As a Christian, the way I see it, why can't evolution be the process that God has used (and is still using) to create the universe?
Although that is, in fact, my opinion, I think religious scholars balk at this concept because it pigeonholes God into a smaller player in the universe. If God has to play by His own rules (and I'm not sure we have any documented proof that He has violated them), then it comes down to the opposite of what Einstein said about quantum mechanics: God ONLY plays dice with the universe. If the only effect God can have is to change the rolls of the dice, it limits God in a way that many highly religious folks don't believe He should be limited.
The fact that we can trace most species back through DNA and how it's expressed physiologically in the fossil record means that God doesn't appear to be Creating much new life these days-- just letting the process run its course. And if you include humans in that tree and assert that there were billions of years of pre-human life that later formed humans, it again diminishes God's direct role as our immediate creator, and relegates Him to an indirect force that set things in motion a long time ago.
Ironically, DivX was at least as forgiving as any of the digital movie download DRM systems everyone is touting as the obvious technology that Blu-ray will lose to.
Blu-ray media was already outselling HD DVD by more than 2 to 1 in the US and much greater margins overseas by the time Warner cut HD DVD. The only two major studios to back HD DVD had to be bribed, as well. I don't see this as quite the precipitating event that the article summary seems to imply... consumers appeared to have already chosen Blu-ray by the time of Warner's action. If Warner hadn't made their decision now, it just would have been a slightly slower death, but not by a lot.
I remember when I was younger, we were down to 10 years of oil underground.
It all comes down to yours sources. 20 years ago, they were still finding more oil each year than was being consumed, so the "10 years left" folks weren't the responsible people. The opposite is true now. 20 years ago it wasn't economically feasible to pump the sludge out of Canada's shale, but now it is. It wasn't economically feasible to put a platform in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and drill a mile down, but now it is. But all those sources are limited, as well. We have a much more accurate picture of how big the problem is now than we did 20 years ago.
At this data rate, this appears to be not so much competing with the keyboard/mouse/printer USB connector than it does the DVI video connector. Now all we need is some of Tesla's magic to transmit the electricity wirelessly and we're home free.
The SEI and various other organizations focused on process have a lot of suggestions. There are some simple ones, such as "function points" * "complexity" as a measure of productivity. Or defects per function point as a measure of quality. Or some from the extreme programming world of user stories completed.
But nothing is really truly accurate, only guides humans. If it were, managers could be robots.
If these engineers had wanted to work for Microsoft, they probably would have gone and gotten a job with Microsoft. It's not like Microsoft hasn't been hiring aggressively for a decade. My guess is the best and brightest from Yahoo would quickly go work for Google, Apple, or someone else if Yahoo is acquired, and Microsoft will be left with the folks who were unable to escape. Acquiring a culturally incompatible company for the engineers doesn't make sense.
It seems a lot more likely to me that Microsoft made this offer in order to disrupt the industry for awhile as Yahoo spins in panic mode and Google spends a lot of time contingency planning. I have little belief that Microsoft will actually go through with this acquisition.
Again, if Europe is so powerful, why does the USA need to have bases in Germany?
Well, in that particular case it's a great staging area for middle east operations, and a nice halfway point to evacuate casualties to. I think our military presence in Germany have probably saved a lot of American lives.
The real question is why we need so many ground troops there. And I don't think there's a good answer for that.
After all there's nothing more benign a powerplant that outputs high-level "spent" nuclear waste that we have nowhere in the world to store, and is going to remain "hot" for at least another hundred thousand years
That's only true of current reactor designs because anti-nuclear folks dried up the research three decades ago. If the "waste" is that "hot", then we haven't extracted all that much of the energy! There are fast neutron reactor designs that are hundreds of times more efficient and produce less waste that isn't that hot and only radioactive for a century. While certainly no picnic, that stuff is probably a lot easier to deal with than what coal produces.
While you're mostly correct about item #2 (I think you're a little optimistic about file sizes), the parent poster was correct about item #1. The default encoding on Blu-ray is h.264/AAC and a well-encoded movie can take up a substantial portion of the disc. You can see tons of comparisons of Blu-ray vs. Apple's iTMS where the iTMS looks slightly better than upconverted DVD and substantially worse than Blu-ray, as an example.
No, I'd say a fundamental premise of the submitter is wrong:
I know it's not true that Linux is worth less than Windows. It's far more valuable to the end user in terms of getting things done.
Actually, without MS Office and their ilk for the corporate world and without as wide a selection of games for the home world, linux is actually not as valuable as Windows to most of the market.
And McCain/Feingold by itself puts John McCain into the 'menace to the Republic' catagory. Either the man is too illiterate to understand the plain language of the 1st Amendment or too wicked to care.
I can't see them satisfied with the market share of 20% in next-gen consoles
The Wii is doing great, but the PS3 has been picking up quite a bit of steam. The XBox360 is also doing great in the US, but not so much elsewhere. Sony got broadsided early on, but has been surprisingly competitive as of late.
I think the interesting thing is that the Wii is selling to a lot of people who would probably never, no matter how Sony would have priced, packaged or marketed it, bought a PS3. Thus, the Wii is increasing the size of the total market, which isn't all bad for Sony. Also, the Wii is cheap enough that for those would WOULD buy one of the other consoles, it's not necessarily an either/or decision-- many can buy a Wii AND a PS3.
HD DVD typically had a better picture, better contrast, better compression, better sound quality, and a cheaper method of production.
Actually, the truth is pretty much the opposite of this statement. Because Blu-ray had 50% more bandwidth, it could be compressed less, and since it supported exactly the same video codecs as HD DVD that's all that really matters. Although some of the audio codecs are optional on Blu-ray that are mandatory on HD DVD, when present Blu-ray requires greater bandwidth for those, too, leading to better fidelity.
Yes, HD DVD were cheaper to produce, but the discs cost the same to the consumer. (And much less $ per megabyte, which matters for the geeks out there who will use it in their computers.)
Does that mean Sony now rules what will probably become the next main data format?
Not really. Sony isn't even the majority patent holder in Blu-ray, they're just the most visible proponent of the format and have sold a few million of the players.
Incidentally, the same thing is true for anti-terrorism. As soon as we add racial profiling against arabs to our airport screening process, they'll start recruiting and sending radical Indonesians against us. As soon as we start checking shoes, they'll start hiding things in hats. The only way to really protect us is to have a truly random screening process as the last resort, and really stop them by tracking money and travel patterns ahead of time.
Even with one giant file it's my understanding that it would be possible for them to utilize the Time Machine API such that single records could be restored out of that file and searches performed from the past. That's part of the power of Time Machine-- that it's much more than a simple file-by-file or volume-by-volume snapshotting solution.
Actually slightly less. And that's not considering the hours of useless time I've spent waiting for flights to or from Newark, sitting on the Newark tarmac, circling above Newark, or trying to figure out how to get to Newark when you get flown to another NY airport instead. (How can an airline *coughUSAirwayscough* consider their job done when they switch you to a flight going to the wrong city in the wrong state... LGA is 45 minutes from Newark!)
When looking at companies, the products are important but only as indicators as to the people behind them. When Amazon was losing money hand over fist, its shares were still sky-high because people believed that Jeff Bezos and his team were a good bet. I can't imagine how anyone could feel that, after everything, SCO could possibly have assembled a $100M team. I don't know how to say this without offending the dozens of people left at SCO, but you'd have to have some form of brain damage, or be really, really desperate for gainful employment to still work there.
Aside from airports* and some hotels, wireless is free everywhere that has it. (And what are you going to do, use another airport?)
Actually, yes. It's one of several reasons that, living in mid-NJ, I drive down to Philadelphia instead of up to Newark for my flights (the other being substantially fewer delays, of course). Philadelphia has free wireless (as does Pittsburgh), but Newark charges $8... someone would have to be really desperate to pay that.
People certainly do download and install Ubuntu. They even pay RedHat for support contracts. So people are obviously willing to remove Windows from their purchased machine and replace it with an alternate OS. If BeOS is better than Ubuntu, then wouldn't it be worth money, since we've already established that end-users seek these products out?
I sometimes wonder if anyone on Slashdot was awake in Econ 101.
Personal attacks aren't appreciated. I certainly do understand economics, which is why I understand that BeOS could have found some way to collect the delta in value between their product and the default one. The idea that Microsoft "killed" BeOS is simply false. They (probably illegally) made life more difficult, but the fact that RedHat as well as a large collection of embedded OS vendors still exist while BeOS is history either says they fubbed the business side of things or the technology didn't add enough value to customers.
A lot more people have downloaded Ubuntu than have bought a car without an engine. If BeOS was that much better than the alternatives, wouldn't some of those people have bought BeOS?
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I was referring to the rules of physics and chemistry, not the ten commandments.
As a Christian, the way I see it, why can't evolution be the process that God has used (and is still using) to create the universe?
Although that is, in fact, my opinion, I think religious scholars balk at this concept because it pigeonholes God into a smaller player in the universe. If God has to play by His own rules (and I'm not sure we have any documented proof that He has violated them), then it comes down to the opposite of what Einstein said about quantum mechanics: God ONLY plays dice with the universe. If the only effect God can have is to change the rolls of the dice, it limits God in a way that many highly religious folks don't believe He should be limited.
The fact that we can trace most species back through DNA and how it's expressed physiologically in the fossil record means that God doesn't appear to be Creating much new life these days-- just letting the process run its course. And if you include humans in that tree and assert that there were billions of years of pre-human life that later formed humans, it again diminishes God's direct role as our immediate creator, and relegates Him to an indirect force that set things in motion a long time ago.
Anyway, I think that's the objection.
Ironically, DivX was at least as forgiving as any of the digital movie download DRM systems everyone is touting as the obvious technology that Blu-ray will lose to.
Blu-ray media was already outselling HD DVD by more than 2 to 1 in the US and much greater margins overseas by the time Warner cut HD DVD. The only two major studios to back HD DVD had to be bribed, as well. I don't see this as quite the precipitating event that the article summary seems to imply... consumers appeared to have already chosen Blu-ray by the time of Warner's action. If Warner hadn't made their decision now, it just would have been a slightly slower death, but not by a lot.
I remember when I was younger, we were down to 10 years of oil underground.
It all comes down to yours sources. 20 years ago, they were still finding more oil each year than was being consumed, so the "10 years left" folks weren't the responsible people. The opposite is true now. 20 years ago it wasn't economically feasible to pump the sludge out of Canada's shale, but now it is. It wasn't economically feasible to put a platform in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico and drill a mile down, but now it is. But all those sources are limited, as well. We have a much more accurate picture of how big the problem is now than we did 20 years ago.
At this data rate, this appears to be not so much competing with the keyboard/mouse/printer USB connector than it does the DVI video connector. Now all we need is some of Tesla's magic to transmit the electricity wirelessly and we're home free.
The original report said miles, not hours. The article made a mistake copying the text, apparently.
The SEI and various other organizations focused on process have a lot of suggestions. There are some simple ones, such as "function points" * "complexity" as a measure of productivity. Or defects per function point as a measure of quality. Or some from the extreme programming world of user stories completed.
But nothing is really truly accurate, only guides humans. If it were, managers could be robots.
If these engineers had wanted to work for Microsoft, they probably would have gone and gotten a job with Microsoft. It's not like Microsoft hasn't been hiring aggressively for a decade. My guess is the best and brightest from Yahoo would quickly go work for Google, Apple, or someone else if Yahoo is acquired, and Microsoft will be left with the folks who were unable to escape. Acquiring a culturally incompatible company for the engineers doesn't make sense.
It seems a lot more likely to me that Microsoft made this offer in order to disrupt the industry for awhile as Yahoo spins in panic mode and Google spends a lot of time contingency planning. I have little belief that Microsoft will actually go through with this acquisition.
Again, if Europe is so powerful, why does the USA need to have bases in Germany?
Well, in that particular case it's a great staging area for middle east operations, and a nice halfway point to evacuate casualties to. I think our military presence in Germany have probably saved a lot of American lives.
The real question is why we need so many ground troops there. And I don't think there's a good answer for that.
After all there's nothing more benign a powerplant that outputs high-level "spent" nuclear waste that we have nowhere in the world to store, and is going to remain "hot" for at least another hundred thousand years
That's only true of current reactor designs because anti-nuclear folks dried up the research three decades ago. If the "waste" is that "hot", then we haven't extracted all that much of the energy! There are fast neutron reactor designs that are hundreds of times more efficient and produce less waste that isn't that hot and only radioactive for a century. While certainly no picnic, that stuff is probably a lot easier to deal with than what coal produces.
While you're mostly correct about item #2 (I think you're a little optimistic about file sizes), the parent poster was correct about item #1. The default encoding on Blu-ray is h.264/AAC and a well-encoded movie can take up a substantial portion of the disc. You can see tons of comparisons of Blu-ray vs. Apple's iTMS where the iTMS looks slightly better than upconverted DVD and substantially worse than Blu-ray, as an example.
No, I'd say a fundamental premise of the submitter is wrong:
I know it's not true that Linux is worth less than Windows. It's far more valuable to the end user in terms of getting things done.
Actually, without MS Office and their ilk for the corporate world and without as wide a selection of games for the home world, linux is actually not as valuable as Windows to most of the market.
And McCain/Feingold by itself puts John McCain into the 'menace to the Republic' catagory. Either the man is too illiterate to understand the plain language of the 1st Amendment or too wicked to care.
Transferring money is not speech.
I can't see them satisfied with the market share of 20% in next-gen consoles
The Wii is doing great, but the PS3 has been picking up quite a bit of steam. The XBox360 is also doing great in the US, but not so much elsewhere. Sony got broadsided early on, but has been surprisingly competitive as of late.
I think the interesting thing is that the Wii is selling to a lot of people who would probably never, no matter how Sony would have priced, packaged or marketed it, bought a PS3. Thus, the Wii is increasing the size of the total market, which isn't all bad for Sony. Also, the Wii is cheap enough that for those would WOULD buy one of the other consoles, it's not necessarily an either/or decision-- many can buy a Wii AND a PS3.
You're misinformed, the GP is correct.
I don't think so. I think you haven't kept up with the latest information over the last year or so.
Blu-tay has a larger capacity, but the 1st several releases suffered from bad transfers and use of old MP2 compression.
Yes, but that was years ago.
Since Blu-ray seems to be prevailing I hope that this is old news and no longer the case.
It is indeed no longer the case, and hasn't been for some time. The Blu-ray discs are now generally regarded as higher quality than HD DVD.
HD DVD typically had a better picture, better contrast, better compression, better sound quality, and a cheaper method of production.
Actually, the truth is pretty much the opposite of this statement. Because Blu-ray had 50% more bandwidth, it could be compressed less, and since it supported exactly the same video codecs as HD DVD that's all that really matters. Although some of the audio codecs are optional on Blu-ray that are mandatory on HD DVD, when present Blu-ray requires greater bandwidth for those, too, leading to better fidelity.
Yes, HD DVD were cheaper to produce, but the discs cost the same to the consumer. (And much less $ per megabyte, which matters for the geeks out there who will use it in their computers.)
Does that mean Sony now rules what will probably become the next main data format?
Not really. Sony isn't even the majority patent holder in Blu-ray, they're just the most visible proponent of the format and have sold a few million of the players.
Incidentally, the same thing is true for anti-terrorism. As soon as we add racial profiling against arabs to our airport screening process, they'll start recruiting and sending radical Indonesians against us. As soon as we start checking shoes, they'll start hiding things in hats. The only way to really protect us is to have a truly random screening process as the last resort, and really stop them by tracking money and travel patterns ahead of time.
Even with one giant file it's my understanding that it would be possible for them to utilize the Time Machine API such that single records could be restored out of that file and searches performed from the past. That's part of the power of Time Machine-- that it's much more than a simple file-by-file or volume-by-volume snapshotting solution.
You don't fly internationally much, huh?
Nope. Almost all my business travel is domestic.
or maybe you spend more on your flight
Actually slightly less. And that's not considering the hours of useless time I've spent waiting for flights to or from Newark, sitting on the Newark tarmac, circling above Newark, or trying to figure out how to get to Newark when you get flown to another NY airport instead. (How can an airline *coughUSAirwayscough* consider their job done when they switch you to a flight going to the wrong city in the wrong state... LGA is 45 minutes from Newark!)
When looking at companies, the products are important but only as indicators as to the people behind them. When Amazon was losing money hand over fist, its shares were still sky-high because people believed that Jeff Bezos and his team were a good bet. I can't imagine how anyone could feel that, after everything, SCO could possibly have assembled a $100M team. I don't know how to say this without offending the dozens of people left at SCO, but you'd have to have some form of brain damage, or be really, really desperate for gainful employment to still work there.
Aside from airports* and some hotels, wireless is free everywhere that has it. (And what are you going to do, use another airport?)
Actually, yes. It's one of several reasons that, living in mid-NJ, I drive down to Philadelphia instead of up to Newark for my flights (the other being substantially fewer delays, of course). Philadelphia has free wireless (as does Pittsburgh), but Newark charges $8... someone would have to be really desperate to pay that.
No, because people don't buy OS's.
People certainly do download and install Ubuntu. They even pay RedHat for support contracts. So people are obviously willing to remove Windows from their purchased machine and replace it with an alternate OS. If BeOS is better than Ubuntu, then wouldn't it be worth money, since we've already established that end-users seek these products out?
I sometimes wonder if anyone on Slashdot was awake in Econ 101.
Personal attacks aren't appreciated. I certainly do understand economics, which is why I understand that BeOS could have found some way to collect the delta in value between their product and the default one. The idea that Microsoft "killed" BeOS is simply false. They (probably illegally) made life more difficult, but the fact that RedHat as well as a large collection of embedded OS vendors still exist while BeOS is history either says they fubbed the business side of things or the technology didn't add enough value to customers.
It sure was fun to play with, though.
A lot more people have downloaded Ubuntu than have bought a car without an engine. If BeOS was that much better than the alternatives, wouldn't some of those people have bought BeOS?