Wow for the first time it might actually be a good thing for the country that congress never reads anything they vote on, never thought I'd see the day.
In case anyone is wondering I was be sarcastic, the degree to which most our legislators allow themselves to be uninformed as to the content of the acts they vote on is shameful and terrible for our democracy in general.
There is much contention as to if WebM/VP8 violates those patents or not and Google has DEEP pockets DEEP enough to litigate the issue until the technology is obsolete, so I don't see the need for the patent pool.
Flash wrappers are the legacy way to put video on a web page. If you wrap the h.264 decode up in flash than the licenses for the decoding support are Adobe's problem. Flash works in pretty much any browser anywhere the user is willing to install the plug in. I don't see Google as having any issue with that. What is pretty clear is that the HTML 5 video tag WILL replace those flash objects for sites with simple needs at least, sites like Hulu, netflix, et al will continue to use other tech.
Open browsers can't for license the software they'd need to implement native decoding of h.264 to handle the video tag, yes plugs and external handlers could be uses as kludgy workarounds but that would tilt the table in favor of the mainstream commercial browsers. Google has a vested interest in getting content encoded in their format, and its open so anyone else can use it as well, it is also the technical equal of h.264. Even though Google will gain leverage in the content industry in general through this they can never really hit anyone to hard over the head with it because of the openness, I for one hope they enjoy success in pushing WebM as the way to do video going forward. I don't use chrome but this means I am going to have a better experience in my browser of choice, Seamonkey, and Google is not trying to take that choice away from me unlike the folks pushing the h.264 browsers.
This is an important point though. I too have had enough trouble solving reCAPTCHAs to become frustrated enough just to leave the site, and if I am an AI I don't know it. We have reached a point where I think even if they unbreak reCAPTCHA to the point where machines can't solve them at an effective rate, they will have crossed the threshold where it becomes so hard for humans that a new solution is needed.
What I don't understand is why they went to market without multitasking ready to go. If a few apps can multitask then they already have the scheduling and memory management / segmentation ready to go on the platform. All they need is the UI which really could not possibly take that long to do, I mean how many weeks could getting that done have delayed their time to market? The bar is currently pretty low both Apple's and the Android family's interfaces pretty much amount to a simple task list with icons, with choices being terminate or switch to for each.
The only thing you can conclude about WP7 given it was last to market and not feature complete in this way is there must exist so pretty significant problems with the platform that make general multitasking unworkable for the moment and the solution is to kludge like crazy to make a few big name apps work; not a good omen for long term support.
The other surprising thing is how much of WINCE got fork lifted, while it certainly was not without its problems and the UI never made sense for small devices, the core platform was fairly modern and reasonably well done.
If and that is a big big IF things ever got bad enough at Microsoft for the board to replace Ballmer involuntarily Bill Gates would probably return as an interim CEO.
Its not about just what it costs to produce its what the market will bear above the costs to produce. Apparently given the relative success Barns and Amazon are having with there E-distribution business $10 is in fact a price point at which there are a suitable number of customers. I just bought the most recent addition of a series I have been reading in hard cover, it was almost $30. I'd been excited about it for a long time and had no wish to wait for either my library to get it or for it to come out in paper back. I would have jumped at $10 E-book version; provided it was sufficiently free of DRM that I felt I had a reasonably good chance of being able to read it again a few years from now.
I really find these OMG we have to get away from COBOL articles sort of silly. While I agree that doing new development in COBOL probably does not make a whole lot of sense most of the time using the existing code base is not a problem. IBM makes it real easy to not only run your forty year old COBOL applications but integrate them with Java, Ruby and other more modern languages. You can even do things like implement web services and the like pretty easily in COBOL these days, I have seen some pretty impressive copy books.
What we should remember is COBOL has run these business systems for 40 years with success. It might not be the most fun thing to write code in but its actually quite good for accounting and basic reporting processes. Oh sure you can do these things in C, C++, Java, or anything else just fine but in general its going to be more error prone because those languages are not really targeted at the task and in truth probably use more total lines of code to get it done, even if most of its warped up in some frame work or STL. Finally most of these business accounting type tasks really do make more sense thought about in structured programming terms or even just simply as control break processes, they can be forced on to an object model like anything else but the operative word there is forced.
There are lots of good reasons to replace systems and forklift old code. If you are tossing out you old COBOL process because its a mess of badly done spaghetti code fine, if you are getting rid of it just because OMGs COBOL is dying that is fixing what is not broken an asking for trouble.
well since this is slashdot, the parent post said 10^2bps and that is way fewer than 100 characters which might be 6, 7, usually 8 (ASCII), or 16 bits each.
I had not thought of that. I agree if the cores have different functions / feature sets that are not always needed at the same time, that could be a useful approach, it would be innovative in terms of cellular handsets and probably worthy of anticipiation.
Really why would that be an anticipated product. To the end user it should mean nothing. The only time multiple cores is better is when the power use / price / performance ration of a single core system has reached a maximum for the current capabilities of a single core. In the case of phones usually you are optimizing for performance / power use. I think we can still get more umph out of building a better core than adding more cores at this stage. Unless you scheduling is teh 5ux0r its still just as good a user experience if apps are otherwise properly threaded as N cores for smallish values of N and if apps are not properly threaded its a better experience.
Really, why don't you think Office will run on ARM. First off more and more of it is being ported to.Net which we know the VM and runtime libraries are portable so all of that code should just work one ARM. Second any code I have ever seen from Microsoft has been really good about not making assumptions about the size if ints and endianness and things like that which generally cause portability problems. They already have an x86_64 Office that they ship, which is a pretty good sign they could make office run on other architectures as well.
Getting Office to work on arm probable would be a porting effort and not just a simple rebuild but its doable in short order if you have the resources and Microsoft does.
I'm glad to see the legendary brand back in use rather than sitting in limbo."
You are happy to see someone attempt to get attention by confusing consumers about a product by conflating it with a past one through reuse of the name? I mean I guess if the original Byte people were able to make some money selling the name to this new organization I am happy for them. I guess I am not so happy about them trying to sucker people. If they were trying to create a magazine with similar content and focus to old Byte and using the name for that I'd be happy.
Its kinda like I don't get all that excited when someone slaps Amiga on something that has nothing at all to do with C= and is in no way even reminiscent.
I realize its a serious condition and I hope you don't think I was trying to make light of IBS, I was not trying to do that. I was just pointing out a potential flaw I see in the study and hey not often but things we thought were very complex occasional have really simple solutions like a little bit of sugar a few times daily.
What about the possibility, I know it sounds crazy, but what if sugar pill is actually an effective treatment for IBS. Seems like they need to use the same placebo on test groups with other conditions to eliminate that possibility.
I think that is worth considering spelling is not at all like math or even language composition in terms of correctness and there is doubt of the need for a canonical spelling of each word.
Firstly there are a number of studies that show when reading people really only consider the first and last letters of longer words, all the middle is then fluff that is never needed or filled in from context.
Second, having a correct spelling at all is a pretty new concept in terms of English language history. The first English dictionaries did not appear until around the year 1600. Before that there were no standard spellings if it sounded right and readers could in a non distracting way understand the word as written, it was right. There were complainers before that time who felt English should have standardization but its fair to say authors were authoring and business was taking place just fine before there was an English dictionary.
Personally as far as English is concerned I think the standard still should be if the reader can understand the message the writer message quickly and without being distracted from the message by the encoding then the use of language and spelling should be deemed to be correct.
Worry about, allot being spelled with or without two Ls is for people with a stick shoved up their rear end.
First of all I really hope not, and second I suspect most homes will remain edge networks so the ISP can handle all the routing to and from the Internet.
I am not really trying to take a position here one way or the other. I don't even know that our societal acceptance of explicit violence and rejection of explicit sex is actually sensible but I do sorta identify with the following thinking.
Violence is part of the human story as is sex. Depictions of violence make most normal people glad they are not experiencing it themselves and while it might be fascinating to see depictions of most people are not inclined to engage in it and thankfully many will never experience it. Sex is as much a part of the human condition as violence but on the other hand is something most everyone wants to do and something most will experience in person. When depicted most people want it more. Its perhaps for these reasons its not as necessary to communicate the explicit nature of sex in art and entertainment. Implicit sex is sufficient to tell most stories and express most ideas and feelings.
Well this is exactly why the founding fathers tried to create due process and an independent judiciary, for dealing with domestic private properties and private persons. These actions clearly should have gone through the courts or at the very least an established agency review process were the owners could present evidence and testify if desired on their own behalf.
When executive fiat is used to act on individuals and private property there are always going to be these kinds of abuses.
Right but while everyone else was playing with key disks, and what is the third word on the 37 page of the instructions type games Microsoft did not bother. They were smart enough to realize it does not work, and that if people use it at home they will likely want to use it at work and that means business sales where their bread was buttered.
They probably were more interested in discovering how many pirated copies might be out there rather than thwarting them. Microsoft has always been about market share even if they have to give it way to get it. They practically encouraged people to pirate Windows in the 3.x days.
Well the only real issue is the lack of utility. Obviously there is some risk associate with making modifications to critical infrastructure systems. Lots of organizations like to avoid doing it for that reason until they have to do so, after all it aint broke don't fix it.
Other posters have compared DNSSEC to IPv6 which to me is kinda silly. DNSSEC is an extension it does not effect existing standard operations. IE my outdated stub resolver in my operating system will continue to talk to DNS just fine. Those extra signing records might be there but my computer won't ask for them. Until the client side software supports it, they can still be attacked via DNS poisoning. So anyone who setup DNSSEC has gone to allot of trouble which most users won't be able to get an immediate benefit from.
Self signed certificates are ALWAYS more secure if you can trust the issuer. For instance if I went to my local bank branch and the manager there handed me a key in person and told me to go home and install it to validate their online site, that would be better than the Verisign cert they use now.
It only requires I trust the bank and not a third party CA as well, which I know from experience buying them that they don't always do the due diligence correctly.
The practical way to do this for the home routers is this:
Let the use wire it up and connect to it the first time, the WAN port is shutdown at this point.
When the first connection is made the router uses a hard coded CA signed certificate.
The router generates a new certificate and self signs that certificate.
The user is instructed to download the public part, and import it into their browser, operating system key store, or whatever on the devices they want to use. If they will be connecting from remote sites encorage them to put a copy on a USB stick. For Windows users this is A ONE CLICK OPERATION so not a big deal.
The use returns to the router config URI and continues setup.
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Wow for the first time it might actually be a good thing for the country that congress never reads anything they vote on, never thought I'd see the day.
In case anyone is wondering I was be sarcastic, the degree to which most our legislators allow themselves to be uninformed as to the content of the acts they vote on is shameful and terrible for our democracy in general.
There is much contention as to if WebM/VP8 violates those patents or not and Google has DEEP pockets DEEP enough to litigate the issue until the technology is obsolete, so I don't see the need for the patent pool.
Flash wrappers are the legacy way to put video on a web page. If you wrap the h.264 decode up in flash than the licenses for the decoding support are Adobe's problem. Flash works in pretty much any browser anywhere the user is willing to install the plug in. I don't see Google as having any issue with that. What is pretty clear is that the HTML 5 video tag WILL replace those flash objects for sites with simple needs at least, sites like Hulu, netflix, et al will continue to use other tech.
Open browsers can't for license the software they'd need to implement native decoding of h.264 to handle the video tag, yes plugs and external handlers could be uses as kludgy workarounds but that would tilt the table in favor of the mainstream commercial browsers. Google has a vested interest in getting content encoded in their format, and its open so anyone else can use it as well, it is also the technical equal of h.264. Even though Google will gain leverage in the content industry in general through this they can never really hit anyone to hard over the head with it because of the openness, I for one hope they enjoy success in pushing WebM as the way to do video going forward. I don't use chrome but this means I am going to have a better experience in my browser of choice, Seamonkey, and Google is not trying to take that choice away from me unlike the folks pushing the h.264 browsers.
This is an important point though. I too have had enough trouble solving reCAPTCHAs to become frustrated enough just to leave the site, and if I am an AI I don't know it. We have reached a point where I think even if they unbreak reCAPTCHA to the point where machines can't solve them at an effective rate, they will have crossed the threshold where it becomes so hard for humans that a new solution is needed.
What I don't understand is why they went to market without multitasking ready to go. If a few apps can multitask then they already have the scheduling and memory management / segmentation ready to go on the platform. All they need is the UI which really could not possibly take that long to do, I mean how many weeks could getting that done have delayed their time to market? The bar is currently pretty low both Apple's and the Android family's interfaces pretty much amount to a simple task list with icons, with choices being terminate or switch to for each.
The only thing you can conclude about WP7 given it was last to market and not feature complete in this way is there must exist so pretty significant problems with the platform that make general multitasking unworkable for the moment and the solution is to kludge like crazy to make a few big name apps work; not a good omen for long term support.
The other surprising thing is how much of WINCE got fork lifted, while it certainly was not without its problems and the UI never made sense for small devices, the core platform was fairly modern and reasonably well done.
If and that is a big big IF things ever got bad enough at Microsoft for the board to replace Ballmer involuntarily Bill Gates would probably return as an interim CEO.
Its not about just what it costs to produce its what the market will bear above the costs to produce. Apparently given the relative success Barns and Amazon are having with there E-distribution business $10 is in fact a price point at which there are a suitable number of customers. I just bought the most recent addition of a series I have been reading in hard cover, it was almost $30. I'd been excited about it for a long time and had no wish to wait for either my library to get it or for it to come out in paper back. I would have jumped at $10 E-book version; provided it was sufficiently free of DRM that I felt I had a reasonably good chance of being able to read it again a few years from now.
I really find these OMG we have to get away from COBOL articles sort of silly. While I agree that doing new development in COBOL probably does not make a whole lot of sense most of the time using the existing code base is not a problem. IBM makes it real easy to not only run your forty year old COBOL applications but integrate them with Java, Ruby and other more modern languages. You can even do things like implement web services and the like pretty easily in COBOL these days, I have seen some pretty impressive copy books.
What we should remember is COBOL has run these business systems for 40 years with success. It might not be the most fun thing to write code in but its actually quite good for accounting and basic reporting processes. Oh sure you can do these things in C, C++, Java, or anything else just fine but in general its going to be more error prone because those languages are not really targeted at the task and in truth probably use more total lines of code to get it done, even if most of its warped up in some frame work or STL. Finally most of these business accounting type tasks really do make more sense thought about in structured programming terms or even just simply as control break processes, they can be forced on to an object model like anything else but the operative word there is forced.
There are lots of good reasons to replace systems and forklift old code. If you are tossing out you old COBOL process because its a mess of badly done spaghetti code fine, if you are getting rid of it just because OMGs COBOL is dying that is fixing what is not broken an asking for trouble.
well since this is slashdot, the parent post said 10^2bps and that is way fewer than 100 characters which might be 6, 7, usually 8 (ASCII), or 16 bits each.
I had not thought of that. I agree if the cores have different functions / feature sets that are not always needed at the same time, that could be a useful approach, it would be innovative in terms of cellular handsets and probably worthy of anticipiation.
The new rules ensure that you have already paid by providing him highly subsidized insurance.
Really why would that be an anticipated product. To the end user it should mean nothing. The only time multiple cores is better is when the power use / price / performance ration of a single core system has reached a maximum for the current capabilities of a single core. In the case of phones usually you are optimizing for performance / power use. I think we can still get more umph out of building a better core than adding more cores at this stage. Unless you scheduling is teh 5ux0r its still just as good a user experience if apps are otherwise properly threaded as N cores for smallish values of N and if apps are not properly threaded its a better experience.
Really, why don't you think Office will run on ARM. First off more and more of it is being ported to .Net which we know the VM and runtime libraries are portable so all of that code should just work one ARM. Second any code I have ever seen from Microsoft has been really good about not making assumptions about the size if ints and endianness and things like that which generally cause portability problems. They already have an x86_64 Office that they ship, which is a pretty good sign they could make office run on other architectures as well.
Getting Office to work on arm probable would be a porting effort and not just a simple rebuild but its doable in short order if you have the resources and Microsoft does.
I'm glad to see the legendary brand back in use rather than sitting in limbo."
You are happy to see someone attempt to get attention by confusing consumers about a product by conflating it with a past one through reuse of the name? I mean I guess if the original Byte people were able to make some money selling the name to this new organization I am happy for them. I guess I am not so happy about them trying to sucker people. If they were trying to create a magazine with similar content and focus to old Byte and using the name for that I'd be happy.
Its kinda like I don't get all that excited when someone slaps Amiga on something that has nothing at all to do with C= and is in no way even reminiscent.
I realize its a serious condition and I hope you don't think I was trying to make light of IBS, I was not trying to do that. I was just pointing out a potential flaw I see in the study and hey not often but things we thought were very complex occasional have really simple solutions like a little bit of sugar a few times daily.
What about the possibility, I know it sounds crazy, but what if sugar pill is actually an effective treatment for IBS. Seems like they need to use the same placebo on test groups with other conditions to eliminate that possibility.
So you don't think a patent should have been awarded for something like a transistor?
I think that is worth considering spelling is not at all like math or even language composition in terms of correctness and there is doubt of the need for a canonical spelling of each word.
Firstly there are a number of studies that show when reading people really only consider the first and last letters of longer words, all the middle is then fluff that is never needed or filled in from context.
Second, having a correct spelling at all is a pretty new concept in terms of English language history. The first English dictionaries did not appear until around the year 1600. Before that there were no standard spellings if it sounded right and readers could in a non distracting way understand the word as written, it was right. There were complainers before that time who felt English should have standardization but its fair to say authors were authoring and business was taking place just fine before there was an English dictionary.
Personally as far as English is concerned I think the standard still should be if the reader can understand the message the writer message quickly and without being distracted from the message by the encoding then the use of language and spelling should be deemed to be correct.
Worry about, allot being spelled with or without two Ls is for people with a stick shoved up their rear end.
First of all I really hope not, and second I suspect most homes will remain edge networks so the ISP can handle all the routing to and from the Internet.
I am not really trying to take a position here one way or the other. I don't even know that our societal acceptance of explicit violence and rejection of explicit sex is actually sensible but I do sorta identify with the following thinking.
Violence is part of the human story as is sex. Depictions of violence make most normal people glad they are not experiencing it themselves and while it might be fascinating to see depictions of most people are not inclined to engage in it and thankfully many will never experience it. Sex is as much a part of the human condition as violence but on the other hand is something most everyone wants to do and something most will experience in person. When depicted most people want it more. Its perhaps for these reasons its not as necessary to communicate the explicit nature of sex in art and entertainment. Implicit sex is sufficient to tell most stories and express most ideas and feelings.
Well this is exactly why the founding fathers tried to create due process and an independent judiciary, for dealing with domestic private properties and private persons. These actions clearly should have gone through the courts or at the very least an established agency review process were the owners could present evidence and testify if desired on their own behalf.
When executive fiat is used to act on individuals and private property there are always going to be these kinds of abuses.
Right but while everyone else was playing with key disks, and what is the third word on the 37 page of the instructions type games Microsoft did not bother. They were smart enough to realize it does not work, and that if people use it at home they will likely want to use it at work and that means business sales where their bread was buttered.
They probably were more interested in discovering how many pirated copies might be out there rather than thwarting them. Microsoft has always been about market share even if they have to give it way to get it. They practically encouraged people to pirate Windows in the 3.x days.
Well the only real issue is the lack of utility. Obviously there is some risk associate with making modifications to critical infrastructure systems. Lots of organizations like to avoid doing it for that reason until they have to do so, after all it aint broke don't fix it.
Other posters have compared DNSSEC to IPv6 which to me is kinda silly. DNSSEC is an extension it does not effect existing standard operations. IE my outdated stub resolver in my operating system will continue to talk to DNS just fine. Those extra signing records might be there but my computer won't ask for them. Until the client side software supports it, they can still be attacked via DNS poisoning. So anyone who setup DNSSEC has gone to allot of trouble which most users won't be able to get an immediate benefit from.
Self signed certificates are ALWAYS more secure if you can trust the issuer. For instance if I went to my local bank branch and the manager there handed me a key in person and told me to go home and install it to validate their online site, that would be better than the Verisign cert they use now.
It only requires I trust the bank and not a third party CA as well, which I know from experience buying them that they don't always do the due diligence correctly.
The practical way to do this for the home routers is this:
Let the use wire it up and connect to it the first time, the WAN port is shutdown at this point.
When the first connection is made the router uses a hard coded CA signed certificate.
The router generates a new certificate and self signs that certificate.
The user is instructed to download the public part, and import it into their browser, operating system key store, or whatever on the devices they want to use. If they will be connecting from remote sites encorage them to put a copy on a USB stick. For Windows users this is A ONE CLICK OPERATION so not a big deal.
The use returns to the router config URI and continues setup.