Actually, Ethanol makes a fine (green) fuel. It's only the decision to based it on corn that sucks. There are a huge number of higher yield plants available.
"its sap is a skin irritant, and ingesting three untreated seeds can kill a person."
"Western Australia banned the plant as invasive and highly toxic to people and animals."
"Jatropha needs at least 600mm (23in) of rain a year to thrive."
"20 per cent of seedlings planted will not survive"
"farmers in India are already expressing frustration that after being encouraged to plant huge swaths of the bush they have found no buyers for the seeds."
"needs two to three years to develop into a cash crop."
It is a very good biomass source, it grows just about everywhere.
It's a terrible fuel crop, yeilding far less biodiesel than many more popular options like soy. It's better than corn, but corn is a terrible biofuel crop.
Your reasons for pushing Hemp surely have nothing at all to do with it's biofuel properties.
I wouldn't trust the Divx installer either, but it's just another MPEG-4 codec, and not nearly the best of the bunch. Xvid and FMP4/Lavc are both freely available, and the license fees are the same whichever implementation you use.
These are 40Gb disks, and a DVD is just under 4Gb, hence the 10% figure. Whether this is acceptable will differ according to who you are.
Hate to post twice, but I neglected capacity, and thought I should explain this one a bit.
First, it's incredibly rare to see a single layer DVD sold commercially. They're almost always dual layer (~9GB) discs with the movie itself taking up 3/4ths of that and the extras taking the rest. So either you're taking up at least 20% of the new disc, or you're making the DVD version much lower quality than a normal DVD, which certainly wasn't a trade off made with the switch to color TV or stereo records.
And while it's only 20% if you purely compare GBs, the new format obviously isn't exactly like the old one. Trying to mimic an old format will require much more on-disc real estate than the equivalent amount of (GBs of...) space for the new format.
BluRay and HD-DVD at least had the potential to add a DVD layer, without losing any capacity, thanks to the different colored lasers (which this format does not) but even that didn't work out well thanks to the realities (rather than pure theory) of optical materials.
My point in all this is just that disc compatibility is very hard problem, and backwards compatibility of (new) players should be more than enough to make everyone happy. Even in the ideal case, the discs would have to cost a non-trivial amount more money, and the studios will have to work much harder to put out a highdef version also for no extra money, and so, it's very likely to never take off. Consumers that want the regular version will want to pay a few dollars less. Consumers that want a high definition version aren't going to want to pay a few dollars more for a disc with a lowdef copy they won't use, and 10%-20% lower video quality than the competition, when quality is what highdef is all about. Every percent you lower the bit rate is a few less stars in the sky (and other visual features) in your movie. HD is not like DVDs, where there's more space than they really need.
Note that I said "if your data format is clever enough". Evidently you know enough to say that the current formats are not clever enough.
It is pretty much inherent in any situation where you're trying to provide backwards-compatibility, that the older codec is going to be less efficient than the new. So, even in the ideal case, while you might be able to technically "use" that wasted "10%," the new (lossless) codec could instead redundantly store that same data again itself, in much less than 10% of the disc space. And yes, any small gain you get would be extremely computationally intensive, computations that could probably be put to better use by adding some more intensive video compression methods to the new codec instead.
When you get to lossy codecs, which is the situation now and into the foreseeable future, it gets immediately untenable, requiring more "space" to try and use the video stored by the old codec, than just duplicating that effort, which is the scenario I described. Any changes at all to the perceptual encoding methods between the old and new codecs, and it's really even theoretically unusable.
All that is required is that they give the source to their customers, for a reasonable copy and distribution fee, if they ask for it.
Anyone who got the binary has the right to request source under the GPL. The binary is freely downloadable on their website, and the submitter says he asked them for the source code, and they refused.
And as for VNC and friends, well, if they didn't change that code they don't need to give you the source either.
Not true. If they didn't change it, they still need to provide the unmodified source. And that's a pretty laughable assumption to make. It's pretty certain they at least linked some other code to it, making that fall under the GPL as well.
As for the illegal codec stolen from Microsoft... if that were true, than DivX would have been sued into oblivion already.
I was assuming you were going on information from the old Divx 3 days, when it was a hex-edited MSMPEG4 DLLs. Plenty of info in Wikipedia about it if you're interested.
A big design goal of VC-1 was to be about as good at compressing as H.264, but requiring less processing power to decode.
No doubt the goal was even more ambitious, and since WMV9/VC-1 predates h.264 by a good margin, it would be hard to have any such goal... Never the less, just because someone had a goal doesn't mean they succeeded.
I test with low/medium bitrates because there the difference between codecs is immediately apparent. I haven't yet seen a codec that does great at low bitrates while doing terrible at high, nor the inverse, so I sincerely doubt VC-1 is all that good... Much better than MPEG-2 no doubt, but probably used just to avoid h.264 licensing fees.
You might not even lose that 10% - if your data format is clever enough, you can use that 10% within the VMD playback rather than redundantly repeating it in the non-VMD data. I'm sure this is possible, but I'm not sure it is computationally feasible.
The recording surface in a BD disc is very close to the underside of the disc. This will increase the likelihood that scratches will cause errors
Which is why the BD standard absolutely mandates scratch-proof coatings on the surface of the discs, instantly making them the most durable (bare) disc format anyone has ever seen. HD-DVD, OTOH, is the most dense disc format, and without such a scratch resistant layer, the most easily susceptible to damage anyone has seen.
Why is it an utter crime to want to get free tv listings?
Because it costs money to get them, assemble them, and distribute them.
Linux is free because a bunch of volunteers put it together for free. So why aren't you volunteering to call up numerous TV networks, every few days, to get a list of their schedule, and input that into a public database for others to use, for free?
How about calling up every cable network in the country every month, to see if they've made any changes to their channel line-ups? And checking on every FCC action to see if broadcast TV channels have made any changes.
Somebody needs to do it. In absence of a huge and sustained mass of unimaginably dedicated volunteers, somebody needs to get paid for doing the hard and thankless work. Otherwise, you're just being a leech.
Why is it considered mandated that you must pay money to get them, where before they were free?
Zap2It was being charitable, nothing more. It was costing them money, but they put up with it for quite a while anyhow. No one else has, nor will do so again. There's just no profit in it, and it's not sustainable.
I'm sure you can think of many other examples of some software or service that started out free, but was merely a loss-leader or other marketing ploy, before it went commercial.
These politicians who (while it was a popular subject) wanted to crucify Google don't have any qualms about continuing to support China by importing their cheap goods and exploiting the cheap labor costs.
Indeed they are hypocrites.
That doesn't necessarily make them wrong, and doesn't absolve Google.
Google is unwilling to risk losing the Chinese market, and will do plenty of evil to keep it.
1. In Your Face animated ads (subtle ones are OK) 2. Anything that makes sounds. 3. Flash Ads. I especially hate the Intel "follow the cursor" ads. 4. Ads that pop up when my mouse moves over a word. Chances are if your site does that, I put it on my personal blacklist.
Nearly all of those disappear if you use the NoScript extension for Firefox. It disables Javascript by default, so in-page pop-ups don't work. You can configure it to block Flash unless you click on it. Ditto for embedded sounds. The only other form of animation is plain GIFs, and a visit to about:config setting image.animation_mode=none can disable any movement.
Something like 90% of what he said is all public record... If you were following news of the subjects at that time (just a couple years ago or so) you'd know just about all of it. There's been plenty of stories about the numerous troubles Microsoft got into with the standardization process, and the changes to the supported codes of the BluRay format.
The rest are things you could more or less assume, The statements of intention, ie. what those involved "felt" "feared" or "wanted" to have happen.
Porn helped VHS because it was really the first time you could watch porn in the privacy of your home,
Film wasn't cheap, but never the less, a great many people watched porn in the privacy of their own homes. I've found several reels myself when looking through old boxes. Just don't try to slow or pause the film, lest it instantly melt.
Even at 1.4 gigs (two cd's) dvd-rips didn't look particularily good contrary to lots of opinions where people somehow deemed it to be almost as good as dvd quality.
Lossy codecs aren't just a black box that you throw video at, and get magic out the other end. You need someone who knows what the hell they're doing to get halfway decent quality out of it, at a reasonable bitrate.
But as ISO MPEG-4 (on which DivX is based), and now H.264 have come on the scene, DivX is showing its age.
You're either being incredibly pedantic, or ignorant.
DivX isn't just "based" on MPEG-4, IT IS A MPEG-4 CODEC. It was slightly incompatible with version 3 some ~8 years ago, but that's ancient history. Next you'll be complaining it's an illegal codec stolen from Microsoft...
Players that claim to be "DivX compatible" can play any "ISO MPEG-4" video just as well, though you may have to forge the fourcc, and perhaps force closed GOPS, but are otherwise entirely compatible.
Both H.264 and VC-1 beat out DivX in quality, all while using less space on disc.
VC-1 is said to be good codec, but I certainly don't see it in anything I've tried. It does appear to be lower quality than MPEG-4 codecs, at least at low to medium bitrates.
and then they use higher bitrates for both audio and video. The audio & visual quality of a DVD-DL+DivX doesn't even compare.
I certainly agree with you there. People are quick to say X can do HighDef, but of course with lossy codecs, it's all a question of visual quality... I can stream HighDef video over dialup modem if you'd like, it'll just be ridiculously low quality.
IMHO, there is only one search engine that poses competition, and is (in any way) better than Google, and that is http://www.clusty.com/
If you search for a diverse subject, or a key word that is used many different ways, for many different things, Google just becomes a mess of irrelevent links, and trial-and-error GUESSING what other key words you need to use in conjunction with what you want to find is rather difficult, time consuming, etc.. Clusty actually provides a list on the left of categories.
IMHO, the one problem with Clusty is a higher amount of spam, generally towards the end of the list of results. However, these seem to exclusively come from "Wisenut" results they've included. By visiting the preferences page, you can disable search results from Wisenut quite easily.
Ask: Tries to categorize, but does so incredibly stupidly... A search for "Putty" turns up categories that are all something about "silly putty".
Yahoo: Gives results that aren't much worse than Google most of the time, anymore, but that's not the makings for a real alternative... Just an also-ran.
AllTheWeb: Actually rather funny it's still around... It's a dinosaur. A remnant of the old days, when a search for any subject turned up a bunch of irrelevent links, often to porn. Until recently, hit #3 for "slashdot" was goatse. More ironic, since it appeared just before Google took over the scene, and forced every other (even older) search engine to change.
The courts have sided with disallowing OnStar's use for listening in on conversations inside the vehicle,
No, they only said it was illegal because doing so disabled the normal function of the system (nothing happens when you push the button). It takes only very simple technology on the police's part to allow the system to function, while spying, and I have no doubt that's exactly what they did... about a week after the lawsuit.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Ethanol makes a fine (green) fuel. It's only the decision to based it on corn that sucks. There are a huge number of higher yield plants available.
So is fusion.
Unfortunately, this part is not true. They've tried for decades, and they could never make it work. Algae starts dying off early, and keeps dying.
If you're so sure about it being magic, go mortgage your house, empty your bank accounts, and invest.
"its sap is a skin irritant, and ingesting three untreated seeds can kill a person."
"Western Australia banned the plant as invasive and highly toxic to people and animals."
"Jatropha needs at least 600mm (23in) of rain a year to thrive."
"20 per cent of seedlings planted will not survive"
"farmers in India are already expressing frustration that after being encouraged to plant huge swaths of the bush they have found no buyers for the seeds."
"needs two to three years to develop into a cash crop."
It's a terrible fuel crop, yeilding far less biodiesel than many more popular options like soy. It's better than corn, but corn is a terrible biofuel crop.
Your reasons for pushing Hemp surely have nothing at all to do with it's biofuel properties.
I wouldn't trust the Divx installer either, but it's just another MPEG-4 codec, and not nearly the best of the bunch. Xvid and FMP4/Lavc are both freely available, and the license fees are the same whichever implementation you use.
You're quite correct. In fact VC-1 has a higher cap on maximum license fees than h.264. That certainly wasn't the situation before standardization.
Hate to post twice, but I neglected capacity, and thought I should explain this one a bit.
First, it's incredibly rare to see a single layer DVD sold commercially. They're almost always dual layer (~9GB) discs with the movie itself taking up 3/4ths of that and the extras taking the rest. So either you're taking up at least 20% of the new disc, or you're making the DVD version much lower quality than a normal DVD, which certainly wasn't a trade off made with the switch to color TV or stereo records.
And while it's only 20% if you purely compare GBs, the new format obviously isn't exactly like the old one. Trying to mimic an old format will require much more on-disc real estate than the equivalent amount of (GBs of...) space for the new format.
BluRay and HD-DVD at least had the potential to add a DVD layer, without losing any capacity, thanks to the different colored lasers (which this format does not) but even that didn't work out well thanks to the realities (rather than pure theory) of optical materials.
My point in all this is just that disc compatibility is very hard problem, and backwards compatibility of (new) players should be more than enough to make everyone happy. Even in the ideal case, the discs would have to cost a non-trivial amount more money, and the studios will have to work much harder to put out a highdef version also for no extra money, and so, it's very likely to never take off. Consumers that want the regular version will want to pay a few dollars less. Consumers that want a high definition version aren't going to want to pay a few dollars more for a disc with a lowdef copy they won't use, and 10%-20% lower video quality than the competition, when quality is what highdef is all about. Every percent you lower the bit rate is a few less stars in the sky (and other visual features) in your movie. HD is not like DVDs, where there's more space than they really need.
It is pretty much inherent in any situation where you're trying to provide backwards-compatibility, that the older codec is going to be less efficient than the new. So, even in the ideal case, while you might be able to technically "use" that wasted "10%," the new (lossless) codec could instead redundantly store that same data again itself, in much less than 10% of the disc space. And yes, any small gain you get would be extremely computationally intensive, computations that could probably be put to better use by adding some more intensive video compression methods to the new codec instead.
When you get to lossy codecs, which is the situation now and into the foreseeable future, it gets immediately untenable, requiring more "space" to try and use the video stored by the old codec, than just duplicating that effort, which is the scenario I described. Any changes at all to the perceptual encoding methods between the old and new codecs, and it's really even theoretically unusable.
Anyone who got the binary has the right to request source under the GPL. The binary is freely downloadable on their website, and the submitter says he asked them for the source code, and they refused.
Not true. If they didn't change it, they still need to provide the unmodified source. And that's a pretty laughable assumption to make. It's pretty certain they at least linked some other code to it, making that fall under the GPL as well.
Haven't visited it in years? Visvisimo has been Clusty for a long time now.
Fair enough.
I was assuming you were going on information from the old Divx 3 days, when it was a hex-edited MSMPEG4 DLLs. Plenty of info in Wikipedia about it if you're interested.
No doubt the goal was even more ambitious, and since WMV9/VC-1 predates h.264 by a good margin, it would be hard to have any such goal... Never the less, just because someone had a goal doesn't mean they succeeded.
I test with low/medium bitrates because there the difference between codecs is immediately apparent. I haven't yet seen a codec that does great at low bitrates while doing terrible at high, nor the inverse, so I sincerely doubt VC-1 is all that good... Much better than MPEG-2 no doubt, but probably used just to avoid h.264 licensing fees.
You may be sure, but you're still wrong.
I explained some of the problems to someone else here who had a similar idea a short time ago: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=230181&cid=18
What's more, you are almost certainly going to lose more than 10% of the storage space for it... Not that 10% would be acceptable to begin with.
Which is why the BD standard absolutely mandates scratch-proof coatings on the surface of the discs, instantly making them the most durable (bare) disc format anyone has ever seen. HD-DVD, OTOH, is the most dense disc format, and without such a scratch resistant layer, the most easily susceptible to damage anyone has seen.
Because it costs money to get them, assemble them, and distribute them.
Linux is free because a bunch of volunteers put it together for free. So why aren't you volunteering to call up numerous TV networks, every few days, to get a list of their schedule, and input that into a public database for others to use, for free?
How about calling up every cable network in the country every month, to see if they've made any changes to their channel line-ups? And checking on every FCC action to see if broadcast TV channels have made any changes.
Somebody needs to do it. In absence of a huge and sustained mass of unimaginably dedicated volunteers, somebody needs to get paid for doing the hard and thankless work. Otherwise, you're just being a leech.
Zap2It was being charitable, nothing more. It was costing them money, but they put up with it for quite a while anyhow. No one else has, nor will do so again. There's just no profit in it, and it's not sustainable.
I'm sure you can think of many other examples of some software or service that started out free, but was merely a loss-leader or other marketing ploy, before it went commercial.
Indeed they are hypocrites.
That doesn't necessarily make them wrong, and doesn't absolve Google.
Google is unwilling to risk losing the Chinese market, and will do plenty of evil to keep it.
Nearly all of those disappear if you use the NoScript extension for Firefox. It disables Javascript by default, so in-page pop-ups don't work. You can configure it to block Flash unless you click on it. Ditto for embedded sounds. The only other form of animation is plain GIFs, and a visit to about:config setting image.animation_mode=none can disable any movement.
So, you're saying basically ever other web-based company on the planet is, in fact, filled with idiots?
Something like 90% of what he said is all public record... If you were following news of the subjects at that time (just a couple years ago or so) you'd know just about all of it. There's been plenty of stories about the numerous troubles Microsoft got into with the standardization process, and the changes to the supported codes of the BluRay format.
The rest are things you could more or less assume, The statements of intention, ie. what those involved "felt" "feared" or "wanted" to have happen.
Me... I have a high def player that fits 100GBs on a 2 cent disc, and the player costs $20.
Or perhaps the holographic disc format coming out any time now that will fit terabytes of data on a cheap disc, and be given away in cereal boxes...
Vaporware is fun.
Film wasn't cheap, but never the less, a great many people watched porn in the privacy of their own homes. I've found several reels myself when looking through old boxes. Just don't try to slow or pause the film, lest it instantly melt.
Lossy codecs aren't just a black box that you throw video at, and get magic out the other end. You need someone who knows what the hell they're doing to get halfway decent quality out of it, at a reasonable bitrate.
You're either being incredibly pedantic, or ignorant.
DivX isn't just "based" on MPEG-4, IT IS A MPEG-4 CODEC. It was slightly incompatible with version 3 some ~8 years ago, but that's ancient history. Next you'll be complaining it's an illegal codec stolen from Microsoft...
Players that claim to be "DivX compatible" can play any "ISO MPEG-4" video just as well, though you may have to forge the fourcc, and perhaps force closed GOPS, but are otherwise entirely compatible.
VC-1 is said to be good codec, but I certainly don't see it in anything I've tried. It does appear to be lower quality than MPEG-4 codecs, at least at low to medium bitrates.
I certainly agree with you there. People are quick to say X can do HighDef, but of course with lossy codecs, it's all a question of visual quality... I can stream HighDef video over dialup modem if you'd like, it'll just be ridiculously low quality.
That wouldn't be a "fine feature" at all, that would be an incredible waste of space.
Did anyone say DVDs need to play in VCD players? A "fine feature" needed to get a foothold and catch on?
IMHO, there is only one search engine that poses competition, and is (in any way) better than Google, and that is http://www.clusty.com/
If you search for a diverse subject, or a key word that is used many different ways, for many different things, Google just becomes a mess of irrelevent links, and trial-and-error GUESSING what other key words you need to use in conjunction with what you want to find is rather difficult, time consuming, etc.. Clusty actually provides a list on the left of categories.
IMHO, the one problem with Clusty is a higher amount of spam, generally towards the end of the list of results. However, these seem to exclusively come from "Wisenut" results they've included. By visiting the preferences page, you can disable search results from Wisenut quite easily.
Ask: Tries to categorize, but does so incredibly stupidly... A search for "Putty" turns up categories that are all something about "silly putty".
Yahoo: Gives results that aren't much worse than Google most of the time, anymore, but that's not the makings for a real alternative... Just an also-ran.
AllTheWeb: Actually rather funny it's still around... It's a dinosaur. A remnant of the old days, when a search for any subject turned up a bunch of irrelevent links, often to porn. Until recently, hit #3 for "slashdot" was goatse. More ironic, since it appeared just before Google took over the scene, and forced every other (even older) search engine to change.
No, they only said it was illegal because doing so disabled the normal function of the system (nothing happens when you push the button). It takes only very simple technology on the police's part to allow the system to function, while spying, and I have no doubt that's exactly what they did... about a week after the lawsuit.