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Comment Re:FFmpeg's AAC encoder is not finished (Score 1) 277

by Shrubbman (#36866064) Attached to: Public AAC Listening Test @ ~96 Kbps [July 2011].

FFmpeg's AAC encoder is not finished (yet?), and flagged as experimental. Including it in such a test is rather a dubious idea: it is likely to give a bad impression of the whole project.

Having the new vo-aacenc as contender for the Free Software community would IMHO have been more relevant.

Well they ARE using it as the low anchor, i.e. they know full well it's gonna sound bad so if people wind up rating it higher than any of the other options that's an indication that something odd and/or wrong has happened, plus it's helpful just to see a worst case scenario option on the list.

Comment Re:Schedulers alienated by SciFi? (Score 1) 742

by Shrubbman (#35316378) Attached to: Does Syfy Really Love Sci-Fi?

Well actually.... they couldn't air season 1 of Lexx because of licensing issues. Lexx was a Canadian/German co-production, and Showtime was the original US broadcaster but bowed out after season 1. They still had the US broadcast rights to that fist season when Sci-Fi got involved with co-funding season 2. For whatever reason a deal between Showtime and Sci-Fi just didn't get hashed at the time.
Censorship

Venezuela's Last Opposition TV Owner Arrested 433

Posted by timothy from the or-in-this-case-on-air dept.
WrongSizeGlass writes "AP is reporting the owner of Venezuela's only remaining TV channel that takes a critical line against President Hugo Chavez was arrested Thursday. 'Guillermo Zuloaga, owner of Globovision, was arrested on a warrant for remarks that were deemed "offensive" to the president,' Attorney General Luisa Ortega said. This comes on the heels of last week's story titled Venezuela's Chavez To Limit Internet Freedom."
Apple

Has Apple Created the Perfect Board Game Platform? 531

Posted by kdawson from the triple-word-score dept.
andylim writes "recombu.com is running an interesting piece about how Apple has created a 'Jumanji (board game) platform.' The 9.7-inch multi-touch screen is perfect for playing board games at home, and you could use Wi-Fi or 3G to play against other people when you're on your own. What would be really interesting is if you could pair the iPad with iPhones, 'Imagine a Scrabble iPad game that used iPhones as letter holders. You could hold up your iPhone so that no one else could see your letters and when you were ready to make a word on the Scrabble iPad board, you could slide them on to the board by flicking the word tiles off your iPhone.' Now that would be cool."

Comment Re:Set the computer to use half the native resolut (Score 1) 549

by Shrubbman (#30122404) Attached to: Are There Affordable Low-DPI Large-Screen LCD Monitors?

Some of you will say that 840x525 is too small (resolution size, not physical display size), but it's a bit larger than 800x480 which is what most netbooks are these days.

Well actually, most netbooks run at 1024x600, at least the ones with a ~9" or ~10" screen size. Some of the newer ones with ~11" screens are even 1366x768. Only the very earliest netbooks with the nigh-unusable 7" screens had the puny 800x480 resolution.

That's not to say 840x525 wouldn't be a workable display size, but personally I know I find any display with less than 1024 pixels across rather irritating to try to use.
Security

Windows 7 Users Warned Over Filename Security Risk 613

Posted by timothy from the death's-too-good-for-some-people dept.
nandemoari writes "Would-be Windows 7 users have been warned to change a default setting which could leave them vulnerable to attack via bogus files. As a result, Microsoft is taking flak for failing to correct a problem found in previous editions of Windows. The issue involves the way Windows Explorer displays filenames. In all editions of Windows after Windows 98, the default setting hides the filename extension (which identifies what type of file it is). This means that a Word file titled 'partyinvite.doc' will show up in Windows Explorer as simply 'partyinvite'. The only exception to this rule is if Windows does not recognize the file type. The reason for this setting is that it makes for a less cluttered look and avoids filling the screen with redundant detail. However, a flaw in the way it works leaves it liable to exploitation by hackers. They can take an executable file (which can do much more damage to a computer when opened) and disguise it by calling it 'partyinvite.doc.exe.'"
Image

Churches Use Twitter To Reach a Wider Audience 169

Posted by samzenpus from the go-tell-it-on-the-internet dept.
In an attempt to reverse declining attendance figures, many American churches are starting to ask WWJD in 140 or fewer characters. Pastors at Westwinds Community Church in Michigan spent two weeks teaching their 900-member congregation how to use Twitter. 150 of them are now tweeting. Seattle's Mars Hill Church encourages its members to Twitter messages during services. The tweets appear on the church's official Twitter page. Kyle Firstenberg, the church's administrator, said,"It's a good way for them to tell their friends what church is about without their friends even coming in the building."

Comment I used to use Miro... (Score 1) 148

by Shrubbman (#26807281) Attached to: Miro 2.0 Launches Today

I used to use Miro, for the better part of a year, and while I loved certain parts of it there were a few other things that eventually drove me away from using it. I got really tired of the odd crash, which while not a daily occurrence was still often enough to be quite irritating, and then also some videos just wouldn't play properly, and then there was the OBSCENE amount of RAM it used just idling in the background. I don't care what explanations the people over there kept coming up to justify why a glorified podcatcher was using ~150megs of RAM when minimized in the background doing NOTHING other than just checking some RSS feeds once an hour, that just irked me from day one and was a fairly major factor in why I stopped using it.

Now, it's been maybe half a year since I stopped using it, and maybe this 2.0 release is the bees knees fixing this and that, but unless they've gotten that RAM usage down I'll just make do with letting GoogleReader let me know when i can go stream my latest episodes.

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