You're in luck, this can be done in software. Install the K-Lite Codec Pack Standard. Open your movie in Media Player Classic. Go to "View->Options->External Filters", click Add Filter and add a "Compressor". Rightclick the blue "FFa" systray icon, click "FFDShow audio decoder", enable "Volume" on the left, and in those volume settings enable "Normalize". Voila, quiet parts are louder and loud parts are quieter.

So what? It's not like that makes anyone poorer.

Hi, what you said bothers me because I can't quite understand it.

Adolescent? Intellectual? Hmm? Could you explain?

This is so beautiful. It might be the first web service I truly, really like. It's in the right place at the right time. People, me included, love clicking "upvote" buttons all day long, because they like to show appreciation and it gives them a feeling of power. How much more meaningful this becomes when there's money attached! It will feel great to "flatter" people with some of your money, while never bothering to keep track of "how much you spend" (stressful, anyone will tell you), as it's a constant that you've decided you want to give out to the world for a month.

I don't know about you guys, but this fits my mental model of donations better than anything before. I think it'll catch on, because both providers and consumers will love it. We will move to a web with less crap. Maybe even reverse Sturgeon's law.

Thanks, I found that somewhat eye-opening.

No, it's not obligatory.
Look, I love xkcd as much as everybody else, but stop pasting it everywhere, that cheapens it.

Oh, you'd think so, wouldn't you?

Couple of years back I tried to build my dad a cheap wordprocessing machine. I got a pentium II, 64MB RAM-type one, put Ubuntu with fluxbox and Abiword on it. Boot time: 4 minutes. Time to usable Abiword: 2 minutes. Probably spent most of that swapping in and out. Then the UI was _crawling_. My dad quipped that "wow, Linux must be for rich people".

So I had to swap that with a Win98, Word97 setup and suddenly it was flying.

When this sort of box was the state of art, Ubuntu didn't exist, and AbiWord was just starting out. Can't blame them they didn't care to make their product fast enough - after all, devs just use nice new machines, right?

On an old box Linux might be great for VIM but that's not all everyone needs :)

Now you've got me dreamin'...
I would so love a crappy but dirt cheap machine. $5 for a Pentium II, 32MB RAM laptop with ethernet :)
Put Firefox 1 and Windows 98 on it, and I'd get a few, if only to play NFS2 and chat on skype :)

vim already does exactly this. http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Modeline_magic

it looks like this. (ts = tabstop, sw=shiftwidth) // vim: noai:ts=4:sw=4
      -or- /* vim: noai:ts=4:sw=4
*/
      -or- /* vim: set noai ts=4 sw=4: */
      -or- /* vim: set fdm=expr fde=getline(v\:lnum)=~'{'?'>1'\:'1': */

so using your example: /* MS_VC_INTENT=2; MS_VC_TAB=4 */

if you put on top of your file, // vim: set tabstop=4 shiftwidth=2

then vim will do the correct thing.

How much faster would my internet access get if all spam were to cease?

You need to read the original from end to end then :)

And Firefox is a bad name? How about Chrome, Excel, Opera and Skype?

Names are not supposed to be descriptive, although sometimes it helps. They're supposed to be catchy, short and easy to pronounce/spell.

OK, fifteen pages of complainers who have no idea about HCI now... let me give you a clue.

Icons are beneficial in all interfaces - menus, file managers, toolbars, you name it. They let you find what you're looking for faster. The human brain is optimized to recognize and analyze colors and shapes. When you're confronted with a menu of 10 programs, research shows you find yours more easily by looking for the circular blue-and-red icon than the words "Mozilla Firefox".

Factors in icon design include:
- A clear shape. Firefox is a circle, VS is an infinity symbol, Notepad is a rectangular notebook, and Word is a W in a square.
- Evocative colors. A red cross means delete, a green tick means confirm, yellow-black strips mean security, gray means utility application
- A unique, simple, recognizable design. Your brain sees it a few times and henceforth only looks for the icon, because it's less strain than reading the text.

If you don't trust me, perhaps you'll believe:
Microsoft
Apple

No they were not talking crap. Doing work in front of the client is a horrible idea unless the client is a better designer than you are, in which case each of you should consider a career change. Good design takes time which you're not going to take with a client sitting over your shoulder so even if the client leaves you alone you're going to be producing shoddy work. Even worse, their instant feedback ends up with you being nothing more than an input device, a glorified mouse providing the merely technical skills any trained monkey could master while they design it themselves with these results. For all but the absolute worst designers this is their least valuable skill, presumably what the client actually hired you for your design expertise not merely your knowledge of which menu is hiding the lens flare filter.