You're lucky you just get spam... I get collectors looking for some "Jose" all the time. Apparently my number either used to belong to a deadbeat or was used by some twit to sign up for some credit.
Naah, I get plenty of recognition for my incredible genius. Get lots of people coming to me for my opinion on lots of things. I train clients most of the time, which basically requires leadership skills to keep the classes moving in the right direction, not getting derailed, etc. So, your perceptions are pretty far off.
What I dislike are assholes like you who think that because they're managers they know everything and don't have anything to learn. Yes, management decisions are hard, and you don't like rocking the boat. But sometimes you need to rock the boat to get into calmer waters.
I just use MythTV as a media interface on my TV. And it uses mplayer as the default player, so anything mplayer plays MythTV will play. I have an X2 4600+ with 2GB of RAM that decodes 1080p H.246 MKV files quite well (The Fifth Element to be exact). I think it may be partially because I have an ATI RS690 onboard chip in there (x1250), with the fglrx drivers. Just uses the standard xv video device, nothing fancy.
It may be with your filesystem, drives or possibly just NVidia. An Athlon X2 4600+ drives 1080p video for me fine, but I use an RS690 embedded chip (AMD x1250).
Seconded. I've got my MythTV box hooked up through VGA to my 61" LED Samsung DLP, and 1080p works pretty well. Just gotta beware of the little bits of noise VGA cables can pick up from other cables running near them. I'll get an HDMI cable eventually.
Weird... I have an Athlon X2 4600+ and just an embedded AMD x1250 (RS690 chip), and it plays 1080p quite well on my MythTV media center. But I use mplayer as the backend. Perhaps your drive wasn't up to the reading speed necessary, or VLC is just crap at HD video? Because the only stuttering or weird stuff I get is when I pause and start or skip around in the file, and that's only for less than a second while things sync back up.
If the laptop's already infected, then it can spread to the rest of the network it gets connected to. Voila! Infected, malfunctioning machines on the separate LAN, and no intarweb needed!
Think before you post kids. You could be the stupid management and not know it.
So... should he have said something like "If you hire people who only know MS Office, you get people who only know that program, rather than hiring people who know Office-style concepts, and are thus able to use many different programs"?
You certainly are "really good at your job" if your job includes being incapable of basic reasoning and drawing parallels between what the GPP said and what your position is.
I'm glad I don't have an incompetent asshole like you working here.
Install the server version of Ubuntu. Start up X and set the root window as your kiosk application, and you're good to go. CUPS is web administrable. I could do it easily, and I'm not someone who gets paid to make those kinds of systems.
I'd say the problem is that he's thinking of evolution in too concrete of terms. Evolution doesn't have an endpoint, it doesn't have a goal. It is simply a mechanism. Birds and bats both fly... similar outcomes, completely different evolutionary pathways. "Pure" chance is only involved in the mutation part. The rest is due to selection.
And don't forget that it's not only genes, but the proteins and activation results of those genes. Identical twins have the same genes, but they're activated differently and in different ways, even though they're similar.
That's a stupid argument. It also has a very specific assumption in it that is completely wrong, which makes the whole point moot. It assumes that evolution is perfect and consistent.
The first example of this that is see is when he points to a bacterial flagellum, and if we can't force a bacteria to evolve one after millions of generations, it must mean that it's impossible to have evolved, right? Except that it's completely wrong. There are way too many variables to even think we might be starting from the same point. Hell, we can barely even simulate a relatively simple chemical reaction down to the atomic level on supercomputers now. How could we guarantee that we had the same pressures, atoms, molecules, radiation, etc. that affected the original bacteria?
What we WOULD see is that the bacteria would respond to the pressures that were placed on them. They wouldn't do so the same way as before, but THEY WOULD RESPOND. And that is the ONLY thing that evolution predicts.
Evolution is simply SELECTION. As a horrible analogy, if the only choices of a "dark" color you have are navy blue or forest green, does that make black not a dark color? That doesn't mean someone else, at some other time, had black and used it as a dark color.
The big deal is that it encourages people to eschew facts, and try to fit their observations to a hypothesis, rather than trying to fit a hypothesis to the facts. Basically turning the entire scientific method on it's head is what the problem is. You start with evolution, but it's not a big step from there to alchemy. Allowing any "science" teacher to teach anything that isn't verified or even possibly verifiable through the scientific method is a great way to make our already stupid nation much less intelligent. You Christians bitch about how all our jobs are being taken by foreigners, yet go on to encourage the mediocrity and ignorance of our people. Doesn't really surprise me, though... cause and effect are lost on people like you.
Kubuntu defaults to KDE 3.5 last time I checked. Yup, running Kubuntu 8.04 right here, using KDE 3.5. The remix is KDE4, but hey, they're experimenting with it. You can OPTIONALLY install it, but you don't have to run with it if you don't want to. But they can't get feedback if no one uses it.
That's because they moved to udev, I believe. If you want the "old" functionality, you can probably tweak the udev rules yourself. It's not terribly difficult or hard to figure out. Probably just write a script, or hell, create persistent mountpoints since you likely only have a few hotplugged devices that you use.
You aren't much of a geek, then. Preferring the GUI for CERTAIN TASKS is a good thing. But the GUI is simply not the best interface for everything. There are some things that are much better done with the CLI, which is what I think the GPP was getting at. Don't stop development of the command-line interface and tools simply because we want to appeal to grandmas and other people scared of the command line.
Meh. I (and a lot of my friends) own full copies of many games, but still get the cracks and pirated versions. It's just a hell of a lot easier to play, I can keep the disc images on my machine (or not even need them), rather than trying to cart around a bunch of CD's or trying to keep them in pristine condition going in and out of the drive all the time.
The no return with open package isn't just because of piracy... it's because people would use big-box stores as rental stores. Get a game, play through it, return it and get another one, all "free". What I'd be most impressed with is if they did a return policy like Gamestop does. 7 days, no questions asked, after that, you're SOL. 7 days is long enough that you can return it if it sucks, but short enough that you can't play through most games worth money, assuming you're a normal person. There may be a few people who abuse it, but I think that would be a solution that would appease the greatest number of people, and get more people buying games again.
Farmers easily did 80 hours a week during harvest and planting. Working from sunup to sundown, as long as they could see, every day until it was done. I think you think too little of the amount of work it takes to grow food... try growing a garden sometime. But that was only a couple times a year... it wasn't constantly.
See, I like being available for emergencies for family and such. Or if my brother and his fiancee just want to go out to dinner or something. So just turning off the phone isn't really something that will make me happier... it'll just push my family and friends away. OTOH, I will look at who's calling, and ignore it if I don't recognize the number, or don't want to talk to them. Just gotta listen to your internal voice on some of those things, rather than having the "Phone rings, answer it!" reaction.
Personally, I have two phones and a SIM card. I switch from my 8800 to my SLVR when I want to be phone-only (and want a device that's not expensive to replace should it break). People can call me, and I can check my email on a *gasp* COMPUTER if I really, really want to. But the Blackberry works as a mobile modem, a GPS, and lots of other nice toys alongside getting instant email alerts while I'm traveling for business, so it's pretty nice to have in general. I like knowing what's going on with the customer I'm working with, even if it's just contract updates or discussions I'm only CC'd on.
That said, I also use it because of the company culture. I know people don't expect me to respond to email at all times of the night unless we're in a crunch for a project, which happens maybe 2-3 times a year, which I think is reasonable. If we weren't a small company that operated so well together and tends to do the "right" thing in general, I wouldn't be as happy about having the leash.
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[mkv] Track ID 2: audio (A_AC3) "English (AC3)", -aid 0, -alang eng
[mkv] Will play video track 1.
Matroska file format detected.
VIDEO: [avc1] 1920x800 24bpp 23.976 fps 0.0 kbps ( 0.0 kbyte/s)
ID_FILENAME=The Fifth Element - HD1080p.mkv
I'm pretty sure that [avc1] is H.264, so yes, it is H.264. Didn't realize it was only 800px high, though. I thought it was 1080. Whoops.
You're lucky you just get spam... I get collectors looking for some "Jose" all the time. Apparently my number either used to belong to a deadbeat or was used by some twit to sign up for some credit.
Naah, I get plenty of recognition for my incredible genius. Get lots of people coming to me for my opinion on lots of things. I train clients most of the time, which basically requires leadership skills to keep the classes moving in the right direction, not getting derailed, etc. So, your perceptions are pretty far off.
What I dislike are assholes like you who think that because they're managers they know everything and don't have anything to learn. Yes, management decisions are hard, and you don't like rocking the boat. But sometimes you need to rock the boat to get into calmer waters.
That's an unknown option on mplayer (at least v1.0rc2). Where did you get that?
They put Linux in a sandbox from what I hear. It's actually blocking, they deny addressing of the video chip without the proper key I believe.
I just use MythTV as a media interface on my TV. And it uses mplayer as the default player, so anything mplayer plays MythTV will play. I have an X2 4600+ with 2GB of RAM that decodes 1080p H.246 MKV files quite well (The Fifth Element to be exact). I think it may be partially because I have an ATI RS690 onboard chip in there (x1250), with the fglrx drivers. Just uses the standard xv video device, nothing fancy.
It may be with your filesystem, drives or possibly just NVidia. An Athlon X2 4600+ drives 1080p video for me fine, but I use an RS690 embedded chip (AMD x1250).
Seconded. I've got my MythTV box hooked up through VGA to my 61" LED Samsung DLP, and 1080p works pretty well. Just gotta beware of the little bits of noise VGA cables can pick up from other cables running near them. I'll get an HDMI cable eventually.
Weird... I have an Athlon X2 4600+ and just an embedded AMD x1250 (RS690 chip), and it plays 1080p quite well on my MythTV media center. But I use mplayer as the backend. Perhaps your drive wasn't up to the reading speed necessary, or VLC is just crap at HD video? Because the only stuttering or weird stuff I get is when I pause and start or skip around in the file, and that's only for less than a second while things sync back up.
Send it to me? I'll even pay shipping ;)
MythTV uses mplayer to play the videos. So really, your solution is exactly what MythTV uses, except MythTV gives you a nice interface for a TV set.
And 1080i is about half the bandwidth of 1080p. There's a big difference between decoding the two.
If the laptop's already infected, then it can spread to the rest of the network it gets connected to. Voila! Infected, malfunctioning machines on the separate LAN, and no intarweb needed!
Think before you post kids. You could be the stupid management and not know it.
So... should he have said something like "If you hire people who only know MS Office, you get people who only know that program, rather than hiring people who know Office-style concepts, and are thus able to use many different programs"?
You certainly are "really good at your job" if your job includes being incapable of basic reasoning and drawing parallels between what the GPP said and what your position is.
I'm glad I don't have an incompetent asshole like you working here.
Install the server version of Ubuntu. Start up X and set the root window as your kiosk application, and you're good to go. CUPS is web administrable. I could do it easily, and I'm not someone who gets paid to make those kinds of systems.
Go troll elsewhere.
I'd say the problem is that he's thinking of evolution in too concrete of terms. Evolution doesn't have an endpoint, it doesn't have a goal. It is simply a mechanism. Birds and bats both fly... similar outcomes, completely different evolutionary pathways. "Pure" chance is only involved in the mutation part. The rest is due to selection.
And don't forget that it's not only genes, but the proteins and activation results of those genes. Identical twins have the same genes, but they're activated differently and in different ways, even though they're similar.
That's a stupid argument. It also has a very specific assumption in it that is completely wrong, which makes the whole point moot. It assumes that evolution is perfect and consistent.
The first example of this that is see is when he points to a bacterial flagellum, and if we can't force a bacteria to evolve one after millions of generations, it must mean that it's impossible to have evolved, right? Except that it's completely wrong. There are way too many variables to even think we might be starting from the same point. Hell, we can barely even simulate a relatively simple chemical reaction down to the atomic level on supercomputers now. How could we guarantee that we had the same pressures, atoms, molecules, radiation, etc. that affected the original bacteria?
What we WOULD see is that the bacteria would respond to the pressures that were placed on them. They wouldn't do so the same way as before, but THEY WOULD RESPOND. And that is the ONLY thing that evolution predicts.
Evolution is simply SELECTION. As a horrible analogy, if the only choices of a "dark" color you have are navy blue or forest green, does that make black not a dark color? That doesn't mean someone else, at some other time, had black and used it as a dark color.
The big deal is that it encourages people to eschew facts, and try to fit their observations to a hypothesis, rather than trying to fit a hypothesis to the facts. Basically turning the entire scientific method on it's head is what the problem is. You start with evolution, but it's not a big step from there to alchemy. Allowing any "science" teacher to teach anything that isn't verified or even possibly verifiable through the scientific method is a great way to make our already stupid nation much less intelligent. You Christians bitch about how all our jobs are being taken by foreigners, yet go on to encourage the mediocrity and ignorance of our people. Doesn't really surprise me, though... cause and effect are lost on people like you.
Kubuntu defaults to KDE 3.5 last time I checked. Yup, running Kubuntu 8.04 right here, using KDE 3.5. The remix is KDE4, but hey, they're experimenting with it. You can OPTIONALLY install it, but you don't have to run with it if you don't want to. But they can't get feedback if no one uses it.
What was it you were bitching about again?
That's because they moved to udev, I believe. If you want the "old" functionality, you can probably tweak the udev rules yourself. It's not terribly difficult or hard to figure out. Probably just write a script, or hell, create persistent mountpoints since you likely only have a few hotplugged devices that you use.
You aren't much of a geek, then. Preferring the GUI for CERTAIN TASKS is a good thing. But the GUI is simply not the best interface for everything. There are some things that are much better done with the CLI, which is what I think the GPP was getting at. Don't stop development of the command-line interface and tools simply because we want to appeal to grandmas and other people scared of the command line.
Meh. I (and a lot of my friends) own full copies of many games, but still get the cracks and pirated versions. It's just a hell of a lot easier to play, I can keep the disc images on my machine (or not even need them), rather than trying to cart around a bunch of CD's or trying to keep them in pristine condition going in and out of the drive all the time.
The no return with open package isn't just because of piracy... it's because people would use big-box stores as rental stores. Get a game, play through it, return it and get another one, all "free". What I'd be most impressed with is if they did a return policy like Gamestop does. 7 days, no questions asked, after that, you're SOL. 7 days is long enough that you can return it if it sucks, but short enough that you can't play through most games worth money, assuming you're a normal person. There may be a few people who abuse it, but I think that would be a solution that would appease the greatest number of people, and get more people buying games again.
Farmers easily did 80 hours a week during harvest and planting. Working from sunup to sundown, as long as they could see, every day until it was done. I think you think too little of the amount of work it takes to grow food... try growing a garden sometime. But that was only a couple times a year... it wasn't constantly.
See, I like being available for emergencies for family and such. Or if my brother and his fiancee just want to go out to dinner or something. So just turning off the phone isn't really something that will make me happier... it'll just push my family and friends away. OTOH, I will look at who's calling, and ignore it if I don't recognize the number, or don't want to talk to them. Just gotta listen to your internal voice on some of those things, rather than having the "Phone rings, answer it!" reaction.
Personally, I have two phones and a SIM card. I switch from my 8800 to my SLVR when I want to be phone-only (and want a device that's not expensive to replace should it break). People can call me, and I can check my email on a *gasp* COMPUTER if I really, really want to. But the Blackberry works as a mobile modem, a GPS, and lots of other nice toys alongside getting instant email alerts while I'm traveling for business, so it's pretty nice to have in general. I like knowing what's going on with the customer I'm working with, even if it's just contract updates or discussions I'm only CC'd on.
That said, I also use it because of the company culture. I know people don't expect me to respond to email at all times of the night unless we're in a crunch for a project, which happens maybe 2-3 times a year, which I think is reasonable. If we weren't a small company that operated so well together and tends to do the "right" thing in general, I wouldn't be as happy about having the leash.