You need to remember that digital downloads from iTunes and the Amazon MP3 Download service are using 256 kilobits per second minimum variable bit rate compression, and as such they're still inferior to the Compact Disc original for overall sound quality.
A better comparison between an LP and digital format would be comparing an LP to audio encoded in Apple Lossless or Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) formats. Since Apple Lossless and FLAC are non-lossy compression formats, the audio quality should be excellent, and unlike LP's (which are subject to all kinds of mechanical issues like physical wear, wow and flutter, turntable rumble and needle mistracking) the sound quality will not degrade over time.,
I do think that within the next 2-3 years we'll see game programmers take better advantage of something far beyond the traditional game controller held by two hands by doing what is possible with the Nintendo Wii MotionPlus controller, the new PlayStation 3 Move controller and the upcoming Xbox 360 Kinect system. The result could be games with AMAZING realism and level of gameplay far beyond what we expect now. Can you imagine a future version of Square Enix's Final Fantasy series taking full advantage of the PS3 Move controller?
This article points out one thing: the income tax system in the USA is hurting the US economy, even more so with the ending of the 2003 tax cuts starting in 2011.
Why? Because with the second-highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world (only Japan has a higher rate), the payroll tax and taxes on capital gains and stock dividend payments, American companies are offshoring jobs, manufacturing facilities, and even corporate headquarters on a huge scale in order to legally reduce the income tax burden (why do you think American companies are sending so much production to Mexico and China and have corporate headquarters registered and often operating from Caribbean island nations like the Bahamas, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Nettherlands Antilles, and so forth).
This, in my humble opinion, is economic insanity. We should seriously pursue MASSIVE taxation reform on the scale of either the Steve Forbes flat income tax proposal (based on a book he wrote in 2005) or the even more radical FairTax proposal to replace the income tax entirely. Our current income tax system--no thanks to a MOUNTAIN of deductions and tax credits to support almost every Tom, Dick and Harry tax lobbying group out there--now costs over US$304 BILLION per year in compliance costs and not only drove jobs and manufacturing facilities offshore, but also may have driven nearly US$2 TRILLION into the illegal cash-only underground economy and circa US$14 TRILLION in American-owned liquid assets to offshore financial centers (many of them located in the Caribbean island nations I mentioned)--all in the name of keeping these assets out of the hands of IRS.
Fix our income tax system so it encourages American citizens and businesses to keep as much of the savings and captital investments in the USA, and the US economy will come roaring back to life in a matter of months.
Google Wave failed for one particular reason: it did not work under Internet Explorer 7.0 and 8.0.
If Wave had worked under IE 7.0 and/or 8.0, it's likely that many corporations would have at least tried it out and maybe found a use for it. People forget that in corporate environments, installing more than one type of web browser is STRICTLY prohibited (indeed, all software installation is done remotely over the network), and as such the majority of corporate users could not install the Google Chrome web browser to try out Wave.
However, I do have this feeling that Google may not have completely abandoned Wave. After all, the much-rumored Google Me social networking application may use Wave features, and Google may revive Wave if the upcoming Internet Explorer 9.0 does work with Wave, since IE 9.0 will include HTML 5.0 support for the first time.
Funny you should write this because all the major railroads that have a presence in the USA--Union Pacific, BNSF, Norfolk Southern, CSX, and the US subsidiaries of CN and Canadian Pacific--are privately undergoing a massive expansion of trackage capacity all over the USA. This expansion of capacity will allow doublestack container trains to travel between any major shipping terminal in the USA within a week's time on a normal basis. And improvements in RoadRailer technology may finally make it possible for United Parcel Service to possibly buy as many as 5,000 RoadRailer cars that can travel as truck trailers or as railroad cars without the need for the fuel-wasting spline car to carry the trailer while on rails. And new signalling and train-tracking technology now coming online allows for much faster and more frequent train movements; that's why UP has that refrigerator train that ships produce grown in Washington state to New York state in around 4-5 days.
But getting back on topic, because of the sheer size of the USA and the enormous distances between population centers, especially west of the Mississippi River, high-speed passenger trains are only viable in a few regions: San Francisco Bay Area-Los Angeles-San Diego, Eugene, OR-Vancouver, BC, Chicago to various points in the Midwest, Jacksonville, FL-Orlando, FL-Miami, FL, the Dallas-Houston-San Antonio "triangle," the Northeast Corridor. And it won't be cheap: you need separated right of way for the fastest operation and lots of noise abatement near the tracks, since high-speed trains generate a LOT of noise.
If I remember correctly, Lucas' former wife Marcia Griffin has to be compensated BIG TIME big time if Lucasfilm releases any home video version of the original cut version of Episodes IV to VI because she substantially did the editing work on these three films. That's why the DVD releases of the original versions that came out a few years ago was still in its pre-1997 version that came out on Laserdisc; the current video release version is based on the 2004 release that does not have her editing credits.
As such, when the Blu-ray editions arrive in 2011, they will be based on:
1) For Episodes I, II and III, the digital version shown in theaters with digital projectors.
2) For Episodes IV, V and VI, the 2004 DVD release (plus any additional changes to compensate for continuity errors noted by some viewers of this edition).
It will be very interesting to see what audio encoding they use on the Blu-ray releases. Lucasfilm has a preference for Dolby-encoded soundtracks, but 20th Century Fox nowadays pretty much releases new Blu-ray titles encoded with DTS-HD Master Audio (the current de facto standard for Blu-ray discs); I think the Star Wars films will be released with DTS-HD Master Audio tracks not only because of the de facto usage, but also because DTS-HD Master Audio tracks can be decoded by older receivers in standard DTS 5.1/6.1 surround sound mode.
Of course, I think Apple better do something FAST before the Federal Trade Commission (or its equivalent at the European Commission) starts asking questions on why Apple sold a deliberately defective product and tried to hide the fact of this known defect. If Apple can't fix this problem with an update to iOS 4.0 then the potential for huge financial losses from recalling all iPhone 4's and the stock price hit could be quite real.
Except they've built actual thorium reactors to test the technology--and that was many, many years ago at the Idaho National Laboratory in Arco, ID. As such, the technology is a lot more mature than you think.
They've designed a new type of reactor (liquid fluoride thorium reactor) that requires a tiny fraction of the space needed by a uranium water-cooled reactor and also by design cannot melt down, either. As such, since thorium is way more plentiful than uranium, we have a source of fuel that could potentially last thousands of years--of course, in the longer run humanity will get its electric needs from solar power satellites or a power source based on physics principles we've yet to discover.
While it sounds like a laudable idea, many office workers cannot telecommute because they deal with highly proprietary data or data that if compromised could have serious privacy implications. At where I currently work (the California Franchise Tax Board), any privacy breaches can result not only in your termination, but also could face serious fines AND jail time, too--I have to follow a lot of strict policies in regards to protecting taxpayer data.
In my humble opinion, I think one of the reasons why the original R-36 (SS-9 Scarp) missile lasted longer in service than anticipated even with the arrival of the better R-36M (SS-18 Satan) was the fact it could be used to detonate its 18-25 MT nuclear warhead maybe 400-700 km above the ground, creating a GIGANTIC EMP burst that would essentially knock out the entire power grid, especially important since that could have cut communications from NORAD and SAC headquarters to missile launch control centers and bomber bases. I'm sure the USAF had the same thing in mind using the W53 9 MT warhead on the Titan II for the same purpose.
I think the big problem is that that the "go go" mentality of the stock market is ruining EVERYTHING.
We need to bring sanity back to the equities market RIGHT NOW before we end up with another stock market crash--and this time it will bring the world the worst economic depression that could make the 1930's look like a minor event.
Here's what I suggest we do:
1) The SEC MUST start oversight on all those "exotic" investments such as hedge funds, credit default swaps, derivatives, and others by requiring real liquidity to trade in them or ban them outright as financially too risky.
2) Increase the minimum margin requirements for futures and index trades from 5% to 15%, with 25% minimum for the following items:
a) Crude oil and certain petroleum products. b) Certain foodstuffs such as corn, millet, oats, rice and wheat. c) Certain industrial metals such as aluminum, copper, iron, nickel, tin and titanium. d) Precious metals such as gold, silver, palladium and platinum.
3) Reimpose the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act to get the banks out of the equities business to protect bank assets from the ups and downs of the equities market.
4) Re-do the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to allow for more IPO's with less paperwork and re-do the "mark to market" provisions of the Act.
5) Change the regulations on credit rating agencies such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's so they don't wield excessive influence.
Hopefully, these changes will bring sanity back to the stock market and that will go a long way towards a real economic recovery.
Here's the thing: the latest modern motherboards have high-quality sound card, network card and I/O connector functionality built in. Have you seen motherboards that use higher-end nVidia or AMD/ATI chipsets?
What's interesting was that if IBM had been far more open in licensing Micro Channel technology, we would never had VESA Local Bus, let alone the PCI bus! Micro Channel had to potential to be an extremely fast bus for expansion cards, and in fact some of the later implementations of Micro Channel used internally by IBM were at least as fast as the AGP bus used for graphics cards.
In fact, I wonder why the countries along the southern coastline of the Persian Gulf haven't started to install gigantic solar power arrays just south of the coastline to create a huge power source for 80% power generation and 20% powering water desalinization. The Persian Gulf area has a lot of sun per year, and it's perfect for solar power generation.
In fact, these deserts could be used for another purpose: creating large farms of tanks growing oil-laden algae in seawater (no need for exorbitantly expensive desalinization systems!). And they could grow enough oil-laden algae as a biomass source to make diesel fuel, gasoline and kerosene on a huge scale, the fuels critical for so many industries around the world. And the "waste" from the processing of the algae could be used to make fertilizer or even ethanol, another fuel with increasing usage around the world.
And there's another good reason for this: it's often by far the highest-rated NFL game of the week. And NBC doesn't have a decent cable network to dump it to, either, unless they want it on USA Network.
I'd agree on uranium, but there's an answer: thorium.
Thorium is far more available than uranium, and thorium-based reactors generate nuclear waste with very short radioactive half-lives (500 years compared to over 10,000 years with the waste from a uranium-based reactor). And with modern technology, a thorium-based reactor would require a tiny fraction of the land needed for a uranium-based reactor.
Why do you think the Indian government--realizing that there is a large amount of thorium deposits in their own country--will aggressively push to develop thorium-based reactors in India?
In fact, a new type of nuclear reactor based on using thorium as the fissile material could be the answer.
Unlike uranium, reactors designed around thorium have these advantages:
1) They can be designed to be essentially meltdown-proof. 2) The radioactive by-products of a thorium reactor can't be turned into weapons-grade material and have a half-life of only 500 years, not the tens of thousands of years you get from uranium-based reactors. 3) The latest thorium designs can be made that the entire powerplant generating 1,000 MW would require very little land space to build it in the first place. 4) Thorium is much more widely available than uranium.
If I were the Obama Administration, Energy Secretary Steven Chu should direct a nuclear powerplant project using thorium at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to create a standardized thorium-232/uranium-233 reactor design that could be built as a "standardized powerplant" similar to what the French did with their nuclear reactors. And then provide funding to build potentially in 25-30 years hundreds of these standardized powerplants all over the USA.
I believe that MPEG LA has some patent rights on the VC-1 codec, too. As such, MPEG LA could after 2015 literally grind much of the video industry to a halt if they up their licensing fees for technology MPEG LA has paten rights on.
Indeed, during the Maunder Minimum the Thames River regularly froze over in the London area during the winter. It was this period that the trees harvested in had unusually dense properties due to the very thin tree rings in the grain of the wood; many scientists agree that the great sound of a Stradivari or Guarneri made violin and viola came because of the unusually dense wood these two luthiers had access to, thanks to the cold winters caused by the Maunder Minimum.
But since most Blu-ray players are flash-upgradeable, they could potentially add accelerated VP8 support in the future.
People are scared that after 2015 MPEG LA could seriously up the licensing costs for H.264, and that could increase the price of hardware and software everywhere.
The thing that REALLY scares Mark Zuckerberg is the possibility he could be subpoenaed to testify before Congress over Facebook's privacy policies, and if he lies to Congress over this matter, Zuckerberg could face real jail time for contempt of Congress.
H.264 is entrenched, but it has one BIG downside: it requires a license from MPEG LA to use it on a commercial scale. That's why there is interest in VP8, especially if this new format gets hardware acceleration support from the likes of Intel, AMD/ATI and nVidia. It could mean a potential drop in the cost of Blu-ray disc mastering and production, since we no longer need to pay MPEG LA a license, meaning less expensive discs and players.
1) You can't print from an iPad directly to a printer even through a Wi-Fi connection to a Wi-Fi-enabled printer. Apple promises a fix, but who knows when will that happen.
2) The lack of Flash means many web sites are unreadable or forces webmasters to do the expensive process of completely re-writing the web site to be HTML 5.0 compatible.
3) Apple should have incorporated iTunes itself into the iPad. That way, you don't need a second computer to buy music, video and e-books that work on the iPad.
While Windows 3.0 was important in its day, the more important version is Windows 95, which came out on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 took full advantage of 32-bit memory addressing, and the interface standards pioneered by Windows 95 are still with us in 2010, where even Windows 7 still has the taskbar on the bottom of the screen with the Start button on the lower left corner of the screen.
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You need to remember that digital downloads from iTunes and the Amazon MP3 Download service are using 256 kilobits per second minimum variable bit rate compression, and as such they're still inferior to the Compact Disc original for overall sound quality.
A better comparison between an LP and digital format would be comparing an LP to audio encoded in Apple Lossless or Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) formats. Since Apple Lossless and FLAC are non-lossy compression formats, the audio quality should be excellent, and unlike LP's (which are subject to all kinds of mechanical issues like physical wear, wow and flutter, turntable rumble and needle mistracking) the sound quality will not degrade over time.,
I do think that within the next 2-3 years we'll see game programmers take better advantage of something far beyond the traditional game controller held by two hands by doing what is possible with the Nintendo Wii MotionPlus controller, the new PlayStation 3 Move controller and the upcoming Xbox 360 Kinect system. The result could be games with AMAZING realism and level of gameplay far beyond what we expect now. Can you imagine a future version of Square Enix's Final Fantasy series taking full advantage of the PS3 Move controller?
This article points out one thing: the income tax system in the USA is hurting the US economy, even more so with the ending of the 2003 tax cuts starting in 2011.
Why? Because with the second-highest corporate income tax rate in the developed world (only Japan has a higher rate), the payroll tax and taxes on capital gains and stock dividend payments, American companies are offshoring jobs, manufacturing facilities, and even corporate headquarters on a huge scale in order to legally reduce the income tax burden (why do you think American companies are sending so much production to Mexico and China and have corporate headquarters registered and often operating from Caribbean island nations like the Bahamas, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Nettherlands Antilles, and so forth).
This, in my humble opinion, is economic insanity. We should seriously pursue MASSIVE taxation reform on the scale of either the Steve Forbes flat income tax proposal (based on a book he wrote in 2005) or the even more radical FairTax proposal to replace the income tax entirely. Our current income tax system--no thanks to a MOUNTAIN of deductions and tax credits to support almost every Tom, Dick and Harry tax lobbying group out there--now costs over US$304 BILLION per year in compliance costs and not only drove jobs and manufacturing facilities offshore, but also may have driven nearly US$2 TRILLION into the illegal cash-only underground economy and circa US$14 TRILLION in American-owned liquid assets to offshore financial centers (many of them located in the Caribbean island nations I mentioned)--all in the name of keeping these assets out of the hands of IRS.
Fix our income tax system so it encourages American citizens and businesses to keep as much of the savings and captital investments in the USA, and the US economy will come roaring back to life in a matter of months.
Google Wave failed for one particular reason: it did not work under Internet Explorer 7.0 and 8.0.
If Wave had worked under IE 7.0 and/or 8.0, it's likely that many corporations would have at least tried it out and maybe found a use for it. People forget that in corporate environments, installing more than one type of web browser is STRICTLY prohibited (indeed, all software installation is done remotely over the network), and as such the majority of corporate users could not install the Google Chrome web browser to try out Wave.
However, I do have this feeling that Google may not have completely abandoned Wave. After all, the much-rumored Google Me social networking application may use Wave features, and Google may revive Wave if the upcoming Internet Explorer 9.0 does work with Wave, since IE 9.0 will include HTML 5.0 support for the first time.
Funny you should write this because all the major railroads that have a presence in the USA--Union Pacific, BNSF, Norfolk Southern, CSX, and the US subsidiaries of CN and Canadian Pacific--are privately undergoing a massive expansion of trackage capacity all over the USA. This expansion of capacity will allow doublestack container trains to travel between any major shipping terminal in the USA within a week's time on a normal basis. And improvements in RoadRailer technology may finally make it possible for United Parcel Service to possibly buy as many as 5,000 RoadRailer cars that can travel as truck trailers or as railroad cars without the need for the fuel-wasting spline car to carry the trailer while on rails. And new signalling and train-tracking technology now coming online allows for much faster and more frequent train movements; that's why UP has that refrigerator train that ships produce grown in Washington state to New York state in around 4-5 days.
But getting back on topic, because of the sheer size of the USA and the enormous distances between population centers, especially west of the Mississippi River, high-speed passenger trains are only viable in a few regions: San Francisco Bay Area-Los Angeles-San Diego, Eugene, OR-Vancouver, BC, Chicago to various points in the Midwest, Jacksonville, FL-Orlando, FL-Miami, FL, the Dallas-Houston-San Antonio "triangle," the Northeast Corridor. And it won't be cheap: you need separated right of way for the fastest operation and lots of noise abatement near the tracks, since high-speed trains generate a LOT of noise.
If I remember correctly, Lucas' former wife Marcia Griffin has to be compensated BIG TIME big time if Lucasfilm releases any home video version of the original cut version of Episodes IV to VI because she substantially did the editing work on these three films. That's why the DVD releases of the original versions that came out a few years ago was still in its pre-1997 version that came out on Laserdisc; the current video release version is based on the 2004 release that does not have her editing credits.
As such, when the Blu-ray editions arrive in 2011, they will be based on:
1) For Episodes I, II and III, the digital version shown in theaters with digital projectors.
2) For Episodes IV, V and VI, the 2004 DVD release (plus any additional changes to compensate for continuity errors noted by some viewers of this edition).
It will be very interesting to see what audio encoding they use on the Blu-ray releases. Lucasfilm has a preference for Dolby-encoded soundtracks, but 20th Century Fox nowadays pretty much releases new Blu-ray titles encoded with DTS-HD Master Audio (the current de facto standard for Blu-ray discs); I think the Star Wars films will be released with DTS-HD Master Audio tracks not only because of the de facto usage, but also because DTS-HD Master Audio tracks can be decoded by older receivers in standard DTS 5.1/6.1 surround sound mode.
Of course, I think Apple better do something FAST before the Federal Trade Commission (or its equivalent at the European Commission) starts asking questions on why Apple sold a deliberately defective product and tried to hide the fact of this known defect. If Apple can't fix this problem with an update to iOS 4.0 then the potential for huge financial losses from recalling all iPhone 4's and the stock price hit could be quite real.
Except they've built actual thorium reactors to test the technology--and that was many, many years ago at the Idaho National Laboratory in Arco, ID. As such, the technology is a lot more mature than you think.
They've designed a new type of reactor (liquid fluoride thorium reactor) that requires a tiny fraction of the space needed by a uranium water-cooled reactor and also by design cannot melt down, either. As such, since thorium is way more plentiful than uranium, we have a source of fuel that could potentially last thousands of years--of course, in the longer run humanity will get its electric needs from solar power satellites or a power source based on physics principles we've yet to discover.
While it sounds like a laudable idea, many office workers cannot telecommute because they deal with highly proprietary data or data that if compromised could have serious privacy implications. At where I currently work (the California Franchise Tax Board), any privacy breaches can result not only in your termination, but also could face serious fines AND jail time, too--I have to follow a lot of strict policies in regards to protecting taxpayer data.
In my humble opinion, I think one of the reasons why the original R-36 (SS-9 Scarp) missile lasted longer in service than anticipated even with the arrival of the better R-36M (SS-18 Satan) was the fact it could be used to detonate its 18-25 MT nuclear warhead maybe 400-700 km above the ground, creating a GIGANTIC EMP burst that would essentially knock out the entire power grid, especially important since that could have cut communications from NORAD and SAC headquarters to missile launch control centers and bomber bases. I'm sure the USAF had the same thing in mind using the W53 9 MT warhead on the Titan II for the same purpose.
I think the big problem is that that the "go go" mentality of the stock market is ruining EVERYTHING.
We need to bring sanity back to the equities market RIGHT NOW before we end up with another stock market crash--and this time it will bring the world the worst economic depression that could make the 1930's look like a minor event.
Here's what I suggest we do:
1) The SEC MUST start oversight on all those "exotic" investments such as hedge funds, credit default swaps, derivatives, and others by requiring real liquidity to trade in them or ban them outright as financially too risky.
2) Increase the minimum margin requirements for futures and index trades from 5% to 15%, with 25% minimum for the following items:
a) Crude oil and certain petroleum products.
b) Certain foodstuffs such as corn, millet, oats, rice and wheat.
c) Certain industrial metals such as aluminum, copper, iron, nickel, tin and titanium.
d) Precious metals such as gold, silver, palladium and platinum.
3) Reimpose the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act to get the banks out of the equities business to protect bank assets from the ups and downs of the equities market.
4) Re-do the Sarbanes-Oxley Act to allow for more IPO's with less paperwork and re-do the "mark to market" provisions of the Act.
5) Change the regulations on credit rating agencies such as Moody's and Standard & Poor's so they don't wield excessive influence.
Hopefully, these changes will bring sanity back to the stock market and that will go a long way towards a real economic recovery.
Here's the thing: the latest modern motherboards have high-quality sound card, network card and I/O connector functionality built in. Have you seen motherboards that use higher-end nVidia or AMD/ATI chipsets?
What's interesting was that if IBM had been far more open in licensing Micro Channel technology, we would never had VESA Local Bus, let alone the PCI bus! Micro Channel had to potential to be an extremely fast bus for expansion cards, and in fact some of the later implementations of Micro Channel used internally by IBM were at least as fast as the AGP bus used for graphics cards.
In fact, I wonder why the countries along the southern coastline of the Persian Gulf haven't started to install gigantic solar power arrays just south of the coastline to create a huge power source for 80% power generation and 20% powering water desalinization. The Persian Gulf area has a lot of sun per year, and it's perfect for solar power generation.
In fact, these deserts could be used for another purpose: creating large farms of tanks growing oil-laden algae in seawater (no need for exorbitantly expensive desalinization systems!). And they could grow enough oil-laden algae as a biomass source to make diesel fuel, gasoline and kerosene on a huge scale, the fuels critical for so many industries around the world. And the "waste" from the processing of the algae could be used to make fertilizer or even ethanol, another fuel with increasing usage around the world.
And there's another good reason for this: it's often by far the highest-rated NFL game of the week. And NBC doesn't have a decent cable network to dump it to, either, unless they want it on USA Network.
I'd agree on uranium, but there's an answer: thorium.
Thorium is far more available than uranium, and thorium-based reactors generate nuclear waste with very short radioactive half-lives (500 years compared to over 10,000 years with the waste from a uranium-based reactor). And with modern technology, a thorium-based reactor would require a tiny fraction of the land needed for a uranium-based reactor.
Why do you think the Indian government--realizing that there is a large amount of thorium deposits in their own country--will aggressively push to develop thorium-based reactors in India?
In fact, a new type of nuclear reactor based on using thorium as the fissile material could be the answer.
Unlike uranium, reactors designed around thorium have these advantages:
1) They can be designed to be essentially meltdown-proof.
2) The radioactive by-products of a thorium reactor can't be turned into weapons-grade material and have a half-life of only 500 years, not the tens of thousands of years you get from uranium-based reactors.
3) The latest thorium designs can be made that the entire powerplant generating 1,000 MW would require very little land space to build it in the first place.
4) Thorium is much more widely available than uranium.
If I were the Obama Administration, Energy Secretary Steven Chu should direct a nuclear powerplant project using thorium at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to create a standardized thorium-232/uranium-233 reactor design that could be built as a "standardized powerplant" similar to what the French did with their nuclear reactors. And then provide funding to build potentially in 25-30 years hundreds of these standardized powerplants all over the USA.
I believe that MPEG LA has some patent rights on the VC-1 codec, too. As such, MPEG LA could after 2015 literally grind much of the video industry to a halt if they up their licensing fees for technology MPEG LA has paten rights on.
Indeed, during the Maunder Minimum the Thames River regularly froze over in the London area during the winter. It was this period that the trees harvested in had unusually dense properties due to the very thin tree rings in the grain of the wood; many scientists agree that the great sound of a Stradivari or Guarneri made violin and viola came because of the unusually dense wood these two luthiers had access to, thanks to the cold winters caused by the Maunder Minimum.
But since most Blu-ray players are flash-upgradeable, they could potentially add accelerated VP8 support in the future.
People are scared that after 2015 MPEG LA could seriously up the licensing costs for H.264, and that could increase the price of hardware and software everywhere.
The thing that REALLY scares Mark Zuckerberg is the possibility he could be subpoenaed to testify before Congress over Facebook's privacy policies, and if he lies to Congress over this matter, Zuckerberg could face real jail time for contempt of Congress.
H.264 is entrenched, but it has one BIG downside: it requires a license from MPEG LA to use it on a commercial scale. That's why there is interest in VP8, especially if this new format gets hardware acceleration support from the likes of Intel, AMD/ATI and nVidia. It could mean a potential drop in the cost of Blu-ray disc mastering and production, since we no longer need to pay MPEG LA a license, meaning less expensive discs and players.
My gripe with the iPad comes in two parts:
1) You can't print from an iPad directly to a printer even through a Wi-Fi connection to a Wi-Fi-enabled printer. Apple promises a fix, but who knows when will that happen.
2) The lack of Flash means many web sites are unreadable or forces webmasters to do the expensive process of completely re-writing the web site to be HTML 5.0 compatible.
3) Apple should have incorporated iTunes itself into the iPad. That way, you don't need a second computer to buy music, video and e-books that work on the iPad.
While Windows 3.0 was important in its day, the more important version is Windows 95, which came out on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 took full advantage of 32-bit memory addressing, and the interface standards pioneered by Windows 95 are still with us in 2010, where even Windows 7 still has the taskbar on the bottom of the screen with the Start button on the lower left corner of the screen.