What earth laws? because no country has any jurisdiction at all so what laws you are thinking of are silly ramblings of an uneducated person.
Pot, meet kettle. The waters are international, the ships are the territory of the flag they're sailing under and the flag state laws apply. This is for example true for all crimes committed on board, but also the usual rules of "What if you stand on the Canadian/Mexican border and shoot someone in the US?", short answer they'll need to extradite you but you'll be trialed under US law. Same thing if you shoot at a vessel under US flag in international waters and kill someone, you just committed a crime under US jurisdiction. If disrupting the GPS signal is illegal in the US mainland it's probably illegal to do the same to a vessel under US flag, unless the regulations specifically limit themselves to US territorial waters or restricts itself to regulating broadcasters in US territory, not signals received - a small but crucial distinction in such "border" disputes.
on a decent TV you can see a difference. not that big of a deal
Yeah, when you target DVD5 and DVD9 it is on the low side, rips that go for almost transparent quality typically adds +50-100%. But 3840x2160 is only 4x the pixels of 1920x1080 while a 50GB BluRay is 5.86 times the size of a DVD9, audio size remains constant so only the video stream quadruples and H.265 will compress better so I'm thinking you can deliver damn good 4K on a BluRay disc without introducing a new physical format. They're probably going to anyway, but where you can spot the difference between a BluRay and DVD9 rip today I doubt you'll spot one between a 300GB disc and a BD50 rip.
Just HDMI, DisplayPort 1.2 can do 4K @ 60Hz using MST. And movies are generally shot at 24 FPS with some extremely few exceptions - where the high-FPS version isn't available to consumers anyway. Right now it's more a limitation for using it as a monitor than anything else, but yes... it's not "future-proof". After HDMI 2.0 arrives later this year that won't be a problem anymore, but it's not really "future-safe" until they've picked a 4K consumer format and your TV will work with that. Remember those TVs that had HD component inputs, but players didn't want to output HD over analog? Technical capability may not matter much...
SSDs aren't really what killed home-burned optical media, it was USB sticks in multi-GB size at reasonable cost. For storage a 4TB HDD for $179 beats a stack of optical discs by miles and makes discs unfeasible even as backup, the reason to burn discs was portability but USB sticks mopped up that market. Today either you copy to your stick and bring it (push) or your buddy visits with his stick to bring home (pull), either way you don't need any one-time discs. Or using any online service instead, that too.
The downside to HDDs (and for that matter SSDs) is that they need babysitting, the one thing I'd like optical media for is if they can promise me high-capacity discs I can put in a drawer (or more likely a safety deposit box), forget for 20-100 years and still read fine. Wouldn't even need to be a home burner, as long as I could have a home reader - I'd upload a disc image to some burning service, they'd ship the finished disc in the mail. There's a lot of static data I'd like to keep without having to copy from HDD to HDD regularly in order to keep it alive.
I'm well aware of why Germany wanted to invade Norway, but like everything else it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. A sea invasion against a properly equipped and trained navy and coastal defenses could have been made costly, whether it was the Germans or the British. Enough to withstand the whole Wehrmacht or Royal Navy? No, but perhaps enough it'd take too many troops, ships and airplanes as well as incur too many losses. As it were the Norwegian forces were mostly all overrun and all major coastal cities fell within 24 hours, all except the northern area in a month and the entire country in two months with 5-6000 Axis casualties in the whole campaign. In two words: Too easy.
If both parties have too much to lose there won't be another war. That's a fortunate consequence of globalization.
Before WWII I'm sure you could have made many reasonable and credible arguments for why Germany would never attack France or why Japan would never attack the US that are equal or better to "globalization". Many wars have started small and escalated quickly and unpredictably, whether it's North and South Korea, Taiwan, those islands south of Japan or whatever one match can start a kindle that'll start a fire to put the world in flames. I mean it's not like anyone saw the US getting involved because a dictator started annexing a few areas around Germany. In retrospect you can say the Mutually Assured Destruction policy worked in the Cold War but during the Cuban missile crisis.it was a very close call.
Maybe your perspective is different but my country of Norway took the neutrality route in the 1930s, no military build-up, no signs of military aggression, we were seeking a position of neutrality and being a non-threat to everybody. What happened was the Nazis said "thank you very much" and invaded with minimal resistance. And today I see the same, with the NATO alliance and Russia being a shadow of its former military might we're running the defense with half a skeleton crew on outdated equipment, we're spending some money on elite units for operations abroad but the mass defense? We'd fall like a house of cards, all the money is bet on their not being any war in the first place.
True that, but cache latencies will have to go vastly up measured in clock cycles. If we say 3GHz = 10cm then 3THz = 0,1mm and an SO-DIMM module is 6.76cm across, you go from <1 cycle to 676 cycle latency just crossing the module. At those rates keeping the CPU fed with data might be the biggest challenge.
I swear that if you took random sunsets from Google Maps and turned them into artistic-looking drawings/paintings they'd pass the "Turing test" with flying colors without any human being directly involved in the capture or composition. With all the bizarre things called art, it's almost impossible to say something was not somebody's "creative vision" even if it's actually a random machine-picked choice.
The key criterion is creativity and expressive/emotional content, and wherever that comes from, that's the source of the art.
In my experience it seems to be far more the audience's ability to project their expressive / emotional content onto the work, where it came from and what the artist wanted it to mean might be totally irrelevant - or at least in total contradiction. Take for example this example of abstract art, simply a white canvas. What does it mean? Whatever you want it to mean, I guess.
If you go a good step down from art and say "I just want an aesthetically pleasing wall-piece to hang over the couch in the living room" then I've no doubt the computers can make up something "good enough", really how much time do people really spent philosophizing over their paintings? And that's the way most people use art, now I haven't been to an art gallery lately but rumor has it neither have most people.
I agree with you on the first half, but not with the second half. Mail that is delivered to some "community mailbox" nearby is much less useful than having it delivered to your door/driveway. I'd rather have mon/wed/fri delivery all the way than mon-sat at a community mailbox.
What scares me is that there's going to be a point where we just can't grow anymore. Exponential growth is unsustainable, anyone with a little bit of math knowledge would be able to tell you that. When Wall Street and co. realize that their expectations cannot be met anymore and investors start panicking, we could see a big market crash again, perhaps worse than ever before. I really hate how our entire economy rests on what is essentially a bunch of petulant children.
Wall Street may be those causing the waves by moving jobs, but they're not the underlying cause. From 1970 to 2000 literacy rate in China rose from 53% to 91%, that's 400 million learning how to read and write with higher education to follow. The western world no longer has a monopoly on a skilled workforce so the premium is getting harder and harder to justify, relatively speaking a US worker is not as valuable as he once was. Chinese wages are also on the rise, but that means prices are on the rise as well. We're not going to come back to the glory days where Americans earned lots of the almighty dollar to be traded for dirt cheap things made in the third world, this time they're looking to join the "first world" club.
I should also point out that even if "locally" the US median real income hasn't been moving much, the world has seen a huge economic growth overall and the number of people living in extreme poverty has been reduced for each year, even through the financial crisis, to take the trend from 1981-2010: 52-47-42-43-41-35-34-31-25-23-21%. Undernourishment is also in decline, though it has been slowing down. Yes, for the "leading billion" it might not have been that fantastic the last few decades but for the middle five billion a lot has happened, while there's a billion at the bottom that still has huge issues. But the gravity point is that big (HUGE) countries like China, India etc. are dragging themselves out of the mud.
$250,000 per song or something like that? And this is willful commercial infringement, not personal use.
They're not going for criminal copyright violation, just civil copyright violation so 120 songs * $150,000 = $18 million. Even the statutory minimum is 120 * $750 = $90,000 if they're found guilty which sounds quite good compared to $20/month (if that's what she'd normally be paid per the contract).
Which according to newegg can be had for $229, sure it's not pocket change but if you're thinking of say a computer vision program for a car... that's a tree, that's a house, that's a dog, there's a child running around. I would imagine it's a lot easier to collect sensor data than to make sense of it in real time, if you can rapidly identify points of interest like facial recognition in photo cameras on steroids you can put processing power - and potentially directional sensors - to good use. For example, you very closely look for clues whether a pedestrian walking down the street past a crossing is going to make use of it, so should an AI driver. Blunt use of raw processing power will only take you so far.
21 inches for one application? Google has strongly resisted any attempt to add tiled or overlapping window management policy to stock Android. This means applications have to be coded to each hardware manufacturer's proprietary window management API. I can dig up Google employees' explanation of this "all maximized all the time" policy and why Cornerstone isn't in CyanogenMod if you want.
Well I might be the odd man out among tech-savvy users, but I run most applications maximized on my 24" screen, I've tried doing it differently, I've been on Linux for some years and tried multiple desktops, I've tried working with multiple monitors as well but I come back to the KISS model - maximized apps and rapid switching. I don't think I've ever used such a thing as drag and drop between apps, it's select in one app, Ctrl-X/C, switch, Ctrl-V. I very often flip-flop between two apps, like say code and specs by clicking the same app icon to show/hide instead of side-by-side. It might not be for everyone but I think many users will get by just fine without tiles or overlapping windows.
Is this a preview of what might happen to Linux distros at some point in the future? Android has had a bigger impact than anyone expected. I wouldn't be surprised if it leads to Linux becoming more marginalised (servers only) and fewer people adopting it on the desktop.
Quite possibly, with AIOs like this coming out now in September, 21" IPS touchscreen, keyboard and mouse using Android. It'll take a while before the OS and apps catch up, but fundamentally this is what most people are looking for in a "real" computer, it's not the CPU, not the GPU, not the RAM it's a big screen, keyboard and mouse. It's the kind of PC you can crank out a novel at or work on a big spreadsheet (not in Excel, but there are alternatives), anything where it's not about x86 compatibility or computer horsepower. That said, the big migration potential is certainly Windows users but if there's a landslide like in the mobile market Linux is sure to notice it too.
Glad to see OpenGL at parity, or close to it, with Microsoft's 3D stack. One wonders if that is due to the huge growth in OpenGL utilization by mobile platforms, even though those often use only embedded OpenGL profiles.
Well, that depends on what level you're talking about. At the bottom level is of course the hardware, which will have the exact same features so on the top level declaring an API that does the same is not that hard. The hard part is everything in the middle, which is why OpenGL is now up to version 4.4 while Mesa (the open source implementation) still only supports version 3.1 from March 2009, so that "feature parity" OpenGL version is only available using proprietary blobs. What the packing formats and such are about though is really neither top nor bottom, it's about using the same kind of primitives (textures, shaders etc.) in the same way as DirectX, not because it provides any additional functionality but just to make 1:1 reimplementations easy.
To take one such example from OpenGL 3.1 ARB_fragment_coord_conventions, in traditional OpenGL the first pixel is lower-left, in DirectX upper-left. Before that extension, you had to rewrite everything to match the coordinate system, now you just say it's using DirectX-style coordinates and pass it right through. It makes transitioning between the two easier if you're writing for example a cross-platform game engine and it particularly helps things like WINE, but mostly it's just happening because it's the same hardware down below - there's no good reason why the calling conventions should need to be different or why you can't support the same format in both languages. The other part is whether the OpenGL stack is as optimized as the DirectX stack, correctness is just a part of the equation.
What would be helpful is if MPEG-LA came out and said whether it plans to do that with H.265 also.
Don't forget that MPEG LA isn't the one holding the patents, it's just a mouthpiece for all the companies involved that deals with collecting and distributing royalty fees. Until they've got deals signed with every patent holder, they can't really say anything on behalf of all of them. That said, if they want any H.265 adoption to take place the terms should probably not be significantly worse than H.264...
And if I go for a walk in the forest the foreign element of my boot can have an adverse effect on the ant that I stepped on but raising it to the level of "pollution" is an exaggeration. For any sane amount of lighting the by far greatest impact on the environment is the street, not the street light or for that matter the dwelling and the outdoor light. Nocturnal creatures instantly retreat to the shadows and day creatures like ourselves "pollute" ourselves with thousands of times more artificial light at "unnatural" hours of the day with no significant ill effects to show for it.
It's fair that astronomers speak of it that way in context with astronomy, since they're so extremely sensitive to it the same way I'd also accept hyper-allergics speaking of "contaminants" in food to describe what is insignificant and imperceptible impurities for others, but outside of that you just look like a fool. In short, unless your lights are inconveniencing anybody and they're reasonably necessary for their purpose don't worry about it, you're not some kind of eco-terrorist. Or if you are, you probably are in a thousand more significant ways than that.
Make sure to still have them enabled when the SWAT team arrives, may I also suggest live cameras streaming to YouTube? You might get famous, Darwin award famous.
As this measures the speed to Akamai's servers, the numbers are not comparable to other numbers. I found the numbers way too low, for example here in Norway it says broadband penetration (>4Mbps) is 50%, actual figures (and the numbers for this are very good, they're very hard on you delivering agreed speeds) is about 77%. I'm guessing the difference is people who use their Internet connection for other things while connecting to Akamai, if your connection is busy with other things and you only got 3Mbps to spare for Akami you'll be counted in the "slowband" category.
I can't speak for the US but at least here in Norway the distinction between personal activity (that doesn't have to pay taxes) and commercial activity comes down to scope and profitability, not organization. Everything from professional poker players to product pushing bloggers and prostitutes have had their activity deemed taxable with demands of back payment and penalty taxes. If you rent out your house once a year while you're away on summer vacation it'll fail the scope requirement, if you're just trying to make your own hobby tax deductible as a business expense you'll be denied, but if you turn a profit over time it's taxable income.
As for having no rights, well you're also the boss of your own individual business. Employee rights are there to protect workers from the boss, they don't work very well when you are the boss. Either way what you do or don't do will come straight out of your own paycheck, that's just how it is running your own business.
Obviously, but the point that people seem to be missing is that any one of those boxes is only likely to upgrade to anything compatible with HDMI 1.x. You get a HDMI 2.0 set top box? Well either it talks HDMI 1.x (1.4 probably, maybe 1.3) to your TV or it's a dud. Nobody's going to ship a DisplayPort-only TV until they're sure everyone has a DisplayPort source and nobody's going to ship a DisplayPort source-only device until they're sure everyone has a DisplayPort TV. It's always the extra that you might have, like Firewire to USB. Not every computer has a Firewire port, but you can assume that anything relatively modern will have an USB port. Maybe the tide will turn the tide with Apple etc. pushing mini-DP, but I haven't seen it happen yet.
That said, I've heard a saying that says "the market can be wrong longer than you can be right", which is to say as long as you're planning to sell in the stock market again (as opposed to getting a controlling majority and go private) you need the market to realize its mistake and adjust the stock price accordingly. Otherwise you're stuck with it, either you can sell out again at the same undervalued price or you can leave your funds invested there hoping that some day eventually the market will understand. It is especially true of bubble economics, you might think it's a bubble but if you bet it's going to burst the market might continue inflating the bubble beyond your means forcing you to sell off before it finally bursts. You were "right", but unless you can understand when the market turns you might still end up the loser.
Windows Phone has 4% global share. 85% of that is from Nokia. Nokia's margins on Windows Phones is -14%. That means it is not mathematically possible for Windows Phone to be returning a profit to the average builder.
It is mathematically possible if the remaining 15% are sold at 80%+ margin. Realistically possible no, but mathematics have never concerned itself with what is practically possible.
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What earth laws? because no country has any jurisdiction at all so what laws you are thinking of are silly ramblings of an uneducated person.
Pot, meet kettle. The waters are international, the ships are the territory of the flag they're sailing under and the flag state laws apply. This is for example true for all crimes committed on board, but also the usual rules of "What if you stand on the Canadian/Mexican border and shoot someone in the US?", short answer they'll need to extradite you but you'll be trialed under US law. Same thing if you shoot at a vessel under US flag in international waters and kill someone, you just committed a crime under US jurisdiction. If disrupting the GPS signal is illegal in the US mainland it's probably illegal to do the same to a vessel under US flag, unless the regulations specifically limit themselves to US territorial waters or restricts itself to regulating broadcasters in US territory, not signals received - a small but crucial distinction in such "border" disputes.
on a decent TV you can see a difference. not that big of a deal
Yeah, when you target DVD5 and DVD9 it is on the low side, rips that go for almost transparent quality typically adds +50-100%. But 3840x2160 is only 4x the pixels of 1920x1080 while a 50GB BluRay is 5.86 times the size of a DVD9, audio size remains constant so only the video stream quadruples and H.265 will compress better so I'm thinking you can deliver damn good 4K on a BluRay disc without introducing a new physical format. They're probably going to anyway, but where you can spot the difference between a BluRay and DVD9 rip today I doubt you'll spot one between a 300GB disc and a BD50 rip.
Just HDMI, DisplayPort 1.2 can do 4K @ 60Hz using MST. And movies are generally shot at 24 FPS with some extremely few exceptions - where the high-FPS version isn't available to consumers anyway. Right now it's more a limitation for using it as a monitor than anything else, but yes... it's not "future-proof". After HDMI 2.0 arrives later this year that won't be a problem anymore, but it's not really "future-safe" until they've picked a 4K consumer format and your TV will work with that. Remember those TVs that had HD component inputs, but players didn't want to output HD over analog? Technical capability may not matter much...
SSDs aren't really what killed home-burned optical media, it was USB sticks in multi-GB size at reasonable cost. For storage a 4TB HDD for $179 beats a stack of optical discs by miles and makes discs unfeasible even as backup, the reason to burn discs was portability but USB sticks mopped up that market. Today either you copy to your stick and bring it (push) or your buddy visits with his stick to bring home (pull), either way you don't need any one-time discs. Or using any online service instead, that too.
The downside to HDDs (and for that matter SSDs) is that they need babysitting, the one thing I'd like optical media for is if they can promise me high-capacity discs I can put in a drawer (or more likely a safety deposit box), forget for 20-100 years and still read fine. Wouldn't even need to be a home burner, as long as I could have a home reader - I'd upload a disc image to some burning service, they'd ship the finished disc in the mail. There's a lot of static data I'd like to keep without having to copy from HDD to HDD regularly in order to keep it alive.
I'm well aware of why Germany wanted to invade Norway, but like everything else it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis. A sea invasion against a properly equipped and trained navy and coastal defenses could have been made costly, whether it was the Germans or the British. Enough to withstand the whole Wehrmacht or Royal Navy? No, but perhaps enough it'd take too many troops, ships and airplanes as well as incur too many losses. As it were the Norwegian forces were mostly all overrun and all major coastal cities fell within 24 hours, all except the northern area in a month and the entire country in two months with 5-6000 Axis casualties in the whole campaign. In two words: Too easy.
If both parties have too much to lose there won't be another war. That's a fortunate consequence of globalization.
Before WWII I'm sure you could have made many reasonable and credible arguments for why Germany would never attack France or why Japan would never attack the US that are equal or better to "globalization". Many wars have started small and escalated quickly and unpredictably, whether it's North and South Korea, Taiwan, those islands south of Japan or whatever one match can start a kindle that'll start a fire to put the world in flames. I mean it's not like anyone saw the US getting involved because a dictator started annexing a few areas around Germany. In retrospect you can say the Mutually Assured Destruction policy worked in the Cold War but during the Cuban missile crisis.it was a very close call.
Maybe your perspective is different but my country of Norway took the neutrality route in the 1930s, no military build-up, no signs of military aggression, we were seeking a position of neutrality and being a non-threat to everybody. What happened was the Nazis said "thank you very much" and invaded with minimal resistance. And today I see the same, with the NATO alliance and Russia being a shadow of its former military might we're running the defense with half a skeleton crew on outdated equipment, we're spending some money on elite units for operations abroad but the mass defense? We'd fall like a house of cards, all the money is bet on their not being any war in the first place.
True that, but cache latencies will have to go vastly up measured in clock cycles. If we say 3GHz = 10cm then 3THz = 0,1mm and an SO-DIMM module is 6.76cm across, you go from <1 cycle to 676 cycle latency just crossing the module. At those rates keeping the CPU fed with data might be the biggest challenge.
I swear that if you took random sunsets from Google Maps and turned them into artistic-looking drawings/paintings they'd pass the "Turing test" with flying colors without any human being directly involved in the capture or composition. With all the bizarre things called art, it's almost impossible to say something was not somebody's "creative vision" even if it's actually a random machine-picked choice.
The key criterion is creativity and expressive/emotional content, and wherever that comes from, that's the source of the art.
In my experience it seems to be far more the audience's ability to project their expressive / emotional content onto the work, where it came from and what the artist wanted it to mean might be totally irrelevant - or at least in total contradiction. Take for example this example of abstract art, simply a white canvas. What does it mean? Whatever you want it to mean, I guess.
If you go a good step down from art and say "I just want an aesthetically pleasing wall-piece to hang over the couch in the living room" then I've no doubt the computers can make up something "good enough", really how much time do people really spent philosophizing over their paintings? And that's the way most people use art, now I haven't been to an art gallery lately but rumor has it neither have most people.
I agree with you on the first half, but not with the second half. Mail that is delivered to some "community mailbox" nearby is much less useful than having it delivered to your door/driveway. I'd rather have mon/wed/fri delivery all the way than mon-sat at a community mailbox.
I think he meant he would assume the signs were real except for the missile.
Did you hear that WHOOSH? No it was not a missile, it was a joke going over your head...
Yeah today between machines and self-service spying (meaning, people post it on Facebook themselves) it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
What scares me is that there's going to be a point where we just can't grow anymore. Exponential growth is unsustainable, anyone with a little bit of math knowledge would be able to tell you that. When Wall Street and co. realize that their expectations cannot be met anymore and investors start panicking, we could see a big market crash again, perhaps worse than ever before. I really hate how our entire economy rests on what is essentially a bunch of petulant children.
Wall Street may be those causing the waves by moving jobs, but they're not the underlying cause. From 1970 to 2000 literacy rate in China rose from 53% to 91%, that's 400 million learning how to read and write with higher education to follow. The western world no longer has a monopoly on a skilled workforce so the premium is getting harder and harder to justify, relatively speaking a US worker is not as valuable as he once was. Chinese wages are also on the rise, but that means prices are on the rise as well. We're not going to come back to the glory days where Americans earned lots of the almighty dollar to be traded for dirt cheap things made in the third world, this time they're looking to join the "first world" club.
I should also point out that even if "locally" the US median real income hasn't been moving much, the world has seen a huge economic growth overall and the number of people living in extreme poverty has been reduced for each year, even through the financial crisis, to take the trend from 1981-2010: 52-47-42-43-41-35-34-31-25-23-21%. Undernourishment is also in decline, though it has been slowing down. Yes, for the "leading billion" it might not have been that fantastic the last few decades but for the middle five billion a lot has happened, while there's a billion at the bottom that still has huge issues. But the gravity point is that big (HUGE) countries like China, India etc. are dragging themselves out of the mud.
$250,000 per song or something like that? And this is willful commercial infringement, not personal use.
They're not going for criminal copyright violation, just civil copyright violation so 120 songs * $150,000 = $18 million. Even the statutory minimum is 120 * $750 = $90,000 if they're found guilty which sounds quite good compared to $20/month (if that's what she'd normally be paid per the contract).
When you say small amounts, you mean 32Gb.
Which according to newegg can be had for $229, sure it's not pocket change but if you're thinking of say a computer vision program for a car... that's a tree, that's a house, that's a dog, there's a child running around. I would imagine it's a lot easier to collect sensor data than to make sense of it in real time, if you can rapidly identify points of interest like facial recognition in photo cameras on steroids you can put processing power - and potentially directional sensors - to good use. For example, you very closely look for clues whether a pedestrian walking down the street past a crossing is going to make use of it, so should an AI driver. Blunt use of raw processing power will only take you so far.
21 inches for one application? Google has strongly resisted any attempt to add tiled or overlapping window management policy to stock Android. This means applications have to be coded to each hardware manufacturer's proprietary window management API. I can dig up Google employees' explanation of this "all maximized all the time" policy and why Cornerstone isn't in CyanogenMod if you want.
Well I might be the odd man out among tech-savvy users, but I run most applications maximized on my 24" screen, I've tried doing it differently, I've been on Linux for some years and tried multiple desktops, I've tried working with multiple monitors as well but I come back to the KISS model - maximized apps and rapid switching. I don't think I've ever used such a thing as drag and drop between apps, it's select in one app, Ctrl-X/C, switch, Ctrl-V. I very often flip-flop between two apps, like say code and specs by clicking the same app icon to show/hide instead of side-by-side. It might not be for everyone but I think many users will get by just fine without tiles or overlapping windows.
Is this a preview of what might happen to Linux distros at some point in the future? Android has had a bigger impact than anyone expected. I wouldn't be surprised if it leads to Linux becoming more marginalised (servers only) and fewer people adopting it on the desktop.
Quite possibly, with AIOs like this coming out now in September, 21" IPS touchscreen, keyboard and mouse using Android. It'll take a while before the OS and apps catch up, but fundamentally this is what most people are looking for in a "real" computer, it's not the CPU, not the GPU, not the RAM it's a big screen, keyboard and mouse. It's the kind of PC you can crank out a novel at or work on a big spreadsheet (not in Excel, but there are alternatives), anything where it's not about x86 compatibility or computer horsepower. That said, the big migration potential is certainly Windows users but if there's a landslide like in the mobile market Linux is sure to notice it too.
Glad to see OpenGL at parity, or close to it, with Microsoft's 3D stack. One wonders if that is due to the huge growth in OpenGL utilization by mobile platforms, even though those often use only embedded OpenGL profiles.
Well, that depends on what level you're talking about. At the bottom level is of course the hardware, which will have the exact same features so on the top level declaring an API that does the same is not that hard. The hard part is everything in the middle, which is why OpenGL is now up to version 4.4 while Mesa (the open source implementation) still only supports version 3.1 from March 2009, so that "feature parity" OpenGL version is only available using proprietary blobs. What the packing formats and such are about though is really neither top nor bottom, it's about using the same kind of primitives (textures, shaders etc.) in the same way as DirectX, not because it provides any additional functionality but just to make 1:1 reimplementations easy.
To take one such example from OpenGL 3.1 ARB_fragment_coord_conventions, in traditional OpenGL the first pixel is lower-left, in DirectX upper-left. Before that extension, you had to rewrite everything to match the coordinate system, now you just say it's using DirectX-style coordinates and pass it right through. It makes transitioning between the two easier if you're writing for example a cross-platform game engine and it particularly helps things like WINE, but mostly it's just happening because it's the same hardware down below - there's no good reason why the calling conventions should need to be different or why you can't support the same format in both languages. The other part is whether the OpenGL stack is as optimized as the DirectX stack, correctness is just a part of the equation.
What would be helpful is if MPEG-LA came out and said whether it plans to do that with H.265 also.
Don't forget that MPEG LA isn't the one holding the patents, it's just a mouthpiece for all the companies involved that deals with collecting and distributing royalty fees. Until they've got deals signed with every patent holder, they can't really say anything on behalf of all of them. That said, if they want any H.265 adoption to take place the terms should probably not be significantly worse than H.264...
And if I go for a walk in the forest the foreign element of my boot can have an adverse effect on the ant that I stepped on but raising it to the level of "pollution" is an exaggeration. For any sane amount of lighting the by far greatest impact on the environment is the street, not the street light or for that matter the dwelling and the outdoor light. Nocturnal creatures instantly retreat to the shadows and day creatures like ourselves "pollute" ourselves with thousands of times more artificial light at "unnatural" hours of the day with no significant ill effects to show for it.
It's fair that astronomers speak of it that way in context with astronomy, since they're so extremely sensitive to it the same way I'd also accept hyper-allergics speaking of "contaminants" in food to describe what is insignificant and imperceptible impurities for others, but outside of that you just look like a fool. In short, unless your lights are inconveniencing anybody and they're reasonably necessary for their purpose don't worry about it, you're not some kind of eco-terrorist. Or if you are, you probably are in a thousand more significant ways than that.
Make sure to still have them enabled when the SWAT team arrives, may I also suggest live cameras streaming to YouTube? You might get famous, Darwin award famous.
As this measures the speed to Akamai's servers, the numbers are not comparable to other numbers. I found the numbers way too low, for example here in Norway it says broadband penetration (>4Mbps) is 50%, actual figures (and the numbers for this are very good, they're very hard on you delivering agreed speeds) is about 77%. I'm guessing the difference is people who use their Internet connection for other things while connecting to Akamai, if your connection is busy with other things and you only got 3Mbps to spare for Akami you'll be counted in the "slowband" category.
I can't speak for the US but at least here in Norway the distinction between personal activity (that doesn't have to pay taxes) and commercial activity comes down to scope and profitability, not organization. Everything from professional poker players to product pushing bloggers and prostitutes have had their activity deemed taxable with demands of back payment and penalty taxes. If you rent out your house once a year while you're away on summer vacation it'll fail the scope requirement, if you're just trying to make your own hobby tax deductible as a business expense you'll be denied, but if you turn a profit over time it's taxable income.
As for having no rights, well you're also the boss of your own individual business. Employee rights are there to protect workers from the boss, they don't work very well when you are the boss. Either way what you do or don't do will come straight out of your own paycheck, that's just how it is running your own business.
Obviously, but the point that people seem to be missing is that any one of those boxes is only likely to upgrade to anything compatible with HDMI 1.x. You get a HDMI 2.0 set top box? Well either it talks HDMI 1.x (1.4 probably, maybe 1.3) to your TV or it's a dud. Nobody's going to ship a DisplayPort-only TV until they're sure everyone has a DisplayPort source and nobody's going to ship a DisplayPort source-only device until they're sure everyone has a DisplayPort TV. It's always the extra that you might have, like Firewire to USB. Not every computer has a Firewire port, but you can assume that anything relatively modern will have an USB port. Maybe the tide will turn the tide with Apple etc. pushing mini-DP, but I haven't seen it happen yet.
That said, I've heard a saying that says "the market can be wrong longer than you can be right", which is to say as long as you're planning to sell in the stock market again (as opposed to getting a controlling majority and go private) you need the market to realize its mistake and adjust the stock price accordingly. Otherwise you're stuck with it, either you can sell out again at the same undervalued price or you can leave your funds invested there hoping that some day eventually the market will understand. It is especially true of bubble economics, you might think it's a bubble but if you bet it's going to burst the market might continue inflating the bubble beyond your means forcing you to sell off before it finally bursts. You were "right", but unless you can understand when the market turns you might still end up the loser.
Windows Phone has 4% global share. 85% of that is from Nokia. Nokia's margins on Windows Phones is -14%. That means it is not mathematically possible for Windows Phone to be returning a profit to the average builder.
It is mathematically possible if the remaining 15% are sold at 80%+ margin. Realistically possible no, but mathematics have never concerned itself with what is practically possible.