Ha! Does Linux have a software mixer, you ask. Linux is much better than that! Linux has numerous software mixers! None of them are compatible with each other, much less any player applications, but you bet there are software mixers around! It's all about choice! Of course, they are all userland programs, so they skip now and then, but that's a small price to pay for ensuring that something so trivial does not offend the great Linux kernel by depriving it of some of its low-latency resources. Such resources are critically important towards providing optimal networking, disk I/O, RAID, and other things that are invisible to the user which he or she clearly does not appreciate enough.
I, being an educated and l33t hacker, know that I would much rather get an extra 5kB/sec on my downloads than be able to listen to two streams of audio at once. You already have two ears, isn't that good enough? Software mixer, pshaw.
The story told on my favorite sitcom this week could have been a short story.
I think he meant reading something insightful, to cause you to do scary things like think about all kinds of stuff from politics up to and including the meaning of life. Most good books fall into this category. He certainly didn't mean reading a trashy supermarket romance novel.
There really is no available comparison. The most thought-provoking thing I've ever seen on the aptly-named boob tube was "The Matrix". How sad is that?
Mindless entertainment is great, don't get me wrong. I play video games all the time. You're welcome to watch TV instead if you like. Intellectually they're about the same. But you need to balance it out with something more challenging. It's nice to give the mind a rest now and then. But just like resting a bit is nice, despite the benefits of exercise, it's also good to give your mind some exercise. Read a good, intelligent book (sci-fi, fiction, non-fiction, doesn't matter), or really anything except TV. Build something, draw something, do something. All these things are much more rewarding than sitting and passively watching TV.
I realize I sound like this guy but honestly, when I started to cut down my TV-watching, it not only gave me time to start cycling a lot more and getting my body in shape, reading because I enjoy it, and it gave me much more time for my hobbies like photography and programming as well.
TVs give outlets for advertisements, thus furthering our economy.
I am not an economist, but our economy is furthered by the creation of wealth -- technological advancements, increased industrial production, etc. Advertising creates no wealth, it does not advance society or the economy. It is a tool for encouraging voluntary redistribution of existing wealth, a byproduct of capitalism, not a contribution to the economy.
As best I've been able to figure, for some people, their style of play is fundamentally at odds with MMORPGs. Some people play a game because they want to feel they are the best, the strongest, the greatest, "teh winnar". In a MMO this is for almost all intents and purposes, completely impossible. There will always be someone out there who's higher level or has a better sword or completed such and such quest perfectly while you died halfway through.
For the small subset of these people who for whatever inexplicable reason refuse to just stop playing MMORPGs (typically because they have run into some personality conflict with some other player and have become determined to beat them in whatever way possible), they can see only one possible solution, and that is to buy your way to the top to preserve their enjoyment of the game. This, on the other hand, is feasable, because the sprawling majority of MMO players will never spend anything on buying third-party stuff, or sell it. They'll just trade it around in-game. Fewer still will spend more on third-party stuff than they spend on the game in the first place. So they merrily spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy powerlevelling services, "uber" equipment, or even buy high-level characters outright. It is generally pretty easy to become one of the top 10 players this way, and voila, they're satiated.
I can't really explain it, as I don't understand it very well myself. But I've seen it time and time again, in numerous different MMORPGs.
Display thumbnail views. Display full-size views. Cache said views so it's easy to navigate around (a thumbnail on a 3MB, 3072x2048 JPG is not quick to generate, especially with hundreds or thousands of images). Make it easy to edit said pictures in [editing application of choice]. Set EXIF keywords. Sort by EXIF keywords. Search by EXIF keywords. Importing from camera or CF card is greatly appreciated. For some people, printing is the desired end result. Others want a web gallery. For a few, they just want a high-quality digital image for whatever purpose.
Most importantly, though: It all has to be smooth, efficient, and fast. Most serious digital photographers will be living in this program along with their photo editor(s) as long as they're at their computer.
SETI@home is a pointless waste of time. It is full of cheaters, and the entire SETI dataset has been gone over about twice now. They are ever, ever, ever-so-slowly developing a SETI v2.0, called "BOINC". If it's ever ready, maybe they'll let you know. If their servers aren't down. (Me? Bitter? Nah.)
Folding@home has an even nobler goal, is much more competently run, and by participating you are really causing an immediate effect on current scientific projects and helping further our scientific understanding for every single work unit you complete.
So, you are suggesting that perhaps IBM, RedHat, Novell, Sun, Netscape, et al, are only supporting Linux and OSS because they expect the license on it to become invalid and somehow result in a victory for them? Nevermind the fact that the GPL being ruled unenforcable means that you are no longer allowed to copy the code at all, so they will HAVE to take their products off the market (if the GPL is enforcable, they could opt to just release the code instead)
If these "people that matter" don't want to use the GPL'd code, fine. No one is telling them they have to or even should use it. The point is that they can if they want to, as long as they give it back when they're done.
I'm sorry, but your scenario just doesn't make any sense. At best, it's nothing to be afraid of. At worst, it's just plain wrong.
If by easily, you mean downloading a third-party plugin, then sure. But give credit where credit is due. The guy who wrote the plugin deserves the praise. iTunes Ogg Vorbis support is certainly no thanks to Apple, and there are numerous problems with it as it stands, that *are* in fact their fault. Of all the OSes, all the MP3 players, all the music players I've ever used, Apple is by far the most anti-vorbis, and it really is the only thing that continues to bother me about them.
I really don't understand how anyone could say that Apple is hedging their bets towards Vorbis. They seem to be furiously struggling against it, continuing to push forward with their AAC format against all odds, despite the fact that other manufacturers are increasingly giving in, or at least saying that plan to maybe do so. Apple, on the other hand, consistently refuses to have anything to do with it.
I love OS X. I love the iPod. But Apple: I also love Vorbis.
I have no problems with the way this happened. I still have some faith in the legal process in Canada. The prosecutor petitioned the judge for the right to use the black-box as evidence, and won that right only after they had presented severe inconsistencies in testimony and evidence.
He was supposedly going just over the speed limit, but the excessive damage to the cars didn't support this. There were no skidmarks to suggest that he had tried to stop. He said the other car was running a red light. There were just a lot of things that didn't add up.
So, rather than just making a guess at who was right and who was lying, they brought in more evidence to make sure. That makes me feel more confident, not less. I'd rather have justice properly served, than not introduce that evidence for some silly reasons.
I'm a huge privacy advocate, but I don't oppose things like properly-granted search warrants, nor do I oppose this. If it gets abused in the future, then something should be done to prevent that abuse. But in this case, everything was done correctly, and what do you know, the system works.
I'm sorry, but that's just completely wrong. Used sales isn't a magical black-hole of entertainment dollars. If I sell my game to someone else, I have more money to spend on the latest new game. Your entire post falls apart if you take that into account.
No one tells anyone to go "get IE". Everyone who can have IE already HAS IE, for better or for worse. No need to link to it. As a result, the pagerank of most "Download IE" sites (uh, Windows Update???) would be remarkably low compared to the number of people who link to Mozilla et al.
You misunderstood. My wording was a bit unclear. By "that chemical composition", I was referring to the composition of this "Sapphire" (hooray for overloading material names, guys. Imagine if they had named plexiglas "Diamond"...)
Anyway, the composition of this liquid is CF3CF2C(O)CF(CF3)2. No chlorine at all. Carbon, Fluorine, and oxygen.
I am not a chemist, but you do know that CFC stands for 'chlorofluorocarbon' right? As in, Chlorine, Flourine, and Carbon? Where in that chemical composition do you see any chlorine? It's not a CFC just because it has the letters 'C', 'F', and 'C' in it somewhere.
Which isn't to say fluorine is pleasant stuff, but it's not going to destroy the ozone layer.
Yeah, I know the first thing my grandma did when she downloaded Thunderbird was to look through the code for documentation on how to set up her POP account.
Code comments are for co-developers who want to work on your code. Code comments are NEVER FOR USERS. Sometimes, developers are the users, but this does not excuse the practice. As a developer who wants to use something, I never want to have to download the source package to get README about how something works, much less have to poke around looking for comments.
I agree with you in principle, but I think the reason people are upset is because using RFID for alerting drivers about road conditions and making driving safer and all the other assorted stuff they mention DOESN'T MAKE SENSE in the context of RFID.
RFID is a short range ID tag. It doesn't give information other than a static ID number. It doesn't receive information other than RF electrical current to power its transmitter. It's an ID. How in the world does an ID help you know that there's a collision ahead? They already do that with signs above the road (at least here in Canada).
The only thing RFID does make sense for is paying tolls. But if it's mandatory and built into all new cars, that opens up alllll the wonderful little tracking schemes such as people getting busted in NY because authorities looked through the EZ-Pass database.
Haha. As a profesional developer, albeit with much less experience, I agree completely with you. I'm not a big fan of Oracle, and probably wouldn't use it even if it were free, which it most certainly is not. Things like its ODBC drivers sending all data as strings, regardless of whether it's a number or not (yes, I know there are practical reasons for this) make open source alternatives look much more attractive.
I'm tired of banging my head on Oracle. My PostgreSQL test database works beautifully.
Ah, but there's a twist in this case: ClearChannel has an exclusive, government-granted monopoly over a large swath of the FM broadcast spectrum through their numerous, sweeping FCC licenses. With increased power, comes increased responsibility. Someone who can't get their work published in the NYT can simply print their own newspaper and distribute it. Not so with radio.
If you have petitioned the government to allow you to be the nearly the only provider of 'x', then you must serve the public interest in a responsible manner. That includes protecting free-speech for someone who is in all other respects a welcome addition to your network. That especially includes not dumping a show because you disagree with something that's been said on it, even more so if you know that many members of the public (who you are expected to be serving) agree with it. If the FCC wasn't so busy being puritanical itself, they should really be enforcing the service of the public interest and free-speech ideals instead.
If ClearChannel is really that unhappy about the arrangement, perhaps they should get out of the completely saturated, FCC-limited market they're in, so they can do something with a little less responsibility required, like satellite radio.
Besides, regardless of whether it's a free-speech issue or not, we're allowed to bash them for it. You know, free-speech and all that.;)
That's not at all true. First of all, the quantum part is seperate from the cryptography part. It's primary purpose is to provide you a conduit over which you can send data and be absolutely sure that if someone other than your recipient saw it, the recipient will know.
The one-time pad, which is only feasable by quantum cryptography, is impossible to decrypt without the key. Or rather, impossible to know which decryption is correct, as you can easily decrypt it into whatever you want.
You have no idea whether: "5preio2309d91kcn2s02ia" actually means:
"al-Qaeda strikes again" or "Hi there, how are you?" or "ZekdjEs322SKE#aap2MZal"
and so on. You can say it means whatever you want, but you'll never really have any idea if that is what it meant or not unless you have the key.
Yes, someone may break quantum cryptography, but to say that it will happen because is has happened before is silly.
Would my software be spyware if I had it collect general system stats if you choose to register
Absolutely. If you don't show me every piece of info you're sending through the registration process, it's spyware.
Are you sending the processor model? How about the MHz? What if I've overclocked? Maybe I don't want you to know that. Does "General system stats" include a list of running processes perhaps?
If you want to have me send in an automatically-filled out survey about my machine, I might be happy to do that for you, provided I can see and change the answers as needed. It is a survey, right? You are trusting my answers, right? If you covertly sneak some auto-detected information about my system into your registration process, that's spyware.
1.
a. Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.
b. A particular form of this activity.
2. An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.
3. An active pastime; recreation.
Fishing, Hunting, Darts, Bowling, Auto Racing, and Golf, to name just a few, are all commonly considered to be sports. I apologise in advance for offending people who participate in these sports, but none of them involve really significant athletic exertion. If you do it competitively and professionally, there's no reason not to consider it a sport. It doesn't have to revolve around physical activity, and I don't think it should even have to involve physical activity.
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Haha. Are you actually in favour of the US 2-party system? Haha. Unbelievable.
I never thought I'd see the day.
Haha, thanks. You said with vitriol exactly what I felt like saying.
Weird... Perhaps the entire POST was sarcastic bullshit... Nah.
Ha! Does Linux have a software mixer, you ask. Linux is much better than that! Linux has numerous software mixers! None of them are compatible with each other, much less any player applications, but you bet there are software mixers around! It's all about choice! Of course, they are all userland programs, so they skip now and then, but that's a small price to pay for ensuring that something so trivial does not offend the great Linux kernel by depriving it of some of its low-latency resources. Such resources are critically important towards providing optimal networking, disk I/O, RAID, and other things that are invisible to the user which he or she clearly does not appreciate enough.
I, being an educated and l33t hacker, know that I would much rather get an extra 5kB/sec on my downloads than be able to listen to two streams of audio at once. You already have two ears, isn't that good enough? Software mixer, pshaw.
The story told on my favorite sitcom this week could have been a short story.
I think he meant reading something insightful, to cause you to do scary things like think about all kinds of stuff from politics up to and including the meaning of life. Most good books fall into this category. He certainly didn't mean reading a trashy supermarket romance novel.
There really is no available comparison. The most thought-provoking thing I've ever seen on the aptly-named boob tube was "The Matrix". How sad is that?
Mindless entertainment is great, don't get me wrong. I play video games all the time. You're welcome to watch TV instead if you like. Intellectually they're about the same. But you need to balance it out with something more challenging. It's nice to give the mind a rest now and then. But just like resting a bit is nice, despite the benefits of exercise, it's also good to give your mind some exercise. Read a good, intelligent book (sci-fi, fiction, non-fiction, doesn't matter), or really anything except TV. Build something, draw something, do something. All these things are much more rewarding than sitting and passively watching TV.
I realize I sound like this guy but honestly, when I started to cut down my TV-watching, it not only gave me time to start cycling a lot more and getting my body in shape, reading because I enjoy it, and it gave me much more time for my hobbies like photography and programming as well.
TVs give outlets for advertisements, thus furthering our economy.
I am not an economist, but our economy is furthered by the creation of wealth -- technological advancements, increased industrial production, etc. Advertising creates no wealth, it does not advance society or the economy. It is a tool for encouraging voluntary redistribution of existing wealth, a byproduct of capitalism, not a contribution to the economy.
As best I've been able to figure, for some people, their style of play is fundamentally at odds with MMORPGs. Some people play a game because they want to feel they are the best, the strongest, the greatest, "teh winnar". In a MMO this is for almost all intents and purposes, completely impossible. There will always be someone out there who's higher level or has a better sword or completed such and such quest perfectly while you died halfway through.
For the small subset of these people who for whatever inexplicable reason refuse to just stop playing MMORPGs (typically because they have run into some personality conflict with some other player and have become determined to beat them in whatever way possible), they can see only one possible solution, and that is to buy your way to the top to preserve their enjoyment of the game. This, on the other hand, is feasable, because the sprawling majority of MMO players will never spend anything on buying third-party stuff, or sell it. They'll just trade it around in-game. Fewer still will spend more on third-party stuff than they spend on the game in the first place. So they merrily spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy powerlevelling services, "uber" equipment, or even buy high-level characters outright. It is generally pretty easy to become one of the top 10 players this way, and voila, they're satiated.
I can't really explain it, as I don't understand it very well myself. But I've seen it time and time again, in numerous different MMORPGs.
Display thumbnail views. Display full-size views. Cache said views so it's easy to navigate around (a thumbnail on a 3MB, 3072x2048 JPG is not quick to generate, especially with hundreds or thousands of images). Make it easy to edit said pictures in [editing application of choice]. Set EXIF keywords. Sort by EXIF keywords. Search by EXIF keywords. Importing from camera or CF card is greatly appreciated. For some people, printing is the desired end result. Others want a web gallery. For a few, they just want a high-quality digital image for whatever purpose.
Most importantly, though: It all has to be smooth, efficient, and fast. Most serious digital photographers will be living in this program along with their photo editor(s) as long as they're at their computer.
Hooray for not checking links. Corrected link to Folding@home
Sorry.
SETI@home is a pointless waste of time. It is full of cheaters, and the entire SETI dataset has been gone over about twice now. They are ever, ever, ever-so-slowly developing a SETI v2.0, called "BOINC". If it's ever ready, maybe they'll let you know. If their servers aren't down. (Me? Bitter? Nah.)
Folding@home has an even nobler goal, is much more competently run, and by participating you are really causing an immediate effect on current scientific projects and helping further our scientific understanding for every single work unit you complete.
So, you are suggesting that perhaps IBM, RedHat, Novell, Sun, Netscape, et al, are only supporting Linux and OSS because they expect the license on it to become invalid and somehow result in a victory for them? Nevermind the fact that the GPL being ruled unenforcable means that you are no longer allowed to copy the code at all, so they will HAVE to take their products off the market (if the GPL is enforcable, they could opt to just release the code instead)
If these "people that matter" don't want to use the GPL'd code, fine. No one is telling them they have to or even should use it. The point is that they can if they want to, as long as they give it back when they're done.
I'm sorry, but your scenario just doesn't make any sense. At best, it's nothing to be afraid of. At worst, it's just plain wrong.
You can easily play OGG formats in iTunes
If by easily, you mean downloading a third-party plugin, then sure. But give credit where credit is due. The guy who wrote the plugin deserves the praise. iTunes Ogg Vorbis support is certainly no thanks to Apple, and there are numerous problems with it as it stands, that *are* in fact their fault. Of all the OSes, all the MP3 players, all the music players I've ever used, Apple is by far the most anti-vorbis, and it really is the only thing that continues to bother me about them.
I really don't understand how anyone could say that Apple is hedging their bets towards Vorbis. They seem to be furiously struggling against it, continuing to push forward with their AAC format against all odds, despite the fact that other manufacturers are increasingly giving in, or at least saying that plan to maybe do so. Apple, on the other hand, consistently refuses to have anything to do with it.
I love OS X. I love the iPod. But Apple: I also love Vorbis.
I have no problems with the way this happened. I still have some faith in the legal process in Canada. The prosecutor petitioned the judge for the right to use the black-box as evidence, and won that right only after they had presented severe inconsistencies in testimony and evidence.
He was supposedly going just over the speed limit, but the excessive damage to the cars didn't support this. There were no skidmarks to suggest that he had tried to stop. He said the other car was running a red light. There were just a lot of things that didn't add up.
So, rather than just making a guess at who was right and who was lying, they brought in more evidence to make sure. That makes me feel more confident, not less. I'd rather have justice properly served, than not introduce that evidence for some silly reasons.
I'm a huge privacy advocate, but I don't oppose things like properly-granted search warrants, nor do I oppose this. If it gets abused in the future, then something should be done to prevent that abuse. But in this case, everything was done correctly, and what do you know, the system works.
I'm sorry, but that's just completely wrong. Used sales isn't a magical black-hole of entertainment dollars. If I sell my game to someone else, I have more money to spend on the latest new game. Your entire post falls apart if you take that into account.
Not really fishy.
No one tells anyone to go "get IE". Everyone who can have IE already HAS IE, for better or for worse. No need to link to it. As a result, the pagerank of most "Download IE" sites (uh, Windows Update???) would be remarkably low compared to the number of people who link to Mozilla et al.
You misunderstood. My wording was a bit unclear. By "that chemical composition", I was referring to the composition of this "Sapphire" (hooray for overloading material names, guys. Imagine if they had named plexiglas "Diamond"...)
Anyway, the composition of this liquid is CF3CF2C(O)CF(CF3)2. No chlorine at all. Carbon, Fluorine, and oxygen.
I am not a chemist, but you do know that CFC stands for 'chlorofluorocarbon' right? As in, Chlorine, Flourine, and Carbon? Where in that chemical composition do you see any chlorine? It's not a CFC just because it has the letters 'C', 'F', and 'C' in it somewhere.
Which isn't to say fluorine is pleasant stuff, but it's not going to destroy the ozone layer.
Yeah, I know the first thing my grandma did when she downloaded Thunderbird was to look through the code for documentation on how to set up her POP account.
Code comments are for co-developers who want to work on your code. Code comments are NEVER FOR USERS. Sometimes, developers are the users, but this does not excuse the practice. As a developer who wants to use something, I never want to have to download the source package to get README about how something works, much less have to poke around looking for comments.
I agree with you in principle, but I think the reason people are upset is because using RFID for alerting drivers about road conditions and making driving safer and all the other assorted stuff they mention DOESN'T MAKE SENSE in the context of RFID.
RFID is a short range ID tag. It doesn't give information other than a static ID number. It doesn't receive information other than RF electrical current to power its transmitter. It's an ID. How in the world does an ID help you know that there's a collision ahead? They already do that with signs above the road (at least here in Canada).
The only thing RFID does make sense for is paying tolls. But if it's mandatory and built into all new cars, that opens up alllll the wonderful little tracking schemes such as people getting busted in NY because authorities looked through the EZ-Pass database.
Haha. As a profesional developer, albeit with much less experience, I agree completely with you. I'm not a big fan of Oracle, and probably wouldn't use it even if it were free, which it most certainly is not. Things like its ODBC drivers sending all data as strings, regardless of whether it's a number or not (yes, I know there are practical reasons for this) make open source alternatives look much more attractive.
I'm tired of banging my head on Oracle. My PostgreSQL test database works beautifully.
MOO3 does not run on Linux? I consider that a feature.
Worst. Sequel. Evar.
Ah, but there's a twist in this case: ClearChannel has an exclusive, government-granted monopoly over a large swath of the FM broadcast spectrum through their numerous, sweeping FCC licenses. With increased power, comes increased responsibility. Someone who can't get their work published in the NYT can simply print their own newspaper and distribute it. Not so with radio.
;)
If you have petitioned the government to allow you to be the nearly the only provider of 'x', then you must serve the public interest in a responsible manner. That includes protecting free-speech for someone who is in all other respects a welcome addition to your network. That especially includes not dumping a show because you disagree with something that's been said on it, even more so if you know that many members of the public (who you are expected to be serving) agree with it. If the FCC wasn't so busy being puritanical itself, they should really be enforcing the service of the public interest and free-speech ideals instead.
If ClearChannel is really that unhappy about the arrangement, perhaps they should get out of the completely saturated, FCC-limited market they're in, so they can do something with a little less responsibility required, like satellite radio.
Besides, regardless of whether it's a free-speech issue or not, we're allowed to bash them for it. You know, free-speech and all that.
That's not at all true. First of all, the quantum part is seperate from the cryptography part. It's primary purpose is to provide you a conduit over which you can send data and be absolutely sure that if someone other than your recipient saw it, the recipient will know.
The one-time pad, which is only feasable by quantum cryptography, is impossible to decrypt without the key. Or rather, impossible to know which decryption is correct, as you can easily decrypt it into whatever you want.
You have no idea whether:
"5preio2309d91kcn2s02ia"
actually means:
"al-Qaeda strikes again" or
"Hi there, how are you?" or
"ZekdjEs322SKE#aap2MZal"
and so on. You can say it means whatever you want, but you'll never really have any idea if that is what it meant or not unless you have the key.
Yes, someone may break quantum cryptography, but to say that it will happen because is has happened before is silly.
Would my software be spyware if I had it collect general system stats if you choose to register
Absolutely. If you don't show me every piece of info you're sending through the registration process, it's spyware.
Are you sending the processor model? How about the MHz? What if I've overclocked? Maybe I don't want you to know that. Does "General system stats" include a list of running processes perhaps?
If you want to have me send in an automatically-filled out survey about my machine, I might be happy to do that for you, provided I can see and change the answers as needed. It is a survey, right? You are trusting my answers, right? If you covertly sneak some auto-detected information about my system into your registration process, that's spyware.
So true. I still can't help but admire how accurately they gauged the true viewership of Futurama, Family Guy, Farscape, and Firefly.
It's so weird, though, how well all the DVDs are selling. Kind of strange, that.
A sport requires athletic exertion by definition.
Bzzzt! Try again!
sport
n.
1.
a. Physical activity that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often engaged in competitively.
b. A particular form of this activity.
2. An activity involving physical exertion and skill that is governed by a set of rules or customs and often undertaken competitively.
3. An active pastime; recreation.
Fishing, Hunting, Darts, Bowling, Auto Racing, and Golf, to name just a few, are all commonly considered to be sports. I apologise in advance for offending people who participate in these sports, but none of them involve really significant athletic exertion. If you do it competitively and professionally, there's no reason not to consider it a sport. It doesn't have to revolve around physical activity, and I don't think it should even have to involve physical activity.