Could also be an artifact of whatever colour correction that they used on the image before public release. The stuff that gets released like this is never the same as the raw colour/image data that is actually used in research or study.
That's right. When comparing the price/value of computer hardware, the cost of software does not matter. Your $700 mid-range (or upper middle or however you want to measure it) hardware is $700 worth of hardware regardless of how much you spend on software.
For the obligatory car analogy, if you buy a cheap second hand car and then put a $50,000 sound system in it, you still have a cheap second hand car. It just has a nice sound system.
Professional programmer with extensive experience using open source software finds Linux easy to use out of the box; Can't understand why other people have trouble. News at 11.
That wasn't a judgment on people who enjoy this type of gameplay. The GP was putting a spotlight on the ridiculous nature of the claims. By any measure that includes games outside of the OSS community this game is anything but raising the bar. It may be fun to play, it may be an excellent example of this style of gameplay done well, but the game design itself is a retread. The graphics are passable but on par with legacy commercial shooters. The level design is, frankly, brutal and very behind the curve. The weapons and characters are obviously based on well known commercial equivalents.
It may also be a lot of fun to play. So is Tetris. Nobody would post a Tetris clone and claim it is raising the bar for anyone.
The enormous benefit to who? Creators gotta get paid. Creators that never get paid stop creating, or at least stop doing very much creating because they are too busy doing some other job in order to pay the bills. Copyright, the idea that creators can exert limited legal control over who can copy their work, is a fairly successful real-world solution to this problem. And, on the whole, it's worked fairly well. Yes, things have started breaking down a little over the last couple decades and there are some problems that need to be addressed. A more limited term and more lenient fair-use and modification would go a long way. But content can NOT be free. It has to be paid for. The eventual viewer may not pay directly and instead pay through advertising or some such, but it's the same thing.
If copyright disappeared tomorrow, and I mean really disappeared overnight, the only new stuff showing up on the file sharing networks a week from now would be Linux builds. If, as a society, we decide that copyright is no longer working for us, we had better put an alternative in place before we pull the plug.
Not at all. Apple has said many times that background is possible in the sense that there is not theoretical reason the software/hardware can't do it. They have also said every time that they are not willing to allow background applications due to battery life and performance issues. This has been the known position from day one, so there isn't any room for either developers or customers to say that they did not go in with eyes open.
Background apps are available on jailbroken phones. Most of them also come with a big hit to battery life and overall performance. Make of that what you will.
Mine, and most people's I know, are doing fine. But there are lots of 3rd party alternate headphones out there made to work with the iPhone. They have the microphone and control buttons. Some of them are dirt cheap. And, oddly enough, the apple store carries many of them.
What DRM? I keep hearing about how much DRM there is on my iPhone and all the things it prevents me from doing. So I keep looking for it, but I have yet to find it. I mean, all those pesky mp3s I ripped from various CDs seem to be playing fine. And those DVD rips that I converted into mp4s with open software play happily. With one of the many file handlers on the app store, I can open and read 99% of the text formats out there. As far as I can tell, the only types of formats the iPhone won't play are ones that do include DRM or are simply beyond the hardware. So what DRM is on the iPhone?
Even better, get a network drive like the d-link DNS-323 or others. I got one of the 323s a year ago for external storage. It's plugged into my 802.11n router. Nice streaming media to everywhere in the house with RAID1 backup in case of a drive failure. Considering there is close to a TB of stuff on there I would hate to lose, having it mirrored is nice. No modification or extra stuff plugged into the mini, no extra wires.
This might interest you. Anand Tech did some recent benchmarks on the current integrated chipsets, including the same one the new Mini uses. http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3432 It's not a mini, but it is a similar setup. The difference is huge and quite intriguing. I'm giving serious thought to using a new Mini as a front-end myself. When OSX gets bluray support I'll swap out the drive for a sony slot-loading bluray laptop drive. Should make a very nice all-in-one media box.
One of the biggest changes in the new chipsets is massively improved hardware acceleration for video decoding. The new graphics chips are more than capable of decoding any video stream at 1080p in any of the current codecs like h264, VC1 or MPEG2. For anyone planning on using the mini as a media center, this will make a huge difference. It almost completely removes the load from the processor. So the mini will run cooler, quieter and have lots of processing overhead for any background tasks that you may wish to run.
Also, assuming we ever see bluray support in OSX, it will make a really interesting bluray player.
These benchmarks are meaningless and worthless. The site itself says that these are artificial tests based almost entirely on processor power. So, similar processors with the same RAM is going to give the same 'score' regardless of OS, video card, hard drive performance or any other factor. In an update defined by new graphics chipsets that were build specifically to accelerate high definition video playback these geniuses are testing the processor performance.
These are not Mac benchmarks. They are intel processor benchmarks. You could have gotten the same numbers months ago (and many sites have) by testing the new intel processors as they came out.
If you are interested in some useful numbers, anandtech did some good competitive tests on the current generation of integrated graphics chipsets. No, these are not inside a Mac Mini, but it provides much more relevant information than this ridiculous article.
You are right that if the USA expanded the current health system to cover everybody it would be incredibly expensive. However, this is because the USA has the least efficient medical system in the industrial world.
In 2000 (the first numbers I could pull up), the USA spent an average of $4500 per person. At the same time, many other industrial nations with an effectively universal health system spent roughly $2000 per person, give or take a little. This includes Canada, the United Kingdom and France along with many, many other smaller countries. All of which have a higher average life expectancy than the United States. The only thing private medicine is good at is making medial companies rich. Most developed countries in the world have decided that making profit on the health of the general population is unacceptable. Capitalism is, on the whole, a good thing, but that doesn't mean that every facet of life can or should be monetized. As long as America insists on high profit margins for medial procedures it will remain expensive and inefficient.
If you are curious, take half an hour and google "health care spending per capita". There is a lot of good information. The American system of healthcare sucks by any comparative metric.
Not if those half dozen models collectively sell less than the competitors single model. In fact, having a dozen moving targets makes the developers jobs that much harder, even assuming the same number of total phones sold.
So the obvious follow-up would be to get mice with a different genetic defect that is related to learning. Do the same thing with them and see what pathways are affected. Depending on results, it could really shake things up.
Why do people keep bringing proxies into these discussions? Sure, there are lots of proxies available, but how many free (or cheap) high bandwidth ones are there? We are talking video here. Bouncing it through a bunch of low bandwidth connections doesn't leave you with a very good experience.
Let's say they make this into a thumb drive. Now, let's say that you read/write the entire drive twice a day. That's four operations. 18,000/4/365 gives you twelve years of this. Even if you are filling and then erasing the drive ten times every day it is still two and a half years of use. Less than you can do with current flash memory, but fine as a proof-of-concept.
If the computer doesn't do what she needs it to do in the first place, why does better security matter? She could put a rock on the desk, call it a computer and be just as productive and free from computer viruses.
Somewhat tangential, but can someone explain why Matroska is the favorite container for ripped H.264 video? While I can appreciate that it is the 'open' alternative to the other formats it does not have significant technical advantages. However, open source ideology doesn't usually trump practical concerns in the ripping communities. Many devices and programs commonly used with ripped video, like media servers, media extenders, portable media players and many software players deal poorly with.mkv files. So why the heavy bias for.mkv as a container format instead of something like.mp4?
The list is obviously bull. Most of the companies on there could survive in some form for years just on legacy support contracts. Sure, some of them might shrink, have some layoffs or toss out a department or two, but go under? Not on your life.
Also, FAT32 is only an issue if you are dealing with single files larger than 4GB. Considering that most cards are still smaller than that there is no problem. If you are the type of person who is aware enough about file systems that you want something different, you are free to reformat it for no extra effort than you would have had to expend if it came unformatted. And if they are going to come formatted, FAT32 is a pretty good choice as a no-hassle work anywhere format.
Depending on the popularity of a piece of data, I could easily see the cost of transfer being much higher over time than the cost of storage. After all, once you have stored your 1GB file on their servers, with a fixed asset cost for that 1GB likely 1$, and then it gets accessed by a couple people a day for a year or so. I'd be willing to bet that the cost of moving the data around would be signifigantly larger than the cost of keeping it stored.
Both claims could be correct. It is entirely possible that by having a really low seek time and high read speed the drive could launch programs, specifically larger applications that involve many smaller files and plug-ins, an order of magnitude faster than current drives. At the same time, it could have a write speed that is only a couple times faster than normal drives. Personally, I take all of this with a grain of salt until independent benchmarks come out but the claims themselves are not impossible or contradictory.
Of course you and ten million other people would risk a couple dollars on the next Bourne movie. After all, other people already shouldered the real risk by making the FIRST Bourne movie. And before that otehr people shouldered the risk of publishing the book it was based on. And before that someone took the first risk by publishing Robert Ludlum's first works with no guarantee that anyone other than his mother would ever buy it.
Real crowd sourced funding like this will never work for any media with a decent budget. It is simply not realistic to convince a million random people to give you $10 to make something they have never heard of before, and that's for a total budget of $10 million, or peanuts in film terms. If something has enough brand recognition to get a million random people to pony up money, then it has enough recognition to make use of simpler sources of funding.
Now, cheaper distributed distribution and lowered production costs might still make alternate production methods feasible. A company that produces episodic content where you can buy in ahead of time for a 'season' of their work and get some say over what is made, with continued production of any given project based on interest and return? Possible. But it would be a lot of work and big time risky for anyone willing to risk their livelihood on getting it to work.
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Could also be an artifact of whatever colour correction that they used on the image before public release. The stuff that gets released like this is never the same as the raw colour/image data that is actually used in research or study.
That's right. When comparing the price/value of computer hardware, the cost of software does not matter. Your $700 mid-range (or upper middle or however you want to measure it) hardware is $700 worth of hardware regardless of how much you spend on software.
For the obligatory car analogy, if you buy a cheap second hand car and then put a $50,000 sound system in it, you still have a cheap second hand car. It just has a nice sound system.
Professional programmer with extensive experience using open source software finds Linux easy to use out of the box; Can't understand why other people have trouble. News at 11.
Through a Flash vulnerability? You really haven't paid much attention to the iPhone, have you?
That wasn't a judgment on people who enjoy this type of gameplay. The GP was putting a spotlight on the ridiculous nature of the claims. By any measure that includes games outside of the OSS community this game is anything but raising the bar. It may be fun to play, it may be an excellent example of this style of gameplay done well, but the game design itself is a retread. The graphics are passable but on par with legacy commercial shooters. The level design is, frankly, brutal and very behind the curve. The weapons and characters are obviously based on well known commercial equivalents.
It may also be a lot of fun to play. So is Tetris. Nobody would post a Tetris clone and claim it is raising the bar for anyone.
The enormous benefit to who? Creators gotta get paid. Creators that never get paid stop creating, or at least stop doing very much creating because they are too busy doing some other job in order to pay the bills. Copyright, the idea that creators can exert limited legal control over who can copy their work, is a fairly successful real-world solution to this problem. And, on the whole, it's worked fairly well. Yes, things have started breaking down a little over the last couple decades and there are some problems that need to be addressed. A more limited term and more lenient fair-use and modification would go a long way. But content can NOT be free. It has to be paid for. The eventual viewer may not pay directly and instead pay through advertising or some such, but it's the same thing.
If copyright disappeared tomorrow, and I mean really disappeared overnight, the only new stuff showing up on the file sharing networks a week from now would be Linux builds. If, as a society, we decide that copyright is no longer working for us, we had better put an alternative in place before we pull the plug.
Not at all. Apple has said many times that background is possible in the sense that there is not theoretical reason the software/hardware can't do it. They have also said every time that they are not willing to allow background applications due to battery life and performance issues. This has been the known position from day one, so there isn't any room for either developers or customers to say that they did not go in with eyes open.
Background apps are available on jailbroken phones. Most of them also come with a big hit to battery life and overall performance. Make of that what you will.
Mine, and most people's I know, are doing fine. But there are lots of 3rd party alternate headphones out there made to work with the iPhone. They have the microphone and control buttons. Some of them are dirt cheap. And, oddly enough, the apple store carries many of them.
What DRM? I keep hearing about how much DRM there is on my iPhone and all the things it prevents me from doing. So I keep looking for it, but I have yet to find it. I mean, all those pesky mp3s I ripped from various CDs seem to be playing fine. And those DVD rips that I converted into mp4s with open software play happily. With one of the many file handlers on the app store, I can open and read 99% of the text formats out there. As far as I can tell, the only types of formats the iPhone won't play are ones that do include DRM or are simply beyond the hardware. So what DRM is on the iPhone?
Even better, get a network drive like the d-link DNS-323 or others. I got one of the 323s a year ago for external storage. It's plugged into my 802.11n router. Nice streaming media to everywhere in the house with RAID1 backup in case of a drive failure. Considering there is close to a TB of stuff on there I would hate to lose, having it mirrored is nice. No modification or extra stuff plugged into the mini, no extra wires.
This might interest you. Anand Tech did some recent benchmarks on the current integrated chipsets, including the same one the new Mini uses.
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3432
It's not a mini, but it is a similar setup. The difference is huge and quite intriguing. I'm giving serious thought to using a new Mini as a front-end myself. When OSX gets bluray support I'll swap out the drive for a sony slot-loading bluray laptop drive. Should make a very nice all-in-one media box.
One of the biggest changes in the new chipsets is massively improved hardware acceleration for video decoding. The new graphics chips are more than capable of decoding any video stream at 1080p in any of the current codecs like h264, VC1 or MPEG2. For anyone planning on using the mini as a media center, this will make a huge difference. It almost completely removes the load from the processor. So the mini will run cooler, quieter and have lots of processing overhead for any background tasks that you may wish to run.
Also, assuming we ever see bluray support in OSX, it will make a really interesting bluray player.
These benchmarks are meaningless and worthless. The site itself says that these are artificial tests based almost entirely on processor power. So, similar processors with the same RAM is going to give the same 'score' regardless of OS, video card, hard drive performance or any other factor. In an update defined by new graphics chipsets that were build specifically to accelerate high definition video playback these geniuses are testing the processor performance.
These are not Mac benchmarks. They are intel processor benchmarks. You could have gotten the same numbers months ago (and many sites have) by testing the new intel processors as they came out.
If you are interested in some useful numbers, anandtech did some good competitive tests on the current generation of integrated graphics chipsets. No, these are not inside a Mac Mini, but it provides much more relevant information than this ridiculous article.
You are right that if the USA expanded the current health system to cover everybody it would be incredibly expensive. However, this is because the USA has the least efficient medical system in the industrial world.
In 2000 (the first numbers I could pull up), the USA spent an average of $4500 per person. At the same time, many other industrial nations with an effectively universal health system spent roughly $2000 per person, give or take a little. This includes Canada, the United Kingdom and France along with many, many other smaller countries. All of which have a higher average life expectancy than the United States. The only thing private medicine is good at is making medial companies rich. Most developed countries in the world have decided that making profit on the health of the general population is unacceptable. Capitalism is, on the whole, a good thing, but that doesn't mean that every facet of life can or should be monetized. As long as America insists on high profit margins for medial procedures it will remain expensive and inefficient.
If you are curious, take half an hour and google "health care spending per capita". There is a lot of good information. The American system of healthcare sucks by any comparative metric.
Not if those half dozen models collectively sell less than the competitors single model. In fact, having a dozen moving targets makes the developers jobs that much harder, even assuming the same number of total phones sold.
So the obvious follow-up would be to get mice with a different genetic defect that is related to learning. Do the same thing with them and see what pathways are affected. Depending on results, it could really shake things up.
Why do people keep bringing proxies into these discussions? Sure, there are lots of proxies available, but how many free (or cheap) high bandwidth ones are there? We are talking video here. Bouncing it through a bunch of low bandwidth connections doesn't leave you with a very good experience.
Let's say they make this into a thumb drive. Now, let's say that you read/write the entire drive twice a day. That's four operations. 18,000/4/365 gives you twelve years of this. Even if you are filling and then erasing the drive ten times every day it is still two and a half years of use. Less than you can do with current flash memory, but fine as a proof-of-concept.
If the computer doesn't do what she needs it to do in the first place, why does better security matter? She could put a rock on the desk, call it a computer and be just as productive and free from computer viruses.
Somewhat tangential, but can someone explain why Matroska is the favorite container for ripped H.264 video? While I can appreciate that it is the 'open' alternative to the other formats it does not have significant technical advantages. However, open source ideology doesn't usually trump practical concerns in the ripping communities. Many devices and programs commonly used with ripped video, like media servers, media extenders, portable media players and many software players deal poorly with .mkv files. So why the heavy bias for .mkv as a container format instead of something like .mp4?
The list is obviously bull. Most of the companies on there could survive in some form for years just on legacy support contracts. Sure, some of them might shrink, have some layoffs or toss out a department or two, but go under? Not on your life.
Also, FAT32 is only an issue if you are dealing with single files larger than 4GB. Considering that most cards are still smaller than that there is no problem. If you are the type of person who is aware enough about file systems that you want something different, you are free to reformat it for no extra effort than you would have had to expend if it came unformatted. And if they are going to come formatted, FAT32 is a pretty good choice as a no-hassle work anywhere format.
Depending on the popularity of a piece of data, I could easily see the cost of transfer being much higher over time than the cost of storage. After all, once you have stored your 1GB file on their servers, with a fixed asset cost for that 1GB likely 1$, and then it gets accessed by a couple people a day for a year or so. I'd be willing to bet that the cost of moving the data around would be signifigantly larger than the cost of keeping it stored.
Both claims could be correct. It is entirely possible that by having a really low seek time and high read speed the drive could launch programs, specifically larger applications that involve many smaller files and plug-ins, an order of magnitude faster than current drives. At the same time, it could have a write speed that is only a couple times faster than normal drives. Personally, I take all of this with a grain of salt until independent benchmarks come out but the claims themselves are not impossible or contradictory.
Of course you and ten million other people would risk a couple dollars on the next Bourne movie. After all, other people already shouldered the real risk by making the FIRST Bourne movie. And before that otehr people shouldered the risk of publishing the book it was based on. And before that someone took the first risk by publishing Robert Ludlum's first works with no guarantee that anyone other than his mother would ever buy it.
Real crowd sourced funding like this will never work for any media with a decent budget. It is simply not realistic to convince a million random people to give you $10 to make something they have never heard of before, and that's for a total budget of $10 million, or peanuts in film terms. If something has enough brand recognition to get a million random people to pony up money, then it has enough recognition to make use of simpler sources of funding.
Now, cheaper distributed distribution and lowered production costs might still make alternate production methods feasible. A company that produces episodic content where you can buy in ahead of time for a 'season' of their work and get some say over what is made, with continued production of any given project based on interest and return? Possible. But it would be a lot of work and big time risky for anyone willing to risk their livelihood on getting it to work.