Saw 'em when they came to DC. They seem pretty much exactly as they're being portrayed - or else they go to great lengths to conform to the 'bunch of cranks and racists' stereotype. In which case I want to congratulate whoever it is that's in charge of making sure every single sign they hold aloft has misspelled words and/or crudely expressed bigotry on it.
Uh, no. You have to buy Server 2003, then the WMV streaming server is 'free'. That is in terms of cost, of course; if you're not too worried about facts, you're probably even less concerned by restrictive licensing.
Real is a classic example of a company that formed around a great tech product and then was ruined by their corporate governors. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, they stopped developing their technology years ago when they decided to focus on obtrusive advertising. It's too bad because, and I don't think this has been pointed out elsewhere, the codec is pretty damn good. It's been a long time since it was cutting-edge, but for many years (still? I don't work in this area anymore) you could get better results with Real using less bandwidth than anything else, and that's still probably true at least compared to WM. In the dialup days this helped get web video off the ground. The interminable 'buffering' message was mostly a matter of poor provisioning, from which no codec can save you. They also did other cool stuff - early implementations of SMIL, and of course Helix - but in the end they chose to keep flogging the same tired software over and over. Beats working, I guess.
Whether the movie is 'faithful' to the book or not is kind of beside the point. Watchmen is about as un-filmable as a novel can get. Hollywood tends to look at comics as ready-made storyboards, but the best comics are a great deal more than that. Watchmen itself is perhaps the greatest expression of the concept of comics-as-comics - not a static version of a cartoon, but a visual literature with its own rules. The movie, I think, will be more or less bad, but most of all it will be unnecessary. It can't add anything to the story, and it can't re-create what's best in it.
What gets me is the director's terribly mistaken view of himself as 'a fan' who 'really gets it'. He's an idiot, and 300 was an abortion.
I was a bike messenger in DC for several years, and did a number of line standings. Messengers are often hired for this purpose, being familiar with the Hill offices, and being still more familiar with working as dispensable help for some of the worst people in the world.
I never liked doing line standings, though they usually paid well (relative to my average income back then); besides being deadly boring, there was always a sort of bitter ethical aftertaste, it's true. I think the last one I did was for one of the asbestos hearings; I'll never forget seeing the looks on the faces of what appeared to be genuine concerned citizens, showing up at what they thought was an early hour only to find themselves effectively locked out of the room by a ragged bunch of guys in rain jackets and shoes that close with velcro - who were only proxies for three-piece suits and wing tips, but whatever.
The deal (for whoever's interested in these things) is you show up at one of the Senate or House office buildings at some crazy hour, usually well before dawn or even a day or two ahead of time, and wait. The building isn't open yet, so you have to wait outside, and then march in to the hallway near the assigned hearing room, trying to preserve the order of the line as it was. Sometimes the hearing room is a ways from the open entrance; guys want to move up in line or at least not lose too many places, everybody starts walking faster and the line will break into a sprint. Kind of fun to run across the floor of the Hart building at 5am, bike cleats ringing on marble, but as things are generally a lot more locked down on the Hill these days I doubt if this happens much anymore.
So one problem, for the waiter, is that while this is basically an accepted practice the Capitol Hill police don't really fully condone it, either. I'm guessing that there's no clear regulations, let alone laws, covering these things, but once you're inside the cops will threaten to kick you out if you try to sit down, or leave a bag or other placeholder in line while you use the bathroom. If they catch you holding someone else's place in line (besides the one person who's paying you to be there, natch) they'll wait for the other guy to come back and throw you both out. Their right to do any of these things is pretty vaguely defined, but good luck trying to lodge a complaint.
Of course for important hearings where people are waiting for many hours beforehand, some bending of these rules has to happen, and so it does, but you have to defer to the cops by not doing it in front of their faces. They in turn give a little leeway; right up until an hour or so before the hearing, they only walk down the line once in 20-30 minutes, then as the time approaches they come by more and more often. By the time the lawyers and lobbyists show up it's a reasonably orderly scene. You're not really supposed to just have a sign out, airport-limo style, because somehow that is considered too blatant. So there's this funny school-dance thing that happens where a bunch of suits are walking up and down the line, looking for their guy or guys, both sides murmuring the names of various client firms. Once you find each other you switch out, and the cop who was diligently making sure you didn't hold your buddy's place for five minutes while he went to take a piss will stand there and watch and not say a damn thing.
I have a very low opinion of the Capitol Hill police, for reasons only tangentially related to the above, so excuse me if that colors my description; I'm just describing the phenomenon from the underling's perspective for anyone who cares to know about it.
You mean I did my taxes in haste? On the wrong day?
That holiday would be Emancipation Day. The DC government's observation of that holiday on the 16th is what pushed the tax deadline back (further). Emancipation Day is also celebrated in Texas on June 19th (as Juneteenth) and in Puerto Rico on March 22nd.
But that's just what Wikipedia tells me. I'm in DC and saw a lot of people going to work that day.
she said it came back up just a few minutes before midnight.
Must have. I submitted my return in TurboTax at about 11:45 EDT on the 16th and had no problems. So you see, the problem was not that people were procrastinating, it's that they weren't procrastinating enough.
First, thanks for the comments - lots of good stuff. I feel like I should explain myself a bit more. In the interest of making my question short and to the point, I left a few things out:
-We do have the rackmounted machines in a SKB-type case - I forget the make, but it has 5" casters. So it rolls. But it's still very big, heavy, clunky, and far from easy to travel with.
-We are using a 1U tray Keyboard/trackball/monitor + KVM switch unit to control both machines. The thing is, it's less than a year old and a pin has already gone on it somewhere, taking out most of the keyboard, which makes me think that maybe the whole integration thing is not so hot. I think I'd rather have a petite standalone screen, input devices, and KVM.
-When I said "non-proprietary", I was being imprecise - I just meant that we want to use PC-type devices, not dedicated appliances, so that we can use them for SCP, editors, browsers, etc.
-Both encoding machines run Windows XP, which I'm *really* not crazy about, especially since they often have to get plugged into networks that I don't know anything about (hotels, studios, other venues). One has already picked up something tenacious and will probably need a a reinstall of the OS soon. However, my options are limited - I'm usually a Mac user and a burgeoning Linux noob (run Ubuntu on my laptop [blush]) and I'm not confident that I could get these machines to do what I need them to do under Linux.
-The two machines are 1) a 2U Niagara (Viewcast) machine similar to this one, and 2) a very plain Visionman 1U machine. Both have Osprey 560 cards mounted, though I don't think that we need the full capabilities of the 560 -we've used the 230 and 300 for other jobs and they work just as well for our purposes (more on our purposes below). The 230 and 300 cards could fit in an XPS-type case, I think. The 560s are rather large.
-We mostly need these machines to simultaneously encode multi-bitrate Windows and Real streams, and send them to a distribution network (Akamai) for streaming over the Internet, while archiving a local copy on the HD. This is why we like the Osprey cards; the 'Simulstream' feature (add-on)allows two encoding apps to feed off the same capture. The bitrate settings are generally quite modest by broadcast standards, though the multiple bitrates x double streams x redundant backup encodes can add up.
-The audience is usually the world at large (or rather some tiny fraction thereof) so we're bound to use WM and Real almost exclusively. FWIW, I actually like the Real product - the encoding quality is distinctly superior to WM at low bitrates - but their player has been stuffed with so much marketing poison over the years that many of our clients are now opting for WM only, which is kind of depressing even if there's a good reason for it. I am interested in working with Flash more in the future, as 2006 has proven to be the year that Flash video broke wide. It's just that not enough people are running version 8 yet, which supports the first decent FLV codec.
I think I'll be taking a close look at a pair of Shuttle XPS machines, at least for a traveling kit. The goal is full redundancy, all the capabilties I mentioned above, and - the holy grail - being able to fit the whole kit in an overhead compartment.
Slashdot Mirror
Saw 'em when they came to DC. They seem pretty much exactly as they're being portrayed - or else they go to great lengths to conform to the 'bunch of cranks and racists' stereotype. In which case I want to congratulate whoever it is that's in charge of making sure every single sign they hold aloft has misspelled words and/or crudely expressed bigotry on it.
30 GB of porn
Lightweight.
Welcome to Slashdot. The context of this thread is: you're too lazy to type 'scummvm' into Google.
Yup. And:
Sounds like my Mac Mini!
Not true.
http://osflash.org/red5
Uh, no. You have to buy Server 2003, then the WMV streaming server is 'free'. That is in terms of cost, of course; if you're not too worried about facts, you're probably even less concerned by restrictive licensing.
Real is a classic example of a company that formed around a great tech product and then was ruined by their corporate governors. As has been pointed out elsewhere in this thread, they stopped developing their technology years ago when they decided to focus on obtrusive advertising. It's too bad because, and I don't think this has been pointed out elsewhere, the codec is pretty damn good. It's been a long time since it was cutting-edge, but for many years (still? I don't work in this area anymore) you could get better results with Real using less bandwidth than anything else, and that's still probably true at least compared to WM. In the dialup days this helped get web video off the ground. The interminable 'buffering' message was mostly a matter of poor provisioning, from which no codec can save you. They also did other cool stuff - early implementations of SMIL, and of course Helix - but in the end they chose to keep flogging the same tired software over and over. Beats working, I guess.
Whether the movie is 'faithful' to the book or not is kind of beside the point. Watchmen is about as un-filmable as a novel can get. Hollywood tends to look at comics as ready-made storyboards, but the best comics are a great deal more than that. Watchmen itself is perhaps the greatest expression of the concept of comics-as-comics - not a static version of a cartoon, but a visual literature with its own rules. The movie, I think, will be more or less bad, but most of all it will be unnecessary. It can't add anything to the story, and it can't re-create what's best in it.
What gets me is the director's terribly mistaken view of himself as 'a fan' who 'really gets it'. He's an idiot, and 300 was an abortion.
I was a bike messenger in DC for several years, and did a number of line standings. Messengers are often hired for this purpose, being familiar with the Hill offices, and being still more familiar with working as dispensable help for some of the worst people in the world.
I never liked doing line standings, though they usually paid well (relative to my average income back then); besides being deadly boring, there was always a sort of bitter ethical aftertaste, it's true. I think the last one I did was for one of the asbestos hearings; I'll never forget seeing the looks on the faces of what appeared to be genuine concerned citizens, showing up at what they thought was an early hour only to find themselves effectively locked out of the room by a ragged bunch of guys in rain jackets and shoes that close with velcro - who were only proxies for three-piece suits and wing tips, but whatever.
The deal (for whoever's interested in these things) is you show up at one of the Senate or House office buildings at some crazy hour, usually well before dawn or even a day or two ahead of time, and wait. The building isn't open yet, so you have to wait outside, and then march in to the hallway near the assigned hearing room, trying to preserve the order of the line as it was. Sometimes the hearing room is a ways from the open entrance; guys want to move up in line or at least not lose too many places, everybody starts walking faster and the line will break into a sprint. Kind of fun to run across the floor of the Hart building at 5am, bike cleats ringing on marble, but as things are generally a lot more locked down on the Hill these days I doubt if this happens much anymore.
So one problem, for the waiter, is that while this is basically an accepted practice the Capitol Hill police don't really fully condone it, either. I'm guessing that there's no clear regulations, let alone laws, covering these things, but once you're inside the cops will threaten to kick you out if you try to sit down, or leave a bag or other placeholder in line while you use the bathroom. If they catch you holding someone else's place in line (besides the one person who's paying you to be there, natch) they'll wait for the other guy to come back and throw you both out. Their right to do any of these things is pretty vaguely defined, but good luck trying to lodge a complaint.
Of course for important hearings where people are waiting for many hours beforehand, some bending of these rules has to happen, and so it does, but you have to defer to the cops by not doing it in front of their faces. They in turn give a little leeway; right up until an hour or so before the hearing, they only walk down the line once in 20-30 minutes, then as the time approaches they come by more and more often. By the time the lawyers and lobbyists show up it's a reasonably orderly scene. You're not really supposed to just have a sign out, airport-limo style, because somehow that is considered too blatant. So there's this funny school-dance thing that happens where a bunch of suits are walking up and down the line, looking for their guy or guys, both sides murmuring the names of various client firms. Once you find each other you switch out, and the cop who was diligently making sure you didn't hold your buddy's place for five minutes while he went to take a piss will stand there and watch and not say a damn thing.
I have a very low opinion of the Capitol Hill police, for reasons only tangentially related to the above, so excuse me if that colors my description; I'm just describing the phenomenon from the underling's perspective for anyone who cares to know about it.
You mean I did my taxes in haste? On the wrong day?
That holiday would be Emancipation Day. The DC government's observation of that holiday on the 16th is what pushed the tax deadline back (further). Emancipation Day is also celebrated in Texas on June 19th (as Juneteenth) and in Puerto Rico on March 22nd. But that's just what Wikipedia tells me. I'm in DC and saw a lot of people going to work that day.
First, thanks for the comments - lots of good stuff. I feel like I should explain myself a bit more. In the interest of making my question short and to the point, I left a few things out: -We do have the rackmounted machines in a SKB-type case - I forget the make, but it has 5" casters. So it rolls. But it's still very big, heavy, clunky, and far from easy to travel with. -We are using a 1U tray Keyboard/trackball/monitor + KVM switch unit to control both machines. The thing is, it's less than a year old and a pin has already gone on it somewhere, taking out most of the keyboard, which makes me think that maybe the whole integration thing is not so hot. I think I'd rather have a petite standalone screen, input devices, and KVM. -When I said "non-proprietary", I was being imprecise - I just meant that we want to use PC-type devices, not dedicated appliances, so that we can use them for SCP, editors, browsers, etc. -Both encoding machines run Windows XP, which I'm *really* not crazy about, especially since they often have to get plugged into networks that I don't know anything about (hotels, studios, other venues). One has already picked up something tenacious and will probably need a a reinstall of the OS soon. However, my options are limited - I'm usually a Mac user and a burgeoning Linux noob (run Ubuntu on my laptop [blush]) and I'm not confident that I could get these machines to do what I need them to do under Linux. -The two machines are 1) a 2U Niagara (Viewcast) machine similar to this one, and 2) a very plain Visionman 1U machine. Both have Osprey 560 cards mounted, though I don't think that we need the full capabilities of the 560 -we've used the 230 and 300 for other jobs and they work just as well for our purposes (more on our purposes below). The 230 and 300 cards could fit in an XPS-type case, I think. The 560s are rather large. -We mostly need these machines to simultaneously encode multi-bitrate Windows and Real streams, and send them to a distribution network (Akamai) for streaming over the Internet, while archiving a local copy on the HD. This is why we like the Osprey cards; the 'Simulstream' feature (add-on)allows two encoding apps to feed off the same capture. The bitrate settings are generally quite modest by broadcast standards, though the multiple bitrates x double streams x redundant backup encodes can add up. -The audience is usually the world at large (or rather some tiny fraction thereof) so we're bound to use WM and Real almost exclusively. FWIW, I actually like the Real product - the encoding quality is distinctly superior to WM at low bitrates - but their player has been stuffed with so much marketing poison over the years that many of our clients are now opting for WM only, which is kind of depressing even if there's a good reason for it. I am interested in working with Flash more in the future, as 2006 has proven to be the year that Flash video broke wide. It's just that not enough people are running version 8 yet, which supports the first decent FLV codec. I think I'll be taking a close look at a pair of Shuttle XPS machines, at least for a traveling kit. The goal is full redundancy, all the capabilties I mentioned above, and - the holy grail - being able to fit the whole kit in an overhead compartment.