>People like me who make their own videos hate YouTube because it recompresses the videos into FLV format at an extremely low bit rate.
Right on. It would be really nice if they offered better quality downloadable versions of the videos in addition to the quick streaming Flash/Shockwave/whatever crap. That's one reason i frequent archive.org's video collection moreso than anywhere else. If you first want to quickly see if something is any good you can download/stream heavily compressed realmedia or mpeg4. If you decide you like it (and maybe want to even add it to your media center or burn a disc) they have mpeg1 (vcd quality) and even mpeg2 (dvd quality) versions available of most things.
For another example take a look at Systm, the online technology show. They offer their episodes in H.264 Quicktime, Theora, Windows Media, XViD and even available over bit torrent to take the strain off their servers. IMHO, this is the kind of online programming that will endure. IMHO, the flash stuff is best suited for previews and short clips that are mildy amusing.
Maybe Youtube just wants to save on bandwidth, but for sites that are serious about delivering video content they should really step it up a notch. We're not on 56k modems with 640x480 15" CRT displays anymore.
There are other ways to run mailing lists. Most of my friends use Yahoo Groups or a list manager from their hosting company. But i just did a quick search and came across http://www.coollist.com/ . Dunno if it's any good but might be worth looking into.
It sounds like you're describing the type of blog that would appeal to you and that's great. But how exactly is that teenage girl you linked "forcing her life down your throat"? It seems more that you picked her blog out at random to illustrate your rant that some people have blogs that are of no interest to you. Just to turn it around, do you think that teenage girl would be interested in reading developers' blogs?
IMHO, 97% (or whatever high percentage) of anything that is popular is going to be crap, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the medium. Most of the songs on mp3.com for instance were shit but mp3.com was cool resource that turned up interesting artists from time to time. I think the blog scene could
be
looked at
inthesame way.
Been reading since 2000 here and posted maybe 10-15 times ever. I don't bother usually because 1) it takes time and effort 2) whatever point I was going to make is eventually said by someone else anyway. 3) most stories are just rehashes in some way or another so most of the important points have been covered again and again (anything that has to do with RIAA, DMCA, PATRIOT act, linux vs windows, macs vs pc, to name a few) unless i were to have a real stroke of brilliance, why bother?
it's not like home users access services at work, bank accounts, online shopping, credit cards, in house file sharing, personal financial correspondence, IP phone calls, and so on... they really have nothing to worry about.
You have a point. But let's be a little realistic. The fact is that you dont have malicious wardrivers in every neighborhood in every town just waiting to get your bank password, credit card, etc. I think a lot of well meaning computer security folks tone up the FEAR factor a little too much, as if the blackhats have been waiting for you and now all your base are belong to them. All because you invested on some shitty wifi gear.
I use WEP personally just to "keep the honest man honest", because I know it's not real security by any means. I'm sure more people would use it if it were easier to setup. With my netgear AP/orinoco card combination I had to enter the passkey in HEX for god's sake. And then there's all this talk about rotating the keys often for better security. Who wants to enter a long ass string of hex characters once a week?
Not sure whether this will make you feel any better, but I have a Netgear ME-102 access point and it's never had any heat problems.
I second that. The ME-102 is a fine piece of equipment for the price. Seriously you shouldn't have to go through hoops just to keep your AP cool. I'd suggest either getting rid of it (and buying an ME-102) or calling up Siemens and asking what gives.
SecureIM has been around for a while now. It basically acts as a proxy and you set your Aim to connect through it. Inside the proxy it encrypts everything with 256bit blowfish, then on the receiver's end reverses the process. The result is transparent encryption with the standard Aim client.
It's easy to install but since both parties need to have it running can be tricky trying to get non-geeks to understand why they should install it.
I used it for a while with the few(2) friends I could convince to run it but then kind of forgot about it...
I have my monitor set to screensaver in 15 minutes, standby in 45. Which for me is the best tradeoff in savings without my monitor shutting off too abrubtly if i get up for a little while. I use a dell/sony trinitron from 98 and it still works great (hell the dell pII 350 is still my main box, and you call 700mhz computers OLD). Leaving your monitor running all the time will only waste electricity, burn in the screen, and burn out the CRT. Then you end up with those monitors like you see at libraries and schools which have no brightness left at all and are barely readable.
We should start a Slashdotter's anonymous (cowards?) club.
I used to spend a lot less time on the net before I found Slashdot. Then I got this uncontrollable urge to read every story and most comments, every day! Although it's time I could be spending doing things, i'm not sure it's really wasting time either because there's plenty to be learned by observing discussions. I'd say my overall tech knowledge has definately improved a lot since i discovered/. Also, I don't think I would know about annoying things like the DMCA if it werent for/. nor would I know the difference between free and Free.
You guys (cmdrtaco and crew) have done a great job getting relevant info out to the techies but without too much bullshit (cnet, wired, pcmag).
Dupe posts, incorrect spelling, and search engines aside,/. is my favorite website for 2+ years now.
I was just having a discussion with a friend about the possibility of advertisers beaming things straight into our heads. I already think there's too much advertising in the world and i don't think marketers would use this thing ethically at all. He says if they don't use it ethically people will just get annoyed and vote with their dollars.. (just like they did with DVDs, and overpriced cds:-/)
Shut up, thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field.
"Denham's Dentifrice."
They toil not-
"Denham's--"
Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up.
"Dentifrice ! "
He tore the book open and flicked the pages and felt them as if he were blind, he picked at the shape of the individual letters, not blinking.
"Denham's. Spelled : D-E.N "
They toil not, neither do they . . . A fierce whisper of hot sand through empty sieve.
"Denham's does it!"
Consider the lilies, the lilies, the lilies... "Denham's dental detergent."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag found himself on his feet, the shocked inhabitants of the loud car staring, moving back from this man with the insane, gorged face, the gibbering, dry mouth, the flapping book in his fist.
Re:I too attended the conference
on
H2K2 Wrapup
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I agree most of the speakers were pretty bad... Speech Communication 101 could set em straight.
There were a few guys who really knew how to engage the audience, including Mike levine. He may have gone off the track but IMHO at least he spoke with some passion and had interesting things to say. (who knows how true any of it is)
My personal highlights were the Boondocks guy (who i didnt know about at all and turned out to be an interesting speaker), Jello (old DK and spoken word fan of his, so was really excited to hear he could make it), Social engineering panel, Negativland presentation (here's a band that REALLY needs a Behind The Music special..;), typing up crappy BASIC programs on the retro computers downstairs, and the beautiful view of the sunset from the 18th floor during negativland on saturday.
There was probably other stuff but i can't think of it now.. My first time there and I had a lot of fun, even though i went alone it didn't feel like it because almost anyone there was eager to strike up a conversation if the opportunity presented itself.
My only regret is not owning a laptop with wireless that i could bring, and being stuck trying out those badly configured X terminals. Thought it was a shame they never worked right the whole weekend cuz it must have been a hassle bringing all that gear in...
internet access aside, can't wait for the next one!
A while ago, back when Audiogalaxy was still useful I did a search for 4'33 just for shits and giggles.. Suprisingly it was available! I got a real kick out of that but not as much as when I downloaded it and received a file over 4 Megs in size!
(The whole idea behind lossy formats like mp3 is to throw out unimportant audio data for a smaller file size)
[geeky aside] so i reencoded it as.ogg at only 33k.. w00t
Personally, I seldom get bored on the net because one interesting page/site usually leads to another and another.. etc
But I have some friends that only go online to chat here and there or to see specific sites they heard about.. They usually just log off after a few minutes.
I think if you're the kind of person that loves to constantly learn about things, the net has plenty to check out and is constantly being updated too.
Right now this works great because most sites are free and advertiser supported, but I wonder what the net will be like when most of the good sites force you to pay up...
I agree, and where's the cost savings that PC advocates go on about so much. This thing is retailing for about as much as the most expensive iMac.
Gateway ($1699)
best iMac $1,799
and it has 128M less ram, 20G smaller HD, no Superdrive, no NVIDIA GeForce2 MX w/32MB DDR graphics...
I'm just another PC user (ibook drooler;) but in comparison the new iMac looks like a much better deal that this.
All we ever did in the elementary schools I went to was stupid crap that could have been done easier without a computer or was a waste of time.
here's a timeline of what i can recall:
-Simple math on the commodore PET
-Fractions on a TRS-80
-Oregon Trail on Apple IIe
at home i had a commodore 128 that I used to play games, dial interesting BBS's or practice BASIC programming. It was far more interesting and useful than anything the school could offer.
and the few times i tried playing with the BASIC interpreter on the Apple IIe's (instead of playing Oregon trail like a good little boy) resulted in me getting yelled at. go figure..
I'd watch a lot more movies if they were only a buck.
This sounds handy but its still a hassle, and if you're like most people you gotta watch the movie on your clear but small monitor.
At my local library I can rent new movies on VHS and DVD for anywhere from free to 2 bucks.. It may not be hip to get your rentals at the library but some of them (like mine) have a suprisingly good collection.
it just doesn't not show me that it is rendering a window... and that's something that Gnome was doing even on 450 mhz machine.
The preemptive patches have made my system a lot more responsive under use. Most notably the mouse cursor doesn't slow down during heavy compiles and audio latency is good enough to play with some of the more interesting sound software projects out for linux.
But it really sounds like your problem isn't with linux but with XFree86. X has its share of problems but if you have a good video card that's supported well under it, you should get more than acceptible 2d drawing performance. I use a 3dfx voodoo3 here and its about as good as win2k running KDE (sometimes you can see it rendering when resizing or moving windows quickly but i like to think of it as a cool effect;) and its way faster with lighter WM's like blackbox.
I'm still a big Quake2 fan myself. To avoid the CD thing just install the latest update patch. Dedicate your spare *nix box as the server and you're good to go.
slackware is the first distro i actually stuck with after trying the other big names and some niche ones.
i started off with redhat 5.2, it worked but i didn't get it, went on to mandrake, it worked easier but i still didn't get it and i thought it was way too bloated, tried some niche distros but they didnt have what i wanted, tried slackware for a 386 firewall i wanted to build, it worked so well i use it on all my linux installs now, AND i get it
you know exactly what you put into a slack system and what is running on it, its not as easy as redhat (at first) but you have more control...
another (more powerful) machine to set everything up on
just pop in an empty drive in the development machine and do a slack install, recompile the kernel for just the essentials and pop the drive into the 386. get the bios to autoconfigure the drive and make sure lilo is setup and boot up on the 386.. thats about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Right on. It would be really nice if they offered better quality downloadable versions of the videos in addition to the quick streaming Flash/Shockwave/whatever crap. That's one reason i frequent archive.org's video collection moreso than anywhere else. If you first want to quickly see if something is any good you can download/stream heavily compressed realmedia or mpeg4. If you decide you like it (and maybe want to even add it to your media center or burn a disc) they have mpeg1 (vcd quality) and even mpeg2 (dvd quality) versions available of most things.
For another example take a look at Systm, the online technology show. They offer their episodes in H.264 Quicktime, Theora, Windows Media, XViD and even available over bit torrent to take the strain off their servers. IMHO, this is the kind of online programming that will endure. IMHO, the flash stuff is best suited for previews and short clips that are mildy amusing.
Maybe Youtube just wants to save on bandwidth, but for sites that are serious about delivering video content they should really step it up a notch. We're not on 56k modems with 640x480 15" CRT displays anymore.
Yeah, it's never been done before...
Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996)
The Rugrats Movie (1998)
Pokémon: The First Movie (1999)
South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999)
HELLO??? Who the hell modded this up to +3 insightful??
There are other ways to run mailing lists. Most of my friends use Yahoo Groups or a list manager from their hosting company. But i just did a quick search and came across http://www.coollist.com/ . Dunno if it's any good but might be worth looking into.
IMHO, 97% (or whatever high percentage) of anything that is popular is going to be crap, that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the medium. Most of the songs on mp3.com for instance were shit but mp3.com was cool resource that turned up interesting artists from time to time. I think the blog scene could be looked at in the same way.
Been reading since 2000 here and posted maybe 10-15 times ever. I don't bother usually because 1) it takes time and effort 2) whatever point I was going to make is eventually said by someone else anyway. 3) most stories are just rehashes in some way or another so most of the important points have been covered again and again (anything that has to do with RIAA, DMCA, PATRIOT act, linux vs windows, macs vs pc, to name a few) unless i were to have a real stroke of brilliance, why bother?
I use WEP personally just to "keep the honest man honest", because I know it's not real security by any means. I'm sure more people would use it if it were easier to setup. With my netgear AP/orinoco card combination I had to enter the passkey in HEX for god's sake. And then there's all this talk about rotating the keys often for better security. Who wants to enter a long ass string of hex characters once a week?
It's easy to install but since both parties need to have it running can be tricky trying to get non-geeks to understand why they should install it.
I used it for a while with the few(2) friends I could convince to run it but then kind of forgot about it...
and one from the slackware adduser script..
i also remember a good one in the enlightenment configure script though i dont have it saved .. something about searching the -lfridge for lager ;)
I have my monitor set to screensaver in 15 minutes, standby in 45. Which for me is the best tradeoff in savings without my monitor shutting off too abrubtly if i get up for a little while. I use a dell/sony trinitron from 98 and it still works great (hell the dell pII 350 is still my main box, and you call 700mhz computers OLD). Leaving your monitor running all the time will only waste electricity, burn in the screen, and burn out the CRT. Then you end up with those monitors like you see at libraries and schools which have no brightness left at all and are barely readable.
I used to spend a lot less time on the net before I found Slashdot. Then I got this uncontrollable urge to read every story and most comments, every day! Although it's time I could be spending doing things, i'm not sure it's really wasting time either because there's plenty to be learned by observing discussions. I'd say my overall tech knowledge has definately improved a lot since i discovered /. Also, I don't think I would know about annoying things like the DMCA if it werent for /. nor would I know the difference between free and Free.
You guys (cmdrtaco and crew) have done a great job getting relevant info out to the techies but without too much bullshit (cnet, wired, pcmag).
Dupe posts, incorrect spelling, and search engines aside, /. is my favorite website for 2+ years now.
but anyway... i'm reminded of this eerie scene from a well known sci-fi novel:
Trumpets blared.
"Denham's Dentrifice."
Shut up, thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field.
"Denham's Dentifrice."
They toil not-
"Denham's--"
Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up.
"Dentifrice ! "
He tore the book open and flicked the pages and felt them as if he were blind, he picked at the shape of the individual letters, not blinking.
"Denham's. Spelled : D-E.N "
They toil not, neither do they . . .
A fierce whisper of hot sand through empty sieve.
"Denham's does it!"
Consider the lilies, the lilies, the lilies...
"Denham's dental detergent."
"Shut up, shut up, shut up!" It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag found himself on his feet, the shocked inhabitants of the loud car staring, moving back from this man with the insane, gorged face, the gibbering, dry mouth, the flapping book in his fist.
There were a few guys who really knew how to engage the audience, including Mike levine. He may have gone off the track but IMHO at least he spoke with some passion and had interesting things to say. (who knows how true any of it is)
My personal highlights were the Boondocks guy (who i didnt know about at all and turned out to be an interesting speaker), Jello (old DK and spoken word fan of his, so was really excited to hear he could make it), Social engineering panel, Negativland presentation (here's a band that REALLY needs a Behind The Music special.. ;), typing up crappy BASIC programs on the retro computers downstairs, and the beautiful view of the sunset from the 18th floor during negativland on saturday.
There was probably other stuff but i can't think of it now.. My first time there and I had a lot of fun, even though i went alone it didn't feel like it because almost anyone there was eager to strike up a conversation if the opportunity presented itself.
My only regret is not owning a laptop with wireless that i could bring, and being stuck trying out those badly configured X terminals. Thought it was a shame they never worked right the whole weekend cuz it must have been a hassle bringing all that gear in...
internet access aside, can't wait for the next one!
(The whole idea behind lossy formats like mp3 is to throw out unimportant audio data for a smaller file size)
[geeky aside] so i reencoded it as .ogg at only 33k.. w00t
Personally, I seldom get bored on the net because one interesting page/site usually leads to another and another.. etc
But I have some friends that only go online to chat here and there or to see specific sites they heard about.. They usually just log off after a few minutes.
I think if you're the kind of person that loves to constantly learn about things, the net has plenty to check out and is constantly being updated too.
Right now this works great because most sites are free and advertiser supported, but I wonder what the net will be like when most of the good sites force you to pay up...
Definately my favorite for most annoying/catchy/scary corporate theme... But they forgot to link the Drum n Bass version! check it out here
I agree, and where's the cost savings that PC advocates go on about so much. This thing is retailing for about as much as the most expensive iMac.
Gateway ($1699) best iMac $1,799
and it has 128M less ram, 20G smaller HD, no Superdrive, no NVIDIA GeForce2 MX w/32MB DDR graphics...
I'm just another PC user (ibook drooler;) but in comparison the new iMac looks like a much better deal that this.
p.s. i'm aware most KDE2 apps already do this.
All we ever did in the elementary schools I went to was stupid crap that could have been done easier without a computer or was a waste of time.
here's a timeline of what i can recall:
-Simple math on the commodore PET
-Fractions on a TRS-80
-Oregon Trail on Apple IIe
at home i had a commodore 128 that I used to play games, dial interesting BBS's or practice BASIC programming. It was far more interesting and useful than anything the school could offer.
and the few times i tried playing with the BASIC interpreter on the Apple IIe's (instead of playing Oregon trail like a good little boy) resulted in me getting yelled at. go figure..
This sounds handy but its still a hassle, and if you're like most people you gotta watch the movie on your clear but small monitor.
At my local library I can rent new movies on VHS and DVD for anywhere from free to 2 bucks.. It may not be hip to get your rentals at the library but some of them (like mine) have a suprisingly good collection.
I dont think they have this one either.
The preemptive patches have made my system a lot more responsive under use. Most notably the mouse cursor doesn't slow down during heavy compiles and audio latency is good enough to play with some of the more interesting sound software projects out for linux.
But it really sounds like your problem isn't with linux but with XFree86. X has its share of problems but if you have a good video card that's supported well under it, you should get more than acceptible 2d drawing performance. I use a 3dfx voodoo3 here and its about as good as win2k running KDE (sometimes you can see it rendering when resizing or moving windows quickly but i like to think of it as a cool effect ;) and its way faster with lighter WM's like blackbox.
I'm still a big Quake2 fan myself. To avoid the CD thing just install the latest update patch. Dedicate your spare *nix box as the server and you're good to go.
i started off with redhat 5.2, it worked but i didn't get it, went on to mandrake, it worked easier but i still didn't get it and i thought it was way too bloated, tried some niche distros but they didnt have what i wanted, tried slackware for a 386 firewall i wanted to build, it worked so well i use it on all my linux installs now, AND i get it
you know exactly what you put into a slack system and what is running on it, its not as easy as redhat (at first) but you have more control...
basically you need:
just pop in an empty drive in the development machine and do a slack install, recompile the kernel for just the essentials and pop the drive into the 386. get the bios to autoconfigure the drive and make sure lilo is setup and boot up on the 386.. thats about it.