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User: arthurp

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  1. Re:So, its for the DRM then... on Why IE9 Will Not Support Codecs Other Than H.264 · · Score: 1

    Often the DRM does need to know about the stream it is encoding though. Because it will only encode part of the stream. This is true of DVDs for instance. If you let mplayer play an encoded DVD stream you will see fragments of frames. I bet the same if true of modern DRM. It uses up space to encrypt. So you just encrypt enough to make the stream unwatchable (like only only encrypt the key frames). And to do that you need to know the structure of the stream and implementing that for multiple different stream type requires being not lazy.

  2. Re:Thought experiment on LoTR Lawsuit Threatens Hobbit Production · · Score: 1

    I don't think you should hold the accountants liable. Hold the company liable. And punish it with death by revoking it's charter and liquidating it or something like that. And maybe the government could take control of the brand and certain critical assets so the company cannot just reappear under new ownership.

  3. Re:What's this picture for? on 14-Year-Old Boy Smote By Meteorite · · Score: 1

    He would have been hit by the super sonic shock wave it produced wouldn't he? It wouldn't have much mass, but it would carry a sh*t load of energy.

  4. It's in OpenJDK too on Java Gets New Garbage Collector, But Only If You Buy Support · · Score: 5, Informative

    G1 is in OpenJDK and JDK7 as well as the new JDK6. So it's open source. So fear not. I think that as people have mentioned below they are simply trying to protect themselves from people turning on this feature in a production environment and then bitching to them about it.

  5. Re:Glassfish is a Must-Have for Oracle on Will Oracle Keep Funding Sun's Pet Java Projects? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'd be really sad to see JavaFX die. I know people hate applets and although I don't agree with them I can't really blame them. Applets have done some serious sucking over the years. But I think times have changed a lot. And especially with all the new JVM languages popping up I'd be really sad to see Flash continue to be the goto technology for interactive graphical web apps. This is partly because I hate flash though.

  6. Re:The mass still has to come from somewhere on Future Astronauts May Survive On Eating Silkworms · · Score: 1

    The meat eating world always seems to ignore the human ability to eat plants. I'm not going to say we shouldn't use silk worms. But human can eat the plants too. It would provide more variety and would probably make the diet healthier. So:

    ----> while (1) { plants(Sun, Fertiziler); silkworm(Plants); humans(Silkworm, Plants); }

  7. Re:Only 50 years on Battlestar Galactica Gets Spinoff Prequel Series · · Score: 1

    It actually looks like the cylons gained sentients quite recently. Roughly 55 years before the series it looks like. The war 40 years before really was the first cylon war, cause they didn't exist before that.

    And although I think the idea of repeated hybridization is cool it's not applicable to the show.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylon_(reimagining)#History

  8. Re:Not bad, but... on What Needs Fixing In Linux · · Score: 1

    I thought that they minimized it in ways that the userspace switch could not. But I don't know much about the subject

    Regardless it seems if the kernel knew about the driver processes it could reduce there latency even below what is possible with the "realtime" scheduler modes. Basically it could force a context switch to the driver as soon as important events occurred.

  9. Re:Not bad, but... on What Needs Fixing In Linux · · Score: 1

    I would like to see a stabilized and standardized device interface API for standard devices, something exposing a limited subset of the kernel that would simplify simple devices like block, serial, and network types of devices.

    FUSD. Seriously, closed source drivers running in kernel space are a bad idea. If companies want to release closed source drivers, and apparently they do since this whining about the lack of a fixed-forever ABI comes up every now and again, then those drivers should run in their own process space and not as part of the kernel.

    That is a good point. However it might be worth considering having a hooks in the kernel to make interfacing to the user-space process easier. I think there is work on this going on and that is great. Low-bandwidth/high-latency devices will be able to move into userspace.

    However I never want to see a video or audio driver running in userspace. I could be OK with a those drivers running in a "driver-space" if you will. Something like a microkernel. But userspace has way to high of latency and context switch costs.

    I'm not sure what the solution is, but closed source drivers are not going to go away, so we will need a way to handle it. As crazy as it sounds maybe a microkernel type interface would be good. It would allow drivers to run outside the kernel without the cost of a full userspace context switch.

  10. Re:fairness on Bittorrent To Cause Internet Meltdown · · Score: 1
    I think that a UDP bulk transfer protocol would be cool for a very different reason: Multicast

    Wouldn't it be cool if a seeder could queue up lists of people who want a specific small hunk of a block and then send it out to all at once using multicast? It seems like that could actually have a pretty big band-width advantage over TCP. It would be hard to design. Since it would need to implement traffic shaping and all that, but I think it could actually produce a net reduction in bandwidth usage especially at the seed.

    In fact it might be able to allow a single seed to appear to upload at many times its real bandwidth.

    -Arthur

  11. Re:1. isolate the genes on Rainforest Fungus Synthesizes Diesel · · Score: 1

    If you are converting biomass that would be well-sequestered, then you lose, but I tend to doubt that is a major problem, unless you tr to cut down a rain forest to get your biomass.

    I would not put that past people.

    That is exactly what I was getting at. But I didn't explain it well.

  12. Re:1. isolate the genes on Rainforest Fungus Synthesizes Diesel · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It would be carbon neutral only if the fuel was being created from biomass that was specifically grown for that purpose, in this case carbon would be grabbed from the air and then made into fuel. If the biomass would have existed anyway (this includes garbage even) then what you are doing to converting otherwise solid carbon (== not a problem for global warming) into gaseous carbon (== a problem) and that would not be carbon neutral.

  13. Re:Containers on Microsoft, Google Battle Over Energy Efficiency · · Score: 2, Informative

    Almost all containers used in the US are recycled. It's cheaper in general to make new containers in China to ship good to the US than to ship the empty containers back to China. So there is a build up of containers in the US. So used containers are really cheap.

  14. This is absurd on Qantas Blames Wireless For Aircraft Incidents · · Score: 1

    As far as I know all avionics are required to be shielded pretty heavily. It seems like the absolutely worst case should be that the radio gets slightly more crackly. And that wouldn't make a plane loose altitude.
    This seems to me to be an excuse by the airline. There is probably some issue with the Airbus planes and they don't want to have to officially admit that. Hopefully they are working on fixing it, but they should really just some out and say it instead of trying to blame a passenger.
    Some airlines are starting to put Wifi hotspots and cellphone nano-cells on planes. That is the future in my book, not totally banning all wireless on planes. And that is what will happen if airlines start blaming wireless for problems.

  15. Re:Splashing meteorites... on Unbelievably Large Telescopes On the Moon? · · Score: 1
    They could use a very viscus liquid so the dust would just bounce off and not deform the mirror much.

    I've always wondered why they don't just spin liquid glass or metal and then let it harden. Then plate it with a reflective surface to make it into a mirror. It seems like it would be a fairly simple and easy way to make a big mirror on site.

  16. Re:hurp on Prevent Gmail From Emailing Under the Influence · · Score: 1

    And people will go to some pretty long lengths to get Vista off a machine. So maybe this would be the push needed to get that type of problem solved.

    "Oh my god I must prove the Riemann Zeta Hypothesis or be stuck forever on Vista!"

    -Arthur

  17. Re:Another revolutionary technology... on Scientists Claim Breakthrough On Holographic Display · · Score: 1

    The thing about porn pushing the industry is that it isn't actually computer related. Porn is one reason VHS won out over Betamax (Sony didn't allow it on Betamax, the same thing almost happened with BluRay BTW). Also the porn industry were early adopters of HD video. So although it is try that porn didn't effect the spread of computers much, porn has had a lot of effect on the techniques used for video distribution. And I wouldn't doubt that they would jump at the chance to do holographic porn and have a significant effect on the development of the technology

  18. Lots of pretty picture = good VR on Mars Rover's Epic Trek For the Crater Endeavor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think they should make a point of taking a full panoramic image every 10m or so. That way we can add that to the current data on mars and create a *really* nice VR version of that area. Being able to "walk" the same path as Opportunity in VR seems like it is a worthy PR and artistic goal and certainly wouldn't hurt the science of the mission either.

  19. This has also been done with Java on Microsoft Singularity Now "Open" Source · · Score: 1
    There is a similar project that is a Java based kernel. It is called JX and is truly open-source (GNU GPL).

    I think this is a very neat idea. Just one more step on the progression of languages down the software stack. A while back no one would have dreamed of writing OS code in anything but assembler. Now the Linux scheduler is written in C. Times change. Maybe a managed OS will be future. Garbage collection is really nice to have.