
I agree. Saying "well, all the people I know who smoke are smart" is just saying that you know a lot of smart people rather than a wide variety of smokers.
But what if he was unaware? In a large company (which are usually the ones that do the kind of things we are trying to prevent) it is impossible for a single person to manage everything without some delegation. This means that middle management has more independence than in a smaller company.
Also, your analogy is flawed. The reason why parents are responsible is because a child has been judged to be too stupid to know what to do and what not to do, and that the parent is burdened with the responsibility of making sure they don't blow everything up. If they fail, they've failed as a parent and deserve it. With management, managers and executives aren't expected to be aware of every single thing their employees do that is company-related.
As well, your potential accountability law would have some serious loopholes - what if a middle manager ordered something that he knew would get his superiors fired, so that he could move up another rung and perhaps become a junior executive?
I'm sorry, but that just doesn't work. The distributed nature of authority within corporations means that there is no "smoking man" sitting in a dark room pulling all the strings; executives run the corporation, the CEO runs the executives... but HR departments still control hiring and firing, and it is all supposedly being managed for the stockholders. The corporation is the sum total of all of its employees and workers, and most bad decisions are things done by committee, not by a single person with an agenda. When voting in a committee, people will support things they'd never support alone.
Come on, /., be at least a little bit more subtle. A good joke actually has people fall for it.
It's easy. Compare the cost of each. With one, they might potentially lose money. With the other, they lose lives. And money wins over lives every time.
It doesn't matter. Once you say "oh, it's 99% copyrighted anyway", you're basically saying that a site that has some copyrighted material (but isn't devoted to it) still deserves to be shut down. This would provide an easy way to take down any site that allows media uploads: 1. Upload copyrighted material, 2. Report it, 3. Site is taken down. It basically allows any site to be taken down for very weak reasons.
It's interesting that more and more stuff is being put on private trackers, completely changing the dynamics of things. Instead of being a large, massively distributed system, it's a small, private system between groups of hard-to-pin-down people.
The issue isn't OpenSolaris no longer being FOSS, the issue is that Oracle is more likely to make it atrophy (cut off the important updates until it's so out-of-date compared to Solaris, Linux, BSD, et. al. that any sane person would switch away). Their strategy is probably to kill OpenSolaris and try to force people to pay for Solaris as a cheap way of trying to squeeze some short-term money out of the situation.
The irony of this being modded "Troll"...
Seriously, do they think that any piece of crap content delivery system (to use their buzzwords against them) will supplant webpages? I just find it unbelievably arrogant for them to think that people will abandon a mature, (somewhat) stable system to use whatever crazy stuff they're cooking up.