That seems to defy history. MS drags its feet and tries to undercut every new web tech it can.
I'm not sure this is true. It's true MS has the reputation for that, but the fact is until Microsoft basically decided with IE6 that there was no need to ever do anything again in the web browser world, that IE6 was perfect and any flaws weren't an issue because the whole world was using IE anyway, Internet Explorer was more standards compliant than its biggest rival, Netscape Communicator 4.x.
This isn't to say IE complied with all standards. It's not to say that Mozilla didn't change things. But anyone in the late nineties who had to code for both Netscape 3.x/4.x and IE noticed that IE at least gave lipservice to modern HTML and CSS, while Netscape kept doing its own thing and getting increasingly creaky as a result. Arguably it was because of the standards gap that the Mozilla Foundation threw out the code for Netscape and started again from scratch.
Microsoft seems perfectly able to adopt standards, they do, however, have an annoying habit of adding their own spin on things. Their use of Kerberos and LDAP is almost completely standard except for some entirely optional extensions and a decision to write a new schema from scratch rather than build upon the POSIX schema. They pioneered the use of CSS in web browsers. They've been willing to adopt HTML5 for video, albeit unhappy with open codecs. When they restarted IE development, IE has genuinely gotten much closer to being standards compliant to the point that you can reasonably suggest every rendering fault of IE is a bug, not an "embrace and extend" tactic (if it's the latter, why do they keep fixing things in later versions?)
Even Lync speaks SIP.
So, actually, I think it's quite possible they'll adopt WebRTC.
One of the major reasons Apple and Microsoft have been anti-WebM was because of "license uncertainty". Given that they manage two of the four major browsers (in Apple's case I'm more concerned about the iOS version of Safari FWIW), this has been a major blow to WebM and a major blow to HTML5 video.
Now, to be fair, Apple has also criticized the power of WebM, but at this point simply arguing that a particular codec isn't as powerful as another one isn't really a good reason to refuse to support it if there's no downside to supporting it. There really isn't a downside to supporting WebM from the point of view of a browser maker if you're no longer concerned about patents.
Because the headline is bullshit. The proposal cannot "ban all online pornography", the EU parliament doesn't have the capability to do that (I mean legally, forget practically.) All it can do is call on member states to do whatever it believes is the right thing to do, and hope they follow.
Yes, it's a stupid proposal. No, nothing's going to get banned as a result.
Imagine instead that the same content can be reached by an infinite (or almost infinite) number of links, such that someone who uploads Die_Hard_7.mov can have it downloaded at:
to name but four. Can you tell me how "focussing on links" is supposed to be "how a DMCA compliance system is supposed to work".
You can't. Because it was never envisaged to work like that. If John uploaded Die_Hard_7.mov, then both for copyright and public sanitary reasons, the copyright holder was supposed to be able to file a take-down notice about the file John put up for download, and the website owner was supposed to take it down.
That's what we're talking about here. As for your example? It's worth noting that nothing in copyright law says that you can upload a file whose copyright belongs to a third party to another third party's webserver, regardless of whether you intend to distribute it to millions of anonymous strangers, or keep it as a back-up. Now, you and I and possibly even the CEO of Sony (though not likely the latter) can make strong arguments about how backups are fair use and none of a copyright owner's business, but from a strictly legal point of view, from the point of view of the actual likely intent of those framing copyright laws, no, they're unlikely - in the extreme - to have thought "We need to focus on links, because otherwise someone who's also violating copyright law but not to the same extent might get caught in the cross fire."
I was actually talking about the Strawberry e, but WHATEVER.
More seriously, I'm inclined to think that the processing power needed for this application means that both the Raspberry Pi and the Nexus One are more than capable of doing it. Indeed, I suspect an old Nokia N800 would have enough power. Or an iPod.
I can't help but feel that in a context where you need very little processing power, but a lot of reliability, a smartphone is a terribly bad idea.
But if it doesn't need a battery what's the advantage of this anyway? I mean, the Nexus seems to have a lot of crap (screen, speakers, cameras - well, I guess they may be useful, GSM/UMTS radio, bluetooth radio, Wi-fi radio, GPS, and probably a crapload more I can't think of at the moment) that seems completely useless for a device intended to control a satellite, while being missing almost everything needed aside from the CPU, memory, and storage.
You know, if only there was some kind of cheap computing device, much much cheaper than a smartphone, that didn't have all that unncessary stuff, maybe something with slightly more in the way of IO features, albeit not enough for this application, maybe with a name that's the combination of a fruit and a mathematical symbol and constant so you know it's going to be high quality?
I'm hesitant to ask, because I'd like to think no corporation would be stupid enough to create a survey that was guaranteed to conform to a preset notion, but did they at least make an attempt to compare the VPN results with a control group of cube dwellers?
(And if they did, did they also do something to avoid a bias being introduced along the lines of "People who slack off might be more inclined to work remotely"?)
YouTube's also spent a lot of time making itself legal and started out with a legitimate premise (not a "We're legal nudge-nudge wink-wink" premise, but an entirely legitimate concept from the get-go - a place to share home movies. Things like the ten minute maximum length of each video, considerably shorter than 90% of TV shows and 100% of movies helped demonstrate that.)
YouTube went to the content industry and worked with them on everything from implementing filters to block identifiable unauthorized content to providing them with royalties should they prefer that over DMCA takedowns.
I just don't see any of that in the MU case. MU was no different from the other major "Upload up to a gigabyte and then distribute a link that anyone can use to access the same content" services. Even their DMCA compliance system was a joke, focussing on links to content (where an infinite number of links pointed to the same file) rather than on content.
Was MU intended to be a facilitator of unauthorized material? I can't answer that, but I know YouTube never intended itself to be, didn't want to be, and took pro-active steps to deal with that situation. That's a major difference in and of itself.
"Linux doesn't work, I used [INSERT INFAMOUS DISTRO FAMOUS FOR BEING A PIECE OF SHIT] here and I spent six years [INSERT TEDIOUS JOB THAT ACTUALLY ISN'T EASY IN WINDOWS/MAC EITHER] just getting it to work" - all of you.
True story: when I bought my first Mac, I installed Jaguar on it, and then thought "Hey, this thing doesn't have a CD/DVD writer, I need to get one". So I trudged down to Staples (or Office Depot or something, I forget), grabbed the cheapest IDE CD/DVD writer they had, went home, installed it, and found - to my amazement - that the Mac said it was a read-only optical drive.
After much Googling, I found that the way to fix this was... find one of the CD/DVD writer device drivers, edit the frickin' binary so it had the same vendor/device ID as that for the writer I bought, and use that.
I believe they fixed this beautiful example of lockinness and dumbassness in later versions of OS X, but, quite honestly, it didn't fit the "Just works" crap that we're told about OS X all the time. (Neither did things like getting weird numeric error messages when something went wrong with the network.)
Meanwhile, I genuinely get fewer problems with Ubuntu these days than Windows or OS X. Ubuntu tends to "just works".
But for future reference, taking a distro that's not even attempting to be a "Just works" operating system (Fedora? Srsly? At least you're not one of the idiots posting "Of course Linux doesn't work, ten years ago I was so frustrated with Slackware that I switched to Macs and have refused to touch Lunix since!") and claiming that it doesn't says more about you stacking the argument than being intellectually honest. There is one distro that matters in the Linux desktop world. It's called Ubuntu.
It just works. You can install it on more hardware without having to tweak anything than you can the latest version of Windows. That's not an exaggeration, you'll be lucky to get a generic, non-OEM, version of Windows to boot on older hardware, and if it does, you'll have to spend a few hours installing device drivers - initially using thumbdrives, because if you think the network's going to work, you have another thing coming.
Oh, ironically I picked an example where Google's first answer is actually Microsoft's documentation for the DeleteFile function. The second search result is from StackOverflow mind you...
His story wasn't rejected. An artist didn't want to work with him.
Sorry, I know Slashdotters want this to be a basic censorship thing, but this is a "You work with this fascist asshole if you want, I choose not to" thing.
I think, when it comes down to it, the average Slashdotter's demand that an artist be forced to work with someone they find reprehensible is the unreasonable position.
SO probably does have better SEO, but you also need to consider the fact that "Windows API function to delete file" is more likely to be used as a phrase for a question, and thus appear as that sequence of words on Stackoverflow, than it's likely to appear in a documentation for whatever the devil it is you use to delete files programmatically on the Windows site.
Of course, you're more likey to get a "sprintf(buffer, "DEL %s", filename); system(buffer)" type answer from Stackoverflow...
There are these things called "Handbags" that are carried by people that have problems with hips and breasts interfering with the usefulness of pockets, which typically can carry a 7" tablet without problems but strain to hold a 10" version.
This about a computer determining what ads to show people based upon educated guesses as to what they might be interested in.
Google is not selling this information. Nobody can go to Google and say "Here's $10, tell me if my neighbor's pregnant" or anything remotely close to it.
The problem here is language. People use language that is similar for:
- Describing a private detective investigating a named person
- Describing a non-sentient computer doing textual analysis in order to provide a service whose results are only known to the person providing the text.
In common with most people, I don't give a rat's ass whether my computer thinks I'm pregnant. If Sergey Brin thinks I'm pregnant, that might be another story, but there's no evidence he has the ability to find out (that is, the tool to find out might be possible to make, but it's unlikely he's made it or has access to it if someone has.) And I certainly would object if Google was sending lists of named, identifiable people it thinks are pregnant to Gerber. But they're not. And I'd be spitting blood and demanding Google be subject to terrorist attacks if Google were sending lists of named, identifiable people it thinks are pregnant to insurance companies. But they're not.
Sure, it's possible this information might be abusable. Likewise, it's possible for me to abuse that 3D printable lower receiver on the Interwebs by doing the work necessary to get that receiver, get a gun anonymously, and shoot someone I don't like with it. But is the fact I could do that if I wanted to a reason to run a FUD and hate campaign against little old me?
You know, I remember when I almost had a conversation about immigration with my friend - at least, I like to think of him as my friend - Aaron Swartz. I'd have said something like "The whole problem with immigration and jobs is rights. The right for a non-immigrant to be treated fairly. The right for an immigrant to be treated as a human being. The whole H1B thing undermines that by discriminating against American who need jobs at home, by recruiting desperate foreigners who can be abused and paid less to do the same work."
I like to think Aaron would have agreed with me on this.
This is an issue only if you consider it important that GNU/Linux be popular on the desktop, rather than Ubuntu and/or Debian and/or CentOS and/or SuSE.
According to the White House response, the relevent parties already had a chat with the LoC, at the normal time, who said "No":
The White House's position detailed in this response builds on some critical thinking done by the President's chief advisory Agency on these matters: the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). For more context and information on the technical aspects of the issue, you can review the NTIA's letter to the Library of Congress' Register of Copyrights (.pdf), voicing strong support for maintaining the previous exception to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for cell phone carrier unlocking.
Contrary to the NTIA's recommendation, the Librarian of Congress ruled that phones purchased after January of this year would no longer be exempted from the DMCA. The law gives the Librarian the authority to establish or eliminate exceptions -- and we respect that process
The response goes on to say - with some agreement - that the LoC feels that the problem is the DMCA, and that legislation would be a better way to move forward than trying to hack around the DMCA all the time.
So I think the Whitehouse is deliberately avoiding the LoC route. It's not clear whether they would prefer the LoC take action, but it's clear that executive policy is that the situation needs to be resolved permanently, in legislation.
You are either oversized, or wear very oversized clothing
No, I am neither.
often a regionally or subculturally-specific style
I'm an office worker. It's possible that outside of the US and Europe, office workers wear clothes with stupidly sized pockets, but it's not very likely.
The vast majority of people can NOT fit a 7" electronic device into their pants pocket and then still sit down without damaging the device or the pocket or both.
The vast majority of people can, and why would sitting down cause any damage? I'm assuming you're not talking about the back pockets, but that's a fair assumption because you'd be out of your tree to put ANY electronic device in your back pocket and then sit on it - size doesn't come in to it.
I'm not sure what you think I was trying to say, but what I said in no way is contradicted by what you're saying, any more than it would have been if I'd said that CDs are recorded as a continuous sequence of digital audio samples, and you'd inerjected that CDs are encoded as EFM with Reed-Solomon encoding.
Of course, at an extremely low level, the grid of pixels is further subdivided into blocks of pixels, and yes, amazingly enough they're not transmitted directly onto a wire, what with wire being incapable of transmitting numbers unless they're encoded in some fashion.
That doesn't make it wrong. And more importantly, in context, transmitting an uncompressed 1920x1080 image sixty times a second does not require an ARM with 2Gb of RAM, a completely ridiculously overengineered design for something that's more simply done with an ASIC.
There are several answers to this. One is that Apple, like most companies, presumably has a lot of designs ready to go that management doesn't quite believe in when seeing the final version.
Another is that the iPad mini's design doesn't actually show signs of being the result of a great amount of thought. It's an older iPad with a smaller screen in a case whose only innovative aspect - if it is to begin with - is the reduction of the bezels on the longer sides. It does strike me as something that Apple's engineers could have put together inside of a month.
But yeah, Jobs knew he's not infallable. The Cube was a beautiful Mac design that was cancelled, with the Mac Mini coming out a couple of years later. The later was essentially the same concept, indeed a much more powerful machine, but aimed (and priced) at a very different market. And it was a success.
Jobs oversaw the development of both. It's not impossible to imagine that the iPad mini would have happened under his watch. I just don't think it did.
My Kindle Fire (7") fits in my trouser(s) pockets just fine, indeed that's where I carry it most of the time. Where is this myth that 7" is "too big for pockets" coming from? A shirt pocket perhaps, but 7" isn't that much bigger than many mobile phones.
A tablet should be able to go whereever you'd take a notebook (the paper kind, obviously.) That's why the iPad was ridiculously stupidly oversized from the get-go, and is one of the reasons why I'm still baffled it sold as well as it did. I am not surprised that the "iPad mini" has taken off by storm, despite the poor spec and high price. It's the first useful iPad, and the popularity of it reflects that.
No, it's not transcoding, it's either copying or decoding. You can't transmit compressed video over HDMI. HDMI is a raw digital feed - that is, grids of pixels are sent for every frame.
It's copying if TFA is wrong. It's decoding if they're (completely or mostly - Airplay might not be involved but it might be an Airplay like protocol over USB) right.
I tend to use my CPU to do the re-encoding myself, I find my hard drive (and the SATA protocol) just isn't Turing complete and, as a result, is incapable of converting something to H.264.
RPM is about access times, not about data rate. Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion. For that reason, and the high cost of SSD storage per gigabyte, I can't see any reason on Earth why DVRs would switch over.
I'm not saying Panic is right. But I am saying that their explanation, at least, sounds like it's going in the right direction, whereas it would be extraordinarily overengineered for this thing to be there solely to convert from one DRM system to another.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure this is true. It's true MS has the reputation for that, but the fact is until Microsoft basically decided with IE6 that there was no need to ever do anything again in the web browser world, that IE6 was perfect and any flaws weren't an issue because the whole world was using IE anyway, Internet Explorer was more standards compliant than its biggest rival, Netscape Communicator 4.x.
This isn't to say IE complied with all standards. It's not to say that Mozilla didn't change things. But anyone in the late nineties who had to code for both Netscape 3.x/4.x and IE noticed that IE at least gave lipservice to modern HTML and CSS, while Netscape kept doing its own thing and getting increasingly creaky as a result. Arguably it was because of the standards gap that the Mozilla Foundation threw out the code for Netscape and started again from scratch.
Microsoft seems perfectly able to adopt standards, they do, however, have an annoying habit of adding their own spin on things. Their use of Kerberos and LDAP is almost completely standard except for some entirely optional extensions and a decision to write a new schema from scratch rather than build upon the POSIX schema. They pioneered the use of CSS in web browsers. They've been willing to adopt HTML5 for video, albeit unhappy with open codecs. When they restarted IE development, IE has genuinely gotten much closer to being standards compliant to the point that you can reasonably suggest every rendering fault of IE is a bug, not an "embrace and extend" tactic (if it's the latter, why do they keep fixing things in later versions?)
Even Lync speaks SIP.
So, actually, I think it's quite possible they'll adopt WebRTC.
One of the major reasons Apple and Microsoft have been anti-WebM was because of "license uncertainty". Given that they manage two of the four major browsers (in Apple's case I'm more concerned about the iOS version of Safari FWIW), this has been a major blow to WebM and a major blow to HTML5 video.
Now, to be fair, Apple has also criticized the power of WebM, but at this point simply arguing that a particular codec isn't as powerful as another one isn't really a good reason to refuse to support it if there's no downside to supporting it. There really isn't a downside to supporting WebM from the point of view of a browser maker if you're no longer concerned about patents.
Because the headline is bullshit. The proposal cannot "ban all online pornography", the EU parliament doesn't have the capability to do that (I mean legally, forget practically.) All it can do is call on member states to do whatever it believes is the right thing to do, and hope they follow.
Yes, it's a stupid proposal. No, nothing's going to get banned as a result.
Imagine instead that the same content can be reached by an infinite (or almost infinite) number of links, such that someone who uploads Die_Hard_7.mov can have it downloaded at:
1. http://1.aharmatey.com/777/Die_Hard_7.mov
2. http://bob.aharmatey.com/777/Die_Hard_7.mov
3. http://www.aharmatey.com/777/Die_Hard_7.mov?src=100
4. http://1.aharmatey.com/777/
to name but four. Can you tell me how "focussing on links" is supposed to be "how a DMCA compliance system is supposed to work".
You can't. Because it was never envisaged to work like that. If John uploaded Die_Hard_7.mov, then both for copyright and public sanitary reasons, the copyright holder was supposed to be able to file a take-down notice about the file John put up for download, and the website owner was supposed to take it down.
That's what we're talking about here. As for your example? It's worth noting that nothing in copyright law says that you can upload a file whose copyright belongs to a third party to another third party's webserver, regardless of whether you intend to distribute it to millions of anonymous strangers, or keep it as a back-up. Now, you and I and possibly even the CEO of Sony (though not likely the latter) can make strong arguments about how backups are fair use and none of a copyright owner's business, but from a strictly legal point of view, from the point of view of the actual likely intent of those framing copyright laws, no, they're unlikely - in the extreme - to have thought "We need to focus on links, because otherwise someone who's also violating copyright law but not to the same extent might get caught in the cross fire."
I was actually talking about the Strawberry e, but WHATEVER.
More seriously, I'm inclined to think that the processing power needed for this application means that both the Raspberry Pi and the Nexus One are more than capable of doing it. Indeed, I suspect an old Nokia N800 would have enough power. Or an iPod.
I can't help but feel that in a context where you need very little processing power, but a lot of reliability, a smartphone is a terribly bad idea.
But if it doesn't need a battery what's the advantage of this anyway? I mean, the Nexus seems to have a lot of crap (screen, speakers, cameras - well, I guess they may be useful, GSM/UMTS radio, bluetooth radio, Wi-fi radio, GPS, and probably a crapload more I can't think of at the moment) that seems completely useless for a device intended to control a satellite, while being missing almost everything needed aside from the CPU, memory, and storage.
You know, if only there was some kind of cheap computing device, much much cheaper than a smartphone, that didn't have all that unncessary stuff, maybe something with slightly more in the way of IO features, albeit not enough for this application, maybe with a name that's the combination of a fruit and a mathematical symbol and constant so you know it's going to be high quality?
I'm hesitant to ask, because I'd like to think no corporation would be stupid enough to create a survey that was guaranteed to conform to a preset notion, but did they at least make an attempt to compare the VPN results with a control group of cube dwellers?
(And if they did, did they also do something to avoid a bias being introduced along the lines of "People who slack off might be more inclined to work remotely"?)
YouTube's also spent a lot of time making itself legal and started out with a legitimate premise (not a "We're legal nudge-nudge wink-wink" premise, but an entirely legitimate concept from the get-go - a place to share home movies. Things like the ten minute maximum length of each video, considerably shorter than 90% of TV shows and 100% of movies helped demonstrate that.)
YouTube went to the content industry and worked with them on everything from implementing filters to block identifiable unauthorized content to providing them with royalties should they prefer that over DMCA takedowns.
I just don't see any of that in the MU case. MU was no different from the other major "Upload up to a gigabyte and then distribute a link that anyone can use to access the same content" services. Even their DMCA compliance system was a joke, focussing on links to content (where an infinite number of links pointed to the same file) rather than on content.
Was MU intended to be a facilitator of unauthorized material? I can't answer that, but I know YouTube never intended itself to be, didn't want to be, and took pro-active steps to deal with that situation. That's a major difference in and of itself.
"Linux doesn't work, I used [INSERT INFAMOUS DISTRO FAMOUS FOR BEING A PIECE OF SHIT] here and I spent six years [INSERT TEDIOUS JOB THAT ACTUALLY ISN'T EASY IN WINDOWS/MAC EITHER] just getting it to work" - all of you.
True story: when I bought my first Mac, I installed Jaguar on it, and then thought "Hey, this thing doesn't have a CD/DVD writer, I need to get one". So I trudged down to Staples (or Office Depot or something, I forget), grabbed the cheapest IDE CD/DVD writer they had, went home, installed it, and found - to my amazement - that the Mac said it was a read-only optical drive.
After much Googling, I found that the way to fix this was... find one of the CD/DVD writer device drivers, edit the frickin' binary so it had the same vendor/device ID as that for the writer I bought, and use that.
I believe they fixed this beautiful example of lockinness and dumbassness in later versions of OS X, but, quite honestly, it didn't fit the "Just works" crap that we're told about OS X all the time. (Neither did things like getting weird numeric error messages when something went wrong with the network.)
Meanwhile, I genuinely get fewer problems with Ubuntu these days than Windows or OS X. Ubuntu tends to "just works".
But for future reference, taking a distro that's not even attempting to be a "Just works" operating system (Fedora? Srsly? At least you're not one of the idiots posting "Of course Linux doesn't work, ten years ago I was so frustrated with Slackware that I switched to Macs and have refused to touch Lunix since!") and claiming that it doesn't says more about you stacking the argument than being intellectually honest. There is one distro that matters in the Linux desktop world. It's called Ubuntu. It just works. You can install it on more hardware without having to tweak anything than you can the latest version of Windows. That's not an exaggeration, you'll be lucky to get a generic, non-OEM, version of Windows to boot on older hardware, and if it does, you'll have to spend a few hours installing device drivers - initially using thumbdrives, because if you think the network's going to work, you have another thing coming.
Oh, ironically I picked an example where Google's first answer is actually Microsoft's documentation for the DeleteFile function. The second search result is from StackOverflow mind you...
His story wasn't rejected. An artist didn't want to work with him.
Sorry, I know Slashdotters want this to be a basic censorship thing, but this is a "You work with this fascist asshole if you want, I choose not to" thing.
I think, when it comes down to it, the average Slashdotter's demand that an artist be forced to work with someone they find reprehensible is the unreasonable position.
SO probably does have better SEO, but you also need to consider the fact that "Windows API function to delete file" is more likely to be used as a phrase for a question, and thus appear as that sequence of words on Stackoverflow, than it's likely to appear in a documentation for whatever the devil it is you use to delete files programmatically on the Windows site.
Of course, you're more likey to get a "sprintf(buffer, "DEL %s", filename); system(buffer)" type answer from Stackoverflow...
I get a message saying they've discontinued the site blocking service. Sad squiggleslash is sad.
There are these things called "Handbags" that are carried by people that have problems with hips and breasts interfering with the usefulness of pockets, which typically can carry a 7" tablet without problems but strain to hold a 10" version.
No, they're not.
This about a computer determining what ads to show people based upon educated guesses as to what they might be interested in.
Google is not selling this information. Nobody can go to Google and say "Here's $10, tell me if my neighbor's pregnant" or anything remotely close to it.
The problem here is language. People use language that is similar for:
- Describing a private detective investigating a named person
- Describing a non-sentient computer doing textual analysis in order to provide a service whose results are only known to the person providing the text.
In common with most people, I don't give a rat's ass whether my computer thinks I'm pregnant. If Sergey Brin thinks I'm pregnant, that might be another story, but there's no evidence he has the ability to find out (that is, the tool to find out might be possible to make, but it's unlikely he's made it or has access to it if someone has.) And I certainly would object if Google was sending lists of named, identifiable people it thinks are pregnant to Gerber. But they're not. And I'd be spitting blood and demanding Google be subject to terrorist attacks if Google were sending lists of named, identifiable people it thinks are pregnant to insurance companies. But they're not.
Sure, it's possible this information might be abusable. Likewise, it's possible for me to abuse that 3D printable lower receiver on the Interwebs by doing the work necessary to get that receiver, get a gun anonymously, and shoot someone I don't like with it. But is the fact I could do that if I wanted to a reason to run a FUD and hate campaign against little old me?
You know, I remember when I almost had a conversation about immigration with my friend - at least, I like to think of him as my friend - Aaron Swartz. I'd have said something like "The whole problem with immigration and jobs is rights. The right for a non-immigrant to be treated fairly. The right for an immigrant to be treated as a human being. The whole H1B thing undermines that by discriminating against American who need jobs at home, by recruiting desperate foreigners who can be abused and paid less to do the same work."
I like to think Aaron would have agreed with me on this.
This is an issue only if you consider it important that GNU/Linux be popular on the desktop, rather than Ubuntu and/or Debian and/or CentOS and/or SuSE.
GNU/Linux may be fragmented, but Ubuntu isn't.
The response goes on to say - with some agreement - that the LoC feels that the problem is the DMCA, and that legislation would be a better way to move forward than trying to hack around the DMCA all the time.
So I think the Whitehouse is deliberately avoiding the LoC route. It's not clear whether they would prefer the LoC take action, but it's clear that executive policy is that the situation needs to be resolved permanently, in legislation.
No, I am neither.
I'm an office worker. It's possible that outside of the US and Europe, office workers wear clothes with stupidly sized pockets, but it's not very likely.
The vast majority of people can, and why would sitting down cause any damage? I'm assuming you're not talking about the back pockets, but that's a fair assumption because you'd be out of your tree to put ANY electronic device in your back pocket and then sit on it - size doesn't come in to it.
I'm not sure what you think I was trying to say, but what I said in no way is contradicted by what you're saying, any more than it would have been if I'd said that CDs are recorded as a continuous sequence of digital audio samples, and you'd inerjected that CDs are encoded as EFM with Reed-Solomon encoding.
Of course, at an extremely low level, the grid of pixels is further subdivided into blocks of pixels, and yes, amazingly enough they're not transmitted directly onto a wire, what with wire being incapable of transmitting numbers unless they're encoded in some fashion.
That doesn't make it wrong. And more importantly, in context, transmitting an uncompressed 1920x1080 image sixty times a second does not require an ARM with 2Gb of RAM, a completely ridiculously overengineered design for something that's more simply done with an ASIC.
There are several answers to this. One is that Apple, like most companies, presumably has a lot of designs ready to go that management doesn't quite believe in when seeing the final version.
Another is that the iPad mini's design doesn't actually show signs of being the result of a great amount of thought. It's an older iPad with a smaller screen in a case whose only innovative aspect - if it is to begin with - is the reduction of the bezels on the longer sides. It does strike me as something that Apple's engineers could have put together inside of a month.
But yeah, Jobs knew he's not infallable. The Cube was a beautiful Mac design that was cancelled, with the Mac Mini coming out a couple of years later. The later was essentially the same concept, indeed a much more powerful machine, but aimed (and priced) at a very different market. And it was a success.
Jobs oversaw the development of both. It's not impossible to imagine that the iPad mini would have happened under his watch. I just don't think it did.
My Kindle Fire (7") fits in my trouser(s) pockets just fine, indeed that's where I carry it most of the time. Where is this myth that 7" is "too big for pockets" coming from? A shirt pocket perhaps, but 7" isn't that much bigger than many mobile phones.
A tablet should be able to go whereever you'd take a notebook (the paper kind, obviously.) That's why the iPad was ridiculously stupidly oversized from the get-go, and is one of the reasons why I'm still baffled it sold as well as it did. I am not surprised that the "iPad mini" has taken off by storm, despite the poor spec and high price. It's the first useful iPad, and the popularity of it reflects that.
No, it's not transcoding, it's either copying or decoding. You can't transmit compressed video over HDMI. HDMI is a raw digital feed - that is, grids of pixels are sent for every frame.
It's copying if TFA is wrong. It's decoding if they're (completely or mostly - Airplay might not be involved but it might be an Airplay like protocol over USB) right.
I tend to use my CPU to do the re-encoding myself, I find my hard drive (and the SATA protocol) just isn't Turing complete and, as a result, is incapable of converting something to H.264.
RPM is about access times, not about data rate. Movies are about shoving massive amounts of data to the drive in a linear fashion. For that reason, and the high cost of SSD storage per gigabyte, I can't see any reason on Earth why DVRs would switch over.
Does an implementation of HDCP require 2G of RAM?
I'm not saying Panic is right. But I am saying that their explanation, at least, sounds like it's going in the right direction, whereas it would be extraordinarily overengineered for this thing to be there solely to convert from one DRM system to another.