They could place all actual program files (everything that was put there during installation) in a single system-wide folder in Program Files and all user-specific things (preferences, caches, whatever needs to be modified when running the game) in a single folder inside the user's personal folder.
That would allow for an easy backup or transfer of the entire installation (including personal preferences etc.) since there would still be only two folders to back up (assuming one user who plays the game), and it would also allow the game to be run as a non-admin user.
That's approximately how it would be done on unix anyway...
Depends on what he means by "owns", and ignoring the hyperbole (the "serious work" part is especially egregious, just like when "business" or gamers make the same claim in reverse), he's got a point. The programming one is a bit confusing, but the others are pretty accurate.
No, they aren't. High-performance computing most certainly isn't a strong area for Apple, with Linux being probably the most used platform and other Unix systems and Windows coming somewhere behind. While Macs are certainly used for some scientific modeling and visualisation tasks, I'm not aware of a particularly market share, definitely not to the point of "owning" the market.
In the end, the only item on his list that stands is "design", with a lot of programmers also using Macs nowadays but I wouldn't say they dominate at that either.
Companies like Google may be legally required to retain logging data. It may not be by their own choice alone that they do it.
But I'm also sure the company will also try to squeeze any advantage they can get out of the data for themselves. In this regard, I find Schmidt's apparent lack of respect for users' privacy rather concerning. It may be that everyone knows governments will have access to the data, and that in that sense you perhaps shouldn't do (without some kind of external anonymization) what you don't want them to know, but Schmidt's statement also suggests that Google itself will be willing to do just about anything they can with your data (within the boundaries of law), and particularly that he thinks it's normal and acceptable for everybody else as well to gather all the data about you that they want and retain it for any purposes they see fit.
Google of course uses the data also to its users' benefit to some extent (improving search results), but certainly not all companies in all fields do. Think about insurance companies, for instance, where the benefit of the company and the customer are much more clearly at odds with each other (the optimal point where the customer pays the most and receives the least is pretty much just probability and statistics, and the companies use all available information to determine that optimal setting). Will Google eventually come to cooperate with them? "Oh, but you searched for this and that... it puts you in a risk group for foobar, so we can't give you anything."
Yes, I know that kind of thing is probably illegal. However, laws do change and when the data is out there and there's clearly the willingness to use it for anything (and the companies don't seem to need to worry that customers will leave them because of it), it almost becomes a matter of lobbying. And that's just an example -- the dynamics with that kind of a mineable mass of data are something that we can't even predict in the long run. We don't know who's going to want to use it and for what.
That makers the lack of respect for privacy more disturbing than stating the fact that the government is likely to get their hands on data if they want to.
Why would it lead to apocalyptic consequences? Why would the change in prices happen overnight rather than gradually? In particular, if the peak already occurred two years ago and you expect a sudden panic and apocalypse because of it, why aren't there any signs of that yet?
If it doesn't happen overnight, people and communities can adapt. Some countries already have (quite ambitious) plans to get rid of oil dependency by 2020 or so.
I think GAs have definitely had a time when they were popular at least as an idea, mostly sometime in the early 90's or so, and there was quite a bit of research into applying them to various problems. They haven't always turned out to perform very well, though. Quite a few attempts have been made towards using GAs as a heuristic to traditional NP-hard combinatorial problems, for example, and while there has been some success, quite often other heuristics have beaten GAs.
My impression of the beauty of GAs in general isn't quite as positive as yours. The idea certainly is aesthetically pleasing, and you can, in theory, try to apply a GA to pretty much any optimization problem, but how well GAs work really depends a lot on the problem: the very nature of the problem (does it fulfill the building block hypothesis, or whatever magic is that makes GAs work for some problems?), what kind of a landscape the search space provides, what kinds of cases of the problem are more likely in your application, etc. That's not including all the nontrivial problem-specific tweaking that will be needed in a practical application of a GA, such as how to encode or represent the solutions (has a big effect on how much good genetic crossover does).
I'd rather say that GAs have worked well for some specific problems, and some new specific applications will probably still emerge, but I'm not sure they will ever become very generally applicable. They had a chance, but it turned out that they mostly work just for some particular problems, not others, and nobody seems to really know very well why.
"Cannot be watched", when (judging from your post) the only way to make it possible would be to use a player compiled from development source? Considering how few people do that, I believe there must be an awful lot of people watching anime who can't watch anime.
And if I were the insurer, I would question that if someone is functioning well enough to go on vacation, to go out to a bar with friends, etc... is ready to go back to work.
If I were the insurer, I might do the same, but only because it would be in my selfish interest. It would still be either ignorant or dishonest and shouldn't be allowed.
As many others have already pointed out in various ways, a majorly depressed person can easily have a good moment. The thing is, even if she has a good moment of 15 minutes, the rest of the 23 h 45 mins of the day she might still be disfunctional. She might even have decently good full days if her friends take her for a trip and get her involved in a lot of fun stuff, making her forget about her problems for a moment. That doesn't make it last or mean that she'd be fine or able to function normally in normal everyday life. That makes a major difference. Depression may not make you unable to laugh at a joke, but that doesn't make it any less of a problem -- you can't live laughing at a joke all the time.
Of course major depression tends to come with major drop in motivation to do anything, so you might think something requiring arrangements such as a vacation might be out of reach for a majorly depressed person. After all, she'd have to find the motivation to get through the arrangements, choosing a place and activities etc. to actually get out for a vacation, right? Well, maybe she just has good caring friends who arranged it for her.
Games old enough to have timing issues on new computers are probably from the DOS era, and DOSBox might come to the rescue. Among other things, it allows you to adjust the speed of the emulation.
Why do something in software when it can be done better by specialized hardware?
Software tends to be more flexible and offer more options. Also, it should be a non-issue for a modern graphics card to do the scaling with a pretty decent algorithm and with no perceptible loss of performance if the driver just provides that kind of support.
The NVidia Linux driver offers that option, and I use it instead of the scaling support of the display unit itself. It allows me to keep aspect ratio (the monitor's scaling support doesn't), and I haven't found reason to complain yet.
I imagine the Windows driver might offer something similar, although I don't really know.
It wouldn't be free according to Free Software Foundation standards if it placed restrictions on how the software can be used. Obviously they wouldn't craft and encourage a license that would be against their own idea of freedom. The GPL licenses only place some restrictions on redistribution, ot use.
There is, however, a variant of GPL used by a third party that prohibits use of the software for military purposes. Perhaps that's what you're thinking about.
Hardware -- including consumer electronics that Apple is largely doing -- is driven by software, and that largely determines compatibility. MS produces both platform software and applications as well as some services.
Both companies are in the market on several different levels of the stack, and both like to tie their offerings of different levels together and use their market share on one level to boost it on others. Even if their focus on end products is slightly different, they have enough areas where both have interests that they're quite effectively competitors.
That competition is centered in software. That's the level that determines how the various classes of products are bound together.
It's probably still in Microsoft's interests to produce some software also for Apple platforms because there are customers and fields that they'd have a very hard time winning over. At least they can still try to reinforce their hegemony in office software by selling it to the graphics artists who are going to use Macs anyway, for example.
Maybe you mixed it with some video codecs such as Dirac?
Just FYI, there's the Theora video codec which is also used with the Ogg container, as well as the Speex audio codec aimed at low-bitrate encoding of speech. FLAC is also occasionally muxed into an Ogg container.
Xiph.org nowadays recommends.oga for audio,.ogv for video and so on (see http://wiki.xiph.org/MIMETypesCodecs), but it's true that.ogg is probably still by far the most commonly used extension with Ogg/Vorbis, with many portable players supporting the format but not recognizing the newer recommendations etc. Having the same extension for both just audio and muxed video/audio is a bit icky from the end user's point ot view, so maybe some day the newer recommendations will be more commonly followed.
"Heroic cooling" sounds like someone frantically waving a hand-held fan at the servers and biting his teeth in pain while an epic score plays in the background.
I understand it perfectly well if it's against another company in the same field, and if the logos of both companies essentially consist of a stylished 'W' and not much else. That just might constitute a trademark infringement, and in such a case the trademark holder might have to enforce their trademark just to be sure.
Taking action against a company in another field that would just happen to incorporate a 'W' different than yours somewhere as a part of its logo sounds like a rather different case. But, frankly, IANAL.
I might have believed that until I checked out the logo of Adults Only, the channel over which Apple is suing Foxtel.
The Woolsworth logo contains no apple but it just might be considered similar in appearance to the Apple logo, mostly thanks to the stem-like shape above the "W". The AO logo, on the other hand, contains an apple, but certainly could never be mistaken for the Apple logo. It's got a small apple figure which makes up 1/6 of the logo at best, and instead of a consumer electronics label the intended connotation might be the forbidden fruit or something. Here's a direct link to just the logo on the channel's website, in case you want to take a look without going to the rest of the site.
I repeat: the only common feature is the shape of an apple. Does Apple really claim that all logos containing the fruit might infringe on their trademark even without any other similarities? That's either paranoia or extreme arrogance.
Encoders such as Theora, DVD rippers, and GUIs for these are pretty much separate things. Normally an end user doesn't even end up in any kind of direct interaction with a Theora encoder, or an H.264 encoder implementation such as x264. The article is about encoders, not GUI applications that use them.
While I don't know much about MediaCoder, judging from screenshots on the site it's clearly a front-end that binds together these features -- ripping, decoding, processing (scaling etc.), and re-encoding, and gives end users a GUI for using them. It might use open source ripping and encoding libraries in its back-end for actually implementing these technical tasks, or it might have its own implementations (which I doubt). How it presents that functionality and workflow to the user in its GUI is independent of the details of how exactly the encoding etc. have been implemented -- or at least it should be.
It's true that most F/OSS GUIs for DVD ripping and encoding suck, Handbrake probably being the closest one I've seen so far to being both featureful and providing a reasonably humane GUI for general video transcoding. However, for actual encoder implementations efficiency is indeed the prime focus. (How easy the actual encoders are to use also has some importance, but that's mostly a direct concern only to power users who use the encoders directly and for developers who write software that uses the encoders as a back-end.)
Or even more like "Major industry vendors will be able to get together and keep working on open source software projects, and MS will convince their customers to run that open source software on Windows rather than on Linux".
MS realizes that a lot of open source software (servers, scripting languages, etc.) are in broad use and will stay that way. It's useless trying to make them go away. What MS can try to do is prevent that open source software from dragging people away from Windows.
MS wants visibility in the same space with specific open source projects. If they doesn't have that visibility, open source software (Apache, MySQL, whatever) will be associated mainly with open source platforms, but if MS can break that association, many organizations might end up running their open source applications on Windows. That means keeping their customers, and many open source projects don't even compete directly with MS products because MS doesn't have a similar offering, so MS might not even lose that much by advocating selected projects.
Creating bindings between open source software -- say, a scripting language -- and MS platforms such as.NET may help MS with that as well. You know, the whole embrace, extend, etc. thing.
Scrum where management doesn't actually understand a thing about scrum just won't work, at least without sacrificing your sanity -- and the pattern seems to be unfortunately common. (Not based on experience but on stories heard.)
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They could place all actual program files (everything that was put there during installation) in a single system-wide folder in Program Files and all user-specific things (preferences, caches, whatever needs to be modified when running the game) in a single folder inside the user's personal folder.
That would allow for an easy backup or transfer of the entire installation (including personal preferences etc.) since there would still be only two folders to back up (assuming one user who plays the game), and it would also allow the game to be run as a non-admin user.
That's approximately how it would be done on unix anyway...
Depends on what he means by "owns", and ignoring the hyperbole (the "serious work" part is especially egregious, just like when "business" or gamers make the same claim in reverse), he's got a point. The programming one is a bit confusing, but the others are pretty accurate.
No, they aren't. High-performance computing most certainly isn't a strong area for Apple, with Linux being probably the most used platform and other Unix systems and Windows coming somewhere behind. While Macs are certainly used for some scientific modeling and visualisation tasks, I'm not aware of a particularly market share, definitely not to the point of "owning" the market.
In the end, the only item on his list that stands is "design", with a lot of programmers also using Macs nowadays but I wouldn't say they dominate at that either.
Companies like Google may be legally required to retain logging data. It may not be by their own choice alone that they do it.
But I'm also sure the company will also try to squeeze any advantage they can get out of the data for themselves. In this regard, I find Schmidt's apparent lack of respect for users' privacy rather concerning. It may be that everyone knows governments will have access to the data, and that in that sense you perhaps shouldn't do (without some kind of external anonymization) what you don't want them to know, but Schmidt's statement also suggests that Google itself will be willing to do just about anything they can with your data (within the boundaries of law), and particularly that he thinks it's normal and acceptable for everybody else as well to gather all the data about you that they want and retain it for any purposes they see fit.
Google of course uses the data also to its users' benefit to some extent (improving search results), but certainly not all companies in all fields do. Think about insurance companies, for instance, where the benefit of the company and the customer are much more clearly at odds with each other (the optimal point where the customer pays the most and receives the least is pretty much just probability and statistics, and the companies use all available information to determine that optimal setting). Will Google eventually come to cooperate with them? "Oh, but you searched for this and that... it puts you in a risk group for foobar, so we can't give you anything."
Yes, I know that kind of thing is probably illegal. However, laws do change and when the data is out there and there's clearly the willingness to use it for anything (and the companies don't seem to need to worry that customers will leave them because of it), it almost becomes a matter of lobbying. And that's just an example -- the dynamics with that kind of a mineable mass of data are something that we can't even predict in the long run. We don't know who's going to want to use it and for what.
That makers the lack of respect for privacy more disturbing than stating the fact that the government is likely to get their hands on data if they want to.
Would you like a bug with thaaaat. Would you like a bug with thaaaat.
I didn't know that was an optional ingredient.
Why would it lead to apocalyptic consequences? Why would the change in prices happen overnight rather than gradually? In particular, if the peak already occurred two years ago and you expect a sudden panic and apocalypse because of it, why aren't there any signs of that yet?
If it doesn't happen overnight, people and communities can adapt. Some countries already have (quite ambitious) plans to get rid of oil dependency by 2020 or so.
I think GAs have definitely had a time when they were popular at least as an idea, mostly sometime in the early 90's or so, and there was quite a bit of research into applying them to various problems. They haven't always turned out to perform very well, though. Quite a few attempts have been made towards using GAs as a heuristic to traditional NP-hard combinatorial problems, for example, and while there has been some success, quite often other heuristics have beaten GAs.
My impression of the beauty of GAs in general isn't quite as positive as yours. The idea certainly is aesthetically pleasing, and you can, in theory, try to apply a GA to pretty much any optimization problem, but how well GAs work really depends a lot on the problem: the very nature of the problem (does it fulfill the building block hypothesis, or whatever magic is that makes GAs work for some problems?), what kind of a landscape the search space provides, what kinds of cases of the problem are more likely in your application, etc. That's not including all the nontrivial problem-specific tweaking that will be needed in a practical application of a GA, such as how to encode or represent the solutions (has a big effect on how much good genetic crossover does).
I'd rather say that GAs have worked well for some specific problems, and some new specific applications will probably still emerge, but I'm not sure they will ever become very generally applicable. They had a chance, but it turned out that they mostly work just for some particular problems, not others, and nobody seems to really know very well why.
Let me guess, you didn't understand grandparent's sarcasm.
"Cannot be watched", when (judging from your post) the only way to make it possible would be to use a player compiled from development source? Considering how few people do that, I believe there must be an awful lot of people watching anime who can't watch anime.
It must have been some very, very bubbly champagne.
And if I were the insurer, I would question that if someone is functioning well enough to go on vacation, to go out to a bar with friends, etc... is ready to go back to work.
If I were the insurer, I might do the same, but only because it would be in my selfish interest. It would still be either ignorant or dishonest and shouldn't be allowed.
As many others have already pointed out in various ways, a majorly depressed person can easily have a good moment. The thing is, even if she has a good moment of 15 minutes, the rest of the 23 h 45 mins of the day she might still be disfunctional. She might even have decently good full days if her friends take her for a trip and get her involved in a lot of fun stuff, making her forget about her problems for a moment. That doesn't make it last or mean that she'd be fine or able to function normally in normal everyday life. That makes a major difference. Depression may not make you unable to laugh at a joke, but that doesn't make it any less of a problem -- you can't live laughing at a joke all the time.
Of course major depression tends to come with major drop in motivation to do anything, so you might think something requiring arrangements such as a vacation might be out of reach for a majorly depressed person. After all, she'd have to find the motivation to get through the arrangements, choosing a place and activities etc. to actually get out for a vacation, right? Well, maybe she just has good caring friends who arranged it for her.
Games old enough to have timing issues on new computers are probably from the DOS era, and DOSBox might come to the rescue. Among other things, it allows you to adjust the speed of the emulation.
Why do something in software when it can be done better by specialized hardware?
Software tends to be more flexible and offer more options. Also, it should be a non-issue for a modern graphics card to do the scaling with a pretty decent algorithm and with no perceptible loss of performance if the driver just provides that kind of support.
The NVidia Linux driver offers that option, and I use it instead of the scaling support of the display unit itself. It allows me to keep aspect ratio (the monitor's scaling support doesn't), and I haven't found reason to complain yet.
I imagine the Windows driver might offer something similar, although I don't really know.
It wouldn't be free according to Free Software Foundation standards if it placed restrictions on how the software can be used. Obviously they wouldn't craft and encourage a license that would be against their own idea of freedom. The GPL licenses only place some restrictions on redistribution, ot use.
There is, however, a variant of GPL used by a third party that prohibits use of the software for military purposes. Perhaps that's what you're thinking about.
Hardware -- including consumer electronics that Apple is largely doing -- is driven by software, and that largely determines compatibility. MS produces both platform software and applications as well as some services.
Both companies are in the market on several different levels of the stack, and both like to tie their offerings of different levels together and use their market share on one level to boost it on others. Even if their focus on end products is slightly different, they have enough areas where both have interests that they're quite effectively competitors.
That competition is centered in software. That's the level that determines how the various classes of products are bound together.
It's probably still in Microsoft's interests to produce some software also for Apple platforms because there are customers and fields that they'd have a very hard time winning over. At least they can still try to reinforce their hegemony in office software by selling it to the graphics artists who are going to use Macs anyway, for example.
You bring up an interesting contradiction between "invulnerable" and "generally desirable way of coding". ;-)
Maybe you mixed it with some video codecs such as Dirac?
Just FYI, there's the Theora video codec which is also used with the Ogg container, as well as the Speex audio codec aimed at low-bitrate encoding of speech. FLAC is also occasionally muxed into an Ogg container.
Xiph.org nowadays recommends .oga for audio, .ogv for video and so on (see http://wiki.xiph.org/MIMETypesCodecs), but it's true that .ogg is probably still by far the most commonly used extension with Ogg/Vorbis, with many portable players supporting the format but not recognizing the newer recommendations etc. Having the same extension for both just audio and muxed video/audio is a bit icky from the end user's point ot view, so maybe some day the newer recommendations will be more commonly followed.
Isn't AAC @ 48kbs the same as OGG at 128kbs?
Why would it be?
Small nitpick: Ogg isn't an encoder but a container format. Vorbis is an audio format and encoder/decoder.
Larger nitpick: Wavelet encoder? Really? I thought Vorbis used some kind of MDCT just like the rest of them.
Well, the point still stands -- they produce different artifacts, although perhaps for some other reasons.
"Heroic cooling" sounds like someone frantically waving a hand-held fan at the servers and biting his teeth in pain while an epic score plays in the background.
I understand it perfectly well if it's against another company in the same field, and if the logos of both companies essentially consist of a stylished 'W' and not much else. That just might constitute a trademark infringement, and in such a case the trademark holder might have to enforce their trademark just to be sure.
Taking action against a company in another field that would just happen to incorporate a 'W' different than yours somewhere as a part of its logo sounds like a rather different case. But, frankly, IANAL.
I might have believed that until I checked out the logo of Adults Only, the channel over which Apple is suing Foxtel.
The Woolsworth logo contains no apple but it just might be considered similar in appearance to the Apple logo, mostly thanks to the stem-like shape above the "W". The AO logo, on the other hand, contains an apple, but certainly could never be mistaken for the Apple logo. It's got a small apple figure which makes up 1/6 of the logo at best, and instead of a consumer electronics label the intended connotation might be the forbidden fruit or something. Here's a direct link to just the logo on the channel's website, in case you want to take a look without going to the rest of the site.
I repeat: the only common feature is the shape of an apple. Does Apple really claim that all logos containing the fruit might infringe on their trademark even without any other similarities? That's either paranoia or extreme arrogance.
Encoders such as Theora, DVD rippers, and GUIs for these are pretty much separate things. Normally an end user doesn't even end up in any kind of direct interaction with a Theora encoder, or an H.264 encoder implementation such as x264. The article is about encoders, not GUI applications that use them.
While I don't know much about MediaCoder, judging from screenshots on the site it's clearly a front-end that binds together these features -- ripping, decoding, processing (scaling etc.), and re-encoding, and gives end users a GUI for using them. It might use open source ripping and encoding libraries in its back-end for actually implementing these technical tasks, or it might have its own implementations (which I doubt). How it presents that functionality and workflow to the user in its GUI is independent of the details of how exactly the encoding etc. have been implemented -- or at least it should be.
It's true that most F/OSS GUIs for DVD ripping and encoding suck, Handbrake probably being the closest one I've seen so far to being both featureful and providing a reasonably humane GUI for general video transcoding. However, for actual encoder implementations efficiency is indeed the prime focus. (How easy the actual encoders are to use also has some importance, but that's mostly a direct concern only to power users who use the encoders directly and for developers who write software that uses the encoders as a back-end.)
Or even more like "Major industry vendors will be able to get together and keep working on open source software projects, and MS will convince their customers to run that open source software on Windows rather than on Linux".
MS realizes that a lot of open source software (servers, scripting languages, etc.) are in broad use and will stay that way. It's useless trying to make them go away. What MS can try to do is prevent that open source software from dragging people away from Windows.
MS wants visibility in the same space with specific open source projects. If they doesn't have that visibility, open source software (Apache, MySQL, whatever) will be associated mainly with open source platforms, but if MS can break that association, many organizations might end up running their open source applications on Windows. That means keeping their customers, and many open source projects don't even compete directly with MS products because MS doesn't have a similar offering, so MS might not even lose that much by advocating selected projects.
Creating bindings between open source software -- say, a scripting language -- and MS platforms such as .NET may help MS with that as well. You know, the whole embrace, extend, etc. thing.
why fix it when it isn't broke? IE6 still works, right?
Still using IE6 on the open Internet is too dangerous, and more and more web sites will not support its quirks any more either.
This is a bit of a contradiction.
Try explaining that to PHB du jour, though...
PS I need a new job :(
Sounds like that, unfortunately.
Scrum where management doesn't actually understand a thing about scrum just won't work, at least without sacrificing your sanity -- and the pattern seems to be unfortunately common. (Not based on experience but on stories heard.)