Childhood friend never spoke until he was five. Seemed to be in a world of his own, but I still liked him. So he graduated from one of the Ivy League (honors or something) and finished two doctorates. He's still in his own world.
People have been studying "genius" for quite a while. Although inconclusive, there are some interesting findings about genius. One of the interesting things is what people like to call the 10,000 practice hour rule. The presumption is: you can be smart or talented in an area, but if you don't practice, you don't get to the genius level. The other side of that coin is that if you don't have the smarts or talent, all the practice in the world won't get you there.
Maybe being in a "world of your own" helps to carve out 10,000 hours of practice time, but if you don't have the talent in that area to begin with, you probably won't get anywhere near the genius level.
So there might be some correlation between some asocial/ASD behavior and genius in getting in the required 10,000 hours of practice, but you can also have a dragon-like parental units, or group of like-minded friends/collegues/mentors, or have a hostile/driven/ambitious personality, or maybe just being born/stranded in a small town (or island) with nothing else to do help you get to 10,000 hours... Researchers of genius have seen all these components in their studies...
As to where the underlying smarts/talent comes from? Well, some might be nature and some might be nurture, but since there are many examples of ASD folks with varying levels of "intelligence", it stands to reason that there is a good chance ASD is not a sign of genius...
Fun fact: new employees at Google are told that "they better have a good reason" if they request a Windows laptop for their primary machine.
Given that Apple has google in their crosshairs over android, I shutter to think how good an ubuntu laptop as a primary machine would be if they wanted to avoid windows laptops and they didn't want to make Apple's warchest any larger... Hopefully ubuntu has gotten better at power management on laptops since I last checked...
Uhm, Arm doesnt' "open-source" their architecture and it's pretty successful. The company that used to be called Sun did a community license similar to what your are suggesting with their Sparc core. Which do you think was more sucessful?
I always find it surprising how the opensource vultures/jackals come out to attack the weak and wounded with their "suggestions" on how to run thier business into the ground. It's as if they actually want the weak companies to die so they can feed off of the remains. Open source should be considered insurance against a businesses abandoning a product, not something that keeps a dying company alive just enough and turned into a zombie patent troll company... Only a scavenger wants that...
For those not visiting grocery stores in the State of California (USA), you don't have the privilege of seeing these signs posted everywhere...
WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
This is because of a silly law created by lawyers called Prop 65. So as a totally defensive measure, grocery stores sellling food in CA all have these signs which apparently do three things:
1. Satisfy the "inform the consumer" portion of the law to help the store avoid liability (aka CYA). 2. Give no information at all about what the specifics or scope of the problem with a particular product or how to avoid it. 3. Train consumers to ignore the warning such warning signs.
Since there is no penatly to post the sign even if the chemical exposure is minimal or none, all stores post this to satisfy #1. This would be funny, if it wasn't just all sad...
I think this Prop 65 label is essentially equivalent to the proposed Violence in Video Games Act labeling requirements. Lots of political grandstanding, no actual effect. I predict all games published by large, even those that might be "EC" will include this label to avoid lawsuits, and it'll just become one of those things that are generally ignored.
For example, who pays attention these warnings on the Nintendo Wii...
1. Sit or stand as far from the screen as possible. 2. Play video games on the smallest available television screen. 3. Do not play if you are tired or need sleep. 4. Play in a well-lit room. 5. Take a 10 to 15 minute break every hour.
Don't worry, people have to endure all sorts of extraneous labeling requirements without causing the end of civilization. A link to some these to cheer you up... This link has some pretty good ones too...
I'm really glad to see Mozilla making the pragmatic move. I understand it's ultimately a question of their own self interest; but in this case that dovetails nicely with what's best for their customers, in my opinion.
The best of all worlds would be for Google to continue development of WebM so it reaches quality parity with h.264. Right now I think it's harder for WebM to gain traction when most of the "pro" arguments are about licensing issues and gloss over any technical deficiencies.
It's easy to say that the WebM folks should just "do something better", but unfortunatly many of the simple techniques that they could use to get better quality w/ the same framework (predictive motion-compensated transformed block encoding), would likely tread on the patent portfolio of H.264. Most video compression experts are pretty sure many of the VP8/WebM features/limitations are a result of engineering around existing well-known patents.
Doing something better would probably mean stealing mindshare of compression experts from the HEVC/H.265 effort. Although it's possible for a bunch of smart people in google to try to do something better, WebM-Next (or even Dirac-Next) aren't getting much love these day from the world-wide community of people likely to make it significantly better, so the odds are long that one company by itself will be able to outdo the chorus of folks contributing to the HEVC committee...
I'm sure that Google isn't going to stop working on WebM, but doing something fundamentally different is gonna be hard. First, they'll have to convince HW accelerators in mobile phones to adopt it and if it doesn't share much HW with the standard, it's gonna be an uphill sell. Second, is the submarine patent problem. If they do something "close" to the standard, at least they can avoid the patents they probably know about, if they do something totally different, it's possible they accidentally read on some patent from some nearly bankrupt company that thinks it hit the jackpot (not necesarily like apple and proview which was a trademark dispute, but you get the idea)...
Arguably, Google's current play in this space is very similar to what MSFT's playbook has been in the past: take something that exists, re-engineer it, call it something else and offer it under unreasonably financially favorable licensing terms to OEMs to attempt to capture market share. WMV and Silverlight anyone? That seems to turn out great for them... On the other hand, Gary Sullivan (one of the key guys on H.264 and the new HEVC standards development), is a long time MSFT employee. You gotta know that Google is playing on both sides of the fence just like MSFT, so don't be surprised that WebM is always gonna be trailing the state of the art...
(And WebM really is not better than MPEG3 in quality; it's inferior.)
I think you mean MPEG4 (the original MPEG4pt2 which was kinda like DivX or H.263L), as opposed to the "new" MPEG4pt10 which is known as AVC or H.264. There is no MPEG3. The standards process that was going to lead to MPEG3 (aka HD-MPEG2) encountered the roadblock that none of the proposed techniques was much better than MPEG2 at the proposed resolution and bitrate so it was cancelled which is why HDTV on first-gen satellites and terrestrial broadcast still used MPEG2 compression that was originally developed for SDTV (e.g., DVD and SDTV satellite).
The very term "bias intimidation" itself is crazy vague. And you're crossing pretty far into free speech territory there without a guide. Does it include insulting someone? Calling them a derogatory name? And who decides what's derogatory or not, or what is an insult or not?
If you are a member of a "protected class" you get to decide what's derogatory or not. If you are not a member of a "protected class", you don't get to decide. That is the current state of affairs (in case you haven't noticed).
It doesn't mean that every statement gets independently vetted.
Certainly not every statement, but every statement that was: 1. asserted as a fact. 2. verfiable to an independent source. At least that's the standard when I was doing editing. Apparently, Mr. Daisey conveniently tried to weasel out of the "2nd" criteria as illustrated below...
During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey's story, This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter's contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn't work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.
"At that point, we should've killed the story," says Ira Glass, Executive Producer and Host of This American Life. "But other things Daisey told us about Apple's operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn't think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake."
If Mr. Glass could have had this one back, I'm sure that he would. It's clearly the reason why professionals that do fact checking always check things that can be verified to an independent source. This doesn't catch all factual errors (of course), but it's the bare minimum. You don't just have a random number generator on statements to decide if they are worth fact checking.
Of course the modern web has drastically reduced standards (because of the dynamics of the medium and the fact that it is bankrupting the traditional fact-checked media).
So he made up some plausable sounding stories to make his point. It's not false in spirit, but he had to present it as literal truth for people to take it seriously.
Well, Mr. Daisey apparently attempted to humanize his story, but in a twist, the human in the story is him, but it isn't a news story, it's now just a poor retelling of the "boy who cried wolf" fable...
In the attempt to humanize the (alleged) victims of this particular industrial march, he steps over the line and dehumanizes his audience as he thinks he knows what is best for them and must "hide" the truth. It is a tragedy that many people often can't see that problem before they take these kind of steps. Often they are more concerned with their own glory than their cause and in that step, they dehumanize the very folks they wish to inform.
To say that it needed to be presented as literal truth to be taken seriously is an insult to literary history and proof of lack of perspective. As a few examples, "Sybil", "Mary Barton", "Hard Times", "Alton Locke", "The Jungle", or "Grapes of Wrath". Now it seem everyone wants a pseudo-documentary like "Roger and Me", or "An inconvenient truth". Sadly the later are only a stone's throw away from "War of the Worlds"...
I wonder if that sentence says more than they intended it to. Could it be that the skills of the NSA people are eroding just like the skills at CIA did? I knew that CIA was in trouble - tradecraft-wise - when a COS let an asset into their HQ and he blew half the station to kingdom come. No one would have done that in the old days. Maybe NSA is having the same problem.
Crypto-guys are the "old guys" from a tradecraft point of view. AFAIK, in the NSA, many of the old-guys are involved with developing clever new internal ciphers (so-called classified "suite-A" algorithms). Since many of the "bad-guys" aren't nation states with heavy duty crypto development capablities, they often are using off the shelf stuff like AES/ECDSA (members of the "suite-B" algorithms). Until someone discovers a huge gaping hole backdoor, breaking these "suite-B" algorithms benefit from mostly from brute force (even if you know a few clever tricks that others do not which chops things down an order of magnitude or two). This is pretty much an admission that there is no huge gaping back door in these suite-B algorithms, not that any crypto-tradecraft capability was in trouble.
I find it oddly somewhat comforting that the we have "old-guys" that realize that sometimes the best thing to do is to throw this problem at a box of computers and spend their time on other pursuits. Who knows, this facility might be dedicated to cranking on some clever cracking algorithm that is unknown to the public, all we know it it takes lots of OPS. Isn't surpising to me that cracking these algorithms are hard. As a historical data point, DES was apparently hard for even the NSA to crack so they deliberatly limited the DES key size from the original 64-bits, to the final 56-bit (although the NSA apparently lobbied for a mere 48-bits).
"vote early, vote often"*** I hope all those advocates of internet voting are paying attention to this... *** a quote attributed to John Van Buren, son of the Dutch speaking 8th president of the USA from New Amsterdam, a Lawyer, and a radical castout of the Democratic Party. Long live the Van Buren Boys
In my experience, the problem you are observing with STEM career track is a systematic problem.
Often the folks that are coming into industry from graduate or post-graduate university are looking for a job where they can apply their newly minted skills (let's call that a mid-entry job for argument's sake). Most managers in industry are looking for people that can help them work out problems and are willing to hire smart people and throw them on the job to learn (let's call that an entry-level job for argument's sake), or folks that can help them that are already skilled in the industry who already have lots of experience (let's call that a job for an highly experienced person). Which is basically what you have observed.
Of course there are some jobs for folks that work on advanced projects that require more than entry level experience, but perhaps less than highly experience level. Maybe that is some type of "entry-mid" level job you might be interested in?
Here's the dillema. If you were a hiring manager, would you promote someone that you've seen working on an entry-level basis for a few years to that new advanced project, or hire what we like to call a new-college-grad++ for that position? Well, I can tell you that NCG++ had better knock my socks off before I'd take the risk to hire that person over promoting someone that I know is a smart and a hard worker. That's because hiring new folks is really a crap shoot (sometimes you win, sometimes you lose). Also, if I hire the NCG++ from outside, an inside person that I might have promoted might decide to take off to another company and we'd lose the institutional knowledge that came with that person as they walk out the door to a competitor. As a result, some of these positions just aren't open to outside folks.
Basically, it sounds like you are trying to "retrack" a STEM career from academia to industry. That's is one of the problems built into the system. Mid-career track in academia generally involves lots of publishing and research (which tends to be in one narrow area if you are only doing something for 3 years) where industry tends to value generalized knowledge or dotting "i's" and crossing "t's" on problems on its mid-career folks.
The only advice I have is that if you want to re-track your career at mid-track, you need to get data points on your resume where it shows you can dot i's and cross t's and have lots of general field knowledge (not 2-years of papers in a very narrow area). If you don't you probably have to wait it out until you get 5-10 years of experience at something specific where you can qualify for a highly experienced job in that more narrow area on its own merit, or you can take an entry level job and hope to wow someone. Sometimes that works too. In most successful companies, it doesn't often matter at what level you are hired in, as long as the company lets the good people bubble-up (and most successful companies have this attribute in common). Good luck.
No free tool can exist because h.264 is licensed and proprietary.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, this statement is misleading.
First of all, almost all codecs are proprietary and licensed (including WebM), so you really need to look at the terms of the license to compare them.
Here's the WebM license.
Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of this implementation of VP8, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by this implementation of VP8. This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of this implementation. If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of VP8 or any code incorporated within this implementation of VP8 constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Basically, free unless you or anyone you know sue anyone. In which case you don't get a license (the time-bomb provision). The H.264 license is of course longer, but here is a brief summary of the relavent terms...
For (a) (1) branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of a personal computer operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = “unit”), royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one Legal Entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty (“cap”) for an Enterprise (commonly controlled Legal Entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5 million per year 2009-10, and $6.5 million per year in 2011-15.... In the case of Internet Broadcast AVC Video (AVC Video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an End User for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither Title-by-Title nor Subscription), there will be no royalty for the life of the License.
So although technical no free tool can exist (unless it was somehow capped at 100,000 units per year), a tool costing.20 cents or less is certainly possible, so I don't think "expensive" is really the right adjective to apply to it.
Basically, you don't have to pay anything at less than 100,000 units per year, and there's an upper cap on the amount you have to pay and you don't have a timebomb where if one of your customers decides to go sue crazy, it destroys your buisness. If you were a business person, which one would you pick? Of course not everyone is a business person, but as a freelance website developer, perhaps there is some sympathy with some business folk...
On the other hand the actual existance of "free" h.264 tools like x264, seems to disprove that fact that "no free tool can exist" (even if you debate the legality of x264, it's hard to debate its existance)...
More than likely, a lot of the projects that Google is working on are not things that will pay off immediately, but in the end, will pay off. They are at least trying to establish the path that other companies *should* take once the technology becomes cheaper/more viable, instead of just sitting on their cash saying "know what we should do with our money? Put more money on top of it." like most companies would.
Or, perhaps they are just "investing" for their "retirement". The sad truth could be that they don't plan on being successful in any of these futuristic endeavors, they just plan on establishing the path that companies *should* take, and building a huge IP landmine field for those that will become successful in the future...
If/when they start declining in relavance (like yahoo), they'll have many more patents to sue the world with as their ship is sinking. That is the retirement pay off at the end...
The radar in the driverless car would be an awesome safety feature to add to any car. I heard an interview on NPR where they said their car could see what people couldn't--- the radar picks up reflections off the pavement, and can "see through" the trucks they're following.
Let's hope they try to make do with lidar, but don't actually continuously use radar in passenger vehicles, though... Even though most automotive radar systems seem to be using a 500MHz band instead of a 2.4GHz band like a microwave oven, or 36GHz, like police radar, given the history of radar and clusters of cancer (military and police radar), it seems bit foolish. 500MHz may not sound high in comparison, but it's what they use for NMR (and if you commute 2 hours a day, would you want to spend that near an NMR machine)...
Almost any interesting game will be NP-hard. Mostly only boring games will be NP-complete though.
NP is the second-most boring class of problems (and it might even be the most-boring class, if NP=P).
Look into some lecture of AI-planing, most problem solving problems are EXP(EXP())- complete, and if you want optimal solutions, it might even get harder....
Even more interesting than an NP-hard game is a game that simulates real life. With NP-hard game you know there is an optimal solution and you usually get a chance to try it over and take another decision path if you fail (even if you can't verify the optimality of your decision in polynomial time). In games that simulate real life, you know that you aren't playing optimally, and you don't get to try again and make another different decision, so NP-complete may be the third-most boring class of problems. As a simple example, take the secretary problem. Of course if you "replay" the secretary problem, you can get the optimal result (basically a P-problem with order 1), but if you can't, well isn't that more interesting?
On the other hand maybe such a game would be so interesting that it's boring (too much like real life, not escapist enough). Which leaves open the other possiblity that a game can be so boring, that it can be made interesting again. Say like a favorite drinking game, or playing inverse checkers for example.
It did, but they got enough Unobtainium to build this sub.
Actually the alchemy that Mr Cameron performed was to transform 3D hypium and virutal Unobtainum into gold by using a motion picture catalyst derived from a pocahontas precursor...
A common truism you learn in business school is that it's usually easier (and less costly) to sell more to your existing customer than to try to get new customers...
If every new dollar you earn is less costly, you have more operating margin which you can then use to feed back into your business and make it grow faster. Thus cross-selling and up-selling techniques are really just no brainers that nearly everyone uses. Works in almost any business (including the gaming industry).
Sorry, but reality is a bit more complicated. China was basically in a civil war at the beginning of WWII. Japan had basically already taken over Manchuria (there was a movie about this "the last emperor"). To help keep Japan in check, first we gave money and supplies to the KMT (basically chiang kai-shek govt) to help them fight the Japanese, but they turned out to be incompetent, so then we gave money to CCP (basically mao and his supporters of the communist party). W/o money from the US, it is likely that both "governments" would have been defeated by the japanese. Of course that's a bit simplification, but when a countries is in a civil war and fighing the Soviet Union & Japan at the same time (ironically, germany was allied with china for a short time, until they flipped sides joined with Japan against the Soviet Union, but I digress), it isn't very simple...
As you mentioned, the KMT is now one of the parties in Taiwan (currently holding power), but the DPP is a taiwan opposition party which breifly held the presidency from 2000-2008. So in many respects, the KMT, DPP and CCP are really sort parties, not "governments", per-se. Nominally, you'd think the DPP would be the most friendly to the US, but since the DPP supports taiwan independence, we are oddly more aligned with the KMT (and the CCP in mainland china) on this issue. Politics makes strange bedfellows...
My guess is that it's probably erlang. It fits all the descriptions of how erlang works. Erlang is used in all sorts of realtime systems, it wouldn't be a stretch to see that it was used in a virus library. Someone that is in the Telecom or Network infrastructure industry might be familiar with Erlang and that type of person might also be the same type of person that knows enough about networks and network vunerabilities to architect a framework for virus distribution.
Not by much. Inflation rate is pretty much nil these days (CPI when ipad2 launched ~217, CPI today ~227). @$500, that's only about $20... Since the wholesale electronics probably got cheaper it's probably a wash for Apple's profit.
On the other hand, median wages have been falling, so relative to typical purchasing power, the price has gone up.
Of course just like any electronics, the specs always get better for new models, so that isn't anything to sneeze at.
In a nutshell Android is a Linux based kernel w/ some power saving improvements (e.g, wakelocks for drivers) and that's pretty much where the similarities end.
Android ships w/o most of the standard libraries (e.g., Xlib), and includes lots of Android specific middleware and support Apache Harmony (java compatible libraries). Although most applications are often written in Java, instead of being compiled to java bytecode and run on a standard JVM, Android uses it's own Dalvik byte code and Dalvik VM, and Android only supports it's own SDK so standard Java apps that use standard class libraries often won't run.
Other than provide a stable OS to run Android w/ lots of device drivers, it's not clear how much of Linux is really required to run Android. I suspect that it could even be ported to a BSD based OS w/o too much trouble (if someone wanted to go through the trouble to make it a pure Apache style license)...
Often if you dial 911 on a cell phone you get routed all over the place before they can either talk to you to determine where you are (sometimes state patrol in a far off county). If you dial 911 from a land line, you get the nearest dispatch center.
Just the other day at my office, some was having a seizure. Several people immediatly dialed 911 on their cell phones, but most got no connection, and the only one that got through rerouted to Sacramento (we were in Santa clara about 120 miles away). Someone ran over to an cube, picked up a land line dialed 911 and immediatly got emergency dispatch w/o any delay.
Most of the people that tried to dial 911 on their cell phones also had the latest phones w/ GPS and other location devices, but even the supposed e911 network didn't know what to do with them. That incident convinced me to not give up my land line at home until they fix this situation.
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Childhood friend never spoke until he was five. Seemed to be in a world of his own, but I still liked him. So he graduated from one of the Ivy League (honors or something) and finished two doctorates. He's still in his own world.
People have been studying "genius" for quite a while. Although inconclusive, there are some interesting findings about genius. One of the interesting things is what people like to call the 10,000 practice hour rule. The presumption is: you can be smart or talented in an area, but if you don't practice, you don't get to the genius level. The other side of that coin is that if you don't have the smarts or talent, all the practice in the world won't get you there.
Maybe being in a "world of your own" helps to carve out 10,000 hours of practice time, but if you don't have the talent in that area to begin with, you probably won't get anywhere near the genius level.
So there might be some correlation between some asocial/ASD behavior and genius in getting in the required 10,000 hours of practice, but you can also have a dragon-like parental units, or group of like-minded friends/collegues/mentors, or have a hostile/driven/ambitious personality, or maybe just being born/stranded in a small town (or island) with nothing else to do help you get to 10,000 hours... Researchers of genius have seen all these components in their studies...
As to where the underlying smarts/talent comes from? Well, some might be nature and some might be nurture, but since there are many examples of ASD folks with varying levels of "intelligence", it stands to reason that there is a good chance ASD is not a sign of genius...
quadcorder
1. Geological
2. Meteorological
3. Biological
4. ???
5. Profit!!!
Fun fact: new employees at Google are told that "they better have a good reason" if they request a Windows laptop for their primary machine.
Given that Apple has google in their crosshairs over android, I shutter to think how good an ubuntu laptop as a primary machine would be if they wanted to avoid windows laptops and they didn't want to make Apple's warchest any larger... Hopefully ubuntu has gotten better at power management on laptops since I last checked...
Uhm, Arm doesnt' "open-source" their architecture and it's pretty successful. The company that used to be called Sun did a community license similar to what your are suggesting with their Sparc core. Which do you think was more sucessful?
I always find it surprising how the opensource vultures/jackals come out to attack the weak and wounded with their "suggestions" on how to run thier business into the ground. It's as if they actually want the weak companies to die so they can feed off of the remains. Open source should be considered insurance against a businesses abandoning a product, not something that keeps a dying company alive just enough and turned into a zombie patent troll company... Only a scavenger wants that...
For those not visiting grocery stores in the State of California (USA), you don't have the privilege of seeing these signs posted everywhere...
WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
This is because of a silly law created by lawyers called Prop 65. So as a totally defensive measure, grocery stores sellling food in CA all have these signs which apparently do three things:
1. Satisfy the "inform the consumer" portion of the law to help the store avoid liability (aka CYA).
2. Give no information at all about what the specifics or scope of the problem with a particular product or how to avoid it.
3. Train consumers to ignore the warning such warning signs.
Since there is no penatly to post the sign even if the chemical exposure is minimal or none, all stores post this to satisfy #1. This would be funny, if it wasn't just all sad...
I think this Prop 65 label is essentially equivalent to the proposed Violence in Video Games Act labeling requirements. Lots of political grandstanding, no actual effect. I predict all games published by large, even those that might be "EC" will include this label to avoid lawsuits, and it'll just become one of those things that are generally ignored.
For example, who pays attention these warnings on the Nintendo Wii...
1. Sit or stand as far from the screen as possible.
2. Play video games on the smallest available television screen.
3. Do not play if you are tired or need sleep.
4. Play in a well-lit room.
5. Take a 10 to 15 minute break every hour.
Don't worry, people have to endure all sorts of extraneous labeling requirements without causing the end of civilization. A link to some these to cheer you up... This link has some pretty good ones too...
I'm really glad to see Mozilla making the pragmatic move. I understand it's ultimately a question of their own self interest; but in this case that dovetails nicely with what's best for their customers, in my opinion.
The best of all worlds would be for Google to continue development of WebM so it reaches quality parity with h.264. Right now I think it's harder for WebM to gain traction when most of the "pro" arguments are about licensing issues and gloss over any technical deficiencies.
It's easy to say that the WebM folks should just "do something better", but unfortunatly many of the simple techniques that they could use to get better quality w/ the same framework (predictive motion-compensated transformed block encoding), would likely tread on the patent portfolio of H.264. Most video compression experts are pretty sure many of the VP8/WebM features/limitations are a result of engineering around existing well-known patents.
Doing something better would probably mean stealing mindshare of compression experts from the HEVC/H.265 effort. Although it's possible for a bunch of smart people in google to try to do something better, WebM-Next (or even Dirac-Next) aren't getting much love these day from the world-wide community of people likely to make it significantly better, so the odds are long that one company by itself will be able to outdo the chorus of folks contributing to the HEVC committee...
I'm sure that Google isn't going to stop working on WebM, but doing something fundamentally different is gonna be hard. First, they'll have to convince HW accelerators in mobile phones to adopt it and if it doesn't share much HW with the standard, it's gonna be an uphill sell. Second, is the submarine patent problem. If they do something "close" to the standard, at least they can avoid the patents they probably know about, if they do something totally different, it's possible they accidentally read on some patent from some nearly bankrupt company that thinks it hit the jackpot (not necesarily like apple and proview which was a trademark dispute, but you get the idea)...
Arguably, Google's current play in this space is very similar to what MSFT's playbook has been in the past: take something that exists, re-engineer it, call it something else and offer it under unreasonably financially favorable licensing terms to OEMs to attempt to capture market share. WMV and Silverlight anyone? That seems to turn out great for them... On the other hand, Gary Sullivan (one of the key guys on H.264 and the new HEVC standards development), is a long time MSFT employee. You gotta know that Google is playing on both sides of the fence just like MSFT, so don't be surprised that WebM is always gonna be trailing the state of the art...
(And WebM really is not better than MPEG3 in quality; it's inferior.)
I think you mean MPEG4 (the original MPEG4pt2 which was kinda like DivX or H.263L), as opposed to the "new" MPEG4pt10 which is known as AVC or H.264. There is no MPEG3. The standards process that was going to lead to MPEG3 (aka HD-MPEG2) encountered the roadblock that none of the proposed techniques was much better than MPEG2 at the proposed resolution and bitrate so it was cancelled which is why HDTV on first-gen satellites and terrestrial broadcast still used MPEG2 compression that was originally developed for SDTV (e.g., DVD and SDTV satellite).
The very term "bias intimidation" itself is crazy vague. And you're crossing pretty far into free speech territory there without a guide. Does it include insulting someone? Calling them a derogatory name? And who decides what's derogatory or not, or what is an insult or not?
If you are a member of a "protected class" you get to decide what's derogatory or not. If you are not a member of a "protected class", you don't get to decide. That is the current state of affairs (in case you haven't noticed).
It doesn't mean that every statement gets independently vetted.
Certainly not every statement, but every statement that was: 1. asserted as a fact. 2. verfiable to an independent source. At least that's the standard when I was doing editing. Apparently, Mr. Daisey conveniently tried to weasel out of the "2nd" criteria as illustrated below...
During fact checking before the broadcast of Daisey's story, This American Life staffers asked Daisey for this interpreter's contact information. Daisey told them her real name was Anna, not Cathy as he says in his monologue, and he said that the cell phone number he had for her didn't work any more. He said he had no way to reach her.
"At that point, we should've killed the story," says Ira Glass, Executive Producer and Host of This American Life. "But other things Daisey told us about Apple's operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn't think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake."
If Mr. Glass could have had this one back, I'm sure that he would. It's clearly the reason why professionals that do fact checking always check things that can be verified to an independent source. This doesn't catch all factual errors (of course), but it's the bare minimum. You don't just have a random number generator on statements to decide if they are worth fact checking.
Of course the modern web has drastically reduced standards (because of the dynamics of the medium and the fact that it is bankrupting the traditional fact-checked media).
So he made up some plausable sounding stories to make his point. It's not false in spirit, but he had to present it as literal truth for people to take it seriously.
Well, Mr. Daisey apparently attempted to humanize his story, but in a twist, the human in the story is him, but it isn't a news story, it's now just a poor retelling of the "boy who cried wolf" fable...
In the attempt to humanize the (alleged) victims of this particular industrial march, he steps over the line and dehumanizes his audience as he thinks he knows what is best for them and must "hide" the truth. It is a tragedy that many people often can't see that problem before they take these kind of steps. Often they are more concerned with their own glory than their cause and in that step, they dehumanize the very folks they wish to inform.
To say that it needed to be presented as literal truth to be taken seriously is an insult to literary history and proof of lack of perspective. As a few examples, "Sybil", "Mary Barton", "Hard Times", "Alton Locke", "The Jungle", or "Grapes of Wrath". Now it seem everyone wants a pseudo-documentary like "Roger and Me", or "An inconvenient truth". Sadly the later are only a stone's throw away from "War of the Worlds"...
I wonder if that sentence says more than they intended it to. Could it be that the skills of the NSA people are eroding just like the skills at CIA did? I knew that CIA was in trouble - tradecraft-wise - when a COS let an asset into their HQ and he blew half the station to kingdom come. No one would have done that in the old days. Maybe NSA is having the same problem.
Crypto-guys are the "old guys" from a tradecraft point of view. AFAIK, in the NSA, many of the old-guys are involved with developing clever new internal ciphers (so-called classified "suite-A" algorithms). Since many of the "bad-guys" aren't nation states with heavy duty crypto development capablities, they often are using off the shelf stuff like AES/ECDSA (members of the "suite-B" algorithms). Until someone discovers a huge gaping hole backdoor, breaking these "suite-B" algorithms benefit from mostly from brute force (even if you know a few clever tricks that others do not which chops things down an order of magnitude or two). This is pretty much an admission that there is no huge gaping back door in these suite-B algorithms, not that any crypto-tradecraft capability was in trouble.
I find it oddly somewhat comforting that the we have "old-guys" that realize that sometimes the best thing to do is to throw this problem at a box of computers and spend their time on other pursuits. Who knows, this facility might be dedicated to cranking on some clever cracking algorithm that is unknown to the public, all we know it it takes lots of OPS. Isn't surpising to me that cracking these algorithms are hard. As a historical data point, DES was apparently hard for even the NSA to crack so they deliberatly limited the DES key size from the original 64-bits, to the final 56-bit (although the NSA apparently lobbied for a mere 48-bits).
"vote early, vote often"*** I hope all those advocates of internet voting are paying attention to this...
*** a quote attributed to John Van Buren, son of the Dutch speaking 8th president of the USA from New Amsterdam, a Lawyer, and a radical castout of the Democratic Party. Long live the Van Buren Boys
In my experience, the problem you are observing with STEM career track is a systematic problem.
Often the folks that are coming into industry from graduate or post-graduate university are looking for a job where they can apply their newly minted skills (let's call that a mid-entry job for argument's sake). Most managers in industry are looking for people that can help them work out problems and are willing to hire smart people and throw them on the job to learn (let's call that an entry-level job for argument's sake), or folks that can help them that are already skilled in the industry who already have lots of experience (let's call that a job for an highly experienced person). Which is basically what you have observed.
Of course there are some jobs for folks that work on advanced projects that require more than entry level experience, but perhaps less than highly experience level. Maybe that is some type of "entry-mid" level job you might be interested in?
Here's the dillema. If you were a hiring manager, would you promote someone that you've seen working on an entry-level basis for a few years to that new advanced project, or hire what we like to call a new-college-grad++ for that position? Well, I can tell you that NCG++ had better knock my socks off before I'd take the risk to hire that person over promoting someone that I know is a smart and a hard worker. That's because hiring new folks is really a crap shoot (sometimes you win, sometimes you lose). Also, if I hire the NCG++ from outside, an inside person that I might have promoted might decide to take off to another company and we'd lose the institutional knowledge that came with that person as they walk out the door to a competitor. As a result, some of these positions just aren't open to outside folks.
Basically, it sounds like you are trying to "retrack" a STEM career from academia to industry. That's is one of the problems built into the system. Mid-career track in academia generally involves lots of publishing and research (which tends to be in one narrow area if you are only doing something for 3 years) where industry tends to value generalized knowledge or dotting "i's" and crossing "t's" on problems on its mid-career folks.
The only advice I have is that if you want to re-track your career at mid-track, you need to get data points on your resume where it shows you can dot i's and cross t's and have lots of general field knowledge (not 2-years of papers in a very narrow area). If you don't you probably have to wait it out until you get 5-10 years of experience at something specific where you can qualify for a highly experienced job in that more narrow area on its own merit, or you can take an entry level job and hope to wow someone. Sometimes that works too. In most successful companies, it doesn't often matter at what level you are hired in, as long as the company lets the good people bubble-up (and most successful companies have this attribute in common). Good luck.
No free tool can exist because h.264 is licensed and proprietary.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, this statement is misleading.
First of all, almost all codecs are proprietary and licensed (including WebM), so you really need to look at the terms of the license to compare them.
Here's the WebM license.
Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of this implementation of VP8, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by this implementation of VP8. This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of this implementation. If you or your agent or exclusive licensee institute or order or agree to the institution of patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that this implementation of VP8 or any code incorporated within this implementation of VP8 constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, or inducement of patent infringement, then any patent rights granted to you under this License for this implementation of VP8 shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
Basically, free unless you or anyone you know sue anyone. In which case you don't get a license (the time-bomb provision).
The H.264 license is of course longer, but here is a brief summary of the relavent terms...
For (a) (1) branded encoder and decoder products sold both to End Users and on an OEM basis for incorporation into personal computers but not part of a personal computer operating system (a decoder, encoder, or product consisting of one decoder and one encoder = “unit”), royalties (beginning January 1, 2005) per Legal Entity are 0 - 100,000 units per year = no royalty (this threshold is available to one Legal Entity in an affiliated group); US $0.20 per unit after first 100,000 units each year; above 5 million units per year, royalty = US $0.10 per unit. The maximum annual royalty (“cap”) for an Enterprise (commonly controlled Legal Entities) is $3.5 million per year 2005-2006, $4.25 million per year 2007-08, $5 million per year 2009-10, and $6.5 million per year in 2011-15....
In the case of Internet Broadcast AVC Video (AVC Video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an End User for which the End User does not pay remuneration for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither Title-by-Title nor Subscription), there will be no royalty for the life of the License.
So although technical no free tool can exist (unless it was somehow capped at 100,000 units per year), a tool costing .20 cents or less is certainly possible, so I don't think "expensive" is really the right adjective to apply to it.
Basically, you don't have to pay anything at less than 100,000 units per year, and there's an upper cap on the amount you have to pay and you don't have a timebomb where if one of your customers decides to go sue crazy, it destroys your buisness. If you were a business person, which one would you pick? Of course not everyone is a business person, but as a freelance website developer, perhaps there is some sympathy with some business folk...
On the other hand the actual existance of "free" h.264 tools like x264, seems to disprove that fact that "no free tool can exist" (even if you debate the legality of x264, it's hard to debate its existance)...
^
This.
More than likely, a lot of the projects that Google is working on are not things that will pay off immediately, but in the end, will pay off. They are at least trying to establish the path that other companies *should* take once the technology becomes cheaper/more viable, instead of just sitting on their cash saying "know what we should do with our money? Put more money on top of it." like most companies would.
Or, perhaps they are just "investing" for their "retirement". The sad truth could be that they don't plan on being successful in any of these futuristic endeavors, they just plan on establishing the path that companies *should* take, and building a huge IP landmine field for those that will become successful in the future...
If/when they start declining in relavance (like yahoo), they'll have many more patents to sue the world with as their ship is sinking. That is the retirement pay off at the end...
The radar in the driverless car would be an awesome safety feature to add to any car. I heard an interview on NPR where they said their car could see what people couldn't--- the radar picks up reflections off the pavement, and can "see through" the trucks they're following.
Let's hope they try to make do with lidar, but don't actually continuously use radar in passenger vehicles, though... Even though most automotive radar systems seem to be using a 500MHz band instead of a 2.4GHz band like a microwave oven, or 36GHz, like police radar, given the history of radar and clusters of cancer (military and police radar), it seems bit foolish. 500MHz may not sound high in comparison, but it's what they use for NMR (and if you commute 2 hours a day, would you want to spend that near an NMR machine)...
Almost any interesting game will be NP-hard. Mostly only boring games will be NP-complete though.
NP is the second-most boring class of problems (and it might even be the most-boring class, if NP=P).
Look into some lecture of AI-planing, most problem solving problems are EXP(EXP())- complete, and if you want optimal solutions, it might even get harder....
Even more interesting than an NP-hard game is a game that simulates real life. With NP-hard game you know there is an optimal solution and you usually get a chance to try it over and take another decision path if you fail (even if you can't verify the optimality of your decision in polynomial time). In games that simulate real life, you know that you aren't playing optimally, and you don't get to try again and make another different decision, so NP-complete may be the third-most boring class of problems. As a simple example, take the secretary problem. Of course if you "replay" the secretary problem, you can get the optimal result (basically a P-problem with order 1), but if you can't, well isn't that more interesting?
On the other hand maybe such a game would be so interesting that it's boring (too much like real life, not escapist enough). Which leaves open the other possiblity that a game can be so boring, that it can be made interesting again. Say like a favorite drinking game, or playing inverse checkers for example.
It did, but they got enough Unobtainium to build this sub.
Actually the alchemy that Mr Cameron performed was to transform 3D hypium and virutal Unobtainum into gold by using a motion picture catalyst derived from a pocahontas precursor...
A common truism you learn in business school is that it's usually easier (and less costly) to sell more to your existing customer than to try to get new customers...
If every new dollar you earn is less costly, you have more operating margin which you can then use to feed back into your business and make it grow faster. Thus cross-selling and up-selling techniques are really just no brainers that nearly everyone uses. Works in almost any business (including the gaming industry).
Sorry, but reality is a bit more complicated. China was basically in a civil war at the beginning of WWII. Japan had basically already taken over Manchuria (there was a movie about this "the last emperor"). To help keep Japan in check, first we gave money and supplies to the KMT (basically chiang kai-shek govt) to help them fight the Japanese, but they turned out to be incompetent, so then we gave money to CCP (basically mao and his supporters of the communist party). W/o money from the US, it is likely that both "governments" would have been defeated by the japanese. Of course that's a bit simplification, but when a countries is in a civil war and fighing the Soviet Union & Japan at the same time (ironically, germany was allied with china for a short time, until they flipped sides joined with Japan against the Soviet Union, but I digress), it isn't very simple...
As you mentioned, the KMT is now one of the parties in Taiwan (currently holding power), but the DPP is a taiwan opposition party which breifly held the presidency from 2000-2008. So in many respects, the KMT, DPP and CCP are really sort parties, not "governments", per-se. Nominally, you'd think the DPP would be the most friendly to the US, but since the DPP supports taiwan independence, we are oddly more aligned with the KMT (and the CCP in mainland china) on this issue. Politics makes strange bedfellows...
My guess is that it's probably erlang. It fits all the descriptions of how erlang works. Erlang is used in all sorts of realtime systems, it wouldn't be a stretch to see that it was used in a virus library. Someone that is in the Telecom or Network infrastructure industry might be familiar with Erlang and that type of person might also be the same type of person that knows enough about networks and network vunerabilities to architect a framework for virus distribution.
Not by much. Inflation rate is pretty much nil these days (CPI when ipad2 launched ~217, CPI today ~227). @$500, that's only about $20... Since the wholesale electronics probably got cheaper it's probably a wash for Apple's profit.
On the other hand, median wages have been falling, so relative to typical purchasing power, the price has gone up.
Of course just like any electronics, the specs always get better for new models, so that isn't anything to sneeze at.
FWIW: Android != Linux
In a nutshell Android is a Linux based kernel w/ some power saving improvements (e.g, wakelocks for drivers) and that's pretty much where the similarities end.
Android ships w/o most of the standard libraries (e.g., Xlib), and includes lots of Android specific middleware and support Apache Harmony (java compatible libraries). Although most applications are often written in Java, instead of being compiled to java bytecode and run on a standard JVM, Android uses it's own Dalvik byte code and Dalvik VM, and Android only supports it's own SDK so standard Java apps that use standard class libraries often won't run.
Other than provide a stable OS to run Android w/ lots of device drivers, it's not clear how much of Linux is really required to run Android. I suspect that it could even be ported to a BSD based OS w/o too much trouble (if someone wanted to go through the trouble to make it a pure Apache style license)...
875
Often if you dial 911 on a cell phone you get routed all over the place before they can either talk to you to determine where you are (sometimes state patrol in a far off county). If you dial 911 from a land line, you get the nearest dispatch center.
Just the other day at my office, some was having a seizure. Several people immediatly dialed 911 on their cell phones, but most got no connection, and the only one that got through rerouted to Sacramento (we were in Santa clara about 120 miles away). Someone ran over to an cube, picked up a land line dialed 911 and immediatly got emergency dispatch w/o any delay.
Most of the people that tried to dial 911 on their cell phones also had the latest phones w/ GPS and other location devices, but even the supposed e911 network didn't know what to do with them. That incident convinced me to not give up my land line at home until they fix this situation.