The article says letterbox. This is terrible. There's no excuse for widescreen DVDs not to be anamorphic.
Quite aside from the loss of vertical resolution, letterbox format DVD cause huge problems when viewing on a 16:9 TV using subtitles.
Pretty much all DVD players place the subtitles towards the bottom of the screen, in the black letterbox bar. If you zoom the picture so the letterboxed area fills the screen, you lose the subtitles. So people are forced to watch 16:9 video in a little window on their 16:9 TV, with black bars on four sides, just so they can read the subtitles.
I think the US is catching up on this one, and I think it's because the US TV industry decided that it would use Widescreen as a driver for the HDTV market: hence no non-HDTV widescreen sets. As long ago as Summer 2000, I was astonished to go into a Chicago Sony Centre to find only one widescreen set on display -- while in Europe it's now (and was then) rare to see a new TV >=28" that's not widescreen.
Most original free to air content in the UK is broadcast in digital widescreen, right down to news, soaps, gardening programmes etc. 4:3 content tends only to be imports and repeats -- and even then "prestige" US imports such as 24 are widescreen.
This is interesting. A while back a Welsh supermarket noticed that their own-brand vegetable oil was selling in huge amounts, and it turned out that a number of locals were manufacturing biodiesel for their own private use. Biodiesel is manufactured by adding methanol to vegetable/animal oil/grease, which displaces glycerine from the oil and allows it to be used in an unmodified Diesel engine.
The authorities came down on this lot, not because there's anything illegal about Biodiesel, but because once it's engine fuel, it's taxed as engine fuel, and they hadn't been paying the appropriate taxes. With the taxes added on, it's still cheaper than standard Diesel, but not as dramatically so.
However, this Greasel site appears to be about modified engines which run on ordinary vegetable oil, not Biodiesel. So what are the tax implications there? Does the taxman have to rule that vegetable oil is taxable as soon as you put it in a fuel tank? Or based on your intention for the oil at the point of sale? What?
It doesn't recommend stuff for you to watch and it won't think you're gay if you tape Will & Grace
... which is a shame because that's one of TiVo's best features.
I believe TiVo bases its recommendations on metadata included in the proprietary listings it gets. I think there are two avenues that a free recommendation engine could go down:
Bayesian filtering using the text from publically available listings. I imagine a Bayesian spam classifier like bogofilter would barely need any changes to do this reasonably well.
A centralised "people who like X also like Y" database, based on stats collected from the community.
Why haven't television stations started broadcasting thier schedules on the verticle blank interupt? (black lines around the edge of the tv screen)
You seem to be describing teletext. All analogue terrestrial TV channels in the UK transmit a set of text pages on the VBI (addressable by a 3 digit code), and the vast majority of TVs sold in the territory are equipped to display them. The space is used for TV listings, news, and all the trivia you'd expect: ads, games, gossip columns, astrology etc.
The same technology is used for subtitles (just a frequently updated page with a lot of transparent characters).
There are teletext cards for PCs out there, and I daresay there are screen scraping programs out there that can parse the TV listings. Listings are not broadcast in anything like a structured markup, however, so a screen scraper wouldn't be all that trivial.
it (Freevo) supports the Hollywood + mpeg decoder board.
So it does. My mistake. My excuse is that the documentation is hidden behind the cryptic link "dxr3"... Your rebuttal was a little gleeful for my liking though;)
So that's good news, although it seems a shame to spend money on a board when the epia mobos have MPEG decoding built in.
The latest release of MythTV is broken up into a server/client model if you like. A mini-itx system would be perfect as a front-end for this and put your noisy powerful system out of earshot.
This is true, and a great solution if you don't mind putting your video/audio sources in the same out of earshot place. Certainly possible, but it's not conducive to dipping your toe in experimentally.
My first reaction to the article was that it doesn't consider noise, and my ideal Freevo box would have to be whisper quiet, if not silent.
I've investigated the mini-itx boards, and it appears that they might have just enough oomph to play back video, maybe to encode video with low compression, but not do both at the same time.
Some of the mini-itx boards have onboard hardware MPEG decoders, which would help a lot, but I'm fairly sure there is no Linux support for these, and I know Freevo doesn't support any hardware MPEG decoders yet.
One day, one day.
Adding an PCI MPEG encoder/decoder uses up your one PCI slot...
In situations like that, encryption is worse than useless without deniability.
Then use StegFS which gives you an arbitrary number encrypted layers. One the one hand you can give away a certain number of passwords, then insist there are no more. On the other hand, the bad guys don't know when it's OK to stop torturing you...
You can roll your own version of most innovations if you have the time and the inclination. However many people reach a point where their time is worth more to them than the money.
I'd rather pay the money for a TiVo that works out of the box, than spend time building a box that does the same thing.
I'd rather spend $500 on this box than spend $400 and several hours of my free time building and configuring a homebrew version.
Ironically, I guess, the time I would have been prepared to put in the effort would be the time before I knew how to do it. Then it would have been in interesting challenge. Now it would just be a chore.
the whole music piracy brouhaha is not about musicians, it's only about record companies, and that we really don't need record companies
It's about more than music companies. It's about the whole infrastructure that brings music from a musician's head to our ears, while helping us filter out what we'll buy from the stuff we don't want to hear.
That means: the talent scouts, the agents, the record companies, the promoters, the live venues, the print reviewers, the gossip media, radio and TV, etc. etc.... and all of these entities are in bed with each other to some extent, and most of them are only interested in the bottom line at the end of the day. (sorry, rather too many cliched metaphors in that sentence. Still, in for a penny in for a pound).
This system does serve a purpose though: of all the music out there, a huge percentage of it is either out-and-out awful, or merely mediocre. The music industry infrastructure does a moderate job of filtering and sorting the music that's out there, so that even the laziest consumer can be exposed to music they may well want to buy.
That's handy, but I feel that the filtering and sorting is biased towards making money for the middlemen.
In order to cut the RIAA et al out of the picture, we need an alternative filtering mechanism, and it needs to be one that does not require a great deal of effort from the end consumer. An example might be if I strarted hearing music on the radio, and was told "and you can get the album from http://...".
Given that the technology already exists for coverting diesel engines to run on veggie oil,
You don't even need to convert the engine. Used cooking oil (animal or vegetable) treated with a little glycerine works cleanly in an unmodified diesel car.
Re:What's so bad about maximized browser windows?
on
Hyatt Discusses Tabs
·
· Score: 1
I don't get it: Why would anybody want to not maximize his browser windows?
On my laptop, I generally have browser windows maximised.
On my desktop, which has a larger monitor that runs at a higher resolution, at my preferred font size (which isn't all that small) I find that a full-width window is hard to read. There's so much text on a line that it's difficult to locate the start of line n+1 when I'm at the end of line n.
A narrower browser window fixes this.
Incidentally, this is the reason newspapers are printed in columns.
When was the last time you played a game you honestly thought was innovative?
Jet (Set|Grind) Radio. The graphics and general atmosphere set it apart instantly (especially when it first came out, and Cel Shading wasn't being used by everyone and their dog), but it was the unique way the game made you look at your environment that made it innovative. Everywhere, something to grind on and jump off, yet as a way of getting from place to place, not just for the sake of tricking (as in Tony Hawk Pro Skater).
The Xbox sequel adds little in the way of innovation, but it's still a cracking game.
Of course, brilliance and innovation does not automatically equal sales.
Not if you do it right the first time. Surely directory listnings generated by different servers looks different, but all of those I have seen had one thing in common: They contains links to the files in the directory. So to produce a directory listning from the HTML file is not really a problem if you only need filenames. Just parse the HTML documents and find all links. Remove those links not pointing to files in the directory in question, and remove doubles if any. And once you actually get the files, be prepared to handle nonexisting files correctly.
It can be done, but it can't be done/trivially/ and the scope for automation is limited. There's nothing/explicit/ in the HTML that states categorically that it's a directory listing, for example, so you need some kind of human input to say "yes, this is a directory listing, use it as a list of stuff to fetch", or "no, this is data I want, fetch it and save it".
And, more to the point, although there are tools to let you "get everything linked off this chunk of HTML", they're not ubiquitous the way mget is.
IMHO email addresses, domain names and URLs are easier to remember and use than numbers. There are very few phone numbers I can type in from memory (my own, my parents', my work's... that's probably it), and dozens of email addresses and web site front page URLs.
Rather than embed a clunky phone number into a DNS entry, can't we hide phone numbers behind a directory the way DNS hides IP addresses? The spam issue would need to be addressed of course, but the sooner I can use a payphone without needing to look up a number manually the better.
The HTTP protocol may or may not recommend DIR listings by default
No, the HTTP protocol does not even specify the concept of a directory listning. Some servers can generate an HTML file from the directory listning, but that is all up to the server, it can generate that file as it likes or even just serve an error.
Exactly right, and the point is that there is no explicit standard (the may be a few de-facto standards) to say what an HTML directory listing looks like, so coding the equivalent of an FTP client's "mget" command becomes a new job for every site.
My advice is, if you think your users would like mget or its equivalent, then either give them FTP or think hard about how you could provide the same functionality using HTTP/HTML.
Slashdot Mirror
The article says letterbox. This is terrible. There's no excuse for widescreen DVDs not to be anamorphic.
Quite aside from the loss of vertical resolution, letterbox format DVD cause huge problems when viewing on a 16:9 TV using subtitles.
Pretty much all DVD players place the subtitles towards the bottom of the screen, in the black letterbox bar. If you zoom the picture so the letterboxed area fills the screen, you lose the subtitles. So people are forced to watch 16:9 video in a little window on their 16:9 TV, with black bars on four sides, just so they can read the subtitles.
I think the US is catching up on this one, and I think it's because the US TV industry decided that it would use Widescreen as a driver for the HDTV market: hence no non-HDTV widescreen sets. As long ago as Summer 2000, I was astonished to go into a Chicago Sony Centre to find only one widescreen set on display -- while in Europe it's now (and was then) rare to see a new TV >=28" that's not widescreen.
Most original free to air content in the UK is broadcast in digital widescreen, right down to news, soaps, gardening programmes etc. 4:3 content tends only to be imports and repeats -- and even then "prestige" US imports such as 24 are widescreen.
You need to get them into the digital domain and, once there, moving them from format to format is relatively easy.
To a point. Re-encoding from one lossy codec to another is probably a bad idea.
vi(1) uses curses for text editing
I'd be very surprised if vi used Curses. Maybe some of the vi clones (vim, elvis, vile, etc.) but not vi.
Wiki is indeed a very nice tool to create collaborative documentation.
Maybe, if you restrict access.
But I've seen way too many publicly modifiable Wiki pages collapse into a discussion about what Wiki is for/about.
A lot of the arguments for round covers make different assumptions:
Probably other factors... I have work to do
This is interesting. A while back a Welsh supermarket noticed that their own-brand vegetable oil was selling in huge amounts, and it turned out that a number of locals were manufacturing biodiesel for their own private use. Biodiesel is manufactured by adding methanol to vegetable/animal oil/grease, which displaces glycerine from the oil and allows it to be used in an unmodified Diesel engine.
The authorities came down on this lot, not because there's anything illegal about Biodiesel, but because once it's engine fuel, it's taxed as engine fuel, and they hadn't been paying the appropriate taxes. With the taxes added on, it's still cheaper than standard Diesel, but not as dramatically so.
However, this Greasel site appears to be about modified engines which run on ordinary vegetable oil, not Biodiesel. So what are the tax implications there? Does the taxman have to rule that vegetable oil is taxable as soon as you put it in a fuel tank? Or based on your intention for the oil at the point of sale? What?
I believe TiVo bases its recommendations on metadata included in the proprietary listings it gets. I think there are two avenues that a free recommendation engine could go down:
Why haven't television stations started broadcasting thier schedules on the verticle blank interupt? (black lines around the edge of the tv screen)
You seem to be describing teletext. All analogue terrestrial TV channels in the UK transmit a set of text pages on the VBI (addressable by a 3 digit code), and the vast majority of TVs sold in the territory are equipped to display them. The space is used for TV listings, news, and all the trivia you'd expect: ads, games, gossip columns, astrology etc.
The same technology is used for subtitles (just a frequently updated page with a lot of transparent characters).
There are teletext cards for PCs out there, and I daresay there are screen scraping programs out there that can parse the TV listings. Listings are not broadcast in anything like a structured markup, however, so a screen scraper wouldn't be all that trivial.
I wasn't aware that Windows supported a view of files where they had multiple forks.
I hated the concept of resource forks on Macs, and I hate this.
WRONG!!!!
;)
it (Freevo) supports the Hollywood + mpeg decoder board.
So it does. My mistake. My excuse is that the documentation is hidden behind the cryptic link "dxr3"... Your rebuttal was a little gleeful for my liking though
So that's good news, although it seems a shame to spend money on a board when the epia mobos have MPEG decoding built in.
The latest release of MythTV is broken up into a server/client model if you like. A mini-itx system would be perfect as a front-end for this and put your noisy powerful system out of earshot.
This is true, and a great solution if you don't mind putting your video/audio sources in the same out of earshot place. Certainly possible, but it's not conducive to dipping your toe in experimentally.
My first reaction to the article was that it doesn't consider noise, and my ideal Freevo box would have to be whisper quiet, if not silent.
I've investigated the mini-itx boards, and it appears that they might have just enough oomph to play back video, maybe to encode video with low compression, but not do both at the same time.
Some of the mini-itx boards have onboard hardware MPEG decoders, which would help a lot, but I'm fairly sure there is no Linux support for these, and I know Freevo doesn't support any hardware MPEG decoders yet.
One day, one day.
Adding an PCI MPEG encoder/decoder uses up your one PCI slot...
In situations like that, encryption is worse than useless without deniability.
Then use StegFS which gives you an arbitrary number encrypted layers. One the one hand you can give away a certain number of passwords, then insist there are no more. On the other hand, the bad guys don't know when it's OK to stop torturing you...
You can roll your own version of most innovations if you have the time and the inclination. However many people reach a point where their time is worth more to them than the money.
I'd rather pay the money for a TiVo that works out of the box, than spend time building a box that does the same thing.
I'd rather spend $500 on this box than spend $400 and several hours of my free time building and configuring a homebrew version.
Ironically, I guess, the time I would have been prepared to put in the effort would be the time before I knew how to do it. Then it would have been in interesting challenge. Now it would just be a chore.
the whole music piracy brouhaha is not about musicians, it's only about record companies, and that we really don't need record companies
... and all of these entities are in bed with each other to some extent, and most of them are only interested in the bottom line at the end of the day. (sorry, rather too many cliched metaphors in that sentence. Still, in for a penny in for a pound).
It's about more than music companies. It's about the whole infrastructure that brings music from a musician's head to our ears, while helping us filter out what we'll buy from the stuff we don't want to hear.
That means: the talent scouts, the agents, the record companies, the promoters, the live venues, the print reviewers, the gossip media, radio and TV, etc. etc.
This system does serve a purpose though: of all the music out there, a huge percentage of it is either out-and-out awful, or merely mediocre. The music industry infrastructure does a moderate job of filtering and sorting the music that's out there, so that even the laziest consumer can be exposed to music they may well want to buy.
That's handy, but I feel that the filtering and sorting is biased towards making money for the middlemen.
In order to cut the RIAA et al out of the picture, we need an alternative filtering mechanism, and it needs to be one that does not require a great deal of effort from the end consumer. An example might be if I strarted hearing music on the radio, and was told "and you can get the album from http://...".
It's an open platform. If it doesn't already play Ogg, you can hack until it does.
Name it something else like: TINAA. It stands for This Is Not An Apple.
;)
LISA? "LISA Imitates Standard Apple"...
Can't see Apple having a problem with that
Given that the technology already exists for coverting diesel engines to run on veggie oil,
You don't even need to convert the engine. Used cooking oil (animal or vegetable) treated with a little glycerine works cleanly in an unmodified diesel car.
News item here
I don't get it: Why would anybody want to not maximize his browser windows?
On my laptop, I generally have browser windows maximised.
On my desktop, which has a larger monitor that runs at a higher resolution, at my preferred font size (which isn't all that small) I find that a full-width window is hard to read. There's so much text on a line that it's difficult to locate the start of line n+1 when I'm at the end of line n.
A narrower browser window fixes this.
Incidentally, this is the reason newspapers are printed in columns.
When was the last time you played a game you honestly thought was innovative?
Jet (Set|Grind) Radio. The graphics and general atmosphere set it apart instantly (especially when it first came out, and Cel Shading wasn't being used by everyone and their dog), but it was the unique way the game made you look at your environment that made it innovative. Everywhere, something to grind on and jump off, yet as a way of getting from place to place, not just for the sake of tricking (as in Tony Hawk Pro Skater).
The Xbox sequel adds little in the way of innovation, but it's still a cracking game.
Of course, brilliance and innovation does not automatically equal sales.
Not if you do it right the first time. Surely directory listnings generated by different servers looks different, but all of those I have seen had one thing in common: They contains links to the files in the directory. So to produce a directory listning from the HTML file is not really a problem if you only need filenames. Just parse the HTML documents and find all links. Remove those links not pointing to files in the directory in question, and remove doubles if any. And once you actually get the files, be prepared to handle nonexisting files correctly.
/trivially/ and the scope for automation is limited. There's nothing /explicit/ in the HTML that states categorically that it's a directory listing, for example, so you need some kind of human input to say "yes, this is a directory listing, use it as a list of stuff to fetch", or "no, this is data I want, fetch it and save it".
It can be done, but it can't be done
And, more to the point, although there are tools to let you "get everything linked off this chunk of HTML", they're not ubiquitous the way mget is.
IMHO email addresses, domain names and URLs are easier to remember and use than numbers. There are very few phone numbers I can type in from memory (my own, my parents', my work's... that's probably it), and dozens of email addresses and web site front page URLs.
Rather than embed a clunky phone number into a DNS entry, can't we hide phone numbers behind a directory the way DNS hides IP addresses? The spam issue would need to be addressed of course, but the sooner I can use a payphone without needing to look up a number manually the better.
The HTTP protocol may or may not recommend DIR listings by default
No, the HTTP protocol does not even specify the concept of a directory listning. Some servers can generate an HTML file from the directory listning, but that is all up to the server, it can generate that file as it likes or even just serve an error.
Exactly right, and the point is that there is no explicit standard (the may be a few de-facto standards) to say what an HTML directory listing looks like, so coding the equivalent of an FTP client's "mget" command becomes a new job for every site.
My advice is, if you think your users would like mget or its equivalent, then either give them FTP or think hard about how you could provide the same functionality using HTTP/HTML.
If they don't need mget, HTTP might be fine.
Because we already PAID for them once when they were built.
To echo your eloquent use of capitals, the cost of their maintenance is ONGOING.
There are no sufficiently muddy puddles within 20 miles of the congestion charging zone.
"Plates fitted or treated in such a manner as to obscure or disguise the mark or make it difficult or impossible to photograph" are illegal.
Such acts *would* be followed up by the law.
I'm sure smearing on mud would count.