Divx is just an implementation of mpeg4, a low-bitrate compression that is intended for streaming video over low-bandwith lines like 56k6 modems. mpeg1 and 2 are still better, but also a lot bigge
Dude, you are just so wrong! DivX is a hack of MS MPEG-4 candidate code. It has been changed to allow it to be used in AVI files (MS only wants you to use it in ASF due to copy protection stuff) and adds in the Fraunhofer mp3 encode for audio. I believe it is VBR. This hack was possible because the MS code was available under an NDA and 'escaped'. DivX (and MPEG-4 in general) whup MPEG-1,2 ass! A standard VCD is 1374 kbits/sec, fits about an hour of 352x240 video on a CD, and looks terrible. MPEG-1 caps out there while MPEG-2 can do higher resolution/bitrates, but still aint great. MPEG-4 can easily fit about 45 minutes of 640x480 (resolution I sometimes use with TV captures) on a CD. Check out some DivX trailers and you'll see what I mean.
A lot of people claim DivX is better than a DVD (MPEG-2), which is true. Just don't expect to see than when you are stuffing the same video on one or two CDs instead of a DVD. It still looks great though.
One other thing, this increased compression is traded off with greater processing power to decompress. You could do MPEG-1 with a pentium 133 or something, but I wouldn't suggest MPEG-4 without at least a pentium 450 or equivalent.
Well considering DOC can store ANYTHING - including the description of 3D objects yes.
This comment is meaningless. Any file can store anything. BFD. Does DOC have predefined data structures to store a 3D database? No. It does have the ability to 'serialize' (is this a Java only term?) OLE/whatever objects. Not at all the same.
Why would a company with the smartest people in the world make life more difficult on themselves by making their own formats hard to read?
I don't know, maybe to make more money? I try to stay relatively sane when it comes to MS bashing, but doesn't it only make sense that if the file format is what is locking your product into the market, you will do everything you can to keep it a secret? Autodesk did it with DWG (I had to muck around with reading DWGs a couple years ago and there was incredibly little info out there).
Microsoft are moving to XML based everything. Serialization of com services will be XML based rather binary based as they are today as well. Just don't complain when your documents are 100MB.
I won't be complaining since all my XML docs will be gzip'ed and all my apps will automagically decompress them before reading them. XML is a standard data markup format, but just wait until MS goes crazy with its DTD. Just because you can parse a file doesn't mean you have a clue as to how it works.
Now, if only FlasK could be ported to Linux...we'd be made in the shade.
I haven't used flasK mpeg but is there any technical reason it can't be ported? The source code (GPL) is available on its homepage under DOCS. Any coders should also look into the DivX port contest. In the files section there's a ton of useful source code, though maybe not all legal.
Anyone have a technical description of MPEG-4 compression? I understand a bit about MPEG-1 with distance vectors and all that, but what is it about MPEG-4 that makes it so cool?
Orthogonally apropos, I remember that back in the day.uk sites were always incredibly slow and flaky, while.de sites performed well for me. I thought the US would be connected to UK then to rest of Europe so it didn't really make sense to me. This was from West Coast US.
Is Microsoft trying to piss the gov't off? They are being treatened with a split up so they decide to patent their file formats (ASF) and force programs to stop using them (VirtualDUB). Now they are placing incredible burdens on consumers to go along with the MS tax? What the hell are they thinking? Interesting side note: I heard on the radio an interview with a law professor who theorized that all of MS patents were basically useless now since there was no chance that MS would risk sueing anyone at this point. Knowing Gates' huge ego, I'm not sure if that's true.
It was already screwed up that when I bought a laptop a couple of years ago the only copy of Windows was 30 disk images on the HD, this was also the only source of drivers. Completely brilliant.
The obvious answer is that the web should follow the TV based model of advertising - Subliminal Messages! Why is television advertising FNORD! effective? I don't think it's because we watch commercials and then make a balanced, logical decision to purchase the product. It's because we are constantly bombarded with consumptive (as in consuming, not TB) pressure. You think I drink Coke(tm) because I like it? Hell no! It tastes like shit, rots my teeth, and makes me fat. I drink it because I have been programmed since birth to drink gallons of the stuff.
The only way to get ads to work online is to bombard the consumer, not just have these puny little banner ads. Maybe have branded web sites, like Redhat's User Friendly, or Mountain Dew's Slashdot, where ads are integrated with the content. Imagine: Posted by Hemos SomeGuy writes "check out these new low power Intel chips, they're hella cool!" Wow, that's almost as refreshing as the caffeine packed Mountain Dew that I'm drinking right now.
This could easily be accomplished with something like the askjesus.org filter, so that existing web sites don't have to be changed. As long as the user isn't presented with any alternatives, they will have to expose FNORD! themselves to advertising.
Mark my words, the web will become a uber-capitalist wasteland in 3-5 years!
I don't remember any banner ads on any Gopher sites...
I believe current Linux kernels do this by default. During the recent ungodly heat in the Bay Area I had lots of problems keeping my Celeron 300 running at 450 under Win98, the processor was extremely hot to the touch. Under Linux the thing oc'ed fine and was at room temp (this is with the basic heat sink & fan).
There are utils for windows systems like Waterfall and CPU Idle that do the same thing.
Text adventures were fun because you interacted with people and monsters, not just wandered around a bunch of pretty, inanimate objects. The only draw Myst really had for me was to see all the nicely rendered graphics; the story never developed enough to suck me in.
NTSC TVs have 60 interlaced FIELDS per second, so watching the IRS Smackdown would not be as exciting as playing GL Quake on a GeForce 4 RDR Turbo++ Alpha.
And I played HHGTTG on a IIe goddamit! I know I still have that Don't Panic pin somewhere...
x86 has always been obsolete since the RISC technology has always been ahead of it
When the PPro came out its integer performance was faster than any RISC chip at the time. The G4 is about the same speed on integer ops in real life. x86 FPU is seriously fucked though.
People are already making 100 page long empty posts, I think the problem is the 500 character wide lines. Of course this could easily be fixed by forcing line breaks at 60 or 80 characters per line.
Just what I've been waiting for: boredom at 30fps. Myst was ok for its day, when PC multimedia was a relatively new thing ( I was kickin' it with my proprietary interface, x2 CD-ROM ); but am I the only one who thought Myst was more a slide show than a game?
You might want to be careful about keeping all your archives on floppies. I have had nothing but bad experiences with info on floppies. I've seen new, brand name disks give read errors within a month. I've had 30 disk spanning archives ruined by a single bad sector in disk 23. I would hate to think of irreplacable photos gone due to media failure.
It might be a better plan to copy the floppies to your hard drive and when you get enough pictures burn a CD - CD burners are incredibly cheap as are the media. CD have the advantage of being even more widely accepted than 3.5s these days.
Slashdot denizens: Write a killer trojan/worm/virus but put a license agreement in it. Have it play a stupid animation or something, you know the suckers out there love that crap. Have a pop up box that clears you of any responsibility, then have it infect every binary it can find, send itself to every email address on the hard drive, and start a DOS attack against www.microsoft.com. No problem, right? All you wrote was an animation, there must have been a couple of bugs though...
On May 10, 2000, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it has reached settlement agreements with Universal Music and Video Distribution, Sony Corp. of America, Time-Warner Inc., EMI Music Distribution and Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), the five largest distributors of recorded music who sell approximately 85 percent of all compact discs (CDs) purchased in the United States to end their allegedly illegal advertising policies that affected prices for CDs. "The FTC estimates that U.S. consumers may have paid as much as $480 million more than they should have for CDs and other music because of these policies over the last three years," said FTC Chairman Robert Pitofsky
Goddamnit, I really like Grolsch Beer. But I don't know if I can feel right about my hard earned currency lining the pocket of this irrational megalomaniac. I guess I'll just stick with the local brews.
At least everyone has yet another reason not to purchase music from the Cranberries, 98 Degrees, or those other crappy bands.
Another organization that has been important in the computing community is USENIX. I haven't seen them get any attention on slashdot, but they donated US$100,000 to EFF to help fight the DeCSS case as well as cryptography cases.
I cannot forget that the reason such laws exist are for a simple purpose: to benefit the artists who created the entertainment (and the people who financially backed those artists).
Actually, American copyright laws exist to benefit the American people. Implicit in that is the balance between restricting rights in order to promote production of creative works, and giving people rights to enjoy creative works and to express themselves.
Is it illegal for you to lend a book to a friend? No. Is it illegal for an institution to lend books to anyone for free? No - it's called a library.
Drexler was one of the first to really study nanotech, giving lots of thought to its scientific underpinnings as well as the dangers that it could pose.
I saw Bill Joy on the News Hour and he struck me as incredibly naive, taking an extremely simplistic viewpoint of nanotech and biotech.
Conforming to fucked-up beauty standards just perpetuates them further and messes up people's self esteem.
I've never gone out with a girl who regularly wears makeup. I've always found that there's an inverse relationship of intelligence to concern with looks. Sure you should get haircuts and try and dress nice, but people who look in the mirror every 5 minutes have problems.
I am thinking of getting forehead implants so I can look really brainy. I think it will give me an advantage in job interviews and will help me intimidate my chess opponets.
Slashdot Mirror
Divx is just an implementation of mpeg4, a low-bitrate compression that is intended for streaming video over low-bandwith lines like 56k6 modems. mpeg1 and 2 are still better, but also a lot bigge
Dude, you are just so wrong! DivX is a hack of MS MPEG-4 candidate code. It has been changed to allow it to be used in AVI files (MS only wants you to use it in ASF due to copy protection stuff) and adds in the Fraunhofer mp3 encode for audio. I believe it is VBR. This hack was possible because the MS code was available under an NDA and 'escaped'. DivX (and MPEG-4 in general) whup MPEG-1,2 ass! A standard VCD is 1374 kbits/sec, fits about an hour of 352x240 video on a CD, and looks terrible. MPEG-1 caps out there while MPEG-2 can do higher resolution/bitrates, but still aint great. MPEG-4 can easily fit about 45 minutes of 640x480 (resolution I sometimes use with TV captures) on a CD. Check out some DivX trailers and you'll see what I mean.
A lot of people claim DivX is better than a DVD (MPEG-2), which is true. Just don't expect to see than when you are stuffing the same video on one or two CDs instead of a DVD. It still looks great though.
One other thing, this increased compression is traded off with greater processing power to decompress. You could do MPEG-1 with a pentium 133 or something, but I wouldn't suggest MPEG-4 without at least a pentium 450 or equivalent.
Well considering DOC can store ANYTHING - including the description of 3D objects yes.
This comment is meaningless. Any file can store anything. BFD. Does DOC have predefined data structures to store a 3D database? No. It does have the ability to 'serialize' (is this a Java only term?) OLE/whatever objects. Not at all the same.
Why would a company with the smartest people in the world make life more difficult on themselves by making their own formats hard to read?
I don't know, maybe to make more money? I try to stay relatively sane when it comes to MS bashing, but doesn't it only make sense that if the file format is what is locking your product into the market, you will do everything you can to keep it a secret? Autodesk did it with DWG (I had to muck around with reading DWGs a couple years ago and there was incredibly little info out there).
Microsoft are moving to XML based everything. Serialization of com services will be XML based rather binary based as they are today as well. Just don't complain when your documents are 100MB.
I won't be complaining since all my XML docs will be gzip'ed and all my apps will automagically decompress them before reading them. XML is a standard data markup format, but just wait until MS goes crazy with its DTD. Just because you can parse a file doesn't mean you have a clue as to how it works.
Now, if only FlasK could be ported to Linux...we'd be made in the shade.
I haven't used flasK mpeg but is there any technical reason it can't be ported? The source code (GPL) is available on its homepage under DOCS. Any coders should also look into the DivX port contest. In the files section there's a ton of useful source code, though maybe not all legal.
Anyone have a technical description of MPEG-4 compression? I understand a bit about MPEG-1 with distance vectors and all that, but what is it about MPEG-4 that makes it so cool?
Orthogonally apropos, I remember that back in the day .uk sites were always incredibly slow and flaky, while .de sites performed well for me. I thought the US would be connected to UK then to rest of Europe so it didn't really make sense to me. This was from West Coast US.
Is Microsoft trying to piss the gov't off? They are being treatened with a split up so they decide to patent their file formats (ASF) and force programs to stop using them (VirtualDUB). Now they are placing incredible burdens on consumers to go along with the MS tax? What the hell are they thinking? Interesting side note: I heard on the radio an interview with a law professor who theorized that all of MS patents were basically useless now since there was no chance that MS would risk sueing anyone at this point. Knowing Gates' huge ego, I'm not sure if that's true.
It was already screwed up that when I bought a laptop a couple of years ago the only copy of Windows was 30 disk images on the HD, this was also the only source of drivers. Completely brilliant.
The obvious answer is that the web should follow the TV based model of advertising - Subliminal Messages! Why is television advertising FNORD! effective? I don't think it's because we watch commercials and then make a balanced, logical decision to purchase the product. It's because we are constantly bombarded with consumptive (as in consuming, not TB) pressure. You think I drink Coke(tm) because I like it? Hell no! It tastes like shit, rots my teeth, and makes me fat. I drink it because I have been programmed since birth to drink gallons of the stuff.
The only way to get ads to work online is to bombard the consumer, not just have these puny little banner ads. Maybe have branded web sites, like Redhat's User Friendly, or Mountain Dew's Slashdot, where ads are integrated with the content. Imagine:
Posted by Hemos
SomeGuy writes "check out these new low power Intel chips, they're hella cool!" Wow, that's almost as refreshing as the caffeine packed Mountain Dew that I'm drinking right now.
This could easily be accomplished with something like the askjesus.org filter, so that existing web sites don't have to be changed. As long as the user isn't presented with any alternatives, they will have to expose FNORD! themselves to advertising.
Mark my words, the web will become a uber-capitalist wasteland in 3-5 years!
I don't remember any banner ads on any Gopher sites...
I believe current Linux kernels do this by default. During the recent ungodly heat in the Bay Area I had lots of problems keeping my Celeron 300 running at 450 under Win98, the processor was extremely hot to the touch. Under Linux the thing oc'ed fine and was at room temp (this is with the basic heat sink & fan).
There are utils for windows systems like Waterfall and CPU Idle that do the same thing.
Text adventures were fun because you interacted with people and monsters, not just wandered around a bunch of pretty, inanimate objects. The only draw Myst really had for me was to see all the nicely rendered graphics; the story never developed enough to suck me in.
NTSC TVs have 60 interlaced FIELDS per second, so watching the IRS Smackdown would not be as exciting as playing GL Quake on a GeForce 4 RDR Turbo++ Alpha.
And I played HHGTTG on a IIe goddamit! I know I still have that Don't Panic pin somewhere...
Here's a bit of technical info on the whole psychoacoustical audio compression thing:
click here
I didn't see any attributions so I'm not sure where the concepts originated from.
x86 has always been obsolete since the RISC technology has always been ahead of it
When the PPro came out its integer performance was faster than any RISC chip at the time. The G4 is about the same speed on integer ops in real life. x86 FPU is seriously fucked though.
People are already making 100 page long empty posts, I think the problem is the 500 character wide lines. Of course this could easily be fixed by forcing line breaks at 60 or 80 characters per line.
Just what I've been waiting for: boredom at 30fps. Myst was ok for its day, when PC multimedia was a relatively new thing ( I was kickin' it with my proprietary interface, x2 CD-ROM ); but am I the only one who thought Myst was more a slide show than a game?
You might want to be careful about keeping all your archives on floppies. I have had nothing but bad experiences with info on floppies. I've seen new, brand name disks give read errors within a month. I've had 30 disk spanning archives ruined by a single bad sector in disk 23. I would hate to think of irreplacable photos gone due to media failure.
It might be a better plan to copy the floppies to your hard drive and when you get enough pictures burn a CD - CD burners are incredibly cheap as are the media. CD have the advantage of being even more widely accepted than 3.5s these days.
Evidently the armored car company only had problems with people being too smart. Dishonest stupid people get caught, dishonest smart people don't ;)
Slashdot denizens:
Write a killer trojan/worm/virus but put a license agreement in it. Have it play a stupid animation or something, you know the suckers out there love that crap. Have a pop up box that clears you of any responsibility, then have it infect every binary it can find, send itself to every email address on the hard drive, and start a DOS attack against www.microsoft.com. No problem, right? All you wrote was an animation, there must have been a couple of bugs though...
I think I played a demo for it before. Didn't it have neural networks so that the NPCs could learn or something? That's all I can recall.
(from http://www.lchb.com/cd.htm)
On May 10, 2000, the Federal Trade Commission announced that it has reached settlement agreements with Universal Music and Video Distribution, Sony Corp. of America, Time-Warner Inc., EMI Music Distribution and Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), the five largest distributors of recorded music who sell approximately 85 percent of all compact discs (CDs) purchased in the United States to end their allegedly illegal advertising policies that affected prices for CDs. "The FTC estimates that U.S. consumers may have paid as much as $480 million more than they should have for CDs and other music because of these policies over the last three years," said FTC Chairman Robert Pitofsky
Goddamnit, I really like Grolsch Beer. But I don't know if I can feel right about my hard earned currency lining the pocket of this irrational megalomaniac. I guess I'll just stick with the local brews.
At least everyone has yet another reason not to purchase music from the Cranberries, 98 Degrees, or those other crappy bands.
Well, unless you believe John Carmack is the devil.
No, but John Romero is.
Strousup gave us istream::operator(char *) with _exactly_ the same problem
If you're going to use an istream you might as well use std::string. I always use fgets anyway, just train yourself early and ignore that gets exists.
Another organization that has been important in the computing community is USENIX. I haven't seen them get any attention on slashdot, but they donated US$100,000 to EFF to help fight the DeCSS case as well as cryptography cases.
I cannot forget that the reason such laws exist are for a simple purpose: to benefit the artists who created the entertainment (and the people who financially backed those artists).
Actually, American copyright laws exist to benefit the American people. Implicit in that is the balance between restricting rights in order to promote production of creative works, and giving people rights to enjoy creative works and to express themselves.
Is it illegal for you to lend a book to a friend? No. Is it illegal for an institution to lend books to anyone for free? No - it's called a library.
For another viewpoint, check out:
http://www.foresight.org/EOC/
Drexler was one of the first to really study nanotech, giving lots of thought to its scientific underpinnings as well as the dangers that it could pose.
I saw Bill Joy on the News Hour and he struck me as incredibly naive, taking an extremely simplistic viewpoint of nanotech and biotech.
I'm sure BMRT will be able to work on OS X.
Conforming to fucked-up beauty standards just perpetuates them further and messes up people's self esteem.
I've never gone out with a girl who regularly wears makeup. I've always found that there's an inverse relationship of intelligence to concern with looks. Sure you should get haircuts and try and dress nice, but people who look in the mirror every 5 minutes have problems.
I am thinking of getting forehead implants so I can look really brainy. I think it will give me an advantage in job interviews and will help me intimidate my chess opponets.