How i feel as a console gamer lately on r/gaming...

GoochGobbler · 2 days

Fair enough, cheers for correction. I still don't want to have to install Origin, however.

GoochGobbler · 2 days

What kicked it off was Mass Effect 3 being an Origin exclusive and not being on Steam, if I remember.

mindspread · 4 days

Something browser based would probably work, Chromium with the Google chat plugin and Google+ hangouts might be OK.

mindspread · 4 days

There are ARM versions, assuming that's what runs on all the Skype-branded mobile phones.

dbwun · 5 days

I'd have suggested taking it and giving £1000 each to the 1000 lowest paid staff members in RBS, but yeah similar idea.

Even if they had to wait two years for his stock options to mature it would have been pretty great all round.

Glueyfeathers · 6 days

But The Science is A-OK if it's to spread the word of jesus! Otherwise it's for fags, yes.

Glueyfeathers · 6 days

All you need is a media cartel in on the game, 40 years of agressive anti-intellectualism and some dickheads on TV to run about screaming "DER TUK DER JERBS! TERRIZM! HE NO 'MERICAN?!" to get the masses to vote against themselves.

Who knew it could be so easy.

OtherSideReflections · 6 days

Not unless you moved slowly across the room with the sun :P

findergrrr · 7 days

"ujelly" "lolololol" "madbro?"

Just finishing this bickering off with it's inevitable final conclusion.

DARTHMAGNUS · 7 days

Usually because if you get a phone on a contract there is an obligation you have to use the carrier-approved spam-filled version. Removing it is technically a violation of your contract and therefore illegal. Helping people remove the spam-approved version by writing software to remove it is also illegal. Obviously.

Additionally you only have a license to the software that was originally installed on the phone, I suppose you could replace it with the exact same copy and it not be illegal, but what would be the point in that.

Christmas11 · 8 days

Yeah, there is a lot of difference.

memoryfailure · 9 days

All the benchmarks include the VideoCore IV GPU which can by itself run applications, SoC's like the Broadcom in the Pi are basically powerful GPU's with tiny CPU's stuck to them.

For media, the Pi will compare well to the current smart phones and tablets.

memoryfailure · 9 days

Previous iterations of the Broadcom SoC that powers the Pi have been used in iPods and other popular mobile devices, it's a fair comparison. Power requirements are likely to be similar, the Pi will draw a little more as it has onboard ethernet (on the B model), USB hub and other additional things.

Power draw of the CPU and GPU are equivolent to a modern smart phone though.

memoryfailure · 9 days

The Pi is based on a mobile phone chipset and the 4S is a popular smartphone, a comparison is reasonable (as is a comparison to any other modern smartphone).

DARTHMAGNUS · 9 days

I didn't say I agreed with the argument. If you wipe and install completely new software that would be different, however jailbreaking or installing a cracked/modified copy of the original software is still using their licensed (and hence they claim illegal) versions of their software. This is ignoring the issue of phones and carriers and assuming you've bought the item outright and not on a contract.

It'll be an interesting few court cases before this is actually set with a precedent. Yes, you should be able to do whatever you like with the device itself as that's no different to wiping Windows off a PC after you've bought it. Having said that replacing it with a different version of Windows where you've modified it in violation of its license is still technically illegal, despite your original Windows license. As another example using an iPhone without iOS is near impossible (it's possible to get them to boot other images with a lot of hassle but not exactly desirable).

This probably opens a deeper debate, particularly with items like smart phones and tablets, regarding manufacturers effectively tying software to their handsets.

Thagor · 9 days

Check it has H264 in the title or description of the torrent then yes, in theory, it should. Assuming the video clip is of decent enough quality anyway then transcoding shouldn't be required.

DARTHMAGNUS · 9 days

The complication here is that you buy the phone but "lease" the software, meaning they can't do anything against you putting a snazy case on the phone but they can petition courts who know bugger all about software to make tampering with "their software" illegal if they have expensive enough lawyers and stupid enough judges.

The theory being you can circumvent things like DRM if you have actual control of your device's software... which is illegal (under the DCMA)... despite not doing anything illegal in itself but possibly allowing you to be illegal... but whenever I start reading into this my face starts twitching with rage and I have to stop. There's talk of "fair use" DRM being not illegal but it's such a colossal clusterfuck no-one really knows whats OK and what's actually get-in-trouble illegal in the murky area until the government storms in and randomly enforces whatever it interprets as the law on someone.

Yes, it is all very, very, very, very silly.

Thagor · 9 days

You need to think of the container and the codec separately. The container format is simply the way the video, audio and meta data (such as subtitles) are bundled together and have extensions like .MOV, .MKV and .AVI. The codec is what matters for hardware decoding support as there is usally a quite small list that the hardware and drivers explicitly supports, such as H264, H263, Theora, VP3 and so on.

In short, yes, you can convert any video encoding format and container to any other within reason. If you're ripping a DVD or Blu-Ray this is quite simple because the format and specifications are known and good pre-sets have been written into most "ripper" software so you can encode it in a single click and a few hours of waiting. If you're talking about converting high quality video into another encoding it's far trickier than it might first appear. There are an insane number of re-encoding (or transcoding) options and it's extremely easy to degrade the quality, drop frames, desync audio, drop data during action scenes when using variable bitrates and many other problems. For an example of the vast number of possible options have a play with ffmpeg which is a decent free command line media converter.

The simple answer is usually to know what your hardware supports and only get media in that format as converting media can be a bitch. Not least of which it can take many, many hours to encode a high quality decent length video only to find out you've done it wrong and made a bad encoding or used the wrong option and your 720p video clip is now 800 gigabytes in size.

After a quick search of the Broadcom site (the people who make the VideoCore IV GPU, along with the rest of the innards of the Pi) it only makes mention of H264 support, which means you may be able to use various video containers but probably only have the hardware assist H264 playback (effectively meaning that any HD video you want to play smoothly must be encoded in H264).

Most decoding hardware actually support a large number of encoding formats but they must be licensed from their patent owners and so are restricted heavily. in this case it's a group of companies under the MPEG LA banner being patent-weilding dicks. It's likely they only offer H264 support via the closed source bundle because that's all they could afford to keep prices down, which is a shame.

Thagor · 9 days

I'm bored so have a massively over the top detailed explanation. System on a chip boards like the one the Pi is based from are basically a CPU with a GPU stuck to it. In the case of the SoC the Pi uses the GPU is very powerful. In straight compuational speed the GPU is faster in certain cases than the CPU. The GPU features a hardware decoder for certain encoding types. What this means is that the GPU manufactuer hard-wires the ability to decode some encoded media streams releases (usually closed source) drivers or codecs for various operating systems.

This effectively means is that the CPU and operating system can open a video file and stream the encoded contents into the codec or driver directly. The driver then asks the GPU to decode it straight into the frame buffer. In practice this means you can play video streams with near zero CPU overhead as the heavy lifting is done mostly by the GPU, but it requires explicit support from the hardware for each encoding type.

This is exactly the same as hardware accelerated video on Windows and VDPAU in Linux (and many other examples). There is a reason in the video they're using H264 encoded videos in a MOV container because that's probably what the GPU and codecs support natively. This whole principle is very similar to hardware accelerated 3D graphics such as OpenGL and DirectX which offload complex work to the GPU.

Phrost · 11 days

I think he was more implying that many members of the US congress are exempt from airport security checks.

DrJulianBashir · 12 days

"Colder and less dense" could be... ice? shrug

woocheese · 12 days

I like turtles.

sofwhat · 12 days

No, but I will be in a couple of months when I move a bit closer. Keep the bacon on standby.

spooz · 13 days

I'm not, the crown's assets are worth a lot more than that. I was under the impression the Queen had a network of companies that own private property, hence the personal assets claim, although I may be wrong or have absorbed some monarchy-bashing article by accident.

Regardless, as stated I have absolutely no issue with yachts or any other gifts if businesses or or other non-taxpayer sources voluntarily cover the cost. Last I read they were looking to fund it with business donations but maintain and harbour it with taxpayer money whch probably needs more scrutiny to make sure it doesn't end up costing vast amounts like the last one.

elucubra · 13 days

Given it has an official native ARM port and a beta version for Debian (which is officially supported on the Pi) probably not particularly hard.

meeb

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meeb

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