I can understand the appeal of singles. I've been buying albums for quite a while, but I think I'm going to switch. I've been burned far too many times lately when buying albums based on 1 single, only to discover it was the only half-decent song on the entire thing.
Having had a wedding recently, I know that, at least in Canada, the analogous license is around $50-75 for night. This is not very much, considering this was part of the cost of a $35k wedding. It actually cost me less than the license to serve liquor. Consider music and booze played a considerable part in everyone's enjoyment of the night, it was definitely money well spent.
It is a chicken and egg problem. I think the main question is if gaming is the cause or a symptom of the issue. The "think of the children" crowd seem to believe the former, that video games make people go nuts. Others think it is the latter, that video gaming is merely one manifestation of a kid's depression or mental problems. It is probably a bit of both, w/ video games letting one feed the other.
I really don't think anyone doubts that there will be better codecs than h.264. However, superior competitors have not stopped mp3 from still being widely used today. The topic of discussion is whether any of these codecs will succeed h.264 in the near future. Given Blu-Ray's h.264 support, you can bet that it won't going anywhere for a while.
Also, this isn't about whether other codecs (eg. WebM) will run alongside the current codec, but whether the current codec will be replaced in a decade. Certainly mp3 has lots of competitors, competitors that are far more worthy, but its still kicking. It's inertia has kept it going, even while being outpaced by others.
HEVC is aiming for a 50% reduction in bit rate for the same subjective quality, while increasing the complexity no more than 200%. A few candidate solutions have been able to get similar quality, at lower bit rates, all while decreasing the complexity. It's likely that by the time the standard is completed, it will be a lot better than h.264.
It sounds very cool, but you have to remember, this still hasn't even been finalized. Blu-Ray just came out and there are tons of players, which means devices capable of decoding h.264 have become commodities. A Blu-Ray player made even 5 years from now can use the same hardware to decode a Blu-Ray and a streaming h.264 (this h/w will also be fairly cheap). Adding all the necessary h/w support to save 50% bandwidth may not be worth it. Especially for the cheap stuff. I'm not suggesting h.264 is the end-all-be-all, i just don't think it'll disappear in a decade.
The reason that good codecs stick around is that there's a lot of hardware that will play/display them. A lot of people still have DVD-players so MPEG-2 still gets used because that's what the player expects, even though MPEG-2 isn't all that good compared to h.264. MP3 is still around because there are still tons of MP3 players and almost any device that can output audio continues to include MP3 support because it's cheap to do so.
Yeah, that's what I meant by inertia. Once everyone has adopted a standard, it is hard to change that unless there is significant improvements. People and companies have a vested interest in the codec, so minor performance improvements aren't going to help much.
Really? I'd think a good codec would have a longer useful life. I mean, mp3 is going on 17 years at this point. JPEG is around 20 years old. MPEG-2 is still being used in DVDs and BDs today and is 15 years old (BD requires h.264 support as well, though). I think you have the law of diminishing returns. How much better can we really do than h.264? It took a while to get audio right, but once it got 'good enough' (mp3), any minor improvements weren't enough to overcome the inertia mp3s had already gained. Same with JPEGs and PNGs. After a certain point, the minor improvements just aren't enough to win over the inertia gained by the previous codec. In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.
Facebook and MySpace are just a personal CMS. One that has free hosting, is stupidly simple to use, and also connects with all your friends and families CMSes as an added feature.
The language itself has 0 to do with its speed. As for the JVM, well Android uses the Dalvik VM. As for whether or not it is fast, there is really no technical reason it would be any slower than any other byte-code interpreter (eg..NET). So, given that, I take it you have a problem with any sort of bytecode, preferring only natively compiled software? That kind of goes against the hardware agnostic nature of Android, doesn't it? What would you suggest that an OS, whose major feature is cross-device compatability, do?
I said the exact same thing a few days ago to a friend. I commute on the train everyday (a 35 min express commute) and have yet to see anyone reading a book on an iPad. Everyone is just playing games or watching shows/movies.
Copyright is a societal construction. It doesn't matter what other societies do. We, as a group of people, in this society have all decided to agree that copying other people's work without their permission is a dick move. That people in China don't feel that way is immaterial to me. I don't want to live in China. Now, you may say that those other countries have saner laws. But I know that the vast majority of those countries have nowhere near the entertainment industry that we do.
What would really show those guys you've had enough of their bullshit is if you could gather the will power to cut yourself off their product completely. It isn't enough to just show them you don't want them, you need to show them you don't need them.
Animators spend a lot of time and effort making animals and inanimate objects more human. Animators are great at boiling down human emotions, expressions, gestures, etc. into the most basic elements, while still being recognizable as such. It takes a great deal of skill in a very competitive field.
I'd say a better analogy would simply be cats and dogs. Very different; they don't smile, or laugh, but for the most part, neither have too much trouble getting their basic emotions across to their owners.
Interestingly enough, my friend and I who regularly have a wings, beer, and games, prefer single-screen games, taking turns. We found that the lack of downtime from constantly playing in split-screen was cutting into the beer drinking and wing eating.
Unfortunately, the nursery I was at was staffed by summer students. At best I got an older woman who told me, she has these 2 and her cat is fine (even though one was actually poisonous to cats). Luckily, the ASPCA provides a great web site where I found this info out in a quick second or 2: http://www.aspca.org/pet-care/poison-control/plants/
I've bought several Linux games now, NWN (Diamond ed.), Quake 3 & 4, and Doom 3. For each, I actually bought the Windows version, then downloaded the Linux client for free from the developer's website. In NWN case, I actually only bought the Windows version for the license key, even the data was available for download.
I'm in the market for a new TV, but haven't done any research. I see a TV in BestBuy that is on sale, compare the price to other stores, see it actually is a good price, then buy it. If I didn't have my smart phone, I would've gone home and did some research first, rather than buy it right there. That means I'm out of the store, and that most likely means a lost sale for them.
Similarly, I was at a (plant) nursery this last spring. I had the impulse to buy some plants for my house, but since I have a cat, I wanted to make sure I didn't buy a plant that was poisonous to cats. I whipped out my phone, went on the web, and researched the plants I liked, one-by-one, to find the ones that were cat safe. In the end I bought $100 worth of plants. If I didn't have my smart phone, then I wouldn't have bought anything.
Walmart shoots for certain price points, and those are often met by low-quality items. I know that Walmart single-handedly saved Levis from bankruptcy. However, Levis actually had to create a whole new line of jeans for Walmart, because none of their jeans at the time could be made cheap enough for Walmart's asking price. If you are looking for a cheap commodity item, then Walmart is great. If you are looking for the best value for a non-commodity item, then Walmart may not be your best bet.
It's not just the toxins, but also the fertilizers that are really terrible. There run off (from farming) is a leading cause of eutrophication (think algae blooms).
That said, let me ask a question as someone w/ no background in the subject. Could genetically modified foods be the way out of this fertilizer/pesticide use? I know most organic food use different varieties than regular farming crops, since they need to be a little more resilient.
1) 95% of the people in the agency couldn't write HTML.
2) The majority of stuff we posted was not made by us.
3) A large number of documents were made before personal computers existed and are scanned in.
4) HTML does not make a good presentation format. Especially for the presenter who doesn't know that a world exist beyond what is on his desktop.
5) Read-only isn't necessarily bad, especially in regards to #2. Keep in mind this content also includes video and audio (although a large number of these are transcribed).
6) MS Word and other office applications are easy to use and effective.
7) Most of these documents have to be shared/edited amongst a dozen or more people (many who are not gov't employees). Working in Word or something similar is a necessity. Though some folks have started using Google Docs, there are all sorts of issues in Canada with having certain kinds of information on servers outside Canada.
8) Having a web developer convert all your documents cost a LOT of money.
All that said, a surprisingly large amount of content is in HTML or other highly accesible formats (they do take this very seriously). However, if we are talking about a dry, 100 page, outdated and obsolete report from 80 years ago that no one reads, then no, probably not worth it to worry about.
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Good for you. Around these parts a 500 sq. ft. condo costs $300k and you couldn't even book an officiant for a few hundred dollars.
I can understand the appeal of singles. I've been buying albums for quite a while, but I think I'm going to switch. I've been burned far too many times lately when buying albums based on 1 single, only to discover it was the only half-decent song on the entire thing.
Having had a wedding recently, I know that, at least in Canada, the analogous license is around $50-75 for night. This is not very much, considering this was part of the cost of a $35k wedding. It actually cost me less than the license to serve liquor. Consider music and booze played a considerable part in everyone's enjoyment of the night, it was definitely money well spent.
It is a chicken and egg problem. I think the main question is if gaming is the cause or a symptom of the issue. The "think of the children" crowd seem to believe the former, that video games make people go nuts. Others think it is the latter, that video gaming is merely one manifestation of a kid's depression or mental problems. It is probably a bit of both, w/ video games letting one feed the other.
I really don't think anyone doubts that there will be better codecs than h.264. However, superior competitors have not stopped mp3 from still being widely used today. The topic of discussion is whether any of these codecs will succeed h.264 in the near future. Given Blu-Ray's h.264 support, you can bet that it won't going anywhere for a while.
Also, this isn't about whether other codecs (eg. WebM) will run alongside the current codec, but whether the current codec will be replaced in a decade. Certainly mp3 has lots of competitors, competitors that are far more worthy, but its still kicking. It's inertia has kept it going, even while being outpaced by others.
HEVC is aiming for a 50% reduction in bit rate for the same subjective quality, while increasing the complexity no more than 200%. A few candidate solutions have been able to get similar quality, at lower bit rates, all while decreasing the complexity. It's likely that by the time the standard is completed, it will be a lot better than h.264.
It sounds very cool, but you have to remember, this still hasn't even been finalized. Blu-Ray just came out and there are tons of players, which means devices capable of decoding h.264 have become commodities. A Blu-Ray player made even 5 years from now can use the same hardware to decode a Blu-Ray and a streaming h.264 (this h/w will also be fairly cheap). Adding all the necessary h/w support to save 50% bandwidth may not be worth it. Especially for the cheap stuff. I'm not suggesting h.264 is the end-all-be-all, i just don't think it'll disappear in a decade.
The reason that good codecs stick around is that there's a lot of hardware that will play/display them. A lot of people still have DVD-players so MPEG-2 still gets used because that's what the player expects, even though MPEG-2 isn't all that good compared to h.264. MP3 is still around because there are still tons of MP3 players and almost any device that can output audio continues to include MP3 support because it's cheap to do so.
Yeah, that's what I meant by inertia. Once everyone has adopted a standard, it is hard to change that unless there is significant improvements. People and companies have a vested interest in the codec, so minor performance improvements aren't going to help much.
MPEG-2 video, not audio. Sorry for the confusion.
I've been using the term web app for quite a while too.
Really? I'd think a good codec would have a longer useful life. I mean, mp3 is going on 17 years at this point. JPEG is around 20 years old. MPEG-2 is still being used in DVDs and BDs today and is 15 years old (BD requires h.264 support as well, though). I think you have the law of diminishing returns. How much better can we really do than h.264? It took a while to get audio right, but once it got 'good enough' (mp3), any minor improvements weren't enough to overcome the inertia mp3s had already gained. Same with JPEGs and PNGs. After a certain point, the minor improvements just aren't enough to win over the inertia gained by the previous codec. In order to beat h.264, you have to be significantly better, and h.264 is pretty darn good.
Facebook and MySpace are just a personal CMS. One that has free hosting, is stupidly simple to use, and also connects with all your friends and families CMSes as an added feature.
The language itself has 0 to do with its speed. As for the JVM, well Android uses the Dalvik VM. As for whether or not it is fast, there is really no technical reason it would be any slower than any other byte-code interpreter (eg. .NET). So, given that, I take it you have a problem with any sort of bytecode, preferring only natively compiled software? That kind of goes against the hardware agnostic nature of Android, doesn't it? What would you suggest that an OS, whose major feature is cross-device compatability, do?
I said the exact same thing a few days ago to a friend. I commute on the train everyday (a 35 min express commute) and have yet to see anyone reading a book on an iPad. Everyone is just playing games or watching shows/movies.
Copyright is a societal construction. It doesn't matter what other societies do. We, as a group of people, in this society have all decided to agree that copying other people's work without their permission is a dick move. That people in China don't feel that way is immaterial to me. I don't want to live in China. Now, you may say that those other countries have saner laws. But I know that the vast majority of those countries have nowhere near the entertainment industry that we do.
What would really show those guys you've had enough of their bullshit is if you could gather the will power to cut yourself off their product completely. It isn't enough to just show them you don't want them, you need to show them you don't need them.
Animators spend a lot of time and effort making animals and inanimate objects more human. Animators are great at boiling down human emotions, expressions, gestures, etc. into the most basic elements, while still being recognizable as such. It takes a great deal of skill in a very competitive field.
I'd say a better analogy would simply be cats and dogs. Very different; they don't smile, or laugh, but for the most part, neither have too much trouble getting their basic emotions across to their owners.
Interestingly enough, my friend and I who regularly have a wings, beer, and games, prefer single-screen games, taking turns. We found that the lack of downtime from constantly playing in split-screen was cutting into the beer drinking and wing eating.
Unfortunately, the nursery I was at was staffed by summer students. At best I got an older woman who told me, she has these 2 and her cat is fine (even though one was actually poisonous to cats). Luckily, the ASPCA provides a great web site where I found this info out in a quick second or 2: http://www.aspca.org/pet-care/poison-control/plants/
I've bought several Linux games now, NWN (Diamond ed.), Quake 3 & 4, and Doom 3. For each, I actually bought the Windows version, then downloaded the Linux client for free from the developer's website. In NWN case, I actually only bought the Windows version for the license key, even the data was available for download.
I'm in the market for a new TV, but haven't done any research. I see a TV in BestBuy that is on sale, compare the price to other stores, see it actually is a good price, then buy it. If I didn't have my smart phone, I would've gone home and did some research first, rather than buy it right there. That means I'm out of the store, and that most likely means a lost sale for them.
Similarly, I was at a (plant) nursery this last spring. I had the impulse to buy some plants for my house, but since I have a cat, I wanted to make sure I didn't buy a plant that was poisonous to cats. I whipped out my phone, went on the web, and researched the plants I liked, one-by-one, to find the ones that were cat safe. In the end I bought $100 worth of plants. If I didn't have my smart phone, then I wouldn't have bought anything.
Walmart shoots for certain price points, and those are often met by low-quality items. I know that Walmart single-handedly saved Levis from bankruptcy. However, Levis actually had to create a whole new line of jeans for Walmart, because none of their jeans at the time could be made cheap enough for Walmart's asking price. If you are looking for a cheap commodity item, then Walmart is great. If you are looking for the best value for a non-commodity item, then Walmart may not be your best bet.
I know my bank does exactly that. First time logging in from a new computer and it asks me a few security questions.
It's not just the toxins, but also the fertilizers that are really terrible. There run off (from farming) is a leading cause of eutrophication (think algae blooms).
That said, let me ask a question as someone w/ no background in the subject. Could genetically modified foods be the way out of this fertilizer/pesticide use? I know most organic food use different varieties than regular farming crops, since they need to be a little more resilient.
Actually, Canadian-French keyboards aren't AZERTY, but still QWERTY (I've tried an AZERTY kb and, yes, they suck). http://frontype.com/keyboarding/540px-Computer-keyboard-Canadian-French.svg.png
At my last job I had to write content in both French and English. I bought a French-Canadian keyboard.
1) 95% of the people in the agency couldn't write HTML.
2) The majority of stuff we posted was not made by us.
3) A large number of documents were made before personal computers existed and are scanned in.
4) HTML does not make a good presentation format. Especially for the presenter who doesn't know that a world exist beyond what is on his desktop.
5) Read-only isn't necessarily bad, especially in regards to #2. Keep in mind this content also includes video and audio (although a large number of these are transcribed).
6) MS Word and other office applications are easy to use and effective.
7) Most of these documents have to be shared/edited amongst a dozen or more people (many who are not gov't employees). Working in Word or something similar is a necessity. Though some folks have started using Google Docs, there are all sorts of issues in Canada with having certain kinds of information on servers outside Canada.
8) Having a web developer convert all your documents cost a LOT of money.
All that said, a surprisingly large amount of content is in HTML or other highly accesible formats (they do take this very seriously). However, if we are talking about a dry, 100 page, outdated and obsolete report from 80 years ago that no one reads, then no, probably not worth it to worry about.