Discs that do not allow me to fast forward through FBI warnings, commercials, etc, get ripped and burned in a format that is immediately watchable from the time I stick it in the player. I don't care about animated menus, extras, features, commentary, bonus scenes. I want the movie to play w/o interruption the second I close that tray.
Which is why I always watch the few DVDs I own in VLC. For movies, I can load the disc, then play it on Title 1, Chapter 1. If the distributor decides to dick with the standard layout and make the movie another title number, I go with that one. For TV series DVDs, I choose Title X, Chapter 1. Unfortunately most consumer DVD players still implement the "button lockout" feature that some DVDs use to prevent the user from fast-forwarding or skipping an FBI warning or commercial, but some of the better DVD players allow you to nav to a specific title. I've never seen Sony DVD players let the user nav to a specific title, which highlights how tightly Sony's entertainment content division controls the rest of the company.
and the same MCI that is the number 1 spammer according to the Spamhaus charts. Spamhaus also put out this article charging that MCI profits from spam. Verizon's getting all that.
This will have to be the data file format to end all data file formats, because otherwise there will be quality loss. Also, hard drives fail, and so on; what happens if the data file is lost? Will the consumer have to buy it again? Not to mention the murdering of the already lost language of cover art. Now there will be nothing but a line of text in Verdana (nice choice, webmaster!) to associate something visual with the audio. Well, that and the RIAA logo.
The advantage with Redbook is that it doesn't bite back. What happens if something embedded in this format does bite back?
Reminds me of something Dean Kamen said: China has 10 engineers to every lawyer, while the US has 10 lawyers to every engineer. I don't know the figures on MBAs versus engineers, but it's probably close.
my 2500+ Barton is running at 42 right now, so you're doing fine. My general rule of thumb is that you want to be below 50 C, and 60 C is in the range where the life could be shortened with sustained exposure.
Thermal design power and electrical power (V * I) are two different things. Still, that means the motherboard needs to provide whatever current level that the dual-P4 needs to operate correctly, and that means every component in there must be able to run correctly. This is in an age when a significant amount of computer crashes are caused by faulty or inconsistent power supplies or components (remember the "bad caps" issue with Abit boards?).
Bit of trivia: Toy Story was rendered on 117 SparcStation 20 computers (87 dual, 30 quad). In that article they quote "800,000 computer hours" and "16 billion instructions per second", but remember that this is a press release from December 1995. Consider that in early 2001 Steve Jobs and a guy from Pixar demonstrated rendering Luxo Jr in REAL TIME!!!
Re:Solaris 10 on Sun Ultra 5/Ultra 10 questions
on
Solaris 10 Released
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· Score: 1
I have an Ultra 2 (2 x 300 MHz, 640MB RAM, 18GB 10K RPM Seagate HDD), and it ran Solaris 9 and Debian 3 well (considering how old it is). Of course the Ultra 2 has two CPUs and a SCSI controller, which help a lot. IIRC in one of the earlier enumerated system requirement lists, it said "200 MHz processor", and right now the required specs say "Memory: 128 MB minimum (for Solaris install only)", which is strange. So you'll definitely want to hunt down some RAM for this machine, which probably won't be easy or cheap unless you strike gold on eBay or go to a computer swapfest.
I consider myself lucky that I bought a used Ultra 2 with so much RAM in it; hopefully I'll be able to put it to good use.
Forgive me for oversimplifying, but it sounds like it burns down to how many iterations are carried out in the feedback loop. They outsource the project, receive the "finished product", try it out, compile the laundry-list of things wrong with it, and send it back, repeat ad infinitum. Seeing it this way makes outsourcing seem like an obvious bad choice.
I remember back in 1999/2000, when Sony entered the portable music market with the MC-P10 "Music Clip" and another, larger flash-based player. The "Music Clip" was the size of a pen, had 64 megabytes of internal, nonremovable flash memory, and took a single AA battery as a power source. Here's its COMDEX 1999 press release, which also announces a partnership with Microsoft to support WMA (remember? The "secure" format that got cracked in a day?). The other player took Sony's proprietary "Memory Stick" format, but not just any old stick would do: it would only accept "Magic Gate" Memory Sticks, which were white, and cost at least twice as much as a standard MStick with the same capacity. It was part of Sony's proprietary "OpenMG" content protection system. I don't know in what way it's "open", and since you could process MP3 or WAV files into the device without problem, I don't know how it protected anything, other than the "transfer songs from the player to a computer other than the original uploader" avenue, which was NOT the problem back in the heyday of Napster.
I actually owned the Music Clip at one time. The interface software accepted either audio CDs, MP3 files, or WAV files as input, and transferred songs into the device. The transfer process took as long for each song as it did to encode each song into MP3, because the interface was indeed doing encoding, to ATRAC3. I don't remember much about sound quality, mostly because back then I still thought Sony's earbuds and headphones were pretty good (insert laugh track here). I do remember that the max you could encode in ATRAC3 was 144kbps, IIRC, but then you'd lose quite a bit of space on the flash memory. I would usually encode at 128 so I'd have the space, but the transfer process took so long, I only did about one or two transfers during the short time I actively used the device.
Sony's competition back then was already well established, with Diamond's Rio line. The 32 MB PMP300 had been out for around a year, and the 64MB PMP500 was just in. They also used an interface software, but it would carry MP3 files right over to the player, without doing any intermediary re-encoding. Creative was soon to come out with a flash-based player, and later the HDD-based Nomad Jukebox. RCA also had an MP3 player come out, and much like RCA's other electronic devices, was avoided like the plague by those in the know. These non-Sony players dealt natively with MP3, used standard removable flash media without "content protection" locking, and frankly worked better than Sony's pittance of an offering, even in the infancy of the portable music player market. Sony's players were left in the dust, their only remaining market being the fanatics.
Fast-forward to today. Past the fall of Napster, the maturation of the LAME encoder, the introduction of Ogg Vorbis, the iPod, larger flash capacities and lower flash prices. For the same $300 price of the Music Clip back in 2000, one could buy a Palm Tungsten E (today's equivalent of the Vx back then), fit it with a 128 MB MMC card, install AeroPlayer, load the Palm up with a bunch of songs in Ogg format, and go. The Palm also has a bit more bang for buck, considering you can use it as a clock, calendar, day planner, flashlight, MATLAB-esque calculator, etc. Plus, many portable music players allow the user to just copy the files directly into the storage medium instead of tangling with a proprietary transfer interface with proprietary drivers. I can just throw my MMC card into a flash reader, copy what I want into the card directly, and go. I can even do it from Linux! So where's Sony in all of this? Still stuck in 1999, with their "Sonic Stage" software, which still encodes everything it receives into ATRAC3, which is all Sony's players can still handle. Their big marketing push during the years was that they had MiniDisc players that can be loaded up with MP3s (which had to be converted to ATRAC3). They even advertised that the
I heard this story last night on All Things Considered (NPR radio show); FWIH the wind power array size necessary to alter the climate would be able to supply the world's power today, and we know that's not happening anytime soon.
thanks for the link to blastwave; I have an Ultra 2 running a base install of 9, and I was using the pkg-get system off of sunfreeware.com, which has a far smaller list of packages for Solaris 9 Sparc. I was missing out particularly on octave and xmms, since I was in dependency HELL trying to compile them manually.
I also have a SparcStation 5 with Debian 3 currently on it; for obvious reasons it won't be doing workstation duties. Debian's okay, but I wanted to give Gentoo a legitimate try sometime.
Remember, UT2K3 is slated to take up over 3GB of hard drive space. Hopefully they're not going to require a CD present in the drive since they're implementing a cd key system (IIRC), but that's still a huge chunk for an MP-only game.
Don't waste your money unnecessarily; I plan on sticking with the demo unless I find a really good reason to buy it.
Sure, this might be a good sign for general programming evolution, but it didn't prevent the first Black & White from fizzling due to virtually zero replay value and plenty of bugs. PC Gamer gave it an Editor's Choice back in about May 2001, but that was mere weeks after the game was released; months later, player opinion of the game plunged. Black & White, Lionhead, and Peter Molyneux became the butt of many jokes.
It wasn't like Id Software's games, where a great engine was held back by a vacuous storyline. The engine was buggy, the principle was weak, and even the AI had problems. People asked themselves whether the developers at Lionhead had played their own game through to the end.
Personally, I've learned my lesson after purchasing stinkers like Red Faction purely on the speculations spewed out by "gaming sites", only to find out that the game wasn't worth 1/4th its release MSRP. And it seems that the good games are taking forever to develop since the developers are actually playtesting them and making sure they don't mess up during development. There's going to be a long stretch of time before the good games get released, while the discount devhouses pump out half-developed games by the truckload.
Yeah, I don't see this as amounting to much either; I mean, look at what Intel has done in supporting Microsoft. I bet that's what the AMD execs were saying to themselves when they were trying to think of a way to ensure the viability of X86-64's future.
Other than that, nothing but lots of knee-jerk reaction posts and trite speculations. Oh well, carry on.
My thoughts exactly. Someone needs to draw the line to stop this technological arms race started by the corporate world to help them boost their net gains. I've seen some wacky things in the course of three years, from DeCSS to the CueCat to Charlie Pride to Cactus to Windows Product Activation to Celine Dion. All of these events involved some huge corporation or for-profit organization putting consumers at a disadvantage in order to protect their assets, and they were all incredibly absurd.
I think it's time for governments to start restricting what companies can do to consumers, instead of turning a blind eye.
I'm suddenly having mental images of breakdancers in front of a man writing a $50,000 check (warning: my memory is fuzzy).
I'm not going to watch this for the storyline (that's why I'm reading Catch-22 and The Grapes of Wrath right now). This movie is pure action. Personally, I'm sick of all the schlock appearing on the silver screen lately: nauseating horror-dramas, "historical" movies with an emphasis on artistic license and a lack of fact checking (just how did your character get to London from Grand Central, Ben?), and asinine comedies catering to the lowest common denominator.
Thank you, Blade II, for breaking the trend. I shall spend my $9.50 (or hopefully less; I can see a matinee if I want) to watch you on the silver screen as I should have the original.
Re:Self _cooling_ would rock...
on
Self-Heating Can
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· Score: 1
I forget what the link was, but a Japanese inventor recently publicised his version of a self-cooling can. The can is double-walled, with a helix-shaped chamber between the two walls that holds pressurised gas (in this case, carbon dioxide). When you pop the top and depressurize the chamber, the quick drop in pressure without a change in volume causes a drop in temperature (near freezing next to the can; anything in contact gets pretty cold by conduction). This effect can be demonstrated by your average air duster (the Curtis Blaster works much better, as it uses CO2-only canisters; I've done it many times, touching my tongue to the canister after each time and getting it frozen, numbing that particular taste bud zone for about two hours).
From what I remember, these guys also had air pollution allegations raised on them, and they countered with something about recycled CO2. I'll reply with the link if I find it.
I really wish there were audio samples to accompany the pictures, but maybe that's coming later. I'm still wondering what kind of spectrum response it would get. Imagine the hilarious sonic terrorism that would ensue if this thing could play the brown note.
I moved to http://www.shacknews.com/ because it suits me better. I'm not too much into Linux (tried RedHat 6.2 and had a bad experience overall; I'll download the ISO for a new distro sometime), and I'm more into gaming. Also, the messageboard on the Shack has a pace midway in between that of Slashdot and a chat room. Also, there's no karma, so there's no karma whoring (but yes, there is trolling sometimes).
I just don't see the price of a PC dropping below $350 without a huge sacrifice of quality. Take e-machines, for example: the company name alone makes certified technicians shudder. They're the masters of corner-cutting and rock-bottom unit prices, and they've earned a bad reputation because of this. Only entry-level customers on a very tight budget tend to go for those now.
Figure in the push for faster and bigger, and you have another factor against lower prices. The Celeron is above 1 GHz now, and Microsoft and Intel have pounded it into the mind of consumers that a computer with a CPU running below that clock speed isn't worth jack. So in a way, Microsoft itself has been taking measures to prevent this from happening.
Sorry, bible thumpers; keep dreaming.
So this is the Itanic replacement?
on
Intel's Big Chip
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· Score: 1
Someone should inform Intel that President McKinley was assassinated. Will the Hammer do the same to this McKinley?
Damn right; software and hardware buily by businesses, for businesses. None of this leisure time programming stuff that passes by just fine in the Linux world.
Haven't you zealots stopped to think that this is why Linux is only doing well in the server room because people familiar with it have installed it there? I still haven't seen anything running Linux that reaches the grandiose level of Sun's high-end server hardware and Oracle's high-end database software. I don't think I ever will.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why I always watch the few DVDs I own in VLC. For movies, I can load the disc, then play it on Title 1, Chapter 1. If the distributor decides to dick with the standard layout and make the movie another title number, I go with that one. For TV series DVDs, I choose Title X, Chapter 1. Unfortunately most consumer DVD players still implement the "button lockout" feature that some DVDs use to prevent the user from fast-forwarding or skipping an FBI warning or commercial, but some of the better DVD players allow you to nav to a specific title. I've never seen Sony DVD players let the user nav to a specific title, which highlights how tightly Sony's entertainment content division controls the rest of the company.
and the same MCI that is the number 1 spammer according to the Spamhaus charts. Spamhaus also put out this article charging that MCI profits from spam. Verizon's getting all that.
This will have to be the data file format to end all data file formats, because otherwise there will be quality loss. Also, hard drives fail, and so on; what happens if the data file is lost? Will the consumer have to buy it again? Not to mention the murdering of the already lost language of cover art. Now there will be nothing but a line of text in Verdana (nice choice, webmaster!) to associate something visual with the audio. Well, that and the RIAA logo.
The advantage with Redbook is that it doesn't bite back. What happens if something embedded in this format does bite back?
Reminds me of something Dean Kamen said: China has 10 engineers to every lawyer, while the US has 10 lawyers to every engineer. I don't know the figures on MBAs versus engineers, but it's probably close.
my 2500+ Barton is running at 42 right now, so you're doing fine. My general rule of thumb is that you want to be below 50 C, and 60 C is in the range where the life could be shortened with sustained exposure.
Thermal design power and electrical power (V * I) are two different things. Still, that means the motherboard needs to provide whatever current level that the dual-P4 needs to operate correctly, and that means every component in there must be able to run correctly. This is in an age when a significant amount of computer crashes are caused by faulty or inconsistent power supplies or components (remember the "bad caps" issue with Abit boards?).
Hell, I've heard stories of a Solaris 9 box getting rooted an HOUR into the install.
Bit of trivia: Toy Story was rendered on 117 SparcStation 20 computers (87 dual, 30 quad). In that article they quote "800,000 computer hours" and "16 billion instructions per second", but remember that this is a press release from December 1995. Consider that in early 2001 Steve Jobs and a guy from Pixar demonstrated rendering Luxo Jr in REAL TIME!!!
I consider myself lucky that I bought a used Ultra 2 with so much RAM in it; hopefully I'll be able to put it to good use.
Forgive me for oversimplifying, but it sounds like it burns down to how many iterations are carried out in the feedback loop. They outsource the project, receive the "finished product", try it out, compile the laundry-list of things wrong with it, and send it back, repeat ad infinitum. Seeing it this way makes outsourcing seem like an obvious bad choice.
I actually owned the Music Clip at one time. The interface software accepted either audio CDs, MP3 files, or WAV files as input, and transferred songs into the device. The transfer process took as long for each song as it did to encode each song into MP3, because the interface was indeed doing encoding, to ATRAC3. I don't remember much about sound quality, mostly because back then I still thought Sony's earbuds and headphones were pretty good (insert laugh track here). I do remember that the max you could encode in ATRAC3 was 144kbps, IIRC, but then you'd lose quite a bit of space on the flash memory. I would usually encode at 128 so I'd have the space, but the transfer process took so long, I only did about one or two transfers during the short time I actively used the device.
Sony's competition back then was already well established, with Diamond's Rio line. The 32 MB PMP300 had been out for around a year, and the 64MB PMP500 was just in. They also used an interface software, but it would carry MP3 files right over to the player, without doing any intermediary re-encoding. Creative was soon to come out with a flash-based player, and later the HDD-based Nomad Jukebox. RCA also had an MP3 player come out, and much like RCA's other electronic devices, was avoided like the plague by those in the know. These non-Sony players dealt natively with MP3, used standard removable flash media without "content protection" locking, and frankly worked better than Sony's pittance of an offering, even in the infancy of the portable music player market. Sony's players were left in the dust, their only remaining market being the fanatics.
Fast-forward to today. Past the fall of Napster, the maturation of the LAME encoder, the introduction of Ogg Vorbis, the iPod, larger flash capacities and lower flash prices. For the same $300 price of the Music Clip back in 2000, one could buy a Palm Tungsten E (today's equivalent of the Vx back then), fit it with a 128 MB MMC card, install AeroPlayer, load the Palm up with a bunch of songs in Ogg format, and go. The Palm also has a bit more bang for buck, considering you can use it as a clock, calendar, day planner, flashlight, MATLAB-esque calculator, etc. Plus, many portable music players allow the user to just copy the files directly into the storage medium instead of tangling with a proprietary transfer interface with proprietary drivers. I can just throw my MMC card into a flash reader, copy what I want into the card directly, and go. I can even do it from Linux! So where's Sony in all of this? Still stuck in 1999, with their "Sonic Stage" software, which still encodes everything it receives into ATRAC3, which is all Sony's players can still handle. Their big marketing push during the years was that they had MiniDisc players that can be loaded up with MP3s (which had to be converted to ATRAC3). They even advertised that the
I heard this story last night on All Things Considered (NPR radio show); FWIH the wind power array size necessary to alter the climate would be able to supply the world's power today, and we know that's not happening anytime soon.
thanks for the link to blastwave; I have an Ultra 2 running a base install of 9, and I was using the pkg-get system off of sunfreeware.com, which has a far smaller list of packages for Solaris 9 Sparc. I was missing out particularly on octave and xmms, since I was in dependency HELL trying to compile them manually.
I also have a SparcStation 5 with Debian 3 currently on it; for obvious reasons it won't be doing workstation duties. Debian's okay, but I wanted to give Gentoo a legitimate try sometime.
Don't waste your money unnecessarily; I plan on sticking with the demo unless I find a really good reason to buy it.
Sure, this might be a good sign for general programming evolution, but it didn't prevent the first Black & White from fizzling due to virtually zero replay value and plenty of bugs. PC Gamer gave it an Editor's Choice back in about May 2001, but that was mere weeks after the game was released; months later, player opinion of the game plunged. Black & White, Lionhead, and Peter Molyneux became the butt of many jokes. It wasn't like Id Software's games, where a great engine was held back by a vacuous storyline. The engine was buggy, the principle was weak, and even the AI had problems. People asked themselves whether the developers at Lionhead had played their own game through to the end. Personally, I've learned my lesson after purchasing stinkers like Red Faction purely on the speculations spewed out by "gaming sites", only to find out that the game wasn't worth 1/4th its release MSRP. And it seems that the good games are taking forever to develop since the developers are actually playtesting them and making sure they don't mess up during development. There's going to be a long stretch of time before the good games get released, while the discount devhouses pump out half-developed games by the truckload.
http://www.shacknews.com/funk.y?id=3439046
Yeah, I don't see this as amounting to much either; I mean, look at what Intel has done in supporting Microsoft. I bet that's what the AMD execs were saying to themselves when they were trying to think of a way to ensure the viability of X86-64's future.
Other than that, nothing but lots of knee-jerk reaction posts and trite speculations. Oh well, carry on.
My thoughts exactly. Someone needs to draw the line to stop this technological arms race started by the corporate world to help them boost their net gains. I've seen some wacky things in the course of three years, from DeCSS to the CueCat to Charlie Pride to Cactus to Windows Product Activation to Celine Dion. All of these events involved some huge corporation or for-profit organization putting consumers at a disadvantage in order to protect their assets, and they were all incredibly absurd.
I think it's time for governments to start restricting what companies can do to consumers, instead of turning a blind eye.
I'm suddenly having mental images of breakdancers in front of a man writing a $50,000 check (warning: my memory is fuzzy).
I'm not going to watch this for the storyline (that's why I'm reading Catch-22 and The Grapes of Wrath right now). This movie is pure action. Personally, I'm sick of all the schlock appearing on the silver screen lately: nauseating horror-dramas, "historical" movies with an emphasis on artistic license and a lack of fact checking (just how did your character get to London from Grand Central, Ben?), and asinine comedies catering to the lowest common denominator.
Thank you, Blade II, for breaking the trend. I shall spend my $9.50 (or hopefully less; I can see a matinee if I want) to watch you on the silver screen as I should have the original.
From what I remember, these guys also had air pollution allegations raised on them, and they countered with something about recycled CO2. I'll reply with the link if I find it.
I really wish there were audio samples to accompany the pictures, but maybe that's coming later. I'm still wondering what kind of spectrum response it would get. Imagine the hilarious sonic terrorism that would ensue if this thing could play the brown note.
I moved to http://www.shacknews.com/ because it suits me better. I'm not too much into Linux (tried RedHat 6.2 and had a bad experience overall; I'll download the ISO for a new distro sometime), and I'm more into gaming. Also, the messageboard on the Shack has a pace midway in between that of Slashdot and a chat room. Also, there's no karma, so there's no karma whoring (but yes, there is trolling sometimes).
Figure in the push for faster and bigger, and you have another factor against lower prices. The Celeron is above 1 GHz now, and Microsoft and Intel have pounded it into the mind of consumers that a computer with a CPU running below that clock speed isn't worth jack. So in a way, Microsoft itself has been taking measures to prevent this from happening.
Sorry, bible thumpers; keep dreaming.
Someone should inform Intel that President McKinley was assassinated. Will the Hammer do the same to this McKinley?
Decisions, decisions...
Damn right; software and hardware buily by businesses, for businesses. None of this leisure time programming stuff that passes by just fine in the Linux world. Haven't you zealots stopped to think that this is why Linux is only doing well in the server room because people familiar with it have installed it there? I still haven't seen anything running Linux that reaches the grandiose level of Sun's high-end server hardware and Oracle's high-end database software. I don't think I ever will.