The weird thing is the status bar has become an Add-ins bar so it's still there but there is no widget to show status text. Logically (and sensibly), there should be a widget on the customize toolbar that implements status text. It's a very basic thing to add and would placate people annoyed by the status bar changes. Better yet if Add-ins is prepopulated with it.
There are problems with every browser's implementation of HTML5. Test your browser here and see. For all the buzzword bullshit about HTML5 from every browser maker, it's clear that pretty much all of them come up short. And that page is just looking at the top level functions, I bet there are bugs and quirks galore once you drill deeper.
That's a great article and more or less elucidates what I've been saying in the last few days in various places. Basically you want to fuck with the crackers as much as possible, inlining mutually dependent checks all over the place. Perhaps EVENTUALLY they'll crack the thing (no doubt premium games are worth the effort) but the time required gives a great window of opportunity for legit sales. It also annoys and confuses the hell out of consumers of the pirate game especially if they've just wasted 10-50Gb bandwidth trying to download the damned game to discover it's broken.
Of course there are things they can do. The 360 is cracked and MS engages in waves of mass bannings, usually to coincide with it's firmware updates. I expect the same will happen with the PS3 too.
So the most obvious thing would be for Sony to seed firmware and games with audits (some obvious, some not so obvious) and then ban the shit out of anyone stupid enough to sign onto PSN with modded firmware. That in itself would be a huge deterrent because it would shut the door on all multiplayer, DLC, patches etc.
There are other things they could do such as padding out game data on disk to bloat out the size of downloads, causing games to bug out midway through if they fail checks, cease & desist notices etc. Maybe nothing that would stop ALL piracy, but stuff that would scare most people to avoid it, keep the problem manageable and minimize the impact as much as possible on legit revenues.
There was little appreciable difference between AVC and VC-1, either in terms of picture quality of in compression. There may have been an advantage during the early days where VC-1 tools were more mature. This may explain why there were so many MPEG-2 and VC-1 but the majority of discs are now authored with AVC. VC-1 only represented 22% of encoded discs released in 2010, down from 29% in 2009, down from 33% in 2008. This can be observed on www.blu-raystats.com.
It's not a codec which is going places. Of course all hardware makers are burdened with licensing it.
As for why some blu rays choose VC-1 and still do, it probably boils down to history. WB bought tools to author HD DVDs and Blu Ray discs and have stuck with those tools. I wouldn't be surprised if MS was throwing free licences around like candy back a year or two ago.
It that picture is illustrative of how the phone docks then Motorola needs to fire its designers. It would be more sensible to have it click into place with the screen or the keyboard. I expect some genius said "what happens if your phone rings" and that lead to the awkward design to accommodate people picking the phone up to answer. Which is fine until you consider what happens if you pick up the "laptop" bit to go a meeting room or whatever and the phone goes flying to the floor. Perhaps with ultra wide band there is no reason the two devices should even be connected unless the user wants to charge the phone.
I do like the concept of docks with phones & tablets though. Despite what some people might say, a keyboard and mouse is essential for productivity. If tablets want to progress from being dumb consumption devices, they'll need to provide decent input controls. I think it would be nice if Android steering members formalised how docks would function so we don't get in a stupid situation where Samsung, HTC, Motorola et al all release mutually incompatible docking systems.
No, if Google want to pull a Microsoft they just do what they've done here. Microsoft was rightly flamed for only including VC-1 in Silverlight and for generally trying to inflict VC-1 everywhere they had their claws sunk in. They were flamed because there already was a perfectly good standard in H264 and their own codec really didn't add much to the party except complicate hardware and software now burdened with implementing two codecs.
Some might argue that WebM is not patent encumbered, but it still has Google at the helm. The codec goes where Google says it goes. My take is this is a preemptive move at MPEG-LA so when licencing negotiations come up again for YouTube or elsewhere they can wave WebM around and threaten to go off their own way. Realistically that won't happen without a massive infrastructure change, but it's still a threat with some bite. Of course once its served its purpose and YouTube gets a reduced rate or whatever you might suddenly find Google have a change of heart and back H264 again.
Obviously a few generations are not going to cause speciation, but even in an artificial environment it's not hard to see differences that could cause traits to change over time - light (UV, spectrum), radiation, gravity, length of days & seasons, atmosphere, diet, temperature, lack / presence of other organisms (animals, plants, virii & bacteria) still still all be major changes.
Those differences mean squat for a single life, but they might mean a lot even over a relatively small number generations especially if the population is small. 3 or 4 generations down the line you might discover Mars bound humans are smaller, have weaker muscles and jaws, have intolerances to certain proteins (e.g. in meat) , have a different circadian rhythm, weaker immune systems, poorer sense of smell & taste and a whole bunch of other changes for better or worse. Maybe nothing in themselves which class them as species, but certainly genetic drift.
Of course if humans are coming & going between Mars & Earth it probably makes no damned difference since there will be no chance for changes to meaningfully accumulate.
Like I said about the polarized, prejudiced positions everyone has on the subject. It sounds to me like no amount of links or evidence I compile will change your mind.
No they won't because they have been discredited over and over. As for your own circumstances, as unfortunate as they may be, you confuse cause and effect.
My kids are coeliac. One was diagnosed in hospital, the other retrospectively (due to other issues and the positive diagnosis on his sister). I could as easily blame their condition on vaccines as you could for yours. After all, their problems started around the time they had vaccines right? But I don't. Their condition was always there and was exposed during their development because they started eating solids containing gluten.
The antivax movement has tried for a long time to claim that vaccines are harmful (autism being just one example of alleged harm) and has utterly failed to prove any link. That's even after Wakefield stirred up a hornet's nest that saw multiple attempts to reproduce his results. If there was evidence it would stand up to peer review and medical scrutiny. Anecdotes & personal testimonies don't count. Discredited studies don't count. The word of various quack doctors and institutes don't count.
Blogs such as Respectful Insolence spend a great deal of time picking through anti-vax claims and methodically squashing them. You would do well to read some of them. It's not a case of some massive big pharma conspiracy. It's a case of good evidence based medicine versus quackery and anecdotes.
Of course it's profit. Medical treatments that go through extensive trials and can be proven to be efficacious and safe can make a lot of money. The key point being medicine must be proven to work. If it doesn't it gets dumped or discarded for one that does. It doesn't mean the system is perfect though or that pharmaceuticals are saints.
As for vaccinations, researchers have tried time and time again to show a correlation between various conditions such as autism and vaccination and the results have been negative. There is no link. None. Vaccination is a proven cheap and affordable way of stopping people especially kids from succumbing to the most unpleasant and potentially fatal diseases. Vaccination is also why we don't have wards full of people on iron lungs any more, or crippled polio kids or a high infant mortality. They work. Not only do they work for the vaccinated person but they also work for those around them because it breaks a communicable link that could spread the disease. Hence "herd immunity" protects everyone not just the vaccinated.
I feel very strongly that any who withholds vaccination from their kids is guilty of neglect. At a minimum they should be required to sign a waiver and they should be put on trial for neglect, assault or involuntary manslaughter if / when their kid or any other kid he / she comes into contact with contracts a preventable disease. Wakefield and the anti-vaxxers have blood of dead kids on their hands and it's time the law changed to reflect the harm they have caused.
Which is, you know, the entire point of the JPEG format.
Quite. PNG is probably the perfect solution for a site layout since it offers bit perfect 24-bit graphics and alpha channel. You probably want your site to look as great as possible and then ensure the images are static and persistent so they stay in the browser cache.
JPEG is perfect for content that changes in the site, (as in pictures, thumbnails etc.) since it's faster to load and more transient.
GIF is a waste of time for anything but animation and legacy uses, i.e. where some crappy old browser is a supported browser.
It doesn't get around it. Unless you live somewhere enlightened enough to not allow software patents, it probably isn't legal to use without a license for the patented tech.
Besides which, even if you do live somewhere with software patents then the liklihood is you already have an H264 licence with your OS. It's certainly the case for Windows & OS X users. In fact they have an entire media framework ready and at the disposal of any browser to invoke for content it doesn't handle natively.
The whole situation is absurd. If Firefox / Opera / Chrome don't support H264 out of the box for legal / patent reasons then fine, don't ship it out of the box. Instead open up the video api so it's extensible. Better yet, invoke whatever media framework is on the OS and let that decide if the content is playable or not.
Not providing any convenient way to support other video formats is just stupid. It won't drive people to the open standards, instead it will drive them the other way, using Flash plugins and other hacks to workaround the issue.
Or back to the era of having to install a huge number of plug ins.
A video tag is a specialized plugin that serves video content and has an interface to do stuff like trickplay, register event listeners etc. i.e. it's a glorified plugin.
Most browsers support NPAPI so I do not understand why Opera, Firefox & Google can't just formalise the interface for a video plugins (being NPAPI + some extensions) and be done with it. It shouldn't be hard. That doesn't prevent Firefox or Google from just supporting WebM or Theora or whatever out of the box. But it does allow users to conveniently and easily augment the default with plugins that play H264 or handle different container formats.
FFS, it's so obvious a solution I wonder what the hell is going on with these people. Open up the bloody video tag and the DIVX's, VLCs of this world will do the rest.
HD and SD are completely arbitrary terms. At least the European HD Ready logo sets a minimum requirements for the resolutions and inputs a TV supports.
In Europe at least HD Ready has quite a precise set of minimum specs that TVs must be compliant with to sport the logo - HDMI, 720 lines or higher and being able to accept PAL and 720p / 1080i at 50 & 60. Most TVs go higher than that these days and there is also an HD Ready 1080p standard which goes even higher and mandates DVB-T and AVC decoding too.
I realise some US sets might take the piss, but that kind of underscores the importance of producing a reasonable standard of compliance so consumers know for sure what they're getting.
The reason Archos devices don't have Android marketplace is because they fail the compatible device document and therefore do not qualify to ship it. Why don't they qualify? Because they (sensibly) omit a bunch of crap mandated in the CDD which a PMP has no good reason for needing - compass, gps, camera etc. The CDD as it exists makes sense for phones, it makes no sense for other kinds of devices.
The only way Samsung can stay compliant with the CDD is if a) Google change the CDD in Android 3.0 to specify a range of device profiles (a way overdue change) or b) Samsung bloat the price of their device by packing it with superfluous features.
a) is obviously the most preferable option. The CDD really should be specifying basic and extended profiles for tablets, media players, ereaders etc. Expecting tablets to be glorified giant phones is just going to stymie the Android tablet market and confuse everyone.
Zimbabwe's infrastructure is probably minimal and informational in nature. A few Linux boxes running a web server. Certainly makes an easier target than Amazon, Paypal etc. where Anon's boasted how it was going to take it down and managed to cause minimal disruption.
How naive are the folks at Marin county? In my experience, every single consulting firm in existence lies about the team they're going to place on a project. I have seen some utterly staggering misrepresentations.
And perhaps if they got called on it more often they wouldn't be so fast to lie.
What Apple will allow software and hardware related will be the issue.
It's not hard to see what will happen there. Nothing. 3rd parties that pay $$$ will get to licence limited access to whatever APIs expose music streaming, volume control etc.
I expect by default that the change in cable will let you charge via a standard cable and preciselessly nothing else.
I have a lot more mini USB cables knocking around than mini but it is about half the thickness, so it is more suitable for thin devices. My HTC desire came with one cable and I bought another one off ebay from Hong Kong for less than 2 euros.
Most devices are chargable over USB anyway (if you buy the leads to do it) so it makes no technical sense that the device end features a proprietary connection. Apple and others probably do it only to sell expensive 3rd party peripherals that licence the connector. So it's good to see some sense being imposed on the market.
Yes I think the experiment is methodologically flawed. If you are stuck behind an old women you may as well double or triple the amount of time it will take to process that customer. She won't start bagging her items until the very last one has been scanned, she'll try to engage the checkout girl in a conversation, she'll fumble for the exact change, she'll then painfully slowly begin bagging her items. All completely oblivious to the line of impatient people forming behind her.
I expect the panic would be so much greater if you did this on New Year's eve and dropped a flour bomb or two over Times Square. Probably dozens of people would be killed in the stampede that resulted from your "anthrax" attack.
Slashdot Mirror
The weird thing is the status bar has become an Add-ins bar so it's still there but there is no widget to show status text. Logically (and sensibly), there should be a widget on the customize toolbar that implements status text. It's a very basic thing to add and would placate people annoyed by the status bar changes. Better yet if Add-ins is prepopulated with it.
There are problems with every browser's implementation of HTML5. Test your browser here and see. For all the buzzword bullshit about HTML5 from every browser maker, it's clear that pretty much all of them come up short. And that page is just looking at the top level functions, I bet there are bugs and quirks galore once you drill deeper.
That's a great article and more or less elucidates what I've been saying in the last few days in various places. Basically you want to fuck with the crackers as much as possible, inlining mutually dependent checks all over the place. Perhaps EVENTUALLY they'll crack the thing (no doubt premium games are worth the effort) but the time required gives a great window of opportunity for legit sales. It also annoys and confuses the hell out of consumers of the pirate game especially if they've just wasted 10-50Gb bandwidth trying to download the damned game to discover it's broken.
So the most obvious thing would be for Sony to seed firmware and games with audits (some obvious, some not so obvious) and then ban the shit out of anyone stupid enough to sign onto PSN with modded firmware. That in itself would be a huge deterrent because it would shut the door on all multiplayer, DLC, patches etc.
There are other things they could do such as padding out game data on disk to bloat out the size of downloads, causing games to bug out midway through if they fail checks, cease & desist notices etc. Maybe nothing that would stop ALL piracy, but stuff that would scare most people to avoid it, keep the problem manageable and minimize the impact as much as possible on legit revenues.
There was little appreciable difference between AVC and VC-1, either in terms of picture quality of in compression. There may have been an advantage during the early days where VC-1 tools were more mature. This may explain why there were so many MPEG-2 and VC-1 but the majority of discs are now authored with AVC. VC-1 only represented 22% of encoded discs released in 2010, down from 29% in 2009, down from 33% in 2008. This can be observed on www.blu-raystats.com. It's not a codec which is going places. Of course all hardware makers are burdened with licensing it. As for why some blu rays choose VC-1 and still do, it probably boils down to history. WB bought tools to author HD DVDs and Blu Ray discs and have stuck with those tools. I wouldn't be surprised if MS was throwing free licences around like candy back a year or two ago.
I do like the concept of docks with phones & tablets though. Despite what some people might say, a keyboard and mouse is essential for productivity. If tablets want to progress from being dumb consumption devices, they'll need to provide decent input controls. I think it would be nice if Android steering members formalised how docks would function so we don't get in a stupid situation where Samsung, HTC, Motorola et al all release mutually incompatible docking systems.
Some might argue that WebM is not patent encumbered, but it still has Google at the helm. The codec goes where Google says it goes. My take is this is a preemptive move at MPEG-LA so when licencing negotiations come up again for YouTube or elsewhere they can wave WebM around and threaten to go off their own way. Realistically that won't happen without a massive infrastructure change, but it's still a threat with some bite. Of course once its served its purpose and YouTube gets a reduced rate or whatever you might suddenly find Google have a change of heart and back H264 again.
Just don't try and use the internet through Tor or you might die of old age before the page loads.
Those differences mean squat for a single life, but they might mean a lot even over a relatively small number generations especially if the population is small. 3 or 4 generations down the line you might discover Mars bound humans are smaller, have weaker muscles and jaws, have intolerances to certain proteins (e.g. in meat) , have a different circadian rhythm, weaker immune systems, poorer sense of smell & taste and a whole bunch of other changes for better or worse. Maybe nothing in themselves which class them as species, but certainly genetic drift.
Of course if humans are coming & going between Mars & Earth it probably makes no damned difference since there will be no chance for changes to meaningfully accumulate.
No they won't because they have been discredited over and over. As for your own circumstances, as unfortunate as they may be, you confuse cause and effect.
My kids are coeliac. One was diagnosed in hospital, the other retrospectively (due to other issues and the positive diagnosis on his sister). I could as easily blame their condition on vaccines as you could for yours. After all, their problems started around the time they had vaccines right? But I don't. Their condition was always there and was exposed during their development because they started eating solids containing gluten.
The antivax movement has tried for a long time to claim that vaccines are harmful (autism being just one example of alleged harm) and has utterly failed to prove any link. That's even after Wakefield stirred up a hornet's nest that saw multiple attempts to reproduce his results. If there was evidence it would stand up to peer review and medical scrutiny. Anecdotes & personal testimonies don't count. Discredited studies don't count. The word of various quack doctors and institutes don't count.
Blogs such as Respectful Insolence spend a great deal of time picking through anti-vax claims and methodically squashing them. You would do well to read some of them. It's not a case of some massive big pharma conspiracy. It's a case of good evidence based medicine versus quackery and anecdotes.
Of course it's profit. Medical treatments that go through extensive trials and can be proven to be efficacious and safe can make a lot of money. The key point being medicine must be proven to work. If it doesn't it gets dumped or discarded for one that does. It doesn't mean the system is perfect though or that pharmaceuticals are saints.
As for vaccinations, researchers have tried time and time again to show a correlation between various conditions such as autism and vaccination and the results have been negative. There is no link. None. Vaccination is a proven cheap and affordable way of stopping people especially kids from succumbing to the most unpleasant and potentially fatal diseases. Vaccination is also why we don't have wards full of people on iron lungs any more, or crippled polio kids or a high infant mortality. They work. Not only do they work for the vaccinated person but they also work for those around them because it breaks a communicable link that could spread the disease. Hence "herd immunity" protects everyone not just the vaccinated.
I feel very strongly that any who withholds vaccination from their kids is guilty of neglect. At a minimum they should be required to sign a waiver and they should be put on trial for neglect, assault or involuntary manslaughter if / when their kid or any other kid he / she comes into contact with contracts a preventable disease. Wakefield and the anti-vaxxers have blood of dead kids on their hands and it's time the law changed to reflect the harm they have caused.
Quite. PNG is probably the perfect solution for a site layout since it offers bit perfect 24-bit graphics and alpha channel. You probably want your site to look as great as possible and then ensure the images are static and persistent so they stay in the browser cache.
JPEG is perfect for content that changes in the site, (as in pictures, thumbnails etc.) since it's faster to load and more transient.
GIF is a waste of time for anything but animation and legacy uses, i.e. where some crappy old browser is a supported browser.
Besides which, even if you do live somewhere with software patents then the liklihood is you already have an H264 licence with your OS. It's certainly the case for Windows & OS X users. In fact they have an entire media framework ready and at the disposal of any browser to invoke for content it doesn't handle natively.
The whole situation is absurd. If Firefox / Opera / Chrome don't support H264 out of the box for legal / patent reasons then fine, don't ship it out of the box. Instead open up the video api so it's extensible. Better yet, invoke whatever media framework is on the OS and let that decide if the content is playable or not.
Not providing any convenient way to support other video formats is just stupid. It won't drive people to the open standards, instead it will drive them the other way, using Flash plugins and other hacks to workaround the issue.
A video tag is a specialized plugin that serves video content and has an interface to do stuff like trickplay, register event listeners etc. i.e. it's a glorified plugin.
Most browsers support NPAPI so I do not understand why Opera, Firefox & Google can't just formalise the interface for a video plugins (being NPAPI + some extensions) and be done with it. It shouldn't be hard. That doesn't prevent Firefox or Google from just supporting WebM or Theora or whatever out of the box. But it does allow users to conveniently and easily augment the default with plugins that play H264 or handle different container formats.
FFS, it's so obvious a solution I wonder what the hell is going on with these people. Open up the bloody video tag and the DIVX's, VLCs of this world will do the rest.
HD and SD are completely arbitrary terms. At least the European HD Ready logo sets a minimum requirements for the resolutions and inputs a TV supports.
In Europe at least HD Ready has quite a precise set of minimum specs that TVs must be compliant with to sport the logo - HDMI, 720 lines or higher and being able to accept PAL and 720p / 1080i at 50 & 60. Most TVs go higher than that these days and there is also an HD Ready 1080p standard which goes even higher and mandates DVB-T and AVC decoding too. I realise some US sets might take the piss, but that kind of underscores the importance of producing a reasonable standard of compliance so consumers know for sure what they're getting.
The only way Samsung can stay compliant with the CDD is if a) Google change the CDD in Android 3.0 to specify a range of device profiles (a way overdue change) or b) Samsung bloat the price of their device by packing it with superfluous features.
a) is obviously the most preferable option. The CDD really should be specifying basic and extended profiles for tablets, media players, ereaders etc. Expecting tablets to be glorified giant phones is just going to stymie the Android tablet market and confuse everyone.
Zimbabwe's infrastructure is probably minimal and informational in nature. A few Linux boxes running a web server. Certainly makes an easier target than Amazon, Paypal etc. where Anon's boasted how it was going to take it down and managed to cause minimal disruption.
And perhaps if they got called on it more often they wouldn't be so fast to lie.
It's not hard to see what will happen there. Nothing. 3rd parties that pay $$$ will get to licence limited access to whatever APIs expose music streaming, volume control etc.
I expect by default that the change in cable will let you charge via a standard cable and preciselessly nothing else.
I have a lot more mini USB cables knocking around than mini but it is about half the thickness, so it is more suitable for thin devices. My HTC desire came with one cable and I bought another one off ebay from Hong Kong for less than 2 euros.
Most devices are chargable over USB anyway (if you buy the leads to do it) so it makes no technical sense that the device end features a proprietary connection. Apple and others probably do it only to sell expensive 3rd party peripherals that licence the connector. So it's good to see some sense being imposed on the market.
Exactly. If you download apps from some dodgy warez site you will receive absolutely everything you expect and deserve.
Yes I think the experiment is methodologically flawed. If you are stuck behind an old women you may as well double or triple the amount of time it will take to process that customer. She won't start bagging her items until the very last one has been scanned, she'll try to engage the checkout girl in a conversation, she'll fumble for the exact change, she'll then painfully slowly begin bagging her items. All completely oblivious to the line of impatient people forming behind her.
I expect the panic would be so much greater if you did this on New Year's eve and dropped a flour bomb or two over Times Square. Probably dozens of people would be killed in the stampede that resulted from your "anthrax" attack.