This is a pretty hot topic on the forums and mailing lists devoted to Knoppix. For DVD is, obviously, space for more programs. Against, we have the fact that not everyone has DVD burners, DVD burners are still much more expensive than CD burners, DVDs cost quite a bit more, and downloading DVD images would suck up even more bandwidth. Some of these would be mitigated by maintaining two images (one DVD, one CD) but then there's the PITA of having two images to maintain! What I'd like to see is Knoppix create sort of a framework DVD that you can use to remaster your own DVD. That's sort of the best of both worlds, I think.
There were a lot of voodoo hardware doctors on the Interweb that claim it's the slider. Multiple people only notice the problem after either opening or closing it, which lends credibility to this. It could very well be 3rd party software, if it was the software that talked to the digitizer or something. But there were plenty of reports of completely clean installations with this problem. Also, if you check the Brighthand forums (I believe that's where it is), you'll see that T2 and T3 models did have this problem, although perhaps to a lesser degree.
Have you noticed any "digitizer drift" problems? Where you have to recalibrate it with increasing frequency? Maybe they've fixed that problem and I can finally buy a T3:)
Also, do you notice a higher battery life due to the underclocking? That's something I would definately be interested in. Any stability issues?
Yeah, my mistake, (and of course, Slashdot doesn't allowe editing). I meant the E didn't have any connectivity. Wonder how many posts I'll get correcting me, now.:) And while the T had bluetooth, as you say, it has been off the shelf for some time now, and as long as I'm complaining, it doesn't have enough memory for me:)
That first bluetooth card was their offering before they had any PDAs that were built with bluetooth. Palm hasn't released drivers for that card for PalmOS5 yet, so there's no support for any newer palms, and certainly no support for anything in PalmOne's current offering. The second card (from Sandisk) isn't made by PalmOne, so that doesn't help or harm my argument, but you'll also note that there aren't (yet) drivers for PalmOS5.
And I don't really think that 7 models is too many...that was the parent to my post. I just postulated that one of the reasons was to give users more choice while stifiling upgradeabillity--they just still don't have a combination that I want, yet.
Palm doesn't want you to be able to add bluetooth or other connectivity options to your cheap PDA, so they make you buy a more expensive one. I suspect that this is also why they have 7 different models, though I'd prefer customizeablity over that anyway.
I've been a big fan of Palm since around their 3 series (got a 3xe pretty close to when they came out). Back then, it did everything I wanted that I expected a handheld to be able to do--i.e. I never expected multimedia support or anything.
The most recent offerings, however, have been atrocious in my mind. To get Bluetooth, you had to go with a Tungsten 2 or 3, both of which have a slider design that's notorious for breaking the digitizer. The Tungsten T is almost as good, but doesn't feature any extra connectivity--i.e. no "Universal Connector" (the wired connection that most phones that connect to Palms use) and no bluetooth (and as yet, no bluetooth drivers for the SD cards that give you bluetooth). The Zire series is great for affordability, and they finally added bluetooth (yay!), but the damned camera...some people aren't allowed to take into work (and technically count as recording devices--MPAA says you can't take it into a movie theater).
I'm waiting for the day when Palm or some other company begins customizing handhelds much like Dell does for computers. Then I could get my wireless connectivity, no camera, customize the memory and processor (taking into consideration battery life) etc. Then I'll be truly happy. Until then, I think I'll go shopping for a good phone.
As I understand it, playing the flute increments or decrements a counter depending upon which direction Link is facing on the screen. Then that counter checks some value (like which dungeon you finished last or some such), adds to it, skipping over any dungeons you haven't finished already, and that's your destination. So playing the flute multiple times means you get to basically decide where you want to go (within the set of dungeons you've finished).
It may make things easier, but if you can play a more or less perfect game, it doesn't actually speed things up. See, you don't NEED the blue ring to finish the game. Just never get hit. Other items can be gained easily on the way to the various dungeons, so there's no need to buy them. Even keys can be gained in an "optimal" way so that you rarely ever have to go out of your way to get one. Nothing you purchase in shops is necessary except maybe for the monster bait, and that's far enough along in the game that you don't need to gamble early to get it.
How about just keys? They're hard to give out, though it can be problematic if they are compromised. As long as it's easy to revoke them, though, that won't be an issue. Of course, then you have to worry about key management, which non-geeks may not want to do.
Even a low end computer these days will be capable of rendering DVD quality video in a short time with many filters in place. I routinely use free tools (AVISynth being the biggest) as well as inexpensive encoders (TMPGEnc, and I want to try CCE Basic one of these days) to make DVDs from my video. I filter the hell out of my video, and it rarely takes more than 7x realtime on my Athlon XP 2800. Usually it takes much less time. And TMPGEnc is considered a fairly slow encoder. With a P-IV and CCE, I would probably cut that time in half, at least. Using a higher resolution source would certainly slow down the process, but is it really enough to warrant paying high prices for this sort of software? Probably not. If you are going for real quality, you'll probably spend much more time working out the processing for the video than the time you will spend encoding. If you just want something simple, you probably aren't going to need this hardware because for simple, general computing power is definately fast enough. Without filters, I encode at roughly half-realtime for Full-D1 DVD resolution, for example.
How you sample analog material plays a big part in the overal quality of the finished product. For music, you typically think of samples per second (CDs play at 44.1khz). But typically for the initial digitization of analog material, you oversample (perhaps sampling the analog music at 88.2khz, or even higher). This gives you something that's much closer to the original work than normal, and allows you to work with a higher quality, well, sample. Performing digital transformations, including cleaning up the video, removing scratches, etc. always works better if you have more samples to work from. So a higher resolution picture will make it easier to get rid of any scratches or imperfections in the original film.
Eventually, of course, you have to downsample to fit the format that you will be distributing. For CDs, you downsample to 44.1khz. For DVDs, you downsample (the resolution) to 720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL. Note that that's somewhere around 1/8th the resolution that they're scanning. The idea is simple. With this one scan, they can be prepared for format changes. Once high definition DVDs come out, they can downsample to whatever that resolution will be. If they want to broadcast a movie on an HD television channel, they can downsample to 1080i or whatever HD format they wish.
This seems to be about making a high-resolution copy now for archival purposes, so that if the film itself degrades (as it is prone to do) there will still be something really close to the original to work from. Not a bad idea, I think.
But a huge part of the problem is that users allow this stuff on their machines. They read the licenses and click "Install". Anything they allow on their computer is quite probably legal. Most of this crap also has a clause in the EULA saying they can install other software, and that you agree to the EULAs of those other software products. Now anything that exploits a vulnerability to get installed is clearly illegal, not just for the wiretapping aspects (which someone could probably sue over) but also the various computer misuse and abuse acts that are floating around. Same laws that make viruses and other trojans illegal. Just good luck finding someone to sue.
I went through that. Boy did I go through that. The only way I figured out what you had to do was because I went through the game to that poitn so many times that I just got fed up and hit "reset" to get to play it again faster. I hit reset and learned that, no, that button isn't hard-wired, it's actually software controlled! Boy was I angry, and at the same time, horribly amused.. To think, I'd spent hours looking around on the SCREEN for a reset button!
To date I haven't found an emulator that correctly emulates the Reset button to play this game correctly....
I missed the part in the article where Squenix is forcing you to buy the rerelease. Obviously there is a market for it, or else rereleases wouldn't make money. Don't blame Squenix for making a product there's a demand for, blame the people who will go out and buy the same game 10 times over.
It's scary if you want to be able to lie, or even just don't want your every conscious thought to be available to people. Imagine if one day, in the distant future, EVERYONE was required to have one of these, and ALL of their concious thoughts were analyzed in a Carnivore-like system. Thinking, "I'm going to bomb X embassy," even if you have no intention of doing it, could lead to investigations. Right now, our thoughts, our minds, are one of the few safe-havens we have. No one can force us to disclose our thoughts, barring the use of some chmicals that sometimes have a truth-inducing effect (fairly rare, though, because all it really makes you do is talk a lot, but not necessarily about what your interrogators want to hear), and these are very active. They have to grab you, inject you, interrogate you, and all this takes quite a bit of time. With subvocalizers, it would be much easier.
It IS scary, even just as a lie detector, because what if I thought, "Man, that cop is hot!" while they're interrogating me. Pretty embarassing. And it could lead to a whole slew of fifth amendment issues, in the US.
Well you DID get a cheap router out of the deal. Imagine if companies didn't use Linux for routers, opting to develop the OS on their own or purchase it. How much do you think that would add to the cost of each router?
But it's fairly likely that more than half the people interested in the article would want to make encodings of their DVDs, or at least of already-compressed material. If that's what their target is, then their methodology (other than the transitive Indeo step and the lack of tweaking the codecs--for example, ever heard of 2-pass encoding?) was sound.
For one, they could have chosen all Superbit movies. That certainly would have been better than plain DVDs, in terms of quality. Also, is it really fair to say that all of the codecs can deal with MPEG2 as source? Doesn't it really depend upon the application that calls the codec? As you probably know, the codec itself usually consists of a library that handles encoding and decoding. It relies on the application that calls it to supply the input in some format it can handle, which almost always would require converting the frames into an uncompressed form to feed to the encoder. That's really picking nits, I suppose, but Sorenson and Quicktime are fairly tightly coupled, whereas the other codecs aren't really limited to a single encoding application, and while theorhetically it shouldn't matter, slight differences in the application can yield different results at times (it's rare, but it happens).
Sort of, but not quite.. I believe that he actually generated the frames using the games own code, but there was no actual play involved. There were some places in the game where impossible stunts WERE performed, but not because a skilled player couldn't pull it off. It was because the game itself wouldn't throw that particular number or sequence of enemies at the player within a certain amount of time (I'm specifically referring to the airship stages, where multiple 1ups could be had by jumping on the mole guys).
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This is a pretty hot topic on the forums and mailing lists devoted to Knoppix. For DVD is, obviously, space for more programs. Against, we have the fact that not everyone has DVD burners, DVD burners are still much more expensive than CD burners, DVDs cost quite a bit more, and downloading DVD images would suck up even more bandwidth. Some of these would be mitigated by maintaining two images (one DVD, one CD) but then there's the PITA of having two images to maintain!
What I'd like to see is Knoppix create sort of a framework DVD that you can use to remaster your own DVD. That's sort of the best of both worlds, I think.
There were a lot of voodoo hardware doctors on the Interweb that claim it's the slider. Multiple people only notice the problem after either opening or closing it, which lends credibility to this. It could very well be 3rd party software, if it was the software that talked to the digitizer or something. But there were plenty of reports of completely clean installations with this problem.
Also, if you check the Brighthand forums (I believe that's where it is), you'll see that T2 and T3 models did have this problem, although perhaps to a lesser degree.
Have you noticed any "digitizer drift" problems? Where you have to recalibrate it with increasing frequency? Maybe they've fixed that problem and I can finally buy a T3 :)
Also, do you notice a higher battery life due to the underclocking? That's something I would definately be interested in. Any stability issues?
Yeah, my mistake, (and of course, Slashdot doesn't allowe editing). :) And while the T had bluetooth, as you say, it has been off the shelf for some time now, and as long as I'm complaining, it doesn't have enough memory for me :)
I meant the E didn't have any connectivity. Wonder how many posts I'll get correcting me, now.
That first bluetooth card was their offering before they had any PDAs that were built with bluetooth. Palm hasn't released drivers for that card for PalmOS5 yet, so there's no support for any newer palms, and certainly no support for anything in PalmOne's current offering.
The second card (from Sandisk) isn't made by PalmOne, so that doesn't help or harm my argument, but you'll also note that there aren't (yet) drivers for PalmOS5.
And I don't really think that 7 models is too many...that was the parent to my post. I just postulated that one of the reasons was to give users more choice while stifiling upgradeabillity--they just still don't have a combination that I want, yet.
The Tungsten T went away when the T2 came out. Guess what happened when the T3 came out? :)
Who has no virtual grafitti area? Palm? The Tungsten 3 does, in fact, have a virtual "silkscreen" as they call it.
Palm doesn't want you to be able to add bluetooth or other connectivity options to your cheap PDA, so they make you buy a more expensive one. I suspect that this is also why they have 7 different models, though I'd prefer customizeablity over that anyway.
I've been a big fan of Palm since around their 3 series (got a 3xe pretty close to when they came out). Back then, it did everything I wanted that I expected a handheld to be able to do--i.e. I never expected multimedia support or anything.
The most recent offerings, however, have been atrocious in my mind. To get Bluetooth, you had to go with a Tungsten 2 or 3, both of which have a slider design that's notorious for breaking the digitizer. The Tungsten T is almost as good, but doesn't feature any extra connectivity--i.e. no "Universal Connector" (the wired connection that most phones that connect to Palms use) and no bluetooth (and as yet, no bluetooth drivers for the SD cards that give you bluetooth). The Zire series is great for affordability, and they finally added bluetooth (yay!), but the damned camera...some people aren't allowed to take into work (and technically count as recording devices--MPAA says you can't take it into a movie theater).
I'm waiting for the day when Palm or some other company begins customizing handhelds much like Dell does for computers. Then I could get my wireless connectivity, no camera, customize the memory and processor (taking into consideration battery life) etc. Then I'll be truly happy. Until then, I think I'll go shopping for a good phone.
As I understand it, playing the flute increments or decrements a counter depending upon which direction Link is facing on the screen. Then that counter checks some value (like which dungeon you finished last or some such), adds to it, skipping over any dungeons you haven't finished already, and that's your destination. So playing the flute multiple times means you get to basically decide where you want to go (within the set of dungeons you've finished).
It may make things easier, but if you can play a more or less perfect game, it doesn't actually speed things up. See, you don't NEED the blue ring to finish the game. Just never get hit. Other items can be gained easily on the way to the various dungeons, so there's no need to buy them. Even keys can be gained in an "optimal" way so that you rarely ever have to go out of your way to get one. Nothing you purchase in shops is necessary except maybe for the monster bait, and that's far enough along in the game that you don't need to gamble early to get it.
How about just keys? They're hard to give out, though it can be problematic if they are compromised. As long as it's easy to revoke them, though, that won't be an issue.
Of course, then you have to worry about key management, which non-geeks may not want to do.
Even a low end computer these days will be capable of rendering DVD quality video in a short time with many filters in place. I routinely use free tools (AVISynth being the biggest) as well as inexpensive encoders (TMPGEnc, and I want to try CCE Basic one of these days) to make DVDs from my video. I filter the hell out of my video, and it rarely takes more than 7x realtime on my Athlon XP 2800. Usually it takes much less time. And TMPGEnc is considered a fairly slow encoder. With a P-IV and CCE, I would probably cut that time in half, at least.
Using a higher resolution source would certainly slow down the process, but is it really enough to warrant paying high prices for this sort of software? Probably not. If you are going for real quality, you'll probably spend much more time working out the processing for the video than the time you will spend encoding. If you just want something simple, you probably aren't going to need this hardware because for simple, general computing power is definately fast enough. Without filters, I encode at roughly half-realtime for Full-D1 DVD resolution, for example.
How you sample analog material plays a big part in the overal quality of the finished product. For music, you typically think of samples per second (CDs play at 44.1khz). But typically for the initial digitization of analog material, you oversample (perhaps sampling the analog music at 88.2khz, or even higher). This gives you something that's much closer to the original work than normal, and allows you to work with a higher quality, well, sample. Performing digital transformations, including cleaning up the video, removing scratches, etc. always works better if you have more samples to work from. So a higher resolution picture will make it easier to get rid of any scratches or imperfections in the original film.
Eventually, of course, you have to downsample to fit the format that you will be distributing. For CDs, you downsample to 44.1khz. For DVDs, you downsample (the resolution) to 720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL. Note that that's somewhere around 1/8th the resolution that they're scanning.
The idea is simple. With this one scan, they can be prepared for format changes. Once high definition DVDs come out, they can downsample to whatever that resolution will be. If they want to broadcast a movie on an HD television channel, they can downsample to 1080i or whatever HD format they wish.
This seems to be about making a high-resolution copy now for archival purposes, so that if the film itself degrades (as it is prone to do) there will still be something really close to the original to work from. Not a bad idea, I think.
But a huge part of the problem is that users allow this stuff on their machines. They read the licenses and click "Install".
Anything they allow on their computer is quite probably legal. Most of this crap also has a clause in the EULA saying they can install other software, and that you agree to the EULAs of those other software products.
Now anything that exploits a vulnerability to get installed is clearly illegal, not just for the wiretapping aspects (which someone could probably sue over) but also the various computer misuse and abuse acts that are floating around. Same laws that make viruses and other trojans illegal. Just good luck finding someone to sue.
I went through that. Boy did I go through that.
The only way I figured out what you had to do was because I went through the game to that poitn so many times that I just got fed up and hit "reset" to get to play it again faster. I hit reset and learned that, no, that button isn't hard-wired, it's actually software controlled! Boy was I angry, and at the same time, horribly amused.. To think, I'd spent hours looking around on the SCREEN for a reset button!
To date I haven't found an emulator that correctly emulates the Reset button to play this game correctly....
I didn't, until the article mentioned it.
I missed the part in the article where Squenix is forcing you to buy the rerelease. Obviously there is a market for it, or else rereleases wouldn't make money. Don't blame Squenix for making a product there's a demand for, blame the people who will go out and buy the same game 10 times over.
I think you want this.
But it might as well be reading minds, if the article implications are to be believed.
"What is analyzed is silent, or subauditory, speech, such as when a person silently reads or talks to himself," Jorgensen said.
"Biological signals arise when reading or speaking to oneself with or without actual lip or facial movement."
In other words, nerve impulses are sent when your inner monologue is playing, whether or not you actually intend to speak.
It's scary if you want to be able to lie, or even just don't want your every conscious thought to be available to people.
Imagine if one day, in the distant future, EVERYONE was required to have one of these, and ALL of their concious thoughts were analyzed in a Carnivore-like system. Thinking, "I'm going to bomb X embassy," even if you have no intention of doing it, could lead to investigations.
Right now, our thoughts, our minds, are one of the few safe-havens we have. No one can force us to disclose our thoughts, barring the use of some chmicals that sometimes have a truth-inducing effect (fairly rare, though, because all it really makes you do is talk a lot, but not necessarily about what your interrogators want to hear), and these are very active. They have to grab you, inject you, interrogate you, and all this takes quite a bit of time. With subvocalizers, it would be much easier.
It IS scary, even just as a lie detector, because what if I thought, "Man, that cop is hot!" while they're interrogating me. Pretty embarassing. And it could lead to a whole slew of fifth amendment issues, in the US.
Well you DID get a cheap router out of the deal. Imagine if companies didn't use Linux for routers, opting to develop the OS on their own or purchase it. How much do you think that would add to the cost of each router?
But it's fairly likely that more than half the people interested in the article would want to make encodings of their DVDs, or at least of already-compressed material. If that's what their target is, then their methodology (other than the transitive Indeo step and the lack of tweaking the codecs--for example, ever heard of 2-pass encoding?) was sound.
For one, they could have chosen all Superbit movies. That certainly would have been better than plain DVDs, in terms of quality.
Also, is it really fair to say that all of the codecs can deal with MPEG2 as source? Doesn't it really depend upon the application that calls the codec? As you probably know, the codec itself usually consists of a library that handles encoding and decoding. It relies on the application that calls it to supply the input in some format it can handle, which almost always would require converting the frames into an uncompressed form to feed to the encoder. That's really picking nits, I suppose, but Sorenson and Quicktime are fairly tightly coupled, whereas the other codecs aren't really limited to a single encoding application, and while theorhetically it shouldn't matter, slight differences in the application can yield different results at times (it's rare, but it happens).
Sort of, but not quite..
I believe that he actually generated the frames using the games own code, but there was no actual play involved. There were some places in the game where impossible stunts WERE performed, but not because a skilled player couldn't pull it off. It was because the game itself wouldn't throw that particular number or sequence of enemies at the player within a certain amount of time (I'm specifically referring to the airship stages, where multiple 1ups could be had by jumping on the mole guys).