While sales taxes discourage sales, income tax discourages *both* sales and investment. Given the pathetically low level of savings in this country, it makes a lot more sense to cut income taxes than it does to cut sales taxes.
Sales levels do not make any systemic change in the economy. Stimulating sales (aggregate demand) is a short term fix to economic problems, and while it is a short term fix that can dull the pain until the next upswing of the business cycle, it cannot and will not make the economy "grow" in any real, permanent sense. The size of the economy, especially in a modern, high-value-added economy like the US's, is dependent almost entirely on capital spending. On investment. On money spent on factories, technology, and education. Not money spent on consumable goods.
Now, while I like low sales taxes too, given that there have to be taxes, a sales tax is a tax that does the least long-term harm to the economy. Given a choice, it is the least of two evils.
(Anybody who committs a murder is also responsible for wrongful death, but what good is being owed money by somebody who's already in jail for life and spent everything they had on a failed defense?)
Mostly true. DARPA actually does tend to give out grants that read very similarly to "Here's a big chunk of cash... please make something cool with it." There's just the subtext of "that you were mostly interested in making anyway, but you convinced us that there's a fair chance it will have military value, especially after sexing up your proposal from the one you gave the NSF."
"Pure" research, or rather, non-applied research, is not something that private industry is interested in. If it won't generate a return in 5 years with high probability, then it won't get funded privately. So you can't turn to them for funding. Unless you happen to be interested in a problem that happens to have immediate practical payoff, the government is your only realistic option.
Also, the government spends a shedload of money on grants that have nothing whatsoever to do with the DoD, NASA, DoE, or DARPA. However, that money is still finite. So if a researcher can increase the pool of grants they can apply to by adding a military benefit spin to it, then most researchers will jump at it. Indeed, researchers in hard-science fields that don't accept defence money come in two classes: unsuccessful (cause they can't get any funding) or absolutely successful (since they're so wonderful that every grant they write is accepted, DoD be damned).
Consider getting tenure. In hard-science fields, the recomendation of the department carries a lot of weight. These are people who can draw on money from many more sources, and so the institutions will assume that they can come up with their own grant money, and all that matters is if they can get along with their coworkers. In, say, the history department, it is commonplace for a faculty member that the department is desparate to keep to leave, because their tenure case failed.
It isn't that DoD money is addictive, it's just that in a field that is so competitive, failing to use it as a resource puts you at a disadvantage, which can have negative effects in the long run. DARPA does not have a huge effect on the direction of research, either. I'd guess that the majority of grants are re-writes of something that was originally submitted to NSF or another no-strings source of money.
And if anybody in the DoD happens to agree with me, I'd be happy to accept a fellowship. CS, interests in distributed systems, willing to accept as much baby-killer money as it takes to pay the rent.:)
Never mind that so far as video goes, getting totally uncompressed source is nearly impossible. 640 wide*480 high*24 bit*30 fps = 221Mbps. Yep, two-hundread and twenty-one million bits per second. That translates to under 30 seconds of video on a standard CD, or about 6 minutes on a DVD.
I've done some work in video compression, and it was a non-trivial task to get never-compressed source. Indeed, we had to generate it ourselves, and were limited to low-motion real life (stop motion-style pan over a room) and animation (hours upon hours of Bryce). And at that, it turned out that in practice, we could have just ripped some DVD and gotten identical results.
Re:Which formats are the most durable?
on
Video Codec Comparison
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Both XviD and DivX5 can be fully standards complaint mpeg4. They offer a few (very few, optional, generally experimental) features which are outside the standard, but for the most part, they *are* mpeg4. Some of the seemingly basic differences between XviD and DivX5 is that mpeg4 has a lot of features which are not mandatory for encoders, and (for the longest time at least) they implemented different sets of optional features. And while the XviD and DivX5 teams are both attempting to implement as many of the fancy features as possible, they haven't polished them all off yet.
To repeat: DivX5 and XviD are both implementations of the core MPEG4 specification, plus some set of optional features which are included in the MPEG4 specification, plus an extra or two which don't really make any quality differences (yet).
MPEG4 _was_ initially intended for very low bitrate applications. And indeed, if bitrate is not an issue, then MPEG2 can (and generally will) produce output that is indistinguishable from the source.
However, a lot of the features included in MPEG4 make it equivilent to MPEG2 in quality potential. It would be proper to think of MPEG4 as MPEG2 with a bunch of extra options. If you turn the options off, then you can expect very similar results. Since people generally are using MPEG4 to generate medium-quality (say, around SVHS) video at low (yes, 3 hours of video on 2 CDs is _low_ bitrate), most implementations are much more aggressive about allocating bits than most MPEG2 implementations are. Indeed, at the target bitrates people are choosing, most MPEG2 implementations will utterly fall apart (although MPEG2 itself ought to hold up better than actual performance would suggest).
Among the key new features of MPEG4 are:
1) QPel - MPEG2 allows you to say that a block in a frame is the same as a previous (or future) frame shifted by x pixels, or x.5 pixels, or is kinda like this block and kinda like this other block. MPEG4 extends this to quarters, rather than halves. This is supposed to really help very low motion, or small variations in globally compensated motion.
2) Global motion compensation - MPEG4 allows you to say that the whole frame is panning/sweeping so-and-so much, and then make localized offsets. Actually, IIRC, it lets you make "global" statements at the object level, which leads to...
3) Object-based decomposition - consider a video scene. You have a background, and several "objects" in the foreground. In theory, it would be nice to encode the background with low-motion assumptions (or constant panning assumptions), and the foreground with higher-motion assumptions. Additionally, picking out the different objects in traditional cel-style animation should let MPEG4 totally kick-ass in compressing animation. In practice, all of the techniques for separating out objects automatically suck royally (how you identify objects is not a matter of the spec, the spec just says that if you've separated out, you can handle them individually and paste them together later). This is MPEG4's biggest unrealized potential. The first implementation with good object decomposition should be a huge improvement over all past attempts at video compression. OTOH, don't hold your breath waiting for good object decomposition--it's a "hard" problem, as in computer-vision hard. Developing even half-way decent object decomposition ought to be good for at least 3 or 4 PhD theses.
4) MPEG4 is looser. Just in general it leaves more things up to the encoder, such as what quantization tables to use, letting you vary q-levels more drastically, etc. Also, IIRC, MPEG2 only allows for certain fixed ratios of B-frames and P-frames. MPEG4 loosens these restrictions (all the way?) to allow much greater use on B and P-frames. These frames (especially B-frames) tend to be very compressable, although there are signifigent CPU-usage tradeoffs involved. If nothing else, MPEG2 implementations will almost never let more than 8 frames go by without an I-frame, regardless of whether the spec allows more or not.
5) MPEG4 includes a wavelet-based transform for certain elements. I don't believe that anybody actually uses it for anything, but it is in the spec.
6) Not a spec difference, but in practice, only MPEG4 uses 2-pass encoding. MPEG2 is heavily used for live stuff (well, 3 seconds delay for the censors plus a second for motion comp), and 2-pass is not an option. 2-pass has been implemented in MPEG2 (indeed, the first work with 2-pass was done with MPEG2), but the idea is relatively new. So most MPEG2 implementations don't do 2-pass, and never will, since all the new development effort is going into MPEG4. Many/most MPEG4 implementations include 2-pass since it lets the coder be much smarter about bitrate allocation, and it is a known technique.
That just about sums up the major differences between MPEG2 and MPEG4. Oh yeah, and MPEG4's number is 2 higher:)
A better translation of "Maximum Quantizer" would be "what's the most information you should throw away". The lossy compression formats get a lot of their effectiveness by quantizing the data. Specifically, a quantizer of n means divide everything by n and throw away the fractional part on compression, then multiply everything by n on decompression. From a practical standpoint, it is the same thing as throwing away the least signifigant bits (a q of 16 throws away 4 bits, for example).
Bitrate is generally controlled by modifying the quantizer values as the video progresses. So lowering the maximum quantizer is the same as specifying a higher minimum bitrate. In theory, a good implementation of a codec (using 2-pass quality-based VBR, B-frames, QPel, etc.) will function best if you don't restrict it's choice of quantizer. However, a really high quantizer value generally means that the codec screwed up, so limiting it doesn't hurt too much.
Along with the new censoring of nudity, there comes the censoring of violence. I recently watched a series called Noir, a action-spy type series, where people shot guns and got shot, but there was no blood. Anything "gruesome" was off camera and or only shown in the shadows. This make the anime feel very fake.
The lack of blood in Noir doesn't seem to me to be a censorship issue, but one of artistic decision. This has been talked about somewhat extensively on some of the Noir forums. I can't find a link to the whole discussion, but I did found a quote from it: "...that wonderful unique trademark of Noir: only the those who have humanity bleed. No one else."
The vast majority of the deaths are the bad guys. The handful of innocents (the less-guilty if you prefer) who die do bleed. Most notably the Bouquet family in the repeated flashbacks, but in the instances when Kirika or Mireille are injured they *do* bleed. Not excessively; getting nicked with a knife/bullet isn't a very bloody thing, and even a fatal knife/bullet wound doesn't bleed all that much, much less a non-fatal hit.
I'd challenge that agreeing to the EULA is a requirement at all.
When I purchase boxed software, the exchange has the basic properties of a sale. I don't go into CompUSA and license software--I buy it. By purhasing the software in such a manner, there are certain things that I feel I'm implicitly allowed to do. Like, say, installing and running the software. The text of the EULA is not required in any way for me to be allowed to do this. Furthermore, I would hold that "agreeing" to a shrinkwrap license by performing some action which would be reasonably expected to be performed after purchasing the software (again, opening the box, installing it, and running it) is not in fact agreement, but just clicking on pretty widgets (or shredding the pretty shrinkwrap).
Actually, DivX is an MPEG-4 varient, and DivX Networks pays the MPEG-LA fees for the use of their technology. For the new version of the codec, you get the choice of paying for it, adware, or choosing a version which doesn't use the latest and greatest (and patented) techniques.
XVid would have been a better choice, although they probably are just scoffing at paying the fees, like Lame did.
There's a lot of evidence that our "natural" diet is composed of a large percentage of animal protien, upwards of 60%. We don't have the bone structure or jaw muscles to be true herbavores, and large brains are found mostly (always?) in predators, since they have the caloric intake to support them.
Additionally, there are present-day cultures, such as the Inuit, who get about 95% of thier calories from animal products, without bad health effects. Their high-protien diets are offset by a high-activity lifestyle, and by eating leaner meat that is the usual fare in many other places.
This month's Scientific American has a very interesting article about homonid diet. You may want to check it out.
are actually the preferred way to proof text. A project to create "The Collected Works of Edmund Spenser" is headquartered here, and the English-types were looking for people to work on some software for them. The current most accurate way to create an electronic copy is to hire people without even a passing familiarity with the alphabet you are targeting, train them to identify the letters themselves (using the font you're targetting, which may be very much non-standard, esp. for work as old as Spencer's), and have them enter it in character by character. You then have another illiterate person do the same, and have 1 editor (English graduate student) check both copies. Then any differences have to be handled by another editor (English PhD), and the final copy signed off by yet another editor (PhD).
A very very expensive way to do it.
See, an illiterate person won't introduce any bias into the text. They will faithfully duplicate any spelling mistakes that they find. In the case of an English scholarly collection, the mistakes are amoung the most important part, since they can identify different print runs, and how language shifts over time.
As a side note, the software project is hopeless. The best that cann be managed is to automate the administration of their current systems--no OCR will ever meet the level of accuracy that their current system provides.
So I'm a student at Washington University, and I know the people who programmed Lewis. A couple of points:
Skin tone: For the most part, the skin tone thing works. Lewis was left roaming around CS happy hour, and he merrirly took pictures of people from India and Africa as well as those from Sweden. He did have problems with one person from India who was *very* dark skinned, but at the time his training data was pictures of Micheal Dixon, the guy who programmed the people recognizer. Micheal is as pale as they get, so that's pretty good. Unfortunately Lewis works much better if the training data is taken under the same lighting conditions as he'll be working on, so if nobody with rather dark skin was available to make training data at SIGGRAPH, it's likely he would have ignored them.
People ignoring Lewis: Eventually, even little kids get bored with him. It's cool at first, but the novelty wears off. Besides, little kids would have a hard time pushing him over: he weights a lot.
Hardware: Lewis is a commercial robot, and runs on the order of $80,000. Consider a 1 time investment in a robot, or having to pay the salary of a real photographer year after year. At 10%, Lewis's yearly cost is only $8,000. Also, he has a lot of sensors and other features that aren't used when he's in photographer mode. Either way his current hardware wouldn't work for a wedding: Dr. Smart's strictly forbidden putting food or drink on top of Lewis, for good reasons.
Kill all humans mode: Lewis has only gone into kill all humans mode twice before, and we've kept the casualties down to an art student and a couple of drunk B-schoolers. Personally, those are acceptable casualty rates. But seriously, a huge quantity of robot research money comes from the DoD. Who really thinks that a robot photographer was what was written on the grant application? Apparently they've already sent 1 robot into caves into Afgahnistan with a payload that included a live weapon. Lewis can navigate around, avoid moving obsticles, and point his camera right at head hight. Now, nobody's applied the technology in Lewis in such a manner yet, but connect the dots.
Anyway, it was a lot more work than you'd imagine to get Lewis to function properly. Lots of things you don't think of crop up (The laser's can't see the legs of a table. Micheal is pale and other people aren't. Wooden doors are approximately skin toned.), and the problem is intrinsically difficult. The skin tone stuff alone eats up most of the processor, nevermind the path planing and mobile obsticle avoidence. For SIGGRAPH he was running on reduced hardware too: he has a dual mobo, but it isn't as reliable as the singe-processor one used at SIGGRAPH.
The correct price, in the long run, for any good, under a properly functioning market, is the marginal cost of production.
That is, given that it costs so much to produce 1 extra unit of a good, then in a competitive market price competition will drive the price down to a point where if it was any cheaper, selling it would be a money-loosing proposition. Ever hear farmers complain about how they'd be just as well off selling their land/equipment and living off the interest? That's because farm goods are a near perfect market (the massive attempts of various governments to use price supports notwithstanding). The price of a bushel of corn is almost precisely the marginal cost of said bushel, accounting for the labour of the farmer the the opportunity cost inheirit in the stored capital (what you could earn selling the land/machinery).
Now, if the average cost is above the marginal cost, then firms will price-compete themselves out of business, until the inefficient firms are gone and the average cost is again a hair below the marginal. If the average cost is signifigantly below the marginal, then new firms will want to enter the market, and the increased price competition will depress prices. If no firm can be efficient enough to move their average cost below their marginal cost, then either a good simply won't be produced, or it will only be produced in a monopolistic/oligopolistic market.
The only reason the "correct" pricing of an entertainment product is "whatever the customer is willing to pay" is that the producers of entertainment have been granted a legal semi-monopoly. That is, only 1 firm can produce any particulary copyrighted work.
However, at the same time, there are substitutes, in that one work may be a good substitute for another (N'Sync vs. Backstreet Boys). Given this, the high prices must be a result of oligopolic power. The number of firms in the industry is too small to produce effective price competition, or the firms are colluding to inflate prices. Additionally, the lack of new firms entering signifies that the existing firms are raising barriers to entry in their industry. That is, a new recording company can't get (buy) radio airtime, isn't able to get (buy) shelf space at merchants, can't book venues (bribe Clear Channel) for their artists, etc.
There is massive evidence that the music industry is not an efficient free market. There are few firms. They have been convicted of price fixing (collusion in the form of enforcing minimal advertised prices for retailers). A handfull of firms (most notably Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting) control the airwaves (and almost control booking of bands). The costs of their goods are much higher than the marginal cost, and have increased despite signifigent decreases in the costs of the factors of production (not just pressing CD's, but the labor to ship them, make cover art, even the artists themselves).
As a rule of thumb, a industry that is in an efficient free market is an industry that you can't get ahead in. Farming is the best example, but computer retailing (Dell/HP/et. al. have razor thin profit margins), airlines (they're pushing financial ruin), and the automobile industry (0% financing *and* cutthroat pricing!) are others. Examples of industries where there doesn't appear to be an efficient market (for one reason or another) include health care (current doctors increase barriers of entry for new doctors all the time), jewlry (Debeers==cartel), and of course, entertainment.
RAM I/O shouldn't be too much of a bottleneck, or does your processor not have any cache?
Seriously, right now I'm almost completely CPU bound. The resident size of my compilation processes are well small enough to fit inside L2 cache, and the working set probably fits in L1. Sure, eventually it'll finish with the file it's currently working on and move to another, and *then* RAM I/O will matter (but not disk--everything should be in the buffers by now), but that takes a matter of milliseconds, and it'll chew on that file for a good minute.
I'm actually expecting this compile job to take a good 3 hours or so. Fairly small by the standards around here. Uptime matters when you run a job which a) is totally serial (no parallelism) b) is nasty to checkpoint and c) ain't finishing today. You peg CPU load to above 1 for a week straight and then tell me there's no need for faster processors. Just because the working set is small doesn't make it non-trivial.
I don't know about California, but IIRC Delaware (where an ungodly percentage of companies are incorporated because of an overall corporate-friendly atmosphere) doesn't allow a corporation to attempt to influence the political process, and doing so is grounds for disincorporation. Additionally, a corp must "act for the public interest", that is, the people as a whole need to vaguely not disapprove of what a corp. is doing. It used to be that activities which were moralally questionable (at the time) like making liquor were out of reach of most corps, because then they'd be disincorporated.
Granted, most corps get around the politics thing by having their officers donate, and by working through various proxies, and the public interest thing hasn't been enforced too well lately (75 years? all last century?), but if a really large number of people became really pissed at corporations in general, and made enforcement of these existing provisions a big deal, there'd be more than enough ground to clean up this mess.
The trouble is, there is a cost to blacklisting : violation of their contractual peering/carrier responsibilities. They have agreed to carry a lot of traffic. Some for money, some in exchange for peering, but they've agreed to carry it nevertheless. If they just cave, then they open themselves to suits from all of the people they've contracted with for breach of contract.
Now, true, you can't contract to do something illegal and have the contract be enforcable. However, they need to make a reasonable effort to fulfill their contractual obligations, which would include fighting back. Additionally, this is a civil matter, and not a criminal one, so even if they fight and loose, they could still be drug into court over failure to deliver. They may win such cases, but if they just cave to the RIAA, they can't also just cave to all of their customers. And their customers aren't small fry either -- I believe UUNET now requires you to have 3 geographically distant POP's connected by 10 Mbit to even vaguely consider peering.
Also, corporations are fully aware of the idea of setting a bad precident (shit, is that spelled right? 'prolly not). Every time they let somebody dictate what they can carry, it makes it that much easier for the next person who wants another IP block to be stopped at the border. The big baddass backbone routers already have oversized routing tables--they simply can't afford to add any unnecessary entries. And if adding these entries causes service to slip, well, most big backbones include all sorts of lovely penalty provisions against themselves in their carrier contracts, because they know that they can charge extra for the ironclad guaruntee.
No, they all but have to fight. They can either fight the RIAA in one big battle, or fight their customers in a hundred big battles. 1 is a lot less than 100...
You may think that the RIAA is good at influencing the legal and political process, but I think they've just picked a fight they can't hope to win. The big backbone providers got to where they are through skillful manipulation of the system. If any set of entities is capable of playing the litigation game, it has got to be the phone and cable companies.
First off, every other case the RIAA has attempted has been against shallow pockets. Not so here. While WorldCom is in trouble, they do have a large legal team sitting around doing nothing (can't work on the bankruptcy 'cause that's not their area). I don't think I need mention how deep the pockets of ATT, Sprint, et. al. are.
Also, in the past they've gone against entities without experience. At any one time any major phone company is involved in more litagation than you can imagine (minimum of 3 major legal actions per state--justifying their current rates, attacking the justification their competitors give for their rates, and fighting to keep their preferred status as incumbant carrier, besides various federal and local actions). They know how to take full advantage of the rules, which rules they have to follow, which they can bend, and which they can break. They'll make dragging any information out of them during discovery a total nightmare, while at the same time demanding the most minor scraps of records the RIAA has. They'll abuse the calander, run the clock, and overall be just not very nice.
The RIAA may act like an 800 lb. gorrilla, but they've just picked a fight with the 8000 lb. bunch. Not a good idea.
Speaking of the rounded cables, can anybody speak as to how well they work? I had heard horror stories about the first generation of them, but I haven't for a while?
Are they as reliable as the ribbon connectors? Are the ground wire/signal wire pairs twisted or free-running?
Basically, given that cooling/looks aren't a problem for me, but finding reliable cables is, should I try one of the rounded ones?
Bzzt! Wrong. While listing in order of importance is one way, also common is listing alphabetically, especially if a paper had few contributors (unlike, say, some physics experiments where the contributors list may be longer than the paper).
Since the order isn't Katz, Jallad, Schneier, we can't assume that Schneier is a minor contributor. Since RSA published as RSA rather than ARS, we _can_ assume something about importance there. But that's not the case here, is it?
.NET is basically Corba and SOAP, tied to a new virtual-machine sandbox, which allows running the usual "trusted" (garbage collected, bounds checked, etc) sandboxed code, as well as untrusted (that is, you can turn off array bounds checking, use pointers, not use garbage collection, etc), possibly mixed together.
One could look at it as Java and RMI redesigned, with the benefit of seeing where Java needed a bit of work.
Well, allegedly the original owners of the patent were JPEG members, so they did have a duty to disclose.
And silence with respect to your IP being included in a large, public, very prominent standard the designers of which have gone out of their way to attempt to ensure a lack of restraining IP certainly seems enough to generate an estoppel.
Slashdot Mirror
While sales taxes discourage sales, income tax discourages *both* sales and investment. Given the pathetically low level of savings in this country, it makes a lot more sense to cut income taxes than it does to cut sales taxes.
Sales levels do not make any systemic change in the economy. Stimulating sales (aggregate demand) is a short term fix to economic problems, and while it is a short term fix that can dull the pain until the next upswing of the business cycle, it cannot and will not make the economy "grow" in any real, permanent sense. The size of the economy, especially in a modern, high-value-added economy like the US's, is dependent almost entirely on capital spending. On investment. On money spent on factories, technology, and education. Not money spent on consumable goods.
Now, while I like low sales taxes too, given that there have to be taxes, a sales tax is a tax that does the least long-term harm to the economy. Given a choice, it is the least of two evils.
(Anybody who committs a murder is also responsible for wrongful death, but what good is being owed money by somebody who's already in jail for life and spent everything they had on a failed defense?)
Not much, but if their defense didn't quite fail, the standards are lower for wrongful death.
I for one would like to not have a military, but then we're left with the problem of gaining a reliable ally that has a very strong one.
Ah, that's Japan's solution to the problem. Maybe we should use their reliable ally.
Mostly true. DARPA actually does tend to give out grants that read very similarly to "Here's a big chunk of cash... please make something cool with it." There's just the subtext of "that you were mostly interested in making anyway, but you convinced us that there's a fair chance it will have military value, especially after sexing up your proposal from the one you gave the NSF."
:)
"Pure" research, or rather, non-applied research, is not something that private industry is interested in. If it won't generate a return in 5 years with high probability, then it won't get funded privately. So you can't turn to them for funding. Unless you happen to be interested in a problem that happens to have immediate practical payoff, the government is your only realistic option.
Also, the government spends a shedload of money on grants that have nothing whatsoever to do with the DoD, NASA, DoE, or DARPA. However, that money is still finite. So if a researcher can increase the pool of grants they can apply to by adding a military benefit spin to it, then most researchers will jump at it. Indeed, researchers in hard-science fields that don't accept defence money come in two classes: unsuccessful (cause they can't get any funding) or absolutely successful (since they're so wonderful that every grant they write is accepted, DoD be damned).
Consider getting tenure. In hard-science fields, the recomendation of the department carries a lot of weight. These are people who can draw on money from many more sources, and so the institutions will assume that they can come up with their own grant money, and all that matters is if they can get along with their coworkers. In, say, the history department, it is commonplace for a faculty member that the department is desparate to keep to leave, because their tenure case failed.
It isn't that DoD money is addictive, it's just that in a field that is so competitive, failing to use it as a resource puts you at a disadvantage, which can have negative effects in the long run. DARPA does not have a huge effect on the direction of research, either. I'd guess that the majority of grants are re-writes of something that was originally submitted to NSF or another no-strings source of money.
And if anybody in the DoD happens to agree with me, I'd be happy to accept a fellowship. CS, interests in distributed systems, willing to accept as much baby-killer money as it takes to pay the rent.
Never mind that so far as video goes, getting totally uncompressed source is nearly impossible. 640 wide*480 high*24 bit*30 fps = 221Mbps. Yep, two-hundread and twenty-one million bits per second. That translates to under 30 seconds of video on a standard CD, or about 6 minutes on a DVD.
I've done some work in video compression, and it was a non-trivial task to get never-compressed source. Indeed, we had to generate it ourselves, and were limited to low-motion real life (stop motion-style pan over a room) and animation (hours upon hours of Bryce). And at that, it turned out that in practice, we could have just ripped some DVD and gotten identical results.
Both XviD and DivX5 can be fully standards complaint mpeg4. They offer a few (very few, optional, generally experimental) features which are outside the standard, but for the most part, they *are* mpeg4. Some of the seemingly basic differences between XviD and DivX5 is that mpeg4 has a lot of features which are not mandatory for encoders, and (for the longest time at least) they implemented different sets of optional features. And while the XviD and DivX5 teams are both attempting to implement as many of the fancy features as possible, they haven't polished them all off yet.
To repeat: DivX5 and XviD are both implementations of the core MPEG4 specification, plus some set of optional features which are included in the MPEG4 specification, plus an extra or two which don't really make any quality differences (yet).
MPEG4 _was_ initially intended for very low bitrate applications. And indeed, if bitrate is not an issue, then MPEG2 can (and generally will) produce output that is indistinguishable from the source.
:)
However, a lot of the features included in MPEG4 make it equivilent to MPEG2 in quality potential. It would be proper to think of MPEG4 as MPEG2 with a bunch of extra options. If you turn the options off, then you can expect very similar results. Since people generally are using MPEG4 to generate medium-quality (say, around SVHS) video at low (yes, 3 hours of video on 2 CDs is _low_ bitrate), most implementations are much more aggressive about allocating bits than most MPEG2 implementations are. Indeed, at the target bitrates people are choosing, most MPEG2 implementations will utterly fall apart (although MPEG2 itself ought to hold up better than actual performance would suggest).
Among the key new features of MPEG4 are:
1) QPel - MPEG2 allows you to say that a block in a frame is the same as a previous (or future) frame shifted by x pixels, or x.5 pixels, or is kinda like this block and kinda like this other block. MPEG4 extends this to quarters, rather than halves. This is supposed to really help very low motion, or small variations in globally compensated motion.
2) Global motion compensation - MPEG4 allows you to say that the whole frame is panning/sweeping so-and-so much, and then make localized offsets. Actually, IIRC, it lets you make "global" statements at the object level, which leads to...
3) Object-based decomposition - consider a video scene. You have a background, and several "objects" in the foreground. In theory, it would be nice to encode the background with low-motion assumptions (or constant panning assumptions), and the foreground with higher-motion assumptions. Additionally, picking out the different objects in traditional cel-style animation should let MPEG4 totally kick-ass in compressing animation. In practice, all of the techniques for separating out objects automatically suck royally (how you identify objects is not a matter of the spec, the spec just says that if you've separated out, you can handle them individually and paste them together later). This is MPEG4's biggest unrealized potential. The first implementation with good object decomposition should be a huge improvement over all past attempts at video compression. OTOH, don't hold your breath waiting for good object decomposition--it's a "hard" problem, as in computer-vision hard. Developing even half-way decent object decomposition ought to be good for at least 3 or 4 PhD theses.
4) MPEG4 is looser. Just in general it leaves more things up to the encoder, such as what quantization tables to use, letting you vary q-levels more drastically, etc. Also, IIRC, MPEG2 only allows for certain fixed ratios of B-frames and P-frames. MPEG4 loosens these restrictions (all the way?) to allow much greater use on B and P-frames. These frames (especially B-frames) tend to be very compressable, although there are signifigent CPU-usage tradeoffs involved. If nothing else, MPEG2 implementations will almost never let more than 8 frames go by without an I-frame, regardless of whether the spec allows more or not.
5) MPEG4 includes a wavelet-based transform for certain elements. I don't believe that anybody actually uses it for anything, but it is in the spec.
6) Not a spec difference, but in practice, only MPEG4 uses 2-pass encoding. MPEG2 is heavily used for live stuff (well, 3 seconds delay for the censors plus a second for motion comp), and 2-pass is not an option. 2-pass has been implemented in MPEG2 (indeed, the first work with 2-pass was done with MPEG2), but the idea is relatively new. So most MPEG2 implementations don't do 2-pass, and never will, since all the new development effort is going into MPEG4. Many/most MPEG4 implementations include 2-pass since it lets the coder be much smarter about bitrate allocation, and it is a known technique.
That just about sums up the major differences between MPEG2 and MPEG4. Oh yeah, and MPEG4's number is 2 higher
A better translation of "Maximum Quantizer" would be "what's the most information you should throw away". The lossy compression formats get a lot of their effectiveness by quantizing the data. Specifically, a quantizer of n means divide everything by n and throw away the fractional part on compression, then multiply everything by n on decompression. From a practical standpoint, it is the same thing as throwing away the least signifigant bits (a q of 16 throws away 4 bits, for example).
Bitrate is generally controlled by modifying the quantizer values as the video progresses. So lowering the maximum quantizer is the same as specifying a higher minimum bitrate. In theory, a good implementation of a codec (using 2-pass quality-based VBR, B-frames, QPel, etc.) will function best if you don't restrict it's choice of quantizer. However, a really high quantizer value generally means that the codec screwed up, so limiting it doesn't hurt too much.
8, and it doesn't have the movies.
Along with the new censoring of nudity, there comes the censoring of violence. I recently watched a series called Noir, a action-spy type series, where people shot guns and got shot, but there was no blood. Anything "gruesome" was off camera and or only shown in the shadows. This make the anime feel very fake.
The lack of blood in Noir doesn't seem to me to be a censorship issue, but one of artistic decision. This has been talked about somewhat extensively on some of the Noir forums. I can't find a link to the whole discussion, but I did found a quote from it: "...that wonderful unique trademark of Noir: only the those who have humanity bleed. No one else."
The vast majority of the deaths are the bad guys. The handful of innocents (the less-guilty if you prefer) who die do bleed. Most notably the Bouquet family in the repeated flashbacks, but in the instances when Kirika or Mireille are injured they *do* bleed. Not excessively; getting nicked with a knife/bullet isn't a very bloody thing, and even a fatal knife/bullet wound doesn't bleed all that much, much less a non-fatal hit.
Bidet.
I'd challenge that agreeing to the EULA is a requirement at all.
When I purchase boxed software, the exchange has the basic properties of a sale. I don't go into CompUSA and license software--I buy it. By purhasing the software in such a manner, there are certain things that I feel I'm implicitly allowed to do. Like, say, installing and running the software. The text of the EULA is not required in any way for me to be allowed to do this. Furthermore, I would hold that "agreeing" to a shrinkwrap license by performing some action which would be reasonably expected to be performed after purchasing the software (again, opening the box, installing it, and running it) is not in fact agreement, but just clicking on pretty widgets (or shredding the pretty shrinkwrap).
Just my two cents.
Actually, DivX is an MPEG-4 varient, and DivX Networks pays the MPEG-LA fees for the use of their technology. For the new version of the codec, you get the choice of paying for it, adware, or choosing a version which doesn't use the latest and greatest (and patented) techniques.
XVid would have been a better choice, although they probably are just scoffing at paying the fees, like Lame did.
There's a lot of evidence that our "natural" diet is composed of a large percentage of animal protien, upwards of 60%. We don't have the bone structure or jaw muscles to be true herbavores, and large brains are found mostly (always?) in predators, since they have the caloric intake to support them.
Additionally, there are present-day cultures, such as the Inuit, who get about 95% of thier calories from animal products, without bad health effects. Their high-protien diets are offset by a high-activity lifestyle, and by eating leaner meat that is the usual fare in many other places.
This month's Scientific American has a very interesting article about homonid diet. You may want to check it out.
are actually the preferred way to proof text. A project to create "The Collected Works of Edmund Spenser" is headquartered here, and the English-types were looking for people to work on some software for them. The current most accurate way to create an electronic copy is to hire people without even a passing familiarity with the alphabet you are targeting, train them to identify the letters themselves (using the font you're targetting, which may be very much non-standard, esp. for work as old as Spencer's), and have them enter it in character by character. You then have another illiterate person do the same, and have 1 editor (English graduate student) check both copies. Then any differences have to be handled by another editor (English PhD), and the final copy signed off by yet another editor (PhD).
A very very expensive way to do it.
See, an illiterate person won't introduce any bias into the text. They will faithfully duplicate any spelling mistakes that they find. In the case of an English scholarly collection, the mistakes are amoung the most important part, since they can identify different print runs, and how language shifts over time.
As a side note, the software project is hopeless. The best that cann be managed is to automate the administration of their current systems--no OCR will ever meet the level of accuracy that their current system provides.
So I'm a student at Washington University, and I know the people who programmed Lewis. A couple of points:
Anyway, it was a lot more work than you'd imagine to get Lewis to function properly. Lots of things you don't think of crop up (The laser's can't see the legs of a table. Micheal is pale and other people aren't. Wooden doors are approximately skin toned.), and the problem is intrinsically difficult. The skin tone stuff alone eats up most of the processor, nevermind the path planing and mobile obsticle avoidence. For SIGGRAPH he was running on reduced hardware too: he has a dual mobo, but it isn't as reliable as the singe-processor one used at SIGGRAPH.
Bzzt!
The correct price, in the long run, for any good, under a properly functioning market, is the marginal cost of production.
That is, given that it costs so much to produce 1 extra unit of a good, then in a competitive market price competition will drive the price down to a point where if it was any cheaper, selling it would be a money-loosing proposition. Ever hear farmers complain about how they'd be just as well off selling their land/equipment and living off the interest? That's because farm goods are a near perfect market (the massive attempts of various governments to use price supports notwithstanding). The price of a bushel of corn is almost precisely the marginal cost of said bushel, accounting for the labour of the farmer the the opportunity cost inheirit in the stored capital (what you could earn selling the land/machinery).
Now, if the average cost is above the marginal cost, then firms will price-compete themselves out of business, until the inefficient firms are gone and the average cost is again a hair below the marginal. If the average cost is signifigantly below the marginal, then new firms will want to enter the market, and the increased price competition will depress prices. If no firm can be efficient enough to move their average cost below their marginal cost, then either a good simply won't be produced, or it will only be produced in a monopolistic/oligopolistic market.
The only reason the "correct" pricing of an entertainment product is "whatever the customer is willing to pay" is that the producers of entertainment have been granted a legal semi-monopoly. That is, only 1 firm can produce any particulary copyrighted work.
However, at the same time, there are substitutes, in that one work may be a good substitute for another (N'Sync vs. Backstreet Boys). Given this, the high prices must be a result of oligopolic power. The number of firms in the industry is too small to produce effective price competition, or the firms are colluding to inflate prices. Additionally, the lack of new firms entering signifies that the existing firms are raising barriers to entry in their industry. That is, a new recording company can't get (buy) radio airtime, isn't able to get (buy) shelf space at merchants, can't book venues (bribe Clear Channel) for their artists, etc.
There is massive evidence that the music industry is not an efficient free market. There are few firms. They have been convicted of price fixing (collusion in the form of enforcing minimal advertised prices for retailers). A handfull of firms (most notably Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting) control the airwaves (and almost control booking of bands). The costs of their goods are much higher than the marginal cost, and have increased despite signifigent decreases in the costs of the factors of production (not just pressing CD's, but the labor to ship them, make cover art, even the artists themselves).
As a rule of thumb, a industry that is in an efficient free market is an industry that you can't get ahead in. Farming is the best example, but computer retailing (Dell/HP/et. al. have razor thin profit margins), airlines (they're pushing financial ruin), and the automobile industry (0% financing *and* cutthroat pricing!) are others. Examples of industries where there doesn't appear to be an efficient market (for one reason or another) include health care (current doctors increase barriers of entry for new doctors all the time), jewlry (Debeers==cartel), and of course, entertainment.
RAM I/O shouldn't be too much of a bottleneck, or does your processor not have any cache?
Seriously, right now I'm almost completely CPU bound. The resident size of my compilation processes are well small enough to fit inside L2 cache, and the working set probably fits in L1. Sure, eventually it'll finish with the file it's currently working on and move to another, and *then* RAM I/O will matter (but not disk--everything should be in the buffers by now), but that takes a matter of milliseconds, and it'll chew on that file for a good minute.
I'm actually expecting this compile job to take a good 3 hours or so. Fairly small by the standards around here. Uptime matters when you run a job which a) is totally serial (no parallelism) b) is nasty to checkpoint and c) ain't finishing today. You peg CPU load to above 1 for a week straight and then tell me there's no need for faster processors. Just because the working set is small doesn't make it non-trivial.
I don't know about California, but IIRC Delaware (where an ungodly percentage of companies are incorporated because of an overall corporate-friendly atmosphere) doesn't allow a corporation to attempt to influence the political process, and doing so is grounds for disincorporation. Additionally, a corp must "act for the public interest", that is, the people as a whole need to vaguely not disapprove of what a corp. is doing. It used to be that activities which were moralally questionable (at the time) like making liquor were out of reach of most corps, because then they'd be disincorporated.
Granted, most corps get around the politics thing by having their officers donate, and by working through various proxies, and the public interest thing hasn't been enforced too well lately (75 years? all last century?), but if a really large number of people became really pissed at corporations in general, and made enforcement of these existing provisions a big deal, there'd be more than enough ground to clean up this mess.
Also in response to Renraku's comment above.
The trouble is, there is a cost to blacklisting : violation of their contractual peering/carrier responsibilities. They have agreed to carry a lot of traffic. Some for money, some in exchange for peering, but they've agreed to carry it nevertheless. If they just cave, then they open themselves to suits from all of the people they've contracted with for breach of contract.
Now, true, you can't contract to do something illegal and have the contract be enforcable. However, they need to make a reasonable effort to fulfill their contractual obligations, which would include fighting back. Additionally, this is a civil matter, and not a criminal one, so even if they fight and loose, they could still be drug into court over failure to deliver. They may win such cases, but if they just cave to the RIAA, they can't also just cave to all of their customers. And their customers aren't small fry either -- I believe UUNET now requires you to have 3 geographically distant POP's connected by 10 Mbit to even vaguely consider peering.
Also, corporations are fully aware of the idea of setting a bad precident (shit, is that spelled right? 'prolly not). Every time they let somebody dictate what they can carry, it makes it that much easier for the next person who wants another IP block to be stopped at the border. The big baddass backbone routers already have oversized routing tables--they simply can't afford to add any unnecessary entries. And if adding these entries causes service to slip, well, most big backbones include all sorts of lovely penalty provisions against themselves in their carrier contracts, because they know that they can charge extra for the ironclad guaruntee.
No, they all but have to fight. They can either fight the RIAA in one big battle, or fight their customers in a hundred big battles. 1 is a lot less than 100...
You may think that the RIAA is good at influencing the legal and political process, but I think they've just picked a fight they can't hope to win. The big backbone providers got to where they are through skillful manipulation of the system. If any set of entities is capable of playing the litigation game, it has got to be the phone and cable companies.
First off, every other case the RIAA has attempted has been against shallow pockets. Not so here. While WorldCom is in trouble, they do have a large legal team sitting around doing nothing (can't work on the bankruptcy 'cause that's not their area). I don't think I need mention how deep the pockets of ATT, Sprint, et. al. are.
Also, in the past they've gone against entities without experience. At any one time any major phone company is involved in more litagation than you can imagine (minimum of 3 major legal actions per state--justifying their current rates, attacking the justification their competitors give for their rates, and fighting to keep their preferred status as incumbant carrier, besides various federal and local actions). They know how to take full advantage of the rules, which rules they have to follow, which they can bend, and which they can break. They'll make dragging any information out of them during discovery a total nightmare, while at the same time demanding the most minor scraps of records the RIAA has. They'll abuse the calander, run the clock, and overall be just not very nice.
The RIAA may act like an 800 lb. gorrilla, but they've just picked a fight with the 8000 lb. bunch. Not a good idea.
Speaking of the rounded cables, can anybody speak as to how well they work? I had heard horror stories about the first generation of them, but I haven't for a while?
Are they as reliable as the ribbon connectors? Are the ground wire/signal wire pairs twisted or free-running?
Basically, given that cooling/looks aren't a problem for me, but finding reliable cables is, should I try one of the rounded ones?
Bzzt! Wrong. While listing in order of importance is one way, also common is listing alphabetically, especially if a paper had few contributors (unlike, say, some physics experiments where the contributors list may be longer than the paper).
Since the order isn't Katz, Jallad, Schneier, we can't assume that Schneier is a minor contributor. Since RSA published as RSA rather than ARS, we _can_ assume something about importance there. But that's not the case here, is it?
.NET is basically Corba and SOAP, tied to a new virtual-machine sandbox, which allows running the usual "trusted" (garbage collected, bounds checked, etc) sandboxed code, as well as untrusted (that is, you can turn off array bounds checking, use pointers, not use garbage collection, etc), possibly mixed together.
One could look at it as Java and RMI redesigned, with the benefit of seeing where Java needed a bit of work.
Well, allegedly the original owners of the patent were JPEG members, so they did have a duty to disclose.
And silence with respect to your IP being included in a large, public, very prominent standard the designers of which have gone out of their way to attempt to ensure a lack of restraining IP certainly seems enough to generate an estoppel.