I think the point should be made that Josh Groban appears to be one of the top album producers in the last couple years, and I never heard of him until he sang with Andrea Corr (of my favorite band, The Corrs.)
And he sings classical (i.e., stuff that sounds like Italian opera to me, like "Canto ala Vida" which is what he sang with Andrea) and pop. So if he's big, I can certainly understand Beethoven.
Not to mention I read an article some years ago that said classical artists were getting smarter these days - the album covers feature hot classical music babes like Vanessa Mae instead of ancient line drawings of Beethoven. In other words, marketing is being applied instead of just selling to random collectors.
You imply that "our leaders" are merely mistaken in taking the actions of terrorists as justifications for removing rights. You imply that our "leaders" are merely incompetent.
Trust me - our "leaders" know goddamn well what they're doing this for - and it has NOTHING to do with some random Arab fanatics. That's only the cover story, the excuse. And it's likely they deliberately created the cover story as well, certainly by their policies in the Middle East for the last seventy five years.
The nature of the state is to constantly expand its powers until "everything that is not mandatory is forbidden."
I've described the basic concept of the state many times:
"You give us everything you have and do exactly what we tell you to do, and we'll protect you from the bad people on the inside and outside of our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some."
That is the exact essence of the state and every single solitary person who works in it. It stems from the human primate hierarchy which in turn is based entirely on the fear of death. Which means every single human being has to tear down everybody above him and stomp on everybody below him, in order to please his primitive notions of deities who might then grant him more life.
In other words, humans are apes with a slightly better ability to conceptualize and no more control over their emotional states than a chimp.
Nothing but Transhumanism and the appropriate enabling technologies can change this.
"However, whenever anybody is asked to site a case in which some poor schmuck actually got shafted by these laws, they suddenly fall silent."
Actually, no, they don't.
Much of the Guantanamo criticism is related to these laws used to snatch people off the street and hold them without charge - including actual US citizens. And while the courts HAVE stomped on the Feds in a number of specific cases, there has been no real attempt by the courts to control the Feds by declaring much of this stuff unconstitutional.
Also, there have been articles in the press about a number of ordinary criminal cases - and even cases where there was no criminal intent at all - which have nothing to do with terrorism where these laws were inappropriately applied.
OTOH, this has been the trend for decades now, so it's no surprise to me that law enforcement is striving for more and more heavy-handed power. This is the nature of law enforcement (and the state itself), as any one who has done time can tell you, or anyone who has ever read any history or real-life stories about law enforcement.
Cops are assholes. Period. It has nothing to do with "a few rotten apples in the barrel" - the barrel itself is riddled with maggots. Always has been, always will be - until we Transhumans run a nanotech broom handle up their asses.
You're a little late with that - freedom went out the door, oh, probably a hundred years ago when Lincoln became dictator. One could probably pick an earlier time, such as when John Adams revoked habeous corpus during Shay's Rebellion (if I got the right Adams).
It doesn't concern me any more. In due time, history shows, all empires get their comeuppance.
Your job is simply to avoid getting squashed in the comeuppance. Concentrate on that, not on trying to change history or primate human nature (unless you're working on nanotech.)
Plays fine with MPlayer on Linux, though. So it has to be some interaction between the file, the QuickTime codecs, MPlayer and, who knows, maybe the video drivers. But only on Windows.
What pissed me off was the way Windows handled the locked up app. When I tell Windows to kill a process, I want that process DEAD AND BURIED immediately - just like on Linux. I don't want to sit there for five or ten minutes while it rummages around trying to figure out what to do next, and issuing stupid messages that are meaningless under the circumstances.
I think the problem is that "Task Manager" is way more than a task manager - it has all those freakin' tabs with performance animations, and God knows what else. This is Microsoft's problem - too many damn features loaded onto a system utility that should only do ONE THING: manage processes. If somebody wants to monitor system performance, they can get a Sysinternals utility. And the process manager should not sit there and second-guess me when I click on "Kill process!" I can imagine how wonderful this is on a server.
Nope - file plays perfectly fine on Mandrake 10.1 using MPlayer.
Of course, it could be some sort of glitch in the file that is not fatal under certain circumstances during playback and is fatal otherwise. Who knows?
I'm amazed at how many glitches show up in playback of video files. I don't know if it's the encoders people use to encode the video or the decoders used to play them back, but the quality of video playback frequently sucks. Of course, if the original video was recorded off a TV card or something, I guess I can't be too surprised that encoders have less than perfect resolution to deal with in the first place.
I don't think it's QuickTime per se anyway - I think it's QuickTime ON WINDOWS that was the problem. And I wasn't even using QuickTime itself - I was using QuickTime Alternative using MPlayer on Windows. In fact, I'd be more inclined to blame Windows or the video drivers than QuickTime.
But what really bugged me was how XP pathetically handled the lockup and shutdown. I mean, ten minutes to recover a locked up app and/or shutdown? Whatever happened to pre-emptive multitasking?
And I hate QuickTime, too. Although I'm actually running it with QuickTime Alternative using MPlayer on Windows.
I booted into Mandrake 10.1, managed to get MPlayer installed after a ton of work rebuilding my repositories which must have been out of whack, and the trailer plays fine using a slightly older version of MPlayer than the one someone else used.
And while QuickTime may have been the culprit on Windows, at least if it had happened on Linux, a nice quick "kill -9 " would have been a lot easier than wrestling with that POS Task Manager on XP.
Which is why I use Mandrake - or any other easy to install distro. Slackware and Gentoo are not known for easy installs compared to Mandrake, SUSE and Fedora, let alone Lycoris, Linspire and Xandros.
Well, I was so pissed off at Windows I booted into Mandrake 10.1.
Since my default install only has Kaffeine and it (or XINE) doesn't play MOV files, I went hunting for MPlayer.
Unfortunately my repositories were apparently out of whack - installing mplayer, urpmi told me there were no signatures on several of the dependencies - so I had to spend an hour rebuilding urpmi's database. I then installed mplayer and the KMplayer GUI.
I opened the file. It played perfectly through to the end.
No locking up - and damn sure no ten minutes trying to recover the fucking operating system.
Now, I CAN complain how fucking complicated it is to rebuild your repositories on Mandrake using urpmi. This should be a one-click operation that goes to the Mandrake Web site, downloads a list of repositories, shows them to you, you select the ones you want, it rebuilds the freaking database and go from there.
Thanks to the Easy URPMI Web site, it's not quite that easy. Easy URPMI gives you the repository selection, but then only gives you the command lines to enter into URPMI. Lame, very lame. OTOH, it would be nightmare for a naive user if Easy URPMI didn't exist. OTOH, if you don't know about that Web site, it's still a nightmare.
Geeks, stop releasing software until it works with one click.
I downloaded the trailer which is in Quicktime MOV format. Knowing Firefox would probably fuck it up, I downloaded it, then double-clicked it to run it.
It ran. At least I got to see most of it. Toward the end it locked up Windows XP totally. I finally managed to get the Task Manager to come up after a long time, and told it to kill the fucking QuickTime player. No effect.
After getting the Task Manager up a second or third time, I managed to tell Windows to restart.
It then proceeded to repeatedly tell me that Task Manager DLL initialization failed because Windows was shutting down - oh, fucking brilliant, Bill!
Then it proceeded to tell me every single program in the System Tray was being shut down and if I ended them, I'd "lose any data" - another brilliant fucking message, Bill!!
Now I have to click on a dozen messages to get the system to shut the hell down.
JUST END THE FUCKING PROGRAMS AND SHUT THE FUCKING SYSTEM DOWN, YOU MORON!
This is the SECOND fucking time in FOUR HOURS I've had Windows XP totally unable to handle a screwed up application!
JESUS BARON VON CHRIST! I HATE FUCKING WINDOWS!
I should have booted into Mandrake to run this trailer.
Windows as a multimedia player plays everything out there, someone said here the other day. Oh, yeah, right, moron.
Until normal people realize Christianity is not compatible with a free society expect more such "enriching" cross-cultural exchanges...
By the way, the Sheik was right - there IS no difference between an American soldier and a civilian IN IRAQ. No US civilians are there under the current circumstances unless they're there to fuck the Iraqi people. Most of these fucks are ex-military contractors working for the CIA or security companies protecting US occupation employees. An occupier is an occupier. Get the fuck out, no US citizens will be endangered.
Because it's just another variant on the same old Microsoft lies.
How many times have I said this: Microsoft is run by and employs LIARS. Deliberate, focused, unabashed, paid LIARS. NOTHING said from the lips of a Microsoft employee can be taken to be anything but a lie.
It's time the OSS community started publicly calling these lies what they are: not spin, not marketing, not a difference in opinion - straightforward, unabashed, fucking LIES.
It's time the OSS community started publicly calling the Microsoft people BY NAME what they are: not officers, not Vice Presidents of whatever - straightforward, unabashed, fucking LIARS.
I'll start - this motherfucker Taylor is a fucking LIAR. Give me his email address and I'll send an email to him explicitly stating so.
Someone there suggested clearing and/or closing the Download Manager dialog windows as a solution - I don't see this working at all. I use the Download Manager Tweak which does all that automatically and there's no difference - Firefox still starts to slow dramatically and start behaving strangely after a few dozen downloads. I suspect the effect is worse depending on how big the images downloaded are.
Supposedly this has been fixed in the 1.1 code. It better be, it's a real ugly bug.
The Corrs are there (when they aren't in France, Germany, England, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Malaysia, Australia, Taiwan, Africa, Scotland, Switzerland, the US (RARELY!), Canada, Japan, New Zealand...)
I upgraded to 3Mbps recently (and I don't seem to be getting it but that's another story), and the rep told me they're running fiber everywhere to offer 20Mbps within the next twelve months. We'll see.
I doubt we'll see 100Mbps here until there's fiber to the curb. At $250,000 or whatever it is per quarter mile, that could take a while.
Yes, I haven't done enough with Firefox on Linux to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised if the problem is Firefox interacting with Windows system calls and functions that may not do a good job managing memory. You probably remember the stupid resource management issue back in Windows 98. I wouldn't be surprised to see something equally dumb in Windows 2000 and XP (I run XP on my dual boot.)
Or maybe the Firefox guys just aren't good at porting to Windows.
One more reason for me to get cracking and do more of my day-to-day work on Linux alone.
Well, in all fairness, while I do download a lot of NAKED babes, I also download a lot of NON-NAKED babes...:-)
I have over 3500 pictures of my favorite rock band, The Corrs, and believe me, NONE of them have ever been naked in public (with one possible exception being a much-touted shot of Andrea topless on a beach somewhere - which doesn't even look like her since the woman in the picture actually HAS tits.)
Slashdot Mirror
You're right - so I just stopped reading your post after "Jesus Christ"...
Score: 5, Funny?
It was funny ONCE.
Try factoring ONE.
I think the point should be made that Josh Groban appears to be one of the top album producers in the last couple years, and I never heard of him until he sang with Andrea Corr (of my favorite band, The Corrs.)
And he sings classical (i.e., stuff that sounds like Italian opera to me, like "Canto ala Vida" which is what he sang with Andrea) and pop. So if he's big, I can certainly understand Beethoven.
Not to mention I read an article some years ago that said classical artists were getting smarter these days - the album covers feature hot classical music babes like Vanessa Mae instead of ancient line drawings of Beethoven. In other words, marketing is being applied instead of just selling to random collectors.
"Slashback tonight brings you a larger-than-usual assortment of updates, clarifications and followups"
Or do we get a "dupe Slashback" tomorrow?
You make one serious mistake.
You imply that "our leaders" are merely mistaken in taking the actions of terrorists as justifications for removing rights. You imply that our "leaders" are merely incompetent.
Trust me - our "leaders" know goddamn well what they're doing this for - and it has NOTHING to do with some random Arab fanatics. That's only the cover story, the excuse. And it's likely they deliberately created the cover story as well, certainly by their policies in the Middle East for the last seventy five years.
The nature of the state is to constantly expand its powers until "everything that is not mandatory is forbidden."
I've described the basic concept of the state many times:
"You give us everything you have and do exactly what we tell you to do, and we'll protect you from the bad people on the inside and outside of our borders - and if there aren't any bad people, we'll make some."
That is the exact essence of the state and every single solitary person who works in it. It stems from the human primate hierarchy which in turn is based entirely on the fear of death. Which means every single human being has to tear down everybody above him and stomp on everybody below him, in order to please his primitive notions of deities who might then grant him more life.
In other words, humans are apes with a slightly better ability to conceptualize and no more control over their emotional states than a chimp.
Nothing but Transhumanism and the appropriate enabling technologies can change this.
"However, whenever anybody is asked to site a case in which some poor schmuck actually got shafted by these laws, they suddenly fall silent."
Actually, no, they don't.
Much of the Guantanamo criticism is related to these laws used to snatch people off the street and hold them without charge - including actual US citizens. And while the courts HAVE stomped on the Feds in a number of specific cases, there has been no real attempt by the courts to control the Feds by declaring much of this stuff unconstitutional.
Also, there have been articles in the press about a number of ordinary criminal cases - and even cases where there was no criminal intent at all - which have nothing to do with terrorism where these laws were inappropriately applied.
OTOH, this has been the trend for decades now, so it's no surprise to me that law enforcement is striving for more and more heavy-handed power. This is the nature of law enforcement (and the state itself), as any one who has done time can tell you, or anyone who has ever read any history or real-life stories about law enforcement.
Cops are assholes. Period. It has nothing to do with "a few rotten apples in the barrel" - the barrel itself is riddled with maggots. Always has been, always will be - until we Transhumans run a nanotech broom handle up their asses.
You're a little late with that - freedom went out the door, oh, probably a hundred years ago when Lincoln became dictator. One could probably pick an earlier time, such as when John Adams revoked habeous corpus during Shay's Rebellion (if I got the right Adams).
It doesn't concern me any more. In due time, history shows, all empires get their comeuppance.
Your job is simply to avoid getting squashed in the comeuppance. Concentrate on that, not on trying to change history or primate human nature (unless you're working on nanotech.)
That's actually what I was using.
Plays fine with MPlayer on Linux, though. So it has to be some interaction between the file, the QuickTime codecs, MPlayer and, who knows, maybe the video drivers. But only on Windows.
What pissed me off was the way Windows handled the locked up app. When I tell Windows to kill a process, I want that process DEAD AND BURIED immediately - just like on Linux. I don't want to sit there for five or ten minutes while it rummages around trying to figure out what to do next, and issuing stupid messages that are meaningless under the circumstances.
I think the problem is that "Task Manager" is way more than a task manager - it has all those freakin' tabs with performance animations, and God knows what else. This is Microsoft's problem - too many damn features loaded onto a system utility that should only do ONE THING: manage processes. If somebody wants to monitor system performance, they can get a Sysinternals utility. And the process manager should not sit there and second-guess me when I click on "Kill process!" I can imagine how wonderful this is on a server.
Sorry for the rant - I hate Windows...:-)
Nope - file plays perfectly fine on Mandrake 10.1 using MPlayer.
Of course, it could be some sort of glitch in the file that is not fatal under certain circumstances during playback and is fatal otherwise. Who knows?
I'm amazed at how many glitches show up in playback of video files. I don't know if it's the encoders people use to encode the video or the decoders used to play them back, but the quality of video playback frequently sucks. Of course, if the original video was recorded off a TV card or something, I guess I can't be too surprised that encoders have less than perfect resolution to deal with in the first place.
I don't think it's QuickTime per se anyway - I think it's QuickTime ON WINDOWS that was the problem. And I wasn't even using QuickTime itself - I was using QuickTime Alternative using MPlayer on Windows. In fact, I'd be more inclined to blame Windows or the video drivers than QuickTime.
But what really bugged me was how XP pathetically handled the lockup and shutdown. I mean, ten minutes to recover a locked up app and/or shutdown? Whatever happened to pre-emptive multitasking?
Yup - that was the exact point on my system, too.
And I hate QuickTime, too. Although I'm actually running it with QuickTime Alternative using MPlayer on Windows.
I booted into Mandrake 10.1, managed to get MPlayer installed after a ton of work rebuilding my repositories which must have been out of whack, and the trailer plays fine using a slightly older version of MPlayer than the one someone else used.
And while QuickTime may have been the culprit on Windows, at least if it had happened on Linux, a nice quick "kill -9 " would have been a lot easier than wrestling with that POS Task Manager on XP.
Which is why I use Mandrake - or any other easy to install distro. Slackware and Gentoo are not known for easy installs compared to Mandrake, SUSE and Fedora, let alone Lycoris, Linspire and Xandros.
Well, I was so pissed off at Windows I booted into Mandrake 10.1.
Since my default install only has Kaffeine and it (or XINE) doesn't play MOV files, I went hunting for MPlayer.
Unfortunately my repositories were apparently out of whack - installing mplayer, urpmi told me there were no signatures on several of the dependencies - so I had to spend an hour rebuilding urpmi's database. I then installed mplayer and the KMplayer GUI.
I opened the file. It played perfectly through to the end.
No locking up - and damn sure no ten minutes trying to recover the fucking operating system.
Now, I CAN complain how fucking complicated it is to rebuild your repositories on Mandrake using urpmi. This should be a one-click operation that goes to the Mandrake Web site, downloads a list of repositories, shows them to you, you select the ones you want, it rebuilds the freaking database and go from there.
Thanks to the Easy URPMI Web site, it's not quite that easy. Easy URPMI gives you the repository selection, but then only gives you the command lines to enter into URPMI. Lame, very lame. OTOH, it would be nightmare for a naive user if Easy URPMI didn't exist. OTOH, if you don't know about that Web site, it's still a nightmare.
Geeks, stop releasing software until it works with one click.
Sorry, pal, I tried that.
Hoses Windows XP big time no matter what.
Windows is total shit.
Use Linux only to play this trailer - and I'm not sure that will work.
What has this got to do with "Serenity"?
I downloaded the trailer which is in Quicktime MOV format. Knowing Firefox would probably fuck it up, I downloaded it, then double-clicked it to run it.
It ran. At least I got to see most of it. Toward the end it locked up Windows XP totally. I finally managed to get the Task Manager to come up after a long time, and told it to kill the fucking QuickTime player. No effect.
After getting the Task Manager up a second or third time, I managed to tell Windows to restart.
It then proceeded to repeatedly tell me that Task Manager DLL initialization failed because Windows was shutting down - oh, fucking brilliant, Bill!
Then it proceeded to tell me every single program in the System Tray was being shut down and if I ended them, I'd "lose any data" - another brilliant fucking message, Bill!!
Now I have to click on a dozen messages to get the system to shut the hell down.
JUST END THE FUCKING PROGRAMS AND SHUT THE FUCKING SYSTEM DOWN, YOU MORON!
This is the SECOND fucking time in FOUR HOURS I've had Windows XP totally unable to handle a screwed up application!
JESUS BARON VON CHRIST! I HATE FUCKING WINDOWS!
I should have booted into Mandrake to run this trailer.
Windows as a multimedia player plays everything out there, someone said here the other day. Oh, yeah, right, moron.
Until normal people realize Christianity is not compatible with a free society expect more such "enriching" cross-cultural exchanges...
By the way, the Sheik was right - there IS no difference between an American soldier and a civilian IN IRAQ. No US civilians are there under the current circumstances unless they're there to fuck the Iraqi people. Most of these fucks are ex-military contractors working for the CIA or security companies protecting US occupation employees. An occupier is an occupier. Get the fuck out, no US citizens will be endangered.
This is a DUPE!
Why?
Because it's just another variant on the same old Microsoft lies.
How many times have I said this: Microsoft is run by and employs LIARS. Deliberate, focused, unabashed, paid LIARS. NOTHING said from the lips of a Microsoft employee can be taken to be anything but a lie.
It's time the OSS community started publicly calling these lies what they are: not spin, not marketing, not a difference in opinion - straightforward, unabashed, fucking LIES.
It's time the OSS community started publicly calling the Microsoft people BY NAME what they are: not officers, not Vice Presidents of whatever - straightforward, unabashed, fucking LIARS.
I'll start - this motherfucker Taylor is a fucking LIAR. Give me his email address and I'll send an email to him explicitly stating so.
Since the editors actually looked at it, does this mean it won't be a dupe tomorrow?
Or does it mean it will be a dupe tomorrow?
Score: 1,Insightful.
Moderator: shill, Windows.
Probably.
Someone there suggested clearing and/or closing the Download Manager dialog windows as a solution - I don't see this working at all. I use the Download Manager Tweak which does all that automatically and there's no difference - Firefox still starts to slow dramatically and start behaving strangely after a few dozen downloads. I suspect the effect is worse depending on how big the images downloaded are.
Supposedly this has been fixed in the 1.1 code. It better be, it's a real ugly bug.
Hey! At least it's not a DUPE!
Oh, wait, there's always tomorrow...
"those 20 customers will also be finished 50 times faster"
You're assuming they're ever going to be finished. For some people (gamers),this is a bad assumption.
Unless they use Windows, then sooner or later it will crash and the next guy can get in.
I'll take Ireland.
The Corrs are there (when they aren't in France, Germany, England, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Malaysia, Australia, Taiwan, Africa, Scotland, Switzerland, the US (RARELY!), Canada, Japan, New Zealand...)
I upgraded to 3Mbps recently (and I don't seem to be getting it but that's another story), and the rep told me they're running fiber everywhere to offer 20Mbps within the next twelve months. We'll see.
I doubt we'll see 100Mbps here until there's fiber to the curb. At $250,000 or whatever it is per quarter mile, that could take a while.
Yes, I haven't done enough with Firefox on Linux to tell, but I wouldn't be surprised if the problem is Firefox interacting with Windows system calls and functions that may not do a good job managing memory. You probably remember the stupid resource management issue back in Windows 98. I wouldn't be surprised to see something equally dumb in Windows 2000 and XP (I run XP on my dual boot.)
Or maybe the Firefox guys just aren't good at porting to Windows.
One more reason for me to get cracking and do more of my day-to-day work on Linux alone.
Well, in all fairness, while I do download a lot of NAKED babes, I also download a lot of NON-NAKED babes...:-)
I have over 3500 pictures of my favorite rock band, The Corrs, and believe me, NONE of them have ever been naked in public (with one possible exception being a much-touted shot of Andrea topless on a beach somewhere - which doesn't even look like her since the woman in the picture actually HAS tits.)