Any Aussie Slashdot readers should be aware there's a huge linux Installfest happeneing this Saturday at Melbounre University - why not come along, enjoy the free BBQ, play some Quake3, do some installs, check out the cool hardware, and pick up a copy of your favourite distro?
www.luv.sn.or for details, registration, and volunteering.
About three months ago a female geek posted a story at a popular geek humor website. In a joking style, it told the story of meeting a person from a software company at Linuxworld. Some thing may or may not have happened between the author and said person. The author says it didn't, others say otherwise.
Whatever the truth is, the result of that meeting was somebody at said software company mass-mailing a rather detailed and humiliating description of these [real or fictional] events to every employee of the company.
Responses ranged from the intelligent to "you're fat" to "your a lesbian" to "I checked your webpage and you're ugly". Half bored, and interested in what was causing all the fuss, I visited the authors webpage. It was probably one of the most interesting personal websites I have ever read. I've never actually been interested in anyone else's personal links, but I spent an hour discovering some of the most entertaining content I've ever seen online. Here was an engaging and intelligent personality surely worth the title of geek girl.
Another article was posted on the same site questioning the authors credentials. Things intensified dramatically. Maybe eighty percent of responses to any article would consist of comments concerning this author. Not flattering or friendly - explicit, violent and unoriginal.
Meanwhile, the author stopped writing any more articles. She also stopped defending herself. The comments continued unabatedly for two months. Last week they disabled their comments and write-ins after the volume and content of posts concerning the author became overwhelming.
I revisited the webpage recently. None of the old content exists anymore, presumably after the same sort of filth ended up in her personal email. No more witty links, no more personal stuff, lyrics, poetry, stories, no more 'you know you're Chinese if'... now there's a transcript of Tori Amos's 'Crucify'.
One bright spirit extinguished by so many bored horny fools. The world is a lesser place since you left it, MLM.
Specialist hardware will always outperform software, however, inevitably this ends up being negligible.
When ultra-low quality MPEG movies first came to PC in the earlky days of 486. Hardware decoders were mandatory. Thanks to Moore's law, these days the same movies can be played nowadays with CPU usage below five percent.
Ultimately this will likely be of benefit to DVD - CPU speeds increase and come down in price, vendors don't have to worry about added prices for hardware decoders, CD-ROM / DVD-ROM price difference is small. The bar to entry is lowered, and the Rest of us can enjoy the technology.
If MP3's still took up forty-five percent of your CPU-usage, they wouldn't have the popularity [or controversy] that surrounds them today either.
Ironically, Moore's law also popularisez media in another way. Encryption schemes such as the DVD zone information are inevitable cracked and wholesale ignored by the general public, as a long-forgotten nuisance.
As far as I know - from Xing techs website and a number of other sources....joint stereo actually limits stero only to higher frequencies and uses monto for bass sound. It's better in terms of filesize, and dosen't really detriment sound [since your dubwooofer is obviously mono] but it certainly dosen't increase quality - its encoding less [but irrelevant] data.
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Any Aussie Slashdot readers should be aware there's a huge linux Installfest happeneing this Saturday at Melbounre University - why not come along, enjoy the free BBQ, play some Quake3, do some installs, check out the cool hardware, and pick up a copy of your favourite distro?
www.luv.sn.or for details, registration, and volunteering.
About three months ago a female geek posted a story at a popular geek humor website. In a joking style, it told the story of meeting a person from a software company at Linuxworld. Some thing may or may not have happened between the author and said person. The author says it didn't, others say otherwise.
Whatever the truth is, the result of that meeting was somebody at said software company mass-mailing a rather detailed and humiliating description of these [real or fictional] events to every employee of the company.
Responses ranged from the intelligent to "you're fat" to "your a lesbian" to "I checked your webpage and you're ugly". Half bored, and interested in what was causing all the fuss, I visited the authors webpage. It was probably one of the most interesting personal websites I have ever read. I've never actually been interested in anyone else's personal links, but I spent an hour discovering some of the most entertaining content I've ever seen online. Here was an engaging and intelligent personality surely worth the title of geek girl.
Another article was posted on the same site questioning the authors credentials. Things intensified dramatically. Maybe eighty percent of responses to any article would consist of comments concerning this author. Not flattering or friendly - explicit, violent and unoriginal.
Meanwhile, the author stopped writing any more articles. She also stopped defending herself. The comments continued unabatedly for two months. Last week they disabled their comments and write-ins after the volume and content of posts concerning the author became overwhelming.
I revisited the webpage recently. None of the old content exists anymore, presumably after the same sort of filth ended up in her personal email. No more witty links, no more personal stuff, lyrics, poetry, stories, no more 'you know you're Chinese if'... now there's a transcript of Tori Amos's 'Crucify'.
One bright spirit extinguished by so many bored horny fools. The world is a lesser place since you left it, MLM.
Specialist hardware will always outperform software, however, inevitably this ends up being negligible.
When ultra-low quality MPEG movies first came to PC in the earlky days of 486. Hardware decoders were mandatory. Thanks to Moore's law, these days the same movies can be played nowadays with CPU usage below five percent.
Ultimately this will likely be of benefit to DVD - CPU speeds increase and come down in price, vendors don't have to worry about added prices for hardware decoders, CD-ROM / DVD-ROM price difference is small. The bar to entry is lowered, and the Rest of us can enjoy the technology.
If MP3's still took up forty-five percent of your CPU-usage, they wouldn't have the popularity [or controversy] that surrounds them today either.
Ironically, Moore's law also popularisez media in another way. Encryption schemes such as the DVD zone information are inevitable cracked and wholesale ignored by the general public, as a long-forgotten nuisance.
_
As far as I know - from Xing techs website and a number of other sources....joint stereo actually limits stero only to higher frequencies and uses monto for bass sound. It's better in terms of filesize, and dosen't really detriment sound [since your dubwooofer is obviously mono] but it certainly dosen't increase quality - its encoding less [but irrelevant] data.