The FLAC format has metadata support, and since you now can put FLAC in Ogg containers, it can also use Ogg tag support which is truly great.
In short: id3 (especially id3v2) sucks and should just DIE as soon as possible. Foobar 2000 even goes as far as to completely forgo id3v2 support on ideological reasons. Honestly, I think they are on to something.
From what I hear, it doesn't work quite as well as one could hope. First of all, it doesn't support DivX3.11 so all those illegal DVD-rips won't play on it. Second: It doesn't support MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile, so if you encoded your video with Quarter Pixel Motion Estimation or Global Motion Compensation it won't play. And finally, I've heard reports that it doesn't work on MPEG-4 compliant videos encoded with XviD, so I'd say that it is pretty much a piece of crap.
And don't forget that its MPEG-4 decoding chip was made by Sigma Designs. The very same company that stole code from XviD. I won't EVER buy anything made by those thieving bastards.
And my last gripe: If it isn't region free, then it's worthless.
DivX 4.12 comes rather close to being MPEG-4 compliant, but I'd personally recommend XviD which is a GPL'ed implementation of MPEG-4. As such, there are some licensing issues, but it is probably the best MPEG-4 codec there is. DivX 3.11 is really good, but there are serious legal issues as well as future compatibility problems. There might be made a program that can convert DivX 3.11 AVI files to ISO MPEG-4 though. Read about that here. Here are a few quick URLs:
Doom9. The site about MPEG-4 encoding (and SVCDs and DVD-ripping). Koepi's XviD site. Has binaries. Be gentle on the server folks... we don't want it slashdotted.
Doom9 also has a quick tutorial to make XviD do as you want. It's probably not optimal, but it ought to guarantee that you don't end up with a piece of crap.
that someone could cook up a single line of Perl code that could do all that. Of course, the code would be write-only and hellishly slow (and probably involve one or more regular expressions of extraordinary length), so it wouldn't do much good though.
Relativity theory is not that easy
on
E ~ mc^2
·
· Score: 1
Nothing is ever as easy as they tell you in High School, now is it?
That E != mc^2 in all circumstances would certainly come as a surprise to those who havent't studied physics (caveat: I haven't, but I happen to sit with a book written by one of the best Danish authors on physics of all time. The now diseased (sp?) Ove Nathan).
The correct formula is E^2 - p^2c^2 = m^2c^4, where "p" is the linear momentum of the particle and it is by definition equal to the product of its mass and its velocity. The reason I write the formula in this way and not with the energy alone on the left of the equality sign is because the special theory of relativity states that E^2 - p^2c^2 must be constant in all inertial systems (do not make me try to explain this concept - I would probably fail in making it understandable).
I don't think that "Left Party" is the correct translation of "Venstre". It would be more correct to say that it is the Danish liberal party, as Venstre most certainly is not a left wing party. (venstre means "left" in Danish. I will spare you for the exact reason that a party with a name with that meaning is a right wing (somewhat) party, but it has something to do with the location of the seatings in the house of parliament in the early days of democracy in Denmark)
The vast majority of the Danish parties (if I remember correctly, there currently are 8 parties in the Danish parliament) are what we would call "mid-seeking" i.e. their political programs don't differ too much and they all share a lot of common ground. The most important thing probably being that they support the idea of having a big government (and thus high taxes. The Danish taxes are if I remember correctly somewhere around 40-50% on your income, 25% sales tax, and there a lot of taxes on luxury goods and things that are bad for the environment.) which takes care of the ones who can't take care of themselves. Almost the entire health care system in Denmark is run by the public offices (and they are often critized for being bad - but they are probably to some extent underfunded).
I hope that this makes it clear, that the wast majority of the parties is very much a homogenous group. The notable exceptions being "Dansk Folkeparti" (a nationalist party with somewhat strong resentments towards immigrants. They aren't well liked by the intellectuals, and they are currently the supportive party for the two parties in government.) and "Enhedslisten" (the closest you can get to a communist party in Denmark. They keep a high profile on environmental issues as well. It's is not for nothing that they call themselves "Denmark's red/green party").
Danes with better insight into our political system (and I am sure there are) are free to point out factual errors and also add anything that I might have left out (that is probably the case too).
You should take a good solid look at Hydrogen Audio. It is the place to go for audiophiles, and reading their MP3 forum should convince you that r3mix is deprecated and should never be used any more. Instead, you should use --alt-preset standard/extreme/insane for the best possible quality at ~192/~256/320 kbps.
If you really want the best from your encodings, you could try MPC which has absolutely amazing quality at high bitrates. The general consensus at Hydrogen Audio is that MPC currently is the best lossy format for achiving purposes. Of course, nothing beats lossless and with harddrives getting larger and larger, it is getting more and more realistic to encode everything with FLAC or Monkey's Audio.
Yeah, if the current trend continues it won't be too long before half the American population is part of a boy band *shudder*. 150 million n'sync clones. ARGH! My eyes and ears!
Until this year, the science department of this university (University of Copenhagen (Denmark)) from where I am posting used SuSE Linux 7.3 exclusively with FVWM2 as the default Window Manager. Now, you take a guess to how many people were turned off from using Linux because of that? Sure it is rock solid and is easy as hell to support, but it is also a major turn-off for most people. Fortunately, they also have KDE2 installed, but there is just no way to use it except editing ~/.xsession manually - fat chance that the normal users would ever figure that out. My disappointment in the admin was enormous when I came back from summer break to find that they had installed Windows 2000 on the machines. Why switch from something that just works and does so every single time to something that... well... doesn't? Needless to say, I quite often see strange things happening under Windows. My reaction: hard reboot the machine next to it and get on with some serious work (or reading/. ^_^). And you wouldn't believe how many lusers type their stuff in Word now instead of using LaTeX-mode in (X)Emacs... They haven't even bothered to install OOo.
Disappointed in them I am!
I tried to use asfrecorder
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 1
but they tried their best to make it impossible to figure out what the sourcefile was (hey, it's late here, and I don't like to look at fugly html from a GUI web-editor). How did you figure that out?
Oh, someone explain to me
on
Equilibrium
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
WHY THE H*** THEY WON'T LET ME DOWNLOAD A HQ TRAILER TO MY HARDDRIVE!! I just don't get their logic. It's a commercial for them; something they put there because they want people to know about their product, yet they don't want me to see it in anything but shitty quality? I "only" have 256k (and there are still a lot of modem users out there!) and I don't get to see that trailer in all it's (potential) glory.
Bitch/moan++: even if I had 768k, I still wouldn't be able to see it if I didn't have IE... well SCREW THEM! If they don't even want me to see their trailer, I don't want to spend any money on their movie.
I see this as somewhat akin to gamespot's move to a pay-to-see-video business model. It surprises me that anybody has signed up, because all they (essentially) get is commercials for games. That's right! They pay to see commercials! It would be ironic if it wasn't such a damned tragedy that someone went ahead and actually bough into that.
Which compiler are YOU talking about?! ANSI C does not require that you initialize variables. However, it also does not require the compiler to automatically initialize variables for you. z could contain any junk data that was in memory at the position the system decided to put it there, because it won't get automatically initialized.
I guess this comes from using a particular compiler for too long that does not adhere to the C standard. Auto-initialzing might be nice, but relying on it is foolish, and IMO should result in a compiler error.
It is possible for them to get a search warrant in a civil matter, but it (like in criminal cases) has to be very specific as to what is to be searched, when it is to be searched and who is to be present at the search. (This, I believe, is written in the American constitution as well - although it has become rather insignificant as of late with the post-9/11 anti-terror laws). Also, an officer of the court (Fogeden. I have no idea on what that would be equivalent to in USA. I suspect you have no such thing.) has to be present.
Antipiratgruppen (in Denmark often reffered to as APG - or AGP by morons who can't tell the difference between an organization and a hardware interface...) has a pretty bad track record with respect to their ability to abide by Danish law. My personal favourite examples of their behaviour are the following two (restated here to the best of my recollection - any fellow Dane may correct me on the facts as best s?he can):
1) They at one point were questioning a 14-year-old boy without calling his parents and without him having a lawyer present (in case you are wondering - Danish law does not allow for this).
2) They showed up at a private appartment or house with a court order (most likely gotten from a technologyimpaired judge), entered the suspect's house, and then proceeded straight to his PC where a "computerexpert" (whatever that means) proceeded to look through it for illegal materials. This was done without the suspect was allowed to watch what they were doing (which he is entitled to according to Danish law).
It should be obvious that APG is loathed for their methods, not for their goals. Most tech-litterate people agree that it is fair that they attempt (and most often fail) to stop copyright infringement, but we (I like to consider myself tech-literate, yes) feel that it is a shame that the Danish media doesn't take a more critical stance towards APG. Basically, they print/run whatever propaganda APG has manufactured about their latest bust, unless some other organization (like the public office for consumer rights (Forbrugerrådet)) raises questions.
Personally, I am of the opinion that they should just roll over die if they refuse to change their methods (and I just don't see that happening).
is downright weird. Get this:
I may go to the library and borrow a CD, make a perfect digital copy of it at home and take the CD back to the library.
I may also borrow a CD from a friend of mine and make a copy of the CD.
However, I may not receive a copy of said CD from my friend.
The difference is that in the last case I had "outside help" in copying the CD. Thus, it wouldn't save my a** a whole lot to show up in court with the physical media and pointing to it - it would still have been illegal.
On the Danish site Newz.dk a couple of guys have pondered if they should make a few "APG target marks" consisting of files like "Harry Potter CD1.avi", "LOTR_TTT CD2.avi", etc. containing nothing but junk data or something they have a legitimate right to distribute (Linux ISOs might be great for this. They are the right size too ^_^). It would be interesting to say the least to see APG look real stupid in court then.
Well, considering how DMCA is bad for everyone, I can't really see it as a surprise that you would come to the conclusion that it is bad for Apple users as well.
${x | x \mathrm{is an Apple user}} \in P(everyone)$
I guess this is where PGP signatures would come in handy. Simply refuse to accept anything without a valid PGP signature (and possibly all unencrypted mail too). Of course, you would be very reliant on the concept of "trust" that is already present in PGP - although on a different basis. The web of trust today only reflects how much people are who they claim to be, whereas a new model also would have to reflect how much people "like" the person sending the mail. Spammers could obviously "validate" each others, and thus the would system would break down:(
The obvious "problem" with e-mail is that anyone can send anything to any valid adress (this also makes it a Good Thing (TM) though), so it would also be an idea to make it harder to get e-mail adresses. Never typing ones e-mail adress - even in "encoded" form (my-email at thisserver dot com) - is definately a start, but all it takes is one AOLer to type it on a webpage, and you are f***ed. Honestly, putting you e-mail available only as an image is not going to help much. There will be a breach of "security" somewhere along the line, and then the flood of spam commences.
The only solution I can see is to just outlaw spam and prosecute them hard and fast. Fat chance that'll ever happen in good 'ole business-friendly US of A.
Slashdot Mirror
The FLAC format has metadata support, and since you now can put FLAC in Ogg containers, it can also use Ogg tag support which is truly great.
In short: id3 (especially id3v2) sucks and should just DIE as soon as possible. Foobar 2000 even goes as far as to completely forgo id3v2 support on ideological reasons. Honestly, I think they are on to something.
From what I hear, it doesn't work quite as well as one could hope. First of all, it doesn't support DivX3.11 so all those illegal DVD-rips won't play on it. Second: It doesn't support MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Profile, so if you encoded your video with Quarter Pixel Motion Estimation or Global Motion Compensation it won't play. And finally, I've heard reports that it doesn't work on MPEG-4 compliant videos encoded with XviD, so I'd say that it is pretty much a piece of crap. And don't forget that its MPEG-4 decoding chip was made by Sigma Designs. The very same company that stole code from XviD. I won't EVER buy anything made by those thieving bastards. And my last gripe: If it isn't region free, then it's worthless.
DivX 4.12 comes rather close to being MPEG-4 compliant, but I'd personally recommend XviD which is a GPL'ed implementation of MPEG-4. As such, there are some licensing issues, but it is probably the best MPEG-4 codec there is. DivX 3.11 is really good, but there are serious legal issues as well as future compatibility problems. There might be made a program that can convert DivX 3.11 AVI files to ISO MPEG-4 though. Read about that here. Here are a few quick URLs:
Doom9. The site about MPEG-4 encoding (and SVCDs and DVD-ripping).
Koepi's XviD site. Has binaries. Be gentle on the server folks... we don't want it slashdotted.
Doom9 also has a quick tutorial to make XviD do as you want. It's probably not optimal, but it ought to guarantee that you don't end up with a piece of crap.
that someone could cook up a single line of Perl code that could do all that. Of course, the code would be write-only and hellishly slow (and probably involve one or more regular expressions of extraordinary length), so it wouldn't do much good though.
Nothing is ever as easy as they tell you in High School, now is it?
That E != mc^2 in all circumstances would certainly come as a surprise to those who havent't studied physics (caveat: I haven't, but I happen to sit with a book written by one of the best Danish authors on physics of all time. The now diseased (sp?) Ove Nathan).
The correct formula is E^2 - p^2c^2 = m^2c^4, where "p" is the linear momentum of the particle and it is by definition equal to the product of its mass and its velocity. The reason I write the formula in this way and not with the energy alone on the left of the equality sign is because the special theory of relativity states that E^2 - p^2c^2 must be constant in all inertial systems (do not make me try to explain this concept - I would probably fail in making it understandable).
I don't think that "Left Party" is the correct translation of "Venstre". It would be more correct to say that it is the Danish liberal party, as Venstre most certainly is not a left wing party. (venstre means "left" in Danish. I will spare you for the exact reason that a party with a name with that meaning is a right wing (somewhat) party, but it has something to do with the location of the seatings in the house of parliament in the early days of democracy in Denmark)
The vast majority of the Danish parties (if I remember correctly, there currently are 8 parties in the Danish parliament) are what we would call "mid-seeking" i.e. their political programs don't differ too much and they all share a lot of common ground. The most important thing probably being that they support the idea of having a big government (and thus high taxes. The Danish taxes are if I remember correctly somewhere around 40-50% on your income, 25% sales tax, and there a lot of taxes on luxury goods and things that are bad for the environment.) which takes care of the ones who can't take care of themselves. Almost the entire health care system in Denmark is run by the public offices (and they are often critized for being bad - but they are probably to some extent underfunded).
I hope that this makes it clear, that the wast majority of the parties is very much a homogenous group. The notable exceptions being "Dansk Folkeparti" (a nationalist party with somewhat strong resentments towards immigrants. They aren't well liked by the intellectuals, and they are currently the supportive party for the two parties in government.) and "Enhedslisten" (the closest you can get to a communist party in Denmark. They keep a high profile on environmental issues as well. It's is not for nothing that they call themselves "Denmark's red/green party").
Danes with better insight into our political system (and I am sure there are) are free to point out factual errors and also add anything that I might have left out (that is probably the case too).
That must be American schools. Here in Denmark there are (to the best of my knowledge) almost no Macs in use in schools.
You should take a good solid look at Hydrogen Audio. It is the place to go for audiophiles, and reading their MP3 forum should convince you that r3mix is deprecated and should never be used any more. Instead, you should use --alt-preset standard/extreme/insane for the best possible quality at ~192/~256/320 kbps.
If you really want the best from your encodings, you could try MPC which has absolutely amazing quality at high bitrates. The general consensus at Hydrogen Audio is that MPC currently is the best lossy format for achiving purposes. Of course, nothing beats lossless and with harddrives getting larger and larger, it is getting more and more realistic to encode everything with FLAC or Monkey's Audio.
Yeah, if the current trend continues it won't be too long before half the American population is part of a boy band *shudder*. 150 million n'sync clones. ARGH! My eyes and ears!
Until this year, the science department of this university (University of Copenhagen (Denmark)) from where I am posting used SuSE Linux 7.3 exclusively with FVWM2 as the default Window Manager. Now, you take a guess to how many people were turned off from using Linux because of that? Sure it is rock solid and is easy as hell to support, but it is also a major turn-off for most people. Fortunately, they also have KDE2 installed, but there is just no way to use it except editing ~/.xsession manually - fat chance that the normal users would ever figure that out. My disappointment in the admin was enormous when I came back from summer break to find that they had installed Windows 2000 on the machines. Why switch from something that just works and does so every single time to something that... well... doesn't? Needless to say, I quite often see strange things happening under Windows. My reaction: hard reboot the machine next to it and get on with some serious work (or reading /. ^_^). And you wouldn't believe how many lusers type their stuff in Word now instead of using LaTeX-mode in (X)Emacs... They haven't even bothered to install OOo.
Disappointed in them I am!
but they tried their best to make it impossible to figure out what the sourcefile was (hey, it's late here, and I don't like to look at fugly html from a GUI web-editor). How did you figure that out?
WHY THE H*** THEY WON'T LET ME DOWNLOAD A HQ TRAILER TO MY HARDDRIVE!! I just don't get their logic. It's a commercial for them; something they put there because they want people to know about their product, yet they don't want me to see it in anything but shitty quality? I "only" have 256k (and there are still a lot of modem users out there!) and I don't get to see that trailer in all it's (potential) glory.
Bitch/moan++: even if I had 768k, I still wouldn't be able to see it if I didn't have IE... well SCREW THEM! If they don't even want me to see their trailer, I don't want to spend any money on their movie.
I see this as somewhat akin to gamespot's move to a pay-to-see-video business model. It surprises me that anybody has signed up, because all they (essentially) get is commercials for games. That's right! They pay to see commercials! It would be ironic if it wasn't such a damned tragedy that someone went ahead and actually bough into that.
Which compiler are YOU talking about?! ANSI C does not require that you initialize variables. However, it also does not require the compiler to automatically initialize variables for you. z could contain any junk data that was in memory at the position the system decided to put it there, because it won't get automatically initialized. I guess this comes from using a particular compiler for too long that does not adhere to the C standard. Auto-initialzing might be nice, but relying on it is foolish, and IMO should result in a compiler error.
No, he means XviD.
It is possible for them to get a search warrant in a civil matter, but it (like in criminal cases) has to be very specific as to what is to be searched, when it is to be searched and who is to be present at the search. (This, I believe, is written in the American constitution as well - although it has become rather insignificant as of late with the post-9/11 anti-terror laws). Also, an officer of the court (Fogeden. I have no idea on what that would be equivalent to in USA. I suspect you have no such thing.) has to be present.
Antipiratgruppen (in Denmark often reffered to as APG - or AGP by morons who can't tell the difference between an organization and a hardware interface...) has a pretty bad track record with respect to their ability to abide by Danish law. My personal favourite examples of their behaviour are the following two (restated here to the best of my recollection - any fellow Dane may correct me on the facts as best s?he can):
1) They at one point were questioning a 14-year-old boy without calling his parents and without him having a lawyer present (in case you are wondering - Danish law does not allow for this).
2) They showed up at a private appartment or house with a court order (most likely gotten from a technologyimpaired judge), entered the suspect's house, and then proceeded straight to his PC where a "computerexpert" (whatever that means) proceeded to look through it for illegal materials. This was done without the suspect was allowed to watch what they were doing (which he is entitled to according to Danish law).
It should be obvious that APG is loathed for their methods, not for their goals. Most tech-litterate people agree that it is fair that they attempt (and most often fail) to stop copyright infringement, but we (I like to consider myself tech-literate, yes) feel that it is a shame that the Danish media doesn't take a more critical stance towards APG. Basically, they print/run whatever propaganda APG has manufactured about their latest bust, unless some other organization (like the public office for consumer rights (Forbrugerrådet)) raises questions.
Personally, I am of the opinion that they should just roll over die if they refuse to change their methods (and I just don't see that happening).
is downright weird. Get this: I may go to the library and borrow a CD, make a perfect digital copy of it at home and take the CD back to the library. I may also borrow a CD from a friend of mine and make a copy of the CD. However, I may not receive a copy of said CD from my friend. The difference is that in the last case I had "outside help" in copying the CD. Thus, it wouldn't save my a** a whole lot to show up in court with the physical media and pointing to it - it would still have been illegal. On the Danish site Newz.dk a couple of guys have pondered if they should make a few "APG target marks" consisting of files like "Harry Potter CD1.avi", "LOTR_TTT CD2.avi", etc. containing nothing but junk data or something they have a legitimate right to distribute (Linux ISOs might be great for this. They are the right size too ^_^). It would be interesting to say the least to see APG look real stupid in court then.
Yeah, a couple of Molotov Cocktails should make for a nice housewarming.
Ming Li (alias Cartman) was Vietnamese... oh well... they are all the same, right? (Ask any anime-otaku (like me!) and s?he will say: "NO WAY!") ^_^
Well, considering how DMCA is bad for everyone, I can't really see it as a surprise that you would come to the conclusion that it is bad for Apple users as well. ${x | x \mathrm{is an Apple user}} \in P(everyone)$
I guess this is where PGP signatures would come in handy. Simply refuse to accept anything without a valid PGP signature (and possibly all unencrypted mail too). Of course, you would be very reliant on the concept of "trust" that is already present in PGP - although on a different basis. The web of trust today only reflects how much people are who they claim to be, whereas a new model also would have to reflect how much people "like" the person sending the mail. Spammers could obviously "validate" each others, and thus the would system would break down :(
The obvious "problem" with e-mail is that anyone can send anything to any valid adress (this also makes it a Good Thing (TM) though), so it would also be an idea to make it harder to get e-mail adresses. Never typing ones e-mail adress - even in "encoded" form (my-email at thisserver dot com) - is definately a start, but all it takes is one AOLer to type it on a webpage, and you are f***ed. Honestly, putting you e-mail available only as an image is not going to help much. There will be a breach of "security" somewhere along the line, and then the flood of spam commences.
The only solution I can see is to just outlaw spam and prosecute them hard and fast. Fat chance that'll ever happen in good 'ole business-friendly US of A.