EC2's processing performance is rather anemic compared to competing cloud hosts such as Linode, which tend to enormously outperform EC2 instances that cost several times more. EC2 does make performance guarantees about how much CPU power you have, though, which is nice. Just not necessarily cost-effective for most people.
Studies actually put it over a million now, but the core set of English words needed to communicate clearly are far smaller. VOA Special English contains about 1500 words, and is sufficient for Voice of America to use it for news broadcasts in parts of the world. Text written in Special English might seem simple or childlike to a native speaker, but it's hard to argue that it doesn't succeed in conveying the information despite representing a tiny fraction of the English language.
Netcraft's web server market share stats are similar, although a bit more extreme. They show Microsoft's IIS at a bit under 16% marketshare, compared to the market leader, Apache's httpd, at about 65%.
Yes, although rarely unmodified (in my personal experience trying to get a few small utilities that I'd written). Getting even simple.NET software to run on Mono requires that you either developed with Mono in mind from the start, or you "port" your code to Mono. You need to work around bits of the.NET framework that Mono doesn't support, work around Mono bugs (obviously the same bugs don't exist in Mono and Microsoft's implementation), figure out solutions anywhere you used Windows API calls (.NET has some glaring gaps that still require Win32 API calls, like using aero glass, freeing a tray icon, etc), etc.
If you stuck pretty close to core.NET functionality, it's probably a ton easier than porting to a different OS/language would normally be, but if you've used any other.NET frameworks (like XNA) then you might as well be porting to a different language anyhow.
Right, but when comparing rechargeable batteries and non-rechargeable, the re-use of the rechargeables needs to be taken into account. If you're using few batteries a year, it may not pay off. A pack of four Eneloops goes for about ten bucks, and the same amount of Rayovacs seem to go for about two. The eneloops can be recharged 1500-2000 times (depending on model), but such a large figure may not be relevant if use is only occasional; they'd need to be recharged five times each to pay themselves off.
Panasonic also now owns Sanyo, which means that Panasonic also makes the Sanyo Eneloop batteries, widely regarded as being the best NiMH batteries on the market.
Alkaline batteries themselves are falling out of favour, because they don't last nearly as long. Their voltage curve is much steeper than NiMH, and under load they just fall apart. An Eneloop battery will last almost twice as long as an alkaline under high load (and they're rechargable), and lithium batteries in the same form factor (AA or AAA) (which are not) last almost three times longer than alkaline.
Typical HDTV viewing distance is considered to be about 2.5x the diagonal. That gives you 80" for a 32" television, or 6.7'.
THX's rating for cinema distances (presuming that we're talking 4K here) is 0.84x the diagonal. That gives you 2.2'.
So, with a 32" panel, you're going to need to sit with your face barely over two feet from the display. That makes perfect sense for a computer screen, although even then 4K might be a bit excessive; I'm sitting about two feet from a 27" 2.5K display, and the pixels are tiny enough that I can't see a higher resolution making anything sharper. But for a television, you're not going to want to sit that close.
Online data based on typical visual acuity seems to back that up. The farthest you can actually sit from a 32" display and still pick out the difference between two lines of pixels is a hair over four feet, and 4K would be correspondingly less than that. If you're sitting 6 or 7 feet away from a 32" display, you won't be able to tell the difference between 1080p and 4K. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between 720p and 4K.
Your 60Hz hardware is perfectly capable of displaying 48FPS or 60FPS video, although there will be some judder with 48FPS video (interpolation may be required). The purpose of a 120Hz display would be to display 48FPS video with less judder, since the duplicate frames can be more evenly distributed. Judder-free video would require a 240Hz display, but it's by no means required.
It's unfortunate, in many ways, that the film industry (Cameron, primarily) have chosen 48FPS over 60FPS, as 60FPS would not have had these issues.
If you need a 60" panel in order to make 4K worthwhile, the percentage of the market that can afford that kind of display is currently very small, and is likely to remain so for more than a few years. As such, there's little point in producing content for such a display.
High framerate displays, on the other hand, are something that can improve the quality of video on smaller displays, and can be achieved with current technology; indeed, it can be achieved with displays already on the market. Almost any HDTV will do 60FPS natively, since they're 60Hz displays. 48FPS is trickier, since displaying 48FPS on a 60Hz display would have a much more pronounced judder than 24FPS on a 60Hz display. However, 120Hz displays should offer acceptable quality for this (240Hz would be required for judder-free playback, much like 120Hz is required for judder-free 24FPS playback). Conveniently, 3D displays are already set up for this, and can actually accept the higher input framerate, unlike non-3D 120Hz televisions, which may not necessarily accept 120Hz input. Certainly any 3D computer display can, when not used in 3D mode, simply display at 120Hz.
You ask why I'm bringing FPS into the discussion, and it's because 4K is largely pointless, and can't provide any benefits to a portion of the market large enough to matter, while higher framerates can provide large benefits to consumers with the hardware that they already have.
When I was a kid, NiCad was the best rechargeable batteries you'd typically find. They suffered from the memory effect, and maxed out at about 150 Wh/L (well, modern ones do anyhow, according to wikipedia). Nowadays, Panasonic makes a 18650 lithium ion cell that does 620, and they expect to push that to 800 by 2013. A rather hefty improvement!
Sure, but few large-scale deployments use panels. SEGS has automated cleaning equipment, and replaces about 3000 panels every year on top of that (due to damage, mostly from wind).
If you're very close to a 4K panel, it's useful. When you're sitting 10 feet away from a 32" or even a 40" television, it wouldn't make a difference. At that point, 48 or 60 FPS would make a far bigger improvement.
Those aren't the original models, and it's not just the models they're missing. They're missing everything else, too. The animation data, the composition data, etc. They thought they'd just re-open the files on the computer and re-render it at higher resolution with minimal effort. But they lost all the files.
When they were doing the newer B5 stuff (the "lost tales" stuff), some of the CG models (like B5 itself) were indeed sourced from community models and then touched up.
You'd be surprised. There was some CG, even as early as season 1 (The crystalline entity in Datalore), but CG was expensive and not very convincing. Ships were never done in CG, they used models through TNG (DS9 was the series that started doing CG ships, although practical models were still used a lot, including the station itself, and Voyager was the first one to go primarily CG for all ships). CG was expensive and not very convincing at the time, so they had ILM do a bunch of effects for the series at the start, and kept re-using that stock footage for the entire run of the show (plus extra footage when required, obviously). The Enterprise going to warp was a traditional slitscan effect, for example.
If you watch the behind-the-scenes features that came with the DVDs, they do go into the effects for each season. They were really doing this on a shoestring budget, so there was a ton of "shot the effect in my basement" kind of stuff going on.
Right, because nobody ever solved the problem of "how to clean a mirror", and plants like SEGS that have been operating for over a quarter century without a significant drop in efficiency, they're just lies and propaganda.
In fact, the *newest* section of SEGS is 21 years old, and still going strong.
Extreme or not, Intel's price range has really gone down with Sandy Bridge; their highest priced chip (and quite possibly the single fastest consumer CPU on the market) is about $300ish. And I believe their highest price Sandy Bridge Xeon is only $600ish.
I'd like to see you double-click to mount an ISO on Linux without any third party software. For that matter, I'd like to see you do *anything* with Linux without any third party software. Booting the kernel without that third-party bootloader isn't so easy. The ability to double-click an ISO on a Linux system relies on a rather lot of third-party software, from the bootloader, to the shell environment, to the windowing system, to the window manager, to the desktop environment, to the file manager...
It's kind of a double-standard, claiming that Windows can't do something without third-party software when any given Linux distro is nothing but a collection of third party software arranged in a certain manner. I love Linux, but fair is fair.
Right, and your Xoom isn't a "tablet PC", it's a tablet.
If your Xoom was double the thickness, double the weight, and double the price, would it compare favourably to the current Xoom? The Acer CEO's remarks are amusing because the tablet PC never had a bubble to burst. They were always a tiny niche market that never went anywhere, until real tablets like the iPad, Xoom, Galaxy Tab, etc. came along.
The speed isn't the issue. A sufficiently well focused and powerful laser (or multiple lasers) could probably push as much bandwidth as you need. The problem is the latency.
The distance between Earth and Mars varies from between roughly 56 and 399 million kilometres. That's a minimum round-trip time of ~374,000ms and a maximum round trip time of ~2,600,000ms, ignoring the speed of light in atmosphere. Somebody's going to make a killing selling Squid boxes when we get around to colonizing the place.
Because their trademark is no longer enforceable, they have no rights to the domain, but ICANN may not heed that fact and so force the register to hand the domain over to Atari.
All registrars must follow the the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (often referred to as the "UDRP"). Under the policy, most types of trademark-based domain-name disputes must be resolved by agreement, court action, or arbitration before a registrar will cancel, suspend, or transfer a domain name. Disputes alleged to arise from abusive registrations of domain names (for example, cybersquatting) may be addressed by expedited administrative proceedings that the holder of trademark rights initiates by filing a complaint with an approved dispute-resolution service provider.
To invoke the policy, a trademark owner should either (a) file a complaint in a court of proper jurisdiction against the domain-name holder (or where appropriate an in-rem action concerning the domain name) or (b) in cases of abusive registration submit a complaint to an approved dispute-resolution service provider (see below for a list and links).
Maybe it might, but health care in Canada is not handled by a single federal agency. There isn't even any federal requirement to provide universal healthcare. Every province has their own health care system, and the provincial goverment-run health insurer can, if it chooses, adhere to the requirements of the Canada Health Act in order to get federal funds to pay for the insurance. But there's no requirement to do so. We have universal healthcare because the provinces would be stupid to turn down the money, but there's nothing stopping a province from opting out and deciding to go for an American-style system. The electorate would never stand for it. In Quebec, we've had enormous debates for years about if we should introduce a parallel private health care system alongside the public system, for example.
Canada does not use fancy mechanical systems with chads. Voters are provided with pencils and put marks in a circle. It's simple and effective, and Canada gets voting results far faster than the US (and before you cite population size differences, the Elections Canada model would take the same amount of time even if you had 10x as many ridings). It's one single system and organization that handles federal voting for the entire country.
Slashdot Mirror
EC2's processing performance is rather anemic compared to competing cloud hosts such as Linode, which tend to enormously outperform EC2 instances that cost several times more. EC2 does make performance guarantees about how much CPU power you have, though, which is nice. Just not necessarily cost-effective for most people.
Studies actually put it over a million now, but the core set of English words needed to communicate clearly are far smaller. VOA Special English contains about 1500 words, and is sufficient for Voice of America to use it for news broadcasts in parts of the world. Text written in Special English might seem simple or childlike to a native speaker, but it's hard to argue that it doesn't succeed in conveying the information despite representing a tiny fraction of the English language.
Netcraft's web server market share stats are similar, although a bit more extreme. They show Microsoft's IIS at a bit under 16% marketshare, compared to the market leader, Apache's httpd, at about 65%.
Yes, although rarely unmodified (in my personal experience trying to get a few small utilities that I'd written). Getting even simple .NET software to run on Mono requires that you either developed with Mono in mind from the start, or you "port" your code to Mono. You need to work around bits of the .NET framework that Mono doesn't support, work around Mono bugs (obviously the same bugs don't exist in Mono and Microsoft's implementation), figure out solutions anywhere you used Windows API calls (.NET has some glaring gaps that still require Win32 API calls, like using aero glass, freeing a tray icon, etc), etc.
If you stuck pretty close to core .NET functionality, it's probably a ton easier than porting to a different OS/language would normally be, but if you've used any other .NET frameworks (like XNA) then you might as well be porting to a different language anyhow.
Right, but when comparing rechargeable batteries and non-rechargeable, the re-use of the rechargeables needs to be taken into account. If you're using few batteries a year, it may not pay off. A pack of four Eneloops goes for about ten bucks, and the same amount of Rayovacs seem to go for about two. The eneloops can be recharged 1500-2000 times (depending on model), but such a large figure may not be relevant if use is only occasional; they'd need to be recharged five times each to pay themselves off.
Actually, at high loads, NiMH batteries have nearly double the capacity of alkalines.
Take a look at this review for some AAA-powered flashlights:
http://www.candlepowerforums.com/vb/showthread.php?240639-ITP-A3-EOS-amp-Maratac-AAA-Reviews-RUNTIMES-BEAMSHOTS-DETAILED-PICS-amp-more!
Here's the time-until-50% for three kinds of batteries:
Alkaline (brand not mentioned): 34 minutes
NiMH (Sanyo Eneloop): 59 minutes
Lithium (Energizer L92): 87 minutes
Panasonic also now owns Sanyo, which means that Panasonic also makes the Sanyo Eneloop batteries, widely regarded as being the best NiMH batteries on the market.
Alkaline batteries themselves are falling out of favour, because they don't last nearly as long. Their voltage curve is much steeper than NiMH, and under load they just fall apart. An Eneloop battery will last almost twice as long as an alkaline under high load (and they're rechargable), and lithium batteries in the same form factor (AA or AAA) (which are not) last almost three times longer than alkaline.
Typical HDTV viewing distance is considered to be about 2.5x the diagonal. That gives you 80" for a 32" television, or 6.7'.
THX's rating for cinema distances (presuming that we're talking 4K here) is 0.84x the diagonal. That gives you 2.2'.
So, with a 32" panel, you're going to need to sit with your face barely over two feet from the display. That makes perfect sense for a computer screen, although even then 4K might be a bit excessive; I'm sitting about two feet from a 27" 2.5K display, and the pixels are tiny enough that I can't see a higher resolution making anything sharper. But for a television, you're not going to want to sit that close.
Online data based on typical visual acuity seems to back that up. The farthest you can actually sit from a 32" display and still pick out the difference between two lines of pixels is a hair over four feet, and 4K would be correspondingly less than that. If you're sitting 6 or 7 feet away from a 32" display, you won't be able to tell the difference between 1080p and 4K. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between 720p and 4K.
Your 60Hz hardware is perfectly capable of displaying 48FPS or 60FPS video, although there will be some judder with 48FPS video (interpolation may be required). The purpose of a 120Hz display would be to display 48FPS video with less judder, since the duplicate frames can be more evenly distributed. Judder-free video would require a 240Hz display, but it's by no means required.
It's unfortunate, in many ways, that the film industry (Cameron, primarily) have chosen 48FPS over 60FPS, as 60FPS would not have had these issues.
If you need a 60" panel in order to make 4K worthwhile, the percentage of the market that can afford that kind of display is currently very small, and is likely to remain so for more than a few years. As such, there's little point in producing content for such a display.
High framerate displays, on the other hand, are something that can improve the quality of video on smaller displays, and can be achieved with current technology; indeed, it can be achieved with displays already on the market. Almost any HDTV will do 60FPS natively, since they're 60Hz displays. 48FPS is trickier, since displaying 48FPS on a 60Hz display would have a much more pronounced judder than 24FPS on a 60Hz display. However, 120Hz displays should offer acceptable quality for this (240Hz would be required for judder-free playback, much like 120Hz is required for judder-free 24FPS playback). Conveniently, 3D displays are already set up for this, and can actually accept the higher input framerate, unlike non-3D 120Hz televisions, which may not necessarily accept 120Hz input. Certainly any 3D computer display can, when not used in 3D mode, simply display at 120Hz.
You ask why I'm bringing FPS into the discussion, and it's because 4K is largely pointless, and can't provide any benefits to a portion of the market large enough to matter, while higher framerates can provide large benefits to consumers with the hardware that they already have.
When I was a kid, NiCad was the best rechargeable batteries you'd typically find. They suffered from the memory effect, and maxed out at about 150 Wh/L (well, modern ones do anyhow, according to wikipedia). Nowadays, Panasonic makes a 18650 lithium ion cell that does 620, and they expect to push that to 800 by 2013. A rather hefty improvement!
Sure, but few large-scale deployments use panels. SEGS has automated cleaning equipment, and replaces about 3000 panels every year on top of that (due to damage, mostly from wind).
If you're very close to a 4K panel, it's useful. When you're sitting 10 feet away from a 32" or even a 40" television, it wouldn't make a difference. At that point, 48 or 60 FPS would make a far bigger improvement.
Those aren't the original models, and it's not just the models they're missing. They're missing everything else, too. The animation data, the composition data, etc. They thought they'd just re-open the files on the computer and re-render it at higher resolution with minimal effort. But they lost all the files.
When they were doing the newer B5 stuff (the "lost tales" stuff), some of the CG models (like B5 itself) were indeed sourced from community models and then touched up.
You'd be surprised. There was some CG, even as early as season 1 (The crystalline entity in Datalore), but CG was expensive and not very convincing. Ships were never done in CG, they used models through TNG (DS9 was the series that started doing CG ships, although practical models were still used a lot, including the station itself, and Voyager was the first one to go primarily CG for all ships). CG was expensive and not very convincing at the time, so they had ILM do a bunch of effects for the series at the start, and kept re-using that stock footage for the entire run of the show (plus extra footage when required, obviously). The Enterprise going to warp was a traditional slitscan effect, for example.
If you watch the behind-the-scenes features that came with the DVDs, they do go into the effects for each season. They were really doing this on a shoestring budget, so there was a ton of "shot the effect in my basement" kind of stuff going on.
Right, because nobody ever solved the problem of "how to clean a mirror", and plants like SEGS that have been operating for over a quarter century without a significant drop in efficiency, they're just lies and propaganda.
In fact, the *newest* section of SEGS is 21 years old, and still going strong.
Extreme or not, Intel's price range has really gone down with Sandy Bridge; their highest priced chip (and quite possibly the single fastest consumer CPU on the market) is about $300ish. And I believe their highest price Sandy Bridge Xeon is only $600ish.
The enemy can shoot at the light all they want. They won't hit anything.
Except, perhaps... the light? Rendering your expensive remote-control light useless.
I'd like to see you double-click to mount an ISO on Linux without any third party software. For that matter, I'd like to see you do *anything* with Linux without any third party software. Booting the kernel without that third-party bootloader isn't so easy. The ability to double-click an ISO on a Linux system relies on a rather lot of third-party software, from the bootloader, to the shell environment, to the windowing system, to the window manager, to the desktop environment, to the file manager...
It's kind of a double-standard, claiming that Windows can't do something without third-party software when any given Linux distro is nothing but a collection of third party software arranged in a certain manner. I love Linux, but fair is fair.
Right, and your Xoom isn't a "tablet PC", it's a tablet.
If your Xoom was double the thickness, double the weight, and double the price, would it compare favourably to the current Xoom? The Acer CEO's remarks are amusing because the tablet PC never had a bubble to burst. They were always a tiny niche market that never went anywhere, until real tablets like the iPad, Xoom, Galaxy Tab, etc. came along.
I meant that while the new system makes a big improvement in bandwidth, it can't do anything about the latency due to the speed of light.
The speed isn't the issue. A sufficiently well focused and powerful laser (or multiple lasers) could probably push as much bandwidth as you need. The problem is the latency.
The distance between Earth and Mars varies from between roughly 56 and 399 million kilometres. That's a minimum round-trip time of ~374,000ms and a maximum round trip time of ~2,600,000ms, ignoring the speed of light in atmosphere. Somebody's going to make a killing selling Squid boxes when we get around to colonizing the place.
Because their trademark is no longer enforceable, they have no rights to the domain, but ICANN may not heed that fact and so force the register to hand the domain over to Atari.
They're not supposed to according to the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy:
All registrars must follow the the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy (often referred to as the "UDRP"). Under the policy, most types of trademark-based domain-name disputes must be resolved by agreement, court action, or arbitration before a registrar will cancel, suspend, or transfer a domain name. Disputes alleged to arise from abusive registrations of domain names (for example, cybersquatting) may be addressed by expedited administrative proceedings that the holder of trademark rights initiates by filing a complaint with an approved dispute-resolution service provider.
To invoke the policy, a trademark owner should either (a) file a complaint in a court of proper jurisdiction against the domain-name holder (or where appropriate an in-rem action concerning the domain name) or (b) in cases of abusive registration submit a complaint to an approved dispute-resolution service provider (see below for a list and links).
Maybe it might, but health care in Canada is not handled by a single federal agency. There isn't even any federal requirement to provide universal healthcare. Every province has their own health care system, and the provincial goverment-run health insurer can, if it chooses, adhere to the requirements of the Canada Health Act in order to get federal funds to pay for the insurance. But there's no requirement to do so. We have universal healthcare because the provinces would be stupid to turn down the money, but there's nothing stopping a province from opting out and deciding to go for an American-style system. The electorate would never stand for it. In Quebec, we've had enormous debates for years about if we should introduce a parallel private health care system alongside the public system, for example.
Canada does not use fancy mechanical systems with chads. Voters are provided with pencils and put marks in a circle. It's simple and effective, and Canada gets voting results far faster than the US (and before you cite population size differences, the Elections Canada model would take the same amount of time even if you had 10x as many ridings). It's one single system and organization that handles federal voting for the entire country.