This is true. I was sort of ignoring the geosynchronous communications satellites because they require somewhat larger antennas than Iridium does; although I suppose you could put a flat patch antenna on top of a car's roof if you wanted to use them.
But anyway, I'm in agreement with you; the whole scheme seems a bit... half-cocked.
As the disparity between the capabilities of US forces and those of our adversaries increase, we only encourage them to target "soft" (read: civilian) targets. Sure. However, since the majority of the enemies the U.S. is fighting don't have the capability of targeting anything so far away, the civilians that get targeted won't be U.S. civilians -- which is really the only thing the voting public cares about.
Look at the reasons why public support for the war in Iraq has flagged: primarily, it's because of the loss of U.S. troops. Yeah, occasionally you hear about Iraqi civilian deaths, but it's usually only from people who are already against the war. It's not changing any minds. Americans, to put it bluntly, are pretty well inured to civilian death that's not their own. (Particularly, and I hate to say this but it's pretty obvious, when the people dying are non-White, non-Christians.)
So, looking at this from a military commander's perspective, who needs to both fight the enemy while also maintaining support from the public at home, weapons systems which protect his soldiers -- even if they might encourage terrorism against civilians in the short run -- are a good thing overall, because if he takes too many casualties, the public will just pull the plug and then he'll fail at his mission. And politically, by turning the enemy into civilian-slaughtering terrorists, it makes the case for attacking them that much easier, while also making them less likely to achieve their political/strategic goals.
There needs to be some method for civilians to control them
I agree -- we should replace our current government with one where the head of state and head of government is a civilian, and put them in charge of all our military branches.
Violence can be defined as increasing the further away the assailant is from his/her target. School children in a fight is violent. A bully using a baseball bat (increasing his reach and distance) is more violent. A pilot of a plane dropping a bomb (an even further reach) is more violent still. Remote controlled military aircraft, AFAIK, is the farthest reach yet (save perhaps ICBMs), and therefore (according to this definition) the most violent yet. I disagree with that definition. In fact, I think you're completely turned around.
It requires very little in the way of actual violent intent to push a button or type a command on a console from thousands of miles away, which might or might not kill someone; it's an abstract action, safely removed from consequences. As such, it can be done by someone without any propensity or desire for violence. It's a disconnected action.
To swing a machete at someone -- or more to the point, grab their face and drive your thumbs through their eyes and into their brain -- isn't so easily depersonalized. It's fundamentally violent, there's no disconnecting it, and only a person who either inherently is, or has made themselves, comfortable with intense violence can accomplish it. At least without enduring a lot of psychological problems afterwards.
The missile may be more destructive, but since it occurs so far away, the act of firing it has little in the way of actual violence. It's not even required that the person firing it really know what it's going to do. No violent intent is required. On the other hand, when a person swings a machete towards the face of another, they know what's going to happen. It's impossible to do with out the violent intention. (For this reason, people who murder others with primitive instruments are often punished more severely than people who do it with firearms, automobiles, or some indirect method: our legal system recognizes the qualitative difference between applying some pressure to a piece of metal which begins a chain reaction which results in a bullet punching a hole in someone's chest fifteen feet away, and standing over them with a claw hammer, relentlessly beating their skull in while ignoring their pleas for mercy.)
I understand the point you're trying to make about ranged weapons perhaps making destruction easier, but to say that they are 'more violent' is just wrong. If anything, the main reason why they are easier to use is simply because they demand less violence.
I would tend to think that a GPS tracking system for cars would be land based like what ships and boats use out at sea. Doesn't require the same level of transmission gear and is pretty damned reliable. You could certainly track cars as I believe that is what onStar does here in the U.S. already. Of course I suppose nothing stops car manufacturers from putting the required gear to transmit to a satellite or five.
What are you talking about, in terms of "like what ships and boats use out at sea"?
A GPS receiver is just that -- a receiver. It doesn't transmit. Full stop.
If you want to create a position reporting system, then you need some way to get the positional data back into a network. There have been various ways of accomplishing this.
Amateur radio operators have put together a very nice network called APRS, which uses 2-meter handheld radios, coupled with standard GPS receivers and interface chips, to "ping" your position to ground stations, which then dump the data onto the Internet so you can see it.
Most commercial systems, like those used on trucks, use the cellular phone network in some capacity. (Some of them use analog modems and make voice calls, others use GPRS or CSD to avoid the voice call.) But of course this costs money -- you have to pay for the cellular connection somehow, even if you only use it a few times an hour or day. This is how OnStar works (and you pay a monthly or yearly fee for it).
In order to make a "position beacon" that would work everywhere, you'd need a backhaul that didn't depend on terrestrial infrastructure -- the logical choice would be to use the Iridium network. (A network of low-orbiting, cellular-type voice communications satellites.) I suspect this is used for sea shipping and marine navigation, if you want remote position-reporting. But Iridium equipment and airtime isn't exactly cheap.
Creating a network that could tell you the position of every car on the road, in real-time, would be a big endeavor. It's probably a lot easier just to use E-Z Pass-type RFID sensors and readers at key locations (under bridges, etc.) than to try and create a wide-area network of GPS-equipped position beacons and receivers, just because in a congested area, you'd need a base station pretty much on every lamp-post in order to provide good coverage. If every car in an area was reporting its position ever minute or so, you'd quickly saturate the available capacity of the cellular and APRS networks. RFID would be a much better choice.
I don't understand this logic that a "full featured" operating system has to be slow. What the hell are you OS designers doing that's eating up all the juice ? Just because Windows XP preloads a gazillion binaries doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Two words: Marketing department.
As soon as a tech company acquires one of those, the follow a pretty much predictable ballistic arc, based on how much velocity they had at the time they got one.
This doesn't seem hard to believe at all to me. At the actual boots-meeting-pavement level, what most people who file patents (while working as part of a big corporation) are looking for is just a resume line or feather in their cap, something to bring them a little closer to the next promotion. Whether the patent actually turns into anything hardly matters -- since most of them don't.
At a lot of companies, just having a patent with your name on it is a way to get yourself a little respect and maybe a little extra consideration come bonus time.
I've seen some spectacularly boneheaded ideas patented for exactly this reason.
One of the reasons biofuels might still be worth it is as an "energy converter". Liquids are very desirable as fuels from a materials handling standpoint -- they're storeable, they're pumpable and flow through pipelines easily, they're directly measurable, they allow for readings of the quantities sold or stored, they have a fairly high energy density, most of them are stable enough, and they're already well understood by people. We already have a giant liquid fuel infrastructure in place (tankers, trucks, pipelines, storage tanks and filling stations.) And we already have millions of engines designed to burn liquid fuels.
All very true. Add to that one other reason why liquid fuels are very desirable, which doesn't get mentioned often: flight.
There aren't a lot of other sources (none, that I'm aware of) that approach the energy/weight and energy/volume that liquid fuels and liquid-fueled engines do. Most modern electric battery systems are either heavy or take up a significant amount of space for the energy they carry. Compressed or cryogenically-liquefied fuels require much stronger, and thus heavier, storage tanks than room-temperature liquids (although these are probably the next-most-attractive option). And while nuclear-powered aircraft are technically feasible (the USAF played around with the concept in the 1950s or 60s), the amount of shielding you have to remove from the reactor makes them more a form of cheap contraception than transportation. (You end up with "shadow shielding," with a lot of radiation going everywhere but into the pilots, IIRC.)
If we as a civilization want to retain the ability to fly (heavier-than-air craft, anyway) cheaply from place to place, then preserving some sort of production and distribution network for high-energy liquid fuels is a must, at least in the short- to medium-term.
I think you need to do some research on the issue.
This isn't just a dispute between the recording industry and some radio stations. If it were, it would be settled according to contract law and that would be the end of it.
SoundExchange has been granted a special distinction -- a monopoly, in fact -- by the government (in the form of the Copyright Office), allowing it to sell special 'blanket licenses' to broadcasters. These licenses allow a broadcaster to play whatever sort of music they want, without having to worry about getting permission from each individual artist. They are an absolute requirement in order to broadcast music, either terrestrially or digitally, unless you stick only to the very tiny minority of music that's freely licensed, or you negotiate individual licenses with each rights-holder (which is not only the artist, but could be the person with the rights to the score, the rights to the lyrics, etc., in addition to the recording itself), which is obviously impractical on anything but a trivial scale.
SoundExchange is the only place that one can go to for this, by law. Therefore, I think it's entirely reasonable for people to protest the rates that they charge, since they were granted their entire business by the Copyright Office, which is a government agency. SoundExchange is allowed to speak for all artists, and license the copyright to all artists' music, only because the Copyright Office says they can. They don't "own" the music they purport to represent; it's not "theirs." They don't own the rights to anything.
I get upset every time I spend money to hire a DVD and then be forced to sit through warnings and adds. It makes me WANT to copy the DVD and strip this crap.
Amen, brother. That's one of the reasons why I now do almost all my DVD watching through Myth. Either I rip the DVD on my Mac and send it over the network to the playback machine, or I watch it directly using mplayer, which by default just plays the main title stream on the DVD, and doesn't do menus, UOPs, or any other garbage. It makes the "DVD experience" very much like the "VideoCD experience," only without LP-sized discs, LaserRot, or a player that sounds like a UFO landing.
Yeah my information was out of date, I hadn't realized they had done a Windows GUI. (I made a comment about some of the other new features further down in the thread.)
The Linux version is still CLI only, but in some ways that's not too bad, because it's easy to use in a script, and it avoids them getting into the GTK/KDE/Gnome religious war. It's nice to have something for Linux that doesn't have a giant list of dependencies, which was what killed me with other DVD ripping packages that I played with on my Linux box. (Thank God for monolithic applications.)
Well, you can copy a DVD and preserve the menus, while dropping the bitrate on the video material to squeeze it down somewhat. This is typically done to put a dual-layer DVD onto a 4.7GB DVD-R blank. It's a multistep process: you have to rip the DVD, which includes decrypting it, then reduce the size, and then burn the size-reduced files to a DVD. I'm sure someone out there probably scripted it at some point, but I think it became a lot less attractive when MPEG-4 encoders got to the point where they can rip a DVD in faster-than-realtime, and hard drives got big enough to hold hundreds of films and make them available to you instantly.
There was, at one time anyway, some "one click to ISO" tools for Windows that took a DVD and produced a 4.7GB image, and I think they had the option of preserving menus. I never used them, because I don't do Windows, but I saw someone using one once (this was probably back around 2002-ish). You may have a hard time finding them now, because it seems like interests have shifted.
(Personally I've always detested DVD menus, and when I do watch DVDs it's usually with mplayer, which cuts right to the main feature, skipping all the menus/previews/crap...although, admittedly, every once in a while there's some extra content worth something. Personally I've always wished that they could have just left all disc navigation functions to the player, and just present the user with a list of options, but Hollywood would never want to relinquish that much control. Damn, I liked LaserDisc.)
I think the point is that you'd pay (let's round up for the sake of overhead) $250,000 now, to store a petabyte. Let's also say that the drives are good for five years, at which point you'd need to replace them.
So in five years you go out and buy another petabyte of storage. If we assume that the price of storage halves every 24 months or so, then 1PB should only cost you around $62,500 (again, factoring in some overhead). And five years after that, maybe $16k.
The "halves every 24 months" argument could be specious (I'm not sure how safe it is to continue it too far, although it seems to have been roughly true in the past), but my general point is that once you get over the initial cost 'hump,' it only gets cheaper in the future to keep storing it. Eventually, you get to the point where 1PB is just something you can load into the Internet Archive and forget about.
Although it's a lot of data, it's not like there aren't a lot of companies around that do this. I'm sure EMC has storage farms that go up to way more than a PB; it wouldn't surprise me if you can't get some sort of 'datacenter in a box,' delivered to you in a shipping container, that would hold that much, right now. And stuff like that is only going to get easier to find, not harder, as time goes on.
Ultimately it's a question of balancing risk and cost -- do you want to do it now, onto 2000 500GB drives, or do you want to wait until next year, and do it onto 1000 1TB drives? Or wait until the year after that, and put it onto 500 2TB drives? Etc.
Interesting. I hadn't visited the HandBrake site in a while, because I've just been pretty happy with the old version I've been using for a while to feed the Mythbox, but apparently they seem to be doing well.
Hopefully if Sony and its cronies get out the DMCA-hammer, they'll be able to locate to someplace friendlier. (The VideoLAN people seem to be based out of France and don't get a lot of crap, and they maintain libdvdcss, which is sort of the key to every piece of DVD-related free software.) It's a pity, because I've probably bought more (admittedly, bargain bin) DVDs as a result of my HandBrake+MythTV setup than I ever did previously. But nobody has ever accused the media conglomerates of having a surplus of foresight or common sense.
Also, they supposedly have a Windows GUI for the new version. I'm not entirely pleased about this (I'm going to be annoyed if they get flooded with Windows script kiddies and the development focus moves there from Mac/Linux), but it's worth noting, I suppose. And the Linux CLI version seems to have been brought up to speed with the other versions, although there are other Linux DVD rippers that might be more attractive to people on that platform.
And it seems to finally have surround-sound and H.264 High Profile support. (Though why you'd need High Profile for a DVD rip I'm not sure, but hey, the more options the merrier.) And presets, which will be nice.
What? If you have a computer with a dvd writer, surely you also have something like nero installed. Maybe I've been away from windows for too long, but I don't remember seeing some form of protection to do a 1:1 copy of a DVD. Thinking about it, that would have made sense. Is there such a protection in commercial burning application?
Yes, there is. Although the people who put together CSS weren't incredibly bright, they weren't that stupid, either.
First, most commercial programs like Nero won't even make an image of an encrypted DVD. There's no technical limitation preventing them from doing so, but they just stop you. I think that's a lawyer-imposed limit.
Anyway, if you did make a block-by-block copy of an encrypted DVD, and burn it to a new disc, it would not play back on normal hardware. This is because the key to the content is stored on the disc in a special location, which is always made unwritable on blank DVDs. (Actually, I'm not sure if it's that the blanks don't let you write there, or if the consumer writers aren't capable of writing there, or both.) But anyway, you can copy all the encrypted data, but without the key your player will just barf on it.
However, DVD playback systems that don't rely on retrieving the key from the disc will play it just fine -- this includes every DVD player on Linux that I'm aware of, once you get the libdvdcss package installed. This is because if the drive fails to hand over the key, libdvdcss will proceed and recover the key through several other methods (one of which is just brute force, and is pretty speedy because of the braindead way CSS is implemented).
Apple's "DVD Player" application will also play an encrypted VIDEO_TS folder, even if it's not on a disc with the key on it. (Though I've never tried it off of a DVD-R disc; it will work just fine if you copy the VIDEO_TS folder from a DVD to your hard drive and play it, which is nice if you want to watch a movie on an airplane without draining your battery or something.)
But anyway, one of the only things that CSS actually does is prevent 1:1 copying onto DVD-R discs. Or at least it did until it was cracked eight ways from Sunday. (The biggest thing that stops people from copying movies, or stopped them while it was still an interesting thing to do [before you could go out and get hard drives at a lower cost-per-MB], was that most feature films won't fit on a 4.7GB DVD blank.)
(Yeah, it's Mac and Linux only, and I think the Linux version doesn't have a GUI yet. Thankfully, I don't care.)
Actually copying a DVD, as in making a disc from another disc, seems like a waste of time. It's like copying CDs. Who uses CDs anymore? The price of storage is low enough that I can have my entire movie and video collection on my MythTV box, ready to watch with just a few presses of the remote.
(And yeah, I know MythTV will supposedly rip DVDs itself, but I've never gotten it to work correctly. Everything that has to do with DVDs is flaky in MythTV, IMO, probably because it's hard to even discuss anything about encrypted playback without people wigging out because of the DMCA. It's easier to just encode them on a Mac and then shove them onto the Myth box over the network.)
It would be damned interesting to see MSFT come up with a new idea that folks actually like, instead of chasing others' successes (e.g. with xbox and Zune and IE, to varying degrees of success), or trying to rehash their failed ones.
Except, as far as I can tell, they've never done that. The core of their business model is to either copy other people's successful ideas (sometimes after buying them, sometimes without), or just take an idea that hasn't ever been successful, and use their weight to ram it down people's throats regardless.
They have no experience in the creation-of-new-novel-stuff department. Someday, that's going to catch up with them and be their undoing, but with so much money to burn, it could take an exceptionally long time.
The next intelligent species will find us and be amazed at how many human corpses they've found lying around next to an artifact with what seems to be a mice-shaped object in their hand. It might take them a while to guess what we were doing,
I think what it has in its other hand will be a significant clue.
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This is true. I was sort of ignoring the geosynchronous communications satellites because they require somewhat larger antennas than Iridium does; although I suppose you could put a flat patch antenna on top of a car's roof if you wanted to use them.
... half-cocked.
But anyway, I'm in agreement with you; the whole scheme seems a bit
Yes, it's true, you've figured it out. World of Warcraft is actually a real-life war in the Persian Gulf, and has been for years.
Look at the reasons why public support for the war in Iraq has flagged: primarily, it's because of the loss of U.S. troops. Yeah, occasionally you hear about Iraqi civilian deaths, but it's usually only from people who are already against the war. It's not changing any minds. Americans, to put it bluntly, are pretty well inured to civilian death that's not their own. (Particularly, and I hate to say this but it's pretty obvious, when the people dying are non-White, non-Christians.)
So, looking at this from a military commander's perspective, who needs to both fight the enemy while also maintaining support from the public at home, weapons systems which protect his soldiers -- even if they might encourage terrorism against civilians in the short run -- are a good thing overall, because if he takes too many casualties, the public will just pull the plug and then he'll fail at his mission. And politically, by turning the enemy into civilian-slaughtering terrorists, it makes the case for attacking them that much easier, while also making them less likely to achieve their political/strategic goals.
There needs to be some method for civilians to control them
I agree -- we should replace our current government with one where the head of state and head of government is a civilian, and put them in charge of all our military branches.
It requires very little in the way of actual violent intent to push a button or type a command on a console from thousands of miles away, which might or might not kill someone; it's an abstract action, safely removed from consequences. As such, it can be done by someone without any propensity or desire for violence. It's a disconnected action.
To swing a machete at someone -- or more to the point, grab their face and drive your thumbs through their eyes and into their brain -- isn't so easily depersonalized. It's fundamentally violent, there's no disconnecting it, and only a person who either inherently is, or has made themselves, comfortable with intense violence can accomplish it. At least without enduring a lot of psychological problems afterwards.
The missile may be more destructive, but since it occurs so far away, the act of firing it has little in the way of actual violence. It's not even required that the person firing it really know what it's going to do. No violent intent is required. On the other hand, when a person swings a machete towards the face of another, they know what's going to happen. It's impossible to do with out the violent intention. (For this reason, people who murder others with primitive instruments are often punished more severely than people who do it with firearms, automobiles, or some indirect method: our legal system recognizes the qualitative difference between applying some pressure to a piece of metal which begins a chain reaction which results in a bullet punching a hole in someone's chest fifteen feet away, and standing over them with a claw hammer, relentlessly beating their skull in while ignoring their pleas for mercy.)
I understand the point you're trying to make about ranged weapons perhaps making destruction easier, but to say that they are 'more violent' is just wrong. If anything, the main reason why they are easier to use is simply because they demand less violence.
I would tend to think that a GPS tracking system for cars would be land based like what ships and boats use out at sea. Doesn't require the same level of transmission gear and is pretty damned reliable. You could certainly track cars as I believe that is what onStar does here in the U.S. already. Of course I suppose nothing stops car manufacturers from putting the required gear to transmit to a satellite or five.
What are you talking about, in terms of "like what ships and boats use out at sea"?
A GPS receiver is just that -- a receiver. It doesn't transmit. Full stop.
If you want to create a position reporting system, then you need some way to get the positional data back into a network. There have been various ways of accomplishing this.
Amateur radio operators have put together a very nice network called APRS, which uses 2-meter handheld radios, coupled with standard GPS receivers and interface chips, to "ping" your position to ground stations, which then dump the data onto the Internet so you can see it.
Most commercial systems, like those used on trucks, use the cellular phone network in some capacity. (Some of them use analog modems and make voice calls, others use GPRS or CSD to avoid the voice call.) But of course this costs money -- you have to pay for the cellular connection somehow, even if you only use it a few times an hour or day. This is how OnStar works (and you pay a monthly or yearly fee for it).
In order to make a "position beacon" that would work everywhere, you'd need a backhaul that didn't depend on terrestrial infrastructure -- the logical choice would be to use the Iridium network. (A network of low-orbiting, cellular-type voice communications satellites.) I suspect this is used for sea shipping and marine navigation, if you want remote position-reporting. But Iridium equipment and airtime isn't exactly cheap.
Creating a network that could tell you the position of every car on the road, in real-time, would be a big endeavor. It's probably a lot easier just to use E-Z Pass-type RFID sensors and readers at key locations (under bridges, etc.) than to try and create a wide-area network of GPS-equipped position beacons and receivers, just because in a congested area, you'd need a base station pretty much on every lamp-post in order to provide good coverage. If every car in an area was reporting its position ever minute or so, you'd quickly saturate the available capacity of the cellular and APRS networks. RFID would be a much better choice.
I don't understand this logic that a "full featured" operating system has to be slow. What the hell are you OS designers doing that's eating up all the juice ? Just because Windows XP preloads a gazillion binaries doesn't mean it's a good idea.
Two words: Marketing department.
As soon as a tech company acquires one of those, the follow a pretty much predictable ballistic arc, based on how much velocity they had at the time they got one.
This doesn't seem hard to believe at all to me. At the actual boots-meeting-pavement level, what most people who file patents (while working as part of a big corporation) are looking for is just a resume line or feather in their cap, something to bring them a little closer to the next promotion. Whether the patent actually turns into anything hardly matters -- since most of them don't.
At a lot of companies, just having a patent with your name on it is a way to get yourself a little respect and maybe a little extra consideration come bonus time.
I've seen some spectacularly boneheaded ideas patented for exactly this reason.
One of the reasons biofuels might still be worth it is as an "energy converter". Liquids are very desirable as fuels from a materials handling standpoint -- they're storeable, they're pumpable and flow through pipelines easily, they're directly measurable, they allow for readings of the quantities sold or stored, they have a fairly high energy density, most of them are stable enough, and they're already well understood by people. We already have a giant liquid fuel infrastructure in place (tankers, trucks, pipelines, storage tanks and filling stations.) And we already have millions of engines designed to burn liquid fuels.
All very true. Add to that one other reason why liquid fuels are very desirable, which doesn't get mentioned often: flight.
There aren't a lot of other sources (none, that I'm aware of) that approach the energy/weight and energy/volume that liquid fuels and liquid-fueled engines do. Most modern electric battery systems are either heavy or take up a significant amount of space for the energy they carry. Compressed or cryogenically-liquefied fuels require much stronger, and thus heavier, storage tanks than room-temperature liquids (although these are probably the next-most-attractive option). And while nuclear-powered aircraft are technically feasible (the USAF played around with the concept in the 1950s or 60s), the amount of shielding you have to remove from the reactor makes them more a form of cheap contraception than transportation. (You end up with "shadow shielding," with a lot of radiation going everywhere but into the pilots, IIRC.)
If we as a civilization want to retain the ability to fly (heavier-than-air craft, anyway) cheaply from place to place, then preserving some sort of production and distribution network for high-energy liquid fuels is a must, at least in the short- to medium-term.
I think you need to do some research on the issue.
This isn't just a dispute between the recording industry and some radio stations. If it were, it would be settled according to contract law and that would be the end of it.
SoundExchange has been granted a special distinction -- a monopoly, in fact -- by the government (in the form of the Copyright Office), allowing it to sell special 'blanket licenses' to broadcasters. These licenses allow a broadcaster to play whatever sort of music they want, without having to worry about getting permission from each individual artist. They are an absolute requirement in order to broadcast music, either terrestrially or digitally, unless you stick only to the very tiny minority of music that's freely licensed, or you negotiate individual licenses with each rights-holder (which is not only the artist, but could be the person with the rights to the score, the rights to the lyrics, etc., in addition to the recording itself), which is obviously impractical on anything but a trivial scale.
SoundExchange is the only place that one can go to for this, by law. Therefore, I think it's entirely reasonable for people to protest the rates that they charge, since they were granted their entire business by the Copyright Office, which is a government agency. SoundExchange is allowed to speak for all artists, and license the copyright to all artists' music, only because the Copyright Office says they can. They don't "own" the music they purport to represent; it's not "theirs." They don't own the rights to anything.
I think you forgot to set the Subject of your post. It was supposed to be "GET SOME PRIORITIES".
s/VideoCD/LaserDisc/g
Although admittedly, VideoCD is a lot like LaserDisc in terms of format; it too (to my knowledge) just plays when you pop it in.
I get upset every time I spend money to hire a DVD and then be forced to sit through warnings and adds. It makes me WANT to copy the DVD and strip this crap.
Amen, brother. That's one of the reasons why I now do almost all my DVD watching through Myth. Either I rip the DVD on my Mac and send it over the network to the playback machine, or I watch it directly using mplayer, which by default just plays the main title stream on the DVD, and doesn't do menus, UOPs, or any other garbage. It makes the "DVD experience" very much like the "VideoCD experience," only without LP-sized discs, LaserRot, or a player that sounds like a UFO landing.
Yeah my information was out of date, I hadn't realized they had done a Windows GUI. (I made a comment about some of the other new features further down in the thread.)
The Linux version is still CLI only, but in some ways that's not too bad, because it's easy to use in a script, and it avoids them getting into the GTK/KDE/Gnome religious war. It's nice to have something for Linux that doesn't have a giant list of dependencies, which was what killed me with other DVD ripping packages that I played with on my Linux box. (Thank God for monolithic applications.)
Well, you can copy a DVD and preserve the menus, while dropping the bitrate on the video material to squeeze it down somewhat. This is typically done to put a dual-layer DVD onto a 4.7GB DVD-R blank. It's a multistep process: you have to rip the DVD, which includes decrypting it, then reduce the size, and then burn the size-reduced files to a DVD. I'm sure someone out there probably scripted it at some point, but I think it became a lot less attractive when MPEG-4 encoders got to the point where they can rip a DVD in faster-than-realtime, and hard drives got big enough to hold hundreds of films and make them available to you instantly.
There was, at one time anyway, some "one click to ISO" tools for Windows that took a DVD and produced a 4.7GB image, and I think they had the option of preserving menus. I never used them, because I don't do Windows, but I saw someone using one once (this was probably back around 2002-ish). You may have a hard time finding them now, because it seems like interests have shifted.
(Personally I've always detested DVD menus, and when I do watch DVDs it's usually with mplayer, which cuts right to the main feature, skipping all the menus/previews/crap...although, admittedly, every once in a while there's some extra content worth something. Personally I've always wished that they could have just left all disc navigation functions to the player, and just present the user with a list of options, but Hollywood would never want to relinquish that much control. Damn, I liked LaserDisc.)
I think the point is that you'd pay (let's round up for the sake of overhead) $250,000 now, to store a petabyte. Let's also say that the drives are good for five years, at which point you'd need to replace them.
So in five years you go out and buy another petabyte of storage. If we assume that the price of storage halves every 24 months or so, then 1PB should only cost you around $62,500 (again, factoring in some overhead). And five years after that, maybe $16k.
The "halves every 24 months" argument could be specious (I'm not sure how safe it is to continue it too far, although it seems to have been roughly true in the past), but my general point is that once you get over the initial cost 'hump,' it only gets cheaper in the future to keep storing it. Eventually, you get to the point where 1PB is just something you can load into the Internet Archive and forget about.
Although it's a lot of data, it's not like there aren't a lot of companies around that do this. I'm sure EMC has storage farms that go up to way more than a PB; it wouldn't surprise me if you can't get some sort of 'datacenter in a box,' delivered to you in a shipping container, that would hold that much, right now. And stuff like that is only going to get easier to find, not harder, as time goes on.
Ultimately it's a question of balancing risk and cost -- do you want to do it now, onto 2000 500GB drives, or do you want to wait until next year, and do it onto 1000 1TB drives? Or wait until the year after that, and put it onto 500 2TB drives? Etc.
Interesting. I hadn't visited the HandBrake site in a while, because I've just been pretty happy with the old version I've been using for a while to feed the Mythbox, but apparently they seem to be doing well.
Hopefully if Sony and its cronies get out the DMCA-hammer, they'll be able to locate to someplace friendlier. (The VideoLAN people seem to be based out of France and don't get a lot of crap, and they maintain libdvdcss, which is sort of the key to every piece of DVD-related free software.) It's a pity, because I've probably bought more (admittedly, bargain bin) DVDs as a result of my HandBrake+MythTV setup than I ever did previously. But nobody has ever accused the media conglomerates of having a surplus of foresight or common sense.
Also, they supposedly have a Windows GUI for the new version. I'm not entirely pleased about this (I'm going to be annoyed if they get flooded with Windows script kiddies and the development focus moves there from Mac/Linux), but it's worth noting, I suppose. And the Linux CLI version seems to have been brought up to speed with the other versions, although there are other Linux DVD rippers that might be more attractive to people on that platform.
And it seems to finally have surround-sound and H.264 High Profile support. (Though why you'd need High Profile for a DVD rip I'm not sure, but hey, the more options the merrier.) And presets, which will be nice.
What? If you have a computer with a dvd writer, surely you also have something like nero installed. Maybe I've been away from windows for too long, but I don't remember seeing some form of protection to do a 1:1 copy of a DVD. Thinking about it, that would have made sense. Is there such a protection in commercial burning application?
Yes, there is. Although the people who put together CSS weren't incredibly bright, they weren't that stupid, either.
First, most commercial programs like Nero won't even make an image of an encrypted DVD. There's no technical limitation preventing them from doing so, but they just stop you. I think that's a lawyer-imposed limit.
Anyway, if you did make a block-by-block copy of an encrypted DVD, and burn it to a new disc, it would not play back on normal hardware. This is because the key to the content is stored on the disc in a special location, which is always made unwritable on blank DVDs. (Actually, I'm not sure if it's that the blanks don't let you write there, or if the consumer writers aren't capable of writing there, or both.) But anyway, you can copy all the encrypted data, but without the key your player will just barf on it.
However, DVD playback systems that don't rely on retrieving the key from the disc will play it just fine -- this includes every DVD player on Linux that I'm aware of, once you get the libdvdcss package installed. This is because if the drive fails to hand over the key, libdvdcss will proceed and recover the key through several other methods (one of which is just brute force, and is pretty speedy because of the braindead way CSS is implemented).
Apple's "DVD Player" application will also play an encrypted VIDEO_TS folder, even if it's not on a disc with the key on it. (Though I've never tried it off of a DVD-R disc; it will work just fine if you copy the VIDEO_TS folder from a DVD to your hard drive and play it, which is nice if you want to watch a movie on an airplane without draining your battery or something.)
But anyway, one of the only things that CSS actually does is prevent 1:1 copying onto DVD-R discs. Or at least it did until it was cracked eight ways from Sunday. (The biggest thing that stops people from copying movies, or stopped them while it was still an interesting thing to do [before you could go out and get hard drives at a lower cost-per-MB], was that most feature films won't fit on a 4.7GB DVD blank.)
That's all I'm going to say.
(Yeah, it's Mac and Linux only, and I think the Linux version doesn't have a GUI yet. Thankfully, I don't care.)
Actually copying a DVD, as in making a disc from another disc, seems like a waste of time. It's like copying CDs. Who uses CDs anymore? The price of storage is low enough that I can have my entire movie and video collection on my MythTV box, ready to watch with just a few presses of the remote.
(And yeah, I know MythTV will supposedly rip DVDs itself, but I've never gotten it to work correctly. Everything that has to do with DVDs is flaky in MythTV, IMO, probably because it's hard to even discuss anything about encrypted playback without people wigging out because of the DMCA. It's easier to just encode them on a Mac and then shove them onto the Myth box over the network.)
It would be damned interesting to see MSFT come up with a new idea that folks actually like, instead of chasing others' successes (e.g. with xbox and Zune and IE, to varying degrees of success), or trying to rehash their failed ones.
Except, as far as I can tell, they've never done that. The core of their business model is to either copy other people's successful ideas (sometimes after buying them, sometimes without), or just take an idea that hasn't ever been successful, and use their weight to ram it down people's throats regardless.
They have no experience in the creation-of-new-novel-stuff department. Someday, that's going to catch up with them and be their undoing, but with so much money to burn, it could take an exceptionally long time.
Who are these companies who don't allow open-source software? Even Microsoft makes extensive use of GPL software.
Probably ones rapidly going out of business.
The next intelligent species will find us and be amazed at how many human corpses they've found lying around next to an artifact with what seems to be a mice-shaped object in their hand. It might take them a while to guess what we were doing,
I think what it has in its other hand will be a significant clue.
This is why it's critically important to lower the signal-to-noise ratio, by sending filthy pornography to everyone you know.
Do it for America.
Maybe if it was an FPS where you rode a heavily-armed Segway around...
Actually, that sounds like it might be fun.
Think about how many things factor into placing a phone call over the internet versus a landline.
You presume that there will always be a difference? I don't.