Re:ffmpeg is better...
on
XVID 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm astonished at all the Xvid fanboyism
around here. Sure it produces better quality
than Divx, but at the same time, it's damn
slow.
Why would you bother using an MPEG-4 codec if
you don't care about quality?
Yes, XviD encodes fairly slowly. But you only
have to do it once, whereas you enjoy
the better quality of the job every time you
watch it. They call this "asymmetric"
encoding for a reason. Encode takes forever,
decode doesn't.
If you only care about an encoding taking as
little time as possible, hey, cool, not a
problem. But if you care about quality
results - Let it run overnight, and it makes
little difference if it takes a half-hour or
six hours.
I've done side-by-side comparisons with Xvid
and Lavc using mplayer, quite recently. The two
are very close, but I found Lavc was just a bit
better.
I find that hard to believe. Without repeating
your results, I have to suspect you've fallen for
a "trick" Lavc uses, such as slightly boosting
the gamma, or adding a blur-then-sharpen filter
to give the illusion of clarity while actually
removing quite a lot of detail.
Basically, with modern PC hardware and
MPEG-4 codecs, "you get what you wait for".
More CPU time, with some tolerance for various
optimizations, generally means better quality.
Personally, I care only about the quality
of the end product. I look forward to a functioning
H.264 implementation, even if it means encoding
90 minutes of source material takes two full days.
Perhaps I don't get the problem, but why not
use a "real" root password (which you can
arbitrarily change as often as you like),
along with a one- or two-character hash on the
individual machines as part of the password
(preferably known only to the root users, but
really only intended to keep total outsiders
from rooting every box at once).
I recommend a similar technique to friends and
relatives who have no clue how to pick "good"
passwords - pick a nice, random seven-char
password, and make one consistant character
(say, the third) something as simple as the
first letter of the machine/site using that
password. Perhaps not suitable for really
highly sensitive information, but a hell of a
lot better (and easier to remember, in most
cases) than "my dog's name" or "my kid's
birthday".
As for tracking what your root users do...
Another poster summed it up nicely - You don't
call them "trusted users" for nothing. Anything
you can do on a machine, root can circumvent.
Any limitation of programs fails with even a
single program that allows dropping to a shell
(most editors, for example) or invoking a
compiler (In which case, why bother having
additional root users at all?).
I am actually quiet impressed with how you
fool the moderators. Skillfull indeed you are
with your time. Quiet funny actually.
I don't know that I'd consider him a troll,
from the examples you gave.
Sure, they all got modded down as trolls, but
IMO, very mild ones. At worst, too short and
a tad uninformed, the sort of thing I might
have modded "overrated" (or more likely, just
ignored completely) but certainly not as a
troll.
We all post stupid comments occasionally, or
comments that people take wrong (comparing with
my own posting history, almost everything I've
posted in an Apple-related topic end up modded
down as troll or flamebait, despite my intending
them as neither). Seems a bit harsh to assume
he trolls deliberately, when he has an otherwise
good track record.
Of course, having mentioned my posting
history, you might call me a karma-whoring
troll as well. I generally get modded up,
have exellent karma, yet occasionally the
mods crucify me. Yet, I neither post for
karma, nor deliberately troll (at worst, in
a foul mood, you could accuse me of the
occasional flame).
That said, looking at some of his
positive mods, I have to suspect
him as a bit of a braggart. He has
apparently done everything and knows it
all. Now, he may actually tell the truth
in that regard (one of my grandfathers,
for example, really has "done it
all"). But as long as he remains factually
correct, I'd say he still doesn't warrant
a "troll" label.
Nothing makes that decision. 'You' evolve
every which way in the multiverse, and each
copy has the same continuity of consciousness
that you do. ...
Your consciousness splits just like everything
else.
I agree with you, mostly, but I think
you skirted the parent's own point...
At this moment (we'll ignore the up-to-800ms
but always greater-than-50ms lag between
consciousness and physical reality), how many
universes do "you" consciously perceive? Not
"you" in the abstract multiverse sense, but
"you" in the subjective sense. I only see one,
basically consistant, universe around me.
So, to go back to the parent's point, if each
quantum event in the universe causes a sort
of global fork(), what determines which PID
our consciousness gets?
In more physical terms, why can we not tell
the difference EWG and Copenhagen? If the
state vector collapses, why; if it doesn't,
why does it "look" like it does, to us? .
Optimal situation... you are slain by a
stray gang fight bullet.
How ironic... Even in your ill-wishing,
you addressed the very reason for my original
point.
No one cares if gang members go around killing
one another. Sure, a few surprised family members
end up on TV ("No, really, we thought Ricky just
liked collecting guns and playing pool... I blame
this on that tough crowd he hung out with!"), but
for the most part, one less gang member means, well,
one less gang member. The realists (and just about
everyone but the most hardcore bleeding-hearts) will
consider it good riddance.
People do care, though, when a three year old
boy takes a bullet playing in his back yard as
entirely unintended collateral damage. People
care when a woman dies in a hit-and-run after a
joyride in a stolen car. In a current case local
to my area, people care when an engaged 20YO
couple gets carjacked and killed execution-style
in either some sort of initiation ritual or just
to look "tough" for the boyz.
1 Apathetic twit vanishes in a momentary embrace
of the chaos
...Because, as we all know, apathetic twits pose
a far greater danger to society than
those deliberately choosing to destroy, steal, kill,
rape, and otherwise wreak havoc. Yeah, whatever.
At least you have your priorities.
Your complete and total lack of humanity
disgusts me
And the fact that you would defend human scum,
who have chosen to find recreation in
activities the rest of us consider horrifying,
disgusts me. Guess we can call it even, eh?
When I say we'd do better off letting them
kill one another, I say so because of
compassion for my fellow humans, not out of
a lack thereof.
Should have let them kill eachother, would
have been Darwin at its finest
Why did this get modded funny?
I tend to agree, quite seriously.
Here we had three dozen people, all members
of organizations we consider a bane on
society, organizations that have, as their
very essence, violence and theft.
These three dozen people wanted to kill
or seriously injure one another. Success
in that endeavor would have removed them
from both the streets and the gene pool.
So why did we waste taxpayer dollars
stopping this brawl before it
happened?
Optimal situation... All of one side dies,
half of the other side dies, and we can throw
the rest away for murder. 36 problems vanish
in a half-hour "controlled burn", of sorts.
Now, in the case of the NYT, they have enough
in-house content to make it worth registering
(though I'll still give fake info as long as
it remains possible). But very few localish
news sites can make that claim. They post
syndicated content and little else.
Go glance around IGN.com. Bet you find at
least 5 things to bitch about within the first
5 page loads.
Nope. IGN publishes almost entirely original
content. They don't require me to register to
view that content. And between popup blocking
and a decent hosts file, I don't even find their
site all that annoying to navigate.
Note the two key differences here - Mostly
original content, and no registration for viewing
typical FP content. The ads, well, I consider
that another matter entirely, and if you want
to call me greedy for blocking them, I can't
really defend against that. But for the rest,
I would say IGN has more of a reason to
require a login than the NYT.
If you have no problem with providing
your personal info, feel free to give it out
to any website that asks. Some of us take our
privacy more seriously.
And keep in mind... While the NYT (or any
reasonably-legit site) may not currently
spam or sell your info, it takes only one hacker, or
one policy change, to turn their registration DB into
a spam mailing list.
Not PCI-X, but Matrox has offered quad-headed
machines for years.
For those who don't want it for gaming (ie,
don't want to blow a few hundred for the
latest and greatest multi-headed AGP card),
throw in a few extra el-cheapo PCI cards.
Win2K supported up to ten heads - Only one
AGP, obviously, but although it can't run
as the boot display, both Windows and Linux
(X, anyway) can make it the primary after
startup so your games will run on it. XP
supports even more than that (up to 255, I
believe?).
On my Windows development machine, I use a 5+
year old Trident PCI card for the second head,
and an older Geforce (3? low-end 4? Don't
really care, it works) as the primary. I
keep WinAmp, Task Manager, Calculator (a nice
graphing one, not the 'doze default), and
SI's TCPMon (a network connection monitor that looks
much like TaskMan) on the second head, with
my actual dev IDE open on the primary. On
the rare occasions when I want to play a
graphics-intensive game (I far prefer RTS to
FPS), it works perfectly. Good frame rates,
no glitches (that wouldn't have happened
anyway). I do run a single-monitor screen
saver I wrote (I've made it publically
available on
my homepage), that uses a moving-windows
style saver so I can see its contents without
worying about showing a static screen for too
long. I also use a mouse corral (don't recall
the name, do a Google search), to keep the mouse
from leaving the primary display while playing
a fullscreen game (that will cause
glitches, just don't go there). Overall, it
works great, and that PC doesn't even have
a PCI-X bus.
So, not really news, I'd have to say. Someone
managed to do with a new tech what we've had
the ability to do with the previous gen of
hardware. Whoop-de-do. "In other news, the
sun has continued to burn hydrogen for the
4.6 billionth year, making a new record for
our solar system!".
Don't forget that it continues to make
the community look bad.
To which community do you refer? FSF people?
GNU people? EFF people? Free-and-Open source
(in general) people? Whitehats? Greyhats?
Blackhats? Music lovers? Anti-corporate
people? Slashdotters?
Put simply, it doesn't really matter how you
answer. When something threatens corporate
profits (you can see that I at least fall into
the last category above), they spin it so we
all manage to come out looking bad.
Cracked DRM? Damn those anti-corporate
open-source hippy weed-smokin' bastards!
Leaked Windows source code? Damn those
anti-corporate open-source hippy weed-smokin'
bastards! A new worm that only affects
Outlook or MSIE? Damn those anti-corporate
open-source hippy weed-smokin' bastards!
We can't win the PR war, because "they" have
a PR budget, and we do not.
Don't bother with DRM, RIAA sponsored music,
and certainly don't bother with breaking it.
Just ignore it and support free music.
While good in theory (and a stance I almost
fully agree with), we all have a few
RIAA-signed groups we enjoy. As a better
choice than supporting DRM'd downloads, just
buy the CD (preferably used so the RIAA doesn't
actually profit from the sale, although on the
down side, the artist doesn't get any money
that way either). Then rip to whatever format
you like.
Of course, the RIAA has already started working
to plug that particular hole (via broken CDs),
but so far have failed miserably. Aside from
the overall pathetically weak nature of the DRM
on CDs so far, broken CDs have failed for the
only reason the RIAA cares about - Profit.
The general poublic may have no idea about the
trampling of their fair-use rights, but they
do get annoyed when they buy a CD and
it won't play in their car.
Well, maybe I didn`t quite get it right,
but in what way exactly is what he`s done
illegal?
Perhaps nothing, perhaps violated Japanese
law. Tough to tell, since police everywhere
(ie, not confined to the US) pretty much have
no regard whatsoever for actual law, and can
always find something with which
to charge those who annoy them.
As a better quesiton, which no Slashdotters
(or more relevantly, GrokLaw crossovers) have
commented on... Does he actually stand a
chance of incurring some punishment (beyond
"mere" harassment), under Japanese law? And
if so, would this result in something like a
few hours of community service and a year of
probation, or would he do hard time with a
bunkie nicknamed Bubba?
I honestly don't know Japanese law well enough
to say, but would really like to know.
Maybe you've never ripped audio CDs
before, but you can very easily get sync
errors if you use inferrior ripper programs,
poor readers, or a combination of both.
Key phrase there, "poor readers".
Yes, back in the days of cheap-but-fast CD-ROM
drives, the phenomenon you describe could
occur.
On a higher-quality CD drive (such as a
burner) or on just about any DVD
drive, those sort of errors simply do not
occur.
So yes, if you want to talk about decade-old
hardware, I did indeed err. I probably
should have also said, in my list of
ways-such-errors-could-occur, "if you
use ancient noname drives". But on
modern hardware? It just doesn't
happen.
And just for reference, I have indeed heard,
in my own rips, exactly the clicks your
quoted text refers to (I even wrote a small
tool that takes three rips and derives a
single good audio file from them). Sometime
around three CD/DVD drive upgrades ago
(perhaps 6 years), they vanished completely,
never to return.
Copying from one drive to another on the fly
like this can introduce lots of tiny errors.
They're not that noticable, but the preferred
method of getting an exact copy is to use
something like EAC to extract to the hard
drive first, then burn to CD.
Umm... Sorry, no.
Although errors can theoretically occur,
for the PC to not catch it, you'd need an
enormous amount of corruption over a small
area, that produces reproduceable false reads,
with the correct CRC. Not bloody likely.
Now, if you refer to either subchannel data,
or to physical disk features (such as "hard"
bad sectors), sure, a number of imaging
programs will work better than a 1:1 copy.
But that doesn't really apply to audio data,
only to various copy protection mechanisms.
As something of an aside, making disc images
does have advantages, even though the ones
you suggest seem a tad irrelevant. For most driver
disks, before I even install the hardware,
I make an image of the install disc. It goes
to my fileserver, and if I ever need to
reinstall, I find it takes me less time to
burn the ISO than it does to find the original
disc. And, if something happens (ie, the dog
eats the original), not a problem; a $0.25 disc
and 4 minutes later, and I've replaced it.
THEY WILL REFUSE TO LET YOU HELP THEM
Doesn't stop them from still calling you up
...For which, I have a fairly standard response:
"Run both SpyBot and AdAware. Let them delete
everything they flag as suspicious. If
this includes a program you use, you have two
choices. Either find an alternative that SpyBot
and AdAware don't detect, or stop asking
me for help - If you actually want spyware,
I can't help you anyway".
That about covers it. Some people may
not like that attitude, but TFB. I consider
my time a lot more valuable than their
ability to know the current weather without a
quick visit to weather.com, and will tell people
as much.
In my experience, if a person's machine has
started behaving poorly enough to prompt a
call to me, they will welcome and thank
me for cleaning their machines, even if I
do end up killing a program or two that
they actually use. I have yet to hear someone
complain that their machine feels about 10x
faster at the expense of their pretty
cursors.
Now, the more negotiable grey area, IMO, involves
what loads at startup. I personally tend to
disable everything that I can manually load
when I need to actually use something. That
includes most printer and display "control
panels", Palm's hotsync manager (or similar app
for other handhelds), most multimedia apps'
quick-start features (Netscape, QuickTime, Real,
etc). If a person really does use that
functionality very frequently, fine, they can
keep it. Otherwise, they waste memory, meaning
they don't really speed up loading, they slow
down everything. Not a net gain, IMO.
No, this should not have gotten modded
"offtopic".
It expresses a sentiment I think most
of us feel. SCO. Meritless. Litigious
Bastards.
We... Don't... Care... Anymore!
When an actual court gives Darl a backhand,
then we can all chat about how we knew it
would happen all along. But updates on every
stupid little "Group X says this" or "SCO
added another company to their suits" really
stopped impressing most of us months
ago.
Please, people, stop submitting this crap
to Slashdot. Go make a blog site dedicated
to every little gossipy detail of SCO's
legal activities if you want, but, well, read
the tagline - "News for Nerds. Stuff that
matters". SCO neither counts as news, nor
do they matter.
I believe packet smoothing refers to taming
rapid swings in packet output rates
Indeed it does... You couldn't really do much with
the raw received signal at a higher level than
the device's firmware, and you'd probably want it
even lower than that (such as in the actual
analog hardware).
But that didn't fit as nicely into a pun
involving Pringles.
So, I take it this means that the "greybacks
of AI" no longer believe this to be true? What
is the new thinking?
I put that in the past tense for two reasons...
First, at least the followers of Minsky have
apparently deemed connectionist learning models
as passe. In fact, as far as I can tell, the
very field of artificial intelligence
has shifted away from the "intelligence" part,
preferring to focus on (the far more marketable)
automated problem solving and classification,
rather than trying to mimic aspects of actual
consciousness.
And second, neurophysiology (rather than AI
researcher) has all but obliterated the hope
that any basic variation on the standard
multilayer feedforward neural net really does
all that great of a job at modeling the brain.
It seems that real neurons do some pretty
impressive processing, each having a local
store, exceedingly fine-grained delay lines,
self-feedback (at the signal, rather than
just the obvious neurotransmitter level),
and some degree of actual flow control. And
that just mentions what we know, they
may have quite a good many more secrets waiting
for someone to notice... For example, recently,
a few bright folks noticed that glia, the
non-neuronal cells making up literally half
of our brains, might do more than just sit
there and take up space.
Please confine your answer to words of
less than ten syllables:)
I apologize for the length of words in
this domain, but I didn't make
them up, we all just inherited them from
people who liked Latin and nominalization
waaaaaaaay too much. <G>
A simplification, perhaps, but he gets to the
point as it matters in this applications - Most
of the "suggestions" as better alternatives to
an FRNN do classification, not numerical output
(and thus the implication, that someone just
wanted to toss out cool-sounding names as a
form of karma-whoring).
Sure, you could hack them up to have
the classes represent the integers, but why
not just start with a technique that already
handles purely numeric data well? Anyone who
embeds the integers into a class space without
a damn good reason really needs to learn
the old maxim about everything looking like a
nail when you have a hammer.
When I see the headline: "Nonlinear Neural
Nets Smooth Wi-Fi Packets" and I only understand
the words nets, smooth and packets...and none
of them in relation to each other
Simple 'nuff, really...
Neural net - An arrangement of "dumb" processing
nodes in a style mimicing that which the
greybacks of AI (such as Minsky and Turing
et al) once believed real biological neurons
used. Basically, each node has a set of inputs
and outputs. It sums all its inputs (each
with a custom weight, the part of the algorithm
you actually train), performs some very simple
operation (such as hyperbolic tangent) called
the "transfer function" on that sum, then sets
all of its outputs to that value (which other
neurons in turn use as their inputs).
Nonlinear - This refers to the shape of the
transfer function. A linear neural net can,
at best, perform linear regression. You don't
need a neural net to do that well (in fact,
you can do it a LOT faster with just a single
matrix inversion). So calling it "nonlinear"
practically counts as redundant in any modern
context.
Smooth - A common signal processing task
involves taking a noisy signal, and cleaning
it up.
Wi-Fi - An example of a fairly noisy signal that
would benefit greatly from better prediction
of the signal dynamics, and from better ability
to clean the signal (those actually go together,
believe it or not - In order to "clean" the
signal without degrading it, you need to know
roughly what it "should" look like).
Packets - The unit in which "crisps" come. Without
these, you can't use a Pringles can to boost the
gain on your antenna to near-illegal values.;-)
First, read all of this before you feel I've
ignored your point - I agree with you, but
think you've made an entirely different
argument than I did (A strawman, technically,
but I don't consider it intentional).
Ears have nothing to do with it.
Ears have everything to do with it.
Aside from strong bass (which we can sense
tactilely but have very near zero discriminatory
capability for) Humans have two and only two
entry points for sound - Our ears. Every sound
that we sense, with the ability to resolve a
direction and pitch for that sound, comes
through our ears.
Left/Right sound direction we can resolve
very well (since we have an ear on
each side). Front/Back we can resolve to
some degree, thanks to the shape of our
outer ear and timing differences in reflections
reaching our eardrum. Up/Down sounds we have
almost no ability to tell apart, unless the
local environment allows it (ie, a strong
reflection from the ground will produce a
distinct delay that we can subconsciously
process).
Now, on to apply all that to what you wrote:
5.1 has nothing to do with making it sound
better in any part of the room. It has
everything to do with recreating an accurate
soundstage
To reproduce a sound, you need to produce the
acoustic equivalent of an illusion. You need
to trick the brain into thinking the surrounding
auditory environment (the "soundstage", if you
prefer) equals that of the original
performance.
You can do that in two ways.
You can measure the sound incident on the eardrums,
and try to reproduce that (which requires two
channels, one for each ear). Or, you can try
to actually reproduce the 3d pattern of sound
present in the local environment (which requires
at least four speakers, and 5.1 seems
to do a pretty good job of it).
Now, for a single listener, perfectly positioned
withing the target area, these will produce
identical results, subjectively. Headphones
mean the listener always occupies the perfect
position. Random placement on a couch in the
den does not. Thus...
If you reproduce the soundstage, rather
than reproduce the pressure at each ear, then
people have some ability to move around within
that environment (as long as they don't get too
close to an acoustically reflective surface, or
move outside the boundary of the speakers
themselves), and the sound will remain true to
the original orientation.
Thus, you have "widened" the sweet spot from
beyond a single two-point listener.
There is very little usefull information
that can be discreetly encoded in a 5.1 live
performance that you cannot do with effects,
since the band itself is never behind you
spacially.
And here, our arguments come back together
nicely. I agree 100%, you can't encode
any information in 5.1 that a single
listener can appreciate, that you can't
also produce in stereo with a variety of
subtle delays. Not just with respect to
front-to-back, though - You could have a
full orchestra sit in a sphere surrounding
the listener, and you still couldn't
record any information that a single listener
can discriminate in 5.1 that you couldn't fit
in L/R.
who said that next generation music will have
only 2 channels?
Count the ears.
Although you could make a good argument for
2.1ch (the ".1" to give the bass "feel" of a
live performance), having more than two channels
really only makes a difference for content designed
for more than a single listener at a time.
For watching a movie, something people usually
do (at home, anyway) in small groups, you want
good sound quality for a wide area of the room.
At least the width of a typical sofa, and the
depth of the sofa plus a couple of kids sitting
in front of it. Thus, you have 5.1 channel,
allowing more than a single person to experience
decent sound.
For listening to music, usually you either have
"background" music on (for which, perfect reproduction
doesn't matter as much as just having something on),
or you wear headphones (truly obsessive audiophiles
who may have a whole small room engineered just to
accomplish the same effect as wearing headphones
notwithstanding). Your ears define the
"sweet spot" for the music, and a mere two channels
can produce any spatial orientation of sound that
you have the physical ability to perceive.
Thus, for just music, 2 channels will stay the
dominant medium not just for the near future,
but until evoution gives us another ear (and even
including that ".1" I mentioned earlier, you don't
need a third channel, since you can derive that
from the center of the two channels).
If you are into dynamic analysis and
recovery of exceptions -- that is, self-healing
software
Stupid question time...
Why not make it work correctly, rather than
praying the language can make up for the
programmer's ineptitude?
I guess I show my age here (and I haven't
even hit 30 yet)... Once upon a time, we
just made the code work. We didn't need
the compiler to read our minds to know our
intent (and, in fact, most "real" programmers
find it severely annoying when the compiler
tries to second-guess us).
If your code has a bug, FIX IT. Trusing
that you have a serious enough bug to throw an
exception, yet a mild enough bug to leave exception-throwing
intact, just begs for trouble. But then, you
also said:
Java invented the dynamic analysis and handling
of stack traces, not just exceptions.
Which tells me that you either count as a troll, or
completely clueless about the subject matter. Care
to tell us which one?
and ssh windows. Full cmd line support, without the
full cygwin install.
Actually, I do use that one, though more for the
server than the client.
As its only down side, sftp doesn't seem to work (I've
tried the various hacks for it I've seen online, and at
best I can get the connection to hang, rather than
immediately disconnect... Not a great improvement <G>).
But yes, I do enjoy that one, and would recommend it to
anyone needing an sshd for Windows.
That's it! Convenience!!!
You actually answered your own stupid questions.
Please try to work on your overblown sense of
self-importance. It is truly tiring.
Sorry to bore you. Please, add me to your "foes" list
and give them a -6 modifier; wouldn't want to waste
your time by making you read the entirety of
my comments, rather than just the first sentence of
the biggest paragraph.
For a more serious response...
Does paying (usually) more, and getting less,
really outweigh a five minute stop at a local
CD store on the way home from work? I just
can't understand that mentality.
Guess I need to go back to marketing 101...
You just can't go wrong by overestimating
people's stupidity or laziness.
Sigh. What a great world we live in. (commence
sarcastic comeback about "then feel free to
leave it")
The whole point is that it costs a lot. It
shows that you made a sacrifice for her.
Exactly... So why go for something useless to
both people?
I "get" the idea of self-sacrifice, thus my
suggestion of buying her land. Or even something
useful, like a collection of her 1000 favorite
DVDs. Or a car.
Perhaps the part I don't "get" involves
having an SO who would rather have a $10k rock
than just about anything else. I have
a quite happy long-term relationship (despite
the implications of another respondant), and
neither she, nor any of my previous SOs would
have wanted something very expensive but
useless. If they had, somehow I doubt I would
have found them interesting in the first place
(so I admit I may have a selection bias in my
sample).
Put another way... Sure, I'd blow a few grand on
a trinket for my SO. But what does it say about
her if she'd actually want me to
do so? "Can't buy love", and all...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm astonished at all the Xvid fanboyism around here. Sure it produces better quality than Divx, but at the same time, it's damn slow.
Why would you bother using an MPEG-4 codec if you don't care about quality?
Yes, XviD encodes fairly slowly. But you only have to do it once, whereas you enjoy the better quality of the job every time you watch it. They call this "asymmetric" encoding for a reason. Encode takes forever, decode doesn't.
If you only care about an encoding taking as little time as possible, hey, cool, not a problem. But if you care about quality results - Let it run overnight, and it makes little difference if it takes a half-hour or six hours.
I've done side-by-side comparisons with Xvid and Lavc using mplayer, quite recently. The two are very close, but I found Lavc was just a bit better.
I find that hard to believe. Without repeating your results, I have to suspect you've fallen for a "trick" Lavc uses, such as slightly boosting the gamma, or adding a blur-then-sharpen filter to give the illusion of clarity while actually removing quite a lot of detail.
Basically, with modern PC hardware and MPEG-4 codecs, "you get what you wait for". More CPU time, with some tolerance for various optimizations, generally means better quality.
Personally, I care only about the quality of the end product. I look forward to a functioning H.264 implementation, even if it means encoding 90 minutes of source material takes two full days.
Perhaps I don't get the problem, but why not use a "real" root password (which you can arbitrarily change as often as you like), along with a one- or two-character hash on the individual machines as part of the password (preferably known only to the root users, but really only intended to keep total outsiders from rooting every box at once).
I recommend a similar technique to friends and relatives who have no clue how to pick "good" passwords - pick a nice, random seven-char password, and make one consistant character (say, the third) something as simple as the first letter of the machine/site using that password. Perhaps not suitable for really highly sensitive information, but a hell of a lot better (and easier to remember, in most cases) than "my dog's name" or "my kid's birthday".
As for tracking what your root users do... Another poster summed it up nicely - You don't call them "trusted users" for nothing. Anything you can do on a machine, root can circumvent. Any limitation of programs fails with even a single program that allows dropping to a shell (most editors, for example) or invoking a compiler (In which case, why bother having additional root users at all?).
You're right about MOST of those posts by Sarojin, but this one is really inexcusable:
:-(
Ack!
Okay, that one did it for me (I didn't follow that particular link, originally).
I retract my defense of Sarojin. Going out of his way to hide a link like that pretty much guarantees trolldom, no possible excuses whatsoever.
Ugh. I feel dirty.
I am actually quiet impressed with how you fool the moderators. Skillfull indeed you are with your time. Quiet funny actually.
I don't know that I'd consider him a troll, from the examples you gave.
Sure, they all got modded down as trolls, but IMO, very mild ones. At worst, too short and a tad uninformed, the sort of thing I might have modded "overrated" (or more likely, just ignored completely) but certainly not as a troll.
We all post stupid comments occasionally, or comments that people take wrong (comparing with my own posting history, almost everything I've posted in an Apple-related topic end up modded down as troll or flamebait, despite my intending them as neither). Seems a bit harsh to assume he trolls deliberately, when he has an otherwise good track record.
Of course, having mentioned my posting history, you might call me a karma-whoring troll as well. I generally get modded up, have exellent karma, yet occasionally the mods crucify me. Yet, I neither post for karma, nor deliberately troll (at worst, in a foul mood, you could accuse me of the occasional flame).
That said, looking at some of his positive mods, I have to suspect him as a bit of a braggart. He has apparently done everything and knows it all. Now, he may actually tell the truth in that regard (one of my grandfathers, for example, really has "done it all"). But as long as he remains factually correct, I'd say he still doesn't warrant a "troll" label.
Nothing makes that decision. 'You' evolve every which way in the multiverse, and each copy has the same continuity of consciousness that you do.
...
.
Your consciousness splits just like everything else.
I agree with you, mostly, but I think you skirted the parent's own point...
At this moment (we'll ignore the up-to-800ms but always greater-than-50ms lag between consciousness and physical reality), how many universes do "you" consciously perceive? Not "you" in the abstract multiverse sense, but "you" in the subjective sense. I only see one, basically consistant, universe around me.
So, to go back to the parent's point, if each quantum event in the universe causes a sort of global fork(), what determines which PID our consciousness gets?
In more physical terms, why can we not tell the difference EWG and Copenhagen? If the state vector collapses, why; if it doesn't, why does it "look" like it does, to us?
Optimal situation... you are slain by a stray gang fight bullet.
...Because, as we all know, apathetic twits pose
a far greater danger to society than
those deliberately choosing to destroy, steal, kill,
rape, and otherwise wreak havoc. Yeah, whatever.
At least you have your priorities.
How ironic... Even in your ill-wishing, you addressed the very reason for my original point.
No one cares if gang members go around killing one another. Sure, a few surprised family members end up on TV ("No, really, we thought Ricky just liked collecting guns and playing pool... I blame this on that tough crowd he hung out with!"), but for the most part, one less gang member means, well, one less gang member. The realists (and just about everyone but the most hardcore bleeding-hearts) will consider it good riddance.
People do care, though, when a three year old boy takes a bullet playing in his back yard as entirely unintended collateral damage. People care when a woman dies in a hit-and-run after a joyride in a stolen car. In a current case local to my area, people care when an engaged 20YO couple gets carjacked and killed execution-style in either some sort of initiation ritual or just to look "tough" for the boyz.
1 Apathetic twit vanishes in a momentary embrace of the chaos
Your complete and total lack of humanity disgusts me
And the fact that you would defend human scum, who have chosen to find recreation in activities the rest of us consider horrifying, disgusts me. Guess we can call it even, eh?
When I say we'd do better off letting them kill one another, I say so because of compassion for my fellow humans, not out of a lack thereof.
Should have let them kill eachother, would have been Darwin at its finest
Why did this get modded funny?
I tend to agree, quite seriously.
Here we had three dozen people, all members of organizations we consider a bane on society, organizations that have, as their very essence, violence and theft.
These three dozen people wanted to kill or seriously injure one another. Success in that endeavor would have removed them from both the streets and the gene pool.
So why did we waste taxpayer dollars stopping this brawl before it happened?
Optimal situation... All of one side dies, half of the other side dies, and we can throw the rest away for murder. 36 problems vanish in a half-hour "controlled burn", of sorts.
it's a small price to pay for a free service
Small != free.
Now, in the case of the NYT, they have enough in-house content to make it worth registering (though I'll still give fake info as long as it remains possible). But very few localish news sites can make that claim. They post syndicated content and little else.
Go glance around IGN.com. Bet you find at least 5 things to bitch about within the first 5 page loads.
Nope. IGN publishes almost entirely original content. They don't require me to register to view that content. And between popup blocking and a decent hosts file, I don't even find their site all that annoying to navigate.
Note the two key differences here - Mostly original content, and no registration for viewing typical FP content. The ads, well, I consider that another matter entirely, and if you want to call me greedy for blocking them, I can't really defend against that. But for the rest, I would say IGN has more of a reason to require a login than the NYT.
If you have no problem with providing your personal info, feel free to give it out to any website that asks. Some of us take our privacy more seriously.
And keep in mind... While the NYT (or any reasonably-legit site) may not currently spam or sell your info, it takes only one hacker, or one policy change, to turn their registration DB into a spam mailing list.
Not PCI-X, but Matrox has offered quad-headed machines for years.
For those who don't want it for gaming (ie, don't want to blow a few hundred for the latest and greatest multi-headed AGP card), throw in a few extra el-cheapo PCI cards. Win2K supported up to ten heads - Only one AGP, obviously, but although it can't run as the boot display, both Windows and Linux (X, anyway) can make it the primary after startup so your games will run on it. XP supports even more than that (up to 255, I believe?).
On my Windows development machine, I use a 5+ year old Trident PCI card for the second head, and an older Geforce (3? low-end 4? Don't really care, it works) as the primary. I keep WinAmp, Task Manager, Calculator (a nice graphing one, not the 'doze default), and SI's TCPMon (a network connection monitor that looks much like TaskMan) on the second head, with my actual dev IDE open on the primary. On the rare occasions when I want to play a graphics-intensive game (I far prefer RTS to FPS), it works perfectly. Good frame rates, no glitches (that wouldn't have happened anyway). I do run a single-monitor screen saver I wrote (I've made it publically available on my homepage), that uses a moving-windows style saver so I can see its contents without worying about showing a static screen for too long. I also use a mouse corral (don't recall the name, do a Google search), to keep the mouse from leaving the primary display while playing a fullscreen game (that will cause glitches, just don't go there). Overall, it works great, and that PC doesn't even have a PCI-X bus.
So, not really news, I'd have to say. Someone managed to do with a new tech what we've had the ability to do with the previous gen of hardware. Whoop-de-do. "In other news, the sun has continued to burn hydrogen for the 4.6 billionth year, making a new record for our solar system!".
Don't forget that it continues to make the community look bad.
To which community do you refer? FSF people? GNU people? EFF people? Free-and-Open source (in general) people? Whitehats? Greyhats? Blackhats? Music lovers? Anti-corporate people? Slashdotters?
Put simply, it doesn't really matter how you answer. When something threatens corporate profits (you can see that I at least fall into the last category above), they spin it so we all manage to come out looking bad. Cracked DRM? Damn those anti-corporate open-source hippy weed-smokin' bastards! Leaked Windows source code? Damn those anti-corporate open-source hippy weed-smokin' bastards! A new worm that only affects Outlook or MSIE? Damn those anti-corporate open-source hippy weed-smokin' bastards!
We can't win the PR war, because "they" have a PR budget, and we do not.
Don't bother with DRM, RIAA sponsored music, and certainly don't bother with breaking it. Just ignore it and support free music.
While good in theory (and a stance I almost fully agree with), we all have a few RIAA-signed groups we enjoy. As a better choice than supporting DRM'd downloads, just buy the CD (preferably used so the RIAA doesn't actually profit from the sale, although on the down side, the artist doesn't get any money that way either). Then rip to whatever format you like.
Of course, the RIAA has already started working to plug that particular hole (via broken CDs), but so far have failed miserably. Aside from the overall pathetically weak nature of the DRM on CDs so far, broken CDs have failed for the only reason the RIAA cares about - Profit. The general poublic may have no idea about the trampling of their fair-use rights, but they do get annoyed when they buy a CD and it won't play in their car.
Well, maybe I didn`t quite get it right, but in what way exactly is what he`s done illegal?
Perhaps nothing, perhaps violated Japanese law. Tough to tell, since police everywhere (ie, not confined to the US) pretty much have no regard whatsoever for actual law, and can always find something with which to charge those who annoy them.
As a better quesiton, which no Slashdotters (or more relevantly, GrokLaw crossovers) have commented on... Does he actually stand a chance of incurring some punishment (beyond "mere" harassment), under Japanese law? And if so, would this result in something like a few hours of community service and a year of probation, or would he do hard time with a bunkie nicknamed Bubba?
I honestly don't know Japanese law well enough to say, but would really like to know.
Maybe you've never ripped audio CDs before, but you can very easily get sync errors if you use inferrior ripper programs, poor readers, or a combination of both.
Key phrase there, "poor readers".
Yes, back in the days of cheap-but-fast CD-ROM drives, the phenomenon you describe could occur.
On a higher-quality CD drive (such as a burner) or on just about any DVD drive, those sort of errors simply do not occur.
So yes, if you want to talk about decade-old hardware, I did indeed err. I probably should have also said, in my list of ways-such-errors-could-occur, "if you use ancient noname drives". But on modern hardware? It just doesn't happen.
And just for reference, I have indeed heard, in my own rips, exactly the clicks your quoted text refers to (I even wrote a small tool that takes three rips and derives a single good audio file from them). Sometime around three CD/DVD drive upgrades ago (perhaps 6 years), they vanished completely, never to return.
Copying from one drive to another on the fly like this can introduce lots of tiny errors. They're not that noticable, but the preferred method of getting an exact copy is to use something like EAC to extract to the hard drive first, then burn to CD.
Umm... Sorry, no.
Although errors can theoretically occur, for the PC to not catch it, you'd need an enormous amount of corruption over a small area, that produces reproduceable false reads, with the correct CRC. Not bloody likely.
Now, if you refer to either subchannel data, or to physical disk features (such as "hard" bad sectors), sure, a number of imaging programs will work better than a 1:1 copy. But that doesn't really apply to audio data, only to various copy protection mechanisms.
As something of an aside, making disc images does have advantages, even though the ones you suggest seem a tad irrelevant. For most driver disks, before I even install the hardware, I make an image of the install disc. It goes to my fileserver, and if I ever need to reinstall, I find it takes me less time to burn the ISO than it does to find the original disc. And, if something happens (ie, the dog eats the original), not a problem; a $0.25 disc and 4 minutes later, and I've replaced it.
THEY WILL REFUSE TO LET YOU HELP THEM
...For which, I have a fairly standard response:
Doesn't stop them from still calling you up
"Run both SpyBot and AdAware. Let them delete everything they flag as suspicious. If this includes a program you use, you have two choices. Either find an alternative that SpyBot and AdAware don't detect, or stop asking me for help - If you actually want spyware, I can't help you anyway".
That about covers it. Some people may not like that attitude, but TFB. I consider my time a lot more valuable than their ability to know the current weather without a quick visit to weather.com, and will tell people as much.
In my experience, if a person's machine has started behaving poorly enough to prompt a call to me, they will welcome and thank me for cleaning their machines, even if I do end up killing a program or two that they actually use. I have yet to hear someone complain that their machine feels about 10x faster at the expense of their pretty cursors.
Now, the more negotiable grey area, IMO, involves what loads at startup. I personally tend to disable everything that I can manually load when I need to actually use something. That includes most printer and display "control panels", Palm's hotsync manager (or similar app for other handhelds), most multimedia apps' quick-start features (Netscape, QuickTime, Real, etc). If a person really does use that functionality very frequently, fine, they can keep it. Otherwise, they waste memory, meaning they don't really speed up loading, they slow down everything. Not a net gain, IMO.
No, this should not have gotten modded "offtopic".
It expresses a sentiment I think most of us feel. SCO. Meritless. Litigious Bastards.
We... Don't... Care... Anymore!
When an actual court gives Darl a backhand, then we can all chat about how we knew it would happen all along. But updates on every stupid little "Group X says this" or "SCO added another company to their suits" really stopped impressing most of us months ago.
Please, people, stop submitting this crap to Slashdot. Go make a blog site dedicated to every little gossipy detail of SCO's legal activities if you want, but, well, read the tagline - "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters". SCO neither counts as news, nor do they matter.
I believe packet smoothing refers to taming rapid swings in packet output rates
Indeed it does... You couldn't really do much with the raw received signal at a higher level than the device's firmware, and you'd probably want it even lower than that (such as in the actual analog hardware).
But that didn't fit as nicely into a pun involving Pringles.
So, I take it this means that the "greybacks of AI" no longer believe this to be true? What is the new thinking?
:)
I put that in the past tense for two reasons...
First, at least the followers of Minsky have apparently deemed connectionist learning models as passe. In fact, as far as I can tell, the very field of artificial intelligence has shifted away from the "intelligence" part, preferring to focus on (the far more marketable) automated problem solving and classification, rather than trying to mimic aspects of actual consciousness.
And second, neurophysiology (rather than AI researcher) has all but obliterated the hope that any basic variation on the standard multilayer feedforward neural net really does all that great of a job at modeling the brain. It seems that real neurons do some pretty impressive processing, each having a local store, exceedingly fine-grained delay lines, self-feedback (at the signal, rather than just the obvious neurotransmitter level), and some degree of actual flow control. And that just mentions what we know, they may have quite a good many more secrets waiting for someone to notice... For example, recently, a few bright folks noticed that glia, the non-neuronal cells making up literally half of our brains, might do more than just sit there and take up space.
Please confine your answer to words of less than ten syllables
I apologize for the length of words in this domain, but I didn't make them up, we all just inherited them from people who liked Latin and nominalization waaaaaaaay too much. <G>
I'm sorry, but that's not quite true.
A simplification, perhaps, but he gets to the point as it matters in this applications - Most of the "suggestions" as better alternatives to an FRNN do classification, not numerical output (and thus the implication, that someone just wanted to toss out cool-sounding names as a form of karma-whoring).
Sure, you could hack them up to have the classes represent the integers, but why not just start with a technique that already handles purely numeric data well? Anyone who embeds the integers into a class space without a damn good reason really needs to learn the old maxim about everything looking like a nail when you have a hammer.
When I see the headline: "Nonlinear Neural Nets Smooth Wi-Fi Packets" and I only understand the words nets, smooth and packets...and none of them in relation to each other
;-)
Simple 'nuff, really...
Neural net - An arrangement of "dumb" processing nodes in a style mimicing that which the greybacks of AI (such as Minsky and Turing et al) once believed real biological neurons used. Basically, each node has a set of inputs and outputs. It sums all its inputs (each with a custom weight, the part of the algorithm you actually train), performs some very simple operation (such as hyperbolic tangent) called the "transfer function" on that sum, then sets all of its outputs to that value (which other neurons in turn use as their inputs).
Nonlinear - This refers to the shape of the transfer function. A linear neural net can, at best, perform linear regression. You don't need a neural net to do that well (in fact, you can do it a LOT faster with just a single matrix inversion). So calling it "nonlinear" practically counts as redundant in any modern context.
Smooth - A common signal processing task involves taking a noisy signal, and cleaning it up.
Wi-Fi - An example of a fairly noisy signal that would benefit greatly from better prediction of the signal dynamics, and from better ability to clean the signal (those actually go together, believe it or not - In order to "clean" the signal without degrading it, you need to know roughly what it "should" look like).
Packets - The unit in which "crisps" come. Without these, you can't use a Pringles can to boost the gain on your antenna to near-illegal values.
There, all make sense now?
First, read all of this before you feel I've ignored your point - I agree with you, but think you've made an entirely different argument than I did (A strawman, technically, but I don't consider it intentional).
Ears have nothing to do with it.
Ears have everything to do with it.
Aside from strong bass (which we can sense tactilely but have very near zero discriminatory capability for) Humans have two and only two entry points for sound - Our ears. Every sound that we sense, with the ability to resolve a direction and pitch for that sound, comes through our ears.
Left/Right sound direction we can resolve very well (since we have an ear on each side). Front/Back we can resolve to some degree, thanks to the shape of our outer ear and timing differences in reflections reaching our eardrum. Up/Down sounds we have almost no ability to tell apart, unless the local environment allows it (ie, a strong reflection from the ground will produce a distinct delay that we can subconsciously process).
Now, on to apply all that to what you wrote:
5.1 has nothing to do with making it sound better in any part of the room. It has everything to do with recreating an accurate soundstage
To reproduce a sound, you need to produce the acoustic equivalent of an illusion. You need to trick the brain into thinking the surrounding auditory environment (the "soundstage", if you prefer) equals that of the original performance.
You can do that in two ways.
You can measure the sound incident on the eardrums, and try to reproduce that (which requires two channels, one for each ear). Or, you can try to actually reproduce the 3d pattern of sound present in the local environment (which requires at least four speakers, and 5.1 seems to do a pretty good job of it).
Now, for a single listener, perfectly positioned withing the target area, these will produce identical results, subjectively. Headphones mean the listener always occupies the perfect position. Random placement on a couch in the den does not. Thus...
If you reproduce the soundstage, rather than reproduce the pressure at each ear, then people have some ability to move around within that environment (as long as they don't get too close to an acoustically reflective surface, or move outside the boundary of the speakers themselves), and the sound will remain true to the original orientation.
Thus, you have "widened" the sweet spot from beyond a single two-point listener.
There is very little usefull information that can be discreetly encoded in a 5.1 live performance that you cannot do with effects, since the band itself is never behind you spacially.
And here, our arguments come back together nicely. I agree 100%, you can't encode any information in 5.1 that a single listener can appreciate, that you can't also produce in stereo with a variety of subtle delays. Not just with respect to front-to-back, though - You could have a full orchestra sit in a sphere surrounding the listener, and you still couldn't record any information that a single listener can discriminate in 5.1 that you couldn't fit in L/R.
who said that next generation music will have only 2 channels?
.
Count the ears.
Although you could make a good argument for 2.1ch (the ".1" to give the bass "feel" of a live performance), having more than two channels really only makes a difference for content designed for more than a single listener at a time.
For watching a movie, something people usually do (at home, anyway) in small groups, you want good sound quality for a wide area of the room. At least the width of a typical sofa, and the depth of the sofa plus a couple of kids sitting in front of it. Thus, you have 5.1 channel, allowing more than a single person to experience decent sound.
For listening to music, usually you either have "background" music on (for which, perfect reproduction doesn't matter as much as just having something on), or you wear headphones (truly obsessive audiophiles who may have a whole small room engineered just to accomplish the same effect as wearing headphones notwithstanding). Your ears define the "sweet spot" for the music, and a mere two channels can produce any spatial orientation of sound that you have the physical ability to perceive.
Thus, for just music, 2 channels will stay the dominant medium not just for the near future, but until evoution gives us another ear (and even including that ".1" I mentioned earlier, you don't need a third channel, since you can derive that from the center of the two channels)
If you are into dynamic analysis and recovery of exceptions -- that is, self-healing software
Stupid question time...
Why not make it work correctly, rather than praying the language can make up for the programmer's ineptitude?
I guess I show my age here (and I haven't even hit 30 yet)... Once upon a time, we just made the code work. We didn't need the compiler to read our minds to know our intent (and, in fact, most "real" programmers find it severely annoying when the compiler tries to second-guess us).
If your code has a bug, FIX IT. Trusing that you have a serious enough bug to throw an exception, yet a mild enough bug to leave exception-throwing intact, just begs for trouble. But then, you also said:
Java invented the dynamic analysis and handling of stack traces, not just exceptions.
Which tells me that you either count as a troll, or completely clueless about the subject matter. Care to tell us which one?
and ssh windows. Full cmd line support, without the full cygwin install.
Actually, I do use that one, though more for the server than the client.
As its only down side, sftp doesn't seem to work (I've tried the various hacks for it I've seen online, and at best I can get the connection to hang, rather than immediately disconnect... Not a great improvement <G>).
But yes, I do enjoy that one, and would recommend it to anyone needing an sshd for Windows.
That's it! Convenience!!!
You actually answered your own stupid questions.
Please try to work on your overblown sense of self-importance. It is truly tiring.
Sorry to bore you. Please, add me to your "foes" list and give them a -6 modifier; wouldn't want to waste your time by making you read the entirety of my comments, rather than just the first sentence of the biggest paragraph.
For a more serious response...
Does paying (usually) more, and getting less, really outweigh a five minute stop at a local CD store on the way home from work? I just can't understand that mentality.
Guess I need to go back to marketing 101... You just can't go wrong by overestimating people's stupidity or laziness.
Sigh. What a great world we live in. (commence sarcastic comeback about "then feel free to leave it")
The whole point is that it costs a lot. It shows that you made a sacrifice for her.
Exactly... So why go for something useless to both people?
I "get" the idea of self-sacrifice, thus my suggestion of buying her land. Or even something useful, like a collection of her 1000 favorite DVDs. Or a car.
Perhaps the part I don't "get" involves having an SO who would rather have a $10k rock than just about anything else. I have a quite happy long-term relationship (despite the implications of another respondant), and neither she, nor any of my previous SOs would have wanted something very expensive but useless. If they had, somehow I doubt I would have found them interesting in the first place (so I admit I may have a selection bias in my sample).
Put another way... Sure, I'd blow a few grand on a trinket for my SO. But what does it say about her if she'd actually want me to do so? "Can't buy love", and all...