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Comment Tumblr (Score 1) 114

If there was a service that came out with 300 characters as a limit, it would crush Twitter.

You mean like Tumblr or Blogspot or LiveJournal or just about any other blogging platform?

superior services will demolish their business if they don't listen to the number one complaint about Twitter from their users

I thought the biggest complaint about Twitter was sockpuppetry. See Twitter use thirteen different characters.

Comment Offline reading (Score 1) 114

Imagine the article loading in its entirety, so you can start reading it, before there's even a single image tag on the page; then, well-written javascript popping the images in as you read. The content loads and renders faster and you have an over-all better experience, especialy if you happen to be on a mobile device or slow connection.

I have the opposite experience. Because my mobile device has no cellular Internet connection, I often load pages over Wi-Fi at home and then read them while riding public transit. If a page uses this "lazy loading" technique, none of the images will load when I get around to reading them.

Comment Re:Serious question (Score 1) 114

I'm @PinoBatch.

But this list mentions Erris, Mactrope*, gnutoo, inTheLoo, willeyhill*, westbake*, Odder*, ibane, DeadZero, freenix, myCopyWrong, right handed, GNUChop, trimmer, and wiiiyhiii*. Or, rather, Twitter uses them. All of them. And this Twitter can post more than 140 characters.

* These are typosquatted versions of other Slashdot users' usernames.

Comment Comcast's monthly HD technology fee (Score 1) 332

No, because they don't actially offer "SD only service", it's all HD now.

Cable TV is all digital, but not necessarily high-definition. Operators of digital cable systems can and do use conditional access in the digital cable platform to give 480i or 1080i versions of a particular channel to particular customers. For example, Comcast charges a "monthly HD technology fee" if an XFINITY TV customer has HD in his plan. This was true as of this forum post three years ago, and another forum post from three months ago confirms that it still is being charged. Or was it very recently discontinued?

Comment Re:TV system doesn't match (Score 1) 332

Were you going RCA video out?

Yes. All three of these devices were pre-HDMI and used S-Video output.

But most of the other video standards, like RCA, composite, S-video and such are 1-way. It would be *impossible* for the system to "know" that the TV doesn't match.

The Apex would scale 576i at 50 Hz to 480i at 60 Hz. The others just threw up their hands and gave up.

I've never had any DVD played on a computer (or by association, out the computer's video out) that cared about PAL/NTSC.

From roughly 1987 to 2006, it was rare to connect a PC to a TV-sized monitor. PCs were for desks, and "consumer electronics" devices were for the living room, and conventional wisdom was that never the twain shall meet. SDTVs of that era that couldn't display the VGA or DVI signals coming from a computer, unlike now where most TVs have VGA and HDMI inputs respectively, and one had to buy an obscure scan converter (or a desktop PC video card with a built-in scan converter) to convert the signals.

Comment What makes GNU/* (Score 1) 169

So, it is probably more correct to say Linux without the GNU unless we should call Windows "GNU Windows" since one might choose to run a Mingw app.

MinGW is just GCC with the C library of Microsoft Visual C++ 6. If someone were to install Cygwin, on the other hand, that might stand a better chance of being called GNU/Windows. (In fact, Cygwin stands for Cygnus GNU/Windows.) And you're not the only person to present this sort of reduction to absurdity argument. So I set out to define a "GNU/$kernel" userland for myself as GNU Coreutils plus two other major GNU components, such as Bash, Emacs, GCC, or shared glibc. GNU/Linux counts, Cygwin counts, and MSYS counts.

Would "X11/Linux" be a better term to distinguish Fedora, Debian, and the like from Android and uses of Linux on router appliances?

Comment VP8 is BSD licensed (Score 1) 169

Technology-wise: In rate-distortion terms, Theora is comparable to H.263-family codecs such as DivX (a popular implementation of MPEG-4 ASP). VP8 is comparable to the baseline profile of H.264. This means the picture can be more detailed at the same bitrate.

License-wise: WebM is distributed under the revised BSD license. As a free alternative to a patented format, it's in a similar position to Ogg Vorbis, for which RMS approved of use of the revised BSD license.

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