This is an old and dead issue since any reputable MMO will have locks in place to prevent large scale money laundering. Also i would put odds that The Treasury Department has folks "in world" just so they can monitor things.
I can see the Fox News headlines now: "Federal Government Hires People to Play Video Games."
Windows 7 comes with a paid for H.264 codec while XP, and Linux? Do NOT. And yet again you are mistaking HARDWARE FOR software. dxva AND va-api are simple APIs but do NOT, I repeat do NOT give you the H.264 codec.
This is completely incorrect. The entire purpose of the DXVA, VA-API, and VDPAU APIs is to allow video bitstreams to be sent directly to the graphics hardware for decoding. See, for instance, this page on Intel Linux graphics which specifically states that Intel's newer graphics chips support H.264 hardware decoding on Linux via VA-API. Newer versions of VLC have the ability to use these protocols. The way these APIs work is that you hand them a video bitstream and they give you back pointers to decoded frames. Your software never needs to touch the patented decoding steps; that's all done in hardware and/or firmware which already has its license fees paid by the manufacturer. You said there was something on the Mozilla Blog saying the opposite of this, but I was unable to find any such article there. In fact, they are going to be supporting H.264 on mobile devices using basically the same method I outlined here (sending bitstreams to low-level APIs that talk directly to the hardware).
Sorry that license covers HARDWARE and NOT SOFTWARE, should have read the fine print. That was why both Nvidia and ATI have the hardware but don't provide jack shit for accessing the hardware anymore, license fees. This is also why Moz won't support H.264 on Linux, MSFT paid the $699 license fee to put the codec in win 7 and 8 and Linux distros didn't.
Where are you getting this from? Windows supports DXVA, Linux supports VA-API or VDPAU depending on the manufacturer. Both of these APIs allow H.264 bitstreams (as well as VC-1 and MPEG-2) to be sent directly to the video driver for hardware decoding. You aren't doing any decoding in software, so you don't pay any patent fees. Those fees were already paid by the video card manufacturers when they shipped the hardware and drivers.
And incidentally, where in the world is this $699 figure coming from? H.264 support is charged at a few dollars a device at most, not $699. If it were that much, how in the world could they sell Blu-ray players and Roku boxes for $100?
Many here presume Flash will go away. This is sort of like saying Linux will become popular, people here do not understand why people use software, they use software because it works well. Adobe has great tools that work well and just expecting people to stop using them when there are no alternatives or the alternatives are inferior is absurd.
They may not want to stop using Flash, but they will, unless they want to write off essentially all portable devices. Steve Jobs signed Flash's death warrant when he refused to support it on iOS. How many businesses will want to pay for a website that doesn't work on iPhones or iPads?
Virtually every GPU designed in the last 5 to 7 years, whether for phones, tablets, or PCs, supports H.264 decoding in hardware. This feature is available through a driver API and the license fee was already paid by the vendor. So implementing H.264 support shouldn't be any problem for open source software (even though Mozilla is dragging their feet on this as hard as they can).
GP's point is till valid; the real question is why they never improved flash to use those additional cores.
That's easier said than done. Flash's scripting language, if I'm not mistaken, is Turing-complete, so they'd basically have to write a JIT parallelizing compiler – not at all a simple thing to do. Some tasks simply can't be parallelized due to their nature (for instance, the Deflate algorithm used in Zip files and PNGs is pretty much limited to one thread).
A shame. I was hoping GCC would remain small and fast. A program written in C++ is going to be slower than an equivalent program written in C, no way around it. And that's without even getting into features like templates, which only five people in the world understand.
Several commenters have asked why anyone would fall for this – after all, US law enforcement agencies generally don't just shake people down for cash. But there are two real-world situations the average person might have dealt with that are somewhat analogous to this.
One is traffic tickets: In most cases, drivers are given the option to simply pay the fine without having to go to court. You can have a full hearing if you want, but most people just pay the fine.
The other is the legal threats against BitTorrent users, the ones where the MAFIAA sends out letters demanding that the person whose account the activity was conducted from either must pay $1000 or some similar amount immediately, or face a lawsuit for significantly more.
Now, there are definitely some legal differences there: a traffic infraction is a "summary offense" that doesn't carry the threat of jail time, and the MAFIAA lawsuits are civil cases, not criminal. But most people don't understand these subtleties: to many of them, any scary-sounding authority figure saying "Pay up" is the same thing. Heck, the Milgram experiment showed that you could have regular people deliver "fatal" electric shocks just by having a guy in a white lab coat tell them they had to.
Does anyone make a Bluetooth keyboard with mechanical switches, or is it all just USB or PS/2? (And why would anyone want to use PS/2 in a new design, anyway?)
In many cases, electronics that are supposed to be recycled really aren't. Instead, they are dumped in the Third World where they cause all kinds of environmental problems.
Even when some actual recycling is done, it is likely to make the impact on the environment worse, not better, than if it was just dumped in a landfill. See this article for some details (with photos) of how an electronics "recycling" operation in China threatens both the environment and worker safety. Of course, it's all about the Benjamins: "Sending a monitor to China costs about ten cents. Actually recycling it costs several dollars."
If the European Union wants this regulation to have a positive impact, they need to stipulate that the equipment be recycled locally under EU safety and environmental standards – not just exported to Ghana or China and down the memory hole.
The Buick Riviera had all-touch-screen controls way back in 1986. (The screen was a small CRT display.) Consumer Reports hated it and described it as "future schlock". You can see a video of one here (go to 0:20).
You'd think that car companies could do better now, since we've got so many other examples of what a good touch-screen interface should be like.
As long as the fucking Chinese have a stranglehold on most of the rare-earth production then we're stupid not to recycle what we have.
Contrary to what the name implies, rare-earth metals actually aren't that rare. They are just found in very low concentrations, which means that refining them is energy-expensive and environmentally unfriendly. This is why most production takes place in China: they run coal-fired power plants (with lots of cheap coal to run them) and don't give a crap about the environment. We could refine rare-earth metals in the US or European Union from domestic ore supplies, but it would be much more expensive because the production would have to be compliant with worker safety and environmental protection standards. Should a true emergency situation arise, we could make ends meet.
If anything NoScript should be default browser functionality.
Running NoScript means essentially every web site is broken by default, and you have to whitelist whatever domains they use for scripting to make it work. Invariably, people will just choose "allow all" to get things going. What's the point?
Not all cases have precedential value. For instance, small claims court cases generally don't. Furthermore, as I said, you need to consider what is likely to actually get you sued, not just what theoretically could.
Theoretically, anyone can sue for anything in the United States. If the suit is completely groundless, it may be thrown out at the first hearing, but they can sue anyway.
The important question is, what are the actual chances of a business getting sued for social media related activities? If it's low enough, then the best resolution may be to simply not worry about it. You can't avoid every single conceivable risk. Are there a small number of specific behaviors that are more likely than anything else to result in a lawsuit?
Anecdotes can't settle this issue, and from the review, it sounds like McHale's book consists mostly of anecdotes about specific legal cases. We need real statistics.
Wouldn't a "reasonable person" raise a finger and say "hey, now, doesn't harassment imply that the action was continuous or repeated after objections were raised?"
That pretty much is the law already, at least as it was related to me in the last workplace training course I took. A single action would only be sexual harassment if it was quid pro quo (e.g. "Put out or you're fired") or if the action was extremely crude and beyond the boundaries of normal behavior (the crotch-grabbing described in this article would qualify for that). With regards to more minor incidents that might be considered offensive, it is the responsibility of the person who is offended to speak up (either directly to the people involved or to HR). Only if it continues after that would it be considered a hostile environment. So people can't sue for harassment over one dirty joke, for instance. Only if the behavior is "severe" or "pervasive" would there be a cause of action.
Disclaimer: IANAL, and I may be misremembering – ask your own HR representative rather than taking my word on anything. Company policy may be stricter than the law requires (IMO, this is a major cause of the backlash against harassment policies we see on this thread and elsewhere – when risk-averse corporate lawyers make rules like "No dating a fellow employee" and claim falsely that harassment law requires this, it makes the policies come off as a war on sex rather than an attempt to ensure that men and women are treated equitably.)
Assuming they actually do release it (has anything official been announced yet?), Apple is going to have a hard time setting a good price for the iPad Mini.
The Nook Tablet, Kindle Fire, and Nexus 7 all start at $199. Therefore, Apple won't be able to price the iPad Mini much more than $250 unless they want to be seriously beat out on price by A-list competitors. It's one thing to be beaten on price by bottom-of-the-barrel crap like Archos, but until now, the iPad has been quite competitive on price with equivalently powerful systems from A-list vendors such as Samsung. No other 10-inch tablet provides equal performance to the iPad at a substantially cheaper price. In fact, no consumer tablet at any price can beat the iPad 3's display resolution. Apple's success comes not only from providing a slicker product, but also from the fact that they've pretty much abolished the "Apple tax" on portable hardware, and used their supply chain dominance to leverage prices way down.
At the same time, Apple can't sell the iPad Mini for much cheaper than the iPad 2 ($399), because if they do, it will cost them a substantial number of sales on the better hardware. A lot of tablet users would gladly drop from 10 inches to 7 inches to save $150, if the user experience is otherwise the same. Apple doesn't want to cannibalize its own profit margins on their high-end tablets.
I'm sure their marketers have crunched all the numbers. My prediction: if the iPad Mini does see production, it will start at $249 or $299 for the cheapest model. Just low enough to lure over a decent number of Nexus/Kindle/Nook users, just high enough to keep the iPad 2 competitive. Also, the screen resolution will be 1024x768.
No doubt this is a stupid question (I'm not really that familiar with the technical details of the Linux graphics stack), but why is middleware like X11 or Wayland needed at all? Why can't the desktop/window manager talk directly to OpenGL, which in turn talks to the graphics hardware via a driver? Intuitively, it would seem like this would give better performance and fewer places for bugs to crop up. Why do there have to be 20 different layers in the rendering stack? Is this just abstraction for abstraction's sake or is there actually a good reason?
No it shouldn't. Didn't you study "checks and balances" in school?
You're talking to someone with a Bachelor's in Political Science. Of course I am aware of the standard civics-textbook account. I just don't buy it, and it was my studies that led me to the conclusion I stated above. Specifically, the writings of Sanford Levinson and Robert Dahl (see also this book review by Hendrik Hertzberg) led me to agree with those authors that the Constitution and the federal system it sets up are deeply flawed in many ways and need to be re-thought from the ground up.
Alas, the Double Jeopardy Clause, which sure seems like it would apply here, does not because the conviction was overturned on appeal rather than acquitted by the trial court.
That would be true if it was the federal government that wanted to re-try him. However, in this case, the reason double jeopardy doesn't apply is because of the dual sovereignty doctrine – the state prosecution is considered legally separate from the federal prosecution. It's another weird bit of legacy code from the US's obsolete federal system, which should have died at Appomatox in 1865.
Actually, top individual contributors are tasked with two separate part-time jobs. So, no, they don't get paid a lot more for this.
For some people, being tasked with two separate jobs is more stressful than being able to focus on one specific task. This is true even if the total hours are the same (and I'm rather skeptical that this is actually the case in practice).
Furthermore, the skills needed to be a good programmer are different from the skills needed to be a good trainer. Many of the best programmers aren't exactly very social types.
What you're doing is driving away and/or burning out your best programmers by making them do a job they probably don't want to do, aren't very good at, and essentially punishes them for their talent.
We all know that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is a sockpuppet of Steve Ballmer (why the Nokia shareholders put up with this is beyond me, but it probably reflects the lack of actual control over corporate governance by the nominal owners). Now Elop is taking yet more actions that don't really help Nokia, but are calculated to hurt Google (and probably Apple as well) as much as possible. The reason is obvious: Microsoft wants these Nokia patents in the hands of patent trolls to cause trouble.
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This is an old and dead issue since any reputable MMO will have locks in place to prevent large scale money laundering. Also i would put odds that The Treasury Department has folks "in world" just so they can monitor things.
I can see the Fox News headlines now: "Federal Government Hires People to Play Video Games."
Windows 7 comes with a paid for H.264 codec while XP, and Linux? Do NOT. And yet again you are mistaking HARDWARE FOR software. dxva AND va-api are simple APIs but do NOT, I repeat do NOT give you the H.264 codec.
This is completely incorrect. The entire purpose of the DXVA, VA-API, and VDPAU APIs is to allow video bitstreams to be sent directly to the graphics hardware for decoding. See, for instance, this page on Intel Linux graphics which specifically states that Intel's newer graphics chips support H.264 hardware decoding on Linux via VA-API. Newer versions of VLC have the ability to use these protocols. The way these APIs work is that you hand them a video bitstream and they give you back pointers to decoded frames. Your software never needs to touch the patented decoding steps; that's all done in hardware and/or firmware which already has its license fees paid by the manufacturer. You said there was something on the Mozilla Blog saying the opposite of this, but I was unable to find any such article there. In fact, they are going to be supporting H.264 on mobile devices using basically the same method I outlined here (sending bitstreams to low-level APIs that talk directly to the hardware).
Sorry that license covers HARDWARE and NOT SOFTWARE, should have read the fine print. That was why both Nvidia and ATI have the hardware but don't provide jack shit for accessing the hardware anymore, license fees. This is also why Moz won't support H.264 on Linux, MSFT paid the $699 license fee to put the codec in win 7 and 8 and Linux distros didn't.
Where are you getting this from? Windows supports DXVA, Linux supports VA-API or VDPAU depending on the manufacturer. Both of these APIs allow H.264 bitstreams (as well as VC-1 and MPEG-2) to be sent directly to the video driver for hardware decoding. You aren't doing any decoding in software, so you don't pay any patent fees. Those fees were already paid by the video card manufacturers when they shipped the hardware and drivers.
And incidentally, where in the world is this $699 figure coming from? H.264 support is charged at a few dollars a device at most, not $699. If it were that much, how in the world could they sell Blu-ray players and Roku boxes for $100?
Many here presume Flash will go away. This is sort of like saying Linux will become popular, people here do not understand why people use software, they use software because it works well. Adobe has great tools that work well and just expecting people to stop using them when there are no alternatives or the alternatives are inferior is absurd.
They may not want to stop using Flash, but they will, unless they want to write off essentially all portable devices. Steve Jobs signed Flash's death warrant when he refused to support it on iOS. How many businesses will want to pay for a website that doesn't work on iPhones or iPads?
How big would "Badger Badger Badger", a 36-second vector animation loop, become if converted from vectors to H.264?
Then don't convert it to H.264 – convert it to something more appropriate, probably a HTML5 dynamic canvas with JavaScript animation.
Virtually every GPU designed in the last 5 to 7 years, whether for phones, tablets, or PCs, supports H.264 decoding in hardware. This feature is available through a driver API and the license fee was already paid by the vendor. So implementing H.264 support shouldn't be any problem for open source software (even though Mozilla is dragging their feet on this as hard as they can).
GP's point is till valid; the real question is why they never improved flash to use those additional cores.
That's easier said than done. Flash's scripting language, if I'm not mistaken, is Turing-complete, so they'd basically have to write a JIT parallelizing compiler – not at all a simple thing to do. Some tasks simply can't be parallelized due to their nature (for instance, the Deflate algorithm used in Zip files and PNGs is pretty much limited to one thread).
Yeah, and for a lot of people (maybe 80%), that's all they need.
But a lot of these people also need 100% compatibility (in both directions) with Microsoft Office documents.
A shame. I was hoping GCC would remain small and fast. A program written in C++ is going to be slower than an equivalent program written in C, no way around it. And that's without even getting into features like templates, which only five people in the world understand.
Several commenters have asked why anyone would fall for this – after all, US law enforcement agencies generally don't just shake people down for cash. But there are two real-world situations the average person might have dealt with that are somewhat analogous to this.
One is traffic tickets: In most cases, drivers are given the option to simply pay the fine without having to go to court. You can have a full hearing if you want, but most people just pay the fine.
The other is the legal threats against BitTorrent users, the ones where the MAFIAA sends out letters demanding that the person whose account the activity was conducted from either must pay $1000 or some similar amount immediately, or face a lawsuit for significantly more.
Now, there are definitely some legal differences there: a traffic infraction is a "summary offense" that doesn't carry the threat of jail time, and the MAFIAA lawsuits are civil cases, not criminal. But most people don't understand these subtleties: to many of them, any scary-sounding authority figure saying "Pay up" is the same thing. Heck, the Milgram experiment showed that you could have regular people deliver "fatal" electric shocks just by having a guy in a white lab coat tell them they had to.
Does anyone make a Bluetooth keyboard with mechanical switches, or is it all just USB or PS/2? (And why would anyone want to use PS/2 in a new design, anyway?)
In many cases, electronics that are supposed to be recycled really aren't. Instead, they are dumped in the Third World where they cause all kinds of environmental problems.
Even when some actual recycling is done, it is likely to make the impact on the environment worse, not better, than if it was just dumped in a landfill. See this article for some details (with photos) of how an electronics "recycling" operation in China threatens both the environment and worker safety. Of course, it's all about the Benjamins: "Sending a monitor to China costs about ten cents. Actually recycling it costs several dollars."
If the European Union wants this regulation to have a positive impact, they need to stipulate that the equipment be recycled locally under EU safety and environmental standards – not just exported to Ghana or China and down the memory hole.
The Buick Riviera had all-touch-screen controls way back in 1986. (The screen was a small CRT display.) Consumer Reports hated it and described it as "future schlock". You can see a video of one here (go to 0:20).
You'd think that car companies could do better now, since we've got so many other examples of what a good touch-screen interface should be like.
As long as the fucking Chinese have a stranglehold on most of the rare-earth production then we're stupid not to recycle what we have.
Contrary to what the name implies, rare-earth metals actually aren't that rare. They are just found in very low concentrations, which means that refining them is energy-expensive and environmentally unfriendly. This is why most production takes place in China: they run coal-fired power plants (with lots of cheap coal to run them) and don't give a crap about the environment. We could refine rare-earth metals in the US or European Union from domestic ore supplies, but it would be much more expensive because the production would have to be compliant with worker safety and environmental protection standards. Should a true emergency situation arise, we could make ends meet.
If anything NoScript should be default browser functionality.
Running NoScript means essentially every web site is broken by default, and you have to whitelist whatever domains they use for scripting to make it work. Invariably, people will just choose "allow all" to get things going. What's the point?
Not all cases have precedential value. For instance, small claims court cases generally don't. Furthermore, as I said, you need to consider what is likely to actually get you sued, not just what theoretically could.
Theoretically, anyone can sue for anything in the United States. If the suit is completely groundless, it may be thrown out at the first hearing, but they can sue anyway.
The important question is, what are the actual chances of a business getting sued for social media related activities? If it's low enough, then the best resolution may be to simply not worry about it. You can't avoid every single conceivable risk. Are there a small number of specific behaviors that are more likely than anything else to result in a lawsuit?
Anecdotes can't settle this issue, and from the review, it sounds like McHale's book consists mostly of anecdotes about specific legal cases. We need real statistics.
In other words, AES-256 encryption is still secure. This shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone.
Wouldn't a "reasonable person" raise a finger and say "hey, now, doesn't harassment imply that the action was continuous or repeated after objections were raised?"
That pretty much is the law already, at least as it was related to me in the last workplace training course I took. A single action would only be sexual harassment if it was quid pro quo (e.g. "Put out or you're fired") or if the action was extremely crude and beyond the boundaries of normal behavior (the crotch-grabbing described in this article would qualify for that). With regards to more minor incidents that might be considered offensive, it is the responsibility of the person who is offended to speak up (either directly to the people involved or to HR). Only if it continues after that would it be considered a hostile environment. So people can't sue for harassment over one dirty joke, for instance. Only if the behavior is "severe" or "pervasive" would there be a cause of action.
Disclaimer: IANAL, and I may be misremembering – ask your own HR representative rather than taking my word on anything. Company policy may be stricter than the law requires (IMO, this is a major cause of the backlash against harassment policies we see on this thread and elsewhere – when risk-averse corporate lawyers make rules like "No dating a fellow employee" and claim falsely that harassment law requires this, it makes the policies come off as a war on sex rather than an attempt to ensure that men and women are treated equitably.)
Assuming they actually do release it (has anything official been announced yet?), Apple is going to have a hard time setting a good price for the iPad Mini.
The Nook Tablet, Kindle Fire, and Nexus 7 all start at $199. Therefore, Apple won't be able to price the iPad Mini much more than $250 unless they want to be seriously beat out on price by A-list competitors. It's one thing to be beaten on price by bottom-of-the-barrel crap like Archos, but until now, the iPad has been quite competitive on price with equivalently powerful systems from A-list vendors such as Samsung. No other 10-inch tablet provides equal performance to the iPad at a substantially cheaper price. In fact, no consumer tablet at any price can beat the iPad 3's display resolution. Apple's success comes not only from providing a slicker product, but also from the fact that they've pretty much abolished the "Apple tax" on portable hardware, and used their supply chain dominance to leverage prices way down.
At the same time, Apple can't sell the iPad Mini for much cheaper than the iPad 2 ($399), because if they do, it will cost them a substantial number of sales on the better hardware. A lot of tablet users would gladly drop from 10 inches to 7 inches to save $150, if the user experience is otherwise the same. Apple doesn't want to cannibalize its own profit margins on their high-end tablets.
I'm sure their marketers have crunched all the numbers. My prediction: if the iPad Mini does see production, it will start at $249 or $299 for the cheapest model. Just low enough to lure over a decent number of Nexus/Kindle/Nook users, just high enough to keep the iPad 2 competitive. Also, the screen resolution will be 1024x768.
No doubt this is a stupid question (I'm not really that familiar with the technical details of the Linux graphics stack), but why is middleware like X11 or Wayland needed at all? Why can't the desktop/window manager talk directly to OpenGL, which in turn talks to the graphics hardware via a driver? Intuitively, it would seem like this would give better performance and fewer places for bugs to crop up. Why do there have to be 20 different layers in the rendering stack? Is this just abstraction for abstraction's sake or is there actually a good reason?
No it shouldn't. Didn't you study "checks and balances" in school?
You're talking to someone with a Bachelor's in Political Science. Of course I am aware of the standard civics-textbook account. I just don't buy it, and it was my studies that led me to the conclusion I stated above. Specifically, the writings of Sanford Levinson and Robert Dahl (see also this book review by Hendrik Hertzberg) led me to agree with those authors that the Constitution and the federal system it sets up are deeply flawed in many ways and need to be re-thought from the ground up.
Alas, the Double Jeopardy Clause, which sure seems like it would apply here, does not because the conviction was overturned on appeal rather than acquitted by the trial court.
That would be true if it was the federal government that wanted to re-try him. However, in this case, the reason double jeopardy doesn't apply is because of the dual sovereignty doctrine – the state prosecution is considered legally separate from the federal prosecution. It's another weird bit of legacy code from the US's obsolete federal system, which should have died at Appomatox in 1865.
Actually, top individual contributors are tasked with two separate part-time jobs. So, no, they don't get paid a lot more for this.
For some people, being tasked with two separate jobs is more stressful than being able to focus on one specific task. This is true even if the total hours are the same (and I'm rather skeptical that this is actually the case in practice).
Furthermore, the skills needed to be a good programmer are different from the skills needed to be a good trainer. Many of the best programmers aren't exactly very social types.
What you're doing is driving away and/or burning out your best programmers by making them do a job they probably don't want to do, aren't very good at, and essentially punishes them for their talent.
We all know that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop is a sockpuppet of Steve Ballmer (why the Nokia shareholders put up with this is beyond me, but it probably reflects the lack of actual control over corporate governance by the nominal owners). Now Elop is taking yet more actions that don't really help Nokia, but are calculated to hurt Google (and probably Apple as well) as much as possible. The reason is obvious: Microsoft wants these Nokia patents in the hands of patent trolls to cause trouble.