Microsoft had bet that high DPI displays (significantly greater than 100) would become common, even going to far as to upscale/resample program windows that dont declare themselves as "DPI aware" within their manifest.
The reality is that the only place you see 200DPI or better is in cell phones and MP3 players.
As many programmers will tell you, the DPI setting in Windows is a problematic farce.
The most important thing to understand is that it lies. It has absolutely nothing to do with the DPI of the display. If the setting happens to match the displays actual DPI then its merely a coincidence. This value is actually used both in practice, and as a matter of policy, as a global scaling factor. So people with bad eyesight are EXPECTED to have this value set to completely lie its ass off.
Instead of blindly betting the farm on higher DPI displays becoming common, they should have solidified what this value means, to an actual DPI setting (with prominent warning that if its set incorrectly that some programs may not render themselves in a satisfactory manner.)
If I am expected to make "DPI aware" programs (and I am, thanks Microsoft), then at least give me access to an actual god damn DPI. If you want a global scaling factor, you can have one of them in addition to the DPI setting.
WARNING: *** Text in this post may appear larger, or smaller, than it is.
I do not believe that ReadyBoost caches frequently used files because thats not the problem that it is solving. I believe that you are thinking of SuperFetch (which itself does cooperate with ReadyBoost.)
ReadyBoost is an attempt to reduce latency by leveraging devices that have very fast seek times, such as USB thumb drives and SD cards.
These same devices often have *horrible* throughput. Typically only a few megabytes per second, pretty much never anywhere near as fast as even the slowest hard drives. The bad throughput means that they cannot be used to effectively cache frequently used files, but instead only small parts of files. The first few sectors of sequentially read blocks get cached here, but for bulk moving of data into memory the HD must still be relied upon.
So readyboost drives mostly cache just the first few sectors of the files you use, along with a minority of hot sectors.
It would probably be a dump of a large, fully annotated and understood database system. Or there are plenty of files I have that are several hundred megabytes where the columns are x y z and are motion tracking files, which are fully annotated in perfect order as far as protocol is concerned, but if I simply handed you that file with no preparation of what any of it actual is, then you have no idea what the hell to do with it.
How hard is it to create readme.txt, and then type in "This is motion tracking data, format is X Y Z, its from..."
Give me a fucking break. Stop making excuses for why you do not want to release your data. Your excuses are so weak that it is clearly obvious that YOU SIMPLE DONT WANT TO RELEASE THE DATA. YOU SEEM TO THINK THAT ITS YOURS.
BUT WHERE? I can't argue that it is research time.
Yes you can. It *is* research time. Keeping your data organized and usable IS PART OF RESEARCH.
Why? If that was not stipulated in the grant?
Because you are doing science, asshole. Thats right.. the gloves are off, because you are also doing it on public money. You are doing FUCKING SCIENCE. THE DATA IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING yet you seem to think that you get to treat the data like shit, being completely careless with it, not even having any of it organized,..
Its this fucking simple:
YOU ARE NOT THE RESEARCH. THE DATA IS. IT SHOULD ALWAYS BE ORGANIZED, EVEN IF YOU ARE A SLOPPY INCONSIDERATE FUCK THAT WASTES PUBLIC MONEY.
As per FoI requests, data needs to be prepared in some form. I couldn't just send you a 60GB.txt file full of numbers and no information about it.
Why is your data in a 60GB completely undocumented text file? You've already failed to fulfill your responsibility if thats the state its currently in.
Where do I account for the time spent on giving out data because some random person wants it?
Everywhere. You account for all of your time.
If the data is somehow in some random inexplicable state right this second, and your excuse is that you didnt have enough money allocated for "community outreach", then I believe that you should have your grant money pulled immediately.
In the private sector, YOU GET FIRED if your data never makes it to a usable state. There isnt special "outreach" time for this. Keeping careful and detailed track of your data IS PART OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROCESS and is DONE IMMEDIATELY. This falls under "research." You keep your shit organized.
That community outreach time you need.. if you dont have enough to take that ALREADY carefully documented and tracked data that you ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE and stick it on an FTP site, then you need more than 15 minutes of time. Is that what you have? Less than 15 minutes of "outreach" time? Really?
Stop making excuses. Put the data up. Click click click. Done.
That is indeed an issue. Presumably the methodology is already published, as is the rule for scientific papers.
There is at least one case in =two climate research papers where what the methodologies claimed was impossible because the data to do it didn't even exist. This didn't come out for 16 years, and was only discovered because a FOI request was finally honored.
In this case, the authors of the papers had claimed that the station data that they used was from stations that had "few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times." (quote from one paper) and "selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times" (quote from the other paper)
"Hey! We only used great data!"
Now, these two authors used the same data, and one of these authors was actually a co-author of the other paper. These authors are Jones (hello climate gate) and Wang.
Now, they finally sourced the data as being from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which coincedentally had co-published a report with the US Department of Energy at about the same time as those two research papers, stating quite specifically that DATA OF THAT QUALITY DID NOT EXIST. The report was specifically about the quality of the Chinese climate record.
Both papers concluded that the Urban Heat Island effect was minimal. Too bad that they didn't actually have data good enough to draw that conclusion. They said they did, tho.
None of this would have come out if it wasn't for the Freedom of Information Act. Jones and Wang both obstructed the release of the data (denying FOI requests, etc) for nearly 2 decades.
This all came out several years ago, but the media didnt give a fuck. They did care about hacked emails tho. Go figure. Now, as it turns out it probably wasn't Jones who was lying his ass off. Wang was a co-author on Jones's paper and supplied the "data." Jones gets credit for having his email hacked.
Failure to beat the competition results in no grants, no tenure and stuck in a dead-end role somewhere far less exciting.
Good. Fuck 'em.
It used to be that a scientist didn't make a name for himself unless he was remarkably more brilliant than his contemporaries. Now they get to make a name for themselves by social networking, and then conspiring within that good ol' boy club that they form, to maximize grant money.
Fuck that. Thats got to stop. If you want to play it that way, go into the private sector.
Now, do you REALLY want us to spend a serious fraction of our time and money preparing and making available the raw data in a form which will probably be useless to you instead of analysing and coming up with results which you are far more likely to find useful?
So you are the grand arbiter, eh? YOU decide whats useless to others and what isn't, on my dime?
You are soaking up public money, so there is a very serious conflict of interest if YOU get to play arbiter. Obviously you think that you are smarter than every other person, but here you are wanting to 'prepare raw data.'
Its raw data. You don't need to prepare it. You just make it available. Its really that fucking simple. Not so smart.
..and it doesnt really matter if it was answered or not by the paper.
Knowing what to do with data is not a prerequisite for obtaining it. Once you open THAT can of worms then you need an arbiter somewhere making judgments about who does and doesnt know what to do with the data, which is exactly what these fucking scientists in TFA were trying to do, and that got bitch slapped for it.
Access the raw data we have published at setiQuest and show us how to process it in new ways, find signals that our current signal detection algorithms are missing.
I suggest looking for data that fits too closely with white noise. Modern human digital data is highly compressed, and as such is nearly indistinguishable from random bits. Images, Music, Movies... the bulk of the traffic on the internet looks like random bits.
..and then the boss shows up at your trial after the shit hits the fan and says "What envelope? I have no idea what he is talking about. That man destroyed our data!"
And I quote: "There is an App for just about anything. Only on the iPhone."
Re:BS on 200GB/year for audio
on
Life Recorder
·
· Score: 1
I don't see a bitrate given in the new, original, or secondary articles.
Nobody said he gave a bitrate.
But if you take 200 gigabytes (base-2, gibibytes) and divide by the seconds in the year, you get 6805
Which is 54.4kbps. Sure, maybe he meant 56kbps (the next valid MP3 bitrate), but 64kbps is probably what he meant because he is just some neophyte that calculated the storage cost of a video file that he had on hand. You can tell because he doesnt justify anything and lacks any actual understanding in what he is talking about.
And nothing said it had to be uncompressed.
Nobody said it had to be uncompressed. Not even me. I pointed out that for the purposes he is talking about, you can go ahead and use uncompressed audio and STILL meet the purpose requirement of a "Life Recorder" in the space requirement he is theorizing.
We expect about 10:1 compression on average with MP3 files, so essentially he was either (A) grossly overestimating the quality required, (B) not knowing that at least 10:1 compression can be expected, or (C) based his calculations on an arbitrary video file that had absolutely no bearing on the requirements of a "Life Recorder."
I'm guessing its (C), leading to both (A) and (B) as well.
BS on 200GB/year for audio
on
Life Recorder
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The assumption the author is making is that there is always something to record. I'm pretty sure that the 1/3rd of the year that a person sleeps will contain highly compressible audio, not to mention the fact that he seems to think that a 64kbps bitrate is a requirement.
Regular telephone quality audio (from the "you can hear a pin drop" era) was considered to be about 8,000 samples per/second, which is in fact 64kbps for an 8-bit sample depth. This is uncompressed recording here. TFA can't beat uncompressed telephone quality audio? Really?
Steam actually adds value (download to any PC anywhere, never need a CD, etc) in compensation for the loss of certain freedoms associated with their DRM system (no resale, etc.)
Nobody elses DRM is adding value.
An example of the value its given me: I purchased Left 4 Dead from Walmart a year or so ago I guess, but when I opened the product, the CD was broken. "Aww crap!".. This stuff happens.. but wait.. its a steam game! No need to go back to the store! Launch steam, enter the product key, latest version downloads with all patches applied, and off I went killing zombies....
There is plenty of demand for a high end photo manipulation and editing package.
While gimp is pretty good (it would certainly take a man year or two to catch up to it), its still like 10 years behind photoshop and even paintshop in most of the meaningful ways. The problem is that the demands being filled is not the same.
The developers of GIMP are fulfilling developer demand. There is no advantage to fulfilling professional or consumer demand, even though there is PLENTY of both.
A telling statement. If enough programmers find the program useful, but in need of improvement, then it is very likely some of them will improve it. If enough non-programmers think that way then they can pay to have it improved. If this doesn't happen then maybe the program wasn't so very important after all.
One of these models is better for the consumer than the other:
Vendors each compete to satisfy demand.
Demand selects from competing vendor bids.
The former is the retail side of the closed source world as it is today, springing to life variations on the theme which then competes with the others.
The later is the contract driven side of the closed source world, springing to life a single solution which often contains the absolute minimum feature set required to satisfy the contract.
While both are used in practice today, one of them requires lawyers and other expensive shit just to get started.
Also, open-source software doesn't come in 5 different versions (e.g. Home, Studio, Office, Professional,...), it comes in 1 version, with all the features in it, what one guy smarter than me called "Awesome Edition".
What's your point, that we should encourage closed drivers by setting the APIs in stone for years on end?
I think the point is that the driver ABI doesnt need to change every cycle just to discourage closed drivers.
..and here is an idea.. an operating system can support more than one driver model and ABI. Pick one, call it BIN_DRV_1. Declare it to be supported for at least N > 5 years, and then continue to fuck around with the SRC_DRV one. After 5 or more years, when there seems to be a significant advantage if BIN_DRV_1 had the same features as SRC_DRV, you define BIN_DRV_2 and then support that one for a long time.
Right now what you have is a catch-22 situation where vendors don't want to write drivers because of low market share, while market share remains low partly because vendors don't want to write drivers.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft had bet that high DPI displays (significantly greater than 100) would become common, even going to far as to upscale/resample program windows that dont declare themselves as "DPI aware" within their manifest.
The reality is that the only place you see 200DPI or better is in cell phones and MP3 players.
As many programmers will tell you, the DPI setting in Windows is a problematic farce.
The most important thing to understand is that it lies. It has absolutely nothing to do with the DPI of the display. If the setting happens to match the displays actual DPI then its merely a coincidence. This value is actually used both in practice, and as a matter of policy, as a global scaling factor. So people with bad eyesight are EXPECTED to have this value set to completely lie its ass off.
Instead of blindly betting the farm on higher DPI displays becoming common, they should have solidified what this value means, to an actual DPI setting (with prominent warning that if its set incorrectly that some programs may not render themselves in a satisfactory manner.)
If I am expected to make "DPI aware" programs (and I am, thanks Microsoft), then at least give me access to an actual god damn DPI. If you want a global scaling factor, you can have one of them in addition to the DPI setting.
WARNING: *** Text in this post may appear larger, or smaller, than it is.
I do not believe that ReadyBoost caches frequently used files because thats not the problem that it is solving. I believe that you are thinking of SuperFetch (which itself does cooperate with ReadyBoost.)
ReadyBoost is an attempt to reduce latency by leveraging devices that have very fast seek times, such as USB thumb drives and SD cards.
These same devices often have *horrible* throughput. Typically only a few megabytes per second, pretty much never anywhere near as fast as even the slowest hard drives. The bad throughput means that they cannot be used to effectively cache frequently used files, but instead only small parts of files. The first few sectors of sequentially read blocks get cached here, but for bulk moving of data into memory the HD must still be relied upon.
So readyboost drives mostly cache just the first few sectors of the files you use, along with a minority of hot sectors.
It would probably be a dump of a large, fully annotated and understood database system. Or there are plenty of files I have that are several hundred megabytes where the columns are x y z and are motion tracking files, which are fully annotated in perfect order as far as protocol is concerned, but if I simply handed you that file with no preparation of what any of it actual is, then you have no idea what the hell to do with it.
How hard is it to create readme.txt, and then type in "This is motion tracking data, format is X Y Z, its from ..."
Give me a fucking break. Stop making excuses for why you do not want to release your data. Your excuses are so weak that it is clearly obvious that YOU SIMPLE DONT WANT TO RELEASE THE DATA. YOU SEEM TO THINK THAT ITS YOURS.
BUT WHERE? I can't argue that it is research time.
Yes you can. It *is* research time. Keeping your data organized and usable IS PART OF RESEARCH.
Why? If that was not stipulated in the grant?
Because you are doing science, asshole. Thats right.. the gloves are off, because you are also doing it on public money. You are doing FUCKING SCIENCE. THE DATA IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING yet you seem to think that you get to treat the data like shit, being completely careless with it, not even having any of it organized, ..
Its this fucking simple:
YOU ARE NOT THE RESEARCH. THE DATA IS. IT SHOULD ALWAYS BE ORGANIZED, EVEN IF YOU ARE A SLOPPY INCONSIDERATE FUCK THAT WASTES PUBLIC MONEY.
Why are you running a 64-bit browser? Do you often have over 4 gigs of web pages loaded?
As per FoI requests, data needs to be prepared in some form. I couldn't just send you a 60GB .txt file full of numbers and no information about it.
Why is your data in a 60GB completely undocumented text file? You've already failed to fulfill your responsibility if thats the state its currently in.
In science, WE DOCUMENT THE DATA.
Where do I account for the time spent on giving out data because some random person wants it?
Everywhere. You account for all of your time.
If the data is somehow in some random inexplicable state right this second, and your excuse is that you didnt have enough money allocated for "community outreach", then I believe that you should have your grant money pulled immediately.
In the private sector, YOU GET FIRED if your data never makes it to a usable state. There isnt special "outreach" time for this. Keeping careful and detailed track of your data IS PART OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROCESS and is DONE IMMEDIATELY. This falls under "research." You keep your shit organized.
That community outreach time you need.. if you dont have enough to take that ALREADY carefully documented and tracked data that you ARE SUPPOSED TO HAVE and stick it on an FTP site, then you need more than 15 minutes of time. Is that what you have? Less than 15 minutes of "outreach" time? Really?
Stop making excuses. Put the data up. Click click click. Done.
That is indeed an issue. Presumably the methodology is already published, as is the rule for scientific papers.
There is at least one case in =two climate research papers where what the methodologies claimed was impossible because the data to do it didn't even exist. This didn't come out for 16 years, and was only discovered because a FOI request was finally honored.
In this case, the authors of the papers had claimed that the station data that they used was from stations that had "few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times." (quote from one paper) and "selected stations have relatively few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location, or observation times" (quote from the other paper)
"Hey! We only used great data!"
Now, these two authors used the same data, and one of these authors was actually a co-author of the other paper. These authors are Jones (hello climate gate) and Wang.
Now, they finally sourced the data as being from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which coincedentally had co-published a report with the US Department of Energy at about the same time as those two research papers, stating quite specifically that DATA OF THAT QUALITY DID NOT EXIST. The report was specifically about the quality of the Chinese climate record.
Both papers concluded that the Urban Heat Island effect was minimal. Too bad that they didn't actually have data good enough to draw that conclusion. They said they did, tho.
None of this would have come out if it wasn't for the Freedom of Information Act. Jones and Wang both obstructed the release of the data (denying FOI requests, etc) for nearly 2 decades.
This all came out several years ago, but the media didnt give a fuck. They did care about hacked emails tho. Go figure. Now, as it turns out it probably wasn't Jones who was lying his ass off. Wang was a co-author on Jones's paper and supplied the "data." Jones gets credit for having his email hacked.
Failure to beat the competition results in no grants, no tenure and stuck in a dead-end role somewhere far less exciting.
Good. Fuck 'em.
It used to be that a scientist didn't make a name for himself unless he was remarkably more brilliant than his contemporaries. Now they get to make a name for themselves by social networking, and then conspiring within that good ol' boy club that they form, to maximize grant money.
Fuck that. Thats got to stop. If you want to play it that way, go into the private sector.
Now, do you REALLY want us to spend a serious fraction of our time and money preparing and making available the raw data in a form which will probably be useless to you instead of analysing and coming up with results which you are far more likely to find useful?
So you are the grand arbiter, eh? YOU decide whats useless to others and what isn't, on my dime?
You are soaking up public money, so there is a very serious conflict of interest if YOU get to play arbiter. Obviously you think that you are smarter than every other person, but here you are wanting to 'prepare raw data.'
Its raw data. You don't need to prepare it. You just make it available. Its really that fucking simple. Not so smart.
..and it doesnt really matter if it was answered or not by the paper.
Knowing what to do with data is not a prerequisite for obtaining it. Once you open THAT can of worms then you need an arbiter somewhere making judgments about who does and doesnt know what to do with the data, which is exactly what these fucking scientists in TFA were trying to do, and that got bitch slapped for it.
Access the raw data we have published at setiQuest and show us how to process it in new ways, find signals that our current signal detection algorithms are missing.
I suggest looking for data that fits too closely with white noise. Modern human digital data is highly compressed, and as such is nearly indistinguishable from random bits. Images, Music, Movies... the bulk of the traffic on the internet looks like random bits.
The readers are the product, which is being sold to the advertisers.
..and then the boss shows up at your trial after the shit hits the fan and says "What envelope? I have no idea what he is talking about. That man destroyed our data!"
And I quote: "There is an App for just about anything. Only on the iPhone."
I don't see a bitrate given in the new, original, or secondary articles.
Nobody said he gave a bitrate.
But if you take 200 gigabytes (base-2, gibibytes) and divide by the seconds in the year, you get 6805
Which is 54.4kbps. Sure, maybe he meant 56kbps (the next valid MP3 bitrate), but 64kbps is probably what he meant because he is just some neophyte that calculated the storage cost of a video file that he had on hand. You can tell because he doesnt justify anything and lacks any actual understanding in what he is talking about.
And nothing said it had to be uncompressed.
Nobody said it had to be uncompressed. Not even me. I pointed out that for the purposes he is talking about, you can go ahead and use uncompressed audio and STILL meet the purpose requirement of a "Life Recorder" in the space requirement he is theorizing.
We expect about 10:1 compression on average with MP3 files, so essentially he was either (A) grossly overestimating the quality required, (B) not knowing that at least 10:1 compression can be expected, or (C) based his calculations on an arbitrary video file that had absolutely no bearing on the requirements of a "Life Recorder."
I'm guessing its (C), leading to both (A) and (B) as well.
The assumption the author is making is that there is always something to record. I'm pretty sure that the 1/3rd of the year that a person sleeps will contain highly compressible audio, not to mention the fact that he seems to think that a 64kbps bitrate is a requirement.
Regular telephone quality audio (from the "you can hear a pin drop" era) was considered to be about 8,000 samples per/second, which is in fact 64kbps for an 8-bit sample depth. This is uncompressed recording here. TFA can't beat uncompressed telephone quality audio? Really?
Steam actually adds value (download to any PC anywhere, never need a CD, etc) in compensation for the loss of certain freedoms associated with their DRM system (no resale, etc.)
.. This stuff happens.. but wait.. its a steam game! No need to go back to the store! Launch steam, enter the product key, latest version downloads with all patches applied, and off I went killing zombies....
Nobody elses DRM is adding value.
An example of the value its given me: I purchased Left 4 Dead from Walmart a year or so ago I guess, but when I opened the product, the CD was broken. "Aww crap!"
There is plenty of demand for a high end photo manipulation and editing package.
While gimp is pretty good (it would certainly take a man year or two to catch up to it), its still like 10 years behind photoshop and even paintshop in most of the meaningful ways. The problem is that the demands being filled is not the same.
The developers of GIMP are fulfilling developer demand. There is no advantage to fulfilling professional or consumer demand, even though there is PLENTY of both.
A telling statement. If enough programmers find the program useful, but in need of improvement, then it is very likely some of them will improve it. If enough non-programmers think that way then they can pay to have it improved. If this doesn't happen then maybe the program wasn't so very important after all.
One of these models is better for the consumer than the other:
Vendors each compete to satisfy demand.
Demand selects from competing vendor bids.
The former is the retail side of the closed source world as it is today, springing to life variations on the theme which then competes with the others.
The later is the contract driven side of the closed source world, springing to life a single solution which often contains the absolute minimum feature set required to satisfy the contract.
While both are used in practice today, one of them requires lawyers and other expensive shit just to get started.
Also, open-source software doesn't come in 5 different versions (e.g. Home, Studio, Office, Professional, ...), it comes in 1 version, with all the features in it, what one guy smarter than me called "Awesome Edition".
hmmm..
...
Ubuntu, Slack, Fedora, Suse, Debian, Mandriva, Gentoo,
Maybe with the government in charge of health care, he can finally afford the operation that makes that possible.
What's your point, that we should encourage closed drivers by setting the APIs in stone for years on end?
I think the point is that the driver ABI doesnt need to change every cycle just to discourage closed drivers.
..and here is an idea.. an operating system can support more than one driver model and ABI. Pick one, call it BIN_DRV_1. Declare it to be supported for at least N > 5 years, and then continue to fuck around with the SRC_DRV one. After 5 or more years, when there seems to be a significant advantage if BIN_DRV_1 had the same features as SRC_DRV, you define BIN_DRV_2 and then support that one for a long time.
Right now what you have is a catch-22 situation where vendors don't want to write drivers because of low market share, while market share remains low partly because vendors don't want to write drivers.
In actual practice, what you just said translates to "the artist could just learn to program, and then users.."
We do, for a while (as a society).
So nobody has to monitor and maintain the machines? Really? EVERYONE gets to do nothing?