Ever heard of PNG,GIF,Animated PNG/GIF? these are formats for both images and video, that are 100% lossless, and better than a 2:1 compression ratio on most video and images
I said photos, not images. The picture of your dog that you scanned in and saved to PNG won't compress nearly as much as the pie chart image on your website. Images with large areas of solid color will indeed compress down by a large amount. (A picture I scanned in of my truck compressed with PNG got about 1.63:1. Lena got about 1.65:1. Both sources were BMPs where the source data had never been subjected to lossy compression...they were compressed with bmptoppm foo.bmp | pnmtopng -comp 9 >foo.png.)
In the case of video, compression ratios are on the order of 100:1
Lossy compression can do that, but there's no lossless video compression that routinely gets anywhere near that. Reread my original assertion...it pertains to lossless compression of text, video, and audio and the likelihood of getting something substantially better than 2:1 compression.
Huffyuv is a codec that video editors use that is lossless and better than 2:1 in the average case
Not in my experience...720x480 captures from an All-In-Wonder Radeon usually get somewhere around 2:1, give or take a bit. (It's also worth noting that Huffyuv is lossless only for YUV sources; RGB video will experience a slight loss from colorspace conversion. For analog video capture, this isn't an issue...composite/S-video/component video are all variations of YCbCr, which is close enough to YUV for government work. CG video will most likely start out as RGB, so there will be some slight loss introduced by the RGB-to-YUV conversion...but it'll also likely see greater-than-typical compression for the same reason that a PowerPoint slide will compress more than a scanned photo.)
Text, for sure on the average case, is WAY WAY WAY over a 2:1 compression ratio (Ever heard of gzip,zip,bz2?). Especially considering they are zipping up code, and not written english, it is very very compressable because of so much redundancy.
Code is a special case. Compressing natural-language text is a more likely scenario. Taking Project Gutenberg's Hamlet, stripping out excess whitespace, and compressing it with gzip -9 yielded 2.32:1 compression. Doing the same with the text on/.'s main page (just the text, not the raw HTML) as I type this message yielded 2.10:1 compression. (Use strings foo.txt | wc; strings foo.txt | gzip -9 | wc to get before-and-after sizes.) Substituting bzip2 -9 got 2.68:1 and 2.22:1, respectively. While those numbers are better than 2:1, they're not "WAY WAY WAY over a 2:1 compression ratio." Substantial improvement, I'd think, would mean at least 4:1 compression on any of these examples. If you can do that, you'll make a killing in the market.
MIT guys! Why don't you put your brain into better compression technology?
And don't say it isn't doable... If I had the time, I could do it, and I'm a mere highschool graduate...
Spoken like somebody who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. I'm sure there'd be a fair chunk of money involved if somebody manages to deliver substantially better than 2:1 lossless compression on text, photos, and/or sound...hell, it'd probably be good for a Turing Award, if it's verifiable. It's something that the best minds in computer science (people a good bit brighter than most of us) have been grinding away at for decades to yield little more than incremental improvements. It's highly unlikely that some random schmuck is going to figure it out between Quake deathmatches.
I hope the slashdot effects cripples the graphics.com servers and sets them on fire in a glorious blaze of divine revenge! Take that for full screen popups!
Ye shall know the lizard, and the lizard shall set you free...
for i in `cat suckers`; do mutt -xs "MAKE $100 BILLION IN 10 SECONDS!!!!!!!!!" $i <spam; done
(I actually used something like this recently to send out notices to members of the local homebrew club that the newsletter was up. It'd work as well for spamming people, and would even have the added advantage of defeating the recently-discussed graylisting.)
The article said K++ and K-Lite are integrated with the PeerGuardian database. That's a list of IPs from which to refuse traffic. You can get the plaintext list here and run it through a converter here that converts the list into a script full of iptables commands to cut off the ??AA at your firewall, so they won't even get through to whatever filesharing software you're running.
"I've lost the sweeps. I've lost the bleeps. And I've lost the creeps."
The moderator who modded the above post "redundant" can turn in his Geek ID at the front desk at the end of the day. The geek that doesn't know Spaceballs is not the true geek.
But you'd probably need a pretty hefty power source on that boat, or a verrrrrry long extension cord.
Most boats have a "pretty hefty power source" on them...it's called an "engine." Some boats even have two of them (or even more). Hook a generator to that puppy (or maybe just a $100 inverter tied into the electrical system) and you'd get way more power than you'd need to jam a satellite. (It doesn't take much power...maybe enough power to run a light bulb or two.)
At least that's what I took away from reading the article (!)...not much power is involved in satellite communications.
I love Gentoo, but I can entirely understand someone not wanting to spend 18 hours compiling OO.org or KDE.
Gentoo provides binary downloads of the larger packages. The stage 3 tarballs (available in multiple flavors to accomodate different processors) provide the basic system, while v1.4rc2 includes the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP). GRP provides prebuilt X11, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice on x86 and PowerPC systems. (It doesn't seem to have been updated for newer Gentoo versions, so it's no doubt a few versions behind now.)
Binary packages are somewhat ignoring the point of Gentoo...yes, they speed along deployment if you have a bunch of machines to roll out, but you could achieve the same effect on a bunch of identical machines by doing one install in the normal manner and then just clone that install into the other machines. The desire of some people for a quick install hasn't been completely ignored.
(For my purposes, I'll usually start with a stage 1 tarball. I built 1.4rc4 inside VMware on a WinXP box at home; even with VMware only letting Linux see one of the two processors in that system, the build ran quickly enough. Once I migrate my stuff off of the existing server config, alfter.us will switch from Linux From Scratch to Gentoo. I've had it running on several servers at work for a while now...it combines the performance and security of Linux From Scratch with most of the ease of setup of a conventional Linux distro.)
Well, you wouldn't want to direct them to just any 256-byte chunk of the first 64K of memory. Assuming you're using IIgs-specific graphics, you still wouldn't want to point them to 0xc000 lest they start flipping softswitches and suddenly a critical block on your disk gets wiped out.
I've not done too much GS-specific programming (even after 10 years, I've stuck mostly with 8-bit code)...but if I'm not mistaken, the softswitches aren't in bank 0 when you kick the processor into native mode. If that's the case, you would have all of the first 64K available since the softswitches would've been mapped into a different bank. (I could be wrong, though...can't seem to find a memory map just now to confirm if this is true.)
It's not on every day, but I used mine to write the software that controls my beer fridge (that software is currently running on a IIe with 1 meg of RAM and LocalTalk, but was written to run on something as minimal as a 64K II+). More recently, it's seeing use as a Morse-code trainer (decided to take another stab at that after reading this article). Could I do this with a more modern system (like the dual Athlon MP 2100+ parked next to it)? Yes. I already have some software for the IIGS that I downloaded & installed years ago, though, so it saves me the bother of searching for something newer.
The Apple IIGS might well be 1986 technology...but it's good 1986 technology! Plenty of other machines have come and gone, but this machine's been parked on my desk since 1985 (it started as a IIe and was upgraded in 1993) and it isn't going anywhere any time soon.
Oh, and not have to try and explain why Gemstone Warrior was so frickin' creepy-scary, and why the Beagle Brothers kicked ass.
Beagle Bros kicked loose most of its stuff as freeware (as in beer) years ago. I think the TimeOut add-ons for AppleWorks and some other newer apps are the only ones that are still in abandonware limbo (and even a handful of those are free).
Yikes!!!! $155 for a network card for a IIgs? The machine itself is probably worth around $25!
That's kept me away from buying one...fortunately, newer versions of Marinetti also support MacIP. Get yourself a LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge of some sort and connect through that. (A bridge could be a hardware device, like a Cayman GatorBox (cheap when they turn up on eBay), or it could just be software, such as LocalTalk Bridge running on an older Mac. You'd need a MacIP gateway somewhere...not sure what software will do this, but the GatorBox has this functionality. If all you want to do is share files (and don't care about Internet access from your IIGS), netatalk running on Linux will do that with AFP-over-TCP.)
That's the "glass is half empty" viewpoint. The "half full" viewpoint says that the 6502 gives you 256 registers with the special optimized opcodes for fast access to the lowest 8 bits of memory space.
...and the 65816 had the direct-page register, which lets you direct zero-page operations to any 256-byte chunk of the first 64K of memory. For context switching, you could set the direct-page register to a different value for each process and write the processor registers to the same (reserved) bytes in each page.
The right to keep a gun isn't a part of being human, it's a right granted by the US government through the constitution that the government cannot revoke (without an amendment).
Reread my post...that whooshing sound you heard was the point going right by you.
The difference being the precedent set by the Constitution allowing the possession of firearms
Your right to keep and bear arms is not granted by the Constitution. Like the right to speak your mind, gather with whoever you like, etc., the right to keep guns is a natural right...it's part of being human. More generally, the Bill of Rights is not an enumeration of your rights. It is a guarantee (one that's not always been followed, unfortunately) that the government will not encroach on your rights. Notice that the amendments are not of the form "The people have the right to X;" instead, they are generally of the form "The right of the people to X shall not be infringed."
Jet fighter pilots can pull 4-5 G's momentarily before blacking out.
They can go a fair bit higher than that. I saw a show on Discovery Wings not long ago that said Deke Slayton used to pull 9 Gs without a G-suit. (The "without a G-suit" part is a bit extreme, but the "9 Gs" part is kinda on the edge where some people will black out and some won't.) You might want to have a look at this page.
But the interesting thing is, most people think that "horsepower" and "torque" are the same thing. I can't tell you how many times I've heard people talk about horsepower as being the same as speed off the line.
s/people/riceboys/g
(Yeah, I suppose the general public doesn't know any better either, but riceboys tend to be the most obnoxiously ignorant of it. That they pretend they know anything about performance only makes things worse. They'll never get decent torque from their dinky 4-bangers, so they just gloss over it and hope to distract you with their obnoxious fart-can exhaust tips into thinking that they have something worth writing home about.)
Of course you should buy the Geo Metro over the Corvette. Do you have any idea how much insurance is for a Corvette?
I don't doubt that insurance on a Vette is expensive...but it'd be a hell of a lot more fun to drive. You damn near have to stand on the gas to get a Metro to move at all (speaking from rental experience).
(What I drive falls between these two extremes...an '02 S-10 (with the 4.3L V6, of course) and a '77 Cutlass Supreme (with an Olds 350 V8, which was the most common engine shipped in what was the top-selling car in the country at the time).)
Fuck off you elitist twat. Almost nobody knows what horsepower is, it's just a number, just like GHz.
That whooshing noise you heard was a clue passing right over your head. "Horsepower? What difference does that make? I think I'll buy this Geo Metro over here instead of that Corvette over there."
While you don't need to know how to rebuild a carburetor or swap out an automatic-transmission valve body, it helps to know what the different controls (steering wheel, pedals, etc.) do and to know some of the basic performance specs of the car you're buying. Likewise, you don't need to know how to string together a DirectShow filter graph in order to make an informed computer purchase, but "speeds and feeds" provide a reasonable metric even for someone with only a passing familiarity with computers.
...try this instead. The server isn't/.'d (yet), but the link to the page with more info about the XP-TMC is invalid. (None of the other product links on that page work, either...mighty fine website.:-P )
Since the ads are inserted at the ISP theres no way to even block them
To insert them, it has to alter the HTML returned by a webserver as it passes through...essentially, it's a proxy server that munges content to insert ads. There are other proxy servers (WebWasher comes to mind as an example) that do the opposite--they examine the HTML they receive and alter it to remove ads, scripts, and other nastiness. Since your browser will also issue an HTTP GET request for the extra ads, ad-filtering proxies that work by redirecting certain types of requests (Squid can do this) should still be effective as well...you just need to create another rule to block your ISP's ad server.
DVD-R/RW media are cheaper (especially DVD-R, which you can now get for under $1 each). The DVD-R and -RW formats are from the same organization (the DVD Forum...site doesn't seem to work with Mozilla) that's behind DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, and DVD-ROM, so compatibility should be less of a concern. (I think they also did DVD-RAM, but that's definitely a niche format.)
Slashdot Mirror
I said photos, not images. The picture of your dog that you scanned in and saved to PNG won't compress nearly as much as the pie chart image on your website. Images with large areas of solid color will indeed compress down by a large amount. (A picture I scanned in of my truck compressed with PNG got about 1.63:1. Lena got about 1.65:1. Both sources were BMPs where the source data had never been subjected to lossy compression...they were compressed with bmptoppm foo.bmp | pnmtopng -comp 9 >foo.png.)
Lossy compression can do that, but there's no lossless video compression that routinely gets anywhere near that. Reread my original assertion...it pertains to lossless compression of text, video, and audio and the likelihood of getting something substantially better than 2:1 compression.
Not in my experience...720x480 captures from an All-In-Wonder Radeon usually get somewhere around 2:1, give or take a bit. (It's also worth noting that Huffyuv is lossless only for YUV sources; RGB video will experience a slight loss from colorspace conversion. For analog video capture, this isn't an issue...composite/S-video/component video are all variations of YCbCr, which is close enough to YUV for government work. CG video will most likely start out as RGB, so there will be some slight loss introduced by the RGB-to-YUV conversion...but it'll also likely see greater-than-typical compression for the same reason that a PowerPoint slide will compress more than a scanned photo.)
Code is a special case. Compressing natural-language text is a more likely scenario. Taking Project Gutenberg's Hamlet, stripping out excess whitespace, and compressing it with gzip -9 yielded 2.32:1 compression. Doing the same with the text on /.'s main page (just the text, not the raw HTML) as I type this message yielded 2.10:1 compression. (Use strings foo.txt | wc; strings foo.txt | gzip -9 | wc to get before-and-after sizes.) Substituting bzip2 -9 got 2.68:1 and 2.22:1, respectively. While those numbers are better than 2:1, they're not "WAY WAY WAY over a 2:1 compression ratio." Substantial improvement, I'd think, would mean at least 4:1 compression on any of these examples. If you can do that, you'll make a killing in the market.
Spoken like somebody who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. I'm sure there'd be a fair chunk of money involved if somebody manages to deliver substantially better than 2:1 lossless compression on text, photos, and/or sound...hell, it'd probably be good for a Turing Award, if it's verifiable. It's something that the best minds in computer science (people a good bit brighter than most of us) have been grinding away at for decades to yield little more than incremental improvements. It's highly unlikely that some random schmuck is going to figure it out between Quake deathmatches.
FOAD, troll. Take your goatse.cx link (verified with Lynx) and shove it where the sun don't shine.
Ye shall know the lizard, and the lizard shall set you free...
for i in `cat suckers`; do mutt -xs "MAKE $100 BILLION IN 10 SECONDS!!!!!!!!!" $i <spam; done
(I actually used something like this recently to send out notices to members of the local homebrew club that the newsletter was up. It'd work as well for spamming people, and would even have the added advantage of defeating the recently-discussed graylisting.)
You forgot Usenet...alt.binaries.sounds.mp3* 0wnz j00.
The article said K++ and K-Lite are integrated with the PeerGuardian database. That's a list of IPs from which to refuse traffic. You can get the plaintext list here and run it through a converter here that converts the list into a script full of iptables commands to cut off the ??AA at your firewall, so they won't even get through to whatever filesharing software you're running.
s/that is not useful//
The moderator who modded the above post "redundant" can turn in his Geek ID at the front desk at the end of the day. The geek that doesn't know Spaceballs is not the true geek.
Most boats have a "pretty hefty power source" on them...it's called an "engine." Some boats even have two of them (or even more). Hook a generator to that puppy (or maybe just a $100 inverter tied into the electrical system) and you'd get way more power than you'd need to jam a satellite. (It doesn't take much power...maybe enough power to run a light bulb or two.)
At least that's what I took away from reading the article (!)...not much power is involved in satellite communications.
Gentoo provides binary downloads of the larger packages. The stage 3 tarballs (available in multiple flavors to accomodate different processors) provide the basic system, while v1.4rc2 includes the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP). GRP provides prebuilt X11, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice on x86 and PowerPC systems. (It doesn't seem to have been updated for newer Gentoo versions, so it's no doubt a few versions behind now.)
Binary packages are somewhat ignoring the point of Gentoo...yes, they speed along deployment if you have a bunch of machines to roll out, but you could achieve the same effect on a bunch of identical machines by doing one install in the normal manner and then just clone that install into the other machines. The desire of some people for a quick install hasn't been completely ignored.
(For my purposes, I'll usually start with a stage 1 tarball. I built 1.4rc4 inside VMware on a WinXP box at home; even with VMware only letting Linux see one of the two processors in that system, the build ran quickly enough. Once I migrate my stuff off of the existing server config, alfter.us will switch from Linux From Scratch to Gentoo. I've had it running on several servers at work for a while now...it combines the performance and security of Linux From Scratch with most of the ease of setup of a conventional Linux distro.)
I've not done too much GS-specific programming (even after 10 years, I've stuck mostly with 8-bit code)...but if I'm not mistaken, the softswitches aren't in bank 0 when you kick the processor into native mode. If that's the case, you would have all of the first 64K available since the softswitches would've been mapped into a different bank. (I could be wrong, though...can't seem to find a memory map just now to confirm if this is true.)
This bit of code is more fun...feed it and a WAV to your II and it'll play the WAV.
It's not on every day, but I used mine to write the software that controls my beer fridge (that software is currently running on a IIe with 1 meg of RAM and LocalTalk, but was written to run on something as minimal as a 64K II+). More recently, it's seeing use as a Morse-code trainer (decided to take another stab at that after reading this article). Could I do this with a more modern system (like the dual Athlon MP 2100+ parked next to it)? Yes. I already have some software for the IIGS that I downloaded & installed years ago, though, so it saves me the bother of searching for something newer.
The Apple IIGS might well be 1986 technology...but it's good 1986 technology! Plenty of other machines have come and gone, but this machine's been parked on my desk since 1985 (it started as a IIe and was upgraded in 1993) and it isn't going anywhere any time soon.
Beagle Bros kicked loose most of its stuff as freeware (as in beer) years ago. I think the TimeOut add-ons for AppleWorks and some other newer apps are the only ones that are still in abandonware limbo (and even a handful of those are free).
That's kept me away from buying one...fortunately, newer versions of Marinetti also support MacIP. Get yourself a LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge of some sort and connect through that. (A bridge could be a hardware device, like a Cayman GatorBox (cheap when they turn up on eBay), or it could just be software, such as LocalTalk Bridge running on an older Mac. You'd need a MacIP gateway somewhere...not sure what software will do this, but the GatorBox has this functionality. If all you want to do is share files (and don't care about Internet access from your IIGS), netatalk running on Linux will do that with AFP-over-TCP.)
Reread my post...that whooshing sound you heard was the point going right by you.
Your right to keep and bear arms is not granted by the Constitution. Like the right to speak your mind, gather with whoever you like, etc., the right to keep guns is a natural right...it's part of being human. More generally, the Bill of Rights is not an enumeration of your rights. It is a guarantee (one that's not always been followed, unfortunately) that the government will not encroach on your rights. Notice that the amendments are not of the form "The people have the right to X;" instead, they are generally of the form "The right of the people to X shall not be infringed."
They can go a fair bit higher than that. I saw a show on Discovery Wings not long ago that said Deke Slayton used to pull 9 Gs without a G-suit. (The "without a G-suit" part is a bit extreme, but the "9 Gs" part is kinda on the edge where some people will black out and some won't.) You might want to have a look at this page.
s/people/riceboys/g
(Yeah, I suppose the general public doesn't know any better either, but riceboys tend to be the most obnoxiously ignorant of it. That they pretend they know anything about performance only makes things worse. They'll never get decent torque from their dinky 4-bangers, so they just gloss over it and hope to distract you with their obnoxious fart-can exhaust tips into thinking that they have something worth writing home about.)
I don't doubt that insurance on a Vette is expensive...but it'd be a hell of a lot more fun to drive. You damn near have to stand on the gas to get a Metro to move at all (speaking from rental experience).
(What I drive falls between these two extremes...an '02 S-10 (with the 4.3L V6, of course) and a '77 Cutlass Supreme (with an Olds 350 V8, which was the most common engine shipped in what was the top-selling car in the country at the time).)
That whooshing noise you heard was a clue passing right over your head. "Horsepower? What difference does that make? I think I'll buy this Geo Metro over here instead of that Corvette over there."
While you don't need to know how to rebuild a carburetor or swap out an automatic-transmission valve body, it helps to know what the different controls (steering wheel, pedals, etc.) do and to know some of the basic performance specs of the car you're buying. Likewise, you don't need to know how to string together a DirectShow filter graph in order to make an informed computer purchase, but "speeds and feeds" provide a reasonable metric even for someone with only a passing familiarity with computers.
...try this instead. The server isn't /.'d (yet), but the link to the page with more info about the XP-TMC is invalid. (None of the other product links on that page work, either...mighty fine website. :-P )
To insert them, it has to alter the HTML returned by a webserver as it passes through...essentially, it's a proxy server that munges content to insert ads. There are other proxy servers (WebWasher comes to mind as an example) that do the opposite--they examine the HTML they receive and alter it to remove ads, scripts, and other nastiness. Since your browser will also issue an HTTP GET request for the extra ads, ad-filtering proxies that work by redirecting certain types of requests (Squid can do this) should still be effective as well...you just need to create another rule to block your ISP's ad server.
DVD-R/RW media are cheaper (especially DVD-R, which you can now get for under $1 each). The DVD-R and -RW formats are from the same organization (the DVD Forum...site doesn't seem to work with Mozilla) that's behind DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, and DVD-ROM, so compatibility should be less of a concern. (I think they also did DVD-RAM, but that's definitely a niche format.)