Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Swiftness, Ender's, Streams
When it comes to records, context begets significance. Fandu writes: "In regards to the article about the new internet2 land speed record.. That is not correct, The Canadian CA*Net3 network is about 60X faster still. It may be a net speed record for Internet2, but it's certainly no new internet speed record. See the ABC Article about the network from a few years back and the NOC webpage."
And no one is in line for tickets yet? flea writes: "So, fans of orson scott card (to whom I was turned onto by luna) should be happy. The books Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow are on the track to being made into a movie. Script is being written and OSC is involved in the process. It's being made by Wolfgan Petersen, who has a few hits and misses (http://us.imdb.com/Name?Petersen,+Wolfgang); Air Force One and Outbreak are, well, ya know ... To his credit though, he did Enemy Mine, the movie with Louis Gossett Jr. playing the speach impediment'd alien trapped on a rock after a battle with Dennis Quaid and then LGj gives birth (wtf). C'mon, we all liked that. Anyway, it hasn't even started filming yet and the script isn't done, but things look good. More info here."
Speak up for Ogg Vorbis! SgtChaireBourne writes: "The BBC's testing period for Ogg Vorbis is now finished, but they are still soliciting feedback.
Now's the chance to add any words of encouragement to the BBC regarding Ogg, especially since, perhaps by oversight, RealOne (formerly RealPlayer) is now only available for Windows 98, 2000, ME, NT and XP. Currently, the download page for older versions seem to turn up empty for all requests for Linux versions, but deep links can still get you there.
As far as I can tell, the BBC is the first large (or even medium) news service to try Ogg. Here is last year's announcment on Slashdot about the start of the test."
"Sounds cool." blocksetter writes: "Cool Chips plc appreciates the interest of the Slashdot community. We've made an effort to address the points raised in last week's discussion of our technology and we've posted the resulting FAQ on our site. In the interest of conserving bandwidth, a text-only version is available for your viewing pleasure. We would like to thank everybody whose questions and criticisms inspired us to do this.
If there is something we haven't covered, you can also write directly to Cool Chips President Isaiah Cox, or to myself, Company Wonky Chris Bourne."
Click here or here.
transgaming is awesome software! I've just been playing Warcraft 2 (Battle-net edition, the old one was DOS and needs Dosemu), Deus Ex, and Counter-strike. All without leaving linux, and all *with* the ability to change workspaces to talk in Gaim while I'm playing (in between rounds of counter-strike can get tedious, after all).
The long developmental time for films is a frustrating and, sometimes, sad thing. One of our greatest writers, Philip K. Dick, died just before getting to see the screen adaptation of his fabulous novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
That was particulary sad because, as told in Lawrence Sutin's excellent Divine Invasions : A Life of Philip K. Dick, this would have been a self-vindicating landmark in a life tortured by schizophrenia and criminal disregard by literary critics.
It's worth noting that Douglas Adams also died after years trying to get a film of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy off the ground.
It's really nice to get quality radio on a non-traditional device. I should mention that I'm posting this from my iPAQ too :-)
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
The thing that makes Ender's Game such a great book is that the small unwashed masses of alienated, hyper-intelligent geeks could truly empathize with Ender on an emotional level. We can understand his trials and feel his pains. We can also understand his pyrrhic victories. The rest of the books are good (for the most part) but that visceral sense of identification gets left behind. And, in Ender's Shadow, Card tries to shift that sense of identification from Ender to Bean. He fails miserably. He comes closer, yet also fails with Qing-Jao.
In the first book, Ender's Game, Card forges an emotional envolvement with Ender. (Well, if you're an alienated, hyper-intelligent geek anyway). The rest of the books in the initial series -- Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, Children of the Mind -- are good. He comes closest to reforging that emotional link in the Xenocide/Children of the Mind sub-duology with the character of Qing-Jao. He doesn't quite make it though...I can truly empathize with a braniac with no friends, an obsessive-compulsive super-braniac is a bit beyond my league.
He repeats himself in the sub-duology of Ender's Shadow and Shadow of the Hegemon. Yes, Bean is super-smart. But he's a genetically engineered human. Card has once again taken what worked with Ender and altered the character so much that readers can't truly relate.
Damn, I've been rambling. The point that I'm trying to emphasize (out of the many points that I've made) is that the appeal of Ender's Game is that readers could honestly and wholely identify with the main character. I don'think that the same sense of identification will come across on the screen.
While I never got a change to try out the BBC Ogg Vorbis streams (because my net connection is a mere 56k modem shared to 3 computers) I am quite interested to hear how it would have sounded with the encoding settings they have used. Below is a quote from the BBC website explaining the settings they used.
:)
Currently there is a Radio 4 stream, and two Radio 1 streams using different quality settings to ices. The _low is using -q 0, whilst the _high is using -q 3. I'd be interested to know if anyone can tell much difference between them (challenge for all you audiophiles out there
Now I have been mucking around with Ogg Vorbis for a few months and I have encountered some quite impressive results. On my website I have music downloads and I store them at -q 2, which equates to a nominal bitrate of 80-96 and in my opinion is on par with a MP3 using VBR ranging between 112-160. At this setting it still has a few minor artifacts but for the most part they aren't noticable and thus makes a good setting for free music downloads.
Furthermore I encode my CD collection at -q 5 and on my decent stereo and headphones I can't tell the difference between the original CD and the Ogg Vorbis track. For those interested this stores my guitar based music at an average bit-rate of 160-190 and electronic at 190-250 roughly speaking.
Anyway long story short, from my past experience it sounds like the high quality stream at a quality setting of 3.00, which I am guessing equates to a nominal bit-rate of 135 or so would have sounded pretty darn good. Definitely better than FM reception and perhaps almost as good as CD quality depending on the setup used. Can anyone verify or comment on this?
aus.music.scrapbook
is it just me, or is Ogg Vorbis kind of a dumb name for a multimedia format?
I'm sorry, I don't mean to troll, I just want to find people who agree. Think of this-"I have 5600 MP3s".
Now replace it- "I have 5600 [Ogg Vorbis's|Ogg Vorbis Multimedia Files|Ogg Vorbis Audios]".
It doesn't work. It's like legos. You don't say I have 2030 Lego brand entertainment bricks, or 2030 Lego bricks. You say I have 2030 Legos. This, imho, is Ogg's greatest downfall. The project works great, the compression is good, the audio sounds pretty dang good, but it will never catch on, first because of the large installed base of mp3s and players, and second, because it just sounds dumb.