Err...I'm using Windows XP and IE and I can do the same damn thing.
Really? I'd like to know how to get tabs and multiple virtual desktops in IE. Bonus points if your method does not require installation of extra software. (And why should it? Redhat 7.3 includes mozilla by default.)
When you're done explaining the above, perhaps you'd like to go on and explain how to:
Make IE block ads.
Make IE block unrequested popups while allowing popups in response to a click.
Make IE animate images but loop through them exactly once.
Turn any of the above features on or off at any time with a single mouse click. Drilling down into a configuration dialog does not count as a single mouse click.
Again, bonus points if you can do it without having to install extra software.
This post is not an idle flame -- if any or all of the above are possible with IE, I'd genuinely like to know how to accomplish it.
2: We have a tab system as well, runs along a bar on the bottom of our screen.
I am sorry, but the windows taskbar as a tabbing system does not cut it. If you have used mozilla or opera tabs for even as much as a day then you will know what I mean.
At this very moment I have over fifty web pages open. Can you do that with IE? Without going insane? I didn't think so. I'll tell you how it's done: I have four GNOME desktops, two of which contain three browser windows each, and each browser window contains about ten tabs. I keep all my slashdot pages in one window, all my nytimes pages in another window, etc.
The multiple-desktop to multiple-window to multiple-tab hierarchy allows for, essentially, three levels of tabbing, as opposed to the puny (and for all practical purposes unusable) one level of tabbing that Windows/IE provides. Not only do you get an order of magnitude more open pages, but managing those pages is much simpler too. Whereas Alt-Tab in windows cycles through your browser windows and all your non-browser windows in some random and ever-changing order, the corresponding Ctrl-PgUp/Dn keys in mozilla cycle through your tabs in a much more predictable fashion without your non-browser windows getting in the way.
The tabbing feature in mozilla is not a toy. It's a killer feature, and one that makes me unable to stand using IE for any length of time anymore.
In fact, every DRM-mandatory scenario is unlikely, because the two groups that don't want it are 1) those that sell the hardware and 2) those that buy the hardware.
I wish this were true, but the problem is that the one group that does want it, namely the media companies, have disproportionate influence simply because they control the media and too many people are blindly influenced by what they see and hear in the media.
CBDTPA may have failed for now, but I have a sickening feeling that Sen. Hollings is going to keep leeching the CBDTPA provisions as amendments onto other bills until he finally succeeds.
You're absolutely right, there are some barriers to mixing French and Japanese DVDs, but said barriers have nothing to do with region coding.
It should also be pointed out that a DVD-ROM drive on a computer can play back DVDs no matter what the video signal format is. Computers don't care whether the DVD is PAL or NTSC. And I'm sure there are a lot of DVD-ROM drives in both France and Japan.
More to the point, PAL/NTSC converter boxes exist and are unquestionably legal. Why is it that circumventing signal differences using converter boxes is perfectly legal, but circumventing region coding using DeCSS is illegal (in the US)? It makes no sense at all.
Agreed, the SVCD spec allows VBR. But most SVCDs that I've seen actually use CBR, or at least don't use VBR to a large enough extent to justify two passes.
writing a large chunk of data to a disk and reading a large chunk of data from a disk is just plain inefficient
The problem with this reasoning is that VBR encoding (popular with the divx crowd) requires two passes over the video, once to find the hard to encode spots and twice to actually do the encoding. Copying the whole thing to the hard drive actually speeds up the I/O, since two reads to the hard drive is much faster and less taxing on the system than two reads from the DVD-ROM drive.
For SVCD (which is usually done with CBR), this problem does not exist, and indeed the tarball of the mplayer program comes with a shell script called mencvcd which decodes a DVD to raw uncompressed video and then reencodes it at once to [S]VCD using a named pipe to save your hard drive the 100GB of space per hour that uncompressed video would otherwise require.
My own Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide (shameless plug) -- intended for anime fansubbers but perfectly serviceable as a ripping guide if you ignore the stuff about subtitles.
The summary is that all the stuff your friends do under windows (divx, vbr, two-pass encoding, pulldown flags, inverse telecine, etc.) are perfectly feasible under linux too, using free software.
You yourself admit that you haven't looked deeply into possible Linux solutions for Japanese input. I have found that skk with emacs in Linux is every bit as powerful, usable, and easy as anything Microsoft has to offer for Japanese input. Granted, it doesn't let you draw in a character, but I never use that anyway.
Where linux may suffer a little bit is in the areas of printing and uniform input support across all applications (for example, skk only works in emacs). However, for writing Japanese-page php scripts, emacs is quite sufficient. Redhat 7.3 even includes skk by default, so you don't have to do anything special to install it.
The story with Chinese is a little bit different... I've been looking for about six years and I have not found anything in linux that matches the ease and comprehensiveness of Chinese language support in Windows 2000. So for anybody (such as the story poster) who is looking to handle Chinese in Linux: it can be done, but it is probably not as easy as in Windows.
The whole lack of command reordering, one device on the bus at a time, etc. -- but none of these are ever going to impact a home user.
With the recent proliferation of firewire camcorders and Apple iMacs with iMovie, a lot of people are getting interested in video editing on a home PC, and I must say having worked on both modern SCSI and IDE machines for this purpose that a SCSI machine is much nicer for video editing.
The "one device on the bus at a time" problem with IDE means it is basically impossible to do any meaningful copying or editing of one video while burning another video to DVD. With SCSI on the other hand such a thing barely causes your system to break out a sweat.
So I think it's unfair to say to home users that they will never see any gains from SCSI--remember that at one time there were some people who said that a 486 was all the average user would ever need, and boy were they wrong.
If you're sharng your collection with people who don't own those CDs, that's illegal.
Suppose I am with my roommate in my room and I play a CD on the boom box. My roommate does not own this CD; yet he is able to "share" in the listening of this CD as I play it. Is this illegal?
Suppose my roommate is in another room and I run a speaker wire from my boom box in my room to the speakers in his room. I then play my CD on my boom box. I hear it on the boom box; he hears it on his speakers in his room. Is this illegal?
Suppose I replace the boom box with a 300 disc CD changer that is capable of playing two discs simultaneously. I play one disc on my speakers and I play another disc on his speakers. Is this illegal?
Suppose I replace the 300 disc CD changer with an mp3 server and the speaker wire with a network cable. I play one mp3 on my speakers and another mp3 on his speakers. Is this illegal?
Where do you draw the line of legality? I don't think it's such an open and shut case that local area sharing of mp3s is illegal, especially in light of the provisions in the Audio Home Recording Act that permit noncommercial copying of recorded material in exchange for RIAA taxes on blank media.
Did he ever even take into consideration that P3's doesn't scale that well anymore? Heat, my friend.:)
Actually, he's right and you're wrong. The new Tualatin core Pentium IIIs have extremely impressive thermal characteristics. You're probably thinking of the old Coppermine core Pentium IIIs, which had serious heat problems at 1.13GHz that led to the infamous Pentium III recall.
[Tualatins] put out about 29W of heat, which is 4W less than the Coppermine 1Ghz, and significantly less than the Pentium 4 or Athlon processors. As a matter of fact, I was able to run the processor with a small heatsink and NO fan....
The low heat output of the Tualatin Pentium IIIs is the major reason why the Pentium IIIs still remain the preferred CPUs for rackmount server installations where space and heat dissipation are at a premium. I own one of these myself, and the core temperature of the CPU has never risen above my body temperature in the six months or so that I've had it.
The 15 minutes figure is no joke. I have worked with Pentium 4 systems that can install a default Redhat Linux 7.2 Workstation Install in under 10 minutes. If you're installing over the network then you can even get away with about two minutes of typing and then walking away from the computer. If you're installing from cdrom then you have no choice but to sit there and swap in the second disc, but even with this step I have done it in under 10 minutes.
Windows is much more annoying to install and is almost impossible to install in 15 minutes if you expect the result to be able to do anything.
Actually, a little known secret is that there exist Tualatin-compatible slot 1 slockets, and they work quite well. I've been using one for months and I am very happy with it. (Disclaimer: I have no relationship with PowerLeap other than that of satisfied customer.)
If you have slot 1, you most likely have 100Mhz FSB. These new pentium III have 133mhz, so you will either underclock or look for the rare 100Mhz chips.
100 MHz Tualatin Pentium IIIs are actually extremely easy to find. You just have to realize that Intel calls them "Celerons" and not "Pentium III"s.
For a 100 MHz slot 1 upgrade kit complete with Tualatin-compatible slocket and Pentium III based 1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, look for the PowerLeap PL-iP3T.
buy everything you want used... The Industry doesn't get any of your money that way.
While buying used is a lot better than buying new, a sale of a used copy still does lift the market for the item, and contribute some fraction to the Industry's bottom line.
The reason is that used goods and new goods are substitutes, and as anyone who has taken microeconomics can tell you, an increase in demand for one of the two substitutes results in a feedback effect that increases demand, and thus sales, for the other substitute as well.
It's the same reason why the price of natural gas spikes up whenever there is a shortage of oil, even if there is the same supply of gas as before.
A lot of people do not understand the fallacy of the false positive. A system like this with even a 99.9% accuracy rate is still almost useless.
Suppose 1 out of 10000 people in the US are terrorists. This strikes me as an absurdly high ratio, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it is this high. This system claims to scan 10000 faces in one day. At that rate, it will catch one airport terrorist and nine innocent people per day.
See something wrong here? I do.
If we assume a more realistic ratio of 1 terrorist per 100000 people, then you end up catching 99 innocent people and 1 terrorist every 10 days. At this point the utility of the system looks very questionable indeed. And this is without even considering the ease of importing new terrorists that aren't in the system yet.
I'm not that big a fan of face recognition technology in general, but airport terrorism is just about one of the absolute poorest possible applications of the idea.
Your comments about the true origins of copyright in England are "spot on", but when it comes to the US I would definitely not say that the US "adopted both copyright and patent law more or less intact from our former British overlords".
In the US constitution (article I section 8), it is stated very clearly that the primary purpose of copyright and patent law in the US is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
I will not speak for whatever crazy notions the British have of copyright, but in the US at least I feel the constitutional principle of copyright is sound. However I also feel that current copyright law in the US is unconstitutional, for the following reasons:
Portions of it (such as the DMCA) cannot be in any way construed as promoting progress in science and arts.
The constitution requires copyright to last for limited times, but the current copyright term (95 years after the death of the author) is being periodically extended by Congress in a way that makes it virtually unlimited.
The constitution confers copyrights and patents to authors and inventors, not to publishers and record labels and employers. Courtney Love should never be in a position as an author of ranting about having no rights to her own songs.
You got it wrong. The social security number space (9 digits) is too small, but the credit card number space is perfectly adequate.
Most credit card numbers (not counting store-issued cards here) are 16 digits, for a total of 1E16 possible numbers. There are 6E9 people in the world, and less than one credit card per person. That leaves you over a million invalid credit card numbers for every valid one.
Now, granted, there are some regularities in the set of valid credit card numbers that you can use to increase your chances of guessing one, but that's not enough to overcome the million to one shot that you start out with. Moreover, in most cases, actually using a credit card number requires knowing the name and expiration date of the account as well.
I agree that banks assigning credit card numbers predictably is a problem, but this problem would exist regardless of the size of the number space. The size of the number space itself is not a problem.
I can't speak for digital cable channels, because I don't have any, but for old-fashioned cable and over-the-air broadcasts, I can tell you that the "Commercial Advance" feature on my VCR works just fine.
I have no idea how it works, though... for all I know it could really be using luminance level detection.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? I'd like to know how to get tabs and multiple virtual desktops in IE. Bonus points if your method does not require installation of extra software. (And why should it? Redhat 7.3 includes mozilla by default.)
When you're done explaining the above, perhaps you'd like to go on and explain how to:
- Make IE block ads.
- Make IE block unrequested popups while allowing popups in response to a click.
- Make IE animate images but loop through them exactly once.
- Get decent font size control in IE (c.f. useit).
- Turn any of the above features on or off at any time with a single mouse click. Drilling down into a configuration dialog does not count as a single mouse click.
Again, bonus points if you can do it without having to install extra software.This post is not an idle flame -- if any or all of the above are possible with IE, I'd genuinely like to know how to accomplish it.
I am sorry, but the windows taskbar as a tabbing system does not cut it. If you have used mozilla or opera tabs for even as much as a day then you will know what I mean.
At this very moment I have over fifty web pages open. Can you do that with IE? Without going insane? I didn't think so. I'll tell you how it's done: I have four GNOME desktops, two of which contain three browser windows each, and each browser window contains about ten tabs. I keep all my slashdot pages in one window, all my nytimes pages in another window, etc.
The multiple-desktop to multiple-window to multiple-tab hierarchy allows for, essentially, three levels of tabbing, as opposed to the puny (and for all practical purposes unusable) one level of tabbing that Windows/IE provides. Not only do you get an order of magnitude more open pages, but managing those pages is much simpler too. Whereas Alt-Tab in windows cycles through your browser windows and all your non-browser windows in some random and ever-changing order, the corresponding Ctrl-PgUp/Dn keys in mozilla cycle through your tabs in a much more predictable fashion without your non-browser windows getting in the way.
The tabbing feature in mozilla is not a toy. It's a killer feature, and one that makes me unable to stand using IE for any length of time anymore.
I wish this were true, but the problem is that the one group that does want it, namely the media companies, have disproportionate influence simply because they control the media and too many people are blindly influenced by what they see and hear in the media.
CBDTPA may have failed for now, but I have a sickening feeling that Sen. Hollings is going to keep leeching the CBDTPA provisions as amendments onto other bills until he finally succeeds.
It should also be pointed out that a DVD-ROM drive on a computer can play back DVDs no matter what the video signal format is. Computers don't care whether the DVD is PAL or NTSC. And I'm sure there are a lot of DVD-ROM drives in both France and Japan.
More to the point, PAL/NTSC converter boxes exist and are unquestionably legal. Why is it that circumventing signal differences using converter boxes is perfectly legal, but circumventing region coding using DeCSS is illegal (in the US)? It makes no sense at all.
Agreed, the SVCD spec allows VBR. But most SVCDs that I've seen actually use CBR, or at least don't use VBR to a large enough extent to justify two passes.
Ironically, your example is a bad one, because both France and Japan are region 2.
The problem with this reasoning is that VBR encoding (popular with the divx crowd) requires two passes over the video, once to find the hard to encode spots and twice to actually do the encoding. Copying the whole thing to the hard drive actually speeds up the I/O, since two reads to the hard drive is much faster and less taxing on the system than two reads from the DVD-ROM drive.
For SVCD (which is usually done with CBR), this problem does not exist, and indeed the tarball of the mplayer program comes with a shell script called mencvcd which decodes a DVD to raw uncompressed video and then reencodes it at once to [S]VCD using a named pipe to save your hard drive the 100GB of space per hour that uncompressed video would otherwise require.
- Moritz's DVD ripping and transcoding with Linux
howto
- Linux SVCD guide, written in French
- My own Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide (shameless plug) -- intended for anime fansubbers but perfectly serviceable as a ripping guide if you ignore the stuff about subtitles.
The summary is that all the stuff your friends do under windows (divx, vbr, two-pass encoding, pulldown flags, inverse telecine, etc.) are perfectly feasible under linux too, using free software.Jakob Nielsen has been saying for almost five years that newspapers will have to use classified ads, not banner ads to make money.
Where linux may suffer a little bit is in the areas of printing and uniform input support across all applications (for example, skk only works in emacs). However, for writing Japanese-page php scripts, emacs is quite sufficient. Redhat 7.3 even includes skk by default, so you don't have to do anything special to install it.
The story with Chinese is a little bit different ... I've been looking for about six years and I have not found anything in linux that matches the ease and comprehensiveness of Chinese language support in Windows 2000. So for anybody (such as the story poster) who is looking to handle Chinese in Linux: it can be done, but it is probably not as easy as in Windows.
Multiple head assemblies in a hard drive sounds like a great idea, but doesn't work very well in practice. See here for info.
With the recent proliferation of firewire camcorders and Apple iMacs with iMovie, a lot of people are getting interested in video editing on a home PC, and I must say having worked on both modern SCSI and IDE machines for this purpose that a SCSI machine is much nicer for video editing.
The "one device on the bus at a time" problem with IDE means it is basically impossible to do any meaningful copying or editing of one video while burning another video to DVD. With SCSI on the other hand such a thing barely causes your system to break out a sweat.
So I think it's unfair to say to home users that they will never see any gains from SCSI--remember that at one time there were some people who said that a 486 was all the average user would ever need, and boy were they wrong.
There exist devices called "dual CD players" that are capable of independently playing two different tracks simultaneously off of one disc. For example http://namm.harmony-central.com/WNAMM02/Content/De non/PR/DN-D9000.html.
Are these devices inherently illegal?
Suppose I am with my roommate in my room and I play a CD on the boom box. My roommate does not own this CD; yet he is able to "share" in the listening of this CD as I play it. Is this illegal?
Suppose my roommate is in another room and I run a speaker wire from my boom box in my room to the speakers in his room. I then play my CD on my boom box. I hear it on the boom box; he hears it on his speakers in his room. Is this illegal?
Suppose I replace the boom box with a 300 disc CD changer that is capable of playing two discs simultaneously. I play one disc on my speakers and I play another disc on his speakers. Is this illegal?
Suppose I replace the 300 disc CD changer with an mp3 server and the speaker wire with a network cable. I play one mp3 on my speakers and another mp3 on his speakers. Is this illegal?
Where do you draw the line of legality? I don't think it's such an open and shut case that local area sharing of mp3s is illegal, especially in light of the provisions in the Audio Home Recording Act that permit noncommercial copying of recorded material in exchange for RIAA taxes on blank media.
Actually, he's right and you're wrong. The new Tualatin core Pentium IIIs have extremely impressive thermal characteristics. You're probably thinking of the old Coppermine core Pentium IIIs, which had serious heat problems at 1.13GHz that led to the infamous Pentium III recall.
For example, these guys say:
The low heat output of the Tualatin Pentium IIIs is the major reason why the Pentium IIIs still remain the preferred CPUs for rackmount server installations where space and heat dissipation are at a premium. I own one of these myself, and the core temperature of the CPU has never risen above my body temperature in the six months or so that I've had it.Windows is much more annoying to install and is almost impossible to install in 15 minutes if you expect the result to be able to do anything.
Actually, a little known secret is that there exist Tualatin-compatible slot 1 slockets, and they work quite well. I've been using one for months and I am very happy with it. (Disclaimer: I have no relationship with PowerLeap other than that of satisfied customer.)
100 MHz Tualatin Pentium IIIs are actually extremely easy to find. You just have to realize that Intel calls them "Celerons" and not "Pentium III"s.
For a 100 MHz slot 1 upgrade kit complete with Tualatin-compatible slocket and Pentium III based 1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, look for the PowerLeap PL-iP3T.
While buying used is a lot better than buying new, a sale of a used copy still does lift the market for the item, and contribute some fraction to the Industry's bottom line.
The reason is that used goods and new goods are substitutes, and as anyone who has taken microeconomics can tell you, an increase in demand for one of the two substitutes results in a feedback effect that increases demand, and thus sales, for the other substitute as well.
It's the same reason why the price of natural gas spikes up whenever there is a shortage of oil, even if there is the same supply of gas as before.
Suppose 1 out of 10000 people in the US are terrorists. This strikes me as an absurdly high ratio, but let's assume for the sake of argument that it is this high. This system claims to scan 10000 faces in one day. At that rate, it will catch one airport terrorist and nine innocent people per day.
See something wrong here? I do.
If we assume a more realistic ratio of 1 terrorist per 100000 people, then you end up catching 99 innocent people and 1 terrorist every 10 days. At this point the utility of the system looks very questionable indeed. And this is without even considering the ease of importing new terrorists that aren't in the system yet.
I'm not that big a fan of face recognition technology in general, but airport terrorism is just about one of the absolute poorest possible applications of the idea.
In the US constitution (article I section 8), it is stated very clearly that the primary purpose of copyright and patent law in the US is "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries".
I will not speak for whatever crazy notions the British have of copyright, but in the US at least I feel the constitutional principle of copyright is sound. However I also feel that current copyright law in the US is unconstitutional, for the following reasons:
12 numbers it may be, but no single bank has the entire human population as customers, so 1E12 is not an unreasonable space size for a single bank.
They *are* often sequential
This kind of stupidity on the part of the banks is not a problem that an increased space size will solve.
You got it wrong. The social security number space (9 digits) is too small, but the credit card number space is perfectly adequate.
Most credit card numbers (not counting store-issued cards here) are 16 digits, for a total of 1E16 possible numbers. There are 6E9 people in the world, and less than one credit card per person. That leaves you over a million invalid credit card numbers for every valid one.
Now, granted, there are some regularities in the set of valid credit card numbers that you can use to increase your chances of guessing one, but that's not enough to overcome the million to one shot that you start out with. Moreover, in most cases, actually using a credit card number requires knowing the name and expiration date of the account as well.
I agree that banks assigning credit card numbers predictably is a problem, but this problem would exist regardless of the size of the number space. The size of the number space itself is not a problem.
I can't speak for digital cable channels, because I don't have any, but for old-fashioned cable and over-the-air broadcasts, I can tell you that the "Commercial Advance" feature on my VCR works just fine.
I have no idea how it works, though ... for all I know it could really be using luminance level detection.
Point still stands, though.