Ishin's Journal: The life of a slashdot post.

Today the links will come after the observation.

I just read the article posting about Microsoft changing the Win2k EULA for service pack 4. I posted a response (clearly and impartially) to the first post, in which the poster claimed their board of directors were getting rid of all Microsoft desktops and replacing them with Linux and OSX. I posted back that without any listing of what company he was posting about, it was rather hard to believe, and gave my reasoning.

While the post wasn't the most interesting or insightful in my opinion, it was quickly modded up to +5 insight/interesting. A couple of uninspiring replies were made that I felt no need to respond to. A little while later, the post received 4 negative points for overrated. Now I'm not convinced my post deserved a 5, but I'm also not convinced it really needed to be modded down that far. It will probably end up modded to 0 or -1 for no reason I can understand (maybe because of my incredulity about companies immediately abandoning Microsoft).

What's my point? Karma on Slashdot is a strange thing. It seems more like the administration's way of trying to censor while appearing to not censor than a way for the users to self police. (also, shouldn't unregistered people browse at -1 by default? I've known people that only browse /. without registering and had no idea that there were posts they weren't seeing. A lot of them are crap, but sometimes... just sometimes, things are truely unfairly modded into oblivion, and once you cross the threshold from 1 to 0, there's little chance of getting back).

Anyway, on to the useful stuff.

xvid is still the best codec around, but divx is at least trying to get better. They're now releasing beta software for everyone to try, divx pro owner or not. http://labs.divx.com

xvid is still heading into the 1.0 release at www.xvid.org with binaries for windows available from http://xvid.hopto.org and http://roeder.goe.net/~koepi/

avisynth is moving on to 2.52, with supposedly stable yv12 support. Of course, the problem with going to 2.52 is losing compatbility with a lot of old avisynth filters. http://www.avisynth.org

also virtualdub has passed version 1.5.0 and virtualdub mod has, too. http://www.virtualdub.org and http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net

Anyway, happy encoding, and remember, just because you don't like someone's post for personal reasons, please try to be objective before you start abusing your mod points.