http://xkcd.com/350/ :)

I found them incredible, especially the second one. Rarely does music relax me this much, make me so cheery. And I'm picky about my music.

I definitely find it more enjoyable than most of Mozart, though not all of him (25th Symphony...)

Oops, that was me.

It can be done on the fly.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1553928&cid=31208856

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 :)

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 :)