Testing out both on one complete album, rar's default settings fare about 2% worse than FLAC's weakest/fastest compression setting. That's a lot better than zip manages. Unfortunately, rar decompresses considerably slower than FLAC and won't play in any audio players. For those reasons it's difficult to recommend over other dedicated lossless audio formats.
zip and rar are meant for text data. Applying either of them to wav files will yield about 5-10% compression if you're lucky. FLAC gets about 50% compression on average. For a 600MB CD, that's a savings of over 240MB, and FLAC files can be played directly from audio players - unlike zip or rar.
FLACs also offer checksumming, metadata and ReplayGain in addition to smaller files. But at least one can encode them with little pain given a bunch of PCM WAVs.
They were part of my childhood too, but I had lots and lots of other great things in my childhood that had nothing to do with Lucasfilm Ltd. so even if Lucas decided to replace the characters in films with Looney Tunes animations, it wouldn't really make that big a dent in my life. If Lucas wants to futz around with the originals to make them his ultimate vision, then more power to him. Yeah, it sucks a little because it drills a little hole in that precious bag of nostalgia that we carry around, but in the end, is it really that big a deal?
It's not a really big deal to me because I've got the original trilogy of films memorized. But it is a big deal to those who haven't, like the generations that'll come after me. They'll never get to see the films I saw. Maybe they won't care about seeing the special effects that changed the industry, or pointless re-edits to things done right the first time. But I feel it's obnoxious not to give them that choice.
If you don't care about any of that, that's fine. But I think those that do care have a right to complain - even though it may sound like a broken record after awhile. Though in the end, voting with one's wallet is the only thing that'll make any difference.
Re:yet another worthless article about IPv6
on
An Introduction to IPv6
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Be thankful people don't have unlimited IPs in their house. Most people that want to have multiple computers connected to the Internet use a NAT router and at least protect themselves SOMEWHAT from the outside threats. Can you imagine what would happen if all the Comcast retards were straight to the Net with their own IP on each computer?
People are going to buy some sort of all-in-one switch to connect their home computers to the internet as well as to each other, and that device will undoubtedly have a built-in firewall. That'll help secure the consumer-built home networks while unfucking the internet by removing NAT and its port-forwarding hacks.
Spielberg has been good about releasing the original versions of his movies. He might digitally erase a snake reflection or tweak some background goofs nobody cares about, but he won't do wholesale changes to the films people remember. Lucas has a long history of not only changing the movies he's directed, but never going back and releasing the originals. Star Wars isn't the first, but it'll only be the last once he stops directing altogether.
Can some explain to me what all the commotion is about regarding the cantina shootout scene?
In the original that everyone around here grew up with, Han Solo guns down Greedo the bounty hunter because he's sneaky and cold-blooded when we first meet him. In the new versions, Han Solo shoots Greedo in self-defense and survives by sheer luck. In effect, Lucas changes the character to be more "warm and fuzzy".
What is needed is hardware accelerated graphics where the window managers have direct access to video memory and not through some slow and useless network layer.
X client running on the same host as the X server don't use the network layer whatsoever. They often use (very fast) shared memory, or some form of accelerated video. But the ability to use that network layer with any X client is what seperates multi-user OSes from ones that use screen scrapers (like VNC) meant for one user at a time.
But will I be able to play the new game on my existing Infocom interpreter???
If they're smart, they'll just take the original game and translate it from its original Z-Code level 3 to the graphics-enabled level 6 (used by Zork Zero). That'll allow the game to use graphics and still run on common, multi-platform intepreters.
But if they're not smart, they'll translate it from the original Z-Code to Something Else, and it'll be a huge screw up.
How do you get by not feeding the dog? As I remember, you end up in someone's brain, with synapses all around. Could you get out of that?
I think you get a second chance by having Ford feed the dog. Eventually you (as Arthur Dent) wind up in your own mazelike brain. By removing your common sense, you'll be able to take tea and no tea at the same time (since it won't be able to say you can't do that).
That's right out of the book! Arthur tells the Vogon that it's "Actully quite nice" which pisses the commander off and orders them to be tossed out the airlock.
That's the beauty of Infocom games. The solution is blindingly obvious in retrospect, but "enjoying poetry" (or using "enjoy" as a verb at all) never crossed my mind.
Worst Puzzle: "put junk mail on satchel". Ok, maybe the three previous steps for getting the fish were somewhat logical, but the "confuse-the-upper-half-of-the-room-robot" step was ridiculous!
I was able to deduce the babel fish puzzle back when the game first came out. Once one remembers the last item the Rube Goldberg-style sequence stops at, it's not hard to figure out what part of your limited inventory to use next.
But "enjoy poetry" was one thing I never figured out until I found a guide to the game.
First, this is NOT meant as a flame at all. I would just like to know. Who here actually backs up their DVD's or CD's?
I've got a ton of expensive, import or out-of-print CDs backed up to lossless FLAC files. And, I've got an ISO dump of an out-of-print import DVD kept backed-up to my hard drive also. It doesn't make sense to backup common CDs or DVDs I can pick up replacements for at any store. But when it comes to the rare stuff, making an extra backup is a sensible precaution.
For comparing arbitrary files though, you might want a tool that simply compares them byte-by-byte, and in that case you need to use cmp(1).
The problem with cmp is that it only works for a single file. If one wants to compare all the files across two different directory trees (like/home and/mnt/home_backup) diff's recursive option is very handy. Add the -q option (which reports only whether the files are different, not the differences themselves) and diff is a fine method of verifying local backups - such as an rsync'ed USB drive.
I'm a Python programmer. I never learned Java because I heard so many people complain about how many books and reference materials they need just to get things done.
Last I checked (Java 1.2), Java as a language was mostly small and simple - not much more complicated than C. But the volume of Java APIs and their complexity required a decent reference of some sort. Python is a larger and more powerful language, and tends to use less complex APIs to achieve the same tasks.
Expect this feature to break many current emulators (Mame will be fine.)
This won't break MAME's dynarec MIPS core? Has R. Belmont said that explicitly? I get the nasty feeling NX will make kinst and friends run very slowly.
As for bringing back the Cybermen, yes, I'd much prefer that. For me that's the real story here, since the Cybermen are also a Terry Nation creation and I believe that this announcement clears their use in the series too. However I'd like to see them toughed up a bit - they always seemed a bit slow and the silly "rub gold on their grill and they die" thing wasn't great.
I'm pretty sure the Cybermen were Kit Peddler's creation (co-created by Gerry Davis). The weakness to gold was a late addition, first appearing in "Revenge of the Cybermen", IIRC. Since the Cybermen are an ever-evolving adversary, I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to write out that particular weakness and return to the characters' roots. The theme of dehumanizing medicine is surely as relevent today as it was back in the 60s when they were created. Though keeping them tall yet somewhat slow (yet virtually unstoppable) is part of their trademark.
I just got a new AMD64 laptop, and am wondering about getting a version of redhat to run on it. Anyone know of any torrents or download links to get a good version?
as I thought GBA was a 16 bit superset of the GB instructions
Near as I can tell, the GBA has a custom ARM 7 chip with an embedded Z80 for backwards compatibility with old Gameboy titles. If the DS leaves out the Z80 functionality, it'll lose compatibility with the old Gameboy and Gameboy Color titles. But I don't think there's been any definite word whether that's the case or not.
Since Sony announced 100 developers for their device and its portable music/vid capabilities, will the DS lose out to the PSx juggernaut (can 20 more games make/break a game)?
If the PSP comes to market at $300 with 3-5 hours of battery life compared to 10+ hours for the DS and a probable $150 price tag, the DS will bury the PSP easily - despite the PSP's obvious technical merits. Battery life and initial cost are everything in the portable market, and the backwards-compatibility with the huge GBA library gives the DS even more of an edge.
Is it all that hard to add a 'print reciept' option to all of these voting machines?
A receipt that tells who you've voted for would be quite valuable to anyone who'd like to buy your vote - or threaten you to vote for a particular candidate. Ensuring that all those receipts stay with the election officials is preferable, but then there's no point in using computers in the vote casting process to begin with.
By the way, was that I Am Not Spock or I Am Spock? I've read the second one, but the first is out of print...
It's in the second one: I am Spock. It's a fascinating and surprisingly well-written book. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the whole Star Trek phenomenon from an actor's point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
Testing out both on one complete album, rar's default settings fare about 2% worse than FLAC's weakest/fastest compression setting. That's a lot better than zip manages. Unfortunately, rar decompresses considerably slower than FLAC and won't play in any audio players. For those reasons it's difficult to recommend over other dedicated lossless audio formats.
It's called extortion, and it wouldn't win the author any friends in law enforcement.
zip and rar are meant for text data. Applying either of them to wav files will yield about 5-10% compression if you're lucky. FLAC gets about 50% compression on average. For a 600MB CD, that's a savings of over 240MB, and FLAC files can be played directly from audio players - unlike zip or rar.
FLACs also offer checksumming, metadata and ReplayGain in addition to smaller files. But at least one can encode them with little pain given a bunch of PCM WAVs.
It's not a really big deal to me because I've got the original trilogy of films memorized. But it is a big deal to those who haven't, like the generations that'll come after me. They'll never get to see the films I saw. Maybe they won't care about seeing the special effects that changed the industry, or pointless re-edits to things done right the first time. But I feel it's obnoxious not to give them that choice.
If you don't care about any of that, that's fine. But I think those that do care have a right to complain - even though it may sound like a broken record after awhile. Though in the end, voting with one's wallet is the only thing that'll make any difference.
People are going to buy some sort of all-in-one switch to connect their home computers to the internet as well as to each other, and that device will undoubtedly have a built-in firewall. That'll help secure the consumer-built home networks while unfucking the internet by removing NAT and its port-forwarding hacks.
Spielberg has been good about releasing the original versions of his movies. He might digitally erase a snake reflection or tweak some background goofs nobody cares about, but he won't do wholesale changes to the films people remember. Lucas has a long history of not only changing the movies he's directed, but never going back and releasing the originals. Star Wars isn't the first, but it'll only be the last once he stops directing altogether.
In the original that everyone around here grew up with, Han Solo guns down Greedo the bounty hunter because he's sneaky and cold-blooded when we first meet him. In the new versions, Han Solo shoots Greedo in self-defense and survives by sheer luck. In effect, Lucas changes the character to be more "warm and fuzzy".
X client running on the same host as the X server don't use the network layer whatsoever. They often use (very fast) shared memory, or some form of accelerated video. But the ability to use that network layer with any X client is what seperates multi-user OSes from ones that use screen scrapers (like VNC) meant for one user at a time.
Infocom always had the best goodies.
But if they're not smart, they'll translate it from the original Z-Code to Something Else, and it'll be a huge screw up.
I think you get a second chance by having Ford feed the dog. Eventually you (as Arthur Dent) wind up in your own mazelike brain. By removing your common sense, you'll be able to take tea and no tea at the same time (since it won't be able to say you can't do that).
That's the beauty of Infocom games. The solution is blindingly obvious in retrospect, but "enjoying poetry" (or using "enjoy" as a verb at all) never crossed my mind.
I was able to deduce the babel fish puzzle back when the game first came out. Once one remembers the last item the Rube Goldberg-style sequence stops at, it's not hard to figure out what part of your limited inventory to use next.
But "enjoy poetry" was one thing I never figured out until I found a guide to the game.
I've got a ton of expensive, import or out-of-print CDs backed up to lossless FLAC files. And, I've got an ISO dump of an out-of-print import DVD kept backed-up to my hard drive also. It doesn't make sense to backup common CDs or DVDs I can pick up replacements for at any store. But when it comes to the rare stuff, making an extra backup is a sensible precaution.
The problem with cmp is that it only works for a single file. If one wants to compare all the files across two different directory trees (like /home and /mnt/home_backup) diff's recursive option is very handy. Add the -q option (which reports only whether the files are different, not the differences themselves) and diff is a fine method of verifying local backups - such as an rsync'ed USB drive.
Last I checked (Java 1.2), Java as a language was mostly small and simple - not much more complicated than C. But the volume of Java APIs and their complexity required a decent reference of some sort. Python is a larger and more powerful language, and tends to use less complex APIs to achieve the same tasks.
This won't break MAME's dynarec MIPS core? Has R. Belmont said that explicitly? I get the nasty feeling NX will make kinst and friends run very slowly.
I'm pretty sure the Cybermen were Kit Peddler's creation (co-created by Gerry Davis). The weakness to gold was a late addition, first appearing in "Revenge of the Cybermen", IIRC. Since the Cybermen are an ever-evolving adversary, I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to write out that particular weakness and return to the characters' roots. The theme of dehumanizing medicine is surely as relevent today as it was back in the 60s when they were created. Though keeping them tall yet somewhat slow (yet virtually unstoppable) is part of their trademark.
Near as I can tell, the GBA has a custom ARM 7 chip with an embedded Z80 for backwards compatibility with old Gameboy titles. If the DS leaves out the Z80 functionality, it'll lose compatibility with the old Gameboy and Gameboy Color titles. But I don't think there's been any definite word whether that's the case or not.
If the PSP comes to market at $300 with 3-5 hours of battery life compared to 10+ hours for the DS and a probable $150 price tag, the DS will bury the PSP easily - despite the PSP's obvious technical merits. Battery life and initial cost are everything in the portable market, and the backwards-compatibility with the huge GBA library gives the DS even more of an edge.
A receipt that tells who you've voted for would be quite valuable to anyone who'd like to buy your vote - or threaten you to vote for a particular candidate. Ensuring that all those receipts stay with the election officials is preferable, but then there's no point in using computers in the vote casting process to begin with.
And I don't think that's such a bad idea.
Every one except the Saturn, that is.
It's in the second one: I am Spock. It's a fascinating and surprisingly well-written book. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the whole Star Trek phenomenon from an actor's point of view.