Not sure about exact numbers, but when I switched from steel to aluminum I could pedal up the hill in my city (about 12-13 degrees for around 600m) all the way without significant problems. Steel bike, not doable for me. I think I managed it once, and I literally had to stop to rest at the top.
On the newer aluminum bike, I had no problems getting back to speed after climbing the whole way without needing any kind of rest.
You can certainly make due with a steel bike, I made due with them for at least a decade and a half. But aluminum is a very obvious upgrade. In computer terms, for me updating to aluminum bike was a bit like upgrading from HDD to SSD. It's a completely different experience in terms of weight of the bike. Suddenly you can do things you never could do before, ranging from cycling up hills and still going normally to just grabbing your bike, lifting it and carrying it for extended distances when necessary.
If you're slapping NiMH batteries of any reasonable capacity on top of a steel frame, you will want disk brakes. The weight of the whole package including the rider is going to be far too much for anything less.
Ergonomics. Your back is not going to like the "efficient" position because it's not natural for human back to be bent like that.
I am something of a cycling oldie, I've been actively riding since I was little and I've come to despise the racing style handlebars that make you want to go into aerodynamic position. Instead I have the wide "horns" style handle bars that let me sit straight.
And mind you, my average riding speed, including all the stops and climbs is around 20km/h according to my bike's computer, and my normal riding speed on the road is around 30km/h. I will bend down a bit when I go fast using the "horns", but not much unless it's really windy and wind is in my face, making drag too harsh.
A bit of boasting to show the quality of bikes I ride - I have a downhill slope of 12 degrees that is over half a kilometer long in my city, and I've cloked over 80km/h speed at the bottom of the slope. It's my testbed if I want to check a new bike - it must remain controllable at those speeds. That means at least two point shock absorbers on the frame but also a solidly built frame and wheels that remain stable at those speeds.
I guess then we'll be seeing tens and hundreds of ffmpeg-like encoders available for both free (as in beer), free (of bugs), and actually functional and with functional GUI front ends.
Makes me wonder why we haven't seen that back in divx days or h.264 days going right now if you are indeed correct and I'm wrong. What's holding all these people back?
I don't think you quite understand the complexity of the task at hand. Just because a huge company supports it doesn't mean that it will be there. Google itself is not exactly awesome with video players today (one of the big reasons to buy samsung for example is their vastly superior media player to that of google's own which lacks support for a lot of formats).
Specialists who actually can do necessary software design and programming in the field are rare, and most of them are already employed under very good terms, or exceptionally idealistic and do not want to help the large megacorp known as google become even bigger and more powerful (ffmpeg crowd). This is not a problem you can throw money at and expect it to be solved.
Incorrect conclusion which appears to house anarchist/libertrarian bent. While we indeed become more exposed to corruption as we grow in size, simply due to value of the control over larger entity, in most cases increased bureaucracy and regulation is capable of keeping the system functioning. A good example here is the post WW2 USA, which had its government control explode without massive increase in corruption. There was an increase, but it was manageable.
Please log into your account and press yes to agree that you want to use internet though our ISP and to use out transparent proxy which is an integral part of our service. Thank you.
You appear to ignore human nature completely in your rather convoluted spin.
Reality is, if any entity has enough money to influence people in key positions, and have enough interest in doing so, they will. That is why all functioning entities ran by humans have bureaucracy and internal policing. It's to reduce the impact of corruption's pressure on key positions.
That's only partially true. Some parts of h.264 decoding were indeed in the phones, but early ones were cripplingly limited. I have an older 3G phone that can only decode h.264 MP at 180p. Anything more than that and it will not decode. Installing a player with software decoder will enable ability to decode more, but at hilarious speeds of fractions of a frame per second.
Because developing software for it, as well as possibly dedicated silicon (if you're not talking about GPU decoding but actual dedicated hardware as is done in mobile in many cases today) is far from free.
Factually false. VP9 is approximately on par with h.264 by design. The goal of VP9 is not to improve quality over h.264, but to shrink the amount data needed. It's end goal is to get less data intensive than h.265.
As such, it's strictly inferior to h.265 which aims to improve quality while reducing data requirements. The current implementation, as far as I know, is inferior to HEVC in all areas. Of course, both implementations are very much a work in progress at this stage.
Not entirely sure what CPUs you were using this decade, but unless you have always been on a very powerful server/gaming grade machine, or only decoded stuff that is packed with older codecs, you are presenting an impossible scenario.
CPU power is very much behind the curve even today and has been so for last two decades at the very least when it comes to real time decoding of cutting edge video compression technology. It remains one of the barriers preventing widespread adoption of h.265 - in fact much of the development was basically stalled until CPUs would become powerful enough even though base algorithms were ready for a while. Same thing happened with h.264 and with divx - it took them a while to get adopted because when they were invented/researched, only a handful of machines in the world could decode them in real time at decent resolutions. Even today, better implementations of h.264 such as hi10p tend to have pretty heavy CPU requirements. We simply do not have the power to decode h.265 on the fly at higher resolutions without dedicated hardware support even today without a very powerful CPU. It's that CPU intensive. The math you have to crunch through is mindboggingly complex.
So the only way I can see your statement to be true is if you always stuck to hardware decoding (meaning no cutting edge) or you had a very powerful CPU at your disposal at all times. And if you didn't then you definitely had all the same problems that pretty much everyone else had. One of which was figuring out just how high of resolution you could decode before your CPU choked decoding the video in real-time.
For the rest of people, h.264 HiP still chokes on slower CPUs today when ran at 1080p. I have a lower end laptop that is less than two years old that cannot decode h.264 Hi10P in software at more than 720p (and sometimes chokes even on that in spite of me looking for an optimized codec that wouldn't for a long time - fastest I could find was a certain ffmpeg implementation) and struggles with HiP in 1080p, resulting in dropped frames. Very recent builds finally added proper GPU decoder that isn't exceptionally crashy and actually features support for more than just h264 MP and HiP, so I could actually decode these at 1080p in some cases. But that has been created over last year or so. And the implementation still has its share of bugs. That's for h.264, the biggest mainstream of them all. More exotic codecs like VP9 need all the help they can get and then some in this department.
My desktop has no such problems, but it's a gaming desktop with heavily overclocked CPU. All in all, we desperately need faster decoders for all modern codecs. Just because a small subset of users like you and myself has access to extreme high end hardware at all times, doesn't mean that the rest of people have the same privilege. And I still would like to not have to transcode my stuff to view it on my laptop.
And to answer your last question: dedicated hardware decoders are exceptionally bad for generalist machines like PCs, because they are extremely limited in what they can do. Even minor deviation from what they support renders hardware in question utterly useless. For example, a lot of hardware decoders in older mobile phones only support h.264 MP. Feed it HiP and it will just show you an error. Newer decoders support HiP, but feed them Hi10P and bam, nothing comes out again. As far as I know, there are few Hi10P capable hardware decoders out in the wild even today (feel free to correct me here, my information is dated on this particular subject). And this stuff is old, the spec for all High profiles came out in 2005! We're talking about VP9 which is much newer. That spec was only established in 2012.
GPU decoders are the modern way of handling this problem, which are essentially a software implementation but designed to run on programmable GPU, allowing it to run almost as well as on dedicated hardware. But this has problems of optimizations and general bugginess - and tends to take time to produce a decod
I don't think you need to worry. Windows 7, which is routinely sold with everything but cheapest stuff is not on the fire sale.
This actually looks more like a desperate attempt to peddle win 8 under a different guise. Most of the mid range and higher ads that I see nowadays show win 7.
Let's hope it does. Ballmer leaving in spite of financial success strongly suggest that even the leviathan of Microsoft has started to turn to answer the trouble in consumer world created with win8 and exacerbated with xbone.
It's not. This is simply the power of consumer action at work. They tried to act allmighty after their runaway success with PS2 and consumers actually bought a lot less stuff and gave their money to the competitor, as a show that they did in fact have the money, they just didn't want to give it to Sony.
A company with leaders worth a dime make an analysis and draw conclusions from such a situation, which is exactly what Sony did here. They massively rolled back on anti-consumer items in their agenda and pushed hard to become more consumer friendly than competition. As a result, Sony became a much more consumer-friendly company in gaming world because of the power of consumer action.
At the same time, Microsoft is currently eating the same cake of consumer action that Sony was eating early in PS3/360 generation.
Frankly, if you are anti-company because of their actions, rather than because you have a "strong belief it's evil", you should both punish the company for bad actions as well as reward it for good ones. Both carrot and stick are important in making companies work for us rather that forcibly shove crap down out collective throats. It's important to punish Microsoft, and it's important to reward Sony at this stage, but preferably remind them of the punishing potential if they ever try to pull an XB1 of their own.
The numbers pretty much match up. This is simply a gender based preference. Argument that "women play more but are discriminated against in competitive scene" which is what these claims usually push appears to be patently false - the issue is that women are simply not interested in comeptitive gaming, preferring cooperative gaming instead.
It's most definitely a sport, far more so than chess for example. In SC2, you actually need to be in top physical shape in terms of both your hand dexterity (these people need push out a steady stream of over 300 actions per minute for entire game, try doing that with untrained hands, your muscles will be cramping up in less than a minute) as well as mentally.
And it's helluva competitive, more so than many physical sports.
I played games ever since duke nukem 3d over heat.net over 28800 baud modem days, thank you very much. I imagine I've met more cheaters than most people.
And while nothing "stops me from playing on vac free servers", nothing stops steam from running vac DNS checks on me either.
So the idea of the day is "understanding the issue, not being utterly stupid and posting as AC to cover it".
For those of us actually playing games, it's a massive leap in the wrong direction. I'll take ten times the amount of cheaters they banned with this in my games if that means they do not violate my privacy.
It does send it back to the mothership. Otherwise mothership wouldn't know how to ban. The detail they're arguing on is that they're doing comparison against database on your machine rather than theirs.
Of course, absolutely nothing stops a NSA mole inserting a few appropriate cites into target's VAC to check for sexual interests in case they need blackmail material to forward to CIA that specific person for example. And Gabe will be none the wiser, like the google and facebook CEOs were about NSA having essentially direct indexed search access to all their user data on demand.
NSA thanks you for your useful idiocy. As a large company, Valve just like its peers is thoroughly infiltrated and your data is siphoned as deemed necessary in the name of national security.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure about exact numbers, but when I switched from steel to aluminum I could pedal up the hill in my city (about 12-13 degrees for around 600m) all the way without significant problems. Steel bike, not doable for me. I think I managed it once, and I literally had to stop to rest at the top.
On the newer aluminum bike, I had no problems getting back to speed after climbing the whole way without needing any kind of rest.
You can certainly make due with a steel bike, I made due with them for at least a decade and a half. But aluminum is a very obvious upgrade. In computer terms, for me updating to aluminum bike was a bit like upgrading from HDD to SSD. It's a completely different experience in terms of weight of the bike. Suddenly you can do things you never could do before, ranging from cycling up hills and still going normally to just grabbing your bike, lifting it and carrying it for extended distances when necessary.
If you're slapping NiMH batteries of any reasonable capacity on top of a steel frame, you will want disk brakes. The weight of the whole package including the rider is going to be far too much for anything less.
In cities, that may also include stops at red lights.
Ergonomics. Your back is not going to like the "efficient" position because it's not natural for human back to be bent like that.
I am something of a cycling oldie, I've been actively riding since I was little and I've come to despise the racing style handlebars that make you want to go into aerodynamic position. Instead I have the wide "horns" style handle bars that let me sit straight.
And mind you, my average riding speed, including all the stops and climbs is around 20km/h according to my bike's computer, and my normal riding speed on the road is around 30km/h. I will bend down a bit when I go fast using the "horns", but not much unless it's really windy and wind is in my face, making drag too harsh.
A bit of boasting to show the quality of bikes I ride - I have a downhill slope of 12 degrees that is over half a kilometer long in my city, and I've cloked over 80km/h speed at the bottom of the slope. It's my testbed if I want to check a new bike - it must remain controllable at those speeds. That means at least two point shock absorbers on the frame but also a solidly built frame and wheels that remain stable at those speeds.
Okay.
I guess then we'll be seeing tens and hundreds of ffmpeg-like encoders available for both free (as in beer), free (of bugs), and actually functional and with functional GUI front ends.
Makes me wonder why we haven't seen that back in divx days or h.264 days going right now if you are indeed correct and I'm wrong. What's holding all these people back?
I don't think you quite understand the complexity of the task at hand. Just because a huge company supports it doesn't mean that it will be there. Google itself is not exactly awesome with video players today (one of the big reasons to buy samsung for example is their vastly superior media player to that of google's own which lacks support for a lot of formats).
Specialists who actually can do necessary software design and programming in the field are rare, and most of them are already employed under very good terms, or exceptionally idealistic and do not want to help the large megacorp known as google become even bigger and more powerful (ffmpeg crowd). This is not a problem you can throw money at and expect it to be solved.
Incorrect conclusion which appears to house anarchist/libertrarian bent. While we indeed become more exposed to corruption as we grow in size, simply due to value of the control over larger entity, in most cases increased bureaucracy and regulation is capable of keeping the system functioning. A good example here is the post WW2 USA, which had its government control explode without massive increase in corruption. There was an increase, but it was manageable.
Please log into your account and press yes to agree that you want to use internet though our ISP and to use out transparent proxy which is an integral part of our service. Thank you.
You appear to ignore human nature completely in your rather convoluted spin.
Reality is, if any entity has enough money to influence people in key positions, and have enough interest in doing so, they will. That is why all functioning entities ran by humans have bureaucracy and internal policing. It's to reduce the impact of corruption's pressure on key positions.
That's only partially true. Some parts of h.264 decoding were indeed in the phones, but early ones were cripplingly limited. I have an older 3G phone that can only decode h.264 MP at 180p. Anything more than that and it will not decode. Installing a player with software decoder will enable ability to decode more, but at hilarious speeds of fractions of a frame per second.
Because developing software for it, as well as possibly dedicated silicon (if you're not talking about GPU decoding but actual dedicated hardware as is done in mobile in many cases today) is far from free.
Factually false. VP9 is approximately on par with h.264 by design. The goal of VP9 is not to improve quality over h.264, but to shrink the amount data needed. It's end goal is to get less data intensive than h.265.
As such, it's strictly inferior to h.265 which aims to improve quality while reducing data requirements. The current implementation, as far as I know, is inferior to HEVC in all areas. Of course, both implementations are very much a work in progress at this stage.
Not entirely sure what CPUs you were using this decade, but unless you have always been on a very powerful server/gaming grade machine, or only decoded stuff that is packed with older codecs, you are presenting an impossible scenario.
CPU power is very much behind the curve even today and has been so for last two decades at the very least when it comes to real time decoding of cutting edge video compression technology. It remains one of the barriers preventing widespread adoption of h.265 - in fact much of the development was basically stalled until CPUs would become powerful enough even though base algorithms were ready for a while. Same thing happened with h.264 and with divx - it took them a while to get adopted because when they were invented/researched, only a handful of machines in the world could decode them in real time at decent resolutions. Even today, better implementations of h.264 such as hi10p tend to have pretty heavy CPU requirements. We simply do not have the power to decode h.265 on the fly at higher resolutions without dedicated hardware support even today without a very powerful CPU. It's that CPU intensive. The math you have to crunch through is mindboggingly complex.
So the only way I can see your statement to be true is if you always stuck to hardware decoding (meaning no cutting edge) or you had a very powerful CPU at your disposal at all times. And if you didn't then you definitely had all the same problems that pretty much everyone else had. One of which was figuring out just how high of resolution you could decode before your CPU choked decoding the video in real-time.
For the rest of people, h.264 HiP still chokes on slower CPUs today when ran at 1080p. I have a lower end laptop that is less than two years old that cannot decode h.264 Hi10P in software at more than 720p (and sometimes chokes even on that in spite of me looking for an optimized codec that wouldn't for a long time - fastest I could find was a certain ffmpeg implementation) and struggles with HiP in 1080p, resulting in dropped frames. Very recent builds finally added proper GPU decoder that isn't exceptionally crashy and actually features support for more than just h264 MP and HiP, so I could actually decode these at 1080p in some cases. But that has been created over last year or so. And the implementation still has its share of bugs. That's for h.264, the biggest mainstream of them all. More exotic codecs like VP9 need all the help they can get and then some in this department.
My desktop has no such problems, but it's a gaming desktop with heavily overclocked CPU. All in all, we desperately need faster decoders for all modern codecs. Just because a small subset of users like you and myself has access to extreme high end hardware at all times, doesn't mean that the rest of people have the same privilege. And I still would like to not have to transcode my stuff to view it on my laptop.
And to answer your last question: dedicated hardware decoders are exceptionally bad for generalist machines like PCs, because they are extremely limited in what they can do. Even minor deviation from what they support renders hardware in question utterly useless. For example, a lot of hardware decoders in older mobile phones only support h.264 MP. Feed it HiP and it will just show you an error. Newer decoders support HiP, but feed them Hi10P and bam, nothing comes out again. As far as I know, there are few Hi10P capable hardware decoders out in the wild even today (feel free to correct me here, my information is dated on this particular subject).
And this stuff is old, the spec for all High profiles came out in 2005! We're talking about VP9 which is much newer. That spec was only established in 2012.
GPU decoders are the modern way of handling this problem, which are essentially a software implementation but designed to run on programmable GPU, allowing it to run almost as well as on dedicated hardware. But this has problems of optimizations and general bugginess - and tends to take time to produce a decod
I think most people would pay 15 just to not have to downgrade to 8 if they were forced to make a choice.
I don't think you need to worry. Windows 7, which is routinely sold with everything but cheapest stuff is not on the fire sale.
This actually looks more like a desperate attempt to peddle win 8 under a different guise. Most of the mid range and higher ads that I see nowadays show win 7.
It's good that piratebay offers a very good absolution from these feelings of guilt.
Let's hope it does. Ballmer leaving in spite of financial success strongly suggest that even the leviathan of Microsoft has started to turn to answer the trouble in consumer world created with win8 and exacerbated with xbone.
It's not. This is simply the power of consumer action at work. They tried to act allmighty after their runaway success with PS2 and consumers actually bought a lot less stuff and gave their money to the competitor, as a show that they did in fact have the money, they just didn't want to give it to Sony.
A company with leaders worth a dime make an analysis and draw conclusions from such a situation, which is exactly what Sony did here. They massively rolled back on anti-consumer items in their agenda and pushed hard to become more consumer friendly than competition. As a result, Sony became a much more consumer-friendly company in gaming world because of the power of consumer action.
At the same time, Microsoft is currently eating the same cake of consumer action that Sony was eating early in PS3/360 generation.
Frankly, if you are anti-company because of their actions, rather than because you have a "strong belief it's evil", you should both punish the company for bad actions as well as reward it for good ones. Both carrot and stick are important in making companies work for us rather that forcibly shove crap down out collective throats. It's important to punish Microsoft, and it's important to reward Sony at this stage, but preferably remind them of the punishing potential if they ever try to pull an XB1 of their own.
Moonshine.
http://psychology.wichita.edu/...
The numbers pretty much match up. This is simply a gender based preference. Argument that "women play more but are discriminated against in competitive scene" which is what these claims usually push appears to be patently false - the issue is that women are simply not interested in comeptitive gaming, preferring cooperative gaming instead.
It's most definitely a sport, far more so than chess for example. In SC2, you actually need to be in top physical shape in terms of both your hand dexterity (these people need push out a steady stream of over 300 actions per minute for entire game, try doing that with untrained hands, your muscles will be cramping up in less than a minute) as well as mentally.
And it's helluva competitive, more so than many physical sports.
I played games ever since duke nukem 3d over heat.net over 28800 baud modem days, thank you very much. I imagine I've met more cheaters than most people.
And while nothing "stops me from playing on vac free servers", nothing stops steam from running vac DNS checks on me either.
So the idea of the day is "understanding the issue, not being utterly stupid and posting as AC to cover it".
For those of us actually playing games, it's a massive leap in the wrong direction. I'll take ten times the amount of cheaters they banned with this in my games if that means they do not violate my privacy.
It does send it back to the mothership. Otherwise mothership wouldn't know how to ban. The detail they're arguing on is that they're doing comparison against database on your machine rather than theirs.
Of course, absolutely nothing stops a NSA mole inserting a few appropriate cites into target's VAC to check for sexual interests in case they need blackmail material to forward to CIA that specific person for example. And Gabe will be none the wiser, like the google and facebook CEOs were about NSA having essentially direct indexed search access to all their user data on demand.
NSA thanks you for your useful idiocy. As a large company, Valve just like its peers is thoroughly infiltrated and your data is siphoned as deemed necessary in the name of national security.