Apparently, 8,000 signs are replaced in New York every year anyway for wear and tear anyway. And the initiative started in 2003, for a 2018 deadline. If they started sooner, they would be in a better position. This is also a federal program, not a state or city program, both of whom opposed the initiative because they didn't want the deadline. And street signs have a lifetime expectancy of 10 years. 15 years to replace all of the signs, when they're expected to be replaced every 10 years, seems fine.
Better reflective backing, and a font designed for maximum road readability at distances, seems completely reasonable. The increased cost sounds marginal (as the DOD states), as signs aren't really that robust long-term (my sister worked with the sign department for an LA suburb).
Really, this is a controversy manufactured to sell papers. And it worked.
Taliban != Islam. If you don't label them, the "Opposing force" becomes any muslim, raghead, sandn*****, etc you might happen to see. This is a huge cultural problem currently in the US, where swaths of people think we were attacked by the entire middle east on 9/11 and isn't it great we have the Saudi Royal Family and Israel on our side to help spread freedom.
Label the enemy properly, and you're one step closer to understanding why we're stuck in the region, and you're one step closer to getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not a big step, but holy crap if people keep thinking we were attacked on 9/11 by Saddam Hussein I'm giving up and moving to Australia where at least there is good beer.
It's a common use case, but any artifacts present in the original JPG will be scaled down and reproduced in the WebP image. Besides, if you're talking about replacing JPEG with WebP for professional web dev, pros shoot in RAW. you're looking at converting RAW files to a PSD layout, to either JPEG or WebP.
A more proper comparison would involve shooting in raw, then converting that output to JPEG and WebP at the same filesize. Diff the two against the original RAW file, and see the extent of the difference introduced by the file formats.
To be fair, they're changing the system to a microtransaction model 3 years after release, and 2 years after everyone else would have abandoned it. It was about 10 years in development, and at release it was about 1/3rd of the cost of a full game. It has had quite literally several hundred updates throughout the years, and is by far the most actively developed FPS I've ever seen. And while it is slow, you can supposedly grind the items that effect gameplay. As far as I can tell, the items that effect gameplay are all items that were previously available in-game.
Imagine the Modern Warfare 2 people launching at $20, and receiving an update every two weeks for at least three years. It just wouldn't happen. The people at Valve have found a way to potentially keep the game in development, which means more upgrades, more balancing, and a longer life for your initial purchase. We'll have to see how the store pans out over time, but if the choice is target noobs that can die with higher-level items, or an abandoned game collapsing to the rigors of time, I'll take the target noobs.
Also, Steam is a lot better than a serial number. If you lose a physical disk, you lose your game. If you're at work or at a friend's house and want to show off a physical disk at home, you're out of luck. If you have two computers and one disk, you're out of luck. How is a serial number better? Unless you plan on downloading a pirated copy, it's completely useless to you.
Burnout Paradise came out with basically a microtransaction system. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to make enough to sustain the process, as they moved on after releasing their initial batch of content.
TF2 is a really high quality game, that they've been selling for less than the cost of a Starbucks run. They have made hundreds of updates to the game over the years, yet they haven't complicated the experience to the point where it is no longer fun. I'm just getting back into it on a new laptop, and it is still amazing. I completely forgot about weapons upgrades and hats and such in the middle of playing, because I was just having fun.
Hopefully a few dollars here and there will allow them to continue enough development of the title that there are a continuous stream of new players to it. The game is worthy of being a competitive gaming standard, like Counterstrike and Starcraft, but is also pretty accessible to new players.
I've slowly become a fan of JPEG-2000. For those that don't know, JPEG-2000 lets you encode the largest image once, then download only the amount of file that you need for the image resolution that you're displaying. So those 5 or 6 different size versions of your vacation photos in a gallery and the thumbnail on a server can all come from the same file.
There are also far less artifacts at lower bitrates.
There are a few other technological tricks in JPEG-2000, but those are the major ones. Sadly, as you can tell by the name JPEG-2000 has been around for a long time, and doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Unlike PNG, which solved an essential problem for web development (and game development), JPEG-2000 merely does a few new tricks above JPEG.
All WebP seems to do is reduce file size. It's great to optimize, but I can't see a %40 reduction in file size on something that's trivially small for today's computers being enough impetus to change.
On the other hand, the way the article frames the discussion is that the moment IPv4 allocation spaces run out in X years, the internet ceases to function. That's just not true. There is a lot of duct-tape left, and the kinds of problems duct-tape can solve. It is problematic, but it is the kind of slow burn problem that we tend to learn to live with. We still have the dead crappy unvalidated, spam-prone e-mail system kicking around.
Moving to IPv6 is the right and proper solution. But I suspect we still have about 15 years left of dealing with IPv4 problems before we get there.
To be fair, right now there is unprecedented unemployment, two wars, a midterm election, an overhaul of the health care system, and the largest oil spill this country has ever seen. The planet will soon be destroyed by global warming, global cooling, rogue nukes, biological terrorism, Al Qaeda in the UK, peak oil, Iran, North Korea, Christian fundamentalism, and the last Harry Potter movie. Running low on global routing numbers, like we have been since 1990, has understandably been backburnered.
I'm glad someone finally said it. NAT is the (slightly slower) Plan B.
We don't need every computer on the network to have an address. We need every SERVER and external-facing router on the network to have an address. A company of 10,000 desktops may really only have 100 servers and a few external access routers, meaning they could work fine with 100 IP addresses instead of 10,000. Heck, most of those servers are internal anyway. You could require users to VPN in first (which you should be doing anyway), and then those servers could live entirely on the local NAT.
And yes, that will break a few applications, which will have to find ways around it. NAT issues have been worked around in consumer software since the mid 90's. It's not a deal breaker. I haven't had a real IP at home in about 10 years.
And then you start having DNS-style auctions with IP addresses. Eventually, those start going for too much money, and everyone gets off their butts and enables IPv6.
A tech article full of falsehoods and exaggerations? A US business that doesn't understand how trains work? I'm shocked.
Seriously, though, you do make good points. I would also add that the biggest impediment to high-speed rail in the US is figuring out how to relocate people who live or work along the incredibly straight tracks that bullet trains require. Population reshaping, however, is something China is good at.
Yes, and very true. Also a sphere would have been a better representation. But if someone is going to say that a 20 light year radius is a small search space, they should know that the number is really, really big.
Even if searching by stars cuts down your search area by a billion-to-one, you still have quadrillions of cubic miles to search.
I was under the impression that we were basically working towards genetically modifying humans, as well as cybernetically and chemically modifying them / us. And that it is pretty darned slow going, as we can't even figure out how half of our diseases work.
Curing Cancer seems like a small goal compared to genetically modifying people to survive a nuclear winter. And we can't really do either.
20 light years away gives a search area of about 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic miles. Unless it is spewing massive amounts of radiation all of the time, things like that in that big of a search space are pretty hard to detect. And while 20 light years might be small by astronomical standards, human beings haven't even been two light *seconds* away from the earth.
They get the same privacy rights that the rest of us do. They get to have their browsing habits spied upon, their junk fondled at the airport, and all of their trade secrets given to hackers when a human happens to leave their private information on a public server like an idiot.
Remember when everything on a computer was a "killer app?" People have been using app as shorthand for application for years. Devs would walk up to other devs at conferences and ask "So what's your app?" or "How's the app going?"
App as Apple applies it to phone applications is a relatively recent development. Before Apple, apps existed.
Does annyone know what kind of quality level they can bring to the "3d-ification" of what is essentially 2D source material? The Last Airbender was genuinely atrocious in 3D, partially because the process of making 3D images from 2D films seems pretty bad at the moment. Of course, it was an atrocious movie in 2D too, but that's not my question.
Also, will he take the opportunity to re-do scenes from the prequels? This might be a great opportunity to edit Jar Jar, and some of the other embarassing storytelling problems with those movies.
If they can read your bookmarks, they can know what you're interested in. If they know that, they can sell that information to advertising companies, who can target you more effectively.
I doubt there is a lot of money to be made there, but it should be enough.
I wonder how much name recognition Open Office really had, and how much of that was positive. As much as I like the idea of a free open-source alternative to MS Office, and as much as I relied on it for specific tasks, for at least 5 years I've wanted them to fix the bloated mess that it has become. They never have, and many people hate it for that.
If they can get some real movement under their wings now, and separate out the fat, a break with the OO name might just be the Mozilla / Firefoxification the suite needs.
Israel provides valuable intel to the US. Intel on extremists in the Middle East.
If any of this was involved in the run-up to Iraq, we can see just how valuable that intel really is.
This information is shared with the US military and results in fewer casualties of American soldiers.
We give over 3 billion dollars a year to Israel. If the goal was developing tactics and strategies for desert forces with US weaponry, I'm sure 3 billion dollars would buy a lot of training time at a facility in the Saudi desert.
Are you arguing that spending money on information that saves American lives is a waste of money?
US support of Israel is frequently cited as the reason why Middle East terrorists keep hitting the US. In very direct ways, if we didn't support Israel, we wouldn't have lost 5,000 people in 9-11. We wouldn't have lost thousands of soldiers in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. More significantly, we wouldn't have hundreds of thousands of young men and women coming back from the front traumatized or permanently injured, requiring help for the rest of their lives. And of course, the trillion and a half dollars we spent on those wars could have gone a long way to saving lives domestically.
The UN created the nation of Israel to keep the middle east fighting one another for the foreseeable future, and as the nominal leader of the UN (that is to say, the most puissant nation in the UN Security Council, the only nations who actually have a say in the UN) the USA is funding the status quo. It's not very complicated.
The UN created the nation of Israel at the end of World War 2 because it needed a grand anti-axis gesture, and had learned nothing about the dangers of displacing existing people for societal engineering reasons. That it has kept the middle east in turmoil is probably legitimately an accidental side effect, rather than an intentional one.
Slashdot Mirror
You used to be able to pay cities to have street signs made to your specifications for personal use. I don't know if New York does this, though.
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/bronx/million_kuj8X4Z2VolVhXnCymfkvM
Apparently, 8,000 signs are replaced in New York every year anyway for wear and tear anyway. And the initiative started in 2003, for a 2018 deadline. If they started sooner, they would be in a better position. This is also a federal program, not a state or city program, both of whom opposed the initiative because they didn't want the deadline. And street signs have a lifetime expectancy of 10 years. 15 years to replace all of the signs, when they're expected to be replaced every 10 years, seems fine.
Better reflective backing, and a font designed for maximum road readability at distances, seems completely reasonable. The increased cost sounds marginal (as the DOD states), as signs aren't really that robust long-term (my sister worked with the sign department for an LA suburb).
Really, this is a controversy manufactured to sell papers. And it worked.
Why is it that whenever something is wrong in one area, clearly the solution is to not spend any money anywhere else until that problem is fixed?
Taliban != Islam. If you don't label them, the "Opposing force" becomes any muslim, raghead, sandn*****, etc you might happen to see. This is a huge cultural problem currently in the US, where swaths of people think we were attacked by the entire middle east on 9/11 and isn't it great we have the Saudi Royal Family and Israel on our side to help spread freedom.
Label the enemy properly, and you're one step closer to understanding why we're stuck in the region, and you're one step closer to getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan. It's not a big step, but holy crap if people keep thinking we were attacked on 9/11 by Saddam Hussein I'm giving up and moving to Australia where at least there is good beer.
Large chunks of my family died in WW2. Could you please remove the Americans from all your future WW2 games as well?
Oh wait, I forgot which side of the pacific I was on. Please continue to nuke my family.
It's a common use case, but any artifacts present in the original JPG will be scaled down and reproduced in the WebP image. Besides, if you're talking about replacing JPEG with WebP for professional web dev, pros shoot in RAW. you're looking at converting RAW files to a PSD layout, to either JPEG or WebP.
A more proper comparison would involve shooting in raw, then converting that output to JPEG and WebP at the same filesize. Diff the two against the original RAW file, and see the extent of the difference introduced by the file formats.
To be fair, they're changing the system to a microtransaction model 3 years after release, and 2 years after everyone else would have abandoned it. It was about 10 years in development, and at release it was about 1/3rd of the cost of a full game. It has had quite literally several hundred updates throughout the years, and is by far the most actively developed FPS I've ever seen. And while it is slow, you can supposedly grind the items that effect gameplay. As far as I can tell, the items that effect gameplay are all items that were previously available in-game.
Imagine the Modern Warfare 2 people launching at $20, and receiving an update every two weeks for at least three years. It just wouldn't happen. The people at Valve have found a way to potentially keep the game in development, which means more upgrades, more balancing, and a longer life for your initial purchase. We'll have to see how the store pans out over time, but if the choice is target noobs that can die with higher-level items, or an abandoned game collapsing to the rigors of time, I'll take the target noobs.
Also, Steam is a lot better than a serial number. If you lose a physical disk, you lose your game. If you're at work or at a friend's house and want to show off a physical disk at home, you're out of luck. If you have two computers and one disk, you're out of luck. How is a serial number better? Unless you plan on downloading a pirated copy, it's completely useless to you.
Burnout Paradise came out with basically a microtransaction system. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to make enough to sustain the process, as they moved on after releasing their initial batch of content.
TF2 is a really high quality game, that they've been selling for less than the cost of a Starbucks run. They have made hundreds of updates to the game over the years, yet they haven't complicated the experience to the point where it is no longer fun. I'm just getting back into it on a new laptop, and it is still amazing. I completely forgot about weapons upgrades and hats and such in the middle of playing, because I was just having fun.
Hopefully a few dollars here and there will allow them to continue enough development of the title that there are a continuous stream of new players to it. The game is worthy of being a competitive gaming standard, like Counterstrike and Starcraft, but is also pretty accessible to new players.
To be fair, the WebP image is being generated from a compressed JPEG. Which is also completely idiotic.
I've slowly become a fan of JPEG-2000. For those that don't know, JPEG-2000 lets you encode the largest image once, then download only the amount of file that you need for the image resolution that you're displaying. So those 5 or 6 different size versions of your vacation photos in a gallery and the thumbnail on a server can all come from the same file.
There are also far less artifacts at lower bitrates.
There are a few other technological tricks in JPEG-2000, but those are the major ones. Sadly, as you can tell by the name JPEG-2000 has been around for a long time, and doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Unlike PNG, which solved an essential problem for web development (and game development), JPEG-2000 merely does a few new tricks above JPEG.
All WebP seems to do is reduce file size. It's great to optimize, but I can't see a %40 reduction in file size on something that's trivially small for today's computers being enough impetus to change.
NAT is not a solution, and it is duct-tape.
On the other hand, the way the article frames the discussion is that the moment IPv4 allocation spaces run out in X years, the internet ceases to function. That's just not true. There is a lot of duct-tape left, and the kinds of problems duct-tape can solve. It is problematic, but it is the kind of slow burn problem that we tend to learn to live with. We still have the dead crappy unvalidated, spam-prone e-mail system kicking around.
Moving to IPv6 is the right and proper solution. But I suspect we still have about 15 years left of dealing with IPv4 problems before we get there.
To be fair, right now there is unprecedented unemployment, two wars, a midterm election, an overhaul of the health care system, and the largest oil spill this country has ever seen. The planet will soon be destroyed by global warming, global cooling, rogue nukes, biological terrorism, Al Qaeda in the UK, peak oil, Iran, North Korea, Christian fundamentalism, and the last Harry Potter movie. Running low on global routing numbers, like we have been since 1990, has understandably been backburnered.
I'm glad someone finally said it. NAT is the (slightly slower) Plan B.
We don't need every computer on the network to have an address. We need every SERVER and external-facing router on the network to have an address. A company of 10,000 desktops may really only have 100 servers and a few external access routers, meaning they could work fine with 100 IP addresses instead of 10,000. Heck, most of those servers are internal anyway. You could require users to VPN in first (which you should be doing anyway), and then those servers could live entirely on the local NAT.
And yes, that will break a few applications, which will have to find ways around it. NAT issues have been worked around in consumer software since the mid 90's. It's not a deal breaker. I haven't had a real IP at home in about 10 years.
And then you start having DNS-style auctions with IP addresses. Eventually, those start going for too much money, and everyone gets off their butts and enables IPv6.
A tech article full of falsehoods and exaggerations? A US business that doesn't understand how trains work? I'm shocked.
Seriously, though, you do make good points. I would also add that the biggest impediment to high-speed rail in the US is figuring out how to relocate people who live or work along the incredibly straight tracks that bullet trains require. Population reshaping, however, is something China is good at.
Yes, and very true. Also a sphere would have been a better representation. But if someone is going to say that a 20 light year radius is a small search space, they should know that the number is really, really big.
Even if searching by stars cuts down your search area by a billion-to-one, you still have quadrillions of cubic miles to search.
I was under the impression that we were basically working towards genetically modifying humans, as well as cybernetically and chemically modifying them / us. And that it is pretty darned slow going, as we can't even figure out how half of our diseases work.
Curing Cancer seems like a small goal compared to genetically modifying people to survive a nuclear winter. And we can't really do either.
20 light years away gives a search area of about 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic miles. Unless it is spewing massive amounts of radiation all of the time, things like that in that big of a search space are pretty hard to detect. And while 20 light years might be small by astronomical standards, human beings haven't even been two light *seconds* away from the earth.
They get the same privacy rights that the rest of us do. They get to have their browsing habits spied upon, their junk fondled at the airport, and all of their trade secrets given to hackers when a human happens to leave their private information on a public server like an idiot.
Remember when everything on a computer was a "killer app?" People have been using app as shorthand for application for years. Devs would walk up to other devs at conferences and ask "So what's your app?" or "How's the app going?"
App as Apple applies it to phone applications is a relatively recent development. Before Apple, apps existed.
Does annyone know what kind of quality level they can bring to the "3d-ification" of what is essentially 2D source material? The Last Airbender was genuinely atrocious in 3D, partially because the process of making 3D images from 2D films seems pretty bad at the moment. Of course, it was an atrocious movie in 2D too, but that's not my question.
Also, will he take the opportunity to re-do scenes from the prequels? This might be a great opportunity to edit Jar Jar, and some of the other embarassing storytelling problems with those movies.
Hacking a $300 console is still a lot cheaper than a $1,000 gaming PC, and the gaming PC doesn't even live in your living room.
If they can read your bookmarks, they can know what you're interested in. If they know that, they can sell that information to advertising companies, who can target you more effectively.
I doubt there is a lot of money to be made there, but it should be enough.
I wonder how much name recognition Open Office really had, and how much of that was positive. As much as I like the idea of a free open-source alternative to MS Office, and as much as I relied on it for specific tasks, for at least 5 years I've wanted them to fix the bloated mess that it has become. They never have, and many people hate it for that.
If they can get some real movement under their wings now, and separate out the fat, a break with the OO name might just be the Mozilla / Firefoxification the suite needs.
Israel provides valuable intel to the US. Intel on extremists in the Middle East.
If any of this was involved in the run-up to Iraq, we can see just how valuable that intel really is.
This information is shared with the US military and results in fewer casualties of American soldiers.
We give over 3 billion dollars a year to Israel. If the goal was developing tactics and strategies for desert forces with US weaponry, I'm sure 3 billion dollars would buy a lot of training time at a facility in the Saudi desert.
Are you arguing that spending money on information that saves American lives is a waste of money?
US support of Israel is frequently cited as the reason why Middle East terrorists keep hitting the US. In very direct ways, if we didn't support Israel, we wouldn't have lost 5,000 people in 9-11. We wouldn't have lost thousands of soldiers in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. More significantly, we wouldn't have hundreds of thousands of young men and women coming back from the front traumatized or permanently injured, requiring help for the rest of their lives. And of course, the trillion and a half dollars we spent on those wars could have gone a long way to saving lives domestically.
The UN created the nation of Israel to keep the middle east fighting one another for the foreseeable future, and as the nominal leader of the UN (that is to say, the most puissant nation in the UN Security Council, the only nations who actually have a say in the UN) the USA is funding the status quo. It's not very complicated.
The UN created the nation of Israel at the end of World War 2 because it needed a grand anti-axis gesture, and had learned nothing about the dangers of displacing existing people for societal engineering reasons. That it has kept the middle east in turmoil is probably legitimately an accidental side effect, rather than an intentional one.