News like this has to be a real slap in the face to Microsoft with the tireless Vista promotion, when XP is still big news.
A slap in the face to the marketing and software development departments, perhaps... but I guarantee you that Hell, Gates, Ballmer & Co. is still laughing all the way to the bank.
That's not the only problem, either. The people that own the shows precompress the video stream before transmitting to the broadcaster (cable, satellite, whoever) to save transmission charges. That means the broadcaster has to take what he can get, and if he wants to recompress it even further... well. Occasionally I'll watch an old Stargate re-run, and honestly they're so heavily compressed as to be almost unwatchable. I mean, you're paying these people good money each month to watch video that's little better than YouTube after clicking on the full-screen button. We're not even talking Hi-Def here, either.
I have them for Internet at the moment: at one time, I had them for TV and phone service as well. And yes, it was reasonably-priced at the outset, and the services worked well enough. Then the monthly bill started edging ever upward 'til after a couple years I was paying more than double. The phones alone (two lines) went over ninety dollars a month. Then picture quality began to degrade (due to compression artifacts as well as line quality issues and they couldn't/wouldn't fix the latter) so I dumped the phone and cable TV. Now I just have a cable modem, and use AT&T's Callvantage for my phones (yes yes, I know it's SBC but it works well, it's inexpensive and they haven't raised the rates.) As for cable TV... well, so far I found that I can live quite well without it.
Frankly, given the sheer size and worldwide distribution of that company and its various divisions, I'd wager that nobody at Sony has any idea what that percentage really is either. That's true for any behemoth corporation: tracking licenses is a full-time job for some people.
Certainly Photoshop has a few remaining strengths over the GIMP
Regardless of the technical merits, the reality is that Photoshop has the acceptance of professionals everywhere, and that kind of inertia will be hard to overcome even if GIMP ultimately exceeds Photoshop in capability and usability. "Free" means little to people that use something as a business tool that can be written off their taxes, and which they must trust to get the job done. That said, Photoshop is hardly perfect, Adobe is an obnoxious company, and I sincerely hope that the GIMP makes it out of amateur status and truly does go head-to-head with Adobe's stuff. Sooner or later it will, I think.
who's to say they won't change it back again at some point in the future? This really highlights all the problems with using someone else's equipment to host and processes personal data files.
he article makes it clear that no one knows how China will play its burgeoning antitrust influence -- conciliatory or nationalistic.
Initially conciliatory and ultimately nationalistic. China's government isn't "conciliatory" on much of anything else, so I fail to see why they would start now.
Some suicide bombers may be in for a big surprised when they get to heaven.
True, and even if they do happen to be the right sex, there's no guarantee they'll actually be attractive. I mean, who wants to spend eternity shagging a whale? There's a reason some people never get laid.
In any event, the promise of virgin sex seems to work well on male suicide bombers... what I want to know is, what do they promise the female ones?
Well, what you're saying would make sense on the surface, but when you realize how little training doctors are required to have in pharmacology, you'll gain a new appreciation for those pharmacists you just slammed. My father would have been dead several times over if it hadn't been for the pharmacist connecting the dots and realizing one or the other of his physicians had just prescribed a killer combo. That happens more often than you might think, sometimes because of a mistake, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of communication between doctors. Either way, there's a reason that pharmacists study pharmacology. They're more than just robotic pill dispensers.
When your doctor prescribes something for you, go talk to your pharmacist about your entire drug picture before you start swallowing those little pills. That can very well save your life, particularly if you have something like a heart condition.
For comparison, my profession - Pharmacy - has, at worst, an error rate of 0.0925%. And we handled between 3 and 4 Billion prescriptions.
The difference being the penalties for failure. If a patent examiner "screws up", he just made the USPTO more money in the form of maintenance fees (the fact that entire swaths of technology are illegitimately locked down is irrelevant.)
If a pharmacist screws up... well. There's a reason your error rates are so low, and I'm damned glad they are: like most people I take a prescription medication now and then. If Pharmacists filled prescriptions they way Patent Examiners issue patents, nobody would ever take a pill.
I say we give a newly-minted Patent Examiner some number of "points" when they start their careers. Every time one of their patents gets invalidated, they lose a point. When they lose all their points, they lose their jobs. Have additional penalties too, for example if you lose more than x points in a year you get passed over for promotions, etc.
Maybe that wouldn't work, I don't know. I can say that there needs to be a structure in place that tends to keep bad patents (and bad examiners) out of the system. As matters stand, the issuing of bad patents is rewarded and the Patent Office is perfectly happy to let the courts sort things out later. That's causing way too many problems to be allowed to continue.
I think we can count on them to use up all that extra logic.
Sorry, what I meant was having the software tools to develop applications to make effective use of all that power. We're having a hard time writing compilers that can parallelize code across eight or nine processors: what if we have chips with a thousand cores? Of course, with that much power it probably won't matter much if your code isn't all that efficient.
I won't comment on SCART either way because as an American I've never dealt with it, but I liked this paragraph from the article:
For some reason, us Europeans decided that instead of sticking with RCA connectors, and maybe slowly moving over to component video, we'd invent a whole new way of getting video from a DVD player or other device to our TVs. Regrettably, we left the design up to the French, and the result was Scart.
So SCART has forced european TVs a twenty years headstart on the quality of analog input and changed the experience of everyone with a TV-based home computer in the 80s.
Maybe it would be fairer to say that the Europeans were where they should have been at that point in time, while we were twenty years behind.
You can imagine the hue-and-cry that would result if an NSA-originated back door (or other deliberate remote exploit) was found. In a product like Windows, I suppose they could get away with it (probably already have) but an open-source product is a different matter. No plausible deniability.
I imagine the Chinese will be looking upon this effort with some interest.
I'm convinced that Tom Cruise is being faked as well.
Tom Cruise is a robot. He'd have to be: nothing human could spout that much nonsense and not choke to death on his own vomit. That applies to most political figures as well, I might add.
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News like this has to be a real slap in the face to Microsoft with the tireless Vista promotion, when XP is still big news.
... but I guarantee you that Hell, Gates, Ballmer & Co. is still laughing all the way to the bank.
A slap in the face to the marketing and software development departments, perhaps
That's not the only problem, either. The people that own the shows precompress the video stream before transmitting to the broadcaster (cable, satellite, whoever) to save transmission charges. That means the broadcaster has to take what he can get, and if he wants to recompress it even further ... well. Occasionally I'll watch an old Stargate re-run, and honestly they're so heavily compressed as to be almost unwatchable. I mean, you're paying these people good money each month to watch video that's little better than YouTube after clicking on the full-screen button. We're not even talking Hi-Def here, either.
Ridiculous.
I have them for Internet at the moment: at one time, I had them for TV and phone service as well. And yes, it was reasonably-priced at the outset, and the services worked well enough. Then the monthly bill started edging ever upward 'til after a couple years I was paying more than double. The phones alone (two lines) went over ninety dollars a month. Then picture quality began to degrade (due to compression artifacts as well as line quality issues and they couldn't/wouldn't fix the latter) so I dumped the phone and cable TV. Now I just have a cable modem, and use AT&T's Callvantage for my phones (yes yes, I know it's SBC but it works well, it's inexpensive and they haven't raised the rates.) As for cable TV ... well, so far I found that I can live quite well without it.
Frankly, given the sheer size and worldwide distribution of that company and its various divisions, I'd wager that nobody at Sony has any idea what that percentage really is either. That's true for any behemoth corporation: tracking licenses is a full-time job for some people.
They're hypocrites, pure and simple. And nobody respects a hypocrite.
I'd classify this under evidence there is a God
But only if you believe that Sony BMG was intelligently designed.
I didn't say it was impossible ... just difficult.
Certainly Photoshop has a few remaining strengths over the GIMP
Regardless of the technical merits, the reality is that Photoshop has the acceptance of professionals everywhere, and that kind of inertia will be hard to overcome even if GIMP ultimately exceeds Photoshop in capability and usability. "Free" means little to people that use something as a business tool that can be written off their taxes, and which they must trust to get the job done. That said, Photoshop is hardly perfect, Adobe is an obnoxious company, and I sincerely hope that the GIMP makes it out of amateur status and truly does go head-to-head with Adobe's stuff. Sooner or later it will, I think.
who's to say they won't change it back again at some point in the future? This really highlights all the problems with using someone else's equipment to host and processes personal data files.
Using B to get from A to C is an engineering revolution?
How the hell did we ever get into space?
I think it's because we used numbers instead of letters.
will the entertainment companies catch on to how music propagates?
Supposedly, it was just a series of unfortunate mishaps.
he article makes it clear that no one knows how China will play its burgeoning antitrust influence -- conciliatory or nationalistic.
Initially conciliatory and ultimately nationalistic. China's government isn't "conciliatory" on much of anything else, so I fail to see why they would start now.
I hear that Apple Computer is getting into the POD business as well.
I see no reason whatsoever to return to the small, shuttered prison cell that is Windows.
... it is comfortably furnished.
Yes, but as small, shuttered prison cells go
Some suicide bombers may be in for a big surprised when they get to heaven.
... what I want to know is, what do they promise the female ones?
True, and even if they do happen to be the right sex, there's no guarantee they'll actually be attractive. I mean, who wants to spend eternity shagging a whale? There's a reason some people never get laid.
In any event, the promise of virgin sex seems to work well on male suicide bombers
Inquiring minds want to know.
Well, what you're saying would make sense on the surface, but when you realize how little training doctors are required to have in pharmacology, you'll gain a new appreciation for those pharmacists you just slammed. My father would have been dead several times over if it hadn't been for the pharmacist connecting the dots and realizing one or the other of his physicians had just prescribed a killer combo. That happens more often than you might think, sometimes because of a mistake, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of communication between doctors. Either way, there's a reason that pharmacists study pharmacology. They're more than just robotic pill dispensers.
When your doctor prescribes something for you, go talk to your pharmacist about your entire drug picture before you start swallowing those little pills. That can very well save your life, particularly if you have something like a heart condition.
Actually, I was focusing on the word "expensive" in the GP's post.
For comparison, my profession - Pharmacy - has, at worst, an error rate of 0.0925%. And we handled between 3 and 4 Billion prescriptions.
... well. There's a reason your error rates are so low, and I'm damned glad they are: like most people I take a prescription medication now and then. If Pharmacists filled prescriptions they way Patent Examiners issue patents, nobody would ever take a pill.
The difference being the penalties for failure. If a patent examiner "screws up", he just made the USPTO more money in the form of maintenance fees (the fact that entire swaths of technology are illegitimately locked down is irrelevant.)
If a pharmacist screws up
I say we give a newly-minted Patent Examiner some number of "points" when they start their careers. Every time one of their patents gets invalidated, they lose a point. When they lose all their points, they lose their jobs. Have additional penalties too, for example if you lose more than x points in a year you get passed over for promotions, etc.
Maybe that wouldn't work, I don't know. I can say that there needs to be a structure in place that tends to keep bad patents (and bad examiners) out of the system. As matters stand, the issuing of bad patents is rewarded and the Patent Office is perfectly happy to let the courts sort things out later. That's causing way too many problems to be allowed to continue.
Why is it that we have to buy expensive 5.1 speaker systems to get anywhere close these days?
I think you just answered your own question.
I think we can count on them to use up all that extra logic.
Sorry, what I meant was having the software tools to develop applications to make effective use of all that power. We're having a hard time writing compilers that can parallelize code across eight or nine processors: what if we have chips with a thousand cores? Of course, with that much power it probably won't matter much if your code isn't all that efficient.
I won't comment on SCART either way because as an American I've never dealt with it, but I liked this paragraph from the article:
For some reason, us Europeans decided that instead of sticking with RCA connectors, and maybe slowly moving over to component video, we'd invent a whole new way of getting video from a DVD player or other device to our TVs. Regrettably, we left the design up to the French, and the result was Scart.
So SCART has forced european TVs a twenty years headstart on the quality of analog input and changed the experience of everyone with a TV-based home computer in the 80s.
Maybe it would be fairer to say that the Europeans were where they should have been at that point in time, while we were twenty years behind.
You can imagine the hue-and-cry that would result if an NSA-originated back door (or other deliberate remote exploit) was found. In a product like Windows, I suppose they could get away with it (probably already have) but an open-source product is a different matter. No plausible deniability.
I imagine the Chinese will be looking upon this effort with some interest.
I'm convinced that Tom Cruise is being faked as well.
Tom Cruise is a robot. He'd have to be: nothing human could spout that much nonsense and not choke to death on his own vomit. That applies to most political figures as well, I might add.