I don't know... Get Your Snack On is good stuff, but I'm still partial to Clint Mansell's Pi theme for best d'n'b track ever. Or at least best recreation of the Amen break ever.
(I do love Amon Tobin, don't get me wrong. Supermodified is a damn fine record.)
I bet it won't, because if it does cover the iPod, the prior art is so obvious that MS *knows* the patent will break. Plus, it's not like Apple would back down from that particular legal fight. MS knows they can't retro-patent the iPod at this point; they aren't dumb enough to try.
Congratulations, you're an idiot who misses the point. Broadcast NTSC is crap quality. Further, if the *bandwidth* is 5 MHz (it isn't, actually, but close enough), how fast do you have to sample? Answer? 2*BW. Nyquist. 60 GB/hr. Still way too much. I win. Blanking data is actually 8%, not 18% (21 lines of VBI, 262.5 lines per field, 8%), meaning that it's actually going to be closer to 66 GB/hr, but either way, way too much.
Next, NTSC only broadcasts 4:2:0 (this is not, technically true, due to analog vs. digital differences, but it is close enough for now - suffice to say, color resolution in NTSC is roughly half that of luminance resolution) but people worried about quality know that *capturing* at 4:2:0 will produces all sorts of degradations; capturing at 4:2:2 is really necessary to sample NTSC broadcast analog video without loss of quality.
CCIR is a studio format, used before broadcast, and is much higher quality than bNTSC. If you want to talk about the errors compression induces, then obviously you're going to capture at the highest possible quality, right? And the highest possible quality is *not* broadcast NTSC, especially as non-broadcast sources like DirectTV become more and more prevalent.
Re:It's not obsolete, it's just politics
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 1
And I say again, I used to work at Kennedy (you know... where they launch the shuttle from?), so I knew pretty goddamn well when a launch was going up, because you can't prepare the Shuttle without everyone on base knowing. Further, I worked payload management. Believe me when I say that we knew which packages were what, because we had to. Military utilization of the shuttle in the last decade has been next to zero; a single military package on a flight by no means makes the flight military, and is in and of itself fairly rare these days, since ISS takes the entire bay and non-ISS flights have been rare since the late 90s.
A random military clearance doesn't mean that you know what goes on shuttle - I know enough about the military to know that if you didn't need to know about it, you wouldn't. Working payloads for Kennedy, I *needed* to know what was going on my flights. And most of the time, it was purely civilian. The rest of the time, there was a small satellite or some form of earth-observation package, sitting next to the rest of the payload.
To sum up: there are no secret military flights. That's absurd.
To sum up: Most all military launches are done on expendables. Cheaper, and the military *can* control access to those a lot more closely, as a Delta launch takes a lot fewer people than a shuttle launch to get right.
To sum up: I agree, there were minor human-operated military packages on shuttle on occasion, but nothing that comes even close to making a flight "military".
Re:It's not obsolete, it's just politics
on
Hope for Hubble
·
· Score: 1
All shuttle flights *are* civilian. Have been since the early 90s. Historically, most of them *were* civilian. 19 have been military flights. There have been over 100 shuttle flights.
Get over it, the shuttle is now a civilian program. It was not envisioned as one, but after Challenger the Air Force backed away from shuttle faster than Republicans backed away from Trent Lott.
And yet, the cost of developing a brand new robotic servicing system *from scratch* and launching it would be somehow less than making a new mirror to an existing design spec? You're fucking dreaming.
The costs are probably about equal, between a human servicing mission and a replacement Hubble. If you start talking robotic repair, give up; replacing Hubble with a replica will be cheaper. The only reason to do robotic repair on Hubble is to develop the technology for the future; if you consider it as an amortization against all future robotic servicing missions, it makes sense. Otherwise, the robotic idea is just plain dumb. Human servicing is moderately cost-effective; however, Hubble as-is will continue operation for X years; most likely we would get more science out of not servicing Hubble 1 and launching Hubble 2 than we would out of either servicing option.
Well, I spent some time working at NASA Kennedy Space Center working on the payload management team back in 2002, so I have, in fact, seen shuttle mission provisioning costs.
You can't even *launch* a shuttle for 300 million. Much less service the Hubble. I'd guess on the order of 500-800 million for a human servicing mission, and probably 1-1.5 billion for a robotic.
Yes, based on the current Hubble spare parts inventory and expendable launch costs, we probably could launch a Hubble-duplicate for less than the robotic mission would cost.
God yes, let's have FULL BITRATE VIDEO SITTING ON OUR DAMN HARD DRIVES. Speaking for myself, I don't feel like investing in an 80GB HDD for every hour of video I want to record (CCIR 601 digital video is roughly 90 GB per hour, using a 4:2:2 sampling scheme without any other compression - this is what most studios use).
MPEG-2 is good enough for DVD, and can be better than DVD if you run it at very low compression ratios. Good enough for DVD? Good enough for me.
Yeah, yeah. Chicago has had one-person train operation since 1964. Typical Canadians, trying to take credit for something we've been doing more than twice as long.;)
I dunno about the rest of you, but I want a conductor on the train. Things like having a human look outside the train to make sure nobody is about to get on when the doors close, having someone on the train in case of an emergancy, having someone on the train that is a detterent to crime (just imagine, would a would-be rapist be more or less likely to rape a woman if a conductor was walking up and down the cars).
Anti-pinch doors. A telephone connected to a central switching station. Other passengers should take an interest in their fellows well-being (and no, I don't imagine most rapists are dissuaded by the vague possibility of a conductor, considering how infrequently conductors ever pass through when I've been in NYC). Your objections are, honestly, minor.
Chicago has been single-operator (the system NYC is moving to) on all lines since '97 (technically, 2000, as they ran conductor-assisted in the Red/Blue subways until then). The first line to go OPTO (one-person train operation) was the Yellow Line, back in 1964; it's been OPTO ever since. NYC has been using OPTO since '96 on shuttle lines. This isn't a new thing, just the beginning of a changeover of the rest of the system.
They're not suggesting ATO (automated transit operation, or computer controlled) although that'll probably happen soon enough. OPTO maintains an operator to drive the thing.
Plus, you would have to give the "keyboard exchanger job" full access to all of the hospital. These people would also likely be paid near nothing, so the incentive to steal or even pry goes up.
No offense, but have you ever heard the word "janitor" before?
If they can keep the floors clean without major security risks, they can swap keyboards the same way. Whether it is a good idea, I cannot say, but claiming it can't be done because it's insecure is just dumb.
Actually, no. The shuttle has a 2% failure rate. Compare that to the original Soyuz 7K-OK (1 manned flight out of 8 manned failed resulting in death, unmanned ratio similar), or the redesigned 7KT-OK (2 flights, 1 failure resulting in loss of crew). I think of mission failure rates as more important than absolute crew loss numbers, because a failure on a space mission nearly invariably kills everyone; loss numbers are simply a function of how many people are on a given mission. So, no, the Shuttle is by no means the most lethal space vehicle ever, nor is it the most lethal vehicle ever to be produced in a series.
That and the fact that they make the best greasy hamburgers in the world. Triple, bleu cheese (sometimes provolone when bleu was just too much to think about), grilled onions, pickles, ketchup, mustard, and regular fries, please!
Of course, I also over-tip for good service in restaurants, buy local art, and more. Yeah, it's hard for those new guys to quit their day jobs and support themselves entirely on music, but if it was EASY... everyone would be doing it.
Most of us don't expect to support ourselves on our music. I put mine out becase I like making music; if I wanted to make a profit, I'd spend that time doing consulting work or something like that. You'd be surprised how many bands are making music sheerly for the fun of it.
Shit, advertise for the owner! There are plenty of us out here who would kill for a place like that. (Ain't enough room in Chicago apartments for me to put a table in at home.)
Pat Lawlor - without question the single best pinball table designer in history. Designed the Addams Family, the finest pinball table in history, amongst other classics.
Sid Meier - Civilization. 'nuff said.
Will Wright - Maxis. Sim City. The Sims. Some of the most popular video games, ever.
Chris Sawyer - Transport Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon. I'll forgive you if you didn't know him, he isn't quite on the same plane. I would personally have gone with Chris Roberts (Wing Commander) or Peter Molyneux (Black and White, Populous) or Richard Garriott (Ultima).
Except the parent poster said "IBM's value has mainly been in hardware and support", which is flatly not true. The value has been in the basic research they conduct and place into their products; hence, they are an IP company.
Dell is a hardware company.
Accenture is a services company.
IBM is, believe it or not, an IP company. In the good way.
And yet, they're one of (possibly the) largest holders of patents in the US.
You're fooling yourself if you think IBM isn't IP-oriented; their hardware has often been valuable due to their basic *patented* research improvements.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know... Get Your Snack On is good stuff, but I'm still partial to Clint Mansell's Pi theme for best d'n'b track ever. Or at least best recreation of the Amen break ever.
(I do love Amon Tobin, don't get me wrong. Supermodified is a damn fine record.)
It wasn't a merger. It was a buyout.
I don't care what you think, I work with them, and trust me - the people running DCX speak German.
I bet it won't, because if it does cover the iPod, the prior art is so obvious that MS *knows* the patent will break. Plus, it's not like Apple would back down from that particular legal fight. MS knows they can't retro-patent the iPod at this point; they aren't dumb enough to try.
Congratulations, you're an idiot who misses the point. Broadcast NTSC is crap quality. Further, if the *bandwidth* is 5 MHz (it isn't, actually, but close enough), how fast do you have to sample? Answer? 2*BW. Nyquist. 60 GB/hr. Still way too much. I win. Blanking data is actually 8%, not 18% (21 lines of VBI, 262.5 lines per field, 8%), meaning that it's actually going to be closer to 66 GB/hr, but either way, way too much.
Next, NTSC only broadcasts 4:2:0 (this is not, technically true, due to analog vs. digital differences, but it is close enough for now - suffice to say, color resolution in NTSC is roughly half that of luminance resolution) but people worried about quality know that *capturing* at 4:2:0 will produces all sorts of degradations; capturing at 4:2:2 is really necessary to sample NTSC broadcast analog video without loss of quality.
CCIR is a studio format, used before broadcast, and is much higher quality than bNTSC. If you want to talk about the errors compression induces, then obviously you're going to capture at the highest possible quality, right? And the highest possible quality is *not* broadcast NTSC, especially as non-broadcast sources like DirectTV become more and more prevalent.
And I say again, I used to work at Kennedy (you know... where they launch the shuttle from?), so I knew pretty goddamn well when a launch was going up, because you can't prepare the Shuttle without everyone on base knowing. Further, I worked payload management. Believe me when I say that we knew which packages were what, because we had to. Military utilization of the shuttle in the last decade has been next to zero; a single military package on a flight by no means makes the flight military, and is in and of itself fairly rare these days, since ISS takes the entire bay and non-ISS flights have been rare since the late 90s.
A random military clearance doesn't mean that you know what goes on shuttle - I know enough about the military to know that if you didn't need to know about it, you wouldn't. Working payloads for Kennedy, I *needed* to know what was going on my flights. And most of the time, it was purely civilian. The rest of the time, there was a small satellite or some form of earth-observation package, sitting next to the rest of the payload.
To sum up: there are no secret military flights. That's absurd.
To sum up: Most all military launches are done on expendables. Cheaper, and the military *can* control access to those a lot more closely, as a Delta launch takes a lot fewer people than a shuttle launch to get right.
To sum up: I agree, there were minor human-operated military packages on shuttle on occasion, but nothing that comes even close to making a flight "military".
All shuttle flights *are* civilian. Have been since the early 90s. Historically, most of them *were* civilian. 19 have been military flights. There have been over 100 shuttle flights.
Get over it, the shuttle is now a civilian program. It was not envisioned as one, but after Challenger the Air Force backed away from shuttle faster than Republicans backed away from Trent Lott.
And yet, the cost of developing a brand new robotic servicing system *from scratch* and launching it would be somehow less than making a new mirror to an existing design spec? You're fucking dreaming.
The costs are probably about equal, between a human servicing mission and a replacement Hubble. If you start talking robotic repair, give up; replacing Hubble with a replica will be cheaper. The only reason to do robotic repair on Hubble is to develop the technology for the future; if you consider it as an amortization against all future robotic servicing missions, it makes sense. Otherwise, the robotic idea is just plain dumb. Human servicing is moderately cost-effective; however, Hubble as-is will continue operation for X years; most likely we would get more science out of not servicing Hubble 1 and launching Hubble 2 than we would out of either servicing option.
Well, I spent some time working at NASA Kennedy Space Center working on the payload management team back in 2002, so I have, in fact, seen shuttle mission provisioning costs.
(if needed due to install lockdowns root exploit and) Install it, of course!
USPTO, not USPO. A USPO is a post office.
You can't even *launch* a shuttle for 300 million. Much less service the Hubble. I'd guess on the order of 500-800 million for a human servicing mission, and probably 1-1.5 billion for a robotic.
Yes, based on the current Hubble spare parts inventory and expendable launch costs, we probably could launch a Hubble-duplicate for less than the robotic mission would cost.
God yes, let's have FULL BITRATE VIDEO SITTING ON OUR DAMN HARD DRIVES. Speaking for myself, I don't feel like investing in an 80GB HDD for every hour of video I want to record (CCIR 601 digital video is roughly 90 GB per hour, using a 4:2:2 sampling scheme without any other compression - this is what most studios use).
MPEG-2 is good enough for DVD, and can be better than DVD if you run it at very low compression ratios. Good enough for DVD? Good enough for me.
Yeah, yeah. Chicago has had one-person train operation since 1964. Typical Canadians, trying to take credit for something we've been doing more than twice as long. ;)
I dunno about the rest of you, but I want a conductor on the train. Things like having a human look outside the train to make sure nobody is about to get on when the doors close, having someone on the train in case of an emergancy, having someone on the train that is a detterent to crime (just imagine, would a would-be rapist be more or less likely to rape a woman if a conductor was walking up and down the cars).
Anti-pinch doors. A telephone connected to a central switching station. Other passengers should take an interest in their fellows well-being (and no, I don't imagine most rapists are dissuaded by the vague possibility of a conductor, considering how infrequently conductors ever pass through when I've been in NYC). Your objections are, honestly, minor.
Chicago has been single-operator (the system NYC is moving to) on all lines since '97 (technically, 2000, as they ran conductor-assisted in the Red/Blue subways until then). The first line to go OPTO (one-person train operation) was the Yellow Line, back in 1964; it's been OPTO ever since. NYC has been using OPTO since '96 on shuttle lines. This isn't a new thing, just the beginning of a changeover of the rest of the system.
They're not suggesting ATO (automated transit operation, or computer controlled) although that'll probably happen soon enough. OPTO maintains an operator to drive the thing.
Plus, you would have to give the "keyboard exchanger job" full access to all of the hospital. These people would also likely be paid near nothing, so the incentive to steal or even pry goes up.
No offense, but have you ever heard the word "janitor" before?
If they can keep the floors clean without major security risks, they can swap keyboards the same way. Whether it is a good idea, I cannot say, but claiming it can't be done because it's insecure is just dumb.
Actually, no. The shuttle has a 2% failure rate. Compare that to the original Soyuz 7K-OK (1 manned flight out of 8 manned failed resulting in death, unmanned ratio similar), or the redesigned 7KT-OK (2 flights, 1 failure resulting in loss of crew). I think of mission failure rates as more important than absolute crew loss numbers, because a failure on a space mission nearly invariably kills everyone; loss numbers are simply a function of how many people are on a given mission. So, no, the Shuttle is by no means the most lethal space vehicle ever, nor is it the most lethal vehicle ever to be produced in a series.
That and the fact that they make the best greasy hamburgers in the world. Triple, bleu cheese (sometimes provolone when bleu was just too much to think about), grilled onions, pickles, ketchup, mustard, and regular fries, please!
I *miss* Blimpy.
They get half of what they got, proportionally, back in the days of Apollo
Not even close to half, actually. NASA, at the peak of Apollo, got around 4.5% of the federal budget. Now, it gets around 0.75%.
RGBI was CGA only. For EGA, they threw away intensity and allowed 2 lines per color (R1R2G1G2B1B2). 2^6 = 64. But it was still digital RGB.
Of course, I also over-tip for good service in restaurants, buy local art, and more. Yeah, it's hard for those new guys to quit their day jobs and support themselves entirely on music, but if it was EASY... everyone would be doing it.
Most of us don't expect to support ourselves on our music. I put mine out becase I like making music; if I wanted to make a profit, I'd spend that time doing consulting work or something like that. You'd be surprised how many bands are making music sheerly for the fun of it.
Shit, advertise for the owner! There are plenty of us out here who would kill for a place like that. (Ain't enough room in Chicago apartments for me to put a table in at home.)
Pat Lawlor - without question the single best pinball table designer in history. Designed the Addams Family, the finest pinball table in history, amongst other classics.
Sid Meier - Civilization. 'nuff said.
Will Wright - Maxis. Sim City. The Sims. Some of the most popular video games, ever.
Chris Sawyer - Transport Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon. I'll forgive you if you didn't know him, he isn't quite on the same plane. I would personally have gone with Chris Roberts (Wing Commander) or Peter Molyneux (Black and White, Populous) or Richard Garriott (Ultima).
Sure.
Except the parent poster said "IBM's value has mainly been in hardware and support", which is flatly not true. The value has been in the basic research they conduct and place into their products; hence, they are an IP company.
Dell is a hardware company.
Accenture is a services company.
IBM is, believe it or not, an IP company. In the good way.
TANSTAAFLEUTBL.
TANSTAAFL - Except Under The BSD License.
And yet, they're one of (possibly the) largest holders of patents in the US.
You're fooling yourself if you think IBM isn't IP-oriented; their hardware has often been valuable due to their basic *patented* research improvements.