Have you considered that, although it's no better than placebo, it might be better than nothing?
Prescribing a placebo is a serious form of medical malpractice, even though a significant number of doctors routinely practice it. Perhaps our current perception of what is proper practice for a doctor needs to change... or perhaps not. But currently, you simply can't do that.
Prescribing a medication that will be ineffective, but DOES have side effects, is tantamount to "doing harm". The very antithesis at the basis of the modern medical profession.
NetFlix chose to use VC-1 instead, and as a result they have 1.5 megabit standard definition streams that look like crap.
The codec-standard being used doesn't have a huge amount to do with video quality. The implementation matters a lot more than the codec.
For very high quality encoding, you really can't even theoretically do much better than MPEG-2 already has. All newer codecs can really do, that old ones couldn't, is to do a better job of masking digital artifacts, when using bitrates so low that they can't be avoided (1.5MBps should be high enough not to require it).
You can certainly find commercial H.264 video encoders that produce horrible results.
WMV3 (aka WMV9, VC-1, etc.) suffers from the fact that practically nobody but Microsoft chooses to make an encoder for the format, and Microsoft isn't interested in the endless testing a tweaking that it takes to really squeeze the maximum quality out of it.
What x264 has going for it, are the same things Xvid and Lavc (ffmpeg/mplayer) have going for them... Lots of people spending lots of time, dedicated to improving the encoder, for everyone's benefit. Whether you love or hate open source, perceptual coding is really the canonical example where proprietary software just can't compete. Actually LAME, Musepack, et al, fall into this category as well, on the audio side of the spectrum.
Of course, the most prominent counter-example would be Theora, which has turned into a bottomless pit of embarrassment, but several-dozen to one isn't bad odds at all.
But I digress.
Netflix does a lousy job at video encoding. They could do a much better job, while sticking with VC-1, but they instead chose not to invest the slightest effort into it. Switching to x264 would help a lot, but switching to Xvid, or Lavc MPEG-2 would do almost as much, really.
In conclusion, where'd my bottle of whiskey go?...
And it still comes with a built-in dialup modem inside.
What. The. Hell.
I dread the day that modems and RS-232 cease to be available on computers.
First, because of the "dumb terminal" capability... While practically no-one uses it for text these days, it's still of TREMENDOUS benefit for sys admins and others.
Modems are still a nice option for sending or receiving faxes, not to mention voice modems which can be provide full-fledged voice-mail/PBX capabilities.
And if nothing else, we've got a couple centuries of history and legacy tied-up in our modems... They can still connect to the earliest and slowest modems, and might well be able to drive an old stock ticker, on which early teletypes were based.
It's unfortunate modems haven't be improved over the past few years to provide DSL, ISDN, or T-1 (CSU/DSU) capabilities instead of just traditional dial-up features... I'd certainly opt for a PCI "modem" in my OpenBSD firewall, instead of an external DSL box with it's own wal-wart, and requiring an ethernet card.
Have you ever dealt with LA rush hour, when you can easily average under 5mph for miles? What do you think would alleviate that?
Technology...
Dynamic speed limits, coordinated traffic lights, some form of dynamic contraflow during rush hour, etc.
Bicycles don't prevent traffic, they just make it a bit smaller. You could get the same effect on traffic by forcing everyone to drive motorcycles... Or just substantially smaller cars.
Have you breathed the LA air? It makes for pretty sunsets, for sure!
Cars don't necessarily have to pollute.
That's an extreme example, but for many other reasons it is somewhere between nice and crucial that we move away from cars,
It's also crucial that we KEEP cars by MANY metrics.
I don't know what gasoline costs, but it sure as hell isn't $2/gallon.
The concrete in that sidewalk you're walking on just happens to be one of the most prolific sources of man-made greenhouse gasses.
The short answer is this: we have created a society in which people need cars.
Cars have also had a HUGE positive impact on our economy, and standard of living. You're not going to have doctors getting an emergency call on their cell phone in the middle of the night, and go walk to the nearest bus stop, and stand around.
Again, that's just an extreme example, but millions of others exist. The dynamic flow of labor has allowed far more economic development than has been possible in countries with heavy reliance on mass transit.
And moving to some form of transit that is slightly more fuel efficient or compact, merely moves the problem out a bit further... You only THINK getting rid of cars will get rid of long commutes. In fact, in places like Japan, you can see RIDICULOUSLY long daily commutes via train. And that's in no small part caused by the greater consolidation and urban sprawl caused by the spoke and wheel system of mass transit.
Don't get me wrong, I know full well the downsides of automobiles. However, I also know that there is no GOOD alternative known to mankind. Maybe one day we'll have our man-side "pods" that pilot themselves at amazing speeds, but they aren't practical yet.
Mass transit has serious problems. For individual transit, you have the choice of cars, and things that are almost cars (eg. bicycles). Mandate the elimination of cars, but allow bicycles, and you'll quickly see very large "bicycles" with enclosed cabs, shocks, gasoline or electric power, and air conditioning...
Meanwhile, if you just crank up fuel efficiency and pollution standards, the problem gradually solves itself...
There are plenty of very active and fit people who drive cars.
Now why should I pay for it?
Why should the vast majority of people subsidize the public transit system, sidewalks, etc. that you and a very, very small minority of people are using?
Every time major new roads are constructed, the economy grows dramatically.
Why shouldn't the individual using the car pay for some of the car's costs?
Individual car owners already pay high taxes at every turn. A parking meter is not a question of the money, it is more a question of the hassle, and a clear sign of the government trying to unfairly extract excess money unfairly.
If parking meters read credit cards, and charged per-second, rather than requiring you to overpay and/or watch the clock and rush back out to feed it more quarters, the vast majority of complaints would disappear.
And an for paying for a regular parking spot, it's the old issue of a hidden charge... The overwhelming majority of people are going to need a parking space, yet it's not included with the price of... whatever (eg. rent).
what else happened in the west during the enlightenment? religion was questioned. this is not a mistake or a coincidence: the questioning of religion is inseperable from being a strong scientific thinker. the probing mind of a scientist must be able to question everything, no taboos
There are innumerable taboos in western science. Picking on religion as one of the MANY taboos that went away in unison with the declining power of the church, seems a pretty baseless assertion.
Science has done well in many situations where there are/were strong religious taboos.
Re:In some ways it was much better in 1996
on
Jurassic Web
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· Score: 1
While Google was great between about '97 and '03 or so, it's become so gamed to be as bad as Altavista was in 1996
If you believe that, you suffer from horrible memory loss.
Before google, you couldn't find what you wanted, even if you knew it by name. You'd get a ton of other pages with some keyword repeated a hundred times at the bottom, and never find the real site.
You don't have to believe me, just look at what was happening with domain names at the time... Remember the early days, when companies were sending multi-millions to kids, just so they could get their namesake DNS entry? Now, they're reasonably happy with some variation on their name, since anybody that wants to find them, WILL be able to no matter what the domain. The appearance of Google single-handedly made that happen, even if quality is not as amazing as it was in 2000, and even if they are no longer the best, there's no denying they made an unbelievable world of difference.
While the active scripting browser exploits were much rarer, it is MUCH SAFER to download and install executable files now than it was in '96.
Back then, there were very, very few "BIG" websites, and those that were big did very little monitoring of their own... Now, most redirect to Download.com, where all the files are scanned for malware before they are made available.
And let's not forget about the lack of Google. When you searched for drivers for some bit of hardware, you'd get thousands of random sites, designed to fool search engines, before the legit site would appear, non-obviously, in one of the distant results. It was only a couple years ago that a search for slashdot on alltheweb.com still turned up goatse as the #3 hit... And alltheweb isn't a very distant throwback at all... the old days were far worse.
for the fuller attack that takes advantage of the IDN then you'd probably need to read the certificate itself, which would require you to know which certificate you're expecting,
No. You just look next to the padlock icon in the Firefox statusbar, and notice that it says, in no uncertain terms: "www.evil.com" You realize that you weren't trying to get to www.evil.com, and that the URL isn't showing www.evil.com and are forced to consider that something is very wrong.
Compare this to Apple's PowerPC and x86 transitions. They provided emulation layers to run all of your old code.
Apple computers is also a tightly controlled market. Their word is the definitive word for the platform. So, when they said their platform was going from x86 to PPC, developers and users had just one choice... accept it or die.
x86 (and servers is general) is a much more open market. It's large and diverse enough that it is it's own toughest competition. It has a LOT more legacy invested in it, and no matter how hard you try, it's going to take a LONG time before the most performance-critical bits of it get ported over.
The old apps were 'fast enough' already. The new ones were the ones that taxed the system.
That's only true when you can force people to upgrade most of their apps. You have NO HOPE of that in the x86 world.
If Apple couldn't force their developers to update, and couldn't stop the sale of compatible (PPC) systems, you'd have seen them having a MUCH harder time with the transition as well. Of course, at that point, their systems had really stagnated, and their latest PPC chips were horrendously slow compared to x86, so their own inability to push their own platform helped the jump to the next one as well.
Isn't one of the hugest factors in the Fermi Paradox the "Great Silence" aka that if life in the universe is so abundant why don't we hear their radio transmissions?
Nope. This is just another form of modulation. You can't use it without broadcasting a beam of modulating energy outward. Even if we couldn't understand what was being broadcasted, we'd still recognize an intelligent signal.
Besides, this is just another dimension of RF modulation, not something that would be used completely in lieu of all else.
and then someone will say 'I'll do that for a dollar instead of two dollars' And then the whole cycle starts again... Recession every twenty(ish) years
Cheap foreign labor has NOTHING to do with the current recession, or any past recessions that I am aware of.
The VHF lo band carries much further then UHF so I wonder what the attraction of UHF is.
Mainly, VHF-lo is very noisy, which you might not notice much with analog, but can cause havoc with a digital signal. It doesn't help that power requirements are much higher, or that the much longer wavelength requires larger antennas that many people don't have these days.
I believe they have to get special approval from the FCC to do that, though.
Nope. ALL TV broadcasters have the option of continuing to use their newly alloted UHF channel, or keeping their old (sometimes VHF, sometimes UHF) channel. In either case, they had to notify the FCC long ago. There is no special requirement either way.
Most are just going to stick with their UHF allotments and let the VHF go dark.
Also no. Outside of Alaska, just about all broadcasters with an analog channel on VHF-lo (2-6) are jumping to UHF. Just about all broadcasters that had a VHF-hi allotment (7-13) wish to continue using their VHF station.
Fortunately, VHF-hi is close to the low-end of UHF, and the old UHF loop antennas work surprisingly well for it (better than rabbit ears in my own tests). Yagi/Corner-reflectors don't work all that well, but other outdoor UHF antenna types have at least decent gain on VHF-hi. That, combined with the switch to digital means I wouldn't worry about it much.
After all, if I state that "Each time a plant is deprived of water and sunlight it dies.", stating "Correlation is not causation" is complete nonsense.
That's not a correlation at all. That's a directly observed fact, based on a single (well, two, actually) variable in otherwise controlled conditions.
That's vastly different than saying, etc., plants start dying when birds migrate over-head, and trying to suggest there's a link.
If you're going to specifically deprive some variable from group A, and compare their results to group B, it's not just correlation, it's a scientific experiment.
Think about that for a moment, 88% vs 1%. The question should be, why do we care about the latest build of anything else?
1) More than 1 of every 10 systems is something non-Windows... A very big group to just throw under the bus. 2) Classifying all different iterations as "Windows" is intentionally misleading. It would only be fair to similarly say Unix has 12% of the desktop market... 3) I can't remember the last time I met someone that had just one computer. That's figure is likely MACHINES used, NOT what "people" use, and a good percentage of population probably use something other than Windows on a regular basis as well.
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Prescribing a placebo is a serious form of medical malpractice, even though a significant number of doctors routinely practice it. Perhaps our current perception of what is proper practice for a doctor needs to change... or perhaps not. But currently, you simply can't do that.
Prescribing a medication that will be ineffective, but DOES have side effects, is tantamount to "doing harm". The very antithesis at the basis of the modern medical profession.
What problems, with USB to RS-232 adapters, are you referring to?
The codec-standard being used doesn't have a huge amount to do with video quality. The implementation matters a lot more than the codec.
For very high quality encoding, you really can't even theoretically do much better than MPEG-2 already has. All newer codecs can really do, that old ones couldn't, is to do a better job of masking digital artifacts, when using bitrates so low that they can't be avoided (1.5MBps should be high enough not to require it).
You can certainly find commercial H.264 video encoders that produce horrible results.
WMV3 (aka WMV9, VC-1, etc.) suffers from the fact that practically nobody but Microsoft chooses to make an encoder for the format, and Microsoft isn't interested in the endless testing a tweaking that it takes to really squeeze the maximum quality out of it.
What x264 has going for it, are the same things Xvid and Lavc (ffmpeg/mplayer) have going for them... Lots of people spending lots of time, dedicated to improving the encoder, for everyone's benefit. Whether you love or hate open source, perceptual coding is really the canonical example where proprietary software just can't compete. Actually LAME, Musepack, et al, fall into this category as well, on the audio side of the spectrum.
Of course, the most prominent counter-example would be Theora, which has turned into a bottomless pit of embarrassment, but several-dozen to one isn't bad odds at all.
But I digress.
Netflix does a lousy job at video encoding. They could do a much better job, while sticking with VC-1, but they instead chose not to invest the slightest effort into it. Switching to x264 would help a lot, but switching to Xvid, or Lavc MPEG-2 would do almost as much, really.
In conclusion, where'd my bottle of whiskey go?...
I dread the day that modems and RS-232 cease to be available on computers.
First, because of the "dumb terminal" capability... While practically no-one uses it for text these days, it's still of TREMENDOUS benefit for sys admins and others.
Modems are still a nice option for sending or receiving faxes, not to mention voice modems which can be provide full-fledged voice-mail/PBX capabilities.
And if nothing else, we've got a couple centuries of history and legacy tied-up in our modems... They can still connect to the earliest and slowest modems, and might well be able to drive an old stock ticker, on which early teletypes were based.
It's unfortunate modems haven't be improved over the past few years to provide DSL, ISDN, or T-1 (CSU/DSU) capabilities instead of just traditional dial-up features... I'd certainly opt for a PCI "modem" in my OpenBSD firewall, instead of an external DSL box with it's own wal-wart, and requiring an ethernet card.
Technology...
Dynamic speed limits, coordinated traffic lights, some form of dynamic contraflow during rush hour, etc.
Bicycles don't prevent traffic, they just make it a bit smaller. You could get the same effect on traffic by forcing everyone to drive motorcycles... Or just substantially smaller cars.
Cars don't necessarily have to pollute.
It's also crucial that we KEEP cars by MANY metrics.
The concrete in that sidewalk you're walking on just happens to be one of the most prolific sources of man-made greenhouse gasses.
Cars have also had a HUGE positive impact on our economy, and standard of living. You're not going to have doctors getting an emergency call on their cell phone in the middle of the night, and go walk to the nearest bus stop, and stand around.
Again, that's just an extreme example, but millions of others exist. The dynamic flow of labor has allowed far more economic development than has been possible in countries with heavy reliance on mass transit.
And moving to some form of transit that is slightly more fuel efficient or compact, merely moves the problem out a bit further... You only THINK getting rid of cars will get rid of long commutes. In fact, in places like Japan, you can see RIDICULOUSLY long daily commutes via train. And that's in no small part caused by the greater consolidation and urban sprawl caused by the spoke and wheel system of mass transit.
Don't get me wrong, I know full well the downsides of automobiles. However, I also know that there is no GOOD alternative known to mankind. Maybe one day we'll have our man-side "pods" that pilot themselves at amazing speeds, but they aren't practical yet.
Mass transit has serious problems. For individual transit, you have the choice of cars, and things that are almost cars (eg. bicycles). Mandate the elimination of cars, but allow bicycles, and you'll quickly see very large "bicycles" with enclosed cabs, shocks, gasoline or electric power, and air conditioning...
Meanwhile, if you just crank up fuel efficiency and pollution standards, the problem gradually solves itself...
There are plenty of very active and fit people who drive cars.
Why should the vast majority of people subsidize the public transit system, sidewalks, etc. that you and a very, very small minority of people are using?
Every time major new roads are constructed, the economy grows dramatically.
Individual car owners already pay high taxes at every turn. A parking meter is not a question of the money, it is more a question of the hassle, and a clear sign of the government trying to unfairly extract excess money unfairly.
If parking meters read credit cards, and charged per-second, rather than requiring you to overpay and/or watch the clock and rush back out to feed it more quarters, the vast majority of complaints would disappear.
And an for paying for a regular parking spot, it's the old issue of a hidden charge... The overwhelming majority of people are going to need a parking space, yet it's not included with the price of... whatever (eg. rent).
There are innumerable taboos in western science. Picking on religion as one of the MANY taboos that went away in unison with the declining power of the church, seems a pretty baseless assertion.
Science has done well in many situations where there are/were strong religious taboos.
If you believe that, you suffer from horrible memory loss.
Before google, you couldn't find what you wanted, even if you knew it by name. You'd get a ton of other pages with some keyword repeated a hundred times at the bottom, and never find the real site.
You don't have to believe me, just look at what was happening with domain names at the time... Remember the early days, when companies were sending multi-millions to kids, just so they could get their namesake DNS entry? Now, they're reasonably happy with some variation on their name, since anybody that wants to find them, WILL be able to no matter what the domain. The appearance of Google single-handedly made that happen, even if quality is not as amazing as it was in 2000, and even if they are no longer the best, there's no denying they made an unbelievable world of difference.
While the active scripting browser exploits were much rarer, it is MUCH SAFER to download and install executable files now than it was in '96.
Back then, there were very, very few "BIG" websites, and those that were big did very little monitoring of their own... Now, most redirect to Download.com, where all the files are scanned for malware before they are made available.
And let's not forget about the lack of Google. When you searched for drivers for some bit of hardware, you'd get thousands of random sites, designed to fool search engines, before the legit site would appear, non-obviously, in one of the distant results. It was only a couple years ago that a search for slashdot on alltheweb.com still turned up goatse as the #3 hit... And alltheweb isn't a very distant throwback at all... the old days were far worse.
There's a simple solution for 99.99% of sites like this.
Leave the form blank, and click on the (LOGIN) button anyhow.
THEN you will be taken to a SECURE page, where you can safely enter private information.
Just because USBank is careless and stupid, doesn't mean you have to be.
No. You just look next to the padlock icon in the Firefox statusbar, and notice that it says, in no uncertain terms: "www.evil.com"
You realize that you weren't trying to get to www.evil.com, and that the URL isn't showing www.evil.com and are forced to consider that something is very wrong.
http://www.snopes.com/pregnant/blackout.asp
It's been shown to be a complete myth that the birth rate goes up after an extended power outage.
Would you like to buy my Tiger-rock? 20 years with it by my side, still not one tiger.
Apple computers is also a tightly controlled market. Their word is the definitive word for the platform. So, when they said their platform was going from x86 to PPC, developers and users had just one choice... accept it or die.
x86 (and servers is general) is a much more open market. It's large and diverse enough that it is it's own toughest competition. It has a LOT more legacy invested in it, and no matter how hard you try, it's going to take a LONG time before the most performance-critical bits of it get ported over.
That's only true when you can force people to upgrade most of their apps. You have NO HOPE of that in the x86 world.
If Apple couldn't force their developers to update, and couldn't stop the sale of compatible (PPC) systems, you'd have seen them having a MUCH harder time with the transition as well. Of course, at that point, their systems had really stagnated, and their latest PPC chips were horrendously slow compared to x86, so their own inability to push their own platform helped the jump to the next one as well.
If you can only run 32-bit Windows on your 64-bit chip at half the speed of a new 32-bit chip, do you think anyone will care?
Intel didn't (Itanium)
AMD did (x86-64)
Nope. This is just another form of modulation. You can't use it without broadcasting a beam of modulating energy outward. Even if we couldn't understand what was being broadcasted, we'd still recognize an intelligent signal.
Besides, this is just another dimension of RF modulation, not something that would be used completely in lieu of all else.
Nah. Just a pharmaceutical company testing a new drug... one which works even AFTER the disease has killed the individual.
Move along.
Cheap foreign labor has NOTHING to do with the current recession, or any past recessions that I am aware of.
There were no "poor" before capitalism? That's news. A thriving middle class is in fact a recent phenomenon, arising at the same time as capitalism.
No we wouldn't... In the same way that there wouldn't be plane crashes if there weren't any airplanes.
You're not a troll at all, you're just willfully ignorant, yet outspoken. Sort of the opposite end of the spectrum of Fox News.
By all means, explain your system that works any better than the current system.
"If there's a new way, I'll be the first in line...but it better work this time." -Megadeth
Mainly, VHF-lo is very noisy, which you might not notice much with analog, but can cause havoc with a digital signal. It doesn't help that power requirements are much higher, or that the much longer wavelength requires larger antennas that many people don't have these days.
You couldn't have been more wrong if you tried...
Nope. ALL TV broadcasters have the option of continuing to use their newly alloted UHF channel, or keeping their old (sometimes VHF, sometimes UHF) channel. In either case, they had to notify the FCC long ago. There is no special requirement either way.
Also no. Outside of Alaska, just about all broadcasters with an analog channel on VHF-lo (2-6) are jumping to UHF. Just about all broadcasters that had a VHF-hi allotment (7-13) wish to continue using their VHF station.
Fortunately, VHF-hi is close to the low-end of UHF, and the old UHF loop antennas work surprisingly well for it (better than rabbit ears in my own tests). Yagi/Corner-reflectors don't work all that well, but other outdoor UHF antenna types have at least decent gain on VHF-hi. That, combined with the switch to digital means I wouldn't worry about it much.
That's not a correlation at all. That's a directly observed fact, based on a single (well, two, actually) variable in otherwise controlled conditions.
That's vastly different than saying, etc., plants start dying when birds migrate over-head, and trying to suggest there's a link.
If you're going to specifically deprive some variable from group A, and compare their results to group B, it's not just correlation, it's a scientific experiment.
Apple and Google would beg to differ. I'm sure there's many, many, many other examples as well.
1) More than 1 of every 10 systems is something non-Windows... A very big group to just throw under the bus.
2) Classifying all different iterations as "Windows" is intentionally misleading. It would only be fair to similarly say Unix has 12% of the desktop market...
3) I can't remember the last time I met someone that had just one computer. That's figure is likely MACHINES used, NOT what "people" use, and a good percentage of population probably use something other than Windows on a regular basis as well.