Re:HTML5 for the win? Sorry, that's not a codec.
on
YouTube Revamp Imminent?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From what I've seen, and I did look into the matter a great deal, mp3 decoding (playing) hasn't really been an issue, either because Franhougher (I don't remember how to spell it) doesn't bother to sue anyone who makes software mp3 players or their claimed patent on it doesn't exist / isn't valid.
The problem is with mp3 encoders. Sometime around the late 1990s the company started suing open source developers until they stopped making any encoders. The only project which survived was GNU Lame, but apparently only because they had the legal backing and they declared their program for "educational and research" purposes.
This is why Ogg Vorbis gained traction. Open source developers didn't have to worry about being sued when using this format. Also note mpeg 4 video may have similar problems. The group which handles licensing (I believe called MPEG-LA) has repeatedly said they want to charge per file created, not just per encoder.
It could get really expensive if they decide to do this. This is also why Ogg Theora is important. Not necessarily to get everyone to use it, but for an alternative in case you can't afford or don't want to pay license fees. Some video game companies use ogg vorbis because there is some high flat fee for the license of games. I think it was $30,000(US)/game when I checked. Not a small amount at any rate.
If you need to encode for your mp3 devices, from what I understand (IANAL) the patent for mpeg layer 2 has run out, so you don't have to worry about royalties. The project toolame encodes layer 2. I know it is on debian and the source should be easy to find. It is older codec, so doesn't compress as well.
But then from my observations in sound and compression, mp3s are inferior to ogg vorbis. mp3 is just used because every device supports it and everyone is used to it. Some company (same one?) came out with a "mp3 pro" format, but no one used it and no one cared. Probably for the same reason as vorbis, but also because it required licensing fees as well.
So I am not really sure anyone will notice or care about any issues with layer 2 anyway. I notice a little, but only because I try to get my files really small (below 64kbps if possible)
I know how powerful a $3000 computer is. That was my point. Hollywood has set up an arms race for who has the most polygons and most complex textures in their graphics, which requires super fast computers to render.
It doesn't really make the graphics look more real in any significant way, but it does make everything cost more--both in production of the game and in hardware needed to play the game. Problem is most people in the "high tech" crowd buy into this myth, so those who are most able to form small start ups don't bother because they don't think their product will sell. Retailers don't seem to stock these products either.
It seems to me there is a huge untapped market for video games. People who don't upgrade their computer every year and don't buy consoles, and their computer is a low end model with integrated graphics. My friend hasn't upgraded her computer for several years. I think it has a 1GHz CPU. In the eighties that would've been considered a supercomputer which could play incredible games, yet almost no one makes video games which would work for those specs. Some companies will even put out a DS port which has a 100MHz CPU and I think 8 MB of ram, but not one for a much faster computer? It makes no sense.
No, the people who think it is a good idea to spend $3000 on gaming computers and are willing to pay $700 just for a game console buy games for the looks. Meaning rich teenagers whose mommy and daddy throw money at them.
The masses don't really care about 10 billion polygon "realistically" shaded 3d scenes rendered by massive chips. But then the masses wouldn't pay $60 just for a video game, and the video game "industry" calls anything but FPS and RTS titles "casual games."
I'm not so sure governments decide what is bad as much as "religious leaders." If you don't belong to the "one true religion" or conform to its beliefs then they and their "followers" will try to erase you one way or another.
Who bothers having an actual copyright on an item to send a DMCA notice? Anyone who reads slashdot on any regular basis knows plenty of people send false DMCA complaints with no worry of punishment....well, except for the possibility of a little public shaming and more people hearing about the thing you are trying to suppress.
No punishment for taking away the free speech rights of others or taking away their ability to do legitimate business and such. You can easily take away someone's copyright by spamming the internet with DMCA complaints against their work, and then when caught say: "oops, sorry! My temp made a mistake."
What airline do they serve shrimp? Are the people who are allergic to shrimp have such an extreme reaction that they can't even touch shrimp? Apparently some peanut allergies are that bad. Some people can't even be around peanuts because even the small amount of molecules ejected into the air causes problems.
That is why there was a problem. Airlines like to serve peanuts during flight, and even slight exposure to peanuts causes serious problems for this woman. Then again, some assholes would rather believe other people's medical problems are just "imaginary" so they don't have to deal with it. I've met plenty of those.
It's not like this is a huge inconvenience for other people. The airline just has to give some other snack in that section. I also have a soybean allergy, but not as bad as this woman. Sometimes even being around someone who has used a soy based dryer sheet on their clothes is enough to set it off.
Though, I'm also allergic to jack-booted idiot security theater thugs who have the power of the gestapo. Does this mean they need to make a TSA free zone for me?
Re:Lots of evidence for higher frame rates
on
Framerates Matter
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· Score: 1
Well, any device I know which converts a voltage into a specified current uses power. Pulse width modulation allows the circuit to deliver nearly all the power to the LED.
In the ideal approximation, the device delivering the current will have either 0 volts across it and full current in one state. (0V times any Amps=0 Watts) The other state will have all the voltage across it, but no current flowing. (any V * 0 A= 0 W) All the power used goes to the LED.
I think there is a setting to limit the number of simultaneous connections. I forget what it is called, but I'm sure you can find it in about:config...looking with the search filter, I think it is network.http.max-connections... there appear to be settings per server too.
Though, what I think the real problem there is Firefox should just use the cached copy there, since I assume with what you are doing it would have it. Isn't this the point of having a cache--so the browser doesn't have to constantly reload from the network all the time?
It also seems to do this when saving files and restoring from crash. Lots of bandwidth wasted, also sometimes I don't have network access while I use these features, so it doesn't work. I thought it used to access the cache for saving. I wonder what changed.
I do have to say one thing they did really well. They did do a great job with crash recovery, now you don't loose your links. I have a messed up machine. It used to lock up quite a bit, fixed that, but sometimes the video doesn't come back after wake up, so I have to switch to a vt, kill -2 firefox (to make sure it quits nicely), and reboot. As well as I can remember, every time Firefox still has the tabs saved somewhere and asks me if I want to reopen them or not. Kudos to them.
Anyone smoking tobacco, marijuana, crack or anything else in the presence of others or where others will breathe the smoke should be prosecuted under industrial pollution laws. I'm sure there are also laws against forcing other people to take medical substances, and they should be prosecuted under those laws as well.
The real scam is the war on drugs. The government just makes it so the stuff that goes on is hidden, production of the stuff is completely unregulated (leading innocent people to be exposed to dangerous substances), and if you are a victim of exposure, you can't do much about it because you are just as likely to be arrested just for being near the stuff as the guy who does it, and your property is just as likely to be confiscated just for being in contact with it.
Really, what are they doing to stop recreational drug use? Obviously not much, but they are making more people afraid of the police, just like the TSA makes more people afraid of flying than the terrorists.
WTF Linux user says netbooks should only have a web browser? You must've been talking to some idiot script kiddie, or someone from Google (isn't Chrome OS just linux with a web browser?)
The US government doesn't believe in investing in infrastructure because big companies brib^W"lobby" them to "believe" it. We are little more than a banana republic controlled by oil, media, software, genetically engineered food, healthcare "insurance", banks and other large interests.
The only way to have a chance at reducing their power would be to send competing money to lawmakers, avoid contributing to these companies by not doing business with them as much as possible, and fighting their political goals.
I don't think so. About 20 years ago, I noticed many companies started putting out shoddy products not only for low price items, but for the medium and high priced items as well. If you do the research, you can find out which brands have the highest quality (sometimes the one with lowest price!), but you can't tell by price anymore.
Since almost everyone here tries assume higher price supposedly means higher quality, their expectations are broken, so they figure they may as well just buy the cheapest one. It is lazy most of them don't do any research, but it doesn't mean they want low quality crap.
Then again, I think some of them don't understand what quality is. For example, if something breaks with little force or under regular use, they say you didn't take care of it. Or if something is really buggy and glitches alot, they insist it is normal behavior. Perhaps this is because of Microsoft brainwashing?;-)
Is this why in the late '90s I'd see tons of job postings for programmers with absurd demands. Things like 'must have 10+ yrs exp with Java for some webmonkey position, even though Java had only been known to the public for about 5 years. As if high level engineers from Sun would be applying for simple webmonkey positions.
H1Bs are responsible for fake employment ads? For this alone, we should make H1Bs so illegal any congressmen or CEO even talking about them gives the death penalty. Fuck that.
"Trusted Computing" just means the hardware (and OS) manufacturer "trusts" you to do what they want you to do. Make a competing product or support open source, then suddenly they don't "trust" you and revoke your key.
It is a code censorship system, not security system. Security can be shoehorned in, but if they allow (or before the manufacturer/OS company revokes the key and it propagates), a "trusted" party could run just about any code they want on a "trusted" machine, including rooting your server or copying your server image.
Most undoubtedly, any large hosting company would be "trusted" by their manufacturer, so you wouldn't be in any different state than without "trusted computing."
I don't get why it isn't obvious, but if you can't trust your hosting provider, you can't trust the server you run at their site. Period. If you can't trust them with the root password, then you shouldn't be hosting with them. They have physical access. Any 20 minute downtime (which you may never notice) could be them pulling the hard drive and cloning it, then putting it back.
Even if you encrypt the hard drive, most likely they could stage a MITM attack one way or another to get the key. They can go to the point of emulating the machine on a hypervisor and access the RAM directly. They have total physical and network control of the machine, so nothing can stop them. It is like saying you don't trust your bank, but your safety deposit box is secure because they gave you a key.
If you don't use a host you can trust, don't be surprised if they root your server or copy your private data. Just as if you can't trust your bank, don't be surprised if they funnel all your money into their personal accounts (such as charging absurdly high interest / fees and upper management giving themselves absurd multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses). Do research and try to find a company you can trust. If what you have is too valuable to be trusted with someone else, don't let them handle it.
It seems to me with everything being run by large corporations, you are essentially living in a manorial type society. You plead fealty to your lords, and they give you wages in return.
The problem with this is it you create a massive top-down hierarchy where you are totally dependent upon the honesty of those at the top. If anyone in the management structure wants to siphon most of the wealth into their own pockets, there isn't much to stop them except the manager above. At the top, there is no one above, so they don't have any one person to stop them.
This is where communism fails. You can't really depend upon people to be that honest, plus most normal people don't want that level of responsibility, so only people who want to take advantage of the situation strive for the top.
It seems to me the only obvious solution would be to just get out of their game. Find a way to run your own small business, so if one of your clients is screwing you, you can just drop them when you can. This has more risk (you don't get a steady paycheck) and requires more effort, but if you can do it, in the long term it could be the best way.
Yes, but what do you think the chances of someone starving to death in the US vs a country in Africa if they fall into hard times? What do you think the chances of someone in Africa getting medical care if they don't have money or insurance up front to pay for it? Quite a few hospitals in the US will take you in if you really need it, even if they know you can't pay.
I can't believe this is slashdot, we're talking about sports when there is a perfectly good excuse to bash the RIAA. After all, top musicians vs high school rock bands have the same comparison to sports in this thread.
However, I think the real problem is the baby boomer's worship of TV stars combined their hatred of "nerds" or anything to do with intelligence. Which led to them teaching their kids those values, and so on. The degeneration of news into car crashes, explosions, and tabloid obsession with celebrities proves my point.
compare NFL players to the likes of Bill Gates, who are the IT field's equivalent of NFL players. Again, who wins that contest?
That doesn't sit well with me. If you are going to compare Bill Gates with somebody in sports, it should be Don King. Bill Gates didn't get into his position by being a great programmer, he got there by manipulating users and his business position to his advantage.
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From what I've seen, and I did look into the matter a great deal, mp3 decoding (playing) hasn't really been an issue, either because Franhougher (I don't remember how to spell it) doesn't bother to sue anyone who makes software mp3 players or their claimed patent on it doesn't exist / isn't valid.
The problem is with mp3 encoders. Sometime around the late 1990s the company started suing open source developers until they stopped making any encoders. The only project which survived was GNU Lame, but apparently only because they had the legal backing and they declared their program for "educational and research" purposes.
This is why Ogg Vorbis gained traction. Open source developers didn't have to worry about being sued when using this format. Also note mpeg 4 video may have similar problems. The group which handles licensing (I believe called MPEG-LA) has repeatedly said they want to charge per file created, not just per encoder.
It could get really expensive if they decide to do this. This is also why Ogg Theora is important. Not necessarily to get everyone to use it, but for an alternative in case you can't afford or don't want to pay license fees. Some video game companies use ogg vorbis because there is some high flat fee for the license of games. I think it was $30,000(US)/game when I checked. Not a small amount at any rate.
If you need to encode for your mp3 devices, from what I understand (IANAL) the patent for mpeg layer 2 has run out, so you don't have to worry about royalties. The project toolame encodes layer 2. I know it is on debian and the source should be easy to find. It is older codec, so doesn't compress as well.
But then from my observations in sound and compression, mp3s are inferior to ogg vorbis. mp3 is just used because every device supports it and everyone is used to it. Some company (same one?) came out with a "mp3 pro" format, but no one used it and no one cared. Probably for the same reason as vorbis, but also because it required licensing fees as well.
So I am not really sure anyone will notice or care about any issues with layer 2 anyway. I notice a little, but only because I try to get my files really small (below 64kbps if possible)
I know how powerful a $3000 computer is. That was my point. Hollywood has set up an arms race for who has the most polygons and most complex textures in their graphics, which requires super fast computers to render.
It doesn't really make the graphics look more real in any significant way, but it does make everything cost more--both in production of the game and in hardware needed to play the game. Problem is most people in the "high tech" crowd buy into this myth, so those who are most able to form small start ups don't bother because they don't think their product will sell. Retailers don't seem to stock these products either.
It seems to me there is a huge untapped market for video games. People who don't upgrade their computer every year and don't buy consoles, and their computer is a low end model with integrated graphics. My friend hasn't upgraded her computer for several years. I think it has a 1GHz CPU. In the eighties that would've been considered a supercomputer which could play incredible games, yet almost no one makes video games which would work for those specs. Some companies will even put out a DS port which has a 100MHz CPU and I think 8 MB of ram, but not one for a much faster computer? It makes no sense.
No, the people who think it is a good idea to spend $3000 on gaming computers and are willing to pay $700 just for a game console buy games for the looks. Meaning rich teenagers whose mommy and daddy throw money at them.
The masses don't really care about 10 billion polygon "realistically" shaded 3d scenes rendered by massive chips. But then the masses wouldn't pay $60 just for a video game, and the video game "industry" calls anything but FPS and RTS titles "casual games."
Yeah sure. How often has that happened?
I'm not so sure governments decide what is bad as much as "religious leaders." If you don't belong to the "one true religion" or conform to its beliefs then they and their "followers" will try to erase you one way or another.
Who bothers having an actual copyright on an item to send a DMCA notice? Anyone who reads slashdot on any regular basis knows plenty of people send false DMCA complaints with no worry of punishment. ...well, except for the possibility of a little public shaming and more people hearing about the thing you are trying to suppress.
No punishment for taking away the free speech rights of others or taking away their ability to do legitimate business and such. You can easily take away someone's copyright by spamming the internet with DMCA complaints against their work, and then when caught say: "oops, sorry! My temp made a mistake."
Just stay north of the US/Canada border, and you should avoid all the self-righteous idiots just fine. :-)
What airline do they serve shrimp? Are the people who are allergic to shrimp have such an extreme reaction that they can't even touch shrimp? Apparently some peanut allergies are that bad. Some people can't even be around peanuts because even the small amount of molecules ejected into the air causes problems.
That is why there was a problem. Airlines like to serve peanuts during flight, and even slight exposure to peanuts causes serious problems for this woman. Then again, some assholes would rather believe other people's medical problems are just "imaginary" so they don't have to deal with it. I've met plenty of those.
It's not like this is a huge inconvenience for other people. The airline just has to give some other snack in that section. I also have a soybean allergy, but not as bad as this woman. Sometimes even being around someone who has used a soy based dryer sheet on their clothes is enough to set it off.
Though, I'm also allergic to jack-booted idiot security theater thugs who have the power of the gestapo. Does this mean they need to make a TSA free zone for me?
Well, any device I know which converts a voltage into a specified current uses power. Pulse width modulation allows the circuit to deliver nearly all the power to the LED.
In the ideal approximation, the device delivering the current will have either 0 volts across it and full current in one state. (0V times any Amps=0 Watts) The other state will have all the voltage across it, but no current flowing. (any V * 0 A= 0 W) All the power used goes to the LED.
I think there is a setting to limit the number of simultaneous connections. I forget what it is called, but I'm sure you can find it in about:config ...looking with the search filter, I think it is network.http.max-connections ... there appear to be settings per server too.
Though, what I think the real problem there is Firefox should just use the cached copy there, since I assume with what you are doing it would have it. Isn't this the point of having a cache--so the browser doesn't have to constantly reload from the network all the time?
It also seems to do this when saving files and restoring from crash. Lots of bandwidth wasted, also sometimes I don't have network access while I use these features, so it doesn't work. I thought it used to access the cache for saving. I wonder what changed.
I do have to say one thing they did really well. They did do a great job with crash recovery, now you don't loose your links. I have a messed up machine. It used to lock up quite a bit, fixed that, but sometimes the video doesn't come back after wake up, so I have to switch to a vt, kill -2 firefox (to make sure it quits nicely), and reboot. As well as I can remember, every time Firefox still has the tabs saved somewhere and asks me if I want to reopen them or not. Kudos to them.
Anyone smoking tobacco, marijuana, crack or anything else in the presence of others or where others will breathe the smoke should be prosecuted under industrial pollution laws. I'm sure there are also laws against forcing other people to take medical substances, and they should be prosecuted under those laws as well.
The real scam is the war on drugs. The government just makes it so the stuff that goes on is hidden, production of the stuff is completely unregulated (leading innocent people to be exposed to dangerous substances), and if you are a victim of exposure, you can't do much about it because you are just as likely to be arrested just for being near the stuff as the guy who does it, and your property is just as likely to be confiscated just for being in contact with it.
Really, what are they doing to stop recreational drug use? Obviously not much, but they are making more people afraid of the police, just like the TSA makes more people afraid of flying than the terrorists.
WTF Linux user says netbooks should only have a web browser? You must've been talking to some idiot script kiddie, or someone from Google (isn't Chrome OS just linux with a web browser?)
The US government doesn't believe in investing in infrastructure because big companies brib^W"lobby" them to "believe" it. We are little more than a banana republic controlled by oil, media, software, genetically engineered food, healthcare "insurance", banks and other large interests.
The only way to have a chance at reducing their power would be to send competing money to lawmakers, avoid contributing to these companies by not doing business with them as much as possible, and fighting their political goals.
I don't think so. About 20 years ago, I noticed many companies started putting out shoddy products not only for low price items, but for the medium and high priced items as well. If you do the research, you can find out which brands have the highest quality (sometimes the one with lowest price!), but you can't tell by price anymore.
Since almost everyone here tries assume higher price supposedly means higher quality, their expectations are broken, so they figure they may as well just buy the cheapest one. It is lazy most of them don't do any research, but it doesn't mean they want low quality crap.
Then again, I think some of them don't understand what quality is. For example, if something breaks with little force or under regular use, they say you didn't take care of it. Or if something is really buggy and glitches alot, they insist it is normal behavior. Perhaps this is because of Microsoft brainwashing? ;-)
Is this why in the late '90s I'd see tons of job postings for programmers with absurd demands. Things like 'must have 10+ yrs exp with Java for some webmonkey position, even though Java had only been known to the public for about 5 years. As if high level engineers from Sun would be applying for simple webmonkey positions.
H1Bs are responsible for fake employment ads? For this alone, we should make H1Bs so illegal any congressmen or CEO even talking about them gives the death penalty. Fuck that.
You make it yourself? Sorry, you can't do that. We own all the patents. Expect our liquidators to take all your stuff tomorrow. Good day.
Indeed. When the rich can buy legislation to manipulate enforcement to favor themselves, small businesses can't compete.
"Trusted Computing" just means the hardware (and OS) manufacturer "trusts" you to do what they want you to do. Make a competing product or support open source, then suddenly they don't "trust" you and revoke your key.
It is a code censorship system, not security system. Security can be shoehorned in, but if they allow (or before the manufacturer/OS company revokes the key and it propagates), a "trusted" party could run just about any code they want on a "trusted" machine, including rooting your server or copying your server image.
Most undoubtedly, any large hosting company would be "trusted" by their manufacturer, so you wouldn't be in any different state than without "trusted computing."
I don't get why it isn't obvious, but if you can't trust your hosting provider, you can't trust the server you run at their site. Period. If you can't trust them with the root password, then you shouldn't be hosting with them. They have physical access. Any 20 minute downtime (which you may never notice) could be them pulling the hard drive and cloning it, then putting it back.
Even if you encrypt the hard drive, most likely they could stage a MITM attack one way or another to get the key. They can go to the point of emulating the machine on a hypervisor and access the RAM directly. They have total physical and network control of the machine, so nothing can stop them. It is like saying you don't trust your bank, but your safety deposit box is secure because they gave you a key.
If you don't use a host you can trust, don't be surprised if they root your server or copy your private data. Just as if you can't trust your bank, don't be surprised if they funnel all your money into their personal accounts (such as charging absurdly high interest / fees and upper management giving themselves absurd multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses). Do research and try to find a company you can trust. If what you have is too valuable to be trusted with someone else, don't let them handle it.
BTW, from the posts in that story, from what I understood, they wanted his root password because they moved his image to another computer because the old one was flaky and they needed to install drivers on the new one to get it to boot, and the asshole was too cheap to pay their $35/day fee for virtual kvm access so he could do it himself.
It seems to me with everything being run by large corporations, you are essentially living in a manorial type society. You plead fealty to your lords, and they give you wages in return.
The problem with this is it you create a massive top-down hierarchy where you are totally dependent upon the honesty of those at the top. If anyone in the management structure wants to siphon most of the wealth into their own pockets, there isn't much to stop them except the manager above. At the top, there is no one above, so they don't have any one person to stop them.
This is where communism fails. You can't really depend upon people to be that honest, plus most normal people don't want that level of responsibility, so only people who want to take advantage of the situation strive for the top.
It seems to me the only obvious solution would be to just get out of their game. Find a way to run your own small business, so if one of your clients is screwing you, you can just drop them when you can. This has more risk (you don't get a steady paycheck) and requires more effort, but if you can do it, in the long term it could be the best way.
Yes, but what do you think the chances of someone starving to death in the US vs a country in Africa if they fall into hard times? What do you think the chances of someone in Africa getting medical care if they don't have money or insurance up front to pay for it? Quite a few hospitals in the US will take you in if you really need it, even if they know you can't pay.
Well, obviously it is their choice. It is just a possible way for the investors to get their money back. The fans would love it too.
I can't believe this is slashdot, we're talking about sports when there is a perfectly good excuse to bash the RIAA. After all, top musicians vs high school rock bands have the same comparison to sports in this thread.
However, I think the real problem is the baby boomer's worship of TV stars combined their hatred of "nerds" or anything to do with intelligence. Which led to them teaching their kids those values, and so on. The degeneration of news into car crashes, explosions, and tabloid obsession with celebrities proves my point.
That doesn't sit well with me. If you are going to compare Bill Gates with somebody in sports, it should be Don King. Bill Gates didn't get into his position by being a great programmer, he got there by manipulating users and his business position to his advantage.
Or you can just release source packages and use a compiler which supports a vast number of architectures.
Why should we need a multi-GHz computer to do word processing and look up information? Those tasks should be instantaneous on a 100MHz computer!