Unfortunately, you didn't sign a name, so you won't see this reply.
I live in Western Oregon, dumbass. We have a ten-month rainy season, seasonal winds, slush, and rain. We have rain, slurries, downpours, showers, drizzle, and the occasional freezing rain.
The trick is to not speed on Interstate 5 just because it's the cool thing to do. You limit yourself to 65 MPH, and you get where you're going without losing control and going flying.
Besides, if my car is so goddamn unsafe, why the fuck are all the accidents I see on the sides of I-5 SUVs that have smacked each other silly?
Seriously, though, my car comfortably seats five and luggage. The trick is to not take the entire contents of your closet with you. Also I will wager that I paid less for my car than you, which means that in my eyes, you're getting stiffed not just on gas, but also on the price of your car.
No kidding. I'm from Western Oregon; we have a ten-month rainy season. I've got chains if I need 'em, but mostly I just keep my tires full and use antifreeze as needed.
I own a Ford Escort from the turn of the century. It may not be very pretty, or very fast, but gets roughly 40 MPG. I can't understand how people are content with their goddamn SUVs getting 25 or less miles to the gallon. Oh well.
You presume that the existence of x264 means that there's no patents on it!? H.264 is part of Sorenson's patent folder, and they are fairly voracious on smacking anybody who distributes it. That's one of the reasons ffmpeg is illegal to possess in the USA. Also, Youtube has to stream H.264 with MP3 audio because that's the way FLV works. The container doesn't support anything else.
Oh, and Theora does have one massive advantages over H.264: It requires significantly less CPU time to decode.
Sure. Do Slashdot-style page moderation. Deletion requires a quorum of moderators to agree (say, twenty), and there are only a hundred or so moderators on any given day. User administration is handled by a different group of people, administrators, and any block requires at least two administrators to sign off on it. Mods are randomly chosen from a pool of editors with a history of good faith, noted by other editors, and administrators are nominated and then elected by a majority of editors in the moderator pool. (Note that election would not be by quorum, you need a majority of ALL editors with voting power.) Blocks may not be made on IP addresses. Blocks placed on IPs in dynamic ranges must not last longer than a week.
Unfortunately, you are an admin, and on my list, you have lost the assumption of good faith in administrative actions. Perhaps, after watching you at work for a while, I might be willing to trust your actions, but right now I have to assume that any action you make is in bad faith. You can thank your fellow administrators for that.
There's only one admin I know well enough to trust, and that's Mopper. You seem like that kind of guy, too. Why don't you guys do more to try and clean out the cabal? There are many, many, many people like me, who stopped editing because there were horrible things being done by admins, and would gladly come back if we knew there was no risk of being banned for doing things like assuming good faith and being nice to people that certain other people don't like.
Really? so comcast in your area went against the SEC rulings and adsorbed them instead of replacing it with their own infrastructure on an emergency budget like they did across the country? (Yes, I worked for comcast at that time so I know what happened with complete detail.)
2 years later the @home SGI servers and other gear were still sitting in most comcast headends waiting for the holding company and liquidator to come and retrieve them. WE could not throw it away or get rid of it because of legal matters. (I really wanted to dispose in my own way the rackmount SGI servers that @home used for proxy servers.)
What area do you live in? They need to be reported for not following the legal and company policies when that happened.
Sounds like what happened in Eugene, Oregon, where I lived when they @home was dissolved and subsequently absorbed by Comcast. Our IP didn't even change; one day I just noticed that our gateway reversed to or1.comcast.net (now or.bverton.comcast.net). No cables were moved or relaid, no interruption of Internet or cable TV. The building a mile down the highway, where TCI cable set up shop in the nineties? Now owned by Comcast. Go figure. The only change that my parents cared about was in 2002, when they were notified that their @home.net account would be forwarded to @comcast.net for a few months while they notified their contacts.
Talk about copyrights when your copyrights are violated and copyright law is the only protection that your work has. As you wish.
I will attempt to milk my GPL code for as long as I can, just to keep it out of the greedy paws of closed-source evil people. But if my code loses copyright, so does theirs, so I'm okay with that.
My music shouldn't be copyrighted. The only part of my music that I feel has value is being present at a performance, and for that I can always charge a fee. (Of course, I often go out in public and give free impromptu concerts, but then again, who doesn't?)
If I need money, I shall follow the time-honored musician's tradition of working in food services.
Also, I have a lot of respect for Ernie Ball products; their guitar strings are my favorite. I'm relating this story to my local LUG. They deserve some respect for publicly denouncing MS.
I'm a musician. My ears can appreciate the difference between LAME and other MP3 encoders, and between LAME and Vorbis. That's about it. I'm too deaf for anything else. Also I'm a college student. When I can afford to eat something besides ramen, I'll reconsider.
5th generation iPods can be flashed with Rockbox or iPodLinux, both of which have FLAC support. Also USB sound cards are $40 and usually don't sound better than the cards bundled with most laptops, while also being slower than onboard chips. Finally, $200 will get you 750GB, which is adequate for music, assuming, of course, that you are storing lossless. Please "do a bit of research before spouting off."
Hey look, my server's melting -- must of hit slashdot...
Must have! Must HAVE!
How can you write a paper revolutionizing our understanding of physics if you don't use proper grammar?! I imagine he spent his time studying maths and physics instead of English. That is, after all, the point of specialization and university; he becomes incredibly competent in one field at the expense of another. This, of course, also explains why I have excellent karma but no life.
You can have anything you wish, on "linksys" wireless. You can have anything you wish, on "linksys" wireless. Associate, it's on channel six; Fire up your browser and grab some bits. An' you can have anything you wish, on "linksys" wireless, On "linksys" wireless!
A corollary to Duverger's Law, which predicts that plurality voting will always lead to two-party systems, the spoiler effect is the tendency of a third-party candidate (like Ms. "Cleanup" or Mr. "Merge") to "steal votes" from another, similarly aligned candidate, like Mr. "Keep."
My comment was that advanced members of the community with a broader mindset than "Keep/delete," such as myself back when I was on Wikipedia, tended to aim towards merging or cleanup whenever possible for notable articles, but there is almost never any such splintering within the "delete" crowd, and they tend to be quite vocal in eliminating claims of notability. For example, in this case, I remember a few months back how the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards, possibly the highest honor a webcomic artist can receive, was not only refused as a measure of notability, but also had its article deleted. This is a more serious example, but there are others.
I need sleep now, but I'll just leave with my story. I left the project because of what I perceived as administrative abuse of a fellow user who was always acting in good faith until she was blocked, after which her actions were made in the same bad faith as those of the administrators with whom she sparred. It's really too bad; I wanted to do a series of articles on Internet memes, but I left and ED stepped in instead. (Believe me, ED is no improvement.) You can find the story at my userpage. People like me will never rejoin the project as long as it refuses a simple truth: It's not possible for Wikipedia to be open and controlled at the same time. The same thing happened to cdrecord, XFree86, and Mozilla with Debian; they thought they could control something that belongs to the community, and each time, Debian just shrugged and forked. The only things standing between Wikipedia and that fate are deep pockets and name recognition.
The problem is that deletionism is viewed as an acceptable way of doing things, which is intrinsically flawed due to capricious and arbitrary notability standards. While administrators are sometimes rather wild, they are not the big problem. The big problem is the systemic denial that Wikipedia could eventually be the sum of all recordable knowledge, and the push to try and remove valuable information "in favor of" more notable entries. Wikipedia is not paper; it's possible to both expand a notable entry and keep a non-notable entry.
And yes, there are problems with administrators. They are neither sysadmins, nor moderators, but mop-wielders; the problem is that many of them forget that their place on Wikipedia is that of the janitor. It's not a position of nobility and honor, but a behind-the-scenes set of tasks that should never be brazenly abused.
Finally, the community does not have a system in place for culling definitive consensus. The system currently in place is essentially plurality voting: A small slice of the population shows up, registers to vote, and then votes for one of the two candidates (Mr. "Keep" or Mr. "Delete.") Occasionally, there are write-ins, but those are usually viewed as part of the spoiler effect. The administrator presiding over the vote may choose to, at his discretion, nullify or amend the results of the vote. It's democratic, but not quite consensual.
There are three ATI drivers. There is fglrx, which is this driver that was just released. There is radeon, which is the open-source driver that controls Rages, R200s, R300s, and R400s. And there is radeonhd, which controls R500s and R600s.
fglrx has many issues. It now has AIGLX, but it still has broken XComposite. Xvideo doesn't work for many people. Direct 3D rendering is slower than on Windows. The entire driver is closed-source and shims a binary blob into the kernel. But, it still offers 3D for R400, R500, and R600 chipsets.
radeon is the dependable open-source driver for older Radeon-based and Rage-based cards. It works excellently, with direct rendering for all chipsets up to the R200 series. People are working on R300/R400 direct rendering right now; see http://tirdc.livejournal.com/ .
radeonhd is a brand-new open-source driver that controls new R500 and R600 cards. It has no direct rendering yet, but there is a promise from ATI/AMD that documents pertaining to direct rendering will be released sometime soon without NDA. This driver is still being worked on, but it offers satisfactory 2D for many people.
Problem one: Doesn't actually work with Compiz. While AIGLX works, XComposite does not, and loading Compiz results in massive screen corruption. Joy.
Problem two: Anybody who had XVideo problems before, will probably still have them now. Sad but true. Ditto with font selection and rendering.
Problem three: While X.org server 1.4 is supported, Linux 2.6.23 is not. Anybody running on the bleeding edge is once again locked out.
I'm sure more bugs will show up, but I'm pretty disappointed that they haven't improved the heavily broken XComposite support that they claim "works just fine."
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, you didn't sign a name, so you won't see this reply.
I live in Western Oregon, dumbass. We have a ten-month rainy season, seasonal winds, slush, and rain. We have rain, slurries, downpours, showers, drizzle, and the occasional freezing rain.
The trick is to not speed on Interstate 5 just because it's the cool thing to do. You limit yourself to 65 MPH, and you get where you're going without losing control and going flying.
Besides, if my car is so goddamn unsafe, why the fuck are all the accidents I see on the sides of I-5 SUVs that have smacked each other silly?
A Slashdotter with a family?! Astounding!
Seriously, though, my car comfortably seats five and luggage. The trick is to not take the entire contents of your closet with you. Also I will wager that I paid less for my car than you, which means that in my eyes, you're getting stiffed not just on gas, but also on the price of your car.
No kidding. I'm from Western Oregon; we have a ten-month rainy season. I've got chains if I need 'em, but mostly I just keep my tires full and use antifreeze as needed.
I own a Ford Escort from the turn of the century. It may not be very pretty, or very fast, but gets roughly 40 MPG. I can't understand how people are content with their goddamn SUVs getting 25 or less miles to the gallon. Oh well.
You presume that the existence of x264 means that there's no patents on it!? H.264 is part of Sorenson's patent folder, and they are fairly voracious on smacking anybody who distributes it. That's one of the reasons ffmpeg is illegal to possess in the USA. Also, Youtube has to stream H.264 with MP3 audio because that's the way FLV works. The container doesn't support anything else. Oh, and Theora does have one massive advantages over H.264: It requires significantly less CPU time to decode.
Sure. Do Slashdot-style page moderation. Deletion requires a quorum of moderators to agree (say, twenty), and there are only a hundred or so moderators on any given day. User administration is handled by a different group of people, administrators, and any block requires at least two administrators to sign off on it. Mods are randomly chosen from a pool of editors with a history of good faith, noted by other editors, and administrators are nominated and then elected by a majority of editors in the moderator pool. (Note that election would not be by quorum, you need a majority of ALL editors with voting power.) Blocks may not be made on IP addresses. Blocks placed on IPs in dynamic ranges must not last longer than a week.
How does this sound?
Unfortunately, you are an admin, and on my list, you have lost the assumption of good faith in administrative actions. Perhaps, after watching you at work for a while, I might be willing to trust your actions, but right now I have to assume that any action you make is in bad faith. You can thank your fellow administrators for that.
There's only one admin I know well enough to trust, and that's Mopper. You seem like that kind of guy, too. Why don't you guys do more to try and clean out the cabal? There are many, many, many people like me, who stopped editing because there were horrible things being done by admins, and would gladly come back if we knew there was no risk of being banned for doing things like assuming good faith and being nice to people that certain other people don't like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:CorbinSimpson/TINC
Amazing how it still holds today, eh?
2 years later the @home SGI servers and other gear were still sitting in most comcast headends waiting for the holding company and liquidator to come and retrieve them. WE could not throw it away or get rid of it because of legal matters. (I really wanted to dispose in my own way the rackmount SGI servers that @home used for proxy servers.)
What area do you live in? They need to be reported for not following the legal and company policies when that happened.
Sounds like what happened in Eugene, Oregon, where I lived when they @home was dissolved and subsequently absorbed by Comcast. Our IP didn't even change; one day I just noticed that our gateway reversed to or1.comcast.net (now or.bverton.comcast.net). No cables were moved or relaid, no interruption of Internet or cable TV. The building a mile down the highway, where TCI cable set up shop in the nineties? Now owned by Comcast. Go figure. The only change that my parents cared about was in 2002, when they were notified that their @home.net account would be forwarded to @comcast.net for a few months while they notified their contacts.
Spiral Frog only distributes WMA. I'm on Linux. There's a small problem here; can you guess what it is?
I will attempt to milk my GPL code for as long as I can, just to keep it out of the greedy paws of closed-source evil people. But if my code loses copyright, so does theirs, so I'm okay with that.
My music shouldn't be copyrighted. The only part of my music that I feel has value is being present at a performance, and for that I can always charge a fee. (Of course, I often go out in public and give free impromptu concerts, but then again, who doesn't?)
If I need money, I shall follow the time-honored musician's tradition of working in food services.
Both cheaper, and more powerful.
Also, I have a lot of respect for Ernie Ball products; their guitar strings are my favorite. I'm relating this story to my local LUG. They deserve some respect for publicly denouncing MS.
I'm a musician. My ears can appreciate the difference between LAME and other MP3 encoders, and between LAME and Vorbis. That's about it. I'm too deaf for anything else. Also I'm a college student. When I can afford to eat something besides ramen, I'll reconsider.
5th generation iPods can be flashed with Rockbox or iPodLinux, both of which have FLAC support. Also USB sound cards are $40 and usually don't sound better than the cards bundled with most laptops, while also being slower than onboard chips. Finally, $200 will get you 750GB, which is adequate for music, assuming, of course, that you are storing lossless. Please "do a bit of research before spouting off."
How can you write a paper revolutionizing our understanding of physics if you don't use proper grammar?! I imagine he spent his time studying maths and physics instead of English. That is, after all, the point of specialization and university; he becomes incredibly competent in one field at the expense of another. This, of course, also explains why I have excellent karma but no life.
You can have anything you wish, on "linksys" wireless.
You can have anything you wish, on "linksys" wireless.
Associate, it's on channel six;
Fire up your browser and grab some bits.
An' you can have anything you wish, on "linksys" wireless,
On "linksys" wireless!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write-in_candidate (Insomnia strikes again!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect (See what I did there?)
A corollary to Duverger's Law, which predicts that plurality voting will always lead to two-party systems, the spoiler effect is the tendency of a third-party candidate (like Ms. "Cleanup" or Mr. "Merge") to "steal votes" from another, similarly aligned candidate, like Mr. "Keep."
My comment was that advanced members of the community with a broader mindset than "Keep/delete," such as myself back when I was on Wikipedia, tended to aim towards merging or cleanup whenever possible for notable articles, but there is almost never any such splintering within the "delete" crowd, and they tend to be quite vocal in eliminating claims of notability. For example, in this case, I remember a few months back how the Web Cartoonist's Choice Awards, possibly the highest honor a webcomic artist can receive, was not only refused as a measure of notability, but also had its article deleted. This is a more serious example, but there are others.
I need sleep now, but I'll just leave with my story. I left the project because of what I perceived as administrative abuse of a fellow user who was always acting in good faith until she was blocked, after which her actions were made in the same bad faith as those of the administrators with whom she sparred. It's really too bad; I wanted to do a series of articles on Internet memes, but I left and ED stepped in instead. (Believe me, ED is no improvement.) You can find the story at my userpage. People like me will never rejoin the project as long as it refuses a simple truth: It's not possible for Wikipedia to be open and controlled at the same time. The same thing happened to cdrecord, XFree86, and Mozilla with Debian; they thought they could control something that belongs to the community, and each time, Debian just shrugged and forked. The only things standing between Wikipedia and that fate are deep pockets and name recognition.
The problem is that deletionism is viewed as an acceptable way of doing things, which is intrinsically flawed due to capricious and arbitrary notability standards. While administrators are sometimes rather wild, they are not the big problem. The big problem is the systemic denial that Wikipedia could eventually be the sum of all recordable knowledge, and the push to try and remove valuable information "in favor of" more notable entries. Wikipedia is not paper; it's possible to both expand a notable entry and keep a non-notable entry.
And yes, there are problems with administrators. They are neither sysadmins, nor moderators, but mop-wielders; the problem is that many of them forget that their place on Wikipedia is that of the janitor. It's not a position of nobility and honor, but a behind-the-scenes set of tasks that should never be brazenly abused.
Finally, the community does not have a system in place for culling definitive consensus. The system currently in place is essentially plurality voting: A small slice of the population shows up, registers to vote, and then votes for one of the two candidates (Mr. "Keep" or Mr. "Delete.") Occasionally, there are write-ins, but those are usually viewed as part of the spoiler effect. The administrator presiding over the vote may choose to, at his discretion, nullify or amend the results of the vote. It's democratic, but not quite consensual.
It already has. I know at least two server admins who prefer remote administration via cell phone to actually going into the office to get to the VPN.
Oh, no, this still happens, just not with crack. Come to Oregon and see our meth problem. It's quite horrific.
XD, didn't even catch that. "Direct 3D rendering" should be "direct rendering, e.g. 3D," not "Direct3D rendering." Thanks.
...this is not an open-source driver.
There are three ATI drivers. There is fglrx, which is this driver that was just released. There is radeon, which is the open-source driver that controls Rages, R200s, R300s, and R400s. And there is radeonhd, which controls R500s and R600s.
fglrx has many issues. It now has AIGLX, but it still has broken XComposite. Xvideo doesn't work for many people. Direct 3D rendering is slower than on Windows. The entire driver is closed-source and shims a binary blob into the kernel. But, it still offers 3D for R400, R500, and R600 chipsets.
radeon is the dependable open-source driver for older Radeon-based and Rage-based cards. It works excellently, with direct rendering for all chipsets up to the R200 series. People are working on R300/R400 direct rendering right now; see http://tirdc.livejournal.com/ .
radeonhd is a brand-new open-source driver that controls new R500 and R600 cards. It has no direct rendering yet, but there is a promise from ATI/AMD that documents pertaining to direct rendering will be released sometime soon without NDA. This driver is still being worked on, but it offers satisfactory 2D for many people.
...at least in my experience.
Problem one: Doesn't actually work with Compiz. While AIGLX works, XComposite does not, and loading Compiz results in massive screen corruption. Joy.
Problem two: Anybody who had XVideo problems before, will probably still have them now. Sad but true. Ditto with font selection and rendering.
Problem three: While X.org server 1.4 is supported, Linux 2.6.23 is not. Anybody running on the bleeding edge is once again locked out.
I'm sure more bugs will show up, but I'm pretty disappointed that they haven't improved the heavily broken XComposite support that they claim "works just fine."