Y'know, there's always someone harping all day long about how MP3 takes a steaming liquid crap all over your sound, and I cannot agree with them. I have a mid-range yet respectable sound system, worth maybe $4000 new. I listen to a LOT of music with an unforgiving ear for detail, and what I often joke as "digital audio memory". Anytime I listen to something, I'm comparing it to a very precise memory in my head. If the pitch is off by a hundredth, there's subtle (dynamic) compression, or phasing issues, I know immediately.
Back when we were peddling 112 and 128kbps MP3s (y'know, 15 years ago), it was pretty obvious that our encoders sucked. You could hear the nasty phasing all over the high end. Today, with most dedicated rippers using "LAME -V0" or 256/320kbps CBR, I'll say that it is impossible to tell the difference on 99.9% of all music out there. Yes, you theoretically lose some high-frequency information above 19khz, but hardly any adults can hear those frequencies anyway, as our range of hearing degrades with age. At 32, I have supposedly great hearing, yet I can barely hear 18khz, and 19khz I can't really hear but just "feel" as pressure on my ears canal. The parts MP3 encoders discard, most people can't hear anyway, and even if we could, it's so high in the audio spectrum that it's just headache-inducing whine. In practice, many mastering engineers will filter that out anyway, because those frequencies are nothing but trouble, they can mess with playback on cheap (read: common) stereos, and are basically a waste of signal which could be better allocated to the mids.
The compression artifacts themselves, they are nothing like they were 15 years ago. If you really want to see how much sound is lost from compression, take an uncompressed WAV, convert it to MP3, then back to WAV. Pull a spectrogram for both the original and processed WAVs, and compare these in a graphics editor. If you're lazy, you can grab the screenshots from here instead. If you're using photoshop, change the blending mode to "Difference" on one of them. Any coloured pixels are the differences, while black means both images are identical.
So, that's digital compression. The other big thing audiophiles bitch about is dynamic compression, and that is an all-too real problem. This is the "brick wall" sound people often cite as the cancer that's killing music. It is the process by which quiet sounds are made disproportionately loud, resulting in the average signal level being louder across the entire album. Most common audio is stored as 16-bit data, this means there are 65536 different intensities available, from silence to maximum, across what is often quoted as 96dbfs of range. Most modern pop music crunches all the sound into the uppermost 6db, so you're kind-of getting 1/16th of the fidelity (yes my math is flawed). This makes crappy speakers and earbuds sound "better" (still shit), and good speakers sound equally shit. It's the sonic equivalent of turning the brightness and contrast on your TV all the way up, now everyone has bright red skin and look like cartoon characters. If you want a painful example of this distortion, cue up Metallica's Death Magnetic, the official CD or iTunes version. Then go find the Guitar Hero version of the same album on TPB and compare. The pressed version is brickwalled, the Guitar Hero version was mixed much more reasonably, in-line with past Metallica releases. Then if you want to hear the opposite, something with very wide dynamic range, try ZZ Top's Eliminator, or Van Halen's 1984. Björk's albums also tend to have good characteristics. You're looking for quiet sounds amid the louder ones - they might be the little squeaks of guitar strings or drum skins, or the long fade of a cymbal.
Back to our buddy boy Ian Shepherd... one of his recommendations for good dynamic range is Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack. This is pretty much an admission that the man is completely full of shit. Don't get
It could have been a geographical thing too, but by 1996 we were starting to get DSL and cable internet in my area. We had municipal projects to get people on the net, and they were hiring students all over the place to build the web site and write content. By 1998, I was in the hosting and design business, convincing local businesses and malls to let me build their web site. I was just a college kid, so for a well established company like Britannica, I would have expected them to be right on top of this stuff.
Not at all. That was just the "mystery customer" call to confirm the shenanigans, after several users complained about it to Avast.
After RTFA (*gasp*), my interpretation is that iYogi is pretty much attempting customer fraud, by running bogus diagnostics and selling expensive solutions the customer does not need - and dare I say, probably won't fix anything besides the fake alerts. Over here in Canada/U.S., that's a serious offense that can land you in jail. I don't know how India's criminal code relates, but even from a purely business perspective, iYogi is still defrauding its client, Avast, as they are spending their client's time and money to convince users to fall for a fake diagnostic scam. That's a very good reason to terminate the contract, and then sue the company.
Now I guess the question becomes: how hard is it to sue an Indian company into the ground ?
When you are a politician, you are a public figure. Public figures are, by law, fair targets for public criticism.
Vic Toews is pissing off the entire country, with the exception of a handful of extreme right-wingers and corporatists. He is pushing a bill that is widely perceived as overreaching and unnecessary. He is spreading false truths and flawed analogies to justify his actions, dismissing public opinion, and basically labeling us all as potential criminals who "side with pedophiles".
We've tried to talk sense into him, he isn't listening, he's even saying we're too stupid to understand the issue, so the only logical action is to escalate. If that means DDoS and viral videos, he should be thankful to be living in the age of the internet. Fifty years ago, we'd have hired a fall guy to assassinate him.
You're ignoring the fact that they will resell the item as a refurb, recouping a significant chunk of the purchase price. I still see private individuals selling the original iPad for $400 - good old Apple resale value hilarity. I doubt YBUY is worried about this stuff. Any cash they earn by renting them out is gravy on top of the eventual resale, and it's quite likely they've negotiated a volume discount with Apple.
Brick and mortar still wins at "pay now, get it now". There's nothing that annoys me more in this world than women, but my second greatest annoyance is slow/costly shipping for online purchases. If I can drive/bus/taxi to a store 10 minutes away, get my gadget, and get home an hour later vs ordering online, paying $75 in shipping, waiting four days and having to stay home all day because no big name couriers work after 5 pm... yeah, I'm going to the store, saving my money and my time. Even if the retail price is a few points higher than online, it's still a win. If I have any problem with the item, and need repair/replacement, then brick and mortar wins BIG!
"There is no reason for a chargeback to ever be filed" and "YOU AGREE THAT THIS SITE MAY RECOVER THE AMOUNT OF THE CHARGEBACK IN ADDITION TO $ BY ANY MEANS DEMED NECESSARY" (sic)
Pretty sure that statement's in breach of their merchant agreement. At least it would be for me. Sounds like they found their lawyer at the bottom of the foreign owner's family.
Same as my wife. For a lot of people, a tablet can be the ideal device. If they spend most of their time in a web browser anyway, and don't do a whole lot of typing, the tablet is a shoe-in. A laptop is too much for them.
For me, that's exactly how it played out. I'm a programmer, I need a beast of a machine with a good keyboard and tons of display real estate. The only time I ever use the tablet is for playing Angry Birds on the crapper.
For my wife though, the tablet is her new PC. She uses it almost exclusively, because it does 99% of what she needs from a computer: surf the web, play dinky little games, read email, stream youtube. The other 1% is when she needs to edit a real word doc or print something for work.
Thing is, there are a lot more non-tech users like my wife, for whom a tablet is enough "computer" for their needs. This YBUY thing could take off, but then again, if you want to try an iPad, you can go to any Apple store and play with the demo units. The YBUY service might be more for people who want an iPad, but only for a week or two (e.g. trip or business demo). In my case, I could rent one to test an iPad app I'm developing, because I don't do enough of that kind of work to justify spending $600 on one.
Well now, I posit that if Yahoo were to inherit Facebook, they would fold in a millisecond. Top brass would cash out, the remaining suckers would continue Yahooing everything into mediocrity, and Fuckerberg would just start all over again.
Free will is an illusion in this world. Society pushes you in a certain direction whether you like it or not. And sure as shit, when they stumble, society is right there to kick them while they're down.
I don't claim to understand the entire psychology of crime, but I do know that people only resort to it because it's the most appealing option available to them. Do I really believe I belong in my current job, chopping up web sites and mobile apps for business clients ? No, I feel it's a huge waste of my time and abilities, but right now it's the best way for me to pay the rent and feed myself, while hopefully saving up enough to launch the business I actually want to be in.
I consider myself lucky, because I was a "gifted" child and was able to assimilate a very broad spectrum of knowledge-based skills. If I.T. didn't work out, I could easily have become a mechanical engineer, chemist, architect or any number of brainy careers. For people who aren't so blessed between the ears, whose job options are much more constrained, I can very easily see why they would choose a life of crime. If I were in their shoes, I'd do the same. Why make $11 an hour at Wal-Mart working for assholes when you can make $1000 a week, tax-free, slinging party favours at the club ? Or what about the taxi driver who sells a few cases of beer after hours to double his income ? I cannot easily fault these people, they have been backed into a corner and are doing whatever they can to make it in this greed-obsessed world. People are not born criminals, that's just a label.
That's not selection bias, that's educated wisdom.
Anyone in 1996 had to be quite the luddite, to not see where this computer "fad" was headed. I'll even say that if a Britannica rep saw Encarta, and did not immediately shit bricks, that person was infinitely dumber than their own gullible customers.
For myself, growing up, Britannica was the most vibrant example of informercial-style deceptive marketing. Corny actors, offers for a "free promotional booklet", a big dumb 1-800 number with repeated commands to "Call NOW!", and some bullshit gift for ordering in the next 15 minutes, because the one thing you really want when buying a shelf of useless books is even more useless books to litter your coffee table.
I really cannot think of any occasion where the two-paragraph overview from a printed encyclopedia ever helped me accomplish anything. If I needed to study something specific, I went to the library and borrowed a few books on the topic. I didn't need to spend $1500 on a bunch of superficial books edited by non-experts, just as I wouldn't spend a penny on Wikipedia today. Encyclopedias are what you read when you don't really care all that much about the subject.
Yes, but the problem I see is: they already had him behind bars. He was released, and he went back to being a parasitic sack of shit. This is a failure of the penal system to rehabilitate convicts, a failure of the legal system to legalize prostition, creating this black market where thugs thrive, and finally a failure of the economy for creating an environment where crime pays way better than any proper career this Dears twit could ever possibly sustain. Heck, $500 a night is more than I make as an I.T. contractor.
Destroying Facebook will not result in a "consumer revolt". The users will hop on the next big thing. They might go on G+, where they will incessantly upvote each others "Fuck Yahoo I miss Facebook" posts, without actually doing anything about it.
Social media is dangerous in that respect, because it encourages people to talk about doing right, in order to get recognition from their "friends", without actually following through. Everyone suddenly thinks they're an activist because they shared some viral pic.
User-space software translates whatever fancy document format into a flat bitstream, suitable for catting to the printer port. Bits is bits, the kernel does not need to bother itself with their contents.
If a device has the capability to print, it is a PRINTER.
15 years ago, we were up in arms with WinModems, because these did not work in Linux. Why ? Because instead of implementing a serial interface and their own hardware DAC, they were little more than sound cards with an RJ11 jack. This moved the burden of encoding the audio stream to the host CPU, and why not ? It resulted in much cheaper modems due to ditching an expensive and license-burdened encoder chip. Linux had to catch up, but instead of doing so, people bitched and moaned all day long.
Printers and winmodems do not require the Windows OS. They require device drivers that go beyond what we were doing 15 years ago, but that's where Linux is right now. That's all it supports, and with that misplaced anti-MS sentiment you just love to spread, that's where it will stay, because the last thing a guy like me wants to do is slave for dozens of hours over a device driver that will benefit an insatiable finger-pointer like you.
I get what you're saying, and I know the majority of home-use printers have little in the way of brains, just a glorified servo-controller with sensors. That said, if you already have a graphical representation of the document you're printing, it is a simple matter to transform this bitmap into striped data for a printer. Dare I say, before the advent of fancy-schmancy VESA graphics cards and their linear framebuffers, we had to do something similar for any EGA or VGA graphics, splitting our colours out into bitplanes and tiles, since that's how those dumb graphics chips worked.
We could have simple print drivers if there was a common framework to program against. Do you really think Canon, Epson and friends reinvent the wheel with every single device ?
A printer is a device whose job it is to deposit ink or toner on a piece of paper, according to instructions fed via a data transport, be it a cable, wireless network, or storage device. Postscript just happens to be the messy protocol Linux printing developers decided to settle with, presumably because, like most other fundamental tenets of open-source software, they couldn't be bothered to target the actual open-source software user's hardware. Same reason we have spotty support for mainstream sound cards, but thousands of obscure network adapters work just fine. Tunnel vision and snobbery.
In practice, over 15 years of using Linux on a daily basis, I've only encountered maybe 20 different network adapters across thousands of machines: Realtek NE2000 clones, Intel PRO 100/1000, Marvell Yukon, and back in the day DEC Tulip. Dare I say, it is more reasonable to support relatively expensive printers the users actually own, than a gazillion cheap NICs that have never been seen outside of Malaysia.
Well it's quite simple: they're focusing large amounts of energy at a person. Since the actual power source cannot dispense this much energy at once, it must be used to charge a capacitor bank - much like a camera flash.
That said, they could probably optimize it to shoot a narrower beam, but hey: this is the military. They can't do anything right, that would be unpatriotic.
Perhaps because the solution to homelessness is rarely "a job". Some people wind up homeless because they lack employment for too long, but those are a very small minority. Most of them have far more insidious issues such as psychological trauma, drug addiction or mental deficiency that simply makes them unable to function within the tight confines of "society".
I know what you're saying, and no, I don't use absolute positioning. Years of HTML and CSS experience have taught me to avoid such rabbit holes. My gripe is that the layout system itself feels extremely immature. Sure, you can design with weights, but proportional layouts simply do not work well on with grossly divergent aspect ratios. When going from legacy 320x480 smartphone to a 1024x768 tablet, scaling does not cut it, you need to reflow elements or even completely change the UI to better suit tablet users, and that's where I find the Android SDK drops the ball. Tablet support was hastily tacked on as an afterthought and it really shows. I usually have to create a largely separate code path for the tablet sizes, with their own layouts, so the result is essentially two different apps packed inside the same APK, with a handful of shared non-UI classes between them.
I'm not saying iOS did a fantastic job with their tablet support, but at least having explicit support for the iPad makes it easier to manage. I can build in as little or as much tablet support as I care to do (read: what my client is willing to pay). If I just have time for the phone version, it will still work and look fine on tablets. With the Android, the moment one of my users installs a phone-centric app on a tablet, the bug reports start streaming in.
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Y'know, there's always someone harping all day long about how MP3 takes a steaming liquid crap all over your sound, and I cannot agree with them. I have a mid-range yet respectable sound system, worth maybe $4000 new. I listen to a LOT of music with an unforgiving ear for detail, and what I often joke as "digital audio memory". Anytime I listen to something, I'm comparing it to a very precise memory in my head. If the pitch is off by a hundredth, there's subtle (dynamic) compression, or phasing issues, I know immediately.
Back when we were peddling 112 and 128kbps MP3s (y'know, 15 years ago), it was pretty obvious that our encoders sucked. You could hear the nasty phasing all over the high end. Today, with most dedicated rippers using "LAME -V0" or 256/320kbps CBR, I'll say that it is impossible to tell the difference on 99.9% of all music out there. Yes, you theoretically lose some high-frequency information above 19khz, but hardly any adults can hear those frequencies anyway, as our range of hearing degrades with age. At 32, I have supposedly great hearing, yet I can barely hear 18khz, and 19khz I can't really hear but just "feel" as pressure on my ears canal. The parts MP3 encoders discard, most people can't hear anyway, and even if we could, it's so high in the audio spectrum that it's just headache-inducing whine. In practice, many mastering engineers will filter that out anyway, because those frequencies are nothing but trouble, they can mess with playback on cheap (read: common) stereos, and are basically a waste of signal which could be better allocated to the mids.
The compression artifacts themselves, they are nothing like they were 15 years ago. If you really want to see how much sound is lost from compression, take an uncompressed WAV, convert it to MP3, then back to WAV. Pull a spectrogram for both the original and processed WAVs, and compare these in a graphics editor. If you're lazy, you can grab the screenshots from here instead. If you're using photoshop, change the blending mode to "Difference" on one of them. Any coloured pixels are the differences, while black means both images are identical.
So, that's digital compression. The other big thing audiophiles bitch about is dynamic compression, and that is an all-too real problem. This is the "brick wall" sound people often cite as the cancer that's killing music. It is the process by which quiet sounds are made disproportionately loud, resulting in the average signal level being louder across the entire album. Most common audio is stored as 16-bit data, this means there are 65536 different intensities available, from silence to maximum, across what is often quoted as 96dbfs of range. Most modern pop music crunches all the sound into the uppermost 6db, so you're kind-of getting 1/16th of the fidelity (yes my math is flawed). This makes crappy speakers and earbuds sound "better" (still shit), and good speakers sound equally shit. It's the sonic equivalent of turning the brightness and contrast on your TV all the way up, now everyone has bright red skin and look like cartoon characters. If you want a painful example of this distortion, cue up Metallica's Death Magnetic, the official CD or iTunes version. Then go find the Guitar Hero version of the same album on TPB and compare. The pressed version is brickwalled, the Guitar Hero version was mixed much more reasonably, in-line with past Metallica releases. Then if you want to hear the opposite, something with very wide dynamic range, try ZZ Top's Eliminator, or Van Halen's 1984. Björk's albums also tend to have good characteristics. You're looking for quiet sounds amid the louder ones - they might be the little squeaks of guitar strings or drum skins, or the long fade of a cymbal.
Back to our buddy boy Ian Shepherd... one of his recommendations for good dynamic range is Daft Punk's Tron Legacy soundtrack. This is pretty much an admission that the man is completely full of shit. Don't get
It could have been a geographical thing too, but by 1996 we were starting to get DSL and cable internet in my area. We had municipal projects to get people on the net, and they were hiring students all over the place to build the web site and write content. By 1998, I was in the hosting and design business, convincing local businesses and malls to let me build their web site. I was just a college kid, so for a well established company like Britannica, I would have expected them to be right on top of this stuff.
Not at all. That was just the "mystery customer" call to confirm the shenanigans, after several users complained about it to Avast.
After RTFA (*gasp*), my interpretation is that iYogi is pretty much attempting customer fraud, by running bogus diagnostics and selling expensive solutions the customer does not need - and dare I say, probably won't fix anything besides the fake alerts. Over here in Canada/U.S., that's a serious offense that can land you in jail. I don't know how India's criminal code relates, but even from a purely business perspective, iYogi is still defrauding its client, Avast, as they are spending their client's time and money to convince users to fall for a fake diagnostic scam. That's a very good reason to terminate the contract, and then sue the company.
Now I guess the question becomes: how hard is it to sue an Indian company into the ground ?
When you are a politician, you are a public figure. Public figures are, by law, fair targets for public criticism.
Vic Toews is pissing off the entire country, with the exception of a handful of extreme right-wingers and corporatists. He is pushing a bill that is widely perceived as overreaching and unnecessary. He is spreading false truths and flawed analogies to justify his actions, dismissing public opinion, and basically labeling us all as potential criminals who "side with pedophiles".
We've tried to talk sense into him, he isn't listening, he's even saying we're too stupid to understand the issue, so the only logical action is to escalate. If that means DDoS and viral videos, he should be thankful to be living in the age of the internet. Fifty years ago, we'd have hired a fall guy to assassinate him.
Tons of people buy iPads, change their minds, then resell them in the used market. That "hurts" Apple more than a rental.
Yes.
You're ignoring the fact that they will resell the item as a refurb, recouping a significant chunk of the purchase price. I still see private individuals selling the original iPad for $400 - good old Apple resale value hilarity. I doubt YBUY is worried about this stuff. Any cash they earn by renting them out is gravy on top of the eventual resale, and it's quite likely they've negotiated a volume discount with Apple.
Brick and mortar still wins at "pay now, get it now". There's nothing that annoys me more in this world than women, but my second greatest annoyance is slow/costly shipping for online purchases. If I can drive/bus/taxi to a store 10 minutes away, get my gadget, and get home an hour later vs ordering online, paying $75 in shipping, waiting four days and having to stay home all day because no big name couriers work after 5 pm... yeah, I'm going to the store, saving my money and my time. Even if the retail price is a few points higher than online, it's still a win. If I have any problem with the item, and need repair/replacement, then brick and mortar wins BIG!
"There is no reason for a chargeback to ever be filed" and "YOU AGREE THAT THIS SITE MAY RECOVER THE AMOUNT OF THE CHARGEBACK IN ADDITION TO $ BY ANY MEANS DEMED NECESSARY" (sic)
Pretty sure that statement's in breach of their merchant agreement. At least it would be for me. Sounds like they found their lawyer at the bottom of the foreign owner's family.
Same as my wife. For a lot of people, a tablet can be the ideal device. If they spend most of their time in a web browser anyway, and don't do a whole lot of typing, the tablet is a shoe-in. A laptop is too much for them.
For me, that's exactly how it played out. I'm a programmer, I need a beast of a machine with a good keyboard and tons of display real estate. The only time I ever use the tablet is for playing Angry Birds on the crapper.
For my wife though, the tablet is her new PC. She uses it almost exclusively, because it does 99% of what she needs from a computer: surf the web, play dinky little games, read email, stream youtube. The other 1% is when she needs to edit a real word doc or print something for work.
Thing is, there are a lot more non-tech users like my wife, for whom a tablet is enough "computer" for their needs. This YBUY thing could take off, but then again, if you want to try an iPad, you can go to any Apple store and play with the demo units. The YBUY service might be more for people who want an iPad, but only for a week or two (e.g. trip or business demo). In my case, I could rent one to test an iPad app I'm developing, because I don't do enough of that kind of work to justify spending $600 on one.
Well now, I posit that if Yahoo were to inherit Facebook, they would fold in a millisecond. Top brass would cash out, the remaining suckers would continue Yahooing everything into mediocrity, and Fuckerberg would just start all over again.
Free will is an illusion in this world. Society pushes you in a certain direction whether you like it or not. And sure as shit, when they stumble, society is right there to kick them while they're down.
I don't claim to understand the entire psychology of crime, but I do know that people only resort to it because it's the most appealing option available to them. Do I really believe I belong in my current job, chopping up web sites and mobile apps for business clients ? No, I feel it's a huge waste of my time and abilities, but right now it's the best way for me to pay the rent and feed myself, while hopefully saving up enough to launch the business I actually want to be in.
I consider myself lucky, because I was a "gifted" child and was able to assimilate a very broad spectrum of knowledge-based skills. If I.T. didn't work out, I could easily have become a mechanical engineer, chemist, architect or any number of brainy careers. For people who aren't so blessed between the ears, whose job options are much more constrained, I can very easily see why they would choose a life of crime. If I were in their shoes, I'd do the same. Why make $11 an hour at Wal-Mart working for assholes when you can make $1000 a week, tax-free, slinging party favours at the club ? Or what about the taxi driver who sells a few cases of beer after hours to double his income ? I cannot easily fault these people, they have been backed into a corner and are doing whatever they can to make it in this greed-obsessed world. People are not born criminals, that's just a label.
That's not selection bias, that's educated wisdom.
Anyone in 1996 had to be quite the luddite, to not see where this computer "fad" was headed. I'll even say that if a Britannica rep saw Encarta, and did not immediately shit bricks, that person was infinitely dumber than their own gullible customers.
For myself, growing up, Britannica was the most vibrant example of informercial-style deceptive marketing. Corny actors, offers for a "free promotional booklet", a big dumb 1-800 number with repeated commands to "Call NOW!", and some bullshit gift for ordering in the next 15 minutes, because the one thing you really want when buying a shelf of useless books is even more useless books to litter your coffee table.
I really cannot think of any occasion where the two-paragraph overview from a printed encyclopedia ever helped me accomplish anything. If I needed to study something specific, I went to the library and borrowed a few books on the topic. I didn't need to spend $1500 on a bunch of superficial books edited by non-experts, just as I wouldn't spend a penny on Wikipedia today. Encyclopedias are what you read when you don't really care all that much about the subject.
Yes, but the problem I see is: they already had him behind bars. He was released, and he went back to being a parasitic sack of shit. This is a failure of the penal system to rehabilitate convicts, a failure of the legal system to legalize prostition, creating this black market where thugs thrive, and finally a failure of the economy for creating an environment where crime pays way better than any proper career this Dears twit could ever possibly sustain. Heck, $500 a night is more than I make as an I.T. contractor.
Destroying Facebook will not result in a "consumer revolt". The users will hop on the next big thing. They might go on G+, where they will incessantly upvote each others "Fuck Yahoo I miss Facebook" posts, without actually doing anything about it.
Social media is dangerous in that respect, because it encourages people to talk about doing right, in order to get recognition from their "friends", without actually following through. Everyone suddenly thinks they're an activist because they shared some viral pic.
They still are.
User-space software translates whatever fancy document format into a flat bitstream, suitable for catting to the printer port. Bits is bits, the kernel does not need to bother itself with their contents.
This is yet more zealotry.
If a device has the capability to print, it is a PRINTER.
15 years ago, we were up in arms with WinModems, because these did not work in Linux. Why ? Because instead of implementing a serial interface and their own hardware DAC, they were little more than sound cards with an RJ11 jack. This moved the burden of encoding the audio stream to the host CPU, and why not ? It resulted in much cheaper modems due to ditching an expensive and license-burdened encoder chip. Linux had to catch up, but instead of doing so, people bitched and moaned all day long.
Printers and winmodems do not require the Windows OS. They require device drivers that go beyond what we were doing 15 years ago, but that's where Linux is right now. That's all it supports, and with that misplaced anti-MS sentiment you just love to spread, that's where it will stay, because the last thing a guy like me wants to do is slave for dozens of hours over a device driver that will benefit an insatiable finger-pointer like you.
I get what you're saying, and I know the majority of home-use printers have little in the way of brains, just a glorified servo-controller with sensors. That said, if you already have a graphical representation of the document you're printing, it is a simple matter to transform this bitmap into striped data for a printer. Dare I say, before the advent of fancy-schmancy VESA graphics cards and their linear framebuffers, we had to do something similar for any EGA or VGA graphics, splitting our colours out into bitplanes and tiles, since that's how those dumb graphics chips worked.
We could have simple print drivers if there was a common framework to program against. Do you really think Canon, Epson and friends reinvent the wheel with every single device ?
Ahh, another religious wingnut.
A printer is a device whose job it is to deposit ink or toner on a piece of paper, according to instructions fed via a data transport, be it a cable, wireless network, or storage device. Postscript just happens to be the messy protocol Linux printing developers decided to settle with, presumably because, like most other fundamental tenets of open-source software, they couldn't be bothered to target the actual open-source software user's hardware. Same reason we have spotty support for mainstream sound cards, but thousands of obscure network adapters work just fine. Tunnel vision and snobbery.
In practice, over 15 years of using Linux on a daily basis, I've only encountered maybe 20 different network adapters across thousands of machines: Realtek NE2000 clones, Intel PRO 100/1000, Marvell Yukon, and back in the day DEC Tulip. Dare I say, it is more reasonable to support relatively expensive printers the users actually own, than a gazillion cheap NICs that have never been seen outside of Malaysia.
"Cunthammer"
I just learned my new favorite word!
It is the American way (tm).
Well it's quite simple: they're focusing large amounts of energy at a person. Since the actual power source cannot dispense this much energy at once, it must be used to charge a capacitor bank - much like a camera flash.
That said, they could probably optimize it to shoot a narrower beam, but hey: this is the military. They can't do anything right, that would be unpatriotic.
Perhaps because the solution to homelessness is rarely "a job". Some people wind up homeless because they lack employment for too long, but those are a very small minority. Most of them have far more insidious issues such as psychological trauma, drug addiction or mental deficiency that simply makes them unable to function within the tight confines of "society".
I know what you're saying, and no, I don't use absolute positioning. Years of HTML and CSS experience have taught me to avoid such rabbit holes. My gripe is that the layout system itself feels extremely immature. Sure, you can design with weights, but proportional layouts simply do not work well on with grossly divergent aspect ratios. When going from legacy 320x480 smartphone to a 1024x768 tablet, scaling does not cut it, you need to reflow elements or even completely change the UI to better suit tablet users, and that's where I find the Android SDK drops the ball. Tablet support was hastily tacked on as an afterthought and it really shows. I usually have to create a largely separate code path for the tablet sizes, with their own layouts, so the result is essentially two different apps packed inside the same APK, with a handful of shared non-UI classes between them.
I'm not saying iOS did a fantastic job with their tablet support, but at least having explicit support for the iPad makes it easier to manage. I can build in as little or as much tablet support as I care to do (read: what my client is willing to pay). If I just have time for the phone version, it will still work and look fine on tablets. With the Android, the moment one of my users installs a phone-centric app on a tablet, the bug reports start streaming in.