"The applicants and others have been making huge efforts, not only against the Newzbin website, but against piracy in general and yet the industries are still suffering huge losses to piracy," Richard Spearman, representing the MPA, told the court.
I guess this is as close we'll ever get to hearing them say "Over the past 10 years we've spent a lot of our members' cash trying to kill off sharing sites, yet we've ultimately proven ineffective."
Apple, Amazon, Spotify, and others have affected piracy far more than the RIAA/MPAA/etc. ever will.
I guess it means that even if you're watching a single channel and not recording anything else at the moment, the second/third/etc. tuners are still powered on.
It could probably be helped further if the device recognized when your TV was turned off, so it could turn off tuners/HDD completely when it's not recording. There are probably other things like hardware MPEG codecs and video-out that could be turned off as well.
I don't know how much power they consume but I can attest to the tuners I have in my PC being very hot even when I'm not using them. So I guess the problem applies to more than just DVRs and cable boxes.
An interesting part of AMP is that it is platform-agnostic. Their implementation uses DirectCompute under the hood, but none of that is exposed in the API. This means it could probably be implemented for *nix.
Believe it or not, Microsoft has also done this a couple other times recently -- with real results -- and it all comes from the native C++ team as part of Microsoft's new-found focus on C++ after so many years in.NET mode.
The Parallel Patterns Library integrates extremely well. It knows that it's a C++ library and doesn't try to act like a Windows library, and certainly not like a COM library. It's pure, modern C++. So much, in fact, that Intel's Thread Building Blocks provides a compatible implementation that is cross-platform. If AMP ends up being similar, this could indeed be a very cool thing.
With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft showed everyone that they finally get it. One UI doesn't work everywhere. If this UI is used for normal desktop PCs, I guess it will disprove that.
They haven't said so yet, but I'm going to bet this will be a completely optional shell. Similar to Windows Media Center, it will be there but won't be forced and probably not enabled by default on desktops.
As a tablet interface, I think this looks pretty slick. The ability to run non-tablet apps could prove useful for power users, too.
Already last season the new Doctor was a little too full of himself, but I was quite shocked to find that it got infinitely worse this season.
Agreed. It seems like the new way the Doctor gets out of impossible situations always begins with something like "Do you know who I am? I did X, I did Y, I'm the Doctor, you should fear me!", sometimes ending with the bad guys just picking up and scampering away.
Last season was terrible about this, and it's carried over into this season despite the new Doctor and change of show runner. The cocky Doctor needs to go.
River Song doesn't bother me quite as much, but she's definitely the Doctor's version of LOST -- lots of mystery and never any pay off. It seems like this arc might finally come to an end this season, but who knows.
I can't speak to what Amazon measured as "50%" nor what PhrostyMcByte measured at "6%"... they both sound like strange attempts to connote more than measure.
The 6% is a fact -- E-Ink's website has all the technical details of their Pearl screen, and anyone can do the math. I was curious about it so I did. The 50% number is technically correct, but is cheating a little. It corresponds to the amount of light reflected and NOT the perceived brightness (your eyes don't see twice the photons as 2x brighter).
E-Ink already has pretty poor contrast... about as much as a newspaper if you're in good light, and significantly less in poor light. I'm not knocking progress -- only their marketing.
I find it laughable that this is what it comes down to.
Something that would set a reader worlds ahead of the others is proper typesetting. I want automatic hyphenation, good kerning, ligatures, hanging punctuation, and paragraph-optimized justification.
Should all be completely doable on a low-power device. This is the last great advantage that books have over e-readers. The first one to get these things wins, hands down. I fear it'll be a long time coming though, since a lot of these devices seem to be designed by people who don't actually read.
I own the original Nook, and get in at least an hour, usually two or more, spread throughout the day. Do people buying dedicated e-readers (as opposed to color tablets) really only get in a half hour every day? I'd thought the market was mostly for readers like me.
Then again Amazon is no saint here either, with their "50% higher contrast Kindle 3!" which in reality only had 6% darker (to the eye) blacks.
The disadvantage of 2D is that animating sprites requires a new texture for each frame... upscale all of those, and you might run out of video memory. Something like Mario might work, but I'm not sure about Street Fighter.
(Conceptually, of course. In reality you'd probably bundle an entire animation into one larger texture)
This doesn't make much sense, but I suppose it comes down to how they licensed it. If Apple is allowed to sub-license the patent to whoever they want, then right on. If not, then for this to work it means your apps are all owned entirely by Apple. Now that's a scary thought!
Some elderly get comfortable doing things one specific way. By the time they're forced to change, things are completely unfamiliar. When nothing is familiar, they don't feel comfortable enough to just play around until they figure it out.
In contrast, we use tech every day. Nothing seems entirely unfamiliar to us because we have a very gradual introduction into new things. We intimately know the old feature, so much that the new one feels obvious and with immediate benefit, allowing us to lock in quickly.
I think Microsoft—after repeatedly failing in the tablet market with Windows—has finally noticed that precisely what allows the current tablets to succeed is that they don't try to act like a touch-screen desktop. There's no point in them bringing compatibility with old apps!
Portal 2 was made with casual console gamers in mind -- you probably noticed that those tricks in Portal that required good reflexes and precise aim are gone. Now all the challenges really just involve figuring out the order to place portals, with lots of auto-aim to help you hit the right spots. It removed most of the skill from the game and left only the puzzle solving.
Don't get me wrong, the later challenges were for the most part fun and reasonably difficult. I'm just looking forward to seeing some made-for-PC custom maps. There's a lot of room for variety and difficulty.
I think his whole point is that the barrier to entry is now so low that college and even high-school kids can easily have a number of high-quality apps out by the time they're ready to get a job.
This is a good way of filtering out people who're book smart but not really motivated or enthusiastic about it.
The big bugs have all been patched. Some minor glitches remain, but nothing that takes away from gameplay. Give it another try. I've been able to run through the game with friends without a hitch for a while now.
Okay, so the game had little story, got a little easy near the end once you learned some good spells, and it has little replayability. But the spell building mechanic was a brilliant contribution to gaming—something I think will influence many RPGs in the future. I can't wait to see how it gets refined in triple-A RPGs.
And the inside jokes were great. Every so often you hear PR-speak about how a game was designed by gamers for gamers, only to cringe at things you know any gamer wouldn't have done. Magicka was different. You could tell the game was made by people who have truly loved gaming for a long time. Their game was a celebration of it.
This isn't so much about computers doing things too slowly, or trying to compute too much. It's about computers sitting idle at the wrong times, or computing things too early or too late. It's about buffering -- which trades latency for throughput -- making it more and more difficult to coordinate those timings correctly.
In gaming you have screen lag, video card lag, render lag, input lag, and network lag. They all add up, and synchronizing their timings to make things appear fluid and lag-free is so difficult that most games end up leaving some not-so-corner cases uncovered.
Quality of gaming has been measured in FPS for so long that video drivers have been "optimized" to transparently buffer 3 or more frames if you turn vsync on. I've seen this alone destroy many unsuspecting games.
A cable box needs to have a separate tuner for each stream. Live TV takes one, each recording show takes one, etc. and such keyframe prefetching would also take at least one. Most cable boxes only have 2-3 tuners, and inevitably they're all going to be taken. So while this could definitely hide the latency in some situations, it's not a perfect solution.
Cable companies are also beginning to use SDV, which broadcasts channels on demand instead of all at once. Some latency will be involved here too, because your cable box needs to send a request to the SDV hub if it's not streaming the channel already.
Although, how can you tell if it is translated correctly if you don't listen to it?
They don't listen in, at least not initially. You do. If it's not translated correctly, there's a box for you to check that gives them permission to listen.
It's been established that WebM's only real advantage is in being supposedly patent-free, with H.264 still offering significantly more room for higher quality at lower bitrates.
But YouTube doesn't care about efficiency, really. They care about speed and compatibility, which significantly reduces their options. I wonder how x264 fairs compression-wise against YouTube's WebM encoder when tuned to run at the same speed. I'd guess probably still better, but I haven't seen anyone do this sort of test.
Based on their graphs, a 3min video takes them about 1min 45sec to finish encoding -- about 85fps. Unfortunately they don't list what resolution that's in, or what encoders/settings they use.
The police's practices here are clearly an abuse of power over ignorant citizens. They are searching you. You are under no obligation to consent, though they will use their authority in attempts to trick you into it. Even if they merely ASK you what is there, it is a seach and you do not need to answer.
If police tell you to hand over an item in your car or on your person, just respectfully and unambiguously decline consent. In no case hand them anything or open a door for them, as it will imply consent. If they continue to reach into your pockets or enter your car, keep saying it. You will have a far greater chance fighting it in court.
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"The applicants and others have been making huge efforts, not only against the Newzbin website, but against piracy in general and yet the industries are still suffering huge losses to piracy," Richard Spearman, representing the MPA, told the court.
I guess this is as close we'll ever get to hearing them say "Over the past 10 years we've spent a lot of our members' cash trying to kill off sharing sites, yet we've ultimately proven ineffective."
Apple, Amazon, Spotify, and others have affected piracy far more than the RIAA/MPAA/etc. ever will.
I guess it means that even if you're watching a single channel and not recording anything else at the moment, the second/third/etc. tuners are still powered on.
It could probably be helped further if the device recognized when your TV was turned off, so it could turn off tuners/HDD completely when it's not recording. There are probably other things like hardware MPEG codecs and video-out that could be turned off as well.
I don't know how much power they consume but I can attest to the tuners I have in my PC being very hot even when I'm not using them. So I guess the problem applies to more than just DVRs and cable boxes.
An interesting part of AMP is that it is platform-agnostic. Their implementation uses DirectCompute under the hood, but none of that is exposed in the API. This means it could probably be implemented for *nix.
Believe it or not, Microsoft has also done this a couple other times recently -- with real results -- and it all comes from the native C++ team as part of Microsoft's new-found focus on C++ after so many years in .NET mode.
The Parallel Patterns Library integrates extremely well. It knows that it's a C++ library and doesn't try to act like a Windows library, and certainly not like a COM library. It's pure, modern C++. So much, in fact, that Intel's Thread Building Blocks provides a compatible implementation that is cross-platform. If AMP ends up being similar, this could indeed be a very cool thing.
With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft showed everyone that they finally get it. One UI doesn't work everywhere. If this UI is used for normal desktop PCs, I guess it will disprove that.
They haven't said so yet, but I'm going to bet this will be a completely optional shell. Similar to Windows Media Center, it will be there but won't be forced and probably not enabled by default on desktops.
As a tablet interface, I think this looks pretty slick. The ability to run non-tablet apps could prove useful for power users, too.
Already last season the new Doctor was a little too full of himself, but I was quite shocked to find that it got infinitely worse this season.
Agreed. It seems like the new way the Doctor gets out of impossible situations always begins with something like "Do you know who I am? I did X, I did Y, I'm the Doctor, you should fear me!", sometimes ending with the bad guys just picking up and scampering away.
Last season was terrible about this, and it's carried over into this season despite the new Doctor and change of show runner. The cocky Doctor needs to go.
River Song doesn't bother me quite as much, but she's definitely the Doctor's version of LOST -- lots of mystery and never any pay off. It seems like this arc might finally come to an end this season, but who knows.
I can't speak to what Amazon measured as "50%" nor what PhrostyMcByte measured at "6%" ... they both sound like strange attempts to connote more than measure.
The 6% is a fact -- E-Ink's website has all the technical details of their Pearl screen, and anyone can do the math. I was curious about it so I did. The 50% number is technically correct, but is cheating a little. It corresponds to the amount of light reflected and NOT the perceived brightness (your eyes don't see twice the photons as 2x brighter).
E-Ink already has pretty poor contrast... about as much as a newspaper if you're in good light, and significantly less in poor light. I'm not knocking progress -- only their marketing.
I find it laughable that this is what it comes down to.
Something that would set a reader worlds ahead of the others is proper typesetting. I want automatic hyphenation, good kerning, ligatures, hanging punctuation, and paragraph-optimized justification.
Should all be completely doable on a low-power device. This is the last great advantage that books have over e-readers. The first one to get these things wins, hands down. I fear it'll be a long time coming though, since a lot of these devices seem to be designed by people who don't actually read.
I own the original Nook, and get in at least an hour, usually two or more, spread throughout the day. Do people buying dedicated e-readers (as opposed to color tablets) really only get in a half hour every day? I'd thought the market was mostly for readers like me.
Then again Amazon is no saint here either, with their "50% higher contrast Kindle 3!" which in reality only had 6% darker (to the eye) blacks.
The disadvantage of 2D is that animating sprites requires a new texture for each frame... upscale all of those, and you might run out of video memory. Something like Mario might work, but I'm not sure about Street Fighter. (Conceptually, of course. In reality you'd probably bundle an entire animation into one larger texture)
This doesn't make much sense, but I suppose it comes down to how they licensed it. If Apple is allowed to sub-license the patent to whoever they want, then right on. If not, then for this to work it means your apps are all owned entirely by Apple. Now that's a scary thought!
I think it's an issue of familiarity.
Some elderly get comfortable doing things one specific way. By the time they're forced to change, things are completely unfamiliar. When nothing is familiar, they don't feel comfortable enough to just play around until they figure it out.
In contrast, we use tech every day. Nothing seems entirely unfamiliar to us because we have a very gradual introduction into new things. We intimately know the old feature, so much that the new one feels obvious and with immediate benefit, allowing us to lock in quickly.
I think Microsoft—after repeatedly failing in the tablet market with Windows—has finally noticed that precisely what allows the current tablets to succeed is that they don't try to act like a touch-screen desktop. There's no point in them bringing compatibility with old apps!
6,073,150
Best patent I've found? Computing the absolute value of an integer. Yes, really.
Currently owned by Oracle, previously by Sun.
Portal 2 was made with casual console gamers in mind -- you probably noticed that those tricks in Portal that required good reflexes and precise aim are gone. Now all the challenges really just involve figuring out the order to place portals, with lots of auto-aim to help you hit the right spots. It removed most of the skill from the game and left only the puzzle solving.
Don't get me wrong, the later challenges were for the most part fun and reasonably difficult. I'm just looking forward to seeing some made-for-PC custom maps. There's a lot of room for variety and difficulty.
I think his whole point is that the barrier to entry is now so low that college and even high-school kids can easily have a number of high-quality apps out by the time they're ready to get a job.
This is a good way of filtering out people who're book smart but not really motivated or enthusiastic about it.
The big bugs have all been patched. Some minor glitches remain, but nothing that takes away from gameplay. Give it another try. I've been able to run through the game with friends without a hitch for a while now.
Okay, so the game had little story, got a little easy near the end once you learned some good spells, and it has little replayability. But the spell building mechanic was a brilliant contribution to gaming—something I think will influence many RPGs in the future. I can't wait to see how it gets refined in triple-A RPGs.
And the inside jokes were great. Every so often you hear PR-speak about how a game was designed by gamers for gamers, only to cringe at things you know any gamer wouldn't have done. Magicka was different. You could tell the game was made by people who have truly loved gaming for a long time. Their game was a celebration of it.
This isn't so much about computers doing things too slowly, or trying to compute too much. It's about computers sitting idle at the wrong times, or computing things too early or too late. It's about buffering -- which trades latency for throughput -- making it more and more difficult to coordinate those timings correctly.
In gaming you have screen lag, video card lag, render lag, input lag, and network lag. They all add up, and synchronizing their timings to make things appear fluid and lag-free is so difficult that most games end up leaving some not-so-corner cases uncovered.
Quality of gaming has been measured in FPS for so long that video drivers have been "optimized" to transparently buffer 3 or more frames if you turn vsync on. I've seen this alone destroy many unsuspecting games.
A cable box needs to have a separate tuner for each stream. Live TV takes one, each recording show takes one, etc. and such keyframe prefetching would also take at least one. Most cable boxes only have 2-3 tuners, and inevitably they're all going to be taken. So while this could definitely hide the latency in some situations, it's not a perfect solution.
Cable companies are also beginning to use SDV, which broadcasts channels on demand instead of all at once. Some latency will be involved here too, because your cable box needs to send a request to the SDV hub if it's not streaming the channel already.
They don't listen in, at least not initially. You do. If it's not translated correctly, there's a box for you to check that gives them permission to listen.
Not just that, but I don't remember it being ground-breaking at all. It was a bit boring.
It's been established that WebM's only real advantage is in being supposedly patent-free, with H.264 still offering significantly more room for higher quality at lower bitrates.
But YouTube doesn't care about efficiency, really. They care about speed and compatibility, which significantly reduces their options. I wonder how x264 fairs compression-wise against YouTube's WebM encoder when tuned to run at the same speed. I'd guess probably still better, but I haven't seen anyone do this sort of test.
Based on their graphs, a 3min video takes them about 1min 45sec to finish encoding -- about 85fps. Unfortunately they don't list what resolution that's in, or what encoders/settings they use.
What the hell??? Don't erase your phone.
The police's practices here are clearly an abuse of power over ignorant citizens. They are searching you. You are under no obligation to consent, though they will use their authority in attempts to trick you into it. Even if they merely ASK you what is there, it is a seach and you do not need to answer.
If police tell you to hand over an item in your car or on your person, just respectfully and unambiguously decline consent. In no case hand them anything or open a door for them, as it will imply consent. If they continue to reach into your pockets or enter your car, keep saying it. You will have a far greater chance fighting it in court.