The one part of the article that really stuck out at me, though, was the comment that "large motions is how you have fun".
Abso-bloomin-lutely!
My family play Donkey Konga on the GC. Sure, you can play it just by pressing the sensors on the drum pads, or tapping the microphone instead of clapping, but it's MUCH more fun to be pounding your way through a track. In fact, it's almost subconcious - if you start out being gentle and making controlled movements, by the end you'll be pounding away like the best of them.
(Actually, I should probably rephrase that last sentance, but you get the point!)
Often overlooked by geeks is the adrenaline factor. You can have such a good time you don't even notice you're having excercise until afterwards when the adrenaline wears off. I go kite-landboarding, which can be pretty physically demanding (not to mention painful) but I never notice my muscles hurting or the bruises until afterwards, when the adrenaline has faded away. You can get good excercise without even noticing if the situation is right.:)
To scale this experiment up, this chap dropped a big lump if it into a lake:
http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/ 011.2/
TBH, if the liquid sodium coolant was escaping, I think its reaction with the water would be the least of my worries.
How much do you value your free time and do you have a girlfriend? Do you want to keep her? Is salary important or is job satisfaction?
I very much doubt you will find a cut and dry answer to your question here.
Try to find out about both companies and the culture as much as possible. Don't be afraid to ask - it shows you're interested and enthusiastic.
There's two polar ways to work, and I've experienced both:
- The jobs where you're above it and life is easy, and you have lots of free time.
- At the other end, the jobs where you're key to the project, spend massive amounts of time on it with no end in sight, travelling the world and feeling important (whether you really are or not is irrelivent).
The first is easy, but gets very boring. The latter is great if you love being at work and don't have a family or other commitments. I do have a family, and it was only fun for a short while.
For me, the balance was in the middle, which happily I've found. Where you sit on the scale is entirely up to you - but it does sound like Google is on the crazy end and Microsoft is a bit towards the other end.
Utube marketing guy: WTF? Our server is down! Utube hosting provider: (putting down fire extinguisher) We want more money, you're burning bandwidth like the U.S. burns fossil fuels! Utube marketing guy: Wait - I've just hear that Google bought YouTube and people are interested. Hey! This is an amazing marketing opportunity, I wonder how we can make use of it? (Pays hosting provider big wodge of cash)
(...ten minutes of googling later)
Utube marketing guy: My highly expensive and accurate research shows that tubes are incredibly important to our new potential customer base at slashdot.org, they talk about them a lot. Utube CEO: OK, so how do we get their attention? Utube marketing guy: Simple, we whine to CNN about how our business is going down the toilet thanks to google, then submit a story to slashdot - they love that stuff!
(...)
Slashdot editor: Hmm, I've been rejecting a lot of stories like this recently, and this one appears to be suitably poorly put together - perfect! Slashdot editor: (skipping "Dupe Check"/"Spel Check"/"Grahma Check" buttons) *PUBLISH* Slashdot readers: Oooh, how cruel to link to that site! (Follows link to see if servers really are down or not). Server room: (indifferent rattle of hard disks) Utube hosting provider: (puffing on expensive cigar) Suckers! Time to order my new Humvee.
Worth noting that the professionally edited article at CNN links to everyone concerned except utube.com. At least they engage their brains before publishing stories.
Passivated glass block storage solves all the storage problems. The waste is distributed in the block, the block will last longer than the waste's dangerous lifespan, the production of the block is easy and the stored materials will neither erode, progress chemically, or distribute themselves through the environment any other way. The technology is here now, and all it takes is using it to resolve the problem. In other words, money. The only down side is that once in said glass block, the "waste" is really waste, that is, we can't use it for anything else. This may not be optimum.
Optimum or not, we're not going to run out of Uranium any time soon - few people realise that it's more common than gold/silver/tungsten. There's an awful lot of it in the world (and currently most of it is exported from Australia!)
Regarding two-pass VBR encoding - there is one situation where this is very useful in real-time broadcast systems too. If you're a broadcaster and have an allocated amount of bandwidth for some transport, and are pushing say, three video streams down that transport, obviously you have to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth (bitrate) to each video stream. But this is where VBR encoding is useful - sometime video streams can take a lot of bitrate when a lot is happening on-screen, while others take less bitrate while not-a-lot is happening (think talking heads in a studio vs panning across a football field). So how do you ensure that all of your variable bitrate video streams don't exceed the total bandwidth allowance? The answer is two-pass VBR encoding. On the first pass, the encoder works out how "hard" it's going to be to encode a particular frame. It passes this information on to some controlling system that can allocate bandwidth to each encoder (often a mux). The mux responds with a bandwidth allocation on a per-frame basis to each encoder, based on each encoders "first pass". And so the sum of all outputs from the encoders won't exceed the total allocation, and you make the best use of your bandwidth. This works best when the three (or more) video channels have very different content being broadcast, so are less likely to all require high bitrates at the same time (in this situation, the encoders are bitrate-limited and the video quality drops). Similarly, in systems that don't do multiple passes, there is likely to be a one frame latency between the encoder encoding a difficult frame and getting a higher bandwidth allocation from the mux, during which the video quality will degrade (for just that one frame).
The subject is of such incredible depth that it's impossible to convey even a tiny fraction of what is involved in a post on slashdot. As a self confessed geek, that's why I love working in digital television. I used to work for a company that made the silicon and drivers used in 70% of STB worldwide, and spent a lot of time with broadcasters ensuring the STBs would work with their interpretations of the DVB standards - except DirecTV of course, who are a law unto themselves.;) Now I work for a company that designs professional head-end broadcast equipment. There is always something new to learn, something that you hadn't previously considered. As a job, it stays fresh and doesn't get boring and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it as a career path to any potential geeks.:)
This is utterly rubbish. Many modern broadcast systems have very sophisticated and very easy to manage front ends for handling staggering numbers of encoders/muxes/routing/modulating equipment. Of course the expense comes from redundancy, so that the broadcaster has minimal off-air time if a mux or encoder fails by having software managed backups (IE spare muxes and encoders). Advertisers will get very upset if their content isn't aired correctly. So in modern systems, switching from failed equipment can be detected and done so quickly that the consumer in most cases will not notice that the switch and associated re-routing has occurred. Equipment which can do this cleanly does not come cheap.
Anyway, back to the original question. It's not stated whether the output is analog or digital. If digital, then the transport mux and program tables and all the other DVB mandatory content has to be correctly generated. Encoding high quality complient MPEG-2 on the fly requires some pretty serious hardware support in the professional encoders, so there is no way this could be done with a PC - sure you can encode crappy quality MPEG at low resolutions, but trying to produce professional quality video that makes the most out of your bitrate really isn't going to happen (good motion compensation is non-trivial, in a "You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to quality motion compensation!" kind of way).
Of course, you can encode offline and store the transport streams on disk, but then when you mux the output with all the other DVB content, you've got to have consistent GOP structures, PCRs (Program Clock References), presentation time stamps, time codes etc, which is immensely difficult to achieve, especially if you're planning on splicing in adverts and other content (hint - this is one reason why satellite and cable broadcasters encode live from SDI inputs).
If you're trying to replace a tape archive (rather than "Run a TV Station on Linux" - which is a whole lot more, as discussed above), then perhaps you can MPEG encode the videos offline with a good quality software encoder and play it back raw (SDI/YUV) to the head-end bits that do the final encoding/modulating, but even then, getting it all synchronised correctly is likely to be non-trivial (you can't just produce your SDI frames willy-nilly you know - it's got to be synced to the rest of the station, just like the original tape system must have been - possibly off a "black and burst" generator).
Really, I think you're in for a very tough time trying to do this with Linux and OSS, unless you're willing to accept very low quality results that might not integrate with a professional broadcast system.
This is destined to go nowhere! People won't take them seriously if they keep misspelling words. I mean, who's ever heard of words like "analogue" and "favourite"? Not this red-blooded American!
You sir, are a cad and a bounder. Now, stand still while I whack your arse with this piece of aluminium!
I remember my first encounter with Chinese manufacturing.
The factory had pictures of their product in their brochures. I was about to place a sample order when I noticed a picture of the product being made on their production line. It looked NOTHING like the one in their brochure. Closer inspection revealed that their product brochure consisted of products made by reputable manufacturers but with the brand names edited out (quite poorly). Shame on me for not spotting something so obvious before.
Their actual products - a poor quality copy.
Of course, that is my experience as a sample of one out of one. Hardly representative, I know, but kinda representative of TFA.:)
Well, the problem with SIP and Skype is NAT. The phone/computer doesn't know it's WAN IP to establish connections with other phones, and there aren't necessarily inbound UDP ports open to route UDP traffic to the phone.
NAT routers temporarily accept inbound UDP packets on a port when there has been an outbound UDP packet on that port (aka UDP pinholes). So you get a working UDP "connection" (well, stateless;) ) both ways once you've estabilished an outbound connection. For VoIP with both users behind NAT, however, this is unlikely to work.
Skype gets around this by using computers that aren't behind NAT to route traffic between two phones that are behind NAT. So if everyone was to block this behaviour, Skype just wouldn't work for NAT users. It requires some community spirit (even if this is unintentional on the part of the user).
SIP systems often employ STUN servers that allow a phone/computer to query the server to find out what its WAN IP and NAT type are (and use the query itself to open up temporary UDP inbound ports on the router - something that works with all NAT types except symmetric).
In addition, SIP is also an open protocol, so there is nice free open-source software available (Asterix) to allow you to set up your own home switchboard (calls from different outside lines can be routed to different phones - IE, whenever your daughter's boyfriend calls, it can be routed to ring her VoIP phone). Skype is proprietry so you won't get any customisable features like this.
So really, SIP is the way to go if you're a supporter of open standards, and Skype if you want to follow the headless masses.:)
How many other kinds of global nuclear war are there?
Global happy rainbows and ponies nuclear war?
Well, you say that, but type "nukes" into a phone with predictive text, and before you know it you're requesting the use of tactical "mules" (not as effective and messy when dropped from a great height).
And we all know that MADreally stands for Mutual Assured Donkeys.
When our craft so much as approached Mars, we got devastating wars.
Now we dared to look the God of War in the face -- better start preparing for another World War, brought upon us by NASA -- the hitherto deemed benevolent arm of the American war-mongering government.
NASA - the hitherto deemed purveyor of all things space, to the exclusion of all other space agencies.
Suggestion to RTFA. Oh wait, slashdot. Ability to read not required.
Slashdot Mirror
Who modded this offtopic? I mean, blatent bash paste it may be, but it's hardly offtopic, is it?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2409469
Abso-bloomin-lutely!
My family play Donkey Konga on the GC. Sure, you can play it just by pressing the sensors on the drum pads, or tapping the microphone instead of clapping, but it's MUCH more fun to be pounding your way through a track. In fact, it's almost subconcious - if you start out being gentle and making controlled movements, by the end you'll be pounding away like the best of them.
(Actually, I should probably rephrase that last sentance, but you get the point!)
Often overlooked by geeks is the adrenaline factor. You can have such a good time you don't even notice you're having excercise until afterwards when the adrenaline wears off. I go kite-landboarding, which can be pretty physically demanding (not to mention painful) but I never notice my muscles hurting or the bruises until afterwards, when the adrenaline has faded away. You can get good excercise without even noticing if the situation is right.
To scale this experiment up, this chap dropped a big lump if it into a lake: http://www.theodoregray.com/PeriodicTable/Stories/ 011.2/
TBH, if the liquid sodium coolant was escaping, I think its reaction with the water would be the least of my worries.
How much do you value your free time and do you have a girlfriend? Do you want to keep her? Is salary important or is job satisfaction?
I very much doubt you will find a cut and dry answer to your question here.
Try to find out about both companies and the culture as much as possible. Don't be afraid to ask - it shows you're interested and enthusiastic.
There's two polar ways to work, and I've experienced both:
- The jobs where you're above it and life is easy, and you have lots of free time.
- At the other end, the jobs where you're key to the project, spend massive amounts of time on it with no end in sight, travelling the world and feeling important (whether you really are or not is irrelivent).
The first is easy, but gets very boring. The latter is great if you love being at work and don't have a family or other commitments. I do have a family, and it was only fun for a short while.
For me, the balance was in the middle, which happily I've found. Where you sit on the scale is entirely up to you - but it does sound like Google is on the crazy end and Microsoft is a bit towards the other end.
Your choice. Make an informed decision.
EXT4-fs warning (device sdb1): ext4_journal_start_sb: Detected tasteless ReiserFS jokes - hahahaha!
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/04/151323 6
I, for one, don't welcome our fabulous editing underlords.
Utube marketing guy: WTF? Our server is down!
Utube hosting provider: (putting down fire extinguisher) We want more money, you're burning bandwidth like the U.S. burns fossil fuels!
Utube marketing guy: Wait - I've just hear that Google bought YouTube and people are interested. Hey! This is an amazing marketing opportunity, I wonder how we can make use of it? (Pays hosting provider big wodge of cash)
(...ten minutes of googling later)
Utube marketing guy: My highly expensive and accurate research shows that tubes are incredibly important to our new potential customer base at slashdot.org, they talk about them a lot.
Utube CEO: OK, so how do we get their attention?
Utube marketing guy: Simple, we whine to CNN about how our business is going down the toilet thanks to google, then submit a story to slashdot - they love that stuff!
(...)
Slashdot editor: Hmm, I've been rejecting a lot of stories like this recently, and this one appears to be suitably poorly put together - perfect!
Slashdot editor: (skipping "Dupe Check"/"Spel Check"/"Grahma Check" buttons) *PUBLISH*
Slashdot readers: Oooh, how cruel to link to that site! (Follows link to see if servers really are down or not).
Server room: (indifferent rattle of hard disks)
Utube hosting provider: (puffing on expensive cigar) Suckers! Time to order my new Humvee.
Worth noting that the professionally edited article at CNN links to everyone concerned except utube.com. At least they engage their brains before publishing stories.
And how kind of the slashdot editors to link to utube directly, just to rub the slashdot salt into the wounds.
(I can hear their servers weeping in the corner right now).
Optimum or not, we're not going to run out of Uranium any time soon - few people realise that it's more common than gold/silver/tungsten. There's an awful lot of it in the world (and currently most of it is exported from Australia!)
Wow, that's interesting.
:)
My daughter, when she was young, would sometimes fall asleep with her eyes open. Totally freaked us out as parents, but apparently it happens.
Just goes to show that having the visual data coming in doesn't necessarily keep the brain awake.
1. Invent Jolt-Cola for birds (I dunno, something that straps to their beaks or similar)
2. PROFIT!
Regarding two-pass VBR encoding - there is one situation where this is very useful in real-time broadcast systems too. If you're a broadcaster and have an allocated amount of bandwidth for some transport, and are pushing say, three video streams down that transport, obviously you have to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth (bitrate) to each video stream. But this is where VBR encoding is useful - sometime video streams can take a lot of bitrate when a lot is happening on-screen, while others take less bitrate while not-a-lot is happening (think talking heads in a studio vs panning across a football field). So how do you ensure that all of your variable bitrate video streams don't exceed the total bandwidth allowance? The answer is two-pass VBR encoding. On the first pass, the encoder works out how "hard" it's going to be to encode a particular frame. It passes this information on to some controlling system that can allocate bandwidth to each encoder (often a mux). The mux responds with a bandwidth allocation on a per-frame basis to each encoder, based on each encoders "first pass". And so the sum of all outputs from the encoders won't exceed the total allocation, and you make the best use of your bandwidth. This works best when the three (or more) video channels have very different content being broadcast, so are less likely to all require high bitrates at the same time (in this situation, the encoders are bitrate-limited and the video quality drops). Similarly, in systems that don't do multiple passes, there is likely to be a one frame latency between the encoder encoding a difficult frame and getting a higher bandwidth allocation from the mux, during which the video quality will degrade (for just that one frame).
;) Now I work for a company that designs professional head-end broadcast equipment. There is always something new to learn, something that you hadn't previously considered. As a job, it stays fresh and doesn't get boring and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it as a career path to any potential geeks. :)
The subject is of such incredible depth that it's impossible to convey even a tiny fraction of what is involved in a post on slashdot. As a self confessed geek, that's why I love working in digital television. I used to work for a company that made the silicon and drivers used in 70% of STB worldwide, and spent a lot of time with broadcasters ensuring the STBs would work with their interpretations of the DVB standards - except DirecTV of course, who are a law unto themselves.
This is utterly rubbish. Many modern broadcast systems have very sophisticated and very easy to manage front ends for handling staggering numbers of encoders/muxes/routing/modulating equipment. Of course the expense comes from redundancy, so that the broadcaster has minimal off-air time if a mux or encoder fails by having software managed backups (IE spare muxes and encoders). Advertisers will get very upset if their content isn't aired correctly. So in modern systems, switching from failed equipment can be detected and done so quickly that the consumer in most cases will not notice that the switch and associated re-routing has occurred. Equipment which can do this cleanly does not come cheap.
:)
Anyway, back to the original question. It's not stated whether the output is analog or digital. If digital, then the transport mux and program tables and all the other DVB mandatory content has to be correctly generated. Encoding high quality complient MPEG-2 on the fly requires some pretty serious hardware support in the professional encoders, so there is no way this could be done with a PC - sure you can encode crappy quality MPEG at low resolutions, but trying to produce professional quality video that makes the most out of your bitrate really isn't going to happen (good motion compensation is non-trivial, in a "You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to quality motion compensation!" kind of way).
Of course, you can encode offline and store the transport streams on disk, but then when you mux the output with all the other DVB content, you've got to have consistent GOP structures, PCRs (Program Clock References), presentation time stamps, time codes etc, which is immensely difficult to achieve, especially if you're planning on splicing in adverts and other content (hint - this is one reason why satellite and cable broadcasters encode live from SDI inputs).
If you're trying to replace a tape archive (rather than "Run a TV Station on Linux" - which is a whole lot more, as discussed above), then perhaps you can MPEG encode the videos offline with a good quality software encoder and play it back raw (SDI/YUV) to the head-end bits that do the final encoding/modulating, but even then, getting it all synchronised correctly is likely to be non-trivial (you can't just produce your SDI frames willy-nilly you know - it's got to be synced to the rest of the station, just like the original tape system must have been - possibly off a "black and burst" generator).
Really, I think you're in for a very tough time trying to do this with Linux and OSS, unless you're willing to accept very low quality results that might not integrate with a professional broadcast system.
But, good luck nonetheless.
Holy moley - how much energy does 10Gb of data have?! That'd just punch right through a firewall, and set fire to the editors sitting the other side!
You sir, are a cad and a bounder. Now, stand still while I whack your arse with this piece of aluminium!
I remember my first encounter with Chinese manufacturing.
:)
The factory had pictures of their product in their brochures. I was about to place a sample order when I noticed a picture of the product being made on their production line. It looked NOTHING like the one in their brochure. Closer inspection revealed that their product brochure consisted of products made by reputable manufacturers but with the brand names edited out (quite poorly). Shame on me for not spotting something so obvious before.
Their actual products - a poor quality copy.
Of course, that is my experience as a sample of one out of one. Hardly representative, I know, but kinda representative of TFA.
Well, the problem with SIP and Skype is NAT. The phone/computer doesn't know it's WAN IP to establish connections with other phones, and there aren't necessarily inbound UDP ports open to route UDP traffic to the phone.
;) ) both ways once you've estabilished an outbound connection. For VoIP with both users behind NAT, however, this is unlikely to work.
r aversal3.html
:)
NAT routers temporarily accept inbound UDP packets on a port when there has been an outbound UDP packet on that port (aka UDP pinholes). So you get a working UDP "connection" (well, stateless
Skype gets around this by using computers that aren't behind NAT to route traffic between two phones that are behind NAT. So if everyone was to block this behaviour, Skype just wouldn't work for NAT users. It requires some community spirit (even if this is unintentional on the part of the user).
SIP systems often employ STUN servers that allow a phone/computer to query the server to find out what its WAN IP and NAT type are (and use the query itself to open up temporary UDP inbound ports on the router - something that works with all NAT types except symmetric).
There's a description and some pretty pictures of how STUN works here: http://www.newport-networks.com/whitepapers/nat-t
In addition, SIP is also an open protocol, so there is nice free open-source software available (Asterix) to allow you to set up your own home switchboard (calls from different outside lines can be routed to different phones - IE, whenever your daughter's boyfriend calls, it can be routed to ring her VoIP phone). Skype is proprietry so you won't get any customisable features like this.
So really, SIP is the way to go if you're a supporter of open standards, and Skype if you want to follow the headless masses.
As Yoda would say, "If on ebay you can buy it, on slashdot it does not belong".
m =300031914752
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite
Save the environment, recycle your old slashdot news here!
And we all know that MAD really stands for Mutual Assured Donkeys.
And so the great Pony Wars of 2006 began...
NASA - the hitherto deemed purveyor of all things space, to the exclusion of all other space agencies.
Suggestion to RTFA. Oh wait, slashdot. Ability to read not required.
The first time I read this I thought, "surely the US can't have 4/5 of the world's disk space?"
I think my brain is sufffering some form of slashdot effect.
Paranoia mode ON
And before you know it, it'll be applied to software as well:
"Your system has detected new hardware - please purchase a new Vista licence".
Pananoia mode OFF
"twice as bright as others of its type"
/. reader then. ;)
Obviously not a