The whole copy paste thing is so tired. It was debunked the first day someone used an iPhone... the device is perfectly usable without it
Your own usage may not require copy & paste, but many other tasks are tedious and impractical, if not impossible without it.
I have an iPod Touch and it's great for many things, but the lack of copy & paste is the #1 reason the iPhone is (still) not on my radar this time round.
I don't know how you twist "very interested" into "don't want to know", but that's ridiculous. Your interpretation of "once it's made public" as "whenever" rather than "once they let us see it" ignores context so blatantly, it's like you *want* to think Microsoft are... oh right, Slashdot, sorry. Carry on.
I would say rather that, since we cannot take in the infinite complexity and detail of Mandelbrots or pi, we have of necessity devised (lossy) windowing mechanisms to let us see/use a small part of it at a time. The system itself is no less complex for that; the limit is only with ourselves.
It's perfectly possible for insanely complex systems to arise from very simple rules. We cannot grasp the entirety of the system, but we can know exactly how to create it, or perhaps manipulate it.
It's all happened before. Faulty brakes, exploding fuel tanks, engines unexpectedly bursting into flames - car manufacturers have always had to deal with the consequences of design flaws, and so have drivers. The only solution is lots of careful testing. The consumer pays for it all in the end, of course.
Five years. Say, $10,000 each. There are about 250,000,000 cars in the USA, so replace 50,000,000 per year. That's $500 billion per year.
Not counting infrastructure, development cost, replacement cost of the whiz-bang robocars, etc.
Assuming we can build them for $10,000 and still meet all those legal requirements. Or were you assuming these things weren't going to be required to meet Federal Safety Requirements?
Thing is, we're already paying for all those things. New cars, research, infrastructure, replacement costs etc; those costs all apply to our current system too.
TFA is talking about reducing those costs through increased efficiency (and less accidents), not eliminating them altogether.
And assuming that people will buy them, if you make them available. That's a pretty big assumption.
The more costs like petrol go up, the more attractive a safe, ultralight electric gets. There's millions of people who commute daily or who take taxis daily who would already appreciate a lower-cost alternative.
the average five year old car is just going to be traded
I don't think he claimed all cars would be replaced in 5 years, or indeed ever. That was simply an indicator of how often the average car is upgraded.
Oh, and how had you planned on handling the first class-action lawsuit against the makers of these cars after the first 250 car pileup?
Same way 250 car pileups are handled now - insurance.
Liability fears are certainly a short-term obstacle, and insurance premiums will reflect that, but I don't think anyone doubts that robo-cars can and eventually will be significantly safer than the average fallible/inattentive/elderly/drunk human driver - and insurance premiums will reflect that too.
Digital video is all or nothing, meaning it will play or it will not play.
If you don't have enough bandwidth to watch digital video in real-time, you let it download first to a local buffer, then watch it.
Or had you forgotten that 50% of BitTorrent traffic is TV shows? Full-length, high-definition, 30+ Mbps movies over the internet are just as workable; it simply takes longer to buffer.
are the answer, and most motherboards have one or both of these built-in these days.
Never output an analogue signal from a PC, if you've got a choice. Internal D/A sucks, so do it externally. Either use decent powered speakers or an inexpensive integrated receiver, and the PC is removed from the sound quality equation completely.
You're not a gfx programmer yourself, are you? Otherwise you'd be linking to nVidia specifications, not consumer reviews. The relevent OpenGL extension is GL_ARB_color_buffer_float, which was indeed implemented for G70-class hardware as of R75 drivers (actually, GL_NV_float_buffer.txt was implemented even earlier).
Yes, you can use this for offscreen framebuffer objects and pbuffers, which is all you need when float texture blending for HDR rendering, but this is then tone-mapped to the 32bit displayable framebuffer for output. It's still not possible to get more than 8bit RGB actually out of the chip. Apart from SGI (who patented float rasterisation), I've only heard of an old Matrox card claiming to do real 10bit integer RGBA output (under quite specific conditions, apparently). Even nVidia's current high-end Quadros can't do it (well, unless you count 10bit 4:2:2 YUV from the SDI connector on some models). I'd welcome any comments showing real evidence to the contrary (preferably from someone who hasn't been repeatedly modded down as a troll), but I've never seen it done.
I can see it easily with my own eyes
As I said earlier, the "washed out blacks" you say you're seeing is poor colour mapping, not lack of deep colour.
The PS3 can decode TrueHD into PCM
There it is right there. Yes, the PS3 player supports TrueHD, but it does notpass it over the HDMI link - it gets decoded to good ol' HDMI 1.0-standard multichannel PCM first. Read the rest of the article - a Sony rep has confirmed this. And AFAIK the PS3 still does not yet support DTS-HD; it only passes through the DTS component. Incidentally, I found it ironic that you're accusing me of trolling:-)
You don't have to convince me that the PS3 is good hardware. It certainly has the edge in CPU power, and the Blu-Ray player is a valuable addition (though it's also the primary reason Sony released late and expensive, throwing away their lead from the PS2). Its graphics are debatable though, and most unbiased people consider PS3 and Xbox 360 GPU power to be roughly equivalent. More on topic, the PS3's HDMI port is more capable than the 360's (which can't even pass multichannel PCM) - but the HDMI 1.3 output is pure marketing, nothing more. Most TV sets (even those that accept deep colour) still can't actually display it, only use it for cleaner tweaking. Certainly no plasma or consumer LCD panel that I'm aware of is capable.
Just FYI, I've been working as a programmer in the film/video graphics industry for the last 12 years, so I'm very familiar with the difference between 8bit/component and deeper colours. "Washed out black and saturated regions" are actually symptoms of poor colour mapping, usually NTSC (16-235) video being displayed on a non-NTSC (0-255) monitor, and have nothing to do with 8bit's low dynamic range (which can manifest as visible banding in certain colour ranges).
While it's certainly true that HDMI 1.3 can support >8bits, that is of course no guarantee that all video passed along it is >8bits. The PS3 uses nVidia's RSX chip, which is based on the GeForce 7900, and like all nVidia chips of that era it uses a max 8bit per channel framebuffer (textures may be deeper, but not the framebuffer). Even potentially deep-colour Blu-Ray movies must be decoded and rendered into this 8bit framebuffer, so the PS3's output is bottlenecked at 8 bits. That's why you've never seen any articles actually confirming real deep-colour, only marketing literature and misleading online screenshots with "washed out blacks".
I always get a chuckle when PS3 fans bring up their beloved "HDMI 1.3" bullet point, because the fact is, it's only good for passing through TrueHD and DTS-HD audio. Oh, whoops...
If the gap continues to widen, and with Blu-ray ruling the hi def world there is no reason to doubt it will
Ah, you see there is the fallacy. Xbox 360 is not an HD-DVD player, it's a games player. Many PS3 owners fail to appreciate this distinction, but almost every single person who bought a 360 did so for the games, not for the movies.
Counter exclusives; there's GTS IV's episodic content, Too Human, Gears 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Halo Wars (& Halo: Chronicles?), Fable 2... but perhaps they're not "obvious" to you.
And as for your list of "issues" (color resolution? You're kidding, right?), the only significant issue to the games market is the failure rate, which is no longer a problem for new sales. The rest only seem to matter to the occasional troll like yourself.
Since when is malware such a big problem on WinMob, Symbian or Linux-based phones? Can't say I've heard of a single case. Symbian also implements app-signing, as of S60v3 and UIQv3, but they still allow open apps - and plugins. Besides, most malware spreads through code exploits, and the iPhone is as vulnerable to those as any other system.
Sorry, but the "Apple just wants to make life easier for you" line is so much BS. MacOS X isn't signed & locked down, why should "OS X in a mobile device" be so different? Are phones so much more mission-critical than computers? Am I too stupid to watch my own battery life? As I said elsewhere, insisting that *no* user is competant to manage his/her own device is just insulting.
What they want is to restrict the user's freedom of use simply in order to protect their (and their carriers') commercial interests, nothing more. There's no other reason to e.g. ban Skype over cell (which is encouraged on other platforms).
"It lets us create desktop class applications and networking, not the crippled stuff you find on most phones. These are real desktop applications." - S. Jobs, 2007
Yes, allowing the user to modify a device complicates support. But this can be dealt with - look at how e.g. HP and Dell manage user support nowadays? "Reset your system to the factory-shipped state with the included Restore partition - problem solved." This is even easier to do with the iPhone.
Thing is, users don't have to install any third-party software, if they want a "guaranteed quality experience". Why not simply allow people the choice about how they use their device? Hell, put up a warning on install - "You are now straying from the Apple Way - Abandon All Hope!" - but to assume that *every* customer is incapable of managing their own device is just insulting.
What bugs me most is how Apple apologists go on about how the iPhone is so great because "it's got an entire OS!" (like this is new) - and then claim that every limit on this OS, every restriction and removal of user choice, is actually somehow for the user's benefit. "No 3G? Might kill battery. No Flash? Might kill performance. No plugins? Might, um, break something." It really gets old.
Yeah yeah, vote with my wallet, I don't have to buy one. I'd really like to buy one, they've done so much right with it, but these decisions are deal-breakers for me, and the continual excuses don't give me hope that this will change.
No matter how fast the system responds, you can probably type the letters faster than you can dictate them.
Not if you're trying to type them on a phone.
Anyway, that's hardly a typical case; you wouldn't often be typing out huge regex strings or hash values on a phone. I don't think anyone's claiming that voice will completely replace keyboards (a basic touchscreen keyboard a la iPhone could still be used for rare cases), but voice input can make a great supplement to a keyboard, even on general-purpose PCs. Especially for non-touch-typers.
As a reasonably decent touch-typer, I could probably still speak this post faster than I typed it. I'd still use a mouse & keyboard to edit it, insert HTML tags etc, but I'd willingly use voice commands for certain commands like Preview, Post, Track 42 Left and Gimme a Hardcopy Right There...
While I certainly agree with your viewpoint in principle, more than a few "standards" are written in an insufficiently precise manner, and two fully "compliant" products may well turn out to be more than a little incompatible with each other, depending on how closely they guessed the intentions of the authors. A rigorous testing suite can help of course, but the more complex the standard, the greater the likelyhood of corner cases being missed, same as with code.
So are they compliant or not, when the real bugs are in the standard itself? The standard can be rewritten to be more precise of course, but occasionally the interpretation of the definition *should* be up for negotiation (lawmakers realise this, that's why we have courts).
I applaud your position of absolutes, but in the Greyscale World, the involvement of humans etc makes the attainment of absolutely 100% anything significant more of an iterative process than than a fact.
MS were pushing their VC-1 codec, but that's available on both formats, not just HD-DVD.
MS also licenced their HDi interactivity platform and authoring tools to HD-DVD.
Initial BD discs didn't have high-quality authoring tools available, so they had to use MPEG-2 instead. As a result, quality suffered.
Most BD discs now use H.264/AVC, not VC-1. H.264 is also available for HD-DVD.
MS initially adopted a neutral approach to format support. They changed to supporting HD-DVD, citing its greater consumer friendlyness (lack of region coding, and mandatory support for managed copy). The Xbox player was clearly a response to the PS3's built-in player, while still hedging their bets as to which format might win eventually.
The metal shaft fatigued and literally snapped off at the base, after a year or so's (not particularly heavy) use of each. Or I was just unlucky with defects in the metal.
Slashdot Mirror
... is a wood-fired silicon wafer manufactory, to go with it. Oh, and nail polish.
So, the ideal target market is probably a third-world Italian-derived family with a backyard silicon fab and a teenage daughter.
The iPhone's SDK is free to download - but you have to pay $99 if you want to actually distribute your application.
I'm not aware of any fees for Android distribution.
The whole copy paste thing is so tired. It was debunked the first day someone used an iPhone... the device is perfectly usable without it
Your own usage may not require copy & paste, but many other tasks are tedious and impractical, if not impossible without it.
I have an iPod Touch and it's great for many things, but the lack of copy & paste is the #1 reason the iPhone is (still) not on my radar this time round.
Somebody send it an Internet-based message to wake it, then.
I don't know how you twist "very interested" into "don't want to know", but that's ridiculous. Your interpretation of "once it's made public" as "whenever" rather than "once they let us see it" ignores context so blatantly, it's like you *want* to think Microsoft are... oh right, Slashdot, sorry. Carry on.
I would say rather that, since we cannot take in the infinite complexity and detail of Mandelbrots or pi, we have of necessity devised (lossy) windowing mechanisms to let us see/use a small part of it at a time. The system itself is no less complex for that; the limit is only with ourselves.
It's perfectly possible for insanely complex systems to arise from very simple rules. We cannot grasp the entirety of the system, but we can know exactly how to create it, or perhaps manipulate it.
By way of example: the Mandlebrot set.
It's all happened before. Faulty brakes, exploding fuel tanks, engines unexpectedly bursting into flames - car manufacturers have always had to deal with the consequences of design flaws, and so have drivers. The only solution is lots of careful testing. The consumer pays for it all in the end, of course.
Five years. Say, $10,000 each. There are about 250,000,000 cars in the USA, so replace 50,000,000 per year. That's $500 billion per year.
Not counting infrastructure, development cost, replacement cost of the whiz-bang robocars, etc.
Assuming we can build them for $10,000 and still meet all those legal requirements. Or were you assuming these things weren't going to be required to meet Federal Safety Requirements?
Thing is, we're already paying for all those things. New cars, research, infrastructure, replacement costs etc; those costs all apply to our current system too.
TFA is talking about reducing those costs through increased efficiency (and less accidents), not eliminating them altogether.
And assuming that people will buy them, if you make them available. That's a pretty big assumption.
The more costs like petrol go up, the more attractive a safe, ultralight electric gets. There's millions of people who commute daily or who take taxis daily who would already appreciate a lower-cost alternative.
the average five year old car is just going to be traded
I don't think he claimed all cars would be replaced in 5 years, or indeed ever. That was simply an indicator of how often the average car is upgraded.
Oh, and how had you planned on handling the first class-action lawsuit against the makers of these cars after the first 250 car pileup?
Same way 250 car pileups are handled now - insurance.
Liability fears are certainly a short-term obstacle, and insurance premiums will reflect that, but I don't think anyone doubts that robo-cars can and eventually will be significantly safer than the average fallible/inattentive/elderly/drunk human driver - and insurance premiums will reflect that too.
Yeah, that bit was awesome :-)
If you don't have enough bandwidth to watch digital video in real-time, you let it download first to a local buffer, then watch it.
Or had you forgotten that 50% of BitTorrent traffic is TV shows? Full-length, high-definition, 30+ Mbps movies over the internet are just as workable; it simply takes longer to buffer.
[citation needed]
are the answer, and most motherboards have one or both of these built-in these days.
Never output an analogue signal from a PC, if you've got a choice. Internal D/A sucks, so do it externally. Either use decent powered speakers or an inexpensive integrated receiver, and the PC is removed from the sound quality equation completely.
So how many petaflops will be needed before tasty wheat tastes like anything other than chicken?
At least, for Google AU.
Now I understand your sig better.
You're not a gfx programmer yourself, are you? Otherwise you'd be linking to nVidia specifications, not consumer reviews. The relevent OpenGL extension is GL_ARB_color_buffer_float, which was indeed implemented for G70-class hardware as of R75 drivers (actually, GL_NV_float_buffer.txt was implemented even earlier).
Yes, you can use this for offscreen framebuffer objects and pbuffers, which is all you need when float texture blending for HDR rendering, but this is then tone-mapped to the 32bit displayable framebuffer for output. It's still not possible to get more than 8bit RGB actually out of the chip. Apart from SGI (who patented float rasterisation), I've only heard of an old Matrox card claiming to do real 10bit integer RGBA output (under quite specific conditions, apparently). Even nVidia's current high-end Quadros can't do it (well, unless you count 10bit 4:2:2 YUV from the SDI connector on some models). I'd welcome any comments showing real evidence to the contrary (preferably from someone who hasn't been repeatedly modded down as a troll), but I've never seen it done.
As I said earlier, the "washed out blacks" you say you're seeing is poor colour mapping, not lack of deep colour.There it is right there. Yes, the PS3 player supports TrueHD, but it does notpass it over the HDMI link - it gets decoded to good ol' HDMI 1.0-standard multichannel PCM first. Read the rest of the article - a Sony rep has confirmed this. And AFAIK the PS3 still does not yet support DTS-HD; it only passes through the DTS component. Incidentally, I found it ironic that you're accusing me of trolling :-)
You don't have to convince me that the PS3 is good hardware. It certainly has the edge in CPU power, and the Blu-Ray player is a valuable addition (though it's also the primary reason Sony released late and expensive, throwing away their lead from the PS2). Its graphics are debatable though, and most unbiased people consider PS3 and Xbox 360 GPU power to be roughly equivalent. More on topic, the PS3's HDMI port is more capable than the 360's (which can't even pass multichannel PCM) - but the HDMI 1.3 output is pure marketing, nothing more. Most TV sets (even those that accept deep colour) still can't actually display it, only use it for cleaner tweaking. Certainly no plasma or consumer LCD panel that I'm aware of is capable.
Just FYI, I've been working as a programmer in the film/video graphics industry for the last 12 years, so I'm very familiar with the difference between 8bit/component and deeper colours. "Washed out black and saturated regions" are actually symptoms of poor colour mapping, usually NTSC (16-235) video being displayed on a non-NTSC (0-255) monitor, and have nothing to do with 8bit's low dynamic range (which can manifest as visible banding in certain colour ranges).
While it's certainly true that HDMI 1.3 can support >8bits, that is of course no guarantee that all video passed along it is >8bits. The PS3 uses nVidia's RSX chip, which is based on the GeForce 7900, and like all nVidia chips of that era it uses a max 8bit per channel framebuffer (textures may be deeper, but not the framebuffer). Even potentially deep-colour Blu-Ray movies must be decoded and rendered into this 8bit framebuffer, so the PS3's output is bottlenecked at 8 bits. That's why you've never seen any articles actually confirming real deep-colour, only marketing literature and misleading online screenshots with "washed out blacks".
I always get a chuckle when PS3 fans bring up their beloved "HDMI 1.3" bullet point, because the fact is, it's only good for passing through TrueHD and DTS-HD audio. Oh, whoops...
Ah, you see there is the fallacy. Xbox 360 is not an HD-DVD player, it's a games player. Many PS3 owners fail to appreciate this distinction, but almost every single person who bought a 360 did so for the games, not for the movies.
Counter exclusives; there's GTS IV's episodic content, Too Human, Gears 2, Ninja Gaiden 2, Halo Wars (& Halo: Chronicles?), Fable 2... but perhaps they're not "obvious" to you.
And as for your list of "issues" (color resolution? You're kidding, right?), the only significant issue to the games market is the failure rate, which is no longer a problem for new sales. The rest only seem to matter to the occasional troll like yourself.
Since when is malware such a big problem on WinMob, Symbian or Linux-based phones? Can't say I've heard of a single case. Symbian also implements app-signing, as of S60v3 and UIQv3, but they still allow open apps - and plugins. Besides, most malware spreads through code exploits, and the iPhone is as vulnerable to those as any other system.
Sorry, but the "Apple just wants to make life easier for you" line is so much BS. MacOS X isn't signed & locked down, why should "OS X in a mobile device" be so different? Are phones so much more mission-critical than computers? Am I too stupid to watch my own battery life? As I said elsewhere, insisting that *no* user is competant to manage his/her own device is just insulting.
What they want is to restrict the user's freedom of use simply in order to protect their (and their carriers') commercial interests, nothing more. There's no other reason to e.g. ban Skype over cell (which is encouraged on other platforms).
"It lets us create desktop class applications and networking, not the crippled stuff you find on most phones. These are real desktop applications." - S. Jobs, 2007
Oh the irony.
Yes, allowing the user to modify a device complicates support. But this can be dealt with - look at how e.g. HP and Dell manage user support nowadays? "Reset your system to the factory-shipped state with the included Restore partition - problem solved." This is even easier to do with the iPhone.
Thing is, users don't have to install any third-party software, if they want a "guaranteed quality experience". Why not simply allow people the choice about how they use their device? Hell, put up a warning on install - "You are now straying from the Apple Way - Abandon All Hope!" - but to assume that *every* customer is incapable of managing their own device is just insulting.
What bugs me most is how Apple apologists go on about how the iPhone is so great because "it's got an entire OS!" (like this is new) - and then claim that every limit on this OS, every restriction and removal of user choice, is actually somehow for the user's benefit. "No 3G? Might kill battery. No Flash? Might kill performance. No plugins? Might, um, break something." It really gets old.
Yeah yeah, vote with my wallet, I don't have to buy one. I'd really like to buy one, they've done so much right with it, but these decisions are deal-breakers for me, and the continual excuses don't give me hope that this will change.
Not if you're trying to type them on a phone.
Anyway, that's hardly a typical case; you wouldn't often be typing out huge regex strings or hash values on a phone. I don't think anyone's claiming that voice will completely replace keyboards (a basic touchscreen keyboard a la iPhone could still be used for rare cases), but voice input can make a great supplement to a keyboard, even on general-purpose PCs. Especially for non-touch-typers.
As a reasonably decent touch-typer, I could probably still speak this post faster than I typed it. I'd still use a mouse & keyboard to edit it, insert HTML tags etc, but I'd willingly use voice commands for certain commands like Preview, Post, Track 42 Left and Gimme a Hardcopy Right There...
While I certainly agree with your viewpoint in principle, more than a few "standards" are written in an insufficiently precise manner, and two fully "compliant" products may well turn out to be more than a little incompatible with each other, depending on how closely they guessed the intentions of the authors. A rigorous testing suite can help of course, but the more complex the standard, the greater the likelyhood of corner cases being missed, same as with code.
So are they compliant or not, when the real bugs are in the standard itself? The standard can be rewritten to be more precise of course, but occasionally the interpretation of the definition *should* be up for negotiation (lawmakers realise this, that's why we have courts).
I applaud your position of absolutes, but in the Greyscale World, the involvement of humans etc makes the attainment of absolutely 100% anything significant more of an iterative process than than a fact.
Well, not perhaps anything, that's a bit too absolute...
- MS were pushing their VC-1 codec, but that's available on both formats, not just HD-DVD.
- MS also licenced their HDi interactivity platform and authoring tools to HD-DVD.
- Initial BD discs didn't have high-quality authoring tools available, so they had to use MPEG-2 instead. As a result, quality suffered.
- Most BD discs now use H.264/AVC, not VC-1. H.264 is also available for HD-DVD.
MS initially adopted a neutral approach to format support. They changed to supporting HD-DVD, citing its greater consumer friendlyness (lack of region coding, and mandatory support for managed copy). The Xbox player was clearly a response to the PS3's built-in player, while still hedging their bets as to which format might win eventually.The metal shaft fatigued and literally snapped off at the base, after a year or so's (not particularly heavy) use of each. Or I was just unlucky with defects in the metal.
I did like the stick a lot though.