Eventhough, I don't think this mainly is about VLC vs. MPlayer. Both applications uses many of the same libraries, but with different implementation. MPlayer also gets its "hands dirty" with DeCSS and WMV "support" in *nix.
And, importantly for some, provides plugin support for a whole crapload of stuff - especially on amd64 where realplayer seems not to want to go. With no mplayer I coudn't listen to BBC raido unless I wanted to muck around with the 32 bit bin version of firefox.
I made it through a masters degree in engineering without buying a single textbook. Maybe twice a semester I had to go to the library to get out a course text to find something I needed that was only in a set text.
The rest of the time general texts, internet resources and lecture materials covered the gap... so what's the big problem elsewhere?
Just strip out some of the useless crap like foreign language support and make everyone learn English. That should save a few megabytes...
Now, where were we going to be sending these laptops again?
(Seriously, I don't see the problem... not only is the code open so you can delete what you want but nearly everything has a multitude of options to disable large chunks of functionality to make it smaller at will, modularity at it's best. There are a few things that it would be fair to level the criticism at (OO.o for example) but on the whole most Linux software is pretty good - good enough to cram the essentials onto a USB drive at least.)
The big news is that it contains an integrated 3G data modem - meaning UK addicts will be able to connect from the device and their laptop (via USB/BlueTooth) at 3G broadband speeds <br><br> And the only thing faster than the connection will be the speed at which the bill rises.
Hey well since I was the one saying I would be add blocking the ludicrous 700k omg-blinken-flashing-epilepsy-microsoft-friendly flash adds they were showing on the TEXT ONLY LIGHTWEIGHT MOBILE version of/. I can't really complain that they now started to display adds as a few byte of text I guess.
This is known as the Browk Window theory in Economics - that is, by running around breaking windows I create work for glaziers.
In actual fact were the windows not being broken the resources could be put to better use elsewhere - the time of the labourer and the money spent could be used to grow the economy rather than in the mantainance of existing infrastructure which is an activity that adds zero to the bottom line.
In this case not needing spyware companies will allow the workers and the capital emplyed to go and do something more efficent, in economic terms... such as innovating new and better spyware, seeing as how well Microsoft's other security related announcements have worked out:)
American beer is *gaasp* improving to the point that some of it is even drinkable, certainly the local stuff in New England.
While the mass produced crap deserves it's repuation as being better after urination than before, so does European mass produced beer in the large part. Things like Concorde Pale Ale are not quite up to snuff compared to Fursty Ferret (partly due to the instance on selling it chilled, which impairs the flavour), but it's a hell of a lot better than the canned sewerage output they sell as John Smiths.
Public Health Warning - Tourist Advisary
on
Green Geek Beer
·
· Score: 4, Funny
If you are in Boston at this time of year DO NOT respond when people introduce themselves as "Irish-American" with "Nice to meet you, I'm a Saxon-Norman-Viking-Dutch-Englishman". Breaking them out of their fantasy world may result in you spending the night in the gutter looking for your teeth instead of getting personally aquainted with a drunk BU chick who can't tell the difference between a Home Counties and Irish Counties accent.
He gave them more than 3 months to fix it. They didnt. He releases the information so that admins can take steps to protect themselves......and they call HIM the dick? Right...
Now we can be locked into paying more for wireless because of the laptop provider we chose.
One of the shitty features of the US market that the UK cellphone market has been picking up recently is longer contracts (now up to 18 months) and higher and higher fees to unlock your device at the end of the term. Orange are up from £free to £20.
And now they want us to pay this on a laptop as well? Sure, fine, throw in a 3G/GPRS data card if you want - but FFS don't cripple it by making it work only with one service. No one would accept a wireless card that only worked with T-Mobil hotspots after all.
Could the slashdot editors please refrain from mentioning teh terrorists in just about every piece of totally unrelated news. (I know, I know the BBC did it too, but I would much rather have news for nerds, or stuff that matters. Mentioning terrorism here is neither.)
Well, unless there are some terrorists holding hostages at Apple and threatening to blow it up unless we turn over Torvalds.
Thanks to new UK legislation that is threatening to allow product placement advertisers will be getting their crap pushed and 'content' creators will be getting their 20 pieces of silver no matter how you rebroadcast space cadets 97: the final farce... so why should they care?
You get the BBC World Service in the US as well... around 1am in the morning when they are running syndicated stations. It's great for night driving to keep you awake:)
I actually know some construction workers in MA who tape it overnight and then listen to it at work instead of the normal programming.
At least here in the UK when we give over (essentially) tax money to our radio stations we get something good for it. If you are going to fuck around with the free market you may as well make it work *for* you rather than against.
Satellite raido is going to go the same way as satellite TV - in a few years time you will have exactly the same crap there when the execs realise that terrestrial raido is dead and they can squeeze out a few more pennies by running adverts.
The only defense is to get the government to pay for more ad free stations like NPR (but make it conditional on being ad free and give them editorial independance and a budget that cannot be touched in retaliation for bad stories) because experience with television has shown that the free market in broadcast media is fundamentally broken and will only shaft the consumer sooner or later.
The existance of one or two government funded stations *forces* the commercial competition to keep their standards up to remain competative. Without that, there is no hope of a good service.
*No one wants to set up a music player with new content just for the drive to work. *The commentary is generally interesting or informative. *No adverts! Even the commercial stations have far far fewer adverts than the US.
It's no wonder the medium is dying in the US where you have to listen to the same ad over and over again followed by a Rent A Moron yelling *more* adverts at you - just disguised as 'content'. Then, to cap it off, you get to hear essentially a paid musical advert.
Compare this to the UK:
*Radio 1 - not my thing, but they play popular music and talk about popular events. *Radio 2 - some alternative and older music with some other great programmes. *Radio 3 - great classical music and discussion about the history and styles and composers. *Radio 4 - the one true radio station - all the best comedy, programmes to make you think, news that does more than scratch the surface but takes a deeper look. Humphries (morning news presenter) is an abrasive moron, but you can forgive him for winding up politicians. *Radio 5 - sport, waste of bandwidth, but at least it has no adverts. *Classic FM - more populsr classical music - adverts no more than once every 5 minutes or so, and no interrupting pieces. *All the local stations, BBC - no adverts, good local coverage. *All the local stations - commercial - a bit like US stations, but even they have not managed to sink so low.
If you had that lot available on a device costing $9.50 wouldn't you listen more?
...the media got a taste of their own medicine. After all they *never* prominantly post damaging, factually incorrect stories and then hide the retractions, right?
You can always use two SSH demons - one on port 22 that allows only connections with certificates, and one on port rand# that is limited to few retries per second, then a short ban after a few bad attempts, but otherwise normal logins.
Slashdot Mirror
Eventhough, I don't think this mainly is about VLC vs. MPlayer. Both applications uses many of the same libraries, but with different implementation. MPlayer also gets its "hands dirty" with DeCSS and WMV "support" in *nix.
And, importantly for some, provides plugin support for a whole crapload of stuff - especially on amd64 where realplayer seems not to want to go. With no mplayer I coudn't listen to BBC raido unless I wanted to muck around with the 32 bit bin version of firefox.
2. Legal downloads of Linux/BSD CD's.
Somehow I have never seen this as Job's first priority on the list of things to make easy in OS X.
You upload a little and you get infinite download credit for whatever movie you want. Sometimes even before it's out in the stores!
I agree with this article and I have only had 7 double expressos this morning. Hardly a high dose of caffine at all.
I made it through a masters degree in engineering without buying a single textbook. Maybe twice a semester I had to go to the library to get out a course text to find something I needed that was only in a set text.
The rest of the time general texts, internet resources and lecture materials covered the gap... so what's the big problem elsewhere?
Just strip out some of the useless crap like foreign language support and make everyone learn English. That should save a few megabytes...
Now, where were we going to be sending these laptops again?
(Seriously, I don't see the problem... not only is the code open so you can delete what you want but nearly everything has a multitude of options to disable large chunks of functionality to make it smaller at will, modularity at it's best. There are a few things that it would be fair to level the criticism at (OO.o for example) but on the whole most Linux software is pretty good - good enough to cram the essentials onto a USB drive at least.)
The big news is that it contains an integrated 3G data modem - meaning UK addicts will be able to connect from the device and their laptop (via USB/BlueTooth) at 3G broadband speeds
<br><br>
And the only thing faster than the connection will be the speed at which the bill rises.
So they are actually going to be selling beer in the movie theater for sports?
No, they are going to be selling Bud.
Hey well since I was the one saying I would be add blocking the ludicrous 700k omg-blinken-flashing-epilepsy-microsoft-friendly flash adds they were showing on the TEXT ONLY LIGHTWEIGHT MOBILE version of /. I can't really complain that they now started to display adds as a few byte of text I guess.
That's like the lamp lighters union bitching about the need to safeguard jobs by not installing electric lights.
This is known as the Browk Window theory in Economics - that is, by running around breaking windows I create work for glaziers.
:)
In actual fact were the windows not being broken the resources could be put to better use elsewhere - the time of the labourer and the money spent could be used to grow the economy rather than in the mantainance of existing infrastructure which is an activity that adds zero to the bottom line.
In this case not needing spyware companies will allow the workers and the capital emplyed to go and do something more efficent, in economic terms... such as innovating new and better spyware, seeing as how well Microsoft's other security related announcements have worked out
American beer is *gaasp* improving to the point that some of it is even drinkable, certainly the local stuff in New England.
While the mass produced crap deserves it's repuation as being better after urination than before, so does European mass produced beer in the large part. Things like Concorde Pale Ale are not quite up to snuff compared to Fursty Ferret (partly due to the instance on selling it chilled, which impairs the flavour), but it's a hell of a lot better than the canned sewerage output they sell as John Smiths.
If you are in Boston at this time of year DO NOT respond when people introduce themselves as "Irish-American" with "Nice to meet you, I'm a Saxon-Norman-Viking-Dutch-Englishman". Breaking them out of their fantasy world may result in you spending the night in the gutter looking for your teeth instead of getting personally aquainted with a drunk BU chick who can't tell the difference between a Home Counties and Irish Counties accent.
He gave them more than 3 months to fix it. They didnt. He releases the information so that admins can take steps to protect themselves... ...and they call HIM the dick? Right...
Now we can be locked into paying more for wireless because of the laptop provider we chose.
One of the shitty features of the US market that the UK cellphone market has been picking up recently is longer contracts (now up to 18 months) and higher and higher fees to unlock your device at the end of the term. Orange are up from £free to £20.
And now they want us to pay this on a laptop as well? Sure, fine, throw in a 3G/GPRS data card if you want - but FFS don't cripple it by making it work only with one service. No one would accept a wireless card that only worked with T-Mobil hotspots after all.
Could the slashdot editors please refrain from mentioning teh terrorists in just about every piece of totally unrelated news. (I know, I know the BBC did it too, but I would much rather have news for nerds, or stuff that matters. Mentioning terrorism here is neither.)
Well, unless there are some terrorists holding hostages at Apple and threatening to blow it up unless we turn over Torvalds.
Fill half your data center, use the rest to house illegal immigrants or store cia!is pills for $$profit$$.
Thanks to new UK legislation that is threatening to allow product placement advertisers will be getting their crap pushed and 'content' creators will be getting their 20 pieces of silver no matter how you rebroadcast space cadets 97: the final farce... so why should they care?
You get the BBC World Service in the US as well... around 1am in the morning when they are running syndicated stations. It's great for night driving to keep you awake :)
I actually know some construction workers in MA who tape it overnight and then listen to it at work instead of the normal programming.
At least here in the UK when we give over (essentially) tax money to our radio stations we get something good for it. If you are going to fuck around with the free market you may as well make it work *for* you rather than against.
Satellite raido is going to go the same way as satellite TV - in a few years time you will have exactly the same crap there when the execs realise that terrestrial raido is dead and they can squeeze out a few more pennies by running adverts.
The only defense is to get the government to pay for more ad free stations like NPR (but make it conditional on being ad free and give them editorial independance and a budget that cannot be touched in retaliation for bad stories) because experience with television has shown that the free market in broadcast media is fundamentally broken and will only shaft the consumer sooner or later.
The existance of one or two government funded stations *forces* the commercial competition to keep their standards up to remain competative. Without that, there is no hope of a good service.
Here in the UK raido is doing just fine:
*No one wants to set up a music player with new content just for the drive to work.
*The commentary is generally interesting or informative.
*No adverts! Even the commercial stations have far far fewer adverts than the US.
It's no wonder the medium is dying in the US where you have to listen to the same ad over and over again followed by a Rent A Moron yelling *more* adverts at you - just disguised as 'content'. Then, to cap it off, you get to hear essentially a paid musical advert.
Compare this to the UK:
*Radio 1 - not my thing, but they play popular music and talk about popular events.
*Radio 2 - some alternative and older music with some other great programmes.
*Radio 3 - great classical music and discussion about the history and styles and composers.
*Radio 4 - the one true radio station - all the best comedy, programmes to make you think, news that does more than scratch the surface but takes a deeper look. Humphries (morning news presenter) is an abrasive moron, but you can forgive him for winding up politicians.
*Radio 5 - sport, waste of bandwidth, but at least it has no adverts.
*Classic FM - more populsr classical music - adverts no more than once every 5 minutes or so, and no interrupting pieces.
*All the local stations, BBC - no adverts, good local coverage.
*All the local stations - commercial - a bit like US stations, but even they have not managed to sink so low.
If you had that lot available on a device costing $9.50 wouldn't you listen more?
...the media got a taste of their own medicine. After all they *never* prominantly post damaging, factually incorrect stories and then hide the retractions, right?
You can always use two SSH demons - one on port 22 that allows only connections with certificates, and one on port rand# that is limited to few retries per second, then a short ban after a few bad attempts, but otherwise normal logins.
...a greak year for geeks everywhere to go and visit Paris.