Transcoding to a lower bit-rate doesn't necessarily entail actually decoding and re-encoding of the file stream. Depending on the format, you could just dump the higher-order coefficients and fix up the metadata to reflect this. DVDShrink, I think, supposedly does something like that.
If it's not tape-delayed for editing, what the fsck are you doing passing it through a desktop OS at all? The machine it's going through shouldn't even *have* a gui.
You don't want to do that because most of what we're currently calling "waste" really isn't. It's more like ~98% still fuel. Burying it somewhere we can't get to when the low-hanging fruit has been consumed is a fantastically poor decision.
Every radio shack I've been to, in the back of the store, near all the antennas and sham antennas, is a big pull-out file or two of assorted basic electronics components. Granted, you're not going to build a working computer* from the bits you find there (you could, but it'd be enormous), but you could certainly build a working transceiver or PID controller using only parts and instruments obtained from a radio shack retail store.
*They do, however, sell microcontroller kits though.
But yeah, for all your real parts needs, you've gotta go to a jameco or a digikey or the like. But.. who buys cables from Best Buy? It's a similar problem.
I have a video encoder that will encode at maximum resolution and fidelity, on any computer with a fast enough bus. A version of it is on every posix compatible OS. It's called, "dd"
You shouldn't be encoding your video as you stream it anyway, because you're probably going to want to edit it before packing it up. Further, the hardware these days generally does the encoding*, so you'll only be re-encoding things, and if you edit it then you'll have re-re-encoding before you're done. not pretty.
*if you've paid the premium for hardware that doesn't, then you'll also have bothered to pay for the disk you need so the software won't have to.
Video encoding is a terrible metric for "productivity" since it's something the computer can do on it's on while you go get tea. It's pretty much CPU and memory bound. The underlying OS shouldn't be doing anything but getting out of the way.
But UI "tricks" are an improvement. If find it easier to start your video encoder, or can do other resource-light things while the video encoder is running at a small cost to the actual encoding speed, then you're making better use of your meat co-processor. Which really is a "productivity" gain.
Ok, but why do you need a government enforced, "we're going to lie about the time" period?
Why not just encourage businesses to start earlier? (which has an added benefit: some businesses won't, and others will peg either the start or end time to the variable cycle, which spreads out the traffic and reduces congestion during rush hour. Five minutes in an car is like running *all* the lights in a typical household for half an hour. Longer if they're CFLs.)
Government mandated delusion is unnecessary. It's like that thing where you ask a question about something you think you need to do something you need to do, when you should've asked about the thing you're actually trying to accomplish because your workaround might be unnecessarily complicated.
Indeed. Although computing is hurt a little by the folders metaphor:
Unlike a file cabinet, there is no reason why any document needs to be in only one folder at a time.
Now this is somewhat solved by linking: what a file cabinet solves with duplication of resources, most modern file systems solve with pointers, although this functionality is typically *not* exposed at a level that is convenient or intuitive for the median user.
But, there's no reason why that needs to be the limit of things, and indeed there are database structured file systems out there, though they don't seem to have caught on as well as their slightly flatter counterparts, and I think this is partially because of the way the files/folders metaphor restricts thinking.
All DVDs sandwich the data layer. This is no problem, and should be no problem for CDs, either, since the "data layer" on CDs is actually the foil side, and they are read through the polycarbonate disk. Nothing you put on the other side will affect optical quality whatsoever.* The increased thickness (and therefore areal density) is a problem for some drives, I am told.
*Though I imagine that stickers or markers could react chemically with the data surface, or physically stress it, distorting the tracks.
AFAIK, there are a few places online that will make glass masters for you and do short runs. Just do a google search for 'CD press glass' or something like that, Minimum seems to be about 1,000 disks which runs from $500 to $3k. I have no idea of the quality of such companies, though.
But I would posit that if you're spending $1000 per 650 MB and thousands of duplicate backup disks per, you're probably not doing the right thing. And anyway, if multiple disks are an option, ten on differing chemistries and/or locations is probably more than sufficient.
Unless, of course, you actually want to distribute your backups to thousands of different locations (and maybe have some way to spread the cost around...)
Problem with par2 is that it does not work well with lots of files spread out across directories, and it especially doesn't work recursively. Though par2-ing your image is still probably a pretty good idea.
My partial solution so far is to make a hidden directory and hard link *every* file on the disk into that directory, then run par2 in that "flat" directory. (I put the inode number in the filenames to make sure there aren't any name collisions. If you use the inode number AS the name, you won't get any dupes on multiply linked files)
I haven't got the details worked out yet, though, but iso9660 supports hard links, so the disk burns and verifies well, and (importantly to me) unlike dvdisaster, it's not just a technically usable image, but an actually standard-compliant image.
I'm not quite sure how I'll go about restoring if verify fails, though, since the goal is to keep the same directory structure (presuming it's still mostly intact) and repair the files themselves. Perhaps unionfs over the loopback mounted iso would work. Or just repairing the files and using the a recursive directory listing (also saved on disk) to regenerate the directory structure.
But this would all be less necessary if the standard ECC in the CD format was more generalized: i.e. you could set it to always use the entire disk, no matter how little actual data you had, and just use extra layers of ECC that take advantage of the extra space. It would be good if reading could still be done transparently (like current CD ECC) and report "goodness" of the disk as determined by how much of the parity data was actually needed (so you could keep track of degradation over time, if any, and replace disks if the numbers start increasing)
Sure, you end up with the changes made, but it doesn't actually do it "in place" It actually makes a complete copy and unlinks the old file.
It's a lot of disk access if the thing you want to replace is always in the first block of a ten megabyte file, of which you have hundreds of files to modify.
I don't know a better way, though. At least with the copying, you don't have to worry about the changing the size and screwing up everything.
Ahh, but is that really the best use of those bits? I mean, sure, if you're starting with CD audio files, lossless from that is the best you can do.
But presuming the songs are actually recorded in something with much more fidelity than CD, I'd think that 30 megs of a careful lossy format taken from that would be better than 30 megs of pefect "CD" sampled from that.
After all, in this example, CD is basically a naive lossy compression format from the "original" higher quality master.
Economic policy always boils down to the question of what brings the greatest quality of life to the greatest number of people.
And here is the problem:
There is a curve, call it the "laffer curve" if you want, because we don't actually know much about it. We do know the boundary conditions and the behavior around them, though: At 0% and 100% taxation, government revenues are zero. If you increase from zero or decrease from 100%, revenues go up.
On the left side, it's obvious. On the right side however, the reason is still pretty clear: at taxation below 100%, economic activity is possible, and that's what generates the taxable transactions.
Now, it's been suggested that somewhere in between there is a maximum, and therefore for any level of spending except one, there are at least two levels of taxation which result in that revenue.
Unless you're trying to suppress economic growth for some reason, it is both unnecessary and immoral to use the higher taxation levels that result in the required revenue. Which is perhaps one reason why Friedman said, "If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough."
Actually.. most of the search engines (and especially Yahoo as originally envisioned) did this.
Google just happened to be "the one with the decent results right now" (i.e. the one the SEO jerks hadn't turned their attention to yet) when moderate-bandwidth "raw" connections became popular. Prior to that, you had Alta-Vista, Lycos, Web Crawler, Yahoo, etc.
All of which had their period of most-useful-results, but google was in vogue at just the time everyone got connected, so they got lots of mind-share.
I only wish they were as good now as they were then.
Just write your own sheet music that corresponds to what you did. For bonus points, get a graphic artist to design you a "robot clef" for the machine parts.
Assuming, of course, that what you did corresponds well enough to the standard scales.
Welcome to/., btw.
(also, you might wanna get a free account, even if you just post anonymously. Lock in your user-number today, they're only going to go up!)
Does the calculation happen on the card itself or in the reader? This is, IMO, particularly important if you want to use your card anywhere but your home and the bank's branch offices.
Slashdot Mirror
Yow.
Is it at least encrypted email?
Transcoding to a lower bit-rate doesn't necessarily entail actually decoding and re-encoding of the file stream. Depending on the format, you could just dump the higher-order coefficients and fix up the metadata to reflect this. DVDShrink, I think, supposedly does something like that.
If it's not tape-delayed for editing, what the fsck are you doing passing it through a desktop OS at all? The machine it's going through shouldn't even *have* a gui.
You don't want to do that because most of what we're currently calling "waste" really isn't. It's more like ~98% still fuel. Burying it somewhere we can't get to when the low-hanging fruit has been consumed is a fantastically poor decision.
Every radio shack I've been to, in the back of the store, near all the antennas and sham antennas, is a big pull-out file or two of assorted basic electronics components. Granted, you're not going to build a working computer* from the bits you find there (you could, but it'd be enormous), but you could certainly build a working transceiver or PID controller using only parts and instruments obtained from a radio shack retail store.
*They do, however, sell microcontroller kits though.
But yeah, for all your real parts needs, you've gotta go to a jameco or a digikey or the like. But.. who buys cables from Best Buy? It's a similar problem.
I have a video encoder that will encode at maximum resolution and fidelity, on any computer with a fast enough bus. A version of it is on every posix compatible OS. It's called, "dd"
You shouldn't be encoding your video as you stream it anyway, because you're probably going to want to edit it before packing it up. Further, the hardware these days generally does the encoding*, so you'll only be re-encoding things, and if you edit it then you'll have re-re-encoding before you're done. not pretty.
*if you've paid the premium for hardware that doesn't, then you'll also have bothered to pay for the disk you need so the software won't have to.
Are you sure it's a subset and not a union? Which AV program did you run first?
It's trying to, but something is protecting the bankers.
Video encoding is a terrible metric for "productivity" since it's something the computer can do on it's on while you go get tea. It's pretty much CPU and memory bound. The underlying OS shouldn't be doing anything but getting out of the way.
But UI "tricks" are an improvement. If find it easier to start your video encoder, or can do other resource-light things while the video encoder is running at a small cost to the actual encoding speed, then you're making better use of your meat co-processor. Which really is a "productivity" gain.
Ah yes, the old "Take the wrong lesson from the parable of the broken window" approach to economics. Fantastic.
Ok, but why do you need a government enforced, "we're going to lie about the time" period?
Why not just encourage businesses to start earlier? (which has an added benefit: some businesses won't, and others will peg either the start or end time to the variable cycle, which spreads out the traffic and reduces congestion during rush hour. Five minutes in an car is like running *all* the lights in a typical household for half an hour. Longer if they're CFLs.)
Government mandated delusion is unnecessary. It's like that thing where you ask a question about something you think you need to do something you need to do, when you should've asked about the thing you're actually trying to accomplish because your workaround might be unnecessarily complicated.
You know there IS a temp regulator in there, when it's just "holding" it cycles on and off. Even if it is on all day, it's not on all day.
Why didn't you just turn pages with a forceps?
Indeed. Although computing is hurt a little by the folders metaphor:
Unlike a file cabinet, there is no reason why any document needs to be in only one folder at a time.
Now this is somewhat solved by linking: what a file cabinet solves with duplication of resources, most modern file systems solve with pointers, although this functionality is typically *not* exposed at a level that is convenient or intuitive for the median user.
But, there's no reason why that needs to be the limit of things, and indeed there are database structured file systems out there, though they don't seem to have caught on as well as their slightly flatter counterparts, and I think this is partially because of the way the files/folders metaphor restricts thinking.
Considering how easy it is to image a disk for identical machines, those are some well-paid children. Better paid than you, I would imagine.
Unless you're saying that that's what development costs, in which case, I'd say those are some well-educated children...
I'm pretty sure that's not how it works.
All DVDs sandwich the data layer. This is no problem, and should be no problem for CDs, either, since the "data layer" on CDs is actually the foil side, and they are read through the polycarbonate disk. Nothing you put on the other side will affect optical quality whatsoever.* The increased thickness (and therefore areal density) is a problem for some drives, I am told.
*Though I imagine that stickers or markers could react chemically with the data surface, or physically stress it, distorting the tracks.
AFAIK, there are a few places online that will make glass masters for you and do short runs. Just do a google search for 'CD press glass' or something like that, Minimum seems to be about 1,000 disks which runs from $500 to $3k. I have no idea of the quality of such companies, though.
But I would posit that if you're spending $1000 per 650 MB and thousands of duplicate backup disks per, you're probably not doing the right thing. And anyway, if multiple disks are an option, ten on differing chemistries and/or locations is probably more than sufficient.
Unless, of course, you actually want to distribute your backups to thousands of different locations (and maybe have some way to spread the cost around...)
Problem with par2 is that it does not work well with lots of files spread out across directories, and it especially doesn't work recursively. Though par2-ing your image is still probably a pretty good idea.
My partial solution so far is to make a hidden directory and hard link *every* file on the disk into that directory, then run par2 in that "flat" directory. (I put the inode number in the filenames to make sure there aren't any name collisions. If you use the inode number AS the name, you won't get any dupes on multiply linked files)
I haven't got the details worked out yet, though, but iso9660 supports hard links, so the disk burns and verifies well, and (importantly to me) unlike dvdisaster, it's not just a technically usable image, but an actually standard-compliant image.
I'm not quite sure how I'll go about restoring if verify fails, though, since the goal is to keep the same directory structure (presuming it's still mostly intact) and repair the files themselves. Perhaps unionfs over the loopback mounted iso would work. Or just repairing the files and using the a recursive directory listing (also saved on disk) to regenerate the directory structure.
But this would all be less necessary if the standard ECC in the CD format was more generalized: i.e. you could set it to always use the entire disk, no matter how little actual data you had, and just use extra layers of ECC that take advantage of the extra space. It would be good if reading could still be done transparently (like current CD ECC) and report "goodness" of the disk as determined by how much of the parity data was actually needed (so you could keep track of degradation over time, if any, and replace disks if the numbers start increasing)
That doesn't do what it claims to do.
Sure, you end up with the changes made, but it doesn't actually do it "in place" It actually makes a complete copy and unlinks the old file.
It's a lot of disk access if the thing you want to replace is always in the first block of a ten megabyte file, of which you have hundreds of files to modify.
I don't know a better way, though. At least with the copying, you don't have to worry about the changing the size and screwing up everything.
Ahh, but is that really the best use of those bits? I mean, sure, if you're starting with CD audio files, lossless from that is the best you can do.
But presuming the songs are actually recorded in something with much more fidelity than CD, I'd think that 30 megs of a careful lossy format taken from that would be better than 30 megs of pefect "CD" sampled from that.
After all, in this example, CD is basically a naive lossy compression format from the "original" higher quality master.
Wait.. explain how that's not like sports.
Economic policy always boils down to the question of what brings the greatest quality of life to the greatest number of people.
And here is the problem:
There is a curve, call it the "laffer curve" if you want, because we don't actually know much about it. We do know the boundary conditions and the behavior around them, though: At 0% and 100% taxation, government revenues are zero. If you increase from zero or decrease from 100%, revenues go up.
On the left side, it's obvious. On the right side however, the reason is still pretty clear: at taxation below 100%, economic activity is possible, and that's what generates the taxable transactions.
Now, it's been suggested that somewhere in between there is a maximum, and therefore for any level of spending except one, there are at least two levels of taxation which result in that revenue.
Unless you're trying to suppress economic growth for some reason, it is both unnecessary and immoral to use the higher taxation levels that result in the required revenue. Which is perhaps one reason why Friedman said, "If a tax cut increases government revenues, you haven't cut taxes enough."
Actually.. most of the search engines (and especially Yahoo as originally envisioned) did this.
Google just happened to be "the one with the decent results right now" (i.e. the one the SEO jerks hadn't turned their attention to yet) when moderate-bandwidth "raw" connections became popular. Prior to that, you had Alta-Vista, Lycos, Web Crawler, Yahoo, etc.
All of which had their period of most-useful-results, but google was in vogue at just the time everyone got connected, so they got lots of mind-share.
I only wish they were as good now as they were then.
So.. You programmed the thing, right?
Just write your own sheet music that corresponds to what you did. For bonus points, get a graphic artist to design you a "robot clef" for the machine parts.
Assuming, of course, that what you did corresponds well enough to the standard scales.
Welcome to /., btw.
(also, you might wanna get a free account, even if you just post anonymously. Lock in your user-number today, they're only going to go up!)
Does the calculation happen on the card itself or in the reader? This is, IMO, particularly important if you want to use your card anywhere but your home and the bank's branch offices.