Most (as in 99.9%) updates I install work without any sort of configuration changes needed, and as an additional nice point, don't require a reboot (usually only kernel updates need a reboot in Linux).
I've never had the kernel go down, but I've been forced to kill the X server quite a few times and early KDE4 made unrecoverable barfs on top of X a few times too. So as a server sure it can have years of uptime, but as a desktop it doesn't really live up to its reputation. That it doesn't go down for planned updates is nice but the unplanned are the worst anyway and the difference between a reboot and and X reset is minimal to a desktop.
In this context, when he was repairing one of the compartments in question he saw that it was full of bundles of cash. The prosecutors argued (and the jury agreed) that this was clear evidence that something illegal was going on, most likely drugs. He could have said no at that point, but he didn't.
Yes, drugs is a controlled substance but last I checked cash is not. You can have it, you can carry it, you can put it in the secret compartment of your car. So if I see someone with large bundles of cash, should I report it to the police even though I don't have a shred of evidence of where it came from or indeed if it's part of any illegal activity at all? You're creating a whole undefined region of "he should say no" that extends far beyond anything you could actually report to the police to all things odd and strange. I think only in the US would seeing cash be equal to seeing drugs.
I know it's not black or white that either you have knowledge of something illegal or you don't, but this creates a hilarious amount of grey. He already told everyone who used drug lingo to go away, so what should he do next? All those who look a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way? Hello discrimination lawsuit. That this was the best they could come up with clearly shows he made a real effort to stay clean. Unfortunately to the police he probably came across as a person who was poking his nose at the police, like I know you want to arrest me but I'm clean and you got no leverage to force me to cooperate. And the jury clearly bought it.
I don't know if it qualifies as a luddite, but demand has actually been less than I expected. When I in 1993 saw "The 7th Guest" shipping on 2 CDs for a whopping gigabyte, I would have thought the games and video we see today would take many, many terabytes. But with much more powerful computers and much better compression you can deliver so incredibly much more in a gigabyte. 10 -> 100 Mbit was wonderful, 100 Mbit -> GigE was luxury and 10G... well honestly I don't feel the need even if it was reasonably priced. Even if we should quadruple up to 4K video, H.265 promises to cut that by half again.
I think we're approaching the point where "How much bandwidth do you have?" will be like asking "How big are your water pipes?" Don't know, but plenty to cook and shower and run a washing machine and water the lawn. Same with the electricity grid, I think they can deliver somewhere north of 50 kilowatts without blowing the main fuse, which I probably couldn't reach if I turned on everything I got on maximum. It's great that they make it for the Internet backbone and data centers and whatnot so hopefully there'll be a trickle down effect, but I could already get 6-7x faster Internet than I got (60/60 Mbit now, 400/400 possible).
So if there was a physical memory stick at ReDigi could I buy it, transfer my music to it (fair use?) then sell it to someone who'll transfer their music off it (fair use?) and sell the empty memory stick back to ReDigi? That way a "material object" changes hands, no distribution or reproduction is done as part of the sale itself.
These things have been obvious since Orwell or even before, which is well over sixty years ago. What has this site come to?
Yes but despite that I feel it is almost unstoppable force of technology, just like copyright is doomed through incredibly accurate and ubiquitous data duplication equipment aka computers it seems surveillance is an unstoppable force of smaller, smarter and more networked electronics and optics. This isn't East Germany where you had to recruit almost every citizen, what you need is the cooperation of a handful of people in payment processing (electronic cash), telecom (communication, GPS positioning) and social media (networks, on site surveillance). Imagine for example you had access to GPS coordinates and could access any Facebook upload within 100 meters, regardless of geo-tagging and privacy settings. It's a silent army of spies who might snap a photo with you in the background. Include Google Glass on top and any traditional sense of privacy is gone.
I will admit it, in the battle of privacy versus convenience the convenience wins hands down particularly since many places have made it inconvenient to use cash since they fear robberies, being available 24x7 (but not to my boss) is worth carrying a cell phone over and there's only so much you can do with friends and family blogging their lives which happens to intersect with mine and so on. The Internet won't ever forget and the more of our lives go online, the more just isn't going to age and go away. That and camera phones, luckily of all the stupid, silly, embarrassing, crazy or illegal things we did very little if anything is documented. And you won't find them linked to my name on Google, I don't really care what an old classmate has in a dead tree photo album on a bookshelf. Today I'd probably find myself tagged on Facebook for shits and giggles...
Does it develop and license significant know-how related to its patent portfolio? If so, it's genuine innovation (cf. ARM).
That's a fairly good negative proof, but the absence is hardly a good positive proof. After all, most companies are in the business of using their own innovations not licensing them to third parties. Nor do small companies have a patent portfolio, they may have patented one or a few key innovations that their business model revolves around that would be their unique selling point. And demanding it be in actual use it is a lot harder for small innovators that are looking for funding/production/partners/customers than for a huge corporation that can afford to make 100 units in a "production run" even though they're never going to launch it to their millions of customers. The patent system already favors the big incumbents way too much.
Was it a mistake? Oracle has blown huge sums of cash in acquiring and then attempting to defend and monetize Sun's IP. And what have they got for all of it? Linux is still carving into Solaris and Sparc market share. Java was already leaving Sun's hands long before Oracle bought it. Oracle bought very little for a lot of money, and now they're left arguing a spec is the same as an implementation.
Not to mention with this case they pretty much settled it if Google starts going after desktop java with an enhanced Dalvik for laptop/desktop replacements. What would be nice though is if the Linux devs could get their hands on a GPL-compatible version of Solaris so they could integrate ZFS and some various other goodies, but I suspect you'd have to pay dearly for that.
And that is the trap that many people fall into, particularly the more science inclined, who get sucked into arguments with people whose minds are not open to change.
Science and religion will cease to clash when religion stops making claims about the world we live in, rather than what exists before, after and outside like souls and heaven and hell. Of course scientists object when religion claims Earth is the center of the universe, because based on all observation it is false. There is of course the loophole that God might just be messing with us, but the religious don't want to jump down that hole so I don't see why we should either. I would say that even though we haven't won and possibly can't even win, we have mostly driven religion back into the realm of metaphysics and philosophy and out of science, education and law. Hopefully we can keep it that way, but really the only way is to oppose their religious dogma every step of the way.
Exactly. If he's concerned about image quality, then why not offer downloads that are up to his standards at a price that's so good it's easier to pay it and get a guaranteed good DL.
I can't really say the quality is better or that it is simpler, but I did sign up for HBO Nordic's streaming service, 79 NOK/mo (13.51 USD/no, for comparison Spotify Premium is 99 NOK/mo) for commercial free HD streaming within 24h of US premiere, no TV subscription required (or offered AFAIK in the Nordic markets). It's a pretty barebones offering with some huge draws like Vikings and Game of Thrones but a rather narrow selection, but it's a lot more current than Netflix. It's not downloads but you can watch past seasons of most HBO produced shows, there's no offline mode though so you can't take it with you. I hope this becomes the model for most TV, cutting out the cable/satellite broadcasters as middlemen.
Read up on the Korean DMZ, then you'll see exactly why te USMIC doesn't want to touch this.
The real reason is that it's on China's doorstep, if the US invades North Korea they'll literally be on the Chinese border to the north. If shit really hits the fan and North Korea really had to be eliminated I think China would rather invade themselves than let the US do it.
I have nothing against "software on silicon". However, it does smell of anti-competition... I doubt Oracle works with other CHIP designers on this HW API... but I could be wrong.
I would ask the question the other way, would other chip designers be interested in "do Oracle stuff to database" instructions on their general purpose CPUs? I doubt that, since dead silicon is would greatly cut into the margins of all their other sales.
Oracle is going to need to come up with a new game to make waves with the new processor. Simply improving a processor isn't going to change the fact that what people want are low cost processors without vendor lock in.
"People" are not Oracle's target market. Their target are are huge 24x7x365 enterprise clusters that are not about to change databases unless they absolutely have to so for most of them the question isn't whether they'll run Oracle it's what they'll run Oracle on. Whether it's SPARC, POWER or Intel's E7 Xeons with RAS features they'll be paying blood for the hardware, ARM and Postgres isn't even on the radar. If you run a tiny, non-performance or non-uptime critical Oracle DB it's because you're an Oracle shop and have standardized on it, not because you need it or you have a PHB who insists on Oracle because it's enterprisy. I'm feeling pretty they'll sell if Oracle just spins it right that they take full top-to-bottom responsibility (just not liability) for the stack working at optimal performance.
Actually it's not even a Wayland idea per-se. There is no reason -at all- that client side decorations need to be done by Wayland: it's entirely possible to get the compositor to draw them. For some reason, however the Wayland developers policy is client decorations.
Right now I'm browsing in Chrome on Win7, where the top window bar is full of tabs so where do the client decorations start and end? One of the main complaints I hear about CSD is that a frozen application will also freeze the windows, but you have a compositor - you can have a key combo show a pop-up menu to minimize/move the window or kill the application etc. - your options are very static if it's not responding. The other big one is consistency, but I'm not sure if you're better off just having Gtk+/Qt applications have a standard way to ask for the standard window decorations and render it themselves or have the compositor do it. Those that do something special will just ask for an undecorated window and do their own thing anyway.
Not light-weight in that respect, the main difference is it doesn't draw anything. Each application has to render its own window complete with decorations, then tell Wayland where to find it. The only thing Wayland does is to combine them, like if you have overlapping windows, transparency, transitions or 3D effects. So it should be able to handle multiple graphics devices, multiple monitors and all that locally. What it doesn't have is any forwarding, since shared buffers are inherently local and it has no knowledge of the rendering commands so it can't send a rendering stream.
Even in theory it's not so easy to know if you should render something locally or remotely, for example complex 3D application that use lots of textures and such you want to render locally, then send the finished window to the client. But say if you're a terminal server for 100 clients that want to run apps and all these are proper desktops with graphics card maybe you want to send OpenGL commands and render client side. Or maybe not again, if there are thin clients. And it probably depends on what the available bandwidth is. Personally I think web applications are far more suited to the task, if you need to access it remotely and it doesn't have a web interface then it's going to be some form of screen scraping.
That's what I was thinking too, if the simplest solution is to just get a bigger disk, then let's just do that. Doing otherwise is like a company rationing office supplies. Personally I just bought 2x4TB drives that'll give me 5TB more HDD space (I'm retiring two 1.5TB drives) because I'm too lazy to sort through it all. Hell, I can't even keep my downloading in pace with technology, at one point I had ten HDDs operational now I'm down to six and if I wasn't looking for room to expand I could go down to four. I don't think of limiting my HDD use any more than I limit drinking from the tap.
Also, GPUs tend not to be as fixed-function as they used to be. Some of the nastier mobile parts are still pretty inflexible; but Nvidia has certainly been pushing the nearly-general-purpose compute capabilities of their PC line down into their Tegra products, and they probably won't be the only one.
I've been paying a little attention to the possibility of shader-based decoding in the AMD open source drivers since AMD probably can't release UVD specs (their fixed function hardware) and so far it's been a dud, yes certain things are extremely well suited to GPUs and is done in shaders by the proprietary driver as well but other parts run very poor so they've been looking at mixed CPU/GPU solutions but then you have all sorts of latency/memory synchronization issues. In short, if you're not doing it all on the CPU you want some form of fixed function hardware and I imagine that is true for VP8 as well.
MPEG-LA made a binding agreement that licensing of H.264 decoders would be free forever.
Ah no, if you want to provide an encoder or decoder there are royalties, and even if the recipient has a licensed decoder the sender must pay if you offer a subscription or PPV service. The only thing they've promised is that Internet Broadcast AVC Video like YouTube does not require extra payment for the use of the codec on top of what you've already paid for the decoder (typically through Windows, OS X, Chrome or Flash) and Google has paid for the encoder. P.S. If you do have an AVC encoder, you will typically find that the license terms say you can only use it for "personal and non-commercial use", anything else requires a special license from MPEG LA and it doesn't come cheap.
Every time I fly, I hear that talk at least 4 times before I get back home, because I can't fly anywhere useful without at least 1 connection. I could give the damn talk. Why do they care if I pay attention to it or not?
I've never noticed that they do, I've spent many a lecture reading the paper or a book or something like that and never heard any complaint. Here in Europe you can actually end up hearing it twice or in rare cases three times per flight going to and from different countries, which doesn't take much. I've literally heard it hundreds of times and the only thing I sorta pay attention to is where the emergency exists are to know if there's any over the wings or not.
No, Opera did not have 'a bug which that style sheet worked around'. I am too lazy to find a link, but when Opera changed the user agent to 'IE' (or Firefox, I'm not sure) without changing the renderer or anything else, the pages rendered perfectly. So there was no bug in Opera, MS borked the stylesheet they served to Opera.
If only there was a tech site full of geeks running in 2003 that could provide insight into this, oh wait here...
Yeah but the stylesheet for opera is designed to work with Opera v6. The bug in the stylesheet was hidden by a bug in v6 which was only last week fixed in v7. sure, there's a bug in the stylesheet, but that doesn't mean it's new or that it was placed there specifically to break Opera v7.
Hmmm... although the thing is, the item in the stylesheet which they claim is broken (ul tag style) is the same in the Nav6 stylesheet.
Mozilla renders the page perfectly, and it gets the nav6 stylesheet with that very same ul {} declaration... here's all three listed together:
It seems my memory was a bit off (hey it's been 10 years), it was Netscape Navigator that had the bug but Opera v6 rendered fine anyway - but would have with the standards compliant CSS too. Then they released Opera v7 and Opera broke because it got the fix for Netscape Navigator that now caused it to render 38 pixels off.
Back in 2003 msn.com deliberately sent Opera a faulty style sheet that broke the page, in response and to make a point Opera released a Bork version of their browser that turned msn.com into Swedish Chef talk. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-984632.html
Of course the actual story is that Opera had a bug which that style sheet worked around, when they fixed it in a new version the page looked broken because they still got the modified style sheet. So yes it was deliberate but not malicious, in fact someone had made extra effort to make it work on Opera however the PR opportunity was far too good for Opera to pass up. That's one problem with browser-based hacks, if you're not around to maintain them should you assume the next version of IE will be 100% standards compliant or that most the IE6 hacks would also be required for IE7. It wasn't as obvious as you'd think, to the clients it looked like your site was incredibly fragile when it broke horribly on any new browser version. Those were dark days, long before real standards compliance.
Sure, in an ideal world it's not needed. But in the real world browsers have bugs and no matter how much you blame the browser to the average user your website is broken. Unless you want to limit yourself to the minimal subset of HTML that no browser has managed to screw up you want the ability to work around browser bugs, which means you need to know what browser they're running. That is why so many file formats have a field to let you know what software wrote it. Honestly if you haven't had to implement an IE-specific hack, then you can't have done any web development in the last decade. Because of IEs conditional comments that serve much the same purpose, we could provide Firefox/Opera (and if it were today, Chrome) with a standards-compliant page while still making it work with IE. Otherwise the standards compliant web would have died on the drawing table.
I seriously doubt that MS is dropping the desktop or considering it legacy. The reality is that Microsoft is unifying their interface across phone, tablet and computer and since tablets are the future and tablets use touch, touch is the priority. This is obviously imperfect for those of us who still use traditional form-factor computers, but in 5-10 years we'll be a minority (if not sooner).
Perhaps most laptops have a touchscreen whether you want it to or not, if you don't want to use it then don't. Perhaps they are mostly detachable or convertible or whatever so if you use it in tablet mode you want touch, again if you don't need a tablet don't use it that way. Economics of scale and standardization can quickly lead to you getting it even if you don't need it. But I really don't see a lot of people at the office using the computer only or even mostly in touch mode. If you want to type or click with any kind of speed and precision, keyboard and mouse is still the way to go.
No one wants a degraded experience and whoever made the spec for LCD to only use the max and use software degradation tricks to still display should be taken out in a field and shot!
The old CRTs don't have a physical screen grid, it's just an electron beam in the back that can sweep over the screen and draw how many lines you want it to. On an LCD screen every pixel is a physical unit, they can't move or change size. "Whoever made the spec for LCD" only chose what was possible instead of the impossible. Personally I tend to blame the software if it must run in some specific resolution and games should be configurable so you can play them at high resolutions with low quality. There's no good excuse for why a game should do worse at rendering directly in high resolution instead of rendering in low resolution and then upscaling.
Once that happens, either laws like DMCA and IP will have to be scrapped just so growth can continue
Last century it was about who owns the factories and those that tried to wrest those from capitalists and corporations into the hands of the people are reviled socialists and communists. This century it'll be about who owns the bits and bytes and I expect the same warm welcome of any IP reform. Oh sure, different companies want different IP laws that best suit their business model but 99% of all campaign contributions to Congress want them in some form, even Red Hat probably prefers the GPL via copyright as opposed to no IP law at all. If there is to be a reform, I think it would have to be a popular revolt that most people simply no longer consider those rights valid.
Pyrrhus was fighting the Romans and despite inflicting heavier losses and winning the battles the Romans had far more men to resupply with which was why these "victories" would be his undoing. Veoh won, but still lost because they ran out of money while their opponent had much deeper pockets. How could it get any more appropriate than that?
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Most (as in 99.9%) updates I install work without any sort of configuration changes needed, and as an additional nice point, don't require a reboot (usually only kernel updates need a reboot in Linux).
I've never had the kernel go down, but I've been forced to kill the X server quite a few times and early KDE4 made unrecoverable barfs on top of X a few times too. So as a server sure it can have years of uptime, but as a desktop it doesn't really live up to its reputation. That it doesn't go down for planned updates is nice but the unplanned are the worst anyway and the difference between a reboot and and X reset is minimal to a desktop.
In this context, when he was repairing one of the compartments in question he saw that it was full of bundles of cash. The prosecutors argued (and the jury agreed) that this was clear evidence that something illegal was going on, most likely drugs. He could have said no at that point, but he didn't.
Yes, drugs is a controlled substance but last I checked cash is not. You can have it, you can carry it, you can put it in the secret compartment of your car. So if I see someone with large bundles of cash, should I report it to the police even though I don't have a shred of evidence of where it came from or indeed if it's part of any illegal activity at all? You're creating a whole undefined region of "he should say no" that extends far beyond anything you could actually report to the police to all things odd and strange. I think only in the US would seeing cash be equal to seeing drugs.
I know it's not black or white that either you have knowledge of something illegal or you don't, but this creates a hilarious amount of grey. He already told everyone who used drug lingo to go away, so what should he do next? All those who look a certain way, dress a certain way, act a certain way? Hello discrimination lawsuit. That this was the best they could come up with clearly shows he made a real effort to stay clean. Unfortunately to the police he probably came across as a person who was poking his nose at the police, like I know you want to arrest me but I'm clean and you got no leverage to force me to cooperate. And the jury clearly bought it.
I don't know if it qualifies as a luddite, but demand has actually been less than I expected. When I in 1993 saw "The 7th Guest" shipping on 2 CDs for a whopping gigabyte, I would have thought the games and video we see today would take many, many terabytes. But with much more powerful computers and much better compression you can deliver so incredibly much more in a gigabyte. 10 -> 100 Mbit was wonderful, 100 Mbit -> GigE was luxury and 10G... well honestly I don't feel the need even if it was reasonably priced. Even if we should quadruple up to 4K video, H.265 promises to cut that by half again.
I think we're approaching the point where "How much bandwidth do you have?" will be like asking "How big are your water pipes?" Don't know, but plenty to cook and shower and run a washing machine and water the lawn. Same with the electricity grid, I think they can deliver somewhere north of 50 kilowatts without blowing the main fuse, which I probably couldn't reach if I turned on everything I got on maximum. It's great that they make it for the Internet backbone and data centers and whatnot so hopefully there'll be a trickle down effect, but I could already get 6-7x faster Internet than I got (60/60 Mbit now, 400/400 possible).
So if there was a physical memory stick at ReDigi could I buy it, transfer my music to it (fair use?) then sell it to someone who'll transfer their music off it (fair use?) and sell the empty memory stick back to ReDigi? That way a "material object" changes hands, no distribution or reproduction is done as part of the sale itself.
These things have been obvious since Orwell or even before, which is well over sixty years ago. What has this site come to?
Yes but despite that I feel it is almost unstoppable force of technology, just like copyright is doomed through incredibly accurate and ubiquitous data duplication equipment aka computers it seems surveillance is an unstoppable force of smaller, smarter and more networked electronics and optics. This isn't East Germany where you had to recruit almost every citizen, what you need is the cooperation of a handful of people in payment processing (electronic cash), telecom (communication, GPS positioning) and social media (networks, on site surveillance). Imagine for example you had access to GPS coordinates and could access any Facebook upload within 100 meters, regardless of geo-tagging and privacy settings. It's a silent army of spies who might snap a photo with you in the background. Include Google Glass on top and any traditional sense of privacy is gone.
I will admit it, in the battle of privacy versus convenience the convenience wins hands down particularly since many places have made it inconvenient to use cash since they fear robberies, being available 24x7 (but not to my boss) is worth carrying a cell phone over and there's only so much you can do with friends and family blogging their lives which happens to intersect with mine and so on. The Internet won't ever forget and the more of our lives go online, the more just isn't going to age and go away. That and camera phones, luckily of all the stupid, silly, embarrassing, crazy or illegal things we did very little if anything is documented. And you won't find them linked to my name on Google, I don't really care what an old classmate has in a dead tree photo album on a bookshelf. Today I'd probably find myself tagged on Facebook for shits and giggles...
Does it develop and license significant know-how related to its patent portfolio? If so, it's genuine innovation (cf. ARM).
That's a fairly good negative proof, but the absence is hardly a good positive proof. After all, most companies are in the business of using their own innovations not licensing them to third parties. Nor do small companies have a patent portfolio, they may have patented one or a few key innovations that their business model revolves around that would be their unique selling point. And demanding it be in actual use it is a lot harder for small innovators that are looking for funding/production/partners/customers than for a huge corporation that can afford to make 100 units in a "production run" even though they're never going to launch it to their millions of customers. The patent system already favors the big incumbents way too much.
Was it a mistake? Oracle has blown huge sums of cash in acquiring and then attempting to defend and monetize Sun's IP. And what have they got for all of it? Linux is still carving into Solaris and Sparc market share. Java was already leaving Sun's hands long before Oracle bought it. Oracle bought very little for a lot of money, and now they're left arguing a spec is the same as an implementation.
Not to mention with this case they pretty much settled it if Google starts going after desktop java with an enhanced Dalvik for laptop/desktop replacements. What would be nice though is if the Linux devs could get their hands on a GPL-compatible version of Solaris so they could integrate ZFS and some various other goodies, but I suspect you'd have to pay dearly for that.
And that is the trap that many people fall into, particularly the more science inclined, who get sucked into arguments with people whose minds are not open to change.
Science and religion will cease to clash when religion stops making claims about the world we live in, rather than what exists before, after and outside like souls and heaven and hell. Of course scientists object when religion claims Earth is the center of the universe, because based on all observation it is false. There is of course the loophole that God might just be messing with us, but the religious don't want to jump down that hole so I don't see why we should either. I would say that even though we haven't won and possibly can't even win, we have mostly driven religion back into the realm of metaphysics and philosophy and out of science, education and law. Hopefully we can keep it that way, but really the only way is to oppose their religious dogma every step of the way.
Exactly. If he's concerned about image quality, then why not offer downloads that are up to his standards at a price that's so good it's easier to pay it and get a guaranteed good DL.
I can't really say the quality is better or that it is simpler, but I did sign up for HBO Nordic's streaming service, 79 NOK/mo (13.51 USD/no, for comparison Spotify Premium is 99 NOK/mo) for commercial free HD streaming within 24h of US premiere, no TV subscription required (or offered AFAIK in the Nordic markets). It's a pretty barebones offering with some huge draws like Vikings and Game of Thrones but a rather narrow selection, but it's a lot more current than Netflix. It's not downloads but you can watch past seasons of most HBO produced shows, there's no offline mode though so you can't take it with you. I hope this becomes the model for most TV, cutting out the cable/satellite broadcasters as middlemen.
Read up on the Korean DMZ, then you'll see exactly why te USMIC doesn't want to touch this.
The real reason is that it's on China's doorstep, if the US invades North Korea they'll literally be on the Chinese border to the north. If shit really hits the fan and North Korea really had to be eliminated I think China would rather invade themselves than let the US do it.
I have nothing against "software on silicon". However, it does smell of anti-competition... I doubt Oracle works with other CHIP designers on this HW API... but I could be wrong.
I would ask the question the other way, would other chip designers be interested in "do Oracle stuff to database" instructions on their general purpose CPUs? I doubt that, since dead silicon is would greatly cut into the margins of all their other sales.
Oracle is going to need to come up with a new game to make waves with the new processor. Simply improving a processor isn't going to change the fact that what people want are low cost processors without vendor lock in.
"People" are not Oracle's target market. Their target are are huge 24x7x365 enterprise clusters that are not about to change databases unless they absolutely have to so for most of them the question isn't whether they'll run Oracle it's what they'll run Oracle on. Whether it's SPARC, POWER or Intel's E7 Xeons with RAS features they'll be paying blood for the hardware, ARM and Postgres isn't even on the radar. If you run a tiny, non-performance or non-uptime critical Oracle DB it's because you're an Oracle shop and have standardized on it, not because you need it or you have a PHB who insists on Oracle because it's enterprisy. I'm feeling pretty they'll sell if Oracle just spins it right that they take full top-to-bottom responsibility (just not liability) for the stack working at optimal performance.
Actually it's not even a Wayland idea per-se. There is no reason -at all- that client side decorations need to be done by Wayland: it's entirely possible to get the compositor to draw them. For some reason, however the Wayland developers policy is client decorations.
Right now I'm browsing in Chrome on Win7, where the top window bar is full of tabs so where do the client decorations start and end? One of the main complaints I hear about CSD is that a frozen application will also freeze the windows, but you have a compositor - you can have a key combo show a pop-up menu to minimize/move the window or kill the application etc. - your options are very static if it's not responding. The other big one is consistency, but I'm not sure if you're better off just having Gtk+/Qt applications have a standard way to ask for the standard window decorations and render it themselves or have the compositor do it. Those that do something special will just ask for an undecorated window and do their own thing anyway.
Not light-weight in that respect, the main difference is it doesn't draw anything. Each application has to render its own window complete with decorations, then tell Wayland where to find it. The only thing Wayland does is to combine them, like if you have overlapping windows, transparency, transitions or 3D effects. So it should be able to handle multiple graphics devices, multiple monitors and all that locally. What it doesn't have is any forwarding, since shared buffers are inherently local and it has no knowledge of the rendering commands so it can't send a rendering stream.
Even in theory it's not so easy to know if you should render something locally or remotely, for example complex 3D application that use lots of textures and such you want to render locally, then send the finished window to the client. But say if you're a terminal server for 100 clients that want to run apps and all these are proper desktops with graphics card maybe you want to send OpenGL commands and render client side. Or maybe not again, if there are thin clients. And it probably depends on what the available bandwidth is. Personally I think web applications are far more suited to the task, if you need to access it remotely and it doesn't have a web interface then it's going to be some form of screen scraping.
That's what I was thinking too, if the simplest solution is to just get a bigger disk, then let's just do that. Doing otherwise is like a company rationing office supplies. Personally I just bought 2x4TB drives that'll give me 5TB more HDD space (I'm retiring two 1.5TB drives) because I'm too lazy to sort through it all. Hell, I can't even keep my downloading in pace with technology, at one point I had ten HDDs operational now I'm down to six and if I wasn't looking for room to expand I could go down to four. I don't think of limiting my HDD use any more than I limit drinking from the tap.
Also, GPUs tend not to be as fixed-function as they used to be. Some of the nastier mobile parts are still pretty inflexible; but Nvidia has certainly been pushing the nearly-general-purpose compute capabilities of their PC line down into their Tegra products, and they probably won't be the only one.
I've been paying a little attention to the possibility of shader-based decoding in the AMD open source drivers since AMD probably can't release UVD specs (their fixed function hardware) and so far it's been a dud, yes certain things are extremely well suited to GPUs and is done in shaders by the proprietary driver as well but other parts run very poor so they've been looking at mixed CPU/GPU solutions but then you have all sorts of latency/memory synchronization issues. In short, if you're not doing it all on the CPU you want some form of fixed function hardware and I imagine that is true for VP8 as well.
MPEG-LA made a binding agreement that licensing of H.264 decoders would be free forever.
Ah no, if you want to provide an encoder or decoder there are royalties, and even if the recipient has a licensed decoder the sender must pay if you offer a subscription or PPV service. The only thing they've promised is that Internet Broadcast AVC Video like YouTube does not require extra payment for the use of the codec on top of what you've already paid for the decoder (typically through Windows, OS X, Chrome or Flash) and Google has paid for the encoder. P.S. If you do have an AVC encoder, you will typically find that the license terms say you can only use it for "personal and non-commercial use", anything else requires a special license from MPEG LA and it doesn't come cheap.
Every time I fly, I hear that talk at least 4 times before I get back home, because I can't fly anywhere useful without at least 1 connection. I could give the damn talk. Why do they care if I pay attention to it or not?
I've never noticed that they do, I've spent many a lecture reading the paper or a book or something like that and never heard any complaint. Here in Europe you can actually end up hearing it twice or in rare cases three times per flight going to and from different countries, which doesn't take much. I've literally heard it hundreds of times and the only thing I sorta pay attention to is where the emergency exists are to know if there's any over the wings or not.
No, Opera did not have 'a bug which that style sheet worked around'. I am too lazy to find a link, but when Opera changed the user agent to 'IE' (or Firefox, I'm not sure) without changing the renderer or anything else, the pages rendered perfectly. So there was no bug in Opera, MS borked the stylesheet they served to Opera.
If only there was a tech site full of geeks running in 2003 that could provide insight into this, oh wait here...
Yeah but the stylesheet for opera is designed to work with Opera v6. The bug in the stylesheet was hidden by a bug in v6 which was only last week fixed in v7. sure, there's a bug in the stylesheet, but that doesn't mean it's new or that it was placed there specifically to break Opera v7.
Hmmm... although the thing is, the item in the stylesheet which they claim is broken (ul tag style) is the same in the Nav6 stylesheet.
Mozilla renders the page perfectly, and it gets the nav6 stylesheet with that very same ul {} declaration... here's all three listed together:
Opera: ul {list-style-position: outside; margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px; list-style-image: url(http://msimg.com/m/8/bullet-black.gif);}
Nav 6: ul {list-style-position: outside; margin: -2px 0px 0px -30px; list-style-image: url(http://msimg.com/m/8/bullet-black.gif);}
IE6: ul {list-style-position: outside; margin: -2px 0px 0px 8px; list-style-image: url(http://msimg.com/m/8/bullet-black.gif);}
It seems my memory was a bit off (hey it's been 10 years), it was Netscape Navigator that had the bug but Opera v6 rendered fine anyway - but would have with the standards compliant CSS too. Then they released Opera v7 and Opera broke because it got the fix for Netscape Navigator that now caused it to render 38 pixels off.
And just for laughs, one of the sigs from 2003:
World IPv6 Launch
Maybe in another 10 years, mate...
Back in 2003 msn.com deliberately sent Opera a faulty style sheet that broke the page, in response and to make a point Opera released a Bork version of their browser that turned msn.com into Swedish Chef talk. http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-984632.html
Of course the actual story is that Opera had a bug which that style sheet worked around, when they fixed it in a new version the page looked broken because they still got the modified style sheet. So yes it was deliberate but not malicious, in fact someone had made extra effort to make it work on Opera however the PR opportunity was far too good for Opera to pass up. That's one problem with browser-based hacks, if you're not around to maintain them should you assume the next version of IE will be 100% standards compliant or that most the IE6 hacks would also be required for IE7. It wasn't as obvious as you'd think, to the clients it looked like your site was incredibly fragile when it broke horribly on any new browser version. Those were dark days, long before real standards compliance.
Sure, in an ideal world it's not needed. But in the real world browsers have bugs and no matter how much you blame the browser to the average user your website is broken. Unless you want to limit yourself to the minimal subset of HTML that no browser has managed to screw up you want the ability to work around browser bugs, which means you need to know what browser they're running. That is why so many file formats have a field to let you know what software wrote it. Honestly if you haven't had to implement an IE-specific hack, then you can't have done any web development in the last decade. Because of IEs conditional comments that serve much the same purpose, we could provide Firefox/Opera (and if it were today, Chrome) with a standards-compliant page while still making it work with IE. Otherwise the standards compliant web would have died on the drawing table.
I seriously doubt that MS is dropping the desktop or considering it legacy. The reality is that Microsoft is unifying their interface across phone, tablet and computer and since tablets are the future and tablets use touch, touch is the priority. This is obviously imperfect for those of us who still use traditional form-factor computers, but in 5-10 years we'll be a minority (if not sooner).
Perhaps most laptops have a touchscreen whether you want it to or not, if you don't want to use it then don't. Perhaps they are mostly detachable or convertible or whatever so if you use it in tablet mode you want touch, again if you don't need a tablet don't use it that way. Economics of scale and standardization can quickly lead to you getting it even if you don't need it. But I really don't see a lot of people at the office using the computer only or even mostly in touch mode. If you want to type or click with any kind of speed and precision, keyboard and mouse is still the way to go.
No one wants a degraded experience and whoever made the spec for LCD to only use the max and use software degradation tricks to still display should be taken out in a field and shot!
The old CRTs don't have a physical screen grid, it's just an electron beam in the back that can sweep over the screen and draw how many lines you want it to. On an LCD screen every pixel is a physical unit, they can't move or change size. "Whoever made the spec for LCD" only chose what was possible instead of the impossible. Personally I tend to blame the software if it must run in some specific resolution and games should be configurable so you can play them at high resolutions with low quality. There's no good excuse for why a game should do worse at rendering directly in high resolution instead of rendering in low resolution and then upscaling.
Once that happens, either laws like DMCA and IP will have to be scrapped just so growth can continue
Last century it was about who owns the factories and those that tried to wrest those from capitalists and corporations into the hands of the people are reviled socialists and communists. This century it'll be about who owns the bits and bytes and I expect the same warm welcome of any IP reform. Oh sure, different companies want different IP laws that best suit their business model but 99% of all campaign contributions to Congress want them in some form, even Red Hat probably prefers the GPL via copyright as opposed to no IP law at all. If there is to be a reform, I think it would have to be a popular revolt that most people simply no longer consider those rights valid.
Pyrrhus was fighting the Romans and despite inflicting heavier losses and winning the battles the Romans had far more men to resupply with which was why these "victories" would be his undoing. Veoh won, but still lost because they ran out of money while their opponent had much deeper pockets. How could it get any more appropriate than that?