You can't (or can't in my country) sign up for Yahoo! or Gmail without it, as the providers want to ensure that each account is associated with a real person who is less likely to abuse the service by sending automated spam. In addition, numerous providers are moving toward two-factor authentication by receiving SMS. Twitter, for example, produces an error message to the effect "Carrier is not supported" if I try to add a landline instead of a mobile phone.
Does the swappable card include both the CDMA2000 subscriber information ("CSIM") and the LTE subscriber information, or only the LTE subscriber information?
To whom? Just as all four U.S. carriers raised their SMS rates in lockstep a few years back, they can all raise their data rates to unapproved domains in lockstep.
Did the blur somehow get worse, or did user expectations get better?
You already answered your own question.
Ah, the good old mathematician's answer: funny to some, but unhelpful. Which of the above was the answer?
It's caused by being low resolution and stretched across a much higher resolution display.
PC monitors in the DivX era had a typical resolution of 1024x768 or 1280x1024, but DVD-Video source material in North America and Japan was 704x480.* Movies were commonly encoded at resolutions even smaller than that due to preference for square pixels. So things were already stretched even then. And a 1024x768 pixel phone display would have roughly Retina-class resolution. Are you referring specifically to use of Binge On with Retina-class tablets?
* The Rec. 601 scanline, used by DVD and other standard-definition video standards, is 720 pixels wide because it includes 16 pixels of nominal analog blanking. This is not considered part of the 4:3 or 16:9 frame but is instead intended for recentering a signal.
Because historically, the nonstandard network may have had better voice and data coverage in the area where a subscriber lives and works than the standard one.
1.5Mbps [...] means getting blurry 480p videos with Binge On enabled.
Back when the warez scene was using MPEG-4 Part 2* as a video codec, it was common to squeeze a movie into a 700 MB AVI file to fit onto a single CD-R. A 93 minute movie would have allowed 1 Mbps for video and audio combined. And nowadays, it's more common to use the more sophisticated MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka H.264) video codec. Did the blur somehow get worse, or did user expectations get better? Or is this blur caused by some sort of peaking behavior, in which a scene release at 1 Mbps ABR can have short bursts of 2 Mbps or more balanced by sub-0.6 Mbps stretches with less action, while a 1.5 Mbps Binge On stream is capped at that rate?
* Commonly called DivX or Xvid after its popular encoder implementations.
What was the duration of the contract you signed? (If there's no ETF, there's no real duration.) When it expired, Comcast signed you up for a new contract that included a monthly data transfer quota, and you indicated your agreement by continuing to receive service.
People who lack experience in advanced cooking may be unaware of the respectable definition of the word "aspic". They instead may incorrectly assume it to be a disparaging neologism for "Latino with Asperger-type autism": "aspie" plus "spic". Compare "niggardly".
OTOH, if your ads are fetched from multiple third parties, instead of served locally, then it's noscript, ghostery, and disconnect for you.
I can think of two ways to serve ads locally. One is to sell ad space locally, which requires each site to operate its own full-service ad sales department. Said department can prove impractical for a small site, and advertisers tend to worry more about click fraud on smaller sites that sell their own ad space. The other is to arrange for the site server to proxy the ad server, which ad networks forbid at present.
What practical means of "served locally" did you have in mind? Or is it fine if a site just chooses one third party at a time and sticks with it?
Only a copyright owner can lawfully order DNS records to be pulled down because only a copyright owner knows whether a particular use is licensed. Have you tried reporting the results of your investigation of piracy sites to the legitimate copyright owners of the affected works so that they can act?
if they don't have a product anyone wants to pay for
I want to pay for a product: one single article that a search engine, social media friend, or other aggregator recommended to me. I just don't feel a need to pay for a large number of unrelated products on the same site by buying an all-you-can-eat subscription or a thousand page views. So how would a site operator go about letting a viewer pay for a single page, as opposed to paying for a year's access to the site? The fairly high per-transaction fees of credit cards and Bitcoin rule out their use for micropayments.
Don't accept any offer that isn't per pixel per minute the ad is on you monitor.
Then the site could turn it around by charging the owner of the monitor a pixel per minute rate to view the site, which rate happens to exactly match the rate that it pays the owner of the monitor to show ads, so that it all balances out.
And how much of your ISP bill is your ISP remitting to site operators? Probably a lot less than cable television retransmission fees, if any at all. The only case I'm aware of where ISPs pay a site operator is ESPN3.
Problem is that people get their news socially these days, e.g. via a link from a summary on Slashdot or Facebook.
But then who pays for Slashdot or Facebook, if not those sites' advertisers? And who pays for verification that it isn't a hoax, if not the advertisers on Snopes?
Unless the "minor tweaks" include features deliberately removed from the PC version, such as multi-gamepad shared-screen multiplayer because the publisher doesn't find it worthwhile to target Steam's Big Picture mode.
I've got the perfect video game in my head and would love to try to lay it out there.
Have you tried making it for a PC or mobile platform first? Those might be more inviting platforms to start out on, even after this announcement of an official softmod for development. You used to need a PC tech demo in order to score a devkit, and PC experience would probably still serve you well if you want to make the most of this softmod.
Is there any special media required to make disks - for those who want to use/offer physical installation media?
With all respect, if you have to ask about discs, you likely aren't quite ready to know. An indie startup's first commercial game isn't likely to exceed a few hundred MB at most. For comparison, N64 games maxed out at 32 MB with about two exceptions, and PS1 games that weren't sprawling RPGs largely fit on a 650 MB disc. You probably will not need physical installation media until it's several GB, so let's keep the proverbial cart behind the tractor until your tech demo is working.
Literally, I've no idea how modern consoles work. I've not been a gamer in years but being able to access one as a developer just might be enough to make me want to own one.
Do you know DirectX? There's a reason Microsoft calls it the "Xbox". Make a game for Windows 10 UWP and get it on the Windows Store, and there should be little problem building it for Xbox One.
Considering games for the Sega Nomad rarely exceeded 4 MB, compared to the 500,000 MB hard drive of the launch Xbox One, I suspect your guess is right.
Android went years without a standard multi-window window manager. Being forced to tab back and forth between full-screen apps isn't optimal. Android also has an aggressive OOM killer (by UNIX standards), and applications traditionally go out of their way to dump caches in response to memory pressure. Losing data because your web browser decided to "purge" the page on which which you had been entering text into a form isn't optimal. Finally, how can Intents and ContentProviders and the like be linked up in a way remotely reminiscent of a UNIX pipe?
Not a single [operating system listed at without-systemd] is likely to be the primary OS of a *BSD user or developer, and it is unlikely any have been developed by a *BSD user or developer.
Perhaps you had to leave before reading far enough, but the UNIX-like and derivatives section lists plenty of *BSD variants as well as the Solaris-derived OpenIndiana OS. The "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD" and "ubuntuBSD" entries, which combine GNU with the kernel from FreeBSD, look interesting.
There's really nothing Windows offers anymore except PC gaming
And being preinstalled on PCs sold in brick-and-mortar stores. And a (relatively) easy path from Windows game development to console game development, for those genres that do work better on consoles than PCs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, well my television is 65" with a native resolution of 3840×2160 and 480p looks like shit on it.
Then don't watch Binge On on a 4K living room TV. Instead subscribe to wired broadband. Move if you have to.
Watching video directly on my 5" phone screen is already straining enough, I don't need to compound the problem by also using low resolution garbage.
The bottom line is 480p is not acceptable.
If it's unacceptable enough to get you to pay to remove the unacceptability, then disable Binge On and instead enable pay per bit.
Does anyone even use SMS anymore?
You can't (or can't in my country) sign up for Yahoo! or Gmail without it, as the providers want to ensure that each account is associated with a real person who is less likely to abuse the service by sending automated spam. In addition, numerous providers are moving toward two-factor authentication by receiving SMS. Twitter, for example, produces an error message to the effect "Carrier is not supported" if I try to add a landline instead of a mobile phone.
Does the swappable card include both the CDMA2000 subscriber information ("CSIM") and the LTE subscriber information, or only the LTE subscriber information?
Then you switch away from Verizon.
To whom? Just as all four U.S. carriers raised their SMS rates in lockstep a few years back, they can all raise their data rates to unapproved domains in lockstep.
Did the blur somehow get worse, or did user expectations get better?
You already answered your own question.
Ah, the good old mathematician's answer: funny to some, but unhelpful. Which of the above was the answer?
It's caused by being low resolution and stretched across a much higher resolution display.
PC monitors in the DivX era had a typical resolution of 1024x768 or 1280x1024, but DVD-Video source material in North America and Japan was 704x480.* Movies were commonly encoded at resolutions even smaller than that due to preference for square pixels. So things were already stretched even then. And a 1024x768 pixel phone display would have roughly Retina-class resolution. Are you referring specifically to use of Binge On with Retina-class tablets?
* The Rec. 601 scanline, used by DVD and other standard-definition video standards, is 720 pixels wide because it includes 16 pixels of nominal analog blanking. This is not considered part of the 4:3 or 16:9 frame but is instead intended for recentering a signal.
Because historically, the nonstandard network may have had better voice and data coverage in the area where a subscriber lives and works than the standard one.
1.5Mbps [...] means getting blurry 480p videos with Binge On enabled.
Back when the warez scene was using MPEG-4 Part 2* as a video codec, it was common to squeeze a movie into a 700 MB AVI file to fit onto a single CD-R. A 93 minute movie would have allowed 1 Mbps for video and audio combined. And nowadays, it's more common to use the more sophisticated MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka H.264) video codec. Did the blur somehow get worse, or did user expectations get better? Or is this blur caused by some sort of peaking behavior, in which a scene release at 1 Mbps ABR can have short bursts of 2 Mbps or more balanced by sub-0.6 Mbps stretches with less action, while a 1.5 Mbps Binge On stream is capped at that rate?
* Commonly called DivX or Xvid after its popular encoder implementations.
What was the duration of the contract you signed? (If there's no ETF, there's no real duration.) When it expired, Comcast signed you up for a new contract that included a monthly data transfer quota, and you indicated your agreement by continuing to receive service.
Send me a paper bill, in the mail, and I'll pay it.
They'd gladly do that in exchange for a $5 per month paper billing surcharge.
People who lack experience in advanced cooking may be unaware of the respectable definition of the word "aspic". They instead may incorrectly assume it to be a disparaging neologism for "Latino with Asperger-type autism": "aspie" plus "spic". Compare "niggardly".
Better yet, both: helping Uncle Jack jack off a horse.
OTOH, if your ads are fetched from multiple third parties, instead of served locally, then it's noscript, ghostery, and disconnect for you.
I can think of two ways to serve ads locally. One is to sell ad space locally, which requires each site to operate its own full-service ad sales department. Said department can prove impractical for a small site, and advertisers tend to worry more about click fraud on smaller sites that sell their own ad space. The other is to arrange for the site server to proxy the ad server, which ad networks forbid at present.
What practical means of "served locally" did you have in mind? Or is it fine if a site just chooses one third party at a time and sticks with it?
Only a copyright owner can lawfully order DNS records to be pulled down because only a copyright owner knows whether a particular use is licensed. Have you tried reporting the results of your investigation of piracy sites to the legitimate copyright owners of the affected works so that they can act?
if they don't have a product anyone wants to pay for
I want to pay for a product: one single article that a search engine, social media friend, or other aggregator recommended to me. I just don't feel a need to pay for a large number of unrelated products on the same site by buying an all-you-can-eat subscription or a thousand page views. So how would a site operator go about letting a viewer pay for a single page, as opposed to paying for a year's access to the site? The fairly high per-transaction fees of credit cards and Bitcoin rule out their use for micropayments.
Don't accept any offer that isn't per pixel per minute the ad is on you monitor.
Then the site could turn it around by charging the owner of the monitor a pixel per minute rate to view the site, which rate happens to exactly match the rate that it pays the owner of the monitor to show ads, so that it all balances out.
I already pay for the internet.
And how much of your ISP bill is your ISP remitting to site operators? Probably a lot less than cable television retransmission fees, if any at all. The only case I'm aware of where ISPs pay a site operator is ESPN3.
Problem is that people get their news socially these days, e.g. via a link from a summary on Slashdot or Facebook.
But then who pays for Slashdot or Facebook, if not those sites' advertisers? And who pays for verification that it isn't a hoax, if not the advertisers on Snopes?
Unless the "minor tweaks" include features deliberately removed from the PC version, such as multi-gamepad shared-screen multiplayer because the publisher doesn't find it worthwhile to target Steam's Big Picture mode.
I've got the perfect video game in my head and would love to try to lay it out there.
Have you tried making it for a PC or mobile platform first? Those might be more inviting platforms to start out on, even after this announcement of an official softmod for development. You used to need a PC tech demo in order to score a devkit, and PC experience would probably still serve you well if you want to make the most of this softmod.
Is there any special media required to make disks - for those who want to use/offer physical installation media?
With all respect, if you have to ask about discs, you likely aren't quite ready to know. An indie startup's first commercial game isn't likely to exceed a few hundred MB at most. For comparison, N64 games maxed out at 32 MB with about two exceptions, and PS1 games that weren't sprawling RPGs largely fit on a 650 MB disc. You probably will not need physical installation media until it's several GB, so let's keep the proverbial cart behind the tractor until your tech demo is working.
Literally, I've no idea how modern consoles work. I've not been a gamer in years but being able to access one as a developer just might be enough to make me want to own one.
Do you know DirectX? There's a reason Microsoft calls it the "Xbox". Make a game for Windows 10 UWP and get it on the Windows Store, and there should be little problem building it for Xbox One.
Two questions for you first: Is Xbox One tanking harder than Wii U? And is Xbox One tanking harder than Steam Machine and other living room PCs?
Considering games for the Sega Nomad rarely exceeded 4 MB, compared to the 500,000 MB hard drive of the launch Xbox One, I suspect your guess is right.
How many people can fit around one television to watch a video or play a game? How many gamepads have been sold for use with a television?
Now repeat the question on mobile.
Android went years without a standard multi-window window manager. Being forced to tab back and forth between full-screen apps isn't optimal. Android also has an aggressive OOM killer (by UNIX standards), and applications traditionally go out of their way to dump caches in response to memory pressure. Losing data because your web browser decided to "purge" the page on which which you had been entering text into a form isn't optimal. Finally, how can Intents and ContentProviders and the like be linked up in a way remotely reminiscent of a UNIX pipe?
Not a single [operating system listed at without-systemd] is likely to be the primary OS of a *BSD user or developer, and it is unlikely any have been developed by a *BSD user or developer.
Perhaps you had to leave before reading far enough, but the UNIX-like and derivatives section lists plenty of *BSD variants as well as the Solaris-derived OpenIndiana OS. The "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD" and "ubuntuBSD" entries, which combine GNU with the kernel from FreeBSD, look interesting.
There's really nothing Windows offers anymore except PC gaming
And being preinstalled on PCs sold in brick-and-mortar stores. And a (relatively) easy path from Windows game development to console game development, for those genres that do work better on consoles than PCs.