Is there some efficiency to be gained by building a four square mile device over, say, 2560 one acre devices? Energy efficiency? Cost? It seems like there's a lot of risk in building one giant unit.
They certainly seem to have turned over a new leaf in terms of implementing standards in IE. I hardly think this absolves them of the guilt of the dirty tricks campaign they ran against OOXML.
By making inflammatory statements that you can't be reasonably assumed to actually believe. (Please note that your intent doesn't matter. If you're just crazy, the post is still a troll.)
Just because I disagree with you and pissed you off by daring to express myself?
A beautiful case in point. I've done nothing to make you feel so persecuted. So, either you're a nut job with a persecution complex, or your playing hurt as part of a troll. Make sense?
Of course the answer to your ridiculous question is no.
I suppose you and the slashdot moderators who (co-incidentally, I'm sure) agree with your assessment feel that only the "correct" opinions should be allowed?
You understand that Slashdot hasn't had "moderators" in the sense you seem to be using for over a decade, right? I'm a moderator right now. You could be two in just two simple steps. 1. Log in. 2. Contribute. Good luck!
Feel free to disagree (I wont, and cant, moderate you down for it), but I see no evidence that Microsoft is actively undermining SVG simply by their participation in the working group. In fact, like it or not but their participation now means it is far more likely to succeed.
I don't understand why you hold your ignorance up as evidence. I encourage you to do a little research and discover the history of Microsoft's relationship with SVG to date. And its history with standards bodies. I'm sure it will shed light on my comments.
Presumably you are passionate about SVG succeeding and not simply passionate about Microsoft failing, so I would have thought you would see this as good news.
Can you tell me a better predictor of of a person or an organizations behavior than the history of his or its behavior?
I am a fan of technological progress. I've used SVG to good effect. Open standards have universally proven beneficial to society.
I am perfectly indifferent to the success or failure of Microsoft. But I'm very much against allowing Microsoft to torpedo a useful standard like SVG. I am a stanch capitalist, and I encourage microsoft to compete in the marketplace. But that doesn't mean I have to accept their track record of dirty tricks that ultimately retard progress.
It would certainly benefit SVG if Microsoft sincerely supported it. And if they wanted to do that, they have but to implement it in their browser.
But, they refuse this, while seeking to sit on the working group. If that isn't suspicious to you, then you are paranoid and gullible in a way that I would have thought impossible.
PS: The slashdot group think that pervades every discussion here is the reason why I don't bother with an account. I've tried in the past and have been downmodded into oblivion.
Yes, Slashdot is a horrible place full of meanies. And yet, here you are. Yet another example of you ostensibly taking a position, but clearly having contradicting underlying motives.
While I can identify with your position, if boycotts by the technologically conscious were by any means effective, Internet Explorer would have shriveled and died in the '90s.
For the benefit of those who might be led astray by your post:
Open standards don't harm anyone. Well, anyone except for those who want to control their customers with proprietary formats. If thinking that's a bad idea is "populist", then I'm guilty.
My shot at the UN was an afterthought. The same idea applies, that people who seem to want an organization to fail at their objective aren't helpful to that organization. Feel free to work against SVG, just not in the SVG working group!
Get a user account. They're free, and they allow us to have a conversation. As it stands, I have no way of knowing if any reply is from you.
I don't really know how the W3C is organized, but shouldn't there be some protection against allowing organizations who are openly hostile toward a technology from sitting on the committee? Isn't this just common sense?
If you had two Exchange accounts you wanted to access via ActiveSync you'd be in the same position. I don't see how this adds up to poor integration with Google.
Furthermore, I think that this is at least partially attributable to the nature of ActiveSync itself. There's a clear model for multiple email accounts on a device, but less so for multiple contacts databases.
For example, the iPhone does not synch well with google
Where on Earth did you get this idea?! On day one the iPhone worked . . . adequately with Google services. Now it's stellar.
I have a Google hosted domain, a separate Gmail account with mail and calendar, and it all works brilliantly with my iPhone. And that's without the advantage of Google Sync, which I can't use due to the iPhone only allowing one ActiveSync account -- which I use for my work mail and calendar.
In what way do you want to synchronize an iPhone with Google services that you can't?!
Generally, "better" compression [...] requires a lot more power to encode and often some more power to decode. [...] But their customers' television sets might not have the horsepower to decode it at full quality.
Your first statement is true. And it is interesting to note that the "power" requirements generally increase exponentially on the encode side, but linearly on the decode side. This is due to the intentionally asymmetric design of video codecs of interest.
Your second statement makes less sense. There may be some nuance here that I'm unaware of, but generally you are able to successfully decode a video frame or you aren't. You can't fairly characterize a failure to decode a frame as reduced quality.
The good news is that profiles are rigidly defined, so this should never happen.
It's also possible that, by compressing the video stream into a denser compression method, signal loss is having a greater effect than it did with the old compression method.
Uncorrectable blocks invariably results in "macroblocking" (or "tiling") artifacts. Since the same number of frames are being transmitted per second, line errors of a given duration will affect the same number of frames.
The determining factor here is the interleaver depth, not the bits per frame.
Most games sacrifice story telling in favor of action. And that's generally a good approach.
Iif you're going to make a game that is fundamentally about the story, then you need a fully realized first act. The first act in most games consists of as little as a blurb in the manual, or, at best, a two minute (skippable) cut-scene. Assuming that this game (story) runs over ten hours, spending an hour establishing the characters doesn't seem at all excessive to me.
I don't know what the video acceleration API on OSX is called.
GCD has nothing to do with accelerated video. Preemptively, neither does OpenCL.
The limited GCD documentation I've read looks like it would be amenable to simple approaches for conditional compiling. (I.e. #IFDEFs around the GCD stuff). I can't imagine an API more friendly to sharing code with another multi-processing API. Similarly, I can't imagine how this is more difficult than porting a game from XBox 360 to PS3, or vice-versa.
Again, this is way out of my realm of expertise, but I think that GCD is fundamentally kernel-based. I don't see how Apple can schedule cores on Windows.
I think you must have replied to the wrong post. You're attacking all sorts of postions that I didn't take. Allow me to clarify, without the irony; it seems inevitable that publicly funded Science will become politicized. Do you disagree?
Now that you mention it, it seems to me that under a regime of publicly funded research, finding problems is more lucrative than finding solutions, or an absence of problems.
I think that you and I probably have very different views on government. I see government as a necessary evil. I see politicians as a bunch of noisy, attention-seeking children. Completely distinct from the Scientific aspects of the climate, I see "Global Climate Change" as a very noisy toy with flashing lights that politicians simply can't resist playing with. But if you think that government meddling in Science is a good thing, I'd encourage you to send your children to school in Kansas.
All of that aside, I have a copule of problems with your second paragraph. First, your statement about "the truth of anthropogenic global warming". If you seek truth, try Philosophy -- or find a religion. Science is about facts. And mutable conclusions drawn from facts. The history of Science is rightly littered with discarded theories which were, once, broadly accepted. This is proper and desirable. But you can't alter the truth.
Then you said, "about half-a-dozen scientists (each of whom is now making a good living as a professional sceptic)". While I do take your meaning, I think it's worthwhile to note that every Scientist, whether he makes a good living at it or not, should be a professional skeptic.
In any case, I think you read far more into my post than was there. I hope I have been able to clarify things somewhat.
Who could have possibly predicted that accepting hundreds of billions of dollars from governments over the last couple of decades could have somehow politicized Science?
Suppose you're a religious fundamentalist wack-job who thinks your God wants you to kill people who aren't following his rules. You'd probably have ideas about ways to get certain things on the plane*. (And you'd probably just do it.)
Now, imagine you're some white-bread, middle aged man from the Midwest with a wife, a couple of kids, and a dog. Suppose it's you're job to stop Mr. Wack-job. You'd probably think in terms of what you'd have on the line if you went up against Uncle Sam. And you'd probably suppose that he'd want to do some test runs with indifferent items with similar physical characteristics to the naughty items. But, because the test items would be neither dangerous nor prohibited, you couldn't count on security indicating that they saw the items.
Mr. Wack-job would gain much more information if he could watch the monitor for signs of his test items while an accomplice ran them through security.
-Peter
* I can think of several such items and approaches (and probable counter-measures, and possible counter-counter-measures), but I will keep them to myself so as to avoid any risk of giving the impression that I condone such behavior.
I had the same concern before I bought an iPhone. (And I was mildlyanti-Apple at the time. I'm now a Mac convert.)
The advantages of the fully re-configurable UI outweigh the advantages of tactile buttons by leaps and bounds. For me anyway. I'd welcome the addition of configurable tactile buttons on top of a dynamic visual UI, but, given the choice, there's no question in my mind.
Of course, this assumes a complex device like a smartphone. The GUI gives no advantage -- and the advantage of hard buttons come to the fore -- with a simple device like the single-function candybar phone I was using ten years ago.
I can't express to you the degree to which I don't want to kill anyone. (Isn't this, you know, a pretty normal, human state of mind?) This desire, however, is clearly exceeded by my desire to live.
So, yeah, I guess, if you're "lucky" enough to get mugged, you might be able to brutalize your mugger and get away with it. Then again, I'd prefer not to go up against a medical examiner in court with a bullshit story and my life on the line.
In fact, it seems that you're suggesting that a mugger might get away with it, and should be subject to street justice. But then you turn around an make a murder of yourself, under the theory that you can get away with it.
Do I misunderstand you? I find this line of reasoning deeply disturbing.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for clearing that up for me, sport.
-Peter
Is there some efficiency to be gained by building a four square mile device over, say, 2560 one acre devices? Energy efficiency? Cost? It seems like there's a lot of risk in building one giant unit.
-Peter
ODF. That gets me EVERY TIME.
-Peter
They certainly seem to have turned over a new leaf in terms of implementing standards in IE. I hardly think this absolves them of the guilt of the dirty tricks campaign they ran against OOXML.
-Peter
Good talk.
-P
By making inflammatory statements that you can't be reasonably assumed to actually believe. (Please note that your intent doesn't matter. If you're just crazy, the post is still a troll.)
A beautiful case in point. I've done nothing to make you feel so persecuted. So, either you're a nut job with a persecution complex, or your playing hurt as part of a troll. Make sense?
Of course the answer to your ridiculous question is no.
You understand that Slashdot hasn't had "moderators" in the sense you seem to be using for over a decade, right? I'm a moderator right now. You could be two in just two simple steps. 1. Log in. 2. Contribute. Good luck!
I don't understand why you hold your ignorance up as evidence. I encourage you to do a little research and discover the history of Microsoft's relationship with SVG to date. And its history with standards bodies. I'm sure it will shed light on my comments.
Can you tell me a better predictor of of a person or an organizations behavior than the history of his or its behavior?
I am a fan of technological progress. I've used SVG to good effect. Open standards have universally proven beneficial to society.
I am perfectly indifferent to the success or failure of Microsoft. But I'm very much against allowing Microsoft to torpedo a useful standard like SVG. I am a stanch capitalist, and I encourage microsoft to compete in the marketplace. But that doesn't mean I have to accept their track record of dirty tricks that ultimately retard progress.
It would certainly benefit SVG if Microsoft sincerely supported it. And if they wanted to do that, they have but to implement it in their browser.
But, they refuse this, while seeking to sit on the working group. If that isn't suspicious to you, then you are paranoid and gullible in a way that I would have thought impossible.
Yes, Slashdot is a horrible place full of meanies. And yet, here you are. Yet another example of you ostensibly taking a position, but clearly having contradicting underlying motives.
-Peter
While I can identify with your position, if boycotts by the technologically conscious were by any means effective, Internet Explorer would have shriveled and died in the '90s.
-Peter
Your point is well taken. But don't count Silverlight out yet. The sole fact that Netflix uses it for their streaming service is reason enough.
-Peter
Cute troll.
For the benefit of those who might be led astray by your post:
-Peter
I don't really know how the W3C is organized, but shouldn't there be some protection against allowing organizations who are openly hostile toward a technology from sitting on the committee? Isn't this just common sense?
Who do they think they are? The UN?
-Peter
As I mentioned, I have the same problem.
If you had two Exchange accounts you wanted to access via ActiveSync you'd be in the same position. I don't see how this adds up to poor integration with Google.
Furthermore, I think that this is at least partially attributable to the nature of ActiveSync itself. There's a clear model for multiple email accounts on a device, but less so for multiple contacts databases.
-Peter
Where on Earth did you get this idea?! On day one the iPhone worked . . . adequately with Google services. Now it's stellar.
I have a Google hosted domain, a separate Gmail account with mail and calendar, and it all works brilliantly with my iPhone. And that's without the advantage of Google Sync, which I can't use due to the iPhone only allowing one ActiveSync account -- which I use for my work mail and calendar.
In what way do you want to synchronize an iPhone with Google services that you can't?!
-Peter
Your first statement is true. And it is interesting to note that the "power" requirements generally increase exponentially on the encode side, but linearly on the decode side. This is due to the intentionally asymmetric design of video codecs of interest.
Your second statement makes less sense. There may be some nuance here that I'm unaware of, but generally you are able to successfully decode a video frame or you aren't. You can't fairly characterize a failure to decode a frame as reduced quality.
The good news is that profiles are rigidly defined, so this should never happen.
Uncorrectable blocks invariably results in "macroblocking" (or "tiling") artifacts. Since the same number of frames are being transmitted per second, line errors of a given duration will affect the same number of frames.
The determining factor here is the interleaver depth, not the bits per frame.
-Peter
-Peter
Most games sacrifice story telling in favor of action. And that's generally a good approach.
Iif you're going to make a game that is fundamentally about the story, then you need a fully realized first act. The first act in most games consists of as little as a blurb in the manual, or, at best, a two minute (skippable) cut-scene. Assuming that this game (story) runs over ten hours, spending an hour establishing the characters doesn't seem at all excessive to me.
-Peter
I don't know what the video acceleration API on OSX is called.
GCD has nothing to do with accelerated video. Preemptively, neither does OpenCL.
The limited GCD documentation I've read looks like it would be amenable to simple approaches for conditional compiling. (I.e. #IFDEFs around the GCD stuff). I can't imagine an API more friendly to sharing code with another multi-processing API. Similarly, I can't imagine how this is more difficult than porting a game from XBox 360 to PS3, or vice-versa.
Again, this is way out of my realm of expertise, but I think that GCD is fundamentally kernel-based. I don't see how Apple can schedule cores on Windows.
-Peter
I don't see any reason why use of Grand Central would be necessary. After all, the OSX port of VLC predates GC by years!
GC doesn't replace any API. It just simplifies access to multiple processing cores.
-Peter
I don't know all the reasons, but the fact that OSX uses a unique graphics system is surely one. (OSX includes X, but it is not the native system.)
-Peter
I think you must have replied to the wrong post. You're attacking all sorts of postions that I didn't take. Allow me to clarify, without the irony; it seems inevitable that publicly funded Science will become politicized. Do you disagree?
Now that you mention it, it seems to me that under a regime of publicly funded research, finding problems is more lucrative than finding solutions, or an absence of problems.
I think that you and I probably have very different views on government. I see government as a necessary evil. I see politicians as a bunch of noisy, attention-seeking children. Completely distinct from the Scientific aspects of the climate, I see "Global Climate Change" as a very noisy toy with flashing lights that politicians simply can't resist playing with. But if you think that government meddling in Science is a good thing, I'd encourage you to send your children to school in Kansas.
All of that aside, I have a copule of problems with your second paragraph. First, your statement about "the truth of anthropogenic global warming". If you seek truth, try Philosophy -- or find a religion. Science is about facts. And mutable conclusions drawn from facts. The history of Science is rightly littered with discarded theories which were, once, broadly accepted. This is proper and desirable. But you can't alter the truth.
Then you said, "about half-a-dozen scientists (each of whom is now making a good living as a professional sceptic)". While I do take your meaning, I think it's worthwhile to note that every Scientist, whether he makes a good living at it or not, should be a professional skeptic.
In any case, I think you read far more into my post than was there. I hope I have been able to clarify things somewhat.
-Peter
Who could have possibly predicted that accepting hundreds of billions of dollars from governments over the last couple of decades could have somehow politicized Science?
-Peter
It's almost certainly to prevent test runs.
Suppose you're a religious fundamentalist wack-job who thinks your God wants you to kill people who aren't following his rules. You'd probably have ideas about ways to get certain things on the plane*. (And you'd probably just do it.)
Now, imagine you're some white-bread, middle aged man from the Midwest with a wife, a couple of kids, and a dog. Suppose it's you're job to stop Mr. Wack-job. You'd probably think in terms of what you'd have on the line if you went up against Uncle Sam. And you'd probably suppose that he'd want to do some test runs with indifferent items with similar physical characteristics to the naughty items. But, because the test items would be neither dangerous nor prohibited, you couldn't count on security indicating that they saw the items.
Mr. Wack-job would gain much more information if he could watch the monitor for signs of his test items while an accomplice ran them through security.
-Peter
* I can think of several such items and approaches (and probable counter-measures, and possible counter-counter-measures), but I will keep them to myself so as to avoid any risk of giving the impression that I condone such behavior.
I had the same concern before I bought an iPhone. (And I was mildly anti-Apple at the time. I'm now a Mac convert.)
The advantages of the fully re-configurable UI outweigh the advantages of tactile buttons by leaps and bounds. For me anyway. I'd welcome the addition of configurable tactile buttons on top of a dynamic visual UI, but, given the choice, there's no question in my mind.
Of course, this assumes a complex device like a smartphone. The GUI gives no advantage -- and the advantage of hard buttons come to the fore -- with a simple device like the single-function candybar phone I was using ten years ago.
-Peter
Maybe, but that would also make them far easier to detect and hit with conventional anti-aircraft guns and missiles.
-Peter
Infinitely many things do or could exist. The fact that you took the time to write out this particular scheme is not irrelevant to the conversation.
In any case, I'm relieved that you're not interested in executing your perverse plan.
-Peter
These are the same sort of arguments proving that everyone will be running Linux on their desktop by . . . five years ago.
Maybe things will be different on cell phones.
-Peter
I don't really know how to react to your post.
I can't express to you the degree to which I don't want to kill anyone. (Isn't this, you know, a pretty normal, human state of mind?) This desire, however, is clearly exceeded by my desire to live.
So, yeah, I guess, if you're "lucky" enough to get mugged, you might be able to brutalize your mugger and get away with it. Then again, I'd prefer not to go up against a medical examiner in court with a bullshit story and my life on the line.
In fact, it seems that you're suggesting that a mugger might get away with it, and should be subject to street justice. But then you turn around an make a murder of yourself, under the theory that you can get away with it.
Do I misunderstand you? I find this line of reasoning deeply disturbing.
-Peter