I forgot to mention that Litestep's core as well as most modules are GPLed. If you object to that, there's a non-GPL (I think it's Artistic Licensed) clone called Retrostep.
If you want to see what a customizable desktop SHOULD be, you need to try Litestep, which unfortunately only runs under Windows. It's definitely geared towards people who want more eyecandy than this guy, but you really can make your desktop look and act pretty much however you want. Check out the vast variety of screenshots on Litestep.com and the list of modules at Shellfront's module archive. It may be possible to do the same under X using a variety of different applications scripted to all start on login, but personally I have no idea where to find what I'm looking for. For instance, I click on the left edge of the screen (even with a window maximized) and I get a popup menu containing a list of programs and places to navigate to. I press (windows button + spacebar) and a single-line command prompt appears ready for a variety of input, including regular command line stuff, Litestep-specific commands, web address or search to open in the default browser, etc... All this together with a taskbar/clock/system tray/media controls/virtual desktops/whatever, in any graphical/spatial configuration you define. Granted the command prompt in Unices is an effective replacement for some of the functionality, but it doesn't take care of all of it and certainly doesn't provide for the flexible eye-candy.
If someone wants to rebut me by telling me how to configure all of this in Linux, I'll definitely boot up my Linux partition and try it out.
Lossless audio compression has its place and that place is in archiving samples and such that are going to be repeatedly used and compressed. For final products lossless compression is a colossal waste of bits. I don't care what kind of audio snob you are, there's no way you can hear the difference between a CD and a 320kbit mp3; probably a much lower bitrate would do, and an even lower bitrate than that would be rougly equivalent for ogg. If you want better audio quality, petition for a new media format that has a better sample rate and more bits per sample than CD audio; compress that down to maybe half of CD audio size with your choice of lossy compressor and you'll be amazed how much better it would sound. Lossy audio compression tries to throw out bits that don't matter; sampling at 44100Hz/16bit just throws out all information about frequencies above 22500Hz indiscriminately. Bottom line is that lossless formats don't even try to be efficient whereas lossy formats are actively going for the best sound for the bitrate. You want better sound, use a better codec and compress at a higher bitrate.
Who needs a scrollwheel or scrollbar when there are arrow keys on the keyboard?
I do. I do a lot of things (web browsing not least) with just my mouse hand.
IMHO the best combination is to use the left hand for the mouse, and the right for keyboard. The keyboard and the mouse both have their advantages, so why not enjoy them at the same time?
Cause that's how YOU like to do it. I like to sit back with only my right hand on the desk for webbrowsing.
Adding lots of bells and whistles to the mouse seems like an evil M$ plan. They want you to do everything with the mouse, it's so fun an easy just to click your way through the computing experience. Now if you really think it's so great to use the mouse, why don't you ditch the fscking keyboard and get a virtual, clickable keyb instead?
uhhhh... evil MS plan, the mouse. ok, where were we? Using a mouse as a keyboard? That would suck, for obvious reasons. Mouse is good for intuitive UI's that require clicking one button at a time and don't require doing commands fast enough so that memorizing the keyboard shortcuts (and putting a hand on the keyboard) becomes necessary; they're also good for interfaces that don't have a set number of options that correspond nicely to predefined keyboard shortcuts: for instance, web page links, file manager icons, etc. etc. Gestures are a way to make the mouse more versatile; I think of them as keyboard shortcuts for my mouse hand. I also find it appeals more to my laziness to keep my right hand on the mouse and lazily gesture with it, than to use the keyboard for tabbing around (blech!) to links and pressing alt-left, alt-right all the time. Clear enough? Ditch the conspiracy theories, the mouse is there cause it's a useful user-input tool.
This is the most tired argument. If you use windows for a day or two you're likely to figure out that any folder-specific controls are gotten by choosing "properties" from the right-click menu. Where do you choose what folders to share? Bingo. Properties, and from there it's a nice self-explanatory gui. I realize it's often more complicated than that (you might have to install an IPX protocol for instance) but all the tools are in the folder properties and the control panels.
If you use Linux for a day or two you figure out that most settings are in/etc, and can be accessed through whatever random gui config apps your distro threw in. Where do you choose what folders to share? Hmmm. Of course you can look at the samba man pages (big help) or you could google for some gui app, or look at your distro's online support... The point is in Windows you don't even have to RTFM. I like Linux a lot but ReadingTheFuckingManual isn't what I want to do all day just so that I know how and can go and tell people that it's only hard because they don't.
It's not so much MDI that's needed, but for a single document to take a single window... I really hate having to bring FOUR windows to the front in order to edit what I'm working on. Could use a separate desktop but I don't like that either. What's wrong with putting toolbars and controls in the same window with the picture?
First scenario: Any particular store could (but probably wouldn't) record the key responses that pass through their systems, but if, as I said, the authentication system asks for a different output each time, the stored responses would be useless.
Second: It's supposed to be impossible to counterfeit these as yet; that's the whole idea. If it becomes possible, we'd probably have to move on to a new system. However, (and this applies to the third scenario as well) obviously the storage of keypairs has to be secure for any such scheme. This part of it can be done using as many expensive precautions as you like since it's only done in one or possibly two places. But really, what's a security solution that doesn't face these problems? You could just as well say that if someone steals your cardkey and forces you at gunpoint to reveal your pin number, then the key's no longer secure - of course.
Beyond the obvious constraint of having to record 10^11 or more distinct interference patterns in order to produce the hologram, the incoherent superposition of these N patterns decreases the overall diffraction efficiency of the hologram by 1/N, making them all effectively unobservable.
As far as video quality, vp3 is a good bit behind the better mpeg4 variants such as divx and xvid according to this codec comparison, and this one also seems to be saying that vp4 isn't up to their level either. Both articles are focused on dvd-ripping, which involves resolutions typically from 400 to 700 (horizontal) at around 0.15 to 0.4 bits per pixel, so as to fit an hour-plus movie onto a 700mb cdr at a decent resolution. If vp3 and vp4 weren't designed to be optimal in these ranges then the comparison might be fair, but in general it seems like mpeg4 is the better bet if any halfway decent bitrate (500+ kilobits per second) is available. Of course, the patent-free nature of the xiph codec is what'll be attractive about it.
What's wrong with donations to non-profits being tax-deductible? All that means is that if a person thinks an organization is worth lowering their annual gross income by $X, they contribute $X that year. Hardly seems like a government subsidy to me.
Also I have to laugh when anyone says they're satisfied by the diversity and broadness of cable TV programming...
the part that was retarded was how he struggled to move the pillar when Dooku collapsed it over Obi-wan and Anakin - move the PEOPLE, dumbass, not the humongous pillar thing.
The parent of your post oversimplified it, but there is some point to what he's saying. In the current system in the US, if the board of a publicly-held corporation makes decisions that don't maximize profit, shareholders can sue. (Correct me if I too am oversimplifying.) This basically forces corporations to maximize profit regardless of ethics. Saying the two are mutually exclusive isn't quite right, but profit is almost always unrelated to and often at odds with ethics.
He killed thousands of people and not millions like, Pol-Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Mao.
But then dictators like these are the ones we actually hear about. There's plenty of places that have been run by dictators over the years that we never hear two words about cause their atrocities, if any, are either fairly piddly or else just not sensational enough. I'm no political know-it-all but I'd estimate Pinochet probably ranks around the 90th percentile of bastard dictators. Especially since the regime he overthrew (with plenty of American help) was actually fairly democratic, though socialist.
Not to defend their viewpoint, but for one I'm not sure I get your analogy (penguins = children? violence = black & white? tv shows = tv shows? Are they saying some children are tv shows?)...
And for another, attacking ideas like this as logical fallacies isn't such a devastating argument. Sure, their logic isn't deductive and/or/if/then/exists/forall type logic; it's more inductive, as is all science. Like this: I drop a rock; it falls. I drop a rock; it falls. I drop a rock; it falls. I drop a rock; it falls. I drop a rock; it falls. I drop a rock; it falls. ....
Therefore, if I drop a rock, it'll fall.
Not a (deductive) logical consequence, but a pretty safe bet anyway.
Anyway that's the basis of their argument: they're saying show a kid violent tv; the kid acts violent, etc. Whether you have observed the same is what's arguable, not the basis of logic. You use the same logic every day whether you like it or not.
The zombies are in the U.S. version of Carmageddon 2 as well. Ze Germans aren't alone in their squeamishness. In any case, they were pretty lame zombies if you ask me - looked, acted, screamed, and dismembered just like real pedestrians.
IANAL - This means I won't draw the same line between logic and reality that a lawyer will. Ya know, we all see this kind of thing all the time on slashdot, and it makes me wonder if people really think it'd actually fly. You've seen them a million times before: some genius poster takes some legalism (the DMCA is popular, for instance) to some far-out logical extreme or other for the purpose of defeating or ridiculing the piece of law in question. You know what? The law doesn't deal with logical extremes, you weirdos. It's all well and good to spoof bad laws with the old ROT-26 joke and whatnot, but posts like this which try and pull clever loopholes out of their non-lawyer asses make me wonder alot about slashdot poster sanity. You're not alone -- but really.
In answer to your question: Projects which implement patented algorithms without paying aren't unheard of: lame mp3 and xvid mpeg4, for instance. As you say, it's compiling and distributing that's iffy, and for that question I don't see how it makes any difference whether or not there's some small deliberate error. What's the point? You're not allowed (?) to compile and use this stuff, whether or not there was an error in there before you fixed it. I ain't a lawyer either but what're you getting at?
How about +1, Funny instead? At least, I hope it was supposed to be a joke... I pretty much have to laugh at Lyndon Larouche; haven't found any other reaction that works for me. Such a hilarious loony-toon, he is.
Re:Another book on the topic...
on
Enigma
·
· Score: 1
Much as it'd be cool, I suspect it's such a long book that the movie would either leave out too much or be way too long. Seriously, there are how many subplots? each of which could easily be a two hour movie on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
I forgot to mention that Litestep's core as well as most modules are GPLed. If you object to that, there's a non-GPL (I think it's Artistic Licensed) clone called Retrostep.
If you want to see what a customizable desktop SHOULD be, you need to try Litestep, which unfortunately only runs under Windows. It's definitely geared towards people who want more eyecandy than this guy, but you really can make your desktop look and act pretty much however you want. Check out the vast variety of screenshots on Litestep.com and the list of modules at Shellfront's module archive. It may be possible to do the same under X using a variety of different applications scripted to all start on login, but personally I have no idea where to find what I'm looking for. For instance, I click on the left edge of the screen (even with a window maximized) and I get a popup menu containing a list of programs and places to navigate to. I press (windows button + spacebar) and a single-line command prompt appears ready for a variety of input, including regular command line stuff, Litestep-specific commands, web address or search to open in the default browser, etc... All this together with a taskbar/clock/system tray/media controls/virtual desktops/whatever, in any graphical/spatial configuration you define. Granted the command prompt in Unices is an effective replacement for some of the functionality, but it doesn't take care of all of it and certainly doesn't provide for the flexible eye-candy.
If someone wants to rebut me by telling me how to configure all of this in Linux, I'll definitely boot up my Linux partition and try it out.
Score: -1, Incorrect.
MPlayer is a very good media player for Unixes.
Xvid is an open-source mpeg4 video codec. MPlayer competes with Xine. Xvid competes with Divx.
Lossless audio compression has its place and that place is in archiving samples and such that are going to be repeatedly used and compressed. For final products lossless compression is a colossal waste of bits. I don't care what kind of audio snob you are, there's no way you can hear the difference between a CD and a 320kbit mp3; probably a much lower bitrate would do, and an even lower bitrate than that would be rougly equivalent for ogg. If you want better audio quality, petition for a new media format that has a better sample rate and more bits per sample than CD audio; compress that down to maybe half of CD audio size with your choice of lossy compressor and you'll be amazed how much better it would sound. Lossy audio compression tries to throw out bits that don't matter; sampling at 44100Hz/16bit just throws out all information about frequencies above 22500Hz indiscriminately. Bottom line is that lossless formats don't even try to be efficient whereas lossy formats are actively going for the best sound for the bitrate. You want better sound, use a better codec and compress at a higher bitrate.
Who needs a scrollwheel or scrollbar when there are arrow keys on the keyboard?
I do. I do a lot of things (web browsing not least) with just my mouse hand.
IMHO the best combination is to use the left hand for the mouse, and the right for keyboard. The keyboard and the mouse both have their advantages, so why not enjoy them at the same time?
Cause that's how YOU like to do it. I like to sit back with only my right hand on the desk for webbrowsing.
Adding lots of bells and whistles to the mouse seems like an evil M$ plan. They want you to do everything with the mouse, it's so fun an easy just to click your way through the computing experience. Now if you really think it's so great to use the mouse, why don't you ditch the fscking keyboard and get a virtual, clickable keyb instead?
uhhhh... evil MS plan, the mouse. ok, where were we? Using a mouse as a keyboard? That would suck, for obvious reasons. Mouse is good for intuitive UI's that require clicking one button at a time and don't require doing commands fast enough so that memorizing the keyboard shortcuts (and putting a hand on the keyboard) becomes necessary; they're also good for interfaces that don't have a set number of options that correspond nicely to predefined keyboard shortcuts: for instance, web page links, file manager icons, etc. etc. Gestures are a way to make the mouse more versatile; I think of them as keyboard shortcuts for my mouse hand. I also find it appeals more to my laziness to keep my right hand on the mouse and lazily gesture with it, than to use the keyboard for tabbing around (blech!) to links and pressing alt-left, alt-right all the time. Clear enough? Ditch the conspiracy theories, the mouse is there cause it's a useful user-input tool.
Linux might take a deeper understanding of computing, but once it's set up properly it works much better than anything from MS.
I do agree about that, I just would very much like to have it both ways.
This is the most tired argument. If you use windows for a day or two you're likely to figure out that any folder-specific controls are gotten by choosing "properties" from the right-click menu. Where do you choose what folders to share? Bingo. Properties, and from there it's a nice self-explanatory gui. I realize it's often more complicated than that (you might have to install an IPX protocol for instance) but all the tools are in the folder properties and the control panels.
/etc, and can be accessed through whatever random gui config apps your distro threw in. Where do you choose what folders to share? Hmmm. Of course you can look at the samba man pages (big help) or you could google for some gui app, or look at your distro's online support... The point is in Windows you don't even have to RTFM. I like Linux a lot but ReadingTheFuckingManual isn't what I want to do all day just so that I know how and can go and tell people that it's only hard because they don't.
If you use Linux for a day or two you figure out that most settings are in
It's not so much MDI that's needed, but for a single document to take a single window... I really hate having to bring FOUR windows to the front in order to edit what I'm working on. Could use a separate desktop but I don't like that either. What's wrong with putting toolbars and controls in the same window with the picture?
First scenario: Any particular store could (but probably wouldn't) record the key responses that pass through their systems, but if, as I said, the authentication system asks for a different output each time, the stored responses would be useless.
Second: It's supposed to be impossible to counterfeit these as yet; that's the whole idea. If it becomes possible, we'd probably have to move on to a new system. However, (and this applies to the third scenario as well) obviously the storage of keypairs has to be secure for any such scheme. This part of it can be done using as many expensive precautions as you like since it's only done in one or possibly two places. But really, what's a security solution that doesn't face these problems? You could just as well say that if someone steals your cardkey and forces you at gunpoint to reveal your pin number, then the key's no longer secure - of course.
So they record a few thousand input position/output pattern pairs and ask for a different few each time.
Beyond the obvious constraint of having to record 10^11 or more distinct interference patterns in order to produce the hologram, the incoherent superposition of these N patterns decreases the overall diffraction efficiency of the hologram by 1/N, making them all effectively unobservable.
just means you have to reach over to the keyboard and press control while rightclicking, if you want those features.
As far as video quality, vp3 is a good bit behind the better mpeg4 variants such as divx and xvid according to this codec comparison, and this one also seems to be saying that vp4 isn't up to their level either. Both articles are focused on dvd-ripping, which involves resolutions typically from 400 to 700 (horizontal) at around 0.15 to 0.4 bits per pixel, so as to fit an hour-plus movie onto a 700mb cdr at a decent resolution. If vp3 and vp4 weren't designed to be optimal in these ranges then the comparison might be fair, but in general it seems like mpeg4 is the better bet if any halfway decent bitrate (500+ kilobits per second) is available. Of course, the patent-free nature of the xiph codec is what'll be attractive about it.
What's wrong with donations to non-profits being tax-deductible? All that means is that if a person thinks an organization is worth lowering their annual gross income by $X, they contribute $X that year. Hardly seems like a government subsidy to me.
Also I have to laugh when anyone says they're satisfied by the diversity and broadness of cable TV programming...
the part that was retarded was how he struggled to move the pillar when Dooku collapsed it over Obi-wan and Anakin - move the PEOPLE, dumbass, not the humongous pillar thing.
The parent of your post oversimplified it, but there is some point to what he's saying. In the current system in the US, if the board of a publicly-held corporation makes decisions that don't maximize profit, shareholders can sue. (Correct me if I too am oversimplifying.) This basically forces corporations to maximize profit regardless of ethics. Saying the two are mutually exclusive isn't quite right, but profit is almost always unrelated to and often at odds with ethics.
He killed thousands of people and not millions like, Pol-Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Mao.
But then dictators like these are the ones we actually hear about. There's plenty of places that have been run by dictators over the years that we never hear two words about cause their atrocities, if any, are either fairly piddly or else just not sensational enough. I'm no political know-it-all but I'd estimate Pinochet probably ranks around the 90th percentile of bastard dictators. Especially since the regime he overthrew (with plenty of American help) was actually fairly democratic, though socialist.
correct me.
Sure it's not always reliable, but just try going without it.
Four.
so, as I said, you decide from your experience of what happens when kids watch violent TV. I more or less agree with you.
Not to defend their viewpoint, but for one I'm not sure I get your analogy (penguins = children? violence = black & white? tv shows = tv shows? Are they saying some children are tv shows?)...
And for another, attacking ideas like this as logical fallacies isn't such a devastating argument. Sure, their logic isn't deductive and/or/if/then/exists/forall type logic; it's more inductive, as is all science. Like this:
I drop a rock; it falls.
I drop a rock; it falls.
I drop a rock; it falls.
I drop a rock; it falls.
I drop a rock; it falls.
I drop a rock; it falls.
....
Therefore, if I drop a rock, it'll fall.
Not a (deductive) logical consequence, but a pretty safe bet anyway.
Anyway that's the basis of their argument: they're saying show a kid violent tv; the kid acts violent, etc. Whether you have observed the same is what's arguable, not the basis of logic. You use the same logic every day whether you like it or not.
The zombies are in the U.S. version of Carmageddon 2 as well. Ze Germans aren't alone in their squeamishness. In any case, they were pretty lame zombies if you ask me - looked, acted, screamed, and dismembered just like real pedestrians.
IANAL - This means I won't draw the same line between logic and reality that a lawyer will. Ya know, we all see this kind of thing all the time on slashdot, and it makes me wonder if people really think it'd actually fly. You've seen them a million times before: some genius poster takes some legalism (the DMCA is popular, for instance) to some far-out logical extreme or other for the purpose of defeating or ridiculing the piece of law in question. You know what? The law doesn't deal with logical extremes, you weirdos. It's all well and good to spoof bad laws with the old ROT-26 joke and whatnot, but posts like this which try and pull clever loopholes out of their non-lawyer asses make me wonder alot about slashdot poster sanity. You're not alone -- but really.
In answer to your question:
Projects which implement patented algorithms without paying aren't unheard of: lame mp3 and xvid mpeg4, for instance. As you say, it's compiling and distributing that's iffy, and for that question I don't see how it makes any difference whether or not there's some small deliberate error. What's the point? You're not allowed (?) to compile and use this stuff, whether or not there was an error in there before you fixed it. I ain't a lawyer either but what're you getting at?
How about +1, Funny instead? At least, I hope it was supposed to be a joke... I pretty much have to laugh at Lyndon Larouche; haven't found any other reaction that works for me. Such a hilarious loony-toon, he is.
Much as it'd be cool, I suspect it's such a long book that the movie would either leave out too much or be way too long. Seriously, there are how many subplots? each of which could easily be a two hour movie on its own.