I grabbed it back in April when it first appeared at the nearest real bookstore...
Like the review says, this book is entirely about COOKING ITSELF, not about recipes (though it does include several for illustrative purposes), which is something I like, since cooking seems to bo the one "artistic" talent I've got any noteworthy amount of.
Also recommended - Shirley Corriher's "Cookwise" (she is, coincidentally, the "Food Scientist" that appears occasionally on Alton Brown's show - anybody know if the Nutritional Anthropologist that frequently appears on his show has written a book yet as well?), which is similar but is more focussed around "types of food" rather than "techniques of cooking" [she also has a section on eggs, as well as a section on breads and pastries, a section on meats, a section on sweets, etc.], and, of course, the Granddaddy of them all, Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" (VERY good food-science book...without a single recipe wasting space in it!) Compared to these, though, Alton Brown's book is probably the most "accessible" to the non-nerdly, non-culinary audience (while still being very informative). If you've seen his show [also highly recommended!] you're familiar with his 'informative in plain and entertaining language' style.
With the sad situation where nearly the entire "Cooking" section of the bookstore is bloated with "lists of recipes - instructions even a robot can follow mindlessly" (BAH! RECIPES ARE FOR THE WEAK!:-) ), it always pleases me greatly to see a good book on "cooking theory and practice" like this one show up at the bookstore.
The book's about COOKING, not just "meat". The ingredients, in fact, are secondary in the whole book (with the exception of the section on "eggs", which discusses the effects of adding eggs to food [and how it affects the cooking]) to the actual techniques of "cooking food"...
Anyone know how a PNG photo compares to a JPG one?
In my experience, for photographic images, jpeg is (on the whole) better, in terms of space taken up. Basically, PNG's should look slightly better, but be much larger. For NON-photographic images (diagrams, things with lots of blocks of solid color, etc. - i.e. stuff that.gif USED to be better for technically, before PNG came out) PNG is MUCH better than jpeg.
This is a purely subjective opinion, though. It would be interesting to see some sort of improved "jpng" or something of the sort developed to supply a patent-unencumbered lossy image compression scheme analogous to.png's lossless one, to combat this ridiculous litigation...
Quicktime in Linux and such...
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QuickTime 6 Is Out
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually, quicktime seems to work quite well on linux via, for example, mplayer, with the sole exception that I've run into of SVQ3 (Sorenson, of course). SVQ1 is even working now, with optimized code (also appearing in FFMPEG) based on the reverse engineering done by the folks working on Xine. Oddly enough, the specifications page for QT6 mentiones SVQ2 and SVQ3, but implies that it DOESN'T support SVQ1...
If the release of QT6 means that MPEG4 will become the "default" codec for QuickTime movies as time goes on (as some posts, As
well as several of the QuickTime pages at Apple, are hinting), the "quicktime barrier" to video on linux will all but disappear, since as far as I can tell just about every variant of MPEG4 works on Linux in some form or another. I suppose this depends on how the dispute between Apple and Sorenson goes...(anybody heard anything about that lately?) and how long it takes someone to work out how to interpret the type of what I assume are "pointer files" or something of the sort on the previously mentioned apple Quicktime Mpeg4 page (mplayer seems to have trouble decoding them...)
Of course, somewhere in here I should insert the obligatory comment about Ogg Theora and how I wish they'd hurry up and get the mailing lists working and get a working prototype that I can test, but as I can't think of what to say, I won't....
Re:Great...(slightly but not totally OT)
on
QuickTime 6 Is Out
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· Score: 1
On a related note - I've been trying to figure out how to set up mplayer as the "helper application" for.avi's and.mov's and so on in Konqueror, and the more I try, the stupider I feel.
The "substitution codes" for the command lines aren't well documented (e.g. "%U" for "URL" and "%f" for local file...what are the rest?) and I can't seem to avoid getting "can't find a plugin for." (no typo - that's what the error box says)...
Playing "by hand" from the command line works fine, I just get lazy occasionally and want to be able to "just click on it and watch it..."...
Anyone got any good pointers to information about setting this kind of thing up?
At this point, at least for the 3.x series, it's mostly 'tweaks' for improved useability, more standards compliance, and so on.
I update my copies of the current KDE CVS a few times per week, though I only occasionally compile and install from there (once every few weeks). I just like to watch what's being updated.
Last few times I updated the core KDELIBS CVS, for example, I noticed more updates to the html and ecma/javascript code. KMail has had a lot of individual updates...you get the idea. I can't honestly say I know how SUBSTANTIAL the changes have been, but I can at least spot when a section that I use frequently has had updates. so that if I get curious or run into problems in that area (something that hasn't happened to me in some time) I know to try an update...
I notice a bunch of the less "core" utilities (e.g. K3B, the video transcoding utility) have been moved from the core libraries to a new area ("KDEEXTRAGEAR", if I remember correctly). I need to check out that module too, now...
Well, he does have SOME point about the fonts. His point wasn't so much that they were "ugly" but that it was comparatively difficult to figure out how to add new ones (due to there being no "standard" way to do it). Now, I personally haven't run into problems plopping.ttf's into the font directory and running the "font update" program (ttmkfdir) to get them working, but that's me...
Other than that, though - you're right. I've not noticed any particular slowness, even WITH KDE 3.0+ (running a recent CVS snapshot), and on those infrequent occasions that I need 3d for games, even my puny ATI Rage-128-based "Xpert 2001" card works fine. And, of course, as you say, I find it MUCH faster to 'make menuconfig' to set building of a new device driver module and "make modules modules_install" to install it than I ever found it to get Windows to properly detect, choose, install, and not fight over IRQ's between binary drivers (and I absolutely LOVE the fact that I can unload a driver and reload it, or load a new one, without rebooting - handy when I forget to turn on my SCSI scanner and need to use it...)
I think the problem is more that the unix way is DIFFERENT rather than DIFFICULT. People get used to "insert CD, hope windows finds and loads the right thing, do an allegedly simple 'reformat and reinstall' if it doesn't" routine (my running joke is "the 5 R's of Windows Support Heirarchy - Retry, Restart, Reboot, Reinstall, Reformat"), so the unix methods SEEM difficult because they are very different (I've been using Linux long enough that the concept of reformatting or reinstalling to fix a driver problem is utterly alien to me now...it seems like more work at first, until you take into account the time required to backup and restore and reconfigure everything after a reformat...)
However, while I think the author's gripes are somewhat "off the mark", his writing was fairly reasonable rather than flamebait, which is nice to see. I also take comfort in the fact that people going back is uncommon enough for it to be "news"...
Definitely. Quite frankly, I'd let 'em store the stuff in MY basement, provided they pay me for the space (which is at a premium where I live...)
I've SEEN the tests they do on the containers they use. They're pretty extreme. Seeing the containers survive that, I'm not the least bit concerned that they'll survive "sitting around" for a few millenia. In addition, a large amount of the material is probably stuff that has been "contaminated" with a speck or two of radioactive material (the containers aren't all going to be full to the top with glowing plutonium), and probably isn't a substantial health hazard even if it were OUTSIDE of the container, unless you stood close to it for long periods of time...
Ha! The article gives it all away! This isn't about some sort of scientific research! This is just the first field-test of the latest insidious high-tech military hardware...on the innocent people of Canada!
It's plain to me that the US has developed a highly sophisticated Neutrino Ray Cannon(tm) that can be fired THROUGH THE EARTH and still hit targets in other countries! The article plainly describes that the beam will be fired through the earth, past the detectors, and INTO CANADA. Naturally, the US has chosen a nearby country to test it on, so that the results can be assessed quickly.
I'm willing to bet it'll be a successful test, too. Being a Neutrino-based Ray Gun(tm), we'll know it works if the characteristic effects of Neutrino Bombardment (that is to say, "Nothing") are seen among the Canadian populace after the test! Previous tests were less successful, though they are rumored to have caused speech alterations described as a very mild form of Tourette's Syndrome, wherein the victims add an extra syllable (described as "Eh") to their sentences...though one heavily affected region is rumored to have had their language altered so severely that they now speak FRENCH instead of Canadian! [Probably just a rumor, I don't believe it myself. Nor do I believe the rumors that the US Government experimented on its own citizens similarly, resulting in the "y'know" at the end of victim's sentences, and inability to spell "lose" with less than 2 "O's" in it.]
In the interests of World Peace(tm), I feel compelled to warn the People of Canada now - PROTECT YOURSELF WITH ALUMINUM FOIL DEFLECTOR BEANIES NOW! Before it's TOO LATE!
As far as I can tell, MOST of the problems caused for consumers by DRM plans involve the **AA's focus on preventing "copying" (indeed, it's even called "COPYright")...despite the fact that the Fair Use doctrine seems to imply that COPYING is not the "cause" of a copyright violation - DISTRIBUTION is.
Theoretically, anything I have a legal right to access, I also have a legal "Fair Use" right to copy, translate, garble, "space shift" to other media, "time shift" to watch later [I assume rented media includes this right, up to the length of the rental agreement, after which I no longer have a right to KEEP a copy], and so on. Where the violation occurs is when I DISTRIBUTE these copies to people who don't have a right to them.
If the focus of DRM would move towards distribution rather than copying, I'd feel a lot less worried about what the **AA were buying from my government. (Not to say that I WANT some sort of monitor chip implanted in every ethernet card, but I would feel less constrained by that than the monitor chip getting in my way every time I try to make a copy for my own personal use...)
Actually, I think they very well may be. Where did they get the address to send the advertisement to? I'm assuming the same place they got the expiration information - whois.
Most whois servers have a notice like the following, I've noticed:
"Any use of this data for any other purpose, including, but not
limited to, allowing or making possible dissemination or
collection of this data in part or in its entirety for any
purpose, such as the transmission of unsolicited advertising and
solicitations, is expressly forbidden without the prior written
permission of (Registrar). By submitting an inquiry,
you agree to these terms of usage and limitations of warranty."
My registrar's whois database has this notice. I got one of verisign's sleazy notes as well (though I knew what it was, at least.) If I get one from DRA, I'll be complaining...
Now nanotech would be something. We could make some nano-probes which would identify bacterias (in some biochemical way, membrane receptors, for example) and destroy them somehow
I'm way ahead of you. I have, in my possession, a two part nanotechnological design for exactly this. The first nanite is relatively simple, it's a "Y"-shaped machine with "grabbers" tuned to match parts of bacteria and viruses, and one end that's recognized by a larger, more complex nanite that spots the first nanite, and is triggered to destroy the invader by surrounding it and attacking it with a burst of oxidizing chemicals.
I'm not kidding - I've been testing this system for years, and I can report that it works very well...
(see any "Immunology" textbook for further details)...
Is it a true antibiotic, or simply some kind of cell-killing agent like bleach?
You know, I'd always thought it was similar to phenols (Remember Dr. Lister's "carbolic acid" [Phenol] antiseptic?), but it appears that triclosan interferes with an enzyme that bacteria use to form their cell walls. I don't know if it's the same thing that Penicillin-related compounds interfere with for the same purpose, though it does imply that bacteria may become resistant to it. It appears that triclosan, like a lot of antibiotics, can activate a "pump" that expels antibiotics from bacteria before they can do damage.
Poking around on Google also brought up an interesting article however, which pointed out that the "resistance" that triclosan induces is ALSO triggered by an awful lot of off the shelf foods from grocery stores...though on the other hand, I don't recall rubbing cinnamon or mustard on my hands like antibacterial soap, either...
Why, why, why, did they leave Tom Bombadil and the barrow-wights out of the first movie?
Because, because, because he was just too silly for the movie:-)
Bear with me - in the book, it wasn't so bad, but then, a lot of people read the book in several "sittings". In the movie, they have to work to keep a "mood" going AND they have to fit the whole thing into a tolerable amount of time (Tom Bombadil would have added, what, at least another 1/2 hour to the movie which was already at 3 hours after cutting?). The giggling, capering 'Deus ex Machina' of Tom Bombadil popping in the middle of 'dark' and dramatic "escape from the Nazgul" situation would have been rather jarring and distracting in the movie, and would have served little purpose, since he's never seen again throughout the rest of the trilogy (but for a brief mention that he won't be leaving his forest to help in the battle).
This isn't to say that I would have minded seeing them do it ANYWAY, but it was probably difficult enough for them to get most of the people watching to sit still for 3 hours, let alone the 4 or so that it would have gone if Tom Bombadil had interrupted things...
(Perhaps they could have worked the barrow wight scene directly into the space between fleeing the village and arriving at Bree, without Tom Bombadil at all...)
So, in short, the "return" on shoe-horning a giggling Tom Bombadil into the movie wouldn't have been worth the effort and damage to the "mood" of the movie at that point and the additional time his appearance would have taken up, and would probably have just confused the audience anyway (especially those who hadn't read the books, and would end up wondering through the next two movies when he'd show up again...)
From the earlier story, it sounds like the "Theora" project (VP3.5 video/Vorbis Audio in a.ogg file) might be a way to go...if it manages to get an implimentation available anytime soon. This is probably dependent on how quickly they get a spec written... It ought to be available for quite some time.
On a related note - does anyone know of a good way to "capture" a flash animation to a more "standard" video file, e.g..mpg or something similar? It'd be nice to take some of these flash web-cartoons and make personal-use VCD's out of them so everyone wouldn't have to cluster around my little monitor so that I could show them...
Come on, there can not be that many tv repair shops in slidell.
Found 2 so far, neither of which show up among the addresses in Spamhaus' entry on him (though 1615 Hwy 190 W on Mapquest comes up as "1615 Gause" - which appears to be highway 190, and is somewhat nearby the 1317 Englewood address...), but in case it helps:
THE TV SHOP
1615 HWY. 190 W.
SLIDELL, LA 70469
(504) 643-8333
ADVANCE ELECTRONICS
1005 OLD SPANISH TR
SLIDELL
(985) 641-6041
VIDEO EQUIPMENT-SERVICE & REPAIR
Now, on the other hand, the article mentions that the shop is about 10 minutes from his house, I imagine that his house is either the 1317 Englewood address or the 43 Cypress Meadows Loop address. Anybody know if either of these video repair places are "about 10 minutes" from either of these adresses (or if, perhaps, 1317 Englewood might be the repair shop? Is it about 10 minutes from 43 Cypress Meadows Loop?)
Hmmm. According to MapQuest, the 1317 Englewood place is just off of Highway 190. 43 Cypress Meadows Loop looks like it's probably a residential area just southwest of the Airport there...in a place that looks like it's probably roughly 10 minutes drive west-northwest. So my guess is that 1317 Englewood is the TV Repair shop and 43 Cypress Meadows Loop is the home.
Perhaps some aspiring people in the area could sneak out to 1317 Englewood some evening and build a little sculpture out of cans of Spam in front of the shop?....
xine 0.9.12;
http://xine.sourceforge.net;
open source;
native Quicktime support.
Need I say more?
Also, MPlayer in cvs currently has native SVQ1 support as well. Certainly, I was just able to play the trailer I downloaded off of one of the mirrors with it. Don't know how many other trailers and such are available in a format that the SVQ1 decoder can handle, but seeing this recent trailer in it gives me hope..>
(Anybody know the proper way to configure Konqueror to use MPlayer to play these things automatically?...)
(In the interest in giving fair credit to the Xine project - I do believe MPlayer's implementation is an optimization of the code made available by Xine, so they certainly deserve credit for figuring it out in the first place...)
Finally! A formal statement that specs will finally be written for video+vorbis in.ogg
From what little I've seen, VP3 is, overall, not as "good" as the various MPEG4 variants out now, but is a little better (in terms of quality and lack of "artifacts") than the "windows media" implementation [at least, from the one review I looked through].
The important thing from my perspective is that VP3/Vorbis in Ogg will give us a completely "free" way to offer videos...which brings me to my point.
There ARE some "public domain" videos out there. Not just obscure "indy" things but actual commercial movies, cartoons, shows, and so on that matured into the public domain when their owner didn't renew them (back when that was required).
There's a whole mess of them available on LSVideo (which appears to be undergoing a redesign, but offered and will apparently continue to offer a wide variety of public-domain [i.e. you can legally make copies for all of your friends if you want] videos) and RetroFilms. Retrofilms even offers a number of Disney(!) cartoons that slipped through their iron grasp into mature public-domain works. MOST of them are rather old, but many are well known (Metropolis [not the new Anime', the classic silent film], for example, and the classic "Nosferatu"...and, I believe, the insipid [in my opinion] but well known "It's a Wonderful Life".)And, of course, there's a whole mess of interesting and/or bizarre and/or educational things in the Prelinger
Archives Movies Online.
So....as soon as encoding software becomes available [I suspect ffmpeg and/or MPlayer will be set up to handle it pretty quickly after the initial source code and specs become available, if their recent development speed is any indication] I plan to go through the surprising number of videos that I own that turn out to be Public Domain, encode them into "Theora"-type files, and try making them available peer-to-peer.
At the very least, there are bound to be enough "oddball" videos available in the public domain that making them available in this format, combined with the fact that neither the "content" nor the file format, nor the video codec, nor the audio codec will be legally prohibited from distribution, they could easily become encountered often enough to promote the format to the point that, though it may never actually overtake proprietary formats, it'll pretty much "need" to be supported by any piece of multimedia software and playback unit that intends to bill itself as handling a lot of different formats...
I yearn for the day when my DVD playback unit can handle "Theora" videos and "Ogg/Vorbis" sound in addition to the.mp3's it already does...
Get cracking on that spec, Xiph!!!!!
(P.S. - Are there already IRC channels devoted to serving legal, public-domain videos?...)
Simple. You revoke their charter (the government-created document that creates the entity of a corporation in the first place). If this is done, the corporation ceases to exist. It has been "killed".
Now, I have no idea how complex the actual procedure that would have to crawl on its hands and knees through the bloated mass of federal agencies/corporations and middlemen would end up being, but the basic CONCEPT is quite simple.
That sounds like EXACTLY the effect that Macrovision has on playback.
I used to see that frequently when I had two VCR's "daisy-chained" so that I could either record TV on the "first" VCR in the chain while watching a movie in the second, and for making archives of recorded TV episodes that I wanted to keep for awhile.
I was very irritated to discover that DVD's have Macrovision as well - you'll notice, I suspect, that most if not all DVD manuals explain that the player must be hooked directly to the television and not "chained" through the VCR, because, of course, we'd all be rampant pirates if we were allowed to get a clean signal through a VCR. Gosh, sure is nice of the MPAA to protect us from our obvious inherent criminal tendencies...(Macrovision has irritated me for nearly a decade now...)
Considering that if I'm patient, I should be able to get a genuine wide-screen legal DVD of this movie soon in the "previously viewed" bins or on sale somewhere for ~$14US, and considering that a GOOD video tape costs at least, say, $4US, I just couldn't picture myself making a low-quality "pirate" copy from DVD to VHS to save a whopping $10....
On a slightly more helpful note - you should be able to rig up a switch on the old TV of the same type they commonly sell for hooking up video game consoles. That means you'd have to reach around behind the TV to switch over to "DVD" to watch them, but at least you'd be able to bypass the VCR then and get a watchable signal from the Macrovision-mangled disks without having to unplug the satellite/VCR combination...
Slashdot Mirror
I grabbed it back in April when it first appeared at the nearest real bookstore...
Like the review says, this book is entirely about COOKING ITSELF, not about recipes (though it does include several for illustrative purposes), which is something I like, since cooking seems to bo the one "artistic" talent I've got any noteworthy amount of.
Also recommended - Shirley Corriher's "Cookwise" (she is, coincidentally, the "Food Scientist" that appears occasionally on Alton Brown's show - anybody know if the Nutritional Anthropologist that frequently appears on his show has written a book yet as well?), which is similar but is more focussed around "types of food" rather than "techniques of cooking" [she also has a section on eggs, as well as a section on breads and pastries, a section on meats, a section on sweets, etc.], and, of course, the Granddaddy of them all, Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" (VERY good food-science book...without a single recipe wasting space in it!) Compared to these, though, Alton Brown's book is probably the most "accessible" to the non-nerdly, non-culinary audience (while still being very informative). If you've seen his show [also highly recommended!] you're familiar with his 'informative in plain and entertaining language' style.
With the sad situation where nearly the entire "Cooking" section of the bookstore is bloated with "lists of recipes - instructions even a robot can follow mindlessly" (BAH! RECIPES ARE FOR THE WEAK! :-) ), it always pleases me greatly to see a good book on "cooking theory and practice" like this one show up at the bookstore.
The book's about COOKING, not just "meat". The ingredients, in fact, are secondary in the whole book (with the exception of the section on "eggs", which discusses the effects of adding eggs to food [and how it affects the cooking]) to the actual techniques of "cooking food"...
In my experience, for photographic images, jpeg is (on the whole) better, in terms of space taken up. Basically, PNG's should look slightly better, but be much larger. For NON-photographic images (diagrams, things with lots of blocks of solid color, etc. - i.e. stuff that .gif USED to be better for technically, before PNG came out) PNG is MUCH better than jpeg.
This is a purely subjective opinion, though. It would be interesting to see some sort of improved "jpng" or something of the sort developed to supply a patent-unencumbered lossy image compression scheme analogous to .png's lossless one, to combat this ridiculous litigation...
Actually, quicktime seems to work quite well on linux via, for example, mplayer, with the sole exception that I've run into of SVQ3 (Sorenson, of course). SVQ1 is even working now, with optimized code (also appearing in FFMPEG) based on the reverse engineering done by the folks working on Xine. Oddly enough, the specifications page for QT6 mentiones SVQ2 and SVQ3, but implies that it DOESN'T support SVQ1...
If the release of QT6 means that MPEG4 will become the "default" codec for QuickTime movies as time goes on (as some posts, As well as several of the QuickTime pages at Apple, are hinting), the "quicktime barrier" to video on linux will all but disappear, since as far as I can tell just about every variant of MPEG4 works on Linux in some form or another. I suppose this depends on how the dispute between Apple and Sorenson goes...(anybody heard anything about that lately?) and how long it takes someone to work out how to interpret the type of what I assume are "pointer files" or something of the sort on the previously mentioned apple Quicktime Mpeg4 page (mplayer seems to have trouble decoding them...)
Of course, somewhere in here I should insert the obligatory comment about Ogg Theora and how I wish they'd hurry up and get the mailing lists working and get a working prototype that I can test, but as I can't think of what to say, I won't....
On a related note - I've been trying to figure out how to set up mplayer as the "helper application" for .avi's and .mov's and so on in Konqueror, and the more I try, the stupider I feel.
The "substitution codes" for the command lines aren't well documented (e.g. "%U" for "URL" and "%f" for local file...what are the rest?) and I can't seem to avoid getting "can't find a plugin for ." (no typo - that's what the error box says)...
Playing "by hand" from the command line works fine, I just get lazy occasionally and want to be able to "just click on it and watch it..."...
Anyone got any good pointers to information about setting this kind of thing up?
Hey, what's going on here, it seems that "Palladium" is already taken as an element name!...
"Dotnetium"? Like "Technetium", except with an MCSE...
Nah, actually, I interpreted that answer as "dry wit". (i.e. "No, I wouldn't do that, the cowboy hat would clash with my spacesuit.")
At this point, at least for the 3.x series, it's mostly 'tweaks' for improved useability, more standards compliance, and so on.
I update my copies of the current KDE CVS a few times per week, though I only occasionally compile and install from there (once every few weeks). I just like to watch what's being updated.
Last few times I updated the core KDELIBS CVS, for example, I noticed more updates to the html and ecma/javascript code. KMail has had a lot of individual updates...you get the idea. I can't honestly say I know how SUBSTANTIAL the changes have been, but I can at least spot when a section that I use frequently has had updates. so that if I get curious or run into problems in that area (something that hasn't happened to me in some time) I know to try an update...
I notice a bunch of the less "core" utilities (e.g. K3B, the video transcoding utility) have been moved from the core libraries to a new area ("KDEEXTRAGEAR", if I remember correctly). I need to check out that module too, now...
Well, he does have SOME point about the fonts. His point wasn't so much that they were "ugly" but that it was comparatively difficult to figure out how to add new ones (due to there being no "standard" way to do it). Now, I personally haven't run into problems plopping .ttf's into the font directory and running the "font update" program (ttmkfdir) to get them working, but that's me...
Other than that, though - you're right. I've not noticed any particular slowness, even WITH KDE 3.0+ (running a recent CVS snapshot), and on those infrequent occasions that I need 3d for games, even my puny ATI Rage-128-based "Xpert 2001" card works fine. And, of course, as you say, I find it MUCH faster to 'make menuconfig' to set building of a new device driver module and "make modules modules_install" to install it than I ever found it to get Windows to properly detect, choose, install, and not fight over IRQ's between binary drivers (and I absolutely LOVE the fact that I can unload a driver and reload it, or load a new one, without rebooting - handy when I forget to turn on my SCSI scanner and need to use it...)
I think the problem is more that the unix way is DIFFERENT rather than DIFFICULT. People get used to "insert CD, hope windows finds and loads the right thing, do an allegedly simple 'reformat and reinstall' if it doesn't" routine (my running joke is "the 5 R's of Windows Support Heirarchy - Retry, Restart, Reboot, Reinstall, Reformat"), so the unix methods SEEM difficult because they are very different (I've been using Linux long enough that the concept of reformatting or reinstalling to fix a driver problem is utterly alien to me now...it seems like more work at first, until you take into account the time required to backup and restore and reconfigure everything after a reformat...)
However, while I think the author's gripes are somewhat "off the mark", his writing was fairly reasonable rather than flamebait, which is nice to see. I also take comfort in the fact that people going back is uncommon enough for it to be "news"...
Definitely. Quite frankly, I'd let 'em store the stuff in MY basement, provided they pay me for the space (which is at a premium where I live...)
I've SEEN the tests they do on the containers they use. They're pretty extreme. Seeing the containers survive that, I'm not the least bit concerned that they'll survive "sitting around" for a few millenia. In addition, a large amount of the material is probably stuff that has been "contaminated" with a speck or two of radioactive material (the containers aren't all going to be full to the top with glowing plutonium), and probably isn't a substantial health hazard even if it were OUTSIDE of the container, unless you stood close to it for long periods of time...
Ha! The article gives it all away! This isn't about some sort of scientific research! This is just the first field-test of the latest insidious high-tech military hardware...on the innocent people of Canada!
It's plain to me that the US has developed a highly sophisticated Neutrino Ray Cannon(tm) that can be fired THROUGH THE EARTH and still hit targets in other countries! The article plainly describes that the beam will be fired through the earth, past the detectors, and INTO CANADA. Naturally, the US has chosen a nearby country to test it on, so that the results can be assessed quickly.
I'm willing to bet it'll be a successful test, too. Being a Neutrino-based Ray Gun(tm), we'll know it works if the characteristic effects of Neutrino Bombardment (that is to say, "Nothing") are seen among the Canadian populace after the test! Previous tests were less successful, though they are rumored to have caused speech alterations described as a very mild form of Tourette's Syndrome, wherein the victims add an extra syllable (described as "Eh") to their sentences...though one heavily affected region is rumored to have had their language altered so severely that they now speak FRENCH instead of Canadian! [Probably just a rumor, I don't believe it myself. Nor do I believe the rumors that the US Government experimented on its own citizens similarly, resulting in the "y'know" at the end of victim's sentences, and inability to spell "lose" with less than 2 "O's" in it.]
In the interests of World Peace(tm), I feel compelled to warn the People of Canada now - PROTECT YOURSELF WITH ALUMINUM FOIL DEFLECTOR BEANIES NOW! Before it's TOO LATE!
As far as I can tell, MOST of the problems caused for consumers by DRM plans involve the **AA's focus on preventing "copying" (indeed, it's even called "COPYright")...despite the fact that the Fair Use doctrine seems to imply that COPYING is not the "cause" of a copyright violation - DISTRIBUTION is.
Theoretically, anything I have a legal right to access, I also have a legal "Fair Use" right to copy, translate, garble, "space shift" to other media, "time shift" to watch later [I assume rented media includes this right, up to the length of the rental agreement, after which I no longer have a right to KEEP a copy], and so on. Where the violation occurs is when I DISTRIBUTE these copies to people who don't have a right to them.
If the focus of DRM would move towards distribution rather than copying, I'd feel a lot less worried about what the **AA were buying from my government. (Not to say that I WANT some sort of monitor chip implanted in every ethernet card, but I would feel less constrained by that than the monitor chip getting in my way every time I try to make a copy for my own personal use...)
Actually, I think they very well may be. Where did they get the address to send the advertisement to? I'm assuming the same place they got the expiration information - whois.
Most whois servers have a notice like the following, I've noticed:
My registrar's whois database has this notice. I got one of verisign's sleazy notes as well (though I knew what it was, at least.) If I get one from DRA, I'll be complaining...
I'm way ahead of you. I have, in my possession, a two part nanotechnological design for exactly this. The first nanite is relatively simple, it's a "Y"-shaped machine with "grabbers" tuned to match parts of bacteria and viruses, and one end that's recognized by a larger, more complex nanite that spots the first nanite, and is triggered to destroy the invader by surrounding it and attacking it with a burst of oxidizing chemicals.
I'm not kidding - I've been testing this system for years, and I can report that it works very well...
(see any "Immunology" textbook for further details)...
You know, I'd always thought it was similar to phenols (Remember Dr. Lister's "carbolic acid" [Phenol] antiseptic?), but it appears that triclosan interferes with an enzyme that bacteria use to form their cell walls. I don't know if it's the same thing that Penicillin-related compounds interfere with for the same purpose, though it does imply that bacteria may become resistant to it. It appears that triclosan, like a lot of antibiotics, can activate a "pump" that expels antibiotics from bacteria before they can do damage.
Poking around on Google also brought up an interesting article however, which pointed out that the "resistance" that triclosan induces is ALSO triggered by an awful lot of off the shelf foods from grocery stores...though on the other hand, I don't recall rubbing cinnamon or mustard on my hands like antibacterial soap, either...
Great, now I'm sitting here bursting brain cells pondering Chen Kenichi's reaction when he finds out the Secret Ingredient is "Lembas"...
Because, because, because he was just too silly for the movie :-)
Bear with me - in the book, it wasn't so bad, but then, a lot of people read the book in several "sittings". In the movie, they have to work to keep a "mood" going AND they have to fit the whole thing into a tolerable amount of time (Tom Bombadil would have added, what, at least another 1/2 hour to the movie which was already at 3 hours after cutting?). The giggling, capering 'Deus ex Machina' of Tom Bombadil popping in the middle of 'dark' and dramatic "escape from the Nazgul" situation would have been rather jarring and distracting in the movie, and would have served little purpose, since he's never seen again throughout the rest of the trilogy (but for a brief mention that he won't be leaving his forest to help in the battle).
This isn't to say that I would have minded seeing them do it ANYWAY, but it was probably difficult enough for them to get most of the people watching to sit still for 3 hours, let alone the 4 or so that it would have gone if Tom Bombadil had interrupted things...
(Perhaps they could have worked the barrow wight scene directly into the space between fleeing the village and arriving at Bree, without Tom Bombadil at all...)
So, in short, the "return" on shoe-horning a giggling Tom Bombadil into the movie wouldn't have been worth the effort and damage to the "mood" of the movie at that point and the additional time his appearance would have taken up, and would probably have just confused the audience anyway (especially those who hadn't read the books, and would end up wondering through the next two movies when he'd show up again...)
So....anyone grabbed the higher-quality version and transcoded it to DivX or something yet? (or even SVQ1, like the lower quality version earlier?)...
From the earlier story, it sounds like the "Theora" project (VP3.5 video/Vorbis Audio in a .ogg file) might be a way to go...if it manages to get an implimentation available anytime soon. This is probably dependent on how quickly they get a spec written... It ought to be available for quite some time.
On a related note - does anyone know of a good way to "capture" a flash animation to a more "standard" video file, e.g. .mpg or something similar? It'd be nice to take some of these flash web-cartoons and make personal-use VCD's out of them so everyone wouldn't have to cluster around my little monitor so that I could show them...
Found 2 so far, neither of which show up among the addresses in Spamhaus' entry on him (though 1615 Hwy 190 W on Mapquest comes up as "1615 Gause" - which appears to be highway 190, and is somewhat nearby the 1317 Englewood address...), but in case it helps:
1615 HWY. 190 W.
SLIDELL, LA 70469 (504) 643-8333
1005 OLD SPANISH TR
SLIDELL
(985) 641-6041
VIDEO EQUIPMENT-SERVICE & REPAIR
Now, on the other hand, the article mentions that the shop is about 10 minutes from his house, I imagine that his house is either the 1317 Englewood address or the 43 Cypress Meadows Loop address. Anybody know if either of these video repair places are "about 10 minutes" from either of these adresses (or if, perhaps, 1317 Englewood might be the repair shop? Is it about 10 minutes from 43 Cypress Meadows Loop?)
Hmmm. According to MapQuest, the 1317 Englewood place is just off of Highway 190. 43 Cypress Meadows Loop looks like it's probably a residential area just southwest of the Airport there...in a place that looks like it's probably roughly 10 minutes drive west-northwest. So my guess is that 1317 Englewood is the TV Repair shop and 43 Cypress Meadows Loop is the home.
Perhaps some aspiring people in the area could sneak out to 1317 Englewood some evening and build a little sculpture out of cans of Spam in front of the shop?....
http://xine.sourceforge.net;
open source;
native Quicktime support.
Need I say more?
Also, MPlayer in cvs currently has native SVQ1 support as well. Certainly, I was just able to play the trailer I downloaded off of one of the mirrors with it. Don't know how many other trailers and such are available in a format that the SVQ1 decoder can handle, but seeing this recent trailer in it gives me hope..>
(Anybody know the proper way to configure Konqueror to use MPlayer to play these things automatically?...)
(In the interest in giving fair credit to the Xine project - I do believe MPlayer's implementation is an optimization of the code made available by Xine, so they certainly deserve credit for figuring it out in the first place...)
Finally! A formal statement that specs will finally be written for video+vorbis in .ogg
From what little I've seen, VP3 is, overall, not as "good" as the various MPEG4 variants out now, but is a little better (in terms of quality and lack of "artifacts") than the "windows media" implementation [at least, from the one review I looked through].
The important thing from my perspective is that VP3/Vorbis in Ogg will give us a completely "free" way to offer videos...which brings me to my point.
There ARE some "public domain" videos out there. Not just obscure "indy" things but actual commercial movies, cartoons, shows, and so on that matured into the public domain when their owner didn't renew them (back when that was required).
There's a whole mess of them available on LSVideo (which appears to be undergoing a redesign, but offered and will apparently continue to offer a wide variety of public-domain [i.e. you can legally make copies for all of your friends if you want] videos) and RetroFilms. Retrofilms even offers a number of Disney (!) cartoons that slipped through their iron grasp into mature public-domain works. MOST of them are rather old, but many are well known (Metropolis [not the new Anime', the classic silent film], for example, and the classic "Nosferatu"...and, I believe, the insipid [in my opinion] but well known "It's a Wonderful Life".)And, of course, there's a whole mess of interesting and/or bizarre and/or educational things in the Prelinger Archives Movies Online.
So....as soon as encoding software becomes available [I suspect ffmpeg and/or MPlayer will be set up to handle it pretty quickly after the initial source code and specs become available, if their recent development speed is any indication] I plan to go through the surprising number of videos that I own that turn out to be Public Domain, encode them into "Theora"-type files, and try making them available peer-to-peer.
At the very least, there are bound to be enough "oddball" videos available in the public domain that making them available in this format, combined with the fact that neither the "content" nor the file format, nor the video codec, nor the audio codec will be legally prohibited from distribution, they could easily become encountered often enough to promote the format to the point that, though it may never actually overtake proprietary formats, it'll pretty much "need" to be supported by any piece of multimedia software and playback unit that intends to bill itself as handling a lot of different formats...
I yearn for the day when my DVD playback unit can handle "Theora" videos and "Ogg/Vorbis" sound in addition to the .mp3's it already does...
Get cracking on that spec, Xiph!!!!!
(P.S. - Are there already IRC channels devoted to serving legal, public-domain videos?...)
Simple. You revoke their charter (the government-created document that creates the entity of a corporation in the first place). If this is done, the corporation ceases to exist. It has been "killed".
Now, I have no idea how complex the actual procedure that would have to crawl on its hands and knees through the bloated mass of federal agencies/corporations and middlemen would end up being, but the basic CONCEPT is quite simple.
In case anyone cares, the current Konqueror seems to handle the effect properly as well.
Mind you, I'm using a CVS version from about a week ago, but I suspect KDE 3.0's probably handles it okay as well, and perhaps 2.2 as well.
That sounds like EXACTLY the effect that Macrovision has on playback.
I used to see that frequently when I had two VCR's "daisy-chained" so that I could either record TV on the "first" VCR in the chain while watching a movie in the second, and for making archives of recorded TV episodes that I wanted to keep for awhile.
I was very irritated to discover that DVD's have Macrovision as well - you'll notice, I suspect, that most if not all DVD manuals explain that the player must be hooked directly to the television and not "chained" through the VCR, because, of course, we'd all be rampant pirates if we were allowed to get a clean signal through a VCR. Gosh, sure is nice of the MPAA to protect us from our obvious inherent criminal tendencies...(Macrovision has irritated me for nearly a decade now...)
Considering that if I'm patient, I should be able to get a genuine wide-screen legal DVD of this movie soon in the "previously viewed" bins or on sale somewhere for ~$14US, and considering that a GOOD video tape costs at least, say, $4US, I just couldn't picture myself making a low-quality "pirate" copy from DVD to VHS to save a whopping $10....
On a slightly more helpful note - you should be able to rig up a switch on the old TV of the same type they commonly sell for hooking up video game consoles. That means you'd have to reach around behind the TV to switch over to "DVD" to watch them, but at least you'd be able to bypass the VCR then and get a watchable signal from the Macrovision-mangled disks without having to unplug the satellite/VCR combination...