I'm a long time user of VLC and I have a love-hate relationship with it. On the one hand, I have a lot of loyalty and personal affection to the software, having used it to play back videos that could not be played by anything else. During the past couple of years, I feel that VLC has been falling back and feels harder to use compared to the other software I routinely use.
First of all, the interface is clunky and awkward, still looking like it was written for CDE using X primitives instead of modern toolkits. This is jarringly off-putting, especially for new users. My wife and daughter refuse to use VLC and stick to other windows-based players as it `looks ugly'. Furthermore:
1) The configuration menus are very non-intuitive.
2) Simple functions like zoom, rotate, brightness controls etc are hard to access and buggy.
3) The `variable zoom' interface is particularly awful, seriously who came up with that one? It is hard to imagine something more awkward to use.
4) The configuration options may make sense to VLC programmers, but is REALLY hard for non-experts to use. For example, I want to map the `short step forward' to a non-default value, say 3 seconds. This took me nearly 30 minutes of experimentation to find out. There is no help for any of the options.
5) VLC is missing a number of key functions that are absolutely must haves in 2019. For example, the ability to hold the mouse over the slider bar and see the frame corresponding to that position. I know this is possible because ExMplayer has had that feature for multiple years. Unfortunately that software seems to be dead, having not had an update for years.
6) I don't want VLC to be another Kodi, but it should support some basic `media manager' features. Tagging, integrated searching, thumbnail management, ability to hover over a thumbnail and see video summaries etc are critically important when you are dealing with hundreds of videos. Ideally I would like something like Geeqie for videos.
7) VLC should support `basic' video editiing. It does not have to compete with full-fledged non-linear video editors like Kdenlive or Openshot, but I should be able to (say) increase the brightness of a video, perform basic cropping etc and save the output to disk with reasonable quality. VLC can use ffmpeg to do the hard work, it just needs to provide an easy to use interface.
I can go on and on, but you get the idea. My feeling is that the VLC developers are more focused on backend features like supporting the latest codecs and less on interface functionality. It would be great if someone could take the VLC core and wrap a better interface around it.
That is not the half of it; VLC is a fantastic thing in terms of playing anything you throw at it, but its user interface is still from the 90s and is abysmal. No support for doing anything but basic playback. Accessing even simple functions like zooming, brightening, rotating etc makes ctrl-alt-delete seem user-friendly. No support for obvious things like visual seek.
And of course no support for tagging, searching or even basic media management features.
I find myself using smplayer more and more these days.
This is NOT true; a lot of the fervent opposition to opposition comes from the left, though their concerns are a bit different from that of the religious right.
Availability of affordable, ubiquitous sex reduces the market value of women as far as men are concerned. This undercuts a major advantage that women have in the war between the sexes. Women instinctively know this, and most of them reflexively oppose any aspect of decriminalizing prostitution. Politicians know that women as a whole want this, and know that pro-prostitution => electoral landslide loss even in leftist states.
Most feminists, even those who believe in `true equality' also support the continued criminalization of prostitution. In addition to the gender-power concerns above, they oppose anything that might improve the lot of men as a matter of principle.
Stack Ranking was a concept popularized by `Neutron Jack Welch' of GE fame who could do no wrong in the eighties and nineties. After he left GE, it lagged, and folks figured out that GE had succeeded by borrowing from the future just like many other US companies of the time, and many of Jack Welch's mantras were full of shit. So orgs are dropping his `20-70-10' and other tenets one after the other.
This is not about people being held in Slavery. The number of people who are being forced against their will into Prostitution in the US is less than 1%. Probably much much less.
This is about targeting the women's vote. Women hate prostitution as it drops their bargaining position against men. Politicians have been pandering to this for centuries. The anti-slavery thing is to make it more palatable in this modern age, and neutralize protests from men who would be affected by this.
I feel that the only reason why the media focuses so much on tech is that they feel we'll shrivel up and `cave'.
I have worked with other industries (oil, finance, construction, retal). Have friends who work there. What is supposed to be happening in tech is mild compared to the daily reality in other industries. The only difference is that these guys will take the media to take a hike if they are subjected to this coverage. And they will unleash the lawyers.
The tech industry:
1) Has a lot of money 2) Is mostly composed of apologetic men (`beta males' ?) who are frankly uncomfortable/scared around women, and are paranoid about not always doing the logically correct thing. They are afraid that Captain Picard is continuously judging them. Basically they are ripe targets and natural victims. 3) Do not know how to hit back/divert these criticism.
Can you imagine a tide of similar accusations against Exxon, or Goldman Sachs? `Endemic discrimination against women in the oil industry/not enough women in construction'? Hell, the country just elected a guy who is the poster child for this stuff... and plenty of educated women voted for him.
A few months back, Slashdot was united in their agreement that a similar incident of cheating that was exposed in some Indian school was confirmation that Indian education is of low value, Indian degrees meaningless, and Indian programmers lack basic understanding of CS fundamentals.
Interesting to note that the arc of discussion in this case is completely different.
What, we are not willing to consider the possibility that this indicates that a significant % of `US programmers' may lack an understanding of CS fundamentals, which may be the reason why US multinationals like H1Bs?
This sort of thing has been in full force in the US for nearly the past 8 years; organized downvote brigades have attacked entertainers that have voiced criticisms against right-wing opinions or politicians. For example, Quentin Tarantino is under massive attack for comments on the police iduring the BLM movements. His latest movie was downvoted massively (Hateful Eight) even before it came out. Even his older movies have been under attack. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series is under similar attack for her comments against Trump and Brexit, and her positions on Twitter. Her latest movie (Fantastic Beasts) have attracted a string of -ve reviewers. Amy Schumer attracts an unbelievable level of vitriol due to her anti-Trump comments. The list goes on.
The strategy is discussed and coordinated on right-wing Talk Radio and alt-right websites.
I feel that the Republicans chose to deal with the short-term humiliation of being perceived as being unable to repeal Obamacare for strategic reasons.
The folks who hate Obamacare are a loud minority in their party. They can safely be ignored for a while.
The folks who would have lost coverage and been worse of with Obamacare repealed would have fucked them in the next election. As it is, these guys will still vote Republican in 2018.
So they let Obamacare stay. Big deal. They will dismantle regulations, start teaching religion in schools, pack the Supreme Court with Corporate-owned mouthpieces with no pushback.
I think that ship has sailed; mail-in ballots are vulnerable to that sort of scheme as well. Now that we have adopted mail-in ballots, may as well go the whole hog and do full verification.
Little guy? Auto dealers are owned by some of the wealthiest humans who have ever existed. In a given area, many of them are owned by the same guy!
When you go from one dealer to the other, all you are getting is a different salesperson, so you the only negotiating power you have is over his commission.
You can very easily control immigration... by issuing a national ID to citizens and legal immigrants only, implementing an easy verification system and putting the onus of verification on the employers. No need to build a wall.
The IDs can be issued at Govt expense, thus neutralizing complaints from democrats that it would be unfair to poor people. Also tie the reception of benefits to said ID.
The IDs can also be used to verify voters, thus neutralizing republican complaints about crooked voting.
Assuming $20 per ID (a vast overestimate), you can issue such IDs to every single one of the $400M american citizens for $8B. Far cheaper than building and maintaining walls!
Also, aggressive enforcement; if an employer is found to have employed someone without verification, punitive fines. I find it ridiculous that farmers can go on national TV and bemoan their inability to hire illegals, with no repercussions whatsoever!
No jobs and no benefits means no incentive for illegals to come and stay here. Also a natural motivation for self-deportation. No "roundups" or "camps" necessary.
Actually young single women are far less likely to identify as feminists than older, married women. This may be because of self preservation... men don't tend to want to go out with/commit to women whom they see as natively hostile to their gender. A married woman or an older woman who no longer require/depend on male attraction can afford to be seen as openly feminist.
But Hillary's core constituency is definitely feminist... and of the more militant shade. The bulk of her support from women who are 50 or older, post-menopause, generally angry and bitter for their perceived loss of status due to old age/discrimination and who have hostile attitudes towards men in general.
It is worse than that. It has taken huge backwards strides in stability, in the past 4-6 months to the point where it is unusable. Kwin crashes randomly. The entire desktop freezes up when you try to move windows around. Menu items in the filemanager randomly stop working. Unfortunately gnome is not too much better either at the moment, so I am back to using a regular window manager. Hopefully they get their act together fast.
This may be a problem with my own reading comprehension, but I am not sure I understand the point you are making. The only thing that jumped out at me was your sentence, "Some people, a surprisingly large number of people, simply do not respect women. At all. Even other women.". But I'm afraid I don't see how the rest of your article backs up this claim.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a long time user of VLC and I have a love-hate relationship with it. On the one hand, I have a lot of loyalty and personal affection to the software, having used it to play back videos that could not be played by anything else. During the past couple of years, I feel that VLC has been falling back and feels harder to use compared to the other software I routinely use.
First of all, the interface is clunky and awkward, still looking like it was written for CDE using X primitives instead of modern toolkits. This is jarringly off-putting, especially for new users. My wife and daughter refuse to use VLC and stick to other windows-based players as it `looks ugly'. Furthermore:
1) The configuration menus are very non-intuitive.
2) Simple functions like zoom, rotate, brightness controls etc are hard to access and buggy.
3) The `variable zoom' interface is particularly awful, seriously who came up with that one? It is hard to imagine something more awkward to use.
4) The configuration options may make sense to VLC programmers, but is REALLY hard for non-experts to use. For example, I want to map the `short step forward' to a non-default value, say 3 seconds. This took me nearly 30 minutes of experimentation to find out. There is no help for any of the options.
5) VLC is missing a number of key functions that are absolutely must haves in 2019. For example, the ability to hold the mouse over the slider bar and see the frame corresponding to that position. I know this is possible because ExMplayer has had that feature for multiple years. Unfortunately that software seems to be dead, having not had an update for years.
6) I don't want VLC to be another Kodi, but it should support some basic `media manager' features. Tagging, integrated searching, thumbnail management, ability to hover over a thumbnail and see video summaries etc are critically important when you are dealing with hundreds of videos. Ideally I would like something like Geeqie for videos.
7) VLC should support `basic' video editiing. It does not have to compete with full-fledged non-linear video editors like Kdenlive or Openshot, but I should be able to (say) increase the brightness of a video, perform basic cropping etc and save the output to disk with reasonable quality. VLC can use ffmpeg to do the hard work, it just needs to provide an easy to use interface.
I can go on and on, but you get the idea. My feeling is that the VLC developers are more focused on backend features like supporting the latest codecs and less on interface functionality. It would be great if someone could take the VLC core and wrap a better interface around it.
Magnus.
Bullets, Bombs and Boobs... the 3 B's of cinematic excellence.
I have not used Outlook for a few years, but even then automatic email deletions were standard. Gmail is actually late to the party with this feature.
That is not the half of it; VLC is a fantastic thing in terms of playing anything you throw at it, but its user interface is still from the 90s and is abysmal. No support for doing anything but basic playback. Accessing even simple functions like zooming, brightening, rotating etc makes ctrl-alt-delete seem user-friendly. No support for obvious things like visual seek.
And of course no support for tagging, searching or even basic media management features.
I find myself using smplayer more and more these days.
Would you have been saying the same thing if it had been China or India, not Russia, whose intelligence agency aided Trump?
This is NOT true; a lot of the fervent opposition to opposition comes from the left, though their concerns are a bit different from that of the religious right.
Availability of affordable, ubiquitous sex reduces the market value of women as far as men are concerned. This undercuts a major advantage that women have in the war between the sexes. Women instinctively know this, and most of them reflexively oppose any aspect of decriminalizing prostitution. Politicians know that women as a whole want this, and know that pro-prostitution => electoral landslide loss even in leftist states.
Most feminists, even those who believe in `true equality' also support the continued criminalization of prostitution. In addition to the gender-power concerns above, they oppose anything that might improve the lot of men as a matter of principle.
Stack Ranking was a concept popularized by `Neutron Jack Welch' of GE fame who could do no wrong in the eighties and nineties. After he left GE, it lagged, and folks figured out that GE had succeeded by borrowing from the future just like many other US companies of the time, and many of Jack Welch's mantras were full of shit. So orgs are dropping his `20-70-10' and other tenets one after the other.
This is not about people being held in Slavery. The number of people who are being forced against their will into Prostitution in the US is less than 1%. Probably much much less.
This is about targeting the women's vote. Women hate prostitution as it drops their bargaining position against men. Politicians have been pandering to this for centuries. The anti-slavery thing is to make it more palatable in this modern age, and neutralize protests from men who would be affected by this.
But then they have to worry about their employees being lynched by the `alt-right'.
I feel that the only reason why the media focuses so much on tech is that they feel we'll shrivel up and `cave'.
I have worked with other industries (oil, finance, construction, retal). Have friends who work there. What is supposed to be happening in tech is mild compared to the daily reality in other industries. The only difference is that these guys will take the media to take a hike if they are subjected to this coverage. And they will unleash the lawyers.
The tech industry:
1) Has a lot of money
2) Is mostly composed of apologetic men (`beta males' ?) who are frankly uncomfortable/scared around women, and are paranoid about not always doing the logically correct thing. They are afraid that Captain Picard is continuously judging them. Basically they are ripe targets and natural victims.
3) Do not know how to hit back/divert these criticism.
Can you imagine a tide of similar accusations against Exxon, or Goldman Sachs? `Endemic discrimination against women in the oil industry/not enough women in construction'? Hell, the country just elected a guy who is the poster child for this stuff... and plenty of educated women voted for him.
A few months back, Slashdot was united in their agreement that a similar incident of cheating that was exposed in some Indian school was confirmation that Indian education is of low value, Indian degrees meaningless, and Indian programmers lack basic understanding of CS fundamentals.
Interesting to note that the arc of discussion in this case is completely different.
What, we are not willing to consider the possibility that this indicates that a significant % of `US programmers' may lack an understanding of CS fundamentals, which may be the reason why US multinationals like H1Bs?
This sort of thing has been in full force in the US for nearly the past 8 years; organized downvote brigades have attacked entertainers that have voiced criticisms against right-wing opinions or politicians. For example, Quentin Tarantino is under massive attack for comments on the police iduring the BLM movements. His latest movie was downvoted massively (Hateful Eight) even before it came out. Even his older movies have been under attack. J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series is under similar attack for her comments against Trump and Brexit, and her positions on Twitter. Her latest movie (Fantastic Beasts) have attracted a string of -ve reviewers. Amy Schumer attracts an unbelievable level of vitriol due to her anti-Trump comments. The list goes on.
The strategy is discussed and coordinated on right-wing Talk Radio and alt-right websites.
And they were those in "swing" districts.
I feel that the Republicans chose to deal with the short-term humiliation of being perceived as being unable to repeal Obamacare for strategic reasons.
The folks who hate Obamacare are a loud minority in their party. They can safely be ignored for a while.
The folks who would have lost coverage and been worse of with Obamacare repealed would have fucked them in the next election. As it is, these guys will still vote Republican in 2018.
So they let Obamacare stay. Big deal. They will dismantle regulations, start teaching religion in schools, pack the Supreme Court with Corporate-owned mouthpieces with no pushback.
I think that ship has sailed; mail-in ballots are vulnerable to that sort of scheme as well. Now that we have adopted mail-in ballots, may as well go the whole hog and do full verification.
Little guy? Auto dealers are owned by some of the wealthiest humans who have ever existed. In a given area, many of them are owned by the same guy!
When you go from one dealer to the other, all you are getting is a different salesperson, so you the only negotiating power you have is over his commission.
How about mail-in ballots? How do we know even who is filling it out? If mail-in ballots are OK, why is a selfie such a big deal?
If this is the case, should we not ban mail-in ballots as well?
You can very easily control immigration... by issuing a national ID to citizens and legal immigrants only, implementing an easy verification system and putting the onus of verification on the employers. No need to build a wall.
The IDs can be issued at Govt expense, thus neutralizing complaints from democrats that it would be unfair to poor people. Also tie the reception of benefits to said ID.
The IDs can also be used to verify voters, thus neutralizing republican complaints about crooked voting.
Assuming $20 per ID (a vast overestimate), you can issue such IDs to every single one of the $400M american citizens for $8B. Far cheaper than building and maintaining walls!
Also, aggressive enforcement; if an employer is found to have employed someone without verification, punitive fines. I find it ridiculous that farmers can go on national TV and bemoan their inability to hire illegals, with no repercussions whatsoever!
No jobs and no benefits means no incentive for illegals to come and stay here. Also a natural motivation for self-deportation. No "roundups" or "camps" necessary.
Actually young single women are far less likely to identify as feminists than older, married women. This may be because of self preservation... men don't tend to want to go out with/commit to women whom they see as natively hostile to their gender. A married woman or an older woman who no longer require/depend on male attraction can afford to be seen as openly feminist.
But Hillary's core constituency is definitely feminist... and of the more militant shade. The bulk of her support from women who are 50 or older, post-menopause, generally angry and bitter for their perceived loss of status due to old age/discrimination and who have hostile attitudes towards men in general.
Average sure. Median.... not even close.
The median # of sexual partners a woman accumulates between 18 & marriage: 7
Median # of sexual partners for men: 2
A small % of the men are banging most of the women.
Come on, tell us how you REALLY feel!
It is worse than that. It has taken huge backwards strides in stability, in the past 4-6 months to the point where it is unusable. Kwin crashes randomly. The entire desktop freezes up when you try to move windows around. Menu items in the filemanager randomly stop working. Unfortunately gnome is not too much better either at the moment, so I am back to using a regular window manager. Hopefully they get their act together fast.
This may be a problem with my own reading comprehension, but I am not sure I understand the point you are making. The only thing that jumped out at me was your sentence, "Some people, a surprisingly large number of people, simply do not respect women. At all. Even other women.". But I'm afraid I don't see how the rest of your article backs up this claim.
Or a prospective `white knight' who really really hopes that this female-friendly posture would result in a pity lay.