How can you "steal" a codec that's given away for free? Just because it was used in a non-windows setting means they stole the codec? Granted some of the early DivX codecs were of dubious origin, but they were used in Windows as well, and nobody uses those anymore anyway (except in Windows).
Mplayer does what every good windows player (including mplayer2.exe) does, it incorperates as many codecs as possible from as many free sources as possible. Mplayer does make it a bit easier by including a big bundle of codecs though.
If you really hate the fact that it's closed source, why don't you join the FFMPEG team (which mplayer uses the codecs from) and start hacking? I'll enjoy my non-pirated[1] movies of nearly any format in the meantime.
[1] I know enough about troll logic to know what's coming next.
Actually the $97 Billion doesn't matter either. The only thing that matters is that they drive this guy so far in debt with legal bills (by dragging on the proceedings for a few years), that he'll never get out and serve as a warning to any college student who thinks that information wants to be free. All they want is for people to say "I don't want to end up like that guy, starving cold alone and constantly in court defending himself."
Old decrepit systems or stuff cobbled together from parts may not even HAVE a cdrom, which would shoot down most of your repair utilites on the spot. Also, cheap CD-ROM drives die very frequently, especially in dirty environments. I would definatly bring a spare CD-ROM drive to swap into whatever systems you run into. If possible, i'd also bring a spare floppy drive, as floppy drives are notoriously unreliable and you never know when you're going to run into a system that does not suppot El-Torrito booting.
It might not be a bad idea to look around and try to download as much of the documentation on every piece of hardware you can find as well and stick it on a CD. That way when you hit the mystery board and the one jumper that fell off into the bottom of the case, you might stand a chance of figuring out where it goes. I'd also look around for those old DOS hardware configurator programs that old Ethernet card manufacturers (I'm looking at you NE2000 clones) loved before ISA plug and pray came around.
That's the real reason to oppose that crap. It's like crack for farmers. It's sad when there is a good reason to oppose something, but the hippies go after nebulous fears of a mouse somehow being born with an ear of corn coming out of its ass.
Yes, as a computer scientist, I obviously know more about farming than the farmers. They should listen to what I have to say since I undoubtedly understand the complexities of running a modern business (farm). Those farmers are obviously too stupid to make decisions on their own, and those years of college they took were obviously a waste.
I also don't trust the crowd that seems to think subsistence farming is some sort of idyllic lifestyle and just throwing away all technology will lead to some sort of paradise. I'd like to see some of these guys actually try to live without technology and see how much they like it.
Also, Keven was part of the "Hacker Community." Maher was a suit at Intel. Still, I'd hope more civil liberties groups would take notice, as this is obviously yet another violation of human rights. I'd rather if governments didn't get away with this sort of thing on a regular basis. Either charge him with something and give him his normal legal rights, or stop lying to the people and change the name to the Tyrannical States of America.
It all depends on what you're doing. Most business pages (brochurepages) are actually quite static and would not need much automation.
On a counterpoint, some homepages have dynamic content of some sort that you just can't do with static HTML. It's all a matter of what you're doing, not who you're doing it for.
Also, some people put up private pages as a way of teaching themselves the ins and outs of running webpages. Those pages can quickly include all sorts of bells and whisles including dynamic content, flash, etc. Additionally, those sights can look good on a Resume since it shows the person has enough interest in the technology to play with it outside of the workplace.
I'd expect someone to get it working on Linux (requiring a 400Mhz machine in the process no doubt). To be fair, most windows users can't even play Duke anymore because the Dos emulation in the NT kernel isn't up to snuff, and even if people reboot to DOS, their soundcard isn't even close to being supported by any game of that era, nor is their Video card all that hot at VESA graphics.
Plus the original Duke had a lot of graphics glitches with certain cards (I'm looking at you VESA mode).
Refueling fires are in the category of freak accidents these days and almost everybody uses self serve (except in those states were it's illegal for some reason). Cars dissipate static electiricty fairly quickly, and the no-smoking rule is a no brainer.
In other words, don't be stupid when refueling, but you don't have to be totally paranoid either. A touch of commmon sense reduces the chance of an accident to "act of god" probabilites.
Personally, smooth scrolling drives me nuts. It was my #1 complaint about IE (fortunatly you can disable it). I set my scrolls to go one page at a time, since I don't like unnecessary scrolling, I also read documents where you sometimes have to go to the bottom of the doc (to check the footnote) and back a few times. It drove me nuts when I clicked down and had to wait a few seconds for the page to scroll past. It's not like I can read it while it's scrolling or anything either, it's too fast for that. Worse, I'd quickly scroll to the bottom and have to wait for the page to catch up.
All this time I thought that feature was just there to infuriate people who don't like to wait on their machine. Now I find it actually does have a use, for people who scroll down annoyingly small amounts at a time. Doesn't your scroll finger get tired after awhile?
If a 175 pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end of 38 pounds of oil,
7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterlized water.
You missed the point. It is entirely possible that the other two formats are just plain less efficent than the XML version (you did check them both when they were compressed right?), but it's not by the nature of the protocol. With XML, the lower bound on the size of the document will be higher than it would be on a pure datastream. That's because the XML document has to encode it's formatting inside of itself, while the datastream's formatting information is tucked away in whatever parser the program uses to read its save files. That information on how to parse the document ads some true complexity to the data, which you will not be able to fully compress away with any general purpose compression. The amount of compression you can get on the actual data is fixed (since it is the same data in both cases), so the end result is that the XML will be larger than any efficently encoded straight datafile.
Also, beware of doing conversions like the one you mentioned above. Sometimes "unimportant" data is thrown away or added in the conversion (stuff like the creator metadata on the file) in the process, which can skew the results.
Just because your ISP is stuck in the 90's doesn't mean you need to drag everybody else down with you. Personal servers are what make the internet great, not giant media conglomorates feeding you exactly what their advertisers want. You'll note that the most useful webpages are usually the ones put up by some devoted guy on some particular topic in his spare time, not the multi-million dollar popup/flash/trendy keyword extravaganzas that big companies bought into.
of course you can just run your server on your ISP's website (if they offer one), but that's usually rather limited if you have a large number of infrequenty accessed files or dynamic content, and lord help you if your website needs a database backend to keep everything convienent yet manageable.
Sorry about the rant, but I just hate when people get suckered into thinking they're nothing more than "consumers" that aren't allowed to contribute to the public good.
Re:basically why it doesn't suck
on
Why XML Doesn't Suck
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
4 is a big old red herring.
The data compresses so well because it's encoded in a highly inefficent manner. Your average compression algorithm will be able to find more redundancy and give you a better % compressed, but it still won't compare with a human actually packing the data tightly together in the first place.
or, to take a more information theory POV, there is a certain amount of information in your post, which can be compressed down X percent by default. That same information has to be encoded in the XML version, and has the additional overhead of XML to deal with, so even compresed it will always be larger than the compacted and compresed binary only version.
XML has a lot of strengths, but compactness is not one of them.
Stop hanging out with pirates so you can appreciate the beauty of imports. Lots of games never make it over to the states, leaving little recourse but to import. One certainly doesn't need a translation for any Bemani game, or Fighting games, or even Sims for the most part. Plus there are tons of sites out on the web that provide translations for the more difficult parts.
I think you've allowed yourself to get caught up in the scene too much to even consider what people are doing with their stuff. I mean, why bother pirating a game when you can have a real copy in minutes with a trip down to your local store? And the real copy doesn't require any funky chips or discs to get working.
IMHO, Nintendo got this right with the GBA. The GBA has no region lock out, so there is basically no modchip industry for it. Granted there are still mods (The Afterburner is a nice kit that works great), but none of the "defeat lockout" variety. I don't know anybody who pirates GBA games (although I'm not really part of the Warez scene either).
Don't worry, in a few years you will be able to pick these up for $200 in a blue light special. Of couse by then they'll be too small to be really useful, like your CDs are now.
Those Aimbot guys really annoyed me sometimes though. You go to all of the trouble to sneak up on the guy from behind (because he's a camper naturally), and then the railgun embedded in his back shoots you dead the instant you come into view. That's just weak, especially when you are then called a n00b buy the aimbot guy.
That's why I generally only play online with friends. I don't need that kind of BS.
Yeah, Minesweeper is one of those games you can play by instinct if you play it enough. A friend of mine plays the "small" games in Windows minesweeper in 4 to 5 seconds (unless his mouse glitches).
Damn, those are cheap components. The desktop PC with Maxed RAM (the server I assume) for only $600? Did you remember to add the HDDs, case, power supply and processor? What is "maxed ram" anyway? I'd say you'd want to invest a bit more hardware into your server.
That's not as bad as your clients though.
$160 for a PC and 17" monitor. Well, the cheapest 17" monitor I could find on Pricewatch is a Daewoo for $97 + $10 shipping. That leaves you with $53 for case, power supply, keyboard, processor, memory, NIC, motherboard, mouse, graphics card, and cables. The cheapest processor I could find was a Duron 950 for $25. That leaves you with $28 for everything else. 128MB of memory comes to $20, leaving you with $8. I don't think you're going to be able to afford much of a case, keyboard, mouse, power supply, motherboard, graphics card, NIC, or even cables, and you've already used all of the bottom of the barrel parts. Those Suns are actually surprisingly hard to match, although if you really wanted to you could do it. Just be preprared to replace lots of broken hardware since you'll be using a low end equipment.
Too big!?! Can you actually get your hands around an entire pencil? My biggest complaint with the GBA (after installing the Afterburner at least) is that the X,Y and L,R buttons were too close together. After awhile playing games that require heavy use of the L & R (Metroid) my hands would be all cramped up. There is a definate pain barrier to some games due to the controller design. My hands aren't huge either, the PSx controller is just about the right size, while the original X-Box controller was too big. Everytime I look at the GBASP, I wonder how long it will take for the pain barrier to be a problem on games that extensively use the L & R buttons.
I am still rather annoyed at Nintendo for not putting the light in the original GBA though, as the Afterburner has shown there is ample room for it in the case.
I'll bet you'll be able to pick up the original GBA + an Afterburner kit for peanuts before too long though.
DirecTivos don't work on a DirectTV system because they save money by pulling out the MPEG encoder chip and just writing the compressed streams directly on the HDD. That's why they don't work with regular TV, it isn't already compressed for them. The DirctTivos still use the same guide data though, so they'll still be up a creek if Tivo goes under (although they'll still work as a regular cable box). That's also why DirecTiVos are cheaper than regular TiVos.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'm feeding the troll here, but...
How can you "steal" a codec that's given away for free? Just because it was used in a non-windows setting means they stole the codec? Granted some of the early DivX codecs were of dubious origin, but they were used in Windows as well, and nobody uses those anymore anyway (except in Windows).
Mplayer does what every good windows player (including mplayer2.exe) does, it incorperates as many codecs as possible from as many free sources as possible. Mplayer does make it a bit easier by including a big bundle of codecs though.
If you really hate the fact that it's closed source, why don't you join the FFMPEG team (which mplayer uses the codecs from) and start hacking? I'll enjoy my non-pirated[1] movies of nearly any format in the meantime.
[1] I know enough about troll logic to know what's coming next.
Actually the $97 Billion doesn't matter either. The only thing that matters is that they drive this guy so far in debt with legal bills (by dragging on the proceedings for a few years), that he'll never get out and serve as a warning to any college student who thinks that information wants to be free. All they want is for people to say "I don't want to end up like that guy, starving cold alone and constantly in court defending himself."
Old decrepit systems or stuff cobbled together from parts may not even HAVE a cdrom, which would shoot down most of your repair utilites on the spot. Also, cheap CD-ROM drives die very frequently, especially in dirty environments. I would definatly bring a spare CD-ROM drive to swap into whatever systems you run into. If possible, i'd also bring a spare floppy drive, as floppy drives are notoriously unreliable and you never know when you're going to run into a system that does not suppot El-Torrito booting.
It might not be a bad idea to look around and try to download as much of the documentation on every piece of hardware you can find as well and stick it on a CD. That way when you hit the mystery board and the one jumper that fell off into the bottom of the case, you might stand a chance of figuring out where it goes. I'd also look around for those old DOS hardware configurator programs that old Ethernet card manufacturers (I'm looking at you NE2000 clones) loved before ISA plug and pray came around.
Yes, as a computer scientist, I obviously know more about farming than the farmers. They should listen to what I have to say since I undoubtedly understand the complexities of running a modern business (farm). Those farmers are obviously too stupid to make decisions on their own, and those years of college they took were obviously a waste.
I also don't trust the crowd that seems to think subsistence farming is some sort of idyllic lifestyle and just throwing away all technology will lead to some sort of paradise. I'd like to see some of these guys actually try to live without technology and see how much they like it.
Also, Keven was part of the "Hacker Community." Maher was a suit at Intel. Still, I'd hope more civil liberties groups would take notice, as this is obviously yet another violation of human rights. I'd rather if governments didn't get away with this sort of thing on a regular basis. Either charge him with something and give him his normal legal rights, or stop lying to the people and change the name to the Tyrannical States of America.
It all depends on what you're doing. Most business pages (brochurepages) are actually quite static and would not need much automation.
On a counterpoint, some homepages have dynamic content of some sort that you just can't do with static HTML. It's all a matter of what you're doing, not who you're doing it for.
Also, some people put up private pages as a way of teaching themselves the ins and outs of running webpages. Those pages can quickly include all sorts of bells and whisles including dynamic content, flash, etc. Additionally, those sights can look good on a Resume since it shows the person has enough interest in the technology to play with it outside of the workplace.
It's like the Enterprise-D separating the saucer section when the warp core in engineering is about to breech.
Sometimes it's nice to be reassured that I'm reading Slashdot. Can anybody think of geekier analogy?
I'd expect someone to get it working on Linux (requiring a 400Mhz machine in the process no doubt). To be fair, most windows users can't even play Duke anymore because the Dos emulation in the NT kernel isn't up to snuff, and even if people reboot to DOS, their soundcard isn't even close to being supported by any game of that era, nor is their Video card all that hot at VESA graphics. Plus the original Duke had a lot of graphics glitches with certain cards (I'm looking at you VESA mode).
Refueling fires are in the category of freak accidents these days and almost everybody uses self serve (except in those states were it's illegal for some reason). Cars dissipate static electiricty fairly quickly, and the no-smoking rule is a no brainer.
In other words, don't be stupid when refueling, but you don't have to be totally paranoid either. A touch of commmon sense reduces the chance of an accident to "act of god" probabilites.
Personally, smooth scrolling drives me nuts. It was my #1 complaint about IE (fortunatly you can disable it). I set my scrolls to go one page at a time, since I don't like unnecessary scrolling, I also read documents where you sometimes have to go to the bottom of the doc (to check the footnote) and back a few times. It drove me nuts when I clicked down and had to wait a few seconds for the page to scroll past. It's not like I can read it while it's scrolling or anything either, it's too fast for that. Worse, I'd quickly scroll to the bottom and have to wait for the page to catch up.
All this time I thought that feature was just there to infuriate people who don't like to wait on their machine. Now I find it actually does have a use, for people who scroll down annoyingly small amounts at a time. Doesn't your scroll finger get tired after awhile?
Especially if he is on an all-bean diet.
Huh, wha? What ever happened to your little buddy xset fp rehash?
I don't think you have to restart with Xft either, although I havn't had an opportunity to install a font under it yet.
You missed the point. It is entirely possible that the other two formats are just plain less efficent than the XML version (you did check them both when they were compressed right?), but it's not by the nature of the protocol. With XML, the lower bound on the size of the document will be higher than it would be on a pure datastream. That's because the XML document has to encode it's formatting inside of itself, while the datastream's formatting information is tucked away in whatever parser the program uses to read its save files. That information on how to parse the document ads some true complexity to the data, which you will not be able to fully compress away with any general purpose compression. The amount of compression you can get on the actual data is fixed (since it is the same data in both cases), so the end result is that the XML will be larger than any efficently encoded straight datafile.
Also, beware of doing conversions like the one you mentioned above. Sometimes "unimportant" data is thrown away or added in the conversion (stuff like the creator metadata on the file) in the process, which can skew the results.
Just because your ISP is stuck in the 90's doesn't mean you need to drag everybody else down with you. Personal servers are what make the internet great, not giant media conglomorates feeding you exactly what their advertisers want. You'll note that the most useful webpages are usually the ones put up by some devoted guy on some particular topic in his spare time, not the multi-million dollar popup/flash/trendy keyword extravaganzas that big companies bought into.
of course you can just run your server on your ISP's website (if they offer one), but that's usually rather limited if you have a large number of infrequenty accessed files or dynamic content, and lord help you if your website needs a database backend to keep everything convienent yet manageable.
Sorry about the rant, but I just hate when people get suckered into thinking they're nothing more than "consumers" that aren't allowed to contribute to the public good.
4 is a big old red herring.
The data compresses so well because it's encoded in a highly inefficent manner. Your average compression algorithm will be able to find more redundancy and give you a better % compressed, but it still won't compare with a human actually packing the data tightly together in the first place.
or, to take a more information theory POV, there is a certain amount of information in your post, which can be compressed down X percent by default. That same information has to be encoded in the XML version, and has the additional overhead of XML to deal with, so even compresed it will always be larger than the compacted and compresed binary only version.
XML has a lot of strengths, but compactness is not one of them.
Stop hanging out with pirates so you can appreciate the beauty of imports. Lots of games never make it over to the states, leaving little recourse but to import. One certainly doesn't need a translation for any Bemani game, or Fighting games, or even Sims for the most part. Plus there are tons of sites out on the web that provide translations for the more difficult parts.
I think you've allowed yourself to get caught up in the scene too much to even consider what people are doing with their stuff. I mean, why bother pirating a game when you can have a real copy in minutes with a trip down to your local store? And the real copy doesn't require any funky chips or discs to get working.
IMHO, Nintendo got this right with the GBA. The GBA has no region lock out, so there is basically no modchip industry for it. Granted there are still mods (The Afterburner is a nice kit that works great), but none of the "defeat lockout" variety. I don't know anybody who pirates GBA games (although I'm not really part of the Warez scene either).
The Brits are planning to attack Russia in the winter?
Except the end result is to only let the rabble in! Savvy users are more likely to be blocked and not bother.
Don't worry, in a few years you will be able to pick these up for $200 in a blue light special. Of couse by then they'll be too small to be really useful, like your CDs are now.
Those Aimbot guys really annoyed me sometimes though. You go to all of the trouble to sneak up on the guy from behind (because he's a camper naturally), and then the railgun embedded in his back shoots you dead the instant you come into view. That's just weak, especially when you are then called a n00b buy the aimbot guy.
That's why I generally only play online with friends. I don't need that kind of BS.
Yeah, Minesweeper is one of those games you can play by instinct if you play it enough. A friend of mine plays the "small" games in Windows minesweeper in 4 to 5 seconds (unless his mouse glitches).
Damn, those are cheap components. The desktop PC with Maxed RAM (the server I assume) for only $600? Did you remember to add the HDDs, case, power supply and processor? What is "maxed ram" anyway? I'd say you'd want to invest a bit more hardware into your server.
That's not as bad as your clients though.
$160 for a PC and 17" monitor. Well, the cheapest 17" monitor I could find on Pricewatch is a Daewoo for $97 + $10 shipping. That leaves you with $53 for case, power supply, keyboard, processor, memory, NIC, motherboard, mouse, graphics card, and cables. The cheapest processor I could find was a Duron 950 for $25. That leaves you with $28 for everything else. 128MB of memory comes to $20, leaving you with $8. I don't think you're going to be able to afford much of a case, keyboard, mouse, power supply, motherboard, graphics card, NIC, or even cables, and you've already used all of the bottom of the barrel parts. Those Suns are actually surprisingly hard to match, although if you really wanted to you could do it. Just be preprared to replace lots of broken hardware since you'll be using a low end equipment.
Too big!?! Can you actually get your hands around an entire pencil? My biggest complaint with the GBA (after installing the Afterburner at least) is that the X,Y and L,R buttons were too close together. After awhile playing games that require heavy use of the L & R (Metroid) my hands would be all cramped up. There is a definate pain barrier to some games due to the controller design. My hands aren't huge either, the PSx controller is just about the right size, while the original X-Box controller was too big. Everytime I look at the GBASP, I wonder how long it will take for the pain barrier to be a problem on games that extensively use the L & R buttons.
I am still rather annoyed at Nintendo for not putting the light in the original GBA though, as the Afterburner has shown there is ample room for it in the case.
I'll bet you'll be able to pick up the original GBA + an Afterburner kit for peanuts before too long though.
DirecTivos don't work on a DirectTV system because they save money by pulling out the MPEG encoder chip and just writing the compressed streams directly on the HDD. That's why they don't work with regular TV, it isn't already compressed for them. The DirctTivos still use the same guide data though, so they'll still be up a creek if Tivo goes under (although they'll still work as a regular cable box). That's also why DirecTiVos are cheaper than regular TiVos.
Plus pipe smoke smells a heck of a lot better than cigarette smoke.