You're missing the point here: Vorbis + Theora is the only major non-patent-encumbered (and therefore legal to use commercially or in free software without paying a bunch of lawyers to figure out what patent fees you owe who) option for video.
MPEG-4 and similar are great for pirates and organizations big enough to have patent lawyers on staff - but standards have to do better than that. Small companies and free software projects have to be able to play too.
they are doing something seriously wrong (in which I'd incluide living in expensive small-town American and/or getting married and having kids)
This is a reasonable economic conclusion in much of the United States, and that's a serious social problem. Any society where people frequently make a practical decision not to have children is basically doomed.
In any case, programmer aptitude can go a great deal towards making up for a poor platform choice.
Poor programmers or poor tools (compared to the best options available) won't actually ensure failure, but that doesn't make crippling your project a good business decision. Trying to make up for poor tools with good programmers is no better than trying to make up for poor programmers with good tools - it's better than nothing, but it's still bad.
The sort of optimization needed to fix that shouldn't be terribly difficult. It's definitely no harder than the issues with trying to make PHP sessions work in a cluster.
You *CAN* develop equivalent applications in ASP, J2EE, LAMP, or what have you (see Church-Turing Thesis), sometimes just as easily, sometimes more easily.
The Church-Turing thesis says that these things are computationally equivalent, but makes no guarantee that real programmers will be able to produce results of the same quality in the same amount of time.
Make your own custom framework in PHP, that fits the needs of whatever project you are working on, and you can probably turn out features extremely quickly. And your own framework will actually need what you need it to do, instead of you having to make compromises for the shortcomings of the framework.
That's what every well written non-trivial PHP program has ended up doing. And none of them made any of the same design decisions. So whenever someone asks me to make some simple change to a PHP program, the first step is figuring out how this new (usually undocumented) unique framework that the developers wrote works. I'm a programmer not an archaeologist, damn it.
Yea, and everything you can do in PHP you could hand code in assembly. And everything you can do with a wood saw you can do with a screwdriver and a hammer. It'll just take longer and end up being crapper in the end because you didn't have the time to do everything right.
The whole point of a tool is to make it as fast and easy as possible to do the task well. For the task of writing web applications, Ruby + Rails accomplishes that better than PHP.
That's how you would define high level language if you were trying to exclude C, and even then it's arguable - malloc is part of the C language for example. Sure, you'll argue that it's a function call - part of the standard library not the language - but that's really just a question of syntactic sugar - C-like language where malloc was a keyword with special syntax wouldn't be any higher level than C.
Hand compiling is only moderately more complicated for Perl than it is for C. Just as the C function turns into a specific pattern in assembler, the various things that Perl provides can be turned into assembler patterns too. The stuff that Perl does for memory management implicitly is only moderately more complex than the stack manipulation that C does implicitly for lexical variables. Even the two data structures that Perl provides - vectors and hashes - are just very simple data structures that would always translate into the same simple pattern of assembler.
Basically the only thing that cleanly differentiates a language like Perl from a language like C is the "eval" function - which requires access to a Perl interpreter/compiler to work.
All in all the U.S. isn't looking too bad. Granted our taxes are ridiculous, but a hard working person in poverty can still become one of the richest people on earth and that can't be said for to many countries.
To the limits of statistical significance, this never happens. Pretending that it does is part of the great American myth.
The United States is not the greatest nation on earth, except when it comes to rich people making tons of money bombing far away poor people - we're definitely the greatest at that. In pretty much every way you'd actually want a country to excel, the United States is either poor or mediocre.
Now lets compare the U.S.A. to say.... oh I don't know Saudi Arabia, Iran, or many other middle east countries.
Who cares? The United States can do better than god awful - so what. What's next - you're going to say we're tropical because we beat out Greenland in average winter temperature?
The United States loses in the "Religions Fanatics" comparison to, say, the UK - who has a Queen that's the head of the national church. Lowering the standard below that to make us look good is absurd - we really should be raising the standard to those countries that actually do well at the measure.
This isn't (known to be) a security issue. Basically when the bug gets triggered, the processor just crashes. I guess you could carefully craft input to trigger it as a denial of service attack...
Wow, bad times for AMD. They're losing the war against intel, and now have another set back. A 20% performance penalty is simply unacceptable for any processor.
Why? Sure, a 20% performance penalty sucks - but for a processor that sort of performance difference is really just noise. Sure, it's huge from a marketing perspective when competing on benchmarks, but when you actually have a computer it really doesn't matter that much. Oh noes - not 40 fps instead of 50 fps on Crysis, or maybe you need 12 servers instead of 10 to serve your high volume web site - and that's the extreme case where the user can even *notice* the difference.
That's like saying that you can't have a free market when people own land. Exactly the opposite is true. A free market is only a meaningful term in the presence of property rights - without property rights there is no market. Any property right is a government (or societal) restriction.
The question is which set of government restrictions is most socially beneficial.
Interestingly, having a free market in some areas makes it impossible to have a free market in others - which makes an ideal free-market world impossible.
It is a waste of money. My kids have had computer labs all through grade and middle school to learn how to use the software, not use the software as a crutch.
Learning how to use software is a waste of time except as job training. Knowing some specific pieces of software isn't computer literacy any more than knowing the story of Romeo and Juliet is literacy.
Even in high school, some math classes don't use calculators because they are learning the principles by hand first.
Computers aren't calculators. They're general purpose machines that can become calculators, but that doesn't mean that reasoning about calculators applies to computers.
It can be hard to see what the benefits of these computers will be for kids without actually watching them use the computers - but there are some things that are obvious. The easiest one I can see is that computers will help basic literacy and written communication skills. Kids working (or playing) on a computer can't just decide to not read, and if they want to communicate to anyone else they'll have to type. Maybe they'll type in retard leetspeek pidgin english, but that's still a step up for elementary-school students.
Remember how quickly radio frequencies decrease with range. Effectively jamming short range transmissions over a large area with a single transmitter is massively expensive. The FCC could probably just put a power cap on transmissions in general - and basically turn this into a local zoning question.
Assuming the existence of a free-market economy, an auction is an *excellent* way to allocate a limited resource.
In order for spectrum auctions to be a bad idea, we would either need to have a non-free market or spectrum would have to be a non-limited resource. There are excellent arguments for both of those claims, but you'd have to make one of them for your point to be correct.
In order to comply with GPLv2, you *must* do one of the following when you distribute binaries:
Include complete source with the binaries. Generally posting the source right next to the binary for download is considered good enough - but even off server links are questionable, and if the binary distribution was on physical media then only offering the source for download doesn't cut it.
Provide a written offer to provide the source by mail order.
Distributing a GPLed work in violation of the license is a copyright violation (at least if the termination clause works at all). All you have to do to get an idea of what the expected damages should be for copyright violations is to look at recent RIAA court cases - Judges aren't "reluctant to access damages", they take your house away for distributing a single small copyrighted work with zero people.
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Like what? Animated GIF?
Seriously - what production-quality video codec other than Theora isn't patent encumbered?
Absolutely. Now - did that happen around the time of the civil war, or around the time of WWII?
You're missing the point here: Vorbis + Theora is the only major non-patent-encumbered (and therefore legal to use commercially or in free software without paying a bunch of lawyers to figure out what patent fees you owe who) option for video.
MPEG-4 and similar are great for pirates and organizations big enough to have patent lawyers on staff - but standards have to do better than that. Small companies and free software projects have to be able to play too.
Here's one that's pretty cheap, just looking for a couple minutes. If I cared, I'd spend five or ten more minutes and find something half the price. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16855507005
This is a reasonable economic conclusion in much of the United States, and that's a serious social problem. Any society where people frequently make a practical decision not to have children is basically doomed.
Poor programmers or poor tools (compared to the best options available) won't actually ensure failure, but that doesn't make crippling your project a good business decision. Trying to make up for poor tools with good programmers is no better than trying to make up for poor programmers with good tools - it's better than nothing, but it's still bad.
The sort of optimization needed to fix that shouldn't be terribly difficult. It's definitely no harder than the issues with trying to make PHP sessions work in a cluster.
The Church-Turing thesis says that these things are computationally equivalent, but makes no guarantee that real programmers will be able to produce results of the same quality in the same amount of time.
Choice of programming tools matters - see this classic article.
That's what every well written non-trivial PHP program has ended up doing. And none of them made any of the same design decisions. So whenever someone asks me to make some simple change to a PHP program, the first step is figuring out how this new (usually undocumented) unique framework that the developers wrote works. I'm a programmer not an archaeologist, damn it.
Oh come on - you're complaining about which parens are required?!?
Have you ever used a programming language that didn't descend from ALGOL?
Yea, and everything you can do in PHP you could hand code in assembly. And everything you can do with a wood saw you can do with a screwdriver and a hammer. It'll just take longer and end up being crapper in the end because you didn't have the time to do everything right.
The whole point of a tool is to make it as fast and easy as possible to do the task well. For the task of writing web applications, Ruby + Rails accomplishes that better than PHP.
But, but, we have to stop all cloning research or we'll all be eaten by raptors!
That's how you would define high level language if you were trying to exclude C, and even then it's arguable - malloc is part of the C language for example. Sure, you'll argue that it's a function call - part of the standard library not the language - but that's really just a question of syntactic sugar - C-like language where malloc was a keyword with special syntax wouldn't be any higher level than C.
Hand compiling is only moderately more complicated for Perl than it is for C. Just as the C function turns into a specific pattern in assembler, the various things that Perl provides can be turned into assembler patterns too. The stuff that Perl does for memory management implicitly is only moderately more complex than the stack manipulation that C does implicitly for lexical variables. Even the two data structures that Perl provides - vectors and hashes - are just very simple data structures that would always translate into the same simple pattern of assembler.
Basically the only thing that cleanly differentiates a language like Perl from a language like C is the "eval" function - which requires access to a Perl interpreter/compiler to work.
To the limits of statistical significance, this never happens. Pretending that it does is part of the great American myth.
The United States is not the greatest nation on earth, except when it comes to rich people making tons of money bombing far away poor people - we're definitely the greatest at that. In pretty much every way you'd actually want a country to excel, the United States is either poor or mediocre.
Who cares? The United States can do better than god awful - so what. What's next - you're going to say we're tropical because we beat out Greenland in average winter temperature?
The United States loses in the "Religions Fanatics" comparison to, say, the UK - who has a Queen that's the head of the national church. Lowering the standard below that to make us look good is absurd - we really should be raising the standard to those countries that actually do well at the measure.
This isn't (known to be) a security issue. Basically when the bug gets triggered, the processor just crashes. I guess you could carefully craft input to trigger it as a denial of service attack...
Why? Sure, a 20% performance penalty sucks - but for a processor that sort of performance difference is really just noise. Sure, it's huge from a marketing perspective when competing on benchmarks, but when you actually have a computer it really doesn't matter that much. Oh noes - not 40 fps instead of 50 fps on Crysis, or maybe you need 12 servers instead of 10 to serve your high volume web site - and that's the extreme case where the user can even *notice* the difference.
That's like saying that you can't have a free market when people own land. Exactly the opposite is true. A free market is only a meaningful term in the presence of property rights - without property rights there is no market. Any property right is a government (or societal) restriction.
The question is which set of government restrictions is most socially beneficial.
Interestingly, having a free market in some areas makes it impossible to have a free market in others - which makes an ideal free-market world impossible.
Learning how to use software is a waste of time except as job training. Knowing some specific pieces of software isn't computer literacy any more than knowing the story of Romeo and Juliet is literacy.
Computers aren't calculators. They're general purpose machines that can become calculators, but that doesn't mean that reasoning about calculators applies to computers.
It can be hard to see what the benefits of these computers will be for kids without actually watching them use the computers - but there are some things that are obvious. The easiest one I can see is that computers will help basic literacy and written communication skills. Kids working (or playing) on a computer can't just decide to not read, and if they want to communicate to anyone else they'll have to type. Maybe they'll type in retard leetspeek pidgin english, but that's still a step up for elementary-school students.
You to realize that computers are good for things other than "learning computer skills", right?
Remember how quickly radio frequencies decrease with range. Effectively jamming short range transmissions over a large area with a single transmitter is massively expensive. The FCC could probably just put a power cap on transmissions in general - and basically turn this into a local zoning question.
Assuming the existence of a free-market economy, an auction is an *excellent* way to allocate a limited resource.
In order for spectrum auctions to be a bad idea, we would either need to have a non-free market or spectrum would have to be a non-limited resource. There are excellent arguments for both of those claims, but you'd have to make one of them for your point to be correct.
In order to comply with GPLv2, you *must* do one of the following when you distribute binaries:
The GTX and Ultra are still faster than the GT. Just not by enough to make the extra $300 worth it.
Distributing a GPLed work in violation of the license is a copyright violation (at least if the termination clause works at all). All you have to do to get an idea of what the expected damages should be for copyright violations is to look at recent RIAA court cases - Judges aren't "reluctant to access damages", they take your house away for distributing a single small copyrighted work with zero people.