I added a link to the news at the ffmpeg.org site re: the actual release, might have fixed some punctuation or some other trivial stuff, but the submission that became this post came in pretty much as-is.
Apologies for not noting this release a few days sooner, too; the things that FFmpeg make possible are deeply appreciated by naive end-users like me.
I bought a Kindle Paperwhite used, from a friend of mine, and it's been great -- quite an amazing device, really. But I was disappointed (not hugely, just a twinge) that it didn't come with audio features; I had hoped it would be my car audiobook player as well as book replacement -- hadn't researched enough, and it hadn't occurred to me that they would have removed such a good feature.
Amazon's catalog may be weak, but if you live in the U.S. and need (read "can rationalize") Amazon Prime, then a good chunk of the movies are yours for the watching anyhow.
Also: I think Amazon's biggest problem on this front, even considering just the free-with-Prime movies, isn't so much the depth of the catalog as the awful search. Netflix's search interface isn't all that hot either (idiosyncratic, strangely limited results, IMO), but compared to Amazon's it seems to be a model of clarity and accuracy. Which is funny, because Amazon's search powers more generally are amazing. ("Here's this thing you purchased 19 months ago! Here's the obscure product your puny search terms were somehow enough to trigger our hive mind into locating!") With movies, the searching is suddenly awkward and messy, with all kinds of checkboxes, confusing costs, etc. Not end-of-the-world bad, but annoying in that it could be a far more valuable perk. As is, I occasionally watch a movie through Amazon, and am impressed by their original TV shows, but if something's on Amazon and Netflix, I'm watching it on Netflix before I even bother to search for it on Amazon.
"[E]nforcing a relationship seems impossible at interplanetary distances."
Well... not so very long ago, same would have been true for any relationship at all at intercontinental distances.
But it Mars is worth colonizing, then it must have value. For new Martians, even if Mars is made of delicious, easily transported cheese that regrows quickly and never dies, Earth is going to have a *lot* of value, because that's where the movies, Baja pullovers, and chocolate oranges are made.
Maybe the problem is that "enforcing" is a rightfully strange verb to apply to "relationship." Sounds pretty dysfunctional;)
Everybody's got an opinion, I guess, but I think Episode IV (or, let's face it, the movie that everyone means when they just say "Star Wars") holds up really well.
- The music -- is there anyone in the world who doesn't hum along? The music is melodramatic, but is a perfect match for the tone of the movie. Epic story! Heart-stirring! - Princess Leia, childhood crush justified - Han and Chewie, one of the best science-fiction buddy pairs; always wondered about whether their mixed-language conversation was partly inspired by Lassie ("Bark! barkbarkbark! Whine, bark!" "Little Jessica's in the well, you say, and she's refusing to leave until all her demands are met, and you think she may have been hypnotized?!") - Special effects *still* look good to me; the more original ones generally seem more organic and real than the fancier replacements within scenes (thought the wholly new insertions are dumb) - The story overall - The camera movements and other filming choices still make it seem to me like "a modern" movie. One example: Film stock can bother me; I dislike evident grain, and the really orangey cast of a lot of '60s and '70s movies (not sure how they originally looked, but that's the way they look to me now). Star Wars has only a very slight cast; compared to others from the late '70s or early '80s (and some far more recent), it just doesn't feel dated in the same way. Some movies you get the impression that you're "watching a movie," but with Star Wars, I am totally sucked in / absorbed, even with the funny wipes between scenes. Can't see those wipes elsewhere without thinking of SW, actually.
Well, not that this means it will necessarily be around at any given time in the future, but I've been using Elementary on my most-used desktop system (well, OK, a perma-docked laptop) for at least 6 months, so there's at least some track record...
I have some minor quibbles with it (have had the occasional strangeness with printing, and my 2d monitor gets a bit wonky sometimes), but overall am very pleased with Elementary; it does a better job of "it just works" than most systems I've used before of any kind.
I can't really justify it, but what I want is pretty close, in the form of 1080p LED short-throw projectors; right now Philips and LG both have models out, though reviews favor the LG by a long shot.
LED: long projector life, and brightness figures that are getting better with each year's new models.
Short-throw: less clutter in my living room or wherever; I've got a projector (720p) from LG which I rather like, but the throw it requires makes set-up rather annoying. I suppose I could bother with a perma-install, sure, but I like being able to move it around.
Projector: vs. conventional TV -- easy to move within the house, or bring it while traveling, or secure / hide against theft...
I'd also like to be able to get two of them, turn them on their sides, and make an even bigger picture; I've seen multi-projector set-ups that worked surprisingly well, but the set-up was finicky, and pretty much requires a dedicated viewing room. If this was a simple endeavor (to the user!), something like making a panorama shot on a modern phone, it would be great -- just put up all the projectors available, and let some algorithms work out how to use them all to make a high-as-practical total output...
It is amazing how things that aren't obviously genetic can be so linked to parentage... I can understand hair color, facial structure, height, etc, but some behaviors like facial expression, or posture, or even complex behaviors like hoarding that I used to assume were entirely learned just seem too spookily similar from one generation to the next for them to be only imitation. Of course maybe they *are* just imitation anyhow, but I like to hope not;)
I'm sure that was a typo, and Yes, perhaps it was generated by a lack of sleep;) I've fixed that now, and Mr. Anonymous can complain if he meant "slow" instead.
1) MacBook Air. 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM -- pretty ludicrous. Nice and zippy, doesn't crash much. I'm not a huge fan of OS X, but I keep that on here, in part because this (Craigslist find) machine has some of the MS Office suite that you'd think big companies would be smart enough not to base too much of their operations on, and yet... Yeah, right:)
Being a MBA, no optical drive.
Current / recent OS X seems perfectly adequate and generally pleasant to me, but I do have a lot of minor gripes; what's new? All modern OSes are pretty highly evolved -- not to say *finished,* perfect, complete, etc, or even getting aysmptotically closer to the singularity, but *pretty good,* as a baseline. And since the things I use most are cross platform, I'm not all that concerned about the look of the scaffolding.
2) Older Lenovo ThinkPad, recently upgraded from 2GB to 4GB (the RAM, another Craigslist buy -- 4 GB that got split between two older 2GB ThinkPads; 4GB may be strictly low-end these days, but sure beats 2). This is running Elementary OS, which I'm generally pleased with, barring one (quite substantial) objection: memory use creeps up and up, and once in a while I have to reboot the whole system, because fighting with process control takes more time than restarting does. That's what motivated the RAM expansion in the first place, but even with doubled RAM it can get obnoxious even after just a day, sometimes less. 100-ish GB (spinning) drive. Optical drive... well, it has one, but either I've tried a few bum disks or that drive is toast.
This machine has a terrible keyboard, and a lousy trackpad -- both of which are disappoints from Lenovo, and from a machine that says ThinkPad -- so it's static, set us as dual-screen CPU, with an LCD display attached via HDMI.
That one is set up with 1) Model M keyboard, manu'd mid '80s -- PS/2 connector and USB adapter 2) A Dell quiet key keyboard (USB) -- this one is to keep peace at night, since apparently not everyone loves the sound of a Model M 3) Logitech trackball, the one true USB trackball (they fail once in a while, but it's worth the pain and cursing as they decline, to avoid the pain and cursing of a conventional mouse, or even most trackballs). MouseMan, the way to go! 3) a multi-port USB hub with switches per port -- bought it for $5 on Amazon, though you can find them for much more elsewhere, if your intent is to spend more money. Ahem. 4) A nice HD Logitech webcam
Elementary OS, save that inevitable, occasional reboot (the kind of thing I'd like to be able to crow more about with Linux, but Hey) is growing on me; it replaced Linux Mint, largely because of the obnoxious custom google search that Mint uses. I still prefer the default MATE DE to the Mac-ish one in Elementary, but they both have their merits, and I'm enjoying the difference / novelty, too.
Y'know, a "tl;dr" line for every single story would be interesting -- good idea. I'm going to put that is as a feature request. I think that would be a cool thing on many sites, actually; it would be a cool thing if more newsy/texty sites had a checkbox to turn on that feature.
And I wish idiotic clickbait image ads (the "You'll never believe which naked celebrity said you should eat this one weird vegetable..." ones) came with it, too, you could could at least kill the curiosity by knowing the answer to their tease questions. "It's Roseanne Barr! And the weird vegetable is just Boy Choi, nothing all that weird!"
a) That's a funny word to title that comment with;)
b) I wonder how many such schemes *have* been effected; maybe some smart lotto cheaters have done so with much smaller jackpots, gotten their closest conspirators to actually buy the tickets, etc.
Like all politicians, the regret *may* be heartfelt and really, really emotional (also: all ousted executives actually quit because they want to "spend more time with their families"), but the proper expansion is always "regrets she got caught."
Also: "family email server" makes it sound like "family car" -- oh, it just happaned to be around, and Pat doesnt' have a fur coat. She has a good, Republican (No! Democratic!) fur coat / Ford F-150 / email server. Nah -- this was not an "aw, shoot, I'll just wear any old thing" decision, with a "Oh, you mean you guys want copies, *too*?!" innocent shrug and sufficient deflection. It was the same kind of record-hiding move that people righteously castigated the Bush administration for -- that's being revived as an issue, which is appropriate, but mostly as a "that other kid did it too!" excuse, which isn't.
If otherwise you are happy with the phone's camera, you could also use one of the various approaches to holding a phone with friction, or case that attaches to a standard tripod mount, etc...
There are quite a few options; I just ordered (haven't tried, can't endorse...) one called the shoulderpod, and I am looking forward to the next iteration of the Beastgrip; I saw a prototype and was impressed.
I do the same, though -- don't want to rely on one camera anyhow, aside from the fact that I don't want my phone to be out of my immediate reach.
(See above response to the A/C comment re: staying-logged-in bug; no guarantees for a fix, but we could add it to our list of bugs... sorry about the annoyance.)
re: "Posting as Anon since Slashdot is refusing to keep me logged in on the article pages."
Sorry for what sounds like a bug hitting you. If you see this response, and mail more details (things like your username, and all the information you don't mind disclosing about your reading-Slashdot environment) to feedback@slashdot.org, we may be able to reproduce and fix the problem; at the very least, it would add to our list of bugs!
Slashdot Mirror
You're not right :)
I added a link to the news at the ffmpeg.org site re: the actual release, might have fixed some punctuation or some other trivial stuff, but the submission that became this post came in pretty much as-is.
Apologies for not noting this release a few days sooner, too; the things that FFmpeg make possible are deeply appreciated by naive end-users like me.
timothy
I bought a Kindle Paperwhite used, from a friend of mine, and it's been great -- quite an amazing device, really. But I was disappointed (not hugely, just a twinge) that it didn't come with audio features; I had hoped it would be my car audiobook player as well as book replacement -- hadn't researched enough, and it hadn't occurred to me that they would have removed such a good feature.
Definitely; I have Prime for the shipping, and the TV / movies are a nice bonus. I thought their Bosch series was excellent.
Amazon's catalog may be weak, but if you live in the U.S. and need (read "can rationalize") Amazon Prime, then a good chunk of the movies are yours for the watching anyhow.
Also: I think Amazon's biggest problem on this front, even considering just the free-with-Prime movies, isn't so much the depth of the catalog as the awful search. Netflix's search interface isn't all that hot either (idiosyncratic, strangely limited results, IMO), but compared to Amazon's it seems to be a model of clarity and accuracy. Which is funny, because Amazon's search powers more generally are amazing. ("Here's this thing you purchased 19 months ago! Here's the obscure product your puny search terms were somehow enough to trigger our hive mind into locating!") With movies, the searching is suddenly awkward and messy, with all kinds of checkboxes, confusing costs, etc. Not end-of-the-world bad, but annoying in that it could be a far more valuable perk. As is, I occasionally watch a movie through Amazon, and am impressed by their original TV shows, but if something's on Amazon and Netflix, I'm watching it on Netflix before I even bother to search for it on Amazon.
"[E]nforcing a relationship seems impossible at interplanetary distances."
Well ... not so very long ago, same would have been true for any relationship at all at intercontinental distances.
But it Mars is worth colonizing, then it must have value. For new Martians, even if Mars is made of delicious, easily transported cheese that regrows quickly and never dies, Earth is going to have a *lot* of value, because that's where the movies, Baja pullovers, and chocolate oranges are made.
Maybe the problem is that "enforcing" is a rightfully strange verb to apply to "relationship." Sounds pretty dysfunctional ;)
Everybody's got an opinion, I guess, but I think Episode IV (or, let's face it, the movie that everyone means when they just say "Star Wars") holds up really well.
- The music -- is there anyone in the world who doesn't hum along? The music is melodramatic, but is a perfect match for the tone of the movie. Epic story! Heart-stirring!
- Princess Leia, childhood crush justified
- Han and Chewie, one of the best science-fiction buddy pairs; always wondered about whether their mixed-language conversation was partly inspired by Lassie ("Bark! barkbarkbark! Whine, bark!" "Little Jessica's in the well, you say, and she's refusing to leave until all her demands are met, and you think she may have been hypnotized?!")
- Special effects *still* look good to me; the more original ones generally seem more organic and real than the fancier replacements within scenes (thought the wholly new insertions are dumb)
- The story overall
- The camera movements and other filming choices still make it seem to me like "a modern" movie. One example: Film stock can bother me; I dislike evident grain, and the really orangey cast of a lot of '60s and '70s movies (not sure how they originally looked, but that's the way they look to me now). Star Wars has only a very slight cast; compared to others from the late '70s or early '80s (and some far more recent), it just doesn't feel dated in the same way. Some movies you get the impression that you're "watching a movie," but with Star Wars, I am totally sucked in / absorbed, even with the funny wipes between scenes. Can't see those wipes elsewhere without thinking of SW, actually.
Well, not that this means it will necessarily be around at any given time in the future, but I've been using Elementary on my most-used desktop system (well, OK, a perma-docked laptop) for at least 6 months, so there's at least some track record ...
I have some minor quibbles with it (have had the occasional strangeness with printing, and my 2d monitor gets a bit wonky sometimes), but overall am very pleased with Elementary; it does a better job of "it just works" than most systems I've used before of any kind.
You're right -- sorry about that, and now fixed.
I can't really justify it, but what I want is pretty close, in the form of 1080p LED short-throw projectors; right now Philips and LG both have models out, though reviews favor the LG by a long shot.
LED: long projector life, and brightness figures that are getting better with each year's new models.
Short-throw: less clutter in my living room or wherever; I've got a projector (720p) from LG which I rather like, but the throw it requires makes set-up rather annoying. I suppose I could bother with a perma-install, sure, but I like being able to move it around.
Projector: vs. conventional TV -- easy to move within the house, or bring it while traveling, or secure / hide against theft ...
I'd also like to be able to get two of them, turn them on their sides, and make an even bigger picture; I've seen multi-projector set-ups that worked surprisingly well, but the set-up was finicky, and pretty much requires a dedicated viewing room. If this was a simple endeavor (to the user!), something like making a panorama shot on a modern phone, it would be great -- just put up all the projectors available, and let some algorithms work out how to use them all to make a high-as-practical total output ...
Well, there were upward of a dozen submissions about the new rPI; apologies if yours was better. It's not an exact science.
We've had more than one earlier story about the CHIP -- here are two (and there might be a few more, too).
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
http://build.slashdot.org/stor...
Happy Thanksgiving!
the "I learned it by watching you!" anti-drug commercial of the '80s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It is amazing how things that aren't obviously genetic can be so linked to parentage ... I can understand hair color, facial structure, height, etc, but some behaviors like facial expression, or posture, or even complex behaviors like hoarding that I used to assume were entirely learned just seem too spookily similar from one generation to the next for them to be only imitation. Of course maybe they *are* just imitation anyhow, but I like to hope not ;)
Sorry! Peeve mitigated now ...
I'm sure that was a typo, and Yes, perhaps it was generated by a lack of sleep ;) I've fixed that now, and Mr. Anonymous can complain if he meant "slow" instead.
1) MacBook Air. 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM -- pretty ludicrous. Nice and zippy, doesn't crash much. I'm not a huge fan of OS X, but I keep that on here, in part because this (Craigslist find) machine has some of the MS Office suite that you'd think big companies would be smart enough not to base too much of their operations on, and yet ... Yeah, right :)
Being a MBA, no optical drive.
Current / recent OS X seems perfectly adequate and generally pleasant to me, but I do have a lot of minor gripes; what's new? All modern OSes are pretty highly evolved -- not to say *finished,* perfect, complete, etc, or even getting aysmptotically closer to the singularity, but *pretty good,* as a baseline. And since the things I use most are cross platform, I'm not all that concerned about the look of the scaffolding.
2) Older Lenovo ThinkPad, recently upgraded from 2GB to 4GB (the RAM, another Craigslist buy -- 4 GB that got split between two older 2GB ThinkPads; 4GB may be strictly low-end these days, but sure beats 2). This is running Elementary OS, which I'm generally pleased with, barring one (quite substantial) objection: memory use creeps up and up, and once in a while I have to reboot the whole system, because fighting with process control takes more time than restarting does. That's what motivated the RAM expansion in the first place, but even with doubled RAM it can get obnoxious even after just a day, sometimes less. 100-ish GB (spinning) drive. Optical drive ... well, it has one, but either I've tried a few bum disks or that drive is toast.
This machine has a terrible keyboard, and a lousy trackpad -- both of which are disappoints from Lenovo, and from a machine that says ThinkPad -- so it's static, set us as dual-screen CPU, with an LCD display attached via HDMI.
That one is set up with
1) Model M keyboard, manu'd mid '80s -- PS/2 connector and USB adapter
2) A Dell quiet key keyboard (USB) -- this one is to keep peace at night, since apparently not everyone loves the sound of a Model M
3) Logitech trackball, the one true USB trackball (they fail once in a while, but it's worth the pain and cursing as they decline, to avoid the pain and cursing of a conventional mouse, or even most trackballs). MouseMan, the way to go!
3) a multi-port USB hub with switches per port -- bought it for $5 on Amazon, though you can find them for much more elsewhere, if your intent is to spend more money. Ahem.
4) A nice HD Logitech webcam
Elementary OS, save that inevitable, occasional reboot (the kind of thing I'd like to be able to crow more about with Linux, but Hey) is growing on me; it replaced Linux Mint, largely because of the obnoxious custom google search that Mint uses. I still prefer the default MATE DE to the Mac-ish one in Elementary, but they both have their merits, and I'm enjoying the difference / novelty, too.
Wait, shouldn't that be "Politicians SHOULD not be prosecuted for lying. After all, it's their primary function."
Just because it's primary doesn't mean it's good ;)
Y'know, a "tl;dr" line for every single story would be interesting -- good idea. I'm going to put that is as a feature request. I think that would be a cool thing on many sites, actually; it would be a cool thing if more newsy/texty sites had a checkbox to turn on that feature.
And I wish idiotic clickbait image ads (the "You'll never believe which naked celebrity said you should eat this one weird vegetable ..." ones) came with it, too, you could could at least kill the curiosity by knowing the answer to their tease questions. "It's Roseanne Barr! And the weird vegetable is just Boy Choi, nothing all that weird!"
Right you are; entirely my fault, and corrected now.
Sorry, and thanks.
Sorry -- I cut-and-not-pasted that link; now fixed.
a) That's a funny word to title that comment with ;)
b) I wonder how many such schemes *have* been effected; maybe some smart lotto cheaters have done so with much smaller jackpots, gotten their closest conspirators to actually buy the tickets, etc.
Sorry for not catching that! Fixed fixed.
timothy
Like all politicians, the regret *may* be heartfelt and really, really emotional (also: all ousted executives actually quit because they want to "spend more time with their families"), but the proper expansion is always "regrets she got caught."
Also: "family email server" makes it sound like "family car" -- oh, it just happaned to be around, and Pat doesnt' have a fur coat. She has a good, Republican (No! Democratic!) fur coat / Ford F-150 / email server. Nah -- this was not an "aw, shoot, I'll just wear any old thing" decision, with a "Oh, you mean you guys want copies, *too*?!" innocent shrug and sufficient deflection. It was the same kind of record-hiding move that people righteously castigated the Bush administration for -- that's being revived as an issue, which is appropriate, but mostly as a "that other kid did it too!" excuse, which isn't.
If otherwise you are happy with the phone's camera, you could also use one of the various approaches to holding a phone with friction, or case that attaches to a standard tripod mount, etc ...
There are quite a few options; I just ordered (haven't tried, can't endorse ...) one called the shoulderpod, and I am looking forward to the next iteration of the Beastgrip; I saw a prototype and was impressed.
I do the same, though -- don't want to rely on one camera anyhow, aside from the fact that I don't want my phone to be out of my immediate reach.
(See above response to the A/C comment re: staying-logged-in bug; no guarantees for a fix, but we could add it to our list of bugs ... sorry about the annoyance.)
Meta:
re: "Posting as Anon since Slashdot is refusing to keep me logged in on the article pages."
Sorry for what sounds like a bug hitting you. If you see this response, and mail more details (things like your username, and all the information you don't mind disclosing about your reading-Slashdot environment) to feedback@slashdot.org, we may be able to reproduce and fix the problem; at the very least, it would add to our list of bugs!
Frustrating, things like that, I know.
The secret is out! Now we'll have to return the gold suits and fancy cars ...