Re:The un-PC point of view in re: Google IPO
on
Google IPO Swami
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The only people who are against google's method of pricing, and selling, their IPO are those who benefitted from the old (ok, still current), hideously corrupt system. With google's approach (and a couple of other companies that did the OpenIPO thing back during the bubble) the favoritism and "old boy's club" method of handing out IPO shares to people who would "flip" them the same day for huge gains with little to no risk is eliminated.
Like most things in this world, I'm sure that this approach is not completely equalitarian but it is sure a damn sight better than the current scum-bags-r-us method endorsed by all the big players (aka thieves).
Re:XviD + Matroska + Vorbis Damn hard to beat...
on
XVID 1.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
Matroska container with XViD video and Vorbis audio is the best free way to go today. You may find licensing problems with XViD, but you are likely find that with any modern video codec, although VP3 (I think) has beem released as Free and that might be worth considering as an alternative with absolutely no legal entanglements.
Also, for playback, if you are hosted on a Windows box, look at the FFDshow video filter and XViD decoder, its scaling functinality is excellent, much better than the hardware scalers built into consumer-grade video cards.
The point is that the PNAC is so arrogant that they don't feel the need to keep their evil conspiracy plans a secret. They feel that they are right, correct, good, the one truth. So better to tell the whole world what they are going to do, and then go do it. Of course listening to what the whole world has to say in response is not in the plan because only the PNAC has the one truth, anything anyone says to the contrary is simply the devil trying to make them stray from the one true path of righteous glory.
You guys in Finland are just one disclosure away from losing that trust. You've heard the phrase, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Well, your governments may not have absolute power, but they certainly have a boatload, so be prepared for a boatload of corruption. It *is* human nature, all it takes is the wrong person in the wrong place with the wrong justification.
The problem we in the USA have is the our government is already openly corrupted by corporate lobbying (bribes), and thus many of us are paranoid about it. But, too many people are OK with it since it hasn't bit them in the ass personally, yet.
Forget the amendments, how about something in the actual constitution itself? Something so important that the Found Fathers put it in Article I - the first Article of the US Constitution. The right of Habeas Corpus.
A CD with copy-prevention techniques applied is like a car with no bumpers and a leaking brake-line.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the way attempts at copy-prevention are implemented on CDs - almost invariably they "use up" the error-correction data on the disc so as to confuse any CD reader that cares about that stuff when there are no errors (e.g. many CD-ROM drives). Thus a scratch on one of those discs has a much greater probability of rendering the disc unplayable on regular equipment than an equal scratch on a standards-complaint CD.
Furthermore your implicit connection between people who wish to exercise their rights as customers to receive the highest quality product for their dollar is simply anti-american and probably communistic to boot.
Faxing them back won't make a difference. It will cost you. Perhaps a smart fax modem program with caller ID set with an access list (ala sendmail: Block THESE countries).
Take it a step further, instead of blocking those countries, make the fax drop down to the slowest possible speed. If possible (software modem/fax?) fake a bunch of bad transmits and request resends (does the fax protocol even do that?) so as to tie up their system as long as possible. Of course, it would be bad if you didn't have multiple incoming lines behind your fax number, else you'll just DoS yourself too.
For a guy who started out arguing that environment creates lanaguage, you sure seem stuck on language from 50 years ago.
Nowadays, even people in the atlantic states refer to it as mahimahi - I've lived in Boston, NYC and Miami and mahimahi was in common use in seafood restraunts.
No, dolphin is the mammal. So is porpoise. The fish you are referring to is called mahimahi. The hawaiians named lava, they get to name a couple of fish too.
1) The USA does not like the red commies in China, current ruler of the USA thinks China is a threat to the national interests of the USA. But those damn Chinese have nukes, so the current ruler of the USA can't take any overt action against China without fear of nuclear retaliation.
2) The USA develops anti-missile defensive-only technology capable of stopping hundreds of simultaneously launched missiles.
3) Now the threat of nuclear retaliation by China against the USA is nullified by the USA's anti-missile technology. Said current ruler of the USA now feels like there is no downside to the USA in overt attacks against China. So he declares war.
4) Ooops. That missile defense stuff wasn't test so well and China is able to squeeze off a couple of missiles that get past the defenses and take out LA and Seattle. Not to mention the damage that the USA has done to Beijing and Hong Kong.
So much for defensive weaponry reducing the threat of war.
PS - Over the last decade or so, those red commies have done an amazing job of turning into green-shirt fascists. Here's what Benito Mussolini, the father of modern fascism, had to say about the topic - "Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power." Looks like the USA and China aren't so different after all.
From what I have read, most video cards (or at least the drivers for said cards) do not implement the bidirectional functionality of the AGP 3.0 spec.
Bidirectionality is a feature often touted of the new PCI-Express hosted GPUs, as if even AGP 3.0 was still only one way. If they would just do AGP 3.0 right it wouldn't be such a big deal, but with AGP now officially an obsolete bus, chances are no one will spend the engineering resources necessary to make full AGP 3.0 functionality available. Onward and Upward! (or at least Onward and Sideways!)
Even your list contains some problem items - those promo GCs that they offer for making certain purchases are notoriously hard to claim. Five of the last six times I've made a qualifying purchase -- Amazon "forgot" about me and I had to take action in order to get them to "automatically" send me my promo GC and judging from the discussion on the deal boards I am in a significant minority, if not majority with that experience. Since they typically won't send the promo GC's out until at least a month after the end of the promotional period, I'm sure plenty of people completely forget that they are even due a promo GC in the first place. All due to an "innocent" mistake on Amazon's part.
As the operator of such a site, then you ought to be equally aware of such problems with amazon too. Denying they exist does your readership no good, although you probably get more money from affiliate links to amazon products than you do directly from your readership.
Amazon is way more than books. When I was still amazed at the practice, I regularly found household items and foodstuffs with "retail price" listings that were more than what the manufacturer listed the MSRP for on their own websites. Books have an MSRP printed on them which makes games like that just a little bit harder (or require even bigger cojones than Amazon has grown, yet).
Bullshit. If you "really care" about winning an auction, then be prepared to pay through the nose. The only person who ever really wins at an auction is the seller - the buyer is just the guy who was willing to spend the most money.
I use another sniping service and I routinely win auctions which have tons of "human" sniping going on (easy to determine from the bid records).
Furthermore, sniping is GOOD for buyers because:
1) It lets you "retract" a bid with no penalty since all you are doing is cancelling a snipe instead of a real bid.
2) It reduces bid-inflation. Snipers set a max price and walk away. If everyone used automated snipes, it would be like a blind auction since there would be no opportunity to "make an exception" and bid "just a few dollars more" then your pre-determined limit because someone has outbid you.
Maybe once upon an internet time that was generally true. But nowadays, Amazon is rarely ever the cheapest online source for anything and their customer service has gone down the toilet too (try finding a phone number listed on their website, good luck).
Occasionally, they will have an outstanding price on a particular item, but the chances are more than even that they will declare it a misprice, cancel all the orders for the item and if you had purchased additonal items in order to get the free shipping, they will immediatey ship the additional items and charge you shipping since the total is now below the $25 threshold. Many people won't even notice and of those that do, many won't even bother to fight it because, in the grand scheme of things, Amazon skimming/scammig you for a couple of bucks just isn't worth the fight.
Tactics like the above, plus listing artificially inflated "retail" prices to make their pricing look like impressive discounting have rightly earned them the moniker Scamazon. Although, in all fairness, they are nowhere near as bad as a place like Tiger Direct which doesn't have such an easy name to mutate.
Reaching out and clobbering computers is exactly the same thing that the RIAA wants the legal power to do.
I say bring it on! The RIAA doesn't stand a chance against the combined creativity, greed and showmanship of a million teenage boys. The only places they hold the upper hand are in Congress and the courts -- if they want to venture beyond their stronghold, they won't last long.
Plus, it will have the beneficial effect of accelerating "our" (the entire internet community not just the RIAA-vs-P2P camps) general knowledge of network based attack and defense strategems, which can only lead to stronger security for everyone in the long run. Think of it as wargames in preparation for a real internet "cyber"-war.
It depends on what else is on their resume. I sure as hell would not want to hire a CS grad who is just a heads-down coder with no understanding of market forces, human motivations or legal systems like patent law. Very few attributes define an entire person, and a college degree is definitely not one of them.
Bulb life is rated as the amount of time it takes for the bulb to reach 50% of original brightness. But, brightness vs time is not a linear function, there is a dramatic decrease in the first couple of hundred hours and then it asymptocially approachs zero lumens. So, unless you are watching with a brand new bulb, you are probably already down to 75% or less of originally brightness.
So, this leads to another option - buy a really bright screen. On the low end, Dalite has a model that will easily come in under $300 - the down side is that the audience must sit relatively close to center to get the full brightness, and you can't ceiling mount the projector because the material in this particular Dalite model is retro-reflective, i.e. the light is reflected back towards the source. You need angular-reflective material if you want to ceiling mount, which leads to the more expensive option--
Vutec came out with a new material about a year ago that they are selling in their high-end screens - model name Silverstar. This material almost defies the laws of physics in that viewing angle is much wider than it "should be" (just like a bumble bee "can't" fly). The silverstar is also angular-reflective instead of retro-reflective. The top end Silverstar will run you around $2K depending on how much margin the dealer gets from you.
Both the silverstar and this unnamed model from Dalite look incredible, if you sit in the right place. Being so bright, the image just pops out, especially outdoor daylight scenes. Just for the silverstar the "right place" to sit is much more of the room than with the Dalite.
The bulbs for my projector are rated for 1000 hours and cost about $500 each, maybe more if you don't want to shop around. So far, I have been able to run my current bulb to about 2500 hours with my silverstar screen. I fully expect to get past 3000 hours, maybe even close to 4000 before the bulb is really too dim to keep using. Meanwhile I'm using the extra time between bulb changes to watch ebay and other sources for people selling the necessary bulbs for really cheap.($200 and under).
So, in some ways, the expensive screen pays for itself by significantly increasing usuable bulb life. And, in the meantime, it produces one of the best looking images available and will continue to do so even when I upgrade to a new projector.
I know that was a joke, but allow me to riff on it a little...
The hilton sex tape showed up about three weeks before her TV show about being an idiot on the farm debuted.
The hilton sex tape was first "announced" to the public on the O'Reilly Factor, on Fox News. (Remember that the next time he talks about his "no spin zone." Also consider what this implies Fox management thinks of O'Reilly's audience.)
The hilton farm show ran on the Fox network.
The tape's release was clearly a deliberate publicity stunt. I doubt she was even embarrassed by it -- she's richer than the world, and enjoy's a good fuck and doesn't care who knows it. I suspect that most anyone who found themselves in her shoes would feel the same.
I can't agree, primarily because you are arguing in support of a lack of professionalism. If a person's job is to check IDs they ought to have the experience and knowledge to do their job well. If a company hires someone without the required level of experience, then it is that company's fault and not the government's.
Making the job of "the police" (I use that term loosely) easier is a common theme in totalitarian regimes. But, in the USA it was believed that "the police" serve the people and not the other way around.
Do you mean that you literally "can't identify" an out of state driver's license as a driver's license, nevermind getting to the point where you can tell if it is authentic?
Either way, they have books for that sort of thing and if people are using crappy forgeries of out of state ID cards, then the book is going to be a whole lot more helpful than dealing with super-high quality forgeries of any kind of ID - common or uncommon.
Slashdot Mirror
The only people who are against google's method of pricing, and selling, their IPO are those who benefitted from the old (ok, still current), hideously corrupt system. With google's approach (and a couple of other companies that did the OpenIPO thing back during the bubble) the favoritism and "old boy's club" method of handing out IPO shares to people who would "flip" them the same day for huge gains with little to no risk is eliminated.
Like most things in this world, I'm sure that this approach is not completely equalitarian but it is sure a damn sight better than the current scum-bags-r-us method endorsed by all the big players (aka thieves).
Matroska container with XViD video and Vorbis audio is the best free way to go today. You may find licensing problems with XViD, but you are likely find that with any modern video codec, although VP3 (I think) has beem released as Free and that might be worth considering as an alternative with absolutely no legal entanglements.
Also, for playback, if you are hosted on a Windows box, look at the FFDshow video filter and XViD decoder, its scaling functinality is excellent, much better than the hardware scalers built into consumer-grade video cards.
The point is that the PNAC is so arrogant that they don't feel the need to keep their evil conspiracy plans a secret. They feel that they are right, correct, good, the one truth. So better to tell the whole world what they are going to do, and then go do it. Of course listening to what the whole world has to say in response is not in the plan because only the PNAC has the one truth, anything anyone says to the contrary is simply the devil trying to make them stray from the one true path of righteous glory.
Don't forget that Hamas was in large part funded by Israel to create a strong opponent to the PLO. What an collosal backfire that was!
You guys in Finland are just one disclosure away from losing that trust. You've heard the phrase, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Well, your governments may not have absolute power, but they certainly have a boatload, so be prepared for a boatload of corruption. It *is* human nature, all it takes is the wrong person in the wrong place with the wrong justification.
The problem we in the USA have is the our government is already openly corrupted by corporate lobbying (bribes), and thus many of us are paranoid about it. But, too many people are OK with it since it hasn't bit them in the ass personally, yet.
Forget the amendments, how about something in the actual constitution itself? Something so important that the Found Fathers put it in Article I - the first Article of the US Constitution. The right of Habeas Corpus.
A CD with copy-prevention techniques applied is like a car with no bumpers and a leaking brake-line.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the way attempts at copy-prevention are implemented on CDs - almost invariably they "use up" the error-correction data on the disc so as to confuse any CD reader that cares about that stuff when there are no errors (e.g. many CD-ROM drives). Thus a scratch on one of those discs has a much greater probability of rendering the disc unplayable on regular equipment than an equal scratch on a standards-complaint CD.
Furthermore your implicit connection between people who wish to exercise their rights as customers to receive the highest quality product for their dollar is simply anti-american and probably communistic to boot.
Faxing them back won't make a difference. It will cost you. Perhaps a smart fax modem program with caller ID set with an access list (ala sendmail: Block THESE countries).
Take it a step further, instead of blocking those countries, make the fax drop down to the slowest possible speed. If possible (software modem/fax?) fake a bunch of bad transmits and request resends (does the fax protocol even do that?) so as to tie up their system as long as possible. Of course, it would be bad if you didn't have multiple incoming lines behind your fax number, else you'll just DoS yourself too.
For a guy who started out arguing that environment creates lanaguage, you sure seem stuck on language from 50 years ago.
Nowadays, even people in the atlantic states refer to it as mahimahi - I've lived in Boston, NYC and Miami and mahimahi was in common use in seafood restraunts.
No, dolphin is the mammal. So is porpoise. The fish you are referring to is called mahimahi. The hawaiians named lava, they get to name a couple of fish too.
and the 35% ones are like rocking horse shit.
Exactly what is rocking horse shit like? Is putting it in a rocker better then putting it in a swing?
It works like this hypothetical example:
1) The USA does not like the red commies in China, current ruler of the USA thinks China is a threat to the national interests of the USA. But those damn Chinese have nukes, so the current ruler of the USA can't take any overt action against China without fear of nuclear retaliation.
2) The USA develops anti-missile defensive-only technology capable of stopping hundreds of simultaneously launched missiles.
3) Now the threat of nuclear retaliation by China against the USA is nullified by the USA's anti-missile technology. Said current ruler of the USA now feels like there is no downside to the USA in overt attacks against China. So he declares war.
4) Ooops. That missile defense stuff wasn't test so well and China is able to squeeze off a couple of missiles that get past the defenses and take out LA and Seattle. Not to mention the damage that the USA has done to Beijing and Hong Kong.
So much for defensive weaponry reducing the threat of war.
PS - Over the last decade or so, those red commies have done an amazing job of turning into green-shirt fascists. Here's what Benito Mussolini, the father of modern fascism, had to say about the topic - "Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power." Looks like the USA and China aren't so different after all.
From what I have read, most video cards (or at least the drivers for said cards) do not implement the bidirectional functionality of the AGP 3.0 spec.
Bidirectionality is a feature often touted of the new PCI-Express hosted GPUs, as if even AGP 3.0 was still only one way. If they would just do AGP 3.0 right it wouldn't be such a big deal, but with AGP now officially an obsolete bus, chances are no one will spend the engineering resources necessary to make full AGP 3.0 functionality available. Onward and Upward! (or at least Onward and Sideways!)
Even your list contains some problem items - those promo GCs that they offer for making certain purchases are notoriously hard to claim. Five of the last six times I've made a qualifying purchase -- Amazon "forgot" about me and I had to take action in order to get them to "automatically" send me my promo GC and judging from the discussion on the deal boards I am in a significant minority, if not majority with that experience. Since they typically won't send the promo GC's out until at least a month after the end of the promotional period, I'm sure plenty of people completely forget that they are even due a promo GC in the first place. All due to an "innocent" mistake on Amazon's part.
As the operator of such a site, then you ought to be equally aware of such problems with amazon too.
Denying they exist does your readership no good, although you probably get more money from affiliate links to amazon products than you do directly from your readership.
Amazon is way more than books. When I was still amazed at the practice, I regularly found household items and foodstuffs with "retail price" listings that were more than what the manufacturer listed the MSRP for on their own websites. Books have an MSRP printed on them which makes games like that just a little bit harder (or require even bigger cojones than Amazon has grown, yet).
Bullshit. If you "really care" about winning an auction, then be prepared to pay through the nose. The only person who ever really wins at an auction is the seller - the buyer is just the guy who was willing to spend the most money.
I use another sniping service and I routinely win auctions which have tons of "human" sniping going on (easy to determine from the bid records).
Furthermore, sniping is GOOD for buyers because:
1) It lets you "retract" a bid with no penalty since all you are doing is cancelling a snipe instead of a real bid.
2) It reduces bid-inflation. Snipers set a max price and walk away. If everyone used automated snipes, it would be like a blind auction since there would be no opportunity to "make an exception" and bid "just a few dollars more" then your pre-determined limit because someone has outbid you.
Maybe once upon an internet time that was generally true. But nowadays, Amazon is rarely ever the cheapest online source for anything and their customer service has gone down the toilet too (try finding a phone number listed on their website, good luck).
Occasionally, they will have an outstanding price on a particular item, but the chances are more than even that they will declare it a misprice, cancel all the orders for the item and if you had purchased additonal items in order to get the free shipping, they will immediatey ship the additional items and charge you shipping since the total is now below the $25 threshold. Many people won't even notice and of those that do, many won't even bother to fight it because, in the grand scheme of things, Amazon skimming/scammig you for a couple of bucks just isn't worth the fight.
Tactics like the above, plus listing artificially inflated "retail" prices to make their pricing look like impressive discounting have rightly earned them the moniker Scamazon. Although, in all fairness, they are nowhere near as bad as a place like Tiger Direct which doesn't have such an easy name to mutate.
Reaching out and clobbering computers is exactly the same thing that the RIAA wants the legal power to do.
I say bring it on! The RIAA doesn't stand a chance against the combined creativity, greed and showmanship of a million teenage boys. The only places they hold the upper hand are in Congress and the courts -- if they want to venture beyond their stronghold, they won't last long.
Plus, it will have the beneficial effect of accelerating "our" (the entire internet community not just the RIAA-vs-P2P camps) general knowledge of network based attack and defense strategems, which can only lead to stronger security for everyone in the long run. Think of it as wargames in preparation for a real internet "cyber"-war.
It depends on what else is on their resume. I sure as hell would not want to hire a CS grad who is just a heads-down coder with no understanding of market forces, human motivations or legal systems like patent law. Very few attributes define an entire person, and a college degree is definitely not one of them.
Bulb life is rated as the amount of time it takes for the bulb to reach 50% of original brightness. But, brightness vs time is not a linear function, there is a dramatic decrease in the first couple of hundred hours and then it asymptocially approachs zero lumens. So, unless you are watching with a brand new bulb, you are probably already down to 75% or less of originally brightness.
So, this leads to another option - buy a really bright screen. On the low end, Dalite has a model that will easily come in under $300 - the down side is that the audience must sit relatively close to center to get the full brightness, and you can't ceiling mount the projector because the material in this particular Dalite model is retro-reflective, i.e. the light is reflected back towards the source. You need angular-reflective material if you want to ceiling mount, which leads to the more expensive option--
Vutec came out with a new material about a year ago that they are selling in their high-end screens - model name Silverstar. This material almost defies the laws of physics in that viewing angle is much wider than it "should be" (just like a bumble bee "can't" fly). The silverstar is also angular-reflective instead of retro-reflective. The top end Silverstar will run you around $2K depending on how much margin the dealer gets from you.
Both the silverstar and this unnamed model from Dalite look incredible, if you sit in the right place. Being so bright, the image just pops out, especially outdoor daylight scenes. Just for the silverstar the "right place" to sit is much more of the room than with the Dalite.
The bulbs for my projector are rated for 1000 hours and cost about $500 each, maybe more if you don't want to shop around. So far, I have been able to run my current bulb to about 2500 hours with my silverstar screen. I fully expect to get past 3000 hours, maybe even close to 4000 before the bulb is really too dim to keep using. Meanwhile I'm using the extra time between bulb changes to watch ebay and other sources for people selling the necessary bulbs for really cheap.($200 and under).
So, in some ways, the expensive screen pays for itself by significantly increasing usuable bulb life. And, in the meantime, it produces one of the best looking images available and will continue to do so even when I upgrade to a new projector.
I know that was a joke, but allow me to riff on it a little...
The hilton sex tape showed up about three weeks before her TV show about being an idiot on the farm debuted.
The hilton sex tape was first "announced" to the public on the O'Reilly Factor, on Fox News. (Remember that the next time he talks about his "no spin zone." Also consider what this implies Fox management thinks of O'Reilly's audience.)
The hilton farm show ran on the Fox network.
The tape's release was clearly a deliberate publicity stunt. I doubt she was even embarrassed by it -- she's richer than the world, and enjoy's a good fuck and doesn't care who knows it. I suspect that most anyone who found themselves in her shoes would feel the same.
I can't agree, primarily because you are arguing in support of a lack of professionalism. If a person's job is to check IDs they ought to have the experience and knowledge to do their job well. If a company hires someone without the required level of experience, then it is that company's fault and not the government's.
Making the job of "the police" (I use that term loosely) easier is a common theme in totalitarian regimes. But, in the USA it was believed that "the police" serve the people and not the other way around.
Do you mean that you literally "can't identify" an out of state driver's license as a driver's license, nevermind getting to the point where you can tell if it is authentic?
Either way, they have books for that sort of thing and if people are using crappy forgeries of out of state ID cards, then the book is going to be a whole lot more helpful than dealing with super-high quality forgeries of any kind of ID - common or uncommon.
You are going to burn in Hell for that post!
Watch out for the men in black too.