Oddly enough, the main advantage of 1080p for me is the fact that I have a 1080p monitor -- so it doesn't have to scale. Scaling 720p to 1080p (in software!) lags slightly. Decoding 1080p just works.
The primary reason I like the digital channels is that they are true 16:9 widescreen. Opening up the edges of the scene makes a much bigger difference than the horizontal resolution, as far as I'm concerned.
Except, frustratingly, they're often not.
Here's what usually happens: No one wants to put those vertical bars up. So when showing a 4:3 show on your 16:9 screen, they usually scale it -- which looks awful (squashed). This is true whether it's an SD feed scaled up, an HD version of a movie that was simply shot in 4:3, or even an SD clip in an otherwise widescreen show.
Worse are the widescreen shows broadcast as 4:3 SD -- then you've got a little widescreen box right in the middle of your bigger widescreen TV.
It's maddening.
I'm going to say that, once again, broadcast TV fails. Why would I want to watch the show all censored, with ads every 5 minutes (and some in the middle of the show), compressed to hell, and now they even fuck up the aspect ratio, when I can just head over to my nearest torrent site^W^WNetflix queue and get a much higher quality version that just works on my computer?
It was about $300 extra for a 128 gig SSD in this Dell laptop. I just ran a casual test. Keep in mind, this is currently being used (lightly), and I haven't done anything to improve the results of this test -- in fact, probably just the opposite, as the file in question was downloaded via BitTorrent, and I've never defragmented this hard drive. It certainly hasn't been read since the last boot.
dd if=foo.avi of=/dev/null 348459+1 records in 348459+1 records out 178411124 bytes (178 MB) copied, 1.82521 s, 97.7 MB/s
Keep in mind, that's throughput -- it gains nothing from the real killer feature of no seek times.
I can always buy big, slow spinning disks and put them in a NAS somewhere. I can take old desktops, put Linux on them, and turn them into a NAS. For the kind of stuff that takes hundreds of gigs, I don't need much speed.
But for the places where it counts -- like booting an OS -- there is a definite, real benefit, and it's not entirely out of reach, if you care about this kind of thing.
Worth mentioning, sudo is essentially UAC, only somewhat less annoying. But it's still a broken model.
One thing a lot of Unix daemons get right is, one user per task. Basic, stupidly simple security model -- nothing should have more access than it needs to do its job. Server systems still handle this reasonably well -- small things as root, only where needed. Take Apache -- it's root mostly just to bind port 80; everything else is www-data.
Things like this completely go away with modern desktops. The only two users you deal with most of the time are yourself and root. Not that it matters -- X is full of potential exploits.
Oh, and Windows isn't entirely unrecoverable, though the most effective recovery tools I know of are all Linux-based -- a decent livecd, ntfsclone, etc.
The point isn't that it makes it easier for your competition, it's that it makes it easier for that industry as a whole.
Right now, with the market so fragmented, there's no way I'm buying a set-top box for one of these services -- if anything, I'll buy one I can hack to play my torrents.
If there was one to rule them all, I think a lot more people would consider it.
As far as I know, there's no legal requirement to have a lawyer -- you can always represent yourself. There's only a right to legal counsel if you're accused of a crime -- and, I assume, some sort of requirement to represent someone else.
Even assuming that's not the case, there are always asshats like Jack Thompson.
confirm('Do you want to do the thing?'); setupTabs();
While it's waiting for you to click yes/no, the tabs are currently not working -- in fact, both are displayed, and the page layout is only designed to handle one. In this case, it's cosmetic and a bit contrived, but it's easy to imagine cases where javascript is relying on the fact that the tab is single-threaded. For example, suppose it had been some form elements, or script-only links? Large chunks of functionality would be unpredictably broken.
You could argue that any page should be able to work without Javascript. I don't think that is always true, but even supposing it is, I don't think you can argue that any page should be expected to work when Javascript is working as expected sometimes, and is sometimes suspended.
I hope I've made the case that at least confirm and prompt must be blocking in their current versions, to avoid breaking existing pages -- alert is probably harmless, though I can still think of edge cases where people at least expect the alert to block, even if they don't technically depend on that behavior.
Given that, you could argue that there should be nonblocking variants of these. And I'd agree -- and I'd love to see them implemented in browsers. It could be done well -- like the parts of jQuery (some selectors) which make native calls when available, and implement it in javascript when those aren't available (mostly in IE).
But if you're going that route, well, it's possible to build your own nonblocking variant in pure DHTML/AJAX, bundle it as a library (jQuery Growl), and never bother to standardize. That seems the most likely path.
If you think EVERYONE should go out and buy a car in the same fashion YOU do because you think it is for the betterment of society, then I think you are crazy.
I think that you're attaching too much weight to my use of the first person -- my mistake for abusing it.
Yes, I do think everyone should take their time to research it. That seems reasonable -- everyone should be expected to wear their seatbelt, also. The fact that I also wear my seatbelt in no way makes the discussion about me.
Stupid people have a right to exist and buy stuff too, to no detriment I can think of.
The detriment is to the rest of us -- advertising significantly increases the amount of spam in our lives, and reduces the signal/noise. It lowers the quality of life for those of us who are capable of making our own decisions.
Again: Do you really think that, without a brochure, a stupid person wouldn't buy a car? Of course they would, but they'd be forced to look at what other people are driving, maybe ask them what they like -- in other words, forced to think about it.
And I don't think it's elitist to expect that people should think for themselves. In fact, I think it's quite the opposite of elitist to suggest that we all can think, given the chance.
That's what I mean -- by default. Click on the "comments" tab and it's back the way it was -- simple comment headlines, consistently bundled into articles.
Now music is so hip-hop/rap influenced that the only thing the composers seem to think about is the beat and the star-power behind each act.
Having recently seen an Umphrey's McGee concert, I can pretty confidently ask, WTF are you talking about?
Maybe popular music is crap, but there a lot of music out there -- most of it independent, and some of it refreshingly new (not intentionally "retro") -- which is genuinely good, melody-driven, and artful.
This problem has always existed, but before it typically showed up as filler in an album.
Since people can now buy individual songs, it's harder to sell an album with filler in it.
I consider that a good thing, overall. It means that if they're going to make every song mostly filler, I can tell pretty quickly whether or not to like the album.
Really young people are going to like whatever is produced because they don't know anything better- that is certainly a big market.
Maybe I'm just naive, or insulated, but many of the young people I know have varied and eclectic tastes of their own. Almost all of them dig Hendrix and the Beatles. Kids as young as 15 -- I know that described my own tastes at 15, also, though I also had an unhealthy tendency towards death metal.
To me, the more irritating trend is the loudness wars. The latest Metallica album sounds better on Rock Band than it does on CD, because Rock Band didn't compress the range. When that happens, you know something is very, very wrong.
Of course, though it might not be entirely legal, it would be pretty easy to arrange with someone inside the US. Like any other exporter, only much cheaper shipping.
But that's the same mistake you usually only find DRM'd media making -- if you have to do something illegal anyway, why bother paying for the privilege?
expect another decade of thrashing before it all shakes out.
Knowing how these people think and work, and simply crunching the numbers, I can tell you that they won't last another decade. They simply don't have the money to do so, the way they've been burning it.
Ah, but who do you think maintains that top 40 list? Who chooses the artists who will end up there -- and grooms them to be exactly the kind of crap they think will sell?
You're right -- there's a lot of talent out there. So why doesn't the industry better support and promote the good stuff? Why do they, instead, shovel crap?
Same thing happens with TV -- there's almost always something good on, somewhere. Something like, say, Firefly. Except they never seem to realize what they have, and so we end up with more Desperate Housewives.
The upgrade that bothers me is my profile -- I now have one extra click to get to "comments" in the old style. But you know, I'm really not going to bitch about one extra bookmark-able click.
So, a single popup the first time, giving you the option to either allow it or turn it off, and also the option (checked by default) to not see that dialog anymore.
It does, however, present it in a non-technical way first:
AdRater "phones home", but tells us as little as possible.
For many users, that says it all.
AdRater sends the domain name associated with each advertisement you see to SiteTruth.
A domain name is pretty common knowledge. Even if it isn't, now you know some information is going to something called SiteTruth.
Thus, we can tell what advertisers have reached you, but cannot tell what web pages you have been viewing. We can't tell if you click on an ad.
Again, non-technical.
It seems like a non-technical user could read this and understand enough to decide whether or not they need to care -- and if they need to care, they can ask for help understanding it. Us technical users are grateful that all the relevant information about IP addresses, domain names, and cookies are all right there, so we don't have to go digging for clues as to what the "non-technical" marketspeak might mean.
Either you use a whitelist, which makes surfing the Web pretty impractical, or you use a blacklist. If you know where they're sending this information, a firewall and/or proxy can be pretty effective -- or just a good old-fashioned/etc/hosts.
Why are we not pressuring our governments to legislate serious jail time for those responsible for all of this waste?
Partly, because some of us would rather it go the other way -- after all, if a teenager can write a program in his parents' basement that brings major corporations to their knees (or causes a ton of expense), I think it says as much about the corporations than it says about the teenager.
And that teenager could still grow up to become a well-rounded human being.
So, partly, it's because we like the underdog, and we don't like the evil corporations.
I think the other side to it is, the amount of punishment is irrelevant when the perp is never caught.
No, all signs point to solving this at the other end. Any computer system can be set up securely. When it's not, I feel like the user should be held liable. After all, if we gave actual jail time for harboring botnet nodes, people might start paying more attention to keeping their machines clean.
They are also sending this to Google, which crawls the entire Internet. If Apple is indeed sending a hash of every page I view, is it inconceivable that Google could build a hash of every page I might ever view?
It's actually much simpler: Apple decides things for you.
Good or evil, what's actually going on here is that Apple has decided that the Best User Experience (TM) will be best served by you surrendering personal information to Google -- that the benefit of privacy is far outweighed by the risk of phishing.
Kind of like how Apple decided that the benefits of being able to install any software you want on a device (iPhone) are far outweighed by the risks of you installing something harmful.
And for what it's worth, when you agree with Steve Jobs on the way things should be done, it's actually pretty amazing. Safari isn't a bad browser.
But when you disagree with Steve Jobs, you have no recourse other than to suck it up or stop buying Apple products.
Slashdot Mirror
Now I'm curious -- why do they want the SD channels?
And if a card can average 120 FPS, it should be able to handle a vsync'd 60 FPS.
Oddly enough, the main advantage of 1080p for me is the fact that I have a 1080p monitor -- so it doesn't have to scale. Scaling 720p to 1080p (in software!) lags slightly. Decoding 1080p just works.
The primary reason I like the digital channels is that they are true 16:9 widescreen. Opening up the edges of the scene makes a much bigger difference than the horizontal resolution, as far as I'm concerned.
Except, frustratingly, they're often not.
Here's what usually happens: No one wants to put those vertical bars up. So when showing a 4:3 show on your 16:9 screen, they usually scale it -- which looks awful (squashed). This is true whether it's an SD feed scaled up, an HD version of a movie that was simply shot in 4:3, or even an SD clip in an otherwise widescreen show.
Worse are the widescreen shows broadcast as 4:3 SD -- then you've got a little widescreen box right in the middle of your bigger widescreen TV.
It's maddening.
I'm going to say that, once again, broadcast TV fails. Why would I want to watch the show all censored, with ads every 5 minutes (and some in the middle of the show), compressed to hell, and now they even fuck up the aspect ratio, when I can just head over to my nearest torrent site^W^WNetflix queue and get a much higher quality version that just works on my computer?
It was about $300 extra for a 128 gig SSD in this Dell laptop. I just ran a casual test. Keep in mind, this is currently being used (lightly), and I haven't done anything to improve the results of this test -- in fact, probably just the opposite, as the file in question was downloaded via BitTorrent, and I've never defragmented this hard drive. It certainly hasn't been read since the last boot.
dd if=foo.avi of=/dev/null
348459+1 records in
348459+1 records out
178411124 bytes (178 MB) copied, 1.82521 s, 97.7 MB/s
Keep in mind, that's throughput -- it gains nothing from the real killer feature of no seek times.
I can always buy big, slow spinning disks and put them in a NAS somewhere. I can take old desktops, put Linux on them, and turn them into a NAS. For the kind of stuff that takes hundreds of gigs, I don't need much speed.
But for the places where it counts -- like booting an OS -- there is a definite, real benefit, and it's not entirely out of reach, if you care about this kind of thing.
Worth mentioning, sudo is essentially UAC, only somewhat less annoying. But it's still a broken model.
One thing a lot of Unix daemons get right is, one user per task. Basic, stupidly simple security model -- nothing should have more access than it needs to do its job. Server systems still handle this reasonably well -- small things as root, only where needed. Take Apache -- it's root mostly just to bind port 80; everything else is www-data.
Things like this completely go away with modern desktops. The only two users you deal with most of the time are yourself and root. Not that it matters -- X is full of potential exploits.
Oh, and Windows isn't entirely unrecoverable, though the most effective recovery tools I know of are all Linux-based -- a decent livecd, ntfsclone, etc.
The point isn't that it makes it easier for your competition, it's that it makes it easier for that industry as a whole.
Right now, with the market so fragmented, there's no way I'm buying a set-top box for one of these services -- if anything, I'll buy one I can hack to play my torrents.
If there was one to rule them all, I think a lot more people would consider it.
Well, it does help if they take most of the dev team with them.
As far as I know, there's no legal requirement to have a lawyer -- you can always represent yourself. There's only a right to legal counsel if you're accused of a crime -- and, I assume, some sort of requirement to represent someone else.
Even assuming that's not the case, there are always asshats like Jack Thompson.
It'd really only have to block scripts in that tab until it was dismissed.
No, it would have to block the whole tab, barring plugins, else it's a fundamental change in the way scripts work.
For example: Suppose I have a document that looks like this (pseudocode):
And I have a script that looks like this:
While it's waiting for you to click yes/no, the tabs are currently not working -- in fact, both are displayed, and the page layout is only designed to handle one. In this case, it's cosmetic and a bit contrived, but it's easy to imagine cases where javascript is relying on the fact that the tab is single-threaded. For example, suppose it had been some form elements, or script-only links? Large chunks of functionality would be unpredictably broken.
You could argue that any page should be able to work without Javascript. I don't think that is always true, but even supposing it is, I don't think you can argue that any page should be expected to work when Javascript is working as expected sometimes, and is sometimes suspended.
I hope I've made the case that at least confirm and prompt must be blocking in their current versions, to avoid breaking existing pages -- alert is probably harmless, though I can still think of edge cases where people at least expect the alert to block, even if they don't technically depend on that behavior.
Given that, you could argue that there should be nonblocking variants of these. And I'd agree -- and I'd love to see them implemented in browsers. It could be done well -- like the parts of jQuery (some selectors) which make native calls when available, and implement it in javascript when those aren't available (mostly in IE).
But if you're going that route, well, it's possible to build your own nonblocking variant in pure DHTML/AJAX, bundle it as a library (jQuery Growl), and never bother to standardize. That seems the most likely path.
If you think EVERYONE should go out and buy a car in the same fashion YOU do because you think it is for the betterment of society, then I think you are crazy.
I think that you're attaching too much weight to my use of the first person -- my mistake for abusing it.
Yes, I do think everyone should take their time to research it. That seems reasonable -- everyone should be expected to wear their seatbelt, also. The fact that I also wear my seatbelt in no way makes the discussion about me.
Stupid people have a right to exist and buy stuff too, to no detriment I can think of.
The detriment is to the rest of us -- advertising significantly increases the amount of spam in our lives, and reduces the signal/noise. It lowers the quality of life for those of us who are capable of making our own decisions.
Again: Do you really think that, without a brochure, a stupid person wouldn't buy a car? Of course they would, but they'd be forced to look at what other people are driving, maybe ask them what they like -- in other words, forced to think about it.
And I don't think it's elitist to expect that people should think for themselves. In fact, I think it's quite the opposite of elitist to suggest that we all can think, given the chance.
That's what I mean -- by default. Click on the "comments" tab and it's back the way it was -- simple comment headlines, consistently bundled into articles.
Now music is so hip-hop/rap influenced that the only thing the composers seem to think about is the beat and the star-power behind each act.
Having recently seen an Umphrey's McGee concert, I can pretty confidently ask, WTF are you talking about?
Maybe popular music is crap, but there a lot of music out there -- most of it independent, and some of it refreshingly new (not intentionally "retro") -- which is genuinely good, melody-driven, and artful.
This problem has always existed, but before it typically showed up as filler in an album.
Since people can now buy individual songs, it's harder to sell an album with filler in it.
I consider that a good thing, overall. It means that if they're going to make every song mostly filler, I can tell pretty quickly whether or not to like the album.
Really young people are going to like whatever is produced because they don't know anything better- that is certainly a big market.
Maybe I'm just naive, or insulated, but many of the young people I know have varied and eclectic tastes of their own. Almost all of them dig Hendrix and the Beatles. Kids as young as 15 -- I know that described my own tastes at 15, also, though I also had an unhealthy tendency towards death metal.
To me, the more irritating trend is the loudness wars. The latest Metallica album sounds better on Rock Band than it does on CD, because Rock Band didn't compress the range. When that happens, you know something is very, very wrong.
Of course, though it might not be entirely legal, it would be pretty easy to arrange with someone inside the US. Like any other exporter, only much cheaper shipping.
But that's the same mistake you usually only find DRM'd media making -- if you have to do something illegal anyway, why bother paying for the privilege?
expect another decade of thrashing before it all shakes out.
Knowing how these people think and work, and simply crunching the numbers, I can tell you that they won't last another decade. They simply don't have the money to do so, the way they've been burning it.
True.
and not really the fault of the record companies.
Ah, but who do you think maintains that top 40 list? Who chooses the artists who will end up there -- and grooms them to be exactly the kind of crap they think will sell?
You're right -- there's a lot of talent out there. So why doesn't the industry better support and promote the good stuff? Why do they, instead, shovel crap?
Same thing happens with TV -- there's almost always something good on, somewhere. Something like, say, Firefly. Except they never seem to realize what they have, and so we end up with more Desperate Housewives.
Weird, I don't see the main page that way.
The upgrade that bothers me is my profile -- I now have one extra click to get to "comments" in the old style. But you know, I'm really not going to bitch about one extra bookmark-able click.
Some of those edge cases really should be standardized, though. Lagging standards is why we have to put up with bullshit like Flash.
Which is the point.
As long as we're striving for an ideal, in my ideal world, sites follow the standards, or the sites get blamed, not the browsers.
So, a single popup the first time, giving you the option to either allow it or turn it off, and also the option (checked by default) to not see that dialog anymore.
But this isn't even in the EULA.
It does, however, present it in a non-technical way first:
AdRater "phones home", but tells us as little as possible.
For many users, that says it all.
AdRater sends the domain name associated with each advertisement you see to SiteTruth.
A domain name is pretty common knowledge. Even if it isn't, now you know some information is going to something called SiteTruth.
Thus, we can tell what advertisers have reached you, but cannot tell what web pages you have been viewing. We can't tell if you click on an ad.
Again, non-technical.
It seems like a non-technical user could read this and understand enough to decide whether or not they need to care -- and if they need to care, they can ask for help understanding it. Us technical users are grateful that all the relevant information about IP addresses, domain names, and cookies are all right there, so we don't have to go digging for clues as to what the "non-technical" marketspeak might mean.
Read TFA -- or at least TFS, FFS.
This article is about an anti-phishing feature in Safari that compromises your privacy.
Your solution is to switch to Firefox, which has the exact same feature enabled by default.
Aside from sheer Firefox fanboyism, what's your point?
how do you prevent this using a firewall?
Either you use a whitelist, which makes surfing the Web pretty impractical, or you use a blacklist. If you know where they're sending this information, a firewall and/or proxy can be pretty effective -- or just a good old-fashioned /etc/hosts.
Why are we not pressuring our governments to legislate serious jail time for those responsible for all of this waste?
Partly, because some of us would rather it go the other way -- after all, if a teenager can write a program in his parents' basement that brings major corporations to their knees (or causes a ton of expense), I think it says as much about the corporations than it says about the teenager.
And that teenager could still grow up to become a well-rounded human being.
So, partly, it's because we like the underdog, and we don't like the evil corporations.
I think the other side to it is, the amount of punishment is irrelevant when the perp is never caught.
No, all signs point to solving this at the other end. Any computer system can be set up securely. When it's not, I feel like the user should be held liable. After all, if we gave actual jail time for harboring botnet nodes, people might start paying more attention to keeping their machines clean.
They are also sending this to Google, which crawls the entire Internet. If Apple is indeed sending a hash of every page I view, is it inconceivable that Google could build a hash of every page I might ever view?
It's actually much simpler: Apple decides things for you.
Good or evil, what's actually going on here is that Apple has decided that the Best User Experience (TM) will be best served by you surrendering personal information to Google -- that the benefit of privacy is far outweighed by the risk of phishing.
Kind of like how Apple decided that the benefits of being able to install any software you want on a device (iPhone) are far outweighed by the risks of you installing something harmful.
And for what it's worth, when you agree with Steve Jobs on the way things should be done, it's actually pretty amazing. Safari isn't a bad browser.
But when you disagree with Steve Jobs, you have no recourse other than to suck it up or stop buying Apple products.