I also think that purely theoretical security issues that only give root to a normal user are not such an issue on single user desktops that are the most likely machines to need graphics acceleration...
WebGL makes this relevant.
And it's not just security. I've had a fair number of stability issues which seem to be related to the nVidia driver. But it's hard to tell. The kernel is one giant monolithic address space, and any part of it could be responsible for doing anything to any other part. The nVidia drivers are in the kernel, and as such, they're a giant proprietary blob which can do anything to your system, without restriction.
In other words, if your system crashes, and you're running the nVidia drivers, the kernel developers generally won't help you, because they can't rule out that it was caused by anything in the kernel. If it's a bug in the nVidia drivers, it's hard to verify whether or not this is the case, and even if they could somehow track it down, they can't fix it.
By contrast, have you noticed how all kinds of other stuff Just Works on Linux? Pretty much any soundcard, keyboard, mouse, pc card, usb headset, digital camera, etc, etc. Plug it in, it works -- you never have a driver issue that brings your system down, because the drivers are all open source, high quality, and maintained with the kernel. We only start to have this conversation when we run into hardware for which we only have binary drivers, or at least binary blobs.
I have no problem running a proprietary program. I prefer an open source one, but whatever. What I do have a problem with is having to run that proprietary program in my kernel -- and on top of that, having libgl loaded into half the programs on my system, so even if it's just a program that crashed, I don't know if it's the program or nVidia.
nVidia has decent Linux binary drivers. In fact, they're something like 95% of the same code nVidia uses on Windows.
Only problem is, Linux is diverse enough, and the kernel moves fast enough, that the nVidia Linux drivers will never be as good as they could be if they were open source. To that end, ATI has been working on getting some good open source drivers going in order to stay competitive.
But what you're suggesting is pure unadulterated insanity. If the nVidia Linux drivers are buggy, why on earth would you think the nVidia Windows drivers would be less buggy under Linux?
After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang.
Portal.
Oh, does it have to be an actual shooter? Alright, then, how about...
Natural Selection. Half-Life 2. etc...
But I chose Portal because your complaint was about the FPS interface. Portal makes good use of that interface to deliver a decidedly non-FPS game. So does Penumbra.
There's more that could be done, but I think leveraging the years of experience people have playing FPSes, and just the overall fluidity of that interface for actually exploring a 3D world, is far, far better than trying to make any sort of 3D game in which you reinvent the controls, badly. If I recall, The Sims was particularly annoying -- completely different controls which ended up being less effective overall.
I consider the ability to tap into the sum total of human knowledge instantly to be as important as sanitation, yes. For one, if there's something I need to know about sanitation, I can find out -- in seconds.
Your original point, if I understand it, was that people "managed" -- WTF does that mean, "managed"? What did they manage to do? I doubt very much that they managed to communicate instantly with people on the other side of the planet -- in fact, geographical isolation naturally led to xenophobia, for millions of years.
I don't think computers are always needed, and I don't use it for distracting purposes in class -- if I'm on my computer, I'm taking notes, looking up something relevant, or trying out the example code from the board. I'm not on IM, and I don't have a Facebook account, and I put it away if pencil and paper would be better for the topic at hand.
But I'm frankly quite surprised by your luddite attitude here, since I have to imagine you're posting this yourself. I know I've heard of professors who got their email printed out for them so they didn't have to learn to use email, but I wouldn't imagine these same professors would learn to use Slashdot.
waaah, I can't get samba to authenticate against AD
Erm, actually? I can. And if I can't, I'm sure as hell not going to bother IT about it.
Generally, we make your job easier if you've got sane policies to begin with. We're not the ones who will be calling you up and asking you for help logging in because we left capslock on. We're not going to be begging you to get rid of the porn popups so we can give a presentation. We're not going to be whining that our machine is too slow and that you have to update it.
Your personal preference for the fancy or non-standard tool doesn't make sense if the standard industrial one does the job just fine.
It does if I save you licenses and become several times more productive. I don't think I work cheaply enough that it's worth making me several times less productive, or spending several times my salary to hire enough people to make up the difference, just so you can force me into your mold.
In a corporate environment there are large issues to worry about than just you.
I'd think spelling would be a larger issue, but regardless...
You would think the largest issue at a technology company is keeping the developers developing. That's the whole point of the company -- for the developers to develop something, and for the salespeople to sell it.
Actually, your attitude smells much less like "I'm just following policy" and more like "I'm a sad little king of a sad little hill, and to make me feel better about myself, I'm going to exert whatever amount of control I possibly can over everyone else. That's right, bitch, you run XP here because I'm the alpha male!" Or alpha female.
Make people responsible for their own security, to the extent that you trust them. In particular:
a. If computers are coming and going without permission how do you know which are from employees and which are rogue systems
Why are you letting rogue people into the building to plug their machines in? And one solution would be to force employees to register their mac addresses.
b. If computers are coming and going how do you ensure they aren't a threat for Virii or bots
By insisting that computers be secure, rather than relying on your corporate firewall. In particular, if you ever allow an employee to take their corporate laptop to a Starucks, and if this was at all a problem, you have already lost.
i. At least with company sanctioned computers they should have virus scanners with updated definitions
So should employees' machines, once they realize they'll get much less support from IT if they run their own personal hardware.
2. Standardization
Different people work better with different tools. Standardize on protocols and formats so you have interoperability, then let people run what they want.
a. Whaawhaaa, my xxx isn't working properly; can you fix it: "I NEED IT RIGHT NOW"
If you need it right now, you walk down to the helpdesk and pick up a loaner laptop and pull your presentation from the network. Then you fix your own machine (with or without help from IT) when you have time.
i. Troubleshooting some hipsters 3D floating mouse with alpha drivers for Windows 7 is just a waste of time
What makes you think IT would be responsible for that?
b. Why can't my Windows 7 Home edition logon the domain, no one told me this when I bought it
Too bad. Provide a buying guide for the user, and let them take their machine back.
Why do you need their personal equipment logging onto the domain anyway? None of the workplaces I've been in recently have had a Windows domain at all, and two of them were running pretty much entirely online by the time I left.
it's just a fast search engine being able to work with keywords, like Google and it's search terms.
I thought exactly that. Then I watched some of their promotional videos. It's harder than that. Look at 1:55 to or so -- keywords only really help you find what you're looking for once you actually know what you're looking for.
Now, ultimately, there's going to be a lot of that, and a lot of statistical analysis, but it's still not an easy problem.
Mac OS X, where it's Shift-Command-F in Chrome and Firefox.
And also VLC, if I recall.
As I understand it, there are multiple APIs that can be used depending on which graphics driver you're using.
Hmm. I think I should look into this more.
Right now, I know there's some commandline flags I can use to enable it in mplayer, and I can even make it the default (with an appropriate fallback in case it's not available or it's not h264 content), but it is nvidia-specific. However, if ATI does anything remotely similar, it should be trivial to just configure mplayer to default to whichever accelerated codec is available.
What I'm wondering is how difficult this would be to do with something like GStreamer. Is it something you'd have to do in the application, or could you trivially configure it, system-wide?
But it's the same original lossless source for all three encodes.
Not all codecs are part of the OS and will be updated with it. H.264 except for Windows 7 definitely will _not_ be updated with the OS.
...and OS X.
On other platforms, then, if H.264 doesn't come with XP, wouldn't it then become the problem of whoever's distributing codecs to make them updatable? It doesn't seem to be a problem for plugin or addon developers, which are arguably a much higher risk.
Probably, but they have a smaller install base,
Not by terribly much. If you're going to exploit Flash, you're probably targeting a specific OS anyway -- probably Windows -- meaning Windows Media Player is also going to be available.
To my knowledge Firefox does not run Windows Media Player automatically in any case.
I'm not sure, but it does seem like there are a number of things which automatically get installed to Firefox -- for instance, if you install Silverlight on Windows, it'll probably end up on Firefox. I would be surprised if Media Player didn't do this.
Never mind that it'd dramatically speed up video playback
Why do you think that?
Hardware acceleration, unless the browser implements that independently for each OS -- which is even more redundant code, as an accelerated implementation is likely already installed. I'm not sure how Windows does it, but on Linux, the nVidia drivers include an accelerated decoder.
The biggest speed costs are due to the browser trying to rendering the video fancy inside the web page instead of "dumping it somewhere on the screen", and that won't go away that way...
True, that'll only really be addressed by browsers using the video card to do more compositing, and I think that's happening anyway. But try playing a full 1080p H.264 video in software mode, even outside a browser. Modern machines can do it, but it sucks a lot of CPU. Try again with acceleration enabled, and it drops to only a few percent.
And that's in dedicated media players. Stuff like mplayer -- I seriously doubt they haven't enabled the appropriate optimizations. A browser could certainly screw stuff up in addition to that, but when you start with most or all of a core just decoding the video, there's a limit to how much you can do.
Here's the problem: I wanted to believe what The Movement was telling me. But when it came right down to it, there were absurdities in their metaphysics and very few real answers when I actually had a real question.
For example, if Yogic Flying is actually flight of any sort other than hopping around on your ass, why not measure it? Why not, say, put pressure plates under a yogic flier and do some calculations to see if there's any component to it other than them exerting a muscular force on the ground in order to hop?
Or if people can actually fly like Superman, where are all the people flying like Superman? I haven't seen one. You'd think if Maharishi's goal was to make the whole world enlightened, a trivial way to get a giant head-start would be to start flying. How many people would've tried TM if he actually did fly? (Never mind the trivial grab of James Randi's million dollar prize.) I mean, he only needs one percent of the population meditating, supposedly -- that's, what, 70 million people? Surely a single act of flying could convince 70 million people to start meditating.
Or let's try the square root of one percent doing the Sidhis. That's under ten thousand people. Fly in front of the President, the Joint Chiefs, even a few high-level officers, and you'll easily get that many soldiers ordered to do it.
Yet so far, I see nothing about the Movement which isn't equally well explained -- better, in fact -- as an interesting and mostly harmless cult which is only really still alive because of a few very wealthy contributors (David Lynch, etc). About the only thing that separates this from Scientology is the "mostly harmless" part.
None of this has anything to do with what TM claims, which is that anyone sufficiently enlightened can close their eyes and meditate, and through that act alone, levitate.
They're not claiming they can fool you into thinking the person levitated -- and after all, believing something doesn't make it so.
They're not claiming people once floated, mythologically, because they were so enlightened. Or they are claiming that, but I'm not disputing that these myths exist. I'm disputing that the events they describe actually happened.
But the claim they're making is that the only technology you need to levitate is to be sufficiently enlightened, and then you can fly unaided.
In reality, what they do is close their eyes, sit cross-legged (lotus position, actually), and hop around on their asses, claiming this is the first stage of three stages, where stage 2 will be actual levitation, and stage 3 will be Superman.
He does point out the obvious that the rhetoric of 'we believe in open' is really better read as 'we are too cheap for licensing decoders for a free browser'...
That's not the point at all. It's not the point for Mozilla, and it certainly isn't for Google.
First of all, Google already has to pay some royalties on H.264 anyway -- they use it on YouTube. I'm not sure if those cover Chrome, but I find it hard to believe they'd have a problem paying the royalties themselves. Google seems to prefer free and open, but they've certainly shown themselves willing to use and pay for proprietary technology when it makes sense.
Remember when it was all H.264 vs Theora? Google determined Theora wasn't good enough to use on YouTube.
In Mozilla's case, they could certainly raise the money if that would cover what they want. But while it's possible to pay for a license for a free browser, it's not possible, or at least unrealistic, to pay for a license for a truly open source browser. Consider Firefox, first -- if they included H.264 and paid the royalties for Firefox itself, no one could legally fork Firefox without also stripping the H.264 functionality -- thus, a critical part of Firefox (the H.264 support) would be "open" in the same way that the Tivo Linux kernel's sources are. You can look, but you can't touch.
Now consider Chrome. Google has solved this problem so far by separating Google Chrome from the Chromium project. Essentially, Chrome is just Chromium plus some stuff they can't legally include in Chromium -- and H.264 is an example. Reducing the number of changes they have to make to turn Chromium into Chrome would vastly simplify their development process.
That's before you get into the religious issues, which are the real problem.
See, most modern desktop OSes include at least one H.264 decoder. On my machine, Win7 includes an official one from Microsoft, and my Linux includes an official one from nVidia which talks to a hardware decoder on my video card. (Realistically, the nVidia one is probably also on Windows and used by default.) Even if it ended up being a $50 codec pack, people have done this in the past -- you could buy a new Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, and it would include a codec pack.
The only reason this is an issue is that neither Firefox nor Chrome are using the native OS codec APIs, or offering any API of their own for people to add codecs to the browser.
Firefox claims this is because of security. Bullshit -- using OS libraries is the right software engineering practice here. If the OS itself is insecure, unpatched, etc, that's the fault either of the OS for not releasing patches, or the user for not applying them -- I don't see how the browser should be responsible, especially as this could lead to exploits in any number of other ways. For that matter, there are multiple standalone players which people use to access Web content -- Windows Media Player comes to mind -- if the codecs were so insecure, why don't we see tons of WMP attacks?
Really, I don't think anyone would be talking about this as a security issue unless they also didn't want to implement it for ideological reasons. Invariably, the same people who make the "can't do it because of security" argument will also be the people who rant about how dangerous H.264 is for an open Web. They're right about that, but it's far less dangerous than Flash.
However, whether it's because of security, because they don't want H.264 to win, or because they actually can't make it work legally (which seems dubious), none of the above has anything whatsoever to do with one company or another trying to be cheap. It's not about Google saving themselves money. It's about them saving anyone who tries to implement HTML5 money.
Problem is, the idea of "open" and "free" in the FOSS sense is that anyone should be able to pick up your product and do anything they want with it, subject to at most the restriction that it must be released under the same license.
H.264 doesn't allow that. Sure, I can grab the x264 decoder, but I still need to license the patents myself just to use it, let alone develop it.
I think this bit from TFA is particularly telling:
This makes H.264 an open standard in the same way as, for example, JPEG still images, or the C++ programming language, or the ISO 9660 filesystem used on CD-ROMs.
Pick up a vanilla Ubuntu distribution. Hell, even GNewSense. You'll find JPEG and ISO9660 is supported out of the box. C++? sudo apt-get install g++.
Claiming WebM is not open is just as absurd. MPEG-LA could prevent me from forking H.264 if I didn't like how the standard was run. Google can't prevent me from forking WebM -- all they really own is the name.
The one good point TFA makes is that this is yet another bit of fucking around that's going to make developers go back to Flash. I do think Chrome should include H.264 as a backup in case the OS doesn't have it. I think Chromium and Firefox shouldn't, but they should use the OS codecs when available. I would much rather live in a world with H.264 via the video tag, which I can play even if I have to pass it all the way to nVidia's hardware decoder to make it legal (and perform better anyhow), than a world with only Flash and Silverlight.
I'm better off with, conservatively, 40 minutes of extra time per day.
And that's just the meditation itself -- it's not just that I've stopped meditating. I've left the Movement. This means I no longer have, as a goal in life, meditating to achieve enlightenment so as to break the cycle of reincarnation and become one with the universe. It means I no longer believe in Vedic astrology, or levitation, or any of the dozens of other crazy things I used to believe.
It also means I speak my mind, instead of always being careful to "speak the sweet truth."
And I'm certainly better off with the $5k or so I didn't spend getting the Sidhi program.
Unfortunately I don't have a way to verify but I have been told that Safari does not allow 3rd-party codecs to be used (otherwise it should be trivial to add WebM support to it?).
Things may have changed since I last heard, but yes, that's the implication -- it should be trivial to provide a WebM plugin for Safari, which would provide exactly as much WebM as Microsoft is promising IE will support.
Also what you say just isn't true: Safari does _not_ use native platform codec support it uses _Apple's_ (witness Safari on Windows), meaning fixing any issues with it is still fully within Apple's control.
I don't think anyone ever really claimed Safari on Windows was a good thing. But since QuickTime has a plugin system, Apple is limited to fixing vulnerabilities in the codecs they ship.
Also, it is the native platform on OS X. If you want to play video, that's what you use. So if I were to write a browser, I'd do exactly what Safari does on OS X, and I'd probably do something similar to what IE does on Windows, and I'd plug into something like GStreamer on Linux.
Not likely, given it's unlikely you're able to install plugins on iOS without Apple's blessing. Apple tends not to like things which suck battery. H.264 has a hardware implementation on iDevices, while WebM does not, so H.264 is going to use less battery -- so it seems very unlikely Apple would allow WebM there.
I could be wrong. I don't generally keep tabs on what is and isn't allowed on iOS anymore. When something's allowed, great, iOS has temporarily (for as long as Apple allows it) acquired a feature open OSes always had.
DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA - whose concentration has not been revealed - had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field.
I thought the point of publishing was that we could replicate your experiments? Is it normal to withhold information like this?
So... erm... Let's see the evidence. Having skimmed the paper, I just don't see it claiming what Hagelin claims.
I was a meditator for years. I grew up in it. I'm better off without it now, but I'd still very much like to be proven wrong, if only because it'd be really cool to know how humans can levitate, if, in fact, they can.
Except the point is that if enough people meditate regularly -- the original idea was 20 minutes, twice a day -- then you can live an otherwise normal life, but it'll lower crime.
I grew up in Fairfield, IA. I was somewhat disappointed when I checked out the skepdic entry on TM only to find that the strongest debunk was James Randi calling up the Fairfield Police Department and asking whether the influx of meditators had reduced crime. Nope, crime rates had increased if anything, but were pretty typical either way.
It's a good argument, but I'm kind of disappointed. I'm going to have to deconstruct it sometime. It seems to get either respected or ignored, never seriously challenged other than people saying, "You think people can fly?" and laughing hysterically. It's not really a threat, so I can see why other absurdities would be a bigger target, but it also means the meditators themselves never have to really think hard about why they believe what they do.
How many times a year are exams held? I count less than twenty, and probably more like ten, for a given course -- and they do try to pack the exams relatively close together.
Should the exam rooms sit idle the rest of the time? I generally see lecture halls being co-opted as exam rooms, but they're useful as lecture halls the rest of the time.
Or are you saying we should cage everything that might ever be used for an exam, so students can't use laptops or cell phones during class? Do not want.
If you can come up with a way to do it easily and cheaply, and just for exam time, I'm all for it. But even then, I'd also rather catch the cheaters and expel the fuckers than just throw up another obstacle for them to work around.
I used to think as you do, and I've come to realize that while it's very true for some things, it's exactly wrong for many.
Test with no collaboration and no open book / Google are not the real world and just lead to people who can pass the test but have no idea on how to do the work.
Well, to start with, if you only know how to solve the problem with Google, do you really know how to solve the problem? Anyone can Google for the answer. What you need to do is solve the problem yourself. Yes, it's boring, it's something everyone else has already solved, and you probably solved at least once on the homework. But if you can solve this problem, you've demonstrated that if someone throws a new problem at you, one no one has solved yet, you'll be able to do it -- and it'll be all the easier when you have Google to help.
The same can be said of the book.
If you test people in groups, you now have all the problems of groupwork -- how do you know who did what? Who actually contributed, who did all the work, and who sat back and collected the credit? Or, if it's a problem that actually needs multiple people to solve in the given time, maybe one of the students you're about to fail was actually competent, just got stuck with a useless group?
Add to that the logistical problems. If you allow Google, but not collaboration, how do you prevent students from communicating? What if you want to limit collaboration? How do you know a student hasn't hidden an answer sheet on Google or in their book?
The only way this could possibly work is if you came up with at least significant variations on a project each semester, if not entirely new projects, and you made sure that the key concepts you want students to understand are something Google doesn't know -- which means you're basically going to do original research each semester. Really?
Homework is good on its own, and it has many of the above problems. But a test is one way to make sure a student has actually learned something from your course.
Of course, the better courses include sufficient information on the test to bring it closer to the environment you were supposed to be doing your homework in -- enough to avoid the memorization, but not enough for you to just Google "Hey, everybody, what's the answer?" For instance, for my Data Structures course, the Javadoc for relevant pieces of the Java APIs was included on the test. For my introductory Physics course, relevant equations were included on the test, you just needed to know what they mean and how to apply them.
And guess what?
If you made it through that Physics course without understanding what E=K+U means, or F=ma, or K=(1/2)mv^2, guess what? You don't know what they mean and how to apply them. Sure, on the job, you have access to Google, so maybe you could Google things like the universal gravitational constant or the formula for energy in a sinusoidal oscillator, but if you have to Google for what F=ma means, you didn't learn a single goddamned thing from that course, and you deserve the F you'll be getting. If you don't know that F means Force, you get F for Fail.
You can have the Java Collections APIs -- we don't care if you've memorized something your IDE will tab-complete for you anyway. But if you can't loop through a linked list without Googling "linked lists" or using iterators, you don't really understand linked lists. I don't care that iterators make more sense in the real world -- you fail, see you next semester.
Slashdot Mirror
I also think that purely theoretical security issues that only give root to a normal user are not such an issue on single user desktops that are the most likely machines to need graphics acceleration...
WebGL makes this relevant.
And it's not just security. I've had a fair number of stability issues which seem to be related to the nVidia driver. But it's hard to tell. The kernel is one giant monolithic address space, and any part of it could be responsible for doing anything to any other part. The nVidia drivers are in the kernel, and as such, they're a giant proprietary blob which can do anything to your system, without restriction.
In other words, if your system crashes, and you're running the nVidia drivers, the kernel developers generally won't help you, because they can't rule out that it was caused by anything in the kernel. If it's a bug in the nVidia drivers, it's hard to verify whether or not this is the case, and even if they could somehow track it down, they can't fix it.
By contrast, have you noticed how all kinds of other stuff Just Works on Linux? Pretty much any soundcard, keyboard, mouse, pc card, usb headset, digital camera, etc, etc. Plug it in, it works -- you never have a driver issue that brings your system down, because the drivers are all open source, high quality, and maintained with the kernel. We only start to have this conversation when we run into hardware for which we only have binary drivers, or at least binary blobs.
I have no problem running a proprietary program. I prefer an open source one, but whatever. What I do have a problem with is having to run that proprietary program in my kernel -- and on top of that, having libgl loaded into half the programs on my system, so even if it's just a program that crashed, I don't know if it's the program or nVidia.
Erm...
nVidia has decent Linux binary drivers. In fact, they're something like 95% of the same code nVidia uses on Windows.
Only problem is, Linux is diverse enough, and the kernel moves fast enough, that the nVidia Linux drivers will never be as good as they could be if they were open source. To that end, ATI has been working on getting some good open source drivers going in order to stay competitive.
But what you're suggesting is pure unadulterated insanity. If the nVidia Linux drivers are buggy, why on earth would you think the nVidia Windows drivers would be less buggy under Linux?
After Half-Life the FPSs were all just whizz-bang.
Portal.
Oh, does it have to be an actual shooter? Alright, then, how about...
Natural Selection.
Half-Life 2.
etc...
But I chose Portal because your complaint was about the FPS interface. Portal makes good use of that interface to deliver a decidedly non-FPS game. So does Penumbra.
There's more that could be done, but I think leveraging the years of experience people have playing FPSes, and just the overall fluidity of that interface for actually exploring a 3D world, is far, far better than trying to make any sort of 3D game in which you reinvent the controls, badly. If I recall, The Sims was particularly annoying -- completely different controls which ended up being less effective overall.
I consider the ability to tap into the sum total of human knowledge instantly to be as important as sanitation, yes. For one, if there's something I need to know about sanitation, I can find out -- in seconds.
Your original point, if I understand it, was that people "managed" -- WTF does that mean, "managed"? What did they manage to do? I doubt very much that they managed to communicate instantly with people on the other side of the planet -- in fact, geographical isolation naturally led to xenophobia, for millions of years.
I don't think computers are always needed, and I don't use it for distracting purposes in class -- if I'm on my computer, I'm taking notes, looking up something relevant, or trying out the example code from the board. I'm not on IM, and I don't have a Facebook account, and I put it away if pencil and paper would be better for the topic at hand.
But I'm frankly quite surprised by your luddite attitude here, since I have to imagine you're posting this yourself. I know I've heard of professors who got their email printed out for them so they didn't have to learn to use email, but I wouldn't imagine these same professors would learn to use Slashdot.
waaah, I can't get samba to authenticate against AD
Erm, actually? I can. And if I can't, I'm sure as hell not going to bother IT about it.
Generally, we make your job easier if you've got sane policies to begin with. We're not the ones who will be calling you up and asking you for help logging in because we left capslock on. We're not going to be begging you to get rid of the porn popups so we can give a presentation. We're not going to be whining that our machine is too slow and that you have to update it.
Your personal preference for the fancy or non-standard tool doesn't make sense if the standard industrial one does the job just fine.
It does if I save you licenses and become several times more productive. I don't think I work cheaply enough that it's worth making me several times less productive, or spending several times my salary to hire enough people to make up the difference, just so you can force me into your mold.
In a corporate environment there are large issues to worry about than just you.
I'd think spelling would be a larger issue, but regardless...
You would think the largest issue at a technology company is keeping the developers developing. That's the whole point of the company -- for the developers to develop something, and for the salespeople to sell it.
Actually, your attitude smells much less like "I'm just following policy" and more like "I'm a sad little king of a sad little hill, and to make me feel better about myself, I'm going to exert whatever amount of control I possibly can over everyone else. That's right, bitch, you run XP here because I'm the alpha male!" Or alpha female.
Somehow Google manages...
1. Security
Make people responsible for their own security, to the extent that you trust them. In particular:
a. If computers are coming and going without permission how do you know which are from employees and which are rogue systems
Why are you letting rogue people into the building to plug their machines in? And one solution would be to force employees to register their mac addresses.
b. If computers are coming and going how do you ensure they aren't a threat for Virii or bots
By insisting that computers be secure, rather than relying on your corporate firewall. In particular, if you ever allow an employee to take their corporate laptop to a Starucks, and if this was at all a problem, you have already lost.
i. At least with company sanctioned computers they should have virus scanners with updated definitions
So should employees' machines, once they realize they'll get much less support from IT if they run their own personal hardware.
2. Standardization
Different people work better with different tools. Standardize on protocols and formats so you have interoperability, then let people run what they want.
a. Whaawhaaa, my xxx isn't working properly; can you fix it: "I NEED IT RIGHT NOW"
If you need it right now, you walk down to the helpdesk and pick up a loaner laptop and pull your presentation from the network. Then you fix your own machine (with or without help from IT) when you have time.
i. Troubleshooting some hipsters 3D floating mouse with alpha drivers for Windows 7 is just a waste of time
What makes you think IT would be responsible for that?
b. Why can't my Windows 7 Home edition logon the domain, no one told me this when I bought it
Too bad. Provide a buying guide for the user, and let them take their machine back.
Why do you need their personal equipment logging onto the domain anyway? None of the workplaces I've been in recently have had a Windows domain at all, and two of them were running pretty much entirely online by the time I left.
Where am I thinking that?
it's just a fast search engine being able to work with keywords, like Google and it's search terms.
I thought exactly that. Then I watched some of their promotional videos. It's harder than that. Look at 1:55 to or so -- keywords only really help you find what you're looking for once you actually know what you're looking for.
Now, ultimately, there's going to be a lot of that, and a lot of statistical analysis, but it's still not an easy problem.
People also managed without clean water or indoor plumbing for millions of years. What's your point?
Mac OS X, where it's Shift-Command-F in Chrome and Firefox.
And also VLC, if I recall.
As I understand it, there are multiple APIs that can be used depending on which graphics driver you're using.
Hmm. I think I should look into this more.
Right now, I know there's some commandline flags I can use to enable it in mplayer, and I can even make it the default (with an appropriate fallback in case it's not available or it's not h264 content), but it is nvidia-specific. However, if ATI does anything remotely similar, it should be trivial to just configure mplayer to default to whichever accelerated codec is available.
What I'm wondering is how difficult this would be to do with something like GStreamer. Is it something you'd have to do in the application, or could you trivially configure it, system-wide?
But it's the same original lossless source for all three encodes.
Hmm. I guess you have a point, then.
Not all codecs are part of the OS and will be updated with it. H.264 except for Windows 7 definitely will _not_ be updated with the OS.
...and OS X.
On other platforms, then, if H.264 doesn't come with XP, wouldn't it then become the problem of whoever's distributing codecs to make them updatable? It doesn't seem to be a problem for plugin or addon developers, which are arguably a much higher risk.
Probably, but they have a smaller install base,
Not by terribly much. If you're going to exploit Flash, you're probably targeting a specific OS anyway -- probably Windows -- meaning Windows Media Player is also going to be available.
To my knowledge Firefox does not run Windows Media Player automatically in any case.
I'm not sure, but it does seem like there are a number of things which automatically get installed to Firefox -- for instance, if you install Silverlight on Windows, it'll probably end up on Firefox. I would be surprised if Media Player didn't do this.
Never mind that it'd dramatically speed up video playback
Why do you think that?
Hardware acceleration, unless the browser implements that independently for each OS -- which is even more redundant code, as an accelerated implementation is likely already installed. I'm not sure how Windows does it, but on Linux, the nVidia drivers include an accelerated decoder.
The biggest speed costs are due to the browser trying to rendering the video fancy inside the web page instead of "dumping it somewhere on the screen", and that won't go away that way...
True, that'll only really be addressed by browsers using the video card to do more compositing, and I think that's happening anyway. But try playing a full 1080p H.264 video in software mode, even outside a browser. Modern machines can do it, but it sucks a lot of CPU. Try again with acceleration enabled, and it drops to only a few percent.
And that's in dedicated media players. Stuff like mplayer -- I seriously doubt they haven't enabled the appropriate optimizations. A browser could certainly screw stuff up in addition to that, but when you start with most or all of a core just decoding the video, there's a limit to how much you can do.
Or too skeptical, inquisitive, and logical.
Here's the problem: I wanted to believe what The Movement was telling me. But when it came right down to it, there were absurdities in their metaphysics and very few real answers when I actually had a real question.
For example, if Yogic Flying is actually flight of any sort other than hopping around on your ass, why not measure it? Why not, say, put pressure plates under a yogic flier and do some calculations to see if there's any component to it other than them exerting a muscular force on the ground in order to hop?
Or if people can actually fly like Superman, where are all the people flying like Superman? I haven't seen one. You'd think if Maharishi's goal was to make the whole world enlightened, a trivial way to get a giant head-start would be to start flying. How many people would've tried TM if he actually did fly? (Never mind the trivial grab of James Randi's million dollar prize.) I mean, he only needs one percent of the population meditating, supposedly -- that's, what, 70 million people? Surely a single act of flying could convince 70 million people to start meditating.
Or let's try the square root of one percent doing the Sidhis. That's under ten thousand people. Fly in front of the President, the Joint Chiefs, even a few high-level officers, and you'll easily get that many soldiers ordered to do it.
Yet so far, I see nothing about the Movement which isn't equally well explained -- better, in fact -- as an interesting and mostly harmless cult which is only really still alive because of a few very wealthy contributors (David Lynch, etc). About the only thing that separates this from Scientology is the "mostly harmless" part.
None of this has anything to do with what TM claims, which is that anyone sufficiently enlightened can close their eyes and meditate, and through that act alone, levitate.
They're not claiming they can fool you into thinking the person levitated -- and after all, believing something doesn't make it so.
They're not claiming people once floated, mythologically, because they were so enlightened. Or they are claiming that, but I'm not disputing that these myths exist. I'm disputing that the events they describe actually happened.
But the claim they're making is that the only technology you need to levitate is to be sufficiently enlightened, and then you can fly unaided.
In reality, what they do is close their eyes, sit cross-legged (lotus position, actually), and hop around on their asses, claiming this is the first stage of three stages, where stage 2 will be actual levitation, and stage 3 will be Superman.
He does point out the obvious that the rhetoric of 'we believe in open' is really better read as 'we are too cheap for licensing decoders for a free browser'...
That's not the point at all. It's not the point for Mozilla, and it certainly isn't for Google.
First of all, Google already has to pay some royalties on H.264 anyway -- they use it on YouTube. I'm not sure if those cover Chrome, but I find it hard to believe they'd have a problem paying the royalties themselves. Google seems to prefer free and open, but they've certainly shown themselves willing to use and pay for proprietary technology when it makes sense.
Remember when it was all H.264 vs Theora? Google determined Theora wasn't good enough to use on YouTube.
In Mozilla's case, they could certainly raise the money if that would cover what they want. But while it's possible to pay for a license for a free browser, it's not possible, or at least unrealistic, to pay for a license for a truly open source browser. Consider Firefox, first -- if they included H.264 and paid the royalties for Firefox itself, no one could legally fork Firefox without also stripping the H.264 functionality -- thus, a critical part of Firefox (the H.264 support) would be "open" in the same way that the Tivo Linux kernel's sources are. You can look, but you can't touch.
Now consider Chrome. Google has solved this problem so far by separating Google Chrome from the Chromium project. Essentially, Chrome is just Chromium plus some stuff they can't legally include in Chromium -- and H.264 is an example. Reducing the number of changes they have to make to turn Chromium into Chrome would vastly simplify their development process.
That's before you get into the religious issues, which are the real problem.
See, most modern desktop OSes include at least one H.264 decoder. On my machine, Win7 includes an official one from Microsoft, and my Linux includes an official one from nVidia which talks to a hardware decoder on my video card. (Realistically, the nVidia one is probably also on Windows and used by default.) Even if it ended up being a $50 codec pack, people have done this in the past -- you could buy a new Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, and it would include a codec pack.
The only reason this is an issue is that neither Firefox nor Chrome are using the native OS codec APIs, or offering any API of their own for people to add codecs to the browser.
Firefox claims this is because of security. Bullshit -- using OS libraries is the right software engineering practice here. If the OS itself is insecure, unpatched, etc, that's the fault either of the OS for not releasing patches, or the user for not applying them -- I don't see how the browser should be responsible, especially as this could lead to exploits in any number of other ways. For that matter, there are multiple standalone players which people use to access Web content -- Windows Media Player comes to mind -- if the codecs were so insecure, why don't we see tons of WMP attacks?
Really, I don't think anyone would be talking about this as a security issue unless they also didn't want to implement it for ideological reasons. Invariably, the same people who make the "can't do it because of security" argument will also be the people who rant about how dangerous H.264 is for an open Web. They're right about that, but it's far less dangerous than Flash.
However, whether it's because of security, because they don't want H.264 to win, or because they actually can't make it work legally (which seems dubious), none of the above has anything whatsoever to do with one company or another trying to be cheap. It's not about Google saving themselves money. It's about them saving anyone who tries to implement HTML5 money.
Nope. There are also fees which must be paid by software distributors.
Problem is, the idea of "open" and "free" in the FOSS sense is that anyone should be able to pick up your product and do anything they want with it, subject to at most the restriction that it must be released under the same license.
H.264 doesn't allow that. Sure, I can grab the x264 decoder, but I still need to license the patents myself just to use it, let alone develop it.
I think this bit from TFA is particularly telling:
This makes H.264 an open standard in the same way as, for example, JPEG still images, or the C++ programming language, or the ISO 9660 filesystem used on CD-ROMs.
Pick up a vanilla Ubuntu distribution. Hell, even GNewSense. You'll find JPEG and ISO9660 is supported out of the box. C++? sudo apt-get install g++.
Claiming WebM is not open is just as absurd. MPEG-LA could prevent me from forking H.264 if I didn't like how the standard was run. Google can't prevent me from forking WebM -- all they really own is the name.
The one good point TFA makes is that this is yet another bit of fucking around that's going to make developers go back to Flash. I do think Chrome should include H.264 as a backup in case the OS doesn't have it. I think Chromium and Firefox shouldn't, but they should use the OS codecs when available. I would much rather live in a world with H.264 via the video tag, which I can play even if I have to pass it all the way to nVidia's hardware decoder to make it legal (and perform better anyhow), than a world with only Flash and Silverlight.
I'm better off with, conservatively, 40 minutes of extra time per day.
And that's just the meditation itself -- it's not just that I've stopped meditating. I've left the Movement. This means I no longer have, as a goal in life, meditating to achieve enlightenment so as to break the cycle of reincarnation and become one with the universe. It means I no longer believe in Vedic astrology, or levitation, or any of the dozens of other crazy things I used to believe.
It also means I speak my mind, instead of always being careful to "speak the sweet truth."
And I'm certainly better off with the $5k or so I didn't spend getting the Sidhi program.
Unfortunately I don't have a way to verify but I have been told that Safari does not allow 3rd-party codecs to be used (otherwise it should be trivial to add WebM support to it?).
Things may have changed since I last heard, but yes, that's the implication -- it should be trivial to provide a WebM plugin for Safari, which would provide exactly as much WebM as Microsoft is promising IE will support.
Also what you say just isn't true: Safari does _not_ use native platform codec support it uses _Apple's_ (witness Safari on Windows), meaning fixing any issues with it is still fully within Apple's control.
I don't think anyone ever really claimed Safari on Windows was a good thing. But since QuickTime has a plugin system, Apple is limited to fixing vulnerabilities in the codecs they ship.
Also, it is the native platform on OS X. If you want to play video, that's what you use. So if I were to write a browser, I'd do exactly what Safari does on OS X, and I'd probably do something similar to what IE does on Windows, and I'd plug into something like GStreamer on Linux.
Not likely, given it's unlikely you're able to install plugins on iOS without Apple's blessing. Apple tends not to like things which suck battery. H.264 has a hardware implementation on iDevices, while WebM does not, so H.264 is going to use less battery -- so it seems very unlikely Apple would allow WebM there.
I could be wrong. I don't generally keep tabs on what is and isn't allowed on iOS anymore. When something's allowed, great, iOS has temporarily (for as long as Apple allows it) acquired a feature open OSes always had.
DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA - whose concentration has not been revealed - had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field.
I thought the point of publishing was that we could replicate your experiments? Is it normal to withhold information like this?
So... erm... Let's see the evidence. Having skimmed the paper, I just don't see it claiming what Hagelin claims.
I was a meditator for years. I grew up in it. I'm better off without it now, but I'd still very much like to be proven wrong, if only because it'd be really cool to know how humans can levitate, if, in fact, they can.
Except the point is that if enough people meditate regularly -- the original idea was 20 minutes, twice a day -- then you can live an otherwise normal life, but it'll lower crime.
I grew up in Fairfield, IA. I was somewhat disappointed when I checked out the skepdic entry on TM only to find that the strongest debunk was James Randi calling up the Fairfield Police Department and asking whether the influx of meditators had reduced crime. Nope, crime rates had increased if anything, but were pretty typical either way.
It's a good argument, but I'm kind of disappointed. I'm going to have to deconstruct it sometime. It seems to get either respected or ignored, never seriously challenged other than people saying, "You think people can fly?" and laughing hysterically. It's not really a threat, so I can see why other absurdities would be a bigger target, but it also means the meditators themselves never have to really think hard about why they believe what they do.
How many times a year are exams held? I count less than twenty, and probably more like ten, for a given course -- and they do try to pack the exams relatively close together.
Should the exam rooms sit idle the rest of the time? I generally see lecture halls being co-opted as exam rooms, but they're useful as lecture halls the rest of the time.
Or are you saying we should cage everything that might ever be used for an exam, so students can't use laptops or cell phones during class? Do not want.
If you can come up with a way to do it easily and cheaply, and just for exam time, I'm all for it. But even then, I'd also rather catch the cheaters and expel the fuckers than just throw up another obstacle for them to work around.
I used to think as you do, and I've come to realize that while it's very true for some things, it's exactly wrong for many.
Test with no collaboration and no open book / Google are not the real world and just lead to people who can pass the test but have no idea on how to do the work.
Well, to start with, if you only know how to solve the problem with Google, do you really know how to solve the problem? Anyone can Google for the answer. What you need to do is solve the problem yourself. Yes, it's boring, it's something everyone else has already solved, and you probably solved at least once on the homework. But if you can solve this problem, you've demonstrated that if someone throws a new problem at you, one no one has solved yet, you'll be able to do it -- and it'll be all the easier when you have Google to help.
The same can be said of the book.
If you test people in groups, you now have all the problems of groupwork -- how do you know who did what? Who actually contributed, who did all the work, and who sat back and collected the credit? Or, if it's a problem that actually needs multiple people to solve in the given time, maybe one of the students you're about to fail was actually competent, just got stuck with a useless group?
Even assuming the students are honest about it, it can be hard to remember how it actually happened.
Add to that the logistical problems. If you allow Google, but not collaboration, how do you prevent students from communicating? What if you want to limit collaboration? How do you know a student hasn't hidden an answer sheet on Google or in their book?
The only way this could possibly work is if you came up with at least significant variations on a project each semester, if not entirely new projects, and you made sure that the key concepts you want students to understand are something Google doesn't know -- which means you're basically going to do original research each semester. Really?
Homework is good on its own, and it has many of the above problems. But a test is one way to make sure a student has actually learned something from your course.
Of course, the better courses include sufficient information on the test to bring it closer to the environment you were supposed to be doing your homework in -- enough to avoid the memorization, but not enough for you to just Google "Hey, everybody, what's the answer?" For instance, for my Data Structures course, the Javadoc for relevant pieces of the Java APIs was included on the test. For my introductory Physics course, relevant equations were included on the test, you just needed to know what they mean and how to apply them.
And guess what?
If you made it through that Physics course without understanding what E=K+U means, or F=ma, or K=(1/2)mv^2, guess what? You don't know what they mean and how to apply them. Sure, on the job, you have access to Google, so maybe you could Google things like the universal gravitational constant or the formula for energy in a sinusoidal oscillator, but if you have to Google for what F=ma means, you didn't learn a single goddamned thing from that course, and you deserve the F you'll be getting. If you don't know that F means Force, you get F for Fail.
You can have the Java Collections APIs -- we don't care if you've memorized something your IDE will tab-complete for you anyway. But if you can't loop through a linked list without Googling "linked lists" or using iterators, you don't really understand linked lists. I don't care that iterators make more sense in the real world -- you fail, see you next semester.