I will say that VLC did just recently play a DVD that none of the other DVD players I have (mplayer, xine, etc...) wouldn't even touch. Heck the other players would crash and burn badly - even lsdvd had troubles with this one DVD - the Dark Knight.
What I don't like about VLC is how there is absolutely nothing intuitive about what combination of codecs will work on a transcode. With a recent example, I could get MPEG2 video to encode into a mpeg container or an avi container, but I couldn't get any audio to go into the same container at all. Using mpga would crash the program where using mp2a would go through the motions but you would end up with no audio in the output.
If you find that you need "support" of any sort for VLC, good luck with that. I have found in many cases that the forums are unmonitored and the IRC channel folk ignores people with real questions.
I just don't think that VLC deserves the title of "the best" in anything.
The first thing you want is a natural gas powered generator, not gasoline. Nothing like having to take a trip to the local gas station (presuming THEY have power) to fill up the generator every 8 hours or so. This, by definition, will make the generator a stationary unit (not on wheels, designed to be bolted down to a concrete pad).
Next, you want a generator with auto-start, auto-transfer with manual return. You want the thing to automatically kick in if the power dies, but YOU should be in control of when it decides to return to the grid. Nothing like finding out that the power died 10 minutes after you and the family left the house for a couple of days and coming back to a cold house with no power and potentially burst pipes.
Wattage - you will want at least a 5000 watt unit for whole-house use. Forget this idea of running power cords everywhere - unless you like the idea of tripping over power cords everywhere. With the transfer switch mentioned above, the generator takes the place of the grid so your internal house wiring will continue to serve it's duty.
There are several manufacturers of house generator systems. You can find low-end units at places like Home Depot or Lowes. Better units are best obtained from an electrical wholesale house.
Do yourself a huge favor here and hire a licensed electrician to do the work. It'll get done right the first time, the electrical inspector won't get excited (in a negative way) when he sees the work, and the odds of "something going wrong" go way down.
Generally, to protect your email from discovery, write an email retention policy (timestamp on implemention date), and follow it without exception. If your policy says you delete all emails after 30 days - do it. Up until you are served with a discovery request, anything you have destroyed as a part of your retention policy is no problem. Of course, once you get that discovery request and the matching "you are being sued" notice, do not destroy a thing.
Check with YOUR lawyer before you rely on this foolish advice
During the State of the Union, Bush did not once say if we were winning or loosing the War on Terror. When does the frisking of seniors end?
Simply put - the war on terror can not by definition ever end. The reason for this is quite simple: how exactly do you determine they you have won this so-called war? An end of attacks? Sure, this could mean that we "won", but it could just as likely mean that the terrorists are giving a 6 month hiatus so we think they are all gone.
Since these terrorists have no flag, no uniform, no government, we have no place to go to negotiate a surrender or anything else. We have no way to identify a terrorist without relying on essentially "he said she said". We literally have no way to know if the terrorists are defeated, or just out on holiday for a spell.
Maybe I am old fashioned here, but my problem is more along the lines of the asymetrical nature of home broadband.
Last I checked, bandwidth on the open (business) market is symetrical. A DS-1 is 1.544 megabits up and down, a DS-3 is 45 megabits up and down, an OC-12 is 620 megbits up and down, my home cable internet is 6 meg up and 80 k down (it's advertised at 256k, but I have never seen it exceed 80 k). Yeah, I know - restricted to make home servers inpractical and all that baloney...
It's not like it'll cost the home broadband providers more to provide a symetrical connection!
Let me see... I had to reinstall Windows 12 times on my son's computer, 8 times on my Wife's computer, 5 times on my computer at work, 15 times on my dad's computer, and so on....
Yeah, I can see how Microsoft can claim 1 billion installs - let's see them filter it out to "unique computers" and see where that number goes.
My company does that - Mi-Connect.com - cheap colocation with good service. $49.95 a month with a 400 gig a month transfer limit for a 1u. $89.95 a month for a 4u. I can also do a dedicated server (my equipment, your control) starting at $89.95 a month. And no, I don't do "VSP" type hosting - too much potential for performance hits by having a single "host" getting popular.
My connectivity is good: 1 gig to level-3, OC-12 (620 meg) to Saavis and OC-3 (155 meg) to UUNet.
No - you don't "give up the right to assert a patent" through inaction. You are thinking of trademark where if you don't vigorously defend your trademark, you can and often will loose it.
A patent can only become unenforceable by either reexamination from the USPTO, federal court decision, or definitive action from the patent holder itself (like a covenant not to enforce or a donation to a third party, etc).
You can hold a patent and do nothing with it for years, then all of a sudden decide to enforce it. Perfectly legal - think UniSys and the LZW patent covering the GIF format.
You guys know how Microsoft folk like to toss about that Linux violates Microsoft's patents...
You guys know how "we" like to shout out "put up or shut up"...
Opportunity is right in front of our noses - right now!
Whether we think the patent is valid or not is irrelevent - it's been held as valid by the USPTO. The existance of a patent is considered prima facie evidence of validity in a court of law. It takes LOTS of money and time to get a patent declared invalid in court. LOTS of money - a million dollars would not be unusual for legal costs in a patent fight. Unless YOU have the money to put up for the fight, the battle is already lost here.
Microsoft has a valid patent on FAT (or more specifically FAT32). Linux implements FAT and FAT32. Unless someone has a signed document from Microsoft stating that Linux has a royalty-free license to use the patented technology, we are violating the patent - period.
Time to get coding - people talk about "coding around" a patent issue should one be found. Well, one has been laid directly at our feet. Time to get coding...
How about you guys (Dell) just worry about making sure that your hardware works under Linux. If necessary, distribute patches or drivers as tar.gz files. Don't worry about the OS - leave that to us, the community.
Why tar.gz files?? Because they are universally compatible with all distributions. They may not have all the nice extras like dependency tracking and all that, but name a distribution that can't deal with a tar.gz file. Besides, I would argue that Dell should only be distributing device drivers - things that would rarely have much in the way of dependencies external to themself (other than the kernel, obviously).
I say: just support your hardware - all of it - under Linux and we'll take it from there...
Typed on my Dell Latitude D610 laptop running Slackware 11 - only...
I have several white-box servers in a co-lo that together with a good stiff tailwind draw about 4 amps total.
I also have several Dell 1950 and 2950 servers in a data center for my day job. Each one by itself draws about 3 amps (dual supply, 1.5 amps per supply, surging to 3 amps when one of the supplies is turned off for whatever reason). Granted, there are many more fans in the Dell servers than in my whitebox servers, but I have more storage in my whitebox servers.
So we get to replace all those PAR-64 lamps and Leko's and Fresnel lamps with intelligent fixtures like I-Beams, or Vari*Lites, or TeleScans or whatever...
Sounds like a great idea.... for the manufacturers of automated lighting fixtures...
As near as I can tell from the text of the patent, this patent troll has patented the use of an Analog to Digital Convertor for converting the analog output of a joystick into a digital signal. I'm not 100% certain but it sounds like either an integrator type circuit or a PWM type circuit. The intriguing bit is the mentioned use of a VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip as a part of the design. This could mean utilizing any of the large fabric chips from the likes of Altera, TI, or Lord knows how many others are in the market nowadays. Heck, this could be interpreted to include the PIC chips in common use nowadays.
I'd have to look in my old college electronics book (Electronic Communications - vol 5 by Schrader) to see, but I think these types of ADC circuits were discussed even back then (circa 1985). If not, I know the Peavey DECA series of digital power amplifiers (circa 1988) utilized an integrator type ADC for doing converting the analog audio signal to a series of digital pulses (PWM) used for driving the MOSFET finals.
This is easy and one of the tenants of so-called dual licensing setups...
Basically, if you don't want to pay to use the software, you are bound to the terms of the GPL. If you don't want to be bound to the terms of the GPL, you gotta pay.
I think the coolest thing I ever built (or designed and programmed) was a self-contained turntable system for an automated monorail part transport system. The thing had multiple stop points that could be programmed, automatic homing, and built-in accel/decel ramping. Used a mini handheld pendant to program the stop points - you could literally walk under the thing and see the alignment as you made your adjustments.
To the best of my knowledge, it is still in production at Caterpillar today. It was designed and built in 1998.
The second best coolest thing I ever built was some software for interfacing a Linux based PC to an Allen Bradley ControlLogix PLC. The real cool bit is knowing that this software is being used in multiple production facilities around the world from making baby formula in Canada to being used in a mix simulator for the AirBorne Laser program.
Let's keep this on a simple level - the financial costs to a hosting outfit between Windows and Linux, assuming all other factors are equal (same labor requirements, same hardware, same rack costs, same power/bandwidth costs)...
The Windows hosts that I operate in my hosting business cost me $10.00 per machine per month in licensing fees. The Slackware Linux hosts that I operate in my hosting business cost me $0.00 per machine per month. The database on both machines is free: SQL Express 2005 on Windows and MySQL on Linux.
Please go ahead and try to convince me how $120.00 per year for a Windows machine costs me less than $0.00 per year.
I think you will find that just because something is legal in one country doesn't necessarily make it legal in another.
We see this example of allofmp3.com and we think "...since it is legal in the Soviet State(s) and we bought it from them on their terms, it must be legal here too." - this is a very dangerous mistake to make.
Consider this near identical situation: if Marijuana is legal in Jangaland and you purchase on their terms from them, does that fact trump the laws of your homeland that make Marijuana posession (and use) illegal?
We need to kill this line of thought right now - totally dead! It is totally wrong to rely on the "where I purchased it - it was legal" crap. (Good) Firewooks are legal in Ohio, but are illegal here in Michigan. Making copies of a work without permission of the author and/or rights owner is not legal here - regardless of the laws of the Soviet States.
No, I am not a lawyer, but I do have a bit of common sense
All the people who steal from me in my business have had bad credit scores - therefore, all people with bad credit scores will steal from me and my business
Sounds like a bad case of daim bramage...
You know, we could extend this logic to the auto insurance industry too..
If 75% of the people who file claims have bad credit, then all people with bad credit are likely to file a claim. Sounds like a perfectly (il)logical reason to jack up the rates on the people least likely to be able to afford insurance in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
I will say that VLC did just recently play a DVD that none of the other DVD players I have (mplayer, xine, etc...) wouldn't even touch. Heck the other players would crash and burn badly - even lsdvd had troubles with this one DVD - the Dark Knight.
What I don't like about VLC is how there is absolutely nothing intuitive about what combination of codecs will work on a transcode. With a recent example, I could get MPEG2 video to encode into a mpeg container or an avi container, but I couldn't get any audio to go into the same container at all. Using mpga would crash the program where using mp2a would go through the motions but you would end up with no audio in the output.
If you find that you need "support" of any sort for VLC, good luck with that. I have found in many cases that the forums are unmonitored and the IRC channel folk ignores people with real questions.
I just don't think that VLC deserves the title of "the best" in anything.
The first thing you want is a natural gas powered generator, not gasoline. Nothing like having to take a trip to the local gas station (presuming THEY have power) to fill up the generator every 8 hours or so. This, by definition, will make the generator a stationary unit (not on wheels, designed to be bolted down to a concrete pad).
Next, you want a generator with auto-start, auto-transfer with manual return. You want the thing to automatically kick in if the power dies, but YOU should be in control of when it decides to return to the grid. Nothing like finding out that the power died 10 minutes after you and the family left the house for a couple of days and coming back to a cold house with no power and potentially burst pipes.
Wattage - you will want at least a 5000 watt unit for whole-house use. Forget this idea of running power cords everywhere - unless you like the idea of tripping over power cords everywhere. With the transfer switch mentioned above, the generator takes the place of the grid so your internal house wiring will continue to serve it's duty.
There are several manufacturers of house generator systems. You can find low-end units at places like Home Depot or Lowes. Better units are best obtained from an electrical wholesale house.
Do yourself a huge favor here and hire a licensed electrician to do the work. It'll get done right the first time, the electrical inspector won't get excited (in a negative way) when he sees the work, and the odds of "something going wrong" go way down.
From another guy in Michigan (Westland)...
IANAL and all that....
Generally, to protect your email from discovery, write an email retention policy (timestamp on implemention date), and follow it without exception. If your policy says you delete all emails after 30 days - do it. Up until you are served with a discovery request, anything you have destroyed as a part of your retention policy is no problem. Of course, once you get that discovery request and the matching "you are being sued" notice, do not destroy a thing.
Check with YOUR lawyer before you rely on this foolish advice
Perhaps it wasn't the best choice to start off at Area-51. That place doesn't exist after all....
From your post:
During the State of the Union, Bush did not once say if we were winning or loosing the War on Terror. When does the frisking of seniors end?
Simply put - the war on terror can not by definition ever end. The reason for this is quite simple: how exactly do you determine they you have won this so-called war? An end of attacks? Sure, this could mean that we "won", but it could just as likely mean that the terrorists are giving a 6 month hiatus so we think they are all gone.
Since these terrorists have no flag, no uniform, no government, we have no place to go to negotiate a surrender or anything else. We have no way to identify a terrorist without relying on essentially "he said she said". We literally have no way to know if the terrorists are defeated, or just out on holiday for a spell.
Alas, poor Zimbra, we hardly knew you. We will miss you dearly...
Salaries, unlike hourlies, are a flat amount, regardless of how much you work.
That explains perfectly why companies feel it necessary to pro-rate your pay when you join and/or leave the company...
Maybe I am old fashioned here, but my problem is more along the lines of the asymetrical nature of home broadband.
Last I checked, bandwidth on the open (business) market is symetrical. A DS-1 is 1.544 megabits up and down, a DS-3 is 45 megabits up and down, an OC-12 is 620 megbits up and down, my home cable internet is 6 meg up and 80 k down (it's advertised at 256k, but I have never seen it exceed 80 k). Yeah, I know - restricted to make home servers inpractical and all that baloney...
It's not like it'll cost the home broadband providers more to provide a symetrical connection!
All you need to know about PLC's:
xic b3/1 bst xio b3/2 ote b3/3 nxb ote b3/2 bnd
Oh, you said Schneider (Modicon), nevermind....
And in other news
And while they won't admit it, 74% of all IT staff routinely violate the rules they force the rest of the staff to live under
Not that I would do such a thing, but....I've heard stories... :)
Let me see... I had to reinstall Windows 12 times on my son's computer, 8 times on my Wife's computer, 5 times on my computer at work, 15 times on my dad's computer, and so on....
Yeah, I can see how Microsoft can claim 1 billion installs - let's see them filter it out to "unique computers" and see where that number goes.
My company does that - Mi-Connect.com - cheap colocation with good service. $49.95 a month with a 400 gig a month transfer limit for a 1u. $89.95 a month for a 4u. I can also do a dedicated server (my equipment, your control) starting at $89.95 a month. And no, I don't do "VSP" type hosting - too much potential for performance hits by having a single "host" getting popular.
My connectivity is good: 1 gig to level-3, OC-12 (620 meg) to Saavis and OC-3 (155 meg) to UUNet.
No - you don't "give up the right to assert a patent" through inaction. You are thinking of trademark where if you don't vigorously defend your trademark, you can and often will loose it.
A patent can only become unenforceable by either reexamination from the USPTO, federal court decision, or definitive action from the patent holder itself (like a covenant not to enforce or a donation to a third party, etc).
You can hold a patent and do nothing with it for years, then all of a sudden decide to enforce it. Perfectly legal - think UniSys and the LZW patent covering the GIF format.
I am not proposing that we can code around a patent. I am merely repeating what others have stated in the past.
The irony is not lost on you obviously: you can't code around a patent like this. Either you license the patent or you drop the feature.
Since I've been moderated as flamebait on this, it's obviously a touchy subject - sorry about that. The truth sucks sometimes...
You guys know how Microsoft folk like to toss about that Linux violates Microsoft's patents...
You guys know how "we" like to shout out "put up or shut up"...
Opportunity is right in front of our noses - right now!
Whether we think the patent is valid or not is irrelevent - it's been held as valid by the USPTO. The existance of a patent is considered prima facie evidence of validity in a court of law. It takes LOTS of money and time to get a patent declared invalid in court. LOTS of money - a million dollars would not be unusual for legal costs in a patent fight. Unless YOU have the money to put up for the fight, the battle is already lost here.
Microsoft has a valid patent on FAT (or more specifically FAT32). Linux implements FAT and FAT32. Unless someone has a signed document from Microsoft stating that Linux has a royalty-free license to use the patented technology, we are violating the patent - period.
Time to get coding - people talk about "coding around" a patent issue should one be found. Well, one has been laid directly at our feet. Time to get coding...
How about something a bit more obvious...
How about you guys (Dell) just worry about making sure that your hardware works under Linux. If necessary, distribute patches or drivers as tar.gz files. Don't worry about the OS - leave that to us, the community.
Why tar.gz files?? Because they are universally compatible with all distributions. They may not have all the nice extras like dependency tracking and all that, but name a distribution that can't deal with a tar.gz file. Besides, I would argue that Dell should only be distributing device drivers - things that would rarely have much in the way of dependencies external to themself (other than the kernel, obviously).
I say: just support your hardware - all of it - under Linux and we'll take it from there...
Typed on my Dell Latitude D610 laptop running Slackware 11 - only...
I can attest to this personally.
I have several white-box servers in a co-lo that together with a good stiff tailwind draw about 4 amps total.
I also have several Dell 1950 and 2950 servers in a data center for my day job. Each one by itself draws about 3 amps (dual supply, 1.5 amps per supply, surging to 3 amps when one of the supplies is turned off for whatever reason). Granted, there are many more fans in the Dell servers than in my whitebox servers, but I have more storage in my whitebox servers.
Haven't these folk heard of Web-DAV before?
So we get to replace all those PAR-64 lamps and Leko's and Fresnel lamps with intelligent fixtures like I-Beams, or Vari*Lites, or TeleScans or whatever...
Sounds like a great idea.... for the manufacturers of automated lighting fixtures...
As near as I can tell from the text of the patent, this patent troll has patented the use of an Analog to Digital Convertor for converting the analog output of a joystick into a digital signal. I'm not 100% certain but it sounds like either an integrator type circuit or a PWM type circuit. The intriguing bit is the mentioned use of a VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip as a part of the design. This could mean utilizing any of the large fabric chips from the likes of Altera, TI, or Lord knows how many others are in the market nowadays. Heck, this could be interpreted to include the PIC chips in common use nowadays.
I'd have to look in my old college electronics book (Electronic Communications - vol 5 by Schrader) to see, but I think these types of ADC circuits were discussed even back then (circa 1985). If not, I know the Peavey DECA series of digital power amplifiers (circa 1988) utilized an integrator type ADC for doing converting the analog audio signal to a series of digital pulses (PWM) used for driving the MOSFET finals.
This is easy and one of the tenants of so-called dual licensing setups...
Basically, if you don't want to pay to use the software, you are bound to the terms of the GPL. If you don't want to be bound to the terms of the GPL, you gotta pay.
I think the coolest thing I ever built (or designed and programmed) was a self-contained turntable system for an automated monorail part transport system. The thing had multiple stop points that could be programmed, automatic homing, and built-in accel/decel ramping. Used a mini handheld pendant to program the stop points - you could literally walk under the thing and see the alignment as you made your adjustments.
To the best of my knowledge, it is still in production at Caterpillar today. It was designed and built in 1998.
The second best coolest thing I ever built was some software for interfacing a Linux based PC to an Allen Bradley ControlLogix PLC. The real cool bit is knowing that this software is being used in multiple production facilities around the world from making baby formula in Canada to being used in a mix simulator for the AirBorne Laser program.
Let's keep this on a simple level - the financial costs to a hosting outfit between Windows and Linux, assuming all other factors are equal (same labor requirements, same hardware, same rack costs, same power/bandwidth costs)...
The Windows hosts that I operate in my hosting business cost me $10.00 per machine per month in licensing fees. The Slackware Linux hosts that I operate in my hosting business cost me $0.00 per machine per month. The database on both machines is free: SQL Express 2005 on Windows and MySQL on Linux.
Please go ahead and try to convince me how $120.00 per year for a Windows machine costs me less than $0.00 per year.
I think you will find that just because something is legal in one country doesn't necessarily make it legal in another.
We see this example of allofmp3.com and we think "...since it is legal in the Soviet State(s) and we bought it from them on their terms, it must be legal here too." - this is a very dangerous mistake to make.
Consider this near identical situation: if Marijuana is legal in Jangaland and you purchase on their terms from them, does that fact trump the laws of your homeland that make Marijuana posession (and use) illegal?
We need to kill this line of thought right now - totally dead! It is totally wrong to rely on the "where I purchased it - it was legal" crap. (Good) Firewooks are legal in Ohio, but are illegal here in Michigan. Making copies of a work without permission of the author and/or rights owner is not legal here - regardless of the laws of the Soviet States.
No, I am not a lawyer, but I do have a bit of common sense
Let me see if I get this right...
All the people who steal from me in my business have had bad credit scores - therefore, all people with bad credit scores will steal from me and my business
Sounds like a bad case of daim bramage...
You know, we could extend this logic to the auto insurance industry too..
If 75% of the people who file claims have bad credit, then all people with bad credit are likely to file a claim. Sounds like a perfectly (il)logical reason to jack up the rates on the people least likely to be able to afford insurance in the first place.