Great show - one of my all-time faves but you have to understand that they have a clear bias for British-made cars and a overall attitude that European-made cars are superior to everything else. They absolutely loathe the United States, lampooning it in their trips here and dislike almost all American cars (except for the Ford GT that Jeremy owns).
Just know that Top Gear is a fun show meant for entertainment purposes only not as a source of factual information. It's kinda like the Glenn Beck of the automotive world.
I'm guessing it's because Microsoft doesn't have a touch-based UI for Windows that they're saying tablets are a fad. They thought the same about the internet and portable mp3 players too. Yes, they had tablet PC's long before others but it was a barely-modified version of XP that simply replaced a mouse with a stylus - it wasn't the same.
They'll get into the market as soon as they can cobble together a "good enough" touch-based UI for Windows and then leave it about 5 years later when they realize they aren't making any headway against already well-entrenched Android and iOS markets.
The Microsoft-dominated era is over unless they can figure out a way to execute at least as well as their rivals.
As a web developer on the Mac (never was a switcher), I think what you're experiencing is what most switchers do when they go Mac - they want to force it to work they way they did when they were in Windows or Linux and they don't take the time to learn. Usually, they assume a tool or solution doesn't exist if it's not presented in the same manner as Windows or Linux
It has not taken 8 years to support tabs. Textmate has always had tabs, albeit only in a project window. BBEdit, a text editor that predates OS X, has always had the ability to have multiple documents in a single window for as long as I can remember. Aside from the GUI way to switch between documents, you can use command-{, command-} in Textmate and option-command [, option-command-] in BBEdit.
Finder sucks. No doubt about that. If you want customization and things like SVN in a file manager, try a Finder replacement like Path Finder (think Windows Explorer with extensions built in). However, you don't require an SVN-enabled Finder as both Textmate and BBEdit have SVN built in.
JPEG, GIF and MP3 all have/had encumbered with licenses yet they are still to this day, web standards. I never hear anyone complain about seeing JPEG's on their web page be it web developer or end user. It's only an issue to people who place ideals over practicality. People are listening to billions of AAC and MP3 files on a daily basis without complaint (and with hardware support).
Which leads me to the next point. What practical reason do I have for wanting h.264 support in a browser? Because I get hardware-based decoding with h.264. It saves my battery time and leaves my CPU free to do other more important tasks. With WebM or Theora I get software decoding and thus a less responsive machine with a shorter battery life.
Perhaps most importantly, the MPEG group have time and time again have brought us the best codecs for digital media. Given Theora's performance compared to WebM and h.264, I certainly hope Ogg isn't responsible for pushing r&d into codecs for the future. Open source is great. I use it every day and can't imagine how much more difficult computing would be without it but the great bulk of its work has been with reproducing free/open versions of existing products and paradigms, not at pushing the boundaries of research and development.
You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?
You don't need artists and writers and a disc full of content if you make multiplayer-only games. I think this is more of what EA execs want rather than what the current reality is. The highest rated games are still single player (Mass Effect, Assasin's Creed, Fallout, etc.) because they immerse you into story and give you many hours of play.
If everything becomes a Call of Duty experience then I suppose I'll be purchasing a lot less games. Running around on tiny maps hoping my twitch reflexes and ping time is faster than the timmie who plays 8 hours a day is not my idea of engaging entertainment. In fact, it's just Pac-Man with guns.
At what point don't they just buckle down and rewrite the apps to use standards-based methods? They put their money on a losing horse. Suck it up and move on.
I understand that Microsoft encouraged folks to write their apps with Active X and all that but they learned a valuable lesson - don't trust mission-critical operations to a single-vendor solution.
Yes, I know Exchange and Active Directory ft into this category as well but the only difference is that Microsoft hasn't dropped support for them. I mean, why is going 100% Microsoft a rational decision but if your CIO said "We're going 100% Apple." he'd be fired in a heartbeat?
There are many large companies and governments that seem to make things work without Microsoft technologies and I'm sure you can too.
Unless you ascribe to the belief that government, even democratic forms eventually end up becoming an oligarchy of some form. It's not hard to imagine that the US is currently heading in that direction given the figures you cite.
Is it so far-fetched to think that if given enough time, unimpeded, the Republican party would structure government in a manner that corporations would be self-regulated, all-powerful entities and that government's purpose is to protect wealth rather than people? Look at how the fringe in today's GOP believe BP is the victim in the Gulf disaster. Is the war in Iraq truly taking place to protect the citizenry of Iraq or is it to secure/institute a US-friendly oil producer/port in a time where oil reserves are declining and China and India's oil consumption will only increase given their current state of economic development? Why does New Orleans, a city with a large poverty base situated in one of the poorest states still look like a disaster zone? Because to fix it would require a transfer of wealth with no reward for doing so that the wealthy aren't willing to endure. That's why we're pouring billions into a war rather than rebuilding a city.
The weak always cede power in times of perceived crisis and fear until the point in which so much power has been ceded that revolt, be it internal or external, is needed to get it back.
Anyway, the point is guess that I think we are moving beyond the point at which our government is solely dedicated to protecting the weak and that many of our policies are now crafted for maintaining and acquiring wealth. And I'm not singling out Republicans to be partisan - they're simplyt actors in the natural pro(re)gression of democractic forms of government and the more crises like terrorism and depressions we experience the faster it will happen.
I guess this means a new round of ALL CAPS EMAIL CHAIN LETTER WARNINGS IN 48 PT COMIC SANS TELLING ME TO SEND THIS TO ALL MY FRIENDS AND NOT TO LET THEM TAKE THIS COUNTRY AWAY FROM US WITHOUT A FIGHT. TEA PARTY FTW!!!
What's strange is that the all caps part bothers me more than the crazy far-right subject material of those things.
So if a person had never bothered to put up any curtains and failed to install doors in their house and Google snapped a photo of the street in which you can see inside the house should Google be tried for invasion of privacy? Can such a person who leaves his or her house in that state have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Do people that can't be bothered to put up electronic versions of curtains and doors for their wireless networks have a reasonable expectation of privacy?
If you throw out incriminating evidence in the garbage, took it to the curb and investigators went through to get it and used it against you do you have any expectation that they shouldn't be able to use that evidence?
Seriously, if you make your life available to the public, whether it be failing to install curtains and doors in your home, putting sensitive documents in the trash and taking it out to the curb, posting your marital indiscretions on Facebook or allowing the public to connect to your publicly broadcasted and open network you have no reasonable expectation of privacy at those points.
At worst, Google can be accused of being creepy for picking through the "virtual" trash left at the curb and snapping photos of your doorless and curtainless home.
What is scary is that congresspersons involved with this investigation had no clue about securing consumer routers and are currently making decisions guiding the Department of Homeland Security . If there's anything alarming and scary to take away from this story that would be that, not Google.
I think Bill Nye should redo his entire show episodes filmed from a cave with a couple of bodyguards and AK-47's behind him.
C'mon people - when did we forget what it was like to be a boy? It's how we learn. Are taping several bottle rockets together to make it multi-stage and seeing what lights on fire with a magnifying glass going to be terrorist activities too? Do we need a 3-day waiting period for building a potato gun?
It's amazing what a little bit of fear and fear-mongering (I'm talking to you the Fox News) will do to the way people interact with the world.
Someone mentioned that we need to vote for candidates that have detailed plans for everything rather than voting for those with slick ad campaigns. So put yourself in the situation of someone running for office. Are you expert enough to lay out detailed solutions to issues concerning telecommunications, agriculture, commerce, defense, transportation, welfare, immigration, international relations and all the myriad sub-fields they contain? Nobody can possibly be a competent expert in all of these areas yet congress has to regularly make long-lasting decisions that impact these fields. How can they possibly make an informed decision for every bill? Enter the lobbyist. The lobbyist is an expert in his or her particular field and is more than happy to inform a congressperson what the important issues are regarding House Bill 714.
We don't need "informed" politicians because nobody will ever exist that can make competent decisions on every or even some of the issues he or she will face in their political careers. We need to somehow neutralize the power and influence a lobbyist holds in our government without removing the essential service they provide - access to expertise and the ability to provide a cliff note summary of the topic at hand. What the answer to that is I don't know but it's clear why corporations seem to run the show - because they have all the experts. How did you gain the expertise in whatever vocation you decided to practice? More than likely you gained it by working for someone, maybe even a large corporation or two.
...but just having it sit idle on a static HTML page with no flash or video makes my CPU fan come on. I hate that. Why the hell is FF using enough CPU cycles to require CPU cooling when it's just SITTING THERE AT IDLE.
Get your crap together Mozilla or you're going to lose everything you worked so hard to accomplish. Extensions are the only thing saving your bacon and Chrome is making some real progress in that area - plus it doesn't tax my CPU.
I completely understand where you are coming from. However, I believe that plugins would go against the spirit of the HTML5 video tag where browser plugins should not be a requirement in order to watch the video.
Certainly, the browser can be made to support various codecs but HTML5 is attempting to reduce browser feature fragmentation and avoiding the current practice of constructing sites in a manner that requires dedicating time and resources to supporting multiple browsers. Why as a site owner, should I have to encode h.264 for WebKit, Flash for legacy and Theora for Firefox for each video? It's a waste of time and resources and serves only the plugin/browser creator agendas and not the end-user's agenda which is simply to watch the video. Yes, yes - I understand that DRM and licensing serves agendas that aren't the end-user's but HTML5 wants a plugin-less web and is leaving browser manufacturers to determine what that standard is. You think they would have learned their lesson but to the credit of the browser manufacturers they are playing nice for the most part with the HTML5 spec.
If Theora was competitive on a technical level to h.264 there might be a more compelling argument to standardize on Theora but the facts are it's an obscure codec with no widespread support for hardware decoding, it fails on measurements of frame quality, filesize and CPU usage, and much of world's existing videos are already encoded using h.264 (including much of Flash). Also, does the license of Theora allow for DRM wrappers? I honestly don't know but if so, then that's unfortunately a real issue going against Theora as well.
I too want an open web and wish Theora could fit that bill better than it does but I can understand why it is being dismissed by most browser manufacturers.
The obvious reason Microsoft has standardized on h.264 is its support for DRM. However, Ogg Theora is inferior to h.264 by any standard of measurement except for licensing.
Ars has a good article summarizing a comparison study between Theora and h.264. Basically, Theora produces much lower quality videos with larger filesizes and higher CPU utilization when compared to h.264 videos with identical bitrates.
I've heard Theora advocates say "just jack up the bitrates until it looks good - we're in the age of Hulu so no big deal." I find that unacceptable. Theora will have to up its game if it wants to be a true competitor to h.264. All it has going right now is an open license.
You're a computer guy, right? My cousin's kid been trying to help us with this TV station thing we're doing but I don't think he knows what he's doing. Plus he's starting soccer now and he doesn't have much time anymore. It's not like you don't, eh? Heh heh.
Anyway, can you help? We use The Windows and all that so it's pretty standard.
You will? Thanks buddy - I'll see that you get some extra "unmonitored" visits from the little lady this month.
He claims to be a web developer, which one can assume that he's writing code (be it PHP, Ruby, ASP or even Javascript.) How is this not programming? Because you don't have to hit "compile" when you want to test code? Because you don't mess with C-type memory pointers or track down potential buffer overflows?
Have you been paying attention to the web lately? The lines between application as an OS-bound executable are being blurred more and more by the web each day and these type of web services all employ object-orientation, design patterns, APIs, unit-tested frameworks, algorithm optimization, security hardening, database design, etc. Proper usage any of these tools and concepts are normally beyond the casual script writer. They require a good understanding of what it takes to make a modern web-app.
Is the code necessary to implement Gmail any less complex than code used to write an email app?
Why do OS app programmers seem to think no one else programs but them and everybody else is a self-taught hack?
Well, the question is, does the increased fuel efficiency actually pay for itself? The thing is, the more efficient you are, the more complex you are. The more complex you are, the more you cost.
That's what automotive engineers would have said in 1950 if you slapped a plain-old, gas-burning 2009 Honda Civic in front of them - and they may have been right. It would have been much too expensive, is far more complex than the car of that day and the tremendous increase in fuel efficiency may not have offset the 27 cents per gallon cost of gasoline. However, I don't think anybody would argue that the 2009 Civic isn't a much better car in almost every way over anything offered in 1950. Your statement seems to imply there is no point in going any further with advancing efficiency because of costs right now.
In any case, most models show that even a rather dramatic altering of CO2 emissions will not alter the course of climate change for a minimum of 200 years. Even if we stopped now, the glaciers are still going to melt. The CO2 is already in the air.
You know, properly disposing of waste and building sewers is going to be expensive. Even if we stopped now millions are going to die. The plague rats are already out there.
When it comes down to it, the problems with conservatives is that the only thing they ever want to see change is the value of their bank accounts and investments. Their minds can think no further than the short-term future. Anything new, even if it will lead to a betterment of society and the saving of lives, is a perceived potential threat to their precious short-term revenue streams. As if worldwide economic models won't be upended by global crop-failures, coastline flooding and increased hurricane strength and frequency. Conservatives always pooh-pooh the potential profits to be made by converting to green energy (wind turbine manufacturers like to be paid too.)
Always the short-term thinking (it's about MY bank account not my grandson's.)
Why did Bush classify these photographs? Because they know the truth - they just don't care. Money for me now is more important than a better society and fewer deaths or even profit in the future. The very things that are causing global warming are some of the largest established revenue streams (re: oil) ever known and changing how we do things to reduce the effect we're having on the climate will cost money now and that's what it boils down to.
It's this stupid, short-sighted, short-term, money-for-me-now thinking that got us into our current economic situation too.
It's astounding to me that right wing Americans object to the governent taking over healthcare on cost grounds when ALL the evidence from other countries is that no one else pays as much for their healthcare than Americans do currently.
That's because right-wing Americans don't care about the American people as much as they care about American corporations.
I'll go further and say the building doesn't matter. It will just be filled with people that cognitively acknowledge Jesus but have nothing to show for it but their weekly attendance to said building. Worthless.
Simply show them a life of someone that practices Jesus' teachings and they might see that it's more than an antiquated fairy tale. Love those that are hard to love. If you've been blessed with abundance (in whatever wealth, love, etc.) then share it with the poor (in wealth, love, etc.). Recognize that you're certainly no better than the drunk lying in the gutter and quite possibly a worse person than he or she is. Recognize that there are no "degrees" of sins - homosexuals are your equals and that their lifestyle is no worse than your cheating on taxes/wife lifestyle. Know that listening to crappy Christian music does not make you a better Christian any more than being at a certain building one day a week does. It's just another expression of Christians segregating themselves from people that aren't like them. Stop "tithing" to yourselves by building lavish, beautiful "worship-campuses" and ignoring the homeless person starving in front of it. You can't be both pro-life and support capital punishment. You can't say "peace be with you" at church and support war. You can't be Republican/Democrat first, Christian second.
If people actually listened to Jesus and what he had to say rather than observing so-called Christians then they might not be so quick to write Christianity off. I don't blame the world for its judgement of us though because today's Christian church and the people that fill it are artificial, ineffective and lame.
User-submitted doesn't imply client-side (javascript) validation. I always sanitize user-submitted content via PHP. Of course, replace PHP with Ruby, ASP, Java or whatever other server-side language you're using. It's pretty hard for a user to manipulate server-side code without a login shell to the webserver or a really brain-dead server setup.
Curiously, as I voted this morning (Ohio, for the curious) I was given the option of a paper ballot or an electronic ballot. People were standing in line waiting for their turn at the Diebold machines while the paper ballot tables remained largely empty. I saw 3 people (including my wife and myself) opt for the paper ballot in my time there.
Personally, I chose the paper ballot because my tin-foil hat prevents me from trusting the Diebold machines but I assumed more would have opted for paper simply out of time constraints to get to work or whatever else they had planned for the day. Not so.
I don't have any grand conclusion or poignant observation other than people implicitly trust the electronic voting machines despite the nationally-publicized problems with them, they are unaware there have been major issues with them (Diebold in particular) or the shiny touchscreen is newer and cooler or perhaps perceived as easier to use. Maybe it's something I'm not thinking of.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. I had no idea. Thanks for the info.
I love Jeremy all the same :)
Great show - one of my all-time faves but you have to understand that they have a clear bias for British-made cars and a overall attitude that European-made cars are superior to everything else. They absolutely loathe the United States, lampooning it in their trips here and dislike almost all American cars (except for the Ford GT that Jeremy owns).
Just know that Top Gear is a fun show meant for entertainment purposes only not as a source of factual information. It's kinda like the Glenn Beck of the automotive world.
I'm guessing it's because Microsoft doesn't have a touch-based UI for Windows that they're saying tablets are a fad. They thought the same about the internet and portable mp3 players too. Yes, they had tablet PC's long before others but it was a barely-modified version of XP that simply replaced a mouse with a stylus - it wasn't the same.
They'll get into the market as soon as they can cobble together a "good enough" touch-based UI for Windows and then leave it about 5 years later when they realize they aren't making any headway against already well-entrenched Android and iOS markets.
The Microsoft-dominated era is over unless they can figure out a way to execute at least as well as their rivals.
As a web developer on the Mac (never was a switcher), I think what you're experiencing is what most switchers do when they go Mac - they want to force it to work they way they did when they were in Windows or Linux and they don't take the time to learn. Usually, they assume a tool or solution doesn't exist if it's not presented in the same manner as Windows or Linux
It has not taken 8 years to support tabs. Textmate has always had tabs, albeit only in a project window. BBEdit, a text editor that predates OS X, has always had the ability to have multiple documents in a single window for as long as I can remember. Aside from the GUI way to switch between documents, you can use command-{, command-} in Textmate and option-command [, option-command-] in BBEdit.
Finder sucks. No doubt about that. If you want customization and things like SVN in a file manager, try a Finder replacement like Path Finder (think Windows Explorer with extensions built in). However, you don't require an SVN-enabled Finder as both Textmate and BBEdit have SVN built in.
Plus, while you're making GE rich they can't even be bothered to pay for the roads you used to drive to your job with them.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110325/ts_yblog_thelookout/g-e-paid-no-taxes-on-5-1-billion-in-profits
JPEG, GIF and MP3 all have/had encumbered with licenses yet they are still to this day, web standards. I never hear anyone complain about seeing JPEG's on their web page be it web developer or end user. It's only an issue to people who place ideals over practicality. People are listening to billions of AAC and MP3 files on a daily basis without complaint (and with hardware support).
Which leads me to the next point. What practical reason do I have for wanting h.264 support in a browser? Because I get hardware-based decoding with h.264. It saves my battery time and leaves my CPU free to do other more important tasks. With WebM or Theora I get software decoding and thus a less responsive machine with a shorter battery life.
Perhaps most importantly, the MPEG group have time and time again have brought us the best codecs for digital media. Given Theora's performance compared to WebM and h.264, I certainly hope Ogg isn't responsible for pushing r&d into codecs for the future. Open source is great. I use it every day and can't imagine how much more difficult computing would be without it but the great bulk of its work has been with reproducing free/open versions of existing products and paradigms, not at pushing the boundaries of research and development.
You know, we complained endlessly when Microsoft fragmented the web user experience for years...why are some of us giving Mozilla and Google a free pass when, however noble the motivation, they are trying to do the same thing?
You don't need artists and writers and a disc full of content if you make multiplayer-only games. I think this is more of what EA execs want rather than what the current reality is. The highest rated games are still single player (Mass Effect, Assasin's Creed, Fallout, etc.) because they immerse you into story and give you many hours of play.
If everything becomes a Call of Duty experience then I suppose I'll be purchasing a lot less games. Running around on tiny maps hoping my twitch reflexes and ping time is faster than the timmie who plays 8 hours a day is not my idea of engaging entertainment. In fact, it's just Pac-Man with guns.
At what point don't they just buckle down and rewrite the apps to use standards-based methods? They put their money on a losing horse. Suck it up and move on.
I understand that Microsoft encouraged folks to write their apps with Active X and all that but they learned a valuable lesson - don't trust mission-critical operations to a single-vendor solution.
Yes, I know Exchange and Active Directory ft into this category as well but the only difference is that Microsoft hasn't dropped support for them. I mean, why is going 100% Microsoft a rational decision but if your CIO said "We're going 100% Apple." he'd be fired in a heartbeat?
There are many large companies and governments that seem to make things work without Microsoft technologies and I'm sure you can too.
Panic, maker of (excellent) Mac software has some Atari 2600 boxes for their current lineup of products.
Pretty cool if you ask me.
Unless you ascribe to the belief that government, even democratic forms eventually end up becoming an oligarchy of some form. It's not hard to imagine that the US is currently heading in that direction given the figures you cite.
Is it so far-fetched to think that if given enough time, unimpeded, the Republican party would structure government in a manner that corporations would be self-regulated, all-powerful entities and that government's purpose is to protect wealth rather than people? Look at how the fringe in today's GOP believe BP is the victim in the Gulf disaster. Is the war in Iraq truly taking place to protect the citizenry of Iraq or is it to secure/institute a US-friendly oil producer/port in a time where oil reserves are declining and China and India's oil consumption will only increase given their current state of economic development? Why does New Orleans, a city with a large poverty base situated in one of the poorest states still look like a disaster zone? Because to fix it would require a transfer of wealth with no reward for doing so that the wealthy aren't willing to endure. That's why we're pouring billions into a war rather than rebuilding a city.
The weak always cede power in times of perceived crisis and fear until the point in which so much power has been ceded that revolt, be it internal or external, is needed to get it back.
Anyway, the point is guess that I think we are moving beyond the point at which our government is solely dedicated to protecting the weak and that many of our policies are now crafted for maintaining and acquiring wealth. And I'm not singling out Republicans to be partisan - they're simplyt actors in the natural pro(re)gression of democractic forms of government and the more crises like terrorism and depressions we experience the faster it will happen.
I guess this means a new round of ALL CAPS EMAIL CHAIN LETTER WARNINGS IN 48 PT COMIC SANS TELLING ME TO SEND THIS TO ALL MY FRIENDS AND NOT TO LET THEM TAKE THIS COUNTRY AWAY FROM US WITHOUT A FIGHT. TEA PARTY FTW!!!
What's strange is that the all caps part bothers me more than the crazy far-right subject material of those things.
So if a person had never bothered to put up any curtains and failed to install doors in their house and Google snapped a photo of the street in which you can see inside the house should Google be tried for invasion of privacy? Can such a person who leaves his or her house in that state have a reasonable expectation of privacy? Do people that can't be bothered to put up electronic versions of curtains and doors for their wireless networks have a reasonable expectation of privacy?
If you throw out incriminating evidence in the garbage, took it to the curb and investigators went through to get it and used it against you do you have any expectation that they shouldn't be able to use that evidence?
Seriously, if you make your life available to the public, whether it be failing to install curtains and doors in your home, putting sensitive documents in the trash and taking it out to the curb, posting your marital indiscretions on Facebook or allowing the public to connect to your publicly broadcasted and open network you have no reasonable expectation of privacy at those points.
At worst, Google can be accused of being creepy for picking through the "virtual" trash left at the curb and snapping photos of your doorless and curtainless home.
What is scary is that congresspersons involved with this investigation had no clue about securing consumer routers and are currently making decisions guiding the Department of Homeland Security . If there's anything alarming and scary to take away from this story that would be that, not Google.
I think Bill Nye should redo his entire show episodes filmed from a cave with a couple of bodyguards and AK-47's behind him.
C'mon people - when did we forget what it was like to be a boy? It's how we learn. Are taping several bottle rockets together to make it multi-stage and seeing what lights on fire with a magnifying glass going to be terrorist activities too? Do we need a 3-day waiting period for building a potato gun?
It's amazing what a little bit of fear and fear-mongering (I'm talking to you the Fox News) will do to the way people interact with the world.
Someone mentioned that we need to vote for candidates that have detailed plans for everything rather than voting for those with slick ad campaigns. So put yourself in the situation of someone running for office. Are you expert enough to lay out detailed solutions to issues concerning telecommunications, agriculture, commerce, defense, transportation, welfare, immigration, international relations and all the myriad sub-fields they contain? Nobody can possibly be a competent expert in all of these areas yet congress has to regularly make long-lasting decisions that impact these fields. How can they possibly make an informed decision for every bill? Enter the lobbyist. The lobbyist is an expert in his or her particular field and is more than happy to inform a congressperson what the important issues are regarding House Bill 714.
We don't need "informed" politicians because nobody will ever exist that can make competent decisions on every or even some of the issues he or she will face in their political careers. We need to somehow neutralize the power and influence a lobbyist holds in our government without removing the essential service they provide - access to expertise and the ability to provide a cliff note summary of the topic at hand. What the answer to that is I don't know but it's clear why corporations seem to run the show - because they have all the experts. How did you gain the expertise in whatever vocation you decided to practice? More than likely you gained it by working for someone, maybe even a large corporation or two.
...but just having it sit idle on a static HTML page with no flash or video makes my CPU fan come on. I hate that. Why the hell is FF using enough CPU cycles to require CPU cooling when it's just SITTING THERE AT IDLE.
Get your crap together Mozilla or you're going to lose everything you worked so hard to accomplish. Extensions are the only thing saving your bacon and Chrome is making some real progress in that area - plus it doesn't tax my CPU.
I completely understand where you are coming from. However, I believe that plugins would go against the spirit of the HTML5 video tag where browser plugins should not be a requirement in order to watch the video.
Certainly, the browser can be made to support various codecs but HTML5 is attempting to reduce browser feature fragmentation and avoiding the current practice of constructing sites in a manner that requires dedicating time and resources to supporting multiple browsers. Why as a site owner, should I have to encode h.264 for WebKit, Flash for legacy and Theora for Firefox for each video? It's a waste of time and resources and serves only the plugin/browser creator agendas and not the end-user's agenda which is simply to watch the video. Yes, yes - I understand that DRM and licensing serves agendas that aren't the end-user's but HTML5 wants a plugin-less web and is leaving browser manufacturers to determine what that standard is. You think they would have learned their lesson but to the credit of the browser manufacturers they are playing nice for the most part with the HTML5 spec.
If Theora was competitive on a technical level to h.264 there might be a more compelling argument to standardize on Theora but the facts are it's an obscure codec with no widespread support for hardware decoding, it fails on measurements of frame quality, filesize and CPU usage, and much of world's existing videos are already encoded using h.264 (including much of Flash). Also, does the license of Theora allow for DRM wrappers? I honestly don't know but if so, then that's unfortunately a real issue going against Theora as well.
I too want an open web and wish Theora could fit that bill better than it does but I can understand why it is being dismissed by most browser manufacturers.
The obvious reason Microsoft has standardized on h.264 is its support for DRM. However, Ogg Theora is inferior to h.264 by any standard of measurement except for licensing.
Ars has a good article summarizing a comparison study between Theora and h.264. Basically, Theora produces much lower quality videos with larger filesizes and higher CPU utilization when compared to h.264 videos with identical bitrates.
I've heard Theora advocates say "just jack up the bitrates until it looks good - we're in the age of Hulu so no big deal." I find that unacceptable. Theora will have to up its game if it wants to be a true competitor to h.264. All it has going right now is an open license.
You're a computer guy, right? My cousin's kid been trying to help us with this TV station thing we're doing but I don't think he knows what he's doing. Plus he's starting soccer now and he doesn't have much time anymore. It's not like you don't, eh? Heh heh.
Anyway, can you help? We use The Windows and all that so it's pretty standard.
You will? Thanks buddy - I'll see that you get some extra "unmonitored" visits from the little lady this month.
He claims to be a web developer, which one can assume that he's writing code (be it PHP, Ruby, ASP or even Javascript.) How is this not programming? Because you don't have to hit "compile" when you want to test code? Because you don't mess with C-type memory pointers or track down potential buffer overflows?
Have you been paying attention to the web lately? The lines between application as an OS-bound executable are being blurred more and more by the web each day and these type of web services all employ object-orientation, design patterns, APIs, unit-tested frameworks, algorithm optimization, security hardening, database design, etc. Proper usage any of these tools and concepts are normally beyond the casual script writer. They require a good understanding of what it takes to make a modern web-app.
Is the code necessary to implement Gmail any less complex than code used to write an email app?
Why do OS app programmers seem to think no one else programs but them and everybody else is a self-taught hack?
That's what automotive engineers would have said in 1950 if you slapped a plain-old, gas-burning 2009 Honda Civic in front of them - and they may have been right. It would have been much too expensive, is far more complex than the car of that day and the tremendous increase in fuel efficiency may not have offset the 27 cents per gallon cost of gasoline. However, I don't think anybody would argue that the 2009 Civic isn't a much better car in almost every way over anything offered in 1950. Your statement seems to imply there is no point in going any further with advancing efficiency because of costs right now.
You know, properly disposing of waste and building sewers is going to be expensive. Even if we stopped now millions are going to die. The plague rats are already out there.
When it comes down to it, the problems with conservatives is that the only thing they ever want to see change is the value of their bank accounts and investments. Their minds can think no further than the short-term future. Anything new, even if it will lead to a betterment of society and the saving of lives, is a perceived potential threat to their precious short-term revenue streams. As if worldwide economic models won't be upended by global crop-failures, coastline flooding and increased hurricane strength and frequency. Conservatives always pooh-pooh the potential profits to be made by converting to green energy (wind turbine manufacturers like to be paid too.)
Always the short-term thinking (it's about MY bank account not my grandson's.)
Why did Bush classify these photographs? Because they know the truth - they just don't care. Money for me now is more important than a better society and fewer deaths or even profit in the future. The very things that are causing global warming are some of the largest established revenue streams (re: oil) ever known and changing how we do things to reduce the effect we're having on the climate will cost money now and that's what it boils down to.
It's this stupid, short-sighted, short-term, money-for-me-now thinking that got us into our current economic situation too.
It's astounding to me that right wing Americans object to the governent taking over healthcare on cost grounds when ALL the evidence from other countries is that no one else pays as much for their healthcare than Americans do currently.
That's because right-wing Americans don't care about the American people as much as they care about American corporations.
I'll go further and say the building doesn't matter. It will just be filled with people that cognitively acknowledge Jesus but have nothing to show for it but their weekly attendance to said building. Worthless.
Simply show them a life of someone that practices Jesus' teachings and they might see that it's more than an antiquated fairy tale. Love those that are hard to love. If you've been blessed with abundance (in whatever wealth, love, etc.) then share it with the poor (in wealth, love, etc.). Recognize that you're certainly no better than the drunk lying in the gutter and quite possibly a worse person than he or she is. Recognize that there are no "degrees" of sins - homosexuals are your equals and that their lifestyle is no worse than your cheating on taxes/wife lifestyle. Know that listening to crappy Christian music does not make you a better Christian any more than being at a certain building one day a week does. It's just another expression of Christians segregating themselves from people that aren't like them. Stop "tithing" to yourselves by building lavish, beautiful "worship-campuses" and ignoring the homeless person starving in front of it. You can't be both pro-life and support capital punishment. You can't say "peace be with you" at church and support war. You can't be Republican/Democrat first, Christian second.
If people actually listened to Jesus and what he had to say rather than observing so-called Christians then they might not be so quick to write Christianity off. I don't blame the world for its judgement of us though because today's Christian church and the people that fill it are artificial, ineffective and lame.
User-submitted doesn't imply client-side (javascript) validation. I always sanitize user-submitted content via PHP. Of course, replace PHP with Ruby, ASP, Java or whatever other server-side language you're using. It's pretty hard for a user to manipulate server-side code without a login shell to the webserver or a really brain-dead server setup.
Did anyone else find Dead Space creepy more than a few times? The audio did a spectacular job of creeping the player out.
Curiously, as I voted this morning (Ohio, for the curious) I was given the option of a paper ballot or an electronic ballot. People were standing in line waiting for their turn at the Diebold machines while the paper ballot tables remained largely empty. I saw 3 people (including my wife and myself) opt for the paper ballot in my time there.
Personally, I chose the paper ballot because my tin-foil hat prevents me from trusting the Diebold machines but I assumed more would have opted for paper simply out of time constraints to get to work or whatever else they had planned for the day. Not so.
I don't have any grand conclusion or poignant observation other than people implicitly trust the electronic voting machines despite the nationally-publicized problems with them, they are unaware there have been major issues with them (Diebold in particular) or the shiny touchscreen is newer and cooler or perhaps perceived as easier to use. Maybe it's something I'm not thinking of.