"When I compare Windows 8 to Apple's approach with OS X for desktops and iOS for smaller devices, the Apple method makes a lot more sense to me." IMO you can see computing portability as a spectrum, at one end you have the desktop (highly capable, not portable at all), at the other you have the smartphone (highly portable but very restricted capabilities). In between you have a whole plethora of devices of different prices, capabilites and levels of portability.
Apples soloution is to draw the line between tablets and laptops. Tablets get treated like smartphones, laptops get treated like desktops. Google also puts their smartphone OS on tablets (and doesn't really play significantly in the desktop or laptop space). Treating tablets like smartphones certainly has it's merits but it means you often end up carrying two devices, a tablet for media consumption and use on the go and a laptop for when you need to sit down somewhere and work. MS is weak in the smartphone market and by making a smartphone-like tablet they would be setting themselves up to be equally weak in the tablet market but by making a tablet system that can turn into a laptop by plugging in a keyboard unit they have a unique selling point that the other tablet OS vendors don't.
I think they are realising that throwing desktop/laptop users under the bus to support their tablet vision was a bad idea and I hope they can come up with a soloution that satisfies both. The general impression I get is that 8.1 is not as bad for desktop use as 8 but it's still widely considered to be inferior to earlier versions in that environment.
It can mean 8-bit indexed PNG with binary transparency, or it can mean 8-bit indexed PNG with full transparency.
IIRC in the format itself there isn't really a distinction, PNG transparency for indexed images is always handled by specifying alpha values for palette entries. It's just old versions of IE fail to handle them correctly.
I thought the world moved on from JPEG a long time ago.
Either you are trolling or you operate in some strange niche that is isolated from the rest of the world
Back in the real world jpeg is by far the dominant format for lossy compression of photographic images. The wide compatiblity of jpeg has outweighed the advantages of more modern formats.
Still patented?
There have been a number of patent claims against baseline jpeg over the years but afaict none of them have really stuck.
There was also previously a patent on the optional arithmetic coding feature but that has since expired.
Note that in paletted png files transparency is always handled by specifying alpha values for palette entries. Even if you are only doing simple binary transparencys so on a format level there is no real difference, it's just that some old browsers can't handle partially transparent palette values correctly.
jpegtran is a good util for shaving 5-10% off most jpegs out there.
Something to watch for with jpeg, "arithmetic coding" reduces your filesize compared to "huffman coding" but it also reduces compatibility. It caused me a fair bit of head scratching trying to work out why pdflatex wouldn't accept the jpegs that came out of jpegcrop (which started using arithmetic coding by default).
The main reason to keep image filesizes down on the web is to make life easier for those end users who are stuck on crappy dialup or cellular connections.
JPEG is good enough that there is little motivation to build browser detection to serve up different formats to different browsers. So unless MS decides to support webp I don't see it taking off.
There are two possbilities I can see for the government trying to regulate bitcoin.
One option is to do a 51% attack, this would let them arbiterally block transactions from confirming, they could then demand whatever registration requirements they wanted to get your transactions to confirm. Last I ran the sums doing a 51% attack on bitcoin was expensive but almost certainly within the capabilities of any major world government.
The other option is to treat bitcoin like cash. AIUI governments let people use small ammounts of cash pretty freely but if anyone tries to deposit a large ammount of cash they had better have a good explanation of where it came from or it may not be theirs much longer.
Why did people lose their bitcoins? Surely any sensible person would keep their coins in their own wallet.
I can think of a couple of reasons why people would keep their bitcoins in the exchange.
1: they were lazy/ignorant of the risks of storing money (whether bitcoins or dollars) in such organisations. 2: they wanted to be able to execute trades quickly, moving bitcoins into the exchange takes time which may mean that by the time you get them into the exchange the opportunity they were trying to trade on is no longer there.
So you start with 3D printing for your prototypes and small production runs, then if/when you get enough orders to justify it you get someone to make an injection mould.
The USA to drop its stupid double taxation policies (the money was already taxed once, where it was earned, and most countries try to avoid double taxing in this situatoin)
As I understand it the US does give credit for foriegn tax paid.
The trouble is the corporations in question have found accounting tricks that let them avoid paying corporate taxes in europe, so if/when they bring the money back to the US there is no foreign tax to claim credit for.
and everything to do with gentrification - Not a bad word, BTW, it just means making the slums safe for human habitation again.
And why were they "unsafe for human habitation" in the first place? Because they were populated with poor people some of whom are low level criminals*.
Consider yourself as an honest poor person (a janitor or whatever), you've lived in an area all your life, it's not the best area and crime is higher than you would like but you have friends there and you know how to avoid the thugs and so-on. Then rents start rising, the local criminals can no longer afford the rent but neither can you so you are forced to move to another poor area which is likely further from your job, where you don't know the local crime patterns and where you likely don't have any friends (it's unlikely everyone will be forced to move at exactly the same time and even if they are it's unlikely they will be able to move together). Oh and moving is always expensive and disruptive even when it's something you do for your own benefit.
* Rich people can be criminals too but they tend to commit different sorts of crime.
The problem is that to be effective a mask has to seal to the face so that the air is forced through the mask rather than bypassing it round the sides but the face has an awkward shape and tends to move.
-> Probably sell them a Win7 license as well (though I'm not sure on this one maybe the upgrade is no extra charge on top of Win8 Pro? I'd be unsurprised either way.)
MS doesn't charge seperately for volume license rights per-se but it does make them horriblly messy, if you get your windows 8 pro license from an OEM with your PC then you can downgrade but if you buy a retail copy or buy a system builder copy for "personal use" you can't, and apparently upgrading an 8 home OEM license through buying the pro pack counts as "retail" (though I haven't found any official confirmation of this and it doesn't seem there is any way to buy downgrade rights seperately.
So it seems if the machine came with 8 (non pro) then your only legit options are to get a volume license upgrade (ok if you are doing a bunch of machines or already have a volume license agreement you can tack it onto, but not really an option for one machine) or get a complete new copy of windows 7 (which does still seem to be available right now but may not be for much longer).
Also if you don't have a volume license agreement then MS sometimes makes excercising your downgrade rights a pain. They won't give you a product key specifically for the downgrade and you can't use your win8 product key to activate win7. Apparently some machines may have codes in the bios that allow win7 to activate without a key but if yours doesn't then get ready to explain yourself over the phone for every machine you reinstall using an existing product key from another machine.
Otoh, if they want to implement it all using token ring, maybe we can talk.
Modern ethernet networks are a network of switched full duplex point to point links. CSMA/CD is still supported in the general purpose copper physical layers but only for backwards compatibility reasons.
I think there is a difference between clearly advertising something as a "demo" (and listing the price for the full game upfront)or "first episode free" (and then clearly listing all the remaining episodes upfront with prices) and advertising something as free to play and then slowly extracting the money from the person as they realise they have to pay for important features of the game one by one which is different again from pushing the gamer the gamer into spending real money on in-game consumables.
The question is who are these people spending £10K a month? are they people whose "luxuries budget" is to big they just don't see £10K as a lot of money? or are they people who are so hopelessly addicted they are spending money they can't really afford to spend.
I would think no crew would make life harder for the pirates. Currently they can take the crew hostage which means they can force (at gunpoint) the crew to tell them how to operate the ship, and it also means that attempting to recover the ship by force puts the crews life at risk.
With a crewless ship I'd it would be much harder for the pirates to take control of the ship and much easier for a recovery team to take it back off them without getting any "good guys" killed.
Anyone who has used a satellite uplink for the web can tell you that the bandwidth is oversold, and if you even try to stream video you get nailed by the FUP (fair use policy).
That is what you get for buying cheap "broadband" services. Major TV networks have been doing outside broadcast over satellite uplinks for years.
I don't know about Mac - it seems hard to find out how many Mac games I would have on Steam if I was to load it up on there - but I imagine it's the same at best, and much less at worst.
I haven't done any formal analsys but browsing the steam store I can't remember seeing any games listed as windows+linux, it's either windows only, windows+mac or all three.
Slashdot Mirror
"When I compare Windows 8 to Apple's approach with OS X for desktops and iOS for smaller devices, the Apple method makes a lot more sense to me."
IMO you can see computing portability as a spectrum, at one end you have the desktop (highly capable, not portable at all), at the other you have the smartphone (highly portable but very restricted capabilities). In between you have a whole plethora of devices of different prices, capabilites and levels of portability.
Apples soloution is to draw the line between tablets and laptops. Tablets get treated like smartphones, laptops get treated like desktops. Google also puts their smartphone OS on tablets (and doesn't really play significantly in the desktop or laptop space). Treating tablets like smartphones certainly has it's merits but it means you often end up carrying two devices, a tablet for media consumption and use on the go and a laptop for when you need to sit down somewhere and work. MS is weak in the smartphone market and by making a smartphone-like tablet they would be setting themselves up to be equally weak in the tablet market but by making a tablet system that can turn into a laptop by plugging in a keyboard unit they have a unique selling point that the other tablet OS vendors don't.
I think they are realising that throwing desktop/laptop users under the bus to support their tablet vision was a bad idea and I hope they can come up with a soloution that satisfies both. The general impression I get is that 8.1 is not as bad for desktop use as 8 but it's still widely considered to be inferior to earlier versions in that environment.
It can mean
8-bit indexed PNG with binary transparency, or it can mean 8-bit indexed PNG with
full transparency.
IIRC in the format itself there isn't really a distinction, PNG transparency for indexed images is always handled by specifying alpha values for palette entries. It's just old versions of IE fail to handle them correctly.
I thought the world moved on from JPEG a long time ago.
Either you are trolling or you operate in some strange niche that is isolated from the rest of the world
Back in the real world jpeg is by far the dominant format for lossy compression of photographic images. The wide compatiblity of jpeg has outweighed the advantages of more modern formats.
Still patented?
There have been a number of patent claims against baseline jpeg over the years but afaict none of them have really stuck.
There was also previously a patent on the optional arithmetic coding feature but that has since expired.
Note that in paletted png files transparency is always handled by specifying alpha values for palette entries. Even if you are only doing simple binary transparencys so on a format level there is no real difference, it's just that some old browsers can't handle partially transparent palette values correctly.
jpegtran is a good util for shaving 5-10% off most jpegs out there.
Something to watch for with jpeg, "arithmetic coding" reduces your filesize compared to "huffman coding" but it also reduces compatibility. It caused me a fair bit of head scratching trying to work out why pdflatex wouldn't accept the jpegs that came out of jpegcrop (which started using arithmetic coding by default).
Serving static files is pretty cheap nowadays.
The main reason to keep image filesizes down on the web is to make life easier for those end users who are stuck on crappy dialup or cellular connections.
JPEG is good enough that there is little motivation to build browser detection to serve up different formats to different browsers. So unless MS decides to support webp I don't see it taking off.
On the other hand fuel weight is lost as the energy in the fuel is used battery weight stays with the plane for the entire flight.
There are two possbilities I can see for the government trying to regulate bitcoin.
One option is to do a 51% attack, this would let them arbiterally block transactions from confirming, they could then demand whatever registration requirements they wanted to get your transactions to confirm. Last I ran the sums doing a 51% attack on bitcoin was expensive but almost certainly within the capabilities of any major world government.
The other option is to treat bitcoin like cash. AIUI governments let people use small ammounts of cash pretty freely but if anyone tries to deposit a large ammount of cash they had better have a good explanation of where it came from or it may not be theirs much longer.
Why did people lose their bitcoins? Surely any sensible person would keep their coins in their own wallet.
I can think of a couple of reasons why people would keep their bitcoins in the exchange.
1: they were lazy/ignorant of the risks of storing money (whether bitcoins or dollars) in such organisations.
2: they wanted to be able to execute trades quickly, moving bitcoins into the exchange takes time which may mean that by the time you get them into the exchange the opportunity they were trying to trade on is no longer there.
Oh sorry I thought you were talking about ammounts of ram, rereading it seems more likely you were talking about mobile phone standards.
So you start with 3D printing for your prototypes and small production runs, then if/when you get enough orders to justify it you get someone to make an injection mould.
The USA to drop its stupid double taxation policies (the money was already taxed once, where it was earned, and most countries try to avoid double taxing in this situatoin)
As I understand it the US does give credit for foriegn tax paid.
The trouble is the corporations in question have found accounting tricks that let them avoid paying corporate taxes in europe, so if/when they bring the money back to the US there is no foreign tax to claim credit for.
On the other hand, they do cost the city money in that that can (and do) delay the actual city busses from stopping at the stops
On the other hand replacing private cars with corporate shuttle busses probably reduces general road congestion which also costs the city money.
and everything to do with gentrification - Not a bad word, BTW, it just means making the slums safe for human habitation again.
And why were they "unsafe for human habitation" in the first place? Because they were populated with poor people some of whom are low level criminals*.
Consider yourself as an honest poor person (a janitor or whatever), you've lived in an area all your life, it's not the best area and crime is higher than you would like but you have friends there and you know how to avoid the thugs and so-on. Then rents start rising, the local criminals can no longer afford the rent but neither can you so you are forced to move to another poor area which is likely further from your job, where you don't know the local crime patterns and where you likely don't have any friends (it's unlikely everyone will be forced to move at exactly the same time and even if they are it's unlikely they will be able to move together). Oh and moving is always expensive and disruptive even when it's something you do for your own benefit.
* Rich people can be criminals too but they tend to commit different sorts of crime.
The problem is that to be effective a mask has to seal to the face so that the air is forced through the mask rather than bypassing it round the sides but the face has an awkward shape and tends to move.
-> Probably sell them a Win7 license as well (though I'm not sure on this one maybe the upgrade is no extra charge on top of Win8 Pro? I'd be unsurprised either way.)
MS doesn't charge seperately for volume license rights per-se but it does make them horriblly messy, if you get your windows 8 pro license from an OEM with your PC then you can downgrade but if you buy a retail copy or buy a system builder copy for "personal use" you can't, and apparently upgrading an 8 home OEM license through buying the pro pack counts as "retail" (though I haven't found any official confirmation of this and it doesn't seem there is any way to buy downgrade rights seperately.
So it seems if the machine came with 8 (non pro) then your only legit options are to get a volume license upgrade (ok if you are doing a bunch of machines or already have a volume license agreement you can tack it onto, but not really an option for one machine) or get a complete new copy of windows 7 (which does still seem to be available right now but may not be for much longer).
Also if you don't have a volume license agreement then MS sometimes makes excercising your downgrade rights a pain. They won't give you a product key specifically for the downgrade and you can't use your win8 product key to activate win7. Apparently some machines may have codes in the bios that allow win7 to activate without a key but if yours doesn't then get ready to explain yourself over the phone for every machine you reinstall using an existing product key from another machine.
Otoh, if they want to implement it all using token ring, maybe we can talk.
Modern ethernet networks are a network of switched full duplex point to point links. CSMA/CD is still supported in the general purpose copper physical layers but only for backwards compatibility reasons.
I think there is a difference between clearly advertising something as a "demo" (and listing the price for the full game upfront)or "first episode free" (and then clearly listing all the remaining episodes upfront with prices) and advertising something as free to play and then slowly extracting the money from the person as they realise they have to pay for important features of the game one by one which is different again from pushing the gamer the gamer into spending real money on in-game consumables.
The question is who are these people spending £10K a month? are they people whose "luxuries budget" is to big they just don't see £10K as a lot of money? or are they people who are so hopelessly addicted they are spending money they can't really afford to spend.
I would think no crew would make life harder for the pirates. Currently they can take the crew hostage which means they can force (at gunpoint) the crew to tell them how to operate the ship, and it also means that attempting to recover the ship by force puts the crews life at risk.
With a crewless ship I'd it would be much harder for the pirates to take control of the ship and much easier for a recovery team to take it back off them without getting any "good guys" killed.
Anyone who has used a satellite uplink for the web can tell you that the bandwidth is oversold, and if you even try to stream video you get nailed by the FUP (fair use policy).
That is what you get for buying cheap "broadband" services. Major TV networks have been doing outside broadcast over satellite uplinks for years.
Portal 1 was fairly sparse on the dialog front
Portal was fairly sparse overall. It was an extra thrown in with the orange box and the production values reflected that.
Portal 2 was clearly a much higher budget game.
I don't know about Mac - it seems hard to find out how many Mac games I would have on Steam if I was to load it up on there - but I imagine it's the same at best, and much less at worst.
I haven't done any formal analsys but browsing the steam store I can't remember seeing any games listed as windows+linux, it's either windows only, windows+mac or all three.
Umm according to http://surface.microsoftstore.... The lower models come with 4GB of ram and the higher models come with 8GB of ram.