American AC in Paris had a great quote below -- "Assume that you're just as good at revising some lawyer's contract as you'd expect that lawyer to be at revising your code. Act accordingly."
Does that mean I get to outsource the lawyer's job to India at a tenth of the salary of a lawyer here? At $20/hour vs. $200/hour, that turns out to be pretty cheap.
Avid Xpress, Apple FCP, Adobe Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas, and most other modern NLE software have keying as a standard feature. The four-input switcher I'll have to concede, but in the context of emulating the hardware, there are alternatives if you're not too concerned about online capabilities. Frankly, if you want online you shouldn't really be using a stock PC anyway. Then again, I don't think that the online capabilities of the original Toaster, given its rendering speed for certain operations, was really a factor.
IIRC the Toaster did utilize the Amiga's chips to the extent that it could. The magic was in that ASIC, and IMO that would be the more interesting thing to examine, although I'm sure if you dig into the code enough you'd have a rough idea of what they were trying to do.
However, to do anything with it today is pretty redundant. Your average $500 PC from Dell with a $250 Canopus ADVC-100 has more capability to edit than the toaster ever did, plus the ability to do real-time previews and output to DVD or DV tape. If you were to emulate the hardware, you'd have something that with full effects would take fractions of a second to several minutes per frame or more to render its output. Then you'd need an analog deck with frame-by-frame control, because that's how the Toaster used to do its thing: frame-by-frame, painfully, slowly usually. Plus you'd need stand-alone Time Base Correctors at a few hundred a pop for frame stabilization. To do a 1-2 hour video and have a render and print-to-tape go overnight or even over the course of a couple of days wasn't a big deal considering the lack of alternatives at the time.
I think for historical purposes or the code geek will appreciate the relase of code, but anyone with a PC from the last two years with a decent capture/output solution and a DVD writer can do far more than the original Toaster ever could.
This is a significant development because Newtek brought to the desktop level what used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment only broadcast stations could afford. It was an Amiga 2000 based box, which is why a reference exists to the Amiga in the first place. The original price was around $5000, and that didn't include the price of time-base correctors, frame-by-frame editing decks, cameras, etc.. But any professional videographer or low-end filmmaker suddenly had the most amazing set of tools to create what was in the hands of only the big players or the well funded. Their original promo video, called "Revolution," was an amazing demo. If you can find a copy, I suggest you view it and see that in 1991 terms this was a truly revolutionary concept.
Beyond that, Amigas with Newtek's Lightwave software were used in the production of series like Babylon 5 and Seaquest DSV. Huge render farms with 10^3 computers were generating graphics for major television series. You had better believe that it's significant from a historical perspective.
Today, Newtek's online editing setups are pretty interesting but vastly different. It's no skin off their backs to release the source because it's not really commercially valuable. That's because in the last couple of years editing come to the point where it is really accessible by the average person. I do technical consultation for video editors, and know for certain that the seed for desktop editing today was planted by Newtek's Video Toaster over 12 years ago.
One last note: the Amiga technology back in 1984 was being bid upon by two companies. The company that won was Commodore, and we know what a debacle of excess and poor marketing they were. The other was International Business Machines, who decided it wasn't valuable. Had IBM purchased the Amiga technology, it's very likely the computing landscape and development of multimedia technologies would have been a lot different and IMO advanced much further for the average person than history as it stands today shows.
Ashcroft has this, Ashcroft has that...it took congress and various state governments to bring much of what you claim to fruition. Don't focus on Ashcroft. If you hate him, hate him only for what he's done. There are more individuals involved in what you claim than you would have us believe, and those include your elected officials. Don't like 'em? Vote 'em out next time.
Also, according to the 60 Minutes II report, Canadian intelligence officials knew and approved of Arar's deportation to Syria. So, all they had was a foreign national that they didn't want, BUT when they asked Canadian officials if they wanted him back the Canadian officials said "naaah, send him back to Syria, we don't want him." Now who's at fault in this case? The worst part is that Arar's American lawyers are using him as a puppet in a case he has no chance to win in order to propagate their political cause when in reality Arar should be suing the Canadian government.
At least your reporters don't get their homes raided for reporting the news. I don't know of a single case where a US reporter has had their source of information seized by the police and potentially face criminal charges for what they said.
Although the Athlon64/Opteron and AthlonXP processors either match or surpass the Pentium 4 line, the one application that the Pentium 4 processors still excel at is in multimedia editing and encoding. Most people don't look at Hyperthreading favorably, yet with Hyperthreading enabled you get an over 30% performance boost in DV25 to MPEG-2 transcoding for video with everything else equal. That's not to say that the Athlon64/Opterons are not useful, but this is one area where they still excel. Considering that transcoding is the major bottleneck for the folks who edit video and create DVDs, there is a good reason to go for a Pentium 4. 30% of your time on a 2 hour video is a lot of time lost if you're trying to crank out videos. Not to mention that most of Matrox's editing cards are almost always approved for Intel hardware to be stable but not for all AMD hardware, particularly motherboards.
If, however, you're a gamer and aren't doing much media encoding or do it casually, then I would recommend an Athlon64.
I wish I had never taken my engineering degree. It is the biggest regret of my life. I'm doing some consulting and have a few business ideas, but it's very difficult to get funding for what I want because of the climate for tech. My alma mater's graduating EE class last year had very few employment opportunities, and what few were there were either extremely low paying or extremely demanding field work (16 hour days 6 days a week). A friend who's a vice-principal of a school wanted me to come in and talk to her students last year about technology careers, and I told her I couldn't conscionably do it because the climate is so awful and unlikely to change that I'd recommend either medicine or trades instead of what I took.
There are tons of jobs for doctors here in Canada and the US. Unlike the vast majority of engineering and CS jobs, medical diagnoses will never be outsourced. Heck, take a small business course and get creative with what you've got now and market your services uniquely as a GP or whatever else you want to do. Without health, we have nothing. That's why your job is likely the fundamentally most important job in our society, and why doctors will be the last people on earth out of work.
Comcast has potentially shot itself in the foot legally by not quantifying what "acceptable use" means to the particular users it targets. In contract law, there is a doctrine which states that any ambiguity in a contract works against the party that drafted the contract. In this case, since Comcast is the drafter, the individual that it shuts down could turn around and seek civil redress against Comcast for not clearly specifying what the term "acceptable use" is in terms of amount of data, rate of data, or time data is transferred.
In short, if you don't fight back you should take your lumps and not complain. Maybe if a few people fight back at least some benchmark will be revealed if by no other means than Comcast being subpoenaed for the information. I don't see them getting much money in the way of actual damages since business use is prohibited and you can't be making money with it, but it would be interesting to see punitive damage awards wake them up.
This is EXACTLY the problem here. Many of these companies outsourcing want to have their cake and eat it two. They're pitting two different systems of rules against each other and exploiting the gaps.
The US government was not the only party complicit in Maher Arar's deportation. The Canadian government allowed Arar to be deported after US government officials consulted with Canadians.
What's ironic is that Maher Arar should be suing Canada first. If not for the Canadian government's acceptance of Arar's deportation to Syria by the US, Arar would have been sent back to Canada. The Canadian government officials are as complicit in this as anyone else, and probably more so. To the US, Arar was a non-resident alien. To Canada, he was their citizen. It should've been Canada stepping up to bat for Arar.
We used to sell photocopiers in our family business around 18 years ago. I remember when the first copier came in, a Sharp, the police also came for a visit not too long afterwards. They wanted to know who was buying it, and expressly forbid either us or any customer from photocopying money.
Now, we were very curious, so one of the salesmen took a Canadian $50 and copied the one side of an 8.5"x11" 20lb bond copier paper. To be honest, it was far too glossy to be passed off as a bill, and the paper didn't feel right. Still, in a stack of bills it could easily be passed over in a bill counter if it was properly aligned, which in and of itself was impossible. Essentially, it wasn't feasible.
Anyway, fast forward to today, all color copiers come with a currency copying detection system. They detect the paper notes of most major currencies, and if anyone attempts to copy them, a flag is set in the machine such that the next time it gets serviced it actually informs the technician, who then informs the police. I believe some machines even cease operation until a technician is called. It's basically a big mess, so any potential criminal would still be better off using a PC with scanner and inkjet printer, which is how most counterfeiting is done AFAIK.
About 5 years ago, when I was working for a telecom consortium in Canada, one of the guys who was an expert for ATM was telling me that most deployments of ATM at the time were in purely synchronous mode due to the complexity of configuring the equipment to handle various types of traffic. Of course, what you ended up with is a very expensive switch with basically redundant capabilities.
ATM had a lot of promise but it's really an unnecessary technology relative to the amount of bandwidth available. Tons of fiber still lies dark. SONET switches and Ethernet are basically all that's going in these days for medium and long haul. Even for synchronous traffic, fast asynchronous transport can make the asynchronous nature of the medium transparent.
I deal with professional DVD creation and archival for a living. Believe me, people do NOT want to be re-encoding their video in perpetuity, and do want maximum lifespan and compatibility.
DVD+R is not the most compatible format. It's not even sanctioned by the DVD Forum, which is the official body that determines DVD standards. All of the rewriteable formats have even less compatibility. DVD-RAM has the worst compatibility of all despite having good potential as an archival medium. This doesn't mean that media will in some way be limited in supply in the near future, but it does mean that one should prevail for the sake of the data being put on it.
Here is what you need to have maximum compatibility and datalife for DVD videos:
1. A good DVD-R blank like Verbatim Datalife Plus or MAM-A Silver/Gold Archive DVD-R. These have data life in excess of 100 years, but more importantly stand a far better chance in regular use to last far longer than the $0.50/blank generic junk that's out there right now. Of course, you also need to store it in a temperature-stable low-humidity zero-UV zero-light environment.
2. Video encoded in one of the standard DVD-compliant resolutions, framerates and data rates, most preferrably 720x480 29.97fps MPEG-2 with IBP Group-of-Frames no longer than 0.6 seconds.
3. Audio encoded either in 48kHz 16-bit PCM stereo or 192kbit/s Dolby Digital AC-3 stereo. Most DVD software is too cheap to use AC-3, so they frequently use MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio, which is not compatible in most players. Using PCM requires a huge amount of space on the DVD which requires either a smaller video or lower encoder quality, though it is 100% compatible.
4. DVD-Video bit asserted. Some older players refuse to play anything that identifies as DVD-ROM. This is a bit of a "trick" but in reality can help compatibility.
5. Turning on the verification step in the burning software to ensure that the DVD data was written properly.
Do all of this and you will have the best chance of keeping your videos over the long term. If it's just data, eliminate steps 2-5, rinse and repeat, though for photographs you may want to have a DVD slideshow regardless. It's certainly better than the prospect of severely degraded VHS tapes that have little hope of recovery and are notoriously difficult to encode without fancy time base correctors, comb filters, software filters, and a lot of experimentation and coddling during the capture process to refine parameters. How much worse would it be to record a DVD that isn't compatible with your standard player today and, worse, anything left behind later on? It's not worth the risk.
Someone please mod the parent up. This is precisely what we were taught in graduate business school - that former employers should never give any information about an individual to anyone aside from the dates of employment and the position title.
Frankly, there are very few non-professional solutions if any that sync audio to video with any reliability. The Canopus ADVC line is about the only one that I know that does it 100% of the time for only a few hundred dollars. I also rarely if ever hear about audio sync problems on ReplayTV/Tivo boxes, which is probably a testament to its ground-up design rather than relying on someone else's solution. Some people claim that they have no sync problems with ATI AIW products, and that's them. I've heard far too many stories about and had too much personal experience directly with ATI's AIW garbage to deal with it.
Basically it boils down to this: if you want video in with a tuner, get a Tivo or ReplayTV with an ethernet jack and drop them on your computer; otherwise, if you want to capture video for editing purposes, get a dedicated professional capture solution.
Folks in the NLE world are so enamored with Macs that they really don't give the credit to PC editing as they should. The new Adobe Premiere Pro and Sony Vegas 4.0 are both more than capable of editing High Definition. I can build you a Premiere Pro- centered editing box consisting of a Bluefish 444 Iridium XP uncompressed HD capture card, Medea Fiber Channel or SCSI disk array, dual Opteron or Xeon workstation board with a couple of gigs of memory and all the other odds and ends for about $25k out the door. Mind you, this may not afford many real-time effects, but for that you have to go to $150k+ Avid HD workstations or even more expensive Discreet stuff to get that. I will stand it against any Apple solution in its price range, however.
What you also glance over is that many editors do offline editing on Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro on their own time, then export an EDL or Editor Decision List file and rent time on a real online editor like a Discreet at a post facility at some exorbitant sum per hour and have the final editing done there. In that sense, FCP offers no real advantage over Premiere Pro because it's the same information that's getting transmitted via EDL anyway.
Believe me, PCs are more than capable of editing. The Apple FCP hype is just that - hype. That Avid is a broadcast industry standard is certain, but the prices of Avid's truly professional products start out at around $30k for Standard Definition and skyrocket from there, and even Avid Xpress Pro software isn't a comparison to its standalone editors. There are plenty of good PC-based editors to do anything from a basic DV-based workflow doing basic tv commercials and wedding videos all the way up to uncompressed HD that involve neither FCP nor Avid products. Both PCs and Macs have their merits, but neither is so vastly superior that one could entirely exclude the other.
Go search Google on ATI All-In-Wonder audio sync, and you'll see that there are problems, especially on long captures. There's no real reliable configuration to alleviate this problem, and ATI has refused to deal with this problem pretty much since the first AIW cards were released. If you have the time and patience to manually re-sync your audio to the nearest frame, be my guest. Otherwise, forget about this solution.
Standard DV is 25Mbits/s which translates to roughly 13GB per hour. It's roughly equivalent to Motion JPEG or I-frame only MPEG2. Depending on how much TV you want to store, you could be looking at less than 20 hours for your average 250GB hard drive.
It's not over yet, however, as you have to then transcode it into some other useful format. If it's DVD, then you'll need MPEG-2. On the average machine, you can encode MPEG-2 in real time (29.97fps) at Constant Bit Rate, but Variable Bit Rate is even slower. If you want CD DivX/3ivX files, you'll be encoding even slower. Now multiply that by the number of hours of tv you have, and you'll see that there's a major logistical problem here.
The saddest part is that going to an ATI All-In-Wonder card that encodes MPEG-2 on the fly will pretty much guarantee you audio sync problems on long captures. It's not a real solution to me if you have to sit there and resynch all your audio to your video, and ATI and it's incompetent tech support has basically ignored this problem since the beginning.
In effect, you're left with almost no reliable choice in tv video recording except one: get a Tivo/ReplayTV box with a big hard drive and an Ethernet connection, suck the MPEG-2 files from that box into your computer, and burn them onto DVDs or convert them to DivX files. It won't be the highest quality, but it really is the only practical solution IMO. I deal with audio/video editing for a living now, and this is all I can recommend to all but the most hardcore user as the best solution.
The Canadian prices for iPods are $439, $579, and $729 for 10GB, 20GB and 40GB iPods, respectively. You must pay 7% GST on top of anything that you buy.
The US prices for iPods are $299, $399, and $499 for the same above. If you're not in California you only pay shipping and no tax.
At $1.32 Canadian exchange rate, assuming no skimming by your bank, the US prices to Canadians are $395, $527, and $658. Aside from the difference in price, to then bring it across the border you will be charged 7% GST and unknown amounts of excise, brokerage, inspection and other taxes, and they're not small change. I can guarantee you that it will end up costing you more to order it from the US if you're in Canada.
More proof that the Canadian dollar should be at around $1.50 or that prices in Canada should fall. Every Canadian iPod sold makes Apple in Cupertino extra profit at this point, and there's nothing that Canadians can do about it.
Why does one group get to have its way with all digital media without respect for other groups? Why is it that musicians and songwriters deserve to impose a "guilty until proven innocent" handout? If they get that much, then what will happen when other groups ask for them? What about film producers and movie studios? What about software companies? What about print publishers? If you take all of these groups into consideration, given what is already charged, the average CD blank will end up with a $4 per blank tax.
Great. The deal is then that I will get all of my software, music and books from warez newsgroups, filesharing networks and wherever else I can.
Does this make any sense whatsoever? Because if these groups think they can tax all this blank media, they will utterly destroy retail sales of both original media and blanks and the incentive of the consumer to engage in purchases thereof. This will end up hurting the artists represented by the collective. They will also drive blank media into the underground where trucks haul this stuff into black markets. Who loses in this scheme? Everyone but the people who supposedly get these taxes.
I consult for a living in the video editing and commercial production field, and now I have to tell my clients to make an emergency purchase tomorrow of spindles of DVD-Rs, CD-Rs and any other media and stockpile them because of this ridiculous tax. My clients don't deal in pirated material, and often we have to license music, images and footage from the creators anyway. They will never be able to apply for the proceeds from these taxes because they'll never qualify.
Enough is enough. E-mail Claude Majeau at majeau.claude@cb-cda.gc.ca and let him know what you think of him and his band of thugs. Find the MP for your riding and tell them that the Canadian Copyright Board needs to be stopped before they destroy retail sales in Canada and end up fueling mass piracy and the black market for the sake of artists who should be paid based on the merits of their music, not because they have been somehow directly robbed.
The radio and tv stations are at fault for this...
on
Kazaa-lite Shut Down
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· Score: 2, Insightful
When do you hear wide playing of so-called "B" sides? All you hear are what the companies consider the top 3-4 songs at most to promote the album. If that's all people hear, then that's all people want.
US inflation has been stable in the midst of the rise of the Euro. Obviously there is more than one lever involved in the matter which I was waiting for someone to walk into. One of those levers includes less assumption of consumer debt. Another is that prices for certain imported commodities (e.g. oil) are not controlled by the US, and as means of production, this relative stability only helps matters. From a purchasing power parity perspective, Canada (the largest US trading partner and where I am now, so stop this "you" business) is still not balanced relative to the US though prices have begun to fall somewhat in Canada on certain imported items (e.g. Apple's computers). In fact, Canada's economic growth was limited to 1.1% instead of the 3% the Bank of Canada projected because of the relative rise in the Canadian dollar, all while the US economy was rising 8.2%. Taxes have also fallen in the US creating additional money circulating through the US economy while the tax base in Europe is relatively steady albeit extremely high. I would've thought that there would be an increase in prices in the US, but there isn't, which means that there are many other things going on other than what I discussed. And now you know.
So, the question becomes, what do you do when some countries are high and some are low? That's the inherent weakness of the Euro - that one monetary policy cannot account for the fiscal policy of all countries. I did mention Greece, did I not? So obviously one of two things will happen here. Either all these countries in an economic funk will have their economies sink, or the rest of Europe will have to give them handouts. Either way, it's harmful long-term for the Euro.
First off, you focus on the US, but the fact of the matter is anyone - from anarchists to terrorists to civil disobedience organizers - can choose to jam BOTH the GPS system AND Galileo.
Then you mention how much clout the EU has with the US now. Unfortunately, all commodities are still traded in US dollars and probably will be for the foreseeable future. The high Euro has also significantly hurt European exports and all of this in the midst of increasing European deficits contrary to EU constitution by Germany and France recently. All this in the midst of rampant inflation like 30% increases in the cost of damned table salt per year in Greece last year, for example, and the UK being resistant to joining and giving up the pound. In fact, Europe's economy is teetering on stagflation at this point. The higher the Euro becomes the more expensive European exports become and the more European countries get hurt.
The article is pretty heavily laden with propaganda, and your post skims over too many details. However, just like the meteoric rise of the Nasdaq and Dow three years ago, the meteoric rise of the Euro of over 20% in the span of eight to ten months indicates something - volatility, not strength.
There are several very critical hurdles you need to overcome, including:
1. You need to be a registered business entity and have a business license, utility bill as proof, etc.. (so much for saving your home videos and pictures)
2. You need to pay a $60 per year application fee to even apply if you're a corporate entity, or $15 if you're not, and there is no guarantee that they will accept you. ($60 per year in levies is what I'd pay for buying them in the stores as an individual anyway)
3. You are obligated to provide records and account for the use of every piece of media for a span of two years and cannot resell it. (yes, even coasters have to be accounted for apparently but you basically let them walk in at any time to be able to audit you)
4. You can only buy royalty-free media from a handful of retailers. (so much for consumer choice)
In other words, the system is set up such that you are innocent until proven guilty and that only large consumers of media might see financial benefit because the imposed transaction costs appear cleverly designed to be at the sweet spot of the amount of media consumed by the average individual.
This is thuggery and a make-work project for government bureaucrats, plain and simple. Nobody remembers all the people whose copyrighted images are supposedly scanned and saved on writeable media. Nobody remembers the movie companies whose movies are supposedly pirated on CDs. Nobody remembers all the software developers whose software is widely copied. But when it comes to the poor musicians who need a welfare handout, no problem - except they're not getting the money either. As I said, thuggery.
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Does that mean I get to outsource the lawyer's job to India at a tenth of the salary of a lawyer here? At $20/hour vs. $200/hour, that turns out to be pretty cheap.
Hot damn...where do I find one of these guys?
Avid Xpress, Apple FCP, Adobe Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas, and most other modern NLE software have keying as a standard feature. The four-input switcher I'll have to concede, but in the context of emulating the hardware, there are alternatives if you're not too concerned about online capabilities. Frankly, if you want online you shouldn't really be using a stock PC anyway. Then again, I don't think that the online capabilities of the original Toaster, given its rendering speed for certain operations, was really a factor.
IIRC the Toaster did utilize the Amiga's chips to the extent that it could. The magic was in that ASIC, and IMO that would be the more interesting thing to examine, although I'm sure if you dig into the code enough you'd have a rough idea of what they were trying to do.
However, to do anything with it today is pretty redundant. Your average $500 PC from Dell with a $250 Canopus ADVC-100 has more capability to edit than the toaster ever did, plus the ability to do real-time previews and output to DVD or DV tape. If you were to emulate the hardware, you'd have something that with full effects would take fractions of a second to several minutes per frame or more to render its output. Then you'd need an analog deck with frame-by-frame control, because that's how the Toaster used to do its thing: frame-by-frame, painfully, slowly usually. Plus you'd need stand-alone Time Base Correctors at a few hundred a pop for frame stabilization. To do a 1-2 hour video and have a render and print-to-tape go overnight or even over the course of a couple of days wasn't a big deal considering the lack of alternatives at the time.
I think for historical purposes or the code geek will appreciate the relase of code, but anyone with a PC from the last two years with a decent capture/output solution and a DVD writer can do far more than the original Toaster ever could.
This is a significant development because Newtek brought to the desktop level what used to take hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment only broadcast stations could afford. It was an Amiga 2000 based box, which is why a reference exists to the Amiga in the first place. The original price was around $5000, and that didn't include the price of time-base correctors, frame-by-frame editing decks, cameras, etc.. But any professional videographer or low-end filmmaker suddenly had the most amazing set of tools to create what was in the hands of only the big players or the well funded. Their original promo video, called "Revolution," was an amazing demo. If you can find a copy, I suggest you view it and see that in 1991 terms this was a truly revolutionary concept.
Beyond that, Amigas with Newtek's Lightwave software were used in the production of series like Babylon 5 and Seaquest DSV. Huge render farms with 10^3 computers were generating graphics for major television series. You had better believe that it's significant from a historical perspective.
Today, Newtek's online editing setups are pretty interesting but vastly different. It's no skin off their backs to release the source because it's not really commercially valuable. That's because in the last couple of years editing come to the point where it is really accessible by the average person. I do technical consultation for video editors, and know for certain that the seed for desktop editing today was planted by Newtek's Video Toaster over 12 years ago.
One last note: the Amiga technology back in 1984 was being bid upon by two companies. The company that won was Commodore, and we know what a debacle of excess and poor marketing they were. The other was International Business Machines, who decided it wasn't valuable. Had IBM purchased the Amiga technology, it's very likely the computing landscape and development of multimedia technologies would have been a lot different and IMO advanced much further for the average person than history as it stands today shows.
Ashcroft has this, Ashcroft has that...it took congress and various state governments to bring much of what you claim to fruition. Don't focus on Ashcroft. If you hate him, hate him only for what he's done. There are more individuals involved in what you claim than you would have us believe, and those include your elected officials. Don't like 'em? Vote 'em out next time.
Also, according to the 60 Minutes II report, Canadian intelligence officials knew and approved of Arar's deportation to Syria. So, all they had was a foreign national that they didn't want, BUT when they asked Canadian officials if they wanted him back the Canadian officials said "naaah, send him back to Syria, we don't want him." Now who's at fault in this case? The worst part is that Arar's American lawyers are using him as a puppet in a case he has no chance to win in order to propagate their political cause when in reality Arar should be suing the Canadian government.
At least your reporters don't get their homes raided for reporting the news. I don't know of a single case where a US reporter has had their source of information seized by the police and potentially face criminal charges for what they said.
Although the Athlon64/Opteron and AthlonXP processors either match or surpass the Pentium 4 line, the one application that the Pentium 4 processors still excel at is in multimedia editing and encoding. Most people don't look at Hyperthreading favorably, yet with Hyperthreading enabled you get an over 30% performance boost in DV25 to MPEG-2 transcoding for video with everything else equal. That's not to say that the Athlon64/Opterons are not useful, but this is one area where they still excel. Considering that transcoding is the major bottleneck for the folks who edit video and create DVDs, there is a good reason to go for a Pentium 4. 30% of your time on a 2 hour video is a lot of time lost if you're trying to crank out videos. Not to mention that most of Matrox's editing cards are almost always approved for Intel hardware to be stable but not for all AMD hardware, particularly motherboards.
If, however, you're a gamer and aren't doing much media encoding or do it casually, then I would recommend an Athlon64.
I wish I had never taken my engineering degree. It is the biggest regret of my life. I'm doing some consulting and have a few business ideas, but it's very difficult to get funding for what I want because of the climate for tech. My alma mater's graduating EE class last year had very few employment opportunities, and what few were there were either extremely low paying or extremely demanding field work (16 hour days 6 days a week). A friend who's a vice-principal of a school wanted me to come in and talk to her students last year about technology careers, and I told her I couldn't conscionably do it because the climate is so awful and unlikely to change that I'd recommend either medicine or trades instead of what I took.
There are tons of jobs for doctors here in Canada and the US. Unlike the vast majority of engineering and CS jobs, medical diagnoses will never be outsourced. Heck, take a small business course and get creative with what you've got now and market your services uniquely as a GP or whatever else you want to do. Without health, we have nothing. That's why your job is likely the fundamentally most important job in our society, and why doctors will be the last people on earth out of work.
(DISCLAIMER: IANAL)
Comcast has potentially shot itself in the foot legally by not quantifying what "acceptable use" means to the particular users it targets. In contract law, there is a doctrine which states that any ambiguity in a contract works against the party that drafted the contract. In this case, since Comcast is the drafter, the individual that it shuts down could turn around and seek civil redress against Comcast for not clearly specifying what the term "acceptable use" is in terms of amount of data, rate of data, or time data is transferred.
In short, if you don't fight back you should take your lumps and not complain. Maybe if a few people fight back at least some benchmark will be revealed if by no other means than Comcast being subpoenaed for the information. I don't see them getting much money in the way of actual damages since business use is prohibited and you can't be making money with it, but it would be interesting to see punitive damage awards wake them up.
This is EXACTLY the problem here. Many of these companies outsourcing want to have their cake and eat it two. They're pitting two different systems of rules against each other and exploiting the gaps.
The US government was not the only party complicit in Maher Arar's deportation. The Canadian government allowed Arar to be deported after US government officials consulted with Canadians.
What's ironic is that Maher Arar should be suing Canada first. If not for the Canadian government's acceptance of Arar's deportation to Syria by the US, Arar would have been sent back to Canada. The Canadian government officials are as complicit in this as anyone else, and probably more so. To the US, Arar was a non-resident alien. To Canada, he was their citizen. It should've been Canada stepping up to bat for Arar.
We used to sell photocopiers in our family business around 18 years ago. I remember when the first copier came in, a Sharp, the police also came for a visit not too long afterwards. They wanted to know who was buying it, and expressly forbid either us or any customer from photocopying money. Now, we were very curious, so one of the salesmen took a Canadian $50 and copied the one side of an 8.5"x11" 20lb bond copier paper. To be honest, it was far too glossy to be passed off as a bill, and the paper didn't feel right. Still, in a stack of bills it could easily be passed over in a bill counter if it was properly aligned, which in and of itself was impossible. Essentially, it wasn't feasible. Anyway, fast forward to today, all color copiers come with a currency copying detection system. They detect the paper notes of most major currencies, and if anyone attempts to copy them, a flag is set in the machine such that the next time it gets serviced it actually informs the technician, who then informs the police. I believe some machines even cease operation until a technician is called. It's basically a big mess, so any potential criminal would still be better off using a PC with scanner and inkjet printer, which is how most counterfeiting is done AFAIK.
About 5 years ago, when I was working for a telecom consortium in Canada, one of the guys who was an expert for ATM was telling me that most deployments of ATM at the time were in purely synchronous mode due to the complexity of configuring the equipment to handle various types of traffic. Of course, what you ended up with is a very expensive switch with basically redundant capabilities.
ATM had a lot of promise but it's really an unnecessary technology relative to the amount of bandwidth available. Tons of fiber still lies dark. SONET switches and Ethernet are basically all that's going in these days for medium and long haul. Even for synchronous traffic, fast asynchronous transport can make the asynchronous nature of the medium transparent.
I deal with professional DVD creation and archival for a living. Believe me, people do NOT want to be re-encoding their video in perpetuity, and do want maximum lifespan and compatibility.
DVD+R is not the most compatible format. It's not even sanctioned by the DVD Forum, which is the official body that determines DVD standards. All of the rewriteable formats have even less compatibility. DVD-RAM has the worst compatibility of all despite having good potential as an archival medium. This doesn't mean that media will in some way be limited in supply in the near future, but it does mean that one should prevail for the sake of the data being put on it. Here is what you need to have maximum compatibility and datalife for DVD videos:
1. A good DVD-R blank like Verbatim Datalife Plus or MAM-A Silver/Gold Archive DVD-R. These have data life in excess of 100 years, but more importantly stand a far better chance in regular use to last far longer than the $0.50/blank generic junk that's out there right now. Of course, you also need to store it in a temperature-stable low-humidity zero-UV zero-light environment.
2. Video encoded in one of the standard DVD-compliant resolutions, framerates and data rates, most preferrably 720x480 29.97fps MPEG-2 with IBP Group-of-Frames no longer than 0.6 seconds.
3. Audio encoded either in 48kHz 16-bit PCM stereo or 192kbit/s Dolby Digital AC-3 stereo. Most DVD software is too cheap to use AC-3, so they frequently use MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio, which is not compatible in most players. Using PCM requires a huge amount of space on the DVD which requires either a smaller video or lower encoder quality, though it is 100% compatible.
4. DVD-Video bit asserted. Some older players refuse to play anything that identifies as DVD-ROM. This is a bit of a "trick" but in reality can help compatibility.
5. Turning on the verification step in the burning software to ensure that the DVD data was written properly.
Do all of this and you will have the best chance of keeping your videos over the long term. If it's just data, eliminate steps 2-5, rinse and repeat, though for photographs you may want to have a DVD slideshow regardless. It's certainly better than the prospect of severely degraded VHS tapes that have little hope of recovery and are notoriously difficult to encode without fancy time base correctors, comb filters, software filters, and a lot of experimentation and coddling during the capture process to refine parameters. How much worse would it be to record a DVD that isn't compatible with your standard player today and, worse, anything left behind later on? It's not worth the risk.
Someone please mod the parent up. This is precisely what we were taught in graduate business school - that former employers should never give any information about an individual to anyone aside from the dates of employment and the position title.
Frankly, there are very few non-professional solutions if any that sync audio to video with any reliability. The Canopus ADVC line is about the only one that I know that does it 100% of the time for only a few hundred dollars. I also rarely if ever hear about audio sync problems on ReplayTV/Tivo boxes, which is probably a testament to its ground-up design rather than relying on someone else's solution. Some people claim that they have no sync problems with ATI AIW products, and that's them. I've heard far too many stories about and had too much personal experience directly with ATI's AIW garbage to deal with it.
Basically it boils down to this: if you want video in with a tuner, get a Tivo or ReplayTV with an ethernet jack and drop them on your computer; otherwise, if you want to capture video for editing purposes, get a dedicated professional capture solution.
Folks in the NLE world are so enamored with Macs that they really don't give the credit to PC editing as they should. The new Adobe Premiere Pro and Sony Vegas 4.0 are both more than capable of editing High Definition. I can build you a Premiere Pro- centered editing box consisting of a Bluefish 444 Iridium XP uncompressed HD capture card, Medea Fiber Channel or SCSI disk array, dual Opteron or Xeon workstation board with a couple of gigs of memory and all the other odds and ends for about $25k out the door. Mind you, this may not afford many real-time effects, but for that you have to go to $150k+ Avid HD workstations or even more expensive Discreet stuff to get that. I will stand it against any Apple solution in its price range, however.
What you also glance over is that many editors do offline editing on Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro on their own time, then export an EDL or Editor Decision List file and rent time on a real online editor like a Discreet at a post facility at some exorbitant sum per hour and have the final editing done there. In that sense, FCP offers no real advantage over Premiere Pro because it's the same information that's getting transmitted via EDL anyway.
Believe me, PCs are more than capable of editing. The Apple FCP hype is just that - hype. That Avid is a broadcast industry standard is certain, but the prices of Avid's truly professional products start out at around $30k for Standard Definition and skyrocket from there, and even Avid Xpress Pro software isn't a comparison to its standalone editors. There are plenty of good PC-based editors to do anything from a basic DV-based workflow doing basic tv commercials and wedding videos all the way up to uncompressed HD that involve neither FCP nor Avid products. Both PCs and Macs have their merits, but neither is so vastly superior that one could entirely exclude the other.
Go search Google on ATI All-In-Wonder audio sync, and you'll see that there are problems, especially on long captures. There's no real reliable configuration to alleviate this problem, and ATI has refused to deal with this problem pretty much since the first AIW cards were released. If you have the time and patience to manually re-sync your audio to the nearest frame, be my guest. Otherwise, forget about this solution.
Standard DV is 25Mbits/s which translates to roughly 13GB per hour. It's roughly equivalent to Motion JPEG or I-frame only MPEG2. Depending on how much TV you want to store, you could be looking at less than 20 hours for your average 250GB hard drive.
It's not over yet, however, as you have to then transcode it into some other useful format. If it's DVD, then you'll need MPEG-2. On the average machine, you can encode MPEG-2 in real time (29.97fps) at Constant Bit Rate, but Variable Bit Rate is even slower. If you want CD DivX/3ivX files, you'll be encoding even slower. Now multiply that by the number of hours of tv you have, and you'll see that there's a major logistical problem here.
The saddest part is that going to an ATI All-In-Wonder card that encodes MPEG-2 on the fly will pretty much guarantee you audio sync problems on long captures. It's not a real solution to me if you have to sit there and resynch all your audio to your video, and ATI and it's incompetent tech support has basically ignored this problem since the beginning.
In effect, you're left with almost no reliable choice in tv video recording except one: get a Tivo/ReplayTV box with a big hard drive and an Ethernet connection, suck the MPEG-2 files from that box into your computer, and burn them onto DVDs or convert them to DivX files. It won't be the highest quality, but it really is the only practical solution IMO. I deal with audio/video editing for a living now, and this is all I can recommend to all but the most hardcore user as the best solution.
The Canadian prices for iPods are $439, $579, and $729 for 10GB, 20GB and 40GB iPods, respectively. You must pay 7% GST on top of anything that you buy.
The US prices for iPods are $299, $399, and $499 for the same above. If you're not in California you only pay shipping and no tax.
At $1.32 Canadian exchange rate, assuming no skimming by your bank, the US prices to Canadians are $395, $527, and $658. Aside from the difference in price, to then bring it across the border you will be charged 7% GST and unknown amounts of excise, brokerage, inspection and other taxes, and they're not small change. I can guarantee you that it will end up costing you more to order it from the US if you're in Canada.
More proof that the Canadian dollar should be at around $1.50 or that prices in Canada should fall. Every Canadian iPod sold makes Apple in Cupertino extra profit at this point, and there's nothing that Canadians can do about it.
Why does one group get to have its way with all digital media without respect for other groups? Why is it that musicians and songwriters deserve to impose a "guilty until proven innocent" handout? If they get that much, then what will happen when other groups ask for them? What about film producers and movie studios? What about software companies? What about print publishers? If you take all of these groups into consideration, given what is already charged, the average CD blank will end up with a $4 per blank tax.
Great. The deal is then that I will get all of my software, music and books from warez newsgroups, filesharing networks and wherever else I can.
Does this make any sense whatsoever? Because if these groups think they can tax all this blank media, they will utterly destroy retail sales of both original media and blanks and the incentive of the consumer to engage in purchases thereof. This will end up hurting the artists represented by the collective. They will also drive blank media into the underground where trucks haul this stuff into black markets. Who loses in this scheme? Everyone but the people who supposedly get these taxes.
I consult for a living in the video editing and commercial production field, and now I have to tell my clients to make an emergency purchase tomorrow of spindles of DVD-Rs, CD-Rs and any other media and stockpile them because of this ridiculous tax. My clients don't deal in pirated material, and often we have to license music, images and footage from the creators anyway. They will never be able to apply for the proceeds from these taxes because they'll never qualify.
Enough is enough. E-mail Claude Majeau at majeau.claude@cb-cda.gc.ca and let him know what you think of him and his band of thugs. Find the MP for your riding and tell them that the Canadian Copyright Board needs to be stopped before they destroy retail sales in Canada and end up fueling mass piracy and the black market for the sake of artists who should be paid based on the merits of their music, not because they have been somehow directly robbed.
When do you hear wide playing of so-called "B" sides? All you hear are what the companies consider the top 3-4 songs at most to promote the album. If that's all people hear, then that's all people want.
US inflation has been stable in the midst of the rise of the Euro. Obviously there is more than one lever involved in the matter which I was waiting for someone to walk into. One of those levers includes less assumption of consumer debt. Another is that prices for certain imported commodities (e.g. oil) are not controlled by the US, and as means of production, this relative stability only helps matters. From a purchasing power parity perspective, Canada (the largest US trading partner and where I am now, so stop this "you" business) is still not balanced relative to the US though prices have begun to fall somewhat in Canada on certain imported items (e.g. Apple's computers). In fact, Canada's economic growth was limited to 1.1% instead of the 3% the Bank of Canada projected because of the relative rise in the Canadian dollar, all while the US economy was rising 8.2%. Taxes have also fallen in the US creating additional money circulating through the US economy while the tax base in Europe is relatively steady albeit extremely high. I would've thought that there would be an increase in prices in the US, but there isn't, which means that there are many other things going on other than what I discussed. And now you know.
The Netherlands still has 5% inflation, and Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal have inflation rates in excess of 4%.
So, the question becomes, what do you do when some countries are high and some are low? That's the inherent weakness of the Euro - that one monetary policy cannot account for the fiscal policy of all countries. I did mention Greece, did I not? So obviously one of two things will happen here. Either all these countries in an economic funk will have their economies sink, or the rest of Europe will have to give them handouts. Either way, it's harmful long-term for the Euro.
First off, you focus on the US, but the fact of the matter is anyone - from anarchists to terrorists to civil disobedience organizers - can choose to jam BOTH the GPS system AND Galileo.
Then you mention how much clout the EU has with the US now. Unfortunately, all commodities are still traded in US dollars and probably will be for the foreseeable future. The high Euro has also significantly hurt European exports and all of this in the midst of increasing European deficits contrary to EU constitution by Germany and France recently. All this in the midst of rampant inflation like 30% increases in the cost of damned table salt per year in Greece last year, for example, and the UK being resistant to joining and giving up the pound. In fact, Europe's economy is teetering on stagflation at this point. The higher the Euro becomes the more expensive European exports become and the more European countries get hurt.
The article is pretty heavily laden with propaganda, and your post skims over too many details. However, just like the meteoric rise of the Nasdaq and Dow three years ago, the meteoric rise of the Euro of over 20% in the span of eight to ten months indicates something - volatility, not strength.
According to the Canadian Private Copying Collective website, you can apply for an exemption from media levies.
...
HOWEVER
There are several very critical hurdles you need to overcome, including:
1. You need to be a registered business entity and have a business license, utility bill as proof, etc.. (so much for saving your home videos and pictures)
2. You need to pay a $60 per year application fee to even apply if you're a corporate entity, or $15 if you're not, and there is no guarantee that they will accept you. ($60 per year in levies is what I'd pay for buying them in the stores as an individual anyway)
3. You are obligated to provide records and account for the use of every piece of media for a span of two years and cannot resell it. (yes, even coasters have to be accounted for apparently but you basically let them walk in at any time to be able to audit you)
4. You can only buy royalty-free media from a handful of retailers. (so much for consumer choice)
In other words, the system is set up such that you are innocent until proven guilty and that only large consumers of media might see financial benefit because the imposed transaction costs appear cleverly designed to be at the sweet spot of the amount of media consumed by the average individual.
This is thuggery and a make-work project for government bureaucrats, plain and simple. Nobody remembers all the people whose copyrighted images are supposedly scanned and saved on writeable media. Nobody remembers the movie companies whose movies are supposedly pirated on CDs. Nobody remembers all the software developers whose software is widely copied. But when it comes to the poor musicians who need a welfare handout, no problem - except they're not getting the money either. As I said, thuggery.