No more shrinking a movie by 75% with minimal quality loss (although I can still tell the difference); you're going to have to make harder choices about quality vs. resolution.
Unresampled HD movies are already all over the Usenet, at ~12GB each, which is about 7-8 hours of downloading on a 5Mbit connection. As connection speeds rapidly increase, this will become more of a non-issue.
At any rate, your observation is a bit off. Say we compress a 16x16 (256 pixel) image to an 8x8 (16 pixel) image, that's 1/4 the size. If you are satisfied with that 8x8 image, then there's no reason you can't compress a 128x128 image down to 8x8 as well, and in fact, it will look better because there was more information there to start with, which makes the interpolation more accurate. It's the quality of the source material which determines the quality of the result. The higher the quality you start with the better any compressed material will look.
Oops, your link was there, I just read too fast. After reading TFA, there's not really any information beyond what you wrote, so I'd wager my inference is correct.
The arrogance of the position that I would have to pay extra to get rid of crap I didn't want in the first place really chaps my undies.
What he was likely implying (if he didn't say outright -- no link?) was that the junk they install is paid for by the respective companies -- McAfee/Norton, AOL, WildTangent, etc. -- and in the world of razor-thin margins, every little bit helps. I wouldn't be surprised if the arrangement allows them to cut the price of systems by $100 or more.
Yeah, the stuff is annoying.. The only system I've bought with Windows preloaded was an HP laptop for the GF, but I'd sanitized friends' computers in the past ("Why is my brand new computer running so slow?" "Here, lemme fix that for you..") and it only takes a few minutes to uninstall the junk. A few minutes of my time is worth $100. Maybe its not for some people, but they're free to buy more expensive systems.
Entrapment only covers law enforcement. Private parties can basically do whatever they want.
At any rate, "when a person is predisposed to commit a crime, offering opportunities to commit the crime is not entrapment, a widely held misconception similar to the idea that police officers must answer questions truthfully if they are asked the same question three times, or that they must say "yes" if asked if they are a police officer." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment
Well, yes and no.. there are postfertilization protections as well, so just because one ovulates doesn't mean the birth control wasn't working, just not working 100% (which it doesn't claim to). Still, you're right that not taking the pill will likely cause ovulation, so it gets back to the correlation/causation debate. At any rate, the study indicated an increase in "forgetfulness" around the time of would-be ovulation, as compared to the placebos taken during menstruation.
Actually, the phrase is "past performance is no guarantee of future results." It's not a guarantee, but it's the best indicator we humans have. Drop a ball 5 times, we figure it will probably fall the 6th, 7th, and 8th as well. The gravity of Apple seems to be Steve Jobs, so as long as he's around, motivated, and sane (and I use that term loosely), it's likely money will keep falling in Apple's direction. iPods may be to cellphones what golf is to hockey, but Steve himself isn't playing, he's coaching, and the coaching skills for any given sport have more in common than not. As long as he's got good players (designers and engineers) working for him, he will likely succeed.
That said, I'm not much impressed by the iPhone, but I wouldn't discount Apple's ability to make it successful.
You seem to be the only one saying this. Yes, one notable/.'er has a famous "lame" quote about the iPod. Apparently, according to you, that was a market prediction from the entire community.
If you go back and read the posts, the overwhelming majority of them were negative. In fact, I still agree with most of the points raised, and I've never bought an iPod to this day (although that's mainly because I'd prefer to use removable media to store my songs and/or files -- the iPod has evolved fairly well and is widely supported by third parties). But really, the general sentiment when the iPod came out -- in the tech community in general, and the Slashdot community in particular -- was that it was going to tank. From a techie standpoint, it should have tanked, but advertising was great, and it made the mp3 player cute and accessible to the masses.
I realize though, that you're pointing out the caveats of the iPhone.. I just wanted to clarify that people were, in fact, saying much the same things about the iPod when it was released.
But to the GP, I wanted to point out that this is a different game. It's a completely different landscape for mobile phones, and the factors that helped them succeed with the iPod may be irrelevant in the area of wireless communications. It's an existing market, and the market is saturated, so the feature/price arguments make more sense here. Trying to break into an existing market is difficult for anyone, no matter how big of a fan base they may have. There is already intense competition among manufacturers, which drives costs down and features up. Additionally, Apple now has high expectations to live up to, and as a result, any area in which they fall short of those expectations is going to hurt more than if the exact same phone came from an unexpected source.
I think it's too early to predict where the iPhone will go. I'm sure there will be an initial surge of eager buyers, and it's likely that Apple will continue to innovate to provide a better product. Whether they can maintain their popularity beyond the initial release is anybody's guess -- it's a distinct possibility, but far from certain. If other manufacturers adopt and exceed what few innovative features the iPhone provides and/or provide similar features at a lower price, as they likely will, it could spell trouble for Apple. By releasing the product demo well before launch, competitors also have lots of time to respond.
Virtual OS's are virtually useless for redundancy because they don't protect against hardware malfunctions such as the unscheduled combustion of a component.
I don't see blind people doing a lot of texting, or watching videos. In fact, I'd venture to say that the display is probably the least important quality for a blind person's phone, and as such, they'd have little to no interest in something like the iPhone to begin with. A phone that plays MP3's? Maybe.. but when hearing is your #1 perceptive sense, you probably don't want to cut it off with some earbuds. Hard enough being blind without being functionally deaf too.
Also similar to Karl Grammer's 1996 study, The human mating game: the battle of the sexes and the war of signals, in which he found that women in prison often wore skimpier clothing during ovulation.
Of course, the obvious counterpoint is that many women don't feel too great during menstruation and personal care tends to suffer when people aren't feeling well.
Much more interesting is women's tendencies to forget to take birth control, and to have affairs during ovulation.
[W]hen women have sexual affairs with someone other than the husband or boyfriend, the affair often occurs during ovulation, the woman and her partner typically use no birth control, and the partner chosen by the woman has some quality that the husband/boyfriend lacks (Baker & Bellis, 1993; Bellis & Baker, 1990).
Ok, let's say it was a sales pitch for Egypt. Do you really think Egypt gives two sh!ts about the fact that Canadian currency may have been forged in the process?
Canada might care, but a) there's no evidence this was for them, and b) who said it was counterfiet? They could have just modified existing currency which, if Canadian law is anything like US law, is only a crime if it was modified to defraud (i.e., wash a $1 and print a $100 on the paper).
True, however that was many years ago, when Carmack still had some ambition and imagination. I'm not saying Doom III was bad, but...
At any rate, it's trendy to bash the PS3 lately. It really is a leap in console capabilities (and I don't even like/buy/use consoles period), but all the negative comments about developers avoiding the PS3 are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The problem is people viewing it as a hurdle rather than an opportunity.
The fact of the matter is that multi-threading is here to stay, and if developers ignore it on the PS3, they're only delaying the inevitable. It's a safe bet that the XBox 1080 (or whatever) will have multi cores, and of course the PC industry is full-steam ahead on that front. Granted, the architectures may be completely different, but the principles involved are the same.
Oh well, I'm tired of listening to myself bitch about all the bitching. I guess we'll see what happens.
I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one.
This is just my perception/opinion, but it sounds more like Carmac is getting old and lazy than any fundamental flaw with Sony's choice in processor. What we need is a new generation of developers to embrace the domain of parallel processing so that it can begin to realize its potential. I'm tired of the foot dragging and bellyaching about how different/difficult it is to multithread. Companies such as the previously mentioned RapidMind and PeakStream have made significant advancements in making multithreading more accessible, and if developers would put more effort into thinking in parallel rather than complaining about a changing environment, we'd be a lot farther along than we are now.
It's not just a specific word or symbol that's covered under Trademark -- it's also any which are confusingly similar. That's why there's no Coca-Colah, Budwiser, or some telecom company with a deathstar facing a different direction.
Sure they could. WTF is a pod anyway? A foot? A pea container? A three-legged object? A herd of whales? What does that have to do with music?
They could call it the iCom (as in Communicator, Complete, Compact, etc), or the iCon (as in Icon, Console, etc), or the iDea, or just use an unrelated word again... the iPea (as in freely), or the iScream (for kids), or the iPack (for trendy hikers), or the iNod (for the hip hop crowd), or the iPatch (for pirates!), or the iBo (don't forget the ninjas...), or the iJob (for Steve wannabes).
Really, they could call it anything they want. None of their other products use existing terminology, why should the "iPhone" be any different?
Mod parent up. He may be an AC, but he's exactly right. The banks don't freeze funds, the government does. Banks are only permitted to hold deposits over $5,000 for 11 days. The bank must notify the IRS of some transactions -- I've heard any single deposit approaching or exceeding $10,000, or individual deposits totaling the same withinin a given period -- but the details of that program are not public. The IRS might audit him because of it, but he would be covered with his PayPal transaction records. Since no one person (likely) gave him more than $10,000 (or whatever the taxable limit is these days), no taxes would be owed. But even if taxes were due, they would have to be paid by the giftor.
Of course if he's got unrelated skeletons in his financial closet, they may fall out during the audit, but that's incidental.
Hopefully a lawyer reads this far down so they can lend some insight, but my guess would be that there would not be any sort of restitution since a) the patent was granted, which means the patent holder had a reasonable belief that licensing his patent was legal, b) the licensing arrangement was entered into voluntarily, and c) that would create a huge liability for patent holders. Item B is probably the strongest -- licensees could have opted not to license if they felt a patent was invalid. From a business perspective though, it's definately safer to license.
My guess is that it was just a proof-of-concept for one of the vendors looking to sell the technology to someone (although obviously not to the contractors involved), therefore it was irrelevant as to whether the coins were disposed of shortly, or ever. If someone had developed a method of tracking the RFID tags over distances of 10s or 100s of meters, it would make tagging and following someone much easier. Additionally, if the tags could fit in a coin, it's great evidence that they can be implanted in small everyday objects that wouldn't raise suspicion.
If I were a vendor, and I could say "Hey, I planted these devices on US personnel and was able to track them all over Toronto without raising suspicion (until much later)."
On the other hand, the fact that they were, in fact, discovered later sort of invalidates that claim. The object may well have been to have the individuals dispose of the coins before ever noticing they had been compromised.
The one catch: As a patent holder I'm not required by law to license to you. I believe I can even revoke (or refuse to renew) your license. So patent holders could use that as leverage to prevent suits by declining to let people license the patent while they were actively challenging it in court.
That's not necessarily a catch since licensing income may well turn a profit after court costs, whereas court costs alone is a guaranteed loss. In other words, it would be foolish not to accept money from the person who's trying to invalidate your patent. It's unlikely they'd have to repay it, but even if they did, it would be usable capital while they had it.
I understand the form factor of the plug is the same, but is it backwards compatible? Will it fit in existing accessories, like the plethora of iPod enabled stereos, and will those devices, especially those with external controls, still work? I would assume so, but the lack of information is disconcerting.
Slashdot Mirror
No more shrinking a movie by 75% with minimal quality loss (although I can still tell the difference); you're going to have to make harder choices about quality vs. resolution.
Unresampled HD movies are already all over the Usenet, at ~12GB each, which is about 7-8 hours of downloading on a 5Mbit connection. As connection speeds rapidly increase, this will become more of a non-issue.
At any rate, your observation is a bit off. Say we compress a 16x16 (256 pixel) image to an 8x8 (16 pixel) image, that's 1/4 the size. If you are satisfied with that 8x8 image, then there's no reason you can't compress a 128x128 image down to 8x8 as well, and in fact, it will look better because there was more information there to start with, which makes the interpolation more accurate. It's the quality of the source material which determines the quality of the result. The higher the quality you start with the better any compressed material will look.
Oops, your link was there, I just read too fast. After reading TFA, there's not really any information beyond what you wrote, so I'd wager my inference is correct.
The arrogance of the position that I would have to pay extra to get rid of crap I didn't want in the first place really chaps my undies.
What he was likely implying (if he didn't say outright -- no link?) was that the junk they install is paid for by the respective companies -- McAfee/Norton, AOL, WildTangent, etc. -- and in the world of razor-thin margins, every little bit helps. I wouldn't be surprised if the arrangement allows them to cut the price of systems by $100 or more.
Yeah, the stuff is annoying.. The only system I've bought with Windows preloaded was an HP laptop for the GF, but I'd sanitized friends' computers in the past ("Why is my brand new computer running so slow?" "Here, lemme fix that for you..") and it only takes a few minutes to uninstall the junk. A few minutes of my time is worth $100. Maybe its not for some people, but they're free to buy more expensive systems.
Entrapment only covers law enforcement. Private parties can basically do whatever they want.
At any rate, "when a person is predisposed to commit a crime, offering opportunities to commit the crime is not entrapment, a widely held misconception similar to the idea that police officers must answer questions truthfully if they are asked the same question three times, or that they must say "yes" if asked if they are a police officer." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment
Well, yes and no.. there are postfertilization protections as well, so just because one ovulates doesn't mean the birth control wasn't working, just not working 100% (which it doesn't claim to). Still, you're right that not taking the pill will likely cause ovulation, so it gets back to the correlation/causation debate. At any rate, the study indicated an increase in "forgetfulness" around the time of would-be ovulation, as compared to the placebos taken during menstruation.
Actually, the phrase is "past performance is no guarantee of future results." It's not a guarantee, but it's the best indicator we humans have. Drop a ball 5 times, we figure it will probably fall the 6th, 7th, and 8th as well. The gravity of Apple seems to be Steve Jobs, so as long as he's around, motivated, and sane (and I use that term loosely), it's likely money will keep falling in Apple's direction. iPods may be to cellphones what golf is to hockey, but Steve himself isn't playing, he's coaching, and the coaching skills for any given sport have more in common than not. As long as he's got good players (designers and engineers) working for him, he will likely succeed.
That said, I'm not much impressed by the iPhone, but I wouldn't discount Apple's ability to make it successful.
You seem to be the only one saying this. Yes, one notable /.'er has a famous "lame" quote about the iPod. Apparently, according to you, that was a market prediction from the entire community.
If you go back and read the posts, the overwhelming majority of them were negative. In fact, I still agree with most of the points raised, and I've never bought an iPod to this day (although that's mainly because I'd prefer to use removable media to store my songs and/or files -- the iPod has evolved fairly well and is widely supported by third parties). But really, the general sentiment when the iPod came out -- in the tech community in general, and the Slashdot community in particular -- was that it was going to tank. From a techie standpoint, it should have tanked, but advertising was great, and it made the mp3 player cute and accessible to the masses.
I realize though, that you're pointing out the caveats of the iPhone.. I just wanted to clarify that people were, in fact, saying much the same things about the iPod when it was released.
But to the GP, I wanted to point out that this is a different game. It's a completely different landscape for mobile phones, and the factors that helped them succeed with the iPod may be irrelevant in the area of wireless communications. It's an existing market, and the market is saturated, so the feature/price arguments make more sense here. Trying to break into an existing market is difficult for anyone, no matter how big of a fan base they may have. There is already intense competition among manufacturers, which drives costs down and features up. Additionally, Apple now has high expectations to live up to, and as a result, any area in which they fall short of those expectations is going to hurt more than if the exact same phone came from an unexpected source.
I think it's too early to predict where the iPhone will go. I'm sure there will be an initial surge of eager buyers, and it's likely that Apple will continue to innovate to provide a better product. Whether they can maintain their popularity beyond the initial release is anybody's guess -- it's a distinct possibility, but far from certain. If other manufacturers adopt and exceed what few innovative features the iPhone provides and/or provide similar features at a lower price, as they likely will, it could spell trouble for Apple. By releasing the product demo well before launch, competitors also have lots of time to respond.
Virtual OS's are virtually useless for redundancy because they don't protect against hardware malfunctions such as the unscheduled combustion of a component.
I don't see blind people doing a lot of texting, or watching videos. In fact, I'd venture to say that the display is probably the least important quality for a blind person's phone, and as such, they'd have little to no interest in something like the iPhone to begin with. A phone that plays MP3's? Maybe.. but when hearing is your #1 perceptive sense, you probably don't want to cut it off with some earbuds. Hard enough being blind without being functionally deaf too.
Sounds like a repeat of this study from 2004.
Also similar to Karl Grammer's 1996 study, The human mating game: the battle of the sexes and the war of signals, in which he found that women in prison often wore skimpier clothing during ovulation.
Of course, the obvious counterpoint is that many women don't feel too great during menstruation and personal care tends to suffer when people aren't feeling well.
Ok, let's say it was a sales pitch for Egypt. Do you really think Egypt gives two sh!ts about the fact that Canadian currency may have been forged in the process?
Canada might care, but a) there's no evidence this was for them, and b) who said it was counterfiet? They could have just modified existing currency which, if Canadian law is anything like US law, is only a crime if it was modified to defraud (i.e., wash a $1 and print a $100 on the paper).
True, however that was many years ago, when Carmack still had some ambition and imagination. I'm not saying Doom III was bad, but...
At any rate, it's trendy to bash the PS3 lately. It really is a leap in console capabilities (and I don't even like/buy/use consoles period), but all the negative comments about developers avoiding the PS3 are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. The problem is people viewing it as a hurdle rather than an opportunity.
The fact of the matter is that multi-threading is here to stay, and if developers ignore it on the PS3, they're only delaying the inevitable. It's a safe bet that the XBox 1080 (or whatever) will have multi cores, and of course the PC industry is full-steam ahead on that front. Granted, the architectures may be completely different, but the principles involved are the same.
Oh well, I'm tired of listening to myself bitch about all the bitching. I guess we'll see what happens.
I think the decision to use an asymmetric CPU by Sony was a wrong one.
This is just my perception/opinion, but it sounds more like Carmac is getting old and lazy than any fundamental flaw with Sony's choice in processor. What we need is a new generation of developers to embrace the domain of parallel processing so that it can begin to realize its potential. I'm tired of the foot dragging and bellyaching about how different/difficult it is to multithread. Companies such as the previously mentioned RapidMind and PeakStream have made significant advancements in making multithreading more accessible, and if developers would put more effort into thinking in parallel rather than complaining about a changing environment, we'd be a lot farther along than we are now.
It's not just a specific word or symbol that's covered under Trademark -- it's also any which are confusingly similar. That's why there's no Coca-Colah, Budwiser, or some telecom company with a deathstar facing a different direction.
E/i-device, oh?
McDonalds already trademarked that one. One free in every Happy Meal for a limited time!
Sure they could. WTF is a pod anyway? A foot? A pea container? A three-legged object? A herd of whales? What does that have to do with music?
They could call it the iCom (as in Communicator, Complete, Compact, etc), or the iCon (as in Icon, Console, etc), or the iDea, or just use an unrelated word again... the iPea (as in freely), or the iScream (for kids), or the iPack (for trendy hikers), or the iNod (for the hip hop crowd), or the iPatch (for pirates!), or the iBo (don't forget the ninjas...), or the iJob (for Steve wannabes).
Really, they could call it anything they want. None of their other products use existing terminology, why should the "iPhone" be any different?
Mod parent up. He may be an AC, but he's exactly right. The banks don't freeze funds, the government does. Banks are only permitted to hold deposits over $5,000 for 11 days. The bank must notify the IRS of some transactions -- I've heard any single deposit approaching or exceeding $10,000, or individual deposits totaling the same withinin a given period -- but the details of that program are not public. The IRS might audit him because of it, but he would be covered with his PayPal transaction records. Since no one person (likely) gave him more than $10,000 (or whatever the taxable limit is these days), no taxes would be owed. But even if taxes were due, they would have to be paid by the giftor.
Of course if he's got unrelated skeletons in his financial closet, they may fall out during the audit, but that's incidental.
Hopefully a lawyer reads this far down so they can lend some insight, but my guess would be that there would not be any sort of restitution since a) the patent was granted, which means the patent holder had a reasonable belief that licensing his patent was legal, b) the licensing arrangement was entered into voluntarily, and c) that would create a huge liability for patent holders. Item B is probably the strongest -- licensees could have opted not to license if they felt a patent was invalid. From a business perspective though, it's definately safer to license.
My guess is that it was just a proof-of-concept for one of the vendors looking to sell the technology to someone (although obviously not to the contractors involved), therefore it was irrelevant as to whether the coins were disposed of shortly, or ever. If someone had developed a method of tracking the RFID tags over distances of 10s or 100s of meters, it would make tagging and following someone much easier. Additionally, if the tags could fit in a coin, it's great evidence that they can be implanted in small everyday objects that wouldn't raise suspicion.
If I were a vendor, and I could say "Hey, I planted these devices on US personnel and was able to track them all over Toronto without raising suspicion (until much later)."
On the other hand, the fact that they were, in fact, discovered later sort of invalidates that claim. The object may well have been to have the individuals dispose of the coins before ever noticing they had been compromised.
The one catch: As a patent holder I'm not required by law to license to you. I believe I can even revoke (or refuse to renew) your license. So patent holders could use that as leverage to prevent suits by declining to let people license the patent while they were actively challenging it in court.
That's not necessarily a catch since licensing income may well turn a profit after court costs, whereas court costs alone is a guaranteed loss. In other words, it would be foolish not to accept money from the person who's trying to invalidate your patent. It's unlikely they'd have to repay it, but even if they did, it would be usable capital while they had it.
Right.. no tactile response also makes it more difficult for texters. No more texting without looking.
But I would expect to see some very interesting viruses should these things actually become widespread.
I understand the form factor of the plug is the same, but is it backwards compatible? Will it fit in existing accessories, like the plethora of iPod enabled stereos, and will those devices, especially those with external controls, still work? I would assume so, but the lack of information is disconcerting.