It's the dominant web codec, it's the dominant portable device codec, and it's superior to WebM. These are factual statements.
I call bullshit. By all means point me to some real numbers that prove this assertion.
H.264 gets a lot of press, because it's supposed to be the future codec on the horizon (if WebM doesn't beat it). However, all my web video viewing indicates that H.264 is still a minority. The old, original Flast video codec, Sorenson Spark, still remains the dominant web video codec out there.
For portable devices, I'd want some proof, too. MPEG-4 SP/ASP/Part2 was popular in portable devices for years before H.264 entered the picture, and many new devices are still designed around it. In addition, damn near all devices support MJPEG, and many don't support anything else, so that's as good a candidate as any.
And as for H.264 being superior to WebM, that's only barely true. It's a very small technical difference between the two, to be sure. So much so that if WebM were to get the community support, and H.264 did not, that situation could easily be reversed in fairly short order. After all, x264 is the premeire implemention, despite all the money spent by companies trying to get that title themselves. If that kind of effort was put behind WebM, it wouldn't be a contest.
More importantly, how do I get the WebM video I just downloaded to work in my iPod? Or my TV? They only do Apple and MPEG codecs.
Guess what... your iPod doesn't even support H.264... What it does support is a seriously restricted version of it, if and only if, it has the magic proprietary Apple signature in the header. Otherwise, it gets reencoded by iTunes, just like WebM or any other format does.
At that point, when it must be encoded specifically for iPod, why does it even matter if the result can be called H.264 or any other standard? You've lost all the compatibilty that a standard is supposed to bring. How is having your H.264 videos reencoded to H.264 any better than them being reencoded to WebM?
Web standards have a much longer lifetime than whatever probable devices you own now. I certainly don't encode all my videos to be compatible with your iPod, why would I stick to the same video format (with incompatible settings?).
Besides, if we always stuck with what was out there and supported right now, we never wouuld have moved past MPEG-1. Hell, let iPod and iPhone users become second class citizens, with a subset of videos reencoded on the internet only for them, if Apple insists on being an insolent child.
Funny how our state go slammed with record levels of snow, and the National Guard couldn't help out...because they'r deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
No. The national guard was always intended for military service. The fact that they were previously unoccupied and available to help with routine tasks unrelated to their job was merely a perk, paid for by the federal government. It was never a good idea to depend on them being available. If your local government needs more men, it should hire them, like everything else.
Roger rabbit didn't originate the idea. Just as Disney constantly steals from the public domain. But there is Undeniably substantial truth behind the story...
We can't keep messing about for another fifty years, we need an EM-proof(ish) replacement for LongBitsOfWire (TM).
You're an idiot. This was as powerful as solar flares get, yet, from TFA:
the reported problems were with high-frequency radio communications.
HF was deprecated for just about all practical uses, as soon as viable alternatives (ie. communications satellites) were introduced. Earthbound wires have been pretty well impervious to solar flares just about forever.
The only real threat solar flares pose is to a few, already-overloaded, electrical transmission circuits which are operating at the edge of their capacity before the unexpected power-boost arrives. Other than that, it's a very insignificant bit of occasional static on the line. Nothing more.
Listen up everybody. Next time a glint of sun light momentarily blinds you, you know what to do... SLAM ON YOUR BRAKES! It's just the SAFE THING to do!
Gold has inherent value in it's physical properties. Electronics and aerospace don't use gold because it's pretty and shiny...
You can say that you don't want gold when you've dying of starvation, but that's a horrible cop out... If I'm on fire, I don't give a damn about gold, food, or machines either. If you can't breathe, you'll do anything for air, but good luck selling it on the street.
My phone came with that. Doesn't Android have it too?
Of course Android has it. It's just one of a billion examples where desktop apps are a nightmare to run on a non-desktop device. A phone in particular is massively constrained and so makes this even more exaggerated.
I actually forgot my favorite example... Google Map. Running the GMaps web-app on the browser on your phone is, frankly, useless and impossible, yet it works fine on a desktop. Google is hardly made up of idiots...
Having java installed doesn't magically put you in danger. The only place where java increases your attack profile is when its running as a browser plug in, and that is easy to disable without removing java.
Now, if you just don't know how to do it, and refuse to learn, that's a different issue entirely.
A word processor is about the simplest application possible. I named MUAs specifically, because they at least have multiple panes, and will be a common app.
My criticisms aren't made up. I've tried the same thing dozens of times over, and while it looks nice in screen-shots (which marketing always sells), trying to use most applications is a nightmare. It might look nice, but it's painful to actually use.
For input, just try web pages that extensively use on-mouse-over for their JS navigation menus. Plenty of apps do practically the same thing.
There are no more legitimate, hardware-related excuses for OS fragmentation: it exists solely because it pays to lock your customer into a proprietary platform.
Loading up a bunch of X11 apps on a phone is a terrible idea. Traditional apps were designed with 3 mouse buttons in mind, and a cursor that glides across the screen from point A to point B. Put them on a device with a touch screen, and an on-screen keyboard, and the pain level goes through the roof.
Add to that issues of screen resolution... Your MUA that works great at 1280x960 is likely completely unusable on a small device with 640x320 or similar.
There's a reason PDAs weren't very popular. It took a decade for designers to figure out what interface designs work on space constrained devices, and I can say from experience that apps that work amazingly well on small screens are quite undesirable on large screens, unmodified.
And that's just scratching the surface. Sure, you can run a desktop OS on your phone, but it'll be burning up shortly, as all those apps in the background continue chewing up CPU time, and there's no equivalent API for X11 to tell the OS that your browser can be suspended when not in the foreground, but your media player needs to keep running at all times.
Honestly, the new, better interfaces small devices have, combined with the tighter integration with the hardware, are what has made portable devices fly past Desktops/Laptops/Netbooks. Really, what is the difference between a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard, and a laptop? Its all in the software... People want the better UIs.
As for the hardware being somewhat closed and proprietary, that's true of any new class of devices. It takes quite some time for standardization efforts (eg. VESA) to get everyone together on a certain baseline. And its not even that desireable, as that standardizations later becomes an anchor. It would be better if variation was reduced, and specs were available, but I haven't gotten that on my desktop graphics card yet, so I don't expect phones or tablets to open up any time soon. When I find an inexpensive tablet that is open enough to run 3rd part ports of Linux well (video playback, power management), Ill be first in line.
I would just add that customizing vim is a great idea. Because you'll never want to run vim on a new system you haven't extensively configured before... And besides, inconsistent behavior is just the spice pod life, you're sure to notice immediately, make no mistakes because of it, and just have a laugh about it later.
Seriously, nvi is awesome. Shows you the dos crlf breaks in your config file that are hosing up your server with a nonsense error message and no useful indications. Tiny, notably faster than vim, and much less nonsense popping up and showing you down.
-who knows what random proceess got put in a bad state by the resource exhaustion
That's easy... I do. I'm the admin who knows how everything is supposed to behave, have tons of logs to look through, and get emailed whenever something new or abnormal appears in the logs.
Besides that, you're not doing a great job if one errant process can exhaust all memory, or similar. Disk quotas work quite well. Always resist increasing ulimits, no matter how much programmers insist or beg.
A free codec better than MPEG2, but not as good as H.264. So they're re-inventing Theora?
Theora can't compete with MPEG-2 to begin with. MPEG-2 is designed for high-bitrate, high quality video encoding. Theora can't handle that at all. No matter how much you crank up the bitrate, Theora will continue to be fuzzy. It was designed exclusively for very low bitrate encoding. H.264 learned from On2's mistakes, and designed their codec to excel in low-bitrates, but having the ability to shut off those features, and still be tolerable at high bitrates (though really not much better than MPEG-2).
MPEG LA on the other hand actively does not want any codec better than say Microsoft Video 1 (the format most classic AVI files used) available on royalty free terms. They would lose out on a substantial amount of royalties if devices like phones or low end Digital Cameras used such a format rather than one of their formats.
MPEG-1 video has been freely implementable for a long time. MPEG-2 will be out from under its relevant patents very shortly. Both are decidedly better than MV1, and there's nothing stopping digital camera manufactures from using them... HOWEVER, that's just not how the world works. Phone manufacturers either use MJPEG because it's computationally free (just a series of JPEGs, which any phone can already create), where using any decent video codec would require specialized hardware and added cost. Plus, how much video can fit on a flash card isn't a major selling point for basic cameras, so almost nobody cares.
At the other end of the spectrum are manufacturers who want to be buzz-word compatible. They don't care what H.264 is, and will happily sell you a camera that records videos that are nothing but static noise, as long as they can have the "H.264" buzzword on the box.
VP8/WebM won't change this, and certainly won't result in consumers getting better video quality from the cheap junk cameras out there.
Additionally, everyone here has no idea what they're talking about. The MPEG is as big and slow moving of a bureaucracy as it gets. Since they've just decided to start working on this, you can expect it will be at least 5+ years before we see even a basic spec come out of it, and longer before anyone has any implementations to show for it. VP8 is here now. Dropping the license fees on H.264 is what they've done to try to compete with VP8. This foray is irrelevant to that.
What they're trying to do here is compete with is themselves... They want to produce something that's just slightly better than MPEG-2, and where they have a way to monetize it (which they don't with MPEG-2 once the patents expire). Maybe they'll make it so that the decoder is royalty free, but the encoder needs extensive patent licenses. Maybe there will be a free encoder as well, but ONLY if you don't use several encoding options that greatly improve quality. So they'll hope to make some money up-selling their new "free" codec.
If open-source hardware made any sense, it would already be here.
An idiotic assertion... Nothing is here until it its created. Not everything that can be made, has been made. Not every good idea had yet been realized. The demand its not there because you can't expect purple to demand a theoretical product that doesn't exist. One it's created, we will see if there is demand.
Why would a chinese company would want to do this and enjoy no competitive advantage and the corresponding 0.01% profits? A government? Right, those are well-known for innovativeness and efficiency.
Dvd players are a complete refutation of your above assertion. profits are terrible due to the heavy patent license fees, yet companies are rising to make them. their tony profit margins are better than the nothing they were getting before. And the government initially subsidized the factories building dvd players specifically because they wanted their populace to have cheap electronics available domestically. There done the same thing with the Dragon Chip, and many, many others.
chinese companies would love such a product without license fees, far more than they like dvd players, yet they churn those out for $20 a shot.
And cell phones are another good example. The no named chinese companies are turning out $50 smart phones ruining Android, at next to no profit, with no differentiation, while the big names are making vastly more profits... Yet the no name chinese companies keep churning them out, even with the royalties they have to party on the underlying tech. They'd love to be rid of those fixed fees they get nothing out of and only inhibit their business. And when the fees drop, and the device prices can be lowered even further, new markets will open, creating all nw demand, ala EEE PC
Products like RAM and integrated video are typically protected by an army of patents,
You clearly missed my meaning. I'm referring to something decidedly low end. Something that is dirt cheap, but more than capable of being a good ebook reader, though it won't compete with saxophones on the few high end features like h.264 video playback.
Its only at the high end where patents are a hindrance. 2D graphics is easy. Basic 3d has been around well over 20 years now, too. Jurassic Park comes to mind, on sgi they were probably using open gl as well.
Ditto for memory. You might not get the fastest or lowest power memory, but it will be plenty fast for a low end device.
In terms of energy density, our battery technology is pathetic when compared with liquid hydrocarbons.
This is untrue on most levels.
For starters, liquid hyrocarbons are useless on their own. You need a large, complicated engine to make it do work. Then all kinds of supporting machinery, like a radiator, fan, fuel pumps, gas pumps, and most importantly, a massive transmission and axle.
Meanwhile, the best efficiency you can hope for is 25%. So you get to divide that energy density by at least a factor of 4, while batteries and an electric motor are extremely efficient.
And finally, if you think theoretical energy capacity is even remotely relevant, I'll have to remind you that fission of PB, NiMH, or Li would produce more energy.
Of course, none of that matters... What matters is that electric cars are practical, and in a fairly short time their shortcomings will be resolved. Absolutely nothing else holds that promise... Decades of work on ethanol, biodiesel, algae, and hydrogen never showed the slightest sign of being able to scale up. Electricity can, and will. There's nothing else even on the horizon, so there's no point in arguing whether its good or bad, practical or impractical. It is the future, no matter how hard car companies pushed to prevent it, and the future will form up around whatever limitations they have, just as the car changed the world long before it.
Right now, electric cars are probably practical for a large minority of the public, if not for the high initial price. Extending car loans further would likely solve the intial price problem, and the net cost (at least for something like the Nissan Leaf) will likely work out better than a conventional vehichle if you are lucky enough to fit into that category.
For the rest of us, hybrids make a good trade off in the mean time as the early adopters help pay for the research and development.
I've been hearing about open hardware for a good decade now, so where is it? Where's the patent-free 500mhz MIPS CPU based tablet that runs on AA batteries, maybe with with a 32 shade grey scale b+w LCD (no backlite needed)?
if you fab it, they will come.
I'm sure there are chinese manufacturers out there who would love a tablet they can manufacture initially locally, without license or royalty payments. Hell the government has that as a major goal.
So with the innumerable products coming out every year why haven't we seen even one based on open hardware?
I was absolutely gagging, reading TFA, when every third line was some heavy handed implication that this was a big secret, actively covered up by the military for half a centure...
I don't consider myself an amateur historian, let alone that specializes in women's lib, yet I've heard about women running advanced control systems, and yes, even the ones computing ballistics tables, and cracking crypto. I guess a couple hours of History Channel a day is enough to make amateur historians look stupid... Then again, maybe that's not even a prereq for making her look stupid.
And to the ladies, why would you ever expect someone to get your story down? You didn't bother taking it to a publisher, write to historians or women's lib groups. Did you attend reunions? Did you share your story with anyone outside your immediate family? I know there have been documentaries made, and some women were in it, just not you. Did you expect the media to track down every single woman that served, 65 years later, in the hopes they'd have an interesting story? How could anyone have ever found out your story, or even found you? You might be the most interesting person in the world, but if you don't actively do something, you can't ever expect any greater recognition or impact.
Honestly, the repressed women angle, conjured up out of thin air and permeating everything, really got my bile up.
THEY HAVE ROOTED YOUR BOX! At that point, you've got MUCH bigger problems
You couldn't be more wrong.
There are inumerable situations where someone gains the ability to see the shadow file (or a hash going over the network) without gaining root access.
Hell, if root access on a box was the only concern, YOU WOULDN'T NEED TO EVEN HASH PASSWORDS, let alone salt them. Plain text, no problem, only root can read 'em, right? And never mind password expiration... its not there as an advanced memory test.
If someone gets root access on a box, but can't decrypt the passwords, then they can't just up and use those credentials to gain access to other, more important boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
I call bullshit. By all means point me to some real numbers that prove this assertion.
H.264 gets a lot of press, because it's supposed to be the future codec on the horizon (if WebM doesn't beat it). However, all my web video viewing indicates that H.264 is still a minority. The old, original Flast video codec, Sorenson Spark, still remains the dominant web video codec out there.
For portable devices, I'd want some proof, too. MPEG-4 SP/ASP/Part2 was popular in portable devices for years before H.264 entered the picture, and many new devices are still designed around it. In addition, damn near all devices support MJPEG, and many don't support anything else, so that's as good a candidate as any.
And as for H.264 being superior to WebM, that's only barely true. It's a very small technical difference between the two, to be sure. So much so that if WebM were to get the community support, and H.264 did not, that situation could easily be reversed in fairly short order. After all, x264 is the premeire implemention, despite all the money spent by companies trying to get that title themselves. If that kind of effort was put behind WebM, it wouldn't be a contest.
Guess what... your iPod doesn't even support H.264... What it does support is a seriously restricted version of it, if and only if, it has the magic proprietary Apple signature in the header. Otherwise, it gets reencoded by iTunes, just like WebM or any other format does.
At that point, when it must be encoded specifically for iPod, why does it even matter if the result can be called H.264 or any other standard? You've lost all the compatibilty that a standard is supposed to bring. How is having your H.264 videos reencoded to H.264 any better than them being reencoded to WebM?
Web standards have a much longer lifetime than whatever probable devices you own now. I certainly don't encode all my videos to be compatible with your iPod, why would I stick to the same video format (with incompatible settings?).
Besides, if we always stuck with what was out there and supported right now, we never wouuld have moved past MPEG-1. Hell, let iPod and iPhone users become second class citizens, with a subset of videos reencoded on the internet only for them, if Apple insists on being an insolent child.
And that's what slashdot is for these days... Trolling the world for added page views... but with an occasional tech story.
No. The national guard was always intended for military service. The fact that they were previously unoccupied and available to help with routine tasks unrelated to their job was merely a perk, paid for by the federal government. It was never a good idea to depend on them being available. If your local government needs more men, it should hire them, like everything else.
Sounds like a crappy way to lose the retirement benefits you earned...
Roger rabbit didn't originate the idea. Just as Disney constantly steals from the public domain. But there is Undeniably substantial truth behind the story...
http://www.internalcombustionbook.com/archive/offsite/pbs/history_detectives.html
It's a problem, but a fixable one. And more importantly, fiber optics won't help...
You're an idiot. This was as powerful as solar flares get, yet, from TFA:
HF was deprecated for just about all practical uses, as soon as viable alternatives (ie. communications satellites) were introduced. Earthbound wires have been pretty well impervious to solar flares just about forever.
The only real threat solar flares pose is to a few, already-overloaded, electrical transmission circuits which are operating at the edge of their capacity before the unexpected power-boost arrives. Other than that, it's a very insignificant bit of occasional static on the line. Nothing more.
Unfortunately, no, they aren't... Too bad, since there's so little detail in the summary I have no idea what this is actually about.
Not Found
The requested URL /publications/drafts/ fips180-4/Draft-FIPS180-4_Feb2011.pdf was not found on this server.
Great tip!
Listen up everybody. Next time a glint of sun light momentarily blinds you, you know what to do... SLAM ON YOUR BRAKES! It's just the SAFE THING to do!
Gold has inherent value in it's physical properties. Electronics and aerospace don't use gold because it's pretty and shiny...
You can say that you don't want gold when you've dying of starvation, but that's a horrible cop out... If I'm on fire, I don't give a damn about gold, food, or machines either. If you can't breathe, you'll do anything for air, but good luck selling it on the street.
Of course Android has it. It's just one of a billion examples where desktop apps are a nightmare to run on a non-desktop device. A phone in particular is massively constrained and so makes this even more exaggerated.
I actually forgot my favorite example... Google Map. Running the GMaps web-app on the browser on your phone is, frankly, useless and impossible, yet it works fine on a desktop. Google is hardly made up of idiots...
Having java installed doesn't magically put you in danger. The only place where java increases your attack profile is when its running as a browser plug in, and that is easy to disable without removing java.
Now, if you just don't know how to do it, and refuse to learn, that's a different issue entirely.
A word processor is about the simplest application possible. I named MUAs specifically, because they at least have multiple panes, and will be a common app.
My criticisms aren't made up. I've tried the same thing dozens of times over, and while it looks nice in screen-shots (which marketing always sells), trying to use most applications is a nightmare. It might look nice, but it's painful to actually use.
For input, just try web pages that extensively use on-mouse-over for their JS navigation menus. Plenty of apps do practically the same thing.
Loading up a bunch of X11 apps on a phone is a terrible idea. Traditional apps were designed with 3 mouse buttons in mind, and a cursor that glides across the screen from point A to point B. Put them on a device with a touch screen, and an on-screen keyboard, and the pain level goes through the roof.
Add to that issues of screen resolution... Your MUA that works great at 1280x960 is likely completely unusable on a small device with 640x320 or similar.
There's a reason PDAs weren't very popular. It took a decade for designers to figure out what interface designs work on space constrained devices, and I can say from experience that apps that work amazingly well on small screens are quite undesirable on large screens, unmodified.
And that's just scratching the surface. Sure, you can run a desktop OS on your phone, but it'll be burning up shortly, as all those apps in the background continue chewing up CPU time, and there's no equivalent API for X11 to tell the OS that your browser can be suspended when not in the foreground, but your media player needs to keep running at all times.
Honestly, the new, better interfaces small devices have, combined with the tighter integration with the hardware, are what has made portable devices fly past Desktops/Laptops/Netbooks. Really, what is the difference between a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard, and a laptop? Its all in the software... People want the better UIs.
As for the hardware being somewhat closed and proprietary, that's true of any new class of devices. It takes quite some time for standardization efforts (eg. VESA) to get everyone together on a certain baseline. And its not even that desireable, as that standardizations later becomes an anchor. It would be better if variation was reduced, and specs were available, but I haven't gotten that on my desktop graphics card yet, so I don't expect phones or tablets to open up any time soon. When I find an inexpensive tablet that is open enough to run 3rd part ports of Linux well (video playback, power management), Ill be first in line.
I would just add that customizing vim is a great idea. Because you'll never want to run vim on a new system you haven't extensively configured before... And besides, inconsistent behavior is just the spice pod life, you're sure to notice immediately, make no mistakes because of it, and just have a laugh about it later.
Seriously, nvi is awesome. Shows you the dos crlf breaks in your config file that are hosing up your server with a nonsense error message and no useful indications. Tiny, notably faster than vim, and much less nonsense popping up and showing you down.
That's easy... I do. I'm the admin who knows how everything is supposed to behave, have tons of logs to look through, and get emailed whenever something new or abnormal appears in the logs.
Besides that, you're not doing a great job if one errant process can exhaust all memory, or similar. Disk quotas work quite well. Always resist increasing ulimits, no matter how much programmers insist or beg.
Theora can't compete with MPEG-2 to begin with. MPEG-2 is designed for high-bitrate, high quality video encoding. Theora can't handle that at all. No matter how much you crank up the bitrate, Theora will continue to be fuzzy. It was designed exclusively for very low bitrate encoding. H.264 learned from On2's mistakes, and designed their codec to excel in low-bitrates, but having the ability to shut off those features, and still be tolerable at high bitrates (though really not much better than MPEG-2).
MPEG-1 video has been freely implementable for a long time. MPEG-2 will be out from under its relevant patents very shortly. Both are decidedly better than MV1, and there's nothing stopping digital camera manufactures from using them... HOWEVER, that's just not how the world works. Phone manufacturers either use MJPEG because it's computationally free (just a series of JPEGs, which any phone can already create), where using any decent video codec would require specialized hardware and added cost. Plus, how much video can fit on a flash card isn't a major selling point for basic cameras, so almost nobody cares.
At the other end of the spectrum are manufacturers who want to be buzz-word compatible. They don't care what H.264 is, and will happily sell you a camera that records videos that are nothing but static noise, as long as they can have the "H.264" buzzword on the box.
VP8/WebM won't change this, and certainly won't result in consumers getting better video quality from the cheap junk cameras out there.
Additionally, everyone here has no idea what they're talking about. The MPEG is as big and slow moving of a bureaucracy as it gets. Since they've just decided to start working on this, you can expect it will be at least 5+ years before we see even a basic spec come out of it, and longer before anyone has any implementations to show for it. VP8 is here now. Dropping the license fees on H.264 is what they've done to try to compete with VP8. This foray is irrelevant to that.
What they're trying to do here is compete with is themselves... They want to produce something that's just slightly better than MPEG-2, and where they have a way to monetize it (which they don't with MPEG-2 once the patents expire). Maybe they'll make it so that the decoder is royalty free, but the encoder needs extensive patent licenses. Maybe there will be a free encoder as well, but ONLY if you don't use several encoding options that greatly improve quality. So they'll hope to make some money up-selling their new "free" codec.
An idiotic assertion... Nothing is here until it its created. Not everything that can be made, has been made. Not every good idea had yet been realized. The demand its not there because you can't expect purple to demand a theoretical product that doesn't exist. One it's created, we will see if there is demand.
Dvd players are a complete refutation of your above assertion. profits are terrible due to the heavy patent license fees, yet companies are rising to make them. their tony profit margins are better than the nothing they were getting before. And the government initially subsidized the factories building dvd players specifically because they wanted their populace to have cheap electronics available domestically. There done the same thing with the Dragon Chip, and many, many others.
chinese companies would love such a product without license fees, far more than they like dvd players, yet they churn those out for $20 a shot.
And cell phones are another good example. The no named chinese companies are turning out $50 smart phones ruining Android, at next to no profit, with no differentiation, while the big names are making vastly more profits... Yet the no name chinese companies keep churning them out, even with the royalties they have to party on the underlying tech. They'd love to be rid of those fixed fees they get nothing out of and only inhibit their business. And when the fees drop, and the device prices can be lowered even further, new markets will open, creating all nw demand, ala EEE PC
You clearly missed my meaning. I'm referring to something decidedly low end. Something that is dirt cheap, but more than capable of being a good ebook reader, though it won't compete with saxophones on the few high end features like h.264 video playback.
Its only at the high end where patents are a hindrance. 2D graphics is easy. Basic 3d has been around well over 20 years now, too. Jurassic Park comes to mind, on sgi they were probably using open gl as well.
Ditto for memory. You might not get the fastest or lowest power memory, but it will be plenty fast for a low end device.
This is untrue on most levels.
For starters, liquid hyrocarbons are useless on their own. You need a large, complicated engine to make it do work. Then all kinds of supporting machinery, like a radiator, fan, fuel pumps, gas pumps, and most importantly, a massive transmission and axle.
Meanwhile, the best efficiency you can hope for is 25%. So you get to divide that energy density by at least a factor of 4, while batteries and an electric motor are extremely efficient.
And finally, if you think theoretical energy capacity is even remotely relevant, I'll have to remind you that fission of PB, NiMH, or Li would produce more energy.
Of course, none of that matters... What matters is that electric cars are practical, and in a fairly short time their shortcomings will be resolved. Absolutely nothing else holds that promise... Decades of work on ethanol, biodiesel, algae, and hydrogen never showed the slightest sign of being able to scale up. Electricity can, and will. There's nothing else even on the horizon, so there's no point in arguing whether its good or bad, practical or impractical. It is the future, no matter how hard car companies pushed to prevent it, and the future will form up around whatever limitations they have, just as the car changed the world long before it.
Right now, electric cars are probably practical for a large minority of the public, if not for the high initial price. Extending car loans further would likely solve the intial price problem, and the net cost (at least for something like the Nissan Leaf) will likely work out better than a conventional vehichle if you are lucky enough to fit into that category.
For the rest of us, hybrids make a good trade off in the mean time as the early adopters help pay for the research and development.
I've been hearing about open hardware for a good decade now, so where is it? Where's the patent-free 500mhz MIPS CPU based tablet that runs on AA batteries, maybe with with a 32 shade grey scale b+w LCD (no backlite needed)?
if you fab it, they will come.
I'm sure there are chinese manufacturers out there who would love a tablet they can manufacture initially locally, without license or royalty payments. Hell the government has that as a major goal.
So with the innumerable products coming out every year why haven't we seen even one based on open hardware?
I second your comment, and then some.
I was absolutely gagging, reading TFA, when every third line was some heavy handed implication that this was a big secret, actively covered up by the military for half a centure...
I don't consider myself an amateur historian, let alone that specializes in women's lib, yet I've heard about women running advanced control systems, and yes, even the ones computing ballistics tables, and cracking crypto. I guess a couple hours of History Channel a day is enough to make amateur historians look stupid... Then again, maybe that's not even a prereq for making her look stupid.
And to the ladies, why would you ever expect someone to get your story down? You didn't bother taking it to a publisher, write to historians or women's lib groups. Did you attend reunions? Did you share your story with anyone outside your immediate family? I know there have been documentaries made, and some women were in it, just not you. Did you expect the media to track down every single woman that served, 65 years later, in the hopes they'd have an interesting story? How could anyone have ever found out your story, or even found you? You might be the most interesting person in the world, but if you don't actively do something, you can't ever expect any greater recognition or impact.
Honestly, the repressed women angle, conjured up out of thin air and permeating everything, really got my bile up.
You couldn't be more wrong.
There are inumerable situations where someone gains the ability to see the shadow file (or a hash going over the network) without gaining root access.
Hell, if root access on a box was the only concern, YOU WOULDN'T NEED TO EVEN HASH PASSWORDS, let alone salt them. Plain text, no problem, only root can read 'em, right? And never mind password expiration... its not there as an advanced memory test.
If someone gets root access on a box, but can't decrypt the passwords, then they can't just up and use those credentials to gain access to other, more important boxes.