dvgrab works OK, but files are *HUGE*, and I've found there is some kind of limit that does not allow recording of more than about 15 minutes at a time in a single file. Transcoding those files and splicing them does not work for me, and at any rate it's a pain.
In contrast, using a dirt cheap BT8x8 card is very well supported, using something like `vcr' produces small files of good enough quality for TV. Size limits correspond to about 90 minutes of continuous grabbing. I have more problems with my reception than with the encoding (no cable here, free to air only). With good reception or cable, the quality is much better than VCR.
So in my actual experience, it's capture card all the way.
Cheers.
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
A republic can be a democracy, the two are not incompatible.
A republic is a type of government, with an elected president as the head of state and various legislative assemblies. Non-republics include consitutional monarchies (with a king or queen as head of state) for example.
A democracy is a system where the power ultimately resides with the people. In the case of the US, the people elect the president, congress and judges. All three branches of government. Therefore it is considered a democracy. France also has a republican system which is a democracy for example. Non-democracies include oligarchies (power with a few), ploutocracies (power with the rich), gerontocracies (power with the old) and tyrannies (power with a tyran).
I think you equate democracy with the system of direct representation (roughly the Athenian model) which is not the only one.
The UK have a consitutional monarchy which is a democracy as well, in the sense that they elect their prime minister who has the real power.
China has a republican system which is not democratic -- it calls itself the People's Republic of China (PRC), in the sense that the Chinese people does not elect its leaders, only the unique party members do.
Re:Michael Moore's Letter to Governor Bush
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
So let's see, something fishy is going on with those votes, but we've got a deadline. Which is more important: the deadline or the fishiness?
The supreme court ruled the deadline, but that wasn't obvious.
By fishy I don't mean the hanging chads, I mean the African Americans that brother Jeb Bush struck off the register for having names that *sounded like* convicted felons.
Re:Why not the FSF/Emacs/GCC/GDB month?
on
RMS Turns 50
·
· Score: 1
> And everything that came from RMS of the FSF is > large, slow, and very ineffecient.
I take issue with that. Large, slow and very inefficient compared to what? If you compare vi and emacs you compare two very different tools. One is a a text editor, the other a whole development environment that can even do symbolic maths.
If you are talking about gcc I suggest you try to write a small, portable, standard-compliant, efficient C, C++, Java, Ada and FORTRAN compiler. Good luck to you. AFAIK gcc is unique, not even the BSDs have an alternative.
It's a good thing to complain about various shortcomings of available software packages, but here you are just repeating hearsay opinions that are not backed by fact.For example have a look at this site for a more unbiased study of gcc's performances.
Re:Why not the FSF/Emacs/GCC/GDB month?
on
RMS Turns 50
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for that,
My recollection (maybe wrong) is that BSD wasn't a full distribution and that it still used a lot of old AT&T code until the early 1990s. It wasn't until Net/2 and later UCB 4.4 BSD-lite was released that a fully free and usable distribution was made available. The latter is dated 1993 according to the NetBSD history
I seem to recall too that this only came about because of the growing Linux pressure. Linux 0.01 was released in 1991, but again, maybe I'm interpreting things. Overall BSD and Linux fed on each other, it's not clear what level of free Unix we would have today without either.
Also it would have been very hard for any of the BSDs to progress without a good, portable free C compiler, the one true crucial component that the FSF provided.
Iran is closer to a democracy than it has ever been. I believe that is his point.
People in Iran are not forced to vote and they vote for whom they want. Now the choice might not be great, but some would argue that the democracy in the USA has some problems too.
Honestly I don't think many people would be interested in an illegal copy of MS's source code. As a proof you don't find anything like this on P2P networks. ISO's of the latest games, yes.
What would you do with it? compile it to see how long it takes? make your own Windows distro? fix Microsoft bugs for them?
Look at the source code itself for brilliant insights or proof of anti-competitive practices? Waste of time all of this...
> My digital camera (Nikon D1X) captures 12 bits > of color per channel, which is far, far more > than the human eye can distinguish.
First of all unless your camera has active cooling I doubt there is a lot of information in the last 2 bits - Your camera may be capturing 12 bits but the usables one would be the first 9 or 10. Most camera's 8th bit is not that useful either. The rest is lost in noise of various origins.
Second of all the human eye can see more than 12 linear bits per channel. This is easy to prove. Right now for example I'm typing at a bright CRT screen in a darkened office while I look at some sunny outdoors. My eye can see all at once from decyphering the hand-written note on the post-it under the shadow of CRT to the brightest leaves outside, but not even film can capture that. I'm not even sure 16 bits per channel would be sufficient.
Also the RGB model does not capture all the colours visible to the human eye, this is well documented (CIE), and film is no better in that regard.
What people usually mean by `the eye cannot distinguish more than 8 bit per channel' is that most people cannot make a difference between a 7-bit encoded image and a 8-bit image in printed form or on a CRT screen. But there is much more to human vision than that.
Now if illumination were encoded on a logarithmic scale it might be different, but this is not what CCDs or CMOS chips capture.
Re:Why not the FSF/Emacs/GCC/GDB month?
on
RMS Turns 50
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Absolutely!
No one is above criticism, not all of what RMS did is right. Not even him would go that far I'm sure. Note however that the GNU/Linux issue is not unambiguously wrong, merely controversial (you will find a lot of people who support his views). It's not as if he'd killed somebody with his views.
However it's today is his birthday. This is not a dark day for Free Software, on the contrary. If from time to time people realise what others have done and acknowledge them, it often gets easier to understand one another.
No offence to Italian drivers, but this little project developed an autonomous vehicle using Linux, that could drive on Italian highways. Pretty impressive!
The V100 is a 1U rackable server designed for web usage with a 600MHz US-II CPU, this is not what I'm talking about. Yes it's 64-bit but you can't really use it as a compute or DB server for example.
Entry level general purpose Unix servers are in the $20,000 range. Divide by 4 and you still have an expensive machine that families or even small businesses are unlikely to buy in a hurry.
I guess my question should have been: will the 64-bit CPUs from AMD eventually replace the 32-bit ones? Will *really* cheap machines be made out of them, soon? Can we count on AMD to bring everybody to 64-bit computing soon?
Why not the FSF/Emacs/GCC/GDB month?
on
RMS Turns 50
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I can see everybody trolling on the GNU/Linux issue, but really seriously Stallman stands for a *lot* more than that. Without him:
- no Free Software Foundation. no GNU! at all! - no Emacs - no GCC - no GDB - no GNU/Make
Very likely there would be no Linux and no *free* BSD either. We would be using SCO and BSDI!
I don't care about the GNU/blabla name myself but his contribution, both technical and philosophical, is simply enormous. In years to come people will compare who in the early years of the personal computer made the most impact, between Bill Gates and RMS. For now the jury is still out, but I know which one I respect most and whose software I use!
Happy birthay RMS, many return! -- and thanks for not letting compromise dilute your message. May the hordes understand you some day.
I agree that if you `truly understand' something you can come to a situation where you can basically distill its essence in not too many words. You can have it in your mind and pretty much watch it from any angle.
That does not mean that if you utter those words to a complete stranger they will understand it at once. If that were the case you would see books like `Quantum Chromo Dynamics for dummies', which you don't. Instead you have people like Murray Gell-Mann writing popular books that give a shadow of a hint about what the theory is about but you don't get an understanding.out of these books.
If you want to understand what these people mean you have to follow a great deal of schooling.
I have had a much worse time in terms of ISO compliance with most commercial compilers, including Sun's and HP's. Even MSVC++ 7.0 is not quite good enough, and the Intel compiler does not fare much better.
Are you sure you tried a 3.x version of G++? up to 2.95 major sections of the STL and ISO compliance were missing but everything is there now (except for the export template features that is useless anyway, at least if you believe the C++ User Journal). It compiles Loki out of the box as a practical demonstration.
Speaking of CUJ there was a study not long ago that showed that G++ was doing pretty well indeed.
What do you mean by `much larger' and `much slower'? What % difference?
There isn't such a huge difference if you think about it. Personally I prefer it when people show their biases. At least it's more honest.
The kind of pseudo-balanced journalism that you see sometimes even in the best papers annoys me every time. I don't mind people giving their opinion, and I will usually listen to more than one. I hate it when people pretend that they are delivery the truth from on high.
And FYI headlines in big newspapers are not chosen lightly. They are all carefully designed.
Sorry, with all due respect you don't understand. the point is made very clearly in the book that Sagan is talking about the mathematical constant.
This makes absolutely zero sense. Mathematically Pi is the ratio of the circumference of the disk to its diameter in the Euclidean plane. It can only have one real value no matter how you look at it. It is an idealized number, not a physical constant that the designer of this universe, if any, would have any control over.
It makes as much sense as wanting to change the value of 1.
The second point of my post is just as important. Any message can be found in Pi, it is a property of that number. If you look down the suite of Pi numbers you will find (eventually) all the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, the history of the world, the encyclopedia britannica, all the constants of the universe to an arbitrary precision. Everything. In ASCII or in ABCDIC, In English or in German, your choice. Just as you would if you had a perfect random number generator and you waited long enough.
So that point in the book make doubly no sense at all. First of all no God can design Pi to put a message there, and second of all any message is already contained in it.
The article says x86-64 will make possible servers that will be 4x cheaper than the current Sparc/Alpha/SGI crop. That still translates into the $5-10k range, at least at first.
On top of that you'll need more memory (programs will be larger and will *require* more HD space and RAM).
Altogether I don't think even x86-64 is for the mass market. In a few years maybe, if it's a success.
Because Hydrogen is not freely or even cheaply available like oil, it can never replace it.
Hydrogen is just useful (but not even convenient) for transporting energy. You need to produce energy somehow and then you can convert it inefficiently to Hydrogen (by water separation for example). At the other end you can convert it again to water in an engine of some sort (inefficiently again).
So really Hydrogen is not the answer. Rather Hydrogen is the question: `maybe later' is the answer.
1- Lower income taxes *seriously* (do we need this huge an army BTW?) 2- Triple the price of petrol with taxes 3- Fund alternative energy resources research with these taxes 4- Watch the researchers and entrepreneurs come up with efficient engines and petrol alternatives.
Alternatively to 2 one could just wait a few years, it will happen anyway.
There are lots of demonstrators that work. Biogas, tides, solar energy, wind, etc.
However if you want to replace what we do with oil with any of these technologies you'll find it's a different kettle of fish. Scale issues start biting.
Currently the processes to make solar panels are expensive and *polluting* (think etching, use of powerful acids, etc). There have been a number of studies that have shown that solar panels are not efficient enough yet to be worth it for that kind of application.
Some people have computed that using vegetable oil or alcohol for transportation is at best neutral. You need so much energy to cultivate it, harvest it, process it and distribute it that it is not worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
DV capture under Linux is not perfect.
dvgrab works OK, but files are *HUGE*, and I've found there is some kind of limit that does not allow recording of more than about 15 minutes at a time in a single file. Transcoding those files and splicing them does not work for me, and at any rate it's a pain.
In contrast, using a dirt cheap BT8x8 card is very well supported, using something like `vcr' produces small files of good enough quality for TV. Size limits correspond to about 90 minutes of continuous grabbing. I have more problems with my reception than with the encoding (no cable here, free to air only). With good reception or cable, the quality is much better than VCR.
So in my actual experience, it's capture card all the way.
Cheers.
A republic can be a democracy, the two are not incompatible.
A republic is a type of government, with an elected president as the head of state and various legislative assemblies. Non-republics include consitutional monarchies (with a king or queen as head of state) for example.
A democracy is a system where the power ultimately resides with the people. In the case of the US, the people elect the president, congress and judges. All three branches of government. Therefore it is considered a democracy. France also has a republican system which is a democracy for example. Non-democracies include oligarchies (power with a few), ploutocracies (power with the rich), gerontocracies (power with the old) and tyrannies (power with a tyran).
I think you equate democracy with the system of direct representation (roughly the Athenian model) which is not the only one.
The UK have a consitutional monarchy which is a democracy as well, in the sense that they elect their prime minister who has the real power.
China has a republican system which is not democratic -- it calls itself the People's Republic of China (PRC), in the sense that the Chinese people does not elect its leaders, only the unique party members do.
See the wikipedia entry on democracy for more information than you need.
Apologies for being pedantic.
So let's see, something fishy is going on with those votes, but we've got a deadline. Which is more important: the deadline or the fishiness?
The supreme court ruled the deadline, but that wasn't obvious.
By fishy I don't mean the hanging chads, I mean the African Americans that brother Jeb Bush struck off the register for having names that *sounded like* convicted felons.
Read this story if you don't believe me.
> And everything that came from RMS of the FSF is
> large, slow, and very ineffecient.
I take issue with that. Large, slow and very inefficient compared to what? If you compare vi and emacs you compare two very different tools. One is a a text editor, the other a whole development environment that can even do symbolic maths.
If you are talking about gcc I suggest you try to write a small, portable, standard-compliant, efficient C, C++, Java, Ada and FORTRAN compiler. Good luck to you. AFAIK gcc is unique, not even the BSDs have an alternative.
It's a good thing to complain about various shortcomings of available software packages, but here you are just repeating hearsay opinions that are not backed by fact.For example have a look at this site for a more unbiased study of gcc's performances.
Thanks for that,
My recollection (maybe wrong) is that BSD wasn't a full distribution and that it still used a lot of old AT&T code until the early 1990s. It wasn't until Net/2 and later UCB 4.4 BSD-lite was released that a fully free and usable distribution was made available. The latter is dated 1993 according to the NetBSD history
I seem to recall too that this only came about because of the growing Linux pressure. Linux 0.01 was released in 1991, but again, maybe I'm interpreting things. Overall BSD and Linux fed on each other, it's not clear what level of free Unix we would have today without either.
Also it would have been very hard for any of the BSDs to progress without a good, portable free C compiler, the one true crucial component that the FSF provided.
Iran is closer to a democracy than it has ever been. I believe that is his point.
People in Iran are not forced to vote and they vote for whom they want. Now the choice might not be great, but some would argue that the democracy in the USA has some problems too.
Honestly I don't think many people would be interested in an illegal copy of MS's source code. As a proof you don't find anything like this on P2P networks. ISO's of the latest games, yes.
What would you do with it? compile it to see how long it takes? make your own Windows distro? fix Microsoft bugs for them?
Look at the source code itself for brilliant insights or proof of anti-competitive practices? Waste of time all of this...
Hello,
> My digital camera (Nikon D1X) captures 12 bits
> of color per channel, which is far, far more
> than the human eye can distinguish.
First of all unless your camera has active cooling I doubt there is a lot of information in the last 2 bits - Your camera may be capturing 12 bits but the usables one would be the first 9 or 10. Most camera's 8th bit is not that useful either. The rest is lost in noise of various origins.
Second of all the human eye can see more than 12 linear bits per channel. This is easy to prove. Right now for example I'm typing at a bright CRT screen in a darkened office while I look at some sunny outdoors. My eye can see all at once from decyphering the hand-written note on the post-it under the shadow of CRT to the brightest leaves outside, but not even film can capture that. I'm not even sure 16 bits per channel would be sufficient.
Also the RGB model does not capture all the colours visible to the human eye, this is well documented (CIE), and film is no better in that regard.
What people usually mean by `the eye cannot distinguish more than 8 bit per channel' is that most people cannot make a difference between a 7-bit encoded image and a 8-bit image in printed form or on a CRT screen. But there is much more to human vision than that.
Now if illumination were encoded on a logarithmic scale it might be different, but this is not what CCDs or CMOS chips capture.
Absolutely!
No one is above criticism, not all of what RMS did is right. Not even him would go that far I'm sure. Note however that the GNU/Linux issue is not unambiguously wrong, merely controversial (you will find a lot of people who support his views). It's not as if he'd killed somebody with his views.
However it's today is his birthday. This is not a dark day for Free Software, on the contrary. If from time to time people realise what others have done and acknowledge them, it often gets easier to understand one another.
No offence to Italian drivers, but this little project developed an autonomous vehicle using Linux, that could drive on Italian highways. Pretty impressive!
the ARGO project
If you've ever driven in Italy you should be impressed too...
The V100 is a 1U rackable server designed for web usage with a 600MHz US-II CPU, this is not what I'm talking about. Yes it's 64-bit but you can't really use it as a compute or DB server for example.
Entry level general purpose Unix servers are in the $20,000 range. Divide by 4 and you still have an expensive machine that families or even small businesses are unlikely to buy in a hurry.
I guess my question should have been: will the 64-bit CPUs from AMD eventually replace the 32-bit ones? Will *really* cheap machines be made out of them, soon? Can we count on AMD to bring everybody to 64-bit computing soon?
I can see everybody trolling on the GNU/Linux issue, but really seriously Stallman stands for a *lot* more than that. Without him:
- no Free Software Foundation. no GNU! at all!
- no Emacs
- no GCC
- no GDB
- no GNU/Make
Very likely there would be no Linux and no *free* BSD either. We would be using SCO and BSDI!
I don't care about the GNU/blabla name myself but his contribution, both technical and philosophical, is simply enormous. In years to come people will compare who in the early years of the personal computer made the most impact, between Bill Gates and RMS. For now the jury is still out, but I know which one I respect most and whose software I use!
Happy birthay RMS, many return! -- and thanks for not letting compromise dilute your message. May the hordes understand you some day.
No they would still be unhappy, complaining that they didn't have the balls to stand up to Microsoft.
I'm still not with you.
I agree that if you `truly understand' something you can come to a situation where you can basically distill its essence in not too many words. You can have it in your mind and pretty much watch it from any angle.
That does not mean that if you utter those words to a complete stranger they will understand it at once. If that were the case you would see books like `Quantum Chromo Dynamics for dummies', which you don't. Instead you have people like Murray Gell-Mann writing popular books that give a shadow of a hint about what the theory is about but you don't get an understanding.out of these books.
If you want to understand what these people mean you have to follow a great deal of schooling.
No I was talking about C++ too.
I have had a much worse time in terms of ISO compliance with most commercial compilers, including Sun's and HP's. Even MSVC++ 7.0 is not quite good enough, and the Intel compiler does not fare much better.
Are you sure you tried a 3.x version of G++? up to 2.95 major sections of the STL and ISO compliance were missing but everything is there now (except for the export template features that is useless anyway, at least if you believe the C++ User Journal). It compiles Loki out of the box as a practical demonstration.
Speaking of CUJ there was a study not long ago that showed that G++ was doing pretty well indeed.
What do you mean by `much larger' and `much slower'? What % difference?
There isn't such a huge difference if you think about it. Personally I prefer it when people show their biases. At least it's more honest.
The kind of pseudo-balanced journalism that you see sometimes even in the best papers annoys me every time. I don't mind people giving their opinion, and I will usually listen to more than one. I hate it when people pretend that they are delivery the truth from on high.
And FYI headlines in big newspapers are not chosen lightly. They are all carefully designed.
Sorry, with all due respect you don't understand. the point is made very clearly in the book that Sagan is talking about the mathematical constant.
This makes absolutely zero sense. Mathematically Pi is the ratio of the circumference of the disk to its diameter in the Euclidean plane. It can only have one real value no matter how you look at it. It is an idealized number, not a physical constant that the designer of this universe, if any, would have any control over.
It makes as much sense as wanting to change the value of 1.
The second point of my post is just as important. Any message can be found in Pi, it is a property of that number. If you look down the suite of Pi numbers you will find (eventually) all the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, the history of the world, the encyclopedia britannica, all the constants of the universe to an arbitrary precision. Everything. In ASCII or in ABCDIC, In English or in German, your choice. Just as you would if you had a perfect random number generator and you waited long enough.
So that point in the book make doubly no sense at all. First of all no God can design Pi to put a message there, and second of all any message is already contained in it.
Might as well look for a message in white noise.
That's the question I have.
The article says x86-64 will make possible servers that will be 4x cheaper than the current Sparc/Alpha/SGI crop. That still translates into the $5-10k range, at least at first.
On top of that you'll need more memory (programs will be larger and will *require* more HD space and RAM).
Altogether I don't think even x86-64 is for the mass market. In a few years maybe, if it's a success.
Because Hydrogen is not freely or even cheaply available like oil, it can never replace it.
Hydrogen is just useful (but not even convenient) for transporting energy. You need to produce energy somehow and then you can convert it inefficiently to Hydrogen (by water separation for example). At the other end you can convert it again to water in an engine of some sort (inefficiently again).
So really Hydrogen is not the answer. Rather Hydrogen is the question: `maybe later' is the answer.
1- Lower income taxes *seriously* (do we need this huge an army BTW?)
2- Triple the price of petrol with taxes
3- Fund alternative energy resources research with these taxes
4- Watch the researchers and entrepreneurs come up with efficient engines and petrol alternatives.
Alternatively to 2 one could just wait a few years, it will happen anyway.
Wouldn't that be the American way?
OTEC works as a demonstrator.
There are lots of demonstrators that work. Biogas, tides, solar energy, wind, etc.
However if you want to replace what we do with oil with any of these technologies you'll find it's a different kettle of fish. Scale issues start biting.
Phew,
for a moment there I thought you'd written
"the Army *explodes* everything".
Which they do.
For two reasons at least:
One is indeed to cover their asses and still be a leader if and when the time comes for these technologies to become mainstream.
The other is just PR.
Currently the processes to make solar panels are expensive and *polluting* (think etching, use of powerful acids, etc). There have been a number of studies that have shown that solar panels are not efficient enough yet to be worth it for that kind of application.
Some people have computed that using vegetable oil or alcohol for transportation is at best neutral. You need so much energy to cultivate it, harvest it, process it and distribute it that it is not worth it.
See this link