The W3C are the browser manufacturers. This is their standard.
The design of this "DRM scheme" isn't an accident, it requires each DRM vendor cooperate with each individual browser manufacturer, guaranteeing that minor and community developed browsers never see the ability to show commercial videos. This represents a hijacking of the W3C to lock out future competitors. You can't even build a new browser based upon Blink or WebKit now that can display all the same content as Chrome or Safari, they just made an end-run around the GPL to ensure their "open source" code is useless to potential competitors.
They love this standard. Don't kid yourself otherwise.
I understand what you're saying, but in this case the terms are fake. Yes, technically EDGE was 256kbps, but when T-Mobile announced what people call EDGE speeds for throttled connections, the speed was about 64kbps. Likewise T-Mobile called the 256kbps throttled service "3G".
The justification, I suppose, is that 256kbps is the minimum speed you can call "3G". (As an aside, EDGE is actually technically 3G - people rarely call it that because it sucked, but it fulfilled the ITU/etc technical criteria for IMT-2000, the specification that's normally cited as the technical definition of 3G.)
I live in South Florida and I'm a happy T-Mobile user. Absolutely nothing you've said describes my experience with the operator. I saw absolutely no outages during Irma.
I'm not sure if you're making it up, if you used T-Mobile a decade ago and think they haven't improved since, or if you have less... virtuous motives... but basically what you've written is false.
3G. Bear in mind though that 3G is something like 256-512kbps, it's better than EDGE, but it's not suitable for, say, streaming video. In some ways this made T-Mobile One a downgrade from T-Mobile's previous offerings, as they allowed unlimited video with tethering (didn't come out of your data cap) if you used Binge On.
Every time EME comes up, a sizable number of Slashdotters announce they support it because "it's a DRM standard" and it means the end of plug-ins like Flash.
It is not a DRM standard. It's a standard for communication with plug-ins, known in this standard as CDMs.
And those plug-ins aren't like the old Netscape plug-ins, that worked (at the time) with every browser (except IE), with different versions only required for each CPU architecture and operating system combination. You won't be able to use your "Adobe DRM" plug-in for Edge under Firefox. In fact, every single browser, CPU, and operating system combination will require its own plug-in. Don't have one for your favorite browser? You're out of luck.
This isn't a standard, it's a non-standard. It's actually worse than Flash.
...but is different from a regular train crash. There are rarely more than a handful of deaths on train crashes, even at speed. And Hyperloop is being aimed at shutting down High Speed Train projects (the original target was CaHSR, and the NIMBYs in Florida are trying to argue it should be used to prevent All Aboard Florida), not airliners.
Cricket is an AT&T brand. Virgin is an MVNO that currently uses the Sprint network. "Roaming", in the US, is something people worried about in the 1990s when there were 600 different AMPS networks rather than four nationwide LTE networks.
The current Firefox search bar is redundant since most of its features can be performed by the URL address bar.
No, it's not redundant. The search bar/URL address bar split permits some level of privacy as what's entered on the URL bar isn't sent to a search engine, and what's placed in the search bar is, in real time.
That's a significant difference, significant enough that it absolutely should be removed from the Slashdot summary, because the summary re-enforces the idea that getting rid of it is OK because "they're the same" when they're not.
Mozilla just has to fuck up tabs now and I'll switch to Chrome. I cannot believe the level of contempt these idiots have for their own users - if you're trying to compete with another browser, you don't build a clone of it, especially when that means ditching every feature that makes your browser better, because the only time you can compete when building clones of rival products is on price, and Chrome is already free.
In practice, making Firefox a clone of Chrome is giving users of Firefox the middle finger, not extending an invite to those who prefer Chrome already.
No, he's right and you're kind of admitting it ironically by promoting an "official" definition. You claim that this "frequently does not coincide with" (blah blah) but the reality is that nobody has ever said "I agree with SJWs", or "I agree with SJWs, I just wish that some of them would promote social justice through their actions."
If your "official" definition had any truth to it, people would say the latter. They don't. What they say is "OMG! SJWs are destroying working/open source/politics/cons/parties/TV and movies/Slashdot" by saying things like "You shouldn't really be trying to chat up every female co-worker" or "It does appear that despite one survey saying otherwise, the vast majority of surveys that suggest women are paid less than men for equivalent work are true." and things like that!"
If the problem were hypocrisy nobody would give a shit because you'd still agree with the central issue SJWs are raising. Just as nobody gets their panties in a wad because a politician has called for more spending on healthcare, simply because you could probably claim they don't do enough themselves to bring that about. The problem is the issue they're raising.
If it isn't, why does everyone, literally everyone, who uses the term SJW, also argue against feminism, anti-racism, and movements that try to lift up the disadvantaged?
Not really, it's something we do occasionally, not all the time including at completely inappropriate venues.
If you really think it's reasonable to be "trying to get laid" while at work, then look forward to a lifetime of short employment lifespans. Also look forward to becoming incredibly unpopular with just about everyone that ever meets you, male or female.
Are you saying there was an email analog or there wasn't? Sorry, it's not clear from your comment ("You are mistaken" vs "there was instant messaging")
I think UUCP ended up being developed in the early eighties, but that's besides the point: email doesn't necessarily have to leave a machine to be email. I find it hard to believe that, for example, MULTICS, which was designed by telephone companies in the 1960s as a massively multiuser operating system, didn't have an interuser messaging feature, whether it was called "mail" or something else.
One day I'll have to download MULTICS and take a look at it. Supposedly it's the most influential operating system ever, not because everyone duplicated it, but because everyone took care to learn from its errors...
With DACA, Obama was pretty much trying to create new law where none existed before.
It was more of a "We're not going to enforce the law under this narrow set of circumstances, which we can justify because aside from anything else we don't have the power to fully enforce the law against everyone, and we have quite a bit of discretion."
One note: part of the reason why there's no law explicitly protecting Dreamers is that Congress is completely dysfunctional, and while there was a majority (inside Congress and with the public in general) in favor of, say, what Marco Rubio was trying to do, there was no practical way to get it passed. There's talk of another attempt to do so, but tying it to something utterly poisonous to Democrats (say, Wall funding), which will again ensure it's sunk.
Trump is but one horrible character in a cast of Washington's worst. If you want to get this fixed, it's probably time to lobby Congress, but don't expect anything to actually happen.
Close. It's actually a big pile of bollocks. There are lots of opinions flying around about strong AI right now. It's a good time to have the conversation because it's still a good way off.
Sure, right now we should have a calm measured discussion about realistic consequences of bad AI. What part of "OMG KILLBOTS ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL" is a calm measured discussion about realistic consequences of bad AI? Because that's what Musk is doing, and you can call my saying that "bollocks" as much as you want, it doesn't change the fact that this is what he's doing.
Or perhaps you're agreeing we should be all OMG KILLBOTS ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL, in which case lie down, take a pill, and stop fucking up the calm, measured, discussion the rest of us want about the realistic consequences of bad AI.
If it does get created, you don't want Dear Leader Putin to have it first. Seriously.
Probably not, but that would imply that Musk's aim is to ensure the US gets Ultron... uh, I mean Killbots, rather than the baddies... uh, I mean Ruskies... sorry, I mean Russia.
That doesn't appear to be the intent, rather it's to wave hands hysterically screaming "OMG KILLBOTS ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL."
No, I think it's a little closer. Supposedly Robert Downey Jr based his portrayal of Tony Stark (Iron Man - do I really need to add this?) on Elon Musk. In one of the more recent Iron Man movies, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Stark comes into the possession of a very advanced AI, which turns out, because this is Hollywood and not real life Musk, to be malignant and wants to take over the world/destroy it/whatever it is supervillains do.
Shortly after the release of Age of Ultron, all of a sudden Elon Musk gets fearful of AI, and announces OpenAI, a project to supposedly contain the "threat" of Artificial Intelligence.
Yes, Musk watched a movie because one of the characters is supposedly based on him, and he took it seriously.
Now, I know what you're about to say: "That's a bit of a stretch Squiggie, I mean, it's probably just a coincidence." OK, then, riddle me this: AI is being used increasingly in the real world, and presenting threats. Like privacy, and security. People are sticking microphones in their homes attached to giant AI clusters presenting ample opportunities for Big Data analysis of their very lives.
Is this what OpenAI is about? Or is it about KILLER KILLBOTS and AIs trying to RULE THE WORLD, like in that f---ing Joss Whedon movie?
I honestly think that'd be a better solution. I'm a little bothered by Vermont's decision to make renewal dependent upon this kind of obligation. While I'm no fan of Comcast, I honestly think we need to be immensely careful on how we regulate infrastructure companies. If the government's belief is that private enterprise cannot do the job, the solution isn't to hack on a set of obligations to an entity that requires profits to be sustainable, it should instead be filling in the gaps.
This kind of over-regulation is, in part, what killed the railroads in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the time it was just assumed you could pack mandate on top of mandate with that industry because the companies were large and superficially profitable. The railroads were forced to continue services that had no chance of profitability, and were put through bureaucratic hurdles so huge that they actually started running down profitable services that they thought might become unprofitable, just so that the paperwork could start to get them closed.
If Comcast wasn't so unpopular, we wouldn't have so many fans on Slashdot of forcing them to do this. But I honestly don't think it's a good idea. Let's see Vermont fund its own infrastructure. They could even tax Comcast and other telecommunications franchisees to pay for it.
Apparently some IMAX theatres had sign saying "there's nothing wrong with our sound, the film is supposed to sound that way"
That was largely because how loud the movie was. A lot of people misinterpreted it as meaning "You're not supposed to be able to hear the dialog" but actually in the theater we went to the dialog was fine and crystal clear, which tells me the audio was widely fucked up, and nobody cared.
Nolan is partially to blame in the sense that, for example, George Lucas spent much of the 1980s making sure the Star Wars movies actually sounded good in theaters, actually sending people out to test and certify them and making sure they had certain standards, whereas Nolan seems to have just told the IMAX theaters in particular "Oh, it's supposed to be loud", and not bothered to instruct them on the quality.
The dialog is important, If it wasn't it wouldn't be in the film. There are certain scenes in Dunkirk where it's very important to the message Nolan is trying to express. I find it bizarre theaters are using the "It's supposed to be loud!" excuse to fuck up the dialog.
If you're suicidal, this is great logic, because the chances are at 60mph not only will you not be killed, you won't even be injured.
60mph train crashes have happened many times in history, but in the last 100 years or so very few have resulted in the majority of passengers being killed or seriously injured.
To be clear: there's usually several deaths in a 60mph crash, but it's usually because of the specific circumstances of the crash (for example, a front most coach in a head-on collision), rather than distributed evenly throughout the train.
At what speed do deaths become common? Even much faster trains like in the recent Philadelphia train derailment, which happened at 102mph, resulted in just eight deaths out of 238 passengers (most people were injured, but like I said, 102mph, not 60mph); similarly the Great Heck train crash in the UK in 2001 involved a train running at 88mph crashing into a freight train at 54mph (effectively a head on collision at 142mph):: 10 deaths, 82 injuries, with 7 people completely unharmed.
Rail is probably the safest form of powered transportation today, and it's unlikely that'll change any time soon.
Basically, if you're using any other file systems, on any of your computers, Apple is going to convert them to APFS.
Have a brand new Mac Pro running the very latest Mac OS X? It'll upgrade automatically.
Still running a Mac Plus from 1985? You'll be mailed replacement System 6 disks.
Have a DEC PDP-11 running RSX-11? They'll send an engineer around to install a patched version that uses APFS instead.
Do you have a Commodore VIC 20 sitting in your closet? They'll come over and install a new ROM that treats the tape drive as a block device and maintains a APFS file system on it.
Abacus? They'll actually send you some APFS formatted beads.
Hi, squiggleslash here, to give you another insight on why things are the way they are, here to add my 2c to any conversation, on any subject. As always, a lot of things to cover today, but I want to focus on just one comment in particular, and that's from fluffernutter, who writes "I find videos horribly inefficient at relaying information. Maybe it's because I'm a fast reader, or I can skim for certain words. Videos for the sake of entertainment, fine, but for the sake of learning unless it's something highly visual I would way rather read it. If I click on a news story and it's a video I exit out. Not worth my time to consume it."
Well, fluffernutter, you're not the only one, but there's another factor I think you should consider to, and that's the format.
You see, when we write, we're typically very careful in what we write, we know the more words about irrelevant topics we add, the harder it is to follow our arguments. We have to be concise.
Concise
...and that leads to an entirely different way of imparting information. Also unlike video, we don't have a single channel, we can impart related concepts, such as ways to encourage people to share our content with others, in graphical form outside of the main body of whatever it is we're trying to communicate.
Other channels
...and that means when you read something, typically you can get it in a few seconds rather than a video where you have to listen to a lot of information that's just completely unrelated to whatever it was you were interested in before you hear what you need to hear.
So did I give you a useful answer? Hey, if you fluffernutter or anyone else on Slashdot wants to give me an answer, just hit the "Reply" button underneath this text, and let's hear what you have to say.
Reply or email
...and remember, you can check out my channel by going to the word "squiggleslash" just above this comment and clicking on it. Don't forget to friend me for more of my stunning insight and interesting posts.
Well kind of, it's too early to say he is the next Hitler, but I draw the line at suggesting comparisons are out of the question. The fact it's merely too early, something that couldn't be said of any other President in living memory, rather than ridiculous, is by itself worrying.
When Trump decided to scapegoat immigrants and smear immigrants and Muslims, and when he endorsed violence against protestors, and when he did all of this while apparently embracing the idea of imprisoning his political rival, it was raising enough red flags for any comparisons with Hitler to be forgivable. He certainly has gone out of his way to look like a fascist. The question, still unanswered, is how far he'll go.
I know you're getting push back on the comparisons and it's important to seem "reasonable", but you can do that without suggesting Trump isn't a long way down a dark and frightening road, and that we shouldn't fear that or raise comparisons with others who have been on that road.
Streaming is better quality on this side of the pond too, though not for the same reason:
- Broadcast TV, which very few people use, is ATSC which is MPEG 2 based. While H.264 appeared in the standard in the late 200xes, it's unused, very few TVs support it. ATSC only supports 1920x1080i/30, 1280x720p/60, and some SD resolutions. To make matters worse, ATSC is very vulnerable to bad weather and other sources of interference, and this is 100% due to a "NIH/America is different" attitude by the FCC. When it works, it's moderately good quality, but still manages to be slightly inferior to a VUDU/Netflix/etc stream at 1/3 of the bitrate.
- Cable and Satellite are worse, they usually are based off of the MPEG 2 streams broadcast by the TV stations, recompressed as H.264 (adding a whole new set of artifacts), and over compressed at that. Some networks (I believe Dish does this) also cut 1920x1080 to 1440x1080.
- Many cable and satellite boxes then upconvert the signal, regardless of source, to 1080i/30 ot 720p/60, making it harder for the reverse pulldown logic built into most flat panels to remove interlacing artifacts without introducing artifacts of their own.
Seriously tempted to play with Sling TV's service (essentially cable TV over the Internet), as I just find the current situation beyond ridiculous.
Yes, he's TiVo's patent lawyer. You know, the company that successfully sued Dish Network over technologies that predate TiVo's founding, but that TiVo was merely the first to popularize.
Seems improbable to me too for the simple reason that the most likely Nakamoto is actually a group of people, which would explain a number of well documented oddities such as frequent switching between British and American spelling, and other unusual aspects of Nakamoto's life. That makes me doubt the entire NSA thing.
Part of me really wants to believe that one member of the group was really Craig Wright, partially because it'd upset a sizable amount of the Bitcoin community, and partially because he does fit the profile of what I'd suggest was the leadership of the group. I'm not going to make that bet though.
(Of course the perfect answer would be if it were Wright, Finney, and... Dorian Nakamoto. That'd be glorious.)
Slashdot Mirror
The W3C are the browser manufacturers. This is their standard.
The design of this "DRM scheme" isn't an accident, it requires each DRM vendor cooperate with each individual browser manufacturer, guaranteeing that minor and community developed browsers never see the ability to show commercial videos. This represents a hijacking of the W3C to lock out future competitors. You can't even build a new browser based upon Blink or WebKit now that can display all the same content as Chrome or Safari, they just made an end-run around the GPL to ensure their "open source" code is useless to potential competitors.
They love this standard. Don't kid yourself otherwise.
I understand what you're saying, but in this case the terms are fake. Yes, technically EDGE was 256kbps, but when T-Mobile announced what people call EDGE speeds for throttled connections, the speed was about 64kbps. Likewise T-Mobile called the 256kbps throttled service "3G".
The justification, I suppose, is that 256kbps is the minimum speed you can call "3G". (As an aside, EDGE is actually technically 3G - people rarely call it that because it sucked, but it fulfilled the ITU/etc technical criteria for IMT-2000, the specification that's normally cited as the technical definition of 3G.)
I live in South Florida and I'm a happy T-Mobile user. Absolutely nothing you've said describes my experience with the operator. I saw absolutely no outages during Irma.
I'm not sure if you're making it up, if you used T-Mobile a decade ago and think they haven't improved since, or if you have less... virtuous motives... but basically what you've written is false.
3G. Bear in mind though that 3G is something like 256-512kbps, it's better than EDGE, but it's not suitable for, say, streaming video. In some ways this made T-Mobile One a downgrade from T-Mobile's previous offerings, as they allowed unlimited video with tethering (didn't come out of your data cap) if you used Binge On.
Every time EME comes up, a sizable number of Slashdotters announce they support it because "it's a DRM standard" and it means the end of plug-ins like Flash.
It is not a DRM standard. It's a standard for communication with plug-ins, known in this standard as CDMs.
And those plug-ins aren't like the old Netscape plug-ins, that worked (at the time) with every browser (except IE), with different versions only required for each CPU architecture and operating system combination. You won't be able to use your "Adobe DRM" plug-in for Edge under Firefox. In fact, every single browser, CPU, and operating system combination will require its own plug-in. Don't have one for your favorite browser? You're out of luck.
This isn't a standard, it's a non-standard. It's actually worse than Flash.
Shame on the W3C for adopting it.
Cricket is an AT&T brand. Virgin is an MVNO that currently uses the Sprint network. "Roaming", in the US, is something people worried about in the 1990s when there were 600 different AMPS networks rather than four nationwide LTE networks.
No, it's not redundant. The search bar/URL address bar split permits some level of privacy as what's entered on the URL bar isn't sent to a search engine, and what's placed in the search bar is, in real time.
That's a significant difference, significant enough that it absolutely should be removed from the Slashdot summary, because the summary re-enforces the idea that getting rid of it is OK because "they're the same" when they're not.
Mozilla just has to fuck up tabs now and I'll switch to Chrome. I cannot believe the level of contempt these idiots have for their own users - if you're trying to compete with another browser, you don't build a clone of it, especially when that means ditching every feature that makes your browser better, because the only time you can compete when building clones of rival products is on price, and Chrome is already free.
In practice, making Firefox a clone of Chrome is giving users of Firefox the middle finger, not extending an invite to those who prefer Chrome already.
No, he's right and you're kind of admitting it ironically by promoting an "official" definition. You claim that this "frequently does not coincide with" (blah blah) but the reality is that nobody has ever said "I agree with SJWs", or "I agree with SJWs, I just wish that some of them would promote social justice through their actions."
If your "official" definition had any truth to it, people would say the latter. They don't. What they say is "OMG! SJWs are destroying working/open source/politics/cons/parties/TV and movies/Slashdot" by saying things like "You shouldn't really be trying to chat up every female co-worker" or "It does appear that despite one survey saying otherwise, the vast majority of surveys that suggest women are paid less than men for equivalent work are true." and things like that!"
If the problem were hypocrisy nobody would give a shit because you'd still agree with the central issue SJWs are raising. Just as nobody gets their panties in a wad because a politician has called for more spending on healthcare, simply because you could probably claim they don't do enough themselves to bring that about. The problem is the issue they're raising.
If it isn't, why does everyone, literally everyone, who uses the term SJW, also argue against feminism, anti-racism, and movements that try to lift up the disadvantaged?
Not really, it's something we do occasionally, not all the time including at completely inappropriate venues.
If you really think it's reasonable to be "trying to get laid" while at work, then look forward to a lifetime of short employment lifespans. Also look forward to becoming incredibly unpopular with just about everyone that ever meets you, male or female.
Are you saying there was an email analog or there wasn't? Sorry, it's not clear from your comment ("You are mistaken" vs "there was instant messaging")
I think UUCP ended up being developed in the early eighties, but that's besides the point: email doesn't necessarily have to leave a machine to be email. I find it hard to believe that, for example, MULTICS, which was designed by telephone companies in the 1960s as a massively multiuser operating system, didn't have an interuser messaging feature, whether it was called "mail" or something else.
One day I'll have to download MULTICS and take a look at it. Supposedly it's the most influential operating system ever, not because everyone duplicated it, but because everyone took care to learn from its errors...
It was more of a "We're not going to enforce the law under this narrow set of circumstances, which we can justify because aside from anything else we don't have the power to fully enforce the law against everyone, and we have quite a bit of discretion."
One note: part of the reason why there's no law explicitly protecting Dreamers is that Congress is completely dysfunctional, and while there was a majority (inside Congress and with the public in general) in favor of, say, what Marco Rubio was trying to do, there was no practical way to get it passed. There's talk of another attempt to do so, but tying it to something utterly poisonous to Democrats (say, Wall funding), which will again ensure it's sunk.
Trump is but one horrible character in a cast of Washington's worst. If you want to get this fixed, it's probably time to lobby Congress, but don't expect anything to actually happen.
Sure, right now we should have a calm measured discussion about realistic consequences of bad AI. What part of "OMG KILLBOTS ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL" is a calm measured discussion about realistic consequences of bad AI? Because that's what Musk is doing, and you can call my saying that "bollocks" as much as you want, it doesn't change the fact that this is what he's doing.
Or perhaps you're agreeing we should be all OMG KILLBOTS ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL, in which case lie down, take a pill, and stop fucking up the calm, measured, discussion the rest of us want about the realistic consequences of bad AI.
Probably not, but that would imply that Musk's aim is to ensure the US gets Ultron... uh, I mean Killbots, rather than the baddies... uh, I mean Ruskies... sorry, I mean Russia.
That doesn't appear to be the intent, rather it's to wave hands hysterically screaming "OMG KILLBOTS ARE GOING TO KILL US ALL."
No, I think it's a little closer. Supposedly Robert Downey Jr based his portrayal of Tony Stark (Iron Man - do I really need to add this?) on Elon Musk. In one of the more recent Iron Man movies, Avengers: Age of Ultron, Stark comes into the possession of a very advanced AI, which turns out, because this is Hollywood and not real life Musk, to be malignant and wants to take over the world/destroy it/whatever it is supervillains do.
Shortly after the release of Age of Ultron, all of a sudden Elon Musk gets fearful of AI, and announces OpenAI, a project to supposedly contain the "threat" of Artificial Intelligence.
Yes, Musk watched a movie because one of the characters is supposedly based on him, and he took it seriously.
Now, I know what you're about to say: "That's a bit of a stretch Squiggie, I mean, it's probably just a coincidence." OK, then, riddle me this: AI is being used increasingly in the real world, and presenting threats. Like privacy, and security. People are sticking microphones in their homes attached to giant AI clusters presenting ample opportunities for Big Data analysis of their very lives.
Is this what OpenAI is about? Or is it about KILLER KILLBOTS and AIs trying to RULE THE WORLD, like in that f---ing Joss Whedon movie?
Musk needs to get out more.
I honestly think that'd be a better solution. I'm a little bothered by Vermont's decision to make renewal dependent upon this kind of obligation. While I'm no fan of Comcast, I honestly think we need to be immensely careful on how we regulate infrastructure companies. If the government's belief is that private enterprise cannot do the job, the solution isn't to hack on a set of obligations to an entity that requires profits to be sustainable, it should instead be filling in the gaps.
This kind of over-regulation is, in part, what killed the railroads in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the time it was just assumed you could pack mandate on top of mandate with that industry because the companies were large and superficially profitable. The railroads were forced to continue services that had no chance of profitability, and were put through bureaucratic hurdles so huge that they actually started running down profitable services that they thought might become unprofitable, just so that the paperwork could start to get them closed.
If Comcast wasn't so unpopular, we wouldn't have so many fans on Slashdot of forcing them to do this. But I honestly don't think it's a good idea. Let's see Vermont fund its own infrastructure. They could even tax Comcast and other telecommunications franchisees to pay for it.
That was largely because how loud the movie was. A lot of people misinterpreted it as meaning "You're not supposed to be able to hear the dialog" but actually in the theater we went to the dialog was fine and crystal clear, which tells me the audio was widely fucked up, and nobody cared.
Nolan is partially to blame in the sense that, for example, George Lucas spent much of the 1980s making sure the Star Wars movies actually sounded good in theaters, actually sending people out to test and certify them and making sure they had certain standards, whereas Nolan seems to have just told the IMAX theaters in particular "Oh, it's supposed to be loud", and not bothered to instruct them on the quality.
The dialog is important, If it wasn't it wouldn't be in the film. There are certain scenes in Dunkirk where it's very important to the message Nolan is trying to express. I find it bizarre theaters are using the "It's supposed to be loud!" excuse to fuck up the dialog.
If you're suicidal, this is great logic, because the chances are at 60mph not only will you not be killed, you won't even be injured.
60mph train crashes have happened many times in history, but in the last 100 years or so very few have resulted in the majority of passengers being killed or seriously injured.
To be clear: there's usually several deaths in a 60mph crash, but it's usually because of the specific circumstances of the crash (for example, a front most coach in a head-on collision), rather than distributed evenly throughout the train.
At what speed do deaths become common? Even much faster trains like in the recent Philadelphia train derailment, which happened at 102mph, resulted in just eight deaths out of 238 passengers (most people were injured, but like I said, 102mph, not 60mph); similarly the Great Heck train crash in the UK in 2001 involved a train running at 88mph crashing into a freight train at 54mph (effectively a head on collision at 142mph):: 10 deaths, 82 injuries, with 7 people completely unharmed.
Rail is probably the safest form of powered transportation today, and it's unlikely that'll change any time soon.
Basically, if you're using any other file systems, on any of your computers, Apple is going to convert them to APFS.
Have a brand new Mac Pro running the very latest Mac OS X? It'll upgrade automatically.
Still running a Mac Plus from 1985? You'll be mailed replacement System 6 disks.
Have a DEC PDP-11 running RSX-11? They'll send an engineer around to install a patched version that uses APFS instead.
Do you have a Commodore VIC 20 sitting in your closet? They'll come over and install a new ROM that treats the tape drive as a block device and maintains a APFS file system on it.
Abacus? They'll actually send you some APFS formatted beads.
And the best part is there's no charge to you.
Hi, squiggleslash here, to give you another insight on why things are the way they are, here to add my 2c to any conversation, on any subject. As always, a lot of things to cover today, but I want to focus on just one comment in particular, and that's from fluffernutter, who writes "I find videos horribly inefficient at relaying information. Maybe it's because I'm a fast reader, or I can skim for certain words. Videos for the sake of entertainment, fine, but for the sake of learning unless it's something highly visual I would way rather read it. If I click on a news story and it's a video I exit out. Not worth my time to consume it."
Well, fluffernutter, you're not the only one, but there's another factor I think you should consider to, and that's the format.
You see, when we write, we're typically very careful in what we write, we know the more words about irrelevant topics we add, the harder it is to follow our arguments. We have to be concise.
Concise
Other channels
So did I give you a useful answer? Hey, if you fluffernutter or anyone else on Slashdot wants to give me an answer, just hit the "Reply" button underneath this text, and let's hear what you have to say.
Reply or email
Thanks for reading!
Well kind of, it's too early to say he is the next Hitler, but I draw the line at suggesting comparisons are out of the question. The fact it's merely too early, something that couldn't be said of any other President in living memory, rather than ridiculous, is by itself worrying.
When Trump decided to scapegoat immigrants and smear immigrants and Muslims, and when he endorsed violence against protestors, and when he did all of this while apparently embracing the idea of imprisoning his political rival, it was raising enough red flags for any comparisons with Hitler to be forgivable. He certainly has gone out of his way to look like a fascist. The question, still unanswered, is how far he'll go.
I know you're getting push back on the comparisons and it's important to seem "reasonable", but you can do that without suggesting Trump isn't a long way down a dark and frightening road, and that we shouldn't fear that or raise comparisons with others who have been on that road.
Streaming is better quality on this side of the pond too, though not for the same reason:
- Broadcast TV, which very few people use, is ATSC which is MPEG 2 based. While H.264 appeared in the standard in the late 200xes, it's unused, very few TVs support it. ATSC only supports 1920x1080i/30, 1280x720p/60, and some SD resolutions. To make matters worse, ATSC is very vulnerable to bad weather and other sources of interference, and this is 100% due to a "NIH/America is different" attitude by the FCC. When it works, it's moderately good quality, but still manages to be slightly inferior to a VUDU/Netflix/etc stream at 1/3 of the bitrate.
- Cable and Satellite are worse, they usually are based off of the MPEG 2 streams broadcast by the TV stations, recompressed as H.264 (adding a whole new set of artifacts), and over compressed at that. Some networks (I believe Dish does this) also cut 1920x1080 to 1440x1080.
- Many cable and satellite boxes then upconvert the signal, regardless of source, to 1080i/30 ot 720p/60, making it harder for the reverse pulldown logic built into most flat panels to remove interlacing artifacts without introducing artifacts of their own.
Seriously tempted to play with Sling TV's service (essentially cable TV over the Internet), as I just find the current situation beyond ridiculous.
Nakamoto is Craig Wright, confirmed!
Yes, he's TiVo's patent lawyer. You know, the company that successfully sued Dish Network over technologies that predate TiVo's founding, but that TiVo was merely the first to popularize.
It's in the summary.
Seems improbable to me too for the simple reason that the most likely Nakamoto is actually a group of people, which would explain a number of well documented oddities such as frequent switching between British and American spelling, and other unusual aspects of Nakamoto's life. That makes me doubt the entire NSA thing.
Part of me really wants to believe that one member of the group was really Craig Wright, partially because it'd upset a sizable amount of the Bitcoin community, and partially because he does fit the profile of what I'd suggest was the leadership of the group. I'm not going to make that bet though.
(Of course the perfect answer would be if it were Wright, Finney, and... Dorian Nakamoto. That'd be glorious.)