please tell me how having faith in your version of the origin of the universe is any different from me having faith in my version...
Well, your version isn't based on widely accepted, independently verified and verifiable physical laws and observations, derived from first principles and based on the search for truth.
Rather, yours is based on supporting the (unverifiable) concept of a suprime being which has handed down a whole bunch of stories, rules and laws which, funnily enough, work to both re-inforce the meme and help give a certain set of people rather a lot of power...
Of course, accepting either concept means a certain degree of trust and, indeed, faith in the systems behind them (be they the entire scientific community, the system of mathematics, or $your_favourite_faith), but to suggest that all systems have equal merit is somewhat.. misguided.
Mac IE is an entirely different browser to Win32 IE; it's got a completely different rendering engine, for a start. One that is really rather good. It doesn't require quite the same mess of workarounds and hacks it's Windows cousin does. In fact, it held the prize for the browser with the most complete CSS Level 1 support for quite a while.
Heh, mine's a real illegible squiggle (which looks practically identical either way up), but it's one I can identify quite easily; I can even pick out the bits that, uh, evolved from the letters of my name.
It's got quite some variation, being written basically by waving my hand about a bit, but it's surprisingly consistant in areas that are, to me, very identifiable.
Not really. Some encoders are pretty poor, but an 8 bit PNG can easily rival, if not beat it's gif counterpart.
Let's pick a quick example:
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 27382 Jun 9 10:12 states_imgmap.gif -rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 23176 Jun 9 13:28 states_imgmap.png -rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 22619 Jun 9 13:29 states_imgmap_pngcrush.png -rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 21404 Jun 9 13:31 states_imgmap_pngout.png
The.png is saved from Paint Shop Pro 7, _pngcrush.png using bog-standard pngcrush (which was, btw, identical to pngcrush -brute), , and _pngout.png using pngout.
If you think this is too simple an image, let's try a screengrab of my desktop, reduced to 256 colours. Feeling lucky?
-rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 342508 May 31 02:22 grab_orig.png -rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 136461 Jun 9 13:41 grab.gif -rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 97538 Jun 9 13:40 grab.png -rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 95336 Jun 9 13:42 grab_pngcrush.png -rw-r--r-- 1 freaky None 87168 Jun 9 13:44 grab_pngout.png
Same deal as above. The original is a 24bit pngcrushed file. None were saved as interlaced/progressive, nor with any transparency.
I dunno about you, but PNG looks pretty good to me.
Remember that most PNG's are likely to be 24 bits, as opposed to GIF's maximum of 8, and can even include an extra 8 bits of alpha transparency.
Yes, IE doesn't support alpha transparency (something GIF doesn't even have the potential to do; PNG's 8 bit alpha channel is as big as GIF's entire range!), but for general use PNG's a perfect replacement for GIF.
JPEG can beat both, but only if you don't mind it dropping image quality to do so; not something you want to do generally.
little exposure
So what? Most users can just double click on the image file (who's file extension Windows helpfully hides by default) and won't notice the difference. And if some so called "web developer" hasn't heard of it, well, sucks to be him and his clients.
Uhm, CSS isn't exactly taxing and already has support for multiple media types, including handhelds. XML's easier to parse than bastardised SGML, more difficult to screw up, and able to encode much richer descriptions of whatever you encode in it. Why plan to make the same mistakes HTML made by bloating it with crap and the like?
A custom XML doctype and basic CSS would work fine, and could even be rendered easily in current browsers, as well as handhelds. It compresses easily, degrades gracefully if you do it right, can be restyled to suit any environment you care to mention; including braile, audio, desktop and handheld, and can be converted to any other format you like with XSLT or $your_favourite_language.
The metadata you can store using it can also be used to create eBook libraries and the like (similar to Music libraries in some current media players). An XML format could be perfect for users.
It won't happen though. Industry's way too greedy to make it easy to read and copy stuff like this. If we do find them using an XML format, it'll be buried deep in some encrypted DRM enabled binary format containing the string 'Microsoft' and protected by DMCA 3 which will make it a capital crime to read it without a fully licensed reader and copy of the eBook, which will self-destruct immediately after you close the reader.
Try developing websites using CSS 2 -- over 5 years old as of this month. Hell, CSS 1 and PNG have both been around for nearly 7 years, and IE's support for both is still flakey.
Half-decade old standards are not "cutting edge", and I guarantee you after trying to exploit them you'll rapidly find yourself wanting to lump IE6 into the same category as NS4 while poaching the entire MSIE development and management team over a pit of boiling tungsten.
I write to the most recent standards I can because I'm not prepared to quadruple the complexity of my markup for the sake of a few fractions of one percent of my users seeing my website's style.
My guess is that modern drives are more sensitive to heat
Well, put it this way; that 10MB drive that's been running for a decade is probably spinning quite slowly, running cooler, and has way more leeway over how far the read/write heads can be off before it starts having trouble operating correctly; probably by quite a few orders of magnitude compared to a drive where a single platter may be 8,000 times denser.
So: 1. The platter can wobble to the point at which the drive rattles like crazy and it'll still be fine. 2. The bearings can fail to this point without anything batting an eyelid. 3. The components can expand a lot more freely without worrying too much about anything becoming misaligned. 4. All these components have less stress on them due to lower RPMs and less aggressive seek times.
Compare this with your shiny new 80G drive, where if your drive's rattling, it's probably already dead, and if the bearings are going, you're probably going to see tonnes of failing sectors long before you even hear the buzz of the platter's misalignment.
Quality isn't going down; requirements are getting stricter -- You can compare it to a shooting range; you start off 1m from your target, and slowly increase the range until it's 8km away.
The quality of your gun and your aim's almost certainly improved massively during that period, but it's pretty obvious which target's easier to hit reliably, especially when you're competing in a cutthroat market where you have to do it before the other guy and at least as cheaply, or else.
I'm sure there are people out there who are clearly smart enough to be able to combine A Good Time (TM) with Something New (TM) that Everyone Can Enjoy (SM).
Like, say:
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. -- an FPS based around some odd Russian sci-fi around Chernobyl. Not only does it look like a cracking good FPS, but it has an original idea behind it that shapes the entire game!
Well, er, we hope. We'll let you know when it's released.
Republic -- set in a fictitious eastern Europe country, where you have to build up a political movement and eventually overthrow/take over the government. A political game, no less.
Splinter Cell -- a game where you're supposed to avoid hurting people! Owes a lot to Thief, though.
Duke Nukem Forever -- a game where patience is more important than an itchy trigger finger.
That's the esoteric telesync (hence "ts"); not exactly one of the better rips.
If you must try a telesync (basically a cam with decent sound and equipment to keep the cam in sync with the frames), go for the Centropy one; they are the undisputed kings of telesync releases.
... to know it wasn't worth throwing money at. It may have been a wildly successful film, but I won't be contributing towards it.
Is Neo a program running in some sort of meta Matrix, along with Zion etc? Well, get this -- I don't care! The characters are shallow enough for me not to bat an eyelid if they all get wiped out, and the storyline's convoluted and, frankly, boring enough for me to not be drooling over the next movie.
Endless "woo-we-can-slow-the-camera-down!!!11!1111" special effects do not impress me enough to put up with an otherwise laughable movie.
I think maybe I'm just spoiled by books. Anyone fancy making a handful of movies based around Nightsdawn? Revelation Space? Slant? Fallen Dragon? Well, don't bother; I don't think anyone in a position to do such a thing has the skill to do it properly.
Being able to "promise" to leave the BitTorrent client alive long after the download's complete could balance this out, though, no?
Obviously this would require some way of persistantly identifying and tracking a host, so if they've shown themselves to typically leave the client running it can give them preferential treatment. If enough people did this, it should balance out the extra bandwidth usage, since there will be a lot more (admittedly slow) sources to swarm from.
Sorry, your release does not meet the requirements for posting on the KaZZa media network. In case you need reminding:
For MP3 release, the maximum bitrate is 128kbps if you're using LAME (although not with an --alt-preset); unlimited if using Xing (with a requirement of at least 4 annoying artifacts and 1 annoying flanging effect through at least 20% of the track).
For OGG Vorbis, you have two choices: -q-1 (that's minus 1), or any quality setting provided you transcode from an MP3 that passes the MP3 rules. Any and all OGGs must come with ID3 tags; preferably for a different album.
No NFO, no scans of albums. Either the ID3 tag must be empty, incorrect or missing, or the filenames must be of the form track[1-12].{mp3,ogg}.
SFV's and similar are out of the question unless they were created during processing; i.e. before adding ID3 tags (especially for OGG's), or created using some oddball tool that nobody uses.
All these rules may be waived provided the files are only served off a single 200bps modem user in Alaska, who connects for five minutes every week.
Remember, failing to abide by these rules may result in your removal from the search database (except for those movies and crappy partial mp3's you haven't bothered deleting yet).
The KaZZa Media Network thanks you for helping to reinforce the quality of service our users expect from the network.
Words may be longer, true, but the commands so much more authoritative!
Sigh, when will people realise that computers work better if you're polite, meek and gentle around them; just think how much more data would be lost without people around the world repeating words to the effect of "Please, Please don't fail until this backup's complete" when hard drives start to fail!
In this vein, I have started development of a next generation data processing language, aimed at harnessing the hugely underused power of politeness in this field, where data integrity is paramount.
Here's an example query:
DEAR PQL_SERVER. -- begin transaction
ALLOW_ME_TO_INTRODUCE_MYSELF AS Mr username password. -- authenticate; -- username is a maximum of 1 letter, and password must be a suitably respected surname. -- Mrs and Ms are of course also allowed, and may have impacts on the exact -- speed and quality of the results, depending on server configuration and orientation.
PLEASE_ACCEPT UPTO 20% OF MY_QUOTA. -- enable certain optimizations.
IF (it_would_not_be_too_much_bother) COULD_YOU_PLEASE
FETCH any_columns_you_can FROM MyTable
AND MAYBE(IF (you_have_time))
FILTER OUT ANY WHERE MyTable.ID IS NOT SOMEWHERE_AROUND 50.
-- enable consistency checks in result PLEASE_TAKE_CARE.
THANK_YOU_VERY_MUCH. -- end transaction; expect response within 3-4 days. -- Don't forget to acknowledge (THANK) the server sufficiently -- once it has been received, or server errors may result later.
Re:Lots of good info here...
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
He doesn't need to recoup anything; he can just get his client to pay up front, regardless of the actual response rate.
I personally think it's not only the spammers which need hefty fines; it's the people hiring them. I don't think jail time for fraud and many counts of unauthorised computer use (and paying someone to do these things for you) is a bad idea either.
Never mind crap like "spammer gets $100,000 fine, sells one of his ferrari's to pay for it"; I want to see "spammer gets $100,000 fine, 3 year jail term, and all assets potentially paid by or related to spamming confiscated. Companies responsible get $1,000,000 + 1 year profit fine each".
Then I want to see Bush announce a War on Spam; out of the country? No fines for you, we'll just blow you up with a Predator Drone.
Sadly I doubt much less than this would have a significant impact on the problem. And blowing people up might be taking things a little far;)
aagh.net -- degrades gracefully, uses real (X)HTML properly, has clean URL's, simple and clear navigation, plenty of <link>'s, and is one of the few sites I know of that not only serves XHTML as application/xhtml+xml as it should be, but serves HTML 4.01 to clients that don't support it. Yes, it's my site;)
It's still pretty rank; it's a mess of semantically meaningless tags like and , doesn't bother with any paragraphs ( everywhere), and is just generally nasty for what's supposed to be nice clean HTML aimed at textmode browsers and the like.
Just because it's written like a 1989 website, doesn't make it clean.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure it wasn't "Beyond the Fall of Night"?
#include <imho.h>
Well, your version isn't based on widely accepted, independently verified and verifiable physical laws and observations, derived from first principles and based on the search for truth.
Rather, yours is based on supporting the (unverifiable) concept of a suprime being which has handed down a whole bunch of stories, rules and laws which, funnily enough, work to both re-inforce the meme and help give a certain set of people rather a lot of power...
Of course, accepting either concept means a certain degree of trust and, indeed, faith in the systems behind them (be they the entire scientific community, the system of mathematics, or $your_favourite_faith), but to suggest that all systems have equal merit is somewhat.. misguided.
Mac IE is an entirely different browser to Win32 IE; it's got a completely different rendering engine, for a start. One that is really rather good. It doesn't require quite the same mess of workarounds and hacks it's Windows cousin does. In fact, it held the prize for the browser with the most complete CSS Level 1 support for quite a while.
Heh, mine's a real illegible squiggle (which looks practically identical either way up), but it's one I can identify quite easily; I can even pick out the bits that, uh, evolved from the letters of my name.
It's got quite some variation, being written basically by waving my hand about a bit, but it's surprisingly consistant in areas that are, to me, very identifiable.
Yeah, it's Greg Martin's "Silhouettes", which you can find in the wallpaper section of his website. I just flipped it
Not really. Some encoders are pretty poor, but an 8 bit PNG can easily rival, if not beat it's gif counterpart.
Let's pick a quick example:The
If you think this is too simple an image, let's try a screengrab of my desktop, reduced to 256 colours. Feeling lucky?Same deal as above. The original is a 24bit pngcrushed file. None were saved as interlaced/progressive, nor with any transparency.
I dunno about you, but PNG looks pretty good to me.
Remember that most PNG's are likely to be 24 bits, as opposed to GIF's maximum of 8, and can even include an extra 8 bits of alpha transparency.
What? There's at least one free high quality reference implementation anyone's welcome to use (even Microsoft), the full specification's there for anyone to read, there's a W3C recommendation that's actively maintained. What more standardization do you need?
Yes, IE doesn't support alpha transparency (something GIF doesn't even have the potential to do; PNG's 8 bit alpha channel is as big as GIF's entire range!), but for general use PNG's a perfect replacement for GIF.
JPEG can beat both, but only if you don't mind it dropping image quality to do so; not something you want to do generally.
So what? Most users can just double click on the image file (who's file extension Windows helpfully hides by default) and won't notice the difference. And if some so called "web developer" hasn't heard of it, well, sucks to be him and his clients.
Uhm, CSS isn't exactly taxing and already has support for multiple media types, including handhelds. XML's easier to parse than bastardised SGML, more difficult to screw up, and able to encode much richer descriptions of whatever you encode in it. Why plan to make the same mistakes HTML made by bloating it with crap and the like?
A custom XML doctype and basic CSS would work fine, and could even be rendered easily in current browsers, as well as handhelds. It compresses easily, degrades gracefully if you do it right, can be restyled to suit any environment you care to mention; including braile, audio, desktop and handheld, and can be converted to any other format you like with XSLT or $your_favourite_language.
The metadata you can store using it can also be used to create eBook libraries and the like (similar to Music libraries in some current media players). An XML format could be perfect for users.
It won't happen though. Industry's way too greedy to make it easy to read and copy stuff like this. If we do find them using an XML format, it'll be buried deep in some encrypted DRM enabled binary format containing the string 'Microsoft' and protected by DMCA 3 which will make it a capital crime to read it without a fully licensed reader and copy of the eBook, which will self-destruct immediately after you close the reader.
*grumble*
Give materials science another decade or so, and hopefully we'll be able to make a space elevator or three.
Good enough for you?
WordStar and Clarisworks are not increasingly common open standards Microsoft helped to create and claim to support seriously.
Try developing websites using CSS 2 -- over 5 years old as of this month. Hell, CSS 1 and PNG have both been around for nearly 7 years, and IE's support for both is still flakey.
Half-decade old standards are not "cutting edge", and I guarantee you after trying to exploit them you'll rapidly find yourself wanting to lump IE6 into the same category as NS4 while poaching the entire MSIE development and management team over a pit of boiling tungsten.
I write to the most recent standards I can because I'm not prepared to quadruple the complexity of my markup for the sake of a few fractions of one percent of my users seeing my website's style.
Well, put it this way; that 10MB drive that's been running for a decade is probably spinning quite slowly, running cooler, and has way more leeway over how far the read/write heads can be off before it starts having trouble operating correctly; probably by quite a few orders of magnitude compared to a drive where a single platter may be 8,000 times denser.
So: 1. The platter can wobble to the point at which the drive rattles like crazy and it'll still be fine. 2. The bearings can fail to this point without anything batting an eyelid. 3. The components can expand a lot more freely without worrying too much about anything becoming misaligned. 4. All these components have less stress on them due to lower RPMs and less aggressive seek times.
Compare this with your shiny new 80G drive, where if your drive's rattling, it's probably already dead, and if the bearings are going, you're probably going to see tonnes of failing sectors long before you even hear the buzz of the platter's misalignment.
Quality isn't going down; requirements are getting stricter -- You can compare it to a shooting range; you start off 1m from your target, and slowly increase the range until it's 8km away.
The quality of your gun and your aim's almost certainly improved massively during that period, but it's pretty obvious which target's easier to hit reliably, especially when you're competing in a cutthroat market where you have to do it before the other guy and at least as cheaply, or else.
Lucky you; you obviously have good airflow around the drive bay. Most don't; ~50c is *far* more common.
Same with CPU's; some people with low output CPU's and high throughput fans will hit 30c, the rest of us will hit 55c.
1337 = l337 = leet = elite
Somewhat commonly used to refer to something as good; as in:
"l337, this WASTE thing does exactly what I want"
Well, er, we hope. We'll let you know when it's released.
That's the esoteric telesync (hence "ts"); not exactly one of the better rips.
If you must try a telesync (basically a cam with decent sound and equipment to keep the cam in sync with the frames), go for the Centropy one; they are the undisputed kings of telesync releases.
Humans Blamed for Piracy - MPAA Lobbies for their Extermination
Posted by CmdrTaco on 2003-05-27 15:32
Damnit, too late.
So, how much energy they can leech from you is linked to your happiness? Damn, I must be about ready for being replaced as faulty.
Psst, Matrix supervisors, fix me up with a girlfriend and I'll make sure I generate a few more watts to help, uh, boost your fusion processes.
<waits...>
Bah. The service here sucks; I'm off to Cyberia*.
(* Cyberia: Ref; Red Dwarf book _Last Human_. A computer-generated reality tuned to be your own personal hell)
... to know it wasn't worth throwing money at. It may have been a wildly successful film, but I won't be contributing towards it.
Is Neo a program running in some sort of meta Matrix, along with Zion etc? Well, get this -- I don't care! The characters are shallow enough for me not to bat an eyelid if they all get wiped out, and the storyline's convoluted and, frankly, boring enough for me to not be drooling over the next movie.
Endless "woo-we-can-slow-the-camera-down!!!11!1111" special effects do not impress me enough to put up with an otherwise laughable movie.
I think maybe I'm just spoiled by books. Anyone fancy making a handful of movies based around Nightsdawn? Revelation Space? Slant? Fallen Dragon? Well, don't bother; I don't think anyone in a position to do such a thing has the skill to do it properly.
*sulks*
Being able to "promise" to leave the BitTorrent client alive long after the download's complete could balance this out, though, no?
Obviously this would require some way of persistantly identifying and tracking a host, so if they've shown themselves to typically leave the client running it can give them preferential treatment. If enough people did this, it should balance out the extra bandwidth usage, since there will be a lot more (admittedly slow) sources to swarm from.
- For MP3 release, the maximum bitrate is 128kbps if you're using LAME (although not with an --alt-preset); unlimited if using Xing (with a requirement of at least 4 annoying artifacts and 1 annoying flanging effect through at least 20% of the track).
- For OGG Vorbis, you have two choices: -q-1 (that's minus 1), or any quality setting provided you transcode from an MP3 that passes the MP3 rules. Any and all OGGs must come with ID3 tags; preferably for a different album.
- No NFO, no scans of albums. Either the ID3 tag must be empty, incorrect or missing, or the filenames must be of the form track[1-12].{mp3,ogg}.
- SFV's and similar are out of the question unless they were created during processing; i.e. before adding ID3 tags (especially for OGG's), or created using some oddball tool that nobody uses.
- All these rules may be waived provided the files are only served off a single 200bps modem user in Alaska, who connects for five minutes every week.
Remember, failing to abide by these rules may result in your removal from the search database (except for those movies and crappy partial mp3's you haven't bothered deleting yet). The KaZZa Media Network thanks you for helping to reinforce the quality of service our users expect from the network.Sigh, when will people realise that computers work better if you're polite, meek and gentle around them; just think how much more data would be lost without people around the world repeating words to the effect of "Please, Please don't fail until this backup's complete" when hard drives start to fail!
In this vein, I have started development of a next generation data processing language, aimed at harnessing the hugely underused power of politeness in this field, where data integrity is paramount.
Here's an example query:
He doesn't need to recoup anything; he can just get his client to pay up front, regardless of the actual response rate.
;)
I personally think it's not only the spammers which need hefty fines; it's the people hiring them. I don't think jail time for fraud and many counts of unauthorised computer use (and paying someone to do these things for you) is a bad idea either.
Never mind crap like "spammer gets $100,000 fine, sells one of his ferrari's to pay for it"; I want to see "spammer gets $100,000 fine, 3 year jail term, and all assets potentially paid by or related to spamming confiscated. Companies responsible get $1,000,000 + 1 year profit fine each".
Then I want to see Bush announce a War on Spam; out of the country? No fines for you, we'll just blow you up with a Predator Drone.
Sadly I doubt much less than this would have a significant impact on the problem. And blowing people up might be taking things a little far
Um, yes.. I was going to mention the bitter aftertaste from that, but forgot when I rewrote my comment. Bah :)
;)
It does at least look quite nice and clean, anyway
It's still pretty rank; it's a mess of semantically meaningless tags like and , doesn't bother with any paragraphs (
everywhere), and is just generally nasty for what's supposed to be nice clean HTML aimed at textmode browsers and the like.
Just because it's written like a 1989 website, doesn't make it clean.