I can vouch for that. I paid $380 for a Canopus ADVC-300 converter about two years ago and recently re-sold it on ebay for $350.
It enabled me to work wonders on some old home VHS tapes. The built-in TBC fixed the tracking and some nasty color-synch problems. The built-in luma, chroma, and de-noising filters, while sometimes difficult to get 'right' are top-notch and save you that much more time processing the AVI's on your CPU.
I'll also echo what's already been said several times in this thread: Get yourself a decent SVHS deck and use the S-Video cable to connect to the ADVC. I spent countless hours trying to make it come out like the Canopous ads showed using my $40 Toshiba VCR with nothing but frustration. I bought a used JVC SVHS deck for about $230 and it made *all* the difference.
Just for comparison - inputting the signal from the SVHS deck into my friend's cheap-o EZTV (I think that was what it was called) USB-based converter without the ADVC was futile. Canopus makes an excellent video conversion tool.
Well, while I know this isn't the MSFT suggestion box, the obvious solution is to have the app show generic icons as quickly as possible then fill in metadata and thumbnails on-the-fly... WITHOUT affecting the user's ability to work.
Perl 5 is when things finally got interesting. I hated Perl 4, but I don't think I could live without Perl as it is today!
Granted, Perl pales in comparison to Ruby when it comes to "interesting" (and I mean that in a good way! (for ruby))
Use the right tool for the job. And that depends on the job, the toolbox, and the programmer. For example, for interfacing with our hideous OSS gateway most programmers would use Java. I would use a length of steel rebar and a lot of foul language.:)
I just want to put in my vote for Dink Smallwood. It's like King's Quest or Legend of Zelda, on drugs.
Last year, after years of collecting dust, the publisher released an update with some nice new features and bug-fixes. And (I just looked) it's now open-sourced.
There's a *huge* collection of mods, add-ons, extra levels, etc available for free and the people making them are just as twisted as the original author. Many of the mods I tried were really, really fun. Some were incredible in what they added to the original game.
Well, graphics are nice and all, but if a Ghostbusters game does come to the Wii, I'll be the first to market with a silly-string attachment for the remote!
Silly string attachment - $10.00 Silly string refills - $2.00 Silly string cleaner for your living room and your precious flat-panel TV - $39.95!
First Mitt Romney, now this? Massachusetts, you used to be cool, but now y'all have a lot to answer for.
As a life-long resident of MA I am dumbfounded.
I repeatedly hear people crying sighs of relief, "Now that Romney's out and we can start again..." Yet, I completely fail to understand what he did wrong.
Indeed, he came into the governor's office as a republican after a long spell of mis-management and gross ineptitude by his predecessors of the same party. At the same time, his term spanned the same period that a republican president and congress have totally f*cked up on an immense scale.
Yet, despite the failings of Mitt's political party, he has run the office of governor as a consummate executive. His agenda was made clear prior to the election, and has been consistently pursued, with remarkable results given the opposition. While having shown an admirable ability to compromise, just as admirable has been his intolerance of ineptitude, waste, and inefficiency. For both the state budget and our overall economic health, his policies and leadership have stemmed the arterial bleeding and we are currently on the mend.
I do not begrudge Mr. Romney's presidential ambitions. Even with that on his agenda for possibly his whole gubernatorial term, I have been singularly impressed with his performance.
Despite all this, the voters in Massachusetts have elected someone who appears to be the opposite of Mr. Romney in every way. From his eloquent parries to avoid taking positions on a multitude of political topics to his questionable political backers, not to mention his complete lack of executive experience, the man we elected our new governor seems to *me* to be the one who is 'uncool'.
Of course, I base my judgments of 'coolness' on facts, track records, plans, and common sense. However is is quite evident that most other citizens of this state prefer youthful ideology and a perfect salesman's smile.
One last thing, just to say something on-topic... Deval Patrick was given and borrowed a *lot* of money to run his campaign. I have read that Microsoft has already made successful appeals to his administration. I suspect that Mr. Thompson smells an opportunity as well.
whoops - fuzzy math there... about 6000 users, 150,000/year ~ 2.00/month/user. But that didn't count storage costs, which would almost double that figure. Still far too expensive considering the resources my employer has.
I love it. You made me laugh... Have you no understanding of the concept of "Troll"?;)
In another life I administered email. Recently, I was pulled off my duties as a developer for my company's NMS group for three months because they couldn't get a handle on their (very poorly designed) email systems. For 1/3rd my salary they could have hired a couple of college kids to do the job.
In the end I outsourced the whole service to the tune of about 150K a year (about $15/mo/user) just so I could get back to programming. Chumps.
Experience counts for a lot, but sometimes the cost far outweighs it's benefits.
Good distinction, considering the context in which each word is most commonly used.
Like Larry Wall, I'm a bit of a linguistic junkie myself and respect the way that two words can have the exact same definition in the dictionary and yet two different connotations. My comment was actually supposed to be somewhat of a joke though... a concise statement in itself.:)
I still haven't taken the time to learn Ruby, but Perl code tends to be difficult to read because most programmers simply look for the result of an operation based on it's inputs and must think a lot harder to take into account the seemingly arbitrary mixture of context-based 'dwimmyness' and overloaded syntactical constructs... not to mention all the fun dynamic run-time behavior that can be created. The terse syntax can make it hard enough to follow, but that combined with the sheer complexity (some might say depth) of Perl's behavior makes it something reviled by many. (not me!!!)
Hmmmm... I work in telecom and ASN.1 parsing, generation and debugging is a constant nightmare.
I have dreams where ASN.1 has been replaced by XML and the sun is shining and the birds are chirping and there are happy little munchkins singing "Ding dong the witch is dead!"...But then I wake up to the sound of my pager because a firmware update changed the VarBind order of a notification type and the freakin' SMI compiler choked on the syntax...
Market analysts created the term "pure-play" to designate those providers that focus solely on the real application services delivered to their customers online, and if possible, on a rental basic. Pure-play ASP's business models, marketing strategies, research, and operations focus mostly on business applications: value chain activities, data processing, or analyticals (see application taxonomy). In their purest form, they:
Host applications whose licenses they buy from ISVs
Don't host customers' custom applications
Don't own the hosting infrastructure
So, um... I still don't know what it is, but I suddenly think I need to buy some "middleware"...
There are tools to find that code and correct it. Proper testing and debugging procedures should be able to find and fix those bugs with relative ease.
To play devil's advocate though - The Flash developers have stated repeatedly that the main difficulty with porting Flash is the necessity to re-create old buggy behavior so that SWF files built against those old versions still play properly. If there are behaviors that rely on vector-processing routines that handle pointers like integers that could be a bit hairy.
OTOH, simulating that behavior via a specialized function and simply substituting it in isn't out of the question - inline the call and the performance hit should *hopefully* be minimized.
Hey now! Don't feed him that old line. Every geek knows -- being cool is *way* more important than being true to yourself!//That only came from an image in my head of those cheesy movies where the geek tries so hard to fit in only to learn the value of being him/herself in the end
I'm not particularly enamored with the game selection for the N64, but it had one thing that has spoiled me for every console since - the controller.
You know, the one that looked like the Batman logo... Maybe it's just me, but I found the control for games like Mario64, TLo Zelda *, StarFox64 and even GoldenEye to be superb.
The PS* style controllers aren't all bad, but the analog sticks couldn't compare. I could never get the hang of the GameCube controller for some reason - I think it's the different sizes and shapes of the buttons, plus I just couldn't 'feel' the analog properly. (And WHY put the Z button where I could never reach it? WHY???):)
Of course, I still pull out the ol' IntelliVision from time to time and have lots of fun - maybe I'm just getting old and inflexible...
*Spire are both crap. It's dissapointing 'cause I had such high hopes for their endeavor. I've tried both the free and the paid versions (got it for free during a promo) and they both made me sad. Mepis is superior on desktop and multimedia, especially in the realm of free KDE-centric distros.
While I prefer GNOME's interface over KDE, the primary thing that keeps me with Ubuntu (over Mepis) is the size of the community, and the fact that it's been able to impress enough engineers at my place of employ that I think I may have sown the seeds necessary to start moving away from RHEL. (Many of the other engineers love debian and gentoo and *BSD and I think they're all good, but they have never appealed to the PHBs enough to get consideration)
The problem with sudo is very strange - but having sound quit on Flash is not all that uncommon.
I've found that using either EasyUbuntu or Automatix tends to help get the multimedia stuff working. If a package update breaks it again, I just re-run which ever one I used and it fixes stuff again.
BTW: my own experience with these two utilities, if you haven't used them yourself --
Automatix's tweaks tend to work, but the script is often buggy and not exactly user friendly. Their repository is also almost unusably slow (frequent timeouts, leading to failed package downloads).
EasyUbuntu is much friendlier but doesn't always finish the job, installing the multimedia packages but not always setting them up successfully.
Automatix is constantly being updated and the community around it is active and responsive. EasyUbuntu hasn't (last I looked) had an updated release in several months and I have no clue what's going on with development.
YMMV, When all's said and done, I personally prefer EasyUbuntu given the two choices - but it's better still to just use the tips from ubuntuguide - even though that's a PITA as well.
No single distro works for everybody - Ubuntu's my favorite and it works on all my machines, but perhaps Mepis or Sarge or some other distro may be better for your friend. (Mepis *is* very nice)
There's some interest in doing this same sort of thing at my current employer. Of course, we're a telecom and we'd be providing not just the Utility Computing service but the bandwidth to the customer as well...
I can see this as working *very* well, for companies that can deliver both with reasonable cost.
BTW - I want a datacenter full of these so bad I can taste it!
'Cause if so, congrats, you're subsidizing the Dig.
Not that I'm proud of it, it's just that I feel that my fellow Americans should understand that no matter where you are, the Federal government is screwing you. Moving to another state won't help any more...
If the insiders are corrupt and/or simply don't care about the business they've likely invested significant amounts of time and money into, then, yes, you may be right.
But the point of an IPO is to raise capital that can be used to grow a company through a mechanism that allows those investors to recieve a return based on future growth and/or interest in the company. (assuming said growth/interest happens)
As all investments carry a degree of risk, the situation of Vonage's shareholders is by no means uncommon, unusual, or even wrong.
Furthermore - just because the stock market does not currently seem to believe that an investment in Vonage has a high likelihood of turning a profit does not mean it won't happen. If Vonage uses this new capital wisely, and is capable of competing profitably in this industry, the investment may still pay off, perhaps very well, even.
I find it hard to believe that a process that works like evolution is supposed to work would always create the simplest, most efficient design with nothing unnecessary.
Very insightful. I've never thought of that before.
I think your basic point can also be bolstered through the observation of many other species, who have developed certain behaviors that are for the most part inexplicable, except as a side-effect of the specialization of a part of their physiology.
Dolphins, dogs, cats, and even birds (macaws and other parrots especially) have behaviors that would probably do nothing to improve their survival, yet when one thinks about it - may be linked to a trait that *does* improve survival.
Personally, I believe that a brain that has evolved the ability to communicate is the most likely to have these traits. However, since people tend to anthropomorphize I'm certain there are a plethora of other things that could also fit this concept that I, among many others, have missed.
(Is the run-on sentence a side-effect of survival traits? I hope so...):)
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I can vouch for that. I paid $380 for a Canopus ADVC-300 converter about two years ago and recently re-sold it on ebay for $350.
It enabled me to work wonders on some old home VHS tapes. The built-in TBC fixed the tracking and some nasty color-synch problems. The built-in luma, chroma, and de-noising filters, while sometimes difficult to get 'right' are top-notch and save you that much more time processing the AVI's on your CPU.
I'll also echo what's already been said several times in this thread: Get yourself a decent SVHS deck and use the S-Video cable to connect to the ADVC. I spent countless hours trying to make it come out like the Canopous ads showed using my $40 Toshiba VCR with nothing but frustration. I bought a used JVC SVHS deck for about $230 and it made *all* the difference.
Just for comparison - inputting the signal from the SVHS deck into my friend's cheap-o EZTV (I think that was what it was called) USB-based converter without the ADVC was futile. Canopus makes an excellent video conversion tool.
Well, while I know this isn't the MSFT suggestion box, the obvious solution is to have the app show generic icons as quickly as possible then fill in metadata and thumbnails on-the-fly... WITHOUT affecting the user's ability to work.
It's too bad you left then.
:)
Perl 5 is when things finally got interesting. I hated Perl 4, but I don't think I could live without Perl as it is today!
Granted, Perl pales in comparison to Ruby when it comes to "interesting" (and I mean that in a good way! (for ruby))
Use the right tool for the job. And that depends on the job, the toolbox, and the programmer. For example, for interfacing with our hideous OSS gateway most programmers would use Java. I would use a length of steel rebar and a lot of foul language.
I just want to put in my vote for Dink Smallwood. It's like King's Quest or Legend of Zelda, on drugs.
Last year, after years of collecting dust, the publisher released an update with some nice new features and bug-fixes. And (I just looked) it's now open-sourced.
There's a *huge* collection of mods, add-ons, extra levels, etc available for free and the people making them are just as twisted as the original author. Many of the mods I tried were really, really fun. Some were incredible in what they added to the original game.
Well, graphics are nice and all, but if a Ghostbusters game does come to the Wii, I'll be the first to market with a silly-string attachment for the remote!
Silly string attachment - $10.00
Silly string refills - $2.00
Silly string cleaner for your living room and your precious flat-panel TV - $39.95!
I *so* want to see a Ghostbusters game \on the Wii!
I imagine aiming at the ghosts with the remote while moving with the nunchuck... and with today's graphics the ghosts would look phenomenal!
You win the thread! That was the first post in a long time that made me want to be a moderator again!
I repeatedly hear people crying sighs of relief, "Now that Romney's out and we can start again..." Yet, I completely fail to understand what he did wrong.
Indeed, he came into the governor's office as a republican after a long spell of mis-management and gross ineptitude by his predecessors of the same party. At the same time, his term spanned the same period that a republican president and congress have totally f*cked up on an immense scale.
Yet, despite the failings of Mitt's political party, he has run the office of governor as a consummate executive. His agenda was made clear prior to the election, and has been consistently pursued, with remarkable results given the opposition. While having shown an admirable ability to compromise, just as admirable has been his intolerance of ineptitude, waste, and inefficiency. For both the state budget and our overall economic health, his policies and leadership have stemmed the arterial bleeding and we are currently on the mend.
I do not begrudge Mr. Romney's presidential ambitions. Even with that on his agenda for possibly his whole gubernatorial term, I have been singularly impressed with his performance.
Despite all this, the voters in Massachusetts have elected someone who appears to be the opposite of Mr. Romney in every way. From his eloquent parries to avoid taking positions on a multitude of political topics to his questionable political backers, not to mention his complete lack of executive experience, the man we elected our new governor seems to *me* to be the one who is 'uncool'.
Of course, I base my judgments of 'coolness' on facts, track records, plans, and common sense. However is is quite evident that most other citizens of this state prefer youthful ideology and a perfect salesman's smile.
One last thing, just to say something on-topic... Deval Patrick was given and borrowed a *lot* of money to run his campaign. I have read that Microsoft has already made successful appeals to his administration. I suspect that Mr. Thompson smells an opportunity as well.
whoops - fuzzy math there... about 6000 users, 150,000/year ~ 2.00/month/user. But that didn't count storage costs, which would almost double that figure. Still far too expensive considering the resources my employer has.
I love it. You made me laugh... Have you no understanding of the concept of "Troll"? ;)
In another life I administered email. Recently, I was pulled off my duties as a developer for my company's NMS group for three months because they couldn't get a handle on their (very poorly designed) email systems. For 1/3rd my salary they could have hired a couple of college kids to do the job.
In the end I outsourced the whole service to the tune of about 150K a year (about $15/mo/user) just so I could get back to programming. Chumps.
Experience counts for a lot, but sometimes the cost far outweighs it's benefits.
Like Larry Wall, I'm a bit of a linguistic junkie myself and respect the way that two words can have the exact same definition in the dictionary and yet two different connotations. My comment was actually supposed to be somewhat of a joke though... a concise statement in itself.
I still haven't taken the time to learn Ruby, but Perl code tends to be difficult to read because most programmers simply look for the result of an operation based on it's inputs and must think a lot harder to take into account the seemingly arbitrary mixture of context-based 'dwimmyness' and overloaded syntactical constructs... not to mention all the fun dynamic run-time behavior that can be created. The terse syntax can make it hard enough to follow, but that combined with the sheer complexity (some might say depth) of Perl's behavior makes it something reviled by many. (not me!!!)
Hmmmm... I work in telecom and ASN.1 parsing, generation and debugging is a constant nightmare.
...But then I wake up to the sound of my pager because a firmware update changed the VarBind order of a notification type and the freakin' SMI compiler choked on the syntax...
I have dreams where ASN.1 has been replaced by XML and the sun is shining and the birds are chirping and there are happy little munchkins singing "Ding dong the witch is dead!"
This guy is not amused...
/BTW... nice Red Dwarf ref! (I think it was...)
So, um... I still don't know what it is, but I suddenly think I need to buy some "middleware"...
There are tools to find that code and correct it. Proper testing and debugging procedures should be able to find and fix those bugs with relative ease.
To play devil's advocate though - The Flash developers have stated repeatedly that the main difficulty with porting Flash is the necessity to re-create old buggy behavior so that SWF files built against those old versions still play properly. If there are behaviors that rely on vector-processing routines that handle pointers like integers that could be a bit hairy.
OTOH, simulating that behavior via a specialized function and simply substituting it in isn't out of the question - inline the call and the performance hit should *hopefully* be minimized.
Hey now! Don't feed him that old line. Every geek knows -- being cool is *way* more important than being true to yourself! //That only came from an image in my head of those cheesy movies where the geek tries so hard to fit in only to learn the value of being him/herself in the end
I'm not particularly enamored with the game selection for the N64, but it had one thing that has spoiled me for every console since - the controller.
:)
You know, the one that looked like the Batman logo... Maybe it's just me, but I found the control for games like Mario64, TLo Zelda *, StarFox64 and even GoldenEye to be superb.
The PS* style controllers aren't all bad, but the analog sticks couldn't compare. I could never get the hang of the GameCube controller for some reason - I think it's the different sizes and shapes of the buttons, plus I just couldn't 'feel' the analog properly. (And WHY put the Z button where I could never reach it? WHY???)
Of course, I still pull out the ol' IntelliVision from time to time and have lots of fun - maybe I'm just getting old and inflexible...
I read the journal entry - yep.
*Spire are both crap. It's dissapointing 'cause I had such high hopes for their endeavor. I've tried both the free and the paid versions (got it for free during a promo) and they both made me sad. Mepis is superior on desktop and multimedia, especially in the realm of free KDE-centric distros.
While I prefer GNOME's interface over KDE, the primary thing that keeps me with Ubuntu (over Mepis) is the size of the community, and the fact that it's been able to impress enough engineers at my place of employ that I think I may have sown the seeds necessary to start moving away from RHEL. (Many of the other engineers love debian and gentoo and *BSD and I think they're all good, but they have never appealed to the PHBs enough to get consideration)
Happy linuxing!
The problem with sudo is very strange - but having sound quit on Flash is not all that uncommon.
I've found that using either EasyUbuntu or Automatix tends to help get the multimedia stuff working. If a package update breaks it again, I just re-run which ever one I used and it fixes stuff again.
BTW: my own experience with these two utilities, if you haven't used them yourself --
Automatix's tweaks tend to work, but the script is often buggy and not exactly user friendly. Their repository is also almost unusably slow (frequent timeouts, leading to failed package downloads).
EasyUbuntu is much friendlier but doesn't always finish the job, installing the multimedia packages but not always setting them up successfully.
Automatix is constantly being updated and the community around it is active and responsive. EasyUbuntu hasn't (last I looked) had an updated release in several months and I have no clue what's going on with development.
YMMV, When all's said and done, I personally prefer EasyUbuntu given the two choices - but it's better still to just use the tips from ubuntuguide - even though that's a PITA as well.
No single distro works for everybody - Ubuntu's my favorite and it works on all my machines, but perhaps Mepis or Sarge or some other distro may be better for your friend. (Mepis *is* very nice)
There's some interest in doing this same sort of thing at my current employer. Of course, we're a telecom and we'd be providing not just the Utility Computing service but the bandwidth to the customer as well...
I can see this as working *very* well, for companies that can deliver both with reasonable cost.
BTW - I want a datacenter full of these so bad I can taste it!
Do you live in the US?
'Cause if so, congrats, you're subsidizing the Dig.
Not that I'm proud of it, it's just that I feel that my fellow Americans should understand that no matter where you are, the Federal government is screwing you. Moving to another state won't help any more...
If the insiders are corrupt and/or simply don't care about the business they've likely invested significant amounts of time and money into, then, yes, you may be right.
But the point of an IPO is to raise capital that can be used to grow a company through a mechanism that allows those investors to recieve a return based on future growth and/or interest in the company. (assuming said growth/interest happens)
As all investments carry a degree of risk, the situation of Vonage's shareholders is by no means uncommon, unusual, or even wrong.
Furthermore - just because the stock market does not currently seem to believe that an investment in Vonage has a high likelihood of turning a profit does not mean it won't happen. If Vonage uses this new capital wisely, and is capable of competing profitably in this industry, the investment may still pay off, perhaps very well, even.
Blah. I just fed a troll. Eat hearty.
I don't think it's entirely along the same logic.
I find it hard to believe that a process that works like evolution is supposed to work would always create the simplest, most efficient design with nothing unnecessary.
Very insightful. I've never thought of that before.
:)
I think your basic point can also be bolstered through the observation of many other species, who have developed certain behaviors that are for the most part inexplicable, except as a side-effect of the specialization of a part of their physiology.
Dolphins, dogs, cats, and even birds (macaws and other parrots especially) have behaviors that would probably do nothing to improve their survival, yet when one thinks about it - may be linked to a trait that *does* improve survival.
Personally, I believe that a brain that has evolved the ability to communicate is the most likely to have these traits. However, since people tend to anthropomorphize I'm certain there are a plethora of other things that could also fit this concept that I, among many others, have missed.
(Is the run-on sentence a side-effect of survival traits? I hope so...)