Yeah, really.. It's a horrible deal. It's even worse when you consider that the average income in India is considerably less than what people make in the U.S. And then $16.50 for 500 megs a month would be a rip off even in the U.S.
I bet you could just write it as a pluggable extension in mozilla.
I'm currently a Phoenix user and I would love to see it (Opera's fast-forward) added. Also, I'd like to see a feature which saves all your open web pages when you exit the browser, like Opera has done for ages. When I have some time, I might have to sit down and write some of these features, but I have no experience writing Mozilla extensions yet.
Opera is not wor4h $40 when the competition is giving away superior, free extensible products
"Superior" is debatable. I like and use Phoenix, but after using Opera 7 (for Windows) for a few days, I really felt it blew away the competition. It is to the level that it is worth the money because it is a quality product. I'm trying out the Linux version as I write this.
It's the sheer speed that really sets it above the rest, in addition to the features and well thought-out user interface. If you don't agree that Opera 7 is faster, you haven't used Opera 7. For example, browsing Slashdot can be very slow in Phoenix. I find myself waiting for pages to load. At first I thought this was Slashdot's fault and blamed slow servers. But when Slashdot starts getting slow in Phoenix, I run Opera and its still blazing fast (and yes I'm logged in when I try it). Maybe it's something I need to tweak in Phoenix (pipelining or something?), but I don't know exactly why it behaves like this.
I'd love to see Mozilla improve to the point where it can compete with Opera 7 in terms of performance, but I don't think this will happen any time soon. Maybe KHTML-based browsers have some promise. But in any case, when Opera 7 for Linux is released, I may just throw down $40 for it.
Why the hell would I pay for a browser? Or why should I settle for an ad-supported browser? This is not 1990!! And especially since I have so many free and open source choices. Why would I not use Phoenix, Mozilla or Konqueror?
I can appreciate your quote of Jay and Silent Bob strikes back, a guilty pleasure that movie was. Pure crap, but funny as hell.
All you motherfuckers are gonna pay. You are the ones who are the ball-lickers. We're gonna fuck your mothers while you watch and cry like little bitches. Once we get to Hollywood and find those Miramax fucks who are making the movie, we're gonna make 'em eat our shit, then shit our shit, then eat their shit which is made of our shit that we made 'em eat. Then all you motherfuckers are next.
That's why I only watch indy movies. I like to steer clear of herd mentality. I don't put much stock in mainstream stuff anyway, since lately it's all bull.
I don't watch movies at all, it's a waste of my fucking time.
And no, I don't consider "porno movies" actual movies so they don't count, but those don't waste much time as I just watch short clips.
Give me a break! If I offer you a free beer or a 50 cent beer (same brand, same born on date) which one are you going to take? Even if the the the beer was discounted 49 cents, most people would take the free one.
Well, I will take the free one, but I will tip the bartender quite well.
If I am at a keg party, and I drink the free beer, I may offer the buyer of the keg money depending on the circumstances, and will very often contribute money to the buying of another keg. But the best thing I can do is to throw a keg party myself and buy the keg.
For the record, I drink free beer every saturday night just about, and my bartenders do well as does the club that provides the free beer.
Don't most people go with linux to get away from m$?
Not necessarilly. I've always used Linux because it is UNIX-like and supports x86 hardware relatively well. And these days it has huge amounts of software and is well supported.
I don't know if a significant amount of people are switching from Windows to Linux. But I can see it because of the simple fact that a lot of people do want to get away from Microsoft, and the most obvious answer is Linux (sure there is OS X, but that requires hardware change).
I think a lot of new Linux users are supplementing their computer experience with Linux, rather than totally leaving Windows behind. Though I do know a few people who started using Linux, and decided they didn't really need Windows anymore.
People always say "it is better at lower bitrates" but who wants to listen to audio at lower (read: poorer) bitrates?
Well, think about it this way: Who doesn't want better audio quality for the bitrate they are currently using? So if you're already using 128kbps, would you rather have that be ogg or mp3? Personally, I use low bitrates a lot, as I've got a lot of my own recordings that I share or access from a remote location and compress when it's taking up too much space locally, and there's no reason for high bitrates on low quality scratch recordings. For music that I listen to I don't use lossy compression at all, so I'm not arguing for the use of low bitrates or even any compression at all of music. If I had a portable digital music player with a small amount of space on it (like 32MB-128MB), I can see myself using 96kbps ogg on it if it supported it (whereas 96kbps mp3 just wouldn't do).
And sure, "lower bitrates" might be suitable for Internet radio, but we are quickly moving to ubiquitous broadband world
Broadband doesn't change anything for Internet radio, the server still has to be able to deliver it (to all people listening to the stream), and I don't see this problem going away just by throwing more bandwidth at it, since the load on the server can only be expected to increase. Even for us with broadband, outbound bandwidth is still quite small (~30kB), so compression is still pretty handy.
Anyways, the only real point I made with the original post was that ogg doesn't need any extra features over mp3, it already has everything it needs. If people want to use it, fine. If they don't want to use it, fine. It's just a codec, it's there for anyone to use. I'll use it for my purposes. If everyone else is using and supporting mp3, well, sucks for them.
Rather than adding actual features music fans might find compelling enough to switch all their probably-already-ripped digital music to.ogg, they imitated rather than innovated. It's a fine quality audio compression format, but there's nothing interesting whatsoever about "Ogg" other than legal patent ideology, and that's simply not interesting whatsoever to 99.99% of the music-listening public.
What's there to innovate? It's an audio codec. It sounds better at lower bitrates than mp3. What more do you need? What features are you talking about? The music-listening public doesn't care about features, they just want their songs, and they want to be able to burn them to CD, play them on their portable digital music players, they want to pay as little as possible for it, etc.
Sure, I can write the back-end in like 5 minutes in Java. The frontend, now that'll take some time... Ok, so I might not be able to call it "good" because the GUI will be a bit slow.
I understood the original parent to be talking about normal users, ie Joe Sixpack and your mom, running Windows
You're right in that Joe Sixpack isn't going to see many Java GUI applications. These things occur more on the business side of things. And even there, there is a trend to move away from that because everyone is realizing writing Java GUI's is a huge pain in the ass. Hopefully this will change.
Oracle uses a Java GUI for their installer. I thought that was kinda silly. Give me a CLI installer, please.
It's things like this that make many of us want to support open source free-as-in-speech software, rather than support closed source nonfree-as-in-jail software.
I agree that it is a bad law, and a bad ruling, but I don't think think this qualifies as 'abuse of the law.' This is exactly the kind of thing those bribed lawmakers had in mind when they wrote it.
Any use of DMCA to address circumventing copy protection is abuse. Just like any use of smoking crack-rock is abuse. Then, again, maybe there are some legitimate uses of smoking crack-rock?
Yeah, really.. It's like I went to bed one night, and woke up the next morning, and just touching my computer had suddenly became illegal. I turned on my monitors, and hit alt-tab to switch to my e-mail program to check my mail (I happen to be running Linux, which is now illegal because it violates the DMCA), and all of a sudden FBI agents crashed throw my window and came in through my door, handcuffed me and hauled me directly to prison and took all the money out of my bank account and took all physical property that I owned including my car which happened to have a Linux CD in it. What is the world coming to? The future looks bleak...
Why not call them network engineers. Seems like every profession has stolen the engineering name to make themselves seem more important, why not IT people too?
Network engineer is taken, it refers to someone working in telecommunications.
PC's in any form will not be replaced by anything that cannot beat it in gaming quality. Until my palm can play a Quake, a Half Life, or a Freelancer BETTER than my pc, I'm not unplugging.
Well, not every uses their computers to waste time. It's only a small percentage of...
*I realize the irony that I am saying this while posting on Slashdot*
Oh, ummm.. nevermind.. Carry on with your computer gaming.
Though I'm not one of the people complaining about spam because I'm able to filter most of it out, I can completely understand why people have a problem with it.
You say you take all these precautionary measures to avoid spam, but here is an anecdote that makes all that irrelevant: with my ISP I can create up to 3 extra e-mail accounts. I can delete and create accounts at any time, making it possible to constantly change my e-mail address if I wanted to. However, any time I create an account, no matter how obscure the username is, within hours I am receiving a boatload of spam, and this is before I have used this address for anything. Sure this may be because my ISP makes it easy to discover e-mail addresses.. and I could get an e-mail address somewhere else that will help me hide a little better, but why should I?
What it amounts to is this: if we have to constantly hide from spam, that in itself is a problem. In the mid-90's many of us had our e-mail addresses on our web pages. At the time, we never had any problems with spam. These days, you put your e-mail address in public view, and you're inundated with spam. This is a problem, and its silly to imply its irrelevant just because for your case you're able to avoid it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, really.. It's a horrible deal. It's even worse when you consider that the average income in India is considerably less than what people make in the U.S. And then $16.50 for 500 megs a month would be a rip off even in the U.S.
I bet you could just write it as a pluggable extension in mozilla.
I'm currently a Phoenix user and I would love to see it (Opera's fast-forward) added. Also, I'd like to see a feature which saves all your open web pages when you exit the browser, like Opera has done for ages. When I have some time, I might have to sit down and write some of these features, but I have no experience writing Mozilla extensions yet.
Opera is not wor4h $40 when the competition is giving away superior, free extensible products
"Superior" is debatable. I like and use Phoenix, but after using Opera 7 (for Windows) for a few days, I really felt it blew away the competition. It is to the level that it is worth the money because it is a quality product. I'm trying out the Linux version as I write this.
It's the sheer speed that really sets it above the rest, in addition to the features and well thought-out user interface. If you don't agree that Opera 7 is faster, you haven't used Opera 7. For example, browsing Slashdot can be very slow in Phoenix. I find myself waiting for pages to load. At first I thought this was Slashdot's fault and blamed slow servers. But when Slashdot starts getting slow in Phoenix, I run Opera and its still blazing fast (and yes I'm logged in when I try it). Maybe it's something I need to tweak in Phoenix (pipelining or something?), but I don't know exactly why it behaves like this.
I'd love to see Mozilla improve to the point where it can compete with Opera 7 in terms of performance, but I don't think this will happen any time soon. Maybe KHTML-based browsers have some promise. But in any case, when Opera 7 for Linux is released, I may just throw down $40 for it.
Why the hell would I pay for a browser? Or why should I settle for an ad-supported browser? This is not 1990!! And especially since I have so many free and open source choices. Why would I not use Phoenix, Mozilla or Konqueror?
One feature: fast-forward
Um, the cops would seize the backups, too.
You should have multiple _offsite_ backups.
He thinks the killer app for this one is for keeping your porn storage hidden, if you're busted by the cops.
I was wondering if it really was porn they are trying to hide from the cops. I think I know what they were really trying to get at:
Slashdot
News for Warez Monkeys. Stuff that's 0-day.
I can appreciate your quote of Jay and Silent Bob strikes back, a guilty pleasure that movie was. Pure crap, but funny as hell.
All you motherfuckers are gonna pay. You are the ones who are the ball-lickers. We're gonna fuck your mothers while you watch and cry like little bitches. Once we get to Hollywood and find those Miramax fucks who are making the movie, we're gonna make 'em eat our shit, then shit our shit, then eat their shit which is made of our shit that we made 'em eat. Then all you motherfuckers are next.
Love, Jay and Silent Bob.
That's why I only watch indy movies. I like to steer clear of herd mentality. I don't put much stock in mainstream stuff anyway, since lately it's all bull.
I don't watch movies at all, it's a waste of my fucking time.
And no, I don't consider "porno movies" actual movies so they don't count, but those don't waste much time as I just watch short clips.
Give me a break! If I offer you a free beer or a 50 cent beer (same brand, same born on date) which one are you going to take? Even if the the the beer was discounted 49 cents, most people would take the free one.
Well, I will take the free one, but I will tip the bartender quite well.
If I am at a keg party, and I drink the free beer, I may offer the buyer of the keg money depending on the circumstances, and will very often contribute money to the buying of another keg. But the best thing I can do is to throw a keg party myself and buy the keg.
For the record, I drink free beer every saturday night just about, and my bartenders do well as does the club that provides the free beer.
Don't most people go with linux to get away from m$?
Not necessarilly. I've always used Linux because it is UNIX-like and supports x86 hardware relatively well. And these days it has huge amounts of software and is well supported.
I don't know if a significant amount of people are switching from Windows to Linux. But I can see it because of the simple fact that a lot of people do want to get away from Microsoft, and the most obvious answer is Linux (sure there is OS X, but that requires hardware change).
I think a lot of new Linux users are supplementing their computer experience with Linux, rather than totally leaving Windows behind. Though I do know a few people who started using Linux, and decided they didn't really need Windows anymore.
People always say "it is better at lower bitrates" but who wants to listen to audio at lower (read: poorer) bitrates?
Well, think about it this way: Who doesn't want better audio quality for the bitrate they are currently using? So if you're already using 128kbps, would you rather have that be ogg or mp3? Personally, I use low bitrates a lot, as I've got a lot of my own recordings that I share or access from a remote location and compress when it's taking up too much space locally, and there's no reason for high bitrates on low quality scratch recordings. For music that I listen to I don't use lossy compression at all, so I'm not arguing for the use of low bitrates or even any compression at all of music. If I had a portable digital music player with a small amount of space on it (like 32MB-128MB), I can see myself using 96kbps ogg on it if it supported it (whereas 96kbps mp3 just wouldn't do).
And sure, "lower bitrates" might be suitable for Internet radio, but we are quickly moving to ubiquitous broadband world
Broadband doesn't change anything for Internet radio, the server still has to be able to deliver it (to all people listening to the stream), and I don't see this problem going away just by throwing more bandwidth at it, since the load on the server can only be expected to increase. Even for us with broadband, outbound bandwidth is still quite small (~30kB), so compression is still pretty handy.
Anyways, the only real point I made with the original post was that ogg doesn't need any extra features over mp3, it already has everything it needs. If people want to use it, fine. If they don't want to use it, fine. It's just a codec, it's there for anyone to use. I'll use it for my purposes. If everyone else is using and supporting mp3, well, sucks for them.
Rather than adding actual features music fans might find compelling enough to switch all their probably-already-ripped digital music to .ogg, they imitated rather than innovated. It's a fine quality audio compression format, but there's nothing interesting whatsoever about "Ogg" other than legal patent ideology, and that's simply not interesting whatsoever to 99.99% of the music-listening public.
What's there to innovate? It's an audio codec. It sounds better at lower bitrates than mp3. What more do you need? What features are you talking about? The music-listening public doesn't care about features, they just want their songs, and they want to be able to burn them to CD, play them on their portable digital music players, they want to pay as little as possible for it, etc.
Show me a good Java-based mail client
Sure, I can write the back-end in like 5 minutes in Java. The frontend, now that'll take some time... Ok, so I might not be able to call it "good" because the GUI will be a bit slow.
I understood the original parent to be talking about normal users, ie Joe Sixpack and your mom, running Windows
You're right in that Joe Sixpack isn't going to see many Java GUI applications. These things occur more on the business side of things. And even there, there is a trend to move away from that because everyone is realizing writing Java GUI's is a huge pain in the ass. Hopefully this will change.
Oracle uses a Java GUI for their installer. I thought that was kinda silly. Give me a CLI installer, please.
She will probably be able to buy something better at the same price, or roughly equivalent at a cheaper price, once she is there.
I think you're thinking of Korea, not Japan. Korea, from what I hear, is the place for cheaper electronics.
It's things like this that make many of us want to support open source free-as-in-speech software, rather than support closed source nonfree-as-in-jail software.
I agree that it is a bad law, and a bad ruling, but I don't think think this qualifies as 'abuse of the law.' This is exactly the kind of thing those bribed lawmakers had in mind when they wrote it.
Any use of DMCA to address circumventing copy protection is abuse. Just like any use of smoking crack-rock is abuse. Then, again, maybe there are some legitimate uses of smoking crack-rock?
Yeah, really.. It's like I went to bed one night, and woke up the next morning, and just touching my computer had suddenly became illegal. I turned on my monitors, and hit alt-tab to switch to my e-mail program to check my mail (I happen to be running Linux, which is now illegal because it violates the DMCA), and all of a sudden FBI agents crashed throw my window and came in through my door, handcuffed me and hauled me directly to prison and took all the money out of my bank account and took all physical property that I owned including my car which happened to have a Linux CD in it. What is the world coming to? The future looks bleak...
monkey
Why not call them network engineers. Seems like every profession has stolen the engineering name to make themselves seem more important, why not IT people too?
Network engineer is taken, it refers to someone working in telecommunications.
Maybe administration engineer?
PC's in any form will not be replaced by anything that cannot beat it in gaming quality. Until my palm can play a Quake, a Half Life, or a Freelancer BETTER than my pc, I'm not unplugging.
Well, not every uses their computers to waste time. It's only a small percentage of...
*I realize the irony that I am saying this while posting on Slashdot*
Oh, ummm.. nevermind.. Carry on with your computer gaming.
I'm glad you actually got the joke. Do you have a fanless computer too? :P
I also have a fanless computer.
Though I'm not one of the people complaining about spam because I'm able to filter most of it out, I can completely understand why people have a problem with it.
You say you take all these precautionary measures to avoid spam, but here is an anecdote that makes all that irrelevant: with my ISP I can create up to 3 extra e-mail accounts. I can delete and create accounts at any time, making it possible to constantly change my e-mail address if I wanted to. However, any time I create an account, no matter how obscure the username is, within hours I am receiving a boatload of spam, and this is before I have used this address for anything. Sure this may be because my ISP makes it easy to discover e-mail addresses.. and I could get an e-mail address somewhere else that will help me hide a little better, but why should I?
What it amounts to is this: if we have to constantly hide from spam, that in itself is a problem. In the mid-90's many of us had our e-mail addresses on our web pages. At the time, we never had any problems with spam. These days, you put your e-mail address in public view, and you're inundated with spam. This is a problem, and its silly to imply its irrelevant just because for your case you're able to avoid it.
obviously you've never attended college
Prepare yourself for five hundred posts linking to MPlayer in this thread.
Pro: Linux gets Windoze proprietary formats.
Con: Probably NOT going to be open-source.
Pro: Linux gets Opera 7
Con: Its not open-source and not free.
End result: If its quality software, I'll use it and won't care if its open-source or not.