Actually, what this looks like is a blue laser burner for CD/DVD compatible R/RW discs. FYI, CD's bought in a store are not written with lasers, so discs bought in a store are irrelevant to this discussion. The problem is the inaccuracies of BURNING a CD-R/RW (i.e. you burning it yourself with a drive in your computer).
Therefore this actually is a big deal, because it could mean the ability to burn (at home in your computer) a backward compatible music CD, at higher speeds with less failure rate.
This is even more important for Mastering houses. A mastering house will use a laser burner to write the final master CD. That CD is then sent to a reproduction house, which uses a machine to read the data and cut a permanent bit pattern into a glass disc. Blank Plastic discs are then pressed into the glass to form the pits for the data on disc. this process has an extremely low failure rate (why you rarely get bad discs from the store).
HOWEVER, if the mastering house burns a master with errors in it, and nobody notices (i.e. a bit is halfway burned, and sometimes it plays, some times it doesn't. happened to me 3 days ago), then the cutting reader might mis-read the master. Next thing you know, that error gets replicated into the glass disc, and usually into a few thousand store copies, before it is noticed. Thus ensues a recall and a reprint, at the expense of the musician. Sucko.
I can confirm this as well. My fiance just got a passport (received in the mail two days ago) and it came with neither a sleeve nor any kind of warning that this kind of attack was possible and needed to be guarded against.
Three cheers for the brilliance of modern man. We can make tiny chips that transmit information from several feet away, but we can't figure out how to make "basic security procedures" work.
Nope. The average user has no clue what "DRM" is. They just know that when they put vista on their formerly decent machine, it suddenly runs slow and won't let them do things that used to work just fine.
Ditto on this...Had really bad experiences with Hitachi and Western Digital. Swore by Maxtor for a while in the early-90's, and then a got several in a row that died within 2 years. Never used a samsung, but I've been sticking with seagate for about 15 years now, and they are incredibly reliable.
testament to reliability: with only a little care and maintenance, I have now gone a whopping 12(!!!!) years with out losing a single byte of important data. The only problem for me actually is size...in 12 years without information loss, you really do accumulate a massive amount of data. Even with regularly cleaning out unneeded data and archiving stuff I don't need instant access to, I've managed to fill 2/3rds of my 1TB storage drive already.
This is actually the hard truth. If you want to get a good job, you need experience. The only way to get experience is to work for someone who is desperate. That's what I did. Look for small startups. You might not get paid well. You might not get a project you like. Best case, you work on some new idea and help bring a cool new start up off the ground. Worst case, you eke by for a year and presto! have a year of experience as a commercial software developer!
Are you a professor? or do you work in theoretical software practices? Have you EVER worked on commercial software? I work for a certain media co., on a certain well known video player. There are so many things that simply cannot be tested except by a human. Management is always begging QA and engineering to try and come up with ways to automate testing of these things, but no one ever gets anywhere.
How can code analysis ever verify:
* YUV->RGB color conversion (there isn't even a single right answer to this, it's subjective)
* A/V Sync
* Audio language selection (how do you write code to tell if the guy is speaking in french as opposed to spanish?)
* GUI Widget alignment
* Subtitle Placement
The list goes on and on. Some of these things do have unit tests, but bugs pop up anyway, bugs which never could have been caught by any unit test. Some parts of our code lend themselves to unit tests (file parsers) and those sections are heavily tested. Other sections simply don't offer the opportunity for analyzing the results via code. All-in-all, a major update to the player can require over two months of QA by a team of 8 testers. This is in addition to the thorough unit tests you claim _should_ take care of all that.
Those two games alone did more for modern gaming than any, with the exception of super mario 1, which was also left out. They brought viable formulas for the RPG and adventure games, giving us a whole new way to play: long quests, detailed plots, epic battles. For the first time, games were so huge, they needed yet another new feature: the NES battery-backed RAM.
and what about tomb raider? Let's not be blinded by it's embarrassing recent history. tomb raider 1 and 2 cracked the 3D world wide open. Until tomb raider, the only thing you could really do with a 3D engine was make First Person Shooters. As innovative as Wolf3D and Doom were (there's two more for your list, btw), 3D engines didn't really come into their own until Tomb Raider. It showed the world how a little creative thinking could make any concept, not just shooters, viable in 3D.
He seems to be suggesting that it is a conflict of interest somehow for a large organization to become a champion for "the little guy." I see two problems with your logic Mr. Sherman...
1) You've forgotten that the RIAA was originally founded with the intention of being a large organization which championed the "little guy." In that case, at that time, the little guy was musicians, who got screwed left and right by both record labels and copyright infringers (the REAL ones, you know, the guy who would happen upon the lyrics for some unpublished song and claim it was his own, or collaborate with someone and then fail to credit them). I see his point here, sure, but the organization which he represents is his own best example of how such an organization can be perverted to serve the needs of a special few.
2) He is claiming that it is somehow wrong for a large powerful organization to take up arms in the name of joe consumer. What I read into this, however, is that he is afraid. I'm damn sure he would much prefer to continue winning little battles against poor defenseless consumers, rather than have to win a war he knows cannot be won against an organization with the legal muscle to force him into a fair fight.
this gives me an idea...Someone should start a news show that is ONLY allowed to report on GOOD things that have happened. Peace accords, people helping each other, non-controversial life-saving medical breakthroughs. Happy nice things. I wonder if anyone would watch the show. Is is the news that is pushing bad events, or does the news show bad things because that's the only time all of us hypocrits watch the news?
I took a class on public opinion and propaganda in college. Very interesting class. First thing we learned in the propaganda section, is that EVERYTHING is propaganda. Every person who ever writes, speaks, or otherwise communicates anything, subconciously puts their own spin on it. Therefore, to call it propaganda is not enough.
To use the true terms, there is white propaganda, which is the average person stating something in their own words. They are trying to be objective, they have no ulterior motives, they simply state things in the manner which their brain happened to percieve it. There is Gray Propaganda, which knowingly leads you to one side, but at least makes an attempt to be truthful in the information they provide (i.e. they leave things out, but don't blatantly decieve). black propaganda is something which intentionally decieves.
I believe that the bush administration in particular is guilty of a larger than normal amount of black propaganda. I think corporations, especially in the U.S. typically engage in a good amount of grey propaganda, in fact, advertising itself is generally grey. But all it takes is one individual within the organization to push grey into black. In other words, doing these kinds of things isn't inherently wrong, but it is definitely treading a thin line between doing something self-promoting, and something very wrong.
Not really, and it kind of misses the bigger point. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to go into much detail about how cool it's really going to get. See, as you might have guessed, I know all this because I work for DivX, I am an engineer here, I am in the office right now, and I am staring at a large pile of very cool toys, which I helped make. DivX has just filed for IPO, and we are in the quiet period, so I have to be careful what info I give out. All I can give you is a bunch of published, but not well known info. So to give you the general idea:
DivX 6 does tons of things which vastly improve quality, while squashing the files down even futher. Technically, nothing prevents you from doing what you describe, it is simply the quality profiles that we use to certify DVD players as meeting our interoperability standards. These profiles are guidelines only, and the encoder CAN encode outside of them (although new versions will warn you). But we make no guarantees about the ability of hardware decoders to play such files. The profiles are to help you make sure that you are buying devices, and making or downloading movies, which will all play nice together.
The other reason for the profiles is the emergence of hardware encoding devices. There is an emerging market for DivX capable recorders, digital cameras, and hybrid devices, like linux based net appliances. These devices need stricter encoding contstraints in order to produce files that will play back on whatever player you stick them in.
In other words, yes, you COULD encode a huge resolution with any DivX codec, but you would be hard pressed to find a DVD player that could play it on a TV, in NTSC, let alone 720 or 1080. You'd also have trouble finding codec settings that struck a good balance between quality and file size. A 2 hour DivX 5.0 file, even in 720p, would be a long download, and only play on a fairly hefty PC. Oh yeah, and only the DivX 6 HD profile supports non-square pixels, so if you used anything older, you'd get the typical blocky scaling artifacts.
But even that misses my real point from the original post. See, even if you got past all of that, you would still just have an avi file right? it's just a plain old movie, even if it's a really nice looking movie. No menus, no multiple audio languages, no subtitles, no chaptering, and no bonus "making of" movies.
So, what would you say if I told you that I have a 2 hour, 720p movie on my hard drive? What if I told you that it had full DVD-style menus, 8 audio tracks, 8 subtitle tracks, 50 chapter points, and a making-of documentary? And if I told you that the encoding was so good you could barely tell it was encoded, even on an HDTV? Cool, no? So what if I told you that the entire file is under 4 GB?
Now, how about I tell you that I'm sitting here, right now, watching a $200 DVD player PLAYING that file, off a standard DVD-R, at full resolution, on an HDTV? That you don't NEED a blue laser? That you don't have to pay $1500? That you never needed more storage space in the first place?
That's the point. It's one thing to encode a huge video. It's another thing to fit the entire movie, bonus features and all, on a normal DVD, completely bypassing the need for expensive new technology.
It kind of highlights the fact that the piracy-fearing tatics of companies like sony, are putting a strangle hold on innovation in digital video, does it not? There IS a better way, a cheaper way, an easier way, and a more environmentally friendly way, to watch a movie. And DivX is going to try and give it to you. I'll let you in on a secret, that will tell you exactly what the MPAA's mentality has done to the industry. We have a half-finished piece of software in house here. It can rip entire DVD's into DivX files, bonus features and everything. Entirely automated. A few mouse clicks, and your whole DVD collection is faithfully reproduced on your hard drive, as easy as ripping it with DVD decrypter, but with 1/8 the hard drive space. But it's likely that you will never see DivX release such software. Why
a little tip - www.divx.com - DivX 6.1
Supports 720p. plans for 1080i and even 1080p in the works, all with advanced MPEG-4 encoding features, to preserve high quality at extremely low bitrates. DVD players should be out in time for Xmas, at price points only slightly above current SD DVD players. DivX 6 can squish a full length HD movie onto a single DVD, including multiple audio and subtitle tracks. screw new discs, new hardware, new DRM, and new high prices. kthnx.
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there was... Remember Stage 6? DOA thanks to MPAA lawsuit.
Pulled out of own ass.....
Interesting....I think you have stumbled upon the long lost "infallible peer review" method....
Interesting idea, actually...Humans will respond to torture, bots will not....
the trick is how to measure human suffering?
1. Use your fancy Harvard Credentials to Sue somebody
2. Sit back and smoke some pot
3. Profit!!!!
Welcome my new sarcastic, wise-cracking overlord?
Compared to everything else....take this lovely mafia family over here...or this fair and justly operated drug ring in south america....
All far less corrupt than the fairest of governments.
Actually, what this looks like is a blue laser burner for CD/DVD compatible R/RW discs. FYI, CD's bought in a store are not written with lasers, so discs bought in a store are irrelevant to this discussion. The problem is the inaccuracies of BURNING a CD-R/RW (i.e. you burning it yourself with a drive in your computer).
Therefore this actually is a big deal, because it could mean the ability to burn (at home in your computer) a backward compatible music CD, at higher speeds with less failure rate.
This is even more important for Mastering houses. A mastering house will use a laser burner to write the final master CD. That CD is then sent to a reproduction house, which uses a machine to read the data and cut a permanent bit pattern into a glass disc. Blank Plastic discs are then pressed into the glass to form the pits for the data on disc. this process has an extremely low failure rate (why you rarely get bad discs from the store).
HOWEVER, if the mastering house burns a master with errors in it, and nobody notices (i.e. a bit is halfway burned, and sometimes it plays, some times it doesn't. happened to me 3 days ago), then the cutting reader might mis-read the master. Next thing you know, that error gets replicated into the glass disc, and usually into a few thousand store copies, before it is noticed. Thus ensues a recall and a reprint, at the expense of the musician. Sucko.
Poppy Seed Bagel, maybe? o_O
Phase 1: Pose as college student looking to make a few bucks
Phase 2: ???
Phase 3: PROFIT!!!
There, fixed that for you.
I can confirm this as well. My fiance just got a passport (received in the mail two days ago) and it came with neither a sleeve nor any kind of warning that this kind of attack was possible and needed to be guarded against.
Three cheers for the brilliance of modern man. We can make tiny chips that transmit information from several feet away, but we can't figure out how to make "basic security procedures" work.
Nope. The average user has no clue what "DRM" is. They just know that when they put vista on their formerly decent machine, it suddenly runs slow and won't let them do things that used to work just fine.
"a quick port to alternate dimensions"
Strange...Jobs told me that Apple wouldn't have that working until 2013.
Ah, 4 blades is pointless, but the first 2 additional blades made perfect sense to you, did they? nice logic on that one...
Ditto on this...Had really bad experiences with Hitachi and Western Digital. Swore by Maxtor for a while in the early-90's, and then a got several in a row that died within 2 years. Never used a samsung, but I've been sticking with seagate for about 15 years now, and they are incredibly reliable. testament to reliability: with only a little care and maintenance, I have now gone a whopping 12(!!!!) years with out losing a single byte of important data. The only problem for me actually is size...in 12 years without information loss, you really do accumulate a massive amount of data. Even with regularly cleaning out unneeded data and archiving stuff I don't need instant access to, I've managed to fill 2/3rds of my 1TB storage drive already.
This is actually the hard truth. If you want to get a good job, you need experience. The only way to get experience is to work for someone who is desperate. That's what I did. Look for small startups. You might not get paid well. You might not get a project you like. Best case, you work on some new idea and help bring a cool new start up off the ground. Worst case, you eke by for a year and presto! have a year of experience as a commercial software developer!
Are you a professor? or do you work in theoretical software practices? Have you EVER worked on commercial software? I work for a certain media co., on a certain well known video player. There are so many things that simply cannot be tested except by a human. Management is always begging QA and engineering to try and come up with ways to automate testing of these things, but no one ever gets anywhere.
How can code analysis ever verify:
* YUV->RGB color conversion (there isn't even a single right answer to this, it's subjective)
* A/V Sync
* Audio language selection (how do you write code to tell if the guy is speaking in french as opposed to spanish?)
* GUI Widget alignment
* Subtitle Placement
The list goes on and on. Some of these things do have unit tests, but bugs pop up anyway, bugs which never could have been caught by any unit test. Some parts of our code lend themselves to unit tests (file parsers) and those sections are heavily tested. Other sections simply don't offer the opportunity for analyzing the results via code. All-in-all, a major update to the player can require over two months of QA by a team of 8 testers. This is in addition to the thorough unit tests you claim _should_ take care of all that.
Legend of Zelda?
Final Fantasy?
Those two games alone did more for modern gaming than any, with the exception of super mario 1, which was also left out. They brought viable formulas for the RPG and adventure games, giving us a whole new way to play: long quests, detailed plots, epic battles. For the first time, games were so huge, they needed yet another new feature: the NES battery-backed RAM.
and what about tomb raider? Let's not be blinded by it's embarrassing recent history. tomb raider 1 and 2 cracked the 3D world wide open. Until tomb raider, the only thing you could really do with a 3D engine was make First Person Shooters. As innovative as Wolf3D and Doom were (there's two more for your list, btw), 3D engines didn't really come into their own until Tomb Raider. It showed the world how a little creative thinking could make any concept, not just shooters, viable in 3D.
DirectShow works well for a nice case of rage.
I, for one, welcome our new floating iceberb overlords...
He seems to be suggesting that it is a conflict of interest somehow for a large organization to become a champion for "the little guy." I see two problems with your logic Mr. Sherman...
1) You've forgotten that the RIAA was originally founded with the intention of being a large organization which championed the "little guy." In that case, at that time, the little guy was musicians, who got screwed left and right by both record labels and copyright infringers (the REAL ones, you know, the guy who would happen upon the lyrics for some unpublished song and claim it was his own, or collaborate with someone and then fail to credit them). I see his point here, sure, but the organization which he represents is his own best example of how such an organization can be perverted to serve the needs of a special few.
2) He is claiming that it is somehow wrong for a large powerful organization to take up arms in the name of joe consumer. What I read into this, however, is that he is afraid. I'm damn sure he would much prefer to continue winning little battles against poor defenseless consumers, rather than have to win a war he knows cannot be won against an organization with the legal muscle to force him into a fair fight.
this gives me an idea...Someone should start a news show that is ONLY allowed to report on GOOD things that have happened. Peace accords, people helping each other, non-controversial life-saving medical breakthroughs. Happy nice things. I wonder if anyone would watch the show. Is is the news that is pushing bad events, or does the news show bad things because that's the only time all of us hypocrits watch the news?
To use the true terms, there is white propaganda, which is the average person stating something in their own words. They are trying to be objective, they have no ulterior motives, they simply state things in the manner which their brain happened to percieve it. There is Gray Propaganda, which knowingly leads you to one side, but at least makes an attempt to be truthful in the information they provide (i.e. they leave things out, but don't blatantly decieve). black propaganda is something which intentionally decieves.
I believe that the bush administration in particular is guilty of a larger than normal amount of black propaganda. I think corporations, especially in the U.S. typically engage in a good amount of grey propaganda, in fact, advertising itself is generally grey. But all it takes is one individual within the organization to push grey into black. In other words, doing these kinds of things isn't inherently wrong, but it is definitely treading a thin line between doing something self-promoting, and something very wrong.
whoa...wtf??? what happened to all my formatting? oh well.. sorry for the big blob of text.
Not really, and it kind of misses the bigger point. Unfortunately, I'm not allowed to go into much detail about how cool it's really going to get. See, as you might have guessed, I know all this because I work for DivX, I am an engineer here, I am in the office right now, and I am staring at a large pile of very cool toys, which I helped make. DivX has just filed for IPO, and we are in the quiet period, so I have to be careful what info I give out. All I can give you is a bunch of published, but not well known info. So to give you the general idea: DivX 6 does tons of things which vastly improve quality, while squashing the files down even futher. Technically, nothing prevents you from doing what you describe, it is simply the quality profiles that we use to certify DVD players as meeting our interoperability standards. These profiles are guidelines only, and the encoder CAN encode outside of them (although new versions will warn you). But we make no guarantees about the ability of hardware decoders to play such files. The profiles are to help you make sure that you are buying devices, and making or downloading movies, which will all play nice together. The other reason for the profiles is the emergence of hardware encoding devices. There is an emerging market for DivX capable recorders, digital cameras, and hybrid devices, like linux based net appliances. These devices need stricter encoding contstraints in order to produce files that will play back on whatever player you stick them in. In other words, yes, you COULD encode a huge resolution with any DivX codec, but you would be hard pressed to find a DVD player that could play it on a TV, in NTSC, let alone 720 or 1080. You'd also have trouble finding codec settings that struck a good balance between quality and file size. A 2 hour DivX 5.0 file, even in 720p, would be a long download, and only play on a fairly hefty PC. Oh yeah, and only the DivX 6 HD profile supports non-square pixels, so if you used anything older, you'd get the typical blocky scaling artifacts. But even that misses my real point from the original post. See, even if you got past all of that, you would still just have an avi file right? it's just a plain old movie, even if it's a really nice looking movie. No menus, no multiple audio languages, no subtitles, no chaptering, and no bonus "making of" movies. So, what would you say if I told you that I have a 2 hour, 720p movie on my hard drive? What if I told you that it had full DVD-style menus, 8 audio tracks, 8 subtitle tracks, 50 chapter points, and a making-of documentary? And if I told you that the encoding was so good you could barely tell it was encoded, even on an HDTV? Cool, no? So what if I told you that the entire file is under 4 GB? Now, how about I tell you that I'm sitting here, right now, watching a $200 DVD player PLAYING that file, off a standard DVD-R, at full resolution, on an HDTV? That you don't NEED a blue laser? That you don't have to pay $1500? That you never needed more storage space in the first place? That's the point. It's one thing to encode a huge video. It's another thing to fit the entire movie, bonus features and all, on a normal DVD, completely bypassing the need for expensive new technology. It kind of highlights the fact that the piracy-fearing tatics of companies like sony, are putting a strangle hold on innovation in digital video, does it not? There IS a better way, a cheaper way, an easier way, and a more environmentally friendly way, to watch a movie. And DivX is going to try and give it to you. I'll let you in on a secret, that will tell you exactly what the MPAA's mentality has done to the industry. We have a half-finished piece of software in house here. It can rip entire DVD's into DivX files, bonus features and everything. Entirely automated. A few mouse clicks, and your whole DVD collection is faithfully reproduced on your hard drive, as easy as ripping it with DVD decrypter, but with 1/8 the hard drive space. But it's likely that you will never see DivX release such software. Why
a little tip - www.divx.com - DivX 6.1 Supports 720p. plans for 1080i and even 1080p in the works, all with advanced MPEG-4 encoding features, to preserve high quality at extremely low bitrates. DVD players should be out in time for Xmas, at price points only slightly above current SD DVD players. DivX 6 can squish a full length HD movie onto a single DVD, including multiple audio and subtitle tracks. screw new discs, new hardware, new DRM, and new high prices. kthnx.