Even then it'll cost me $3,000 for a large TV and new DVD player;
Theatres don't have a big LCD/CRT screen, they have a projector.
A projector that can do HDTV resolutions, natively in widescreen will only cost you about $1,000. Add to that a computer with a decent videocard and soundcard (<$300), and some good surround-sound speakers, and you're set. Well-under $2,000 for a complete (and damn good) home-theatre system.
(Also, it's creepy to invite your date over to your house for a first date. Movie theaters are a nice, neutral place.)
People are rude and inconsiderate (hell, just read a recent experience [kuro5hin.org]). Not to mention the crowds.
Personally, I consider the audience to be the best reason to go to a theatre. Sure, there are occasionally the loud idiots, crying babies, etc., but other than that, it's all good. When you're watching a comedy, it's much funnier when you have a lot of people around you laughing too. Bad movies (I'm thinking of recent Star Treks) that would be mind-numbing were you watching alone, are entertaining in a theatre, if only because everyone is laughing at the unintentionally funny scenes and bad acting. Then there's always the MST3K effect, which makes horrible movies watchable.
I haven't gone to the theatre in quite a while now, but not because of the audience. It's entirely because of crappy theatres.
They charge incredible prices for tickets, require you to sit through the trailers, have the projector light set far too dim, have floor seating, over-sell movies, fail to clean the floors and seats, charge incredible prices for cheap snacks, stopped having intermissions during 2+ hour movies, have rude employees, etc.
For $1,000 you can buy your own projector, and it's only slightly more for decent surround-sound speakers, and a cheap computer for playback. I'm surprised theatres can continue to convince people that they should pay tons of money for the crappy service they get.
Placing a heavy tax burden on extra income makes people ask themselves, "Why bother?"
That's absolutely ridiculous. The more extremely wealthy people there are, the worse off an economy is. We WANT as many in the upper-middle-class as we can get, so if they stop advancing when they start getting rich, that would actually be a very good thing for the economy. However, the reality is that the ever-increasing tax burden is gradual, and does not act as a deterrant to making significant ammounts of money.
In the United States today, for example, spending is too high, resulting in massive personal and national debt,
It's not that spending is too high, most people can afford all the things they are buying. The problem is the easy credit, with outrageous late fees, incredibly high interest rates that people can't get out from. Plus, there have been extensive studies that show that the large majority of people that declare bankruptcy do so because of unexpected medical bills they cannot pay. When someone has a stroke, they have huge medical bills, and cannot work to pay them off. The current problems in the USA have NOTHING to do with the tax system.
Last but not least, save as they might, the rich will eventually have to spend. Otherwise, their money is worthless.
Completely wrong. Having vast assets is extremely valuable. If you look at rich families, you will see that the faily saving grows over the generations, not the other way around. A little bit of money might get spent, but it usually results in more income than spending, with ever increasing savings for the rich.
It's the poor and middle-class that fit the pattern you describe. They are the ones who will eventually spend all of their savings.
Money is useless unless spent. What is the point of being a billionair if you can't buy a big boat and other such things. Sure they may not buy that boat today, but at some time that money needs to be spent. You can be sure the rich will spend it sometime.
No, you can be sure the rich will be keeping a huge chunk of their money saved, and NEVER spending it. You can expect the poor and the middle-classes to be the ones who will eventually spend most/all of the money they've made.
Rich families pass down their savings accounts, spend a tiny portion of it, and keep the rest locked away practically forever. You can bet that the bulk of Bill Gates' money will still be unspent dozens of generations down the family tree.
There is no reason we can't exempt these things in a fair tax.
Someday he will die, and then that money will pass one to someone who will spend it.
No, it will pass to someone who will spend a few million, and keep the rest locked-up in perpetuity.
In fact, most of the time, the estates of the rich grow from generation to generation, meaning that not only will it never be totally spent, as time progresses, more will be locked-up and unspent.
A family making $20,000 annually is likely to pay little or no taxes due to the dependent deductions.
Yes, but that's only the case if you very carefully chose the numbers. Those in the middle class will still be paying just as much of their income in taxes as Bill Gates. Those who only make $32,000/year or so will get no deductions, and would be considered very poor in some parts of this country where the cost of living is very high.
A tax that does not increase the percentage of taxable income propotional to the level of income, is an overly light burden on the rich, and an overly harsh burden on the poor (if they are above the deduction level) and middle-class.
Having to pay $5 million to a wasteful government is NEVER a non-issue.
It is a non-issue if you have $45 million left afterwards.
Of course, my point was that it is COMPARATIVELY a non-issue, when compared with someone who makes, say $32,000/year.
The 10% will not make it difficult (at all) for the rich to make ends meet, but those who are in the middle-class and below may have a very hard time without that 10% of their income.
They're generally hard-working folks who don't like seeing their money go to waste.
Nobody is calling rich people villians. However, it is only fair that they should be required to pay a higher percentage of their income than the middle and lower class.
A consumption tax with a refund for the poor, however, is a great idea
No, it is a terrible idea, as only the very, very poor get a rebate. Those who make only $32,000/year will be paying the same tax rate at Bill Gates, and that is just wrong.
as it encourages savings
Now that is utter nonsense. It DISCOURAGES SAVING, because the longer you save your money, the more significant the taxes will be on it. Taxing sales rather than income INCREASES the effects of inflation, which DISCOURAGES savings.
and investment
Yes, and who is going to be able to have a higher portion of their money invested? Those who make $32,000/year, or those who make $10,000,000/year?
and discourages the rampant over-consumption that is leading to record levels of consumer debt.
No, it encourages immediately spending your money. It will have NO effect on over-consumption, except for leaving the middle-class with simply having less money to spend.
Pay attention--the rebate check to cover spending up to the poverty level addresses this. Sheesh. Read something.
Nonsense.
The rebate check only addresses the lowest of low incomes. Those who are making more than $32,000 may still be deply in poverty if they live someplace with a very high cost of living, but will still have just as much of their income going to taxes as the likes of Bill Gates.
Do you think it's right that someone who makes $32,000/year has just as much of their income going to taxes as a very wealthy person who makes $10,000,000/year?
Next, stick in a flat tax. You don't have to be a genius to realize that 10% of $50,000,000 is a lot more than 10% of $40,000,000.
That's ridiculous. Having to pay 10% of your income is a non-issue for people making $50,000,000/year, but 10% is painful for those making, say, $20,000/year.
the more you buy, the more you pay in taxes, the less you buy, the less you pay in taxes. It's simple.
It's simple, and it's vastly biased in favor of the rich.
The poorer people will be spending 100% of their income (or close to it), while the more wealthy you are, the more you will save, which means you spend vastly less.
Hell, they PROMOTE this fact, saying taxing consumption is better than income, because those with no income will still have to make purchases.
It's always good to have a tax system that is extremely biased towards the rich, makes it harder on people who save their money (basically doubles the burden of inflation), and charges people just as much when they are making plenty of money, as it does when they are out of work and can't afford extra taxes.
Nonsense. It's the hot thing right now, but many things could be implimented that would make it look quaint, obsolete, wasteful, pointless, etc.
What if, after the adoption of IPv6, multicasting wasn't blocked? Requiring only enough bandwidth to upload a file once, you could send it to an unlimited number of people using multicasting, and without requiring them to sacrifice any of their upload bandwidth either.
What if ISPs finally start seriously doing internet caching? You would only need to upload the (multigigabyte) file to each major ISP once, and then millions of users can transparently get it as fast as their local connection can support. It would only cost you a few bytes for each user who downloads a multi-gigabyte file from you. This would make everyone overwhelmingly happy if ISPs (who normally impliment a quota) would allow users to download cached files at the maximum speed their lines can sustain, with no quota limitations at all.
Either one of these two technologies would instantly result in the end of almost ALL peer-to-peer.
It's taking the Internet back to 1950s technology, where you watch when they want you to watch.
Just because something is old, doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it. How old is the CRT technology that your monitor is based-on?
You can, of course, time-shift these streams even easier than you can time-shift TV, if pull is really your thing.
Ever hear of Magnaband? They're an "internet TV station". Up for years. Nobody watches.
No, I haven't heard of them, which may be the problem. More than that, their 3 channels seem to be complete crap that nobody would want to watch.
Personally, I like internet TV very much. Nullsoft TV (Winamp 5) in particular has a good selection and reasonably good content. The biggest problem with "pull" technology, is that it's a lot of work for you. Watching some NTV streams, I find a wealth of good material that was actually available elsewhere on the internet, but which I was unaware of. Internet TV is a good place to compile all of these videos, and provide them to an interested audience. On a handful of internet TV streams, I generally find better content than on any conventional TV stations, though they also broadcast some junk, they do so much less often.
I have to ask, though, why require the download of yet *another* media application to use it?
They explain why in their tech section. Different players fall flat on different things that are required for this. Most players don't handle changes in the resolution of playing streams very well.
Would it be possible to make a plugin of the protocol for gstreamer, WMP, or any of the already established multimedia players?
Of course it would. It's just MP3 and H.264, along with their variation on swarmcast P2P.
However what about sound cards, video cards, ethernet, wireless, mouse, etc.
With the exception of videocards, this is all pretty much trivial, assuming there is an installed-base (unlike BeOS).
Videocards are very complex, so you don't see many open source drivers that support 3D and most hardware acceleration. However, there is no doubt Apple will be using NVidia and ATI cards like everyone else, so I believe the built-in drivers will likely be good enough for most everyone. Nvidia just about invented the all-in-one driver, so I would be surprised if you couldn't use just about any Nvidia card in an Intel OS X system.
Proper CD recording support because the makers understand the need for backwards compatibility, and don't go around breaking APIs just because they feel like it.
He asked about OPENBSD, NOT LINUX.
As far back as I can remember, OpenBSD has always had a perfectly good SCSI layer, which worked with cdrecord. Linux is the one where SCSI and IDE access are mutually exclusive, where you can't get any better than 16X record speeds due to lack of DMA support, where it's regularly broken, and incompatible changes are common.
I would say that OpenBSD is second only to Solaris as far as cdrecord is concerned. The primary developers of OpenBSD love SCSI nearly as much as Jorg does.
Here are some select quotes about what a "big step up" Divx 6 is...
DivX 6 adds a new deblocking filter that smoothes areas of a frame after their pixels are decoded, but prior to being rendered.
Wow! The DivX guys invented the deblocking filter. There's probably only been 50 other video programs that have implimented this before Divx got around to it.
They wouldn't have wanted to actually improve the MPEG-4 codec, or upgrade to a better one (H.264/Wavelet), they just want to mask the defects in their current codec, so it's still lower quality than anyone else, but the blockiness isn't so obvious.
What was different about this file was not just that it was re-mastered in DivX 6, but that it also contained a fully-functional, fully-convincing "hyperdrive" menu screen
And they invented MENUS. What a shock. Other formats (such as Matroska) have only had this functionality for a good 6 months now...
This is no-doubt going to end-up like SVCD menus, and the like. Sure, you CAN make them now, but it's so incredibly complicated that NOBODY will ever bother (unless they are getting paid to make a demonstration by Divx Networks). The Flash-based DVD menus are just too complicated to automatically convert, and most people HATE THEM WITH A PASSION anyhow.
As Jérôme Rota told us, a DMF wrapper file can contain multiple DivX 6 video files of varying resolutions. Chapter points within the titles may be linked to frames within any of these files [...] Other DVD-like features that will make their way to DMF include multiple-language subtitle sets, alternate audio tracks,
...just like every other modern audio-video container format.
Adding further to the richer media experience, noted Huntington, is the licensing of the Thomson/Fraunhofer Labs MPEG Layer-3 (MP3) codec, which will enable DivX 6 files to support MP3 Surround sound.
Yes, you should always go for a cutting-edge audio codec like MP3, not one of those crappy ones, like AC3, AAC, DTS, Vorbis, etc.
Re:Surround Sound (finally?)
on
DivX 6.0 is Out
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· Score: 1
With MP3 surround sound, we'll no longer be wasting space with AC3 files (at 120MB per hour!)- meaning that the days of the 2CD rips could be over!
That's a ridiculous statement. AC3 sound FAR better at FAR lower bitrates than MP3 could dream of.
It sounds as if the problem you have with it is people copying the AC3 stream from the DVD directly, rather than re-compressing it to a sane bitrate for internet distribution.
What we really need is for Vorbis to finally get channel coupling support for multiple channel audio, so it doesn't waste so many bits needlessly on >2 channel audio. Then it would (finally) be competitive with AC3.
I don't know about the rest of you, but with Vorbis and Theora moving along at a snails pace, I think Xiph is no the organization to depend on for multimedia codecs. It's a good thing a few others are working on Vorbis, though it seems Theora will be obsolete before it's even stable... It's a shame, since we all could have had (free) VP3 video encoding on Unix/Linux working since 2001 with only a small ammount of effort, rather than the Theora rewrite, which has taken many years, and hasn't helped bitrate/quality much.
we'll have to wait for hardware support, I'm sure...
After the last few Batman horrors I swore I would never go to another Batman-related movie, but this one seems to be faring well on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roger Ebert even gave it 4 stars
Replace "Batman" with "Star Wars (EP3)" and you've got something...
A) That is not a quote. It is not only a paraphrazing, it is also vastly out of context. B) Jobs said he HAD TO drop out because of money. C) He said that going back was the "best decision" part. D) He never suggested that anyone should do that.
2: On-Demand, CNG water heater (i.e.: no tank to keep warm)
Unless they've improved drastically in the past few years, these systems are terrible, and they only sell because they trick the "green" crowd into believing they're wonderful, and because of cheapo construction companies who buy this cheap junk instead of a more expensive tank-based water heater.
Basically, when you turn on the hot water, you can expect the first gallon to be scalding hot, and the rest will be barely warmed above room tempurature...
If you want to be environmentally friendly, use a normal hot water heater, leave it set low, and put lots and lots of extra layers of insulation around it.
If you've got some freezer space to dedicate to the project, the bottles of ice are probably an excellent idea-- have a set in the freezer and one in the heat pump.
This is a hell of a long way from an "excellent idea".
All you are essentially doing is opening the door to your freezer. Homer Simpson comes up with better ideas than this...
You are dramatically stortening the life of your freezer, making it use significantly more power, and are only transfering the heat. Your freezer will output more heat into your house than the ice it produces will be able to cool.
Purpose-built air conditioners have the hot side mounted outside your house. If they were like freezers, with the heat going out into your house, they wouldn't possibly be able to cool your house one bit.
No on both accounts. He didn't get lucky (he went back to school), and he didn't suggest anyone else drop out.
Of course, you couldn't be bothered to read the short article before calling a guy a dick for something he never said. Who's the "shortsighted, obnoxious, dick" now?
Near 200 bucks for just a gig of flash ram? I mean, if the thing did something new, or in a new way, I'd say sure...but this is just another mp3 player! WTF is this doing on this site?
Frankly, I'm happy they're slashvertising for iRiver now, rather than posting a dozen stories for every new MP3 player that Apple comes out with.
At least iRiver plays Ogg/Vorbis, so it's "for geeks" in that respect at least, as opposed to Apple's over-priced MP3/AAC players.
Re:What does hyperthreading have to do with it?
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
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· Score: 1
Some video encoding makes very heavy use of search routines which could be greatly helped by multithreading.
You're being very vague, so it's difficult to argue.
If you are referring to motion vectors, each is dependant on the previous, so they cannot really be helped by threading. Well, they can be, actually, but with a significant drop in visual quality, because they can't use the motion vectors from the previous frames.
You'll also have to be specific about what "Some video encoding" means, because with libavcodec's MPEG-4, disabling motion estimation completely, only results in about a 25% speed-up, which is obviously not "very heavy use".
Slashdot Mirror
Theatres don't have a big LCD/CRT screen, they have a projector.
A projector that can do HDTV resolutions, natively in widescreen will only cost you about $1,000. Add to that a computer with a decent videocard and soundcard (<$300), and some good surround-sound speakers, and you're set. Well-under $2,000 for a complete (and damn good) home-theatre system.
And how does that matter to most
Personally, I consider the audience to be the best reason to go to a theatre. Sure, there are occasionally the loud idiots, crying babies, etc., but other than that, it's all good. When you're watching a comedy, it's much funnier when you have a lot of people around you laughing too. Bad movies (I'm thinking of recent Star Treks) that would be mind-numbing were you watching alone, are entertaining in a theatre, if only because everyone is laughing at the unintentionally funny scenes and bad acting. Then there's always the MST3K effect, which makes horrible movies watchable.
I haven't gone to the theatre in quite a while now, but not because of the audience. It's entirely because of crappy theatres.
They charge incredible prices for tickets, require you to sit through the trailers, have the projector light set far too dim, have floor seating, over-sell movies, fail to clean the floors and seats, charge incredible prices for cheap snacks, stopped having intermissions during 2+ hour movies, have rude employees, etc.
For $1,000 you can buy your own projector, and it's only slightly more for decent surround-sound speakers, and a cheap computer for playback. I'm surprised theatres can continue to convince people that they should pay tons of money for the crappy service they get.
That's absolutely ridiculous. The more extremely wealthy people there are, the worse off an economy is. We WANT as many in the upper-middle-class as we can get, so if they stop advancing when they start getting rich, that would actually be a very good thing for the economy. However, the reality is that the ever-increasing tax burden is gradual, and does not act as a deterrant to making significant ammounts of money.
It's not that spending is too high, most people can afford all the things they are buying. The problem is the easy credit, with outrageous late fees, incredibly high interest rates that people can't get out from. Plus, there have been extensive studies that show that the large majority of people that declare bankruptcy do so because of unexpected medical bills they cannot pay. When someone has a stroke, they have huge medical bills, and cannot work to pay them off. The current problems in the USA have NOTHING to do with the tax system.
Completely wrong. Having vast assets is extremely valuable. If you look at rich families, you will see that the faily saving grows over the generations, not the other way around. A little bit of money might get spent, but it usually results in more income than spending, with ever increasing savings for the rich.
It's the poor and middle-class that fit the pattern you describe. They are the ones who will eventually spend all of their savings.
No, you can be sure the rich will be keeping a huge chunk of their money saved, and NEVER spending it. You can expect the poor and the middle-classes to be the ones who will eventually spend most/all of the money they've made.
Rich families pass down their savings accounts, spend a tiny portion of it, and keep the rest locked away practically forever. You can bet that the bulk of Bill Gates' money will still be unspent dozens of generations down the family tree.
Quite the opposite. There are very good reasons you can't exempt these things in a fair tax: http://www.fairtaxvolunteer.org/smart/faq-main.ht
No, it will pass to someone who will spend a few million, and keep the rest locked-up in perpetuity.
In fact, most of the time, the estates of the rich grow from generation to generation, meaning that not only will it never be totally spent, as time progresses, more will be locked-up and unspent.
Wrong.
Yes, but that's only the case if you very carefully chose the numbers. Those in the middle class will still be paying just as much of their income in taxes as Bill Gates. Those who only make $32,000/year or so will get no deductions, and would be considered very poor in some parts of this country where the cost of living is very high.
A tax that does not increase the percentage of taxable income propotional to the level of income, is an overly light burden on the rich, and an overly harsh burden on the poor (if they are above the deduction level) and middle-class.
It is a non-issue if you have $45 million left afterwards.
Of course, my point was that it is COMPARATIVELY a non-issue, when compared with someone who makes, say $32,000/year.
The 10% will not make it difficult (at all) for the rich to make ends meet, but those who are in the middle-class and below may have a very hard time without that 10% of their income.
Nobody is calling rich people villians. However, it is only fair that they should be required to pay a higher percentage of their income than the middle and lower class.
No, it is a terrible idea, as only the very, very poor get a rebate. Those who make only $32,000/year will be paying the same tax rate at Bill Gates, and that is just wrong.
Now that is utter nonsense. It DISCOURAGES SAVING, because the longer you save your money, the more significant the taxes will be on it. Taxing sales rather than income INCREASES the effects of inflation, which DISCOURAGES savings.
Yes, and who is going to be able to have a higher portion of their money invested? Those who make $32,000/year, or those who make $10,000,000/year?
No, it encourages immediately spending your money. It will have NO effect on over-consumption, except for leaving the middle-class with simply having less money to spend.
Nonsense.
The rebate check only addresses the lowest of low incomes. Those who are making more than $32,000 may still be deply in poverty if they live someplace with a very high cost of living, but will still have just as much of their income going to taxes as the likes of Bill Gates.
Do you think it's right that someone who makes $32,000/year has just as much of their income going to taxes as a very wealthy person who makes $10,000,000/year?
That's ridiculous. Having to pay 10% of your income is a non-issue for people making $50,000,000/year, but 10% is painful for those making, say, $20,000/year.
It's simple, and it's vastly biased in favor of the rich.
The poorer people will be spending 100% of their income (or close to it), while the more wealthy you are, the more you will save, which means you spend vastly less.
Hell, they PROMOTE this fact, saying taxing consumption is better than income, because those with no income will still have to make purchases.
It's always good to have a tax system that is extremely biased towards the rich, makes it harder on people who save their money (basically doubles the burden of inflation), and charges people just as much when they are making plenty of money, as it does when they are out of work and can't afford extra taxes.
What a stupid tax system.
Nonsense. It's the hot thing right now, but many things could be implimented that would make it look quaint, obsolete, wasteful, pointless, etc.
What if, after the adoption of IPv6, multicasting wasn't blocked? Requiring only enough bandwidth to upload a file once, you could send it to an unlimited number of people using multicasting, and without requiring them to sacrifice any of their upload bandwidth either.
What if ISPs finally start seriously doing internet caching? You would only need to upload the (multigigabyte) file to each major ISP once, and then millions of users can transparently get it as fast as their local connection can support. It would only cost you a few bytes for each user who downloads a multi-gigabyte file from you. This would make everyone overwhelmingly happy if ISPs (who normally impliment a quota) would allow users to download cached files at the maximum speed their lines can sustain, with no quota limitations at all.
Either one of these two technologies would instantly result in the end of almost ALL peer-to-peer.
Just because something is old, doesn't mean there is anything wrong with it. How old is the CRT technology that your monitor is based-on?
You can, of course, time-shift these streams even easier than you can time-shift TV, if pull is really your thing.
No, I haven't heard of them, which may be the problem. More than that, their 3 channels seem to be complete crap that nobody would want to watch.
Personally, I like internet TV very much. Nullsoft TV (Winamp 5) in particular has a good selection and reasonably good content. The biggest problem with "pull" technology, is that it's a lot of work for you. Watching some NTV streams, I find a wealth of good material that was actually available elsewhere on the internet, but which I was unaware of. Internet TV is a good place to compile all of these videos, and provide them to an interested audience. On a handful of internet TV streams, I generally find better content than on any conventional TV stations, though they also broadcast some junk, they do so much less often.
They explain why in their tech section. Different players fall flat on different things that are required for this. Most players don't handle changes in the resolution of playing streams very well.
Of course it would. It's just MP3 and H.264, along with their variation on swarmcast P2P.
With the exception of videocards, this is all pretty much trivial, assuming there is an installed-base (unlike BeOS).
Videocards are very complex, so you don't see many open source drivers that support 3D and most hardware acceleration. However, there is no doubt Apple will be using NVidia and ATI cards like everyone else, so I believe the built-in drivers will likely be good enough for most everyone. Nvidia just about invented the all-in-one driver, so I would be surprised if you couldn't use just about any Nvidia card in an Intel OS X system.
He asked about OPENBSD, NOT LINUX.
As far back as I can remember, OpenBSD has always had a perfectly good SCSI layer, which worked with cdrecord. Linux is the one where SCSI and IDE access are mutually exclusive, where you can't get any better than 16X record speeds due to lack of DMA support, where it's regularly broken, and incompatible changes are common.
I would say that OpenBSD is second only to Solaris as far as cdrecord is concerned. The primary developers of OpenBSD love SCSI nearly as much as Jorg does.
Wow! The DivX guys invented the deblocking filter. There's probably only been 50 other video programs that have implimented this before Divx got around to it.
They wouldn't have wanted to actually improve the MPEG-4 codec, or upgrade to a better one (H.264/Wavelet), they just want to mask the defects in their current codec, so it's still lower quality than anyone else, but the blockiness isn't so obvious.
And they invented MENUS. What a shock. Other formats (such as Matroska) have only had this functionality for a good 6 months now...
This is no-doubt going to end-up like SVCD menus, and the like. Sure, you CAN make them now, but it's so incredibly complicated that NOBODY will ever bother (unless they are getting paid to make a demonstration by Divx Networks). The Flash-based DVD menus are just too complicated to automatically convert, and most people HATE THEM WITH A PASSION anyhow.
Yes, you should always go for a cutting-edge audio codec like MP3, not one of those crappy ones, like AC3, AAC, DTS, Vorbis, etc.
That's a ridiculous statement. AC3 sound FAR better at FAR lower bitrates than MP3 could dream of.
It sounds as if the problem you have with it is people copying the AC3 stream from the DVD directly, rather than re-compressing it to a sane bitrate for internet distribution.
What we really need is for Vorbis to finally get channel coupling support for multiple channel audio, so it doesn't waste so many bits needlessly on >2 channel audio. Then it would (finally) be competitive with AC3.
I don't know about the rest of you, but with Vorbis and Theora moving along at a snails pace, I think Xiph is no the organization to depend on for multimedia codecs. It's a good thing a few others are working on Vorbis, though it seems Theora will be obsolete before it's even stable... It's a shame, since we all could have had (free) VP3 video encoding on Unix/Linux working since 2001 with only a small ammount of effort, rather than the Theora rewrite, which has taken many years, and hasn't helped bitrate/quality much.
Don't hold your breath.
Replace "Batman" with "Star Wars (EP3)" and you've got something...
A) That is not a quote. It is not only a paraphrazing, it is also vastly out of context.
B) Jobs said he HAD TO drop out because of money.
C) He said that going back was the "best decision" part.
D) He never suggested that anyone should do that.
Unless they've improved drastically in the past few years, these systems are terrible, and they only sell because they trick the "green" crowd into believing they're wonderful, and because of cheapo construction companies who buy this cheap junk instead of a more expensive tank-based water heater.
Basically, when you turn on the hot water, you can expect the first gallon to be scalding hot, and the rest will be barely warmed above room tempurature...
If you want to be environmentally friendly, use a normal hot water heater, leave it set low, and put lots and lots of extra layers of insulation around it.
This is a hell of a long way from an "excellent idea".
All you are essentially doing is opening the door to your freezer. Homer Simpson comes up with better ideas than this...
You are dramatically stortening the life of your freezer, making it use significantly more power, and are only transfering the heat. Your freezer will output more heat into your house than the ice it produces will be able to cool.
Purpose-built air conditioners have the hot side mounted outside your house. If they were like freezers, with the heat going out into your house, they wouldn't possibly be able to cool your house one bit.
No on both accounts. He didn't get lucky (he went back to school), and he didn't suggest anyone else drop out.
Of course, you couldn't be bothered to read the short article before calling a guy a dick for something he never said. Who's the "shortsighted, obnoxious, dick" now?
No, I meant iPods are overpriced. You don't seem to understand what that means.
Yes, "overpriced" is always a subjective determination.
If all you've got is trivial nit-picking, I won't be continuing this thread...
No.
Yes, it is $30 more expensive, but that gets you a lot more features.
LCD Screen
FM Tuner
MP3 Recording
Vorbis/Ogg
3X the battery life
etc.
Frankly, I'm happy they're slashvertising for iRiver now, rather than posting a dozen stories for every new MP3 player that Apple comes out with.
At least iRiver plays Ogg/Vorbis, so it's "for geeks" in that respect at least, as opposed to Apple's over-priced MP3/AAC players.
You're being very vague, so it's difficult to argue.
If you are referring to motion vectors, each is dependant on the previous, so they cannot really be helped by threading. Well, they can be, actually, but with a significant drop in visual quality, because they can't use the motion vectors from the previous frames.
You'll also have to be specific about what "Some video encoding" means, because with libavcodec's MPEG-4, disabling motion estimation completely, only results in about a 25% speed-up, which is obviously not "very heavy use".
I know the subject very well.