Umm, you're pulling that out of your ass. I don't think any modern cellphone system uses 64Kbps.
GSM uses 5.6Kbps for half-rate, 13 Kbps for full rate, and 12.2 Kbps for enhanced full rate. Most other voice codecs operate in that range, although they can usually do far better than the 3.1 KHz that you get from GSM.
ISDN at 64Kbps is irrelevant; that's the data rate, and if you're trying to run a VoIP system over there, unless you need fax support (there are better alternatives), then you're not dedicating your entire ISDN line to a single phone call. You're likely running a better codec with a much lower bitrate in order to make things work.
The only thing that's at 64Kbps related to this is the g.711 codec, which is used by the POTS (and VoIP customers with bandwidth to burn, since it's the most compatible). It's a narrowband codec that's basically uncompressed, and even twenty year old codecs can beat it.
The benchmarks here were testing music at 64Kbps, which is a fair comparison. That's probably what the digital radio systems use. But HE-AAC and other low-bandwidth codecs (such as voice codecs) tend to do their best work at much lower bitrates.
I've done so, extensively. The results at 24Kbps and 32Kbps are very impressive. I'm not claiming that they're CD-quality by any stretch, only that it's a great leap forward over competing codecs. The idea that a dialup internet user can stream audio with that kind of quality is impressive, and for internet radio broadcasters in a bandwidth/budget crunch, it can be a lifesaver, especially if it's primarily talk radio.
What about lower bitrates? HE-AAC is designed for low-bitrate audio, and 64 Kbps is right on the outside edge of where HE-AAC is useful. 24-32 Kbps is where HE-AAC really shines, and that's where stuff really gets impressive.
Would you care to point out a 4K digital projector that can do 48Hz, but not 60Hz? In fact, a quick search of a few random theater-grade digital projectors show that they already can do 60Hz. So, 60Hz should *already* work with theater projectors, home projectors (1080p60), mobile devices, computer monitors, NTSC/PAL-M televisions...
In fact, the only place they don't work perfectly is PAL televisions, but 48Hz isn't perfect there either, and many people in PAL territory probably have some other device that can display it (computer, projector, etc). If they don't, downscaling 60Hz to 50Hz is no worse than scaling 30Hz up to 50Hz (or down to 25Hz).
30/60 is only good in the US and a few rare other 60Hz countries. It doesn't convert well to 25/50 which the rest of the world uses (either you pay fortunes to have every single frame re-calculated to get 24 brand-new frames per second, or you just drop every 6th frame and get a terribly jerky 25fps result).
And requires the horrible 3:2 pulldown (or whatever it is called), to be projected in any movie theater at 24 fps.
No, 30/60 is not "forward looking" at all. Quite the opposite: it's backward looking at the history of US TV.
NTSC/PAL-M is used by 60 countries worldwide. 60Hz is also the standard on LCD computer monitors in every country, even those that use PAL/SECAM for televisions.
48Hz isn't compatible with *any* of these. You need to speed it up to 50Hz for PAL/SECAM, and frame double for NTSC/PAL-M/computers/smartphones/tablets/everything else The only refresh rate in use that I've seen that would directly support 48Hz is 240Hz
With today's audience viewing content increasingly on non-television devices, 60Hz would have been a far more forward-thinking choice than 48Hz. At least then it'd work without issue on all computing devices. 50Hz displays would still be possible to accommodate through a variety of means. The simplest would probably be simply dropping or blending every sixth frame, but really the problem is exactly the same as displaying 30Hz content on a 50Hz display.
48Hz pleases nobody (except those who own 240Hz televisions), while 60Hz could have pleased everyone on at least one type of device.
Do we even need to do that? SpaceX and their competitors have (or promise to) significantly reduced the cost of getting payloads into orbit. If your goal is to use multiple heavy-lift launches to assemble the launch vehicle in orbit, why is that not doable today with a sufficiently large amount of money? I'm not saying it'd be cheap, but it's doable.
Part of the cost problem is that it currently costs NASA roughly 12x more than it costs SpaceX to get payload into LEO (based on $450 million per shuttle launch). It's hard to do such a mission affordably when your costs are so obscenely high.
That doesn't solve it, it works around it. It doesn't actually fix the problem, because now I need to remember to be turning wifi on and off all the time.
The health concerns might all be bunk, but the stability concerns aren't. The 3DS is notoriously unstable, with widespread reports of frequent crashing. I have personally had my 3DS crash four times while playing a game.
They've already sold an estimated $33 million worth of Minecraft with very little costs. Furthermore, nothing will actually change on release date; the game will be sold for the same price before and after that date. It's just a development milestone target. I don't think "suicidal" applies here.
I have DSL. My ISP's closest PoP is over 500KM away in a Toronto (I'm in Montreal). My PPPoE session is carried over an L2TP tunnel; my first hop is 500KM away. This is actually a very common scenario for anyone in Ontario or Quebec, since that's how all DSL in the region works. If you're on Bell Canada, your PoP is probably in the same city, but if you're using a wholesaler, it's probably not. Because the lowest possible latency to me is in Toronto, that's where this technique would see me.
As such, it'd be impossible for anybody to geolocate me down to 1KM, or even 100KM. Every geolocation service I've ever tried has pegged me as being 500KM away. You might suggest that they could calculate my distance to Toronto based on last-hope latency plus known DSL fastpath latency and figure out that I'm in Montreal as it'd probably be the only major intersecting city at that distance. The problem with that is that the last-hop latency depends on too many factors, such as connection speed, connection type, interleave depth...
They rarely try to test such things. Their results are normally a lot more basic. Can you make a lead balloon? Can an electromagnet in a watch deflect a bullet? Can you surf the shockwave of an explosion? Can cockroaches survive a nuclear apocalypse (that one was actually fairly rigorous, involving controls, although it wasn't even a blind study).
They probably have more negative than positive results, but they do have a few. They also often have a result of "plausible", where they were unable to achieve a positive result, but got close enough that they think that it's probably possible. Is that definitive? No, but still a useful result, if only because it indicates where further study would be useful.
Stability during transportation, filling, and flight is not a requirement of "Can you make a lead balloon that is lighter than air". Had they not needed scotch tape (imagine some hypothetical giant machine that directly formed the lead into a balloon shape without the need for adhesives except perhaps to close the filling hole), their balloon would have been lighter. Their lead sheets were touching anyhow, despite the tape. If the lead had been bonded, there would have been no need for the tape, therefore the tape was strictly additional mass, and did not influence the results.
The rigor also is only useful for negative results. For positive results, rigor is unnecessary; if you aim to prove that something is possible, and you can make it happen, then it's possible.
The lead balloon is a good example. The myth was that a lead balloon is an impossibility. They built a working lead balloon. Therefore, lead balloons are possible.
Now, if they had set out to prove that something is possible, and failed to do so, that does not necessarily mean that it's impossible.
But Schroyer said some students were shaken by the initial alert and criticized the university for taking about 12 minutes to send an email confirming it was false.
"That was unacceptable in my opinion," he said.
Really? 12 minutes is too slow? The thing sent out 87,000 e-mails (which takes a while no matter how big and distributed your mail system is), and the person who made the error probably didn't notice until either they got the e-mail or somebody who did told them.
I think 12 minute response time for something like this is pretty impressive.
Xoom is also thicker, heavier, and in terms of GPU power, far slower. Samsung's ~9 and ~10 inch Galaxy Tabs are looking far more interesting. It unfortunately doesn't do anything in the GPU department (still using a Tegra 2, which is far slower than the PowerVR SGX 543MP2), but at least it matches or beats the iPad 2 in terms of form factor.
OK, so if I sell more than $50 million in cars a year, and a single transistor was made by a company that uses piracy, they still can't sell the car.
I don't necessarily have any problem with blocking imports from companies that use pirated software. But liability should stop at the company doing the pirating; the car company has no way of knowing that the company that made that tiny transistor was using pirated software.
It seems like there will be so many submarine issues with this law. Companies suddenly finding out that some supplier used pirated software, and being financially ruined because of it.
The funny thing is that anglophones are rather prevalent in the software industry here in Quebec. In Montreal, many software companies operate in English internally too. Then again, most of the software companies I've worked at in Montreal have sold primarily to the states...
Australia has censorship too, and I believe both France and Canada have French language requirements that a self-publishing indie studio might not be able to meet for its first release.
And yet games are almost without exception released the same day in Canada as the US. And if I'd had trouble buying at retail, I bought my copy of Crysis 2 on Steam, and played it on March 22nd like everybody else in North America.
Quebec law doesn't require that a game must have a French version. It only states that a French version of a game must be released in Quebec if there is a French version available.
In other words, if your game is released in the US and Canada, it's fine to be English-only. But if you also released your game in France, well, you've probably got a French version, so you need to release that French version in Quebec too. Which sounds perfectly reasonable to me; the Quebec government isn't even asking for more development effort, they're just asking developers not to arbitrarily restrict the available language options in Quebec.
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Umm, you're pulling that out of your ass. I don't think any modern cellphone system uses 64Kbps.
GSM uses 5.6Kbps for half-rate, 13 Kbps for full rate, and 12.2 Kbps for enhanced full rate. Most other voice codecs operate in that range, although they can usually do far better than the 3.1 KHz that you get from GSM.
ISDN at 64Kbps is irrelevant; that's the data rate, and if you're trying to run a VoIP system over there, unless you need fax support (there are better alternatives), then you're not dedicating your entire ISDN line to a single phone call. You're likely running a better codec with a much lower bitrate in order to make things work.
The only thing that's at 64Kbps related to this is the g.711 codec, which is used by the POTS (and VoIP customers with bandwidth to burn, since it's the most compatible). It's a narrowband codec that's basically uncompressed, and even twenty year old codecs can beat it.
The benchmarks here were testing music at 64Kbps, which is a fair comparison. That's probably what the digital radio systems use. But HE-AAC and other low-bandwidth codecs (such as voice codecs) tend to do their best work at much lower bitrates.
I've done so, extensively. The results at 24Kbps and 32Kbps are very impressive. I'm not claiming that they're CD-quality by any stretch, only that it's a great leap forward over competing codecs. The idea that a dialup internet user can stream audio with that kind of quality is impressive, and for internet radio broadcasters in a bandwidth/budget crunch, it can be a lifesaver, especially if it's primarily talk radio.
What about lower bitrates? HE-AAC is designed for low-bitrate audio, and 64 Kbps is right on the outside edge of where HE-AAC is useful. 24-32 Kbps is where HE-AAC really shines, and that's where stuff really gets impressive.
Would you care to point out a 4K digital projector that can do 48Hz, but not 60Hz? In fact, a quick search of a few random theater-grade digital projectors show that they already can do 60Hz. So, 60Hz should *already* work with theater projectors, home projectors (1080p60), mobile devices, computer monitors, NTSC/PAL-M televisions...
In fact, the only place they don't work perfectly is PAL televisions, but 48Hz isn't perfect there either, and many people in PAL territory probably have some other device that can display it (computer, projector, etc). If they don't, downscaling 60Hz to 50Hz is no worse than scaling 30Hz up to 50Hz (or down to 25Hz).
No, they'll just drop one of the two angles and you'll see a 48fps 2D experience.
30/60 is only good in the US and a few rare other 60Hz countries. It doesn't convert well to 25/50 which the rest of the world uses (either you pay fortunes to have every single frame re-calculated to get 24 brand-new frames per second, or you just drop every 6th frame and get a terribly jerky 25fps result).
And requires the horrible 3:2 pulldown (or whatever it is called), to be projected in any movie theater at 24 fps.
No, 30/60 is not "forward looking" at all. Quite the opposite: it's backward looking at the history of US TV.
NTSC/PAL-M is used by 60 countries worldwide. 60Hz is also the standard on LCD computer monitors in every country, even those that use PAL/SECAM for televisions.
48Hz isn't compatible with *any* of these. You need to speed it up to 50Hz for PAL/SECAM, and frame double for NTSC/PAL-M/computers/smartphones/tablets/everything else The only refresh rate in use that I've seen that would directly support 48Hz is 240Hz
With today's audience viewing content increasingly on non-television devices, 60Hz would have been a far more forward-thinking choice than 48Hz. At least then it'd work without issue on all computing devices. 50Hz displays would still be possible to accommodate through a variety of means. The simplest would probably be simply dropping or blending every sixth frame, but really the problem is exactly the same as displaying 30Hz content on a 50Hz display.
48Hz pleases nobody (except those who own 240Hz televisions), while 60Hz could have pleased everyone on at least one type of device.
Do we even need to do that? SpaceX and their competitors have (or promise to) significantly reduced the cost of getting payloads into orbit. If your goal is to use multiple heavy-lift launches to assemble the launch vehicle in orbit, why is that not doable today with a sufficiently large amount of money? I'm not saying it'd be cheap, but it's doable.
Part of the cost problem is that it currently costs NASA roughly 12x more than it costs SpaceX to get payload into LEO (based on $450 million per shuttle launch). It's hard to do such a mission affordably when your costs are so obscenely high.
Also, Ghost Recon crashed again on my last night while wifi was off :P
That doesn't solve it, it works around it. It doesn't actually fix the problem, because now I need to remember to be turning wifi on and off all the time.
Yes on all counts.
The health concerns might all be bunk, but the stability concerns aren't. The 3DS is notoriously unstable, with widespread reports of frequent crashing. I have personally had my 3DS crash four times while playing a game.
They've already sold an estimated $33 million worth of Minecraft with very little costs. Furthermore, nothing will actually change on release date; the game will be sold for the same price before and after that date. It's just a development milestone target. I don't think "suicidal" applies here.
I have DSL. My ISP's closest PoP is over 500KM away in a Toronto (I'm in Montreal). My PPPoE session is carried over an L2TP tunnel; my first hop is 500KM away. This is actually a very common scenario for anyone in Ontario or Quebec, since that's how all DSL in the region works. If you're on Bell Canada, your PoP is probably in the same city, but if you're using a wholesaler, it's probably not. Because the lowest possible latency to me is in Toronto, that's where this technique would see me.
As such, it'd be impossible for anybody to geolocate me down to 1KM, or even 100KM. Every geolocation service I've ever tried has pegged me as being 500KM away. You might suggest that they could calculate my distance to Toronto based on last-hope latency plus known DSL fastpath latency and figure out that I'm in Montreal as it'd probably be the only major intersecting city at that distance. The problem with that is that the last-hop latency depends on too many factors, such as connection speed, connection type, interleave depth...
Sure, except Newfoundland isn't a poor region of the world, it's one of the richest parts of one of the richest countries on earth.
NFL's GDP per capita is $61k. Ontario is $44k. Quebec is $37k.
They rarely try to test such things. Their results are normally a lot more basic. Can you make a lead balloon? Can an electromagnet in a watch deflect a bullet? Can you surf the shockwave of an explosion? Can cockroaches survive a nuclear apocalypse (that one was actually fairly rigorous, involving controls, although it wasn't even a blind study).
They probably have more negative than positive results, but they do have a few. They also often have a result of "plausible", where they were unable to achieve a positive result, but got close enough that they think that it's probably possible. Is that definitive? No, but still a useful result, if only because it indicates where further study would be useful.
Stability during transportation, filling, and flight is not a requirement of "Can you make a lead balloon that is lighter than air". Had they not needed scotch tape (imagine some hypothetical giant machine that directly formed the lead into a balloon shape without the need for adhesives except perhaps to close the filling hole), their balloon would have been lighter. Their lead sheets were touching anyhow, despite the tape. If the lead had been bonded, there would have been no need for the tape, therefore the tape was strictly additional mass, and did not influence the results.
The rigor also is only useful for negative results. For positive results, rigor is unnecessary; if you aim to prove that something is possible, and you can make it happen, then it's possible.
The lead balloon is a good example. The myth was that a lead balloon is an impossibility. They built a working lead balloon. Therefore, lead balloons are possible.
Now, if they had set out to prove that something is possible, and failed to do so, that does not necessarily mean that it's impossible.
But Schroyer said some students were shaken by the initial alert and criticized the university for taking about 12 minutes to send an email confirming it was false.
"That was unacceptable in my opinion," he said.
Really? 12 minutes is too slow? The thing sent out 87,000 e-mails (which takes a while no matter how big and distributed your mail system is), and the person who made the error probably didn't notice until either they got the e-mail or somebody who did told them.
I think 12 minute response time for something like this is pretty impressive.
Xoom is also thicker, heavier, and in terms of GPU power, far slower. Samsung's ~9 and ~10 inch Galaxy Tabs are looking far more interesting. It unfortunately doesn't do anything in the GPU department (still using a Tegra 2, which is far slower than the PowerVR SGX 543MP2), but at least it matches or beats the iPad 2 in terms of form factor.
Carmack does that too, and everybody justifiably thinks that's great. Would you rather than Carmack never GPL'd the source to his older engines?
OK, so if I sell more than $50 million in cars a year, and a single transistor was made by a company that uses piracy, they still can't sell the car.
I don't necessarily have any problem with blocking imports from companies that use pirated software. But liability should stop at the company doing the pirating; the car company has no way of knowing that the company that made that tiny transistor was using pirated software.
It seems like there will be so many submarine issues with this law. Companies suddenly finding out that some supplier used pirated software, and being financially ruined because of it.
The funny thing is that anglophones are rather prevalent in the software industry here in Quebec. In Montreal, many software companies operate in English internally too. Then again, most of the software companies I've worked at in Montreal have sold primarily to the states...
Australia has censorship too, and I believe both France and Canada have French language requirements that a self-publishing indie studio might not be able to meet for its first release.
And yet games are almost without exception released the same day in Canada as the US. And if I'd had trouble buying at retail, I bought my copy of Crysis 2 on Steam, and played it on March 22nd like everybody else in North America.
Quebec law doesn't require that a game must have a French version. It only states that a French version of a game must be released in Quebec if there is a French version available.
In other words, if your game is released in the US and Canada, it's fine to be English-only. But if you also released your game in France, well, you've probably got a French version, so you need to release that French version in Quebec too. Which sounds perfectly reasonable to me; the Quebec government isn't even asking for more development effort, they're just asking developers not to arbitrarily restrict the available language options in Quebec.
But just who's phone is it?
Unless you paid full price for it, your carrier's. On day one, you paid $299 out of $779 for that phone.
If you lease a car, it isn't yours either, and the repo man can take it back if you don't play by the rules.