All of this is still consistent with the possibility of packets being intercepted/proxied, and only altered under certain conditions.
But it is nice that someone's checking these claims before we all get medieval on Comcast. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate them without us making them up.
From what I understand, sound studio apps really, really don't need specialized hardware -- CPUs are more than fast enough.
Photoshop, I'll give you. Flash has sucked for performance for a long time, and I doubt it'll be able to get much out of this that it hasn't out of OpenGL or just sane programming over the last decade.
Hey, I'll steal one: Since wetriffs turned out to be a new idea, how about getting married while showering with electric guitars? Or, since showers are impractical, do that under a waterfall?
Point is, I was able to pull three ideas out of my ass, one of which you can't find an example of. And there's a fourth.
I saw a thing on a some cable channel show, where a saw blade would instantly stop [sawstop.com] when you put your finger into it.
I would very much want to know, and I would test it -- not with a human finger, but with something I wouldn't mind seeing chopped in half. If it fails the test, it goes back to the store. If it's a scam, they get what they deserve -- if it's merely defective, I get one that actually works.
Now, I'll reject GP's notion of testing all basic assumptions myself, certainly where it carries significant risk of bodily harm, but mostly because there are simply too many to test all of them.
At the same time, it is that willingness to test things, even when there is significant risk of bodily harm (see Marie Curie), that drives science forward.
We all know that science is a conspiracy to gain control of the government and children.
No, science is a process by which we observe the world and try to understand it. That's all.
And by the way, technology is applied science. If science is really such a conspiracy, you, sir, have no business using a computer, or any of the fruits of science, if you truly believe what you're saying. I hope the next time you're offered antibiotics, you refuse them, on the grounds that you believe evolution is a conspiracy -- after all, without evolution, no antibiotics, and no modern medicine.
Let's say you're right. Let's pretend for a moment that science really is some vast conspiracy with some "liberal" agenda. What would be the point?
I mean, think about this for two seconds. Can you actually come up with a motive that makes sense? Really, now -- a vast, global conspiracy, among tons of educated people -- people who often disagree on other things, and are not easily lead (think "herding cats"), but all agree that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming -- to, what, convince people of evolution?
Dude. At least the moon hoax kind of makes sense, to boost the morale of the country, and to be able to say we were there first -- and that's bunk, too. Your conspiracy theory doesn't even make as much sense as the moon hoax.
But then, I'm not sure why I'm going to bother arguing with you...
These evolutionists should be gagged and put in their place.
Clearly, you don't believe in freedom of speech, either, let alone separation of church and state. These are not dangerous liberal ideals, these are the founding principles of the United States of America. I don't know that you live here, but if you do, your whole post here is an insult to your country -- the founding fathers would've been ashamed.
God told Moses it was 7 days, because Moses just wouldn't understand something like 7 Billion years maybe.
Or it's possible the Bible was, in whole or in part, written by humans who got it wrong.
Here's what I believe, God Created the universe, god created life, God caused evolution to Just work,
Abiogenesis doesn't require a supernatural being, either.
But you're right -- there are many opportunities for a deity to help things along, and neither evolution nor abiogenesis makes it impossible to adapt a Christian belief.
That's not a typo -- I said "adapt", not "adopt". Just as Christianity has had to adapt itself before, to the idea of Earth being spherical, and Earth not being the center of the Universe.
It's good to see you're on the right track... I only hope...
I am also a Christian (LDS)
I only hope that you don't try to apply any of that religion to either your science or your ethics -- or at least, I hope you're as good at adapting it as you have been with evolution.
Free fall without air resistance is exactly the same phenomenon as "Zero Gravity" or "Microgravity".
In fact, orbit is exactly like this -- it is free fall. The only difference is that the trajectory takes you around the earth instead of into it.
Yes, that is a difference worth noting, but that's more like the difference between a water bottle and a water fountain. It's still water, it's just that the bottle will run out -- the plane will have to level off (or smack into the ground).
Example: I doubt anyone's been married on waterskis before. Or while submerged and in Scuba gear. Or with a priest who has recently inhaled large quantities of helium.
For that matter, you lack imagination about other reasons one might not want to be married in a church -- one might be Jewish, or Muslim, or Wiccan, or Pagan, or Buddhist, or Taoist, or Hindu, or atheist, or anything in between. Even if one is Christian, it wouldn't quite be a traditional marriage if it was between homosexuals -- and that assumes your local church will do it. And even if you're Christian and straight, and have no desire to be original, you might want to save a little money and have a smaller wedding at home with friends, or outside if it's a nice day.
But even so, it'd be damned cool to be able to show your future kids and grandkids that your wedding is in the Guinness Book of World Records.
despite the VGA input on the majority of HDTVs and the existence of affordable VGA-to-SDTV converters.
Never mind the existence of HDMI out on laptops now.
Therefore, video game genres designed for same-room multiplayer on a large monitor, like Bomberman series or Super Smash Bros. series, tend to be underrepresented on Steam just as they are in the rest of the PC game market.
Yeah, that does suck. I really wish we saw more of these.
However, splitscreen multiplayer sucks more. That's one advantage of PC, at least -- even if we're playing co-op, I can't see your screen, and we each have a nice, big, high-res, fullscreen picture of whatever we're doing.
Publishers exist to separate the wheat from the chaff. Otherwise, you'd have the situation like on Apple's app store, where you don't know which of the 25,000 apps are worthwhile.
That's not a question of publisher vs no publisher, it's a question of Apple being a shitty publisher.
As an example: How do you separate the wheat from the chaff on blogs? Or webcomics? Or anything on the Internet? Answer: Word of mouth, links (a more direct form of word-of-mouth), and trying it out (which is why they publish demo versions).
Ideally, do what I do: Set up www.example.com to permanently redirect to example.com. Or, at least, redirect the other way.
It's kind of irritating when people just make them point to the same place -- this destroys cache coherency if I follow different links to the site, or if there are any absolute URLs there, and there's also the slight possibility that the site will behave differently on one than the other, or cookies won't be shared, or something like that.
I'm tempted to actually not redirect that way, but to show a short message first, but that would probably be just as annoying.
Someone who purchases a domain name with the intent to sell it later, at a profit - doesn't *have* to make it look like something it isn't.
The majority do, however, as a way to generate that secondary income source they'll need -- ad revenue from people hitting the site.
I dunno, I just don't feel like squatting is inherently evil.
It's possible my attitude has been colored by both how aggressive the squatters are -- seriously, type a name into whois, or into a registrar, and you'd better register it within a few hours or it'll be gone -- and by the fact that the vast majority do, in fact, misrepresent it, and use it for nothing but advertising.
There's also the fact that it is a very close business model to spamming. You're generally buying a ton of domains, most of which will never be used -- thus, you're cluttering the namespace, wasting valuable resources of the DNS system (though, arguably, you're also helping to fund those same resources), and irritating people in their search results, and generally doing nothing productive and wasting time, resources, and energy of other people......all in the hopes that you'll get a buyer, and that the number of buyers you get will pay for the rest of it.
That's how spam works, and it works pretty well. Send mail to millions of users, get back maybe hundreds of buyers, but it's so absurdly cheap to send that mail that you don't need many buyers to make up from it.
I guess the only way I really see it being semi-legitimate is when it's only a few domains, and they're just parked.
If enough people did that, they could effectively drive squatters out of business.
Unfortunately, there are so many possible domains that I don't know it would make a dent. I'd effectively be just another squatter in an already crowded market of squatters. They'd still get people willing to pay more to someone else who happened on a better name -- because it's really not about who's selling them, it's about what name you have.
No, the best I can do is just refuse to buy from them. And I do.
What is release quality depends on what you are using.
Assume I'm using all the features that were in KDE3, and everything that is currently in KDE4. There really isn't an excuse to have a feature missing from KDE4 that was in KDE3, or to have a feature available-but-broken in KDE4.
If you are a free software dev, then to know what your users are using, you _need_ to release.
Or, y'know, ask them.
not betas, because don't attract nearly as much users.
See, I've heard this before, and it really pisses me off every time I see it.
You guys are trying to have your cake and eat it. You're trying to fool users into thinking the release is ready, to get them to beta-test for you, when they don't want to beta-test, they want a solid product.
And then you're scolding those exact same users for reading the fine print: "Not ready for users."
The 4.0 release, I can't believe even KDE developers used it. Kdevelop on KDE4 was only released, what, yesterday? Eat your own dogfood, assholes.
Once you can't break it anymore, and you show it to your family, and they can't break it anymore, and you've released a dozen betas and a half dozen release candidates, and no one who wants those can break them anymore...
Then you get to release.
To do otherwise is just irresponsible, and if this is really the official position of KDE, I'll make a note never to touch anything with a K in it again. I need my stuff to work -- I do not need to be tricked into being a beta tester.
That way, there is pain in the beginning, but in the end, it works much, much better.
Yes, for the users that ditch KDE and go back to Windows. Vista's release was bad, but not nearly as bad as KDE4.
In fact, the Linux Kernel did a hell of a lot better than both of them with the 2.6.0 release. So did distros, for that matter -- and everything was backported to 2.4 for long enough to resolve any issues anyone had with upgrading.
So it's not an issue with being a free software dev, it's an issue with being a dishonest fuck.
What I'm complaining about is the fact that it's different parts of this that were broken in each version, and that if they spent just a little bit of effort maintaining the stable version while they went galavanting off to the bold new kde4 future.
And yeah, it is frustrating -- somewhere along the line, this used to work in the old version. So what's even more annoying is it's a regression, and a stupid one at that. But they couldn't be bothered to fix it.
The whole point of having an exciting, new, development version is that your stable version is supposed to not break while you work on the new one, and while you bring it up to feature parity with the old one, so it's actually a drop-in replacement.
This is idiotic: it is different code. Eventually, if a given feature is needed, it'll be "back", in the sense that it will have been added again, with the experience and knowledge of the previous system.
However, many basic features were not "back" on release. That is broken.
I realize it's a full rewrite, but you don't want to make people miss the old system. There are very, very few things OS 9 did that OS X cannot, for example.
See, this has nothing to do with KDE. This is a low(er)-level hardware issue,
Actually, no, it was a temporary (if you call two months "temporary") compatibility issue between KDE4's bluetooth interface and the bluez system on Linux. But yeah, probably a distro issue.
Kubuntu was always broken, not due to lack of dedication, but from lack of manpower.
Lack of manpower really isn't an excuse for this kind of stuff. I can understand some minor known bugs (with workarounds) making it to a released project, but you know what? If your OS won't talk to my mouse, you delay the release until it will. To do otherwise is an embarrassment.
As for KDE being behind Vista, you are right. If the race is towards higher levels of suckiness.
No, I'm talking about the fact that Vista actually seems decent after one service pack, and at launch, it just didn't have anywhere near the issues KDE 4.0 did, or even 4.1. And not all of these are packaging-related.
Free software, fortunately or unfortunately is more used, by people who think that it is some product in finished form. It is not.
Ubuntu is trying to promote the idea that it can compete with actual products in finished form.
to reach that stage, it must be tested, and that means pain for the early adopters,
Traditionally, this "early adopter" stage has been in the so-called development releases.
What's more, KDE 3 development seems to have pretty much stopped. This is certainly the case for the KDE3 version of Amarok -- all their work is going into the new KDE4 version. An example: The ability to choose a preferred format for a device (I want to transcode to AAC, not MP3, for an iPod) was dropped from a recent KDE3 version of Amarok, but development has stopped, so they refuse to fix it. The KDE4 version of Amarok either has this, or will fix it, but did not support transcoding at all, last I checked.
So, I'd have to manually download some random older version of KDE3's Amarok to get that very basic -- seriously, a shell script could do this -- level of functionality.
It basically means, I'm damned if I upgrade, and I'm damned if I don't. If I'm an early adopter, you tell me it's at my own risk -- but if I don't upgrade, you shrug and mark things "wontfix, this will all work in kde4". And yes, I have actually seen this happen, multiple times, in multiple KDE apps -- another example was KPDF, which lacked the ability to rotate its view sideways.
See, I didn't blame Compiz (or the Beryl fork) when I had issues with it. I hacked around them any way I could, and I was generally a decent citizen, I think.
But Compiz never declared itself to be a dot-oh release -- it's still 0.8.2. And it certainly wasn't calling itself "stable" when I was having those issues -- KDE 4.1 kind of did, even if 4.0 didn't. KDE 4.2 is what everyone is saying is when they finally got it right -- yet it even has a few basic UI issues that seem unrelated to the distro (how can I suspend-to-ram using only the keyboard?)
And, what's more, if Compiz didn't work, there were other window managers that did most of what was needed -- and these were under active development. No one said, "Oh, we're not adding the ability to shade a window, because Compiz will have that."
Nothing but unnecessary disk seeks to put the slower systems in their place, right?
The same disk seeks caused by fragmentation. Which are also zero cost on SSDs.
And we're talking about reading at most two streams at once. Combined, were they Blu-Ray, they'd be 50 megabits per second.
The last 7200 RPM drive I had -- common in a desktop -- got 60 megabytes per second in sequential reads. I don't care how many milliseconds your seek time is, you've got a lot of room to play there.
Add in some intelligent caching and scheduling -- read a meg from one stream, and a meg from the other -- and the seeks add up to barely anything at all. Certainly a seek every second or ten is no more than an idle, background task would do.
Heaven forbid someone might have something running in the background while watching video
Given that I've shown it hardly costs anything -- hell, it's probably less CPU intensive than having to demultiplex -- I doubt it'll have much of an impact on multitasking.
In fact, aren't you the one who, a second before, was shocked at the thought that I might ask the OS to do more than one thing at once?
Most users seem just fine playing a game, or browsing the web, or doing whatever else, while streaming music from their hard drive and/or the Internet. Clearly, there are extra seeks there, yet no one (except you) seems to mind.
Designers like you are the reason why a gigahertz machine can take several seconds to bring up a simple dialog box.
No, designers like me are the reason why people can spend a few hours building a simple blog site, instead of a few weeks or months.
Designers like you are the reason some people actually try to code websites in C -- or worse, assembly. Those people tend not to keep their jobs very long.
Do me a favor -- try it yourself. Take a random video, and a random song. Use a decent video player, and specify an external audio source. For example:
mplayer -audiofile foo.mp3 bar.avi
Try it on an older computer. Try it on an older laptop, with a slow hard drive. Compare it with and without the audiofile. Tell me if there's really a huge difference.
There'll be a small difference, sure -- mostly caused by the fact that you still have to demux the video file and throw away its audio stream -- but nothing huge.
If you don't do this experiment, I will assume you have no idea what you're talking about, and worse, no desire to learn.
If you do this experiment, I expect you'll be surprised -- and that's without either mplayer or your OS being optimized to do this.
If you wish to prove me wrong, post benchmarks. I'm curious.
I am not saying nothing should ever be written in C, or that multiplexing is always wrong. I am saying that there are times and places to optimize, and times and places where flexibility and ease of implementation trumps squeezing a few fractions of a percent more speed out of something.
You need muxing for streams, unless you have two streams.
Fair enough. But this could be done, albeit clumsily, with the format I described.
I just ran a trace on unzipping a file. It had a grand total of four seeks.
This is possible to do with vanilla HTTP -- run a HEAD to get the length of the file. Grab the last however many bytes you need for the metadata, using a Range header. Then, open the additional streams using separate connections, each using a Range to your now known offsets in the zipfile.
So, you're now letting your IP stack do the multiplexing for you, just as locally, you'd let your OS' disk scheduler do the multiplexing for you.
Again, the only place this really presents a problem is spinning optical media, where the seek time (and wear and tear on the drive) would make it impractical. Hard drives are more than fast enough, and it seems likely SSDs may take over.
The advantages of this format are that it is actually possible for some programs, and operating systems, to see a zipfile as a folder, and provide random access within it. It's a standard way of archiving several related things together. And, it provides lossless compression, for any parts that are more convenient to store in a textual format -- even if you don't agree that XML is a good idea, subtitles would certainly be sanely stored as text.
There's also the fact that, like with OpenDocument, many programs will be able to work with the unzipped file as a folder. This presents some interesting possibilities -- playing with symlinks, for example, or even specify paths outside the file -- for example, take a TV series for which the opening sequence is always, or almost always, identical. Why not store it exactly once, and then refer to it from each episode? A decent player should be able to make it seamless.
I'd actually much rather see it in that form, but the zipfiles would give you most of the advantages of mkv, except for two obvious things: mkv is widely supported, and multiplexing is needed for optical media.
I do not understand this insistence towards XML. There is no reason for XML for menus here, either
All the reasons one might choose XML in the first place still apply. You've got actual, real extensibility, namespaces, a textual format that I can stick in version control, or use version control, and the fact that there are likely several XML-based formats (like XHTML) which are already quite close to having the functionality needed.
Sticking semistructured data into semistructured data has no advantage.
It does when the respective formats have different advantages.
There's no way I want to develop a menu or a script in EBML. Get me something that compiles to it from a saner format, and maybe, but I just don't see the point.
But, using the EBML for multiplexing makes sense, if we need multiplexing.
In contrast Apple did not let me upgrade my Macintosh
Really? You're getting no updates? Does Software Update do nothing?
Or is it just that you haven't gotten another "service pack" release?
unable to run the latest stuff like Firefox 3
First: Apple didn't force Mozilla to stop supporting old versions of OS X. Indeed, Firefox 3 seems to cause major problems for some people on Win2K, and I'm pretty sure they've dropped Win98 support.
The only reason people support XP is because Vista took so long to come out, and Vista is so bad that so many people refuse to upgrade.
I suspect you'll be in for a rude awakening with Win7, and whatever comes next -- when Microsoft starts their upgrade treadmill again.
But, for that matter, you could have gone with iCab, which even includes an OS 9 version. Or you could've used Opera, which claims 10.2 works (though it's unsupported) in the latest version.
do you understand my point?
I do, and I did. But opening with "whatever" is a great way to avoid mine.
It's also worth mentioning: The Mac has never been the "cheap" approach. But that hardware is durable, and an OS upgrade is certainly cheaper than buying a PC.
Meh. Disclaimer to all of the above: I'm a Linux user, and I did buy my copy of XP.
When I'm not at home, I just run OpenVPN, with compression on, and default-route everything through it -- either to my machine at home, or to a VPS that I'm not using for much.
That way, it's not just web, it's anything else I do, and it's all nicely secured. Ok, yes, I'm now trusting my VPS host, but better than trusting everyone else at the local Internet cafe.
What makes me cringe is when I tell people a URL, or an actual domain, and they type that into Google.
But yeah, I will type applebees into Google, because if they do actually own applebees.com, it'll be in the first few results. But you never know -- and that way, if I typo it, Google catches me.
It also saves me from having to try t.mobile.com, t-mobile.com, t_mobile.com, tmobile.com, t.mobi, and whatever other combinations might've worked. Yeah, for large business, it's pretty reliable, as they'll have bought all the common ways people might try, but for smaller ones, you want to get it right.
But, it doesn't stop me from memorizing things like youtube, last.fm, etc. And I get even more annoyed at everyone's insistence on putting 'www' in front of everything. I still see people type http://www.foo.com...
Let's see. Four domains, $10/year, means she can't come up with $40/year?
Let me put that in perspective. She can't come up with eleven cents a day?
I don't know about parking them. I'd say, just let the registration run out. But homeless people panhandling could pay for four or five domains a year.
Yeah, the hosting is probably costing more, but the domains?
Unlike the above, squatters also clog up my search results, and pretend to be some sort of resource in their own right, feigning relevance to whatever search I did. That's more difficult to make an analogy, but I'll try...
It's like buying thousands of houses that you guess a few might be undervalued, putting a sign outside that says "Bed & Breakfast" or "Ye Olde Antique Shop", and when people come in looking for something entirely different, you either refer them to someone down the block who paid you for it, or you try to sell them the house.
It is generally quite dishonest.
Now, there may indeed be some cybersquatter rule that I can use to hurt them, but either way, I absolutely refuse to support their business model. If it's some kid who bought a personal domain and isn't doing much with it, fine -- but if it's yet another "What you need, when you need it" bullshit site, they can rot.
Slashdot Mirror
All of this is still consistent with the possibility of packets being intercepted/proxied, and only altered under certain conditions.
But it is nice that someone's checking these claims before we all get medieval on Comcast. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to hate them without us making them up.
Enough said.
Seriously, if you're going to copy/paste, at least try one that bothered to, I don't know, at least spell properly. Web sights? Really?
From what I understand, sound studio apps really, really don't need specialized hardware -- CPUs are more than fast enough.
Photoshop, I'll give you. Flash has sucked for performance for a long time, and I doubt it'll be able to get much out of this that it hasn't out of OpenGL or just sane programming over the last decade.
Yeah, I could've picked some better examples.
Hey, I'll steal one: Since wetriffs turned out to be a new idea, how about getting married while showering with electric guitars? Or, since showers are impractical, do that under a waterfall?
Point is, I was able to pull three ideas out of my ass, one of which you can't find an example of. And there's a fourth.
I want to work there, now.
Curiosity, and science...
Science is not for pussies!
And, as for this one:
I saw a thing on a some cable channel show, where a saw blade would instantly stop [sawstop.com] when you put your finger into it.
I would very much want to know, and I would test it -- not with a human finger, but with something I wouldn't mind seeing chopped in half. If it fails the test, it goes back to the store. If it's a scam, they get what they deserve -- if it's merely defective, I get one that actually works.
Now, I'll reject GP's notion of testing all basic assumptions myself, certainly where it carries significant risk of bodily harm, but mostly because there are simply too many to test all of them.
At the same time, it is that willingness to test things, even when there is significant risk of bodily harm (see Marie Curie), that drives science forward.
We all know that science is a conspiracy to gain control of the government and children.
No, science is a process by which we observe the world and try to understand it. That's all.
And by the way, technology is applied science. If science is really such a conspiracy, you, sir, have no business using a computer, or any of the fruits of science, if you truly believe what you're saying. I hope the next time you're offered antibiotics, you refuse them, on the grounds that you believe evolution is a conspiracy -- after all, without evolution, no antibiotics, and no modern medicine.
Let's say you're right. Let's pretend for a moment that science really is some vast conspiracy with some "liberal" agenda. What would be the point?
I mean, think about this for two seconds. Can you actually come up with a motive that makes sense? Really, now -- a vast, global conspiracy, among tons of educated people -- people who often disagree on other things, and are not easily lead (think "herding cats"), but all agree that the evidence for evolution is overwhelming -- to, what, convince people of evolution?
Dude. At least the moon hoax kind of makes sense, to boost the morale of the country, and to be able to say we were there first -- and that's bunk, too. Your conspiracy theory doesn't even make as much sense as the moon hoax.
But then, I'm not sure why I'm going to bother arguing with you...
These evolutionists should be gagged and put in their place.
Clearly, you don't believe in freedom of speech, either, let alone separation of church and state. These are not dangerous liberal ideals, these are the founding principles of the United States of America. I don't know that you live here, but if you do, your whole post here is an insult to your country -- the founding fathers would've been ashamed.
God told Moses it was 7 days, because Moses just wouldn't understand something like 7 Billion years maybe.
Or it's possible the Bible was, in whole or in part, written by humans who got it wrong.
Here's what I believe, God Created the universe, god created life, God caused evolution to Just work,
Abiogenesis doesn't require a supernatural being, either.
But you're right -- there are many opportunities for a deity to help things along, and neither evolution nor abiogenesis makes it impossible to adapt a Christian belief.
That's not a typo -- I said "adapt", not "adopt". Just as Christianity has had to adapt itself before, to the idea of Earth being spherical, and Earth not being the center of the Universe.
It's good to see you're on the right track... I only hope...
I am also a Christian (LDS)
I only hope that you don't try to apply any of that religion to either your science or your ethics -- or at least, I hope you're as good at adapting it as you have been with evolution.
Free fall without air resistance is exactly the same phenomenon as "Zero Gravity" or "Microgravity".
In fact, orbit is exactly like this -- it is free fall. The only difference is that the trajectory takes you around the earth instead of into it.
Yes, that is a difference worth noting, but that's more like the difference between a water bottle and a water fountain. It's still water, it's just that the bottle will run out -- the plane will have to level off (or smack into the ground).
Example: I doubt anyone's been married on waterskis before. Or while submerged and in Scuba gear. Or with a priest who has recently inhaled large quantities of helium.
For that matter, you lack imagination about other reasons one might not want to be married in a church -- one might be Jewish, or Muslim, or Wiccan, or Pagan, or Buddhist, or Taoist, or Hindu, or atheist, or anything in between. Even if one is Christian, it wouldn't quite be a traditional marriage if it was between homosexuals -- and that assumes your local church will do it. And even if you're Christian and straight, and have no desire to be original, you might want to save a little money and have a smaller wedding at home with friends, or outside if it's a nice day.
But even so, it'd be damned cool to be able to show your future kids and grandkids that your wedding is in the Guinness Book of World Records.
despite the VGA input on the majority of HDTVs and the existence of affordable VGA-to-SDTV converters.
Never mind the existence of HDMI out on laptops now.
Therefore, video game genres designed for same-room multiplayer on a large monitor, like Bomberman series or Super Smash Bros. series, tend to be underrepresented on Steam just as they are in the rest of the PC game market.
Yeah, that does suck. I really wish we saw more of these.
However, splitscreen multiplayer sucks more. That's one advantage of PC, at least -- even if we're playing co-op, I can't see your screen, and we each have a nice, big, high-res, fullscreen picture of whatever we're doing.
Publishers exist to separate the wheat from the chaff. Otherwise, you'd have the situation like on Apple's app store, where you don't know which of the 25,000 apps are worthwhile.
That's not a question of publisher vs no publisher, it's a question of Apple being a shitty publisher.
As an example: How do you separate the wheat from the chaff on blogs? Or webcomics? Or anything on the Internet? Answer: Word of mouth, links (a more direct form of word-of-mouth), and trying it out (which is why they publish demo versions).
Hear hear!
No WWW!
Ideally, do what I do: Set up www.example.com to permanently redirect to example.com. Or, at least, redirect the other way.
It's kind of irritating when people just make them point to the same place -- this destroys cache coherency if I follow different links to the site, or if there are any absolute URLs there, and there's also the slight possibility that the site will behave differently on one than the other, or cookies won't be shared, or something like that.
I'm tempted to actually not redirect that way, but to show a short message first, but that would probably be just as annoying.
Someone who purchases a domain name with the intent to sell it later, at a profit - doesn't *have* to make it look like something it isn't.
The majority do, however, as a way to generate that secondary income source they'll need -- ad revenue from people hitting the site.
I dunno, I just don't feel like squatting is inherently evil.
It's possible my attitude has been colored by both how aggressive the squatters are -- seriously, type a name into whois, or into a registrar, and you'd better register it within a few hours or it'll be gone -- and by the fact that the vast majority do, in fact, misrepresent it, and use it for nothing but advertising.
There's also the fact that it is a very close business model to spamming. You're generally buying a ton of domains, most of which will never be used -- thus, you're cluttering the namespace, wasting valuable resources of the DNS system (though, arguably, you're also helping to fund those same resources), and irritating people in their search results, and generally doing nothing productive and wasting time, resources, and energy of other people... ...all in the hopes that you'll get a buyer, and that the number of buyers you get will pay for the rest of it.
That's how spam works, and it works pretty well. Send mail to millions of users, get back maybe hundreds of buyers, but it's so absurdly cheap to send that mail that you don't need many buyers to make up from it.
I guess the only way I really see it being semi-legitimate is when it's only a few domains, and they're just parked.
If enough people did that, they could effectively drive squatters out of business.
Unfortunately, there are so many possible domains that I don't know it would make a dent. I'd effectively be just another squatter in an already crowded market of squatters. They'd still get people willing to pay more to someone else who happened on a better name -- because it's really not about who's selling them, it's about what name you have.
No, the best I can do is just refuse to buy from them. And I do.
Yeah, in Kubuntu, it fails on my home WPA network.
What is release quality depends on what you are using.
Assume I'm using all the features that were in KDE3, and everything that is currently in KDE4. There really isn't an excuse to have a feature missing from KDE4 that was in KDE3, or to have a feature available-but-broken in KDE4.
If you are a free software dev, then to know what your users are using, you _need_ to release.
Or, y'know, ask them.
not betas, because don't attract nearly as much users.
See, I've heard this before, and it really pisses me off every time I see it.
You guys are trying to have your cake and eat it. You're trying to fool users into thinking the release is ready, to get them to beta-test for you, when they don't want to beta-test, they want a solid product.
And then you're scolding those exact same users for reading the fine print: "Not ready for users."
The 4.0 release, I can't believe even KDE developers used it. Kdevelop on KDE4 was only released, what, yesterday? Eat your own dogfood, assholes.
Once you can't break it anymore, and you show it to your family, and they can't break it anymore, and you've released a dozen betas and a half dozen release candidates, and no one who wants those can break them anymore...
Then you get to release.
To do otherwise is just irresponsible, and if this is really the official position of KDE, I'll make a note never to touch anything with a K in it again. I need my stuff to work -- I do not need to be tricked into being a beta tester.
That way, there is pain in the beginning, but in the end, it works much, much better.
Yes, for the users that ditch KDE and go back to Windows. Vista's release was bad, but not nearly as bad as KDE4.
In fact, the Linux Kernel did a hell of a lot better than both of them with the 2.6.0 release. So did distros, for that matter -- and everything was backported to 2.4 for long enough to resolve any issues anyone had with upgrading.
So it's not an issue with being a free software dev, it's an issue with being a dishonest fuck.
What I'm complaining about is the fact that it's different parts of this that were broken in each version, and that if they spent just a little bit of effort maintaining the stable version while they went galavanting off to the bold new kde4 future.
And yeah, it is frustrating -- somewhere along the line, this used to work in the old version. So what's even more annoying is it's a regression, and a stupid one at that. But they couldn't be bothered to fix it.
The whole point of having an exciting, new, development version is that your stable version is supposed to not break while you work on the new one, and while you bring it up to feature parity with the old one, so it's actually a drop-in replacement.
Amarok fails this epicly.
This is idiotic: it is different code. Eventually, if a given feature is needed, it'll be "back", in the sense that it will have been added again, with the experience and knowledge of the previous system.
However, many basic features were not "back" on release. That is broken.
I realize it's a full rewrite, but you don't want to make people miss the old system. There are very, very few things OS 9 did that OS X cannot, for example.
See, this has nothing to do with KDE. This is a low(er)-level hardware issue,
Actually, no, it was a temporary (if you call two months "temporary") compatibility issue between KDE4's bluetooth interface and the bluez system on Linux. But yeah, probably a distro issue.
Kubuntu was always broken, not due to lack of dedication, but from lack of manpower.
Lack of manpower really isn't an excuse for this kind of stuff. I can understand some minor known bugs (with workarounds) making it to a released project, but you know what? If your OS won't talk to my mouse, you delay the release until it will. To do otherwise is an embarrassment.
As for KDE being behind Vista, you are right. If the race is towards higher levels of suckiness.
No, I'm talking about the fact that Vista actually seems decent after one service pack, and at launch, it just didn't have anywhere near the issues KDE 4.0 did, or even 4.1. And not all of these are packaging-related.
Free software, fortunately or unfortunately is more used, by people who think that it is some product in finished form. It is not.
Ubuntu is trying to promote the idea that it can compete with actual products in finished form.
to reach that stage, it must be tested, and that means pain for the early adopters,
Traditionally, this "early adopter" stage has been in the so-called development releases.
What's more, KDE 3 development seems to have pretty much stopped. This is certainly the case for the KDE3 version of Amarok -- all their work is going into the new KDE4 version. An example: The ability to choose a preferred format for a device (I want to transcode to AAC, not MP3, for an iPod) was dropped from a recent KDE3 version of Amarok, but development has stopped, so they refuse to fix it. The KDE4 version of Amarok either has this, or will fix it, but did not support transcoding at all, last I checked.
So, I'd have to manually download some random older version of KDE3's Amarok to get that very basic -- seriously, a shell script could do this -- level of functionality.
It basically means, I'm damned if I upgrade, and I'm damned if I don't. If I'm an early adopter, you tell me it's at my own risk -- but if I don't upgrade, you shrug and mark things "wontfix, this will all work in kde4". And yes, I have actually seen this happen, multiple times, in multiple KDE apps -- another example was KPDF, which lacked the ability to rotate its view sideways.
See, I didn't blame Compiz (or the Beryl fork) when I had issues with it. I hacked around them any way I could, and I was generally a decent citizen, I think.
But Compiz never declared itself to be a dot-oh release -- it's still 0.8.2. And it certainly wasn't calling itself "stable" when I was having those issues -- KDE 4.1 kind of did, even if 4.0 didn't. KDE 4.2 is what everyone is saying is when they finally got it right -- yet it even has a few basic UI issues that seem unrelated to the distro (how can I suspend-to-ram using only the keyboard?)
And, what's more, if Compiz didn't work, there were other window managers that did most of what was needed -- and these were under active development. No one said, "Oh, we're not adding the ability to shade a window, because Compiz will have that."
Nothing but unnecessary disk seeks to put the slower systems in their place, right?
The same disk seeks caused by fragmentation. Which are also zero cost on SSDs.
And we're talking about reading at most two streams at once. Combined, were they Blu-Ray, they'd be 50 megabits per second.
The last 7200 RPM drive I had -- common in a desktop -- got 60 megabytes per second in sequential reads. I don't care how many milliseconds your seek time is, you've got a lot of room to play there.
Add in some intelligent caching and scheduling -- read a meg from one stream, and a meg from the other -- and the seeks add up to barely anything at all. Certainly a seek every second or ten is no more than an idle, background task would do.
Heaven forbid someone might have something running in the background while watching video
Given that I've shown it hardly costs anything -- hell, it's probably less CPU intensive than having to demultiplex -- I doubt it'll have much of an impact on multitasking.
In fact, aren't you the one who, a second before, was shocked at the thought that I might ask the OS to do more than one thing at once?
Most users seem just fine playing a game, or browsing the web, or doing whatever else, while streaming music from their hard drive and/or the Internet. Clearly, there are extra seeks there, yet no one (except you) seems to mind.
Designers like you are the reason why a gigahertz machine can take several seconds to bring up a simple dialog box.
No, designers like me are the reason why people can spend a few hours building a simple blog site, instead of a few weeks or months.
Designers like you are the reason some people actually try to code websites in C -- or worse, assembly. Those people tend not to keep their jobs very long.
Do me a favor -- try it yourself. Take a random video, and a random song. Use a decent video player, and specify an external audio source. For example:
Try it on an older computer. Try it on an older laptop, with a slow hard drive. Compare it with and without the audiofile. Tell me if there's really a huge difference.
There'll be a small difference, sure -- mostly caused by the fact that you still have to demux the video file and throw away its audio stream -- but nothing huge.
If you don't do this experiment, I will assume you have no idea what you're talking about, and worse, no desire to learn.
If you do this experiment, I expect you'll be surprised -- and that's without either mplayer or your OS being optimized to do this.
If you wish to prove me wrong, post benchmarks. I'm curious.
I am not saying nothing should ever be written in C, or that multiplexing is always wrong. I am saying that there are times and places to optimize, and times and places where flexibility and ease of implementation trumps squeezing a few fractions of a percent more speed out of something.
You need muxing for streams, unless you have two streams.
Fair enough. But this could be done, albeit clumsily, with the format I described.
I just ran a trace on unzipping a file. It had a grand total of four seeks.
This is possible to do with vanilla HTTP -- run a HEAD to get the length of the file. Grab the last however many bytes you need for the metadata, using a Range header. Then, open the additional streams using separate connections, each using a Range to your now known offsets in the zipfile.
So, you're now letting your IP stack do the multiplexing for you, just as locally, you'd let your OS' disk scheduler do the multiplexing for you.
Again, the only place this really presents a problem is spinning optical media, where the seek time (and wear and tear on the drive) would make it impractical. Hard drives are more than fast enough, and it seems likely SSDs may take over.
The advantages of this format are that it is actually possible for some programs, and operating systems, to see a zipfile as a folder, and provide random access within it. It's a standard way of archiving several related things together. And, it provides lossless compression, for any parts that are more convenient to store in a textual format -- even if you don't agree that XML is a good idea, subtitles would certainly be sanely stored as text.
There's also the fact that, like with OpenDocument, many programs will be able to work with the unzipped file as a folder. This presents some interesting possibilities -- playing with symlinks, for example, or even specify paths outside the file -- for example, take a TV series for which the opening sequence is always, or almost always, identical. Why not store it exactly once, and then refer to it from each episode? A decent player should be able to make it seamless.
I'd actually much rather see it in that form, but the zipfiles would give you most of the advantages of mkv, except for two obvious things: mkv is widely supported, and multiplexing is needed for optical media.
I do not understand this insistence towards XML. There is no reason for XML for menus here, either
All the reasons one might choose XML in the first place still apply. You've got actual, real extensibility, namespaces, a textual format that I can stick in version control, or use version control, and the fact that there are likely several XML-based formats (like XHTML) which are already quite close to having the functionality needed.
Sticking semistructured data into semistructured data has no advantage.
It does when the respective formats have different advantages.
There's no way I want to develop a menu or a script in EBML. Get me something that compiles to it from a saner format, and maybe, but I just don't see the point.
But, using the EBML for multiplexing makes sense, if we need multiplexing.
In contrast Apple did not let me upgrade my Macintosh
Really? You're getting no updates? Does Software Update do nothing?
Or is it just that you haven't gotten another "service pack" release?
unable to run the latest stuff like Firefox 3
First: Apple didn't force Mozilla to stop supporting old versions of OS X. Indeed, Firefox 3 seems to cause major problems for some people on Win2K, and I'm pretty sure they've dropped Win98 support.
The only reason people support XP is because Vista took so long to come out, and Vista is so bad that so many people refuse to upgrade.
I suspect you'll be in for a rude awakening with Win7, and whatever comes next -- when Microsoft starts their upgrade treadmill again.
But, for that matter, you could have gone with iCab, which even includes an OS 9 version. Or you could've used Opera, which claims 10.2 works (though it's unsupported) in the latest version.
do you understand my point?
I do, and I did. But opening with "whatever" is a great way to avoid mine.
It's also worth mentioning: The Mac has never been the "cheap" approach. But that hardware is durable, and an OS upgrade is certainly cheaper than buying a PC.
Meh. Disclaimer to all of the above: I'm a Linux user, and I did buy my copy of XP.
When I'm not at home, I just run OpenVPN, with compression on, and default-route everything through it -- either to my machine at home, or to a VPS that I'm not using for much.
That way, it's not just web, it's anything else I do, and it's all nicely secured. Ok, yes, I'm now trusting my VPS host, but better than trusting everyone else at the local Internet cafe.
What makes me cringe is when I tell people a URL, or an actual domain, and they type that into Google.
But yeah, I will type applebees into Google, because if they do actually own applebees.com, it'll be in the first few results. But you never know -- and that way, if I typo it, Google catches me.
It also saves me from having to try t.mobile.com, t-mobile.com, t_mobile.com, tmobile.com, t.mobi, and whatever other combinations might've worked. Yeah, for large business, it's pretty reliable, as they'll have bought all the common ways people might try, but for smaller ones, you want to get it right.
But, it doesn't stop me from memorizing things like youtube, last.fm, etc. And I get even more annoyed at everyone's insistence on putting 'www' in front of everything. I still see people type http://www.foo.com...
Let's see. Four domains, $10/year, means she can't come up with $40/year?
Let me put that in perspective. She can't come up with eleven cents a day?
I don't know about parking them. I'd say, just let the registration run out. But homeless people panhandling could pay for four or five domains a year.
Yeah, the hosting is probably costing more, but the domains?
Unlike the above, squatters also clog up my search results, and pretend to be some sort of resource in their own right, feigning relevance to whatever search I did. That's more difficult to make an analogy, but I'll try...
It's like buying thousands of houses that you guess a few might be undervalued, putting a sign outside that says "Bed & Breakfast" or "Ye Olde Antique Shop", and when people come in looking for something entirely different, you either refer them to someone down the block who paid you for it, or you try to sell them the house.
It is generally quite dishonest.
Now, there may indeed be some cybersquatter rule that I can use to hurt them, but either way, I absolutely refuse to support their business model. If it's some kid who bought a personal domain and isn't doing much with it, fine -- but if it's yet another "What you need, when you need it" bullshit site, they can rot.
Then keep Medicare/Medicaid, and kill insurance.