I would have to say that this piece is very funny and in some senses very true too. I've also studied philosophy and French literature and I can relate to a lot of it.
However, the start of his speech that was a joke... well, it makes sense (apart from the end bit)
The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other,
collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.
Think about it. It means people in chat rooms are not who you think they are. Even if you think you know. You can't see if they are black or white, fat or thin, male or female. The end tapers off it's not supposed to make sense.
The point, of course, is that saying this stuff in writing is always more condensed. Presenting it to your peers usually involves a bit more gesturing, pausing, and re-explaining in other terms.
Hi, thanks for the detailed response. I was trying to pin down some simple mistakes that I have seen on encodings that I have received; it's only a quick kneejerk reaction. I might add to your comments that I frames are full frames, whereas P and B frames contain only differences from the previous or next frame, or both. I would generally go with 25fps because I'm a PAL person (in Europe, and the standard is better too...). One thing we haven't mentioned so far is sound. A lot of people just encode that without any preproduction tweaks like downsampling to 44.1KHz, normalizing, and possible compression on some films in 5.1 with very high dynamic range that don't sound so hot in MP3/Ogg stereo without a touch of compression. If you have space, then you can go MP3 AC3 or similar to keep all 6 channels but then you're into 3 discs per movie territory. I'd rather sacrifice sound for image quality, although my rips have reasonable stereo sound, some people live for 5.1...
I generally use multipass XviD these days and do reduce resolution because subjectively for me I prefer the results. Objectively, it means the bits per pixel goes up and of course encoding time is reduced. A good bicubic resampling routine tends to soften images but they tend to encode quite nicely compared with full resolution sharp images.
An interesting response. Don't get too many of those these days. The article you linked to is particularly good, thanks a lot for that too, it might encourage me to finally find the time to go back to dual boot Linux (I lost a hard drive with my linux install and I just haven't had the heart to get it all back so far).
Gordian Knot does not take days. In fact, it's just a well put together collection of tools.
The ripping of a DVD itself doesn't take very long. The compression might, but that really depends on how you set it up, how you resize, and how you then compress it. If you know a little bit about what you're doing, you can get those times down, sacrificing quality sometimes. VCD and SVCD is unsurprising as these will play in set tops, and you can encode to VCD more quickly than to higher quality DivX formats.
Common mistakes :
not cropping the black bars from a 16:9 widescreen version actually encoded on the DVD at 4:3 regular TV aspect ratio.
Using default compression parameters that are too high quality and make multiple passes.
Not resizing the image down to a smaller width, leaving it at full resolution. Note that resizing and then encoding at the same bitrate as a bigger size version can result in better looking films, though they're 'softer' to the eye.
There are many other things as well, like the hardware you have, what you're doing at the same time on the PC, etc. But on a reasonable system you can rip and compress to DivX or XviD in less than three hours. Make sure you have a 2GHz+ processor and plenty of RAM.
Yes. Yahoo jumped in to get Google tech when it was running high, and probably got a good deal too, since Google wasn't so well known back in 2000. The original press release is here.
Yahoo! at the time said
"Yahoo! is focused on meeting the needs of these individuals [daily web searchers] by providing them with high-quality, relevant search results"
It would seem that the relevance of Google results is declining, precisely because so many people are working 24 hours a day to get their site ranked higher, and Kelkoo in particular seems to have done very well at that. www.alltheweb.com looks a lot like Google but isn't suffering at the moment from database pollution. I've seen it mentioned before on Slashdot, I think we'll be seeing it again. However, the plot thickens - if you click the "About" link on the AllTheWeb homepage you'll see that "AlltheWeb is a business of Overture Services, Inc." Now we know that Yahoo! acquired Overture back on October 7, 2003... and so there's no need for them to keep paying Google I guess. Especially not with a company that has a similar looking site!
What Google said at the time of Yahoo! integration of Google results:
"This is a significant milestone for Google and a strong validation of our business strategy"
The warning bells are ringing, since Yahoo! leaving - having been the loudest validation of the original Google business model - is terrible news in my opinion. It is of note that the Wall Street Journal (and not cnet news or CNN online or ZDNet, etc) picked up on this. The IPO is starting to look less rosy. What I would like to know is whether in the Yahoo! boardroom there was a long debate about the timing of this decision, and indeed what kinds of money were changing hands with Google for provision of searches and whether the price was set to go up for 2004!
I think linking to the original source has its merits. There are links to other articles too. All the articles are short on details and lead back to the Wall Street Journal article. So it's a reasonable thing.
I submitted this article with the Forbes link myself, but this other submitter got his through with a Yahoo! news regurgitation of the Reuteurs story. Yawn.
Yahoo! have bought up all this technology, it's clearly with something in mind. Google cannot continue it's run at the top, and this move may be a precursor to other stuff. Google are about to give their IPO. Once they do that, investors will start to want bigger ROI and more and more people will be saying WTF Google is all paid advertising now what happened to impartiality.
As an aside, I think there's a conspiracy. I submitted this story earlier than the current submitter, with more links to background and all, but it got rejected. Am I blacklisted because Taco disagreed with me once (I remained fully polite throughout).
Well I'm getting a lot more than that. More than a hundred a day on my Yahoo! address that are filtered, 20+ that slip by each working weekday. I report as many as I can be bothered. I might end up having to retire my Yahoo! address if ever I can't keep near a connected machine.
As for company mail, well I'd say about 30 a day, and that's after some basic header (subject line) filtering, rejecting non existent domain names and poorly formed addresses...
What sort of spam volumes are you getting? I get quite a lot, and I have filters. I just can't afford to go too crazy because running a company mail server means no false positives can be allowed until everyone learns what a separate SPAM inbox is.
Yes, but it takes rather more to convert | to i, @ to a, and all the other possible replacements. It's not impossible, but removing punctuation is only part of the battle.
Your whole post makes it sound like it's easy. If it were easy, we would stop a lot more spam. As it happens, it's difficult. Spammers are always going to keep ahead of the curve if they can, and as long as they're making money, they will continue to increase volume and keep on banging server CPU up and up in improved bayesian spam filtering.
I have agreed to differ with CmdrTaco before, in retrospect he has firm beliefs and sticks to them, all power to him.
Now, there are some things that could be improved on SlashDot, and we all know that. But basically it's still the most popular and the userbase is too diverse for anyone to really do much. First thing I would change is the moderation choices. Other than Interesting or Insightful there is no other reasonable option. Scaling is a problem though, they already have to handle huge load on their servers and I expect that changing code isn't easy... anything that will introduce extra load is going to cause problems for sure!
Yes, but if this is done officially, rather than in the "pirate" market, then the downloads could well be encoded in stereo at a decent resolution with DivX or XviD or something, and turn out to be much better quality on your big screen TV than the crappy NTSC pirate copies. TV output to your big screen can be got on a PCI/USB card for less than $50US.
Happens all the time. I correctly submit stories citing my source (some stories get published by other submitters with less interesting text and links) but it's the luck of the draw.
Don't be surprised - most stories are the first one or two paragraphs from an article.
Suffice it to say that most of the audence that saw it with me had no idea they had just seen a movie trailer; they actually believed that someone was going to start selling a "fully automated domestic assistant" some time next year...
That's the whole point. What better way to get everyone to talk about your movie? The site does not give a single indication that this is a joke, it drops a few hints though... if you read it all, it's far too exaggerated and heavy on technobabble, but I bet people are trying to contact them and call them in order to have demos on their TV shows and all sorts. I wonder how long they can keep it up?
The child labour law thing was really just a joke. Although in the UK until you're 16 you cannot work more than a certain number of hours, because you're supposed to be using your free time to do school homework and stuff... you have to be present in school until you are 16 years old.
For the anecdote, the school year in the UK runs September-August. If you are born in August 1988 you cannot leave school until the end of the current academic year, and would pretty much finish your GCSE (final exams before higher "A level" exams) exams. However you could be in class with someone in the same "school year" as you, same classes etc, preparing for your final exams, born in September 1987, and have already legally left school without so much as sitting in a classroom for your final academic year before A levels... so being born early in the school year makes you more likely to drop out before taking exams (but only slightly, most people at least sit the exams, though they aren't legally required to attend classes like others in their "school year". That's how I understood it anyway, legislation may have changed since I was at school...
Don't show his photo to your boss as you talk about the 2.4 kernels you're probably still running. The kernel maintainer for your corporate servers is a 20 year old guy who was 18 when he started maintaining. Whoah.
In the corporate world, even if there was some kind of genius kid really running the show, he'd be hidden behind grey haired puppets so that it didn't look like some genius kid was really running the show.
Kudos to Marcello, even though child labour laws (if he was paid to work with the ISP in Brazil when he was 13 years old) and human rights issues might get a mention if the press could ever see beyond Linus as a Linux hacker.
Re:Not that big a problem - yes it is, with photos
on
China's War Against Wires
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
I can frequently use a driver from Windows 3.1 on my Windows 98 or ME system.
You might get a printer to work with older drivers, but are you really serious in saying that 16 bit Win3.1 drivers worked satisfactorily for you in Windows? We are talking about high end graphics card drivers here, not keyboard, printer or network card drivers. The only things which most Linux users can't get to work these days fall into two categories:
software driven hardware... that is to say, hardware which is basically a simple I/O device and all processing happens in the main CPU. Like some modems, cheap USB scanners, etc.
high end specific cards with separate processing units on them (GPUs, low latency audio processors, hardware encoding cards, TV combo cards)
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think you'd get any of those kinds of hardware running in WinME with even a Win98 driver let alone a driver from Win3.1!
Hmmm... interesting, if the language search is really useful. There will be a lot of extraneous noise though, in a lot of conversations people reply to messages that aren't related but don't delete context, etc... so this system is either going to have to be very clever or make assumptions about everybody top-posting / bottom-posting, etc etc;
Searching my mailbox has never been difficult. I can find anything very quickly with simple text tools, and mutt. However if you've always lived in Outlook land then you'll need tools that take up loads of time indexing and doing clever stuff to do what I do every day with just a console mail app.
This is intended to do a better job than that: it looks at the content of the mail as well and tries to infer the threading structure from that.
That's only any use if your mailers are all broken in the first place and don't add "In-Reply-To" headers in the first place. Any piece of software could also analyze quoting and work out if an email was indeed a reply, but that's just silly. Mail headers were defined years ago for this sort of thing, people need to learn to use proper email etiquette (even Outlook/OE can do In-Reply-To)... and also STOP replying to some old message on a completely different subject too... that's the only thing that screws up threading for those of us who've been using it for years (mutt my personal favourite).
I'm not sure how much difference there is between 'decriminalise' and 'turn a blind eye', because the laws still forbid those decriminalised things.
As for whether something is illegal or not, well that's a hard thing to decide. I'm against nanny states making anything that might harm you illegal when it's also considered morally questionable, yet leaving other stuff perfectly legal. So many double standards, so much strangeness in the law (esp. corporate and tax law).
You can't do everything right, and turning a blind eye happens all the time for petty crime everywhere. People just tend to get on their high horses more when it's about narcotics, even though alcohol is as addictive and more dangerous it just happens to be socially acceptable. I expect cannabis to be the same within my generation, because it is socially acceptable already for my age group (25-34).
Most stuff that Holland is famed for is indeed illegal: they adopted a stance of decriminalising which is, quite frankly, the best way to go. You still can't deal massive quantities of dope or run prostitution scams involving pimping and extortion. The laws are just relaxed at a small time level and for people who pay their taxes on products and services that they buy. Black market activity (which usually means higher quantities or non declared employment) is still illegal.
No point making software illegal. The concept is out there, and not so hard to implement, so stopping Kazaa is just like taking a cup of water out of the sea and hoping that you'll stop the tides.
So kudos to the court, who are dead right. Kazaa should not be a special case and made illegal, just like video recorders, DVD burners, CD burners, cassette recorders, MP3 player/recorders, codecs, etc etc. The music industry reply is that the files could easily be filtered to stop copyrighted material from being shared. I beg to know how they propose to find out from an MP3 file whether it is copyrighted; the "copyright" bit in the files is removeable so that's not a solution is it?
Slashdot Mirror
I would have to say that this piece is very funny and in some senses very true too. I've also studied philosophy and French literature and I can relate to a lot of it.
However, the start of his speech that was a joke... well, it makes sense (apart from the end bit)
Think about it. It means people in chat rooms are not who you think they are. Even if you think you know. You can't see if they are black or white, fat or thin, male or female. The end tapers off it's not supposed to make sense.
The point, of course, is that saying this stuff in writing is always more condensed. Presenting it to your peers usually involves a bit more gesturing, pausing, and re-explaining in other terms.
I generally use multipass XviD these days and do reduce resolution because subjectively for me I prefer the results. Objectively, it means the bits per pixel goes up and of course encoding time is reduced. A good bicubic resampling routine tends to soften images but they tend to encode quite nicely compared with full resolution sharp images.
An interesting response. Don't get too many of those these days. The article you linked to is particularly good, thanks a lot for that too, it might encourage me to finally find the time to go back to dual boot Linux (I lost a hard drive with my linux install and I just haven't had the heart to get it all back so far).
The ripping of a DVD itself doesn't take very long. The compression might, but that really depends on how you set it up, how you resize, and how you then compress it. If you know a little bit about what you're doing, you can get those times down, sacrificing quality sometimes. VCD and SVCD is unsurprising as these will play in set tops, and you can encode to VCD more quickly than to higher quality DivX formats.
Common mistakes :
There are many other things as well, like the hardware you have, what you're doing at the same time on the PC, etc. But on a reasonable system you can rip and compress to DivX or XviD in less than three hours. Make sure you have a 2GHz+ processor and plenty of RAM.
Dumb journalist converting IP to Internet Protocol to make it look like he's technosavvy
It would seem that the relevance of Google results is declining, precisely because so many people are working 24 hours a day to get their site ranked higher, and Kelkoo in particular seems to have done very well at that. www.alltheweb.com looks a lot like Google but isn't suffering at the moment from database pollution. I've seen it mentioned before on Slashdot, I think we'll be seeing it again. However, the plot thickens - if you click the "About" link on the AllTheWeb homepage you'll see that "AlltheWeb is a business of Overture Services, Inc." Now we know that Yahoo! acquired Overture back on October 7, 2003 ... and so there's no need for them to keep paying Google I guess. Especially not with a company that has a similar looking site!
What Google said at the time of Yahoo! integration of Google results:
The warning bells are ringing, since Yahoo! leaving - having been the loudest validation of the original Google business model - is terrible news in my opinion. It is of note that the Wall Street Journal (and not cnet news or CNN online or ZDNet, etc) picked up on this. The IPO is starting to look less rosy. What I would like to know is whether in the Yahoo! boardroom there was a long debate about the timing of this decision, and indeed what kinds of money were changing hands with Google for provision of searches and whether the price was set to go up for 2004!
I submitted this article with the Forbes link myself, but this other submitter got his through with a Yahoo! news regurgitation of the Reuteurs story. Yawn.
Yahoo! have bought up all this technology, it's clearly with something in mind. Google cannot continue it's run at the top, and this move may be a precursor to other stuff. Google are about to give their IPO. Once they do that, investors will start to want bigger ROI and more and more people will be saying WTF Google is all paid advertising now what happened to impartiality.
As an aside, I think there's a conspiracy. I submitted this story earlier than the current submitter, with more links to background and all, but it got rejected. Am I blacklisted because Taco disagreed with me once (I remained fully polite throughout).
Well I'm getting a lot more than that. More than a hundred a day on my Yahoo! address that are filtered, 20+ that slip by each working weekday. I report as many as I can be bothered. I might end up having to retire my Yahoo! address if ever I can't keep near a connected machine.
As for company mail, well I'd say about 30 a day, and that's after some basic header (subject line) filtering, rejecting non existent domain names and poorly formed addresses...
What sort of spam volumes are you getting? I get quite a lot, and I have filters. I just can't afford to go too crazy because running a company mail server means no false positives can be allowed until everyone learns what a separate SPAM inbox is.
Yes, but it takes rather more to convert | to i, @ to a, and all the other possible replacements. It's not impossible, but removing punctuation is only part of the battle.
Your whole post makes it sound like it's easy. If it were easy, we would stop a lot more spam. As it happens, it's difficult. Spammers are always going to keep ahead of the curve if they can, and as long as they're making money, they will continue to increase volume and keep on banging server CPU up and up in improved bayesian spam filtering.
Now, there are some things that could be improved on SlashDot, and we all know that. But basically it's still the most popular and the userbase is too diverse for anyone to really do much. First thing I would change is the moderation choices. Other than Interesting or Insightful there is no other reasonable option. Scaling is a problem though, they already have to handle huge load on their servers and I expect that changing code isn't easy... anything that will introduce extra load is going to cause problems for sure!
Yes, but if this is done officially, rather than in the "pirate" market, then the downloads could well be encoded in stereo at a decent resolution with DivX or XviD or something, and turn out to be much better quality on your big screen TV than the crappy NTSC pirate copies. TV output to your big screen can be got on a PCI/USB card for less than $50US.
Don't be surprised - most stories are the first one or two paragraphs from an article.
That's the whole point. What better way to get everyone to talk about your movie? The site does not give a single indication that this is a joke, it drops a few hints though... if you read it all, it's far too exaggerated and heavy on technobabble, but I bet people are trying to contact them and call them in order to have demos on their TV shows and all sorts. I wonder how long they can keep it up?
For the anecdote, the school year in the UK runs September-August. If you are born in August 1988 you cannot leave school until the end of the current academic year, and would pretty much finish your GCSE (final exams before higher "A level" exams) exams. However you could be in class with someone in the same "school year" as you, same classes etc, preparing for your final exams, born in September 1987, and have already legally left school without so much as sitting in a classroom for your final academic year before A levels... so being born early in the school year makes you more likely to drop out before taking exams (but only slightly, most people at least sit the exams, though they aren't legally required to attend classes like others in their "school year". That's how I understood it anyway, legislation may have changed since I was at school...
Don't show his photo to your boss as you talk about the 2.4 kernels you're probably still running. The kernel maintainer for your corporate servers is a 20 year old guy who was 18 when he started maintaining. Whoah.
In the corporate world, even if there was some kind of genius kid really running the show, he'd be hidden behind grey haired puppets so that it didn't look like some genius kid was really running the show.
Kudos to Marcello, even though child labour laws (if he was paid to work with the ISP in Brazil when he was 13 years old) and human rights issues might get a mention if the press could ever see beyond Linus as a Linux hacker.
Kudos if that's your lady, dude.
Do you work for Microsoft?
You might get a printer to work with older drivers, but are you really serious in saying that 16 bit Win3.1 drivers worked satisfactorily for you in Windows? We are talking about high end graphics card drivers here, not keyboard, printer or network card drivers. The only things which most Linux users can't get to work these days fall into two categories:
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think you'd get any of those kinds of hardware running in WinME with even a Win98 driver let alone a driver from Win3.1!
Searching my mailbox has never been difficult. I can find anything very quickly with simple text tools, and mutt. However if you've always lived in Outlook land then you'll need tools that take up loads of time indexing and doing clever stuff to do what I do every day with just a console mail app.
That's only any use if your mailers are all broken in the first place and don't add "In-Reply-To" headers in the first place. Any piece of software could also analyze quoting and work out if an email was indeed a reply, but that's just silly. Mail headers were defined years ago for this sort of thing, people need to learn to use proper email etiquette (even Outlook/OE can do In-Reply-To)... and also STOP replying to some old message on a completely different subject too... that's the only thing that screws up threading for those of us who've been using it for years (mutt my personal favourite).
How is taking more time able to allow him to make his funding last?
As for whether something is illegal or not, well that's a hard thing to decide. I'm against nanny states making anything that might harm you illegal when it's also considered morally questionable, yet leaving other stuff perfectly legal. So many double standards, so much strangeness in the law (esp. corporate and tax law).
You can't do everything right, and turning a blind eye happens all the time for petty crime everywhere. People just tend to get on their high horses more when it's about narcotics, even though alcohol is as addictive and more dangerous it just happens to be socially acceptable. I expect cannabis to be the same within my generation, because it is socially acceptable already for my age group (25-34).
Most stuff that Holland is famed for is indeed illegal: they adopted a stance of decriminalising which is, quite frankly, the best way to go. You still can't deal massive quantities of dope or run prostitution scams involving pimping and extortion. The laws are just relaxed at a small time level and for people who pay their taxes on products and services that they buy. Black market activity (which usually means higher quantities or non declared employment) is still illegal.
So kudos to the court, who are dead right. Kazaa should not be a special case and made illegal, just like video recorders, DVD burners, CD burners, cassette recorders, MP3 player/recorders, codecs, etc etc. The music industry reply is that the files could easily be filtered to stop copyrighted material from being shared. I beg to know how they propose to find out from an MP3 file whether it is copyrighted; the "copyright" bit in the files is removeable so that's not a solution is it?