Mail order (catalog or phone) items which cross state lines have never been subject to sales tax;
Maybe where you live. In Virginia and many other states, the seller does not have to collect the tax unless they have a presence in the state, but you are still required to pay the tax when you file your tax forms. There are exemptions if you paid tax on the sale in the seller's state.
If BASEBALL, the most old-fashioned, stodgy sport out there, can stream all games online, there's absolutely no good reason besides stupidity that the NFL, NBA, and other sports don't take advantage of this.
Baseball can stream video better than other sports because for the vast majority of the game, almost nothing MOVES. Chess is another good candidate for cheap streaming video.
If you follow Cuban's argument through, the RIAA could easily claim that it is due $5 per month from you and everyone who got a copy of a song from you illegally . Which puts the damages back where the RIAA wants them.
The mac mini includes firewire and USB2 ports. People using it for a media PC will generally use external hard disks and media capture cards. The EyeTV capture cards seem to be particularly popular -- You can even get HDTV working with a mini.
One of the nice things about a mac is that the non-PVR features of a HTPC, like watching DVDs, playing music, managing your picture library, and burning DVDs are Apple supported best of breed apps.
The patent system can be used for defensive publication but this (usually, ie not in EU,US,UK, at least) doesn't require those presenting the matter for publication to get a patent
Defensive publication only works if the patent office is diligent about recognizing prior art. They issue patents despite prior art all the time. The bogus patent holder then sues and the victim frequently licenses the patent for less than it would cost to fight the patent in court to get it overturned. That's the ??? in the patent scam business plan.
Response time was the reason I returned the LCD I bought and went back to my CRT -- DVD playback was awful.
A response time of 40ms means it takes a pixel 40 milliseconds to change color. At that rate, it can change 1/.040 times per second, or 25 frames/sec if new images are perfectly in sync (and they never are). That's slow enough that most people will notice rapidly changing images bleed into one another as the pixel is given a new value more rapidly than it can change. Thus a 40ms LCD is a poor choice for action games and DVDs. It may be fine for web browsing, word processing, and email.
Newer LCDs typically have 25ms (40 fps), 16ms (62 fps) or even faster response times. Look for them if that's important to you.
The ONLY unique thing about this thing is the streaming of the remote control over the net.
Actually, the unique thing is that it can supposedly stream TV quality images over a much lower bandwidth connection (384kbs) than other systems. It uses a custom card for this. See this Cringely article for another take on it.
I just wonder how many decades it will take and how far behind the United States will have to fall behind the rest of the world before those in power take notice.
It's not those in power that have to notice; it's the sheep that continue to elect them.
So brace yourself geeks, because we don't have a Voice. We are without economic or political power, and we are so small a minority in the democratic whole we can be ignored no matter how loud we yell
Maybe if they helped companies like Nvidia to work on algorithms which would help reduce the blurring effect by adjusting the brightness of a colour which only gets drawn for a milisecond to help reduce the blurring), or something better, it could give them a killer market.. Every gamer on the block would want one.
The blurring you see on most LCDs when gaming or showing movies is a result of the pixel response time. LCDs can only respond so fast to changes. A typical response time for LCDs is 25ms, which is about twice the speed of a CRT. Newer LCDs have improved noticably. 16ms response times are available from many monitor manufacturers and virtually eliminate the ghosting/blurring. I never see the LCD TV specs quote the pixel response time, but I wouldn't buy one slower than 16ms.
But some mathematicians are trying to prove that there's really no difference between 'hard' and 'not hard' problems
If they succeed, won't it be humiliating for those mathematicians that have spent decades studying this problem to find it isn't harder than solving 2 + 2.
png and jpg have different strengths. jpg is great for photographic images. It's one of the reasons virtually every digital camera supports it. jpg is horrible for images with just a few colors or with large areas of exactly the same color, hence screenshots would generally favor png.
png is great for non-photographic images like icons, flow charts, or cartoons. Since it is lossless, it's also a good choice if you are going to be doing processing of the image.
Modchips serve one purpose: to circumvent technology designed to keep your box from playing pirated or otherwise illegal software.
That is certainly a common purpose, but it's not the only one. Mod chips are also used to run purchased software from the "wrong" region, or a different operating system than came with the hardware -- which is now owned by end user, not the manufacturer.
Like P2P, mod chips have substantial non-infringing uses.
Re:I'll be shopping at an Apple Store Tonight
on
A Six-Step Plan for Apple
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's unfortunate that Apple doesn't have competitive pricing for desktop models and other notebooks like they do for the 12" iBook.
On the contrary. Apple isn't competative in the low end, low margin market, but they don't try to be. Try comparing a
Dell Dimension XPS 3.4GHz P4, Windows XP Professional, 512MB RAM, 60 GB ATA disk 128MB ATI Radeon Video, DVD+RW drive with a Powermac dual 1.8 GHz G5, Panther, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB SATA disk, 128MB ATI Radeon Video, DVD-R/CD-RW. They are within about $20 of each other. And it's the PowerMac that's cheaper. And substantially faster.
When Apple moves the G5 down to the iMac line, I expect them be competative at the midrange desktop market as well. I doubt they will even try for the low end, since they would have to start sacrificing features that they and developers can currently count on.
Ahh, the magic of statistics.
Macs seem to have a longer useful lifespan. That means that they can keep the same fraction of desktops-in-use, or even increase, while losing market share as measured by sales.
Say I have a mac that is lasts for 5 years, and you have a windows box that you replace every 2.5 years. We buy our initial machines at the same time. After four years, there have been twice as many windows boxes sold as Mac boxes, just because you bought a new one and I didn't.
As we each continue to use our respective OSs as we upgrade, the Mac fraction of desktops stays unchanged, but the Mac fraction of sales drops.
That's fine for normal proggies but for graphics instensive, CPU optimized code like games, it would take a hell of a lot of CPU horse power to make the games enjoyable under an emulator.
Which is why they wouldn't do it that way. The way to emulate a graphic game on a new architecture is to capture the API calls into your library (in this case directX). The captured calls are then run at fully optimized speed on the new CPU and GPU. Do this for the OS/system calls as well and big chunks of the game would be running at full speed on the new platform.
Emulating x86 instructions on a ppc g5 is not trivial, but it is feasible. Their bigger problem is lack of hard disk. I don't know how many xbox games need significant amounts of disk (levels, save games etc), but if xbox2 doesn't have one, it's pretty hard to emulate it. (Of course, if the whole idea is to force you to have broadband, and to use MSN/XboxLive to serve as your "local" storage, that's feasible too. Maybe I should stop giving them ideas.)
Many years ago, when I was just learning programming, I loved extensible languages. Languages that are extensible the way Lisp and Forth are allow wonderfully expressive core constructs. Want a for loop that runs each iteration in it's own thread? Just add it. You can basically build up your own custom language in which your application can be expressed as "do it".
While this is great for the individual programmer, it can be horrible for multiperson projects, particularly in a commercial setting where the project members come and go. With extensible languages, you can't be sure that what you are reading does what you think it does unless you pretty much understand the entire system.
You can see faint echos of this problem if you've ever encountered C++ code where someone thoughtfully defined "+" or "=" or a cast operation whose behavior caught you by surprise.
Read the line
A a = b.func( c + d); and tell me how many user defined functions I have to understand before I know what is going on. In Java the answer is 1 -- b.func. In a language like C++ it could be 1, 2, 3, 4 or more. In a language so extensible you can write your own loops and variable declarations, multiply the problem by at least 10.
A program gets read much more than it gets written. Just as with prose authors, it's imperative for those software authors among us to write so that our readers understand what is going on. Remember, that reader is most likely to be you in six months.
First, the iPod only supports a limited number of formats, and iTunes should only natively support the same formats as the iPod. This is for a combination of ease of use, user perception, and technical reasons.
Too late. iTunes already natively supports the Apple Lossless codec, but Apple does not support that codec on many iPods. My 10G iPod is only a year and a half old and doesn't support lossless -- even with the latest updates.
Ideally I'd like to losslessly rip my CDs and dynamically encode them in the lossy-codec-de-jour as they are downloaded to the ipod. Then I don't have to re-rip any of my CDs as better codecs are developed.
I'm glad he cleared that up for us. Because this little known company called SGI didn't develop OpenGL back in 1992.
OpenGL predates DirectX even on Windows boxes. Windows NT shipped with OpenGL long before there was a DirectAnything. Microsoft then bought a company called Reality Lab in 1995 that had a Rendermorphics 3D engine. From the press release at the time:
"Microsoft plans to enhance the Reality Lab product line and make it a general-purpose, real-time 3-D API in future versions of its Windows family of operating systems products (beyond the release of Windows(R) 95). The Reality Lab API will complement support for the OpenGL(TM) API, a higher-end API specially suited to professional applications."
And thus was born Direct3D.
The Microsoft position from Microsoft: OpenGL was too constrained and complicated for 3D gaming, and has no sound or peripheral integration anyway. We need something more.
The Microsoft position from opponents: We don't control the OpenGL API. If people write their 3D apps in OpenGL, they can run them anywhere. Come up with a new "standard".
You're coming up to the intersection, the light changes, either because the cycle changes, or because a speeder has triggered it. br> In neither case does the speeder (or anyone else) know where the signal is in its cycle.
Where I live (Herndon, VA, USA) they've had traffic lights like this for years. They are on major roads that have little used side roads. The light is virtually always green for drivers on the major road unless:
1. Someone is speeding more than about 10mph over the limit. 2. Somone is trying to enter the major road from one of the side streets.
It works pretty well at keeping the speed resonable, although still above the posted limit. Anyone willing to REALLY speed gets through the light before it turns red, but I've only seen that a couple of times in 10+ years.
I point this out because when the red light is tripped when there are no cars waiting at a side street, it's pretty obvious it's because of a speeder, and it's usually pretty obvious who it was.
Re:gl pipeline not for raytracing
on
The State of OpenGL
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Most frames in Pixar movies are rendered using some form of ray-tracing.
Technically, no. Renderman (the Pixar renderer) does not perform ray tracing. It uses a scanline renderer that is much faster than any ray tracer I've ever seen. They've been at this for literally decades, and are very good at it. Still, the most complex images in their movies can take many hours -- sometimes more than a day -- to render. The time-to-render doesn't seem to improve much from picture to picture because as computers get faster, they just add complexity to the scene.
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Mail order (catalog or phone) items which cross state lines have never been subject to sales tax;
Maybe where you live. In Virginia and many other states, the seller does not have to collect the tax unless they have a presence in the state, but you are still required to pay the tax when you file your tax forms. There are exemptions if you paid tax on the sale in the seller's state.
If BASEBALL, the most old-fashioned, stodgy sport out there, can stream all games online, there's absolutely no good reason besides stupidity that the NFL, NBA, and other sports don't take advantage of this.
Baseball can stream video better than other sports because for the vast majority of the game, almost nothing MOVES. Chess is another good candidate for cheap streaming video.
If you follow Cuban's argument through, the RIAA could easily claim that it is due $5 per month from you and everyone who got a copy of a song from you illegally . Which puts the damages back where the RIAA wants them.
The mac mini includes firewire and USB2 ports. People using it for a media PC will generally use external hard disks and media capture cards. The EyeTV capture cards seem to be particularly popular -- You can even get HDTV working with a mini.
One of the nice things about a mac is that the non-PVR features of a HTPC, like watching DVDs, playing music, managing your picture library, and burning DVDs are Apple supported best of breed apps.
Defensive publication only works if the patent office is diligent about recognizing prior art. They issue patents despite prior art all the time. The bogus patent holder then sues and the victim frequently licenses the patent for less than it would cost to fight the patent in court to get it overturned. That's the ??? in the patent scam business plan.
I think the American public aswered that question last November.
That's the wrong question. The right question is 'Can the people that want to sell it convince Congress to mandate it?'
Look at the HDTV broadcast flag issue. Consumers don't want it. Hardware manufacturers don't want it. Come July we get it anyway.
A response time of 40ms means it takes a pixel 40 milliseconds to change color. At that rate, it can change 1/.040 times per second, or 25 frames/sec if new images are perfectly in sync (and they never are). That's slow enough that most people will notice rapidly changing images bleed into one another as the pixel is given a new value more rapidly than it can change. Thus a 40ms LCD is a poor choice for action games and DVDs. It may be fine for web browsing, word processing, and email.
Newer LCDs typically have 25ms (40 fps), 16ms (62 fps) or even faster response times. Look for them if that's important to you.
Actually, the unique thing is that it can supposedly stream TV quality images over a much lower bandwidth connection (384kbs) than other systems. It uses a custom card for this. See this Cringely article for another take on it.
It's not those in power that have to notice; it's the sheep that continue to elect them.
You forget we program the voting machines.
The blurring you see on most LCDs when gaming or showing movies is a result of the pixel response time. LCDs can only respond so fast to changes. A typical response time for LCDs is 25ms, which is about twice the speed of a CRT. Newer LCDs have improved noticably. 16ms response times are available from many monitor manufacturers and virtually eliminate the ghosting/blurring. I never see the LCD TV specs quote the pixel response time, but I wouldn't buy one slower than 16ms.
If they succeed, won't it be humiliating for those mathematicians that have spent decades studying this problem to find it isn't harder than solving 2 + 2.
png and jpg have different strengths. jpg is great for photographic images. It's one of the reasons virtually every digital camera supports it. jpg is horrible for images with just a few colors or with large areas of exactly the same color, hence screenshots would generally favor png. png is great for non-photographic images like icons, flow charts, or cartoons. Since it is lossless, it's also a good choice if you are going to be doing processing of the image.
Modchips serve one purpose: to circumvent technology designed to keep your box from playing pirated or otherwise illegal software.
That is certainly a common purpose, but it's not the only one. Mod chips are also used to run purchased software from the "wrong" region, or a different operating system than came with the hardware -- which is now owned by end user, not the manufacturer.
Like P2P, mod chips have substantial non-infringing uses.
It's unfortunate that Apple doesn't have competitive pricing for desktop models and other notebooks like they do for the 12" iBook.
On the contrary.
Apple isn't competative in the low end, low margin market, but they don't try to be. Try comparing a
Dell Dimension XPS 3.4GHz P4, Windows XP Professional, 512MB RAM, 60 GB ATA disk 128MB ATI Radeon Video, DVD+RW drive with a
Powermac dual 1.8 GHz G5, Panther, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB SATA disk, 128MB ATI Radeon Video, DVD-R/CD-RW.
They are within about $20 of each other.
And it's the PowerMac that's cheaper.
And substantially faster.
When Apple moves the G5 down to the iMac line, I expect them be competative at the midrange desktop market as well. I doubt they will even try for the low end, since they would have to start sacrificing features that they and developers can currently count on.
Ahh, the magic of statistics. Macs seem to have a longer useful lifespan. That means that they can keep the same fraction of desktops-in-use, or even increase, while losing market share as measured by sales. Say I have a mac that is lasts for 5 years, and you have a windows box that you replace every 2.5 years. We buy our initial machines at the same time. After four years, there have been twice as many windows boxes sold as Mac boxes, just because you bought a new one and I didn't. As we each continue to use our respective OSs as we upgrade, the Mac fraction of desktops stays unchanged, but the Mac fraction of sales drops.
That's fine for normal proggies but for graphics instensive, CPU optimized code like games, it would take a hell of a lot of CPU horse power to make the games enjoyable under an emulator. Which is why they wouldn't do it that way. The way to emulate a graphic game on a new architecture is to capture the API calls into your library (in this case directX). The captured calls are then run at fully optimized speed on the new CPU and GPU. Do this for the OS/system calls as well and big chunks of the game would be running at full speed on the new platform. Emulating x86 instructions on a ppc g5 is not trivial, but it is feasible. Their bigger problem is lack of hard disk. I don't know how many xbox games need significant amounts of disk (levels, save games etc), but if xbox2 doesn't have one, it's pretty hard to emulate it. (Of course, if the whole idea is to force you to have broadband, and to use MSN/XboxLive to serve as your "local" storage, that's feasible too. Maybe I should stop giving them ideas.)
Or more succinctly, 9 women can't make a baby in one month.
Many years ago, when I was just learning programming, I loved extensible languages. Languages that are extensible the way Lisp and Forth are allow wonderfully expressive core constructs. Want a for loop that runs each iteration in it's own thread? Just add it. You can basically build up your own custom language in which your application can be expressed as "do it".
While this is great for the individual programmer, it can be horrible for multiperson projects, particularly in a commercial setting where the project members come and go. With extensible languages, you can't be sure that what you are reading does what you think it does unless you pretty much understand the entire system.
You can see faint echos of this problem if you've ever encountered C++ code where someone thoughtfully defined "+" or "=" or a cast operation whose behavior caught you by surprise.
Read the line
A a = b.func( c + d);
and tell me how many user defined functions I have to understand before I know what is going on. In Java the answer is 1 -- b.func. In a language like C++ it could be 1, 2, 3, 4 or more. In a language so extensible you can write your own loops and variable declarations, multiply the problem by at least 10.
A program gets read much more than it gets written. Just as with prose authors, it's imperative for those software authors among us to write so that our readers understand what is going on. Remember, that reader is most likely to be you in six months.
No, but all the other rednecks who own macs, own Mac TRUCKS.
First, the iPod only supports a limited number of formats, and iTunes should only natively support the same formats as the iPod. This is for a combination of ease of use, user perception, and technical reasons.
Too late. iTunes already natively supports the Apple Lossless codec, but Apple does not support that codec on many iPods. My 10G iPod is only a year and a half old and doesn't support lossless -- even with the latest updates.
Ideally I'd like to losslessly rip my CDs and dynamically encode them in the lossy-codec-de-jour as they are downloaded to the ipod. Then I don't have to re-rip any of my CDs as better codecs are developed.
I'm glad he cleared that up for us. Because this little known company called SGI didn't develop OpenGL back in 1992.
OpenGL predates DirectX even on Windows boxes. Windows NT shipped with OpenGL long before there was a DirectAnything. Microsoft then bought a company called Reality Lab in 1995 that had a Rendermorphics 3D engine. From the press release at the time:
"Microsoft plans to enhance the Reality Lab product line and make
it a general-purpose, real-time 3-D API in future versions of its
Windows family of operating systems products (beyond the release
of Windows(R) 95). The Reality Lab API will complement support
for the OpenGL(TM) API, a higher-end API specially suited to
professional applications."
And thus was born Direct3D.
The Microsoft position from Microsoft: OpenGL was too constrained and complicated for 3D gaming, and has no sound or peripheral integration anyway. We need something more.
The Microsoft position from opponents: We don't control the OpenGL API. If people write their 3D apps in OpenGL, they can run them anywhere. Come up with a new "standard".
You're coming up to the intersection, the light changes, either because the cycle changes, or because a speeder has triggered it. br>
In neither case does the speeder (or anyone else) know where the signal is in its cycle.
Where I live (Herndon, VA, USA) they've had traffic lights like this for years. They are on major roads that have little used side roads. The light is virtually always green for drivers on the major road unless:
1. Someone is speeding more than about 10mph over the limit.
2. Somone is trying to enter the major road from one of the side streets.
It works pretty well at keeping the speed resonable, although still above the posted limit. Anyone willing to REALLY speed gets through the light before it turns red, but I've only seen that a couple of times in 10+ years.
I point this out because when the red light is tripped when there are no cars waiting at a side street, it's pretty obvious it's because of a speeder, and it's usually pretty obvious who it was.
Most frames in Pixar movies are rendered using some form of ray-tracing.
Technically, no. Renderman (the Pixar renderer) does not perform ray tracing. It uses a scanline renderer that is much faster than any ray tracer I've ever seen. They've been at this for literally decades, and are very good at it. Still, the most complex images in their movies can take many hours -- sometimes more than a day -- to render. The time-to-render doesn't seem to improve much from picture to picture because as computers get faster, they just add complexity to the scene.