Games are typically designed with ultra-high res textures and ultra-high poly or NURBS models which get transformed into something which will run on PCs. For textures this is a relatively simple resize (I say relatively because many of them actually get it wrong!), and for models this means generating bump/tessellation maps, etc.
It doesn't make any sense for them to make multiple sets of these high-quality assets because whichever has lesser quality (games) can be generated from the one with higher-quality.
A lot of the the time, the examiner responsible for a patent application is not particularly worried about the quality of the patent being issue but is more concerned with just getting the application off his/her docket. This makes it reasonably likely that the examiner will either ignore the new prior art or accept whatever dubious amendment/argument that the patent owner submitted.
This may very well be true, and I would sadly not bat an eye in surprise.
I would suggest that a better strategy is to just record and publish lists of prior art after the patent issues.
But seriously, the fact that the patent office is so messed up that this is the advice when it comes to reducing patent garbage... this launches a huge war in my head, between the pragmatic programmer and the idealistic open-source hacker.
I just read the book Multipliers. It is targeted towards managers, but I think it is useful information for just about anyone. This dev (who has so far shown no interest in joining management) certainly took it to heart. The book compares "diminishers" and "multipliers".
Diminishers, like your company rockstar. They need to know everything and have the last word. They can appear to be a team player when they're really just using people around them to prop themselves up. They strike fear into people who challenge them. They make large decisions by themselves, or take input from a small inner circle of people. They are at their A game, but diminish other people's output and potential. When people work with diminishers, they feel like they're giving 50%. It is a net loss.
Multipliers create an environment where people can give input with confidence, make mistakes, and learn from them. This doesn't mean they are soft. In return for this they expect greatness and weed out those who can't give it or who can't work with the team. They identify genius (described in the book as an innate, exceptional ability which someone may not even realize they have) and try to flourish it. A multiplier can still be at their A game, but puts emphasis toward helping others grow. When people work with multipliers, they feel like they're giving 150%.
It sounds a lot like some management BS and I'm sure I'm not selling it well, but it really is a great read. It has a lot of studies within tech companies, so it was generally very relateable. It helped me identify areas of improvement in myself, not just in my attitude but also to find opportunities to help others grow where I otherwise may have just taken control and pushed someone out.
PowerVR has some of the most pathetic support for x86 and Windows I've ever seen, and it hasn't got any better. With my fanless Shuttle PC using an Atom N2800, I have a choice of either 32-bit Windows and glitchy graphics, 64-bit Windows and VGA output, or Linux with VGA output.
It's pretty obvious why, of course... PowerVR's x86 market is so infinitesimally small compared to their ARM market, they probably hired some old printer driver developer to be the sole guy working on it stashed in a closet somewhere.
It is really surprising that Intel ever decided to use them, without some sort of support contract built in.
Small projects can be about purity. Making the best possible code base you can. Especially ones where people work on it for free -- they wouldn't be working on it if they didn't deeply believe in it.
Large corporations have different goals. The success of a changeset is not measured in how many bugs you fix or even how many features you add, but how much positive impact your paying customers and shareholders perceive.
The problem with FLAC is that a minor loss of data can result in an archive that cannot be extracted. A single bit error can result in major lossage.
PCM does not have that problem - you only lose what you lose.
I'd say you're doing it wrong, then. I'd prefer to have zero loss of data. Format used (FLAC vs WAV) does not really affect this.
For something you can recover from a 3rd party but would rather not (personal rips), make some parity archives – a few MB for a ~400MB album will let you recover from several errors and still be much smaller than a WAV file. Studio masters should be backed up in multiple highly-reliable places – no excuses there.
That said, I've always wondered why FLAC does not have FEC capability built in. It makes sense for a lossless format to have some support for more reliable archiving.
He might be a fantastic audio engineer, but I think his reason for continuing to use analog tape is idiotic.
Albini records to analog tape, not because he's in love with the sound of analog. No, he's concerned that as digital formats continue to evolve, today's digital recordings will be unplayable in the future. I loved the way Albini put it: "I feel it would be irresponsible to give my clients digital files as their permanent masters, knowing they would eventually disappear or become unusable, so I won't do it"... Albini feels that analog tape offers the best chance for recordings to survive.
I can't see FLAC losing support for a long long time. When it finally does, the beauty of lossless digital formats is that you can batch-convert your entire library into a newer, better format with a very small script and no loss of quality. Seriously, if you don't have the diligence to convert your music library once every 25 years, do you really think you'll be able to keep a tape from rotting or being accidentally degaussed?
As for tape -- once it's on there, that's it. You can't transfer the audio anywhere else without it being lossy. Audio engineers have been able to transfer older recordings from tape with excellent results so I'm not say it would necessarily sound bad (assuming your tape is still good) but why use a lossy format if you don't have to?
I can only assume his reasoning is for the super-long-term Roland Emmerich future. In 2000 years, some aliens will be digging up a post-nuke Earth and come across a collection of tapes, which will be easy to reverse engineer relative to a digital system's multiple formats (HDD/file system/compression).
This sounds like the classic case of an audiophile finding a way to justify use of an ancient technology, but I don't understand how an actual audio engineer could succumb to such nonsense.
Yes, meaningless. Tell that to XVID, x264, and LAME. All very successful Open Source projects implementing patent minefields. Sometimes it's more about the fun of coding than pushing an ideology.
Because anything less then 100 Hz looks stuttery as hell.
This really isn't true. The cause of stutter is fast shutter speeds. A standard film is shot at 24fps with a 1/48 shutter -- literally throwing out half the temporal information and causing the image to "jump" between frames. They do this because it creates a sharper image. Some movies use an even faster shutter to create a super-sharp or gritty feel -- Children of Men for instance.
I guess some social skill is better than none, especially for those with serious disorders. This could have benefits.
Yet, somehow this reminds me of Comcast's CableCard activation line. Every time I've called it, I get someone sounding exactly the same... an guy with a truly bizarre, unplaceable and somewhat feminine accent and an equally WTF speech pattern.
Some outsourced call center is training every one of their employees to sound exactly the same, to the point that I've called from multiple time zones, at all hours of the day, and from different numbers/accounts and am still not entirely sure if they have more than a single sleepless extraterrestrial behind the phone. Creepy as hell. And this type of app sounds like just the thing to do that.
I have a Unichip in my car. It plugs in between the car's computer and its sensors, modifying the signals to influence performance. Undetectable and takes 10 minutes to install. It's programmable, too, via USB, and might work for what you're proposing without any new hardware.
Looking at friends, I think, would be a great indicator if someone has no credit history, or if they're taking out a large loan and have never done so before. It would be foolish of them to look at your friends if you've got a full history of being responsible with the kind of loan you're asking for -- I can't see them doing this.
And your account logins, OF COURSE THEY WANT THIS. Everyone does, because everyone is fucking evil. I'm totally not surprised. Don't sign up with them.
Click N' Play was great -- heavy on the GUI with some very light scripting to tie more complex events together, and you could create a pretty wide variety of games so long as they were 2D.
I don't really feel sorry for him, but I do understand him. Few of us will ever know what it's like to have success on Notch's scale, but I'm sure plenty of us can relate even in some small way.
Sometimes, usually by accident, you fall into a wildly successful project. And one day you catch yourself really, dreadfully bored of it, yet still fervently working on it. Maybe due to a sense of ownership -- not wanting others to screw it up --, or maybe just because a ton of people expect you to and it gives you a little prestige that you're afraid to let go of. If you're lucky you'll wake up and stop lying to yourself, move on to different things, hopefully find someone to continue the work. Because even though you genuinely care about the project and don't want to disappoint its fans, you can't kill yourself doing it.
Unwise to generate publicity for a toy project? Definitely. He's only human. It's clear that the main thing he enjoys is sharing his toys, not necessarily generating a finished product.
First, to be on the cop's side -- these aren't just security cameras watching specific areas from a distance, this is directly monitoring someone's work. I'm not foolish enough to trust any of them, but I venture to guess that the majority of cops are well-meaning and ethical, and do not throw the power trips you see an abundance of on Youtube. I'd quit any job if my employer tried to look over my shoulder in this way. But then again, my job as a software dev does not give me a power that can so easily have direct, permanent ramifications on the lives of others if abused. I'm conflicted on this point.
At the same time, as a joe citizen I don't want to have cops walking the streets with facial recognition devices potentially giving false positives with some criminal who happens to have a vaguely similar facial structure. And because the tech is there, what's to stop them from recording and cataloging what faces they capture, or even just fully archiving the entire video feed? Once someone has the video, what's to stop them from looking at it and leaking it? I really would rather not see a video of a crime scene involving my loved ones pop up because of some douchebag cop wanting to make a buck selling it to a sleazy website.
First, Wikileaks isn't just about making information open. They are about giving that information the most impact possible. If they release 400GB of damning stuff, do you think news organizations around the world will be able to stay on point, or will the primary story just be an unhelpful "Wikileaks releases 400GB of information"? It will eventually all get out, but in smaller, focused chunks. They also like to scrub information first so they don't end up blowing military or covert ops that could result in lives lost.
Because they release it in small chunks, they don't want anybody deciding to raid Wikileaks to prevent whatever is coming next. This way, there are copies all over the place. Presumable a number of trusted people have the key and would be able to let it all loose in such a major event.
Digg's thing is all about measuring how relevant a news story is. Getting thousands of extra, live data points for the cost of some initial development and bandwidth seems like a pretty good deal.
Considering peering, your bandwidth consumption is basically free for your ISP if you stay within their network, right? Is it technically feasible for them to give you uncapped speeds for connections which never leave their network?
There's that saying that the best camera is the one you've got on you when the moment happens. This is clearly targeting photographers who can't carry a DSLR with them all the time, or people interested in photography but not willing to commit to an expensive camera.
The 41MP isn't just so you can take gargantuan pictures -- it is intended to replace a zoom lens. The example photos I've seen look comparable to the best point-and-shoots I've seen, and it has exceptional OIS and low-light performance. If they work out the kinks it'll replace a point-and-shoot quite well.
A small target market is made even smaller due to lack of interest in Windows Phone. I can't help wonder how many of these they're expecting to sell.
That's my point -- you can't simply skip to the next line. Where a HTTP header's value ends and the next header begins is dependent on the header. They can even span multiple lines. Custom headers are impossible to parse correctly, so implementations usually just assume they'll be on a single line, or maybe quoted like some of the standard headers allow.
Slashdot Mirror
Games are typically designed with ultra-high res textures and ultra-high poly or NURBS models which get transformed into something which will run on PCs. For textures this is a relatively simple resize (I say relatively because many of them actually get it wrong!), and for models this means generating bump/tessellation maps, etc.
It doesn't make any sense for them to make multiple sets of these high-quality assets because whichever has lesser quality (games) can be generated from the one with higher-quality.
A lot of the the time, the examiner responsible for a patent application is not particularly worried about the quality of the patent being issue but is more concerned with just getting the application off his/her docket. This makes it reasonably likely that the examiner will either ignore the new prior art or accept whatever dubious amendment/argument that the patent owner submitted.
This may very well be true, and I would sadly not bat an eye in surprise.
I would suggest that a better strategy is to just record and publish lists of prior art after the patent issues.
But seriously, the fact that the patent office is so messed up that this is the advice when it comes to reducing patent garbage... this launches a huge war in my head, between the pragmatic programmer and the idealistic open-source hacker.
This is fucking disgusting.
My MP3 player, the nearly 10 years old Cowon D2, actually came with a power-only USB cable. Maybe their goal was to save money on copper.
Why are you running 64-bit Windows when all the Atom chipsets only support 2GB of RAM?
This is not true. Cedar Trail (the current gen, out for about 2 years now) supports 4GB max, which is what I have in mine.
I just read the book Multipliers. It is targeted towards managers, but I think it is useful information for just about anyone. This dev (who has so far shown no interest in joining management) certainly took it to heart. The book compares "diminishers" and "multipliers".
Diminishers, like your company rockstar. They need to know everything and have the last word. They can appear to be a team player when they're really just using people around them to prop themselves up. They strike fear into people who challenge them. They make large decisions by themselves, or take input from a small inner circle of people. They are at their A game, but diminish other people's output and potential. When people work with diminishers, they feel like they're giving 50%. It is a net loss.
Multipliers create an environment where people can give input with confidence, make mistakes, and learn from them. This doesn't mean they are soft. In return for this they expect greatness and weed out those who can't give it or who can't work with the team. They identify genius (described in the book as an innate, exceptional ability which someone may not even realize they have) and try to flourish it. A multiplier can still be at their A game, but puts emphasis toward helping others grow. When people work with multipliers, they feel like they're giving 150%.
It sounds a lot like some management BS and I'm sure I'm not selling it well, but it really is a great read. It has a lot of studies within tech companies, so it was generally very relateable. It helped me identify areas of improvement in myself, not just in my attitude but also to find opportunities to help others grow where I otherwise may have just taken control and pushed someone out.
PowerVR has some of the most pathetic support for x86 and Windows I've ever seen, and it hasn't got any better. With my fanless Shuttle PC using an Atom N2800, I have a choice of either 32-bit Windows and glitchy graphics, 64-bit Windows and VGA output, or Linux with VGA output. It's pretty obvious why, of course... PowerVR's x86 market is so infinitesimally small compared to their ARM market, they probably hired some old printer driver developer to be the sole guy working on it stashed in a closet somewhere. It is really surprising that Intel ever decided to use them, without some sort of support contract built in.
Small projects can be about purity. Making the best possible code base you can. Especially ones where people work on it for free -- they wouldn't be working on it if they didn't deeply believe in it.
Large corporations have different goals. The success of a changeset is not measured in how many bugs you fix or even how many features you add, but how much positive impact your paying customers and shareholders perceive.
The problem with FLAC is that a minor loss of data can result in an archive that cannot be extracted. A single bit error can result in major lossage. PCM does not have that problem - you only lose what you lose.
I'd say you're doing it wrong, then. I'd prefer to have zero loss of data. Format used (FLAC vs WAV) does not really affect this.
For something you can recover from a 3rd party but would rather not (personal rips), make some parity archives – a few MB for a ~400MB album will let you recover from several errors and still be much smaller than a WAV file. Studio masters should be backed up in multiple highly-reliable places – no excuses there.
That said, I've always wondered why FLAC does not have FEC capability built in. It makes sense for a lossless format to have some support for more reliable archiving.
Does FLAC support 24bit/192kHz? If not, it's useless for recording masters.
FLAC supports up to 32-bit @ 655 kHz
He might be a fantastic audio engineer, but I think his reason for continuing to use analog tape is idiotic.
I can't see FLAC losing support for a long long time. When it finally does, the beauty of lossless digital formats is that you can batch-convert your entire library into a newer, better format with a very small script and no loss of quality. Seriously, if you don't have the diligence to convert your music library once every 25 years, do you really think you'll be able to keep a tape from rotting or being accidentally degaussed?
As for tape -- once it's on there, that's it. You can't transfer the audio anywhere else without it being lossy. Audio engineers have been able to transfer older recordings from tape with excellent results so I'm not say it would necessarily sound bad (assuming your tape is still good) but why use a lossy format if you don't have to?
I can only assume his reasoning is for the super-long-term Roland Emmerich future. In 2000 years, some aliens will be digging up a post-nuke Earth and come across a collection of tapes, which will be easy to reverse engineer relative to a digital system's multiple formats (HDD/file system/compression).
This sounds like the classic case of an audiophile finding a way to justify use of an ancient technology, but I don't understand how an actual audio engineer could succumb to such nonsense.
Yes, meaningless. Tell that to XVID, x264, and LAME. All very successful Open Source projects implementing patent minefields. Sometimes it's more about the fun of coding than pushing an ideology.
Because anything less then 100 Hz looks stuttery as hell.
This really isn't true. The cause of stutter is fast shutter speeds. A standard film is shot at 24fps with a 1/48 shutter -- literally throwing out half the temporal information and causing the image to "jump" between frames. They do this because it creates a sharper image. Some movies use an even faster shutter to create a super-sharp or gritty feel -- Children of Men for instance.
I guess some social skill is better than none, especially for those with serious disorders. This could have benefits.
Yet, somehow this reminds me of Comcast's CableCard activation line. Every time I've called it, I get someone sounding exactly the same... an guy with a truly bizarre, unplaceable and somewhat feminine accent and an equally WTF speech pattern.
Some outsourced call center is training every one of their employees to sound exactly the same, to the point that I've called from multiple time zones, at all hours of the day, and from different numbers/accounts and am still not entirely sure if they have more than a single sleepless extraterrestrial behind the phone. Creepy as hell. And this type of app sounds like just the thing to do that.
I have a Unichip in my car. It plugs in between the car's computer and its sensors, modifying the signals to influence performance. Undetectable and takes 10 minutes to install. It's programmable, too, via USB, and might work for what you're proposing without any new hardware.
Creepy? Yes. But also logical.
Looking at friends, I think, would be a great indicator if someone has no credit history, or if they're taking out a large loan and have never done so before. It would be foolish of them to look at your friends if you've got a full history of being responsible with the kind of loan you're asking for -- I can't see them doing this.
And your account logins, OF COURSE THEY WANT THIS. Everyone does, because everyone is fucking evil. I'm totally not surprised. Don't sign up with them.
It'd be really clever if someone made it into a ring.
Click N' Play was great -- heavy on the GUI with some very light scripting to tie more complex events together, and you could create a pretty wide variety of games so long as they were 2D.
I don't really feel sorry for him, but I do understand him. Few of us will ever know what it's like to have success on Notch's scale, but I'm sure plenty of us can relate even in some small way.
Sometimes, usually by accident, you fall into a wildly successful project. And one day you catch yourself really, dreadfully bored of it, yet still fervently working on it. Maybe due to a sense of ownership -- not wanting others to screw it up --, or maybe just because a ton of people expect you to and it gives you a little prestige that you're afraid to let go of. If you're lucky you'll wake up and stop lying to yourself, move on to different things, hopefully find someone to continue the work. Because even though you genuinely care about the project and don't want to disappoint its fans, you can't kill yourself doing it.
Unwise to generate publicity for a toy project? Definitely. He's only human. It's clear that the main thing he enjoys is sharing his toys, not necessarily generating a finished product.
There's so much potential for abuse.
First, to be on the cop's side -- these aren't just security cameras watching specific areas from a distance, this is directly monitoring someone's work. I'm not foolish enough to trust any of them, but I venture to guess that the majority of cops are well-meaning and ethical, and do not throw the power trips you see an abundance of on Youtube. I'd quit any job if my employer tried to look over my shoulder in this way. But then again, my job as a software dev does not give me a power that can so easily have direct, permanent ramifications on the lives of others if abused. I'm conflicted on this point.
At the same time, as a joe citizen I don't want to have cops walking the streets with facial recognition devices potentially giving false positives with some criminal who happens to have a vaguely similar facial structure. And because the tech is there, what's to stop them from recording and cataloging what faces they capture, or even just fully archiving the entire video feed? Once someone has the video, what's to stop them from looking at it and leaking it? I really would rather not see a video of a crime scene involving my loved ones pop up because of some douchebag cop wanting to make a buck selling it to a sleazy website.
First, Wikileaks isn't just about making information open. They are about giving that information the most impact possible. If they release 400GB of damning stuff, do you think news organizations around the world will be able to stay on point, or will the primary story just be an unhelpful "Wikileaks releases 400GB of information"? It will eventually all get out, but in smaller, focused chunks. They also like to scrub information first so they don't end up blowing military or covert ops that could result in lives lost.
Because they release it in small chunks, they don't want anybody deciding to raid Wikileaks to prevent whatever is coming next. This way, there are copies all over the place. Presumable a number of trusted people have the key and would be able to let it all loose in such a major event.
Digg's thing is all about measuring how relevant a news story is. Getting thousands of extra, live data points for the cost of some initial development and bandwidth seems like a pretty good deal.
This is basically just the HEVC reference encoder right now. Expect it to be slow and inefficient.
Maybe someone here can explain this --
Considering peering, your bandwidth consumption is basically free for your ISP if you stay within their network, right? Is it technically feasible for them to give you uncapped speeds for connections which never leave their network?
There's that saying that the best camera is the one you've got on you when the moment happens. This is clearly targeting photographers who can't carry a DSLR with them all the time, or people interested in photography but not willing to commit to an expensive camera.
The 41MP isn't just so you can take gargantuan pictures -- it is intended to replace a zoom lens. The example photos I've seen look comparable to the best point-and-shoots I've seen, and it has exceptional OIS and low-light performance. If they work out the kinks it'll replace a point-and-shoot quite well.
A small target market is made even smaller due to lack of interest in Windows Phone. I can't help wonder how many of these they're expecting to sell.
That's my point -- you can't simply skip to the next line. Where a HTTP header's value ends and the next header begins is dependent on the header. They can even span multiple lines. Custom headers are impossible to parse correctly, so implementations usually just assume they'll be on a single line, or maybe quoted like some of the standard headers allow.