I don't think you're on-target here. That is the classic use of the term "line-doubler," which is why the DVD players in question don't usually call themselves that. They're usually called "upconverting."
In this case, they're not deinterlacing a signal--i.e. combining an every-other-line-per-frame signal into an every-line-per-frame signal. Instead, they're interpolating a higher resolution signal from a lower resolution one. Specifically, they're taking a 640x480 signal up to a 1280x720 or 1920x1080 signal. That may include deinterlacing as well, if the original signal's interlaced and the output's progressive. And it's true that progressive-scan players also deinterlace. Nobody would call them line-doublers though, I don't think.
Thing is, your HD TV does this as well, assuming it takes a 480i/p signal. It has to in order to display that signal at the TV's native resolution of 720p, 1080i, or 1080p.
So the question of whether an upconverting player makes a damned bit of difference comes down to this: Who has the better upconverting algorithm, the TV or the player?
If you have a great TV and a crappy player, it's possible an upconverting player can hurt your picture, not help it. In that case, run the lower-res signal to the TV and let the TV upconvert. This is similar to how, in the early 90s, sometimes it was better to run composite video instead of S-Video from your Laserdisc player to your TV, because your TV did a better job of comb filtering than the player did.
My basic take on upconverters, assuming your TV isn't made by Coby or similar, is that if you get them for free in the DVD player, awesome. If not, don't waste your money.
Regarding DVDs, my experience is that most film-original DVDs aren't interlaced, and most/all video-original DVDs are.
Eh, there are some definite WTFs on the iPhone, both in terms of implementation and process.
It's still the only game in town at this level, with the possible eventual exception of the OpenMoka. My understanding is that the 'Moka isn't quite there yet, thoug.
Once the iPhone has some more competition, things will likely become somewhat more sane.
As mentioned by the other poster, the AT&T 611 CSR could have removed your discount instantly, allowing our account to be upgraded. You had to ask for a remove and an instant refresh. Apple Store employees told us this while we were standing in line, so we'd be ready by the time we hit the front.
As an AT&T retailer, the Apple Store should have given you better information. However, you could have also called AT&T to verify for yourself, or even just wandered over to the other kiosk. It shouldn't be necessary, but the goal is to solve the problem, not browbeat someone into giving you what you want without solving the problem.
My guess is that your 20 minutes of angry negotation culminated in you being a bit of an ass, if they actually asked you to leave.
There are certain technologies that just aren't compelling until you've actually experienced them, and had a chance to explore the possibilities they give you.
DVRs would be a prime example. Nobody realizes what a difference timeshifting with a season pass makes, until they use one. It converted me from a non-watcher to a fairly avid TV fan, since my primary block was scheduling.
Broadband is another. My parents didn't understand why it was compelling either, until I finally more or less browbeat them into getting a connection. -Now- they get it, and wouldn't go back to dialup for the world.
Once you have it, the value proposition becomes pretty obvious: always on, internet being easily available to all computers in the house, a -lot- faster, more types of websites available, being able to effectively use web-apps, not having to worry about missing emergency calls from relatives (no matter how you configure the modem, sometimes the call-waiting beep doesn't disconnect it) and so on.
I'm not saying these techs are right for everyone. I am saying that in many ways, they're transcendent, and you can't make a good judgment about them until you've actually experienced them.
You make some valid points, in terms of bad habits and whatnot. When most everything comes easy, hard things seem -really- hard.
However, high intelligence, if not a handicap in and of itself, can lead to significant social disorders.
This shouldn't be surprising. Anything on the extreme ends of the intelligence bell curve is going to have problems meshing socially with the middle. The only thing that separates a gifted child from a retarded child in this aspect is that the gifted child has a higher chance of being able to fake normality.
In terms of development, the root of the problem is that when everyone else is a young child, the highly gifted kid is many years ahead of them intellectually. Often they're not interested in the same activities, and discourse can be limited. So, no social meshing means not learning social basics. This has lots of ramifications throughout life, as the opportunities to learn them later are decreased by the social stigma of being behind in the first place.
There are other frustrations for a highly intelligent person trying to communicate with the rest of the world. Some of it comes down to being several steps ahead in the thought process, and constantly having to bring others up to speed. You have no idea how frustrating that can be to do day in and day out.
A secondary problem is that highly intelligent thought processes often include a lot of intuition. Your mind sort of works in the background and suggests the solution, Then you figure out how to explain why the solution works...in that order. It makes it a little difficult to explain conclusions in real-time.
In the end, it's hard to complain. There are lots of opportunities that are only available or at least more easily available to the highly intelligent. However, emotionally speaking, it definitely has its pitfalls. Go to any Mensa gathering for plenty of real-world examples.
I geek on virtual machines, I post on LiveJournal. For one, I'm one of many guys behind the curtain, for the other, I'm one of many consumers. I think most of my friends and colleagues would be -more- than happy to call me an "actual geek."
Personally, I use these services as technology to improve efficiency, which is think is a pretty geeky reason.
Being an introvert, I only have a few close friends, and I update them personally for the most part. They're not the target audience, really.
However, I do a lot of stuff. So, I have a metric buttload of people who are either older friends I now see much less often, or acquaintances. For them, I can keep track of and update them en masse through social networking services.
The nice thing is that, being a pull technology, it avoids most of the pushiness associated with periodically letters/emails/etc that require replies by proper etiquette. Instead, it's just hanging out there. If they care, they can choose to read it. If not, no harm, no foul.
32 bit in graphics card terms is 8 bits per colored pixel plus an 8-bit alpha channel for transparency. Only 24 bits are used for colors, and our displays have been 24 bit displays.
I like my Kindle lots. It's easy to read, content is readily available (both free and pay) and the cell connectivity is transformative.
These things you all talk about, the perils of DRM, costs, formats, etc., they're things that ostensibly affect me too. But they haven't mattered.
Don't buy books on it that you intend to keep. Buy books that you want shortly after release, but that you'll almost certainly want to sell later. If you haven't gotten to the point of having such books, you probably will. Most of us on here read way more than we can reasonably afford to store and shelve.
When you do the math, a $10 or less book fitting that description ends up being comparable to buying off the shelf then selling. Only you got yours instantly.
Sure, you can beat it by buying used, but if it's brick and mortar you have to wait for opportunity and if it's online shipping kills the savings.
There are lots of free books out there that offset the cost, too. Sure, you can read them on a PDA or your computer, but I guarantee you it's not as comfortable. Those of you who insist otherwise just haven't compared. Reflective e-ink displays will always be more comfortable than luminous LCD displays because they redirect ambient lighting instead of adding their own, and because they are 100% flicker-free.
Keep in mind that the CRX is a two-seater. There's not enough room for a rear seat, so it just has a cargo area back there under the hatch.
It's been awhile since I've been in one, but you might actually be able to stretch somewhat from under-dash to back of the hatch without encountering major level changes.
That doesn't explain the inch of water, though, and apparently the defense timeline had him sleeping in it after it was flooded.
I don't think anyone was suggesting that just because it's in the encyclopedia it's general knowledge and needs no cite whatsoever.
I think the point was that you can't cite the encyclopedia itself. You have to hit the bibliography and find a primary source to cite. Luckily, Wiki makes this especially easy for you if the articles are following the rules.
MP3.com was doing something entirely different. They weren't doing individual backups. They actually just had a bunch of MP3s online, not unlike Rhapsody or similar.
If you could establish that you owned the song/album/whatever (can't remember if it was through the track's CRC or what) then you could download the MP3 version from them. Of course, it was easy to do this with a borrowed or burned CD.
They claimed it was a backup/ripping service, but it was really a music distribution service with funky, easily defeatable authentication.
In this case, sounds like the user would have to rip the file themselves then upload them. That's an important difference.
This should cause a nice bump for encrypted drive/volume software.
It's a real shame this revolved around a kiddie porn case that hinged on the admissibility of the evidence. Nobody wants to let the kiddie porn guy go, so the chances of getting a good precedent here were probably that much lower.
I'm sure I could get used to it. I'm just not sure it's a good thing.
I agree that legalese is an excellent analogy. It looks like plain-language, but is really laden with specifically meaningful words and phrases that don't look specific.
It's one of those deals where if we could -actually- do natural language, that's awesome. But something that's -almost- natural language is potentially confusing and trap-laden.
I agree with you: the biggest saving grace is the audience and their expectations/skillset. If we ever come up with a programming language for lawyers, this might be one to emulate.
OK, disclaimer, I'm not an implementor, and I haven't gotten deeply into Inform 6 or 7. I did go through the Inform 6 tutorials, and have read the Inform 7 docs.
I think Inform 7 comes way too close to falling into an "uncanny valley" of natural language.
Traditional structured computer languages have the advantage of being distinctly unlike other languages, so they're a separate learning path. This makes them easy to identify, and easy to 'switch gears' mentally into, with the downside that multiple languages mean more to learn.
When you're this close to natural language, the distinctive and necessary bits are pretty subtle, and the chance for confusion is much higher, IMO. At this point, you're not learning a language so much as a new dialect.
No, he had it exactly. Use tax is generally exacted on every item, regardless of origin, then waived for items on which sales tax has already been collected.
It's an end-run around regulation of interstate commerce being reserved to the federal government. It's arguably unconstitutional in concept. I'm unsure of existing court rulings on it.
The real problem, as mentioned elsewhere, is that New York doesn't have standing to collect from Amazon in Washington (they can't possibly enforce this). Quill Corp v. North Dakota established that you may not even try to compel a company to collect sales tax for your state unless it has significant physical presence.
NY-based affiliates may be a different story, but even then, I'm pretty sure NY needs to collect from the affiliates in their state, not Amazon proper. I'm pretty sure it's more or less the same mechanism and legalities as eBay/PayPal collecting money for auction sellers.
As it stands, at least from media readings of the law, I fully expect this to get struck down, either in a limited way against Quill v. North Dakota, or in a wider way that puts use taxes in general in question.
That's completely unreasonable. I've worked with many excellent Indian programmers. The ones who've been H1B and working here in the US have shown the same range of skill as US-native employees.
This implies it's a factor of the company's hiring processes, not anything to do with their national or educational origin.
Outsource teams have their own common issues, but they have a lot more to do with the distance and management issues than with ethnicity or culture.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you're on-target here. That is the classic use of the term "line-doubler," which is why the DVD players in question don't usually call themselves that. They're usually called "upconverting."
In this case, they're not deinterlacing a signal--i.e. combining an every-other-line-per-frame signal into an every-line-per-frame signal. Instead, they're interpolating a higher resolution signal from a lower resolution one. Specifically, they're taking a 640x480 signal up to a 1280x720 or 1920x1080 signal. That may include deinterlacing as well, if the original signal's interlaced and the output's progressive. And it's true that progressive-scan players also deinterlace. Nobody would call them line-doublers though, I don't think.
Thing is, your HD TV does this as well, assuming it takes a 480i/p signal. It has to in order to display that signal at the TV's native resolution of 720p, 1080i, or 1080p.
So the question of whether an upconverting player makes a damned bit of difference comes down to this: Who has the better upconverting algorithm, the TV or the player?
If you have a great TV and a crappy player, it's possible an upconverting player can hurt your picture, not help it. In that case, run the lower-res signal to the TV and let the TV upconvert. This is similar to how, in the early 90s, sometimes it was better to run composite video instead of S-Video from your Laserdisc player to your TV, because your TV did a better job of comb filtering than the player did.
My basic take on upconverters, assuming your TV isn't made by Coby or similar, is that if you get them for free in the DVD player, awesome. If not, don't waste your money.
Regarding DVDs, my experience is that most film-original DVDs aren't interlaced, and most/all video-original DVDs are.
Sales figures look much more exciting in roman numerals!
To be fair, I'm fine with them flying -away-. Let's just keep them from flying back.
Well, this -is- Slashdot.
Eh, there are some definite WTFs on the iPhone, both in terms of implementation and process.
It's still the only game in town at this level, with the possible eventual exception of the OpenMoka. My understanding is that the 'Moka isn't quite there yet, thoug.
Once the iPhone has some more competition, things will likely become somewhat more sane.
As mentioned by the other poster, the AT&T 611 CSR could have removed your discount instantly, allowing our account to be upgraded. You had to ask for a remove and an instant refresh. Apple Store employees told us this while we were standing in line, so we'd be ready by the time we hit the front.
As an AT&T retailer, the Apple Store should have given you better information. However, you could have also called AT&T to verify for yourself, or even just wandered over to the other kiosk. It shouldn't be necessary, but the goal is to solve the problem, not browbeat someone into giving you what you want without solving the problem.
My guess is that your 20 minutes of angry negotation culminated in you being a bit of an ass, if they actually asked you to leave.
I really wouldn't dismiss RE4 as a waggled port. Point and shoot aiming changes the game pretty significantly.
There are certain technologies that just aren't compelling until you've actually experienced them, and had a chance to explore the possibilities they give you.
DVRs would be a prime example. Nobody realizes what a difference timeshifting with a season pass makes, until they use one. It converted me from a non-watcher to a fairly avid TV fan, since my primary block was scheduling.
Broadband is another. My parents didn't understand why it was compelling either, until I finally more or less browbeat them into getting a connection. -Now- they get it, and wouldn't go back to dialup for the world.
Once you have it, the value proposition becomes pretty obvious: always on, internet being easily available to all computers in the house, a -lot- faster, more types of websites available, being able to effectively use web-apps, not having to worry about missing emergency calls from relatives (no matter how you configure the modem, sometimes the call-waiting beep doesn't disconnect it) and so on.
I'm not saying these techs are right for everyone. I am saying that in many ways, they're transcendent, and you can't make a good judgment about them until you've actually experienced them.
You make some valid points, in terms of bad habits and whatnot. When most everything comes easy, hard things seem -really- hard.
However, high intelligence, if not a handicap in and of itself, can lead to significant social disorders.
This shouldn't be surprising. Anything on the extreme ends of the intelligence bell curve is going to have problems meshing socially with the middle. The only thing that separates a gifted child from a retarded child in this aspect is that the gifted child has a higher chance of being able to fake normality.
In terms of development, the root of the problem is that when everyone else is a young child, the highly gifted kid is many years ahead of them intellectually. Often they're not interested in the same activities, and discourse can be limited. So, no social meshing means not learning social basics. This has lots of ramifications throughout life, as the opportunities to learn them later are decreased by the social stigma of being behind in the first place.
There are other frustrations for a highly intelligent person trying to communicate with the rest of the world. Some of it comes down to being several steps ahead in the thought process, and constantly having to bring others up to speed. You have no idea how frustrating that can be to do day in and day out.
A secondary problem is that highly intelligent thought processes often include a lot of intuition. Your mind sort of works in the background and suggests the solution, Then you figure out how to explain why the solution works...in that order. It makes it a little difficult to explain conclusions in real-time.
In the end, it's hard to complain. There are lots of opportunities that are only available or at least more easily available to the highly intelligent. However, emotionally speaking, it definitely has its pitfalls. Go to any Mensa gathering for plenty of real-world examples.
Wow, elitist much?
I geek on virtual machines, I post on LiveJournal. For one, I'm one of many guys behind the curtain, for the other, I'm one of many consumers. I think most of my friends and colleagues would be -more- than happy to call me an "actual geek."
Personally, I use these services as technology to improve efficiency, which is think is a pretty geeky reason.
Being an introvert, I only have a few close friends, and I update them personally for the most part. They're not the target audience, really.
However, I do a lot of stuff. So, I have a metric buttload of people who are either older friends I now see much less often, or acquaintances. For them, I can keep track of and update them en masse through social networking services.
The nice thing is that, being a pull technology, it avoids most of the pushiness associated with periodically letters/emails/etc that require replies by proper etiquette. Instead, it's just hanging out there. If they care, they can choose to read it. If not, no harm, no foul.
Gah. I blew it in my prior response.
32 bit in graphics card terms is 8 bits per colored pixel plus an 8-bit alpha channel for transparency. Only 24 bits are used for colors, and our displays have been 24 bit displays.
This uses 30 bits for colors.
Because current-tech LCDs don't display that full range.
It goes to 111111111111111111111111111111.
I like my Kindle lots. It's easy to read, content is readily available (both free and pay) and the cell connectivity is transformative.
These things you all talk about, the perils of DRM, costs, formats, etc., they're things that ostensibly affect me too. But they haven't mattered.
Don't buy books on it that you intend to keep. Buy books that you want shortly after release, but that you'll almost certainly want to sell later. If you haven't gotten to the point of having such books, you probably will. Most of us on here read way more than we can reasonably afford to store and shelve.
When you do the math, a $10 or less book fitting that description ends up being comparable to buying off the shelf then selling. Only you got yours instantly.
Sure, you can beat it by buying used, but if it's brick and mortar you have to wait for opportunity and if it's online shipping kills the savings.
There are lots of free books out there that offset the cost, too. Sure, you can read them on a PDA or your computer, but I guarantee you it's not as comfortable. Those of you who insist otherwise just haven't compared. Reflective e-ink displays will always be more comfortable than luminous LCD displays because they redirect ambient lighting instead of adding their own, and because they are 100% flicker-free.
That's so 1990s cryptozoology. The new hotness is Bunyipv6.
Keep in mind that the CRX is a two-seater. There's not enough room for a rear seat, so it just has a cargo area back there under the hatch.
It's been awhile since I've been in one, but you might actually be able to stretch somewhat from under-dash to back of the hatch without encountering major level changes.
That doesn't explain the inch of water, though, and apparently the defense timeline had him sleeping in it after it was flooded.
I don't think anyone was suggesting that just because it's in the encyclopedia it's general knowledge and needs no cite whatsoever.
I think the point was that you can't cite the encyclopedia itself. You have to hit the bibliography and find a primary source to cite. Luckily, Wiki makes this especially easy for you if the articles are following the rules.
MP3.com was doing something entirely different. They weren't doing individual backups. They actually just had a bunch of MP3s online, not unlike Rhapsody or similar.
If you could establish that you owned the song/album/whatever (can't remember if it was through the track's CRC or what) then you could download the MP3 version from them. Of course, it was easy to do this with a borrowed or burned CD.
They claimed it was a backup/ripping service, but it was really a music distribution service with funky, easily defeatable authentication.
In this case, sounds like the user would have to rip the file themselves then upload them. That's an important difference.
That's why you go for the volume-in-a-volume option, and scatter a few spreadsheets around in the outer volume.
If you're forced to decrypt, you show them that one, and never even mention the inner hidden volume.
This should cause a nice bump for encrypted drive/volume software.
It's a real shame this revolved around a kiddie porn case that hinged on the admissibility of the evidence. Nobody wants to let the kiddie porn guy go, so the chances of getting a good precedent here were probably that much lower.
Yeah, I totally see that.
I'm sure I could get used to it. I'm just not sure it's a good thing.
I agree that legalese is an excellent analogy. It looks like plain-language, but is really laden with specifically meaningful words and phrases that don't look specific.
It's one of those deals where if we could -actually- do natural language, that's awesome. But something that's -almost- natural language is potentially confusing and trap-laden.
I agree with you: the biggest saving grace is the audience and their expectations/skillset. If we ever come up with a programming language for lawyers, this might be one to emulate.
OK, disclaimer, I'm not an implementor, and I haven't gotten deeply into Inform 6 or 7. I did go through the Inform 6 tutorials, and have read the Inform 7 docs.
I think Inform 7 comes way too close to falling into an "uncanny valley" of natural language.
Traditional structured computer languages have the advantage of being distinctly unlike other languages, so they're a separate learning path. This makes them easy to identify, and easy to 'switch gears' mentally into, with the downside that multiple languages mean more to learn.
When you're this close to natural language, the distinctive and necessary bits are pretty subtle, and the chance for confusion is much higher, IMO. At this point, you're not learning a language so much as a new dialect.
No, he had it exactly. Use tax is generally exacted on every item, regardless of origin, then waived for items on which sales tax has already been collected.
It's an end-run around regulation of interstate commerce being reserved to the federal government. It's arguably unconstitutional in concept. I'm unsure of existing court rulings on it.
The real problem, as mentioned elsewhere, is that New York doesn't have standing to collect from Amazon in Washington (they can't possibly enforce this). Quill Corp v. North Dakota established that you may not even try to compel a company to collect sales tax for your state unless it has significant physical presence.
NY-based affiliates may be a different story, but even then, I'm pretty sure NY needs to collect from the affiliates in their state, not Amazon proper. I'm pretty sure it's more or less the same mechanism and legalities as eBay/PayPal collecting money for auction sellers.
As it stands, at least from media readings of the law, I fully expect this to get struck down, either in a limited way against Quill v. North Dakota, or in a wider way that puts use taxes in general in question.
That's completely unreasonable. I've worked with many excellent Indian programmers. The ones who've been H1B and working here in the US have shown the same range of skill as US-native employees.
This implies it's a factor of the company's hiring processes, not anything to do with their national or educational origin.
Outsource teams have their own common issues, but they have a lot more to do with the distance and management issues than with ethnicity or culture.
I'm pretty sure the companies I've worked for have usually gotten something like a contract agreement before sending out pre-releases to anyone.
Post-release, you can sell freebie copies. The stuff we get as release-party schwag has been known to hit eBay.