I agree, what is the purpose here? The first thing I thought was, "does he know he can run the vast majority of Linux software natively under OS X?" That's the beauty of tools like fink and macports. If you find something you want to use, "sudo port install foo".
Even X Windows apps compile, install, and run fine.
The whole reason I made the switch to OS X (from linux) was that I had everything I wanted on the Unix side via Darwin, plus a commercial desktop with commercial app availability.
I'm not sure I'll ever understand questions like this.
I can't figure out why it's so hard for people to get this straight. I suppose the person who composed the title of the post and the author of the quoted piece may not be American citizens. Just for clarification, there is no "Democrat Party". A Democrat is a member of the Democratic Party.
[Democratic] Win May Be Good News For Internet Policy Posted by Zonk on 2006.11.09 15:50 from the little-from-column-a-little-from-column-b dept. [ The Internet ] [ Politics ] [ Your Rights Online ] Null Nihils writes "Following the pivotal U.S. Midterm elections, things look hopeful for a free and open Internet, but the likelihood of progress in terms of copyright and privacy legislation is still uncertain. At any rate, it isn't hard to see a shift in U.S. information technology policy coming over the horizon. Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), strong supporters for Net Neutrality, will most likely take command of Internet policy, but [Democratic Party] commitments regarding privacy, data retention, and digital copyright have yet to be made certain. A C|Net article discusses the likely shift in priorities at Capitol Hill. 'If (Democrat Rick) Boucher gets the nod as chairman, a broadcast flag becomes far less likely and changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention sections become politically feasible... If Rep. Howard Berman, however, gets the job, the recording industry and motion picture industry will have a staunch ally as subcommittee chairman.'"
This whole issue has been there for the past several years. It's always been said that analog outputs would be down rez'd for new HD devices. In fact, 3 years ago I did a Christmas stint at Best Buy (you wouldn't believe the discount on Monster Cable) and we were trying to steer people away from any set without digital signal inputs. But frankly, consumers didn't care.
Customer: "You mean I'll probably have to buy a new TV in a few years if I don't pay $200 more for this one now?"
Me: "Yup"
Customer: "Well, I'm not paying an extra $200. Give me the all analog set. And no delivery, I'll take it out of the box and force it into the back of my Geo Metro."
And note that the hardware manufacturers are limited in what they can provide by what the content providers are willing to do. And the CPs made it very clear that if the "analog hole" wasn't closed, they were going to get behind HD.
So, no one should be surprised by this. If you bought an analog set in the past three years, it's your fault for not doing your homework. Anything bought earlier is the price of progress.
"Something more likely, though not much more, than an Apple switch from PPC to x86 would be Intel announcing that it will begin fabricating PowerPC CPUs.... The most likely Intel/Apple partnership would actually be the use of ancillary Intel chipsets in Apple products."
I guess I wondered about this as well. Why wouldn't Adobe simply pay to license the needed IP from Nikon. Would Nikon really NOT be interested in this?
Because HD-DVD was designed to be produced using existing pressing infrastructure, its per unit cost will (at least initially) be much lower than Blu-Ray (which requires new fab plants).
And HD-DVD does not require a caddy. Though several companies have announced coating products for Blu-Ray discs, I don't believe any of them have released additional production costs for using them, which will force Blu-Ray costs even higher.
The studios that support HD-DVD are going to have much better profit margins from HD-DVD releases than they would from Blu-Ray.
As someone else noted, there are more variables than just storage capacity that come into play.
As an aside, HD-DVD can hold a maximum of 60gigs per disc, while Blu-Ray tops out at 50.
Also BLu-Ray players will most likely be more expensive as it is harder to build one that will also play legacy DVDs.
In the consumer space, particularly in these days of $40 name-brand players, cost is everything.
I'm not sure why your message was mod'd to flamebait, but I've seen that happen other times when someone "questioned" the quality of a/. favorite (e.g. the lametable Firefly).
The original version of the video was truncated by about ten minutes. The people at OpenStep.se posted corrected versions in QT contained MPEG-4 files.
Microsoft convinced IBM to trash development on their own file-system codenamed 'Hilda' by showing them charts and graphs, etc., of how great HPFS was.
So, IBM, in it's usual pattern, bought the presentation and stopped all work on Hilda. THen waited... and waited... and waited.
Turns out, MSFT hadn't written a line of HPFS code when they gave the presentations on HPFS. And when OS/2 2.0 finally arrived years late, it had a buggy new filesystem written by MSFT. One of its stellar features was the disappearing filesystem!
I've done this many times for LDs that have not as yet been (and probably never will be) released on DVD.
I have over 1000 Laserdiscs, and two very good players (one brand new in the box, waiting for the day my main one dies). However, a couple of the rare discs that I really like have started to exhibit some speckling, so I've transferred those to DVD.
As others have pointed out, the video track on LDs are actually analog, so the setup is very simple (assuming you don't want to extract the digital audio from the disc). Here's how I do it:
S-Video and analog R/L outputs of the player connect to the inputs of a Sony DVMC-DA2 Analog-to-DV Firewire bridge.
The Sony DVMC-DA2 is set for 16-bit audio and the Firewire output of DA2 is connected to my Apple G5.
That's pretty much it. Now, you just start recording in whatever app you use to capture DV, and start the player.
Note that you should be sure to select the correct audio mode on the LD player if you're capturing a disc with Dolby Digital audio. One of the major failings of DD on LD (which DTS didn't have) was that they sacrificed one of the audio channels to contain the DD bitstream.
You may also want de-interlace the footage in your capture app before transcoding for DVD.
I don't think the producers of the Trek spinoffs have ever cared (probably haven't even seen) about Star Trek. They've changed nearly everything that was ever set up in Star Trek.
Eg., Next Generation changed the Klingons to honorable warriors and the Romulans to skulking liars.
Somehow, the Vulcans became nearly human in their capacity for Machiavellian behavior and Zephram Cochran became an alcoholic roustabout.
The author of the NYT article certainly has a way with words.
If, in fact, the file were permanently compressed, there would be no way to play it. The file is decompressed to play it, so it can't be "permanently compressed". Along with other examples of the authors 10 million mile view, this article isn't worth much.
In its fight for Dolby Digital, Dolby freqently maintains that the number of bits have little to do with the quality of the file. It's the quality of the algorithm that makes the difference. I'm not much of a fan of DD (I find DTS much better), but if Dolby can make that argument stick, so can Apple.
-David
Re:What made you think that EFax was PS compatible
on
eFax Hell?
·
· Score: 1
I don't see PostScript files listed on eFax's supported formats list:
MS Word MS Access MS Excel MS Excel Word Perfect ASCII Comma Delimited RTF Files Adobe Acrobat
The complain by Dell and others is more a matter of semantics (as is the add itself).
Dell claims that the term PC can apply to a workstation as well, rather than simply being used (as in the Apple add) to indicate a personal computer.
I never hear the word PC and think workstation, so I don't find Apple's ads misleading.
It's like a color printer add from a couple of years ago that said, "somewhere between black and white is silver, which is just one of the colors between the colors that the color printer can print." Note that they never claim they can print silver, just that it's between two colors they CAN print. Misleading? Not if you actually pay attention to what they're saying.
Not much need for tubes on the player side, since you only really need the tubes in the pre-amp and amp where the bitstream gets decoded and processed.
Frankly, I think the test material was of questionable value.
Starting off with material recovered from a lossy storage platform makes no sense at all. All you'll be doing is compounding the MPEG-2 artifacts (blockiness, mosquito noise, dirty windows, wavy noise, shadow definition, etc.) with those of the new encoding.
The only way I would accept a test of codecs is if a non-compressed (or uncompressed from a lossless storage platform) original were used in all the encodings.
What they've done would be like my taking a jpeg and trying to figure out which secondary image compression format is best, bitmap, gif, or png. Pointless.
I've watched a lot of dire sci-fi (War Of The Worlds springs to mind) in my time but ST:E really scrapes the bottom of the barrel. The characters are a joke (there's not a single one that I can empathise with or admire), and the storylines are almost entirely incompatible with the rest of the Star Trek universe (Klingons that look like TNG/DS9/Voyager rather than TOS, etc).
Knowing that you're probably taking a lot of heat for your comments, I would like you to know that you are not alone. I find this should to be awful (along the lines of Firefly) and your point about incompatible storylines/races/etc. absolutely spot on.
Of course, what you and I need to remember is that this show is not a prequel to Star Trek, it is a prequel to ST:TNG, ST:DS9, and ST:V, none of which made any sense in the context of Star Trek in any case.
The concept of Firefly was interesting, but poorly executed in my opinion. For example, the train robbery was ludicrous. I don't mind the concept "western in space", but it shouldn't be a literal western in space (to my mind). A good example of what Firefly could have been was Outland, which did a great job of updating the western to the realm of science-fiction.
The show had 9 main characters
I think this was one of its problems, as the various recent Star Trek shows have exhibited the same issue. There are too many characters to devote time to develop, since each of the actors generally has some type of screen-time requirement in the contract.
Actually, the one thing the show did have going for it was that the cast was generally good. And I did like the premise that we hadn't run across hundreds of alien races.
By the way, thanks for the reply. Apparently, people are allowed to say "this show rocked" without providing their reasons, but you can't say "this show was pretty lame" without being attacked for not backing up your claim.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, what is the purpose here? The first thing I thought was, "does he know he can run the vast majority of Linux software natively under OS X?" That's the beauty of tools like fink and macports. If you find something you want to use, "sudo port install foo".
Even X Windows apps compile, install, and run fine.
The whole reason I made the switch to OS X (from linux) was that I had everything I wanted on the Unix side via Darwin, plus a commercial desktop with commercial app availability.
I'm not sure I'll ever understand questions like this.
-nedrow
I can't figure out why it's so hard for people to get this straight. I suppose the person who composed the title of the post and the author of the quoted piece may not be American citizens. Just for clarification, there is no "Democrat Party". A Democrat is a member of the Democratic Party.
... If Rep. Howard Berman, however, gets the job, the recording industry and motion picture industry will have a staunch ally as subcommittee chairman.'"
[Democratic] Win May Be Good News For Internet Policy
Posted by Zonk on 2006.11.09 15:50
from the little-from-column-a-little-from-column-b dept.
[ The Internet ] [ Politics ] [ Your Rights Online ]
Null Nihils writes "Following the pivotal U.S. Midterm elections, things look hopeful for a free and open Internet, but the likelihood of progress in terms of copyright and privacy legislation is still uncertain. At any rate, it isn't hard to see a shift in U.S. information technology policy coming over the horizon. Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.), strong supporters for Net Neutrality, will most likely take command of Internet policy, but [Democratic Party] commitments regarding privacy, data retention, and digital copyright have yet to be made certain. A C|Net article discusses the likely shift in priorities at Capitol Hill. 'If (Democrat Rick) Boucher gets the nod as chairman, a broadcast flag becomes far less likely and changes to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention sections become politically feasible
This whole issue has been there for the past several years. It's always been said that analog outputs would be down rez'd for new HD devices. In fact, 3 years ago I did a Christmas stint at Best Buy (you wouldn't believe the discount on Monster Cable) and we were trying to steer people away from any set without digital signal inputs. But frankly, consumers didn't care.
Customer: "You mean I'll probably have to buy a new TV in a few years if I don't pay $200 more for this one now?"
Me: "Yup"
Customer: "Well, I'm not paying an extra $200. Give me the all analog set. And no delivery, I'll take it out of the box and force it into the back of my Geo Metro."
And note that the hardware manufacturers are limited in what they can provide by what the content providers are willing to do. And the CPs made it very clear that if the "analog hole" wasn't closed, they were going to get behind HD.
So, no one should be surprised by this. If you bought an analog set in the past three years, it's your fault for not doing your homework. Anything bought earlier is the price of progress.
http://tinyurl.com/dygn3
"Something more likely, though not much more, than an Apple switch from PPC to x86 would be Intel announcing that it will begin fabricating PowerPC CPUs.... The most likely Intel/Apple partnership would actually be the use of ancillary Intel chipsets in Apple products."
I guess I wondered about this as well. Why wouldn't Adobe simply pay to license the needed IP from Nikon. Would Nikon really NOT be interested in this?
-David
Because HD-DVD was designed to be produced using existing pressing infrastructure, its per unit cost will (at least initially) be much lower than Blu-Ray (which requires new fab plants).
And HD-DVD does not require a caddy. Though several companies have announced coating products for Blu-Ray discs, I don't believe any of them have released additional production costs for using them, which will force Blu-Ray costs even higher.
The studios that support HD-DVD are going to have much better profit margins from HD-DVD releases than they would from Blu-Ray.
As someone else noted, there are more variables than just storage capacity that come into play.
As an aside, HD-DVD can hold a maximum of 60gigs per disc, while Blu-Ray tops out at 50.
Also BLu-Ray players will most likely be more expensive as it is harder to build one that will also play legacy DVDs.
In the consumer space, particularly in these days of $40 name-brand players, cost is everything.
-David
Yes, it is so far as I've seen.
/. favorite (e.g. the lametable Firefly).
I'm not sure why your message was mod'd to flamebait, but I've seen that happen other times when someone "questioned" the quality of a
-David
Small (160x120) 11M
Tracker info at:
Nedron's HE Torrent Tracker
I've made torrents available at:
http://nedron.net:6969/
I use BitTorrent for two things, Fedora distros and X-Plane downloads.
http://www.x-plane.com/demo.html
-David
Microsoft convinced IBM to trash development on their own file-system codenamed 'Hilda' by showing them charts and graphs, etc., of how great HPFS was.
So, IBM, in it's usual pattern, bought the presentation and stopped all work on Hilda. THen waited... and waited... and waited.
Turns out, MSFT hadn't written a line of HPFS code when they gave the presentations on HPFS. And when OS/2 2.0 finally arrived years late, it had a buggy new filesystem written by MSFT. One of its stellar features was the disappearing filesystem!
-David
It's "The Monkees", not "The Munkees".
Frankly, I don't think "Head" is a bad movie, but it is certainly a product of its time. Sort of like watching "Wild in the Streets" today.
-David
I have over 1000 Laserdiscs, and two very good players (one brand new in the box, waiting for the day my main one dies). However, a couple of the rare discs that I really like have started to exhibit some speckling, so I've transferred those to DVD.
As others have pointed out, the video track on LDs are actually analog, so the setup is very simple (assuming you don't want to extract the digital audio from the disc). Here's how I do it:
- S-Video and analog R/L outputs of the player connect to the inputs of a Sony DVMC-DA2 Analog-to-DV Firewire bridge.
- The Sony DVMC-DA2 is set for 16-bit audio and the Firewire output of DA2 is connected to my Apple G5.
That's pretty much it. Now, you just start recording in whatever app you use to capture DV, and start the player.Note that you should be sure to select the correct audio mode on the LD player if you're capturing a disc with Dolby Digital audio. One of the major failings of DD on LD (which DTS didn't have) was that they sacrificed one of the audio channels to contain the DD bitstream.
You may also want de-interlace the footage in your capture app before transcoding for DVD.
-David
I don't think the producers of the Trek spinoffs have ever cared (probably haven't even seen) about Star Trek. They've changed nearly everything that was ever set up in Star Trek.
Eg., Next Generation changed the Klingons to honorable warriors and the Romulans to skulking liars.
Somehow, the Vulcans became nearly human in their capacity for Machiavellian behavior and Zephram Cochran became an alcoholic roustabout.
It only got worse in subsequent series.
-David
The author of the NYT article certainly has a way with words.
If, in fact, the file were permanently compressed, there would be no way to play it. The file is decompressed to play it, so it can't be "permanently compressed". Along with other examples of the authors 10 million mile view, this article isn't worth much.
In its fight for Dolby Digital, Dolby freqently maintains that the number of bits have little to do with the quality of the file. It's the quality of the algorithm that makes the difference. I'm not much of a fan of DD (I find DTS much better), but if Dolby can make that argument stick, so can Apple.
-David
I don't see PostScript files listed on eFax's supported formats list:
MS Word
MS Access
MS Excel
MS Excel
Word Perfect
ASCII Comma Delimited
RTF Files
Adobe Acrobat
-David
Eg.
Ummm, AVI is a container, not a codec. OK, so you can open an AVI container. What video codecs in the container do you support? Indeo? DivX? etc.
I see this more and more and it drives me nuts.
Since this article is neither for nerds, nor does it in any way matter, why was it OK'd? Slow news day?
As the original poster mentioned, DSP 3 finally supports muxing DTS audio streams.
This has been a requested feature since 1.0. Noce to see they finally got DTS support into the product.
The complain by Dell and others is more a matter of semantics (as is the add itself).
Dell claims that the term PC can apply to a workstation as well, rather than simply being used (as in the Apple add) to indicate a personal computer.
I never hear the word PC and think workstation, so I don't find Apple's ads misleading.
It's like a color printer add from a couple of years ago that said, "somewhere between black and white is silver, which is just one of the colors between the colors that the color printer can print." Note that they never claim they can print silver, just that it's between two colors they CAN print. Misleading? Not if you actually pay attention to what they're saying.
That's what marketing is all about.
Not much need for tubes on the player side, since you only really need the tubes in the pre-amp and amp where the bitstream gets decoded and processed.
http://www.mcintoshlabs.com/
Frankly, I think the test material was of questionable value.
Starting off with material recovered from a lossy storage platform makes no sense at all. All you'll be doing is compounding the MPEG-2 artifacts (blockiness, mosquito noise, dirty windows, wavy noise, shadow definition, etc.) with those of the new encoding.
The only way I would accept a test of codecs is if a non-compressed (or uncompressed from a lossless storage platform) original were used in all the encodings.
What they've done would be like my taking a jpeg and trying to figure out which secondary image compression format is best, bitmap, gif, or png. Pointless.
-David
I agree, WINE is as big an issue for GNU/Linux as Win-OS2 was for OS/2.
We'll never get native apps so long as a company (eg. Macromedia) can find a way NOT to make a native version.
-David
Knowing that you're probably taking a lot of heat for your comments, I would like you to know that you are not alone. I find this should to be awful (along the lines of Firefly) and your point about incompatible storylines/races/etc. absolutely spot on.
Of course, what you and I need to remember is that this show is not a prequel to Star Trek, it is a prequel to ST:TNG, ST:DS9, and ST:V, none of which made any sense in the context of Star Trek in any case.
-David
Actually, the one thing the show did have going for it was that the cast was generally good. And I did like the premise that we hadn't run across hundreds of alien races.
By the way, thanks for the reply. Apparently, people are allowed to say "this show rocked" without providing their reasons, but you can't say "this show was pretty lame" without being attacked for not backing up your claim. ;-)