Absinthe is quite different from Jagermeister, though the flavours are similar.
Both have had a history of questionable legal status, i believe.
I can't say much about Jagermeister since i know little about it's history, but i can give some info on absinthe.
The reasons absinthe was banned are somewhat unclear.
The whole 'wormwood drives you insane' thing is rather misleading, you would need to drink an amount of absinthe sufficient to induce alcohol poisoning before you would suffer any ill effects from the thujone in the wormwood.
Prolonged use probably does have some risk attached, but if youre drinking enough absinthe for the wormwood to pose a problem, you've got much bigger problems from the alcohol.
The 'real' reason for absinthe's toxic effects were the dyes the manufacturers used (back in the day - nobody would risk doing this now) to enhance absinthes typical green colour - these dyes, based on bismuth and other toxic metals probably did drive people insane/made their hair fall out/teeth drop out etc.
Traditionally, absinthe is poured into a glass, and then ice water is dripped through a spoonful of sugar (using a special perforated spoon) into the glass.
The cold water, combined with the lowered alcohol content causes the 'louching' effect - where the liquid turns opaque, by precipitating terpenes from the alcohol solution, which were dissolved at the higher temperature/alcohol concentration.
I don't know much about Jagermeister, having only sampled it once at a friend's house. Jagermeister is slightly more viscous, like a liquer, while absinthe flows like water. - it should, it's typically >70% ethanol.
Both are herbally-flavoured drinks, chartruese being another type of this drink.
Not really my favourite drinks, but theyre great when youre looking for something a bit interesting.
The big issue here is that CG rendering techniques are mostly geared to producing footage the viewer expects to see - that is, footage captured by a camera and printed to video/film.
Camera and rendering models are all about simulating a camera. Since all camera exhibit motion blur - their shutters stay open for a finite amount of time, during which an object may conceivably move, it is necessary to 'fake' this to properly simulate a camera.
Same with depth-of-field. All cameras with conventional lenses have a finite range in which they can capture images with high precision. Simulating this effect is key to the idea of simulating a camera.
As soon as you move away from the idea of simulating a camera, youre stuck with the vexing question of 'what am i simulating?' Whose viewpoint is your computer model applied to?
The big problem with images lacking depth of field is that your eyes can focus on the entire image, since it is presented at a single 'depth' - a flat plane perpendicular to your line of sight. you can happily focus on every element in the image without adjusting your eyes, and so the illusion of depth - typically as it relates to the subject of the image, is lost.
Images are not presented for their own sake - an image is a composite presentation containing as many visual cues as necessary to draw your attention to the subject of the image. You can surely imagine numerous devices to alter the composition of an image, but in order to successfully convey a message, the viewer must be able to pick up on and use these devices to decipher your message.
These devices are defined not by any hard-and-fast physical model, but by convention - collectively, we have seen so much film that it seems natural that an image projected with grain looks 'real', and an image projected without it does not look 'real'.
However, many realtime computer games are good examples of what can be achieved without motion blur and depth-of-field effects. High framerates all but eliminate 'strobing' - traditionally dealt with by motion blur, and everything is in stark focus, regardless of it's distance. This is 'useful', allowing you to aim accurately at objects a great distance away, but sacrifices 'realism' and 'atmosphere' - you won't be winning any awards for cinematography with a Quake demo.
It may be interesting to read some case studies of people who have received head injuries etc. which have effected the way they see things - some see only objects in motion, others can only see objects in primarily horizontal or vertical configurations. These people see the world using a fundamentally different model than the majority.
It would be interesting to work on producing images that would only be fully appreciated by people who did not, or could not view the image as it would appear to 'normal' individuals.
I don't have a credit card, and have no intention of getting one.
Since there is apparently no other way to pay for online content - either directly or indirectly e.g. PayPal, i won't be buying anything off the internet, including 'content'.
When i was a kid, i had the choice between Meccano or Lego.
I chose the Lego every time, because somebody had obviously put a lot of thought into it's design - Lego is designed to appeal to kids, Meccano is designed to appeal, well, possibly to British railway engineers?
Meccano's iron material would certainly make for more durable constructions, but the breadth of the Lego offerings - from castles to spaceships, dwarfs Meccano's range.
Lego is not just about encouraging construction skills, it's about encouraging the imagination.
When you build your own spaceship to fly your tiny astronauts to the moon, somehow it's much more real to you than if you were to have been given a ready-made space-ship toy.
And when the engines on your spacecraft fail, and you are forced to make a crash landing on the moon, being able to put your craft back together, perhaps in a new configuration (some parts were too badly damaged by the crash to be repaired) and fly home again is a whole new adventure.
Meccano could arguably supply the same experience, but crashing a meccano ship is just not the same, since they tend not to come apart unless under extreme stress, and then youre looking at permanent damage.
I too lament the recent 'dumbing down' of Lego, going for mechandising tie-ins like with Star Wars instead of creating new designs, but I own the Lego Mindstorms kit, which i plan on giving to my girlfriend's nephew when he's wise enough not to lose all the pieces.
This is a lot of fun to play with (even for a 26-year old software developer like me), and i think it's great that Lego has stepped outside it's traditional market with new and somewhat groundbreaking products.
Meccano vs Lego?
It may be more 'realistic', but there is no way it's more fun.
I mean, really.. We have open bytecode-based VMs, we have XML-RPC, SOAP etc.
We have C-like languages up the yin-yang on UNIX.
The whole OS is built around the idea that a network connection is just like a file.
Now MS is trying to sell this concept as if its something new? or interesting?
What is M$ giving us here except an 'authentication service' - hell, you could probably whip that up in a weekend with an SSL-enabled apache and perl, and yet another language, based on proprietary technology and attempting to duplicate the functions that Java is already providing?
MS has proved time and again that they aren't interested in working with anyone else unless they retain control, and they make the most $$$.
If there was ever a time to make a conscious decision to say - 'Not this time, Bill. You can cram.NET up your pasty-white corporate ass.', this is it.
Where you follow the wacky Gordon Freeman and his happy-go-lucky Barney sidekicks on a no-holds-barred fight to escape the depths of the secret Black Mesa government research facililty and the clutches of the mysterious 'Administrator'.
Frequent travel to alien worlds and the unravelling of the evil plot to rule the world by harnessing an alien army... It would kick ass!
There were no chicks in the game, except for those big-titted black-op assasins, but surely the TV show could work some sexy scientists into the script.
I have a Siemens M20 GSM modem hooked up to my Linux box, which lets me do all sorts of nifty stuff, like run SMS mailing lists and other services, run programs on my machine in response to an SMS message, play-by-SMS games, recieve SMS alerts etc.
at NZ$0.20 a message (sender pays), it can get expensive with heavy use, but is not cost-prohibitive with moderate use.
The biggest problems with getting games onto linux are:
a) Developers are mostly much more familiar with Windows, leading them to adopt Windows-specific techniques, making porting difficult and/or expensive.
and
b) There is no 'Standard' under Linux for audio/video/input handling.
Loki is attempting to solve both those problems by
a) releasing documentation e.g. this book that enables programmers to become familiar with game-development techniques on Linux
and
b) releasing a cross-platform library (SDL) that handles these functions, and is looking like the most promising 'Standard' gaming API for Linux.
I don't see how this is a 'free ride' for anyone, since ideas represented in code, regardless of who they are written by can be easily protected using various licenses, most notably the GPL, which prevents companies from 'stealing' anything.
And how the hell you arrive at the conclusion that writing documentation is somehow 'the wrong thing to do' is completely beyond me.
The reason many gaming companies don't support Linux is the same reason they don't support BSD. In terms of the gaming market, nobody buys Linux games.
Is that any reason not to write games for Linux?
Linux never would have made any ground in any sector of computing if this attitude prevailed - 'No companies are doing it, so theres no point trying.'
If a Linux port of a Windows game can be produced for close-to-zero cost, or if Linux can be used as a development environment (can you say 'Playstation 2'?), then delivering games for Linux becomes easier and more attractive, and having good games available leads gamers to consider Linux as their primary OS.
Linux has only just become a platform capable of supporting modern games, and outshines every other *NIX variant in this respect.
It is only natural that books like this should be produced, and i can't think of a better group of people to produce them than Loki.
I have an Iomega Buz card that works great for capturing MJPEG video under linux. Low-to-No CPU usage, full-screen, full-frame PAL.
I would normally lean towards using half-frame (352x288 PAL) capturing as it consumes less disk space (1-2MB/s) than the 2-5MB/s of 720x576.
My soundcard, however, can't do mmapped recording and is no good for synched audio capturing. This screws me royally till i get round to putting a new soundcard in the machine.
I have had a BT848 TV Tuner card in the same machine, and that worked great for fullscreen TV playback at 800x600, also with low to no CPU usage.
My original foray into this field was with the BT848 in a P-200 box. I used it as a TV, an MP3 jukebox and an internet terminal displaying on my TV.
This was connected to the TV via an external scan converter, and let me watch TV in a window, while i surfed the net/played MP3s etc.
Remote control was taken care of by a home-built IR adapter and LIRC, and later an analog IR 'joypad' which came with the scan converter. and worked as a serial mouse.
Fonts and stuff needed major tweaking, and the general usability of a standard X desktop on a TV is bad.
With regard to the DC10/Buz:
I am not sure whether it is possible to capture MJPEG to a file, and play it back at the same time. Theoretically, since the bytes are on the disk, this should be easy, but you never know.
MJPEG will also consume vast amounts of disk space. realtime transcoding to MPEG or even DivX would be nice - piping the MJPEG through an encoder instead of writing to disk, but the encoders i have used aren't fast enough (though my machine is slowish - a dual P.Pro 200 that lacks MMX), but may be an option with good hardware.
An MJPEG-based PVR would be the best first step to take, but be aware that MJPEG consumes at least twice as much space as MPEG, so budget for big disks. However quality should be really good.
The stability of lavtools (MJPEG capture/playback utils) has been good for me so far, but i haven't used them in a PVR-like capacity - i.e heavy use with a failure in capturing being somewhat unnacceptable.
When i get a new soundcard for my box, i will be looking at doing this again, perhaps what we need is a sourceforge project or similar 'hub' for MJPEG-based PVR projects.
Also, you don't need MS's development tools to do Windows development.
You can use the (free) Cygwin/MinGW32 or Borland C/C++ compilers if you like.
You can use any of a plethora of non-MS languages, like Java, Perl, Python, Delphi and lots of others.
QT, GTK, wxWindows are all good, cross-platform toolkits for Windows, your comment about needing Windows development tools to develop on Windows is plain wrong.
I'm not denying that MS tools are the most widely used and convenient tools to use for M$ development in an M$-only environment, but to say you have no alternative is just plain wrong.
What youre complaining about is the fact that your employer requires you to use M$ tools.
So get your employer to get a single Passport and then all developers at your company use it. When you perform work for your company, you represent that company, not yourself personally.
M$ is free to use any authentication scheme it likes with it's web services.
Its not news that M$ is a giant corporate entity that abuses its monopoly power to screw the consumer and lock them in so it can keep screwing them, but you have, and always have had the choice not to use their products.
All this decision does is enforce the notion that 'content on the internet' is subject to different laws than content that isn't on the internet.
I can see how the writers have a problem with the publisher profiting from their work independently from them, but surely a standard licensing agreement with a clause that states republishing on any medium other than those expicitly agreed to by the writer/publisher is not acceptable.
This ruling is just giving ammunition to the RIAA/MPAA etc, who argue that because a recording is in digital form, it is suddenly exempt from fair use requirements etc.
'It's different when its on the internet'
I'd like to think this was the courts standing up for the little guy, and preventing big media from ripping them off, but to me it sounds more like the RIAA/MPAA just bought a whole lotta justice.
of how the largest and supposedly 'best' software company in the world, with legions of paid developers, only managed to delay SoftImage's next-gen product (Sumatra/XSI) for so long that everyone who really needed it was forced to go and buy Maya.
I'm sure this wasn't entirely M$'s fault - but the acquisition of SI by M$ hardly induced a revolution in the devlopment of the product, did it?
Just because lots pf people get paid to do something doesn't make it good. McDonalds pays a whole lot of people a whole lot of money, but their food is still only fit for pigs.
What would Linux be like if there was some system for everyone who contributes to be compensated? Well, it'd be like Windows, and then we'd all have to go and hack on something else.
I agree, i have Xine working great on my machine, fullscreen and windowed xv output with perfect audio sync.
I also have it playing back through my Hollywood+ after using the dxr3 patches. Audio sync is not working perfectly yet, so i wouldn't use it as a replacement for my hardware DVD deck, but practically no CPU usage and a perfect picture on my external TV is awesome.
Xine also plays DivX and other AVI formats if you supply it with win32 codecs, which earns it top marks in my books.
While I will try VideoLAN at some point, i can't imagine how it could be particularly 'better' than Xine, since xine works so damn well with almost all my video clips.
You can start multiple X servers on different virtual terminals. (Linux/BSD and other *NIXes that support virtual terminals)
From an X terminal on your current X desktop, type 'X:1 &' - this will start a new X server on the next available virtual terminal with a display name of yourbox:1 in the background.
Then type 'X:2 &', to start another one with the display name of yourbox:2.
you'll probably need to fire up a local xterm on each of these servers to type 'xhost +remotebox', so that your remote machines have permission to connect, but then you can telnet into your remote box, type 'export DISPLAY=yourbox:1 or whatever, and then fire up whatever dektop environment you like.
Then all the desktops for all your machines can be a Ctrl-Alt-F* away.
There is most likely a better way to set this up, but since my Voodoo 3 has major problems doing this, i use a single X server with multiple workspaces, ssh into each of my boxen and use the X-forwarding features to have them display windows on my desktop - i.e. i don't have a separate 'desktop environment' for each machine.
Another option is starting multiple VNC Servers on your local machine, and local VNC Viewers as well. This may get around your copy/paste issue.
Then, on your remote boxes, set DISPLAY= localbox:X, where X is the number of your VNC server, and run your desktop environment startup script i.e. 'gnome-session &' form a telnet/ssh shell to the remote machine.
Hope that helps. Others may be able to suggest more streamlined ways of doing this stuff, but this is what works for me
Kiki worked for Play!, you used to be able to see her on their website pretending she's actually doing something useful with that big blue and orange video workstation of theirs.
If you buy amorphium, you can also have an extremely poor model of her head which you can squish around with various 3D deformation tools.
Play! have gone out of business, of course, so Kiki is probably out on the street turning tricks for a hit off the ol' crackpipe.
Perhaps if you drive round the seedier part of town, you can pick her up, and 'have kiki again'
a) it's not 'personal', in that no content is held by the user. The cable company has total control over what you do and don't watch with this device.
b) it's not a 'recorder', since it doesn't record anything. The servers at the other end of the cable do the actual 'recording'.
i suppose the word 'video' has some relevance in this context.
This is nothing like a TiVO, this is just flexible programming taken to a new level. The bandwidth requirements for this will be astronomical, not to mention the I/O requirements for the video servers themselves.
But why only do this with a set-top box? Why not give cable modem users this capability - i.e. stream MPEG-2 to a window on your Windows/ MacOS/ X desktop? I've often wondered, since i subscribe to both cable TV and cable internet from the same provider, why they can't offer me something like this.
If 'unauthorised access' is illegal, then if i run a web server, with an index page that clearly states that i do not wish anyone to request any of the documents from it, and someone requests and transfers a document from it, are they breaking the law?
Slashdot Mirror
Absinthe is quite different from Jagermeister, though the flavours are similar.
Both have had a history of questionable legal status, i believe.
I can't say much about Jagermeister since i know little about it's history, but i can give some info on absinthe.
The reasons absinthe was banned are somewhat unclear.
The whole 'wormwood drives you insane' thing is rather misleading, you would need to drink an amount of absinthe sufficient to induce alcohol poisoning before you would suffer any ill effects from the thujone in the wormwood.
Prolonged use probably does have some risk attached, but if youre drinking enough absinthe for the wormwood to pose a problem, you've got much bigger problems from the alcohol.
The 'real' reason for absinthe's toxic effects were the dyes the manufacturers used (back in the day - nobody would risk doing this now) to enhance absinthes typical green colour - these dyes, based on bismuth and other toxic metals probably did drive people insane/made their hair fall out/teeth drop out etc.
Traditionally, absinthe is poured into a glass, and then ice water is dripped through a spoonful of sugar (using a special perforated spoon) into the glass.
The cold water, combined with the lowered alcohol content causes the 'louching' effect - where the liquid turns opaque, by precipitating terpenes from the alcohol solution, which were dissolved at the higher temperature/alcohol concentration.
I don't know much about Jagermeister, having only sampled it once at a friend's house. Jagermeister is slightly more viscous, like a liquer, while absinthe flows like water. - it should, it's typically >70% ethanol.
Both are herbally-flavoured drinks, chartruese being another type of this drink.
Not really my favourite drinks, but theyre great when youre looking for something a bit interesting.
I would recommend XFree86 4.x for Windows, it has been available for some time now, compiled with Cygwin/Mingw32.
Works great, and costs nothing, unlike X-Win32, which works great, but costs a lot.
The big issue here is that CG rendering techniques are mostly geared to producing footage the viewer expects to see - that is, footage captured by a camera and printed to video/film.
Camera and rendering models are all about simulating a camera. Since all camera exhibit motion blur - their shutters stay open for a finite amount of time, during which an object may conceivably move, it is necessary to 'fake' this to properly simulate a camera.
Same with depth-of-field. All cameras with conventional lenses have a finite range in which they can capture images with high precision. Simulating this effect is key to the idea of simulating a camera.
As soon as you move away from the idea of simulating a camera, youre stuck with the vexing question of 'what am i simulating?' Whose viewpoint is your computer model applied to?
The big problem with images lacking depth of field is that your eyes can focus on the entire image, since it is presented at a single 'depth' - a flat plane perpendicular to your line of sight. you can happily focus on every element in the image without adjusting your eyes, and so the illusion of depth - typically as it relates to the subject of the image, is lost.
Images are not presented for their own sake - an image is a composite presentation containing as many visual cues as necessary to draw your attention to the subject of the image. You can surely imagine numerous devices to alter the composition of an image, but in order to successfully convey a message, the viewer must be able to pick up on and use these devices to decipher your message.
These devices are defined not by any hard-and-fast physical model, but by convention - collectively, we have seen so much film that it seems natural that an image projected with grain looks 'real', and an image projected without it does not look 'real'.
However, many realtime computer games are good examples of what can be achieved without motion blur and depth-of-field effects. High framerates all but eliminate 'strobing' - traditionally dealt with by motion blur, and everything is in stark focus, regardless of it's distance. This is 'useful', allowing you to aim accurately at objects a great distance away, but sacrifices 'realism' and 'atmosphere' - you won't be winning any awards for cinematography with a Quake demo.
It may be interesting to read some case studies of people who have received head injuries etc. which have effected the way they see things - some see only objects in motion, others can only see objects in primarily horizontal or vertical configurations. These people see the world using a fundamentally different model than the majority.
It would be interesting to work on producing images that would only be fully appreciated by people who did not, or could not view the image as it would appear to 'normal' individuals.
Will Konqueror conceivably run the Windows Terminal server client?
That would be pretty cool.
I don't have a credit card, and have no intention of getting one.
Since there is apparently no other way to pay for online content - either directly or indirectly e.g. PayPal, i won't be buying anything off the internet, including 'content'.
When i was a kid, i had the choice between Meccano or Lego.
I chose the Lego every time, because somebody had obviously put a lot of thought into it's design - Lego is designed to appeal to kids, Meccano is designed to appeal, well, possibly to British railway engineers?
Meccano's iron material would certainly make for more durable constructions, but the breadth of the Lego offerings - from castles to spaceships, dwarfs Meccano's range.
Lego is not just about encouraging construction skills, it's about encouraging the imagination.
When you build your own spaceship to fly your tiny astronauts to the moon, somehow it's much more real to you than if you were to have been given a ready-made space-ship toy.
And when the engines on your spacecraft fail, and you are forced to make a crash landing on the moon, being able to put your craft back together, perhaps in a new configuration (some parts were too badly damaged by the crash to be repaired) and fly home again is a whole new adventure.
Meccano could arguably supply the same experience, but crashing a meccano ship is just not the same, since they tend not to come apart unless under extreme stress, and then youre looking at permanent damage.
I too lament the recent 'dumbing down' of Lego, going for mechandising tie-ins like with Star Wars instead of creating new designs, but I own the Lego Mindstorms kit, which i plan on giving to my girlfriend's nephew when he's wise enough not to lose all the pieces.
This is a lot of fun to play with (even for a 26-year old software developer like me), and i think it's great that Lego has stepped outside it's traditional market with new and somewhat groundbreaking products.
Meccano vs Lego?
It may be more 'realistic', but there is no way it's more fun.
I mean, really.. We have open bytecode-based VMs, we have XML-RPC, SOAP etc. We have C-like languages up the yin-yang on UNIX. The whole OS is built around the idea that a network connection is just like a file. Now MS is trying to sell this concept as if its something new? or interesting? What is M$ giving us here except an 'authentication service' - hell, you could probably whip that up in a weekend with an SSL-enabled apache and perl, and yet another language, based on proprietary technology and attempting to duplicate the functions that Java is already providing? MS has proved time and again that they aren't interested in working with anyone else unless they retain control, and they make the most $$$. If there was ever a time to make a conscious decision to say - 'Not this time, Bill. You can cram .NET up your pasty-white corporate ass.', this is it.
Maybe they have a repeater that runs on 802.11 or something?
Half Life - the TV series.
Where you follow the wacky Gordon Freeman and his happy-go-lucky Barney sidekicks on a no-holds-barred fight to escape the depths of the secret Black Mesa government research facililty and the clutches of the mysterious 'Administrator'.
Frequent travel to alien worlds and the unravelling of the evil plot to rule the world by harnessing an alien army... It would kick ass!
There were no chicks in the game, except for those big-titted black-op assasins, but surely the TV show could work some sexy scientists into the script.
Well, i think it'd be cool anyway.
I have a Siemens M20 GSM modem hooked up to my Linux box, which lets me do all sorts of nifty stuff, like run SMS mailing lists and other services, run programs on my machine in response to an SMS message, play-by-SMS games, recieve SMS alerts etc.
at NZ$0.20 a message (sender pays), it can get expensive with heavy use, but is not cost-prohibitive with moderate use.
The biggest problems with getting games onto linux are:
a) Developers are mostly much more familiar with Windows, leading them to adopt Windows-specific techniques, making porting difficult and/or expensive.
and
b) There is no 'Standard' under Linux for audio/video/input handling.
Loki is attempting to solve both those problems by
a) releasing documentation e.g. this book that enables programmers to become familiar with game-development techniques on Linux
and
b) releasing a cross-platform library (SDL) that handles these functions, and is looking like the most promising 'Standard' gaming API for Linux.
I don't see how this is a 'free ride' for anyone, since ideas represented in code, regardless of who they are written by can be easily protected using various licenses, most notably the GPL, which prevents companies from 'stealing' anything.
And how the hell you arrive at the conclusion that writing documentation is somehow 'the wrong thing to do' is completely beyond me.
The reason many gaming companies don't support Linux is the same reason they don't support BSD. In terms of the gaming market, nobody buys Linux games.
Is that any reason not to write games for Linux?
Linux never would have made any ground in any sector of computing if this attitude prevailed - 'No companies are doing it, so theres no point trying.'
If a Linux port of a Windows game can be produced for close-to-zero cost, or if Linux can be used as a development environment (can you say 'Playstation 2'?), then delivering games for Linux becomes easier and more attractive, and having good games available leads gamers to consider Linux as their primary OS.
Linux has only just become a platform capable of supporting modern games, and outshines every other *NIX variant in this respect.
It is only natural that books like this should be produced, and i can't think of a better group of people to produce them than Loki.
I have an Iomega Buz card that works great for capturing MJPEG video under linux. Low-to-No CPU usage, full-screen, full-frame PAL.
I would normally lean towards using half-frame (352x288 PAL) capturing as it consumes less disk space (1-2MB/s) than the 2-5MB/s of 720x576.
My soundcard, however, can't do mmapped recording and is no good for synched audio capturing. This screws me royally till i get round to putting a new soundcard in the machine.
I have had a BT848 TV Tuner card in the same machine, and that worked great for fullscreen TV playback at 800x600, also with low to no CPU usage.
My original foray into this field was with the BT848 in a P-200 box. I used it as a TV, an MP3 jukebox and an internet terminal displaying on my TV.
This was connected to the TV via an external scan converter, and let me watch TV in a window, while i surfed the net/played MP3s etc.
Remote control was taken care of by a home-built IR adapter and LIRC, and later an analog IR 'joypad' which came with the scan converter. and worked as a serial mouse.
Fonts and stuff needed major tweaking, and the general usability of a standard X desktop on a TV is bad.
With regard to the DC10/Buz:
I am not sure whether it is possible to capture MJPEG to a file, and play it back at the same time. Theoretically, since the bytes are on the disk, this should be easy, but you never know.
MJPEG will also consume vast amounts of disk space. realtime transcoding to MPEG or even DivX would be nice - piping the MJPEG through an encoder instead of writing to disk, but the encoders i have used aren't fast enough (though my machine is slowish - a dual P.Pro 200 that lacks MMX), but may be an option with good hardware.
An MJPEG-based PVR would be the best first step to take, but be aware that MJPEG consumes at least twice as much space as MPEG, so budget for big disks. However quality should be really good.
The stability of lavtools (MJPEG capture/playback utils) has been good for me so far, but i haven't used them in a PVR-like capacity - i.e heavy use with a failure in capturing being somewhat unnacceptable.
When i get a new soundcard for my box, i will be looking at doing this again, perhaps what we need is a sourceforge project or similar 'hub' for MJPEG-based PVR projects.
Theres nothing quite like the horror of running X on a 2MB M68000-powered black & white NCD X Terminal.
the 19" monochrome monitor looks cool in an old-skool way, but its unbelieveably slow.
After i bought this machine, i was hit with the shocking realisation that i am indeed a hopeless *NIX geek, and there is no going back.
This technique works great for me.
Also, you don't need MS's development tools to do Windows development.
You can use the (free) Cygwin/MinGW32 or Borland C/C++ compilers if you like.
You can use any of a plethora of non-MS languages, like Java, Perl, Python, Delphi and lots of others.
QT, GTK, wxWindows are all good, cross-platform toolkits for Windows, your comment about needing Windows development tools to develop on Windows is plain wrong.
I'm not denying that MS tools are the most widely used and convenient tools to use for M$ development in an M$-only environment, but to say you have no alternative is just plain wrong.
What youre complaining about is the fact that your employer requires you to use M$ tools.
So get your employer to get a single Passport and then all developers at your company use it. When you perform work for your company, you represent that company, not yourself personally.
M$ is free to use any authentication scheme it likes with it's web services.
Its not news that M$ is a giant corporate entity that abuses its monopoly power to screw the consumer and lock them in so it can keep screwing them, but you have, and always have had the choice not to use their products.
All this decision does is enforce the notion that 'content on the internet' is subject to different laws than content that isn't on the internet.
I can see how the writers have a problem with the publisher profiting from their work independently from them, but surely a standard licensing agreement with a clause that states republishing on any medium other than those expicitly agreed to by the writer/publisher is not acceptable.
This ruling is just giving ammunition to the RIAA/MPAA etc, who argue that because a recording is in digital form, it is suddenly exempt from fair use requirements etc.
'It's different when its on the internet'
I'd like to think this was the courts standing up for the little guy, and preventing big media from ripping them off, but to me it sounds more like the RIAA/MPAA just bought a whole lotta justice.
of how the largest and supposedly 'best' software company in the world, with legions of paid developers, only managed to delay SoftImage's next-gen product (Sumatra/XSI) for so long that everyone who really needed it was forced to go and buy Maya. I'm sure this wasn't entirely M$'s fault - but the acquisition of SI by M$ hardly induced a revolution in the devlopment of the product, did it? Just because lots pf people get paid to do something doesn't make it good. McDonalds pays a whole lot of people a whole lot of money, but their food is still only fit for pigs. What would Linux be like if there was some system for everyone who contributes to be compensated? Well, it'd be like Windows, and then we'd all have to go and hack on something else.
I have played pac-man a couple of times, but i have absolutely no idea what it means to compare the GPL to Pac-Man.
Can someone fill me in on what the hell Bill is on about?
I agree, i have Xine working great on my machine, fullscreen and windowed xv output with perfect audio sync.
I also have it playing back through my Hollywood+ after using the dxr3 patches. Audio sync is not working perfectly yet, so i wouldn't use it as a replacement for my hardware DVD deck, but practically no CPU usage and a perfect picture on my external TV is awesome.
Xine also plays DivX and other AVI formats if you supply it with win32 codecs, which earns it top marks in my books.
While I will try VideoLAN at some point, i can't imagine how it could be particularly 'better' than Xine, since xine works so damn well with almost all my video clips.
At least the Canadian government is thinking about spending it's tax dollars on something that might actually be useful to its people.
Link it with a library, or include some code that is itself under the GPL.
The university may then 'own' it, but they can't distribute it without being bound by the GPL.
And i doubt any university would go so far as to ban the use of GPLed code, unless you study in Redmond.
You can start multiple X servers on different virtual terminals. (Linux/BSD and other *NIXes that support virtual terminals)
:1 &' - this will start a new X server on the next available virtual terminal with a display name of yourbox:1 in the background.
:2 &', to start another one with the display name of yourbox:2.
From an X terminal on your current X desktop, type 'X
Then type 'X
you'll probably need to fire up a local xterm on each of these servers to type 'xhost +remotebox', so that your remote machines have permission to connect, but then you can telnet into your remote box, type 'export DISPLAY=yourbox:1 or whatever, and then fire up whatever dektop environment you like.
Then all the desktops for all your machines can be a Ctrl-Alt-F* away.
There is most likely a better way to set this up, but since my Voodoo 3 has major problems doing this, i use a single X server with multiple workspaces, ssh into each of my boxen and use the X-forwarding features to have them display windows on my desktop - i.e. i don't have a separate 'desktop environment' for each machine.
Another option is starting multiple VNC Servers on your local machine, and local VNC Viewers as well. This may get around your copy/paste issue.
Then, on your remote boxes, set DISPLAY= localbox:X, where X is the number of your VNC server, and run your desktop environment startup script i.e. 'gnome-session &' form a telnet/ssh shell to the remote machine.
Hope that helps. Others may be able to suggest more streamlined ways of doing this stuff, but this is what works for me
-Pete
Kiki worked for Play!, you used to be able to see her on their website pretending she's actually doing something useful with that big blue and orange video workstation of theirs.
If you buy amorphium, you can also have an extremely poor model of her head which you can squish around with various 3D deformation tools.
Play! have gone out of business, of course, so Kiki is probably out on the street turning tricks for a hit off the ol' crackpipe.
Perhaps if you drive round the seedier part of town, you can pick her up, and 'have kiki again'
Try running XF4.0.1 on LinuxPPC with the Rage Pro driver that ships in the stable build.
Its a pig.
I imagine with the driver work and the inclusion of DRI, that 4.1.0 will be a massive improvement for Linux/PPC users.
a) it's not 'personal', in that no content is held by the user. The cable company has total control over what you do and don't watch with this device.
b) it's not a 'recorder', since it doesn't record anything. The servers at the other end of the cable do the actual 'recording'.
i suppose the word 'video' has some relevance in this context.
This is nothing like a TiVO, this is just flexible programming taken to a new level. The bandwidth requirements for this will be astronomical, not to mention the I/O requirements for the video servers themselves.
But why only do this with a set-top box? Why not give cable modem users this capability - i.e. stream MPEG-2 to a window on your Windows/ MacOS/ X desktop? I've often wondered, since i subscribe to both cable TV and cable internet from the same provider, why they can't offer me something like this.
If 'unauthorised access' is illegal, then if i run a web server, with an index page that clearly states that i do not wish anyone to request any of the documents from it, and someone requests and transfers a document from it, are they breaking the law?