The link you gave is to the Real Alternative, (which is great, btw, but not exactly useful in this situation). There are two versions of the Quicktime Alternative software, linked to here. Version 1.52 is for Quicktime 6, and supports older Microsoft OS's, the other is 1.63 which is based on Quicktime 7, but only works on NT5+ kernels (W2k, XP, Vista).
The actual settlement was $92 million, a far cry from the $1 billion they asked for.
Which was about 92 million more dollars than what they deserved, but still, when your business model (film) becomes obsolete, whatcha gonna do? Innovate? Ha!
Actually, ranting rarely has a specific target, and mine was to the youngin' masses, not specifically to you. Your comment was really just a springboard for some pent-up frustration. For once I'm happy to be preaching to the converted.
It's Axel F, goddammit. Axel F, written by Harold Faltermeyer in 1984 for the movie Beverly Hills Cop, the protagonist of which, played by Eddie Murphy, was named Axel Foley.
NOT "the Crazy Frog" song.
Oh, and for the record, that Puff Daddy song, I'll Be Missing You? That was written by this dude called Sting, in a song called Every Breath You Take in 1983.
Goddamned kids these days. They're all "But I hate the 80s!" yet conveniently ignore the fact that three-quarters of their "culture" is ripped off from the 70s and 80s./rant
Perhaps we'll start seeing Microsoft offering for sale downloads of movies in xvid format?
Don't count on it. You think Vista would be such a DRM-infested pile of turd if Microsoft was thinking of heading in that direction? No, what's more likely is that by supporting an open codec like XVID, Microsoft gains automatic, free compatibility with all the other media players that don't want to play Apple's or DiVX's proprietary-codec game (think: Archos, Cowon, etc). The only proprietary that Microsoft will allow is MS-Proprietary.
I checked this wasn't a fool with in a fool, and it wasn't. This really happened.
Lemme guess... you clicked on this link, right? And then did a page search for "Ceausescu"? And there it was, almost verbatim:
"In Romania, during the Ceausescu era, one newspaper printed an article as an April Fool's joke saying all political prisoners were being freed," says Wainwright.
"People started turning up at prisons and waiting for family and friends to be released. It didn't go down well when it was revealed to be a hoax."
Did you happen to see the date on that BBC article?
The biological process for making vitamin C from glucose requires four enzymes. Primates (which includes us) share a damaged gene for producing the fourth enzyme. We have the other three, but because we lack the fourth, the incomplete product of the third enzyme is simply broken down and recycled.
Fascinating! I'm always happy to read intelligent responses on/. from people who actually know what the hell they're talking about. You've already been modded to the stratosphere, so I just wanted to say "thanks".
Spoken like someone who's never used Beryl.
on
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Noone claims that Linux has obscene hardware requirements on the basis that you'd need a decent cpu/ram/gpu to run XGL/Compriz/Beryl or whatever, why should Aero be any different
Ah, but that's the hilarious, beautiful thing about it.
I'm running Beryl on my 5 year-old laptop. Celeron 1.5 Ghz. Built-in video (Intel 810). 384 megs of RAM. This is some old, anemic friggin' hardware.
And yet, it flies. Everything runs as quickly as it should. The 3D bells and whistles don't slow the machine down a single cycle. Now, can you please explain to me how I can somehow get all the cool eye candy of Vista (and then some) on a system with one-quarter the spec of the recommended system architecture? Is Microsoft's coding really that bad?
Also, as you get into pure touchscreen devices (which the media side of this is) then the in-phone UI is crucial
I respectfully disagree. In fact, I'd suggest to you that a pure-touchscreen telephone will be a user-interface monstrosity because it will be practically impossible to accurately dial a phone number without requiring you to look at the screen. People are right to rail against this Samsung for requiring you to flip it over to operate it, but that's still not much different than the iPhone: you're still sitting there staring at a screen when you could be multitasking. Our fingers have sensors on the ends of them, you know? Electronic devices don't need to rely on the eyes for input!
Honestly, touch screens have taken the electronics world about twenty steps back in the usability department. My first Sony Walkman was more usable and practical than any iPod because I could operate its basic functions while it remained in my pocket. Same with the original Nokia "thick candy bar" cell phones. The numbers actually had some tactile feedback to remind you that, "Yes, Virginia, you just pressed a button."
For a Windows user, a zombied process is no different than an orphaned one, in that you still have to manually kill it. If you've never had to kill a process before, I'd be surprised.
To log into Windows, you have to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete before Windows will show you a login screen.
Which is completely different than a console login (CTRL-ALT-F1).
Neither Linux nor OSX needed to implement the ctrl-alt-del scheme.
Linux gets orphaned processes all the time, and you'd be blind without a method to view what's running on your machine. Thus ps, or the more useful top.
I won't be surprised if 14 is the minimal legal age to be sent to the electric chair.
Actually, so far the youngest person on death row in America was sixteen (Shareef Cousin). Cousin would have been executed by the Great State of Louisiana by now, except for the small problem that he's innocent. After spending four years on death row, the conviction was finally overturned. Yay, justice.
Here's the last words of seventeen year-old Joseph John Cannon (executed by the State of Texas). Another interesting fact: 1 in 9 people on death row were under the age of 19 at the time of arrest (source: Bureau of Justice).
Here's a Time Magazine article on the Kids of Death Row. According to the article, previous Republican Governor of California Pete Wilson suggested that 14-year-olds should be eligible for the death penalty. So your initial statement isn't too far off the charts.
Unfortunately, Kubuntu ships with the Wireless Assistant - which is a POS that does NOT work well with WEP among other defects, let alone WPA.
First I thought, "wait, Xubuntu doesn't ship with any wireless apps" until I remembered the Wireless Assistant. Good god, what in the hell were they thinking bundling it with a release? I probably spent 10 minutes trying to get it to work before disregarding it as utterly useless.
This is why (X)buntu is not suitable for new Linux users. It is not mature enough.
Well, I'm a new Linux user--I used to be a whiz on the DOS command line, but that's about it. Luckily the Ubuntu Forums are a welcoming place for total newbs. All the stumbling blocks I've come across (what few there were) were already addressed in previous posts, so I didn't even have to embarrass myself by asking.:)
Agreed that it's not quite ready for Grandma, but it's definitely getting a hell of a lot closer.
Funny, I've got an IBM Thinkpad R51, and I've had the same experience. It was nearly flawless. The only tricky part was configuring the wireless support, which was actually incredibly easy once I read that I should use the Gnome Wireless Network Manager applet. Built-in support for WPA/WPA2 + VPN. Easy as Windows.
I was even able to get Beryl working, since the built-in graphics hardware is Intel. It's old as hell, but it's Intel (open-source drivers), so now I've got a desktop that rivals Windows Vista's "Aero," running on laptop hardware that's five years old (Pentium 1.5 Ghz).
First time I went abroad, I brought all sorts of gadgets with me: a mini-television to watch all the exotic foreign shows (before I understood the difference between NTSC, NTSC-J and PAL), a MiniDisc recorder to take "audio" photos of different places (worked out nicely), a laptop to "do work" (ended up using it as a glorified travel diary). The camera was low-tech film, so no worries about backing up files. I also brought a portable immersion water heater to boil noodles or make pasta.
The second time I went, I brought the heater, the camera and the minidisc recorder. The heater had adapters for nearly every kind of AC socket, so that was fine. The other two relied on batteries. The key was that they could use simple, easy-to-find batteries (AA's, primarily). I wouldn't want to be at the mercy of a rechargeable battery for anything really important because you'll have to cart around a bunch of adapters, but more importantly, if the batteries die you have to wait a number of hours before you can use your little slice of technology again. (Sorry, iPod).
The more low-tech, the higher the reliability. No-tech gadgets like travel journals (with real paper) might cramp up your hand, but at least they'll work in the middle of the jungle.
Well, ReactOS just released version 0.3.1. At this rate, you'll have your SP5 sometime around 2009. The good news: after that, you'll get regular updates again for (potentially) ever.
It's not "just fucking television." It's a MASSIVE consumer market.
More than that, it's also the primary means for advertising candidates. If you want name-recognition at the polls, I can guarantee you that for a large majority of voters, everything they know of potential presidential or congressional candidates will be from television. To not specifically cater your funding and legislation to favor mass media would be political suicide.
I used to download torrents, but I stopped after a rather unusual set of events that occurred one night. I should preface this by saying I am a Time Warner RoadRunner customer. While I was downloading (and uploading, as is the nature of bittorrent) my network connection inexplicably dropped to 0 kb/s. I thought it might be a problem with the client I was using, so I opened up my browser to find out more information, but instead of opening up to my default homepage, it was a form letter from Time Warner that said, in a nutshell, "We know what you're doing. Stop it." At the bottom was a submit button acknowledging that I had read the warning.
I realize this sounds conspiratorial, but it honestly happened exactly as I describe (the form letter was obviously longer and more lawyer-sounding... I wish I had taken a screenshot). My first thought was that somehow my Firefox browser had been hijacked through some 0-day exploit, and if I clicked the submit button I'd be taken to porn sites or something. So I close the browser, check my running tasks to make sure it's not still running, then open it up again. Once again, the same message. OK... weird. I then try and trace route Yahoo, and all my outbound connections are going to the same place... a Time Warner IP.
In other words, they redirected all my outbound requests, and the only inbound response I got was from their web servers. I mean, I know intellectually that they have the power to do something like that, but it was friggin' spooky to see them actually do it.
As soon as I clicked the submit button, my outbound network traffic was restored. And I have to say, even amidst all the scare-mongering on sites like Slashdot about the MP/RIAA's tactics, this finally did the trick.
Also note, I'd downloaded (and uploaded) hundreds of gigs of traffic before this without a peep. In the form I got in my browser, it stated that my IP had basically been singled out as violating their usage policies and they had received complaints from copyright holders. As the parent poster said, they didn't have to do this. They could have simply handed my IP over and wiped their hands of it. Take their warning to heart. It might be the only one you get.
And I am not happy to see Dune II by Westwood Studios not beeing recognized as the basis for which the success of WarCraft was build on.
And I am not happy to see that Populus by Peter Molyneux (and Bullfrog) not being recognized as the basis for which the success of Dune II, Warcraft, and all "god-like" games were built on (Sim City and Populus came out in the same year).
Then: A dozen different video card manufacturers, twice that many chipsets, equal variety of drivers.
Also: The only drivers you got were the ones that came packaged with the card. Oh sure, you could download them if you had a modem, and it was set up properly, and wasn't the card that you needed the drivers for, and the manufacturer had a BBS, and the line wasn't busy...
Then: IDE=slow. Master? Slave? Cable? WTF is this?
Also: 5 MEGAbyte hard drives, FULL HEIGHT. Cable-connection order matters. And remember the joys of TERMINATING RESISTORS? Kids these days have it so damned easy.
Then: Set up your modem to connect to your ISP and hope you don't get any incoming calls. Firewall? What's that?
Then: Scanner? SCSI (and don't forget your terminators). Printer? Parallel. Video in? Forget it....NULL modem cables, Joystick ("game") cards, the only quality video-out card was the Targa 3000 and it cost an arm and a leg, a 300 KB file took hours to download...
Then: Steel case weighing 20kg, built out of razor blades.
Nothing more to add here. They really sucked that much.
Instead of using security cameras, which have a bad public perception, we could instead mandate that all television importers be required to install cameras inside their sets. This way we could have nearly 100% coverage, even inside people's houses (where most crimes are committed), yet not be so obviously pervasive as to give citizens discomfort.
Naturally there would be a public concern of targeted "viewing", so we just have to hire people to monitor these sets and do it at random. That way, people won't actually know if they're being monitored or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, I missed the Quicktime Alternative link in your original thread (wasn't link-ified).
The link you gave is to the Real Alternative, (which is great, btw, but not exactly useful in this situation). There are two versions of the Quicktime Alternative software, linked to here. Version 1.52 is for Quicktime 6, and supports older Microsoft OS's, the other is 1.63 which is based on Quicktime 7, but only works on NT5+ kernels (W2k, XP, Vista).
The actual settlement was $92 million, a far cry from the $1 billion they asked for.
Which was about 92 million more dollars than what they deserved, but still, when your business model (film) becomes obsolete, whatcha gonna do? Innovate? Ha!
You're ranting at the wrong person.
Actually, ranting rarely has a specific target, and mine was to the youngin' masses, not specifically to you. Your comment was really just a springboard for some pent-up frustration. For once I'm happy to be preaching to the converted.
it's that Crazy Frog ringtone
/rant
It's Axel F, goddammit. Axel F, written by Harold Faltermeyer in 1984 for the movie Beverly Hills Cop , the protagonist of which, played by Eddie Murphy, was named Axel Foley.
NOT "the Crazy Frog" song.
Oh, and for the record, that Puff Daddy song, I'll Be Missing You? That was written by this dude called Sting, in a song called Every Breath You Take in 1983.
Goddamned kids these days. They're all "But I hate the 80s!" yet conveniently ignore the fact that three-quarters of their "culture" is ripped off from the 70s and 80s.
Perhaps we'll start seeing Microsoft offering for sale downloads of movies in xvid format?
Don't count on it. You think Vista would be such a DRM-infested pile of turd if Microsoft was thinking of heading in that direction? No, what's more likely is that by supporting an open codec like XVID, Microsoft gains automatic, free compatibility with all the other media players that don't want to play Apple's or DiVX's proprietary-codec game (think: Archos, Cowon, etc). The only proprietary that Microsoft will allow is MS-Proprietary.
...and from now on, stop playing with yourself! /ref
Lemme guess... you clicked on this link, right? And then did a page search for "Ceausescu"? And there it was, almost verbatim:
Did you happen to see the date on that BBC article?
The biological process for making vitamin C from glucose requires four enzymes. Primates (which includes us) share a damaged gene for producing the fourth enzyme. We have the other three, but because we lack the fourth, the incomplete product of the third enzyme is simply broken down and recycled.
/. from people who actually know what the hell they're talking about. You've already been modded to the stratosphere, so I just wanted to say "thanks".
Fascinating! I'm always happy to read intelligent responses on
Noone claims that Linux has obscene hardware requirements on the basis that you'd need a decent cpu/ram/gpu to run XGL/Compriz/Beryl or whatever, why should Aero be any different
Ah, but that's the hilarious, beautiful thing about it.
I'm running Beryl on my 5 year-old laptop . Celeron 1.5 Ghz. Built-in video (Intel 810). 384 megs of RAM. This is some old, anemic friggin' hardware.
And yet, it flies. Everything runs as quickly as it should. The 3D bells and whistles don't slow the machine down a single cycle. Now, can you please explain to me how I can somehow get all the cool eye candy of Vista (and then some) on a system with one-quarter the spec of the recommended system architecture? Is Microsoft's coding really that bad?
Since Java's license is neither free nor open source, a small but vocal minority has responded both strongly and negatively.
Welcome back, 2005! We sure missed you!
In other news, the 1.6 JRE is noticeably faster in every regard to 1.5. Just sayin'.
Also, as you get into pure touchscreen devices (which the media side of this is) then the in-phone UI is crucial
I respectfully disagree. In fact, I'd suggest to you that a pure-touchscreen telephone will be a user-interface monstrosity because it will be practically impossible to accurately dial a phone number without requiring you to look at the screen. People are right to rail against this Samsung for requiring you to flip it over to operate it, but that's still not much different than the iPhone: you're still sitting there staring at a screen when you could be multitasking. Our fingers have sensors on the ends of them, you know? Electronic devices don't need to rely on the eyes for input!
Honestly, touch screens have taken the electronics world about twenty steps back in the usability department. My first Sony Walkman was more usable and practical than any iPod because I could operate its basic functions while it remained in my pocket. Same with the original Nokia "thick candy bar" cell phones. The numbers actually had some tactile feedback to remind you that, "Yes, Virginia, you just pressed a button."
No it doesn't.
For a Windows user, a zombied process is no different than an orphaned one, in that you still have to manually kill it. If you've never had to kill a process before, I'd be surprised.
To log into Windows, you have to press Ctrl-Alt-Delete before Windows will show you a login screen.
Which is completely different than a console login (CTRL-ALT-F1).
Neither Linux nor OSX needed to implement the ctrl-alt-del scheme.
Linux gets orphaned processes all the time, and you'd be blind without a method to view what's running on your machine. Thus ps , or the more useful top .
I won't be surprised if 14 is the minimal legal age to be sent to the electric chair.
Actually, so far the youngest person on death row in America was sixteen (Shareef Cousin). Cousin would have been executed by the Great State of Louisiana by now, except for the small problem that he's innocent. After spending four years on death row, the conviction was finally overturned. Yay, justice.
Here's the last words of seventeen year-old Joseph John Cannon (executed by the State of Texas). Another interesting fact: 1 in 9 people on death row were under the age of 19 at the time of arrest (source: Bureau of Justice).
Here's a Time Magazine article on the Kids of Death Row. According to the article, previous Republican Governor of California Pete Wilson suggested that 14-year-olds should be eligible for the death penalty. So your initial statement isn't too far off the charts.
Unfortunately, Kubuntu ships with the Wireless Assistant - which is a POS that does NOT work well with WEP among other defects, let alone WPA.
:)
First I thought, "wait, Xubuntu doesn't ship with any wireless apps" until I remembered the Wireless Assistant. Good god, what in the hell were they thinking bundling it with a release? I probably spent 10 minutes trying to get it to work before disregarding it as utterly useless.
This is why (X)buntu is not suitable for new Linux users. It is not mature enough.
Well, I'm a new Linux user--I used to be a whiz on the DOS command line, but that's about it. Luckily the Ubuntu Forums are a welcoming place for total newbs. All the stumbling blocks I've come across (what few there were) were already addressed in previous posts, so I didn't even have to embarrass myself by asking.
Agreed that it's not quite ready for Grandma, but it's definitely getting a hell of a lot closer.
Funny, I've got an IBM Thinkpad R51, and I've had the same experience. It was nearly flawless. The only tricky part was configuring the wireless support, which was actually incredibly easy once I read that I should use the Gnome Wireless Network Manager applet. Built-in support for WPA/WPA2 + VPN. Easy as Windows.
I was even able to get Beryl working, since the built-in graphics hardware is Intel. It's old as hell, but it's Intel (open-source drivers), so now I've got a desktop that rivals Windows Vista's "Aero," running on laptop hardware that's five years old (Pentium 1.5 Ghz).
First time I went abroad, I brought all sorts of gadgets with me: a mini-television to watch all the exotic foreign shows (before I understood the difference between NTSC, NTSC-J and PAL), a MiniDisc recorder to take "audio" photos of different places (worked out nicely), a laptop to "do work" (ended up using it as a glorified travel diary). The camera was low-tech film, so no worries about backing up files. I also brought a portable immersion water heater to boil noodles or make pasta.
The second time I went, I brought the heater, the camera and the minidisc recorder. The heater had adapters for nearly every kind of AC socket, so that was fine. The other two relied on batteries. The key was that they could use simple, easy-to-find batteries (AA's, primarily). I wouldn't want to be at the mercy of a rechargeable battery for anything really important because you'll have to cart around a bunch of adapters, but more importantly, if the batteries die you have to wait a number of hours before you can use your little slice of technology again. (Sorry, iPod).
The more low-tech, the higher the reliability. No-tech gadgets like travel journals (with real paper) might cramp up your hand, but at least they'll work in the middle of the jungle.
Well, ReactOS just released version 0.3.1. At this rate, you'll have your SP5 sometime around 2009. The good news: after that, you'll get regular updates again for (potentially) ever.
It's not "just fucking television." It's a MASSIVE consumer market.
More than that, it's also the primary means for advertising candidates. If you want name-recognition at the polls, I can guarantee you that for a large majority of voters, everything they know of potential presidential or congressional candidates will be from television. To not specifically cater your funding and legislation to favor mass media would be political suicide.
No-one is trying to break HDCP. No-one ever will.
I used to download torrents, but I stopped after a rather unusual set of events that occurred one night. I should preface this by saying I am a Time Warner RoadRunner customer. While I was downloading (and uploading, as is the nature of bittorrent) my network connection inexplicably dropped to 0 kb/s. I thought it might be a problem with the client I was using, so I opened up my browser to find out more information, but instead of opening up to my default homepage, it was a form letter from Time Warner that said, in a nutshell, "We know what you're doing. Stop it." At the bottom was a submit button acknowledging that I had read the warning.
I realize this sounds conspiratorial, but it honestly happened exactly as I describe (the form letter was obviously longer and more lawyer-sounding... I wish I had taken a screenshot). My first thought was that somehow my Firefox browser had been hijacked through some 0-day exploit, and if I clicked the submit button I'd be taken to porn sites or something. So I close the browser, check my running tasks to make sure it's not still running, then open it up again. Once again, the same message. OK... weird. I then try and trace route Yahoo, and all my outbound connections are going to the same place... a Time Warner IP.
In other words, they redirected all my outbound requests, and the only inbound response I got was from their web servers. I mean, I know intellectually that they have the power to do something like that, but it was friggin' spooky to see them actually do it.
As soon as I clicked the submit button, my outbound network traffic was restored. And I have to say, even amidst all the scare-mongering on sites like Slashdot about the MP/RIAA's tactics, this finally did the trick.
Also note, I'd downloaded (and uploaded) hundreds of gigs of traffic before this without a peep. In the form I got in my browser, it stated that my IP had basically been singled out as violating their usage policies and they had received complaints from copyright holders. As the parent poster said, they didn't have to do this. They could have simply handed my IP over and wiped their hands of it. Take their warning to heart. It might be the only one you get.
And I am not happy to see Dune II by Westwood Studios not beeing recognized as the basis for which the success of WarCraft was build on.
And I am not happy to see that Populus by Peter Molyneux (and Bullfrog) not being recognized as the basis for which the success of Dune II, Warcraft, and all "god-like" games were built on (Sim City and Populus came out in the same year).
This old computer fogey completely agrees.
...NULL modem cables, Joystick ("game") cards, the only quality video-out card was the Targa 3000 and it cost an arm and a leg, a 300 KB file took hours to download...
Then: A dozen different video card manufacturers, twice that many chipsets, equal variety of drivers.
Also: The only drivers you got were the ones that came packaged with the card. Oh sure, you could download them if you had a modem, and it was set up properly, and wasn't the card that you needed the drivers for, and the manufacturer had a BBS, and the line wasn't busy...
Then: IDE=slow. Master? Slave? Cable? WTF is this?
Also: 5 MEGAbyte hard drives, FULL HEIGHT. Cable-connection order matters. And remember the joys of TERMINATING RESISTORS? Kids these days have it so damned easy.
Then: Set up your modem to connect to your ISP and hope you don't get any incoming calls. Firewall? What's that?
Also: Modem init strings. ATH0M0S11=50ETC,ETC. Modem connect strings. Busy signals... ALWAYS busy signals. X-Modem, Y-Modem, Z-Modem (now with recovery!). DIP switches, conflicting IRQs... tons of fun.
Then: Scanner? SCSI (and don't forget your terminators). Printer? Parallel. Video in? Forget it.
Then: Steel case weighing 20kg, built out of razor blades.
Nothing more to add here. They really sucked that much.
Instead of using security cameras, which have a bad public perception, we could instead mandate that all television importers be required to install cameras inside their sets. This way we could have nearly 100% coverage, even inside people's houses (where most crimes are committed), yet not be so obviously pervasive as to give citizens discomfort.
Naturally there would be a public concern of targeted "viewing", so we just have to hire people to monitor these sets and do it at random. That way, people won't actually know if they're being monitored or not.
We could call these modified TV's... telescreens.