Anyone play around with hardware MPEG2 encoding? I like the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR (different than the regular WinTV), but it looks like this thing is Windows only:( I'd like to be able to capture and record stuff directly to MPEG2. Anyone know about any Linux drivers for this one? The regular WinTV works with video4linux, but this one apparently does not.
This is a toolkit problem, not an X problem. Besides the lack AA fonts (which is IMHO an overrated problem) You're blaming X for something it has no control over.
If every app you run uses a different toolkit, then you're going to end up with an inconsistant desktop. Pick GTK+ or Qt, and standardize on that if it is important to have a constistant look to your desktop.
150 million Americans? Yea I'd say that number is pretty spot on.
The super bowl has to be the biggest example of scripted, sanitized entertainment, strained and drained for the huge "Drooling Idiot" demographic. Go on. Watch it. Let me get you a bib...
* Tech companies expect un-sustainable levels of work from their employees.
Why not get another job?
* Tech companies will lay-off people without a second thought if it helps the bottom line.
Why not get another job?
* Tech companies will require unfair, new contracts to be signed by all employees, without any form of negotiation at all!
Why not get another job?
I don't see the point of unions--especially in the tech industry where there is SO much work. If you don't like your job, quit and find a new one. If you don't like your salary, re-negotiate or quit. If you don't like your working conditions, re-negotiate or quit.
Make sure your contract is fair BEFORE you sign it. If the company is allowed to lay you off at will, make sure you can walk at will. If you are skilled, and the company still is set on firing you, then it's bad management--the company is clearly doomed from the start. Find another one!
Maybe if we're lucky, crowds will see the Spielberg name and think "Oh, A.I.? That must be like E.T.! Let's go see it!"
Yea, unfortunately you're absolutely right. It's a sad commentary on American taste when "Steven Spielberg's AI" will bring a bigger audience than would "Stanley Kubrick's AI".
You are arguing from the premise that information is property--which is still open to debate. But for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that "information as property" actually makes sense:
If I hear a song that you recorded (and "own") am I allowed to hum it to myself? Am I allowed to sing the song to someone else? Can I play the song with other people in the same room? According to popular corporate logic, all of these situations make me a pirate--I am reproducing your content without your permission. Of course these examples are absurd, but it only illustrates the absurdity that is "intellectual property".
To corporate media, intellectual property is about PROFIT and PROGRAMMING. It's about control. Ideally, these huge conglomerates would like a garden hose that goes directly from their studio to your brain--preferrably a hose that required you to put money in each time to operate. They want a world where every bit of communication you might receive has a price tag. This is not the kind of world most people want to live in.
The sad thing is, the people who believe communication is property are winning. They bought the appropriate laws, and they bought the approval of the government (armed enforcement). How do we fight this? Go to a free live concert (they are everywhere). Read a book in the library. See and appreciate the beauty in the world that, so far, has not been bottled up and sold by the corporate world. Spread the attitude that life would go on without Brittany Spears and Bruce Willis.
So, basically what you are saying is, re-invent X, but do it in a way that is incompatible with most of the existing X apps out there... all so you can get rid of X?? Hmm.. something doesn't make much sense here...
I consider Mike Abrash my personal hero. His writing inspired me to get into graphics programming. He has a simple way of writing, and he makes it a pleasure to follow him thorough the complex concepts he writes about.
Mike's "Zen of..." books should be on any graphics programmer's bookshelf.
It's kind of sad that he now works for Microsoft, but I guess it's good for MS--if nothing else it proves that they CAN hire talented (and old-school) coders.
His tips on the second page are golden! Particularly:
Get past the abstractions and know what your code does. Profile in many ways: profilers, NULL drivers, bracketing key code with timing calls, breaking into the debugger at random and seeing where you are. If you don't do this, you're guessing.
Knowing what to optimize matters as much as knowing how to optimize. Otherwise, you'll optimize the wrong thing, and end up with really fast slow code.
Ralph has a chunk of wood. Useless and valueless by itself. If ralph cuts it up and makes it into a birdhouse, however, it now has a value and can be sold.
I was commenting on the attitudes of people like the one who wrote the article on somethingawful.com ("How Can the Internet Survive?", etc). A lot of people in the business of "web publishing" share his point of view. On the contrary, most of the posters here on slashdot are quite reasonable, and like yourself, offer other solutions besides ads.
Why is it that so many people believe that without advertisements, the web would just disappear? Clearly they are newbies, or they just forget that the Internet and the web were around long before advertising.
I don't see why ad-blocking software couldn't be built right into the browser! We HAVE the source for Mozilla. It would just take a dedicated programmer a week or two to hack in a "Block Advertisements" option on the preferences screen. I'm sure a lot of people would use it if it were just another preference option.
Now if only this functionality could come built-in in the mainstream browsers (Netscape, IE)...
Just a thought: How are "unsolicited religious, racial or sexual messages, a somewhat more serious matter" than junk advertising? Fundamentally, what makes this kind of junk communication any "worse" than that kind of junk communication? Oh, that's right... things like religious, racial and sexual messages attack a person's beliefs, but advertisements don't do that, right? Junk email is just a product of an over-zealous businessman, right? (Yaaay capitalism)
An example is that we used to judge gaming computers by how many colours they can display, be it 8, 256, or 65536. But once we reached 16 million, there wasn't any further useful improvement that could be made.
64-bit color (16-bits per channel) will definitely be necessary for complicated pixel shaders. The more stages in the pipe, the more precise your internal representation must be to avoid a final result that looks washed-out.
This is great stuff--I heartily agree! Anyone who claims to be able to write about the Internet should repeat that 10 times every morning: "The commercial web is not the web. The web is not the Internet" You've hit the nail on the head.
The thing that is instructive (to the mainstream media) about things like napster, irc, and online games, is that they have little or nothing to do with "the web". They don't fit the "Go to a web site and click BUY" mold, and this scares people.
I've talked to relatives who honestly believe that the only reason the Internet exists is because it is a new way to "Buy Stuff(tm)".
As with all media, there is a certain percentage that is here because of commercial interests, and a certain percentage that is "independant" and is done without commercial motivation. Public radio vs. Casey's top-40 (although some would argue that because public radio is partially subsidized commercially it is not purely independant)
Unfortunately, so far, most mainstream media (books, magazines, radio, television,...) have become nearly 100% commercial. Television, for instance, exists today not because it is so entertaining, but because it is a tool to deliver advertisements to the millions of mindless consumeroids eagerly waiting to be influenced by it.
The Internet is different because it is still largely independant. Before the commercial world's saturation of the Internet, it was a place where people shared information because that information is usefull to others, and not because it could be a way to Make Money Fast. If the Internet (in zdnet's mind, the commercial web) has peaked, I think this is a great thing. It shows that more and more people are using the Internet for reasons OTHER THAN shopping. This would help ensure that the Internet doesn't become the next television.
You're mislead. It is not about revenge. It is about PREVENTION.
I'm not sure if I agree with that. I don't have any studies to back my theories up so I wont ask for any from you, but I kind of doubt that there really is anywhere (at least in the US) that harsher punishments have conclusively resulted in lower crime rates. Harsher punishments tend to just make criminals meaner, and turn non-violent criminals into violent criminals.
If murderers are just "corrected" without lowering their overall happiness, hell sure many more people will get killed everyday.
Reduce the incentive for murder. Why are people murdered? There are many social ills that drive people to kill. Try to correct these things, and you've prevented more murders than sending someone to jail--where they get angry, lift weights, and prepare for their next crime spree.
"the system is about correction" is bull. Show me how you can make correction on some dedicated criminals without making them suffer, either monetarily, physically or mentally.
When dealing with rational people your argument makes sense. Unfortunately the truth is people are not rational. Criminals are released from jail, and are now more angry, bitter, and socially inept than before they went in, because there is nothing for one to do in jail than sit around getting angry and working out.
If you're going to put someone in jail, make it for life, because they will sure be hell-bent on being a criminal when they come out.
No one likes spammers, and truly I think if convicted they should really lose their internet privileges, but PRISON?
This is evidence of a judicial system that is more about revenge than correction.
PRISON is for keeping violent people from hurting the rest of society. PRISON is for people who must be physically restrained. In the US, we send more non-violent offenders to prison than most other countries. Should you go to jail if you are caught speeding on the highway? How about jay-walking? Why do we send SOME non-violent criminals to prison and not others?
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone play around with hardware MPEG2 encoding? I like the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR (different than the regular WinTV), but it looks like this thing is Windows only :( I'd like to be able to capture and record stuff directly to MPEG2. Anyone know about any Linux drivers for this one? The regular WinTV works with video4linux, but this one apparently does not.
I understand the guys at LinuxTV have drivers for a particular board with the Visiontech KFir chip but I've never seen this board anywhere...
This is a toolkit problem, not an X problem. Besides the lack AA fonts (which is IMHO an overrated problem) You're blaming X for something it has no control over.
If every app you run uses a different toolkit, then you're going to end up with an inconsistant desktop. Pick GTK+ or Qt, and standardize on that if it is important to have a constistant look to your desktop.
150 million Americans? Yea I'd say that number is pretty spot on.
The super bowl has to be the biggest example of scripted, sanitized entertainment, strained and drained for the huge "Drooling Idiot" demographic. Go on. Watch it. Let me get you a bib...
Hmm.. Maybe because despite what TV viewing statistics tell us, not all of us suffer from Drooling Mass-ism.
* Tech companies expect un-sustainable levels of work from their employees.
Why not get another job?
* Tech companies will lay-off people without a second thought if it helps the bottom line.
Why not get another job?
* Tech companies will require unfair, new contracts to be signed by all employees, without any form of negotiation at all!
Why not get another job?
I don't see the point of unions--especially in the tech industry where there is SO much work. If you don't like your job, quit and find a new one. If you don't like your salary, re-negotiate or quit. If you don't like your working conditions, re-negotiate or quit.
Make sure your contract is fair BEFORE you sign it. If the company is allowed to lay you off at will, make sure you can walk at will. If you are skilled, and the company still is set on firing you, then it's bad management--the company is clearly doomed from the start. Find another one!
Maybe if we're lucky, crowds will see the Spielberg name and think "Oh, A.I.? That must be like E.T.! Let's go see it!"
Yea, unfortunately you're absolutely right. It's a sad commentary on American taste when "Steven Spielberg's AI" will bring a bigger audience than would "Stanley Kubrick's AI".
You are arguing from the premise that information is property--which is still open to debate. But for the sake of this discussion, let's assume that "information as property" actually makes sense:
If I hear a song that you recorded (and "own") am I allowed to hum it to myself? Am I allowed to sing the song to someone else? Can I play the song with other people in the same room? According to popular corporate logic, all of these situations make me a pirate--I am reproducing your content without your permission. Of course these examples are absurd, but it only illustrates the absurdity that is "intellectual property".
To corporate media, intellectual property is about PROFIT and PROGRAMMING. It's about control. Ideally, these huge conglomerates would like a garden hose that goes directly from their studio to your brain--preferrably a hose that required you to put money in each time to operate. They want a world where every bit of communication you might receive has a price tag. This is not the kind of world most people want to live in.
The sad thing is, the people who believe communication is property are winning. They bought the appropriate laws, and they bought the approval of the government (armed enforcement). How do we fight this? Go to a free live concert (they are everywhere). Read a book in the library. See and appreciate the beauty in the world that, so far, has not been bottled up and sold by the corporate world. Spread the attitude that life would go on without Brittany Spears and Bruce Willis.
So, basically what you are saying is, re-invent X, but do it in a way that is incompatible with most of the existing X apps out there... all so you can get rid of X?? Hmm.. something doesn't make much sense here...
But would this stop all the oh-so-EVIL pornographic stories stored as ascii text files?
I consider Mike Abrash my personal hero. His writing inspired me to get into graphics programming. He has a simple way of writing, and he makes it a pleasure to follow him thorough the complex concepts he writes about.
Mike's "Zen of..." books should be on any graphics programmer's bookshelf.
It's kind of sad that he now works for Microsoft, but I guess it's good for MS--if nothing else it proves that they CAN hire talented (and old-school) coders.
His tips on the second page are golden! Particularly:
Get past the abstractions and know what your code does. Profile in many ways: profilers, NULL drivers, bracketing key code with timing calls, breaking into the debugger at random and seeing where you are. If you don't do this, you're guessing.
Knowing what to optimize matters as much as knowing how to optimize. Otherwise, you'll optimize the wrong thing, and end up with really fast slow code.
Value can increase too.
Ralph has a chunk of wood. Useless and valueless by itself. If ralph cuts it up and makes it into a birdhouse, however, it now has a value and can be sold.
I was commenting on the attitudes of people like the one who wrote the article on somethingawful.com ("How Can the Internet Survive?", etc). A lot of people in the business of "web publishing" share his point of view. On the contrary, most of the posters here on slashdot are quite reasonable, and like yourself, offer other solutions besides ads.
I amend that: The Internet and the web were around before the concept of advertising ON THE INTERNET came along.
:)
I wasn't trying to argue that the net predates advertising IN GENERAL
Why is it that so many people believe that without advertisements, the web would just disappear? Clearly they are newbies, or they just forget that the Internet and the web were around long before advertising.
I don't see why ad-blocking software couldn't be built right into the browser! We HAVE the source for Mozilla. It would just take a dedicated programmer a week or two to hack in a "Block Advertisements" option on the preferences screen. I'm sure a lot of people would use it if it were just another preference option.
Now if only this functionality could come built-in in the mainstream browsers (Netscape, IE)...
Because money and value are not conserved. In a capitalist system, wealth is not just re-distributed--it also can be created.
Just a thought: How are "unsolicited religious, racial or sexual messages, a somewhat more serious matter" than junk advertising? Fundamentally, what makes this kind of junk communication any "worse" than that kind of junk communication? Oh, that's right... things like religious, racial and sexual messages attack a person's beliefs, but advertisements don't do that, right? Junk email is just a product of an over-zealous businessman, right? (Yaaay capitalism)
Think about it.
An example is that we used to judge gaming computers by how many colours they can display, be it 8, 256, or 65536. But once we reached 16 million, there wasn't any further useful improvement that could be made.
64-bit color (16-bits per channel) will definitely be necessary for complicated pixel shaders. The more stages in the pipe, the more precise your internal representation must be to avoid a final result that looks washed-out.
I'm not sure I see what is so difficult about:
./configure
make install
Which is about all it takes to install 95% of the stuff out there from source...
This is what happens when you continuously moderate the trolls up, eventually they start posting at +2.
This is great stuff--I heartily agree! Anyone who claims to be able to write about the Internet should repeat that 10 times every morning: "The commercial web is not the web. The web is not the Internet" You've hit the nail on the head.
The thing that is instructive (to the mainstream media) about things like napster, irc, and online games, is that they have little or nothing to do with "the web". They don't fit the "Go to a web site and click BUY" mold, and this scares people.
I've talked to relatives who honestly believe that the only reason the Internet exists is because it is a new way to "Buy Stuff(tm)".
As with all media, there is a certain percentage that is here because of commercial interests, and a certain percentage that is "independant" and is done without commercial motivation. Public radio vs. Casey's top-40 (although some would argue that because public radio is partially subsidized commercially it is not purely independant)
Unfortunately, so far, most mainstream media (books, magazines, radio, television,
The Internet is different because it is still largely independant. Before the commercial world's saturation of the Internet, it was a place where people shared information because that information is usefull to others, and not because it could be a way to Make Money Fast. If the Internet (in zdnet's mind, the commercial web) has peaked, I think this is a great thing. It shows that more and more people are using the Internet for reasons OTHER THAN shopping. This would help ensure that the Internet doesn't become the next television.
Only at high resolutions. At resolutions like 640x480 and 800x600, we're still limited by system bus.
You're mislead. It is not about revenge. It is about PREVENTION.
I'm not sure if I agree with that. I don't have any studies to back my theories up so I wont ask for any from you, but I kind of doubt that there really is anywhere (at least in the US) that harsher punishments have conclusively resulted in lower crime rates. Harsher punishments tend to just make criminals meaner, and turn non-violent criminals into violent criminals.
If murderers are just "corrected" without lowering their overall happiness, hell sure many more people will get killed everyday.
Reduce the incentive for murder. Why are people murdered? There are many social ills that drive people to kill. Try to correct these things, and you've prevented more murders than sending someone to jail--where they get angry, lift weights, and prepare for their next crime spree.
"the system is about correction" is bull. Show me how you can make correction on some dedicated criminals without making them suffer, either monetarily, physically or mentally.
When dealing with rational people your argument makes sense. Unfortunately the truth is people are not rational. Criminals are released from jail, and are now more angry, bitter, and socially inept than before they went in, because there is nothing for one to do in jail than sit around getting angry and working out.
If you're going to put someone in jail, make it for life, because they will sure be hell-bent on being a criminal when they come out.
Maybe I am offtopic but...
No one likes spammers, and truly I think if convicted they should really lose their internet privileges, but PRISON?
This is evidence of a judicial system that is more about revenge than correction.
PRISON is for keeping violent people from hurting the rest of society. PRISON is for people who must be physically restrained. In the US, we send more non-violent offenders to prison than most other countries. Should you go to jail if you are caught speeding on the highway? How about jay-walking? Why do we send SOME non-violent criminals to prison and not others?
You basically just proved his point.