I hear you brother. Along with Simpsons and X-Files (which nowadays I watch more out of habit than out of still liking the shows), the Iron Chef is the only thing I go out of my way to watch.
Guess you haven't gotten curious and looked around Napster lately. Do a search on 'metallica' and see how many "Metallica_Sucks.mp3" (and similar) files you find, that are actually Britney Spears or something else as aweful. They're doing it on purpose, foo'!:)
No one cares about your COBOL certification, post y2k.
State Farm Insurance does. I worked there, and their roadmap shows them hiring COBOL programmers on past 2010. They've got more legacy code than you can shake a stick at.:)
I guess you haven't used CDE much then. Sure, the interface is clunky, but you've got years of massive enterprise apps that are written for it (HP OpenView comes to mind) because it's the only surefire way to get somewhere near cross-platform on the major contenders.
Maybe because of the recent opening of the source on Motif it'll be more likely we'll see these things getting ported over, but so far, the new open-source "modern" desktop environments are only being used as a secondary to CDE on anything but the open-source OSes.
I think it'll be a long time before anything "beats the tar out of CDE" as far as sheer number of users.
No, there is Corel code in the standard Wine, and they do occasional code dumps to move stuff over, but Corel keeps there own CVS tree because they do some extra stuff specifically for Corel app compatibility and such.
It gets moved over, but as time goes by there are more and more areas that are out of synch, from what I understand.
As my MP3 archive is 13 gig, I'd rather not almost double it by keeping 24kbit and 64kbit versions around as well.
What I'm doing is I've got a perl script to re-encode on the fly and broadcast it, sort of like liveice, but it supports multiple bitstreams (I assume it's like liveice, I've never been able to get liveice to work correctly).
I do like the live365mon however, playing with it right now. Of course, it thinks my server needs to be reset when it doesn't, but I think that's because I'm timing out to cgi.live365.com right now.:)
You can check my perl script to do the on-the-fly thing at defiance.dyndns.org. It's not as small tho'.:)
Of course, we're veering off topic a tad. Oh well.
If anyone's ever run a shoutcast stream with winamp/dsp you will know that compressing audio to 128kbit in real time is a also major hit.
I'm not running shoutcast and winamp (icecast and libshout), but yeah, LAME pretty much destroys my machine if I try to push it too hard.
I've got a 24kbps and a 64kbps stream right now on a celeron 466, and my load average is at about 50%. If I try to kick the 64kbps up to 96, it gets breakups because I peak over 100% at times, even though the average stays under 1 (and this is with --fast going to LAME). As it is, I can still compile and do other general system stuff without breaking my stream (hrm... sounds perverted:)
I hope to alleviate this somewhat by decoding once and encoding each stream off that (right now I'm just doing lame --mp3input -b [bitrate] for each stream) but I haven't gotten to that yet.
The TV will add black bars on the left and right sides, and since the movie is letterboxed, black bars will also appear on the top and bottom.
Perhapse they will implement something my little portable DVD player does, and expand the image so the sides fit and the top and bottom are cut off. That would let you see it in widescreen even if it was encoded wrong, and would give better widescreen viewing of old VHS letterboxed stuff as well.
Another claim was that DVD included some sort of on-the-fly editing feature that would use a cut list on the disk to do the pan-n-scan in the player, as well as other crazy tricks such as editing a R movie down to PG.
Ahh, see that I wasn't aware of, and you're right, that would make things much cooler. I suppose it's possible for the DVD spec to support this (at least, the hardware wouldn't have to change, just the firmware/software), or maybe it already does support it, and the tools people are using to create things aren't good enough yet.
All I know about DVDs is gleaned from a friend asking about AfterEffects stuff...:) (quick plug... Don May at Synapse Films -- he's got some whacky stuff).
If you're a widescreen advocate, reply to this and I'll be happy to discuss it with you. But first I'd like to say that my beef is with letterboxing, not widescreen.
Personally, I'd rather waste some of my screen space and see the movie the way it was filmed, rather than some after-the-fact hack edit by a 12-year-old. Pan-and-scan tends to distract me too much.
And apparently, many people agree, because it seems like most of the DVDs are coming out in widescreen.
Of course, it depends on how the DVD was made. Some of them are crappy and do the letterboxing on the print of the DVD, and it actually plays in 4:3 mode. That's just wrong. But the good ones are the ones that encode in 16:9 (or whatever) and then the DVD player converts it to letterbox for display on your 4:3 screen.
Complain to the people who do bad transfers, DVD has the ability to do letterboxing right for when you do get that spiffy HDTV.
The oldskool Intellivison programmers did this with Intellivision Lives! -- I got it, it's fairly decent, and it's such a rush to actually play Utopia again.
As someone who recently spent 2 weeks converting his entire collection of CDs (200+) to MP3, I have to say that I agree with you.
In fact, once I got around to that, I started broadcasting them through live365.com (if you read the fine print, it appears that Live365 has a deal with ASCAP) so I could listen to my whole collection at work without lugging around a hard drive. And then I wrote an open source program to do broadcasting automatically.
So far, my MP3 experience has been very good for all parties involved. ASCAP gets their money from Live365 so I can legally broadcast, Live365 gets their money through banner ads and special high-bandwidth deals (there's usually at least a couple thousand people listening at any given tim), I get to listen to my collection at work, I get to give back to the community whose software I've used happily and often (and maybe even get some press!), and it's a *hell* of a lot more portable than 200 CDs.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way for Napster and the such to prove that you own the album you're downloading. It's just way too open for piracy, and that makes it hard to defend. Napster doesn't pay ASCAP for every song downloaded. The people downloading are the ones that are *actually* liable, but since when has that stopped a juicy lawsuit in the good ol' U. S. of A?
I'm with the "Open Source Leaders", it's morally bad to steal, but in the long run, unless artists and labels start cooperating, they're going to lose all control.
The UI is still relatively young. What they've been working on all this time is the rendering engine, the other peripheral technologies, a very portable foundation, etc.
It wasn't that long ago that the Mozilla UI was a title bar and a menu.
I'd say they've done amazing things in a short amount of time. Considering how ambitious the project is (a "platform", not just a browser), they've done pretty well.
> Yeah... and I'm sure the RIAA would lok > favourably on me giving out my username and > password so that the mozilla developers can see > just how nasty the myplay setup can be. And > another problem is that you can't really link > to the problem pages inside the site. Gurrr
File -> Save As
Remove anything possibly damaging and stick it up on Tripod or something if you have to.
Slashdot Mirror
'Tis a sad, sad day.
Don't try to tell me her newest album isn't just a William Orbit album with her singing over it.
Hey, my first name is Benjamin, and I resent it being used in this context! I'm gonna sue you for defamation.
State Farm Insurance does. I worked there, and their roadmap shows them hiring COBOL programmers on past 2010. They've got more legacy code than you can shake a stick at. :)
I guess you haven't used CDE much then. Sure, the interface is clunky, but you've got years of massive enterprise apps that are written for it (HP OpenView comes to mind) because it's the only surefire way to get somewhere near cross-platform on the major contenders.
Maybe because of the recent opening of the source on Motif it'll be more likely we'll see these things getting ported over, but so far, the new open-source "modern" desktop environments are only being used as a secondary to CDE on anything but the open-source OSes.
I think it'll be a long time before anything "beats the tar out of CDE" as far as sheer number of users.
It gets moved over, but as time goes by there are more and more areas that are out of synch, from what I understand.
Have you ever thought about your need to do this? Maybe it's implying that you're lame.
It's right. Dumbass.
What I'm doing is I've got a perl script to re-encode on the fly and broadcast it, sort of like liveice, but it supports multiple bitstreams (I assume it's like liveice, I've never been able to get liveice to work correctly).
I do like the live365mon however, playing with it right now. Of course, it thinks my server needs to be reset when it doesn't, but I think that's because I'm timing out to cgi.live365.com right now. :)
You can check my perl script to do the on-the-fly thing at defiance.dyndns.org. It's not as small tho'. :)
Of course, we're veering off topic a tad. Oh well.
I'm not running shoutcast and winamp (icecast and libshout), but yeah, LAME pretty much destroys my machine if I try to push it too hard.
I've got a 24kbps and a 64kbps stream right now on a celeron 466, and my load average is at about 50%. If I try to kick the 64kbps up to 96, it gets breakups because I peak over 100% at times, even though the average stays under 1 (and this is with --fast going to LAME). As it is, I can still compile and do other general system stuff without breaking my stream (hrm... sounds perverted :)
I hope to alleviate this somewhat by decoding once and encoding each stream off that (right now I'm just doing lame --mp3input -b [bitrate] for each stream) but I haven't gotten to that yet.
Maybe this weekend. :)
Perhapse they will implement something my little portable DVD player does, and expand the image so the sides fit and the top and bottom are cut off. That would let you see it in widescreen even if it was encoded wrong, and would give better widescreen viewing of old VHS letterboxed stuff as well.
Better off starting with something else and not going down that road. :)
Ahh, see that I wasn't aware of, and you're right, that would make things much cooler. I suppose it's possible for the DVD spec to support this (at least, the hardware wouldn't have to change, just the firmware/software), or maybe it already does support it, and the tools people are using to create things aren't good enough yet.
All I know about DVDs is gleaned from a friend asking about AfterEffects stuff... :) (quick plug... Don May at Synapse Films -- he's got some whacky stuff).
*zot*
Personally, I'd rather waste some of my screen space and see the movie the way it was filmed, rather than some after-the-fact hack edit by a 12-year-old. Pan-and-scan tends to distract me too much.
And apparently, many people agree, because it seems like most of the DVDs are coming out in widescreen.
Of course, it depends on how the DVD was made. Some of them are crappy and do the letterboxing on the print of the DVD, and it actually plays in 4:3 mode. That's just wrong. But the good ones are the ones that encode in 16:9 (or whatever) and then the DVD player converts it to letterbox for display on your 4:3 screen.
Complain to the people who do bad transfers, DVD has the ability to do letterboxing right for when you do get that spiffy HDTV.
Sorry, guess that turned into a rant. ;)
Ahh... memories.
As someone who recently spent 2 weeks converting his entire collection of CDs (200+) to MP3, I have to say that I agree with you.
In fact, once I got around to that, I started broadcasting them through live365.com (if you read the fine print, it appears that Live365 has a deal with ASCAP) so I could listen to my whole collection at work without lugging around a hard drive. And then I wrote an open source program to do broadcasting automatically.
So far, my MP3 experience has been very good for all parties involved. ASCAP gets their money from Live365 so I can legally broadcast, Live365 gets their money through banner ads and special high-bandwidth deals (there's usually at least a couple thousand people listening at any given tim), I get to listen to my collection at work, I get to give back to the community whose software I've used happily and often (and maybe even get some press!), and it's a *hell* of a lot more portable than 200 CDs.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way for Napster and the such to prove that you own the album you're downloading. It's just way too open for piracy, and that makes it hard to defend. Napster doesn't pay ASCAP for every song downloaded. The people downloading are the ones that are *actually* liable, but since when has that stopped a juicy lawsuit in the good ol' U. S. of A?
I'm with the "Open Source Leaders", it's morally bad to steal, but in the long run, unless artists and labels start cooperating, they're going to lose all control.
It wasn't that long ago that the Mozilla UI was a title bar and a menu.
I'd say they've done amazing things in a short amount of time. Considering how ambitious the project is (a "platform", not just a browser), they've done pretty well.
> favourably on me giving out my username and
> password so that the mozilla developers can see
> just how nasty the myplay setup can be. And
> another problem is that you can't really link
> to the problem pages inside the site. Gurrr
File -> Save As
Remove anything possibly damaging and stick it up on Tripod or something if you have to.
No biggy.