Blu-Ray has a max capacity of 25GB/layer, and a standard player can read discs up to 100GB without modifications.
No they don't, because no-one has ever made such a disc. All we have are people making claims about how many layers they can get onto a disc. Works the same for HDDVD. The reality is that 30 GB is enough for a HD movie, and we're never going to see these super-discs they keep bragging about. A 51GB HDDVD standard had been approved BTW.
So while you can claim that HD-DVD supports full 1080p, in reality many movies were over-compressed or simply encoded at 1080i in order to fit them onto a single disc.
Bullshit. Every film on HDDVD was released in 1080p, just like on Blu-ray. Interlaced video is only used for high-framerate television recordings.
but the studios were lining up on one side or the other, nobody was releasing to both mediums.
Actually they were. Particularly, there were a few studios that while having avoided HDDVD in the US, were releasing on both formats in Europe. Abandoning support was an organized sabotage by the major media corporations.
So I'm glad that the one with the better technical specifications ended up winning out.
All too often the system with the higher numbers isn't the better spec overall. The region codes alone are worth avoiding Blu-Ray, not to mention the other crap like profile updates. And HDDDVD had more mandatory audio codecs. So for computer storage, Blu-Ray is indeed the better format. But for consumers as a Media distribution format, not really.
For completely configurable hardware it's okay, but most integrated gateway devices only let you have a DSL WAN port, and rarely do they support any bridging mode. As soon as you want to change something in your network, your hardware becomes useless.
What graphics chip are you using? ATI cards can be a real pain. OTOH, setting up multiple monitors can be a hassle in Windows too and the drivers suck. The vast majority of users would be completely baffled by your requirements, most people don't understand to set their display at the correct resolution.
There are a few rough edges on Linux distros like advanced graphics and scanners, but for the vast majority of settings it's much easier and faster than Windows. With Windows, you're constantly googling driver installers, clicking boxes and navigating the maze of control panel settings. In Ubuntu, everything that can be done in a GUI (which is the vast majority) is no more than one submenu on the task bar.
They do. At least, they're not very rigorous about taking them down. The courts get to interpret the law. Because of the uncertainty, Europeans have to license much the same patents as Americans.
Software patents certainly are enforced, that's kinda what this story is about. The only issue is that the patents may not apply to all European countries, but even so everybody pays more or less the same fees as in the US.
Well that's not a question of resolution or size, but simply aspect ratio. As Monitor sizes increase the hight also gets bigger. So the real question is merely "when is big too big". And the simple answer is that widescreen formats are much better at using the human field of view. Even 16:9 isn't really wide enough. If my monitor were much bigger vertically I couldn't see all of it without having to look over the rim of my glasses or moving my head.
People move and contacts are lost. While immediate friends and family can usually be telephoned, it's likely you will have missed quite a few people. Old school friends and colleagues are often a very touching attendants to funeral and memorial services, especially when they can tell you of memories of the persons life you never heard before.
e-mail is certainly what I call the lazy option. While we do hear a lot about the silver surfer generation in the media, the majority of people are probably still completely inept, and the rest only check emails occasionally.
I guess it's to prevent people from using "lazy" passwords to meet character requirements. If my password was five characters and they want eight, I'd just type every letter twice.
I didn't say they weren't. But it's apples and Oranges. Youtube is a service which relies on IP traffic, whereas telcos sell Internet connections to facilitate just such traffic. As far as they are concerned, Youtube traffic is the content that the customers want, and have paid for.
I had that in mind. But such a disruption in performance would normally give you the right to withdraw from your contract. Obviously this varies depending on jurisdiction.
It also depends on how stubborn you ISP is, but blocking YouTube will certainly get a lot of people really pissed. ISPs tend to shy away from court cases that create precedent.
While they're not exactly clear about the distinction in the article, it's a foregone conclusion that they meant all parts of the standard and codec will be free. Concerning patents, they will have been examined thoroughly when they developed the codec. While there's always a risk someone will sue you, that's also a risk with Theora, H.264 and any other proprietary codec.
Not really, all it depends on is bargaining power. Google definitely has the upper hand here, because of the popularity of YouTube. And so do the customers by the way, who can instantly cancel their ISP if they start blocking traffic.
Actually, google itself is not making any content either. Its users are.
Maybe not the content, but they're providing a very expensive service. The huge amount of storage space, the development that goes into the platform and the data centers operating all over the world are what makes youtube so usable.
free applications not yet packaged, some of which have a needs-packaging bug in Launchpad that hasn't been filled;
Now you're getting highy specialized. Generally, if it's popular it will have a package. In this respect it's no different from Windows. That's all a setup.exe is, a package of software (and a particularly messy way of doing it). This problem generally only applies to free software, and then the chances are you'll find Linux packages before you find a supported Windows installer.
commercial proprietary software.
I'll admit I've had little experience here, but generally what I have used has had usable packages. I've come across a few horrible binary installers though
Different tasks, different skills. If you can write good guides and enjoy doing it, why should you want any more? Having in-depth knowledge doesn't make you a good teacher.
Going completely fanless is often overkill. A decent fan at minimum power will hardly make any noise. If my computers much quieter than my TV, my Stereo system, and all my consoles, I really don't see the point in crapping out over a power supply. DVD drives are the biggest problem, which is why I just always copy the DVD to a hard drive before playing it.
Not unless all warfare is terrorism. That's certainly a possible position to take, however there's little reason to single out H&N for that.
Indiscriminately killing people to force an enemy power to act as desired is terrorism. Traditionally a military would use direct force to achieve their objectives.
Of course dropping atomic bombs was militarily justified, being the most effective means available to force Japan to surrender with least casualties to the USA.
That wasn't the question. You said "civilian casualties were justified by them being considered (rightly, IMHO) murderous genocidal bastards". If you allow such sentiments to influence your decision, then that's collective punishment.
There is a difference between collective punishment, where causing suffering is the goal in itself, and collateral damage, where suffering is the unfortunate side effect of the means chosen to achieve a goal.
Not really. Collateral damage is a recent euphemistic term used exclusively by the U.S. military. Reality is never as clear cut as many people fancy it to be. The collective punishment and terror committed by the German occupation in France and Belgium were certainly hoped to prevent attacks by the resistance for example.
Being superior enough means you don't have to resort to carpet-bombing cities to win.
In theory, but in practice the participants of war rarely show any form of restraint. The bombings happened in spite of being vastly superior to the enemy.
Tell me, who is responsible for the Germans who died in WWII, Churchill or Hitler?
It is a huge tragedy in human history. Putting the blame one one of two individuals is ridiculous. And so is blaming every individual of an entire population.
Yes, US Army dropped the atomic bombs, but it was Japan who pushed things to the point where that was the best available solution.
I don't disagree. However that doesn't mean that the U.S. can wave off the moral responsibility for their actions.
Neither rape nor massacres are unavoidable. They happen when nihilism and anger win over discipline and moral restraints.
Another swoosh moment. You really are brilliant at misleading quotation. They most certainly are avoidable, depending on the moral standards and enforcement by those in charge. That was the whole point. They have nothing to do with nihilism and also seemingly little to do with individual restraints. Rape and massacres seem to come naturally with undisciplined armies, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religion or moral standards of the culture.
Really, now? And all the reports of Japanese atrocities, told by the very people who suffered them 60 years after the war ended, are they too just propaganda? You know, the atrocities Japanese directed against other asians?
I really can't understand how you could interpret such a thing from my post. I meant that we should analyze the effects of war without constantly having to refer to extreme collective responsibility. While such sentiment might have been prevalent at the time, they are not helpful for discussing it in a historical context.
Of course not, the same as not all Germans were Nazis. Are you suggesting these countries should had been allowed to conquer the world and divide it amongst themselves, which is what they specifically attempted?
Once again you're getting far too creative with your interpretation.
No, I can't say I do.
It seems you're not even trying
You keep on suggesting that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was motivated by racism, despite all evidence that points to it being a purely military decision, and now see
Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't about punishment, they were about "enough is enough, surrender or DIE".
And that is also blatently terrorist. The more people talk, the more these deep-founded feelings emerge.
Had the bombs been dropped after Japan surrendered, that had been collective punishment; as it was, it was a military action whose civilian casualties were justified by them being considered (rightly, IMHO) murderous genocidal bastards.
You're mixing the two. Either the bombings were militarily justified or not. If your feelings about the war crimes of the military are influencing your decision, then you're considering collective punishment, albeit with an excuse up your sleeve.
Notice how no mass killing of population took place in Japan after the surrender - in fact, the victors helped rebuild the country
They imposed a variety of reforms and provided emergency aid, but saying they rebuilt the country sounds like something from a rose-tinted school textbook. Abandoning the planned de-industrialisation of the axis countries is widely considered a strategic decision rather than an act of compassion.
If you are superior enough to your enemy, you can go out of your way to try to avoid that, and still win
Most military superior technologies only avoid deaths of your own combatents, and increase the numbers of civilian casualties, as with air strikes and nuclear weapons.
And besides, most armed forces in such a conflict are consist of conscripted troops; is it really any better to kill someone who's forced to wear a uniform on pain of death than someone who was lucky enough to be allowed to stay at home?
Morally and philosophically this is indeed an interesting question, but the rules of war are quite clear about this.
Hirohito was the Emperor of Japan when all this happened. On what grounds should he be absolved of responsibility for Japan's actions, or the results of them?
I wasn't suggesting that. But if you drop a bomb on a city and then point to one man who's in charge, that's running from responsibility for your actions. It was the american military which decided to bomb the city and kill thousands of civilians, not Hirohito.
Yes, that happened in Vietnam.
That happens in every conflict.
It has nothing to do with atomic bombings, which were ordered and authorized - in writing, in fact, since the subordinate in question refused to carry out such a thing on verbal orders alone - from the very top. They may or may not have been war crimes, but had nothing to do with things getting out of hand, which you described.
I didn't describe anything. I was explaining how many authoritive persons who should enforce moral and humane standards can become complacent by simply describing atrocities as unavoidable. Rape is unavoidable when you have an army of rough men occupy a country. Massacres are unavoidable when you have thousands of frustrated soldiers with heavy weaponry under pressure. Just how much happens depends on how "unavoidable" the commanders think it really is. The Americans did a lot better job than the Japanese for example.
It is rather hard to scrutinize historical actions without considering their historical context.
The historical context is that nationaist sentiment was extremely strong in the former half of the twentieth century. Combined with an enemy stereotype that had been built up over the previous years and the overall racial hostility towards asians in the era, many Americans indeed considered the entire people of Japan to be responsible and punishable. This sentiment is reflected in the reporting of the time.
For the vast majority of human history you went to war against a people, not an army
That's a misguided analysis. It sounds as if you have the impression that every conflict was an attempt of genocide.
What is different today is not so much the ideology of the military mission but the massive destructive power of aerial strikes. Throughout history, even going back to antiquity, armies were expected to act morally. In practice though, soldiers often engage in massacres, something that can still happen in modern western armies.
Previously armies would engage in close combat and the attacking army would risk their lives. But airstrikes are different. They can instantly obliterate their target and burn thousands of people to a cinder. So while the attack might be militarily effective, it can kill an unprecedented amount of people with minimal risk to your own forces.
There are basically two arguments here:
1) It minimizes risk to your own forces. It is better to kill many more civilians than risk the lives of your own soldiers counter-argument: At this point you're judgeing the value of lives. It's a nationalistic and/or racist view.
2) They deserve it. counter-argument: War is almost never decided by national consensus but by a minority with power and influence. Most of the population are innocent or naive.
Unless the military commanders balance the two wisely, then they will face accusations entirely like those those throughout history.
Curious. Maybe that is what Churchill truly felt, but he would never ever have said it that way. Because the two reasons you give are blatant war crimes. Collective punishment is not an accepted means of warfare. So if your reasons were true (it is in fact a bit more intricate) then that would only help to prove the parent's point.
Your post reeks of collective punishment. War atrocities are awful, but the idea that an entire population should be killed for the crimes of a minority is the same kind of stubborn "them against us" ideology that fuels the massacres themselves. War is all about excuses. Describing civilian deaths as unavoidable is an attempt to deal with the uncomfortable idea that one's own actions are indeed questionable. The same goes for pushing the blame on Hirohito. In fact many military atrocities are more or less a direct result of commanders accepting the war crimes of subordinates as a necessity. We should shake off the old remnants of nationalism and racism and be able to objectively scrutinize the actions of certain armies without having to give some weak historical justification.
That's one way of looking at it, but the reason we have consumer protection laws is because without them we would be exposed to a lot more of this kind of anti-competitive behavior. It's easy to simply say you could go elsewhere but particularly for cinema that is just not an option for most people.
The difficult part is enriching enough uranium which would require large dedicated facilities. Once you have the uranium though, it's not inconceivable for relatively small efforts by certain groups to create a powerful fissile weapon. There's certainly no shortage of talented engineers in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Blu-Ray has a max capacity of 25GB/layer, and a standard player can read discs up to 100GB without modifications.
No they don't, because no-one has ever made such a disc. All we have are people making claims about how many layers they can get onto a disc. Works the same for HDDVD.
The reality is that 30 GB is enough for a HD movie, and we're never going to see these super-discs they keep bragging about. A 51GB HDDVD standard had been approved BTW.
So while you can claim that HD-DVD supports full 1080p, in reality many movies were over-compressed or simply encoded at 1080i in order to fit them onto a single disc.
Bullshit. Every film on HDDVD was released in 1080p, just like on Blu-ray. Interlaced video is only used for high-framerate television recordings.
but the studios were lining up on one side or the other, nobody was releasing to both mediums.
Actually they were. Particularly, there were a few studios that while having avoided HDDVD in the US, were releasing on both formats in Europe. Abandoning support was an organized sabotage by the major media corporations.
So I'm glad that the one with the better technical specifications ended up winning out.
All too often the system with the higher numbers isn't the better spec overall. The region codes alone are worth avoiding Blu-Ray, not to mention the other crap like profile updates. And HDDDVD had more mandatory audio codecs.
So for computer storage, Blu-Ray is indeed the better format. But for consumers as a Media distribution format, not really.
For completely configurable hardware it's okay, but most integrated gateway devices only let you have a DSL WAN port, and rarely do they support any bridging mode. As soon as you want to change something in your network, your hardware becomes useless.
What graphics chip are you using? ATI cards can be a real pain. OTOH, setting up multiple monitors can be a hassle in Windows too and the drivers suck.
The vast majority of users would be completely baffled by your requirements, most people don't understand to set their display at the correct resolution.
There are a few rough edges on Linux distros like advanced graphics and scanners, but for the vast majority of settings it's much easier and faster than Windows. With Windows, you're constantly googling driver installers, clicking boxes and navigating the maze of control panel settings. In Ubuntu, everything that can be done in a GUI (which is the vast majority) is no more than one submenu on the task bar.
They do. At least, they're not very rigorous about taking them down. The courts get to interpret the law. Because of the uncertainty, Europeans have to license much the same patents as Americans.
Software patents certainly are enforced, that's kinda what this story is about. The only issue is that the patents may not apply to all European countries, but even so everybody pays more or less the same fees as in the US.
Well that's not a question of resolution or size, but simply aspect ratio. As Monitor sizes increase the hight also gets bigger. So the real question is merely "when is big too big". And the simple answer is that widescreen formats are much better at using the human field of view. Even 16:9 isn't really wide enough. If my monitor were much bigger vertically I couldn't see all of it without having to look over the rim of my glasses or moving my head.
People move and contacts are lost. While immediate friends and family can usually be telephoned, it's likely you will have missed quite a few people. Old school friends and colleagues are often a very touching attendants to funeral and memorial services, especially when they can tell you of memories of the persons life you never heard before.
e-mail is certainly what I call the lazy option. While we do hear a lot about the silver surfer generation in the media, the majority of people are probably still completely inept, and the rest only check emails occasionally.
I guess it's to prevent people from using "lazy" passwords to meet character requirements. If my password was five characters and they want eight, I'd just type every letter twice.
I didn't say they weren't. But it's apples and Oranges. Youtube is a service which relies on IP traffic, whereas telcos sell Internet connections to facilitate just such traffic. As far as they are concerned, Youtube traffic is the content that the customers want, and have paid for.
I had that in mind. But such a disruption in performance would normally give you the right to withdraw from your contract. Obviously this varies depending on jurisdiction.
It also depends on how stubborn you ISP is, but blocking YouTube will certainly get a lot of people really pissed. ISPs tend to shy away from court cases that create precedent.
While they're not exactly clear about the distinction in the article, it's a foregone conclusion that they meant all parts of the standard and codec will be free.
Concerning patents, they will have been examined thoroughly when they developed the codec. While there's always a risk someone will sue you, that's also a risk with Theora, H.264 and any other proprietary codec.
Not really, all it depends on is bargaining power. Google definitely has the upper hand here, because of the popularity of YouTube.
And so do the customers by the way, who can instantly cancel their ISP if they start blocking traffic.
Actually, google itself is not making any content either. Its users are.
Maybe not the content, but they're providing a very expensive service. The huge amount of storage space, the development that goes into the platform and the data centers operating all over the world are what makes youtube so usable.
free applications not yet packaged, some of which have a needs-packaging bug in Launchpad that hasn't been filled;
Now you're getting highy specialized. Generally, if it's popular it will have a package. In this respect it's no different from Windows. That's all a setup.exe is, a package of software (and a particularly messy way of doing it). This problem generally only applies to free software, and then the chances are you'll find Linux packages before you find a supported Windows installer.
commercial proprietary software.
I'll admit I've had little experience here, but generally what I have used has had usable packages. I've come across a few horrible binary installers though
Different tasks, different skills. If you can write good guides and enjoy doing it, why should you want any more? Having in-depth knowledge doesn't make you a good teacher.
So I bought an Arduino [...] Write some C code [...] Hook up a potentiometer and a LED, and dim it based on the pot's position.
Most redundant use of a microprocessor, EVER.
Going completely fanless is often overkill. A decent fan at minimum power will hardly make any noise.
If my computers much quieter than my TV, my Stereo system, and all my consoles, I really don't see the point in crapping out over a power supply.
DVD drives are the biggest problem, which is why I just always copy the DVD to a hard drive before playing it.
They don't have to be a monopoly to break the law.
Indiscriminately killing people to force an enemy power to act as desired is terrorism. Traditionally a military would use direct force to achieve their objectives.
That wasn't the question. You said "civilian casualties were justified by them being considered (rightly, IMHO) murderous genocidal bastards". If you allow such sentiments to influence your decision, then that's collective punishment.
Not really. Collateral damage is a recent euphemistic term used exclusively by the U.S. military. Reality is never as clear cut as many people fancy it to be. The collective punishment and terror committed by the German occupation in France and Belgium were certainly hoped to prevent attacks by the resistance for example.
In theory, but in practice the participants of war rarely show any form of restraint. The bombings happened in spite of being vastly superior to the enemy.
It is a huge tragedy in human history. Putting the blame one one of two individuals is ridiculous. And so is blaming every individual of an entire population.
I don't disagree. However that doesn't mean that the U.S. can wave off the moral responsibility for their actions.
Another swoosh moment. You really are brilliant at misleading quotation. They most certainly are avoidable, depending on the moral standards and enforcement by those in charge. That was the whole point.
They have nothing to do with nihilism and also seemingly little to do with individual restraints. Rape and massacres seem to come naturally with undisciplined armies, regardless of nationality, ethnicity, religion or moral standards of the culture.
I really can't understand how you could interpret such a thing from my post. I meant that we should analyze the effects of war without constantly having to refer to extreme collective responsibility. While such sentiment might have been prevalent at the time, they are not helpful for discussing it in a historical context.
Once again you're getting far too creative with your interpretation.
It seems you're not even trying
And that is also blatently terrorist.
The more people talk, the more these deep-founded feelings emerge.
You're mixing the two. Either the bombings were militarily justified or not. If your feelings about the war crimes of the military are influencing your decision, then you're considering collective punishment, albeit with an excuse up your sleeve.
They imposed a variety of reforms and provided emergency aid, but saying they rebuilt the country sounds like something from a rose-tinted school textbook. Abandoning the planned de-industrialisation of the axis countries is widely considered a strategic decision rather than an act of compassion.
Most military superior technologies only avoid deaths of your own combatents, and increase the numbers of civilian casualties, as with air strikes and nuclear weapons.
Morally and philosophically this is indeed an interesting question, but the rules of war are quite clear about this.
I wasn't suggesting that. But if you drop a bomb on a city and then point to one man who's in charge, that's running from responsibility for your actions. It was the american military which decided to bomb the city and kill thousands of civilians, not Hirohito.
That happens in every conflict.
I didn't describe anything. I was explaining how many authoritive persons who should enforce moral and humane standards can become complacent by simply describing atrocities as unavoidable.
Rape is unavoidable when you have an army of rough men occupy a country. Massacres are unavoidable when you have thousands of frustrated soldiers with heavy weaponry under pressure.
Just how much happens depends on how "unavoidable" the commanders think it really is. The Americans did a lot better job than the Japanese for example.
The historical context is that nationaist sentiment was extremely strong in the former half of the twentieth century. Combined with an enemy stereotype that had been built up over the previous years and the overall racial hostility towards asians in the era, many Americans indeed considered the entire people of Japan to be responsible and punishable. This sentiment is reflected in the reporting of the time.
But these days we should know that not ever
For the vast majority of human history you went to war against a people, not an army
That's a misguided analysis. It sounds as if you have the impression that every conflict was an attempt of genocide.
What is different today is not so much the ideology of the military mission but the massive destructive power of aerial strikes. Throughout history, even going back to antiquity, armies were expected to act morally. In practice though, soldiers often engage in massacres, something that can still happen in modern western armies.
Previously armies would engage in close combat and the attacking army would risk their lives. But airstrikes are different. They can instantly obliterate their target and burn thousands of people to a cinder. So while the attack might be militarily effective, it can kill an unprecedented amount of people with minimal risk to your own forces.
There are basically two arguments here:
1) It minimizes risk to your own forces. It is better to kill many more civilians than risk the lives of your own soldiers
counter-argument: At this point you're judgeing the value of lives. It's a nationalistic and/or racist view.
2) They deserve it.
counter-argument: War is almost never decided by national consensus but by a minority with power and influence. Most of the population are innocent or naive.
Unless the military commanders balance the two wisely, then they will face accusations entirely like those those throughout history.
Curious. Maybe that is what Churchill truly felt, but he would never ever have said it that way. Because the two reasons you give are blatant war crimes. Collective punishment is not an accepted means of warfare. So if your reasons were true (it is in fact a bit more intricate) then that would only help to prove the parent's point.
Your post reeks of collective punishment. War atrocities are awful, but the idea that an entire population should be killed for the crimes of a minority is the same kind of stubborn "them against us" ideology that fuels the massacres themselves. War is all about excuses. Describing civilian deaths as unavoidable is an attempt to deal with the uncomfortable idea that one's own actions are indeed questionable. The same goes for pushing the blame on Hirohito.
In fact many military atrocities are more or less a direct result of commanders accepting the war crimes of subordinates as a necessity.
We should shake off the old remnants of nationalism and racism and be able to objectively scrutinize the actions of certain armies without having to give some weak historical justification.
That's one way of looking at it, but the reason we have consumer protection laws is because without them we would be exposed to a lot more of this kind of anti-competitive behavior.
It's easy to simply say you could go elsewhere but particularly for cinema that is just not an option for most people.
The difficult part is enriching enough uranium which would require large dedicated facilities. Once you have the uranium though, it's not inconceivable for relatively small efforts by certain groups to create a powerful fissile weapon. There's certainly no shortage of talented engineers in the world.