Natrium Nepal Asia legend: The lion, the sorceress, the evil spirit wardrobe "already lack" the evil spirit abstains the trilogy "rich in poetic and artistic flavor, also has not let" the Harley baud "the series novel have the infinite pleasure the undercurrent to be turbulent.

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"The Chronicles of Narnia" doesn't come near the poetic vision of "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, and it doesn't have the dark undercurrents that makes the "Harry Potter" series endlessly fascinating.

This reminds me of an email in English that I once received from a Russian programmer, and not having the slightest idea what it said. And I know Russian! Moral of the story: if you want a human to read it, have a human write it.

The malware, called Antinny, finds random files on Winny users' PCs and makes them available on the file-sharing network. So far, the data leaked have been varied and plentiful: passwords for restricted areas at airports, police investigations, customer information, sales reports, staff lists.

The constantly updated virus seems to have spared no one — airlines, local police forces, mobile phone companies, the National Defense Agency. Even an antivirus software manufacturer has suffered.

Who in their right mind would put file-sharing software on the same machine that has secret investigation documents?

The download package includes:

• wvc1dmoe.dll - WMV9 Advanced Profile Encoder DMO BETA
• wvc1dmod.dll - WMV9 Advanced Profile Decoder DMO
• WMCmd.vbs - Updated WME9 command-line encoder script

Install requirements:

• Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 SP1
• Windows Media Format SDK 9.5 or Windows Media Player 10

As you can see, this release is aimed primarily at XP users who want to try the new WVC1 encoder beta but don't want to install the full WMP11 beta, and Server 2003 users who can't install WMP11 beta anyway. You can't install this update over WMP11 (XP or Vista) - nor do you want to. WVC1 encoder is already a part of WMF11 runtime.

The package also includes an update to WMCmd.vbs, the first since Windows Media Encoder 9 Series was released 3.5 years ago. The update to WMCmd.vbs will only be installed if you already have WME9 installed on your system! It will overwrite your existing WMCmd.vbs in your WME9 folder, so if you really really really want to keep the old one for some reason - make a backup of it prior to installation.

If you have already installed WMP11 beta and would only like to get the WMCmd.vbs update, I have made it available as a separate download:

http://www.citizeninsomniac.com/WMV/WMCmd_20060519.zip

So what's new about the WMCmd.vbs? Here's the changelog:

5-19-2006:

• Added support for WVC1 encoding (WMV9 Advanced Profile video codec).
• Added support for WMA10 Professional low-bitrate encoding and changed WMA codec identifiers to be version-agnostic (i.e. WMASTD instead of WMA9STD)
• Added command-line parameters for advanced video settings otherwise exposed only through the registry. For details, see: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/codecadvancedsettings.aspx
• Added support for Avisynth (.avs) script sources and worked around a related duration bug in the source plugin.
• Rewrote the encoding progress screen so that it estimates encoding time, ETA and encoding speed.
• Added command-line parameters for music centric metadata such as album, track number, release year, genre, etc.
• Added metadata summary to the output screen.
• Added documentation for the new advanced video settings to the inline help.
• Reorganized inline help documentation and grouped settings in a more intuitive way.
• Fixed bug where encoder script would sometimes hang at the end of encoding process.
• Improved error handling for bad source files.

Yep, the encoder script now supports .avs inputs. The truth of the matter is that it always did. You see, WME9 has a concept of source plugins which allows it to treat file inputs, screen captures and device captures in a very similar fashion. It uses its own AVI source plugin to read AVI files, and that plugin cannot retrieve the duration property from AVS scripts - for one reason or another. So the AVS workaround was to retrieve the duration using some other method. Wmcmd being VBScript based, it wasn't possible to use DirectShow or VfW, so I used the next best thing: WMP ActiveX control. So the first time you use WMCmd.vbs to encode an Avisynth script you might get a dialog box from WMP asking you if you're sure you want to open an .avs file in WMP. Just click the 'Don't ask me again' check box, say Yes, and you'll never be bothered by the question again. If for some reason the duration can't be retrieved again (i.e. XP with absolutely no WMP present), you'll still be able to encode - you just won't have the pretty progress bar to tell you how long you need to take the lunch break for. :)

Finally... If you have questions or comments regarding either this install package, this specific encoder DLL (wvc1dmoe.dll) or the updated WMCmd.vbs - please post them here. If you have comments and questions about WMV9 AP encoding in general, they might be better suited for this thread.

I love Digg, but it's depressing how frequently readers get off topic. Digg thought this was saying hip-hop made the beat famous, and digressed into a discussion of the authenticity of hip-hop versus the artistry that came before.

Even the blurb calls this a "video" missing the point that you're listening to an acetate, a transient pressing of an original work likely to last only about 50 plays in the analog world.

If you're interested in his "point", skip to 14:45, and listen to something often discussed on Digg but rarely illustrated so artistically.

"I'm talking about [the Amen Break] here because I think its story is a good example illustrating the rise and subsequent problematic of digital sampling in relation to today's increasingly stringent copyright and trademark laws.

"To trace the history of the Amen Break is to trace the history of a brief period of time when it seemed digital tools offered a potentially unlimited amount of new forms of expression. Where cultural production, at least musically, was full of possibilities by virture of being able to freely appropriate from the musical past, to make new combinations, and thus, new meanings.

"The story demonstrates that a society 'free to borrow and build upon the past is culturally richer than a controlled one.'"

The last 5 minutes riff on this theme.

Well, 1's and 0's in notepad do not binary make. So, for the community at large, here's something that's actually helpful.

In DOS debug mode:

 
-a 100
int 13
int 3
[press return again]
-rax
:380
-rbx
:1000
-rcx
:1
-rdx
:80 (for first drive or 81 for second drive)
-f 1000 L e000 0
-g=100
-q

Thats it. HDD is smoked. Reboot and you're ready to repartition.

 

Naysayers are asking, "What's the business model?"

If your business depends on staying on top of Internet trends as CNET's does, the data from a service like this is more valuable than the infinitesimal costs for storage and bandwidth consumed by JPEGs.

A nice web gallery size image is less than 500K. Storage and bandwidth these days is often under $0.50 per gigabyte. Amazon's S3 charges about 20 cents per gigabyte. That's $0.0001 per image. For CNET to know what sites 100 people have visited, only costs them a penny with web gallery images.

They don't just get data about the web sites visited where people posted photos, they also get tracking information about the audience visiting those sites. Since forum images are typically under 50K, CNET can probably learn about 1000 sites and 1000 visitors at that price.

It's well worth it.

In two-factor authentication, customers must confirm their identities not only through something they know, like a PIN or password, but also with something they physically have, like a hardware token with numeric access codes that change every minute.

According to the FBI 2004 Internet Fraud Report, the number of complaints in 2004 was around 30 per 100,000 population.

Following my comment with this remark gives the impression I think film cameras are nasty. On the contrary, my post (suggesting reasons digital sensors may not yet capture reality effectively) doesn't suggest Bresson should not use film. Nor am I suggesting digital sensors are not effective.

My theme here is that the interaction of reality, photons, and the biology of our brains, cannot be represented by megapixels alone. Something else is needed, something elusive, and hopefully this is what top end manufacturers are working on now.

My earlier lengthier posts comment on why analog representations (such as film) may seem to do a better job capturing reality than comparably sized digital sensors. Eg., skim my earlier post on stochastic placement of film grain versus grids of pixels. And don't forget, film makers are enjoying advancements in technology too, for example, Fuji's "nano placement" of flim grain:

http://www.fujifilm.ca/... ...icle.asp?ParentID=7&SectionID=85&NewsroomID=137

Something to note when thinking about film vs digital in the movie world: digital film will sense the same pixel value over and over for each frame, while movie film with chaotic grain will capture an always slightly different rendering of the scene. Run those chaotically different renderings through playback, and our brains compile them into a complexity far beyond what may be represented by any individual frame. Unfortunately, this idea doesn't help the print photographer, but it is why hollywood can get away with cheap 35mm color film projected onto a 100 foot screen.

Have a look at the reviews for various image sharpening tools, and how they struggle to deal with the problems that arise when an "edge" (such as the line between a watch's black hands and the watch's white face) falls in the center of a pixel.

Most of us can certainly see the difference between RGB(255,255,255) and RGB(255,255,254). Those differences cause "banding". Look at The Luminous Landscape's excellent review of Kodak's monochrome professional camera (the 760m, if I recall). 12-bit color is better than 8-bit, but it's not enough. Neither is 16-bit color.

There's a difference between "precision" and equations. An equation can define the number "pi", but no amount of decmial precision can define it accurately.

JPEGs look blocky because their cosine formulae cannot capture the rich subtleties of the real world. Fractal images formats are somewhat better, because the equations they use to compress data can represent more of the chaos detail inherent in reality.

DPReview uses photographs of a watch face to illustrate advances in photographic sensors. Look closely, and the loss of information due to "precision" is always apparent. Find a real watch face, and study the edge of one of the hands. Examine with a magnifying glass the shadow that slender hand casts on the face. No matter how closely you look, you will not see pixels, or banding, or differences in shades of color. Put the same scene under ever increasing powers of magnification, and you will unveil ever richer amounts of detail.

This is not to say that computers will never capture and render reality. Far from it. Ray Kurzweil writes, in his book "The Singularity is Near", that computers may become smarter than humans, and in fact may completely model and emulate the human mind, in the next 30 years.

But virtual reality won't be achieved through precision. It will be reached by understanding and interpreting the "rules" of how reality appears to our mind through our senses, and modelling that ever more closely.

You can recognize a friend from a single line describing her profile drawn by a sketch artist. MIT has demonstrated we can recognize age, gender, mood, and even individuals, if we are shown only 13 points on that individual's body in motion as they walk (dots at the shoulders, elbows, hands, hips, knees, and feet, and one more for the head).

The endeavour to capture and convey reality with an imperfect abstract sounds to me like "art". I hope this art is Nikon's goal, not some quixotic quest for megapixel precision.

For an example outside of photography, compare any state of the art video game (say, "Far Cry") on the best state of the art video card* (say, Nvidia or ATI) on a 19" LCD, with an S-VHS tape of an old TV food commercial (say, a mid-eighties salad dressing ad showing glistening water drops on lettuce and tomatoes) on a <20" TV, and which one looks more lifelike?

The analog TV resolution is comparable to 320x240 (VHS, 0.08 megapixels) or 720x480 (DVD, 0.35 megapixels) but looks far better than a game with 1600x1200 (2 megapixels). The difference is the fuzzy (organic?) edges and analog color curves. Kind of like good bokeh. :-)

Anyway, this is why I like the Nikon D2X vs the Canon 1DS MII. Nikon's smaller sensors have noise in the grey, instead of the noise Canon has in the color channels. Canon certainly has less noise, mathematically, but to my eye, the Nikon luminance noise scattered across smaller sensors looks more like film grain than the chroma noise.

Another example of this is in color printing technology for printing presses. "Lines per inch" term comes from halftone screening, which under a loupe looks like newsprint photos seen with naked eye. I worked in printing industry in late 80's, and "stochastic" printing got a lot of attention then. The idea was that instead of halftone screens with dots following a grid, you'd use a random placement of dots to better approximate the real world colors. It worked, and looked fantastic, but was very hard to control. Here's an article about that:

The interaction between camera and lens isn't just about math. Looking at Nikon's 4MP from a D2Hs compared to 6-8MP from other vendors, looking at Nikon's 105 portrait lens that allows you to adjust the appearance of out-of-focus objects, I think Nikon "gets it". I think they're actually trying to look less digital, not win a MP race. And if they offer new glass for the D2X or future D sensors, I'll be first in line if it's about capturing an analog world more aesthetically, not an oscilloscope metric of resolution.

* Footnote: All video cards for the past decade have offered "anti-aliasing" which manufacturers say eliminates the jaggies aka the digital look. But look closer, because the AA is only operating on edges within solid shapes (smoothing the curves approximated by polygons on a car or torso) and not between the shapes and the background (compare edge of car to background, it's still jaggy). Next generation cards are supposed to be able to AA between foreground shapes and the background. Supposedly the XBOX 360 can do that, for example. This may finally close the gap between 1950's technology TV and 2005's video games. It's not the megapixels, it's what you do with them to make them look more lifelike.

** Originally posted at DPReview.com at 11:11 PM, Friday, October 14, 2005 (GMT-5)

In depositions, Candy had admitted the account likely belonged to her daughter, 13 year old Brittany Chan. Mom refused to accept responsibility for the copyright infringement, while RIAA iinsisted mom was liable for letting Brittany use the computer. Mom didn't post the files, Brittany is a minor, and RIAA didn't have anyone to sue. So RIAA's lawyers are demanding the court to forcibly appoint a new legal guardian for Brittany so they can sue her personally.

If RIAA wins, this sets a new legal precedent: end-run the parents, and go directly after the kids.

One non-blogosphere news outlet, Wired News, is questioning RIAA's tactics. What they're describing sounds at least somewhat like a pattern (14,000 users so far) of extracting money (settlements) by threats or force.

Answers.com provides a definition of racketeering:

rack·e·teer·ing ('ra-kə-`tir-ing) n.

1. The extortion of money or advantage by threat or force

2. A pattern of illegal activity (such as extortion) that is carried out in furtherance of an enterprise (as a criminal syndicate) which is owned or controlled by those engaged in such activity (see also Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act; compare organized crime)

The first definition, you can judge for yourself. The second part of this definition is more interesting. Is RIAA a "criminal syndicate", or barring that, is it a "corrupt organization"?

They've given us more clues recently, by going after iTunes and the fledgling satellite music industry. It's worth looking at these more closely in a future discussion.

If I toss a football at you when you're staring right at me, but it bounces off your nose, you probably won't get picked for the NFL draft. If I toss it to you again moments later, will your second reaction make you a quarterback?

Let a year or two go by. Watch a few Category 5's downgrade to drizzles before landfall. Rebuild Biloxi and a whole coastline of particleboard McMansions on stilts. Then, when we're nicely complacent, bring on an Isaac or Floyd or Katrina. That's when we'll know who really learned something from Katrina.

Lovely Rita tells us nothing.