Except here's a real case: windows 95. The last OO.o that ran on windows 95 was 1.0.3. If you have a 2.0 odt document, the win95 clients can't read it.
That's nothing: I can't even find a modern system with a drive capable of taking the 5.25" disks upon which my AppleWorks files are stored.
At least those who carved their documents into bear skins with stone knives can use a digital camera or a flatbed scanner and use OCR.
The book has also been turned into movies several times by various independent film makers. There's about five versions out there. The current "big ones" in my opinion would be Flatland the Film by Ladd Ehlinger Jr., which is out and available. Low budget, but decent CG, and voice actors are.. okay.
I have this version (signed, shipped direct from publisher through Amazon.com) but have not watched it yet. I do however note that it is published on single-layer DVD-R and not a pressed DVD. That would mean no CSS in the way of making backups, but also that some players may have difficulty playing it.
I've previously had problems playing DVD-R media in Sony's 400-disc DVD changer. I've had no problems playing DVD-Rs in Philips, RCA, or Toshiba players.
Matrox never went away completely - they just left the consumer market.... They don't handle games well, but it you just want lots of displays... Except for devices like their DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go, a box that takes the displays you hook up to it and presents them as one big screen to the computer. They even come with an application to patch some games to work better when displayed across three screens.
I have the all-VGA version of the TripleHead2Go. They now have a version that connects to three DVI displays and offers both VGA and dual-link DVI connections to the computer and an adjustment to account for display bevel thickness. It doesn't need to do 3D because that's your existing video card's job; it just splits the signal across the displays. The TripleHead2Go can use three 1280x1024 displays (3840x1024), or two 1920x1200 displays (3840x1200), but it can't do three portrait 1024x1280 displays (3072x1280).
I don't see how anything running over CAT-5 is going to be adequate for remoting high-def video / gaming displays. Gaming really is not where Matrox's interests lie (apart from devices like the TripleHead2Go which is more of a display concatenator).
And HD video, not so much until they can do their four 1920x1200 displays, unless HD for you is 1280x720p. You really don't want your HD video broken up by bezels.
If a computer virus can propagate via Bluetooth connections between two vulnerable computers in physical proximity, is it then considered to be an airborne computer virus?
Part of the problem with a large RAID though is making sure you have a power supply that can handle that many drives and cards, as well as a case with enough drive bays and sufficient cooling. And paying for the power to feed it too, especially if it is always on.
Then there's the extra storage for redundancy so that if one drive fails (typically one containing critical file-system data) you don't lose your whole collection. You're probably not wanting to take that setup to a data recovery company that may report you to the MPAA if you can't prove you invented your own DVD copying software independently (the DMCA loophole).
Then there's the question of how long do you grow a RAID with more drives before migrating it to a new set using larger drives before it becomes an onerous financial burden?
And the last reason why I buy DVD's is because burning or copying a DVD takes AGES! To get a similar quality you have a huge honken file.
When downconverting your HD MPEG-2 transport stream captured from a Firewire-enabled cable box to a size and aspect suitable for editing before burning to DVD, it isn't generally worth it to use DVCPRO50 encoding. DV25 is a lot easier to deal with (smaller file size, less overhead) and good enough for editing of homebrewed disks.
I also have a large collection of purchased DVDs, movies and TV series (the latter being the lion's share). I buy Atlantic Penguin 644CD racks (holds 360 DVDs) in pairs and join them together for another 180 DVDs-worth of storage, only having to cut a few extra all-thread screws from stock with a Dremel. Right now I have enough storage for 2700 DVDs on three walls behind the TV in Atlantic Penguin racks alone, plus another 360 in Atlantic Elf racks (longer tubes, half the height).
I have planned to burn entire seasons to box sets myself, but have abandoned it when the box set came out first. And if I had burned them first, I would still have bought the box set when/if it came out. As it stands, my collection has no backups.
To me, the appeal of a movie is seeing it, not seeing it over and over again. If a friend has a movie I'd like to watch, I'll borrow the DVD, watch the movie and give it back to him. Even the movies I like, I can't see myself copying...
But seeing as you have kids (that like to watch Monsters, Inc. repeatedly), I'd expect your friend to loan you a burned copy of the DVD rather than his original.
The story though seems focused on burning DVDs rather than ripping them. I wouldn't be surprised if there was more ripping than burning. As hard drives get bigger, there's less reason to burn to DVD and more to keeping it on a video server. More hard data on this particular research would be nice.
Meanwhile the editions you find for rent at Blockbuster and Netflix are increasingly not the same ones you can buy. The feature may be the same content, but the bitrate may be lower, there'll be fewer extras if any, and more advertisements (and less likely to be skippable) included on the disk.
Personally, I'm more likely to burn stuff recorded from broadcast TV, especially as non-rental DVD releases of TV shows are having more and more omissions. I'm not just talking music rights like with WKRP in Cincinnati or Quantum Leap (Georgia On My Mind), but signature footage like the alien hand over the Earth in the War of the Worlds TV series, the missing recaps of the previous episode from Odyssey 5, and the almost universal omission of trailers for the next episode (The X-Files being an exception--I hate to think what they'll do to Max Headroom). Only animated fare even consider retaining commercial bumpers (Transformers and Robotech for examples).
Some shows on DVD are even the versions cut for more ad space in syndication, and some movies are released as widescreen and are still not as wide as their theatrical release (Colossus: The Forbin Project, Head Office).
I have a large paid-for DVD library, mainly because DVDs do go out of print and out of rental circulation, sometimes due to loss of rights (MST3K Vol. 10).
So you pull from multiple seeders and you end up with the sum of their maximum seeding bandwidths.
Of course, with that much bandwidth, why bother with local storage at all? She can just stream anything she needs, and all the real storage will be at her son's place.
Re:Sony BMG does nothing to hurt their reputation
on
Sony Sues Rootkit Maker
·
· Score: 4, Funny
If your phone didn't work, would you sue Alexander Bell or your phone company? Guess who you'd have more success suing? I think you might be able to get a default judgment against Alexander Graham Bell for failure to appear. But then, I don't think he personally has any assets to seize anymore. Of course, IANAL.
Re:Sony BMG does nothing to hurt their reputation
on
Sony Sues Rootkit Maker
·
· Score: 3, Funny
What matters is whether Amergence falsely represented the product they sold to Sony. How? By saying, "DRM is effective," or, "It's completely undetectable"?
Probably on the day DRM is renamed as DCE as per recent industry execs suggestions. Digital Consumer Enablement. Changing DRM's name won't make it any less DiCEy.
I was really just pointing out that if you're talking about the bitrate of uncompressed video, you're not talking about analog video; it's still digital. Capturing the decompressed and decrypted digital stream is not the analog hole.
The analog hole for audio is connecting the headphone out to the microphone in and capturing that way. It's analog because there's an A-D (analog to digital) conversion involved. It's a hole because it can't be prevented (if I can hear it, I can record it(1)).
Decrypting a decompressed digital stream fails both "analog" and "hole": it's digital, not analog, and it isn't a hole (you have to defeat the encryption).
(1) Analog watermarking seeks to plug the analog hole and only works if (a) all analog recording devices detect the watermark and refuse to record or (b) all playback devices prevent playback if a watermark is detected without a corresponding digital mark also present. Macrovision qualifies as a method to plug the video analog hole, first as a technical barrier to analog recorders (VCRs), then later as a mandated support for digital recorders otherwise immune to its shenanigans. Normally one cannot guarantee that all devices will honor your analog watermarks; bullying through the legal system though achieves this for any marketed or disclosed product.
That's because it is too much data, too fast. But if you really let it go completely analog, you can resample that a lot faster than you can the data stream. The CCD can take in far more pixels at once in parallel than you can as a data stream serially, and it's all prepackaged per frame by the CCD so you can recompress however much you want. (Frame-sync and 1:1 pixel correspondence is more difficult, but that can be handled using multiple recorders with oversampling and overlap, and a display with no overscan. And using even more 640x480 recorders may be more affordable.)
Of course there's a loss of quality, but there's a loss of quality in recompressing the digital stream as well. Sending photons through the air just loses more. When exploiting the analog hole, you have to go completely analog (like HD-camming a movie in a theater with digital projection).
But if you could take the stream in and process it like you were a display, storing it all in a frame buffer, and could pipeline multiple frames and process it to a compressed stream fast enough before sending it to storage (basically emulate an HD camcorder), then maybe you could record an uncompressed HD stream as a recompressed video stream. That's a lot of high-speed memory and custom GPUs you'll be needing.
It's still specialized hardware (or at least unlikely consumer hardware can be repurposed for it), and it would be difficult to argue that there's a legitimate market. The pros can afford the striped storage to capture and hold a raw data stream and process it at slower than real time (and in multiple passes) to get the best compression with the least artifacts. The research into developing it is legitimate (high speed data processing theory), but the end product's market is still black.
Keeping it digital does have the potential of faster than real time (FTRT) conversion rates, but to really achieve that you need to decompress it yourself, and then there's no additional decryption involved. This is why defeating AACS and BD+ is superior to resampling analog output whenever you have access to the source media. And since you can decompress at your leisure, you can do a better job at recompressing, even multi-pass.
Yes, but sale prices on hard drives are dropping them to about 20 cents per gigabyte. At 15 GB per HD-DVD or 25 GB per Blu-Ray that's $3 or $5 respectively, a lot cheaper than a commercial disk, no media compatibility or DRM problems, and a lot more convenient to play when placed in a home network server. And they're rewritable too!
You could fit two copies of the HD-DVD The Matrix box set on one 120 GB drive (separate partitions for PC and Mac if you like), even include software players, and it still takes up less space than the original in its packaging on a shelf (if you really need to put it on a shelf). You can even stick pretty labels on the drive if you like and build a deck with a caddyless swappable drive bay.
And you don't even need to use the 3.5" drives. Laptop drives are also sufficiently large and have a smaller form factor (though not as cheap). And you can get both with easy-to-use USB interfaces too.
Sorry but the "analog hole" is crap when it comes to HD. The bitrates are just too high to be grabbing the uncompressed (aka analog) video and compressing it down for later viewing in some sort of realtime fashion.
Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony should be able to bar whatever they want Would you extend Microsoft's right to being able to prevent playing AO games on XP or Vista?
What if all the major record labels decided they would no longer publish songs with profanity in them? Or even CD players refused to play certain CDs based on their content?
How about the DVDCCA deciding to amend their license to require DVD players to refuse to play anything above R?
Yeah, I disagree that the makers of a game console can restrict what types of games I can play based on their content. That console is in the privacy of my own home; I should get to decide what gets played on it. Once I buy it, it isn't their console anymore; it's mine! If they want control, they should lease the console, not sell it.
Slashdot Mirror
At least those who carved their documents into bear skins with stone knives can use a digital camera or a flatbed scanner and use OCR.
I'm not even sure what you should do. Lay off the coffee maybe. Or have some.
"Remember, Ralphie, if you're ranting on Slashdot it means you've had too much caffeine... or not enough!"
I've previously had problems playing DVD-R media in Sony's 400-disc DVD changer. I've had no problems playing DVD-Rs in Philips, RCA, or Toshiba players.
I have the all-VGA version of the TripleHead2Go. They now have a version that connects to three DVI displays and offers both VGA and dual-link DVI connections to the computer and an adjustment to account for display bevel thickness. It doesn't need to do 3D because that's your existing video card's job; it just splits the signal across the displays. The TripleHead2Go can use three 1280x1024 displays (3840x1024), or two 1920x1200 displays (3840x1200), but it can't do three portrait 1024x1280 displays (3072x1280).
And HD video, not so much until they can do their four 1920x1200 displays, unless HD for you is 1280x720p. You really don't want your HD video broken up by bezels.
If a computer virus can propagate via Bluetooth connections between two vulnerable computers in physical proximity, is it then considered to be an airborne computer virus?
Part of the problem with a large RAID though is making sure you have a power supply that can handle that many drives and cards, as well as a case with enough drive bays and sufficient cooling. And paying for the power to feed it too, especially if it is always on.
Then there's the extra storage for redundancy so that if one drive fails (typically one containing critical file-system data) you don't lose your whole collection. You're probably not wanting to take that setup to a data recovery company that may report you to the MPAA if you can't prove you invented your own DVD copying software independently (the DMCA loophole).
Then there's the question of how long do you grow a RAID with more drives before migrating it to a new set using larger drives before it becomes an onerous financial burden?
I also have a large collection of purchased DVDs, movies and TV series (the latter being the lion's share). I buy Atlantic Penguin 644CD racks (holds 360 DVDs) in pairs and join them together for another 180 DVDs-worth of storage, only having to cut a few extra all-thread screws from stock with a Dremel. Right now I have enough storage for 2700 DVDs on three walls behind the TV in Atlantic Penguin racks alone, plus another 360 in Atlantic Elf racks (longer tubes, half the height).
I have planned to burn entire seasons to box sets myself, but have abandoned it when the box set came out first. And if I had burned them first, I would still have bought the box set when/if it came out. As it stands, my collection has no backups.
The story though seems focused on burning DVDs rather than ripping them. I wouldn't be surprised if there was more ripping than burning. As hard drives get bigger, there's less reason to burn to DVD and more to keeping it on a video server. More hard data on this particular research would be nice.
Meanwhile the editions you find for rent at Blockbuster and Netflix are increasingly not the same ones you can buy. The feature may be the same content, but the bitrate may be lower, there'll be fewer extras if any, and more advertisements (and less likely to be skippable) included on the disk.
Personally, I'm more likely to burn stuff recorded from broadcast TV, especially as non-rental DVD releases of TV shows are having more and more omissions. I'm not just talking music rights like with WKRP in Cincinnati or Quantum Leap (Georgia On My Mind), but signature footage like the alien hand over the Earth in the War of the Worlds TV series, the missing recaps of the previous episode from Odyssey 5, and the almost universal omission of trailers for the next episode (The X-Files being an exception--I hate to think what they'll do to Max Headroom). Only animated fare even consider retaining commercial bumpers (Transformers and Robotech for examples).
Some shows on DVD are even the versions cut for more ad space in syndication, and some movies are released as widescreen and are still not as wide as their theatrical release (Colossus: The Forbin Project, Head Office).
I have a large paid-for DVD library, mainly because DVDs do go out of print and out of rental circulation, sometimes due to loss of rights (MST3K Vol. 10).
My question is: Is that speed bi-directional, or is the uplink speed considerably slower? Imagine if it were 40 Gb/s down but only 110 b/s up!
So you pull from multiple seeders and you end up with the sum of their maximum seeding bandwidths.
Of course, with that much bandwidth, why bother with local storage at all? She can just stream anything she needs, and all the real storage will be at her son's place.
Sounds like an episode of Whose Fault Is It Anyway? to me.
"And now, everyone's favorite game, it's time for the Sue-Down!"
I was really just pointing out that if you're talking about the bitrate of uncompressed video, you're not talking about analog video; it's still digital. Capturing the decompressed and decrypted digital stream is not the analog hole.
The analog hole for audio is connecting the headphone out to the microphone in and capturing that way. It's analog because there's an A-D (analog to digital) conversion involved. It's a hole because it can't be prevented (if I can hear it, I can record it(1)).
Decrypting a decompressed digital stream fails both "analog" and "hole": it's digital, not analog, and it isn't a hole (you have to defeat the encryption).
(1) Analog watermarking seeks to plug the analog hole and only works if (a) all analog recording devices detect the watermark and refuse to record or (b) all playback devices prevent playback if a watermark is detected without a corresponding digital mark also present. Macrovision qualifies as a method to plug the video analog hole, first as a technical barrier to analog recorders (VCRs), then later as a mandated support for digital recorders otherwise immune to its shenanigans. Normally one cannot guarantee that all devices will honor your analog watermarks; bullying through the legal system though achieves this for any marketed or disclosed product.
That's because it is too much data, too fast. But if you really let it go completely analog, you can resample that a lot faster than you can the data stream. The CCD can take in far more pixels at once in parallel than you can as a data stream serially, and it's all prepackaged per frame by the CCD so you can recompress however much you want. (Frame-sync and 1:1 pixel correspondence is more difficult, but that can be handled using multiple recorders with oversampling and overlap, and a display with no overscan. And using even more 640x480 recorders may be more affordable.)
Of course there's a loss of quality, but there's a loss of quality in recompressing the digital stream as well. Sending photons through the air just loses more. When exploiting the analog hole, you have to go completely analog (like HD-camming a movie in a theater with digital projection).
But if you could take the stream in and process it like you were a display, storing it all in a frame buffer, and could pipeline multiple frames and process it to a compressed stream fast enough before sending it to storage (basically emulate an HD camcorder), then maybe you could record an uncompressed HD stream as a recompressed video stream. That's a lot of high-speed memory and custom GPUs you'll be needing.
It's still specialized hardware (or at least unlikely consumer hardware can be repurposed for it), and it would be difficult to argue that there's a legitimate market. The pros can afford the striped storage to capture and hold a raw data stream and process it at slower than real time (and in multiple passes) to get the best compression with the least artifacts. The research into developing it is legitimate (high speed data processing theory), but the end product's market is still black.
Keeping it digital does have the potential of faster than real time (FTRT) conversion rates, but to really achieve that you need to decompress it yourself, and then there's no additional decryption involved. This is why defeating AACS and BD+ is superior to resampling analog output whenever you have access to the source media. And since you can decompress at your leisure, you can do a better job at recompressing, even multi-pass.
Yes, but sale prices on hard drives are dropping them to about 20 cents per gigabyte. At 15 GB per HD-DVD or 25 GB per Blu-Ray that's $3 or $5 respectively, a lot cheaper than a commercial disk, no media compatibility or DRM problems, and a lot more convenient to play when placed in a home network server. And they're rewritable too!
You could fit two copies of the HD-DVD The Matrix box set on one 120 GB drive (separate partitions for PC and Mac if you like), even include software players, and it still takes up less space than the original in its packaging on a shelf (if you really need to put it on a shelf). You can even stick pretty labels on the drive if you like and build a deck with a caddyless swappable drive bay.
And you don't even need to use the 3.5" drives. Laptop drives are also sufficiently large and have a smaller form factor (though not as cheap). And you can get both with easy-to-use USB interfaces too.
Personally though, I like the original packaging.
What if all the major record labels decided they would no longer publish songs with profanity in them? Or even CD players refused to play certain CDs based on their content?
How about the DVDCCA deciding to amend their license to require DVD players to refuse to play anything above R?
Yeah, I disagree that the makers of a game console can restrict what types of games I can play based on their content. That console is in the privacy of my own home; I should get to decide what gets played on it. Once I buy it, it isn't their console anymore; it's mine! If they want control, they should lease the console, not sell it.