It could be said that a career as an England cricketer is the perfect grounding for a lifetime of gambling. For if, like me, you have limited resources, time, patience and discipline, there is only one way to approach betting – expect to lose.

As we arrive for our interview with Ken Clarke, he is groaning about having to squeeze into his black tie for a dinner. The Conservatives' man of the people is more comfortable in shirt sleeves and suede shoes. He prefers dingy jazz cellars to swanky yachts. He loves birdwatching on the moors but he would never go shooting in plus-fours - “the idea would be hilarious”, he says. For years, he played snooker every week with his son - “I should have been brilliant after a lifetime of dedication,” he says, “but I was never any good.”

The next installment in The Met: Live in HD series will be a new production of Berlioz’s rarely staged opera-oratorio, La Damnation de Faust. The composer’s unconventional take on Goethe’s version of the Faust legend has never had a secure place in the operatic repertoire, in part because it’s not quite an opera and not quite an oratorio. It contains some of Berlioz’s most extravagantly expressive music, though, and is most often presented in concert form, as it was at its Met premiere in 1896. The work is becoming more dramatically viable as new developments in stagecraft make it possible for companies to create scenic effects that were unimaginable during the composer’s lifetime, and the work is finally beginning to gain a foothold in the repertoire. The innovative Canadian director Robert Lepage introduced an earlier version of this production in 1999 in Matsumoto, Japan, but he has extensively expanded the scenic elements for the Met’s production, which promises to be visually stunning. James Levine will conduct, and the production will feature Susan Graham as Marguerite, Marcello Giordani as Faust, and John Relyea as Méphistopheles.

The live transmission of La Damnation de Faust will be on Saturday, November 22 at 1:00 (ET), with an encore broadcast on Wednesday, December 3 at 7:00 pm (local time). Check your local theater listings for details or check out the Met’s website.

pFiled under: a href="http://www.joystiq.com/category/culture/" rel="tag"Culture/a, a href="http://www.joystiq.com/category/business/" rel="tag"Business/a/pdiv align="center"a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/josh_gross/11/20/ufc-cuts-fitch/"img width="490" vspace="4" hspace="0" height="326" border="1" align="top" alt="" src="http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2008/11/ufcfiring.jpg" //abr //div strongUpdate/strong: Fitch caved in and signed the contract. Thanks to Scott for reading a href="http://mmajunkie.com/news/13299/report-jon-fitch-will-sign-videogame-agreement-returns-to-ufc.mma"MMAJunkie.com/a.br /br /strongOriginal Story/strong: The Ultimate Fighting Championship has a href="http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/josh_gross/11/20/ufc-cuts-fitch/"released/a welterweight crown contender Jon Fitch for refusing to sign his image rights away emfor a lifetime/em to UFC-based games being made by THQ. Fitch stated he thought it was "crazy" to sign "anything away for your lifetime." Fitch isn't the only one kicked out, many of his teammates from the American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose have been dismissed for refusing to submit.br /br /We'll take this to mean that Fitch won't be appearing in THQ's emUFC 2009 Undisputed/em expected in May '09. We know, all 10 of you out there who were going to buy the game and cared are devastated.br /br /[Via a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=312325"Eurogamer/a]p style="padding:5px;background:#ddd;border:1px solid #ccc;clear:both;"a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/21/ufc-fires-fighters-for-not-signing-video-game-image-rights-away/"UFC fires fighters for not signing video game image rights away/a originally appeared on a href="http://www.joystiq.com"Joystiq/a on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 11:43:00 EST. Please see our a href="http://www.weblogsinc.com/feed-terms/"terms for use of feeds/a./pp style="clear: both; padding: 8px 0 0 0; height: 2px; font-size: 1px; border: 0; margin: 0; padding: 0;"nbsp;/ppa href=http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/josh_gross/11/20/ufc-cuts-fitch/Read/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/21/ufc-fires-fighters-for-not-signing-video-game-image-rights-away/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent link to this entry"Permalink/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/forward/1379328/" title="Send this entry to a friend via email"Email this/anbsp;|nbsp;a href="http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/21/ufc-fires-fighters-for-not-signing-video-game-image-rights-away/#comments" title="View reader comments on this entry"Comments/a/p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/4gvD-T-H6Ufp76I9xAUFsIWDd0E/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/4gvD-T-H6Ufp76I9xAUFsIWDd0E/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=B935UDEF"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=B935UDEF" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?a=GjKRusZR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/weblogsinc/joystiq?i=GjKRusZR" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/weblogsinc/joystiq/~4/ToES-NIwcSo" height="1" width="1"/

Jon Fitch has been released from the Ultimate Fighting Championship as he refused to sign away exclusive image rights for the new and upcoming UFC video game from THQ. "We thought that was kind of crazy," Fitch said. "Why would you sign anything away for your lifetime?"

The lesbian love affair of our lifetime has been on rocky lately, and now in a last ditch effort to save it, Lindsay and Samantha have entered couples counseling. Awww. Page Six reports: [[ This is a content summary only. Visit IDontLikeYouInThatWay.com for full links, other content, and more! ]]

div class="rxbodyfield"p page="1" class="ArticleBody"Thirty years have passed since the Internet Protocol was first described in a series of technical documents written by early a target="_blank" href="http://www.potaroo.net/ietf/html/ienindex.html"experimenters/a . Since then, countless engineers have created systems and applications that rely on IP as the communications link between people and their computers./pp align="right"a href="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" target="_blank" /img src="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.info.rss/news;pos=imu;tile=6;sz=336x280;skey=patch_management;pkey=security;ord=123456789?" width="336" height="280" border="0" alt="" align="right"//a/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Here#39;s the rub: IP has continued to evolve, but no one has been carefully documenting all of the changes./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"b[ Some experts predict#160;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/17/Storm-clouds-looming-for-Internet-experts-say_1.html?source=fssr"storm clouds looming for the Internet/a#160;and say#160;a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/15/Govts-must-intervene-to-end-IP-address-shortage_1.html?source=rssamp;url=http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/05/15/Govts-must-intervene-to-end-IP-address-shortage_1.html?source=fssr"governments must intervene to end an IP address shortage/a. Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at a href="http://www.infoworld.com/news/?source=fssr"InfoWorld News/a, or subscribe to the a href="http://www.infoworld.com/newsletter/subscribe.html?source=fssr"Today#39;s Headlines newsletter/a. ]/b/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;The IP model is not this static thing,quot; explains Dave Thaler, a member of the a target="_blank" href="http://www.iab.org/index.html"Internet Architecture Board/a and a software architect for Microsoft. quot;It#39;s something that has changed over the years, and it continues to change.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"Thaler gave the plenary address Wednesday at a meeting of the a target="_blank" href="http://www.ietf.org/"Internet Engineering Task Force/a , the Internet#39;s premier standards body. Thaler#39;s talk was adapted from a document the IAB has drafted entitled quot; a target="_blank" href="http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-iab-ip-model-evolution-01.txt"Evolution of the IP Model/a .#39;#39;#160;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"quot;Since 1978, many applications and upper layer protocols have evolved around various assumptions that are not listed in one place, not necessarily well known, not thought about when making changes, and increasingly not even true,quot; Thaler said. quot;The goal of the IAB#39;s work is to collect the assumptions -- or increasingly myths -- in one place, to document to what extent they are true, and to provide some guidance to the community.quot;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"The following list of myths about how the Internet works is adapted from Thaler#39;s a target="_blank" href="http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/08nov/slides/plenaryw-1.pdf"talk/a :#160;/pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"strong1. If I can reach you, you can reach me.br//strongThaler dubs this myth, quot;reachability is symmetric,quot; and says many Internet applications assume that if Host A can contact Host B, then the opposite must be true. Applications use this assumption when they have request-response or callback functions. This assumption isn#39;t always true because middleboxes such as network address translators (NAT) and firewalls get in the way of IP communications, and it doesn#39;t always work with 802.11 wireless LANs or satellite links./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"strong2. If I can reach you, and you can reach her, then I can reach her.br//strongThaler calls this theory quot;reachability is transitive,quot; and says it is applied when applications do referrals. Like the first myth, this assumption isn#39;t always true today because of middleboxes such as NATs and firewalls as well as with 802.11 wireless and satellite transmissions./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"strong3. Multicast always works.br//strongMulticast allows you to send communications out to many systems simultaneously as long as the receivers indicate they can accept the communication. Many applications assume that multicast works within all types of links. But that isn#39;t always true with 802.11 wireless LANs or across tunneling mechanisms such as Teredo or 6to4./pp page="1" class="ArticleBody"strong4. The time it takes to initiate communications between two systems is what you#39;ll see throughout the communication.br//strongThaler says many applications assume that the end-to-end delay of the first packet sent to a destination is typical of what will be experienced afterwards. For example, many applications ping servers and select the one that responds first. However, the first packet may have additional latency because of the look-ups it does. So applications may choose longer paths and have slower response times using this assumption. Increasingly, applications such as Mobile IPv6 and Protocol Independent Multicast send packets on one path and then switch to a shorter, faster path./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"strong5. IP addresses rarely change.br//strongMany applications assume that IP addresses are stable over long periods of time. These applications resolve names to addresses and then cache them without any notion of the lifetime of the name/address connection, Thaler says. This assumption isn#39;t always true today because of the popularity of the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol as well as roaming mechanisms and wireless communications./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"strong6. A computer has only one IP address and one interface to the network.br//strongThis is an example of an assumption that was never true to begin with, Thaler says. From the onset of the Internet, hosts could have several physical interfaces to the network and each of those could have several logical Internet addresses. Today, computers are dealing with wired and wireless access, dual IPv4/IPv6 nodes and multiple IPv6 addresses on the same interface making this assumption truly a myth./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"strong7. If you and I have addresses in a subnet, we must be near each other.br//strongSome applications assume that the IP address used by an application is the same as the address used for routing. This means an application might assume two systems on the same subnet are nearby and would be better to talk to each other than a system far away. This assumption doesn#39;t hold up because of tunneling and mobility. Increasingly, new applications are adopting a scheme known as an identifier/locator split that uses separate IP addresses to identify a system from the IP addresses used to locate a system./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"strong8. New transport-layer protocols will work across the Internet.br//strongIP was designed to support new transport protocols underneath it, but increasingly this isn#39;t true, Thaler says. Most NATs and firewalls only allow Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) for transporting packets. Newer Web-based applications only operate over Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"strong9. If one stream between you and me can get through, so can another one.br//strongSome applications open multiple connections -- one for data and another for control -- between two systems for communications. The problem is that middleboxes such as NATs and firewalls block certain ports and may not allow more than one connection. That#39;s why applications such as File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and the Real-time Transfer Protocol (RTP) don#39;t always work, Thaler says./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"strong10. Internet communications are not changed in transit.br//strongThaler cites several assumptions about Internet security that are no longer true. One of them is that packets are unmodified in transit. While it may have been true at the dawn of the Internet, this assumption is no longer true because of NATs, firewalls, intrusion-detection systems and many other middleboxes. IPsec solves this problem by encrypting IP packets, but this security scheme isn#39;t widely used across the Internet./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"strong11. Internet communications are private.br//strongAnother security-related assumption Internet developers and users often make is that packets are private. Thaler says this was never true. The only way for Internet users to be sure that their communications are private is to deploy IPsec, which is a suite of protocols for securing IP communications by authenticating and encrypting IP packets./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"strong12. Source addresses are not forged.br//strongMany Internet applications assume that a packet is coming from the IP source address that it uses. However, IP address spoofing has become common as a way of concealing the identity of the sender in denial of service and other attacks. Applications built on this assumption are vulnerable to attack, Thaler says./pp page="2" class="ArticleBody"ema target="_blank" href="http://www.networkworld.com"Network World/a/em emis an InfoWorld affiliate/em/p/divbr style=clear: both;/ a href=http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=8d2a452e447cfdd98c4745a2d58e2228p=1img alt= style=border: 0; border=0 src=http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=8d2a452e447cfdd98c4745a2d58e2228p=1//a img src=http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=8d2a452e447cfdd98c4745a2d58e2228 style=display: none; border=0 height=1 width=1 alt=/

Category: Productivity
Released: Nov 18, 2008
Price: $1.99

Description:
Geared toward general and work needs, CheckOff allows you to easily manage templates and auto create checklists by day of week. It will show what objects you must collect or actions you need to take. A great way to remember the essential checks for everyday routines. Infrequent or once in a lifetime checklists are easily handled. Whether assembling the items in your pocket, the contents of your picnic basket, or checking the condition of important equipment, CheckOff is equally valuable. Everyday or specialized, CheckOff helps you remember the details. Features: - Multiple checklists allow you to keep track of more than one list at a time. - Templates for tasks you need to do more than once. - Checklist auto-creation for everyday lists or just on certain weekdays. - Organize related templates into groups for easy access.

Website: http://buckaroosoftware.com/CheckOff.html
Support Website: http://buckaroosoftware.com/CheckOff.html

Note: The description above is the official one supplied by the application developer and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of this site or its staff.


Get it on iTunes: CheckOff

pimg src="http://www.gamasutra.com/db_area/images/news2001/21215/Image1.jpg" align="left" hspace="5"/Online reports have suggested that contract negotiations between game publisher THQ and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) have contributed to high profile fighter John Fitch and many of his teammates leaving the organization. Reports from Sports Illustrated and other mixed martial arts weblogs suggest that Fitch refused to sign a lifetime contract for his likeness to be used by THQ in its games. The move apparently came after earlier complaints by a majority of UFC .../p pmap name="google_ad_map_5QbyvGwTVXzC85QigFGT-W66Yuk_"area shape="rect" href="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/imgclick/5QbyvGwTVXzC85QigFGT-W66Yuk_?pos=0" coords="1,2,367,28"/area shape="rect" href="http://services.google.com/feedback/abg" coords="384,10,453,23"//mapimg usemap="#google_ad_map_5QbyvGwTVXzC85QigFGT-W66Yuk_" border="0" src="http://imageads.googleadservices.com/pagead/ads?format=468x30_aff_imgclient=ca-pub-3896033488060561channel=feedburner-rssoutput=pngcuid=5QbyvGwTVXzC85QigFGT-W66Yuk_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamasutra.com%2Fphp-bin%2Fnews_index.php%3Fstory%3D21215"//pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=fKXlN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=fKXlN" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=iZNfN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=iZNfN" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?a=U0WhN"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/GamasutraNews?i=U0WhN" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/GamasutraNews/~4/460802081" height="1" width="1"/

I left Iraq in 1981, at the age of 9. I remember that day as if it were yesterday. My mother, sister and I left together, while my father stayed behind for a few weeks to finish dismantling a lifetime in a country he loved.div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=BrzIWWAJ"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=1yU22V95"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=0XkjWfeS"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=0XkjWfeS" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=96s44sPj"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=P7YeqPGT"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=P7YeqPGT" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~4/hMi9VewOrgA" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/codecsarentgoodlkepancakes.jpg" width="807" height="414" style="display:block;float:none;" /Once upon time, video codecs and formats were really only the concern of AV nerds, anime freaks and hardcore not-so-legal movie downloaders. Now, even the most part-time of geeks has to deal with them, whether they're trying to stream a flick across their house with an Apple TV, dump some video onto their phone or just trying to grab last night's episode of Dexter because they, uh, forgot to renew their Showtime subscription that'll work in their media player. It's messy and annoying, but we're here to clean it up. Take a deep breath./p pYou might recall our discussion about a href="http://gizmodo.com/5048025/giz-explains-why-hd-video-downloads-arent-very-high-def"video bitrates earlier/a, or how much data is packed into a file. As a general rule, more bits per second translates into more betterer quality audio and video. The variable in thatmdash;the other part of the equationmdash;is how the content is compressed and de-compressed. Better compression techniquesmdash;the zen of knowing what bits of data to pull out to make big data chunks smallermdash;make for better quality video while taking up less space on your hard drive. Basically, the part you need to know is that codecs are the software that make that magic happen./p pstrongStandard Standards/strongbr bull; strongH.261/strong is not a term you have to worry about, but it's the technology a href="http://www.javvin.com/protocolH261.html"that most video standards and codecs/a were originally based on. Originating in 1990, it's the first major digital video compression standard, and like other "H" standards, it was developed by the International Telecommunication Union. This one was primarily for teleconferencing over ISDN lines, and as such, it looks like ass./p pbull; strongMPEG-1 Part 2/strong is another oldie, developed by the a href="http://www.chiariglione.org/mpeg/"Movie Picture Experts Group/a and approved in 1991. (All of the MPEG codecs we talk about, btw, will have an associated layer, since the video section is only part of the full standard, which includes audio and other stuff. MPEG-1 Layer 3, you probably know, is MP3.) Based quite a bit on H.261, a href="http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/frame/research/mpeg/mpeg_overview.html"MPEG-1 was designed to take VHS quality video/a and squeeze it down to a bit rate of about 1.5Mbps, optimized for CD transfers. No surprise, it's the standard used for all VCDs (which can play in most DVD players), but not a standard you would see hanging around today./p pbull; With strongMPEG-2 Part 2/strong, approved in 1994, we're finally talking decent vid. Also known as H.262, since it was developed jointly by the ITU-T and ISO, a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/papers/paper_14/paper_14.shtml"MPEG-2 is an extension of MPEG-1/a that delivers better resolution and higher bit rates (3-15Mbps for standard def and 15-30Mbps for HD). It's the video codec used by DVD and digital television, though now it's slowly being replaced by the more efficient MPEG-4, except on DVDs, where it'll ride out that disc format's lifetime./p pbull; bH.263/b is a href="http://www.phonescoop.com/glossary/term.php?gid=197"designed for sending video over crappy connections/a. So it's used to encode most Flash video and to send video over mobile networks./p pbull; strongMPEG-4/strong is where we really stand right now. It has a much broader scope than past MPEG standards, aiming to tackle both the low end (crappy cellphones on a crappy network) and the high end (Blu-ray). It's still developing, so it's not-so-coincidentally a href="http://www.m4if.org/mpeg4/"where this whole story gets messier/a. There are two relevant parts of the MPEG-4 standard for our myopic video purposes: Part 2 and Part 10mdash;which is also known as H.264 or Advanced Video Coding (AVC). To be clear though, even though they're both part of the MPEG-4 standard, they're itotally different formats/i. Nevertheless, both are more efficient at compression than past MPEG codecs, delivering better quality using less space./p pbull;Okay, so if you've ever frequented a Torrent site, you've actually watched tons of videos that use strongMPEG-4 Part 2/strong, though it's not like they would've had a flashing sign telling you so. MPEG-4 Part 2 actually a href="http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:2-AcZvq6F8YJ:www.mpegif.org/public/documents/vault/m4-out-30037.pdf+mpeg-4+profileshl=enct=clnkcd=4gl=usclient=firefox-a"has different "profiles"/amdash;the two that matter being Simple Profile, for low bitrate, low-res stuff, and Advanced Simple Profile. The latter profile is what's used by movies you would download in formats like DivX or XviD or 3ivxmdash;which are all codecs that are essentially just differing implementations of the MPEG-4 Part 2 standard./p pbull;strongMPEG-4 Part 10/strong, the other part, was actually co-devopled by MPEG and the ITU-T, so it's also knownmdash;in fact, more commonly knownmdash;as H.264. It's more efficient than MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 Part 2, delivering the same quality video in as little as half the space, making it suitable for the low and high-end. Because of this, it's quickly becoming a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC_Products_and_Implementations"the standardest standard/a. It's part of the HD DVD and Blu-ray spec, replacing MPEG-2 in digital TV (like with satellite services and ATT's U-Verse IPTV) and supported by pretty much every portable video player on the planet from the iPod to the PSP. Apple has a decent, if Kool-Aid flavored, a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/faq.html"FAQ about H.264/a./p pbull;strongVC-1/strong is essentially a a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/vc1techoverview.aspx"Microsoft developed alternative video codec/a to H.264 released as a standard by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, though it descends from the same H.26X/MPEG family. (It essentially started life as WMV9, but then a href="http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=50500181"Microsoft shopped it to the SMPTE/a to make it an industry standard, and now it is.) It too, is part of the mandatory Blu-ray and HD DVD spec, and is the official video codec of the Xbox 360. It's pitch is the same as H.264'smdash;trying to deliver better quality using less space, like HD video in 6-8Mbps./p pstrongFree-Floating Codecs/strongbr Okay, so all that stuff up there are industry-wide standard video codecs. On top of emall of those/em, various entities love putting out their own spin on those standards. As we mentioned before, DivX (a href="http://www.divx.com/"proprietary/a) and a href="http://www.xvid.org/"XviD/a (open source), for instance, use MPEG-4 Part 2 (more specifically, MPEG-4 ASP) compression, meaning stuff that'll natively play back MPEG-4 ASP will also play back DivX. a href="http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/xbox-360-divx%5Cxvid-test/xbox-360-divxxvid-tested-it-plays-almost-everything-329769.php"Like the Xbox 360/a, for instance. There are a ton of MPEG-4 ASP-based codecs, actually, like FFmpeg, 3ivx and others, but DivX and XviD are the most common. Same deal with H.264: Some well known codecs that use it are Apple's Quicktime H.264, x264 and Nero Digital. You've also got Windows Media Video (WMV) codecs, which are Microsoft's proprietary twists on industry standards./p pstrongContainers aka Wrappers/strongbr Alright, well you've probably noticed that none of your video files have the extension .h264 or .vc1 or the like. That's because videos are packaged in a href="http://www.doom9.org/glossary.htm#Container"containers or wrappers/a that stuff things like the audio, navigational info, etc. along with the video in a single pretty file. Naturally, there are about as many of them as there are codecs. To be clear, you would take a video encoded with, say, H.264, and wrap it up as a .MP4 file./p pThe majors ones are:br bull;AVI (Audio Video Interleave) is a href="http://www.jmcgowan.com/avi.html#Definition"Windows' standard multimedia container/abr bull;MPEG-4 Part 14 (known to you as .mp4) is the a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP4"standardized container for MPEG-4/abr ·:FLV (Flash Video) is the a href="http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flv/"format used to deliver video through Flash Player/abr bull;MOV is Apple's QuickTime a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/"container format/abr bull;OGG is an a href="http://www.xiph.org/"open standard container/abr bull;MKV (Mastroska) a href="http://www.matroska.org/"is another open specification container/a that you've seen if you've ever downloaded animebr bull;VOB a href="http://www.afterdawn.com/glossary/terms/vob.cfm"stands for DVD Video Object/a. Guess what? It's DVD's standard container, and what you get when you rip a DVD.br bull;ASF is a a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/format/asfspec.aspx"Microsoft format designed/a for WMV and WMA. (Files can end in .wmv or .asf)./p pSo, in order to play a video file, your setup has to be able to handle both the actual video codec, and the container. It's why you can try to play an AVI file and Windows Media Player laughs at you, even though it totally played one a minute agomdash; the container was no problem, it didn't have the right codec. Or conversely, even though an iPod could play back an H.264 encoded video, if it was wrapped up in MKV, it couldn't read it./p pOkay, my brain hurts. Hopefully this will make yours hurt less when it comes to dealing with pesky videos. If you'd like to do even more homework, Wikipedia, as always, has a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_codecs"a more in-depth discussion/a. And Doom9 a href="http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-final-105-1.htm"is always an amazing resource/a for all things digital video./p pemSomething you still wanna know? Send any questions about codecs, kitties or pad thai (but not RealMedia) to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line./em/p p[Image: a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/siebeneinhalb-de/2385134555/"ME/a@Flickr]/p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=8b16e36f57caf7463dda52b4758c5125amp;p=1"img style="border:0;" src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=8b16e36f57caf7463dda52b4758c5125amp;p=1" border="0" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=FxSbpUqh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=6oQdGflA"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=qLBnOvuS"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=qLBnOvuS" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=pIR4dxIP"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=pIR4dxIP" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/q1B1QOVLsx0" height="1" width="1"/

pimg class="float_right" src="/~~/f?id=488a1d84796c7a5300f14aafmaxX=444maxY=192" border="0" alt="janetandarthurNYT.jpg" title="janetandarthurNYT.jpg" width="444" height="192" /As you recall, back in July, we happily made an offer for the digital operations of the New York Times Company (NYT)./p pWe offered a massive price--$1 billion--and proposed an innovative deal structure that would avoid the need for annoying shareholder approvals, jillion-dollar legal fees, egregious tax hits, etc. (In short, the NYT would acquire us, and then spin us and NYT Digital out--see details below). We explained how we would run the standalone NYT Digital and how the proposed transaction would benefit New York Times shareholders, who have since been obliterated. /p pWell, we are pleased to say that, despite the global market carnage, our offer remains in effect! Alas, in light of the impending depression and recent developments at the New York Times Company, we must mark our offer to market./p pIn July, when we made our offer, NYT's stock was at $12. Now it's $6. Also, the New York Times Company is now running on fumes. So now we're probably looking at a number in the $400 million range./p pWe're still stoked about this opportunity, though./p p(One thing we do need to discuss is your a href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/cash-crunch-at-new-york-times-nyt-400-million-due-in-may"cash crisis/a. Back in July, you seemed to be awash in the stuff, and we were counting on this to take care of our post-merger working capital needs. Now, we may have to ask you to draw downa href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/11/cash-crunch-at-new-york-times-nyt-400-million-due-in-may" your remaining $400 million credit line/a before the banks wake up and cut it off. We would advise you to do this anyway, by the way. The Red Sox stake would probably work, too, as long as we could liquidate it in a timely fashion.)/p hr / pstrongOur Original Offer For The New York Times Company (July 25, 2008):/strong/p pAt its charming new stock price of $12, the New York Times Company (NYT) has an enterprise value of about $2.85 billion. As a href="http://www.businessweek.com/investor/content/jul2008/pi20080725_458084.htm"BusinessWeek's Jay Yarow notes/a, after you back out all the non-core stuff, that means that the New York Times itself--the paper and the digital assets--are valued at about $750 million. That's less than half of what CBS just paid for CNET./p pSo we have an offer for the New York Times Company: We'd like to buy New York Times Digital from you.* Not the venerable paper or printing plants. Not the gorgeous building you own in midtown Manhattan. Not your share of the Red Sox. Not the regional papers. Not the Boston Globe. Just New York Times Digital--the Martin Nisenholtz division that gets zillions of unique visitors a month./p pHow much are we willing to pay? $1 Billion./p pThat's right: A 33% premium over what the entire emNew York Times/em division is valued at right now--just for the web site! Not a bad price, given our collapsing economy. And especially not bad considering that we think the newspaper industry is hosed./p pWhy do we just want the web site?/p pWell, in truth, we'd like the whole thing, but the New York Times won't survive in its current form, and we're not thrilled about the idea of losing our shirts. We're also not eager to be vilified by the labor unions, newsroom, and Columbia Journalism Review for doing what needs to be done to save the business. So here's what we're going to do instead./p ol listrongSign a contract with you that allows us to reprint all New York Times content for three years./strong This will give us some time to build our own news organization, one unencumbered by the various cultural, economic, and contractual baggage that is currently preventing you (and other papers) from saving yourselves.br //li listrongImmediately make offers to the 20% of your journalists and editors that we think can make the transition to digital (24/7 real-time blogging)./strong These folks won't be hard to find, given that some of them are writing excellent blogs already. (Andrew Ross Sorkin, Floyd Norris, David Carr, Joe Nocera, Gretchen Morgenson, Brian Stelter, Saul Hansell, Paul Krugman, Landon Thomas, and a few dozen other folks jump to mind.) By the way, we don't mind if these folks continue to distribute their stuff in the paper, too, so don't worry about losing them. In fact, that would be great exposure for us.br //li /ol pWhy will we only be making offers to 20% of your staff? Because the economics of the online business won't support any more than that. And because 20% of your folks are probably accounting for at least 80% of your pageviews and readership anyway./p pSo how about it, Janet and Arthur? strongspan style="text-decoration: underline;"$1 Billion./span /strongMore than a third of the current enterprise value of your entire company--just for the web site! You get to keep the paper, the building, the Red Sox, the Boston Globe. It's the deal of a lifetime!/p hr / p*N.B.: We're actually much more excited about this offer than we were abouta href="http://www.alleyinsider.com/2007/12/announcing_our_friendly_takeover_offer_for_cnet" the one we made for CNET a few months back/a. Truth be told, we just couldn't get that excited about CNET. But The New York Times? We f***ing LOVE the New York Times!/p pHere's how we propose structuring the deal:/p pWe just raised $1 million, so that means we only need another $999 million to close. Raising the money shouldn't be a problem, but who needs that hassle. So here's what we'd like to do instead:/p pWe'll agree to let you acquire us for, say, $100 million of New York Times stock. Then, in a simultaneous closing, you can spin us and New York Times Digital out as a separate public company--via a special dividend to shareholders. (You can load us up with enough debt to make the numbers work, and then we'll convert it to equity)./p pSound good? We think so. We look forward to hearing from you./p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/5WAOlOrg9qvXEQJQUE7uHa7yq_E/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/5WAOlOrg9qvXEQJQUE7uHa7yq_E/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=EMz0hqca"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=EMz0hqca" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=52Q1K403"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=ufgNpauW"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=80" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=BxfkMmxw"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?i=BxfkMmxw" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=oztpKBzC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=131" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=ItlRzLeh"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=336" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=sK8qsOqV"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?a=7BOvGSuo"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider?d=50" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~4/rqZ8azVWLKw" height="1" width="1"/

Multiple outlets say Jon Fitch dumped by mixed martial arts league over refusal to sign away lifetime name and likeness rights.

Blackwolf, a 4,000-year-old wizard and LORDI's number one fan, had the opportunity of a lifetime when Triumph the Insult Comic Dog introduced him to the Finnish monster rockers at NBC Studios earlier this month when the band taped its appearance for the Late Night with Conan O'Brien show.

Is it just me or has everyone living within a 120-mile radius of the U.S. Capitol Building heard from his or her fifth cousin lately?div class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=2Uxv6i3L"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=5DBePeVu"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=50" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=llUxQNrx"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=llUxQNrx" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=xqQqrKpg"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?a=Jk7SgYnb"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/rss/cnn_topstories?i=Jk7SgYnb" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rss/cnn_topstories/~4/P4ZGXIyaHzg" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://www.toutelatele.com/IMG/arton13496.jpg" align="left" width="210" height="150" hspace="4" vspace="4" Le jeudi 27 novembre, Canal+ diffusera la tout premier épisode de sa nouvelle série américaine Pushing Daisies. Au même moment, TMC s'offrira American Wives, plus connue sous le titre de Army Wives, outre-Atlantique. br /Cette production de Mark Gordon -programmée sur Lifetime- met en scène Roxy qui tente de de s'habituer à sa vie de femme de militaire. Et sa première impression de la communauté du camp n'est pas celle à laquelle elle s'attendait. br /Trois épisodes seront ainsi proposées chaque jeudi en prime time. br /Avec (...)