Funny you should mention this, because: 1) when Cisco acquired the patents, the acquired me, too (and about 35 other engineers); and 2) WiLan sued Cisco over them.
Yippee! Someone posted a comment that I happen to have a relevant response for! He made a joke about monkeys walking erect and I happen to know that just such a thing has been all over the news lately! Oh, wait...
This is not QUITE as revolutionary as it first appears. As the article points out, monkeys normally alternate between walking upright and walking on all fours. This one has just chosen to no longer walk on all fours.
So it is not that this macaque has learned a new behavior, but discarded an old one.
Good points, definitely. The x-ray application makes a lot of sense to me.
The question is this: would you rather have a 22" screen at 3840x2400 or a 30" screen at 2560x1600? Particularly when the 30" screen is cheaper? It just seems to me that the majority of people would prefer the 30" screen, though as you point out there may be applications where the resolution is more important than the screen size.
The poster I replied to suggested that this blows away Apple's offerings. I'd say it's a far closer call than that, and indeed Apple will win for some, even if price is not an object... and if it is, Apple's definitely on top.
Hardly. This is only a 22" screen, so all the extra resolution is going into detail, not screen real estate. It seems to me that you really wouldn't want to fit much more on this screen than you would, say, a 1920x1200 22" screen. You won't want to make the fonts any smaller than they already are! So instead, you'll probably just use larger fonts so the result is a smoother picture. But is that really necessary for most practical work?
So I would say that Apple's 30" monitor, which will truly provide more useful screen real estate, is a far better choice for most people than this one.
Maybe this monitor will be useful for folks working on 4K video editing.
Wi-Lan has been fighting Cisco on OFDM patents for years, including some of the fixed wireless stuff we were working on in the late 90s. Their patents are incredibly weak and flawed. Cisco should prevail, though stranger things have happened, so it wouldn't completely surprise me if they settled somehow. I'm sure Wi-Lan would love that.
I RTFA, and followed the link, but didn't see the details mentioned.
That's fair, my information comes from sources other than the article. There have been quite a few threads on this over at AVS Forum, including first-hand reports from people who saw it at Infocomm.
I suspect that the screen will be required to match the bandpass of the dichroic filter which are placed in front of the projector lamp.
Actually, no, the screen will have to be far more restrictive than the dichroics used in projectors, which have nice wide bandpass characteristics. The screen, in contrast, is tuned rather precisely to the spikes present in common projector bulb spectra.
If your projector does not use the same filter frequencies as the screen is designed to reflect, you will end up with color shifts in your output image (not enough red/green/blue, depending on your particular projecors setup).
You are absolutely correct! This screen must actually be designed for the specific type of bulb used. I could be wrong, but I believe the screen being demoed now is designed for a Xenon bulb. More common and less expensive are UHP bulbs; they would need to design a different screen material for this.
Also note that small color shifts induced by this technique can be corrected for by calibration. This can affect the projector's contrast ratio slightly (in either direction, actually) but it shouldn't be too severe.
Fluorescent lighting could really screw these things up, and you might see a red, green, or blue colored screen depending on the phosphor wavelengths.
Right. This may have been the problem that Sony was having with one of the demo sites.
with the exception of the primary bands illuminated by the projector's bulb.
Just to clarify what I meant here, I'm talking about the primary spectral bands. That is, the screen reflects those wavelengths that the projector bulb emits most strongly, and absorbs the rest.
This screen, then, depends on two key assumptions: 1) that the projector bulb's output is concentrated in narrow spectral bands; and 2) the ambient light is not concentrated in those same bands. If I remember correctly, Sony had trouble with one demo setup because assumption #2 failed: the lighting at one show was too close to the projector's bulb output. But for common incandescent lighting I doubt there's an issue.
The technology here is in the screen, not the projector. In particular, the screen absorbs most light, with the exception of the primary bands illuminated by the projector's bulb.
Any projector with the same type of bulb---and in home theater nowadays, there are only two main types (Xenon and UHP), will work with this setup. And Sony could conceivably make a similar screen for the other bulb type too.
There have been so many dupe threads over at AVS Forum (by far the best place to go to discuss anything home theater) that it is getting a bit irritating.
AC, when I read the article, I got the impression that the original poster was asking why it's ever worthwhile to have swap if it is feasible to just buy more RAM. Other people seemed to be suggesting that it was still worthwhile. That's why I posed the question the way I did.
The potential speed increase isn't seen when comparing 1G RAM vs a 2G RAM system. Its comparing a 1G RAM system with a 1G RAM system with swap.
OK, now this is what I thought. However, the original poster was asking the question, "why not just buy more RAM instead of using a swap partition?" and people seemed to be suggesting that it is always useful to have swap, no matter what. Hence my confusion. Thanks for the info.
Seriously, I don't get it. How in the world can swap ever increase performance.
Specifically, suppose I have one computer with 1GB of RAM and 1GB of swap, and another computer with 2GB of RAM and no swap. Under what circumstances will the first computer be any faster?
Now I suppose if the swap is used for other things besides memory space then I could understand it. But then it seems like a simple solution would be to allocate a fraction of RAM for those things. In effect, create a swap partition on a RAM disk:)
Seriously, I'd appreciate some education here, but make sure you answer my specific scenario above if you reply... thanks
The way I understand the testing methodology (and I could be wrong):
--- The files that the testers received were all uncompressed (or compressed with a lossless codec). In other words, they each had been run through their respective lossy encoders and then decoded back to.wav format. There are several reasons for this: 1) it prevents the testers from deducing anything from the file sizes; 2) it eliminates the need for the testers to have access to all the codecs; and 3) it simplifies the design of the ABC/HR+ testing tool.
--- The tests weren't pitting the codecs against each other per se, but rather each against the uncompressed original. So there is no sense in including a lossless codec in the test because, well, it's already there in the form of the control file.
Again I could be wrong about this, so please correct me if I am wrong. In any case, there is no sense in testing FLAC here.
The MPC codec was neck-and-neck with Vorbis most of the time, except for one song by Debussy. What is interesting though is that it only encoded at 91kbps for that song---suggesting that perhaps if it were forced to use more bits it might have scored higher. It seems the heuristics it uses to determine how many bits it needs didn't quite work for that song.
One important tidbit from this story that the poster failed to mention was that this ruling also eliminated the payment of damages, because the plaintiff failed to prove that the defendant received any additional profit as a result of the use of the patented seeds.
I quote: Since there was no evidence that he sprayed Roundup herbicide to reduce the weeks [sic], the majority said, there is no way to conclude that he gained any financial advantage.
More semantic games. A "life" is something that is "alive".
Besides, I did consult the definition of "life" in the dictionary. And again, there are conflicting definitions. And we don't get to choose the one that suits our arguments and ignore the rest.
Actually, the single cell embyro is more of a cancer feeding off the mother.
First of all, the embryo does not implant in the mother and "feed" off of her for a couple of days after conception, at which point it is at blastocyst stage; at least thousands of cells large. But hey that's a technical error, so no big deal.
Secondly, cancer cells are genetically indistinct from their host. Yes they obviously have undergone a genetic mutation but no more so than the many benign mutations our cells often undergo. In contrast, an embryo has a distinct DNA signature indicating clearly that it is a different organism. So to call it a cancer would not be accurate. As for the comparison to a virus---a single-celled embryo is far more complex on the taxonomic scale than a virus, or even a bacterium.
Arguably, "parasite" is a more accurate term. You say you have no problem putting an end to the growth of a parasite; and you define as a "parasite" a living thing that depends on a host to stay alive. Well, an infant for the first several months, even years, of its life depends upon the care of others for its very survival. Does that make them parasites? Are you in agreement with Dr. Singer, then? Or perhaps you would even extend the time period within which parents can kill their infants?
Finally, the basic fact is that you don't get to decide for yourself what constitutes "a life". For example, I could decide that you're not alive, justifying a host of activities that would bring an end to your oxygen processing. (I can't say "kill" here, of course, because it's not killing if you're not alive.) I'm sure you would object to my definition (well, hey, maybe not), and so would the authorities. Which definition should prevail?
Now to be honest with you, I don't believe the "full" human life begins at conception. That's because I believe in the concept of ensoulment: that the body is in fact the host of a soul which is not necessarily present at conception, but rather somewhere later in the development of an embryo. However, while I am confident that ensoulment occurs somewhere within the normal 40-week gestation process, I do not know exactly where. Heck, it is likely different for each child. Thus to avoid murder we must err on the side of safety---at the very least, ratcheting legal abortion way back to, say, the first trimester alone.
I don't make many friends in the pro-life community with such a view, indeed. But I share their cause because the salient issue in the abortion debate is one of life, and not one of choice. As our country's founding documents illustrate, the right to life precedes the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Ooh, fun semantic games. You get to pick the definition that suits your argument. The only problem is, by doing so you lead yourself to contradiction, because it forces you to claim that the fetus is not alive before birth. Surely not even you would suggest that an 8-month old fetus is not alive; and yet that's what your little game forces you to do.
I admit to purposeful overstatement. I certainly concede that not every pro-choicer think life begins at birth. But don't think for a moment you speak for every pro-choicer when you say this. Indeed, some of the strongest defenders of so-called abortion "rights" fully believe that abortion should not be restricted under any circumstances whatsoever.
Furthermore, pro-choicers are required to play semantic games. It is simply indisuputable that life begins at conception. By all biological definitions, even the single-celled embryo is a life, a unique, distinct. So the answer to "when does life begin" is simply not open to debate. Thus pro-abortioners are forced to shift the debate not to the more amorphous discussion of "when is a fetus sufficiently developed to give it the full rights of protection we give to born persons."
In fact, Princeton professor Peter Singer has advocated that parents be given the right to kill their infants up to 28 days after birth. I quote: "Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all." I must give him credit, he takes the pro-choice argument to a radical extreme---but it is an extreme which is entirely consistent with pro-choice logic on "when does life begin."
In practice they prefer to be cautious - an abortion after 8 months would not be defended by any pro-choicer (except when there is danger to the health of the mother), while an abortion after 1 month is nothing special.
To simply ignore the conclusion because it's difficult to make is not caution at all. True caution would be to make the choice that errs on the side of life. After all, 1) as mentioned above, it is indisputable that life is present at all stages; and 2) the right to life trumps the right to liberty.
Where to draw the line is up to everyone, but we usually rely on legislators to set some limits and then stick to them.
Because life is involved the line must be drawn collectively, not individually. After all, once a child is born we give a parent certain latitude on how to discipline and raise their children. But we have our limits---and physical abuse and killing are definitely outside of those limits. We rightly forbid parents from taking such acts.
The same goes with the unborn child. If the killing of the child is not enjoined, what else can be? I mean, we indict women who use illegal drugs while pregnant, on grounds of child endangerment. We are justifiably outraged when someone causes a miscarriage through assault.
Unfortunately, this is not the only problem. With MP3 encoding, and I imagine (though I'm not 100% sure) with AAC encoding as well, each data block contains information affecting the sound not just of its own time slot but also neighboring slots as well. If you encode tracks separately, even if you split them apart very precisely, you cannot necessarily insure that the encoded results will blend smoothly when put together in a gapless fashion.
So if an album is recorded continuously, it needs to be encoded continuously.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no need for it to be reverse engineered. VC-1 is a SMPTE spec.
(well to be fair I've been away from Cisco for 3 years now)
Funny you should mention this, because: 1) when Cisco acquired the patents, the acquired me, too (and about 35 other engineers); and 2) WiLan sued Cisco over them.
Can't be too long. They think they patented all OFDM technology, it would seem.
Two words: McCain. Feingold.
Yippee! Someone posted a comment that I happen to have a relevant response for! He made a joke about monkeys walking erect and I happen to know that just such a thing has been all over the news lately!
Oh, wait...
...and monkeys will start walking erect, too.
Oh, wait.
This is not QUITE as revolutionary as it first appears. As the article points out, monkeys normally alternate between walking upright and walking on all fours. This one has just chosen to no longer walk on all fours.
So it is not that this macaque has learned a new behavior, but discarded an old one.
Good points, definitely. The x-ray application makes a lot of sense to me.
The question is this: would you rather have a 22" screen at 3840x2400 or a 30" screen at 2560x1600? Particularly when the 30" screen is cheaper? It just seems to me that the majority of people would prefer the 30" screen, though as you point out there may be applications where the resolution is more important than the screen size.
The poster I replied to suggested that this blows away Apple's offerings. I'd say it's a far closer call than that, and indeed Apple will win for some, even if price is not an object... and if it is, Apple's definitely on top.
That certainly blows away Apple's new offerings.
Hardly. This is only a 22" screen, so all the extra resolution is going into detail, not screen real estate. It seems to me that you really wouldn't want to fit much more on this screen than you would, say, a 1920x1200 22" screen. You won't want to make the fonts any smaller than they already are! So instead, you'll probably just use larger fonts so the result is a smoother picture. But is that really necessary for most practical work?
So I would say that Apple's 30" monitor, which will truly provide more useful screen real estate, is a far better choice for most people than this one.
Maybe this monitor will be useful for folks working on 4K video editing.
Wi-Lan has been fighting Cisco on OFDM patents for years, including some of the fixed wireless stuff we were working on in the late 90s. Their patents are incredibly weak and flawed. Cisco should prevail, though stranger things have happened, so it wouldn't completely surprise me if they settled somehow. I'm sure Wi-Lan would love that.
I RTFA, and followed the link, but didn't see the details mentioned.
That's fair, my information comes from sources other than the article. There have been quite a few threads on this over at AVS Forum, including first-hand reports from people who saw it at Infocomm.
I suspect that the screen will be required to match the bandpass of the dichroic filter which are placed in front of the projector lamp.
Actually, no, the screen will have to be far more restrictive than the dichroics used in projectors, which have nice wide bandpass characteristics. The screen, in contrast, is tuned rather precisely to the spikes present in common projector bulb spectra.
If your projector does not use the same filter frequencies as the screen is designed to reflect, you will end up with color shifts in your output image (not enough red/green/blue, depending on your particular projecors setup).
You are absolutely correct! This screen must actually be designed for the specific type of bulb used. I could be wrong, but I believe the screen being demoed now is designed for a Xenon bulb. More common and less expensive are UHP bulbs; they would need to design a different screen material for this.
Also note that small color shifts induced by this technique can be corrected for by calibration. This can affect the projector's contrast ratio slightly (in either direction, actually) but it shouldn't be too severe.
Fluorescent lighting could really screw these things up, and you might see a red, green, or blue colored screen depending on the phosphor wavelengths.
Right. This may have been the problem that Sony was having with one of the demo sites.
with the exception of the primary bands illuminated by the projector's bulb.
Just to clarify what I meant here, I'm talking about the primary spectral bands. That is, the screen reflects those wavelengths that the projector bulb emits most strongly, and absorbs the rest.
This screen, then, depends on two key assumptions: 1) that the projector bulb's output is concentrated in narrow spectral bands; and 2) the ambient light is not concentrated in those same bands. If I remember correctly, Sony had trouble with one demo setup because assumption #2 failed: the lighting at one show was too close to the projector's bulb output. But for common incandescent lighting I doubt there's an issue.
The technology here is in the screen, not the projector. In particular, the screen absorbs most light, with the exception of the primary bands illuminated by the projector's bulb.
Any projector with the same type of bulb---and in home theater nowadays, there are only two main types (Xenon and UHP), will work with this setup. And Sony could conceivably make a similar screen for the other bulb type too.
There have been so many dupe threads over at AVS Forum (by far the best place to go to discuss anything home theater) that it is getting a bit irritating.
AC, when I read the article, I got the impression that the original poster was asking why it's ever worthwhile to have swap if it is feasible to just buy more RAM. Other people seemed to be suggesting that it was still worthwhile. That's why I posed the question the way I did.
OK, now this is what I thought. However, the original poster was asking the question, "why not just buy more RAM instead of using a swap partition?" and people seemed to be suggesting that it is always useful to have swap, no matter what. Hence my confusion. Thanks for the info.
Seriously, I don't get it. How in the world can swap ever increase performance.
:)
Specifically, suppose I have one computer with 1GB of RAM and 1GB of swap, and another computer with 2GB of RAM and no swap. Under what circumstances will the first computer be any faster?
Now I suppose if the swap is used for other things besides memory space then I could understand it. But then it seems like a simple solution would be to allocate a fraction of RAM for those things. In effect, create a swap partition on a RAM disk
Seriously, I'd appreciate some education here, but make sure you answer my specific scenario above if you reply... thanks
The way I understand the testing methodology (and I could be wrong):
.wav format. There are several reasons for this: 1) it prevents the testers from deducing anything from the file sizes; 2) it eliminates the need for the testers to have access to all the codecs; and 3) it simplifies the design of the ABC/HR+ testing tool.
--- The files that the testers received were all uncompressed (or compressed with a lossless codec). In other words, they each had been run through their respective lossy encoders and then decoded back to
--- The tests weren't pitting the codecs against each other per se, but rather each against the uncompressed original. So there is no sense in including a lossless codec in the test because, well, it's already there in the form of the control file.
Again I could be wrong about this, so please correct me if I am wrong. In any case, there is no sense in testing FLAC here.
The MPC codec was neck-and-neck with Vorbis most of the time, except for one song by Debussy. What is interesting though is that it only encoded at 91kbps for that song---suggesting that perhaps if it were forced to use more bits it might have scored higher. It seems the heuristics it uses to determine how many bits it needs didn't quite work for that song.
One important tidbit from this story that the poster failed to mention was that this ruling also eliminated the payment of damages, because the plaintiff failed to prove that the defendant received any additional profit as a result of the use of the patented seeds.
I quote: Since there was no evidence that he sprayed Roundup herbicide to reduce the weeks [sic], the majority said, there is no way to conclude that he gained any financial advantage.
More semantic games. A "life" is something that is "alive".
Besides, I did consult the definition of "life" in the dictionary. And again, there are conflicting definitions. And we don't get to choose the one that suits our arguments and ignore the rest.
First of all, the embryo does not implant in the mother and "feed" off of her for a couple of days after conception, at which point it is at blastocyst stage; at least thousands of cells large. But hey that's a technical error, so no big deal.
Secondly, cancer cells are genetically indistinct from their host. Yes they obviously have undergone a genetic mutation but no more so than the many benign mutations our cells often undergo. In contrast, an embryo has a distinct DNA signature indicating clearly that it is a different organism. So to call it a cancer would not be accurate. As for the comparison to a virus---a single-celled embryo is far more complex on the taxonomic scale than a virus, or even a bacterium.
Arguably, "parasite" is a more accurate term. You say you have no problem putting an end to the growth of a parasite; and you define as a "parasite" a living thing that depends on a host to stay alive. Well, an infant for the first several months, even years, of its life depends upon the care of others for its very survival. Does that make them parasites? Are you in agreement with Dr. Singer, then? Or perhaps you would even extend the time period within which parents can kill their infants?
Finally, the basic fact is that you don't get to decide for yourself what constitutes "a life". For example, I could decide that you're not alive, justifying a host of activities that would bring an end to your oxygen processing. (I can't say "kill" here, of course, because it's not killing if you're not alive.) I'm sure you would object to my definition (well, hey, maybe not), and so would the authorities. Which definition should prevail?
Now to be honest with you, I don't believe the "full" human life begins at conception. That's because I believe in the concept of ensoulment: that the body is in fact the host of a soul which is not necessarily present at conception, but rather somewhere later in the development of an embryo. However, while I am confident that ensoulment occurs somewhere within the normal 40-week gestation process, I do not know exactly where. Heck, it is likely different for each child. Thus to avoid murder we must err on the side of safety---at the very least, ratcheting legal abortion way back to, say, the first trimester alone.
I don't make many friends in the pro-life community with such a view, indeed. But I share their cause because the salient issue in the abortion debate is one of life, and not one of choice. As our country's founding documents illustrate, the right to life precedes the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Try again.
Pro-choicers don't think life begins at birth
I admit to purposeful overstatement. I certainly concede that not every pro-choicer think life begins at birth. But don't think for a moment you speak for every pro-choicer when you say this. Indeed, some of the strongest defenders of so-called abortion "rights" fully believe that abortion should not be restricted under any circumstances whatsoever.
Furthermore, pro-choicers are required to play semantic games. It is simply indisuputable that life begins at conception. By all biological definitions, even the single-celled embryo is a life, a unique, distinct. So the answer to "when does life begin" is simply not open to debate. Thus pro-abortioners are forced to shift the debate not to the more amorphous discussion of "when is a fetus sufficiently developed to give it the full rights of protection we give to born persons."
In fact, Princeton professor Peter Singer has advocated that parents be given the right to kill their infants up to 28 days after birth. I quote: "Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all." I must give him credit, he takes the pro-choice argument to a radical extreme---but it is an extreme which is entirely consistent with pro-choice logic on "when does life begin."
In practice they prefer to be cautious - an abortion after 8 months would not be defended by any pro-choicer (except when there is danger to the health of the mother), while an abortion after 1 month is nothing special.
To simply ignore the conclusion because it's difficult to make is not caution at all. True caution would be to make the choice that errs on the side of life. After all, 1) as mentioned above, it is indisputable that life is present at all stages; and 2) the right to life trumps the right to liberty.
Where to draw the line is up to everyone, but we usually rely on legislators to set some limits and then stick to them.
Because life is involved the line must be drawn collectively, not individually. After all, once a child is born we give a parent certain latitude on how to discipline and raise their children. But we have our limits---and physical abuse and killing are definitely outside of those limits. We rightly forbid parents from taking such acts.
The same goes with the unborn child. If the killing of the child is not enjoined, what else can be? I mean, we indict women who use illegal drugs while pregnant, on grounds of child endangerment. We are justifiably outraged when someone causes a miscarriage through assault.
Unfortunately, this is not the only problem. With MP3 encoding, and I imagine (though I'm not 100% sure) with AAC encoding as well, each data block contains information affecting the sound not just of its own time slot but also neighboring slots as well. If you encode tracks separately, even if you split them apart very precisely, you cannot necessarily insure that the encoded results will blend smoothly when put together in a gapless fashion.
So if an album is recorded continuously, it needs to be encoded continuously.