Bravo couchslug, for saving me the trouble of writing up a post. My thoughts exactly.
Additionally though... It's not JUST that geeks are held back. Even people of average intelligence are allowed languish, while being forced to memorize the basics, over and over again, with just a couple twists the second and third time around.
eg. From 6th grade on through high school, I was taught introductory algebra every year... That's 7 years running. In 6th grade it was represented by blank spaces in equations, rather than Xs, but exactly the same otherwise.
It's some horrible combination of unbelievable grade inflation, combined with the concept of grading attendance and volumes of busywork, which has made the US secondary school system fail society so miserably.
I see no reason to believe increasing the amount of time spent in school will reverse this, nor can I possibly recomend foisting even more of this mild form of torture on anyone's children.
The point you've responded to states that two kinds of regulation (preventing companies from offering catastrophic coverage, and preventing companies from offering policies across state lines) are bad.
The parent was an anti-regulation shill. Nothing more. It's a shame you can't see that.
C) These problems exist currently, the two classes of regulation in the quoted point have nothing to do with recision, and I can see no reason why it would cause recision to increase if those two classes of regulation were removed. If you can find one, state it and it'll be worth discussing.
One of the two was "low-cost catastrophic-only insurance". The very idea is LAUGHABLE. The fact of recision directly counters this idea. Even the "high-cost" general-coverage insurance plans face serious issues with recision. There's no way a lower-cost option is going to somehow do better.
the insurance company must be liable to pay some sizeable percentage of what you paid
If so, you're undeniably better off NOT getting insurance. Put that money in a savings account and earn interest on it. Then you get more than 100% of the money you put in. AND for the 99.9% of the population that never needs it, you also get all your money BACK.
Health insurance ONLY WORKS if the health insurance company will be required to pay your medical bills, no matter how expensive they get. That's exactly why you're paying them... for INSURANCE against the very unlikely event that you end up with astronomical medical bills.
Do doctors or lawyers or engineers ever argue that their service should be free?
Both doctors and lawyers most certainly do. There's a very tentative balance between charging for your services to stay alive and well, and doing charitable work.
A great many doctors do a LOT of charity work, including traveling to foreign countries to treat people who can't pay anything. In fact, accepting Medicare patients tends to be a loss rather than a profit for many doctors, but most will still accept those patients.
The tradition of the public defender, lawyers working for free to support a cause, and even pro-bono cases, is alive and well, too.
Sure, there's always the corporate lawyers, plastic surgeons, etc., but they exist in the software world as well.
You can design the best application in the world, but if you name it "RETARD," don't expect to be taken seriously (or used in any professional setting).
The makers of The Pimp Ass Newsreader, BitchX, and several others, would beg to differ.
Among the major options that many right-leaning politicians in America have been pushing is tearing down regulation that has prevented insurance companies from offering low-cost catastrophic-only insurance, and removing regulation that prevents cross-state offerings for insurance. Those two items alone would greatly expand the choices and lower prices across the board for insurance.
Look up recision. In the private health insurance market (ie. not through your employer) if you start racking up significant medical bills, you have a ~50% chance that your insurance company will find some excuse to cancel your insurance coverage on any technicality they can come up with.
THAT is what an unregulated health insurance industry will get you. It's cheaper to only insure people who won't get sick, so everyone will find some way to eliminate those with any chance of major bills, or worse, discontinue their insurance for no reason when they actually start to need it.
Possibly - so long as you don't want any audio with your video.
MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio is patent-free as well. Sisvel/AudioMPEG has stopped asserting patent rights on the technology some time ago now.
It's only the slightly more recent MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer 3) which will get you into patent trouble... Which is a non-issue, since from the very beginning, just about EVERY hardware device or software player made that supports MPEG-1 video also supports MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio, but usually NOT MP3.
Encoding and decoding complexity for MPEG-1 is... actually going to be quite close to MPEG-2.
Complexity, and everything else about MPEG-1 is going to be IDENTICAL to MPEG-2. MPEG-2 IS MPEG-1, with just a couple features added, like support for interlaced video...
h.264 also offers quality improvements at *every* bitrate
At high bitrates, the improvements are absolutely nominal. It's a fundamental law of perceptual encoding. Here's my/. form-letter response:
You're also welcome to look-up subjective benchmark comparisons of H.264/AVC and MPEG-2, which, even if they've biased the test to use old and poor quality MPEG-2 encoders, at the very least, will demonstrate the diminishing returns of H.264/AVC at increased bitrates/quality.
And finally, there are inherent limits that audio and video codecs cannot possibly exceed... For audio, that limit is called "Perceptual Entropy" (PE), and was defined decades ago. Once you exceed PE, you no longer have any hope of reproducing an audio signal that cannot be distinguished from the uncompressed original... You can only hope to make it sound acceptable, the distortions non-obvious, and eliminate sounds that might seem like they don't belong, anyhow. MPEG-1 Layer II audio, as used in DAB, is already quite close to that limit, and 128kbps compression substantially exceeds the PE for 44.1KHz stereo audio.
For video, I will admit I have never heard of such a nice simple term and single study to exactly define the limit... Still, I'd be willing to make an educated guess that the figure is no more than 40:1, because (like PE with audio) a rather sharp tailing-off of improvements can be seen in subjective codec tests when nearing that level of compression, which spans the full range of codecs, no matter the technology used.
As with audio, even early lossy video codecs (like MPEG-2) are sufficiently close to that fundamental limit to make the development of better high-bitrate codecs largely pointless. Instead, the focus has been, and continues to be, on the low-end, where you're simply trying to make it look "good", rather than identical, and can flexibly discard perceptual information in a way that it isn't too... distracting.
There is still some room for debate on the subject, since MPEG-2 doesn't entirely hit the perceptual limits of lossy compression. Still, newer codecs don't have very much room to squeeze better compression out of video, while maintaining high-quality video that is close to being indistinguishable from the original.
But if you want to argue that point with me, you face two further problems... First, I've used H.264/AVC encoders and recent/advanced MPEG-2 encoders plenty, so I can speak pretty conclusively when I say there's not much improvement to be had at high bitrates (but like HE-AACv2, it does an impressive job at very low bitrates). Secondly, I know codec internals pretty well, so I can also attest that H.264/AVC is heavily based on the same technologies as it's predecessors (MPEG-1, MPEG-2), and that all the (terribly CPU-hungry) improvements that have been made (eg. qpel vs half-pel, multiple ref/anchor frames, in-loop deblocking, et al.) simply can't provide very much compressibility improvement with high quality (weakly quantized) materials... The amount of change and randomness is too high for such tricks to be effective,
that doesn't mean someone hasn't patented some part of the format at a later time than the standard came out,
Yes, it does. You have 1 year after publication to file a patent. After that, any patent is invalid.
Would such a patent pass the test of prior art? It depends on what they patented,
It would be trivially easy to demonstrate the patent is invalid in the specific case of a MPEG-1 video encoder/decoder, since people were doing that before the (later) patent was filed.
Unless it becomes popular, in which case the so-called "submarine" (actually they may not even be submarine) patents will come to the fore, and you'll have to pay.
If there were going to be submarine patents, they would have showed up when Xiph was selling the codecs... or their successors... or when AOL licensed them and used them in Winamp and AIM... or when Adobe licensed VP6 for Flash8 video... or...
So I stand by my question: Do.mkv or Theora even HAVE hardware accelerated anything? At all?
Your question is just as stupid the second time around... MKV is a container, just like AVI, MOV/MP4, etc. You can put any codec in it that you want, including H.264.
If the quality is a little bit worse, but it's still fit for the purpose, and it's free, then it has more value than superior technology that is not affordable.
MPEG-1 is completely free, in most areas of the world, due to patent expiration.
It'll also put Theora to shame in just about every respect. Encoding and decoding complexity is so low your digital watch could handle it, and h.264 offers practically no quality improvement at high bitrates, and only a small improvement at VERY LOW bitrates (what it was designed for).
This kind of airship will, once at operating altitude, be essentially be impossible to shoot down unless the enemy has a true SAM based defense (e.g. SA-11).
...or access to ANY jet aircraft ever made....or a few weeks in mom's basement with a model rocket kit.
Not that I care which OS you us, but since when is Old == Bad ?
If you really want to spin it, you could equally say that the version in OpenSolaris is newer and therefore unstable and untested, so FreeBSD would be a better choice.
by default/tmp is actually partially backed by RAM, which is extremely convenient and useful from time to time, when you want a little piece of lightning-fast filesystem space, or want to eliminate disk as a variable in some sort of timing test.
Those who do not understand RAM caching are doomed to re-implement it... poorly.
Just mount/tmp async and be done with it.
Writes as fast as your memory can store it, and will be cached in RAM (like everything else on the filesystem) until something more important forces it out.
being able to do a weekly "zpool scrub" in a 4TB array without the downtime is a beautiful thing. Kernel CIFS with proper ACLs and integration with ZFS snapshots is pretty great as well.
Why OpenSolaris, rather than FreeBSD? ZFS support is stable, Samba is certainly better supported/tested, and it's much less of a departure from Linux (Open Source, really) than Solaris.
OSOL has some really cool features (ZFS and DTrace, for example), and I've mucked around in it on my x86 boxes before, but overall Linux is still easier to work with in my experience, even on Sun servers.
If you want the best of the Solaris and Linux world, install FreeBSD. Stable ZFS support, DTrace, etc. Plus ports and packages, and Linux binary compatibility if you need it.
It still heavily favors the BSD side of things, rather than SysV style... in fact, much more than any Linux distro I've seen... but it still definitely has far more of the nice features of the old commercial Unix systems than Linux.
Far superior to FAT32 and Ext2 is the Unix File System (UFS). Unparalleled reliability, extended from the early days, and still going strong. Also known as the Berkley Fast Filesystem (FFS).
Damn near everything supports it. Solaris/SunOS, HP-UX, Linux, BSD, MacOS, etc. And thanks to a couple of projects on SourceForge.net dedicated to writing UFS/FFS drivers for Windows, it's available there, too.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of minor variations on the format... Differing types of disklabels (partition tables), big/little-endian byte-swapping, et al. I find sticking to BSD-created UFS/FFS file systems works best.
Still, it's an incredibly solid filesystem, widely compatible, available, and just generally has everything you could want.
Do you really think anyone believes any of the mindless crap you spout? Taking a look at a few of your other comments shows a sad, sad individual with nothing in his life, and nothing to contribute to society.
Now let's try the full quote. Specifically, where I first mentioned, and explained in detail, exactly what the Japanese "military" is and isn't:
"The Japanese Military, such as it is, never goes to war, and soldiers are banned from firing their weapons, unless under life-threatening attack, and even then, they are expected to attempt to non-lethally disable the aggressor, if possible. In other words, Japan has no military."
I can see how someone like you, with an IQ they can count on their fingers and toes, might be unable to comprehend the English language, and believe it to mean something else entirely. I guess we should be happy you managed to be on your own, using the computed for several minutes without starting a single fire...
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Bravo couchslug, for saving me the trouble of writing up a post. My thoughts exactly.
Additionally though... It's not JUST that geeks are held back. Even people of average intelligence are allowed languish, while being forced to memorize the basics, over and over again, with just a couple twists the second and third time around.
eg. From 6th grade on through high school, I was taught introductory algebra every year... That's 7 years running. In 6th grade it was represented by blank spaces in equations, rather than Xs, but exactly the same otherwise.
It's some horrible combination of unbelievable grade inflation, combined with the concept of grading attendance and volumes of busywork, which has made the US secondary school system fail society so miserably.
I see no reason to believe increasing the amount of time spent in school will reverse this, nor can I possibly recomend foisting even more of this mild form of torture on anyone's children.
Where are these training programs, and what are in these drugs, which allow a dead person to keep going? I'll take two!
The parent was an anti-regulation shill. Nothing more. It's a shame you can't see that.
One of the two was "low-cost catastrophic-only insurance". The very idea is LAUGHABLE. The fact of recision directly counters this idea. Even the "high-cost" general-coverage insurance plans face serious issues with recision. There's no way a lower-cost option is going to somehow do better.
If so, you're undeniably better off NOT getting insurance. Put that money in a savings account and earn interest on it. Then you get more than 100% of the money you put in. AND for the 99.9% of the population that never needs it, you also get all your money BACK.
Health insurance ONLY WORKS if the health insurance company will be required to pay your medical bills, no matter how expensive they get. That's exactly why you're paying them... for INSURANCE against the very unlikely event that you end up with astronomical medical bills.
Both doctors and lawyers most certainly do. There's a very tentative balance between charging for your services to stay alive and well, and doing charitable work.
A great many doctors do a LOT of charity work, including traveling to foreign countries to treat people who can't pay anything. In fact, accepting Medicare patients tends to be a loss rather than a profit for many doctors, but most will still accept those patients.
The tradition of the public defender, lawyers working for free to support a cause, and even pro-bono cases, is alive and well, too.
Sure, there's always the corporate lawyers, plastic surgeons, etc., but they exist in the software world as well.
The makers of The Pimp Ass Newsreader, BitchX, and several others, would beg to differ.
What the fuck is "I may a damned good living"? Is that French? Dammed if I know what you are trying to say there.
Look up recision. In the private health insurance market (ie. not through your employer) if you start racking up significant medical bills, you have a ~50% chance that your insurance company will find some excuse to cancel your insurance coverage on any technicality they can come up with.
THAT is what an unregulated health insurance industry will get you. It's cheaper to only insure people who won't get sick, so everyone will find some way to eliminate those with any chance of major bills, or worse, discontinue their insurance for no reason when they actually start to need it.
MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio is patent-free as well. Sisvel/AudioMPEG has stopped asserting patent rights on the technology some time ago now.
It's only the slightly more recent MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer 3) which will get you into patent trouble... Which is a non-issue, since from the very beginning, just about EVERY hardware device or software player made that supports MPEG-1 video also supports MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio, but usually NOT MP3.
Complexity, and everything else about MPEG-1 is going to be IDENTICAL to MPEG-2. MPEG-2 IS MPEG-1, with just a couple features added, like support for interlaced video...
At high bitrates, the improvements are absolutely nominal. It's a fundamental law of perceptual encoding. Here's my /. form-letter response:
You're also welcome to look-up subjective benchmark comparisons of H.264/AVC and MPEG-2, which, even if they've biased the test to use old and poor quality MPEG-2 encoders, at the very least, will demonstrate the diminishing returns of H.264/AVC at increased bitrates/quality.
And finally, there are inherent limits that audio and video codecs cannot possibly exceed... For audio, that limit is called "Perceptual Entropy" (PE), and was defined decades ago. Once you exceed PE, you no longer have any hope of reproducing an audio signal that cannot be distinguished from the uncompressed original... You can only hope to make it sound acceptable, the distortions non-obvious, and eliminate sounds that might seem like they don't belong, anyhow. MPEG-1 Layer II audio, as used in DAB, is already quite close to that limit, and 128kbps compression substantially exceeds the PE for 44.1KHz stereo audio.
For video, I will admit I have never heard of such a nice simple term and single study to exactly define the limit... Still, I'd be willing to make an educated guess that the figure is no more than 40:1, because (like PE with audio) a rather sharp tailing-off of improvements can be seen in subjective codec tests when nearing that level of compression, which spans the full range of codecs, no matter the technology used.
As with audio, even early lossy video codecs (like MPEG-2) are sufficiently close to that fundamental limit to make the development of better high-bitrate codecs largely pointless. Instead, the focus has been, and continues to be, on the low-end, where you're simply trying to make it look "good", rather than identical, and can flexibly discard perceptual information in a way that it isn't too... distracting.
There is still some room for debate on the subject, since MPEG-2 doesn't entirely hit the perceptual limits of lossy compression. Still, newer codecs don't have very much room to squeeze better compression out of video, while maintaining high-quality video that is close to being indistinguishable from the original.
But if you want to argue that point with me, you face two further problems... First, I've used H.264/AVC encoders and recent/advanced MPEG-2 encoders plenty, so I can speak pretty conclusively when I say there's not much improvement to be had at high bitrates (but like HE-AACv2, it does an impressive job at very low bitrates). Secondly, I know codec internals pretty well, so I can also attest that H.264/AVC is heavily based on the same technologies as it's predecessors (MPEG-1, MPEG-2), and that all the (terribly CPU-hungry) improvements that have been made (eg. qpel vs half-pel, multiple ref/anchor frames, in-loop deblocking, et al.) simply can't provide very much compressibility improvement with high quality (weakly quantized) materials... The amount of change and randomness is too high for such tricks to be effective,
Yes, it does. You have 1 year after publication to file a patent. After that, any patent is invalid.
It would be trivially easy to demonstrate the patent is invalid in the specific case of a MPEG-1 video encoder/decoder, since people were doing that before the (later) patent was filed.
That should be "On2", not Xiph.
If there were going to be submarine patents, they would have showed up when Xiph was selling the codecs... or their successors... or when AOL licensed them and used them in Winamp and AIM... or when Adobe licensed VP6 for Flash8 video... or...
Your question is just as stupid the second time around... MKV is a container, just like AVI, MOV/MP4, etc. You can put any codec in it that you want, including H.264.
MPEG-1 is completely free, in most areas of the world, due to patent expiration.
It'll also put Theora to shame in just about every respect. Encoding and decoding complexity is so low your digital watch could handle it, and h.264 offers practically no quality improvement at high bitrates, and only a small improvement at VERY LOW bitrates (what it was designed for).
FreeBSD has full, stable ZFS support as well.
Not that I care which OS you us, but since when is Old == Bad ?
If you really want to spin it, you could equally say that the version in OpenSolaris is newer and therefore unstable and untested, so FreeBSD would be a better choice.
Those who do not understand RAM caching are doomed to re-implement it... poorly.
Just mount /tmp async and be done with it.
Writes as fast as your memory can store it, and will be cached in RAM (like everything else on the filesystem) until something more important forces it out.
Why OpenSolaris, rather than FreeBSD? ZFS support is stable, Samba is certainly better supported/tested, and it's much less of a departure from Linux (Open Source, really) than Solaris.
If you want the best of the Solaris and Linux world, install FreeBSD. Stable ZFS support, DTrace, etc. Plus ports and packages, and Linux binary compatibility if you need it.
It still heavily favors the BSD side of things, rather than SysV style... in fact, much more than any Linux distro I've seen... but it still definitely has far more of the nice features of the old commercial Unix systems than Linux.
Sure you do... When visibility is 100%, nothing is distracting you, and you're feeling good.
Otherwise, not so much.
Far superior to FAT32 and Ext2 is the Unix File System (UFS). Unparalleled reliability, extended from the early days, and still going strong. Also known as the Berkley Fast Filesystem (FFS).
Damn near everything supports it. Solaris/SunOS, HP-UX, Linux, BSD, MacOS, etc. And thanks to a couple of projects on SourceForge.net dedicated to writing UFS/FFS drivers for Windows, it's available there, too.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of minor variations on the format... Differing types of disklabels (partition tables), big/little-endian byte-swapping, et al. I find sticking to BSD-created UFS/FFS file systems works best.
Still, it's an incredibly solid filesystem, widely compatible, available, and just generally has everything you could want.
Ever since the first guy died of smoke inhalation and Carbon Monoxide poisoning, and everyone else decided it was a good idea to put-in exhaust vents.
The only thing worse than a mindless troll is a 42 year-old Canadian idiot troll.
Not that I blame you, Steve. I guess if I was stuck in Halifax, I might hate my life, too.
Do you really think anyone believes any of the mindless crap you spout? Taking a look at a few of your other comments shows a sad, sad individual with nothing in his life, and nothing to contribute to society.
Now let's try the full quote. Specifically, where I first mentioned, and explained in detail, exactly what the Japanese "military" is and isn't:
"The Japanese Military, such as it is, never goes to war, and soldiers are banned from firing their weapons, unless under life-threatening attack, and even then, they are expected to attempt to non-lethally disable the aggressor, if possible. In other words, Japan has no military."
I can see how someone like you, with an IQ they can count on their fingers and toes, might be unable to comprehend the English language, and believe it to mean something else entirely. I guess we should be happy you managed to be on your own, using the computed for several minutes without starting a single fire...
The Japanese soldiers in Iraq don't do any fighting: "Their mission is purely humanitarian" -BBC
In fact, Japanese soldiers are PROTECTED by soldiers from other countries when they need to go into a moderated dangerous area.
In other words, the more you try to look smart, the more you prove you're an idiot.