Post looks ripped from the website. Website is very low on details.
The section on pressed-cds makes it seem as though the disc can tell what kind of device it trying to read it, and somehow take action to prevent access if the disc was not intended to be accessible on that device.
Huh?
If it's "encapsulated" red-book, then it's not red-book anymore. An audioCD player would need to be built with logic to read and remove the encapsulation.
I don't see how they could implement this without "bastardizing" the intended CD format. There's no logic on a CD, therefore the logic would need to be in the player or drive, etc.
I can't help but thinking this is vapor. There's no way for me to tell, but the post smells like it was entered by a company marketing employee.
I drive two used Fords: a 1999 Contour with the Duratec 24v engine, and a 2000 Merc Sable with the standard Vulcan engine. Both cars are just about right on the EPA numbers, maybe a mile higher. My driving is either city or highway, as I live in a city of 50K, close to work, and take the occasional road trip.
The Contour has 79,000 miles, and the Sable 60,000.
The hydrogen is envisioned to replace petrochemicals in automotive uses and small-scale electrical generation with fuel-cells.
The only problem is the ethanol source. Right now it is pretty much corn, period. With present technology, much petrochemicals must be expended to grow the corn and refine it into Ethanol. The fact that no petrochemicals are used in the subsequent conversion to hydrogen is lost on the fact that a large amount of petrochemicals were burned to get the ethanol in the first place.
If a suitably-credentialed person does the math, I think we'd probably find that less petrochemicals would be burned in generating the electricity conventionally, or powering the car conventionally.
We'll have to wait for future tech that can generate the ethanol or hydrogen without using, or by using significantly less petrochemicals.
My idea shouldn't be surprising, because no process is ever 100% efficient.
I'm with you. I started in 35mm photography with the aim of taking astrophotos. I was looking for a body that would fill those requirements. At the same time, my wife suggested we get something robust enough to do great terrestrial photography as well, and replace the limited point-and-shoot'ers lying about.
We chose the Elan 7. Designed for EF lenses, it's an automagic everything SLR, BUT it can be fully manually controlled! You choose! I go manual, my wife goes auto as she gains experience.
I picked up this nifty accessory for it too, an infrared shutter remote. This lets me get into pictures from tens of feet away and have total control. Or, it lets me trip the shutter on long exposures without disturbing the camera. Way better than the old cable system (which is also an option with the Elan), in my opinion.
You're right about the costs. I'm a fan of both film and digital. Each have great PROs and equally great CONs. There's little processing cost for dig, provided you don't print any of the pictures you take! For the cash outlay required to get a nice digital SLR with the same flexibilty as its 35mm counterpart, you could shoot film literally for years, buying and processing the whole way.
The real digital advantage is in capturing precisely the shot you wanted without waste of film or time. Film shooters must take notes, bracket exposures, and cross fingers. Sometimes this may even mean a reshoot after proofing.
I'd say don't cheap out too much. Buy a decent modern body. As you hone your craft, you may appreciate "some" automation down the road.
I have two EF lenses now, and the automation inside them makes for faster shooting, which helps during the high action of, say, jousting at the Renaissance Festival!
With any modern body, you can later purchase t-mounts and adapters which will let you use virually ANY manual lens in existance. Best of both worlds there.
You may find you want to try some elaborate things later like off-camera flash setups. A modern body will make working with external flashes easier, espcially those designed for that particular body. The flash exposure can be setup automatically from the camera body. That means less confusing guide-number charts of which I admit I'm totally ignorant.
My setup also includes a decent film scanner. This lets me take my film into the digital realm as needed. I truly get the best of both this way, and for the time being, I'll keep shooting film on my Elan. I can invest the money saved into more lenses, flashes, tripods, filters, and such.
When digital and film level up, then I will very likely add a digital body. With a little luck, the EF lens system will still be in use and I can retain my EF collection for use on the digital body too!
The limited amount of news and info I have on the subject seems to suggest to me that with the 3G standards effort a total mess (what does 3G truly mean, anyway?) it will slowly die out. As it does 802.11 tech will continue to become more widespread and evolve.
I see descendents of present 802.11 standards merging with cellular, as cell companies realize that their mixed systems of digital phonecalls and data can be much better, and more economically managed in a Voice-over-IP infrastructure.
Far-far ahead, I think the phone system in its entirety will evolve into a far more flexible data pipeline system, with the major telcos providing national and regional backbone networks, and many others providing various other a variety of connection options to the backbone. You'll cease to have a phone jack in your home, and instead have a multipurpose communications jack. Unless you're on some sort of wireless link.
Some cable companies are already offering VoIP phone service over their newly laid down cable Internet infrastructures. It's a good thing.
Cell companies could use the shakeup and breath of fresh air a proven standards like 802.11 and VoIP could bring. Should make voice and data blend more seamlessly behind the phone.
Copyrights for ideas, patents for physical things
on
AOL Patents IM
·
· Score: 1
$ who $ talk someuser
Would that be covered too? Is my Linux box suddenly no longer free? Will I need to pay royalties to AOL?
I ask you, is AOL trying to protect and profit from AOL Instant Messenger, or are they trying to siphon license and royalty fees out of the developers of all the other IM systems?
I just cannot believe how woefully unsalvageable our Patent and Trademark Office has become. I believe that patenting software techniques should be forbidden internationally. I'll stand up for copyrighted source code, but not patents. Computer systems are designed to be multi-purpose, and so they uniquely lend themselves to overly-broad patent creation when people attempt to patent a technique they implemented within a computer.
Somewhere there has to exist a more articulate commentary on what I'm trying to say. I think it's appropriate to patent the specific computer system itself, but not the software techniques used to do work with it.
Patents were designed to protect innovators and allow them to profit from their development work, not as a means of making money by trying to subvert the work of others.
First, let me say that I have always loved Trek, and always will. That being said, I am impressed with the fact that Mr. Shatner has such beautiful and talented horses. My question is this:
What do you think of the recent changes the American Quarter Horse Association has made and are making concerning their excessive white rules, embryo transfer and now the vote that will be coming up in March regarding allowing cremellos and perlinos to be registered?
One other question - would you ever allow a Trek fan who also loves horses to come and see your ranch?:)
My God. This hosting company is absolutely terrible! Is that kind of treatment even mentioned or condoned in their terms of use? (I bet not.)
Their response was so "knee-jerk-pimply-nerd" it reminds me of the Bastard Sysop from Hell series, and the "Your Company Computer Guy" sketches on Saturday Night Live.
Their response suggests they are a MUCH smaller hosting company than the supposed "pictures" of their facilities indicate. I bet they're really just a couple of kids looking to make a few bucks from the cable-modem and spare Pentium II in their basement. How immature and unprofessional. It's a pa-freakin' website. You serve pages, that's your job. If you can't handle your job, you're fired.
I appeal to the remaining Webmasters.com account holders to FIRE this their hosting company.
I saw the same program. The theory on the vanishing ships was that the gas release from the seafloor was large enough that the local density of the water is lowered, and the ship can no longer maintain bouyancy. It made sense if there were so much gas in one release, that the only water around was that contained in the space between the bubbles. Testing with models in tanks demonstrated the effect, but the researchers were not totally convinced the effect would be the same on the sea.
As for energy, current (very preliminary) estimates indicate there could be more energy locked up in methane hydrates in the sea floor than in all the coal and crude oil extracted from the earth's crust to date.
There was some speculation about the danger of extracting the methane. On another TV program run on TLC, a researcher was concerned that extracting the methane hydrate could accidentally trigger the stuff to undergo the conversion from solid to gas spontaneously, on a very massive scale. The resulting release of gas could be large enough to further upset world climate.
I say, let's investigate. Until we achieve greenhouse-gas free fusion, it could be an excellent energy source, if it can be safely extracted. It's so abundant, we could all drive Toyota Prius-es (or Priuii?) for like $0.01/mile (versus $0.07/mile on a typical 26MPG car at today's fuel prices)
Yes! Digital extortion is the phrase everyone should keep in mind. This stuff really is getting insane. The courts are burdend with trying to bring justice to legitimate patent cases, while the USPTO's totally awful performance floods that same system with tons of frivilous litigation.
PanIP. What a bunch of opportunists! Makes me wish I could take an icepick to the midsection of the guy over at PanIP who thought up this strategy. If anyone should pay damages...
I started with Slackware, and I love it. I don't care so much about package management and I ususally compile most software I run from source instead of installing binary packages. There are tools that let a person build a piece of software from a source dist, then track its installation for later easy removal.
I like Slackware for a lot of reasons, one of which is "YOU" get total control over the look and placement of everything. Want to change the way the system boots, edit the scripts in/etc/rc.d. Granted, you can do this with any disto, but there are no assumptions made with Slackware about how you'd like to setup your box.
I view Slack as a robust, full-featured distro, with a "Do-It-Yourself" feel. You get to decide how you want to build it. And, like a Jedi Knight building a lightsaber at the completion of their training, when done this way, you are much more familiar with the internal goings on of your OS. That really helps to not only fix problems faster, but broaden your understanding of Unix.
Reading the docs of the latest Slack, it seems Patrick Volkerding and his group of active developers were excited about the new changes developing in Linux, and eager to keep Slackware the quality product it is. I'll wait to hear from him, when the distro is at an end.
POV-Ray is a great freeware raytracing engine for Win, Mac, and Unix. It makes use of an easy to learn text-format scene description language. There was a set of include files available for POV-Ray that you could use in your scene description to describe the "camera" lenses and thus yield up many teriffic lens flares. I forgot the name of the package, but I think you can still find it in the contrib section. Very impressive!
Hotmail's pages are insecure anyway.
on
Hotmail Hacked
·
· Score: 1
Hotmail's been bare and open to intrusion since it first opened, before SSL secured pages protected the password exchange, and before Microsoft bought them (remember HoTMaiL). When SSL did come about, only the password exchange was secured, the remainder of the session was left as cleartext HTTP. That's how it is today. It's not hard, as others have pointed out, to sniff out anyone's hotmail. Hotmail I believe in their service agreement states that the mail cannot be guaranteed to be private, and you have to accept that if you want to use the service.
So, if you want secured e-mail, do what you'd do on any other mail service, be it web, POP3, IMAP or whatever...PGP the message, and e-mail the PGP cyphertext. Otherwise, they are all just cleartext.
(I was there at the beginning, HoTMaiL's launch on July 4th, 1996.)
I think many people close to the art world glitterati are also very zoned in on a small set of media they believe to be the true fine arts. But art is necessarily one of those things that are necessarily in the eyes of the beholder. For many artists, it's about making an emotional impact. If that's your goal, I see no reason you must be constrained to using traditional mediums to communicate that emotion. True art, I feel, is that which the observer can experience, and come away feeling that it was an original work. There are hundereds of graphic design tools and widgets out there to create "ooh" and "ahh" effects. Your detractors I think are focusing too much on those. But, no number of canned widgets can turn unimaginative doodles into meaningful art. An artist, however, uses such widgets sparingly and uniquely to enhance or help form the message of the piece.
Take the frozen 360-degree action shots from "The Matrix". That movie's cinematographers created the technique to capture the essence of a turning point in the action. It turned into a very "art"ful shot, giving new meaning to the sequence.
Today, you can see that same basic technique showing up in action sequences almost everywhere (like TNT's new "Witchblade" TV show), but in canned form. Something a non-artistically-inclined director can pull from the shelf in canned form and insert where he pleases. The result: an overused gimmick that, if anything, detracts from the overall drama of the sequence. In simple terms: The Matrix's shot felt slick, but Witchblade's shot feels hollow and cheap.
I believe CG can be used to create worthy art, and detractors be damned! The real artists always struggle against established thinking.
With all these myriad developments surrounding digital media and copyrights, intellectual property, DMCA and other legal developments...does anyone know if visiting our local public library is still legal?
I have a library card, and I use it often, but *gosh* I'd sure hate to have the police show up and haul me off to jail.
I read some Arthur C. Clarke just last week, and with my library card, it didn't cost me anything! Auch, I feel so cheap and dirty! I hope Mr. Clarke is not to angry. I'M SORRY!,-[
Not quite.
FlaskMPEG is designed to interpret the MPEG-2 streams from DVDs and output them to separate encoder softwares. It is a front-end which interprets the.VOB format, and pipes it to another encoder to do the real work.
It comes with bbMPEG (3rd party encoder) which can produce MPEG-1 (i.e. VCD) or MPEG-2 (i.e. DVD, SVCD) streams, but not MPEG-4.
It can also pipe to the Windows AVI system, where you can pick from any AVI codec you have installed (like DivX, or Indeo, or whatever).
Yes. MS won't die any more than Apple Computer has. Althought somewhat arguable, the Macintosh is still managing to hang on, and K-12 schools and media professionals -still- drip for the latest "cubes" or "iFruits". Even in the dark dark days a couple of years ago, when Apple had less than zero corporate direction. They managed to tough it out, and stay alive. Even complacency has not yet killed it.
So then, if all the stomping of a strong Win/LIntel base has not quashed the MacOS from our globe, surely it will take an as yet undiscovered miracle of physics to do so for Microsoft.
As for Linux, Microsoft is good for Linux. Without Microsoft, Linux would not be where it is today. Sure, it stands on its own merits, but it was the zeal of those who are so tired of Microsoft that has accelerated the growth of Linux from a unique collaborative experiment, to a cutting-edge OS. Microsoft still has that effect on the Linux community. If MS didn't exist, then Linux would just be that other OS one would be use if the drivers weren't available in FreeBSD.
Slashdot Mirror
Post looks ripped from the website. Website is very low on details.
The section on pressed-cds makes it seem as though the disc can tell what kind of device it trying to read it, and somehow take action to prevent access if the disc was not intended to be accessible on that device.
Huh?
If it's "encapsulated" red-book, then it's not red-book anymore. An audioCD player would need to be built with logic to read and remove the encapsulation.
I don't see how they could implement this without "bastardizing" the intended CD format. There's no logic on a CD, therefore the logic would need to be in the player or drive, etc.
I can't help but thinking this is vapor. There's no way for me to tell, but the post smells like it was entered by a company marketing employee.
PC:
Maximum PC
Non-PC (by order of personal significance):
Scientific American
Popular Photography
National Geographic
Flying
Aviation Week & Space Tech
Smithsonian
A big share of my computers and infotech information comes from the web and books over periodicals.
I drive two used Fords: a 1999 Contour with the Duratec 24v engine, and a 2000 Merc Sable with the standard Vulcan engine. Both cars are just about right on the EPA numbers, maybe a mile higher. My driving is either city or highway, as I live in a city of 50K, close to work, and take the occasional road trip.
The Contour has 79,000 miles, and the Sable 60,000.
This is a laudable achievement.
The hydrogen is envisioned to replace petrochemicals in automotive uses and small-scale electrical generation with fuel-cells.
The only problem is the ethanol source. Right now it is pretty much corn, period. With present technology, much petrochemicals must be expended to grow the corn and refine it into Ethanol. The fact that no petrochemicals are used in the subsequent conversion to hydrogen is lost on the fact that a large amount of petrochemicals were burned to get the ethanol in the first place.
If a suitably-credentialed person does the math, I think we'd probably find that less petrochemicals would be burned in generating the electricity conventionally, or powering the car conventionally.
We'll have to wait for future tech that can generate the ethanol or hydrogen without using, or by using significantly less petrochemicals.
My idea shouldn't be surprising, because no process is ever 100% efficient.
I'm with you. I started in 35mm photography with the aim of taking astrophotos. I was looking for a body that would fill those requirements. At the same time, my wife suggested we get something robust enough to do great terrestrial photography as well, and replace the limited point-and-shoot'ers lying about.
We chose the Elan 7. Designed for EF lenses, it's an automagic everything SLR, BUT it can be fully manually controlled! You choose! I go manual, my wife goes auto as she gains experience.
I picked up this nifty accessory for it too, an infrared shutter remote. This lets me get into pictures from tens of feet away and have total control. Or, it lets me trip the shutter on long exposures without disturbing the camera. Way better than the old cable system (which is also an option with the Elan), in my opinion.
You're right about the costs. I'm a fan of both film and digital. Each have great PROs and equally great CONs. There's little processing cost for dig, provided you don't print any of the pictures you take! For the cash outlay required to get a nice digital SLR with the same flexibilty as its 35mm counterpart, you could shoot film literally for years, buying and processing the whole way.
The real digital advantage is in capturing precisely the shot you wanted without waste of film or time. Film shooters must take notes, bracket exposures, and cross fingers. Sometimes this may even mean a reshoot after proofing.
I'd say don't cheap out too much. Buy a decent modern body. As you hone your craft, you may appreciate "some" automation down the road.
I have two EF lenses now, and the automation inside them makes for faster shooting, which helps during the high action of, say, jousting at the Renaissance Festival!
With any modern body, you can later purchase t-mounts and adapters which will let you use virually ANY manual lens in existance. Best of both worlds there.
You may find you want to try some elaborate things later like off-camera flash setups. A modern body will make working with external flashes easier, espcially those designed for that particular body. The flash exposure can be setup automatically from the camera body. That means less confusing guide-number charts of which I admit I'm totally ignorant.
My setup also includes a decent film scanner. This lets me take my film into the digital realm as needed. I truly get the best of both this way, and for the time being, I'll keep shooting film on my Elan. I can invest the money saved into more lenses, flashes, tripods, filters, and such.
When digital and film level up, then I will very likely add a digital body. With a little luck, the EF lens system will still be in use and I can retain my EF collection for use on the digital body too!
The limited amount of news and info I have on the subject seems to suggest to me that with the 3G standards effort a total mess (what does 3G truly mean, anyway?) it will slowly die out. As it does 802.11 tech will continue to become more widespread and evolve.
I see descendents of present 802.11 standards merging with cellular, as cell companies realize that their mixed systems of digital phonecalls and data can be much better, and more economically managed in a Voice-over-IP infrastructure.
Far-far ahead, I think the phone system in its entirety will evolve into a far more flexible data pipeline system, with the major telcos providing national and regional backbone networks, and many others providing various other a variety of connection options to the backbone. You'll cease to have a phone jack in your home, and instead have a multipurpose communications jack. Unless you're on some sort of wireless link.
Some cable companies are already offering VoIP phone service over their newly laid down cable Internet infrastructures. It's a good thing.
Cell companies could use the shakeup and breath of fresh air a proven standards like 802.11 and VoIP could bring. Should make voice and data blend more seamlessly behind the phone.
$ who
$ talk someuser
Would that be covered too? Is my Linux box suddenly no longer free? Will I need to pay royalties to AOL?
I ask you, is AOL trying to protect and profit from AOL Instant Messenger, or are they trying to siphon license and royalty fees out of the developers of all the other IM systems?
I just cannot believe how woefully unsalvageable our Patent and Trademark Office has become. I believe that patenting software techniques should be forbidden internationally. I'll stand up for copyrighted source code, but not patents. Computer systems are designed to be multi-purpose, and so they uniquely lend themselves to overly-broad patent creation when people attempt to patent a technique they implemented within a computer.
Somewhere there has to exist a more articulate commentary on what I'm trying to say. I think it's appropriate to patent the specific computer system itself, but not the software techniques used to do work with it.
Patents were designed to protect innovators and allow them to profit from their development work, not as a means of making money by trying to subvert the work of others.
First, let me say that I have always loved Trek, and always will. That being said, I am impressed with the fact that Mr. Shatner has such beautiful and talented horses. My question is this:
:)
What do you think of the recent changes the American Quarter Horse Association has made and are making concerning their excessive white rules, embryo transfer and now the vote that will be coming up in March regarding allowing cremellos and perlinos to be registered?
One other question - would you ever allow a Trek fan who also loves horses to come and see your ranch?
My God. This hosting company is absolutely terrible! Is that kind of treatment even mentioned or condoned in their terms of use? (I bet not.)
Their response was so "knee-jerk-pimply-nerd" it reminds me of the Bastard Sysop from Hell series, and the "Your Company Computer Guy" sketches on Saturday Night Live.
Their response suggests they are a MUCH smaller hosting company than the supposed "pictures" of their facilities indicate. I bet they're really just a couple of kids looking to make a few bucks from the cable-modem and spare Pentium II in their basement. How immature and unprofessional. It's a pa-freakin' website. You serve pages, that's your job. If you can't handle your job, you're fired.
I appeal to the remaining Webmasters.com account holders to FIRE this their hosting company.
Thank you.
I saw the same program. The theory on the vanishing ships was that the gas release from the seafloor was large enough that the local density of the water is lowered, and the ship can no longer maintain bouyancy. It made sense if there were so much gas in one release, that the only water around was that contained in the space between the bubbles. Testing with models in tanks demonstrated the effect, but the researchers were not totally convinced the effect would be the same on the sea.
As for energy, current (very preliminary) estimates indicate there could be more energy locked up in methane hydrates in the sea floor than in all the coal and crude oil extracted from the earth's crust to date.
There was some speculation about the danger of extracting the methane. On another TV program run on TLC, a researcher was concerned that extracting the methane hydrate could accidentally trigger the stuff to undergo the conversion from solid to gas spontaneously, on a very massive scale. The resulting release of gas could be large enough to further upset world climate.
I say, let's investigate. Until we achieve greenhouse-gas free fusion, it could be an excellent energy source, if it can be safely extracted. It's so abundant, we could all drive Toyota Prius-es (or Priuii?) for like $0.01/mile (versus $0.07/mile on a typical 26MPG car at today's fuel prices)
The CD could not "fubar the firmware." However, it could bring out a bug in that firmware that leads to its own state of fubar.
I hate copyprotected CDs. But the fubar'ed iMac CD drive firmware needs to be addressed by Apple.
Yes! Digital extortion is the phrase everyone should keep in mind. This stuff really is getting insane. The courts are burdend with trying to bring justice to legitimate patent cases, while the USPTO's totally awful performance floods that same system with tons of frivilous litigation.
PanIP. What a bunch of opportunists! Makes me wish I could take an icepick to the midsection of the guy over at PanIP who thought up this strategy. If anyone should pay damages...
"Not one red cent!"
I started with Slackware, and I love it. I don't care so much about package management and I ususally compile most software I run from source instead of installing binary packages. There are tools that let a person build a piece of software from a source dist, then track its installation for later easy removal.
/etc/rc.d. Granted, you can do this with any disto, but there are no assumptions made with Slackware about how you'd like to setup your box.
I like Slackware for a lot of reasons, one of which is "YOU" get total control over the look and placement of everything. Want to change the way the system boots, edit the scripts in
I view Slack as a robust, full-featured distro, with a "Do-It-Yourself" feel. You get to decide how you want to build it. And, like a Jedi Knight building a lightsaber at the completion of their training, when done this way, you are much more familiar with the internal goings on of your OS. That really helps to not only fix problems faster, but broaden your understanding of Unix.
Reading the docs of the latest Slack, it seems Patrick Volkerding and his group of active developers were excited about the new changes developing in Linux, and eager to keep Slackware the quality product it is. I'll wait to hear from him, when the distro is at an end.
POV-Ray is a great freeware raytracing engine for Win, Mac, and Unix. It makes use of an easy to learn text-format scene description language. There was a set of include files available for POV-Ray that you could use in your scene description to describe the "camera" lenses and thus yield up many teriffic lens flares. I forgot the name of the package, but I think you can still find it in the contrib section. Very impressive!
http://www.povray.org/
Hotmail's been bare and open to intrusion since it first opened, before SSL secured pages protected the password exchange, and before Microsoft bought them (remember HoTMaiL). When SSL did come about, only the password exchange was secured, the remainder of the session was left as cleartext HTTP. That's how it is today. It's not hard, as others have pointed out, to sniff out anyone's hotmail. Hotmail I believe in their service agreement states that the mail cannot be guaranteed to be private, and you have to accept that if you want to use the service.
So, if you want secured e-mail, do what you'd do on any other mail service, be it web, POP3, IMAP or whatever...PGP the message, and e-mail the PGP cyphertext. Otherwise, they are all just cleartext.
(I was there at the beginning, HoTMaiL's launch on July 4th, 1996.)
Take the frozen 360-degree action shots from "The Matrix". That movie's cinematographers created the technique to capture the essence of a turning point in the action. It turned into a very "art"ful shot, giving new meaning to the sequence.
Today, you can see that same basic technique showing up in action sequences almost everywhere (like TNT's new "Witchblade" TV show), but in canned form. Something a non-artistically-inclined director can pull from the shelf in canned form and insert where he pleases. The result: an overused gimmick that, if anything, detracts from the overall drama of the sequence. In simple terms: The Matrix's shot felt slick, but Witchblade's shot feels hollow and cheap.
I believe CG can be used to create worthy art, and detractors be damned! The real artists always struggle against established thinking.
Yeah, whatever, Beefcake.
I have a library card, and I use it often, but *gosh* I'd sure hate to have the police show up and haul me off to jail.
I read some Arthur C. Clarke just last week, and with my library card, it didn't cost me anything! Auch, I feel so cheap and dirty! I hope Mr. Clarke is not to angry. I'M SORRY! ,-[
It comes with bbMPEG (3rd party encoder) which can produce MPEG-1 (i.e. VCD) or MPEG-2 (i.e. DVD, SVCD) streams, but not MPEG-4.
It can also pipe to the Windows AVI system, where you can pick from any AVI codec you have installed (like DivX, or Indeo, or whatever).
No MPEG-4 support.
Yes. MS won't die any more than Apple Computer has. Althought somewhat arguable, the Macintosh is still managing to hang on, and K-12 schools and media professionals -still- drip for the latest "cubes" or "iFruits". Even in the dark dark days a couple of years ago, when Apple had less than zero corporate direction. They managed to tough it out, and stay alive. Even complacency has not yet killed it. So then, if all the stomping of a strong Win/LIntel base has not quashed the MacOS from our globe, surely it will take an as yet undiscovered miracle of physics to do so for Microsoft. As for Linux, Microsoft is good for Linux. Without Microsoft, Linux would not be where it is today. Sure, it stands on its own merits, but it was the zeal of those who are so tired of Microsoft that has accelerated the growth of Linux from a unique collaborative experiment, to a cutting-edge OS. Microsoft still has that effect on the Linux community. If MS didn't exist, then Linux would just be that other OS one would be use if the drivers weren't available in FreeBSD.