On the one hand Google do better backups than I do and I'd be amazed if I ever lost data from my Gmail account
On the other hand do I want sensitive data stored on someone else's server?
True, in the short term.
In the long term, though, all those servers cost a lot of money to operate. Google isn't just going to keep everyone's email around forever if they're not making money from it in some way. The security of your data, therefore, depends on the continued success of their business model and their company generally.
In terms of things like fires, floods, bad media, and PEBKAC problems, I trust that my data will probably be more safe on Google's servers than just stored on my hard drive and no where else. However, I don't trust that Google is just going to continue to offer GMail as a free service, forever. Lots of free services have become pay-to-use over time. If someone made a better webmail service than Google, and they started losing advertising eyeballs, it might start to get hard for them to pay the bills for all that storage. They might decide to give everyone 30 days notice, and either start paying for a subscription service, or lose the archives.
Now, the way Google is doing these days, it doesn't seem like much of a risk. I mean, they've got more money than God -- why can't they just keep everyone's email archived forever? But a lot of seemingly invincible companies have crashed and burned; Wall Street can be pretty fickle, and Google made themselves its bitch when they went public. If they ever started hemorrhaging cash, you can bet that their investors would demand that all those TB of email get the axe if it saved a few dollars on the electric bill.
I think there's a place for both desktop and web-based/online email. Ultimately, in a combination of the two: keep your email both saved on the server, so you can access it anywhere, and on your desktop, so you can back it up and integrate it with other applications. GMail doesn't do a terrible job of this (I use Gmail combined with Apple Mail and it works reasonably well) but there are still improvements that could be made, in order to make the online and offline experiences more seamless.
So in this case I could happly distribut the code with the flag switched on for the M/S patented code and it does not become a problem untill someone tries to import it into the US.
This is (IMO) correct. And this is the situation not just for the font-rendering, but for all other software-patent issues as well. You can write software that violates software patents and license it under the GPL all you want; the problem only occurs when someone in a jurisdiction that does enforce software patents wants to use it.
Since a very large percentage of the Linux userbase and developerbase are in the U.S., most software is basically designed around the legal situation in the U.S.
There have been at some times, Linux distros maintained entirely outside the U.S., which have taken a much freer approach to patent-encumbered software. IIRC Mepis may be one like this, and there are probably others. Technically they're illegal to download in the U.S. but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone.
I suppose if you bought some rackspace in a "data haven" jurisdiction like Sealand, you'd be free to write code without regard to any sort of non-technical barriers; you could produce a distro that did everything that people would want it to do, right out of the box, without licensing or tithing to anyone. It would just be illegal pretty much everywhere, and I suspect if it got popular enough, the big monopolies would lobby to have your internet connection blockaded.
I looked at the screenshot, and both of the Microsoft samples in it look terrible. However, from what I can tell, the rest of the text on your screen looks fine. Oddly though, when I look at the same thing on my Windows machine, I don't see the same blurriness in the MS samples. Maybe whatever Microsoft is trying to do with the samples to make them look better just backfires when rendered on an OS X machine. (Maybe it's a 72dpi vs 96dpi thing?)
FWIW, I've tried the Cleartype thing on a few MS laptops and have never been very impressed with it. I still find the text on my Mac laptop, with just the regular subpixel rendering, equally if not more pleasant to read.
Slightly offtopic: It's bugged me that the average resolution of laptop displays has seemingly decreased over the past few years, at least in terms of what you can get without spending a bundle, but I guess that's just the buying habits of the unwashed masses in action -- people seem to prefer larger screens and don't care (or at least don't buy; I suspect they probably do care later on) about resolution, so the major manufacturers have cut corners on it.
You still run into the problem of association by IP address unless you use a proxy.
What I think is best, is use two browsers, and set one up to use a proxy (preferably Tor, because it's better than just a single, basically untrusted, proxy), and do anything sensitive/private there. Don't ever log in there, and set it to get rid of cookies at the end of your session.
Apple's Safari browser has a nice mode called "Private Browsing" where it pauses adding anything you enter to the History or to saved form values, and when you turn it back off at the end, purges the cache and cookies. Although it's not that difficult to clean that stuff in Firefox, it'd be a nice option to see other browsers adopt. (Frankly, it would be nice if they built in Tor/Privoxy, so that when you activated the feature, it automatically started sending your traffic through the onion-router system, but that's an additional level of paranoia.)
In other news... Russian mafia releases list of 10 pieces of software to avoid. Topping the list are anti-virus and anti-spyware utilities. Details at 11.
Who wants to be immersed to 100 degrees in a picture that the director framed to occupy only 30 degrees?
I think this is a pretty important point, that most of the electronics manufacturers and content-pushers are ignoring (for the moment).
Pretty much all the content made from the dawn of motion pictures to today, and the majority made today and in the foreseeable future, was made with the assumption that you'd be watching it on a screen that wouldn't fill more of your vision than a typical movie house's screen does. Made-for-TV shows are probably on the assumption that the typical viewer will be looking through something even smaller, so that the director is really framing everything as if the viewer is looking through a small window.
Material made under those assumptions isn't going to benefit much from being stretched across the viewer's entire visual field. In fact, it could probably get downright unpleasant. I can think of some modern TV shows that feature a lot of camera movement, which would probably be pretty sickening to watch on a 100+ degree screen, because they were made for the average household's 32" TV.
What I think has to happen, is manufacturers of big-screen projectors and TVs need to include some sort of 'compatibility mode' where they can simulate different screen sizes by framing the picture with black bars. I would do it by having the user enter their viewing distance from the set (when they're setting up the TV, along with everything else). Then, assuming you're sitting close to it, you could cycle through a number of presets: from IMAX, to traditional cinema size, down to a medium and even a simulated "average TV" size for material that's just too nausea-inducing otherwise. If you wanted to be really slick, on a CRT-based TV or on a projector, you could compress the full resolution and brightness of the imaging device into the smaller picture area (in a CRT, by changing the scan size, in a projector, by zooming the lens); on a LCD TV you'd necessarily throw away resolution. But that would let you watch stuff that was shot with a 4:3 or square, 30" screen, 8' away, in mind in the way it was meant to be watched: as a portal or window into another world, not a panorama that takes up your entire field of view.
It's going to be a while before TV directors and cinematographers start really thinking with HD, and really-big-screen TVs, in mind. Having the majority of your viewers watching your product on a 100-degree screen changes the dynamic a lot; while it brings a lot of exciting opportunities for immersiveness, it also means that you need to be careful applying techniques that may be benign in a "window" format.
I don't have a lot of evidence to back this up, but I strongly suspect that the difference has to do with the uneven spread of "pixels" across your eye's field of view. You can resolve things a lot better at the center of your field of vision than at the edges; if you can resolve 2 pixels per minute of arc across the middle 50% of your FoV, then there's probably some portion near the center (but outside of the retinal nerve 'hole') that has a higher resolving power than the edges.
So a small screen, which you'll necessarily be looking at with the sharpest part of your eyes, will probably still look better at a further distance, than you'd think based on the resolution data or experience gathered by looking at large screens.
If you're thinking about large screens that are going to take up 25-30% of your FoV, what you care about is the sort of "average" resolution of the eye; if you're talking about small screens, then you're interested in the maximum resolving power of the most sensitive part of the eye.
Also, I think that trying to simplify the human eye as if it's a camera sensor with 'pixels' may be a bit of a mistake. We don't really understand how the brain takes the raw data coming from the retinal 'sensors' and processes it into the stream of information that we perceive and experience. It could be that there is (almost certainly) a lot of "compression" and "interpolation," going on, and that this compression/interpolation is fine-tuned for things like high-contrast edges and shapes, or fine detail. It might be that there are psychological/neurological factors that could cause your "perceptive resolution" to be higher in specific cases than the measured resolving power (measured by just staring at some lines until they blur together, which I'm assuming is where the lines/arcmin figures come from) would indicate. It wouldn't surprise me if humans are capable of recognizing familiar objects and features even when they're very small, and in theory shouldn't be resolvable.
I think there are multiple techniques used to control X-ray production. Leaded glass might be one of them.
What's interesting to note is that although you generally think about the picture tube being the source of problematic X-rays, in reality it was some of the other tubes -- particularly rectifier tubes -- back in the guts of older TVs that really had issues. Since modern televisions usually don't contain any tubes besides the one you look at, we don't think about the others very often, but they were at one point a major concern.
This Q&A from the Health Physics Society describes the issue: "The three major sources of x rays from these sets were the picture tube, the vacuum tube rectifier, and the shunt regulator tube. The latter (designations 6EF4 and 6LC6) were a particular problem. Over a third of the 6EF4 tubes tested produced exposure rates above 50 mR/hr at a distance of nine inches, and exposure rates up to 8 R/hr were observed at seven inches with one defective tube!" Just to put that in perspective, 8 R/hr is like ~150 chest X-rays per hour, or like getting a whole-body CAT scan once an hour. Granted, you probably don't usually sit seven inches away from your TVs power supply, but it's still unhealthy. (And a lot of people's cats do...)
So really, sitting next to the side of that old (1965-70) TV could be a lot more hazardous than sitting in front of it.
The USA does this quite a bit, and we really don't have so many subversive groups, because the way that it is done makes their subversive groups look like fringe crazies.
It helps a lot that in many cases, the subversive groups are fringe crazies.
Sadly though, there are probably people graduating from "computer science" programs who only know of 'processes' as something you get after pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and clicking on the "Task Manager" button.
You're vastly overestimating the CS curriculum, at least at my local State uni, if you think that UNIX anything is taught in the 100-level courses.
Yes, and that's the icing on the cake; 640x480 ought to look similar to a DVD. Same vertical resolution anyway, just less horizontal pixels. They also seem to be compressing the living crap out of them in order to make them small enough for iPod Video sales.
What I think needs to happen, is Apple needs to find a way of letting people download video for a particular device. Unlike with audio, where most people will listen to the same track on their iPod and through their home stereo (which makes me think that a lot of people must be near-deaf, but I digress), people aren't going to do the same thing with video. They want high-def content for their HDTV, which means a different file from the quick-downloading version for their iPod.
Assuming Apple has the source material available, it should be trivial to produce HD versions of the programming that's on the iTMS. What's more difficult is how they're going to let users choose between versions, and how it'll be priced. If you download a TV episode for your iPod, will that be the same price as a HD version for your iTV? And if you get the iTV version, will you automatically get the low-res version as well (because it would be trivial to transcode down if not)? Or will there just be one price that entitles you to all resolutions (fat chance)? Those questions are more complicated than the technical ones -- Apple has more than enough expertise to produce good-looking HD material...look at their own Movie Trailer site if you want examples. Some of those clips are practically reference material for people setting up HD displays, because they're pretty close to broadcast quality.
The technical capability is all there, I just think they haven't quite worked out the business and user-training angle yet.
Well, I guess the point that I was making with the disclaimer, is that I'm not out to try and engage in some social engineering, like attempting to produce a violence-free society, via graphic propaganda in childhood. I've met self-proclaimed "pacifists" who advocate essentially rubbing children's noses in disturbing imagery in order to modify their behavior as adults, which has always struck me as very Aldous Huxley. I'm more just suggesting that coddling children in the way we're wont to do in the U.S., as a society (where violence per se is acceptable for children, but showing the consequences of it, like blood and gore and suffering, are not) is counterproductive.
I'm not after social engineering, just honesty, and I'm content to live in the society that honesty and accuracy produces.
You can actually extend that concept to the entire world. The income and quality-of-life disparity between, say, the US and Afghanistan/Iran/Iraq/etc. is enormous. Someone needs to tell Bush that they don't hate us because they hate freedom, a growing number of them hate us because they want a piece of the pie.
This, I think, is the crux of the disagreement. On one hand, you have people -- usually but not always social liberals -- claiming that the source of the world's problems are mostly economic, and that terrorists are produced by folks envious of our plasma TVs, SUVs, and 40-hour-workweeks.
On the other hand you have others -- usually but not always social conservatives -- claiming that the source of terrorism and related global instability is philosophical, religious, and dogmatic: e.g., what the terrorists hate isn't our conspicuously consumptive lifestyles per se, but really they hate the concept of a secular society in general, and really only hate McDonalds, etc., as a symptom of this essential problem.
I don't think the differences between these views can be overstated, because they lead to vastly different ways of visualizing and dealing with the threat of Islamic radicalism and terrorism generally. If the problem is economic imbalance, then you could theoretically correct it through trade and economic-aid programs. But if the problem is philosophical, then by fixing the wealth disparity, you're just enabling terrorism; giving people whose motivations are fundamentally opposed to secularism the means with which to really attack us.
I've seen little convincing evidence and lots of rhetoric on both sides. The fact that people like Bin Laden came from wealthy families, not poor ones, would seem to at least partially substantiate the theory that you can't just give radicals a house, a car, and a front lawn, and suddenly transform them into happy little proto-Americans.
I would much prefer to believe that the problem is economic rather than religious or philosophical, because that to me seems like a tractable problem. However, I'm not particularly upbeat on that being the case.
That with near daily Orwellian reports about the copious amounts of surveillance the British citizens put up with, and it starts to feel like we, be it the United States or whomever else as a third party should be taking some cues here to help.
Seeing how we "helped" the Iraqis, I'd say that countries should probably be very careful about crying for help from the U.S., lest they end up getting some.
They don't know what it's called, but people particularly in Europe absolutely know what it is; they want "a DVD player that will play imported discs."
They're not quite as big a deal here in the U.S., because frankly very few people watch imported content of any sort, but the few people that do can go out and get them without any problems. (Also, I've heard that most of the cheap Chinese DVD players are Region 0 anyway, right out of the box. Never tested it, because I don't have any non-Region-1 discs, but it's probably easier for the manufacturers to only make one model which they can sell worldwide, and not three or four different ones.)
I think a big part of the problem is that movies and video games aren't realistic enough. They glamorize violence, and make it seem clean and easy.
I would much rather have children watch things that realistically portray violence, and its consequences, than some semi-abstract depiction of it, where the baddies just fall down dead without any blood. That's not reality; the world isn't clean like that. You don't walk around shooting anonymous bad guys in black jumpsuits who appear endlessly out of nowhere and disappear after a few seconds on the floor.
There aren't a whole lot of movies -- and no video games that I can immediately think of -- that deal with violence realistically. I think that the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan gets pretty close. Black Hawk Down is also up there. I would much rather have children watch those at an early age, and have those images burned into their brains, then watch PG-rated (no blood!) action flicks where you can machine-gun people and just have them fall over in a pile. [1] In the real world, when you shoot people, there's blood. There's blood, and urine, and feces (when's the last time you've seen a real perforated abdomen in a video game?) and a whole lot of screaming, because that's the sort of thing that doing violence entails.
I'm not even a pacifist; far from it. I believe there's a legitimate place in society for violence, properly contained and used. However, raising children who have some twisted conception of it from the movies and video games doesn't help anyone. In my opinion, if children are going to be exposed to any violence, it should only be the most realistic violence, because at least then they won't have any false opinions about it. Only adults and near-adults who are mature enough to understand the abstract nature of an action movie or game, and the license that it takes to gloss over the necessary unpleasantness that comes with pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger, should be watching or playing them.
[1] There is a great side-by-side comparison of a James Bond movie and Saving Private Ryan in the IFC documentary "This Film is Not Yet Rated." It's on cable occasionally and they have it at Netflix; it's totally worth watching.
Just to follow up, by "non free repository," you'll need something outside the normal Debian repo system -- probably Penguin Liberation Front, certainly nothing U.S.-based -- in order to get that software. (Although I think the Debian/Ubuntu PLF mirrors are down at the moment.)
In addition to Flash (patent issues) and the Win32 codecs (patents), you'll also need libdvdcss2 (DMCA) if you want to play DVDs, and you might as well get LAME if it's not in there by default (god knows -- probably patents).
Putting deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ stable main into your sources.list ought to work, but I'm not sure how actively that repo is maintained (it still lists sarge as the stable tree). The VideoLAN people likewise just have instructions for Sarge but hopefully that'll change soon.
You can call it what you want, but that's no more "bribery" than when a car dealership says they'll give me free oil changes for life, if I'll buy a car from them instead of the dealership down the street.
It's called making a better deal than your competition. If you think that's immoral, then by all means, don't do it. But you may find yourself a bit broke.
I actually bought a Dual G5 tower about 18 months ago, at a very good price from Apple (refurbished), and I have no real interest in upgrading anytime soon.
I don't play games, and I don't have a high-definition camcorder. As far as I'm concerned, those are the only two things in the immediate future that would cause me to need a more powerful computer. For everything I do, even scanning and processing 35mm slide scans at 3600 dpi, it's fine. (Although, Aperture is a ridiculous RAM hog, I don't know if it loads every image in an open preview pane into memory or what, but open a folder with 100, 100MB images in it, and suddenly it's swap city.)
There just doesn't seem to be a "killer app" yet that's really making me want to go out and drop a few grand on a Xeon-based system. Sure, I could probably get a few extra seconds here and there with one, but what would it really enable me to do that I can't do now? Not that much.
Granted, I have a pretty long upgrade cycle on my primary machine -- my Dual G5 was an upgrade from a 400MHz G4, and that was an upgrade from a 200MHz Performa -- but they were all driven by particular tasks that I wanted to complete, and there just doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to do that at this point.
The problem with trying to actually run the numbers is that it's difficult to quantify the fuel consumption of a railroad locomotive. Unlike a plane, you can configure a train in a variety of ways, and what's really of note is the fuel consumption per passenger-mile.
The U.S. government used to compile such statistics, but they ceased doing it in 1963. The last year such numbers were available, trains averaged approximately 41 passenger-miles per gallon of diesel, but this represents a national average, including many trains that may have been underutilized (and which really shouldn't have been operated but were for political reasons). What's interesting is that in 1945, when they were really using the equipment at maximum capacity, the economy more than doubled to 83 passenger-miles per gallon (of diesel equivalent).
I suspect that it's a vast lowball compared to modern trains, given the level of diesel technology in 1963. To put that in perpective, a modern Greyhound bus is almost twice that, and a bus is using an internal-combustion engine, on a relatively high-friction surface, and its drag profile is far less attractive than a train (cross section vs volume). So I suspect that a modern diesel-electric is significantly more efficient.
Looking at modern high-speed, inter-city trains, there's a little more data available. Wikipedia has a nice compilation. The TGV in particular, when fully loaded, gets around 506 passenger-miles per gallon diesel equivalent. The only modern diesel listed is a DMU-based (self-propelled cars) train with double-deck cars, and fully loaded they claim 328 pmile/gal.
To compare to aircraft, Boeing claims as high as 162 pmiles/gal (of Jet-A, I think), depending on how full the aircraft is, others get numbers that range down around 100, with occasional environmentalist estimates in the 30s. The national average is allegedly around 50 according to Wikipedia (same page as earlier).
Any chance you, or some Anonymous Coward, would like to provide a link or other information about that? I'm really curious since I've never heard of a crack being open-sourced before.
Cracking groups always seemed very -- at some points almost comically -- secretive about their source code and method of exploits; I'd sooner expect a crack dealer to give you the name of his wholesaler than for a cracker to distribute source.
Kinda makes me wonder if perhaps the number of trojans disguised as cracks have been the push necessary even to push the 'black' areas of coding into open source.
But at any rate, the people who have influence -- mostly white, middle income and up -- aren't too botheredby the cameras and other "innovative" policing techniques...
The way I had it written, made it ambiguous as to whether I was saying that people with influence weren't bothered by the crime or the cameras. I meant the cameras.
The people I know, who are all over-30, middle- or upper-middle-class whites with families, seem a whole lot more annoyed by the speed cameras (which there seem to be a TON of, although I question their effectiveness because all the locals seem to know exactly where they are) than the whole surveillance issue.
Slashdot Mirror
True, in the short term.
In the long term, though, all those servers cost a lot of money to operate. Google isn't just going to keep everyone's email around forever if they're not making money from it in some way. The security of your data, therefore, depends on the continued success of their business model and their company generally.
In terms of things like fires, floods, bad media, and PEBKAC problems, I trust that my data will probably be more safe on Google's servers than just stored on my hard drive and no where else. However, I don't trust that Google is just going to continue to offer GMail as a free service, forever. Lots of free services have become pay-to-use over time. If someone made a better webmail service than Google, and they started losing advertising eyeballs, it might start to get hard for them to pay the bills for all that storage. They might decide to give everyone 30 days notice, and either start paying for a subscription service, or lose the archives.
Now, the way Google is doing these days, it doesn't seem like much of a risk. I mean, they've got more money than God -- why can't they just keep everyone's email archived forever? But a lot of seemingly invincible companies have crashed and burned; Wall Street can be pretty fickle, and Google made themselves its bitch when they went public. If they ever started hemorrhaging cash, you can bet that their investors would demand that all those TB of email get the axe if it saved a few dollars on the electric bill.
I think there's a place for both desktop and web-based/online email. Ultimately, in a combination of the two: keep your email both saved on the server, so you can access it anywhere, and on your desktop, so you can back it up and integrate it with other applications. GMail doesn't do a terrible job of this (I use Gmail combined with Apple Mail and it works reasonably well) but there are still improvements that could be made, in order to make the online and offline experiences more seamless.
So in this case I could happly distribut the code with the flag switched on for the M/S patented code and it does not become a problem untill someone tries to import it into the US.
This is (IMO) correct. And this is the situation not just for the font-rendering, but for all other software-patent issues as well. You can write software that violates software patents and license it under the GPL all you want; the problem only occurs when someone in a jurisdiction that does enforce software patents wants to use it.
Since a very large percentage of the Linux userbase and developerbase are in the U.S., most software is basically designed around the legal situation in the U.S.
There have been at some times, Linux distros maintained entirely outside the U.S., which have taken a much freer approach to patent-encumbered software. IIRC Mepis may be one like this, and there are probably others. Technically they're illegal to download in the U.S. but that doesn't seem to be stopping anyone.
I suppose if you bought some rackspace in a "data haven" jurisdiction like Sealand, you'd be free to write code without regard to any sort of non-technical barriers; you could produce a distro that did everything that people would want it to do, right out of the box, without licensing or tithing to anyone. It would just be illegal pretty much everywhere, and I suspect if it got popular enough, the big monopolies would lobby to have your internet connection blockaded.
I looked at the screenshot, and both of the Microsoft samples in it look terrible. However, from what I can tell, the rest of the text on your screen looks fine. Oddly though, when I look at the same thing on my Windows machine, I don't see the same blurriness in the MS samples. Maybe whatever Microsoft is trying to do with the samples to make them look better just backfires when rendered on an OS X machine. (Maybe it's a 72dpi vs 96dpi thing?)
FWIW, I've tried the Cleartype thing on a few MS laptops and have never been very impressed with it. I still find the text on my Mac laptop, with just the regular subpixel rendering, equally if not more pleasant to read.
Slightly offtopic: It's bugged me that the average resolution of laptop displays has seemingly decreased over the past few years, at least in terms of what you can get without spending a bundle, but I guess that's just the buying habits of the unwashed masses in action -- people seem to prefer larger screens and don't care (or at least don't buy; I suspect they probably do care later on) about resolution, so the major manufacturers have cut corners on it.
You still run into the problem of association by IP address unless you use a proxy.
What I think is best, is use two browsers, and set one up to use a proxy (preferably Tor, because it's better than just a single, basically untrusted, proxy), and do anything sensitive/private there. Don't ever log in there, and set it to get rid of cookies at the end of your session.
Apple's Safari browser has a nice mode called "Private Browsing" where it pauses adding anything you enter to the History or to saved form values, and when you turn it back off at the end, purges the cache and cookies. Although it's not that difficult to clean that stuff in Firefox, it'd be a nice option to see other browsers adopt. (Frankly, it would be nice if they built in Tor/Privoxy, so that when you activated the feature, it automatically started sending your traffic through the onion-router system, but that's an additional level of paranoia.)
In other news ... Russian mafia releases list of 10 pieces of software to avoid. Topping the list are anti-virus and anti-spyware utilities. Details at 11.
I think this is a pretty important point, that most of the electronics manufacturers and content-pushers are ignoring (for the moment).
Pretty much all the content made from the dawn of motion pictures to today, and the majority made today and in the foreseeable future, was made with the assumption that you'd be watching it on a screen that wouldn't fill more of your vision than a typical movie house's screen does. Made-for-TV shows are probably on the assumption that the typical viewer will be looking through something even smaller, so that the director is really framing everything as if the viewer is looking through a small window.
Material made under those assumptions isn't going to benefit much from being stretched across the viewer's entire visual field. In fact, it could probably get downright unpleasant. I can think of some modern TV shows that feature a lot of camera movement, which would probably be pretty sickening to watch on a 100+ degree screen, because they were made for the average household's 32" TV.
What I think has to happen, is manufacturers of big-screen projectors and TVs need to include some sort of 'compatibility mode' where they can simulate different screen sizes by framing the picture with black bars. I would do it by having the user enter their viewing distance from the set (when they're setting up the TV, along with everything else). Then, assuming you're sitting close to it, you could cycle through a number of presets: from IMAX, to traditional cinema size, down to a medium and even a simulated "average TV" size for material that's just too nausea-inducing otherwise. If you wanted to be really slick, on a CRT-based TV or on a projector, you could compress the full resolution and brightness of the imaging device into the smaller picture area (in a CRT, by changing the scan size, in a projector, by zooming the lens); on a LCD TV you'd necessarily throw away resolution. But that would let you watch stuff that was shot with a 4:3 or square, 30" screen, 8' away, in mind in the way it was meant to be watched: as a portal or window into another world, not a panorama that takes up your entire field of view.
It's going to be a while before TV directors and cinematographers start really thinking with HD, and really-big-screen TVs, in mind. Having the majority of your viewers watching your product on a 100-degree screen changes the dynamic a lot; while it brings a lot of exciting opportunities for immersiveness, it also means that you need to be careful applying techniques that may be benign in a "window" format.
I don't have a lot of evidence to back this up, but I strongly suspect that the difference has to do with the uneven spread of "pixels" across your eye's field of view. You can resolve things a lot better at the center of your field of vision than at the edges; if you can resolve 2 pixels per minute of arc across the middle 50% of your FoV, then there's probably some portion near the center (but outside of the retinal nerve 'hole') that has a higher resolving power than the edges.
So a small screen, which you'll necessarily be looking at with the sharpest part of your eyes, will probably still look better at a further distance, than you'd think based on the resolution data or experience gathered by looking at large screens.
If you're thinking about large screens that are going to take up 25-30% of your FoV, what you care about is the sort of "average" resolution of the eye; if you're talking about small screens, then you're interested in the maximum resolving power of the most sensitive part of the eye.
Also, I think that trying to simplify the human eye as if it's a camera sensor with 'pixels' may be a bit of a mistake. We don't really understand how the brain takes the raw data coming from the retinal 'sensors' and processes it into the stream of information that we perceive and experience. It could be that there is (almost certainly) a lot of "compression" and "interpolation," going on, and that this compression/interpolation is fine-tuned for things like high-contrast edges and shapes, or fine detail. It might be that there are psychological/neurological factors that could cause your "perceptive resolution" to be higher in specific cases than the measured resolving power (measured by just staring at some lines until they blur together, which I'm assuming is where the lines/arcmin figures come from) would indicate. It wouldn't surprise me if humans are capable of recognizing familiar objects and features even when they're very small, and in theory shouldn't be resolvable.
I think there are multiple techniques used to control X-ray production. Leaded glass might be one of them.
What's interesting to note is that although you generally think about the picture tube being the source of problematic X-rays, in reality it was some of the other tubes -- particularly rectifier tubes -- back in the guts of older TVs that really had issues. Since modern televisions usually don't contain any tubes besides the one you look at, we don't think about the others very often, but they were at one point a major concern.
This Q&A from the Health Physics Society describes the issue: "The three major sources of x rays from these sets were the picture tube, the vacuum tube rectifier, and the shunt regulator tube. The latter (designations 6EF4 and 6LC6) were a particular problem. Over a third of the 6EF4 tubes tested produced exposure rates above 50 mR/hr at a distance of nine inches, and exposure rates up to 8 R/hr were observed at seven inches with one defective tube!" Just to put that in perspective, 8 R/hr is like ~150 chest X-rays per hour, or like getting a whole-body CAT scan once an hour. Granted, you probably don't usually sit seven inches away from your TVs power supply, but it's still unhealthy. (And a lot of people's cats do...)
So really, sitting next to the side of that old (1965-70) TV could be a lot more hazardous than sitting in front of it.
The USA does this quite a bit, and we really don't have so many subversive groups, because the way that it is done makes their subversive groups look like fringe crazies.
It helps a lot that in many cases, the subversive groups are fringe crazies.
You really think that the banks are better than paypal?
If my bank was as bad as PayPal, I'd be keeping my money in my mattress.
So, yes.
Just in case we needed another piece of evidence showing how much IBM has changed over the years...
... seriously, from IBM?
I can't believe I just read the phrase "Headlamps on! To the bat cave!" in an IBM technical publication.
I'm not saying it's bad, in fact the article is a much more amusing read than I thought it was going to be, but
Sadly though, there are probably people graduating from "computer science" programs who only know of 'processes' as something you get after pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and clicking on the "Task Manager" button.
You're vastly overestimating the CS curriculum, at least at my local State uni, if you think that UNIX anything is taught in the 100-level courses.
Yes, and that's the icing on the cake; 640x480 ought to look similar to a DVD. Same vertical resolution anyway, just less horizontal pixels. They also seem to be compressing the living crap out of them in order to make them small enough for iPod Video sales.
What I think needs to happen, is Apple needs to find a way of letting people download video for a particular device. Unlike with audio, where most people will listen to the same track on their iPod and through their home stereo (which makes me think that a lot of people must be near-deaf, but I digress), people aren't going to do the same thing with video. They want high-def content for their HDTV, which means a different file from the quick-downloading version for their iPod.
Assuming Apple has the source material available, it should be trivial to produce HD versions of the programming that's on the iTMS. What's more difficult is how they're going to let users choose between versions, and how it'll be priced. If you download a TV episode for your iPod, will that be the same price as a HD version for your iTV? And if you get the iTV version, will you automatically get the low-res version as well (because it would be trivial to transcode down if not)? Or will there just be one price that entitles you to all resolutions (fat chance)? Those questions are more complicated than the technical ones -- Apple has more than enough expertise to produce good-looking HD material...look at their own Movie Trailer site if you want examples. Some of those clips are practically reference material for people setting up HD displays, because they're pretty close to broadcast quality.
The technical capability is all there, I just think they haven't quite worked out the business and user-training angle yet.
Well, I guess the point that I was making with the disclaimer, is that I'm not out to try and engage in some social engineering, like attempting to produce a violence-free society, via graphic propaganda in childhood. I've met self-proclaimed "pacifists" who advocate essentially rubbing children's noses in disturbing imagery in order to modify their behavior as adults, which has always struck me as very Aldous Huxley. I'm more just suggesting that coddling children in the way we're wont to do in the U.S., as a society (where violence per se is acceptable for children, but showing the consequences of it, like blood and gore and suffering, are not) is counterproductive.
I'm not after social engineering, just honesty, and I'm content to live in the society that honesty and accuracy produces.
You can actually extend that concept to the entire world. The income and quality-of-life disparity between, say, the US and Afghanistan/Iran/Iraq/etc. is enormous. Someone needs to tell Bush that they don't hate us because they hate freedom, a growing number of them hate us because they want a piece of the pie.
This, I think, is the crux of the disagreement. On one hand, you have people -- usually but not always social liberals -- claiming that the source of the world's problems are mostly economic, and that terrorists are produced by folks envious of our plasma TVs, SUVs, and 40-hour-workweeks.
On the other hand you have others -- usually but not always social conservatives -- claiming that the source of terrorism and related global instability is philosophical, religious, and dogmatic: e.g., what the terrorists hate isn't our conspicuously consumptive lifestyles per se, but really they hate the concept of a secular society in general, and really only hate McDonalds, etc., as a symptom of this essential problem.
I don't think the differences between these views can be overstated, because they lead to vastly different ways of visualizing and dealing with the threat of Islamic radicalism and terrorism generally. If the problem is economic imbalance, then you could theoretically correct it through trade and economic-aid programs. But if the problem is philosophical, then by fixing the wealth disparity, you're just enabling terrorism; giving people whose motivations are fundamentally opposed to secularism the means with which to really attack us.
I've seen little convincing evidence and lots of rhetoric on both sides. The fact that people like Bin Laden came from wealthy families, not poor ones, would seem to at least partially substantiate the theory that you can't just give radicals a house, a car, and a front lawn, and suddenly transform them into happy little proto-Americans.
I would much prefer to believe that the problem is economic rather than religious or philosophical, because that to me seems like a tractable problem. However, I'm not particularly upbeat on that being the case.
That with near daily Orwellian reports about the copious amounts of surveillance the British citizens put up with, and it starts to feel like we, be it the United States or whomever else as a third party should be taking some cues here to help.
Seeing how we "helped" the Iraqis, I'd say that countries should probably be very careful about crying for help from the U.S., lest they end up getting some.
They don't know what it's called, but people particularly in Europe absolutely know what it is; they want "a DVD player that will play imported discs."
They're not quite as big a deal here in the U.S., because frankly very few people watch imported content of any sort, but the few people that do can go out and get them without any problems. (Also, I've heard that most of the cheap Chinese DVD players are Region 0 anyway, right out of the box. Never tested it, because I don't have any non-Region-1 discs, but it's probably easier for the manufacturers to only make one model which they can sell worldwide, and not three or four different ones.)
I think a big part of the problem is that movies and video games aren't realistic enough. They glamorize violence, and make it seem clean and easy.
I would much rather have children watch things that realistically portray violence, and its consequences, than some semi-abstract depiction of it, where the baddies just fall down dead without any blood. That's not reality; the world isn't clean like that. You don't walk around shooting anonymous bad guys in black jumpsuits who appear endlessly out of nowhere and disappear after a few seconds on the floor.
There aren't a whole lot of movies -- and no video games that I can immediately think of -- that deal with violence realistically. I think that the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan gets pretty close. Black Hawk Down is also up there. I would much rather have children watch those at an early age, and have those images burned into their brains, then watch PG-rated (no blood!) action flicks where you can machine-gun people and just have them fall over in a pile. [1] In the real world, when you shoot people, there's blood. There's blood, and urine, and feces (when's the last time you've seen a real perforated abdomen in a video game?) and a whole lot of screaming, because that's the sort of thing that doing violence entails.
I'm not even a pacifist; far from it. I believe there's a legitimate place in society for violence, properly contained and used. However, raising children who have some twisted conception of it from the movies and video games doesn't help anyone. In my opinion, if children are going to be exposed to any violence, it should only be the most realistic violence, because at least then they won't have any false opinions about it. Only adults and near-adults who are mature enough to understand the abstract nature of an action movie or game, and the license that it takes to gloss over the necessary unpleasantness that comes with pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger, should be watching or playing them.
[1] There is a great side-by-side comparison of a James Bond movie and Saving Private Ryan in the IFC documentary "This Film is Not Yet Rated." It's on cable occasionally and they have it at Netflix; it's totally worth watching.
Just to follow up, by "non free repository," you'll need something outside the normal Debian repo system -- probably Penguin Liberation Front, certainly nothing U.S.-based -- in order to get that software. (Although I think the Debian/Ubuntu PLF mirrors are down at the moment.)
In addition to Flash (patent issues) and the Win32 codecs (patents), you'll also need libdvdcss2 (DMCA) if you want to play DVDs, and you might as well get LAME if it's not in there by default (god knows -- probably patents).
Putting
deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org/ stable main
into your sources.list ought to work, but I'm not sure how actively that repo is maintained (it still lists sarge as the stable tree). The VideoLAN people likewise just have instructions for Sarge but hopefully that'll change soon.
You can call it what you want, but that's no more "bribery" than when a car dealership says they'll give me free oil changes for life, if I'll buy a car from them instead of the dealership down the street.
It's called making a better deal than your competition. If you think that's immoral, then by all means, don't do it. But you may find yourself a bit broke.
Does Europe truly want a theocracy sitting on their doorstep?
I think Europe would prefer a theocracy on their doorstep, then in their living room.
Agreed.
I actually bought a Dual G5 tower about 18 months ago, at a very good price from Apple (refurbished), and I have no real interest in upgrading anytime soon.
I don't play games, and I don't have a high-definition camcorder. As far as I'm concerned, those are the only two things in the immediate future that would cause me to need a more powerful computer. For everything I do, even scanning and processing 35mm slide scans at 3600 dpi, it's fine. (Although, Aperture is a ridiculous RAM hog, I don't know if it loads every image in an open preview pane into memory or what, but open a folder with 100, 100MB images in it, and suddenly it's swap city.)
There just doesn't seem to be a "killer app" yet that's really making me want to go out and drop a few grand on a Xeon-based system. Sure, I could probably get a few extra seconds here and there with one, but what would it really enable me to do that I can't do now? Not that much.
Granted, I have a pretty long upgrade cycle on my primary machine -- my Dual G5 was an upgrade from a 400MHz G4, and that was an upgrade from a 200MHz Performa -- but they were all driven by particular tasks that I wanted to complete, and there just doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to do that at this point.
The problem with trying to actually run the numbers is that it's difficult to quantify the fuel consumption of a railroad locomotive. Unlike a plane, you can configure a train in a variety of ways, and what's really of note is the fuel consumption per passenger-mile.
The U.S. government used to compile such statistics, but they ceased doing it in 1963. The last year such numbers were available, trains averaged approximately 41 passenger-miles per gallon of diesel, but this represents a national average, including many trains that may have been underutilized (and which really shouldn't have been operated but were for political reasons). What's interesting is that in 1945, when they were really using the equipment at maximum capacity, the economy more than doubled to 83 passenger-miles per gallon (of diesel equivalent).
I suspect that it's a vast lowball compared to modern trains, given the level of diesel technology in 1963. To put that in perpective, a modern Greyhound bus is almost twice that, and a bus is using an internal-combustion engine, on a relatively high-friction surface, and its drag profile is far less attractive than a train (cross section vs volume). So I suspect that a modern diesel-electric is significantly more efficient.
Looking at modern high-speed, inter-city trains, there's a little more data available. Wikipedia has a nice compilation. The TGV in particular, when fully loaded, gets around 506 passenger-miles per gallon diesel equivalent. The only modern diesel listed is a DMU-based (self-propelled cars) train with double-deck cars, and fully loaded they claim 328 pmile/gal.
To compare to aircraft, Boeing claims as high as 162 pmiles/gal (of Jet-A, I think), depending on how full the aircraft is, others get numbers that range down around 100, with occasional environmentalist estimates in the 30s. The national average is allegedly around 50 according to Wikipedia (same page as earlier).
Any chance you, or some Anonymous Coward, would like to provide a link or other information about that? I'm really curious since I've never heard of a crack being open-sourced before.
Cracking groups always seemed very -- at some points almost comically -- secretive about their source code and method of exploits; I'd sooner expect a crack dealer to give you the name of his wholesaler than for a cracker to distribute source.
Kinda makes me wonder if perhaps the number of trojans disguised as cracks have been the push necessary even to push the 'black' areas of coding into open source.
A clarification on one sentence:
But at any rate, the people who have influence -- mostly white, middle income and up -- aren't too bothered by the cameras and other "innovative" policing techniques...
The way I had it written, made it ambiguous as to whether I was saying that people with influence weren't bothered by the crime or the cameras. I meant the cameras.
The people I know, who are all over-30, middle- or upper-middle-class whites with families, seem a whole lot more annoyed by the speed cameras (which there seem to be a TON of, although I question their effectiveness because all the locals seem to know exactly where they are) than the whole surveillance issue.