Some pessimists decry that even electric cars have pollution created at the power plant thus what’s the point - let’s just have our current gas guzzlers. What they forget are their thermodynamics lessons in college. It’s no secret that we have yet to find an efficient way to convert fuel into useful energy. Of that $3 gallon of gas, only around $1 is used to move your car forward. The rest is blown out the tailpipe.

So, according to Thoggen’s count, it took 4.45 hours to encode into Theora. At least with this DVD it seems that the coding team has fixed their error where the software seems to keep going past the end of the DVD. As far as I recall from one year ago, it didn’t add more infomation in - the thread just didn’t get the message that the title was done encoding.

Thoggen is a tool for backing up DVDs to the ogg container with the theora video codec and vorbis audio codec. Theora is the darling video codec in Linux because it is unencumbered by patents. There are other free formats, such as Xvid - a format compatible with Divx, but it is based on MPEG-3, which is patented by the group the controls the MPEG standard. Technically all encoders need to pay them a fee to encode to MPEG formats. This can get expensive - M$ is curently being sued by one of the patent holders of MPEG Layer 3 Audio (AKA MP3) for a very large amount of money. I *think* it’s in the billion range, but I could be off by an order of magnitude. So, theora, which was licensed to the open source community, is the safest bet.

Move your clocks ahead one hour! Congress decided that two weeks earlier would save us tons of oil - so it’s today, not in two weeks. Both my Windows XP SP2 and GNU/Linux Fedora Core 6 automatically updated on time, so your computers should be fine as long as they’ve gotten updates since 2005. (I think that’s when Congress did it)

Enjoy - don’t be late today!

I’m pretty sure that in previous posts I’ve mentioned that the RIAA has always been wrong about what technological disruptions do to their business. They wanted to kill LPs because they thought no one would go see live performances. They wanted to quash AM radio for fear no one would by LPs. They wanted to kill the cassette tape because it would allow piracy of LPs. Currently they want to prevent the existence of a Tivo-like device for digital radio.

The Inquirer.net reports a boy who is counter-suing the RIAA! Why?

for defamation, violating anti-trust laws, conspiring to defraud the courts and making extortionate threats.

Awesome! It’s about time someone fought back!

They have demanded a jury trial and filing a counterclaim against the companies for allegedly damaging the boy’s reputation, distracting him from school and costing him legal fees. The record companies have engaged in a wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the courts of the United States, the court documents say. Competitors in the recording industry are a cartel acting together in violation of the antitrust laws by bringing the piracy cases jointly and using the same agency “to make extortionate threats … to force defendants to pay”, our precocious teen wrote.

Well, I’m not sure if Timbaland did it purposely or if he was under the impression that he had permission, but he took music for Nelly Furtado’s song “Do It”. The sampled song is in the MOD format, popular in the early 1990s electronic BBS music scene. Currently it has a pretty decent underground following, as you can see at modarchive.org. You can see the MOD artist’s information here. And you can see some more detailed information at this forum. If you listen to the original file and then the background at the beginning of the Nelly song it is extremely obvious that they are the same song. I hope that Tempest (Janne Suni) gets the compensation he deserves. Tempest did not license his music under a permissive license so if the song makes money, he deserves it. After all, it was his creative genius that came up with the song. Obviously, it was good enough if Timbaland wanted to use it.

DRM and why it’s evil…..

DRM on Vimeo

I don’t know if it’s Global Warming or El Niño, but 2 weeks ago in the Baltimore-DC area it was 70 degrees and outside in a tank top in January. This week, in fact, yesterday or so, it’s snowing in Dallas, Texas! I’m hearing this has ruined orange, lemon, and avocado crops. What the heck is going on here?

I don’t know if it’s the fault of global warming, but something is seriously wrong with the climate recently. Yesterday it was 72 degrees in Washington DC - IN THE MIDDLE OF JANUARY! Don’t get me wrong, I love walking around in a tshirt and tank top in January - it kinda reminds me of when I used to live in South Florida. But, seriously, something very wrong is going on here. By this time last year it had snowed at least two times here, if not more.