I don't know what bud you've got in your pipe, but the DVD I rented from Hollywood Video of "Life is Beautiful" had both subbed and dubbed versions. (NB: I watched the subbed version 'cuz Italian is fun to listen to:)
My post was deliberately satirical of Mr.-IT-is-always-right, and was written as if it might have come from one of his users. I was being entirely facetious.
Where I work they try to mandate anti-virus software running on all the PCs. Only problem? The damn anti-virus software locks up my PC almost daily.
The really shitty part is that just when I get the anti-virus off my system, IT (in their infinite wisdom) pushes an "update" onto my system.. sending me back into blue-screen land.
I finally installed BlackIce on my system and set it up to deliberately block the fuckers. Yeah, IT gets pissed and thinks I'm stupid or something, but at least my computer doesn't consistently bluescreen anymore.
Re:Anyone else get a CGI short at showing?
on
Review: Men In Black II
·
· Score: 3, Informative
This is hardly new.
40 years ago, WB (and other) cartoons were standard lead-ins to feature shows. Previews of coming attractions used to come at the end of the movie (hence why they are called "trailers"). But, with the large increase in credits, the trailers were moved to the front and the shorts were ditched entirely.
Thank Pixar for bringing back the animated short, and other studios for acknowledging the market and following suit.
I, for one, loved the "ChubChubbs" short (did anyone else notice that the yellow things resembled the Langoliers?).
The Gameboy Advance has two 8-bit PCM channels. You might as well be listening to MP3s through an old SoundBlaster card! It isn't going to sound anywhere near as good as even the lowest-end portable MP3 player.
Can you say "waste of time?" Yeah, I knew you could.
Putting a game on a cell phone is roughly equivalent to playing Quake 3 on a high-volume Exchange server. Your average cell phone has barely enough CPU cycles to manage the cell phone connection, much less handle real-time input needed for a game.
Let's take an example: my cell phone has the game "snake" on it (also sometimes called "nibbles"). I prefer to play it on the highest difficulty, which means the snake moves around pretty fast.
Most of the time.
There are times where the game completely ignores my commands, or decides to respond a fraction of a second after when the button is pressed. Sometimes the snake itself will slow down, only to have a sudden speed boost when the CPU becomes available.
The result is that the game's difficulty comes not from the challenge of avoiding walls and yourself, but from the maddeningly inconsistent performance and response time.
You'd think that the game would become more playable when in a tunnel (or other service-blocking zone), but actually the opposite happens because the CPU spends all its time trying to connect to the phone network.
So, given the choice, I would much rather have a dedicated gaming device such as a Gameboy Advance than eat the battery life of my cell phone with a shoddy gaming experience.
If you want to know more about the special logos (referred to as "Google doodles"), as well as see an archive of the Google doodles over the years, go here.
I make no excuses for the idiocy of the IT department of my employer. Since I am not the IT manager, I do not get to make the decisions.
Yes, it is inexcusable for Mozilla 1.0, which wants to supplant IE, to not be flexible enough to support Microsoft's proprietary protocols. It would be one thing if this protocol were still in the unknown and required actual work to decipher. However, the page you link to itself provides adequate documentation to integrate the authentication into a browser.
The information is out there, and has been for a large portion of Mozilla's development. If Mozilla wants to supplant IE, it needs to integrate with Microsoft standards as well as it supports the W3C standards. All the standards compliance in the world means shit if I can't even authenticate with the proxy!
NTLM itself is a broken protocol because it is wide open to man-in-the-middle attacks. With a log of the NTLM transaction between a client and the server, you have more than enough information to brute-force the password easily.
At work, web access is controlled by a Microsoft proxy server. The MS proxy server requires NTLM authentication support. Guess how many browsers support NTLM? (See also: how many Internet browsers has Microsoft released?)
Given that there is and has been PLENTY of information on the NTLM-over-HTTP authentication process, it is inexcusable for a 1.0 browser to not have support for this protocol.
the relative ease to which you can now transfer content between people. Sure, you could make VHS copies of movies in your basement, but you were still limited to physical distribution. Now that distribution is effectively uncapped, the MPAA and RIAA realize their nest eggs are being poached.
Bullshit.
The "unlimited distribution" myth has been repeated by everyone from New Economists to Technologists to lawmakers. But, no amount of repetition makes it any more true.
Distribution on the Internet is not an economy of scale. In fact, it is exactly the opposite! With economies of scale, the cost of production approach zero with an increase of output--e.g. it costs less to produce 10,000 than it does 100.
The Internet does not work this way. As your production levels increase, production costs go up--often logarithmically. In other words, it costs many times more to distribute 100GB per month than it does to distribute 10GB per month.
What about peer-to-peer, you ask? Peer-to-peer networks rely on the uneconomical nature of high-speed Internet. This market is beginning to correct itself as the ISPs cap the bandwith of bandwidth hogs. Eventually, the peer-to-peer networks will be the proverbial victims of their own success. People will stop using them when the ISP bill runs into the triple digits.
Therefore, even if DVD were completely unencrypted, it would be more expensive to download the 13+GB DVD than it would to simply travel to your local video store and purchase a legal copy.
In fact, if you factor in the time it takes to download the rips/theater screeners, it is already more expensive. However, expect the implicit cost to transform into explicit costs (in terms of higher ISP bills) in the near future.
The preamble to the GPL is adequate because it does not need to be read (much less agreed to) for a user to use GPL software. There is no EULA. The GPL itself does not apply until a user attempts to distribute, modify, or otherwise create derivatives of the software. This will almost never happen in the normal use of most software.
It would be more appropriate to draft the GPL using RFC terminology so that those who will be distributing, modifying, or otherwise creating derivative programs can understand the license. Coders don't speak legalese, but most can grok an RFC.
RPM, and any other tool that uses some form of database for dependency checking, is incredibly broken. The entire package management falls down as soon as a single major package (like, say, perl) is installed from source.
It does not strike me as reasonable that I should have to wait for an RPM maintainer to create an RPM of the newest release. Nor does it strike me as reasonable to expect me to know how or want to build my own RPM. I would much rather be able to install my own utilities from source and not have to give up ever using the package tool ever again because the database doesn't know that the "missing" dependencies actually exist!
A more sensible scheme could be put together using nothing more than bash, grep, tar, and ld. The algorithm would look similar to the following:
For each executable file in the package we are installing:
run ld $file |grep "0x00000000"
if output = "", continue;
display a "missing dependency" message.
For dependency on other executables, use the which command. Just about any package requirement can be located automatically without the use of a database. Hell, you can grep through/proc if you want to check things like CPU speed, architecture, available RAM, etc.
Until package management utilities check for actual presence rather than a registered presence, they will continue to have the problems you have described.
The same reason that a JPEG file converted to raw raster data (e.g. BMP), then re-converted to JPEG will not look identical to the original JPEG file.
Different encoders have different frequency analysis patterns. If you take an MP3 encoded by LAME, convert it to PCM, then encode that PCM back to MP3 using Xing or Fraunhofer, the encoder will analyse the signal differently. Since the original MP3 already has the inaudible frequencies removed, any information removed by the alternate codec will be audible.
In fact, using the same encoder with different settings will have the same effect. The only way you would possibly get the exact same MP3 back would be to use the exact same encoder with the exact same settings used to create the initial MP3. There is no way to get of this information from any kind of analysis on the waveform.
The test was performed by c't, a German magazine. The article is here, although the results summary is available in English in the "Quality" section of r3mix.net (r3mix does not allow deep linking).
This is why I say "properly encoded," because half the work is using the right encoder with the right settings. If you use Xing, the MP3s will sound like crap no matter what settings you use.:) The short version is, use new versions of LAME with the --r3mix alias.:)
The transition I outline is Original -> MP3 -> WAV -> CD. Even with a perfect digital extraction from this CD, they are still getting the waveform that has already been through the MP3 encoding process once. The MP3 encoding process throws away inaudible frequencies ("inaudible" being determined by the encoder's psycho-acoustic model). This means that the second encoding process has to throw away audible frequencies, resulting in audible compression artifacts.
There is lots of excellent information on creating high-quality MP3 files at www.r3mix.net.
Okay, given that a properly encoded MP3 (e.g. lame --r3mix <infile.wav> <outfile.mp3>) has been proven to be indistinguishable from the source material in double-blind tests, I have a better means of protecting CD content:
Encode the source material into high-quality MP3.
Decode the resulting MP3s back into.WAV format.
Use the WAV files to create the master.
Press copies of the master and distribute to retail.
This way there is negligible quality loss, and even perfect CD rips will still sound like ass when re-encoded into MP3. More importantly, the CD does not lose functionality!
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I don't know what bud you've got in your pipe, but the DVD I rented from Hollywood Video of "Life is Beautiful" had both subbed and dubbed versions. (NB: I watched the subbed version 'cuz Italian is fun to listen to :)
The VHS version is another matter..
Nathan
My post was deliberately satirical of Mr.-IT-is-always-right, and was written as if it might have come from one of his users. I was being entirely facetious.
Nathan
Where I work they try to mandate anti-virus software running on all the PCs. Only problem? The damn anti-virus software locks up my PC almost daily.
The really shitty part is that just when I get the anti-virus off my system, IT (in their infinite wisdom) pushes an "update" onto my system.. sending me back into blue-screen land.
I finally installed BlackIce on my system and set it up to deliberately block the fuckers. Yeah, IT gets pissed and thinks I'm stupid or something, but at least my computer doesn't consistently bluescreen anymore.
This is hardly new.
40 years ago, WB (and other) cartoons were standard lead-ins to feature shows. Previews of coming attractions used to come at the end of the movie (hence why they are called "trailers"). But, with the large increase in credits, the trailers were moved to the front and the shorts were ditched entirely.
Thank Pixar for bringing back the animated short, and other studios for acknowledging the market and following suit.
I, for one, loved the "ChubChubbs" short (did anyone else notice that the yellow things resembled the Langoliers?).
Nathan
- Signs (Mel Gibson + crop circles)
- Triple-X (James Bond meets Tony Hawk)
- Terminator 3 teaser (no footage)
- Blue Crush (hot chicks trying to surf)
- Uh.. the slasher movie series with Jamie Lee Curtis in it.
I think that was about it. No Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, or the like. But, the animated short was freaking hilarious.Nathan
The Gameboy Advance has two 8-bit PCM channels. You might as well be listening to MP3s through an old SoundBlaster card! It isn't going to sound anywhere near as good as even the lowest-end portable MP3 player.
Can you say "waste of time?" Yeah, I knew you could.
Nathan
Putting a game on a cell phone is roughly equivalent to playing Quake 3 on a high-volume Exchange server. Your average cell phone has barely enough CPU cycles to manage the cell phone connection, much less handle real-time input needed for a game.
Let's take an example: my cell phone has the game "snake" on it (also sometimes called "nibbles"). I prefer to play it on the highest difficulty, which means the snake moves around pretty fast.
Most of the time.
There are times where the game completely ignores my commands, or decides to respond a fraction of a second after when the button is pressed. Sometimes the snake itself will slow down, only to have a sudden speed boost when the CPU becomes available.
The result is that the game's difficulty comes not from the challenge of avoiding walls and yourself, but from the maddeningly inconsistent performance and response time.
You'd think that the game would become more playable when in a tunnel (or other service-blocking zone), but actually the opposite happens because the CPU spends all its time trying to connect to the phone network.
So, given the choice, I would much rather have a dedicated gaming device such as a Gameboy Advance than eat the battery life of my cell phone with a shoddy gaming experience.
Nathan
If you want to know more about the special logos (referred to as "Google doodles"), as well as see an archive of the Google doodles over the years, go here.
Nathan
Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage by Dr. Norman Matloff.
If you still want to get into IT after reading that (warning: it's very long), then you can continue with the programming courses.
Nathan
I make no excuses for the idiocy of the IT department of my employer. Since I am not the IT manager, I do not get to make the decisions.
Yes, it is inexcusable for Mozilla 1.0, which wants to supplant IE, to not be flexible enough to support Microsoft's proprietary protocols. It would be one thing if this protocol were still in the unknown and required actual work to decipher. However, the page you link to itself provides adequate documentation to integrate the authentication into a browser.
The information is out there, and has been for a large portion of Mozilla's development. If Mozilla wants to supplant IE, it needs to integrate with Microsoft standards as well as it supports the W3C standards. All the standards compliance in the world means shit if I can't even authenticate with the proxy!
Nathan
NTLM itself is a broken protocol because it is wide open to man-in-the-middle attacks. With a log of the NTLM transaction between a client and the server, you have more than enough information to brute-force the password easily.
Nathan
At work, web access is controlled by a Microsoft proxy server. The MS proxy server requires NTLM authentication support. Guess how many browsers support NTLM? (See also: how many Internet browsers has Microsoft released?)
Given that there is and has been PLENTY of information on the NTLM-over-HTTP authentication process, it is inexcusable for a 1.0 browser to not have support for this protocol.
Nathan
The "unlimited distribution" myth has been repeated by everyone from New Economists to Technologists to lawmakers. But, no amount of repetition makes it any more true.
Distribution on the Internet is not an economy of scale. In fact, it is exactly the opposite! With economies of scale, the cost of production approach zero with an increase of output--e.g. it costs less to produce 10,000 than it does 100.
The Internet does not work this way. As your production levels increase, production costs go up--often logarithmically. In other words, it costs many times more to distribute 100GB per month than it does to distribute 10GB per month.
What about peer-to-peer, you ask? Peer-to-peer networks rely on the uneconomical nature of high-speed Internet. This market is beginning to correct itself as the ISPs cap the bandwith of bandwidth hogs. Eventually, the peer-to-peer networks will be the proverbial victims of their own success. People will stop using them when the ISP bill runs into the triple digits.
Therefore, even if DVD were completely unencrypted, it would be more expensive to download the 13+GB DVD than it would to simply travel to your local video store and purchase a legal copy.
In fact, if you factor in the time it takes to download the rips/theater screeners, it is already more expensive. However, expect the implicit cost to transform into explicit costs (in terms of higher ISP bills) in the near future.
Nathan
"Statistically, what are the chances?"
The moon is covered with the results of astronomical odds.
Nathan
The preamble to the GPL is adequate because it does not need to be read (much less agreed to) for a user to use GPL software. There is no EULA. The GPL itself does not apply until a user attempts to distribute, modify, or otherwise create derivatives of the software. This will almost never happen in the normal use of most software.
It would be more appropriate to draft the GPL using RFC terminology so that those who will be distributing, modifying, or otherwise creating derivative programs can understand the license. Coders don't speak legalese, but most can grok an RFC.
Nathan
Actually, it's a three-step process:
1. Create your document.
2. Save as RTF.
3. Open the RTF in Wordpad and immediately save the file.
For some reason, Wordpad saves RTF files smaller than Word does. Go figure.
"The funny thing is that, on the outside, I was an honest man--straight as an arrow. I had to come to prison to become a crook."
--Andy Dufresne, Shawshank Redemption
If you are the angel of death, you may as well put it to some good use! :)
Nathan
The mailto:address@foo.com?Subject=bar syntax was introduced by Netscape 2.0.
Nathan
It does not strike me as reasonable that I should have to wait for an RPM maintainer to create an RPM of the newest release. Nor does it strike me as reasonable to expect me to know how or want to build my own RPM. I would much rather be able to install my own utilities from source and not have to give up ever using the package tool ever again because the database doesn't know that the "missing" dependencies actually exist!
A more sensible scheme could be put together using nothing more than bash, grep, tar, and ld. The algorithm would look similar to the following:
For dependency on other executables, use the which command. Just about any package requirement can be located automatically without the use of a database. Hell, you can grep throughUntil package management utilities check for actual presence rather than a registered presence, they will continue to have the problems you have described.
Nathan
Different encoders have different frequency analysis patterns. If you take an MP3 encoded by LAME, convert it to PCM, then encode that PCM back to MP3 using Xing or Fraunhofer, the encoder will analyse the signal differently. Since the original MP3 already has the inaudible frequencies removed, any information removed by the alternate codec will be audible.
In fact, using the same encoder with different settings will have the same effect. The only way you would possibly get the exact same MP3 back would be to use the exact same encoder with the exact same settings used to create the initial MP3. There is no way to get of this information from any kind of analysis on the waveform.
Nathan
This is why I say "properly encoded," because half the work is using the right encoder with the right settings. If you use Xing, the MP3s will sound like crap no matter what settings you use. :) The short version is, use new versions of LAME with the --r3mix alias. :)
Nathan
There is lots of excellent information on creating high-quality MP3 files at www.r3mix.net.
Nathan
- Encode the source material into high-quality MP3.
- Decode the resulting MP3s back into
.WAV format.
- Use the WAV files to create the master.
- Press copies of the master and distribute to retail.
This way there is negligible quality loss, and even perfect CD rips will still sound like ass when re-encoded into MP3. More importantly, the CD does not lose functionality!Nathan
Movie reviews in real time!
Nathan