You misunderstand what Kubric was doing. He'd frame his shots so that they would transfer directly (without pan/scan) to 4:3, without making TV viewers want to puke. They were still intended to be matted to widescreen, but the idea was not to completely butcher the 4:3 experience.
Most widescreen movies have a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. A widescreen TV is 16:9, which works out to a AR of about 1.7. DVDs are encoded with either 1.33 (4:3) or 1.85 aspect. 2.35 widescreen movies are actually encoded at 1.85 and then scretched out to the appropriate width, complete with the black bars on top and bottom (look closely at a badly transferred/encoded DVD sometime, you'll notice the bars). In fact, anything that is not 4:3 is anamorphically encoded in 1.85 with approriately thick bars, or letterboxed in a 4:3 frame.
So there aren't too many combinations for your DVD player to handle.
Yeah, whatever. Gator itself may be innocuous enough, depending on which of the dozen versions you have. Each version comes with a different privacy policy, which are 10 pages in the 'condensed' version.
Gator is tied comes with something called OfferCompanion, which most certainly IS spyware/popup adware, and has been implicated in various 'drive-by download' schemes. It spams users with various offers, and advertises itself as being able to very accurately target users. How it targets them I leave to your imagination, but will give you a hint: it asks users NO questions to create their profile.
Re:journalling isn't new - no fragmentation would
on
Looking at Longhorn
·
· Score: 1
Hmm...
On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 02:02:50PM +0800, Ñî ×ÀÍ wrote: > Will stephen's defrag run in a ext3 partion correctly? > What about the performance?
I just got this question 4 times --- once would have been enough!
The old defrag should work if you have a 1k blocksize (which most partitions will NOT have), as far as I know. If the defrag is interrupted for any reason, however, your filesystem will be toast.
Cheers,
Stephen
Re:journalling isn't new - no fragmentation would
on
Looking at Longhorn
·
· Score: 1
What WOULD be a great innovation for the Windows world is a filesystem which does not suffer from fragmentation. (And this truly has been in the UNIX world for ages).
Uh, right, that would be why half my ext3 partitions have 20%+ fragmentation (as reported by fsck), and no way to get rid of it.
Uh, OK, so instead of restoring a file from backup, you cut the power to the machine, killing all jobs and wasting who knows how many people's time and work, rebooted, waited for fsck to run its course, all to not have to go to back up tapes? Maybe you just should have reviewed why your backup procedures sucked so much.
My first real gaming experience was Wolfenstein, and I played that over and over for hours, tons of fun.
Doom was actually scary. You'd turn the lights off, get the headphones on (since there was no surround sound back then, headphones were best), and you'd be seriously pumped running around, opening doors, listening for the imps.
I was also pretty impressed with Unreal; just walking around the world (and following those cute little animal things around:) and the graphics and the music... very nice for its time.
The game that seriously threw me off was Sanitarium. It was kinda a role playing game, but really just involved puzzle solving of various kinda, and putting the story together. The story was ultimately linear, but very very good. Like being inside a really good movie. There were a couple of scenes where I got very spooked and hair was standing on my neck and arms.
People that don't read the source code arent the sort of people who are likely to rember names IMO. (Or care about names generaly for that matter)
That's missing the point. The credits are not there to drill obscure names into people's memory. A little blurb in --help or --about or --version should suffice here. Credit should be given, because it's the Right Thing to do. If someone uses some of your code, no one will ever know about it, even though the contribution was valuable enough, obviously.
This would be similar to credits shown in movies. Do you really care who the second unit's driver was? Would you remember the name? But they're shown all the same, even at the cost of an extra song for the sound track.
- This crashes explorer as a whole, due to integration
Mo it doesn't. At least not necessarily, not on Win2000, configuration depending. It crashes the current window of IE only, so even if you have other IE windows open, they're not affected.
Not to mention that half the game play consists of waiting for the levels to load. Why the ship/mission briefing level took the longest, I'll never understand. It was so utterly useless too. In general, the levels were too short, and not challanging enough, except for one part early on which forced me to switch to the easy setting for the whole game. I just wasn't willing to spend 2 hours trying to outmuscle a couple of bad dudes. But it sure does look pretty.
...it a bit, as you don't know what you are hosting.
Well, duh, that's exactly the point! If you know what you're hosting then you know what people download, and others know what you are downloading, so that kinda shoots down that whole plausible deniability thing, hmm?
It's not just deniability of an action, but also content. As everything is encrypted, you don't know what you are downloading. And an observer certainly doesn't. They also wouldn't know if you are downloding something for yourself, or on behalf of someone else, or as part of the segmentation of content scheme.
Re:AAC is pretty weak, no marketing can change tha
on
AAC vs. OGG vs. MP3
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That only 41% chose the WAV as the best says to me one of two things: - the listeners don't know what the hell they're doing - all the formats are pretty damn good If the compressed formats are able to fool or confuse over 50% of the testers, then we're probably just splitting hairs here.
I'm not surprised that Apple is using AAC. For one thing, it is clearly better than the decade-old MP3 format in all respects
Whoa, whoa! Just because mp3 has been around so long doesn't mean that it's '10 years old'. The encoders are being constantly improved. We now have VBR. Frauenhoffer and LAME use different psychoacoustic engines to generate the compressed stream, so you have at least 2 to choose from.
Windows is not necessarily better than unix just because unix is 'older'.
Exactly. ogg/vorbis looks interesting, but there's just no way I'm switching to it any time soon, and I'm definitely NOT re-encoding. Not just because I have better things to do with my time (I probably don't). Simply put, I have too much time and money invested in the tools and system to (semi-)automatically rip, create, tag, index, file, manage, stream, etc, mp3 files, not.ogg files. To suddenly juggle two formats, or even completely switch, would be just way too much work. I'd rather keep on going, even if I need more bits to encode at the same quality.
This is a similar argument to the persistance to Windows; the installed base, and time, money and skills invested in your current platform and the tools that are available for it. Why bother changing everything for a dubious incremental benefit?
Where do you get this argument that there are people giving you music for free? And how do you extend it to ALL music? OK, so some bands are desperate for people to listen to their music, and will give it away for free. Others already have lots of money, and don't care if you listen to their stuff for free, as long as you listen to it period. Others still will make enough money from people paying to hear their music, that they do't care if a certain subset of the population doesn pay. But this is the extent of your example. Most people expect to be paid for what they produce. Most CD pressing plants expect to be paid for pressing the CD. Most sound engineers expect to be paid for mixing the tracks and making them sound good. Guitar and keyboard and sound software makers expect to be paid for their product as well. Where is this money coming from?
If I give a poor person free food, are they to assume all food is now free for the taking, evenever they like, because they got free food from someone? Are the non-poor to assume the same thing?
Look, we've all heard your opinions before, they're hardly original, but make a great excuse for downloading sonfs ogg P2P networks.
As someone mentioned, record companies are not colluding to fix prices or lock out competitors, not any more than in any other industry. If you can't afford the CDs, that's tough. Why should CDs be priced so that they're affordable by everyone? Should Porsches be price so they're affordable by everyone as well? Market forces are at work here, and right now the price is just right (maybe a bit high) for what the market is willing to bear. People are still buying CDs by the bucket load, so the prices can't be that bad.
And how low is low for you? What is the 'right' price? Is the price low enough when YOU can afford to buy CDs? What about the people less fortunate than you, are THEY still justified in getting the music for free illegally? If they are, how come you have to pay? Would you feel so charitable about them and their actions if they're the very cause you're being treated like a criminal every time you step into a music store?
If I really like Porsches, and would really like one, but can't afford it, do I blame Porsche? Do I say, damn those monopolist Germans, they're obviously colluding to keep the masses down! (Porsche et al is about as monopolistic in the auto industry as EMI is in the music industry.) Do I help myself to one off the lot at 3 am and feel justified, because hey, I wouldn't pay for it anyways, so it's not like Porsche's not losing any profits? No! I can't affod it, so I do without. I get by looking at them on the road and in showrooms and in car commercials on TV. What I drive and what I'd LIKE to drive are two separate things, and my actual situation reflects reality, not my dream world. If you can't afford to pay for music, you do the same: listen to the radio, MTV, elevator music, live music in bars, and other music you CAN afford. You don't go out and just HELP yourself to whatever you'd like.
Another case of thinking your opinion is right and everyone else is wrong. Or maybe it's just reality showing through your plan.
All that would happen is the career politicians would become career lobbyists and bureocrats. You think all those randomly selected people would eagerly take to their task? Just look at what happens in the jury system; everyone tries to get off when they get picked, and it's just for a few days of service! You would have all these pissed off people who couldn't care less about the issues they are faced with and just want to get over their term as soon as possible with as little work as possible, and lobbyists wining and dining them, whispering suggestions and solutions. All the guy would say is, oh well, sounds good to me, hmm... sushi & sake... and you're back to the old system, except now you have even less power over those who really run things.
Well, in Quake Team Fortress you could play a spy class, which can disguise itself as enemy, ie, change to enemy skin. I believe the team color on the player list would also change, making a positive id very difficult if you haven't been paying attention, or haven't been a good team player. I always thought that was very cool, and played spy occasionally to amuse myself. Oh yeah, your weapons were an assassin blade, a sleeping dart gun, and a trippy fart cloud:)
I so wish that game hadn't gotten so corrupted by cheaters, I'd still be playing it today.
That both cable and DSL are shared bandwidth at SOME point is a red herring. Everyone in the same neighbourhood shares the cable bandwidth all the way. DSL starts to share at the DSLAM. Right there DSL has one less bottleneck. It is relatively very easy to provision another T3 or DS3 to a phone CO (it probably already has a bunch of dark fiber laying around anyway) than it is to split up a cable neighbourhood ring. Not to mention a hell of a lot cheaper, so it's more likely to happen.
Now, WRT your point about web sites... if everyone went to the same websites and downloaded the same thing at the exact same time, I agree, all bandwidth would be limited by the infrastructure. BUT, the Internet is distributed, so while on DSL a thousand people in your neighbourhood can easily get their full 200KB/s from wherever they are going to (as long as they go a somewhat diversified destinations list), even if those 1000 people went to complete different sites using cable they wouldn't have a prayer of all getting anywhere close to 200kb, hell, not even 20. In reality, DSL bandwidth is limited at the ISP pipe, which is usually pretty much idle, unless run by greedy incompetants, while cable speed is limited by the cable company's willingness to keep splitting up neighbourhood rings.
Most DSL is ADSL, which stands for Asynchronous Digital Subscriber Line. That means that the connection is not a fixed speed. In other words, it's NOT dedicated bandwidth.
ADSL stands for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, and neither asynchronous nor asymetric means the speed is not fixed. Asynchronous means something akin to clockless/not synchronized. Asymmetric means not equal, as in the upload and download are not the same speed.
The speed of the individual components (up/down) is FIXED however, unless your ISP is very generous and uncaps your line. I'm capped at 2.5/896, and 24x7 I can get my full speed for sustained periods of time, from fast, reliable servers. Unlike cable, where in some parts your download speed is still allowed to drop down to below 56k during peak hours, which is also about what most cable ISPs cap their upload as well.
The 'gatling gun' in Predator that Jesse Ventura totes around is a mini gun, and is usually mounted on a chopper or a truck frame. Certainly, no one alive could shoot it handheld with any degree of accuracy; even standing BEHIND the guy fireing one of those wouldn't be very safe.
Slashdot Mirror
You misunderstand what Kubric was doing. He'd frame his shots so that they would transfer directly (without pan/scan) to 4:3, without making TV viewers want to puke. They were still intended to be matted to widescreen, but the idea was not to completely butcher the 4:3 experience.
Most widescreen movies have a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. A widescreen TV is 16:9, which works out to a AR of about 1.7. DVDs are encoded with either 1.33 (4:3) or 1.85 aspect. 2.35 widescreen movies are actually encoded at 1.85 and then scretched out to the appropriate width, complete with the black bars on top and bottom (look closely at a badly transferred/encoded DVD sometime, you'll notice the bars). In fact, anything that is not 4:3 is anamorphically encoded in 1.85 with approriately thick bars, or letterboxed in a 4:3 frame.
So there aren't too many combinations for your DVD player to handle.
Uh... I think the parent was aiming for a +1 Funny... :)
Yeah, whatever. Gator itself may be innocuous enough, depending on which of the dozen versions you have. Each version comes with a different privacy policy, which are 10 pages in the 'condensed' version.
Gator is tied comes with something called OfferCompanion, which most certainly IS spyware/popup adware, and has been implicated in various 'drive-by download' schemes. It spams users with various offers, and advertises itself as being able to very accurately target users. How it targets them I leave to your imagination, but will give you a hint: it asks users NO questions to create their profile.
Hmm...
On Fri, May 10, 2002 at 02:02:50PM +0800, Ñî ×ÀÍ wrote:
> Will stephen's defrag run in a ext3 partion correctly?
> What about the performance?
I just got this question 4 times --- once would have been enough!
The old defrag should work if you have a 1k blocksize (which most
partitions will NOT have), as far as I know. If the defrag is
interrupted for any reason, however, your filesystem will be toast.
Cheers,
Stephen
Uh, right, that would be why half my ext3 partitions have 20%+ fragmentation (as reported by fsck), and no way to get rid of it.
Uh, OK, so instead of restoring a file from backup, you cut the power to the machine, killing all jobs and wasting who knows how many people's time and work, rebooted, waited for fsck to run its course, all to not have to go to back up tapes? Maybe you just should have reviewed why your backup procedures sucked so much.
My first real gaming experience was Wolfenstein, and I played that over and over for hours, tons of fun.
:) and the graphics and the music... very nice for its time.
Doom was actually scary. You'd turn the lights off, get the headphones on (since there was no surround sound back then, headphones were best), and you'd be seriously pumped running around, opening doors, listening for the imps.
I was also pretty impressed with Unreal; just walking around the world (and following those cute little animal things around
The game that seriously threw me off was Sanitarium. It was kinda a role playing game, but really just involved puzzle solving of various kinda, and putting the story together. The story was ultimately linear, but very very good. Like being inside a really good movie. There were a couple of scenes where I got very spooked and hair was standing on my neck and arms.
That's missing the point. The credits are not there to drill obscure names into people's memory. A little blurb in --help or --about or --version should suffice here. Credit should be given, because it's the Right Thing to do. If someone uses some of your code, no one will ever know about it, even though the contribution was valuable enough, obviously.
This would be similar to credits shown in movies. Do you really care who the second unit's driver was? Would you remember the name? But they're shown all the same, even at the cost of an extra song for the sound track.
Mo it doesn't. At least not necessarily, not on Win2000, configuration depending. It crashes the current window of IE only, so even if you have other IE windows open, they're not affected.
Not to mention that half the game play consists of waiting for the levels to load. Why the ship/mission briefing level took the longest, I'll never understand. It was so utterly useless too. In general, the levels were too short, and not challanging enough, except for one part early on which forced me to switch to the easy setting for the whole game. I just wasn't willing to spend 2 hours trying to outmuscle a couple of bad dudes. But it sure does look pretty.
Further supporting the theory that t'pol is some kind of outcast, and so got assigned to babysit the humans?
Well, duh, that's exactly the point! If you know what you're hosting then you know what people download, and others know what you are downloading, so that kinda shoots down that whole plausible deniability thing, hmm?
Hmm, and what legal judgments would those be, eaxctly?
It's not just deniability of an action, but also content. As everything is encrypted, you don't know what you are downloading. And an observer certainly doesn't. They also wouldn't know if you are downloding something for yourself, or on behalf of someone else, or as part of the segmentation of content scheme.
That only 41% chose the WAV as the best says to me one of two things:
- the listeners don't know what the hell they're doing
- all the formats are pretty damn good
If the compressed formats are able to fool or confuse over 50% of the testers, then we're probably just splitting hairs here.
Whoa, whoa! Just because mp3 has been around so long doesn't mean that it's '10 years old'. The encoders are being constantly improved. We now have VBR. Frauenhoffer and LAME use different psychoacoustic engines to generate the compressed stream, so you have at least 2 to choose from.
Windows is not necessarily better than unix just because unix is 'older'.
Exactly. ogg/vorbis looks interesting, but there's just no way I'm switching to it any time soon, and I'm definitely NOT re-encoding. Not just because I have better things to do with my time (I probably don't). Simply put, I have too much time and money invested in the tools and system to (semi-)automatically rip, create, tag, index, file, manage, stream, etc, mp3 files, not .ogg files. To suddenly juggle two formats, or even completely switch, would be just way too much work. I'd rather keep on going, even if I need more bits to encode at the same quality.
This is a similar argument to the persistance to Windows; the installed base, and time, money and skills invested in your current platform and the tools that are available for it. Why bother changing everything for a dubious incremental benefit?
Where do you get this argument that there are people giving you music for free? And how do you extend it to ALL music? OK, so some bands are desperate for people to listen to their music, and will give it away for free. Others already have lots of money, and don't care if you listen to their stuff for free, as long as you listen to it period. Others still will make enough money from people paying to hear their music, that they do't care if a certain subset of the population doesn pay. But this is the extent of your example. Most people expect to be paid for what they produce. Most CD pressing plants expect to be paid for pressing the CD. Most sound engineers expect to be paid for mixing the tracks and making them sound good. Guitar and keyboard and sound software makers expect to be paid for their product as well. Where is this money coming from?
If I give a poor person free food, are they to assume all food is now free for the taking, evenever they like, because they got free food from someone? Are the non-poor to assume the same thing?
Look, we've all heard your opinions before, they're hardly original, but make a great excuse for downloading sonfs ogg P2P networks.
As someone mentioned, record companies are not colluding to fix prices or lock out competitors, not any more than in any other industry. If you can't afford the CDs, that's tough. Why should CDs be priced so that they're affordable by everyone? Should Porsches be price so they're affordable by everyone as well? Market forces are at work here, and right now the price is just right (maybe a bit high) for what the market is willing to bear. People are still buying CDs by the bucket load, so the prices can't be that bad.
And how low is low for you? What is the 'right' price? Is the price low enough when YOU can afford to buy CDs? What about the people less fortunate than you, are THEY still justified in getting the music for free illegally? If they are, how come you have to pay? Would you feel so charitable about them and their actions if they're the very cause you're being treated like a criminal every time you step into a music store?
If I really like Porsches, and would really like one, but can't afford it, do I blame Porsche? Do I say, damn those monopolist Germans, they're obviously colluding to keep the masses down! (Porsche et al is about as monopolistic in the auto industry as EMI is in the music industry.) Do I help myself to one off the lot at 3 am and feel justified, because hey, I wouldn't pay for it anyways, so it's not like Porsche's not losing any profits? No! I can't affod it, so I do without. I get by looking at them on the road and in showrooms and in car commercials on TV. What I drive and what I'd LIKE to drive are two separate things, and my actual situation reflects reality, not my dream world. If you can't afford to pay for music, you do the same: listen to the radio, MTV, elevator music, live music in bars, and other music you CAN afford. You don't go out and just HELP yourself to whatever you'd like.
Another case of thinking your opinion is right and everyone else is wrong. Or maybe it's just reality showing through your plan.
All that would happen is the career politicians would become career lobbyists and bureocrats. You think all those randomly selected people would eagerly take to their task? Just look at what happens in the jury system; everyone tries to get off when they get picked, and it's just for a few days of service! You would have all these pissed off people who couldn't care less about the issues they are faced with and just want to get over their term as soon as possible with as little work as possible, and lobbyists wining and dining them, whispering suggestions and solutions. All the guy would say is, oh well, sounds good to me, hmm... sushi & sake... and you're back to the old system, except now you have even less power over those who really run things.
Well, in Quake Team Fortress you could play a spy class, which can disguise itself as enemy, ie, change to enemy skin. I believe the team color on the player list would also change, making a positive id very difficult if you haven't been paying attention, or haven't been a good team player. I always thought that was very cool, and played spy occasionally to amuse myself. Oh yeah, your weapons were an assassin blade, a sleeping dart gun, and a trippy fart cloud :)
I so wish that game hadn't gotten so corrupted by cheaters, I'd still be playing it today.
That both cable and DSL are shared bandwidth at SOME point is a red herring. Everyone in the same neighbourhood shares the cable bandwidth all the way. DSL starts to share at the DSLAM. Right there DSL has one less bottleneck. It is relatively very easy to provision another T3 or DS3 to a phone CO (it probably already has a bunch of dark fiber laying around anyway) than it is to split up a cable neighbourhood ring. Not to mention a hell of a lot cheaper, so it's more likely to happen.
Now, WRT your point about web sites... if everyone went to the same websites and downloaded the same thing at the exact same time, I agree, all bandwidth would be limited by the infrastructure. BUT, the Internet is distributed, so while on DSL a thousand people in your neighbourhood can easily get their full 200KB/s from wherever they are going to (as long as they go a somewhat diversified destinations list), even if those 1000 people went to complete different sites using cable they wouldn't have a prayer of all getting anywhere close to 200kb, hell, not even 20. In reality, DSL bandwidth is limited at the ISP pipe, which is usually pretty much idle, unless run by greedy incompetants, while cable speed is limited by the cable company's willingness to keep splitting up neighbourhood rings.
ADSL stands for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line, and neither asynchronous nor asymetric means the speed is not fixed. Asynchronous means something akin to clockless/not synchronized. Asymmetric means not equal, as in the upload and download are not the same speed.
The speed of the individual components (up/down) is FIXED however, unless your ISP is very generous and uncaps your line. I'm capped at 2.5/896, and 24x7 I can get my full speed for sustained periods of time, from fast, reliable servers. Unlike cable, where in some parts your download speed is still allowed to drop down to below 56k during peak hours, which is also about what most cable ISPs cap their upload as well.
The 'gatling gun' in Predator that Jesse Ventura totes around is a mini gun, and is usually mounted on a chopper or a truck frame. Certainly, no one alive could shoot it handheld with any degree of accuracy; even standing BEHIND the guy fireing one of those wouldn't be very safe.