It comes down to this, in the experience of an e-bike-experienced friend:
Are there big hills on your route?
If the hill is big enough, you need a rig that can put out enough power to bring you up that hill. Because the only thing worse than pedaling a nice light road bike up a hill is pedaling a heavy e-bike with an ineffective motor and a heavy-ass lead acid battery up that same hill.
My friend was fortunate enough to live in Seattle where it was possible to "try before you buy." She wound up with something halfway between an electric motorcycle and a bike. It was a STEEP hill.
Personally I tend to side with the "just pedal" crowd, unless you're talking about serious hills on days when you have a nasty head cold, etc. I can see wanting a little boost then.
Lead-acid is a poor choice because of its low energy density. The amount of extra work you do pedaling the bike when you feel like it or have run out of power needs to be less than the amount of work the motor does for you while it's running!
(No, I'm not saying I have analyzed any of the above variables definitively, but I *am* passing on a real ebike-evaluation story from someone who was ultimately happy with her purchase.)
The author of this article was not unfairly slamming Microsoft by asking whether a new open source project does anything useful that an existing open source project doesn't do already. That's a question that should be asked about every open source project.
Yes, the rocket/capsule scheme makes getting to and from low earth orbit doable on a somewhat reasonable budget, but low earth orbit is full of space junk; it's not a very smart place to spend your vacation.
This is not a format for use on the web. This is a format for storage of raw, as-yet-unpublished images that you want to edit with all of the information from the camera 100% intact. So I hope we don't start seeing them in img elements. That would be as bad as using bmps on the web (which browsers allow... sigh).
PNG is *not* just a palette color format; it fully supports truecolor, all the way up to 64 bits (red, green, blue and alpha at 16 bits each) if you really want it. There are still good reasons for DNG:
* No compression at all in DNG, versus time-consuming zlib compression in PNG that might be too much to ask of a handheld device.
* As others have pointed out, DNG "knows" when a single camera pixel really only updates red, green or blue and wouldn't waste space storing all three.
Re:Antartica is a nature preserve! KEEP OUT!
on
Antarctic Telescope?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You are missing something. The Antarctic treatyencourages scientific research activities in Antarctica. There is not a single word in that treaty that even momentarily suggests that it would be an awful thing if the research was not expressly about Antarctica itself.
The later Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, established in 1991, goes into more detail about Antarctica's status as a nature preserve, "dedicated to peace and science." It specifically bans mining and similar activities, and makes clear that all activities in Antarctica must be compatible with scientific research and environmental research in particular.
But it definitely does not ban non-scientific activities, like tourism, as long as their environmental impact is addresses correctly. And it certainly doesn't ban astronomy (an awful, polluting activity, astronomy! Shudder!).
Nobody's saying that the only thing worth doing with the robots is exploration. And few are saying that sending humans into space is never worth it. But MANY people are saying, and rightly, that sending humans into low earth orbit to get whacked by orbiting socket wrenches and then attempt to return safely in a balsa wood glider is NOT worth it.
1. Give away free wifi. 2. ???????????????????? 3. TAX REVENUE!!!
Seriously, though, free wifi would attract members of the (cough) creative class, who would then spend mad wack benjamins on cheese steaks at Geno's. It's not much of a stretch, really.
Seems at first to be an Atari 2600, little more or less. I was going to ask why, when emulators for the 2600 are exceedingly close to the real thing due to the thousands of games by unconnected programmers that they must successfully run, anyone would take this approach. But on closer inspection there's 128K of "fast 15ns static RAM" in there, and he mentions that it's fast enough to use as a conventional graphics framebuffer. So you don't necessarily have to take the pure Atari 2600 approach.
Also, the CPU is much faster -- it's probably inaccurate to say 80 times faster because I don't know whether the instruction set is more or less primitive than that of the 6507, but I doubt it could be much more primitive.
That's probably the reason why there is no sprite hardware (*): you can program your raster-on-the-fly graphics fast enough without it. (Yes, even the 2600 had one-dimensional sprites which you could reposition or alter between scanlines.)
(*) If something they would have burned into an FPGA should really be called hardware. Firmware, I guess. For programmer purposes it certainly is part of the hardware.
So this is sort of a super Atari 2600 on steroids, if you ignore the easy way out of simply using the static RAM as a framebuffer or using somebody else's prewritten subroutine for doing so. Apply the same freaky scanline by scanline tricks the 2600 programmers did, but accomplish more with them! In that sense, it's a really neat machine, and I wish him luck with this.
Still, I think writing new games for the 2600 appeals to me more. Not that I'll never do it. Hell no. When it comes to assembly, I'm strictly a voyeur and a dilettante.
"Oh look, Geoffrey. The 6507 programmers are sweating as they seek to save a single clock cyle with a cleverly placed jump instruction. Oh my yes, that is quite admirable. I do work up a thirst watching another man work. Another martini? Why thank you..."
If they didn't exist, the Republicans would have to invent them. What a justification for DMCA nonsense. Oh wait, the Democrats support all that too. Never mind.
So perhaps they shouldn't just install a zillion copies of Debian; perhaps they should cut a deal with SUSE or another distributor that indemnifies them against claims, provides support and still saves bajillions of dollars over working with Microsoft. Would that be so horrible?
I'm against Stupid Patents too and want to see a world where a large organization can safely run Debian without worrying about them, but there's definitely a middle ground between "radically free" and "100% Microsoft."
My understanding is that JPEG 2000 is patented, to use a technical term, all the way to hell and back.
If you can show me that, in fact, I don't have to pay license fees to use it and nobody else does either, I'd be glad to put it in GD. But vigorous arm-waving and "not that I know of" don't count.
Why stop at forking a real OS project when a subproject would have been perfectly okay? That's just minor-league questionable thinking. Go for the gold! Clearly we must rewrite EVERYTHING. We should all run Freedows!
Remember, if it's worth re-doing, it's worth re-doing stupidly!
... My apologies to the ekkoBSD people; I probably don't know enough about that project to question the need for its existence. But it did remind me of Freedows, which was a fascinating late nineties exercise in "developer-free open source development," originated by a guy who just Didn't Understand the difference between an OS and a GUI and insisted you had to rewrite the OS from scratch to have a friendly interface.
Then it morphed into some kind of "astral multiplatform nanokernel for multiple OS transmogrification of everything forever," churned and burned the confused efforts of many for three years, and died. But never officially. That would involve admitting maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place.
I can't seem to find a really good account of the Freedows debacle anywhere. I'm sure it would make good reading. Hint, hint.
I'm sure you're right. But the (pre-Netscape) spec for it was vague, had no provision for saying how long each frame was supposed to appear, and was rarely used; nobody outside of Netscape was talking about using animated GIF, and nobody in Netscape was talking about it to outsiders. A little openness would have helped everyone. That's all I'm saying.
Generally speaking, JPEG even at 100% won't look perfect especially for a non-photographic image, but some images are awfully photograph-ISH, and your experience with individual images is sure to vary. If your 100% quality JPEG looks "perfect" to you and is a small file, hey, that's great.
Also, some programs do a crappy job saving PNGs. There's a program called pngcrush (free of course) which minimizes the size of any PNG you throw at it.
When I led the process of drafting the PNG specification, GIF animation did not yet exist. Animation was not part of the original GIF specification. The GIF89a specification *did* offer a mechanism for including multiple images in a single file, and a very basic (but, in retrospect, effective) mechanism for replacing only a specified part of the preceding image. But whether this was supposed to be animation with a time component was never defined, and there was in fact no way to specify how long each frame was supposed to appear, probably because the real intent was to be able to compose a single final still image from many sections. Multiple image GIFs were a footnote to the GIF specification which hardly anybody used until Netscape stepped in.
Netscape's animated GIF format was a clever hack on top of this: they defined a new GIF chunk to specify the pause between frames.
Here's the kicker: Netscape was repeatedly invited to participate in the PNG design process. They had someone reading the list, I gather, but they never offered any suggestions or contributions. If they had, they would likely have been considered very seriously.
But instead, the first we heard of GIF animation was its public release in Netscape (2.0 beta, if I recall correctly). They could have contributed to the design of a PNG or MNG that did include animation and, by way of that compelling feature, would have been more likely to quickly replace GIF. But they didn't.
We (the PNG designers) did consider retrofitting animation into PNG when Netscape's animated GIF appeared. In fact, I lobbied for that at one point. Unfortunately we had already finalized the functional specification and there was no hope of reaching agreement on how to "jam in" the animation feature at the last minute on top of an otherwise pretty elegant image format.
Instead, the MNG group was formed to create a specification for a powerful lossless animation format. And they succeeded -- but MNG has yet to really catch fire, and animated vector formats like SWF and SVG are gradually replacing animated GIF anyway for most purposes. At the end of the day, lossless bitmap animation is a pretty bandwidth-intensive proposition.
I don't think most Canadians, or most Europeans for that matter, think it is inappropriate to comment on the US election. No more than it is inappropriate for me to comment on, say, a governor's race in California. To suggest that opinions -- and that's all they are -- expressed by Americans somehow don't "let [you] decide who can run [your] own country" implies what? That you are incapable of forming your own opinion if some American happens to offer his? That's pretty patronizing.
If you want to see an example of what seriously unethical foreign election manipulation looks like, consider Nicaragua or Haiti or (cough) Iraq.
Something tells me a truly popular and useful piece of free software stands to make more from Google Adsense than from direct donations. Of course, nothing says you can't pursue both avenues.
Email is far from dead. Yes, spam is getting harder to filter all the time. I thought I was pretty good at it, but boutell.com has definitely been groaning under the load lately.
However, even if we don't fix it with SPF (which is a fine idea) and other similar methods, we can certainly address it -- at the cost of some annoyance -- by using captchas and/or mandatory visits to secure URLs to approve your message. It's not great, no, but it means there is still a way for a real person not already on your whitelist who has a real reason to contact you out of the blue to do so. And that's still quite important.
Why would a spyware company want to follow the rules? Well, a lot of the early spyware companies started out as adware companies. Alas, people saw the potential to get a few more dollars by being unethical about uninstall policies and/or invading other people's software. Several companies, including Radiate, couldn't stand the heat that resulted and backed off from questionable uninstall policies, etc. But the idea was out there at that point, and smaller companies created for the sole purpose of building spyware followed in their footsteps.
If an atmosphere could be created in which spyware couldn't be pulled off, there might be a niche for real, above-board, opt-in adware again. Which might even be a good thing.
I once polled users evaluating one of my products to find out which they would prefer -- shareware with a timer, or adware that runs forever. They overwhelmingly preferred the adware option. I made plans to follow through on that, but the bottom dropped out of the adware market thanks to spyware and the negative message it sent about all "software with ads."
(There are a handful of adware success stories that don't include unethical policies as part of the business case, notably Opera.)
Tried this on Windows, but all I got was a black window. Maybe it already deleted my entire filesystem, no further effort necessary on my part. Efficient software.
Greg Bear predicted this one; the words "karaoke sitcom" appear in "Moving Mars." It's a bit of a throwaway comment really, there's so much inventive stuff in that book he didn't waste much time exploring that particular idea.
Slashdot Mirror
It comes down to this, in the experience of an e-bike-experienced friend:
Are there big hills on your route?
If the hill is big enough, you need a rig that can put out enough power to bring you up that hill. Because the only thing worse than pedaling a nice light road bike up a hill is pedaling a heavy e-bike with an ineffective motor and a heavy-ass lead acid battery up that same hill.
My friend was fortunate enough to live in Seattle where it was possible to "try before you buy." She wound up with something halfway between an electric motorcycle and a bike. It was a STEEP hill.
Personally I tend to side with the "just pedal" crowd, unless you're talking about serious hills on days when you have a nasty head cold, etc. I can see wanting a little boost then.
Lead-acid is a poor choice because of its low energy density. The amount of extra work you do pedaling the bike when you feel like it or have run out of power needs to be less than the amount of work the motor does for you while it's running!
(No, I'm not saying I have analyzed any of the above variables definitively, but I *am* passing on a real ebike-evaluation story from someone who was ultimately happy with her purchase.)
The author of this article was not unfairly slamming Microsoft by asking whether a new open source project does anything useful that an existing open source project doesn't do already. That's a question that should be asked about every open source project.
Yes, the rocket/capsule scheme makes getting to and from low earth orbit doable on a somewhat reasonable budget, but low earth orbit is full of space junk; it's not a very smart place to spend your vacation.
This is not a format for use on the web. This is a format for storage of raw, as-yet-unpublished images that you want to edit with all of the information from the camera 100% intact. So I hope we don't start seeing them in img elements. That would be as bad as using bmps on the web (which browsers allow... sigh).
PNG is *not* just a palette color format; it fully supports truecolor, all the way up to 64 bits (red, green, blue and alpha at 16 bits each) if you really want it. There are still good reasons for DNG:
* No compression at all in DNG, versus time-consuming zlib compression in PNG that might be too much to ask of a handheld device.
* As others have pointed out, DNG "knows" when a single camera pixel really only updates red, green or blue and wouldn't waste space storing all three.
You are missing something. The Antarctic treaty encourages scientific research activities in Antarctica. There is not a single word in that treaty that even momentarily suggests that it would be an awful thing if the research was not expressly about Antarctica itself.
The later Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, established in 1991, goes into more detail about Antarctica's status as a nature preserve, "dedicated to peace and science." It specifically bans mining and similar activities, and makes clear that all activities in Antarctica must be compatible with scientific research and environmental research in particular.
But it definitely does not ban non-scientific activities, like tourism, as long as their environmental impact is addresses correctly. And it certainly doesn't ban astronomy (an awful, polluting activity, astronomy! Shudder!).
No, this is not a dupe. It's more of a followup. Should have referenced the other story though.
Nobody's saying that the only thing worth doing with the robots is exploration. And few are saying that sending humans into space is never worth it. But MANY people are saying, and rightly, that sending humans into low earth orbit to get whacked by orbiting socket wrenches and then attempt to return safely in a balsa wood glider is NOT worth it.
This editorial by Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker hits the nail right on the head.
1. Give away free wifi.
2. ????????????????????
3. TAX REVENUE!!!
Seriously, though, free wifi would attract members of the (cough) creative class, who would then spend mad wack benjamins on cheese steaks at Geno's. It's not much of a stretch, really.
Seems at first to be an Atari 2600, little more or less. I was going to ask why, when emulators for the 2600 are exceedingly close to the real thing due to the thousands of games by unconnected programmers that they must successfully run, anyone would take this approach. But on closer inspection there's 128K of "fast 15ns static RAM" in there, and he mentions that it's fast enough to use as a conventional graphics framebuffer. So you don't necessarily have to take the pure Atari 2600 approach.
Also, the CPU is much faster -- it's probably inaccurate to say 80 times faster because I don't know whether the instruction set is more or less primitive than that of the 6507, but I doubt it could be much more primitive.
That's probably the reason why there is no sprite hardware (*): you can program your raster-on-the-fly graphics fast enough without it. (Yes, even the 2600 had one-dimensional sprites which you could reposition or alter between scanlines.)
(*) If something they would have burned into an FPGA should really be called hardware. Firmware, I guess. For programmer purposes it certainly is part of the hardware.
So this is sort of a super Atari 2600 on steroids, if you ignore the easy way out of simply using the static RAM as a framebuffer or using somebody else's prewritten subroutine for doing so. Apply the same freaky scanline by scanline tricks the 2600 programmers did, but accomplish more with them! In that sense, it's a really neat machine, and I wish him luck with this.
Still, I think writing new games for the 2600 appeals to me more. Not that I'll never do it. Hell no. When it comes to assembly, I'm strictly a voyeur and a dilettante.
"Oh look, Geoffrey. The 6507 programmers are sweating as they seek to save a single clock cyle with a cleverly placed jump instruction. Oh my yes, that is quite admirable. I do work up a thirst watching another man work. Another martini? Why thank you..."
If they didn't exist, the Republicans would have to invent them. What a justification for DMCA nonsense. Oh wait, the Democrats support all that too. Never mind.
So perhaps they shouldn't just install a zillion copies of Debian; perhaps they should cut a deal with SUSE or another distributor that indemnifies them against claims, provides support and still saves bajillions of dollars over working with Microsoft. Would that be so horrible?
I'm against Stupid Patents too and want to see a world where a large organization can safely run Debian without worrying about them, but there's definitely a middle ground between "radically free" and "100% Microsoft."
My understanding is that JPEG 2000 is patented, to use a technical term, all the way to hell and back.
If you can show me that, in fact, I don't have to pay license fees to use it and nobody else does either, I'd be glad to put it in GD. But vigorous arm-waving and "not that I know of" don't count.
Your patches are welcome! There does seem to be some fat worth trimming in gdImageCopyResampled.
Remember, if it's worth re-doing, it's worth re-doing stupidly!
Then it morphed into some kind of "astral multiplatform nanokernel for multiple OS transmogrification of everything forever," churned and burned the confused efforts of many for three years, and died. But never officially. That would involve admitting maybe it wasn't a good idea in the first place.
I can't seem to find a really good account of the Freedows debacle anywhere. I'm sure it would make good reading. Hint, hint.
I'm sure you're right. But the (pre-Netscape) spec for it was vague, had no provision for saying how long each frame was supposed to appear, and was rarely used; nobody outside of Netscape was talking about using animated GIF, and nobody in Netscape was talking about it to outsiders. A little openness would have helped everyone. That's all I'm saying.
Generally speaking, JPEG even at 100% won't look perfect especially for a non-photographic image, but some images are awfully photograph-ISH, and your experience with individual images is sure to vary. If your 100% quality JPEG looks "perfect" to you and is a small file, hey, that's great.
Also, some programs do a crappy job saving PNGs. There's a program called pngcrush (free of course) which minimizes the size of any PNG you throw at it.
Just to set the record straight:
When I led the process of drafting the PNG specification, GIF animation did not yet exist. Animation was not part of the original GIF specification. The GIF89a specification *did* offer a mechanism for including multiple images in a single file, and a very basic (but, in retrospect, effective) mechanism for replacing only a specified part of the preceding image. But whether this was supposed to be animation with a time component was never defined, and there was in fact no way to specify how long each frame was supposed to appear, probably because the real intent was to be able to compose a single final still image from many sections. Multiple image GIFs were a footnote to the GIF specification which hardly anybody used until Netscape stepped in.
Netscape's animated GIF format was a clever hack on top of this: they defined a new GIF chunk to specify the pause between frames.
Here's the kicker: Netscape was repeatedly invited to participate in the PNG design process. They had someone reading the list, I gather, but they never offered any suggestions or contributions. If they had, they would likely have been considered very seriously.
But instead, the first we heard of GIF animation was its public release in Netscape (2.0 beta, if I recall correctly). They could have contributed to the design of a PNG or MNG that did include animation and, by way of that compelling feature, would have been more likely to quickly replace GIF. But they didn't.
We (the PNG designers) did consider retrofitting animation into PNG when Netscape's animated GIF appeared. In fact, I lobbied for that at one point. Unfortunately we had already finalized the functional specification and there was no hope of reaching agreement on how to "jam in" the animation feature at the last minute on top of an otherwise pretty elegant image format.
Instead, the MNG group was formed to create a specification for a powerful lossless animation format. And they succeeded -- but MNG has yet to really catch fire, and animated vector formats like SWF and SVG are gradually replacing animated GIF anyway for most purposes. At the end of the day, lossless bitmap animation is a pretty bandwidth-intensive proposition.
I don't think most Canadians, or most Europeans for that matter, think it is inappropriate to comment on the US election. No more than it is inappropriate for me to comment on, say, a governor's race in California. To suggest that opinions -- and that's all they are -- expressed by Americans somehow don't "let [you] decide who can run [your] own country" implies what? That you are incapable of forming your own opinion if some American happens to offer his? That's pretty patronizing.
If you want to see an example of what seriously unethical foreign election manipulation looks like, consider Nicaragua or Haiti or (cough) Iraq.
Something tells me a truly popular and useful piece of free software stands to make more from Google Adsense than from direct donations. Of course, nothing says you can't pursue both avenues.
Email is far from dead. Yes, spam is getting harder to filter all the time. I thought I was pretty good at it, but boutell.com has definitely been groaning under the load lately.
However, even if we don't fix it with SPF (which is a fine idea) and other similar methods, we can certainly address it -- at the cost of some annoyance -- by using captchas and/or mandatory visits to secure URLs to approve your message. It's not great, no, but it means there is still a way for a real person not already on your whitelist who has a real reason to contact you out of the blue to do so. And that's still quite important.
Why would a spyware company want to follow the rules? Well, a lot of the early spyware companies started out as adware companies. Alas, people saw the potential to get a few more dollars by being unethical about uninstall policies and/or invading other people's software. Several companies, including Radiate, couldn't stand the heat that resulted and backed off from questionable uninstall policies, etc. But the idea was out there at that point, and smaller companies created for the sole purpose of building spyware followed in their footsteps.
If an atmosphere could be created in which spyware couldn't be pulled off, there might be a niche for real, above-board, opt-in adware again. Which might even be a good thing.
I once polled users evaluating one of my products to find out which they would prefer -- shareware with a timer, or adware that runs forever. They overwhelmingly preferred the adware option. I made plans to follow through on that, but the bottom dropped out of the adware market thanks to spyware and the negative message it sent about all "software with ads."
(There are a handful of adware success stories that don't include unethical policies as part of the business case, notably Opera.)
Tried this on Windows, but all I got was a black window. Maybe it already deleted my entire filesystem, no further effort necessary on my part. Efficient software.
Flash itself can be pretty amazingly efficient. It can be used stupidly, but so can HTML. , anyone?
Greg Bear predicted this one; the words "karaoke sitcom" appear in "Moving Mars." It's a bit of a throwaway comment really, there's so much inventive stuff in that book he didn't waste much time exploring that particular idea.