Personally my problem is with the new codecs you speak of. I hate needing to open Quicktime to play a video because Quicktime sucks on Windows. Worse yet is anything that needs something like Nero ShowTime to play because the program's UI blows.
Start off with the latest and greatest ATI All-in-Wonder. That can cost at least $300, usually more towards $500. Sorry, Nvidia can't compete with ATI in the multimedia realm. Not yet, anyways. People are going to want to play games, and impress their friends. And you need that video input/output functionality. Sure, you could use seperate cards, but this solution is more elegant.
Why would you get an ATI card? ATI is not the leader in either TV Tuners or Video Cards.
For TV Tuners, you can get an equivalent Hauppauge PVR150MCE for $30, or go with the Fusion HDTV if you want digital. And as far as nVidia in the TV tuner market, they recently released the DualTV, with 2 tuners, which beats anything ATI has produced, and gives the Hauppauage PVR500 a run for its money.
For the video card, nVidia has all the hardware accelerated MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding, starting with 6xxx (fanless, silent, low profile 6200 is $30).
Seriously. Steve is smart NOT to show off every little detail of 10.5. Look at Microsoft, they promised so much in Longhorn/Vista, then take things out.
It's also better not to release details of your new features if you want to avoid the whole "photocopying" thing. Like how both Spotlight and Time Machine were/are (respectively) features known to be planned for Vista before they were released in OS X. Apple is much quicker to release, but MS surely aren't the only ones "photocopying".
The AC that started this thread a few posts up said that "Borrowing = Stealing", referring to allowing a friend to copy some songs off their Zen Micro....
That equates more to mix tapes than to online downloading.
You are an apologist for thievery. You just mock virtue when you try to make your greed look like something it isn't with specious arguments. It's as simple as this: you're a cheap bastard who wants something for nothing at the expense of others.
It's like the difference between burglary and robbery. Most people don't know the difference. But it's pretty important. In one scenario, the robber used a weapon, likely a gun. The charges for robbery are greater than for burglary because of the increased (chance of) harm done to the victim.
It's a point worth arguing even though I'm neither a burglar nor a robber. Maybe you should stop accusing people of stuff just because insist on using correct terminology.
I almost left out that line, because I had never even heard of the RIAA until after Napster and mp3s. Well, in that case, they didn't do a very good job caring about it.
My point was that, culturally, it wasn't an issue to share music with your friends when it was mixtapes. Can you imagine random people popping up all over the place accusing you of stealing every time you talked about how you're going to spend the evening making a mixtape or two for your friends?
Nobody's going to rewrite history for me. I know what the climate was like when everyone was making mixtapes at home. It was nothing like today.
I think that some people view their computer as more than a computer, a status symbol as it were. As many people will attest the new macbooks have a very stylish and well-refined look to them. Some people think it smacks of "elitist bastard", "artistic", or even "I'm different". However no matter how much Microsoft wants PC makers to make their boxes look pretty, I don't see it happening.
As someone that had about 10 Macs prior to OS X, the thing that bothers me most about them now is the Mac culture, and the fact that they are elitist status symbols. I probably won't ever buy one because of it, but then I probably won't ever buy an SUV either.
(Think about it, Cory - would the labels have let Apple run with this whole music store idea if they were the slightest bit afraid of the lawsuits that would results from a defunct iTMS?)
Yeah, like the time I sued Sony for no longer producing the players to play my Betamax collection.
Wait, I never did that. And neither did anyone else.
Apple's DRM has done more for the availability of music on the internets than anything except bittorrent.
I think you mean Napster. It changed music on the web more than any other technology. It popularized the mp3. It created a market for the first mp3 players. It made WinAMP popular, which had a huge effect on later players, and was the first time that people had a reason to use their computer for music. It caused the RIAA to take the position they have.
Music on the web didn't start with Apple, and it didn't start with BitTorrent. Both were fairly late to the game.
It's the same thing that people used to do with mixtapes. The RIAA never seemed to have a problem with that. It was an accepted and popular activity. I still remember some of the mixtapes I gave girlfriends and others. Back then, you would have been laughed at for accusing me of stealing music by making mixtapes for a friend.
It clearly--without a doubt--helped the music industry. Most of the bands that my friends and I liked were shared interests of ours because of those mixtapes. That meant more music purchases. It still does. But somehow, over time, the RIAA convinced you that it's wrong.
The first time I ran it I almost couldn't figure which window had the video. And needless to say it was the last time.
That's the problem right there. RealPlayer is not so much like the old RealOne Player or any of their other failures. They created a bad name for themselves by being overly intrusive. But they don't deserve that rep so much now.
They also were the first format to optimize for low bandwidth, which created a big problem as far as how their format in general appeared when most RealMedia videos were crappy quality.
That said, I'd prefer everyone used H.264 MPEG-4 for streaming video. It's good quality per bit at all bitrates, it works in several players, and it's easy to hint for streaming and drop into Darwin Streaming Server.
What kind of date format puts the number your most unlikely to need first (the year) and the one you will most likely want to know last.
It depends what you're using it for. If you're using a set of data mostly within the same year, especially consecutive days, you should probably put the day first (dd-mm-yyyy). If you're using data that spans many years, where the most important part is the year, and especially when you want easy sorting, put the year first (yyyy-mm-dd). The only format that doesn't make any sense and serves no useful purpose is the one Americans use.
The first 2 separate the numbers with letters, making it easier to read, and it's entirely unambiguous, at least to those who can read English.
The last is better for sorting lists, and makes the most sense when you're dealing with a set of information that spans several years, making the year the most prominent.
It reminds me of this thread on elderscrolls.com where a mod creator was trying to improve the sounds of the game. Someone suggested using Creative Commons material for the thunder sound, from one of several CC catalogs. The mod creator wasn't interested at all at first, saying something along the lines of "Well, in my experience most of the free stuff is crap."
So here you have a modder creating a free mod for a game, who thinks his sounds are superior to the ones that came with the $50 game, saying that most free stuff is crap.
I wonder where people get so ingrained in thinking that free stuff is crap. From Windows shareware/demos? From their email spam offers?
Okay, so you need OpenGL, and you probably have a video card, but you can't be bothered to install the drivers that came with your card or run Windows Update to get them?
To sum it up, both can be nouns or verbs with different meanings:
affect (noun): To have an influence on or effect a change in effect (noun): Something brought about by a cause or agent; a result.
affect (verb): Feeling or emotion, especially as manifested by facial expression or body language effect (verb): 1. To bring into existence. 2. To produce as a result. 3. To bring about. (Effecting change is the most common usage)
Proponents of said licenses would question just what it is the contributors want to protect. Did they turn over the code for public use or didn't they? You can't plagiarize something that was offered to you as a gift -- and that's sort of the point of open source, isn't it? That your work becomes part of the commons?
I've contributed to a couple of GPL projects because I'm selfish. I make my changes, create a patch, submit it to the project owner, and wait while using my patched version. Usually in a couple of weeks, an improved version gets committed with the project owners own changes and I can use that instead. It's better than both the original and my patched version. So I contributed and I got something back.
I wouldn't bother submitting the patch in the first place if I didn't expect to benefit from further improvements to the code.
Yeah, I didn't really think it through far enough to decide what could be done with the receipt if you knew your vote was miscounted or uncounted, but it would still be nice to be able to verify that your vote was correctly counted. Perhaps in districts where many complaints of miscounted ballots occured, a procedure could be setup to deal with it. In that case, at least thousands of people would know that their votes were not properly counted, which is better than the current situation.
I've become terribly dyslexic at handwriting, skipping letters and then having to go back and fill them in after finishing the next letter. I think I get ahead of myself because I'm a much faster typer. I'm always almost the last person to finish filling out forms in a group.
Can I get you to follow me around Slashdot, and post that every time someone corrects me for using a word in its common, modern meaning, rather than the way it was used a couple hundred years ago in some other country?
The most damning if its accurate:
18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.
Slashdot Mirror
Just install ffdshow to play H.264 in WMP.
It plays H.264 faster and with better profiles than Quicktime, which barely even supports Main Profile.
Why would you get an ATI card? ATI is not the leader in either TV Tuners or Video Cards.
For TV Tuners, you can get an equivalent Hauppauge PVR150MCE for $30, or go with the Fusion HDTV if you want digital. And as far as nVidia in the TV tuner market, they recently released the DualTV, with 2 tuners, which beats anything ATI has produced, and gives the Hauppauage PVR500 a run for its money.
For the video card, nVidia has all the hardware accelerated MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding, starting with 6xxx (fanless, silent, low profile 6200 is $30).
It's also better not to release details of your new features if you want to avoid the whole "photocopying" thing. Like how both Spotlight and Time Machine were/are (respectively) features known to be planned for Vista before they were released in OS X. Apple is much quicker to release, but MS surely aren't the only ones "photocopying".
Those Windex cloths in a tube package probably work almost as well.
The AC that started this thread a few posts up said that "Borrowing = Stealing", referring to allowing a friend to copy some songs off their Zen Micro....
That equates more to mix tapes than to online downloading.
It's like the difference between burglary and robbery. Most people don't know the difference. But it's pretty important. In one scenario, the robber used a weapon, likely a gun. The charges for robbery are greater than for burglary because of the increased (chance of) harm done to the victim.
It's a point worth arguing even though I'm neither a burglar nor a robber. Maybe you should stop accusing people of stuff just because insist on using correct terminology.
I almost left out that line, because I had never even heard of the RIAA until after Napster and mp3s. Well, in that case, they didn't do a very good job caring about it.
My point was that, culturally, it wasn't an issue to share music with your friends when it was mixtapes. Can you imagine random people popping up all over the place accusing you of stealing every time you talked about how you're going to spend the evening making a mixtape or two for your friends?
Nobody's going to rewrite history for me. I know what the climate was like when everyone was making mixtapes at home. It was nothing like today.
As someone that had about 10 Macs prior to OS X, the thing that bothers me most about them now is the Mac culture, and the fact that they are elitist status symbols. I probably won't ever buy one because of it, but then I probably won't ever buy an SUV either.
Yeah, like the time I sued Sony for no longer producing the players to play my Betamax collection.
Wait, I never did that. And neither did anyone else.
I think you mean Napster. It changed music on the web more than any other technology. It popularized the mp3. It created a market for the first mp3 players. It made WinAMP popular, which had a huge effect on later players, and was the first time that people had a reason to use their computer for music. It caused the RIAA to take the position they have.
Music on the web didn't start with Apple, and it didn't start with BitTorrent. Both were fairly late to the game.
It's the same thing that people used to do with mixtapes. The RIAA never seemed to have a problem with that. It was an accepted and popular activity. I still remember some of the mixtapes I gave girlfriends and others. Back then, you would have been laughed at for accusing me of stealing music by making mixtapes for a friend.
It clearly--without a doubt--helped the music industry. Most of the bands that my friends and I liked were shared interests of ours because of those mixtapes. That meant more music purchases. It still does. But somehow, over time, the RIAA convinced you that it's wrong.
That's the problem right there. RealPlayer is not so much like the old RealOne Player or any of their other failures. They created a bad name for themselves by being overly intrusive. But they don't deserve that rep so much now.
They also were the first format to optimize for low bandwidth, which created a big problem as far as how their format in general appeared when most RealMedia videos were crappy quality.
That said, I'd prefer everyone used H.264 MPEG-4 for streaming video. It's good quality per bit at all bitrates, it works in several players, and it's easy to hint for streaming and drop into Darwin Streaming Server.
It depends what you're using it for. If you're using a set of data mostly within the same year, especially consecutive days, you should probably put the day first (dd-mm-yyyy). If you're using data that spans many years, where the most important part is the year, and especially when you want easy sorting, put the year first (yyyy-mm-dd). The only format that doesn't make any sense and serves no useful purpose is the one Americans use.
I prefer:
2 Aug 2006
2006 Aug 2
2006-08-02
The first 2 separate the numbers with letters, making it easier to read, and it's entirely unambiguous, at least to those who can read English.
The last is better for sorting lists, and makes the most sense when you're dealing with a set of information that spans several years, making the year the most prominent.
Ahh, so I did. So much for trying to clarify things on the internet. Heh.
It reminds me of this thread on elderscrolls.com where a mod creator was trying to improve the sounds of the game. Someone suggested using Creative Commons material for the thunder sound, from one of several CC catalogs. The mod creator wasn't interested at all at first, saying something along the lines of "Well, in my experience most of the free stuff is crap."
So here you have a modder creating a free mod for a game, who thinks his sounds are superior to the ones that came with the $50 game, saying that most free stuff is crap.
I wonder where people get so ingrained in thinking that free stuff is crap. From Windows shareware/demos? From their email spam offers?
You mean it will ship with only DX10, while rendering fine on cards that only support DX9 features, right?
It doesn't invalidate any of your points, just saying.
Who builds machines without video cards?
Okay, so you need OpenGL, and you probably have a video card, but you can't be bothered to install the drivers that came with your card or run Windows Update to get them?
To sum it up, both can be nouns or verbs with different meanings:
affect (noun): To have an influence on or effect a change in
effect (noun): Something brought about by a cause or agent; a result.
affect (verb): Feeling or emotion, especially as manifested by facial expression or body language
effect (verb): 1. To bring into existence. 2. To produce as a result. 3. To bring about. (Effecting change is the most common usage)
I've contributed to a couple of GPL projects because I'm selfish. I make my changes, create a patch, submit it to the project owner, and wait while using my patched version. Usually in a couple of weeks, an improved version gets committed with the project owners own changes and I can use that instead. It's better than both the original and my patched version. So I contributed and I got something back.
I wouldn't bother submitting the patch in the first place if I didn't expect to benefit from further improvements to the code.
You should try RtCW: Enemy Territory. It has a Linux build and is free (as in beer). Only multiplayer, but it's a good quality game.
Yeah, I didn't really think it through far enough to decide what could be done with the receipt if you knew your vote was miscounted or uncounted, but it would still be nice to be able to verify that your vote was correctly counted. Perhaps in districts where many complaints of miscounted ballots occured, a procedure could be setup to deal with it. In that case, at least thousands of people would know that their votes were not properly counted, which is better than the current situation.
I've become terribly dyslexic at handwriting, skipping letters and then having to go back and fill them in after finishing the next letter. I think I get ahead of myself because I'm a much faster typer. I'm always almost the last person to finish filling out forms in a group.
Can I get you to follow me around Slashdot, and post that every time someone corrects me for using a word in its common, modern meaning, rather than the way it was used a couple hundred years ago in some other country?
Thanks. Much appreciated.
The most damning if its accurate: 18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.