Most people just don't care that much. When a corporation does something to them, they'll whine, but they won't care enough to actually inconvenience themselves switching to a competitor.
I mean, look at the number of people on Slashdot who still run Windows while claiming to hate Microsoft. "Oh, I need all those games", "OpenOffice isn't quite compatible enough", "I don't want to have to learn something new". Bleagh.
I remember first becoming aware of this in the UK after telecom deregulation. I'd be talking to someone and they'd whine about long distance phone charges. "Well," I'd say, "Why don't you just get a Mercury account?" (Mercury being the first competing long distance provider, with rates less than a quarter of BT's in many cases). There would be a pause, then they'd say something like "Yes, but BT ought to charge less!"
I remember hearing some statistic about the incredibly tiny proportion of customers willing to switch banks. How many people reading this pay ATM fees, monthly fees, fees for checks, even though they don't need to, because they're too lazy to switch banks? And of course, that's why banks introduce gratuitous fees in the first place.
Me, I'm a switcher. A bigger bank bought the one I was at, said they were instituting fees. I took my new cards and checks in, withdrew all the money, closed the account, went elsewhere. Left the bank the task of shredding the paper and destroying the cards, told them it was their problem now.
It's the same with these MySpace whiners. I bet if FOX held to their censorship, 90% of the whiners would just shut up and put up with it, just like most of my friends still use LiveJournal.
I'm sure you could add some text to that GIF without bloating the byte count too much. Like, fake up a screenshot of what a profile would look like if it talked about the girl's terrible hemmorhoid problem and her abortion last summer. Then a huge amount of vertical whitespace to push the real profile out of sight...
OPPO OPDV971H. Of course, I don't really have any way to tell whether it actually works, as I don't have any DVD-Audio discs, which was the point I was trying to make.
Yes, it's misleading to talk about lines of resolution as if that's the be-all and end-all. SVHS theoretically had 410 lines of resolution, almost as much as DVD--but compared to DVD, it looked like shit.
Yes, I know. And my point is that on a TV screen 2m+ away, 480p upscaled so there are no visible lines and cleaned to remove MPEG artifacts, is quite sharp enough. Sooner or later I expect we'll see iterated fractal compression used for upscaling, probably once the patents run out.
Note that I mentioned a DVD player with a good upconverter. There are plenty that'll give you a digital 480p signal, so you can get a widescreen picture with 480 lines of resolution. Mine also does 720p and 1080i.
And yes, I'd settle for 640x480 (SDTV) on my computer if I was using my computer to watch TV shows.
Umm, I had to buy a new DVD player to get DVD-Audio, so why would buying a new receiver be an issue? In fact, I did recently get a new receiver, and it handles digital streams of 192KHz, so stereo DVD-Audio would work just fine.
No new standard was needed, Firewire would have worked fine. The fact that there's no digital DVD-Audio output support is all about copy protection.
For the last year or two I'd been noticing the decline in quality of The Simpsons. Then I watched "The Italian Bob". The episode was completely unfunny, I didn't laugh once. And in the middle, they had the nerve to rip on Family Guy and American Dad for "plagiarism".
Well, Family Guy and American Dad may not be the most original scenarios around, but you know what? Those shows are funny. The Simpsons no longer is. So either get better, or quit whining.
(Or preferably, kill The Simpsons and bring back Futurama.)
Absolutely. I knew DVD was going to catch on as soon as all the movie companies got behind it. That was when I got a player. VHS was dead from that moment.
DVD won't die and be replaced by HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. They were predicting that CD would die and be replaced with SACD or DVD-Audio, and that didn't happen.
Even though my DVD player supports DVD-Audio, I don't have a single DVD-Audio disc. I don't even have the player hooked up to support it. Why not? Because the DRM is so cripplingly inconvenient, it's not worth it. With a CD I can listen on my iPod, stream over my home network and listen at any computer, listen on my PDA, play the CD in the car, make mix CDs for the car, and so on. With DVD-Audio, they won't even allow digital feed from the player to the amp, so I'd need to buy a set of extra analog cables, I'd get lower quality (my amp has much better D to A than my player), and I wouldn't be able to rip the audio conveniently. And though some 'goldenears' folks will disagree, CD is basically good enough.
Similarly, DVD is good enough for the vast majority of people. I actually have an HDTV, and with a well-encoded DVD and a player with a good upconverter, the limiting factor on the image quality is either the source material or my eyesight. When I can see the fingerprints on the glass pane used for the 'floating pen' effect in "2001"--and that's a famously poorly encoded DVD--I know that there's really no great need for finer resolution. I can see the film grain on "Lawrence of Arabia" already, I don't need to see it any better. I can read the paperwork on Sam Lowry's desk in "Brazil". The resolution is just fine. Now, let's have more good movies...
One of the big problems with the iTMS is that the resolution sucks. Another big problem is that the content sucks (it's mostly US major network TV). A third problem is I can't watch it on my portable video device, or on my TV, because of the DRM.
US channels also mess with program times, cut shows mid season, cut content from shows to fit more ads in, cut content from shows to make them fit a 3:2 screen better, cancel whole seasons... and 18 months behind is nothing, here in the US we're not going to get Dr Who at all.
In the early days of the Mac, desk accessories all existed on a separate plane from other applications. The differences from the widget plane were:
- The DA plane wasn't translucent, because 1 bit displays on the Mac at the time didn't support translucency.
- DAs didn't all close and open as one; they closed and opened individually.
The main innovation that made widgets useful to me (and many other people) was making them all appear and disappear at once, when you hit a key. And Konfabulator didn't do that--that was Apple's innovation, which Konfabulator then copied. Konfabulator's widgets were stuck to the desktop, which frankly I never see under all these windows.
But being a failure on the PS2? I'd have to disagree. The only issue is that the PC version was so much better as the PS2 chugged along at times.
Actually, there's another big issue: I can't play it on my PS2, even if I wanted to. It requires the old PS2 hardware. I'm not sure why they haven't made a version that'll run with the current slimline PS2.
(And it's not unthinkable that I'd want to, since I'm currently badly addicted to FF:X.)
Widgets are hardly going to be created or modified by average users either. Average users don't know JavaScript.
Widgets are basically desk accessories written in JavaScript instead of Pascal, with your UI laid out web style rather than using ResEdit. In some ways, they're a step backwards, at least until Apple provides a graphical tool for creating them.
Well, in the light of the fuss over Ralph Nader, I consider IA independence to be an extremely important property for a voting system. So based on that table, I guess I should favor Approval voting as simple and effective--and Condorcet looks like it still fails.
Personally I've used Range Voting most often (for things like picking which features go in products).
Re:I like how C# float and double variables are...
on
Rounding Algorithms
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· Score: 1
Some floating point libraries have hacks to apply automatic rounding and avoid 'unexpected' results. However, the inaccuracy is still there, just hidden, and eventually it can grow and explode in your face.
C# presumably takes the wiser approach of making the actual value visible to the programmer.
The existence of preference cycles in condorcet results is a pretty serious problem. Frankly, it makes it a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.
Wikipedia lists seven different algorithms for resolving cycles. Can you imagine TV news explaining to the average American how the set theory behind the Schwartz set method determines the President?
IRV may be flawed, but it's easily understandable, and a huge improvement on FPTP.
Agreed - the simplest and most efficent solution is full automation with some percentage of completely random auditing.
The simplest and most efficient solution is not to have elections at all. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of troublemakers who believe in this crazy idea called democracy, even though it's inherently complicated and inefficient.
That is: 'simple' and 'efficient' are not the most important criteria for a voting system. They're not even in the top 5.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people just don't care that much. When a corporation does something to them, they'll whine, but they won't care enough to actually inconvenience themselves switching to a competitor.
I mean, look at the number of people on Slashdot who still run Windows while claiming to hate Microsoft. "Oh, I need all those games", "OpenOffice isn't quite compatible enough", "I don't want to have to learn something new". Bleagh.
I remember first becoming aware of this in the UK after telecom deregulation. I'd be talking to someone and they'd whine about long distance phone charges. "Well," I'd say, "Why don't you just get a Mercury account?" (Mercury being the first competing long distance provider, with rates less than a quarter of BT's in many cases). There would be a pause, then they'd say something like "Yes, but BT ought to charge less!"
I remember hearing some statistic about the incredibly tiny proportion of customers willing to switch banks. How many people reading this pay ATM fees, monthly fees, fees for checks, even though they don't need to, because they're too lazy to switch banks? And of course, that's why banks introduce gratuitous fees in the first place.
Me, I'm a switcher. A bigger bank bought the one I was at, said they were instituting fees. I took my new cards and checks in, withdrew all the money, closed the account, went elsewhere. Left the bank the task of shredding the paper and destroying the cards, told them it was their problem now.
It's the same with these MySpace whiners. I bet if FOX held to their censorship, 90% of the whiners would just shut up and put up with it, just like most of my friends still use LiveJournal.
Yeah, what if LiveJournal would actually terminate people for posting or linking to public information? That would be terrible.
I'm sure you could add some text to that GIF without bloating the byte count too much. Like, fake up a screenshot of what a profile would look like if it talked about the girl's terrible hemmorhoid problem and her abortion last summer. Then a huge amount of vertical whitespace to push the real profile out of sight...
It's not just free services either.
Even if you're paying for a service, the company may turn around and shaft you. (See signature.)
OPPO OPDV971H. Of course, I don't really have any way to tell whether it actually works, as I don't have any DVD-Audio discs, which was the point I was trying to make.
I registered a domain using Network Solutions.
Yes, it's misleading to talk about lines of resolution as if that's the be-all and end-all. SVHS theoretically had 410 lines of resolution, almost as much as DVD--but compared to DVD, it looked like shit.
Yes, I know. And my point is that on a TV screen 2m+ away, 480p upscaled so there are no visible lines and cleaned to remove MPEG artifacts, is quite sharp enough. Sooner or later I expect we'll see iterated fractal compression used for upscaling, probably once the patents run out.
Note that I mentioned a DVD player with a good upconverter. There are plenty that'll give you a digital 480p signal, so you can get a widescreen picture with 480 lines of resolution. Mine also does 720p and 1080i.
And yes, I'd settle for 640x480 (SDTV) on my computer if I was using my computer to watch TV shows.
Umm, I had to buy a new DVD player to get DVD-Audio, so why would buying a new receiver be an issue? In fact, I did recently get a new receiver, and it handles digital streams of 192KHz, so stereo DVD-Audio would work just fine.
No new standard was needed, Firewire would have worked fine. The fact that there's no digital DVD-Audio output support is all about copy protection.
For the last year or two I'd been noticing the decline in quality of The Simpsons. Then I watched "The Italian Bob". The episode was completely unfunny, I didn't laugh once. And in the middle, they had the nerve to rip on Family Guy and American Dad for "plagiarism".
Well, Family Guy and American Dad may not be the most original scenarios around, but you know what? Those shows are funny. The Simpsons no longer is. So either get better, or quit whining.
(Or preferably, kill The Simpsons and bring back Futurama.)
Mmm, the sweet smell of corruption.
Absolutely. I knew DVD was going to catch on as soon as all the movie companies got behind it. That was when I got a player. VHS was dead from that moment.
DVD won't die and be replaced by HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. They were predicting that CD would die and be replaced with SACD or DVD-Audio, and that didn't happen.
Even though my DVD player supports DVD-Audio, I don't have a single DVD-Audio disc. I don't even have the player hooked up to support it. Why not? Because the DRM is so cripplingly inconvenient, it's not worth it. With a CD I can listen on my iPod, stream over my home network and listen at any computer, listen on my PDA, play the CD in the car, make mix CDs for the car, and so on. With DVD-Audio, they won't even allow digital feed from the player to the amp, so I'd need to buy a set of extra analog cables, I'd get lower quality (my amp has much better D to A than my player), and I wouldn't be able to rip the audio conveniently. And though some 'goldenears' folks will disagree, CD is basically good enough.
Similarly, DVD is good enough for the vast majority of people. I actually have an HDTV, and with a well-encoded DVD and a player with a good upconverter, the limiting factor on the image quality is either the source material or my eyesight. When I can see the fingerprints on the glass pane used for the 'floating pen' effect in "2001"--and that's a famously poorly encoded DVD--I know that there's really no great need for finer resolution. I can see the film grain on "Lawrence of Arabia" already, I don't need to see it any better. I can read the paperwork on Sam Lowry's desk in "Brazil". The resolution is just fine. Now, let's have more good movies...
One of the big problems with the iTMS is that the resolution sucks. Another big problem is that the content sucks (it's mostly US major network TV). A third problem is I can't watch it on my portable video device, or on my TV, because of the DRM.
Illegal downloads have none of those problems.
US channels also mess with program times, cut shows mid season, cut content from shows to fit more ads in, cut content from shows to make them fit a 3:2 screen better, cancel whole seasons... and 18 months behind is nothing, here in the US we're not going to get Dr Who at all.
In the early days of the Mac, desk accessories all existed on a separate plane from other applications. The differences from the widget plane were:
- The DA plane wasn't translucent, because 1 bit displays on the Mac at the time didn't support translucency.
- DAs didn't all close and open as one; they closed and opened individually.
The main innovation that made widgets useful to me (and many other people) was making them all appear and disappear at once, when you hit a key. And Konfabulator didn't do that--that was Apple's innovation, which Konfabulator then copied. Konfabulator's widgets were stuck to the desktop, which frankly I never see under all these windows.
Life has no specific completable goal. Maybe you should stop playing that for so many hours a day?
Actually, there's another big issue: I can't play it on my PS2, even if I wanted to. It requires the old PS2 hardware. I'm not sure why they haven't made a version that'll run with the current slimline PS2.
(And it's not unthinkable that I'd want to, since I'm currently badly addicted to FF:X.)
Widgets are hardly going to be created or modified by average users either. Average users don't know JavaScript.
Widgets are basically desk accessories written in JavaScript instead of Pascal, with your UI laid out web style rather than using ResEdit. In some ways, they're a step backwards, at least until Apple provides a graphical tool for creating them.
Well, in the light of the fuss over Ralph Nader, I consider IA independence to be an extremely important property for a voting system. So based on that table, I guess I should favor Approval voting as simple and effective--and Condorcet looks like it still fails.
Personally I've used Range Voting most often (for things like picking which features go in products).
Some floating point libraries have hacks to apply automatic rounding and avoid 'unexpected' results. However, the inaccuracy is still there, just hidden, and eventually it can grow and explode in your face.
C# presumably takes the wiser approach of making the actual value visible to the programmer.
President Carter Announces Funding For NASA Space Shuttle Program!
My TV has 720p as its native resolution. Nevertheless, CBS 1080i looks far better than Fox 720p.
The existence of preference cycles in condorcet results is a pretty serious problem. Frankly, it makes it a non-starter as far as I'm concerned.
Wikipedia lists seven different algorithms for resolving cycles. Can you imagine TV news explaining to the average American how the set theory behind the Schwartz set method determines the President?
IRV may be flawed, but it's easily understandable, and a huge improvement on FPTP.
The simplest and most efficient solution is not to have elections at all. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of troublemakers who believe in this crazy idea called democracy, even though it's inherently complicated and inefficient.
That is: 'simple' and 'efficient' are not the most important criteria for a voting system. They're not even in the top 5.