H.264 is the codec, flash is just the wrapper of choice these days. H.264 encoded video should be playable on any machine that can decode it and read the wrapper/container format. What makes H.264 so great is that I can encode the video once and place into whatever container I want and have it read on almost any device these days. It doesn't have to be flash, it could be MOV, M4V, MP4, whatever container. Flash is the current favourite because you can put DRM into the wrapper and make it a bit harder to remove the video from the container. When I create a quicktime movie anymore, I get two files, an.m4v that is the actual video, and the.mov which is a wrapper with a pointer to the movie.
And most video players these days will read a straight m4v encoded file whether it be on mobile phones, windows, mac, linux (provided you have the codec), console, etc..
The problem WebM has right now is that it either has to offer videographers and producers a technical advantage over H.264 and be widely adopted. Currently it's still not AS good bit for bit as H.264 and it's not yet widely adopted. Until those two hurdles are overcome, it's not going to see wide spread adoption.
Our software forces users to change their password every 90 days and it can't be the same as any of the last 4 passwords. This is do to PA-DSS compliance. Interestingly, one of the top 3 complaints we get: we force users to change their password every 90 days and it can't be the same as the last 4 used.
It depends, what is the long game? US companies have the unhealthy opinion of "What do you do for me next quarter?", but if the strategy is "Where do I want to be in 15 years?" (Europe) or "Where do I want to be in 50 years?" (Asia), then those losses are short term. And if you think the future is going to be some kind of media appliance over the next 10 - 15 years, yeah, you've lost a bunch of money on the first two generations, but the experience they've gained for the next 5 generations is invaluable.
I recently bought a 360. I used to play at my friends house, but as we've gotten older and they've gotten married/had kids or moved elsewhere...
Why did I buy a 360 over a Wii or PS3? Because that's what my friends had. Most of the people I know who bought Wii's seemed to have lost interest in the machines. Most use it more to stream Netflix than play games these days. And very few of my friends had a PS3 and most who did also had a 360.
Now I know those numbers don't hold up on a global scale. Xbox has not been that popular outside of the US.
I have friends who work at a company that produces DS games. When they were starting, about 5 kids working on masters degrees, this is exactly what they did and how the industry does work. Usually this is a playable level or proof of concept, but if it's a RPG or other type of game it may also include detailed story outline, universe background, etc.. Once you have your "demo" level created, then you start shopping around for money and demoing it to publishers. If they think it's interesting, they'll fund $X to produce an "Alpha", which is usually 3 - 5 levels or equivalent game play. If they like it then they'll fund the project to produce a final product.
That's how they got their first 2 games published. Once you've published a couple games that have been to some degree successful, then the pitch games becomes different. In fact they have several major "brands" coming to them to develop DS versions of their games. A lot of it is various board games. Yeah, it's not innovative, but the work meets payroll while they work on other projects.
We run our product off PostgreSQL and we were still deploying on 8.3 until 6 months ago. We'll probably be deploying 8.4.x until 2012. I know I want PostgreSQL 9 out for at least a year before moving anything critical over to it.
From 2000 - 2005 I bought a few AMD systems because they were a bit cheaper, but I also had quite a few CPU's fail and even one melt despite heatsink, fan, two case fans, plus another PCI slot fan. Maybe it was just my luck of the draw, but since 2005 everything I've bought except my PowerMac G5 tower has been Intel CPU's. And I haven't had any problems with the intel CPU's.
Or it was debugging code. I know when we move from development to final deployment builds of our app, the size goes from about 40MB down to 12MB once all the debugging and tests are removed.
Actually we did design one of our apps with database abstraction and used as much generic SQL as possible as I had past experience of what happens with MySQL if your app suddenly becomes popular and you need a real database like DB2. And moving from version 1.0 to 2.0 we did change databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL mainly because SUN bought MySQL and didn't really seem to know what to do with it. Still it took about two weeks of 15 hour days to fully port everything over, test, and move the production systems over. We've done tests with DB2 Express-C and moving from PostgreSQL to DB2 was fairly painless. We had it up and running on a development system within a week of spending an afternoon on development.
Fact is the government's budget is going to have to be slashed across the board. But $80B seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the $17Trillion in medicare liabilities. Same with Social Security.
It came with the $150M investment MS made in Apple about 15 years ago. There have been a couple other funny instances, like MS actually has the patent on the Jog Dial interface used by the iPods...
We often deploy SSD's in our POS terminals and recommend SSD for clients who have busy checkout lanes and performance matters. However, in servers we're still HDD because they are well known and proven technology. SSD's have been on the market long enough that they are starting to prove themselves.
But at home, I much rather have the 1TB HDD drive rather than 128MB SSD for the same price. Same thing in my laptop. I much rather have the extra storage space for the money than performance.
Or we can just keep using BBedit to do Perl,PHP, Python, and any other text based scripting language out there like we have for the past 10+ years. (Although some prefer textmate these days)
I do. When travelled by air a lot and held on to my old 12.1" powerbook expressly because it would fit onto a tray table even in coach. Although the laptop did weigh about 5 pounds. I kept using the powerbook as my main machine for email and writing documentation up until a month ago when the power plug broke off in it. I have been using my iPad as the replacement with a docking station at work and one at home. It works well for it's purpose and I can edit documents using iWork.
I've been waiting to see what Apple announced in october and was seriously looking at getting a 13" MacBook pro at the end of the year. Starting next year I'll be traveling again and the iPad is not quite going to cut it. This looks like it fits the bill perfectly. And the size looks to be good for international travel where you're trying to squeeze every inch into the carry on to avoid having to pay another $150 to check an extra bag.
I learned that the hardway on the last Linux box we had around the office. I went to get a PCI wireless card, check the initial specs and all the readings said, "yep, Atheros and works with SuSE just fine". Bring it home, well turns out it was Revision 3 with a marvell chipset which linux didn't support at the time.. I eventually got it to work with a windows driver wrapper after a few hours of banging my head against a wall and remembering this is what made me switch to a mac when OS 10.1 was released.
It depends. Is the product developed by a company? Juniper offers training on their JunOS, based on BSD. Talend offers training and services for their application, as does Jasper Reports, and Openbravo (well with their ERP at least, POS side, not so much). Red Hat offers training an certification for their platform. Novell offers training for SuSE. We develop documentation and offer training for SuitePOS. In fact that is what we're selling is the documentation, training, customization, and technical support and all because the the product/project we forked from failed to offer these services.
Opensource is a big world. Now there are a lot of OSS projects where support is non-existant.
Against Apple, what they have to fear is iWork. Honestly, the past two years I've been using iWork for 90% of my business needs and now I use it on my iPad. But what really hurt MS Office on Mac was the removal of VB Macro support. I had to keep a machine with Office 2004 just incase someone sent me an excel file with macros. The only application that MS Office still has as a killer app is PowerPoint. For presentations PowerPoint for Mac is still king in my book. I can get by with Keynote, but I still prefer PowerPoint. Especially the powerpoint templates.
When I bought my first Mac I got along with Apple Works for about year until I really needed powerpoint.
We deal with HP's point of sale side of the business with our clients and they are a different business unit from the corporate division and consumer division and we've had nothing but great support. Something fails with our client's hardware, usually there is a new unit there the next business day. Most get their $250 per unit extended warranty not only on the CPU, but all peripherals as well. Barcode scanner dies after 3 years, the send a new one. Touch screen dies after 4, they send a new one. Usually it takes less than a 30 minutes on the phone or with their integrated support software for it to happen too. I guess when it comes to HP it depends on what side of house your talking to.
I know a local fortune 500 company that tried this at one of their two buildings here at their corporate campus a couple years ago. Well, they are back to a desktop at every cubical now because they found if something happened, like a switch went down, suddenly all 100 - 200 terminals on that floor was down and no one could do anything until it was back up. With desktops, they may not be able answer emails, but they could at least still use office and get something accomplished if the network went down. You take 100 employs making 20/hr sitting and doing nothing for 2 - 3 hours and you've bought yourself the cost of the PC's.
We provide a software product which we recommend the use of HP rp series Point of Sale terminals. Why? We aren't in the hardware business and when purchased as a bundle for an extra $250 per terminal they can buy a 5-5-5 warranty package on ALL the equipment and all the peripherals. Touchscreen goes bad in year 4, HP overnights a replacement. Receipt printer goes bad, they overnight a replacement. Barcode scanner goes bad, over night a replacement.
We have another company that sells a rebranded version of our POS for a niche industry and they elected to field cheaper equipment they built themselves for less $500 per terminal made up of dual core Atom boxes. Problem is, every couple months they go to order from Tiger Direct or EggHead, it's a slightly different box with different cases/psu's. Plus they order an extra box for every 5 they sell just to have on hand so they can ship it out overnight. And when they do it that, it costs them $100 - $150 in shipping costs. I don't know what they're field rate is, but I believe they are leasing out the boxes to companies for a monthly fee so technically they don't have to release their modified code.
Which I guess works for them, but I don't want to the hassle. And frankly, we've had a couple times where something wasn't working right. HP didn't mess around and just shipped a new unit. Client was happy, we were happy, everybody wins. Granted HP isn't the cheapest, but are competitive in the POS hardware market.
Something I've noticed in the latest iWork software it is extremely easy to export to epub, which then can be read by a number of eReader apps and on the i devices. But writing and publishing isn't what takes up a lot of time and effort for publishers: it's the editing and type setting that is expensive. I have a client and good friend who is in the publishing business and has been for 25 years. We use him for publishing our technical documentation and most of his time/fees are taking what we wrote in whatever word processor and then formatting in Quark or InDesign with making sure images, charts, and graphs are all in the right DPI. Also they do a fair amount of editing and making things visually look neat, clean, and organized.
I have developers and a technical writer who do good work with content and wording, but if you take what they submit as a rough draft and what our publisher actually prints, hey turn good documentation in to great documentation just because of it is presented on the pages. And it takes a certain kind of eye for that kind of work.
Slashdot Mirror
...welcome our new sports writing robotic overlords!
H.264 is the codec, flash is just the wrapper of choice these days. H.264 encoded video should be playable on any machine that can decode it and read the wrapper/container format. What makes H.264 so great is that I can encode the video once and place into whatever container I want and have it read on almost any device these days. It doesn't have to be flash, it could be MOV, M4V, MP4, whatever container. Flash is the current favourite because you can put DRM into the wrapper and make it a bit harder to remove the video from the container. When I create a quicktime movie anymore, I get two files, an .m4v that is the actual video, and the .mov which is a wrapper with a pointer to the movie.
And most video players these days will read a straight m4v encoded file whether it be on mobile phones, windows, mac, linux (provided you have the codec), console, etc..
The problem WebM has right now is that it either has to offer videographers and producers a technical advantage over H.264 and be widely adopted. Currently it's still not AS good bit for bit as H.264 and it's not yet widely adopted. Until those two hurdles are overcome, it's not going to see wide spread adoption.
Our software forces users to change their password every 90 days and it can't be the same as any of the last 4 passwords. This is do to PA-DSS compliance. Interestingly, one of the top 3 complaints we get: we force users to change their password every 90 days and it can't be the same as the last 4 used.
It depends, what is the long game? US companies have the unhealthy opinion of "What do you do for me next quarter?", but if the strategy is "Where do I want to be in 15 years?" (Europe) or "Where do I want to be in 50 years?" (Asia), then those losses are short term. And if you think the future is going to be some kind of media appliance over the next 10 - 15 years, yeah, you've lost a bunch of money on the first two generations, but the experience they've gained for the next 5 generations is invaluable.
I recently bought a 360. I used to play at my friends house, but as we've gotten older and they've gotten married/had kids or moved elsewhere...
Why did I buy a 360 over a Wii or PS3? Because that's what my friends had. Most of the people I know who bought Wii's seemed to have lost interest in the machines. Most use it more to stream Netflix than play games these days. And very few of my friends had a PS3 and most who did also had a 360.
Now I know those numbers don't hold up on a global scale. Xbox has not been that popular outside of the US.
I have friends who work at a company that produces DS games. When they were starting, about 5 kids working on masters degrees, this is exactly what they did and how the industry does work. Usually this is a playable level or proof of concept, but if it's a RPG or other type of game it may also include detailed story outline, universe background, etc.. Once you have your "demo" level created, then you start shopping around for money and demoing it to publishers. If they think it's interesting, they'll fund $X to produce an "Alpha", which is usually 3 - 5 levels or equivalent game play. If they like it then they'll fund the project to produce a final product.
That's how they got their first 2 games published. Once you've published a couple games that have been to some degree successful, then the pitch games becomes different. In fact they have several major "brands" coming to them to develop DS versions of their games. A lot of it is various board games. Yeah, it's not innovative, but the work meets payroll while they work on other projects.
We run our product off PostgreSQL and we were still deploying on 8.3 until 6 months ago. We'll probably be deploying 8.4.x until 2012. I know I want PostgreSQL 9 out for at least a year before moving anything critical over to it.
Until prompted at the terminal whether they wanted to play global thermal nuclear war....
From 2000 - 2005 I bought a few AMD systems because they were a bit cheaper, but I also had quite a few CPU's fail and even one melt despite heatsink, fan, two case fans, plus another PCI slot fan. Maybe it was just my luck of the draw, but since 2005 everything I've bought except my PowerMac G5 tower has been Intel CPU's. And I haven't had any problems with the intel CPU's.
You mean, Velour? Although I guess it does take Valour to make comments on /. sometimes.
Or it was debugging code. I know when we move from development to final deployment builds of our app, the size goes from about 40MB down to 12MB once all the debugging and tests are removed.
because it's so cold and vampires don't have body heat so they'd turn into vampcicles....or was that zombies.
Actually we did design one of our apps with database abstraction and used as much generic SQL as possible as I had past experience of what happens with MySQL if your app suddenly becomes popular and you need a real database like DB2. And moving from version 1.0 to 2.0 we did change databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL mainly because SUN bought MySQL and didn't really seem to know what to do with it. Still it took about two weeks of 15 hour days to fully port everything over, test, and move the production systems over. We've done tests with DB2 Express-C and moving from PostgreSQL to DB2 was fairly painless. We had it up and running on a development system within a week of spending an afternoon on development.
Fact is the government's budget is going to have to be slashed across the board. But $80B seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the $17Trillion in medicare liabilities. Same with Social Security.
Apple and MS have a cross-licensing patenting agreement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation
It came with the $150M investment MS made in Apple about 15 years ago. There have been a couple other funny instances, like MS actually has the patent on the Jog Dial interface used by the iPods...
Apple owns CUPS. The same printing system as used by most linux distros as well as the BSD's.
We often deploy SSD's in our POS terminals and recommend SSD for clients who have busy checkout lanes and performance matters. However, in servers we're still HDD because they are well known and proven technology. SSD's have been on the market long enough that they are starting to prove themselves.
But at home, I much rather have the 1TB HDD drive rather than 128MB SSD for the same price. Same thing in my laptop. I much rather have the extra storage space for the money than performance.
Or we can just keep using BBedit to do Perl,PHP, Python, and any other text based scripting language out there like we have for the past 10+ years. (Although some prefer textmate these days)
I do. When travelled by air a lot and held on to my old 12.1" powerbook expressly because it would fit onto a tray table even in coach. Although the laptop did weigh about 5 pounds. I kept using the powerbook as my main machine for email and writing documentation up until a month ago when the power plug broke off in it. I have been using my iPad as the replacement with a docking station at work and one at home. It works well for it's purpose and I can edit documents using iWork.
I've been waiting to see what Apple announced in october and was seriously looking at getting a 13" MacBook pro at the end of the year. Starting next year I'll be traveling again and the iPad is not quite going to cut it. This looks like it fits the bill perfectly. And the size looks to be good for international travel where you're trying to squeeze every inch into the carry on to avoid having to pay another $150 to check an extra bag.
I learned that the hardway on the last Linux box we had around the office. I went to get a PCI wireless card, check the initial specs and all the readings said, "yep, Atheros and works with SuSE just fine". Bring it home, well turns out it was Revision 3 with a marvell chipset which linux didn't support at the time.. I eventually got it to work with a windows driver wrapper after a few hours of banging my head against a wall and remembering this is what made me switch to a mac when OS 10.1 was released.
It depends. Is the product developed by a company? Juniper offers training on their JunOS, based on BSD. Talend offers training and services for their application, as does Jasper Reports, and Openbravo (well with their ERP at least, POS side, not so much). Red Hat offers training an certification for their platform. Novell offers training for SuSE. We develop documentation and offer training for SuitePOS. In fact that is what we're selling is the documentation, training, customization, and technical support and all because the the product/project we forked from failed to offer these services.
Opensource is a big world. Now there are a lot of OSS projects where support is non-existant.
Against Apple, what they have to fear is iWork. Honestly, the past two years I've been using iWork for 90% of my business needs and now I use it on my iPad. But what really hurt MS Office on Mac was the removal of VB Macro support. I had to keep a machine with Office 2004 just incase someone sent me an excel file with macros. The only application that MS Office still has as a killer app is PowerPoint. For presentations PowerPoint for Mac is still king in my book. I can get by with Keynote, but I still prefer PowerPoint. Especially the powerpoint templates.
When I bought my first Mac I got along with Apple Works for about year until I really needed powerpoint.
We deal with HP's point of sale side of the business with our clients and they are a different business unit from the corporate division and consumer division and we've had nothing but great support. Something fails with our client's hardware, usually there is a new unit there the next business day. Most get their $250 per unit extended warranty not only on the CPU, but all peripherals as well. Barcode scanner dies after 3 years, the send a new one. Touch screen dies after 4, they send a new one. Usually it takes less than a 30 minutes on the phone or with their integrated support software for it to happen too. I guess when it comes to HP it depends on what side of house your talking to.
I know a local fortune 500 company that tried this at one of their two buildings here at their corporate campus a couple years ago. Well, they are back to a desktop at every cubical now because they found if something happened, like a switch went down, suddenly all 100 - 200 terminals on that floor was down and no one could do anything until it was back up. With desktops, they may not be able answer emails, but they could at least still use office and get something accomplished if the network went down. You take 100 employs making 20/hr sitting and doing nothing for 2 - 3 hours and you've bought yourself the cost of the PC's.
We provide a software product which we recommend the use of HP rp series Point of Sale terminals. Why? We aren't in the hardware business and when purchased as a bundle for an extra $250 per terminal they can buy a 5-5-5 warranty package on ALL the equipment and all the peripherals. Touchscreen goes bad in year 4, HP overnights a replacement. Receipt printer goes bad, they overnight a replacement. Barcode scanner goes bad, over night a replacement.
We have another company that sells a rebranded version of our POS for a niche industry and they elected to field cheaper equipment they built themselves for less $500 per terminal made up of dual core Atom boxes. Problem is, every couple months they go to order from Tiger Direct or EggHead, it's a slightly different box with different cases/psu's. Plus they order an extra box for every 5 they sell just to have on hand so they can ship it out overnight. And when they do it that, it costs them $100 - $150 in shipping costs. I don't know what they're field rate is, but I believe they are leasing out the boxes to companies for a monthly fee so technically they don't have to release their modified code.
Which I guess works for them, but I don't want to the hassle. And frankly, we've had a couple times where something wasn't working right. HP didn't mess around and just shipped a new unit. Client was happy, we were happy, everybody wins. Granted HP isn't the cheapest, but are competitive in the POS hardware market.
Something I've noticed in the latest iWork software it is extremely easy to export to epub, which then can be read by a number of eReader apps and on the i devices. But writing and publishing isn't what takes up a lot of time and effort for publishers: it's the editing and type setting that is expensive. I have a client and good friend who is in the publishing business and has been for 25 years. We use him for publishing our technical documentation and most of his time/fees are taking what we wrote in whatever word processor and then formatting in Quark or InDesign with making sure images, charts, and graphs are all in the right DPI. Also they do a fair amount of editing and making things visually look neat, clean, and organized.
I have developers and a technical writer who do good work with content and wording, but if you take what they submit as a rough draft and what our publisher actually prints, hey turn good documentation in to great documentation just because of it is presented on the pages. And it takes a certain kind of eye for that kind of work.