There is the added blow of commoditization of TVs and electronics in general. Even back in the SD days of CRT sets making TVs was difficult and high manufacturing. Back when Sony was considered the top electronics brand int he world, that's one of the major areas where they made their name. So even before the HD boom televisions enjoyed an excellent margin. They used to be sold more like cars, with a certain degree of haggling expected for the higher end models. The last few years have seen all that disappear.
I doubt there is enough market here to be bothered with. For example, Apple has sold about 15 million appleTVs so far. That number is so small that they publicly label it a 'hobby' and actively discourage any real attention on their earnings reports. How big is the after-market car audio market? Has any single unit ever sold 15 million total? A quick Google puts the total value of the car audio industry around 2 billion. Apple's revenue last year was 156 billion. They could capture the entire market and only get a 2% bump. They probably spend more on advertising than the entire car audio industry would net them.
Which is why they are puttering around with the occasional arrangement directly with auto manufacturers. But even that is likely more of a hobby than a serious investment.
You had damn well better cover your bases before launching, especially in international waters. If the first time the governments of the world take notice of you is when they detect your unannounced launch of an ICBM (And anything that can get into space is definitely showing up as an ICBM) in international waters it is going to end in tears.
I haven't read the TOS of WoW, but I doubt there is any clause that says anything like "by agreeing to this, you also give us rights to anything you create which might be related to the service we offer."
I'm pretty sure it says precisely that. Or at least 'You agree to only interact with our software in approved ways". Which, for a multiplayer game, seems like a pretty reasonable restriction.
The current cost of electricity in the USA is anywhere from $.08 to $.17 per KWh depending on location. If fusion can do it for $.20, or even $.25 it would probably be considered a win when you factor in the environmental benefits and reduced dependence on coal and other resources. If you figure in increased use of electric power in areas that currently use gas/oil like cars, then even $.25 looks great due to the reduced reliance on foreign sources.
I've seen a LOT more unexplained crashed with nvidia's drivers spewing stuff into dmesg than I have with nouveau, the intel drivers, or even amd's binary drivers
Sure, but what distro/versions/other hardware are you running? At a guess, I think nVidia had little trouble ironing out all the bugs for a single targeted setup like this. One hardware spec and known OS/packages? Easy. It's supporting every frankenbox and smashed together OS that causes them ulcers.
Uh, how about your neighbor to the north, Canada? We're even larger geographically and are so ethnically diverse that our second largest province has a completely different official language than the rest of the country. And yeah, there's some friction but we make it all work pretty good.
Like any other form of tax, Obamacare's net results will be negative in employment
As a truism, that's bullshit. And it's not even entertaining bullshit.
Let's pretend it was taken to it's logical extreme, aka a society with zero taxes. Also known as a society with no roads, no enforced laws, no food inspection, no building codes, etc. You really thing that's a better functioning society with increased employment? Now, obviously a society at the other extreme (100% taxes) is equally dysfunctional. Arguments can be made for lower taxes (and certainly better spent taxes), and arguments can be made for raising taxes in some circumstances (certainly worked in California lately), but to say lower taxes are always better is so stupid it's not even wrong.
If you think 5-10 Gb is large, you need to recalibrate your expectations. 8Gb is probably the smallest USB stick I've in a store in the last year. Single movie files are regularly that big. 1 Tb and up is a pretty standard hard drive size. back when you had a 100 Gb HD and felt pretty good about it 8 gigs was enormous. Now it's not.
I expect to be able to read PCM files saved onto current CD and DVD media for at least another 50 years, while it's already hard to get good quality tape playback.
I wouldn't be too sure about the 50 years thing. The manufacturers tend to state an average lifespan of around 25-35 years for burned CDs and DVDs. Based on independent testing, those turn out to be fairly accurate numbers. But they are an average. For every one that lasts 25 years, there is one that goes 45 years no problem and one that is kaput after 5.
There are two major things that go wrong. First, any minor flaws in the how the disc has been sealed and the reflective backing will oxidize over time, rendering it useless. The second thing is that the 'burning' is accomplished with photosensitive organic dyes. They can have chemical changes over time, but more importantly remain photosensitive. A single day left out in sunlight can be the end of a disc.
If you want a neat trick, leave a disc out face up in the sun and cover part of it with a piece of paper or something else. It's like one of those old time photography demos.
Archival organizations usually recommend the useful lifespan of a burned disc as 8-10 years. As in if you burn a hundred discs and store them properly you should be able to count of reading them all for the first eight years. After that statistics start taking its toll.
Most Americans should be basically unprepared for regular or severe power outages. If the basic utilities are failing enough that it's accepted as a regular thing, shouldn't you be up in arms?
Looks like someone never tried an iOS upgrade on an older iDevice...
Older than what? Apple has industry leading backwards compatibility on their mobile devices. Hell, plenty of android devices are effectively end-of-life six months after they come out. The latest iOS build is backwards compatible back to the 3GS, which launched just over 4 years ago. Try to find ANY 4 year old android that supports Jelly Bean.
I've seen these percentages reported a lot of places, but I have yet to be able to find anything that lists actual sales numbers. Without knowing how big the market for sub-$300 PC market is, it's a meaningless measurement. For example, if 50 million sub-$300 PCs were sold, 25% is a really respectable number. If two million sub-$300 PCs were sold then the 500,000 total sales are quite disappointing.
if there is no difference in capital gains as opposed to income where is the incentive to invest in companies
You incentive to invest is exactly the same. you invest in order to make more money. Option one is that you leave you money sitting in a bank account where it does nothing. Option two is to invest the money and then pay some percentage of taxes on the profits.
And no one in the history of ever has gotten the profits on their investments, looked at the taxes and wished that they had made $0 instead by not investing.
They've never... understood that Gnome isn't just something for them to tinker with as the mood strikes them but something that other people should want to use.
Except that 'Something to tinker with as the mood strikes them" is exactly what it is. It's open source and it's their project. It is whatever they want it to be, with whatever goals they want it to have. Now, those goals might be very different from what you, or me, or anyone with larger ambitions for the Open Source community might want them to be, but that's tough luck.
It's the big stumbling block of the Open Source movement. When the goals of the developers just happen to align perfectly with what users and the general community envision (i.e. the development of Firefox) the results are stupendous. When the developers are really just scratching their own itch with a public project (GIMP) you get years of frustration as features and design decisions completely baffle observers.
If you want it done differently, you can fork it yourself. And if you think there should be a middle ground between "meekly accepting whatever is tossed your way" and "full fledged OS developer", well, the OS community doesn't have a lot to offer.
Of course, you could provide monetary incentives to get people to provide the features you want. However, given the cost of funding an entire OS development team to do what you want you'll probably have to find some way to recoup the expense. Next thing you know, you're charging people money in exchange for software that does the things they want in the way that they want. What a ridiculous idea.
1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.
Subsidies and long term planning for essential infrastructure is one of the few things that almost everyone agrees is firmly in the role of government. Why even subsidize it? Just build it and run it and screw corporate profit. Break even on the power generation and reap the benefits of increased industry.
2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste? No, seriously, stop joking around: where are you *really* going to put the waste? This has been well-studied, and there's no good answer.
There are many good answers, most of which were figured out before the first nuclear plant was ever built. The most popular seems to be sealed off at the bottom of extremely deep and stable mines. The catch is that the creation of nuclear waste has largely been placed into private hands, but the cost of disposal is largely in government hands.
3. Improving efficiency is faster and more-effective than increasing output in the near term. Sure, we do need increased capacity, but instead of burning money in the form of subsidies lavished on for-profit energy companies, let's commit real public expenditure on real efficiency initiatives.
So why give the money to for-profit companies? If there is no profit in creating basic infrastructure that every other business needs, then provide that infrastructure out of the taxes that all those other businesses pay. That's the point of taxes in the first place.
Great, so it's the fault of the manufacturers. But seeing as VP9 takes several times more processing power to decode in software than VP8, which would you serve up to a mobile phone: h265 that has hardware decode or VP9 that provides the exact same video quality/size but will choke on playback even as the battery life drops by the second?
The difference isn't in quality of the codec, it's the quality of support. One has a massive group that has spent a decade making sure that it is supported by everyone everywhere. The other has been tossed out into the public by a single company without any cooperation or support by other parties.
Production level codecs like ProRes have always supported alpha channels (along with a bunch of other stuff). Besides, content publishing codecs like this are completely unsuitable for production work. After only a generation or two the artifacts would render an alpha channel effectively useless for production quality. Also, their massive processing overhead would be a complete deal-breaker all by itself. Pro codecs require lots and lots of RAM due to the bitrate, but they need ridiculously low processing power. That's a big deal when you are working on a composite that might have dozens (or hundreds) of layers.
They really can't. Once something is released like this it can't be withdrawn and license terms can not be changed. Any attempt would be instant bad-faith and crash-and-burn in the courts.
Meh. Those are useful for professional video codecs because they are effectively lossless. One or two generations of even high quality VP9 encoding would render the alpha channel useless. And you'd never want to edit with it because of the extremely high processing overhead, even with hardware support.
I'm sure someone will find something cute to do with it on a web page some time, but I'd be shocked if it is anything more than a gimmick.
From a technical point of view it's basically h265's peer. That's partially because it's largely based on the same tech as h265, in the same way VP8 was largely similar to h264. And is speculated that it has the same licensing issues that VP8 had, for most of the same reasons.
And the speed issue is entirely due to an almost complete lack of hardware support. And while h265 already has announced and demonstrated support, I am not aware of any VP9 support so far.
And doing VP9 decode in software has order-of-magnitude higher requirements than VP8. If YouTube serves up a VP9 video to your phone, you'll wish for the good old days of Flash video.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but why would you? It's a slightly less efficient implementation of h264 with no hardware support.
There is the added blow of commoditization of TVs and electronics in general. Even back in the SD days of CRT sets making TVs was difficult and high manufacturing. Back when Sony was considered the top electronics brand int he world, that's one of the major areas where they made their name. So even before the HD boom televisions enjoyed an excellent margin. They used to be sold more like cars, with a certain degree of haggling expected for the higher end models. The last few years have seen all that disappear.
I doubt there is enough market here to be bothered with. For example, Apple has sold about 15 million appleTVs so far. That number is so small that they publicly label it a 'hobby' and actively discourage any real attention on their earnings reports. How big is the after-market car audio market? Has any single unit ever sold 15 million total? A quick Google puts the total value of the car audio industry around 2 billion. Apple's revenue last year was 156 billion. They could capture the entire market and only get a 2% bump. They probably spend more on advertising than the entire car audio industry would net them.
Which is why they are puttering around with the occasional arrangement directly with auto manufacturers. But even that is likely more of a hobby than a serious investment.
You had damn well better cover your bases before launching, especially in international waters. If the first time the governments of the world take notice of you is when they detect your unannounced launch of an ICBM (And anything that can get into space is definitely showing up as an ICBM) in international waters it is going to end in tears.
I haven't read the TOS of WoW, but I doubt there is any clause that says anything like "by agreeing to this, you also give us rights to anything you create which might be related to the service we offer."
I'm pretty sure it says precisely that. Or at least 'You agree to only interact with our software in approved ways". Which, for a multiplayer game, seems like a pretty reasonable restriction.
The current cost of electricity in the USA is anywhere from $.08 to $.17 per KWh depending on location. If fusion can do it for $.20, or even $.25 it would probably be considered a win when you factor in the environmental benefits and reduced dependence on coal and other resources. If you figure in increased use of electric power in areas that currently use gas/oil like cars, then even $.25 looks great due to the reduced reliance on foreign sources.
I've seen a LOT more unexplained crashed with nvidia's drivers spewing stuff into dmesg than I have with nouveau, the intel drivers, or even amd's binary drivers
Sure, but what distro/versions/other hardware are you running? At a guess, I think nVidia had little trouble ironing out all the bugs for a single targeted setup like this. One hardware spec and known OS/packages? Easy. It's supporting every frankenbox and smashed together OS that causes them ulcers.
Uh, how about your neighbor to the north, Canada? We're even larger geographically and are so ethnically diverse that our second largest province has a completely different official language than the rest of the country. And yeah, there's some friction but we make it all work pretty good.
Like any other form of tax, Obamacare's net results will be negative in employment
As a truism, that's bullshit. And it's not even entertaining bullshit.
Let's pretend it was taken to it's logical extreme, aka a society with zero taxes. Also known as a society with no roads, no enforced laws, no food inspection, no building codes, etc. You really thing that's a better functioning society with increased employment? Now, obviously a society at the other extreme (100% taxes) is equally dysfunctional. Arguments can be made for lower taxes (and certainly better spent taxes), and arguments can be made for raising taxes in some circumstances (certainly worked in California lately), but to say lower taxes are always better is so stupid it's not even wrong.
If you think 5-10 Gb is large, you need to recalibrate your expectations. 8Gb is probably the smallest USB stick I've in a store in the last year. Single movie files are regularly that big. 1 Tb and up is a pretty standard hard drive size. back when you had a 100 Gb HD and felt pretty good about it 8 gigs was enormous. Now it's not.
I expect to be able to read PCM files saved onto current CD and DVD media for at least another 50 years, while it's already hard to get good quality tape playback.
I wouldn't be too sure about the 50 years thing. The manufacturers tend to state an average lifespan of around 25-35 years for burned CDs and DVDs. Based on independent testing, those turn out to be fairly accurate numbers. But they are an average. For every one that lasts 25 years, there is one that goes 45 years no problem and one that is kaput after 5.
There are two major things that go wrong. First, any minor flaws in the how the disc has been sealed and the reflective backing will oxidize over time, rendering it useless. The second thing is that the 'burning' is accomplished with photosensitive organic dyes. They can have chemical changes over time, but more importantly remain photosensitive. A single day left out in sunlight can be the end of a disc.
If you want a neat trick, leave a disc out face up in the sun and cover part of it with a piece of paper or something else. It's like one of those old time photography demos.
Archival organizations usually recommend the useful lifespan of a burned disc as 8-10 years. As in if you burn a hundred discs and store them properly you should be able to count of reading them all for the first eight years. After that statistics start taking its toll.
Most Americans should be basically unprepared for regular or severe power outages. If the basic utilities are failing enough that it's accepted as a regular thing, shouldn't you be up in arms?
Looks like someone never tried an iOS upgrade on an older iDevice...
Older than what? Apple has industry leading backwards compatibility on their mobile devices. Hell, plenty of android devices are effectively end-of-life six months after they come out. The latest iOS build is backwards compatible back to the 3GS, which launched just over 4 years ago. Try to find ANY 4 year old android that supports Jelly Bean.
I've seen these percentages reported a lot of places, but I have yet to be able to find anything that lists actual sales numbers. Without knowing how big the market for sub-$300 PC market is, it's a meaningless measurement. For example, if 50 million sub-$300 PCs were sold, 25% is a really respectable number. If two million sub-$300 PCs were sold then the 500,000 total sales are quite disappointing.
if there is no difference in capital gains as opposed to income where is the incentive to invest in companies
You incentive to invest is exactly the same. you invest in order to make more money. Option one is that you leave you money sitting in a bank account where it does nothing. Option two is to invest the money and then pay some percentage of taxes on the profits.
And no one in the history of ever has gotten the profits on their investments, looked at the taxes and wished that they had made $0 instead by not investing.
They've never... understood that Gnome isn't just something for them to tinker with as the mood strikes them but something that other people should want to use.
Except that 'Something to tinker with as the mood strikes them" is exactly what it is. It's open source and it's their project. It is whatever they want it to be, with whatever goals they want it to have. Now, those goals might be very different from what you, or me, or anyone with larger ambitions for the Open Source community might want them to be, but that's tough luck.
It's the big stumbling block of the Open Source movement. When the goals of the developers just happen to align perfectly with what users and the general community envision (i.e. the development of Firefox) the results are stupendous. When the developers are really just scratching their own itch with a public project (GIMP) you get years of frustration as features and design decisions completely baffle observers.
If you want it done differently, you can fork it yourself. And if you think there should be a middle ground between "meekly accepting whatever is tossed your way" and "full fledged OS developer", well, the OS community doesn't have a lot to offer.
Of course, you could provide monetary incentives to get people to provide the features you want. However, given the cost of funding an entire OS development team to do what you want you'll probably have to find some way to recoup the expense. Next thing you know, you're charging people money in exchange for software that does the things they want in the way that they want. What a ridiculous idea.
1. The reason reactors are not being built has to do with the cost -- they're not cost-effective for utilities unless they get huge subsidies.
Subsidies and long term planning for essential infrastructure is one of the few things that almost everyone agrees is firmly in the role of government. Why even subsidize it? Just build it and run it and screw corporate profit. Break even on the power generation and reap the benefits of increased industry.
2. Where are you going to put the nuclear waste? No, seriously, stop joking around: where are you *really* going to put the waste? This has been well-studied, and there's no good answer.
There are many good answers, most of which were figured out before the first nuclear plant was ever built. The most popular seems to be sealed off at the bottom of extremely deep and stable mines. The catch is that the creation of nuclear waste has largely been placed into private hands, but the cost of disposal is largely in government hands.
3. Improving efficiency is faster and more-effective than increasing output in the near term. Sure, we do need increased capacity, but instead of burning money in the form of subsidies lavished on for-profit energy companies, let's commit real public expenditure on real efficiency initiatives.
So why give the money to for-profit companies? If there is no profit in creating basic infrastructure that every other business needs, then provide that infrastructure out of the taxes that all those other businesses pay. That's the point of taxes in the first place.
And because they no longer wanted to agree to Google's terms... they stopped using Google's service.
Name one successful app that Apple has cloned after it's become popular.
Yeah, but almost any serious printing requires a heated print area, even if only for the first layers. Otherwise things cool off too fast.
Great, so it's the fault of the manufacturers. But seeing as VP9 takes several times more processing power to decode in software than VP8, which would you serve up to a mobile phone: h265 that has hardware decode or VP9 that provides the exact same video quality/size but will choke on playback even as the battery life drops by the second?
The difference isn't in quality of the codec, it's the quality of support. One has a massive group that has spent a decade making sure that it is supported by everyone everywhere. The other has been tossed out into the public by a single company without any cooperation or support by other parties.
Production level codecs like ProRes have always supported alpha channels (along with a bunch of other stuff). Besides, content publishing codecs like this are completely unsuitable for production work. After only a generation or two the artifacts would render an alpha channel effectively useless for production quality. Also, their massive processing overhead would be a complete deal-breaker all by itself. Pro codecs require lots and lots of RAM due to the bitrate, but they need ridiculously low processing power. That's a big deal when you are working on a composite that might have dozens (or hundreds) of layers.
either license can be withdrawn at a whim
They really can't. Once something is released like this it can't be withdrawn and license terms can not be changed. Any attempt would be instant bad-faith and crash-and-burn in the courts.
Meh. Those are useful for professional video codecs because they are effectively lossless. One or two generations of even high quality VP9 encoding would render the alpha channel useless. And you'd never want to edit with it because of the extremely high processing overhead, even with hardware support.
I'm sure someone will find something cute to do with it on a web page some time, but I'd be shocked if it is anything more than a gimmick.
From a technical point of view it's basically h265's peer. That's partially because it's largely based on the same tech as h265, in the same way VP8 was largely similar to h264. And is speculated that it has the same licensing issues that VP8 had, for most of the same reasons.
And the speed issue is entirely due to an almost complete lack of hardware support. And while h265 already has announced and demonstrated support, I am not aware of any VP9 support so far.
And doing VP9 decode in software has order-of-magnitude higher requirements than VP8. If YouTube serves up a VP9 video to your phone, you'll wish for the good old days of Flash video.