The test by no means disproves this device. The tester chops the sticker up so he can use it with his smaller digital camera battery. Something that the manual apparently claims should work, but this is clearly not its intended use, and thus quite possibly not its optimum use either.
He also fails to repeat the experiment at all or do a control experiment, and even the one test run he does isn't exactly thorough. Also, he does appear find some improvement when using the sticker, just not as much as the company claims, so I don't see how he thinks he has shown that it doesn't work at all (except through his scientific arguments with which he apparently convinced himself even before he did the test of the impossibility the thing could work).
Most importantly - according to the company's website the device has been tested by TÜV and found to work! I'm MUCH more likely to believe the results of TÜV certification than some hobbyist's tests (TÜV is a government body which tests + approves almost everything in Germany - cars, buildings etc. People trust it to tell them if their car is fit to drive, so it is presumably capable of sufficiently thoroughly testing in determining whether some battery enhancer works as claimed.
Of course, given the incredibility of the claims regarding the device, I'm still not neccessarily convinced. I'm just saying lets not discard the possibility that it might actually work to some degree so quickly.
Instead of doing some quick hack-up test of the device, it would be much more useful if someone could start by looking at the TÜV and A-U-F tests (A-U-F is another independent body which allegedly found it to give a 31% increase in battery life to an old Nokia phone) and seeing whether they are for real, or whether there were any flaws in their method etc etc.
The question wasn't 'how many roads must a man walk down?'.... it was 'how many times must the same story be reposted on slashdot until slashdotters give up writing hundreds of comments on it?'
For example, we have a long-standing ban on US nuclear-powered ships coming here. We're entirely nuclear free here, and it's a popular policy. Speaking democratically, it should probably stay. However the US would prefer our government acts undemocratically and scraps the policy.
Its not really an issue of NZ-democracy vs US-undemocracy here. The US wants certain things from NZ, which happen to be not what the NZ public wants. Similarly NZ wants certain things from the US (i.e. abolition of US agricultural subsidies) which happen to be not what the US public wants. But I wouldn't conclude in the latter case that 'NZ would prefer the US government acts undemocratically and scraps the policy' - at least, not with any implication that NZ is against US democracy which is what you're implying in the other direction, especially in stating 'A free trade agreement with the united states is poison for national democracy....'.
The real issue is that any free-trade deals between the world's superpower and individual small countries like NZ are bound to be lopsided. Thats inevitable as long as the small countries fail to join together in negotiating with the US, or as long as the US remains the world's superpower (i.e. as Europe or China grow in power, then they increasingly counterbalance the US, and then NZ thus has more export options or can play these world powers off against each other in negotiating). However the point is that NZ has to make the best of the current situation, and although any free trade deals with the US are bound to be lopsided in near future due purely to the balance of power, they may still be a better alternative to no such free trade deal.
I understood that it wasn't aimed at being production code, but from my experience what starts out as a '10 minute proof of concept' usually ends up being the production code. Personally even for 10 minute proofs of concepts which I never expect to touch again I find its always worth paying attention to some level of intelligent variable names etc.
I'm also sure its much smaller than any C++ version (and it could presumably be still much smaller while being made much more readable). However whether its more readable (even to someone well experienced in both paradigms) is perhaps debatable. I occasionally use regular expressions, which also result in much smaller messes compared to say the non-regular-expression C++/Java/C# code required to achieve the same thing, but I find that even with some experience in regular expressions they generally take longer to comprehend that the equivalent (albiet longer) non-regular-expression code, and anything non-trivial requires a lot of comments regarding what each part aims intend if it is to be maintainable.
You guys really do live in another world don't you?
10 lines of code... but do you seriously thing such style makes for readability and maintainability?
invert c = foldl (.) id [if(testBit c i)then(flip setBit (collength-1-i))else id|i<-[0..collength-1]]
I suppose this example from your code is one line right? Someone tell me please whether this kind of mess is standard Haskell coding practice. Because to me it looks like theres a bunch of different things going on in that line, that would be better readable spread over a few lines with a bit of indentation, a few comments, sensible variable names etc. Or is it just my non-functional-programming ignorance that makes me think this way?
You people go on about how programming is an 'art', and how us non-functional C++/C#/Java programmers don't know that 'art;. Personally I'm open to the advantages of functional programming, and regret that I never took the paper on it at Uni which was offered, but if cramming your program into 15 lines of unreadable, unmaintainable code counts as 'art' then I'll leave the artistry to the academics and get on with my job of creating real solutions to real problems.
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I agree with you there more or less there. Anti-globalisation people often seem to end up protesting against the interests of the people they're supposed to be supporting - the poor, or the 'developing' world as you put it.
The USA government unfortunately has a nice history of bending words like 'free trade' to meet its aims (think 'democracy' == our allies, 'terrorist' / 'communist' == our enemies etc).
Look, we all have our valid reasons for hating Microsoft.
However, if an article writer singles out Microsoft for criticism as if they were the only company doing this, and takes the opportunity to go on about how it all relates back to Gates' evil plans which hes had from day one, when all they're doing in this instance us something its competitors are just as guilty of, then its Microsoft bashing.
And when they take a case regarding NZ patent law and mix it into an anti freemarket-rant, thats showing their stripes.
I liked the article's obligatory closing anti-globalisation rant - 'Politicians still talk of a free trade agreement as benefiting this country. The reality is intellectual property rights will be high on the US agenda and it won't be to this country's benefit.'
Perhaps someone can explain to me how New Zealand's patent office approving dubious patent applications equals the US using globalisation to push their IP agenda?
Anyway, nice of this Microsoft basher to show all his stripes. I agree of course that what is happening with such patents around the world is nuts, but Microsoft is just one of many companies playing this game, and its current stream of patent applications has little to nothing to do with Gates' early days writing BASIC for the Altair 8800 if you ask me.
The average system is already running a number of different processes at once. Even if most individual applications aren't multithreaded, a dual-core will help not only make the system technically faster but also help hugely on the response of the system (which is often a far more important factor for the 'feel' of how fast a system is as the user experiences it) whenever process are running in the background.
While one might ask whether it makes much useful difference to the 'average' home user, one might ask the same about say 4ghz vs 2ghz - for most Microsoft Word users this makes little difference in any case. However, for most users who really make use of CPU-power in whatever form, the dual-core will indeed make a difference even without multi-threaded applications, and it won't take long for most applications where it matters to become multi-threaded, as its really not that hard to make most cpu-intensive tasks multi-threaded and thus further improve things.
I for one am looking forward to buying my first dual-CPU, dual-core system (i.e. 4x the power) once the chips have arrived and reached reasonable price levels, and I'm sure that power won't be going to waste.
How do you figure they are ripping you off exactly? If a million people are prepared to pay for it using the current pricing scheme, it makes no sense for them to lower the price to appeal to say a few thousand people who take your stance or simply can't afford it, as the total income they'd get would be less, and they're not a charity.
So accepting they're not a charity, and that their sales figures justify the price, you should accept that the overall price they're demanding is reasonable. Regarding how they balance this price between the monthly fee + initial price, they could of course drop the initial price, but they would then have to raise the monthly fee correspondingly. Or vice versa. But neither option would neccessarily make you any better off. Based on their sales figures, I'd say they've probably found a good balance. Even if the balance could be better, thats just a problem for them and their business model - if they get the balance wrong then less people will purchase the product, however it doesn't equate to them 'ripping' you off.
For example, I buy very few CDs any more, and won't until the music companies find a more sensible business model (i.e. charging me a monthly fee for unlimited or a large number of album downloads - a business model which makes use of the possibilities the internet provides, and doesn't force me to pay for the unneccessary distribution network and associated costs associated with CDs). However I don't say they're ripping me off by sticking with their old distribution model - rather if anything they're ripping themselves off, as rather than receiving a potentially large monthly fee from me they receive next to nothing.
By 'refusing to be ripped off' however you're only hurting yourself (presuming you really do like the game and think the total price is worth it for you), as a million other users have already declared that blizzard isn't ripping them off with the prices by purchasing the game so blizzard isn't going to care if you don't buy it.
The parent is correct in asserting that FLAC coding is nothing like RLE. If any lossless audio codecs use any form of run length encoding, its a very small part of their engines and seldom serves much purpose.
Take a look at my site for the theory - http://www.lossless-audio.com/theory.htm . This describes how La works, but the other lossless audio codecs are all quite similar, except that some earlier ones like FLAC differ in how the prediction stage works - FLAC most often uses LPC coefficients to predict the signal, but sometimes uses non-adaptive prediction or IF THE SIGNAL IS PURE DIGITAL SILENCE uses RLE. This is in contrast to the adaptive prediction used by La, Wavpack, Monkey's Audio etc.
well rle coding (combined with huffman or whatever) would if anything make most audio files bigger. because audio is typically 16-bit (vs 8-bit for images) theres very little chance two concurrent values will be the same. my codec does use internally for the entropy part something based on range coding, which is similar to, but a little more efficient than, huffman coding, but it does a lot of other stuff as part of the entropy coding as well.
the point about stuffit's improvement is that its so huge. sure huffman is inefficient, but other methods are nowhere near 28% better i can assure you (else other state-of-the-art lossless archivers would have done better than the 4% they achieve before now).
You're a bit confused here. My lossless algorithm is an audio one - nothing to do with RLE. The one under discussion also has nothing to do with RLE. Nor does JPEG in fact. So none of them can be meaningfully compared to RLE.
My codec could be compared to other lossless audio codecs. The differences in compression ratios between all these codecs is relatively small. That was my point. You can also compare various state-of-the-art archivers on how they perform compressing JPGs. Again - very small differences, until you come to this new StuffIt compressor, which suddenly achieves a claimed average of 28% compression (vs the rest which are all less than 4%, i.e. a factor of 6-7x improvement vs the normal say 1-2% improvements in the field).
We need a compression method that is lossless, not one that creates compact files.
Well the compression method they've developed _is_ lossless. They just happen to have applied it to a lossy format, but they also plan to apply it to other things. No reason I can see why it shouldn't improve lossless formats as well (i.e. camera RAW).
Also, having your RAW/JPG files 30% smaller will enable your camera to empty its memory buffers 30% faster (everything else being equal) and thus allow _faster_ continuous shooting, so you bringing up that point is a bit contradictory to your general argument. Of course, this assumes that the compression technology works fast enough.
However they _are_ also planning a new image format, as well as considering applying the compression technology to mp3s and many other formats - virtually all these formats use similar entropy encoding methods which if we are to believe their claims they've improved on substrantially.
If they would apply their compression technology to improve say JPEG2000's wavelet compression by say 25% that would be well worth while. I'm sure theres a lot of people out there who would be happy fitting twice as many pictures on their digital camera's memory cards with better quality than the JPEGs they'd previously been using (this being achievable as JPEG2000 is already a lot better than JPG, but for whatever reason has failed to catch on). I personally have _4GIGs_ of memory for my digital camera and still run out frequently (I use the camera's RAW format but this should also theoretically be improvable by their technology if its for real):). And if you haven't noticed the number of megapixels in the cameras is increasing about the same rate as the size of the SD/CF cards (similar to Window's RAM requirements):).
This is not in competition with JPEG - more with LZW compressed TIFF.
You're misreading the whitepaper. What they're explaining here is different and actually quite clever.
Jpeg compression can be seen as consisting of two main steps. In the first, information in the image deemed unimportant is removed from the image. In the second, the remaining information is compressed losslessly.
It was already known that the second step is not the most efficient possible. Also, the jpeg standard supports both huffman and arithmetic-coding, however due to patent reasons I think arithmetic-coding (which is more efficient) is often not used. So what they're doing is just improving the efficiency of this second step. This works much better than attempting to encode the jpg binary itself, as anything performed following entropy coding will struggle to achieve much compression, as the data has been hugely complicated by the process and it is thus much harder to find any compressible patterns etc.
They've also improved the compression by a very impressive margin. Typically in the lossless compression world, gains are in the.x% range, yet they've apparently improved by a factor of around 6x what the previous best programs were able to achieve. I should note that I developed the audio codec with the currently highest lossless audio compression - http://lossless-audio.com/ - so have some idea of what I'm talking about here.
Anyway, the end effect is the same regardless how the compression is achieved - they're taking a lossily-compressed jpg, and reducing its size. This obviously makes little sense to be say integrated into digital cameras, for which the jpeg2000 format is available anyway and features better gains and is much faster (yet is still awaiting mainstream adoption), however from the archival and theoretical-lossless-compression perspectives what they've allegedly achieved is pretty damn interesting.
Maybe, but StuffIt is an archival program. If I have 10gb of existing jpgs and want to archive them, then this is whats wanted. Reencoding them as you suggest would be equivalent to converting say an mp3 to ogg format - a surefire way to lose quality with little gain.
Re fractal compression, people have been hyping it up for years but as far as I know it never really delivered. I'm dubious about any claims to some mysterious program which compresses anything amazingly well without strong evidence.
Wavelet compression however is used in jpeg2000 which is a bit better than jpeg but even that isn't supported by any digital cameras.
If StuffIt really does compress jpegs 25-30% that is a massive leap forward over the previous state-of-the-art compressors which reached I think around 3-4% - http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/jpg.php . Heres hoping their claims pan out, and that they release at least some details regarding the methods they used.
You could apply the same arguments to any kind of infrastructure - roads, rail etc. Applying your logic, the US and Germany would still be stuck with dirt roads while Namibians would be cruising around on their autobahns.
Hell, between 1992 and 1998 the US sent almost $2.9 billion in PRIVATE AID to CUBA!)
Couldn't ignore this. Theres lots of Cuban exiles in American who send money back to their families in Cuba. I'm guessing this is what you consider 'private aid' in reaching your $2.9 billion total? You probably also realise that this total is dwarfed by the cost to Cuba of the sanctions the US continues to impose on Cuba - sanctions repeatedly condemned by the UN every year for the past dozen or so years.
Note I'm not a communist or even defending Cuba's regime or anything - just want to correct any misimpression your statement might cause.
Personally it makes me sick when we rich countries cause unmeasurable damage to poor countries by our farming subsidies / tarifs (both Europe and US at fault here) (or sanctions as in the case of Cuba) and then claim to be helping them by throwing a few million in 'aid' at them - aid which often causes more harm than good (I just got back from a trip to Africa and its depressing to see + hear what our 'aid' achieves). The sad thing is that these subsidies / tarifs are of very dubious benefit to our economies - thus the cost to us to remove them would be little if anything, and the benefit to poor countries immense. Yet everyone from anti-globalisation leftists who are supposed to have the poor country's interests in mind to government lobbyists to politicians looking for the populist vote ensure this never happens.
Most of the benchmarks are gaming and thus more dependant on the graphics card. Given that not all computers are using the same graphics card, that makes them somewhat unfair.
More interesting are thus the non-synthetic non-graphics application benchmarks, but unfortunately theres just four of these.
What might be interesting with the graphics benchmarks would be to outfit each computer with the state-of-the-art graphics card of its release date. Also unfair, but given that the graphics card used in the test is not uniform anyway (having a somewhat sudden cut-off for computers with only PCI and not PCIe or AGP) it might be a slightly more interesting setup.
The point is choice. They may be worth their price to you, but not to people with smaller budgets.
With normal PCs, I can choose if I want to pay more and get better service etc, or pay less and build it myself. With Apples, I have a much more limited choice as I have only the one manufacturer to choose from. Apple has doomed itself to a small marketshare by being the Sony of the computing world.
To add to my post - another poster writes that google claims precisely this excuse - that the image search is out-of-date:
In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed that our image index is not updated as frequently as it should be. Expect a refresh in the near future.
In the meantime, you can just search on Google Web Search for [abu graib photos] [abu graib photos] [google.com] to get plenty of what you are looking for.
I personally find this hard to believe. Can anyone somehow confirm whether or not google's image search previously found these images, as this this is the deciding issue in the whole matter.
Firstly, if you search google's standard search for 'abu ghraib photos', you'll find plenty of sites with the photos. No censorship there.
The issue however regards google's image search.
Firstly, this search has always by default filtered out offensive images, such as porn. Personally I think the Abu Ghraib images are much more offensive than a nude, so its perfectly understandable that these might be filtered out.
It does however appear that even with the filter set to off, the pictures are still not found by the picture search.
It is also worth mentioning that this has _nothing_ to do with google being 'slow' or 'old' - i.e. the pictures not showing up to it not being up-to-date. Google's normal search finds numerous sites which contain the torture images, and you can find - for example - recent images from the 2004 election already using the image search. While there is some variance in how long various images/sites take to appear on google, I find it completely implausible that this is the cause for the pictures not appearing. The original post also actually mentions that google _used_ to find these images.
Thus it would indeed appear to be a case of censorship, if only on google's images search.
An article about this on www.dpreview.com mentions that the ipod by default downsamples the images when transferring them from the camera. This obviously defeats the point for many people who want to use it as a massive memory card for when travelling etc. Apparently the ipod would have trouble showing the large images that can come from digital cameras.
Does anybody know more about this? I'm presuming its at least an option to transfer the full-size images!?
Slashdot Mirror
The test by no means disproves this device. The tester chops the sticker up so he can use it with his smaller digital camera battery. Something that the manual apparently claims should work, but this is clearly not its intended use, and thus quite possibly not its optimum use either.
He also fails to repeat the experiment at all or do a control experiment, and even the one test run he does isn't exactly thorough. Also, he does appear find some improvement when using the sticker, just not as much as the company claims, so I don't see how he thinks he has shown that it doesn't work at all (except through his scientific arguments with which he apparently convinced himself even before he did the test of the impossibility the thing could work).
Most importantly - according to the company's website the device has been tested by TÜV and found to work! I'm MUCH more likely to believe the results of TÜV certification than some hobbyist's tests (TÜV is a government body which tests + approves almost everything in Germany - cars, buildings etc. People trust it to tell them if their car is fit to drive, so it is presumably capable of sufficiently thoroughly testing in determining whether some battery enhancer works as claimed.
Of course, given the incredibility of the claims regarding the device, I'm still not neccessarily convinced. I'm just saying lets not discard the possibility that it might actually work to some degree so quickly.
Instead of doing some quick hack-up test of the device, it would be much more useful if someone could start by looking at the TÜV and A-U-F tests (A-U-F is another independent body which allegedly found it to give a 31% increase in battery life to an old Nokia phone) and seeing whether they are for real, or whether there were any flaws in their method etc etc.
The question wasn't 'how many roads must a man walk down?' .... it was 'how many times must the same story be reposted on slashdot until slashdotters give up writing hundreds of comments on it?'
Its not really an issue of NZ-democracy vs US-undemocracy here. The US wants certain things from NZ, which happen to be not what the NZ public wants. Similarly NZ wants certain things from the US (i.e. abolition of US agricultural subsidies) which happen to be not what the US public wants. But I wouldn't conclude in the latter case that 'NZ would prefer the US government acts undemocratically and scraps the policy' - at least, not with any implication that NZ is against US democracy which is what you're implying in the other direction, especially in stating 'A free trade agreement with the united states is poison for national democracy
The real issue is that any free-trade deals between the world's superpower and individual small countries like NZ are bound to be lopsided. Thats inevitable as long as the small countries fail to join together in negotiating with the US, or as long as the US remains the world's superpower (i.e. as Europe or China grow in power, then they increasingly counterbalance the US, and then NZ thus has more export options or can play these world powers off against each other in negotiating). However the point is that NZ has to make the best of the current situation, and although any free trade deals with the US are bound to be lopsided in near future due purely to the balance of power, they may still be a better alternative to no such free trade deal.
I understood that it wasn't aimed at being production code, but from my experience what starts out as a '10 minute proof of concept' usually ends up being the production code. Personally even for 10 minute proofs of concepts which I never expect to touch again I find its always worth paying attention to some level of intelligent variable names etc.
I'm also sure its much smaller than any C++ version (and it could presumably be still much smaller while being made much more readable). However whether its more readable (even to someone well experienced in both paradigms) is perhaps debatable. I occasionally use regular expressions, which also result in much smaller messes compared to say the non-regular-expression C++/Java/C# code required to achieve the same thing, but I find that even with some experience in regular expressions they generally take longer to comprehend that the equivalent (albiet longer) non-regular-expression code, and anything non-trivial requires a lot of comments regarding what each part aims intend if it is to be maintainable.
10 lines of code ... but do you seriously thing such style makes for readability and maintainability?
I suppose this example from your code is one line right? Someone tell me please whether this kind of mess is standard Haskell coding practice. Because to me it looks like theres a bunch of different things going on in that line, that would be better readable spread over a few lines with a bit of indentation, a few comments, sensible variable names etc. Or is it just my non-functional-programming ignorance that makes me think this way?You people go on about how programming is an 'art', and how us non-functional C++/C#/Java programmers don't know that 'art;. Personally I'm open to the advantages of functional programming, and regret that I never took the paper on it at Uni which was offered, but if cramming your program into 15 lines of unreadable, unmaintainable code counts as 'art' then I'll leave the artistry to the academics and get on with my job of creating real solutions to real problems. .
I agree with you there more or less there. Anti-globalisation people often seem to end up protesting against the interests of the people they're supposed to be supporting - the poor, or the 'developing' world as you put it.
The USA government unfortunately has a nice history of bending words like 'free trade' to meet its aims (think 'democracy' == our allies, 'terrorist' / 'communist' == our enemies etc).
Look, we all have our valid reasons for hating Microsoft.
However, if an article writer singles out Microsoft for criticism as if they were the only company doing this, and takes the opportunity to go on about how it all relates back to Gates' evil plans which hes had from day one, when all they're doing in this instance us something its competitors are just as guilty of, then its Microsoft bashing.
And when they take a case regarding NZ patent law and mix it into an anti freemarket-rant, thats showing their stripes.
I liked the article's obligatory closing anti-globalisation rant - 'Politicians still talk of a free trade agreement as benefiting this country. The reality is intellectual property rights will be high on the US agenda and it won't be to this country's benefit.'
Perhaps someone can explain to me how New Zealand's patent office approving dubious patent applications equals the US using globalisation to push their IP agenda?
Anyway, nice of this Microsoft basher to show all his stripes. I agree of course that what is happening with such patents around the world is nuts, but Microsoft is just one of many companies playing this game, and its current stream of patent applications has little to nothing to do with Gates' early days writing BASIC for the Altair 8800 if you ask me.
The average system is already running a number of different processes at once. Even if most individual applications aren't multithreaded, a dual-core will help not only make the system technically faster but also help hugely on the response of the system (which is often a far more important factor for the 'feel' of how fast a system is as the user experiences it) whenever process are running in the background.
While one might ask whether it makes much useful difference to the 'average' home user, one might ask the same about say 4ghz vs 2ghz - for most Microsoft Word users this makes little difference in any case. However, for most users who really make use of CPU-power in whatever form, the dual-core will indeed make a difference even without multi-threaded applications, and it won't take long for most applications where it matters to become multi-threaded, as its really not that hard to make most cpu-intensive tasks multi-threaded and thus further improve things.
I for one am looking forward to buying my first dual-CPU, dual-core system (i.e. 4x the power) once the chips have arrived and reached reasonable price levels, and I'm sure that power won't be going to waste.
How do you figure they are ripping you off exactly? If a million people are prepared to pay for it using the current pricing scheme, it makes no sense for them to lower the price to appeal to say a few thousand people who take your stance or simply can't afford it, as the total income they'd get would be less, and they're not a charity.
So accepting they're not a charity, and that their sales figures justify the price, you should accept that the overall price they're demanding is reasonable. Regarding how they balance this price between the monthly fee + initial price, they could of course drop the initial price, but they would then have to raise the monthly fee correspondingly. Or vice versa. But neither option would neccessarily make you any better off. Based on their sales figures, I'd say they've probably found a good balance. Even if the balance could be better, thats just a problem for them and their business model - if they get the balance wrong then less people will purchase the product, however it doesn't equate to them 'ripping' you off.
For example, I buy very few CDs any more, and won't until the music companies find a more sensible business model (i.e. charging me a monthly fee for unlimited or a large number of album downloads - a business model which makes use of the possibilities the internet provides, and doesn't force me to pay for the unneccessary distribution network and associated costs associated with CDs). However I don't say they're ripping me off by sticking with their old distribution model - rather if anything they're ripping themselves off, as rather than receiving a potentially large monthly fee from me they receive next to nothing.
By 'refusing to be ripped off' however you're only hurting yourself (presuming you really do like the game and think the total price is worth it for you), as a million other users have already declared that blizzard isn't ripping them off with the prices by purchasing the game so blizzard isn't going to care if you don't buy it.
The parent is correct in asserting that FLAC coding is nothing like RLE. If any lossless audio codecs use any form of run length encoding, its a very small part of their engines and seldom serves much purpose.
Take a look at my site for the theory - http://www.lossless-audio.com/theory.htm . This describes how La works, but the other lossless audio codecs are all quite similar, except that some earlier ones like FLAC differ in how the prediction stage works - FLAC most often uses LPC coefficients to predict the signal, but sometimes uses non-adaptive prediction or IF THE SIGNAL IS PURE DIGITAL SILENCE uses RLE. This is in contrast to the adaptive prediction used by La, Wavpack, Monkey's Audio etc.
well rle coding (combined with huffman or whatever) would if anything make most audio files bigger. because audio is typically 16-bit (vs 8-bit for images) theres very little chance two concurrent values will be the same. my codec does use internally for the entropy part something based on range coding, which is similar to, but a little more efficient than, huffman coding, but it does a lot of other stuff as part of the entropy coding as well.
the point about stuffit's improvement is that its so huge. sure huffman is inefficient, but other methods are nowhere near 28% better i can assure you (else other state-of-the-art lossless archivers would have done better than the 4% they achieve before now).
You're a bit confused here. My lossless algorithm is an audio one - nothing to do with RLE. The one under discussion also has nothing to do with RLE. Nor does JPEG in fact. So none of them can be meaningfully compared to RLE.
My codec could be compared to other lossless audio codecs. The differences in compression ratios between all these codecs is relatively small. That was my point. You can also compare various state-of-the-art archivers on how they perform compressing JPGs. Again - very small differences, until you come to this new StuffIt compressor, which suddenly achieves a claimed average of 28% compression (vs the rest which are all less than 4%, i.e. a factor of 6-7x improvement vs the normal say 1-2% improvements in the field).
We need a compression method that is lossless, not one that creates compact files.
Well the compression method they've developed _is_ lossless. They just happen to have applied it to a lossy format, but they also plan to apply it to other things. No reason I can see why it shouldn't improve lossless formats as well (i.e. camera RAW).
Also, having your RAW/JPG files 30% smaller will enable your camera to empty its memory buffers 30% faster (everything else being equal) and thus allow _faster_ continuous shooting, so you bringing up that point is a bit contradictory to your general argument. Of course, this assumes that the compression technology works fast enough.
Its not a new format - its an archival program!
:). And if you haven't noticed the number of megapixels in the cameras is increasing about the same rate as the size of the SD/CF cards (similar to Window's RAM requirements) :).
However they _are_ also planning a new image format, as well as considering applying the compression technology to mp3s and many other formats - virtually all these formats use similar entropy encoding methods which if we are to believe their claims they've improved on substrantially.
If they would apply their compression technology to improve say JPEG2000's wavelet compression by say 25% that would be well worth while. I'm sure theres a lot of people out there who would be happy fitting twice as many pictures on their digital camera's memory cards with better quality than the JPEGs they'd previously been using (this being achievable as JPEG2000 is already a lot better than JPG, but for whatever reason has failed to catch on). I personally have _4GIGs_ of memory for my digital camera and still run out frequently (I use the camera's RAW format but this should also theoretically be improvable by their technology if its for real)
This is not in competition with JPEG - more with LZW compressed TIFF.
.x% range, yet they've apparently improved by a factor of around 6x what the previous best programs were able to achieve. I should note that I developed the audio codec with the currently highest lossless audio compression - http://lossless-audio.com/ - so have some idea of what I'm talking about here.
You're misreading the whitepaper. What they're explaining here is different and actually quite clever.
Jpeg compression can be seen as consisting of two main steps. In the first, information in the image deemed unimportant is removed from the image. In the second, the remaining information is compressed losslessly.
It was already known that the second step is not the most efficient possible. Also, the jpeg standard supports both huffman and arithmetic-coding, however due to patent reasons I think arithmetic-coding (which is more efficient) is often not used. So what they're doing is just improving the efficiency of this second step. This works much better than attempting to encode the jpg binary itself, as anything performed following entropy coding will struggle to achieve much compression, as the data has been hugely complicated by the process and it is thus much harder to find any compressible patterns etc.
They've also improved the compression by a very impressive margin. Typically in the lossless compression world, gains are in the
Anyway, the end effect is the same regardless how the compression is achieved - they're taking a lossily-compressed jpg, and reducing its size. This obviously makes little sense to be say integrated into digital cameras, for which the jpeg2000 format is available anyway and features better gains and is much faster (yet is still awaiting mainstream adoption), however from the archival and theoretical-lossless-compression perspectives what they've allegedly achieved is pretty damn interesting.
Maybe, but StuffIt is an archival program. If I have 10gb of existing jpgs and want to archive them, then this is whats wanted. Reencoding them as you suggest would be equivalent to converting say an mp3 to ogg format - a surefire way to lose quality with little gain.
Re fractal compression, people have been hyping it up for years but as far as I know it never really delivered. I'm dubious about any claims to some mysterious program which compresses anything amazingly well without strong evidence.
Wavelet compression however is used in jpeg2000 which is a bit better than jpeg but even that isn't supported by any digital cameras.
If StuffIt really does compress jpegs 25-30% that is a massive leap forward over the previous state-of-the-art compressors which reached I think around 3-4% - http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/jpg.php . Heres hoping their claims pan out, and that they release at least some details regarding the methods they used.
You could apply the same arguments to any kind of infrastructure - roads, rail etc. Applying your logic, the US and Germany would still be stuck with dirt roads while Namibians would be cruising around on their autobahns.
Couldn't ignore this. Theres lots of Cuban exiles in American who send money back to their families in Cuba. I'm guessing this is what you consider 'private aid' in reaching your $2.9 billion total? You probably also realise that this total is dwarfed by the cost to Cuba of the sanctions the US continues to impose on Cuba - sanctions repeatedly condemned by the UN every year for the past dozen or so years.
Note I'm not a communist or even defending Cuba's regime or anything - just want to correct any misimpression your statement might cause.
Personally it makes me sick when we rich countries cause unmeasurable damage to poor countries by our farming subsidies / tarifs (both Europe and US at fault here) (or sanctions as in the case of Cuba) and then claim to be helping them by throwing a few million in 'aid' at them - aid which often causes more harm than good (I just got back from a trip to Africa and its depressing to see + hear what our 'aid' achieves). The sad thing is that these subsidies / tarifs are of very dubious benefit to our economies - thus the cost to us to remove them would be little if anything, and the benefit to poor countries immense. Yet everyone from anti-globalisation leftists who are supposed to have the poor country's interests in mind to government lobbyists to politicians looking for the populist vote ensure this never happens.
Most of the benchmarks are gaming and thus more dependant on the graphics card. Given that not all computers are using the same graphics card, that makes them somewhat unfair.
More interesting are thus the non-synthetic non-graphics application benchmarks, but unfortunately theres just four of these.
What might be interesting with the graphics benchmarks would be to outfit each computer with the state-of-the-art graphics card of its release date. Also unfair, but given that the graphics card used in the test is not uniform anyway (having a somewhat sudden cut-off for computers with only PCI and not PCIe or AGP) it might be a slightly more interesting setup.
The point is choice. They may be worth their price to you, but not to people with smaller budgets.
With normal PCs, I can choose if I want to pay more and get better service etc, or pay less and build it myself. With Apples, I have a much more limited choice as I have only the one manufacturer to choose from. Apple has doomed itself to a small marketshare by being the Sony of the computing world.
To add to my post - another poster writes that google claims precisely this excuse - that the image search is out-of-date:
In short, There is no censorship here. We are embarassed that our image index is not updated as frequently as it should be. Expect a refresh in the near future.
In the meantime, you can just search on Google Web Search for [abu graib photos] [abu graib photos] [google.com] to get plenty of what you are looking for.
I personally find this hard to believe. Can anyone somehow confirm whether or not google's image search previously found these images, as this this is the deciding issue in the whole matter.
Firstly, if you search google's standard search for 'abu ghraib photos', you'll find plenty of sites with the photos. No censorship there.
The issue however regards google's image search.
Firstly, this search has always by default filtered out offensive images, such as porn. Personally I think the Abu Ghraib images are much more offensive than a nude, so its perfectly understandable that these might be filtered out.
It does however appear that even with the filter set to off, the pictures are still not found by the picture search.
It is also worth mentioning that this has _nothing_ to do with google being 'slow' or 'old' - i.e. the pictures not showing up to it not being up-to-date. Google's normal search finds numerous sites which contain the torture images, and you can find - for example - recent images from the 2004 election already using the image search. While there is some variance in how long various images/sites take to appear on google, I find it completely implausible that this is the cause for the pictures not appearing. The original post also actually mentions that google _used_ to find these images.
Thus it would indeed appear to be a case of censorship, if only on google's images search.
An article about this on www.dpreview.com mentions that the ipod by default downsamples the images when transferring them from the camera. This obviously defeats the point for many people who want to use it as a massive memory card for when travelling etc. Apparently the ipod would have trouble showing the large images that can come from digital cameras.
Does anybody know more about this? I'm presuming its at least an option to transfer the full-size images!?
Note, I'm not sure whether the MR-100 is smaller or cheaper than the iPod. It is however the smaller+cheaper of the two Olympus models.