Ah moving the goalposts, a typical denier tactic. There is more than enough witness, video and forensic evidence to support the notion that aircraft struck the towers and they subsequently collapsed from damage and fire. Scene investigators also had plenty of time in the weeks, months after the attack to examine the site in sufficient detail, take photos, remove samples to make conclusions and that is what they did. But this isn't what you want to hear so you move the goalposts far enough long so you can cling to some absurd other story and handwave away the evidence you don't like.
Yes they're all in the conspiracist / denialist mould of thinking. They hold preconceived views about certain subjects and when confronted with evidence to the contrary they rationalise it away through tactics such as quote mining, cherry picking, pseudo science, shifting goalposts, nitpicking and various distortions and outright falsehoods. Anything to avoid actually confronting the evidence head on. It doesn't matter how many times a denier's nonsense is debunked they keep parroting some excuse over and over. It's cognitive dissonance in action.
I don't see global warming deniers being particularly different. Quote mining abounds especially surrounding "climategate". And cherry picking and pseudoscience are a mainstay of the moment (e.g. if the earth is warming how come its snowing? etc.). Goal post shifting is evident every time they holler for the "raw data" for studies they don't agree with. Many people also imagine a shadowy cabal of climate scientists concocting the whole controversy to secure research grants despite virtually every national science academy endorsing the findings on manmade climate change.
Funnily enough when an organisation called the Heartland Institute suffered its own leak quite recently it demonstrated that it was leading climate change deniers who were receiving funding. The Heartland Institute is even copying the creationist tactic to "teach the controversy" in schools by producing misleading educational materials. This is not speculation or conspiracy think - it's written plainly in their own documentation which can be read in context.
So climate change deniers may be different in there are interest groups funding them but it still boils down the same denialist tactics.
What is the basis for the assumption that this is the "last" bastion? I am pretty sure, they will find another reason to hold out within days.... This is an issue of belief (at least for them), so arguments ain't gonna change a thing.
You only have to look at creationists, 9/11 truthers, moon landing hoaxers, anti-vaccinationists to know that you could lock such people in a warehouse full of evidence contradictory to their worldviews and they'd still deny it. I really don't see climate change deniers being any different.
Unless WP8 is getting full WinRT support I find this hard to believe. It may be that if you develop a WP7/8 app that it runs on Windows 8 (providing you do whatever is necessary to cope with the different layout) but whether the reverse is true is another matter entirely.
"Apollo" or Windows Phone 8, Microsoft's next version supposedly allows for native code support if the rumours are to be believed. But that doesn't help developers out there right now. Porting C written to OpenGL ES to C# XNA more or less qualifies as writing from scratch. Perhaps the big boys have the resources to put people to work on a port but I doubt many do.
With just a little bit of glue and abstraction over input devices a game could probably share 90% of the code between iOS, Android and even the Blackberry Tablet OS / Blackberry 10. If you utilised some 3rd party gaming API it's probably even more again. Microsoft really need that native support and preferably OpenGL ES, even if its through gritted teeth.
WP7 phones do look very sleek and if you were new to smart phones you'd probably be enthralled by all the fancy graphics and whizzy effects. However if you come from Android land you'd quickly find it superficial. Android allows interactive widgets, folders, shortcuts to apps and users, multiple desktops, interactive wallpapers and all the rest. You can even customize which app you use for browsing, dialling, inputting characters and pretty much anything if you wish. It does all this from a simple attractive user interface.
Windows Phone is a pale imitation by comparison. You get tiles, some which show non-interactive information and you can rearrange them in a vertical list. Oh and set your screensaver wallpaper. Otherwise what you get is what you're given with little other customization possible.
It's pretty weak and reflects the OS as a whole. It's probably fine if you don't know any better but if you do then the flaws become apparent very quickly.
Second, and this is a serious question, who uses MPEG2 anymore? The only thing I've seen it on recently is DVDs, and they're low enough bitrate to handle in software -- all HD sources I've seen lately use some flavor of MPEG4 or VC-1. Is this a US-only issue?
Many countries still do for broadcast TV, especially SD content. e.g. the UK uses MPEG-2 for its DVB-T SD transmissions. I'm sure it would love to switch to AVC and DVB-T2 but that would instantly obsolete any TV or set top box using the existing format and cause an uproar It means for the moment at least that MPEG-2 is still a necessity. It's also likely that MPEG-LA structures their licences such that there is no reason NOT to include support.
h264 is ubquitous. It's really stupid to deny the reality that people want to use it because of politics which is what it boils down to.
Mozilla wouldn't even have to taint itself by supporting it. Just hook the video tag to the media framework in the host OS - Quicktime, DirectShow, gstreamer etc. and invoke the default h264 codec if its present and suitable or point the user at a way to obtain it if it isn't. They could still ship Theora with the browser if they wanted.
It's quite obvious that any DRM would require some form of device certification process to ensure that key exchange and all the rest was secure and keys were stored in a tamper resistant format so that people could not strip out the DRM from content or clone and resell books or any other exploit such a system could be vulnerable to. It would not prevent open source software from being developed to view it but the key management / decryption portion would probably have to be in hardware or a plugin which was not open source.
But that's the price you'd have to pay if you wanted digital content to be treated like property with all the rights that go along with it. No DRM might sound attractive but there is no way in hell industry would go along with it. It also has disadvantages for end users, e.g. I can buy a DRM free book but it doesn't give me the legal right to sell it on. If a system enforced ownership through DRM then legally I could sell it on if I wished.
I suspect that most "Linux" games will simply be Windows games running against Wine or some commercial variant or Dosbox. This is how most of the games get ported to OS X. It should still please people that its happened though.
I really don't understand your point at all. I am not advocating Ultraviolet, I am advocating something which shares similar properties, i.e. cloud based storage but enshrines fair use for the consumer.
It just has to be standardised. And standardised in a way that implements such concepts as fair use, doctrine of first sale and so on. Basically the whole concept of digital property needs to be defined and implemented by some framework so that when people buy an ebook they're actually buying a book rather than a licence to it.
The book would still be protected by a key but the key could be revoked by one owner and transferred to another. I would still hold a copy of the book as a file but in the absence of the authorizing key it is no longer readable. If such a system were carefully designed it could enshrine concepts such as destroying content, lending it, renting it, selling it and donating it in much the same way as any physical item. Not just books, video, music and any other form of platform neutral data.
I'm kind of surprised the EU isn't pressing for something like this. Ultraviolet demonstrates the industry can agree around some kind of cloud based key system and it needs governments to legislate that such a system should be fair to users as much as it is for providers.
Some 3D support? A look at the article and the demos suggests it has full 3D support. It's also clear from the article that it has a pretty rich programming API including physics.
The biggest issue I could level at it is C# is a strange choice though I suspect Sony are thinking that developers are likely to come from the XBox 360 XNA world than from the Java world. So I guess it makes some sense from that perspective but I can't help but think it will severely hamper developers coming from Java or C/C++ or those who want to use existing 3rd party 3D and physics engines. I expect most C# 3rd party libs are for supporting DirectX not for supporting OpenGL ES.
It does seem a bit nuts to use Mono given that the primary targets are likely to be Android, the PS Vita and the PS3. One would think that C/C++ and / or Java would be a better fit.
I don't think it needs everyone to down rate an app, just a few. Reviews on android tend to be pretty polarized and a smattering of 1 star ratings can drag the overall score down quite significantly. Enough to hurt sales or ranking. Apps that value their reputation will do what it takes to minimize their power consumption or annoying users in other ways.
But most apps don't need to worry about power consumption at all. The system will suspend the app's process as soon as it is no longer in the foreground. It's the ones which kick off services which would have to be more conscious of what they do. But at least Android gives apps the choice. My contention is that Windows Phone (and Windows 8) should too and the way Skype has been gimped and other simple use cases are broken demonstrates this.
The "battery issues" thing is a myth. To make an app run in the background in Android you must write a service or a broadcast receiver. If you don't write a service or receiver (and most apps are simple activities) then the app's process is paused and sits in memory until such time as it comes back to the foreground or is cleaned up by the system. There is also a lifecycle for apps so they can save state or whatnot as they pass into suspended state. If an app has a service then it's implicit that it needs it for a reason, e.g. streaming music, running IM or whatever.
And if for whatever reason an app uses too much power, do you know what happens? It gets uninstalled and the store ratings attracts a lot of downratings. It's a self correcting issue.
And in my experience with a Lumia 800 the restrictions in Windows Phone do not result in better battery life. Far from it, the performance has been atrocious for most of the phone's life and has only improved recently with a firmware update. Even in its improved performance state it's merely comparable to other smart phones.
I know there are background agents and some other things but they do not fit all apps which means I am screwed. It's not hard to imagine examples as I did.
Here is are some recentblogs about Windows 8 and how it will suspend Metro apps. Right at the top of the second it says:
An important attribute of this app model is that apps are suspended when they are no longer visible to the user. Suspending Metro style apps in the background is a good thing, as it conserves CPU for other apps and ensures that background apps don’t cause activity that can consume resources, thereby improving the battery life and increasing responsiveness.
I have to wonder what they were smoking when they came up with this restriction. It's one thing to say the default behaviour is to suspend an app but apps may request an override and the user may restrict further. But to deny it completely is utterly wrongheaded and contrary to the way people use tablets and PCs. I can't think of a rational reason to lock down the UI like this other than some underlying brokenness in the implementation which is deemed too high risk to fix or expose to the user.
I'm not talking about the desktop, I'm talking about Metro apps and not having a way for a metro app to run in the background AT ALL is just wrong. Perhaps it should be the default behaviour in the absence of the app stating a preference but there should be a preference for apps that need it.
Imagine talking to someone on Skype and you want to send them an attachment so you jump to the email app and... oh shit call terminated. Or maybe you want to use VOIP for some smacktalk while playing someone at chess. Except you can't. That is just retarded behaviour.
If Android can allow multitasking and the Playbook can allow multitasking and iOS can enable multitasking then there is no excuse that Windows (Phone) cannot. Especially when we consider tablet and desktop devices where any excuses about memory consumption or CPU fly out of the window.
Windows Phone 7.5 suspends apps when they leave the foreground. The only background activity that an app may do are periodic background agents which run 30 minutes apart and some streaming functionality through the multimedia framework. If your app falls outside that model (as Skype does) then tough shit you're going to have to gimp it to make it work on Windows Phone.
The stupid part is Windows 8 is going to implement a similarly retarded scheme for Metro apps. When they're not in the foreground they're suspended. So tough luck if you were using a video conferencing or VOIP app or a multiplayer game and you want to check an email in the middle of it. Because if you do then you'll probably terminate your session when you step away from it. Multitasking is so yesterday.
Windows Phone sucks for this sort of app. Apps are suspended when they are in the background so tough luck if you want to receive calls with Skype because you can't. You would have to leave it open all the time with no screen lock or you won't be receiving any calls.
Microsoft would have to bless the app or add some background service with special privileges that listens for inbound calls. Or better yet they'd fix the WP architecture so any app can run in the background even if has to request a special permission to do it.
The current situation stinks and demonstrates again why Android is a better phone OS. In Android you can install any VOIP app and run it in the background, better yet some apps such as Viber can actually become the default activity for making / receiving calls so they can merge their functionality in with the standard phone features.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah moving the goalposts, a typical denier tactic. There is more than enough witness, video and forensic evidence to support the notion that aircraft struck the towers and they subsequently collapsed from damage and fire. Scene investigators also had plenty of time in the weeks, months after the attack to examine the site in sufficient detail, take photos, remove samples to make conclusions and that is what they did. But this isn't what you want to hear so you move the goalposts far enough long so you can cling to some absurd other story and handwave away the evidence you don't like.
I don't see global warming deniers being particularly different. Quote mining abounds especially surrounding "climategate". And cherry picking and pseudoscience are a mainstay of the moment (e.g. if the earth is warming how come its snowing? etc.). Goal post shifting is evident every time they holler for the "raw data" for studies they don't agree with. Many people also imagine a shadowy cabal of climate scientists concocting the whole controversy to secure research grants despite virtually every national science academy endorsing the findings on manmade climate change.
Funnily enough when an organisation called the Heartland Institute suffered its own leak quite recently it demonstrated that it was leading climate change deniers who were receiving funding. The Heartland Institute is even copying the creationist tactic to "teach the controversy" in schools by producing misleading educational materials. This is not speculation or conspiracy think - it's written plainly in their own documentation which can be read in context.
So climate change deniers may be different in there are interest groups funding them but it still boils down the same denialist tactics.
What is the basis for the assumption that this is the "last" bastion? I am pretty sure, they will find another reason to hold out within days.... This is an issue of belief (at least for them), so arguments ain't gonna change a thing.
You only have to look at creationists, 9/11 truthers, moon landing hoaxers, anti-vaccinationists to know that you could lock such people in a warehouse full of evidence contradictory to their worldviews and they'd still deny it. I really don't see climate change deniers being any different.
Two holes at once.
Unless WP8 is getting full WinRT support I find this hard to believe. It may be that if you develop a WP7/8 app that it runs on Windows 8 (providing you do whatever is necessary to cope with the different layout) but whether the reverse is true is another matter entirely.
With just a little bit of glue and abstraction over input devices a game could probably share 90% of the code between iOS, Android and even the Blackberry Tablet OS / Blackberry 10. If you utilised some 3rd party gaming API it's probably even more again. Microsoft really need that native support and preferably OpenGL ES, even if its through gritted teeth.
Windows Phone is a pale imitation by comparison. You get tiles, some which show non-interactive information and you can rearrange them in a vertical list. Oh and set your screensaver wallpaper. Otherwise what you get is what you're given with little other customization possible.
It's pretty weak and reflects the OS as a whole. It's probably fine if you don't know any better but if you do then the flaws become apparent very quickly.
Many countries still do for broadcast TV, especially SD content. e.g. the UK uses MPEG-2 for its DVB-T SD transmissions. I'm sure it would love to switch to AVC and DVB-T2 but that would instantly obsolete any TV or set top box using the existing format and cause an uproar It means for the moment at least that MPEG-2 is still a necessity. It's also likely that MPEG-LA structures their licences such that there is no reason NOT to include support.
I think that somebody has secured the tinfoil hat to his head with too many elastic bands.
These planes will be needed in the uprising against the psychlos.
Mozilla wouldn't even have to taint itself by supporting it. Just hook the video tag to the media framework in the host OS - Quicktime, DirectShow, gstreamer etc. and invoke the default h264 codec if its present and suitable or point the user at a way to obtain it if it isn't. They could still ship Theora with the browser if they wanted.
Dump chrome OS. Nobody cares about it. Fold the best bits into Android and bury the rest.
But that's the price you'd have to pay if you wanted digital content to be treated like property with all the rights that go along with it. No DRM might sound attractive but there is no way in hell industry would go along with it. It also has disadvantages for end users, e.g. I can buy a DRM free book but it doesn't give me the legal right to sell it on. If a system enforced ownership through DRM then legally I could sell it on if I wished.
I suspect that most "Linux" games will simply be Windows games running against Wine or some commercial variant or Dosbox. This is how most of the games get ported to OS X. It should still please people that its happened though.
I really don't understand your point at all. I am not advocating Ultraviolet, I am advocating something which shares similar properties, i.e. cloud based storage but enshrines fair use for the consumer.
The book would still be protected by a key but the key could be revoked by one owner and transferred to another. I would still hold a copy of the book as a file but in the absence of the authorizing key it is no longer readable. If such a system were carefully designed it could enshrine concepts such as destroying content, lending it, renting it, selling it and donating it in much the same way as any physical item. Not just books, video, music and any other form of platform neutral data.
I'm kind of surprised the EU isn't pressing for something like this. Ultraviolet demonstrates the industry can agree around some kind of cloud based key system and it needs governments to legislate that such a system should be fair to users as much as it is for providers.
The biggest issue I could level at it is C# is a strange choice though I suspect Sony are thinking that developers are likely to come from the XBox 360 XNA world than from the Java world. So I guess it makes some sense from that perspective but I can't help but think it will severely hamper developers coming from Java or C/C++ or those who want to use existing 3rd party 3D and physics engines. I expect most C# 3rd party libs are for supporting DirectX not for supporting OpenGL ES.
It does seem a bit nuts to use Mono given that the primary targets are likely to be Android, the PS Vita and the PS3. One would think that C/C++ and / or Java would be a better fit.
But most apps don't need to worry about power consumption at all. The system will suspend the app's process as soon as it is no longer in the foreground. It's the ones which kick off services which would have to be more conscious of what they do. But at least Android gives apps the choice. My contention is that Windows Phone (and Windows 8) should too and the way Skype has been gimped and other simple use cases are broken demonstrates this.
And if for whatever reason an app uses too much power, do you know what happens? It gets uninstalled and the store ratings attracts a lot of downratings. It's a self correcting issue.
And in my experience with a Lumia 800 the restrictions in Windows Phone do not result in better battery life. Far from it, the performance has been atrocious for most of the phone's life and has only improved recently with a firmware update. Even in its improved performance state it's merely comparable to other smart phones.
I know there are background agents and some other things but they do not fit all apps which means I am screwed. It's not hard to imagine examples as I did.
An important attribute of this app model is that apps are suspended when they are no longer visible to the user. Suspending Metro style apps in the background is a good thing, as it conserves CPU for other apps and ensures that background apps don’t cause activity that can consume resources, thereby improving the battery life and increasing responsiveness.
I have to wonder what they were smoking when they came up with this restriction. It's one thing to say the default behaviour is to suspend an app but apps may request an override and the user may restrict further. But to deny it completely is utterly wrongheaded and contrary to the way people use tablets and PCs. I can't think of a rational reason to lock down the UI like this other than some underlying brokenness in the implementation which is deemed too high risk to fix or expose to the user.
Imagine talking to someone on Skype and you want to send them an attachment so you jump to the email app and... oh shit call terminated. Or maybe you want to use VOIP for some smacktalk while playing someone at chess. Except you can't. That is just retarded behaviour.
If Android can allow multitasking and the Playbook can allow multitasking and iOS can enable multitasking then there is no excuse that Windows (Phone) cannot. Especially when we consider tablet and desktop devices where any excuses about memory consumption or CPU fly out of the window.
The stupid part is Windows 8 is going to implement a similarly retarded scheme for Metro apps. When they're not in the foreground they're suspended. So tough luck if you were using a video conferencing or VOIP app or a multiplayer game and you want to check an email in the middle of it. Because if you do then you'll probably terminate your session when you step away from it. Multitasking is so yesterday.
Microsoft would have to bless the app or add some background service with special privileges that listens for inbound calls. Or better yet they'd fix the WP architecture so any app can run in the background even if has to request a special permission to do it.
The current situation stinks and demonstrates again why Android is a better phone OS. In Android you can install any VOIP app and run it in the background, better yet some apps such as Viber can actually become the default activity for making / receiving calls so they can merge their functionality in with the standard phone features.