Offtopic, but why on earth do you link to the CBC in your sig. I mean, if you really want to complain about the reporting of the war and it's relegation to entertainment, look no further than FOX or CNN, who, with their "embedded" reporters, have become nothing more than cheerleaders for the American military. I mean, really, IMHO, the CBC is probably one of the better news organizations out there...
I wonder how widespread this view is. Because if it is common, then all this "Micro$oft" bashing is quite pointless. I mean, why ascribe to evil what can be explained by apathy?
You're assuming that I (and others like me) dislike Microsoft because of their massive marketshare, and so I should do all I can to reduce said share. However, that isn't correct. If Microsoft had massive marketshare and got it because they played fair and produced a high-quality product that everyone could agree was worthy of it's popularity, I'd be perfectly happy with MS.
The problem is Microsoft 1) produces shoddy products and foists them on an unsuspecting public and 2) abuses it's monopoly power to maintain (and enlarge) it's marketshare. So, speaking for myself, when I bash Microsoft, it's not because they have a large marketshare, but because of how they got it.
Incidentally, it should also be noted that, just because someone bashes Microsoft, that doesn't mean they should automatically have an interest in trying to take them down. Speaking for myself, as long as I can use my computer freely with whatever operating system I want and can accomplish what I want to accomplish, I'm perfectly happy with Microsoft enjoying 98% of the desktop market. OTOH, it's still enjoyable to poke fun at them (and their unsuspecting users:).
And one more point, I happen to agree that the excessive MS bashing on this site is more than a little pointless. It screams of adolescence, IMHO...
With that attitude, how exactly is open-source software supposed to carve out a majority chunk of the desktop (or any) market? When people besides yourself being satisfied with your software is not a root goal, but a "bonus"?
Careful, you're making this political, and making a false assumption while you're at it. See, you assume that developers care one way or another whether or not open source "[carves] out a majority chunk of the desktop (or any) market". But, speaking for myself, I know I don't give a damn whether or not OSS succeeds in the marketplace.
You see, many (most?) people who develop software in their spare time do it because they *like* to. They do it because it's fun, and because they can scratch some personal itch (as the grand-parent and great-grandparent posters put it). Or they do it because they want to be able to help other people solve their own problem. Do you think Linus created the Linux kernel for political reasons?
Frankly, IMHO, the politicization of this whole "OSS movement" has nothing to do with the actual developers. It's all about people who need an ideology to follow and something to rail against (in this case, closed source software). Sure, there's the odd counter-example to this, but on the whole, I think developers are just pragmatic, generous folks who like to code, and couldn't care less whether or not their software served to destroy the software industry as it exists today.
OOC, why would you need a kernel interface? I'd assume these filesystems have user-space libraries to provide access to their more advanced features. Isn't that all Samba needs?
But I'd wager the lions share of it's user base want samba to replace/supplement Win2k Server, and soon Win2003.
Aren't people reading this article? The work this fellow is doing is exactly along the lines of what you describe. The problem is that Win2k, et al, have a variety of features (like filestreams) which Samba simply can't implement because the underlying filesystem isn't capable of supporting these features.
So, this work involves modifying Samba (actually, re-architecting it) to allow it to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of some of the new filesystems out there. This will allow Samba to implement *more* of the SMB protocol, such as filestreams, advanced ACLs, etc. BUT, this is a lot of work because Samba is really inherently tied to POSIX, and all the limitations that implies. So, the work he's doing right now is to remove these dependencies and allow Samba to be more backing-store-agnostic.
However I can help but wonder how these will be preserved if say the server is XFS and the Client FAT.
Hmm... it seems you didn't fully understand the article, and the problem currently being solved. First, let's create an example. We have a Win2k server serving files to a Win98 box. The Win2k server supports ACLs (in NTFS) and there's a bunch of access controls on the file. The user copies said file to their local box. Guess what, Windows must handle this somehow...
My point? This isn't Samba's problem! In fact, it's not even the same problem domain. Samba runs on the server side. What you mention is a *client side issue*.
The article is describing a method of emulating (or, more accurately, mapping) SMB (actually, probably NTFS) ACLs to ACLs in the native filesystem format. This is something Samba never did before because POSIX simply doesn't have the capabilities necessary to do this, and Samba was always targetted specifically at POSIX-compatible systems. BUT, filesystems like XFS, ext3, and others, have more advanced functionality in this area. So the work being done is to simply make the Samba backend more backing-store-agnostic, allowing it to take advantage of the advanced features in some of the more exotic filesystems out there.
I'm sure there is some way, legally, or at least from a boycott point of view. But this seriously undermines the whole "freeness" aspect of Linux. Basically, what you're saying is Linux is free to all... except those guys we don't like. That's not free, now is it?
I'm still not sure I understand... so you have some devices mapped to some address ranges. Yes, these ranges can not be used for RAM now. But that's just that small range (presumably some set of bits on the bus are reserved for memory mapped I/O). But you still have a massive range of addresses available to you. So I'm not sure how this issue could be the reason why the SCO boxes are limited to 4GB.
Umm, last I checked, a 64-bit processor doesn't give you a wider bus automatically. That's purely a function of the attached bus itself. In fact, in the RDRAM architecture, the bus is actually really *narrow*, it just runs at very high clock rates (IIRC, in the Ghz range these days, with packets that are 8 bytes wide). So, no bandwidth is probably not a key factor in the decision to buy an Itanium-based machine.
The odds are good they either want 1) really excellent floating point performance (something I hear the Itanium is good at), 2) better performing native apps, because, theoretically, the compiler can optimize better with more registers and the ability to statically schedule multiple operations simultaneously (although we'll see how that plays out in practice), or 3) the ability to access large amounts of RAM.
Note, the second point I listed is a bit of a red herring, since I'm not aware of any really good IA-64 compilers yet (other than maybe Intel's), and I'm sure the practice of optimizing for the IA-64 is still developing.
Not at all... so you have some devices mapped in the 4GB range. All that means is you have RAM, a bunch of devices, making a small hole, and then a ton more RAM above 4GB. Where's the problem?
We were smart enough to undo prohibition, although it took about 12 years. Maybe we can correct this error more promptly.
What makes you say that? The US continues to wage it's ill-conceived War on Drugs, and doesn't show any signs of stopping, or even slowing down, despite mounting evidence that it's making absolutely no difference while costing the American public billions and jailing untold numbers of harmless citizens.
Frankly, I think the US government is so tightly wrapped up in it's cozy blanket of rhetoric and propaganda that it is unable to see the reality of it's current situation. This applies to all the stupid moves of the US government... the DMCA, the PATRIOT act, the "War on Terrorism", the "War on Drugs"... Oh well, it just makes me more and more proud that I'm a Canadian.
Legalize it and the money will quit going into the black market.
Umm... I know that, the grand-parent poster knows that (it's called sarcasm;), but apparently that pesky American government doesn't know that. Perhaps someone should let them know... although, they didn't seem to learn much from prohibition (what's that saying about learning about your history or being doomed to repeat it?).
... is that the US will use it's diplomatic muscle to force laws like this on those of us who live in the free world.
Well, I live in Canada, and this hasn't happened yet, nor is there any push (that I'm aware of) to pass similar laws here (minus the odd anti-terrorist law which gets introduced and subsequently shot down). So, for now at least, I'm feeling pretty comfortable about my freedom.
Blah blah blah... this is the same lamentation that comes out every single time a report about a new, faster processor appears. We get it. Please, move on... all this whining about "the good ol' days" is really getting exhausting.
Sorry, try again... those are vector processing units, which perform much different operations. They provide specific support for packing multiple datatypes into a single array for performing simultaneous operations on them. 64-bit registers in the Opteron are NOT designed for this!
For example, in MMX you could pack a pair of 8 byte arrays into two MMX registers and add them together. If you tried to do this using 64-bit Opteron registers, you'd get overflow into adjacent bytes, which is NOT a good thing! As a result, you're highly limited on the kind of packed vector-style operations you can do in a 64-bit register on the Opteron.
64 bit instruction set for faster low level functions, faster 64 bit pipes
This is just plain wrong. 64-bit words at the CPU level has no direct effect on instruction speed, unless you make tricky optimizations, like packing 32-bit variables into a single 64-bit register and doing operations on them simultaneously (which, in general, isn't that useful, BTW). Yes, there are a couple places where wider registers could be useful (bulk data transfers, etc) but there really aren't that many. Some people have mentioned higher-precision arithmetic, but IMHO, if you need that, you're using the FPU anyway, and thus have had 64-bit (80-bit internally) precision for some time now.
The main reason the Opteron is a good thing is because 1) it provides MORE registers, allowing the compiler to make smarter register allocations, which can provide drastic performance improvements, and 2) it provides access to a larger address space, meaning you can finally have >4GB of memory without nasty paging hacks. Of these, only the first is really that useful to your average Joe, which is why you're only going to see the Opteron in higher-end workstations and servers for the immediate future... at least, IMHO.
Yeah, but 64-bit is only useful to people on the higher end, who need lots of memory, or excellent performance (due to the extra registers provided). Opteron on the desktop won't be here in the immediate future, simply because there aren't any user-end apps which could make use of >4GB of RAM. So the price jump is a moot point, generally speaking (especially compared to the Opteron's main competitor, the Itanium2).
Besides, if MS is planning to port WinXP and Windows Server 2003, they probably have some of their other major products in the (pardon the pun) pipeline as well, which could make the Opteron even more attractive.
Newer mods are basically blank flashroms. (Homebrew mods are blank flashroms) I don't see how you could be convicted selling those, unless you specifically make a point of saying the device is for playing pirated software.
Whoa, hold on there. Are you saying that I can sell a device that has potentially illegal uses, but only if I don't mention said uses? So I'm free to sell, say, firearms, but only if I call them guns, and not robbery assistance devices? Sounds kinda scary to me...
I think you've forgotten about the concept of significant, non-infringing use. The reason guns are legal, as is the sale of them, is because they, theoretically, have significant non-infringing uses (target shooting, self-defense, etc). An even better example is VCRs, which have obvious, non-infringing uses. The same goes for mod chips. These things have, IMHO, real, significant non-infringing uses, the least of which is the use of Linux on the X-Box.
Now, if the chip has copyrighted material on it (ie, the BIOS), that's a totally different thing. But a blank mod-chip? That should definitely be legal, no matter how you market the thing. At least, IMHO.
I would just use mplayer with the yuv4mpeg video output driver, and the PCM audio output driver. Create two fifos, one for the video called stream.yuv and one for the audio, say audio.wav, and tell mplayer to write the video and audio to the fifos. Then, using mjpegtools, encode the video from the yuv4mpeg stream, and use toolame for the audio. Then, mplex the resulting streams together, and voila, you have a VCD or SVCD.
'course, this is all assuming your box can handle decoding the TV stream and encoding the video and audio simultaneously.:) OTOH, if you're running an SMP box, this technique is probably more efficient...
To the other post, how would increasing technology (and decreasing million dollar architectural costs) cost the poor anything? How would free "library based" internet access cost "the poor" anything?
Umm... you need a computer to access your lovely computerized books. No computer == no access to books. Your average person below the poverty line probably can't afford a computer...
And by the way, the "poor" you would find are NOT the ones using libraries anyway, so check your figures. The average person in a public library is an educated, high upper middle income person, or home educated Christian kids with their mother getting books for the week. Besides, is your library card free? Most cards I know are at least $15 annually. What poor person pays to read? lol!!
Wow, that's very predjudiced of you. Nice to know that you think all poor people are bums on the street who are uninterested in reading.
You know, I spent a good part of my childhood living under the poverty line. No, I didn't live on the street... I lived in a lower-end condo in a subburb of my city. I was raised by a single mother who has held down 2 or 3 jobs at a time for as long as I can remember in order to support three children. We couldn't afford a computer for quite a long time. Now, I'm a relatively successful, University educated software developer. So your computerized library fantasy would have cut people like me out of the loop. Really great idea. Thanks!
And to answer your impending question, yes, I spent a lot of the time at the library, and yes, I think that's part of the reason I am as successful as I am today... it helped me to foster a passion for learning.
Libraries have become nothing more than monuments to the community prominent.
Do you really need multimillion dollar facilities to house books?
I am the first to agree a book is better than a monitor screen, but it's time to get current and cut government costs. If books in libraries were distributed via network or if the libraries also offered community WiFi, wouldn't that be more useful, less costly?
Yeah, great idea. Lets shut down public libraries and tie them up in technologies that no poor person can possibly afford, because they're too busy spending what little money they have buying food. Then, when they try to educate themselves, they'll be unable to find any information, because it will be all but unavailable to them. Friggin' brilliant.
Why is it that technophiles have such a hard time realizing that there are people who are a) less computer literate than them and/or b) don't have as much money. It's great how people in the cushy middle-class can so easily forget about the massive poverty which exists in their own country. And don't get me started on this Utopian ideal that, somehow, computers are the solution to (and cause of?) all of life's problems.
BTW, your sig makes perfect sense if you understand that, in C, straight numeric constants are assumed to be integers, and hence 1/2 is equal to zero. The obvious fix is to change that to 1.0/2.0. Gotta love it when people complain about non-issues...
Incidentally, Java has similar rules, it's just more verbose when warning about type mismatches and loss of precision.
Who no longer sells flash carts after the lawsuit. Apparently, the preferred sources are gbax.com and success-hk.com.
Heh, look at that, you're right. I didn't realize they'd discontinued those as well. I'm glad I got mine.:)
Who reading Slashdot (other than those behind Macintosh computers) doesn't have a PC around? I can load a game into the GBA, leave the house, play it on the bus, then when I arrive, I put the GBA on sleep until I'm ready to play again or put another game in. Nintendo is using this technique to hide GBA games in some of its newer GCN games (such as Puzzle Collection) as well.
Yes, but then you're forced to have your GBA on at all times, which wastes battery life. I'd much rather be able to load up my flash cart, and have it available whenever I feel like playing a game, without having the damn thing on all the time. And then I can carry around as many games as my cart will hold (in my case, about 25). Besides, if I'm going on a trip (the most likely time for me to use PocketNES), I most certainly *don't* have access to a PC with all my games on it.
And what if I'm playing a PocketNES game and decide I want to play a different game for a while. Well, I'm buggered. Heck, what if my g/f decides she wants to play Tetris while I've got a game of SMB in progress? It's just waaay too much trouble.
Sorry, but a flash cart is, IMHO, the only way to go. Get one... you'll be glad you did. Plus, then you can write your own stuff for the GBA!:)
Err... it's called a flash cart, which you need if you want more than one game on your GBA anyway. I bought mine from Lik Sang. Besides, without a flash cart, you're tethered to your PC (or, rather, you have to have a PC around so you can power up the GBA and copy the game over), so you might as well just use a PC-based emulator. *shrug*
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Offtopic, but why on earth do you link to the CBC in your sig. I mean, if you really want to complain about the reporting of the war and it's relegation to entertainment, look no further than FOX or CNN, who, with their "embedded" reporters, have become nothing more than cheerleaders for the American military. I mean, really, IMHO, the CBC is probably one of the better news organizations out there...
I wonder how widespread this view is. Because if it is common, then all this "Micro$oft" bashing is quite pointless. I mean, why ascribe to evil what can be explained by apathy?
:).
You're assuming that I (and others like me) dislike Microsoft because of their massive marketshare, and so I should do all I can to reduce said share. However, that isn't correct. If Microsoft had massive marketshare and got it because they played fair and produced a high-quality product that everyone could agree was worthy of it's popularity, I'd be perfectly happy with MS.
The problem is Microsoft 1) produces shoddy products and foists them on an unsuspecting public and 2) abuses it's monopoly power to maintain (and enlarge) it's marketshare. So, speaking for myself, when I bash Microsoft, it's not because they have a large marketshare, but because of how they got it.
Incidentally, it should also be noted that, just because someone bashes Microsoft, that doesn't mean they should automatically have an interest in trying to take them down. Speaking for myself, as long as I can use my computer freely with whatever operating system I want and can accomplish what I want to accomplish, I'm perfectly happy with Microsoft enjoying 98% of the desktop market. OTOH, it's still enjoyable to poke fun at them (and their unsuspecting users
And one more point, I happen to agree that the excessive MS bashing on this site is more than a little pointless. It screams of adolescence, IMHO...
With that attitude, how exactly is open-source software supposed to carve out a majority chunk of the desktop (or any) market? When people besides yourself being satisfied with your software is not a root goal, but a "bonus"?
Careful, you're making this political, and making a false assumption while you're at it. See, you assume that developers care one way or another whether or not open source "[carves] out a majority chunk of the desktop (or any) market". But, speaking for myself, I know I don't give a damn whether or not OSS succeeds in the marketplace.
You see, many (most?) people who develop software in their spare time do it because they *like* to. They do it because it's fun, and because they can scratch some personal itch (as the grand-parent and great-grandparent posters put it). Or they do it because they want to be able to help other people solve their own problem. Do you think Linus created the Linux kernel for political reasons?
Frankly, IMHO, the politicization of this whole "OSS movement" has nothing to do with the actual developers. It's all about people who need an ideology to follow and something to rail against (in this case, closed source software). Sure, there's the odd counter-example to this, but on the whole, I think developers are just pragmatic, generous folks who like to code, and couldn't care less whether or not their software served to destroy the software industry as it exists today.
OOC, why would you need a kernel interface? I'd assume these filesystems have user-space libraries to provide access to their more advanced features. Isn't that all Samba needs?
But I'd wager the lions share of it's user base want samba to replace/supplement Win2k Server, and soon Win2003.
Aren't people reading this article? The work this fellow is doing is exactly along the lines of what you describe. The problem is that Win2k, et al, have a variety of features (like filestreams) which Samba simply can't implement because the underlying filesystem isn't capable of supporting these features.
So, this work involves modifying Samba (actually, re-architecting it) to allow it to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of some of the new filesystems out there. This will allow Samba to implement *more* of the SMB protocol, such as filestreams, advanced ACLs, etc. BUT, this is a lot of work because Samba is really inherently tied to POSIX, and all the limitations that implies. So, the work he's doing right now is to remove these dependencies and allow Samba to be more backing-store-agnostic.
However I can help but wonder how these will be preserved if say the server is XFS and the Client FAT.
Hmm... it seems you didn't fully understand the article, and the problem currently being solved. First, let's create an example. We have a Win2k server serving files to a Win98 box. The Win2k server supports ACLs (in NTFS) and there's a bunch of access controls on the file. The user copies said file to their local box. Guess what, Windows must handle this somehow...
My point? This isn't Samba's problem! In fact, it's not even the same problem domain. Samba runs on the server side. What you mention is a *client side issue*.
The article is describing a method of emulating (or, more accurately, mapping) SMB (actually, probably NTFS) ACLs to ACLs in the native filesystem format. This is something Samba never did before because POSIX simply doesn't have the capabilities necessary to do this, and Samba was always targetted specifically at POSIX-compatible systems. BUT, filesystems like XFS, ext3, and others, have more advanced functionality in this area. So the work being done is to simply make the Samba backend more backing-store-agnostic, allowing it to take advantage of the advanced features in some of the more exotic filesystems out there.
I'm sure there is some way, legally, or at least from a boycott point of view. But this seriously undermines the whole "freeness" aspect of Linux. Basically, what you're saying is Linux is free to all... except those guys we don't like. That's not free, now is it?
I'm still not sure I understand... so you have some devices mapped to some address ranges. Yes, these ranges can not be used for RAM now. But that's just that small range (presumably some set of bits on the bus are reserved for memory mapped I/O). But you still have a massive range of addresses available to you. So I'm not sure how this issue could be the reason why the SCO boxes are limited to 4GB.
:)
Then again, I'm no guru either.
Umm, last I checked, a 64-bit processor doesn't give you a wider bus automatically. That's purely a function of the attached bus itself. In fact, in the RDRAM architecture, the bus is actually really *narrow*, it just runs at very high clock rates (IIRC, in the Ghz range these days, with packets that are 8 bytes wide). So, no bandwidth is probably not a key factor in the decision to buy an Itanium-based machine.
The odds are good they either want 1) really excellent floating point performance (something I hear the Itanium is good at), 2) better performing native apps, because, theoretically, the compiler can optimize better with more registers and the ability to statically schedule multiple operations simultaneously (although we'll see how that plays out in practice), or 3) the ability to access large amounts of RAM.
Note, the second point I listed is a bit of a red herring, since I'm not aware of any really good IA-64 compilers yet (other than maybe Intel's), and I'm sure the practice of optimizing for the IA-64 is still developing.
Not at all... so you have some devices mapped in the 4GB range. All that means is you have RAM, a bunch of devices, making a small hole, and then a ton more RAM above 4GB. Where's the problem?
We were smart enough to undo prohibition, although it took about 12 years. Maybe we can correct this error more promptly.
What makes you say that? The US continues to wage it's ill-conceived War on Drugs, and doesn't show any signs of stopping, or even slowing down, despite mounting evidence that it's making absolutely no difference while costing the American public billions and jailing untold numbers of harmless citizens.
Frankly, I think the US government is so tightly wrapped up in it's cozy blanket of rhetoric and propaganda that it is unable to see the reality of it's current situation. This applies to all the stupid moves of the US government... the DMCA, the PATRIOT act, the "War on Terrorism", the "War on Drugs"... Oh well, it just makes me more and more proud that I'm a Canadian.
Legalize it and the money will quit going into the black market.
;), but apparently that pesky American government doesn't know that. Perhaps someone should let them know... although, they didn't seem to learn much from prohibition (what's that saying about learning about your history or being doomed to repeat it?).
Umm... I know that, the grand-parent poster knows that (it's called sarcasm
Well, I live in Canada, and this hasn't happened yet, nor is there any push (that I'm aware of) to pass similar laws here (minus the odd anti-terrorist law which gets introduced and subsequently shot down). So, for now at least, I'm feeling pretty comfortable about my freedom.
Blah blah blah... this is the same lamentation that comes out every single time a report about a new, faster processor appears. We get it. Please, move on... all this whining about "the good ol' days" is really getting exhausting.
Sorry, try again... those are vector processing units, which perform much different operations. They provide specific support for packing multiple datatypes into a single array for performing simultaneous operations on them. 64-bit registers in the Opteron are NOT designed for this!
For example, in MMX you could pack a pair of 8 byte arrays into two MMX registers and add them together. If you tried to do this using 64-bit Opteron registers, you'd get overflow into adjacent bytes, which is NOT a good thing! As a result, you're highly limited on the kind of packed vector-style operations you can do in a 64-bit register on the Opteron.
64 bit instruction set for faster low level functions, faster 64 bit pipes
This is just plain wrong. 64-bit words at the CPU level has no direct effect on instruction speed, unless you make tricky optimizations, like packing 32-bit variables into a single 64-bit register and doing operations on them simultaneously (which, in general, isn't that useful, BTW). Yes, there are a couple places where wider registers could be useful (bulk data transfers, etc) but there really aren't that many. Some people have mentioned higher-precision arithmetic, but IMHO, if you need that, you're using the FPU anyway, and thus have had 64-bit (80-bit internally) precision for some time now.
The main reason the Opteron is a good thing is because 1) it provides MORE registers, allowing the compiler to make smarter register allocations, which can provide drastic performance improvements, and 2) it provides access to a larger address space, meaning you can finally have >4GB of memory without nasty paging hacks. Of these, only the first is really that useful to your average Joe, which is why you're only going to see the Opteron in higher-end workstations and servers for the immediate future... at least, IMHO.
Yeah, but 64-bit is only useful to people on the higher end, who need lots of memory, or excellent performance (due to the extra registers provided). Opteron on the desktop won't be here in the immediate future, simply because there aren't any user-end apps which could make use of >4GB of RAM. So the price jump is a moot point, generally speaking (especially compared to the Opteron's main competitor, the Itanium2).
Besides, if MS is planning to port WinXP and Windows Server 2003, they probably have some of their other major products in the (pardon the pun) pipeline as well, which could make the Opteron even more attractive.
Newer mods are basically blank flashroms. (Homebrew mods are blank flashroms) I don't see how you could be convicted selling those, unless you specifically make a point of saying the device is for playing pirated software.
Whoa, hold on there. Are you saying that I can sell a device that has potentially illegal uses, but only if I don't mention said uses? So I'm free to sell, say, firearms, but only if I call them guns, and not robbery assistance devices? Sounds kinda scary to me...
I think you've forgotten about the concept of significant, non-infringing use. The reason guns are legal, as is the sale of them, is because they, theoretically, have significant non-infringing uses (target shooting, self-defense, etc). An even better example is VCRs, which have obvious, non-infringing uses. The same goes for mod chips. These things have, IMHO, real, significant non-infringing uses, the least of which is the use of Linux on the X-Box.
Now, if the chip has copyrighted material on it (ie, the BIOS), that's a totally different thing. But a blank mod-chip? That should definitely be legal, no matter how you market the thing. At least, IMHO.
I would just use mplayer with the yuv4mpeg video output driver, and the PCM audio output driver. Create two fifos, one for the video called stream.yuv and one for the audio, say audio.wav, and tell mplayer to write the video and audio to the fifos. Then, using mjpegtools, encode the video from the yuv4mpeg stream, and use toolame for the audio. Then, mplex the resulting streams together, and voila, you have a VCD or SVCD.
/dev/null &
:) OTOH, if you're running an SMP box, this technique is probably more efficient...
Something like this should work (for VCD):
mkfifo stream.yuv
mkfifo audio.wav
mplayer <tv options here> -vo yuv4mpeg -ao pcm -aofile audio.wav <
cat stream.yuv | yuvdenoise | mpeg2enc -F 4 -f 1 -n n -a 2 -o video.m1v &
toolame -b 224 -m s audio.wav video.mp2
mplex -o video.mpg video.m1v video.mp2
'course, this is all assuming your box can handle decoding the TV stream and encoding the video and audio simultaneously.
To the other post, how would increasing technology (and decreasing million dollar architectural costs) cost the poor anything? How would free "library based" internet access cost "the poor" anything?
Umm... you need a computer to access your lovely computerized books. No computer == no access to books. Your average person below the poverty line probably can't afford a computer...
And by the way, the "poor" you would find are NOT the ones using libraries anyway, so check your figures. The average person in a public library is an educated, high upper middle income person, or home educated Christian kids with their mother getting books for the week. Besides, is your library card free? Most cards I know are at least $15 annually. What poor person pays to read? lol!!
Wow, that's very predjudiced of you. Nice to know that you think all poor people are bums on the street who are uninterested in reading.
You know, I spent a good part of my childhood living under the poverty line. No, I didn't live on the street... I lived in a lower-end condo in a subburb of my city. I was raised by a single mother who has held down 2 or 3 jobs at a time for as long as I can remember in order to support three children. We couldn't afford a computer for quite a long time. Now, I'm a relatively successful, University educated software developer. So your computerized library fantasy would have cut people like me out of the loop. Really great idea. Thanks!
And to answer your impending question, yes, I spent a lot of the time at the library, and yes, I think that's part of the reason I am as successful as I am today... it helped me to foster a passion for learning.
Libraries have become nothing more than monuments to the community prominent.
Do you really need multimillion dollar facilities to house books?
I am the first to agree a book is better than a monitor screen, but it's time to get current and cut government costs. If books in libraries were distributed via network or if the libraries also offered community WiFi, wouldn't that be more useful, less costly?
Yeah, great idea. Lets shut down public libraries and tie them up in technologies that no poor person can possibly afford, because they're too busy spending what little money they have buying food. Then, when they try to educate themselves, they'll be unable to find any information, because it will be all but unavailable to them. Friggin' brilliant.
Why is it that technophiles have such a hard time realizing that there are people who are a) less computer literate than them and/or b) don't have as much money. It's great how people in the cushy middle-class can so easily forget about the massive poverty which exists in their own country. And don't get me started on this Utopian ideal that, somehow, computers are the solution to (and cause of?) all of life's problems.
BTW, your sig makes perfect sense if you understand that, in C, straight numeric constants are assumed to be integers, and hence 1/2 is equal to zero. The obvious fix is to change that to 1.0/2.0. Gotta love it when people complain about non-issues...
Incidentally, Java has similar rules, it's just more verbose when warning about type mismatches and loss of precision.
Who no longer sells flash carts after the lawsuit. Apparently, the preferred sources are gbax.com and success-hk.com.
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Heh, look at that, you're right. I didn't realize they'd discontinued those as well. I'm glad I got mine.
Who reading Slashdot (other than those behind Macintosh computers) doesn't have a PC around? I can load a game into the GBA, leave the house, play it on the bus, then when I arrive, I put the GBA on sleep until I'm ready to play again or put another game in. Nintendo is using this technique to hide GBA games in some of its newer GCN games (such as Puzzle Collection) as well.
Yes, but then you're forced to have your GBA on at all times, which wastes battery life. I'd much rather be able to load up my flash cart, and have it available whenever I feel like playing a game, without having the damn thing on all the time. And then I can carry around as many games as my cart will hold (in my case, about 25). Besides, if I'm going on a trip (the most likely time for me to use PocketNES), I most certainly *don't* have access to a PC with all my games on it.
And what if I'm playing a PocketNES game and decide I want to play a different game for a while. Well, I'm buggered. Heck, what if my g/f decides she wants to play Tetris while I've got a game of SMB in progress? It's just waaay too much trouble.
Sorry, but a flash cart is, IMHO, the only way to go. Get one... you'll be glad you did. Plus, then you can write your own stuff for the GBA!
Err... it's called a flash cart, which you need if you want more than one game on your GBA anyway. I bought mine from Lik Sang. Besides, without a flash cart, you're tethered to your PC (or, rather, you have to have a PC around so you can power up the GBA and copy the game over), so you might as well just use a PC-based emulator. *shrug*
Yeah, a "bit"... as in 2-4x more expensive. Besides, there's something exciting about coding for raw hardware. :)