It sounds like all you really need is a linux port of huffYUV. That'll give you nearly 2:1 on standard NTSC (dirty) analog caps. On clean HD you might even go 3:1 or more. MythTV offers this as a codec, so most of the work may already be done.
When I was checking out the "benefits of getting verified" info I found you can only transfer two grand OUT of the account into other services (but there is no limit on GETTING money into the account - which makes perfect business sense if you think about it, as they do not charge a fee for spending but collect a nice 7% "tax" on many payments collected into an account).
This is just from memory but as I recall it mentioned no limit on GETTING money into the account - only on spending FROM the account to other services outside paypal. Since most of my spending through the account is to other ebayers (most of whom also use paypal), very little of my overall cap has been used. Perhaps this is the same for you.
They did the same thing to me. I had an account cancelled that was "verified" by them and they immediately froze my twenty bucks in the account. Keep in mind I had done nothing wrong nor had anyone with whom I had transactions - they just said "you can't cancel that account without providing us another" and bam, that was it.
After being treated this way I sure as hell wasn't about to give them "verified" access to ANOTHER account so I figured the twenty bucks long lost and chalked it up to experience. About a year ago I found a check in the mailbox for twenty bucks plus interest for the two years or so they had it "froze." Don't know why they just decided to givc it up, they sent me no notice in spite of the fact they still have my address and email me regularly about the account.
Since they did this I went back to using them for ebay transactions, but all they get is my cc number and the account will remain "unverified" until I have shoveled through it my limit - at which time I'll cancel it and start another, since there's just no way in hell I'm going to trust them with another "verified" acount.
An ootb mandrake install will play movies, music, browse the web, allow you to create powerpoint presentations, write and edit a book, PUBLISH a book on your desktop, create a website, check your email, play arcade games, find and connect you to any nearby linux, mac, or windows machines... all without getting NEAR a command line. It does all this stuff very very well, and does it near perfectly from the moment the installer resets the machine into your default desktop.
Linux is already past windows in terms of sophistication, reliability, and utter wow factor. Have you seen screenshots of any really nice kde or gnome desktops?
I know... You can do a lot of that stuff with windows, too. I know this because I too am a (closeted) windows user. I am sitting at a (presently) windows2000 machine that has bore this same skin (my own version of "Beacon") for years now ala windowblinds. Yes, it makes it a bit slower but goddamn windows is ass-ugly without it!
My system is my TV set, my vcr, my video player (I rarely watch dvds - I rip them and then watch the 1-3gb avis at my leisure). I can drive the vs6 system I was given by a college buddy but I am most definitely not a programmer of the c variety. In linux I can hang the./configure and make install but rarely can figure out what to fix when things don't go properly (one of the best parts of linux is that I can still create nice applications using the multitude of scripting tools that hook so well into the windows manager). Thanks heaven for google, as tech support is now 24/7 and I usually find the answers I need.
So... let's compare.
My windows install has been pretty much stable the last couple of years. Many apps I rely on for my "shell" don't require install or are very quick to do so (dscaler, winrar, irfanview, photoshop, etc). I don't use IE and my entire profile - all my bookmarks, emails - evrything - are in an encrypted 650MB pgp disk which I migrate from install to install. The biggest nuisance of setting up windows is just getting the codecs to all work together smoothly in zoomplayer. That is, except for the vs6 setup, which is a goddamn twitchy nightmare of os patches, swapping cds, rebooting and holding my breath a lot. But I can get a basic install working (ie I can surf the net and watch TV) in about an hour and a half - the rest of it is at least a half a day. Last time I had to do it all it took most of my weekend (thanks to a vs6 install that simply would not... and my weekends are three days!).
Contrast this to linux: I can install mdk10 in about an hour. Spend another hour tweaking settings to make it all look nice and installing a couple of bug patches, and I'm nearly done.
End result: my windows2000 system does what I expect but it takes fucking hours to reload, it's creaky and kinda ugly, and very definitely showing its age - and, it being windows, one does need to reload from time to time. The zoomplayer feels very slick and looks nice as does dscaler (just so long as I don't accidentally launch an mdi app like photoshop, which will force dscaler to throw a bsod every time).
Compare this to mdk10, which in less than one hour installs the entire dev environment, the media engines, gorgeous desktop tools with enough "themes" to provide a nice looking desktop with no downloads required. Spend a few more minutes installing codeweaver's crossover office so I can run photoshop, click to the llf to download decss so I can rip (er, watch) those dvds when I want, and I'm done.
Ironically, the media stuff in mandrake ALL works better than windows (and my files are all avi, a "windows format"). Playback is smoother in totem than in windows, the interface just as nice (albeit slightly different), and the picture and sound quality is better than in windows.
Of course, that part could also be because linux has better drivers for my sis7xx chipset based system than windows, thus offering me the option (in linux) of running 1400x1050 resolution at 75hz with my compaq 19" monitor (as opposed to windows which forces me into using either a flickering 1600x1200x60hz or the gigantic 1024x768 at a decent scan rate, with no proper aspect ratio choice in between). Oh, and that's true with XP as well, although you won't get me near that shit again unless you pay me (which someone does).
Nothing is perfect. Suse9 looks much nicer ootb than mandrake10 (although it takes about three times longer to install even from the DVD) and its cryp
There was an article in BYTE back in the mid 80s that pretty much nailed where we would be at in ten years. it was a little conservative in memory and hard drive specs, but not nearly so off base as the article here.
Why do people read these things, anyways? PC World is nothing but a catalog of buzzwords and hype. Always was.
sooo... you think people should have to be "educated" in order to enjoy the "priviledge" of trading email and gaming at arcade sites? Just because the fucking computer is the enabling technology?
Talk about clueless! How about this? We require everyone to license their telephone - because, after all, I just pick it up and press a few buttons and I can pester anyone in the world! I can talk dirty to them, corrupt youth, organize violent antigovernent actions...
The only differnce between the computer and the telephone to most of the population is the computer blows the fuck up every few months when it is used in a manner expected by any reasonable person. The telephone is simply too "dumb" to be subject to the same infections (or they were until the advent of "smart cellphones").
The car analogy is not only banal but also hideously misplaced. We generally do not have people running around erecting their own misleading road signs and actively disabling the brakes on people's cars.
Most people now don't give a fuck about "creating media" any more than most people cared about operating their own radio transmitter in 1920. They just want to be able to trade personal pictures and porn with their friends, swap music, send notes around... and they should not have to endure the nonsense that is become "the internet" in order to do so. Why this notion seems such a threat to so many like you is completely beyond me; I don't give a fuck about AOL either so I simply don't pay for the service. That it exists is no more a threat to my liberty than the clouds in the sky.
TCPA, Palladium - whatever you want to call it - is still just a segment of the market. If you don't want it then don't buy it. If nough people make that decision it will flop and that will be the end of it.
But if tcpa allows those wal-mart "computing devices" to provide their users some basic functionality without ddosing the entire subnet with virus activity, then I'm all for it... as will be most of the joes and janes presently calling tech support every month because their computer caught (yet another) case of the clap.
Something has to be done about security, and linux (such as it is) is no panacea. That means disabling a certain level of geekiness is required simply because most of those home users don't have a fucking clue how a computer works - nor should they - any more than you should have to know how to rebuild a compressor just so you can enjoy the "priviledge" of preserving your food with a refrigerator.
If "trusted computing" helps prevent grandma from being owned every time she hops on pogo, it has a great deal of value to very many people. Sorry, but that's life.
And rather than pushing all these manufacturers to do what he wants, people like RMS should be out there rounding up talent to help create our own platform. I was designing CPUs from TTL logic when I was in goddamn high school - it ain't that hard if you know what you are doing. And with all the OSS tools available today it should not be that difficult to evolve a truly open cpu and chipset. Yes the open version would be years behind and yeah, it'll be more expensive (at first) than those commodity parts. Such is the nature of supply and economies of scale. But if it's a truly competetive product then others will adopt it, and that will allow the "scale" to tip somewhat back in favor of the open approach. AMD and Intel don't have the only fab lines on the planet, you know - and IBM and Sun would probably love some new tech to help keep those fab lines busy. Hell, make the design simple enough and the parts could be built on the obsolete assembly lines cast off by intel and amd.
I'm not saying we should just shut up and lie back, nor am I saying we have no right to speak out about the evolution of technology - but at a certain level trying to tell manufacturers like intel what to make oversteps the bounds of logic, if not freedom itself.
It's gonna have to happen: either we do it our way and let them do it theirs and let the market decide, or they are going to leap ahead and then will have the power of "proof." Once that happens it won't be a matter of deciding for ourselves because, if TCPA is at all effective in reducing the number of compromised commodity computing systems, the lobbyists will waste no time making sure the braindead old farts in washington legislate away all other options.
Because now I finally know exactly what opentalk is - nd I know to avoid it. Once had a whole network of imacs that would inexplicably "lose the network" from time to time and have to be restarted before the one gone missing would be able to relocate the others. Ironically enough, the pcs with the appletalk patches seemed to work more reliably than the macs...
I find it funny when these "studies" say nonsense like "for open source to compete with windows it must handle these proprietary formats perfectly" - as if windows did that! How many times has YOUR browser been hosed by the bloated and buggy Acrobat? Anyone ever tried opening a powerpoint presentation in office97 that was created in office2k? Or for that matter opening a late model powerpoint presentation in microsoft's own powerpoint "reader" on a machine that doesn't have office?
Open source doesn't have to do anything "perfectly" - and none of the competition does this either. What open source has to be is available - that's all. Because, after all, this is all that made windows "the market leader." The one thing that made windows what it is with a wink and a nod is built into the competition. No wink and nod needed - and as people find themselves increasingly sick of paying 100 bucks to the local geek to "clean" the web residue from their computer every six months, more and more will try it - and many won't turn back.
I'm posting this now from a two hour old Suse kde desktop - just a quick note before I wipe it all out and go back (again) to mandrake. I just wanted to reply before all this gets lost to point out a couple of things.
Having a dock does not make a mac clone to be sure - but neither does having an "explorer" browser and a window frame make a windows clone. And the reason some of us (like myself) don't use the mac (among other reasons) is because it, like windows, is just too limited. If I want a dock I have a dock - but I can make it dance any step I choose and I can make my desktop look and feel any way I choose. This is much harder on the mac and damn near impossible in windows.
I don't care about a finder. I don't need a finder because when I install an app it's almost certain to be included in my path, which means all I really need to do to run it is invoke it by name. If I want a shortcut I make a shortcut and type the name of the app and whatever switches I want - so how is drilling down to the folder and clicking the app more intuitive? Just so I don't have to (shudder) TYPE something one time before using it?
This is coming from someone who has had his own long and reluctant journey. Even now I still have a win2k partition on this machine because I was hesitant to make the complete switch - old habits die hard. But with the arrival of fantastic distros like Mdk10 and Suse9 and FC2 using windows increasingly feels "icky" - like driving around in a 1985 Taurus or something. Yeah, it works most of the time and it's familiar because the seat fits my ass after ten years at that wheel - but I hate being seen in public at that wheel and every time I step out of it I have to change clothes and shower because of the dirt and grease.
Look: Grandma doesn't need a finder because Grandma doesn't have anything TO "find" except more arcade sites to occupy her time. Grandma doesn't install programs, gramma USES programs. Give grannie a desktop shortcut to a web browser that'll let her check her aol mail and play her pogo games and she'll be just fine. Give her all this in a computer that won't be brought to its knees by all the shit floating around those popup ads and grannie can die happy, a cigarette in one hand and her mouse in the other. Your only worry then will be how to clean up the rings left on the desk by her vodka tonics.
And the worse offender I have so far is the slashdot@ address I setup here. Not that slashdot sold it of course - it's just been mined by every spammer on the block since a story submission was accepted. Lesson well learned there!
I've gotten maybe a dozen spams with "made up" to: fields. I think the OP is over-analyzing all this.
Actually, LPs are still being produced. The difference is that it's mostly for DJs now.
Which has zero to do with what I said. I guess you just wanted to reply to make the point that what I said was accurate? Because "DJ records" are NOT mainstream. Or are you saying it's easy to find vinyl in your area of all the latest releases?
So far as no one buying the convertor... Where I live the quality of the digital signal is STILL shit because the dropouts are in the source. But the local CBS station now also has the local UPN and weather stations, which means one station is now three. And the local PBS station is talking about providing another channel (which will probably also have those damn dropouts). But the local NBC station STILL hasn't started providing a digital transponder in spite of their merging with the local ABC affiliate - because NBC and ABC don't like the idea of their signals being piggybacked on the same "channel" but different transponders. So why should the local community invest in $500 piggyback tuners when only half the stations are even there yet? And why buy a piggyback tuner now when, in three years, the $399 TV sets at wal-mart will have those same tuners built in?
I live WAY out in the sticks and even then the rental outlet has ass for selection. But right now I have "in the pipe" the Russian arthouse film "The Russian Ark," part of season 1 of "Space:1999" and "Solaris" (the original Russian version, not the fucked up hollywood remake). My subscription is 22 bucks a month and everything is delivered right to my door on DVD.
But this really has little to do with the topic, which is about DVDs becoming obsolete. Consider this: 802.11x in my area is nearly useless as a community service because there are so many trees and such high humidity. And we STILL have no cable and likely never will, and even if they put a dslam in the local phone box most of the "town" is still too far away to make use of it. But the FCC is plodding ahead with plans to usurp the vhf analog tv band and are talking very seriously about giving some of that bandwidth over to local wireless services. That means even out here in nowhereland wireless media distribution becomes practical. All we need are devices to make VOD as easy to sue as the present day tv remotes and most of the community will never worry about those oddball services like netflix (which will evolve their marketing to providing quality rather than just selection) - because everyone will have "on demand" braindead action movies and tv sitcoms and all the crap they have now. Granted it'll be compressed to hell but, given the zeal of directv viewers who insist their picture is "just as good as dvd," most don't seem to have a problem with that now.
I would say that, if the FCC moves ahead with providing more lower frequency bandwidth to "wireless broadband" then predictions of DVD obsolescence are pretty much spot-on. In ten years "DVDs" won't be "DVDs" anymore they'll probably be some god forsaken "Windows Media" formatted disc (aka "WMDs") and most of us will have available to our homes "VOD" of the (shit) quality now enjoyed by all those digital cable and directv subscribers.
Don't forget: in 1983 it was becoming much harder to find LPs. By 1985 they had nearly disappeared and it was either shit sounding cds or even shittier sounding tapes. By 1995 the tapes were well on their way out and dvds had pretty much taken over. That's a one decade lifetime for cassette as a mainstream commercial format. DVDs have been mainstream (ie cheap at wal-mart) at least two years now. Obsolete doesn't mean "you can't get that" - it means "why are you wasting money on that?" Would you buy a CD player today that would not play MP3s? The FCC is moving ahead with plans to relegate NTSC analog video to the broadcast trash heap and DVD players are already to the point of playing MP3 music and WM format video and audio - you really think the MPEG2 720x480/480x480 NTSC DVD format has another ten years left in it?
I don't think we will EVER have "indestructible media." There's just no money in it. LPs were about the closest we ever came and that's mostly because they are analog - there's lots to be had between "a little" and "everything." Compare this to DVDs that frequently develop "dropouts" just like analog vhs - except with vhs you could still see something there even if it was warped or noisy or had bad sound. Now it's just nothing at all.
Same thing with tv here. The PBS station used to have frequent splats opf noise on it due to some inexplicable inability of the network engineers to maintain a proper stl. Now, thanks to their all digital upgrade, we don't get the splats of noise - we just get really fucking annoying dropouts. Not once or twice an hour but more like two or three a minute. Just a second or two but it's so goddamned annoying I have just about quit watching the only network available to me that had something worth watching.
When digital is good it's really great - but when it's bad it completely sucks ass, which means it must be replaced in order to continue using it. And there's no way the corps are going to spend money developing media that lasts more than a scant few years - there's simply no profit in it.
I must admit I'll probably stand in line to see I, Robot, but I'd still like to see an sf movie of the classic variety - lots less shoot-em-ups and lots more dialog and introspection.
Come to think of it, we may not be able to do an I, Robot or AI from our garage, but I don't think it would be at all out of reach for a couple of basement dwellers to pool their resources and come up with a contemporary Silent Running or Logan's Run. Cityscapes and such are relatively easy and only a few actors would be needed. Hmmmm... maybe I need to invest in a few yards of green felt, myself.
It's easy to sit here in 2004 and say (whatever) movie sucked, but in context this movie was (and I think IS) really great. The 70's was a time with lots of really strange films (like "the cube" in which a man was stuck alone inside a perfectly formed, doorless and featureless white cube - and there is a scene in Brazil that pays a bit of homage to this film). In its time this made thx1138 historical in the sense it was probably one of the "biggest" films of this genre.
And don't forget, many movies of this era plodded along. Look at Xardoz, the original Rollerball, etc - all great films but of very deliberate pace.
And, frankly, I'm sick of everyone ripping on directors who retouch their own work. If this were some indie wannabe filmaker doing this from his parent's basement and releasing the work on bittorrent most of you would be reveling about how this is just one more example of the end of Hollywood, how we are all now empowered via digital technology to retouch and recreate any previous work created by anyone, anywhere, and make it work of our own. So why can't Hollywood do the same damn thing? It's not like Lucas burned the original prints - if I wanna see Casablanca in color or thx1138 in a modern light what right do you have to say otherwise?
Welcome to the generation of the post-modernist-anti-revisionist...
You might think about the difference between responsibility to my employer and responsibility to myself - lest you be forced to consider responsibility for reporting to the unemployment office.
Making yourself comepetive with the services offered by others in your field is what it's all about. If you won't pay for them, someone else might - and then they will be able to provide more feature-rich service than you. They will have greater value to your employer then you (even if they have lesser skills, just because "knowledge" is not so easily visible as "hours worked" on the bottom line).
Life's a balancing act. If they shake the line too much, go dance in someone else's bigtop.
If you go to work in an auto shop, they don't stick you in a bay with a fully loaded toolbox - you bring it when you hire in, you buy shit you want or need to do your job from the snap-on man, you deduct what you can from your taxes, and when you leave you load your shit up and go.
I don't see anything wrong with a business having certain expectations. Most all expect you to get to work on time and they don't care if you have a car, but they at least expect you to have reliable transport.
If you are an IT guy, a broadband connection from your home can give you "reliable transport" without requiring you pile into your clothes and drive to the office at 3AM every time some little something pops into your obsessive CEO's IT-ignorant brain.
If you don't want a blackberry, don't pay for one. I never would carry a pager (again) for any amount of money, and I make that clear from the get-go. I don't even carry a cellphone - if someone wants me they can try to call the landline or they can leave an email. If this isn't a big enough toolbox for them, then it's time to talk about mo money... simple as that.
I dunno. I have several windows apps that intentionally switch the cancel/ok/register buttons around on every start, I have to say that is at least worse than any "nonstandard standard."
I never even noticed the "backwards buttons." What I HAVE noticed is that every single machine I have installed kde on I end up with a seriously ugly desktop unless I'm willing to spend quite some time trying to figure out why all the fonts are so big, why they don't scale in rpoportion to the fonts in the workspace areas, how to make fix everything from looking like some windows noob's uglified XP desktop stuck at 800x600 resolution...
Seiously. Even the very pretty Suse looks ten times better with the plain jane default gnome desktop than the default kde desktop, and Suse has always been a designed-for kde distro.
What does it run? You have some sort of minimal os install and run Mozilla as the shell?
I find a 300+Mhz thinkpad to be an excellent little machine for carrying around work, surfing the net, listening to music, or swapping files - but none of these things at the same time. 366MHz is getting pretty responsive, and 500-700MHz is a damn fine system (sorry, but unless I'm building a portable video workstation I cannot justify a 1GHz+ laptop - even for running gnome 2.6).
What you will find for $15-$30 (in 2.5" form factor) are absolute junk drives that may or may not be guaranteed to "format in DOS" - which says nothing of what they may do once formatted and you try to put data on them.
I buy lots of laptop stuff on ebay and I rebuild IBM lappys as a hobby. Back when I first started doing this I looked at the price of brand new, fully warranteed drives and decided to just buy a few cheap used ones. Of the three I bought (for a total of more than $100) I have zero functional units less than six months later. The first one (Sony - I should have known) accepted a format and then started clicking a week later, the second (Fujitsu) lasted a couple of months. The genuine IBM drive lasted almost four months before it, too, started clicking one day while at the library - just as I was about to complete a 4GB ISO download.
From then on I buy "expensive" new drives with warranties. Spending $100 on a new drive every couple of years makes a hell of a lot more sense than spending $30 every other month on JUNK.
Speaking more directly to the topic, my latest pet is a 500MHz 600 that is being fitted with a custom case and battery pack and internal USB hub and wireless. It will have only one external PCMCIA slot because the other will be permanently occupied by a USB2 card (which will, in turn, talk to the internal wireless USB dongle and USB 10/100 NIC) - but I will be able to refit my machine to a speedy 750MHz or more at my leisure, spare parts are dirt cheap, and I won't have to be a slave to the $60 semi-annual Lithium toss, instead just replacing NiMH cells as they expire.
And the way I'm making room for much of this is by replacing the $80 20GB 2.5" drive with a cool new $110 20GB 1.8" drive. Just a few slight internal adjustments and my one-off geekpad will become the one to rule the world via USB!
But you are ignoring the fact those "0.1% of people who mess with it" are, in fact, the people (on any given project) who give open source much of its value. Open source doesn't require EVERYONE to tweak and contribute - only those who are motivated. But those are the folks who make any given project competetive.
I trust them more since the quality of their drivers partially determines their sales, and thus they have a bigger motivation to make them better.
I have an SiS chipset system right now as my main desktop. It's not the best, but it's not the least. And I don't need high power 3D, I only need good 2D (video) playback on the system. And linux has pretty good (open) SiS drivers and I wanted a smallish system with an "all in one" motherboard, so I went with an SiS765. And, in fact, my system works BETTER in linux than in windows XP or 2000 even *after* I have installed the very latest and greatest from their website *and* added one of those fancy windows toolbar widgets to let me microadjust the scan rate and resolution.
When I install mdk10 or suse9.1 or fc2 it lets me set the resolution of the display to something truly useful like 1440x1050 or 1280x960 rather than the fucked-up distortion that is 1280x1024 - which is all the factory drivers in windows can manage between 1024x768 and an ungodly (for my eyes on my 19" monitor) 1600x1200. And these distros do it right from the default install screen, and I don't even HAVE to adjust anything to get the highest possible scan rate at these settings. But if what you say were true then SiS should have even *better* video drivers available in windows since they (presumably) are motivated by all that income potential and, after all, they have that insight from those linux geeks on which ot base their own work. So if a bunch of geeks can reverse engineer or just read the docs and *create* drivers of this quality, why can't the manufacturer?
This is the greatest lie of the Capitalist church: that money is the greatest motivation above all even in a free market, and that it will lead to the higher quality product every time. If what you say were at all true then SiS should have some insanely great XP drivers for their 7xx chipsets - so why is it the open source drivers beat them hands down?
MS kicked Netscape's ass because Netscape fell into a spiral of devolution while IE became a much better product. In the fight between Netscape 3 and IE4, it was no contest because IE was, at the time, simply the better product. Remember, this was when Netscape was just sure it owned the web and, at the time, it was even thumbing its nose at the W3C. This is perhaps the most perfect example of Microsoft's "embrace and extend" philosophy. Once MS becomes dominant in a market it's very easy for themn to retain that dominance - but attaining dominance in any particular field is NOT a given even for MS.
So compare then to now: you can't even get decent fucking search results of Microsoft's own support site from Microsoft itself. They can't even properly track their own content - how on earth can anyone trust them to track everyone elses? I work tech support a few days a week and I don't even think about using Microsoft's "search the knowledge base" page - it's often laughably short on search results even for well known things like "xp rpc exploit" and "download ie6."
When I can get proper tech support info on Microsoft's own products without having to go to Google and type site:microsoft.com THEN I'll start to believe this is like Netscape vs. Microsoft.
To begin with, worrying about the "legality" of works that were essentially STOLEN to begin with is nonsensical. The recordings are already illicit - paying for them just rewards those who did the thieving.
And: Those blues recordings are ALEADY FREE. The music of Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers - much of the stuff recorded even by BB King is now PD because the recordings were unclaimed back in the 70's when the first laws on this matter were passed - just like those old John Wayne movies that sell at wallyworld for three-ninety-five.
And we're talking about the web. Whose laws apply? Every "point" you make is an insipid defense to excuse your inaction on the matter. If AofMP3.com offers recordings for a dime each and it's legal, how does it suddenly become illegal because it's in your house? How can you even attempt a logical justification for donating twenty bucks to the people lobbying away everyone's rights (including the rights of these artists you seem to treasure)? If BB King says "come to greenwood with your tape deck" how the hell can you say the recording is illegal? How does the guy who wrote and performed the song on stage not get the right to give away his art? The man hasn't sweated a record label in decades - he tours (he'll play your birthday party for just a few grand) and he has his club - so he hasn't earned the right to share his art as he chooses?
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It sounds like all you really need is a linux port of huffYUV. That'll give you nearly 2:1 on standard NTSC (dirty) analog caps. On clean HD you might even go 3:1 or more. MythTV offers this as a codec, so most of the work may already be done.
This is just from memory but as I recall it mentioned no limit on GETTING money into the account - only on spending FROM the account to other services outside paypal. Since most of my spending through the account is to other ebayers (most of whom also use paypal), very little of my overall cap has been used. Perhaps this is the same for you.
After being treated this way I sure as hell wasn't about to give them "verified" access to ANOTHER account so I figured the twenty bucks long lost and chalked it up to experience. About a year ago I found a check in the mailbox for twenty bucks plus interest for the two years or so they had it "froze." Don't know why they just decided to givc it up, they sent me no notice in spite of the fact they still have my address and email me regularly about the account.
Since they did this I went back to using them for ebay transactions, but all they get is my cc number and the account will remain "unverified" until I have shoveled through it my limit - at which time I'll cancel it and start another, since there's just no way in hell I'm going to trust them with another "verified" acount.
An ootb mandrake install will play movies, music, browse the web, allow you to create powerpoint presentations, write and edit a book, PUBLISH a book on your desktop, create a website, check your email, play arcade games, find and connect you to any nearby linux, mac, or windows machines... all without getting NEAR a command line. It does all this stuff very very well, and does it near perfectly from the moment the installer resets the machine into your default desktop.
I know... You can do a lot of that stuff with windows, too. I know this because I too am a (closeted) windows user. I am sitting at a (presently) windows2000 machine that has bore this same skin (my own version of "Beacon") for years now ala windowblinds. Yes, it makes it a bit slower but goddamn windows is ass-ugly without it!
My system is my TV set, my vcr, my video player (I rarely watch dvds - I rip them and then watch the 1-3gb avis at my leisure). I can drive the vs6 system I was given by a college buddy but I am most definitely not a programmer of the c variety. In linux I can hang the ./configure and make install but rarely can figure out what to fix when things don't go properly (one of the best parts of linux is that I can still create nice applications using the multitude of scripting tools that hook so well into the windows manager). Thanks heaven for google, as tech support is now 24/7 and I usually find the answers I need.
So... let's compare.
My windows install has been pretty much stable the last couple of years. Many apps I rely on for my "shell" don't require install or are very quick to do so (dscaler, winrar, irfanview, photoshop, etc). I don't use IE and my entire profile - all my bookmarks, emails - evrything - are in an encrypted 650MB pgp disk which I migrate from install to install. The biggest nuisance of setting up windows is just getting the codecs to all work together smoothly in zoomplayer. That is, except for the vs6 setup, which is a goddamn twitchy nightmare of os patches, swapping cds, rebooting and holding my breath a lot. But I can get a basic install working (ie I can surf the net and watch TV) in about an hour and a half - the rest of it is at least a half a day. Last time I had to do it all it took most of my weekend (thanks to a vs6 install that simply would not... and my weekends are three days!).
Contrast this to linux: I can install mdk10 in about an hour. Spend another hour tweaking settings to make it all look nice and installing a couple of bug patches, and I'm nearly done.
End result: my windows2000 system does what I expect but it takes fucking hours to reload, it's creaky and kinda ugly, and very definitely showing its age - and, it being windows, one does need to reload from time to time. The zoomplayer feels very slick and looks nice as does dscaler (just so long as I don't accidentally launch an mdi app like photoshop, which will force dscaler to throw a bsod every time).
Compare this to mdk10, which in less than one hour installs the entire dev environment, the media engines, gorgeous desktop tools with enough "themes" to provide a nice looking desktop with no downloads required. Spend a few more minutes installing codeweaver's crossover office so I can run photoshop, click to the llf to download decss so I can rip (er, watch) those dvds when I want, and I'm done.
Ironically, the media stuff in mandrake ALL works better than windows (and my files are all avi, a "windows format"). Playback is smoother in totem than in windows, the interface just as nice (albeit slightly different), and the picture and sound quality is better than in windows.
Of course, that part could also be because linux has better drivers for my sis7xx chipset based system than windows, thus offering me the option (in linux) of running 1400x1050 resolution at 75hz with my compaq 19" monitor (as opposed to windows which forces me into using either a flickering 1600x1200x60hz or the gigantic 1024x768 at a decent scan rate, with no proper aspect ratio choice in between). Oh, and that's true with XP as well, although you won't get me near that shit again unless you pay me (which someone does).
Nothing is perfect. Suse9 looks much nicer ootb than mandrake10 (although it takes about three times longer to install even from the DVD) and its cryp
Why do people read these things, anyways? PC World is nothing but a catalog of buzzwords and hype. Always was.
Talk about clueless! How about this? We require everyone to license their telephone - because, after all, I just pick it up and press a few buttons and I can pester anyone in the world! I can talk dirty to them, corrupt youth, organize violent antigovernent actions...
The only differnce between the computer and the telephone to most of the population is the computer blows the fuck up every few months when it is used in a manner expected by any reasonable person. The telephone is simply too "dumb" to be subject to the same infections (or they were until the advent of "smart cellphones").
The car analogy is not only banal but also hideously misplaced. We generally do not have people running around erecting their own misleading road signs and actively disabling the brakes on people's cars.
Most people now don't give a fuck about "creating media" any more than most people cared about operating their own radio transmitter in 1920. They just want to be able to trade personal pictures and porn with their friends, swap music, send notes around... and they should not have to endure the nonsense that is become "the internet" in order to do so. Why this notion seems such a threat to so many like you is completely beyond me; I don't give a fuck about AOL either so I simply don't pay for the service. That it exists is no more a threat to my liberty than the clouds in the sky.
Just like "trusted computing."
But if tcpa allows those wal-mart "computing devices" to provide their users some basic functionality without ddosing the entire subnet with virus activity, then I'm all for it... as will be most of the joes and janes presently calling tech support every month because their computer caught (yet another) case of the clap.
Something has to be done about security, and linux (such as it is) is no panacea. That means disabling a certain level of geekiness is required simply because most of those home users don't have a fucking clue how a computer works - nor should they - any more than you should have to know how to rebuild a compressor just so you can enjoy the "priviledge" of preserving your food with a refrigerator.
If "trusted computing" helps prevent grandma from being owned every time she hops on pogo, it has a great deal of value to very many people. Sorry, but that's life.
And rather than pushing all these manufacturers to do what he wants, people like RMS should be out there rounding up talent to help create our own platform. I was designing CPUs from TTL logic when I was in goddamn high school - it ain't that hard if you know what you are doing. And with all the OSS tools available today it should not be that difficult to evolve a truly open cpu and chipset. Yes the open version would be years behind and yeah, it'll be more expensive (at first) than those commodity parts. Such is the nature of supply and economies of scale. But if it's a truly competetive product then others will adopt it, and that will allow the "scale" to tip somewhat back in favor of the open approach. AMD and Intel don't have the only fab lines on the planet, you know - and IBM and Sun would probably love some new tech to help keep those fab lines busy. Hell, make the design simple enough and the parts could be built on the obsolete assembly lines cast off by intel and amd.
I'm not saying we should just shut up and lie back, nor am I saying we have no right to speak out about the evolution of technology - but at a certain level trying to tell manufacturers like intel what to make oversteps the bounds of logic, if not freedom itself.
It's gonna have to happen: either we do it our way and let them do it theirs and let the market decide, or they are going to leap ahead and then will have the power of "proof." Once that happens it won't be a matter of deciding for ourselves because, if TCPA is at all effective in reducing the number of compromised commodity computing systems, the lobbyists will waste no time making sure the braindead old farts in washington legislate away all other options.
The time is now
I thought zeroconf was it's own thing but don't know enough about it to dispute the poster.
Because now I finally know exactly what opentalk is - nd I know to avoid it. Once had a whole network of imacs that would inexplicably "lose the network" from time to time and have to be restarted before the one gone missing would be able to relocate the others. Ironically enough, the pcs with the appletalk patches seemed to work more reliably than the macs...
Open source doesn't have to do anything "perfectly" - and none of the competition does this either. What open source has to be is available - that's all. Because, after all, this is all that made windows "the market leader." The one thing that made windows what it is with a wink and a nod is built into the competition. No wink and nod needed - and as people find themselves increasingly sick of paying 100 bucks to the local geek to "clean" the web residue from their computer every six months, more and more will try it - and many won't turn back.
I'm posting this now from a two hour old Suse kde desktop - just a quick note before I wipe it all out and go back (again) to mandrake. I just wanted to reply before all this gets lost to point out a couple of things.
Having a dock does not make a mac clone to be sure - but neither does having an "explorer" browser and a window frame make a windows clone. And the reason some of us (like myself) don't use the mac (among other reasons) is because it, like windows, is just too limited. If I want a dock I have a dock - but I can make it dance any step I choose and I can make my desktop look and feel any way I choose. This is much harder on the mac and damn near impossible in windows.
I don't care about a finder. I don't need a finder because when I install an app it's almost certain to be included in my path, which means all I really need to do to run it is invoke it by name. If I want a shortcut I make a shortcut and type the name of the app and whatever switches I want - so how is drilling down to the folder and clicking the app more intuitive? Just so I don't have to (shudder) TYPE something one time before using it?
This is coming from someone who has had his own long and reluctant journey. Even now I still have a win2k partition on this machine because I was hesitant to make the complete switch - old habits die hard. But with the arrival of fantastic distros like Mdk10 and Suse9 and FC2 using windows increasingly feels "icky" - like driving around in a 1985 Taurus or something. Yeah, it works most of the time and it's familiar because the seat fits my ass after ten years at that wheel - but I hate being seen in public at that wheel and every time I step out of it I have to change clothes and shower because of the dirt and grease.
Look: Grandma doesn't need a finder because Grandma doesn't have anything TO "find" except more arcade sites to occupy her time. Grandma doesn't install programs, gramma USES programs. Give grannie a desktop shortcut to a web browser that'll let her check her aol mail and play her pogo games and she'll be just fine. Give her all this in a computer that won't be brought to its knees by all the shit floating around those popup ads and grannie can die happy, a cigarette in one hand and her mouse in the other. Your only worry then will be how to clean up the rings left on the desk by her vodka tonics.
I've gotten maybe a dozen spams with "made up" to: fields. I think the OP is over-analyzing all this.
Which has zero to do with what I said. I guess you just wanted to reply to make the point that what I said was accurate? Because "DJ records" are NOT mainstream. Or are you saying it's easy to find vinyl in your area of all the latest releases?
So far as no one buying the convertor... Where I live the quality of the digital signal is STILL shit because the dropouts are in the source. But the local CBS station now also has the local UPN and weather stations, which means one station is now three. And the local PBS station is talking about providing another channel (which will probably also have those damn dropouts). But the local NBC station STILL hasn't started providing a digital transponder in spite of their merging with the local ABC affiliate - because NBC and ABC don't like the idea of their signals being piggybacked on the same "channel" but different transponders. So why should the local community invest in $500 piggyback tuners when only half the stations are even there yet? And why buy a piggyback tuner now when, in three years, the $399 TV sets at wal-mart will have those same tuners built in?
But this really has little to do with the topic, which is about DVDs becoming obsolete. Consider this: 802.11x in my area is nearly useless as a community service because there are so many trees and such high humidity. And we STILL have no cable and likely never will, and even if they put a dslam in the local phone box most of the "town" is still too far away to make use of it. But the FCC is plodding ahead with plans to usurp the vhf analog tv band and are talking very seriously about giving some of that bandwidth over to local wireless services. That means even out here in nowhereland wireless media distribution becomes practical. All we need are devices to make VOD as easy to sue as the present day tv remotes and most of the community will never worry about those oddball services like netflix (which will evolve their marketing to providing quality rather than just selection) - because everyone will have "on demand" braindead action movies and tv sitcoms and all the crap they have now. Granted it'll be compressed to hell but, given the zeal of directv viewers who insist their picture is "just as good as dvd," most don't seem to have a problem with that now.
I would say that, if the FCC moves ahead with providing more lower frequency bandwidth to "wireless broadband" then predictions of DVD obsolescence are pretty much spot-on. In ten years "DVDs" won't be "DVDs" anymore they'll probably be some god forsaken "Windows Media" formatted disc (aka "WMDs") and most of us will have available to our homes "VOD" of the (shit) quality now enjoyed by all those digital cable and directv subscribers.
I don't think we will EVER have "indestructible media." There's just no money in it. LPs were about the closest we ever came and that's mostly because they are analog - there's lots to be had between "a little" and "everything." Compare this to DVDs that frequently develop "dropouts" just like analog vhs - except with vhs you could still see something there even if it was warped or noisy or had bad sound. Now it's just nothing at all.
Same thing with tv here. The PBS station used to have frequent splats opf noise on it due to some inexplicable inability of the network engineers to maintain a proper stl. Now, thanks to their all digital upgrade, we don't get the splats of noise - we just get really fucking annoying dropouts. Not once or twice an hour but more like two or three a minute. Just a second or two but it's so goddamned annoying I have just about quit watching the only network available to me that had something worth watching.
When digital is good it's really great - but when it's bad it completely sucks ass, which means it must be replaced in order to continue using it. And there's no way the corps are going to spend money developing media that lasts more than a scant few years - there's simply no profit in it.
Come to think of it, we may not be able to do an I, Robot or AI from our garage, but I don't think it would be at all out of reach for a couple of basement dwellers to pool their resources and come up with a contemporary Silent Running or Logan's Run. Cityscapes and such are relatively easy and only a few actors would be needed. Hmmmm... maybe I need to invest in a few yards of green felt, myself.
And don't forget, many movies of this era plodded along. Look at Xardoz, the original Rollerball, etc - all great films but of very deliberate pace.
And, frankly, I'm sick of everyone ripping on directors who retouch their own work. If this were some indie wannabe filmaker doing this from his parent's basement and releasing the work on bittorrent most of you would be reveling about how this is just one more example of the end of Hollywood, how we are all now empowered via digital technology to retouch and recreate any previous work created by anyone, anywhere, and make it work of our own. So why can't Hollywood do the same damn thing? It's not like Lucas burned the original prints - if I wanna see Casablanca in color or thx1138 in a modern light what right do you have to say otherwise?
Welcome to the generation of the post-modernist-anti-revisionist...
Making yourself comepetive with the services offered by others in your field is what it's all about. If you won't pay for them, someone else might - and then they will be able to provide more feature-rich service than you. They will have greater value to your employer then you (even if they have lesser skills, just because "knowledge" is not so easily visible as "hours worked" on the bottom line).
Life's a balancing act. If they shake the line too much, go dance in someone else's bigtop.
I don't see anything wrong with a business having certain expectations. Most all expect you to get to work on time and they don't care if you have a car, but they at least expect you to have reliable transport.
If you are an IT guy, a broadband connection from your home can give you "reliable transport" without requiring you pile into your clothes and drive to the office at 3AM every time some little something pops into your obsessive CEO's IT-ignorant brain.
If you don't want a blackberry, don't pay for one. I never would carry a pager (again) for any amount of money, and I make that clear from the get-go. I don't even carry a cellphone - if someone wants me they can try to call the landline or they can leave an email. If this isn't a big enough toolbox for them, then it's time to talk about mo money... simple as that.
I never even noticed the "backwards buttons." What I HAVE noticed is that every single machine I have installed kde on I end up with a seriously ugly desktop unless I'm willing to spend quite some time trying to figure out why all the fonts are so big, why they don't scale in rpoportion to the fonts in the workspace areas, how to make fix everything from looking like some windows noob's uglified XP desktop stuck at 800x600 resolution...
Seiously. Even the very pretty Suse looks ten times better with the plain jane default gnome desktop than the default kde desktop, and Suse has always been a designed-for kde distro.
I find a 300+Mhz thinkpad to be an excellent little machine for carrying around work, surfing the net, listening to music, or swapping files - but none of these things at the same time. 366MHz is getting pretty responsive, and 500-700MHz is a damn fine system (sorry, but unless I'm building a portable video workstation I cannot justify a 1GHz+ laptop - even for running gnome 2.6).
But a 486-100? Damn, that's really pushing it.
I buy lots of laptop stuff on ebay and I rebuild IBM lappys as a hobby. Back when I first started doing this I looked at the price of brand new, fully warranteed drives and decided to just buy a few cheap used ones. Of the three I bought (for a total of more than $100) I have zero functional units less than six months later. The first one (Sony - I should have known) accepted a format and then started clicking a week later, the second (Fujitsu) lasted a couple of months. The genuine IBM drive lasted almost four months before it, too, started clicking one day while at the library - just as I was about to complete a 4GB ISO download.
From then on I buy "expensive" new drives with warranties. Spending $100 on a new drive every couple of years makes a hell of a lot more sense than spending $30 every other month on JUNK.
Speaking more directly to the topic, my latest pet is a 500MHz 600 that is being fitted with a custom case and battery pack and internal USB hub and wireless. It will have only one external PCMCIA slot because the other will be permanently occupied by a USB2 card (which will, in turn, talk to the internal wireless USB dongle and USB 10/100 NIC) - but I will be able to refit my machine to a speedy 750MHz or more at my leisure, spare parts are dirt cheap, and I won't have to be a slave to the $60 semi-annual Lithium toss, instead just replacing NiMH cells as they expire.
And the way I'm making room for much of this is by replacing the $80 20GB 2.5" drive with a cool new $110 20GB 1.8" drive. Just a few slight internal adjustments and my one-off geekpad will become the one to rule the world via USB!
I trust them more since the quality of their drivers partially determines their sales, and thus they have a bigger motivation to make them better.
I have an SiS chipset system right now as my main desktop. It's not the best, but it's not the least. And I don't need high power 3D, I only need good 2D (video) playback on the system. And linux has pretty good (open) SiS drivers and I wanted a smallish system with an "all in one" motherboard, so I went with an SiS765. And, in fact, my system works BETTER in linux than in windows XP or 2000 even *after* I have installed the very latest and greatest from their website *and* added one of those fancy windows toolbar widgets to let me microadjust the scan rate and resolution.
When I install mdk10 or suse9.1 or fc2 it lets me set the resolution of the display to something truly useful like 1440x1050 or 1280x960 rather than the fucked-up distortion that is 1280x1024 - which is all the factory drivers in windows can manage between 1024x768 and an ungodly (for my eyes on my 19" monitor) 1600x1200. And these distros do it right from the default install screen, and I don't even HAVE to adjust anything to get the highest possible scan rate at these settings. But if what you say were true then SiS should have even *better* video drivers available in windows since they (presumably) are motivated by all that income potential and, after all, they have that insight from those linux geeks on which ot base their own work. So if a bunch of geeks can reverse engineer or just read the docs and *create* drivers of this quality, why can't the manufacturer?
This is the greatest lie of the Capitalist church: that money is the greatest motivation above all even in a free market, and that it will lead to the higher quality product every time. If what you say were at all true then SiS should have some insanely great XP drivers for their 7xx chipsets - so why is it the open source drivers beat them hands down?
So compare then to now: you can't even get decent fucking search results of Microsoft's own support site from Microsoft itself. They can't even properly track their own content - how on earth can anyone trust them to track everyone elses? I work tech support a few days a week and I don't even think about using Microsoft's "search the knowledge base" page - it's often laughably short on search results even for well known things like "xp rpc exploit" and "download ie6."
When I can get proper tech support info on Microsoft's own products without having to go to Google and type site:microsoft.com THEN I'll start to believe this is like Netscape vs. Microsoft.
And: Those blues recordings are ALEADY FREE. The music of Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers - much of the stuff recorded even by BB King is now PD because the recordings were unclaimed back in the 70's when the first laws on this matter were passed - just like those old John Wayne movies that sell at wallyworld for three-ninety-five.
And we're talking about the web. Whose laws apply? Every "point" you make is an insipid defense to excuse your inaction on the matter. If AofMP3.com offers recordings for a dime each and it's legal, how does it suddenly become illegal because it's in your house? How can you even attempt a logical justification for donating twenty bucks to the people lobbying away everyone's rights (including the rights of these artists you seem to treasure)? If BB King says "come to greenwood with your tape deck" how the hell can you say the recording is illegal? How does the guy who wrote and performed the song on stage not get the right to give away his art? The man hasn't sweated a record label in decades - he tours (he'll play your birthday party for just a few grand) and he has his club - so he hasn't earned the right to share his art as he chooses?