if you don't want it shared, don't share it. Seems pretty simple to me - stay away from Redmond and you got nothing to worry about. But what if you WANT to share that info?
45,000 files is nothing - I know people who easily have ten times that. And if it's just about finding redheads with big ones - well.. ok then let's go there: What if you want to put together a slideshow of redheads with big ones? What if you're an old schooler and want it to include those other redheads with not so big ones as well? And what if you want your slideshow to include only "big ones" plus your favorite shots of Julia Hayes and Angie Everhardt? Now you have to navigate to god knows how many directories, fish through thousands of jpegs and add them to some application's "sideshow" list. All so you can enjoy a thirty minute wank. Sure, you can save the slideshow - but repeating this dozens or hundreds of times sounds to me like a huge waste of wanking time.
Enter your data properly, tag it as you add it (and tag the old stuff as you have time) and there's no need to do any more. That directory of 500 Julia Hayes images might be "anonymous" to the database because they're all just numbers and letters, but you only have to select the "JuliaHayes" directory and enter "Julia Hayes Redhead Penthouse Canada usenet dancer height:66 mea:37C-23-34 zoology elephants ballerina" one time to correlate every single file in that folder to the database with those properties. Then the computer will know which are your favorites - they're the ones you keep clicking on and leaving open for minutes at a time.
So now putting together a good wank is only a matter of clicking on your "favorites" link, typing "redheads ++big ones," and enjoying the show. And if sharing this info means it might give some salesdroid the impetus to offer you even more Julia Hayes (ahem) "data"... well, ain't that the point?
I had a direcTV sub and I let it lapse because the quality was so bad the rips I was getting of my favorite tv shows were of MUCH lower quality than what I could download off usenet for free. West Wing, Dark Angel - my gawd, the FOX stations on DirecTV had TERRIBLE quality.
So how are they going to do this? Are they really going to deliver you the 6GB DVD stream of "Signs" or "Moulin Rouge?" I can see networks of DSLams from coast to coast grinding to a halt now. More likely it will be some shit quality rip made by machines in a "ripping factory" - if you have broadband you could ALREADY get anything they have to offer from usenet or bittorrent, in higher quality than they are likely to offer, and get it before these folks get around to "licensing" the content for broadcast from ho-town.
Jack had it wrong all along, and it's sad to see how his antiquated notions have crippled the potential of an entire industry. So long as Hollywood continues to deny broadcasters the ability to compete by offering high quality and convenience in one package, "piracy" is going to grow in the mainstream.
It's not about competing with free, Jack - it's about competing with quality.
Think more like 30GB. Take any person with a digital camera, give them the ability to have at hand any photo ever taken cross referenced by any number of data, and it won't take long at all to amass several GB of thumbnails and tags.
By the time you factor in the near annual cost of replacing DVD-R drives that have failed due to laser burnout it costs about as much today to store data on hard drives as on DVDs. I have 320GB in storage on my desktop that cost all of $200 - why give a fuck if my "search engine" eats up 30GB? These types of accessories are an investment in memory augmentation - buying a bigger hard drive is an incrediby cheap investment for the benefits obtained.
If you want minimal, install gentoo or something and learn to love blackbox. For a long time I used blackbox with mdk8 on 200mhz pentium MMX systems and with only 128MB ram it was pretty damn acceptable and it looked very nice. Minimal is easy - minimal is what linux has been all along.
When I was stuck in windows I used Thumbsplus for this (which, despite its name, will work with just about any MIME type, not just pics). I had several databases, all of them 2GB (for easy backup to DVD). The one thing I have found no acceptable substitute for in linux, ironically, is thumbsplus.
I've been wanting something like this for years. Many times I've stumbled upon a website during a search that seemed mildly interesting for whatever reason at the time but not relevant, only to think a few days later "what was that site where I found...?"
I know that sounds a bit like dashboard, but what I've seen of dashboard falls short of this - it's almost like the two products are the same concepts but built from different directions. When they meet in the middle, many of us will finally have something an order of magnitude closer to our dream desktop.
This just proves yet again "the public will decide what is great in its own time." I'm sure in another twenty years we'll be reliving this shit again and again every saturday night on PBS - right between the Gazillionth rerun of "Lawrence Welk" and the Bazillionth rerun of "Are You Being Served?"
According to Microchip Semiconductor it's been more like 10,000 writes for a few years now. And you don't always have to "write" even if a lot of data is being changed. It's trivially easy for a microprocessor to read a byte to determine whether or not it actually needs to be written before "changing" an area of storage.
But I don't see how bearing lube is going to make hard drives last longer. Most every hard drive failure I've ever seen was due to seek failure in the read heads, not platters that stopped spinning.
Just look at a map of the world. The US is this tiny chunk of land on one side of the globe. Thanks to the greed of the corporations based here, jobs are increasingly moving to those other places that collectively take up about ten times more area. And how many times over do the populations of china and india outnumber us?
It's already happening: you buy or download a copy of your sleek new OS and the first step is to configure the downoad manager to connect to some ftp mirror in one of the free countries of the world. Do I care that mp3s or css are "protected technologies?" Fuck no - and neither do the people I've helped free themselves from the redmond overlord.
Let'em sue. Won't make a damn bit of difference either way - you think ho-town is going to ignore a few Billion chinese who adopt different technological platforms than those of us in the "civilized" west? You really think Russia or Ukraine or even Poland are going to change their copyright system because the screaming brat in the west says so? Fucking christ, have none of you ever ordered online from an overseas vendor?
Already these nations are becoming less vocal about their EU intents: they've already seen one empire crumble this last century, it doesn't take a genius to see we're legislating ourselves into global irrelevance.
The alternative, of course, would be to allow one person of differing beliefs to bend an entire local community over a barrel the second he moves in. Sure, that's fair.
"The community" is allowed to believe whatever the fuck they want - but when they start taking my tax dollars to fund their religious indoctrination then they cross ovr that territory into violating federal law. Lots of people down here also believe niggers should still be segregated to their own "communities" and even lynched for cohabitating with white folk - and every single one of them will quote the Christian Bible as justification of their beliefs. I suppose in your world they should likewise be left to "exercise" these beliefs?
Where the fuck do you see prayer led by teachers in U.S. public school classrooms as a "Constitutional right?"
I'm STILL (re)learning my way around the command line in linux and only recently had the courage to completely remove windows from my machine - but even I have been able to "easily" add an encrypted home directory to my machine. In fact, I encrypt/var and/tmp and/usr, too - and its almost entirely done using the Mandrake install wizard (although it likely works with Suse too). There's bugs in there that had to be figured out and the wizard tells you it can't do things you have to learn to do - but I did it without even knowing (at the beginning) how fstab worked or what a modprobe was. Admittedly it took a few weeks and what seems like hundreds of reinstallations (mostly because I didn't know how to repair a botched job) to figure it out, but once learned it ain't hard to do. And just to save others from having to do "hundreds of reinstalls" I even made a quickie HOWTO and posted it to alt.os.inux.mandrake.
Now I have added scripts to my system that give me all the point and shoot functionality of pgpdisk in windows. All it took was a bit of time to learn the tools (mountloop, mount, umount, etc) and a hack of a shell script I found online and now opening an encrypted filesystem is as easy as clicking it, typing the pass, and pressing enter.
What makes the present system great is its level of abstraction. Having a "thing" one can move around to ANY media without having to create new tools every time is a thing of beauty. It takes a tweaky (and now proprietary) add-on to do this in windows - sticking all the encryption in the fs itself would just be a step back to doing things the Redmond way.
I used my pc as my tv for years now - and I mean years. I haven't owned a TV set since I left LA (where I also worked in the media industry). That was... mid 2000. So I haven't had a TV set in four years now - it's all been my pc runing windows 2000. I had direcTV for a while with one of the first Philips 6000 hard drive recording units (paid through the nose for it, too). And through hours of watching, ripping, recompressing, surfing the internet - the only time MY tv set "bluescreened" on me was when I wasn't actually watching TV, but when I was splitting my attention between a show and an activity and stupidly launched photoshop, which will cause dscaler to BSOD win2k every time.
If one is "watching tv" one's "tv" is not going to BSOD. Even wacky windows doesn't BSOD for no reason - it's either hardware failure or software, and one isn't likely to throw a BSOD when not launching new tasks. Ergo, if one is sitting on one's couching attentively watching a game, one is not likely to be filling half the screen with other processes (like photoshop).
Since going to linux, of course, my "tv" never bluescreens.
Dude, if you can't see this is a "christian nation" then you're either blind or a fool. You don't need a "dictator" to fill the country with religioous nuts - people seem quite happy to do that on their own.
In the town nearby where I live in Miss, the public school has morning prayer every day led by the teacher in whatever class the students happen to be in. they've been doing this for years and no one has been able to make them stop. Recently a person complained that he did not want his kid saying morning prayers, and threatened to go to the courts to stop it. As a result he was essentially censured by the local community at large. Rather than combat the local bands of zealots any further he's simply packing up his kid and moving.
There are still LOTS of places with blue laws - businesses not allowed to operate on Sundays for whatever stupid reason the local legislators can invent. Many more places don't allow liquor to be sold on Sunday, or to be sold before a certain time - this is quite common, in fact. So where do you think they came up with this notion of Sunday? Why not make it Thursday or Friday?
This is absolutely a chrisitan nation, and always has been. Better get that rifle ready.
Good deal, but the point remains (and I've encountered these people myself). So far as the whole Busch/Bud thing... well, that shows ya how much I know about beer - and this from the son of a pipefitter with 20 years experience in Detroit's Stroh's Brewery. Oy, vey...
Consider this: those people who sell those overpriced cokes and water at the games ALSO had to pay a hefty fee to operate there - meaning they substantially underwrite paying for the janitorial workers who have to clean up the shit left behind by their customers - detritus that, in this case, will be of an "official" (paper or soft plastic) nature and not some jagged glass shards left waiting to cut your foot because some wino dropped his bottle of two dollar cabernet on the way to watch tennis.
The attire part has been a part of large sporting events for DECADES, this is nothing new. Ever been to a NASCAR event? the Indy 500? These most always involve lots of tobacco and beer sponsors, and there have long been people hanging around these events whose entire job it is to locate people wearing competitor's logos and "incentivize an exchange of logos" - meaning if you show up at the Busch 500 you may or may not get in the door wearing that budweiser cap.
In "the old days" it was a bit more free market - those folks might not call the cops, they would just pressure you to switch. Maybe offer you a new Busch cap in exchange for your old Bud cap. Or maybe offer you a few bucks to make the trade for the day. Maybe literally just buy the shirt off your back so you won't have it to wear any more.
Now imagine sponsors trying to cover an event like the Olympics using these sales tactics. It would cost a fortune for the sponsors, which makes an Oympic sposnsorship much less of a value - and it means the sponsors are now paying even more employees to "police the grounds" which, given the number of sponsors, would mean an army of corporate hucksters pestering you every fifty feet about changing some part of your personal demeanor. Quite frankly I'm not a great fan of the Olympics (the only Summer event I ever liked was women's gymnastics, and the US has succesfully shot that event to hell with its feminist lobbying of the rules comittees about "little girls being forced to grow up" and American television's prudish editing of the coverage) but these logo rules sure seem to make sense when you look at things from the POV of real life in the modern world.
Does no one remember the fury of the "ringside" banners at the Summer Olympics when Nadya Comaneci was the darling of the event? For years sponsors like Danskin and Brook had banners hung on the sides of barriers, but when Gymnastics became a major event it became clear these banners were essentially "free" worldwide advertising so they changed the rules to forbid them unless they were part of a paid placement. If your goal is to earn money for your investors and protect your brand, duh, this is a no brainer.
Seems to me this is part of the bargain you make when you agree to be part of a corporate event. This isn't fascism unless you are FORCED by your local governance to attend the events; if you don't like the corporate policy, stay the fuck home and don't give them your money.
You can learn to program on DOZENS of the best "classic" arcade platforms (as well as more modern stuff like Dreamcast) and it won't cost a dime. Download MAME and an assembly language manual for the machine of choice and have at it.
Piss off. You sound like every pea-brained, nearsighted geek I've ever met who swears at microsoft under every breath while swearing linus is the second coming of christ.
It's not about "valid." Opera renders fucked up webpages pretty well - it DOESN'T break pages nearly so easily as konq. MSIE, the whipping boy browser of "the community," also handles fucked up html without breaking things so badly. Mozilla - an app that would be great if they would get rid of the fucking xul - also handles broken pages quite well. At the very least it doesn't CRASH every time I stumble upon a website with overzealous javascript.
You don't design a car to shut itself off the first time the tires get low on air. Konq is one of the most brittle of the "mainstream" linux apps - probably THE most brittle - and making excuses about "valid html" don't help market share OR real world usability.
Simple as this: Supporting standards doesn't mean you have to be a slave to them.
I have tried kde on three different computers and it always makes the same errors. It can't be pebcak since I'm using different linux distros even - it just doesn't work, and I cannot believe some folks can honestly claim to have never noticed the hideous job konqueror does with parts of slashdot. Is this piece of crap really the basis for apple's own web browser?
Running shockwave (or pretty much any plugin that fails) is an open door to a browser crash, and even java apps have caused konq to get so hung I had to log out and back in again to undo the damage. Even when it works it's the absolute slowest web browser I've seens since the days of running netscape 3.3 on my 20mhz 386sx. For all the jokes about msie and its instability, kde sure looks a lot like a glass house when it comes to web browsing.
Really? Can konq render the/. profiles pages in 3.3 with some semblance of sanity? Can it handle java reliably? Can it smoothly scroll a 1000 line page of html without requiring the processing power of a dozen P4s?
I used to be a gnome loyalist and I say there's a lot to love about kde - but it sure would be nice if the browser didn't suck do much.
"People say" all kinds of stupid shit and always have. Niggers are lazy, Mexicans steal - and now Russians have become the new Italians. "Oooh, they're Russian - they must be in the mafia!"
Russia has different laws than we do. Whoopee. It's their fault, I suppose, for looking like westerners but being part of Asia. You can go into a store in Japan, plunk down a few bucks and "rent" a CD to copy and no one bats an eyelash, but just let those Russians try to make a legal buck on the internet and suddenly it's all mired in allegations of criminal intent.
Quite frankly, I hope the site is run by some Russian mob. I'd sooner give those folks my money than the parasites in Ho-town.
I guess we really don't "have that now" do we? Since I specifically said low cost - which implies as well fairly high volume. I have my pc connected to a $30 UPS and a lot of folks I know are doing this - folks who you would not think of as being particularly knowledgable or "power users." If there are enough folks to support a thirty dollar UPS business I can't believe there's not enough folks willing to pay an extra fifty bucks for a machine made substantially faster by a hybridized boot drive. Hell, you can buy consumer machines from Dell and Gateway now that come with raid0 arrays - people obviously are willing to pay for faster machines.
Why bother with flash? For a grand a gig you could just build a 30GB RAM array and have it dynamically save itself to the slower "permanent" media on an as-needed basis.
Hell, why don't we have that now? Why don't we have an affordable caching controller that will take a dozen commodity 512MB memory modules? Or a self contained 3.5" disk based on a 1.8" 20 or 40gb drive and a few gigs of battery backed cache?
Aha... but if my dollar is not going any farther, why is it so much cheaper to buy chinese knockoffs?
No, this definitely doesn't apply everywhere - clothing prices are all over the place in spite of there being ever-fewer american garment workers and the same goes for shoes/boots/toys - whatever. Surely "designer" stuff (whether it's clothes or dvd players) could be made in the US and still provide hefty profits - but it would be very hard to compete on the low end with devices made in a part of the world where most of their basic lifestyle is supported by a socialist regime.
I've tried lots of distros in the last months. in fact, I've spent so much free time reinstalling linux I started to feel like it was my only hobby. I do lots of video and music stuff but have little need for office apps unless I'm working on a proposal or resume or something, so I can't tell you the difference between koffice and ooo. What I can tell you is that mandrake seems to have the best ootb experience of them all and it's the one I keep going back to. In fact, it's finally so good my windows partition sees me only when I have to "go back in" to recover some other little piece fo data I forgot to migrate. Once these visits become so infrequent I no longer care, windows is history in my house for good.
Suse has a great rep and it's a gorgeous ootb install (an order of magnitude better than Mandrakes, I think) - but, then again, tvtime doesn't work worth a damn in Suse on my machine and I've actually had the entire kde desktop lock up so hard when using a USB drive that I had to press reset. Mandrake 10 has had none of these troubles, and it's well supported (as far as software) by the plf, so that's where I stay.
My system reports whatever I tell it. Most of the time it reports I am using netscape on unix no matter what computer I am at because my proxy corrects this information on all outgoing transactions. However, I also often use MSIE5 because I don't have to sweat the "this site only work with IE" messages when I am going to those banking (etc) sites. MOST of those site,s in fact, seem to only claim their site doesn't work with other browsers, so if you change the header info you're golden - just as a 16 year old friend discovered after I introduced her to Opera and she happened by her "Gaia" website with the characters and the icons on the widgets. Go there in mozilla and it's broken (and it tells you so); go in Opera and it does likewise - but change the header info to claim ie5 and (at least) Opera works fine. Come to think of it, maybe I should drop by the place in konq and see wazzup.
As I sat at the library doing my browsing on my laptop (500mhz 600x with mdk10), I discovered yesterday that this ALSO happens in konq (not normally a kde user but I've been playing lately). I didn't see it on the main page but the "reply submitted" page is completely fucked up and the mozilla back/forward trick don't fix it.
How ironic is it the website most commonly linked to "the linux community" REFUSES to create a site that consistently renders properly in anything except MSIE?
Joe Six doesn't care much about databases and spreadsheets and such, true, but Joe will likely find his ability to locate and browse his immense porn collection much improved as this very much utilizes one of those "database" things as well as numeric processing. Likewise, joe's ability to rip dvds may well enhance and, too, his ability to videochat online with umpteen different strokemates.
This all means quite a bit to joe sixpack, you see...
I've been using huffYUV for years, I'm pretty familiar with it. It's very rare I get less than 1.5:1 compression with an NTSC broadcast source (and it gets better with cleaner sources). Were you using it with a native linux filesystem or were you using it with one of your captive mounted ntfs partitions? Or were you just using it with windows?
I was able to encode realtime 640x480 NTSC video (using a 16 bit YUV source) on a 450MHz PII and that was WHILE I surfed the web. That was back when I needed to - with an XP1600 I can rip through PAL sized video (720x576) at 100fps or more - and that's in windows with a conversion filter or two in between the "in" and the "out."
Are you using RGB24? If you are using RGB you might try keeping everything RGB32 - you'll find it much faster, and that empty alpha channel won't take up much extra space:)
Slashdot Mirror
45,000 files is nothing - I know people who easily have ten times that. And if it's just about finding redheads with big ones - well.. ok then let's go there: What if you want to put together a slideshow of redheads with big ones? What if you're an old schooler and want it to include those other redheads with not so big ones as well? And what if you want your slideshow to include only "big ones" plus your favorite shots of Julia Hayes and Angie Everhardt? Now you have to navigate to god knows how many directories, fish through thousands of jpegs and add them to some application's "sideshow" list. All so you can enjoy a thirty minute wank. Sure, you can save the slideshow - but repeating this dozens or hundreds of times sounds to me like a huge waste of wanking time.
Enter your data properly, tag it as you add it (and tag the old stuff as you have time) and there's no need to do any more. That directory of 500 Julia Hayes images might be "anonymous" to the database because they're all just numbers and letters, but you only have to select the "JuliaHayes" directory and enter "Julia Hayes Redhead Penthouse Canada usenet dancer height:66 mea:37C-23-34 zoology elephants ballerina" one time to correlate every single file in that folder to the database with those properties. Then the computer will know which are your favorites - they're the ones you keep clicking on and leaving open for minutes at a time.
So now putting together a good wank is only a matter of clicking on your "favorites" link, typing "redheads ++big ones," and enjoying the show. And if sharing this info means it might give some salesdroid the impetus to offer you even more Julia Hayes (ahem) "data"... well, ain't that the point?
So how are they going to do this? Are they really going to deliver you the 6GB DVD stream of "Signs" or "Moulin Rouge?" I can see networks of DSLams from coast to coast grinding to a halt now. More likely it will be some shit quality rip made by machines in a "ripping factory" - if you have broadband you could ALREADY get anything they have to offer from usenet or bittorrent, in higher quality than they are likely to offer, and get it before these folks get around to "licensing" the content for broadcast from ho-town.
Jack had it wrong all along, and it's sad to see how his antiquated notions have crippled the potential of an entire industry. So long as Hollywood continues to deny broadcasters the ability to compete by offering high quality and convenience in one package, "piracy" is going to grow in the mainstream.
It's not about competing with free, Jack - it's about competing with quality.
By the time you factor in the near annual cost of replacing DVD-R drives that have failed due to laser burnout it costs about as much today to store data on hard drives as on DVDs. I have 320GB in storage on my desktop that cost all of $200 - why give a fuck if my "search engine" eats up 30GB? These types of accessories are an investment in memory augmentation - buying a bigger hard drive is an incrediby cheap investment for the benefits obtained.
If you want minimal, install gentoo or something and learn to love blackbox. For a long time I used blackbox with mdk8 on 200mhz pentium MMX systems and with only 128MB ram it was pretty damn acceptable and it looked very nice. Minimal is easy - minimal is what linux has been all along.
When I was stuck in windows I used Thumbsplus for this (which, despite its name, will work with just about any MIME type, not just pics). I had several databases, all of them 2GB (for easy backup to DVD). The one thing I have found no acceptable substitute for in linux, ironically, is thumbsplus.
I've been wanting something like this for years. Many times I've stumbled upon a website during a search that seemed mildly interesting for whatever reason at the time but not relevant, only to think a few days later "what was that site where I found...?"
I know that sounds a bit like dashboard, but what I've seen of dashboard falls short of this - it's almost like the two products are the same concepts but built from different directions. When they meet in the middle, many of us will finally have something an order of magnitude closer to our dream desktop.
300MB? Hell, my /tmp is four times that!
People are idiots.
But I don't see how bearing lube is going to make hard drives last longer. Most every hard drive failure I've ever seen was due to seek failure in the read heads, not platters that stopped spinning.
It's already happening: you buy or download a copy of your sleek new OS and the first step is to configure the downoad manager to connect to some ftp mirror in one of the free countries of the world. Do I care that mp3s or css are "protected technologies?" Fuck no - and neither do the people I've helped free themselves from the redmond overlord.
Let'em sue. Won't make a damn bit of difference either way - you think ho-town is going to ignore a few Billion chinese who adopt different technological platforms than those of us in the "civilized" west? You really think Russia or Ukraine or even Poland are going to change their copyright system because the screaming brat in the west says so? Fucking christ, have none of you ever ordered online from an overseas vendor?
Already these nations are becoming less vocal about their EU intents: they've already seen one empire crumble this last century, it doesn't take a genius to see we're legislating ourselves into global irrelevance.
"The community" is allowed to believe whatever the fuck they want - but when they start taking my tax dollars to fund their religious indoctrination then they cross ovr that territory into violating federal law. Lots of people down here also believe niggers should still be segregated to their own "communities" and even lynched for cohabitating with white folk - and every single one of them will quote the Christian Bible as justification of their beliefs. I suppose in your world they should likewise be left to "exercise" these beliefs?
Where the fuck do you see prayer led by teachers in U.S. public school classrooms as a "Constitutional right?"
Idiot.
Now I have added scripts to my system that give me all the point and shoot functionality of pgpdisk in windows. All it took was a bit of time to learn the tools (mountloop, mount, umount, etc) and a hack of a shell script I found online and now opening an encrypted filesystem is as easy as clicking it, typing the pass, and pressing enter.
What makes the present system great is its level of abstraction. Having a "thing" one can move around to ANY media without having to create new tools every time is a thing of beauty. It takes a tweaky (and now proprietary) add-on to do this in windows - sticking all the encryption in the fs itself would just be a step back to doing things the Redmond way.
If one is "watching tv" one's "tv" is not going to BSOD. Even wacky windows doesn't BSOD for no reason - it's either hardware failure or software, and one isn't likely to throw a BSOD when not launching new tasks. Ergo, if one is sitting on one's couching attentively watching a game, one is not likely to be filling half the screen with other processes (like photoshop).
Since going to linux, of course, my "tv" never bluescreens.
In the town nearby where I live in Miss, the public school has morning prayer every day led by the teacher in whatever class the students happen to be in. they've been doing this for years and no one has been able to make them stop. Recently a person complained that he did not want his kid saying morning prayers, and threatened to go to the courts to stop it. As a result he was essentially censured by the local community at large. Rather than combat the local bands of zealots any further he's simply packing up his kid and moving.
There are still LOTS of places with blue laws - businesses not allowed to operate on Sundays for whatever stupid reason the local legislators can invent. Many more places don't allow liquor to be sold on Sunday, or to be sold before a certain time - this is quite common, in fact. So where do you think they came up with this notion of Sunday? Why not make it Thursday or Friday?
This is absolutely a chrisitan nation, and always has been. Better get that rifle ready.
Good deal, but the point remains (and I've encountered these people myself). So far as the whole Busch/Bud thing... well, that shows ya how much I know about beer - and this from the son of a pipefitter with 20 years experience in Detroit's Stroh's Brewery. Oy, vey...
The attire part has been a part of large sporting events for DECADES, this is nothing new. Ever been to a NASCAR event? the Indy 500? These most always involve lots of tobacco and beer sponsors, and there have long been people hanging around these events whose entire job it is to locate people wearing competitor's logos and "incentivize an exchange of logos" - meaning if you show up at the Busch 500 you may or may not get in the door wearing that budweiser cap.
In "the old days" it was a bit more free market - those folks might not call the cops, they would just pressure you to switch. Maybe offer you a new Busch cap in exchange for your old Bud cap. Or maybe offer you a few bucks to make the trade for the day. Maybe literally just buy the shirt off your back so you won't have it to wear any more.
Now imagine sponsors trying to cover an event like the Olympics using these sales tactics. It would cost a fortune for the sponsors, which makes an Oympic sposnsorship much less of a value - and it means the sponsors are now paying even more employees to "police the grounds" which, given the number of sponsors, would mean an army of corporate hucksters pestering you every fifty feet about changing some part of your personal demeanor. Quite frankly I'm not a great fan of the Olympics (the only Summer event I ever liked was women's gymnastics, and the US has succesfully shot that event to hell with its feminist lobbying of the rules comittees about "little girls being forced to grow up" and American television's prudish editing of the coverage) but these logo rules sure seem to make sense when you look at things from the POV of real life in the modern world.
Does no one remember the fury of the "ringside" banners at the Summer Olympics when Nadya Comaneci was the darling of the event? For years sponsors like Danskin and Brook had banners hung on the sides of barriers, but when Gymnastics became a major event it became clear these banners were essentially "free" worldwide advertising so they changed the rules to forbid them unless they were part of a paid placement. If your goal is to earn money for your investors and protect your brand, duh, this is a no brainer.
Seems to me this is part of the bargain you make when you agree to be part of a corporate event. This isn't fascism unless you are FORCED by your local governance to attend the events; if you don't like the corporate policy, stay the fuck home and don't give them your money.
You can learn to program on DOZENS of the best "classic" arcade platforms (as well as more modern stuff like Dreamcast) and it won't cost a dime. Download MAME and an assembly language manual for the machine of choice and have at it.
It's not about "valid." Opera renders fucked up webpages pretty well - it DOESN'T break pages nearly so easily as konq. MSIE, the whipping boy browser of "the community," also handles fucked up html without breaking things so badly. Mozilla - an app that would be great if they would get rid of the fucking xul - also handles broken pages quite well. At the very least it doesn't CRASH every time I stumble upon a website with overzealous javascript.
You don't design a car to shut itself off the first time the tires get low on air. Konq is one of the most brittle of the "mainstream" linux apps - probably THE most brittle - and making excuses about "valid html" don't help market share OR real world usability.
Simple as this: Supporting standards doesn't mean you have to be a slave to them.
Running shockwave (or pretty much any plugin that fails) is an open door to a browser crash, and even java apps have caused konq to get so hung I had to log out and back in again to undo the damage. Even when it works it's the absolute slowest web browser I've seens since the days of running netscape 3.3 on my 20mhz 386sx. For all the jokes about msie and its instability, kde sure looks a lot like a glass house when it comes to web browsing.
I used to be a gnome loyalist and I say there's a lot to love about kde - but it sure would be nice if the browser didn't suck do much.
Russia has different laws than we do. Whoopee. It's their fault, I suppose, for looking like westerners but being part of Asia. You can go into a store in Japan, plunk down a few bucks and "rent" a CD to copy and no one bats an eyelash, but just let those Russians try to make a legal buck on the internet and suddenly it's all mired in allegations of criminal intent.
Quite frankly, I hope the site is run by some Russian mob. I'd sooner give those folks my money than the parasites in Ho-town.
I guess we really don't "have that now" do we? Since I specifically said low cost - which implies as well fairly high volume. I have my pc connected to a $30 UPS and a lot of folks I know are doing this - folks who you would not think of as being particularly knowledgable or "power users." If there are enough folks to support a thirty dollar UPS business I can't believe there's not enough folks willing to pay an extra fifty bucks for a machine made substantially faster by a hybridized boot drive. Hell, you can buy consumer machines from Dell and Gateway now that come with raid0 arrays - people obviously are willing to pay for faster machines.
Hell, why don't we have that now? Why don't we have an affordable caching controller that will take a dozen commodity 512MB memory modules? Or a self contained 3.5" disk based on a 1.8" 20 or 40gb drive and a few gigs of battery backed cache?
No, this definitely doesn't apply everywhere - clothing prices are all over the place in spite of there being ever-fewer american garment workers and the same goes for shoes/boots/toys - whatever. Surely "designer" stuff (whether it's clothes or dvd players) could be made in the US and still provide hefty profits - but it would be very hard to compete on the low end with devices made in a part of the world where most of their basic lifestyle is supported by a socialist regime.
Suse has a great rep and it's a gorgeous ootb install (an order of magnitude better than Mandrakes, I think) - but, then again, tvtime doesn't work worth a damn in Suse on my machine and I've actually had the entire kde desktop lock up so hard when using a USB drive that I had to press reset. Mandrake 10 has had none of these troubles, and it's well supported (as far as software) by the plf, so that's where I stay.
My system reports whatever I tell it. Most of the time it reports I am using netscape on unix no matter what computer I am at because my proxy corrects this information on all outgoing transactions. However, I also often use MSIE5 because I don't have to sweat the "this site only work with IE" messages when I am going to those banking (etc) sites. MOST of those site,s in fact, seem to only claim their site doesn't work with other browsers, so if you change the header info you're golden - just as a 16 year old friend discovered after I introduced her to Opera and she happened by her "Gaia" website with the characters and the icons on the widgets. Go there in mozilla and it's broken (and it tells you so); go in Opera and it does likewise - but change the header info to claim ie5 and (at least) Opera works fine. Come to think of it, maybe I should drop by the place in konq and see wazzup.
How ironic is it the website most commonly linked to "the linux community" REFUSES to create a site that consistently renders properly in anything except MSIE?
This all means quite a bit to joe sixpack, you see...
I was able to encode realtime 640x480 NTSC video (using a 16 bit YUV source) on a 450MHz PII and that was WHILE I surfed the web. That was back when I needed to - with an XP1600 I can rip through PAL sized video (720x576) at 100fps or more - and that's in windows with a conversion filter or two in between the "in" and the "out."
Are you using RGB24? If you are using RGB you might try keeping everything RGB32 - you'll find it much faster, and that empty alpha channel won't take up much extra space :)