1) Please stop citing that. It's not fair to compare highly tweaked Theora encodes to untweaked H.264. Put them on level ground at least. 2) That quote is clearly hyperbole. 3) For Theora to maintain equal video quality in the sub-1mbit range, it would take at least 30% higher bitrates on most videos. For some videos that H.264 compresses well, it could be 80% higher bitrates. H.264 does extremely well with fading, single-colour areas that aren't updated often (slides, captions), and preserving shapes. It's particularly noticeable with small 2D sprites. In short, H.264 is good for lectures and game speed-runs. Theora would spend a huge amount of bits and lose quality for those types of vids, but does okay on actual video footage.
For an example of what H.264 can do for speed-runs, check out this 75 second 256kbit example:
There's lots of fading in it, a few graphical effects, lots of sprites, and lots of bland terrain. Pay attention to the quality of the terrain, sprites, etc.; there's no shimmering, and only slight artifacts after fading. The perceived quality is quite good. Youtube is a poor measure of what H.264 (the spec) and x264 (the encoder) are capable of.
If someone wants to do an objective test, I'd be happy to upload the 1024kbit source. Or if anyone could point me towards the best version of the Theora encoder (thusnelda), and send some tweaked settings my way, I'll eventually get around to it myself. Experimenting with different encoders on different vids is a bit of a hobby for me. I even have an Ubuntu VM set up in case a good version of the encoder is linux-only.:P
It'd feel odd to teach a group of old people how to access information about killing themselves.
Yes, it would.
And yet technically we do that every day. Our media glamorizes things like fast food... okay, perhaps McDonalds isn't so popular anymore, but there seems to be an abundance of advertisements for food that can be cooked in 5 minutes flat. I'm sure eating that food for years and years and years is going to have an effect. The media used to favour smoking - it was huge in both ads and TV shows. These are just two ways of slowly killing yourself, which could knock decades off your life.
Well... a car crash, a gun shot to the head, and an overdose on drugs are also ways of knocking decades off your life. You just see the result a bit sooner.
Is it the abruptness of it? I don't know. Technically we should be just as disturbed by an obese diabetic person looking up dutch recipes(Mmmm!... sugar and butter!), as an elderly person looking up euthanasia. They're both killing themselves, because they want their lives to be more enjoyable. And yet if they had pills in their hand, you'd stop them - but if they had candy, you probably wouldn't.:/
I'm not sure what I'd do, but I try not to be a hypocrite about such things. It's your life - just be aware there's no reset button, and the choices you make do affect everyone left behind.
P.S. The PCI 4 port SATA card may be fixed now - but when I tried 9.10 in 2009, it detected it as an nVidia RAID Array (!) and obviously didn't function.
I dont think any one would want Yahoo as default search
Conspiracy theorists will suggest that Google outbid Yahoo.
But of course, the real reason is all the people complaining to them and posting about it on their forums. With community driven projects, pissing off your community isn't such a good idea. Also, it seemed silly to be powered by Bing.
Actually, I kind of look down on dual booting. It's rather silly, now that we have several methods of running virtual machines. Especially since running a VM means that you need almost no AV and malware security software running. If I get a drive-by infection, I can shut down the VM and restore it to a snapshot - no need to jump through hoops for half a day to clean the infection.
Yep, I feel the same way. That's why I run Ubuntu in VirtualBox. Whenever I screw up a conf file, or an update totally breaks the system, I just revert and it's good as new!
My Windows XP host has no worries about infection. It's safely locked behind a Tomato router, and I stay away from crapware.
Ubuntu has been a very good learning experience. I'm a lot more confident with CLI stuff now.;) I still dislike how long it takes to configure things, but I've become downright preachy about repositories. They're spiffy and very convenient.:P I think I'm to the point where I could tackle Linux without X, if I had to set up a server over SSH. That's a huge improvement over where I was before.
And, it is really "opt-in" because you are asked if you WANT TO participate or not. I'm almost certain that it defaults to "no", you have to click the "yes" button to participate.
This is correct.
Source: Ubuntu 9.10, installed a few weeks ago on an older PC.
will be interesting to see what performance impact this has.
Performance impact?... performance improvement!
Now virus scanners can target specific scanning methods to specific VMs! Oh sure, there's some VM overhead - but think of the efficiency other software (like firewalls and virus scanners) gain by having everything segmented like this?
Re:The road to commoditization
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
He needs a PC that works like a TV: plug it in, turn it on, and use it. Sure, it needs to know some basic information about who's using it (email address, etc.), but beyond that it should just work.
Sounds almost like the original idea behind Zonbu.
I never tried the OS, so I can't say how well it manages it.
Re:Apple has made Microsoft look "open".
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
No it doesn't. IN fact, it adds value. The PC is a mess of Virus, mal-ware, crap that doesn't run right, consumers needing the guess if their PC can actually run something.
How the hell did you get modded insightful?
Windows may be a malware infested mess, but OSX isn't, and that OS is just as open as Windows is.
Linux isn't malware infested either, and it's extremely open.
I'm afraid Closed System vs Open System has nothing to do with malware.
For most consumers having an appliance(aka closed system) is better.
I would replace consumer with "older people". Most of the young people I know like multipurpose gadgets. And if it isn't multi-purpose by design, playing tetris on your $15 mp3 player or watch is still pretty neat.
The camera needs to be higher to give a better vantage point.
The camera has to be able to do real-time video. 30ms delay is good. 60ms is okay, 200ms is unacceptable. If you have a GeForce card, use nHancer to raise or lower the Prerender Limit. That's the number of frames that can or do get rendered/stored, to maintain a smooth framerate. Bigger number usually increases delay, making it difficult to play.
The wheel is another area where there's input delay. It takes time to spin it rather than just pressing a button.
It's possible that these people were playing with ~500ms delay. That's quite nasty. It'd take a few hours of playing to get used to it, but it'd still be a big problem compared to no delay.
I don't think running into a grizzly bear is a valid excuse for carrying a weapon around, in most of the USA.
I would hope that if you were hiking in an area with grizzlies, you would get trained in how to not provoke them.
Most people in my town don't carry knives around. Of course we have knives in our homes. I'm sure some people have guns too - but we don't carry them around in public.
Who said I was a leftist? My point stands - it's so ingrained in your culture, that you can't comprehend there's another (possibly better) way of thinking. Because I feel this way, I must be a crazy leftist eco hippy. It's not possible that the USA has the strange mentality.
In the 1990s you'd be playing 1-2 games every month, each costing around $40. Now a large chunk of people are playing 1 game for years, @ $12/month going to one developer.
Right. So target the players that aren't.
You know - people like me, which buy 3-4 games off Steam and GOG every single month.
Oh wait - what's that? Stupid_Developer_137 is releasing a buggy half-finished MMO? Wonderful... good luck with that. Hope it sells well, you morons!
It's sad that you feel you need a gun to defend yourself. That is how ingrained it is in your culture.
Tip: When the "majority of the world" does it one way, and it's not your way, maybe you should examine that way objectively to see if it's better?
Where I live (in Canada) nobody has guns. Nobody has knives either. If you piss someone off, they might punch or kick you, but there's no worry that your internal organs are going to be shredded by a weapon. If you do get beat up, you just need a week of rest and you're good as new.
The worst thing you'd have to watch out for is someone trying to run you down with their car - but nobody is going to pull a car out of their pocket and hit you with it before their head cools off a bit.
I think the new danger up here is tasers. Those things can stop your heart - and who knows what kind of long term damage they cause if they don't? Way more than a bar room brawl, I bet! And unfortunately taser testing is pretty poor. "Up to 50,000 volts" is okay if the voltage actually drops to ~1500v by the time it hits your body - but it's not okay if the taser overshoots a bit, perhaps producing 500,000v.
No, I don't like tasers. I don't like other weapons either. I feel quite safe without them - but I might carry one around if I ever visit the USA.:/
The point is IBM said they wouldn't use these patents against open source projects, and just did. Therefore the 500 or so patents that they claim are off limits to open source obviously aren't. Their promise is useless because now we know that as soon as it is expedient they will use these patents against open source.
In other words this Hercules emulator is merely the litmus test for IBM's open source patent promise, with lousy (but sadly typical) results.
That's iffy. Someone is trying to steal their cake from them. It's good for us guys with no cake, but it's still IBM's cake.
This seems like a lot of anti-IBM FUD. But when I see the patents listed in an actual legal filing, I'll change my stance.
The linked polls also show that 47% of Iraqis think that the Invasion was "somewhat right" or "absolutely right", which in itself is quite interesting. I'm not sure how Iraqis can oppose the presence of US forces while still wanting them to stay and also thinking that the invasion was justified, but there ya have it. Might have lost something in the translation.
That one's easy.
Saddam was pretty brutal. I'm sure he killed more than his fair share of people. Anyone he wanted, really - lots of people lived in fear.
But now he's been replaced by gungho soldiers with some very dangerous weaponry.
Wouldn't it make sense that many feel the invasion was justified, and many feel they aren't much better off?:P
Slashdot Mirror
But highly tweaked H.264 is amazing, and there's GUI tools that make it ridiculously easy to get set up.
I'm just saying... tweak both, or neither. If you spend the same amount of time tweaking H.264, you end up with incredibly good quality.
A few things:
1) Please stop citing that. It's not fair to compare highly tweaked Theora encodes to untweaked H.264. Put them on level ground at least.
2) That quote is clearly hyperbole.
3) For Theora to maintain equal video quality in the sub-1mbit range, it would take at least 30% higher bitrates on most videos. For some videos that H.264 compresses well, it could be 80% higher bitrates. H.264 does extremely well with fading, single-colour areas that aren't updated often (slides, captions), and preserving shapes. It's particularly noticeable with small 2D sprites. In short, H.264 is good for lectures and game speed-runs. Theora would spend a huge amount of bits and lose quality for those types of vids, but does okay on actual video footage.
For an example of what H.264 can do for speed-runs, check out this 75 second 256kbit example:
http://www.mediafire.com/?zb5wzm1mdyy
There's lots of fading in it, a few graphical effects, lots of sprites, and lots of bland terrain. Pay attention to the quality of the terrain, sprites, etc.; there's no shimmering, and only slight artifacts after fading. The perceived quality is quite good. Youtube is a poor measure of what H.264 (the spec) and x264 (the encoder) are capable of.
If someone wants to do an objective test, I'd be happy to upload the 1024kbit source. Or if anyone could point me towards the best version of the Theora encoder (thusnelda), and send some tweaked settings my way, I'll eventually get around to it myself. Experimenting with different encoders on different vids is a bit of a hobby for me. I even have an Ubuntu VM set up in case a good version of the encoder is linux-only. :P
if you had written that in your first post i'd have modded you informative.
I tried that in the past, multiple times. Usually I get modded flamebait for posting a wall of text (with references) criticizing anything linux.
Of course, if I do the same thing for Windows issues, I get modded flamebait too.
I prefer no mods to bad mods. And in the end, an interested person got the info. (you)
but hey it beats windows would you have any options there...
Old drivers still work in Windows. :P
It'd feel odd to teach a group of old people how to access information about killing themselves.
Yes, it would.
And yet technically we do that every day. Our media glamorizes things like fast food... okay, perhaps McDonalds isn't so popular anymore, but there seems to be an abundance of advertisements for food that can be cooked in 5 minutes flat. I'm sure eating that food for years and years and years is going to have an effect. The media used to favour smoking - it was huge in both ads and TV shows. These are just two ways of slowly killing yourself, which could knock decades off your life.
Well... a car crash, a gun shot to the head, and an overdose on drugs are also ways of knocking decades off your life. You just see the result a bit sooner.
Is it the abruptness of it? I don't know. Technically we should be just as disturbed by an obese diabetic person looking up dutch recipes(Mmmm!... sugar and butter!), as an elderly person looking up euthanasia. They're both killing themselves, because they want their lives to be more enjoyable. And yet if they had pills in their hand, you'd stop them - but if they had candy, you probably wouldn't. :/
I'm not sure what I'd do, but I try not to be a hypocrite about such things. It's your life - just be aware there's no reset button, and the choices you make do affect everyone left behind.
Hmm... recompile my kernel...
No, I think it'll be easier if I just stick with Ubuntu 9.04. ;)
But knock yourself out. If 10.04 works again, that'd make me quite happy.
http://www.jetway.com.tw/jw/ipcboard_view.asp?productid=279&proname=J7F4K1G2ES-LF
http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?pid=28
P.S. The PCI 4 port SATA card may be fixed now - but when I tried 9.10 in 2009, it detected it as an nVidia RAID Array (!) and obviously didn't function.
I dont think any one would want Yahoo as default search
Conspiracy theorists will suggest that Google outbid Yahoo.
But of course, the real reason is all the people complaining to them and posting about it on their forums. With community driven projects, pissing off your community isn't such a good idea. Also, it seemed silly to be powered by Bing.
who would seriously consider ubuntu for a server install?
It's quite popular on RAM constrained VPS's, like these:
http://vpslink.com/vps-hosting/
http://www.vpsville.ca/vps-plans
Debian/Ubuntu clock in at 4-10MB RAM usage, while CentOS is somewhere closer to 30MB.
But I imagine that's only a few thousand installs. Still, Ubuntu is Cloud and VPS ready!
Actually, I kind of look down on dual booting. It's rather silly, now that we have several methods of running virtual machines. Especially since running a VM means that you need almost no AV and malware security software running. If I get a drive-by infection, I can shut down the VM and restore it to a snapshot - no need to jump through hoops for half a day to clean the infection.
Yep, I feel the same way. That's why I run Ubuntu in VirtualBox. Whenever I screw up a conf file, or an update totally breaks the system, I just revert and it's good as new!
My Windows XP host has no worries about infection. It's safely locked behind a Tomato router, and I stay away from crapware.
Ubuntu has been a very good learning experience. I'm a lot more confident with CLI stuff now. ;) I still dislike how long it takes to configure things, but I've become downright preachy about repositories. They're spiffy and very convenient. :P I think I'm to the point where I could tackle Linux without X, if I had to set up a server over SSH. That's a huge improvement over where I was before.
And, it is really "opt-in" because you are asked if you WANT TO participate or not. I'm almost certain that it defaults to "no", you have to click the "yes" button to participate.
This is correct.
Source: Ubuntu 9.10, installed a few weeks ago on an older PC.
But 9.10 cut support for a lot of old hardware.
Like my crappy VIA board's PATA controller.
And my crappy VIA board's SATA controller.
And my PCI SATA 4-port card.
So that leaves... thumbdrives.
Pfff. I changed "root" to "admin". No one would ever expect that on my Linux box. Security through obscurity, baby.
I changed it to Administator!
Nobody will ever guess that!
will be interesting to see what performance impact this has.
Performance impact?... performance improvement!
Now virus scanners can target specific scanning methods to specific VMs! Oh sure, there's some VM overhead - but think of the efficiency other software (like firewalls and virus scanners) gain by having everything segmented like this?
He needs a PC that works like a TV: plug it in, turn it on, and use it. Sure, it needs to know some basic information about who's using it (email address, etc.), but beyond that it should just work.
Sounds almost like the original idea behind Zonbu.
I never tried the OS, so I can't say how well it manages it.
No it doesn't. IN fact, it adds value. The PC is a mess of Virus, mal-ware, crap that doesn't run right, consumers needing the guess if their PC can actually run something.
How the hell did you get modded insightful?
Windows may be a malware infested mess, but OSX isn't, and that OS is just as open as Windows is.
Linux isn't malware infested either, and it's extremely open.
I'm afraid Closed System vs Open System has nothing to do with malware.
For most consumers having an appliance(aka closed system) is better.
I would replace consumer with "older people". Most of the young people I know like multipurpose gadgets. And if it isn't multi-purpose by design, playing tetris on your $15 mp3 player or watch is still pretty neat.
There's a few main issues.
1) Angle.
2) Delay.
3) Controller.
The camera needs to be higher to give a better vantage point.
The camera has to be able to do real-time video. 30ms delay is good. 60ms is okay, 200ms is unacceptable. If you have a GeForce card, use nHancer to raise or lower the Prerender Limit. That's the number of frames that can or do get rendered/stored, to maintain a smooth framerate. Bigger number usually increases delay, making it difficult to play.
The wheel is another area where there's input delay. It takes time to spin it rather than just pressing a button.
It's possible that these people were playing with ~500ms delay. That's quite nasty. It'd take a few hours of playing to get used to it, but it'd still be a big problem compared to no delay.
Yes. They also messed up some Win7 machines. Bad updates broke stuff like DNS and Windows Update. Not being able to resolve hostnames is pretty bad.
But usually System Restore fixes it, and then you just reapply the updates. (now corrected on their second release)
Does the PS3 have a System Restore or rollback feature? I'm not aware of one...
In the technical sense, that is the firmware.
But when you go to download firmware updates, you're usually downloading "OS updates". It's just that the OS is locked down or purpose-built.
It's ridiculous how good a 512kbit h.264/aac stream can look. Better than 350MB xvid-mp3's, and at a fraction of the size.
Increased processing power is definitely a contributor to piracy. :P
I don't think running into a grizzly bear is a valid excuse for carrying a weapon around, in most of the USA.
I would hope that if you were hiking in an area with grizzlies, you would get trained in how to not provoke them.
Most people in my town don't carry knives around. Of course we have knives in our homes. I'm sure some people have guns too - but we don't carry them around in public.
Who said I was a leftist? My point stands - it's so ingrained in your culture, that you can't comprehend there's another (possibly better) way of thinking. Because I feel this way, I must be a crazy leftist eco hippy. It's not possible that the USA has the strange mentality.
In the 1990s you'd be playing 1-2 games every month, each costing around $40. Now a large chunk of people are playing 1 game for years, @ $12/month going to one developer.
Right. So target the players that aren't.
You know - people like me, which buy 3-4 games off Steam and GOG every single month.
Oh wait - what's that? Stupid_Developer_137 is releasing a buggy half-finished MMO? Wonderful... good luck with that. Hope it sells well, you morons!
denied the human right of self defense
It's sad that you feel you need a gun to defend yourself. That is how ingrained it is in your culture.
Tip: When the "majority of the world" does it one way, and it's not your way, maybe you should examine that way objectively to see if it's better?
Where I live (in Canada) nobody has guns. Nobody has knives either. If you piss someone off, they might punch or kick you, but there's no worry that your internal organs are going to be shredded by a weapon. If you do get beat up, you just need a week of rest and you're good as new.
The worst thing you'd have to watch out for is someone trying to run you down with their car - but nobody is going to pull a car out of their pocket and hit you with it before their head cools off a bit.
I think the new danger up here is tasers. Those things can stop your heart - and who knows what kind of long term damage they cause if they don't? Way more than a bar room brawl, I bet! And unfortunately taser testing is pretty poor. "Up to 50,000 volts" is okay if the voltage actually drops to ~1500v by the time it hits your body - but it's not okay if the taser overshoots a bit, perhaps producing 500,000v.
No, I don't like tasers. I don't like other weapons either. I feel quite safe without them - but I might carry one around if I ever visit the USA. :/
The point is IBM said they wouldn't use these patents against open source projects, and just did. Therefore the 500 or so patents that they claim are off limits to open source obviously aren't. Their promise is useless because now we know that as soon as it is expedient they will use these patents against open source.
In other words this Hercules emulator is merely the litmus test for IBM's open source patent promise, with lousy (but sadly typical) results.
That's iffy. Someone is trying to steal their cake from them. It's good for us guys with no cake, but it's still IBM's cake.
This seems like a lot of anti-IBM FUD. But when I see the patents listed in an actual legal filing, I'll change my stance.
The linked polls also show that 47% of Iraqis think that the Invasion was "somewhat right" or "absolutely right", which in itself is quite interesting. I'm not sure how Iraqis can oppose the presence of US forces while still wanting them to stay and also thinking that the invasion was justified, but there ya have it. Might have lost something in the translation.
That one's easy.
Saddam was pretty brutal. I'm sure he killed more than his fair share of people. Anyone he wanted, really - lots of people lived in fear.
But now he's been replaced by gungho soldiers with some very dangerous weaponry.
Wouldn't it make sense that many feel the invasion was justified, and many feel they aren't much better off? :P
It's not going to just stop! Pretty soon it's going to reverse! And then we'll design our chips in 3D! Blessed 130nm 3D!
(this was part joke, part serious - most modern chips are very complicated, but flat...)
who's to know that Apple didn't really come up with the idea first and been developing years before the other group?
In my opinion, it doesn't really matter. The first to prototype an actual device, to prove their design, should win.
Although I suppose intent to mass produce should also be factored in. Sitting on patented technologies is rather lame.