A) The guy doesn't have a Mac. He's a PC user. He wants advice on how to do something that's completely possible with a PC. That it can be done on a different platform is, well, totally irrelevant.
Not totally. If it can be done with a Mac, it should be possible with a PC. All you should need is the right application that will display an incoming DV stream without saving it to disk. If another platform does it, it at least says it is possible.
There are Firewire webcams sold that aren't restricted to just use with Macintoshes. I know one that has a stand in the shape of a bare foot and streams 640x480 square pixel video. Find out what software they're bundled with, whether it is free, and download it.
I don't have one of those webcams because I want one that outputs 720x480 in non-square pixels. I'd rather feed an analog camcorder through my Dazzle* Hollywood DV Bridge than have to resample the DV files to the needed aspect ratio, doubling the needed disk space.
Are they holding back 0.9 GB to preserve a threshold against piracy?
(Note: units for DVD capacity are metric.)
Re:Oh well.....
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Incidentally, I subsequently bought the DVD for One Crazy Summer.
Re:Oh well.....
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I really need to get cracking editing this stuff and burning what I want to save onto DVDs. I've even got the entire run of Max Headroom, the first time it aired.
Advice: get a fresh digital recording wherever you can find it on cable before you start converting VHS to DVD. (Having only one first-run episode on tape, I TiVo'd the run on TechTV, with redundancy.) True, there are scenes cut, they do horrific things to the credits and penultimate scene, lose the pre-credit trailers, and cut off Max's ending monologue, but you'll have the best quality video for most of the footage coming from a digital source and fill in the edits with the VHS.
I did this with the movie One Crazy Summer, pulling the Comedy Central airing with TiVo and mixing it with an old VHS version taped off HBO (just before the DVD release was announced). It was interesting to see what edits were made, both for CC and HBO. It also got me to appreciate just how bad VHS is. I don't even like VHS for use as source material for VCDs anymore.
I thought, if this price change happens soon enough, I could buy one now at the current price at a place that does 30-day price match guarantees and then get the credit for the difference later.
Then I thought again, and realized that they'll probably change the game bundling for the new price point and so the store won't price-match because it isn't the exact same product.
At least if I wait for the day of the sale, I'll know immediately if I can price-match or not when Wal*mart rapidly runs out of stock.
These are also the ATMs that give you time to prepare your deposit envelope ("press this button when your deposit is ready.") But when you push the button, the ATM then reads, "Please wait," and makes you wait for 3-4 seconds. It's like it's spiteful.
That is because it must have some reasonable confidence that you've given it the deposit before it communicates with the bank that you've made a deposit.
Oh yes. The site's style attempts to immerse you into the mythos of the series. This following the lead of the series in tying in both the movie and broadcast.
With the series also having a tripod manta-shaped ship buried on an American Indian reservation thousands of years prior ("Dust to Dust") and a frozen escape pod elsewhere ("The Raising of Lazarus"), this leaves open the possibility of other incidents and allows tying in even more stories.
It gets difficult in some areas though, such as comic books, especially ones that crossover with other comics like Superman. I know it is quite a stretch and that I don't succeed everywhere, but it is just a way to tie the site together in a fun way.
It's a pity I can't make any money off of it, what with its top search ranking and all. Well, I could, but I just don't think it would be right.
Except that Welles did say "It's Halloween" at the end of the broadcast.
At the start he said (in narrative character), "On this particular evening, October 30th, the Crossley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios," and also at the end (out of character), "Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates, by tomorrow night . . . so we did the best next [sic] thing."
And the mention of Halloween, in context: "So good-bye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight: That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living-room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian . . . it's Hallowe'en."
Halloween was in "the next day or so".
The broadcast most certainly occured on the evening of October 30th, 1938(*). I've pulled many newspaper references on this subject, including the days before the broadcast to see how much publicity it got before going to air. Even local radio schedules.
I do also recommend The Night That Panicked America which is occasionally shown on the Sci-Fi Channel. It does so nicely put the events in the context of the day and the efforts of the foley actors to get the effects needed.
I'd really love a copy of the raw newsreel footage of the interviews the next day of Orson Welles though. From what I've been able to gather from other programs, he seemed more prepared than I'd thought.
(*) Technically, the play itself was set on October 30th, 1939, one year in the future to the day from the broadcast date: "In the thirty-ninth year of the Twentieth Century came the great disillusionment." This a paraphrase of the original, "In the last years of the Nineteenth Century came the great disillusionment," to reset the story in contemporary times. (I believe Howard Koch's original script, properly titled "Invasion From Mars", actually said "thirty-eighth". I believe that's how it reads in his book, "The Panic Broadcast".)
The movie depicted destruction of the Eiffel Tower in a still image in the middle, also crashed ships in India and Rio de Janeiro, but these shots weren't used in the TV series. But they did establish entombed aliens in Canada, and a lot active in China in a summit of world scientists in the episode The Last Supper (the first season used biblical references for every episode title).
I would like to hear more about the location for the initial landing site from the movie to add to the site I cited above. If you could send it to the webmaster address at that site, I'd appreciate it.
War of the Worlds was done right the first time (on radio).
I'm still trying to track down what Orson Welles was referring to in his news interviews the next day about previous adaptions of the book, particularly his mention of "comic strips". Can anyone point me in the right direction for that?
You mean the Orson Welles radio play. In the episode that dealt with that, an actual invasion of Grover's Mill, NJ took place (lead scouting mission before the main invasion 15 years later), but the radio play was commissioned by the government to cover up the incident after the fact. That the panic occurred reflected that the play was too real.
Though they did make mistakes in the timeline. The witnesses say it occurred on Halloween, but the radio play actually aired the night before, October 30th. (Like television now, weekly radio shows would have holiday-related programming that didn't necessarily fall on the holiday itself but rather on the week before and after.) Though some of that could be explained by witness confusion.
Those witnesses that had firm memories claimed the radio play was nothing like what actually happened.
And this was how the series tied in the 1938 broadcast in the 1988 show in their late-October episode.
This not to be confused with the other War of the Worlds remake for a 2006 release. That version was going to take place in modern times, but after September 2001 and seeing shots they wanted to make being acted out in reality, the project went into a rewrite to set it in 1898 and make it a much closer adaption of the original book. This caused them to miss their intended release date of Halloween 2003, 50 years after the last movie and the date of the radio broadcast. (I even suggested to them to pull the date back to October 30th, the actual date of the Orson Welles broadcast, or hold a special sneak premiere on that date.)
I've had my hopes on that production more than this Spielburg-Cruise production, both before and after their decision to change the setting. I have no idea when the setting is for this one.
The premise of the TV series was that the 1953 invasion occurred, as did a 1938 invasion and the corresponding radio broadcast.
The first season suggested that the reason why most people didn't remember the 1953 invasion was a combination of traumatic memory suppression and that the aliens had their own way to make humans forget, coupled with the governments of the world collecting all evidence of the invasion and suppressing the knowledge themselves. Which seems rather fantastic unless you also accept that the scope of the invasion wasn't as widespread as depicted in the movie (i.e. perhaps it was only Los Angeles County that suffered greatly in the US).
The second season though revisualized the series as Earth society being in a bad way, perhaps when the invasion was not forgotten and society being more broken. Where drugs were legal and taxed, supplies were harder to come by, pollution was a serious problem, and the government was corrupt and senators were on trial. And the aliens were replaced with ones that didn't eat roses and actually liked that humanity was polluting the Earth into an environment more suited to them.
And they weren't from Mars in the series. The movie laid down a premise that they were, but there was no hard evidence. The series first said they were from Mor-tax, then second series changed it to Morthrai.
The problem is we apparently can only visualize saving as fixing data to a medium, and the type of media we use keeps changing. We don't have a generic symbol for storage of data.
What if we ignored the media and think instead about the process: saving as making the data become fixed in a medium, making it physical. (Yes, this would also encompass printing, but let's put that aside for a moment.)
I'd recommend an icon that shows 1's and 0's as three-dimensional representations of the digits in perspective. Four should be enough, arranged as so:
10 01
Maybe with a smattering of pixels arranging themselves into the voxels making up the icon, depicting how the zero-dimensional data is becoming fixed on three-dimensional media.
A bonus: this works for other outputs. Focusing the pixels into a line would mean to send out over a network (sending the data serially or streaming it). Arranging them in a two-dimensional representation of the digits could be printing.
And as long as it fits the cultural method for reading (use i18n to display the appropriate icon for the region), it can work for the reverse as well: capturing a stream from the net, scanning in a document, or loading data from media.
Or just an arrow pointing down to a horizontal line. That could work too. Simple isn't vague when in the appropriate context.
But with this, you don't even have to move your lips, getting rid of the optical hole in the security.
They're mapping signals to entire words according to the article, which is better for controlling a machine, but you can bet soon they'll be mapping to phonemes for human-to-human communication.
Combine this with a transmitter and receiver, and you get the ability to have sub-vocal backchannel communication with people
I for one welcome our new techno-telepathic overlords.
Seriously though, military applications abound for this. Silent communication without having to maintain line-of-sight to read code hand gestures would be just one. This could be done in short order since the set of commands it has to recognize is short.
And the Secret Service would be a natural implementation for this as it advances to the stage where they can turn the recorded signals directly into speech. Right now, it's just a few commands and numbers.
And if they can feed them back along the same pathways and let the brain interpret the signals, or simulation through the skin to the auditory nerves to prevent eavesdropping on the receiver, all the better.
To keep the channels open, have them keep a single tone in their minds to enable communications (that you can detect) and you have voluntary mind-talk a la The Tomorrow People.
My cellphone's manual explicitly says not to leave it in the car. The hot interior of a car on a sunny day can cause the chemicals in a lithium-ion cell phone battery to reach the tipping point whereupon it will heat up, ignite, or even explode. Possibly setting fire to the car as well, or damaging its upholstery and leaving a terrible smell. (Related news story.)
You should leave the phone at home if your workplace will not provide a safe place to store the phone securely until you leave for the day.
Didn't they already put out a slim, 20th Mac Anniversary iPod?
I have a TAM, but it is non-functional due to a lightning strike coming through the GeoPort modem. I can see the damaged components but am not experienced enough with surface-mount soldering to attempt to repair it.
Slashdot Mirror
A) The guy doesn't have a Mac. He's a PC user. He wants advice on how to do something that's completely possible with a PC. That it can be done on a different platform is, well, totally irrelevant.
Not totally. If it can be done with a Mac, it should be possible with a PC. All you should need is the right application that will display an incoming DV stream without saving it to disk. If another platform does it, it at least says it is possible.
There are Firewire webcams sold that aren't restricted to just use with Macintoshes. I know one that has a stand in the shape of a bare foot and streams 640x480 square pixel video. Find out what software they're bundled with, whether it is free, and download it.
I don't have one of those webcams because I want one that outputs 720x480 in non-square pixels. I'd rather feed an analog camcorder through my Dazzle* Hollywood DV Bridge than have to resample the DV files to the needed aspect ratio, doubling the needed disk space.
You're mistaking GB for GiB. 9.4 GB (metric, 10^9) is only around 8.75 GiB (binary, 2^30).
This discrepancy between metric and binary shatters the so-called "formatted capacity" myth. If only people would do the math.
As opposed to what? British Units?
As opposed to binary units like gibibyte (GiB).
C'mon, that's not funny. The end result of my efforts wasn't very watchable and not widescreen.
Funny is that I still haven't taken the purchased copy out of its shrinkwrap yet.
Last I checked 2 * 4.7 GB was 9.4 GB, not 8.5 GB.
Are they holding back 0.9 GB to preserve a threshold against piracy?
(Note: units for DVD capacity are metric.)
Incidentally, I subsequently bought the DVD for One Crazy Summer.
I really need to get cracking editing this stuff and burning what I want to save onto DVDs. I've even got the entire run of Max Headroom, the first time it aired.
Advice: get a fresh digital recording wherever you can find it on cable before you start converting VHS to DVD. (Having only one first-run episode on tape, I TiVo'd the run on TechTV, with redundancy.) True, there are scenes cut, they do horrific things to the credits and penultimate scene, lose the pre-credit trailers, and cut off Max's ending monologue, but you'll have the best quality video for most of the footage coming from a digital source and fill in the edits with the VHS.
I did this with the movie One Crazy Summer, pulling the Comedy Central airing with TiVo and mixing it with an old VHS version taped off HBO (just before the DVD release was announced). It was interesting to see what edits were made, both for CC and HBO. It also got me to appreciate just how bad VHS is. I don't even like VHS for use as source material for VCDs anymore.
Putting together hotmail, MSN, and AOL will create the largest newbie base on the Internet.
So you're saying that September 1993 is still not expected to end any time soon?
I thought, if this price change happens soon enough, I could buy one now at the current price at a place that does 30-day price match guarantees and then get the credit for the difference later.
Then I thought again, and realized that they'll probably change the game bundling for the new price point and so the store won't price-match because it isn't the exact same product.
At least if I wait for the day of the sale, I'll know immediately if I can price-match or not when Wal*mart rapidly runs out of stock.
These are also the ATMs that give you time to prepare your deposit envelope ("press this button when your deposit is ready.") But when you push the button, the ATM then reads, "Please wait," and makes you wait for 3-4 seconds. It's like it's spiteful.
That is because it must have some reasonable confidence that you've given it the deposit before it communicates with the bank that you've made a deposit.
Perhaps he objects to "flying" and that, unless it is proven to be staying aloft, it should be an unidentified "falling" object.
Oh yes. The site's style attempts to immerse you into the mythos of the series. This following the lead of the series in tying in both the movie and broadcast.
With the series also having a tripod manta-shaped ship buried on an American Indian reservation thousands of years prior ("Dust to Dust") and a frozen escape pod elsewhere ("The Raising of Lazarus"), this leaves open the possibility of other incidents and allows tying in even more stories.
It gets difficult in some areas though, such as comic books, especially ones that crossover with other comics like Superman. I know it is quite a stretch and that I don't succeed everywhere, but it is just a way to tie the site together in a fun way.
It's a pity I can't make any money off of it, what with its top search ranking and all. Well, I could, but I just don't think it would be right.
Except that Welles did say "It's Halloween" at the end of the broadcast.
At the start he said (in narrative character), "On this particular evening, October 30th, the Crossley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios," and also at the end (out of character), "Starting now, we couldn't soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates, by tomorrow night . . . so we did the best next [sic] thing."
And the mention of Halloween, in context: "So good-bye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so, the terrible lesson you learned tonight: That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living-room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody's there, that was no Martian . . . it's Hallowe'en."
Halloween was in "the next day or so".
The broadcast most certainly occured on the evening of October 30th, 1938(*). I've pulled many newspaper references on this subject, including the days before the broadcast to see how much publicity it got before going to air. Even local radio schedules.
I do also recommend The Night That Panicked America which is occasionally shown on the Sci-Fi Channel. It does so nicely put the events in the context of the day and the efforts of the foley actors to get the effects needed.
I'd really love a copy of the raw newsreel footage of the interviews the next day of Orson Welles though. From what I've been able to gather from other programs, he seemed more prepared than I'd thought.
(*) Technically, the play itself was set on October 30th, 1939, one year in the future to the day from the broadcast date: "In the thirty-ninth year of the Twentieth Century came the great disillusionment." This a paraphrase of the original, "In the last years of the Nineteenth Century came the great disillusionment," to reset the story in contemporary times. (I believe Howard Koch's original script, properly titled "Invasion From Mars", actually said "thirty-eighth". I believe that's how it reads in his book, "The Panic Broadcast".)
The movie depicted destruction of the Eiffel Tower in a still image in the middle, also crashed ships in India and Rio de Janeiro, but these shots weren't used in the TV series. But they did establish entombed aliens in Canada, and a lot active in China in a summit of world scientists in the episode The Last Supper (the first season used biblical references for every episode title).
I would like to hear more about the location for the initial landing site from the movie to add to the site I cited above. If you could send it to the webmaster address at that site, I'd appreciate it.
Seen that one. Classic.
"Of all the space-bars in all the worlds, you had to rematerialise in mine."
War of the Worlds was done right the first time (on radio).
I'm still trying to track down what Orson Welles was referring to in his news interviews the next day about previous adaptions of the book, particularly his mention of "comic strips". Can anyone point me in the right direction for that?
You mean the Orson Welles radio play. In the episode that dealt with that, an actual invasion of Grover's Mill, NJ took place (lead scouting mission before the main invasion 15 years later), but the radio play was commissioned by the government to cover up the incident after the fact. That the panic occurred reflected that the play was too real.
Though they did make mistakes in the timeline. The witnesses say it occurred on Halloween, but the radio play actually aired the night before, October 30th. (Like television now, weekly radio shows would have holiday-related programming that didn't necessarily fall on the holiday itself but rather on the week before and after.) Though some of that could be explained by witness confusion.
Those witnesses that had firm memories claimed the radio play was nothing like what actually happened.
And this was how the series tied in the 1938 broadcast in the 1988 show in their late-October episode.
This not to be confused with the other War of the Worlds remake for a 2006 release. That version was going to take place in modern times, but after September 2001 and seeing shots they wanted to make being acted out in reality, the project went into a rewrite to set it in 1898 and make it a much closer adaption of the original book. This caused them to miss their intended release date of Halloween 2003, 50 years after the last movie and the date of the radio broadcast. (I even suggested to them to pull the date back to October 30th, the actual date of the Orson Welles broadcast, or hold a special sneak premiere on that date.)
I've had my hopes on that production more than this Spielburg-Cruise production, both before and after their decision to change the setting. I have no idea when the setting is for this one.
The premise of the TV series was that the 1953 invasion occurred, as did a 1938 invasion and the corresponding radio broadcast.
The first season suggested that the reason why most people didn't remember the 1953 invasion was a combination of traumatic memory suppression and that the aliens had their own way to make humans forget, coupled with the governments of the world collecting all evidence of the invasion and suppressing the knowledge themselves. Which seems rather fantastic unless you also accept that the scope of the invasion wasn't as widespread as depicted in the movie (i.e. perhaps it was only Los Angeles County that suffered greatly in the US).
The second season though revisualized the series as Earth society being in a bad way, perhaps when the invasion was not forgotten and society being more broken. Where drugs were legal and taxed, supplies were harder to come by, pollution was a serious problem, and the government was corrupt and senators were on trial. And the aliens were replaced with ones that didn't eat roses and actually liked that humanity was polluting the Earth into an environment more suited to them.
And they weren't from Mars in the series. The movie laid down a premise that they were, but there was no hard evidence. The series first said they were from Mor-tax, then second series changed it to Morthrai.
What if we ignored the media and think instead about the process: saving as making the data become fixed in a medium, making it physical. (Yes, this would also encompass printing, but let's put that aside for a moment.)
I'd recommend an icon that shows 1's and 0's as three-dimensional representations of the digits in perspective. Four should be enough, arranged as so: Maybe with a smattering of pixels arranging themselves into the voxels making up the icon, depicting how the zero-dimensional data is becoming fixed on three-dimensional media.
A bonus: this works for other outputs. Focusing the pixels into a line would mean to send out over a network (sending the data serially or streaming it). Arranging them in a two-dimensional representation of the digits could be printing.
And as long as it fits the cultural method for reading (use i18n to display the appropriate icon for the region), it can work for the reverse as well: capturing a stream from the net, scanning in a document, or loading data from media.
Or just an arrow pointing down to a horizontal line. That could work too. Simple isn't vague when in the appropriate context.
But with this, you don't even have to move your lips, getting rid of the optical hole in the security.
They're mapping signals to entire words according to the article, which is better for controlling a machine, but you can bet soon they'll be mapping to phonemes for human-to-human communication.
Combine this with a transmitter and receiver, and you get the ability to have sub-vocal backchannel communication with people
I for one welcome our new techno-telepathic overlords.
Seriously though, military applications abound for this. Silent communication without having to maintain line-of-sight to read code hand gestures would be just one. This could be done in short order since the set of commands it has to recognize is short.
And the Secret Service would be a natural implementation for this as it advances to the stage where they can turn the recorded signals directly into speech. Right now, it's just a few commands and numbers.
And if they can feed them back along the same pathways and let the brain interpret the signals, or simulation through the skin to the auditory nerves to prevent eavesdropping on the receiver, all the better.
To keep the channels open, have them keep a single tone in their minds to enable communications (that you can detect) and you have voluntary mind-talk a la The Tomorrow People.
Just leave your personal phone in your car
My cellphone's manual explicitly says not to leave it in the car. The hot interior of a car on a sunny day can cause the chemicals in a lithium-ion cell phone battery to reach the tipping point whereupon it will heat up, ignite, or even explode. Possibly setting fire to the car as well, or damaging its upholstery and leaving a terrible smell. (Related news story.)
You should leave the phone at home if your workplace will not provide a safe place to store the phone securely until you leave for the day.
This can only mean that they broke the Stargate and are looking for a replacement.
What, again?
"Alvarez proved there were no hidden chambers in that pyramid and it is now in scientific literature," said Menchaca
So no, no Stargate found. No teleport rings either. Unless they covered it up.
And are you sure it wouldn't be Tlak'khan technology hidden in that kind of a pyramid instead?
Didn't they already put out a slim, 20th Mac Anniversary iPod?
I have a TAM, but it is non-functional due to a lightning strike coming through the GeoPort modem. I can see the damaged components but am not experienced enough with surface-mount soldering to attempt to repair it.