I'll go straight for the 2010 Pointless Reply Award instead and say that just because people don't often use a 35mm slide (let's presume a positive here, for projection purposes) as something to view directly, it does directly relate to the PPI at -any- size you decide to project it to.
t the 10,000 dpi figure is meaningless unless you like looking at 35mm wide prints at 12 inches away
No - but I might enjoy looking at it on a screen in a theater at its typical size and a typical viewing distance. Is it still meaningless that the film has a '10,000 PPI resolution', or does it tell me that the picture I'm going to be seeing is a heck of a lot better than the 1080p you're barely going to get out of a consumer digital projector. If it were meaningless then you'd be blissfully happy with 75PPI projected from across a street onto the side of a building 5km away because hey.. it's not like your eyes are going to resolve more detail anyway.
As for "nobody here is talking about that" - odd.. I thought the poster you originally replied to was -specifically- referring to this. I should have replied to him instead, I suppose.
This is not true when you're dealing with cellular-level issues.
Again.. zoom. You wouldn't say "Oh, I need a 50000PPI display to view these bacteria", would you? You use a display (or your eyes) on a microscope. Refute the zoom as being a proper viewing method and I'll gladly go along.
And as a sibling poster notes... if you're doing this -in the field-, consider a magnifying glass instead; it'll still be superior to trying to take a pretty low-resolution image and displaying that on a screen that's going to be crap to view in the sun anyway.
Finally, standard 35mm film is around 10,000 DPI, dude.
35mm film is a storage format, not a display format.
Slow down there, cowboy. 35mm film is not even a storage format - it's short for a specification of the physical dimensions of a roll of film (ISO 1007); which have a 36mm (along the length of the roll) x 24mm (across the width) intended active area, or 1.41732283" by 0.94488189".
The 'resolution' is going to depend on just what the film is actually made out of, which determines grain size, which can't really be correlated to a horizontal/vertical 'pixel count' as the grains aren't nice and square. At best you can take the manufacturer's rated lines per mm and work from there. If you do -that-.. then for some pretty expensive film, you do get to about 11,500 x 7,700 pixels.
Plug those into the numbers above... 11,500 / 1.41732283 ~= 8114 7,700 / 0.94488189 ~= 8149 So let's go with about 8100 'DPI' or 'PPI'.
10,000 dpi figure is meaningless unless you like looking at 35mm wide prints at 12 inches away.
As per the above - completely unrelated to the medium. If you meant the -apparent- DPI or PPI; taking into account that surfaces further away appear to be physically smaller... that's where things might get interesting (and Apple's 'Retina Display' kicks in).
That's (looks like the wiki assumes square pixels and measures the diagonal) sqrt(1280^2+1024^2)pix/0.88inch ~= 1863 PPI. Even if that's just marketing and the resolution refers to subpixels, any which way you measure that (e.g. horizontal subpixels: sqrt((1280/3)^2+1024^2)pix/0.88inch ~= 1261 PPI) is going to show a much greater pixel density than any of these phone displays.
Of course those goggles are also a lot more expensive - but it truly isn't a groundbreaking bit from Apple so much as breaking the 'high' PPI into the mass market on a screen the size it is (the LG and Samsung are higher PPI but smaller total size screen)
Although I love myself some high-resolution displays and I think the whole discussion of whether or not a higher resolution is meaningless is itself rather meaningless...
Especially for those of us that require ABSOLUTE DETAIL to diagnose a problem [...] a very high-detail display is required.
No.. not really. You need to be able to see that detail - but that doesn't mean you have to see it as a 1:1 reproduction. There's no reason you can't take the high resolution image you have and simply zoom in on it; even a 320x240 screen is going to be adequate for those purposes.
Of course, again, it is much -nicer- to have a higher resolution display.. but not a requirement.
The Director's Commentary on the DVD (probably the Blu-Ray as well) notes that they did consult with scientists to be as scientifically accurate as possible.. but also noted specifically the float-in-space-and-you-freeze as an example where they went for visual and story-telling appeal, rather than for scientific accuracy; pointing out that it really doesn't matter much that you wouldn't lose heat that quickly.. you can't hold your breath for more than a few minutes anyway and then you'd die from asphyxiation.
So yes, maybe the same piss-poor treatment of science would be in this one, too... if they believe that visual/story-telling appeal takes precedence.
There's probably very little if anything in it that needs surround sound. I wonder if, way back when, people asked the question 'Why surround sound?', too.
There's a few reasons for shooting it in 3D (I hope they're shooting in 3D, at least).
I'll go with the most obvious tied-number-one first: it draws in crowds that go just for the fact that there's 3D on the title (just as there's people who go see -any- movie starring e.g. Natalie Portman), and the tickets command a higher price. Typically theaters don't get both the 3D -and- the 2D version, so if the only convenient theater near you only has the 3D version, that higher price will likely be paid.
Also semi-obvious: because they can. Derived from that and a bit less obvious: and if they do so -now-, they'll spare themselves the headaches and generally iffy results from 2D-to-'3D' post-conversion. Derived from both of the above.. hey, now they've got -two- movies to work with in 2D for a 2D release. The right eye shot looks better than the left? Great, the editor can mix-and-match them as he pleases. ( Just be glad some distributor hasn't decided upon separate Director's Left Eye Cut and Director's Right Eye Cut DVDs/Blu-Rays, charging full price for both, as of yet. )
Which leaves the subject.. why -not- 3D? Why must every 3D movie be packed full of in-your-face effects before it becomes acceptable to use 3D? Avatar might have popularized 3D-as-a-technique-rather-than-an-effect.. but before that the latest Final Destination already showed that even if there's no reason to shoot stereoscopic (only the specific effects distinctly showed the use of 3D) for every scene.. even the 'boring' scenes. Of course part of that is the fact that if you're going to make some shots with 3D in mind, it'd be disruptive to just shoot the rest in 2D), but you could pretty much shoot any movie in 3D and have it 'work'.
You need a minimum of a Cortex A8-family processor to run Flash and many lower-end and older Android phones just don't pack the horsepower to pull it off.
Really?
If you need that much power then how are the Cortex A8-family processor-based machines ever going to handle everything through jscript+html5 canvas?
I decided to hit the very first one on my Pentium Mobile 1.6GHz, strongbad's e-mail #45: http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html Result: 100% CPU use, sound/video synchronization issues, stuttering, etc.
Then I read your comment and remembered that Adobe in fact have a Flash player available for my old Windows Mobile 5 phone (a QTek 9100 / HTC Wizard. TI OMAP 850, 200MHz). You can download it from: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/downloads/player.html So I checked that same SB email out on that device: http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html Result: Perfectly smooth, running full-screen within Pocket IE. Can't give you a CPU use number as I don't have any CPU use app installed on it, but I had no problem playing back some MP3s in the background.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. I highly suspect you're thinking of h.264 video being played back - and indeed, checking out a YouTube video is a different experience altogether - i.e. slow with lots of video frames skipped; although I can watch (barely, as the screen is so small) my favorite StarGate SG-1 episode on it just fine (re-encoded for the format, of course).
But Flash is more than just video... so saying you need a beefy processor for Flash-in-general is inaccurate at best.
Nothing out there is running Android 2.2. 80% of Android phones won't get a legit port of 2.2 to their phone and people will resort to hacks. Obviously, I prefer the iphone.
The original iPhone? You do realize that's not getting iOS 4 either, right?
iPhone 3G, perhaps? That's getting iOS 4 in a stripped-down fashion (no multi-tasking, e.g. Yeah, you probably wouldn't use it anyway).
I guess with the almost compulsory purchase of every new generation of iPhone you could claim that the upgraded firmware/OS comes free with that choice.. but I don't think it's much of an argument against Android - especially the G1 mentioned - and firmware/OS upgrades on that platform.
you don't have to worry about patent claims [...] but at least it isn't an issue for the users.
I thought this Slashdot story... http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/05/02/1114235/The-MPEG-LAs-Lock-On-Culture...led us to believe otherwise - at least if the stream you encode ends up being used commercially; and some interest groups tend to believe that having an ad on your site where the video is played back = commercial exploitation.
Well that's a broader question that's really not at play here, is it?
*All else being equal*, if I get more food for the same price, I get more value for money. ( but, again, wasted.. as I usually can't finish that damn much food. And yes, I usually ask for smaller portions in U.S. restaurants and they can typically accommodate. Now if only they could make proper 'well done' steaks;) )
Final Fantasy : The Spirits Within wasn't a bad movie either.. it just got hyped too much on the 'realistic human faces' which instead started to approach the uncanny valley if you tried to actually see them as such.
And though I'm not a fan of the franchise, the Tomb Raider movies didn't do too badly either.
Finally, I saw Prince of Persia a few days ago; I thought the 'humorous' plot parts that Disney inserted pretty bleh, but again it wasn't a -bad- movie, let alone 'awful', I'd even go so far as to say it was good-ish. No masterpiece, certainly, and not even up to the level of Silent Hill (my favorite in the bunch), but far from 'awful'.
I think overall, though, we should count ourselves lucky. There's maybe 30 or so movies directly based on computer games (if not counting the Pokémon releases, and you can barely say they're computer game movies anymore), versus thousands upon thousands of computer games.
Then again.. they're making a World of WarCraft movie...
That assumes that the portions are reasonable for the person who ordered it.
Which, in the U.S., it rarely is.
I've always been taught to finish my plate, but some of the meal sizes in the U.S. are just ridiculous. I understand that I'm getting more value for money, but in the end it's likely to just go wasted.
What's his policy on taking it home for later?
I presume he wouldn't accept that. After all, everybody would simply claim take-it-home rights -and- the 30% discount.. then probably toss it in the nearest garbage can out of view.
I expect that the fact I paid for it gives me the right to do with it as I damn well please. I'm not paying him to be my mother. I'm paying him to prepare the damn food
So you should be fine at this establishment.
You're not being mothered, you're still more than free to not finish the plate and pay the monetary price.
On the other hand, if you -do- finish your plate, you only pay $7.. but you might pay the price in cramps later that evening:)
It's not necessarily that Apple truly innovates, or even that it simply does things better (i.e. the iPhone).
It's the fact that Apple is one of those brands that a lot of industries follow.
So once -Apple- starts doing videoconferencing, even just the two-way that's been shown in TV commercials since the day phones with two cameras (or just the 'front' camera) were launched, you'll suddenly see a lot of (renewed) interest in supporting it; including carriers.
Personally, I yawn at these announcements in terms of what they announce. But I applaud the announcements themselves, as it'll light some fire under companies' behinds to kick back into gear.
The one announcement bit that has the opposite effect, is the FarmVille-as-an-app. Not that I care for FarmVille, but one major problem FarmVille players supposedly had was the lack of Flash support on the iPhone (and iPod touch, and iPad) - Flash being what FarmVille needed to run. But Apple made it clear that they would definitely not be supporting Flash, and instead were 'promoting' HTML5. So will there be an HTML5 FarmVille? Perhaps - but it's clear that at least as far as the announcement goes, it will be an iPhone/Pod Touch/Pad-only app instead. I believe this is far more the future that Apple envisions, than that developers use HTML5.
But their platform, their store, their firstborns and FarmVille folks' freedom to decide to make it a native app and all that; such are things:)
the FBI gets a button, each of the 50 states gets a button, every county, town, city PD gets a button, etc. etc....the internet would collapse under the weight of all the buttons, none of which would ever get used for a useful purpose...
You mean kinda like how there would be a national emergency number, and then there's the state police number, and the municipality's police number, town police number, and if it's a big city there's probably precinct numbers? Not to mention fire department and ambulance? Yeah, I can totally see how that's a huge giant mess where the emergency services would collapse, and none of them would ever get used for a useful purpose./sarcasm.
Australian police want a "report crime" button on a website, put it on their own...you know, where I'd look for one...if i was looking in the first place...
Would you, though?
Have you noticed how end-users of products pretty much -expect- a company to have a presence on e.g. Twitter -and- have somebody on staff to monitor for any hashtags that might deal with that company, in order to get some manner of support? They don't go to a website and fill in a contact form - they don't go to a forum and register there to post whatever problem they have on there - let alone they bother to call. They post on Twitter/Facebook, and then complain if there isn't some form of a response within 48 hours. So what makes you think this Twitter/Facebook generation wouldn't expect the exact same from emergency services?
In fact, many emergency services -are- on Twitter/Facebook/accept text messages/etc. But you still need to know where to find them in order to reach them. So a single button - just like a single 911 in the U.S. - shouldn't be a problem.
can't see the website button getting abused in any way, no siree...
911 is a free number, you can call it even if you don't have a valid SIM.. does it get abused? Sure. Does it get abused to the point of the service being useless? No. A big reason for that is that abuse is punished. I'd be surprised if the Aussie peeps didn't stipulate somewhere that if they find the button to be abused, that the Facebook user be warned / have their Facebook account suspended.
As for...
Why Facebook?
As opposed to...? I understand your argument if you say 'none at all - just put it on your own website'. But given the above about people being all about the convenience, putting it on someprecinct.somestate.gov.us isn't going to be nearly as efficient as putting it on a large social networking site. If this was about the Dutch government, for example, I'd imagine they'd ask the same of Hyves - and the Brazilian government might poke at Orkut.
I don't know if the button would be a good idea or a bad idea.. there's one easy way to find out, though; charge the gov't for the costs to put it up there and have at it.
When I first read the title my mind thought about a really kick butt cache drive that allowed you to throw in a DVD/Blu-Ray disc, read in its entire contents in one pass - saving power, increasing performance, and that annoying buzzing sound.
And have their Blu-Ray license revoked; the licensing party would be none to please with essentially making a copy of the blu-ray onto the SSD.
Of course you, yourself, would still be free to do exactly this using any one of the blu-ray ripping tools.
In fact I'd even go as far as to say the Optical / SSD combo drive is a useless concept on the face of it.
They already give the main advantage 'on the face of it' in the story: you don't end up taking up one of (and often, the only), 2.5" HDD slot in your notebook.
As if USB slots are hard to come by
No, but when's the last time you opened up a notebook to connect an SSD to a hidden internal USB connector and still get the case closing properly? If you're referring to the connectors for external devices - I'm pretty sure part of the point was to -eliminate- the need for an external device.
Finally, USB2 is nowhere near as fast as SATA3. USB3 gets closer, but it still leaves you with the downside above.
or laptops lack SSD/MMC card slots?
given their a slow interface, I'm not sure why you're even trying to compare them to an SSD.
If I were in the market for a laptop right now and my options included... - Blu-Ray, HDD 750GB - Blu-Ray, SSD 64GB - Blu-Ray+SSD 64GB, HDD 750GB...I'd say it'd be a pretty easy choice if pricing is kept competitive.
Of course there's downsides as well.. such as, presumably, not being able to upgrade the SSD portion easily. ( aside from pricepoint / performance / etc. which remain to be seen )
The rig keeping in place isn't even all that impressive, though. Really, as long as you can still hook up the fuel and electric lines, you could hold a jet engine in place with a reasonably sturdy cement casing. You just won't get a heck of a lot of useful information out of it.
you jest, but both Discovery and Atlantis -are- planned to be up for sale again (they have been previously on sale for figures from $50M down to about $25M). They plant to keep the Endeavour.
Mod parent way up - "succumbed to its own success"
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Parent is absolutely right. Shows like these succumb to their own success.
This is the problem that faced Lost from season 2 onward. It was never -meant- to be as many seasons long as it ended up being. But when you get such high ratings, the stations pretty much force you to produce more content (read:filler), dragging the story on and on, and eventually you end up having so much going on in the show, that the ending you had envisioned by the time you wrote the pilot, that the ending will no longer work and you've got just a few shows (if being abruptly canceled. Hi, Heroes) to try and tie things up - which is, invariably, a mess. ( Let's see how Heroes fares with their cancellation. )
Sadly, hardly any station would allow you to specify in the contract that the show will be N seasons or episodes long with key plot elements from the pilot to the finale, with little room in other (filler) episodes for the station managers to get their egotripping time. The only way to get -that- is with a miniseries.. 2-4 episodes..which aren't well-suited for shows designed as a series.
I stopped watching mid-way through season 3.. don't bother telling me it gets better in season 4; after reading the short summary in the top post here, it could be the most brilliant made-for-TV work of our generation.. and I still wouldn't care to see it.
I could forsee that EIRCOM will soon be known as "formerly one of the biggest ISP".
Similar to how PS3 sales have dropped and millions of users went to the store they purchased their PS3 from to return it when SONY removed the 'other os' option?
Please. There's going to be a handful of people making it a point to cancel their contract, some of those are going to be vocal about it on their blog, and the rest of the subscribers are either not going to care, or do care but check the alternatives and find that the alternatives bring with them other negative points (higher costs, for example) and decide they don't care enough.
This is only going to have a major impact once people -are- getting cut off, and even then only when they're getting cut off improperly; otherwise it's just a matter of "well you -did- share those files.. it's not like you didn't know this could happen, you got two warnings before.. the mistake you made was getting caught - three times. Tough luck, buddy."
People deliberately naming benign files in that manner so as to taunt the RIAA/MPAA/whoever?
Not that it matters - such benign files would get removed at any reasonable indexing site/tracker as being 'fake', and any single user trying to pass off a fragment of the benign file as being part of the proper file will find their fragment hash failing left and right and be rejected.
Suing costs a lot more money (on both the side of the plaintiff and the defendant). Suing ties up legal proceedings in whatever court venue would be involved. Suing would make most people think back of the million dollar lawsuits fought in the U.S. where you're typically better off just paying the extorti...fin...settlement payment.
All of the above are vastly more negative, for both sides, than issuing warning notices (or having them issued) and ultimately having internet access reduced or cut off.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll go straight for the 2010 Pointless Reply Award instead and say that just because people don't often use a 35mm slide (let's presume a positive here, for projection purposes) as something to view directly, it does directly relate to the PPI at -any- size you decide to project it to.
No - but I might enjoy looking at it on a screen in a theater at its typical size and a typical viewing distance. Is it still meaningless that the film has a '10,000 PPI resolution', or does it tell me that the picture I'm going to be seeing is a heck of a lot better than the 1080p you're barely going to get out of a consumer digital projector. If it were meaningless then you'd be blissfully happy with 75PPI projected from across a street onto the side of a building 5km away because hey.. it's not like your eyes are going to resolve more detail anyway.
As for "nobody here is talking about that" - odd.. I thought the poster you originally replied to was -specifically- referring to this. I should have replied to him instead, I suppose.
Again.. zoom. You wouldn't say "Oh, I need a 50000PPI display to view these bacteria", would you? You use a display (or your eyes) on a microscope. Refute the zoom as being a proper viewing method and I'll gladly go along.
And as a sibling poster notes... if you're doing this -in the field-, consider a magnifying glass instead; it'll still be superior to trying to take a pretty low-resolution image and displaying that on a screen that's going to be crap to view in the sun anyway.
Slow down there, cowboy. 35mm film is not even a storage format - it's short for a specification of the physical dimensions of a roll of film (ISO 1007); which have a 36mm (along the length of the roll) x 24mm (across the width) intended active area, or 1.41732283" by 0.94488189".
The 'resolution' is going to depend on just what the film is actually made out of, which determines grain size, which can't really be correlated to a horizontal/vertical 'pixel count' as the grains aren't nice and square.
At best you can take the manufacturer's rated lines per mm and work from there. If you do -that-.. then for some pretty expensive film, you do get to about 11,500 x 7,700 pixels.
Plug those into the numbers above...
11,500 / 1.41732283 ~= 8114
7,700 / 0.94488189 ~= 8149
So let's go with about 8100 'DPI' or 'PPI'.
As per the above - completely unrelated to the medium. If you meant the -apparent- DPI or PPI; taking into account that surfaces further away appear to be physically smaller... that's where things might get interesting (and Apple's 'Retina Display' kicks in).
Good thing that list doesn't include head-mounted displays. Some of those models, such as those from CyberMind, are easily 1280x1024 with a .. had to check here ( http://www.cybermindnl.com/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=50&category_id=11&manufacturer_id=0&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1 ) .. 0.77" display area.
That's (looks like the wiki assumes square pixels and measures the diagonal) sqrt(1280^2+1024^2)pix/0.88inch ~= 1863 PPI.
Even if that's just marketing and the resolution refers to subpixels, any which way you measure that (e.g. horizontal subpixels: sqrt((1280/3)^2+1024^2)pix/0.88inch ~= 1261 PPI) is going to show a much greater pixel density than any of these phone displays.
Of course those goggles are also a lot more expensive - but it truly isn't a groundbreaking bit from Apple so much as breaking the 'high' PPI into the mass market on a screen the size it is (the LG and Samsung are higher PPI but smaller total size screen)
Although I love myself some high-resolution displays and I think the whole discussion of whether or not a higher resolution is meaningless is itself rather meaningless...
No.. not really. You need to be able to see that detail - but that doesn't mean you have to see it as a 1:1 reproduction. There's no reason you can't take the high resolution image you have and simply zoom in on it; even a 320x240 screen is going to be adequate for those purposes.
Of course, again, it is much -nicer- to have a higher resolution display.. but not a requirement.
The Director's Commentary on the DVD (probably the Blu-Ray as well) notes that they did consult with scientists to be as scientifically accurate as possible.. but also noted specifically the float-in-space-and-you-freeze as an example where they went for visual and story-telling appeal, rather than for scientific accuracy; pointing out that it really doesn't matter much that you wouldn't lose heat that quickly.. you can't hold your breath for more than a few minutes anyway and then you'd die from asphyxiation.
So yes, maybe the same piss-poor treatment of science would be in this one, too... if they believe that visual/story-telling appeal takes precedence.
There's probably very little if anything in it that needs surround sound. I wonder if, way back when, people asked the question 'Why surround sound?', too.
There's a few reasons for shooting it in 3D (I hope they're shooting in 3D, at least).
I'll go with the most obvious tied-number-one first: it draws in crowds that go just for the fact that there's 3D on the title (just as there's people who go see -any- movie starring e.g. Natalie Portman), and the tickets command a higher price. Typically theaters don't get both the 3D -and- the 2D version, so if the only convenient theater near you only has the 3D version, that higher price will likely be paid.
Also semi-obvious: because they can.
Derived from that and a bit less obvious: and if they do so -now-, they'll spare themselves the headaches and generally iffy results from 2D-to-'3D' post-conversion.
Derived from both of the above.. hey, now they've got -two- movies to work with in 2D for a 2D release. The right eye shot looks better than the left? Great, the editor can mix-and-match them as he pleases.
( Just be glad some distributor hasn't decided upon separate Director's Left Eye Cut and Director's Right Eye Cut DVDs/Blu-Rays, charging full price for both, as of yet. )
Which leaves the subject.. why -not- 3D? Why must every 3D movie be packed full of in-your-face effects before it becomes acceptable to use 3D? Avatar might have popularized 3D-as-a-technique-rather-than-an-effect.. but before that the latest Final Destination already showed that even if there's no reason to shoot stereoscopic (only the specific effects distinctly showed the use of 3D) for every scene.. even the 'boring' scenes. Of course part of that is the fact that if you're going to make some shots with 3D in mind, it'd be disruptive to just shoot the rest in 2D), but you could pretty much shoot any movie in 3D and have it 'work'.
Really?
If you need that much power then how are the Cortex A8-family processor-based machines ever going to handle everything through jscript+html5 canvas?
I saw a comment elsewhere that pointed to some HTML5 demos at http://smokescreen.us/demo/
I decided to hit the very first one on my Pentium Mobile 1.6GHz, strongbad's e-mail #45:
http://smokescreen.us/demos/sb45demo.html
Result: 100% CPU use, sound/video synchronization issues, stuttering, etc.
Then I checked out the standard Flash version:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: 16% CPU use, perfectly smooth.
Then I read your comment and remembered that Adobe in fact have a Flash player available for my old Windows Mobile 5 phone (a QTek 9100 / HTC Wizard. TI OMAP 850, 200MHz). You can download it from:
http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer_pocketpc/downloads/player.html
So I checked that same SB email out on that device:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail45.html
Result: Perfectly smooth, running full-screen within Pocket IE. Can't give you a CPU use number as I don't have any CPU use app installed on it, but I had no problem playing back some MP3s in the background.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. I highly suspect you're thinking of h.264 video being played back - and indeed, checking out a YouTube video is a different experience altogether - i.e. slow with lots of video frames skipped; although I can watch (barely, as the screen is so small) my favorite StarGate SG-1 episode on it just fine (re-encoded for the format, of course).
But Flash is more than just video... so saying you need a beefy processor for Flash-in-general is inaccurate at best.
The original iPhone? You do realize that's not getting iOS 4 either, right?
iPhone 3G, perhaps? That's getting iOS 4 in a stripped-down fashion (no multi-tasking, e.g. Yeah, you probably wouldn't use it anyway).
I guess with the almost compulsory purchase of every new generation of iPhone you could claim that the upgraded firmware/OS comes free with that choice.. but I don't think it's much of an argument against Android - especially the G1 mentioned - and firmware/OS upgrades on that platform.
You presume that allowing Flash would not 'cost him money'.
I thought this Slashdot story... ...led us to believe otherwise - at least if the stream you encode ends up being used commercially; and some interest groups tend to believe that having an ad on your site where the video is played back = commercial exploitation.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/05/02/1114235/The-MPEG-LAs-Lock-On-Culture
oh, no wonder then - should have translated to Italian!
Well that's a broader question that's really not at play here, is it?
*All else being equal*, if I get more food for the same price, I get more value for money. ;) )
( but, again, wasted.. as I usually can't finish that damn much food. And yes, I usually ask for smaller portions in U.S. restaurants and they can typically accommodate. Now if only they could make proper 'well done' steaks
Agreed.. in addition to those you listed..
Final Fantasy : The Spirits Within wasn't a bad movie either.. it just got hyped too much on the 'realistic human faces' which instead started to approach the uncanny valley if you tried to actually see them as such.
And though I'm not a fan of the franchise, the Tomb Raider movies didn't do too badly either.
Finally, I saw Prince of Persia a few days ago; I thought the 'humorous' plot parts that Disney inserted pretty bleh, but again it wasn't a -bad- movie, let alone 'awful', I'd even go so far as to say it was good-ish. No masterpiece, certainly, and not even up to the level of Silent Hill (my favorite in the bunch), but far from 'awful'.
I think overall, though, we should count ourselves lucky. There's maybe 30 or so movies directly based on computer games (if not counting the Pokémon releases, and you can barely say they're computer game movies anymore), versus thousands upon thousands of computer games.
Then again.. they're making a World of WarCraft movie...
Which, in the U.S., it rarely is.
I've always been taught to finish my plate, but some of the meal sizes in the U.S. are just ridiculous. I understand that I'm getting more value for money, but in the end it's likely to just go wasted.
I presume he wouldn't accept that. After all, everybody would simply claim take-it-home rights -and- the 30% discount.. then probably toss it in the nearest garbage can out of view.
So you should be fine at this establishment.
You're not being mothered, you're still more than free to not finish the plate and pay the monetary price.
On the other hand, if you -do- finish your plate, you only pay $7.. but you might pay the price in cramps later that evening :)
Well that's the thing, isn't it?
It's not necessarily that Apple truly innovates, or even that it simply does things better (i.e. the iPhone).
It's the fact that Apple is one of those brands that a lot of industries follow.
So once -Apple- starts doing videoconferencing, even just the two-way that's been shown in TV commercials since the day phones with two cameras (or just the 'front' camera) were launched, you'll suddenly see a lot of (renewed) interest in supporting it; including carriers.
Personally, I yawn at these announcements in terms of what they announce. But I applaud the announcements themselves, as it'll light some fire under companies' behinds to kick back into gear.
The one announcement bit that has the opposite effect, is the FarmVille-as-an-app. Not that I care for FarmVille, but one major problem FarmVille players supposedly had was the lack of Flash support on the iPhone (and iPod touch, and iPad) - Flash being what FarmVille needed to run. But Apple made it clear that they would definitely not be supporting Flash, and instead were 'promoting' HTML5.
So will there be an HTML5 FarmVille? Perhaps - but it's clear that at least as far as the announcement goes, it will be an iPhone/Pod Touch/Pad-only app instead.
I believe this is far more the future that Apple envisions, than that developers use HTML5.
But their platform, their store, their firstborns and FarmVille folks' freedom to decide to make it a native app and all that; such are things :)
You mean kinda like how there would be a national emergency number, and then there's the state police number, and the municipality's police number, town police number, and if it's a big city there's probably precinct numbers? Not to mention fire department and ambulance? /sarcasm.
Yeah, I can totally see how that's a huge giant mess where the emergency services would collapse, and none of them would ever get used for a useful purpose.
Would you, though?
Have you noticed how end-users of products pretty much -expect- a company to have a presence on e.g. Twitter -and- have somebody on staff to monitor for any hashtags that might deal with that company, in order to get some manner of support?
They don't go to a website and fill in a contact form - they don't go to a forum and register there to post whatever problem they have on there - let alone they bother to call.
They post on Twitter/Facebook, and then complain if there isn't some form of a response within 48 hours.
So what makes you think this Twitter/Facebook generation wouldn't expect the exact same from emergency services?
In fact, many emergency services -are- on Twitter/Facebook/accept text messages/etc. But you still need to know where to find them in order to reach them.
So a single button - just like a single 911 in the U.S. - shouldn't be a problem.
911 is a free number, you can call it even if you don't have a valid SIM.. does it get abused? Sure. Does it get abused to the point of the service being useless? No. A big reason for that is that abuse is punished. I'd be surprised if the Aussie peeps didn't stipulate somewhere that if they find the button to be abused, that the Facebook user be warned / have their Facebook account suspended.
As for...
As opposed to...? I understand your argument if you say 'none at all - just put it on your own website'. But given the above about people being all about the convenience, putting it on someprecinct.somestate.gov.us isn't going to be nearly as efficient as putting it on a large social networking site. If this was about the Dutch government, for example, I'd imagine they'd ask the same of Hyves - and the Brazilian government might poke at Orkut.
I don't know if the button would be a good idea or a bad idea.. there's one easy way to find out, though; charge the gov't for the costs to put it up there and have at it.
And have their Blu-Ray license revoked; the licensing party would be none to please with essentially making a copy of the blu-ray onto the SSD.
Of course you, yourself, would still be free to do exactly this using any one of the blu-ray ripping tools.
They already give the main advantage 'on the face of it' in the story: you don't end up taking up one of (and often, the only), 2.5" HDD slot in your notebook.
No, but when's the last time you opened up a notebook to connect an SSD to a hidden internal USB connector and still get the case closing properly?
If you're referring to the connectors for external devices - I'm pretty sure part of the point was to -eliminate- the need for an external device.
Finally, USB2 is nowhere near as fast as SATA3. USB3 gets closer, but it still leaves you with the downside above.
given their a slow interface, I'm not sure why you're even trying to compare them to an SSD.
If I were in the market for a laptop right now and my options included... ...I'd say it'd be a pretty easy choice if pricing is kept competitive.
- Blu-Ray, HDD 750GB
- Blu-Ray, SSD 64GB
- Blu-Ray+SSD 64GB, HDD 750GB
Of course there's downsides as well.. such as, presumably, not being able to upgrade the SSD portion easily.
( aside from pricepoint / performance / etc. which remain to be seen )
The rig keeping in place isn't even all that impressive, though. Really, as long as you can still hook up the fuel and electric lines, you could hold a jet engine in place with a reasonably sturdy cement casing.
You just won't get a heck of a lot of useful information out of it.
So on the end of simpler 'clamps', you've got something like..
http://www.aviationearth.com/jet_engine.jpg
While near the other end of the spectrum, you've got this bad boy..
http://www.rolls-royce.com/Images/08124008_tcm92-12791.jpg
you jest, but both Discovery and Atlantis -are- planned to be up for sale again (they have been previously on sale for figures from $50M down to about $25M). They plant to keep the Endeavour.
Parent is absolutely right. Shows like these succumb to their own success.
This is the problem that faced Lost from season 2 onward. It was never -meant- to be as many seasons long as it ended up being. But when you get such high ratings, the stations pretty much force you to produce more content (read:filler), dragging the story on and on, and eventually you end up having so much going on in the show, that the ending you had envisioned by the time you wrote the pilot, that the ending will no longer work and you've got just a few shows (if being abruptly canceled. Hi, Heroes) to try and tie things up - which is, invariably, a mess.
( Let's see how Heroes fares with their cancellation. )
Sadly, hardly any station would allow you to specify in the contract that the show will be N seasons or episodes long with key plot elements from the pilot to the finale, with little room in other (filler) episodes for the station managers to get their egotripping time. The only way to get -that- is with a miniseries.. 2-4 episodes ..which aren't well-suited for shows designed as a series.
I stopped watching mid-way through season 3.. don't bother telling me it gets better in season 4; after reading the short summary in the top post here, it could be the most brilliant made-for-TV work of our generation.. and I still wouldn't care to see it.
Similar to how PS3 sales have dropped and millions of users went to the store they purchased their PS3 from to return it when SONY removed the 'other os' option?
Please. There's going to be a handful of people making it a point to cancel their contract, some of those are going to be vocal about it on their blog, and the rest of the subscribers are either not going to care, or do care but check the alternatives and find that the alternatives bring with them other negative points (higher costs, for example) and decide they don't care enough.
This is only going to have a major impact once people -are- getting cut off, and even then only when they're getting cut off improperly; otherwise it's just a matter of "well you -did- share those files.. it's not like you didn't know this could happen, you got two warnings before.. the mistake you made was getting caught - three times. Tough luck, buddy."
People deliberately naming benign files in that manner so as to taunt the RIAA/MPAA/whoever?
Not that it matters - such benign files would get removed at any reasonable indexing site/tracker as being 'fake', and any single user trying to pass off a fragment of the benign file as being part of the proper file will find their fragment hash failing left and right and be rejected.
Suing costs a lot more money (on both the side of the plaintiff and the defendant).
Suing ties up legal proceedings in whatever court venue would be involved.
Suing would make most people think back of the million dollar lawsuits fought in the U.S. where you're typically better off just paying the extorti...fin...settlement payment.
All of the above are vastly more negative, for both sides, than issuing warning notices (or having them issued) and ultimately having internet access reduced or cut off.
So, bouncing the ball back... why sue?
In 2003... and they learned nothing from it, since!