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In the article below on the bbc the national archive talk of time bombs because of old closed formats being used for data which even versions of the same software can’t read (i.e. old docs from word in the 90s can’t be read by word today..).
BBC NEWS | Technology | Warning of data ticking time bomb
Microsoft have pulled of a lovely spin on this. They’ve sold more software to read the files again! Wow, thanks MS. I bought some software it made documents that I own, but can’t read any more.. What can i do?? Oh, Buy some more proprietry software and once again be dependant on good old MS who clearly didn’t screw me in the past.
Oh.. hang on.. That’s why I’m in this mess in the first place. For a national archive they sure seem to have short memories..
Take the hint anyone reading this. DO NOT USE CLOSED FORMATS.. you will forever be ripped off and dependent on the creating software for YOUR OWN INFORMATION. I.e you can’t play your music if it’s ITUNES, unless you are happy to depend on a perminant relationship for the rest of your life with Apple. Don’t use Word/Excel closed formats, use OpenDocument Formats (ODF) which you can even use in word, which is a real open standard which many software packages can read and use. Do not trust your closed provider of being able to guarantee that you can read your own data indefinately. If it matters, use Open technology.. and preferably Open Source. If the people who build the software disapear or simply stop caring (a-la Microsoft) you can’t do anything unless people can examine the data and the methods used to construct it. Open formats and software are the only way to achieve this.
It’s your data. Stop letting someone else dictate what uses you want to put to it.
This article on the BBC is pretty interesting. I think this would be pretty good. I’m not convinced that this is the best if it replaced all outside farming, biodiversity and eco-systems are important in food production also. However farming within urban city environments is very cool.. smaller food miles, much better. They also seem to think parasites wouldn’t be an issue. Not sure about that. Greenhouses get many a pest, and these need dealing with, which can be done organically, but on this scale they would probably resort to chemicals, but you never know.
Very interesting any way..
Just bought an MP4 player, although it’s not MP4, but AMV. Noone seems to have details on how to encode this format under linux. The software bundled includes “mencoder.exe”, running under wine, looking at the process reveals the command.
I gave this a go with mencoder native for linux, and it worked perfectly. I am well pleased about this. I will try and write a pygtk front-end to this and play with some of the settings, however for now I am going to document on the net the mencoder command that works:
mencoder -noodml [SOURCEFILE] -of avi -o [DESTNAME].avi -ofps 24 -vf-add scale=224:176 -vf-add expand=224:176:-1:-1:1 -srate 44100 -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=550:max_bframes=0:quant_type=h263:me_quality=4 -oac lavc -lavcopts acodec=mp2:abitrate=128
Update…
It seems that this is not AMV, but MPG4/AVI, although I think many people think they have an AMV player as I did. The chip is a “RockChip” player, branded as “Sumvision Sempra Pro”, so if you have this player or a similar device, then the above code should work. It seems to be very strict about the video formats, so it must be 24fps, 44100 sound, and 224×176 in size. The bitrates for audio and video can be changes tho..
Hope this helps people get content on
On a side note, I have worked out how to use Acidrip to rip DVDs direct to this size, which goes pretty well on a recent machine. I will blog about this later.
This is a pretty cool Illusion. It reminds me of the puzzlingplace laura and I went to a couple of weekends ago.. The site it links to has a download for a PDF, I’m gunna try that at home, see how well it works in front of me..
Although the announcement was a while ago, just a reminder that the date to watch is Thursday, May 22, 2008. Let’s hope it’s not disappointing.
This article – BBspot – Operating System Showdown: Ubuntu Vs. Vista
- a funny proof that ubuntu is better than vista.
You may well have already heard about the re-write of Wordsworth’s daffodil poem into a rap, but this is the first time i have seen and heard it. What on earth were they thinking?
Good news everyone! There was a recent anouncement that there is going to be a successor to the first Freakonomics book. The first was a really interesting read, and I have long been looking for that little bit more in the same area.
Not only that, but the announcement pointed to the hitherto unknown to me freakonomics blog! Ace.
The Independant has An Article on how mobile phones may be responsible for bees dissappearing. This is being predicted to be the cause of famines because crops are going to fail due to lack of polination. This is interesting because it’s a serious environmental issue, with a serious threat to humanity, but it’s not here being blamed on global warming.
What I think is important is that all this climate change focus doesn’t miss the point of other environmental issues. Everything is getting lumped in with it. People are blaming it with the bees too. The real issue is that there is simply one solution to climate change being forwarded. Less carbon. If we’re not responsible, and if its happening no matter what we’re doing, then forgetting about all other issues and causes can be just as devastating, and mean we’re still stuck.
There’s lots of good things as a consequence of “carbon reduction”, recycle, drive less, is all less waste, less pollution. Some things aren’t going to be fixed this way, and they may well need just as much fixing, and these aren’t even getting a look in.
Will Ferrell Movie Generator
Sweet Tarzan’s corn! My lung is a vicious fairy!
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