Does this mean I could upload a one second long video of silence, pay YouTube for the auto Content Match thing, and have them mass flag any videos that contain a second or longer gap of silence? It's a clear exact copy of my entire work, even if you look at the waveform.
This. And even running bloated modern software, a Pi 3 or compute stick plugged into a keyboard, mouse and monitor would be sufficient for most of my day to day business and casual computing tasks. If you already have a suitable screen, the device itself plus a cheap keyboard and mouse are quite affordable too.
Cheap used laptops are sufficient for everyday tasks as well, at least after replacing the aging HDD with an SSD. But that brings the price higher than Pi 3+MicroSD+keyboard+mouse.
Our phones are powerful enough too - if only there were cheap laptop-like shells we could slot them into, and a good desktop interface it would switch into.
Bingo. I turn down "free" offers, especially ones like this 45 day package. Almost every time, you give them a credit card number when you sign up, and if you don't remember to cancel it within the free period, you start paying for it automatically afterward.
Free on-demand would also have a far smaller selection than piracy, as well as limitations like streaming-only and DRM. No more being able to take a couple movies with you on a tablet for that long flight. Free also comes with the assumption that is will be filled with ads. Even with a $0 price tag, the service has still failed to offer a better experience than piracy.
The only thing it has going for it is convenience, but if someone is already used to torrenting, it's not much of an inconvenience to them. The most irritating bit is waiting for a torrent to finish before you can watch it, but then you discover Popcorn Time and it's almost as good as normal streaming.
Huh... If it's through the ACPI table, can't we bypass it similar to how the Daz Loader piracy tool works: run a "loader" binary before passing control to the usual Windows bootloader. The loader modifies the tables in memory to add or remove entries as needed, and the OS is none the wiser.
Still way too fiddly for non-technical people. Unless it gets a system where you plug the systems together and both pop up something offering to transfer files through the cable, it's not going to catch on. Users cannot be expected to set up a SMB share, discover the other side's auto-configured IP, and then fiddle with passwords, encryption options and no-password sharing mode until some combination is found that works.
One side needs to be able to offer files to the other, which sees a notification allowing them to accept or reject them. Authentication other than just telling the receiving side the name of the device offering files only causes headaches. Some level of consent can be assumed if the users have plugged the devices together directly with a single cable.
Bluetooth simply isn't fast enough. A while ago I recorded a few minutes of 60 fps HD video on my Galaxy S7 and it was about 400 MB. I wanted to send it to my friend's Galaxy S5. I started up a Bluetooth transfer like I'm used to and wtf, 2 hours remaining?! So I tried S Beam and it was done inside of 30 seconds -- but it was only possible because we both happened to have Samsung phones.
We need an industry standard that works sort of like S Beam. Wifi is the only wireless technology found in all devices that's capable of the speeds needed. It should be a temporary ad-hoc wifi connection in order to remove the headaches of making sure both phones are connected to the same AP, finding a different AP if this one has client isolation, and the bandwidth hit from going through a relatively far away router to get to a device that's only inches away. Resuming on error would be nice, but apart from that it should be a pretty simple protocol that offers some files, sends them, and then stops.
SMB is not suitable -- too much fussing about with NETBIOS names, workgroups/domains, logins, share permissions, file permissions inside shares, some Android clients not working with Win10 hosts, etc. Then once you've got it working, it's great for a few big files but it's really slow for lots of small files. Besides, I'm not going to have some external SMB server I can drop files on when I'm at lunch with someone and want to share something with them.
Whether it's a new protocol, repurposed old one, or a proprietary one that becomes open and standardized, it needs to support a few key features if it's going to replace the current mess of USB cables, phones that only support MTP when connected to but only MSD to connect to another USB device, flash drives, OTG adapters, phones with no OTG support, incompatible proprietary systems, paid apps, transferring through a laptop, and profanities: - Simple location and authentication with nearby devices. No pairing or logins should be needed. A simple one-use code, scanning a QR, or an NFC tap would be good options. - Easy. It should be no more complex to use than telling one phone to share a file, the other to expect one, and then tapping them together (or entering or scanning a code, since not everything has NFC or a convenient camera). - Fast. HD and 4K phone videos should be shareable in less time than it took to record them. - Cross platform. The same system should be usable to send files from one PC to another, between phones, or between computers and phones. It's not a replacement for SMB shares or emailing files, just for point-to-point transfers in the same room.
Yes, Bluetooth is very useful for dealing with old phones. But in this age of phones that capture 4K video, it's slower than a snail dragging a brick. So's IR. Same with NFC. We need either an entirely new wireless standard for this, or a standard that uses ad-hoc wifi like so many manufacturer-specific Android ones do.
This. Also way too many sites make you click through "get our app" messages constantly to use their site on a mobile device. Often the app is worse or at least no better in this age when there actually good mobile browsers -- and dang it, I don't want to install a new app for every site I view a few pages of from a Google search.
On far too many sites, the mobile version or app is feature-crippled compared to the desktop version of the site.
The product that failed was also a beta, not a release version of a product that had been on consumer PCs for over 2 years. This makes failure on stage far more acceptable: you always have the excuse of "that's why we're not shipping it just yet".
Come on now, you had a dedicated graphics subsystem that automatically scanned through a text buffer in dedicated video memory, converted it to pixels dynamically and generated a video signal. And bitbanging 1-bit PWM audio over the parallel port is a perfectly functional audio subsystem.
Better yet, they could distribute a IPS file and the MD5 hash of the resulting exe. Unlike some other binary diff formats, IPS only stores offsets and the new replacement bytes -- that is, new material only, no original bytes from the game file. The downside is that there is no verification that the input file is the right one for this patch, which can be solved with an MD5 of the original and/or the result.
Then EA has no claim whatsoever -- no bytes of their work are being redistributed, and any DRM breaking and reverse engineering involved should be allowed under the DMCA since it is to achieve interoperability with their 3rd party server.
They could distribute an all-open-source launcher that launches the game and then patches it as necessary in-memory. That way they aren't redistributing anything they don't directly hold the copyright to, and players can't use it without already having a copy of the game.
The CRT has its advantages too, at least in monitors: 144 Hz LCDs are pretty expensive, but CRTs have been doing 120 Hz for ages. Color accuracy, true black and contrast are better than almost any more modern display (minus AMOLED). Pixel response time is better than many LCDs. And they look equally good at any resolution, instead of superior at one res and absolute crap at any other (minus anything with sufficiently high PPI). Yes, you could beat CRT in every way with a 144 Hz high-density color-calibrated AMOLED with low pixel response time, but good luck finding all those features in one monitor.
I was going to say CRT color TVs are entirely without merit, but there is one reason to own one in 2017. 8-bit game consoles look like rubbish on anything else, and games using light guns only work with CRTs.
>Apple wasn't even the first to delete the ancient 3.5 mm jack.
True. A few Android phones have done it, usually following rumors Apple was going to. 10-15 years ago many feature phones required an adapter to connect headphones. Nintendo tried it too, with the GBA SP. And every time it's gone about the same way: consumers quickly lost or broke the adapter if one was included, assumed you simply couldn't use headphones with the product if one wasn't, and almost universally hated the missing feature.
"this guy blew thousands to make an iPhone 7 something like an iPhone 6 w/o actually achieving it" -- You're forgetting what he gained from all this: Internet fame, Youtube ad bucks, and probably an inbox full of offers from recruiters, along with a few rich Apple fanboys looking for something to set their iPhone 7 apart from their friends'.
It's the only logical reason to remove something as basic as the headphone jack. The only other reasons would be: 1. "Courage." Because taking away something that tons of people use, calling it a feature, and charging more for it takes real balls. 2. It interferes with waterproofing. Samsung managed to make theirs more waterproof and still has the 3.5mm jack. 3. To sell AirPods.
There are exceptions. I've had shitty onboard audio that sounded muddy and very noticeably weaker than even a cheap USB sound card. Some other laptops and boards I've had produced some quiet noises that sounded kind of like coil whine in their outputs. Others sound perfectly fine and I can't hear any difference between them and a hi-fi amp when using good IEMs.
Yes, but many of us want to continue to listen to music, either from another app or another browser tab, and not hear the random site we're reading start screaming at us. Or we leave the sound turned on when nothing's playing in order to hear notification chimes and chirps.
$20 gets you a basic smartphone with $30/mo basic plans available. You don't have to be terribly rich to afford a smartphone anymore.
>and to look 'smart' in some demographic way, however their time is worthless enough that they can afford to be paid (I assume not much) to stand around doing nothing...
All very true, but that isn't how "desktop Linux on Android" setups work. Your Android phone already has all the (proprietary, vendor specific, locked down) mechanisms in place to load the Linux kernel the phone came with. Fortunately that's pretty much the same kernel you need for desktop Linux. You just need a different userland.
So we can let all of Android load, then start an app that chroots into a directory containing all the usual Debian ARM binaries, and runs everything through a customized X11 server that displays through Android's display server.
With a rooted phone I suppose it might be possible to replace everything from init up with a desktop system. However at the very least you'd need a custom compiled X server to work with each SoC GPU. Not to mention making some acceptable setup for calls and texts, or still wanting to run Android apps now and then. So it makes more sense in most cases to have desktop mode load through an app on top of a full Android system.
"And what would you recommend for web animation now that Adobe Animate CC is rental-only?"
There are 3 kinds of web animation: A. Trivial animations, like menus sliding down or slideshow transitions. Just use CSS and a smidge of Javascript directly. It isn't hard. B. Annoying excessive animation. Don't make these. C. Full scene animation or small games. Use Unity or a similar tool that can export to WebGL.
This. I think it's not so much a psychological effect of the price being higher. What we're seeing here is that apps that charge $7-20 a month are usually offering something of actual value, like a large library of TV shows. Meanwhile apps that charge under $7 are usually offering something of little value, that is either useless or can easily be had for free elsewhere.
If I knew putting mirrors facing each other and looking between them at a 45 degree angle was patentable, I would have patented it when I was 7. The only reason Toyota were the first to file this patent was that everyone else thought it was entirely obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this mean I could upload a one second long video of silence, pay YouTube for the auto Content Match thing, and have them mass flag any videos that contain a second or longer gap of silence? It's a clear exact copy of my entire work, even if you look at the waveform.
This. And even running bloated modern software, a Pi 3 or compute stick plugged into a keyboard, mouse and monitor would be sufficient for most of my day to day business and casual computing tasks. If you already have a suitable screen, the device itself plus a cheap keyboard and mouse are quite affordable too.
Cheap used laptops are sufficient for everyday tasks as well, at least after replacing the aging HDD with an SSD. But that brings the price higher than Pi 3+MicroSD+keyboard+mouse.
Our phones are powerful enough too - if only there were cheap laptop-like shells we could slot them into, and a good desktop interface it would switch into.
Bingo. I turn down "free" offers, especially ones like this 45 day package. Almost every time, you give them a credit card number when you sign up, and if you don't remember to cancel it within the free period, you start paying for it automatically afterward.
Free on-demand would also have a far smaller selection than piracy, as well as limitations like streaming-only and DRM. No more being able to take a couple movies with you on a tablet for that long flight. Free also comes with the assumption that is will be filled with ads. Even with a $0 price tag, the service has still failed to offer a better experience than piracy.
The only thing it has going for it is convenience, but if someone is already used to torrenting, it's not much of an inconvenience to them. The most irritating bit is waiting for a torrent to finish before you can watch it, but then you discover Popcorn Time and it's almost as good as normal streaming.
Huh... If it's through the ACPI table, can't we bypass it similar to how the Daz Loader piracy tool works: run a "loader" binary before passing control to the usual Windows bootloader. The loader modifies the tables in memory to add or remove entries as needed, and the OS is none the wiser.
Still way too fiddly for non-technical people. Unless it gets a system where you plug the systems together and both pop up something offering to transfer files through the cable, it's not going to catch on. Users cannot be expected to set up a SMB share, discover the other side's auto-configured IP, and then fiddle with passwords, encryption options and no-password sharing mode until some combination is found that works.
One side needs to be able to offer files to the other, which sees a notification allowing them to accept or reject them. Authentication other than just telling the receiving side the name of the device offering files only causes headaches. Some level of consent can be assumed if the users have plugged the devices together directly with a single cable.
Bluetooth simply isn't fast enough. A while ago I recorded a few minutes of 60 fps HD video on my Galaxy S7 and it was about 400 MB. I wanted to send it to my friend's Galaxy S5. I started up a Bluetooth transfer like I'm used to and wtf, 2 hours remaining?! So I tried S Beam and it was done inside of 30 seconds -- but it was only possible because we both happened to have Samsung phones.
We need an industry standard that works sort of like S Beam. Wifi is the only wireless technology found in all devices that's capable of the speeds needed. It should be a temporary ad-hoc wifi connection in order to remove the headaches of making sure both phones are connected to the same AP, finding a different AP if this one has client isolation, and the bandwidth hit from going through a relatively far away router to get to a device that's only inches away. Resuming on error would be nice, but apart from that it should be a pretty simple protocol that offers some files, sends them, and then stops.
SMB is not suitable -- too much fussing about with NETBIOS names, workgroups/domains, logins, share permissions, file permissions inside shares, some Android clients not working with Win10 hosts, etc. Then once you've got it working, it's great for a few big files but it's really slow for lots of small files. Besides, I'm not going to have some external SMB server I can drop files on when I'm at lunch with someone and want to share something with them.
Whether it's a new protocol, repurposed old one, or a proprietary one that becomes open and standardized, it needs to support a few key features if it's going to replace the current mess of USB cables, phones that only support MTP when connected to but only MSD to connect to another USB device, flash drives, OTG adapters, phones with no OTG support, incompatible proprietary systems, paid apps, transferring through a laptop, and profanities:
- Simple location and authentication with nearby devices. No pairing or logins should be needed. A simple one-use code, scanning a QR, or an NFC tap would be good options.
- Easy. It should be no more complex to use than telling one phone to share a file, the other to expect one, and then tapping them together (or entering or scanning a code, since not everything has NFC or a convenient camera).
- Fast. HD and 4K phone videos should be shareable in less time than it took to record them.
- Cross platform. The same system should be usable to send files from one PC to another, between phones, or between computers and phones. It's not a replacement for SMB shares or emailing files, just for point-to-point transfers in the same room.
Yes, Bluetooth is very useful for dealing with old phones. But in this age of phones that capture 4K video, it's slower than a snail dragging a brick. So's IR. Same with NFC. We need either an entirely new wireless standard for this, or a standard that uses ad-hoc wifi like so many manufacturer-specific Android ones do.
This. Also way too many sites make you click through "get our app" messages constantly to use their site on a mobile device. Often the app is worse or at least no better in this age when there actually good mobile browsers -- and dang it, I don't want to install a new app for every site I view a few pages of from a Google search.
On far too many sites, the mobile version or app is feature-crippled compared to the desktop version of the site.
The product that failed was also a beta, not a release version of a product that had been on consumer PCs for over 2 years. This makes failure on stage far more acceptable: you always have the excuse of "that's why we're not shipping it just yet".
Come on now, you had a dedicated graphics subsystem that automatically scanned through a text buffer in dedicated video memory, converted it to pixels dynamically and generated a video signal. And bitbanging 1-bit PWM audio over the parallel port is a perfectly functional audio subsystem.
Better yet, they could distribute a IPS file and the MD5 hash of the resulting exe. Unlike some other binary diff formats, IPS only stores offsets and the new replacement bytes -- that is, new material only, no original bytes from the game file. The downside is that there is no verification that the input file is the right one for this patch, which can be solved with an MD5 of the original and/or the result.
Then EA has no claim whatsoever -- no bytes of their work are being redistributed, and any DRM breaking and reverse engineering involved should be allowed under the DMCA since it is to achieve interoperability with their 3rd party server.
They could distribute an all-open-source launcher that launches the game and then patches it as necessary in-memory. That way they aren't redistributing anything they don't directly hold the copyright to, and players can't use it without already having a copy of the game.
The CRT has its advantages too, at least in monitors: 144 Hz LCDs are pretty expensive, but CRTs have been doing 120 Hz for ages. Color accuracy, true black and contrast are better than almost any more modern display (minus AMOLED). Pixel response time is better than many LCDs. And they look equally good at any resolution, instead of superior at one res and absolute crap at any other (minus anything with sufficiently high PPI). Yes, you could beat CRT in every way with a 144 Hz high-density color-calibrated AMOLED with low pixel response time, but good luck finding all those features in one monitor.
I was going to say CRT color TVs are entirely without merit, but there is one reason to own one in 2017. 8-bit game consoles look like rubbish on anything else, and games using light guns only work with CRTs.
>Apple wasn't even the first to delete the ancient 3.5 mm jack.
True. A few Android phones have done it, usually following rumors Apple was going to. 10-15 years ago many feature phones required an adapter to connect headphones. Nintendo tried it too, with the GBA SP. And every time it's gone about the same way: consumers quickly lost or broke the adapter if one was included, assumed you simply couldn't use headphones with the product if one wasn't, and almost universally hated the missing feature.
"this guy blew thousands to make an iPhone 7 something like an iPhone 6 w/o actually achieving it" -- You're forgetting what he gained from all this: Internet fame, Youtube ad bucks, and probably an inbox full of offers from recruiters, along with a few rich Apple fanboys looking for something to set their iPhone 7 apart from their friends'.
It's the only logical reason to remove something as basic as the headphone jack. The only other reasons would be:
1. "Courage." Because taking away something that tons of people use, calling it a feature, and charging more for it takes real balls.
2. It interferes with waterproofing. Samsung managed to make theirs more waterproof and still has the 3.5mm jack.
3. To sell AirPods.
There are exceptions. I've had shitty onboard audio that sounded muddy and very noticeably weaker than even a cheap USB sound card. Some other laptops and boards I've had produced some quiet noises that sounded kind of like coil whine in their outputs. Others sound perfectly fine and I can't hear any difference between them and a hi-fi amp when using good IEMs.
Yes, but many of us want to continue to listen to music, either from another app or another browser tab, and not hear the random site we're reading start screaming at us. Or we leave the sound turned on when nothing's playing in order to hear notification chimes and chirps.
Remember to post the password too so we can ensure correct delivery of our reply.
We already know Microsoft can't count properly.
1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10.
1, 360, One, One S.
>They have enough money for a smartphone
$20 gets you a basic smartphone with $30/mo basic plans available. You don't have to be terribly rich to afford a smartphone anymore.
>and to look 'smart' in some demographic way, however their time is worthless enough that they can afford to be paid (I assume not much) to stand around doing nothing...
So, a college student?
All very true, but that isn't how "desktop Linux on Android" setups work. Your Android phone already has all the (proprietary, vendor specific, locked down) mechanisms in place to load the Linux kernel the phone came with. Fortunately that's pretty much the same kernel you need for desktop Linux. You just need a different userland.
So we can let all of Android load, then start an app that chroots into a directory containing all the usual Debian ARM binaries, and runs everything through a customized X11 server that displays through Android's display server.
With a rooted phone I suppose it might be possible to replace everything from init up with a desktop system. However at the very least you'd need a custom compiled X server to work with each SoC GPU. Not to mention making some acceptable setup for calls and texts, or still wanting to run Android apps now and then. So it makes more sense in most cases to have desktop mode load through an app on top of a full Android system.
"And what would you recommend for web animation now that Adobe Animate CC is rental-only?"
There are 3 kinds of web animation:
A. Trivial animations, like menus sliding down or slideshow transitions. Just use CSS and a smidge of Javascript directly. It isn't hard.
B. Annoying excessive animation. Don't make these.
C. Full scene animation or small games. Use Unity or a similar tool that can export to WebGL.
This. I think it's not so much a psychological effect of the price being higher. What we're seeing here is that apps that charge $7-20 a month are usually offering something of actual value, like a large library of TV shows. Meanwhile apps that charge under $7 are usually offering something of little value, that is either useless or can easily be had for free elsewhere.
If I knew putting mirrors facing each other and looking between them at a 45 degree angle was patentable, I would have patented it when I was 7. The only reason Toyota were the first to file this patent was that everyone else thought it was entirely obvious.