Harsh words and little substance. MBPro 2,2 GHz, nVidia 8600GT. I know how to use computers and I do not fuck them up beyond belief or ability to boot. Nevertheless, while playing h264 in Quicktime, the de facto Swiss army knife codec Perian switches to the ffmpeg single threaded h.264 decoder when it encounters a MKV file with h.264 in it. Therefore it cannot decode 1080p very well, at least high action scenes suffer. Running top I can see 100% CPU usage for the QT process, which indicates one core exhausted and the other idling. I have a test copy of Aeon Flux at 1080p that I do not watch (although maybe I should, it has Charlize Theron in spandex), but test with every Perian release (and VLC etc) to see if things have changed. The software almost invariably starts vomiting and stuttering when shots get busier and vary faster. The clip plays smoothly with CoreAVC on a dual core Sempron at 1,8 GHz. There are zero problems on the Mac with 720p, that is true.
There are reasons a lot of us prefer texting over a call in most situations.
Most is an overstatement. In some situations, yes. Noisy environment, reply can wait, must interact with more than one person at a time, avoiding roaming fees etc. Speaking from experience, however, more often than not, a one-minute phone call settles what would have been endless finger-grinding on those ever-useless phone keypads, four messages both ways and still no conclusion reached. So no, in my experience, usually not faster and definitely never with less hassle.
There are problems with the politeness factor as well. While it could be more polite to receive a message rather than a call while in a busy place, replying to it in kind does distract. I see texting at the university all the time, MSN messenger is also rampant, and most of the texters and chatters more often than not have only half a clue about who the professor was this time, let alone what s/he spoke.
Discipline Global Mobile (see also King Crimson, Robert Fripp) has been offering their full catalogue in DRM-free MP3 and FLAC for ages now, and purchases also are downloadable via Bittorrent. There is some wicked stuff there, I can tell ya.
Monkey's Audio better than FLAC since when? Windows only, no portable support, more difficult to transcode, higher CPU usage at decode. Well, the latter is probably a non-issue, since there is no portable support whatsoever, but still.
In Soviet Russia.... well, I have no idea what they call their underclothes, but I'm sure it has something to do with the underclothes wearing YOU. Or something like that.
This is "trusiki" or "trusary" for you. And sometimes they do end up wearing you.
I run rtorrent in a detached screen session on a headless FreeBSD machine tucked away in the closet. I add torrent files to it just by dropping them into rtorrent's watch folder, everything else (starting, stopping, throttle management for off hours) is taken care of automatically. I do not have to have my laptop on or listen to the desktop whine all the time. Plus, rtorrent is blazing fast AND platform agnostic.
It is also accessible in many ways, ssh being the most obvious, but there are also many GUIs available, with which you can manage torrents from afar. I like it how it is possible to add a torrent to the queue, then take a 3 hour train ride home and find it's all done for you. Magic. So, yes, a torrent client that is run in a terminal can be a Very Good Thing for those who can set it up and use it the way it was meant to be. (And I am pretty sure it was meant to be used that way.)
Part of their rules of conduct is to NOT act with any favour towards those who picked them. The commission isn't a political body, but it has extensive political powers, including being the only body who can actually propose new laws.
Can you elaborate? That is a bad thing exactly how? And how is this so far any different from any national government? Also, quantify "squabbling mess" in the context of the EP. What we've seen so far in the real world, apart from the inevitable swinging between Brussels and Strasbourg, has been overwhelmingly positive, at least while I've been looking closely enough and I am saying this regardless of not having elected any of my country's representatives. (The one I voted for ended up president of the country, bummer.)
One wants the council gone, another wants the commission gone... I don't think we're entirely ready for an EU where only the parliament is acting in the capacity of both legislative and executive (some of us still care for separation of powers), plus has all the expertise necessary to be competent in all question areas. I don't think an EP that consists for a large part of retired national politicians is up to snuff.
Funny that no-one is attacking COREPER, yet that is the only completely unelected body whose decisions go through rubberstamped. I do not mind.
And did they not shut it down, then?
Besides, it is probably easier said than done. It is not a police state where you can just go and axe somebody's fiber. Due procedure etc.
Reason number one: streaming. Ogg Vorbis, however, is way better for that for a couple of reasons, one being the better container and the other being the better sound quality at smaller sizes.
Reason number two: portable use. Smaller files still take less space and as portable space is still limited, that's a good thing.
My Sony-Ericsson W810 plays MP3 and AAC, and if I have a choice, I go for 128 Kib/s AAC, because its quality sounds about on par with 192 Kib/s MP3 to me and that way I can cram way more albums onto the memory stick that is of a limited size. Shuffling files on and off the card (or a dedicated player for that matter) is a nuisance to be avoided and the better the new codecs fare at 128, the better off I am. Your kilometrage may certainly vary.
I keep my collection in FLAC when I deem it necessary, otherwise in Ogg Vorbis aoTuV Q5, but hard drive space is way cheaper than memory sticks or flash storage.
...and in related news, I do not recommend visiting my country to anybody whose last name is Seavitt or Munn. You can only laugh at somebody's misfortune for so long. (5 minutes tops.) Plus, they probably wouldn't be able to use online forms, either. (Seavitt means pig's cunt and munn is the rude way to refer to male genitalia.)
Cut it out. It's because of people like this who sit on a high horse and label other people ours enough" and not ours enough" that the country has those problems. Damn, we're a sorry bunch of idiots who deserve all kinds of shit if we keep thinking that way.
First off, harshipper is misinformed at best and overly nationalist (or a moron, I cannot tell) at worst. Children born in Estonia sadly do not become citizens automatically unless one of their parents is a citizen (and until -- I believe -- 1995 it had to be the father, go figure the paternalistic XIX century ius sanguinis system).
I also agree that citizenship should be more readily available. However, I do not think language restrictions are too harsh. Although it is decidedly wrong to point to other countries in that respect, I believe only a handful of countries agree to grant citizenship without prior language exams (Sweden and the Netherlands, but correct me if I am wrong) and even there they are turning the clock back, as they are coming to realise that the new citizens that cannot speak the language are just not participating in the society, hence invalidating their need to be a citizen. (Which almost always really boils down to the right to elect one's leaders. And having a passport that guarantees as many visa-free border crossings as possible. But I shall come to that later.)
I do not consider the requirements to be too harsh, but I do see how they can be a problem. It boils down to the Estonian governments indecisiveness in the nineties as to what to do with all the Soviet time immigrants. The right thing to do would have been to win them over, so to speak, make them feel wanted in that new social setting where they could no longer be a majority. Instead, the government slept on it and kept people in the dark. It did not help that it was the Pro Patria party that was in charge back then. So people chose their side and now it's already quite late to try to win them over once again. See, the language itself is not the problem, the issue here is the willingness to learn it or the lack thereof.
The language, however, is the bulk of the identity. If somebody from the outside of the ethnic community learns it, he or she is automatically highly regarded unless his/her actions prove otherwise. (See Dmitri Klenski.) I think it is comprehensible why Estonians so eagerly demand that every citizen be able to speak their language. Estonian culture's position in the globalising world is not overly strong, so the people cling to it.
Estonia's political elite has only recently realised that the Soviet era immigrants are in Estonia to stay, at least those who aren't using the country as a trampoline to the rich EU or USA, but they are sadly reaping the fruits of their own prior actions.
The bronze soldier debacle can be partly attributed to extremely poor PR on the Estonia's government's side. The other part comes from Russia's elite's wish to recreate a stronghold in its former occupied territory, for which the statue was reinstated as holy through a carefully orchestrated campaign that started sometime after Putin's rise to power. (The statue had been all but forgotten in the nineties.)
As for the SU's foreign debt... Do we really need to go into that? When will Croatia pay the Austro-Hungarian empire's foreign debt? Or will Namibia cough up the dough for South Africa? Probably not. The factories, yes, were built. If you compare Finland and Estonia pre-war, Finland was lagging way behind. Enter Soviet times and Soviet factories being built, but not in Finland. Finland is arguably better off these days. Military factories were installed in all SU, their workers came from Russia and the products went back there. It wasn't beneficial to the local economy and quite many of them were dismantled when the industry left.
Uh, must run. We can continue later. By e-mail, even.
Many a time I've seen inexperienced typists write long sentences without ever taking their eyes off the keyboard. Sometimes with Caps Lock on. The result warrants either tOGGLE cASE or typing it all over again. Even experienced typists sometimes rarely look at the screen, esp when copying something from paper. For example, if you copy your notes from the class or wherever to your computer, it is a possibility that you do not look at the screen for some time, just type. Some finger slippage and you've just pushed Caps instead of Shift. Toggle Case it is, then. Better than typing all those paragraphs anew.
I myself have pined for the option sometimes, back in the day when it had not yet found its way into word processors. That or I couldn't find it.
There's also this neat thing of giving tons of seeds as a "gift" to some African government, watching in wonder how said seeds grow up and eradicate all the original plant varieties, then pulling some levers to get rid of the original farming tribes that inhabited the lands, then having all those vast testing fields in the wild at their disposal for free. No problem! Monoculture 0wnz. (I won't say that the fungi, diseases and parasites have a way of, well, retaliating. And then it's only the monoculture to wreak havoc in, easier than ever!)
I also see a tiny problem with those involved in the testing trying to make a quick buck by selling the GMO in secrecy to people in areas where GMO is prohibited. Another sack of untested GMO rice in the wild in Asia, unaccounted for. Verynice!
Penn and Teller will probably tell you it's for the greater good, give all those starving people eat. I tend to differ.
Wiki has some info on it. If stretched, it can also help explain the US tendency to go with æ (migration from poorer regions up north + Ireland). Then again, it does state that the Boston accent has a:, which was what I had in mind when I came up with the idea in the first place. "So they say culuh and lahst, they must be stupid." I don't know. I am not English, never even been to an English-speaking country, but languages intrigue me and it sounds silly to me to peg some dialects/accents as inferior to others. My language has three degrees of phoneme length, my girlfriend speaks a dialect that sometimes fails to use the overlong one, yet I rarely notice it and when I do, it's lovely and adds versatility to the language.
I keep wondering what's with the Americans making fun of non-rhotic accents. I mean, in GB, it's the predominant way, although in the north and Ireland your kilometrage might be a bit different. Next, someone'll start picking on some US regional dialect using the a: sound instead of æ in words like past, laugh, can't etc. It's fun to watch, but probably for entirely different reasons for me, since I never really understood why something standard on one side of the big water (and in Standard English taught in schools around the world) is is considered bad taste on the other.
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Harsh words and little substance. MBPro 2,2 GHz, nVidia 8600GT. I know how to use computers and I do not fuck them up beyond belief or ability to boot. Nevertheless, while playing h264 in Quicktime, the de facto Swiss army knife codec Perian switches to the ffmpeg single threaded h.264 decoder when it encounters a MKV file with h.264 in it. Therefore it cannot decode 1080p very well, at least high action scenes suffer. Running top I can see 100% CPU usage for the QT process, which indicates one core exhausted and the other idling. I have a test copy of Aeon Flux at 1080p that I do not watch (although maybe I should, it has Charlize Theron in spandex), but test with every Perian release (and VLC etc) to see if things have changed. The software almost invariably starts vomiting and stuttering when shots get busier and vary faster. The clip plays smoothly with CoreAVC on a dual core Sempron at 1,8 GHz. There are zero problems on the Mac with 720p, that is true.
many of the sites I visit regularly are based in Europe.
What? You're surfing long-distance?
Name those non-standard connectors, please.
Do you realise that you just paraphrased the famous John Travolta quote re: pot from Pulp Fiction?
There are reasons a lot of us prefer texting over a call in most situations.
Most is an overstatement. In some situations, yes. Noisy environment, reply can wait, must interact with more than one person at a time, avoiding roaming fees etc. Speaking from experience, however, more often than not, a one-minute phone call settles what would have been endless finger-grinding on those ever-useless phone keypads, four messages both ways and still no conclusion reached. So no, in my experience, usually not faster and definitely never with less hassle.
There are problems with the politeness factor as well. While it could be more polite to receive a message rather than a call while in a busy place, replying to it in kind does distract. I see texting at the university all the time, MSN messenger is also rampant, and most of the texters and chatters more often than not have only half a clue about who the professor was this time, let alone what s/he spoke.
Discipline Global Mobile (see also King Crimson, Robert Fripp) has been offering their full catalogue in DRM-free MP3 and FLAC for ages now, and purchases also are downloadable via Bittorrent. There is some wicked stuff there, I can tell ya.
Monkey's Audio better than FLAC since when? Windows only, no portable support, more difficult to transcode, higher CPU usage at decode. Well, the latter is probably a non-issue, since there is no portable support whatsoever, but still.
In Soviet Russia.... well, I have no idea what they call their underclothes, but I'm sure it has something to do with the underclothes wearing YOU. Or something like that.
This is "trusiki" or "trusary" for you. And sometimes they do end up wearing you.
I run rtorrent in a detached screen session on a headless FreeBSD machine tucked away in the closet. I add torrent files to it just by dropping them into rtorrent's watch folder, everything else (starting, stopping, throttle management for off hours) is taken care of automatically. I do not have to have my laptop on or listen to the desktop whine all the time. Plus, rtorrent is blazing fast AND platform agnostic.
It is also accessible in many ways, ssh being the most obvious, but there are also many GUIs available, with which you can manage torrents from afar. I like it how it is possible to add a torrent to the queue, then take a 3 hour train ride home and find it's all done for you. Magic. So, yes, a torrent client that is run in a terminal can be a Very Good Thing for those who can set it up and use it the way it was meant to be. (And I am pretty sure it was meant to be used that way.)
Part of their rules of conduct is to NOT act with any favour towards those who picked them. The commission isn't a political body, but it has extensive political powers, including being the only body who can actually propose new laws.
Can you elaborate? That is a bad thing exactly how? And how is this so far any different from any national government? Also, quantify "squabbling mess" in the context of the EP. What we've seen so far in the real world, apart from the inevitable swinging between Brussels and Strasbourg, has been overwhelmingly positive, at least while I've been looking closely enough and I am saying this regardless of not having elected any of my country's representatives. (The one I voted for ended up president of the country, bummer.)
One wants the council gone, another wants the commission gone... I don't think we're entirely ready for an EU where only the parliament is acting in the capacity of both legislative and executive (some of us still care for separation of powers), plus has all the expertise necessary to be competent in all question areas. I don't think an EP that consists for a large part of retired national politicians is up to snuff.
Funny that no-one is attacking COREPER, yet that is the only completely unelected body whose decisions go through rubberstamped. I do not mind.
I can use NTFS, but cannot write to it on a Mac.
O but you can. First, you install MacFUSE and then install NTFS-3G on top of it. You can even format disks as NTFS with Disk Utility.
And did they not shut it down, then? Besides, it is probably easier said than done. It is not a police state where you can just go and axe somebody's fiber. Due procedure etc.
Somebody is so obviously humour-impaired that it is not even funny anymore. In short: whooooosh!
Reason number one: streaming. Ogg Vorbis, however, is way better for that for a couple of reasons, one being the better container and the other being the better sound quality at smaller sizes.
Reason number two: portable use. Smaller files still take less space and as portable space is still limited, that's a good thing.
My Sony-Ericsson W810 plays MP3 and AAC, and if I have a choice, I go for 128 Kib/s AAC, because its quality sounds about on par with 192 Kib/s MP3 to me and that way I can cram way more albums onto the memory stick that is of a limited size. Shuffling files on and off the card (or a dedicated player for that matter) is a nuisance to be avoided and the better the new codecs fare at 128, the better off I am. Your kilometrage may certainly vary.
I keep my collection in FLAC when I deem it necessary, otherwise in Ogg Vorbis aoTuV Q5, but hard drive space is way cheaper than memory sticks or flash storage.
Add Opeth and Meshuggah to that list. Cannot talk about Swedish metal without those two.
...and in related news, I do not recommend visiting my country to anybody whose last name is Seavitt or Munn. You can only laugh at somebody's misfortune for so long. (5 minutes tops.) Plus, they probably wouldn't be able to use online forms, either. (Seavitt means pig's cunt and munn is the rude way to refer to male genitalia.)
I've seen him standing next to Vai on stage and play a song of Vai's, together with the soloing. He did not miss a note.
I no longer remember any of this stuff. Young whippersnappers, walking around, remembering stuff...
Cut it out. It's because of people like this who sit on a high horse and label other people ours enough" and not ours enough" that the country has those problems. Damn, we're a sorry bunch of idiots who deserve all kinds of shit if we keep thinking that way.
First off, harshipper is misinformed at best and overly nationalist (or a moron, I cannot tell) at worst. Children born in Estonia sadly do not become citizens automatically unless one of their parents is a citizen (and until -- I believe -- 1995 it had to be the father, go figure the paternalistic XIX century ius sanguinis system).
I also agree that citizenship should be more readily available. However, I do not think language restrictions are too harsh. Although it is decidedly wrong to point to other countries in that respect, I believe only a handful of countries agree to grant citizenship without prior language exams (Sweden and the Netherlands, but correct me if I am wrong) and even there they are turning the clock back, as they are coming to realise that the new citizens that cannot speak the language are just not participating in the society, hence invalidating their need to be a citizen. (Which almost always really boils down to the right to elect one's leaders. And having a passport that guarantees as many visa-free border crossings as possible. But I shall come to that later.)
I do not consider the requirements to be too harsh, but I do see how they can be a problem. It boils down to the Estonian governments indecisiveness in the nineties as to what to do with all the Soviet time immigrants. The right thing to do would have been to win them over, so to speak, make them feel wanted in that new social setting where they could no longer be a majority. Instead, the government slept on it and kept people in the dark. It did not help that it was the Pro Patria party that was in charge back then. So people chose their side and now it's already quite late to try to win them over once again. See, the language itself is not the problem, the issue here is the willingness to learn it or the lack thereof.
The language, however, is the bulk of the identity. If somebody from the outside of the ethnic community learns it, he or she is automatically highly regarded unless his/her actions prove otherwise. (See Dmitri Klenski.) I think it is comprehensible why Estonians so eagerly demand that every citizen be able to speak their language. Estonian culture's position in the globalising world is not overly strong, so the people cling to it.
Estonia's political elite has only recently realised that the Soviet era immigrants are in Estonia to stay, at least those who aren't using the country as a trampoline to the rich EU or USA, but they are sadly reaping the fruits of their own prior actions.
The bronze soldier debacle can be partly attributed to extremely poor PR on the Estonia's government's side. The other part comes from Russia's elite's wish to recreate a stronghold in its former occupied territory, for which the statue was reinstated as holy through a carefully orchestrated campaign that started sometime after Putin's rise to power. (The statue had been all but forgotten in the nineties.)
As for the SU's foreign debt... Do we really need to go into that? When will Croatia pay the Austro-Hungarian empire's foreign debt? Or will Namibia cough up the dough for South Africa? Probably not. The factories, yes, were built. If you compare Finland and Estonia pre-war, Finland was lagging way behind. Enter Soviet times and Soviet factories being built, but not in Finland. Finland is arguably better off these days. Military factories were installed in all SU, their workers came from Russia and the products went back there. It wasn't beneficial to the local economy and quite many of them were dismantled when the industry left.
Uh, must run. We can continue later. By e-mail, even.
Many a time I've seen inexperienced typists write long sentences without ever taking their eyes off the keyboard. Sometimes with Caps Lock on. The result warrants either tOGGLE cASE or typing it all over again. Even experienced typists sometimes rarely look at the screen, esp when copying something from paper. For example, if you copy your notes from the class or wherever to your computer, it is a possibility that you do not look at the screen for some time, just type. Some finger slippage and you've just pushed Caps instead of Shift. Toggle Case it is, then. Better than typing all those paragraphs anew.
I myself have pined for the option sometimes, back in the day when it had not yet found its way into word processors. That or I couldn't find it.
There's also this neat thing of giving tons of seeds as a "gift" to some African government, watching in wonder how said seeds grow up and eradicate all the original plant varieties, then pulling some levers to get rid of the original farming tribes that inhabited the lands, then having all those vast testing fields in the wild at their disposal for free. No problem! Monoculture 0wnz. (I won't say that the fungi, diseases and parasites have a way of, well, retaliating. And then it's only the monoculture to wreak havoc in, easier than ever!)
I also see a tiny problem with those involved in the testing trying to make a quick buck by selling the GMO in secrecy to people in areas where GMO is prohibited. Another sack of untested GMO rice in the wild in Asia, unaccounted for. Verynice!
Penn and Teller will probably tell you it's for the greater good, give all those starving people eat. I tend to differ.
Wiki has some info on it. If stretched, it can also help explain the US tendency to go with æ (migration from poorer regions up north + Ireland). Then again, it does state that the Boston accent has a:, which was what I had in mind when I came up with the idea in the first place. "So they say culuh and lahst, they must be stupid." I don't know. I am not English, never even been to an English-speaking country, but languages intrigue me and it sounds silly to me to peg some dialects/accents as inferior to others. My language has three degrees of phoneme length, my girlfriend speaks a dialect that sometimes fails to use the overlong one, yet I rarely notice it and when I do, it's lovely and adds versatility to the language.
uwaga ~ # ps axwu | grep seamonk raivo 7285 5.5 12.4 334896 129092 ? SLl Oct10 66:54 /usr/lib/seamonkey/seamonkey-bin -mail
It's as real as it gets.
I keep wondering what's with the Americans making fun of non-rhotic accents. I mean, in GB, it's the predominant way, although in the north and Ireland your kilometrage might be a bit different. Next, someone'll start picking on some US regional dialect using the a: sound instead of æ in words like past, laugh, can't etc. It's fun to watch, but probably for entirely different reasons for me, since I never really understood why something standard on one side of the big water (and in Standard English taught in schools around the world) is is considered bad taste on the other.