Exactly, PDF is attractive because it does everything the big paying customers have asked for. Together with the viewer being free, it has meant that the format is attractive for both corporations (pay once, get all the features), and users (download just one one free program, and you get both a browser plugin, and a standalone viewer). Yes, it's a mess, I know, I have contributed to the PDF.js project (the javascript library powering Mozilla's integrated PDF Viewer) in the past, but regardless the point is that it already does all of that, people have already paid for the software, and have familiarized themselves to it, so it would take some convincing for any alternative format to replace it.
XPS is based on the xml-in-a-zip-file paradigm, specifically, the Open Packaging Conventions format, as used by docx and xlsx. In most aspects, PDF and XPS have identical features: both use explicit positioning, formatting and spacing of objects in the document; both support compression, encryption, and some sort of "DRM" schemes. They differ in the details, such as the image formats they support: XPS favors TIFF and JPEG XR, over PDF's Jpeg2000 and JBIG.
In my opinion, OpenXPS is a better format for the Web simply because it's built from formats that the web already supports widely: ZIP and XML. That means it should be much simpler for web browsers to display XPS content without the need of (internal or external) plugins.
Not "de facto", it's an ISO standard. OpenXPS in turn was standarized by ECMA. Also, ghostscript is a Postscript processor, its main purpose is to print (render) Postscript files, be it into an actual printer, into image files, or into PDF .
Because they do what they are supposed to do well enough, and they have a large corporation backing and supporting the format.
If you don't like PDF, you should propose an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical -- or as close to it as possible, anywhere you see it. It should support rendering formatted and spaced text, images, composite images for scanned documents, vector graphics, forms, digital signing,... and any other feature PDF may have that people want to use.
OpenXPS does all of that already, but since it was designed by Microsoft, it may not be acceptable to you.
This was in slashdot years ago. I can't find the slashdot link, but I did find this one. The idea is that you design a cpu focusing the reliability in the more significant bits, while you allow the least significant bits to be wrong more often. The errors will be centered around the right values (and tend to average into them), so if you write code that is aware of that fact, you can teach it to compensate for the wrong values. Of course this is not acceptable for certain kinds of software, but for things like multimedia processing, a small % error in the result wouldn't be appreciable, and over time, the image should keep averaging out the old errors while introducing new ones, assuming the software is designed for it.
You missed the point. This is a framework for writing code that KNOWS about unreliable bits. The whole idea is that it lets you write algorithms that can tell the compiler where it's acceptable to have a few errores bits, and where isn't. No one said it would apply to EXISITNG code...
The industry needs to teach everyone that it's not bad to have reusable assets. You only need to model the human body "once", with enough morphs to make a Sims-like customization tool. Same for plants, animals, houses,... you don't need as many designers as you think. Of course if you want to differentiate yourself in the art style, then you will need to spend extra, but that would be your choice.
You will need graphic designers and artists regardless, but it would be more about placement and details, than the rough base that you could be able to find anywhere, if the industry wasn't stupid. Imagine if Hollywood refused to use the same actors twice...
I know there are many other posts that are saying the same but regardless: bullshit. Polygon counts CAN get better, texture resolution CAN get better, detail quality CAN get better, particle counts CAN get better. And that's while keeping the same "classic" rasterizing concept. If you move into the raytracing world, there's plenty of space for improvement.
The problem with custom encryption systems is that, unlike the real kind, they CAN be hacked "in seconds" by a professional. The only algorithms you could trust to be safe would be the ones the NSA themselves use to store their secrets. On the downside, the docs for those are probably encrypted using the algorithms themselves...
Microsoft offers the sources of many products for research and education purposes. You DO have to sign an NDA to get them, though, so it's not like if just anyone can do the testing.
Suppose you were to design a DNA sequence corresponding to a human, and build, cell by cell, a body of a human as it might have grown with that DNA. Suppose you establish the billions of synaptic connections manually, in such a way that they will produce the expected output once activated, but still in a way that could have happened by chance during a normal growth of that human. Suppose you jolt it with a combination of chemicals and electricity, to jump-start the body functions and bring it to "life". Then right afterwards you give it an input, and observe the output. You crafted a being that would have the expectation of free will, but in reality has been predetermined to behave in a certain way. Can you prove in any way that there is a measurable difference from another human being that has grown naturally, has chosen its way since birth, and then has been "shut down" and jump-started again to replicate the situation?
[...] an identical copy of a human (or indeed any animal) cannot be made and the exact same combination of data and initial conditions cannot be produced.
How do you know that? We do not currently have the ability to make an exact duplicate of a complex animal, but how can you prove that, even if we were to do so, the copy wouldn't choose exactly the same every single time?
So you think we have something special that makes us more complex than, say, a dog or a cat? Many animals have been shown to have abstract thought abilities, and we just thought they are less intelligent (in the sense of the ability of reasoning, not if they can remember more things, or calculate faster), actually just did not have the need to evolve a complex spoken language to help them represent those abstract thoughts.
Dogs are able to understand human gestures, and can understand certain words/phrases. That implies communication skills that many animals don't have. Then they understand those messages, and act upon them. You could say they do so because they want to. How are your choices free will but not theirs?
A cat knows it needs to open a door to reach its food. When it wants food, it might come to you for help, or it may try to open the door on its own. Regardless of which action it takes, the cat made a decision, and chose a way to act. It could have chosen otherwise, but it did not. How is that different than your free will?
Sensorial input does affect your thoughts, quite a lot actually. That means like a throw of a dice, wind, sunlight, the smoothness of the table you are resting your hands on, etc. may radically change the outcome of your thoughts.
Just because the outcome of the universe can be predicted, does not mean that you did not influence that outcome. Your choices, even if they are deterministically predetermined to happen, are still your choices. You could have chosen not to do so, it just so happens that in this exact reality, you do not.
My point was that some ISPs have complained about the cost of running good filters, not that it affects innocent websites. Good filters happen to be the ones that do NOT block innocent websites, but of course they cost more. Avoiding that cost is a very important topic for the ISPs, while blocking innocent websites is just a small PR issue. In the case of Virgin and Sky, cheap blocking seems to have been the chocie.
Says Virgin and Sky Blocking are two people who are part of the Open Rights Group International, who happen to run innocent sites, despite the accusations.
Of course they don't care. We are talking about corporations and politicians. What they were complaining about was that it's not EASY, so it requires more EFFORT. And in corporate terms, effort means money. Of course they stop complaining when you compensate them for the cost of running the filters, but the point stands: they DID complain.
Their game relies on an ever growing "grind" of repetitive and simplistic tasks to progress.
No it does not. Repetitive simplistic tasks are one way of obtaining the resources (gold, experience, item tokens,...), but they are far from being the primary way. In fact the only reason WoW is still as popular as it is, is because unlike almost every other MMO released since 2004, it is NOT a grindfest.
Experience points come from quest chains in the open world and in instanced dungeons, and those quest chains have an actual story that unfolds as you play. Gold is obtained as reward from quests, and looted from monsters, same as gear. Item tokens are rewarded by defeating dungeon and raid bosses, which require a team, and a strategy.
You can argue that it's too easy or boring for your tastes, but you can not say it is a grinding-based MMO.
The issue is not the selling, it's the anti-competitive practice of embedding a chip that identifies the cable as being made by Apple, so that the phone can reject 3rd party cables, for no other reason that the competition wouldn't be paying royalties to Apple.
Because Apple's cables are proprietary, and even contain a chip with the sole purpose to prevent third-parties from making their own. Apple overcharges users for the cables, while preventing the competition from building cheaper alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, PDF is attractive because it does everything the big paying customers have asked for. Together with the viewer being free, it has meant that the format is attractive for both corporations (pay once, get all the features), and users (download just one one free program, and you get both a browser plugin, and a standalone viewer). Yes, it's a mess, I know, I have contributed to the PDF.js project (the javascript library powering Mozilla's integrated PDF Viewer) in the past, but regardless the point is that it already does all of that, people have already paid for the software, and have familiarized themselves to it, so it would take some convincing for any alternative format to replace it.
XPS is based on the xml-in-a-zip-file paradigm, specifically, the Open Packaging Conventions format, as used by docx and xlsx. In most aspects, PDF and XPS have identical features: both use explicit positioning, formatting and spacing of objects in the document; both support compression, encryption, and some sort of "DRM" schemes. They differ in the details, such as the image formats they support: XPS favors TIFF and JPEG XR, over PDF's Jpeg2000 and JBIG.
In my opinion, OpenXPS is a better format for the Web simply because it's built from formats that the web already supports widely: ZIP and XML. That means it should be much simpler for web browsers to display XPS content without the need of (internal or external) plugins.
Not "de facto", it's an ISO standard. OpenXPS in turn was standarized by ECMA. Also, ghostscript is a Postscript processor, its main purpose is to print (render) Postscript files, be it into an actual printer, into image files, or into PDF .
Because they do what they are supposed to do well enough, and they have a large corporation backing and supporting the format.
If you don't like PDF, you should propose an alternative format that can properly serve the same purpose: to be able to distribute documents in a way that is rendered identical -- or as close to it as possible, anywhere you see it. It should support rendering formatted and spaced text, images, composite images for scanned documents, vector graphics, forms, digital signing, ... and any other feature PDF may have that people want to use.
OpenXPS does all of that already, but since it was designed by Microsoft, it may not be acceptable to you.
I use The Old Reader, but I do login with OAuth. As far as I know, they have their own login box, I just don't use it.
This was in slashdot years ago. I can't find the slashdot link, but I did find this one. The idea is that you design a cpu focusing the reliability in the more significant bits, while you allow the least significant bits to be wrong more often. The errors will be centered around the right values (and tend to average into them), so if you write code that is aware of that fact, you can teach it to compensate for the wrong values. Of course this is not acceptable for certain kinds of software, but for things like multimedia processing, a small % error in the result wouldn't be appreciable, and over time, the image should keep averaging out the old errors while introducing new ones, assuming the software is designed for it.
You missed the point. This is a framework for writing code that KNOWS about unreliable bits. The whole idea is that it lets you write algorithms that can tell the compiler where it's acceptable to have a few errores bits, and where isn't. No one said it would apply to EXISITNG code...
The industry needs to teach everyone that it's not bad to have reusable assets. You only need to model the human body "once", with enough morphs to make a Sims-like customization tool. Same for plants, animals, houses, ... you don't need as many designers as you think. Of course if you want to differentiate yourself in the art style, then you will need to spend extra, but that would be your choice.
You will need graphic designers and artists regardless, but it would be more about placement and details, than the rough base that you could be able to find anywhere, if the industry wasn't stupid. Imagine if Hollywood refused to use the same actors twice...
I know there are many other posts that are saying the same but regardless: bullshit. Polygon counts CAN get better, texture resolution CAN get better, detail quality CAN get better, particle counts CAN get better. And that's while keeping the same "classic" rasterizing concept. If you move into the raytracing world, there's plenty of space for improvement.
The problem with custom encryption systems is that, unlike the real kind, they CAN be hacked "in seconds" by a professional. The only algorithms you could trust to be safe would be the ones the NSA themselves use to store their secrets. On the downside, the docs for those are probably encrypted using the algorithms themselves...
Microsoft offers the sources of many products for research and education purposes. You DO have to sign an NDA to get them, though, so it's not like if just anyone can do the testing.
The point was entirely philosophical. I already said that we do not have that ability yet.
Suppose you were to design a DNA sequence corresponding to a human, and build, cell by cell, a body of a human as it might have grown with that DNA. Suppose you establish the billions of synaptic connections manually, in such a way that they will produce the expected output once activated, but still in a way that could have happened by chance during a normal growth of that human. Suppose you jolt it with a combination of chemicals and electricity, to jump-start the body functions and bring it to "life". Then right afterwards you give it an input, and observe the output. You crafted a being that would have the expectation of free will, but in reality has been predetermined to behave in a certain way. Can you prove in any way that there is a measurable difference from another human being that has grown naturally, has chosen its way since birth, and then has been "shut down" and jump-started again to replicate the situation?
[...] an identical copy of a human (or indeed any animal) cannot be made and the exact same combination of data and initial conditions cannot be produced.
How do you know that? We do not currently have the ability to make an exact duplicate of a complex animal, but how can you prove that, even if we were to do so, the copy wouldn't choose exactly the same every single time?
So you think we have something special that makes us more complex than, say, a dog or a cat? Many animals have been shown to have abstract thought abilities, and we just thought they are less intelligent (in the sense of the ability of reasoning, not if they can remember more things, or calculate faster), actually just did not have the need to evolve a complex spoken language to help them represent those abstract thoughts.
Dogs are able to understand human gestures, and can understand certain words/phrases. That implies communication skills that many animals don't have. Then they understand those messages, and act upon them. You could say they do so because they want to. How are your choices free will but not theirs?
A cat knows it needs to open a door to reach its food. When it wants food, it might come to you for help, or it may try to open the door on its own. Regardless of which action it takes, the cat made a decision, and chose a way to act. It could have chosen otherwise, but it did not. How is that different than your free will?
Sensorial input does affect your thoughts, quite a lot actually. That means like a throw of a dice, wind, sunlight, the smoothness of the table you are resting your hands on, etc. may radically change the outcome of your thoughts.
Just because the outcome of the universe can be predicted, does not mean that you did not influence that outcome. Your choices, even if they are deterministically predetermined to happen, are still your choices. You could have chosen not to do so, it just so happens that in this exact reality, you do not.
My point was that some ISPs have complained about the cost of running good filters, not that it affects innocent websites. Good filters happen to be the ones that do NOT block innocent websites, but of course they cost more. Avoiding that cost is a very important topic for the ISPs, while blocking innocent websites is just a small PR issue. In the case of Virgin and Sky, cheap blocking seems to have been the chocie.
Says Virgin and Sky Blocking are two people who are part of the Open Rights Group International, who happen to run innocent sites, despite the accusations.
Of course they don't care. We are talking about corporations and politicians. What they were complaining about was that it's not EASY, so it requires more EFFORT. And in corporate terms, effort means money. Of course they stop complaining when you compensate them for the cost of running the filters, but the point stands: they DID complain.
This is why ISPs have been complaining for years that filtering bad content is not as easy as the copyright people make the politicians think it is.
Their game relies on an ever growing "grind" of repetitive and simplistic tasks to progress.
No it does not. Repetitive simplistic tasks are one way of obtaining the resources (gold, experience, item tokens, ...), but they are far from being the primary way. In fact the only reason WoW is still as popular as it is, is because unlike almost every other MMO released since 2004, it is NOT a grindfest.
Experience points come from quest chains in the open world and in instanced dungeons, and those quest chains have an actual story that unfolds as you play. Gold is obtained as reward from quests, and looted from monsters, same as gear. Item tokens are rewarded by defeating dungeon and raid bosses, which require a team, and a strategy.
You can argue that it's too easy or boring for your tastes, but you can not say it is a grinding-based MMO.
The issue is not the selling, it's the anti-competitive practice of embedding a chip that identifies the cable as being made by Apple, so that the phone can reject 3rd party cables, for no other reason that the competition wouldn't be paying royalties to Apple.
Because Apple's cables are proprietary, and even contain a chip with the sole purpose to prevent third-parties from making their own. Apple overcharges users for the cables, while preventing the competition from building cheaper alternatives.
The company that requests the one-of-a-kind software will want EXCLUSIVE access to the source. If it's open-source, they will refuse to pay as much.