Inch for inch a 4:3 monitor will have more usable space than an equivalent widescreen display
That's just because of an archaic measure-the-diagonal method of comparing screen sizes. 4:3 started as the 'academy ratio' for film, was retained for TV displays, then retained again for monitors so they could share parts of the production line and save manufacturing costs. 16:9 was a compromise ratio between legacy 4:3 and cinemascope so both could fit in with minimal letterboxing or pillarboxing, and again monitors adopted it to save on production costs by sharing the production line and driver electronics. My personal favourite ratio is 16:10. You can fit most document sizes (A series, B series, JIS-B, ANSI A & B, etc) comfortably with minimal edge wasting, whereas with 4:3 or 16:9, even in portrait mode, you'll be wasting significantly more screen space. 4:3 is good for very old films and old TV shows, but not much else.
ALL cableTV and ALL satellite TV is 720P heavy compressed
More likely 'HD lite' at 1440x1080 anamorphic. But the bigger problem is not resolution, it's bitrate. BD sits at the apex with 40-odd mbps h.264 (assuming the disc wasn't encoded by morons, which occurs with unfortunately frequency), sometimes MPEG2 or VC1 for older discs. Then you have broadcast TV at a few 10s of mbps (or even sub-10) h.264. Then you have broadcast TV in the same bitrates but MPEG2. And finally you have streaming video, which often doesn't even break 1mbps. The difference between a blu-ray and youtube's 1080p is at easily over an order of magnitude.
Bose is a name to be reckoned with, but only the name. Their actual equipment is pretty mediocre, dead average, but priced as if it were premium equipment. You're paying 5x/10x the price for the badge, nothing more (hence the common apocryphal backronym Buy Other Sound Equipment).
Your eye is not a camera. Just because you cannot resolve the space between two dots, does not mean your eye cannot resolve detail at much higher resolution, e.g. vernier acuity
Maybe they need a sexier name than "nuclear steam powered light gas gun filled with electrolyzed hydrogen".
I'm not sure you're on the correct website if "nuclear steam powered light gas gun filled with electrolyzed hydrogen" is not near the apex of sexy names.
Quite the contrary. I think dicking about with half-arsed reduce-our-CO2-emissions legislation is committing ourselves to a death spiral of wilful "but we're solving the problem!"-ing ignorance. We need numerous, varied and far-reaching global geoengineering projects aimed at controlling ANY undesired global temperature variation, in the long term. Our recent few-tens-of-thousands-of-years unseasonably warm period has been a huge boon to the human race, and we're on the verge of it's end, either upwards or downwards.
That's great, if CO2 were the only substance involved and the rest of the planet was inert. Does an increase in temperature caused by an increase in CO2 levels result in a cloud cover increase that persists and causes an overall temperature lowering effect? Is there a positive feedback effect that would mean a sudden stop of all anthropogenic CO2 emission would not cause a change in the current temperature increase? Will any of the many, many different biological processes that are either accelerated or retarded by an increase in CO2 concentration (in both the air AND the water) have a net positive or negative effect?
The climate is complicated.
No, but there sure as hell are a lot who disagree on how and why it occurs, and the mechanisms behind it. We know the Earth changes global temperature, often wildly (we have testable records of this). We know the current global temperature is (we have multiple measurements of this). What we don't have is another spare Earth running with accelerated time to test whether injecting the quantities of CO2 that have been released (along with aerosols, particulates, and other assorted crap) will have a long term net warming effect, cooling effect, or something else, and the magnitude of that effect. We can create models to predict the effect, but we only have training data (past records), but no control data. To only current way to test to see if what we think will happen in 100 years is correct is to wait 100 years.
Best thing about the Canadarm: the manipulator is attached with a series of frangible nuts ('explosive bolts' to the rest of us), so in the event of an uncontrolled swing while holding an object the manipulator can be jettisoned to prevent it crashing into the station.
Yep. And not only that, this guide could easily be titled "an incredibly abbreviated guide to assembling somebodies partially customised Mendel variant".
Because unless you build an entire x86 architecture HTPC, any little desktop streamer box is going to be SOC based. Which will inevitable have a really crappy selection of codec compatibilities and will likely baulk at multiple audio tracks and suck at rendering soft-subtitles. And Ordered Chapter support in MKV will either be nonexistant or just cause hard-lockups. Not only does the RasPi's SOC handle Level 4.1 h.264, because it's running the eminently hackable XBMC you are likely to be able to play a much wider range of unusual codecs and containers than you would otherwise. Not to mention being able to hack the hardware itself to do other things like home automation.
It's a good mix of the "I can make it do anything I want" nature of a full-blown HTPC, but with the vastly lower cost and smaller footprint of a streaming box. With the caveats that it cannot double as a gaming machine, and cannot host an internal HDD (apart from a USB2 caddy).
To elaborate: imagine that you were asking for a magical algorithm to automatically colourise an arbitrary monochrome video. That's peanuts compared to adding accurate and, more importantly, pleasant looking stereo data to a 2D video, while creating said stereo data from thin air.
However, the Orion drive was vastly more complicated (and expensive) than the nuclear thermal rockets they're talking about in the article
Not really, no. Ol' put-put is a dirt simple device: a gun to fire bombs a short distance, and a big honking pusher-plate on heavy suspension. A NTR needs some pretty esoteric construction materials to maintain integrity at the very high operating temperatures used (and some rather creative layout of the fuel elements to allow good hypersonic flow), whereas the Orion drive just needs to be big and heavy. The bigger the better, in fact; it scales up better than it scales down.
DVI-A and DVI-I, yes, but I've seen so many things which implement just DVI-D that banishing the port to remove the analog portion is a pointless exercise. More likely, the shift to HDMI and DP is purely because the connectors are smaller so devices can be thinner. Simple.
That's all well and good, but how do you tell if the hash in the magnet link you're hovering over is the hash of the file you want, rather than the hash of some different (and possibly malicious) file? Sure, a torrent file could also have a deceptive filename, but at least with a torrent you can see it's contents before you start downloading anything. With a magnet link, you have to wait for downloading to begin before you can actually tell what the contents of the torrent are.
On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of Pkpriv.
Your home PC is safe, you'll be free to install whatever other OS. It's no longer at the discretion of OEMs, but a requirement for certification.
If the new iPods / iPhones do lock the bootloader and prevent you from installing something else, then that would be something worth complaining about
They do. As do many (probably even the majority) of Android devices. And Symbian devices. And bloody well anything that runs on ARM! The number of locked ARM devices vastly outnumbers the number that are unlocked, or even have the ability to be officially unlocked. Should unlocked ARM devices be the norm? Yes. Is Microsoft's position the norm among every device and OS manufacturer? Also yes.
Also interesting to note is that the updated document specifically requires that UEFI Secure Boot settings can be modified by the end user, contrary to previous hooh-hah.
The programmer is probably just as pissed as the user. Imagine designing an ebook format with built in dynamic page breaks, line breaks, columns, tabs, etc so the text can reform on-the-fly for different aspect ratios and text sizes while maintaining formatting. Now imaging the publisher insists of just hitting enter 20 times between chapters and formatting columns by pressing the space bar a lot each line.
Additionally, the vast majority of CCTV cameras are: a) Not networked, they record locally to a really cheap MJPEG DVR that overwrites itself every day or so
b) Really crap. Think distorted 320x240 at 5fps if you're lucky. And if you're unlucky, a 3x3 grid of those same feeds recorded at 640x480 with a lower bitrate than most MP3s.
Don't ditch stereographic 3D outright. Instead, either do it properly or don't do it at all (I agree that at the moment, the two are functionally equivalent, though). This can be done by following two relatively simply rules: 1) No stereo upconverts. You don't shoot a film in B&W then colourise it (unless you want it to look like ass, especially when colour film is right there), so don't shoot a film in 2D then try and guesstimate some stereo separation. You retard. 2) Hire a stereographer who will hit you in the back of the head every time you suggest something fly out of the screen. Hard. And repeatedly. Until you learn how the human visual cortex recieves stereo cues and how to work with it to trick the viewer rather than grabbing the optic nerve and yanking it about. *
The only film I can think of where stereo 3D was done properly has been Avatar. Regardless of what you think about plot originality or hamfisted delivery, it was an excellent use of stereo 3D.
*I was going to give another analogy of shooting a film in colour and only using BRIGHT BLUE SKY and BRIGHT ORANGE DESERT broad-brush colour grading, but then I remembered the Orange and Teal effect. On second thought, let's just fire the entire movie industry into the sun and start again.
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Inch for inch a 4:3 monitor will have more usable space than an equivalent widescreen display
That's just because of an archaic measure-the-diagonal method of comparing screen sizes. 4:3 started as the 'academy ratio' for film, was retained for TV displays, then retained again for monitors so they could share parts of the production line and save manufacturing costs. 16:9 was a compromise ratio between legacy 4:3 and cinemascope so both could fit in with minimal letterboxing or pillarboxing, and again monitors adopted it to save on production costs by sharing the production line and driver electronics.
My personal favourite ratio is 16:10. You can fit most document sizes (A series, B series, JIS-B, ANSI A & B, etc) comfortably with minimal edge wasting, whereas with 4:3 or 16:9, even in portrait mode, you'll be wasting significantly more screen space. 4:3 is good for very old films and old TV shows, but not much else.
ALL cableTV and ALL satellite TV is 720P heavy compressed
More likely 'HD lite' at 1440x1080 anamorphic. But the bigger problem is not resolution, it's bitrate. BD sits at the apex with 40-odd mbps h.264 (assuming the disc wasn't encoded by morons, which occurs with unfortunately frequency), sometimes MPEG2 or VC1 for older discs. Then you have broadcast TV at a few 10s of mbps (or even sub-10) h.264. Then you have broadcast TV in the same bitrates but MPEG2. And finally you have streaming video, which often doesn't even break 1mbps. The difference between a blu-ray and youtube's 1080p is at easily over an order of magnitude.
It's taken about as long to get from 3.1 to XP as it as from XP to 8? Wow, that feels really weird.
Bose is a name to be reckoned with, but only the name. Their actual equipment is pretty mediocre, dead average, but priced as if it were premium equipment. You're paying 5x/10x the price for the badge, nothing more (hence the common apocryphal backronym Buy Other Sound Equipment).
Your eye is not a camera. Just because you cannot resolve the space between two dots, does not mean your eye cannot resolve detail at much higher resolution, e.g. vernier acuity
It's 'healthy' to follow the data and not make any assumptions before you analyze it.
That's what skepticism is.
Maybe they need a sexier name than "nuclear steam powered light gas gun filled with electrolyzed hydrogen".
I'm not sure you're on the correct website if "nuclear steam powered light gas gun filled with electrolyzed hydrogen" is not near the apex of sexy names.
Quite the contrary. I think dicking about with half-arsed reduce-our-CO2-emissions legislation is committing ourselves to a death spiral of wilful "but we're solving the problem!"-ing ignorance. We need numerous, varied and far-reaching global geoengineering projects aimed at controlling ANY undesired global temperature variation, in the long term. Our recent few-tens-of-thousands-of-years unseasonably warm period has been a huge boon to the human race, and we're on the verge of it's end, either upwards or downwards.
That's great, if CO2 were the only substance involved and the rest of the planet was inert. Does an increase in temperature caused by an increase in CO2 levels result in a cloud cover increase that persists and causes an overall temperature lowering effect? Is there a positive feedback effect that would mean a sudden stop of all anthropogenic CO2 emission would not cause a change in the current temperature increase? Will any of the many, many different biological processes that are either accelerated or retarded by an increase in CO2 concentration (in both the air AND the water) have a net positive or negative effect?
The climate is complicated.
But something sold those iPhone 4Ss at an unprecedented rate
The Apple logo on the back, and the work 'new' in the advertisements.
denies the existence of gravity
No, but there sure as hell are a lot who disagree on how and why it occurs, and the mechanisms behind it.
We know the Earth changes global temperature, often wildly (we have testable records of this). We know the current global temperature is (we have multiple measurements of this). What we don't have is another spare Earth running with accelerated time to test whether injecting the quantities of CO2 that have been released (along with aerosols, particulates, and other assorted crap) will have a long term net warming effect, cooling effect, or something else, and the magnitude of that effect. We can create models to predict the effect, but we only have training data (past records), but no control data. To only current way to test to see if what we think will happen in 100 years is correct is to wait 100 years.
Best thing about the Canadarm: the manipulator is attached with a series of frangible nuts ('explosive bolts' to the rest of us), so in the event of an uncontrolled swing while holding an object the manipulator can be jettisoned to prevent it crashing into the station.
Yes, the ISS can rocket-punch.
Yep. And not only that, this guide could easily be titled "an incredibly abbreviated guide to assembling somebodies partially customised Mendel variant".
It would have to be a higher energy (shorter wavelength) pumping input, e.g. a gamma ray pulse.
Because unless you build an entire x86 architecture HTPC, any little desktop streamer box is going to be SOC based. Which will inevitable have a really crappy selection of codec compatibilities and will likely baulk at multiple audio tracks and suck at rendering soft-subtitles. And Ordered Chapter support in MKV will either be nonexistant or just cause hard-lockups.
Not only does the RasPi's SOC handle Level 4.1 h.264, because it's running the eminently hackable XBMC you are likely to be able to play a much wider range of unusual codecs and containers than you would otherwise. Not to mention being able to hack the hardware itself to do other things like home automation.
It's a good mix of the "I can make it do anything I want" nature of a full-blown HTPC, but with the vastly lower cost and smaller footprint of a streaming box. With the caveats that it cannot double as a gaming machine, and cannot host an internal HDD (apart from a USB2 caddy).
To elaborate: imagine that you were asking for a magical algorithm to automatically colourise an arbitrary monochrome video. That's peanuts compared to adding accurate and, more importantly, pleasant looking stereo data to a 2D video, while creating said stereo data from thin air.
However, the Orion drive was vastly more complicated (and expensive) than the nuclear thermal rockets they're talking about in the article
Not really, no. Ol' put-put is a dirt simple device: a gun to fire bombs a short distance, and a big honking pusher-plate on heavy suspension. A NTR needs some pretty esoteric construction materials to maintain integrity at the very high operating temperatures used (and some rather creative layout of the fuel elements to allow good hypersonic flow), whereas the Orion drive just needs to be big and heavy. The bigger the better, in fact; it scales up better than it scales down.
DVI-A and DVI-I, yes, but I've seen so many things which implement just DVI-D that banishing the port to remove the analog portion is a pointless exercise. More likely, the shift to HDMI and DP is purely because the connectors are smaller so devices can be thinner. Simple.
That's all well and good, but how do you tell if the hash in the magnet link you're hovering over is the hash of the file you want, rather than the hash of some different (and possibly malicious) file? Sure, a torrent file could also have a deceptive filename, but at least with a torrent you can see it's contents before you start downloading anything. With a magnet link, you have to wait for downloading to begin before you can actually tell what the contents of the torrent are.
On non-ARM systems, it is required to implement the ability to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup. A physically present user must be allowed to disable Secure Boot via firmware setup without possession of Pkpriv.
Your home PC is safe, you'll be free to install whatever other OS. It's no longer at the discretion of OEMs, but a requirement for certification.
If the new iPods / iPhones do lock the bootloader and prevent you from installing something else, then that would be something worth complaining about
They do. As do many (probably even the majority) of Android devices. And Symbian devices. And bloody well anything that runs on ARM! The number of locked ARM devices vastly outnumbers the number that are unlocked, or even have the ability to be officially unlocked. Should unlocked ARM devices be the norm? Yes. Is Microsoft's position the norm among every device and OS manufacturer? Also yes.
Also interesting to note is that the updated document specifically requires that UEFI Secure Boot settings can be modified by the end user, contrary to previous hooh-hah.
Eventually, they'll have to start suing each other for having the temerity to even consider operating in the same market.
The programmer is probably just as pissed as the user. Imagine designing an ebook format with built in dynamic page breaks, line breaks, columns, tabs, etc so the text can reform on-the-fly for different aspect ratios and text sizes while maintaining formatting. Now imaging the publisher insists of just hitting enter 20 times between chapters and formatting columns by pressing the space bar a lot each line.
Additionally, the vast majority of CCTV cameras are:
a) Not networked, they record locally to a really cheap MJPEG DVR that overwrites itself every day or so
b) Really crap. Think distorted 320x240 at 5fps if you're lucky. And if you're unlucky, a 3x3 grid of those same feeds recorded at 640x480 with a lower bitrate than most MP3s.
Don't ditch stereographic 3D outright. Instead, either do it properly or don't do it at all (I agree that at the moment, the two are functionally equivalent, though). This can be done by following two relatively simply rules:
1) No stereo upconverts. You don't shoot a film in B&W then colourise it (unless you want it to look like ass, especially when colour film is right there), so don't shoot a film in 2D then try and guesstimate some stereo separation. You retard.
2) Hire a stereographer who will hit you in the back of the head every time you suggest something fly out of the screen. Hard. And repeatedly. Until you learn how the human visual cortex recieves stereo cues and how to work with it to trick the viewer rather than grabbing the optic nerve and yanking it about. *
The only film I can think of where stereo 3D was done properly has been Avatar. Regardless of what you think about plot originality or hamfisted delivery, it was an excellent use of stereo 3D.
*I was going to give another analogy of shooting a film in colour and only using BRIGHT BLUE SKY and BRIGHT ORANGE DESERT broad-brush colour grading, but then I remembered the Orange and Teal effect. On second thought, let's just fire the entire movie industry into the sun and start again.