Maybe not at first, but eventually, yes. Just compare the very first computers with what we have now.
Computers have gotten better at computing, no doubt about it. But they're still way behind once one tries to take them off the desktop and act independently. Compare AIBO to an actual dog, for instance. Or witness how many millions were spent recently trying to get a few cars to navigate the desert autonomously. In those respects, computers haven't gotten much farther than they were 60 years ago.
I feel we're going to have to do a lot better making computers survive and interact out in the real world before we're going to have to worry much about what they can do to us at a cellular level.
Imagine what an army of ricin-bearing nanotech assassins could do to a UN delegation?
Probably not as much as a cloud of plain old ricin gas - or a surreptitious injection. But for anything useful, I'm not convinced our computers (and, by extention, our nanobots) are better at interacting in the real world than plain old biological processes.
Maybe the people that can afford it in the future will have scads of nanobots in their bodies, patrolling it.
We already do, in a sense. And considering how dimwitted computers are now, I'm not convinced that a tiny nanobot army is going to be more intelligent, adaptable or effective as my own immune system anytime soon.
I don't know about you, but to me half the size of uncompressed audio sounds like a lot. How do gzip, bzip2 and FLAC stack up?
gzip and bzip2 are meant for text. Only with rare audio files will they achieve much of any compression whatsoever. FLAC achieves about 50% compression on average, depending on the source material. All other lossless audio schemes achieve similar compression, within about 5%. The big advantage FLAC has is that it uses only integer ops for decoding (making it very fast and non CPU intensive). That also means FLAC has a number of hardware decoders already on the market.
...a lack of buttons. A SNES pad has two more of them than a GBA.
Re:Why were MP ever such a big deal?
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Beyond Megapixels
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The APS format is a failure of legendary porportions. Ask anyone who bought a $250,000 APS minilab from Kodak.
I'm no camera expert, but it seems to me the biggest selling point of APS was how idiot-proof the format was. No 35mm film loading difficulties, no guesswork about how many shots are left on the film, and so forth. The quality didn't match 35mm, but that was never the point. Then along came digital photography and suddenly APS' niche vanished. It was an idea that came too late to catch on, I think.
FLAC also offers error protection so you can be absolutely certain the PCM audio that comes out of it is the same PCM audio that went into it. And, in a worst case scenario, the format limits file damage to the frames they occur in rather than rendering the whole file unreadable.
Some of my first cds purchased in 86 (Are You Experienced and Electric Ladyland) are clearly losing sound quality.
Pressed CDs shouldn't be as vulnerable to bit rot as burned CD-Rs. But I can't understand how the discs would lose quality. One either gets a valid frame of redbook audio or not. I can understand that some of the frames might go bad (even to the point where the built-in error correction can't help) and lead to audio defects, but I don't see how the whole disc would sound different than before.
I don't quite get why all the world seems to be using MySQL, even though Postgres seems so much better. Could it be marketing?
Historically, it's been documentation. MySQL is very well documented from the installation to the DBMS administration to the API. So, even though it may not be as feature-complete as PostgreSQL, people gravitate to it because they can figure it out faster. That's not to say PostgreSQL doesn't have plenty of docs, but MySQL has a lot more of them.
I just happened to be watching Attack of the Clones recently, and I noticed something. With the exception of Count Dooku and Mace Windu, most of the other actors look quite bored most of the time, and I can't figure out why.
I suppose even the best actor would look bored working in a blue room for 8 hours a day, acting to "that thing over there the FX guys will add later" and reciting lines from Lucas' less-than-stellar script.
Stuff like sets and props and made-up critters to act against really do help actors do their jobs better - and a really good script helps even more.
Despite all of Guido Van Sustren's claims to the contrary, Python's garbage collector just doesn't work correctly, allowing the programmer to create a circular reference which never gets resolved.
Circular references are what weak references are meant to handle. But it'd be nice if the garbage collector would handle those cases automatically.
Ok, so what does this mean to the average person trying to compile existing apps to run on the 'new' X, or vice versa.
Your clients don't care whether they're connecting to the new X.org X11 server or the old one. They don't even care if they're running on Sun X server, or Apple's, or some obscure commercial one. Once compiled, they'll Just Work on any X11 server.
That's partly why X11 is so handy, and partly why it advances so slowly compared to other windowing systems that don't give a rat's ass about cross-platform, network-transparent compatibility.
For awhile there, I thought I was the only one addicted to focus-follows-mouse. The fact is, Windows and MacOS just aren't designed for it. One can try to hack in that support, but the apps aren't designed for it either and aren't likely to play nice. For instance, a modal "yes/no" dialog meant to take focus and halt all other input until answered is going to collide with a focus-follows-mouse system and the latter isn't going to work. But since Linux and Unix have had window managers with that capability for over a decade now, every app knows how to deal with it.
My own personal preferences about usability are the reason I'm sticking with Linux. And I've yet to see anything compelling enough on Windows or the MacOS to get me to abandon what I'm used to and switch to either.
The only real qualm people seem to have with the PC as a game platform is that games don't seem to sell too well.
Another problem is a lack of standardization in the platform itself. For example, you might allow a user to have gamepad control, but you have no guarantee how many buttons the pad might have, whether it has analog sticks or what arrangement they're in. To go a step further, if one owns a Playstation 2, one can buy almost any Playstation 2 game without worrying about having a sufficiently fast processor, graphics card and hard drive space. For the vast majority of console games, the console itself (and a TV) is all that's needed to play them.
PCs have many advantages as a gaming platform, as you've stated, but all that power and customization comes at a price. Though I believe both will continue to exist as seperate and viable gaming platforms for the foreseeable future.
Now that Vorbis has an open, integer-based decoding algorithm, its decoding requirements are similar to mp3 at mid-range quality for both. Though I expect the power requirements of spinning a hard drive will trump any decoder chip's. FWIW, iRiver claims 16 hour battery life whereas the iPod is listed at 8.
Despite all that, I expect mp3 will remain the de-facto standard for lossy music due mostly to inertia and the ease of piracy compared to AAC and friends.
Ogg runs on more different portable players than AAC (Rio, iRiver and Neuros) but AAC wins the popularity contest by sheer volume of iPods. Still, out of all of them, crusty old mp3 is the only one I'd really consider to be "mainstream".
(and possibly flac, but I can not find the page) support 5.1.(search for 'surround')
FLAC currently supports up to 8 seperate channels of audio with some room for expansion, if I'm reading the docs right. I assume one of those channels would be a.1 subwoofer channel, but that's not explicit in the spec.
The picture of the fossil featured on RCH's site recently is one of the most incredible pictures I've ever seen. And guess what, NASA refuses to talk about it and they ground the damn thing into dust!!!.
To NASA, an actual fossil of something on Mars means big headlines and (more importantly) big funding. I can't find any reason they would destroy one that doesn't involve donning a tinfoil hat first.
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Computers have gotten better at computing, no doubt about it. But they're still way behind once one tries to take them off the desktop and act independently. Compare AIBO to an actual dog, for instance. Or witness how many millions were spent recently trying to get a few cars to navigate the desert autonomously. In those respects, computers haven't gotten much farther than they were 60 years ago.
I feel we're going to have to do a lot better making computers survive and interact out in the real world before we're going to have to worry much about what they can do to us at a cellular level.
Probably not as much as a cloud of plain old ricin gas - or a surreptitious injection. But for anything useful, I'm not convinced our computers (and, by extention, our nanobots) are better at interacting in the real world than plain old biological processes.
We already do, in a sense. And considering how dimwitted computers are now, I'm not convinced that a tiny nanobot army is going to be more intelligent, adaptable or effective as my own immune system anytime soon.
It's not this one. The reference decoder is already integer-based.
gzip and bzip2 are meant for text. Only with rare audio files will they achieve much of any compression whatsoever. FLAC achieves about 50% compression on average, depending on the source material. All other lossless audio schemes achieve similar compression, within about 5%. The big advantage FLAC has is that it uses only integer ops for decoding (making it very fast and non CPU intensive). That also means FLAC has a number of hardware decoders already on the market.
That's already here. It's called "C".
A,B,X,Y,Left shoulder,Right shoulder,Select and Start. What to do about X and Y is the problem.
...a lack of buttons. A SNES pad has two more of them than a GBA.
I'm no camera expert, but it seems to me the biggest selling point of APS was how idiot-proof the format was. No 35mm film loading difficulties, no guesswork about how many shots are left on the film, and so forth. The quality didn't match 35mm, but that was never the point. Then along came digital photography and suddenly APS' niche vanished. It was an idea that came too late to catch on, I think.
FLAC also offers error protection so you can be absolutely certain the PCM audio that comes out of it is the same PCM audio that went into it. And, in a worst case scenario, the format limits file damage to the frames they occur in rather than rendering the whole file unreadable.
Pressed CDs shouldn't be as vulnerable to bit rot as burned CD-Rs. But I can't understand how the discs would lose quality. One either gets a valid frame of redbook audio or not. I can understand that some of the frames might go bad (even to the point where the built-in error correction can't help) and lead to audio defects, but I don't see how the whole disc would sound different than before.
Historically, it's been documentation. MySQL is very well documented from the installation to the DBMS administration to the API. So, even though it may not be as feature-complete as PostgreSQL, people gravitate to it because they can figure it out faster. That's not to say PostgreSQL doesn't have plenty of docs, but MySQL has a lot more of them.
I suppose even the best actor would look bored working in a blue room for 8 hours a day, acting to "that thing over there the FX guys will add later" and reciting lines from Lucas' less-than-stellar script.
Stuff like sets and props and made-up critters to act against really do help actors do their jobs better - and a really good script helps even more.
That'll add felony hit & run to the crime, if done in the US - assuming the car can be driven at all after the accident.
Circular references are what weak references are meant to handle. But it'd be nice if the garbage collector would handle those cases automatically.
Your clients don't care whether they're connecting to the new X.org X11 server or the old one. They don't even care if they're running on Sun X server, or Apple's, or some obscure commercial one. Once compiled, they'll Just Work on any X11 server.
That's partly why X11 is so handy, and partly why it advances so slowly compared to other windowing systems that don't give a rat's ass about cross-platform, network-transparent compatibility.
Oh how I long for the days when that was indisputable.
Then Berman and company decided to put Generations, Insurrection and Nemesis to film. Now I'm not so sure.
My own personal preferences about usability are the reason I'm sticking with Linux. And I've yet to see anything compelling enough on Windows or the MacOS to get me to abandon what I'm used to and switch to either.
He also thought he could do better than that wacky TCP/IP "standard". Anyone use NetBEUI lately?
Another problem is a lack of standardization in the platform itself. For example, you might allow a user to have gamepad control, but you have no guarantee how many buttons the pad might have, whether it has analog sticks or what arrangement they're in. To go a step further, if one owns a Playstation 2, one can buy almost any Playstation 2 game without worrying about having a sufficiently fast processor, graphics card and hard drive space. For the vast majority of console games, the console itself (and a TV) is all that's needed to play them.
PCs have many advantages as a gaming platform, as you've stated, but all that power and customization comes at a price. Though I believe both will continue to exist as seperate and viable gaming platforms for the foreseeable future.
Despite all that, I expect mp3 will remain the de-facto standard for lossy music due mostly to inertia and the ease of piracy compared to AAC and friends.
Ogg runs on more different portable players than AAC (Rio, iRiver and Neuros) but AAC wins the popularity contest by sheer volume of iPods. Still, out of all of them, crusty old mp3 is the only one I'd really consider to be "mainstream".
FLAC currently supports up to 8 seperate channels of audio with some room for expansion, if I'm reading the docs right. I assume one of those channels would be a .1 subwoofer channel, but that's not explicit in the spec.
To NASA, an actual fossil of something on Mars means big headlines and (more importantly) big funding. I can't find any reason they would destroy one that doesn't involve donning a tinfoil hat first.