I wouldn't want to lug my 40lb PC to the TV everytime I wanted to play a game on the big screen in conosle fashion.
You'd likely have a PC permanently attached to the TV. It's much easier to do this today with HDMI outputs, and you can build a small, attractive HTPC for less than $500.
Hell, I don't even know of any PC games that have multiplayer where each person gets their own controller.
Neither do most modern console games. Most require each player to have their own console.
When the next generation of consoles are released they will be much more powerful than any PC
Probably not without being as expensive as a higher end PC, as benchmarks show that to get the 30fps minimum consoles shoot for at 1920x1080, you will likely need a quad-core processor and the equivalent of a $200 graphics card (at least for modern titles).
Throw in the fact that you will need better thermal solutions (since the console will be smaller, and needs to be quieter), and that will also drive up the price (at least in terms of R&D...the solution may not be expensive to build, but it will almost certainly be expensive to design). Now, if you drop down in graphic quality (720p, no AA, etc.), then the console certainly will require less hardware, but it also won't even be close to being "much more powerful than any PC".
The best thing a console could do is start being more like a real PC, by having optional high-end video, slots to install the networking of choice (e.g., wired or wireless), etc. This would keep the cost of the "base" unit reasonable, while still allowing some purchasers to have "the best", but also know it is compatible. Also, since consumers are getting smarter, the prices for optional items will have to drop (no more $200 for a 200GB hard drive, when you can get 3TB for that same price), but the console manufacturers will likely sell a lot more upgrades that way.
Using a scale also saves dirty measuring cups and spoons, since you can tare the scale, add the new ingredient, and repeat indefinitely.
Although there are many reasons to use a scale when cooking (and I use one often), saving dirty dishes isn't one of them.
I find that most of the recipes I use that require precision measurement also require that you add the ingredients in such a way that you can't just "dump" into a bowl. And, when I'm baking, most of the time I'm adding ingredients to the bowl of the stand mixer while it is running, which is inconvenient to weigh.
Probably not much. Shareware never really worked for the developers. Most people are just greedy bastards.
Part of the issue with shareware is that most authors asked for too much money, so you can include them in the "greedy bastards" group.
The "app revolution" on phones shows that you're better off pricing something far lower than you think it is really worth in terms of utility, and get many more marginal sales.
Likewise, a PayPal link with a "pay what you want" but giving a reasonable suggested minimum (say $5) would likely bring in a lot of money.
You're forgetting to account for electricity costs.
Until somebody comes up with a light bulb that doesn't need electricity, I think that needs to be done for all bulbs.
Also, the 24/7 bulb runs at the lowest dimmer setting, so it's not using anywhere near 300 watts. Unitl there are CFLs or LEDs (or some other high-efficiency bulb) with high maximum lumen output and variable brightness, halogens and incandescents will be here for a long time.
I use a lot of CFLs in places where I don't need varying brightness, and can get more light at times because the fixtures are rated in watts, not lumens. They work particularly well in ceiling fans.
With a 10 Mbit connection, which is readily available where I live, (50 Mbit is actually available, for the record i'm in Canada) you can watch HD streams from Netflix, and you only have to wait 30 seconds for it to buffer.
You are fooling yourself into believing that Netflix has HD video streams.
Yes, they have some streams where the pixel count is higher than SD, but the bitrate is too low for quality at those pixel counts. Also, the audio is decidedly non-HD...not even decent 5.1 channel sound.
1920x1080, 24fps video with good sound will require at least 8Mbps of essentially dedicated bandwidth, and that's still no replacement for what you can get on physical media (which is the point of this sub-thread...when you can download at the same quality as physical media, you can stop buying the physical media). This means that if two people in your house want to watch two different HD shows, your connection isn't fast enough (and it's likely not fast enough for multiple streams at even current Netflix speeds).
Last, since your in Canada, if you move to the "everything is online" paradigm, you won't be able to watch amything for the last week or so of the month, due to the fact that you will have exceeeded your monthly data transfer cap.
As I said, the future where "everything is online" is still fairly far off. A future where "everything is available online for download" might be fairly close, though.
But in the future it could seriously be the norm to just download on demand all that back content you didn't watch.
That future is still fairly far off.
First, you need a fast Internet connection. Even with a solid 2MB/sec dedicated to downloading video, it would take around 20 minutes to download an hour TV show (720p with a reasonable bitrate), and that's assuming the server will feed you data that fast. To be safe, you'd probably need at least 5 minutes of pre-buffering, and likely a lot more based on how often 360p YouTube videos pause to download more.
Second, you'd need a reliable source for the download that would work with whatever device you want. Today, this generally means torrents, as that guarantees that even if the content doesn't work directly on the device, you can make it work. I have this issue in that I have a media player that does not understand H.264, so I have to encode everything to plain MPEG-4 ASP.
In reality you are probably only going to watch 10% of the stuff you record, but you record it anyway, just incase.
I'm not the OP, but I watch everything I record, and am about 2 months behind when the shows were recorded. Now, that's only about 30 hours of TV, but I could see how somebody would have 50-80 hours of backlog in those same two months, as that's only about an hour a day.
But no one wants to buy a $500 light bulb. People would rather spend $1 every year and replace any broken ones.
I recently replaced a 300W halogen bulb that had basically been running continuously for 13 years. It would get turned off a few times a year due to power outages or for cleaning the lamp, but otherwise ran 24/7.
I have three halogen lamps in my house, and have used a total of 6 bulbs in them over the course of 13 years. Although the other two lamps are not run 24/7, they are used daily. At about $3/bulb, that's a pretty good cost per hour of use, and works out to around 20,000 hours life per bulb.
Seeing as how the original movie was "de-Blade-Runner-ised" for the US by removing some violence (less than 30 seconds), I suspect you are right about a sequel being PG-13.
What version of Windows? If less than Vista/7/2008, how did you set that value, since regardless of the percentage set in the UI, the actual max is 4GB.
That will always be a problem if you use your disks to capacity. The solution is to not fill your disks to capacity if you plan to be using them as random read / write media.
I believe the point of the GP was that even by following this strategy, you will eventually "fill" the disk if all deleted files were kept in the recycle bin until you really needed the space.
As an example, my drive to hold TV recordings is about 300GB. Most of the recordings get watched and deleted quickly, but the recording size is about 8GB/hour (OTA HDTV). So, I would "fill" my disk after only 37 hours of recording, regardless of whether those recordings had been watched and deleted. After that, the next file that needs disk space would have to take it from the "deleted" area, and this could cause the fragmenting issues the GP indicated.
Part of the steep drop in sales came long before the lawsuits, and I suspect that it had a lot to do with the fact that about 10 years ago, pretty much every bit of music in the back catalogs had been made available for sale, and everyone who wanted that music had already acquired it.
Then, because CDs were not only generally more resistant to damage, but were also able to be backed up and shifted to different devices with no loss of quality (in general, if you assume MP3 is close enough for most situations), and you end up with at least a decade where the only music that could have any real demand was the new stuff. Until free Internet streaming really hit big, there wasn't much advertising for the new music, so sales dropped. At that point, consumers already had the ability to only purchase the very best individual tracks, so total revenue dropped.
Now, the record companies want to kill their best advertising, and once they do that, revenues will drop again. Since the record companies can't comprehend a world where people might not want to listen to (much less pay for) every bit of new dreck that is produced, they will again decide that piracy is the only possible reason that music isn't being purchased.
Part of the steep drop in sales came long before the lawsuits, and I suspect that it had a lot to do with the fact that about 10 years ago, pretty much every bit of music in the back catalogs had been made available for sale, and everyone who wanted that music had already acquired it.
Then, because CDs were not only generally more resistant to damage, but were also able to be backed up and shifted to different devices with no loss of quality (in general, if you assume MP3 is close enough for most situations), and you end up with at least a decade where the only music that could have any real demand was the new stuff. Until free Internet streaming really hit big, there wasn't much advertising for the new music, so sales dropped. At that point, consumers already had the ability to only purchase the very best individual tracks, so total revenue dropped.
Now, the record companies want to kill their best advertising, and once they do that, revenues will drop again. Since the record companies can't comprehend a world where people might not want to listen to (much less pay for) every bit of new dreck that is produced, they will again decide that piracy is the only possible reason that music isn't being purchased.
If a TV channel is owned by a large enough parent company, it might actually be advantageous if it loses money, as the loss could help with taxes for more profitable ventures.
Also, it depends on exactly how much loss we're talking about. A TV channel that loses a few million a year would be trivial for a large company to keep supporting. I think even burning $1M/month wouldn't be much of an issue.
Because as soon as you telnet smtp.example.com 25 they will do the same to the source address and if they don't get a HELO with the matching hostname in it they will not accept your mail.
First, the client sends the HELO, not the server. Second, in both the server banner (which is sent on initial connection) and the response to the HELO, there is no requirement that the hostname be included in the text (although it is commonly done). What you have done is confuse two different anti-spam technologies, which have in common only the fact that both are of dubious quality.
The first is reverse DNS, which is done by the server on the client IP address, and matched to the HELO argument. This is bad because the RFC does not require the HELO argument be anything but a FQDN. It often will not match exactly, even though a human would look at it and realize that it's probably "close enough".
The second is SMTP callback, which happens after the "MAIL FROM:" command, and the sender e-mail address is checked to see if it exists and is deliverable. This is bad for so many reasons, including the fact that an infinite loop can be created if servers with this system try to send e-mail to each other. But, it also gives you almost no real information about whether the sender is legitimate.
So, you just connected to the IPMI/ILO/DRAC/KVM over IP/whatever and selected "power on", right?
Seriously, this sort of capability seems like a requirement for every server used for "real", and even my home servers have it, at about $10 price premium on the motherboard.
It booted the first time, Why would it not boot the second?
I recently had a long enough power outage that my Linux servers needed to be shut down (I don't have a generator at home).
One of them came back up running really slow. It turns out one CPU fan had seized after stopping and cooling down and wouldn't restart, so the CPU went into thermal slowdown.
So, to answer your question, any of millions of random things can cause the server not to boot correctly the second time.
I normally work as an unprivileged user and perform the few required root actions via sudo. There's no point in restricting sudo commands to anyone who already knows the root password, but I believe it is a good habit to work as a user, not as root.
I tend to either "su - root" or login directly as root (if I'm on the console), because there's nothing I do as a user on my servers...they are there to run services, and users generally don't log in directly. So, when I need to log in, it's to fix something, install an update, etc. The only advantage sudo has for this sort of administation is an audit trail.
If I'm troubleshooting an actual user login, I ususally have to either try to log in as them or su to them to see what they are experiencing, since my non-root user almost certainly doesn't have the same groups, etc., as they do.
For giving users "root-like" privileges (like changing to another non-root user without knowing that user's password), sudo is a great tool.
Run a two-pass and single pass on something like Wrath of Khan or Alien (or even Aliens)...the white noise in the viewscreens causes massive jumps in bitrate on a two-pass.
You can verify the results using bitrate viewer, and I think you'll see that an average quantizer won't change the bitrate as much from frame to frame, and you'll still suffer from the problem of the first 90 minutes moving towards the quantizer you picked on average, even if a larger quantizer would have done just as well. This results in a larger filesize than you really need for the same quality. The "constant ratefactor" mode of x264 is a better method for best quality in the smallest filesize on a one-pass encode.
There's a reason that "average quantizer" (or "constant ratefactor" for x264) isn't an option in a two-pass encode. Two-pass attempts to maximize quality on every frame while remaining within a certain filesize (average bitrate and total filesize are just two different ways of saying the same thing, given the same input frames), while an average quantizer attempts to keep each frame at the same bits/pixel/complexity (where "complexity" is a vaguely defined term), while constant ratefactor tries to make each frame look equally good/bad regardless of the bits required. Check out this good writeup on how x264 does it.
This not to say that one-pass doesn't have its uses...I use it for all my TV show recordings, since those aren't for archive.
Now, what's the going rate for a songwriter's work? Pennies per unit. What's the going rate for a novellist's work? About £1, €1 or $1 per unit, if you're lucky.
So, what you're saying is that everyone should be paid a living wage for their time, regardless of the actual value? I think the name for that is "welfare".
Basically, by your logic, if I toss some paint at a canvas, I should expect to be able to feed my family.
No, the PS3 checks for the Cinavia watermark any time, and triggers if the source is not protected. In other words, only Blu-Ray discs with AACS or DVDs with CSS are free from triggering the Cinavia protection.
Tests have been made where the audio is ripped to an MP3 and when that is streamed, the Cinavia protection kicks in.
Google for "PSNR" and "SSIM". The x264 encoder can run both of these computations while encoding with only a small performance penalty, and there are standalone programs that can be run to do the comparison as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't want to lug my 40lb PC to the TV everytime I wanted to play a game on the big screen in conosle fashion.
You'd likely have a PC permanently attached to the TV. It's much easier to do this today with HDMI outputs, and you can build a small, attractive HTPC for less than $500.
Hell, I don't even know of any PC games that have multiplayer where each person gets their own controller.
Neither do most modern console games. Most require each player to have their own console.
When the next generation of consoles are released they will be much more powerful than any PC
Probably not without being as expensive as a higher end PC, as benchmarks show that to get the 30fps minimum consoles shoot for at 1920x1080, you will likely need a quad-core processor and the equivalent of a $200 graphics card (at least for modern titles).
Throw in the fact that you will need better thermal solutions (since the console will be smaller, and needs to be quieter), and that will also drive up the price (at least in terms of R&D...the solution may not be expensive to build, but it will almost certainly be expensive to design). Now, if you drop down in graphic quality (720p, no AA, etc.), then the console certainly will require less hardware, but it also won't even be close to being "much more powerful than any PC".
The best thing a console could do is start being more like a real PC, by having optional high-end video, slots to install the networking of choice (e.g., wired or wireless), etc. This would keep the cost of the "base" unit reasonable, while still allowing some purchasers to have "the best", but also know it is compatible. Also, since consumers are getting smarter, the prices for optional items will have to drop (no more $200 for a 200GB hard drive, when you can get 3TB for that same price), but the console manufacturers will likely sell a lot more upgrades that way.
Using a scale also saves dirty measuring cups and spoons, since you can tare the scale, add the new ingredient, and repeat indefinitely.
Although there are many reasons to use a scale when cooking (and I use one often), saving dirty dishes isn't one of them.
I find that most of the recipes I use that require precision measurement also require that you add the ingredients in such a way that you can't just "dump" into a bowl. And, when I'm baking, most of the time I'm adding ingredients to the bowl of the stand mixer while it is running, which is inconvenient to weigh.
Probably not much. Shareware never really worked for the developers. Most people are just greedy bastards.
Part of the issue with shareware is that most authors asked for too much money, so you can include them in the "greedy bastards" group.
The "app revolution" on phones shows that you're better off pricing something far lower than you think it is really worth in terms of utility, and get many more marginal sales.
Likewise, a PayPal link with a "pay what you want" but giving a reasonable suggested minimum (say $5) would likely bring in a lot of money.
You're forgetting to account for electricity costs.
Until somebody comes up with a light bulb that doesn't need electricity, I think that needs to be done for all bulbs.
Also, the 24/7 bulb runs at the lowest dimmer setting, so it's not using anywhere near 300 watts. Unitl there are CFLs or LEDs (or some other high-efficiency bulb) with high maximum lumen output and variable brightness, halogens and incandescents will be here for a long time.
I use a lot of CFLs in places where I don't need varying brightness, and can get more light at times because the fixtures are rated in watts, not lumens. They work particularly well in ceiling fans.
With a 10 Mbit connection, which is readily available where I live, (50 Mbit is actually available, for the record i'm in Canada) you can watch HD streams from Netflix, and you only have to wait 30 seconds for it to buffer.
You are fooling yourself into believing that Netflix has HD video streams.
Yes, they have some streams where the pixel count is higher than SD, but the bitrate is too low for quality at those pixel counts. Also, the audio is decidedly non-HD...not even decent 5.1 channel sound.
1920x1080, 24fps video with good sound will require at least 8Mbps of essentially dedicated bandwidth, and that's still no replacement for what you can get on physical media (which is the point of this sub-thread...when you can download at the same quality as physical media, you can stop buying the physical media). This means that if two people in your house want to watch two different HD shows, your connection isn't fast enough (and it's likely not fast enough for multiple streams at even current Netflix speeds).
Last, since your in Canada, if you move to the "everything is online" paradigm, you won't be able to watch amything for the last week or so of the month, due to the fact that you will have exceeeded your monthly data transfer cap.
As I said, the future where "everything is online" is still fairly far off. A future where "everything is available online for download" might be fairly close, though.
But in the future it could seriously be the norm to just download on demand all that back content you didn't watch.
That future is still fairly far off.
First, you need a fast Internet connection. Even with a solid 2MB/sec dedicated to downloading video, it would take around 20 minutes to download an hour TV show (720p with a reasonable bitrate), and that's assuming the server will feed you data that fast. To be safe, you'd probably need at least 5 minutes of pre-buffering, and likely a lot more based on how often 360p YouTube videos pause to download more.
Second, you'd need a reliable source for the download that would work with whatever device you want. Today, this generally means torrents, as that guarantees that even if the content doesn't work directly on the device, you can make it work. I have this issue in that I have a media player that does not understand H.264, so I have to encode everything to plain MPEG-4 ASP.
In reality you are probably only going to watch 10% of the stuff you record, but you record it anyway, just incase.
I'm not the OP, but I watch everything I record, and am about 2 months behind when the shows were recorded. Now, that's only about 30 hours of TV, but I could see how somebody would have 50-80 hours of backlog in those same two months, as that's only about an hour a day.
But no one wants to buy a $500 light bulb. People would rather spend $1 every year and replace any broken ones.
I recently replaced a 300W halogen bulb that had basically been running continuously for 13 years. It would get turned off a few times a year due to power outages or for cleaning the lamp, but otherwise ran 24/7.
I have three halogen lamps in my house, and have used a total of 6 bulbs in them over the course of 13 years. Although the other two lamps are not run 24/7, they are used daily. At about $3/bulb, that's a pretty good cost per hour of use, and works out to around 20,000 hours life per bulb.
If it's filled with derbies, I think we better get up there fast and close the hat gap we're going to be experiencing soon with the rest of the world.
We've know for a while that people aren't wearing enough hats, but now we know just how big the problem is.
Seeing as how the original movie was "de-Blade-Runner-ised" for the US by removing some violence (less than 30 seconds), I suspect you are right about a sequel being PG-13.
What version of Windows? If less than Vista/7/2008, how did you set that value, since regardless of the percentage set in the UI, the actual max is 4GB.
That will always be a problem if you use your disks to capacity. The solution is to not fill your disks to capacity if you plan to be using them as random read / write media.
I believe the point of the GP was that even by following this strategy, you will eventually "fill" the disk if all deleted files were kept in the recycle bin until you really needed the space.
As an example, my drive to hold TV recordings is about 300GB. Most of the recordings get watched and deleted quickly, but the recording size is about 8GB/hour (OTA HDTV). So, I would "fill" my disk after only 37 hours of recording, regardless of whether those recordings had been watched and deleted. After that, the next file that needs disk space would have to take it from the "deleted" area, and this could cause the fragmenting issues the GP indicated.
Now, now... let's not loose our temper. For all intensive porpoises, your right.
FTFY
Part of the steep drop in sales came long before the lawsuits, and I suspect that it had a lot to do with the fact that about 10 years ago, pretty much every bit of music in the back catalogs had been made available for sale, and everyone who wanted that music had already acquired it.
Then, because CDs were not only generally more resistant to damage, but were also able to be backed up and shifted to different devices with no loss of quality (in general, if you assume MP3 is close enough for most situations), and you end up with at least a decade where the only music that could have any real demand was the new stuff. Until free Internet streaming really hit big, there wasn't much advertising for the new music, so sales dropped. At that point, consumers already had the ability to only purchase the very best individual tracks, so total revenue dropped.
Now, the record companies want to kill their best advertising, and once they do that, revenues will drop again. Since the record companies can't comprehend a world where people might not want to listen to (much less pay for) every bit of new dreck that is produced, they will again decide that piracy is the only possible reason that music isn't being purchased.
Part of the steep drop in sales came long before the lawsuits, and I suspect that it had a lot to do with the fact that about 10 years ago, pretty much every bit of music in the back catalogs had been made available for sale, and everyone who wanted that music had already acquired it.
Then, because CDs were not only generally more resistant to damage, but were also able to be backed up and shifted to different devices with no loss of quality (in general, if you assume MP3 is close enough for most situations), and you end up with at least a decade where the only music that could have any real demand was the new stuff. Until free Internet streaming really hit big, there wasn't much advertising for the new music, so sales dropped. At that point, consumers already had the ability to only purchase the very best individual tracks, so total revenue dropped.
Now, the record companies want to kill their best advertising, and once they do that, revenues will drop again. Since the record companies can't comprehend a world where people might not want to listen to (much less pay for) every bit of new dreck that is produced, they will again decide that piracy is the only possible reason that music isn't being purchased.
If a TV channel is owned by a large enough parent company, it might actually be advantageous if it loses money, as the loss could help with taxes for more profitable ventures.
Also, it depends on exactly how much loss we're talking about. A TV channel that loses a few million a year would be trivial for a large company to keep supporting. I think even burning $1M/month wouldn't be much of an issue.
Because as soon as you telnet smtp.example.com 25 they will do the same to the source address and if they don't get a HELO with the matching hostname in it they will not accept your mail.
First, the client sends the HELO, not the server. Second, in both the server banner (which is sent on initial connection) and the response to the HELO, there is no requirement that the hostname be included in the text (although it is commonly done). What you have done is confuse two different anti-spam technologies, which have in common only the fact that both are of dubious quality.
The first is reverse DNS, which is done by the server on the client IP address, and matched to the HELO argument. This is bad because the RFC does not require the HELO argument be anything but a FQDN. It often will not match exactly, even though a human would look at it and realize that it's probably "close enough".
The second is SMTP callback, which happens after the "MAIL FROM:" command, and the sender e-mail address is checked to see if it exists and is deliverable. This is bad for so many reasons, including the fact that an infinite loop can be created if servers with this system try to send e-mail to each other. But, it also gives you almost no real information about whether the sender is legitimate.
Give that AC some mod points.
Verizon's announcement about this stated that static IPs were specifically excluded from the blocking.
So, you just connected to the IPMI/ILO/DRAC/KVM over IP/whatever and selected "power on", right?
Seriously, this sort of capability seems like a requirement for every server used for "real", and even my home servers have it, at about $10 price premium on the motherboard.
It booted the first time, Why would it not boot the second?
I recently had a long enough power outage that my Linux servers needed to be shut down (I don't have a generator at home).
One of them came back up running really slow. It turns out one CPU fan had seized after stopping and cooling down and wouldn't restart, so the CPU went into thermal slowdown.
So, to answer your question, any of millions of random things can cause the server not to boot correctly the second time.
I normally work as an unprivileged user and perform the few required root actions via sudo. There's no point in restricting sudo commands to anyone who already knows the root password, but I believe it is a good habit to work as a user, not as root.
I tend to either "su - root" or login directly as root (if I'm on the console), because there's nothing I do as a user on my servers...they are there to run services, and users generally don't log in directly. So, when I need to log in, it's to fix something, install an update, etc. The only advantage sudo has for this sort of administation is an audit trail.
If I'm troubleshooting an actual user login, I ususally have to either try to log in as them or su to them to see what they are experiencing, since my non-root user almost certainly doesn't have the same groups, etc., as they do.
For giving users "root-like" privileges (like changing to another non-root user without knowing that user's password), sudo is a great tool.
Run a two-pass and single pass on something like Wrath of Khan or Alien (or even Aliens)...the white noise in the viewscreens causes massive jumps in bitrate on a two-pass.
You can verify the results using bitrate viewer, and I think you'll see that an average quantizer won't change the bitrate as much from frame to frame, and you'll still suffer from the problem of the first 90 minutes moving towards the quantizer you picked on average, even if a larger quantizer would have done just as well. This results in a larger filesize than you really need for the same quality. The "constant ratefactor" mode of x264 is a better method for best quality in the smallest filesize on a one-pass encode.
There's a reason that "average quantizer" (or "constant ratefactor" for x264) isn't an option in a two-pass encode. Two-pass attempts to maximize quality on every frame while remaining within a certain filesize (average bitrate and total filesize are just two different ways of saying the same thing, given the same input frames), while an average quantizer attempts to keep each frame at the same bits/pixel/complexity (where "complexity" is a vaguely defined term), while constant ratefactor tries to make each frame look equally good/bad regardless of the bits required. Check out this good writeup on how x264 does it.
This not to say that one-pass doesn't have its uses...I use it for all my TV show recordings, since those aren't for archive.
Now, what's the going rate for a songwriter's work? Pennies per unit. What's the going rate for a novellist's work? About £1, €1 or $1 per unit, if you're lucky.
So, what you're saying is that everyone should be paid a living wage for their time, regardless of the actual value? I think the name for that is "welfare".
Basically, by your logic, if I toss some paint at a canvas, I should expect to be able to feed my family.
No, the PS3 checks for the Cinavia watermark any time, and triggers if the source is not protected. In other words, only Blu-Ray discs with AACS or DVDs with CSS are free from triggering the Cinavia protection.
Tests have been made where the audio is ripped to an MP3 and when that is streamed, the Cinavia protection kicks in.
Google for "PSNR" and "SSIM". The x264 encoder can run both of these computations while encoding with only a small performance penalty, and there are standalone programs that can be run to do the comparison as well.
But, a good starting point is quality factor. For XVID or other standard MPEG-4, an unrestricted two-pass with Qf of 0.20 is going to result in output that is almost identical to the source. For H.264/AVC, you can drop down to 0.15 and achieve the same thing.