So you want defense against snooping but don't care about defense against MITM attacks.
Yes, that's exactly what I want as the minimum requirement. Snooping on traffic is incredibly simple to do, and can really be done easily by anyone at any point along connection path. You just start up a packet sniffer, grab random packets, and wait until you catch something interesting. You don't even have to catch an entire session. Successfully pulling off a MITM attack is MUCH more complicated...requiring something trickier, such as hijacking DNS. You can't just be at any random point along the chain and perform the attack on any random connection coming through.
It's like a lock on my front door. I don't delude myself into thinking that nobody can get into my house, but the lock is a safeguard against the easiest attack vector.
Awesome. And now maybe you've learned a lesson. While the external processor was faster, sending your data over the bus to the external processor has an inherent delay in it. That's why your first post came in fourth.
I should also add on to my last post the following:
The other danger with oxygen is that not only does it make things burn quickly, but it makes it difficult to extinguish. So if you are working with fire (say, trying to set an office supply cabinet on fire) and a spark jumps to you and sets your clothing on fire, normally you could just pat it out, or if worse, do the stop-drop-roll technique or use a blanket to smother it. The problem is, with concentrated oxygen those techniques often don't work very well because you can't remove enough oxygen to interrupt the combustion.
No, it is NOT a myth. Did I say that oxygen was flammable? No, because it isn't. However, in the presence of concentrated oxygen (vs the concentration normally found in the atmosphere), fuel will burn MUCH MUCH quicker. Things that would normally burn at a very slow pace can go up in flames in just a few seconds in pure oxygen. Dropping a hot cigarette ash on your clothing would just normally smolder for a second, cause a burn mark, and then extinguish itself. In the presence of concentrated oxygen, however, that same ash can cause your clothing to go up in flames quickly, causing severe burns.
So of course it's not dangerous because it's flammable. It's dangerous because it can turn a minor fire into a blaze very quickly.
Wait. So as if her action alone wasn't stupid enough, she started a fire at Bayonet Point Oxygen? An oxygen supply company? There's a reason they tell people on oxygen not to smoke.
It's not so much that I want to know, but that the article should have provided at least a little bit of info. I can understand the huge effort involved in providing all those details for everyone on the list, but come on. They were #1 in that category and the article provided almost no information to back up why they were so good in that category.
And (what I forgot to complain about in my original post) from my quick skimming of the other top rated, the ONLY one that got any sort of reasonable detail was the #1 rated (USAA). Even #2 said nothing. Heck, the short blurb on the first page (NO. 2: Booz Allen Hamilton - Offers more than 50 tech focus groups) says more about the company than the page that attempts to describe the company. They invest in their own employees? They offer "top benefits"? Wow, that says so much.
So my point (if perhaps not laid out very well in my initial post) was that the article absolutely dropped the ball.
When I read that the University of Pennsylvania has the best benefit, I said "oh really? like what?". So I went to look further. Does it say anything about typical salary? Nope. Vacation time? Nope. Retirement account (401a,403b) matching? Nope. Anything about how good their health insurance is? Nope. Do they offer free tuition for my family? It doesn't say. This article just says "best benefits" and then offers absolutely zero explanation of exactly why it got that ranking (other than mentioning free tuition for career related course, which is the norm for almost any college or university).
While probably not that great compared to what pros get, for the ease of use and easy access to their services that you get (it's difficult to get a deal with getty), that's not all that bad of a rate for an amateur or even a semi-pro. However, the percentage is only half the picture. It also matters what the rate is. If they figure they can just use the vast array of photos as cannon fodder to make pennies here and pennies there, for them it's going to add up to huge money, while the individual photographer might make $10 a year. That's a pretty terrible income, but I'm sure some people will look at it as "hey, that paid for almost half of my flicker pro account for the year".
For my home network, I've got it setup so that my web server (which I can access remotely) has a php web page which I can use to send a wake-on-lan signal to my desktop PC. It also opens up the remote desktop port on my router to my current IP.
The underlying assumption (miles per year and $/gallon) are both printed on the label.
...
They are going to be consistent for all vehicles in the same class and the same model year, so in the most common cases of comparisons, the variations won't matter.
But that's not the point. This article was pretty clearly talking about a situation where a 2 car family is trying to figure out which of their 2 cars is going to be the most beneficial to upgrade. For that to happen, you are going to need to know the figures for your existing vehicle.
Its a fairly trivial one-time calculation to convert your existing cars rating (presuming you got a car from a model year after the EPA adopted the current methodology) to correct it to the gas price used on labels for the current model year (just multiply the total estimated cost from your cars rating by the the new labels stated cost per gallon and divide by your labels cost per gallon; you've then got a number you can use when comparing against any car from the current model year.)
LOL...yeah, right. You are talking about the same people who can NOT figure out whether 10->20 will save you more than 33->50, and now you expect that they are going to be able to make this calculation on their own?
Of course, this is all a moot point because (as others have already pointed out) it is very rarely financially advantageous to replace an old car with a new one. If you keep your old car and spend X dollars extra on gas (compared to the car you would have bought) and spent Y dollars in upkeep, X+Y will generally be less than the financed cost of the new vehicle minus the residual value of that new vehicle. So, for most people, it really only makes sense to replace a vehicle when it no longer suits your needs (it has become too unreliable, is not safe, does not meet your new family needs or your cargo needs, etc).
And even if we go with the fact that the family is probably not smart enough to realize this and will thus upgrade one of the vehicle anyway, we still need to know the ratio of usage between the 2 vehicle.
But if we kind of put these 2 problems aside and just discuss within the premise of the article (no matter how faulty), then "annual fuel cost" figures are no simpler for people to correctly analyze than the MPG figures are.
You do realize that the current EPA fuel economy sticker already has a consumption measure -- in terms most people understand more readily than gallons-per-mile -- dead center, right?
It called "Estimated fuel cost per year", and the units are dollars.
The problem with that figure is that it has to be based on some set cost per gallon of gas. That means that, periodically, those figures are going to change. Then years from now, when I consider buying a new car, it makes it more difficult for me to compare my current car to cars on the market because the 2 figures are based on 2 different cost-per-gallon figures.
So I buy a car with a fuel cost of $925 per year, then in a few years I'm looking at another vehicle with a cost of $1160 per year? The baseline gas price used to generate the estimate has gone from $2.82/gallon to $3.77/gallon. Now, quickly...without pulling out your calculator, tell me which vehicle is more efficient, and how much more efficient is it?
Why should I pay MORE for the business class service from Comcast when I can pay LESS to WOW and get wonderful service? Wouldn't that just be rewarding Comcast for their inferior service? "Your service was so bad...how about I give you MORE money and maybe THEN you can deliver what you promised me".
I am certainly no more comfortable with Google having it than with my (Dutch) government having it.
Google could potentially use the data to (gasp) serve you targeted advertisements (ie: they're gonna try to annoy you with ads either way, but at least then it will be an annoyance that's relevant to you, instead of tampon ads for a guy, or ads for a Boston restaurant shown to a person in Seattle). The government, on the other hand, can charge you with crimes, fine you, throw you in jail, etc. I think anyone who is not more comfortable with the former than they are with the latter has their sense of perspective severely out of whack.
I swear, I hate when people like you try to be so clever...."so inadvertant that they even applied for a patent on it". Try not to get involved in the discussion if you haven't an understanding of what you are talking about, because you sound like you are just trolling. Google's patent is all about identifying devices and their location. That can be based off of some very simple data which is broadcast by the access point and does NOT require looking at full TCP/IP communications of connected users.
On my ipod touch, I used to have an app call WiFinder (until the Apple bastards started rejecting the app and it stopped working with the new OS). It would show you all of the wireless networks nearby and display a signal strength for each one. Just by simply walking from one end of my house to the other and checking the signal strength, I was able to get a rough estimate about which direction each signal was coming from. Had I repeated this process up and down the street I could have probably determined with a decent level of accuracy where each wifi network was originating. And all that was without me snooping in on peoples HTTP sessions and such. In fact, snooping on such data would be virtually useless to the goal of locating the access point (unless you just happened to snoop on somebody filling out a non-SSL form that contained address info or something)
Are they that bad? Well, lets see. The last time I had them, I had no internet service for 3 days. After repeated calls and a tech coming out I got no resolution. Finally I took it upon myself to install a packet sniffer, and what do you know...all of the IP traffic on my subnet was in an entirely different range than the IP I was being assigned. I picked a random IP in the valid range that appeared to not be in use and statically assigned it, and *mysteriously* every was suddenly working. I had to wade through first level tech support, convince them to let me talk to a network engineer (because he had no clue what I was talking about), and then tell that guy how to fix my internet service.
Then there is the billing department. The bill is conveniently itemized so that you can see the comcast charges, and then separate entries for the franchise fees, city taxes, universal service fees, etc. Comcast raised the bill by exactly $1 with absolutely no mention in any of my previous 6 bills about a coming change. That $1 increase was in the line item for the comcast charge. Yet when I spoke to the billing department, they were insistent that they absolutely did not raise the rate on me, and that the increased charge was solely due to city taxes. Even showing them my previous bill and pointing out exactly where the increase occurred could not budge them. They blatantly lied to me, and continued to lie even when shown evidence that they were clearly lying.
Now, compare that to WOW, where I can personally email the CTO directly about a problem, and he'll happily respond with a technical answer, and even admit fault if something went wrong on their end. Or with the install techs, who routinely show up in the first 30 minutes of the 4 hour service window, instead of the last hour (or even after the 4 hour window). And those techs are always willing to chat with me about how much better WOW treats them and makes it easier to do their job.
yeah, comcast is that bad. I kind of feel bad for the comcast guys that come around to my door every now and then trying to get me to switch back. They probably feel like I treat them as if they're carrying the plague or something, as I won't even humor them to listen to their sales pitch. I'm very polite in declining to hear their offer (I know the guys going door to door really have nothing to do with my experiences), but they always act like they've never seen someone so dissatisfied with a company before.
Looking at the bill, it appears to me to be crafted to not affect things like animal tissue transplants, but whether or not it may inadvertantly affect some other currently accepted practice I can't say (as I'm neither an expert at the nuances of legalese, nor an expert in the terminology and possibilities of medical sciences).
Here's a thought. Perhaps it's not spreading word-for-word, and searching for that specific phrase isn't going to help you find all the instances of it. For example, the rumor has now spread to slashdot, yet that phrase appears nowhere in the slashdot story (at least not until you or anybody else posted it in the comments).
I'm not saying it IS spreading like wildfire, but your reasoning is concluding that it isn't is flawed.
You can get angry and accuse me of cherry picking the data all you want. However, this isn't bullshit. These companies do put a reasonable amount of effort into testing this stuff, and especially with these sort of non-mechanical components, it is reasonably predictable (outside of isolated cases of random failure).
And you are right...I did deliberately pick intel. The reason I picked them is because their drives are the one model I know most about. At the time I purchased my first drive, the first generation X25-M was the king of the crop...far above and beyond other models for performance, bug free operation, etc. I researched the drives in depth, and I know specs on those drives forward and backward. After buying my drive, I've had little reason to keep up on the intimate details of the competition's every spec. I've followed it enough to know that the competition has greatly closed the gap on Intel's lead (and surpassed them in some aspect), but I don't know them in the same depth I did when I bought my drive a year and half ago. Thus I quoted what I know.
But thanks for proving yourself to be an ass by suggesting I deliberately attempted to paint a rosy picture by cherry picking the data.
Reading has no wear effect on SSDs. Writing does, but it's a very high limit. Intel set the bar pretty high with the the X25-M, and it was something like 20GB per day, every day for 5 years the enterprise version is even higher, since it uses SLC instead of MLC flash memory). I haven't tracked the latest releases from other brands, but I imagine they are pretty similar.
Over the years, if I've had 1 component fail more often than hard drives, it would probably have to be optical drives. I just cannot see tying my SSD to an optical drive.
Peter Jackson has said before that the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition will not be released on BluRay until after he is finished up with The Hobbit, because he needs to be directly involved in the project. So does this mean that, since he won't be busy on the Hobbit right now, he'll have time to work on that? Or is LotR EE BR now in indefinite hold too?
Of course, anybody who is nearing retirement and is still that heavily invested in stocks should have their brain checked anyway. But, that's beside the point.
No, that's exactly the point. Despite how everyone tries to use them, experts always seem to suggest that stocks should be a long term investment. Trying to time the market for short term gains is generally a losing proposition. You should invest long term with a company that you feel comfortable with. If absolutely none of the fundamentals or outlook about that company has changed since yesterday, and you thought they were worth holding yesterday, then you should continue holding today, even if there was a 10% drop.
The consequence of being a long term investment is that, at any given moment, the stock may be down considerably, so you shouldn't put money that you need in the short term into such a long term investment. That's why stocks should decline as a percentage of your portfolio as you near retirement (and then continue declining after you retire). The stock market is not for funds you'll need in the next 5 years. Those should be in bonds or fixed income investments. Stocks should only be the part of your retirement that you don't plan on needing for the next 10+ years.
Well, I think you find yourself in a place where pretty much the entire professional graphics industry disagrees with you. 8-bit is far too limiting to be of use for a lot of professional level work, but 16-bit integer is good enough that it is very rarely ever a limitation (and in those occasions, there's is the full 32-bit floating point format). So for most work, your half float idea really offers no real advantage. However, it does offer the disadvantage that it is not widely supported in hardware.
I'm saying that a 12 bit image means you have inserted 3 extra levels between each of the levels of an 8 bit image. Assigning magical properties to this is a mistake. Most of the magical properties people are assuming can be made available by using floating point.
What are you talking about with respect to "magical properties"? Those 3 extra bits give you a little more differentiation in colors. When you are in deep shadows you tend to get blockiness as the slightly different colors get recorded as the same color due to a lack of bits available for recording (it's sort of like rounding off 2 different numbers and ending up with 2 of the same numbers). With the extra bits, there is more precision and fewer of those colors end up being recorded the same. This becomes especially noticeable when you use an editor to try and brighten up the shadows. That's when the difference between the 8-bit and 16-bit versions will start to really become noticeable.
If you convert your image to display correctly on the screen then you must have more bits than the hardware produced, otherwise you will have lost data, due to the pigeonhole principle.
Sorry, but I'm not even remotely clear what you are trying to say.
2) Which cameras capture floating point data natively?
At the lowest hardware level most are using digital counters. However the conversion software coming with the camera often does use a floating point api. The RED camera is a good example.
But it does no good to convert it to floating point unless the sensor is natively capturing floating point data (and to my knowledge, there are no sensors that do so). The conversion gains you no precision in data so there is no upside. On the other hand, there is the downside that the conversion needlessly makes your file size grow (by nature of its design, a floating point number requires more bits than an integer to losslessly store the same range of valuesas that integer.)
Now, if someday sensors were capturing very high bit data (lets go a bit extreme and say we had 1024 bit sensors), it might be decided that we really don't have much need for such precise data, and that we'd like to maintain that dynamic range without the huge file sizes. Then it would make sense for the cameras to record in floating point, throwing away some unneeded precision in the brighter areas in exchange for a more manageable file size. But that time is not now. We aren't there yet, so a floating point format gives us no gain, but it does give us the downside of a pointlessly larger file.
Slashdot Mirror
So you want defense against snooping but don't care about defense against MITM attacks.
Yes, that's exactly what I want as the minimum requirement. Snooping on traffic is incredibly simple to do, and can really be done easily by anyone at any point along connection path. You just start up a packet sniffer, grab random packets, and wait until you catch something interesting. You don't even have to catch an entire session. Successfully pulling off a MITM attack is MUCH more complicated...requiring something trickier, such as hijacking DNS. You can't just be at any random point along the chain and perform the attack on any random connection coming through.
It's like a lock on my front door. I don't delude myself into thinking that nobody can get into my house, but the lock is a safeguard against the easiest attack vector.
Awesome. And now maybe you've learned a lesson. While the external processor was faster, sending your data over the bus to the external processor has an inherent delay in it. That's why your first post came in fourth.
I should also add on to my last post the following:
The other danger with oxygen is that not only does it make things burn quickly, but it makes it difficult to extinguish. So if you are working with fire (say, trying to set an office supply cabinet on fire) and a spark jumps to you and sets your clothing on fire, normally you could just pat it out, or if worse, do the stop-drop-roll technique or use a blanket to smother it. The problem is, with concentrated oxygen those techniques often don't work very well because you can't remove enough oxygen to interrupt the combustion.
No, it is NOT a myth. Did I say that oxygen was flammable? No, because it isn't. However, in the presence of concentrated oxygen (vs the concentration normally found in the atmosphere), fuel will burn MUCH MUCH quicker. Things that would normally burn at a very slow pace can go up in flames in just a few seconds in pure oxygen. Dropping a hot cigarette ash on your clothing would just normally smolder for a second, cause a burn mark, and then extinguish itself. In the presence of concentrated oxygen, however, that same ash can cause your clothing to go up in flames quickly, causing severe burns.
So of course it's not dangerous because it's flammable. It's dangerous because it can turn a minor fire into a blaze very quickly.
Wait. So as if her action alone wasn't stupid enough, she started a fire at Bayonet Point Oxygen? An oxygen supply company? There's a reason they tell people on oxygen not to smoke.
It's not so much that I want to know, but that the article should have provided at least a little bit of info. I can understand the huge effort involved in providing all those details for everyone on the list, but come on. They were #1 in that category and the article provided almost no information to back up why they were so good in that category.
And (what I forgot to complain about in my original post) from my quick skimming of the other top rated, the ONLY one that got any sort of reasonable detail was the #1 rated (USAA). Even #2 said nothing. Heck, the short blurb on the first page (NO. 2: Booz Allen Hamilton - Offers more than 50 tech focus groups) says more about the company than the page that attempts to describe the company. They invest in their own employees? They offer "top benefits"? Wow, that says so much.
So my point (if perhaps not laid out very well in my initial post) was that the article absolutely dropped the ball.
When I read that the University of Pennsylvania has the best benefit, I said "oh really? like what?". So I went to look further. Does it say anything about typical salary? Nope. Vacation time? Nope. Retirement account (401a,403b) matching? Nope. Anything about how good their health insurance is? Nope. Do they offer free tuition for my family? It doesn't say. This article just says "best benefits" and then offers absolutely zero explanation of exactly why it got that ranking (other than mentioning free tuition for career related course, which is the norm for almost any college or university).
While probably not that great compared to what pros get, for the ease of use and easy access to their services that you get (it's difficult to get a deal with getty), that's not all that bad of a rate for an amateur or even a semi-pro. However, the percentage is only half the picture. It also matters what the rate is. If they figure they can just use the vast array of photos as cannon fodder to make pennies here and pennies there, for them it's going to add up to huge money, while the individual photographer might make $10 a year. That's a pretty terrible income, but I'm sure some people will look at it as "hey, that paid for almost half of my flicker pro account for the year".
For my home network, I've got it setup so that my web server (which I can access remotely) has a php web page which I can use to send a wake-on-lan signal to my desktop PC. It also opens up the remote desktop port on my router to my current IP.
The underlying assumption (miles per year and $/gallon) are both printed on the label.
They are going to be consistent for all vehicles in the same class and the same model year, so in the most common cases of comparisons, the variations won't matter.
But that's not the point. This article was pretty clearly talking about a situation where a 2 car family is trying to figure out which of their 2 cars is going to be the most beneficial to upgrade. For that to happen, you are going to need to know the figures for your existing vehicle.
Its a fairly trivial one-time calculation to convert your existing cars rating (presuming you got a car from a model year after the EPA adopted the current methodology) to correct it to the gas price used on labels for the current model year (just multiply the total estimated cost from your cars rating by the the new labels stated cost per gallon and divide by your labels cost per gallon; you've then got a number you can use when comparing against any car from the current model year.)
LOL...yeah, right. You are talking about the same people who can NOT figure out whether 10->20 will save you more than 33->50, and now you expect that they are going to be able to make this calculation on their own?
Of course, this is all a moot point because (as others have already pointed out) it is very rarely financially advantageous to replace an old car with a new one. If you keep your old car and spend X dollars extra on gas (compared to the car you would have bought) and spent Y dollars in upkeep, X+Y will generally be less than the financed cost of the new vehicle minus the residual value of that new vehicle. So, for most people, it really only makes sense to replace a vehicle when it no longer suits your needs (it has become too unreliable, is not safe, does not meet your new family needs or your cargo needs, etc).
And even if we go with the fact that the family is probably not smart enough to realize this and will thus upgrade one of the vehicle anyway, we still need to know the ratio of usage between the 2 vehicle.
But if we kind of put these 2 problems aside and just discuss within the premise of the article (no matter how faulty), then "annual fuel cost" figures are no simpler for people to correctly analyze than the MPG figures are.
You do realize that the current EPA fuel economy sticker already has a consumption measure -- in terms most people understand more readily than gallons-per-mile -- dead center, right?
It called "Estimated fuel cost per year", and the units are dollars.
The problem with that figure is that it has to be based on some set cost per gallon of gas. That means that, periodically, those figures are going to change. Then years from now, when I consider buying a new car, it makes it more difficult for me to compare my current car to cars on the market because the 2 figures are based on 2 different cost-per-gallon figures.
So I buy a car with a fuel cost of $925 per year, then in a few years I'm looking at another vehicle with a cost of $1160 per year? The baseline gas price used to generate the estimate has gone from $2.82/gallon to $3.77/gallon. Now, quickly...without pulling out your calculator, tell me which vehicle is more efficient, and how much more efficient is it?
Why should I pay MORE for the business class service from Comcast when I can pay LESS to WOW and get wonderful service? Wouldn't that just be rewarding Comcast for their inferior service? "Your service was so bad...how about I give you MORE money and maybe THEN you can deliver what you promised me".
I am certainly no more comfortable with Google having it than with my (Dutch) government having it.
Google could potentially use the data to (gasp) serve you targeted advertisements (ie: they're gonna try to annoy you with ads either way, but at least then it will be an annoyance that's relevant to you, instead of tampon ads for a guy, or ads for a Boston restaurant shown to a person in Seattle). The government, on the other hand, can charge you with crimes, fine you, throw you in jail, etc. I think anyone who is not more comfortable with the former than they are with the latter has their sense of perspective severely out of whack.
I swear, I hate when people like you try to be so clever...."so inadvertant that they even applied for a patent on it". Try not to get involved in the discussion if you haven't an understanding of what you are talking about, because you sound like you are just trolling. Google's patent is all about identifying devices and their location. That can be based off of some very simple data which is broadcast by the access point and does NOT require looking at full TCP/IP communications of connected users.
On my ipod touch, I used to have an app call WiFinder (until the Apple bastards started rejecting the app and it stopped working with the new OS). It would show you all of the wireless networks nearby and display a signal strength for each one. Just by simply walking from one end of my house to the other and checking the signal strength, I was able to get a rough estimate about which direction each signal was coming from. Had I repeated this process up and down the street I could have probably determined with a decent level of accuracy where each wifi network was originating. And all that was without me snooping in on peoples HTTP sessions and such. In fact, snooping on such data would be virtually useless to the goal of locating the access point (unless you just happened to snoop on somebody filling out a non-SSL form that contained address info or something)
Is Comcast that bad?
Are they that bad? Well, lets see. The last time I had them, I had no internet service for 3 days. After repeated calls and a tech coming out I got no resolution. Finally I took it upon myself to install a packet sniffer, and what do you know...all of the IP traffic on my subnet was in an entirely different range than the IP I was being assigned. I picked a random IP in the valid range that appeared to not be in use and statically assigned it, and *mysteriously* every was suddenly working. I had to wade through first level tech support, convince them to let me talk to a network engineer (because he had no clue what I was talking about), and then tell that guy how to fix my internet service.
Then there is the billing department. The bill is conveniently itemized so that you can see the comcast charges, and then separate entries for the franchise fees, city taxes, universal service fees, etc. Comcast raised the bill by exactly $1 with absolutely no mention in any of my previous 6 bills about a coming change. That $1 increase was in the line item for the comcast charge. Yet when I spoke to the billing department, they were insistent that they absolutely did not raise the rate on me, and that the increased charge was solely due to city taxes. Even showing them my previous bill and pointing out exactly where the increase occurred could not budge them. They blatantly lied to me, and continued to lie even when shown evidence that they were clearly lying.
Now, compare that to WOW, where I can personally email the CTO directly about a problem, and he'll happily respond with a technical answer, and even admit fault if something went wrong on their end. Or with the install techs, who routinely show up in the first 30 minutes of the 4 hour service window, instead of the last hour (or even after the 4 hour window). And those techs are always willing to chat with me about how much better WOW treats them and makes it easier to do their job.
yeah, comcast is that bad. I kind of feel bad for the comcast guys that come around to my door every now and then trying to get me to switch back. They probably feel like I treat them as if they're carrying the plague or something, as I won't even humor them to listen to their sales pitch. I'm very polite in declining to hear their offer (I know the guys going door to door really have nothing to do with my experiences), but they always act like they've never seen someone so dissatisfied with a company before.
Looking at the bill, it appears to me to be crafted to not affect things like animal tissue transplants, but whether or not it may inadvertantly affect some other currently accepted practice I can't say (as I'm neither an expert at the nuances of legalese, nor an expert in the terminology and possibilities of medical sciences).
Here's a thought. Perhaps it's not spreading word-for-word, and searching for that specific phrase isn't going to help you find all the instances of it. For example, the rumor has now spread to slashdot, yet that phrase appears nowhere in the slashdot story (at least not until you or anybody else posted it in the comments).
I'm not saying it IS spreading like wildfire, but your reasoning is concluding that it isn't is flawed.
You can get angry and accuse me of cherry picking the data all you want. However, this isn't bullshit. These companies do put a reasonable amount of effort into testing this stuff, and especially with these sort of non-mechanical components, it is reasonably predictable (outside of isolated cases of random failure).
And you are right...I did deliberately pick intel. The reason I picked them is because their drives are the one model I know most about. At the time I purchased my first drive, the first generation X25-M was the king of the crop...far above and beyond other models for performance, bug free operation, etc. I researched the drives in depth, and I know specs on those drives forward and backward. After buying my drive, I've had little reason to keep up on the intimate details of the competition's every spec. I've followed it enough to know that the competition has greatly closed the gap on Intel's lead (and surpassed them in some aspect), but I don't know them in the same depth I did when I bought my drive a year and half ago. Thus I quoted what I know.
But thanks for proving yourself to be an ass by suggesting I deliberately attempted to paint a rosy picture by cherry picking the data.
Reading has no wear effect on SSDs. Writing does, but it's a very high limit. Intel set the bar pretty high with the the X25-M, and it was something like 20GB per day, every day for 5 years the enterprise version is even higher, since it uses SLC instead of MLC flash memory). I haven't tracked the latest releases from other brands, but I imagine they are pretty similar.
Over the years, if I've had 1 component fail more often than hard drives, it would probably have to be optical drives. I just cannot see tying my SSD to an optical drive.
Peter Jackson has said before that the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition will not be released on BluRay until after he is finished up with The Hobbit, because he needs to be directly involved in the project. So does this mean that, since he won't be busy on the Hobbit right now, he'll have time to work on that? Or is LotR EE BR now in indefinite hold too?
4 BPS? My god, look at the disaster caused by just 1 BP. Certainly we don't need 4 of them.
Of course, anybody who is nearing retirement and is still that heavily invested in stocks should have their brain checked anyway. But, that's beside the point.
No, that's exactly the point. Despite how everyone tries to use them, experts always seem to suggest that stocks should be a long term investment. Trying to time the market for short term gains is generally a losing proposition. You should invest long term with a company that you feel comfortable with. If absolutely none of the fundamentals or outlook about that company has changed since yesterday, and you thought they were worth holding yesterday, then you should continue holding today, even if there was a 10% drop.
The consequence of being a long term investment is that, at any given moment, the stock may be down considerably, so you shouldn't put money that you need in the short term into such a long term investment. That's why stocks should decline as a percentage of your portfolio as you near retirement (and then continue declining after you retire). The stock market is not for funds you'll need in the next 5 years. Those should be in bonds or fixed income investments. Stocks should only be the part of your retirement that you don't plan on needing for the next 10+ years.
Well, I think you find yourself in a place where pretty much the entire professional graphics industry disagrees with you. 8-bit is far too limiting to be of use for a lot of professional level work, but 16-bit integer is good enough that it is very rarely ever a limitation (and in those occasions, there's is the full 32-bit floating point format). So for most work, your half float idea really offers no real advantage. However, it does offer the disadvantage that it is not widely supported in hardware.
I'm saying that a 12 bit image means you have inserted 3 extra levels between each of the levels of an 8 bit image. Assigning magical properties to this is a mistake. Most of the magical properties people are assuming can be made available by using floating point.
What are you talking about with respect to "magical properties"? Those 3 extra bits give you a little more differentiation in colors. When you are in deep shadows you tend to get blockiness as the slightly different colors get recorded as the same color due to a lack of bits available for recording (it's sort of like rounding off 2 different numbers and ending up with 2 of the same numbers). With the extra bits, there is more precision and fewer of those colors end up being recorded the same. This becomes especially noticeable when you use an editor to try and brighten up the shadows. That's when the difference between the 8-bit and 16-bit versions will start to really become noticeable.
If you convert your image to display correctly on the screen then you must have more bits than the hardware produced, otherwise you will have lost data, due to the pigeonhole principle.
Sorry, but I'm not even remotely clear what you are trying to say.
2) Which cameras capture floating point data natively?
At the lowest hardware level most are using digital counters. However the conversion software coming with the camera often does use a floating point api. The RED camera is a good example.
But it does no good to convert it to floating point unless the sensor is natively capturing floating point data (and to my knowledge, there are no sensors that do so). The conversion gains you no precision in data so there is no upside. On the other hand, there is the downside that the conversion needlessly makes your file size grow (by nature of its design, a floating point number requires more bits than an integer to losslessly store the same range of valuesas that integer.)
Now, if someday sensors were capturing very high bit data (lets go a bit extreme and say we had 1024 bit sensors), it might be decided that we really don't have much need for such precise data, and that we'd like to maintain that dynamic range without the huge file sizes. Then it would make sense for the cameras to record in floating point, throwing away some unneeded precision in the brighter areas in exchange for a more manageable file size. But that time is not now. We aren't there yet, so a floating point format gives us no gain, but it does give us the downside of a pointlessly larger file.