...who saw the title and thought it strange that IBM would pursue someone who "chipped" a PS/2? If I drop a 387DX into a Model 80, am I going to get into trouble?
(Maybe you should come up with some other abbreviation for "Playstation 2"...abbreviation overloading is a Bad Thing.:-) )
The point is that any of those 3 separately are kinda bland. The mixture of them all makes it MUCH better
Potato soup from scratch is fairly simple, and I suspect much better (WRT taste and nutrition). A bag of spuds also costs next to nothing.
Peel and dice a good-sized potato (the size you'd eat if baked, or a little smaller...you could also use two or three smaller potatoes, of course).
Steam or boil until tender, about 15-20 minutes (steaming preferred).
Drain. Pour in enough milk to cover and add 1 tbsp. butter, salt and pepper to taste, and whatever other stuff you might want in there (cooked crumbled bacon, some minced onion, cheese, or whatever). Heat it until it's however you want it.
Hmmm, I just filed US Patent 6,783,251 describing a "Method for displaying graphical images using ASCII characters".
All the ASCII pr0n that's been circulating for decades is prior art...sorry.:-)
Re:Henry Ford set to release Model "A"
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
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· Score: 2
How well do unleaded cars run on the leaded gasoline of early cars?
If you removed the catalytic converter, it'd run just fine. Newer ('81 and up, if you're talking about GM) cars with oxygen sensors might run into trouble unless you can track down an oxygen sensor that isn't bothered by lead, but my father yanked the catalytic converter out of an '80 Chevette before having it shipped to England in '84. It ran without the cat for nearly four years with no problems other than a slight tendency to backfire on deceleration. When we returned to the States, the cat went back in and it ran for several more years until it was totaled in an accident.
Since when is the 8080...
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· Score: 5, Interesting
...considered part of the x86 family? The first processor in that lineup is the 8086. I think the 8086 might've been source-code-compatible (to some extent) with the 8080, but you can't take an 8080 binary and run it on any x86 processor (emulation doesn't count).
I think that it's michael's injury, not his daughter's, but the injury to him (as an athiest) is that his daughter has been brought up 'indoctrinated' in a pledge of alegience that forces people to honor a god that he doesn't believe in.
His beliefs (or lack thereof) are irrelevant. His ex-girlfriend (they were never married) has primary custody, so their daughter is to be raised as she sees fit and he has no right to interfere.
Michael Newdow used his daughter so that he would have standing to bring his case to court. We now know that his case was brought forward under false pretenses. If he coached (coerced?) his daughter to say something in court that she doesn't believe is true, that is subornation of perjury. His own misrepresentation of his daughter's "injury" ought to count as perjury by itself. IANAL, but if I'm not mistaken, an officer of the court (such as a lawyer) who lies and/or twists the truth in court is usually regarded as a Very Bad Thing. For lying to the court, Michael Newdow ought to be disbarred.
I used to think/.ers were just being paranoid about this kinda stuff untill I realized that my DSL providor, Bellsouth, was blocking access to biz.yahoo.com and comments.fuckedcompany.com. They do this by not resolving (or somehow blocking the resolving of) these hosts.
It's easy enough to set up your own DNS cache and use that. Not only does it bypass your ISP's name servers, but since fewer DNS queries will need to go out onto the Internet, you should also see a slight increase in browsing speed.
I think the problem with SVCD is the amount of video you can get on a CD. A CD is only good for about a 1/2 hour of video, and this limits the use.
I regularly put 45-60 minutes (sometimes a little more) of good-quality video (better than VHS) on an SVCD. It's not as much as the 80 minutes you can get with VCD, but it's better quality. Have a look at this page to get some idea of what I do and what software I use for it.
Just like how VHS replaced 16mm film (do any teachers know how to thread a reel these days?)
Did they ever know how to load a projector? Starting in third or fourth grade, I (or one of a few other kids) usually did that--threaded the film through (assuming that it wasn't an autoloading projector), checked the focus and framing, etc. ("Third or fourth grade," BTW, would've been the early '80s.)
I personally like the 8mm CD-Rs. They hold about 24 minutes of audio or VCD, and are perfect for typical 30 minute shows (minus commercials == 22 minutes). They're much more convenient than the 12mm discs IMO.
I'd like to know from what dimension you're getting an 8mm disc that holds nearly half an hour of video.:-) (I think you meant 80mm, or 8cm).
On a more serious note, 80mm discs wouldn't be bad for some things if they weren't so much more expensive than 120mm discs. Economies of scale have favored the larger discs. (In any case, the shows I burn to SVCD are "1-hour" shows that get trimmed down to ~45 minutes. The smaller CDs wouldn't work for that...and note that I'm using SVCD, which is a better format than VCD (SVCD is MPEG-2 instead of MPEG-1, and it uses higher resolution and higher bitrates).)
One reason US elections are a mess is that the government here, at least in theory, does not keep track of where people live.
Maybe that's what they do wherever you live, but these guys manage to get sample ballots sent to voters by mail before elections. It'd be hard for them to do that if they didn't know where people live. (They'd also need to know that information to determine the offices for which people can vote.) I've only registered once (in 1992) and have only had to notify them of a change-of-address when I moved. Voter ID cards are printed and mailed periodically; you bring that with you on election day. (I usually keep it in the glovebox, since I'll need to drive to the polling place anyway.)
(You mentioned later in your post that you live in California. I suspect the lax voter-registration requirements you describe are one reason why that state is so fscked up.)
my brother! I too have Dumped the Grease at Wendy's. One time I made the horrible mistake of breathing while dumping my load of grease. It was, by far, the worst smell I've ever experienced.
I used to do the same stuff at McDonald's. When you consider what ends up in the grease traps (not just cooked-off fat, but also water, grill-cleaning chemicals, food of all types that didn't cook right (any combination of bacon, sausage, beef patties, eggs, etc.), and other such stuff, is it any wonder that the grease dumpster smells like ass?
Later, I asked my manager why we keep all that shit; I mean, who comes to collect it? He told me (and he may have been pulling my leg) that it's used as a blubber substitute in the manufacture of lipstick and other makeup.
I was told pretty much the same thing...every once in a while, a tanker truck would stop by the store to suck the grease out of the dumpster. You have to wonder how many women would keep using their lipstick and other cosmetics if they knew what went into making that stuff.
Refridgeration has come a long way since ammonia was used as the refridgerant.
Don't they still use it in larger systems? The A/C in your car and your home runs on Freon (or the PC replacements that have been devised in the past decade or so), but I thought that stuff didn't scale up to larger cooling needs.
It's also used in gas-powered refrigerators and such, like you might see aboard RVs, boats, etc...you boil the ammonia out of the water, cool the water through one radiator while you condense the ammonia back into a liquid, then you bring the two back together and fear the coldness.:-)
Years ago (well, early-to-mid-'90s anyway), I read some discussions about how this would be the most likely way you'd want to set up solar-powered air conditioning...it'd ultimately be a cheap way to keep cool here in the desert southwest. (It'd be cheaper than what Nevada Power wants to charge for power, anyway.)
Well, if you mean loss-less, then it would not take the place of JPEG because it would take up too much space.
PNG is lossless. It was intended to be lossless. It wouldn't be a suitable replacement for JPEG in all circumstances. It would be a good format for images from your digital camera archived on CD-R (if it supports lossless output). It wouldn't be so good for photos on a website. PNG does use compression (similar to the compression used by gzip, IIRC), but it preserves images 100%.
BTW, there is a lossless mode of compression for JPEG. DCT-based lossy compression is by far the most common JPEG mode, but the IJG software supports lossless JPEG as well. I don't recall offhand what methods of coding it uses, but the last time I tried it, I think it yielded file sizes similar to PNG.
However, palette-based compression, which I think is what PNG is...
GIF was palette-based. PNG isn't. It stores the raw image data, whatever they happen to be. (BTW, I just checked the manpage for pnmtopng; it allows up to 16 bits for each component. That works out to 48 bpp for RGB images and 64 bpp for RGBA images.) It wouldn't make sense to use palette-based compression; you would use that to map a limited number of color codes to colors chosen from a larger range, in the way that VGA would let you choose 16 or 256 colors to display from 262144 possible colors.)
How long will it be before the camera manufactures release cameras using the.PNG format instead of the.JPEG format.
Several cameras are available (such as the Nikon Coolpix 995 I bought a while back...would've linked to it, but that part of Nikon's website is a Flash monstrosity) that can save to TIFF or other lossless formats. You don't get anywhere near as many images on a card, though, and the time the camera takes to save to the card is much longer (mine takes about half a minute to save in its lossless mode).
Most (all?) of the JPEG patents cover the arithmetic coding method that can be used with JPEG. IBM holds several of the relevant patents; there are one or two other companies whose names I don't recall off the top of my head. Most JPEG implementations (including the Independent JPEG Group implementation that most people & companies use) don't implement arithmetic coding of the quantized DCT coefficients for this reason. Huffman coding (usually with a fixed table, though adaptive Huffman coding is also doable) is the predominant method, and isn't patent-encumbered. (I don't think Huffman coding was ever patented. If it was, it would've run out long ago since Huffman coding has been in widespread use since the '50s.)
I thot that PNG was more for line-art type images. JPEG is better for photos where there are a lot of smooth gradiations. PNG would result in a lot of dithering (pixel spots) in your porn for example.
You're confusing PNG and GIF. GIF allowed only 8 bpp...that was fine back in 1990 and is still OK for simple computer-generated images, but not so good for color photos. PNG allows at least 24 bpp (maybe more; I haven't checked). GIF and PNG are both lossless, but PNG uses more effective compression. When I converted all of the GIFs on my website to PNG, their size went down a fair bit with no change in the images.
Your pr0n collection saved as PNGs would look fairly decent...it'd just take quite a bit more space than JPEGs. (Converting from JPEG to PNG wouldn't make any sense, though.)
The assertion was made that USB isn't good enough for a video device. I refuted that idea, completely. SD at 8 Mbps MPEG-2, MP@ML, is considered (by most) to be broadcast quality. USB's bandwidth is 12 Mbps. QED.
...and do you believe that those lightweight speakers down at the computer shop for $10 really deliver 80 watts per channel? As soon as your computer has even the slightest brain fart, you're going to lose some of what the USB dongle is spitting out. I'm not sure I'd trust it to get through a one- or two-hour video capture, unless you're content to do absolutely nothing else with the computer while it's running and you're sure there are no background processes that could interfere. USB wasn't designed with this kind of use in mind. It's like sticking a scanner on a parallel port. You can do that, but is it really the best way to get the job done?
As for the device in question, I have no opinion at all. Never seen it, don't know. That said, I've never seen a software MPEG-2 encoder that could work in real time, so I can't really have an opinion about those, either.
The software that comes with the All-In-Wonder Radeon does on-the-fly MPEG-2 encoding at up to 720x480. I usually capture to AVI with Huffyuv compression, though. I cut the ads out before burning to SVCD, so the fewer times a lossy compression method like MPEG is applied to the video, the better.
There you have it, folks. Of the thousands of cars that GM has sold over the years, only these half-dozen, that have responded with their personal triumphes over entropy, are still driving the road today. Thus, GM cars are crappier than the hundreds of thousands of Hondas, Toyotas, and VWs from 15 years ago still rolling down the highway.
That's odd...around here, the older vehicles I see on the road are mostly American cars. The occasional VW Beetle gets thrown in for a little variety. I see other '77 Cutlass Supremes (besides mine) on the road all the time...it's a rare week when I don't see one, and that's just one model. You see even more '70s- and '80s-model Chevy pickups going around from one job site to the next. Rice-burners that are anywhere near that old are rare...and the last one I remember seeing was a Mazda pickup with "Powered by Chevy" in big letters on the rear window (which means it doesn't really qualify).
Did I mention that I live in Las Vegas, where cars tend to last longer than most other places? If imports don't last more than 10-15 years here, what makes you think they'd hold up better anywhere else?
Makers of "fine" Pontiacs, SAABs, Olds, and Chevys...all cars who can't live longer than 9 years without their interiors falling apart. All cars that choke and wheeze at the 100,000 mile mark.
My '77 Cutlass Supreme would disagree with you on that remark. So would my father's '73 Cutlass (and his '88 Blazer that was just traded in for a new one), my grandfather's '85 Ninety Eight...
Liquid Audio basically received a patent for saying that a domain ending by "co.uk" is in the UK.
We all know that.com/.net/.org aren't restricted to the United States anymore, but even ccTLDs aren't necessarily geographically restricted. Years ago, there was a poster in one newsgroup I followed. I don't remember his name, but I recall that even though he was here in the US, since he worked for Ericsson, his email address ended in.se (this would've been before they snagged a.com address).
There's also the little matter of ccTLDs (.to,.tv,.nu, etc.) that have been opened up to everybody. If for some strange reason I decided to register alfter.tv and associated that with my home server, I would be disappointed with a geolocation system that concluded from my domain name that I was on a tiny island in the south Pacific.
USB has more than enough bandwidth for a TV video and audio signal.
You're kidding, right? Maybe if it's compressed...and given the way USB was designed, I wouldn't expect to be able to do much with your computer while it's capturing. For an external gadget, FireWire would've been much better. DV would be a better capture format than MPEG; it's more easily edited (which is good for cutting ads out of stuff you want to archive). Sony has a device that converts analog video (composite or S-video) to DV and puts it out on FireWire...add a computer-controlled tuner to it and you'd be all set.
(Do Macs have AGP slots? If they do, why couldn't someone drop in any old video card that the rest of us use? Failing that, I know most of 'em do PCI, and you can still find video cards and capture cards that use PCI. I capture to Huffyuv-compressed AVI (720x480, 29.97 fps) with an All-In-Wonder Radeon. The video goes to MPEG only after all the ads are edited out.)
Slashdot Mirror
(Maybe you should come up with some other abbreviation for "Playstation 2"...abbreviation overloading is a Bad Thing. :-) )
Potato soup from scratch is fairly simple, and I suspect much better (WRT taste and nutrition). A bag of spuds also costs next to nothing.
All the ASCII pr0n that's been circulating for decades is prior art...sorry. :-)
If you removed the catalytic converter, it'd run just fine. Newer ('81 and up, if you're talking about GM) cars with oxygen sensors might run into trouble unless you can track down an oxygen sensor that isn't bothered by lead, but my father yanked the catalytic converter out of an '80 Chevette before having it shipped to England in '84. It ran without the cat for nearly four years with no problems other than a slight tendency to backfire on deceleration. When we returned to the States, the cat went back in and it ran for several more years until it was totaled in an accident.
...considered part of the x86 family? The first processor in that lineup is the 8086. I think the 8086 might've been source-code-compatible (to some extent) with the 8080, but you can't take an 8080 binary and run it on any x86 processor (emulation doesn't count).
His beliefs (or lack thereof) are irrelevant. His ex-girlfriend (they were never married) has primary custody, so their daughter is to be raised as she sees fit and he has no right to interfere.
Michael Newdow used his daughter so that he would have standing to bring his case to court. We now know that his case was brought forward under false pretenses. If he coached (coerced?) his daughter to say something in court that she doesn't believe is true, that is subornation of perjury. His own misrepresentation of his daughter's "injury" ought to count as perjury by itself. IANAL, but if I'm not mistaken, an officer of the court (such as a lawyer) who lies and/or twists the truth in court is usually regarded as a Very Bad Thing. For lying to the court, Michael Newdow ought to be disbarred.
It's easy enough to set up your own DNS cache and use that. Not only does it bypass your ISP's name servers, but since fewer DNS queries will need to go out onto the Internet, you should also see a slight increase in browsing speed.
I regularly put 45-60 minutes (sometimes a little more) of good-quality video (better than VHS) on an SVCD. It's not as much as the 80 minutes you can get with VCD, but it's better quality. Have a look at this page to get some idea of what I do and what software I use for it.
Did they ever know how to load a projector? Starting in third or fourth grade, I (or one of a few other kids) usually did that--threaded the film through (assuming that it wasn't an autoloading projector), checked the focus and framing, etc. ("Third or fourth grade," BTW, would've been the early '80s.)
I'd like to know from what dimension you're getting an 8mm disc that holds nearly half an hour of video. :-) (I think you meant 80mm, or 8cm).
On a more serious note, 80mm discs wouldn't be bad for some things if they weren't so much more expensive than 120mm discs. Economies of scale have favored the larger discs. (In any case, the shows I burn to SVCD are "1-hour" shows that get trimmed down to ~45 minutes. The smaller CDs wouldn't work for that...and note that I'm using SVCD, which is a better format than VCD (SVCD is MPEG-2 instead of MPEG-1, and it uses higher resolution and higher bitrates).)
Actually, it was The Meaning of Life. If you're going to quote/paraphrase Monty Python, at least get the source right. :-)
Maybe that's what they do wherever you live, but these guys manage to get sample ballots sent to voters by mail before elections. It'd be hard for them to do that if they didn't know where people live. (They'd also need to know that information to determine the offices for which people can vote.) I've only registered once (in 1992) and have only had to notify them of a change-of-address when I moved. Voter ID cards are printed and mailed periodically; you bring that with you on election day. (I usually keep it in the glovebox, since I'll need to drive to the polling place anyway.)
(You mentioned later in your post that you live in California. I suspect the lax voter-registration requirements you describe are one reason why that state is so fscked up.)
I used to do the same stuff at McDonald's. When you consider what ends up in the grease traps (not just cooked-off fat, but also water, grill-cleaning chemicals, food of all types that didn't cook right (any combination of bacon, sausage, beef patties, eggs, etc.), and other such stuff, is it any wonder that the grease dumpster smells like ass?
I was told pretty much the same thing...every once in a while, a tanker truck would stop by the store to suck the grease out of the dumpster. You have to wonder how many women would keep using their lipstick and other cosmetics if they knew what went into making that stuff.
Don't they still use it in larger systems? The A/C in your car and your home runs on Freon (or the PC replacements that have been devised in the past decade or so), but I thought that stuff didn't scale up to larger cooling needs.
It's also used in gas-powered refrigerators and such, like you might see aboard RVs, boats, etc...you boil the ammonia out of the water, cool the water through one radiator while you condense the ammonia back into a liquid, then you bring the two back together and fear the coldness. :-)
Years ago (well, early-to-mid-'90s anyway), I read some discussions about how this would be the most likely way you'd want to set up solar-powered air conditioning...it'd ultimately be a cheap way to keep cool here in the desert southwest. (It'd be cheaper than what Nevada Power wants to charge for power, anyway.)
PNG is lossless. It was intended to be lossless. It wouldn't be a suitable replacement for JPEG in all circumstances. It would be a good format for images from your digital camera archived on CD-R (if it supports lossless output). It wouldn't be so good for photos on a website. PNG does use compression (similar to the compression used by gzip, IIRC), but it preserves images 100%.
BTW, there is a lossless mode of compression for JPEG. DCT-based lossy compression is by far the most common JPEG mode, but the IJG software supports lossless JPEG as well. I don't recall offhand what methods of coding it uses, but the last time I tried it, I think it yielded file sizes similar to PNG.
GIF was palette-based. PNG isn't. It stores the raw image data, whatever they happen to be. (BTW, I just checked the manpage for pnmtopng; it allows up to 16 bits for each component. That works out to 48 bpp for RGB images and 64 bpp for RGBA images.) It wouldn't make sense to use palette-based compression; you would use that to map a limited number of color codes to colors chosen from a larger range, in the way that VGA would let you choose 16 or 256 colors to display from 262144 possible colors.)
Several cameras are available (such as the Nikon Coolpix 995 I bought a while back...would've linked to it, but that part of Nikon's website is a Flash monstrosity) that can save to TIFF or other lossless formats. You don't get anywhere near as many images on a card, though, and the time the camera takes to save to the card is much longer (mine takes about half a minute to save in its lossless mode).
100:1? That's nothing. I can compress anything down to one byte:
alias gonzocompressor="dd bs=1 count=1"
gonzocompressor if=foo.ppm of=foo.gc
I make no guarantees as to whether you'll be able to recover the original image, though...
Most (all?) of the JPEG patents cover the arithmetic coding method that can be used with JPEG. IBM holds several of the relevant patents; there are one or two other companies whose names I don't recall off the top of my head. Most JPEG implementations (including the Independent JPEG Group implementation that most people & companies use) don't implement arithmetic coding of the quantized DCT coefficients for this reason. Huffman coding (usually with a fixed table, though adaptive Huffman coding is also doable) is the predominant method, and isn't patent-encumbered. (I don't think Huffman coding was ever patented. If it was, it would've run out long ago since Huffman coding has been in widespread use since the '50s.)
You're confusing PNG and GIF. GIF allowed only 8 bpp...that was fine back in 1990 and is still OK for simple computer-generated images, but not so good for color photos. PNG allows at least 24 bpp (maybe more; I haven't checked). GIF and PNG are both lossless, but PNG uses more effective compression. When I converted all of the GIFs on my website to PNG, their size went down a fair bit with no change in the images.
Your pr0n collection saved as PNGs would look fairly decent...it'd just take quite a bit more space than JPEGs. (Converting from JPEG to PNG wouldn't make any sense, though.)
The software that comes with the All-In-Wonder Radeon does on-the-fly MPEG-2 encoding at up to 720x480. I usually capture to AVI with Huffyuv compression, though. I cut the ads out before burning to SVCD, so the fewer times a lossy compression method like MPEG is applied to the video, the better.
That's odd...around here, the older vehicles I see on the road are mostly American cars. The occasional VW Beetle gets thrown in for a little variety. I see other '77 Cutlass Supremes (besides mine) on the road all the time...it's a rare week when I don't see one, and that's just one model. You see even more '70s- and '80s-model Chevy pickups going around from one job site to the next. Rice-burners that are anywhere near that old are rare...and the last one I remember seeing was a Mazda pickup with "Powered by Chevy" in big letters on the rear window (which means it doesn't really qualify).
Did I mention that I live in Las Vegas, where cars tend to last longer than most other places? If imports don't last more than 10-15 years here, what makes you think they'd hold up better anywhere else?
My '77 Cutlass Supreme would disagree with you on that remark. So would my father's '73 Cutlass (and his '88 Blazer that was just traded in for a new one), my grandfather's '85 Ninety Eight...
We all know that .com/.net/.org aren't restricted to the United States anymore, but even ccTLDs aren't necessarily geographically restricted. Years ago, there was a poster in one newsgroup I followed. I don't remember his name, but I recall that even though he was here in the US, since he worked for Ericsson, his email address ended in .se (this would've been before they snagged a .com address).
There's also the little matter of ccTLDs (.to, .tv, .nu, etc.) that have been opened up to everybody. If for some strange reason I decided to register alfter.tv and associated that with my home server, I would be disappointed with a geolocation system that concluded from my domain name that I was on a tiny island in the south Pacific.
You're kidding, right? Maybe if it's compressed...and given the way USB was designed, I wouldn't expect to be able to do much with your computer while it's capturing. For an external gadget, FireWire would've been much better. DV would be a better capture format than MPEG; it's more easily edited (which is good for cutting ads out of stuff you want to archive). Sony has a device that converts analog video (composite or S-video) to DV and puts it out on FireWire...add a computer-controlled tuner to it and you'd be all set.
(Do Macs have AGP slots? If they do, why couldn't someone drop in any old video card that the rest of us use? Failing that, I know most of 'em do PCI, and you can still find video cards and capture cards that use PCI. I capture to Huffyuv-compressed AVI (720x480, 29.97 fps) with an All-In-Wonder Radeon. The video goes to MPEG only after all the ads are edited out.)