Most unnecessary JavaScript is associated with scripts that track you from one website to another. Users of Firefox can therefore drastically reduce execution of unnecessary JavaScript by activating tracking protection across the whole web. In about:config, set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true.
The one downside of enabling tracking protection is that you lose the ability to read websites whose operators believe that cross-site tracking is part of the economic bargain that qualifies you to receive articles from the site. Last I checked, this included WIRED, the INQUIRER, The Atlantic, and Jellynote.
Its frame rate in Firefox on my laptop with an Atom N450 CPU is so much lower than that of the original Flash version that it desyncs noticeably within the first ten seconds, with the first "mushroom mushroom" appearing over a second late.
In part because it requires authors to stop using an outdated yet resellable* used copy of Flash and start renting Adobe Animate in Creative Cloud.
* The license agreements of commercial off-the-shelf proprietary software usually have a provision for license transfer along with all copies of the product.
In principle, any ad which a human can recognise as an ad, a machine can also recognise as an ad.
I thought the goal of ad blocking was to avoid the cross-site tracking, data transfer quota use, and CPU use of requesting, downloading, and processing an ad in the first place. For a long time, Flash's content-type on a site that doesn't have entertaining vector animations was a very good predictor of a particular element being undesirable.
Say there were a country whose law stated that anybody reproducing, importing, or exhibiting a copy of a film adaptation of Peter Pan in that country must pay a tax, and this tax made it unprofitable to offer the film for all-you-can-watch streaming. Would that mean the law is shit? Or would it mean that all-you-can-watch streaming in general is shit?
It turns out that there is such a country, by the name of Great Britain. Its Copyrights, Designs, and Patents Act recognizes a right to a royalty payable to the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity (GOSH) for derivatives of the stage play Peter and Wendy, as if the play were subject to a perpetual copyright with a compulsory licence.
My guess: The MP3 patent expiration brings audio codecs back into the news, which in turn raises awareness among a game's audio team of what codec a particular project is using.
U.S. patents filed before mid-1995 expire the later of 20 years after filing or 17 years after grant. The grant date for these patents can be extended through various procedural tricks. In order to be sure about this, I'd need to see a list of AAC LC-related essential patent numbers in Via's pool, and Via's website didn't make such a list easy for me to find.
And you're right that Opus is too new. It still has artifacts on "killer samples" in the 128-192 kbps range that make it little better than Vorbis at transparency under quiet listening conditions. But it wins listening tests in the 64-96 kbps range for streaming to relatively noisy vehicular and outdoor environments.
I used to see quite a few video game projects use.ogg files [...] . I expect to see more of them ship with MP3s instead.
Unlike a web application, a PC-native video game doesn't have to rely on codecs built into the user's existing operating system. Thus the codec choice depends on licensing and rate-distortion efficiency. Yes, I expect games to switch away from Vorbis, but not to MP3 because MP3 is less space-efficient than Vorbis at a given fidelity level. They'll probably switch to Opus, which beats both MP3 and Vorbis at fidelity per bit.
Even with mobile device manufacturers charging for more storage space and cellular carriers charging for transmission from your home or leased server?
I assume the audio component of those videos could still be using the MP3 standard.
That's true of the DivX stack (ASP video and MP3 audio in the AVI container), not of the MPEG-4 stack (AVC video and AAC-LC audio in the QuickTime-derived MP4 container) or the new MPEG-4 stack (HEVC video and HE-AAC audio in the same MP4 container).
T-Mobile doesn't count Apple Music against your data
Assuming that you pay for a data plan in the first place, as opposed to pay-as-you-go voice-and-text-only service.
Also assuming that your device is one of what appear to be a few devices whitelisted for Apple Music. I've had the Google Play Store page for the Apple Music app say "This app is incompatible with all of your devices," despite one of them being a Galaxy Tab A running Android 6 "Marshmallow".
Free software operating systems, which strive to avoid all U.S. patents.
Libre operating systems
Trisquel and other FSF-endorsed distributions of GNU/Linux consist entirely of free software.
CPU-libre operating systems
The portion of Fedora and CentOS that runs on the CPU consists entirely of free software. These distributions also contain a small number of blobs, or non-free executables that run on I/O coprocessors, not the CPU.
I agree with you that Opus is technically better. But technically better means little if your listeners' playback application does not support it. Among major web browsers tracked by Can I use..., WebKit-based web browsers do not support Opus sources in <audio> elements. This includes Safari for macOS and every browser for iOS.
And mp3 might be good enough, but it is inferior in every way to modern formats.
"Every way"? If you have many listeners on iPod, iPhone, or iPad, MP3 is superior to Vorbis and Opus because Apple refuses to add support for Vorbis or Opus to iOS. MP3 is superior to the AAC-based M4A because MP3 is no longer encumbered by patents.
Can you have an game with it's own mapedit.exe that can work with game.exe without the sandbox getting in the way?
Yes, provided the "mapedit" and "game" applications use either UWP file pickers or the Share contract, which Microsoft is suspiciously not calling an "intent".
The difference? Windows 10 S won't let you turn that off, ever.
Of course it will: one-time payment of $50. Do you remember the "shareware" scene on the Mac, where a reduced-functionality demo of an application would circulate widely as an advertisement for the registered version? Windows 10 S can be considered a reduced-functionality demo of Windows 10 Pro.
With the implication being "It would be inappropriate to allow a student to synchronize a personal entertainment device with a computer owned by a public school district," correct?
The appropriateness then depends on two things. The first is whether Microsoft plans to promote Windows 10 S only for K-12 or also for university, where a student is more likely to own the computer rather than leasing it from a school district. The second is whether Microsoft plans to attempt to expand Windows 10 S beyond the education market.
Or more precisely, the projected cost-driven purchases by people who already owned a perfectly good DVD player exceeded the projected cost-driven purchases by people who wanted to avoid paying for both a DVD player and a game console.
What the hell is wrong with being alone with your own thoughts if you are eating alone.
Being alone with one's thoughts for 45 minutes until the next bus comes can become a waste of time, and the restaurant's dining room has better Wi-Fi reception than the bus hut.
Slashdot Mirror
Most unnecessary JavaScript is associated with scripts that track you from one website to another. Users of Firefox can therefore drastically reduce execution of unnecessary JavaScript by activating tracking protection across the whole web. In about:config, set privacy.trackingprotection.enabled to true.
The one downside of enabling tracking protection is that you lose the ability to read websites whose operators believe that cross-site tracking is part of the economic bargain that qualifies you to receive articles from the site. Last I checked, this included WIRED, the INQUIRER, The Atlantic, and Jellynote.
Its frame rate in Firefox on my laptop with an Atom N450 CPU is so much lower than that of the original Flash version that it desyncs noticeably within the first ten seconds, with the first "mushroom mushroom" appearing over a second late.
Even Adobe is telling people to convert to HTML5
In part because it requires authors to stop using an outdated yet resellable* used copy of Flash and start renting Adobe Animate in Creative Cloud.
* The license agreements of commercial off-the-shelf proprietary software usually have a provision for license transfer along with all copies of the product.
In principle, any ad which a human can recognise as an ad, a machine can also recognise as an ad.
I thought the goal of ad blocking was to avoid the cross-site tracking, data transfer quota use, and CPU use of requesting, downloading, and processing an ad in the first place. For a long time, Flash's content-type on a site that doesn't have entertaining vector animations was a very good predictor of a particular element being undesirable.
Say there were a country whose law stated that anybody reproducing, importing, or exhibiting a copy of a film adaptation of Peter Pan in that country must pay a tax, and this tax made it unprofitable to offer the film for all-you-can-watch streaming. Would that mean the law is shit? Or would it mean that all-you-can-watch streaming in general is shit?
It turns out that there is such a country, by the name of Great Britain. Its Copyrights, Designs, and Patents Act recognizes a right to a royalty payable to the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity (GOSH) for derivatives of the stage play Peter and Wendy, as if the play were subject to a perpetual copyright with a compulsory licence.
As a matter of fact there were no businesses that rely on geo locks at all.
At the time, the home video business broke the world into NTSC vs. PAL vs. PAL-M vs. SECAM vs. MESECAM.
My guess: The MP3 patent expiration brings audio codecs back into the news, which in turn raises awareness among a game's audio team of what codec a particular project is using.
Just don't connect them to the internet and they work exactly like a "dumb" TV.
Unless the TV's system software won't let you switch to RF, composite, or HDMI input without first activating the TV over the Internet.
U.S. patents filed before mid-1995 expire the later of 20 years after filing or 17 years after grant. The grant date for these patents can be extended through various procedural tricks. In order to be sure about this, I'd need to see a list of AAC LC-related essential patent numbers in Via's pool, and Via's website didn't make such a list easy for me to find.
Aoyumi's Tuned Vorbis encoder (aoTuV) is believed transparent at quality 5, which is roughly 160 kbps.
And you're right that Opus is too new. It still has artifacts on "killer samples" in the 128-192 kbps range that make it little better than Vorbis at transparency under quiet listening conditions. But it wins listening tests in the 64-96 kbps range for streaming to relatively noisy vehicular and outdoor environments.
IDIOTs buy over-priced Monster Cables.
But not all Monster cables are overpriced. When I bought my Wii console ten years ago, Monster's component cable was cheaper than Nintendo's.
Outside of the USA, software patents aren't really a thing.
Is most of the world willing to accept refugees from U.S. software patent holders' oppression?
I used to see quite a few video game projects use .ogg files [...] . I expect to see more of them ship with MP3s instead.
Unlike a web application, a PC-native video game doesn't have to rely on codecs built into the user's existing operating system. Thus the codec choice depends on licensing and rate-distortion efficiency. Yes, I expect games to switch away from Vorbis, but not to MP3 because MP3 is less space-efficient than Vorbis at a given fidelity level. They'll probably switch to Opus, which beats both MP3 and Vorbis at fidelity per bit.
Space isn't an issue
Even with mobile device manufacturers charging for more storage space and cellular carriers charging for transmission from your home or leased server?
I assume the audio component of those videos could still be using the MP3 standard.
That's true of the DivX stack (ASP video and MP3 audio in the AVI container), not of the MPEG-4 stack (AVC video and AAC-LC audio in the QuickTime-derived MP4 container) or the new MPEG-4 stack (HEVC video and HE-AAC audio in the same MP4 container).
I think the core problem is that Apple has refused to support VP8, VP9, or other patent-free video codecs in WebKit for iOS.
T-Mobile doesn't count Apple Music against your data
Assuming that you pay for a data plan in the first place, as opposed to pay-as-you-go voice-and-text-only service.
Also assuming that your device is one of what appear to be a few devices whitelisted for Apple Music. I've had the Google Play Store page for the Apple Music app say "This app is incompatible with all of your devices," despite one of them being a Galaxy Tab A running Android 6 "Marshmallow".
At this point, who doesn't support AAC?
Free software operating systems, which strive to avoid all U.S. patents.
Libre operating systems Trisquel and other FSF-endorsed distributions of GNU/Linux consist entirely of free software. CPU-libre operating systems The portion of Fedora and CentOS that runs on the CPU consists entirely of free software. These distributions also contain a small number of blobs, or non-free executables that run on I/O coprocessors, not the CPU.Opus is superior to MP3
I agree with you that Opus is technically better. But technically better means little if your listeners' playback application does not support it. Among major web browsers tracked by Can I use..., WebKit-based web browsers do not support Opus sources in <audio> elements. This includes Safari for macOS and every browser for iOS.
And mp3 might be good enough, but it is inferior in every way to modern formats.
"Every way"? If you have many listeners on iPod, iPhone, or iPad, MP3 is superior to Vorbis and Opus because Apple refuses to add support for Vorbis or Opus to iOS. MP3 is superior to the AAC-based M4A because MP3 is no longer encumbered by patents.
and the processing power of phones compared to audio decompression of any format (is anyone still carrying a dedicated music player?)
My coworker carries an obsolete iPod touch and a dumbphone because they still work and are paid for.
Can you have an game with it's own mapedit.exe that can work with game.exe without the sandbox getting in the way?
Yes, provided the "mapedit" and "game" applications use either UWP file pickers or the Share contract, which Microsoft is suspiciously not calling an "intent".
The difference? Windows 10 S won't let you turn that off, ever.
Of course it will: one-time payment of $50. Do you remember the "shareware" scene on the Mac, where a reduced-functionality demo of an application would circulate widely as an advertisement for the registered version? Windows 10 S can be considered a reduced-functionality demo of Windows 10 Pro.
With the implication being "It would be inappropriate to allow a student to synchronize a personal entertainment device with a computer owned by a public school district," correct?
The appropriateness then depends on two things. The first is whether Microsoft plans to promote Windows 10 S only for K-12 or also for university, where a student is more likely to own the computer rather than leasing it from a school district. The second is whether Microsoft plans to attempt to expand Windows 10 S beyond the education market.
Or more precisely, the projected cost-driven purchases by people who already owned a perfectly good DVD player exceeded the projected cost-driven purchases by people who wanted to avoid paying for both a DVD player and a game console.
What the hell is wrong with being alone with your own thoughts if you are eating alone.
Being alone with one's thoughts for 45 minutes until the next bus comes can become a waste of time, and the restaurant's dining room has better Wi-Fi reception than the bus hut.