JamesTheBard.NET

If there was any chance of things to go more wrong in a given timespan, it did.  The RIAA took it home to Jamie Thomas in a way that, if she had testes, she would have been squarely kicked in them.

The initial set of damaged was $220,000.  I understand that $222,000 is an obscene amount of money.  Since the RIAA was suing for 24 tracks, this came out to $9,250.

Then the retrial.

If $9,250 wasn’t enough, the trial played out again and this time, you can kiss any chance of paying the new amount.  Bump the $9,250 per song to a staggering $80,000 per song for a whopping total of just under $2,000,000.

Now, in the RIAA’s defense, she was a model victim.  They had a preponderance of evidence against her.  It can be summed up from the quote from the judge: “She’s a liar.”

Does that translate to $80,000 per song?  Evidently it does.  I cannot believe that anyone could even come close to paying that back.  I also don’t believe that the music was worth anywhere close to that amount.  I’m sure, if given the playlist, that I could track down everyone of those songs for downloads (most likely many, many more than that).

What makes this even ‘better’ is the sad fact that out of the Harvard Business School comes an interesting read contrary to this finding.  Not that the RIAA had grounds (and, mind you, this is civil court), but filesharing isn’t hurting them [hbs.edu].

Take a few minutes and read, trust me–it should piss you off.

There are some things worth noting: when you have three optical drives and quite a bit of spare time, you can accomplish much.  Now if I can only find the extra money for a quad-Opteron setup then I can encoded somewhat near the same speed.
Also, I’ve opened a new website: http://roleplay.jamesthebard.net.  I can’t really comment on the reasoning behind it, but it seems that everything is working out well.  You can find D&D along with Pathfinder information there along with the campaigns I’m either running or DMing.

Not just one or two, but three...

I’ve read more reviews than I can possibly recall accurately on the subject.  On one side are the folks who complain that D&D 3.5 is too complex, and its complexity detracts from the overall game.  The other side are full of righteously pissed-off people who scream at the top of their lungs about how the new rules effectively neuter the game and reduce it to WoW-on-paper.

Either way, it’s quite a bit complaining.

For a few days, I was on the fence.  I purchased the D&D 4.0 Core books, read through them, made mental notes as I thought about the differences between 4.0 and 3.5.  I even started outlining a ‘test’ campaign to see how the new mechanics played out and how I would use them to fend of the player horde. (continue reading…)

Whilst I sit here and attempt to backup my recent purchase, I have run into a problem:  eac3to refuses to go any farther than around the 30% mark on that specific playlist.

Which playlist?  The Who: Live at Kilburn, 1977. The damnable BD was becoming a real pain the ass.

From eac3to:

1) 00009.mpls, 00017.m2ts, 1:12:53
   - Chapters, 18 chapters
   - h264/AVC, 1080i60 /1.001 (16:9)
   - DTS Master Audio, English, multi-channel, 48khz
   - AC3, English, multi-channel, 48khz
   - RAW/PCM, English, stereo, 48khz                                           

2) 00008.mpls, 00016.m2ts, 1:05:44
   - Chapters, 17 chapters
   - h264/AVC, 1080i60 /1.001 (16:9)
   - DTS Master Audio, English, multi-channel, 48khz
   - AC3, English, multi-channel, 48khz
   - RAW/PCM, English, stereo, 48khz                                           

3) 00007.mpls, 00015.m2ts, 1:10:37
   - Chapters, 22 chapters
   - MPEG2, 480i60 /1.001 (16:9)
   - DTS Master Audio, English, multi-channel, 48khz
   - AC3, English, multi-channel, 48khz
   - AC3, English, stereo, 48khz

The 00016.m2ts file just would not let itself be transcoded.

Then the realization: the Sonic Audio Decoder was getting stuck/hanging at around 30%.  I’m not exactly sure at what point my Arcsoft decoders were having problems, but that’s another story altogether.  I don’t know exactly which revision they fixed this bug (Sonic that is) but it seems that Sonic doesn’t work for everything.

There are few things that make me happier than an easy-to-use command line program that allows me to backup things that are legally mine.  Of course, the United States Congress along with major media lobbiests may disagree so to them I give them the one-finger salute.

I’ll let you guess which one that is. (continue reading…)

If you did, you are more than welcome to ask TomTom about their opinion.  I’m guessing that they aren’t exactly happy.

That’s right, Microsoft is filing a lawsuit against TomTom for the infringement of eight of their patents.

• Patent No. 6,175,789:  Vehicle Computer System with Open Platform Architecture
• Patent No. 7,054,745:  Method and System for Generating Driving Directions
• Patent No. 6,704,032:  Methods and Arrangements for Interacting with Controllable Objects within a Graphical User Interface Environment Using Various Input Mechanisms.
• Patent No. 7,117,286:  Portable Computing Device-integrated Appliance
• Patent No. 6,202,008:  Vehicle Computer System with Wireless Internet Connectivity
• Patent No. 5,579,517:  Common Name Space for Long and Short Filenames
• Patent No. 5,758,352:  Common Name Space for Long and Short Filenames
• Patent No. 6,256,642:  Method and System for File System Management Using a Flash Erasable, Programmable, Read-only Memory

Basically, with these specific patents you could sue anyone out there.  Design a cool car stereo/computer with those ‘nifty’ nanoITX parts you bought?  Don’t think about production, it would probably cost you your soul.

I could rant on and on about this, but it’s a very simple lesson.

Microsoft has pulled out its warchest of patents.  The USPTO is broken, and the sad thing is that with these kind of vague and obvious patents you cannot help but see that TomTom, barring a remarkable shift in the winds as far as patents go, might be the first in a long string of lawsuits.

At least the lawsuit is a humorous read in a sad kind of way.

Well, I started a project to rip chapter information from MPLS files and save them as Matroska XML file. Now, there are already atleast ten different ways to get the chapter information out of the MPLS file associated with the M2TS video on the disc, but I wanted one command-line option that would encompass the entire process…no highlighting, copying of text, etc.

The syntax:

bdchapters -i <mpls file> -o <mkv xml chapter file>

It is a Python program.  I started on a C++ version, but ran out of steam whilst writing it.  The only thing that you have to make sure of is to include it in your PATH variable so you can use it no matter where you’re browsing at.  That and the installer I made isn’t smart enough to add itself to the PATH variable on its own.

As a warning: this Python code hasn’t been documented and will make many people feel like creating a way to stab me over the internet.  I’m working on the whole “nice, neat, and well documented” thing as I transfer it over to C++.

It does, however, just work and no, I’m still learning C/C++.  I did, however, create an NSIS installer/uninstaller that will atleast install it correctly (minus the aforementioned PATH deficiency).

Enjoy.

• Download BD Chapters Version 0.3 (Executable)
• Download BD Chapters Version 0.3 (Source Code)

This isn’t a magical review.  It’s been awhile since I posted last. I’m trying to compile some stats on exactly how much ‘umph’ it takes to go from one format to another.  All of these are the stats I have at this time and I will try to keep it short and to the point.

Now, what it is running on:

• Processor: AMD Athlon 9850BE (2.5 GHz)
• RAM: 4 GB DDR2-800 OCZ Ballistix (2×2)
• Motherboard: Some ASUS board that I had to buy after my old Gigabyte died to being underspec’d.
• Optical: Sony BDU-X10S BluRay Drive
• Operating System: Microsoft Vista Home Premium (32-bit)

(continue reading…)

About two years ago I pieced together a file server and it’s been a great ride.  Unfortunately, due to some issues I’ve been having with the RAID card I installed, I’ve had to rebuild the entire array.  By that I mean I’ve had to delete everything on the 1.5TB array and start from the ground up.

I started with Gentoo and a very minimalist build, then moved over to CentOS once it had progressed enough for it to become a valid option kernel-wise.

After two years, the RAID array was having some very bad problems.  It ‘believed’ that the drive in channel [678] was always corrupted and would remove it from the array and force a rebuild.  After two new hard drives, I am now the proud owner of three perfectly good hard drives.

Before I rant, the specs:

• Motherboard: Intel SE7230NH1 motherboard
• CPU: Intel Pentium D 805 (Socket 775)
• RAM: 2x 512M Patriot PC2-5300 (667MHz)
• Power: Thermaltake ToughPower 600W
• HDD: 6x 320GB WD 3200YS Hard Drives (RAID 5), 1x 250GB Hard Drive (can’t remember make/model, not really important…OS drive)
  
• RAID Controller: Highpoint RocketRaid 2320 (8x SATA II connections with RAID 0/1/5/6)
• OS: Gentoo (Linux), CentOS (Linux)

(continue reading…)

There have been many things about Florida that may make me a bit uncomfortable, but none of them include the latest thing out of the Florida State Bar.

Normally, I would link the first source I could find on this, which comes from GamePolitics, but in this crazy world of gamers and their tendency to carjack vehicles to kill innocent people it seems that GamePolitics at the time of writing, is being slashdotted.

However, Kotaku has a few articles up, one about the ~$40,000 insult on top of the you-can-no-longer-practice-law injury (a.k.a the disbarment ruling).  The second is Jack’s response which, after reading, makes me seriously wonder how bad you have to be to give lawyers an even worse reputation (a.k.a I’M JACK THOMPSON BITCHES!).

Normally, I would have a shred of guilty feeling about something so bad happening to a person, but when you as for the thunder, I mean really beg for it, sometimes you get it.  As in double-barrel shotgun blast to the testes kind of thunder.

So, to the gamers out there: yes, sometimes the law gets it right.

To the douche bag former lawyers named Jack Thompson: You did it to yourself.

Edit: The thumbnail for the article was found on Google Images.  It originated from Crispy Gamer and was tweaked slightly.  Also, Crispy Gamer has coverage on the whole fun carousel known as Jack Thompson.

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