A codec that optimizes PSNR is optimizing the wrong thing. The quality of a lossy codec needs toÃY be measured by perceptual quality, not PSNR, because the way you get good compression ratios is by dropping bits where people can't see them being dropped.
Furthermore, perceptual quality is just as objective as PSNR. Perceptual quality doesn't mean that you ask people "do you like this", it means that you measure quality relative to a mathematical model of what people actually see.
Allows us to have less advertisement time than in the USA, and to have some "quality programs" that are not always maket-/audience-driven.
The US has excellent public television. You should have a look some time. It's a lot better than anything I've ever seen in Switzerland.
Not always a bad thing... like all taxes... although one might disagree with how the money is used.
If European public television were paid out of taxes, that would be OK. Instead, it's usually a separate, regressive fee that's levied outside the control of parliament and relies for its enforcement on an intrusive semi-governmental organization. It's wasteful and dangerous to finance television that way.
How is this different from, oh, say EVERY OTHER STATE SPONSORED SYSTEM IN EXISTENCE for broadcasting.
Well, it's quite different. In the US, public funding to public broadcasting is much smaller and comes out of taxes. It's also part to the usual budget processes.
Ireland, like some other European nations, has decoupled TV licenses and turned it into a regressive tax. But it's a tax with its own enforcement agency and little oversight on spending.
I have no problem with paying taxes for public television; I have big problem with separate licensing agencies and separate fees outside the tax system.
The Evangelical Christians have the "being gay" thing all figured out already--they'll just make it illegal, then kids can't be gay anymore and won't kill themselves anymore. But we still need laws against bad hair days.
Based on what I could find out about the case, Megan Meier was a disturbed girl, on several drugs, from a disturbed family. That other woman was mean to her, but I think what happened was her mother's responsibility.
Let's say you're a university researcher and you get a drug cartel's leader's cell phone number assigned to you, and just for fun, you now impersonate him. People call you and say "should we kill Johnny?" and you respond "sure". They call and ask you "what bank account should we wire the profits to" and you give your own number. Etc. You keep dilligent statistics on how many people the cartel murdered and how much money they sent you.
That's pretty much what's going on here, only that the damage per victim is lower (but there are more of them).
The spirit, as well as the letter, of the law is that you're guilty.
That's no accident: that entry level teacher is still motivated and idealistic, and he's willing to spend a lot of extra time. Give him a few years of teaching, and he'll lose all that.
I see. So how do you propose who should determine who's right or wrong? Students hold a vote on it? There's a special commission on truth in the classroom?
Yes, teachers are wrong sometimes and they make mistakes. Yes, you may lose points because of it or be hassled over it. That's life. The same thing will happen at your job. And if you're human, you'll be doing exactly the same thing to others, including your own children.
If we insist on perfect teachers, there won't be any at all. The job pays poorly enough and is stressful enough that, frankly, schools need to be happy with who they can get.
Dude, Google Gears is developed in C++! (but it could have been developed in anything - it doesn't matter) It also runs as a browser extension. Is that more 'light-weight' than a plasma widget or desktop app?
Dude, Google Gears is not an end user app, it was a first cut at browser-based persistence. Now equivalent functionality is part of HTML5.
So are you saying that all my networking needs should be met through browser plugins, instead of desktop apps? I can see that working.
Where did I say "all" and "networking"? The KDE social desktop proposes to replicate a lot of functionality that works perfectly well through the web browser; that's a waste of time. If you come up with something genuinely new that doesn't have a good current solution, knock yourself out.
Who said I had anything against "new functionality at all"? I like new functionality. Now, what exactly is "new" about the "social desktop"? I get all that stuff with standard web and desktop applications already.
We don't need any of this new fangled 3D programming API stuff.
Again, you don't know your history. SGI pioneered the 3D programming API stuff (incidentally, running on CDE desktops). Microsoft and Apple were late to the party and came out with poor imitations.
and that is why I see KDE being the only thing that is helping the open source desktop on
Well, you just go on believing that. I suppose we should be grateful that KDE sucks up people with the wrong priorities.
And P2P is better... how? How is that data backed up and replicated? What's gonna happen when some users whose data I rely on upgrade to KDE5 and stuff starts failing?
Running these services centralized has a lot of advantages.
Yeah, actually read that page and think about it: to share a workspace, KDE is developing APIs, distributed data storage, services, and new desktop apps/widgets.
Meanwhile, people who actually need to do this open a Google Doc or Spreadsheet in their browser and are done with it. If they need to go off-line, they use Google Gears. (I'm just giving Google as an example, there are many other similar multi-user web apps.)
Without this stuff going on then the open source desktop is just where CDE ended up - a woefully inadequate alternative that saw itself as 'good enough' when the rest of the world said 'No' and moved on to Mac OS and Windows.
Quite the opposite. CDE, in fact, was trying to do too much: it had many things that came to other platforms much later, including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting. And the people who owned CDE thought that because it was ahead of the competition, they could charge a premium for it. Meanwhile, in the PC market, companies were pushing out low-cost machines with crappy and cumbersome low-level GUI libraries by the millions.
KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.
The "social desktop" is already here. It consists of web sites, site specific browsers, instant messenger apps, feed readers, desktop notification, and widgets. Some people also still use local mail, calendar, and address book apps.
What is KDE trying to contribute to that? Even more heavy-weight local apps and new protocols? How are they going to keep up with the rapidly evolving set of protocols and features available through web apps? And why bother?
I think KDE suffers from a serious case of paradigm envy: they keep wanting to revolutionize the desktop instead of just focusing on what works and coming up with specific, useful, incremental improvements.
It's fine if you put it into an OtterBox or Pelican case. Encrypting the disk also becomes important because of thefts from checked luggage (I had computer equipment, and nothing else, stolen out of my checked luggage on a KLM flight).
Yes, and read down a little further: "the trademark Android Data hadn't been used for over three years, that the company has been dissolved for over four years".
Furthermore, "Android" by itself shouldn't enjoy trademark protection, since it's a common word. "Google Android", "Android Data", "Android Mobile Phone" might enjoy trademark protection--separately from each other.
You can get spy cameras in a ball point pen. And you can easily record audio anyway, which is often worse. If you want to, you can record anything and there's nothing they can do about it.
I have unlimited mobile "broadband" in addition to cable. The mobile is fine for E-mail and web browsing and the occasional YouTube. Most of the time, it's actually very fast. But it just isn't quite as predictable as cable, and it is still a fraction of the speed at a much higher price.
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A codec that optimizes PSNR is optimizing the wrong thing. The quality of a lossy codec needs toÃY be measured by perceptual quality, not PSNR, because the way you get good compression ratios is by dropping bits where people can't see them being dropped.
Furthermore, perceptual quality is just as objective as PSNR. Perceptual quality doesn't mean that you ask people "do you like this", it means that you measure quality relative to a mathematical model of what people actually see.
You mean acres of electric eels?
Seems like my hovercraft is indeed full of electric eels.
Allows us to have less advertisement time than in the USA, and to have some "quality programs" that are not always maket-/audience-driven.
The US has excellent public television. You should have a look some time. It's a lot better than anything I've ever seen in Switzerland.
Not always a bad thing... like all taxes ... although one might disagree with how the money is used.
If European public television were paid out of taxes, that would be OK. Instead, it's usually a separate, regressive fee that's levied outside the control of parliament and relies for its enforcement on an intrusive semi-governmental organization. It's wasteful and dangerous to finance television that way.
How is this different from, oh, say EVERY OTHER STATE SPONSORED SYSTEM IN EXISTENCE for broadcasting.
Well, it's quite different. In the US, public funding to public broadcasting is much smaller and comes out of taxes. It's also part to the usual budget processes.
Ireland, like some other European nations, has decoupled TV licenses and turned it into a regressive tax. But it's a tax with its own enforcement agency and little oversight on spending.
I have no problem with paying taxes for public television; I have big problem with separate licensing agencies and separate fees outside the tax system.
The Evangelical Christians have the "being gay" thing all figured out already--they'll just make it illegal, then kids can't be gay anymore and won't kill themselves anymore. But we still need laws against bad hair days.
Based on what I could find out about the case, Megan Meier was a disturbed girl, on several drugs, from a disturbed family. That other woman was mean to her, but I think what happened was her mother's responsibility.
Let's not get overly dramatic here: most people infected with the flu will feel miserable for a week and then they'll be fine.
And what "spirit" would that be?
Let's say you're a university researcher and you get a drug cartel's leader's cell phone number assigned to you, and just for fun, you now impersonate him. People call you and say "should we kill Johnny?" and you respond "sure". They call and ask you "what bank account should we wire the profits to" and you give your own number. Etc. You keep dilligent statistics on how many people the cartel murdered and how much money they sent you.
That's pretty much what's going on here, only that the damage per victim is lower (but there are more of them).
The spirit, as well as the letter, of the law is that you're guilty.
That's no accident: that entry level teacher is still motivated and idealistic, and he's willing to spend a lot of extra time. Give him a few years of teaching, and he'll lose all that.
I see. So how do you propose who should determine who's right or wrong? Students hold a vote on it? There's a special commission on truth in the classroom?
Yes, teachers are wrong sometimes and they make mistakes. Yes, you may lose points because of it or be hassled over it. That's life. The same thing will happen at your job. And if you're human, you'll be doing exactly the same thing to others, including your own children.
If we insist on perfect teachers, there won't be any at all. The job pays poorly enough and is stressful enough that, frankly, schools need to be happy with who they can get.
Dude, Google Gears is developed in C++! (but it could have been developed in anything - it doesn't matter) It also runs as a browser extension. Is that more 'light-weight' than a plasma widget or desktop app?
Dude, Google Gears is not an end user app, it was a first cut at browser-based persistence. Now equivalent functionality is part of HTML5.
So are you saying that all my networking needs should be met through browser plugins, instead of desktop apps? I can see that working.
Where did I say "all" and "networking"? The KDE social desktop proposes to replicate a lot of functionality that works perfectly well through the web browser; that's a waste of time. If you come up with something genuinely new that doesn't have a good current solution, knock yourself out.
Why bother with any new functionality at all?
Who said I had anything against "new functionality at all"? I like new functionality. Now, what exactly is "new" about the "social desktop"? I get all that stuff with standard web and desktop applications already.
We don't need any of this new fangled 3D programming API stuff.
Again, you don't know your history. SGI pioneered the 3D programming API stuff (incidentally, running on CDE desktops). Microsoft and Apple were late to the party and came out with poor imitations.
and that is why I see KDE being the only thing that is helping the open source desktop on
Well, you just go on believing that. I suppose we should be grateful that KDE sucks up people with the wrong priorities.
Which part of "I'm just giving Google as an example, there are many other similar multi-user web apps." did you not understand?
The point is: go ahead and implement open source equivalents, but don't waste your time on developing heavy-weight C++ desktop apps.
And P2P is better... how? How is that data backed up and replicated? What's gonna happen when some users whose data I rely on upgrade to KDE5 and stuff starts failing?
Running these services centralized has a lot of advantages.
Yeah, actually read that page and think about it: to share a workspace, KDE is developing APIs, distributed data storage, services, and new desktop apps/widgets.
Meanwhile, people who actually need to do this open a Google Doc or Spreadsheet in their browser and are done with it. If they need to go off-line, they use Google Gears. (I'm just giving Google as an example, there are many other similar multi-user web apps.)
Without this stuff going on then the open source desktop is just where CDE ended up - a woefully inadequate alternative that saw itself as 'good enough' when the rest of the world said 'No' and moved on to Mac OS and Windows.
Quite the opposite. CDE, in fact, was trying to do too much: it had many things that came to other platforms much later, including styles, theming, remote access, config databases, scalability, and GUI scripting. And the people who owned CDE thought that because it was ahead of the competition, they could charge a premium for it. Meanwhile, in the PC market, companies were pushing out low-cost machines with crappy and cumbersome low-level GUI libraries by the millions.
KDE is repeating the CDE mistake: instead of focusing on what people need right now and doing a really good job at it, KDE is trying to realize some long term pie-in-the-sky technical visions of its developers that no user asked for.
Presumably, it's a compromise: there's some feature they need or want, and for that, they are putting it with problems.
Other people complain about KDE after having tried it and then not using it as their main desktop (I fall into that category).
The "social desktop" is already here. It consists of web sites, site specific browsers, instant messenger apps, feed readers, desktop notification, and widgets. Some people also still use local mail, calendar, and address book apps.
What is KDE trying to contribute to that? Even more heavy-weight local apps and new protocols? How are they going to keep up with the rapidly evolving set of protocols and features available through web apps? And why bother?
I think KDE suffers from a serious case of paradigm envy: they keep wanting to revolutionize the desktop instead of just focusing on what works and coming up with specific, useful, incremental improvements.
It's fine if you put it into an OtterBox or Pelican case. Encrypting the disk also becomes important because of thefts from checked luggage (I had computer equipment, and nothing else, stolen out of my checked luggage on a KLM flight).
You can turn all of those automatic features off in OpenOffice.
Yes, and read down a little further: "the trademark Android Data hadn't been used for over three years, that the company has been dissolved for over four years".
Furthermore, "Android" by itself shouldn't enjoy trademark protection, since it's a common word. "Google Android", "Android Data", "Android Mobile Phone" might enjoy trademark protection--separately from each other.
NASA's electronic nose to sniff brain cancer cells and cells in other organs
I don't want NASA's nose anywhere near my organ.
A piece of tape says "I realize I'm not supposed to use this, and it takes more effort to use it than just turning it on".
If you deliberately wanted to violate the camera ban, there's nothing they can do about it anyway.
You can get spy cameras in a ball point pen. And you can easily record audio anyway, which is often worse. If you want to, you can record anything and there's nothing they can do about it.
I have unlimited mobile "broadband" in addition to cable. The mobile is fine for E-mail and web browsing and the occasional YouTube. Most of the time, it's actually very fast. But it just isn't quite as predictable as cable, and it is still a fraction of the speed at a much higher price.