• (cs) in reply to Lumpio-

    Lumpio-:
    No, I will not use Windows, because I prefer Linux. Luckily I had compiled mplayer with support for WMV, it's really not that hard.

    Can I submit this quote to the Daily WTF? You know, because people want to compile their media player before they can use it?

     

  • Stephan Rose (unregistered) in reply to James Schend

    Florida is the same way, nothing but sparklers and little spinning things are legal. Can't...and watch my words here...use anything that shoots into the sky. But you can BUY it! Have to sign a waiver that you aren't going to use it if you do, but you are allowed to buy.

    So my friends and I went out shopping... $500 worth of fire works later...paid only half though, it was buy 1 get 1 free....I couldn't fit anything more into the trunk of my car.

    We had everything from a few little legal things (about 5% of what we bought) to...bottle rockets, mortarts, and all sorts of other stuff. 95% of all our fireworks were illegal =)

    It was great!

  • (cs) in reply to Stephan Rose

    Wait, what? You only use IE for testing? I can't imagine using IE for webdev, you always end up writing kludgy code to work about IEs flawed support for web standards and you need to use hacks on top of hacks to make everything work on other browsers too... I really hope you also start "supporting" browsers that actually work, like Firefox.

    And I don't find having to compile software before use particularly annoying or hard. Most of people might, but not me.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Interesting.  You were probably the only person in Ohio to actually follow the fireworks law.  I had 4 days worth of neighborhood fireworks displays in NE Ohio that were rather impressive.  But you get a gold star for following the law I guess [:P]

  • (cs) in reply to James Schend

    Anonymous:
    I'm using Firefox 1.0.1.  And, actually, this time when it loaded the page, it didn't overlap... but the post in that image overlaps every single time.  So I dunno... like I said, I don't know jack about web design (last I worked with it, we were using HTML 1.1), I just know what the site looks wrong.  And yeah, 1.0.1 isn't cutting edge, but we also have a horribly slow internet connection here at work and I'm not going to waste bandwidth downloading the *entire* Firefox browser to go from 1.0.1 to 1.0.4... Mozilla.org needs to come up with a patching utility.

    Uh, 1.0.1 has some security holes.  You should definitely get the new version.  If your work connection is that slow (where do you work?  a farm?) download it at home and burn it to a CD.

  • James Schend (unregistered) in reply to dubwai

    I work in a public hospital which:


    1. is too far away from the phone switch to get commercial DSL

    2. the local cable company doesn't offer commercial cable internet

    3. the administration is too cheap to pay for a T1 line


    And so we use a 128k connection from the phone company, paying three times what a commercial DSL account would cost and almost half of what a T1 would.  Oh, and there's over 150 computers on it.


    My job mostly consists of trying to keep Pentium II computers running for another 6 months because we can't afford to replace any of them because we spent our entire IT budget buying a new fileserver to replace the 6-year-old Novell 5 one.  It sucks, believe me... I hate this job.  At least it pays well.

    I know you all get spoiled by working in the private sector, but we here in the public sector have to deal with this crap all the time.

  • (cs) in reply to Fregas

    Say rather:
      But only x86. And only by Intel (couse AMD SUCKS, everybody knows that.)
    Buy only ATI cards and play games which uses DirectX.
    DON'T! Use any programs which aren't made by Microsoft - they might not work well if other stuff like this, they make rubbish on your disk, cause cancer and makes the only truth operating system (windows) worse because your are denying microsoft its money.

    And hey. - black people should be banned from using computer either!


    Ok. Don't get /abused/ by this text. WMV is just closed format, if someone wants to publish something he shouldn't force people to use the only truth something. It is especially BAD in goverment institutions...

  • (cs) in reply to ScienceRocks

    Ok.. but. I've compiled mplayer for x86_64 platform. Drivers/codecs for wmv given by microsoft are 32-bit only, closed and proptriary. 32 bit libs can't be used by 64 bit program...; Its not just another 'linux-problem'. ;) And i'm unable to watch such .wmv on linux not because of linux but because of architecture.

  • (cs) in reply to James Schend
    Anonymous:
    I work in a public hospital which:

    1. is too far away from the phone switch to get commercial DSL

    2. the local cable company doesn't offer commercial cable internet

    3. the administration is too cheap to pay for a T1 line


    And so we use a 128k connection from the phone company, paying three times what a commercial DSL account would cost and almost half of what a T1 would.  Oh, and there's over 150 computers on it.


    My job mostly consists of trying to keep Pentium II computers running for another 6 months because we can't afford to replace any of them because we spent our entire IT budget buying a new fileserver to replace the 6-year-old Novell 5 one.  It sucks, believe me... I hate this job.  At least it pays well.

    I know you all get spoiled by working in the private sector, but we here in the public sector have to deal with this crap all the time.



    You're getting working in the public sector mixed up with working for idiots.  I work in the public sector, however I'm connected to a major web hub, have a pair of 21" monitors with which to work on my P4.  If you wanted to actually classify the connection itself, it's somewhere along the lines of an OC12.

    Anyway, it's pretty much like dubwai and Unclemidriff said;  you being too lazy to DL at home and bring in has nothing to do with the site.  I had a handful of problems with 1.0.1 too, much like what you're describing, however that was an issue with browser rendering and had nothing to do with the site itself;  a simple refresh was often enough to fix the issue.  As for Mozilla's patching system, that was implemented in 1.0.2, and is integrated into the browser itself.

    Cheers.

  • LinuxGuy (unregistered) in reply to Paul

    I'm running linux (Mandriva 2005 LE) and I had no problem watching it.  I used Xine as my media player with Win32 codecs from right here.

  • (cs) in reply to Paul
    Anonymous:


    Guess I'll never know if its good,  I dont know anyone with a windows machine to use.

    (Even my wife's using linux)


    No, as long as you've got a 386 somewhere, you should be able to easily (mplayer running dlls).

  • (cs) in reply to CornedBee
    CornedBee:


    Yes, as the OP said, it's "hard", not "impossible" to watch in on Linux, meaning that you can grab the Windows drivers.

    However, as the OP also said, watching it on non-x86 (e.g. my x86_64) is impossible, because the binary Windows drivers won't run.


    Again, not true; you can run the 32bit version chrooted.
  • (cs) in reply to kim

    Hmm, in Ireland, all fireworks are completely illegal (they're classed as weapons, apparently), unless you're a trained professional with a license.

  • (cs) in reply to rsynnott
    rsynnott:
    Hmm, in Ireland, all fireworks are completely illegal (they're classed as weapons, apparently), unless you're a trained professional with a license.


    Seeing as how all fireworks are really nothing more than small bombs with metallic shavings that burn at different colors based on the metal blend, i'm not terribly surprised.  I've seen the results of a misfired professional display, and the result was the barge they were being launched from sunk in 60 feet of water in the Chesapeake Bay.
  • (cs)

    a) am I the only one have south park flash backs for some reason???

    b) why do I see a LOT of programmers on the FBI watch list next year for buying military grade quantities of sparklers??

    c) if my linux based wireless webcams can stream .ASF files (just a wmv variant), I'm betting that somewhere there is viewer software for linux, which may or may not work on the hundreds of incompatible versions of linux out there for the x86 platform (thank goodness linux never forked, huh??)

    If you are stuck on linux and can't get a viewer, just rewatch the southpark episode where they light the giant black puck - same effect.

  • (cs) in reply to James Schend
    Anonymous:
    I work in a public hospital which:

    1. is too far away from the phone switch to get commercial DSL

    2. the local cable company doesn't offer commercial cable internet

    3. the administration is too cheap to pay for a T1 line




    Ah, I worked at the largest hospital in the country (which is run by the health board) a few years back. At the time, their internet connection was provided by.... about 64 bonded ISDN lines, obviously! How else would you connect to the internet? (They had a deal with the then state-run phone company about this, apparently. They've shifted to something more sensible now).

  • (cs) in reply to rsynnott

    Wow, how do you light all of those at once like that? If I can find this out I'm going to try that next year!

  • Anon (unregistered)

    I guess it just goes to show that you can make as many laws as you like but people will still find ways to get around them.

  • Bruce Shaw (unregistered)

    Kewl!  Sound track by Emerson Lake and Palmer

  • Bastard Cleaning Lad From Hell (unregistered)

    WTF? WMV? "Curios Perversions in Information Technology" doesn't begin to describe it.

  • (cs) in reply to James Schend

    Hmmm, Firefox does have an autoupdate feature, which as far as I know doesn't download the whole thing every update.  Go to Tools>Options then Advanced>Software Update and click on Check Now.


    Not 100% sure if it was there in v1.0.1 but it's worth a look.  It's also probably worth a one-off download if it's not there, since then you can stay up to date.


    On the Windows/Linux thing, I've never compared the video sizes but the WMA (the audio sibling for WMV) codec gives about the same quality in half the filesize as MP3.  I wouldn't be surprised if WMV ran along the same lines.  Proprietary and closed it may be, but it's also highly efficient with space, and that, believe it or not, is an issue when you're runing a website.  So Alex could use an open codec that takes up twice the space and takes us twice as long to download.  Or he could have used Real format, and the less said about that the better.

  • (cs) in reply to johnl
    johnl:
    Hmmm, Firefox does have an autoupdate feature, which as far as I know doesn't download the whole thing every update.  Go to Tools>Options then Advanced>Software Update and click on Check Now.

    Not 100% sure if it was there in v1.0.1 but it's worth a look.  It's also probably worth a one-off download if it's not there, since then you can stay up to date.


    On the Windows/Linux thing, I've never compared the video sizes but the WMA (the audio sibling for WMV) codec gives about the same quality in half the filesize as MP3.  I wouldn't be surprised if WMV ran along the same lines.  Proprietary and closed it may be, but it's also highly efficient with space, and that, believe it or not, is an issue when you're runing a website.  So Alex could use an open codec that takes up twice the space and takes us twice as long to download.  Or he could have used Real format, and the less said about that the better.



    Firefox 1.0.1 doesn't have an autopatch feature, however in 1.0.2 they implemented an inbrowser updating feature which does not need to download the full build for every update.

    On the WMV thing, I agree with you wholeheartedly, however as with some of us here, does not keep me from hating closed source, proprietary anything and everything.

  • Paul (unregistered)

    HAHAHAHAH that's nuts - i actually like the ones with like 100 or 200 - they looked cooler - and maybe if we could actually seeeee the sparklers - sparks and not just a big glob of light - it would have been more ... interesting. anyway.....

     

    later

    Http://www.theblahbrain.com

  • telmesrin (unregistered)

    Ok, I know this is ancient post, but I had to comment anyway. A few years ago ('02, I think), my roommate and I did the same thing. A bundle of about 500 sparklers, and we set them off in the sand volleyball court. We made glass.

  • Sune (unregistered)

    TRWTF is posting this in a lame MS format.

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