Problem is that most services (currently) that can communicate with FB users requires that you have a FB account--so that it knows WHICH FB users to communicate with.
The main reason, in my mind, to upgrade is being able to effectively use 64-bit machines fully--and have more than 4GB of RAM.
Yes you need new machines to do this, but really, if you are buying NEW machines, you should probably upgrade. The question then becomes a matter of whether or not new machines are worthwhile. Your old machines may be still serviceable, but would newer machines result in getting work done enough faster to offset (even partially) the cost of the upgrade.
In many cases, the answer is no--a LOT of secretaries & folks that mainly do word processing are better off just staying where they are--their machines are fast enough for what they do, and additional RAM & extra cores aren't going to make a difference.
That said, if you are doing statistical analysis, engineering, graphic design, programming (and compiling), and a number of other jobs, then you should ABSOLUTELY be on a very aggressive upgrade schedule. Additionally, 8GB of RAM is more than just a good idea for many of those jobs--some of them should be stuffing as MUCH memory as they can into their machines so that they can do their jobs more efficiently.
In any work setting the bottleneck for employee performance should not be the environment or resources, but rather human capacities. That's the ideal. Obviously cost of achieving that and other considerations prevent most companies from getting to the point where that's true--but it should be the goal.
So either move to Win7-x64 OR move to another 64-bit OS with lots of power & memory in the hardware. Staying where you are only makes sense if you are doing mostly word processing.
All I can gather from the last episode was that everything that was presented, happened to the characters. It wasn't a dream, etc. They did get stranded on the island, they did get off it and they did return.
The flash sideways scenes had no specific date/time associated with them. In fact, from what I can tell, it was actually some time in the future as it was a type of purgatory where all the dead "friends" meet up to realize they are actually dead and need to move on. So in that sense, it's in the future but really time has/had no meaning there.
So, no questions were answered, except, in the end, they get to spend eternity together and I'm guessing Hugo passed the torch onto some unknown heir. The island probably lives on with more people going there to figure out who gets to protect the place.
I'm still baffled by what the deal with Walt was and what did Juliet mean by "it worked" with her last words (nuke incident)?
Agg.. I suppose if you assume the show had to end last night, I guess they did an ok job. I wasn't left saying "WTF?" but I certainly didn't feel like I was looking at a completed jigsaw puzzle either.
You weren't? Cause I certainly was. My wife found it moving and touching and all that, but in the end, I'm just left wishing I has SOME FREAKING ANSWERS!!!!!! To ANYTHING IMPORTANT!!!!
The Dharma initiative? Gone--no explanations. The Light? No answers. The OTHER Light? Lame--and NOT an answer. The Island? Nope, not a single REAL answer. The Others? Nope, not a single answer! How did Jacob learn more about the island? Nope, nothing (in fact this question wasn't even RAISED until late season 6, so...). Who is the woman that killed Jacob's real mom? (Again a late-coming question).
Answers in general--NOPE!!
SO screw all this...I'm officially ticked at the waste of time it all was...
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this: if the doctor isn't an expert in statistics, how can he properly evaluate the effectiveness of the medicine he's handing you?
Can he say (with any really justified confidence) that it will actually help? Can he claim to know how the true probability that you have disease X when manifesting symptoms y & z? Does he understand the effect of false positives?
Without a solid grounding in stats, the answers are sadly, no he cannot make justified statements about the effectiveness of the medicine (sorry, relying on the pamphlets handed out by big pharma to tell him means taht i want to go elsewhere for my medical treatment).
My signature has NEVER been more appropriate.
MANY people using stats have NO CLUE what they are doing, but they do it VERY carefully.
I hate it when I see people double-dip on data sets....
For my thesis, approximately 5% of my correlations were statistically significant, and even THOSE were WEAK. I told my committee that I wasn't confident of any of the relationships.
Yes, I expect my doc to know stats. The THEORY behind them is just as important as the math.
I've been using Deposit@Home for a few years now. I'm not sure if you have to have a credit card through them or not to make it work, but it is a very slick process.
I was confused why this is news--the USAA iPhone app was featured on/. when it first became public information. Other banks are just slow I guess....
Huh? I use it with firefox all the time....you must have something wacky going on. I haven't tried it with IE64 bit since I loaded win7-64bit. I'll give it a shot tonight....
They are, if nothing else, extremely cautious about that sort of thing from my experience. I bank with them (as well as have my auto insurance through them). I wouldn't switch away for some imagined slight. Not after having dealt with the HELL that other banks put you through if there is some sort of customer service needed. USAA is by far and away the BEST customer service bank I have EVER dealt with. Bar none. Nope, I'm not switching banks.
I've been using their deposit@home service for a while now, and it's great. This is just a minor evolution of that (camera instead of scanner), and I don't see much to make me think it's a huge difference.
Since none of them support OS X unless you have an Intel processor, I'm ticked at them all. XBMC DOES, but so far I can't get it to stream Netflix OR Hulu (there are ways, but they require you to have another computer and to purchase Playon...FAIL).
Look, I'm not going to shell out hundreds of dollars just to have a media center computer. I happen to have some older hardware that is suitable for the task. PPC support makes sense because I think a fair number of people are walking the same path. So until Boxee gets off their collective butts and decides to support PPC, I'll pass.
Seriously, does anyone REALLY this to work? All it will do is cut down on the absolutely MOST casual pirates and annoy legitimate customers. The tighter they make it, the more this is true. Determined individuals WILL ALWAYS find a way to circumvent their measures. ALWAYS.
I'm not likely to pirate an OS...I like being able to run it with all the updates and I'm happy knowing that my software is legit...but that's certainly not even a close consideration as to what most people are going to do.
Look, if you don't like paying MS for your OS, DON'T USE WINDOWS!!!
Enjoy your next baby, pal. Cause I guarantee that you WILL end up pregnant if you go bareback at all and you have a reasonably fertile wife and you aren't firing blanks.
That's how I (and a BUNCH of other fathers) ended up with my second kid. Sorry, but a reliable male contraceptive sounds great. And honestly, something that quits farking around with my wife's sex drive (as in, killing hers) sounds freaking awesome to me. Even if it drops mine by a bit, if she's up for it, I'd be happy.
I are confused. So/. is now an MMO? It's like the silly game 'Achievement Unlocked' a meta game on various flash-game aggregator sites like Kongregate. Bizarre.
This is correct, in principle, but I think you'll find that in practice what happens is that in MOST courses there is enough wiggle room for the 'teacher's ire' factor, which means that the teacher suddenly starts being much harsher regarding length of paper, grammar, and other 'soft' portions of the grading criteria. Of course, in some courses (physics) there may not be a paper, so that's out--but there are an AWFUL lot of courses with a 'class participation' grade, which very frequently boils down to 'don't tick me off'. It can often make the difference if you are near the edge of a letter grade (A vs. B, etc), and can either hurt you a lot or significantly help you if the teacher is pleased with your performance.
In any case, this is a VERY bad idea on the part of the teacher. It WILL backfire--if the teacher can't find a more creative way to prevent cheating then she needs to be fired.
Actually, what I would prefer to see, rather than a ribbon interface, is a completely CUSTOMIZEABLE interface. Separate the interface out from the core programming into a easily hacked XML-based language and script and make it accessible and you'll see a TON of USERS take over the interface design aspect of it.
Some of them will re-implement the MS Office ribbon. Some of them will re-implement the current 00.o interface. Others will come up with something completely new and innovative. Much of which will be completely unworkable for many people. Some of it will be fantastically brilliant however. BUT IT SHOULD BE DONE!
No, those are the US Senators FROM SC. Ford is a senator in the SC State Senate. Very different beast. At least pay some attention to the facts on the ground.
All that said...while I don't typically swear much, this guy's a moron and needs to be removed from office painfully.
Seriously...that's fine. If you live alone OR it's just you and the SO. And maybe one kid. But if you are looking at a larger family (er, let's try 4 kids), then that kind of space just isn't going to cut it in terms of psychological health. Then there's the family I know with 7 (8?) kids (I've lost track). You seriously want them to move into a smaller house? Not a chance. They need that kind of space. And acreage. It's actually greener/more sustainable for that size of a family to have acreage and work some land (as in GROW some freaking vegetables and have some chickens/cows/goats) than to live in a freaking apartment in the middle of an urban concrete mass.
You can argue that a lifestyle choice about not having a larger family is more sustainable, but I don't know that it's ethical to make that call for another person. I've talked to some people from China recently about their feelings regarding the one-child policy, and they felt that it was detrimental to the country in some ways (and certainly to the children involved). That said, they also felt that it may have still been the right decision for the country as a whole in terms of reducing poverty overall and modernizing the country. Does that make it ethical? I'm not sure it does.
It certainly doesn't give soemone in this country the right to say 'you are an idiot for having a large family and living in an appropriately sized home for that family'.
I was thinking essentially the same thing, and had to read down the page to make sure no one else had the same thought.
In fact--why would anyone consider asking ANYONE BESIDES Terry?
Oh, fine, he has Alzheimer's. Big FARKING DEAL! It's serious, yes, but I'm certain he's getting the best care anyone can get, and I'm sure he's got the capacity for a story like this in him still. I'd love it.
Terry Pratchett is, and always will be, one of my favorite authors. I hope he is cured or at the VERY least the progress is halted for a good long time. His books are worth their weight in freaking platinum. Or something.
Except this wouldn't be labor scarcity, but labor glut, and the traditional recourse for that has been war. Historically speaking of course. Of course, it hasn't happened very often, so we don't have a big sample, but the truth is that when there is a labor glut, poverty and crime spike, and there are a LOT of bored people. This often followed by revolution or the country gets scared and decides it is time to go to war to prevent revolution.
Labor glut is just as bad as labor scarcity. You want everyone to be gainfully employed, but you don't want too much of an over demand.
As an aspiring writer, and someone who tends to read a lot about writing, and reads a LOT (the last of which hardly makes me unique in this crowd, but there you go), lets just say that sex scenes are, by definition poorly written, and the MORE graphic they are, the poorer the writing. They may function perfectly for providing pornographic imagery but as literature they stink. I find that if an author wants to include a sex scene, the BEST ones are those that are minimalistic, initiate the romance, and leave it alone. Let the reader imagine the details, if they so choose.
There are a number of reasons for this. First is that this means that there is less question of age-appropriateness (and yes you can still handle the same themes of love, compassion, romance, etc within a work while remaining very minimalistic in this regard). Second, ALL sex-scenes can a break from the book. If they are sufficiently erotic that they actually elicit a reaction from the reader, then they may actually be jolted from the story (this is bad). Third, sex scenes don't generally advance the story. In most cases the actual description of the sex is inconsequential to the story, and is therefore filler. This is bad in many ways. On the other hand in the rare cases in which the actual sex scene is crucial to the story, I have no problems with its inclusion, but that is an exceptionally rare situation, and almost always a contrivance.
With all that said, as a writer, sometimes a scenario just suggests itself as necessary, and you have to include it. In these cases, I have no problems with it.
my biggest complaint with oovoo (other than cost, mind you), is the fact that it sucks processing power. Mind you, I recognize that ANY solution for this is going to do the same thing to a certain extent, but it wasn't really eating bandwidth the same way it was killing 60% (at a minimum) of my processor (athlon xp 3200+, older proc, I know, but really, some of the other people I know complained of the same thing)
oovoo has a slick interface, but I'm pretty much an unhappy camper with the idea of _having_ to pay them when they decide they want force it out of me, and they don't want to support linux.
Besides, their beta version for the mac had a massive memory leak (using 800MB+ after about 2 hours, while the windows version never got over 50MB). Don't know if they fixed it.
I'll check the other's. Gizmo wasn't looking so hot, though.
Look, reading back over that, it came off much more offensive than I intended. I'm sorry.
I did try openMCU, and the documentation is terrible. Please don't take that the wrong way. I'm normally a reasonable guy, but I've been really frustrated by this whole situation, since it looks like a niche that someone in the F/OSS community should be anxious to fix, since it's really useful for a working group that's spread out to have. Yes it sucks a LOT of bandwidth, and yes it does suck a lot of processing power, but it is really nice to have access to.
Again, I'm sorry about the harshness of my response, I really didn't mean for it to come off that way, but I've been so frustrated looking for documentation on openMCU that I overreacted. I hope you'll accept my apologies.
Hey, look, I'll admit that saying that my reaction was harsh, but look at it like this: I'm willing to help document anything. I don't program much, but I do read code (albeit poorly). The problem with telling someone to use a program that has no documentation is that it isn't helpful. It's actually _worse_ than saying RTFM. Writing a program that has obscure methods of implementation (eg, no user interface), and then not providing a user interface or documentation is bad enough. For someone to then tell me to use it is frustrating.
I apologize because my response was poor, but what I won't apologize for is this: saying that telling someone to use a project without documentation is frustrating. It is.
If the openMCU developers are still around and want help writing the documentation, I'd love to help. I'm more than willing to help _any_ OSS project that needs someone to write documentation. That's something I can do. I'm a stickler for the fact that we need better documentation for the details of software, and I don't think we do enough for the non-technical folks out there.
Now, let me ask this: how helpful was the parent comment to which I replied? Moderately. I had actually evaluated openMCU prior to posting (something I didn't mention because I didn't want to post a novel-length question), without success largely due to the fact that it has poor to non-existent documentation. You will also notice that this is not the only post to mention openMCU.
Not trying to be defensive, and I'm sorry for being offensive.
So that doesn't really help much now does it. A project or software sans documentation is as good as no software. Sorry, but telling me to use a project without documentation when I've asked for something more presentable is as good as spitting in my face.
Now if the community wants openMCU to be useful, then document it. I'd even be willing to work with the developers to write the documentation (that I can do, I'm not much of a programmer, but I can write).
And as I said in the post, the H323 stuff is not easily set up. That's part of my frustration. Let me put it this way. We actually installed OpenMCU, but then there's almost zero documentation on how to properly configure the server and then connect to it. Point me to this, and I'd gladly use it.
But it shouldn't be that complicated, and ad-hoc networks should be possible, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Problem is that most services (currently) that can communicate with FB users requires that you have a FB account--so that it knows WHICH FB users to communicate with.
The main reason, in my mind, to upgrade is being able to effectively use 64-bit machines fully--and have more than 4GB of RAM.
Yes you need new machines to do this, but really, if you are buying NEW machines, you should probably upgrade. The question then becomes a matter of whether or not new machines are worthwhile. Your old machines may be still serviceable, but would newer machines result in getting work done enough faster to offset (even partially) the cost of the upgrade.
In many cases, the answer is no--a LOT of secretaries & folks that mainly do word processing are better off just staying where they are--their machines are fast enough for what they do, and additional RAM & extra cores aren't going to make a difference.
That said, if you are doing statistical analysis, engineering, graphic design, programming (and compiling), and a number of other jobs, then you should ABSOLUTELY be on a very aggressive upgrade schedule. Additionally, 8GB of RAM is more than just a good idea for many of those jobs--some of them should be stuffing as MUCH memory as they can into their machines so that they can do their jobs more efficiently.
In any work setting the bottleneck for employee performance should not be the environment or resources, but rather human capacities. That's the ideal. Obviously cost of achieving that and other considerations prevent most companies from getting to the point where that's true--but it should be the goal.
So either move to Win7-x64 OR move to another 64-bit OS with lots of power & memory in the hardware. Staying where you are only makes sense if you are doing mostly word processing.
All I can gather from the last episode was that everything that was presented, happened to the characters. It wasn't a dream, etc. They did get stranded on the island, they did get off it and they did return.
The flash sideways scenes had no specific date/time associated with them. In fact, from what I can tell, it was actually some time in the future as it was a type of purgatory where all the dead "friends" meet up to realize they are actually dead and need to move on. So in that sense, it's in the future but really time has/had no meaning there.
So, no questions were answered, except, in the end, they get to spend eternity together and I'm guessing Hugo passed the torch onto some unknown heir. The island probably lives on with more people going there to figure out who gets to protect the place.
I'm still baffled by what the deal with Walt was and what did Juliet mean by "it worked" with her last words (nuke incident)?
Agg.. I suppose if you assume the show had to end last night, I guess they did an ok job. I wasn't left saying "WTF?" but I certainly didn't feel like I was looking at a completed jigsaw puzzle either.
You weren't? Cause I certainly was. My wife found it moving and touching and all that, but in the end, I'm just left wishing I has SOME FREAKING ANSWERS!!!!!! To ANYTHING IMPORTANT!!!!
The Dharma initiative? Gone--no explanations. The Light? No answers. The OTHER Light? Lame--and NOT an answer. The Island? Nope, not a single REAL answer. The Others? Nope, not a single answer! How did Jacob learn more about the island? Nope, nothing (in fact this question wasn't even RAISED until late season 6, so...). Who is the woman that killed Jacob's real mom? (Again a late-coming question).
Answers in general--NOPE!!
SO screw all this...I'm officially ticked at the waste of time it all was...
I think most Tolkien fans would agree that elves had higher morals than that.
Hollywood, however, has none. Thus we get...Frodo saving the shire from dinosaurs on frickin pogo sticks--30 years before he was born.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say this:
if the doctor isn't an expert in statistics, how can he properly evaluate the effectiveness of the medicine he's handing you?
Can he say (with any really justified confidence) that it will actually help? Can he claim to know how the true probability that you have disease X when manifesting symptoms y & z? Does he understand the effect of false positives?
Without a solid grounding in stats, the answers are sadly, no he cannot make justified statements about the effectiveness of the medicine (sorry, relying on the pamphlets handed out by big pharma to tell him means taht i want to go elsewhere for my medical treatment).
My signature has NEVER been more appropriate.
MANY people using stats have NO CLUE what they are doing, but they do it VERY carefully.
I hate it when I see people double-dip on data sets....
For my thesis, approximately 5% of my correlations were statistically significant, and even THOSE were WEAK. I told my committee that I wasn't confident of any of the relationships.
Yes, I expect my doc to know stats. The THEORY behind them is just as important as the math.
They do.
I've been using Deposit@Home for a few years now. I'm not sure if you have to have a credit card through them or not to make it work, but it is a very slick process.
I was confused why this is news--the USAA iPhone app was featured on /. when it first became public information. Other banks are just slow I guess....
Huh? I use it with firefox all the time....you must have something wacky going on. I haven't tried it with IE64 bit since I loaded win7-64bit. I'll give it a shot tonight....
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
You don't seem to know much about USAA...
They are, if nothing else, extremely cautious about that sort of thing from my experience. I bank with them (as well as have my auto insurance through them). I wouldn't switch away for some imagined slight. Not after having dealt with the HELL that other banks put you through if there is some sort of customer service needed. USAA is by far and away the BEST customer service bank I have EVER dealt with. Bar none. Nope, I'm not switching banks.
I've been using their deposit@home service for a while now, and it's great. This is just a minor evolution of that (camera instead of scanner), and I don't see much to make me think it's a huge difference.
Since none of them support OS X unless you have an Intel processor, I'm ticked at them all. XBMC DOES, but so far I can't get it to stream Netflix OR Hulu (there are ways, but they require you to have another computer and to purchase Playon...FAIL).
Look, I'm not going to shell out hundreds of dollars just to have a media center computer. I happen to have some older hardware that is suitable for the task. PPC support makes sense because I think a fair number of people are walking the same path. So until Boxee gets off their collective butts and decides to support PPC, I'll pass.
YOU SUCK!
Seriously, does anyone REALLY this to work? All it will do is cut down on the absolutely MOST casual pirates and annoy legitimate customers. The tighter they make it, the more this is true. Determined individuals WILL ALWAYS find a way to circumvent their measures. ALWAYS.
I'm not likely to pirate an OS...I like being able to run it with all the updates and I'm happy knowing that my software is legit...but that's certainly not even a close consideration as to what most people are going to do.
Look, if you don't like paying MS for your OS, DON'T USE WINDOWS!!!
Enjoy your next baby, pal. Cause I guarantee that you WILL end up pregnant if you go bareback at all and you have a reasonably fertile wife and you aren't firing blanks.
That's how I (and a BUNCH of other fathers) ended up with my second kid. Sorry, but a reliable male contraceptive sounds great. And honestly, something that quits farking around with my wife's sex drive (as in, killing hers) sounds freaking awesome to me. Even if it drops mine by a bit, if she's up for it, I'd be happy.
I are confused. So /. is now an MMO? It's like the silly game 'Achievement Unlocked' a meta game on various flash-game aggregator sites like Kongregate. Bizarre.
Now what? I don't even know what to do.
This is correct, in principle, but I think you'll find that in practice what happens is that in MOST courses there is enough wiggle room for the 'teacher's ire' factor, which means that the teacher suddenly starts being much harsher regarding length of paper, grammar, and other 'soft' portions of the grading criteria. Of course, in some courses (physics) there may not be a paper, so that's out--but there are an AWFUL lot of courses with a 'class participation' grade, which very frequently boils down to 'don't tick me off'. It can often make the difference if you are near the edge of a letter grade (A vs. B, etc), and can either hurt you a lot or significantly help you if the teacher is pleased with your performance.
In any case, this is a VERY bad idea on the part of the teacher. It WILL backfire--if the teacher can't find a more creative way to prevent cheating then she needs to be fired.
Actually, what I would prefer to see, rather than a ribbon interface, is a completely CUSTOMIZEABLE interface. Separate the interface out from the core programming into a easily hacked XML-based language and script and make it accessible and you'll see a TON of USERS take over the interface design aspect of it.
Some of them will re-implement the MS Office ribbon. Some of them will re-implement the current 00.o interface. Others will come up with something completely new and innovative. Much of which will be completely unworkable for many people. Some of it will be fantastically brilliant however. BUT IT SHOULD BE DONE!
No, those are the US Senators FROM SC. Ford is a senator in the SC State Senate. Very different beast. At least pay some attention to the facts on the ground.
All that said...while I don't typically swear much, this guy's a moron and needs to be removed from office painfully.
680 sq ft? What?
Seriously...that's fine. If you live alone OR it's just you and the SO. And maybe one kid. But if you are looking at a larger family (er, let's try 4 kids), then that kind of space just isn't going to cut it in terms of psychological health. Then there's the family I know with 7 (8?) kids (I've lost track). You seriously want them to move into a smaller house? Not a chance. They need that kind of space. And acreage. It's actually greener/more sustainable for that size of a family to have acreage and work some land (as in GROW some freaking vegetables and have some chickens/cows/goats) than to live in a freaking apartment in the middle of an urban concrete mass.
You can argue that a lifestyle choice about not having a larger family is more sustainable, but I don't know that it's ethical to make that call for another person. I've talked to some people from China recently about their feelings regarding the one-child policy, and they felt that it was detrimental to the country in some ways (and certainly to the children involved). That said, they also felt that it may have still been the right decision for the country as a whole in terms of reducing poverty overall and modernizing the country. Does that make it ethical? I'm not sure it does.
It certainly doesn't give soemone in this country the right to say 'you are an idiot for having a large family and living in an appropriately sized home for that family'.
I was thinking essentially the same thing, and had to read down the page to make sure no one else had the same thought.
In fact--why would anyone consider asking ANYONE BESIDES Terry?
Oh, fine, he has Alzheimer's. Big FARKING DEAL! It's serious, yes, but I'm certain he's getting the best care anyone can get, and I'm sure he's got the capacity for a story like this in him still. I'd love it.
Terry Pratchett is, and always will be, one of my favorite authors. I hope he is cured or at the VERY least the progress is halted for a good long time. His books are worth their weight in freaking platinum. Or something.
Except this wouldn't be labor scarcity, but labor glut, and the traditional recourse for that has been war. Historically speaking of course. Of course, it hasn't happened very often, so we don't have a big sample, but the truth is that when there is a labor glut, poverty and crime spike, and there are a LOT of bored people. This often followed by revolution or the country gets scared and decides it is time to go to war to prevent revolution.
Labor glut is just as bad as labor scarcity. You want everyone to be gainfully employed, but you don't want too much of an over demand.
Actually there is a LOT of truth to this.
As an aspiring writer, and someone who tends to read a lot about writing, and reads a LOT (the last of which hardly makes me unique in this crowd, but there you go), lets just say that sex scenes are, by definition poorly written, and the MORE graphic they are, the poorer the writing. They may function perfectly for providing pornographic imagery but as literature they stink. I find that if an author wants to include a sex scene, the BEST ones are those that are minimalistic, initiate the romance, and leave it alone. Let the reader imagine the details, if they so choose.
There are a number of reasons for this. First is that this means that there is less question of age-appropriateness (and yes you can still handle the same themes of love, compassion, romance, etc within a work while remaining very minimalistic in this regard). Second, ALL sex-scenes can a break from the book. If they are sufficiently erotic that they actually elicit a reaction from the reader, then they may actually be jolted from the story (this is bad). Third, sex scenes don't generally advance the story. In most cases the actual description of the sex is inconsequential to the story, and is therefore filler. This is bad in many ways. On the other hand in the rare cases in which the actual sex scene is crucial to the story, I have no problems with its inclusion, but that is an exceptionally rare situation, and almost always a contrivance.
With all that said, as a writer, sometimes a scenario just suggests itself as necessary, and you have to include it. In these cases, I have no problems with it.
my biggest complaint with oovoo (other than cost, mind you), is the fact that it sucks processing power. Mind you, I recognize that ANY solution for this is going to do the same thing to a certain extent, but it wasn't really eating bandwidth the same way it was killing 60% (at a minimum) of my processor (athlon xp 3200+, older proc, I know, but really, some of the other people I know complained of the same thing)
oovoo has a slick interface, but I'm pretty much an unhappy camper with the idea of _having_ to pay them when they decide they want force it out of me, and they don't want to support linux.
Besides, their beta version for the mac had a massive memory leak (using 800MB+ after about 2 hours, while the windows version never got over 50MB). Don't know if they fixed it.
I'll check the other's. Gizmo wasn't looking so hot, though.
Thanks for the list, though
Not free from what I can tell. What else do you know.
Look, reading back over that, it came off much more offensive than I intended. I'm sorry.
I did try openMCU, and the documentation is terrible. Please don't take that the wrong way. I'm normally a reasonable guy, but I've been really frustrated by this whole situation, since it looks like a niche that someone in the F/OSS community should be anxious to fix, since it's really useful for a working group that's spread out to have. Yes it sucks a LOT of bandwidth, and yes it does suck a lot of processing power, but it is really nice to have access to.
Again, I'm sorry about the harshness of my response, I really didn't mean for it to come off that way, but I've been so frustrated looking for documentation on openMCU that I overreacted. I hope you'll accept my apologies.
Hey, look, I'll admit that saying that my reaction was harsh, but look at it like this: I'm willing to help document anything. I don't program much, but I do read code (albeit poorly). The problem with telling someone to use a program that has no documentation is that it isn't helpful. It's actually _worse_ than saying RTFM. Writing a program that has obscure methods of implementation (eg, no user interface), and then not providing a user interface or documentation is bad enough. For someone to then tell me to use it is frustrating.
I apologize because my response was poor, but what I won't apologize for is this: saying that telling someone to use a project without documentation is frustrating. It is.
If the openMCU developers are still around and want help writing the documentation, I'd love to help. I'm more than willing to help _any_ OSS project that needs someone to write documentation. That's something I can do. I'm a stickler for the fact that we need better documentation for the details of software, and I don't think we do enough for the non-technical folks out there.
Now, let me ask this: how helpful was the parent comment to which I replied? Moderately. I had actually evaluated openMCU prior to posting (something I didn't mention because I didn't want to post a novel-length question), without success largely due to the fact that it has poor to non-existent documentation. You will also notice that this is not the only post to mention openMCU.
Not trying to be defensive, and I'm sorry for being offensive.
So that doesn't really help much now does it. A project or software sans documentation is as good as no software. Sorry, but telling me to use a project without documentation when I've asked for something more presentable is as good as spitting in my face.
Now if the community wants openMCU to be useful, then document it. I'd even be willing to work with the developers to write the documentation (that I can do, I'm not much of a programmer, but I can write).
And as I said in the post, the H323 stuff is not easily set up. That's part of my frustration. Let me put it this way. We actually installed OpenMCU, but then there's almost zero documentation on how to properly configure the server and then connect to it. Point me to this, and I'd gladly use it.
But it shouldn't be that complicated, and ad-hoc networks should be possible, I think.