And if the Make It Right Fund seems to be reluctant to disburse the funds, meet with your rep and turn up with Linux running on your laptop. Tell them you're considering moving to Linux. Watch the money pour in.
Thing is, how can Microsoft ever sell these subscriptions again to companies that paid and got nothing?
That's the brilliant bit--they don't have to. If the companies let their software assurance drop, they have to pay full price for Longhorn and the new Exchange and SQL server when they ship. Microsoft wins either way.
What, you thought you could play their game by their rules and come out ahead?
I'll support Linux or Mac. My parents are running Mandrake 9.1 at the moment, I'll upgrade them next time I'm over there. In the mean time, the important thing is that their e-mail and web access continue to work, whereas with Windows they got completely wiped out four times in less than a year.
Yeah, I skipped the discussion of block sizes and memory requirements, just like people generally skip such things when talking about Turing machines.
Your distinction between "transformation" and "compression" is unclear and appears arbitrary. For the purposes of the original question, "put data in, get less data out that represents original data losslessly" is compression; whether the method used is technically known as compression or coding or transformation or notational re-engineering is irrelevant.
I recently bought a brand new 200GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive for $99. Stuck it in a $45 USB 2.0/Firewire fanless aluminium enclosure. Hard drive space is so cheap it's insane.
I worked in data recovery back in the days of floppy disks, and we used to get endless drilled and notched disks to recover.
High Density disks are different to regular Double Density ones. Take a look at the surface, it's not even the same color. Sheesh.
Sure, maybe if you buy DD floppy disks from a good brand you can notch them and use them as flaky HD floppies, and maybe your drive is good enough that the out-of-spec data remains readable. If so, you're exceptionally lucky.
Start an ISP which offers reduced prices to people who can pass a basic competency test on Internet security and computer usage. Give them an extra bonus discount if they're not running Windows.
Comcast already sent out clear instructions, both as an e-mail bulletin, and as a booklet included with the bill for people who weren't reading their e-mail.
Why hasn't the EFF gone after the MPAA for its ridiculous Region Code scheme on DVDs? If ever there was an illegal restraint of fair use rights to play legally purchased copies...
You can calculate the best possible compression scheme for handling arbitrary data. That is, the compression algorithm which, if you fed it every possible combination of input data, would compress the data the best. The algorithm is called Huffman coding.
The problem is, in actual use Huffman coding is crap. Why? Because real data isn't random, it doesn't cover the entire space of possible data.
So useful compression algorithms take advantage of the non-randomness of actual data, to do significantly better than Huffman--but only for particular kinds of data. For instance, run-length encoding is fabulous at compressing bitmap graphics which have large areas of the same color--but feed it plain text, and it's hopeless. Lempel-Ziv algorithms are great at compressing plain text, but they're not good at compressing audio files.
As someone else has pointed out in the threads, if you allow your compression scheme to be useful only for particular files, and allow the compression and decompression software to be arbitrarily complex, there's essentially no limit to how tight you can compress data.
For example, suppose I want to write some software which will compress webcam images of playing cards on a table, for transmission across the net. One approach is to have the encoder recognize the cards, and make the decoder contain a complete set of playing card images. That lets me compress a complete 24-bit image of playing cards on a table into a few bytes--a byte to say which card, one to say what angle it's at, and send them in order from back to front. Of course, the resulting code is useless if someone drops a $20 bill on the table, and doing the compression is a bitch.
So in general, there's no way to tell what the technical limit is on compression. There's usually a tradeoff between how specialized the compression is, and how effective; and if your application allows lossy compression, you can compress still further (e.g. JPEG, MP3).
That's a convenient excuse... but the cable company already charges me money any time I make a change to the packages I choose. So they can just charge people for the time they spend dealing with channel subscription changes. THEY ALREADY DO.
I'm sick of having to pay for dozens of channels I never watch and don't want, just to get the half dozen I do want.
I want the cable company to let me pay for just the channels I want. That means no news channels and no sports channels. Ironically, most of the Viacom channels are ones I'd pay for.
I'd also pay extra for HBO, if I didn't have to pay for all those news and sports channels... but since I do, no HBO for me.
Real's "openness" is a hollow gesture. You'll notice the license agreement prohibits turning Real-encoded media into any other format. Which is why I have to use underhanded methods to re-encode Real programs to MP3 in real time to listen to on my iPod.
Until Real let me convert to MP3 easily to listen to on portable devices, the chances of my supporting anything they do are zero.
I used GNOME for a while on my laptop, but then a routine Fedora upgrade made it self-destruct. Suddenly no text anywhere. All the non-GNOME applications were fine. I tried the suggested fixes, but they didn't work.
So, I switched to KDE, purely so I could carry on working. And suddenly I noticed everything was a LOT faster. Even simple things like application window redraws were way faster.
So when I rebuilt the machine, I didn't even bother installing GNOME. I'll look at it again when it's about 4x as fast and much more reliable. Until then, I'm sticking with KDE 3.2, even though it's uglier.
Parrot will perpetually be 6 months from doing anything useful. [...] Parrot is too complex and bloated for what little it does. It already has over a thousand opcodes - talk about simplicity! What moron designed this thing?
There's this CPU that has clearly been designed by a complete bunch of morons... can you believe the documentation listing the opcodes is 566 pages long?
Obviously this x86 thing will perpetually be 6 months from doing anything useful.
Seems to me that distributing source code under the GPL without the necessary data files to build the application as distributed, is violating the spirit of Open Source.
Slashdot Mirror
And if the Make It Right Fund seems to be reluctant to disburse the funds, meet with your rep and turn up with Linux running on your laptop. Tell them you're considering moving to Linux. Watch the money pour in.
That's the brilliant bit--they don't have to. If the companies let their software assurance drop, they have to pay full price for Longhorn and the new Exchange and SQL server when they ship. Microsoft wins either way.
What, you thought you could play their game by their rules and come out ahead?
Your clear-eyed and insightful cynicism delights me.
I'll support Linux or Mac. My parents are running Mandrake 9.1 at the moment, I'll upgrade them next time I'm over there. In the mean time, the important thing is that their e-mail and web access continue to work, whereas with Windows they got completely wiped out four times in less than a year.
Suits me fine, I only watch two networks. I could sign up for a third (HBO) and still be paying less than I pay today.
And of course, they can carry on offering all-in-one bundles to people who prefer that.
Yeah, I skipped the discussion of block sizes and memory requirements, just like people generally skip such things when talking about Turing machines.
Your distinction between "transformation" and "compression" is unclear and appears arbitrary. For the purposes of the original question, "put data in, get less data out that represents original data losslessly" is compression; whether the method used is technically known as compression or coding or transformation or notational re-engineering is irrelevant.
I recently bought a brand new 200GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive for $99. Stuck it in a $45 USB 2.0/Firewire fanless aluminium enclosure. Hard drive space is so cheap it's insane.
I worked in data recovery back in the days of floppy disks, and we used to get endless drilled and notched disks to recover.
High Density disks are different to regular Double Density ones. Take a look at the surface, it's not even the same color. Sheesh.
Sure, maybe if you buy DD floppy disks from a good brand you can notch them and use them as flaky HD floppies, and maybe your drive is good enough that the out-of-spec data remains readable. If so, you're exceptionally lucky.
Start an ISP which offers reduced prices to people who can pass a basic competency test on Internet security and computer usage. Give them an extra bonus discount if they're not running Windows.
Comcast already sent out clear instructions, both as an e-mail bulletin, and as a booklet included with the bill for people who weren't reading their e-mail.
Why hasn't the EFF gone after the MPAA for its ridiculous Region Code scheme on DVDs? If ever there was an illegal restraint of fair use rights to play legally purchased copies...
Compression is weird.
You can calculate the best possible compression scheme for handling arbitrary data. That is, the compression algorithm which, if you fed it every possible combination of input data, would compress the data the best. The algorithm is called Huffman coding.
The problem is, in actual use Huffman coding is crap. Why? Because real data isn't random, it doesn't cover the entire space of possible data.
So useful compression algorithms take advantage of the non-randomness of actual data, to do significantly better than Huffman--but only for particular kinds of data. For instance, run-length encoding is fabulous at compressing bitmap graphics which have large areas of the same color--but feed it plain text, and it's hopeless. Lempel-Ziv algorithms are great at compressing plain text, but they're not good at compressing audio files.
As someone else has pointed out in the threads, if you allow your compression scheme to be useful only for particular files, and allow the compression and decompression software to be arbitrarily complex, there's essentially no limit to how tight you can compress data.
For example, suppose I want to write some software which will compress webcam images of playing cards on a table, for transmission across the net. One approach is to have the encoder recognize the cards, and make the decoder contain a complete set of playing card images. That lets me compress a complete 24-bit image of playing cards on a table into a few bytes--a byte to say which card, one to say what angle it's at, and send them in order from back to front. Of course, the resulting code is useless if someone drops a $20 bill on the table, and doing the compression is a bitch.
So in general, there's no way to tell what the technical limit is on compression. There's usually a tradeoff between how specialized the compression is, and how effective; and if your application allows lossy compression, you can compress still further (e.g. JPEG, MP3).
That's a convenient excuse... but the cable company already charges me money any time I make a change to the packages I choose. So they can just charge people for the time they spend dealing with channel subscription changes. THEY ALREADY DO.
Maybe they're planning to use the data for the upcoming The Getaway 2.
If I ever live somewhere where an 8' dish is even remotely feasible, I'll certainly look into it.
I've been waiting for someone to do this.
I'm sick of having to pay for dozens of channels I never watch and don't want, just to get the half dozen I do want.
I want the cable company to let me pay for just the channels I want. That means no news channels and no sports channels. Ironically, most of the Viacom channels are ones I'd pay for.
I'd also pay extra for HBO, if I didn't have to pay for all those news and sports channels... but since I do, no HBO for me.
Real's "openness" is a hollow gesture. You'll notice the license agreement prohibits turning Real-encoded media into any other format. Which is why I have to use underhanded methods to re-encode Real programs to MP3 in real time to listen to on my iPod.
Until Real let me convert to MP3 easily to listen to on portable devices, the chances of my supporting anything they do are zero.
I used GNOME for a while on my laptop, but then a routine Fedora upgrade made it self-destruct. Suddenly no text anywhere. All the non-GNOME applications were fine. I tried the suggested fixes, but they didn't work.
So, I switched to KDE, purely so I could carry on working. And suddenly I noticed everything was a LOT faster. Even simple things like application window redraws were way faster.
So when I rebuilt the machine, I didn't even bother installing GNOME. I'll look at it again when it's about 4x as fast and much more reliable. Until then, I'm sticking with KDE 3.2, even though it's uglier.
VIA. They released the source for drivers for their EPIA hardware.
It's available on DVD.
Yeah, and you're probably one of those idiots who thought I was attempting an analogy.
There's this CPU that has clearly been designed by a complete bunch of morons... can you believe the documentation listing the opcodes is 566 pages long?
Obviously this x86 thing will perpetually be 6 months from doing anything useful.
I'd have switched to Ruby too if it had innate support for Unicode.
Seems to me that distributing source code under the GPL without the necessary data files to build the application as distributed, is violating the spirit of Open Source.
"Jak II" and "Wipeout Fusion".
Wipeout starts easy enough, but quickly gets harder than the previous games in the series. (Speaking as a long time Wipeout series player...)
Of course, it doesn't help that they fscked up the neGCon controller setup so you have to use the dual shock...