Seriously, MPEG-4 eats so much processing power, it would be practically impossible to encode it at any reasonable rate with... well, with just about any hardware currently available for reasonable prices... and even decoding it requires the power of a Celeron-400. What makes you think it's smarter to make a standalone box than to just use your computer?
Damn it, there should be some kind of codec optimized for lines-and-shapes. True, adding another codec to every DVD player in the world is an utter nightmare in the making, but even for Futurama/Family Guy/Simpsons/Daria/etc rips on IRC, it's plain stupid to be distributing them in RealMedia or DivX;-). There's just not that much information there, people!
If you're going to load and arbitrary codec onto the disc, you're opening up a whole new can of worms. DivX;-) is a processor-intensive codec, requiring (wild guess here) at least a Celeron-400 to decode at anything like realtime.
Wait, you want to use dedicated hardware to speed up the process? Sorry, can't use arbitrary codecs with hardwired logic.
Do you really want to buy a disc and have it say "Requires a 450-MFLOP DVD Player" on it?
Toasting DivX;-) onto a DVD and playing it on your computer is perfectly feasible. But there's no way to make the player forwardly upgradeable. The big reason they're all so damned cheap is because the only processing power needed is an MPEG-2 decoder chip.
No. Manned spaceflight is (estimating here) at least an order of magnitude more expensive than unmanned. We still lack cheap (under $100/kg, as someone here said), reusable (Space Shuttle? not reusable---salvageable) launch technology.
It's clear that we need to learn to build decent ships before we start stuffing them with people. Yes, the eventual point is human transport. But we need to develop the ships first, and it's ridiculous to waste money on ferrying people around in test rockets. At this point, there's really no reason to.
My point is that manned spaceflight serves no purpose now other than to detract resources from actual useful development.
Make no mistake, there is no way we're getting affordable launch technology if we just keep throwing expensive shuttles at everything. We need something cheap and reusable. Kinda like the Rotary Rocket, which I am eternally pissed about the loss of.
In the long run, development of an orbital taxi would do more for humanity moving towards space than a dozen ISS boondoggles.
Bah. That was the kind of thinking that put incredibly expensive men on the moon and is costing a hundred billion dollars for a practically useless "space station".
Consider Deep Space One, which, at a thousandth the cost of the ISS, managed to test five major new technologies. Which would we be better off with---the ISS, or a thousand Deep Space probes, actually improving technology instead of whoring useless PR to the six o'clock news?
Manned space travel just isn't feasible. Let go of the stupid "cool" factor and focus on the machinery. When something like the much-lamented Rotary Rocket is built that can act as a low-earth-orbit "taxi", then we'll talk about manned spaceflight.
Well, at least he didn't use the phrase "Evil RF Rays". But he *did* talk about the children, 'cause who gives a rats ass is the adults get head cancer...
Everyone who says this, in one form or another---"if I could buy tunes at a reasonable price, I would!"---put your money where your mouth is.
eMusic.com exists, and other, similar, services probably do as well.
So, I suppose we'll find out now if all that Slashdotter hot air had any substance. I have a feeling that many of the people who espoused the above sentiment, when given the chance to actually pay for the music, won't give up their gNapster, Morpheus or what-have-you.
-grendel drago
[*toot* celebrating my 350th post, whee!]
Basically, I want infrastructure. All the rest is frothy shit on top. Unfortunately, commercial organisations aren't very good at providing infrastructure. All they can think of is the frothy shit.
Man, that one is definitely going in the quotefile. Thanks a bundle.
TeX was never meant to appeal to "Joe Average". Knuth says as much himself in the TeXbook. It's meant for producing technical manuscripts of the highest possible quality. For most tasks, MS Word will do the trick.
But for those of us who need kickass math functionality, are preparing a thesis, or are awed by the geek-factor, TeX is *it*.
TeX (and by this I mean LaTeX as well) is not meant to be used lightly. But for large, complex projects, its power and utility are evident. It simply scales much, much better than editors like Word.
Good for StarOffice if it wants to take over the office suite market. It's an important part of getting Linux on the desktop... but TeX is something utterly different.
And about the fonts... what is it you're trying to do? Do you have some TrueType fonts you want to use with TeX?
Yeah, I was using gnut. Problem was, I never got anything from 137.99.*.* (on-campus addresses).
I did find a ratio FTP site on oth.net that was local. Getting a half-megabyte per second while fetching music videos is *nice*. I even sent him some movies I had---after all, what hassle is it to me? If only it'd happen more often... or if I could get oth.net to show me all sites in 137.99.*.*...
METAFONT is pretty much integrated into TeX if you're using... well, I've only used teTeX and MiKTeX, but there are scripts to autogenerate any fonts that are needed.
And... well, you can't compete with the userbase. It's been a standard for nearly twenty years. The original program is probably as close to bug-free as any large piece of software can possibly be. Did I mention the enormous userbase?
TeX is far from dead. It's Knuth's dream that a TeX file written today will be compilable and readable in a hundred years. Given how entrenched the system is, I think this is quite likely.
It appears that you've managed to move the focus of the debate from "Industry Lobbies To Curtail Fair Use!" to "Lazy Slashdot Punks Are All Pirates!".
Regardless of whether the industry is losing its shirt, we have the right to fair use. When the industry sells us product, we as consumers have the right to fair use. The industry's desire to eliminate the potential for crime is a distant priority at best.
It is never okay to abrogate a right in order to remove the potential for crime. I'm trying to think of an example to put here, but they're all coming out police-state-y, and I don't want to fall prey to Godwin.
You're right, it wouldn't matter if there were some simple way to limit transfers to within the university network. I'm not aware of any such solutions, though... if there *is* something, I'm certainly all ears.
Is this Scooby Doo? Do I now pull of your mask and reveal you to be Jack Valenti?
1. Cry me a river. For some reason, pity doesn't exactly gush from my heart for the poor, poor movie studios. The cost of any movie not considered a flop is recouped in the theatrical release. Making the DVD is gravy.
2. Umm, studios make mediocre, derivative crap because they are afraid to take risks. This is why they make sequels. They know that enough people will go see it to make back their investment, and then some. This is what happens when a supposedly ``artistic'' industry is run by a bunch of accountants.
3. Like I said, theatrical release almost always makes the cost of the movie. They could *give away* digital copies of the film once it had made back the investment plus ten percent. What a wacky concept, eh?
movies and music ARE NOT PART OF YOUR INALIENABLE RIGHTS
No. But fair use is.
Companies can charge WHATEVER THEY WANT for their products.
Yeah, so?
I think we have two different perspectives here. Sure, piracy is illegal. But any technique that would supposedly prevent piracy would also prevent fair use. I'm sure the studios will be crying all the way to the bank.
I'm having a really hard time believing you're a) serious, and b) not Jack Valenti.
You're thinking of bugs in TeX and METAFONT. Those are currently worth $327.68 apiece, and (I think) will continue to occasionally double so long as Knuth is alive. (Beyond that, any bug is classified as a feature.) Bugs in the books have always been worth $2.56.
Do you know **why** the views taken by the two political parties are so similar? It's terribly obvious: think of an issue as a variable, ranging from ``reactionary'' to ``revolutionary''. The level of public support for a given stance will most likely resemble a bell curve.
Now, each party picks a position. The ``conservative'' party will get all votes to the right of their stake, and the ``liberal'' party all votes to the left. The in-betweens are up for grabs. (This is why we have television!) This is why elections are won by one and two percent. If one party slips too far away from the center, they begin to lose support, and so move closer to the other party. Example: Americans have grown much more tolerant of the idea of gay rights (at least when people they don't know get one) over the last fifty years. Whereas both parties previously resided on the ``gays bad and unnatural! institutionalize!'' side of the debate, that point of view is now limited to white-power activists, Slashdot trolls and Pat Robertson. Both parties at the very least recognize that gays are not automatically evil. The issue was moved to the left.
Just because you're surrounded by people with wacky beliefs, it doesn't make those beliefs any more popular in the General Populace.
Slashdot Mirror
Consumers will just think "Shiny! Four Letter Acronym! Ooh!", and buy it. Come on, how many people even know what SDMI stands for?
-grendel drago
-grendel drago
Seriously, MPEG-4 eats so much processing power, it would be practically impossible to encode it at any reasonable rate with... well, with just about any hardware currently available for reasonable prices... and even decoding it requires the power of a Celeron-400. What makes you think it's smarter to make a standalone box than to just use your computer?
-grendel drago
Why is animation encoded like everything else?
;-). There's just not that much information there, people!
Damn it, there should be some kind of codec optimized for lines-and-shapes. True, adding another codec to every DVD player in the world is an utter nightmare in the making, but even for Futurama/Family Guy/Simpsons/Daria/etc rips on IRC, it's plain stupid to be distributing them in RealMedia or DivX
-grendel drago
If you're going to load and arbitrary codec onto the disc, you're opening up a whole new can of worms. DivX ;-) is a processor-intensive codec, requiring (wild guess here) at least a Celeron-400 to decode at anything like realtime.
;-) onto a DVD and playing it on your computer is perfectly feasible. But there's no way to make the player forwardly upgradeable. The big reason they're all so damned cheap is because the only processing power needed is an MPEG-2 decoder chip.
Wait, you want to use dedicated hardware to speed up the process? Sorry, can't use arbitrary codecs with hardwired logic.
Do you really want to buy a disc and have it say "Requires a 450-MFLOP DVD Player" on it?
Toasting DivX
-grendel drago
APEX AD-1500. $79 at Circuit City. Plays DVD, DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, DVD+RW, CD, CD-R, CD-RW. Plays VCD, SVCD, MP3, XVCD.
Upgradeable with a freely available ROM image to set region to zero and to disable Macrovision.
These D-VHS schmucks *really* have nothing to offer.
-grendel drago
No. Manned spaceflight is (estimating here) at least an order of magnitude more expensive than unmanned. We still lack cheap (under $100/kg, as someone here said), reusable (Space Shuttle? not reusable---salvageable) launch technology.
It's clear that we need to learn to build decent ships before we start stuffing them with people. Yes, the eventual point is human transport. But we need to develop the ships first, and it's ridiculous to waste money on ferrying people around in test rockets. At this point, there's really no reason to.
First the ships, then the people.
-grendel drago
Eventually. Not now.
My point is that manned spaceflight serves no purpose now other than to detract resources from actual useful development.
Make no mistake, there is no way we're getting affordable launch technology if we just keep throwing expensive shuttles at everything. We need something cheap and reusable. Kinda like the Rotary Rocket, which I am eternally pissed about the loss of.
In the long run, development of an orbital taxi would do more for humanity moving towards space than a dozen ISS boondoggles.
-grendel drago
Bah. That was the kind of thinking that put incredibly expensive men on the moon and is costing a hundred billion dollars for a practically useless "space station".
Consider Deep Space One, which, at a thousandth the cost of the ISS, managed to test five major new technologies. Which would we be better off with---the ISS, or a thousand Deep Space probes, actually improving technology instead of whoring useless PR to the six o'clock news?
Manned space travel just isn't feasible. Let go of the stupid "cool" factor and focus on the machinery. When something like the much-lamented Rotary Rocket is built that can act as a low-earth-orbit "taxi", then we'll talk about manned spaceflight.
-grendel drago
Cool! Thanks a bunch.
Well, at least he didn't use the phrase "Evil RF Rays". But he *did* talk about the children, 'cause who gives a rats ass is the adults get head cancer...
-grendel drago
And this is different from what Napster is doing... how?
Any moment now, that Fanning kid is going to pull an Enron, and we can all laugh and point at his investors together. *warm fuzzy*
-grendel drago
Everyone who says this, in one form or another---"if I could buy tunes at a reasonable price, I would!"---put your money where your mouth is.
eMusic.com exists, and other, similar, services probably do as well.
So, I suppose we'll find out now if all that Slashdotter hot air had any substance. I have a feeling that many of the people who espoused the above sentiment, when given the chance to actually pay for the music, won't give up their gNapster, Morpheus or what-have-you.
-grendel drago
[*toot* celebrating my 350th post, whee!]
Man, that one is definitely going in the quotefile. Thanks a bundle.
Heh. "Frothy shit".
-grendel drago
Even though This Is Slashdot, and such things are unheard of here...
... back up that "evil RF rays" quote with a reference. Was it a US senator or a state senator?
-grendel drago
TeX was never meant to appeal to "Joe Average". Knuth says as much himself in the TeXbook. It's meant for producing technical manuscripts of the highest possible quality. For most tasks, MS Word will do the trick.
But for those of us who need kickass math functionality, are preparing a thesis, or are awed by the geek-factor, TeX is *it*.
TeX (and by this I mean LaTeX as well) is not meant to be used lightly. But for large, complex projects, its power and utility are evident. It simply scales much, much better than editors like Word.
Good for StarOffice if it wants to take over the office suite market. It's an important part of getting Linux on the desktop... but TeX is something utterly different.
And about the fonts... what is it you're trying to do? Do you have some TrueType fonts you want to use with TeX?
http://www.radamir.com/tex/ttf-tex.htm
It's nontrivial, but it certainly can be done...
-grendel drago
Yeah, I was using gnut. Problem was, I never got anything from 137.99.*.* (on-campus addresses).
I did find a ratio FTP site on oth.net that was local. Getting a half-megabyte per second while fetching music videos is *nice*. I even sent him some movies I had---after all, what hassle is it to me? If only it'd happen more often... or if I could get oth.net to show me all sites in 137.99.*.*...
-grendel drago
Uh, no.
METAFONT is pretty much integrated into TeX if you're using... well, I've only used teTeX and MiKTeX, but there are scripts to autogenerate any fonts that are needed.
And... well, you can't compete with the userbase. It's been a standard for nearly twenty years. The original program is probably as close to bug-free as any large piece of software can possibly be. Did I mention the enormous userbase?
TeX is far from dead. It's Knuth's dream that a TeX file written today will be compilable and readable in a hundred years. Given how entrenched the system is, I think this is quite likely.
-grendel drago
It appears that you've managed to move the focus of the debate from "Industry Lobbies To Curtail Fair Use!" to "Lazy Slashdot Punks Are All Pirates!".
Regardless of whether the industry is losing its shirt, we have the right to fair use. When the industry sells us product, we as consumers have the right to fair use. The industry's desire to eliminate the potential for crime is a distant priority at best.
It is never okay to abrogate a right in order to remove the potential for crime. I'm trying to think of an example to put here, but they're all coming out police-state-y, and I don't want to fall prey to Godwin.
-grendel drago
Damn, that's good. Except it'd be pronounced "ga-NOOTH".
*snapplause*[*].
-grendel drago
[*] ``Snapplause'' is the sound of scads of people snapping their fingers in approval, Beatnik-style.
It's just for off-campus use.
You're right, it wouldn't matter if there were some simple way to limit transfers to within the university network. I'm not aware of any such solutions, though... if there *is* something, I'm certainly all ears.
-grendel drago
1. Cry me a river. For some reason, pity doesn't exactly gush from my heart for the poor, poor movie studios. The cost of any movie not considered a flop is recouped in the theatrical release. Making the DVD is gravy.
2. Umm, studios make mediocre, derivative crap because they are afraid to take risks. This is why they make sequels. They know that enough people will go see it to make back their investment, and then some. This is what happens when a supposedly ``artistic'' industry is run by a bunch of accountants.
3. Like I said, theatrical release almost always makes the cost of the movie. They could *give away* digital copies of the film once it had made back the investment plus ten percent. What a wacky concept, eh?
No. But fair use is.
Yeah, so?
I think we have two different perspectives here. Sure, piracy is illegal. But any technique that would supposedly prevent piracy would also prevent fair use. I'm sure the studios will be crying all the way to the bank.
I'm having a really hard time believing you're a) serious, and b) not Jack Valenti.
-grendel drago
It's not on the main page. The casual reader doesn't see it. I didn't even know it had been accepted until I looked at my user-info page.
-grendel drago
You're thinking of bugs in TeX and METAFONT. Those are currently worth $327.68 apiece, and (I think) will continue to occasionally double so long as Knuth is alive. (Beyond that, any bug is classified as a feature.) Bugs in the books have always been worth $2.56.
-grendel drago
Do you know **why** the views taken by the two political parties are so similar? It's terribly obvious: think of an issue as a variable, ranging from ``reactionary'' to ``revolutionary''. The level of public support for a given stance will most likely resemble a bell curve.
Now, each party picks a position. The ``conservative'' party will get all votes to the right of their stake, and the ``liberal'' party all votes to the left. The in-betweens are up for grabs. (This is why we have television!) This is why elections are won by one and two percent. If one party slips too far away from the center, they begin to lose support, and so move closer to the other party. Example: Americans have grown much more tolerant of the idea of gay rights (at least when people they don't know get one) over the last fifty years. Whereas both parties previously resided on the ``gays bad and unnatural! institutionalize!'' side of the debate, that point of view is now limited to white-power activists, Slashdot trolls and Pat Robertson. Both parties at the very least recognize that gays are not automatically evil. The issue was moved to the left.
Just because you're surrounded by people with wacky beliefs, it doesn't make those beliefs any more popular in the General Populace.
-grendel drago
Wait, do you mean you just got an adapter from the DVD player directly to the TV? That's not nearly as exciting...
-grendel drago