...about how many lives will be saved, is that they don't take into account that once in place, people rely on them, and change their behavior accordingly.
I would like to see better evidence for this notion than I have seen so far.
Better evidence that the "dangerous" changes in behavior that the geek anticipates will be statistically significant.
Ford's crash avoidance system seems to use a very simple HUD - after a time you shouldn't even be conscious of the thing.
you know the various Traffic Management Authorities would jump head over heals for the ability to see real-time position of all cars on the expressway.
They will be getting that ability anyway.
Satellite technologies, navigation and video. Pilotless aircraft. RFID or something of that sort. There are many, many, ways of doing this. The railroads were working on the problem over a century ago.
The problem is that if one undertakes a huge project to build a big ass ship and it launches, one hundred years later the technology will have advanced so much that we will be able to build another one which is bigger and faster. A hundred years later, the same thing. So the original ship gets to where it was going only to find that several ships are already there.
In 1900 there was a faith in "Progress" we no longer have.
We know that things can disastrously wrong. In tech. In politics. In business and finance.
Maybe better tech will be available in 100 years. But you can't be certain of that.
"You have an awfully low opinion of assembly line workers. I would encourage you to meet one. Then you'd appreciate the physical effort required to meet an extremely strict work schedule, and maintain attention and energy for an entire work day in less than comfortable conditions. Sure, it's not an intellectually demanding field, and we suffer an intelligence deficit as a result of most jobs not stimulating intellect, but these people worked hard for their meager pay."
The pay wasn't always meager.
"In 1914, believing that well-paid laborers are the best consumers, Henry Foird hiked his employees' wages from $2.34 for a nine-hour day to $5.00 for an eight-hour day. The move proved to be highly profitable. Instead of constant employee turnover, the most expert mechanics flocked to the company, raising productivity and reducing training costs. Ford called it the "wage motive." By 1916, as the price of the Model T fell to $360, sales reached 472,000
By 1918, half of all the cars in America were Model Ts. By 1924, 15 million had been sold, Ford had become a multimillionaire, and Detroit was the auto-manufacturing capital of the United States. In 1928, Ford created the Model A to replace the Model T, and four years later introduced the V-8 engine. By 1932, Ford was producing one-third of all the automobiles in the world."
You owe a lot to the assembly line worker:
Shorter hours, the four and five day work week, paid vacations, health care and other employee benefits.
There can be "intellectual stimulation" beyond work --- particularly when you aren't working yourself to physical and mental exhaustion.
Ford's workers owned homes. Raised families. Played ball. Went fishing.
Off the line they could be hobbyists or craftsmen. Who do you think built all those projects published in century-old magazines like "Popular Mechanics?"
The Ford worker could afford a Ford of his own. With all the new-won independence that implies.
It is to your benefit to pirate rather than deal with DRM nightmares. And corporate America is more focused on punishing their customers than trying to attract new ones.
20% of peak hour download traffic was a Netflix stream before Netflix offered a streaming-only service at $9/month.
The Neflix client is baked into every HDTV, video game console and set top box. OnLive! gaming on your Vizio. The same can be said for Pandora and a dozen other services, and with more, much more to come.
Internet radio is becoming as a much a part of home theater sound as FM.
You can imagine a parallel universe in which you cable company or telco offers high speed service exclusively for these direct feeds.
The PC isn't needed.
The browser isn't needed - or at least not the browser that hasn't made its peace with protected content.
Flash. H.264/HEVC video, etc, etc. etc.
The P2P client - always problematical - disappears.
So I get sued for downloading / uploading a fake file can I beat it based on that they are calming that I downloading / uploading the real file?
I am betting "No" - unless you are willing to submit to an independent forensic examination of all your storage media. The fake file is, after all, an admission that you were looking for the real one, and, quite probably, others as well.
The uploader/downloader is the guy who tried to eat one potato chip. What the plaintiff wants is the whole bag.
When people see it's rising, more people vote for it. Then you've got 7%, which encourages more people to vote. Then one year, you wake up and you've changed things.
But not always in the way you expect.
The southern fire-eater broke the Democratic party in 1960.
What he got was Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. The industrialization of the North. The settlement of the West. Vast expenditures on new technologies and infrastruture - investments he had blocked for decades.
If people start voting their principles...
This translates - quite reliably - to "when people start voting our principles..." we will win.
Whatever the cause, it is too easy to convince yourself that you are the only voice of the good and true. That you cannot be opposed by a principled majority.
The fact that buying a bare laptop is more expensive is a nasty side-effect of MS's licensing arrangements with OEMs. That, in turn, is why people are getting fed up with the Windows tax.
Bare bones doesn't sell worth shit.
While Walmart.com finds it profitable to stock 240 Win 7 laptops and 89 desktops. None of them high end product.
The OEM Windows PC benefits from enormous economies of scale.
In manufacturing. In marketing.
The OEM Windows PC benefits from the fact that it is sold as a ready-to-run home appliance and not a kit of parts.
You buy the Win 7 laptop knowing that the sound will work. That ain't always true with Ubuntu.
There is damn little evidence that talk of the "Microsoft Tax" rings anyone's chimes but the geek's. Top 5 Operating Systems
Here's hoping that affected sites put up an intro page on any ISPs that slow them down, explaining to the user that the site is slow not because of problems on the site's end, but rather that it's the user's ISP, the company he pays to get access to the internet, that is artificially slowing things down.
That tells the user you can't afford life in the fast lane. That you are strictly second tier.
...if we stopped calling exploitation attempts "attacks." It's trickery; it's spying; it's occasionally even -- and this is stretching the word a little -- sabotage
When you have a thirst for blood, you are in no mood to argue the fine points of language. Call it trickery, spying, who the helll cares?
Re:The "Comic Code" never had any "teeth".
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Comics Code Dead
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· Score: 2
The judge reviewing the story (yes, that's right: an official of the US government was evaluating comics for their suitability to be published) insisted that the character be made a white guy instead.
The pre-code story "Judgement Day" was re-printed unchanged.
The judge was Charles Murphy, the Comics Code Administrator, a former New York City magistrate.
Among the provisions of the Code:
The words "horror" and "terror" are not permitted as comic-book titles, and no "scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism or masochism" are allowed. Sympathy for criminals, "unique details" of a crime, or any treatment that tends to "create disrespect for established authority" are banned. "Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, ridicule of racial or religious groups" are not allowed, and "all characters shall be depicted in dress reasonably acceptable to society, [with] females drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities."
[It was EC's William Gaines who] called a meeting of his fellow publishers and suggested that the comic book industry gather to fight outside censorship and help repair the industry's damaged reputation. They formed the Comics Magazine Association of America and its Comics Code Authority. The CCA code expanded on the ACMP's restrictions. Unlike its predecessor, the CCA code was rigorously enforced, with all comics requiring code approval prior to their publication. This not being what Gaines intended, he refused to join the association.... When distributors refused to handle many of his comics, Gaines ended publication of his three horror and the two SuspenStory titles on September 14, 1954. EC shifted its focus to a line of more realistic comic book titles, including M.D. and Psychoanalysis... Since the initial issues did not carry the Comics Code seal, the wholesalers refused to carry them.EC Comics
There are two long-standing problems exposed here:
The split between publishers whose books appealed to young readers and those targeting older teens and adults. (Not always with EC's intelligence or care.)
The lack of alternative distribution channels.
Reprints of newspaper comics had legitimacy among adult readers and book stores as early as Gasoline Alley ca. 1920. It was a much harder struggle for the comic book - or graphic novel, if you insist - to win that kind of acceptance.
I'm sure google would love a merger: two top heavy companies doing everything they can to kill R&D
Do you have even the faintest notion of what Microsoft spends on R&D?
Microsoft's $8.7 billion in R&D expenses for the 2010 fiscal year represented 14 percent of the company's $62.5 billion in annual revenue. That was down slightly from the previous year, when the R&D expenses of $9 billion represented about 15 percent of its revenue, roughly in line with its traditional ratio.
Pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding took the top position for innovation spending, having boosted its R&D spend 11.6% to $9.1 billion, replacing Toyota Motor, which cut spending nearly 20% and fell to fourth place.
In fact, healthcare companies took 5 of the top 10 spots on the list and 7 of the top 20.
It sold fine, then it became rated AO and was removed from store shelves at the time, despite the fact that the content couldn't be normally accessed. It wasn't any merits of the game itself that caused it to be removed from store shelves, but rather a pointless rating system by the ESRB.
"Hot Coffee" was accessible in both PC and console versions of the game.
Rockstar Games, the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series, initially denied allegations that the minigame was "hidden" in the video game, stating that the Hot Coffee modification (which they claim violated the game's End User Licence Agreement) is the result of "hackers" making "significant technical modifications to and reverse engineering" the game's code. However, this claim was undermined when a hacker known as N.A.V.A.I.D G, on July 12, 2005, released an "Action Replay Power Save" for the Xbox console, and codes for the PlayStation 2 Action Replay game enhancer that allowed the scenes to be accessed in each of the console versions. These new methods of accessing "Hot Coffee" demonstrated that the controversial content was, indeed, built into the console versions as well.
The creator of the original PC mod, Patrick Wildenborg (under the Internet alias "PatrickW"), a 38-year-old modder from the Netherlands, rejects Rockstar's claim that the mod required significant technical effort, pointing out that he only changed a single bit in the installed game's "main.scm" file, and that there is absolutely no new content that he actually created--every piece of the required code was already in-game, just not available to the player. The PC mod itself is actually just an edited copy of the game script files with the bit changed. The mod was also made possible on the console versions, by changing the bit inside a user's savegame or by using a third-party modding device....
The possibility of enabling the minigame by changing a single bit of code shows that the sexual intercourse content is part of the game's original data, and not new content inserted into the game by the mod. However, it is not possible to access the sexual content simply by playing the game as intended by the developers, because it was fully disabled and the bit cannot be changed by normal gameplay. The oral sex animations are however clearly visible in the background of an early mission, "Cleaning the Hood", even in the re-released game. This may explain why the mini-game was not simply removed when the decision was made to cut it from the game: its assets were in use elsewhere.Hot Coffee minigame controversy
Rockstar had a history of pushing the limits of the M rated game.
Rockstar's use of inner city gangland stereotypes did not endear it to America's racial minorities or the American inner city itself. That was dangerously charged territory to tread for a developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Introducing a button-mashing sexual minigame into a game that implies or allows the rape or murder of a prostitute raised even more red flags. Prostitutes call for ban on GTA
There is - or can be - a meaningful distinction between handling adult sexual themes in a game and porn. The adolescence of "Hot Coffee" was absolute proof that the video game industry had a lot of growing up to do.
The one thing Rockstar could not survive was the precedent it had set for embedding AO content in an M rated game. Content which could be unlocked with a wink and a nod sometime after release.
Re:The "Comic Code" never had any "teeth".
on
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· Score: 2
And it was always voluntary. The publishers were not subject to external censorship. They chose to follow that "code" (and of course not all did. You just never heard of those who didn't.)
The comic book - like the pulp fiction magazine (Think Astounding, Black Mask, Wierd Tales,etc.) - was driven close to extinction by television and the 25 cent paperback book. Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer.
The crime and horror comics were an attempt to re-capture a teen age and adult readership. The problem was that in newstand and cigar store distribution the horror comic would appear on the same racks as Archie, Casper and Scrooge McDuck.
The problem was that the cigar store would be periodically raided by the vice squad for gambling and pornography.
Every commercial artist begins in the sub-basements of his profession - and that is a fair description of the crime and horror comic. Particularly when you look at what Al Capp, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly and others had made of the newspaper comic strip.
In defending free speech, it helps if you have a quality product to defend.
Is there any significance to the fact that Google chose IETF instead of ISO (where MPEG-LA and M$ submitted H.264 and OOXML)?
Let us be honest about H.264. Where it comes from and how it is used.
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content.H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
VCEG was preceded in the ITU-T (which was called the CCITT at the time) by the "Specialists Group on Coding for Visual Telephony" chaired by Sakae Okubo (NTT) which developed H.261. The first meeting of this group was held Dec. 11-14, 1984 in Tokyo, Japan. In 1994, Richard Shaphorst (Delta Information Systems) took over new video codec development in ITU-T with the launch of the project for developing H.324. Schaphorst appointed Karel Rijkse (KPN Research) to chair the development of the H.263 codec standard as part of that project. In 1996, Schaphorst then appointed Gary Sullivan (PictureTel, since 1999 Microsoft) to launch the subsequent "H.263+" enhancement project, which was completed in 1998. In 1998, Sullivan was made rapporteur (chairman) of the question (group) for video coding in the ITU-T that is now called VCEG. After the H.263+ project, the group then completed an "H.263++" effort, produced H.263 Appendix III and H.263 Annex X, and launched the "H.26L" project with a call for proposals issued in January 1998 and a first draft design adopted in August 1999. In 2000, Thomas Wiegand (Fraunhofer HHI) was appointed as an associated rapporteur (vice-chairman) of VCEG. Sullivan and Wiegand led the H.26L project as it progressed to eventually become the H.264 standard after formation of a Joint Video Team (JVT) with MPEG for the completion of the work in 2003. (In MPEG, the H.264 standard is known as MPEG-4 part 10.) Since 2003, VCEG and the JVT have developed several substantial extensions of H.264, produced H.271, and conducted exploration work toward the potential creation of a future new "H.265". In January 2010, the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) was created as a group of video coding experts from ITU-T Study Group 16 (VCEG) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 (MPEG) to develop a new generation video coding standard.
In July 2006, the video coding work of the ITU-T led by VCEG was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history. The image coding work that is now in the domain of VCEG was also highly ranked in the voting, placing third overall.
The organization now known as VCEG has standardized (and is responsible for the maintenance of) the following video compression formats and ancillary standards:
H.120: the first digital video coding standard. v1 (1984) featured conditional replenishment, differential PCM, scalar quantization, variable-length coding and a switch for quincunx sampling. v2 (1988) added motion compensation and background prediction. This standard was little-used and no codecs exist. H.261: was the first practical digital video coding standard (late 1990). This design was a pioneering effort, and all subsequent international video coding standards have been based closely on its design. H.262: it is identical in content to the video part of the ISO/IEC MPEG-2 standard (ISO/IEC 13818-2). This standard was developed in a joint partnership between VCEG and MPEG, and thus it became published as a standard of both organizations. ITU-T Recommendation H.262 and ISO/IEC 13818-2 were developed and published as "common text" international standards. As a result, the two documents are completely identical in all aspects. H.263: was
Take it in for service Tell them not to change the screws.
And if the Apple store refuses to alter their standard service contract or warranty to accomodate the geek with a few loose screws of his own, what then?
ITS YOUR COMPUTER
But it is Apple's repair shop.
You are not going to get far with the AG if your iDevice is brought up to current factory specs.
It seems necessarty here to insert a reminder about what H.264 is and where it comes from:
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT).
H.264 is perhaps best known as being one of the codec standards for Blu-ray Discs; all Blu-ray players must be able to decode H.264. It is also widely used by streaming internet sources, such as videos from Vimeo, YouTube and the iTunes Store, web software such as the Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, broadcast services for DVB and SBTVD, direct-broadcast satellite television services, cable television services, and real-time videoconferencing.
The H.264 video format has a very broad application range that covers all forms of digital compressed video from low bit-rate Internet streaming applications to HDTV broadcast and Digital Cinema applications with nearly lossless coding. With the use of H.264, bit rate savings of 50% or more are reported. For example, H.264 has been reported to give the same Digital Satellite TV quality as current MPEG-2 implementations with less than half the bitrate, with current MPEG-2 implementations working at around 3.5 Mbit/s and H.264 at only 1.5 Mbit/s.
The Digital Video Broadcast project (DVB) approved the use of H.264/AVC for broadcast television in late 2004.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards body in the United States approved the use of H.264/AVC for broadcast television in July 2008, although the standard is not yet used for fixed ATSC broadcasts within the United States. It has also been approved for use with the more recent ATSC-M/H (Mobile/Handheld) standard, using the AVC and SVC portions of H.264.
The CCTV (Close Circuit TV) or Video Surveillance market has included the technology in many products. The introduction of H.264 to the video surveillance industry has meant the ability to stream high resolution at lower bit rates has substantially improved.H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, List of video services using H.264/MPEF-4_AVC
The implications for the global hardware manufactuer - the OEM - are clear:
Whatever the fate of WebM, you will be licensing H.264 and HVEC/H.265 across your entire product line. This is not a problem for companies the size of Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic, Philips, JVC, Sony, or Samsung.
Not a problem for AMD, ARM, Apple, Intel, NVIDIA or Microsoft.
Google is the new kid on the block. HVEC should be final in about two or three years.
HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.
HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range.High Efficiency Video Coding
The implications for the content provider are also clear.
WebM is not a theatrical production codec.
It is not a theatrical, broadcast, cable or sattelite distribution codec. It does not support content protection.
The H.264 base Netflix client is baked into every HDTV set, video player and video game console sold in the U.S.
Ian Hickson, a Google engineer and editor of the HTML5 standard announced that the language will be transitioned to a 'living standard' without version numbers. A bit like like Chrome, if you will."
The HTML standards committee takes eternity and a day to finalize anything.
Which is how and why workable solutions - like Flash - that evolve outside the committee gain traction.
20% of peak hour Internet traffic in the states was a content-protected Netflix stream before Netflix offered a streaming-only service. HVEC - aka H.265 - will be ready in about two years. High Efficiency Video Coding / HEVC / H.265 : Beyond H.264
Half the bit rate of H.264 for content of the same quality...
2.When cutting spending, try cutting big ticket items first.
The big ticket items in your state budget are the ones that care for the poorest and most vulnerable. The very young and the very old. The sick and the disabled.
The geek keeps his toll free commuter bridge.
The middle class entitlement that costs next to nothing in the larger scheme of things.
Grandma loses her senior van, dental clinic and home care services.
The road train is plausible only on the limited access motor way --- where accidents have always been rare and the weather is an important contributing factor.
You are far more likely to be injured or killed before you join the train or after you leave it.
Slashdot Mirror
...about how many lives will be saved, is that they don't take into account that once in place, people rely on them, and change their behavior accordingly.
I would like to see better evidence for this notion than I have seen so far.
Better evidence that the "dangerous" changes in behavior that the geek anticipates will be statistically significant.
Ford's crash avoidance system seems to use a very simple HUD - after a time you shouldn't even be conscious of the thing.
you know the various Traffic Management Authorities would jump head over heals for the ability to see real-time position of all cars on the expressway.
They will be getting that ability anyway.
Satellite technologies, navigation and video. Pilotless aircraft. RFID or something of that sort. There are many, many, ways of doing this. The railroads were working on the problem over a century ago.
In 1900 there was a faith in "Progress" we no longer have.
We know that things can disastrously wrong. In tech. In politics. In business and finance.
Maybe better tech will be available in 100 years. But you can't be certain of that.
"You have an awfully low opinion of assembly line workers. I would encourage you to meet one. Then you'd appreciate the physical effort required to meet an extremely strict work schedule, and maintain attention and energy for an entire work day in less than comfortable conditions. Sure, it's not an intellectually demanding field, and we suffer an intelligence deficit as a result of most jobs not stimulating intellect, but these people worked hard for their meager pay."
The pay wasn't always meager.
"In 1914, believing that well-paid laborers are the best consumers, Henry Foird hiked his employees' wages from $2.34 for a nine-hour day to $5.00 for an eight-hour day. The move proved to be highly profitable. Instead of constant employee turnover, the most expert mechanics flocked to the company, raising productivity and reducing training costs. Ford called it the "wage motive." By 1916, as the price of the Model T fell to $360, sales reached 472,000
By 1918, half of all the cars in America were Model Ts. By 1924, 15 million had been sold, Ford had become a multimillionaire, and Detroit was the auto-manufacturing capital of the United States. In 1928, Ford created the Model A to replace the Model T, and four years later introduced the V-8 engine. By 1932, Ford was producing one-third of all the automobiles in the world."
You owe a lot to the assembly line worker:
Shorter hours, the four and five day work week, paid vacations, health care and other employee benefits.
There can be "intellectual stimulation" beyond work --- particularly when you aren't working yourself to physical and mental exhaustion.
Ford's workers owned homes. Raised families. Played ball. Went fishing.
Off the line they could be hobbyists or craftsmen. Who do you think built all those projects published in century-old magazines like "Popular Mechanics?"
The Ford worker could afford a Ford of his own. With all the new-won independence that implies.
Such a service would likely have few or no works self-published by individuals.
Probably no more and no less than the Apple app store, the Kindle, XBox Live! and so on.
It is to your benefit to pirate rather than deal with DRM nightmares. And corporate America is more focused on punishing their customers than trying to attract new ones.
20% of peak hour download traffic was a Netflix stream before Netflix offered a streaming-only service at $9/month.
The Neflix client is baked into every HDTV, video game console and set top box. OnLive! gaming on your Vizio. The same can be said for Pandora and a dozen other services, and with more, much more to come.
Internet radio is becoming as a much a part of home theater sound as FM.
You can imagine a parallel universe in which you cable company or telco offers high speed service exclusively for these direct feeds.
The PC isn't needed.
The browser isn't needed - or at least not the browser that hasn't made its peace with protected content.
Flash. H.264/HEVC video, etc, etc. etc.
The P2P client - always problematical - disappears.
So I get sued for downloading / uploading a fake file can I beat it based on that they are calming that I downloading / uploading the real file?
I am betting "No" - unless you are willing to submit to an independent forensic examination of all your storage media. The fake file is, after all, an admission that you were looking for the real one, and, quite probably, others as well.
The uploader/downloader is the guy who tried to eat one potato chip. What the plaintiff wants is the whole bag.
When people see it's rising, more people vote for it. Then you've got 7%, which encourages more people to vote. Then one year, you wake up and you've changed things.
But not always in the way you expect.
The southern fire-eater broke the Democratic party in 1960.
What he got was Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. The industrialization of the North. The settlement of the West. Vast expenditures on new technologies and infrastruture - investments he had blocked for decades.
If people start voting their principles...
This translates - quite reliably - to "when people start voting our principles..." we will win.
Whatever the cause, it is too easy to convince yourself that you are the only voice of the good and true. That you cannot be opposed by a principled majority.
The fact that buying a bare laptop is more expensive is a nasty side-effect of MS's licensing arrangements with OEMs. That, in turn, is why people are getting fed up with the Windows tax.
Bare bones doesn't sell worth shit.
While Walmart.com finds it profitable to stock 240 Win 7 laptops and 89 desktops. None of them high end product.
The OEM Windows PC benefits from enormous economies of scale.
In manufacturing. In marketing.
The OEM Windows PC benefits from the fact that it is sold as a ready-to-run home appliance and not a kit of parts.
You buy the Win 7 laptop knowing that the sound will work. That ain't always true with Ubuntu.
There is damn little evidence that talk of the "Microsoft Tax" rings anyone's chimes but the geek's. Top 5 Operating Systems
An EPFCG can be used only once as a pulsed power supply since the device is physically destroyed during operation.
Which implies that you will depositing a generous supply of forensic evidence for the investigation to come.
The shit that gets spewed out of big production hollywood these days is far from the likes of Beethoven.
any realistic look at P2P traffic will tell you that the big Hollywood is what the geek wants to see.
Here's hoping that affected sites put up an intro page on any ISPs that slow them down, explaining to the user that the site is slow not because of problems on the site's end, but rather that it's the user's ISP, the company he pays to get access to the internet, that is artificially slowing things down.
That tells the user you can't afford life in the fast lane. That you are strictly second tier.
...if we stopped calling exploitation attempts "attacks." It's trickery; it's spying; it's occasionally even -- and this is stretching the word a little -- sabotage
When you have a thirst for blood, you are in no mood to argue the fine points of language. Call it trickery, spying, who the helll cares?
The judge reviewing the story (yes, that's right: an official of the US government was evaluating comics for their suitability to be published) insisted that the character be made a white guy instead.
The pre-code story "Judgement Day" was re-printed unchanged.
The judge was Charles Murphy, the Comics Code Administrator, a former New York City magistrate.
Among the provisions of the Code:
The words "horror" and "terror" are not permitted as comic-book titles, and no "scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism or masochism" are allowed. Sympathy for criminals, "unique details" of a crime, or any treatment that tends to "create disrespect for established authority" are banned. "Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, ridicule of racial or religious groups" are not allowed, and "all characters shall be depicted in dress reasonably acceptable to society, [with] females drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities."
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,857654,00.html#ixzz1BoFpABoS
[It was EC's William Gaines who] called a meeting of his fellow publishers and suggested that the comic book industry gather to fight outside censorship and help repair the industry's damaged reputation. They formed the Comics Magazine Association of America and its Comics Code Authority. The CCA code expanded on the ACMP's restrictions. Unlike its predecessor, the CCA code was rigorously enforced, with all comics requiring code approval prior to their publication. This not being what Gaines intended, he refused to join the association. ... When distributors refused to handle many of his comics, Gaines ended publication of his three horror and the two SuspenStory titles on September 14, 1954. EC shifted its focus to a line of more realistic comic book titles, including M.D. and Psychoanalysis... Since the initial issues did not carry the Comics Code seal, the wholesalers refused to carry them. EC Comics
There are two long-standing problems exposed here:
The split between publishers whose books appealed to young readers and those targeting older teens and adults. (Not always with EC's intelligence or care.)
The lack of alternative distribution channels.
Reprints of newspaper comics had legitimacy among adult readers and book stores as early as Gasoline Alley ca. 1920. It was a much harder struggle for the comic book - or graphic novel, if you insist - to win that kind of acceptance.
I'm sure google would love a merger: two top heavy companies doing everything they can to kill R&D
Do you have even the faintest notion of what Microsoft spends on R&D?
Microsoft's $8.7 billion in R&D expenses for the 2010 fiscal year represented 14 percent of the company's $62.5 billion in annual revenue. That was down slightly from the previous year, when the R&D expenses of $9 billion represented about 15 percent of its revenue, roughly in line with its traditional ratio.
Microsoft's annual R&D spending dips for first time in five years
Pharmaceutical giant Roche Holding took the top position for innovation spending, having boosted its R&D spend 11.6% to $9.1 billion, replacing Toyota Motor, which cut spending nearly 20% and fell to fourth place.
In fact, healthcare companies took 5 of the top 10 spots on the list and 7 of the top 20.
Microsoft (#2), Nokia (#3) and Pfizer (#5) rounded out the top five. Corporate R&D spending declined during 2009 downturn, finds Booz & Company global innovation 1000 study
It sold fine, then it became rated AO and was removed from store shelves at the time, despite the fact that the content couldn't be normally accessed. It wasn't any merits of the game itself that caused it to be removed from store shelves, but rather a pointless rating system by the ESRB.
"Hot Coffee" was accessible in both PC and console versions of the game.
Rockstar Games, the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto series, initially denied allegations that the minigame was "hidden" in the video game, stating that the Hot Coffee modification (which they claim violated the game's End User Licence Agreement) is the result of "hackers" making "significant technical modifications to and reverse engineering" the game's code. However, this claim was undermined when a hacker known as N.A.V.A.I.D G, on July 12, 2005, released an "Action Replay Power Save" for the Xbox console, and codes for the PlayStation 2 Action Replay game enhancer that allowed the scenes to be accessed in each of the console versions. These new methods of accessing "Hot Coffee" demonstrated that the controversial content was, indeed, built into the console versions as well.
The creator of the original PC mod, Patrick Wildenborg (under the Internet alias "PatrickW"), a 38-year-old modder from the Netherlands, rejects Rockstar's claim that the mod required significant technical effort, pointing out that he only changed a single bit in the installed game's "main.scm" file, and that there is absolutely no new content that he actually created--every piece of the required code was already in-game, just not available to the player. The PC mod itself is actually just an edited copy of the game script files with the bit changed. The mod was also made possible on the console versions, by changing the bit inside a user's savegame or by using a third-party modding device.
The possibility of enabling the minigame by changing a single bit of code shows that the sexual intercourse content is part of the game's original data, and not new content inserted into the game by the mod. However, it is not possible to access the sexual content simply by playing the game as intended by the developers, because it was fully disabled and the bit cannot be changed by normal gameplay. The oral sex animations are however clearly visible in the background of an early mission, "Cleaning the Hood", even in the re-released game. This may explain why the mini-game was not simply removed when the decision was made to cut it from the game: its assets were in use elsewhere. Hot Coffee minigame controversy
Rockstar had a history of pushing the limits of the M rated game.
Rockstar's use of inner city gangland stereotypes did not endear it to America's racial minorities or the American inner city itself. That was dangerously charged territory to tread for a developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Introducing a button-mashing sexual minigame into a game that implies or allows the rape or murder of a prostitute raised even more red flags. Prostitutes call for ban on GTA
There is - or can be - a meaningful distinction between handling adult sexual themes in a game and porn. The adolescence of "Hot Coffee" was absolute proof that the video game industry had a lot of growing up to do.
The one thing Rockstar could not survive was the precedent it had set for embedding AO content in an M rated game. Content which could be unlocked with a wink and a nod sometime after release.
And it was always voluntary. The publishers were not subject to external censorship. They chose to follow that "code" (and of course not all did. You just never heard of those who didn't.)
The comic book - like the pulp fiction magazine (Think Astounding, Black Mask, Wierd Tales,etc.) - was driven close to extinction by television and the 25 cent paperback book. Mickey Spillane and Mike Hammer.
The crime and horror comics were an attempt to re-capture a teen age and adult readership. The problem was that in newstand and cigar store distribution the horror comic would appear on the same racks as Archie, Casper and Scrooge McDuck.
The problem was that the cigar store would be periodically raided by the vice squad for gambling and pornography.
Every commercial artist begins in the sub-basements of his profession - and that is a fair description of the crime and horror comic. Particularly when you look at what Al Capp, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly and others had made of the newspaper comic strip.
In defending free speech, it helps if you have a quality product to defend.
Is there any significance to the fact that Google chose IETF instead of ISO (where MPEG-LA and M$ submitted H.264 and OOXML)?
Let us be honest about H.264. Where it comes from and how it is used.
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT). The ITU-T H.264 standard and the ISO/IEC MPEG-4 AVC standard (formally, ISO/IEC 14496-10 - MPEG-4 Part 10, Advanced Video Coding) are jointly maintained so that they have identical technical content. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC
VCEG was preceded in the ITU-T (which was called the CCITT at the time) by the "Specialists Group on Coding for Visual Telephony" chaired by Sakae Okubo (NTT) which developed H.261. The first meeting of this group was held Dec. 11-14, 1984 in Tokyo, Japan. In 1994, Richard Shaphorst (Delta Information Systems) took over new video codec development in ITU-T with the launch of the project for developing H.324. Schaphorst appointed Karel Rijkse (KPN Research) to chair the development of the H.263 codec standard as part of that project. In 1996, Schaphorst then appointed Gary Sullivan (PictureTel, since 1999 Microsoft) to launch the subsequent "H.263+" enhancement project, which was completed in 1998. In 1998, Sullivan was made rapporteur (chairman) of the question (group) for video coding in the ITU-T that is now called VCEG. After the H.263+ project, the group then completed an "H.263++" effort, produced H.263 Appendix III and H.263 Annex X, and launched the "H.26L" project with a call for proposals issued in January 1998 and a first draft design adopted in August 1999. In 2000, Thomas Wiegand (Fraunhofer HHI) was appointed as an associated rapporteur (vice-chairman) of VCEG. Sullivan and Wiegand led the H.26L project as it progressed to eventually become the H.264 standard after formation of a Joint Video Team (JVT) with MPEG for the completion of the work in 2003. (In MPEG, the H.264 standard is known as MPEG-4 part 10.) Since 2003, VCEG and the JVT have developed several substantial extensions of H.264, produced H.271, and conducted exploration work toward the potential creation of a future new "H.265". In January 2010, the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC) was created as a group of video coding experts from ITU-T Study Group 16 (VCEG) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 11 (MPEG) to develop a new generation video coding standard.
In July 2006, the video coding work of the ITU-T led by VCEG was voted as the most influential area of the standardization work of the CCITT and ITU-T in their 50-year history. The image coding work that is now in the domain of VCEG was also highly ranked in the voting, placing third overall.
The organization now known as VCEG has standardized (and is responsible for the maintenance of) the following video compression formats and ancillary standards:
H.120: the first digital video coding standard. v1 (1984) featured conditional replenishment, differential PCM, scalar quantization, variable-length coding and a switch for quincunx sampling. v2 (1988) added motion compensation and background prediction. This standard was little-used and no codecs exist.
H.261: was the first practical digital video coding standard (late 1990). This design was a pioneering effort, and all subsequent international video coding standards have been based closely on its design.
H.262: it is identical in content to the video part of the ISO/IEC MPEG-2 standard (ISO/IEC 13818-2). This standard was developed in a joint partnership between VCEG and MPEG, and thus it became published as a standard of both organizations. ITU-T Recommendation H.262 and ISO/IEC 13818-2 were developed and published as "common text" international standards. As a result, the two documents are completely identical in all aspects.
H.263: was
You wouldn't steal a car. But soon you'll be able to copy one.
Not until you can make - finish - assemble - and test - 15,000 to 20,000 parts of any arbitrary size, shape, weight, composition, and precision.
Take it in for service
Tell them not to change the screws.
And if the Apple store refuses to alter their standard service contract or warranty to accomodate the geek with a few loose screws of his own, what then?
ITS YOUR COMPUTER
But it is Apple's repair shop.
You are not going to get far with the AG if your iDevice is brought up to current factory specs.
It seems necessarty here to insert a reminder about what H.264 is and where it comes from:
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a block-oriented motion-compensation-based codec standard developed by the ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) together with the ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). It was the product of a partnership effort known as the Joint Video Team (JVT).
H.264 is perhaps best known as being one of the codec standards for Blu-ray Discs; all Blu-ray players must be able to decode H.264. It is also widely used by streaming internet sources, such as videos from Vimeo, YouTube and the iTunes Store, web software such as the Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight, broadcast services for DVB and SBTVD, direct-broadcast satellite television services, cable television services, and real-time videoconferencing.
The H.264 video format has a very broad application range that covers all forms of digital compressed video from low bit-rate Internet streaming applications to HDTV broadcast and Digital Cinema applications with nearly lossless coding. With the use of H.264, bit rate savings of 50% or more are reported. For example, H.264 has been reported to give the same Digital Satellite TV quality as current MPEG-2 implementations with less than half the bitrate, with current MPEG-2 implementations working at around 3.5 Mbit/s and H.264 at only 1.5 Mbit/s.
The Digital Video Broadcast project (DVB) approved the use of H.264/AVC for broadcast television in late 2004.
The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) standards body in the United States approved the use of H.264/AVC for broadcast television in July 2008, although the standard is not yet used for fixed ATSC broadcasts within the United States. It has also been approved for use with the more recent ATSC-M/H (Mobile/Handheld) standard, using the AVC and SVC portions of H.264.
The CCTV (Close Circuit TV) or Video Surveillance market has included the technology in many products. The introduction of H.264 to the video surveillance industry has meant the ability to stream high resolution at lower bit rates has substantially improved. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, List of video services using H.264/MPEF-4_AVC
The implications for the global hardware manufactuer - the OEM - are clear:
Whatever the fate of WebM, you will be licensing H.264 and HVEC/H.265 across your entire product line. This is not a problem for companies the size of Mitsubishi Electric, Panasonic, Philips, JVC, Sony, or Samsung.
Not a problem for AMD, ARM, Apple, Intel, NVIDIA or Microsoft.
Google is the new kid on the block. HVEC should be final in about two or three years.
HEVC aims to substantially improve coding efficiency compared to AVC High Profile, i.e. reduce bitrate requirements by half with comparable image quality, probably at the expense of increased computational complexity. Depending on the application requirements, HEVC should be able to trade off computational complexity, compression rate, robustness to errors and processing delay time.
HEVC is targeted at next-generation HDTV displays and content capture systems which feature progressive scanned frame rates and display resolutions from QVGA (320x240) up to 1080p and Ultra HDTV (7680x4320), as well as improved picture quality in terms of noise level, color gamut and dynamic range. High Efficiency Video Coding
The implications for the content provider are also clear.
WebM is not a theatrical production codec.
It is not a theatrical, broadcast, cable or sattelite distribution codec. It does not support content protection.
The H.264 base Netflix client is baked into every HDTV set, video player and video game console sold in the U.S.
There are clients for th
There are huge cost savings with not having to buy real estate, deal with local govt, residents, hippies etc.
There is nothing in the world more likely to stir up a fuss than water.
Recreational and commercial fisheries. Drilling platforms. Boating and shipping. Beaches and harbors.
You will be hearing from the locals.
Ian Hickson, a Google engineer and editor of the HTML5 standard announced that the language will be transitioned to a 'living standard' without version numbers. A bit like like Chrome, if you will."
The HTML standards committee takes eternity and a day to finalize anything.
Which is how and why workable solutions - like Flash - that evolve outside the committee gain traction.
20% of peak hour Internet traffic in the states was a content-protected Netflix stream before Netflix offered a streaming-only service. HVEC - aka H.265 - will be ready in about two years. High Efficiency Video Coding / HEVC / H.265 : Beyond H.264
Half the bit rate of H.264 for content of the same quality...
2.When cutting spending, try cutting big ticket items first.
The big ticket items in your state budget are the ones that care for the poorest and most vulnerable. The very young and the very old. The sick and the disabled.
The geek keeps his toll free commuter bridge.
The middle class entitlement that costs next to nothing in the larger scheme of things.
Grandma loses her senior van, dental clinic and home care services.
The road train is plausible only on the limited access motor way --- where accidents have always been rare and the weather is an important contributing factor.
You are far more likely to be injured or killed before you join the train or after you leave it.