Solution: Start telling MSIE users to upgrade when they show up at your website, and if they don't, tell them to shove off. Yes, CSS standards are good. Firefox and Opera implement them a whole heck of a lot better than MSIE does. Okay, MSIE is catching up, but it's only one update followed by another 5 year span of stagnation. Users don't realize what a drag they're causing on web standards by sticking with such an old browser; it's time to help them feel the pain.
To be fair, a number of centrist journalists think that mass-internet-filtering for data is likely to be legal in the future. Clearly, it's a useful tool in tracking criminals. Clearly, it's easy to abuse as well, but it may be possible to have enough oversight to ensure that it's used only for just purposes, and that abuse can rarely occur (eg. just scanning the "outside of the envelope", for instance).
Students obviously shouldn't quote Wikipedia (unless they verify with a more reliable source). Most reasonable websites stopped putting a disclaimer on external links a long time ago... slashdotters more than anyone should know random links can lead to crazy places. Google rank... *shrug* That's under the control of Google, they could hard-code a tweak to their algorithm if they believed such a tweak would better serve their users.
Wikipedia doesn't put a sign up that says "we are totally unbiased". They DO put a sign up that says "we're working towards being unbiased, so we'd prefer if you don't add any edits that clearly work against that goal". Just because any work can never become totally unbiased doens't mean they shouldn't try have a goal of trying to become as unbiased as possible.
No, but if you pay someone else to sell you a patch that specifies which parts should be removed, and you apply the patch yourself (eg. it's fair use to modify other people's copyrighted information if you never redistribute it), then that's legal. Which has always been the case, hasn't it?
No, I don't think it means that authors can ensure that only their authorized versions are sold. I think it means that third parties can only distribute "patches", but they can't include the original material with their patch, nor can they directly distribute the post-patch version. And I think that's been the case in the US for a long, long time.
Not a huge percentage of people dual-boot. But hopefully virtualization will increase the ease of use of Linux and ALL other alternative operating system as well. There are hundreds of home-grown OS's out there, and it would be cool if virtualization were easy enough to use that people just download and run it to test it out, making OS's as easy to try out as applications.
An 80 person coordinated flash mob intending to make the store manager worry about some far-out plots is COMPLETELY different from showing up and offering 80 sales.
If you've got URLs, please post 'em. I try to have a neutral view of things, it's just that market penetration numbers are very hard to find... (manufacturers hide theirs, analysts charge lots of money for theirs).
I thought it was pretty well established that LCD prices were clearly dropping a decent amount every year [1], though I guess that's partly due to lower than expected demand.
Well, whatever. HDNet+PVR and bittorrent are always alternatives for geeks.
I'm not sure I see that BluRay/HD-DVD will obviously fail to be profitable in the short-medium term, when current HDTV owners are shelling out $1000-3000 for their TVs...
25% of TV's sold in 2004 were HDTV's... I can't find the other figures at the moment, but a the % of new purchases that are HDTV is increasing every year by a decent amount, something like 5% more every year. And if that trend continues without changing, then just back-of-the-napkin calculations, yeah, it's 15 years for full-scale HDTV adoption. (it's hard to say whether % yearly purchses will continue to increase at the same rate... you might argue thay'll hit a ceiling unless HDTV prices can dip below $600... I might argue that adoption rates could greatly increase if the price gets low enough (eg. a lot of people suddenly bought a DVD player the year that name-brand players started selling under $99).
So it takes 10 years for a new television to die, so it'll take 10 years for HDTV adoption to be complete. So? HDTV adoption will still eventually happen, and at that point, people will upgrade to HDDVD/BluRay along with their new set.
Prices on LCD panels are dropping quite a bit. Sales of HDTV's are noticably increasing year-over-year. And in a few years, lots of people's analog OTA TV's will go dead.
The format wars should be fought years before Joe Sixpack buys an HDTV... who wants to buy two different $500+ players that do the same thing? By the time Joe Sixpack is interested in HDTV, a format winner might emerge, HD disc players will certainly have dropped in price, and there will be more content available (eg. satellite, cable, consoles,...) to make them more interested.
Most corporate investments are going into upgrading to 720p or 1080i, so they believe that there will be a market there. 1080p might be nice, but the current market is more focused on 720p.
The government mandate says they should go digital; it does not say they should go HD. Upgrading to HD requires more equipment, decisions (720p or 1080i? Do you stretch 4:3 video into 16:9?), and process changes (do you take 4:3 commercials?) than simply upgrading to digital requires.
Yes, it's an obvious improvement. If Joe Sixpack eventually purchases an HDTV, he'll see the obvious association between SD = DVD, HD = HDDVD/BluRay.
PS3 and XBox 360 have upgraded to HD, because it's an obvious improvement. OTA TV stations have upgraded their broadcasting equipment (and over time, their cameras) to HD, because it's an obvious improvement.
So many many companies out there are investing in HDTV products, because it's only an incremental improvement. Sony, Microsoft... OTA TV stations... satellite TV dedicating large amounts of precious bandwidth... PVR companies...
It's true that HDTV market penetration isn't very big yet (5-10% I think?), but there are two large factors that make HDTV adoption in general inevitable...
First, a large number of companies have looked at HDTV, and have made the decision to invest R&D money on HDTV projects, because they think that there will be a future market for HD products/content. OTA TV stations have upgraded their equipment to be able to broadcast HD. MS and Sony have spent money making sure their consoles have the horsepower to generate HDTV frames, and the hardware to output it. Satellite TV companies are dedicating sizable chunks of bandwidth to HDTV channels. PVR manufacturers are integrating HD capability in their products (Tivo hasn't yet, but PVRs from satellite/cable companies support HDTV recording). WM9 and Quicktime have upgraded their formats and players to be able to play very high resolution video.
Second, the fact that all this content is already available in HD makes it increasingly likely that consumers will buy an HDTV eventually. It matters less that prices are somewhat high now. What matters more is that sooner or later, as prices decrease, and available content increases, that when the time comes for a consumer to replace a broken TV, they'll increasingly think about replacing it with an HDTV.
Oh, c'mon, that argument is getting so old and tired.
Saying "DVD is good enough" is the same thing as saying "SD TV is good enough resolution, nobody needs the resolution provided from HDTV".
But that's dead wrong... consoles have decided that SD is not good enough. OTA TV broadcasts, cable and satellite have decided that SD is not good enough. WM9 and Quicktime have decided that SD is not good enough.
There's so much HD content available already that eventually, >50% of people will buy an HDTV. And once they buy an HDTV, the association between SD=DVD is pretty clear.
TFA wasn't clear... I assume this wasn't running a larger fully synchronized CPU with memory and multi-level cache at 500GHz, but is instead running a smaller number of transistors at that speed?
A lot of the vandalism is just teenage-level stuff... eg. vandalizing cock.
Also, it's impossible to please everyone. Some people think anything non-notable should be deleted. Some people think that anything that passes verifiability/NOR should be kept, no matter how trivial, since Wikipedia can potentially grow indefinitely. Some people think that only Britannica-level stuff should be kept (eg. no individual schools, no minor roads, no breakfast cereals). it's almost guaranteed that someone will hold strongly to one of these views, and someone is guaranteed to get pissed off over it.
Though the idea of wikipedia (eg. not being a primary source) is that its authority rests less on the people who wrote it, and more on reputation of the primary sources it cites. (on the other hand, citation of sources is spotty currently, as many others have pointed out)
Goal #1 is to write an encyclopedia, and goal #2 is to treat everyone equally as long as it doesn't conflict with goal #1.
Sometimes Wikipedia gets a bit too political... while a democratic process is certainly important, there are limits. If everybody held a vote where it was decided that Wikipedia would change from an encyclopedia into a collaborative interactive fiction site (or a yellow pages, or a political advocacy site), then that democratic decision would be overruled, because Wikipedia's goal is first and foremost to build an encyclopedia.
Slashdot Mirror
Solution: Start telling MSIE users to upgrade when they show up at your website, and if they don't, tell them to shove off. Yes, CSS standards are good. Firefox and Opera implement them a whole heck of a lot better than MSIE does. Okay, MSIE is catching up, but it's only one update followed by another 5 year span of stagnation. Users don't realize what a drag they're causing on web standards by sticking with such an old browser; it's time to help them feel the pain.
To be fair, a number of centrist journalists think that mass-internet-filtering for data is likely to be legal in the future. Clearly, it's a useful tool in tracking criminals. Clearly, it's easy to abuse as well, but it may be possible to have enough oversight to ensure that it's used only for just purposes, and that abuse can rarely occur (eg. just scanning the "outside of the envelope", for instance).
Students obviously shouldn't quote Wikipedia (unless they verify with a more reliable source). Most reasonable websites stopped putting a disclaimer on external links a long time ago... slashdotters more than anyone should know random links can lead to crazy places. Google rank... *shrug* That's under the control of Google, they could hard-code a tweak to their algorithm if they believed such a tweak would better serve their users.
Wikipedia doesn't put a sign up that says "we are totally unbiased". They DO put a sign up that says "we're working towards being unbiased, so we'd prefer if you don't add any edits that clearly work against that goal". Just because any work can never become totally unbiased doens't mean they shouldn't try have a goal of trying to become as unbiased as possible.
Yes, it is legal, see the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act which explicitely says that ClearPlay (and other things like CustomPlay) are legal.
No, but if you pay someone else to sell you a patch that specifies which parts should be removed, and you apply the patch yourself (eg. it's fair use to modify other people's copyrighted information if you never redistribute it), then that's legal. Which has always been the case, hasn't it?
No, I don't think it means that authors can ensure that only their authorized versions are sold. I think it means that third parties can only distribute "patches", but they can't include the original material with their patch, nor can they directly distribute the post-patch version. And I think that's been the case in the US for a long, long time.
Not a huge percentage of people dual-boot. But hopefully virtualization will increase the ease of use of Linux and ALL other alternative operating system as well. There are hundreds of home-grown OS's out there, and it would be cool if virtualization were easy enough to use that people just download and run it to test it out, making OS's as easy to try out as applications.
An 80 person coordinated flash mob intending to make the store manager worry about some far-out plots is COMPLETELY different from showing up and offering 80 sales.
If you've got URLs, please post 'em. I try to have a neutral view of things, it's just that market penetration numbers are very hard to find... (manufacturers hide theirs, analysts charge lots of money for theirs).
I thought it was pretty well established that LCD prices were clearly dropping a decent amount every year [1], though I guess that's partly due to lower than expected demand.
Well, whatever. HDNet+PVR and bittorrent are always alternatives for geeks.
I'm not sure I see that BluRay/HD-DVD will obviously fail to be profitable in the short-medium term, when current HDTV owners are shelling out $1000-3000 for their TVs...
HDTV prices are dropping 20% anually.
25% of TV's sold in 2004 were HDTV's... I can't find the other figures at the moment, but a the % of new purchases that are HDTV is increasing every year by a decent amount, something like 5% more every year. And if that trend continues without changing, then just back-of-the-napkin calculations, yeah, it's 15 years for full-scale HDTV adoption. (it's hard to say whether % yearly purchses will continue to increase at the same rate... you might argue thay'll hit a ceiling unless HDTV prices can dip below $600... I might argue that adoption rates could greatly increase if the price gets low enough (eg. a lot of people suddenly bought a DVD player the year that name-brand players started selling under $99).
So it takes 10 years for a new television to die, so it'll take 10 years for HDTV adoption to be complete. So? HDTV adoption will still eventually happen, and at that point, people will upgrade to HDDVD/BluRay along with their new set.
Prices on LCD panels are dropping quite a bit. Sales of HDTV's are noticably increasing year-over-year. And in a few years, lots of people's analog OTA TV's will go dead.
The format wars should be fought years before Joe Sixpack buys an HDTV... who wants to buy two different $500+ players that do the same thing? By the time Joe Sixpack is interested in HDTV, a format winner might emerge, HD disc players will certainly have dropped in price, and there will be more content available (eg. satellite, cable, consoles, ...) to make them more interested.
Most corporate investments are going into upgrading to 720p or 1080i, so they believe that there will be a market there. 1080p might be nice, but the current market is more focused on 720p.
The government mandate says they should go digital; it does not say they should go HD. Upgrading to HD requires more equipment, decisions (720p or 1080i? Do you stretch 4:3 video into 16:9?), and process changes (do you take 4:3 commercials?) than simply upgrading to digital requires.
PS3 and XBox 360 have upgraded to HD, because it's an obvious improvement. OTA TV stations have upgraded their broadcasting equipment (and over time, their cameras) to HD, because it's an obvious improvement.
So many many companies out there are investing in HDTV products, because it's only an incremental improvement. Sony, Microsoft... OTA TV stations... satellite TV dedicating large amounts of precious bandwidth... PVR companies...
It's true that HDTV market penetration isn't very big yet (5-10% I think?), but there are two large factors that make HDTV adoption in general inevitable...
First, a large number of companies have looked at HDTV, and have made the decision to invest R&D money on HDTV projects, because they think that there will be a future market for HD products/content. OTA TV stations have upgraded their equipment to be able to broadcast HD. MS and Sony have spent money making sure their consoles have the horsepower to generate HDTV frames, and the hardware to output it. Satellite TV companies are dedicating sizable chunks of bandwidth to HDTV channels. PVR manufacturers are integrating HD capability in their products (Tivo hasn't yet, but PVRs from satellite/cable companies support HDTV recording). WM9 and Quicktime have upgraded their formats and players to be able to play very high resolution video.
Second, the fact that all this content is already available in HD makes it increasingly likely that consumers will buy an HDTV eventually. It matters less that prices are somewhat high now. What matters more is that sooner or later, as prices decrease, and available content increases, that when the time comes for a consumer to replace a broken TV, they'll increasingly think about replacing it with an HDTV.
Saying "DVD is good enough" is the same thing as saying "SD TV is good enough resolution, nobody needs the resolution provided from HDTV".
But that's dead wrong... consoles have decided that SD is not good enough. OTA TV broadcasts, cable and satellite have decided that SD is not good enough. WM9 and Quicktime have decided that SD is not good enough.
There's so much HD content available already that eventually, >50% of people will buy an HDTV. And once they buy an HDTV, the association between SD=DVD is pretty clear.
TFA wasn't clear... I assume this wasn't running a larger fully synchronized CPU with memory and multi-level cache at 500GHz, but is instead running a smaller number of transistors at that speed?
The merged company isn't doing phones, they're doing telecom network equipment.
Only if the flight crew are the ones paying for the ground crew to sit on their thumbs while the shuttle continues to go through R&D.
A lot of the vandalism is just teenage-level stuff... eg. vandalizing cock.
Also, it's impossible to please everyone. Some people think anything non-notable should be deleted. Some people think that anything that passes verifiability/NOR should be kept, no matter how trivial, since Wikipedia can potentially grow indefinitely. Some people think that only Britannica-level stuff should be kept (eg. no individual schools, no minor roads, no breakfast cereals). it's almost guaranteed that someone will hold strongly to one of these views, and someone is guaranteed to get pissed off over it.
Build it and they might come.
Though the idea of wikipedia (eg. not being a primary source) is that its authority rests less on the people who wrote it, and more on reputation of the primary sources it cites. (on the other hand, citation of sources is spotty currently, as many others have pointed out)
Bug 5561 + Category:Protected would achieve that.
Goal #1 is to write an encyclopedia, and goal #2 is to treat everyone equally as long as it doesn't conflict with goal #1.
Sometimes Wikipedia gets a bit too political... while a democratic process is certainly important, there are limits. If everybody held a vote where it was decided that Wikipedia would change from an encyclopedia into a collaborative interactive fiction site (or a yellow pages, or a political advocacy site), then that democratic decision would be overruled, because Wikipedia's goal is first and foremost to build an encyclopedia.