Oh boy, this page AGAIN. I shall stop the sarcasm engine I started up last time someone quoted this thing as an irrefutable fact. From that page:
The primary challenge is that all files at these rates will have problems, so the reviewer is often forced to decide which of two entirely distinct flaws is worse. Sometimes people come to different conclusions. That said, I believe that the Theora+Vorbis results are substantially better than the YouTube 327kbit/sec. Several other people have expressed the same view to me, and I expect you'll also reach the same conclusion.
Why, several people have expressed that they thing the Theora codec might be better, and he (one of the xiph.org people) tends to agree. I'm sorry, but could you please do something a little more than encode the same video with two different codecs and then a jedi-handwave accompanied by saying "Oh this looks so much better, and my buddies with a xiph.org e-mail address tend to agree" ?
How about pointing out flaws in the generated videos, artifacts that will definitely be present at low bitrates, the effect of the encoding on colors, or how well both codecs perform in a scene where everything moves?
The war is already over
Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already.
Does anyone here remember the CD-i? DVD-RAM? MD ? How about the more recent one HD-DVD? (I'm sure someone has an xbox, so that should be a bit more popular). Format wars are never over. Hell, people still argue about Betamax vs VHS. A format war is good for only one thing: making geeks froth at the mouth like a cappuccino. For the rest, the industry will play its part and the war won't be won on technical merits. By the time this thing is settled another format war will take and it'll be cappuccino time all over again.
a hidden agenda
Oh noes! THEY ARE AMONGST US! Posting on our boards, subverting our free codecs by spreading words.
Many of us do not use Blu-Ray. Much video on the Internet is still H.263.
My mother doesn't own a DVD-player, nor does my grandmother. I'd call the DVD pretty much a (set of) standard(s) though. I strongly believe that the next big thing in media-land will no longer be a physical medium, and what's more, we'll beg the industry for more a dollar at a time. And I think that ultimately that will be the deciding factor on this whole debate, but I might as well be wrong in that belief. Only time with tell, but in the meantime: froth on, kind sir!
Oh boy oh boy, a comparison on xiph.org. I'm sure that this will be unbiased in any way. From the conclusion:
The primary challenge is that all files at these rates will have problems, so the reviewer is often forced to decide which of two entirely distinct flaws is worse. Sometimes people come to different conclusions. That said, I believe that the Theora+Vorbis results are substantially better than the YouTube 327kbit/sec. Several other people have expressed the same view to me, and I expect you'll also reach the same conclusion.
I'm totally convinced with such strong arguments. He's clearly gone his way to show flaws in both codecs, instead of just encoding a video with two codecs and letting the audience decide.
If linux freezes, then Alt-SysRq-S+U+B will do an emergency sync of the disks, unmount them and reboot the system.
Bah! That almost looks like an emacs keycombo. M-x-Ctrl-v-p-o-k-l-m-z-w and then press your spacebar with your nose, and it'll do the same thing by the way. It's really handy to have such a shortcut, but the odds of your cat walking over the keyboard and hitting that particular combo are pretty high.
I know you're being ironic, but a few months ago a friend of mine got some medication in a childproof bottle. It's a very funny sight to see two grown men struggle with that particular bottle, and have a six year old open it with ease.
As for this summary:
The report makes five recommendations to keep little Johnny away from the harms of Barrens chat
I always assumed the Barrens chat or trade channel was filled with little Johnnies.
In Dutch SOA stands for "Sexueel Overdraagbare Aandoening", or Sexually Transmitted Disease. Someone at my office recently received the prestigious title "SOA Expert", which of course has led to very strange looks from the mailman when a package arrives for him.
It's been several months, and the joke still hasn't gotten old, which shows either the level of inappropriateness of the title in Dutch or the maturity of the people making the joke. (I'm guessing the combination of both)
While VLC used to be horrendous at ASS/SSA subtitles the 1.0 versions seem to handle those gracefully (if I'm not mistaken the humously named libass is to blame). VLC does still seem to choke on H.264 from time to time, especially when you're fastforwarding. A really good media player experience are the latests incarnations of XBMC, but the disadvantage is that you'll be dedicating your computer to it (not that you're doing much else while watching tv). MPC(-HC) or any other ffdshow based player is probably still a better media player on a desktop though for H.264 with ASS subtitles
Tohou/doujin shooters are Windows only.
They run on wine, without glitches these days even. No need to give up on your bullet hell game addiction. FWIW, switching to the correct locale to get them working, and/or fiddling with Applocale takes about as much time as getting them to run on wine.
Is it working again? Last I heard a bird dropped a baguette on it and it croaked. Then again, I don't really keep up to speed on my particle accelerator news anyway.
Its not criminal in the US, and no one is claiming the US endoreces Nazism. Germany could simply say "we think we've undone the damage to our children, and have beated Facist ideas."
Yes, but that is the US. I'm sure that if Germany stopped banning the swastika some people here would get upset. When the wall fell, a lot of the older generation were mumbling the words "Oh great, give them another 10 years and they'll be occupying us again".
I'm not saying that that particular sentiment is still alive that much at the moment, but there are still plenty of examples of that sentiment. For instance, where I live certain families are still mentioned in the same sentence as the word "collaborator". While people don't really take out to the streets anymore to shave their heads (amongst other things), there is a certain amount of venom in the words particularly when that family has been successful financially.
While most my generation thinks the whole swastika ban is nonsense, my parents generation would frown upon it being lifted, and my grandparents generation would start stocking up on supplies. Remember when prince Harry wore a nazi costume? Look how prominently the swastika is displayed in the picture. A shocking report on TV on neonazis? You bet the camera keeps that swastika on screen as much as possible. I doubt that the symbol will lose its (relatively) new meaning in the next generation, and maybe that is a good thing if it reminds everyone not to stand for such a regime again.
I don't think there is a country in the world that works harder at self-flagellation than the Germans - nor is there any country in the world that is expected to self-flagellate that hard.
True, but what great comedy it has given us. Even today, that episode of Fawlty Towers remains funny, and I'm sure the Germans are allowed to have a laugh too now.
We purchased a few gigabit and 10 gigabit ProCurve switches because they were cheaper than Cisco, but then we found out they don't fully support such standard features as VLAN trunking, or say they support it but have strange incompatibilities when trying to work together in a Cisco environment.
This isn't limited to a Cisco environment, trust me. A few months ago I had one of the ProCurves in the serverroom go insane. Apparently it had decided that our LACP setup wasn't to its tastes, then decided that its partners were lying and in the end just started resending packets all over the place. The strange thing was, that it had worked nicely up to a point and that it changed behaviour without any apparent reason. Nobody had messed with the configuration, there was no power failure causing it to reset back to a previous state, nothing new was introduced to the network. Rest assured, it was a fun day.
The worst part of it all is that they're quite expensive compared to a 3com 4200G that have the exact same features, but without the quirks. Long live company policy!
As for convenience, that's no excuse at all, it's just laziness. Given the ease of legally downloading these days, it's even less of an excuse.
Here are a few examples of convenience:
Legally bought version of MathCAD (1300€ - license for 1 PC). The user has to wait 3 weeks for the package to arrive, and then installs it on his computer. The license manager fails in a spectacular way, resulting in the user uninstalling the application and installing it on another computer. The license however has already been tied to the computer he originally installed it on, and is now no longer valid for another computer. After 3 weeks of contacting the company we've still not made any progress. The user has in the meantime acquired other means to do his work in far less time and far less hassle (although legally not that quite nice). Convenient indeed.
Aforementioned user needed to use a software package developed by a partner to finish a project. This package came with a licensing product that installs itself and binds itself to port 8080, where you can conveniently upload a key that the software producer generates for you based on your MAC address (of all things). The licensing software contained a bug which made it freak out on computers with two network cards (which is default on many desktops these days). The result was a lot of mails going back and forth between the partner and us, where we were eventually told to wait until the 3rd party copyright protection library fixed their bug. After 2 weeks of waiting the user searched for a crack and applied it and finished his project. 2 months after the deadline a bugfix was issued.
An uncle of mine decided to use iTunes for his music needs. I can only applaud him for abandoning his luddite ways and converting to digital era. He decides to purchase about 300$ worth of jazz music, so he can put them on an mp3 player and enjoy his music without his wife complaining about the noise (a fervent music hater). He's convinced by his friends to buy something else than an iPod, which unfortunately cannot play iTunes DRM'ed format. He is now a big fan of various p2p services that allow him to download entire jazz cds for free, and the words "iTunes" and "scam" are mentioned in the same sentence. Sadly I am unable to change his mind on the subject.
My perfectly legally purchases copy of windows XP is currently in the process of reminding me that I might be running counterfeit software. I've decided not to bother with it at the time and give windows 7 (legally purchased, currently en route to me via snail mail) a try. I'm sure that if I google a bit I'll find enough ways to disable WGA until the next update.
I'm sure that anyone here can come up with more examples that disprove that piracy is far more convenient these days than buying a legal copy in many instances. I'm not saying that piracy is ok, because it really isn't, but when it comes to convenience it stands undefeated in most cases. The two users I named beside myself are both the typical Joe Sixpack which slashdot likes to shun, and both of them have found their way to the pirated good on their own, and managed to find this approach much more convenient that the correct way of doing things.
I believe that says a lot about the current state of affairs of copyright protection, and I personally long back for the days where the only thing that harassed me was a serial number on the inside of a box. In the case of software I find it inexcusable that when you've paid a considerable amount of money for a piece of software that you're being treated like a thief. In the case of iTunes... Well, despite that my uncle should've bought the correct piece of hardware, his mp3 player works very well and he's quite satisfied with it regretting the money he spent on a format he can only listen to on his computer.
The more we decide to burden legitimate users with hassles, the more likely it will be they will turn into pirates, which will result in lost s
It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the transporter wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable.
It'll change the way we look at traffic forever. We'll just get out of bed, go through our morning routine and hop on the transporter to beam to work. No more traffic jams on the roads, but photon jams in the fiberoptic cable as billions of humans teleport to work at the same time. And every now and then some idiot will be trying to break the speedlimit, and you'll get a horrible accident. From what I hear, the fiberoptic switch between node 353 and node 295 is hell. I'd pity the poor sobs who have to go to work through those cables.
I won't even mention time-travel.
Yes, please don't. It'll upset the natives and they'll be arguing about paradoxes, self fullfilling prophecy type of time travel, etc ad nauseum. It's not pretty when that happens, and at the end of the day tears will be shed.
Seriously though, I'd rather have a look at a universe that didn't have a nicely wrapped up happy end every 45 minutes (or 90 minutes if it's a two part episode). The technology really doesn't matter that much. Every scifi show solves the faster-than-light problem with a lot of hand waving and a magical device (warp engine, jumpgate, hedge drive, chocolate-doh-doh-wave-accelerator), so in my opinion it's better to ignore the actual technology-aspect and focus on the story. With "ignore the technology" I don't mean to say that you can't focus on the impact of said technology on society, but I'd rather not have "particle of the week"-type of episodes that Star Trek loved so much.
I'd much rather have a story driven Star Trek like many of the episodes in DS9. In the pale moonlight is a perfect example of what I mean. Again a lot of hand waving about "optholithic datarods" (blah blah blah), but you really get a feel for the dilemma Sisko is facing, and how he learns to accept his choice as being for the better despite it not being in his nature. I'd rather have more of that kind of storytelling, than another 3 seasons of "Neutrino emissions from the port nacelle have ruptured the fabric of subspace, so let's bomb it with tachyon emissions from the deflector dish and hope this show gets a lot of money from commercial slots. Ensign Redshirt, you go to the airlock and make sure it's sealed properly."
Can we please stop using uptime as a metric for how well an operating system functions for a desktop? Nobody cares about uptime on desktops. On a desktop it's just measuring e-penis between geeks.
Uptime matters in the serverroom, with a server that takes an hourly beating, and then some. Your sister surfing for flash games, printing documents, or whatever the hell she's doing on the internet doesn't need uptime, she needs for her computer to work as intended.
Linux can be the solution in that regard, but don't measure that in uptime. Not turning off a desktop computer doesn't mean a damn thing, except when the electricity bill comes in.
In other news, Valve just announced that the sequel to their game "Left for Dead" will have a special Australian version with localized content. The localized sequel, named "Theft of Bread", will have a horde of undead stealing bread, where the player equipped with appropriate tools is tasked with the mission to retrieve the bread the undead have stolen slice per slice. Valve has announced that the weaponry will include old-time classics such as the breadknife, the toaster and various kinds of jam. Players can grab the "butter" powerup for that extra toasty goodness.
Rumor has it that Australian censors are quite disturbed by the cake level, and the inclusion of a chainsaw. As the horde of undead minions steal a cake for a birthday party, the player is tasked with skillfully cutting the cake using only a chainsaw. Australian censor believe that the close combat situation involving said cake and the splattering of cake-bits due to the interaction with the chainsaw may upset children and small animals, and potentially could have disastrous effects on birthday parties all over Australia.
"We've really been trying to give our players the best experience," Valve's Gabe Newell said in a recent interview, "and that is why we believe that the cake-level is an integral part of the game. Our playtesters reported a high level of satisfaction of being able to masterfully cut the cake just in time for Mruuuuuh's zombie birthday party, and only one of our 10.000 playtesters reported feeling a bit disturbed by all the flying cake-bits. Up until this point, none of our playtesters have ruined a birthday party, nor have there been any cake-incidents at Valve headquarters."
Australian gamers responded outraged when they heard the censorship boards feedback, and have started a boycot of the Australian cake industry. "Crikey, we're just trying to make a stand here mate," said one angry gamer, "we've had it with the big cake industry lobbying the government to try and stop us from enjoying a game that might change the image of their product. If we don't draw a line here, there will never be an end to it and soon we won't even be able to play Cooking Mama.". Representatives of the cake industrie were unavailable for comment, but an inside source in CakeBake Ltd reveals to us that upper management bakes a cake with Gabe Newells face on it every day, and recently acquired a chainsaw for "maintnance purposes".
Giga is 10^9. It has been 10^9 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 10^9. If you want to talk about 1024^3, then it's Gibi. Gibi is 2^30 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 2^30.
Recently at work a researcher wrote a long and dreadfully boring mail about the SI system, and how the IT world should use G/M/K properly and use Gi/Mi/Ki for it's base-2 needs. You could read in between the lines that it irritated him to such a great extend that if you were to open this subject to debate in smalltalk around the watercooler or coffeepot, he would come at you frothing at the mouth, and was more than likely to enlighten you why we have the SI system, probably dating back to days of Napoleon whom notoriously defined a meter by the distance at which he threw Louix XVI head (or was it how far he could kick a chicken, I forgot).
As with all mails sent company wide, the sender was to be congratulated at considering his message of such importance that he must share this joy with all staff, including people who could care less about the SI system or for that matter how many bytes are on their hard drives. For the rest of the month, none of the messages received managed to outperform this particular mail in banality, and the general consensus in our department is that this gem is still one of the most useless pieces of e-mail the company mailserver ever had to process.
After all, why bother arguing about how many bytes are in a kilobyte, when there are so much more fun things to argue about like "the imperial measurement system versus the metric system" or "Celcius vs Fahrentheit vs Kelvin" or if we should consider an angle to be 360 degrees of 2*PI. For some reason, whenever I think of that mail, I wonder what would've happened if I had replied "How many inches are there in one meter? How many liters in a gallon?". Would he have answered me like the ranting and raving lunatic he appeared to be by the tone of his previous message, or would he provide me with the correct answer along with an explanation of how many grams of salt "a teaspoon of salt" in cooking recipies is, or would he have come to my desk with a rather large shotgun intending bodily harm to me and my loved ones. Alas, I remain without answer to this question, although at some point in my career I am bound to be unable to resist the temptation of asking him just to see what happens.
So, after all these years I've come to regard 1KB as 1024 bytes, except when dealing with hard disk sizes. I really don't care about the issue, and I'll happily open my calculator and start dividing or multiplying by 1024. And by the time the disk runs full, none of the users have ever complained about the KB or KiB or the intricacies of converting from one to the other. I can only conclude that either the user also has a calculator, or just doesn't give a damn and allocates money from the project in order allow me to buy the extra storage they need, which is probably cheaper than arguing about the entire issue.
And thus I'd like to conclude this message, rife with self-importance and rivaling the e-mail that inspired in banality, with the following statement: 2^10 was here, 10^3 is a loser.
the part where at the beginning of the series, the Cylon chick snaps a human baby's neck
*gasp* Not a baby!! Considering the fact that they nuke everything and anything they can see about half an hour later, the baby was lucky. Lateron in the show have breeding farms with humans, and they steal Starbucks ovary, and much later they subjugate all of humanity under the guise of "co-existence" and torture their prisoners. They steal Sauls eyeball (again with the bodypart snatching, what's up with that?). Oh, and then there were suicide terrorists. But oh dear gods, they snapped a babies neck, that really makes this show inappropriate for kids as opposed to... all the other things.
I'd much rather have something I could take my kids to and just plain enjoy.
Feed'm Disney, or Pixar, or whatever is popular these days. Hell, I was entertained for hours with Tom & Jerry and Roadrunner back in the day. (Beware though, in some cartoons featuring Roadrunner, Wiley Coyete is violently smashed against big boulders most often followed by an explosion. This may offend you.) Most of my friends with kids have an entire shelf full of that stuff, and they tend to watch shows like BSG when their kids have gone to sleep.
Just saying, not everything needs to be suitable for kids. There's plenty of stuff that's ready made for them and is still enjoyable to parents.
That is, if you're the first person to apply for a domain, you get it for free, but you have to "improve" it
And thus the "Under construction" sign finally makes sense. But really now, I've got several domains for several purposes, and most of them have an empty index.html but have content in a subdirectory limited to certain users (think subversion repositories, wikis for projects, etc etc).
we require them to bring in a receipt showing they had their PC cleaned by professionals
Dear TechSupport,
My mother recently downloaded a smiley pack for MSN Messenger unaware of the predicament she was about to get into. I charged her dinner and had her do my laundry. Please consider this to be a receipt for said dinner and laundry, since the average local "professional" (that guy with the store that doesn't know the difference between a switch and a router) charges $200.00 for it.
Kind regards,
Your local geek
PS: Feel free to educate her on network security, because I've tried but her eyes glaze over after 5 minutes or the mention of the word "spyware" (whichever comes first).
Is it me or is your procedure (while a step in the right direction) just overly bureaucratic?
Richard Stallman saw his own code he wrote for his own projects incorporated in a commercial product and got forbidden to ever reuse or publish his own code. And thus because the company in question had a license in place that basicly made all changes and extension to the code base the property of the company.
Then the Stallman put on his Open Sauce cape, jumped out of an open window and flew to the moon. There he went into meditation for 25 years to discover the secrets of cheese. And upon his return he came back with superpowers and destroyed the company in question with his mighty beard, and the whole world rejoiced and then the Stallman created world peace with his open sauce.
There, if you have to make shit up, at least make it believable.
Slashdot Mirror
http://people.xiph.org/~greg/video/ytcompare/comparison.html
Oh boy, this page AGAIN. I shall stop the sarcasm engine I started up last time someone quoted this thing as an irrefutable fact. From that page:
The primary challenge is that all files at these rates will have problems, so the reviewer is often forced to decide which of two entirely distinct flaws is worse. Sometimes people come to different conclusions. That said, I believe that the Theora+Vorbis results are substantially better than the YouTube 327kbit/sec. Several other people have expressed the same view to me, and I expect you'll also reach the same conclusion.
Why, several people have expressed that they thing the Theora codec might be better, and he (one of the xiph.org people) tends to agree. I'm sorry, but could you please do something a little more than encode the same video with two different codecs and then a jedi-handwave accompanied by saying "Oh this looks so much better, and my buddies with a xiph.org e-mail address tend to agree" ?
How about pointing out flaws in the generated videos, artifacts that will definitely be present at low bitrates, the effect of the encoding on colors, or how well both codecs perform in a scene where everything moves?
The war is already over
Propaganda. If it was over, we'd all know that already.
Does anyone here remember the CD-i? DVD-RAM? MD ? How about the more recent one HD-DVD? (I'm sure someone has an xbox, so that should be a bit more popular). Format wars are never over. Hell, people still argue about Betamax vs VHS. A format war is good for only one thing: making geeks froth at the mouth like a cappuccino. For the rest, the industry will play its part and the war won't be won on technical merits. By the time this thing is settled another format war will take and it'll be cappuccino time all over again.
a hidden agenda
Oh noes! THEY ARE AMONGST US! Posting on our boards, subverting our free codecs by spreading words.
Many of us do not use Blu-Ray. Much video on the Internet is still H.263.
My mother doesn't own a DVD-player, nor does my grandmother. I'd call the DVD pretty much a (set of) standard(s) though. I strongly believe that the next big thing in media-land will no longer be a physical medium, and what's more, we'll beg the industry for more a dollar at a time. And I think that ultimately that will be the deciding factor on this whole debate, but I might as well be wrong in that belief. Only time with tell, but in the meantime: froth on, kind sir!
You know, Theora video doesn't suck.
<sarcasm>
Oh boy oh boy, a comparison on xiph.org. I'm sure that this will be unbiased in any way. From the conclusion:
The primary challenge is that all files at these rates will have problems, so the reviewer is often forced to decide which of two entirely distinct flaws is worse. Sometimes people come to different conclusions. That said, I believe that the Theora+Vorbis results are substantially better than the YouTube 327kbit/sec. Several other people have expressed the same view to me, and I expect you'll also reach the same conclusion.
I'm totally convinced with such strong arguments. He's clearly gone his way to show flaws in both codecs, instead of just encoding a video with two codecs and letting the audience decide.
</sarcasm>
If linux freezes, then Alt-SysRq-S+U+B will do an emergency sync of the disks, unmount them and reboot the system.
Bah! That almost looks like an emacs keycombo. M-x-Ctrl-v-p-o-k-l-m-z-w and then press your spacebar with your nose, and it'll do the same thing by the way. It's really handy to have such a shortcut, but the odds of your cat walking over the keyboard and hitting that particular combo are pretty high.
Nah, the real money's in owning that sound. Then you can sue every iPhone programmer to make an app, and Apple.
iPullMyFinger for the iPhone. Oh I can smell the cash in that one.
Mod GP -1: Ludicrous
Child-proof caps and lids would suit this purpose
I know you're being ironic, but a few months ago a friend of mine got some medication in a childproof bottle. It's a very funny sight to see two grown men struggle with that particular bottle, and have a six year old open it with ease.
As for this summary:
The report makes five recommendations to keep little Johnny away from the harms of Barrens chat
I always assumed the Barrens chat or trade channel was filled with little Johnnies.
In Dutch SOA stands for "Sexueel Overdraagbare Aandoening", or Sexually Transmitted Disease. Someone at my office recently received the prestigious title "SOA Expert", which of course has led to very strange looks from the mailman when a package arrives for him.
It's been several months, and the joke still hasn't gotten old, which shows either the level of inappropriateness of the title in Dutch or the maturity of the people making the joke. (I'm guessing the combination of both)
Windows boxes are more capable media players.
While VLC used to be horrendous at ASS/SSA subtitles the 1.0 versions seem to handle those gracefully (if I'm not mistaken the humously named libass is to blame). VLC does still seem to choke on H.264 from time to time, especially when you're fastforwarding. A really good media player experience are the latests incarnations of XBMC, but the disadvantage is that you'll be dedicating your computer to it (not that you're doing much else while watching tv). MPC(-HC) or any other ffdshow based player is probably still a better media player on a desktop though for H.264 with ASS subtitles
Tohou/doujin shooters are Windows only.
They run on wine, without glitches these days even. No need to give up on your bullet hell game addiction. FWIW, switching to the correct locale to get them working, and/or fiddling with Applocale takes about as much time as getting them to run on wine.
with the LHC seeming to be working
Is it working again? Last I heard a bird dropped a baguette on it and it croaked. Then again, I don't really keep up to speed on my particle accelerator news anyway.
Its not criminal in the US, and no one is claiming the US endoreces Nazism. Germany could simply say "we think we've undone the damage to our children, and have beated Facist ideas."
Yes, but that is the US. I'm sure that if Germany stopped banning the swastika some people here would get upset. When the wall fell, a lot of the older generation were mumbling the words "Oh great, give them another 10 years and they'll be occupying us again".
I'm not saying that that particular sentiment is still alive that much at the moment, but there are still plenty of examples of that sentiment. For instance, where I live certain families are still mentioned in the same sentence as the word "collaborator". While people don't really take out to the streets anymore to shave their heads (amongst other things), there is a certain amount of venom in the words particularly when that family has been successful financially.
While most my generation thinks the whole swastika ban is nonsense, my parents generation would frown upon it being lifted, and my grandparents generation would start stocking up on supplies. Remember when prince Harry wore a nazi costume? Look how prominently the swastika is displayed in the picture. A shocking report on TV on neonazis? You bet the camera keeps that swastika on screen as much as possible. I doubt that the symbol will lose its (relatively) new meaning in the next generation, and maybe that is a good thing if it reminds everyone not to stand for such a regime again.
I don't think there is a country in the world that works harder at self-flagellation than the Germans - nor is there any country in the world that is expected to self-flagellate that hard.
True, but what great comedy it has given us. Even today, that episode of Fawlty Towers remains funny, and I'm sure the Germans are allowed to have a laugh too now.
What if they were journalists?
ZING! Careful now, you better be carrying a Geiger counter with you if you keep telling jokes like that.
We purchased a few gigabit and 10 gigabit ProCurve switches because they were cheaper than Cisco, but then we found out they don't fully support such standard features as VLAN trunking, or say they support it but have strange incompatibilities when trying to work together in a Cisco environment.
This isn't limited to a Cisco environment, trust me. A few months ago I had one of the ProCurves in the serverroom go insane. Apparently it had decided that our LACP setup wasn't to its tastes, then decided that its partners were lying and in the end just started resending packets all over the place. The strange thing was, that it had worked nicely up to a point and that it changed behaviour without any apparent reason. Nobody had messed with the configuration, there was no power failure causing it to reset back to a previous state, nothing new was introduced to the network. Rest assured, it was a fun day.
The worst part of it all is that they're quite expensive compared to a 3com 4200G that have the exact same features, but without the quirks. Long live company policy!
As for convenience, that's no excuse at all, it's just laziness. Given the ease of legally downloading these days, it's even less of an excuse.
Here are a few examples of convenience:
I'm sure that anyone here can come up with more examples that disprove that piracy is far more convenient these days than buying a legal copy in many instances. I'm not saying that piracy is ok, because it really isn't, but when it comes to convenience it stands undefeated in most cases. The two users I named beside myself are both the typical Joe Sixpack which slashdot likes to shun, and both of them have found their way to the pirated good on their own, and managed to find this approach much more convenient that the correct way of doing things.
I believe that says a lot about the current state of affairs of copyright protection, and I personally long back for the days where the only thing that harassed me was a serial number on the inside of a box. In the case of software I find it inexcusable that when you've paid a considerable amount of money for a piece of software that you're being treated like a thief. In the case of iTunes... Well, despite that my uncle should've bought the correct piece of hardware, his mp3 player works very well and he's quite satisfied with it regretting the money he spent on a format he can only listen to on his computer.
The more we decide to burden legitimate users with hassles, the more likely it will be they will turn into pirates, which will result in lost s
Like OpenAL?
Nice try, but that one's LGPL
It's inconceivable to me that a creation like the transporter wouldn't radically transform human culture and society into something unrecognizable.
It'll change the way we look at traffic forever. We'll just get out of bed, go through our morning routine and hop on the transporter to beam to work. No more traffic jams on the roads, but photon jams in the fiberoptic cable as billions of humans teleport to work at the same time. And every now and then some idiot will be trying to break the speedlimit, and you'll get a horrible accident. From what I hear, the fiberoptic switch between node 353 and node 295 is hell. I'd pity the poor sobs who have to go to work through those cables.
I won't even mention time-travel.
Yes, please don't. It'll upset the natives and they'll be arguing about paradoxes, self fullfilling prophecy type of time travel, etc ad nauseum. It's not pretty when that happens, and at the end of the day tears will be shed.
Seriously though, I'd rather have a look at a universe that didn't have a nicely wrapped up happy end every 45 minutes (or 90 minutes if it's a two part episode). The technology really doesn't matter that much. Every scifi show solves the faster-than-light problem with a lot of hand waving and a magical device (warp engine, jumpgate, hedge drive, chocolate-doh-doh-wave-accelerator), so in my opinion it's better to ignore the actual technology-aspect and focus on the story. With "ignore the technology" I don't mean to say that you can't focus on the impact of said technology on society, but I'd rather not have "particle of the week"-type of episodes that Star Trek loved so much.
I'd much rather have a story driven Star Trek like many of the episodes in DS9. In the pale moonlight is a perfect example of what I mean. Again a lot of hand waving about "optholithic datarods" (blah blah blah), but you really get a feel for the dilemma Sisko is facing, and how he learns to accept his choice as being for the better despite it not being in his nature. I'd rather have more of that kind of storytelling, than another 3 seasons of "Neutrino emissions from the port nacelle have ruptured the fabric of subspace, so let's bomb it with tachyon emissions from the deflector dish and hope this show gets a lot of money from commercial slots. Ensign Redshirt, you go to the airlock and make sure it's sealed properly."
27 days up uptime
hasn't rebooted in well over a month
Can we please stop using uptime as a metric for how well an operating system functions for a desktop? Nobody cares about uptime on desktops. On a desktop it's just measuring e-penis between geeks.
Uptime matters in the serverroom, with a server that takes an hourly beating, and then some. Your sister surfing for flash games, printing documents, or whatever the hell she's doing on the internet doesn't need uptime, she needs for her computer to work as intended.
Linux can be the solution in that regard, but don't measure that in uptime. Not turning off a desktop computer doesn't mean a damn thing, except when the electricity bill comes in.
In other news, Valve just announced that the sequel to their game "Left for Dead" will have a special Australian version with localized content. The localized sequel, named "Theft of Bread", will have a horde of undead stealing bread, where the player equipped with appropriate tools is tasked with the mission to retrieve the bread the undead have stolen slice per slice. Valve has announced that the weaponry will include old-time classics such as the breadknife, the toaster and various kinds of jam. Players can grab the "butter" powerup for that extra toasty goodness.
Rumor has it that Australian censors are quite disturbed by the cake level, and the inclusion of a chainsaw. As the horde of undead minions steal a cake for a birthday party, the player is tasked with skillfully cutting the cake using only a chainsaw. Australian censor believe that the close combat situation involving said cake and the splattering of cake-bits due to the interaction with the chainsaw may upset children and small animals, and potentially could have disastrous effects on birthday parties all over Australia.
"We've really been trying to give our players the best experience," Valve's Gabe Newell said in a recent interview, "and that is why we believe that the cake-level is an integral part of the game. Our playtesters reported a high level of satisfaction of being able to masterfully cut the cake just in time for Mruuuuuh's zombie birthday party, and only one of our 10.000 playtesters reported feeling a bit disturbed by all the flying cake-bits. Up until this point, none of our playtesters have ruined a birthday party, nor have there been any cake-incidents at Valve headquarters."
Australian gamers responded outraged when they heard the censorship boards feedback, and have started a boycot of the Australian cake industry. "Crikey, we're just trying to make a stand here mate," said one angry gamer, "we've had it with the big cake industry lobbying the government to try and stop us from enjoying a game that might change the image of their product. If we don't draw a line here, there will never be an end to it and soon we won't even be able to play Cooking Mama.". Representatives of the cake industrie were unavailable for comment, but an inside source in CakeBake Ltd reveals to us that upper management bakes a cake with Gabe Newells face on it every day, and recently acquired a chainsaw for "maintnance purposes".
It's not a tax. It is a toll for a service.
That's a nice television you have there. It would be a shame if something were to happen to it.
Back in the olden days, we used to monitor our pulses in gym class using a finger and a clock.
Strangely enough, this inexpensive and relatively easy method of measuring your heartbeat no longer seems to work.
Giga is 10^9. It has been 10^9 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 10^9. If you want to talk about 1024^3, then it's Gibi. Gibi is 2^30 since it was created. It was never, ever meant to be anything but 2^30.
Recently at work a researcher wrote a long and dreadfully boring mail about the SI system, and how the IT world should use G/M/K properly and use Gi/Mi/Ki for it's base-2 needs. You could read in between the lines that it irritated him to such a great extend that if you were to open this subject to debate in smalltalk around the watercooler or coffeepot, he would come at you frothing at the mouth, and was more than likely to enlighten you why we have the SI system, probably dating back to days of Napoleon whom notoriously defined a meter by the distance at which he threw Louix XVI head (or was it how far he could kick a chicken, I forgot).
As with all mails sent company wide, the sender was to be congratulated at considering his message of such importance that he must share this joy with all staff, including people who could care less about the SI system or for that matter how many bytes are on their hard drives. For the rest of the month, none of the messages received managed to outperform this particular mail in banality, and the general consensus in our department is that this gem is still one of the most useless pieces of e-mail the company mailserver ever had to process.
After all, why bother arguing about how many bytes are in a kilobyte, when there are so much more fun things to argue about like "the imperial measurement system versus the metric system" or "Celcius vs Fahrentheit vs Kelvin" or if we should consider an angle to be 360 degrees of 2*PI. For some reason, whenever I think of that mail, I wonder what would've happened if I had replied "How many inches are there in one meter? How many liters in a gallon?". Would he have answered me like the ranting and raving lunatic he appeared to be by the tone of his previous message, or would he provide me with the correct answer along with an explanation of how many grams of salt "a teaspoon of salt" in cooking recipies is, or would he have come to my desk with a rather large shotgun intending bodily harm to me and my loved ones. Alas, I remain without answer to this question, although at some point in my career I am bound to be unable to resist the temptation of asking him just to see what happens.
So, after all these years I've come to regard 1KB as 1024 bytes, except when dealing with hard disk sizes. I really don't care about the issue, and I'll happily open my calculator and start dividing or multiplying by 1024. And by the time the disk runs full, none of the users have ever complained about the KB or KiB or the intricacies of converting from one to the other. I can only conclude that either the user also has a calculator, or just doesn't give a damn and allocates money from the project in order allow me to buy the extra storage they need, which is probably cheaper than arguing about the entire issue.
And thus I'd like to conclude this message, rife with self-importance and rivaling the e-mail that inspired in banality, with the following statement: 2^10 was here, 10^3 is a loser.
the part where at the beginning of the series, the Cylon chick snaps a human baby's neck
*gasp* Not a baby!! Considering the fact that they nuke everything and anything they can see about half an hour later, the baby was lucky. Lateron in the show have breeding farms with humans, and they steal Starbucks ovary, and much later they subjugate all of humanity under the guise of "co-existence" and torture their prisoners. They steal Sauls eyeball (again with the bodypart snatching, what's up with that?). Oh, and then there were suicide terrorists. But oh dear gods, they snapped a babies neck, that really makes this show inappropriate for kids as opposed to ... all the other things.
I'd much rather have something I could take my kids to and just plain enjoy.
Feed'm Disney, or Pixar, or whatever is popular these days. Hell, I was entertained for hours with Tom & Jerry and Roadrunner back in the day. (Beware though, in some cartoons featuring Roadrunner, Wiley Coyete is violently smashed against big boulders most often followed by an explosion. This may offend you.) Most of my friends with kids have an entire shelf full of that stuff, and they tend to watch shows like BSG when their kids have gone to sleep.
Just saying, not everything needs to be suitable for kids. There's plenty of stuff that's ready made for them and is still enjoyable to parents.
That is, if you're the first person to apply for a domain, you get it for free, but you have to "improve" it
And thus the "Under construction" sign finally makes sense. But really now, I've got several domains for several purposes, and most of them have an empty index.html but have content in a subdirectory limited to certain users (think subversion repositories, wikis for projects, etc etc).
What exactly constitutes "improving" a domain?
Nobody ever claimed the /b/tards were smart. Clever, created, talent, energetic - sure. But not smart.
I've come to think of 4chan as a modern version those monkeys with the typewriters. I've yet to see one of Shakespeare's works appear.
we require them to bring in a receipt showing they had their PC cleaned by professionals
Dear TechSupport,
My mother recently downloaded a smiley pack for MSN Messenger unaware of the predicament she was about to get into. I charged her dinner and had her do my laundry. Please consider this to be a receipt for said dinner and laundry, since the average local "professional" (that guy with the store that doesn't know the difference between a switch and a router) charges $200.00 for it.
Kind regards,
Your local geek
PS: Feel free to educate her on network security, because I've tried but her eyes glaze over after 5 minutes or the mention of the word "spyware" (whichever comes first).
Is it me or is your procedure (while a step in the right direction) just overly bureaucratic?
Richard Stallman saw his own code he wrote for his own projects incorporated in a commercial product and got forbidden to ever reuse or publish his own code. And thus because the company in question had a license in place that basicly made all changes and extension to the code base the property of the company.
Then the Stallman put on his Open Sauce cape, jumped out of an open window and flew to the moon. There he went into meditation for 25 years to discover the secrets of cheese. And upon his return he came back with superpowers and destroyed the company in question with his mighty beard, and the whole world rejoiced and then the Stallman created world peace with his open sauce.
There, if you have to make shit up, at least make it believable.