1. It would cost them additional finances to battle the decision, and what seals it all is the fact that most likely they would end up being slapped anyway. They knew this was not a battle they could win.
2. You can figure a company of the size of Microsoft by now knows to include and account for consequences of their practices, sucn as being slapped for rigging prices. I.e. like someone else said already, most likely their plan took account of a possible fine and its likely size. They just included it in the 'Likely/Uncertain Expenses' field when planning to rig prices.
Besides, that figure of above 280Wh/kg seems too good to be true. Best available consumer LiOn batteries for laptops (and that is the most used application of these to date) pack about 150Wh/kg give or take, which is about half of what you quoted. And laptop batteries are but at the edge of the development there.
A modern LiOn battery for Thinkpads (link below), rated at 14.4V and 5.2A/h (i.e ~75Wh) weighs 400g (most of it is LiOn cells) which puts it at about 187Wh/kg. Impressive, but still far from those 280Wh/kg you quoted. If laptop batteries were manufactured at that figure today, we would be getting at least 7 hours of battery life on an average plastic-fantastic consumer laptop at full brightness, wifi on and surfing away (consuming 20Wh on average)
That Panasonic battery is most likely experimental/lab product. Do you have links to some press-release information or something like that?
According to Wikipedia, and I for one, although not blindly, come to trust the source for the most part:
Energy per weight figure for LiOn: 100-160Wh/kg Energy per weight figure for LiPo: 130-200Wh/kg
Probably a bit outdated in light of advances, but still.
Also I cant seem to have read anything about optimizing LiPo for high power output. Part of the point with LiPo is replacement of heat-sensitive compount with another not-so heat sensitive compound for better safety, plus the fact that the polymer that is the chemistry can more easily take shape of whatever battery case you need, in contrast to prismatic LiOn cells, which leaves holes in between them, wasting space.
Lithium-oon polymer will take over soon enough. Compared to the good old Lithium-ion (not polymer), it packs more energy per weight and volume, does not enforce specific cell proximity and shape (semi-fluid?) and has lower risk of exploding. The price is already about the same.
Yeah, VLC is okay. Undoubtefully very useful piece of software, and covering needs for the most, although it has its share of somewhat serious drawbacks (for me), which recently have diverted me to MPlayer for Linux and/or dynamically linked FFMpeg and ffplay.
1. VLC embeds FFMpeg library, effectively freezing codec support and optimizations across a version. Since FFMpeg is patched quite frequently and none of these patches make it into a VLC release, because of the embedded FFMpeg snapshot, all these FFMpeg advances are no good in VLC, until next release. Excluding people who compile VLC of course, and can patch it themselves.
2. DVD playback image quality IS MARGINALLY WORSE than Windows Media Player 10 for instance. That is a very easily spottable fact. It may be that VLC configures mpeg decoder to use less sophisticated decoding settings, which result in suboptimal playback quality. Fire up the same mpeg stream in VLC and WMP, and you will most certainly spot the difference with your eyes.
3. The settings dialog is a bit too messy, and even where it seems to have gotten better, it lacks either proper documentation or sufficiently explanatory tooltips (i.e. context sensitive help)
4. All Gnome users are forced to use the QT interface, since QT is now the only one VLC uses, because some smart VLC developer has decided GTK was not goog enough perhaps. Or maybe simply he was Norwegian or German, and a big fan of KDE or QT. Either way, VLC developers may not have heard about user interface uniformity or they think all good people should use KDE or suck it up. I havent looked into the possibility to plug a GTK interface into it yet, has anyone gotten that to work? It does support skins and custom interfaces, so that should be possible as well.
And I am talking about the simple installation of VLC, not all those hackers compiling from source and replacing interfaces statically/dynamically or custom-adapting the MPEG decoder(s).
I find that MPlayer works much better for me. It has a neat minimal interface, CPU usage about 80% of VLC (and that often matters a whole lot), much better subtitle customization (placement, rendering, etc) and it has not made the idiotic decision to statically embed system-wide libraries just because it is *easier* to work with. Until developers are AFRAID of dynamic linking, because of compatibility issues, the libraries will not get better either. So, I am glad, MPlayer developers among others understand this.
As if millions of OpenOffice developers have cried out in terror "So, why have we've been developing OpenOffice for these last 10-15 years?!" and were suddenly silenced...
Never trust a company that puts its name into just about each of its products. That is just lame, and there is no reason the product should not turn out to be just as lame. With attitude like that, there seems to be a lot of immature pride in that startup. They have probably hit gold in some calculations/algorithm and rushed to announce it will change the world. The truth is probably much more modest - they do have some technology or IP to offer, but it will require a lot of effort and hard work to make a difference, and in light of that this is just another company that believes in miracles. Google did that, but the PageRank thing had a lot to offer when it was introduced. I don't think it is the same kind of case.
Adblock Plus rules. It is the new Internet. Sadly, not known to most, and probably hated by most content providers (naturally). It is true however that it shaves off halves, if not more, from loading times.
Then you have the NoScript, which shaves off another half of what is left. But NoScript is manually configured, and is hence not very usable, since you do not notice that there is something wrong with a NoScript blocked JavaScript ridden site, until something breaks and you have to click the "Temporarily allow all this page" or make it permanent for your favourite sites. Anyhow, hardly usable for novices.
As Linux based operating system usage is growing slowly but surely, it is irrelevant whether IE8 is faster than the competition (and we are talking tens of milliseconds, judging from the Microsoft table), because at least that competing product is available for Linux systems, while IE8 is not. Even if it is twice as fast, it is still a hard choice for those of us who are long used to navigate our Gnome and KDE desktops doing the same things people with Windows do. Not everybody will switch to using Wine+IE8 for that, and also it is not sure Wine will even run it at this point.
But then again, maybe IE8 under Wine is faster than native Firefox under Linux, so I may be eating my hat.
For all it is worth, Firefox has its share of problems, and I am a programmer. They have done so many strange decisions, like statically linking Cairo, polling stuff in the code instead of getting on with tickless kernels, disregarding laptop computer specifics with the aggressive idle hard disk and CPU usage etc. It will take months to clear that mindset and meet those problems face to face, instead of being stubborn about it and explain that "this is the way we do it".
I think seeking is something that can be sacrificed more often than not for the majority of users. Additionally, those who DO seek their streams, mostly care for relative time, and a somewhat imprecise too, which together means no biggie if the player skipped 100 frames instead of 10, i.e. error margin of about 3 seconds, which it would have to if it does not want to decode dependencies. Additionally (again) for those of us who like to seek and pause to see flashing boobies, a dependency-resolving seek option may help.
Also, I recall that VLC does not process dependencies, it just uses some (poor) error correction when jumping anywhere that is not a keyframe (I-frame in your and MPEG terms) - which results in wrong and funky YUV values and misplaced video blocks. Try seeking some MPEGS with really sparce I-frames and you should be able to notice that "feature". It is not that bad at work.
Stop the train, i want to get off...
on
Designer Babies
·
· Score: 1
"There is no gene for human spirit." -tagline for "Gattaca".
Recommended in light of this discussion.
And, yes, when I in my fifties will be making love to a rich insanely beautiful smart blue-eyed silk-black-haired goddess in her twenties that has everything but what she can't have (that a bitch aint it), I will be recalling these thoughts I have now.
Heeey, now you are not fair. I never said anything about heart bypass being playing god, that is fine and saves lives where lives are threatened. But the same path that crossed heart bypass eventually crosses more dangerous things, because we dont know where the balance is, where to stop and take a look behind and peek ahead. The oldest human quality. If A is good then any amount of A is good right? Wrong. In that same nature we have learnt everything from, it shows that certain compounds for example may strongly benefit certain lifeforms, but become strong poison to these same lifeforms once the saturation threshold passes certain level. I would take a hint from that.
"Think as infringing"? They do have to decrypt it first, dont they? What is the point of collecting IP adresses of all the other nodes, if they do not even know the contents?
Playing gods again, are we? Hope this one does not turn me into a viscious human animal much like those freaky infected characters from "I Am Legend". Did not look like those guys were having much fun with life. And all they wanted is a shot of a universal cancer vaccine.
Why not just peer-to-peer encrypt communication between BitTorrent nodes on the network? With keys that are distributed privately. Would that not completely hide the BitTorrent traffic making it impossible to eavesdrop at? If I sit by a router and see it transfer a blob of something that does not resemble anything else but an encrypted stream of something, I only have one choice - decrypt it first to see if the traffic belongs to something I consider illegal. But thats where cryptography comes in, right?
I strongly believe the reasons things are the way they are are buried deep in the human condition, which is also the most natural thing sadly, ironically or however it may be.
Usability is likely one of the hardest things to get right because it forces (anyone really) to look outside of their own perspective. I don't see this as a disease of just software developers, but everyone.
www.tunes.org and many brainy researchers came to a respectable conclusion that the only true way to give users their usability is to give them the interface to program their computer themselves to suit their access and interaction habits, however personal and perverse these are. The old idea that users are not programmers and programmers are not users falls away (just like it sort of does with Linux, which annoys great many trolls everywhere). You give them the interface that allows them to reprogram their software to suit them, beyond 'target audiences' and 'looking outside own perspective'. Computers, unlike furniture, can be reprogrammed, so they do not strictly require designers to set the interfaces in stone, and hope the majority will find them usable. Teach people how to easily adapt the interface to their needs - again, beyond moving toolbars, changing keyboard shortcuts and the already taught habit of moving windows around - and they will thank you for the most useful programming you did - you programmed the program to let its users to program its interface.
Life is full of junk. You see quality by comparing. The problem with Apple is, noone knows how good many of their products COULD be, because they like to make a really good point of making sure everybody understands what gets to have the Apple logo on it and what not. The iTunes, iWork, iPlay, iPhone, iSight, iThis and iThat. You can make apps for OSX, and iPhone, but the road to your end users is long and windy and Apple has placed some checkpoints along the way. Their own products however are like delicate newborns, kept in sterile environment so that it is both easier to take care of them, and so they won't die of sicknesses of the real world. They would not ever survive in a harsh Linux free roaming zoo ecosystem, for example. Even Microsoft is much better at it than Apple, granted they were FORCED to remove their delicate zoo fence. Apple IS AFRAID of junk, and they have taken the 'safe' bet to never deal with it, by closing their hardware and closing more of their software, so they can carefully create the environment that is clean enough for all their pets to live in. They call it quality and justify the higher price with the assurance that it is their engineers and designers who do a premium job. I call it the hospital and surgery is always expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
1. It would cost them additional finances to battle the decision, and what seals it all is the fact that most likely they would end up being slapped anyway. They knew this was not a battle they could win.
2. You can figure a company of the size of Microsoft by now knows to include and account for consequences of their practices, sucn as being slapped for rigging prices. I.e. like someone else said already, most likely their plan took account of a possible fine and its likely size. They just included it in the 'Likely/Uncertain Expenses' field when planning to rig prices.
...it appears they go about other things the same half-assed way they go about making their software.
Besides, that figure of above 280Wh/kg seems too good to be true. Best available consumer LiOn batteries for laptops (and that is the most used application of these to date) pack about 150Wh/kg give or take, which is about half of what you quoted. And laptop batteries are but at the edge of the development there.
A modern LiOn battery for Thinkpads (link below), rated at 14.4V and 5.2A/h (i.e ~75Wh) weighs 400g (most of it is LiOn cells) which puts it at about 187Wh/kg. Impressive, but still far from those 280Wh/kg you quoted. If laptop batteries were manufactured at that figure today, we would be getting at least 7 hours of battery life on an average plastic-fantastic consumer laptop at full brightness, wifi on and surfing away (consuming 20Wh on average)
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:item.detail?GroupID=38&Code=41U3197¤t-category-id=444C311FC39C49AEB4E7B2C239F0D071&model-number=7732
That Panasonic battery is most likely experimental/lab product.
Do you have links to some press-release information or something like that?
According to Wikipedia, and I for one, although not blindly, come to trust the source for the most part:
Energy per weight figure for LiOn: 100-160Wh/kg
Energy per weight figure for LiPo: 130-200Wh/kg
Probably a bit outdated in light of advances, but still.
Also I cant seem to have read anything about optimizing LiPo for high power output. Part of the point with LiPo is replacement of heat-sensitive compount with another not-so heat sensitive compound for better safety, plus the fact that the polymer that is the chemistry can more easily take shape of whatever battery case you need, in contrast to prismatic LiOn cells, which leaves holes in between them, wasting space.
I dunno, the LiPo batteries in Thinkpad X300 and X301 laptops seem to be doing their job very well.
Oil is so nineties...
Lithium-oon polymer will take over soon enough. Compared to the good old Lithium-ion (not polymer), it packs more energy per weight and volume, does not enforce specific cell proximity and shape (semi-fluid?) and has lower risk of exploding. The price is already about the same.
Things are always improving :-)
Lobbying - the 'unofficial' 'democracy'. Shaping societies since stone ages.
Newsflash: VLC has had fullscreeen control panel for at least two versions now. Where you been?
Yeah, VLC is okay. Undoubtefully very useful piece of software, and covering needs for the most, although it has its share of somewhat serious drawbacks (for me), which recently have diverted me to MPlayer for Linux and/or dynamically linked FFMpeg and ffplay.
1. VLC embeds FFMpeg library, effectively freezing codec support and optimizations across a version. Since FFMpeg is patched quite frequently and none of these patches make it into a VLC release, because of the embedded FFMpeg snapshot, all these FFMpeg advances are no good in VLC, until next release. Excluding people who compile VLC of course, and can patch it themselves.
2. DVD playback image quality IS MARGINALLY WORSE than Windows Media Player 10 for instance. That is a very easily spottable fact. It may be that VLC configures mpeg decoder to use less sophisticated decoding settings, which result in suboptimal playback quality. Fire up the same mpeg stream in VLC and WMP, and you will most certainly spot the difference with your eyes.
3. The settings dialog is a bit too messy, and even where it seems to have gotten better, it lacks either proper documentation or sufficiently explanatory tooltips (i.e. context sensitive help)
4. All Gnome users are forced to use the QT interface, since QT is now the only one VLC uses, because some smart VLC developer has decided GTK was not goog enough perhaps. Or maybe simply he was Norwegian or German, and a big fan of KDE or QT. Either way, VLC developers may not have heard about user interface uniformity or they think all good people should use KDE or suck it up. I havent looked into the possibility to plug a GTK interface into it yet, has anyone gotten that to work? It does support skins and custom interfaces, so that should be possible as well.
And I am talking about the simple installation of VLC, not all those hackers compiling from source and replacing interfaces statically/dynamically or custom-adapting the MPEG decoder(s).
I find that MPlayer works much better for me. It has a neat minimal interface, CPU usage about 80% of VLC (and that often matters a whole lot), much better subtitle customization (placement, rendering, etc) and it has not made the idiotic decision to statically embed system-wide libraries just because it is *easier* to work with. Until developers are AFRAID of dynamic linking, because of compatibility issues, the libraries will not get better either. So, I am glad, MPlayer developers among others understand this.
Can't wait to hear about Life of Brian. Before and after launch.
As if millions of OpenOffice developers have cried out in terror "So, why have we've been developing OpenOffice for these last 10-15 years?!" and were suddenly silenced...
Never trust a company that puts its name into just about each of its products. That is just lame, and there is no reason the product should not turn out to be just as lame. With attitude like that, there seems to be a lot of immature pride in that startup. They have probably hit gold in some calculations/algorithm and rushed to announce it will change the world. The truth is probably much more modest - they do have some technology or IP to offer, but it will require a lot of effort and hard work to make a difference, and in light of that this is just another company that believes in miracles. Google did that, but the PageRank thing had a lot to offer when it was introduced. I don't think it is the same kind of case.
And yes, I am serious.
Adblock Plus rules. It is the new Internet. Sadly, not known to most, and probably hated by most content providers (naturally). It is true however that it shaves off halves, if not more, from loading times.
Then you have the NoScript, which shaves off another half of what is left. But NoScript is manually configured, and is hence not very usable, since you do not notice that there is something wrong with a NoScript blocked JavaScript ridden site, until something breaks and you have to click the "Temporarily allow all this page" or make it permanent for your favourite sites. Anyhow, hardly usable for novices.
As Linux based operating system usage is growing slowly but surely, it is irrelevant whether IE8 is faster than the competition (and we are talking tens of milliseconds, judging from the Microsoft table), because at least that competing product is available for Linux systems, while IE8 is not. Even if it is twice as fast, it is still a hard choice for those of us who are long used to navigate our Gnome and KDE desktops doing the same things people with Windows do. Not everybody will switch to using Wine+IE8 for that, and also it is not sure Wine will even run it at this point.
But then again, maybe IE8 under Wine is faster than native Firefox under Linux, so I may be eating my hat.
For all it is worth, Firefox has its share of problems, and I am a programmer. They have done so many strange decisions, like statically linking Cairo, polling stuff in the code instead of getting on with tickless kernels, disregarding laptop computer specifics with the aggressive idle hard disk and CPU usage etc. It will take months to clear that mindset and meet those problems face to face, instead of being stubborn about it and explain that "this is the way we do it".
I think seeking is something that can be sacrificed more often than not for the majority of users. Additionally, those who DO seek their streams, mostly care for relative time, and a somewhat imprecise too, which together means no biggie if the player skipped 100 frames instead of 10, i.e. error margin of about 3 seconds, which it would have to if it does not want to decode dependencies. Additionally (again) for those of us who like to seek and pause to see flashing boobies, a dependency-resolving seek option may help.
Also, I recall that VLC does not process dependencies, it just uses some (poor) error correction when jumping anywhere that is not a keyframe (I-frame in your and MPEG terms) - which results in wrong and funky YUV values and misplaced video blocks. Try seeking some MPEGS with really sparce I-frames and you should be able to notice that "feature". It is not that bad at work.
"There is no gene for human spirit." -tagline for "Gattaca".
Recommended in light of this discussion.
And, yes, when I in my fifties will be making love to a rich insanely beautiful smart blue-eyed silk-black-haired goddess in her twenties that has everything but what she can't have (that a bitch aint it), I will be recalling these thoughts I have now.
Heeey, now you are not fair. I never said anything about heart bypass being playing god, that is fine and saves lives where lives are threatened. But the same path that crossed heart bypass eventually crosses more dangerous things, because we dont know where the balance is, where to stop and take a look behind and peek ahead. The oldest human quality. If A is good then any amount of A is good right? Wrong. In that same nature we have learnt everything from, it shows that certain compounds for example may strongly benefit certain lifeforms, but become strong poison to these same lifeforms once the saturation threshold passes certain level. I would take a hint from that.
"Think as infringing"? They do have to decrypt it first, dont they? What is the point of collecting IP adresses of all the other nodes, if they do not even know the contents?
Playing gods again, are we? Hope this one does not turn me into a viscious human animal much like those freaky infected characters from "I Am Legend". Did not look like those guys were having much fun with life. And all they wanted is a shot of a universal cancer vaccine.
A simple question from a noob in the area:
Why not just peer-to-peer encrypt communication between BitTorrent nodes on the network? With keys that are distributed privately. Would that not completely hide the BitTorrent traffic making it impossible to eavesdrop at? If I sit by a router and see it transfer a blob of something that does not resemble anything else but an encrypted stream of something, I only have one choice - decrypt it first to see if the traffic belongs to something I consider illegal. But thats where cryptography comes in, right?
I strongly believe the reasons things are the way they are are buried deep in the human condition, which is also the most natural thing sadly, ironically or however it may be.
www.tunes.org and many brainy researchers came to a respectable conclusion that the only true way to give users their usability is to give them the interface to program their computer themselves to suit their access and interaction habits, however personal and perverse these are. The old idea that users are not programmers and programmers are not users falls away (just like it sort of does with Linux, which annoys great many trolls everywhere). You give them the interface that allows them to reprogram their software to suit them, beyond 'target audiences' and 'looking outside own perspective'. Computers, unlike furniture, can be reprogrammed, so they do not strictly require designers to set the interfaces in stone, and hope the majority will find them usable. Teach people how to easily adapt the interface to their needs - again, beyond moving toolbars, changing keyboard shortcuts and the already taught habit of moving windows around - and they will thank you for the most useful programming you did - you programmed the program to let its users to program its interface.
Life is full of junk. You see quality by comparing. The problem with Apple is, noone knows how good many of their products COULD be, because they like to make a really good point of making sure everybody understands what gets to have the Apple logo on it and what not. The iTunes, iWork, iPlay, iPhone, iSight, iThis and iThat. You can make apps for OSX, and iPhone, but the road to your end users is long and windy and Apple has placed some checkpoints along the way. Their own products however are like delicate newborns, kept in sterile environment so that it is both easier to take care of them, and so they won't die of sicknesses of the real world. They would not ever survive in a harsh Linux free roaming zoo ecosystem, for example. Even Microsoft is much better at it than Apple, granted they were FORCED to remove their delicate zoo fence. Apple IS AFRAID of junk, and they have taken the 'safe' bet to never deal with it, by closing their hardware and closing more of their software, so they can carefully create the environment that is clean enough for all their pets to live in. They call it quality and justify the higher price with the assurance that it is their engineers and designers who do a premium job. I call it the hospital and surgery is always expensive.
He deserves this, right?
Yes, I used to do that too, somehow forgotten about it completely. I can confirm it works as advertised :-)