Your post was interesting (I agree with a mod for a change). What I meant was that your post should have been a reply to the original parody, which was a reference that I didn't get either. But it looked out of place replying to the explanation of the parody.
Wow thanks for the lecture, it's a shame that you don't know about the language to pull it off properly. I guess the fact, than unlike you, I write for living has taught me a thing or two about the language that we use.
There is no distinct shade of meaning: utilization is a *synonym* of usage. Do you know what a synonym is? Just so that you are aware - not one person has suggested blindly replacing "utilize" by "use". But the usage of the word utilization is completely unnecessary, it does not have a distinct meaning that is missing from the word usage.
It is used by pompous asshats who think it makes them sound more knowledgeable, when in fact it merely signals them out to the crowd they wish they were in. Do you know where you stand now? Or has my utilization of the language been overly taxing for your tiny brain?
Do you actually have anything worthwhile to add to the discussion or are you just going to post comments against environmentalists? Apart from your narrow stereotyping I wasn't aware that they were such a cohesive movement. They only thing that they all have in common (that I'm aware of) is that they don't want to fuck up the planet. Gee, how horrible of them. I can see why they've earnt your hatred so readily.
You have completely misunderstood the AC's point. Nothing that you have written adds to this discussion in any way. I can believe that your comment would get posted on slashdot.
Just because it has become a well-defined technical term does not stop it being a bastardisation of the English language. I actually read the essay that the AC linked to to find that Orwell makes some good points. In particular the term utilization is one of a number of phrases used to dress up a meaning and attempt to make it sound more impressive and scientific. Just because the bad authors who do this have succeeded in making the term utilization standard does not change the AC's point in any way.
I know that you're joking but I was recently shocked to discover that my ISP (who I won't name) will offer us a dedicated, unthrottled line for just 50% more. So instead of the current $40 per month for a capped 8Mb line, we are being offered an uncontended 2Mb connection without any restrictions for $65 per month. They are a large reputable ISP, and the only reason that I won't name them is we all know what happens to customer service when an ISP's popularity jumps suddenly. They have also specfically confirms that they will not throttle any kind of traffic on this line and that BitTorrent usage is fine... So I'm looking forward to nearly 800GB a month of download capacity...
No. Not as sweet as having a quad-core up until the point that one core developed a problem and then a three core machine afterwards. I'd estimate that this would be 1.5x - 2x as sweet.
The guy took CDs he bought. He ripped them to mp3. He then loaded those mp3s into some file-sharing program. Why did he do this if not for the purpose of copyright infringement?
Buying CDs is convenient way to get wav files rather than mp3s. This is changing but is still mostly the case. I doubt he wanted to lug around those wavs so he encoded them into his own preference for compression. He fired up a file-sharing program (many of which will automatically scan your harddrive and add any media files that you have to your shared folder). Regardless of why he intended to do this the law has to focus on what he has actually done, and so far he has not yet broken any laws. If he goes on to share files then he may break laws.
But is the EFF really trying to say that it's ok to try to commit copyright infringement, but only wrong if you get caught completing it?
No. They're not saying it is ok, and they do agree that it's wrong if you get caught. But the getting caught is an important aspect. People should not be taken to court because we assume that they have broken the law - there should be some proof that that they have commited an offence. The burden of proof on the accusor should be to show that the defendent commited an offense - not that he did a bunch of things that are related to commiting an offence but fall short. This is a basic principle enshrined in most Western legal systems.
Dislaimer: Substitute law-breaking for copyright infringement above if you feel picky. I know that they're different but it sounds torturous to phrase it that way.
Of course this only works if n is restricted to be less than the size of the problem. Otherwise the original criticism still stands that this doesn't disprove the original post. I'd stop digging there if I were you as trying to prove anything about this problem / solutions tends to get difficult quickly:)
Ouch three replies and nobody got what he was saying.
A single binary 1, would be -1 in 2s complement. You are talking about bytes, as in 8 bits. He is talking about a single bit, for which the two values are -1 and 0. The key word in the description is single.
There was a time when the processor market was divided between lots of players, and it did lead to radical diversity in the marketplace. But it didn't lead to the rate of progress that we've had since it became a one (and a half) horse race. There is an essential tradeoff - we have reduced choice but the standardisation of the x86 architecture(s) has pushed processors into a commodity market.
Large scale enterprises do reduce choice, and tend towards monopolies in markets. But at the same time they reduce production costs. How these savings are distributed depends entirely on the types of companies involved.
In the main the lack of innovation in the x86 market has been because it is more cost effective to push clock rates than attempt to design exotic architectures. Now that the easy gains in clock rates have been played out the marketplace is going to become a lot more interesting, the companies involved are going to have to innovate in harder areas to get ahead of each other.
I can see that this would be the case in some markets. But for some industries economies of scale mean that a smaller number of larger suppliers is more efficient. The current duopoly between Intel and AMD springs to mind.
On the last point, having a few mega-bazillion corporation that were owned by their workers (stakeholder?) would probably benefit society even more but what are the odds of that ever happening?
A) Law is a technical subject. People who specialise in it are professionals - in terms of the education that they require and the amount of time that they devote to their careers. So either we would require a society entirely composed of lawyers (who wouldn't be very good at growing food or other non-essential activities), or we would have a society full of half-assed un-educated law amateurs wielding power.
Note: I'm not suggesting that our current system doesn't involve a room full of half-assed legal amateurs being in charge, but at least they haven't contaminated the whole country.
B) Voting for issues is hard because there isn't a good way to model exclusion. The classic example is: Who wants to vote for better education? Everyone. Better hospitals? Everyone. Lower taxes? Ahh, we have a problem.
One problem is that the law is intrinsically complex - it's a model of allowable human behaviour. People qualified to work with it are specialists, and society needs a mix of specialties in order to survive and be productive. One interesting idea is machine-readable law - it doesn't make it any less complex but it does make it easier to interpret. If my (dodgy) memory holds then the idea is mentioned in Accelerando as the basis for a post-Singularity society. I think some (very basic) initial work was published by Simon Peyton Jones on the subject (although manybe that was trade, rather than law).
I haven't read the whole patent on the Apple keyboard, but it seems to me that there is at least one significant difference between the Lebedev device and the Apple concept, and that is that the keyboard would change dynamically, in real time, i.e. to present contextual controls based on what you are working on. That's very different from the other keyboard, which, as I understand it, is designed to be an all-one-profile or all-another-profile configuration (i.e. go into your Preferences pane and select Russian, and they keyboard will change).
Are you (or anyone who has one) sure about this aspect? Looking at their website they don't specifically say if they can / or can't do that. They do show that they can dynamically update the key images (up to ten fps for the entire keyboard over usb). Adding the code to do the update on a change of active application is trivial, literally trivial given that the hook would be about five lines of code. One important question is whether or not a patent examiner would know that is a trivial extension...
Nice post, it's interesting to hear from someone who has some personal experience on a patent story for a change.
You seem to be fundamentally unable to understand that there are other factors at work in the price of mobile bandwidth. Despite your repeated insistence that video compression = codec licence fees and limited mobile bandwidth = price fixing you are simply wrong, and too stupid to understand why.
Bandwidth is scare for mobile devices. Think about Shannon's theorem and its implications for a battery powered radio device.
There are codecs without licensing fees, so video compression can be offered without an economic cost. Look into the codec that the BBC is developing specifically for this reason.
But unfortunately you are not smart enough to realise or accept when you are wrong. BTW, there are studies into the exact ratios between performing computation (ie decompressing) and communicating on a (short range) radio channel. It is more power efficient to compress the video, send it down a lower speed channel and then decompress it at the far end. This is true regardless of whether or not you are paying a licensing fee for the codec.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I never saw the original so I didn't recognise it until someone translated it. I guess Slashdot is a constant source of "new" information :)
Your post was interesting (I agree with a mod for a change). What I meant was that your post should have been a reply to the original parody, which was a reference that I didn't get either. But it looked out of place replying to the explanation of the parody.
Was there some reason that you replied to (and quoted) the AC post explaining the parody that you didn't understand?
Wow thanks for the lecture, it's a shame that you don't know about the language to pull it off properly. I guess the fact, than unlike you, I write for living has taught me a thing or two about the language that we use.
There is no distinct shade of meaning: utilization is a *synonym* of usage. Do you know what a synonym is? Just so that you are aware - not one person has suggested blindly replacing "utilize" by "use". But the usage of the word utilization is completely unnecessary, it does not have a distinct meaning that is missing from the word usage.
It is used by pompous asshats who think it makes them sound more knowledgeable, when in fact it merely signals them out to the crowd they wish they were in. Do you know where you stand now? Or has my utilization of the language been overly taxing for your tiny brain?
Your comment made me LOL ... until I realised that this slashdot and there is a danger of you representing a good portion of the audience. Scary really
Do you actually have anything worthwhile to add to the discussion or are you just going to post comments against environmentalists? Apart from your narrow stereotyping I wasn't aware that they were such a cohesive movement. They only thing that they all have in common (that I'm aware of) is that they don't want to fuck up the planet. Gee, how horrible of them. I can see why they've earnt your hatred so readily.
Am I supposed to take your word for that? :)
You have completely misunderstood the AC's point. Nothing that you have written adds to this discussion in any way. I can believe that your comment would get posted on slashdot.
Just because it has become a well-defined technical term does not stop it being a bastardisation of the English language. I actually read the essay that the AC linked to to find that Orwell makes some good points. In particular the term utilization is one of a number of phrases used to dress up a meaning and attempt to make it sound more impressive and scientific. Just because the bad authors who do this have succeeded in making the term utilization standard does not change the AC's point in any way.
I know that you're joking but I was recently shocked to discover that my ISP (who I won't name) will offer us a dedicated, unthrottled line for just 50% more. So instead of the current $40 per month for a capped 8Mb line, we are being offered an uncontended 2Mb connection without any restrictions for $65 per month. They are a large reputable ISP, and the only reason that I won't name them is we all know what happens to customer service when an ISP's popularity jumps suddenly. They have also specfically confirms that they will not throttle any kind of traffic on this line and that BitTorrent usage is fine... So I'm looking forward to nearly 800GB a month of download capacity...
No. Not as sweet as having a quad-core up until the point that one core developed a problem and then a three core machine afterwards. I'd estimate that this would be 1.5x - 2x as sweet.
Yes
Buying CDs is convenient way to get wav files rather than mp3s. This is changing but is still mostly the case. I doubt he wanted to lug around those wavs so he encoded them into his own preference for compression. He fired up a file-sharing program (many of which will automatically scan your harddrive and add any media files that you have to your shared folder). Regardless of why he intended to do this the law has to focus on what he has actually done, and so far he has not yet broken any laws. If he goes on to share files then he may break laws.
No. They're not saying it is ok, and they do agree that it's wrong if you get caught. But the getting caught is an important aspect. People should not be taken to court because we assume that they have broken the law - there should be some proof that that they have commited an offence. The burden of proof on the accusor should be to show that the defendent commited an offense - not that he did a bunch of things that are related to commiting an offence but fall short. This is a basic principle enshrined in most Western legal systems.
Dislaimer: Substitute law-breaking for copyright infringement above if you feel picky. I know that they're different but it sounds torturous to phrase it that way.
Of course this only works if n is restricted to be less than the size of the problem. Otherwise the original criticism still stands that this doesn't disprove the original post. I'd stop digging there if I were you as trying to prove anything about this problem / solutions tends to get difficult quickly :)
Full Duplex doesn't mean what you think it does. The term that you are looking for is symmetric.
True, although the meaning of that one bit is still well defined...
Ouch three replies and nobody got what he was saying.
A single binary 1, would be -1 in 2s complement. You are talking about bytes, as in 8 bits. He is talking about a single bit, for which the two values are -1 and 0. The key word in the description is single.
Ah, depends on point of view I guess.
There was a time when the processor market was divided between lots of players, and it did lead to radical diversity in the marketplace. But it didn't lead to the rate of progress that we've had since it became a one (and a half) horse race. There is an essential tradeoff - we have reduced choice but the standardisation of the x86 architecture(s) has pushed processors into a commodity market.
Large scale enterprises do reduce choice, and tend towards monopolies in markets. But at the same time they reduce production costs. How these savings are distributed depends entirely on the types of companies involved.
In the main the lack of innovation in the x86 market has been because it is more cost effective to push clock rates than attempt to design exotic architectures. Now that the easy gains in clock rates have been played out the marketplace is going to become a lot more interesting, the companies involved are going to have to innovate in harder areas to get ahead of each other.
I can see that this would be the case in some markets. But for some industries economies of scale mean that a smaller number of larger suppliers is more efficient. The current duopoly between Intel and AMD springs to mind.
Well said.
On the last point, having a few mega-bazillion corporation that were owned by their workers (stakeholder?) would probably benefit society even more but what are the odds of that ever happening?
A) Law is a technical subject. People who specialise in it are professionals - in terms of the education that they require and the amount of time that they devote to their careers. So either we would require a society entirely composed of lawyers (who wouldn't be very good at growing food or other non-essential activities), or we would have a society full of half-assed un-educated law amateurs wielding power.
Note: I'm not suggesting that our current system doesn't involve a room full of half-assed legal amateurs being in charge, but at least they haven't contaminated the whole country.
B) Voting for issues is hard because there isn't a good way to model exclusion. The classic example is: Who wants to vote for better education? Everyone. Better hospitals? Everyone. Lower taxes? Ahh, we have a problem.
One problem is that the law is intrinsically complex - it's a model of allowable human behaviour. People qualified to work with it are specialists, and society needs a mix of specialties in order to survive and be productive. One interesting idea is machine-readable law - it doesn't make it any less complex but it does make it easier to interpret. If my (dodgy) memory holds then the idea is mentioned in Accelerando as the basis for a post-Singularity society. I think some (very basic) initial work was published by Simon Peyton Jones on the subject (although manybe that was trade, rather than law).
Are you (or anyone who has one) sure about this aspect? Looking at their website they don't specifically say if they can / or can't do that. They do show that they can dynamically update the key images (up to ten fps for the entire keyboard over usb). Adding the code to do the update on a change of active application is trivial, literally trivial given that the hook would be about five lines of code. One important question is whether or not a patent examiner would know that is a trivial extension...
Nice post, it's interesting to hear from someone who has some personal experience on a patent story for a change.
You seem to be fundamentally unable to understand that there are other factors at work in the price of mobile bandwidth. Despite your repeated insistence that video compression = codec licence fees and limited mobile bandwidth = price fixing you are simply wrong, and too stupid to understand why.
Bandwidth is scare for mobile devices. Think about Shannon's theorem and its implications for a battery powered radio device.
There are codecs without licensing fees, so video compression can be offered without an economic cost. Look into the codec that the BBC is developing specifically for this reason.
But unfortunately you are not smart enough to realise or accept when you are wrong. BTW, there are studies into the exact ratios between performing computation (ie decompressing) and communicating on a (short range) radio channel. It is more power efficient to compress the video, send it down a lower speed channel and then decompress it at the far end. This is true regardless of whether or not you are paying a licensing fee for the codec.
If the lead author on the study submitted the summary - why didn't he link to a proper paper rather than the press release junk?
Sure. Now I understand that you can't argue your point because you aren't smart enough to see where facts differ froms your beliefs.
Clue: Bandwidth on mobile devices is not cheap in relation to the size of video files.