Fortunately we have been given an alternative in the VR revolution called the HTC Vive.
I tried a friends headset and was sold on the cool experience it provided and decided to order one. I already have mine now and have been enjoying and sharing it's experience even before people who pre-ordered their Oculus Rift on the first day it was available have gotten their headsets.
This site (not sure why it's not active anymore) Was designed by the site admins to teach people the information they would need to know to be successful on the site.
All the info there is all they ever asked about and covered in the interview questions. Back when I took it 5 years ago or so all the information was correct. What exactly is wrong about the information there?
All they asked was about torrents/trackers/seeding/ratio. Questions about how to properly rip a CD to lossless with secure mode, error correction, cue sheet and log file for verification of correct ripping procedure. Then some questions about different audio formats like lossy vs lossless and bitrates. Also what is a transcode and ways to help identify whether a lossless copy was ever a transcode etc. Pretty basic stuff, I don't see how it could have been wrong.
All the questions were clearly there to make sure someone know how to properly rip cds, how to manage their ratio and share properly, and how to not screw up re-encoding the audio formats. All pretty important stuff to keep a smoothly running community of consistent and high quality music.
Doesn't every phone have voice control these days?
Between Google Now, Siri, and Cortana everyone should easily be able to send off a text completely eyes-free via voice. I use Siri to do it and haven't had a problem dictating or hearing her read the incoming. It's built right into the vehicle's own CarPlay system.
As a child, I never had a single restriction like all my friends seemed to have. I was really into computers too and was online and could do whatever I wanted to. I didn't have a curfew or anything like that but I respected general safety "rules" very much. I'm 28 now and I am pretty much as reserved as a person can be. I never got into trouble and I never wanted to get into trouble. Having no limits didn't cause me to do anything wrong or get into any danger. I was smart enough to prevent myself from doing that I guess?
But the problem is the FBI could use that fix on any phone. So in essence Apple is saying they won't help them because their phones are inherently insecure.
But Apple controls the iOS cryptographic key signing servers which say what firmware versions can be installed on what devices. They have to be signed before the phone accepts that firmware period. Same reason that nobody but Apple can install an older no loner signed version of the OS on an iPhone. It used to be susceptible to a replay attack, but Apple added a nonce a few years ago to stop that too.
The special firmware Apple made with unlimited passcode attempts could only be signed for that specific device. Apple wouldn't even have to give the firmware to the FBI. Make the FBI come in to their secure LAN and have Apple load the special firmware on the phone for them.
What if the government paid Apple fair compensation to do so?
I buy a new phone every year but I don't wait in line or care if I have to wait a couple weeks to get mine.
The reason I do it is because tech gadgets are my hobby and I enjoy using them a lot and like to use the new features. The cost is really not an issue for me at all. I'm not accumulating debt or denying myself something else I need just to get a new phone. Plenty of other people have much more expensive hobbies than mine.
Do I really have a problem? Is it really hard to understand that I just like playing with and utilizing new toys?
What is far more safe to assume is that it is a comparison between their current h.264 encoding setup vs. whatever h.265 coded they would use in practice.
I don't find that more safe to assume because if they were comparing any HEVC encoder to a non-reference H.264 encoder, i.e. a newer, higher quality H.264 encoder then their claims of 50% reduction in bitrate would not be possible.
Nobody in the encoder community has posted any sorts of encoder results with such a reduction in bitrate. What has BBC done that is so incredibly special to achieve what nobody else has?
I find it much more likely that they are comparing to a reference H.264 encoder as that would at least make their results possible, conformable, and repeatable in the first place.
Also, any HEVC encoder implementation produces results so close to a reference encoder that you might as well consider them all reference at this point. I've tested several myself. But H.264 on the other hand, reference vs. the best is quite a large gap.
I think it's safe to assume that the article is talking about reference encoders. The HEVC consortium set out to reduce bit-rate by 50% at equal quality for the HEVC standard and for reference H.264 vs reference HEVC they came out pretty close to that goal.
I was merely pointing out that if you instead compare a reference HEVC encoder or even the current "best" HEVC encoder compared to the best H.264 encoder (x264), the different in quality is negligible so far, especially for bitrates that actually yield a high quality encode (that isn't soft or smoothed out) like HEVC tends to do at lower bitrates.
Also I mentioned x265 in another comment. At this point x265 is hardly better than an HEVC reference encoder. Something you would know if you actually knew what you were talking about and have actually used these encoders and done lots of testing and comparisons.
How is describing my results from my own encoding comparisons rambling?
50% bitrate reduction vs H.264 sure, but not vs x264 which is the current gold standard for HQ video compression.
It's like comparing a new audio codec to the original fraunhofer MP3 encoder. LAME on the other hand is a significantly better MP3 encoder like x264 is a better H.264 encoder.
My own compression testing between HEVC and x264 show that at verty low bitrates, yes HEVC is better, but only at bitrates below what I would normally use and what I would consider "quality" encodes.
When you compare say a 10GB x264 encode of a full-length BluRay film, even 8GB for the HEVC does not provide an equal or superior copy.
Are your monitors 4K? Do they do 120Hz or 144Hz? Do they support G-Sync or FreeSync? These are all reasons why he could have spent what he spent and more than you. And no it has absolutely nothing to do with a fruit or a niche industry thing.
This is an amazing monitor for instance for video gaming. 144Hz IPS is not a cheap thing anywhere plus the G-Sync module from nVidia.
Right, but you asked why do people still use them. Well that's why many, many people still use them. They have great grandfathered legacy plans. For a new plan, sure you can get a better deal elsewhere now.
Because I'm getting great deal with ATT. I still have the unlimited LTE plan for $50/mo and now it's going to $55/mo. Still cheaper than that Metro PCS plan and ATT LTE is a better and faster network, at least in my location.
Plus they still give me discounts on new phones so I only pay $199 for my new iPhone every 2 years.
Grasshopper only went up to 744m and used a continuous engine burn. That's significantly lower altitude and lower speeds than New Shepard which went to 100000m and mach 3.7 and had to re-ignite the engine for instance.
My mind is open, but it needs to be filled with facts, and math. Not random numbers and uncorrelated information. "Trillions of tons" is meaningless out of context...
I just wanted to see for instance where the experiments and measurements and math are that show that trillions of tons accurately predict a 1C increase.
(It doesn't have to be 100% accurate obviously, but accurate enough for science which does have it's measurement of uncertainty that we use to determine how good of a conclusion it makes.)
Also, it was not 30 seconds... It was 9 minutes if you rad the timestamps. How is 9 minutes not an adequate enough time to respond to: "So, the TRILLIONS of TONS of CO2 being put into the atmosphere would have another source?"
It's not exactly a difficult response to respond to since it didn’t actually address my previous question, so my response was mostly restating my question again. Which I have had to do somewhat a third time.
I never said the trillion tons had to come from another source. I am well aware that we know that the vast majority of the additional CO2 did in fact come from humans. I am asking how we know that the trillions of tons are actually enough to cause the entire increase alone or whether it’s possible there are other factors that also contributed that would have raised the temperature had we not released that much CO2.
I'd like to think that I do. I went to school for Software Engineering, but I would say that I do like science. But science to me is usually about the hard, provable facts. I'm more inclined to trust the mathematics where things require indisputable logical proofs.
For example, do you have any reading on anything like the math behind how much CO2 we have released and any scientific experiments that show that that amount of CO2 should be expected to raise the temperature of the planet by 1C?
To me, science is about the experiments used to verify reality. All I ever hear is data like the globe is warmer, we have released all this CO2, but does it really add up correctly in practice? From what I have read, it seemed like we really don't know whether or not the increase in global temperature we see is really what we should have expected to see given our measurements. It seems like too much uncertainty yet for the topic of global warming because there is too much data that we don't know and too many variables that we can't accurately isolate the one we are testing.
Do we have the evidence that shows that the amount of CO2 increase should actually increase the temperatire by 1C?
Maybe the amount of CO2 we released only accounts for 0.5 degrees and there is some other yet undiscovered source for the other 0.5 degrees unrelated to humans and to CO2.
I'm just saying, do we have proof of this? Do we really know there is no alternative explanation for sure?
If you are against unlimited data plans because it means you are "subsidizing" the people who use more.
Then are you also against a national health care plan? Doesn't a national health care plan mean that the people who work hard to live healthy active lives will pay the same in health care through taxes, etc to subsidize the care for the unhealthy lifestyle lazy people who will use the health care far more often?
Your reason for wanting a finely grained Internet bill is the same reason I want private health care. I want to pay just for me because I don't abuse. I don't want to subsidize the abusers.
How do we know for sure that the increased CO2 levels are entirely caused by humans or that the CO2 levels are the entire cause of the entire 1C increase?
How do we know that if humans didn’t exist that some other force wouldn't have or couldn't have caused climate change? I mean the climate has changed in the past just fine on it's own without human intervention.
Are we really 100% completely sure that the reason is humans and that it could have been avoided? Or is it just our best guess so far that it's the reason because we haven't found a better reason yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought VP10 was supposed to be the real competitor to HEVC.
Fortunately we have been given an alternative in the VR revolution called the HTC Vive.
I tried a friends headset and was sold on the cool experience it provided and decided to order one. I already have mine now and have been enjoying and sharing it's experience even before people who pre-ordered their Oculus Rift on the first day it was available have gotten their headsets.
This site (not sure why it's not active anymore) Was designed by the site admins to teach people the information they would need to know to be successful on the site.
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
All the info there is all they ever asked about and covered in the interview questions. Back when I took it 5 years ago or so all the information was correct. What exactly is wrong about the information there?
All they asked was about torrents/trackers/seeding/ratio. Questions about how to properly rip a CD to lossless with secure mode, error correction, cue sheet and log file for verification of correct ripping procedure. Then some questions about different audio formats like lossy vs lossless and bitrates. Also what is a transcode and ways to help identify whether a lossless copy was ever a transcode etc. Pretty basic stuff, I don't see how it could have been wrong.
All the questions were clearly there to make sure someone know how to properly rip cds, how to manage their ratio and share properly, and how to not screw up re-encoding the audio formats. All pretty important stuff to keep a smoothly running community of consistent and high quality music.
Doesn't every phone have voice control these days?
Between Google Now, Siri, and Cortana everyone should easily be able to send off a text completely eyes-free via voice. I use Siri to do it and haven't had a problem dictating or hearing her read the incoming. It's built right into the vehicle's own CarPlay system.
It can work I suppose, but not everyone needs it.
As a child, I never had a single restriction like all my friends seemed to have. I was really into computers too and was online and could do whatever I wanted to. I didn't have a curfew or anything like that but I respected general safety "rules" very much. I'm 28 now and I am pretty much as reserved as a person can be. I never got into trouble and I never wanted to get into trouble. Having no limits didn't cause me to do anything wrong or get into any danger. I was smart enough to prevent myself from doing that I guess?
But the problem is the FBI could use that fix on any phone. So in essence Apple is saying they won't help them because their phones are inherently insecure.
But Apple controls the iOS cryptographic key signing servers which say what firmware versions can be installed on what devices. They have to be signed before the phone accepts that firmware period. Same reason that nobody but Apple can install an older no loner signed version of the OS on an iPhone. It used to be susceptible to a replay attack, but Apple added a nonce a few years ago to stop that too.
The special firmware Apple made with unlimited passcode attempts could only be signed for that specific device. Apple wouldn't even have to give the firmware to the FBI. Make the FBI come in to their secure LAN and have Apple load the special firmware on the phone for them.
What if the government paid Apple fair compensation to do so?
I buy a new phone every year but I don't wait in line or care if I have to wait a couple weeks to get mine.
The reason I do it is because tech gadgets are my hobby and I enjoy using them a lot and like to use the new features. The cost is really not an issue for me at all. I'm not accumulating debt or denying myself something else I need just to get a new phone. Plenty of other people have much more expensive hobbies than mine.
Do I really have a problem? Is it really hard to understand that I just like playing with and utilizing new toys?
What is far more safe to assume is that it is a comparison between their current h.264 encoding setup vs. whatever h.265 coded they would use in practice.
I don't find that more safe to assume because if they were comparing any HEVC encoder to a non-reference H.264 encoder, i.e. a newer, higher quality H.264 encoder then their claims of 50% reduction in bitrate would not be possible.
Nobody in the encoder community has posted any sorts of encoder results with such a reduction in bitrate. What has BBC done that is so incredibly special to achieve what nobody else has?
I find it much more likely that they are comparing to a reference H.264 encoder as that would at least make their results possible, conformable, and repeatable in the first place.
Also, any HEVC encoder implementation produces results so close to a reference encoder that you might as well consider them all reference at this point. I've tested several myself. But H.264 on the other hand, reference vs. the best is quite a large gap.
I think it's safe to assume that the article is talking about reference encoders. The HEVC consortium set out to reduce bit-rate by 50% at equal quality for the HEVC standard and for reference H.264 vs reference HEVC they came out pretty close to that goal.
I was merely pointing out that if you instead compare a reference HEVC encoder or even the current "best" HEVC encoder compared to the best H.264 encoder (x264), the different in quality is negligible so far, especially for bitrates that actually yield a high quality encode (that isn't soft or smoothed out) like HEVC tends to do at lower bitrates.
I was referring to an H.264 reference encoder...
Also I mentioned x265 in another comment. At this point x265 is hardly better than an HEVC reference encoder. Something you would know if you actually knew what you were talking about and have actually used these encoders and done lots of testing and comparisons.
How is describing my results from my own encoding comparisons rambling?
Absolutely.
I have high hopes for the x265 project (development already underway) in the future.
50% bitrate reduction vs H.264 sure, but not vs x264 which is the current gold standard for HQ video compression.
It's like comparing a new audio codec to the original fraunhofer MP3 encoder. LAME on the other hand is a significantly better MP3 encoder like x264 is a better H.264 encoder.
My own compression testing between HEVC and x264 show that at verty low bitrates, yes HEVC is better, but only at bitrates below what I would normally use and what I would consider "quality" encodes.
When you compare say a 10GB x264 encode of a full-length BluRay film, even 8GB for the HEVC does not provide an equal or superior copy.
Are your monitors 4K? Do they do 120Hz or 144Hz? Do they support G-Sync or FreeSync? These are all reasons why he could have spent what he spent and more than you. And no it has absolutely nothing to do with a fruit or a niche industry thing.
This is an amazing monitor for instance for video gaming. 144Hz IPS is not a cheap thing anywhere plus the G-Sync module from nVidia.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...
Hmm, my quadcopter is 0.41lbs so I guess I'm good. Although I occasionally attach my GoPro to it which puts it at 0.61lbs.
Right, but you asked why do people still use them. Well that's why many, many people still use them. They have great grandfathered legacy plans. For a new plan, sure you can get a better deal elsewhere now.
Because I'm getting great deal with ATT. I still have the unlimited LTE plan for $50/mo and now it's going to $55/mo. Still cheaper than that Metro PCS plan and ATT LTE is a better and faster network, at least in my location.
Plus they still give me discounts on new phones so I only pay $199 for my new iPhone every 2 years.
But if we are comparing difficulty...
Grasshopper only went up to 744m and used a continuous engine burn. That's significantly lower altitude and lower speeds than New Shepard which went to 100000m and mach 3.7 and had to re-ignite the engine for instance.
My mind is open, but it needs to be filled with facts, and math. Not random numbers and uncorrelated information. "Trillions of tons" is meaningless out of context...
I just wanted to see for instance where the experiments and measurements and math are that show that trillions of tons accurately predict a 1C increase.
(It doesn't have to be 100% accurate obviously, but accurate enough for science which does have it's measurement of uncertainty that we use to determine how good of a conclusion it makes.)
Also, it was not 30 seconds... It was 9 minutes if you rad the timestamps. How is 9 minutes not an adequate enough time to respond to:
"So, the TRILLIONS of TONS of CO2 being put into the atmosphere would have another source?"
It's not exactly a difficult response to respond to since it didn’t actually address my previous question, so my response was mostly restating my question again. Which I have had to do somewhat a third time.
I never said the trillion tons had to come from another source. I am well aware that we know that the vast majority of the additional CO2 did in fact come from humans. I am asking how we know that the trillions of tons are actually enough to cause the entire increase alone or whether it’s possible there are other factors that also contributed that would have raised the temperature had we not released that much CO2.
I'd like to think that I do. I went to school for Software Engineering, but I would say that I do like science. But science to me is usually about the hard, provable facts. I'm more inclined to trust the mathematics where things require indisputable logical proofs.
For example, do you have any reading on anything like the math behind how much CO2 we have released and any scientific experiments that show that that amount of CO2 should be expected to raise the temperature of the planet by 1C?
To me, science is about the experiments used to verify reality. All I ever hear is data like the globe is warmer, we have released all this CO2, but does it really add up correctly in practice? From what I have read, it seemed like we really don't know whether or not the increase in global temperature we see is really what we should have expected to see given our measurements. It seems like too much uncertainty yet for the topic of global warming because there is too much data that we don't know and too many variables that we can't accurately isolate the one we are testing.
Do we have the evidence that shows that the amount of CO2 increase should actually increase the temperatire by 1C?
Maybe the amount of CO2 we released only accounts for 0.5 degrees and there is some other yet undiscovered source for the other 0.5 degrees unrelated to humans and to CO2.
I'm just saying, do we have proof of this? Do we really know there is no alternative explanation for sure?
Please don't take offense, but I have a question.
If you are against unlimited data plans because it means you are "subsidizing" the people who use more.
Then are you also against a national health care plan? Doesn't a national health care plan mean that the people who work hard to live healthy active lives will pay the same in health care through taxes, etc to subsidize the care for the unhealthy lifestyle lazy people who will use the health care far more often?
Your reason for wanting a finely grained Internet bill is the same reason I want private health care. I want to pay just for me because I don't abuse. I don't want to subsidize the abusers.
Simple. Because every finely grained billing option I've seen always costs more than the current unlimited...
There is a limit to unlimited data plans.
Every data plan has a finite bandwidth per time.
TWC says I have an unlimited data plan, except they limit my speed to 30Mbps. So in one month I can only use 9.855TB in a month.
Humans only have a finite stomach volume, data connections only have a finite bit-rate.
Serious question.
I thought correlation doesn't imply causation?
How do we know for sure that the increased CO2 levels are entirely caused by humans or that the CO2 levels are the entire cause of the entire 1C increase?
How do we know that if humans didn’t exist that some other force wouldn't have or couldn't have caused climate change? I mean the climate has changed in the past just fine on it's own without human intervention.
Are we really 100% completely sure that the reason is humans and that it could have been avoided? Or is it just our best guess so far that it's the reason because we haven't found a better reason yet.
Yes, they bump them up next year.
But the point is both services for new people right now is the same.