Code Monkeyism has very low value (or scarcity) -- the value of the software is in the design or the logic
True, but very few Linux kernel hackers are getting monetary reward for it. Previously, everyone thought solving hard problems cost money, now there are a committed group of people who are doing it for free.
Well, its an interesting thought. My own opinion is that Open Source Software is merely a natural reaction to the fact that software is, essentially, outside most economic principles, which are firmly grounded in scarcity.
Well, excluding Duke Nukem Forever, what little scarcity there is in software is artificially created ("We'll make this stuff expensive, because our coders have got to eat"). If suitably licensed, I can share it around at almost no cost to myself.
Capitalism says "get hold of something scarce and barter it for other scarce things." Communism says "gather together all the scarce things and try and share them out equally." Diametrically opposed, but both relying on scarcity.
Linux is immune, because there isn't a limited amount of it to go round.
Its the first of the signs of the Apocalypse: Doom III appears; then Duke Nukem Forever gets a release; then Hell Freezes Over; then Taco actually checks slashdot before posting another dupe; Then the world is destroyed in a great conflagration, the dead rise, the Messiah returns, four Horsemen, yadda, yadda, yadda
Turing didn't invent the machine. The germans did.
But not the German military. The Enigma machine was invented by a German businessman and engineer called Arthur Scherbius, whose company sold a commercial version throughout the 1920s. The German military merely bought some of these and modified it to add extra layers of encryption
To a Turing machine the hardware / software split is a distinction without a difference. Its just a bunch of ones and zeroes and some simple rules for manipulating them.
Look. Ebay *is* working. I don't care if it doesn't work in theory, it *does* and *is* working in practice. Yes, theres fraud, but theres fraud on the highstreet too (where there is also mugging, street robbery and car jacking).
Its the other way round with/. UIDs. Odd numbers are gurus and geniuses, even numbers are dweebs and wannabes. Its a pretty clever algorithm that gives them out.
It would be nice if, during product announcements, if the submitter actually included a sentence SAYING WHAT THE SOFTWARE DOES.
Yes, I know its an SMTP server, but sheesh, is it so hard to start it "After an extended period of polishing and testing, Postfix, the popular open source mail transfer agent, has reached version 2.1
It was good enough for The Beatles, it'll be good enough for Britney.
The difference between TIFF... and JPEG or PNG
The difference between TIFF and PNG is precisely zero. Thats what "lossless" means. I make no comment about WAVs and MP3, because I don't know enough about MP3 encoding at high quality settings.
You're also talking about the still-semi-obscure JPEG 2000 standard/codec Well lossless JPEG2000s look identical to lossless PNGs, but thats kinda the point. For lossless compression, PNG is the way to go. The fact is, for almost every common purpose, lossy compression is more than good enough.
You should stay away from lossy compression if you modify the images frequently. Other than that, it really makes no discernable difference. Really.
Blow them up, manipulate them, do whatever you do, yeah, if you just look at them they're indistinguishable, but if you do anything else with them, the smashed-up hard edges, "ringing" artifacts, and all that stuff will quickly cause problems.
If you save them as JPEGs of quality 95, you run into pixelation issues long before you run into the artifacts of the compression algorithm. Try it, if you don't believe me. See my other posts for actual evidence, rather than restating some received wisdom.
that absolutely does not indicate thats how you should save your masters.
Well, that depends how you define masters. Masters, to my mind, are the starting point, before you start digitally farking with them. If you're gonna make frequent incremental changes, then sure, you're going to want minimise/zero your losses at each stage. But once you start photoshopping them, they're not masters anymore.
I'd absolutely store wav (and similar) files on my hard drive. Why would I ever want a compressed master?
To save diskspace, perhaps?
The point is that original files shouldn't be compressed using a lossy format (unless you don't care...I do)
As soon as the light passed through the camera lens, information was lost by distortion. When your camera store that light as a digitised or encoded in the grains of film, more information was lost. If that film was then digitally imaged into a PNG, even more information was lost.
Compared to those lossy processes, the difference between a PNG master and high quality JPEG master is negligible. See here for example. Note how the high-quality lossy jpegs are indistuingishable from the lossless formats...
You can't "apply" energy to anything. Energy is transferred, usually by force.
that energy will be conserved
Correct, but irrelevant.
a light object will accellerate very quickly under the application of that energy, a massive object will accellerate very slowly.
Well, that depends how quickly I cause the energy to be transferred i.e. how much work I'm doing or, indirectly, how much force I'm applying. For an object of given inertial mass, a fixed amount of extra energy will result in a fixed change in velocity, but, by varying the force I use (and the amount of time for which I apply that force) I can get any acceleration I want.
a small amount of energy can accellerate a massive object (very slowly).
I'm sorry, but thats a horrible sentence, for a number of reasons related to dimensional analysis.
Better to say "very little energy is wasted in when converted to (rotational or linear) kinetic energy". Or "very little force will accelerate a massive object (slowly)." But the conflation of energy and acceleration... Yuck.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to do more research, my good man. Franklin never said anything of the sort.
I can't be the only person who looked at your screenshot and immediately thought: "The Flaming Lips sing Kylie? Where can I get that from?"
Seriously, where can I get it from?
Well, its an interesting thought. My own opinion is that Open Source Software is merely a natural reaction to the fact that software is, essentially, outside most economic principles, which are firmly grounded in scarcity.
Well, excluding Duke Nukem Forever, what little scarcity there is in software is artificially created ("We'll make this stuff expensive, because our coders have got to eat"). If suitably licensed, I can share it around at almost no cost to myself.
Capitalism says "get hold of something scarce and barter it for other scarce things." Communism says "gather together all the scarce things and try and share them out equally." Diametrically opposed, but both relying on scarcity.
Linux is immune, because there isn't a limited amount of it to go round.
Its the first of the signs of the Apocalypse:
Doom III appears;
then Duke Nukem Forever gets a release;
then Hell Freezes Over;
then Taco actually checks slashdot before posting another dupe;
Then the world is destroyed in a great conflagration, the dead rise, the Messiah returns, four Horsemen, yadda, yadda, yadda
To a Turing machine the hardware / software split is a distinction without a difference. Its just a bunch of ones and zeroes and some simple rules for manipulating them.
Paypal's USP for me is the fact its seamless to buy stuff from people in foreign countries. For UK sales, I'll usually just send a cheque.
Look. Ebay *is* working. I don't care if it doesn't work in theory, it *does* and *is* working in practice. Yes, theres fraud, but theres fraud on the highstreet too (where there is also mugging, street robbery and car jacking).
B's the original, as it happens.
Its the other way round with /. UIDs. Odd numbers are gurus and geniuses, even numbers are dweebs and wannabes. Its a pretty clever algorithm that gives them out.
That was basically Linus's idea. Some people have copied it (Gnome and Gimp hackers spring to mind), but its by no means all pervasive.
It would be nice if, during product announcements, if the submitter actually included a sentence SAYING WHAT THE SOFTWARE DOES.
Yes, I know its an SMTP server, but sheesh, is it so hard to start it "After an extended period of polishing and testing, Postfix, the popular open source mail transfer agent, has reached version 2.1
Nonsense. A quality 95 jpeg is typically 1/3 to 1/2 the size of the equivalent PNG.
You're also talking about the still-semi-obscure JPEG 2000 standard/codec
Well lossless JPEG2000s look identical to lossless PNGs, but thats kinda the point. For lossless compression, PNG is the way to go. The fact is, for almost every common purpose, lossy compression is more than good enough.
You should stay away from lossy compression if you modify the images frequently. Other than that, it really makes no discernable difference. Really.
Consider these two images : A and B.
Now, one of these is the original, and the other has been converted into a bitmap, then back into a (quality setting 95) jpg 50 times, using
for i in `seq 50`; do convert rhi.jpg rhi.png; convert -quality 95 rhi.png rhi.jpg; done
Care to tell me which one is which?
(And quick, before my geocities bandwidth gets totally snarfed)
That depends how many times you modify it. At quality 95, you can resave the file 50+ times with no discernable degradation.
Compared to those lossy processes, the difference between a PNG master and high quality JPEG master is negligible. See here for example. Note how the high-quality lossy jpegs are indistuingishable from the lossless formats...
Better to say "very little energy is wasted in when converted to (rotational or linear) kinetic energy". Or "very little force will accelerate a massive object (slowly)." But the conflation of energy and acceleration... Yuck.