As someone who usually listens to music as entire albums, the playlist has a great feature. The playlist can be displayed as a tree. This is disabled by default, but can be enabled in the preferences. It is nice to drag folders onto the playlist and see the songs for each album grouped together.
Unfortunately, I can't see any way to reorder this list. When I try dragging items around, I end up putting one album folder inside another, rather than reordering them.
Also, it would be really nice if there was a way to have the playlist and the controls in a single window. I don't need two VLC items on my task bar. If I bring up the playlist, I usually want to view the controls as well, so I'd really prefer it all in one window.
If that's the case, why did they release a new disc format? Why not just release movies on the existing DVD format with a different compression algorithm?
I'm sure that you can get good results with compression, but I can't believe that you don't lose something when you squeeze 20-50GB of already compressed data down to 5-9GB.
The cell phone industry has such a huge barrier to entry that it's cost prohibitive for any new company to "come along" and shake things up. The existing companies have no desire to make this change because they're making huge profits under the status quo.
Even if a company did come along and adopt this model, it wouldn't be a big benefit to consumers unless other companies also adopted it. What good is having hardware that is theoretically able to use multiple providers if only one provider actually supports it?
This is a case where market forces aren't going to direct us to the way things should be, and so we need legislation to make it happen.
Aside from the privacy issues, this strikes me as a foolish waste of resources. How many millions of dollars will be spent to install GPS units and to track and bill every driver? The money could be raised just as easily from a flat fuel tax, a system which is already in place with little overhead.
If more fuel efficient cars pay less tax, that simply encourages efficient cars, which is great. If electric cars get out of paying road tax, consider that a subsidy to encourage adoption of electric cars. If electric cars eventually become commonplace, then use electricity taxes for the roads.
There are several reasons that there is a limited interest in ripping Blu-Ray discs so far. The biggest is that not so many computers have BD drives, but the great majority have DVD drives. This should change over time, as BD-R drives become cost effective and more useful than DVD-R drives.
The other factor is hard drive size. With a 1TB drive, a person can backup a library of well over 100 DVDs without recompressing, or well over 1000 recompressed movies. That same drive can only hold 20 or 25 full BD movies. It can hold many more with recompressing, but with too much compression you start losing the benefits of the BD picture.
A few years down the line, if BD-R drives and 50+ TB drives become common, there will be plenty of interest in ripping these movies.
This is exactly the opposite of what would be good for consumers. Mobile providers should get out of the hardware business entirely. They should be selling a service, and providing something like a SIM card which consumers could put into whatever phone or netbook they like.
The benefits for consumers are clear. They could use any hardware they like with any provider. They could reuse their hardware devices for new contracts. There would be a good market to buy/sell used cell phones. And best of all, mobile providers would be forced to compete on service and price rather than competing on who has the shiniest phone.
This will only happen with legislation, but unfortunately our legislators are more likely to be working for the phone companies rather than working for the people.
Another problem is that you can do print preview, and you can choose to print a selection... but you can't preview what will print if you print only the selection. This would be very useful when you want to make sure the selection will print as you expect, or if you want to scale the print to fit on a certain number of pages.
Even better, what if they made the print preview interactive? The user could cut out blocks they don't want to print, or select certain sections to print. Currently, I accomplish this by using Firebug to delete unwanted structures from the page before I print.
Netflix has over 100,000 discs. That's a nice round number for having a home library which has nearly everything you might want to watch, including movies, TV shows, documentaries, etc.
Assuming everything is available on Blu-Ray and no compression is added, this will require 5,000 TB, or 5 PB. Three orders of magnitude is just right.
If a disc has 3 hours of material, this would give you enough material to play non-stop for 35 years. However, the point is not to watch it all. The point is to have whatever you feel like seeing available immediately at very high quality and without dependence on a network.
If these batteries really can store 10 times the energy of current batteries, they could be revolutionary. They could make the electric car more practical than using gasoline.
However, the big catch is that we can't really produce enough Lithium to make all those batteries. There is a plentiful supply in the water: "Seawater contains an estimated 230 billion tons of lithium, though at a low concentration of 0.1 to 0.2 ppm." But there's probably no practical way to extract it.
Our copyright laws are focused on making money for companies. They should be focused on making works as available as possible while still encouraging the creation of new works.
It's one of the clearest examples of how our government has been sold and does not exist primarily for the people.
They should have chosen one of those popular movies in which the small group of rebels are the bad guys and the entrenched, oppressive rulers are the good guys.
Will they be blocking violent movies too? What about violent books and song lyrics?
I don't doubt this will have an effect. Instead of 15-20 year olds playing violent games occasionally, they will now find them incredibly cool, and go to great lengths to play them. They won't have much trouble unless Australia figures out how to block torrents and eBay too. Even that wouldn't stop anyone.
Geez, relax. I just meant that when I searched a year ago I couldn't find anything that fit my needs. Next time I'll remember to do several hours of painstaking research before posting, and I'll keep in mind that nobody who reads/. cares about Linux.
That is a great deal - too bad they don't support Linux!
I'm curious, though: what happens if you lose all your data? Does Mozy just run a 600GB transfer over your ISP connection? You'd be waiting quite some time to get it all back. If you have Comcast, you'd have to spread it out over 3 months to avoid getting cut off.
The average US broadband connection gives you a 2Mbps download. Maxing it out would allow you to download your data in 28 days.
For large amounts of files (100s of GBs), the cheapest way to back them up is to use a couple sets of external hard drives, always keeping at least one set off-site.
I would like to know why this is the case. Why is there no service out there that can provide backups for large amounts of data at a price that is competitive with using external hard drives? Such a service should be able to take advantage of scale by storing the bulk of the data onto industrial tape drives, and only retrieving it as needed.
It would require a lot on bandwidth to do the initial backup, but once that is complete, only incremental backups are needed. A database could store the file names, dates, sizes, and hashes, in order to determine what needs to be updated.
This would not be for data that needs to be accessed repeatedly - it is for backups. So they might charge a modest fee to recover a few files which you accidentally deleted. If you lose an entire drive, you could select a new drive model, and they'd ship it to you with your data on the drive, for the cost of the drive plus a service fee.
Is this not feasible, or has it just not been done?
Slashdot Mirror
As someone who usually listens to music as entire albums, the playlist has a great feature. The playlist can be displayed as a tree. This is disabled by default, but can be enabled in the preferences. It is nice to drag folders onto the playlist and see the songs for each album grouped together.
Unfortunately, I can't see any way to reorder this list. When I try dragging items around, I end up putting one album folder inside another, rather than reordering them.
Also, it would be really nice if there was a way to have the playlist and the controls in a single window. I don't need two VLC items on my task bar. If I bring up the playlist, I usually want to view the controls as well, so I'd really prefer it all in one window.
Gorillas.
If that's the case, why did they release a new disc format? Why not just release movies on the existing DVD format with a different compression algorithm?
I'm sure that you can get good results with compression, but I can't believe that you don't lose something when you squeeze 20-50GB of already compressed data down to 5-9GB.
The cell phone industry has such a huge barrier to entry that it's cost prohibitive for any new company to "come along" and shake things up. The existing companies have no desire to make this change because they're making huge profits under the status quo.
Even if a company did come along and adopt this model, it wouldn't be a big benefit to consumers unless other companies also adopted it. What good is having hardware that is theoretically able to use multiple providers if only one provider actually supports it?
This is a case where market forces aren't going to direct us to the way things should be, and so we need legislation to make it happen.
You need to stop me right there, so you can say the same thing I was saying?
Aside from the privacy issues, this strikes me as a foolish waste of resources. How many millions of dollars will be spent to install GPS units and to track and bill every driver? The money could be raised just as easily from a flat fuel tax, a system which is already in place with little overhead.
If more fuel efficient cars pay less tax, that simply encourages efficient cars, which is great. If electric cars get out of paying road tax, consider that a subsidy to encourage adoption of electric cars. If electric cars eventually become commonplace, then use electricity taxes for the roads.
There are several reasons that there is a limited interest in ripping Blu-Ray discs so far. The biggest is that not so many computers have BD drives, but the great majority have DVD drives. This should change over time, as BD-R drives become cost effective and more useful than DVD-R drives.
The other factor is hard drive size. With a 1TB drive, a person can backup a library of well over 100 DVDs without recompressing, or well over 1000 recompressed movies. That same drive can only hold 20 or 25 full BD movies. It can hold many more with recompressing, but with too much compression you start losing the benefits of the BD picture.
A few years down the line, if BD-R drives and 50+ TB drives become common, there will be plenty of interest in ripping these movies.
This is exactly the opposite of what would be good for consumers. Mobile providers should get out of the hardware business entirely. They should be selling a service, and providing something like a SIM card which consumers could put into whatever phone or netbook they like.
The benefits for consumers are clear. They could use any hardware they like with any provider. They could reuse their hardware devices for new contracts. There would be a good market to buy/sell used cell phones. And best of all, mobile providers would be forced to compete on service and price rather than competing on who has the shiniest phone.
This will only happen with legislation, but unfortunately our legislators are more likely to be working for the phone companies rather than working for the people.
Only something non-human can be anthropomorphized, therefore the desire to be be anthropomorphized is a desire to be non-human. Weird.
I have seen that problem as well. Very annoying.
Another problem is that you can do print preview, and you can choose to print a selection... but you can't preview what will print if you print only the selection. This would be very useful when you want to make sure the selection will print as you expect, or if you want to scale the print to fit on a certain number of pages.
Even better, what if they made the print preview interactive? The user could cut out blocks they don't want to print, or select certain sections to print. Currently, I accomplish this by using Firebug to delete unwanted structures from the page before I print.
Soylent Clock runs on people!
Netflix has over 100,000 discs. That's a nice round number for having a home library which has nearly everything you might want to watch, including movies, TV shows, documentaries, etc.
Assuming everything is available on Blu-Ray and no compression is added, this will require 5,000 TB, or 5 PB. Three orders of magnitude is just right.
If a disc has 3 hours of material, this would give you enough material to play non-stop for 35 years. However, the point is not to watch it all. The point is to have whatever you feel like seeing available immediately at very high quality and without dependence on a network.
If these batteries really can store 10 times the energy of current batteries, they could be revolutionary. They could make the electric car more practical than using gasoline.
However, the big catch is that we can't really produce enough Lithium to make all those batteries. There is a plentiful supply in the water: "Seawater contains an estimated 230 billion tons of lithium, though at a low concentration of 0.1 to 0.2 ppm." But there's probably no practical way to extract it.
In other words, data ain't what they used to be.
Well, of course. They sell everything.
Our copyright laws are focused on making money for companies. They should be focused on making works as available as possible while still encouraging the creation of new works.
It's one of the clearest examples of how our government has been sold and does not exist primarily for the people.
Cool, that worked also. Do you have anything harder?
They should have chosen one of those popular movies in which the small group of rebels are the bad guys and the entrenched, oppressive rulers are the good guys.
Will they be blocking violent movies too? What about violent books and song lyrics?
I don't doubt this will have an effect. Instead of 15-20 year olds playing violent games occasionally, they will now find them incredibly cool, and go to great lengths to play them. They won't have much trouble unless Australia figures out how to block torrents and eBay too. Even that wouldn't stop anyone.
But that's 100 types of people! yuk yuk yuk
They're revamping their whole product line with names like this.
New laser mouse: Jitter
New graphics card: Splatter
New sound card: Sputter
New CPU: Plodder
New speech synthesis software: Mutter
Geez, relax. I just meant that when I searched a year ago I couldn't find anything that fit my needs. Next time I'll remember to do several hours of painstaking research before posting, and I'll keep in mind that nobody who reads /. cares about Linux.
I searched last year and didn't find anything. I remember now why Mozy didn't fit the bill... I run Linux.
I looked around and saw that there are rumors of a Mozy client for Linux. I hope they prove to be true.
That is a great deal - too bad they don't support Linux!
I'm curious, though: what happens if you lose all your data? Does Mozy just run a 600GB transfer over your ISP connection? You'd be waiting quite some time to get it all back. If you have Comcast, you'd have to spread it out over 3 months to avoid getting cut off.
The average US broadband connection gives you a 2Mbps download. Maxing it out would allow you to download your data in 28 days.
For large amounts of files (100s of GBs), the cheapest way to back them up is to use a couple sets of external hard drives, always keeping at least one set off-site.
I would like to know why this is the case. Why is there no service out there that can provide backups for large amounts of data at a price that is competitive with using external hard drives? Such a service should be able to take advantage of scale by storing the bulk of the data onto industrial tape drives, and only retrieving it as needed.
It would require a lot on bandwidth to do the initial backup, but once that is complete, only incremental backups are needed. A database could store the file names, dates, sizes, and hashes, in order to determine what needs to be updated.
This would not be for data that needs to be accessed repeatedly - it is for backups. So they might charge a modest fee to recover a few files which you accidentally deleted. If you lose an entire drive, you could select a new drive model, and they'd ship it to you with your data on the drive, for the cost of the drive plus a service fee.
Is this not feasible, or has it just not been done?