Because at one point IE 6 had over 70% of the browser market share, and it doesn't support the official HTML standard. So you either had to ignore 70+% of the people on the net, or you had to code to support it. Neither was a good choice.
Sorry, I thought I could put my hand right on it, but I haven't been able to find the book. Must have been something I got out of the library. (And my Google-fu is weak.)
Anyway, it has to do with data compression/transmission ratios, and choice-depth theory. Basically, it is easier and faster to run several choices/datapoints of limited precision in parallel than it is to try to run the same amount of data as one wide stream.
Exactly. I hear 'royalty free' and I think of GIF, which was also royalty free... Until it wasn't. Which was an absolutely huge mess.
Honestly, if I were Apple and the Theora foundation offered a $100-per-million-device license saying basically 'we swear we are the sole authority on Ogg Theora, and you have a license from us to implement it to the spec' I'd be much happier than without it. Because then I'd have a set contract, spelling out the cost, and that if someone then comes along and says 'wait, we own this part of the spec, and you owe us $Xbillion' I could turn around to the Theora foundation and say 'Your breach of contract just cost me $Xbillion, and I expect you to pay that.' Basically, at that point the risk is Theora's, and not Apple's.
Apple is unwilling to take the risk that there are IP problems with the spec. It would take a lot of costly research and examinations for them to prove there aren't any, and there is no real benefit to them to spend the money and time. Translation: At free, it costs to much.
Given that there is no real advantage to switching away from binary, why not? Decimal is far slower and less information packed, from the computer's perspective. And since it only takes a cycle or so for the computer to translate for the humans, just let it.
The only really viable alternative is trinary computing, which is slightly less optimal generally. (The actual ideal would be base e, but it's really hard to build a system around irrational numbers.)
The two-state solution is a relatively recent innovation on the solution, actually. There are several legal fictions regarding the situation, but the basic facts are that 'Palestine' (or what is called that) lies entirely inside Israel, and the fighting is between two groups of people who are governed by the same government. (The 'Palestinian Authority' has no authority, no money, is more recent than the idea of a two-state solution, and is subservient at this point to the Israeli government.)
The Palestinian territories are already annexed by Israel, in the sense that Israel claimed them 50 years ago when it formed: They are inside the original borders of the country.
Oh, and BTW: Jerusalem is technically at least half in the Palestinian territories. Unless you talk to the Israelis.
It's a civil war inside Israel: Palestine isn't a separate country, in any sense of the word. (At best they are a semi-independent province.)
Basically it's a war over whether non-Jews have equal rights in Israel, with the stated option being to create a separate country for the non-Jews. (That's grossly oversimplified.)
Actually, many high-end pieces of stereo equipment have optical jacks.
But even if you are hooking up computers via fiber-to-ethernet converters, fiber is at least as easy to run when putting in a new house (especially if you want to run a gigabit-capable network), and is much more future-proof.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that it gets better once you are out of the helpdesk. It only looks like it does. You get less stupid end-users, and more stupid bosses.
Get out, now, while you still can. Go get a degree in plumbing, or electrical work. (Heck, if you want to stay with computers, get certified to install fiber. It's only going to grow, and I've had trouble finding anyone to install it in the new house.) Something that doesn't expect you for the rest of your life to be answering the phone at 12:45am on random nights.
Bingo. Theora may be equally as good, but it's trying to supplant an already-established format. 'Equally as good' isn't good enough for that: You have to be noticeably better. And Theora isn't. It offers no major advantages, and would just give YouTube headaches, as it either tried to re-encode into a choice of formats, or had to explain to people how to play the videos.
The first of those costs money, the second costs viewers. I'd bet very few people would choose the Theora choice, making the money just wasted money. And YouTube lives on it's viewers: making their site any more complicated than 'click play' is just not acceptable.
It's not worth it. Theora doesn't have enough of a benefit.
Even if she is found guilty again, if she's found guilty on good evidence while bad evidence is thrown out that will be a win: It will set some precedent for what is good and bad evidence. (Especially if the RIAA gets some egg on their face for some of the bad evidence.)
It might not help her, but it would help the next person, who can refer to this case and say: 'This judge found these pieces of evidence inadmissible for these reasons', and tell that to their judge when the RIAA tries it again.
Besides, put yourself in the colonist's position. We've been traveling for 900 years. If we abort, it's another 900 years (at least) to get back home. Would you even *want* to go home? Keep in mind that you're the kind of super ambitious Type-A personality person who would volunteer for this mission in the first place.
Home? Who said anything about home? You pick a likely star, with a couple of alternates hopefully nearby. If the first doesn't work, you set course for the next, hoping to find one that works before you reach the end of what you can repair in space.
And as for the FTL: Only if they want to use your design. If we are trying to stick with realm-of-known tech, they need to be able to decide on the fly where to land. Even if that means it's not at the star they originally headed to.
Are you comparing a plane during a flight without any stop at all and a train stopping multiple time ? Not fair. J
But that's how they are used: Airplanes load up, and go straight to a final destination, then unload and reload for the next trip.
Trains by contrast are usually assembled from pieces going to separate places along the same route. So the train as a whole has to stop at each waypoint, drop off a few cars, maybe pick up a few more, and then go on.
(Also trains have a more limited path, and so often have to stop for traffic, where planes don't actually stop when waiting to land...)
I swear to God you're being purposefully dense. Because it's a ONE-USE ship, designed to go from its homeworld to Earth, and nothing else. It's not a freakin' Greyhound bus you can gas-up and take anywhere. Why is this such a hard concept to get? It's the, what, third time? Fourth time? I've explained it.
The whole POINT of the ship is to come to Earth and land. What part of that requires refueling?
I get that's what you are saying. But that's a stupid (to the level of outright suicidal) design: The colonists have a maybe 1-in-4 chance (if they are lucky, and I'm probably over-estimating) of living once they arrive in such a ship, just because you can't guarantee they will have anyplace to land. A minimal amount of extra work up front will allow them to decide if they can live where they've arrived, or go on if they can't.
Sure, once they find a good spot to land, crash the ship: You'll want the resources onboard anyway. But only once it has been determined habitable, which can't be determined until you are in orbit. Until then, you want to be able to re-direct to another choice.
If you are sending single-destination ships, you'll want to either send out explorers first, or have a way to ask for help from home. Either way they'd have to solve the lightspeed problem (at least in communication), and that's way beyond our level of tech.
None of the tech for refueling and resupplying in space is beyond us. We don't use it because it's not needed at our current level of space travel, but it would not be hard to build. Put it in, and you'll immeasurably improve the odds of actually having a viable colony at the end of the trip. Mass cost would be not insignificant, but it's easily worth it.
Landing pods don't have to send down people. We explore with robots all the time. Send one down to see if there are any major problems you couldn't detect from a distance.
And no, they don't know that there would be a habitable planet when they arrived. Not if they have our level of tech. We are just barely able to detect planets that might be in a habitable size/orbit, and still unable to detect their atmosphere, even in general trends. And that's general trends: There are at least a dozen gasses that in concentrations of a few hundredths of a PPM would be lethal to us over time, and detecting that at even zero range is hard, never mind over interstellar distance. Without significantly advanced tech over us, they'd have to hope for the best. And that's even assuming everything is as they saw it from a distance: It also wouldn't take much for a planet to become uninhabitable over the time it took to do a decent interstellar flight at sub-light speeds. (Drop a medium asteroid on us, and all higher life would be toast. Drop Ceres on us, depending on the angle, and there'd be major changes to the atmosphere and tectonic structure.)
So if they have our level of tech, they'd have to be willing to change plans once they got here. Refuel, minimal resupply, repair, and choose a new destination would need to be an at least possible (if not desired) option. Because they are just guessing that there's someplace to land at all, with a no better than 25% chance, at best.
And why are they out of fuel, when they've just arrived in Earth orbit? Earth in general is a fairly poor place for refueling, unless you happen to live here. Depending on your engine type, there are several much better fueling stops in the outer system. (Or even deep-space, if they've got a fusion engine.)
And for that matter, why do they need fuel to drop an asteroid on us? Ok, it'd take a while to drop one using a solar sail, but it could be done if they wanted to. Or solar panels and an ion engine. Again, that'd take time, but we're not going anywhere and it should be within safety tolerances on even the most low-end hibernation system.
Why did they land anything, crash or otherwise? If you are going to send something interstellar, might as well put a couple landing-pods on it, at least for exploration. (Even if they are only one way.)
Why land until they are sure of their ability to stay and survive? Why wake everyone up (if they are hibernating) until they were sure of their ability to stay and survive? Core crew gets woken up, evaluates the situation, and decides how to proceed. Fight, flight, or talk are their options.
And as for the demonstrated capabilities: It's the same tech as the ship they built. They might not be able to do it efficiently, but they'd be able to do it before we could design and build something to stop them.
Doesn't matter: They would have to be at least equal to us in most technology, and they would have a massive tactical advantage: A ship capable of spending an indeterminate time in deep space, with full life-support. They also would have to have more experience with space tech, notably propulsion.
All they have to do to wipe us out is retreat to the asteroid belt, and lob a couple large ones this way. All of that would be easily within their demonstrated abilities. We have no weapons capable of attacking outside of low orbit, and no way of countering (much less actually stopping) an attack of that magnitude. Such an attack would almost certainly leave the biosphere intact, but would likely destroy all real industrial capacity and political stability on Earth. (And might even manage to wipe out humanity directly.)
The only real reason not to do such if they wanted a war would be because they wanted our tech.
Much better to be friendly, and see how well we can bargain. A planet-based civilization can't hold out against an attacker that holds the high orbitals.
The advantage voting machines and paper ballots have isn't that they can't be rigged, it's that they are easier to audit. Auditing an electronic vote requires that the audit trail was built in in the first place, and that the auditors are tech people of skill equal to or greater than the people who created the system in the first place.
Auditing a paper ballot can be done by anyone who managed to pass math through middle school. (Assuming the ballot wasn't designed by idiots. And even then it only takes a little more skill to decide how to handle edge cases.)
A true nerd looks at this card the way an off-roader looks at an H2: It's bigger than it needs to be, costs more than it should, and is at best no better at what it's supposed to be good at then something a third the price. Oh, and only rich posers actually own one.
It's not tech for the sake of tech. It's tech because you can do something cool with it that makes you a nerd. And there's not really much you can do with this that you can't do just as well while spending less money.
A nerd can get his computer, with half as much RAM and less processor power, to do everything this card can do. And do it better.
There have been cars with air brakes in the Le Mans before (in fact, they were introduced there), although the rules may have changed since then. And depending on the exact definition, air brakes may or may not count as variable aerodynamics: They intend disrupt the aerodynamics, not change it into a new form.
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Because at one point IE 6 had over 70% of the browser market share, and it doesn't support the official HTML standard. So you either had to ignore 70+% of the people on the net, or you had to code to support it. Neither was a good choice.
Sorry, I thought I could put my hand right on it, but I haven't been able to find the book. Must have been something I got out of the library. (And my Google-fu is weak.)
Anyway, it has to do with data compression/transmission ratios, and choice-depth theory. Basically, it is easier and faster to run several choices/datapoints of limited precision in parallel than it is to try to run the same amount of data as one wide stream.
Exactly. I hear 'royalty free' and I think of GIF, which was also royalty free... Until it wasn't. Which was an absolutely huge mess.
Honestly, if I were Apple and the Theora foundation offered a $100-per-million-device license saying basically 'we swear we are the sole authority on Ogg Theora, and you have a license from us to implement it to the spec' I'd be much happier than without it. Because then I'd have a set contract, spelling out the cost, and that if someone then comes along and says 'wait, we own this part of the spec, and you owe us $Xbillion' I could turn around to the Theora foundation and say 'Your breach of contract just cost me $Xbillion, and I expect you to pay that.' Basically, at that point the risk is Theora's, and not Apple's.
Apple is unwilling to take the risk that there are IP problems with the spec. It would take a lot of costly research and examinations for them to prove there aren't any, and there is no real benefit to them to spend the money and time. Translation: At free, it costs to much.
Is FAT used for anything other than USB drives?
You say that like that's a small thing.
Given that there is no real advantage to switching away from binary, why not? Decimal is far slower and less information packed, from the computer's perspective. And since it only takes a cycle or so for the computer to translate for the humans, just let it.
The only really viable alternative is trinary computing, which is slightly less optimal generally. (The actual ideal would be base e, but it's really hard to build a system around irrational numbers.)
So in theory, one of the greatest scientific inquiries can now be solved by a quantum computer.
Which came first? The chicken or the egg.
The answer, of course, is 'Yes'.
They did.
The two-state solution is a relatively recent innovation on the solution, actually. There are several legal fictions regarding the situation, but the basic facts are that 'Palestine' (or what is called that) lies entirely inside Israel, and the fighting is between two groups of people who are governed by the same government. (The 'Palestinian Authority' has no authority, no money, is more recent than the idea of a two-state solution, and is subservient at this point to the Israeli government.)
The Palestinian territories are already annexed by Israel, in the sense that Israel claimed them 50 years ago when it formed: They are inside the original borders of the country.
Oh, and BTW: Jerusalem is technically at least half in the Palestinian territories. Unless you talk to the Israelis.
It's a civil war inside Israel: Palestine isn't a separate country, in any sense of the word. (At best they are a semi-independent province.)
Basically it's a war over whether non-Jews have equal rights in Israel, with the stated option being to create a separate country for the non-Jews. (That's grossly oversimplified.)
Actually, many high-end pieces of stereo equipment have optical jacks.
But even if you are hooking up computers via fiber-to-ethernet converters, fiber is at least as easy to run when putting in a new house (especially if you want to run a gigabit-capable network), and is much more future-proof.
That occurred to me when I drove in last night, and found the fiber guy there ahead of me...
(This was just after posting the above.)
You seem to be under the misapprehension that it gets better once you are out of the helpdesk. It only looks like it does. You get less stupid end-users, and more stupid bosses.
Get out, now, while you still can. Go get a degree in plumbing, or electrical work. (Heck, if you want to stay with computers, get certified to install fiber. It's only going to grow, and I've had trouble finding anyone to install it in the new house.) Something that doesn't expect you for the rest of your life to be answering the phone at 12:45am on random nights.
Got to run, the pager's going off...
Wait, are you telling me Wesley Crusher ruined two TV series?
Bingo. Theora may be equally as good, but it's trying to supplant an already-established format. 'Equally as good' isn't good enough for that: You have to be noticeably better. And Theora isn't. It offers no major advantages, and would just give YouTube headaches, as it either tried to re-encode into a choice of formats, or had to explain to people how to play the videos.
The first of those costs money, the second costs viewers. I'd bet very few people would choose the Theora choice, making the money just wasted money. And YouTube lives on it's viewers: making their site any more complicated than 'click play' is just not acceptable.
It's not worth it. Theora doesn't have enough of a benefit.
Even if she is found guilty again, if she's found guilty on good evidence while bad evidence is thrown out that will be a win: It will set some precedent for what is good and bad evidence. (Especially if the RIAA gets some egg on their face for some of the bad evidence.)
It might not help her, but it would help the next person, who can refer to this case and say: 'This judge found these pieces of evidence inadmissible for these reasons', and tell that to their judge when the RIAA tries it again.
Besides, put yourself in the colonist's position. We've been traveling for 900 years. If we abort, it's another 900 years (at least) to get back home. Would you even *want* to go home? Keep in mind that you're the kind of super ambitious Type-A personality person who would volunteer for this mission in the first place.
Home? Who said anything about home? You pick a likely star, with a couple of alternates hopefully nearby. If the first doesn't work, you set course for the next, hoping to find one that works before you reach the end of what you can repair in space.
And as for the FTL: Only if they want to use your design. If we are trying to stick with realm-of-known tech, they need to be able to decide on the fly where to land. Even if that means it's not at the star they originally headed to.
Are you comparing a plane during a flight without any stop at all and a train stopping multiple time ? Not fair. J
But that's how they are used: Airplanes load up, and go straight to a final destination, then unload and reload for the next trip.
Trains by contrast are usually assembled from pieces going to separate places along the same route. So the train as a whole has to stop at each waypoint, drop off a few cars, maybe pick up a few more, and then go on.
(Also trains have a more limited path, and so often have to stop for traffic, where planes don't actually stop when waiting to land...)
I swear to God you're being purposefully dense. Because it's a ONE-USE ship, designed to go from its homeworld to Earth, and nothing else. It's not a freakin' Greyhound bus you can gas-up and take anywhere. Why is this such a hard concept to get? It's the, what, third time? Fourth time? I've explained it.
The whole POINT of the ship is to come to Earth and land. What part of that requires refueling?
I get that's what you are saying. But that's a stupid (to the level of outright suicidal) design: The colonists have a maybe 1-in-4 chance (if they are lucky, and I'm probably over-estimating) of living once they arrive in such a ship, just because you can't guarantee they will have anyplace to land. A minimal amount of extra work up front will allow them to decide if they can live where they've arrived, or go on if they can't.
Sure, once they find a good spot to land, crash the ship: You'll want the resources onboard anyway. But only once it has been determined habitable, which can't be determined until you are in orbit. Until then, you want to be able to re-direct to another choice.
If you are sending single-destination ships, you'll want to either send out explorers first, or have a way to ask for help from home. Either way they'd have to solve the lightspeed problem (at least in communication), and that's way beyond our level of tech.
None of the tech for refueling and resupplying in space is beyond us. We don't use it because it's not needed at our current level of space travel, but it would not be hard to build. Put it in, and you'll immeasurably improve the odds of actually having a viable colony at the end of the trip. Mass cost would be not insignificant, but it's easily worth it.
Landing pods don't have to send down people. We explore with robots all the time. Send one down to see if there are any major problems you couldn't detect from a distance.
And no, they don't know that there would be a habitable planet when they arrived. Not if they have our level of tech. We are just barely able to detect planets that might be in a habitable size/orbit, and still unable to detect their atmosphere, even in general trends. And that's general trends: There are at least a dozen gasses that in concentrations of a few hundredths of a PPM would be lethal to us over time, and detecting that at even zero range is hard, never mind over interstellar distance. Without significantly advanced tech over us, they'd have to hope for the best. And that's even assuming everything is as they saw it from a distance: It also wouldn't take much for a planet to become uninhabitable over the time it took to do a decent interstellar flight at sub-light speeds. (Drop a medium asteroid on us, and all higher life would be toast. Drop Ceres on us, depending on the angle, and there'd be major changes to the atmosphere and tectonic structure.)
So if they have our level of tech, they'd have to be willing to change plans once they got here. Refuel, minimal resupply, repair, and choose a new destination would need to be an at least possible (if not desired) option. Because they are just guessing that there's someplace to land at all, with a no better than 25% chance, at best.
And why are they out of fuel, when they've just arrived in Earth orbit? Earth in general is a fairly poor place for refueling, unless you happen to live here. Depending on your engine type, there are several much better fueling stops in the outer system. (Or even deep-space, if they've got a fusion engine.)
And for that matter, why do they need fuel to drop an asteroid on us? Ok, it'd take a while to drop one using a solar sail, but it could be done if they wanted to. Or solar panels and an ion engine. Again, that'd take time, but we're not going anywhere and it should be within safety tolerances on even the most low-end hibernation system.
Why did they land anything, crash or otherwise? If you are going to send something interstellar, might as well put a couple landing-pods on it, at least for exploration. (Even if they are only one way.)
Why land until they are sure of their ability to stay and survive? Why wake everyone up (if they are hibernating) until they were sure of their ability to stay and survive? Core crew gets woken up, evaluates the situation, and decides how to proceed. Fight, flight, or talk are their options.
And as for the demonstrated capabilities: It's the same tech as the ship they built. They might not be able to do it efficiently, but they'd be able to do it before we could design and build something to stop them.
Doesn't matter: They would have to be at least equal to us in most technology, and they would have a massive tactical advantage: A ship capable of spending an indeterminate time in deep space, with full life-support. They also would have to have more experience with space tech, notably propulsion.
All they have to do to wipe us out is retreat to the asteroid belt, and lob a couple large ones this way. All of that would be easily within their demonstrated abilities. We have no weapons capable of attacking outside of low orbit, and no way of countering (much less actually stopping) an attack of that magnitude. Such an attack would almost certainly leave the biosphere intact, but would likely destroy all real industrial capacity and political stability on Earth. (And might even manage to wipe out humanity directly.)
The only real reason not to do such if they wanted a war would be because they wanted our tech.
Much better to be friendly, and see how well we can bargain. A planet-based civilization can't hold out against an attacker that holds the high orbitals.
The advantage voting machines and paper ballots have isn't that they can't be rigged, it's that they are easier to audit. Auditing an electronic vote requires that the audit trail was built in in the first place, and that the auditors are tech people of skill equal to or greater than the people who created the system in the first place.
Auditing a paper ballot can be done by anyone who managed to pass math through middle school. (Assuming the ballot wasn't designed by idiots. And even then it only takes a little more skill to decide how to handle edge cases.)
A true nerd looks at this card the way an off-roader looks at an H2: It's bigger than it needs to be, costs more than it should, and is at best no better at what it's supposed to be good at then something a third the price. Oh, and only rich posers actually own one.
It's not tech for the sake of tech. It's tech because you can do something cool with it that makes you a nerd. And there's not really much you can do with this that you can't do just as well while spending less money.
A nerd can get his computer, with half as much RAM and less processor power, to do everything this card can do. And do it better.
There have been cars with air brakes in the Le Mans before (in fact, they were introduced there), although the rules may have changed since then. And depending on the exact definition, air brakes may or may not count as variable aerodynamics: They intend disrupt the aerodynamics, not change it into a new form.
Actually, since they are shown in both up an down positions, my bet is that they are air-brakes, supplementing the regular braking system.