I'd be surprised if the global sales figure have dropped only so little. I'd expect the number of sold audio CDs in Europe to approximate zero. The shiny music discs sold in stores today certainly aren't the same kind as the audio CDs I used to buy until the late 90s. (I own just over 1000 of them.)
The new discs are some kind of bizarre crippled pseudo-CD format which doesn't work at all on my DVD player, nor does it work in my skip-protected car stereo or the DVD drive in my laptop. They also seem to omit the old Philips 'audio CD' logo, confirming my impression that they are not in fact music CDs but something else. So why on earth should I or anyone else in their right mind buy them?
It's up to the LAN card driver to read the MAC address on the ethernet adapter and place it in the TCP/IP packet header. A modified/hacked driver can easily ignore the hardwired MAC and spoof whatever.
I quite agree - I'd just like to add that even though I think the OSX gui looks like gay smurf space candy or something, I do like the Apple titanium laptops. I would at least have contemplated switching, had they just placed two mouse buttons by the trackpad. Apple users must have shapeless nubs for hands, or wear mittens a lot, I always found the single big button design retarded.
Such a shame when Apple otherwise have nice engineering and hardware design... Yeah you can buy a multi-button mouse as an accessory, but that's kind of dumb on a laptop when you want to stay mobile. I have been using laptops with trackpads since 1996, today I play a mean game of CS or Q3A using just that.:)
I loathe the Beast just as much as anybody else, but I am quite convinced they have already won the media format "war" (if there ever was one). Not even the same kind of fight Netscape had - they, at least enjoyed some loyalty from many users who held on for years after it really was all over. (Mozilla is King)
Real, on the other hand, is now almost universally despised - their thuggish marketing methods about as subtle as bricks through your windows. I myself didn't bother installing it on the last two PCs I had. Last time I tried installing RMP, maybe a year and a half ago, I uninstalled it again within ten minutes after seeing what it did, or tried to do with my desktop and file associations.
Never again will I want to WRESTLE with a fucking piece of software to regain control of my PC. The nerve of these people! Virtually everybody I speak to has given up on Real entirely, switched to Windows Media Player instead. The content selection is the same, or better, and together with Winamp5 WMP is all I use for playing music and online radio.
I do feel rotten for having to support the Enemy, but really - best option seems to be go for the Lesser Evil. I do feel sorry for the Real engineers, but Real management must be a gang of particularly nasty assclowns and I hope they all rot in hell.
The engineering in the WMA and WMV media codecs is impeccable. I'd like WM9 integration into Virtualdub and Avisynth, but I figger that'll come eventually. DivX, XviD, all the MPEG4 stuff is pretty good but WM9 knocks its socks off. The same quality at two-thirds the bitrate, or lower. Super quality high def 1080i / 720p video at DVD bitrates, great multichannel sound and all the multitrack features you'd want from streaming formats.
You better believe that the future of online streaming video (and audio) has Microsoft written all over it. I know for a fact that Hollywood loves what Microsoft did with their rock-solid DRM tech, and several hardware manufacturers are building high-def capable players with WM9 decoding. MPEG4 will remain hot for a little while yet (and you have that nice huge library of ye ripped moviez traded online), but WM9 is coming right at you like a freight train and there's no escape.
Way to go, dude. You had your five minutes of net.fame, people on the net heard about your phlight, backed you up and sent thousands of dollars your way in order to help you fight the litigious Beast's gorilla attorneys wanting to steal your rightful property. You should have held on! Instead, you just roll over on your back like a sheep and let them bribe you with trinkets. An X-box and a couple of coupons. Ya big loser! You're nothing but a sellout, and Microsoft's henchmen will now ramp up their efforts instead of backing off from such lawsuits and legal threats. No respect. Dipshit.
So the "good corporate citizen" Adobe have inserted ANOTHER perfectly useless black box into the graphics production pipeline of its users.
They say it's not going to hurt performance, and I'd like to see this verified by comparing load times of large hi-res images (as used by graphics professionals every day) between previous photoshop versions and this new crippled version.
Even if such a test turns out to reveal whatever might arbitrarily be perceived as a 'reasonable' performance hit, it doesn't leave me overly inclined to upgrade (I am a licensed user of Photoshop 7.0.)
No matter how you bend it, such a black box is by any definition yet another a crippling feature, an abomination to productivity even if you never need to scan currency.
But what if you do? No law says you can't use currency texture for e.g. a finance related site. The mentioned two-week 'maybe' turnaround time on the written permission and dubious-quality sample set from the Bureau of Engraving is laughable for anyone in the graphics biz with deadlines measured in hours, not months.
While the black box spews a browser window [with a traceable referrer? someone post the URL please] and stops the load and does nothing more, you CAN evidently bypass the 'feature' without problem after this initial nuisance as described in the article. You just need to WORK a little more and your smooth graphics pipeline has suddenly become crippled and bent with a couple needless ninety-degree turns as bothersome as those in the Breezewood, PA I-70/I-78 interchange (but without the tacky motels).
So why is the black box even THERE? It's just ANOTHER performance retarding stopping block. Back in the day when Adobe first started bundling the annoying Digimarc watermark stuff with Photoshop, I was bristling over the substantial performance hit it had on everyday photoshop work. I DOWNGRADED to the previous version and stayed on that for several years.
Eventually the PCs increased in CPU muscle enough that it was no longer an 'issue' for me, and perhaps the digimarc stuff in the latter versions of photoshop was optimized, or whatever. All I'm saying is, THAT useless black box was there in the first place, so THIS is just another. Which one comes NEXT? Where does it END?
Will Photoshop, the good corporate patriot citizen, commission additional black boxes to detect things like:
Drivers' licenses and passports
All government-issued papers
Corporate trademarks (with database of associated legal depts)
Barcodes (cue:cat redux)
Celebrities imagery of which subject to royalties
Heads of state and top bureaucrats (to stem the fark.com floods of Dubya photoshops)
Gotta love feature creep. But no worry, soon as PCs clock 10 GHz, you will barely notice the extended load times.
I -loved- expert builder stuff. I had both the kits you mention, took me days to put together both. In the following years the parts from those projects became cranes, at-at walkers, crawlers and whatnots. Great times. I knew a bunch about structural, mechanical engineering before 2nd grade. I knew how gears worked, how rotational power could be transferred through pivoting joints. BRing back THIS stuff! Too bad the mindstorms concept failed, I think it was just plain too expensive and the bundling was dumb - only big kits, no cheap upgrade path. For a cubicle toy, nothing would have beaten a basic controller with a few motors, and a big bucket of assorted lego tech parts. If you could just buy more motors and buckets as you needed, it would have been more attractive.
LED lights will eventually replace fluorescents, incandescents and other traditional forms of interior illumination. There's all kinds of reasons:
The colors are bright and pure when you want them to be, and significant progress has been made towards (simulated) full-spectrum light. The lights are cool and run on low voltage, are much more efficient than fluorescents and have very long lifetimes.
Cost is coming down (slowly) and eventually LEDs will be reasonable replacements for ordinary lightbulbs, with similar light characteristics except for added features such as optional color control and the like.
The Vos Pad is silly because like so many posters have pointed out, it's as uninhabitable as the star trek apartment that other guy built. Plus, it looks incredibly gay with those colors. Just an immensely complex concept piece demonstrating how not to use LED light fixtures. The Vos Pad appears dark and spooky, a movie set rather than a home. And the light beams coming from the floor will be incredibly annoying. But all this don't mean the technology itself is invalid.
LED lit homes can conveivably be every bit as practical as ordinary types. LEDs can be fitted into whole new kinds of fixtures that wouldn't be possible to make with conventional technologies. The LEDs are so versatile they can be built into anything and arranged in any pattern or configuration imaginable. Thin panels or stripes of light could be fitted under shelves or hidden in the ceiling so as to provide advanced discrete lighting without the hassle of bulb replacement.
As a test project a little while I ago I drew up a fancy model for a dream bathroom in a 3D program, accurately picturing discreet LED illumination with color accents and proper work surface brightness and no nasty point lightsources burning out retinas.
The render engine used was precise enough using photon maps, global illumination and caustics, that you could get a reasonable estimate of the number of LEDs on any given spec you need to light a room properly. You can pretty much go in with a virtual light meter and measure how much light hits any given simulated surface point and add more lights until you have the desired brightness. (As a photographer I have a nice digital spot lightmeter, and was able to calibrate the model using a handful of Nichia superbright white LEDs for reference.)
Turns out you need hundreds of LEDs to get an equivalent brightness to just a few 25 watt halogens. But if I had the cash to splash I'd definitely consider it for my new apartment!
When in Tokyo, visit Roppongi Hills and witness the glorious displays of LED illumination in and around the plaza at the base of the skyscraper complex. There's even LED illumination in the stairways and sometimes in the trees around the plaza too.
Quicktime is fine for stuff like QTVR panoramas and 3D views. Other than that? I really don't see the point.
The 'free' player is dumb and unresponsive. You get a big old nag box right in front, but no full-screen maximize mode on any convenient keypress if the feature is even there. You also get a very limited selection of codecs to choose from, many of which are virtually useless low-quality audio compression codecs or crippled versions of 'pro' codecs like Sorenson. Where's Xvid and mp3?
AVI is a much more versatile wrapper format and tons of 3rd party tools can mux and demux pretty much any damn codec combo you can think of. The APIs are wide open in any of the powerful video server tools like virtualdub and avisynth; you are in control of everything that happens to the stream, regardless of source. Write your own filters, plug it all in!
I like ripping my discs to the very nice Xvid codec and raw AC3. During playback I pipe out the original sound to your digital amp to my digital amp with picture as good as the original DVD but at a quarter the bitrate using one of half a dozen different mpeg4 codecs, so an entire trilogy of features fits snugly on one 4.7GB DVD. (I also happen to have a DVD player in my living room which plays DivX/Xvid DVD-ROMs!) Anyway, Quicktime don't let you do any of this stuff. Who is it for? Who uses it, other than mac loons without viable alternatives?
Whenever content floats around on the net like ripped episodes of a cartoon series or whatever, the quicktime versions always tend to be itty bitty 320x240 things with scratchy lo-fi sound, while the mpeg and avi divx equivalents of similar filesizes are vastly more enjoyable. Quicktime just feels like a stupid and irrelevant loser format. It would be entirely so if it wasn't for the fact that it can serve as an adequate wrapper for DV streams, and so can be used with FinalCut Pro, which doesn't suck.
I live in Europe [region 2] - but I have acquired a substantial collection of region 1 and 3 DVDs. Here of course it is no problem playing region 1 discs since virtually all of our players are region free, even name brands like Sony and whatnot. I still prefer most of my movies as region 1 imports. Why? Well - the region 2 european releases generally suck.
Let me elaborate on that. The French, Spanish, German and Italian audiences insist on having everything dubbed to their own languge (a goddam atrocious practice!), so the wide-release discs are often loaded with a bunch of space-hogging alternate audio tracks which serves no purpose.
Movies should be experienced in their native format and language, without exception! Anyway, those unwanted, stupid audio tracks consume so much space that supplemental features and original DTS main feature audio tracks are sometimes sacrificed or video is encoded with a lower bitrate to make them fit. Sometimes the original English Dolby Digital 5.1 becomes a dull 2.1 downmix along with everyone else's audio in egalitarian mediocrity. Typically, interesting extra material is trimmed down to just a few boring text pages in order to make it easy for the distributors to translate the stuff. One Scandinavian DVD distributor until recently released all movies with just six chapter stops in order to stick to a retarded template menu design.
These and other similar atrocities are absolutely unacceptable to any serious film fan. For this reason I say fuck region codes in general, and region 2 in particular.
Even some European features have better region 1 releases than region 2 releases. Example - the Criterion release of Belgian horror classic "C'est arrive pres de chez vous" is fabulous. The region 2 release is not.
I don't even know if Princess Mononoke was released here. I just got the original japanese Ghibli disc. I didn't want the region 1 version of that feature - The Americans put some kind of awful soundtrack on it featuring the ill-placed drawls of Billy Bob Thornton and others... I despise dubs above everything else!
Anyway, last year legislation was introduced here thanks to US lobbying, which has set up the potential for prohibiting import of DVDs across region borders. Our glaringly inept MP allegedly responsibility for "culture" related issues has been backing this legislation all the way. Bastard! So far there's been no crackdown, but the legislative groundwork has been completed so it's pretty much up to Hollywood and the corrupt american lobbyists when the fascists will beat down our doors and force us into the puddle of mediocre sameness prescribed the hapless denizens of this particular "region". Fuck em all.
One of the reasons that train travel in the U.S. sucks is that there's very little passenger-train compatible track left. Most of the US rail grid has been converted from passenger train use to freight purposes only.
The difference is that passenger trains should travel on banking rail where the inner part of the curve is set slightly deeper than the outer part. This works great for human passengers in that the apparent direction of gravity in the cars are always down, also in turns, which means the trains can go faster and with greater comfort for the passengers. In the 1950s you could travel from coast to coast in the United States along several different routes of fast, banking passenger-car-friedly track.
These days you'll find that most routes have to use freight track much of the way, and freight rail is flat, because the cars are heavier and move slower, and aren't bothered by lateral g-forces (think Roller-Coaster tycoon)... banking does not help freight use. In fact, banking rail is quickly worn down when such heavy cars move over it, so there's a good reason at least why freight trains must run on flat track.
However, the net result of the obliteration of the passenger rail grid is that passengers on freight track are subjected to lateral gravity forces in turns as the cars cannot bank properly. This makes the ride substantially less pleasant than when it travels along dedicated passenger rails. In order to not cause severe passenger discomfort or injury, the passenger trains in the U.S. therefore run much slower than their european counterparts. Fancy undercarriage suspension work will only do so much.
I don't have reliable sources for the next fact, which is that the passenger trains of the 1950s actually could do the coast-to-coast crossing in nearly 12 hours less than today's equivalent.
I was on a delightful vintage steam train trip in Germany about 10 years ago - cars and train beautiful old old things from the 1930s. Part of the journey was along modern passenger rail and was as comfortable as any modern train journey, but because this train moved fairly slow and probably interfered with route traffic, we were switched onto a freight line after about half an hour. The change was immediately noticable! People's bottles and cameras and things fell from the little tables by the windows whenever there was a turn.
The reason the U.S. rail net has been 'destroyed' for passenger use is no doubt one of economy. I'm told that only freight transportation is really profitable for most of the trail companies, the operation of passenger train lines are heavily subsidizeed by government. So if bottom line is affected by congestion on freight track along any line, there'll be a tendency towards converting any existing passenger train track to freight purposes.
FYI - From what I've heard from sources within Nullsoft, only Winamp3 development has been affected. And that product wasn't going anywhere in the first place. Check out Winamp5 btw, it's fun.:)
IE users are sheep and deserve whatever they get
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New IE Holes Discovered
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Really! There's been like a thousand holes in IE over the years, they keep coming with no slowing down or eevn trending towards end in sight.
Those stupid enough to continue using that piece of garbage or any other microsoft software for "secure" applications, are getting it up the ass exactly like they asked for. The only people I see with desktops infested with bonzo and popups and spyware are retarded IE sheep anyway. The comments from the poster of the article just make me laugh. Security from obscurity isn't! The more exploits the better, the sooner people will be forced to switch.
Go open source, go with glass box solutions.
There's absolutely no reason to continue using IE, it's not as if you have to visit the few websites refusing service to other browsers. Refusal of service to other browsers only indicates incompetence - who'd make business with such a company anyway?
I experienced the problem with every track appearing truncated to zero seconds after I lent my PC iPod to a Mac person who connected it to iTunes, hoping to loot some of my vintage DJ mixes. iTunes fucked it up, stupid program. On my PC I used Ephpod, which didn't manage to restore the fucked up files, but at least it could re-generate a working file system so I could copy the songs in anew and things kept right on working. Ephpod is nice also because it lets you share music files without the DRM bullshit.
I dunno why the studios believe that proprietary DRM-infected files playable only on nasty spyware (on your PC) somehow constitute an equivalent and attractive subsistute to MP3s. I cart about 1200 songs @160kbps around on my 10 gig iPod whereever I go, most of them encoded from my own extensive collection of 900+ music CDs, I'd like to point out that all of those were purchased before the era of copy protection, I have bought not a single CD since. I have a few friends with iPods, and we all use Ephpod to manage our files since it allows taking files out of someone elses' iPod. We use that feature to trade songs, often hundreds in one go. In which ways would a DRM format allow for this social aspect?:)
Re:Bluejacking : a growing problem in taxis ...
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Spammed by Bluetooth
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· Score: 1
Okay. Mine's a 6310i I use a bluetooth headset and a bluetooth laptop data connection with it. You CAN switch off bluetooth, but when it's on you can't set it to hide or reject incoming transmissions.
Bluejacking : a growing problem in taxis ...
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Spammed by Bluetooth
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· Score: 4, Informative
At least in Copenhagen this phenomenon is quite common. It seems, every other time I get in a taxi I get a bluetooth transmitted business card from the company or sometimes specifically the driver of the taxi. The first time this happened it was a slightly novel new thing I didn't mind much - but now I find myself cursing the people who implemented this standard for not doing it like on Palm where you have to 'accept' the infrared beamed cards. On the Nokia cellphones it's just stored without question so if this practice gets more widespread, soon your address book will be seriously burdened with unwanted business cards. Just finding them will be a big hassle. That's when you switch off bluetooth I guess.
In Japan, at the Yokohama central train station there is a large cylindrical television about 2 meters in diameter. It's visually quite impressive and the colors are good. When you touch the glass you can feel the powerful hum of the revolving drum inside. From examining photographs of the outside of the cylinder taken at various exposure times, it appears it's made with approximately 24 groups of 3 vertical LED bars, one for each primary color.
These bars sweep by the viewer at great speed and 'paint' each pixel dozens of time per second. Similar to DLP projectors, each pixel is illuminated in turn by the different colors. When you look close on one pixel, you can see it's sort of fluctuating. What you're really looking at is a rapid progression of dozens of different colored LEDs flashing their light at you at the same physical point in space. The final result is a very smooth and stable image with a high refresh rate, great brightness and very rich LED colors.
I wonder if a technology similar to the one above will be used for these booths. Although a busy train station at a major earth quake zone could be considered a particularly hostile environment for a precision engineered rapidly rotating drum of considerable mass, I could easily imagine some european capitals constituting an even more hostile environment in terms of rampant vandalism.
The technology required to build these things are probably nothing much special, but I think it's a fun neat idea. Perhaps each drum will be switching between cities on regular posted hours and according to some kind of schedule so you can plan ahead to "meet" a friend from another city. These things should be placed by plazas and intersections with lots of pedestrians.
Another thing - just 3 cameras? That'll probably mean highly oblique angles for most of the people standing right next to the drum, which in turn might mean you don't get all that much out of 'meeting' someone. It would be something truly special if you could look directly at the virtual representation of someone standing right alongside the remote screen and they'd look right back at you.
Too bad. The removed content was useful. Perhaps the wayback machine or google cache can salvage some of it. I welcome creative misuse of IE exploits and advocate the scattering of disruptive, dangerous, annoying IE bombs all over the web. The browser is a buggy piece of garbage. When you're surfing the web with IE you're wide open to savage attacks through unpatched holes the size of barn doors.
Microsft don't give a shit. The sooner people wise up to these facts and start experimenting with alternatives, the better.
Right now IE users are like frogs in a pot slowly brought to the point of boiling. Because the comfort level keeps sliding gradually, they just sit tight while getting shafted in the ass, many of them oblivious to the availability of nice and secure standards compliant browsers.
Microsoft security is laughable. Apparently their 'increased focus' on this matter has been targeted exclusively on marketing. There keeps surfacing new exploits of all their network products all the time - IIS, IE, MSSQL, RPC, object exploits - it's ridiculous even contemplating this amateurish crud for use in the harsh conditions of public data networks.
Removing the IE vulnerabilities page just helps Microsoft and keeps the IE victims in a state of complacent ennui without the necessary motivation for changing, thinking themselves secure now the exploit publication is gone. In best case inept microsoft programmers will have patched half of them by christmas time. However, twice as many new bugs and exploits will have surfaced by then.
On the other hand, if you want to develop easily and quickly without much hassle, IE is the way to go. Mozilla will force the developer to learn more about the standards, because some of the things are not intuitive.
So you're saying... IE renders off-spec crap code made by imbeciles not bothered with adhering to standards, and that's a good thing? So developers can be lazy? Geezus, what an attitude. So happy I'm no longer in that biz! (I design DVD players and plasma televisions now.)
I wish IE would be un-integrated from Windows completely. I've yet to see a single application in which the embedded IE browser windows were used for anything other than garish ads and useless content nobody wants. (KaZaa, winamp, PowerDVD, etc), and considering how buggy and insecure IE is, I'd much prefer having none of it on the PC at all.
I'm fine with Mickysoft bundling IE with their operating system, I'm fine with sheep and newbies using IE, but it should be possible to uninstall it when people grow up and switch to a real web browser. Why does all microsoft applications cling to the core with a million tentacles?
Fuggit. I'm sick and tired of IE-only sites designed broken in order to work with cludgy IE bugs. I use Mozilla for everything, it's safer and much less constricted by microsoft obfuscation. Popup blocker is super. I enjoy the complete absence of activeX exploits.
If a site don't work with Mozilla, I just don't visit. Big F-U from here to all talentless website 'developers' who make 'go away' screens for non-IE browsers instead of just building proper websites.
I think we should make the decimal people use something else, and leave conventional, historical capacity measurements as-is. Everyone in the biz knows what a gigabyte is 2^30 bytes, megabyte is 2^20 bytes, kilobyte is 2^10 bytes, etc.
I like the Si system and agree that the 'namespace' has been regrettably polluted by these conventions, but I don't think it's nearly as awful as the idea of introducing entirely new magnitude prefixes such as 'mebi' or 'kibi', none of which makes any sense to me and sound like retarded baby gibberish when pronounced.
For the decimal sticklers, I propose instead we introduce 'dits', which are really bits, but when used with ordinary Si-style magnitude prefixes they are a truthful capacity representation.
One Gigabyte is 8 x 2^30 bits/dits. This is the same as ~8.59 Gigadits, og ~8.59 x 10^9 bits.
One Kilodit is 1,000 bits/dits, or 10^6 bits.
One Megadit is 1,000,000 bits/dits, or 10^9 bits/dits, og 122.07 KiloBytes.
And now the bait for the pesky marketing/sales folk out there using the bloated decimal 'gigabyte' count on storage media:
A nice fat 200 'megabyte' (200x10^11 bytes) harddisk would be the same as a 1.6 Teradit / 1600 Gigadits capacity harddisk. (It's the same as a 186 Megabyte capacity harddisk, incidentially.)
Can you see the attraction? BIGGAR NUMBER = MORE SALES! $$$$$! If we could make marketeers use this terminology, we'd see huge capacity figures on all the units (1,600GD HDD W00t!); we'd curse at having to calculate the 'real' Gigabyte capacity by dividing Gigadits with ~8.58; but here's the kicker : At least we'd KNOW it was a bullshit figure!
Huh. That's awful. Fuck me if I'll bother going to the theater anymore if this shit becomes popular with the hollywood suits. Not that there's a whole lot of stuff worth watching these days anyhow, but now I think I'll just wait for the disc.
Is this part of the plan? Sticky cola-coated floors and spongy cardboard-flavored popcorn, broken seats, lousy projection, people talking through the movie, ben affleck, grossly inflated ticket prices and now this sort of sabotage. They prolly just want us to go away altogether.
My own home theater system provides a very nice DVD movie experience, I don't think I'll miss theaters all that much. That is, I don't think I'll ever have anything at home even remotely as cool as what I experienced at the Uptown theater in D.C. sometime back in late 2001 when they played Kubrick's "2001" in vivid 70mm. I watched this about 6 or 7 times!
By the way, are those squares between the sprockets how dolby digital sound is carried on the film prints? Interesting. I thought it was some kind of continous 1D optical strip with digital data.
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I'd be surprised if the global sales figure have dropped only so little. I'd expect the number of sold audio CDs in Europe to approximate zero. The shiny music discs sold in stores today certainly aren't the same kind as the audio CDs I used to buy until the late 90s. (I own just over 1000 of them.)
The new discs are some kind of bizarre crippled pseudo-CD format which doesn't work at all on my DVD player, nor does it work in my skip-protected car stereo or the DVD drive in my laptop. They also seem to omit the old Philips 'audio CD' logo, confirming my impression that they are not in fact music CDs but something else. So why on earth should I or anyone else in their right mind buy them?
It's up to the LAN card driver to read the MAC address on the ethernet adapter and place it in the TCP/IP packet header. A modified/hacked driver can easily ignore the hardwired MAC and spoof whatever.
I quite agree - I'd just like to add that even though I think the OSX gui looks like gay smurf space candy or something, I do like the Apple titanium laptops. I would at least have contemplated switching, had they just placed two mouse buttons by the trackpad. Apple users must have shapeless nubs for hands, or wear mittens a lot, I always found the single big button design retarded.
:)
Such a shame when Apple otherwise have nice engineering and hardware design... Yeah you can buy a multi-button mouse as an accessory, but that's kind of dumb on a laptop when you want to stay mobile. I have been using laptops with trackpads since 1996, today I play a mean game of CS or Q3A using just that.
... you just don't know it yet.
I loathe the Beast just as much as anybody else, but I am quite convinced they have already won the media format "war" (if there ever was one). Not even the same kind of fight Netscape had - they, at least enjoyed some loyalty from many users who held on for years after it really was all over. (Mozilla is King)
Real, on the other hand, is now almost universally despised - their thuggish marketing methods about as subtle as bricks through your windows. I myself didn't bother installing it on the last two PCs I had. Last time I tried installing RMP, maybe a year and a half ago, I uninstalled it again within ten minutes after seeing what it did, or tried to do with my desktop and file associations.
Never again will I want to WRESTLE with a fucking piece of software to regain control of my PC. The nerve of these people! Virtually everybody I speak to has given up on Real entirely, switched to Windows Media Player instead. The content selection is the same, or better, and together with Winamp5 WMP is all I use for playing music and online radio.
I do feel rotten for having to support the Enemy, but really - best option seems to be go for the Lesser Evil. I do feel sorry for the Real engineers, but Real management must be a gang of particularly nasty assclowns and I hope they all rot in hell.
The engineering in the WMA and WMV media codecs is impeccable. I'd like WM9 integration into Virtualdub and Avisynth, but I figger that'll come eventually. DivX, XviD, all the MPEG4 stuff is pretty good but WM9 knocks its socks off. The same quality at two-thirds the bitrate, or lower. Super quality high def 1080i / 720p video at DVD bitrates, great multichannel sound and all the multitrack features you'd want from streaming formats.
You better believe that the future of online streaming video (and audio) has Microsoft written all over it. I know for a fact that Hollywood loves what Microsoft did with their rock-solid DRM tech, and several hardware manufacturers are building high-def capable players with WM9 decoding. MPEG4 will remain hot for a little while yet (and you have that nice huge library of ye ripped moviez traded online), but WM9 is coming right at you like a freight train and there's no escape.
Way to go, dude. You had your five minutes of net.fame, people on the net heard about your phlight, backed you up and sent thousands of dollars your way in order to help you fight the litigious Beast's gorilla attorneys wanting to steal your rightful property. You should have held on! Instead, you just roll over on your back like a sheep and let them bribe you with trinkets. An X-box and a couple of coupons. Ya big loser! You're nothing but a sellout, and Microsoft's henchmen will now ramp up their efforts instead of backing off from such lawsuits and legal threats. No respect. Dipshit.
They told SCO to pretty much fall over and die. This same country on similar terms also got rid of Scientologists. Fuck yeah! Go Germany!
They say it's not going to hurt performance, and I'd like to see this verified by comparing load times of large hi-res images (as used by graphics professionals every day) between previous photoshop versions and this new crippled version.
Even if such a test turns out to reveal whatever might arbitrarily be perceived as a 'reasonable' performance hit, it doesn't leave me overly inclined to upgrade (I am a licensed user of Photoshop 7.0.)
No matter how you bend it, such a black box is by any definition yet another a crippling feature, an abomination to productivity even if you never need to scan currency.
But what if you do? No law says you can't use currency texture for e.g. a finance related site. The mentioned two-week 'maybe' turnaround time on the written permission and dubious-quality sample set from the Bureau of Engraving is laughable for anyone in the graphics biz with deadlines measured in hours, not months.
While the black box spews a browser window [with a traceable referrer? someone post the URL please] and stops the load and does nothing more, you CAN evidently bypass the 'feature' without problem after this initial nuisance as described in the article. You just need to WORK a little more and your smooth graphics pipeline has suddenly become crippled and bent with a couple needless ninety-degree turns as bothersome as those in the Breezewood, PA I-70/I-78 interchange (but without the tacky motels).
So why is the black box even THERE? It's just ANOTHER performance retarding stopping block. Back in the day when Adobe first started bundling the annoying Digimarc watermark stuff with Photoshop, I was bristling over the substantial performance hit it had on everyday photoshop work. I DOWNGRADED to the previous version and stayed on that for several years.
Eventually the PCs increased in CPU muscle enough that it was no longer an 'issue' for me, and perhaps the digimarc stuff in the latter versions of photoshop was optimized, or whatever. All I'm saying is, THAT useless black box was there in the first place, so THIS is just another. Which one comes NEXT? Where does it END?
Will Photoshop, the good corporate patriot citizen, commission additional black boxes to detect things like:
- Drivers' licenses and passports
- All government-issued papers
- Corporate trademarks (with database of associated legal depts)
- Barcodes (cue:cat redux)
- Celebrities imagery of which subject to royalties
- Heads of state and top bureaucrats (to stem the fark.com floods of Dubya photoshops)
Gotta love feature creep. But no worry, soon as PCs clock 10 GHz, you will barely notice the extended load times.I -loved- expert builder stuff. I had both the kits you mention, took me days to put together both. In the following years the parts from those projects became cranes, at-at walkers, crawlers and whatnots. Great times. I knew a bunch about structural, mechanical engineering before 2nd grade. I knew how gears worked, how rotational power could be transferred through pivoting joints. BRing back THIS stuff! Too bad the mindstorms concept failed, I think it was just plain too expensive and the bundling was dumb - only big kits, no cheap upgrade path. For a cubicle toy, nothing would have beaten a basic controller with a few motors, and a big bucket of assorted lego tech parts. If you could just buy more motors and buckets as you needed, it would have been more attractive.
Sure. But it's 5am here so it'll have to be tomorrow. Anyone interested, drop me an email or something.
LED lights will eventually replace fluorescents, incandescents and other traditional forms of interior illumination. There's all kinds of reasons :
The colors are bright and pure when you want them to be, and significant progress has been made towards (simulated) full-spectrum light. The lights are cool and run on low voltage, are much more efficient than fluorescents and have very long lifetimes.
Cost is coming down (slowly) and eventually LEDs will be reasonable replacements for ordinary lightbulbs, with similar light characteristics except for added features such as optional color control and the like.
The Vos Pad is silly because like so many posters have pointed out, it's as uninhabitable as the star trek apartment that other guy built. Plus, it looks incredibly gay with those colors. Just an immensely complex concept piece demonstrating how not to use LED light fixtures. The Vos Pad appears dark and spooky, a movie set rather than a home. And the light beams coming from the floor will be incredibly annoying. But all this don't mean the technology itself is invalid.
LED lit homes can conveivably be every bit as practical as ordinary types. LEDs can be fitted into whole new kinds of fixtures that wouldn't be possible to make with conventional technologies. The LEDs are so versatile they can be built into anything and arranged in any pattern or configuration imaginable. Thin panels or stripes of light could be fitted under shelves or hidden in the ceiling so as to provide advanced discrete lighting without the hassle of bulb replacement.
As a test project a little while I ago I drew up a fancy model for a dream bathroom in a 3D program, accurately picturing discreet LED illumination with color accents and proper work surface brightness and no nasty point lightsources burning out retinas.
The render engine used was precise enough using photon maps, global illumination and caustics, that you could get a reasonable estimate of the number of LEDs on any given spec you need to light a room properly. You can pretty much go in with a virtual light meter and measure how much light hits any given simulated surface point and add more lights until you have the desired brightness. (As a photographer I have a nice digital spot lightmeter, and was able to calibrate the model using a handful of Nichia superbright white LEDs for reference.)
Turns out you need hundreds of LEDs to get an equivalent brightness to just a few 25 watt halogens. But if I had the cash to splash I'd definitely consider it for my new apartment!
When in Tokyo, visit Roppongi Hills and witness the glorious displays of LED illumination in and around the plaza at the base of the skyscraper complex. There's even LED illumination in the stairways and sometimes in the trees around the plaza too.
Quicktime is fine for stuff like QTVR panoramas and 3D views. Other than that? I really don't see the point.
The 'free' player is dumb and unresponsive. You get a big old nag box right in front, but no full-screen maximize mode on any convenient keypress if the feature is even there. You also get a very limited selection of codecs to choose from, many of which are virtually useless low-quality audio compression codecs or crippled versions of 'pro' codecs like Sorenson. Where's Xvid and mp3?
AVI is a much more versatile wrapper format and tons of 3rd party tools can mux and demux pretty much any damn codec combo you can think of. The APIs are wide open in any of the powerful video server tools like virtualdub and avisynth; you are in control of everything that happens to the stream, regardless of source. Write your own filters, plug it all in!
I like ripping my discs to the very nice Xvid codec and raw AC3. During playback I pipe out the original sound to your digital amp to my digital amp with picture as good as the original DVD but at a quarter the bitrate using one of half a dozen different mpeg4 codecs, so an entire trilogy of features fits snugly on one 4.7GB DVD. (I also happen to have a DVD player in my living room which plays DivX/Xvid DVD-ROMs!) Anyway, Quicktime don't let you do any of this stuff. Who is it for? Who uses it, other than mac loons without viable alternatives?
Whenever content floats around on the net like ripped episodes of a cartoon series or whatever, the quicktime versions always tend to be itty bitty
320x240 things with scratchy lo-fi sound, while the mpeg and avi divx equivalents of similar filesizes are vastly more enjoyable. Quicktime just feels like a stupid and irrelevant loser format. It would be entirely so if it wasn't for the fact that it can serve as an adequate wrapper for DV streams, and so can be used with FinalCut Pro, which doesn't suck.
I live in Europe [region 2] - but I have acquired a substantial collection of region 1 and 3 DVDs. Here of course it is no problem playing region 1 discs since virtually all of our players are region free, even name brands like Sony and whatnot. I still prefer most of my movies as region 1 imports. Why? Well - the region 2 european releases generally suck.
Let me elaborate on that. The French, Spanish, German and Italian audiences insist on having everything dubbed to their own languge (a goddam atrocious practice!), so the wide-release discs are often loaded with a bunch of space-hogging alternate audio tracks which serves no purpose.
Movies should be experienced in their native format and language, without exception! Anyway, those unwanted, stupid audio tracks consume so much space that supplemental features and original DTS main feature audio tracks are sometimes sacrificed or video is encoded with a lower bitrate to make them fit. Sometimes the original English Dolby Digital 5.1 becomes a dull 2.1 downmix along with everyone else's audio in egalitarian mediocrity. Typically, interesting extra material is trimmed down to just a few boring text pages in order to make it easy for the distributors to translate the stuff. One Scandinavian DVD distributor until recently released all movies with just six chapter stops in order to stick to a retarded template menu design.
These and other similar atrocities are absolutely unacceptable to any serious film fan. For this reason I say fuck region codes in general, and region 2 in particular.
Even some European features have better region 1 releases than region 2 releases. Example - the Criterion release of Belgian horror classic "C'est arrive pres de chez vous" is fabulous. The region 2 release is not.
I don't even know if Princess Mononoke was released here. I just got the original japanese Ghibli disc. I didn't want the region 1 version of that feature - The Americans put some kind of awful soundtrack on it featuring the ill-placed drawls of Billy Bob Thornton and others... I despise dubs above everything else!
Anyway, last year legislation was introduced here thanks to US lobbying, which has set up the potential for prohibiting import of DVDs across region borders. Our glaringly inept MP allegedly responsibility for "culture" related issues has been backing this legislation all the way. Bastard! So far there's been no crackdown, but the legislative groundwork has been completed so it's pretty much up to Hollywood and the corrupt american lobbyists when the fascists will beat down our doors and force us into the puddle of mediocre sameness prescribed the hapless denizens of this particular "region". Fuck em all.
One of the reasons that train travel in the U.S. sucks is that there's very little passenger-train compatible track left. Most of the US rail grid has been converted from passenger train use to freight purposes only.
... banking does not help freight use. In fact, banking rail is quickly worn down when such heavy cars move over it, so there's a good reason at least why freight trains must run on flat track.
The difference is that passenger trains should travel on banking rail where the inner part of the curve is set slightly deeper than the outer part. This works great for human passengers in that the apparent direction of gravity in the cars are always down, also in turns, which means the trains can go faster and with greater comfort for the passengers. In the 1950s you could travel from coast to coast in the United States along several different routes of fast, banking passenger-car-friedly track.
These days you'll find that most routes have to use freight track much of the way, and freight rail is flat, because the cars are heavier and move slower, and aren't bothered by lateral g-forces (think Roller-Coaster tycoon)
However, the net result of the obliteration of the passenger rail grid is that passengers on freight track are subjected to lateral gravity forces in turns as the cars cannot bank properly. This makes the ride substantially less pleasant than when it travels along dedicated passenger rails. In order to not cause severe passenger discomfort or injury, the passenger trains in the U.S. therefore run much slower than their european counterparts. Fancy undercarriage suspension work will only do so much.
I don't have reliable sources for the next fact, which is that the passenger trains of the 1950s actually could do the coast-to-coast crossing in nearly 12 hours less than
today's equivalent.
I was on a delightful vintage steam train trip in Germany about 10 years ago - cars and train beautiful old old things from the 1930s. Part of the journey was along modern passenger rail and was as comfortable as any modern train journey, but because this train moved fairly slow and probably interfered with route traffic, we were switched onto a freight line after about half an hour. The change was immediately noticable! People's bottles and cameras and things fell from the little tables by the windows whenever there was a turn.
The reason the U.S. rail net has been 'destroyed' for passenger use is no doubt one of economy. I'm told that only freight transportation is really profitable for most of the trail companies, the operation of passenger train lines are heavily subsidizeed by government. So if bottom line is affected by congestion on freight track along any line, there'll be a tendency towards converting any existing passenger train track to freight purposes.
FYI - From what I've heard from sources within Nullsoft, only Winamp3 development has been affected. And that product wasn't going anywhere in the first place. Check out Winamp5 btw, it's fun. :)
Really! There's been like a thousand holes in IE over the years, they keep coming with no slowing down or eevn trending towards end in sight.
Those stupid enough to continue using that piece of garbage or any other microsoft software for "secure" applications, are getting it up the ass exactly like they asked for. The only people I see with desktops infested with bonzo and popups and spyware are retarded IE sheep anyway. The comments from the poster of the article just make me laugh. Security from obscurity isn't! The more exploits the better, the sooner people will be forced to switch.
Go open source, go with glass box solutions.
There's absolutely no reason to continue using IE, it's not as if you have to visit the few websites refusing service to other browsers. Refusal of service to other browsers only indicates incompetence - who'd make business with such a company anyway?
I experienced the problem with every track appearing truncated to zero seconds after I lent my PC iPod to a Mac person who connected it to iTunes, hoping to loot some of my vintage DJ mixes. iTunes fucked it up, stupid program. On my PC I used Ephpod, which didn't manage to restore the fucked up files, but at least it could re-generate a working file system so I could copy the songs in anew and things kept right on working. Ephpod is nice also because it lets you share music files without the DRM bullshit.
I dunno why the studios believe that proprietary DRM-infected files playable only on nasty spyware (on your PC) somehow constitute an equivalent and attractive subsistute to MP3s. I cart about 1200 songs @160kbps around on my 10 gig iPod whereever I go, most of them encoded from my own extensive collection of 900+ music CDs, I'd like to point out that all of those were purchased before the era of copy protection, I have bought not a single CD since. I have a few friends with iPods, and we all use Ephpod to manage our files since it allows taking files out of someone elses' iPod. We use that feature to trade songs, often hundreds in one go. In which ways would a DRM format allow for this social aspect? :)
Okay. Mine's a 6310i I use a bluetooth headset and a bluetooth laptop data connection with it. You CAN switch off bluetooth, but when it's on you can't set it to hide or reject incoming transmissions.
At least in Copenhagen this phenomenon is quite common. It seems, every other time I get in a taxi I get a bluetooth transmitted business card from the company or sometimes specifically the driver of the taxi. The first time this happened it was a slightly novel new thing I didn't mind much - but now I find myself cursing the people who implemented this standard for not doing it like on Palm where you have to 'accept' the infrared beamed cards. On the Nokia cellphones it's just stored without question so if this practice gets more widespread, soon your address book will be seriously burdened with unwanted business cards. Just finding them will be a big hassle. That's when you switch off bluetooth I guess.
In Japan, at the Yokohama central train station there is a large cylindrical television about 2 meters in diameter. It's visually quite impressive and the colors are good. When you touch the glass you can feel the powerful hum of the revolving drum inside. From examining photographs of the outside of the cylinder taken at various exposure times, it appears it's made with approximately 24 groups of 3 vertical LED bars, one for each primary color.
These bars sweep by the viewer at great speed and 'paint' each pixel dozens of time per second. Similar to DLP projectors, each pixel is illuminated in turn by the different colors. When you look close on one pixel, you can see it's sort of fluctuating. What you're really looking at is a rapid progression of dozens of different colored LEDs flashing their light at you at the same physical point in space. The final result is a very smooth and stable image with a high refresh rate, great brightness and very rich LED colors.
I wonder if a technology similar to the one above will be used for these booths. Although a busy train station at a major earth quake zone could be considered a particularly hostile environment for a precision engineered rapidly rotating drum of considerable mass, I could easily imagine some european capitals constituting an even more hostile environment in terms of rampant vandalism.
The technology required to build these things are probably nothing much special, but I think it's a fun neat idea. Perhaps each drum will be switching between cities on regular posted hours and according to some kind of schedule so you can plan ahead to "meet" a friend from another city. These things should be placed by plazas and intersections with lots of pedestrians.
Another thing - just 3 cameras? That'll probably mean highly oblique angles for most of the people standing right next to the drum, which in turn might mean you don't get all that much out of 'meeting' someone. It would be something truly special if you could look directly at the virtual representation of someone standing right alongside the remote screen and they'd look right back at you.
Where's the power to grant "Interesting" moderation when you want it.
Too bad. The removed content was useful. Perhaps the wayback machine or google cache can salvage some of it. I welcome creative misuse of IE exploits and advocate the scattering of disruptive, dangerous, annoying IE bombs all over the web. The browser is a buggy piece of garbage. When you're surfing the web with IE you're wide open to savage attacks through unpatched holes the size of barn doors.
Microsft don't give a shit. The sooner people wise up to these facts and start experimenting with alternatives, the better.
Right now IE users are like frogs in a pot slowly brought to the point of boiling. Because the comfort level keeps sliding gradually, they just sit tight while getting shafted in the ass, many of them oblivious to the availability of nice and secure standards compliant browsers.
Microsoft security is laughable. Apparently their 'increased focus' on this matter has been targeted exclusively on marketing. There keeps surfacing new exploits of all their network products all the time - IIS, IE, MSSQL, RPC, object exploits - it's ridiculous even contemplating this amateurish crud for use in the harsh conditions of public data networks.
Removing the IE vulnerabilities page just helps Microsoft and keeps the IE victims in a state of complacent ennui without the necessary motivation for changing, thinking themselves secure now the exploit publication is gone. In best case inept microsoft programmers will have patched half of them by christmas time. However, twice as many new bugs and exploits will have surfaced by then.
So you're saying ... IE renders off-spec crap code made by imbeciles not bothered with adhering to standards, and that's a good thing? So developers can be lazy? Geezus, what an attitude. So happy I'm no longer in that biz! (I design DVD players and plasma televisions now.)
I wish IE would be un-integrated from Windows completely. I've yet to see a single application in which the embedded IE browser windows were used for anything other than garish ads and useless content nobody wants. (KaZaa, winamp, PowerDVD, etc), and considering how buggy and insecure IE is, I'd much prefer having none of it on the PC at all.
I'm fine with Mickysoft bundling IE with their operating system, I'm fine with sheep and newbies using IE, but it should be possible to uninstall it when people grow up and switch to a real web browser. Why does all microsoft applications cling to the core with a million tentacles?
Fuggit. I'm sick and tired of IE-only sites designed broken in order to work with cludgy IE bugs. I use Mozilla for everything, it's safer and much less constricted by microsoft obfuscation. Popup blocker is super. I enjoy the complete absence of activeX exploits.
If a site don't work with Mozilla, I just don't visit. Big F-U from here to all talentless website 'developers' who make 'go away' screens for non-IE browsers instead of just building proper websites.
I think we should make the decimal people use something else, and leave conventional, historical capacity measurements as-is. Everyone in the biz knows what a gigabyte is 2^30 bytes, megabyte is 2^20 bytes, kilobyte is 2^10 bytes, etc.
I like the Si system and agree that the 'namespace' has been regrettably polluted by these conventions, but I don't think it's nearly as awful as the idea of introducing entirely new magnitude prefixes such as 'mebi' or 'kibi', none of which makes any sense to me and sound like retarded baby gibberish when pronounced.
For the decimal sticklers, I propose instead we introduce 'dits', which are really bits, but when used with ordinary Si-style magnitude prefixes they are a truthful capacity representation.
One Gigabyte is 8 x 2^30 bits/dits. This is the same as ~8.59 Gigadits, og ~8.59 x 10^9 bits.
One Kilodit is 1,000 bits/dits, or 10^6 bits.
One Megadit is 1,000,000 bits/dits, or 10^9 bits/dits, og 122.07 KiloBytes.
And now the bait for the pesky marketing/sales folk out there using the bloated decimal 'gigabyte' count on storage media:
A nice fat 200 'megabyte' (200x10^11 bytes) harddisk would be the same as a 1.6 Teradit / 1600 Gigadits capacity harddisk. (It's the same as a 186 Megabyte capacity harddisk, incidentially.)
Can you see the attraction? BIGGAR NUMBER = MORE SALES! $$$$$! If we could make marketeers use this terminology, we'd see huge capacity figures on all the units (1,600GD HDD W00t!); we'd curse at having to calculate the 'real' Gigabyte capacity by dividing Gigadits with ~8.58; but here's the kicker : At least we'd KNOW it was a bullshit figure!
Start Using GIGADITS today!
(C) Sonny Windstrup
Supar genius
Huh. That's awful. Fuck me if I'll bother going to the theater anymore if this shit becomes popular with the hollywood suits. Not that there's a whole lot of stuff worth watching these days anyhow, but now I think I'll just wait for the disc.
Is this part of the plan? Sticky cola-coated floors and spongy cardboard-flavored popcorn, broken seats, lousy projection, people talking through the movie, ben affleck, grossly inflated ticket prices and now this sort of sabotage. They prolly just want us to go away altogether.
My own home theater system provides a very nice DVD movie experience, I don't think I'll miss theaters all that much. That is, I don't think I'll ever have anything at home even remotely as cool as what I experienced at the Uptown theater in D.C. sometime back in late 2001 when they played Kubrick's "2001" in vivid 70mm. I watched this about 6 or 7 times!
By the way, are those squares between the sprockets how dolby digital sound is carried on the film prints? Interesting. I thought it was some kind of continous 1D optical strip with digital data.