And what's with those stupid "preview" images coming up when you mouse over a link? Why do they think anyone would want callouts obscuring the text they're trying to read? It's one of the most moronic wastes of time ever, and huge distraction.
Agree, and that's all the more reason they shouldn't have collected it in the first place. I don't trust Google or the government. The government probably sees this as a bonanza - they know they wouldn't be allowed to collect the data themselves, so it's a bonus that a company did it illegally to cop the rap.
WTF? Intel might add hardware support for this codec and you declare victory? Intel is a bit-player in hardware video decoders. H.264 is already everywhere. Also, I don't know where you get the idea that it's patent-free. You simply can't make a modern video codec without treading on someone's patent any more, and this is no exception. Remember MS proudly announced that VC1 was patent-free, too. It's all a form of corporate trolling.
Not really - they send you a "please explain" form and a list of valid excuses not to vote. If don't want to be fined, just claim to be Amish - it works. The other way is with an "informal vote" - write "Donald Duck" or something equally stupid in the "other candidate" field and vote 1 for them.
What's really funny is that India is stopping buying Chinese made teleco equipment whilst other countries like the US; also great friends of China (when will you stop blocking their discipline against the rebel province of Taiwan???) still continue to buy Chinese.
No, it's actually quote logical. You see, for Western countries, China is a nominally communist "bad guy" that conveniently serves as an example of what the opposite of their idea of "freedom" would be. In practice, they're too distant for this to cause any change in behaviour, and buying their cheap products seems to keep the plebs happy. OTOH, India and China are highly populous nuclear armed mega-countries that share a disputed land border (see Arunachal Pradesh) - that warrants a degree of caution when dealing with each other.
But Google has deep pockets and would be the first target of any lawsuits over this. If they think VP8 is safe to release, they are probably right.
Google most likely wouldn't be the first target of lawsuits over this because they have deep pockets. Notice Apple is suing HTC over alleged patent violations in Android, and not Google? Patent attacks are launched at the weakest target to establish a precedent; anyone wanting to fight over VP8 would go for the implementer with the least/cheapest lawyers.
That's why it was a big deal that IBM offered you patent indemnity for AIX and Sun offered the same for Solaris - it's like saying, "If SCO sues you, our lawyers will defend you." I see nothing similar for video codecs, not with h.264, not with Theora and not with VP8.
Open-sourcing it alone means next to nothing: there are open-source h.264 codecs. The community still can't use it without a thorough patent examination, a universal royalty-free patent license, and an indemnity guarantee.
Laws vary from place to place. In Australia, even if you entered the intersection before the light turned red, you must clear the intersection within two seconds of it turning red or you're still in the wrong. So if they fire the camera two seconds after it turns red, that's all they need. (This is part of enforcing "don't queue across intersections" - don't enter the intersection if you might be blocked from getting out the other side.)
A perfect example is companies that release earnings and other important news after the closing bell.
That doesn't happen much - for the most part, the exchange just puts a trading halt on the stock for the announcement period, and then lifts it after people have had time to digest the information. This would work just as well with 24-hour trading.
Alpha servers that ran stock exchanges may have been reliable - I had no experience with them. The workstations were horribly unreliable. At any given time, it was likely that at least one in three was out of service because of hardware failure.
It still runs.NET - the new system hasn't been rolled out yet. They've distributed an SDK for directly connected exchange participants, but there isn't even test market access yet. These things take time to implement.
It was definitely an ambitious design, and something that needed to be tried. It did what it promised for the first generation, but sadly it was a dead end. You're right - no-one could have known in advance that the Alpha would end up hitting insurmountable roadblocks; but they Intel should have seen what was coming when they used the concept in P4 NetBurst. Hopefully, the lessons learned have influenced today's processor designs.
Having used Alpha workstations, I beg to differ. The Alpha was a design that managed to do the absolute minimum per clock cycle in each pipeline stage. This allowed very high clock speeds, and high theoretical peak performance with very deep pipelines. In reality, the deep pipelines' branch misprediction penalty was so bad you never got close to the theoretical peak performance, and the high clock speeds made them hot and unreliable - poor reliability was the main driving factor for switching to SPARC. Everyone should've been able to see the problems with the Pentium 4 well in advance - it was basically an Alpha with an x86 recompiler frontend, so it suffered from all the same problems.
DEC Tru64 had a lot going for it - lots of good ideas in there. When DEC and HP merged, they should have taken what was worthwhile from HP-UX and integrated it into Tru64, then ported the result to HP-PA. That would've produced a system that people wanted. (HP-UX horrible - nothing behave quite how it should. I'd be surprised if the thing really passed POSIX conformance without some money under the table.)
Were many Itanium users running Windows? My impression was that most Itanium users were running some sort of *nix. I don't think it's a huge deal for Itanium.
The only Itanium servers I encounter regularly run OpenVMS in order to host the popular OM stock exchange platform. OM-based stock exchanges (ASX, HKFE, OMX, SGX, IDEM) all seem to be a hell of a lot more stable than the.NET-based Tradelect/Infolect system used on LSE for the last few years. I don't know why anyone would actually want to run Windows on Itanium.
Sadly, that isn't completely true in Australia. We use standard gauge in NSW, and for most interstate links, but Victoria and Tasmania use broad gauge, and Queensland and Western Australia use narrow gauge. Loading gauges are different, too: for example Victorian suburban trains have less width to the platform, but may bulge out over the platform and have protruding rearview mirrors, while NSW trains are wider to the platform but have flush vertical sides with only small protrusions.
In Australia, it's a legal requirement that an automatic gearbox has no interlocks preventing the driver from shifting from a driving gear to neutral. You don't even need to press the shift button to shift to neutral. As long as you don't actually switch the engine off, there will be enough oil circulation to keep the gearbox happy while you fly on inertia. Shifting to neutral and switching the engine off would likely cause damage if you were travelling at high speed.
No, cruise control lets me keep my eyes on the road, concentrating on what's going on, rather than constantly glancing down to ensure I'm not more than 3% over the speed limit - that's the tolerance here.
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And what's with those stupid "preview" images coming up when you mouse over a link? Why do they think anyone would want callouts obscuring the text they're trying to read? It's one of the most moronic wastes of time ever, and huge distraction.
Agree, and that's all the more reason they shouldn't have collected it in the first place. I don't trust Google or the government. The government probably sees this as a bonanza - they know they wouldn't be allowed to collect the data themselves, so it's a bonus that a company did it illegally to cop the rap.
I work in the high-frequency trading business. Our office fridge contains:
WTF? Intel might add hardware support for this codec and you declare victory? Intel is a bit-player in hardware video decoders. H.264 is already everywhere. Also, I don't know where you get the idea that it's patent-free. You simply can't make a modern video codec without treading on someone's patent any more, and this is no exception. Remember MS proudly announced that VC1 was patent-free, too. It's all a form of corporate trolling.
M2C is not the same thing as Real-Time Workshop.
You don't even have to write C when you want to get it on your DSP - MATLAB Real-Time Workshop can generate the C code for many popular DSPs.
Not really - they send you a "please explain" form and a list of valid excuses not to vote. If don't want to be fined, just claim to be Amish - it works. The other way is with an "informal vote" - write "Donald Duck" or something equally stupid in the "other candidate" field and vote 1 for them.
No, it's actually quote logical. You see, for Western countries, China is a nominally communist "bad guy" that conveniently serves as an example of what the opposite of their idea of "freedom" would be. In practice, they're too distant for this to cause any change in behaviour, and buying their cheap products seems to keep the plebs happy. OTOH, India and China are highly populous nuclear armed mega-countries that share a disputed land border (see Arunachal Pradesh) - that warrants a degree of caution when dealing with each other.
e-mail to/from China works fine for me in Australia. Almost all of my spam comes from USA.
Well at least they're just engaging in harmless silliness - they could be screwing things up like most politicians seem to be good at.
Google most likely wouldn't be the first target of lawsuits over this because they have deep pockets. Notice Apple is suing HTC over alleged patent violations in Android, and not Google? Patent attacks are launched at the weakest target to establish a precedent; anyone wanting to fight over VP8 would go for the implementer with the least/cheapest lawyers.
That's why it was a big deal that IBM offered you patent indemnity for AIX and Sun offered the same for Solaris - it's like saying, "If SCO sues you, our lawyers will defend you." I see nothing similar for video codecs, not with h.264, not with Theora and not with VP8.
The two-second rule applies in NSW and Victoria - I've never driven in Queensland, so I'm happily oblivious to your banana-bending laws ;)
Open-sourcing it alone means next to nothing: there are open-source h.264 codecs. The community still can't use it without a thorough patent examination, a universal royalty-free patent license, and an indemnity guarantee.
Laws vary from place to place. In Australia, even if you entered the intersection before the light turned red, you must clear the intersection within two seconds of it turning red or you're still in the wrong. So if they fire the camera two seconds after it turns red, that's all they need. (This is part of enforcing "don't queue across intersections" - don't enter the intersection if you might be blocked from getting out the other side.)
That doesn't happen much - for the most part, the exchange just puts a trading halt on the stock for the announcement period, and then lifts it after people have had time to digest the information. This would work just as well with 24-hour trading.
Alpha servers that ran stock exchanges may have been reliable - I had no experience with them. The workstations were horribly unreliable. At any given time, it was likely that at least one in three was out of service because of hardware failure.
It still runs .NET - the new system hasn't been rolled out yet. They've distributed an SDK for directly connected exchange participants, but there isn't even test market access yet. These things take time to implement.
It was definitely an ambitious design, and something that needed to be tried. It did what it promised for the first generation, but sadly it was a dead end. You're right - no-one could have known in advance that the Alpha would end up hitting insurmountable roadblocks; but they Intel should have seen what was coming when they used the concept in P4 NetBurst. Hopefully, the lessons learned have influenced today's processor designs.
Having used Alpha workstations, I beg to differ. The Alpha was a design that managed to do the absolute minimum per clock cycle in each pipeline stage. This allowed very high clock speeds, and high theoretical peak performance with very deep pipelines. In reality, the deep pipelines' branch misprediction penalty was so bad you never got close to the theoretical peak performance, and the high clock speeds made them hot and unreliable - poor reliability was the main driving factor for switching to SPARC. Everyone should've been able to see the problems with the Pentium 4 well in advance - it was basically an Alpha with an x86 recompiler frontend, so it suffered from all the same problems.
DEC Tru64 had a lot going for it - lots of good ideas in there. When DEC and HP merged, they should have taken what was worthwhile from HP-UX and integrated it into Tru64, then ported the result to HP-PA. That would've produced a system that people wanted. (HP-UX horrible - nothing behave quite how it should. I'd be surprised if the thing really passed POSIX conformance without some money under the table.)
The only Itanium servers I encounter regularly run OpenVMS in order to host the popular OM stock exchange platform. OM-based stock exchanges (ASX, HKFE, OMX, SGX, IDEM) all seem to be a hell of a lot more stable than the .NET-based Tradelect/Infolect system used on LSE for the last few years. I don't know why anyone would actually want to run Windows on Itanium.
As a matter of fact, I do like the cable on my keyboard. Even more than that, I like the convenience and reduced weight of not needing batteries.
OK, here are your standard template responses:
Sadly, that isn't completely true in Australia. We use standard gauge in NSW, and for most interstate links, but Victoria and Tasmania use broad gauge, and Queensland and Western Australia use narrow gauge. Loading gauges are different, too: for example Victorian suburban trains have less width to the platform, but may bulge out over the platform and have protruding rearview mirrors, while NSW trains are wider to the platform but have flush vertical sides with only small protrusions.
In Australia, it's a legal requirement that an automatic gearbox has no interlocks preventing the driver from shifting from a driving gear to neutral. You don't even need to press the shift button to shift to neutral. As long as you don't actually switch the engine off, there will be enough oil circulation to keep the gearbox happy while you fly on inertia. Shifting to neutral and switching the engine off would likely cause damage if you were travelling at high speed.
No, cruise control lets me keep my eyes on the road, concentrating on what's going on, rather than constantly glancing down to ensure I'm not more than 3% over the speed limit - that's the tolerance here.