"Sheesh, free popcorn? Wish we had that in the UK."
In my experience it tends to be over-salty and fairly old... but hey, it's free and it tastes OK.
One time (coincidentially, two days before Mothers' Day) I wandered into a 'Godiva Choclatier' store in the Eaton Centre of Toronto (for those who don't know, that's the very central shopping mall in Toronto, Ontario) and the girl told me I could sample the free mocha coffee as I looked around.
Damn, the stuff in the store was expensive, but my mom was really pleased;-)
"Let's face it: People like us are not normal at all. Most people dial in, check email, buy a CD from Amazon on occasion, and that's about it. I've told several people that DSL or cable is easily 50x faster than dialup. They look at me like I'm crazy, "Now why would I need to go so much faster? And doesn't that cost a whole lot?""
If those people ever paid attention to the patches that they should be applying to their windows boxes, they would have a different attitude.
I have 5 machines shared over a 28.8 at home (which is the best connection available here in my area of rural Canada) and the windowsupdate is useless because everything so huge and I don't want to download it for each windows install. So therefore I get the 'prepackaged install' which can be downloaded and run later.
But of course the prepackaged installs and some of the linux security updates are freakin' HUGE! (Mandrake 8.2 wanted to download ~400 mb immediately after I installed it.) The problem is that it's very hard to get secure in a reasonable amount of time on dialup. I'm STILL downloading W2ksp3 (*) a few MB each day. There are still tons of remote root exploits I have to patch in my linux install. But I CAN'T! Thank you, dialup.
(*) Please no lectures about the sp3 EULA. I know.
"Isn't this tantamount to purjury? Their claim that it would criple the system and that it couldn't be removed was obviously false, if all that was necessary to satisfy the courts was to remove the icon from the desktop."
In the courts of the United States, it no longer matters whether you tell truth or falsehood or whether or not you have broken the Law. The side that has more money will just keep appealing and delaying until the other cannot afford to pay for lawyers. And when it comes to having money, MSFT is not exactly in a shortage.
"Has anyone reading this **ever** seen any MS source code for their OS's?"
YOU can see the source code today if you pay enough money and sign the right NDAs. There are hundreds of academic institutions with which MSFT shares the Windows XP source code for educational purposes.
It's not like the windows source code is a hallowed secret that only the highest MSFT techs can access.
"HMM... as if script kiddies don't have it easy enough, lets put a link to a 'crash' script on the front page of slashdot... Do the editors on slashdot ever think before they post links?"
If the editors were more clever, that download may have been a trojan that opens up a NetBus server, BackOrifice, etc so that the kiddiez can be 0wn3d.
"A friend of mine did a work term in Japan, and he told lots of interesting stories. Some of those vending machines dispense "School Girls' panties". You get the used panties, and a little story about the girl they belonged to.
There were also places to stay in Tokyo called "capsule hotels", for men only, like little stacked coffins you could sleep in, and it cost nearly $100 a night. He said each one had a little television in it, and the only stations you could get were porn!
Anyone have any first hand evidence?"
About the vending machines with undergarments. I have read other articles saying that this *was* real but now it is outlawed by trade reglations. Go do a google. There was also an article on/. mentioning this a while back
For those 'coffin hotels' I have seen videos of those. Back in the 1998 Nagano Olympics, there was this small feature that on CBC called "[reporter's name]'s Japanese Adventure" and they did a little featurette each time on a different aspect of Japanese culture. One of them was about hotels and those coffin hotels with the little TVs in them were featured, but there was no mention of pr0n. (Remember CBC is the official Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and aims for a wide audience, so pr0n is not mentioned.)
"But yeah... why aren't these machines the bomb in the States, where vending machines are so normal? Any thoughts?"
In the USA and Canada, video rental stores are part of the culture. There are huge advertising campaigns connecting the *store name* with renting movies. (You probably have not seem that 'hamster and rabbit' blockbuster commercial, hehe.) If you ask the older population here, they would think that video rentals from vending machines should only be for pr0n and that you go to a STORE to rent movies... just because that's the way it should be.
The culture here demands that you go in to the store, sample the free popcorn, browse the ailes, pick up boxes up and read the descriptions, etc, compare with what your friends find and so on.
Video rental stores here also sell a bunch of other (also machine-saleable) items like chips, salse, toy accessories (action figures, etc) for kids movies, candy, posters and so on.
Overall, I'd say that it's just a question of the culture.
"But I think you missed part of my point. That being: weather of not you are talking about a transistor, once a single molecule is used as the focal point of a device, the count will not be rising much from there."
OK I get it... and yes I did miss your point at first. Thank you.
Moore's Law describes an increase in transistor counts.
I hope you are referring to the idea that traditional microprocessor design would be obsolteted by 'optical computing' thus halting the advancement of traditional microelectronics, thus stopping the advancement of transistor counts as opposed to somehow having transistors being used in 'optical computing.'
"You don't want to encode mp3 to ogg; the artifacts that both introduce when multiplied together can be _really_ nasty, much more so than the individual artifacts."
At this point, it might be better to transcode MP3 to a lossless format because no additional artifacts are introduced because the lossless format will not throw out data from the decoded mp3.
Of course you'll have to *decode* your mp3s to do this conversion which technically requires a licensed decoder...
"You/me have ears... IMHO, current sound quality champion is AAC (well, some problems with streaming recovery) than Real codec is cool."
I do agree that AAC is very very good, but I am not able to rank it above or below vorbis using my own ears, high end headphones, etc.
One thing I have been considering is encoding using one of the lossless encoders. I mean, we probably have uber-ninja HDDs and are already encoding at ultra-high bitrates. Lossless might just be the best way to go.
", but downloading the installer from openoffice.org and shoving it into/usr/local/bin/openoffice fixed the problem for me. Maybe you should give it a try..."
"IMHO Ogg sucks ass below 40kbps. However, I'm using 1.0rc3, and it may have improved since then."
One of the main improvements in OGG Vorbis 1.0 over any previous version is much improved low bitrate encoding. If this is important to you, I suggest you upgrade.
"hire someone on the cheep the first time around, get something not at all what you want. Go for some bigger company the second time around, cough up the bucks (after redefining what it is you actually want) and wind up happier."
Interesting... the exact opposite once happenned to me.
A company paid big money to consultants who ultimately created something they did not like.
Then the company redefined what it wanted, hired me, a lowly university co-op student and got something they REALLY liked (or so they said) for much less cash.
"that's odd. I haven't run across a single.doc file that DOESN'T work in SO. what's wrong with your computer?"
I also find it weird because the same documents that would successfully open in SO5.2 now cause SO6 to crash and burn. My version 6 came with my Mandrake 8.2 powerpack. Weird.
"I am surprised they aren't going for something more compatible with Microsoft Office like Star Office."
Staroffice? StarOffice may be good, but I have yet to find a single MSFT Word file that Staroffice 6 for Linux can open. (Yes, I have version 6.) Even the simplest file where you open Word 97, type a sentence and then try to open it in StarOffice will cause SO6 to crash and burn. I cannot find any exceptions.
It is a good Office Suite I think when you are using it without interchanging between MSFT Office, but I still would have preferred GobeProductive. I downloaded the demo and very much liked its table support. Does anyone have news about when the GPL version will be available for download? I am really interested in exploring switching fully to Gobe!
"Finally. Although this is the prototypical example of good technology outdone by better marketing, it's an example of a company being stupidly obstinate about wanting to own a system, and shooting themselves in the foot." (emphasis mine)
I love the hearty sound of a can of worms being opened!
"Heh... My ADSL connection is a reliable 2.5Mbps, for about $35 a month (Sweden). Care to immigrate? OTOH, you might want to consider Japan instead. They've recently rolled out 14(!)Mbps ADSL for about $20(!) a month."
Here's something that makes me cry. I live in rural Canada and can get 31.2 dialup on a good day. Normally it's 28.8 or 21.6.
Here's the best part: There was a contingent of canadian rowers rowing across the atlantic ocean in small boats to set some sort of record and Bell Canada (a big telco here and a sponsor of the team) equipped them all with satphones or whatnotso they could get 128 kbit while on the ocean.
Why do rowers in the middle of the atlantic get 128 kbit when I, sitting at home, get 28.8 from a WIRE?!?
"People on dial ups in rural America are watching and praying."
Seriously.
I live in rural Canada and I *am* watching and praying.
This is because people like me are on ultra long phone loops and can get 31.2 on a good day. Some can only get 21.6. There is not ADSL. Cable TV is not wired. A few wireless options are insanely expensive. Satellite only has modem by upstream and the lag is bad. There are NO plans for expansion of traditional broadband to my area. Telcos won't pull in a T1 and even if they did, the tree density is so high that 802.11b neighborhood sharing so to pay for it is out of the question and houses are 1+ km apart so cat5 is out too.
"It is a problem. If something is too cheap - it is under-valued.... if it is priced high then its perceived value is increased. There are implications for Open Source projects here. If the product is free, is its value nothing as well?"
I agree with you here.
If you ever have a garage sale, try having a 'free stuff' bin where people don't even have to pay. Some people will walk right by it because they think that if it doesn't cost anything, it's not worth anything. (Admittedly, garage sales may be a bad example because it's where bargain hunters lurk.)
Slashdot Mirror
That's what ScummVM is for. Using this VM, you can even run it on Linux and Macintosh.
In my experience it tends to be over-salty and fairly old ... but hey, it's free and it tastes OK.
One time (coincidentially, two days before Mothers' Day) I wandered into a 'Godiva Choclatier' store in the Eaton Centre of Toronto (for those who don't know, that's the very central shopping mall in Toronto, Ontario) and the girl told me I could sample the free mocha coffee as I looked around.
Damn, the stuff in the store was expensive, but my mom was really pleased ;-)
If those people ever paid attention to the patches that they should be applying to their windows boxes, they would have a different attitude.
I have 5 machines shared over a 28.8 at home (which is the best connection available here in my area of rural Canada) and the windowsupdate is useless because everything so huge and I don't want to download it for each windows install. So therefore I get the 'prepackaged install' which can be downloaded and run later.
But of course the prepackaged installs and some of the linux security updates are freakin' HUGE! (Mandrake 8.2 wanted to download ~400 mb immediately after I installed it.) The problem is that it's very hard to get secure in a reasonable amount of time on dialup. I'm STILL downloading W2ksp3 (*) a few MB each day. There are still tons of remote root exploits I have to patch in my linux install. But I CAN'T! Thank you, dialup.
(*) Please no lectures about the sp3 EULA. I know.
In the courts of the United States, it no longer matters whether you tell truth or falsehood or whether or not you have broken the Law. The side that has more money will just keep appealing and delaying until the other cannot afford to pay for lawyers. And when it comes to having money, MSFT is not exactly in a shortage.
YOU can see the source code today if you pay enough money and sign the right NDAs. There are hundreds of academic institutions with which MSFT shares the Windows XP source code for educational purposes.
It's not like the windows source code is a hallowed secret that only the highest MSFT techs can access.
This was modded:
+1 interesting
+1 insightful
+1 funny
WTF?
If the editors were more clever, that download may have been a trojan that opens up a NetBus server, BackOrifice, etc so that the kiddiez can be 0wn3d.
Sometimes I wish there was a +1, Weird Sh~t moderation.
About the vending machines with undergarments. I have read other articles saying that this *was* real but now it is outlawed by trade reglations. Go do a google. There was also an article on /. mentioning this a while back
For those 'coffin hotels' I have seen videos of those. Back in the 1998 Nagano Olympics, there was this small feature that on CBC called "[reporter's name]'s Japanese Adventure" and they did a little featurette each time on a different aspect of Japanese culture. One of them was about hotels and those coffin hotels with the little TVs in them were featured, but there was no mention of pr0n. (Remember CBC is the official Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and aims for a wide audience, so pr0n is not mentioned.)
In the USA and Canada, video rental stores are part of the culture. There are huge advertising campaigns connecting the *store name* with renting movies. (You probably have not seem that 'hamster and rabbit' blockbuster commercial, hehe.) If you ask the older population here, they would think that video rentals from vending machines should only be for pr0n and that you go to a STORE to rent movies ... just because that's the way it should be.
The culture here demands that you go in to the store, sample the free popcorn, browse the ailes, pick up boxes up and read the descriptions, etc, compare with what your friends find and so on.
Video rental stores here also sell a bunch of other (also machine-saleable) items like chips, salse, toy accessories (action figures, etc) for kids movies, candy, posters and so on.
Overall, I'd say that it's just a question of the culture.
OK I get it ... and yes I did miss your point at first. Thank you.
Moore's Law describes an increase in transistor counts.
I hope you are referring to the idea that traditional microprocessor design would be obsolteted by 'optical computing' thus halting the advancement of traditional microelectronics, thus stopping the advancement of transistor counts as opposed to somehow having transistors being used in 'optical computing.'
At this point, it might be better to transcode MP3 to a lossless format because no additional artifacts are introduced because the lossless format will not throw out data from the decoded mp3.
Of course you'll have to *decode* your mp3s to do this conversion which technically requires a licensed decoder...
I do agree that AAC is very very good, but I am not able to rank it above or below vorbis using my own ears, high end headphones, etc.
One thing I have been considering is encoding using one of the lossless encoders. I mean, we probably have uber-ninja HDDs and are already encoding at ultra-high bitrates. Lossless might just be the best way to go.
thank you for this information
One of the main improvements in OGG Vorbis 1.0 over any previous version is much improved low bitrate encoding. If this is important to you, I suggest you upgrade.
Interesting ... the exact opposite once happenned to me.
A company paid big money to consultants who ultimately created something they did not like.
Then the company redefined what it wanted, hired me, a lowly university co-op student and got something they REALLY liked (or so they said) for much less cash.
I also find it weird because the same documents that would successfully open in SO5.2 now cause SO6 to crash and burn. My version 6 came with my Mandrake 8.2 powerpack. Weird.
Staroffice? StarOffice may be good, but I have yet to find a single MSFT Word file that Staroffice 6 for Linux can open. (Yes, I have version 6.) Even the simplest file where you open Word 97, type a sentence and then try to open it in StarOffice will cause SO6 to crash and burn. I cannot find any exceptions.
It is a good Office Suite I think when you are using it without interchanging between MSFT Office, but I still would have preferred GobeProductive. I downloaded the demo and very much liked its table support. Does anyone have news about when the GPL version will be available for download? I am really interested in exploring switching fully to Gobe!
You have been tricked. WMA is inferior quality but the encoder boosts the volume by 3 db which is known to make people think it sounds better.
Now I think that WMA does a better job for very low bitrate compared to mp3 (but of course ogg rules here) but WMA, overall, is inferior quality.
Of course you can. (Was the checkbox added back to the GUI in 1.1? I haven't got it yet.)
But sometimes I use opera or even IE for stubborn sites and then my image blocking does not carry over.
I love the hearty sound of a can of worms being opened!
Here's something that makes me cry. I live in rural Canada and can get 31.2 dialup on a good day. Normally it's 28.8 or 21.6.
Here's the best part: There was a contingent of canadian rowers rowing across the atlantic ocean in small boats to set some sort of record and Bell Canada (a big telco here and a sponsor of the team) equipped them all with satphones or whatnotso they could get 128 kbit while on the ocean.
Why do rowers in the middle of the atlantic get 128 kbit when I, sitting at home, get 28.8 from a WIRE?!?
Seriously.
I live in rural Canada and I *am* watching and praying.
This is because people like me are on ultra long phone loops and can get 31.2 on a good day. Some can only get 21.6. There is not ADSL. Cable TV is not wired. A few wireless options are insanely expensive. Satellite only has modem by upstream and the lag is bad. There are NO plans for expansion of traditional broadband to my area. Telcos won't pull in a T1 and even if they did, the tree density is so high that 802.11b neighborhood sharing so to pay for it is out of the question and houses are 1+ km apart so cat5 is out too.
This is worth geting excited about.
I agree with you here.
If you ever have a garage sale, try having a 'free stuff' bin where people don't even have to pay. Some people will walk right by it because they think that if it doesn't cost anything, it's not worth anything. (Admittedly, garage sales may be a bad example because it's where bargain hunters lurk.)