Search the net for a program called VirtualDub. Its an amazing peice of software, and its free. It converts video into any format you have the codec for (including DivX when you install the 3.11 alpha package), it can resize, choose the audio compression (including MP3) - its just a mindblowing peice of software. I'm suprised that a big house like Adobe hasn't bought it out already - the ambitions of the VirtualDub team will make this program a possible competitor to Adobe Premiere.
Virtual Dub is fast man
Out of all the video compression formats I've encountered, DivX definately rocks by all acounts. First of all, the codec has been ported to a majority of platforms (Win9x (no suprise), BeOS (yeah!!), Linux (yay!) and MacOS (all right!)). The ratio of image quality / file size is the best in the world at the moment - you can compress a full movie (110min) at almost DVD quality to fit onto a standard CDR. Heck, all my holiday videos are now encoded in DivX, and I'm burning souveniers to my family / friends who can also watch my videos on their PC's. As far as software based compression is concerned, the DivX codec is one of the fastest encoders I've encountered. I have a legit copy of Adobe Premiere, which has a large number of codecs (Indeo, Sorenson, Cinepak, M2V, M1V and now DivX), and the DivX codec is the fastest to compress. Coupled with its file size and image quality, I do not want to use any other codec again. DivX is to video what MP3 (Mpeg audio, layer 3) is to audio. It will become the defacto unofficial standard for distribution of videos. The biggest issue is that DivX uses proprietry Micros~1 DLL files, which the DivX; team somehow managed to include in the BeOS and Linux codecs - kudos to them. There is a new project by the DivX team called 3ivX - which will eliminate M$ DLL files with there own GPL libraries. Once thats done, no one, I repeat, NO ONE can take MPEG-4 away from us.
Yep, Commodore decided to create a console with the Amiga API, allowing developers to target both the console and the Amiga computer. Likewise, the consoles (CDTV especially) had some nifty technology, but never achieved the market penetration Commodore hoped for. The money invested ended up sinking the big C=.
Ah Micros~, they're catching up to the competition - the gap is now only 10 years.
Once again we have a case of induced morality - where social norms of one group of people interfere with our rights of acquiring knowledge, speech and individual development as a life form. Our brief existance (as individuals) is hampered with twisted (should I say distorted) perceptions of morality and decency, and we're once again subjected to a form of brain washing. Throughout my youth, as a social being learning about social rules, I was intimidated by a prudent society. Certain teachings about religion, morality, patriotism, nobility etc amongst other purposes mainly served to protect the ruling elite - the armed band of thugs terrorising society, imposing their will (with punishment of death) and establishing nation/states, or religious indoctrination. I was taught to hate my neighbours (they where our enemy), despice people of a different race, automatically assume that the person with a different religion is out to kill me, pornography is not good etc etc etc. I was fortunate to move to a less prudent society in my youth, where issues like religion, race, social norms etc where very relaxed (you can actually see full scale pornographic material on public access TV, and magazines in news-stands, which where incidently located by bus stops, advertised pornography to all passers by, including kids). When you're subjected to this material, it suddenly doesn't become an issue or immoral - and if you watch any foreign movie (French, Italian, Yugoslav etc) you'll see virtually everything. These societies are not prudent, and as such allow an individual to explore various aspects of our psychie. Without ignorance we become better people, and with censorship we promote ignorance - mainly to preserve the current establishment.
So, in my mind, cencorship is another form of dictatorship - as a biological entity, I am not bound by this stupid norms society imposes, and we should structure a society which will allow each individual to explore every tangent that they may be interested in. Exploration doesn't neccesitate physical abuse.
Society should stop grinding axes and focus on educating people, since all problems which exist today stem from a lack of understanding. Beer manufacturers should not be held accountable for alchohol related accidents - drivers should be aware of how alchohol impedes judgement. The poor peasants in Serbia shouldn't be bombed for the insanity of one man - the west should encourage the citizens to seek a wealthier life. Software engineers should not be held accountable for a bug which causes an orbital rocket to deviate from its course and slam into a crowded school - management must allow adequate time for testing. Etc Etc.
What you can do is seek a Software Test Engineer (or QA) position. These positions are not black box testing, they're more white box oriented (where you get to develop testing tools - quite cool actually, cause you actually develop something fast (ie. more than 100 lines of code a day, as opposed to 'regular' programmers who do 6-20 **tested** lines of code a day), since all code is for internal use only. That way you'll advance your programming skills faster by gaining valuable programming experience. These positions are usually open to people of your calibre and present an excellent stepping stone. Be prepared for a rude awakening in the modern IT industry. These days RAD tools make applications in a matter of days (weeks), so in the future greater emphasis will be on testing than on designing / programming. You might discover that a lot of developers convert to testers simply because there is less stress involved, for equal money. And its not a 'in' profession, so with skill you may reach a higher earning managerial position faster.
Your gorgeous Civ is now ugly? Well of course, with all the pollution and terraforming going on, you've ruined the countryside and created an industrial wasteland. He he, too bad that I developed the Hoover Dam first, and now I have the equivalent of a non-polluting Hydro Plant in every city. But my scientist keep warning me that because of **you** there is a chance of global warming occuring and the icecaps melting. Nah, it will never happen. Aha, my SS MODULE is complete. Lets call it ISS ZVEZDA.
Classic can be interpreted in several ways: - A 'classic' is a game which defines a genre, and inspires the creation of hundreds of clones. Q3Arena, Unreal, Doom etc are all clones of the classic - Wolfenstein 3d. Examples would be Tetris, Elite, Pole Position, Lemmings etc. - A 'classic' is a game which can be played again and again and again, always rivetting, inspiring and fun to play. Examples would be Civilization 2 (my all time favourite), Quake 1 (it's still great after all these years, better gameplay than all sequals) and Fifa99. These are games I'd take to a deserted island (together with Naval Signalling for Dummies). So, without further ado, here is my top 10 list of 'classic' games. 10. Age of Empires2 (PC) (hey, I love it!!!!! - best game I ever played) 9. Freecell (night shift classic) (PC) 8. Pinball Dreams (Amiga), the Ignition table. 7. Tetris (C64) 6. Lemmings (Amiga) 5. Quake - the original - nightmare is still challenging, and fun (PC). 4. SWOS (Amiga) 3. Elite (for C64) 2. Fifa 99 (PC)...and finally... 1. Civilization 1/2 (Amiga/PC)(I played that 'til 6:00 in the morning the first time I tried it). Almost that long for Civ2. No other game has captivated me as much.
I've read this somewhere, and thought it was appropriate. When faced with a block, the quoted person would perform some mindless task, like installing Windows...
"I highly recommend taking along a parachute." From what I've heard, skydivers are equiped with two parachutes. There is a 3% chance that the primary chute wont open, hence the second chute. And so far, no one has complained of the second chute not opening:)
Why is it that the prevailing attitude with the OpenSource community is that all bugs can be fixed when the source is freely available (aka many eyes find bugs faster), compared to Closed Source programs, where we're left to the grace of the developer to implement any fixes? As any maintainance programmer will tell you, it is a nightmare to jump into someone elses code, and start sorting and figuring out what functionality each module has, no matter how experienced they might be. It takes weeks (even months) to mentally break down the code into manageable functions, especially with the size of most projects today, with OO modularity, and the multithreaded nature of modern software. The developers have a mental picture of the architecture of their software, and they can implement fixes faster and in a structuraly more sound way than any outsider looking at the source for 1-2 hours. Software engineers spend months developing an architecture, and many more months coding, testing, and bugfixing. Any you think that a 21 year old student, halfway through obtaining a CS degree, or an enthusiest with no formal qualifications, can hack through the code in a few hours and fix bugs which the developers have spent weeks on tracking down. Not likely. You must remember that the developers are able hackers too, even more so than you because they have actually shipped a product, with millions of lines of code, and months of hard work and long hours. WE DEVELOPERS ARE GREAT HACKERS TOO!!! The only software which should be open sourced is abandoned software, where the developers are 2 generations ahead of the old software. The original Quake was open sourced when Q3Arena was almost done - and ID didn't plan on working with it any more (or milking it). Face it, Open Source software will always be 2-4 years behind the latest products. Don't be suprised to see M$ open sourcing M$-DOS 3 these days.
Just because its been tackled by M$, it doesnt automatically mean that there is an additional monopolistic motive, or that its going to be uter crap. They have very intelligant engineers working in Redmond (wheelmouse anyone), and they try to do AS WELL AS THEY CAN under given design constraints. If they start of with a crappy API and 9 months to release a product (Chicago anyone), they'll do the best they can to engineer a product. If they are given the luxury to scrap everything and start fresh (aka BeOS), I'm sure they'll release a kick-ass product. The long-term success of the MS-X will depend on the design decisions they make today - will they start with a brand new API, or hack Win32API? Will X software be compatible with PC software? At the end of the day, I want a bullet-proof/idiot proof product which I can use in the living room with a 70cm TV, and I don't care who makes it
It really is sad that we live in a world with imposing prohibitions - just because someone, somewhere has deemed certain material innapropriate for whatever reasons, other people have restricted instead of full lives. Where is it going to end? As an individual, I dont wont a government telling me what I can and cannot do, especially when the cannot has nothing to do with deteriorating the quality of other peoples lives. I want to see porn. I want to HEAR, or read other peoples opinions. Life is so short, too short for others to restrict my scope of experiances. From the title comments we can see another form of prejudice - political restrictions are bad and pornographic restrictions are good? Not so, my friend. Other societies have no taboos with pornography unlike the English speaking societies. I was raised in a society which played full scale pornographic movies every night on public, free for all TV. No black bars or cut scenes. This is a cultrul issue, and again, who does the government think it is when it imposes restrictions on what I may see. All forms of ccensorship are bad, be they political or pornographical. To quote a fellow/.-er, we are slashdot, open source, closed minds. Ha.
What sort of a world have we created for ourselves? Since when did religion become a dominant factor in our lives? We have screwed society up with preconcieved notions (dogmatism) brought from the dark ages - there should be no taboos in the modern world, otherwise we might as well crawl back into the primordial slime we came from. Ask yourselves these two vital questions - who plants thoughts into our minds, and for what purpose? Only then will you realise what role (and influence)we as individuals have in society. Open source society, thats what we want. Stop the Earth. I want to get off.
Slashdot Mirror
Search the net for a program called VirtualDub. Its an amazing peice of software, and its free. It converts video into any format you have the codec for (including DivX when you install the 3.11 alpha package), it can resize, choose the audio compression (including MP3) - its just a mindblowing peice of software. I'm suprised that a big house like Adobe hasn't bought it out already - the ambitions of the VirtualDub team will make this program a possible competitor to Adobe Premiere. Virtual Dub is fast man
Out of all the video compression formats I've encountered, DivX definately rocks by all acounts. First of all, the codec has been ported to a majority of platforms (Win9x (no suprise), BeOS (yeah!!), Linux (yay!) and MacOS (all right!)). The ratio of image quality / file size is the best in the world at the moment - you can compress a full movie (110min) at almost DVD quality to fit onto a standard CDR. Heck, all my holiday videos are now encoded in DivX, and I'm burning souveniers to my family / friends who can also watch my videos on their PC's. As far as software based compression is concerned, the DivX codec is one of the fastest encoders I've encountered. I have a legit copy of Adobe Premiere, which has a large number of codecs (Indeo, Sorenson, Cinepak, M2V, M1V and now DivX), and the DivX codec is the fastest to compress. Coupled with its file size and image quality, I do not want to use any other codec again. DivX is to video what MP3 (Mpeg audio, layer 3) is to audio. It will become the defacto unofficial standard for distribution of videos. The biggest issue is that DivX uses proprietry Micros~1 DLL files, which the DivX; team somehow managed to include in the BeOS and Linux codecs - kudos to them. There is a new project by the DivX team called 3ivX - which will eliminate M$ DLL files with there own GPL libraries. Once thats done, no one, I repeat, NO ONE can take MPEG-4 away from us.
Yep, Commodore decided to create a console with the Amiga API, allowing developers to target both the console and the Amiga computer. Likewise, the consoles (CDTV especially) had some nifty technology, but never achieved the market penetration Commodore hoped for. The money invested ended up sinking the big C=. Ah Micros~, they're catching up to the competition - the gap is now only 10 years.
Once again we have a case of induced morality - where social norms of one group of people interfere with our rights of acquiring knowledge, speech and individual development as a life form. Our brief existance (as individuals) is hampered with twisted (should I say distorted) perceptions of morality and decency, and we're once again subjected to a form of brain washing. Throughout my youth, as a social being learning about social rules, I was intimidated by a prudent society. Certain teachings about religion, morality, patriotism, nobility etc amongst other purposes mainly served to protect the ruling elite - the armed band of thugs terrorising society, imposing their will (with punishment of death) and establishing nation/states, or religious indoctrination. I was taught to hate my neighbours (they where our enemy), despice people of a different race, automatically assume that the person with a different religion is out to kill me, pornography is not good etc etc etc. I was fortunate to move to a less prudent society in my youth, where issues like religion, race, social norms etc where very relaxed (you can actually see full scale pornographic material on public access TV, and magazines in news-stands, which where incidently located by bus stops, advertised pornography to all passers by, including kids). When you're subjected to this material, it suddenly doesn't become an issue or immoral - and if you watch any foreign movie (French, Italian, Yugoslav etc) you'll see virtually everything. These societies are not prudent, and as such allow an individual to explore various aspects of our psychie. Without ignorance we become better people, and with censorship we promote ignorance - mainly to preserve the current establishment. So, in my mind, cencorship is another form of dictatorship - as a biological entity, I am not bound by this stupid norms society imposes, and we should structure a society which will allow each individual to explore every tangent that they may be interested in. Exploration doesn't neccesitate physical abuse.
Society should stop grinding axes and focus on educating people, since all problems which exist today stem from a lack of understanding. Beer manufacturers should not be held accountable for alchohol related accidents - drivers should be aware of how alchohol impedes judgement. The poor peasants in Serbia shouldn't be bombed for the insanity of one man - the west should encourage the citizens to seek a wealthier life. Software engineers should not be held accountable for a bug which causes an orbital rocket to deviate from its course and slam into a crowded school - management must allow adequate time for testing. Etc Etc.
What you can do is seek a Software Test Engineer (or QA) position. These positions are not black box testing, they're more white box oriented (where you get to develop testing tools - quite cool actually, cause you actually develop something fast (ie. more than 100 lines of code a day, as opposed to 'regular' programmers who do 6-20 **tested** lines of code a day), since all code is for internal use only. That way you'll advance your programming skills faster by gaining valuable programming experience. These positions are usually open to people of your calibre and present an excellent stepping stone. Be prepared for a rude awakening in the modern IT industry. These days RAD tools make applications in a matter of days (weeks), so in the future greater emphasis will be on testing than on designing / programming. You might discover that a lot of developers convert to testers simply because there is less stress involved, for equal money. And its not a 'in' profession, so with skill you may reach a higher earning managerial position faster.
Your gorgeous Civ is now ugly? Well of course, with all the pollution and terraforming going on, you've ruined the countryside and created an industrial wasteland. He he, too bad that I developed the Hoover Dam first, and now I have the equivalent of a non-polluting Hydro Plant in every city. But my scientist keep warning me that because of **you** there is a chance of global warming occuring and the icecaps melting. Nah, it will never happen. Aha, my SS MODULE is complete. Lets call it ISS ZVEZDA.
Classic can be interpreted in several ways: - A 'classic' is a game which defines a genre, and inspires the creation of hundreds of clones. Q3Arena, Unreal, Doom etc are all clones of the classic - Wolfenstein 3d. Examples would be Tetris, Elite, Pole Position, Lemmings etc. - A 'classic' is a game which can be played again and again and again, always rivetting, inspiring and fun to play. Examples would be Civilization 2 (my all time favourite), Quake 1 (it's still great after all these years, better gameplay than all sequals) and Fifa99. These are games I'd take to a deserted island (together with Naval Signalling for Dummies). So, without further ado, here is my top 10 list of 'classic' games. 10. Age of Empires2 (PC) (hey, I love it!!!!! - best game I ever played) 9. Freecell (night shift classic) (PC) 8. Pinball Dreams (Amiga), the Ignition table. 7. Tetris (C64) 6. Lemmings (Amiga) 5. Quake - the original - nightmare is still challenging, and fun (PC). 4. SWOS (Amiga) 3. Elite (for C64) 2. Fifa 99 (PC) ...and finally... 1. Civilization 1/2 (Amiga/PC)(I played that 'til 6:00 in the morning the first time I tried it). Almost that long for Civ2. No other game has captivated me as much.
I've read this somewhere, and thought it was appropriate. When faced with a block, the quoted person would perform some mindless task, like installing Windows...
No I dont. I command you to program for BeOS, and you will be saved, my Son.
"I highly recommend taking along a parachute." From what I've heard, skydivers are equiped with two parachutes. There is a 3% chance that the primary chute wont open, hence the second chute. And so far, no one has complained of the second chute not opening :)
What do you get when you combine the best elements of all three systems? The Free Amigos (with a plethora of features)
Does your monitor run on juice or from hot air. And where do you think the juice comes from? And how much CO2 is generated in the process?
Enough said.
Why is it that the prevailing attitude with the OpenSource community is that all bugs can be fixed when the source is freely available (aka many eyes find bugs faster), compared to Closed Source programs, where we're left to the grace of the developer to implement any fixes? As any maintainance programmer will tell you, it is a nightmare to jump into someone elses code, and start sorting and figuring out what functionality each module has, no matter how experienced they might be. It takes weeks (even months) to mentally break down the code into manageable functions, especially with the size of most projects today, with OO modularity, and the multithreaded nature of modern software. The developers have a mental picture of the architecture of their software, and they can implement fixes faster and in a structuraly more sound way than any outsider looking at the source for 1-2 hours. Software engineers spend months developing an architecture, and many more months coding, testing, and bugfixing. Any you think that a 21 year old student, halfway through obtaining a CS degree, or an enthusiest with no formal qualifications, can hack through the code in a few hours and fix bugs which the developers have spent weeks on tracking down. Not likely. You must remember that the developers are able hackers too, even more so than you because they have actually shipped a product, with millions of lines of code, and months of hard work and long hours. WE DEVELOPERS ARE GREAT HACKERS TOO!!! The only software which should be open sourced is abandoned software, where the developers are 2 generations ahead of the old software. The original Quake was open sourced when Q3Arena was almost done - and ID didn't plan on working with it any more (or milking it). Face it, Open Source software will always be 2-4 years behind the latest products. Don't be suprised to see M$ open sourcing M$-DOS 3 these days.
Need I go on?
Just because its been tackled by M$, it doesnt automatically mean that there is an additional monopolistic motive, or that its going to be uter crap. They have very intelligant engineers working in Redmond (wheelmouse anyone), and they try to do AS WELL AS THEY CAN under given design constraints. If they start of with a crappy API and 9 months to release a product (Chicago anyone), they'll do the best they can to engineer a product. If they are given the luxury to scrap everything and start fresh (aka BeOS), I'm sure they'll release a kick-ass product. The long-term success of the MS-X will depend on the design decisions they make today - will they start with a brand new API, or hack Win32API? Will X software be compatible with PC software? At the end of the day, I want a bullet-proof/idiot proof product which I can use in the living room with a 70cm TV, and I don't care who makes it
It really is sad that we live in a world with imposing prohibitions - just because someone, somewhere has deemed certain material innapropriate for whatever reasons, other people have restricted instead of full lives. Where is it going to end? As an individual, I dont wont a government telling me what I can and cannot do, especially when the cannot has nothing to do with deteriorating the quality of other peoples lives. I want to see porn. I want to HEAR, or read other peoples opinions. Life is so short, too short for others to restrict my scope of experiances. From the title comments we can see another form of prejudice - political restrictions are bad and pornographic restrictions are good? Not so, my friend. Other societies have no taboos with pornography unlike the English speaking societies. I was raised in a society which played full scale pornographic movies every night on public, free for all TV. No black bars or cut scenes. This is a cultrul issue, and again, who does the government think it is when it imposes restrictions on what I may see. All forms of ccensorship are bad, be they political or pornographical. To quote a fellow /.-er, we are slashdot, open source, closed minds. Ha.
What sort of a world have we created for ourselves? Since when did religion become a dominant factor in our lives? We have screwed society up with preconcieved notions (dogmatism) brought from the dark ages - there should be no taboos in the modern world, otherwise we might as well crawl back into the primordial slime we came from. Ask yourselves these two vital questions - who plants thoughts into our minds, and for what purpose? Only then will you realise what role (and influence)we as individuals have in society. Open source society, thats what we want. Stop the Earth. I want to get off.