I think its been close to 15 years ago now... Little things you put out of your mind until someone brings them back up. Strange to see what a following my work has gotten these days.
The reason MP3 got so popular is not because it was the first compressed music standard capable of near CD quality. It was also not because it is the best lossy compression standard.
Actually, you're UTTERLY WRONG here...
MP3 got so popular precisely because it was the first open-standard (MPEG-1) audio codec that was designed to provide nearly CD-quality sound (mono) over ISDN lines (64kbps). The only alternatives were the much lower quality proprietary options from the likes of RealAudio.
MP3 certainly did sound better at 128kbps than anything else out there (though it didn't take much longer for the earliest version of AAC to arrive...).
s compression level was small enough that people found it usable (as opposed to things like ADPCM which do knock the size down, but not enough) on the technology of the day
That's a terrible comparison. The next, small step up in bandwidth and quality was MP2, which was widely used outside of the internet. In many ways, it's quite a shame MP3 gained popularity rather than MP2. If nothing else, music (at 192Kbps) would sound much better, and the patent troubles would have been over a couple years ago. Plus MP2 would have been a no-brainer to use it for DVDs and HDTV, rather than using MP3 on portables, and Dolby Digital/AC-3 on non-portables.
Vorbis had more of a chance since it actually did get released around the time that there was interest in upgrading from MP3 to something better for some things. However they largely lost out (it does have some use, in game engines for example)
Vorbis lost, in large part, because the quality wasn't much better, yet the decoding requirements were MUCH higher. While Xiph was gunning for MP3, AAC snuck in to fill the niche, and deprived Vorbis of its potential foot-hold for world domination. Then, Vorbis stagnated, and HE-AAC soundly ended any debate.
Why do you believe you are entitled to understand every story that is posted to/.? Do you walk around hospitals and interrupt surgeons, telling them to "dumb it down a bit" so that YOU can understand that "gibberish" they're speaking?
Turns out there was an error in the methadology used in the original comparison, which hit x264 for more than 4 dB of difference.
Even if there wasn't, it doesn't matter. PSNR is UTTERLY WORTHLESS for comparing different codecs. It is an extremely simplistic measure of mathematical deviation from the absolute values of each pixel on the screen.
You can easily write a codec that is very strict in storing the "easy bits" exactly right, while completely and terribly distorting everything else on screen, while still getting a great PSNR. Your eyes just don't work that way. Things like adjusting the level of HF noise on screen negatively effects PSNR, yet it's something that is only barely consciously perceived by humans.
Think of something like stationary block artifacts in dark areas. While humans pick-up on those video artifacts easily, PSNR doesn't penalize the video any more than it would for errors in areas of bright, fast-moving objects, that you wouldn't be able to see except by frame-stepping through the video.
Anyway, given H.264 is a more recent codec that is highly optimized for PSNR and has had many years of refinement in a number of implementations, it's hard to conceive of how Theora could even approach it in compression efficiency, let alone beat it.
This is not true at all. There are lots of very easy ways to improve PSNR. Of course, this involves sacrificing video quality. And it usually only works on certain types of video, ath the expense of others.
On2 is notorious for that. As soon as a standard video codec comes out, they put something together that gets great PSNR numbers, and goes crazy with marketing that trumpets those figures. Meanwhile, anyone who has actually used the codec can tell you that it doesn't come close to matching the hype.
It seems like mountains and yes, the Great Wall of China, has little effect in preventing these.
The great wall of China wasn't designed as a wind break. In fact it's in the worst possible location (right at the top of mountains), presenting the bare minimum of resistance to updraft airflow.
demonstrates that wikipedia is pretty good at self-correcting itself !
No, it shows that WP does a halfway decent job handling this particular type of vandalism.
There are endless articles on WP that are extremely heavily biased, to the point of containing obviously factually incorrect information.
While it might not stand out quite as starkly to someone not as knowledgeable in the field, I'd have to point to the WP article on Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) as the most flagrantly biased piece of less-than-worthless trash I've seen in the recent history of WP. It still persists because pushing your POV stays well within the rules of WP. Just a couple steadfast individuals can make the pain level high enough that no-one else is interested in wasting their lives in the endless and almost worthless WP mediation process, required to POSSIBLY get some balance into it.
I don't see how a wall could help, unless it was kilometers high. It would need to stop this ?
The vast majority of the sand is traveling very low to the ground. Sure, there's still a nice big dust cloud up high, but that big tall plume represents the least dense of the material, which is why it rises to the top.
You're essentially asking, "why have a sea wall if the very tops of the largest waves might still occasionally break over the top?"
I'm sorry, but the question was if anyone still actively goes and buys a license.
And they do.
All you've managed to prove in your nice long post is that you have an EXTREMELY limited imagination, and your assumptions are pretty universally completely wrong.
What that really tells me is that McDonald doesn't actually give a flying fuck about SCO Unix as such. They just have a bunch of cashier machines which incidentally came with SCO on them.
You've gotten that utterly and totally wrong. What's more, I can't possibly see how a sane person would reach that conclusion...
And it makes me wonder how many others on that list are essentially the same misleading claim.
That's some lovely circular logic there! YOU have ASSUMED without the slightest basis in fact, that a few entries on the list are not quite entirely what a layman might make of them. And then you use your own assumption as EVIDENCE to jump to the conclusion that other entries MUST BE inaccurate.
Does any still even actively license their craptacular "Unix" from them?
Damn. How lazy can one person possibly be? You didn't even TRY visiting their website to look at their marketing hype, vis-a-vis SCO Unix market share?
http://sco.com/products/openserver6/
* SCO UNIX has more than 40% market share among U.S. pharmacy retailers
* Six of the top 10 global retailers are SCO UNIX customers
* Seven of the top 10 U.S. retailers are SCO UNIX customers
* SCO UNIX runs more than 12,000 McDonald's restaurants worldwide
* Most voice mail systems run on SCO UNIX
* SCO UNIX helps run BMW Service Centers
* SCO UNIX runs 22,000 branches for the Bank of Russia
* SCO UNIX helps the German train system run on time
* SCO UNIX runs thousands of locations throughout China for the China Post
To hell with Zales' POS systems. McDonalds is a MAJOR user of SCO Unix, and they just keep growing.
Maybe they'll buy-up the IP rights for in-house development, or spin-off a small company to maintain it for their own needs and make a bit of money off selling to others at the same time...
Or maybe their contract works out better if they go out of business, then McD gets the software, with full source code, and unlimited rights, automatically. Who knows?
Well, thank you for your input. Unfortunately, you have no clue on the subject you are talking about.
And yet you're utterly able to make the most basic attempt at refuting any of my points. Resorting to ad-hominem attacks as a last resort, proving my point.
The business will move because tariffs and import taxes become cheaper than domestic ones.
The taxes are absolutely TRIVIAL relative to the differences in cost of living and the like. If it was practical for a company to move out of the US, THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT ALREADY. Many did. The rest cannot. Slightly higher taxes won't change that.
I guess in all of of those years of education noone taught you logical fallacies
It's not an ad-hominem attack in any way, shape, or form. You're merely focusing on this one line to claim so, and then IGNORING the facts I also provided. Yours is the logical fallacy here.
Quick search. From 1980 to 2008 the rate of inflation was 161% The government spending on education went up 551%
No, it didn't. The FEDERAL spending on education, which makes up a minuscule portion of the funding for public schools, went up from practically nothing, to a still tiny fraction of overall funding.
Public schools are paid for, by and large, by the INDIVIDUAL STATES, not the Fed. I'm not sure if you're really this ignorant, or if you're trying to prove your point with whatever inaccurate figures you can come up with. In either case, you've pretty well shown you know nothing about the subject at hand.
Go look at the funding for some ACTUAL SCHOOLS. Over-arching figures are completely worthless.
I thought we were talking about public education here?
How much do you think public school should cost? You bring up the $12,000 figure as if it's an astronomical amount of money to be spending, when, in fact, it's quite tiny. A private college is a good comparison, to demonstrate this.
I had excellent teachers. That is why I know what an Ad hominem attack is.
Either you don't, or you're doing anything you can to detract from the facts at hand. You've don't a horrendous job of trying to argue with the facts of inflation, and completely and totally ignored the reality of rapidly growing school-aged population.
One can disagree with dismissal policies and not "hate all teachers".
I've said nothing of the kind, by any stretch of the imagination. I merely challenge you to support your baseless claims, so you resort to this nonsense.
As soon as the authority to make a decision is lost, how can bad behavior be punished?
The converse is, what happens when an authority starts making bad decisions? Whether through maliciousness or ignorance, it happens. That's why we don't have kings and dictators. There certainly needs to be a process in place. How heavy handed it should be is open for debate, but eliminating all safeguards is a stupid overreaction that will only make things worse.
Nevermind the fact that test scores haven't gone up despite hundreds of billions of dollars in spending increases
The same old idiotic and baseless talking point, straight out of the right-wing think-tanks.
There's this little thing called INFLATION. Sure, in the 1890s, teachers would be ecstatic to get $1/hour. These days, that's peanuts.
Yes, in dollar figures, we're spending more money on schools than we used-to. Relative to inflation, however, spending has fallen by 1/3rd over the past 10-20 years, in all the figures I've seen for various school districts around the country...
AND... that drop in funding ALSO happened to coincide with an INCREASE IN STUDENTS. So now 2/3rds as much money is going to try and teach 150% as many students.
the fact that we spend over $12,000 PER STUDENT in Atlanta and D.C., two of the lowest performing school districts in the country!
Did you go to a private college? If so, I bet you paid a hell of a LOT more than $12,000 per year. And that's without the free transportation to/from, school lunch programs, etc.
Its easy. Teachers' Unions have no incentive to do anything but gain as much money and power for the teachers as possible
It's "easy" to be ignorant of a subject (willfully or otherwise) and oversimplify a complex issue to the level of picking an easy scapegoat who may or may not have anything to do with the problem... That doesn't make it the right answer. Maybe if you had halfway decent teachers, you'd know that by now.
If you are a stellar teacher, are rewarded with more compensation, and better kit for your classroom.
If you are a, "do-just-enough-to-get-by", type of teacher, you don't get more/better stuff for your classroom (motivated teachers will make better use of the materials), and if you are bad enough, your contract won't be renewed next year.
Sure, but does your particular school asses performance teacher performance based on how much kids are actually learning, or how well they are doing on the required standardized tests?
We need to have the best staff possible, or else districts and parents will send their kids somewhere else. Competition does make us better.
And are districts and parents motivated by how educated their children really are, or are they just interested in the same standardized test scores, and endless grade inflation that looks good on college applications?
Colleges are all subject to the same economic forces you claim make your school so great... And yet, they've been subject to the same push for grade inflation for decades.
The people have spoken. Windows beats-out everything else in the world. Linux is not irrelevant, but it is VASTLY less relevant.
1% vs 90% market share.
Clearly, the most popular option is the only one of any importance. That's why all car companies other than Toyota are irrelevant... Never mind that GM was the only relevant car company up until just a couple years ago...
This highlights a security problem: if addons can affect/patch each other, how can you ensure the integrity of the browser?
Don't install any code you don't entirely trust.
Example: a malicious addon is released, and it takes some time before the malicious behaviour is discovered, and people delete the addon. But has it injected malicious code into other addons on the system? Now you have to remove all addons to be sure.
NO! What you have to remove EVERYTHING on your computer... Then go through and change ALL your passwords in-use, EVERYWHERE, and your credit card and ATM numbers/pins as well, cause you were running malicious code that could have been doing ANYTHING with any and all data that has ever passed through your computer...
It's all well and good to have quality code and aim to get rid of vulnerabilities at the core, but a really secure system would be able to protect from attack, in the event it did happen.
That's what the privileged separation and chrooting to an empty, non-writable folder is for, used by default in OpenSSH, Xorg, et al.
Yes, theoretically, RBAC could be more secure, but that assumes the kernel is perfect and bug-free as well. A microkernel could be much more secure still... In reality, though, have you ever seen anyone with SELinux properly configure, and basically air-tight? I know I haven't. And if they did, the security of the data inserted into that application is still dependent upon the correctness of the application's code. Who cares if they can't break-out and take over the system if they can capture and transmit all the passwords they could want?
Start making Yahoo.com and Google.com junk with IPv4, and advertise on the page why you get such crappy service and why they should upgrade
I don't recall the evolution from radio to television require a giant conspiracy that actively degraded the quality of radio service to compel people to switch...
Actually, I would simply recommend that you try to avoid exaggerating in the future. ie. Just because the largely-unpopular sport you happen to like isn't available on broadcast TV, doesn't mean "live sports" are unavailable without cable/satellite.
Personally, I wonder just how many Hockey fans would find the high price of cable/satellite worth paying JUST for coverage of that single sport.
Some sports are beginning to be broadcast online... nearly-live. The Olympics being an obvious example. If you wait a while, you're sure to see other options mae available.
Slashdot Mirror
PGP 2.x primarily used IDEA, which is patented, so it's unsupported everywhere else.
Pretty much everything else (including later versions of PGP) interoperates just fine.
I can certainly understand needing the job. But you don't explain why you can't just relocate to be 10X closer to where you work.
I wrote most of the FAQ for Computing.net forever ago:
http://www.computing.net/faq/contentdos/badsector.html
I think its been close to 15 years ago now... Little things you put out of your mind until someone brings them back up. Strange to see what a following my work has gotten these days.
Actually, you're UTTERLY WRONG here...
MP3 got so popular precisely because it was the first open-standard (MPEG-1) audio codec that was designed to provide nearly CD-quality sound (mono) over ISDN lines (64kbps). The only alternatives were the much lower quality proprietary options from the likes of RealAudio.
MP3 certainly did sound better at 128kbps than anything else out there (though it didn't take much longer for the earliest version of AAC to arrive...).
That's a terrible comparison. The next, small step up in bandwidth and quality was MP2, which was widely used outside of the internet. In many ways, it's quite a shame MP3 gained popularity rather than MP2. If nothing else, music (at 192Kbps) would sound much better, and the patent troubles would have been over a couple years ago. Plus MP2 would have been a no-brainer to use it for DVDs and HDTV, rather than using MP3 on portables, and Dolby Digital/AC-3 on non-portables.
Vorbis lost, in large part, because the quality wasn't much better, yet the decoding requirements were MUCH higher. While Xiph was gunning for MP3, AAC snuck in to fill the niche, and deprived Vorbis of its potential foot-hold for world domination. Then, Vorbis stagnated, and HE-AAC soundly ended any debate.
Yes.
Why do you believe you are entitled to understand every story that is posted to /.? Do you walk around hospitals and interrupt surgeons, telling them to "dumb it down a bit" so that YOU can understand that "gibberish" they're speaking?
Hopefully not.
Even if there wasn't, it doesn't matter. PSNR is UTTERLY WORTHLESS for comparing different codecs. It is an extremely simplistic measure of mathematical deviation from the absolute values of each pixel on the screen.
You can easily write a codec that is very strict in storing the "easy bits" exactly right, while completely and terribly distorting everything else on screen, while still getting a great PSNR. Your eyes just don't work that way. Things like adjusting the level of HF noise on screen negatively effects PSNR, yet it's something that is only barely consciously perceived by humans.
Think of something like stationary block artifacts in dark areas. While humans pick-up on those video artifacts easily, PSNR doesn't penalize the video any more than it would for errors in areas of bright, fast-moving objects, that you wouldn't be able to see except by frame-stepping through the video.
This is not true at all. There are lots of very easy ways to improve PSNR. Of course, this involves sacrificing video quality. And it usually only works on certain types of video, ath the expense of others.
On2 is notorious for that. As soon as a standard video codec comes out, they put something together that gets great PSNR numbers, and goes crazy with marketing that trumpets those figures. Meanwhile, anyone who has actually used the codec can tell you that it doesn't come close to matching the hype.
The great wall of China wasn't designed as a wind break. In fact it's in the worst possible location (right at the top of mountains), presenting the bare minimum of resistance to updraft airflow.
No, it shows that WP does a halfway decent job handling this particular type of vandalism.
There are endless articles on WP that are extremely heavily biased, to the point of containing obviously factually incorrect information.
While it might not stand out quite as starkly to someone not as knowledgeable in the field, I'd have to point to the WP article on Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) as the most flagrantly biased piece of less-than-worthless trash I've seen in the recent history of WP. It still persists because pushing your POV stays well within the rules of WP. Just a couple steadfast individuals can make the pain level high enough that no-one else is interested in wasting their lives in the endless and almost worthless WP mediation process, required to POSSIBLY get some balance into it.
The vast majority of the sand is traveling very low to the ground. Sure, there's still a nice big dust cloud up high, but that big tall plume represents the least dense of the material, which is why it rises to the top.
You're essentially asking, "why have a sea wall if the very tops of the largest waves might still occasionally break over the top?"
And they do.
All you've managed to prove in your nice long post is that you have an EXTREMELY limited imagination, and your assumptions are pretty universally completely wrong.
You've gotten that utterly and totally wrong. What's more, I can't possibly see how a sane person would reach that conclusion...
That's some lovely circular logic there! YOU have ASSUMED without the slightest basis in fact, that a few entries on the list are not quite entirely what a layman might make of them. And then you use your own assumption as EVIDENCE to jump to the conclusion that other entries MUST BE inaccurate.
Damn. How lazy can one person possibly be? You didn't even TRY visiting their website to look at their marketing hype, vis-a-vis SCO Unix market share?
To hell with Zales' POS systems. McDonalds is a MAJOR user of SCO Unix, and they just keep growing.
Maybe they'll buy-up the IP rights for in-house development, or spin-off a small company to maintain it for their own needs and make a bit of money off selling to others at the same time...
Or maybe their contract works out better if they go out of business, then McD gets the software, with full source code, and unlimited rights, automatically. Who knows?
You've succeeded in completely avoiding the point, and failing to answer ANY of my questions...
And yet you're utterly able to make the most basic attempt at refuting any of my points. Resorting to ad-hominem attacks as a last resort, proving my point.
The taxes are absolutely TRIVIAL relative to the differences in cost of living and the like. If it was practical for a company to move out of the US, THEY WOULD HAVE DONE IT ALREADY. Many did. The rest cannot. Slightly higher taxes won't change that.
It's not an ad-hominem attack in any way, shape, or form. You're merely focusing on this one line to claim so, and then IGNORING the facts I also provided. Yours is the logical fallacy here.
No, it didn't. The FEDERAL spending on education, which makes up a minuscule portion of the funding for public schools, went up from practically nothing, to a still tiny fraction of overall funding.
Public schools are paid for, by and large, by the INDIVIDUAL STATES, not the Fed. I'm not sure if you're really this ignorant, or if you're trying to prove your point with whatever inaccurate figures you can come up with. In either case, you've pretty well shown you know nothing about the subject at hand.
Go look at the funding for some ACTUAL SCHOOLS. Over-arching figures are completely worthless.
How much do you think public school should cost? You bring up the $12,000 figure as if it's an astronomical amount of money to be spending, when, in fact, it's quite tiny. A private college is a good comparison, to demonstrate this.
Either you don't, or you're doing anything you can to detract from the facts at hand. You've don't a horrendous job of trying to argue with the facts of inflation, and completely and totally ignored the reality of rapidly growing school-aged population.
I've said nothing of the kind, by any stretch of the imagination. I merely challenge you to support your baseless claims, so you resort to this nonsense.
The converse is, what happens when an authority starts making bad decisions? Whether through maliciousness or ignorance, it happens. That's why we don't have kings and dictators. There certainly needs to be a process in place. How heavy handed it should be is open for debate, but eliminating all safeguards is a stupid overreaction that will only make things worse.
The same old idiotic and baseless talking point, straight out of the right-wing think-tanks.
There's this little thing called INFLATION. Sure, in the 1890s, teachers would be ecstatic to get $1/hour. These days, that's peanuts.
Yes, in dollar figures, we're spending more money on schools than we used-to. Relative to inflation, however, spending has fallen by 1/3rd over the past 10-20 years, in all the figures I've seen for various school districts around the country...
AND... that drop in funding ALSO happened to coincide with an INCREASE IN STUDENTS. So now 2/3rds as much money is going to try and teach 150% as many students.
Did you go to a private college? If so, I bet you paid a hell of a LOT more than $12,000 per year. And that's without the free transportation to/from, school lunch programs, etc.
It's "easy" to be ignorant of a subject (willfully or otherwise) and oversimplify a complex issue to the level of picking an easy scapegoat who may or may not have anything to do with the problem... That doesn't make it the right answer. Maybe if you had halfway decent teachers, you'd know that by now.
Sure, but does your particular school asses performance teacher performance based on how much kids are actually learning, or how well they are doing on the required standardized tests?
And are districts and parents motivated by how educated their children really are, or are they just interested in the same standardized test scores, and endless grade inflation that looks good on college applications?
Colleges are all subject to the same economic forces you claim make your school so great... And yet, they've been subject to the same push for grade inflation for decades.
The people have spoken. Windows beats-out everything else in the world. Linux is not irrelevant, but it is VASTLY less relevant.
1% vs 90% market share.
Clearly, the most popular option is the only one of any importance. That's why all car companies other than Toyota are irrelevant... Never mind that GM was the only relevant car company up until just a couple years ago...
Don't install any code you don't entirely trust.
NO! What you have to remove EVERYTHING on your computer... Then go through and change ALL your passwords in-use, EVERYWHERE, and your credit card and ATM numbers/pins as well, cause you were running malicious code that could have been doing ANYTHING with any and all data that has ever passed through your computer...
That's what the privileged separation and chrooting to an empty, non-writable folder is for, used by default in OpenSSH, Xorg, et al.
Yes, theoretically, RBAC could be more secure, but that assumes the kernel is perfect and bug-free as well. A microkernel could be much more secure still... In reality, though, have you ever seen anyone with SELinux properly configure, and basically air-tight? I know I haven't. And if they did, the security of the data inserted into that application is still dependent upon the correctness of the application's code. Who cares if they can't break-out and take over the system if they can capture and transmit all the passwords they could want?
I don't recall the evolution from radio to television require a giant conspiracy that actively degraded the quality of radio service to compel people to switch...
Meanwhile, I am so good at my job because I'm a time-traveler from the 37th century...
Yeah, McDonalds can be like that...
Actually, I would simply recommend that you try to avoid exaggerating in the future. ie. Just because the largely-unpopular sport you happen to like isn't available on broadcast TV, doesn't mean "live sports" are unavailable without cable/satellite.
Personally, I wonder just how many Hockey fans would find the high price of cable/satellite worth paying JUST for coverage of that single sport.
Some sports are beginning to be broadcast online... nearly-live. The Olympics being an obvious example. If you wait a while, you're sure to see other options mae available.