Yes, I belong in one of the many countries outside the US (they do exist, you know) using a national ID card successfully. The hysteria and paranoia over National IDs just amazes me.
Some of the torrent trackers use download links that does URL redirection that mldonkey isn't able to handle when the "dllink $url" command is sent to it. BTjunkie is one which gives me problem, isohunt and piratebay torrent links works fine for me. Anyone has any idea if there is a fix for this or should I simply stick to sites with links that work?
I'm not sure about how/dev/urandom works on FreeBSD, but on Linux it's not a pure PRNG./dev/urandom on Linux grabs entropy from/dev/random (which is a true RNG) and reverts to using PRNG when it's out of entropy.
Re:A Creative Lawsuit is as American as Apple Pie
on
Apple Sues Creative
·
· Score: 1
The problem is hardly with Creative needing to be innovative and coming out with products. If you actually bother to compare their product lineups, you will find that Creative has been the more innovative of the two companies and arguably has equal or better featured products from a technical point of view. Creative released its first mp3 player around 18 months before the ipod was first released.
Creative's failure has nothing to do with lack of innovation and all to do with fuxked up marketing.
Just got banned today after playing WOW because I am not currently in North America. Apparently Blizzard does not care about those who are stationed abroad in the Armed Forces and working for them. I purchased WOW in the Post Exchange in Seoul Korea on the Yongsan Army Base there, which is considered by law, U.S. Soil. I installed the game and created my account using my U.S. Credit Card from Delaware. My billing address was an APO, AP address which stands for Armed Forces Pacific, Army Postal. After playing the game for 3 months I got an email stating this:
" Access to the World of Warcraft account BTOBEYONDER, and all World of Warcraft accounts associated with the payment information you have provided, has been permanently disabled. It is implicitly stated on the account creation page that: This account creation process is only available to customers in North America, New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore. As a result, the account(s) will no longer be accessible in any way and will not be reopened under any circumstances. Thank you for your time and understanding in this matter.
Regards, Account Administration Blizzard Entertainment "
How could you not feel comfortable with Lenovo after checking out the secret Lenovo Tapes that show the kind of testing and developement going on in the Lenovo labs?
I did not have that problem when I (from Singapore, also a Visa Waivered country) visited the US the year after 9/11. I landed in NY for a couple of days and went north to Montreal for a few days, visited Ontario and Ottawa before coming back through Niagara.
I remembered the instructions on the Visa Waiver form specifically said that if I'm leaving the US temporarily and plan to come back before the end of the visa period, I should not surrender the half of the Visa Waiver form stapled to my passport. So we simply informed the Immigration lady that we need to keep the form, and she smiled and let us through. No problems coming back too.
P.S. I just love those road signs at the border saying "We are now using the metric system for speed limits"
Ok, perhaps "doesn't work all that nicely with Windows" was abit of an exaggeration. I use gaim on WinXP at work too, and generally I'm quite happy with it. Just wish that the look and feel of it would be more consistent with the standard Windows apps.
And that the width on the chat tabs can be limited so that onefriend "Jane Doe - I'm feeling really bitchy today!!!!!" doesn't push all the other tabs out of view...
Most of the 3rd party multi-protocol IM clients are cross-platform, the only exception I can think of is gaim. Gaim, however requires the use of gtk, and gtk doesn't work all that nicely with Windows, even with the gtk-wimp theme.
A Mozilla-based IM client would solve the these problem, and I would really look forward to one.
Use foobar2000. Learn to use the auto-freedb lookup feature. Foobar2000 automatically searches for the album for you from freedb (looking up either the tagged discid, the tagged album name or the name of the first track, whichever is available), or you can manually search for the album yourself and enter the discid, and then automatically tags all the tracks for you with the information from freedb.
...why so many people here seem to have very strong objections to identity cards being implemented in the US, looking at the way SSN has been implemented and used.
Identity cards and identity numbers have been implemented successfully in many other countries. The trick, of course, is that everyone understands that the ID is not a secret, but just an identifier. It cannot be used to verify someone's identity by just producing the number. Once that is understood, that solves most so-called identity theft problems we keep hearing about.
WoW has been pretty much out of stock and off the shelves for the past couple of weeks anyway. I've had to get my copy for a ransom on ebay, but I've had no regrets. I don't experience the server problems many other users have complaint about. Yes, my latency is high, being somewhere far from the US, but I do not have to wait in queue, or had server crashes or anything like that.
Here's a simple hint: If you're an idiot who pick a High Population server to play in, stop whining about spending hours on the fucking queue. It's only own fucking fault and you should have known this was coming. I picked a just-turned-medium population server and have been very happy with it. If you joined a server in low or medium population and it turned high, then I'm sorry, tough luck I guess. Anyway, Blizzard has mentioned that they are looking to allow players to transfer their characters from high population servers to low population servers. We'll see how that turns out.
I've worked in 2 MMORPG companies, and have handled at least 5 different MMORPG games, and I can tell you that no amount of hardware or network structure can handle a battle of more than 40 or 50 people within the same area.
MMORPGs were meant to have players spread out over the game world, where bandwidth requirement is similar to O(n). When you have a big number of players within the same area, the bandwidth requirement becomes somthing like O(n). Imagine each time one person swings a sword, everyone within the same area gets sent a message telling them that the player swings a sword. If we have 50 players in the area idling and watching the player, there will only be 50 packets being sent. Turn it into a battle where everyone swings a sword, we're talking about 2500 packets, which will grow exponentially with the number of players within the same area.
High frequencies are not exactly truncated. It just so happens that after quantisation, most of them drop to 0. If there are any outstanding high frequencies that are non-zero, it will not be truncated.
JPEG doesn't just rely on RLE, but rather it is a Huffman-RLE combination. Basically, for each element in the DCT block, JPEG will code the coefficient value together with the number of 0-coefficient elements after this, with the code taken from a Huffman table.
The quantised DCT coefficients of a JPEG image are compressed using a JPEG standard huffman table. From what I've seen, this table is far from optimized even for "the average of the majority" of images out there.
Ogg Vorbis stores its own huffman table in its own stream. The default encoder uses a table optimized for the general audio you can find out there. There is a utility called "rehuff" (goggle it yourself please) that will calculate and build a huffman table optimized for a particular stream and it seems that on average it reduces an Ogg Vorbis filesize by about 5-10%.
Building an optimized huffman table for individual JPEGs will probably yield such improved compression rates too. If the original JPEG tables are less optimized than the Ogg Vorbis ones, the reduction will be even higher. But 30% seems a little... optimistic.
Well, it's true that mp3pro didn't really catch on due to the heavy competition in the 64kbps arena where it goes up against Ogg Vorbis, AAC (HE) and WMA, and performs rather decently. But the "pro" portion (spectral bitrate replication) lives on as it can be plugged into just about any codec, and is now used in HE-AAC encoders such as Ahead Nero's.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I belong in one of the many countries outside the US (they do exist, you know) using a national ID card successfully. The hysteria and paranoia over National IDs just amazes me.
..is 18.7%
http://ff123.net/abx/abx.php
C|Net left that big one out.
But hey! Neverwinter Nights 2 is out!
Some of the torrent trackers use download links that does URL redirection that mldonkey isn't able to handle when the "dllink $url" command is sent to it. BTjunkie is one which gives me problem, isohunt and piratebay torrent links works fine for me. Anyone has any idea if there is a fix for this or should I simply stick to sites with links that work?
I'm not sure about how /dev/urandom works on FreeBSD, but on Linux it's not a pure PRNG. /dev/urandom on Linux grabs entropy from /dev/random (which is a true RNG) and reverts to using PRNG when it's out of entropy.
The problem is hardly with Creative needing to be innovative and coming out with products. If you actually bother to compare their product lineups, you will find that Creative has been the more innovative of the two companies and arguably has equal or better featured products from a technical point of view. Creative released its first mp3 player around 18 months before the ipod was first released.
Creative's failure has nothing to do with lack of innovation and all to do with fuxked up marketing.
From http://vnboards.ign.com/wow_general_board/b19789/9 6506468/p1/?73
Just got banned today after playing WOW because I am not currently in North America. Apparently Blizzard does not care about those who are stationed abroad in the Armed Forces and working for them. I purchased WOW in the Post Exchange in Seoul Korea on the Yongsan Army Base there, which is considered by law, U.S. Soil. I installed the game and created my account using my U.S. Credit Card from Delaware. My billing address was an APO, AP address which stands for Armed Forces Pacific, Army Postal. After playing the game for 3 months I got an email stating this:
" Access to the World of Warcraft account BTOBEYONDER, and all World of Warcraft accounts associated with the payment information you have provided, has been permanently disabled. It is implicitly stated on the account creation page that: This account creation process is only available to customers in North America, New Zealand, Australia, and Singapore. As a result, the account(s) will no longer be accessible in any way and will not be reopened under any circumstances. Thank you for your time and understanding in this matter.
Regards,
Account Administration
Blizzard Entertainment "
And the winner will be decided by whoever the pirates choose to support.
Just like DVD.
How could you not feel comfortable with Lenovo after checking out the secret Lenovo Tapes that show the kind of testing and developement going on in the Lenovo labs?
Anyone remembers the ending from Eye of the Beholder?
2 pages of text, then get thrown out to C:\>
I simply sat there amazed.
Fortunately, the ending from Eye of the Beholder II was great and more than made up for it.
Or you will end up like this guy here:w ow-realm-cenarioncircle&t=145812&p=1&tmp=1#post145 812
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=
I'm pretty sure they were written by Timothy Zahn. Yes, I have the books sitting on my shelf behind me...
if a porno star photographs another porno star?
I did not have that problem when I (from Singapore, also a Visa Waivered country) visited the US the year after 9/11. I landed in NY for a couple of days and went north to Montreal for a few days, visited Ontario and Ottawa before coming back through Niagara.
I remembered the instructions on the Visa Waiver form specifically said that if I'm leaving the US temporarily and plan to come back before the end of the visa period, I should not surrender the half of the Visa Waiver form stapled to my passport. So we simply informed the Immigration lady that we need to keep the form, and she smiled and let us through. No problems coming back too.
P.S. I just love those road signs at the border saying "We are now using the metric system for speed limits"
One of the funniest short videos I've seen, spoofing Star Wars and American Pie.
Link
Ok, perhaps "doesn't work all that nicely with Windows" was abit of an exaggeration. I use gaim on WinXP at work too, and generally I'm quite happy with it. Just wish that the look and feel of it would be more consistent with the standard Windows apps.
And that the width on the chat tabs can be limited so that onefriend "Jane Doe - I'm feeling really bitchy today!!!!!" doesn't push all the other tabs out of view...
Cross platform compatibility and consistency.
Most of the 3rd party multi-protocol IM clients are cross-platform, the only exception I can think of is gaim. Gaim, however requires the use of gtk, and gtk doesn't work all that nicely with Windows, even with the gtk-wimp theme.
A Mozilla-based IM client would solve the these problem, and I would really look forward to one.
Use foobar2000.
Learn to use the auto-freedb lookup feature.
Foobar2000 automatically searches for the album for you from freedb (looking up either the tagged discid, the tagged album name or the name of the first track, whichever is available), or you can manually search for the album yourself and enter the discid, and then automatically tags all the tracks for you with the information from freedb.
...why so many people here seem to have very strong objections to identity cards being implemented in the US, looking at the way SSN has been implemented and used.
Identity cards and identity numbers have been implemented successfully in many other countries. The trick, of course, is that everyone understands that the ID is not a secret, but just an identifier. It cannot be used to verify someone's identity by just producing the number. Once that is understood, that solves most so-called identity theft problems we keep hearing about.
Hmm.. yeah. I actually typed in the ascii code for power of 2 but it disappeared after i submitted it.
Testing again ->
WoW has been pretty much out of stock and off the shelves for the past couple of weeks anyway. I've had to get my copy for a ransom on ebay, but I've had no regrets. I don't experience the server problems many other users have complaint about. Yes, my latency is high, being somewhere far from the US, but I do not have to wait in queue, or had server crashes or anything like that.
Here's a simple hint: If you're an idiot who pick a High Population server to play in, stop whining about spending hours on the fucking queue. It's only own fucking fault and you should have known this was coming. I picked a just-turned-medium population server and have been very happy with it. If you joined a server in low or medium population and it turned high, then I'm sorry, tough luck I guess. Anyway, Blizzard has mentioned that they are looking to allow players to transfer their characters from high population servers to low population servers. We'll see how that turns out.
I've worked in 2 MMORPG companies, and have handled at least 5 different MMORPG games, and I can tell you that no amount of hardware or network structure can handle a battle of more than 40 or 50 people within the same area.
MMORPGs were meant to have players spread out over the game world, where bandwidth requirement is similar to O(n). When you have a big number of players within the same area, the bandwidth requirement becomes somthing like O(n). Imagine each time one person swings a sword, everyone within the same area gets sent a message telling them that the player swings a sword. If we have 50 players in the area idling and watching the player, there will only be 50 packets being sent. Turn it into a battle where everyone swings a sword, we're talking about 2500 packets, which will grow exponentially with the number of players within the same area.
High frequencies are not exactly truncated. It just so happens that after quantisation, most of them drop to 0. If there are any outstanding high frequencies that are non-zero, it will not be truncated.
JPEG doesn't just rely on RLE, but rather it is a Huffman-RLE combination. Basically, for each element in the DCT block, JPEG will code the coefficient value together with the number of 0-coefficient elements after this, with the code taken from a Huffman table.
The quantised DCT coefficients of a JPEG image are compressed using a JPEG standard huffman table. From what I've seen, this table is far from optimized even for "the average of the majority" of images out there.
Ogg Vorbis stores its own huffman table in its own stream. The default encoder uses a table optimized for the general audio you can find out there. There is a utility called "rehuff" (goggle it yourself please) that will calculate and build a huffman table optimized for a particular stream and it seems that on average it reduces an Ogg Vorbis filesize by about 5-10%.
Building an optimized huffman table for individual JPEGs will probably yield such improved compression rates too. If the original JPEG tables are less optimized than the Ogg Vorbis ones, the reduction will be even higher. But 30% seems a little... optimistic.
Well, it's true that mp3pro didn't really catch on due to the heavy competition in the 64kbps arena where it goes up against Ogg Vorbis, AAC (HE) and WMA, and performs rather decently. But the "pro" portion (spectral bitrate replication) lives on as it can be plugged into just about any codec, and is now used in HE-AAC encoders such as Ahead Nero's.