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Slashback: Dataplay, XviD, PPC
Pins and needles, pawns and bishops. s20451 writes "It looked grim earlier in the week, but following a fifth game meltdown by Kramnik and a brilliant game 6 by Fritz, the computer has tied the match 3-3. Betting on the computer in game 6 would have brought you a 7-1 return! I'll be on the phone to Vegas."
The new, new, new economy has room for camels. SwiftOne writes "According to their website, The Perl Journal has gotten enough subscriptions to begin online release (the planning of which was previously covered, along with the concerns about not reaching their goal. The first (next) issue is expected in early November."
Maybe it was the 15th-mover disadvantage. melt writes "Dataplay, the Boulder-based manufacturer of quarter-sized recordable discs and drives, finally called it quits on Friday, October 11, 2002. The remaining 120 employees (who have been on furlough for the past few weeks) have been let go and the company has closed shop. They are looking for a buyer for the remaining pieces. Full story at the Rocky Mtn News web site."
Zoom in until you see little canyons ... Twirlip of the Mists writes "IBM's chief scientist for their iSeries family of servers (a.k.a. the AS/400 family) has an article on iseriesnetwork.com describing the somewhat confusing history of the POWER4 microprocessor. In light of recent speculation about a possible relationship between IBM and Apple, this article is of particular interest. It clears up-- at least partially-- some of the complex, incestuous relationships between the PowerPC architecture, the PowerPC processor family, and the POWER4 processor. As an added bonus, there's some talk about the upcoming POWER5 and POWER6 processors near the end. The key phrase (and disclaimer): 'expected to appear in 2004.'"
Shame on Sigma.
Gruturo writes "After almost 3 months the XviD project and website have reopened, though Sigma Designs has not complied yet with all their requests (they still carry their copyright on many modified sources). In these last 2 1/2 months the project still went underway, although unofficially:
B-frames are practically ready, motion estimation algorithms have been improved, work started for Qpel implementation."
Please stop teasing us. If you liked Cryptonomicon, you've probably been impatiently watching the announcements of when the next Stephenson book would appear. wka writes "Previous false starts notwithstanding, Amazon says Neal Stephenson's new novel Quicksilver will be published in January."
And next week, building box-girder bridges. scubacuda writes "Lawmeme has released Part III to their Law School in a Nutshell series (Part I and Part II were previously featured on /.)"
You should try mplayer instead. It supports loading of win32 codecs, streams, vcd's, dvds, tv capture, some Realplayer files, and my favorite feature... anything it can decode, it can convert. Worked good for turning some vcd's into divx for a dialup friend of mine.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
Then this guy who says he communicated with the publisher and they indicated that it would be coming out in three parts starting next July, must be telling a story:
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
It's also an excellent book in its own right -- it won the National Book Award in 1974, and it would have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize had the board not considered it obscene and overriden the judges' decision.
It has benefits and disadvantages compared to the other major mpeg4 encoders out there: DIVX 4, DIVX 5, and ffmpeg. For decoding, it doesn't matter nearly as much, but it's good to have a lot of encoders around to keep things competitive.
mplayer is not a video codec.
Keep in mind that Amazon has been saying January, 2003 ever since they stopped saying January, 2002 and this was updated AFTER the date that Amazon originally claimed that it would come out. In my experience, Amazon generally is accurate about release dates, but I don't trust them on this one.
Ahem. I belive 3-inch media are called Minidisks. They are very cool and portable. Unfortunatly SONY shot themselves in the foot when if came to introducing the MD-Data disk.
They came out roughly the same time as Zip's did. Zips were 100mb disks were $25, the drives were $299 and included a scsi card. In contrast MD-Data disks 120mb were $50, the drives wer $800+ and did not come with scsi cards, and were frequently UW SCSI only.
SONY marketed them towards the professional music and broadcast industries almost exclusivly and never made it accessible to the average computer user.
*A)bort, R)etry, I)nfluence with large hammer.*
Score: -1, Incorrect.
MPlayer is a very good media player for Unixes.
Xvid is an open-source mpeg4 video codec. MPlayer competes with Xine. Xvid competes with Divx.
I can't pass up an opportunity to plug, "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". I found it in the philosophy section of my local bookstore a month ago and have been devouring it ever since.
Here's an Amazon Link
The real Java experts know how to spell it. Notice the "deprecated" link at the top of the screen.
The morons at "experts exchange" don't.
Hey Geminatron. Nice way to totally plagiarize someone else's post. Why don't you try to write your own comments next time?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
I've done a lot of research into Combinatorial AI design for my program, Gamazons, which has a branching factor that makes chess look like childs play (the opening move has 3-4k different possibilities). For these types of programs, you've got a few primary factors that make a big difference in how your game plays. You need to search fast & deep, prune out as many paths as you can that won't produce worthwhile results. But then you need really good heuristics that give a value to a board state. You have to be careful that your heuristics are incredibly efficient, because your heuristic function will be run on every node (board state) in the search tree. However, from what I've noticed in my program, the quality of the heuristics is the most critical part of the whole game. It doesn't matter much how deep fast and deep you can search if your searching gives inaccurate values to the board states.
It's the same with chess games. Sure, having lots of big beefy hardware was a nice factor for Big Blue, but the defining factor that really made it shine was the quality of its heuristics. They had on staff a number of grand chessmasters as well as a database of all the big games to develop a good opening book (real chess programs don't start searching & evaluating board states until a good 10-15 moves into the game. They search these out ahead of time and store them on disk as the opening book).
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The size of a US quarter. Imation just started to sell players here. It was supose to be out a year ago.
you can read more about it here
Although the main XviD site was taken down for 3 months, the community has still been going strong, testing and debugging the codec. You might want to check them out at their forum
Where Dataplay does (did?) have a cooler formfactor, it was only 500mb and write once.
:) And it's rewriteable! No DRM either :)
Phillips now has a bluelaser system, working prototype, the size of a two euro coin which holds one gig of data
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?