…in both senses of the phrase: striking out at the rational world, where the everyday lives of all of us absolutely disgust them; striking out when trying to defend their hates and prejudices in court.
Judge Walker’s Decision on Prop 8, was a thorough beatdown on the idea that we can, by a simple majority vote, place hate and fear into the Constitution of California. Please read it:
https://ecf.cand.uscourts.gov/cand/09cv2292/files/09cv2292-ORDER.pdf
Please, please, please! OK…not many people will read it. That would explain the comments I read against the decision. These are always re-hashings of arguments that the Prop 8 Proponents had every opportunity to bring before and defend in Court. Every one of them failed. Apparently reading scripture and making up statistics doesn’t carry much legal weight.
The main problem for the Freaks in court was showing that the State has an Interest in denying rights to a subset of its citizens. All of their evidence pointed to the State’s interest in promoting stable families living in stable households. Their evidence bit them hard when it also showed that married, same-sex couples are stable families and create stable household. In fact, all of the evidence pointed to a State Interest in allowing same-sex couples the right to marry.
Please read the decision. The next time you read “people will be marrying dogs!” or “the majority voted for it!” or “they can’t have children!” please point the poster to the above link. They all need to read this.
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“My name is William and I am a Fantasy Baseball user…and I’m diving in again this year.” Not so much a parody of 12 Step meetings as an admission that Fantasy Baseball is no longer a pleasant pastime that I can take or leave as I please.
As with any of my (frequent) consuming passion, I have spent a long time watching my descent into FB. This is not to say that I observed at a remove. I was there and I am fully complicit. I do, however, understand the obsession without being able to control it. Most addicts will understand the place I’m in.
The main thing is the numbers. Baseball is all numbers! Beyond the old stats of Batting Average and Strikeout Ratios, new numbers are being created all the time. I have been lulled into the belief that understanding these numbers will equate with understanding Baseball, which belief is also the reason that so many (worse off than I) create the massive tables of new numbers.
But if understanding Baseball is the objective, my logical side holds out. I’m really not getting a “macro” understanding of the game at all. Consider my usual conversation with a fan:
“Drew Stubbs is going to be a monster this year. His second half numbers would have put him in the top five.”
“Yeah, but their pitching staff is never going to come together.”
“Who’s pitching staff?”
Yes, I understand the statistics for 80 or 100 different players, but I couldn’t say what team they play on. In Fantasy Baseball, it doesn’t matter. I am addicted to statistics, not to Baseball.
And now, the diabolic aim to all of this: I want you to join me! I need some competition!
Yahoo Fantasy Baseball – Join a League – Join a Custom League
Rotisserie League – 314270 – http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/league/ynotroto
Head to Head League – 314335 – http://baseball.fantasysports.yahoo.com/league/ynothead
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After a few weeks testing with Sorenson Squeeze 6, I can say that I will upgrade my licenses. I can’t say that it’s worth the money charged for an upgrade, and I’m not interested in the new “features.” They fixed one bug that had made me crazy with the Main Concept H.264 codec. They’ve zipped up the speed quite a bit. Basically, when you have multiple licenses of a software and they decide that a bug fix should be a new version, your choices are to upgrade or let it pass and buy into something else.
Granted, I have Anystream Agility, Digital Rapids, Procoder and Flix Pro. But I’ve put a few years into Squeeze and I still believe that it could be a Professional Level video encoding software in the future.
This is a continuation of my first run of tests for some specific problems: see previous post to get caught up.
My testing was very specific to what we do, so YMMV.
Testing Runs
- Source was Norah Jones “Chasing Pirates” downsized from an HDCAM capture. YUY2 AVI.
- Profile was three VP6 FLVs, three WM9 and four H.264 Main Concept. All 2 pass.
The source file was exactly as I wanted it. I don’t trust cropping, resizing, deinterlacing, inverse-telecine, gamma correction (or anything else you can name) to encoding software filters. If you’re used to using Avisynth, you’ll know what I mean.
First speed run with Squeeze 5 – 2:48 video took ~51 minutes to encode. I had Squeeze set to four Simultaneous Compressions (Maximum). Squeeze was able to do the three WMV files at once, but could not do more than one VP6 or MP4 at a time. About half of the 51 minutes was watching Squeeze slog through the last three H.264 encodes.
Next up, Squeeze 6 – the same 2:48 video took ~22:30 minutes on Squeeze 6. VP6 is now multi-threaded but Main Concept is not, i.e. no simultaneous compressions.
Knowing what the “support” staff at Sorenson would say, I tried this with the Sorenson H.264 codec. That did do simutaneous encodes but…the whole thing took longer. Leading to my next test:
Main Concept H.264 vs. Sorenson H.264 – doing only the H.264 encodes, here’s the problem: Sorenson H.264, running four encodes at a time, took 14 minutes. Main Concept, running one at a time, took 6 minutes (with CABAC!).
Watch Folders – using Watch Folders should be a part of any Professional encoding software. Squeeze has had them for quite a while. Very often you had to use them. If you tried to import 20 or 25 sources into Squeeze 5 it would (I assume) run out of memory and crash. So on to the Watch Folder. The problem there was: no simultaneous encodes. Each file grinds through each encoding profile separately. Using projects with up to 14 profiles, this can be a drag. Many projects took three times as long to complete.
Sad to say, it’s exactly the same in Squeeze 6. My hopes dashed again.
Conclusions
Improved:
- Speed boost can be up to and over double.
- fixed small bug with Main Concept sticking on the last few frames
Still the same:
- Cannot create hinted QuickTime H.264 MOV
- No support for Avisynth
- Main Concept H.264 – no simutaneous encodes
- Watch Folders – no simutaneous encodes.
If you are encoding a lot to a lot of different codecs, I do recommend that you buy Squeeze 6. If you are using Squeeze 5, and have been happy with it, it’s probably not worth the upgrade. For me, I’ll wait a bit for them to iron out any bugs that I haven’t run into yet, but it seems inevitable.
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