Messages

241

General Discussion / Re: Various geeky news!

« on: August 08, 2006, 02:57:55 am »

I wish they would let you download the utilities seperately, instead of all of it coming with the OS.

Dunno most of the stuff that comes with OSX is the best you can do or atleast from what I've seen. I guess I should rephrase that to be people use it unlike the stuff that ships with Windows which no sane person uses.

But this is just my experience from my school and they made us use IE5 for web development on OSX. It was like a crime against humanity.

242

General Discussion / Re: And the winner (loser?) is... GOOGLE!

« on: August 08, 2006, 02:52:02 am »

It says Fox sites, I'd expect something like FoxNews would be more valuable than Myspace and perhaps the person who asked the question only mentioned Myspace? You aren't exactly going to say it wasn't a big deal when you paid $900 million for it and some other sites.

Also consider that this may have been a valuable research investment for Google since it will(probably dunno specific details) give them access to peoples music and other things that you sign over to Myspace when you put them on your Myspace.

243

General Discussion / Re: External RAID Array?

« on: August 08, 2006, 02:31:01 am »

The question that begs is: does he care if he loses all his data if a drive faults (more space cheaper), or does he want it backed up (less space, unless you dump $$ into it) safely?

I want it backed up, I'm not expecting my collection of things I want stored on it to grow super huge, I'd be very surprised if it grew past 1TB. However, it would be nice to have it all backed up. This is actually something I have put much thought into the best way to do this and one of the main reasons for making a RAID. The problem and the thing I am very concerned about is multiple disk failures occuring at/around the same time. I seem to come across a fair number of stories where events like this have happened.

For that reason I have considered other backup methods but none of them appear all that promising. A tape drive will set you back around $300 and then the media for that is even more expensive. DVDs are probably the best option but how long they will last is still in question as well as the fact that at 4.7GB it would take a lot of them to backup a 1TB collection for example(somewhere over 200 I believe). So that doesn't bold really well and if you have to store that many you lose the advantage of being able to store a copy offsite with ease. The only good thing about this would be the media would only set you back someplace in the $60-70 range so thats not horribly bad. But again the numbers are killer since it will take a lot of tedious time when say Bluray or HD-DVD comes around to migrate a collection over to those.

Right now my photo collection stands at about 30GB or so. So its not incredibly huge or such. But the main reason for this #1 is I haven't been taking as many pictures as I could and #2 I have been learning so I didn't do things correctly for the first 20GB or so of pictures. #3 I actually edit only a small amount now because the Tiff files are rather large, 50MB Tiff file while the raw is 7MB and I want to save both the Tiff and raw file. I'm also considering adding a (HD)video camera to my collection so that will need even more space. Basically I can see the need for lots of space and a way to ensure that I am able to keep it backed up for a long time to come.

244

General Discussion / Re: Let's hear it!

« on: August 08, 2006, 02:05:44 am »

You have her password? Even after she changed it?

That's..... awkward. I mean, if I started dating someone, I would not tell them a single password to anything. If they told me, that's great; I don't plan on using their passwords whatsoever. Only in a drastic situation would I. Even then, I'd change it right after.

Keep us updated Trust! You may have caught her in another lie! I hate to say it, but I won't say it until we see how things pan out, because saying it now may make me wrong! ^^

I think this whole situation is funny, considering hes posted that they drink when they are underage, what else would one expect? Not to be an ass Trust but I don't think you exactly have 'moral high ground' considering everything.

Newby: All the cool kids these days are posting MD5 hashes on their predictions, you know so if it comes true you can post the message and we can be like 'Oh! Newby was right!' and if you were wrong you just say you 'lost' the exact message.

245

General Discussion / External RAID Array?

« on: August 06, 2006, 10:12:25 pm »

So I was considering building myself an external raid array. The main use for this would probably be long term storage of pictures+video, so it will need to be large and able to recover incase of drive failure. Does anyone already have one of these? Does anyone have suggestions? The other thing that I have been considering is spending more $ and going for SCSI drives but I doubt I'll notice the performance increase so the only question is if they will last considerable longer than comparable SATA/IDE drives?

246

New Project Announcements / Re: RTS Type Game

« on: August 05, 2006, 04:36:12 pm »

So, it took you all that time just to write text, when I've been doing it for a long time, *and* I have sweet-ass tool tips, and yet *I* suck?  PH33R!

I like how you took the time to black out the names of the characters but then totally missed the "Diaris on Illidan" on the tab.

247

General Discussion / Re: DVD Ripping software

« on: August 02, 2006, 12:29:37 am »

What I don't understand is, if I, for instance, downloaded Star Trek: Voyager's DVDs, they come through crystal clear 720x405 Divx AVIs, and yet if I use the tools from Doom9 (which were still confusing as hell), the Divx output is very blocky.  I targetted the one-hour (or, 40 minute) Firefly episode off of my DVDs for 375MB (which is your standard download size for a one-hour TV show) and it just came out crappy.

Thoughts?

Possible that you are using different playback methods? Some codecs/players can do deblocking in the postprocessing stage when its actually playing the video back. Its also possible that there is a deblocker setting for the actual encoder too, might want to check on this.

248

General Discussion / Re: DVD Ripping software

« on: August 01, 2006, 07:38:35 pm »

Did you install DivX player? You're going to need codecs for just about any rip unless you keep it as mpeg2 but then you don't get compression so thats rather crappy too.

Yes MeGUI and DVD Decrypter you can get both from http://www.doom9.org. You can read the forums and there is a lot of information on both. One thing about MeGUI because I didn't pay attention to all the install information, it will tell you something about 'Updates being avaibable' click ok or whatever so that you can download the 'updates' this will actually be all the programs it needs to do its job correctly.

249

Graphics / Request: Anyone good at pixel art or making icons?

« on: July 31, 2006, 03:19:49 am »

So I decided one of my programs could use a spiffy icon. My artist skills are about that of an iron(you know one of those old ones that was heated with hot rocks? yeah one of those!). So I was wondering if anyone here would be happy to make me an icon 32x32 pixels is the prefered size but if you can scale it better than a computer 16x16 and 64x64 would also be nice. The program is called 'Anticipating the Hook' and refers to tornadoes but it is software for viewing NEXRAD data. Inspirations might be a tornado/radar/something else weather related.

Thanks in advance if anyone here feels up to doing some charity work!

250

Entertainment District / Honda Element

« on: July 31, 2006, 03:12:20 am »

For some reason I thought this commercial was really clever and highly amusing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unkAvO9v2Nk

251

General Discussion / Re: DVD Ripping software

« on: July 31, 2006, 03:10:30 am »

So what did you end up doing? I forgot to mention that MeGUI actually has an auto encode mode but I've never tried it so I'm not sure if it will actually do the ripping from the DVD for you or not. Currently I'm ripping things and encoding them in h264 with AAC sound and the MP4 container. I have been leaving everything at the resolution it is on the DVD (720x480 for most 4:3 stuff) and doing a bitrate near 1000 and I end up with a movie someplace in the range of 1GB to 1.5GB depending on how long the movie is. I'd have to say it works for me and hopefully(but I really doubt it) the h264+MP4 stuff can just be slapped on a HDDVD or Bluray disk and played in their respective players. Its a long shot but I figured what the hell.

252

General Discussion / Re: Stuck...

« on: July 31, 2006, 03:06:20 am »

Nice, I've gone offroading with some of my friends up here before. Its super fun but sadly they are all off at various bootcamps now But they would all stick together or be willing to come to the rescue when others were out offroading if one got stuck or needed help. So yeah get a buddy with a big truck if you plan to do more :p

253

General Discussion / Re: New Laptop

« on: July 28, 2006, 11:25:22 pm »

WXGA

254

General Discussion / Re: Firefox 1.5.0.5 released

« on: July 28, 2006, 02:08:43 am »

I tend to leave mine open all the time because I'm normally looking into something new or reading a new site I found. Its helpful because I may not want to read the whole article then or such but come back to it a few hours or maybe days later. I normally don't like to bookmark things because I tend not to use them efficiently. Like I'll bookmark something and then end up typing in the URL all the time or bookmark it and forget about it for several months so it ends up adding to my bookmark clutter.

The other reason I like leaving it open is because it provides the history(back button type) so if I find an interesting link off a site I can go back to the orginal site and see if it contains any other interesting links. Of course a large reason I end up doing stuff like this is because search engines are more or less worthless for looking for these types of things. I get better results finding one site I like and manually crawling all the other sites in the link web because they tend to be related when the topic is something like programming.

255

General Discussion / Re: New Laptop

« on: July 28, 2006, 01:58:33 am »

You never got back to us on the update, pssh!

So I just recently got a laptop, its very nice, its a Toshiba Tecra A7-S717.
Specs are
Intel Core Duo T2400 (1.8Ghz)
Intel 10/100/1000 + Intel Wireless A/B/G
DVD Super multi drive
15.4" LCD
Came with 512MB PC4200 memory, replaced with 2GB PC5300
Came with 80GB 5400RPM SATA drive, replaced with 80GB 7200RPM SATA drive
Only semi-downside is the built in Intel graphics, but oh well, I'm not planning on any heavy gaming.
Price: $1,236 before upgrades