I don't really know why this is considered funny. Well, the McGyver reference is almost certainly what did it, but if you watched Sci-Fi, you'd realize not only was it not cancelled as the new season started last Friday, but also 'McGyver' is back as a Brigadier General.
So... seriously was the whole ignorance thing supposed to be funny, or was it just the belief that Richard Dean Anderson actually is McGyver (who I'd like to mention was extremely anti-gun, unlike Jack.)
The talk of running in a sandbox enviornment was for AV software companies. They intentionally release viruses into a sandbox environment in order to figure out how they work to develop the countermeasures included in their updates. A regular user with AV software doesn't have a separate sandbox for running e-mail usually, so it'd install into the main system, and therefore infect, and the AV software wouldn't even see it, as it won't until they release new DAT files for whatever AVS you run.
Not really what you were talking about, but difficult ot enhance something already recorded? Tell that to George Lucas. Actually, seriously, please tell him.
Well, I don't have an HDTV, part of the issue since it hasn't taken off. Part of my point was that without it I wouldn't even consider VoD, and until prices drop drastically on the TVs and the amount of HD programming goes up, I won't even consider one of them. There's nothing really wrong with having the receiver, except that you have to pay extra for them with the three cable companies I've had experience with, and without HD, the only thing it'd give me is the ability to get Pay Per View or n0rp, neither of which I'm going to pay for.
I realize DVD is much lower resolution than HD, which is, again, why I said until there's more widespread HD VoD, it's better to stick with DVD. Again, I don't have an HDTV, so I can't really verify absolutely, but I know at least my company, Patriot Media, doesn't have HD VoD offerings, though we do have standard VoD and HDTV regularly. Comcast isn't available at all in this area.
Maybe I was unclear, but basically, my point was that in many cases either the technology is too weak to make it worthwhile, or else it's just prohibitively expensive overall to support VoD. It will likely become worthwhile some day, but not soon. In answer to Billy G, as you mentioned, with HD-DVD optical media isn't going to die anyway, despite any advancements of VoD.
I don't know the average video on demand prices, but I'd say once VoD starts pushing HD sources, assuming it's still cheaper than a rental, and further assuming HD has actually taken off by then, it will have a market. Until then, renting a DVD may require you to go into the big bad outdoors and drive to the local rental chain, but realistically it's not that big of a hassle, and this doesn't even take things like NetFlix into account, which is either far cheaper or more expensive depending on how quickly you turn around the discs. The quality is significantly better that way, on top of not requiring a digital cable receiver, just a DVD player that lots of people own already.
But, as it is with a standard source that requires new hardware and probably not terribly competetive rates, no thanks. I'll stick with NetFlix.
No. RFID is much less intricate than what they're talking about.
Re:H.S.B.C.## STANDARD CLAIMS ENQUIRY?
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419 Scam Blow-by-Blow
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To the moderator: This massage[sic] is funny. Please mod accordingly.
Aren't most 'funny massages' illegal (through most of the United States at least)?
The problem with integrated authentication is that it starts shooting out your login credentials to anyone who asks for any credentials, meaning you could potentially be giving people access to your account information. I don't think I need to explain why this can be bad.
That said, I'm actually working on a intranet site that uses this exact technology, which is fine and dandy for something only accessible from inside the network that you had to supply credentials to, but still, that doesn't mean that people couldn't do requests and just log credentials invisibly to the user. If security isn't an issue, go right ahead with this insecure auto-verification. If it is...
My father (I'm still in college, and though I work at the same company, it's a much more temporary position) was given a router and was allowed to expense our cable internet charges to do occasional VPN work. Now, he was too moral to take them up on it since he didn't work from home nearly often enough in his opinion, but it was fully legal stuff. Maybe Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development (a mouthful to be sure) is just nicer than the average company these days.
Your iPod may cost the same, but you should really be paying for each and every one of the mp3s you put onto it that's encoded above 56kbps, assuming the mp3s are legal in the first place. It's not up to the player to charge you, it's really up to the encoder, so yes there is a 'license fee free' version out there that supports only vorbis, because the fee doesn't go to the people releasing the versions. By the way, when did the iPod start supporting vorbis AT ALL, much less exclusively?
If the compression/quality ratio doesn't matter to you, there's really not much anyone could say to sway you. However, mp3 is actually a licensed technology, which is bad, and there is a movement to add DRM to it as a standard, which is worse. OGG (Ogg Vorbis to be correct)is free, and certainly isn't about to add draconian DRM to its code. Also, I should mention that I have upwards of 40GB of music on my PC hard drives, so really, a smaller ogg of nearly equal quality to a large mp3 would go a long way to putting more of my music into my device, and I don't think I'm all alone out here with not wanting to stick 256/320kbps MP3s on if 128/192kbps ogg vorbis files are pretty much just as good.
Well, it's a faulty battery issue, not nearly spontaneous combustion, but mine is pretty good, so in fact trading up would be a bad thing, except that bad batteries creep up every few years, then go away and things don't burn for a while. Blame the battery companies, not the cell phone companies.
Blame the cell phone companies for building features into phones that work better than the main function, talking on the phone. Please, just give me a phone that wants to be a phone, not a PDA, Gameboy, camera, *insert next big addon feature of cell phones*. Well, as I said, I have one, so it'll stay big and in my pocket for a while.
So, a six month turn around is equivalent to making sure devices are destroyed every six months via internal bomb/bios coding to shut down/*insert other paranoid ranting*? I don't know how they could force me to buy a new anything really. I, for one, still have a 5 year old cell phone, a 4 year old digital camera, and a 10 year old car, all of which have fast turn around rates. All of them work as well as I need, so how am I being forced to upgrade? It could be said that they aren't working properly, but really, cell phone companies are about the worst for pushing out new products for no reason and trying to make old products seem inferior.
The six month turn around just means that when I do need to buy a product it is more likely that it will be a time of year when I will be buying a realitively new product.
Actually, I look at it in a somewhat opposite way. The six month turn around just means that I'll be able to find a reasonably good product at the last model prices without buying a proverbial bird and stone tablet box.
They keep pushing out new models, the older ones that are still good since they're only six months old will be cheaper. Hopefully, Digital SLRs will follow the digital point and shoot cameras, so a digi-SLR is... you know.. reasonably priced. At all.
Ahem, obligatory "I don't have a DVR or Samsung TV, you insensitive clod!"
On to more serious business, see this where I clearly accounted for the fact that cartoons/cartoon like images are well suited for gif compression. My point was that not everything is 256 colors or less, not that nothing is. In fact, I do remember a conditional 'if' in my post which you quoted. The right tool for the right job.
Ha, beat me to it by being more concise. And to think he got the informative mod. C'est La Vie
To reiterate, GIF is essentially lossless, but only in two conditions: The image is less than 256 colors raw, or the image was a gif originally (basically the same condition.)
Now, PNG is also lossless, and while GIF is still the most common standard, Mozilla supports PNG well, and IE pretends to support it resulting in an okay method, meaning it doesn't have to remain standard. After all, [intentionally ridiculous analogy]the horse and buggy was once the standard for transportation.[/intentionally ridiculous analogy]
Can a file format limited to 256 colors really be called "lossless?" Sure if the raw bmp or whatever raw uncompressed format you prefer was less than 256 colors it's lossless, but 257 on up and it's lossy, just to varying degrees. Detail might still be there, but it has to decide what colors your eye won't really miss too much, and throw out that information, and not always in a pleasing way.
Funny, and here I thought the primary reason to use GIF was a toss-up between transparency and the fact that the algorithm makes it well suited to compressing cartoon like images, usually better than JPEG (admittedly much worse for photos with the 256 color limitation [i.e. quality bites] and larger even if you can get the quality good, but photo rendering was never the point IIRC). PNG does both of these better, and there are certainly better web standards for animation out there than GIF images.
Principle mostly, and perhaps gif development can make it better than png if it becomes free. It's possible anyway. And png does offer better compression/quality from what I've seen in my admittedly limited experience, but the free software community that basically dominatess/. (not a knock, just saying the OSS community here is pretty big) would like it free as a victory for OSS, regardless of its usefulness. Just my $0.02
My mistake, yeah, that is open source. I wasn't thinking and thought of the nvidia module, not nv. Actually, I run the nvidia module, truth be told, because I don't care about corrupting my kernel with non GPL, but for the other nVidia hardware... well, you obviously read it already. And no, probably not that big of a difference, but I wanted the post to be longer;-)
Two things here, not that you'll ever see it since your'e an AC, but 1) it did for quite a while until mods came in later and went on a crusade against it and 2) see this to see where I actually stand on the whole issue of the Gentoo box statement. No, I wasn't kidding there, and I do have a Gentoo box, I just felt like throwing it on there for kicks since my karma isn't really that big of an issue for someone who doesn't contribute often, or really want to moderate.
Of course, the most amusing thing here is that you didn't mention the "Well I for one welcome our new [insert something mildly relevant to discussion] overlords," which is even more overused, and has been for a very long time. But don't let me obfuscate matters with the obvious double standard for what is overused, annoying, and unlikely to get mod points. More people called it funny than offtopic after all. I agree with the overrated, though variants of that still keep getting modded funny, so until the joke dies, I'll keep saying that sort of thing to see if people complain about something everyone else still thinks is funny. The Gentoo port just seemed to die faster.
By the way, I'd have a lot more respect for your request or your pain at being annoyed by me if you weren't an AC. Try putting your name down on something. Please.
Ah yes, learn the truth from a movie that is being billed as a documentary, because everyone knows documentaries are objectively truthful. Unfortunately, this is a heavily political movie that tries to push Moore's view as the truth, rather than objectively stating it. Don't get me wrong here, I'm no right wing zealot (though I usually sit on the right side of the fence, I'm certainly not so blind to it that I'll be voting for Bush in the fall) but Moore is far from trying to lay out 'just the facts' here.
I don't really have that big of an issue with nVidia's graphics support, but their nForce chipset drivers are repulsively bad. They decided not to implement hardware mixing, despite it being one of the chipset's capabilities, and the LAN drivers they ship with are slow and buggy. If they'd just open sourced it, or given out the spec so someone could write the driver, we'd have sound that wasn't horridly bug ridden. The ethernet support was reverse engineered and now works significantly better than the NVNet module that ships on disk included in the motherboard package. On top of this, look up issues between the 2.6 kernel and nForce 2 chipsets if you want to read some horror stories. One of the big problems was ACPI wasn't implemented to the standard, so using it causes hard lockdowns of the system (we're talking to the point that you can't turn the caps/scroll/num lock light on by pushing the button, much less any serious interaction). If the spec here was known, a workaround other than disabling all of the power saving features could be found, but as it is that's about the only recourse for many people. I know this was a graphics card discussion originally, but it is still nVidia's drivers/hardware spec not being open causing real problems.
Also, releasing the source would allow the drivers to be compiled on the systems with your gcc optimizations instead of being forced to use binaries, which has nothing to do with whether you're going to modify the source or not. One of the biggest things about my Gentoo box was that you build everything optimized for your hardware, whereas these binaries have to be much more general. Sure, there may not really be a terribly significant difference, but it's just one more reason why it should be open source.
Finally, to get back to your first point (am I going in reverse?) You really can't revise the nv drivers because they're compiled binaries. Nothing is stopping you from modifying them except the little thing that it's not accessible code to modify, since if it was this thread wouldn't have started. As for getting another company's video card, the options are ATi, and Matrox, neither of which are any better in this regard, and in fact ATi is much worse, so while you are right that nothing is preventing me from buying someone else's video card, it's not the point since no one is playing nice with OSS (AFAIK, Matrox might actually be nicer about it all, but they're not really accessible to the public the way the other two companies are,) leaving penguin worshipers with no options. nVidia is the lesser of two evils to be sure, so they get my money (that and the awful ATi driver issues with Windows XP, but that's a different story) for now, but really only because no one is better. Saying nothing is preventing us from going elsewhere really seems to sidestep the actual issue by blaming the users for something we really can't avoid because the best solution is a partial one. Well, anyway, that's just my $0.02
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So... seriously was the whole ignorance thing supposed to be funny, or was it just the belief that Richard Dean Anderson actually is McGyver (who I'd like to mention was extremely anti-gun, unlike Jack.)
The talk of running in a sandbox enviornment was for AV software companies. They intentionally release viruses into a sandbox environment in order to figure out how they work to develop the countermeasures included in their updates. A regular user with AV software doesn't have a separate sandbox for running e-mail usually, so it'd install into the main system, and therefore infect, and the AV software wouldn't even see it, as it won't until they release new DAT files for whatever AVS you run.
Not really what you were talking about, but difficult ot enhance something already recorded? Tell that to George Lucas. Actually, seriously, please tell him.
I realize DVD is much lower resolution than HD, which is, again, why I said until there's more widespread HD VoD, it's better to stick with DVD. Again, I don't have an HDTV, so I can't really verify absolutely, but I know at least my company, Patriot Media, doesn't have HD VoD offerings, though we do have standard VoD and HDTV regularly. Comcast isn't available at all in this area.
Maybe I was unclear, but basically, my point was that in many cases either the technology is too weak to make it worthwhile, or else it's just prohibitively expensive overall to support VoD. It will likely become worthwhile some day, but not soon. In answer to Billy G, as you mentioned, with HD-DVD optical media isn't going to die anyway, despite any advancements of VoD.
Hundreds of them, but it was still cents. ;)
But, as it is with a standard source that requires new hardware and probably not terribly competetive rates, no thanks. I'll stick with NetFlix.
To the moderator: This massage[sic] is funny. Please mod accordingly. Aren't most 'funny massages' illegal (through most of the United States at least)?
The problem with integrated authentication is that it starts shooting out your login credentials to anyone who asks for any credentials, meaning you could potentially be giving people access to your account information. I don't think I need to explain why this can be bad. That said, I'm actually working on a intranet site that uses this exact technology, which is fine and dandy for something only accessible from inside the network that you had to supply credentials to, but still, that doesn't mean that people couldn't do requests and just log credentials invisibly to the user. If security isn't an issue, go right ahead with this insecure auto-verification. If it is...
My father (I'm still in college, and though I work at the same company, it's a much more temporary position) was given a router and was allowed to expense our cable internet charges to do occasional VPN work. Now, he was too moral to take them up on it since he didn't work from home nearly often enough in his opinion, but it was fully legal stuff. Maybe Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development (a mouthful to be sure) is just nicer than the average company these days.
Your iPod may cost the same, but you should really be paying for each and every one of the mp3s you put onto it that's encoded above 56kbps, assuming the mp3s are legal in the first place. It's not up to the player to charge you, it's really up to the encoder, so yes there is a 'license fee free' version out there that supports only vorbis, because the fee doesn't go to the people releasing the versions. By the way, when did the iPod start supporting vorbis AT ALL, much less exclusively?
If the compression/quality ratio doesn't matter to you, there's really not much anyone could say to sway you. However, mp3 is actually a licensed technology, which is bad, and there is a movement to add DRM to it as a standard, which is worse. OGG (Ogg Vorbis to be correct)is free, and certainly isn't about to add draconian DRM to its code. Also, I should mention that I have upwards of 40GB of music on my PC hard drives, so really, a smaller ogg of nearly equal quality to a large mp3 would go a long way to putting more of my music into my device, and I don't think I'm all alone out here with not wanting to stick 256/320kbps MP3s on if 128/192kbps ogg vorbis files are pretty much just as good.
Blame the cell phone companies for building features into phones that work better than the main function, talking on the phone. Please, just give me a phone that wants to be a phone, not a PDA, Gameboy, camera, *insert next big addon feature of cell phones*. Well, as I said, I have one, so it'll stay big and in my pocket for a while.
So, a six month turn around is equivalent to making sure devices are destroyed every six months via internal bomb/bios coding to shut down/*insert other paranoid ranting*? I don't know how they could force me to buy a new anything really. I, for one, still have a 5 year old cell phone, a 4 year old digital camera, and a 10 year old car, all of which have fast turn around rates. All of them work as well as I need, so how am I being forced to upgrade? It could be said that they aren't working properly, but really, cell phone companies are about the worst for pushing out new products for no reason and trying to make old products seem inferior.
Actually, I look at it in a somewhat opposite way. The six month turn around just means that I'll be able to find a reasonably good product at the last model prices without buying a proverbial bird and stone tablet box.
They keep pushing out new models, the older ones that are still good since they're only six months old will be cheaper. Hopefully, Digital SLRs will follow the digital point and shoot cameras, so a digi-SLR is... you know.. reasonably priced. At all.
Far behind? Didn't that start about two years ago for much of the IT industry?
On to more serious business, see this where I clearly accounted for the fact that cartoons/cartoon like images are well suited for gif compression. My point was that not everything is 256 colors or less, not that nothing is. In fact, I do remember a conditional 'if' in my post which you quoted. The right tool for the right job.
To reiterate, GIF is essentially lossless, but only in two conditions: The image is less than 256 colors raw, or the image was a gif originally (basically the same condition.) Now, PNG is also lossless, and while GIF is still the most common standard, Mozilla supports PNG well, and IE pretends to support it resulting in an okay method, meaning it doesn't have to remain standard. After all, [intentionally ridiculous analogy]the horse and buggy was once the standard for transportation.[/intentionally ridiculous analogy]
Can a file format limited to 256 colors really be called "lossless?" Sure if the raw bmp or whatever raw uncompressed format you prefer was less than 256 colors it's lossless, but 257 on up and it's lossy, just to varying degrees. Detail might still be there, but it has to decide what colors your eye won't really miss too much, and throw out that information, and not always in a pleasing way.
Funny, and here I thought the primary reason to use GIF was a toss-up between transparency and the fact that the algorithm makes it well suited to compressing cartoon like images, usually better than JPEG (admittedly much worse for photos with the 256 color limitation [i.e. quality bites] and larger even if you can get the quality good, but photo rendering was never the point IIRC). PNG does both of these better, and there are certainly better web standards for animation out there than GIF images.
Principle mostly, and perhaps gif development can make it better than png if it becomes free. It's possible anyway. And png does offer better compression/quality from what I've seen in my admittedly limited experience, but the free software community that basically dominatess /. (not a knock, just saying the OSS community here is pretty big) would like it free as a victory for OSS, regardless of its usefulness. Just my $0.02
My mistake, yeah, that is open source. I wasn't thinking and thought of the nvidia module, not nv. Actually, I run the nvidia module, truth be told, because I don't care about corrupting my kernel with non GPL, but for the other nVidia hardware... well, you obviously read it already. And no, probably not that big of a difference, but I wanted the post to be longer ;-)
Of course, the most amusing thing here is that you didn't mention the "Well I for one welcome our new [insert something mildly relevant to discussion] overlords," which is even more overused, and has been for a very long time. But don't let me obfuscate matters with the obvious double standard for what is overused, annoying, and unlikely to get mod points. More people called it funny than offtopic after all. I agree with the overrated, though variants of that still keep getting modded funny, so until the joke dies, I'll keep saying that sort of thing to see if people complain about something everyone else still thinks is funny. The Gentoo port just seemed to die faster.
By the way, I'd have a lot more respect for your request or your pain at being annoyed by me if you weren't an AC. Try putting your name down on something. Please.
Ah yes, learn the truth from a movie that is being billed as a documentary, because everyone knows documentaries are objectively truthful. Unfortunately, this is a heavily political movie that tries to push Moore's view as the truth, rather than objectively stating it. Don't get me wrong here, I'm no right wing zealot (though I usually sit on the right side of the fence, I'm certainly not so blind to it that I'll be voting for Bush in the fall) but Moore is far from trying to lay out 'just the facts' here.
Also, releasing the source would allow the drivers to be compiled on the systems with your gcc optimizations instead of being forced to use binaries, which has nothing to do with whether you're going to modify the source or not. One of the biggest things about my Gentoo box was that you build everything optimized for your hardware, whereas these binaries have to be much more general. Sure, there may not really be a terribly significant difference, but it's just one more reason why it should be open source.
Finally, to get back to your first point (am I going in reverse?) You really can't revise the nv drivers because they're compiled binaries. Nothing is stopping you from modifying them except the little thing that it's not accessible code to modify, since if it was this thread wouldn't have started. As for getting another company's video card, the options are ATi, and Matrox, neither of which are any better in this regard, and in fact ATi is much worse, so while you are right that nothing is preventing me from buying someone else's video card, it's not the point since no one is playing nice with OSS (AFAIK, Matrox might actually be nicer about it all, but they're not really accessible to the public the way the other two companies are,) leaving penguin worshipers with no options. nVidia is the lesser of two evils to be sure, so they get my money (that and the awful ATi driver issues with Windows XP, but that's a different story) for now, but really only because no one is better. Saying nothing is preventing us from going elsewhere really seems to sidestep the actual issue by blaming the users for something we really can't avoid because the best solution is a partial one. Well, anyway, that's just my $0.02