It does. In fact they're really just listing the POSITIVE traits for any failed technologies, and ignoring the negatives. However, the ones listed in the summary aren't spectacular at all.
like if Apple had bought BeOS then there would have been no iPod and of course, no iPhone.
If Apple bought BeOS, instead of NEXT, they wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs back in the deal. Certainly, that would have meant huge changes. Even if they still introduced the iMac and iPods, they certainly would have been far different from how we know them.
The article also claims that the Atari ST was better than the Amiga
They justify that quite well... Atari ST had better musical capabilities, was the first system with 1MB of RAM under $1,000, and had higher resolution than it's competitors. Obviously a matter of opinion, but it's not too spectacular a claim.
and that MiniDisc should have won over CD.
Can't argue with that. Better physical format, technologically light-years ahead of anything we have, even now, with a caddy to protect it and make it mind-numbingly easy to swap discs in the dark, over a million rewrite cycles, and based on Sony's extremely impressive billion dollar Magneto Optical technology. The audio quality of full bitrate ATRAC (v1/2) was as good as CD quality, Sony just fucked it up later on, reducing the bitrate to claim it could compete with MP3, rather than actually supporting MP3 or AAC files directly. The 1GB+ capacity of HD-MDs makes it likely they'd have done far better against MP3 players (like the iPod) than CDs have been able to, if not for Sony's mistakes.
Basically, it's EVERYTHING ELSE that Slashdot didn't quote, which was outlandish.
LaserDisc didn't have a snowball's chance in hell, thanks to it's size. Maybe if they'd waited a couple years, made the discs smaller with larger capacity, they could have been what DVD became, except without DRM.
8-tracks were a bitch, with albums having to be rearranged to fit, songs being split between channels (with a 5 second delay of silence in the middle), inherent weakness at the splice, large size, and no possible method of rewind. They were "neat" toys like anything else, but crap that I'm glad we're not stuck with.
HD-Audio failed because CDs reach the upper limit of human hearing to begin with, and surround-sound channels aren't much of an upgrade.
DTS isn't any better than AC3 by any stretch of the imagination. At any bitrate, compare the two, and AC3 will come out on top. It's companies with stock in DTS degrading the AC3 audio on DVDs that gives the idiotic perception otherwise. As for film, the DTS idea of syncing a CD was a good once, but could have been pulled off with any other audio format just as easily... Make that work with AC3, and maybe you'll get your multiple language reels.
BeOS had it's strong points over other OSes, but so did NEXT... Many more the latter than the former. How often did you even want to play 8 MPEG streams simultaneously on a 1995 era PC?
There have even been several audio tests where people picked cassette tapes with Dolby S noise reduction over minidiscs.
Bullshit. Perhaps you're talking about the later ATRACv3 formats with it's low bitrates comparable with MP3, but the high bitrate ATRAC (v1/2) was entirely transparent.
The CD is superior to the minidisc in every way with the execpetion of size.
Not a chance. Minidiscs have caddies, which made physical damage to the discs, or the drives, extremely unlikely. The format allowed for a million rewrite cycles, compared with CD-RW about 1,000, and the disc format was far more stable.
Compression on minidisc is about 10x higher compared to CD and even I can hear it.
Actually it's less than 5X higher than CD. And more to the point, I've never heard any credible source claim audible artifacts (with ATRAC v1/2), except as the result of crappy hardware that didn't encode ATRAC properly, which was unfortunately the case with at least RCA's models (IIRC).
I don't get the impression that browser speed or footprint is a big deal in itself, most of the processing seems to be content.
You've never used a lightweight browser. Try something like Dillo. Pages which take seconds to load in Firefox/IE/Opera, render before you lift your finger off the mouse button, or enter key. Admittedly, it lacks many features, but disable them in other browsers, and the effect is the same.
Slow rendering of "content" is entirely the fault of a poor performing browser, or, perhaps, poor performing plug-ins like Flash.
I think he really believes his hogwash and honestly thinks he's spreading the good word.
I've had plenty of arguments with him, and I've read plenty of other people's arguments with him, and I'd say exactly the opposite.
I believe he's more along the lines of someone upset about being in a high tax bracket; had a protected species found on his property preventing him from building; or some similar case of an "I got mine" sociopath.
He's not nearly stupid enough to brush off the numerous air-tight arguments he has lost, and not actually realize he's wrong. He ignores any points he can't refute, and continues arguing things he can't possibly justify. In fact, he seems to wait for stories where he can carefully craft arguments that sound good on the surface. And he will continue merrily on his way, suggesting regressive taxes, and abolishing all government, telling everyone how much they have to gain from it.
I suppose if we actually captured all of the energy - or a significant portion - we'd see global warming on a scale the oil companies could never dream of. This is, I suppose somewhat relevant given that current solar collection is only 10-20% efficient, but the panels tend to absorb more energy than the earth.
It's hard to say at what percentage the cross-over point is. For example, the ocean's albedo is so low that any solar panels preventing light reaching its surface would result in global cooling.
And PV panels on roofs are probably a net plus as well. We've already been causing (local) warming with so much dark black (asphalt or shingles) facing the sun... PVs can only be an improvement. Ditto for roads, swampland, grassy areas, etc.
It's also hard to say how much of a benefit you get by going all solar, and not burning fossil fuels any more. As well as how the warmer winters will affect energy usage, and the redistribution of "heat" from the deserts to the more moderate cities will change things.
though I suppose that could be pretty well fixed using selective reflective surfaces which reject non-power-critical wavelegths.
In fact that's a good idea even if just for improving the efficiency and life-span of PV panels, by preventing them from unnecessarily warming.
But can you build such a system capable of cooling down to almost 0K ?
Really not relevant to the topic. There is no magic that happens that would make helium practical to transfer at 0K (frozen) but impractical at 1K (liquid). The decrease in volume is linear with temperature.
In any case, I don't know enough to authoritatively answer your question, not being an expert in materials and their respective albedos.
Because the government will set "standards" of speed, this leaves smaller providers -- who may still be able to provide acceptable speeds -- out of the market.
Not even remotely true. It really only prevents companies from advertising that they are selling a "broadband" service if it's below that speed.
instead of providing for a truly "neutral" pipe, regulations like these will be written by the strongest elements in a market, designed to kill the smaller competitors.
Without net neutrality, companies can just block (or rather seriously "de-prioritize") packets from any of the smaller companies they choose, without any govermental oversight at all.
This is just more pseudo-libertarian astroturfing from dada21...
For years, geeks have criticized the way that the agency collects broadband information, focusing especially on the fact that the bar for "broadband" is set laughably low (200Kbps)
Really? I'd think "geeks" like myself would criticize the fact that "broadband" is a term that describes how the signal is carried, and has nothing at all to do with speed in any way, shape or form.
Turns out my baseband Ethernet connection has been "broadband" for all these years. All those books, and all my teachers, have been lying to me for many years...
For one thing, the agency is directed to come up with a new metric for "second generation broadband," defined as being the minimum speed needed to stream full-motion, high-definition video.
Great! With lossy compression, there is practically no minimum bitrate at any resolution, and quality (aty any bitrate) depends significantly upon the content of the video in question.
I could say my 200Kbps connection can stream HDTV, and you have no grounds to argue with me.
And that's without even mentioning the vast quality/bitrate differences between codecs, and the fact that "HD" is rather loosely defined as well.
If you put something in space, the only kind of cooling it can do is radiative. This is not nearly enough to counter the heating effect of solar radiation it absorbs.
Actually it is. You can get either effect you want.
On the side facing the sun, you have the most reflective colors possible, either reflective (polished metal) or white. On the side that is in the shadow of your own craft, you use the darkest shade of black you can find.
The Space Shuttle already does something similar. The cargo doors are black on the inside, and they are opened as needed to release the excess heat (mostly generated from the trip into orbit).
Okay, what does a glider that can carry several tons look like (on earth)? The ones that can only carry a single human's weight are pretty damn large.
Now, since the atmosphere on Mars is 1% what it is on the Earth... Have fun building your glider two orders of magnitude (100X) larger than normal, and then finding a way to launch that ridiculously huge thing from the Earth.
A single application (on a 32-bit OS) can't address more than 4GBs, BUT if you have two apps, which each use up more than 2GBs of RAM, then you'll get plenty of benefit out of 4+GBs of RAM.
Though, now that 64-bit CPUs are plentiful, it's rather pointless to bother.
If scientists can avoid causing a paradox, their experiment will be a success otherwise time itself will adjust to keep it from happening at all.
The one small problem with your theory is that there is no mechanism in the known universe that could possibly stop a paradox from happening if backwards time travel, in any form, is in fact, possible. That's why they're called paradoxes in the first place.
Personally, I'm betting on the other side. Faster than light communications may be possible, but I don't believe that any form of time travel is. Just chalk the whole idea up to our limited and flawed understanding of the universe that we believe some phenomenon will react in a wholly impossible way.
Still, there are times when Google is useless because of forum link spamming.
Clusty does quite a bit better on vague or expansive topics that are commonly awash in irrelevent results, as narrowing the category helps greatly in finding what you want.
The real shame is that in print I value the ads. They are less intrusive and I often seek them out.
Have you picked up a magazine lately? They're getting much, much worse. Ads that span 4 pages. Just about every article split-up into pieces. And they all seem to be getting worse.
Popular Mechanics is the worst I've seen. There is literally no difference between content and ads. An advertisement may be a column of text talking about a product, written exactly like the rest of their articles, in the middle of a page with actual articles. Perhaps they're just "forward thinking" and an example of the future for all other magazines.
On the Internet they tend to get into the way. Google ads are the exception.
I hope you mean just the ads on google.com, because use of Google's Adwords seems to be getting worse... A huge horizontal column of text ads across the top of the screen, a huge vertical column of text ads squeezing the body down to half the size, another section of text ads in the middle of the article you're reading, and every other word double under-lined and displaying a huge pop-up over the page if your mouse should accidentally pass over it. You'd think Google would have some bare minimum standards as to how their service gets used.
Unfortunately, short of turning off Javascript (which I once advocated but today you really can't use even the most basic of sites without it), AdWords seem nearly unblockable.
I continue to recommend turning off Javascript. All the websites I use for anything work just fine without it. In fact, most work BETTER without it.
If you regularly use a few sites that need javascript, the NoScript Firefox extension will help greatly.
You need one to perform the other, but they're not the same thing.
I fail to see how you can claim pulldown reversal is absolutely perfect, but detection (needed for reversal) is not.
Wow, I've never seen anyone suggest that detecting the current position in the field required checking the CLOCK in the TV... no wonder you think that the process is impossible.
Clock drift has nothing to do with pulldown reversal. It does have to do with the TV receiving a perfect 3:2 pattern from the player, for any length of time. As I said, you NEVER get a perfect pulldown pattern for long.
You assume (incorrectly) that the frame rate of the original source material is always greater than 30fps.
You're saying interlaced material is not (always) interlaced? That doesn't make one bit of sense.
which is more likely -- a portion of the scene remaining somewhat consistent from frame to frame, or a portion changing rapidly enough to cause an epileptic seizure?
That was an extreme example, as was your own. Which is more likely -- video with features and movement, or recording a completely white room, with no shadows and no movement?
ANY movement at all, even the tiniest, and you lose detail when deinterlacing. It is simply not possible, even in theory, to do otherwise.
Certainly, it would help the accuracy of the detection if you did.
I'm confused. How can you be more accurate than 100%, perfectly "artifact free", as you've claimed.
Of course, we were talking about actually reversing the 3:2 pulldown, not detecting it.
To reverse pulldown you have to detect which fields go together. There's no other magic solution.
Unless, of course, your source is a hi-def player outputting 30fps 1080i content rendered from a 24fps 1080p source.
Really? You're going to guarantee that the clock in your TV and the clock in your high-def player are going to be synchronous to at least 1/60th of a second, over the course of any arbitrary 4 hour period? Great!
Bullshit. 60 fields of an interlaced source IS 30 frames.
No, 60 fields is 60 (half-height) frames per second. You can't put 60 interlaced frames (fields) into 30 (double-height) progressive frames, without significant visual losses. You'll get half the smoothness of motion, and as little as half the resolution (when there is significant motion).
I'll assume you mean that it is "mathematically impossible" to reconstruct the original progressive frame from an interlaced source.
No, it's mathematically impossible to display 30fps/60field interlaced material on a 30fps progressive display, without loss. Even if you could generate the "original progressive frame", you've still only got half the frame rate, and so, motion that is inherently twice as jerky.
To which I still call bullshit, and the proof is a simple white screen...
A white screen is a case of absolutely no motion at all. In that, and only that situation, you can deinterlace perfectly, but still images are not VIDEO by any stretch of the imagination.
The counter to your proof is one field of black followed (1/60th of a second later) with one field of white. Repeat that sequence endlessly. Now feed it to any deinterlacer.
The more real sugar you eat, the more you feel full. But with HFCS, the more you eat, the hungrier you feel.
Please don't use the term "sugar". It's too vague to be useful in this discussion.
If you mean sucrose (table sugar) then you're simply wrong. HFCS has approximately the same fructose content (50%, +/- 5%) as sucrose. This was covered in TFA.
If you mean glucose, well, that would be correct, but most people don't think of rice and potatoes as solid "sugar" so that would be poor use of the term.
Just look at marathon runners, they need to eat tons of food to give them the energy they need.
1) That's a couple orders of magnitude away from what he's talking about. He's talking about "Twenty minutes of jogging". Once you're talking about burning thousands of calories, it's not really a form of "exercising" anymore.
2) He's mostly talking about already-obese individuals.
3) He didn't say exercise reduces food intake, but that "getting your cortisol down" will reduce food intake and fat deposits, and exercise is a good method to cause cortisol levels to go down, as well as other benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
It does. In fact they're really just listing the POSITIVE traits for any failed technologies, and ignoring the negatives. However, the ones listed in the summary aren't spectacular at all.
If Apple bought BeOS, instead of NEXT, they wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs back in the deal. Certainly, that would have meant huge changes. Even if they still introduced the iMac and iPods, they certainly would have been far different from how we know them.
They justify that quite well... Atari ST had better musical capabilities, was the first system with 1MB of RAM under $1,000, and had higher resolution than it's competitors. Obviously a matter of opinion, but it's not too spectacular a claim.
Can't argue with that. Better physical format, technologically light-years ahead of anything we have, even now, with a caddy to protect it and make it mind-numbingly easy to swap discs in the dark, over a million rewrite cycles, and based on Sony's extremely impressive billion dollar Magneto Optical technology. The audio quality of full bitrate ATRAC (v1/2) was as good as CD quality, Sony just fucked it up later on, reducing the bitrate to claim it could compete with MP3, rather than actually supporting MP3 or AAC files directly. The 1GB+ capacity of HD-MDs makes it likely they'd have done far better against MP3 players (like the iPod) than CDs have been able to, if not for Sony's mistakes.
Basically, it's EVERYTHING ELSE that Slashdot didn't quote, which was outlandish.
LaserDisc didn't have a snowball's chance in hell, thanks to it's size. Maybe if they'd waited a couple years, made the discs smaller with larger capacity, they could have been what DVD became, except without DRM.
8-tracks were a bitch, with albums having to be rearranged to fit, songs being split between channels (with a 5 second delay of silence in the middle), inherent weakness at the splice, large size, and no possible method of rewind. They were "neat" toys like anything else, but crap that I'm glad we're not stuck with.
HD-Audio failed because CDs reach the upper limit of human hearing to begin with, and surround-sound channels aren't much of an upgrade.
DTS isn't any better than AC3 by any stretch of the imagination. At any bitrate, compare the two, and AC3 will come out on top. It's companies with stock in DTS degrading the AC3 audio on DVDs that gives the idiotic perception otherwise. As for film, the DTS idea of syncing a CD was a good once, but could have been pulled off with any other audio format just as easily... Make that work with AC3, and maybe you'll get your multiple language reels.
BeOS had it's strong points over other OSes, but so did NEXT... Many more the latter than the former. How often did you even want to play 8 MPEG streams simultaneously on a 1995 era PC?
Bullshit. Perhaps you're talking about the later ATRACv3 formats with it's low bitrates comparable with MP3, but the high bitrate ATRAC (v1/2) was entirely transparent.
Not a chance. Minidiscs have caddies, which made physical damage to the discs, or the drives, extremely unlikely. The format allowed for a million rewrite cycles, compared with CD-RW about 1,000, and the disc format was far more stable.
Actually it's less than 5X higher than CD. And more to the point, I've never heard any credible source claim audible artifacts (with ATRAC v1/2), except as the result of crappy hardware that didn't encode ATRAC properly, which was unfortunately the case with at least RCA's models (IIRC).
You've never used a lightweight browser. Try something like Dillo. Pages which take seconds to load in Firefox/IE/Opera, render before you lift your finger off the mouse button, or enter key. Admittedly, it lacks many features, but disable them in other browsers, and the effect is the same.
Slow rendering of "content" is entirely the fault of a poor performing browser, or, perhaps, poor performing plug-ins like Flash.
I've had plenty of arguments with him, and I've read plenty of other people's arguments with him, and I'd say exactly the opposite.
I believe he's more along the lines of someone upset about being in a high tax bracket; had a protected species found on his property preventing him from building; or some similar case of an "I got mine" sociopath.
He's not nearly stupid enough to brush off the numerous air-tight arguments he has lost, and not actually realize he's wrong. He ignores any points he can't refute, and continues arguing things he can't possibly justify. In fact, he seems to wait for stories where he can carefully craft arguments that sound good on the surface. And he will continue merrily on his way, suggesting regressive taxes, and abolishing all government, telling everyone how much they have to gain from it.
What kind of crappy A/C do you have? I would expect more like 0.5 watts for air conditioning.
It's hard to say at what percentage the cross-over point is. For example, the ocean's albedo is so low that any solar panels preventing light reaching its surface would result in global cooling.
And PV panels on roofs are probably a net plus as well. We've already been causing (local) warming with so much dark black (asphalt or shingles) facing the sun... PVs can only be an improvement. Ditto for roads, swampland, grassy areas, etc.
It's also hard to say how much of a benefit you get by going all solar, and not burning fossil fuels any more. As well as how the warmer winters will affect energy usage, and the redistribution of "heat" from the deserts to the more moderate cities will change things.
In fact that's a good idea even if just for improving the efficiency and life-span of PV panels, by preventing them from unnecessarily warming.
Really not relevant to the topic. There is no magic that happens that would make helium practical to transfer at 0K (frozen) but impractical at 1K (liquid). The decrease in volume is linear with temperature.
In any case, I don't know enough to authoritatively answer your question, not being an expert in materials and their respective albedos.
Not even remotely true. It really only prevents companies from advertising that they are selling a "broadband" service if it's below that speed.
Without net neutrality, companies can just block (or rather seriously "de-prioritize") packets from any of the smaller companies they choose, without any govermental oversight at all.
This is just more pseudo-libertarian astroturfing from dada21...
Really? I'd think "geeks" like myself would criticize the fact that "broadband" is a term that describes how the signal is carried, and has nothing at all to do with speed in any way, shape or form.
Turns out my baseband Ethernet connection has been "broadband" for all these years. All those books, and all my teachers, have been lying to me for many years...
Great! With lossy compression, there is practically no minimum bitrate at any resolution, and quality (aty any bitrate) depends significantly upon the content of the video in question.
I could say my 200Kbps connection can stream HDTV, and you have no grounds to argue with me.
And that's without even mentioning the vast quality/bitrate differences between codecs, and the fact that "HD" is rather loosely defined as well.
Err, no. As a matter of fact, only a fraction of that energy is absorbed across the earth. On average, less than 1/3rd in-fact.
Actually it is. You can get either effect you want.
On the side facing the sun, you have the most reflective colors possible, either reflective (polished metal) or white. On the side that is in the shadow of your own craft, you use the darkest shade of black you can find.
The Space Shuttle already does something similar. The cargo doors are black on the inside, and they are opened as needed to release the excess heat (mostly generated from the trip into orbit).
Okay, what does a glider that can carry several tons look like (on earth)? The ones that can only carry a single human's weight are pretty damn large.
Now, since the atmosphere on Mars is 1% what it is on the Earth... Have fun building your glider two orders of magnitude (100X) larger than normal, and then finding a way to launch that ridiculously huge thing from the Earth.
A single application (on a 32-bit OS) can't address more than 4GBs, BUT if you have two apps, which each use up more than 2GBs of RAM, then you'll get plenty of benefit out of 4+GBs of RAM.
Though, now that 64-bit CPUs are plentiful, it's rather pointless to bother.
The one small problem with your theory is that there is no mechanism in the known universe that could possibly stop a paradox from happening if backwards time travel, in any form, is in fact, possible. That's why they're called paradoxes in the first place.
Personally, I'm betting on the other side. Faster than light communications may be possible, but I don't believe that any form of time travel is. Just chalk the whole idea up to our limited and flawed understanding of the universe that we believe some phenomenon will react in a wholly impossible way.
As opposed to the previous episodes, which were filled with actual aliens...
Clusty does quite a bit better on vague or expansive topics that are commonly awash in irrelevent results, as narrowing the category helps greatly in finding what you want.
Have you picked up a magazine lately? They're getting much, much worse. Ads that span 4 pages. Just about every article split-up into pieces. And they all seem to be getting worse.
Popular Mechanics is the worst I've seen. There is literally no difference between content and ads. An advertisement may be a column of text talking about a product, written exactly like the rest of their articles, in the middle of a page with actual articles. Perhaps they're just "forward thinking" and an example of the future for all other magazines.
I hope you mean just the ads on google.com, because use of Google's Adwords seems to be getting worse... A huge horizontal column of text ads across the top of the screen, a huge vertical column of text ads squeezing the body down to half the size, another section of text ads in the middle of the article you're reading, and every other word double under-lined and displaying a huge pop-up over the page if your mouse should accidentally pass over it. You'd think Google would have some bare minimum standards as to how their service gets used.
Found it: http://www.google.com/
I continue to recommend turning off Javascript. All the websites I use for anything work just fine without it. In fact, most work BETTER without it.
If you regularly use a few sites that need javascript, the NoScript Firefox extension will help greatly.
I fail to see how you can claim pulldown reversal is absolutely perfect, but detection (needed for reversal) is not.
Clock drift has nothing to do with pulldown reversal. It does have to do with the TV receiving a perfect 3:2 pattern from the player, for any length of time. As I said, you NEVER get a perfect pulldown pattern for long.
You're saying interlaced material is not (always) interlaced? That doesn't make one bit of sense.
That was an extreme example, as was your own. Which is more likely -- video with features and movement, or recording a completely white room, with no shadows and no movement?
ANY movement at all, even the tiniest, and you lose detail when deinterlacing. It is simply not possible, even in theory, to do otherwise.
I'm confused. How can you be more accurate than 100%, perfectly "artifact free", as you've claimed.
To reverse pulldown you have to detect which fields go together. There's no other magic solution.
Really? You're going to guarantee that the clock in your TV and the clock in your high-def player are going to be synchronous to at least 1/60th of a second, over the course of any arbitrary 4 hour period? Great!
No, 60 fields is 60 (half-height) frames per second. You can't put 60 interlaced frames (fields) into 30 (double-height) progressive frames, without significant visual losses. You'll get half the smoothness of motion, and as little as half the resolution (when there is significant motion).
No, it's mathematically impossible to display 30fps/60field interlaced material on a 30fps progressive display, without loss. Even if you could generate the "original progressive frame", you've still only got half the frame rate, and so, motion that is inherently twice as jerky.
A white screen is a case of absolutely no motion at all. In that, and only that situation, you can deinterlace perfectly, but still images are not VIDEO by any stretch of the imagination.
The counter to your proof is one field of black followed (1/60th of a second later) with one field of white. Repeat that sequence endlessly. Now feed it to any deinterlacer.
Please don't use the term "sugar". It's too vague to be useful in this discussion.
If you mean sucrose (table sugar) then you're simply wrong. HFCS has approximately the same fructose content (50%, +/- 5%) as sucrose. This was covered in TFA.
If you mean glucose, well, that would be correct, but most people don't think of rice and potatoes as solid "sugar" so that would be poor use of the term.
1) That's a couple orders of magnitude away from what he's talking about. He's talking about "Twenty minutes of jogging". Once you're talking about burning thousands of calories, it's not really a form of "exercising" anymore.
2) He's mostly talking about already-obese individuals.
3) He didn't say exercise reduces food intake, but that "getting your cortisol down" will reduce food intake and fat deposits, and exercise is a good method to cause cortisol levels to go down, as well as other benefits.