Hey OpenOffiice.org -- good job!
What's weird is.. why is there so much bile and complaining about this complex piece of software that largely solves a whole class of important problems and is free. Point out deficiencies sure, but the comments here dwell a lot more on these oddball more-than-256-columns cases for a tool which works fine for a million common little cases.
Here's my theory -- the teenager wants to be bitchy to their parents to appear independent. But the parents provide the food and roof over the head.. so how to live there and still feel independent? Be even more bitchy!
Open office is just the same -- the linux kernel and many other initiatives to promote an open and competitive software environment would be far behind where they are without the unglamorous work of OO.o helping solve common document problems in an open way. OpenOffice.org has flaws, but it is extremely valuable.
Oops -- wishful typo, as the linked article above says, the penalty is about 60%, not 30%. That was as of theora1.1a, and now 1.1.1 is out, so I should re-test with that.
Wow, Slashdot has a bit of a focus problem when DRM comes up.. EPub -- you know, the standard discussed in the article -- has DRM!
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB
The amount that DRM sucks is dwarfed by the tremendous, earth-killing suck that is proprietary/closed formats. That's what the article says and that's why you should should avoid all things Kindle.
Hmm, I tried the above suggestion, but actually got worse results. Theoraenc produces much larger files (essentially not hitting the bitrate), so you have to keep that in mind. I suspect I have to do something additional to get theoraenc to use the most recent libtheora on my machine.
Anyway, it seems unlikely that theoraenc is going to get much better results than ffmpeg2theora if they are calling the same underlying library. On the other hand, I can certainly imagine some flag or other that would optimize the encoding better. My preference is to use ffmpeg2theora for the web examples, since it is the most commonly referenced tool on the web for normal people to do Theora encoding. If there is some way of getting higher quality encodings... well it seems like ffmpeg2theora is going to support it.
Hey Monty -- when Thusnelda has made its next step up -- Adaptive Quant and what have you -- I'd be happy to do a followup article + I'm interested to get tips to make sure I'm using the right flags.
My instinct is that high output quality and minimizing bandwidth are the most important things, and encoding CPU use is less so, but I should at least be clear that the low-cpu niche is one some care about.
The big difference between Java FX, Flash, and Silverlight is that Sun suggests that the stack will be open source, and Sun's track record of open-sourcing things is excellent.
That would be a really significant improvement for the open internet.. vs. the ridiculous situation now with the de-facto dominance of totally proprietary Flash. Java FX may have an uphill fight, but it's clearly the one to root for if you don't want the internet locked up by Adobe or Microsoft.
See here: http://java.sun.com/javafx/faqs.jsp#2
Does intolerance count?
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
I've enjoyed his work before, but I'm shocked by his intolerant and fearful views about gay marriage. His ideas are weirdly inline with the Taliban... let's have the government kick everyone's ass to enforce the view of one religion. As opposed to the best aspects of the American tradition centered tolerance and individual liberty. It's so so shockingly bad, I encourage everyone to re-consider buying or supporting anything he touches, but judge for yourself...
http://mormontimes.com/mormon_voices/orson_scott_card/?id=3237
How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.
I work at a university and a corp, and literally every projector is set up with vga input which is ancient but effective. I predict that for the next few years, you will be seated at some presentation, and then the presenter will realize they forgot the dongle and the presentation will be delayed as people run around looking for the adapter. At that moment, the thought will pass through your mind THANK YOU STEVE JOBS FOR SCREWING UP YET ANOTHER PRESENTATION! It'll be hilarious the first 5 or 10 times.
I don't understand why they just don't build a vga connector on there. That would be so much more valuable to me than being a little slimmer or sleeker or whatever. The little dongle, which you mostly don't need, but in rare cases you do... well of course that's just the sort of thing you're going to forget sometimes. What a user-hostile design.
I've taught intro CS at Stanford, and the key is to leverage programming projects as you go. Just talking about CS without doing it is ridiculous... fun programming projects that are scaled to challenge the students at the level of what they know can work really well, emphasizing the key aspects of CS while engaging the students.
This site has live little programming problems that work in the browser http://javabat.com/
Slashdot smarties challenge: heres's a tiny programming problem http://javabat.com/prob?id=Logic.makeBricks See if you can type in a solution which passes the tests the first time -- harder than it looks!
That's funny, this just came up yesterday, but take a look at http://javabat.com/ -- it's a free site with little practice coding problems that run live in the browser. You type in your code and it runs the unit tests right there, so it's a good low-barrier resource, for a class or lab without requiring any setup. The problems are small and focused on algorithms: strings, loops, recursion, logic
For basic coding practice, try the free http://javabat.com/ -- it has little coding problems (logic, strings, arrays, recursion) that run right in the browser, so you get immediate feedback. It's great for building skill in the basics, but it's no substitute for building larger programs. Disclaimer: I built it
This guy has it right. The people complaining are identifying weaknesses of the system, yet it is a huge improvement and along the path that will ultimately solve this.
So you want a secure internet, but you don't want to asked anything? Someday we'll have a more secure internet than now (hard to imagine one less secure actually) and part of that secure internet will certainly involve you or some gadget you have providing better authentication than the near zero authentication that the web uses now.
You have this backwards. As Bruce Schneier has argued, the banks have the central information and control to run anti-fraud effectively. The merchants on the other hand, do not. Therefore, schemes like this, flawed as it is, are the absolutely correct path.
I would sign up for this program because I would be encouraging a scheme which, with evolution, could become a real security system.. unlike the "know the cc number and that's all you need" system which is truly a joke. The new scheme should be compared to the craptacular security of the existing system.
The design is not great, but honestly, can you think of anything with worse security than the default scheme? There's this one number, and if you know it, that's all you need?
The scheme has problems, and yet it's a huge improvement so I think all this complaining is misplaced.
You said it! VbV may be imperfect but compared to the zillions of stories about identify theft etc. at least it's a technical attempt to improve the situation. Bruce Schneier has said that the key step to improving credit card payment is looping the transaction security through the banks (Visa) not the merchant, and that's what this looks like.
I for one would pay more for a card that came with a secureID card or used my cell phone or something else for savvy consumer to confirm transactions. Even though I'm not liable for fraud ultimately, the idea of the fraud just annoys the crap out of me and I'm game to pay to make it harder for the fraudster.
The price of a T1 is irrelevant; it's basic economics.
If a market is competitive, then the price will decline towards the underlying expense of actually providing the service. This is the paradigm assumed by the 99% of the posts here.
If a market is not competitive, the vendor changes according to how *useful* the service is, regardless of the underlying expense, and pockets the difference.
Texting just shows that the cell phone service market is not very competitive.
Java has its problems, but it's actually a great stable platform. I think people carp about Java's flaws because it is so popular, taking shots at the leader. In reality, Java is a huge and boring but effective ecosystem if you want to deliver a piece of software and have it just work.
It's not sexy, but jeez on linux, windows, and Mac, I've built java code and moved the.jars all all over the place, and darned if it doesn't do what it's supposed to, like an old truck that just works carts around all sorts of work.
With Java being open, we all benefit from its increased spread as an open and reliable platform -- like C. Depending on Java looked a more iffy when it was so tied to Sun. Your source code is such an expensive investment, you don't want to take weird risks (cough.net cough). With Java open... well now it looks like a very safe, neutral choice.
You can write C code, and since it's open, you know your code would work all over. Java has a future that way too now.
C is still great for its niche, but (flame on) Java delivers 10x more capability in its libraries. C is a creature of the 1970's, so you don't get so much (I *love* C, but get a lot more done in Java). Also, the optimizations in HotSpot are awesome, making languages which run on the JVM look like the future. I hear if you want to see Java with the cruft stripped away, check out Scala.
My Verizon phone appears to have this "feature" too -- from the factory it will charge from USB, but the modified it to do some sort of check. Anyway, it won't charge from any normal USB source, and that's definitely a feature I'm looking for on all future phones, cameras, games... I think USB will be a sort of ubiquitous charging source. I'd be interested if someone could confirm that's what Verizon did vs. just some freak glitch with my phone.
Given the frequency of billing screwups I've had with Verizon... well I'm guessing it's on purpose. Those guys are the worst (come on Android!).
The only way large groups of people can function is with some transparency about who is doing what.
I ask those opposed to this sort of tracking: would you also prefer to eliminate license plates on cars? Those also create transparency about what car is where (or equivalently "reduce privacy" about what car is where). Nobody minds this great privacy reduction, since... well it doesn't hurt most people, aside from making you pay for your own parking tickets.
Obviously you don't want to make everything transparent, but transparency has great benefits for making a social/trust system work, while privacy advocates only talk about the costs.
This probably should have been in the summary -- merge tracking is being added in 1.5, so bouncing changes from one branch to another is now easy. This is a huge feature, and something as I recall Linus specifically complained about in his talk.
Anyway, I'm sure the world will continue to have need for both distributed and client/server source control systems, and Subversion is a nice example of the latter.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey OpenOffiice.org -- good job! What's weird is .. why is there so much bile and complaining about this complex piece of software that largely solves a whole class of important problems and is free. Point out deficiencies sure, but the comments here dwell a lot more on these oddball more-than-256-columns cases for a tool which works fine for a million common little cases.
Here's my theory -- the teenager wants to be bitchy to their parents to appear independent. But the parents provide the food and roof over the head .. so how to live there and still feel independent? Be even more bitchy!
Open office is just the same -- the linux kernel and many other initiatives to promote an open and competitive software environment would be far behind where they are without the unglamorous work of OO.o helping solve common document problems in an open way. OpenOffice.org has flaws, but it is extremely valuable.
Oops -- wishful typo, as the linked article above says, the penalty is about 60%, not 30%. That was as of theora1.1a, and now 1.1.1 is out, so I should re-test with that.
I did my best attempt at an unbiased comparison which shows Theora to have about a 30% disadvantage, although it uses a slightly older version of Theora: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~nick/theora-soccer/
Check out http://javabat.com/ for coding practice (the *teaching* of the material is still a problem, but JavaBat is great for practicing)
Check out the free online coding practice code at http://javabat.com/ such as this cute problem: http://www.javabat.com/prob/p183562 (shameless self promotion)
Wow, Slashdot has a bit of a focus problem when DRM comes up .. EPub -- you know, the standard discussed in the article -- has DRM!
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB
The amount that DRM sucks is dwarfed by the tremendous, earth-killing suck that is proprietary/closed formats. That's what the article says and that's why you should should avoid all things Kindle.
Hmm, I tried the above suggestion, but actually got worse results. Theoraenc produces much larger files (essentially not hitting the bitrate), so you have to keep that in mind. I suspect I have to do something additional to get theoraenc to use the most recent libtheora on my machine. Anyway, it seems unlikely that theoraenc is going to get much better results than ffmpeg2theora if they are calling the same underlying library. On the other hand, I can certainly imagine some flag or other that would optimize the encoding better. My preference is to use ffmpeg2theora for the web examples, since it is the most commonly referenced tool on the web for normal people to do Theora encoding. If there is some way of getting higher quality encodings ... well it seems like ffmpeg2theora is going to support it.
Hey Monty -- when Thusnelda has made its next step up -- Adaptive Quant and what have you -- I'd be happy to do a followup article + I'm interested to get tips to make sure I'm using the right flags. My instinct is that high output quality and minimizing bandwidth are the most important things, and encoding CPU use is less so, but I should at least be clear that the low-cpu niche is one some care about.
The big difference between Java FX, Flash, and Silverlight is that Sun suggests that the stack will be open source, and Sun's track record of open-sourcing things is excellent. That would be a really significant improvement for the open internet .. vs. the ridiculous situation now with the de-facto dominance of totally proprietary Flash. Java FX may have an uphill fight, but it's clearly the one to root for if you don't want the internet locked up by Adobe or Microsoft.
See here: http://java.sun.com/javafx/faqs.jsp#2
I work at a university and a corp, and literally every projector is set up with vga input which is ancient but effective. I predict that for the next few years, you will be seated at some presentation, and then the presenter will realize they forgot the dongle and the presentation will be delayed as people run around looking for the adapter. At that moment, the thought will pass through your mind THANK YOU STEVE JOBS FOR SCREWING UP YET ANOTHER PRESENTATION! It'll be hilarious the first 5 or 10 times.
I don't understand why they just don't build a vga connector on there. That would be so much more valuable to me than being a little slimmer or sleeker or whatever. The little dongle, which you mostly don't need, but in rare cases you do ... well of course that's just the sort of thing you're going to forget sometimes. What a user-hostile design.
The point is ... the vendor that uses tech to eliminate fraud will have more money, so they can pay *better* interest or rewards or whatever.
Public key crypto is, what, 15 years old now? I a little baffled that credit cards and atm cards remain so primitive.
I've taught intro CS at Stanford, and the key is to leverage programming projects as you go. Just talking about CS without doing it is ridiculous ... fun programming projects that are scaled to challenge the students at the level of what they know can work really well, emphasizing the key aspects of CS while engaging the students.
This site gathers great assignments for use by instructors or whatever:
http://nifty.stanford.edu/
This site has live little programming problems that work in the browser
http://javabat.com/
Slashdot smarties challenge: heres's a tiny programming problem
http://javabat.com/prob?id=Logic.makeBricks
See if you can type in a solution which passes the tests the first time -- harder than it looks!
That's funny, this just came up yesterday, but take a look at http://javabat.com/ -- it's a free site with little practice coding problems that run live in the browser. You type in your code and it runs the unit tests right there, so it's a good low-barrier resource, for a class or lab without requiring any setup. The problems are small and focused on algorithms: strings, loops, recursion, logic
Disclaimer: I built it
For basic coding practice, try the free http://javabat.com/ -- it has little coding problems (logic, strings, arrays, recursion) that run right in the browser, so you get immediate feedback. It's great for building skill in the basics, but it's no substitute for building larger programs. Disclaimer: I built it
This guy has it right. The people complaining are identifying weaknesses of the system, yet it is a huge improvement and along the path that will ultimately solve this.
So you want a secure internet, but you don't want to asked anything? Someday we'll have a more secure internet than now (hard to imagine one less secure actually) and part of that secure internet will certainly involve you or some gadget you have providing better authentication than the near zero authentication that the web uses now.
You have this backwards. As Bruce Schneier has argued, the banks have the central information and control to run anti-fraud effectively. The merchants on the other hand, do not. Therefore, schemes like this, flawed as it is, are the absolutely correct path.
I would sign up for this program because I would be encouraging a scheme which, with evolution, could become a real security system .. unlike the "know the cc number and that's all you need" system which is truly a joke. The new scheme should be compared to the craptacular security of the existing system.
The design is not great, but honestly, can you think of anything with worse security than the default scheme? There's this one number, and if you know it, that's all you need?
The scheme has problems, and yet it's a huge improvement so I think all this complaining is misplaced.
You said it! VbV may be imperfect but compared to the zillions of stories about identify theft etc. at least it's a technical attempt to improve the situation. Bruce Schneier has said that the key step to improving credit card payment is looping the transaction security through the banks (Visa) not the merchant, and that's what this looks like.
I for one would pay more for a card that came with a secureID card or used my cell phone or something else for savvy consumer to confirm transactions. Even though I'm not liable for fraud ultimately, the idea of the fraud just annoys the crap out of me and I'm game to pay to make it harder for the fraudster.
The price of a T1 is irrelevant; it's basic economics.
If a market is competitive, then the price will decline towards the underlying expense of actually providing the service. This is the paradigm assumed by the 99% of the posts here.
If a market is not competitive, the vendor changes according to how *useful* the service is, regardless of the underlying expense, and pockets the difference.
Texting just shows that the cell phone service market is not very competitive.
Java has its problems, but it's actually a great stable platform. I think people carp about Java's flaws because it is so popular, taking shots at the leader. In reality, Java is a huge and boring but effective ecosystem if you want to deliver a piece of software and have it just work.
It's not sexy, but jeez on linux, windows, and Mac, I've built java code and moved the .jars all all over the place, and darned if it doesn't do what it's supposed to, like an old truck that just works carts around all sorts of work.
With Java being open, we all benefit from its increased spread as an open and reliable platform -- like C. Depending on Java looked a more iffy when it was so tied to Sun. Your source code is such an expensive investment, you don't want to take weird risks (cough .net cough). With Java open ... well now it looks like a very safe, neutral choice.
You can write C code, and since it's open, you know your code would work all over. Java has a future that way too now.
C is still great for its niche, but (flame on) Java delivers 10x more capability in its libraries. C is a creature of the 1970's, so you don't get so much (I *love* C, but get a lot more done in Java). Also, the optimizations in HotSpot are awesome, making languages which run on the JVM look like the future. I hear if you want to see Java with the cruft stripped away, check out Scala.
My Verizon phone appears to have this "feature" too -- from the factory it will charge from USB, but the modified it to do some sort of check. Anyway, it won't charge from any normal USB source, and that's definitely a feature I'm looking for on all future phones, cameras, games ... I think USB will be a sort of ubiquitous charging source. I'd be interested if someone could confirm that's what Verizon did vs. just some freak glitch with my phone.
... well I'm guessing it's on purpose. Those guys are the worst (come on Android!).
Given the frequency of billing screwups I've had with Verizon
The only way large groups of people can function is with some transparency about who is doing what.
... well it doesn't hurt most people, aside from making you pay for your own parking tickets.
I ask those opposed to this sort of tracking: would you also prefer to eliminate license plates on cars? Those also create transparency about what car is where (or equivalently "reduce privacy" about what car is where). Nobody minds this great privacy reduction, since
Obviously you don't want to make everything transparent, but transparency has great benefits for making a social/trust system work, while privacy advocates only talk about the costs.
This probably should have been in the summary -- merge tracking is being added in 1.5, so bouncing changes from one branch to another is now easy. This is a huge feature, and something as I recall Linus specifically complained about in his talk.
http://blogs.open.collab.net/svn/2007/09/what-subversion.html
BTW, they did a really nice job of mapping out the use cases and whatnot before implementing the feature. I guess source control people are natural planners.
http://subversion.tigris.org/merge-tracking/requirements.html
Anyway, I'm sure the world will continue to have need for both distributed and client/server source control systems, and Subversion is a nice example of the latter.