ARM CPUs still aren't on-par even with rather old x86 CPUs. They just don't (or at least HAVEN'T) scale-up that well. The DMIPS/MHz of ARM CPUs just isn't that good. Sure, everyone who dreams about ARM taking over the world insists that, sure, with 100 ARM cores, you might have enough CPU power... never mind that programs aren't making good use of more than 2 cores yet...
There are only two existing CPU architectures with enough performance to potentially displace x86. PowerPC & MIPS.
PowerPC is the undeniable king of high performance embedded systems. Power-sipping PowerPC comparable with ARM are available out of Freescale, yet they do major number crunching not far shy of what and x86 CPU could do. The fact that you can find PowerPC CPUs in modern gaming consoles should be a hint... No sign of ARM there.
MIPS is similarly very frugal on power, but well known of its number-crunching prowess. It used to be the king of gaming machines, and still seems to be the muscle behind nearly every piece of high-end embedded and telcom equipment (eg. smart network switches, routers, etc.). Again, no sign of ARM there.
And MIPS has another notable plus... China has been pushing it as an alternative to x86 CPUs. The "Dragon Chip" manages to avoid using any patented technology (so it's seriously dirt cheap) and for years now, you could buy them in a micro-ITX computer that performs comparably to a 1GHz Pentium-4. Their latest generation goes 64-bit, multi-core, etc. I haven't kept up on it's recent developments as I used-to, but it might be out in the market, kicking ass right now. If nothing else, Intel is going to have a hell of a time selling ATOMs if shipfulls of low-power, $10 USD Dragon Chips start showing up in the west.
Re:Conclusions from googling..
on
Volcano Futures
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· Score: 1
- Possibility that propellor planes and helicopters are safer
Safer, but I wouldn't call them safe. A turboprop won't get nearly as much ash flowing through it, since it just needs air for respiration, not directly for thrust, but you're still taking a risk. The lower airspeed of a turboprop likely reduces the abrasion a lot as well, but again, I wouldn't feel comfortable about the prospect...
- Nobody has thought about ash bothering ground transportation. Does it?
When ash is settling down to low altitudes, it's a HUGE problem. Nobody CARES if ground transportation works, because they're too busy trying not to die a horrible death from shredded lungs...
Need a closed engine design. (chemical or hydrogen powered electric closed engine?)
Hydrogen still needs oxygen... Carrying your own will be ridiculously expensive. The only plausible option seems to be batteries (or power lines).
Skill at Contra is extremely specialized. And is as much memorization as it is "skill".
Take someone who has been playing Contra for years, and stick them in front of Quake 3, and see how well developed their "gaming skills" really are, as opposed to their "Contra skills".
In short, playing a "brain training" game repeatedly will make you good at... playing that one single "brain training" game...
If you find that game fun, be my guest, but let's not pretend there is going to be some benfit to your intellect.
The same thing is far too common with children's toys... ridiculously expensive electronic devices pandering to parents trying to give their kids an advantage, with all studies showing playing with the empty box will have the exact same effects...
Ugh, sorry, no I don't like your case/esac solution. I'd rather use the wildcard globbing version someone else wrote in another comment:
Globbing is a bad idea in general. The number of files in the folder will increase, you'll run out of space, and the program will crash.
We are just going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
I don't think there's any denying that opening a file in Python is going to require you typing more characters than Bourne, quotes and all... It's pretty trivial either way, IMHO, it's you who is making a big deal out of needing all of two extra characters...
At first glance this looks horrible. It's much more than the three terse lines of the original. But it's easier to get right, and this is safer to run. If the user specifies something silly for the first arg, or doesn't provide it, this program will immediately stop after trying to change directories. The original would change to "/some/directory" and blindly run on, trying to run "some_program" there, and who knows what would happen? Likewise, if "some_program" fails, this script will stop immediately, and the deleting of the *.temp files will not occur (making it easier to debug what's going on). Finally, in this code we don't have to worry about quoting the arguments; we can just use the arguments and it just works.
The problem is simply that you know Python far better than you know Bourne...
For instance, "set -e" at the top of your script will instantly resolve all your concerns about unset variables and intermediate intermediate steps failing...
junk_extension = (".temp", ".tmp", ".junk") if filename.endswith(junk_extension):
os.remove(filename)
How about:
case `echo $FILE|rev|cut -d. -f1|rev` in
tmp|temp|junk) rm -f "$FILE";; esac
I don't need to worry about quoting the filename;
I fail to see the horrible inconvenience in putting quotes around variables and file-names. Python syntax is VASTLY more cumbersome... In Bourne, I don't need to worry about putting parentheses around args, mandatory indentation, oddities like "=END" to suppress newlines, and other weird syntax crap Python needs...
A telling statement. If enough programmers find the program useful, but in need of improvement, then it is very likely some of them will improve it. If enough non-programmers think that way then they can pay to have it improved. If this doesn't happen then maybe the program wasn't so very important after all.
The problem is one of organization... A program can be extremely important to a large number of people, BUT if the user base isn't all looking for an open source option at the same time, there may SEEM like there's no community for it, and that will lead people towards a commercial alternative, even if, collectively, they would have improved the open source... whatever it is... to the point of being vastly superior to the closed-source option.
You have to factor in the cost of the needs of every single individual... If what one person needs costs X, but a proprietary option costs X/4, then they'll go for the proprietary option, just as will 20 other people, all of whom would be better served by collaborating. But sometimes, the timing just isn't right.
Then there's always the prisoner's dilemma. If I take the public code, and keep my changes private, then I have something valuable... Meanwhile, the community stagnates.
Nowadays ? *ALL* system are either closed , or too complicated to really go on (remember how easy it was to use CGA or even later mode 10h?) , and among the young nerd I know not many really start programming. There you have it. That in my opinion is alone to make people which would be interested into programming less numerous.
While hardware interfacing may be more difficult, the number of kids who have written decent applications in, say, Python, is likely vastly more than the number who have ever done CGA programming. In short, there should be more to interest young people, since they can get started, and doing useful things, quicker and easier.
And I seriously doubt all the Linux kernel developers started where you expect they "should have" (where you did...).
No. It is not proprietary in any sense of the word. You really need to look up the definition before you speak.
Theora has more claim to being proprietary, as one single organization defined it and continues to change it however they see fit. That has been expressed as one of the reasons companies refuse to accept Theora... Not that the quality and installed-base issue isn't overwhelmingly paramount, though.
As for the Quicktime plugin, there's no Linux or *BSD support at all (mainly because there's no QT on those platforms), although there's plugins that use VLC or totem, etc instead.
Now you're on to something...!
That's right, since Quicktime uses standard H.264 with AAC, there were plugins for nearly every system on the planet since day 1.
The problem with flash isn't that it's a big bad plugin. The problem is that it's proprietary. H.264 is NOT proprietary. It just happens to be patented.
5. and they ARE cool... until you put a bunch of servers in them, and then they heat up, and STAY hot, and are harder to cool than on the surface
Indeed. The term is "thermal mass". It was being trumpeted for a good long time as "green" since it helps to average-out the temperatures in homes, offices, etc. Problem is, with extended hot or cold weather, you need active heating/cooling, and a huge amount at that, because of all the thermal mass you now need to heat/cool.
This was solved a long time ago, however, by having the thermal mass attached by pipes, instead of as directly part of the building. Previously, that was in the form of "solar ponds" which you can choose to leave "outside" if they will not provide a benefit. More recently, the superior option is water or ground-source heat-pumps, which can benefit from the thermal mass of the ground even if the ground is hotter/colder than you would prefer to be, and can be shut off at any time should the air temperature be more comfortable than ground...
checking your account every few days is only prudent.
Not unless you're unemployed and therefore have a lot of extra time on your hands...
Honestly, if I have to watch my bank account like a hawk to have a debit or credit card, I'd stick to cash exclusively, and the good old monthly statement... I don't know about anyone else, but the "convenience" of a credit/debit card is pretty damn small to me.
Credit cards are limited by U.S. law to a maximum of $50 liability to the cardholder. Debit cards losses are usually covered by the bank, but they are under no legal obligation to do so.
This is totally and completely untrue. The laws which protect you from debit card fraud are only a couple years younger than the laws protecting you from credit card fraud, so I have no idea how this idiotic idea got started. The only way you can actually lose the money, legally, is "if you fail to notify the bank within 60 days." Otherwise, call the bank, and send it in writing shortly thereafter, and you'll have your money back in no time (do NOT omit the in-writing part!):
"The law limits consumer liability for credit card fraud to $50. For debit card fraud, your liability is $50 if you notify the bank with 2 days of learning of the fraud, and $500 or more after two days"
Andthe claims that maxing-out your credit card due to fraud doesn't affect the consumer, is also nonsense. If you've got a bill pending on your credit card, it'll be rejected, just as it would if it was on your debit card. How is there any difference there? You're screwed either way.
The banks like it because you're putting your money at risk, not theirs.
It's their money, every bit as much as the bill on your charge card is their money.
If you put in writing that money was fraudulently withdrawn from your account, they have to give it back to you within a few days, and can only charge you a maximum of $50 if you didn't report it in a timely fashion.
At least, that's how it is in the USA. If the laws are backwards where you are, get them changed. Credit car theft used to be a life-changing experience, as individuals were held liable for fraudulent charges... The law had to be changed to protect you from credit card fraud, and similar laws were made for all other electronic transactions as well.
But from all the fools here claiming your better off with a credit card, it's sad to see how well the cynical advertising by the credit card companies has work on the unwashed masses...
You get NONE of this with a debit card. The only reason a debit card is preferable is if you don't have the self control to spend an amount you can pay off every month
Or if you don't want to pay a fee to have a credit card. Or if you don't like the terms and conditions. Or if you care AT ALL about your privacy, and don't want every purchase you ever made in the database of the big three, free for ANYBODY to look up. Or if you want to ensure that any lucky identity thieves can't do anything to ruin your non-existent credit rating... Or...
Actually, most websites shutdown. Typically, it's a couple hours, starting at 2AM (PST), perhaps only on one day of the week, perhaps more. Netflix downtime always annoyed me, but Sears was offline so often at night it was getting that I couldn't use it at all (on my schedule)... Worst is when you've been using it for several minutes, and then every click redirects you to the "Maintenance" page...
Re:An updated Workplace Shell would be great
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 1
The Gnome vs. KDE battle is retarded, and both DEs are starting to get kind of nutty. IBM could restore sanity.
XFce4 has grown surprisingly-well in popularity over the past few years. It's not on-par with GNOME or KDE, but by far the closest competitor.
It provides a full featured and extensively configurable desktop environment, all while consuming a fraction the resources of GNOME or KDE. It also doesn't try to provide a million system services, APIs, etc., or come bundled with hundreds of apps that depend on it. While I'm slightly disappointed that they strayed from the old CDE-like interface used in XFce3, and that while quite light on resources, it's no longer the featherweight it was when based on GTK-1.x.
Still, XFce is easily the best competitor to become the standard Linux desktop, and provides a pretty good desktop environment. I also give it massive credit for not simply copying everything about the Windows or OSX environment and calling it advancement, instead, it actually does things BETTER. But I digress. Having some massive corporate funded desktop environment to compete with the other 2 massive open source public funded desktop environments, doesn't seem like it will accomplish anything but more fragmentation. A lightweight and more elegant desktop environment, however, could actually unify the vast majority of users that are currently spread across various options.
That said, I really think people have lost a sense of gravity for where the country is right now.
On the contrary. People are vastly over-reacting to where we are right now.
A year ago the world and the US was on the edge of falling into an economic depression.
This was almost entirely due to the extensive dismantling of our longstanding regulations that have been put in place since the Great Depression. Yes, it was precarious, but any time you have an idiot in the presidency, life gets more precarious... See your own next sentence.
Unemployment is almost 10%, the worst it has been since the Regan years in 1981.
You're right. It was worse <30 years ago. It was worse in the 60s when we were at full-scale war in Vietnam, and full-on space race mode, hemmoraging money, as the economy dipped.
It would be like a person deciding to buy a new car (without a need) after getting fired and after having their savings account depleted by a health care expense.
A person buying a car will lose money, end of story. A government spending on major projects will not lose money, but move it around, reducing unemployment, increasing it's tax base, etc., etc. In short, it will "bring economic success". You seemed to know that a few sentences back, not sure why you forgot it now.
And as others have said, it's not a question of spending money versus not, it's more a question of spending money on unemployment, versus spending money to create jobs. Or even better, spending money on propping-up banks versus fueling the space program.
but if those are real, and this is fully open sourced, Theora AND H264 are in for a beating.
PSNR is a poor metric, with most people switching to SSIM in the recent past.
You should look at some of On2's older codecs. You'll find they ALWAYS claim their codecs are vastly better than anything else out there. I found it amusing that every generation (VP3 vs VP4, VP4 vs VP5, etc., etc.) On2 likes to claim that the new codec gets "up to a 50% improvement" which means we should have HighDef on floppy disks at this point...
That said, I will concede that VP7 was perhaps the first good codec to come out of On2. It was at least competitive with other codecs, though still well behind x264. Also, it required a god-awful amount of CPU to do it.
If you are going for cheap hydro power and a cooler climate why not put your data center in Western NY?
Because nothing is "cheap" unless supply is larger than demand. There's plenty of people around NEW YORK to consume that "cheap" power, to the point it isn't cheap any longer.
In Las Vegas, however, there's a relatively small population, and it's a good distance away from any other population centers which might wish to consume that cheap power...
Additionally, the desert is underrated. Large quantities of land are nearly free, very little infrastructure is needed as most natural destructive forces are not present (ice, heavy rain, etc.), and while temperatures may be high, the dry air make evaporative cooling work amazingly well, to the point that cooling a home in the desert is cheaper than cooling a home in a more humid climate, despite the major temperature differences.
I can get a 1TB hard-drive for under a $100 at many locations (costco, google-shopping) so this seems like a big waste of money to me.
Press releases ALWAYS list the RETAIL PRICES of the product. Complaining that the real prices are lower than MSRP just makes you look like an idiot.
Plain and simple, the retail price of this drive is less than the retail price of an otherwise identical drive. So, after it's been around a while, it will similarly drop to LOWER than current 500GB Seagate drives.
As far as I'm concerned, they can put all the DRMed content on my hard drive that they want... Idiots get to subsidize my hard drive, and I just wipe it immediately, anyhow. Three cheers for another idiot tax.
For the past 10 years, nearly everything coming out of Hollywood has been crap. There's no comparison between the industry today, and 20 years ago. It's non-stop mindless tripe, remakes of old movies, comic books, and TV shows. I can count on one hand the worthwhile films that have been released in the past 10 years.
This is what happens when business eats their own seed corn. Sure, at first you get inflated profits as viewer habits more slowly change (and the prisoner's dilemma keeps you on top until everyone else joins in) but audiences continue to decline, and Hollywood is showing no signs of changing... Odd, since massive success right now would make them a much more attractive investment...
Of course the declining DVD sales also couldn't have anything to do with the recession, or the shine coming off the DVD sales bubble as the technology is no longer new to anyone, and people wise-up to the endless tricks like "Director's Cut #5" and irritants like forced trailers and the like.
Honestly, how could movie sales NOT be declining right now?
I have to disagree with you (and damn near everyone else posting to this thread) there. Larry Sanger has made his uneasiness with the graphic nature of parts of Wikipedia well-known numerous times in the past. He did so before he had put Citizendium (CZ) together, so no conflict of interest was possible at the time.
He's been consistent about it as well. The ban on obscenity is in the founding documents of CZ, and he's repeatedly stated his displeasure with Wikipeia's (WP) distribution of said obscenity.
That may make him many things (the closest proper term I can think of is "Prude") but suggesting he is cynically looking for anything he can find that will harm WP, appears quite baseless. Eliminating the obscenity on WP has been his Quixotic goal for a very long time, and this action seems completely in-line with his stated opinions on the subject. However misguided, his action certainly isn't a "conflict of interest." His letter doesn't make any statement that would promote his own project, such as "at CZ we strive to make our project child-safe" (even though that is true), or suggest harsh action, or the like.
He certainly didn't have to post said letter publicly. He could just as well have kept it quiet, and waited for the Feds to come knocking. Everything he's done sounds like a genuine desire to get the "child pornography" removed, rather than his interests promoted.
Thirdly, looking at history, it's clear that it's not always the best technology that succeeds.
On the contrary. It's just your definition of "best" is inaccurate.
One example is Vorbis vs. MP3, where MP3 has stayed the most popular format, even though Vorbis has been both freely available and better.
Vorbis had no installed base, was computationally more complex, and quality was only slightly better than the best MP3 encoders, and even then, not in all cases (it really falls apart on some audio, where MP3 is much more consistent).
No, you can't release something that's slightly better, 10 years later, and expect the world to drop everything to switch to your new product. Additionally, with the increase in storage size and available bandwidth, the bitrate difference just wasn't significant enough for most anyone.
So no, you shouldn't try to start developing a codec to compete with H.264 right now. You should try to develop a codec to compete with WMV4, H.265, MPEG-5, VP9, etc. And even then, it's can't be just *slightly* better than the competition...
Slashdot Mirror
ARM CPUs still aren't on-par even with rather old x86 CPUs. They just don't (or at least HAVEN'T) scale-up that well. The DMIPS/MHz of ARM CPUs just isn't that good. Sure, everyone who dreams about ARM taking over the world insists that, sure, with 100 ARM cores, you might have enough CPU power... never mind that programs aren't making good use of more than 2 cores yet...
There are only two existing CPU architectures with enough performance to potentially displace x86. PowerPC & MIPS.
PowerPC is the undeniable king of high performance embedded systems. Power-sipping PowerPC comparable with ARM are available out of Freescale, yet they do major number crunching not far shy of what and x86 CPU could do. The fact that you can find PowerPC CPUs in modern gaming consoles should be a hint... No sign of ARM there.
MIPS is similarly very frugal on power, but well known of its number-crunching prowess. It used to be the king of gaming machines, and still seems to be the muscle behind nearly every piece of high-end embedded and telcom equipment (eg. smart network switches, routers, etc.). Again, no sign of ARM there.
And MIPS has another notable plus... China has been pushing it as an alternative to x86 CPUs. The "Dragon Chip" manages to avoid using any patented technology (so it's seriously dirt cheap) and for years now, you could buy them in a micro-ITX computer that performs comparably to a 1GHz Pentium-4. Their latest generation goes 64-bit, multi-core, etc. I haven't kept up on it's recent developments as I used-to, but it might be out in the market, kicking ass right now. If nothing else, Intel is going to have a hell of a time selling ATOMs if shipfulls of low-power, $10 USD Dragon Chips start showing up in the west.
Safer, but I wouldn't call them safe. A turboprop won't get nearly as much ash flowing through it, since it just needs air for respiration, not directly for thrust, but you're still taking a risk. The lower airspeed of a turboprop likely reduces the abrasion a lot as well, but again, I wouldn't feel comfortable about the prospect...
When ash is settling down to low altitudes, it's a HUGE problem. Nobody CARES if ground transportation works, because they're too busy trying not to die a horrible death from shredded lungs...
Hydrogen still needs oxygen... Carrying your own will be ridiculously expensive. The only plausible option seems to be batteries (or power lines).
Skill at Contra is extremely specialized. And is as much memorization as it is "skill".
Take someone who has been playing Contra for years, and stick them in front of Quake 3, and see how well developed their "gaming skills" really are, as opposed to their "Contra skills".
In short, playing a "brain training" game repeatedly will make you good at... playing that one single "brain training" game...
If you find that game fun, be my guest, but let's not pretend there is going to be some benfit to your intellect.
The same thing is far too common with children's toys... ridiculously expensive electronic devices pandering to parents trying to give their kids an advantage, with all studies showing playing with the empty box will have the exact same effects...
Globbing is a bad idea in general. The number of files in the folder will increase, you'll run out of space, and the program will crash.
I don't think there's any denying that opening a file in Python is going to require you typing more characters than Bourne, quotes and all... It's pretty trivial either way, IMHO, it's you who is making a big deal out of needing all of two extra characters...
The problem is simply that you know Python far better than you know Bourne...
For instance, "set -e" at the top of your script will instantly resolve all your concerns about unset variables and intermediate intermediate steps failing...
How about:
case `echo $FILE|rev|cut -d. -f1|rev` in ;;
tmp|temp|junk) rm -f "$FILE"
esac
I fail to see the horrible inconvenience in putting quotes around variables and file-names. Python syntax is VASTLY more cumbersome... In Bourne, I don't need to worry about putting parentheses around args, mandatory indentation, oddities like "=END" to suppress newlines, and other weird syntax crap Python needs...
The problem is one of organization... A program can be extremely important to a large number of people, BUT if the user base isn't all looking for an open source option at the same time, there may SEEM like there's no community for it, and that will lead people towards a commercial alternative, even if, collectively, they would have improved the open source... whatever it is... to the point of being vastly superior to the closed-source option.
You have to factor in the cost of the needs of every single individual... If what one person needs costs X, but a proprietary option costs X/4, then they'll go for the proprietary option, just as will 20 other people, all of whom would be better served by collaborating. But sometimes, the timing just isn't right.
Then there's always the prisoner's dilemma. If I take the public code, and keep my changes private, then I have something valuable... Meanwhile, the community stagnates.
While hardware interfacing may be more difficult, the number of kids who have written decent applications in, say, Python, is likely vastly more than the number who have ever done CGA programming. In short, there should be more to interest young people, since they can get started, and doing useful things, quicker and easier.
And I seriously doubt all the Linux kernel developers started where you expect they "should have" (where you did...).
No. It is not proprietary in any sense of the word. You really need to look up the definition before you speak.
Theora has more claim to being proprietary, as one single organization defined it and continues to change it however they see fit. That has been expressed as one of the reasons companies refuse to accept Theora... Not that the quality and installed-base issue isn't overwhelmingly paramount, though.
Now you're on to something...!
That's right, since Quicktime uses standard H.264 with AAC, there were plugins for nearly every system on the planet since day 1.
The problem with flash isn't that it's a big bad plugin. The problem is that it's proprietary. H.264 is NOT proprietary. It just happens to be patented.
Indeed. The term is "thermal mass". It was being trumpeted for a good long time as "green" since it helps to average-out the temperatures in homes, offices, etc. Problem is, with extended hot or cold weather, you need active heating/cooling, and a huge amount at that, because of all the thermal mass you now need to heat/cool.
This was solved a long time ago, however, by having the thermal mass attached by pipes, instead of as directly part of the building. Previously, that was in the form of "solar ponds" which you can choose to leave "outside" if they will not provide a benefit. More recently, the superior option is water or ground-source heat-pumps, which can benefit from the thermal mass of the ground even if the ground is hotter/colder than you would prefer to be, and can be shut off at any time should the air temperature be more comfortable than ground...
Not unless you're unemployed and therefore have a lot of extra time on your hands...
Honestly, if I have to watch my bank account like a hawk to have a debit or credit card, I'd stick to cash exclusively, and the good old monthly statement... I don't know about anyone else, but the "convenience" of a credit/debit card is pretty damn small to me.
This is totally and completely untrue. The laws which protect you from debit card fraud are only a couple years younger than the laws protecting you from credit card fraud, so I have no idea how this idiotic idea got started. The only way you can actually lose the money, legally, is "if you fail to notify the bank within 60 days." Otherwise, call the bank, and send it in writing shortly thereafter, and you'll have your money back in no time (do NOT omit the in-writing part!):
"The law limits consumer liability for credit card fraud to $50. For debit card fraud, your liability is $50 if you notify the bank with 2 days of learning of the fraud, and $500 or more after two days"
Andthe claims that maxing-out your credit card due to fraud doesn't affect the consumer, is also nonsense. If you've got a bill pending on your credit card, it'll be rejected, just as it would if it was on your debit card. How is there any difference there? You're screwed either way.
It's their money, every bit as much as the bill on your charge card is their money.
If you put in writing that money was fraudulently withdrawn from your account, they have to give it back to you within a few days, and can only charge you a maximum of $50 if you didn't report it in a timely fashion.
At least, that's how it is in the USA. If the laws are backwards where you are, get them changed. Credit car theft used to be a life-changing experience, as individuals were held liable for fraudulent charges... The law had to be changed to protect you from credit card fraud, and similar laws were made for all other electronic transactions as well.
But from all the fools here claiming your better off with a credit card, it's sad to see how well the cynical advertising by the credit card companies has work on the unwashed masses...
Or if you don't want to pay a fee to have a credit card.
Or if you don't like the terms and conditions.
Or if you care AT ALL about your privacy, and don't want every purchase you ever made in the database of the big three, free for ANYBODY to look up.
Or if you want to ensure that any lucky identity thieves can't do anything to ruin your non-existent credit rating...
Or...
Actually, most websites shutdown. Typically, it's a couple hours, starting at 2AM (PST), perhaps only on one day of the week, perhaps more. Netflix downtime always annoyed me, but Sears was offline so often at night it was getting that I couldn't use it at all (on my schedule)... Worst is when you've been using it for several minutes, and then every click redirects you to the "Maintenance" page...
XFce4 has grown surprisingly-well in popularity over the past few years. It's not on-par with GNOME or KDE, but by far the closest competitor.
It provides a full featured and extensively configurable desktop environment, all while consuming a fraction the resources of GNOME or KDE. It also doesn't try to provide a million system services, APIs, etc., or come bundled with hundreds of apps that depend on it. While I'm slightly disappointed that they strayed from the old CDE-like interface used in XFce3, and that while quite light on resources, it's no longer the featherweight it was when based on GTK-1.x.
Still, XFce is easily the best competitor to become the standard Linux desktop, and provides a pretty good desktop environment. I also give it massive credit for not simply copying everything about the Windows or OSX environment and calling it advancement, instead, it actually does things BETTER. But I digress. Having some massive corporate funded desktop environment to compete with the other 2 massive open source public funded desktop environments, doesn't seem like it will accomplish anything but more fragmentation. A lightweight and more elegant desktop environment, however, could actually unify the vast majority of users that are currently spread across various options.
On the contrary. People are vastly over-reacting to where we are right now.
This was almost entirely due to the extensive dismantling of our longstanding regulations that have been put in place since the Great Depression. Yes, it was precarious, but any time you have an idiot in the presidency, life gets more precarious... See your own next sentence.
You're right. It was worse <30 years ago. It was worse in the 60s when we were at full-scale war in Vietnam, and full-on space race mode, hemmoraging money, as the economy dipped.
A person buying a car will lose money, end of story. A government spending on major projects will not lose money, but move it around, reducing unemployment, increasing it's tax base, etc., etc. In short, it will "bring economic success". You seemed to know that a few sentences back, not sure why you forgot it now.
And as others have said, it's not a question of spending money versus not, it's more a question of spending money on unemployment, versus spending money to create jobs. Or even better, spending money on propping-up banks versus fueling the space program.
As opposed to "War in Vietnam or be first to go to the moon?" the first time around...
There's no legal roadblock to them handling the video tag just like every other "embed" tag, and allowing an external application to play it.
They have refused to do exactly this with GStreamer for political reasons, NOT legal ones...
PSNR is a poor metric, with most people switching to SSIM in the recent past.
You should look at some of On2's older codecs. You'll find they ALWAYS claim their codecs are vastly better than anything else out there. I found it amusing that every generation (VP3 vs VP4, VP4 vs VP5, etc., etc.) On2 likes to claim that the new codec gets "up to a 50% improvement" which means we should have HighDef on floppy disks at this point...
That said, I will concede that VP7 was perhaps the first good codec to come out of On2. It was at least competitive with other codecs, though still well behind x264. Also, it required a god-awful amount of CPU to do it.
Because nothing is "cheap" unless supply is larger than demand. There's plenty of people around NEW YORK to consume that "cheap" power, to the point it isn't cheap any longer.
In Las Vegas, however, there's a relatively small population, and it's a good distance away from any other population centers which might wish to consume that cheap power...
Additionally, the desert is underrated. Large quantities of land are nearly free, very little infrastructure is needed as most natural destructive forces are not present (ice, heavy rain, etc.), and while temperatures may be high, the dry air make evaporative cooling work amazingly well, to the point that cooling a home in the desert is cheaper than cooling a home in a more humid climate, despite the major temperature differences.
Press releases ALWAYS list the RETAIL PRICES of the product. Complaining that the real prices are lower than MSRP just makes you look like an idiot.
Plain and simple, the retail price of this drive is less than the retail price of an otherwise identical drive. So, after it's been around a while, it will similarly drop to LOWER than current 500GB Seagate drives.
As far as I'm concerned, they can put all the DRMed content on my hard drive that they want... Idiots get to subsidize my hard drive, and I just wipe it immediately, anyhow. Three cheers for another idiot tax.
Who's stupid enough to believe this assertion?
For the past 10 years, nearly everything coming out of Hollywood has been crap. There's no comparison between the industry today, and 20 years ago. It's non-stop mindless tripe, remakes of old movies, comic books, and TV shows. I can count on one hand the worthwhile films that have been released in the past 10 years.
This is what happens when business eats their own seed corn. Sure, at first you get inflated profits as viewer habits more slowly change (and the prisoner's dilemma keeps you on top until everyone else joins in) but audiences continue to decline, and Hollywood is showing no signs of changing... Odd, since massive success right now would make them a much more attractive investment...
Of course the declining DVD sales also couldn't have anything to do with the recession, or the shine coming off the DVD sales bubble as the technology is no longer new to anyone, and people wise-up to the endless tricks like "Director's Cut #5" and irritants like forced trailers and the like.
Honestly, how could movie sales NOT be declining right now?
I have to disagree with you (and damn near everyone else posting to this thread) there. Larry Sanger has made his uneasiness with the graphic nature of parts of Wikipedia well-known numerous times in the past. He did so before he had put Citizendium (CZ) together, so no conflict of interest was possible at the time.
He's been consistent about it as well. The ban on obscenity is in the founding documents of CZ, and he's repeatedly stated his displeasure with Wikipeia's (WP) distribution of said obscenity.
That may make him many things (the closest proper term I can think of is "Prude") but suggesting he is cynically looking for anything he can find that will harm WP, appears quite baseless. Eliminating the obscenity on WP has been his Quixotic goal for a very long time, and this action seems completely in-line with his stated opinions on the subject. However misguided, his action certainly isn't a "conflict of interest." His letter doesn't make any statement that would promote his own project, such as "at CZ we strive to make our project child-safe" (even though that is true), or suggest harsh action, or the like.
He certainly didn't have to post said letter publicly. He could just as well have kept it quiet, and waited for the Feds to come knocking. Everything he's done sounds like a genuine desire to get the "child pornography" removed, rather than his interests promoted.
On the contrary. It's just your definition of "best" is inaccurate.
Vorbis had no installed base, was computationally more complex, and quality was only slightly better than the best MP3 encoders, and even then, not in all cases (it really falls apart on some audio, where MP3 is much more consistent).
No, you can't release something that's slightly better, 10 years later, and expect the world to drop everything to switch to your new product. Additionally, with the increase in storage size and available bandwidth, the bitrate difference just wasn't significant enough for most anyone.
So no, you shouldn't try to start developing a codec to compete with H.264 right now. You should try to develop a codec to compete with WMV4, H.265, MPEG-5, VP9, etc. And even then, it's can't be just *slightly* better than the competition...