My QVT and Wyse terminals date from the 70s. I still routinely pull out one of them when I want a second screen on a system. Simpler and cheaper than a second monitor, with a surprising amount of utility these days. EVERYTHING still uses a serial port for I/O. There are numerous times I've had an ancient terminal under-arm as I've walked into the server room... Even the fastest laptops can't compete with the durability and instant-on of an old terminal.
As serial ports begin to diappear from laptops, and only ONE is available on most modern PCs rather than the two of old, I've long thought we are over-due for some other standard to develop for headless comms. USB seems a likely candidate, but nobody has even begun to push such a standard as of yet. And with higher-speed buses comes the (also long overdue) possibility of directly connected GUI terminal standards, which would offer extremely cheap multi-user access to a single system, and finally make management of Windows servers tolerable.
But I digress. My 8-bit, 1200baud dial-up modem in my 286 feels far more antiquated than my terminals, but even there, there are unexpected benefits, like extremely fast and very reliable call-setup in just a couple seconds, rather than 30 seconds of wirrrr-graaaahhhh-zzeeeee-buzzz-beep and a roulette game to see what speed you end up getting.
I'm sure there's plenty of people here with old dot matrix printers, if not TTYs that make my equipment look young... Even a Edison-era stock-ticker probably qualifies, since early (~50 char, all-caps) TTYs copied their line signaling standard.
Come on... Enough of the lightweights... Let's hear from the guys around here that have the really old computer equipment.
CRT's project an electron beam into a fixed-size phosphor pixel on the screen.
Only with color TVs is there any semblance of a "dot" of any kind, due to the method used to produce different colors. B&W TVs don't have any notion of "dots"
I used to work in a store where we were told to use "company policy is set in stone" as an excuse for getting the customer to accept something less than the law guaranteed them to.
Whenever someone is telling you something you don't like, or flat out don't believe, ask to get that IN WRITING. It's amazing how quickly soulless fast-talkers do a complete 180 when faced with the necessity of providing hard-proof of their behavior.
One call to the bank, and it becomes the store's problem to prove you are wrong. Also, it costs them $25 to $50 from Visa to deal with a dispute.
Have you actually tried this on more than one occasion, or are you just parroting something you've heard somewhere?
After returning a clearly defective product that I had spent over an hour testing (specifically, a cable from the bastards at cableclub.com, found via pricewatch), I was told the received product was NOT DEFECTIVE, and I would be given a store credit for the price of the product, minus shipping & handling... in short, less than I paid to ship the item back, and less than it would cost to buy (including shipping) ANYTHING from them again. I tried repeatedly to explain that there's no way they could be correct, and pointed out a handful of factual errors in the info they provided, and still got a steadfast refusal to even return the "defective" item.
I contacted the bank that issued my MasterCard, and explained the situation. They told me that there's no way to prove the product was, in fact, defective, and that because they have a stated policy which allows them to do this, my challenge would be declined, and suggested I just stop shopping there. It took me 5 more minutes to convince the rep I still wanted to challenge the charge, and get him to fill out the paperwork. Of course, the refund never showed up on my card, and the paperwork for me to fill out never arrived.
That's the gist of my experience with CC companies. Their "fraud" protection applies only to a very narrowly defined scenario of fraud, and you'll still probably have to take them to court...
The reason flash took over web video is because vistors tired of WMV/QT codec hell.
Yeah... High-quality videos that can easily be played full-screen on 300MHz machines. It was really hell.
WMP standardized on WMV9 for a LONG time before flash video came along, and hasn't changed ever since. It still has a higher installed base than flash, and WMV is vastly higher quality than anything (other than H.264) that (the newest versions of) Flash support.
We're talking about a technology that allows Joe Average in the US to send a message to Juan Promedio in Spain in less time it took you to read this paragraph for a total cost of less than a cent.
Joe Average does not pay 1 cent to send each message. Joe pays a flat monthly fee for "unlimited usage" at a certain speed.
Given that... there are numerous other technologies which can meet or surpass "the internet" for the task you've chosen. For instance: Ham Radio. Cell phones might be one, depending on the terms and conditions, and would probably surpass both the internet and ham radio in terms of minimal require initial capital outlay.
So, those would in fact all be selling points. The fact that they aren't important enough factors for YOU is about as interesting as knowing what computer a single random person someone in the world prefers... In fact, it's EXACTLY the same! So why would you bother to post this banality, or do you in fact believe someone reading slashdot may possibly care?
Any monkey story will automatically degrade into theology versus Science
It's not like every time a monkey fossil is discovered there's an uproar. Scientists could as well be infinitely less provocative by ceasing to frame every new discovery as if it's world-changing, before it has been studied.
How many times has someone reporting discovering what "might be" the "missing link"? It's beyond absurd. And people wonder why there's such a base of distrust of scientists, among the unwashed masses?
Re:Will they ever be truly give-away items?
on
Flash Drive Roundup
·
· Score: 1
I suspect that USB memory sticks will never really get to the same point that 3.5" floppy disks got to in that respect.
In fact we're almost there.
First, it was PCMCIA. Then it was CompactFlash. Now SmartDigital.
They keep getting smaller, with simpler electronics, and cheaper.
USB drives used to be massive. Then they got gum-pack thin. Then they figured out that big metal connector wasn't necessary, and they got gumstick thin.
You don't cheap, flat, low-capacity USB drives in stores, because retailers haven't figured out how to make a profit on low cost flash drives yet. But on places like eBay, you can find 10 smaller flash drives for $10, sometimes less. When large retailers start boxing them up in packs of 10, you'll see prices fall.
In truth, the other thing holding Flash down in CDs and DVDs. It's hard to make something cheaper than a flat bit of plastic... So when you want to give something away, just burn it. It's only with collaboration and frequent updating that rewriteability is really necessary.
Meanwhile, we're trying to come up with fuel cells to use it.
This isn't true at all.
First, because hydrogen can be burned in conventional engines just as easily as methane, or any other gas. It has a few known issues, but there are ways around them, and it has been working in practice in special applications, like submarines, for many years.
Second, because fuel-cells aren't limited to running on hydrogen. Fuel cells exist which can run on methane, and even unleaded gasoline.
Conventional engines top out at 30% efficiency, while fuel cells pretty easily get 60% efficiency. If you want to exceed the inherently limited efficiency of conventional combustion, fuell cells seem like the way to go. Even without the hydrogen economy, instantly DOUBLING fuel efficiency in vehicles would have a PROFOUND effect on the world's energy supplies...
That's okay. I'm sure he'd have some choice words for you as well.
How about shipping it as Water? Then at the "Filling Station" Use Solar, and or Wind Electricity to separate the Hydrogen out.
How about producing hydrogen by some method that isn't so horrendously inefficient as electrolysis? At that point, you're hemorrhaging money to fuel your theoretical H2 car.
I would be willing to load and view reasonably sized banner/side ads that were:
- not animated
- didn't popup or popunder in any way
- didn't play sounds
My thoughts exactly.
I've often suggested a small config option for all browsers. Instead of the typical animate/don't animate, we need an option for "hide animated, show still".
Just imagine... Advertisers have to chose between irritating ads for a smaller audience, or non-annoying ads that would reach a much larger audience. Hopefully, they'll get the idea and eventually all chose the latter.
With GIFs that would be quite trivial to do. With Javascript it would be quite a bit more difficult. With Flash, much more difficult still, but open source flash players hold some hope of making it possible.
There's absolutely no basis in fact to believe that at all.
Innumerable market forces, like economies of scale, very heavily favor the larger, entrenched company, over all challengers.
And with a completely free market, there's nothing stopping the entrenched companies from engaging in anti-competitive behavior to squash all competitors before they get a foothold.
It was during the Gilded Age, where there was the least regulation, and from which sprung forth the largest and most dominant monopolies in history. Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil, etc. History has never shown deregulation to be a panacea.
He's talked about PSNR plenty of times as a way to compare implementations and codecs.
Feel free to point to them...
Let's see what a quick search turns up...
"Unsurprisingly, the encoder I develop for completely trashes every commercial solution I've put it against. I'm not sure whether this speaks for our effectiveness or that everyone else just sucks. Though my own research suggests its because everyone seems to think that PSNR == quality, which is a recipe for visual disaster." http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/9331/173944.aspx#173944
a codec that looks good with poor PSNR, sure, there's tons of tricks.
*Ahem*
You you believe that one codec can look very good with uncharacteristically poor PSNR, yet you still believe PSNR is useful for comparing different codecs...?
But one that looks bad with great PSNR? It cerrtainly isn't going to happen by accident,
Sure it will. PSNR just doesn't work that way. It is utterly useless for comparing the values of different encoders.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm amazed at the mundane responses so far...
My QVT and Wyse terminals date from the 70s. I still routinely pull out one of them when I want a second screen on a system. Simpler and cheaper than a second monitor, with a surprising amount of utility these days. EVERYTHING still uses a serial port for I/O. There are numerous times I've had an ancient terminal under-arm as I've walked into the server room... Even the fastest laptops can't compete with the durability and instant-on of an old terminal.
As serial ports begin to diappear from laptops, and only ONE is available on most modern PCs rather than the two of old, I've long thought we are over-due for some other standard to develop for headless comms. USB seems a likely candidate, but nobody has even begun to push such a standard as of yet. And with higher-speed buses comes the (also long overdue) possibility of directly connected GUI terminal standards, which would offer extremely cheap multi-user access to a single system, and finally make management of Windows servers tolerable.
But I digress. My 8-bit, 1200baud dial-up modem in my 286 feels far more antiquated than my terminals, but even there, there are unexpected benefits, like extremely fast and very reliable call-setup in just a couple seconds, rather than 30 seconds of wirrrr-graaaahhhh-zzeeeee-buzzz-beep and a roulette game to see what speed you end up getting.
I'm sure there's plenty of people here with old dot matrix printers, if not TTYs that make my equipment look young... Even a Edison-era stock-ticker probably qualifies, since early (~50 char, all-caps) TTYs copied their line signaling standard.
Come on... Enough of the lightweights... Let's hear from the guys around here that have the really old computer equipment.
Only with color TVs is there any semblance of a "dot" of any kind, due to the method used to produce different colors. B&W TVs don't have any notion of "dots"
Whenever someone is telling you something you don't like, or flat out don't believe, ask to get that IN WRITING. It's amazing how quickly soulless fast-talkers do a complete 180 when faced with the necessity of providing hard-proof of their behavior.
Have you actually tried this on more than one occasion, or are you just parroting something you've heard somewhere?
After returning a clearly defective product that I had spent over an hour testing (specifically, a cable from the bastards at cableclub.com, found via pricewatch), I was told the received product was NOT DEFECTIVE, and I would be given a store credit for the price of the product, minus shipping & handling... in short, less than I paid to ship the item back, and less than it would cost to buy (including shipping) ANYTHING from them again. I tried repeatedly to explain that there's no way they could be correct, and pointed out a handful of factual errors in the info they provided, and still got a steadfast refusal to even return the "defective" item.
I contacted the bank that issued my MasterCard, and explained the situation. They told me that there's no way to prove the product was, in fact, defective, and that because they have a stated policy which allows them to do this, my challenge would be declined, and suggested I just stop shopping there. It took me 5 more minutes to convince the rep I still wanted to challenge the charge, and get him to fill out the paperwork. Of course, the refund never showed up on my card, and the paperwork for me to fill out never arrived.
That's the gist of my experience with CC companies. Their "fraud" protection applies only to a very narrowly defined scenario of fraud, and you'll still probably have to take them to court...
Yeah... High-quality videos that can easily be played full-screen on 300MHz machines. It was really hell.
WMP standardized on WMV9 for a LONG time before flash video came along, and hasn't changed ever since. It still has a higher installed base than flash, and WMV is vastly higher quality than anything (other than H.264) that (the newest versions of) Flash support.
The idea, IMHO, is to use crop waste (which is discarded) into ethanol.
Except it ISN'T "discarded". It's ground back into the soil, to fertilize the next several generations of crops.
It's a zero-sum game. If you burn the biomass as fuel, you'll need more fertilizer. If you need more fertilizer, you'll need more fuel to make it...
The only problem with hemp is that it's illegal to grow it in the US
That, and the fact that it's mediocre at best for all the uses it's proclaimed to be amazing at.
There are innumerable countries where hemp is NOT banned, and yet they don't have hemp biofuel cars either.
Always! That's why cities have water, sewer, roads, waste disposal, etc. available.
They don't go through and upgrade the infrastructure every time a new house is built. There is always a central authority planning ahead.
Either that... or they all die off in short order....
You know, one or the other...
Both are good.
QED: Nerds do not reproduce.
Joe Average does not pay 1 cent to send each message. Joe pays a flat monthly fee for "unlimited usage" at a certain speed.
Given that... there are numerous other technologies which can meet or surpass "the internet" for the task you've chosen. For instance: Ham Radio. Cell phones might be one, depending on the terms and conditions, and would probably surpass both the internet and ham radio in terms of minimal require initial capital outlay.
Let's see:
Price: $300 less.
Historical significance: Infinitely higher
Styling: Undeniably better
Architecture: MIPS
Reliability: Vastly more error-resilient hardware
So, those would in fact all be selling points. The fact that they aren't important enough factors for YOU is about as interesting as knowing what computer a single random person someone in the world prefers... In fact, it's EXACTLY the same! So why would you bother to post this banality, or do you in fact believe someone reading slashdot may possibly care?
False dichotomy. There is no such thing as a planned city (versus an unplanned city). It's all a question of degree.
It's not like every time a monkey fossil is discovered there's an uproar. Scientists could as well be infinitely less provocative by ceasing to frame every new discovery as if it's world-changing, before it has been studied.
How many times has someone reporting discovering what "might be" the "missing link"? It's beyond absurd. And people wonder why there's such a base of distrust of scientists, among the unwashed masses?
In fact we're almost there.
First, it was PCMCIA. Then it was CompactFlash. Now SmartDigital.
They keep getting smaller, with simpler electronics, and cheaper.
USB drives used to be massive. Then they got gum-pack thin. Then they figured out that big metal connector wasn't necessary, and they got gumstick thin.
You don't cheap, flat, low-capacity USB drives in stores, because retailers haven't figured out how to make a profit on low cost flash drives yet. But on places like eBay, you can find 10 smaller flash drives for $10, sometimes less. When large retailers start boxing them up in packs of 10, you'll see prices fall.
In truth, the other thing holding Flash down in CDs and DVDs. It's hard to make something cheaper than a flat bit of plastic... So when you want to give something away, just burn it. It's only with collaboration and frequent updating that rewriteability is really necessary.
This isn't true at all.
First, because hydrogen can be burned in conventional engines just as easily as methane, or any other gas. It has a few known issues, but there are ways around them, and it has been working in practice in special applications, like submarines, for many years.
Second, because fuel-cells aren't limited to running on hydrogen. Fuel cells exist which can run on methane, and even unleaded gasoline.
Conventional engines top out at 30% efficiency, while fuel cells pretty easily get 60% efficiency. If you want to exceed the inherently limited efficiency of conventional combustion, fuell cells seem like the way to go. Even without the hydrogen economy, instantly DOUBLING fuel efficiency in vehicles would have a PROFOUND effect on the world's energy supplies...
That's okay. I'm sure he'd have some choice words for you as well.
How about producing hydrogen by some method that isn't so horrendously inefficient as electrolysis? At that point, you're hemorrhaging money to fuel your theoretical H2 car.
My thoughts exactly.
I've often suggested a small config option for all browsers. Instead of the typical animate/don't animate, we need an option for "hide animated, show still".
Just imagine... Advertisers have to chose between irritating ads for a smaller audience, or non-annoying ads that would reach a much larger audience. Hopefully, they'll get the idea and eventually all chose the latter.
With GIFs that would be quite trivial to do. With Javascript it would be quite a bit more difficult. With Flash, much more difficult still, but open source flash players hold some hope of making it possible.
There's absolutely no basis in fact to believe that at all.
Innumerable market forces, like economies of scale, very heavily favor the larger, entrenched company, over all challengers.
And with a completely free market, there's nothing stopping the entrenched companies from engaging in anti-competitive behavior to squash all competitors before they get a foothold.
It was during the Gilded Age, where there was the least regulation, and from which sprung forth the largest and most dominant monopolies in history. Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil, etc. History has never shown deregulation to be a panacea.
Intel got a bunch of Alpha engineers from HP, just as AMD did.
Intel set theirs to work on the Itanium, while AMD set theirs to work on x86-64.
Feel free to point to them...
Let's see what a quick search turns up...
"Unsurprisingly, the encoder I develop for completely trashes every commercial solution I've put it against. I'm not sure whether this speaks for our effectiveness or that everyone else just sucks. Though my own research suggests its because everyone seems to think that PSNR == quality, which is a recipe for visual disaster."
http://forums.thedailywtf.com/forums/p/9331/173944.aspx#173944
"x264's recent psy optimizations have proven quite definitively
that one can achieve greatly improved visual quality while decreasing
both PSNR and SSIM"
http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/x264-devel/2009-February/005624.html
Good idea... Maybe you'll listen to him when he tells you that PSNR is useless for comparing codecs. I'm clearly getting nowhere. Oh well.
*Ahem*
You you believe that one codec can look very good with uncharacteristically poor PSNR, yet you still believe PSNR is useful for comparing different codecs...?
Sure it will. PSNR just doesn't work that way. It is utterly useless for comparing the values of different encoders.
See:
http://www.on2.com/index.php?603
And this PDF:
http://www.on2.com/file.php?185
Or will you just accept, on PSNR figures alone, that On2's proprietary crap vastly outperforms H.264, as well as every other codec on the planet?
In her own words, from TFA: "Our electric infrastructure is designed for the rare peak of usage," Chase says. "That's expensive and wasteful."
She's trying to use the charging and discharging of electric cars to balance peak and off-peak demand for electricity.
Much cheaper electricity. Fewer rolling blackouts. Perhaps even cleaner air, and more.
Interesting that someone who openly admitted ignorance still feels compelled to offer an opinion on the idea proposed here.
Except for the fact that it existed in several other codecs like H.263p, VP3, etc., LONG before H.264 was conceived.