There's no integer decoder
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
since then most of [MP3 encoding] happens on cirrus logic processors or TI DSPs.
However, the TI DSPs that handle floating-point arithmetic are much more expensive. Nobody (except Iomega, and even that's not officially released) has made a portable Ogg decoder because the Vorbis reference decoder from xiph.org uses extensive floating-point rather than fixed-point arithmetic.
If you write a Free integer decoder (or fund writing one), they will come.
Whenever there's a GPL violation
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 1
Since when were slashdroids known to be keenly observant of others' intellectual property rights?
Whenever a headline or blurb contains the words "GPL" and "violation". (Read More...)
Wouldn't they also need an OS on which Mozilla-based products could run?
You mean other than all these? The most popular versions are the ones for Windows, Linux, and Mac, probably in that order.
Has AppleWorks been around longer than MS Office?
on
1.3GHz Duron Arrives
·
· Score: 2
AppleWorks would scream at 4 GHz.
I remember using AppleWorks 3.0 on an Apple IIe back in middle school. Now they're up to 6.2, except now it runs not on an Apple II but instead on a Mac. Has AppleWorks been around longer than Microsoft Office?
It's interesting to see how many geeks really care about this political, idealistic stuff. Isn't it more fun to just code?
The copyright industry wants to take away the existence of machines on which we can "just code" by having the hardware trust an encrypted BIOS, which trusts the kernel, which trusts the apps. At this rate, we're heading toward a future where after SSSCA and Son of SSSCA have passed, all computer systems will be closed systems. (Read More...)
The features don't get in the way. Sure, the right click menu got bigger, but everything is still there.
Everything including RAM and system resources available to run other programs? The latest version of ICQ I tried had a much larger memory footprint than MSN.
You don't expect to be able to take the Library of Congress with you, do you? If you want to listen to some punk music, pull out Punk Disc 3 that you made, slap it in your MD player, and go jogging. If you want to carry more music, buy clothes with bigger pockets:-)
I had owned and immediately given away the original, incredibly flawed, RCA Lyra because it simply stank so much I couldn't stand to own the thing. If RCA wants to send one of the new ones, I'd be pleased to check it out, but the shoddy original made me vow never to give RCA more MP3 player money.
RCA already has your MP3 player money, and there's little you can do about it. RCA's parent Thomson Multimedia administers the patent rights for MP3 technology and charges royalties to all manufacturers of hardware MP3 players.
but why can't we buy any iPod-type deviced that doesn't need a computer?
Have you ever looked at MiniDisc recorders? Each 6cm disc can hold five hours of audio in long-play mode, and it doesn't skip when bumped. If that isn't enough for jogging, what is?
but we will still have open source alternatives (such as LAME) for encoding.
Which are illegal to use in the United States and other countries where the algorithms necessary to encode MP3 are patented. Fraunhofer's patents cover more than just its codec and ISO's codec.
If I were a portable music device manufacturer, I would seriously look at this format as a possible option in future products.
However, the current Vorbis reference decoder uses floating-point math, which isn't available on cheap DSPs. As of yet, there isn't (to my knowledge) a fixed-point decoder for any Ogg format. This is the biggest thing holding up Ogg support on portable audio players.
for practical purposes, top-down equals isometric
on
Farscape Video Game
·
· Score: 2
Its not top-down... Neither was diablo. diablo was isometric, as this appears to be.
Most top-down games (e.g. Metal Gear Solid, Zelda, Pokemon, Final Fantasy) are not drawn to be viewed from straight above but instead to be viewed from about 30 to 60 degrees to the horizon. The orientation of an isometric game is not that different, except the camera points northeast instead of north. In fact, though Starcraft is drawn isometric, it actually draws the world with square tiles. In addition, Bomberman 64 and Dungeon Keeper 2 have a key command to change in real time between a traditional "top down" view and an "isometric" view simply by rotating the camera.
Of course, it does require your ISP have a satellite NAP
Why would Napster be any different over satellite than over land lines? Is it because anybody can just pluck somebody's MP3 files off the airwaves, and Canadian law implies that the RIAA can do nothing about it?
For example, you can pass around 8-byte structures in a single register, which is damn useful given the lack of available registers in the x86 architecture.
And when you want to use or change one byte in the structure, what do you do? Shift it out and put it in another register. You can beat the "lack of registers" argument by switching to any current architecture but x86; you'll get at least 16, most likely 32, or even 64 registers.
And with the 64-bit representation, you can do this with just one subtraction and one branch rather than a combination of two subtracts
and two branches.
One problem with your algorithm: one subtraction will "carry" over into the next because the processor assumes you're subtracting whole integers. What you want isn't really 64-bit integers but rather vector SIMD as found in MMX, SSE, and 3DNow!. In fact, AltiVec on the G4 processor is 128-bit.
Hey moderators, don't waste your points modding this AC up to +5,
It's not a waste if the content of the comment deserves it.
that's a total of 6 points
No, ACs start at 0. It takes 5 points to get them up to Score:5.
AC's don't get karma remember?
And neither do experienced users thanks to the karma kap. Karma determines only who gets to moderate and who gets to post at 2. It does not equal penis size. In fact, since Slashdot upgraded to Slashcode 2.2 with a messaging system to tell me when I've been modded or replied to, I haven't even looked at my karma.
(Side note: It seems ironic that as storage space grows, this becomes less and less necessary.)
Compression research continues because in the domain where latency is less than one minute (that is, not FedEx), data communication throughput does not increase nearly as quickly as storage space. Sure, you have 100 GB to store uncompressed images and audio, but how are you going to transfer the information to another computer?
The computers I've seen that have a video-out(Composite or S-Video) usually allow for the output to TV to be set to either NTSC or PAL.
Yes, but they also allow apps (such as DVD player) to override such a setting. Otherwise, the drivers probably won't get Microsoft's signature. I haven't read anything important about this exact issue, but if MS Secure Audio Path is any indication of the direction Microsoft is heading for the operating system that will come with your next PC...
Besides, the telecine method is different. With a 50Hz video technology like PAL, they just speed the 24Hz film up 4% and draw each film frame into two video fields. In 60Hz formats such as NTSC or PAL-M, they draw each frame for three fields, then two, then three, then two... I doubt that most DVD players can convert NTSC telecine to PAL telecine or vice versa, so they just output the format that most closely matches the encoded frame-rate.
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since then most of [MP3 encoding] happens on cirrus logic processors or TI DSPs.
However, the TI DSPs that handle floating-point arithmetic are much more expensive. Nobody (except Iomega, and even that's not officially released) has made a portable Ogg decoder because the Vorbis reference decoder from xiph.org uses extensive floating-point rather than fixed-point arithmetic.
If you write a Free integer decoder (or fund writing one), they will come.
Since when were slashdroids known to be keenly observant of others' intellectual property rights?
Whenever a headline or blurb contains the words "GPL" and "violation". (Read More...)
Guitarzan: I don't remember any AOL CD's with anything other than a .0
AC: try AOL 1.5
AOL 1.x and 2.x came only on floppy bisks, not CD. One of the first mentions on Usenet of AOL software on a CD-ROM came on April 29, 1996, in the infamous "AOL Is Sucks" posting by Saunders to alt.aol-sucks.
Time Warner is sucks.
Wouldn't they also need an OS on which Mozilla-based products could run?
You mean other than all these? The most popular versions are the ones for Windows, Linux, and Mac, probably in that order.
AppleWorks would scream at 4 GHz.
I remember using AppleWorks 3.0 on an Apple IIe back in middle school. Now they're up to 6.2, except now it runs not on an Apple II but instead on a Mac. Has AppleWorks been around longer than Microsoft Office?
It's interesting to see how many geeks really care about this political, idealistic stuff. Isn't it more fun to just code?
The copyright industry wants to take away the existence of machines on which we can "just code" by having the hardware trust an encrypted BIOS, which trusts the kernel, which trusts the apps. At this rate, we're heading toward a future where after SSSCA and Son of SSSCA have passed, all computer systems will be closed systems. (Read More...)
Slashbots drone on about the virtues of Pro Bono Programming
Never capitalize "pro bono" unless you support the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.
The features don't get in the way. Sure, the right click menu got bigger, but everything is still there.
Everything including RAM and system resources available to run other programs? The latest version of ICQ I tried had a much larger memory footprint than MSN.
I think people are taking the evil way out of hand.
Evil:
*Owns Time Warner. Time Warner helped buy the DMCA.
Ya gotta love the RIAA going against the DMCA or whatever that anti-reverse-engineering thing is called.
According to this PDF from the US Library of Congress, law enforcement officers operating in the line of duty are exempt from the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. (Read More...)
MDs suffer from the "many disks" problem again.
You don't expect to be able to take the Library of Congress with you, do you? If you want to listen to some punk music, pull out Punk Disc 3 that you made, slap it in your MD player, and go jogging. If you want to carry more music, buy clothes with bigger pockets :-)
I had owned and immediately given away the original, incredibly flawed, RCA Lyra because it simply stank so much I couldn't stand to own the thing. If RCA wants to send one of the new ones, I'd be pleased to check it out, but the shoddy original made me vow never to give RCA more MP3 player money.
RCA already has your MP3 player money, and there's little you can do about it. RCA's parent Thomson Multimedia administers the patent rights for MP3 technology and charges royalties to all manufacturers of hardware MP3 players.
but why can't we buy any iPod-type deviced that doesn't need a computer?
Have you ever looked at MiniDisc recorders? Each 6cm disc can hold five hours of audio in long-play mode, and it doesn't skip when bumped. If that isn't enough for jogging, what is?
As cool as the iPod is, why can't it record?
AFAIK, no one can make the format ... expensive to use
Not even Thomson?
but we will still have open source alternatives (such as LAME) for encoding.
Which are illegal to use in the United States and other countries where the algorithms necessary to encode MP3 are patented. Fraunhofer's patents cover more than just its codec and ISO's codec.
If I were a portable music device manufacturer, I would seriously look at this format as a possible option in future products.
However, the current Vorbis reference decoder uses floating-point math, which isn't available on cheap DSPs. As of yet, there isn't (to my knowledge) a fixed-point decoder for any Ogg format. This is the biggest thing holding up Ogg support on portable audio players.
Its not top-down ... Neither was diablo. diablo was isometric, as this appears to be.
Most top-down games (e.g. Metal Gear Solid, Zelda, Pokemon, Final Fantasy) are not drawn to be viewed from straight above but instead to be viewed from about 30 to 60 degrees to the horizon. The orientation of an isometric game is not that different, except the camera points northeast instead of north. In fact, though Starcraft is drawn isometric, it actually draws the world with square tiles. In addition, Bomberman 64 and Dungeon Keeper 2 have a key command to change in real time between a traditional "top down" view and an "isometric" view simply by rotating the camera.
Of course, it does require your ISP have a satellite NAP
Why would Napster be any different over satellite than over land lines? Is it because anybody can just pluck somebody's MP3 files off the airwaves, and Canadian law implies that the RIAA can do nothing about it?
For example, you can pass around 8-byte structures in a single register, which is damn useful given the lack of available registers in the x86 architecture.
And when you want to use or change one byte in the structure, what do you do? Shift it out and put it in another register. You can beat the "lack of registers" argument by switching to any current architecture but x86; you'll get at least 16, most likely 32, or even 64 registers.
And with the 64-bit representation, you can do this with just one subtraction and one branch rather than a combination of two subtracts and two branches.
One problem with your algorithm: one subtraction will "carry" over into the next because the processor assumes you're subtracting whole integers. What you want isn't really 64-bit integers but rather vector SIMD as found in MMX, SSE, and 3DNow!. In fact, AltiVec on the G4 processor is 128-bit.
Hey moderators, don't waste your points modding this AC up to +5,
It's not a waste if the content of the comment deserves it.
that's a total of 6 points
No, ACs start at 0. It takes 5 points to get them up to Score:5.
AC's don't get karma remember?
And neither do experienced users thanks to the karma kap. Karma determines only who gets to moderate and who gets to post at 2. It does not equal penis size. In fact, since Slashdot upgraded to Slashcode 2.2 with a messaging system to tell me when I've been modded or replied to, I haven't even looked at my karma.
the guy who developed the Uniform Sampling Theorem [wolfram.com] was Nyquist, not Shannon.
Nyquist conjectured it in 1928; Shannon proved it in 1949. Many texts split the credit, calling it the "Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem."
(Side note: It seems ironic that as storage space grows, this becomes less and less necessary.)
Compression research continues because in the domain where latency is less than one minute (that is, not FedEx), data communication throughput does not increase nearly as quickly as storage space. Sure, you have 100 GB to store uncompressed images and audio, but how are you going to transfer the information to another computer?
Why not AOL?
Because AOL Time Warner funded the DMCA.
What does IE 6 have that Mozilla lacks? For me (and this is real pedantry), the google toolbar is the only thing which keeps me on IE.
This Google sidebar for Mozilla will let you ditch IE.
The computers I've seen that have a video-out(Composite or S-Video) usually allow for the output to TV to be set to either NTSC or PAL.
Yes, but they also allow apps (such as DVD player) to override such a setting. Otherwise, the drivers probably won't get Microsoft's signature. I haven't read anything important about this exact issue, but if MS Secure Audio Path is any indication of the direction Microsoft is heading for the operating system that will come with your next PC...
Besides, the telecine method is different. With a 50Hz video technology like PAL, they just speed the 24Hz film up 4% and draw each film frame into two video fields. In 60Hz formats such as NTSC or PAL-M, they draw each frame for three fields, then two, then three, then two... I doubt that most DVD players can convert NTSC telecine to PAL telecine or vice versa, so they just output the format that most closely matches the encoded frame-rate.