I don't see MS doing anything against Java soon either. Many software titles have some Java glued in, games and business apps. They install the Sun Java runtime libraries and do their thing. As long as Sun doesn't abandon Java entirely, there's little MS can do about it except sit and pout.
Well see, the rap on QT is that it sucks. Not in terms of quality or compression, but rather the viewers and drivers on Windows are pure crap. Why should it take well over 10 seconds to load the movie player on an 850mhz gamer's PC when the same thing takes half a second on a stupid crusty old 500mhz Mac ? Not to mention how slow it is in decoding the video.
I'm sure some of you still remember the Star Wars trailers that were so choppy on a p2-266 that you had to drop the quality setting to be able to run it half-decently. Sure, the video was very crisp and clear if you had the p3-450 to play it on max quality, but back then such a machine was considered reasonably fast, the fastest cpu being only 550 or 600mhz at the time.
On the other hand, my mother has no trouble playing mpegs and most avi's (except DivX of course) on the old P200mmx I gave her. Sure, you might spot a few blocky artifacts in the video stream, but it certainly doesn't warrant quadrupling the cpu requirements just to eliminate that tiny square of faded color that lasts for less than 3-4 frames. At some point we should expect streaming video to have a few glitches, after all it's designed to play as it downloads, preferring a low bitrate over quality. QT tries to keep both low bitrates and high quality, while a good idea in theory, it fails to deliver a practical product that's readily usable since most of the web crowd just can't fully benefit from it. I guess that's what we've come to expect from Steve Jobs and his people.
Good Fnarg! that article is so full of shit.
on
2.2 vs 2.4
·
· Score: 5
I don't get it.. this guy sounds like Steve Ballmer on pot.
In addition to this robust filesystem support, the 2 GB file size limit has also been done away with -- although I don't know exactly who has 2 GB files sitting around on their platters
How clueless can this guy be ? If someone went to such great lengths to defeat the 2gb limit, then I'm pretty sure it's because it's been a problem for a while. Uncompressed video comes to mind, where a reasonable clip bucket can contain well over 10gb of data. Databases also get pretty huge when you start collection data from the web (search engines perhaps, or DoubleClick stats). Next.
Also, at the speed processors are progressing at (we're already at 1.5 GHz), the 2 GHz mark is coming soon -- something Linux 2.4 adds support for.
Ok, will someone tell me how the hell you add support for speed ? Ok so 8 years ago we had a problem with Turbo Pascal's timing loop overflowing, and they all learned to never write such stupid timing code ever again. What could possibly work on my p3-850 that won't work on a 2ghz cpu (besides CGA Pong) ? Software doesn't need to know the speed of the supporting cpu, it just needs to do its thing as fast as it can, and wait if absolutely necessary. Timing is important in code (especially games), speed is not. Speed is merely a byproduct of time.
Linux 2.4 adds support for Wireless LAN devices and also includes PPPoE within the kernel itself
Funny, I thought anyone could include PPPoE in the kernel when configuring it for a recompile. Perhaps he could have mentioned that it was enhanced and tweaked, but saying it's included in the kernel is like saying your brand new car comes with a steering wheel. Du-uh!
Well that's about all I could squeeze out of that one page of blab. Have a great kernel!
I'm always quick to say "screw them, let them die a slow and mediatized death", but in this case the product has such a wide potential audience that it's difficult to make a solid impact. People need to talk about this abuse of control, spread the word and make sure that idiot uncle of yours doesn't go buy one anyway (tying his shoelaces together should keep him put for a few days).
I kinda feel the same about our cable provider here, which has had a 6gb monthly bandwidth limit for years now. 6gb four years ago was something. 6gb today is peanuts. Many people try to speak out and hope management hears them to bump up the limit just a bit, but they usually get outvoiced by the hordes of senseless casual users saying we're just abusing the system since they never go above 1gb/month. Kinda makes me wonder why they even have broadband. Well my point is that there will be a truckload of DirecTV users who will bitch mindlessly at the boycotters saying "You're ruining it for the rest of us", because they just don't know the difference between 480p and 1080i because their primitive brains can't process the extra visual data... well no, not really, they're just lazy and would rather watch things get taken away from them than speak out and fight for what they want. They just don't see the big picture (no pun intended).
Sure, telnetting may feel silly but sometimes you just don't feel like firing up Outlook Express and going through the whole account setup process just because one of your users is complaining that his email isn't coming in fast enough. I'd rather do "TOP 5,25" to find out where the msg is from and what it's about, than have to wait for the whole 40meg attachment to pull through only to tell the guy on the phone that his cousin sent him a home movie.
And concerning your remark about reinventing the wheel, sometimes that's what you have to do to make a better wheel. Better in my case doesn't mean quicker to develop, it means simpler to use. Try to explain IRC to anyone who's never used IRC and who "needs" the middle mouse button assigned to double-click because they still can't get it quite right the usual way. Well that's the kind of people I have to cater to, that's my job : making our corporate intranet a tool for everyone instead of just a boring useless digital library.
Build a server that only technical people can understand, and only those techs will use it. Build a server that's dumbed down enough for anyone to use without making it too awkward for the expert, and everyone will be served adequately. If you had ever taken a course on UI design, you'd know what I'm taking about and why I'm doing it this way.
Funny, whenever I go out to the country, it's the silence that drives me nuts. I've grown accustomed to the hum and whizz of PC's and barely notice the noise anymore. I know it's there, but it doesn't disturb me. The noise is actually something of a status indicator. When I hear the fan speed up ever so slightly, I know Apache is taking a beating.
I can just sit in a server room for hours sipping Jolt and tweaking the shitty vbscript pages and ActiveX modules the IT guys throw at me all day long. I don't get headaches, my ears are perfectly fine and I can still tell the difference between a CD burned from mp3 vs the real thing.
You know, I've been joking around with that naked and petrified crap for a while, but the way you put it just makes it kinda tempting =) It would be a sure way to gather visitors to my lame-excuse-for-a-not-yet-finished-forum-site.
Of course you don't see Microsoft logos spread out and shoved in your face all over the place. The "hip" thing these days is Linux. Why ? Because most magazines simply provide pure spin, and since 95% of all non-technical users have no idea what Linux actually is, so the magazine authors can feed them loads of bright and shiny bullshit under the shield of "Linux, Open-Source, and cute little penguins". That's why all my relatives and friends give me a blank stare and ask "Why are you running Linux on that other PC ? I don't like it, it's like DOS." Well that's what they've been spoonfed by TV and print. Sad but true, for the good sources of Linux news are all over the web and we know them well. These days, everyone and their mother is advertising an "upcoming Linux version" of their GeeWhizBang PowerApp, only to discover that there is no Visual Basic for Linux. Idiots all over the place, I tell you!
Needless to say, if Microsoft ever puts out their own rehash of Linux, it's going to be hard to turn a corner without seeing a "Winux" magazine out there.
Funny, I think new speakers are a great reason to bitch to the management : My neighbors keep banging on the friggin walls all the time. They just bang so damned loud, I have to turn up my music to hear it =)
I don't need new speakers though, I just need a 400 sq.ft. sound proof booth =)
Re:would you be aware if they were dissuaded?
on
Underground Surfaces
·
· Score: 2
I've got just one question for ya : Why didn't you follow through with legal action ? Maybe I'm just a stubborn antisocial anti-establishment anti-everything geek, but if I had been in that situation (this is a major stretch) I would be proud to fight them and expose them for all they're worth. That's the only way they'll learn to put their sexist views aside, or else they'll die ignorant. I'm not suggesting you hire a sniper or hitman (sorry, hitperson), but if you want to do your part to clean up all this discriminatory crap, you have to stick it to em and burn them good.
Let's get this straight. If an MS employee quits his job, his noncompete agreement basically prevents him from getting any other IT job, since MS's competition is basically everyone in the software business. Might as well just lay in the middle of the road and wait for a redneck to change lanes.
I can very well tell you what crack I smoke, PURIST crack. I'm the kind of person who starts throwing things across the room when he spots a blurred transition in a DivX. I'm the kind of guy who encodes all his music at 256kbps because he once heard a swishy song at 192. I'm the bitrate nazi, yes I am.
Well if you had ever developed web applications in a corporate environment, you'd be aware that a very small percentage of the users, if any, know what IRC is and how to use it. If you're developing live chat forums you need to make it as easy as possible, and in this case, easy means integrated. They just fire up that bookmark, log in, and they're ready to go with everything on one screen. Chat, file transfer, user management.. whatever. They don't need to know how to use a dedicated IRC client or any other standard clients; they just sit at their desks and get the job done.
I suppose you have all your users using Telnet to check their mail "because that's how a competent person would do it" ? I'm afraid not. In business, we don't care how the job gets done, as long as it's done efficiently. Integration is a common way to increase user efficiency by putting all the tools in their face.
Of course we're getting screwed, but are you going to coordinate a mass of angry consumers and lead them to bring the MPAA down in protest ? If you want to complain, why not bitch about how pornographic videos are twice as expensive as "regular" movies yet cost very little to produce. Or yap about how we pay 10-13$ for a music cd when it really costs about 8 cents to manufacture. Retail pricing isn't solely dependent on production costs, any 15 year old who's been through Economics 101 knows that it's supply vs demand that regulates that sort of thing (and corrupt megacorporate entities of course). The whole point of technological advancements is to product more stuff for less money, that's how businesses turn a profit. I suggest you look into it if you plan on bitching some more.
Sure I could, but then I could just as well copy it to a VHS tape and make all you AC's much happier. The point of ripping the movie from a DVD is to preserve the image and sound quality. With DivX (and most other codecs), the higher the bitrate, the longer it takes to encode. I prefer to crank up the bitrate around 2000 kbits/sec and end up with a 1.2 gb file, than leave it at 900 kbits/sec and get something that's only slightly better than VCD in terms of image fidelity, however DivX is much less versatile, requiring a PC and a good chunk of CPU power to play back, compared to a VCD which can be played in many consumer devices, and since it's only MPEG-1 format, its performance hit is quite minimal with a good accelerated video overlay.
If I wanted one disc, I'd encode one disc. No thanks.
Well there's nearly always a way to do it without ActiveX, but when the support is there, it just allows you (as a programmer) to develop something that's more complete and generally simpler to manage. For example, I've cobbled together a simple ActiveX chat client that interfaces with an IRC-like server. I could certainly do the same using clever HTML and streaming sockets and it would work fine, but ActiveX lets me throw in whatever functional or aesthetic features I want without struggling with coder-unfriendly HTML. Just try putting together a drop-down menubar with HTML. It's certainly feasible, but requires alot of tinkering with DHTML and javascript, while an ActiveX can simply instantiate a visual control that's consistent with the rest of the system. From the user's perspective (especially the non-technical crowd), it just results in a cleaner, more familiar interface and is generally more responsive than having to load a new page everytime they click on a form button.
20$ ridiculous ? perhaps if you don't like movies, in which case you can rent it for 2 or 3 bucks and beam with inner pride. However DVD's have a strong appeal to collectors such as myself. I buy 3-4 movies per week. I'm not rich, I just like movies old and new, and I like to see them again occasionally. 20$ for a movie doesn't seem ridiculous to me or most other movie lovers. It's an inexpensive form of entertainment that can be shared by as many people as you can fit in your living room; of course then you'll need lots of beer and munchies, now that could rack up a hefty bill:)
Another deterrent is the excruciatingly slow encoding process. Ripping an average DVD to DivX takes anywhere between 18-30 hours on my 850mhz Wintel box and the end product resides on 2 cd's. Sure, I've got a copy of the movie, but do I really want to be interrupted in the middle because I need to swap cd's ?
Perhaps with DVD-R storage it would be more convenient since I could store 3-4 full movies on one such disc, but those burners are still prohibitively expensive and so are the blanks. From a technological standpoint DivX is great, but it's still not convenient enough to be used and abused by every Random Joe. I'd much rather run out and pay 20 bucks for a DVD than waste an afternoon leeching it off some overloaded bot on IRC or a cheesy w@r3z page with a bazillion banners and popups. I won't even mention Gnutella.
I hate to go against 99% of the general opinion here, but browser-specific sites are becoming a necessary evil. I'm not saying what this guy's doing is right in simply blocking off any non-IE browser, he should at least provide alternate content that's free of all his whiz-bang gadgets. However there are enough differences between the browser families to warrant customization for each.
I used to struggle to make my sites look good and work well in both Netscape and IE, which meant using nasty workarounds for many display and script-related affairs. Now I simply create two versions of the same site (or rather, two templates); one whiz-bang template for IE, and one standard yet clean template for Netscape, Opera, Lynx, whatever. The content remains the same, it's the delivery and presentation that differ. It also makes things much easier to debug, since fixing it for one browser won't break it for the other anymore.
I guess it all depends on what you're trying to convey from the site. If it's just a plain old artsy fartsy "Look at me, I'm naked and petrified" site, then cross-browser compatibility should be easy to implement and well worth the effort, but when it comes to efficient web applications, sometimes it's best to focus on IE and ActiveX and leave the rest behind. Java's already proven itself a pain to develop and debug, of course worsened by the poor stability of most JVM's floating around. Portability is a very useful concept, but it's not the solution to all of life's problems. Some of you need to learn that and accept it for now.
What kind of mother names her child "Penfield" anyways ? That even beats the nature-based names of the hippie era. At least when someone's called "Liberty Stevens" you know her mom was just dead stoned, but Penfield ?!
I believe that case mods and other aesthetic features are simply the answer to the ugly beige case that totally disrupts a room's style. PC's have become so friggin' mainstream that they just can't be left in the office anymore. They've become total entertainment centers, and entertainment is something best suited for the living room. Now think about how that ugly soulless beige case clashes with your shiny black leather couch and just stands out as an intruder in the house of style. VCR's and stereo decks usually have their own sleek little style, why not do to same with our PC's ?
Great example : O'Reilly. I may be speaking out of ignorance, but to the best extent of my knowledge they hold a shining reputation for quality reference books. That reputation goes a long way.
Consider this parallel : U.S. is headed for precise beam-type weapons, while other nations use crude, random bioweapons. Absolute accuracy and control vs random chaos and terrorism.
I don't know which solution I prefer. One is "safer", the other is foolproof (you can disarm/destroy a laser turret but curing someone from an engineered virus is difficult and the effect is generally too slow to be any good).
Here's my proposition : Everyone gets spud launchers and we kill these aggressive power-tripping armies before they wipe the whole damned planet out.
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I don't see MS doing anything against Java soon either. Many software titles have some Java glued in, games and business apps. They install the Sun Java runtime libraries and do their thing. As long as Sun doesn't abandon Java entirely, there's little MS can do about it except sit and pout.
Well see, the rap on QT is that it sucks. Not in terms of quality or compression, but rather the viewers and drivers on Windows are pure crap. Why should it take well over 10 seconds to load the movie player on an 850mhz gamer's PC when the same thing takes half a second on a stupid crusty old 500mhz Mac ? Not to mention how slow it is in decoding the video.
I'm sure some of you still remember the Star Wars trailers that were so choppy on a p2-266 that you had to drop the quality setting to be able to run it half-decently. Sure, the video was very crisp and clear if you had the p3-450 to play it on max quality, but back then such a machine was considered reasonably fast, the fastest cpu being only 550 or 600mhz at the time.
On the other hand, my mother has no trouble playing mpegs and most avi's (except DivX of course) on the old P200mmx I gave her. Sure, you might spot a few blocky artifacts in the video stream, but it certainly doesn't warrant quadrupling the cpu requirements just to eliminate that tiny square of faded color that lasts for less than 3-4 frames. At some point we should expect streaming video to have a few glitches, after all it's designed to play as it downloads, preferring a low bitrate over quality. QT tries to keep both low bitrates and high quality, while a good idea in theory, it fails to deliver a practical product that's readily usable since most of the web crowd just can't fully benefit from it. I guess that's what we've come to expect from Steve Jobs and his people.
I don't get it.. this guy sounds like Steve Ballmer on pot.
In addition to this robust filesystem support, the 2 GB file size limit has also been done away with -- although I don't know exactly who has 2 GB files sitting around on their platters
How clueless can this guy be ? If someone went to such great lengths to defeat the 2gb limit, then I'm pretty sure it's because it's been a problem for a while. Uncompressed video comes to mind, where a reasonable clip bucket can contain well over 10gb of data. Databases also get pretty huge when you start collection data from the web (search engines perhaps, or DoubleClick stats). Next.
Also, at the speed processors are progressing at (we're already at 1.5 GHz), the 2 GHz mark is coming soon -- something Linux 2.4 adds support for.
Ok, will someone tell me how the hell you add support for speed ? Ok so 8 years ago we had a problem with Turbo Pascal's timing loop overflowing, and they all learned to never write such stupid timing code ever again. What could possibly work on my p3-850 that won't work on a 2ghz cpu (besides CGA Pong) ? Software doesn't need to know the speed of the supporting cpu, it just needs to do its thing as fast as it can, and wait if absolutely necessary. Timing is important in code (especially games), speed is not. Speed is merely a byproduct of time.
Linux 2.4 adds support for Wireless LAN devices and also includes PPPoE within the kernel itself
Funny, I thought anyone could include PPPoE in the kernel when configuring it for a recompile. Perhaps he could have mentioned that it was enhanced and tweaked, but saying it's included in the kernel is like saying your brand new car comes with a steering wheel. Du-uh!
Well that's about all I could squeeze out of that one page of blab. Have a great kernel!
I'm always quick to say "screw them, let them die a slow and mediatized death", but in this case the product has such a wide potential audience that it's difficult to make a solid impact. People need to talk about this abuse of control, spread the word and make sure that idiot uncle of yours doesn't go buy one anyway (tying his shoelaces together should keep him put for a few days).
I kinda feel the same about our cable provider here, which has had a 6gb monthly bandwidth limit for years now. 6gb four years ago was something. 6gb today is peanuts. Many people try to speak out and hope management hears them to bump up the limit just a bit, but they usually get outvoiced by the hordes of senseless casual users saying we're just abusing the system since they never go above 1gb/month. Kinda makes me wonder why they even have broadband. Well my point is that there will be a truckload of DirecTV users who will bitch mindlessly at the boycotters saying "You're ruining it for the rest of us", because they just don't know the difference between 480p and 1080i because their primitive brains can't process the extra visual data... well no, not really, they're just lazy and would rather watch things get taken away from them than speak out and fight for what they want. They just don't see the big picture (no pun intended).
Sure, telnetting may feel silly but sometimes you just don't feel like firing up Outlook Express and going through the whole account setup process just because one of your users is complaining that his email isn't coming in fast enough. I'd rather do "TOP 5,25" to find out where the msg is from and what it's about, than have to wait for the whole 40meg attachment to pull through only to tell the guy on the phone that his cousin sent him a home movie.
And concerning your remark about reinventing the wheel, sometimes that's what you have to do to make a better wheel. Better in my case doesn't mean quicker to develop, it means simpler to use. Try to explain IRC to anyone who's never used IRC and who "needs" the middle mouse button assigned to double-click because they still can't get it quite right the usual way. Well that's the kind of people I have to cater to, that's my job : making our corporate intranet a tool for everyone instead of just a boring useless digital library.
Build a server that only technical people can understand, and only those techs will use it. Build a server that's dumbed down enough for anyone to use without making it too awkward for the expert, and everyone will be served adequately. If you had ever taken a course on UI design, you'd know what I'm taking about and why I'm doing it this way.
Funny, whenever I go out to the country, it's the silence that drives me nuts. I've grown accustomed to the hum and whizz of PC's and barely notice the noise anymore. I know it's there, but it doesn't disturb me. The noise is actually something of a status indicator. When I hear the fan speed up ever so slightly, I know Apache is taking a beating.
I can just sit in a server room for hours sipping Jolt and tweaking the shitty vbscript pages and ActiveX modules the IT guys throw at me all day long. I don't get headaches, my ears are perfectly fine and I can still tell the difference between a CD burned from mp3 vs the real thing.
You know, I've been joking around with that naked and petrified crap for a while, but the way you put it just makes it kinda tempting =) It would be a sure way to gather visitors to my lame-excuse-for-a-not-yet-finished-forum-site.
Of course you don't see Microsoft logos spread out and shoved in your face all over the place. The "hip" thing these days is Linux. Why ? Because most magazines simply provide pure spin, and since 95% of all non-technical users have no idea what Linux actually is, so the magazine authors can feed them loads of bright and shiny bullshit under the shield of "Linux, Open-Source, and cute little penguins". That's why all my relatives and friends give me a blank stare and ask "Why are you running Linux on that other PC ? I don't like it, it's like DOS." Well that's what they've been spoonfed by TV and print. Sad but true, for the good sources of Linux news are all over the web and we know them well. These days, everyone and their mother is advertising an "upcoming Linux version" of their GeeWhizBang PowerApp, only to discover that there is no Visual Basic for Linux. Idiots all over the place, I tell you!
Needless to say, if Microsoft ever puts out their own rehash of Linux, it's going to be hard to turn a corner without seeing a "Winux" magazine out there.
Funny, I think new speakers are a great reason to bitch to the management : My neighbors keep banging on the friggin walls all the time. They just bang so damned loud, I have to turn up my music to hear it =)
I don't need new speakers though, I just need a 400 sq.ft. sound proof booth =)
I've got just one question for ya : Why didn't you follow through with legal action ? Maybe I'm just a stubborn antisocial anti-establishment anti-everything geek, but if I had been in that situation (this is a major stretch) I would be proud to fight them and expose them for all they're worth. That's the only way they'll learn to put their sexist views aside, or else they'll die ignorant. I'm not suggesting you hire a sniper or hitman (sorry, hitperson), but if you want to do your part to clean up all this discriminatory crap, you have to stick it to em and burn them good.
Let's get this straight. If an MS employee quits his job, his noncompete agreement basically prevents him from getting any other IT job, since MS's competition is basically everyone in the software business. Might as well just lay in the middle of the road and wait for a redneck to change lanes.
I can very well tell you what crack I smoke, PURIST crack. I'm the kind of person who starts throwing things across the room when he spots a blurred transition in a DivX. I'm the kind of guy who encodes all his music at 256kbps because he once heard a swishy song at 192. I'm the bitrate nazi, yes I am.
Well if you had ever developed web applications in a corporate environment, you'd be aware that a very small percentage of the users, if any, know what IRC is and how to use it. If you're developing live chat forums you need to make it as easy as possible, and in this case, easy means integrated. They just fire up that bookmark, log in, and they're ready to go with everything on one screen. Chat, file transfer, user management.. whatever. They don't need to know how to use a dedicated IRC client or any other standard clients; they just sit at their desks and get the job done.
I suppose you have all your users using Telnet to check their mail "because that's how a competent person would do it" ? I'm afraid not. In business, we don't care how the job gets done, as long as it's done efficiently. Integration is a common way to increase user efficiency by putting all the tools in their face.
Bah, I once wrote a Commodore 64 emulator for the C128, and here I release it to open source :
10 dim z
20 z = memalloc(65534)
30 rem APP GOES HERE
Of course we're getting screwed, but are you going to coordinate a mass of angry consumers and lead them to bring the MPAA down in protest ? If you want to complain, why not bitch about how pornographic videos are twice as expensive as "regular" movies yet cost very little to produce. Or yap about how we pay 10-13$ for a music cd when it really costs about 8 cents to manufacture. Retail pricing isn't solely dependent on production costs, any 15 year old who's been through Economics 101 knows that it's supply vs demand that regulates that sort of thing (and corrupt megacorporate entities of course). The whole point of technological advancements is to product more stuff for less money, that's how businesses turn a profit. I suggest you look into it if you plan on bitching some more.
Sure I could, but then I could just as well copy it to a VHS tape and make all you AC's much happier. The point of ripping the movie from a DVD is to preserve the image and sound quality. With DivX (and most other codecs), the higher the bitrate, the longer it takes to encode. I prefer to crank up the bitrate around 2000 kbits/sec and end up with a 1.2 gb file, than leave it at 900 kbits/sec and get something that's only slightly better than VCD in terms of image fidelity, however DivX is much less versatile, requiring a PC and a good chunk of CPU power to play back, compared to a VCD which can be played in many consumer devices, and since it's only MPEG-1 format, its performance hit is quite minimal with a good accelerated video overlay. If I wanted one disc, I'd encode one disc. No thanks.
Well there's nearly always a way to do it without ActiveX, but when the support is there, it just allows you (as a programmer) to develop something that's more complete and generally simpler to manage. For example, I've cobbled together a simple ActiveX chat client that interfaces with an IRC-like server. I could certainly do the same using clever HTML and streaming sockets and it would work fine, but ActiveX lets me throw in whatever functional or aesthetic features I want without struggling with coder-unfriendly HTML. Just try putting together a drop-down menubar with HTML. It's certainly feasible, but requires alot of tinkering with DHTML and javascript, while an ActiveX can simply instantiate a visual control that's consistent with the rest of the system. From the user's perspective (especially the non-technical crowd), it just results in a cleaner, more familiar interface and is generally more responsive than having to load a new page everytime they click on a form button.
Then stage your own death, get a face job, and go grab that fortune :)
20$ ridiculous ? perhaps if you don't like movies, in which case you can rent it for 2 or 3 bucks and beam with inner pride. However DVD's have a strong appeal to collectors such as myself. I buy 3-4 movies per week. I'm not rich, I just like movies old and new, and I like to see them again occasionally. 20$ for a movie doesn't seem ridiculous to me or most other movie lovers. It's an inexpensive form of entertainment that can be shared by as many people as you can fit in your living room; of course then you'll need lots of beer and munchies, now that could rack up a hefty bill :)
Another deterrent is the excruciatingly slow encoding process. Ripping an average DVD to DivX takes anywhere between 18-30 hours on my 850mhz Wintel box and the end product resides on 2 cd's. Sure, I've got a copy of the movie, but do I really want to be interrupted in the middle because I need to swap cd's ?
Perhaps with DVD-R storage it would be more convenient since I could store 3-4 full movies on one such disc, but those burners are still prohibitively expensive and so are the blanks. From a technological standpoint DivX is great, but it's still not convenient enough to be used and abused by every Random Joe. I'd much rather run out and pay 20 bucks for a DVD than waste an afternoon leeching it off some overloaded bot on IRC or a cheesy w@r3z page with a bazillion banners and popups. I won't even mention Gnutella.
I hate to go against 99% of the general opinion here, but browser-specific sites are becoming a necessary evil. I'm not saying what this guy's doing is right in simply blocking off any non-IE browser, he should at least provide alternate content that's free of all his whiz-bang gadgets. However there are enough differences between the browser families to warrant customization for each.
I used to struggle to make my sites look good and work well in both Netscape and IE, which meant using nasty workarounds for many display and script-related affairs. Now I simply create two versions of the same site (or rather, two templates); one whiz-bang template for IE, and one standard yet clean template for Netscape, Opera, Lynx, whatever. The content remains the same, it's the delivery and presentation that differ. It also makes things much easier to debug, since fixing it for one browser won't break it for the other anymore.
I guess it all depends on what you're trying to convey from the site. If it's just a plain old artsy fartsy "Look at me, I'm naked and petrified" site, then cross-browser compatibility should be easy to implement and well worth the effort, but when it comes to efficient web applications, sometimes it's best to focus on IE and ActiveX and leave the rest behind. Java's already proven itself a pain to develop and debug, of course worsened by the poor stability of most JVM's floating around. Portability is a very useful concept, but it's not the solution to all of life's problems. Some of you need to learn that and accept it for now.
What kind of mother names her child "Penfield" anyways ? That even beats the nature-based names of the hippie era. At least when someone's called "Liberty Stevens" you know her mom was just dead stoned, but Penfield ?!
I believe that case mods and other aesthetic features are simply the answer to the ugly beige case that totally disrupts a room's style. PC's have become so friggin' mainstream that they just can't be left in the office anymore. They've become total entertainment centers, and entertainment is something best suited for the living room. Now think about how that ugly soulless beige case clashes with your shiny black leather couch and just stands out as an intruder in the house of style. VCR's and stereo decks usually have their own sleek little style, why not do to same with our PC's ?
Great example : O'Reilly. I may be speaking out of ignorance, but to the best extent of my knowledge they hold a shining reputation for quality reference books. That reputation goes a long way.
Consider this parallel : U.S. is headed for precise beam-type weapons, while other nations use crude, random bioweapons. Absolute accuracy and control vs random chaos and terrorism.
I don't know which solution I prefer. One is "safer", the other is foolproof (you can disarm/destroy a laser turret but curing someone from an engineered virus is difficult and the effect is generally too slow to be any good).
Here's my proposition : Everyone gets spud launchers and we kill these aggressive power-tripping armies before they wipe the whole damned planet out.